More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
December 25, 2019 - January 20, 2020
“Mongrel” became one of the Democrats’ favorite insults in these years.
In 1866, President Johnson effectively abandoned the Republican Party.
Knights of the White Camelia,
“Amalgamation” was classed with incestuous unions and marriages between idiots, which the state already proscribed.
“every man for himself.”
Libertarianism?
When southern Democrats called for a “White Man’s Government,” they did not mean all white men.29
“The ‘poor white’ is actually degraded; the mountain white is a person not yet graded up.”
was at about this time that the term “redneck” came into wider use.
1890s
the science of eugenics, to which Roosevelt was a complete convert.
But they were in total agreement on one thing: the menace of redneck politics.
T. Roosevelt and W.E.B. DuBois both felt rednecks were a menace in politics.
he dared to invite Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee
Democrats ctiticized TR savagely for this.
Booker T. Washington’s daughter Portia attended Wellesley College,
He dramatically embraced the white trash identity.
Roosevelt argued that the nineteenth-century frontier experience had transformed white Americans into superior stock.
Too much domestic peace, luxury, and willful sterility, as TR put it, made Americans weak, lethargic, and prone to self-indulgence.
Roosevelt’s mind, childbirth was nature’s boot camp for women, a life-or-death struggle that strengthened the entire race.
the Confederate generation and their heirs had contributed “very, very little toward anything of which Americans are now proud.”
T. Roosevelt
Roosevelt was an unabashed eugenicist.
Women who shirked their procreative duty were worse than deserters.
Every die-hard eugenicist believed that citizens did not have an individual right to marry or to reproduce.
Educated women were the gatekeepers, the guardians of eugenic marriages, though fecund poor women continued to outbreed their female betters.
Even with such racial overtones, the major target of eugenicists was the poor white woman.
Mongrel Virginians, a study of an isolated mountain community in Virginia known as the Win tribe.
Eugenics suffused the culture of the twenties.
“aristogenic”—what we would call a genetic leadership class.
breeding colony of “Eugenia,”
progressive reformers were eager to rear a cognitive elite, one that could deal with modern technology and bureaucracy.
If a new breed of human arose when it gave labor enhanced social meaning, then the South, with its dull refusal to appreciate the value of work, remained caught in a primitive state of mind.6
Veterans of World War I formed a “Bonus Army,”
Spring and summer 1932
Class, as defined in terms of dignity, was increasingly insecure.
The lines separating the poor from the working and middle classes seemed more permeable.
the “Back to the Land” movement
The Depression revealed that liberty for some—for the select, the privileged—was not liberty for all.
he boldly challenged the credibility of the old, illusive belief that America’s class boundaries were porous and that hard work was all it took to succeed.
Tugwell and the myth of the American meritocracy
The straitjacket of states’ rights had suffocated southern progress long enough.
All these descriptions conflated the unwillingness to work with some innate character flaw.
“shiftlessness” was a major symptom in the eugenicist’s diagnosis of the degenerate.
a fear of unleashing genuine class upheaval—which even the liberal elite were loath to do—led significant numbers to blame the poor for their own failure.
He argued that poor whites had a culture—what he called “folkways.”
The problem was not: “No one knows what to do with him.” It was this: “No one wants to see him as he really is: one of us, an American.”
Mindless conformity, whether Soviet or southern in style, was stifling and repressive.4
"Mindless conformity." Like today's Trumpian GOP?
voters accepted huge disparities in wealth but at the same time expected their elected leaders to “cultivate the appearance of being no different from the rest of us.”68
If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
The country boy might have been enjoying his moment in the sun just then, but he knew in his heart that his place among the power elite was not really secured; he was not fully accepted. A country boy might at any moment reveal some telltale sign of a white trash character. He might say something inappropriate. He could never conceal the artless drawl or dust off the sticky red clay. Indelible marks of class identity were forever stamped on him, no matter how far he wandered from the inhospitable land of his birth.92
LBJ
Some people can choose an identity, but many more have an identity chosen for them.
they possessed the cultural power to shape political discourse. The dispossessed had no such power.
Before the end of the 1980s, “white trash” was rebranded as an ethnic identity, with its own readily identifiable cultural forms: food, speech patterns, tastes,
white trash invented a country of their own within the United States.
Appalachia remained in the minds of many a lost island containing a purer breed of Anglo-Saxon.
In the American model, assimilation preceded social mobility,
