White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

by Nancy Isenberg

The lack of public education funding in the South made the army’s intelligence test results inevitable. The gap in education levels matched what had existed between the North and South before the Civil War. Many of the men who took the test had never used a pencil before. Southern white men exhibited stunted bodies—army medical examiners found them to be smaller, weaker, and less physically fit. National campaigns to fight hookworm and pellagra (both associated with clay-eating and identified as white trash diseases) only reinforced this portrait. Beginning in 1909, the New York–based Rockefeller Institute poured massive amounts of money into a philanthropic program aimed at eliminating hookworm, while the U.S. Public Health Service tackled pellagra. The Rockefeller Foundation published shocking pictures of actual hookworm subjects, some pairing boys of similar ages, one normal and the other literally dwarfed and disfigured by the disease. It didn’t help the South’s image that hookworm was spread by the lack of sanitation. Outhouses were rare among the southern poor, let alone toilets.