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

by Nancy Isenberg

All in all, the rural South stood out as a place of social and now eugenic backwardness. Tenant farmers and sharecroppers, wandering the dusty roads with a balky mule, seemed a throwback to eighteenth-century vagrants. The “lazy diseases” of hookworm and pellagra created a class of lazy lubbers. Illiteracy was widespread. Fear of indiscriminate breeding loomed large. The stock of poor white men produced in the South were dismissed as unfit for military service, the women unfit to be mothers. In the two decades before the war, reformers had exposed that many poor white women and children worked long, grueling hours in southern textile factories. Was this another sign of “race suicide,” some asked? Could they possibly produce future generations of healthy, courageous, intelligent, and fertile Americans? For many in the early twentieth century, then, the “new race problem” was not the “negro problem.” It was instead a different crisis, one caused by the “worthless class of anti-social whites.”