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

by Nancy Isenberg

There was one bit of lore that concerned the squatter that did take hold. He had to be wooed for his vote. He had no patience for a candidate who refused to speak his language. That was the moral of another famous squatter story of 1840, “The Arkansas Traveller,” in which an elite politician canvassing in the backcountry asks a squatter for refreshment. The squatter, seated on a whiskey barrel before his run-down cabin, ignores the man’s request. For a brief interlude (because it was election season), the politician was obliged to bring himself down to the level of the common man. To get his drink and the squatter’s vote, the politician had to dismount his horse, grab the squatter’s fiddle, and show that he could play his kind of music. Once the politician returned to his mansion, however, nothing had changed in the life of the squatter, nor for his drudge of a wife and his brood of dirty, shoeless brats.