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April 22 - June 27, 2020
Southern eugenicists in particular argued that sterilization helped the economy by sending poor women back into the population safely neutered but still able to work at menial jobs.60
The war advanced the importance of intelligence testing. Goddard had created the “moron” classification by using the Binet-Simon test, which was succeeded by the IQ (intelligence quotient) scale promoted by Stanford professor Lewis Terman and then used by the U.S. Army.
The evidence in Mongrel Virginians was sufficient to guide passage of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which prohibited marriages between blacks and whites, and treated Indian blood no differently from black blood.
This regulation was removed from the final version of the bill, but the law still divided the population into white and black, fit and unfit, pure and tainted bloodlines.
Like Justice Taney in the Dred Scott decision, he believed that pedigree could be used to distinguish worthy citizens from the waste people.
Holmes argued that sterilization was a civic duty, saving the nation from being “swamped with incompetence.”
Now it was the endowment of inborn qualities that marked off the superior class.
He called for a breeding colony of “Eugenia,” a separate protectorate within the United States, in which the best and brightest would propagate a superior stock.
Poor whites were inexpensive and expendable, and found their lot comparable to suffering African Americans when it came to the justice system. Nothing proves the point better than the fact that both black and white convicts were referred to as “niggers.”3
that would issue the bonuses, but it failed in the Senate. President Herbert Hoover labeled the marchers criminals and called out the U.S. Army to disperse those that remained after the bill failed, using bayonets, tear gas, and tanks. “The most powerful government in the world shooting its starving veterans out of worthless huts,” was how John Henry Bartlett, former governor of New Hampshire, described the disturbing event in his eyewitness account.
Most southern tenants were in debt to landlords, had little cash, no education; hookworm and pellagra still haunted them.
The entire tenant system operated by coercion and dependence. Landowners did not want their tenants to improve, because then they would have less control over them.
“Can a nation call itself free if it finds itself periodically on the verge of bankruptcy and starvation in the face of the fact that it possesses all the materials of the good life?”
the tenants had little reason to care for the soil as they attempted to eke out a living from it, while the landowners remained unwilling to invest in soil conservation.
Southern politicians shortchanged rural Americans in another crucial way: they made sure that the New Deal’s signature Social Security program excluded farm laborers.
He attacked the South’s prison mentality, the idea that generation after generation of manual laborers should accept their exploitation as natural.
The “Great Society,” as his vast array of programs became known, called for the elimination of poll taxes and voting discrimination, the promotion of education and health care funding, and daring new programs in an effort to eradicate poverty.
track aside, sixties comedies were not purely escapist fare. They tapped into a larger anxiety amid the mass migration of poor whites who headed north and created hillbilly ghettos in cities such as Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago, and Cincinnati—which
Vietnam has been referred to as the living-room war, yet on their black-and-white television sets in 1957, Americans had already watched a racial and class war, as angry poor whites screamed curses at well-mannered black students as they tried to enter Little Rock’s Central High School.
The key to the Levitts’ system was not just cheaper housing, but homogeneous populations—in their phrasing, “stabilized” neighborhoods. They meant racial and class homogeneity, which led them to endorse “restrictive covenants” prohibiting owners from selling their homes to black families.
Instead of eliminating class distinctions, suburbs were turned into class-conscious fortresses. Zoning ordinances set lot sizes and restricted the construction of apartment buildings, emphasizing single-dwelling homes to keep out undesirable lower-class families.
In this and other ways, the federal government underwrote the growth of the new suburban frontier. Tax laws gave homeowners who took out mortgages an attractive deduction. Government made it profitable for banks to grant mortgages to upstanding veterans and to men with steady jobs. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill, created the Veterans Administration, which oversaw the ex-soldiers’ mortgage program. Together, the FHA and the VA worked to provide generous terms: Uncle Sam insured as much as 90 percent of the typical veteran’s mortgage, thereby encouraging
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She shone a light on the rows of tents, trailers, and run-down shacks in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and Mobile, Alabama. She bemoaned the “neglected rural areas,” and called the white trash who migrated from there pitiful, ragged, illiterate, and undernourished. They had refused to move into respectable housing projects out of fear of the law—but mostly, Meyer believed, because they feared the “restraint of being members of a decent community.” Overwhelmed by the condition of their lives, by their physical and mental health and lack of prospects, she asked incredulously, “Is this America?”
Meyer met a fifty-one-year-old man who looked eighty—a clear throwback to the 1840s, when clay-eaters were identified in the same way: old before their time.
In sum, to make the mobile home more acceptable, manufacturers had to domesticate it. These sharp, socially attuned promoters worked hard to reinvent the trailer as a miniature suburban “bungalow-on-wheels.” They did everything they could to remove “trailer trash” from the American vocabulary.31
In many cities and counties, even retirees found their welcome worn out, resented because they lived on tight budgets, contributed too little to commercial growth, and failed to pay property taxes.
As a troubled girl—a bad seed, one might say—she confirmed her dubious class origins by her antics.
On the national stage, and standing before the cameras, the governor of Arkansas embodied the southern stereotype to a tee. He was a complete caricature of folly and backwardness. A reporter for Time accused him of “manufacturing the myth of violence” and then “whipping up” a mob to make it a reality.
A Life photographer was punched in the face and then carried off in a police wagon and charged with disorderly conduct. “Thugs in the crowd” pushed his colleagues, said newsman John Chancellor, and heckled them with nasty slurs. One reporter took the precaution of disguising himself. He rented a pickup truck and wore an old jacket and no tie. For a reporter to go undercover safely, he had to alter his class appearance, passing as a poor white workingman.50
These were all predictable motifs, serving to distance rabble-rousers from the “normal” good people of Arkansas and Tennessee. Even President Eisenhower, in his televised speech, blamed the violence on “demagogic extremists,” and assumed that the core population of Little Rock was the law-abiding, taxpaying, churchgoing people who did not endorse such behavior.
Like Mississippi’s Vardaman and his own state’s Jeff Davis before him, Orval Faubus used the threat of poor white thuggery to stay in power. And it worked.
“Redneck” and “white trash” were often used interchangeably, though not everyone agreed that the two were synonymous.
He thus divided the poor into two camps: the worthy, hardworking poor who strove to move up the social ladder, and the vulgar and hopeless who were trapped on its lowest rung. His worthy poor, having the “stout, earthy qualities of the redneck,” borrowed from the older class of yeoman, a category that no longer meant what it once had.
observer described this phenomenon best. Americans had a taste for what he called a “democracy of manners,” which was not the same as real democracy. He meant
The real Elvis was not a hillbilly at all. He was a poor white boy from Tupelo, Mississippi. He was the son of a sharecropper. He was born into poverty in a shotgun shack situated in the wrong part of town.
“No American family should settle for anything less than three warm meals a day, a warm house, a good education for their children . . . and sometimes simply to plain enjoy life.”
“I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. 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.
then. Besides being a fabrication of his family’s history, Haley’s book applied a kind of logic that was downright conservative. He construed himself as one of an African nobility, and he held that ancestry said a lot about what a person could become—and pass on. Roots was too good to be true, which was why Haley, who pitched his story to the networks before he had even written it, was eventually exposed as a hoaxer and a hustler.
Michael Novak, in The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1972), took the argument one step further, claiming that ethnic Americans were better Americans, because they understood the traditional values of loyalty, love of the flag, and hard work, and they did not expect government to provide unfair special assistance (as they imagined blacks were doing).
Among the “forgotten masses” were an estimated 17.4 million poor whites, and the majority of them lived in the South.
The same impulses would soon be used to refashion the redneck and embrace white trash as an authentic heritage.
They embraced a certain species of freedom—the freedom to be a boor, out in the open and without regrets.
The campaign rhetoric contained a “log cabin” story that captured the family’s rise, but it left out the fact that Jimmy grew up with a tennis court in the backyard.
Instead of descending from indentured servants, the president had one of the most significant family histories in the English-speaking world: he was related to both George Washington and the queen of England.
In effect, the message was: don’t expect equality or compassion if you can’t help yourself.32
Bakker’s ministry preached the white trash dream of excess.
One can directly trace the unholy line from the out-of-control Bakkers to the gawking at rural Georgian white trashdom in TLC’s Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.
No matter “how smart you are, how hard you work,” you will be “put in your place.”
When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win.40
