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November 3 - December 8, 2016
The Yale liberal wore blue suede shoes.
Critics lament that our twenty-four-hour news cycle turned the 2016 election into a horse race or a sideshow, and they’re right. It was treated as a kind of sporting event.
To his supporters, Trump’s tactlessness and personal vindictiveness scored points, while his lack of policy understanding was overlooked.
Distrust of fluid class boundaries made many voters fear competition from below.
They lacked faith
it is the language deployed by the politician that obscures patterns we have seen before but that strikes voters as new and urgent.
goal of historicizing the plight of the underclass over four centuries.
preoccupation with penalizing poor whites
The language of class that America embraced played off English attitudes toward vagrancy, and marked a transatlantic fixation with animal husbandry, demography, and pedigree.
most colonizing schemes that took root in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British America were built on privilege and subordination, not any kind of proto-democracy.
the great majority of early colonists were classified as surplus population and expendable “rubbish,”
British government gave full encouragement to the slave trade when it granted an African monopoly to the Company of Royal Adventurers in 1663.
It was the stigma of landlessness that would leave its mark on white trash from this day forward.
As the English conceived it, however, any land had to be taken out of its natural state and put to commercial use—only then would it be truly owned.6
The poor could be purged.
Brutal exploitation was the modus operandi of the English projectors who conceived an American colonial system at the end of the sixteenth century—before there were colonies.25
The leaders of Jamestown had borrowed directly from the Roman model of slavery: abandoned children and debtors were made slaves.
For Puritans, the church and state worked in tandem; the coercive arm of the magistracy was meant to preserve both public order and class distinctions.42
New Englanders used these titles sparingly, but they were certainly conscious of them; the government they abided by, after all, imitated English county oligarchies in which the landed elite monopolized government offices.43
The first slave cargo arrived in Boston in 1638.
Overly prosperous people aroused envy, and Puritan orthodoxy dictated against such exhibition of arrogance, pride, and insolence.
In the wording of the statute, a law without any British precedent, “condition of the mother” determined whether a child was slave or free.
For Locke was a founding member and third-largest stockholder of the Royal African Company, which secured a monopoly over the British slave trade.
It was on the basis of a fixed class hierarchy that the precious commodity of land was allocated.
A court of heraldry was added to this strange brew: in overseeing marriages and maintaining pedigree, it provided further evidence of the intention to fix (and police) class identity.
“Leet-men,”
Leet-men were intended to take the place of those who lived off the land without contributing to the coffers of the ruling elite.
North Carolina forged a lasting legacy as what we might call the first white trash colony.
Hidden inlets made North Carolina attractive to pirates. Along trade routes from the West Indies to the North American continent, piracy flourished in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
English contempt for the Irish was nothing new,
Unique among the American settlements, Georgia was not motivated by a desire for profit.
Its purpose was twofold: to carve out a middle ground between the extremes of wealth that took hold in the Carolinas, and to
serve as a barrier against the Spanish in Florida.
slave-based oligarchy
Georgia experimented with a social order that neither exploited the lower classes nor favored the rich.
They aimed to do something completely unprecedented: to build a “free labor” colony.
As a sanctuary for “free white people,” Georgia “would not permit slaves, for slaves starve the poor laborer.”
people could be conditioned to do the right thing by observing good leaders.
Oddly, it turned out that the colonists best suited to the Georgia experiment were not English but Swiss, German, French Huguenot, and Scottish Highlander, all of whom seemed prepared for lives of hardship, arriving as whole communities of farming families.
Slavery ruined the “industry of our White People,” he confessed, for they saw a “Rank of Poor Creatures below them,” and detested the thought of work out of a perverse pride, lest they might “look like slaves.”
English sailors back in 1728.
seamen literally functioned as “slaves,” deprived of the liberties granted to freeborn Britons. As poor men, they were dragged off the streets by press gangs, thrown into prison ships, and sold into the navy. Poorly fed, grossly underpaid, and treated as “captives,” they were a brutalized class of laborers, and in every way coerced.
ability to work collectively,
his reform philosophy recognized that weak and desperate men could be led to choose a path that dictated against their own interests.
Both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson agreed that slaveowning corrupted whites.
Giving the accomplished middling sort a feeling of public respect and a sense of civic duty would yield them the solid contentment of happy mediocrity.
means of social mobility in a state where education was purely a privilege of wealthy families.
Adams felt that the “passion for distinction” was the most powerful driving human force, above hunger and fear.
Americans not only scrambled to get ahead; they needed someone to look down on.
“yeoman.”
