Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

Rich planters sipped foreign wine under crystal chandeliers, seated on European chairs, in white-pillared mansions. They saw themselves not as wicked oppressors but as generous benefactors, and poor whites took them as such. At the other extreme, poor whites saw the terrifying misery of the traumatized, short-lived slave. This set in their minds a picture of the best and worst fates in life. Compared to life in New England farming villages, there was much more wealth to envy above, and far more misery to gasp at below. Such a system suggested its own metaphoric line waiting for the American Dream—one with little room for the lucky ahead, and much room for the forgotten behind. Between this top and bottom, Cash describes poor whites as living in unpainted houses with “sagging rail fences . . . and crazy barns which yet bulged with corn.” However, as the plantation system grew, it became harder and harder to cope. Planters bought up the most desirable fertile plains, pressing poorer farmers onto the barren uplands. If poor white farmers tried to move to better land, they found that the planters had “seized the best lands there” even “beyond the Mississippi” in “Arkansas and Texas armed with plentiful capital and solid battalions of slaves.” Poor whites were driven back “to the red hills and the sand lands and the pine barrens and the swamps—to all the marginal lands of the South.” To plant cotton and sugarcane, plantation owners destroyed forests, which deprived “the farmer’...