Will Byrnes's Reviews > White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

“All history is the history of class struggle.” Sound familiar? It should. Well, the actual quote, from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ Communist Manifesto, is “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Doesn’t have quite the same ring, but it gets the job done, however transmogrified it might have been in popular recollection and various translations. And it may or not be the case. Certainly in America one is considered suspect for subscribing to the notion, usually by folks who are better off. But whether class is the be-all and end-all of historical analysis, it would be difficult, and dishonest, to contend that it does not hold, at the very least, a very significant role in human history. It is the history of class in America, and the myths that accompany it, to which Nancy Isenberg has applied her considerable labor and intelligence.

She begins at the beginning, the 1500s. Richard Hakluyt a well-known 16th century writer, promoted development of the New World to the English leaders of the time.

… what Hakluyt foresaw in a colonized America was one giant workhouse. This cannot be emphasized enough. As the “waste firm of America" was settled, it would become a place where the surplus poor, the waste people of England, could be converted into economic assets. The land and the poor could be harvested together, to add to—rather than continue to subtract from—the nation’s wealth. Among the first waves of workers were the convicts, who would be employed at heavy labor, felling trees and burning them for pitch, tar and soap ash; others would dig in the mines for gold, silver, iron, and copper. The convicts were not paid wages. As debt slaves, they were obliged to repay the English commonwealth for their crimes by producing commodities for export. In return they would be kept from a life of crime, avoiding, in Hakluyt’s words, being “miserably hanged,” or packed into prisons to “pitifully pine away” and die.

Large numbers of the earliest Europeans to inhabit these shores were not so much the vaunted seekers after freedom of one sort or another that highlight our usual imagery. They were in fact the social detritus that England was looking to offload. Along with the poor, the criminal, and the unconnected, our mother country dropped off their toxic class system. Even in promotion of the New World in the earliest times, it was portrayed as a place where England could throw out the garbage, or at least put society’s waste people to some use during their brief time above the ground.


Nancy Isenberg - from PRS Speakers.com

In an addled vision (and altered history) of America, many thought that, for various reasons, the New World was or would be the place where class came to die. You’re kidding me, right? It never was. It is not now, and it never will be. What we have now is less of a class struggle, which implies two opponents, and more of a class massacre. For example, the Republicans propose an ACA replacement that absolutely has to include an extra tax break for CEOs earning more than $500K, while effectively denying coverage to millions and raising costs catastrophically for millions more? Clearly those who have, well those who are of a Republican (Koch-brother-backed) frame of mind and have, seem to think that those of us who do not have shouldn’t. But it has almost always been thus. Isenberg traces the history of class in America, with a specific look at the lower echelons of white America. Slavery, of one sort and another, is never far from the history she describes, but she is not writing about slavery, per se.

She traces the persistence and character of class in America, from its English (and presumably Dutch) roots, up to modern times. She looks at the structures that have enforced a lower level of existence on so many in diverse parts of the nation, with particular attention to the English ideal of connection to (meaning ownership of) land, as a core defining measure of one’s civic virtue. Only those with land were considered worthy of voting. Even after the American Revolution, the old ways persisted:

During the colonial period, the right to vote for the lower house of colonial legislatures had been defined in traditional British terms: Only people who had freehold landed property sufficient to ensure that they were personally independent and had a vested interest in the welfare of their communities could vote. - from The Right to Vote and the Rise of Democracy, 1787–1828 by Donald Ratcliffe

I am nobody’s idea of a history nerd, but I have read a fair bit over the last fifty years or so, and am no virgin at looking at class structures. Yet, I found this book filled with stunning revelations. In particular, the views of some of our foundering fathers are particularly unkind when it comes to working class people. Franklin and Jefferson both believed that the availability of vast swaths of new land would provide all that was needed for the new breed of Americans that was emerging, a safety valve on the social and economic pressures of rising population and limited resources. It did not work out quite as hoped, as the wealthy moved west as well, sucking up most of the good land, and bringing along the means to develop the land, slaves and tools, that less favored pioneers lacked. Franklin was boldly in favor of class distinction:

Franklin understood that maintaining class differences had its own appeal. In the Pennsylvania Gazette, the newspaper he edited, an article was published in 1741 that exposed why people preferred having a class hierarchy to having none. Hierarchy was easily maintained when the majority felt there was someone below them. “How many,” the author asked, “even of the better sort,” would choose to be “Slaves to those above them, provided they might exercise an arbitrary and Tyrannical Rule over all below them?” There was something desirable, perhaps even pleasurable, to use Franklin’s utilitarian axiom, in the feeling of lording over subordinate classes.

The notion of breeding is paramount in how class has been viewed over time. It makes it so much easier, I suppose, for the haves to justify their position if they can persuade themselves that those who have not suffer because that is their genetic destiny. Fantasy does become reality often enough as the poor, who often have to struggle just to get fed, watch their children’s development be stunted by malnutrition, some going so far as to eating clay just to feel full, and by a lack of access to good medical care. Some particularly awful examples are noted. Forced sterilization was very much an approach favored by some to keep those they disparaged from reproducing.

We are introduced to a wealth of class slurs from the pages of our past, many of them news to me. Here are a few: Waste people, Clay-eaters, Mudsills, Briar hoppers, sandhillers, lubbers, tackies, scalawags, low-downers, hoe wielders, offscourings, bog-trotters, swamp people. And the more familiar: degenerates, crackers, squatters, rednecks, hillbillies, and trailer trash. And for what it’s worth, some whites were even treated to the n-word.

Isenberg takes us from the teenaged indentured servants of our deep past, when voting with your feet meant running away from an intolerable, and often illegally never-ending indenture, to Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty, from the reality of class exploitation over the centuries to viewing people (not limited to the poor) as cattle, and looking to breed desired traits. From how the poor, particularly lower class whites, were viewed in the 16th century to how they are portrayed in popular media today. She looks at how some have seized on a sort of hillbilly chic to further their own ends.

Isenberg looks at experiments like Oglethorpe’s in Georgia, in which slavery was banned, and how his predictions of what would happen were slavery to be allowed came to pass.

Sometimes Isenberg’s analysis goes a bit too far.

A prison official said it all: “One dies, get another.” 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."

The prison systems in America have never treated people decently, but I would find the claim of equal abuse more persuasive were some research offered to back the claim. She also refers to the TV show The Honeymooners as a satire about the working class. It was nothing of the sort. What it was was a situation comedy that portrayed working class life, during a time when the norm was to show an idealized suburban Ozzie and Harriet world. It was not satirizing working class people, but bringing them to viewers’ consciousness. I would have liked a strong, overt connection to have been made between the mean-spirited right of today. (Why are these people so bloody cold-hearted towards the poor?) and the extant views of the poor from history. There is DNA to be traced there, even if it is mostly the history of excuse-making for hating on those lower down on the ladder.

Overall, I found White Trash wonderfully, if depressingly informative. Any who are foolish enough to see America as a class-free place would do well to check this book out. Class is as real today as it has ever been, and merits our attention as an ever growing number of people are being pushed by automation, globalization, and seizure of more and more of the nation’s wealth by the wealthy, into the lower rungs of class distinction. Any who are interested in American history, in how we got from there to here, are in for a real treat. But whether or not you have a particular interest in American history or class, particularly my fellow and sister Americans, I would urge you to give White Trash a look. The myth of equality of opportunity in America has never been clearer. You have nothing to lose but the chains of ignorance.

Publication date – June 21, 2016

Review posted – March 10, 2017

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, and Twitter pages

More items by Isenberg
-----NY Daily News opinion piece - Donald Trump’s perverse class war -November 2, 2016
-----Salon - American history: Fake news that never goes away — and empowered the Trumpian insurrection - “Fake history is fake news, only more widely believed.”

Interviews

-----The Baffler - Born and Bred - Q & A with Nancy Isenberg - by Emily Carroll - November 07, 2016

Audio
-----On the Media ’White Trash’ and Class in America by Brooke Gladstone
-----WNYC – How America's Landless Poor Defined Politics for Generations - by Leonard Lopate
-----The Takeaway – The Angry Ghost of America's Unresolved Class Warfare - 8:59

Video
-----PBS News Hour - The origin of ‘white trash,’ & why class is still an issue - by Jeffrey Brown

Other
-----February 3, 2018 - NY Times - Who’s Able-Bodied Anyway? by Emily Badger and Margot Sanger-Katz - a familiar extra-legal method for keeping people from getting needed benefits, reveling in a notion of some people as being undeserving of public aid