Words&Dirt

If such a thing as disillusionment is possible inside the skull of Donald Trump, this may be one of those rare weekends in which it is buzzing about. As the idea that leading America would be somehow simple or easy crumbles before Trump’s eyes, those of us looking on do well to remind ourselves that our present is complicated because we have inherited it from a complicated past. This is the just one of the lessons we can take away from White Trash, Nancy Isenberg’s sprawling history of America’s white underclass.

White Trash is not an easy read. Isenberg’s writing is crowded with historical detail, exuding that special character of an author who has done more than her fair share of serious scholarship. Every page seeks to burst the bubble of American mythology, luring us away from dreamy, ahistorical sentiments of equal opportunity and upward mobility and into the reality of our harsh past:

Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system. It is not only directed by the top 1 percent and supported by a contented middle class. We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity. The poor, the waste, the rubbish, as they are variously labeled, have stood front and center during America’s most formative political contests…White trash remind us of one of the American nation’s uncomfortable truths: the poor are always with us. (xv)

The most salient feature of Isenberg’s approach is her fastidious attention to the language of American history. This book brims with examinations of the various monikers and epithets that have been applied to poor whites, beginning with the precolonial era and marching straight into the early 21st century:

The white poor have been with us in various guises, as the names they have been given across the centuries attest: Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters. Tackies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White niggers. Degenerates. White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people. (320)

The superficial goal of Isenberg’s project is to reveal the particular origins and uses of these terms. Going deeper, the true goal seems to be unmasking the violence that each vicious label has wrought on targets and users alike. On the journey through this alien yet eerily familiar terrain, two strong themes emerge: (1) There has always been an undeniable connection between the American willingness to exploit poor whites and our determination to exploit our physical landscape, and (2) The boundaries of the American class system are much less permeable and far more oppressive than our national mythology purports.

It is no secret that the first white people who came to America sought immediately to dominate their surroundings. Less commonly understood is the profound link between the domination of land and the domination of people, especially in contexts where the primary mechanisms of oppression are not race or cultural background, but rather class and socioeconomic standing. Isenberg originates this dynamic with the 16th-century thinker Richard Hakluyt the elder, as well as his cousin of the same name, Richard Hakluyt the younger:

Hakluyt confidently described the entire continent as that “waste firm of America.” Not terra firma, but waste firm. He saw natural resources as raw materials that could be converted into valuable commodities…It was not just land that could be waste. People could be waste too…Hakluyt’s America required what he classified as “waste people,” the corps of laborers needed to cut down the trees, beat the hemp (for making rope), gather honey, salt and dry fish, dress raw animal hides, dig the earth for minerals, raise olives and silk, and sort and pack bird feathers…The bulk of the labor force was to come from the swelling numbers of poor and homeless [in England]…Idle and unused, they were waiting to be transplanted to the American land to be better (albeit no more humanely) put to use. (19-20, emphasis hers)

As scores of poor whites flooded colonial America, they became synonymous with both the regenerative, composting quality of soil as well as with the foul, debouched character of human refuse. Isenberg shows how several of our most prominent founding fathers each created a conception of the “proper” role of the poor in the new nation. One example is Thomas Jefferson’s obsession with the “natural” hierarchy inherent in human life:

Jeffersonian-style classes were effectively strata that mimicked the different nutritive grades within layers of the soil. To this bookish Virginian, idealizing rural society, classes were to be regarded as natural extrusions of a promising land, flesh-and-blood manifestations of an agrarian topography. (88)

Isenberg does not deny the role of race-based thinking in legitimizing and developing such spurious hierarchies, but focuses rather on ideas about breeding and pedigree that originated with animal husbandry and came to dominate elitist thinking about poor people, regardless of skin color. These notions were later employed to justify theories of eugenics and sterilization practices that arose in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The existence of poor, ignorant whites was explained away time and again by the supposedly unavoidable vicissitudes of natural law, and had little to do with the cultural, political, and financial structures that kept wealthy Americans in power. These tropes recurred throughout American history, notably during the Great Depression, where soil erosion was attributed to a lack of moral fiber on the part of those worst affected by the dustbowl:

If for poor rural tenants and sharecroppers class was an inescapable cage or prison, it was equally a source of what Henry Wallace labeled “human erosion.” Human erosion was the reason for soil erosion, and not the other way around. (217)

We see the same thinking applied in contemporary American communities, where politicians insidiously cite immoral behavior or lack of will power as explanations for degradation that is actually brought about by unfair zoning and districting practices and unequal distributions of opportunity and wealth. The American promise of a “level playing field” where all are welcome to compete turns out to be fenced on all sides: “Location determines access to a privileged school, a safe neighborhood, infrastructural improvements, the best hospitals, the best grocery stores” (317).

Isenberg offers no simple solutions for easing the problem of a permanently disenfranchised white underclass, and doesn’t even seem optimistic that modern America is up to the task. White Trash’s eleven-page epilogue is one of the most fascinating historical essays I’ve come across––an explicit call for a return to class-based politics and an implicit rejection of identity-based political sideshows. She leaves us with the resounding message that confrontation is a necessary predicate for any form of reconciliation:

White trash is a central, if disturbing, thread in our national narrative. The very existence of such people––both in their visibility and invisibility––is proof that American society obsesses over the mutable labels we give to the neighbors we wish not to notice. “They are not who we are.” But they are who we are and have been a fundamental part of our history, whether we like it or not. (321)

Rating: 9/10