White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

“First known as ‘waste people,’ and later ‘white trash,’ marginalized Americans were stigmatized for their inability to be productive, to own property, or to produce healthy and upwardly mobile children – the sense of uplift on which the American dream is predicated.”

Isenberg highlights the historical presence of a white underclass in American society. While the demeaning names have changed throughout history, the underclass has consistently been blamed for its poverty and discriminated against.

“Land was the principal source of wealth, and those without any had little chance to escape servitude. It was the stigma of landlessness that would leave its mark on white trash from this day forward.”

From the earliest settlements in Puritan Massachusetts and Jamestown, Virginia, those without land were expendable. In Jamestown, they were literally worked to death. Many of the early immigrants were expelled from England and under contract to serve. They had no chance of acquiring property. Land ownership is vital to building wealth.

“…[I]n 1608, the heavy concentrations of poor … were accused of breeding rapidly and infecting the city [of London] with a ‘plague’ of poverty, thus figuratively designating unemployment a contagious disease. Distant American colonies were presented as a cure. The poor could be purged.”

Disdain for the poor among the upper class traces its roots to England. Elites in England saw the new colonies as an opportunity to rid themselves of this underclass. In the Americas, the poor would face similar disdain.

“What separated rich from poor was that the landless had nothing to pass on. They had no heirs. This was particularly true in Jamestown, where the orphans of dead servants were sold off like the possessions of a foreclosed estate.”

Isenberg repeatedly highlights the connection between land ownership and rights. Those without land did not have any rights and were condemned to poverty. Further, the children of the poor were often sold as slaves and had no means of bettering their social position.

“Populated by what many dismissed as ‘useless lubbers’ (conjuring the image of sleepy and oafish men lolling about doing nothing), North Carolina forged a lasting legacy as what we might call the first white trash colony.”

Although this land was populated with British citizens, the inhabitants were considered a different and inferior breed from the upper class. Elite planters from Virginia occasionally traveled to the swampy lands of North Carolina and described the inhabitants as vile. The poor land, in their view, yielded waste people.

“As late as 1780, [Benjamin Franklin] warned his grandson that society divided people into ‘two Sorts of People,’ those who ‘live comfortably in Good Houses’ and those who ‘are poor and dirty and ragged and vicious and live in miserable Cabins and garrets,’ and ‘if they are idle, they must go without or starve.’”

Associated with advice to move up the ladder in society, Franklin, too, had contempt for the very poor. He expected the hard-working middling men to get ahead, but he had no such expectations for the very poor. Nor would he allow indentured servants to join a free militia, further cutting off their prospects for bettering their social position or playing a role in determining their own futures.

“Though Jefferson sold Europeans on America as a classless society, no such thing existed in Virginia or anywhere else.”

In 18th-century Virginia, poor people could not vote or hold office. For Jefferson to claim that American society was classless required him to assume that poor white people were simply a different breed, inferior to the landed classes. This view also erased the presence of Black people in the Americas, failing to acknowledge their presence or the role of slaves in building the South.

“The distance between town and backwoods was measured in more than miles. It had an evolutionary character, forming what some at the time recognized as an impassable gulf between the classes. The educated routinely wrote in disbelief that such people shared their country.”

Class was defined not only by economic conditions but also by physical attributes and appearance. The upper and middle classes were appalled at the conditions in which the poor lived. Yet, they blamed the poor for their own circumstances, not the economic system or their own complicity in sustaining these conditions.

“Jackson’s appeal as a presidential candidate was not about real democracy, then, but instead the attraction to a certain class of land-grabbing whites and the embrace of the ‘rude instinct of masculine liberty.’”

Westerners and the white underclass celebrated Jackson for his temperament and style, as he behaved similarly to them. He did not advance the interests of the white underclass, however, failing to promote universal male suffrage or economic assistance. He is one of many politicians who have attained the support of this social class although it opposes their self-interest.

“All knew that poor whites were cursed because they were routinely consigned to the worst land: sandy, scrubby pine, and swampy soil. This was how they became known in the mid-nineteenth century as ‘sandhillers’ and ‘pineys.’”

Such poor white people were associated with dying lands and were marginalized. However, they did not even own this undesirable land. They were merely squatters with no claim to permanency.

“Who really spoke of equality among whites anymore? No one of any note. Let us put it plainly: on the path to disunion, the roadside was strewn with white trash.”

In the years leading to the Civil War, there was no concern for the interests of poor white people. The upper and middle classes feared the growing numbers of poor in the Western territories. Ultimately, many in this underclass would give their lives in the Civil War.

“Republicans and Union officers wore the mudsill label as a badge of pride, and made it a rallying cry for northern democracy.”

Confederate leaders called poor white people in the North mudsills and claimed that no white Southerners had to engage in such dirty work. However, Northern leaders embraced the title and argued that the working classes were the backbone of democracy. This embrace signaled the beginning of a Southern or regional association with the white underclass.

“Soldiers in the western theater were taken aback by the mud huts they espied along the Mississippi. The North’s mudsills seemed like royalty compared to the South’s truly mud-bespattered swamp people.”

The rural poor people in the South lived in dire poverty and lacked any education. Originally, Northerners hoped that the end of slavery would uplift these poor white people, but it did not do so. Instead, the white underclass came to be defined by stereotypical features that were decidedly Southern and rural.

“When the low-down dared to speak up, reach across the color line, the hereditary leadership class of the South simply could not stomach their overreach.”

The Southern elite used racism to keep both African American people and the white underclass in their place. Any white person, especially a poor one, who spoke of the common interests of all poor people was called a scalawag and vilified. This prevented poor people from uniting politically and helped sustain the power of the elite.

“Worried about ‘race suicide,’ as [Teddy Roosevelt] put it, he recommended that women of Anglo-American stock have four to six children, ‘enough so the race shall increase and not decrease.’”

In the early 20th century, there was an obsession with eugenics. Women of the upper and middle classes were urged to breed, while those in the white underclass were at times subjected to sterilization. Isenberg highlights the tendency to think of class in race-based or heritable terms.

“In this way, the Depression was an upheaval that portrayed class leveling with disordered images of land erosion. The washing away of topsoil and debris was relatedly seen in the washing away of different classes of people, churned up and let loose in mass migrations caused by economic disaster.”

Repeatedly, Isenberg highlights the association of people with types of land. Thomas Jefferson compared social classes to the layers of soil. When the Great Depression hit, these analogies were again used. For example, people fleeing the Dust Bowl were depicted as akin to particles of dust themselves (213).

“Instead of eliminating class distinctions, suburbs were turned into class-conscious fortresses.”

In the 1950s and 1960s, suburban governments and residents went to great lengths to keep the poor and racial minorities out. Zoning laws kept multi-family dwellings out of desirable areas, and restrictive covenants prohibited the sale of property to Black families. Suburbs became homogeneous enclaves.

“Hollywood did not expose the seamy economic conditions of poor whites so much as emphasize their dark inner demons. By the fifties, ‘redneck’ had come to be synonymous with an almost insane bigotry.”

In popular culture, the rural poor residents of the South were depicted as cruel, ignorant racists. The wealthy white Southerners, who had power, were not subjected to the same characterization. Isenberg is highlighting the economic biases in the media and the resulting invisibility of Southern poverty.

“Poverty, for a female, went beyond the wretchedness of having no money.”

Historically, poor white women were condemned for their sexual deviance and rough manners. They were victims of domestic violence and rape and were subjected to forced sterilization in various eras of US history. In the late 20th century, celebrities such as Dolly Parton dressed in garish outfits in an effort to emphasize femininity and were beloved by poor white women.

“The lesson here is that the choices people make are both class- and gender-charged.”

The poor are often blamed for making the wrong choices. Yet, in addition to race, the class status and gender of a person strongly delineate that person’s options. Most people who are born poor remain trapped in cycles of poverty with no means to escape it; for women, the range of options is additionally limited by gender.

“Clinton’s election did what the earlier nonelite southern presidents could not, turning crackers and rednecks into something that mainstream America could embrace.”

While Bill Clinton did not fit some aspects of the Southern white trash stereotype, he was able to win over popular opinion by embracing the Bubba label. That name did not have the regional and negative associations of terms such as redneck. However, Clinton’s background of Southern poverty dogged him throughout his career. Isenberg emphasizes the reluctance of the elite to accept fully those from this underclass.

“A corps of pundits exist whose fear of the lower classes has led them to assert that the unbred perverse – white as well as black – are crippling and corrupting American society. They deny that the nation’s economic structure has a causal relationship with the social phenomena they highlight. They deny history.”

Repeatedly, Isenberg observes that elites condemn the poor for the consequences of their own poverty, while those in power fail to accept any responsibility for creating and sustaining such an unfair system. Here, she notes that this phenomenon continues in the 21st century.

“If this book accomplishes anything it will be to have exposed a number of myths about the American dream, to have disabused readers of the notion that upward mobility is a function of the founders’ ingenious plan, or that Jackson’s democracy was liberating, or that the Confederacy was about states’ rights rather than preserving class and racial distinctions.”

Isenberg argues that class exploitation has been a constant presence in American history. The founders considered the white poor to be rubbish and expendable. Her goal is to expose the suffering and disdain experienced by this underclass as a consequence of systemic strategies that created and sustain its existence.