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

During the Civil War, both sides vilified each other’s lower classes. Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, criticized the North for its dependence on menial white workers, dubbed mudsills. In an effort to hide the extreme class divisions in the South, Davis and the elite planters stressed the racial dichotomy. They claimed that white people did not do demeaning work, but the planter class perceived itself as superior to both lower-class white and Black people in the South. The draft exempted planters who owned more than 20 slaves. Many poor white people were pro-Union and deserted the Confederate Army. Those individuals raided farms and became “the anarchists that upper-class southerners had long feared” (164-5). The US marshal estimated that there were over 100,000 such deserters (165). Given food shortages in the South, large numbers of poor women rioted and raided food supplies as well.

The North sought to exploit these class divisions in the South. Union leaders embraced the mudsill slur and claimed it as a “badge of pride” (168). They praised working-class Northerners as the backbone of democracy and framed the war as not only about slavery, but also about liberating non-slaveholding white people. Abraham Lincoln, with his backcountry roots, helped to solidify this celebration of the Northern mudsills. The Republican party punished Confederate sympathizers in border states and subjected them to public shaming. As the war progressed, the Union sought to deprive the Southern oligarchy of its land and privilege (171). Union General William T. Sherman’s famous and destructive 285-mile March to the Sea, in which the North took control of and burned much of the industrial center, Atlanta, and progressed to Savannah, exemplifies this effort to destroy the oligarchy’s privileged lifestyle. In the aftermath of the war, however, Northerners recognized the difficulty of helping the white poor residents of the South. The North’s mudsills “seemed like royalty compared to the South’s truly mudbespattered swamp people” (172). Isenberg argues that neither the Northern mudsills nor the Southern poor gained much as a result of this war. 

Following the Civil War, Republicans questioned whether poor white people would help transform the South or resist change. President Andrew Johnson, who essentially left the Republican party, allowed the Southern elite to retain lands but also wanted to empower poor white people in politics. However, Johnson expected Black people to remain disenfranchised. He vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, claiming that he “disapproved of any law that sanctioned interracial marriage” (183). Democrats worried about the loss of white control over government and vilified people of mixed races, whom the labeled “mongrels.” They labeled both carpetbaggers—Northerners who came to the South to make money—and scalawags—Southern white Republicans who betrayed their race—as enemies. The Democrats and planter elites had intense disdain for scalawags, whom they equated with white trash and racial mixing. They viewed them as a threat to class and racial stability.

While the Freedmen’s Bureau extended relief to both freed slaves and poor white people, the image of poor white Southerners became one of hopelessness. Northerners described them as vagrants and criminals, a danger to society. Their political influence ended with the completion of Reconstruction when power was returned to white men of inherited wealth. By the 1890s, the term redneck appeared as a description of rowdy and racist followers of Southern demagogues. The term originated in the Boer War of 1899-1902 to describe English soldiers’ sunburned necks. James Vardaman was an example of a Southern demagogue who embraced the identity of redneck and hurled vicious insults at Northerners, such as President Theodore Roosevelt, for having any association with Black people.

Although Roosevelt loathed redneck politicians, he accepted the era’s racist ideas that were presented as “evolutionary thinking” and believed Black people were “naturally subordinate” (190) to Anglo-Saxons. Like many other people in the early 20th century, Roosevelt was a eugenicist who thought that traits were inherited. He celebrated the return to the wilderness and war as means of retaining “good Saxon stock” (190). Roosevelt also viewed good breeding, which he considered a woman’s civic duty, as essential to the “preservation” of his race. For this reason, he sought to regulate marriage and divorce under federal law. Many states at that time banned interracial marriage. The “right” sort of people, namely middle and upper class white people, were expected to marry well and breed.

On the other hand, those deemed degenerate were to be stopped from breeding. This approach focused mainly on poor Southerners. At first, states considered placing women who were considered to be of poor breeding in asylums during their child-bearing years, but policymakers ultimately decided sterilization was a cheaper option. They targeted sexually aggressive lower-class women. A new classification, moron, was created to depict those more “intelligent than idiots and imbeciles” (197). Such women were deemed especially dangerous because they could pass as normal and bear children. During World War I, intelligence quotient (IQ) tests were administered. These tests helped secure the negative stereotypes of poor Southern white and Black people because those groups scored poorly on these heavily biased tests due to the lack of public education in the South.

During this period and extending into the 1920s, US culture was obsessed with breeding. People were considered akin to horses, with the idea of creating human thoroughbreds presented as a possibility. There was belief in the idea of a cognitive elite, or aristogenics, which was viewed as a superior class with talent in its blood. The Supreme Court allowed forced sterilization of so-called degenerates in the case of Buck v. Bell, ruling that Carrie Buck could be subjected to forced sterilization as a civic duty to “save the nation from being ‘swamped with incompetence’” (201). A form of pseudoscience that allowed for a ranking of inherited social classes predominated. White elites laid claim to the right to rule, while poor white people—especially Southern ones—and non-white people were viewed as inferior.

The Great Depression, with unemployment at 20% by 1932, brought misery to the working class across the US. However, it especially exposed how “tragically out of step” (206) the Southern economy was with the American dream of equal opportunity. Poor white and African American Southerners toiled as sharecroppers and convict laborers, and their lives were viewed as expendable. Harsh prison sentences were meted out for minor crimes. As a result, the “South’s transportation infrastructure and expanded industrial base was built on the backs of chain gangs” (207). The state also leased these prisoners to private businesses. Two thirds of the nation’s tenant farmers lived in the South. These individuals were indebted to landlords, had no education, and commonly had hookworm and other maladies. The Depression sent those escaping the “Dust Bowl”—the extreme drought, high winds, and resulting lack of crops of the 1930s in the Southern Plains——to California, where they were labeled as tramps and treated poorly.

The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administration sought to help the rural poor. His Secretary of Agriculture, Henry Wallace, dismissed the prejudices against the poor white people of the South, stating they were not biologically pre-ordained for a life of poverty. The New Deal created the Resettlement Administration (RA) and subsequent Farm Security Administration with the goals of retiring bad land, relocating the rural poor, resettling the unemployed in suburban communities, and rehabilitating farm families (218). The RA created experimental communities mainly in the South, but they did not do well. Home ownership was not possible for poor families, as credit was not extended to them. Nor did cooperative farming experiments go smoothly, as this was not a practice with which residents had experience. Rex Tugwell, who led these governmental efforts, sought to shift the balance of power in the South via the elimination of poll taxes, which prevented the poor from voting. The concentration of economic power in the region was at odds with democracy.

Southern elites and politicians resisted efforts to change the class structure. They succeeded in excluding farm laborers from the economic benefits of Social Security. Those who administered projects in the South also refused to spend money on “amenities” (223) for the poor—such as indoor plumbing—and resisted the push to educate the working class. However, the Roosevelt Administration pointed to the success of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s modernization of agriculture, construction of dams, and electrifying the region as proof that the poor were receptive to education and training.

Professor Howard Odum influenced Roosevelt Administration officials’ perceptions concerning the rural poor. Odum published a comprehensive study of the Southern region that showed that its leaders had “squandered the chances of millions of people by tolerating poverty and illiteracy” (224) and refusing to provide training or basic services to people. He surveyed sociologists’ descriptions of poor white people and found negative descriptions, most frequently describing them as shiftless (225). They were considered degenerate and presented as a breed apart. Others, such as writers James Agee and Jonathan Daniels, then further probed the image of poor white people. Agee’s works highlighted poor people’s humanity and encouraged his readers to consider their own complicity in the persistence of this level of poverty. Daniels chose to let the poor speak for themselves. They were beginning to tackle the stereotype, but the problem of poor white Southerners’ not being seen as Americans remained.

In the 1950s and 1960s, political figures and popular icons emerged to challenge the negative stereotype of poor white people. Elvis Presley embraced a musical style and image “that had been associated with blacks” (231), as Black Americans’ songs he learned on Memphis’s Beale Street were an anchor for his music. He became an idol for many white teenage boys, not a figure of disdain. President Lyndon Johnson, who hailed from Texas, advocated for the eradication of poverty and civil rights. However, his political adversaries labeled him a cracker, and the elite never fully accepted him. Isenberg argues that class never lost its fixation with bloodlines and place of origin. Johnson and Elvis never fully escaped their poor, rural origins, and elites criticized Elvis for turning the class hierarchy “upside down” (265).

While Americans denied their awareness of class, in reality they were “highly class conscious” (236). Popular television programs, such as Andy Griffith and The Beverly Hillbillies, depicted poor Southern white people as stupid and mocked them. Whether they were presented as hillbillies—a pejorative term for people from the hills—or as “rednecks” from the swamps, they were framed as a breed apart. There was a huge cultural chasm between rural poor people and wealthy urbanites and suburbanites. Governmental policies and business practices served to segregate the poor from the middle and upper classes. For example, zoning laws kept trailer parks, which became a symbol of white trash, distant from areas of town that were perceived as more desirable. Trailer parks were placed in poor areas and became, in the public’s mind, the modern-day “squatter’s hovel” (247).

Interest on mortgage payments, which were made by middle-class homeowners, was tax deductible, while rent, paid by poorer individuals, was not.

The news of the era additionally featured individuals such as Arkansas’s Governor Orval Faubus who embodied the stereotype of white trash. He tried to prevent the desegregation of schools in Arkansas, infamously standing in the door to prevent Black students from attending a school that was previously reserved for white students. Global media captured the fury and venom of the white working class in its presentation of opposition to desegregation, and popular films also incorporated this image of poor white people. They highlighted their bigotry and degeneracy but did not expose the poverty in which they lived, presenting them as villains, never as victims. Meanwhile, the rich in Little Rock, Arkansas, continued to send their children to a high school in which all students were white. The elites viewed race-mixing as only for rednecks, Isenberg notes. Politicians such as Faubus capitalized on racism and class tensions to retain power. Americans, Isenberg explains, were interested only in a “democracy of manners” (258), with political leaders expected to behave as the common man, not to challenge the disparities in wealth.