White
Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
by Nancy Isenberg
Viking (June
21, 2016)
Nancy Isenberg has destroyed whatever may have remained of
the myth that the United States is a classless society or ever was. She shows
that class has been a strong element since Jamestown and that it was
deliberately created and cultivated. The
poor and disadvantaged were always an inevitable part of the picture and,
rather than taking responsibility for an economy that could never achieve full
employment, the wealthier classes chose to blame the poor for their condition.
Instead of giving the poor a way out of poverty or an avenue to social
mobility, those with power and wealth denigrated and punished them for their
poverty, used them as canon fodder in often meaningless wars and as the advance
shield of westward expansion, removal or extermination of native tribes, and
clearing of the land. The poor rarely enjoyed any of the fruits of these
efforts, despite paying the price for them.
The wealthy and privileged invented a myth in which the poor
were a natural result of civilization.
People ended up where they did in the economic and social pecking order
because they were fated to. Social
Darwinism determined who the fittest were and they would survive and prosper,
while others would not. Although she doesn’t mention it, this reflected
Calvinist belief in predestination, practiced by Puritan settlers, which enabled
early and later Americans to believe that, if people were poor, decrepit,
starved, landless and penniless, it was their fate and nothing could (or
should) be done to alter their condition. Followers of the Ayn Rand
interpretation of history subscribe to much the same philosophy, including Paul
Ryan.
Perhaps the greatest irony is how easily those in power have
persuaded the poorer classes to work against their own best interests. By deflecting attention from the real cause
of their place at or near the bottom rung of society, elites have persuaded the
poor that someone or something else was to blame for their condition other than
those who actually are responsible for it.
Scapegoats have typically included racial minorities or immigrants who
were “taking their jobs” or getting help from the government that they didn’t
deserve and were paid for with tax money they worked for and unfairly
disadvantaged them. Much the same thinking appears to have fueled Trump’s
campaign and energized his base. Racism has always played a roll in this
process. As Isenberg notes (p. 315):
“Poor whites are still taught to
hate—but not to hate those who are keeping them in line. Lyndon Johnson knew this when he quipped, ‘if
you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he
won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.
Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for
you.’”
The treatment of squatters on the frontier was not new to me
as my co-author, James R. Boylston, and I researched much about this for our
book David Crockett in Congress: The Rise
and Fall of the Poor Man’s Friend (Bright Sky Press, 2009). Isenberg mentions Crockett’s efforts to
secure legal title to land that squatters had settled, worked, and built homes
on. As a three-term congressman, Crockett repeatedly tried to pass a bill that
would give those parcels to the squatters who worked them, or sold it to them
at a minimal price. He never succeeded, largely because he butted heads with
the Jackson machine and was persona non
grata among his own Tennessee delegation.
Moreover, commercial land interests were not about to give away good
land to squatters when fortunes were to be made from it. Instead, the land went
to speculators, who could afford it and sold it at a profit. Although squatters
were paid for the “improvements” they’d made to the land, such as houses,
barns, fences, fields cleared and cultivated, they were left little option but
to move on and squat on another piece of land.
Land was the only real means of improving one’s economic condition and,
as long as title to land remained elusive, the squatter would remain in an
endless loop of poverty.
As Isenberg notes, the government hadn’t the resources to
keep squatters off of public lands, but she is right in saying that the
government was actually glad to see these frontier areas settled by squatters.
It was a way to push boundaries into Indian lands, clear undeveloped lands, and
produce cultivated farms. If anyone was
going to be killed by Indians or shoved off the land they worked it might as
well be these squatters, or “waste people”.
The squatter has been portrayed in literature and film as
some sort of undesirable loafer, lazy drunkard, or mentally deficient
lunkhead. Perhaps some were, and
Isenberg cites accounts from travelers who saw some of the worst cases, such as
the mind-boggling clay eaters (I never heard of them before, but didn’t eat for
many hours after reading about them). I don’t know how typical these may have
been, but these images obscure that of the hard-working poor squatters who
simply could not afford to buy land, especially when competing with wealthier
speculators and major plantation owners.
Crockett’s constituency included many poor farmers who
pressed him not only to secure title to the lands they had worked, but also to fund
schools in their areas so their children might get an education. Crockett spoke
forcefully in favor of educating the poor as another means to elevate them
economically. He said he understood the
value of an education because he had suffered from the lack of one himself. Although
Isenberg mentions the outrageous tall tales told by and about Crockett, which
were a valuable campaign asset, he understood that education and land ownership
were the only sure ways to improve the economic lot of the poor. He also suspected
that the wealthier classes looked down on the poor and found them unworthy of elevating.
There is a vignette on page 87 that summarizes this business
in regard to Jefferson’s theories:
“Jefferson knew that behind all the
rhetoric touting America’s agricultural potential there was a less enlightened
reality. For every farsighted gentleman
farmer, there were scads of poorly managed plantations and unskilled small (and
tenant) farmers struggling to survive.
…Tenants, who rented land they did not own, and landless laborers and
squatters lacked the commercial acumen and genuine virtue of cultivators
too. In his perfect world, lower-class
farmers could be improved, just like their land. If they were given a freehold
and a basic education, they could adopt better methods of husbandry and pass on
favorable habits and traits to their children.
As we will see, however, Jefferson’s various reform efforts were
thwarted by those of the ruling gentry who had little interest in elevating the
Virginia poor. Even more dramatically,
his agrarian version of social mobility was immediately compromised by his own
profound class biases, of which he was unaware.”
By tracing the images of the poor, the “waste people”, the
“white trash” of society from Jamestown till today, Isenberg administers the
gas to the myth of classlessness in the United States, as well as the Horatio
Alger mobility myth. The political and economic system was rigged against the
poor, regardless of how hard they might work. It was a “Catch 22” – the
economic system blocked upward mobility for the poor, who were then blamed for
their condition. We hear much the same fiction
today from the right wing extremists who are about to take over our government,
and it rings just as hollow today as it did to Crockett.
Of course, squatters were later cultivated as voters, once
suffrage was extended to all white males, including those without property (see
page 128). Although Jackson didn’t care
about squatters (and had helped draft suffrage restrictions for the Tennessee
constitution in 1796), he and the Democrats eventually embraced the idea of
preemption that Crockett had fought for. In fact, after Crockett died at the
Alamo, his son, John Wesley Crockett, won his father’s old seat in Congress and
pushed through the very land bill Crockett had failed to pass. Preemption made
it possible for squatters to buy the land they had cultivated and become landowners
(who, of course, were likely to gratefully vote Democratic).
Isenberg provides an excellent portrait of Andrew Jackson,
who may be the closest thing to Trump that the country has previously seen in the
White House (see pages 123-129). Jackson
and his backers used many of the same tactics Trump has, mainly placing him
outside the mainstream and even portraying his crudeness, tendency to violence,
and illegal acts as a plus. Although
Jackson has been portrayed as a hero to and advocate for the “common man” who
favored expanding democracy, he was anything but. Although a self-made man who
rose from poverty, Jackson had little sympathy for those he left behind. His
brutally cold removal of southeastern Indian tribes from their ancestral lands,
often at bayonet point, is eerily similar to Trump’s vow to expel immigrants.
The populist image of Jackson is as unjustified as his visage on the $20 bill,
which will (thankfully) soon be replaced by that of Harriet Tubman.
Most disturbing, perhaps, is the broad distrust of
intelligent, educated people like John Quincy Adams in favor of little- or
un-educated leaders such as Jackson. The uneducated poor were easily
manipulated to distrust eastern elites and the educated and turn instead to those
who were more like themselves, who spoke “their language”, regardless of their
lack of qualifications or agendas that actually worked against the interests of
the poor. We see much the same today, including
a discrediting and distrust of legitimate journalism, and the easy acceptance
of fake news and propaganda that dovetails with preconceived notions or
whatever makes people feel more comfortable.
Isenberg’s discussion of racial and social thinking among
such founders as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin is particularly
disturbing. It is not unlike the kind of perverted racial thinking developed in
Nazi Germany. This was especially true in her discussion of how early American
elites viewed breeding and blood lines, even comparing them to the breeding of animals
(see pp. 138-139). Although some of these theories allowed that the lower
classes could be “improved” or elevated over several generations through
breeding, there was never any serious effort to give the poor that opportunity—perhaps
for the best as the idea of such breeding is nauseating.
Allen Wiener
