White Trash - Book Review

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