★★★☆☆

• Full Title: White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History Of Class In America
• Author: Nancy Isenberg
• Year: 2016 (mine was a library hardback)
• Genre: History, Class
• Publisher: Viking
• ISBN 978-0-670-78597-1 (hardback)
• Author’s Wikipedia Page

 

Summary

A professor of history at LSU, Nancy Isenberg pokes through corners of U.S. history, digging up voluminous evidence that the U.S. has always had a class system, that poor whites were long considered a different “breed” than the wealthy landowners who founded (and continue to run) our nation. She examines the causes of this poverty, and the results of various attempts to cure it.

 

What I Liked Least About It

Throughout, Isenberg uses “white trash” to mean “poor white people”, which was odd to me — in my lifetime they have never been synonymous. She also, in many places, uses other terms synonymously, including “redneck” and “hillbilly” — words I have always taken as distinct (if sometimes overlapping). Eventually (pg. 255-256), Isenberg acknowledges that “not everyone agreed” the terms are synonymous. I think much earlier in the book would have been a great place to settle on definitions. (Note: My northeastern born-and-raised wife assures me that she always thought of these as synonyms.) In my experience, the appended “trash” has always referred to behavior, mostly unrelated to economic station.

Secondly, I disagree with the premise of the book, which is stated in the preface (pg. xvi and xvii): “we as a people have trouble embracing the pervasiveness of a class heirarchy in the United States.” In the Introduction, Isenberg explains:

“The problem is that popular American history is most commonly told — dramatized — without much reference to the existence of social classes. It is as though in separating from Great Britain, the United States somehow magically escaped the bonds of class and derived a higher consciousness of enriched possibility... The idea of America was presented by its chief promoters with great panache, a vision of how a modern republic might prove itself revolutionary in terms of social mobility in a world dominated by monarchy and fixed aristocracy.”

— page 1

Who, I wonder, is this “we” who doesn’t acknowledge the class system in the U.S.? Because the vast majority of us aren’t in the upper class, and are well aware of that fact. People of color and poor white people have always been aware of the fairly rigid class system in the U.S. — even if it is somewhat more malleable than the class systems of older nations. And Isenberg contradicts her own premise by endlessly citing journalists, politicians, thinkers, bureaucrats, pop culture, and activists, all of whom seemed well aware of the U.S. class system, including poor whites. Granted, some of those people were in favor of keeping the poor in poverty (often assuming they deserved it), and some others wanted to end poverty as much as possible. But all of them saw it, knew it, understood it.

There are also a few inexplicable contradictions in the narrative. For example, on page 40, Isenberg says a 1662 Virginia law was “without any British precedent”, but in the very next sentence she says “English law... served as a model” for this very statute.

She also spends a good deal of time and effort attempting to prove that women were once considered chattel — something I thought was common knowledge (and is still practiced today by many people).

 

What I Liked Most About It

I do like the attempt to tell a different version of history than is sometimes presented. As the aphorism goes, history is written by the victors, so we usually learn in school about the wealthy landowners who drew up the founding documents and led the armies and wrote the songs and owned the ships and so on. Washington, Jefferson, Adams, etc. Isenberg tells the story of everyone else — and how we were kept in our place by those “heroes” we’re taught to deify. (Even so, she is forced to tell it using the words of those very men; the illiterate poor didn’t write any of history.)

As with any well-researched book (and a lot of research went into this one, it seems), I enjoyed the wealth of information. Before reading, I was only somewhat familiar with only some of the things mentioned. I enjoyed reading some of the ridiculous quotations from our founding fathers, including this one from Jefferson:

“It should be further considered that, in America, no other distinction between man and man had ever been known, but that of persons in office exercising powers by authority of the laws, and private individuals. Among these last the poorest labourer stood on equal ground with the wealthiest Millionary, and generally on a more favoured one whenever their rights seemed to jar. It has been seen that a shoemaker, or other artisan, removed by the voice of his country from his work bench into a chair of office, has instantly commanded all the respect and obedience which the laws ascribe to his office. But of distinctions by birth or badge they had no more idea than they had of the mode of existence in the moon or planets. They had heard only that there were such, and knew that they must be wrong. A due horror of the evils which flow from these distinctions could be excited in Europe only, where the dignity of man is lost in arbitrary distinctions, where the human species is classed into several stages of degradation, where the many are crouched under the weight of the few, and where the order established can present to the contemplation of a thinking being no other picture than that of God almighty and his angels trampling under foot the hosts of the damned.”

— pages 97-98

(Isenberg quotes only snippets of this passage; I found the full quotation here.)

One imagines that Jefferson managed to write all those outright lies with a straight face, honestly believing it in the moment. Some of his other writings give away that he really did recognize the existence of various classes in the new country he helped create.

There were also plenty of useful passages like this one:

“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. If they did not, they would recognize that the most powerful engines of the U.S. economy — slaveowning planters and land speculators in the past, banks, tax policy, corporate giants, and compassionless politiicans and angry voters today — bear considerable responsibility for the lasting effects on white trash, or on falsely labeled “black rednecks”, and on the working poor generally. The sad fact is, if we have no class analysis, then we will continue to be shocked at the numbers of waste people who inhabit what self-anointed patriots have styled the “greatest civilization in the history of the world.”

— page 309

 

An Aside: Personal Bias Disclaimer

I’m certain that some of my interest in this book — and some of my objection to parts of it — is due to my own station in life and my family background. Though my household is currently in the middle class, I have been poor as an adult — for 20 years I owned no property (and thus wouldn’t have been considered eligible to vote under early U.S. laws) and my entire history of employment could be considered menial labor (even my lone “white collar” desk job was for poverty wages). And though I lived a middle class childhood, both my parents grew up poor. My mother’s mother, for example, was raised by sharecroppers and married a man who had quit school in the fifth grade. Both my grandfathers could be classed as “itinerant” or “transient” laborers, moving where the work took them. Both eventually acquired land in Oklahoma and thus removed themselves one step from poverty. In a single generation, my parents and their siblings went from dirt floors to the college educated middle class (ironically due in large part to liberal policies that many of them now decry).

When Isenberg quotes studies on “trailer trash”, I reflect that my parents were living in an Oklahoma City trailer park during the weeks and months when I must have been conceived. Or all the friends (and relatives) I knew during my early adulthood who lived in mobile homes in Arkansas and Missouri. When she refers to the “human waste” often on the bleeding edge of westward expansion, I can’t help but think of the genealogy research my mother did, and how generations of my ancestors on both sides of the family skipped from state to state, never staying in one spot long enough for a second generation.

In other words, I could never identify with the “we” in this book; I and almost everyone I’ve ever known was part of the “they”.

 

Conclusion

One lesson I learned from this book is to be careful using “we” when I write. If I do use the word, I need to specify who is included in my we. In Isenberg’s case, she never does clear up who the we is in her preface and Introduction. Perhaps she meant “we in modern academia”, or “people I know personally” or “some movies I watched”. I’m not sure.

I was reminded, however, of my wife’s first visit to the middle of the country. She was shocked, she said, to see white people working at a fast food restaurant. “I didn’t know there were poor white people”, she told me, only half in jest. If you, like her, are or were unaware of the permanent underclass of poor whites in the U.S. (whether or not they behave like “trash”), then you might enjoy this book. Even if you, like me, have actually been a poor white person, there is plenty to learn here.

 

 

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