Many of the southern men who took the IQ test in 1930 had never used a pencil before.
They were members of a class that has been ignored – until Donald Trump rode it to victory. Trump tapped into a rich vein of identity politics: the embrace of the common man, the working stiff, the forgotten rural American.
With her book “White Trash: The 400-year untold history of class in America,” Nancy Isenberg throws a spotlight on the reason for Trump’s success. His platform is a group of uneducated white workers who perform jobs that are just above the level of slavery: the dirtiest and most physically stressful jobs in America. They and their children and grandchildren remain distrustful and resentful of the government and the educated.
This account was brought to my attention by a member of our community, Katherine Boyd, who recommended the book to me. She was absolutely on target!
An astute observer wrote in 1924 that American voters preferred to “cherish the unrealities they have absorbed” based upon “the primal instinct to defeat the side they hate or fear.”
To his supporters, Trump’s tactlessness and personal vindictiveness scored points, while his lack of policy understanding was overlooked.
Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system. It is directed by the top 1 percent and supported by a contented middle class. We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity.
Their history starts in the 1500s, not the 1900s. It derives from British colonial policies dedicated to resettling the poor, decisions that conditioned American notions of class and left a permanent imprint. 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.
Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system - a persistently marginalized people.
During the 1600s, far from being ranked as valued British subjects, the great majority of early colonists were classified as surplus population and expendable “rubbish,” a rude rather than robust population.
The colonists were a mixed lot. On the bottom of the heap were men and women of the poor and criminal classes. Among these unheroic transplants were roguish highwaymen, mean vagrants, Irish rebels, known whores, and an assortment of convicts shipped to the colonies for grand larceny or other property crimes, as a reprieve of sorts, to escape the gallows.
Labor shortages led some ship captains and agents to round up children from the streets of London and other towns to sell to planters across the ocean — this was known as “spiriting.”
Large numbers of poor adults and fatherless boys gave up their freedom, selling themselves into indentured servitude, whereby their passage was paid in return for contracting to anywhere from four to nine years of labor.
Discharged soldiers, also of the lower classes, were shipped off to the colonies. So not a land of equal opportunity, but a much less appealing terrain where death and harsh labor conditions awaited most migrants, along with a firmly entrenched British ideology justified rigid class stations with no promise of social mobility.
As John Smith lamented in his 1624 Generall Historie of Virginia,,, “This dear bought Land with so much bloud and cost, hath onely made some few rich, and all the rest losers.” The leaders of Jamestown had borrowed directly from the Roman model of slavery: abandoned children and debtors were made slaves. Inequality was a given in the “Citty upon a Hill,” submission was regarded as a natural condition of humankind. Governor Winthrop despised democracy, which he brusquely labeled “the meanest and worst of all forms of Government.” The Puritan family was at no time the modern American nuclear family, or anything close. It was often composed of children of different parents, likely to die young, making remarriage quite common.
The year 1776 is a false starting point for any consideration of American conditions. Independence did not magically erase the British class system, nor did it root out long- entrenched beliefs about poverty and the willful exploitation of human labor. An unfavored population, widely thought of as waste or “rubbish,” remained disposable indeed well into modern times. The bulk of the labor force was to come from the swelling numbers of poor and homeless.
The most promising land was never equally available to all. By 1700, indentured servants no longer had much of a chance to own land. the larger tracts were increasingly concentrated in fewer hands. For all their talk of loving the land, Virginians were less skilled in the art of husbandry than their English counterparts. Few ploughs were used in seventeenth-century Virginia. The simple hoe was the principal tool in the raising of tobacco.
Their environment was governed by three interrelated phenomena: harsh labor conditions, the treatment of indentures as commodities, and, most of all, the deliberate choice to breed children so that they should become an exploitable pool of workers. Waste men and waste women (and especially waste children, the adolescent boys who comprised a majority of the indentured servants) were an expendable class of laborers who made colonization possible.
The first surveyor reported that most of the Virginia émigrés in Carolina territory were not legitimate patent holders at all . They were poor squatters . The surveyor warned that the infant Carolina colony would founder if more “ Rich men ” were not recruited , that is , men who could build homes and run productive plantations . Landless trespassers ( who were not servants ) promised only widespread “ leveling , ” by which the surveyor meant a society shorn of desirable class divisions .
The curious history of North Carolina demonstrates why this colony lies at the heart of our white trash story. North Carolina, which came to be known as “Poor Carolina,” went in a very different direction from its sibling to the south. It failed to shore up its elite planter class. It became an imperial renegade territory, a swampy refuge for the poor and landless. North Carolina forged a lasting legacy as what we might call the first white trash colony.
The Carolinians proved resistant to religion and reform. As was noted, the men had an abiding “aversion” to labor of any kind. “They slept (and snored) through most of the morning...”
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I was surprised and delighted to see your post on Nancy Isenberg’s history, White Trash. And thank you for crediting me with the suggestion to read it. I’d just like to add that it was generally accepted by European Christian civilizations in early modern history that people were born into a certain class by the “grace” of God. There was no upward mobility, no leveling of class, and no recognition of human or individual rights until the late 18th century. “White trash” were just one step above enslaved Africans and were often hired as the overseers of the big plantations. Their resentment led to particularly brutal treatment of enslaved people.
Keep 'em poor, keep 'em sick, and keep 'em stupid. Might've taken a whike, but it worked.