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Zusammenfassung von White Trash

Name: White Trash
Rating: 4 (108 reviews)
Author: Nancy Isenberg

Nancy Isenberg

The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

4 (108 Bewertungen)

16 Min.

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What’s in it for me? Delve into the story of white trash America.

In the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election, the voting behavior of white people in America garnered a lot of attention. Some commentators argued that they had voted against their own interests; some that they had voted against minorities, and some disgruntled Democrats even talked about a “whitelash” or a “white trash vote.” It would be easy to dismiss these people as simply sore losers, but maybe there was something more to it than that?

This is the history of the so-called white trash of America, a social phenomenon that didn’t arrive with the first stereotypical trailer park home, but has been engrained in the fabric of American society from the very beginning. It’s the story of how poor white America has been a thread running through the history of the United States, and how that story gives us some insight into where we are today.

In these blinks, you’ll find out

why Benjamin Franklin thought that Western migration could resolve class conflicts;
how two legendary Americans identified with their era’s white trash; and
why the Great Depression changed the country’s historic obsession with genetics.

American society has been shaped by social stratification since the beginning.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was the United States. The nation’s early history laid the foundations for its future class-based society.

In the 1600s, America presented England’s ruling class with a rare opportunity to get rid of the poor and profit from it. The vast, undeveloped and unoccupied landmass of North America seemed free for the taking – to the English, the “uncivilized” natives didn’t count as the country’s custodians.

So America became a dumping ground for England’s criminals, orphans and poor, who were then tasked with building up the first English colonies in America. Before long, the class inequalities embedded in English society were reproduced and intensified in the colonies.

Take Virginia, the first Southern colony, for instance. Its economy was driven by tobacco, a crop that demands large tracts of land that only the rich could afford, and vast numbers of laborers. Upon arrival, poor immigrants were forced to work in the tobacco fields for a period of time to pay off their passage to America.

The class system was also entrenched in the Northern colonies. For example, although New England society contained a thriving religious community, its principles were far from egalitarian. Puritan doctrine established a stiff social hierarchy with poor outsiders – both black slaves and white servants – at the bottom.

Gender inequality was also rife in the American colonies. In the minds of early Americans, the ideas of fertility and “good breeding” were key to a prosperous and healthy nation. The importance of fertility led to women being seen in the same terms as land: both required able-bodied men to take responsibility for them if the economy and the population were to grow.

And, in order to protect good breeding, inter-class marriage was frowned upon in early American society. Those at the top feared that allowing the upper and lower classes to reproduce together would lead to a decline in their superior pedigree.

If this was the face of American society in its nascent decades, what did it look like during the time of independence? We’ll explore this in the next blink, along with the vision that the founding fathers had for America’s future.

The egalitarian visions of the founding fathers were rooted in classist thought.

Even visionary thinkers like the founding fathers of the United States are children of their times. Despite their progressive ideas for the future of American society, they couldn’t shake the classism of the early colonies.

Benjamin Franklin was a strong believer in an equal society. Nevertheless, he saw advantages in social stratification. Franklin argued that a wider dispersal of people across the land would successfully reduce class conflict by ensuring that each person had some property sufficiently far away from others to prevent fights over resources.

The poor whites who led westward expansion represented both the best and worst of American culture.

As nineteenth-century pioneers began to settle beyond the Western frontier, the theories of the founding fathers were put to the test. Large swathes of land lay waiting to be exploited, and poor white men were eager to create a better life for themselves.

Unfortunately, the millions of poor Americans who migrated to what we today call Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas and Missouri, remained poor. They didn’t acquire property rights for land, as Jefferson had envisioned. Instead, they were forced to squat disputed properties illegally.

The Civil War saw a clash between opposing narratives about poor whites.

Over time, social structures in the North and South began to diverge. In the South, slavery was the foundation of social order, while the North prided itself on a society of free men and women.

Many Northerners objected to slavery because it kept white laborers poor and marginalized as slavery supplied unpaid labor, which in turn kept white laborers’ salaries down. Yet, the elites in the South defended the presence of poor whites as evidence not of slavery’s unfairness, but of their own natural superiority.

After the Civil War, discrimination against the poor reemerged under the guise of eugenics.

The close of the Civil War did not mark the end of classism and racism in America. Instead, they were disguised under a new ideology: eugenics.

Eugenicist ideas revolved around the notion of “improving” the genetic quality of the human population. Such ideas found fertile ground in American society, with its historical fixation on lineage and “good breeding.”

Social reforms and new research following the Great Depression challenged the narrative that the white poor were genetically inferior.

America marched into the twentieth century with an economic boom that created scores of new jobs. But by the 1930s, the nation’s economy had collapsed. The Great Depression that followed left millions of workers unemployed, creating a spiral of downward mobility that brought middle-class Americans down to white trash status.

In 1932, 20 percent of the American workforce was jobless. Many who still had their jobs lived in fear of the same fate. Caravan shanty towns inhabited by migrating farmers who had lost their land began to crop up along California highways. The situation was bad and eventually led to large-scale government intervention.

White trash culture became a central part of mainstream American pop culture.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, America fell in love with a hillbilly from Tupelo, Mississippi, named Elvis Presley. He was born into the world in a simple “shotgun shack,” a tiny narrow house synonymous with the poor Americans of the South.

His nationwide popularity reflected a shift in attitudes toward “white trash.”

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Worum geht es in White Trash?

White Trash (2016) retells American history from the perspective of the poor whites who were by turns despised and admired by the upper classes. These blinks trace the biopolitical, cultural and social ideas that have shaped the lives of white trash Americans from early colonial days to the Civil War, through the Great Depression and up to the present day.

Bestes Zitat aus White Trash

The circumstance of superior beauty is thought worthy of attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not that of man? – Thomas Jefferson

—Nancy Isenberg

Wer White Trash lesen sollte

Readers fascinated by American sociology and the history of class
Students of American politics and culture
Those curious about alternative historical narratives for the United States

Über den Autor

Nancy Isenberg is a professor of history at Louisiana State University. She is the author of several award-winning books on American history and the founding fathers. She’s also a regular contributor to Salon.com, where she reflects on contemporary political and cultural affairs from a historical perspective.

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