******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
BOOKFORUM
JUNE/JULY/AUG 2016
An Underclass of Their Own
Nancy Isenberg's cultural history of America's poor southern whites
BY CHRIS LEHMANN
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
BY NANCY ISENBERG
VIKING
It’s no great exaggeration, these days, to say that the state of the
white American working class is driving the American commentariat crazy.
The non-college-educated white voter is notoriously the bedrock
demographic aligned behind likely GOP presidential nominee Donald
Trump—and leaders of the conservative movement, which has long pivoted
on elaborate bait-and-switch appeals to its aggrieved, antigovernment,
downwardly mobile base, are appalled to see that base swallowing whole
the nativist, protectionist, and belligerently class-baiting nostrums
bursting forth from the GOP’s unlikely orange-hued tribune of populist
resentment. National Review writer Kevin D. Williamson recently sized up
Trump’s ardent working-class supporters and came away with a litany of
toxic failings of morality, character, and family discipline. “Even the
economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the
dysfunction and negligence—and the incomprehensible malice—of poor white
America,” Williamson marveled. Poor white communities “deserve to die,”
he wrote: “Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are
indefensible. . . .The white American underclass is in thrall to a
vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin
needles.”
In reality, Williamson’s plaint—which now echoes far and wide in the
leadership circles of the GOP—is but the latest installment in a
founding catechism of American class contempt, as Nancy Isenberg
chronicles in her richly detailed, indispensable study White Trash.
Isenberg, a historian at Louisiana State University, takes pointed
exception to the social mythology of American exceptionalism—which holds
that the unique conditions of mobility and economic opportunity issuing
from the frontier settlement of the New World effectively quarantined
the American experiment from the punishing crucibles of European class
conflict. Instead, she shows that the settlement of America was steeped
in precisely the sort of ugly marginalization of the non-propertied
white poor that Williamson uses to excuse the many moral and economic
failures of the modern GOP.
To take just one notable example, the Fundamental Constitutions of
Carolina, promulgated in 1669 and composed in large part by the revered
British philosopher of social-contract constitutionalism John Locke, is
a revealingly brutal by-product of a system of feudal privilege.
Carolina was emphatically conceived, under the direction of Locke’s
benefactor the Earl of Shaftesbury, as a slave colony—a proviso that
also greatly benefited Locke himself, who was the third-largest
shareholder in the Royal African Company, the concern that held the
monopoly charter of the English slave trade. But Locke—the well-known
theorist of individual political liberty—also used the Fundamental
Constitutions in a thankfully theoretical effort to create both an
inherited noble caste among Carolina colonists and a hereditary white
servant class, known as Leet-men. Like feudal serfs, these workers would
be the property of nobles, inherited across generations. Their
offspring, likewise, would become part of their masters’ estates—and so
they would be encouraged to breed robustly. The harsh provisions of the
Fundamental Constitutions were “really a declaration of war against poor
settlers,” Isenberg writes, setting North Carolina on the trajectory to
be “the first white trash colony” (emphasis in original).
As the colonies recombined into the American republic, the nation’s
animus toward the white landless class became a fixed organizing
principle. Even nominal social democrats like Thomas Jefferson frankly
avowed the proto-eugenic imperative to breed out the reprobate common
workers and promote a “natural aristocracy” founded on a “fortuitous
concourse of breeders.” In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson
asked, rhetorically, “The circumstance of superior beauty is thought
worthy of attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other
domestic animals; why not in that of man?”
Indeed, powerful Americans seeking to pathologize poor whites followed,
to a remarkably consistent degree, the early agrarian republic’s
rhetoric of livestock husbandry, supplemented by land-bound metaphors of
social stagnation, as they anathematized their social inferiors on
grounds of moral and biological unfitness. Under this logic, Isenberg
observes, “poverty has been naturalized, often seen as something beyond
human control. By this measure, poor whites had to be classified as a
distinct breed.” Before “white trash” became the catchall term of
derision for poor whites (particularly in the South), they were known,
variously, as “waste people,” “mudsills,” “fungus growth,” and
“scalawags” (a runt-sized animal, later adopted as a term of derision
for southern collaborators with the Republican occupation of the former
Confederacy). And since the forces of natural history had singled them
out as evolutionary nonstarters, they all displayed telltale behaviors
that disqualified them from full participation in the land of
opportunity’s bounty: To be poor and white was to be deemed lazy,
shiftless, sallow-colored, diseased, criminal, and (quite often) inbred.
This battery of vices acquired a pseudoscientific gloss at the height of
the eugenics movement during the early-twentieth century. After the
militant white leaders of the Jim Crow South tamped down the threat of a
populist cross-racial alliance of poor whites and disenfranchised
African Americans, more respectable, self-styled progressive
intellectuals embarked on their own fantasies of a permanent social
regime of laboratory-bred racial purity. However, the patrician rhetoric
of genetic husbandry still shone through. Popular eugenics lecturer C.
W. Saleeby, for example, trumpeted a brand of “eugenic feminism,” under
which women would not merely gain the voting franchise but also dedicate
themselves to selfless, scientifically managed breeding for the
betterment of the species. Female society would resemble a bee colony,
with putatively superior women pressed into service as hyperfertile
queen bees, “while educated sterile women (or postmenopausal) were best
suited for reform activity.” Harvard professor William McDougall
proposed the founding of a separate breeding colony, Eugenia, which
would function, Isenberg writes, as both “a university and a stud farm.
Raised as ‘aristocrats’ in the tradition of ‘Noblesse oblige,’ the
products of the special colony would go out into the world as skilled
public servants.” The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina could
scarcely have put things any more plainly.
Gradually, the image of poor whites became sanitized, as bona fide
white-trash figures like Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill
Clinton acceded to the highest office in the land, and a suburbanized
middle-class mass culture started to evince a nostalgia for the more
colorful features of rural life in the American interior. A wide range
of postwar TV franchises, from Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, and The
Beverly Hillbillies to Hee-Haw and The Dukes of Hazzard, turned the
once-odious moral failings of the southern underclass into the stuff of
soothing televisual camp.
In real life, however, poor southerners were arraying themselves against
the civil-rights revolution, with proud, self-styled cracker political
leaders such as Arkansas governor Orval Faubus summoning the specter of
violent white resistance to desegregation and extending the demagogic
southern political tradition of employing “the threat of poor white
thuggery to stay in power.” George Wallace would follow the same
playbook in Alabama—as did presumptive Republican presidential nominee
Donald Trump, who dispatched his GOP-primary opponents in every southern
state save Ted Cruz’s native Texas and neighboring Oklahoma. Meanwhile,
as poor white southerners became identified with the worst kinds of
racist reaction, the term “redneck,” Isenberg writes, had “come to be
synonymous with an almost insane bigotry”—so much so that the lead
militant in a Nashville antidesegregation-mob action, who was in fact “a
paid agitator from Camden, New Jersey,” came replete with his own phony
southern accent. Even pathological racism could attract its own perverse
form of carpetbagging.
Indeed, the racial boundaries alleged to shore up the ever-vulnerable
social status of poor whites gradually became blurred during the postwar
era, at least in elite pundit discourse. As Isenberg observes,
influential thinkers on the right like economist Thomas Sowell have
argued that many of the social ills unfairly ascribed to poor black
populations—“laziness, promiscuity, violence, bad English”—were in
reality “passed on from their backcountry white neighbors.” (Though
Isenberg doesn’t mention it here, the same basic argument is taken up in
Fox Butterfield’s 1995 book, All God’s Children.)
At the same time, though, the logic of racist backlash remains very much
at the forefront of American life, and is by no means confined to the
South, as the powerful, polarizing reminders of both the Trump movement
and Black Lives Matter protests readily attest. One of the limitations
of Isenberg’s study is its regional bias, which makes racial tensions
among working-class Americans come across as a virtual southern
monopoly. This means, for example, that while she dissects the historic
showdown over the desegregation of Little Rock schools in 1957, she
bypasses the 1970s Boston busing wars, in which working-class Irish
Catholics in South Boston and Charlestown showed an antiblack animus
every bit as strong and ugly as that in Faubus’s Arkansas or Wallace’s
Alabama. Likewise, she doesn’t follow the migrant poor white populations
in northern and western cities, nor the pitched battles over scarce
resources and racial privilege that ensued there. The ethnic, racial,
and class history of Los Angeles alone could make for a book as long and
revealing as White Trash.
Still, in exposing the tangled origins and richly variegated
articulations of America’s signature civic faith of baiting and
biologizing its poor population, Isenberg has done an inestimable
service. She also starkly lays out the many deep and unresolved costs
involved in the deliberate repression of the history she patiently
documents:
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 politicians 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.”
In other words: Take that, Kevin D. Williamson.
Chris Lehmann is an editor of Bookforum and the author, most recently,
of The Money Cult (Melville House, 2016).
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com