******************** 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.
*****************************************************************
(Essentially the class that rose up against the Confederacy in "The Free
State of Jones".)
NY Times Sunday Book Review, June 26 2016
A Look at America’s Long and Troubled History of White Poverty
By THOMAS J. SUGRUE
WHITE TRASH
The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
By Nancy Isenberg
Illustrated. 460 pp. Viking. $28.
No line about class in the United States is more famous than the one
written by the German sociologist Werner Sombart in 1906. Class
consciousness in America, he contended, foundered “on the shoals of
roast beef and apple pie.” Sombart was among the first scholars to ask
the question, “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” His
answer, now solidified into conventional wisdom about American
exceptionalism, was simple: “America is a freer and more egalitarian
society than Europe.” In the United States, he argued, “there is not the
stigma of being the class apart that almost all European workers have
about them. . . . The bowing and scraping before the ‘upper classes,’
which produces such an unpleasant impression in Europe, is completely
unknown.”
In “White Trash,” Nancy Isenberg joins a long list of historians over
the last century who have sent Sombart’s theory crashing on the shoals
of history. The prolific Charles and Mary Beard, progressive historians
in the first third of the 20th century, reinterpreted American history
as a struggle for economic power between the haves and have-nots. W.E.B.
Du Bois interpreted Reconstruction as a great class rebellion, as freed
slaves fought to control their own working conditions and wages. Labor
and political historians in the 1970s and 1980s recovered a forgotten
history of blue-collar consciousness and grass-roots radicalism, from
the Workingmen’s Party in Andrew Jackson’s America to the
late-19th-century populists of upcountry Georgia to the Depression-era
leftist unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Historians
of public policy, like the influential Michael B. Katz, emphasized the
persistence of notions of “the undeserving poor,” an ideology that
blamed economic deprivation on the alleged pathological behavior of poor
people themselves and eroded support for welfare programs.
So Isenberg’s story is not, as her subtitle suggests, “untold.” But she
retells it with unusual ambition and (to use a class-laden term) in a
masterly manner. Ranging from John Rolfe and Pocahontas to “The Beverly
Hillbillies,” Isenberg — a historian at Louisiana State University whose
previous books include a biography of Aaron Burr — provides a cultural
history of changing concepts of class and inferiority. She argues that
British colonizers saw their North American empire as a place to dump
their human waste: the idle, indigent and criminal. Richard Hakluyt the
younger, one of the many colorful characters who fill these pages, saw
the continent as “one giant workhouse,” in Isenberg’s phrase, where the
feckless poor could be turned into industrious drudges.
That process of shunting outsiders to the nation’s margins, she argues,
continued in the early Republic and in the 19th century, when landless
white settlers began to fill in the backcountry of Appalachia and the
swamps of the lowland South, living in lowly cabins, dreaming of
landownership but mostly toiling as exploited tenant farmers or
itinerant laborers.
In the book’s most ingenious passages, Isenberg offers a catalog of the
insulting terms well-off Americans used to denigrate their economic
inferiors. In 17th-century Virginia, critics of rebellious indentured
servants denounced them as society’s “offscourings,” a term for fecal
matter. A hundred years later, elites railed against the “useless
lubbers” of “Poor Carolina,” a place she calls the “first white trash
colony.” In the early 19th century, landowners described the landless
rural poor as boisterous, foolish “crackers” and idle, vagabond “squatters.”
Not all stereotypes of the white poor were negative. In the Jacksonian
period, populists celebrated Davy Crockett and his coonskin cap. Lincoln
might be derided as a poor woodsman, but he was also valorized for his
log cabin roots. During the Great Depression, New Deal photographers and
writers depicted farmers displaced by the Dust Bowl as virtuous people,
victims of economic forces beyond their control.
By the second half of the 19th century and into the 20th, Isenberg
shows, crude caricatures gave way to seemingly scientific explanations
of lower-class status. “Class was congenital,” she writes, summarizing a
mid-19th-century view of poor whites. One writer highlighted the
“runtish forefathers” and “consumptive parents” who birthed a “notorious
race” of inferior white people. Essayists described human differences by
borrowing terminology from specialists in animal husbandry. Just as dogs
could be distinguished by their breeds and horses distinguished from
mules, so could people be characterized as superior or inferior based on
their physical traits.
By the late 19th century, some writers used family genealogies to trace
the roots of criminality, illness and insanity, and warn of the dangers
of “degeneration.” By the early 20th century, armed with increasingly
sophisticated statistical tools and new understandings of genetics,
eugenicists offered the most chilling of responses to poor whites: They
argued that the state should use its power to keep them from
reproducing. Those arguments shaped one of the Supreme Court’s most
notorious decisions, Buck v. Bell (1927), in which Chief Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes upheld a Virginia sterilization program to prevent
“generations of imbeciles” from proliferating and thus to keep the
nation from being “swamped with incompetence.”
The story of eugenics offers an example of the ways that, throughout the
American past, questions of class status have been entangled with
notions of racial inferiority. Isenberg makes a strong case that one of
the most common ways of stigmatizing poor people was to question their
racial identity. Backcountry vagabonds were often compared unfavorably
with the “savage,” nomadic Indian. Sun-browned tenant farmers faced
derision for their less-than-white appearance. After the emancipation of
slaves, politicians warned of the rise of a “mongrel” nation, fearful
that white bloodlines would be contaminated by blacks, a process that
might expand the ranks of “trash” people.
But Isenberg falls prey to one of the most common and pernicious
fallacies in American popular discourse about class: For her, America’s
landless farmers and precarious workers are by default white. “Class,”
she writes, “had its own singular and powerful dynamic, apart from its
intersection with race.” Thus we get a history of class in America that
discusses white tenant farmers at length, but scarcely mentions black
sharecroppers or Mexican farmworkers, as if somehow their race
segregated them from America’s history of class subjugation. Native
Americans make cameo appearances playing their role as a degraded race
or as the noble savage — as ideal types rather than as exploited and
impoverished peoples themselves. The “coolie” Asian workers imported to
the post-Civil War South, the Filipino agricultural laborers of
California’s Central Valley and the inhabitants of San Francisco’s and
New York’s 19th-century Chinatowns, all workers, most at the bottom of
the economic ladder, are virtually absent from these pages, even though
they were subject to caricatures stunningly similar to those hurled at
backcountry “squatters” and “hillbillies.”
It is a commonplace argument in American politics that somehow race and
class stand apart. Pundits charge that racial minorities practice a
self-segregating “identity politics” rather than uniting around shared
economic grievances. But a history of class in America that assumes its
whiteness and relegates the nonwhite poor to the backstage is one that
misses the fundamental reality of economic inequality in American
history, that race and class were — and are — fundamentally entwined.
Thomas J. Sugrue is a professor of social and cultural analysis and
history at New York University.
_________________________________________________________
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
