White Trash: an American tragedy
Nancy Isenberg’s 2016 book, “White Trash,” traces the history of this American underclass, and underscores the little-known fact that what we call “white trash” is not a new phenomenon, but has scarred the American landscape almost from the first moment Europeans set foot on our shores.
Isenberg reports (and I’d never before heard this) that large numbers of the original Britishers (including Scots and the Irish) that settled the new North American wilderness were considered undesirables in their home country, and were exported here in order to rid the Mother Country of them.
They were called “the waste people,” but acquired other monikers over time (all of these terms are attested to in the book through historical citations): filth, offal, sluggish idlers, losers, debauched, offscourings of society, parasites, landlubbers. They were unhealthy: had ghastly complexions, open sores on their bodies, with missing limbs, noses, palates and teeth, ignorant wretches: an early Governor of North Carolina called them “the meanest, most rustic and squalid part of the [human] species,” whose hovels had “dung and nastiness” on the floor.
The South quickly became their habitat. Northerners, who felt superior to them, argued that the “peculiar institution” of slavery had debased poor white people. Because labor was so cheap, white people did not really have to work; black slaves–a “natural servant class”–would pick the cotton and tobacco and do all the dirty work, leaving poor whites free to eat, drink, fornicate, forage, sleep and drink themselves to death, in the “dismal swamps” where they erected their shanties and hovels.
Needless to say, “gentlemen and gentlewomen”—the productive, educated class—did not much care for the waste people, who were a blemish on the “city on a hill” they were trying to build. Ben Franklin called them “the vilest and most abandoned of mankind,” a “scandalous Collection of drunks and low white servants.” His friend, Thomas Jefferson, called them “rubbish,” squatters who were the opposite of the “cultivators of the earth” who worked hard to build civilization out of the wilderness.
By the late 1700s the waste people were called “crackers,” described by a British official (in the 1760s) as “a lawless set of rascals on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas and Georgia.” Crackers—white trash—it doesn’t matter what you called them. Decent people knew what they were: an undesirable population, antithetical to American values if not actually dangerous, a people to be deplored. By the time the Civil War came, northerners had identified white trash as “the bogeyman of southern hypocrisy.”
Over the next century, the epithets continued to pile up to describe this class of vagabonds and illiterates: scalawags, poltroons, poor folk. W.E.B. DuBois called them “some of the worst stocks of mankind” and noted the irony of southern whites describing Negroes as “inferior” when the southern states were crammed with such “degenerates.” Today, we might call these people “trailer trash” or “rednecks” or, in Hillary Clinton’s apt phrase, “a basket of deplorables.” But the old descriptor, white trash, still seems the best.
They are, of course, Donald J. Trump’s base. They didn’t always used to be Republicans. To the extent they voted at all, in the mid-twentieth century they were for Franklin Roosevelt, and remained Democrats for a generation. Some bolted away from the party when it nominated John F. Kennedy, in 1960; white trash has always been anti-Catholic. More went over to the Republican Party after Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights laws were passed. In the 1970s and 1980s, evangelicalism swept through the south (and Midwest) like a prairie fire, and the unholy alliance of Reagan-style Republicans, unscrupulous pastors such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and conservative political operatives like Lee Atwater and Ed Rollins managed to turn white trash into solid Republican voters.
Which is where we are today. Sadly, this American underbelly, which has tainted our culture from the start, continues to metastasize, eating away at the vitals of American excellence and threatening our stability. I know it’s not politically correct to bash poor white trash: we’re supposed to reach out to one another to discover our common values (Obama constantly preaches this). But once you understand how loathsome this class is, and how feared they’ve been by men and women of knowledge and substance—how much they have undermined our country—how they have formed a third column of depravity and deplorability—how they continue to try and drive our country into the mud–it’s very hard to forgive them. They’ve plunged America into the gutter of this guttersnipe, Trump, and the clowns he surrounds himself with. The Founding Fathers hated them; Democrats and Republicans of good conscience alike have been appalled by them; and so are we, the decent citizens of America in the year 2019. What we eventually do with, or to, them, I do not know; but I know this: They must be resisted.
