35th Portier Lecture: "White Trash: The 400-Year History of Class in America"

well thank you very much for that warm welcome and I also really want to extend my appreciation to the history department for inviting me here this is a wonderful place to give a lecture as you can tell from the title I'm not going to be able to tell you everything that's in my book it covers a lot so what I'm going to try to do tonight is give you a series of snapshots what I see as important threads and themes for understanding a concept that all of us know people still use but we often don't know where it really comes from and why it's so prevalent and the big point that I want to point out is that we have to understand that in America we do have a class system we've always had a class system and we often don't connect it to British understandings of rural Society and that's actually where white trash comes from I'd like to begin tonight with the film that we all know to kill a mockingbird the plot centers on a moralistic lawyer Atticus Finch who refuses to perpetuate the racial double standard he agrees to defend an african-american Tom Robinson on the charge of raping a poor white girl Mayella Ewell the Court finds Robinson guilty but everyone knows he is innocent an honorable hard-working family man Robinson stands well above the degraded eul's his poor white accusers the Shapley attired mela is cowled by her bully of a father a scrawny man and overalls devoid of either merit or morality he's Bob Ewell his full name is Robert Elio and as you can guess he's not an heir of one of the aristocratic families of the Old South as Harper Lee describes them in the novel of which the classic film was based the ules were members of the terminally poor those whose status could not be altered up or down by any economic shift not even the depression in which the story is set the ules live behind the town dump which they comb through regularly they had congenital defects and hookworm their Shack look like and this is how Harper Lee described it a playhouse of an insane child no one knew how many children live there some thought 9 others 6 to the town of Makem Alabama the Ewell children were simply dirty faced ones at the window when any one passed southerners and others too called such people white trash the ules are not bit players in our country's history and their history opens in the 1500s not the 1900s it starts with British colonial policies dedicated to resettling the poor decisions that left a permanent imprint on America and on the structure of classes first known as waste people and later white trash marginalize Americans were stigmatized for their inability to be productive their failure to own property their unhealthy children their lack of any sense of uplift on which the American Dream is predicated it's contrary to the national credo but the truth is that Americans are quite comfortable rationalizing economic inequality they have naturalized poverty determining that it's something beyond human control by this measure poor whites were classified as a distinct breed I'm going to return to that theme over and over again the importance of breeding in other words breeding was not just about the cultivation of social manners or skills that's merely one definition it was all about something more sinister and imposed inheritance the language of class that early Americans embraced was a composite of English attitudes toward vagrancy as well as a transatlantic fixation on animal husbandry demography and pedigree yes the poor were once described as waste and inferior animal stocks in the colonial imagination we prefer to believe all that has changed but well into the 20th century sterilization of the breeding poor struck many even professionals as a rational solution to an old problem so let's not displace colonial history too easily for centuries the worst classes were regarded as extrusions of the least in Hannibal inhabitable land scrubby barren swampy wasteland and all that still relates to home ownership and the rich and poor neighborhoods of today the poor have been with us the white poor been with us in various guises as the names given across the centuries a test and this isn't even all of the names that have been used at different historical time periods to describe poor whites the first one as I mentioned is waste people Rascals did you know the word rascal actually comes from the meaning trash rubbish off scourings lubbers Hillbillies low Downers trailer trash what I've also discovered in writing this book is that even though is I'm going to talk about this we like to imagine these people as marginalized and visible in fact they've often been pushed front and center in America's most formative events from Western expansion to the Civil War and reconstruction and FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society now throughout time they've been blamed for many things they've been blamed for living on bad land as though they had other choices they've been called slothful rootless vagrants and it's assumed that they're physically scarred just as their surroundings were the worst aid clay and turned yellow wild in the muck and their necks were burnt reddened by the hot Sun their ilk loathed meanly fed children sentenced future generations to permanent defectiveness now all these things are going to explain where they come from and how they're used in different time periods and we may think that these themes don't exist anymore but in fact today's trailer trash our scene is yesterday's vagrants on wheels an updated version of Opie's and jalopies and Florida crackers in their rude carts now while America likes to think that the American Revolution enable us to break free from aristocracy and inherited class stations the truth is different English ideas about class and poverty never really disappeared think of this point of comparison Jefferson's yeoman democracy fantasized a fertile country supporting hearty independent farm families yet what happens when the yeoman fails and what about those who never achieve economic independence now as I said it begins in the 1500s it was Richard heckling the Elizabethan promoter of colonization who first employed the term waste people to describe the expendables that could be literally dumped in the new world in his 1584 discourse of western planting he hoped to persuade the queen of the merits of colonization Hakluyt called America not terra firma firma but a waste firm the American landscape though we'd never seen it was described as an unproductive terrain that could only be improved by turning the waste firm into one giant workhouse filled with all the idle drags drawn from English society ex-soldiers orphans children of the wandering of wandering beggars criminal criminals debtors vagrants and if they were lucky enough to survive these idols might be recycled and sent off to fight in English wars now the group that the British and the English hated the most were vagrants they were idle folk analogize to weeds stifling healthy growth in a garden they wandered the countryside detached from the economy much like the wasteland left fallow and untilled so they were rounded up some were branded put into work houses children were actually taken off the streets and sold as indentured servants too cruel masters in America they were also notably referred to as the off scourings and I'm going to see it use that term again it's a rather unpleasant term which refers to fecal waste and so does the quote that I have there now this notion of waste in all its various manifestations persisted Abigail Adams dismissed the poor and landless as rubbish so did Thomas Jefferson who proposed that a few promising impoverished white boys might be quote raped from the rubbish and given an education but his bill drafted in 1779 failed in the Virginia legislature the ruling elite had little desire to raise up even a few wastrels as for the language of human stocks it wasn't Eat Pray Love but it was eat graze and breed whether on two or four legs political rithmetic pre Darwin proposed a means to calculate human productivity Benjamin Franklin was an early proponent who compared human patterns of migration and fertility to that of ants and pigeons the unsettled frontier land was a lure to families he argued like ants to a honeypot overcrowding in pigeon boxes and the experiment that he did meant that the weak would have to move on Franklin's demographic argument constituted an early form of survival of the fittest those who bred large families and toil long were rewarded why the isle do idle would have to either keep moving or die off and as you can guess Franklin had no sympathy for the poor whatsoever even though he did not come from an elite family breeding was at the heart of the domestic slave trade and Jefferson coldly admitted that female slaves were good investment to his mind free white women were breeders too in a series of letters that he changed with John Adams in 1813 he argued that humans were animals guided by the overriding impulse of sexual desire lust however if it was tempered by reason among them gifted he argued was producing what he called a fortuitous concourse of breeders this model of breeding generated for Jefferson an accidental aristocracy of talent class division arose through natural selection superior men were supposed to marry for more than money they would consciously and unconsciously choose mates with favorable traits it was all a matter of probability now the question neither Jefferson or as calculating colleagues never answered was this what happened to those outside the talented rational elite what future I rated the concourse of breeders living on the bottom layer society no matter how one fin finesse it rubbish produced more rubbish now Jefferson like Franklin hoped the poor would be drawn into the western territories so this is why our western territories were like the colonies for the British they were to drain away the poor and the waste what also became prevalent in Jefferson's theory and proved to be long-lasting in justifying why the United States was truly a promised land was the idea that horizontal mobility would substitute for upward mobility that means moving across the land was the alternative to actually moving up the social ladder and this theory is important because it laid the foundation for America's myth of a classless exceptional society but if we think about that logically and if we think about that as historians this theory was flawed from the get-go the West was never an open space land speculators and powerful men always had the advantage in person purchasing the best land Western land wasn't free and the poor rarely had the funds to buy the parcels sold by the federal government instead they invaded public lands as trespassers and the government often had to physically remove them they became the dominant class of the early Republican antebellum period that you've never heard of America's version of English vagrants squatters and crackers now the legendary Davy Crockett believe it or not was a outspoken advocate of squatter's rights that's the real Crockett not the legend the legend as you see here taken from his the popular sort of comic exaggerated version of Crockett and who the stories he told portrayed him as a corn cracker which is a variation it's the Kentucky variation of cracker now what's funny about Crockett is that he also claimed the legendary version and based on the stories that he told claimed that one of the many excellent powers that he had what he had the ability to squat down lower than any man now that may sound strange we can understand him claiming to be Superman and jump as high as he possibly could and he claimed that he could do all these magical things but this illusion is particularly important because he's referring to his own squatter past and as we know the idea of being a squatter is not simply simply something to celebrate the word squat and squatting carried more than one desperate disreputable meaning the term suggested spilling out across the land and it also had other more unpleasant allusions to waste but it also had a significant legal meaning in the British law which we inherited squatting was the opposite of standing to have legal standing and legal standing also was part of a legal principle the English legal principle that justified claims to sovereignty and also justifies the right to the land to have standing the word right itself comes from the root that means to stand recked so it's important that we visualize what these words mean now the cracker that determine all heard of what's interesting is cracker gets associated with the southern back country and quite early in the 1760 a British officer in the Carolinas described crackers as idle stragglers vagabonds worse than Indians who are constantly changing their place of abode the word cracker migrated all the way from Virginia to Florida along with the roving migrating rural poor now why the name cracker what does that really mean where does that come from well they were called cracking traders before the Revolution because they were described as noisy braggarts prone to lying and vulgarity in English one could crack a jest crude Englishmen cracked wind fire crackers gave off a stench and were loud and disrupted Laos cracker referred to a licensed lovingly fellow and another significant connection was the adjective crack-brained which was the English slang for idle headed again reminding us that the poor always idle and this is a kind of recurrent obsession for the English and for American colonists squatters and crackers weren't yeoman they weren't peasants they weren't tenants cracker women were looked at as barely being women at all they were mocked as Haggard lean dirty ugly and toothless whose arune's a variation on mixed waste quadrants was a word coined to describe Indiana squatters dozen of dirty yellow urgence and that word Hooser no linguistic knows where it comes from they have no idea they can't figure it out they may have been hunters and crude farmers but the main attribute of squatters and crackers which they both shared was their constant movement there even was a cracker dictionary that was published in the 1830s they began to identify and collect and identify their distinctive patois and that's interesting because in the 30s it's the same time the English start to study cockney so this is kind of the American version of cockney and it included the verb absquatulate which is a word I love and try to use it whenever you can in the future because it's got squat right in it it's like such a great word which meant the definition was to mosey or to abscond both options are possible that meant they were either on the slow road to nowhere or on the run like an abscond Aksarben now what's interesting about squatters is they were the majority of the population in Kentucky in the 1790s and they remained 35 to 40 percent of the population in Tennessee Alabama and elsewhere in the southwest as late as the 1850s and that's important because these people are prevalent they're everywhere and they become in certain places later in California political force but this also points to the fact that the whole safety valve theory didn't really work in the Old South for example as one scholar has carefully studied the numbers then the number of landless poor whites grew at astonishing rates even with out migration so it's not surprising that by the 1840s there's a dramatic shift away from talking about squatters and crackers and that could be in the old northwest that could be in the backcountry in the southwest and they begin to focus on what is now known as white trash and white trash begins to be specifically identified as a southern phenomenon and on top of that they begin to describe them as quote a curious species of southerners noted for their yellow parchment skin color their children's shocking white hair resembling that of an albino to top it off clay eating poor whites were condemned for their sickly and abnormal children described as shrunken and wrinkled looking like old lonesome cadaverous dwarfs the tallow face Gentry as one Kansas newspaper mockingly labeled them routinely stuffed their infants mouths with clay so by the 1840s white trash have now become clinical specimens belonging to an inferior breed now like breeds like a saying that was taken directly from animal husbandry served as the guiding principle for these damming portraits the wealthy South Carolinian Mary chesnut described a local woman she knew as a perfect specimen of the sandhill tacky race now tacky again another word maybe you haven't heard of tacky was a degenerate breed of horse that lived in the Carolina marshlands chestnut went on to describe that she looked the part and here you have her colorful language her skin was yellow and leathery even the whites of her eyes were bilious in color she was stumpy strong and lean hard featured horny fisted alabama daniel Hundley published a fairly important book on Southern society in 1860 all about class and he divided the white classes into a descending order of bloodlines he had the cavalier gentry at the top anglo-saxons filling the middle and yeoman classes and those he called southern bullies in white trash sat at the bottom these lowest trace their lineage and this is what he argued trace their lineage to convicts and indentured servants of Jamestown they were the be Feld heirs of poor vagrants the rubbish from the back alleys of old London the vagrant stain was now congenital in the blood now it's not surprising given as we've seen that the question of white trash is becoming more prominent it also is moving to the center of politics and it plays a rather significant role at the center of the sectional crisis when we look at the civil war and the debates leading up to it and during the Civil War what we find is that Lincoln's Republican Party insisted that slavery should not be allowed to spread West because it threatened free labor among the poorest poor white men now future Confederates responded with a strident defense of their slave and class system like James Henry Hammond of South Carolina more and more of the southern elite held the class subordination was natural and that Jefferson's this is what he wrote Jefferson's all men are created equal was his Hammond existed a ridiculously absurd concept now Hammond was South Carolina's leading pro-slavery intellectual he also coined the term mud sill and mud sill is an interesting term because it served all the purposes to both attack the north to defend slavery as well as hold up the class hierarchy in the south it was mud still democracy that the Confederacy described as it made its against the north in 1861 southerners mocked the mudsill Union Army as a foul collection of urban roughs Prairie dirt farmers greasy mechanics and unwashed immigrants President Jefferson Davis called the Union Army in one of his major speeches our favorite word again the off scourings of the earth now this mud cell term came from Hammonds 1858 speech and he was arguing that what was essential to the southern structure of society was the fixed nature of class identity in all societies he said there must be a class to do the menial duties to perform the drudgery of life and he insisted that those with fewer skills lower order of intellect they should form the base of every civilized nation every advanced society had to exploit its petty labors the working poor that wallowed in the mud allowed for superior class to emerge on top and that one that emerged on top was the true society that embodied all civilization progress and refinement in Hammonds mine menial laborers were almost literally mud cells stuck in the mud or perhaps a metaphor quicksand if all societies had their mud sails Hammond argued the South had made the right choice in keeping black slaves in the lowest station and he defended this on racial terms he went on to argue and this is just as important in his case he argued that the white mud sills of the North that the north he went to he argued that the North had had to base their own kind and he said that the white mud sills of the North were quote of your own race you are brothers of one blood from Hammonds perspective the North's flawed labor system had corrupted democratic politics discontented White's had been given the vote and being the majority it was only a matter of time before these poor northern one SILS orchestrated a class revolution destroying what was left of the union and as you can guess the Confederate elites were equally afraid of their own white trash that they might be tempted by the democratic processes process promises and join the revolt now what's interesting about the Civil War it's not surprising that from the union's perspective and from the perspective of Republican politicians that they would want to exploit the class divisions between the planter elite and poor whites in general Grant said summation the war was fought to liberate not only slaves but non slaveholders those families exiled to poor land who had few opportunities to better themselves they too needed emancipation he insisted and he used the precise term poor white trash when he described their pre-war subservience to the planter aristocracy it's also not surprising that Abraham Lincoln would be crowned the president of the mud sills his humble Kentucky birthplace made him white trash in the eyes of many southerners and his chosen residents in Illinois made him a prairie mud sill but what's so interesting and this is sort of about the power of language Union soldiers turned the invective on its head deciding to wear the mud sealed label as a badge of pride and made it a rallying cry for northern style democracy now what's happened by the Civil War and continues in reconstruction is that the way white trash is being used has been highly politicized it is not only talking about us a distinct group of people but it is also defending two different economic systems as they are being contrasted the north and the south it's also not surprising that this battle over classes would also reaandtim we would begin to see the term redneck this is the first time that we see redneck become a more popular concept and it's closely identified with the new democratic demagogues of the south South Carolina's Ben Tillman Arkansas is Jeff Davis and Mississippi's James of ornament now in the 1890s using the same old theory that's associated with white trash it was assumed that rednecks were associated with the swamps rednecks could also be found in the mill towns and the descriptions sounds a lot like Bob Ewell they were described as described as the man in overalls a heckler played over dollies and was periodically even elevated to the state legislature one guy wrencher a vardaman Ally claimed the name for himself railing on the floor of the Mississippi House about his long red neck now vardaman if you think Trump is wild vardaman outdid him in lightyears Bornmann democracy no matter how dirty belonged to the people and the people had the right to say whatever they felt there was no limits friends and foes alike called him the white chief partly for his white garb but the main reason was for his role as one critic called him as being a medicine man a witch doctor literally who knew how to enflame his lowdown tribe of white savages now Florida man was the consummate show man he rode to his Senate Victor in 1912 quite literally on the back of an ox Vorderman did all he could to drum up class resentments and his people kind of drove the previous southern elite made them quite fearful of the power that he represented and basically dismissed that as people who mistake cunning for intelligence people who go to revivals and fights and then fornicate in the bush bushes afterwards and this is his line up there they were undiluted anglo-saxons and that's actually a really important concept to think about there's he's again and this is a consistent theme it's as if they're an uninvolved people that have been trapped in a time a way of behavior and haven't changed but it's also important to see how he's connecting that with anglo-saxons he also was afraid of them because he saw them as the sovereign voter and this is why vardaman was powerful and threatening vermin also went after the sitting president at the time who was harvard-educated President Theodore Roosevelt and he actually attacked Roosevelt for his breeding he back went and said that Roosevelt had a bit of the puppet him and he argued this based on medieval medical theory that his mother Roosevelt's mother had seen a dog while she was you know why Theodore was inside of her was in her womb and somehow part of that pup influenced him now Voorman when he was challenged and said this is obnoxious you should apologize well of course he said I'll apologize to the dog but not to Roosevelt so this should give you a sense of the flavor of the times now what we have to remember is that Roosevelt himself also bought into certain racial theories and theories about breeding he believed that racial traits were carried in the blood and conditioned by the experience of one's ancestors Roosevelt argued that it was the 19th century frontier experience that transformed white Americans into a superiors stock except that is white Southerners who had taken the wrong turn on the evolutionary ladder using bombast to conceal unhealthy traits in a letter to Owen Wister who was author of the heroic novel The Virginian Roosevelt concluded the Confederates and their heirs had contributed very very little toward anything of which Americans are now proud for him the VAR demons might be a nuisance but their days in evolutionary terms were numbered now the reason that Roosevelt could be so confident is that he was unabashedly a eugenicist he used the bully pulpit in his office as early as 1903 to insist that women have a critical civic duty to breed a generation of healthy and discipline children worried about race suicide as he put it he recommended that women of anglo-americans stock have four to six children enough so the race shall increase and not decrease in 1913 he wrote supportively to the leading eugenicist of the day Charles Davenport that it was the patriotic duty of every good citizen of superior stock to leave his or her blood behind degenerate he warned must not be permitted to reproduce their kind now often today when we think about the eugenics movement we think it's just a minority of people well in fact everyone bought into eugenics in by the 1920s it was called the eugenic mania and it swept the nation eugenic courses were offered were added to college curricula fitter family contests at state fairs gave out medals to winners like well-bred prize bulls defectives and the unfit were sterilized by 1931 27 States had sterilization laws on the books now the major target of you Genesis was the poor white woman Davenport felt that the best policy was to quarantine dangerous women like cattle during their fertile years how this policy prescription led to sterilized mission is rather more calculated interested politicians and eager reformers concluded that it was cheaper to operate on women than to house them in asylums for decades southern New Genesis in particular argued that sterilization helped the economy by sending women back into the population safely neutered but still able to work at menial jobs now that should perk up your ears a little bit one of the leading advocates of this was Albert pretty who called poor white Virginians the shiftless ignorant and worthless class of anti-social White's of the south and he was the superintendent of the colony for epileptics and feeble-minded in Lynchburg Virginia he is important because he helped shape the legal test case for sterilization a case that went to the Supreme Court in buck V Bell in 1927 carry buck who's over here on this side had been chosen for sterilization on the order of pretty because she was one of that worthless class of southern whites she wasn't a word his perfect specimen of white trash while Carrie buck was the plaintiff her mother and daughter were on trial to carry tested at the quote level and her mother slightly lower according to the highly biased experts her illegitimate child examined at 7 months was termed feeble-minded now how did they draw these conclusions but what they really relied on the experts relied on what were pedigree charts just like breeding charts for animals this is was kind of the major to love you Genesis and they claim that their pedigree chart proved both degeneracy and sexual deviance Carrie's mother had been a prostitute and Carrie had been raped by the nephew of her adoptive parents her rapist went unpublished unpunished and yet she was sterilized Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes offered a revolutionary decision in Buffy Bell which gave the state the power to regulate the breeding of its citizens he believed the pedigree could be used to distinguish worthy citizens from waste people three generations of imbeciles was enough he insisted sterilization was a civic duty saving the nation from being quote swamped with incompetence and notice he used the word swamped he also echoed exactly what the English had argued in the 1600s that the unfit would either starve or be executed for some crime so sending them to be sterilized was as humane as being sent to the colonies was centuries before now it was not until after World War two that the United States finally had a stable and large middle class and politicians began to sing the praises that capitalism was a source of a class of society yet amid the rapid rise of home ownership own ownership of the suburb and suburbs in this 1950s and 1960s the latest in Carter an incarnation of American dream a controversial housing option emerged the Trailer Park as the civil rights movement grew segregation was more than strictly a racial issue zoning laws made it inevitable that housing would adhere to a class delineated geography now the trailer is a conflicted American cultural symbol it can represent untethered freedom or a tin can a small cheap confined way of life at its worst the trailer park is associated with Liberty's dark side a deviant dystopian wasteland on the fringes of the metropolis trailer-trash was first identified in the southern war camps of Mississippi and Alabama in World war two and one of those war camps was right here in Mobile the term circulated nationally in the 1950s as similar enclaves formed around the country in four of Arizona as this Hillis FATA graph shows trailer-trash suddenly became acquainted with squatters they were found in weedy errors and some without houses right in the front yard in the late 50s more mobile homes were built than prefabricated homes yet municipalities continued to look down on them in 1962 in an important New Jersey court case the majority ruled that a rural Township could prohibit trailer parks within its limits quote trailer dwellers had become a recognized class one subject to discrimination owners of mobile homes were now classified under the law as quote Footloose Footloose nomadic people migratory poppers they were vagrants once more by 1968 only 13% of mobile home owners held white-collar jobs a sizable percentage of those who lived in the poorer trailer parks came from rural mainly southern areas families that could not afford to buy a new trailer we're buying or renting depreciated that is secondhand third-hand trailers a new used market for trailers had emerged what to sociologists called hillbilly havens that cropped up on the periphery of cities in the Sunbelt the Midwest and elsewhere scattered along highways often near railroad tracks rundown trailer parks were barely distinguishable from junkyards trailer trash would become America's Untouchables now despite the automatic assumption class has never been simply about income or financial worth alone it has been fashioned in bodily terms dirty feet and tallow faces remain signs of delinquency and depravity to live in a shack a hovel a shebang or in shed town or in a trailer park is to live in a place that never acquires the name of home as transitional spaces unsettled spaces they contain occupants who lack the civic markers of stability predict productivity economic value and human Worth and our devalued urban spaces or have become modern-day wastelands we also really have never had a democracy in this country I'm sure that's not shocking to everyone here but what's interesting is that it was an Australian observer in 1949 who noted that Americans tolerate huge disparities in wealth but they require of their political figures to use Democratic state craft and what that means what they want from their Democratic leaders is to give them high sounding rhetoric and they also want their political leaders to dress down to pretend to be one of them and you may not have thought that this is something this isn't just a new phenomena but it's actually a note of a much older phenomenon today we have politicians who dress down to go to barbecues head out head out to hunt game they are seen wearing blue jeans this is something that Jimmy Carter was known for was wearing blue jeans camouflage cowboy hats bubble caps all in an effort to come across as ordinary people but presidents and other national politicians are anything but ordinary people after they are elected disguising that fact is the real camouflage that distorts the actual class nature of state power but real white trash Bubba's raise different fears in his run for the office run for the office of the presidency William Jefferson Clinton enemies were ruthless in painting him as white trash unworthy of the highest office he was considered a popper compared to the Republicans beloved Prince Ronald Reagan he embodied certain stereotypes his cholesterol rich dining habits and the grinning still campaigning Clinton was photographed with a mule named George Arkansas was ranked 47th in per capita income in 1992 and it's legacy is a state scarred by redneck B'nai teenis lingered on Clinton I know you young people probably don't remember any of this Clinton actually drew on the ghost of Elvis and Elvis was a Mississippi sharecropper son able to shed a lot of the toxic meaning of white trash and be considered cool so claim Jew and Elvis to help get elected by swinging his way into office by playing the Heartbreak Hotel on his saxophone for the Arsenio Hall Show and he invoked all during the campaign kept invoking Elvis all over again and actually what yes yes and it made you know it made the Republicans furious throughout the whole thing now the attacks on Clinton considered continued after his inauguration in 1994 journalist Phil Maxwell Florida an african-american said he thought he knew why it was Clinton's earthiness his southern Asst was seen as being bred into him by his mother Virginia she had published a memoir and her story was grim her mother was a drug addict her childhood was one of deprivation she had been beaten by one husband and she was married four times her appearance borrowed from trailer trash and this is how Maxwell described she had a skunk stripe in her hair elaborate makeup colorful outfits and a racing form in hand in the eyes of his enemies said Maxwell Clinton was his mother's son a kind of bastard breed that fell short of representing quote the right pedigree for US president not surprisingly the malonic oh la Monica Lewinsky impeachment scandal fit this profile of reducing Clinton's life to a pulp fiction story about trailer trash special prosecutor ken starr's famous report mentioned sex 500 times high crimes and misdemeanors was equated with lower-class lewdness now today of course we have reality TV an industry in white trash voyeurism relying as well on the vaudeville tradition a commentator remarked on the popular duck dynasty set in Louisiana all the men looked like they stepped out of a hatfield-mccoy conflict to smoke a corncob pipe and exactly that's where they got their look from giving up their polo shirts and their golf clubs the Robertson men were kissing cousins of the comic Ritz brothers in the 1938 Hollywood film Kentucky moonshine now we today are no less consumed with pedigree than any time before computer dating finds class-specific partners Ivy Leaguers register at good genes calm to find appropriate matches the very inventor of computer dating in 1956 got his start as a leading authority on eugenics and nothing at sociologists tell us is a better predictor of a person's success in 2015 than your class background now duck dynasty may be a cheap and only slightly less scripted remake of The Beverly Hillbillies but its attempt at humor mask the anxiety viewers have on their over their own dubious pedigree it also gives the false message that redneck roots are no longer a barrier to advancement when in fact the class divide only grows wider white my point of all weddings what I'm trying to point out here is that white trash is a central if disturbing thread in our national narrative the very existence of such people both in their visibility and attempts to mask them and make them invisible is proof that Americans aside obsesses over the mutable layer labels we give to neighbors we wish not to notice they are not who we are but they are who we are and have been a fundamental part of our history whether we like it or not thank you you

Channel: Spring Hill College

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Keywords: shc, spring hill college, Mobile (City/Town/Village), Alabama (US State), Video Production (Industry), Communication (Industry), Digital Media (Industry), Lecture (Type Of Public Presentation), Documentary, History, u.s. history, american history

Id: _cPII2l-K4s

Length: 50min 17sec (3017 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Mythosaurus]

I've read her book, and it is pretty illuminating on how poor European-Americans were both looked down upon and organized by the affluent throughout our country's history.

[u/alllie]

Nancy Isenberg is the T. Harry Williams Professor of History at Louisiana State University. She is the author of Madison and Jefferson, 2010, with Andrew Burstein; Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr, 2007; and Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America, 1998.