White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

435 Pages·2016·11.03 MB·English

by  Nancy Isenberg

BY NANCY ISENBERG
Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr
Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America
BY NANCY ISENBERG WITH ANDREW BURSTEIN
Madison and Jefferson

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ISBN 9780670785971
Ebook ISBN 9781101608487
Version_1
In memory of Gerda Lerner and Paul Boyer
CONTENTS
BY NANCY ISENBERG
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
Fables We Forget By
Part I: To Begin the World Anew
CHAPTER ONE
Taking Out the Trash: Waste People in the New World
CHAPTER TWO
John Locke’s Lubberland: The Settlements of Carolina and Georgia
CHAPTER THREE
Benjamin Franklin’s American Breed: The Demographics of Mediocrity
CHAPTER FOUR
Thomas Jefferson’s Rubbish: A Curious Topography of Class
CHAPTER FIVE
Andrew Jackson’s Cracker Country: The Squatter as Common Man
Part II: Degeneration of the American Breed
CHAPTER SIX
Pedigree and Poor White Trash: Bad Blood, Half-Breeds, and Clay-Eaters
CHAPTER SEVEN
Cowards, Poltroons, and Mudsills: Civil War as Class Warfare
CHAPTER EIGHT
Thoroughbreds and Scalawags: Bloodlines and Bastard Stock in the Age of
Eugenics
CHAPTER NINE
Forgotten Men and Poor Folk: Downward Mobility and the Great
Depression
CHAPTER TEN
The Cult of the Country Boy: Elvis Presley, Andy Griffith, and LBJ’s Great
Society
Part III: The White Trash Makeover
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Redneck Roots: Deliverance, Billy Beer, and Tammy Faye
CHAPTER TWELVE
Outing Rednecks: Slumming, Slick Willie, and Sarah Palin
EPILOGUE
America’s Strange Breed: The Long Legacy of White Trash
NOTES
INDEX
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Image 1 The Mapp of Lubberland or the Ile of Lazye (ca. 1670), British Print,
#1953.0411.69AN48846001, The British Museum, London, England
Image 2 Encounter Between a Corncracker and an Eelskin, from Davy
Crockett’s Almanack of 1837, American Antiquarian Society,
Worcester, Massachusetts Image 3 “Old Sug,” from John Robb’s
Streaks of Squatter Life (1847), American Antiquarian Society,
Worcester, Massachusetts
Image 4 “The Bad Bird and the Mudsill,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,
February 21, 1863
Image 5 Chart used at a fair in Kansas promoting fitter families and eugenic
marriages (ca. 1929), Scrapbook, American Eugenic Society Papers,
American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Image 6
The 10,000 Hookworm Family, 201 H Alabama, Hookworm, Box 42,
Folder 1044, #1107, 1913, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow,
New York Image 7 Photograph of Henry McLean, age twenty-three,
infected with hookworm, and W. C. Riddich, age twenty-one, not
infected, 236 H North Carolina, Box 53, Folder 1269, #236 Vashti
Alexander County, North Carolina, May 29, 1913, Rockefeller Archive
Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York Image 8 Carrie Buck and her mother,
Emma (1924), Arthur Estabrook Collection, M. E. Grenander
Department of Special Collections and Archives, University of Albany
Libraries, Albany, New York Image 9 Eroded land on tenant’s farm,
Walker County, Alabama (Arthur Rothstein, 1937), LC-USF34-025121,
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC
Image 10 Homestead, Penderlea, North Carolina (1936), LC-USF33-000717-
M2, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington,
DC
Image 11 The Beverly Hillbillies as American Gothic on the cover of the
Saturday Evening Post, February 2, 1963
Image 12 Trailer trash as squatters in Winkelman, Arizona (1950), Photograph
Collection of the History and Archives Division of the Arizona State
Library, Archives and Public Records, Phoenix, Arizona Image 13 Will
Counts’s photograph of Elizabeth Ann Eckford and Hazel Bryan in
Little Rock, Arkansas, September 4, 1957, Will Counts Collection,
Indiana University Archives Image 14 Taylor Thornberry, Life
magazine, September 23, 1957, Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture
Collection/Getty Images
Image 15 LBJ visiting Appalachian families for the Tour on Poverty (1963),
#215-23-64, Inez Kentucky, LBJ Library Photograph by Cecil
Stoughton, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Texas Image 16
Dolly Parton stand-up poster from Nashville, Tennessee, featured in
Roy Blount Jr., “Country’s Angels,” Esquire, March 1977
Image 17 Tammy Faye Bakker on the cover of her album Don’t Give Up (1985)
Image 18 Bill Maxwell’s article “Seen as ‘White Trash’: Maybe Some Hate
Clinton Because He’s Too Southern,” Wilmington, North Carolina,
Star-News, June 19, 1994
Image 19 Caricature of Sarah Palin in overalls by Steve Brodner in The New
Yorker, December 7, 2009
Image 20 Ritz Brothers from the Hollywood movie Kentucky Moonshine (1938)
and the cast of A&E’s reality TV show Duck Dynasty (2015)