Donald Trump’s success has forced the pundits to talk about class. Using statistical analyses, journalists have contended that his core of support comes from those who possess a high-school degree or less, and who live mostly in the South. They have observed a high correlation between Trump backers and mobile-home residents. Others, less circumspect, have dismissed his constituency as “white trash” or “trailer trash.” Trump has even been called “the revenge of the lower classes.” Nate Cohn of The New York Times has found that Trump’s “best state” is West Virginia.
A strong undercurrent in news coverage and commentary is the notion that poor whites don’t deserve a political voice — they are either too ignorant or too primitive (as conduits of “white anger” and racial bigotry) — and that they fail to see Trump as a mere carnival barker, a con man. This is not to say that Trump doesn’t use racist appeals or feed on anger, but that is not the whole story.
Contrary to the patriotic script that Americans believe all men are created equal, class prejudice has a history at least as old as the Jamestown settlement. Long before the term “the one percent” was coined, and long before Karl Marx divided labor from management, a colonial British vocabulary that centered on “wastelands” and “breeds” directed American thought.
Class prejudice has a history at least as old as the Jamestown settlement.
In the United States, an agrarian nation for more than half of our history, land and property ownership have constituted powerful emblems of civic belonging and social mobility. But failure and landlessness were just as common — in fact, rampant. Poor rural whites have occupied not only the fields and backwaters where they toil, but also a sizable space in the American imagination. They were known to the earliest English colonizers as “waste people,” which later morphed into “white trash.” Americans’ obsession with the unwanted lower classes has survived for 400 years in the various derogatory names such people were given: “offscourings,” “rubbish,” “lazy lubbers,” “squatters,” “crackers,” “tackies,” “sandhillers,” “rednecks,” “brier hoppers,” “low-downers,” “hillbillies,” and “trailer trash.” Berated for their sloth and stigmatized for producing defective children, they have been branded for their inability to assimilate into “normal” civilized society.
How did Donald Trump’s candidacy happen? What ideas has he upended? How is academe responding? What does his candidacy mean for the future of democracy? We asked scholars from a variety of disciplines to weigh in.
Class taxonomy was rooted in topography and in the firm belief that rich soil and well-tilled fields nurtured a healthy and productive people. The worst people were seen as weedy extrusions of scrubby, barren, and swampy wastelands from which they could never escape. Husbandry held that wasteland produced inferior breeds of animals and humans alike. Inheriting this thinking, the American Dialect Society, in 1904, offered a definition of two groups of “uncouth” country people: “hill-billies came from the hills, and the rednecks from the swamps.”
The same language is very much with us today. In a tirade against supporters of Donald Trump, Kevin Williamson of National Review attacked “poor white America” as a people living in “dying communities.” Thus, he revived the old idea that class is a creature of an unproductive landscape. Williamson dismisses the inhabitants of these stagnant enclaves as rubbish, whose communities, as “negative assets,” deserve to die. Ostensibly, through drug and alcohol addiction, family and sexual dysfunction, they have dug their own graves. He reduces an entire class to a simple pathology. If that isn’t insulting enough, he finds Trump’s poor white constituency to be less than human, an inferior breed, their discontents nothing more than the “whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog.”
Williamson may not use the phrase “white trash,” but that is what the journalist, a native Texan, means. By the mid-19th century, poor whites were categorized as a strange breed, prone to the horrifying practice of clay-eating, as well as alcoholism; they typically produced a brood of prematurely-aged children marked by a ghostly yellow pallor. Not until Progressivism stirred consciences in the early 20th century were the “lazy diseases” of hookworm and pellagra properly studied and treated. But Williamson has no problem resurrecting these otherwise lost images — except now, instead of clay, the useless classes are addicted to OxyContin.
Poor whites were among the first beneficiaries of federal welfare assistance. During Reconstruction, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands provided food, clothing, and temporary shelter. Surprisingly, given the pervasive racism of the era, many Union officers and Republicans perceived poor whites to be lagging behind the freed slaves in adopting measures of self-improvement. Impoverished Southern whites were stigmatized for not having “real” homes. In 1864, one commentator noted that they nested in a “tolerably kept swine-sty or dog-kennel.” They were castigated for violating every sexual norm, from incest to wife selling, to mothers who pimped their daughters. The ever-increasing fear of sexual abnormality also came to attach itself to Appalachia — this was seared into the national consciousness when the 1972 blockbuster film Deliverance graphically depicted the perverse ways of hillbillies.
Why does the history of white trash matter? By treating poor whites as a degenerate breed, Southerners and Northerners did more than blame poor individuals for their failure: They told themselves that as a breed, poor whites’ corrupt pedigree determined their fate. By the 1860s, writers of all political persuasions argued ad nauseam that poor whites passed inferior traits from one generation to the next. “Odd” specimens and “congenital” degenerates, they were seen as moving backward on the evolutionary scale. Debased rural habitations produced “sandhillers” and “pineys.” They were all no better than inferior animals, and therefore called “curs,” “scalawags,” and “tackies” (i.e., stray dogs, diseased cattle, and an unimpressive breed of horse found on the Carolina marshes).
Such class-inflected thinking gave rise to callous indifference across the country. The poor were supposedly too inbred, too hopeless to be helped by charity. At the turn of the 20th century, a more radical kind of intervention became “popular": the eugenic sterilization of poor white women. In the landmark Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell (1927), Carrie Buck had been chosen for sterilization because she was the perfect specimen of white trash: in the words of Albert Priddy, one of the “shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South.” Priddy, the superintendent of the State Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded, in Lynchburg, Va., who helped frame the court case, saw sterilization as an economic necessity. For Southern eugenicists like him, poor women could still be exploited as menial laborers without endangering the healthy stock of Americans in the middle or upper classes. A cruel analogy informed his thinking: Sexually promiscuous and degenerate poor white women, like stray dogs, needed to be neutered. A line from animal husbandry persisted in the American vocabulary that justified this disturbing logic: “Like breeds like.”
Recurrence to the language of breeds reminds us that Americans have never been that fond of genuine social equality. Class is always with us, and the past lives on when a certain vulnerable population is characterized as “shiftless,” worthless, or dangerous. We ignore at our own peril the crucial ways a top-down economy and class inequality have wasted millions of lives.
Even in the 21st century, as sociologists, economists, and legal scholars have discovered, the most important predictors of success are the wealth and the privileges bestowed by parents and ancestors. We pretend to be a nation that believes in acting to minimize class distinctions; but the elite, and even the middle classes, shore up distinctions by living in class-zoned neighborhoods and by transferring to children all the marks of social breeding. Hard work in and of itself has never been the principal means of ascent. More barriers to upward mobility exist than we care to acknowledge.
And, like journalists, the entertainment media are complicit in perpetuating inequality in the way they depict poor whites. Reality TV has cashed in on the white-trash trope, but to what ameliorating effect? Has anyone given more attention to the problem of the rural poor as a result of watching Swamp People, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Hillbilly Handfishin’, Redneck Island, Duck Dynasty, Moonshiners, and Appalachian Outlaws? These shows are all fraught with the old baggage of the pathetic, hopelessly ill-bred, whose on-screen lives are more cartoon than editorial. Those stereotypes made it all too easy, earlier in the campaign, to dismiss Trump’s success as something that would never last.
It is time to take white trash seriously. For whether we like it or not, their history is at the heart of our deeply conflicted, all-too-ignored class politics.
Nancy Isenberg is a professor of history at Louisiana State University. Her book White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (Viking) will be published later this month.
