WHITE TRASH

The 400-year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg

“The wretched and landless poor have been a part of American culture from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement. In her ground-breaking history of the class system in America, Nancy Isenberg explodes our comforting myths about equality in the land of opportunity, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present poor white trash.

Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature, and scientific theories over four hundred years. Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society — where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. Some of the founding fathers believed poor people were subhuman, and wanted to apply strategies used in agriculture and animal husbandry to improve the stock. Poor whites were central to the rise of Lincoln’s Republican Party, and in addition to slavery, the Civil War itself was fought over class issues. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which was a factor in the rise of eugenics — a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. Those poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ’s Great Society. Now they are offered to us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty, and the label is applied to celebrities ranging from Dolly Parton to Bill Clinton. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been near the center of major debates over the character of the American identity.

The contemporary focus on the “one percent” has animated public discussion about power dynamics, but without context. We have been taught to overlook the fact that privilege runs deep in our history. Without pause, America has been ignoring, if not hating, its underclass since the seventeenth century. Today we acknowledge racial injustice as an ugly stain on our nation’s history. With Isenberg’s landmark book, we will have to face the truth about the enduring nature of class as well.”

(From the flap of the book)