WHITE TRASH: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America By Nancy Isenberg Viking. $28 If slavery is America’s original sin, class may be its hidden one. It is part of our national. White trash Download white trash or read online books in PDF, EPUB, Tuebl, and Mobi Format. Click Download or Read Online button to get white trash book now. This site is like a library, Use search box in the widget to get ebook that you want. OFFICIAL BOOK DESCRIPTION: In her groundbreaking history of the class system in America, extending from colonial times to the present, Nancy Isenberg takes on our comforting myths about equality, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing––if occasionally entertaining––poor white trash. Has White Trash by Nancy Isenberg been sitting on your reading list? Pick up the key ideas in the book with this quick summary. In the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election, the voting behavior of white people in America garnered a lot of attention. (Portrait: Mindy Stricke/Penguin) A familiar tale about class in America gets a poor retelling in a new book. Nancy Isenberg has produced, in White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in.
WHITE TRASH
The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
By Nancy Isenberg
Illustrated. 460 pp. Viking. $28.
The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
By Nancy Isenberg
Illustrated. 460 pp. Viking. $28.
No line about class in the United States is more famous than the one written by the German sociologist Werner Sombart in 1906. Class consciousness in America, he contended, foundered “on the shoals of roast beef and apple pie.” Sombart was among the first scholars to ask the question, “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” His answer, now solidified into conventional wisdom about American exceptionalism, was simple: “America is a freer and more egalitarian society than Europe.” In the United States, he argued, “there is not the stigma of being the class apart that almost all European workers have about them. . . . The bowing and scraping before the ‘upper classes,’ which produces such an unpleasant impression in Europe, is completely unknown.”
In “White Trash,” Nancy Isenberg joins a long list of historians over the last century who have sent Sombart’s theory crashing on the shoals of history. The prolific Charles and Mary Beard, progressive historians in the first third of the 20th century, reinterpreted American history as a struggle for economic power between the haves and have-nots. W.E.B. Du Bois interpreted Reconstruction as a great class rebellion, as freed slaves fought to control their own working conditions and wages. Labor and political historians in the 1970s and 1980s recovered a forgotten history of blue-collar consciousness and grass-roots radicalism, from the Workingmen’s Party in Andrew Jackson’s America to the late-19th-century populists of upcountry Georgia to the Depression-era leftist unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Historians of public policy, like the influential Michael B. Katz, emphasized the persistence of notions of “the undeserving poor,” an ideology that blamed economic deprivation on the alleged pathological behavior of poor people themselves and eroded support for welfare programs.
So Isenberg’s story is not, as her subtitle suggests, “untold.” But she retells it with unusual ambition and (to use a class-laden term) in a masterly manner. Ranging from John Rolfe and Pocahontas to “The Beverly Hillbillies,” Isenberg — a historian at Louisiana State University whose previous books include a biography of Aaron Burr — provides a cultural history of changing concepts of class and inferiority. She argues that British colonizers saw their North American empire as a place to dump their human waste: the idle, indigent and criminal. Richard Hakluyt the younger, one of the many colorful characters who fill these pages, saw the continent as “one giant workhouse,” in Isenberg’s phrase, where the feckless poor could be turned into industrious drudges.
That process of shunting outsiders to the nation’s margins, she argues, continued in the early Republic and in the 19th century, when landless white settlers began to fill in the backcountry of Appalachia and the swamps of the lowland South, living in lowly cabins, dreaming of landownership but mostly toiling as exploited tenant farmers or itinerant laborers.
In the book’s most ingenious passages, Isenberg offers a catalog of the insulting terms well-off Americans used to denigrate their economic inferiors. In 17th-century Virginia, critics of rebellious indentured servants denounced them as society’s “offscourings,” a term for fecal matter. A hundred years later, elites railed against the “useless lubbers” of “Poor Carolina,” a place she calls the “first white trash colony.” In the early 19th century, landowners described the landless rural poor as boisterous, foolish “crackers” and idle, vagabond “squatters.”
Running exe files windows 10 7zsocao. Not all stereotypes of the white poor were negative. In the Jacksonian period, populists celebrated Davy Crockett and his coonskin cap. Lincoln might be derided as a poor woodsman, but he was also valorized for his log cabin roots. During the Great Depression, New Deal photographers and writers depicted farmers displaced by the Dust Bowl as virtuous people, victims of economic forces beyond their control.
By the second half of the 19th century and into the 20th, Isenberg shows, crude caricatures gave way to seemingly scientific explanations of lower-class status. “Class was congenital,” she writes, summarizing a mid-19th-century view of poor whites. One writer highlighted the “runtish forefathers” and “consumptive parents” who birthed a “notorious race” of inferior white people. Essayists described human differences by borrowing terminology from specialists in animal husbandry. Just as dogs could be distinguished by their breeds and horses distinguished from mules, so could people be characterized as superior or inferior based on their physical traits.
By the late 19th century, some writers used family genealogies to trace the roots of criminality, illness and insanity, and warn of the dangers of “degeneration.” By the early 20th century, armed with increasingly sophisticated statistical tools and new understandings of genetics, eugenicists offered the most chilling of responses to poor whites: They argued that the state should use its power to keep them from reproducing. Those arguments shaped one of the Supreme Court’s most notorious decisions, Buck v. Bell (1927), in which the court, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes writing for the majority, upheld a Virginia sterilization program to prevent “generations of imbeciles” from proliferating and thus to keep the nation from being “swamped with incompetence.”
The story of eugenics offers an example of the ways that, throughout the American past, questions of class status have been entangled with notions of racial inferiority. Isenberg makes a strong case that one of the most common ways of stigmatizing poor people was to question their racial identity. Backcountry vagabonds were often compared unfavorably with the “savage,” nomadic Indian. Sun-browned tenant farmers faced derision for their less-than-white appearance. After the emancipation of slaves, politicians warned of the rise of a “mongrel” nation, fearful that white bloodlines would be contaminated by blacks, a process that might expand the ranks of “trash” people.
But Isenberg falls prey to one of the most common and pernicious fallacies in American popular discourse about class: For her, America’s landless farmers and precarious workers are by default white. “Class,” she writes, “had its own singular and powerful dynamic, apart from its intersection with race.” Thus we get a history of class in America that discusses white tenant farmers at length, but scarcely mentions black sharecroppers or Mexican farmworkers, as if somehow their race segregated them from America’s history of class subjugation. Native Americans make cameo appearances playing their role as a degraded race or as the noble savage — as ideal types rather than as exploited and impoverished peoples themselves. The “coolie” Asian workers imported to the post-Civil War South, the Filipino agricultural laborers of California’s Central Valley and the inhabitants of San Francisco’s and New York’s 19th-century Chinatowns, all workers, most at the bottom of the economic ladder, are virtually absent from these pages, even though they were subject to caricatures stunningly similar to those hurled at backcountry “squatters” and “hillbillies.”
It is a commonplace argument in American politics that somehow race and class stand apart. Pundits charge that racial minorities practice a self-segregating “identity politics” rather than uniting around shared economic grievances. But a history of class in America that assumes its whiteness and relegates the nonwhite poor to the backstage is one that misses the fundamental reality of economic inequality in American history, that race and class were — and are — fundamentally entwined.
A familiar tale about class in America gets a poor retelling in a new book.Nancy Isenberg has produced, in White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, a dreadfully stupid and lazy book. It is badly written, poorly conceived, and incompetently executed. Isenberg would join the long line of American debunkers and would-be debunkers of a familiar and surpassingly tedious sort: “Sure, Americans sent a man to the moon, but what about the United Fruit Company in Guatemala back in 1954? Huh? Huh?”
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Isenberg’s argument, if we may be so generous as to call it that, is this: The American culture was not born ex nihilo on July 4, 1776, and in the English parts of the New World colonists reproduced some form of the English class structure; the freedom-seeking Puritans were not alone, but were joined by all manner of riff-raff dispatched by English powers as a form of domestic social hygiene, making the United States a kind of Australia before there was an Australia; the United States today is not a society without class divisions.
Well, raise my rent.
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Virginia was named for an English queen and its settlement was sponsored by a knight. Its basic law was a royal charter, and its economy was shaped in no small part by indentured servitude and chattel slavery. These are not egalitarian arrangements, and they did not produce egalitarian outcomes. This is not “untold history.” This is history told, and told, and told again. Life in early-17th-century Jamestown, Isenberg tells us, was not unlike the world of William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice; what we are to take from the fact that an English settlement was culturally consistent with the work of an English playwright working at approximately the same time (1596 in this case) is anybody’s guess.
About 20 pages in, I found myself thinking: “I wonder when we get to NASCAR?” Obviously, you cannot have an intellectually lazy and cliché-ridden book about white-trash culture without NASCAR, preferably with a tangential report on the box-office performance of Smokey and the Bandit in 1977. That would be like having a batty and ignorant book on African-American culture without fried chicken and watermelon. Rest assured, you’ll get your NASCAR, your Dukes of Hazzard, and more.
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But it’s a while coming. The structure of the book reeks of sophomore-level procrastination. Perhaps this will be more obvious to you if you’ve ever been obliged to write something long and complicated on a deadline and performed poorly. (Not that I would know anything about that.) The first chapter of the book is the book essay, a distillation of the book’s argument that usually is submitted to publishers as part of a book proposal. You aren’t supposed to publish the book essay, but Isenberg seems to have done that or something quite close to it. So what we have is a brief version of the book’s overall argument, followed by a series of half-thought-out chapters in which we are treated to reports on Thomas Jefferson and class, the Civil War and class, the Great Depression and class, each connected only vaguely, if at all, with the others, and an epilogue.
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You will not be surprised to learn that Jefferson had attitudes about class that were more or less characteristic of a man of his day, and that popular attitudes toward the subject changed slowly over time in response to historical events. It may be that all of this could add up to an illuminating account of class differences in the United States, and maybe even an account of persistent social injustice of a kind, but, if it does, that has escaped Isenberg entirely.
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She does not even seem to read her own sentences, at least as they relate to one another in sequence, e.g.: “[Benjamin] Franklin was not sympathetic to the plight of the poor. His design for the Pennsylvania Hospital in 1751 was intended to assist the industrious poor, primarily men with physical injuries.” I found myself blinking and rereading that sentence, and wondering how and why a man who was not sympathetic to the plight of the poor should design a charity hospital for their benefit. It is true that Franklin, like charitable men before and after and now, distinguished between different kinds of poor people, between the so-called deserving poor and ordinary bums, partly as a moral exercise and partly as a kind of philanthropic triage, resources being limited. But there is not an ordinary reading of the English words “was not sympathetic to the plight of the poor” that describes a man who undertook to relieve the plight of the poor through charitable works.
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Franklin particularly perplexes and vexes Isenberg. He was a fugitive from an apprenticeship to his older brother (a form of indenture) and was from a family of modest means. Isenberg writes: “He had arrived in Philadelphia in 1723 as a runaway, meanly dressed in filthy, wet clothing.” Given this fact, she is scandalized by Franklin’s later complaints about “vagrant and idle persons” congregating in Philadelphia. (The more things change . . .) One wonders whether Isenberg has ever been to America. Franklin, as Isenberg might learn from reading Isenberg, was a man who began with very little and who managed to rise in Philadelphia — and rise and rise until he became its most celebrated resident — despite being an outsider to the Quaker mafia that ran the place and having no real connections to the “Proprietors,” the Penns and allied families who dominated the colony socially and economically. How did that happen? Isenberg knows: “Quaker patrons,” including the lawyer Alexander Hamilton (no relation to that guy Aaron Burr shot), “a non-Quaker leader of the Quaker Party,” along with “liberal Friends, who were not exclusive about who should wield influence within the political faction of the Quaker Party.” Which is to say, Franklin rose in no small part through his own hard work and cunning but was also enabled by an open, liberal, cosmopolitan, commercial society in which one’s original station in life was not necessarily one’s final station — i.e., he rose because of the very American order whose liberality this daft book was written to debunk.
Perhaps Franklin appalls Isenberg because he is recognizably the first modern American, and he talked like one.
Isenberg has a habit of doing that to herself. Hilariously, she argues that one of the problems with westward expansion was that the settlers’ class positions became less secure the farther they traveled from the eastern colonial capitals. That is, of course, the founding idea of the American meritocratic ethos and the related myth of a classless American society. The old divisions really did melt away in the refining fires of the frontier — only to be replaced with new ones. Isenberg writes as though class politics in the United States were a seamless continuation of British class politics (French-speaking, Spanish-speaking, German-speaking, and Russian-speaking America effectively do not exist in her account), when in reality they constitute something closer to an inversion of them. If an Englishman today has the wrong accent and failed to go to the right schools, it doesn’t matter how much money he has; if an American has enough money, nobody cares what sort of funky, plebeian manner of speech he has (cf. Trump, Donald, yugeness of) or whether he went to school at all — in fact, we tend to celebrate those who come from outside the Ivy League–Wall Street world much more intensely than those who merely advance a few degrees within it. If you’re the 14th Earl of Derby and just Derbying on the way the 13th did before you, the English class system regards you with some awe; if you’re the ninth Biddle to be chairman of the Merion Cricket Club membership committee, the American system thinks you should have maybe tried harder in school or gotten an MBA or something.
White Trash Book Pdf Cover
Perhaps Franklin appalls Isenberg because he is recognizably the first modern American, and he talked like one. “I think the best way of doing good to the poor is not making them easy in poverty but leading or driving them out of it.” Is that Ben Franklin or Paul Ryan?
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Eventually, we get to the modern era, and the sympathetic Joads of Isenberg’s imagination become objects of her contempt, from those NASCAR-watching, Burt Reynolds–impersonating hordes to Sarah Palin, who inspires a hatred in Isenberg that is unpleasant to witness on the page and must be absolutely manic in person. She repeats Slate’s report that Palin’s home town of Wasilla, Alaska, is just a place to “get gas and pee,” but she writes as one who obviously never has stopped there, or watched a Lady Wildcats game with bar patrons in Harlan, Ky., or stopped to talk with foot-washing Baptists praying for rain in a cotton field outside Brownfield, Texas. Well, if the bright kids at Slate say so, it must be true.
Isenberg teaches at Louisiana State, having studied at Rutgers and the University of Wisconsin. Her book inevitably will be compared — poorly — with J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. In Isenberg, there is no sense of knowing this culture and its people. By her own telling, her interest in the subject is rooted in To Kill a Mockingbird (the film, not the book), and her work is full of such information as can be had from Google or in a classroom in Madison. As for the people, they’re mainly just evidence to be mustered against the Great Satan that is American capitalism, or else, like Sarah Palin, characters in Isenberg’s white-minstrel-show version of history. There may come a time when the members of the white underclass decide that they do not want or need nice liberal ladies from Rutgers, who get so much wrong speaking about them, to speak for them. But for those of Isenberg’s disposition, the poor are very little more than pawns, and in the end it doesn’t matter very much whether you’re playing the white side of the chess board or the black.