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White Trash

Name: White Trash
Author: Nancy Isenberg

The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

Nancy Isenberg

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eBook - ePub

White Trash

The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

Nancy Isenberg

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About This Book

In this landmark book, Nancy Isenberg argues that the voters who boosted Trump all the way to the White House have been a permanent part of the American fabric, and reveals how the wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlements to today's hillbillies.

Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics - a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society; they are now offered up as entertainment in reality TV shows, and the label is applied to celebrities ranging from Dolly Parton to Bill Clinton. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the centre of major political debates over the character of the American identity.

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 - and forces a nation to face the truth about the enduring, malevolent nature of class.

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Publisher

Atlantic Books

Year

2017

ISBN

9781786492999

Topic

Storia

Subtopic

Storia nordamericana

Part I

TO BEGIN THE WORLD ANEW

CHAPTER ONE

Taking Out the Trash

Waste People in the New World

Colonies ought to be Emunctories or Sinkes of States; to drayne away the filth.

—John White, The Planters Plea (1630)

In the minds of literate English men and women, as colonization began in the 1500s, North America was an uncertain world inhabited by monstrous creatures, a blank territory skirted by mountains of gold. Because it was a strange land that few would ever see firsthand, spectacular tales had more appeal than practical observation. England’s two chief promoters of American exploration would never set foot on the continent. Richard Hakluyt the elder (1530–91) was a lawyer at Middle Temple, a vibrant center of intellectual life and court politics in the London metropolis. His much younger cousin with the identical name (1552–1616) trained at Christ Church, Oxford, and never hazarded a voyage beyond the shores of France.¹

The elder Hakluyt was a bookish attorney who happened to be well connected to those who dreamt of profit from overseas ventures. His circle included merchants, royal officials, and such men on the make as Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and Martin Frobisher, all of whom sought fame and glory from exploration. These men of action were endowed with larger-than-life egos; they were a new breed of adventurer, known for heroism but also for ill-tempered public behavior.²

Richard Hakluyt the younger was an Oxford fellow and clergyman who devoted his life to compiling the travel narratives of explorers. In 1589, he published his most ambitious work, Principall Navigations, an exhaustive catalogue of all the accounts he could track down of English travelers to the East, the North, and of course America. In the age of Shakespeare, everyone who was anyone read Hakluyt. The unstoppable John Smith quoted liberally from his writings, proving himself more than a brute soldier of fortune.³

Even before publishing Principall Navigations, the younger Hakluyt had sought royal favor. He prepared a treatise for Queen Elizabeth I and her top advisers, laying out his working theory of British colonization. “Discourse of Western Planting” (1584) was pure propaganda, designed to persuade the queen of the benefits of American settlements. Sir Walter Raleigh had commissioned the work, hoping for the state financing he never received when he launched an expedition that led to the short-lived Roanoke colony, off the Carolina coast.⁴

In Hakluyt’s English colonial vision, distant America was a wilderness of an almost inconceivable dimension. For the French intellectual Michel de Montaigne, in 1580, it was the habitat of a simple and uncorrupted people whom he whimsically called “cannibals,” slyly challenging the popular image of brutes gorging on human flesh. Like Hakluyt, he had never seen Native peoples, of course. Hakluyt at least was more practical (and more Anglican) than Montaigne in his outlook on the aboriginals. He believed them neither dangerous nor innocent, but empty vessels waiting to be filled with Christian—and, no less, commercial—truths. He imagined the Indians as useful allies in fulfilling English aspirations, possible trading partners, and subordinate, to be sure, but above all a natural resource to be exploited for the greater good.⁵

Attaching “empty” as a metaphor to a mysterious land served the legal purposes of the English state. Without recognized owners, the territory was available and waiting to be taken. Even for the bookish cleric Hakluyt, the trope of conquest he used presented America as a lovely woman waiting to be wooed and wed by the English. They would become her rightful owners and deserving custodians. It was all a fiction, of course, because the land was not really inane ac uacuum—void and vacant. As the English conceived it, however, any land had to be taken out of its natural state and put to commercial use—only then would it be truly owned.⁶

Obviously, the Indian occupants were deemed unable to possess a true title. Combing ancient laws for convincing analogies, English colonizers classified the Natives as savages, and sometimes as barbarians. The Indians did not build what the English would acknowledge as permanent homes and towns; they did not enclose the workable ground inside hedges and fences. Under their tenancy, the land appeared unbounded and untamed—what John Smith, in his accounts of Virginia, and later New England, described as “very ranke” and weedy. The Indians lived off the earth as passive nomads. Profit-seeking planters and industrious husbandmen, on the other hand, were needed to cultivate the ground for its riches, and in doing so impose a firm hand.⁷

This powerful conception of land use would play a key role in future categorizations of race and class on the experimental continent. Before they even established new and busy societies, colonizers denoted some people as entrepreneurial stewards of the exploitable land; they declared others (the vast majority) as mere occupiers, a people with no measurable investment in productivity or in commerce.

Whether barren or empty, uncultivated or rank, the land acquired a quintessentially English meaning. The English were obsessed with waste, which was why America was first and foremost a “wasteland” in their eyes. Wasteland meant undeveloped land, land that was outside the circulation of commercial exchange and apart from the understood rules of agricultural production. To lie in waste, in biblical language, meant to exist desolate and unattended; in agrarian terms, it was to be left fallow and unimproved.

Wasteland was idle land. Arable tracts of desirable property could only be associated with furrowed fields, rows of crops and fruit trees, golden waves of grain, and pasture for cattle and sheep. John Smith embraced the same ideological premise with a precise (if crude) allusion: the Englishman’s right to the land was ensured by his commitment to carpeting the soil with manure. An English elixir of animal waste would magically transform the Virginia wilderness, making untilled wasteland into valuable English territory. Waste was there to be treated, and then exploited. Waste was wealth as yet unrealized.⁸

In his “Discourse of Western Planting,” Hakluyt confidently described the entire continent as that “waste firm of America.” Not terra firma, but waste firm. He saw natural resources as raw materials that could be converted into valuable commodities. Like other Englishmen of his day, he equated wastelands with commons, forests, and fens—those lands that sixteenth-century agrarian improvers eyed for prospective profits. Wasteland served the interest of private owners in the commercial marketplace, when the commons was enclosed and sheep and cattle grazed there; forests could be cut down for timber and cleared for settlements; fens or marshes could be drained and reconstituted as rich, arable farmland.⁹

It was not just land that could be waste. People could be waste too. And this brings us to our most important point of embarkation: Hakluyt’s America required what he classified as “waste people,” the corps of laborers needed to cut down the trees, beat the hemp (for making rope), gather honey, salt and dry fish, dress raw animal hides, dig the earth for minerals, raise olives and silk, and sort and pack bird feathers.¹⁰

He pictured paupers, vagabonds, convicts, debtors, and lusty young men without employment doing all such work. The “fry [young children] of wandering beggars that grow up idly and hurtfully and burdenous to the Realm, might be unladen and better bred up.” Merchants would be sent to trade with the Indians, selling trinkets, venting cloth goods, and gathering more information about the interior of the continent. Artisans were needed: millwrights to process the timber; carpenters, brick makers, and plasterers to build the settlement; cooks, launderers, bakers, tailors, and cobblers to service the infant colony.¹¹

Where would these workers come from? The artisans, he felt, could be spared without weakening the English economy. But the bulk of the labor force was to come from the swelling numbers of poor and homeless. They were, in Hakluyt’s disturbing allusion, “ready to eat up one another,” already cannibalizing the British economy. Idle and unused, they were waiting to be transplanted to the American land to be better (albeit no more humanely) put to use.¹²

This view of poverty was widely shared. One persistent project, first promoted in 1580 but never realized, involved raising a fleet of hundred-ton fishing vessels comprising ten thousand men, half of whom were to be impoverished vagrants. The galley labor scheme was designed to beat the famously industrious Dutch at the fishing trade.¹³ Leading mathematician and geographer John Dee was another who imagined a maritime solution to poverty. In 1577, as the British navy expanded, he proposed converting the poor into sailors. Others wished for the indigent to be swept from the streets, one way or another, whether gathered up as forced laborers building highways and fortifications or herded into prisons and workhouses. London’s Bridewell Prison was chartered in 1553, the first institution of its kind to propose reformation of vagrants. By the 1570s, more houses of corrections had opened their doors. Their founders offered to train the children of the poor to be “brought up in labor and work” so they would not follow in the footsteps of their parents and become “idle rogues.”¹⁴

In this sense, what Hakluyt foresaw in a colonized America was one giant workhouse. This cannot be emphasized enough. As the “waste firm of America” was settled, it would become a place where the surplus poor, the waste people of England, could be converted into economic assets. The land and the poor could be harvested together, to add to—rather than continue to subtract from—the nation’s wealth. Among the first waves of workers were the convicts, who would be employed at heavy labor, felling trees and burning them for pitch, tar, and soap ash; others would dig in the mines for gold, silver, iron, and copper. The convicts were not paid wages. As debt slaves, they were obliged to repay the English commonwealth for their crimes by producing commodities for export. In return, they would be kept from a life of crime, avoiding, in Hakluyt’s words, being “miserably hanged,” or packed into prisons to “pitifully pine away” and die.¹⁵

As he saw it, the larger reward would be reaped in the next generation. By importing raw goods from the New World and exporting cloth and other commodities in return, the poor at home would find work so that “not one poor creature” would feel impelled “to steal, to starve, and beg as they do.” They would prosper along with the growth of colonial trade. The children of “wandering beggars,” having been “kept from idleness, and made able by their own honest and easy labor,” would grow up responsibly, “without surcharging others.” Children who escaped pauperism, no longer burdens on the state, might reenter the workforce as honest laborers. The poor fry sent overseas would now be “better bred up,” making the lot of the English people better off, and the working poor more industrious. It all sounded perfectly logical and realizable.¹⁶

Seeing the indigent as wastrels, as the dregs of society, was certainly nothing new. The English had waged a war against the poor, especially vagrants and vagabonds, for generations. A series of laws in the fourteenth century led to a concerted campaign to root out this wretched “mother of all vice.” By the sixteenth century, harsh laws and punishments were fixed in place. Public stocks were built in towns for runaway servants, along with whipping posts and cages variously placed around London. Hot branding irons and ear boring identified this underclass and set them apart as a criminal contingent. An act of 1547 allowed for vagrants to be branded with a V on their breasts and enslaved. While this unusual piece of legislation appears never to have been put into practice, it was nonetheless a natural outgrowth of the widespread vilification of the poor.¹⁷

By 1584, when Hakluyt drafted his “Discourse of Western Planting,” the poor were routinely being condemned as “thriftless” and “idle,” a diseased and dangerously mobile, unattached people, everywhere running “to and fro over all the realm.” Compared to swarms of insects, labeled as an “over-flowing multitude,” they were imagined in language as an effluvial current, polluting and taxing England’s economic health.¹⁸

Slums enveloped London. As one observer remarked in 1608, the heavy concentrations of poor created a subterranean colony of dirty and disfigured “monsters” living in “caves.” They were accused of breeding rapidly and infecting the city with a “plague” of poverty, thus figuratively designating unemployment a contagious disease. Distant American colonies were presented as a cure. The poor could be purged. In 1622, the famous poet and clergyman John Donne wrote of Virginia in this fashion, describing the new colony as the nation’s spleen and liver, draining the “ill humours of the body . . . to breed good bloud.” Others used less delicate imagery. American colonies were “emunctories,” excreting human waste from the body politic. The elder Richard Hakluyt unabashedly called the transportable poor the “offals of our people.”¹⁹

The poor were human waste. Refuse. The sturdy poor, those without physical injuries, elicited outrage over their idleness. But how could vagabonds, who on average migrated some twenty to eighty miles in a month, be called idle? William Harrison, in his popular Description of England (1577), offered an explanation. Idleness was wasted energy. The vagabonds’ constant movement led nowhere. In moving around, they failed (like the Indians) to put down healthy roots and join the settled labor force of servants, tenants, and artisans. Harrison thought of idleness in the same way we might today refer to the idling motor of a car: the motor runs in place; the idle poor were trapped in economic stasis. Waste people, like wastelands, were stagnant; their energy produced nothing of value; they were like festering weeds ruining an idle garden.²⁰

Wasteland, then, was an eyesore, or what the English called a “sinke hole.” Waste people were analogized to weeds or sickly cattle grazing on a dunghill. But unlike the docile herd, which were carefully bred and contained in fenced enclosures, the poor could become disruptive and disorderly; they occasionally rioted. The cream of society could not be shielded from the public nuisance of the poor, in that they seemed omnipresent at funerals, church services, on highways and byways, in alehouses, and they loitered around Parliament—even at the king’s court. James I was so annoyed with vagrant boys milling around his palace at Newmarket that he wrote the London-based Virginia Company in 1619 asking for its help in removing the offensive population from his sight by shipping them overseas.²¹

As masterless men, detached and unproductive, the vagrant poor would acquire colonial masters. For Hakluyt and others, a quasi-military model made sense. It had been used in Ireland...