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In reply to the discussion: "Trailer park trash" [View all]Hestia
(3,818 posts)69. WHITE TRASH The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/books/review/white-trash-by-nancy-isenberg.html
WHITE TRASH
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 Sombarts 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 Workingmens Party in Andrew Jacksons 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 Isenbergs 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 Isenbergs phrase, where the feckless poor could be turned into industrious drudges.
That process of shunting outsiders to the nations 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 books 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 societys 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.
[more at link]
WHITE TRASH
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 Sombarts 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 Workingmens Party in Andrew Jacksons 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 Isenbergs 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 Isenbergs phrase, where the feckless poor could be turned into industrious drudges.
That process of shunting outsiders to the nations 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 books 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 societys 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.
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That a former darling of the Democratic Party once said if you drag a $100 through a trailer park...
cherokeeprogressive
Aug 2016
#7
Refering to him as being a "darling" reveals much more about that poster than he intended...
NurseJackie
Aug 2016
#219
I need to sell my house for retirement, trouble is finding a trailer is easy, but a lot...
Eleanors38
Aug 2016
#189
I didn't..In fact, outside of the South, that term, and that of 'white trash' wasn't heard until
whathehell
Aug 2016
#27
True, quality of life should not be measured by acreage, but sometimes quality of life
HereSince1628
Aug 2016
#51
I look at that picture and I see kids, bikes, toys, playmates, running, screaming, sand piles,
NBachers
Aug 2016
#62
No need for me to google it - I'm well aware of the jokes. I don't find it funny. n/t
phylny
Aug 2016
#206
I live ten miles outside of Rapid City, SD. There are some very nice trailer parks here and a lot
Laser102
Aug 2016
#37
One might think you would be less tolerant of nasty language than forgiving of it.
uppityperson
Aug 2016
#109
Okay. . .apparently, someone didn't read my last response about my past with bullying
Feeling the Bern
Aug 2016
#149
It is also derogatory towards the poor, and working class folk who live in them.
Agnosticsherbet
Aug 2016
#57
The wheels get taken off and moved to the next mobile home- I used to set them for a living
snooper2
Aug 2016
#147
A friend of mine used that term many years ago, and I suggested to her she not use it again.
C Moon
Aug 2016
#115
How would you describe that grouping so, SheriffBob ? Fox News viewers, perhaps ?
OnDoutside
Aug 2016
#120
Laughable and ridiculous beyond words. You could feed all the homeless in NY with that budget.
Coyotl
Aug 2016
#155
I jokingly called my wife's aunt trailer trash. They sold their house after retiring and were
B Calm
Aug 2016
#140
It's a simplified approach to problem solving practiced by simple minded people.
jalan48
Aug 2016
#161
there are many other terms including: racist, destructive/potentially violent, etc. terms that do
salin
Aug 2016
#195
The Democratic party is ruled by white upper middle class ivory tower academics.
ForgoTheConsequence
Aug 2016
#205