White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

It was inevitable that poor southerners became a greater concern for the agency. Wilson directed attention to the South’s one-crop system and “rural slum areas” in the countryside, which guaranteed the pernicious cycle of poor white and black sharecroppers’ poverty from one generation to the next. Two-thirds of the nation’s tenant farmers were in the South, and two-thirds were white. These facts cannot be overstated. The agricultural distress of the Depression exposed the South’s long-standing dependence on submarginal land and submarginal farmers.20

In this way, the federal government drew national attention to the South’s oppressive class environment. The homestead became a symbol of class security, sustenance, and normalcy. In 1935, the Subsistence Homesteads Division produced a pamphlet that contrasted West Virginia coal miners’ dark and dismal shacks with bright new homesteads (portrayed through a published image of children playing outside on grass). A year later, the President’s Committee on Tenancy made the point clearer by comparing the rungs of the agricultural ladder to prison bars. Tenancy was a cage, class status a jail. Chains tied poor whites to rotten soil and locked them away in abysmal shacks that weren’t really homes at all. There was more than one chain gang in the South.21

Arthur Raper, one of the leading authorities on tenancy in the South, explained conditions in his 1936 study Preface to Peasantry. Most southern tenants were in debt to landlords, had little cash, no education; hookworm and pellagra still haunted them. Unlike the fugitive James Allen, they had no place to run. Rarely did poor whites stay on a single plantation for more than two or three years; in the winter months, they could be seen filling carts with their children and their junk and moving on. This annual phenomenon of southeastern tenant dispersion was already occurring before the mass western exodus of Okies and Arkies.22

The entire tenant system operated by coercion and dependence. Landowners did not want their tenants to improve, because then they would have less control over them. A hungry worker was the best worker, or so many southern cotton growers believed. No one—neither tenants nor their landlords—had any problem making children and women work in the fields. For all the above reasons, then, education remained crucial to the subsistence homestead program. Prospective clients required not only guidance in modern agricultural practices, but also schools, churches, and training in the methods of home food production. Wilson introduced a psychological element often lacking in traditional forms of charity. For poor whites, this meant they had to overcome the feeling that they were “just trash,” a breed lacking the capacity for change. The homestead program would prove above all that poor whites were completely normal people.23

Wilson’s fellow Iowan, Henry Wallace, had a similar outlook. Inferior heredity had nothing to do with rural poverty. Secretary of Agriculture Wallace predicted that if at birth one hundred thousand poor white children were taken from their “tumble-down cabins” and another hundred thousand were taken from the wealthiest families, and both groups were given the same food, education, housing, and cultural experiences, by the time they reached adulthood there would be no difference in mental and moral traits. “Superior ability” was not “the exclusive possession of any one race or any one class,” he said. Reacting to Adolf Hitler’s Aryan fantasy, Wallace predicted that even a “master breeder” might over generations raise a group of people with the same skin, hair, or eye color, but he would just as likely produce a group of “blond morons.”24

Both Wilson and Wallace dismissed the notion that class (or even race) was biologically preordained. Wallace stressed the importance of understanding class insecurity. Over time, he warned, economic benefits accrued to the stronger, shrewder people in society, and if unrestrained by government, conditions would lead to “economic autocracy” and “political despotism.” Sounding a lot like the critics in our present who deplore the concentration of wealth among the top 1 percent of Americans, Wallace in 1936 argued that liberty was impossible if “36 thousand families at the top of the economic pyramid get as much income as 12 million families at the bottom.”25

The Depression revealed that liberty for some—for the select, the privileged—was not liberty for all. In a remarkable article of 1933, titled “The New Deal and the Constitution,” a popular writer named John Corbin questioned the claims of Americans to an exclusive quality of freedom. He posed a rhetorical question: “Can a nation call itself free if it finds itself periodically on the verge of bankruptcy and starvation in the face of the fact that it possesses all the materials of the good life?” He meant that freedom was compromised when a nation allowed the majority of its people to suffer devastating poverty and enduring economic insecurity. Regulation, regional planning, and readjustment (the last a favorite New Deal term) were needed to correct market abuses, control the exploitation of natural resources, and adjust class imbalance, and to do so, in President Roosevelt’s phrase, “not to destroy individualism but to protect it.” Wilson, Wallace, and Corbin all agreed that the old laissez-faire doctrines could no longer be sustained, and that the frontier thesis—which presumed that western migration had alleviated poverty—no longer worked. For Wilson, the “great disorganizing force of the depression” was “a great, magic dark hand.” Unlike Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the free market, Wilson’s dark hand represented the dangers of an unregulated economy: downward mobility and the ruin of countless lives.26

If for poor rural tenants and sharecroppers class was an inescapable cage or a prison, it was equally a source of what Henry Wallace labeled “human erosion.” Human erosion was the reason for soil erosion, and not the other way around, he contended. Tenant farming was a perfect example of this process: the tenants had little reason to care for the soil as they attempted to eke out a living from it, while the landowners remained unwilling to invest in soil conservation. The willingness of Americans to tolerate waste was the real cause of human erosion. It reflected the larger social problem of devaluing human labor and human worth.27

Wallace had positive things to say about rural Americans, who produced more children than their urban counterparts, and played a crucial role in building up society. “The land produces the life-stream of the nation,” he explained, referring to “young people bred on the farms.” In unmistakable language, Wallace urged the whole country to be “concerned that its breeding stock is taken care of, that the nation does not deteriorate at the source of its life-blood.” This was the warning sign John Ford sought to get across in the film version of The Grapes of Wrath, when Ma Joad says, “Rich fellas . . . their kids ain’t no good and die out, but we keep a-comin’. . . . We’ll go on forever, Pa, cos we’re the people.” The city folk needed “the people,” needed their fecundity. It was as though Jefferson and Franklin were talking to Wallace, Steinbeck, and Ford, still promoting the old English idea that national strength was bound up with demographic growth.28

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