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

Instead of eliminating class distinctions, suburbs were turned into class-conscious fortresses. Zoning ordinances set lot sizes and restricted the construction of apartment buildings, emphasizing single-dwelling homes to keep out undesirable lower-class families. In Mahwah, New Jersey, for example, the local government attracted a Ford plant to the town, and then passed an ordinance that required one-acre lots containing homes in the $20,000 price range, ostensibly meaning that low-paid workers in the plant would have to live elsewhere. In New York’s Westchester County, the board of education agreed to build a deluxe school in a wealthy neighborhood, while doing nothing for schools in depressed-income areas where lower-class Italian and black families lived. In Los Angeles, suburbs were appraised by the Federal Housing Authority along class lines: high marks were given to places where gardening was a popular hobby, and low marks to places where poor whites raised food in their backyards. Elvis’s mother’s chicken coop would have been frowned upon.22

In this and other ways, the federal government underwrote the growth of the new suburban frontier. Tax laws gave homeowners who took out mortgages an attractive deduction. Government made it profitable for banks to grant mortgages to upstanding veterans and to men with steady jobs. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill, created the Veterans Administration, which oversaw the ex-soldiers’ mortgage program. Together, the FHA and the VA worked to provide generous terms: Uncle Sam insured as much as 90 percent of the typical veteran’s mortgage, thereby encouraging lenders to provide low interest rates and low monthly payments. Along these same lines, when potential buyers queued up for Levittown homes, the builder initially privileged veterans. With such perks, it became cheaper for “desirable” white men to buy a home than to rent an apartment. And rather than lift up everyone, the system tended to favor those who were already middle class, or those working-class families with steady incomes.23

Suburban subdivisions encouraged buyers to live with their “own kind,” constantly sorting people by religion, ethnicity, race, and class. The esteemed architectural critic Lewis Mumford described Levittown as a “one-class community.” In 1959, the bestselling author and journalist Vance Packard summed up the suburban filtration process as “birds-of-a-feather flocking.” As we have so often seen, the importance of animal stock, and of “breed” generally, remained on the tip of the American tongue when idiomatic distinctions of class identity were being made.24

In 1951, the Levitts opened their second development, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, after U.S. Steel decided to build its Fairless Works in the area. It attracted steelworkers, as well as a community of construction workers who established a trailer camp. Although little actually separated the two working-class communities—the families were stable and had about the same number of children—the Levittowners felt that their community was a “symbol of middle-class attainment,” while the camp’s residents were labeled “trailer trash.” To expel the trailer families, local officials quickly passed ordinances. Offended local residents dismissed the trailer families as “transients,” saying that they should be “gotten rid of as soon as possible.” One of the arguments marshaled against the trailer enclave will sound familiar: the preservation of property values. The construction workers were deemed trash not because of their class background per se, but because they lived in trailers. It was their homes on wheels that carried the stigma.25

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The trailer occupies an important, if uncertain, place in the American cultural imagination. Representing on the one hand a symbol of untethered freedom, the mobile home simultaneously acquired its reputation as a “tin can,” a small, cheap, confined way of life. When you live in a trailer, you are literally rootless, and privacy disappears. Neighbors see and hear. At their worst, such places have been associated with liberty’s dark side: deviant, dystopian wastelands set on the fringe of the metropolis.

Trailers had been controversial since the 1930s. Aside from the sleek streamlined capsules that traverse the open road, these rickety boxes tend to be viewed as eyesores. Almost as soon as they were turned into permanent housing, many were associated with slums built on town dumps. As an object, the trailer is something modern and antimodern, chic and gauche, liberating and suffocating. Unlike the dull but safe middle American suburb, trailer parks contain folks who appear on the way out, not up: retired persons, migrant workers, and the troubled poor. This remains true today.

Prior to World War II, the first generation of trailers were jerry-rigged contraptions built in backyards, expressly used on hunting and fishing trips. When they hit the road in the thirties, right when Okies took to their jalopies along Route 66, one journalist called them “monstrosities,” shanties on wheels. War changed that. Faced with a severe housing shortage, the federal government purchased trailers for soldiers, sailors, and defense workers. As many as thirty-five thousand trailers were drummed into service, and because military and defense installations were everywhere, trailer towns suddenly popped up in unexpected places from Maine to Michigan to Texas. In places like Hartford, Connecticut, defense workers living in “trailer villages” were easily compared to colonists and gypsies.26

The most remarkable account of trailer camps formed in defense centers came from the talented reporter Agnes Meyer of the Washington Post. Her dispatches as a “war correspondent on the home front,” as she called herself, were compiled and published as a book titled Journey Through Chaos. Well-bred American women were not supposed to see “chaos” up close. Indeed, though her family considered higher education inappropriate for a young female, Meyer graduated from Barnard College, studied at the Sorbonne, published a scholarly work on Chinese painting, and became the first woman hired by the New York Sun. Momentously, she went on to marry a multimillionaire who decided to purchase the floundering Washington Post. Their daughter, Katharine Meyer Graham, grew up to be the most influential editor of the family’s paper.27

In 1943, Agnes Meyer was on a fact-finding expedition when she traveled to twenty-seven war centers. From Buffalo to Detroit, and all the way out to Puget Sound, Washington, south to California, and back east by way of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida, she described the people she saw with unsparing detail. Her most disturbing encounters occurred, not surprisingly, in the Deep South. She shone a light on the rows of tents, trailers, and run-down shacks in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and Mobile, Alabama. She bemoaned the “neglected rural areas,” and called the white trash who migrated from there pitiful, ragged, illiterate, and undernourished. They had refused to move into respectable housing projects out of fear of the law—but mostly, Meyer believed, because they feared the “restraint of being members of a decent community.” Overwhelmed by the condition of their lives, by their physical and mental health and lack of prospects, she asked incredulously, “Is this America?”28

It was the shipyards that brought workers to Pascagoula. Nearly five thousand new workers and their families crowded the small town on the Gulf of Mexico, quickly unleashing a panic among local residents. Many of the workers were backwoods people, and their trailers were quite unsanitary. Meyer met a fifty-one-year-old man who looked eighty—a clear throwback to the 1840s, when clay-eaters were identified in the same way: old before their time. Townspeople denounced them as “vermin.” The manager of the shipyards told the weary female reporter that unless these people were lifted up, “they will pull the rest of the Nation down.” On to Mobile, where she learned that the illegitimacy rate was high and getting higher, and that a black-market trade in babies existed. By the time she reached Florida, she found the poor whites to be handsome on approach, but strange-looking as soon as they smiled and exposed sets of decaying teeth. Still, they were less repulsive to her than “the subnormal swamp and mountain folk” she had already encountered in Mississippi and Alabama.29

It was the southern war camps that set the tone, but after the war “trailer trash” became a generic term, no longer regionally specific. They appeared on the outskirts of Pittsburgh and Flint, Michigan, as well as in North Carolina and parts of the upper South. In far-off Arizona, trailer trash doubled as “squatters,” photographed in weedy areas and with outhouses in their front yards. To be displaced and poor was to be white trash.30





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