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

The thirties and forties saw the popularity of Li’l Abner as well as Paul Webb’s cartoon strip The Mountain Boys. Webb’s work was converted into a slapstick film, Kentucky Moonshine (1938), featuring the popular Ritz Brothers comedy team—it was a hillbilly version of The Three Stooges. A trio of New Yorkers disguise themselves as hillbillies, appearing in long, unkempt black beards while wearing tall conical hats and ragged pants (held up by ropes) exposing their dirty bare feet. The Grand Ole Opry radio station got its start in the same decade, and music groups appeared with names like the Beverly Hillbillies. Minnie Pearl, known for her famous hillbilly greeting, “Howdee,” began her career on the Opry in the 1940s, and later became a star of the long-running television series Hee Haw. She was by no means an authentic mountain gal. “Minnie” was born into a wealthy family, was well educated, and crafted a na?ve persona that made her vaudeville act a success. The hillbilly “Minnie” was so out of touch with mainstream America that she wore her trademark hat with the price tag still attached.65

By the forties, then, hillbilly was a stage act, and a kind of catchall name for country folk. Politicians took up the role too, offering a milder version of the theatrics of Mississippi’s “White Chief” James Vardaman and Louisiana’s Huey Long. A sharecropper’s son named Jimmy Davis became Louisiana’s governor in 1944. Though he gamely called himself “just a po’ country boy,” Davis was peculiarly able to straddle class divisions. He was country crooner, a Hollywood actor (in westerns, of course), and a history professor. As one newspaper observed, the “hillbilly in Long’s Chair” was a new political breed. He didn’t yell, or give long harangues, or wave his arms, or make empty promises. He was, concisely put, a hillbilly with a touch of style. Of course, he was not beyond Hollywood theatrics either, riding a horse up the steps of the state capitol.66

As distinctive as he was, Jimmy Davis was not the only one of his kind. In 1944, Idaho matched Louisiana by electing the “Singing Cowboy” Glen Taylor to the U.S. Senate. Even earlier, Texas voters were charmed by the hillbilly ballads and good ol’ radio platitudes of Wilbert Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, a flour merchant whom they first sent to the governor’s mansion, then to the U.S. Senate. It was Lyndon Johnson, in fact, whom the Ohio-reared O’Daniel defeated in the 1941 Senate race. Missouri boasted the only Republican in the bunch, a candidate named Dewey Short. He did not sing, but still earned the affectionate nickname “Hillbilly Demosthenes.” As a philosophy professor, ordained preacher, and congressman, he wore several hats. His style did not borrow from the ancient Greek oratorical tradition, but relied instead on caustic, alliterative adjectives. He creatively called Congress a “supine, subservient, soporific, supercilious, pusillanimous body of nitwits,” and maligned FDR’s vaunted Brain Trust as “professional nincompoops.” Short’s constituency, described in the press as the cornpone crowd, kept reelecting him because he spiced up his prose with a fine assortment of sassy flourishes.67

Why this fascination with the hillbilly? In 1949, an Australian observer described this phenomenon best. Americans had a taste for what he called a “democracy of manners,” which was not the same as real democracy. He meant that voters accepted huge disparities in wealth but at the same time expected their elected leaders to “cultivate the appearance of being no different from the rest of us.”68

The positive mythology about hillbillies suited such appeals to authenticity. Beyond the image of feuding and wasting time fishing, hillbillies also tapped into a set of golden age beliefs: they were isolated, primitive, and rough on the outside yet practiced a kind of genuine democracy. They were once again William Goodell Frost’s rustic Americans of pure Anglo-Saxon blood. The fantasy underwent a revival during the 1940s and 1950s, in the form of stories of plain, honest mountain people with “no respect for money, nor fame, or caste.” But the vaudeville antics never lost their appeal either. Some hillbilly bands became glamorous, and a female performer named Dorothy Shay launched her career in 1950 by playing the “Park Avenue Hillbilly.” She dressed as a city sophisticate while singing “happy-go-lucky” tunes.69

The quintessential pop icon of the 1950s, Elvis Presley, was, some believed, part hillbilly. One of his earliest performances was billed as “The Hillbilly Jamboree,” and took place at Pontchartrain Beach near New Orleans in 1955, where the “Miss Hillbilly Dumplin’ Contest” was also held. He also toured with Andy Griffith. In the early years, Elvis’s musical style was seen as a mixture between hillbilly singing and rhythm and blues. In 1956, the music reviewer for the Times-Picayune was relieved to discover that the “self-confessed country boy” singing about his blue suede shoes lacked an “exaggerated hillbilly dialect.” That same year, Hedda Hopper, the Hollywood gossip columnist, was just as relieved to find that Elvis had not been offered the film part of Li’l Abner.70

The real Elvis was not a hillbilly at all. He was a poor white boy from Tupelo, Mississippi. He was the son of a sharecropper. He was born into poverty in a shotgun shack situated in the wrong part of town. Yet when he put a guitar in his hand and millions ogled at his frenzied (some thought violent) dance moves, he was at once seen as defying middle-class norms and behaving as a sort of hillbilly—well suited to his new home of Tennessee. A friend of his confirmed the hillbilly image when he remarked to a reporter in 1956 that all Elvis had to do was “jes’ show hisself and the gals git to thrashin’ round and pantin’ like mountain mules.”71

And so it was in 1956 that country music, pop culture, and class politics all came together on the national stage. That year, Tennessee’s governor, Frank Clement, became the Democratic Party’s golden (country) boy. He was chosen to give the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, an honor that placed him in the running for the vice presidential nomination. In anticipation of Clement’s big speech, a writer for the Nation called the thirty-five-year-old, six-foot-tall, dark-haired governor “one of the handsomest men in American politics.” He was known for stumping in the Tennessee mountains, and folks admired him for his “barefoot boy sincerity”—a clear allusion to the “honest hillbilly” myth. Even his store-bought suits projected allegiance to the common man: the “type of rig a successful mountain man would wear on a visit to Nashville.”72

His countrified eloquence covered the full range of registers: his voice boomed, then sank to a whisper, or, as one reporter claimed, he “sang like a mountain fiddle and died away.” He used brimstone threats and usually ended with a prayerful benediction. Like Dewey Short, he lit up with alliteration. To top it all off, he had the support of the grandest hillbilly governor, “Big Jim” Folsom of Alabama, who stood six foot eight and was known for taking his shoes off onstage and campaigning with his “strawberry-pickers,” as the Folsom band was called. In 1954, at a large Democratic primary gathering, he told Clement to use all his powers on the rostrum, saying he should “go out there guttin’, cuttin’, and struttin.” “Kissing Jim,” fond of whiskey and women, gave his blessing to the flamboyant Clement.73

John Steinbeck, the famed author of The Grapes of Wrath, wrote one of the most revealing appraisals of Clement’s keynote address. He adjudged that the governor had a future, whether it was in “statesmanship or musical comedy”; he saw the Democrat as part “old country boy” and part Elvis, with a dash of Billy Graham and Liberace as well. As Steinbeck put it, Clement’s voice had the “frayed piercing painfulness of a square dance fiddle,” and “in his most impassioned and rehearsed moments, . . . a refined bump and grind.” While the author thought Clement would shake up the party in a good way, at the same time he was suggesting that the “corn-shucker” style was a regional taste that might not be so easily cultivated elsewhere.74

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