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

Over the next fifteen years, Chute’s politics sharpened. In 1985, she did not call herself a redneck, but by 2000 she did. She lived off the grid, without modern plumbing, and until 2002 without a computer; she continued to wear work boots and bandanas. By now, “redneck” was a symbol of working-class populism for Chute. She organized her own Maine militia group, supported gun rights, and became an outspoken critic of corporate power. There was, she wrote in a postscript to the revised version of The Beans of Egypt in 1995, a “dangerous chasm in the classes [that] is alive and well in the United States of America.” The Beans were no longer ordinary people trying to survive; they were symbols of an approaching class war and a “crumbling” American dream.12

Dorothy Allison displayed just as much of an interest in class as Chute. She tells the story of difficult and sometimes violent relationships between men and women. Her female characters are less likely victims, swept up in circumstances, in the manner of Chute’s female Beans; Allison’s women have more material resources and greater support from their family members. But both writers depict emotionally stunted poor white men and recognize that everyday burdens fall more heavily on their women.13

In Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, young Anne “Bone” Boatwright endures physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her mother’s second husband, Daddy Glen Waddell. In the town of Greenville, South Carolina, as it is for the Beans of Egypt, Maine, the Boatwrights are despised. Daddy Glen’s festering hatred of Bone comes from deeply lodged feelings of humiliation. He comes from a middle-class family, and he is the one member who never amounted to anything. He is a manual laborer and longs for a home like those of his brothers, one a dentist, the other a lawyer. “Nothing I do goes right,” he grouses. “I put my hand in the honey jar and it comes out shit.” He is jealous of Earle Boatwright’s prowess with women too. Unlike the Beans, though, the Boatwright men tend to be affectionate and protective of the women and children in their extended family.14

Allison is fascinated by the thin line that separates the stepfather’s family from the mother’s; they might have more money, but they’re shallow and cruel. Her cousins whisper that their car is like “nigger trash.” Like Chute’s Pomerleaus, they feel compelled to snub those below them. It is shame that keeps the class system in place.15

By the end of the novel, Bone frees herself from Glen, and in the process loses out to him when her psychically damaged mother decides to abandon the family and take off for California with him. In running away, her mother repeats the strategy of crackers a century earlier: to flee and start over somewhere else. Ruminating on her mother’s life—pregnant at fifteen, wed then widowed at seventeen, and married a second time to Glen by twenty-one—Bone wonders whether she herself is equipped to make more sensible decisions. She won’t condemn her mother, because she doesn’t know for certain that she will be able to avoid some of the same mistakes.16

The lesson here is that the choices people make are both class-and gender-charged. Allison’s story serves as a reminder that many more people—women especially—remain trapped in the poverty into which they are born; it is the exception who becomes, like the author Allison, a successful person capable of understanding the poor without condemning. The American dream is double-edged in that those who are able to carve out their own destiny are also hard-pressed not to condemn those who get stuck between the cracks. As it is with the character Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, an awareness of the routine nature of injustice is most forcefully depicted when it is seen through the eyes of a child.

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As the literary canon took on a new dimension with the rise of a talented generation of white trash writers, Americans returned another southerner to the White House in 1993. With Bill Clinton, the national spotlight focused once more on the uneasy relationship between class identity and American democracy. The boy from modest beginnings in Hope, Arkansas, had won a Rhodes Scholarship, was a Yale Law School graduate, and served as the governor of his state—in short, the American dream. William Jefferson Clinton was a perfect example of what his namesake, the man from Monticello, had formulated in 1779: raking from the rubbish a deserving youth who could eventually join the nation’s aristocracy of talent. In his Fourth of July speech in his first year as president, Clinton recounted the story of how thirty years earlier he had met President Kennedy in the Rose Garden of the White House, shaking his hand, standing in awe as a “boy from a small town in Arkansas, with no money and no political connections.”17

The Clinton saga was a blend of Charles Dickens and Dorothy Allison. He did not grow up in a financially secure middle-class nuclear family of the fifties. Rather, his father had died three months before he was born, and his mother left him in the care of grandparents and great-grandparents while she attended nursing school. “The strength of our family could not be measured by the weight of our wallets,” he proudly declared on Independence Day in 1993. But as the public learned from his mother, Virginia, there was a darker side to Bill’s childhood. In the biographical film shown during the Democratic National Convention, Clinton’s fractured roots were exposed. He may have taken the name of his stepfather, but as a fourteen-year-old found he had to stand up to him. Roger Clinton was a car dealer and a gambler; he drank too much, and he became violent. One day, Bill quietly told him, “Don’t ever, ever lay your hands on my mother again.” But like Chute’s and Allison’s treatment of their male characters, he was not without compassion, saying of his stepfather’s problem, “He didn’t think enough of himself.” He had internalized that sense of white trash shame.18

On the campaign trail, Clinton quoted Jefferson, and staged his ceremonial inaugural journey to Washington from the top of Jefferson’s “little mountain.” At the Republican convention, ex-president Reagan had taken the opportunity to question the pretensions of the boy from Hope, dismissing the idea that Clinton was the heir of either Kennedy or Jefferson. In a classic quip, he modified lines that the Texan Lloyd Bentsen had used against Dan Quayle of Indiana in the 1988 vice presidential debate, after the latter had compared himself to a young, untested JFK, with whom Bentsen had served. “Senator,” Bentsen bellowed, “you’re no Jack Kennedy.” With mock gravity, Reagan deployed his own version of Bentsen’s iconic putdown, this time applying the sentiment to then-governor Clinton. “I knew Thomas Jefferson,” Reagan said. “He was a friend of mine. And, Governor, you’re no Thomas Jefferson.”19

What, then, was Bill Clinton? He embodied certain stereotypes: his cholesterol-rich dining habits, the wife-beating story about his mother, and allusions to dirt-poor shacks in the Arkansas hills. To add fuel to the fire, a grinning, still-campaigning Clinton was photographed with an Illinois (not Arkansas) mule named George, and a mule named Bill got press when it strolled down Pennsylvania Avenue as part of the Clinton inauguration parade.20

Arkansas was ranked forty-seventh in per capita income in 1992, and its legacy as a state scarred by “redneck benightedness” lingered on. By calling on a Jefferson or a Kennedy in his speeches, Clinton was attempting to distance himself from his home state and class background. His mentor had been Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright, a liberal champion of education and a statesman of real note, but he still needed national icons for his presidential run. Even in 2004, as a popular and productive ex-president, Clinton was still trying to balance the extremes of his upbringing and his ambition, as Texas pundit Molly Ivins felt when she reviewed his thick memoir: “You just have to stand back and admire the sheer American dream arc of this hopelessly hillbilly kid.”21

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