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

Franklin proved that he had little faith in human nature. From his early days in Pennsylvania, he had fulminated against the intractable poor. In 1731, he wrote a piece in the Pennsylvania Gazette about the “scandalous Collection” of slaves, drunks, and low white servants who gathered at the outdoor fairs. As he gazed on his fellow Philadelphians, he accepted the cynical view of humanity that virtue was a rare and malleable trait. In his Autobiography, he told a story of how he gave up vegetarianism as a young man after he saw the belly of a fish cut open and all the little fish fall out. This story was a class parable, the lesson being that the big fish (or powerful elites) devoured weaker men. Franklin was not a disciple of the “Sermon on the Mount,” but believed instead that the poor were neither less greedy nor naturally humble compared to those above. If the little fish in his world were allowed to rise, they would be just as rapacious.29

If inventive, Franklin was a man of his time, expressing a natural discomfort with unrestrained social mobility. For most Americans of the eighteenth century, it was assumed impossible for a servant to shed his lowly origins; the meaner sort, as one newspaper insisted, could never “wash out the stain of servility.” There were fears that the meaner sort were treading too close on the heels of those above them.30

Franklin certainly never endorsed social mobility as we think of it today, despite his own experience. To be accurate, he fantasized that the continent would flatten out classes, but it was clear that this condition was contingent upon keeping poor people in perpetual motion. Franklin’s militia plan expressed a conservative impulse. Giving the accomplished middling sort a feeling of public respect and a sense of civic duty would yield them the solid contentment of happy mediocrity. Contentment might actually reduce the desire of more ambitious men to rise up the social ladder too quickly or recklessly.

Franklin understood that maintaining class differences had its own appeal. In the Pennsylvania Gazette, the newspaper he edited, an article was published in 1741 that exposed why people preferred having a class hierarchy to having none. Hierarchy was easily maintained when the majority felt there was someone below them. “How many,” the author asked, “even of the better sort,” would choose to be “Slaves to those above them, provided they might exercise an arbitrary and Tyrannical Rule over all below them?” There was something desirable, perhaps even pleasurable, to use Franklin’s utilitarian axiom, in the feeling of lording over subordinate classes. To alter that measure of satisfaction required a drastic rewiring of the eighteenth-century mind. Again, for Franklin, the solution lay in a radical process of spreading people so far apart and in such sparsely settled territory that they would forget who was once above or below them. But did it make sense that the rich would sacrifice their class advantage and not hire laborers or bring along slaves as they headed west? Or was his theory premised on the belief that only the poor would seek out new habitations?31

Franklin knew the frontier he was theorizing was an imaginary place. But it served his purposes. As a political argument, he offered a strong defense for British North America as the demographic stronghold of the empire. Here were the breeders of British subjects, and a fast-growing pool of consumers of manufacturing goods. His demographic science also concealed the deep contempt he felt for the poor. The coercive forces of nature were more palatable than the workhouse or almshouse. As late as 1780, he warned his grandson that society divided people into “two Sorts of People,” those who “live comfortably in Good Houses” and those who “are poor and dirty and ragged and vicious and live in miserable Cabins and garrets,” and “if they are idle, they must go without or starve.” While the foregoing assessment of an uncensored Franklin was harsh, it reminds us of the prevailing sentiment: the poor were expendable. On the frontier, too, in “miserable Cabins,” poverty and hopelessness abounded.32

Franklin knew about white Indians, the English who were taken captive as children and never really readjusted after returning to English settlements. A wealthy young man, a former Indian captive whom Franklin claimed to know, gave up his estate, taking nothing but a gun and coat when he made his way back to the wilderness. With this parable, Franklin acknowledged that freedom from care, and laziness, would always be a temptation for some. Relying on his demographic figures, the law of averages, nevertheless made the occasional outlier less of a worry.33

Franklin was not blind to the fact that North America’s frontier settlers would not be composed solely of the finest British stock. He was quick to call those who inhabited the Pennsylvania backcountry the “refuse” of America. But at the same time, he hoped that the forces of nature would carry the day, that the demands of survival would weed out the slothful, and that the better breeders would supplant the waste people. That was his wish, at least.34

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Franklin’s theory had traction because it was built upon the prevalent English thinking of his time. He was less an innovator than he was an ingenious popularizer. His fame was such that his ideas about demographic expansion found fertile ground as the American Revolution arrived, when the iconic propagandist Thomas Paine presented a variation of Franklin’s American breed to a receptive audience. Like Franklin, Paine imagined a people forged from unique conditions of its land and resources. The American breed was endowed with an instinctive, youthful, and forward-directed spirit.

Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense (1776) is heralded for having captured the spirit of the Revolution, replete with a potent language of natural rights and an economic justification for independence. For Paine, the unique character of America’s empowered white inhabitants, supported by the unquestioned majesty of an extensive continent, was evidence of the irresistible sway of nature’s law. He emphasized free trade and America’s potential as a commercial empire. He celebrated the power of a burgeoning continent over the reach of distant kings, as he employed the rhetorical device of unnatural breeding to disavow monarchy. He forecast that independence would end the waste and idleness that prevailed under the colonial regime.

Paine is actually an odd choice for modern Americans to celebrate as a Revolutionary symbol. He was an Englishman born and bred; better put, an Englishman in exile. When Common Sense was published in January 1776, he had been in Philadelphia for little more than year. He had arrived with a letter of introduction from Franklin, which landed him a job editing the Pennsylvania Magazine; or American Monthly Museum, a venture committed to everything American, despite its unmistakable London design and English editor. Adding to the irony of the situation, he had been an exciseman in England, and tax collectors did not fare well in the protests leading up to the Revolution. Though his pamphlet did not sell the 150,000 copies he claimed, it did win over George Washington, and it did reach audiences in New England, New York, Baltimore, and Charleston. Like his sponsor Franklin, Paine was fascinated by facts and figures, the stuff of political arithmetic and useful knowledge, yet at the same time he was not above quoting Aesop’s fables. His pamphlet spoke a familiar language, a distinctly British language of commerce, employing a simple and direct style capable of reaching readers beyond the educated elite.35

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