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

This was the world of W. E. B. Du Bois. This was also the world of Theodore Roosevelt. The two men agreed on very little—and obviously not on evolutionary theory or the science of eugenics, to which Roosevelt was a complete convert. Certainly Du Bois found no comfort in the president’s militarism or his glorification of the white settler’s savagery in the Old West. But they were in total agreement on one thing: the menace of redneck politics.

Roosevelt unexpectedly became president in 1901, upon the assassination of William McKinley. Only forty-two at the time, he was known for daring military exploits during the Spanish–American War, which had earned him a place on the Republican ticket. Though his mother was born in Georgia and he could claim a Confederate pedigree, the New York politico proved himself fairly inept at navigating the rocks and shoals of southern politics. He roused the ire of many white southerners when he dared to invite Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute to dinner shortly after his inauguration as president. Reviving the script from Reconstruction, Democrats charged the new chief executive with promoting social equality between the races. For angry southerners, breaking bread with a black man in such a public and highly symbolic way was barely one step from endorsing interracial marriage. With no subtlety whatsoever, Vardaman called Roosevelt the “coon-flavored miscegenationist,” describing a White House “so saturated with the odor of the nigger that the rats have taken refuge in the stables.” Southern satirist Bill Arp predicted a mongrel wedding in the executive mansion. In that Booker T. Washington’s daughter Portia attended Wellesley College, she too would be invited to the White House, Arp mused. And then, he sneered, she would be found to be a suitable match for one of TR’s sons.37

In Roosevelt’s opinion, Vardaman and his ilk belonged to the lowest order of demagogues. Writing the Congregationalist minister and editor Lyman Abbott, the president said that the Mississippian’s “foul language” and “kennel filth” were worse than that of the lowest blackguard wallowing in the gutters of New York City. Such “unspeakable lowness” put this southerner beyond the pale of American values. In excoriating Vardaman, the president refused to repeat his hateful words, but the insult that most infuriated him was a crude birthing allusion, to the effect that “old lady Roosevelt” had been frightened by a dog while pregnant, which accounted for “qualities of the male pup that are so prominent in Teddy.” Vardaman, incapable of feeling shame, joked that he was disposed to apologize to the dog but not to the president.38

So who was this Mississippi carnival barker, known for his white suits and white cowboy hat and long dark locks, who claimed to be the voice of “rednecks” and “hillbillies”? James Vardaman had been a newspaperman, who understood the power of invective. Southerners from Andrew Johnson to Wade Hampton had recurred to the barnyard insult when they damned their enemies. For Vardaman, democracy, no matter how dirty, belonged to “the people,” and the people had the right to say whatever they felt. Friends and foes alike called him the “White Chief,” partly for his white garb and partly for his supremacist rhetoric. But he was a “medicine man” to his enemies, a witch doctor who knew how to inflame the lowdown tribe of white savages.39

He saw himself as the defender of poor whites. In his run for the governorship in 1903, Vardaman pitted poor whites against all blacks. Educating blacks was pointless and dangerous, he argued, and the state should ensure that tax dollars from white citizens should only go to white schools. The consummate showman rode to Senate victory in 1912—quite literally—on the back of an ox. When his Democratic primary opponent derided his supporters as an ignorant herd, he exploited the incident. Traveling through Mississippi giving speeches, he liked to pull up in a “cracker cart” amid a long line of cattle. At one rally he rode into town astride a single ox. The beast was adorned with flags and streamers labeled “redneck,” “cattle,” and “lowdown.” He dramatically embraced the white trash identity.40

Insofar as the surviving planter elite and middle-class Mississippians despised Vardaman, he intentionally drummed up class resentments. In his reminiscence, William Percy, the son of Vardaman’s Democratic opponent, LeRoy Percy, best expressed the class anger. Recalling how he surveyed the surly crowd, wondering if Vardaman’s army would launch rotten eggs at his father, Percy wrote:

They were the sort of people that lynch Negroes, that mistake hoodlumism for wit, and cunning for intelligence, that attend revivals and fight and fornicate in the bushes afterwards. They were undiluted Anglo-Saxons. They were the sovereign voter. It was so horrible it seemed unreal.

Though he had no patience for the politics of hate run as a sideshow, Percy conceded that Vardaman was a savvy politician who gave the “sovereign voter” what he wanted—red meat.41

Roosevelt, a patrician, had little choice but to joust with his redneck foes. In 1905, during his southern tour, he rebuked Arkansas governor Jeff Davis for defending the lynch mob. One newspaper joked that the president’s entourage was wise to travel through Mississippi at night, so that Vardaman wouldn’t have to shoot him. Roosevelt also ruffled the feathers of the proud white women of the South when he had dared to class Jefferson Davis (the Confederate president) with Benedict Arnold. When he did that, one incensed Georgia woman declared that the president had dishonored his mother’s blood.42

Blood was thicker than water for Roosevelt, but not in the way the testy Georgia woman would have viewed the matter. His understanding of race and class remained rooted in evolutionary thinking, and he believed that blacks were naturally subordinate to the Anglo-Saxon. But he also felt progress was possible, which was why he backed Booker T. Washington’s program for industrial education at Tuskegee Institute. If blacks proved themselves capable of economic self-sufficiency, then they could qualify for greater political rights. But the Harvard-educated president never abandoned the premise that racial traits were carried in the blood, conditioned by the experiences of one’s ancestors. As an ardent exponent of “American exceptionalism,” Roosevelt argued that the nineteenth-century frontier experience had transformed white Americans into superior stock.43

Roosevelt’s motto can be summed up in three words: “work-fight-breed.” There is clear evidence that he was influenced by the mountaineers’ myth, by which good Saxon stock was separated from the debased southern poor white. History was written in blood, sweat, and “germ protoplasm”—the turn-of-the-century term for what we now refer to as genes. Roosevelt believed that every middle-class American male had to stay in touch with his inner squatter; he must never lose the masculine traits that attached to the “strenuous life.” Too much domestic peace, luxury, and willful sterility, as TR put it, made Americans weak, lethargic, and prone to self-indulgence.44

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