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

Yet the talent and labor of poor whites is wasted too. James Allen’s fellow white prisoners are dead on the inside. “To work out, or die out,” they are told. It is the only way out. They learn to appreciate the true meaning of liberty only by watching Allen achieve it. His daring escape is accomplished not by violence but by rational planning. It proves to be a temporary success, but at least he succeeds in offering his comrades a different vision of manhood.

Allen’s dream is to be an engineer. That aspiration represented the pride Americans felt in raising the Empire State Building, one of the decade’s consummate achievements. In 1932, the same year that the film was released, the photographer Lewis Hine published a book about his time with the “sky boys,” as the skilled men who balanced on the beams and built the iconic skyscraper were known. In Men at Work, now a classic, Hine vividly portrayed the courage and imagination of the workers who left their imprint on the urban landscape. “Cities do not build themselves,” he pronounced, “machines cannot make machines, unless back of them all are the brains and toil of men.” At the age of sixty, with an established reputation for reform, the cameraman believed that life was given power through labor. What distinguished humans from beasts was the capacity to solve problems, to create anew, and to apply cognitive energy to the labor process. The quote Hine selected as his epigraph was taken from the late philosopher William James’s “What Makes a Life Significant”: “Not in clanging fights and desperate marches only is heroism to be looked for, but on every bridge and building that is going up to-day, on freight trains, on vessels and lumber-rafts, in mines, among the firemen and the policemen, the demand for courage is incessant and the supply never fails.” Manual laborers deserved the same respect as heroes on the battlefield. If a new breed of human arose when it gave labor enhanced social meaning, then the South, with its dull refusal to appreciate the value of work, remained caught in a primitive state of mind.6

If the Empire State Building, which opened in 1931, represented the highest testament to moral courage, then the tragedy that played out in Washington in the spring and summer of 1932 displayed America at its lowest ebb. Veterans of World War I formed a “Bonus Army,” some twenty thousand unemployed arriving with their hurting families and setting up a shantytown across the river from Capitol Hill. They demanded of Congress their bonus pay. “We were heroes in 1917, but we’re bums now,” said their spokesman in a plea before the House. The House passed the Pateman Bill that would issue the bonuses, but it failed in the Senate. President Herbert Hoover labeled the marchers criminals and called out the U.S. Army to disperse those that remained after the bill failed, using bayonets, tear gas, and tanks. “The most powerful government in the world shooting its starving veterans out of worthless huts,” was how John Henry Bartlett, former governor of New Hampshire, described the disturbing event in his eyewitness account.7

So this was how the image of the “Forgotten Man” was imprinted in the public mind, as I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang hit the theaters. Allen’s status as a bumming veteran associated him with the men of the Bonus Army. In the film, he discovers that he can’t pawn his war medal. The pawnbroker pulls out a box filled with such medals—by 1932, discarded junk, like the veterans themselves. The truth could hardly be denied. Class, as defined in terms of dignity, was increasingly insecure.

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The Depression was associated with waste. Wasted lives, wasted land, human waste. The stock market crash unleashed a nightmarish downside to the much-vaunted American dream, its unpredictable and unpreventable downward mobility. The traditional marks of poverty were now appearing everywhere. There were Hoovervilles not just in Washington but at the New York City dump. St. Louis had the largest shantytown, with twelve hundred men; Chicago’s makeshift community, on order of the mayor, was burned to the ground. The poor could no longer be considered outcasts, “untouchables,” or even hoboes.8

The lines separating the poor from the working and middle classes seemed more permeable. The poor were simply men and women without jobs, and those who still had gainful employment sensed that they were at risk of experiencing the same fate. This fear was captured in Edward Newhouse’s novel You Can’t Sleep Here (1934), about a New York City Hooverville. On weekends, Newhouse wrote, hundreds came to watch the men in the shantytown as if they were, collectively, a “monkey in a cage.” Instead of looking at them with disgust, “Sunday tourists” wondered if they might be next.9

Old clichés rang hollow. Upward mobility was not a destination to be reached, nor a ladder to be scaled by diligence and hard work. In an autobiographical novel about bumming, called Waiting for Nothing (1935), Tom Kromer put it best when he wrote that his journey in life went nowhere: “What is before is the same as that which is gone. My life is spent before it started.” Long admired for his competitive spirit, in the literature of the thirties the “rugged individualist” appeared ruthless and greedy. The towering giants of the business world were now “great little men.” An investment banker from New York scoffed, “The American Standard of Living—the proudest boast of several administrations [is] the subject of international gibe.” The “City upon a Hill” lay in ruins.10

Margaret Bourke-White used her camera to express the new critical outlook. Working for Life magazine, she shot a line of somber black men and women waiting for relief. They stood before a garish billboard that featured a ruddy-cheeked, smiling family of four driving down the road in a nice car—that’s who and what hung over these real victims of an Ohio Valley flood. Irony shouted at the magazine’s readers like the slogans that blared from the cartoonish billboard image of the idealized white, middle-class family: “World’s Highest Standard of Living”; “There’s No Way Like the American Way.” By the time this provocative photograph appeared in 1937, most Americans had already come to accept the uncomfortable truth about their national situation: equal opportunity was a grand illusion. In the very same issue of Life were photographs of black men in chain gangs, shoring up levees in Tennessee.11

Bourke-White did another, similar photo essay that year. This time her aim was to dispute the myth of the classless society. Visiting Muncie, Indiana, the city made famous in the 1929 study Middletown, the photographer questioned the idea of “typical Americans” that the community had supposedly come to represent. She angered the residents when she featured the insides of homes, contrasting a poor white hovel of “Shedtown” with the opulent parlor of one of the wealthiest families. Her critics charged that she was focused on the upper crust and “soaked bottom,” while ignoring the “middle filling” of the “community pie.” But that was her point. There was no single representative American way of life.12

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