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

The stock market’s “crash” and ensuing “Depression” invoked obvious metaphors of physical collapse. One highly cynical observer compared the bottoming out of Wall Street to a buried Egyptian tomb, “filled with the debris of delusions and false hopes.” Town and country supplied competing images of ruin: boarded-up stores and banks in ghost towns, city breadlines—both symbols of idleness. In rural settings, once-prosperous farms had either dried up or become buried in dust, and fertile fields were scarred by cavernous gullies. “Depression” was another word for what the eighteenth-century governor of Virginia called his impoverished neighbor North Carolina: a “sinkhole.”13

In the writings that suffused 1930s periodicals as well as government reports, economic failure was associated with the old notion of wasteland. When Roy Stryker was put in charge of the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration in 1935, he hired a team of talented photographers to record images of barren land dotted with abandoned farms and long stretches of terrain destroyed by dust storms, floods, and gullies—all caused by destructive farming, irresponsible lumbering, and traditional mining techniques. In this literary and visual construction of reality on the ground, class identity was not just a slippery slope; it was closer in nature to the erratically formed, man-made furrows of the gully. People were seen in the numerous images of the FSA as scattered and anonymous, squatting along roads, worn, beaten, set adrift, washed up. The absence of active laborers conveyed its own unmistakable message—a Life story explained that it was hard to “see” depression because of “business not being done.” Documentary photographer Arthur Rothstein took a haunting picture of an Ohio farm community. Only a few buildings were visible, and there were no people present. His camera focused on a sign planted in the frozen mud, marking the identity of this unincorporated town. It read, “Utopia.”14





Arthur Rothstein’s powerful image of erosion and wasteland (1937). Here the Alabama land is scarred by massive gullies as a forlorn tenant farmer stands helplessly by his barn.

Eroded land on tenant’s farm, Walker County, Alabama (Arthur Rothstein, 1937), LC-USF34-025121, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC





Henry Wallace, FDR’s secretary of agriculture, argued that what had always made America unique was the constant “pressing upon social resources” and the general belief in a “limitless and inexhaustible soil.” But the soil was not limitless, and the frontier was officially closed by the government in 1934. Writers of all stripes, not just agricultural experts, lamented how valuable topsoil was washing down America’s rivers, the resulting waste made worse by levees. In this way, the Depression was an upheaval that portrayed class leveling with disordered images of land erosion. The washing away of topsoil and debris was relatedly seen in the washing away of different classes of people, churned up and let loose in mass migrations caused by economic disaster. In Dorothea Lange’s An American Exodus (1939), a photo-essay book, images capture the turning of the landscape into wasteland. The middle American Dust Bowl swept up clouds of soil, and dislodged humans were driven down the road “like particles of dust.”15

Poor whites remained at the forefront of the American consciousness in the thirties. The Bonus Army’s Hooverville was an urban manifestation of the old squatter’s shack. Tenant farmers in the southern states continued to reside in run-down cabins, a highly mobile, migratory labor force that was the very antithesis of self-sufficiency. After the drought and dust bowls that hit during the middle years of the decade, “Okies” and “Arkies” captured the media. Families in old jalopies crammed with everything they owned headed west to California; en route, they set up camps along major highways. They were visible on the roads in the Golden State, taking seasonal jobs as crop pickers. As migrant workers, they called themselves “Migs,” while others labeled them “rubber tramps” or “shantytowns on wheels.” In his “Talking Dust Bowl Blues,” the legendary folksinger Woody Guthrie expressed the mobile-home theme with the lyric “I swapped my farm for a Ford machine.” Like the refugees from Arkansas who poured into Missouri during the Civil War, the Migs formed a modern-day caravan of vagrants and nomads. John Steinbeck and John Ford made this cross-country trek famous, Steinbeck in his bestselling 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, and Ford in his dark and disquieting 1941 Hollywood film of the same name about the Joads’ pilgrimage.16

Another chaotic migration was the “Back to the Land” movement that led to numerous rural communes. Some of these had outspoken leaders. Ralph Borsodi, who set up a subsistence homestead on the outskirts of New York City, helped to organize a cooperative village near Dayton, Ohio. Similar ventures appeared in other states. The southern journalist Charles Morrow Wilson described these folks as “American peasants,” but they are perhaps better described as the heirs of James Oglethorpe’s eighteenth-century Georgia colonists. One such group from Tulsa established a community in the Ozark hills. They founded a corporation, much like the older joint-stock companies, and adopted a set of bylaws, in which each member was a shareholder and had a vote. They sold timber, raised hogs and chickens, repaired the lumbering shanties on the property, and set up a school.17

Unlike Arkansas tenant farmers and sharecroppers, the Tulsa colonists owned the land, albeit land of little value, which lowered them to the level of subsistence farmers. The common pattern in Arkansas was different. Here, nearly 63 percent of farmers worked as tenants. The Arkies were unlike the Tulsans, many of whom were educated, willing to work collectively, and devised a plan for the future. They might be slumming as white trash and living in shanties, but when the economy improved, the city folk would return to their former lives. For them the land was a “refuge,” not a permanent source of class identity.18

The “Back to the Land” movement had a marked influence on New Deal policy. So it made sense when Milburn Lincoln Wilson, a trained social scientist and expert in agriculture, became the first director of the Subsistence Homesteads Division in 1933. The government’s goal was to give tenants and sharecroppers the resources and skills to rise up the agricultural ladder and help city folk without jobs. Like the soil, the dispossessed had to be rehabilitated. Land, he insisted, was not just a source of profit, but was part of a “well integrated democracted [sic] community,” one that knit people together by attending to the resilience of families. In Wilson’s grand scheme, the homestead community was a laboratory, a demonstration of how government could ease the impact of a flagging economy and make it possible for low-income rural and urban families to become self-sufficient homeowners. The families involved were given long-term loans so that they could buy their homes. The program contributed better housing for the unemployed while acting to humanize living conditions for poor whites.19

At its most visionary, Wilson saw rehabilitation as the process of taking stranded coal miners in abandoned towns, displaced factory workers without jobs, and tenants trapped on unproductive land and helping them all adopt a new way of life. The modern homestead of his design was a source of a genuine democracy, producing “a sturdy rather than servile citizenry.” If ever there was a proactive policy for creating the yeoman republic of Thomas Jefferson’s imagination, this was it.

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