Trailer trash as squatters in Arizona (1950).
Photograph of mobile homes described as “squatters,” in Winkelman, Arizona (1950), #02-4537, Photograph Collection of the History and Archives Division of the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records, Phoenix, Arizona
Responding to bad publicity, trailer manufacturers launched a campaign to dramatically change their image. By 1947, they were calling their product a “trailer coach,” emphasizing more attractive, more convenient interiors, so as to “woo the feminine trade.” The determined trailer manufacturers’ association pressed for improved trailer “parks”—an image that conjured well-manicured, family-friendly garden sites and was meant to cast off the temporary-sounding, refugee-bearing trailer “camps” of World War II. In sum, to make the mobile home more acceptable, manufacturers had to domesticate it. These sharp, socially attuned promoters worked hard to reinvent the trailer as a miniature suburban “bungalow-on-wheels.” They did everything they could to remove “trailer trash” from the American vocabulary.31
It proved difficult for the trailer to compete with the tract house. Potential buyers were placed at an economic disadvantage. The FHA did not get around to insuring mortgages for mobile homes until 1971, so until then, even though trailers were cheaper, owners faced other hidden costs and penalties. Trailer parks were exiled to the least desirable lots, a sorry distance from the nicer, better-protected residential areas. Many park managers forbade children and pets, the two most obvious attractions for young couples living in suburbia. More parks emerged with smaller lots, tiny lawns—or no lawns at all. In many cities and counties, even retirees found their welcome worn out, resented because they lived on tight budgets, contributed too little to commercial growth, and failed to pay property taxes.32
Hollywood captured the uneasy fit between suburban ideals and life on the road in a farcical film of 1954, The Long, Long Trailer, which starred Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. The couple suffered mishap after mishap as they proved that mobile homes undermined privacy in general, and sex life in particular—not to mention providing inadequate space for the husband’s treasured golf clubs. The scene that makes the mobile home problem most disconcerting occurs when the ten-foot-wide trailer flattens a relative’s rosebushes, ruins her yard, and upends what began as a lovely home in a quaint neighborhood. Trailers were shown to be hazards and nuisances—out of place in the suburban dream landscape.33
As trailer living became increasingly popular, opposition grew apace. In the late fifties, more mobile homes were built than prefabricated homes, yet municipalities continued to look down on them. In 1962, in an important New Jersey court case, the majority ruled that a rural township could prohibit trailer parks within its limits. Still, the judge who wrote the dissent exposed the dangerous implications of this decision: “Trailer dwellers” had become a class of people, he explained, through which discrimination was tolerated under the vague language of protecting the “general welfare.” For at least this one jurist, inherited social biases had reduced the owners of mobile homes to “footloose, nomadic people,” a group of “migratory paupers.”34
Retailers and real estate agents once again sought to change public perceptions. Since they could not effectively regulate the quality of mobile home parks in general, they decided to add an upscale version, and turned to advertising more exclusive mobile home communities. To separate the dumpy and dirty trailer slums from five-star dwellings, they rebranded the upscale sites as “resorts.” “Trailer park” became a dirty word. Exchanging his coonskin cap for a Realtor’s jacket, the actor Fess Parker became an investor in and leading promoter of high-end trailer playgrounds. “Carefree living,” Parker boasted, coining a new motto for a new class. In the hands of Sunbelt speculators working hard to attract a lucrative clientele, trailer life was meant to invite comparisons to luxury hotels. Fess Parker’s resort in Santa Barbara offered ocean views, a golf course, and a stock market ticker tape.35
Davy Crockett’s call of the wild did not completely disappear either. Trailer life updated the once-catchy cry of the open road by declaring freedom from the thirty-year mortgage. In 1957, drawing on a playboy motif, a writer for Trailer Topics magazine promised a well-earned respite from the “well-harnessed Suburban life.” (The story was accompanying by a photograph of a sexy blonde sitting coquettishly on a trailer couch.) Other mobile home dealers promised residents freedom from the suburban rut and the tedious routine of playing “nursemaid to lawns, patios, and plumbing.”36
In Richard Nixon’s birthplace of Yorba Linda, California, what was called “primordial Nixon country,” a remarkable trailer community went up. (Nixon country meant Republican, conservative, and deeply class conscious.) Lake Park offered a “country club” style of living, replete with man-made lake, swimming pool, landscaped greenery, and gently winding streets; to a New York Times reporter, it was “suburbia in miniature.” The developers, two men from Los Angeles, spent three years trying to find a city hall in Orange County that would allow them to build, and were repeatedly turned down. In order to convince Yorba Linda officials that it was not their intent to impinge upon the class consciousness of existing residents, they recast the prospective community as a “private club,” highlighting the beautiful environment and ensuring that residents would pay added expenses to maintain their lots. When that was not enough, the developers added one final touch: a five-foot-high wall around the entire complex. As one city administrator observed, “We don’t even know they’re there.” Another local resident, without any apparent shame, admitted, “We call them ‘the people inside the wall,’ and we’re ‘the people outside the wall.’” Was there any better symbol of an undisguised belief in class stratification than the construction of a wall?37
But the Yorba Linda trailer community hardly fit the typical profile. Further down the scale, of course, were the many lowdown trailer parks that dotted the map of America. By 1968, only 13 percent of mobile homeowners held white-collar jobs, and a sizable percentage of those who lived in the poorer trailer parks came from rural, mainly southern areas. Families that could not afford to buy a new trailer were buying or renting depreciated—that is, secondhand, possibly thirdhand––trailers. A new used market emerged, fueling what two sociologists called “Hillbilly Havens” that cropped up on the periphery of cities in the Sunbelt, the Midwest, and elsewhere. Scattered along highways, often near the railroad tracks, run-down trailer parks were barely distinguishable from junkyards. Trailer trash had become America’s untouchables.38