Nancy Isenberg shows how class shaped American history in her new book, “White Trash"
Today's pundits and politicians talk a good game about restrengthening the middle class. But wait, didn’t we avoid the burdens of class when we threw off the mother country?
Early in her book “White Trash: The 400-Year History of Class in America,” Nancy Isenberg laments that popular American history has seldom referenced the existence of social classes for as long as our country is old. Isenberg sets out to demystify Americans’ closely held faith in a class-free society, to do away with the mythology where the landless and impoverished are marginalized in the national narrative. Her goal is to break free of the “gnawing contradictions still present in modern American society.”
Those contradictions are clearly playing out in this year’s presidential cycle as the United States sees a new wave of populism rising with the candidacy of Donald Trump. Isenberg argues that understanding how class influenced American history and culture has lessons for today’s politicians. “We like equality in the abstract, but it doesn’t apply in our daily lives,” she says. “To achieve equality, you can’t hide behind rhetoric.”
Ideas talked with Isenberg by phone from her home in Charlottesville, Va. Below is an edited excerpt.
IDEAS: Your book places class identity at the center of our society. Why has the notion of a class-free past been able to persist so long?
ISENBERG: Americans often prefer myths over reality. The myth that has been reinvented with each generation is the idea that America is an exceptional society, that we promise the American dream, which comes through class mobility. These ideas go back all the way to the founding of America. The problem is that we erase the influence of British colonization and the fact we adopted the British ideas about class and poverty and use them to this day to blame the poor for being idle and lazy.
Rather than provide the promise of class mobility, America’s early architects, such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, promised horizontal mobility. They look to the vast continent as a place where the poor could migrate. Often America has promised not so much class security as migration.
Franklin thought that if the poor could migrate into the continent, they’d change the class structure. But that’s not what happened. The truth is the land was never open; it was never free. The poor were expendable. When the real middle class and the commercialized farmers arrive, the poorest farmers were forced to move.
IDEAS: When and how does the term “white trash” arise?
ISENBERG: It goes back to before Colonial period, to the British term “waste people.” It first appears in print in 1821 and gains widespread popularity in the 1850s. These people are surplus population; they’re already exiled from normal society. By 1850, “white trash” becomes an even greater insult because now they’re viewed as a diseased breed. And it’s hopeless to try to save them. ...