Working-class whites are having a moment
Presidential politics and recent books push beyond redneck stereotypes
White trash, trailer trash, rednecks, hillbillies, squatters, crackers, goobers, bubbas — all the names for these people are insulting. Their avatars in the culture, from Honey Boo-Boo to Bob and Mayella Ewell in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” are the opposite of inspiring.
But between the Donald Trump presidential campaign and two well-regarded books just published, poor and working-class white Americans are getting a rare moment of positive focus.
The two books, Nancy Isenberg’s scholarly “White Trash: The 400-year Untold History of Class in America” and J.D. Vance’s affecting memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” give context to a conversation that Trump blew open.
“Trump opened a door that needed opening before,” says Susan Campbell, a writer who was born and raised in the Missouri Ozarks and still goes back from time to time. “Now it’s a political force.”
Some scholars approach the culture by geography of origin — mostly Scots-Irish — while others stick to economics. The
“Trump opened a door that needed opening before. Now it’s a political force.” Susan Campbell, writer from the Missouri Ozarks
“swamp Yankees” of the rural Northeast, they argue, have many traits in common with their Southern cousins. So do white European ethnics like the Irish of South Boston or the New Jersey culture that produced Bruce Springsteen. (It’s no coincidence that the Boss’ father had the quintessential lower-class-white job, prison guard.)
From Scotland to the South
But it’s the Scots-Irish who come in for the most scrutiny. Michael Lind, an Austin-born, Washington, D.C.-based author who has written often about class divides in America, traces the Scots-Irish travails to the importation of Calvinist Scots to Catholic Northern Ireland by English landlords. These Scots-Irish (really a collection of various Calvinists) migrated to North America, often unwillingly, especially to what would become the Southern colonies, beginning in the 17th century.
“The Quakers, the Yankees, they saw them as uncouth and violent,” Lind says. “They all hated the Scots-Irish.”
The immigrants, trash in the New World as they were in the Old, were relegated to the dangerous frontier where they squatted on land taken from the Indians. As the frontier moved west, into what would be Kentucky and Tennessee, so did the Scots-Irish, pushed off the newly gentrified land.
In 1828, they saw one of their own elected president, Andrew Jackson.
People like Abraham Lincoln’s father moved to Indiana. Some, such as Sam Houston and Davy Crockett, made their way to Texas.
Eventually, some who stayed behind distilled moonshine during Prohibition (and in so doing gave rise to NASCAR).
Some left the hills to work in the auto industry — for many, a ticket to the middle class.
The factory jobs are gone, but Campbell remembers hearing about when a good manufacturing job was the ideal and the way out of poverty. “You could get a bass boat, and you could go to church,” she says.
In the ’70s and ’80s, blue Michigan license plates left the Rust Belt and streamed into Houston, adding to the socalled “hillbilly diaspora.”
But some stayed poor. When Lind was growing up on the northwest side of Austin, the poor whites were called “cedar-choppers” for their habit of cutting down trees and selling the wood by the roadside. “They ended up in the hills that nobody wanted, in absolute, desperate poverty,” Lind says.
In the culture, such folks come in for either scorn or laughs.
Kill ‘Mockingbird’
Both Lind and University of Texas professor John Hartigan Jr. have nothing kind to say about the classic “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“It perpetuates the myth of white trash,” says Hartigan, who wrote “Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People.” In the novel and movie, the well-to-do white people, the Finches, are good, and the poor, morally corrupt Ewells are bad. The book sneers at them.
“It’s the Southern white elite scapegoat,” Lind says. (And don’t get these folks started on “Deliverance.”)
That the white trash are simultaneously treated almost as badly as black people and still seen as the source of racial prejudice is just one of the paradoxes fueling white-trash hatred. “It’s very vivid and powerful,” Hartigan says.
Until the ’60s, Lind says, it was OK to laugh at two stereotypes: “Amos ’n’ Andy” and “Li’l Abner.”
In 2016, it’s still OK to laugh at the redneck.
Some writers have tried to avoid the stereotypes. Hartigan especially likes Dorothy Allison’s novel “Bastard Out of Carolina” and Pete Daniel’s nonfiction “Breaking the Land.”
The hillbilly culture holds tight to a sense of perpetual bad luck. “In my hometown, there was a saying: The rest of us got hind tit,” says Campbell, who wrote a memoir, “Dating Jesus,” and whose most recent book is “Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker.”
But for her, and many others, education was a way up and out. “You leave the environment, and then you marry somebody not like you,” she says.
Campbell still goes back home to recharge sometimes. It’s part of her. “It’s where I come from and how I still identify.”