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Nancy Isenberg

White Trash

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The New York Times Bestseller
A ground-breaking history of the class system in America, which challenges popular myths about equality in the land of opportunity.
In this landmark book, Nancy Isenberg argues that the voters who boosted Trump all the way to the White House have been a permanent part of the American fabric, and reveals how the wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlements to today's hillbillies.
Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics — a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society; they are now offered up as entertainment in reality TV shows, and the label is applied to celebrities ranging from Dolly Parton to Bill Clinton. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the centre of major political debates over the character of the American identity.
Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature and scientific theories over four hundred years, Isenberg upends assumptions about America's supposedly class-free society — where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility — and forces a nation to face the truth about the enduring, malevolent nature of class.
This book is currently unavailable
793 printed pages
Copyright owner
Bookwire
Original publication
2017
Publication year
2017
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Quotes

  • daryaksyonzhas quoted7 years ago
    the interplay of mockery and denial in treatments, historical and fictional, of hardships and limits in a supposed land of equal and abundant opportunity.
  • bblbrxhas quoted6 years ago
    “What everyone has always wanted in this country, what most came here for, was to get away from all those others who smell bad, are sleeping in a shanty, and are eating fatback and are going to loaf tomorrow because there is no job to go to.” Moving up meant staying ahead of those still trapped in the “poverty ditch.” But rather than help others escape destitution, this new addition to the middle class deeply resented a government that wasted money on the poor.
  • bblbrxhas quoted6 years ago
    Wilson’s fellow Iowan, Henry Wallace, had a similar outlook. Inferior heredity had nothing to do with rural poverty. Secretary of Agriculture Wallace predicted that if at birth one hundred thousand poor white children were taken from their “tumble-down cabins” and another hundred thousand were taken from the wealthiest families, and both groups were given the same food, education, housing, and cultural experiences, by the time they reached adulthood there would be no difference in mental and moral traits. “Superior ability” was not “the exclusive possession of any one race or any one class,” he said. Reacting to Adolf Hitler’s Aryan fantasy, Wallace predicted that even a “master breeder” might over generations raise a group of people with the same skin, hair, or eye color, but he would just as likely produce a group of “blond morons.”

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