Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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Fables We Forget By 03
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01 States. Every era in the continent’s vaunted developmental story had its
02 own taxonomy of waste p eople—unwanted and unsalvageable. Each era
03 had its own means of distancing its version of white trash from the main-
04 stream ideal.
05 By thinking of the lower classes as incurable, irreparable “breeds,”
06 this study reframes the relationship of race and class. Class had its own
07 singular and powerful dynamic, apart from its intersection with race. It
08 starts with the rich and potent meaning that came with the different
09 names given the American underclass. Long before they were today’s
10 “trailer trash” and “rednecks,” they were called “lubbers” and “rubbish”
11 and “clay-eaters” and “crackers”—and that’s just scratching the surface.
12 Lest the reader misconstrue the book’s purpose, I want to make the
13 point unambiguously: by reevaluating the American historical experi-
14 ence in class terms, I expose what is too often ignored about American
15 identity. But I’m not just pointing out what we’ve gotten wrong about the
16 past; I also want to make it possible to better appreciate the gnawing
17 contradictions still present in modern American society.
18 How does a culture that prizes equality of opportunity explain, or
19 indeed accommodate, its persistently marginalized people? T wenty-first-
20 century Americans need to confront this enduring conundrum. Let us
21 recognize the existence of our underclass. It has been with us since the
22 first European settlers arrived on these shores. It is not an insignificant
23 part of the vast national demographic today. The puzzle of how white
24 trash embodied this tension is one of the key questions the book pre-
25 sumes to answer.
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27 America’s class language and thinking began with the forceful imprint
28 left by English colonization. The generations of the 1500s and 1600s that
29 first envisioned the b
road-scale English exploitation of America’s natu-
30 ral environment employed a vocabulary that was a mix of purposeful
31 description and raw imagery. They did not indulge in pretty talk. The
32 idea of settlement had to be sold to wary investors; the planting of New
33 World American colonies had to serve Old World purposes. In grand
34 fashion, promoters imagined America not as an Eden of opportunity but
35 as a giant rubbish heap that could be transformed into productive ter-
36S rain. Expendable people—waste people—would be unloaded from
37N England; their labor would germinate a distant wasteland. Harsh as it
sounds, the idle poor, dregs of society, were to be sent thither simply to 01
throw down manure and die in a vacuous muck. Before it became that 02
fabled “City upon a Hill,” America was in the eyes of s ixteenth-century 03
adventurers a foul, weedy w ilderness—a “sinke hole” suited to ill-bred 04
commoners. Dark images of the New World accompanied more seduc- 05
tive ones. When early English promoters portrayed North America as a 06
rich and fertile landscape, they grossly and perhaps knowingly exagger- 07
ated. Most were describing a land they never had seen, of course. Wary 08
investors and state officials had to be convinced to take the plunge into a 09
risky overseas venture. But most important, it was a place into which 10
they could export their own marginalized people. 11
The idea of America as “the world’s best hope” came much later. His- 12
toric memory has camouflaged the less noble origins of “the land of the 13
free and the home of the brave.” We all know what imagery springs to 14
mind when patriots of our day seek confirmation that their country is 15
and was always an “exceptional” place: modest Pilgrims taught to plant 16
by generous Indians; Virginia Cavaliers entertaining guests at their 17
refined estates along the James River. Because of how history is taught, 18
Americans tend to associate Plymouth and Jamestown with cooperation 19
rather than class division. 20
And it gets ever more misty-eyed from there, because disorder and 21
discord serve no positive purpose in burgeoning national pride. Class is 22
the most outstanding, if routinely overlooked, element in presuppositions 23
about early settlement. Even now, the notion of a broad and supple mid- 24
dle class functions as a mighty balm, a smoke screen. We cling to the 25
comfort of the middle class, forgetting that there can’t be a middle class 26
without a lower. It is only occasionally shaken up, as when the Occupy 27
Wall Street movement of recent years shone an embarrassing light on the 28
financial sector and the grotesque separation between the 1 percent and 29
the 99 percent. And then the media giants find new crises and the 30
nation’s inherited disregard for class reboots, as the subject recedes into 31
the background again. 32
An imaginary classless (or class-free) American past is the America 33
that Charles Murray has conjured in his book Coming Apart: The State 34
of White America, 1960–2010 (2012). For Murray, an authority in the 35
minds of many, the large and fluid society of 1963 was held together by S36
the shared experiences of the nuclear family. When they watched The N37
heralds Faith, who lofts above the actual people on the Mayflower: their 01
names appear less prominently on the side of the structure. Thus the first 02
English settlers’ personal motives for making the journey have been sub- 03
sumed into a singular, overwhelming force of religious liberty. The set- 04
tlers remain mute. The complex process of colonization is condensed and 05
forgotten, because all human traces (the actual people tied to those 06
names) are lost. There is no remembrance of those who failed, those 07
without heirs or legacies. Instead, time has left subsequent generations 08
with a hollow symbol: progress on the march.6 09
The compression of history, the winnowing of history, may seem nat- 10
ural and neutral, but it is decidedly not. It is the means by which g rade 11
school history becomes our standard adult history. And so the great 12
American saga, as taught, excludes the very pertinent fact that after the 13
1630s, less than half came to Massachusetts for religious reasons. The 14
tall tales we unthinkingly absorb when young somehow remain within; 15
the result is a narrowly conceived sense of national belonging productive 16
of the most uncompromising of satisfying myths: “American exceptional- 17
ism.” We are unique and different, and the absence of class is one of our 18
hallmarks. 19
Exceptionalism emerges from a host of earlier myths of redemption 20
and good intentions. Pilgrims, persecuted in the Old World, brave the 21
Atlantic dreaming of finding religious freedom on America’s shores; 22
wagon trains of hopeful pioneer families head west to start a new life. 23
Nowhere else, we are meant to understand, was personal freedom so 24
treasured as it was in the American experience. The very act of migration 25
claims to equalize the people involved, molding them into a homoge- 26
neous, effectively classless society. Stories of unity tamp down our dis- 27
contents and mask even our most palpable divisions. And when these 28
divisions are class based, as they almost always are, a pronounced form 29
of amnesia sets in. Americans do not like to talk about class. It is not sup- 30
posed to be important in our history. It is not who we are. 31
Instead, we have the Pilgrims (a people who are celebrated at Thanks- 32
giving, a holiday that did not exist until the Civil War), who came ashore 33
at Plymouth Rock (a place only designated as such in the late eighteenth 34
century). The quintessential American holiday was associated with the 35
native turkey to help promote the struggling poultry industry during the S36
Civil War. The word “Pilgrim” was not even popularized until 1794. N37
makers. She has been called the “patron deity” of Jamestown and the 01
“mother” of both Virginia and America. A writer in 1908 dubiously 02
claimed that Pocahontas was actually the daughter of Virginia Dare, the 03
youngest member of the Roanoke colony, making the Indian princess a 04
child of European descent lost in the wilderness, much like Edgar Rice 05
Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes, published three years later.9 06
The best-known, most recent version of the story is the 1995 Walt 07
Disney animated film. Strikingly beautiful, unnervingly buxom, and 08
more like a pop culture diva than a member of the Tsenacommacah 09
tribe, Disney’s Pocahontas fabulously communes with nature, befriend- 10
ing a raccoon, talking to a tree; she is nearly identical to other Disney 11
heroines Snow White and Cinderella, who also boast a menagerie of ani- 12
mal friends. Why? Communing with nature draws upon the potent 13
romantic image of the New World as a prelapsarian classless society. Old 14
tropes meld seamlessly with new cinematic forms: women in Western 15
culture have been consistently portrayed as closer to Mother Nature, 16
lushness and abundance, Edenic tranquility and fertility. There is no 17
rancid swamp, no foul diseases and starvation, in this Jamestown re- 18
creation.10 19
Scholars have debated whether the rescue of Smith ever took place, 20
since only his account exists and its most elaborate version was published 21
years after Pocahontas’s death. Smith was a military adventurer, a self- 22
promoter, a commoner, who had the annoying habit of exaggerating his 23
exploits. His rescue story perfectly mimicked a popular Scottish ballad of 24
the day in which the beautiful daughter of a Turkish prince rescues an 25
English adventurer who is about to lose his head. Though an Anglican 26
minister presided over Princess Pocahontas’s marriage to the planter 27
John Rolfe, one member of the Jamestown council dismissed her as the 28
heathen spawn of a “cursed generation” and labeled her a “barbarous[ly] 29
mannered” girl. Even Rolfe considered the union a convenient political 30
alliance rather than a love match.11 31
We should not expect Disney to get that right when the fundamental 32
principle of the classless American identity—sympathetic c ommunion— 33
is at stake. The film builds on another mythic strand of the oft-told tale: 34
it is John Smith (blond and brawny in his animated form), not Rolfe, who 35
takes on the role of Pocahontas’s lover. Exaggerating her beauty and S36
highlighting her choice to save Smith and become an ally of the English N37
their child laborers. Even the church reflected class relations: designated 01
seating affirmed class station.14 02
Virginia was even less a place of hope. Here were England’s rowdy 03
and undisciplined, men willing to gamble their lives away but not ready 04
to work for a living. England perceived them as “manure” for a marginal 05
land. All that these idle men understood was a cruel discipline when it 06
was imposed upon them in the manner of the mercenary John Smith, 07
and the last thing they wanted was to work to improve the land. All that 08
would keep the fledgling colony alive was a military-style labor camp 09
meant to protect England’s interests in the country’s ongoing competi- 10
tion with the equally designing Spanish, French, and Dutch govern- 11
ments. That a small fraction of colonists survived the first twenty years of 12
settlement came as no surprise back h ome—nor did London’s elite much 13
care. The investment was not in people, whose already unrefined habits 14
declined over time, whose rudeness magnified in relation to their brutal 15
encounters with Indians. The colonists were meant to find gold, and to 16
line the pockets of the investor class back in England. The people sent to 17
accomplish this task were by definition expendable.15 18
So now we know what happens to our colonial history. It is white- 19
washed. Though New World settlers were supposed to represent the 20
promise of social mobility, and the Pilgrims generated our hallowed faith 21
in liberty, nineteenth-century Americans paradoxically created a larger- 22
than-life cast of “democratic” royalty. These inheritors founded the first 23
genealogical societies in the 1840s, and by the turn of the twentieth cen- 24
tury patriotic organizations with an emphasis on hereditary descent, 25
such as the General Society of Mayflower Descendants and the Order of 26
the Founders and Patriots of America, boasted chapters across the nation. 27
The highly exclusive Order of the First Families of Virginia was estab- 28
lished in 1912, its members claiming that their lineage could be traced 29
back to English lords and Lady Rebecca Rolfe—whom we all know as 30
the ennobled and Anglicized Pocahontas.16 31
Statues are the companions of elite societies in celebrating paternal 32
lineage and a new aristocracy. They tell us that some families (and some 33
classes) have a greater claim as heirs of the founding promise. Municipal 34
and state leaders have supported the national hagiography in bold form 35
by constructing grand monuments to our colonial city fathers. The S36
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01 migratory swarm. Some left their homes to evade debts that might well
02 have landed them in prison; others (a fair number coming from Germany
03 and France) viewed the colonies as an asylum from persecution for their
04 religious faith; just as often, resettlement was their escape from economic
05 restrictions imposed upon their trades. Still others ventured to America
06 to leave tarnished reputations and economic failures behind. As all stu-
07 dents of history know, slaves eventually became one of the largest groups
08 of unfree laborers, transported from Africa and the Caribbean, and from
09 there to the mainland British American colonies. Their numbers grew to
10 over six hundred thousand by the end of the eighteenth century. Africans
11 were found in every colony, especially after the British government gave
12 full encouragement to the slave trade when it granted an African monop-
13 oly to the Company of Royal Adventurers in 1663. The slave trade grew
14 even faster after the monopoly ended, as the American colonists bar-
15 gained for lower prices and purchased slaves directly from foreign ven-
16 dors.20
17 To put class back into the story where it belongs, we have to imagine
18 a very different kind of landscape. Not a land of equal opportunity, but a
19 much less appealing terrain where death and harsh labor conditions
20 awaited most migrants. A firmly entrenched British ideology justified
21 rigid class stations with no promise of social mobility. Certainly, Puritan
22 religious faith did not displace class hierarchy either; the early genera-
23 tions of New Englanders did nothing to diminish, let alone condemn, the
24 routine reliance on servants or slaves. Land was the principal source of
25 wealth, and those without any had little chance to escape servitude. It
26 was the stigma of landlessness that would leave its mark on white trash
27 from this day forward.
28 So, welcome to America as it was. The year 1776 is a false starting
29 point for any consideration of American conditions. Independence did
30 not magically erase the British class system, nor did it root out long-
31 entrenched beliefs about poverty and the willful exploitation of human
32 labor. An unfavored population, widely thought of as waste or “rubbish,”
33 remained disposable indeed well into modern times.
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