Even Arkansas senator William Fulbright, a Johnson ally who leaned in a liberal direction, complained that Elvis symbolized the class hierarchy turned upside down: “the King” earned more than the president. George McGovern of South Dakota was disturbed that Elvis earned more than the combined annual salaries of all the faculty members at the average university. And for what? The New York Times movie critic Bosley Crowther lashed out: “grotesque singing” and “orgiastic” leg shaking.86
In mass media culture, lower-class delinquency was seen as something that could be contracted from pop idols. The “Mothers for a Moral America” that sponsored the negative campaign film about LBJ agreed, and linked his ostensible redneck ways to the danger of class disorder. As one of the Goldwater filmmakers explained, leadership at the top conditioned life at the bottom: if a president’s behavior was too common, too coarse, he gave license to immoral, lower-class desires. Wealth without hard work, sex without marriage, and success without proper breeding were all danger signs. Society suffered.87
Goldwater supporters may have seen Johnson’s behavior as that of a degenerate white trash father figure, but liberal reformers considered behaviors that attended poverty to be a matter of breeding as well. New terms reinforced pedigree: “the culture of poverty,” “the poverty cycle,” the “underendowed.” Class still retained strong hints of the vocabulary of bloodlines and inheritance in the transformational decade of the 1960s.88
Nor had class wholly divorced itself from the land as a source of identity. One of the most influential intellectuals of the decade, John Kenneth Galbraith of Harvard, identified “islands” of poverty amid a society of affluence. Socialist Michael Harrington, whose book The Other America (1962) was instrumental in shaping policy debates, noted that the poor occupied an “invisible land,” a territory hidden from the social awareness of a middle class now living in safe, segregated suburbs. Harrington discussed the economic “rejects,” whom he identified as expendables, exiled from mainstream America’s pleasingly productive, upwardly mobile workforce. The old English idea of dumping the poor in a distant colonial outpost was not quite buried. Out of sight, out of mind.89
In his consideration of the ill-served underclass, Johnson, too, thought in terms of soil. The poor were, in his words, the “little folks living on little lands who want what we already have.” He had in mind the sharecropper of history who dreamt of acquiring a meaningful tract of land. Johnson retained his own attachment to the “harsh caliche soil” of the Texas hill country, acknowledging that his strength came from the “rough, unyielding sticky clay soil.” Lady Bird Johnson felt that it was the land of his youth that made him so unrelenting in his politics. Johnson reversed the older notion that living on wasteland killed the human spirit. Instead of being stuck in the clay, Johnson saw himself as having surmounted his class origins with the same drive that was needed to overcome the unforgiving land.90
James Reston of the New York Times captured Johnson on the day of his inauguration in 1965. Here was a man speaking both the “faith of the old frontier” and the new frontier of science. Here was a man who “spoke every word as if it was his last”; “nobody watching him up close could doubt his sincerity.” In LBJ, Reston found a full-blown “dramatization of the American dream,” the “poor boy, the country boy at the pinnacle of the world.”91
Two weeks later, Johnson spoke to students in the Senate Youth Program. He confidently assured them that it was not important who their ancestors were, or what the color of their skin was, or whether they were born to a tenant farmer and lived in a three-room house. In fact, though, he knew that all these things did matter. The country boy might have been enjoying his moment in the sun just then, but he knew in his heart that his place among the power elite was not really secured; he was not fully accepted. A country boy might at any moment reveal some telltale sign of a white trash character. He might say something inappropriate. He could never conceal the artless drawl or dust off the sticky red clay. Indelible marks of class identity were forever stamped on him, no matter how far he wandered from the inhospitable land of his birth.92
Part III
THE WHITE TRASH MAKEOVER
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Redneck Roots
Deliverance, Billy Beer, and Tammy Faye
The first Cracker President should have been a mixture of Jimmy and Billy [Carter] . . . Billy’s hoo-Lord-what-the-hell-get-out-the-way attitude heaving up under Jimmy’s prudent righteousness—or Jimmy’s idealism heaving up under Billy’s sense of human limitations—and forming a nice-and-awful compound like life in Georgia.
—Roy Blount Jr., Crackers (1980)
As identity politics rose as a force for good in the last decades of the twentieth century, authenticity was to be achieved by registering, and then heeding, the voices of previously marginalized Americans. Whites could no longer speak for people of color. Men could no long speak for women. The New Left, civil rights, and Black Power movements of the 1960s had helped to jump-start the second-wave feminist movement, yet identity politics was not the possession of the left alone. Richard Nixon rode into office in 1968 by claiming to represent the interests of the “Silent Majority” of Americans who saw themselves as hardworking, middle American homeowners dutifully paying their taxes and demanding little of the federal government.1
One could argue that identity has always been a part of politics, that aspiring people adopt identities the same way that they change their style of dress. Yet this is only part of the story. Some people can choose an identity, but many more have an identity chosen for them. White trash folks never took on that name for themselves, nor did the rural poor describe their plight in recognition of having been cast out of society as “waste people,” “rubbish,” or “clay-eaters.” As we have seen, Union soldiers and Lincoln Republicans embraced the intended insult of “mudsill” when it was hurled at them from across the Mason-Dixon Line. But that was because they possessed the cultural power to shape political discourse. The dispossessed had no such power.
Eventually, self-identified “white trash” who had come up in the world began defending their depressed class background as a distinct (and perversely noble) heritage. Before the end of the 1980s, “white trash” was rebranded as an ethnic identity, with its own readily identifiable cultural forms: food, speech patterns, tastes, and, for some, nostalgic memories. If immigrants had foreign origins to reflect on, white trash invented a country of their own within the United States. In its most benign incarnation, this substratum of the amorphous American class system was no longer to be categorized as an inferior “breed” (with undesirable genetic traits) so much as a product of cultural breeding that could easily be shed and later recovered—a tradition, or identity, that one did not have to shy away from in order to gain acceptance in mainstream society. In its worst form, however, white trash identity dredged up a person’s early traumatic experiences, repressed childhood memories. A not insignificant part of that was sexual deviance, a problem that still hovers over white trash America today. Hollywood gave the country an enduring symbol of that deviance, and the unwanted’s recourse to barbarism, in its adaptation of James Dickey’s violent thriller Deliverance (1970). Set in rural Georgia near the South Carolina border, the film, released in 1972, seared into the national imagination its devastating portrait of white trash ugliness and backwoods debauchery.
No matter whether it is cast as urban or rural, religious or secular, Anglo- or other hyphenate, the search for national belonging is never new. Despite the nasty cultural memory jarred loose by the retrogressive message in Deliverance (and especially the horrific rape of Ned Beatty’s character), the backcountry of America never completely lost its regenerative associations. Appalachia remained in the minds of many a lost island containing a purer breed of Anglo-Saxon. Here, in this imaginary country of the past, is where the best of Jefferson’s yeoman “roots” could be traced. Most of all, there was a raw masculinity to be
found in the hills. A larger trend was turning America into a more ethnically conscious nation, one in which ethnicity substituted for class. The hereditary model had not been completely abandoned; instead, it was reconfigured to focus on transmitted cultural values over inbred traits.
An inherent paradox added to the confusion over the nature of cultural identity. Modern Americans’ largely blind pursuit of the authentic, stable self was taking place in a country where roots could be, and often were, discarded. In the American model, assimilation preceded social mobility, which required either adoption of a new identity or assumption of a class disguise in order to insert oneself into the desired category of middle class. Yet by the late 1960s the middle class had become the most inauthentic of places: the suburbs provided indelible images of foil-covered TV dinners, banal Babbittry, and bad sitcoms. People took part in staid dinner parties, evocatively portrayed in The Graduate, where the talk was of a career-making investment in plastics—and what better stood for inauthenticity than unnatural products invented by chemists? There was a growing awareness that middle-class comfort was an illusion. Two sociologists ironically concluded that the few authentic identities still claimable in 1970 existed in the isolated pockets of the rural poor: Appalachian hillbillies in Tennessee, marginal dirt farmers in the upper Midwest, and “swamp Yankees” in New England.2
The broadcast of An American Family on PBS in 1973 gave millions of viewers a palpable sense of middle-class life. As television’s first attempt at a “reality” show, the Loud family saga was a study in dysfunction—a decade removed from Ozzie and Harriet, and emotional light-years from the tame, kid-friendly Brady Bunch. Three hundred hours of taping over the course of a year was edited down to twelve hours of riveting television.
Outsiders may have cared about the new TV family, but a New York Times Magazine article on the Louds described their world as a cultural vacuum: they had few hobbies, cared little about suffering in the world at large, and seemed emotionally short-circuited when attempting to deal with one another. The parents, Bill and Pat, were getting separated, but to the husband, who avoided conflict and admitted to no failures, their pending divorce came devoid of introspection. In the words of commentator Anne Roiphe, the breakup of a marriage was experienced by him as “a minor toothache.” Amid filming, the Louds’ house burned down, and even that barely fazed them. They floated through life like “jellyfish,” transparent and unresponsive; they valued “prettiness” and gave no attention to any but their outwardly attractive and successful neighbors; they were nonplussed when it came to “those who do not make it.”
As Roiphe sublimely put it, with reference to Mario Puzo’s Godfather clan, “Maybe it’s better to be a Corleone than a Loud.” At least the Sicilians’ tribal, violent character got the blood flowing. (She might just as well have used “redneck” in place of “Corleone.”) Blind to their blandness, the Louds were adrift, like so many others of the seventies middle class. Roiphe’s updated motto for the family sampler: “Be it ever so hollow, there’s no place like home.”3
• • •
Historical fictions provided a solution for cultural longing. Alex Haley’s Roots (1976) created a media sensation. It spent twenty-two weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list before becoming a twelve-hour miniseries that won nine Emmys. Haley had done something few imagined possible: he had traced his African American family’s history back to a village in Gambia.
The author’s success was based wholly on his claims to have discovered his paternal ancestor, Kunta Kinte, who acquired the name Toby in America. Haley insisted that he had spent long years doing careful research that had enabled him to prove that his family’s oral history (and that told by an African storyteller) could be corroborated with archival documentation. The dialogue in his book may have been made up, but the family saga was a true slice of history.
Impressed by this gargantuan effort, the New York Times praised Haley for his “wealth of authentic detail,” and for having instilled his narrative with the “feel of history.” The most prominent review in the newspaper of record averred, “Its truths have been quarried by a mountain of facts.” Newsweek likewise lauded the work as an “extraordinary social document, grounded in exhaustive research and animated by a grand passion for personal and historical truth.” But it was all a lie.4
Far from uncovering his real roots, it was discovered that the mega-selling author had invented his lineage. Controversy over his historical claims hit the news in 1977, as prominent journalists and scholars called his work a “fraud,” and the full story unfolded over the next five years. He had manipulated his family oral accounts and embellished his family tree in order to tell a grand tale of an exceptional heritage that never existed. For starters, the Gambian storyteller he relied upon merely told Haley what he wanted to hear. The historical Toby was not even born with the name Kunta Kinte—that genealogical lineage was pure fiction. While Haley’s Africa was not a caricature on the order of Tarzan’s overripe jungle, it was a half-conscious or self-conscious distortion: he converted Gambia into a place mirroring middle America, as a land of many villages. The actual village of his reputed ancestors, as Haley admitted, was a British trading post, not the symbolic West African “Eden” it was portrayed as, a pristine world to constitute for history-hungry Afro-Americans a reverse Plymouth Rock.5
If that were the extent of the author’s crimes, it would be bad enough. But Haley’s attempts at research actually exposed far more serious errors. The birthdates of Kunta Kinte’s American progeny were wrongly given, and Haley attributed to his family tree the names of people to whom he was unrelated. Neither the white nor the black families archived in Roots matched existing historical records.
As to his descent from the white Lea family of North Carolina, Haley completely invented a villainous cracker character named Tom Lea, who raped Kunta Kinte’s daughter, Kizzy (Haley’s alleged direct ancestor), and betrayed his own mulatto son, “Chicken George,” by selling off his family. This could not have occurred, because the historical Thomas Lea was already dead by that time. And Lea was not in fact Haley’s “po’ cracker,” but a prosperous landowner with sixteen thousand acres and numerous slaves; some of his relatives held prestigious political offices.
The class element in Roots was, in this way, as wrong on the American side as on the African. Nor was there a shred of evidence that Haley’s lost Gambian ancestors were of an elite bloodline, and Toby/Kunte Kinte a breed and a class above the African American field hands who did the most backbreaking labor in the U.S. South. Yet for Haley, Kunta Kinte in America had to be fashioned as a man who honored the memory of his proud African ancestors; and in spite of his enslaved condition, he and his family had to set themselves apart from their low-class cracker relatives.6
Let us be clear, then. Besides being a fabrication of his family’s history, Haley’s book applied a kind of logic that was downright conservative. He construed himself as one of an African nobility, and he held that ancestry said a lot about what a person could become—and pass on. Roots was too good to be true, which was why Haley, who pitched his story to the networks before he had even written it, was eventually exposed as a hoaxer and a hustler.7
Haley’s Roots demonstrated how easy it was to invent a pedigree. Fictional family trees were all the rage. James A. Michener, arguably the most popular of twentieth-century historical fiction writers, produced a primarily white version of Roots in his novel Chesapeake (1978). Michener followed several families of varying class backgrounds and tied their destinies to a landscape dotted with geese and blue herons. The white trash lineage he covers originates with one Timothy Turlock, whom Michener describes as “small, quick, sly, dirty of dress and habit,” and the father of “six bastards.” After an undistinguished life in England, Turlock was unceremoniously dumped on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the 1600s, and lived in a swamp.8
Multiple generations later, little had changed for the T
urlock clan. Amos Turlock was a toothless crank living in a trailer in the 1970s. As one reviewer put it, “feral marshlanders” anchored the entire narrative. The Turlocks remained one with their terrain. Amos surrounded his trailer with tacky statuary of Santa and the Seven Dwarfs; he derived the greatest pleasure in finding his way around the game warden and ranging about with his extra-long (illegal) Twombly gun that he used to hunt geese. The Turlocks of Michener’s historical reinvention were all cunning—savage survivalists.9
As sweeping narratives and small-screen histories accompanied the nation’s bicentennial celebrations of 1976, it should come as no surprise, then, that the founders themselves provided a dynastic saga worthy of a miniseries. The Adams Chronicles traced the path of a crusty New England farmer, John Adams, to the presidency, and carried forward with his descendants, three generations’ worth. The Chronicles led up to the accomplished Henry Adams, a strong-minded historian whose life crossed into the twentieth century.
In his introduction to the PBS treatment’s companion book, Professor Daniel Boorstin, the newly appointed Librarian of Congress, recast John Adams as an oxymoron: a “self-made aristocrat.” His well-known “vanity,” his “independence from public opinion” morphs into an “Adams tradition,” redefining class arrogance as an admirable family trait. There were no Turlocks in these Chronicles, so the rabble-rouser Samuel Adams stood in for the “slippery” side of the family. “Plain” John Adams was contrasted with his social climber of a cousin, who insisted on being chauffeured in a fancy carriage when he attended the Continental Congress.10
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