White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  61.On the Chamberlain-Kahn Bill passed by Congress in 1918, for detaining suspected prostitutes, see Kristin Luker, “Sex, Social Hygiene, and the State: The Double-Edged Sword of Social Reform,” Theory and Society 27, no. 5 (October 1998): 601–34, esp. 618–23; Christopher Capozzola, “The Only Badge Needed Is Your Patriotic Fervor: Vigilance, Coercion, and the Law in World War I America,” Journal of American History 88, no. 4 (March 2002): 1354–82, esp. 1370–73; Kline, Building a Better Race, 46–47; Aine Collier, The Humble Little Condom: A History (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), 185, 187. On the draft, see Jeanette Keith, Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight: Race, Class and Power in the Rural South During the First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 43, 70–71, 73–75.

  62.On the army filled with morons, and calls for intelligence tests for voting, see “Are We Ruled by Morons?,” Current Opinion 72, no. 4 (April 1922): 438–40. For southern poor whites and blacks receiving lower scores, especially those from the Deep South, see M. F. Ashley Montagu, “Intelligence of Northern Negroes and Southern Whites in the First World War,” American Journal of Psychology 58, no. 2 (April 1945): 161–88, esp. 165–67, 185–86; also see Daniel J. Kevles, “Testing the Army’s Intelligence: Psychologists and the Military in World War I,” Journal of American History 55, no. 3 (December 1968): 565–81, esp. 576; Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 110; and James D. Watson, “Genes and Politics,” in Witkowski and Inglis, Davenport’s Dream, 11.

  63.Hookworm was identified as the reason for stunted bodies among World War I draftees; see M. W. Ireland, Albert Love, and Charles Davenport, Defects Found in Drafted Men: Statistical Information Compiled from the Draft Records (Washington, DC, 1919), 34, 265. For clay-eating as a white trash addiction, see (the ironically titled) “They Eat Clay and Grow Fat,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 26, 1895; and “The Clay Eaters,” Fort Worth Register, January 12, 1897. On hookworm and stunted bodies, see Marion Hamilton Carter, “The Vampires of the South,” McClure’s Magazine 33, no. 6 (October 1909): 617–31; J. L. Nicholson, M.D., and Watson S. Rankin, M.D., “Uncinariasis as Seen in North Carolina,” Medical News (November 19, 1904): 978–87; H. F. Harris, “Uncinariasis; Its Frequency and Importance in the Southern States,” Atlanta Journal-Record of Medicine, June 1, 1903; “Uncinariasis, the Cause of Laziness,” Zion’s Herald, December 10, 1902; “The Passing of the Po’ ‘White Trash’: The Rockefeller Commission’s Successful Fight Against Hookworm Disease,” Hampton-Columbia Magazine, November 1, 1911. On white trash diseases, see James O. Breeden, “Disease as a Factor in Southern Distinctiveness,” and Elizabeth W. Etheridge, “Pellagra: An Unappreciated Reminder of Southern Distinctiveness,” in Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South, eds. Todd L. Savitt and James Harvey Young (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 1–28, 100–19, esp. 14–15, 104. On the army’s discovery that southern recruits had a “poorer degree of physical development,” see Natalie J. Ring, The Problem of the South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880–1930 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 79.

  64.See S. A. Hamilton, “The New Race Question in the South,” Arena 27, no. 4 (April 1902): 352–58; also see “Science and Discovery: The Coming War on Hookworm,” Current Literature 17, no. 6 (December 1909): 676–80; E. J. Edwards, “The Fight to Save 2,000,000 Lives from Hookworm,” New York Times, August 28, 1910; John Ettling, The Germ of Laziness: Rockefeller Philanthropy and Public Health in the New South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Andrew Sledd, “Illiteracy in the South,” Independent, October 17, 1901, 2471–74; Richard Edmonds, “The South’s Industrial Task: A Plea for Technical Training of Poor White Boys,” an address before the Annual Convention of Southern Cotton Spinners’ Association at Atlanta, November 14, 1901 (Atlanta, 1901). On education and reforming poor whites, see Bruce Clayton, The Savage Ideal: Intolerance and Intellectual Leadership in the South, 1890–1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 114–15, 119, 140. On millwork endangering white women and children, see Elbert Hubbard, “White Slavery in the South,” Philistine (May 1902): 161–78; “Child Labor in the South,” Ohio Farmer (February 3, 1906): 121; Louise Markscheffel, “The Right of the Child Not to Be Born,” Arena 36, no. 201 (August 1906): 125–27; Owen R. Lovejoy, assistant secretary of the National Child Labor Committee, “Child Labor and Family Disintegration,” Independent (September 27, 1906): 748–50. On tenant farmers as the new vagrants, see Frank Tannenbaum, Darker Phases of the South (New York, 1924), 131–35; also see Ring, The Problem of the South, 25–26, 62–63, 121, 125–26, 135–36. The poor whites were also a greater target because blacks had been disenfranchised in many southern states. The uneducated cracker still had political power, which many elite southerners found troubling. See Charles H. Holden, In the Great Maelstrom: Conservatives in Post–Civil War South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 65, 80.

  65.Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 122–23, 129, 132; Paul Lombardo, “Three Generations, No Imbeciles: New Light on Buck v. Bell,” New York University Law Review 60, no. 1 (April 1965): 30–60, esp. 37, 45–50.

  66.See David Starr Jordan and Harvey Ernest Jordan, War’s Aftermath: A Preliminary Study of the Eugenics of War as Illustrated by the Civil War of the United States and the Late Wars in the Balkans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 63; Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 54–55, 57, 59, 62, 65; Gregory Michael Dorr, “Assuring America’s Place in the Sun: Ivey Foreman Lewis and the Teaching of Eugenics at the University of Virginia, 1915–1953,” Journal of Southern History 66, no. 2 (May 2000): 257–96, esp. 264–65.

  67.In addition to focusing on their immoral sexual relations and high fecundity, he emphasized how most of their teachers ranked the children as “feebleminded,” “stupid,” and “hopeless.” He also delineated the degree of inbreeding, mostly second cousins mating and marrying. He identified four “fountain heads,” or male progenitors; one was Joseph Brown, a white man, who married a full-blooded Indian. He described their “stock” as better than if not equal to the common whites of Virginia. The Wins themselves recognized those of pure white blood as having “clar blood.” See Arthur H. Estabrook and Ivan E. M. McDougle, Mongrel Virginians: The Win Tribe (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins Company, 1926), 13–14, 23, 119, 125, 145–46, 154–57, 160–66, 181, 203–5.

  68.Estabrook included in his book a copy of the 1924 proposed law and an explanation of it; see Estabrook, Mongrel Virginians, 203–5. Virginia’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act also had the “Pocahontas exception” that protected elite families (descendants of John Rolfe) from being considered racially tainted; see Richard B. Sherman, “‘The Last Stand’: The Fight for Racial Integrity in Virginia in the 1920s,” Journal of Southern History 54, no. 1 (February 1988): 69–92, esp. 78; Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 145–46.

  69.On the law prohibiting the mixing of blacks and whites in public venues, see Sherman, “‘The Last Stand,’” esp. 83–84. For the opinion of Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, see Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), 208.

  70.Harry Laughlin used Albert Priddy’s words in his disposition for the 1924 trial when he described the Buck family as “belong[ing] to the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South.” In 1914, in a report to the governor, Priddy had defended sterilization for the feeble-minded by equating heredity defects with antisocial behavior (crime, prostitution, drunkenness) among the “non-producing and shiftless persons, living on public and private charity.” See Lombardo, “Three Generations, No Imbeciles,” 37, 49–50, 54; Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 129–30, 132, 134. Eugenic promoters published the court’s decision to justify the expansion of sterilization; see Popenoe, “The Progress of Eugenic Sterilization,” 23–26. For Carrie Buck’s pedigree chart, used in the trial, see “Most Immediate Blood-Kin of Carrie Buck. Showing Illegitimacy and Hereditary Feeblemindedness” (circa 1925), the Harry H. Laughlin Papers, Truma
n State University, Lantern Slides, Brown Box, 1307, accessed from Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement, Dolan DNA Center, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (#1013), http://www.eugenicsarchive.org.

  71.Lewis M. Terman dismissed the influence of environment and saw class as an accurate outcome of hereditary ability. He wrote, “Common observation would itself suggest that social class to which the family belongs depends less on chance than on the parents’ native qualities of intellect and character.” For his class arguments, see Terman, The Measurement of Intelligence, 72, 96, 115. Terman worried more about the low birthrates among the talented class, and doing everything possible to increase this class; see Lewis Madison Terman, “Were We Born That Way?,” The World’s Work 44 (May–October 1922): 655–60. Terman’s intelligence scale was more elitist; he grouped the most severely mentally deficient into one category of the “intellectually feeble,” and then used borderline, inferior, average, superior, very superior, select, very select, and genius. It was the top of the scale that mattered most to him; see Terman, “The Binet Scale and the Diagnosis of Feeble-Mindedness,” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 7, no. 4 (November 1916): 530–43, esp. 541–42; also see Mary K. Coffey, “The American Adonis: A Natural History of the ‘Average American’ Man, 1921–32,” in Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s, eds. Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 185–216, esp. 186–87, 196, 198. Other eugenicists like popular lecturer Albert E. Wiggam feared that if intelligent and beautiful women (as if those traits were united in one class) did not breed, “the next generation will be both homely and dumb”; see R. le Clerc Phillips, “Cracks in the Upper Crust,” Independent (May 29, 1926): 633–36.

  72.On C. W. Saleeby and his new book Woman on Womanhood, see “Urging Women to Lift the Race,” New York Times, November 19, 1911; for a satire of eugenic feminism, of women running down men, replacing marriage for love with the “cold-blooded selection” of the best based on “scientific propagation,” see Robert W. Chambers, “Pro Bono Publico: Further Developments in the Eugenist Suffragette Campaign,” Hampton’s Magazine (July 1, 1911): 19–30; and William McDougall, National Welfare and Decay (London, 1921), 9–25. McDougall did a similar study comparing the intellectual capacity of English private schools (children of educated elite) and primary schools (children of shopkeepers and artisans) and arrived at the same conclusion as Terman: there was a marked superiority of the children of the educated elite. See Reverend W. R. Inge, “Is Our Race Degenerating?,” The Living Age (January 15, 1927): 143–54.

  73.Steven Noll, Feeble-Minded in Our Midst: Institutions for the Mentally Retarded in the South, 1900–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 71. For the importance of targeting delinquent white girls of the poorer class for sterilization in North Carolina in the 1920s, see Karen L. Zipf, Bad Girls at Samarcand: Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016), 3, 66–67, 73, 83–84, 150–52, 154.

  74.See Sherwood Anderson, Poor White (New York: B. W. Huebsch, Inc., 1920), 3–8, 11–14, 18; Stephen C. Enniss, “Alienation and Affirmation: The Divided Self in Sherwood Anderson’s ‘Poor White,’” South Atlantic Review 55, no. 2 (May 1990): 85–99; Welford Dunaway Taylor and Charles E. Modlin, eds., Southern Odyssey: Selected Writings of Sherwood Anderson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997); and on Anderson’s focus on people building walls, often class barriers, see Percy H. Boynton, “Sherwood Anderson,” North American Review 224, no. 834 (March–May 1927): 140–50, esp. 148.

  75.Anderson, Poor White, 29, 43, 55, 56, 62, 72, 80, 118–21, 127–28, 156, 169, 171–72, 190–91, 227–28, 230–31, 253–54, 299.

  76.Ibid., 136, 260, 271, 277, 332, 342, 345, 357, 367–71.

  77.For the idea of “childish impotence,” “arrested development of the social class,” “spiritual stagnation,” and that the South had “buried its Anglo-Saxons,” see Tannenbaum, Darker Phases of the South, 39–42, 56, 70, 117–19, 183; William Garrott Brown, Lower South in American History (New York, 1902), 266; Edgar Gardner Murphy, The Problems of the Present South (New York, 1909), 123; also see Ring, The Problem of the South, 139, 148, 152. Ira Caldwell published a five-part series in 1929 for Eugenics: A Journal of Race Betterment on a poor white family that he called “The Bunglers.” It was his own family study in the tradition of The Jukes. See Ashley Craig Lancaster, “Weeding out the Recessive Gene: Representations of the Evolving Eugenics Movement in Erskine Caldwell’s ‘God’s Little Acre,’” Southern Literary Journal 39, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 78–99, esp. 81.

  78.Erskine Caldwell, The Bastard (New York, 1929), 13–14, 16, 21, 28.

  79.Ibid., 21–23, 141–42, 145–46, 165–66, 170, 175, 177, 198–99.

  80.For articles debating aristocracy, see Robert N. Reeves, “Our Aristocracy,” American Magazine of Civics (January 1896): 23–29; Harry Thurston Peck, “The New American Aristocracy,” The Cosmopolitan (October 1898): 701–9; Harry Thurston Peck, “The Basis for an American Aristocracy,” Independent (December 22, 1898): 1842–45; “Is America Heading for Aristocracy?,” The Living Age (September 21, 1907): 757–60; Charles Ferguson, “A Democratic Aristocracy,” The Bookman: A Review of Books and Life (October 1917): 147–48. In favor of an aristocracy of talent, see James Southall Wilson, “The Future of Aristocracy in America,” North American Review (January 1932), 34–40. And for an inbred civil servant class, see James Edward Dunning, “An Aristocracy of Government in America,” Forum (June 1910): 567–80. There were also critics of creating this master class; see “Modern Biology as the Enemy of Democracy,” Current Opinion 49, no. 3 (September 1920): 346–47; on the new power of science and expertise, see JoAnne Brown, The Definition of a Profession: The Authority of Metaphor in the History of Intelligence Testing, 1900–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 41.

  81.On the flapper, see Corra Harris, Flapper Anne (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926). It was serialized in Ladies’ Home Journal in 1925; see Betsy Lee Nies, Eugenic Fantasies: Racial Ideology and the Literature and Popular Culture of the 1920s (New York: Routledge, 2010), 41.

  Chapter Nine: Forgotten Men and Poor Folk: Downward Mobility and the Great Depression

  1.David M. Kennedy, The American People in the Great Depression: Freedom from Fear: Part I (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 86–87, 89.

  2.See U.S. National Emergency Council, Report on Economic Conditions in the South. Prepared for the President by the National Emergency Council (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1938), 1; Will W. Alexander, “Rural Resettlement,” Southern Review 1, no. 3 (Winter 1936): 528–39, esp. 529, 532, 535, 538. As another expert explained, rural rehabilitation did not mean a return to the status quo, but giving farmers the means to sustain and improve their standard of living; see Joseph W. Eaton, Exploring Tomorrow’s Agriculture: Co-Operative Group Farming—A Practical Program of Rural Rehabilitation (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1943), 4–7.

  3.Matthew J. Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866–1928 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 2–3, 23, 37–38; Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 185–222.

  4.Robert E. Burns, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang, foreword by Matthew J. Mancini (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), vi–ix. By 1932, nearly a third of the population of convicts were white, a tripling since 1908; see Alex Lichtenstein, “Chain Gangs, Communism, and the ‘Negro Question’: John L. Spivak’s Georgia Nigger,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 79, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 633–58, esp. 641–42.

  5.On Warner Brothers, see Andrew Bergman, We’re in the Money: Depression America and Its Films (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1971), 92.

  6.Lewis W. Hin
e, Men at Work: Photographic Studies of Modern Men and Machines (New York, 1932), frontispiece; also see Kate Sampsell Willmann, “Lewis Hine, Ellis Island, and Pragmatism: Photographs as Lived Experience,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 7, no. 2 (April 2008): 221–52, esp. 221–22.

  7.Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 129; Roger Daniels, The Bonus March: An Episode of the Great Depression (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1971); John Dos Passos, “The Veterans Come Home to Roost,” New Republic (June 29, 1932): 177–78. One account noted that there were a large number of farmers; see Mauritz A. Haligren, “The Bonus Army Scares Mr. Hoover,” Nation 135 (July 27, 1932): 73. On burning the shantytown, see “The Bonus Army Incident,” New York Times, September 16, 1932. On the reaction to Hoover calling Bonus Army men criminals, see Harold N. Denny, “Hoover B.E.F. Attack Stirs Legion Anew,” New York Times, September 13, 1932; John Henry Bartlett, The Bonus March and the New Deal (Chicago: M. A. Donohue & Co., 1937), 13; and Donald J. Lisio, “A Blunder Becomes a Catastrophe: Hoover, the Legion, and the Bonus Army,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 51, no. 1 (Autumn 1967): 37–50.

  8.Charles R. Walker, “Relief and Revolution,” Forum and Century 88 (August 1932): 73–79.

  9.Edward Newhouse, You Can’t Sleep Here (New York: Macaulay, 1934), 103–4, 112.

  10.On thirties writers, see David P. Peeler, Hope Among Us Yet: Social Criticism and Social Solace in Depression America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 167–68, 171; Tom Kromer, Waiting for Nothing (New York, 1935), 186; and Arthur M. Lamport, “The New Era Is Dead—Long Live the New Deal,” Banker’s Magazine (June 1933): 545–48.