White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  11.See the photographs “The Flood Leaves Its Victims on the Bread Line” and “Tennessee Puts a Chain Gang on Its Levees,” Life 2, no. 7 (February 15, 1937): 9, 12–13.

  12.“Muncie, Ind. Is the Great U.S. ‘Middletown’: And This Is the First Picture Essay of What It Looks Like,” Life 2 (May 10, 1937): 15–25; also see Sarah E. Igo, “From Main Street to Mainstream: Middletown, Muncie, and ‘Typical America,’” Indiana Magazine of History 101, no. 3 (September 2005): 239–66, esp. 244–45, 255, 259–60. As one writer noted, the popular understanding of the American standard of living was “mouthed about by everyone, but defined by none,” and at the “present time the American Standard of Living is probably nothing more than a set of values which the majority of people place on things they wish they had”; Elmer Leslie McDowell, “The American Standard of Living,” North American Review 237, no. 1 (January 1934): 71–75, esp. 72.

  13.“The American Collapse,” The Living Age (December 1, 1929): 398–401; on the Egyptian tomb theme, see Virgil Jordan, “The Era of Mad Illusions,” North American Review (January 1930): 54–59.

  14.See William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 62–63, 67–68, 212. And on the importance of erosion to Roy Stryker’s photographic agenda, see Stuart Kidd, “Art, Politics and Erosion: Farm Security Administration Photographs of the Southern Land,” Revue française d’études américaines, rev. ed. (1986): 67–68; Arthur Rothstein, “Melting Snow, Utopia, Ohio,” February 1940, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC; and Peeler, Hope Among Us Yet, 148.

  15.On waste, see Herbert J. Spinden, “Waters Flow, Winds Blow, Civilizations Die,” North American Review (Autumn 1937): 53–70; Russell Lord, “Behold Our Land,” North American Review (Autumn 1938): 118–32; on the chaotic groundswell, also see Russell Lord, “Back to the Land?,” Forum (February 1933): 97–103, esp. 99, 102. Spinden was an archeologist who specialized in Mayan art and was curator of American Indian art and culture at the Brooklyn Museum from 1929 to 1951. See Regna Darnell and Frederic W. Gleach, eds., Celebrating a Century of the American Anthropological Association: Presidential Portraits (New York, 2002), 73–76. Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939), 102. Engineer and WPA consultant David Cushman Coyle published a powerful little book titled Waste, which offered this statement in his opening chapter, “Mud”: “Wherever man touches this land, it breaks down and washes away. If he builds a cabin, the track to his door becomes a devouring gully. . . . This land shrinks and withers under the touch of man”; see Waste: The Fight to Save America (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1936), 5–6. He also had a chapter titled “Human Erosion,” and described working people “moving into the slums or into shacks built of rubbish—sliding down and down, at last to the relief line”; see ibid., 57. This little book became a key campaign tool in Roosevelt’s 1936 reelection campaign in Indiana; see James Philip Fadely, “Editors, Whistle Stops, and Elephants: The Presidential Campaign in Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History 85, no. 2 (June 1989): 101–37, esp. 106.

  16.See Carleton Beals, “Migs: America’s Shantytown on Wheels,” Forum and Century 99 (January 1938): 10–16, esp. 11–12; “‘I Wonder Where We Can Go Now,’” Fortune 19, no. 4 (April 1939): 91–100, esp. 91, 94; Paul Taylor, “The Migrants and California’s Future: The Trek to California and the Trek in California” [ca. 1935], in Taylor, On the Ground in the Thirties (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1983), 175–84, esp. 175–77, 179; Charles Poole, “John Steinbeck’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’” in “Books of the Month,” New York Times, April 14, 1939; “‘The Grapes of Wrath’: John Steinbeck Writes a Major Novel About Western Migrants,” Life 6, no. 23 (June 5, 1939): 66–67; Woody Guthrie, “Talking Dust Bowl Blues” (1940); Frank Eugene Cruz, “‘In Between a Past and Future Town’: Home, the Unhomely, and ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’” Steinbeck Review 4, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 52–75, esp. 63, 73; Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997), 259; Vivian C. Sobchack, “The Grapes of Wrath (1940): Thematic Emphasis Through Visual Style,” American Quarterly 31, no. 5 (Winter 1979): 596–615.

  17.Paul K. Conkin, Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal Community Program (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959), 26, 30; William H. Issel, “Ralph Borsodi and the Agrarian Response to Modern America,” Agricultural History 41, no. 2 (April 1967): 155–66; Ralph Borsodi, “Subsistence Homesteads: President Roosevelt’s New Land and Population Policy,” Survey Graphic 23 (January 1934): 11–14, 48, esp. 13; and Borsodi, “Dayton, Ohio, Makes Social History,” Nation 136 (April 19, 1933): 447–48, esp. 448. On Dayton, Ohio, also see John A. Piquet, “Return of the Wilderness,” North American Review (May 1934): 417–26, esp. 425–26; Charles Morrow Wilson, “American Peasants,” The Commonweal 19 (December 8, 1933): 147–49; and Pamela Webb, “By the Sweat of the Brow: The Back-to-the-Land Movement in Depression Arkansas,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 42, no. 4 (Winter 1983): 332–45, esp. 337.

  18.Webb, “By the Sweat of the Brow,” 334. One observer concluded that “many of these would-be farmers are not farmers and most of them may be expected to return to city jobs when prosperity returns”; see W. Russell Taylor, “Recent Trends in City and County Population,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 9, no. 1 (February 1933): 63–74, esp. 72.

  19.Richard S. Krikendall, Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1982), 12–14; and M. L. Wilson, “The Fairway Farms Project,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 2, no. 2 (April 1926): 156–71, esp. 156; Roy E. Huffman, “Montana’s Contributions to New Deal Farm Policy,” Agricultural History 33, no. 4 (October 1959): 164–67; also see “A Hope and a Homestead” (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1935), 6, 8–10; and M. L. Wilson, “The Subsistence Homestead Program,” Proceedings of the Institute of Public Affairs 8 (1934): 158–75.

  20.M. L. Wilson, “A New Land-Use Program: The Place of Subsistence Homesteads,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 10, no. 1 (February 1934): 1–12, esp. 6–8; Wilson, “Problem of Poverty in Agriculture,” Journal of Farm Economics 22, no. 1, Proceedings Number (February 1940): 10–29, esp. 20; Farm Tenancy: Report of the President’s Committee (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1937), 4.

  21.Wilson, “A New Land-Use Program,” 2–3, 11–12; “A Hope and a Homestead,” 4; Farm Tenancy: Report of the President’s Committee, 5.

  22.Arthur F. Raper, Preface to Peasantry: A Tale of Two Black Belt Counties (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936), 61, 172, 218, 405; also see Rupert B. Vance, Human Factors in Cotton Culture: A Study in Social Geography of the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1929), 153, 248, 279; Farm Tenancy: Report of the President’s Committee, 3, 5–7, 9.

  23.Harold Hoffsommer, “The AAA and the Cropper,” Social Forces 13, no. 4 (May 1935): 494–502, esp. 494–96, 501; Raper, Preface to Peasantry, 61, 75, 157–59, 173, 405; Vance, Human Factors in Cotton Culture, 161–62, 168, 201, 204, 215, 259, 307–8; Wilson, “A New Land-Use Program,” 9, 12; Wilson, “Problem of Poverty in Agriculture,” 14–17, 21; Wilson, “The Problem of Surplus Agricultural Population,” International Journal of Agrarian Affairs 1 (1939): 37–48, esp. 41–43; Wilson, “How New Deal Agencies Are Affecting Family Life,” Journal of Home Economics 27 (May 1935): 274–80, esp. 276–78.

  24.Henry A. Wallace, “The Genetic Basis of Democracy” (February 12, 1939), in Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn, ed. Russell Lord (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1944), 155–56.

  25.Wilson, “Problem of Poverty in Agriculture,” 20, 23, 28; Wallace, “Chapter VII: The Blessing of General Liberty,” in Whose Constitution? An Inquiry into the General Welfare (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1936), 102–3.

&
nbsp; 26.John Corbin, “The New Deal and the Constitution,” Forum and Century 90, no. 2 (August 1933): 92–97, esp. 94–95; Wilson, “Problem of Poverty in Agriculture,” 17. Though he was the drama critic for the New York Times, Corbin spent four years studying history, which led to his biography of George Washington, Washington: Biographic Origins of the Republic (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930); also see David M. Clark, “John Corbin: Dramatic Critic (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976). For the importance of the word “readjustment,” see “President’s Address to the Farmers,” New York Times, May 15, 1935.

  27.Wallace, “Chapter VIII: Soil and the General Welfare,” in Whose Constitution, 109, 115–17.

  28.Wallace, “Chapter IX: Population and the General Welfare,” in Whose Constitution, 122–24, 126. The full quote from the film is, “Rich fellas come up an’ they die, an’ their kids ain’t no good and they die out, but we keep a-comin’. We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out, they can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa, cos we’re the people.” Steinbeck wrote, “We ain’t gonna die out. People is goin’ on—changin’ a little, maybe, but goin’ right on.” See The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin, 2014), 423.

  29.Conkin, Tomorrow a New World, 128–30, 142–45; Richard S. Kirkendall, Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966); Kennedy, The American People in the Great Depression, 208–10; Fred C. Frey and T. Lynn Smith, “The Influence of the AAA Cotton Program upon the Tenant, Cropper, and Laborer,” Rural Sociology 1, no. 4 (December 1936): 483–505, esp. 489, 500–501, 505; Warren C. Whatley, “Labor for the Picking: The New Deal in the South,” Journal of Economic History 43, no. 4 (December 1983): 905–29, esp. 909, 913–14, 924, 926–29; Jack T. Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920–1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 65–74; George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 1913–1945 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 409.

  30.Kirkendall, Social Scientists and Farm Politics, 109–11; Sidney Baldwin, Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 92–96, 117–19. On migratory workers, see Paul Taylor, “What Shall We Do with Them? Address Before the Commonwealth Club of California” (April 15, 1938); and “Migratory Agricultural Workers on the Pacific Coast” (April 1938), reprinted in Taylor, On the Ground in the Thirties, 203–20.

  31.R. G. Tugwell, “Resettling America: A Fourfold Plan,” New York Times, July 28, 1935. For Tugwell’s criticism of Jefferson, see “‘Through Our Fault’ Is the Waste of Land,” Science New Letter 30, no. 800 (August 8, 1936), 85–86; Tugwell, “Behind the Farm Problem: Rural Poverty, Not the Tenancy System, but the Low Scale of Life, Says Tugwell, Is the Fundamental Question,” New York Times Magazine, January 10, 1937, 4–5, 22; and Rexford G. Tugwell, “The Resettlement Idea,” Agricultural History 33, no. 4 (October 1959): 159–64, esp. 160–61. On the unromantic portrait of farming, see Rexford G. Tugwell, Thomas Munro, and Roy E. Stryker, American Economic Life and the Means of Its Improvement (New York, 1930), 90; also see Baldwin, Poverty and Politics, 87–88, 105–6, 163–64.

  32.Tugwell, “Behind the Farm Problem,” 22, and “The Resettlement Idea,” 162; Baldwin, Poverty and Politics, 111.

  33.Baldwin, Poverty and Politics, 113–14; Roger Biles, The South and the New Deal (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1994), 64; Howard N. Mead, “Russell vs. Talmadge: Southern Politics and the New Deal,” Georgia Historical Review 65, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 28–45, esp. 36, 38, 42.

  34.On “parlor pink,” see Paul Mallon, “Tugwell,” and in the same paper, see “Tugwellism,” [Steubenville, OH] Herald Star, June 13, 1934. On his “carefully-studied informality,” see “Tugwell Defends ‘New Deal’ Earnestly; Ignore Red Scare,” [Burlington, NC] Daily Times-News, April 24, 1934. On “a dream walking,” see “Tugwell Meets His Critics,” Oelwein [IA] Daily Register, June 11, 1934; also see “Sick of Propertied Czars at 24, Tugwell Homes Dreamy Economics,” Kansas City Star, August 31, 1936; and “Tugwell Named to Fill New Post,” New York Times, April 25, 1934.

  35.On Huey Long’s hillbilly image, see James Rorty, “Callie Long’s Boy Huey,” Forum and Century, August 1935, 74–82, 126–27, esp. 75, 79–80, 127. On Long as a defender of “poor white trash,” see eulogies in “Friends Applaud Memory of Long in Senate Talks,” [New Orleans] Times-Picayune, January 23, 1936. For Long’s failure to help the poor in Louisiana, see Anthony J. Badger, “Huey Long and the New Deal,” New Deal/New South: An Anthony J. Badger Reader (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2007), 1–30, esp. 1, 5–7, 21–25. On Long’s rustic clown role, see J. Michael Hogan and Glen Williams, “The Rusticity and Religiosity of Huey P. Long,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 7, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 149–171, esp. 151, 158–59. On politicians claiming to be one with the plowmen or “plain old country boy[s],” see Roger Butterfield, “The Folklore of Politics,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 74, no. 2 (April 1950): 164–77, esp. 165–66. On Ed “Cotton” Smith using Vardaman’s tricks, see Dan T. Carter, “Southern Political Style,” in The Age of Segregation: Race Relations in the South, 1890–1954, ed. Robert Haws (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1978), 45–67, esp. 51. On friends telling Tugwell to affect a homely democratic manner, see Arthur Krock, “In Washington: Senator Smith Certainly ‘Put On a Good Show,’” New York Times, June 12, 1934.

  36.For the most vicious attack, see Blair Bolles, “The Sweetheart of the Regimenters: Dr. Tugwell Makes America Over,” American Mercury 39, no. 153 (September 1936): 77–86, esp. 84–85. On criticism of the New Deal, see “What Relief Did to Us,” American Mercury 38, no. 151 (July 1936): 274–83, esp. 283; H. L. Mencken, “The New Deal Mentality,” American Mercury 38, no. 149 (May 1936): 1–11. For endorsing eugenics over relief, see Mencken, “The Dole for Bogus Farmers,” American Mercury 39, no. 156 (December 1936): 400–407; also see Cedric B. Cowing, “H. L. Mencken: The Case of the ‘Curdled’ Progressive,” Ethics 69, no. 4 (July 1959): 255–67, esp. 262–63.

  37.On Tugwell’s slogan “nothing is too good for these people,” see Rodney Dutcher, “Behind the Scenes in Washington,” [Biloxi, MS] Daily Herald, September 12, 1937. Bolles wrote another critical article on FDR as an extravagant spender; see “Our Uneconomic Royalist: The High Cost of Dr. Roosevelt,” American Mercury 43, no. 171 (March 1938): 265–69.

  38.See “Mission of the New Deal by Rexford G. Tugwell,” New York Times, May 27, 1934; “Address Delivered at the National Conference of Social Work, Kansas City, May 21, 1934,” in Rexford Tugwell, The Battle for Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), 319. Tugwell defended the theory of a flexible Constitution and the role of government mediating imbalances in class power; see “Design for Government” and “The Return to Democracy,” ibid., 12–13, 204–5; also see Simeon Strunsky, “Professor Tugwell Defines the Battle for Democracy,” New York Times, January 6, 1935.

  39.For Tugwell’s defense of the loans, see Tugwell, “The Resettlement Idea,” 161. For the popularity of the program, see Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 423–24; also see Eleanor Roosevelt, “Subsistence Farmsteads,” Forum and Century 91, no. 4 (April 1934): 199–202; Wesley Stout, “The New Homesteaders,” Saturday Evening Post 207, no. 5 (August 4, 1934): 5–7, 61–65, esp. 7, 64; and Conkin, Tomorrow a New World, 116–17.

  40.For the impact of Arthurdale, see testimony of C. B. Baldwin in Congressional Committee on Non-Essential Services, May 18, 1943, 4307; also see Linda T. Austin, “Unrealized Expectations: Cumberland, the New Deal’s Only Homestead Project,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 68, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 433–50, esp. 443–44. On the Alabama communities, see Charles Kenneth Roberts, “New Deal Community-Building in the South: The Subsistence Homesteads Around Birmingham, Alabama,” Alabama Review 66, no. 2 (April 2013): 83–121,
esp. 91, 95–96, 99, 102, 110, 114–16; and Jack House, “547 Homesteaders in District Now Enjoy More Abundant Life,” Birmingham News-Age Herald, May 9, 1943. I want to thank Charles Roberts for sending me this article.

  41.For images of homesteader and plow, see Frank L. Kluckhorn, “Subsistence Homestead Idea Spreading,” New York Times, December 9, 1934; also see Carl Mydans, “Homestead, Penderlea, North Carolina” (August 1936), and Arthur Rothstein, “Plowing a Field at Palmerdale, Alabama. New Homestead in Background” (February 1937), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF33-T01-00717-M2, LC-USF34-005891-E; and Roberts, “New Deal Community-Building in the South,” 91.

  42.On Penderlea, see Gordon Van Schaack, “Penderlea Homesteads: The Development of a Subsistence Homesteads Project,” Landscape Architecture (January 1935): 75–80, esp. 80. On the discontents of the residents, see Thomas Luke Manget, “Hugh MacRae and the Idea of the Farm City: Race, Class, and Conservation in the New South, 1905–1935” (M.A. thesis, Western Carolina University, 2012), 154–57; and Harold D. Lasswell, “Resettlement Communities: A Study of the Problems of Personalizing Administration” (1938), in Series II: Writings, Box 130, Folders 135–39, Harold Dwight Lasswell Papers, Yale University, New Haven, CT; Conkin, Tomorrow a New World, 290–91.

  43.On the lack of a cooperative agricultural culture in the South, see Charles M. Smith, “Observations on Regional Differentials in Cooperative Organization,” Social Forces 22, no. 4 (May 1944): 437–42, esp. 437, 439, 442. On visitors to the Greenbelt town, see Gilbert A. Cam, “United States Government Activity in Low-Cost Housing, 1932–1938,” Journal of Political Economy 47, no. 3 (June 1939): 357–78, esp. 373. On prefabrication, see Greg Hise, “From Roadside Camps to Garden Homes: Housing and Community Planning for California’s Migrant Work Force, 1935–1941,” Perspectives in Vernacular 5 (1995): 243–58, esp. 243, 249; also see Conkin, Tomorrow a New World, 171–72; Philip K. Wagner, “Suburban Landscapes for Nuclear Families: The Case of the Greenbelt Towns in the United States,” Built Environment 10, no. 1 (1984): 35–41, esp. 41; and Will W. Alexander, “A Review of the Farm Security Administration’s Housing Activities,” Housing Yearbook, 1939 (Chicago: National Association of Housing Officials, 1939), 141–43, 149–50. Only Huey Long protested the exclusion, and led a one-man filibuster in the Senate. On the exclusion of agricultural workers from Social Security, see Mary Poole, The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 33, 39, 41, 43, 45, 94; and Earl E. Muntz, “The Farmer and Social Security,” Social Forces 24, no. 3 (March 1946): 283–90.