White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  52.“Eisenhower Address on Little Rock Crisis,” New York Times, September 25, 1957; Jack Gould, “Little Rock: Television’s Treatment of Major News Developments Found Superficial” and “The Face of Democracy,” New York Times, September 15 and 26, 1957; Richard C. Bedford, “A Bigger Bomb,” Journal of Higher Education 29, no. 3 (March 1958): 127–31; Daniel, Lost Revolutions, 267; and “Tragedy at Little Rock,” Times Literary Supplement, August 28, 1959, 491.

  53.On his political success in Arkansas, see Reed, Faubus, 251, 352, 357; Daniel, Lost Revolutions, 283; Paul Greenberg, “Orval Faubus Finally Blurts Out Truth of His Defiance That Led to the Racial Crisis in Little Rock in 1957,” [Washington, DC] Observer-Reporter, June 1, 1979; “The Faubus Victory,” Lakeland [FL] Ledger, July 30, 1958; “Faubus Unperturbed by Crisis,” [Hopkinsville] Kentucky New Era, September 20, 1957; Anderson, Little Rock, 77; Thomas F. Pettigrew and Ernest Q. Campbell, “Faubus and Segregation: An Analysis of Arkansas Voting,” Public Opinion Quarterly 24, no. 3 (Autumn 1960): 436–47. Faubus had Jeff Davis in mind, because he wanted to be the “first Arkansas governor since Jeff Davis to be elected to a third term.” In the end, Faubus served six terms from 1955 to 1967. He also defended his actions based on polls. See Wallace, “Orval Faubus,” 319, 326; and “Segregation Wins on Arkansas Poll,” New York Times, January 29, 1956; “The Mike Wallace Interview: Guest Orval Faubus,” September 15, 1957, transcript, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

  54.Gilbert Millstein, “Strange Chronicle of Andy Griffith,” New York Times, June 2, 1957; “A Face in the Crowd,” Berkshire [MA] Eagle, June 6, 1957.

  55.Millstein, “Strange Chronicle of Andy Griffith.”

  56.On the film Wild River, see Henry Goodman, “Wild River by Elia Kazan,” Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (Summer 1960): 50–51; Robert Murray and Joe Heumann, “Environmental Catastrophe in Pare Lorentz’s ‘The River’ and Elia Kazan’s ‘Wild River’: The TVA, Politics, and Environment,” Studies in Popular Culture 27, no. 2 (October 2004): 47–65, esp. 55. And on the controversy in Cleveland over Gum Hollow, see “Southern Pride Ends Movie Roles for ‘White Trash,’” Ocala Star-Banner, November 15, 1959.

  57.On the aggressive marketing campaign, see syndicated article by Hollywood correspondent Erskine Johnson, “‘Bayou’ Film, Bust in 1957, Released Under New Title,” [Florence, AL] Times Daily, December 11, 1962; and Jim Knipfel, “The Brooklyn Cajun: Timothy Carey in ‘Poor White Trash,’” The Chiseler, chiseler.org/post/6558011597/the-brooklyn-cajun-timothy-carey-in-poor-white (2011). On the advertising campaign, see [Hopkinsville] Kentucky New Era, October 9, 1961; and “Compromise with Sin,” Lewiston [ME] Daily Sun, June 23, 1962.

  58.Lisa Lindquist Dorr has shown that the politics surrounding rape were more complicated. In her study of Virginia, the reputations of the white woman and the accused black man were taken into account. So the film and Lee’s novel, for dramatic effect, paint a much more skewed picture. This serves to make the white trash characters even more insidious, because the Ewells demand the protection of the code of honor without deserving it. See Lisa Lindquist Dorr, White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 79, 115–19.

  59.In the novel, Lee offers this scathing portrait of the Ewells: “No economic fluctuations changed their status—people like the Ewells lived as guests of the country in prosperity as well as in the depths of the depression. No truant officers could keep their numerous offspring in school; no public health officer could free them from congenital defects, various worms, and diseases indigenous to their filthy surroundings. . . . The Ewells gave the dump a thorough gleaning every day, and the fruits of their industry (those that were not eaten) made the plot of land around their cabin look like the playhouse of an insane child.” Lee also has Atticus Finch offer a different definition of white trash, one decoupled from poverty, as anyone, rich or poor, who tried to cheat a black man or treat him unfairly; see Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (New York: HarperCollins, 1999; originally published 1960), 194–95, 253.

  60.Though the film muted its eugenic theme, one reviewer saw Bob Ewell as a “degenerate father” and the daughter as a “poor white trash type”; see syndicated columnist Alice Hughes, “A Woman’s New York,” Reading Eagle, February 23, 1963. The New York Times called the portrayals of Bob and Mayella Ewell “almost caricatures”; see Bosley Crowther, “Screen: ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’” New York Times, February 15, 1963. For the tangled career of John Frederick Kasper, the paid agitator from New Jersey, see John Egerton, “Walking into History: The Beginning of School Desegregation in Nashville,” Southern Spaces (May 4, 2009).

  61.An Afro-American newspaper gave this description of the film Poor White Trash: “There are no Emily Post rules to raw life, and ‘Poor White Trash’ creates none in this story of a people whose way of life has stood still while time has marched on and left them in a world apart”; see “‘Poor White Trash’ in Neighborhood Runs,” Baltimore Afro-American, September 22, 1962. On Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) and the dangers of losing one’s individuality, see Anna Creadick, Perfectly Normal: The Pursuit of Normality in Postwar America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 77, 86–87. Jeans and a white T-shirt was not only the outfit of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), but also the dress of angry poor white men protesting desegregation in Nashville in 1957. See “The South: What Orval Hath Wrought,” 15.

  62.Daniels, A Southerner Discovers the South, 183, 175, 179.

  63.See “redneck” and “hillbilly,” in Dialect Notes, Vol. II, Part IV, Publications of the American Dialect Society (New Haven, CT, 1904), 418, 420. The Hatfields ruthlessly killed women as well as men, breaking a key taboo of civilized behavior; see “So Ends a Mountain Feud,” Kansas City Times, January 30, 1921. On myth about the feud, see Altina L. Waller, “Feuding and Modernization in Appalachia: The Hatfields and McCoys,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 87, no. 4 (Autumn 1989): 385–404, esp. 399, 401–2; Hal Boyle, “Arkansas Ends Hillbilly Myth,” Tuscaloosa News, May 29, 1947. On a critique of “hillbillydom” from the Arkansas Gazette, see “Hillbillies in Action,” Tuscaloosa News, August 12, 1940. On the woman having “her number,” see Mandel Sherman and Thomas R. Henry, Hollow Folk (New York, 1933), 26. A review of Hollow Folk described them as “degenerate,” and though “the inhabitants of our own race, theirs is a primitive culture”; see Robert E. L. Paris, “Hollow Folk,” American Journal of Sociology 39, no. 2 (September 1933): 256.

  64.Frank S. Nugent, “The Screen: ‘Mountain Justice,’ A Hill-Billy Anthology Is Shown at the Rialto—A New Film at the Cine Roma,” New York Times, May 13, 1937; Sharon Hatfield, “Mountain Justice: The Making of a Feminist Icon and a Cultural Scapegoat,” Appalachian Journal 23, no. 1 (Fall 1995), 26–47, esp. 28, 33, 35, 37, 42.

  65.On hillbilly bands, comic strips, and Kentucky Moonshine, see Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 86–87, 103–13, 124–36, 154–55, 161–62. On Minnie Pearl, see Pamela Fox, “Recycled Trash: Gender and Authenticity in Country Music Autobiography,” American Quarterly 50, no. 2 (1998): 234–66, esp. 253–54. For the connection between “radio rubes” like Minnie Pearl and the vaudeville circuit, see Bill C. Malone, “Radio and Personal Appearances: Sources and Resources,” Western Folklore 30, no. 3, Commercialized Folk Music (July 1971): 215–25, esp. 216–17.

  66.“The Hillbilly in Huey Long’s Chair,” Milwaukee Journal, January 4, 1946. Davis had a bachelor’s degree in history and taught history at Dodd College for women, but had an M.A. thesis in psychology; his thesis, which he earned in 1927, was on the rather racist topic of intellectual differences among whites, blacks, and mulattoes. He sang songs with his band on the campaign trail. His greatest hit was “You Are My Sunshine.” He refused to run a negative campaign. He ran
for governor and won one term in 1944–48, and another in 1960–64. He rode his horse up the capitol steps in 1963. On Davis, see Angie Reese, “Jimmie Davis: From Sharecropper’s Cabin to the Governor’s Mansion” (M.A. thesis, Southeastern Louisiana University, 1995), 1, 4–9, 14–16, 30, 99.

  67.See William C. Pratt, “Glen H. Taylor: Public Image and Reality,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 60, no. 1 (January 1969): 10–16; “O’Daniel Writes Own Songs for Vote Campaign” and “Biscuit Passing Pappy,” [New Orleans] Times-Picayune, July 25 and August 14, 1938; “Hill-Billy Sense,” Cleveland Gazette, September 10, 1938; P. McEvoy, “Pass the Biscuits, Pappy,” Reader’s Digest, October 1938, 9–12. On Dewey Short, see “Hillbilly ‘Demosthenes,’” Milwaukee Journal, August 3, 1942.

  68.See W. R. Crocker, “Why Do Americans Dislike the English?,” Australian Quarterly 21, no. 1 (March 1949): 27–36, esp. 31–33. Crocker made references to both Jimmy Davis and Pappy O’Daniel.

  69.On the time-warp theme, see Brooks Blevins, “In the Land of a Million Smiles: Twentieth-Century Americans Discover the Arkansas Ozarks,” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 1–35, esp. 2, 20, 24. On the classless myth, see speech by Supreme Court justice Hughes on the hill folk of Appalachia in “Merit Not Birth America’s Basis,” [Columbia, SC] State, February 25, 1915. On the theme that mountain people practiced true equality, a place where “pride of birth and social standing meant nothing,” see the advertisement for a movie based on the 1903 classic mountain novel The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, in Lexington Herald, March 21, 1920. By the fifties, the egalitarian theme had become more pronounced; see Julia McAdoo, “Where the Poor Are Rich,” American Mercury (September 1955): 86–89; also see Brooks Blevins, “Wretched and Innocent: Two Mountain Regions in the National Consciousness,” Journal of Appalachian Studies 7, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 257–71, esp. 264–65. On the “Park Avenue Hillbilly,” see Mark Barron, “Broadway Notes,” [New Orleans] Times-Picayune, July 23, 1950.

  70.See promotion for Hillbilly Jamboree staring Red Smith and Elvis Presley, [New Orleans] Times-Picayune, September 1, 1955. For touring with Griffith in 1955, see Hedda Hopper, “Elvis Was Nice to Andy,” Times-Picayune, February 6, 1957; and Goddard Lieberson, “‘Country’ Sweeps Country: Hillbilly Music Makers Have Parlayed a Blend of Blues, Spirituals and Folk Tunes into a $50-Million-Year Business,” New York Times, July 28, 1957; Dick Kleiner, “Elvis Presley,” Sarasota Journal, July 11, 1956; Vivian Boultinghouse, “The Guy with the Blue Suede Shoes,” Times-Picayune, July 1, 1956; and Hedda Hopper, “Hollywood: Star Switch on Goodwin,” Times-Picayune, August 2, 1956.

  71.On Elvis’s background in Tupelo, Mississippi, see Lloyd Shearer, “Elvis Presley,” Parade, September 30, 1956, 8–13, esp. 11; and Michael T. Bertrand, “A Tradition-Conscious Cotton City: (East) Tupelo, Mississippi, Birthplace of Elvis Presley,” in Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History, ed. Karen L. Cox (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2012), 87–109, esp. 87–88, 91–92, 95–97. On his female fans as mountain mules, see Jock Carroll, “Side-Burned Dream Boat of Red-Blooded Youth? This Reviewer (Male) Says I Like Elvis Presley,” Ottawa Citizen, September 8, 1956.

  72.Noel E. Parmenter Jr., “Tennessee Spellbinder: Governor Clement Runs on Time,” Nation (August 11, 1956): 114–17, esp. 113, 116; “Democrats: Answer to Dick Nixon,” Newsweek (July 23, 1956): 19–20; Harold H. Martin, “The Things They Say About the Governor!,” Saturday Evening Post (January 29, 1955): 22–23, 48–51, 54–55, 58, esp. 22.

  73.Martin, “The Things They Say About the Governor!,” 22, 48; “Democrats: Answer to Dick Nixon,” 20; Parmenter, “Tennessee Spellbinder,” 117; “Democrats’ Keynote,” Time (July 23, 1956): 14. On Folsom, see Paul E. Deutschman, “Outsized Governor: ‘Big Jim’ Folsom Loathes Shoes and Grammar—But Loves Nature, Girls and Being Top Man in Alabama,” Life (September 1, 1947): 59–65, esp. 59, 64–65; “‘Clowning’ Blamed in Folsom’s Defeat” and “Politician in Squeeze: Gov. James E. Folsom,” New York Times, June 6, 1948, and February 25, 1956; and Robert J. Norrell, “Labor at the Ballot Box: Alabama Politics from the New Deal to the Dixiecrat Movement,” Journal of Southern History 57, no. 2 (May 1991): 201–34, esp. 230.

  74.For the text of his address, see “Democratic National Convention: Keynote Address, by Frank Clement, Governor of Tennessee,” Vital Speeches of the Day, vol. 22 (September 1, 1956): 674–79; and John Steinbeck, “‘Demos Get Selves Voice in Clement’—Steinbeck,” [New Orleans] Times-Picayune, August 15, 1956.

  75.On Clement’s later comment, see Robert E. Corlew III, “Frank Goad Clement and the Keynote Address of 1956,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 36, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 95–107, esp. 107. There were other critical reviews of his performance, some calling his address mere “bombast,” or a forensic exercise rather than real eloquence; see “The New Democrats: A Democratic Party of Youth and Energy,” Life (August 27, 1957): 20–36, esp. 22; and George E. Sokolsky, “‘A Torrent of Oratory,’ Gadsden Times, August 17, 1956; also see memorandum from Horace Busby to Bill Moyers, July 29, 1964, in the appendix of Robert Mann, Daisy Petals and Mushroom Clouds: LBJ, Barry Goldwater, and the Ad That Changed American Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), 122.

  76.Hodding Carter, “Hushpuppies, Stew—and Oratory: Southern Politicians Must Be Showmen, Too, but Behind Their Act Is a Deadly Seriousness,” New York Times Magazine, June 18, 1950; “The Politician as Bore,” Chicago Tribune, March 23, 1956.

  77.“Hillbilly Chivalry,” Chicago Tribune, March 15, 1958.

  78.On Estes Kefauver and “Big Jim” Folsom, see William G. Carleton, “The Southern Politician—1900 and 1950,” Journal of Politics 13, no. 2 (May 1951): 215–31, esp. 220–21; Corlew, “Frank Goad Clement,” 106–7; and for linking Clement’s fall from prominence to his “corn-filled keynote speech,” see “Politics: Ole Frank,” Time (August 10, 1962): 13. On Johnson as the second most powerful man in the nation, see Stewart Alsop, “Lyndon Johnson: How Does He Do It?,” Saturday Evening Post (January 24, 1959): 13–14, 38, 43, esp. 13–14. And on Johnson hanging Clay’s portrait in the oval office, see “Portraits of Washington, Clay and Jackson on Walls,” New York Times, March 2, 1964. On Johnson as a teacher, see John R. Silber, “Lyndon Johnson as Teacher,” Listener and BBC Television Review 73 (May 20, 1965): 728–30.

  79.On Johnson earning sympathy, see James Reston, “The Office and the Man: Johnson Emerges Grave and Strong as the Presidency Works Its Change,” New York Times, November 28, 1963; Anthony Lewis, “Johnson Style: Earthy and Flamboyant,” New York Times, November 24, 1963; “Lyndon Baines Johnson,” New York Times, August 27, 1964. On his close associates rejecting the rural hick portrait, see the AP article that appeared in numerous newspapers: Arthur Edson, “Johnson Called Complex Person Mistaken as a ‘Cornball’” Milwaukee Journal, December 28, 1963. On “digging down deeply,” see “Johnson’s Way,” New York Times, April 26, 1964; and Russell Baker, “President’s Manner, Like Jackson’s, a Folksy One,” New York Times, November 2, 1964. On his showmanship and deep emotions, see Marianne Means, “Despite His Informal Air, LBJ Seldom Shows Sensitive Side,” San Antonio Light, October 10, 1965. The ambivalence over Johnson continued during his presidency. As one reporter wrote in 1968 on his accession to the presidency, “Just plain folksy or just plain corny, spontaneous or devious, inspiring persuader or ruthless arm-twister, Lyndon Baines Johnson was now firmly in the saddle”; see AP correspondent Saul Pett, “The Johnson Years: The Arc of Paradox,” Hutchinson [KS] News, April 14, 1968.

  80.See Lyndon Johnson, “Remarks in Johnson City, Tex., Upon Signing the Elementary and Secondary Education Bill, April 11, 1965,” in Public Papers of the Presidents: Johnson, 412–14, esp. 414. On his echoes of Odum, see Lyndon B. Johnson, “My Political Philosophy,” Texas Quarterly 1, no. 4 (Winter 1958): 17–22. On the strategic plan for winning over southern legislators, see William B. Cannon, �
�Enlightened Localism: A Narrative Account of Poverty and Education in the Great Society,” Yale Law and Policy Review 4, no. 1 (Fall–Winter 1985): 6–60, esp. 39, 43; John A. Andrew III, Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998), 120–21. On Lady Bird Johnson’s visit without her husband, see Nan Robertson, “Mrs. Johnson Visits Poverty Area,” New York Times, March 22, 1964.

  81.On photographs, see “Johnson and the People,” New York Times, May 3, 1964. On poor white images, also see “Johnson’s Great Society—Lines Are Drawn,” New York Times, March 14, 1965; and John Ed Pearce, “The Superfluous People of Hazard, Kentucky,” Reporter 28, no. 1 (January 3, 1963): 33–35; Homer Bigart, “Kentucky Miners: A Grim Winter,” New York Times, October 20, 1963; Robyn Muncy, “Coal-Fired Reforms: Social Citizenship, Dissident Miners, and the Great Society,” Journal of American History (June 2009): 72–98, esp. 74, 90–95; and Ronald Eller, Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 20, 23–25, 30–32, 36–39; David Torstensson, “Beyond the City: Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in Rural America,” Journal of Policy History 25, no. 4 (2013): 587–613, esp. 591–92, 596, 606.