White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  82.On Johnson’s hat, see “Random Notes from All Over: Johnson Says Aye to LBJ Hats,” New York Times, February 17, 1964. On the poor, see Marjorie Hunter, “President’s Tour Dramatized Issue” and “Johnson Pledges to Aid the Needy,” New York Times, April 26, 1964, and September 21, 1964; Franklin D. Roosevelt, “State of the Union Address,” January 11, 1944.

  83.Bill Moyers, “What a Real President Was Like: To Lyndon Johnson the Great Society Meant Hope and Dignity,” Washington Post, November 13, 1988. On manipulation of white trash pride in Faulkner’s writing, see John Rodden, “‘The Faithful Gravedigger’: The Role of ‘Innocent’ Wash Jones and the Invisible ‘White Trash’ in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!,” Southern Literary Journal 43, no. 1 (Fall 2010): 23–38, esp. 23, 26, 30–31; and Jacques Pothier, “Black Laughter: Poor White Short Stories Behind Absalom, Absalom! and The Hamlet,” in William Faulkner’s Short Fiction, ed. Hans H. Skei (Oslo: Solum Forlag, 1977), 173–184, esp. 173. Nearly thirty years after he wrote A Southerner Discovers the South, Jonathan Daniels wrote of the unfulfilled promise of the American dream in the South. The “New South” was still the Old South, poor whites and blacks remained poor together, and “none but the blind can believe that in the South the unfortunate and dispossessed are only of one color.” See Daniels, “The Ever-Ever Land,” Harper’s Magazine (April 1965): 183–88.

  84.For the Republican campaign attack film, see Nan Robertson, “G.O.P. Film Depicts ‘Moral Decay,’” New York Times, October 21, 1964; and Mann, Daisy Petals and Mushroom Clouds, 94–95. On Billy Carter’s famous comment, see “You’ll Have to Pardon Billy,” Milwaukee Sentinel, February 17, 1977; also see John Shelton Reed, Southern Folk, Plain and Fancy: Native White Social Types (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 38. On Malcolm X, see William E. Leuchtenburg, The White House Looks South: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Lyndon B. Johnson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005) 327.

  85.On Elvis’s Cadillac, see Joe Hyams, “Meet Hollywood’s Biggest Spenders,” This Week Magazine, February 25, 1962. The film’s attack was based on stories about Johnson driving his car fast and drinking beer, but they added the references to him throwing cans out the window. On LBJ’s wild driving and posing with a piglet, see “Presidency: ‘Mr. President, You’re Fun,’” Time (April 3, 1964): 23–24. On the symbolic meaning of freedom (escaping your ancestors) associated with cars in American culture, see Deborah Clark, Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 165.

  86.On Fulbright and McGovern, see Albert Lauterbach, “How Much Cutback for Consumers,” Challenge 6, no. 7 (April 1958): 72–76, esp. 72; and Joseph Green, “Events & Opinions,” The Clearing House 32, no. 8 (April 1958): 485–86; also “Presley Termed a Passing Fancy,” New York Times, December 17, 1956. On Elvis’s “orgiastic” dancing, see Bosley Crowther, “The Screen: Culture Takes a Holiday: Elvis Presley Appears in ‘Love Me Tender,’” New York Times, November 16, 1956.

  87.Robertson, “G.O.P. Film Depicts ‘Moral Decay.’” Elvis’s delinquent ways led a church congregation in Jackson, Florida, to pray for his soul; see “Elvis a Different Kind of Idol,” Life (August 27, 1956): 101–9, esp. 108–9. Elvis was considered the idol of delinquent boys; see Martin Gold, Status Forces in Delinquent Boys (Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research, 1963), 104; and Eugene Gilbert, “Typical Presley Fan Is a ‘C’ Student; Aloof, Indifferent,” [New Orleans] Times-Picayune, March 14, 1958. On Appalachians having no respect for working hard and striving to move up the ladder, see Roscoe Griffin, “When Families Move . . . from Cinder Hollow to Cincinnati,” Mountain Life and Work (Winter 1956): 11–20, esp. 16, 18. On the lure of being lazy, see Damon Runyon, “My Old Home Town—The Passing of Crazy Bill,” Milwaukee Sentinel, September 8, 1957; Eller, Uneven Ground, 26.

  88.Harrington wrote, “But the real explanation of why the poor are where they are is that they made the mistake of being born to the wrong parents, in the wrong section of the country, in the wrong industry, or in the wrong racial or ethnic group. Once that mistake has been made, they could have been paragons of will and morality, but most of them would never have had a chance to get out of the other America.” See Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (Baltimore: Penguin, 1962), 21. Another researcher used a different set of analogies that emphasized inherited incapacities: he said the poor were “underendowed,” “economic invalids,” and possessed an “inadequate personal patrimony.” See Oscar Ornati, “Affluence and the Risk of Poverty,” Social Research 31, no. 3 (Autumn 1964): 333–46, esp. 341–45; and see Eller, Uneven Ground, 101.

  89.John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 40th anniversary ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 235–37; Harrington, The Other America, 9–14, 18, 34.

  90.Lewis H. Lapham, “Who Is Lyndon Johnson?,” Saturday Evening Post (September 9, 1965): 21–25, 65–67, 70–72, esp. 66, 71. On the idiom of “big ones” as rich white folks and poor whites as craving land and respect, see Jack Temple Kirby, “Black and White in Rural South, 1915–1954,” Agricultural History 58, no. 3 (July 1984): 411–22, esp. 418; also see “Johnson’s Rare Word: ‘Caliche,’ a Soil Crust,” New York Times, January 5, 1965; “Politics Was Johnson’s Work, Rest, and Relaxation,” [Clearfield, PA] Progress, January 24, 1973; Ryan Greene, “Sideglances in the Mirror,” Gilmer [TX] Mirror, May 26, 1966.

  91.James Reston, “Paradox and Reason,” New York Times, January 21, 1965.

  92.Lyndon Johnson, “Remarks to Students Participating in the U.S. Senate Youth Program,” February 5, 1965, Public Papers of the Presidents: Johnson, 148–51, esp. 150.

  Chapter Eleven: Redneck Roots: Deliverance, Billy Beer, and Tammy Faye

  1.Mary Bernstein, “Identity Politics,” Annual Review of Sociology 31 (2005): 47–74, esp. 49, 53, 64. As Mary Louis Adams argued, “It is important to note that identity politics encompass a celebration of the group’s uniqueness as well as an analysis of its particular oppression”; see “There’s No Place Like Home: On the Place of Identity in Feminist Politics,” Feminist Review, no. 31 (Spring 1989): 22–33, esp. 25; and Douglas C. Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Mathew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1, 3.

  2.Joseph Bensman and Arthur J. Vidich, “The New Middle Classes: Their Culture and Life Styles,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 4, no. 1 (January 1970): 23–39, esp. 24–25, 29.

  3.Anne Roiphe, “‘An American Family’: Things Are Keen but Could Be Keener,” New York Times Magazine, February 18, 1973, 8–9, 41–43, 45–47, 50–53, esp. 8, 47, 50–53.

  4.Thomas Lask, “Success of Search for ‘Roots’ Leaves Alex Haley Surprised,” New York Times, November 23, 1976; Paul D. Zimmerman, “In Search of a Heritage,” Newsweek (September 27, 1976): 94–96. Even the Library of Congress classified the book as genealogy instead of fiction; see David Henige, “Class as GR Instead?,” American Libraries 31, no. 4 (April 2000): 34–35.

  5.The first compelling critique that exposed problems with his African research was Mark Ottaway, “Tangled Roots,” Sunday Times (London), April 10, 1977, 17, 21. His conclusions were reconfirmed by an African scholar who explained that the griot, or family storyteller, was unreliable, and told the inquirer what he wanted to hear. (Haley failed to tape the interview, relied on only one informant, and when other information contradicted the story he wanted, he ignored it.) See Donald R. Wright, “Unrooting Kunta Kinte: On the Perils of Relying on Encyclopedic Informants,” History in Africa 8 (1981): 205–17, esp. 206, 209–13. For Haley’s response to Ottaway’s criticism and his rationale for the unrealistic portrayal of Kinte’s village, see Robert D. McFadden, “Some Points of ‘Roots’ Questioned: Haley Stands by the Book
as a Symbol,” New York Times, April 10, 1977. Professional historians had different reactions to Haley’s claims: Oscar Handlin of Harvard called the book a “fraud,” and Professor Willie Lee Rose of Johns Hopkins University, an expert in slavery, concluded that the “anachronisms . . . are too numerous and chip away at the verisimilitude of central matters in which it is important to have full faith.” See Israel Shenker, “Some Historians Dismiss Report of Factual Mistakes in ‘Roots,’” New York Times, April 10, 1977.

  6.For the most thorough exposition of research errors in Roots, coauthored by a historian and genealogist, see Gary B. Mills and Elizabeth Shown Mills, “‘Roots’ and the New ‘Faction’: A Legitimate Tool for Clio?,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 89, no. 1 (January 1981): 3–26, esp. 6–19. On Haley’s class bias (making his ancestors superior to other slaves), see Mills and Mills, “‘Roots’ and the New ‘Faction,’” 25; and James A. Hijiya, “Roots: Family and Ethnicity in the 1970s,” American Quarterly 30, no. 4 (Autumn 1978): 548–56.

  7.For Haley as a hoaxer, see Stanley Crouch, “The Beloved Fraud of ‘Roots,’” Garden City Telegram, May 9, 2011; for timing of pitch to ABC, see obituary of Brandon Stoddard, who developed the Roots miniseries, Washington Post, December 29, 2014.

  8.James A. Michener, Chesapeake (New York: Random House, 1978), 158–59, 161.

  9.Ibid., 325, 803, 822, 826, 842–45, 854–55; Tom Horton, “Michener’s ‘Chesapeake’ Revisited Novel,” Baltimore Sun, October 24, 1997.

  10.See Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein, “Adamses on Screen,” in A Companion to John Adams and John Quincy Adams, ed. David Waldstreicher (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 487–509; Boorstin’s introduction, in Jack Shepherd, The Adams Chronicles: Four Generations of Greatness (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), xxxi; and Hijiya, “Roots,” 551.

  11.Pete Hamill, “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class,” New York (April 14, 1969): 24–29; Philip Shabecoff, “A Blue-Collar Voter Discusses His Switch to Nixon,” New York Times, November 6, 1972; Richard Nixon, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida, August 8, 1968,” in John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara, http://presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25968; Scott J. Spitzer, “Nixon’s New Deal: Welfare Reform for the Silent Majority,” Presidential Quarterly 42, no. 3 (September 2012): 455–81, esp. 458–62, 471, 473, 477; Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008); Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 234, 236; Michael Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 4, 30, 53, 60, 70–71, 81, 258–60; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnics Revival in Post–Civil Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 44–45, 190.

  12.See Washington syndicated NEA (Newspaper Enterprise Association) columnist Bruce Biossat, “White Poor in US Forgotten Masses,” Gadsden [AL] Times, September 14, 1969; Biossat, “Poor White Dilemma,” Sumter Daily Item, May 24, 1967; “White Tar Heels Poor, Too,” Spring Hope [NC] Enterprise, November 2, 1967; Marjorie Hunter, “To the Poor in South Carolina, Free Food Stamps Are a Source of Satisfaction and Embarrassment,” New York Times, May 18, 1969. On the role of the welfare rights movement, see Premilla Nadasen, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2005); and Felicia Kornbluh, The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); “The Work Ethic,” New York Times, November 6, 1972; Gaylord Shaw, “Welfare Ethic Advocates Hits; Leads to Vicious Cycle of Dependency—Nixon,” [New Orleans] Times-Picayune, September 4, 1972; also see “Transcript of the President’s Labor Day Address,” New York Times, September 7, 1971.

  13.Marcus Klein, “Heritage of the Ghetto,” Nation (March 27, 1976): 373–75, esp. 373.

  14.On changes in NASCAR from the forties to the seventies, see Daniel, Lost Revolutions, 94–97, 108–10, 118–20. On Dolly Parton, see “People Are Talking About: Dolly Parton,” Vogue (October 1, 1977): 300–301. On “redneck chic,” see Patrick Huber, “A Short History of Redneck: The Fashioning of a Southern White Masculine Identity,” Southern Cultures 1, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 145–66, esp. 159. On redneck country music, see Joe Edwards, “He’s a Redneck,” Reading [PA] Eagle, August 12, 1976; and Joe Edwards, “‘Redneck’ Doesn’t Have to Be Offensive,” Gadsden [AL] Times, March 25, 1983. On White Trash Cooking, see Sylvia Carter, “He’s Proud to Be ‘White Trash,’” Milwaukee Journal, December 29, 1986.

  15.See Robert Basler, “Dolly Parton: Fittin’ into Floozydom Comfortably,” [Lafayette, LA] Advertiser, April 24, 1986; Emily Satterwhite, Dear Appalachia (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2011), 131, 172, 174–75.

  16.See Lillian Smith, “White Trash” (ca. 1964 or 1965) and “The Poor White’s Future” (ca. 1964), Lillian Eugenia Smith Papers, Box 41, ms. 1283 A, and Box 43, ms. 1238 A, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens; Huber, “A Short History of Redneck,” 161.

  17.Robert Sherrill, “The Embodiment of Poor White Power,” New York Times Magazine, February 28, 1971. In 1968, a group of demonstrators from an Appalachian contingent of the Poor People’s Campaign protested at his home in Arlington. See John Yago, “Poor Encountered a Slick Senator,” Charleston Gazette, June 24, 1968; also see Sanford J. Ungar, “The Man Who Runs the Senate: Bobby Byrd: An Upstart Comes to Power,” Atlantic Monthly (September 1975): 29–35, esp. 35; and Robert C. Byrd, Robert C. Byrd: Child of the Appalachian Coalfields (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2005), 42, 53, 219–221, 223, 228, 235–37, 244–45.

  18.See cover and “New Day A’Coming in the South,” Time (May 31, 1971): 14–20, esp. 14–16. On Wallace, see Dan T. Carter, “Legacy of Rage: George Wallace and the Transformation of American Politics,” Journal of Southern History 62, no. 1 (February 1996): 3–26, esp. 10–12, 26; Randy Sanders, “‘The Sad Duty of Politics’: Jimmy Carter and the Issue of Race in His 1970 Gubernatorial Campaign,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 76, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 612–38, esp. 620–21, 623–25; and see James Clotfelter and William R. Hamilton, “Electing a Governor in the Seventies,” in American Governor in Behavioral Perspective, eds. Thad Beyle and J. Oliver Williams (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 32–39, esp. 34, 36.

  19.Sanders, “‘The Sad Duty of Politics,’” 632–33.

  20.On Dickey inventing his mountain roots, see Satterwhite, Dear Appalachia, 149–50, 508–11; and Henry Hart, “James Dickey: The World as a Lie,” The Sewanee Review 108, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 93–106; also Harkins, Hillbilly, 209. In his memoir, Dickey’s son Christopher recounted his father’s endless need to lie about his life; for a review of the memoir (Summer of Deliverance: A Memoir of Father and Son), see David Kirby, “Liar and Son,” New York Times, August 30, 1998; on Dickey’s egomania, see Benjamin Griffith, “The Egomaniac as Myth Maker” (review of The One Voice of James Dickey: His Letters and Life, 1970–1997), Sewanee Review 117, no. 1 (Winter 2009): vi–viii.

  21.In the novel, Dickey describes Bobby as “plump and pink,” and screaming and squalling. He also has Lewis voice the survivalist ethos that the four men must tap the instincts within themselves to endure their ordeal. As used goods, Bobby is unable to overcome the “taint” of his rape. See James Dickey, Deliverance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 54, 121–22, 126, 135, 167; also see Christopher Ricks, “Man Hunt,” New York Review of Books 14, no. 8 (April 23, 1970), 37–40, esp. 40; Walter Clemmons, “James Dickey, Novelist,” New York Times, March 22, 1970. On the sexualized nature of the trauma and the pact among the three survivors, see Linda Ruth Williams, “Blood Brothers,” Sight and Sound, September 1994, 16–19. For a review that focused on “sodomy-inclined hillbillies,” see Vincent Canby, “The Screen: James Dickey’s ‘Deliverance’ Arrives,” New York Times, July 31, 1972.

 
22.Not only does Drew show compassion, but he is the only one to defend the law over Lewis’s primal code of survival. See Dickey, Deliverance, 68, 70, 137; Anil Narine, “Global Trauma at Home: Technology, Modernity, ‘Deliverance,’” Journal of American Studies 42, no. 3 (December 2008): 449–70, esp. 466. On the idiot savant, see Hal Aigner, “‘Deliverance’ by John Boorman,” Film Quarterly 26, no. 2 (Winter 1972–73): 39–41, esp. 41.

  23.On discovery of this “rare breed,” Wolfe writes, “There is Detroit, hardly able to believe itself, what it has discovered, a breed of good old boys from the fastness of the Appalachian hills and flats—a handful from this rare breed—who have given Detroit . . . speed . . . and the industry can present it to a whole generation as . . . yours.” Tom Wolfe, “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!” Esquire (March 1965): 68–74, 138, 142–48, 150–52, 154–55, esp. 71, 74, 147, 155.

  24.Andrew Horton, “Hot Car Films & Cool Individualism or, ‘What We Have Here Is a Lack of Respect for the Law,’” Cinéaste 8, no. 4 (Summer 1978): 12–15, esp. 14; and James Poniewozik, “What Did The Dukes of Hazzard Really Say About the South?,” Time (July 2, 2015).

  25.Wolfe, “The Last American Hero,” 71, 74, 144.

  26.James Wooten, Dasher: The Roots and Rising of Jimmy Carter (New York: Summit Books, 1978), 280, 346–47, 354–56; and James Wooten, “The Man Who Refused to Lose: James Earl Carter Jr.,” New York Times, July 15, 1976.

  27.For Carter on the kinship he felt for Justice Hugo Black and Estes Kafauver, see Anthony Lewis, “Jimmy Carter: Southern Populist,” Morning Record, June 4, 1976. On Carter’s “log cabin” campaign style, see Frank Jackman (of the New York Daily News), “Profile: Who Is Jimmy Carter?” [St. Petersburg, FL] Evening Independent, July 15, 1976. On the Allman Brothers benefits for Carter, see Wayne King, “Rock Goes Back to Where It All Began: Rock Goes South,” New York Times, June 20, 1976. On the radio ad, see Eli Evans, “The Natural Superiority of Southern Politicians,” New York Times, January 16, 1977. For Carter describing himself as “white trash made good,” see Charles Mohr, “Reporter’s Notebook: Enigmatic Side of Carter,” New York Times, July 1, 1976. Young’s comment was aimed at the black community, where many of Carter’s critics called him a “cracker” and “redneck.” And Carter called himself a redneck; see Paul Delaney, “Many Black Democratic Leaders Voice Doubt: Fear and Distrust About Carter,” New York Times, July 6, 1976. Other political observers saw Carter as the “new roots” of a new South, because he was not a redneck; see James Wolcott, “Presidential Aesthetics: You’ve Seen the Movie (‘Nashville’), Now Meet the Candidate—Jimmy Carter,” Village Voice, January 19, 1976.