White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  22.David Grimes, “Put Bubba in White House,” Sarasota Herald-Tribune, July 21, 1992; Nancy Kruh (Dallas Morning News) syndicated in [Spokane, WA] Spokesman Review, February 14, 1993; Michael Kelly, “A Magazine Will Tell All About Bubba,” New York Times, February 4, 1993.

  23.On Greenberg’s use of “Slick Willie,” see Paul Greenberg, “Truth Catches Slick Willie,” Tuscaloosa News, February 19, 1992; Paul Greenberg, “Why Yes, I Did Dub Bill Clinton ‘Slick Willie,’ but Then, He Earned It,” [Fredericksburg, VA] Free Lance-Star, June 28, 2004; “Just Why Is Slick Willy So Smooth?,” [Burlington, NC] Times-News, April 6, 1992; Sandy Grady, “Clinton’s Biggest Enemy Is Image of ‘Slick Willie,’” The Day [New London, CT], April 16, 1992; Martin Schram, “Wherever Bill Clinton Goes, Slick Willie Is Sure to Follow,” Rome [GA] News-Tribune, April 6, 1992; Walter D. Myers, “‘Slick Willie’ Clinton Inherits the Woes of Tricky Dick,” [Bend, OR] Bulletin, April 2, 1992.

  24.See Schieffer and Gates, The Acting President, 180. Colorado congresswoman Patricia Schroeder gave Reagan the name “Teflon-coated president”; see Steven V. Roberts, “Many Who See Failure in His Policies Don’t Blame Their Affable President,” New York Times, March 2, 1984; Donald Kaul, “Slick Willie Starts to Look Like Barney Fife,” [Wilmington, NC] Star-News, February 11, 1993.

  25.On Clinton singing the Elvis song, see “Elvis Presley Sighting in Clinton Campaign,” Allegheny Times [PA], April 3, 1992. Clinton’s staff also used Paul Simon’s song “Graceland” to introduce the candidate before his speeches; see “Elvis Running,” Ellensburg [WA] Daily Record, April 3, 1992. For Elvis as the reporters’ nickname for Clinton, see John King, “Slick Willie’s Calling on Elvis,” Lodi [CA] News-Sentinel, May 4, 1992; “Clinton Inaugural: He’d Invite Elvis,” Gainesville [FL] Sun, May 1, 1992. For Clinton communing with the spirit of Elvis, see “Clinton Enjoying His Lead: He’s Finding Time to Joke About Elvis,” Reading Eagle, October 22, 1992. For an Elvis impersonator participating in the inaugural parade, see “‘Elvis’ to Perform in Grand Parade for Clinton,” New Straits Times [Singapore], December 16, 1992. On Bush hiring an impersonator and The Arsenio Hall Show, see Daniel Marcus, Happy Days and Wonder Years (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 156, 166–67.

  26.For “Elvis is America,” and the Elvis image as a way to attract more centrist voters, see “Elvis and Bill: Southern Boys with Thangs in Common” [Wilmington, NC] Star-News (reprinted from the Economist), August 18, 1996; and Marcus, Happy Days, 155, 158.

  27.Bill Maxwell, “‘Seen as ‘White Trash’: Maybe Some Hate Clinton Because He’s Too Southern,” [Wilmington, NC] Star-News, June 19, 1994. On Noonan gushing over Reagan and Pope John Paul II, two men she wrote books about, see Kenneth L. Woodward, “‘John Paul the Great,’ by Peggy Noonan,” New York Times, December 18, 2005; Helen Eisenbach, “Looking for Mr. Right,” New York (September 1, 2004); and on Gergen and Noonan seeing Reagan as a beloved father figure who transcended his party, see Marcus, Happy Days, 83; and Peggy Noonan, What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era (New York: Random House, 1990), 127.

  28.Maxwell, “Seen as ‘White Trash.’”

  29.For the revival of the “Slick Willie” slur, see Jack Germond and Jules Witcover, “Clinton’s Deposition Reveals Reputation as ‘Slick Willie,’” Reading [PA] Eagle, March 12, 1998. William Rusher argued that Clinton was white trash, that with his “record of moral squalor and criminal misconduct, we must now add an essential tackiness straight out of the trailer parks of Arkansas”; see William Rusher, “White Trash in the White House,” Cherokee County [GA] Herald, February 7, 2001; Jack Hitt, “Isn’t It Romantic?,” Harper’s Magazine (November 1998): 17–20, esp. 17; “Second White House Response to Starr,” Washington Post, September 12, 1998.

  30.See Marianne Means, “But Bill Clinton’s No Thomas Jefferson,” [Wilmington, NC] Star-News, November 7, 1998; Thomas J. Lucente Jr. “No Comparison for Clinton and Jefferson,” Lawrence Journal-World, November 20, 1998; Georgie Anne Geyer, “Clinton and Jefferson: An Odd Comparison,” Victoria Advocate, November 12, 1998. There was a cartoon accompanying Geyer’s article of Clinton calling Jefferson and telling him not to worry about the DNA evidence. “The People don’t give a damn!” Also see Andrew Burstein, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Nancy Isenberg, “Three Perspectives on America’s Jefferson Fixation,” Nation (November 30, 1998): 23–28.

  31.Jeffery Jackson, “Understanding Clinton: The King Is Dead; Long Live the King,” Nevada Daily Mail, August 19, 1999.

  32.See Toni Morrison, “The Talk of the Town,” New Yorker (October 5, 1998): 31–32, esp. 32.

  33.Kathleen Parker, “Democratic Race Seems to Be Bill vs. Oprah,” The Item, December 1, 2007. Andrew Young also made the crude comment that Clinton had slept with more black women than Barack Obama. On Klein’s Primary Colors, see Eric Lott, “The First Boomer: Bill Clinton, George W., and Fictions of State,” Representations 84, no. 1 (November 2003): 100–122, esp. 101, 108, 111.

  34.Frank Rich, “Palin and McCain’s Shotgun Marriage,” New York Times, September 7, 2008; Erica Jong, “The Mary Poppins Syndrome,” Huffington Post, October 4, 2008; Eliza Jane Darling, “O Sister! Sarah Palin and the Parlous Politics of Poor White Trash,” Dialectical Anthropology 33, no. 1 (March 2009): 15–27, esp. 19, 21. On Wasilla as a redneck town, see Jill Clarke of the Associated Press, “Alaskan Views of Clinton Reflect Those in the Lower 48,” [Schenectady, NY] Daily Gazette, January 16, 1999.

  35.Monica Davey, “Palin Daughter’s Pregnancy Interrupts G.O.P. Convention Script,” New York Times, September 2, 2008; Stephanie Clifford, “Readers See Bias in Us Weekly’s Take on Sarah Palin,” New York Times, September 8, 2008; Maureen Dowd, “My Fair Veep,” New York Times, September 10, 2008; David Firestone, “Sarah Palin’s Alaskan Rhapsody,” New York Times, December 9, 2010.

  36.It was discovered that Palin had spent “tens of thousands” more than the disclosed $150,000 and that $20,000 to $40,000 had been used for her husband’s clothes; see “Hackers and Spending Sprees,” Newsweek (November 5, 2008); also see Darling, “O Sister! Sarah Palin,” 24.

  37.Sam Tanenhaus, “North Star: Populism, Politics, and the Power of Sarah Palin,” New Yorker (December 7, 2009); 84–89, esp. 89.

  38.Maureen Dowd, “White Man’s Last Stand,” New York Times, July 15, 2009; on Gretchen Wilson, see Nadine Rubbs, “‘Redneck Woman’ and the Gendered Poetics of Class Rebellion,” Southern Cultures 17, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 44–77, esp. 56, and endnote 24 on page 69. For Palin as a hillbilly and prima donna, see Gail Collins, “A Political Manners Manual,” New York Times, November 8, 2008.

  39.Justin Elliot, “Trig Trutherism: The Definitive Debunker: Salon Investigates the Conspiracy Theory: Is Sarah Palin Really the Mother of Trig Palin?,” Salon.com, April 22, 2011.

  40.On her accent, see Jesse Sheildlower, “What Kind of Accent Does Sarah Palin Have? Wasillan, Actually,” Slate.com, October 1, 2008; Dick Cavett, “The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla,” New York Times, opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com, November 14, 2008.

  41.William Egginton, “The Best or Worst of Our Nature: Reality TV and the Desire for Limitless Change,” Configurations 15, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 177–91, esp. 191; David Carr, “Casting Reality TV, No Longer a Hunch, Becomes a Science,” New York Times, March 28, 2004; Jim Ruttenberg, “Reality TV’s Ultimate Jungle: Simulated Presidential Politics,” New York Times, January 9, 2004; also see Brenda R. Weber, Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 143–44.

  42.Duck Dynasty was simply a modified version of The Real Beverly Hillbillies, a reality TV show that was canceled because of protests; see Appalachian Journal 31, no. 3/4 (Spring/Summer 2004): 438; Jonah Goldberg, “‘Duck Dynasty,’ Unreal Outrage,” New York Post, December 20, 2013.

  43.Mary Elizabeth Williams, “What Will It Take for TLC to Dump ‘Hon
ey Boo Boo’?,” Salon.com, October 23, 2014; Jenny Kutner, “‘Honey Boo Boo’ Star Mama June Reveals Father of Two Daughters Is a Sex Offender,” Salon.com, November 13, 2014.

  44.Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005), 1, 5–9, 14–15, 29, 51; also see James B. Stewart, “Thomas Sowell’s Quixotic Quest to Denigrate African American Culture: A Critique,” Journal of African American History 91, no. 4 (Autumn 2006): 459–66. Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways of the Old South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988). McWhiney’s work was yet another example of the rush to turn poor whites into an ethnicity, and to deny that they were/are a class. McWhiney argued, “Cracker does not signify an economic condition; rather, it defines a culture.” See Cracker Culture, xiv.

  45.Charlotte Hays, When Did White Trash Become the New Normal? A Southern Lady Asks the Impertinent Question (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2013), 7, 9, 11, 45, 172; and Hays, “When Did White Trash Become Normal?,” New York Post, November 2, 2013.

  Epilogue: America’s Strange Breed: The Long Legacy of White Trash

  1.Carl Davis et al., Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems of All 50 States, 3rd. ed. (Washington, DC: Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, 2009), 2.

  2.Jill Lepore, “Fixed: The Rise of Marriage Therapy, and Other Dreams of Human Betterment,” New Yorker (March 29, 2010).

  3.See Sean McElwee, “The Myth Destroying America: Why Social Mobility Is Beyond Ordinary People’s Control,” Salon.com, March 7, 2015; and Lisa A. Keister and Stephanie Moller, “Wealth Inequality in the United States,” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000), 63–81, esp. 72. As one scholar wrote, “If you want the American Dream, you’ll have to go to Denmark.” Also, Americans grossly underestimate wealth inequality, and if shown charts comparing the United States’ and Sweden’s wealth distribution (though without identifying the countries), respondents overwhelming choose Sweden. See Tim Koechlin, “The Rich Get Richer: Neoliberalism and Soaring Inequality,” Challenge 56, no. 2 (March/April 2013): 5–30, esp. 16–17, 20.

  4.Bryce Covert, “The First-Ever Bill to Help Low-Income Moms Afford Diapers,” Think Progress, August 13, 2014, thinkprogress.org. The large families celebrated by Republicans invited a comparison to our eugenic president Theodore Roosevelt and his six children; see Amy Bingham, “Presidential Campaign: Big GOP Families Lining Up to Fill White House,” ABC News, June 21, 2011, abcnews.go.com. It was not only the number of children but the master-race looks of the Romney and Huntsman children that got attention. Scott Stossel, an editor of Atlantic magazine, joked on his Twitter feed, “Huntsman daughters and Romney sons should get together and breed.” See Paul Harris, “Republican Candidates Seek Strength in Numbers to Show Off Family Values,” Guardian, January 7, 2012.

  5.Paul Krugman, “Those Lazy Jobless,” New York Times, September 22, 2014; “Gingrich Says Poor Children Have No Work Habits,” ABC News, December 1, 2011, abcnews.go.com.

  6.“Billy Redden—Deliverance,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBgxdROTTrE; Cory Welles, “40 Years Later, ‘Deliverance’ Causes Mixed Feelings in Georgia,” Marketplace.org, August 22, 2012; “Mountain Men: A Look at the Adaptation of James Dickey’s Novel,” Atlanta Magazine, September 2, 2011.

  INDEX

  The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. The link provided will take you to the beginning of that print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader.

  Abbott, Lyman, 188–89

  abortion, 284, 318

  Adams, Abigail, 97

  Adams, John, 5, 12, 98–99, 101, 103, 104, 139, 141, 274

  Adams, John Quincy, 113, 122, 125, 126, 131

  Adams, Samuel, 274

  Adams Chronicles, The, 274

  Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The, 3–4

  Agee, James, xvi, 227–30, 263, 292, 321

  Alexander, Will, 207, 218, 223

  Allison, Dorothy, 292, 295–97

  Alsop, George, 36

  American colonies, xiv, xv, 1–14, 43, 55–56, 64–84, 314, 318

  fertility and, 34–36, 40–41

  waste people in, 17–42

  women in, 27–28, 36–37, 40–41

  American exceptionalism, 7, 69, 190, 310, 318

  American Exodus, An (Lange), 212–13

  American Family, An, 271–72, 290

  American Gothic (Wood), 234, 234

  American Progress (Gast), 6

  American Revolution, 43, 56, 77, 81–83, 86, 88–89, 96, 97, 105, 107, 110, 153, 155, 317

  Anderson, Sherwood, 203–4

  Andrews, Sidney, 179, 180

  Andy Griffith Show, The, 233–34, 236, 252, 261, 281, 299

  Anglo-Saxons, 138–42, 146, 150–51, 160

  ants, 65–66, 69, 70

  Appalachia, 262–63, 262

  Aquinas, Thomas, 40–41

  Armstrong, Elizabeth, 13

  Armstrong, Hallock, 172

  Arp, Bill, 188

  Arthurdale, W. Va., 221

  Articles of Confederation, 105–6

  Awdeley, John, 23

  Back to the Land movement, 213–14

  Bacon, Elizabeth, 39

  Bacon, Francis, 41

  Bacon, Nathaniel, 37–39

  Bacon’s Rebellion, 37–41

  Bakker, Jim, 286–87

  Bakker, Tammy Faye, 286–90, 289, 300

  Bancroft, George, 6

  Barbé-Marbois, François, 92

  Barnwell, John, 51

  Bartlett, John Henry, 209

  Bastard, The (Caldwell), 204–5

  Bastard Out of Carolina (Allison), 292, 295–96

  Battle of New Orleans, 120, 121

  Beans of Egypt, Maine, The (Chute), 291–95

  Behn, Aphra, 40

  Bell, Alexander Graham, 194, 195

  Benton, Jesse, 123

  Benton, Thomas Hart, 123, 128–29

  Bentsen, Lloyd, 297

  Berkeley, Frances Culpeper, 40

  Berkeley, William, 28, 37–41, 46, 50

  Beverly Hillbillies, The, 4, 233–37, 234, 290

  Biden, Joe, 304–5

  Billings, Hammatt, 6–7

  Blackbeard, 49

  Black Rednecks and White Liberals (Sowell), 308

  blacks, 100, 177, 184, 190

  free, 143, 145, 157, 178–79

  Blair, Francis, Jr., 182, 183

  Blount, Roy, Jr., 269, 282–84, 286

  Blount, William, 117

  Boehner, John, 319

  Boer War, 187–88

  Bolles, Blair, 220

  Bolzius, Reverend, 61–62

  Bonnet, Stede, 49

  Bonus Army, 209, 213

  Boone, Daniel, 147, 235

  Boorstin, Daniel, 274

  Borsodi, Ralph, 213

  Bouquet, Henry, 109

  Bourke-White, Margaret, 210–11

  Boyer, Paul, xvii

  Bradford, William, 29

  breeding, xvi, 1–2, 5, 34, 36–37, 65, 78, 80–81, 83, 88, 100–101, 138, 139, 141, 143, 154, 216, 270, 313–14, 316, 318

  bloodlines and heredity, 138–40, 142, 150–51, 153, 195, 270, 273, 276, 309

  eugenics and, xv, 141, 174–205, 196, 225, 310, 314, 316, 318

  Franklin on, 68, 69

  of horses, 139, 195

  inbreeding, 136, 182, 200

  Jefferson on, 101–2, 175

  poor white trash and, 135–37

  race mixing, 100, 141–42, 182–84, 200

  slavery and, 99–100

  sterilization and, xv, 195, 196, 201

  Bremer, Fredrika, 136

  Bridewell Priso
n, 20

  Brodner, Steve, 305

  Brown, Joseph, 161, 183–84

  Bryan, Hazel, 247–49, 248

  Bryan, Jonathan, 62

  Bubba Magazine, 298

  Buchanan, James, 142

  Buchanan, Patrick, 285–86

  Buck, Carrie, 201, 202

  Buck, Emma, 201, 202

  Bucks County, Pa., 240

  Buck v. Bell, 174, 200, 201, 202, 203

  Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de, 80, 92–94, 100, 109, 148

  Burns, Robert, 207

  Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 9

  Busby, Horace, 260

  Bush, George H. W., 299

  Bush, George W., 311, 316

  Butler, Benjamin, 170

  Byrd, Harry F., 219

  Byrd, Robert, 278–79

  Byrd, William, II, 43, 48–49, 52–56, 58, 64, 68, 73, 92, 100, 106, 111, 317

  Caldwell, Erskine, xvi, 204–5

  California, 140, 143–46, 213

  Carey, Timothy, 254, 255

  Carolina, 36, 43–50, 52–56, 92, 110

  see also North Carolina; South Carolina

  carpetbaggers, 182, 185, 187

  cars, 264–65

  Carter, Billy, xvi, 264, 269, 282–84

  Carter, Jimmy, 264, 269, 279–86, 298, 299, 304, 318

  Cash, W. J., 225–26

  Cavett, Dick, 306

  Chancellor, John, 251

  Charles II, King, 43, 46

  Chase, Salmon P., 167

  Chastellux, François-Jean de, 93

  Chesapeake (Michener), 273–74

  Chesnut, Mary Boykin, 152

  children, 21, 24, 30–31, 34, 66–68, 91, 115, 135–36, 151, 317