White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class In America

Nancy Isenberg

Atlantic Books, £20

Review by Brian Morton

NANCY Isenberg’s book is too tautly and accessibly written to have been merely a niche academic study. It first appeared during the fractious American presidential election campaign of 2016, and gained a whole new audience after November’s shock result. Who voted for Trump? And why had the liberal elite and professional middle class not seen them coming?

Isenberg radically overturns any surviving notion of America as a classless meritocracy. The real surprise words in her subtitle, though, are “400-year” and “untold”. Trump didn’t create a new disaffected constituency. It had always been there, right from colonial times. Its history isn’t exactly untold, just systematically suppressed.

The schoolbook version of American history has small groups of religious dissidents and dashing adventurers battling the Atlantic to find freedom and opportunity, clashing with a fierce indigenous population and surviving conditions to build a new kind of nation that stands out like a “City upon a Hill”.

The real version is that the American colonies were seen as a convenient dumping ground for what were already in the 17th century regarded as “waste people”, the “scum” and “offscourings” (that is, shit) of a steadily urbanising society. In The Planters Plea, written in 1630, John White wrote that “Colonies ought to be Emunctories or Sinkes of States: to drayne away the filth”. The school version makes something of the practice of indentured servitude and makes it sound like a mutually contracted and mutually beneficial arrangement quite different from slavery, when in fact it was almost as odious. Isenberg recoils from saying it, not least because her entire thesis is about class rather than identity or racial politics, but while the black slave population was eventually, painfully and incompletely enfranchised, the white underclass never was. Its straightforward job was to break a little ground, manure it with offscourings and then die.

Isenberg makes it clear that American politics had seen upsurges of populism many times before Donald Trump came along. Andrew Jackson, Jeff Davis of Arkansas, Big Jim Folsom of Alabama, Lyndon Johnson and even in his own way Bill Clinton all played a populist card, to greater or lesser effect. And at the beginning of the 20th century Theodore Roosevelt and others in the political elite seriously entertained eugenics as a solution to the frightening rise of an in-bred, disease-ridden and feeble-minded rural population.

Isenberg’s meticulous historical research is supported by an impressive array of cultural evidence. She points out that while most music historians make much of Elvis Presley’s emulation of black music (and more incidentally, his Native American blood), he was in every significant respect a poor-white country boy, and Graceland was his Trump Tower. There is a thriving literature at the moment that attempts to redress the prejudice directed at what used to be called, with a note of pride, “hillbilly” or “redneck” music. Hipsters will tell you that they listen to pretty much every style, “except country”. They’re blinded by the rhinestones and don’t see the no-hope poverty underneath. Perhaps only Dolly Parton, whose between-song chats are solid social history, has managed to break through.

Good as her cultural analysis is, Isenberg misses a few quite obvious tricks and a few intriguing questions. She might have looked at The Silence of the Lambs, a drama about class wrapped up in a diversionary story about serial killers and psychological profiling. Dr Hannibal Lector (the name suggests educated – classically, even – literate, urbane) taunts Clarice Starling (country singer) for her accent, her good bag and cheap shoes. He calls her a “rube” and suggests that not even a good bag, a whiff of l’Air du Temps and a Quantico training lifts her above “po’white trash”. And look at the landscapes of the late Jonathan Demme’s film: it’s about the clash between urban and rural values. Likewise the equally violent Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in which the murderous rednecks are models of family loyalty, self-sufficiency and stoicism, their middle-class victims snivel and bicker and even mistreat a paraplegic relative in a wheelchair.

Similarly, while Isenberg makes interesting play with now old-fashioned American TV dramas such as Green Acres, The Beverley Hillbillies (Trumpdom personified!) and The Dukes of Hazzard, she makes no reference to a more obvious recent example. My favourite characters of all in The Simpsons are Cletus and Brandine Spuckler and their upwards of 70 children (Hunter, Normal Head, Rumer, Scout, Condoleeza Marie, Crystal Meth, Incest, Rubella . . . don’t start me) whose apparent dysfunction fails to conceal deep bonds of family loyalty and perseverance, in sharp contrast to the warring selfishness of the titular characters and most of the urban families that surround them. Are we supposed merely to laugh at the Spucklers? Or do we not secretly admire their backwoods morality and survivalism? It’s one great measure of Isenberg’s success that even after 450 detailed pages you keep looking for new examples and new questions: an important book.