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White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America Kindle Edition

by Nancy Isenberg (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.3 5,491 ratings

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The New York Times bestseller
A New York Times Notable and Critics’ Top Book of 2016
Longlisted for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction
One of NPR's 10 Best Books Of 2016 Faced Tough Topics Head On
NPR's Book Concierge Guide To 2016’s Great Reads
San Francisco Chronicle's Best of 2016: 100 recommended books
A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2016
Globe & Mail 100 Best of 2016

“Formidable and truth-dealing . . . necessary.” —The New York Times

“This eye-opening investigation into our country’s entrenched social hierarchy is acutely relevant.”—O Magazine

In her groundbreaking bestselling history of the class system in America, Nancy Isenberg upends history as we know it by taking on our comforting myths about equality and uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing—if occasionally entertaining—poor white trash.

“When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win,” says Isenberg of the political climate surrounding Sarah Palin. And we recognize how right she is today. Yet the voters who boosted Trump all the way to the White House have been a permanent part of our American fabric, argues Isenberg.

The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement to today's hillbillies. They were alternately known as “waste people,” “offals,” “rubbish,” “lazy lubbers,” and “crackers.” By the 1850s, the downtrodden included so-called “clay eaters” and “sandhillers,” known for prematurely aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and listless minds.

Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature and scientific theories over four hundred years, Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society––where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics–-a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ’s Great Society; they haunt us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the center of major political debates over the character of the American identity.

We acknowledge racial injustice as an ugly stain on our nation’s history. With Isenberg’s landmark book, we will have to face the truth about the enduring, malevolent nature of class as well.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Formidable and truth-dealing…necessary.” – The New York Times

“This eye-opening investigation into our country’s entrenched social hierarchy is acutely relevant.” –O Magazine

“A gritty and sprawling assault on…American mythmaking.” —Washington Post

“An eloquent synthesis of the country’s history of class stratification.” –The Boston Globe

“A bracing reminder of the persistent contempt for the white underclass.” –The Atlantic

“[White Trash] sheds bright light on a long history of demagogic national politicking, beginning with Jackson. It makes Donald Trump seem far less unprecedented than today’s pundits proclaim.”—Slate

“Isenberg . . . has written an important call for Americans to treat class with the same care that they now treat race…Her work may well help that focus lead to progress.” —TIME

“With her strong academic background and accessible voice, Isenberg takes pains to reveal classism’s deep-seated roots.”–Entertainment Weekly

“Carefully researched…deeply relevant.” –Christian Science Monitor

About the Author

Actress Kirsten Potter has performed on stage, film, and television, including roles on Medium, Bones, and Judging Amy. Her narrations have won AudioFile Earphones Awards, and she earned an Audie nomination for her reading of Rise Again by Ben Tripp.

Nancy Isenberg is the author of Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography and won the Oklahoma Book Award for best book in nonfiction. She is also coauthor, with Andrew Burstein, of Madison and Jefferson.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Clinton’s embarrassing second term didn’t seem to provide lessons, insofar as the Republicans plunged ahead with their own (effectively) white trash candidate in 2008, Alaska governor Sarah Palin. The devastatingly direct Frank Rich of the New York Times referred to the Republican ticket as “Palin and McCain’s Shotgun Marriage.” Did the venerable John McCain of Arizona, ordinarily a savvy politician, have a lapse in judgment here? Slate produced an online video of Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, painting it as a forgettable wasteland, a place “to get gas and pee” before getting back on the road. Wasilla was elsewhere described as the “punch line for most redneck jokes told in Anchorage.” Erica Jong wrote in the Huffington Post, “White trash America certainly has allure for voters,” which explains the photoshopped image of Palin that appeared on the Internet days after her nomination. In a stars-and-stripes bikini, holding an assault rifle and wearing her signature black-rimmed glasses, Palin was one-half hockey mom and one-half hot militia babe.

News of the pregnancy of Palin’s teenage daughter Bristol led to a shotgun engagement to Levi Johnston, which was arranged in time for the Republican National Convention. Us Weekly featured Palin on the cover, with the provocative title, “Babies, Lies, and Scandal.” Maureen Dowd compared Palin to Eliza Doolittle of My Fair Lady fame, in getting prepped for her first off-script television interview. Could there be any more direct allusion to her questionable class origins? The Palin melodrama led one journalist to associate the Alaska clan with the plot of a Lifetime television feature. The joke was proven true to life two years later, when the backwoods candidate gave up her gig as governor and starred in her own reality TV show, titled Sarah Palin’s Alaska.

Palin’s candidacy was a remarkable event on all accounts. She was only the second female of any kind and the first female redneck to appear on a presidential ticket. John McCain’s advisers admitted that she had been selected purely for image purposes, and they joined the chorus trashing the flawed candidate after Obama’s historic victory. Leaks triggered a media firestorm over Palin’s wardrobe expense account. An angry aide categorized the Palins’ shopping spree as “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast.”

The Alaskan made an easy and attractive target. Journalists were flabbergasted when she showed no shame in displaying astounding lapses in knowledge. Her bungled interview with NBC host Katie Couric represented more than gotcha journalism: Palin didn’t just misconstrue facts; she came across as a woman who was unable to articulate a single complex idea. (The old cracker slur as “idle-headed” seemed to fit.) But neither did Andrew Jackson run as an “idea man” in an earlier century, and it was his style of backcountry hubris that McCain’s staffers had been hoping to revive. Shooting wolves from a small plane, bragging about her love of moose meat, “Sarah from Alaska” positioned herself as a regular Annie Oakley on the campaign trail.

It was not enough to rescue her from the mainstream (what she self-protectively called “lamestream”) media. Sarah Palin did not have a self-made woman’s résumé. She could not offset the “white trash” label as the Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton could. She had attended six unremarkable colleges. She had no military experience (à la navy veteran Jimmy Carter), though she did send one son off to Iraq. Writing in the New Yorker, Sam Tanenhaus was struck by Palin’s self-satisfied manner: “the certitude of being herself, in whatever unfinished condition, will always be good enough.”

Maureen Dowd quipped that Palin was a “country-music queen without the music.” She lacked the self-deprecating humor of Dolly Parton—not to mention the natural talent. The real conundrum was why, even more than how, she was chosen: the white trash Barbie was at once visually appealing and disruptive, and she came from a state whose motto on license plates read, “The Last Frontier.” The job was to package the roguish side of Palin alongside a comfortable, conventional female script. In the hit country single “Redneck Woman” (2004), Gretchen Wilson rejected Barbie as an unreal middle-class symbol—candidate Palin’s wardrobe bingeing was her Barbie moment.

Her Eliza Doolittle grand entrance came during the televised debate with Senator Joe Biden of Delaware. As the nation waited to see what she looked like and how she performed, Palin came onstage in a little black dress, wearing heels and pearls, and winked at the camera. From the neck down she looked like a Washington socialite, but the wink faintly suggested a gum-chewing waitress at a small-town diner. Embodying these two extremes, the fetching hockey mom image ultimately lost out to what McCain staffers identified as both “hillbilly” and “prima donna.”

Sex formed a meaningful subtext throughout Palin’s time of national exposure. In terms of trash talk, daughter Bristol Palin’s out‑of‑wedlock pregnancy was handled rather differently from Bill Clinton’s legendary philandering. Bloggers muddied the waters by spreading rumors about Sarah’s Down syndrome child, Trig: “Was he really Bristol’s?” they asked. A tale of baby swapping was meant to suggest a new twist on the backwoods immorality of inbred illegitimacy. Recall that it was Bill Clinton’s mother, Virginia, whose pedigree most troubled the critics. The legacy held: the rhetoric supporting eugenics (and the sterilization laws that followed) mainly targeted women as tainted breeders.

Sarah Palin’s Fargo-esque accent made her tortured speech patterns sound even worse. Former TV talk show host Dick Cavett wrote a scathing satirical piece in which he dubbed her a “serial syntax killer” whose high school English department deserved to be draped in black. He wanted to know how her swooning fans, who adored her for being a “mom like me,” or were impressed to see her shooting wolves, could explain how any of those traits would help her to govern.

We had been down this road before as citizens and voters. “Honest Abe” Lincoln was called an ape, a mudsill, and Kentucky white trash. Andrew Jackson was a rude, ill-tempered cracker. (And like Palin, his grammar was nothing to brag about.) The question loomed: At what point does commonness cease to be an asset, as a viable form of populism, and become a liability for a political actor? And should anyone be shocked when voters are swept up in an “almost Elvis-sized following,” as Cavett said Palin’s were? When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B016JPTQ9U
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books (June 21, 2016)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 21, 2016
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 12798 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 476 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #199,846 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #56 in Social Classes & Economic Disparity
- #220 in Sociology of Class
- #1,293 in History of the U.S.

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Nancy Isenberg

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Nancy Isenberg is the author of Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in Biography. She is the coauthor, with Andrew Burstein, of Madison and Jefferson (2010) and The Problem of Democracy (2019). She is the T. Harry Williams Professor of American History at LSU. Isenberg is the winner of the 2016 Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and was #4 on the 2016 Politico 50 list. She lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Charlottesville, Virginia.

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L. E. Roberts

HATED IT, BUT THANKS, NANCY, FOR WRITING IT. YOU ROCK!

Reviewed in the United States on April 21, 2017

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I gave this book five stars, which according to the website means, "I love it." I did not love it. In fact, I disliked the book in many ways. At the same time, I could not put it down. As a career military person, I had always regarded myself as mostly conservative (even while attending UC Berkeley in the 1970's). I retired from the military around the turn of the century (or millennium, whichever you prefer), and, at around 45 years old, started attempting to live an "examined life." I stopped regarding myself as a "non-partizan conservative," and felt that I was more of a "traditional semi-progressive." If that sounds stupid and naive, that is because I was stupid and naive. I was a middle-aged white man who thought that racism was behind us (except for some tiny lunatic fringe in some "Dogpatch" ultra-rural area). I also believed, buckle and thong, in our judicial system, and truly believed that a black man could get as fair a trial as a white man throughout the United States.

In the last two years of turmoil, I started reading more news online than just the BBC. I discovered Slate and The Economist, and my world view started changing. I ran across a review of this book on Slate.com. I bought it on Amazon. I started reading it early last summer, and couldn't put it down. It is meticulously researched and extremely well-written. I hated it, mainly because of how stupid it told me I was, but also for how it made me almost physically ill about how people, especially those in power with vested interests, think about and manipulate others, and about how the manipulated people are brought to commit heinous acts that are ultimately against their own interests.

During a week surveying railroad in the Mojave Desert, I finished the book and then read it again. It made me understand a lot of things that seemed kind of muddled before, like what my black friends in the military had told me, and where some of the redneck adults from my lower middle class childhood were coming from, and also what a lot of "trouble-making activists" from the 1960's to now were really saying.

While definitely lower middle class on the economic scale, my family has always put huge stock in reading and education. We were raised to never look down on others for their social and economic status. I was taught to look down upon self-proclaimed "elites", and yet to have tastes and education that were usually available only to elites. I later learned that "elites" is a term with a lot of vagueness about it. Academics and elites are definitely two different things, culturally, socially, and economically. Culturally, most "elites" wouldn't know Anatole France from the Tour de France, if they had, in fact, heard of either. Having a college degree (and I DO NOT disparage the accomplishment) does not confer upon the graduate any real claim to academia or even literacy. Often, it seems to be a hurdle that has to be taken and suffered due to family expectations. As a former military officer, I knew fellow officers who were college graduates who were yet barely literate. However unbelievably ignorant they were, they were acceptable, having come from the "right" background.

Thanks to Nancy Isenberg's book, my seventh decade (I recently turned 60) has become far more complex for me. While having been taught NOT to ever despise people of lower social/economic standing, I have to despise many of their prejudices and beliefs. While disliking elites and elitism, I find that many of them share beliefs and tastes with me (although definitely not most of them). Trying (and hopefully achieving at least a fraction) to live an "examined life" has been far more difficult after reading Ms. Isenberg's words. To say the least, learning that Locke was a major shareholder in a slave trade company makes for a certain piquancy while reading his philosophy. My semi-retired life might have been emotionally easier had I not read her book, but I will always be grateful (however annoyed) that I'm less of a stooge of politically acceptable history (not to be confused with the partizan/political battle cry of "politically correct"). In this case, "correct" and truth are two very different things. Thanks, Nancy, for bringing me the truth.

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G. C. Carter

Interesting, Informative, Scholarly Book focused on lower class society with some political insight

Reviewed in the United States on October 20, 2020

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The book entitled: “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America” by Nancy Isenberg was an interesting and informative book. Much of its focus was on the lower middle class or those near to the bottom rung of society. There were extensive scholarly references. Beyond the normal scholarship was a discussion of material like TV and movies related to the topic that captured the sense of class and how the media treated it; some readers will find this supportive of the author’s thesis but this reviewer found it a bit too tangential to the main thesis. This reviewer found discussion about the southern whites and their poverty and their diet and how the slave labor eroded the opportunity for upward mobility quite insightful.
The author, Isenberg, points out: “Trump’s favorite slogan, “Make America Great Again,” was, of course, Ronald Reagan’s first.” And goes on to say: “The argument of this book is that America’s class history is a more complicated story than we’ve previously considered. The past informs the present.” Isenberg states: “One cannot effectively lump voters together into arbitrary blocs … And as White Trash has sought to make clear, the so-called white, working-class vote is an inaccurate designation as well. Class matters, as identity politics matters, but neither is sufficient alone to define categories of voting behavior. … Selective belief, preference for one “truth” over another, explains, for instance, how someone can dismiss the vast majority of scientists who see incontrovertible evidence of dangerous trends in climate change.” She goes on to say: “Only 32.5 percent of Americans today graduate college, which means that the majority does not imagine this path up the social ladder as its ticket to success.
The election has opened up festering wounds. The deepest of these exposes how we measure the value of civic virtue and hard work. Many successful Americans believe they have made it on their own and have little patience for the complaints of those left behind. … Angry Trump voters were convinced that these classes (the “takers”) were not playing by the rules (i.e., working their way up the ladder) and that government entitlement programs were allowing some to advance past more deserving (white, native-born) Americans. This was how many came to feel “disinherited.” … By 2016, Trump’s “I will bring the jobs back” seemed a winning concept. Distrust of fluid class boundaries made many voters fear competition from below. They lacked faith in the promised social mobility of the meritocratic system.
In terms of history of immigrating from Europe and settlement in New England, the author states that: “For every religious dissenter in the exodus of the 1630s, there was one commercially driven emigrant from London or other areas of England. The majority in these years came as extended families accompanied by their servants. And almost 60 percent of the arrivals were under the age of twenty-four—one-third of them unattached males. …. To attract settlers, he boasted that the amount of money required for purchasing a few measly acres in England translated into hundreds of acres in Massachusetts. …. Nevertheless, Winthrop had no plan for redeeming all the poor, whom he referred to as the “scum of the land.” Isenberg states: “Slavery had been slow to take hold, with only around 150 slaves counted in 1640, and barely 1,000 out of a total population of 26,000 in 1670. … Massachusetts and English possessions in the Caribbean, not Virginia, were the first colonies to codify slave law. By the time of Bacon’s Rebellion, there were some 6,000 servants in the southern colony, and roughly one-third of all freeholders, many of them former indentured servants, were barely scraping by, weighed down by debts and unfair taxes.” This reader learned from the author that: “The rivalry between the dueling Carolinas was only part of the story. The original charter of Carolina would eventually be divided three ways, when Georgia was parceled out of the original territory in 1732. … In refusing to permit slavery, the Georgia colony promised that “free labor” would replace a reliance on indentured servants as well as African bondsmen.” Moreover, “But Georgia meant something more. Even as South Carolinians jealously eyed the new territory as a place where they might sell slaves and control the land, the colony of free laborers offered a ready boundary (and slave-free zone) that would protect the vulnerable planter class from Native tribes and Spanish settlers in Florida, who might otherwise offer a haven to their runaway slaves. Georgia, as we shall see, was a remarkable experiment.” Isenberg goes on to say, initially at least that: “Poor settlers coming from England, Scotland, and other parts of Europe were granted fifty acres of land, free of charge, plus a home and a garden. Distinct from its neighbors to the north, Georgia experimented with a social order that neither exploited the lower classes nor favored the rich.” The author goes on to explain: “According to Francis Moore, who visited the settlement in its second year of operation, two “peculiar” customs stood out: both alcohol and dark-skinned people were prohibited. “No slavery is allowed, nor negroes,” Moore wrote. As a sanctuary for “free white people,” Georgia “would not permit slaves, for slaves starve the poor laborer.”” In economic terms the situation had other drivers and Isenberg states: “After allowing South Carolina to send over slaves to fell trees and clear the land for the town of Savannah, Oglethorpe came to regret the decision. … William Byrd … saw how slavery had sparked discontent among poor whites in Virginia, who routinely refused to “dirty their hands with Labour of any kind,” preferring to steal or starve rather than work in the fields.” Life in Georgia changed and as Isenberg states: “In 1750, settlers were formally granted the right to own slaves. … By 1788, Carolinian Jonathan Bryan was the most powerful man in Georgia, with thirty-two thousand acres and 250 slaves. … By 1760, only 5 percent of white Georgians owned even a single slave, while a handful of families possessed them in the hundreds. Jonathan Bryan was the perfect embodiment of the “Slave Merchants” who Oglethorpe had warned would dominate the colony.” The author writes that: “Franklin contended that the only solution to poverty was some kind of coercive system to make the indigent work: “I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.”
But with newfound liberty, their fate rested on the most impersonal of forces: survival of the fittest. The harsh environment of the frontier forced settlers either to work hard or perish. … In his Autobiography, he told a story of how he gave up vegetarianism as a young man after he saw the belly of a fish cut open and all the little fish fall out. This story was a class parable, the lesson being that the big fish (or powerful elites) devoured weaker men.” The author also provides historical insight about Andrew Jackson stating: “In Jackson’s crude lexicon, territorial disputes were to be settled by violent means, not by words alone. He explained his Indian policy as the right of “retaliatory vengeance” against “inhumane bloody barbarians.” … Jackson’s thinking shaped his Indian removal policy as president. He argued that Indians should not be treated as sovereign nations with special claims on the public domain, but as a dependent class. Like squatters, if Indians failed to assimilate or proved incapable of improving the land and securing land titles, they could be forcibly removed.” Later the author examines eugenics as methods for dealing with white trash and states: “By 1931, twenty-seven states had sterilization laws on the books, along with an unwieldy thirty-four categories delineating the kinds of people who might be subject to the surgical procedure.” As Isenberg tries to tie this history together she states: “The Civil War was a struggle to shore up both a racial and a class hierarchy. The Confederacy was afraid that poor whites would be drawn in by Union appeals and would vote to end slavery—because slavery was principally a reflection of the wealthy planters’ self-interest. …Today as well we have a large unbalanced electorate that is regularly convinced to vote against its collective self-interest. These people are told that East Coast college professors brainwash the young and that Hollywood liberals make fun of them and have nothing in common with them and hate America and wish to impose an abhorrent,
godless lifestyle.” The author reflects on the one impact of slavery in the following observation of poor whites in the south, when she states: “The gap in education levels matched what had existed between the North and South before the Civil War. Many of the men who took the test had never used a pencil before. Southern white men exhibited stunted bodies—army medical examiners found them to be smaller, weaker, and less physically fit.
Beginning in 1909, the New York–based Rockefeller Institute poured massive amounts of money into a philanthropic program aimed at eliminating hookworm,
It didn’t help the South’s image that hookworm was spread by the lack of sanitation. Outhouses were rare among the southern poor, let alone toilets. 63
The stock of poor white men produced in the South were dismissed as unfit for military service, the women unfit to be mothers. For many in the early twentieth century, then, the “new race problem” was not the “negro problem.” It was instead a different crisis, one caused by the “worthless class of anti-social whites.”” The author examines efforts by US presidents FDR and LBJ to attempt to improve the lot of the poor and explains how most successful presidential candidates strive to connect to all classes of voters. In summarizing the impact of class and where things are today, Isenberg states: “Upper-and middle-class parents instruct their children in surviving their particular class environment. They give them the appropriate material resources toward this end.
We have always relied—and still do—on bloodlines to maintain and pass on a class advantage to our children. Statistical measurement has shown convincingly that the best predictor of success is the class status of one’s forebears. On average, Americans pass on 50 percent of their wealth to their children; in Nordic countries, social mobility is much higher; parents in Denmark give 15 percent of their total wealth to their children, and in Sweden parents give 27 percent. Class wealth and privileges are a more important inheritance (as a measure of potential) than actual genetic traits.” And as if particularly mindful of the Covid-19 pandemic she states: “It was only in the midst of the Great Depression that the country fully appreciated the meaning of downward mobility. At that time, when a quarter of the nation was thrown out of work, the old standby of blaming the individual no longer convinced anyone.”

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Reviewed in Germany on March 1, 2023

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in my opinion a very good book. The book is not easy to read. Some people might even get offended by reading this book.

docread

A class ridden society transplanted to the New World

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 24, 2021

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An outstanding historical narrative chronicling the trials and tribulations of the marginalised poor whites in the US. It debunks cherished egalitarian myths of equal opportunities and levelling up, and reveals the long standing contempt and scornful attitudes, expressed by the political and intellectual elites towards the white underclass.The book traces the origins of these attitudes in Elizabethan England that faced the problems of a rapidly growing indigent idle population, drifting into the towns begging, thieving and threatening the stability of a stratified order. The primary impetus for the colonisation of North America was to rid the old country of the rabble, by shipping a vast number of poor who were forced to labour in newly established plantation colonies for the profit of the mercantile aristocracy, as had happened in Ireland. It was hoped in the process to acquire a share of the tantalising wealth of the New World exploited by the Spaniards, and undermine the hated Spanish Empire by impeding its Northern penetration into the new Continent.

Although the founders’ motives of the different colonies were at some variance about land distribution for the lower classes, most of the original settlements struggled to thrive or survive in the new challenging environment because of a lack of skilled manpower. This was compounded by the demotivation of indentured labour, a system that duplicated an archaic feudal society. To compensate for the unreliability of an intractable idle labour force, as in Spanish colonies, African slavery was introduced . In its early days white servants worked side by side with black slaves and there was more fluidity in social intercourse as they fraternised and and often cooperated in resisting their masters by running away together. Legislation was implemented in order to create fixed boundaries between the poor landless whites and the black slaves, thus sowing the seeds of Racism that has tainted the fabric of American society ever since. The author emphasised that “Land was the principle source of wealth and the true measure of liberty and civic worth” Land grants and land titles created a privileged class of slave holders particularly in the tobacco and cotton growing colonies of the South. The poor whites were either destitute squatters struggling with disease and malnutrition or poor tenants eking meagre livelihood on marginal unproductive land. They were frequently disenfranchised or their voting rights severely curtailed by property qualifications. The gap continued to widen with every generation with no guarantee of social mobility. Slavery hindered economic progress for the landless white by encouraging idleness, scavenging and begging. This situation remained one of the main drivers of American history leading to the Civil War , but also to the recurrent immigration waves opening up the continent interior to the poor landless masses. It led later to the New Deal following the Great Depression, the first serious attempt to combat mass poverty and redress the wide inequalities in American society by creating greater employment opportunities and a basic welfare system. This was followed in the 1960’s by LBJohnson’s welfare programmes.

An obsession with racial health and pedigree was translated into pseudoscientific eugenic preoccupations about the physical and mental degeneration, well into the second half of the 20th Century. After centuries of propagating an ideology that demonises poverty as a consequence of idleness rather than a lack of favourable circumstances, the State still remains lukewarm at addressing the wider causes of class inequalities in education, health and housing. And to this day punitive judicial and policing systems have aimed principally at controlling the poor and protecting the property owners, while the sham democratic process mobilises their votes with promises of curbing immigration or deflecting their anger unto remote Big Government.

The author documents a detailed social, political and intellectual history to support her thesis. She takes us on an extraordinary journey opening up unexplored vistas in order to undermine the enduring myth of a classless American society. A highly recommended engrossing read.

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Untold history of Class in America

Reviewed in France on May 6, 2021

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Livre très intéressant pour qui s'intéresse à l'histoire américaine.

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Manuel Ramirez Reyes

Poverty in US

Reviewed in Mexico on November 21, 2018

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Ir you want to understand the genesis of poverty in US, this boom is a must. Do not miss the oportunity to comprenhend about this definitory subject nowadays.

Nathália Porto

Great

Reviewed in Brazil on April 29, 2018

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Great book, With a remarkable historical and media research. I recommend for everyone interested in race and class issues in America.

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