White Trash: The 400 Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg

Abstract

Reviewed by: White Trash: The 400 Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg Tina Irvine (bio) White Trash: The 400 Year Untold History of Class in America. By Nancy Isenberg. (New York: Viking Press, 2016. Pp. xi, 480. $21.00 cloth; $12.00 paper) As the title of her book suggests, Nancy Isenberg's White Trash seeks to ambitiously re-frame 400 years of American history—from the colonial period to the present—through the lens of class. The premise of her book is straightforward: America has a class system and always has. She argues that "white trash" people are a "central, if disturbing, thread in our national narrative," and are essential to American national identity (p. 321). Poor whites have been known by many names across time and place, but, like class hierarchies, "they do not disappear" (p. 320). Isenberg uses the neologism "waste people" to describe the "unwanted and salvageable" lower-class white people of American history (p. 2). This term is the greatest contribution of the book, and she uses it frequently. Although Isenberg's premise and phrase is at times repetitive, this reader ultimately found "waste people" to be a useful term in thinking about power and the process by which class is made and re-made. White Trash begins in the colonial area, where Isenberg is at her best. Part one, "To Begin the World Anew," explains how the waste people of England—those individuals who were not profitably engaged in labor of some kind—were imported to America as indentured servants and contracted laborers. The British system of class imprinted itself on American soil from the beginning, and poor white laborers had little chance for social mobility. Indeed, those people who came to America as British waste people simply transformed into American waste persons: lowly whites who lived and died with constrained social and economic circumstances. [End Page 509] Americans re-constructed class distinction many times over the course of the colonial period and the mid-nineteenth century. During those years, both rhetoric and culture helped to further demarcate the divide between worthwhile and worthless whites. Part two, "The Degeneration of the American Breed," discusses this process and explains how Americans came to view lower class whites as genetically damaged people with "bad blood" and defective genes. These chapters cover a lot of historical territory, ranging from westward expansion in the early 1800s, the Civil War, the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and finally the attempts at rural white uplift in President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty of the 1960s. Although this section seems at times like a review of a high school history textbook's greatest hits, Isenberg's message is clear: pivotal moments in American history further entrenched poor whites' class and reputation. In every instance, Americans have despised poor whites—yet they have been unable to look away. Indeed, it appears that America is more fascinated than ever with its white waste people. Isenberg considers this phenomenon in the third and final section of her book, "The White Trash Makeover." This is the shortest and weakest section of White Trash, and does little to further a productive narrative on poor white Americans. Isenberg's summary of white trash culture's flash points in modern American culture is scattered, jumping from a description of the 1972 film Deliverance, to America's response to "redneck" politicians like Bill Clinton and Sarah Palin, and back again to reality television shows unapologetically celebrating white trash culture, as in Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Isenberg's book is based almost entirely on secondary sources and, as a result, is suitable for a general audience. At times, the author sacrifices nuanced discussion for the sake of maintaining the narrative arc of class in America. Most laypeople will not be troubled by this elision, but scholars of gender and race will be frustrated by White Trash's rather flat treatment of class, and its infrequent consideration of those categories in unison. Isenberg also sometimes overstates the [End Page 510] importance of class conflict in American history and declares that the Civil War was a "clash of...