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

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

Nancy Isenberg

Viking

Americans take great pride in thinking we are a land of equal opportunity for all peoples. However, after 240 years of freedom she notes that a definite class system exists amongst our nation's lower and middle classes.

This is the crux of “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America,” which examines how over the last few hundred years the plight of the white poor has moved into the center of our cultural identity.

As Nancy Isenberg points out in her painstakingly researched new nonfiction, the landless poor (classified as ‘hillbillies’ or ‘rednecks') have shaped the American landscape since the nation’s colonization, inception and through the American Revolution, Great Depression and postwar world.

Using history and sociology as her template she goes on to suggests that our modern system of class and elitism has led to the rise of a white trash populous who have impacted our mainstream popular culture. From “Duck Dynasty” to “The Dukes of Hazzard” she surmises that this group has proliferated our American psyche to such an extent that it is a danger to our democracy.

Tracing the origins of ‘white trash’ and its negative connotations, she builds her case that this class of working poor is part of an ever-evolving social struggle to achieve the American Dream amidst economic inequality and lack of education.

Isenberg also explores the eugenics movement and its influence into American politics where the notion of sterilizing the poorer masses was championed by one Roosevelt (Theodore) and firmly rejected by another (FDR).

She also notes that although poor whites have regularly been stereotyped by middle and upper classes as inefficient. This same poverty and into-elitism was a core theme in the rise of Andrew Jackson to the presidency.

  

Smartly written and perfectly paced, “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America” chronicles an endless social struggle that has been entwined in our national heritage and shaped our present cultural divisions.