White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  The 10,000 Hookworm Family (1913) from Alabama were presented as poor white celebrities who escaped the “lazy disease.” They stood in contrast to the “fitter family” competitions as a perfect example of the unfit American family.

  201 H Alabama, Hookworm, Box 42, Folder 1044, #1107, 1913, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York

  This 1913 photograph from North Carolina shows the disfiguring effects of hookworm. In a shocking contrast, an undersized young man, age twenty-three, is placed alongside a normal boy, two years younger, who towers over him.

  236 H North Carolina, Box 53, Folder 1269, #236 Vashti Alexander County, North Carolina, May 29, 1913, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York

  All in all, the rural South stood out as a place of social and now eugenic backwardness. Tenant farmers and sharecroppers, wandering the dusty roads with a balky mule, seemed a throwback to eighteenth-century vagrants. The “lazy diseases” of hookworm and pellagra created a class of lazy lubbers. Illiteracy was widespread. Fear of indiscriminate breeding loomed large. The stock of poor white men produced in the South were dismissed as unfit for military service, the women unfit to be mothers. In the two decades before the war, reformers had exposed that many poor white women and children worked long, grueling hours in southern textile factories. Was this another sign of “race suicide,” some asked? Could they possibly produce future generations of healthy, courageous, intelligent, and fertile Americans? 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.”64

  • • •

  It was Albert Priddy who called poor white Virginians “the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South.” He was the superintendent of the State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded in Lynchburg, Virginia. He helped shape the optimal legal test case for sterilization, a case that went to the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927). Priddy began building his case in 1916, targeting prostitutes. He recruited top eugenics experts, including two colleagues of Davenport’s with ties to the Eugenics Record Office and the Carnegie Institution of Washington.65

  Priddy also had the support of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, which took the lead in eugenic science and public policy. Dean Harvey Ernest Jordan saw Virginia as the “perfect laboratory” for comparing the best (Virginia’s famed “First Families”) and the worst stocks of poor whites. In 1912, he proposed intelligence testing of white, black, and mulatto children. He found a way to pervert the meaning of a classic phrase of the university’s founder, Thomas Jefferson, into eugenic nonsense: “Man does not have an inalienable right to personal or reproductive freedom, if such freedom is a menace to society.” Inalienable rights were now the inherited privileges of the superior classes, what Jordan called America’s “human thoroughbreds.”66

  Eugenicists made Virginia the national test case for weeding out bad blood. Priddy recruited Arthur Estabrook of the Carnegie Institution to his campaign, getting him to offer in the Virginia courts his expert opinion on intelligence testing. But this colleague of Davenport’s spread the eugenics message in yet another way. In 1926, Estabrook published Mongrel Virginians, a study of an isolated mountain community in Virginia known as the Win tribe. The Wins offered a curious case of inbreeding and interracial breeding; they were of “mixed races, neither black or white”—largely Indian. The portrait was damning: the community Estabrook described suffered from congenital ignorance, all springing from the licentiousness of mixed-race women. Their habit of breeding was in his words, “almost that of an animal in their freedom.”67

  The evidence in Mongrel Virginians was sufficient to guide passage of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which prohibited marriages between blacks and whites, and treated Indian blood no differently from black blood. The Virginia law defined a white person as one having “no trace” of any but Caucasian blood. Following the agenda of the eugenicists, the first draft of the law required a racial registry, tracking pedigrees in order to ensure that no light-skinned black with Indian blood might marry a white person. This regulation was removed from the final version of the bill, but the law still divided the population into white and black, fit and unfit, pure and tainted bloodlines. In the end, Virginia legislators believed they had immunized the population against mongrelism at the altar. It stopped the contagion that passed from blacks and Indians to poor whites and up the hierarchy to the unsuspecting white middle class and elites.68

  Three years later, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes would offer a revolutionary decision in Buck v. Bell, which gave the state the power to regulate the breeding of its citizens. Like Justice Taney in the Dred Scott decision, he believed that pedigree could be used to distinguish worthy citizens from the waste people. He ruled that sterilization was the appropriate recourse in order to curb “generations of imbeciles” from reproducing. Holmes argued that sterilization was a civic duty, saving the nation from being “swamped with incompetence.” He echoed what the English had argued in the 1600s: the unfit would either starve or be executed for some crime, so sending them to be sterilized was the humane option, as being sent to the colonies had been centuries before.69

  Carrie Buck (of Buck v. Bell) had been chosen for sterilization on the order of Priddy, because she was one of “these people”—that “worthless class” of southern whites. She was, in a word, a perfect specimen of white trash. While Carrie Buck was the plaintiff, her mother and daughter were on trial too. Carrie tested at the “moron level” and her mother slightly lower, according to the highly biased experts. Her illegitimate child, examined at seven months, was termed feebleminded—this was based on the observations of a Red Cross worker and on a test administered by Estabrook. The experts’ pedigree chart proved degeneracy as well as sexual deviance: Carrie’s mother was a prostitute, and Carrie had been raped by the nephew of her adoptive parents. Her rapist went unpunished, and yet she was sterilized.70

  • • •

  Eugenics suffused the culture of the twenties. Social classes were ranked according to levels of inheritable potential. At the top was the new professional “master class.” Many believed that intelligence was inherited and that tests of schoolchildren proved that the brightest pupils were those whose parents were highly educated professionals. This elite had to be not just mentally but also physically fit. At the Second International Congress of Eugenics in New York, in 1921, two statues were put on display at opposite ends of Darwin Hall in the Museum of Natural History. One was a composite of the biometric measures of the fifty most athletic men at Harvard, the other an amalgam of one hundred thousand doughboys of World War I—in other words, the “average American male.” The Harvard specimen was the decidedly more impressive of the two. A new word was coined for the cognitive elite: “aristogenic”—what we would call a genetic leadership class. One was once again born to a station, as in the traditional meaning of aristocracy, but it was not because of family name or wealth. Now it was the endowment of inborn qualities that marked off the superior class.71

  Carrie Buck and her mother, Emma (1924). Carrie, her mother, and Carrie’s illegitimate daughter were all put on trial in Buck v. Bell (1927). Their crime was one of pedigree—a defective breed perpetuated over three generations.

  Arthur Estabrook Collection, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University of Albany Libraries, Albany, New York

  While eugenicists made it fashionable to celebrate a hereditary ruling class, they were as bent on organizing social classes on the basis of breeding capacity. One of the most popular eugenics lecturers, C. W. Saleeby, spoke up for something called “eugenic feminism,” insisting that the brightest women should not only take up the suffrage cause but also accept their patriotic duty to breed. He imagined female society organized as a bee colony: th
e queens of superior stock bred throughout their fertile years, while educated sterile women (or postmenopausal) were best suited for reform activity. Professor William McDougall at Harvard came up with an equally radical solution. He called for a breeding colony of “Eugenia,” a separate protectorate within the United States, in which the best and brightest would propagate a superior stock. Eugenia would be at once a university and a stud farm. Raised as “aristocrats” in the tradition of “noblesse oblige,” the products of the special colony would go out into the world as skilled public servants.72

  The obsession with white trash did not lose any traction in the 1920s. Reformers and legislators pushed their campaigns, while journalists wrote sensational newspaper stories and published shocking photographs. The Supreme Court ruling in Buck v. Bell inspired Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia to pass sterilization laws similar to the one adopted in Virginia. Protecting and promoting “good blood” would mean little if removing “bad blood” did not receive the same attention.73

  The decade also saw the appearance of a new generation of novelists who experimented with eugenic ideas. Of these, the very popular Sherwood Anderson stood out. He composed semiautobiographical tales about small-town life, publishing the unmistakably titled Poor White in 1920. His character Hugh McIvey is the son of white trash, born in a “hole” of a town on a muddy bank along the Mississippi, in Missouri. His nature is that of a listless dreamer, his sleepy mind unable to fix on anything important. He is saved from his “animal-like stupor” when the railroad comes through town, bringing a fresh-faced New England–born Michigander, in whose veins “flowed the blood of the pioneers,” and who becomes his schoolteacher. Almost Rousseau-like, she stimulates in him a new intellectual vitality.74

  Wanting to escape his past and rise socially, Hugh leaves the South behind. He wanders from town to town for three years, eventually settling in Bridewell, Ohio. There, after he takes a job in a telegraph office, technology shapes his destiny, and his dreamy nature blossoms into what the reader recognizes as good old-fashioned American ingenuity. He invents a series of machines, the most successful of which is the McIvey Corn-Cutter. Transformed into a hero in his adoptive industrializing town, Hugh meets the rebellious Clara Butterfield, a college-educated, feminist-leaning woman. She chooses him for a husband, in an act of eugenic marital selection, preferring what she describes as a “kind horse” to a “wolf or wolfhound.”75

  It is the force of reproduction that ultimately saves the couple from the tensions that arise amid the surge of modern life. After facing various dangers, Hugh becomes dark and brooding when he starts to see the machine age as nihilistic and futile. His wife pulls him back from the brink of insanity by reminding him of the son she carries in her belly. Feeling a primitive, animal impulse to reproduce allows him to carry on.76

  Anderson’s novel rejected the jingoistic optimism of the nineteenth century, but it also pointed to the eugenic idea that poor whites suffered from “childish impotence” or “arrested development,” requiring the reactivation of their better Saxon qualities. Facing challenges, Hugh never reaches the level of hopelessness that infuses Erskine Caldwell’s first novel, The Bastard (1929). Caldwell was the son of a minister in Georgia, and his father was sympathetic to eugenics. The Bastard seeks to prove that no human can hide from his “inborn” traits, from the imprint of his ancestors.77

  Caldwell’s protagonist is Gene Morgan (“Eugene” comes from the same root of wellborn as “eugenic”). Our ironically named hero is a bastard. He learns that his harlot mother was murdered in Louisiana, her belly slit open like a “swamp”—an allusion to the polluted wasteland inside her, from which he was spawned. Gene is a vicious white, a wanderer, and his only pleasure comes from violence. Raised by an old Negro woman and sexually attracted to a mulatto girl, he thoughtlessly transgresses the color line.78

  Gene is lost until he meets Myra Morgan, a “clean . . . feminine woman.” They marry and move to Philadelphia, where he works hard to support his new wife and the baby that soon comes along. The parents watch, to their horror, as their child transforms into a freak. His body is covered with black hair, like that of a wild animal, proving that the taint of the swamp is still present in his blood, despite Myra’s purity. The doctor tells her that she can expect all of her children to be degenerate, leaving a clear message: the bastard Gene is congenitally cursed. There are hints of inbreeding, since Gene and Myra have the same last name. He contemplates murdering his son, but doesn’t go through with it. He leaves his beloved wife, hoping she will marry a normal man.79

  The rising generation of a new, modern century saw little of enduring substance in family dynasties of the Gilded Age. All they had to speak of was their money. In place of America’s imperfect aristocracy, progressive reformers were eager to rear a cognitive elite, one that could deal with modern technology and bureaucracy. Class continued to matter greatly, but it wasn’t going to be the flamboyant aristocracy of the effete Old World that would monitor modernity; hope lay instead with a cadre of men in white lab coats and bureaucrats in tailored suits. Professional expertise would be convincing enough evidence of inborn merit.80

  It should seem odd to us that the high tide of eugenics coexisted with the storied glamour of the Roaring Twenties: Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, lighthearted flappers, and unpoliced speakeasies. Yet even the flappers were warned that their daring dancing style too closely resembled the ways of those who had “gypsy” (i.e., black) blood; they would be better served to settle down with a eugenically suitable mate. If ever there was time when class consciousness sank deep roots, this was it. The 1920s saw social exclusiveness masquerade as science and disdain for rural backwardness and the mongrel taint intensify. In a culture under siege, white trash meant impure, and not quite white. Like the moron who somehow passed into the middle class, the ill-bred bastard gave a watchful people a new set of social hazards to look out for, while they listened to the stock ticker and marched off a cliff with the market crash in 1929.81

  CHAPTER NINE

  Forgotten Men and Poor Folk

  Downward Mobility and the Great Depression

  Shall then this man go hungry, here in lands

  Blest by his honor, builded by his hands?

  Do something for him: let him never be

  Forgotten: let him have his daily bread:

  He who has fed us, let him now be fed.

  Let us remember his tragic lot—

  Remember, or else be ourselves forgot!

  —Edwin Markham, “The Forgotten Man” (1932)

  In 1932, three years after the stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression, Warner Brothers released I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, the gripping story of a World War I veteran transformed into a beast of burden while working on a southern chain gang. It is a strangely powerful film that celebrates the redemptive power of work. Through no fault of their own, 20 percent of the American labor force was out of work by 1932. Average men woke to find themselves as outcasts, without the emblems of American male identity: jobs, homes, the means to provide for their families. The film’s fugitive, James Allen, became a powerful symbol of the country’s decline. His story is that of a patriotic, ambitious, creative, suddenly jobless northerner who becomes, in turn, a tramp, a convict, and a fugitive. He is the Depression’s “Forgotten Man,” exiled from the labor force. His fate is sealed when he goes south. In the last scene of the film, Allen steps back into the shadows, all hope of reclaiming his former life gone, a man forced to admit that his only recourse is to steal in order to survive. So unsettling was the scene that it was almost cut from the film.1

  I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang is a grim and devastating exposé of the degraded South. The story served as a confirmation of the New Deal’s conclusion that the southern economy was tragically out of step with the American dream. In 1938, six years after the film debuted, President Franklin Roosevelt d
eclared, “The South presents right now the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem.” Will Alexander, the Tennessean who headed the Farm Security Administration (FSA), argued that southern tenancy robbed men of any chance to become self-reliant. His agency engaged in “rural rehabilitation”—using the same word that was applied to physically disabled soldiers or to worn-out lands. Destitute families had to be retrained and resettled (but not coerced) into programs. For Alexander, the problem was stark and simple: success could only be achieved when the prejudice against white trash was overcome. In other words, psychological reconditioning was as necessary as educational reform.2

  Dependency had long defined the South. Since the 1870s, impoverished sharecroppers and convict laborers, white as well as black, had clung to the bottom rung of the social order. It may be hard for us to fathom, but the convict population was no better off than southern slaves had been. A prison official said it all: “One dies, get another.” Poor whites were inexpensive and expendable, and found their lot comparable to suffering African Americans when it came to the justice system. Nothing proves the point better than the fact that both black and white convicts were referred to as “niggers.”3