White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  He began his close relationship with the federal government when President Hoover named him to the Research Commission on Social Trends. But it was in 1936 that Professor Odum issued his most comprehensive study, Southern Regions of the United States, a text of more than six hundred pages that became the New Deal’s major resource for regional planning. One of his students, journalist Gerald W. Johnson, translated the massive study into a readable and popular book, momentously titled The Wasted Land. Another star student, Arthur Raper, wrote the definitive work on southern farm tenancy, and served as a principal researcher for the Division of Farm Population and Rural Welfare within the Bureau of Agricultural Economics. Odum collaborated with Roy Stryker of the FSA’s photographic unit in overseeing a three-year sociological project of thirteen counties in North Carolina and Virginia.46

  The real strength of Odum’s work came from the amount of information he amassed. He was able to prove that the South had surrendered ninety-seven million acres to erosion (an area larger than the two Carolinas and Georgia); it had squandered the chances of millions of people by tolerating poverty and illiteracy; and it had ignored human potential by refusing to provide technological training, or even basic services, to its people. The overwhelming power of Odum’s data undercut (what Odum himself called) Gone with the Wind nostalgia—the collective self-image elite southerners had cultivated. Here was one southerner who wanted to see some “sincere, courageous telling of the truth about the South.” He was “tired of the defense complex,” he said, and the unending ridicule, complacency, ignorance, and, above all, the poverty. The greatest virtue of Southern Regions was its quantitative weight and its objective outlook. As the southern historian Broadus Mitchell insisted at the same time, “The South does not need defense, but exposition.”47

  The primary target of Odum’s research was sectionalism’s destructive legacy. Mitchell interpreted Odum in such a way as to say that there was no longer a justification for using Yankee oppression for the South’s refusal to change. To Odum, there were “many Souths”; what was needed now was a regional vision. As a cattle breeder, he compared the sectional dictate to “cultural inbreeding,” and to the “stagnation” that came from resisting the “cross-fertilization of ideas” and by refusing to engage with those beyond one’s state. When he looked at the Tennessee Valley Authority, he saw unmistakably the most successful of New Deal projects in regional planning; the TVA had harnessed the power of seven monumental dams, coordinating among seven states and employing nearly ten thousand people in an area that previously had suffered under tremendous poverty. Odum said he hoped the TVA “would constitute the 49th State.” The straitjacket of states’ rights had suffocated southern progress long enough.48

  Odum was right about the TVA. It was a shining example of positive planning. Its dams alone were marvels of engineering, elegant and modern architectural wonders. Intelligent management resulted in soil conservation; flood, malaria, and pollution control; reforestation; and improved fertilization—all sensible land-use strategies. The TVA led to well-designed communities that supported libraries and health and recreation facilities—everything that Wilson had prescribed for the homestead villages. There were training centers in agriculture, marketing, automotive and electrical repair, mechanical work and metalwork; there were classes in engineering and mathematics at nearby colleges, plus unprecedented opportunities for adult education. A bookmobile carried libraries to workers and their families.49

  Odum knew it would be extremely difficult to dislodge cultural prejudices. In 1938, he sent questionnaires to distinguished academics across the country, asking each to define what “poor white” meant to him. Where and when did they first hear the term? he wanted to know. Were there state and regional differences in how the term was used? Where did they think the term originated? What were its distinctive features? What other terms were prevalent that carried similar meaning?50

  The responses revealed how slippery the label “poor white” could be. While several sociologists said outright that the term was “fuzzy,” a loose example of name-calling, most of Odum’s known forty-six respondents listed as many negative attributes associated with poor whites as came to mind. The most popular adjective was “shiftless.” It was connected to a string of synonyms: purposeless, hand to mouth, lazy, unambitious, no account, no desire to improve themselves, inertia. All these descriptions conflated the unwillingness to work with some innate character flaw.51

  “Shiftless” was not a new word. Chronicling his southern tour in the 1850s, Frederick Law Olmsted had used it to categorize slothful slaveowners and slaves alike. It was a favorite word among New Englanders in describing bad farmers, and was a common reproach toward tavernkeepers and other immoral characters who congregated in dens with lowly laborers. By Theodore Roosevelt’s time it was the word of choice in legislation that punished deserting husbands; “shiftlessness” was a major symptom in the eugenicist’s diagnosis of the degenerate. And it was of course second nature to vagrants and hoboes. W. J. Cash, in The Mind of the South (1941), portrayed a shiftless poor white sitting under a tree, holding a jug and surrounded by his hounds, while his wife and children were out working the fields with a kind of “lackadaisical digging.”52

  Social proximity to blacks was the second most popular explanation for their association with shiftlessness. In 1929, with his appearance in the movie Hearts in Dixie, the very visible African American actor known as Stepin Fetchit began a film career in which he popularized for an entire generation the crude stereotype of laziness suggested by his on-screen name. In his response to Odum on poor whites, Ira de A. Reid, a black scholar at Atlanta University, recalled that when he was growing up, “race etiquette” required that he never address a “poor white” with that name, unless he expected to be called “nigger” in return. For Reid, “white trash,” “poor whites,” and “niggers” all conveyed the same social stigma.53

  Many of Odum’s respondents claimed that the designation “po’ white trash” derived from black vernacular. According to a Mississippian, when whites of the upper or middle class used it, they qualified it with “as blacks would say.” Odum’s respondents noted that poor whites lived near poor black neighborhoods, and it was virtually impossible to distinguish their dwellings. To some middle-class whites, the slight elevation in status of poor whites over poor blacks was but an empty courtesy. From outside the South, in Cincinnati, one sociologist wrote Odum that mountain whites were called “briar hoppers” and subject to de facto segregation just as urban blacks were. (“Briar hoppers” was a variation on the old English slur of “bogtrotters,” aimed at the Irish.)54

  To Odum’s respondents, the twentieth century had had little effect. Poor whites were still adjudged a breed apart, an ill-defined class halfway between white and black. Under no circumstances did they ever socialize with, let alone marry, respectable whites. To another of Odum’s correspondents they were like a mule to a horse or a hound to a dog; whereas dogs were “respectable,” hounds were “ornery.” As dyed-in-the-wool racists said of all blacks, it was said of white trash that, like the leopard, he could not change his spots.55

  How could educated Americans have denied the effect of such persistent prejudice in distorting the southern class system? The reason is actually rather obvious: a fear of unleashing genuine class upheaval—which even the liberal elite were loath to do—led significant numbers to blame the poor for their own failure. Odum saw differently, and was instrumental in reframing the meaning of rural poverty. He argued that poor whites had a culture—what he called “folkways.” He did not think that they had to remain hapless pawns. Nor did their upward path mean merely imitating the middle class; they could shape a viable existence by drawing on their own folk values, rather than striving to be a lesser version of the white-collar class. The solution for poor folk rested on giving them access to education, allowing them to become self-sufficient. This demanded restructuring the South’s resource man
agement. The region had to develop a more diverse and technologically advanced economy and agricultural system, which in turn would require a more highly skilled population of workers. But transforming every man and woman would be a long uphill battle, of course. One of Odum’s respondents put it bluntly: “No one knows what to do with him.” As long as he appeared stuck, he would remain no less a feature of the static South than the gully and the mule.56

  • • •

  It would take the Tennessean James Agee to probe the meaning of “poor white” on a truly meaningful level. In his powerfully drawn, enduringly evocative Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), Agee attempted to toss the source of the white trash fetish back onto the middle class. The unusual book included the chaste still life–style photographs of Walker Evans, and addressed what Odum’s slow-to-change cohort refused to do: interrogate how an interpreter imposed his values on the subject. There could be no such thing as objective journalism.

  Agee opened the book by wondering out loud how a Harvard-educated, middle-class man like himself could write about poor whites without turning them into objects of pity or disgust. He did not want to be a mere gawker. How could he “pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings, an ignorant and helpless rural family, for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of ‘honest journalism’”? Was it possible to convey the “cruel radiance of what is”? Probably not.57

  So Agee experimented with different strategies, offering detailed descriptions of material objects: shoes, overalls, the sparse arrangement of furnishings in the cropper’s home. With a meticulous attention to detail, he tried in words to imitate the camera’s “ice-cold” vision. In another of his departures from conventional reporting, he interspersed what he imagined were the unspoken thoughts of the poor tenant with the uncensored insults he had heard from the landlord. Inside the mind of the cropper, he voiced disbelief: how did he get “trapped,” how did he become “beyond help, beyond hope”? He gave his subjects real feelings, descriptive laments. The landlord’s cruelty comes through his laughter over Agee’s enjoyment of the tenants’ “home cooking.” The landlord curses a poor cropper as a “dirty son-of-a-bitch” who had bragged that he hadn’t bought his family a bar of soap in five years. A woman in one of the tenant families was, in the landlord’s words, the “worst whore” in this part of this country—second only to her mother. The whole bunch were, to the owner, “the lowest trash you can find.”58

  There was a method to Agee’s madness. In this strangely introspective, deeply disturbing narrative, the author tries to force readers to look beyond conventional ways of seeing the poor. Instead of blaming them, he asks his audience to acknowledge their own complicity. The poor are not dull or slow-witted, he insists; they have merely internalized a kind of “anesthesia,” which numbs them against the “shame and insult of discomforts, insecurities, and inferiorities.” The southern middle class deserves the greater portion of shame, and especially those who excused their own callous indifference with the line, “They are ‘used’ to it.”59

  Despite its subsequent literary success, Agee’s unsettling text reached few readers in 1941. For its part, Odum’s work came under attack for speaking above (rather than to) the poor tenant farmer. One of Odum’s most outspoken critics was the Vanderbilt University English professor and poet Donald Davidson, who was also hostile to the TVA, which he saw as evidence of northern meddling. As one of the contributors to I’ll Take My Stand, Davidson defended the old agrarian ideal of the South. He dared to praise the Ku Klux Klan for defeating the “detestable” northern missionaries of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and his only regret was that the KKK could not prevent the rise of the “more subtle utopians” of the New South (by which he meant Odum and his University of North Carolina crowd). The scholarly “southern regionalists” could never unify the South, Davidson declared. Odum’s “indices” could not be translated into the “language of the ‘ignorant man.’” What remained was an apparent paradox: Was it only the sectional demagogue who would ever be able to co-opt the poor in the South? Even if an Agee or an Odum momentarily captured the “cruel radiance of what is,” wasn’t it obvious that the poor whites they wished to free weren’t listening? That was what Davidson believed.60

  Somewhere between the writing styles of Agee and Odum was a new kind of southern writer. Jonathan Daniels’s A Southerner Discovers the South (1938) not only made the bestseller list, but also won over Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Here was a North Carolina journalist with an eye for irony. He avoided the density of Odum’s encyclopedic study, and he steered clear of the sleepy pastoralism of the southern agrarian. With nary a hint of defensiveness, he traveled thousands of miles through the South and let the people he met talk for themselves.61

  Daniels found evidence that disproved Davidson’s critique of Howard Odum when he happened on a small-town lawyer who owned and cherished all of the sociologist’s books. He visited the famous Providence Canyon, a 150-foot-deep Georgia gully, which became a strange monument to soil erosion and a natural wonder. He attacked the South’s prison mentality, the idea that generation after generation of manual laborers should accept their exploitation as natural. At Cannon Mills, in North Carolina, he noted the cyclone fences that turned mills into virtual prisons. Across the street from one massive factory was a playground. The unintended lesson was to “teach the children that property is afraid of the people—their people.”62

  He offered varied portraits of poor whites, defending “restlessness” and refusing to call it shiftlessness. Daniels liked what he saw in Norris, Tennessee, a planned town that was part of the TVA. It was not the photoelectric cell lighting and heating of the big school building that impressed him so much as the “collision of children” inside the school—the “hill children of the big, poor families” alongside the children of engineers. Here was a clear-cut experiment in class desegregation. If only this was America, he thought.63

  As Ma Joad from The Grapes of Wrath had put it, Daniels repeated for his southern audience: the poor are always coming. He praised the TVA for discovering that ordinary southern whites were receptive to training if given a fair chance. Some, he acknowledged, were “underfed,” some “feeble-minded, perverted, insane.” But they could not represent the whole poor population—or the future. It was not only pellagra or illiteracy that stood in the way of their rise; there was also the fear of the wealthier classes that poor whites, like blacks, might not be willing to stay in their place. Daniels refuted the “slander” that had been perpetuated by the educated classes, and he made sure his readers took heed: “The Southern Negro is not an incurably ignorant ape. The Southern white masses are not biologically degenerate.”64

  Daniels was unwavering in his belief that Jeffersonian democracy had long since died, only to be replaced by demagogues on the order of Huey Long, who, following on the heels of generations of southern patricians, plundered the people at will. He took up Odum’s cautionary advice, insisting that all planning for southern revival had to start at the bottom if it was to effect anything approaching real change. “Maybe still one Reb can beat ten Yankees,” wrote Daniels. But “it is irrelevant.” Rebel pride had blinded all classes. “The tyrants and the plutocrats and the poor all need teaching. One of them no more than the others.” Odum, Agee, and Daniels all wanted to see the South rescued from its ideological trap. They were not cynical; they were hopeful. They recognized that simple solutions—a smattering of prettified homesteads—were no cure. Something grander, on the scale of the TVA, represented the only chance to shake up the existing consensus and rearrange class structure.65

  In the 1930s, the forgotten man and woman became a powerful symbol of economic struggle all across America. A good number of voices paid special attention to poor whites who haunted the South. The problem was not: “No one knows what to do wi
th him.” It was this: “No one wants to see him as he really is: one of us, an American.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Cult of the Country Boy

  Elvis Presley, Andy Griffith, and LBJ’s Great Society

  I’m a self-confessed raw country boy and guitar-playing fool.

  —Elvis Presley (1956)

  Lyndon wasn’t upper class at all. Country boy, grown up in the hills.

  —Virginia Foster Durr, Alabama civil rights activist (1991)

  Most will remember the famous photograph of Elvis Presley standing alongside President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office. But why is it forgotten that Presley gained the friendship of Lyndon Baines Johnson? At Graceland, Presley added a three-television console like the one LBJ had in the Oval Office; “the King” also hung in his home an “All the Way with LBJ” bumper sticker from the 1964 presidential campaign, and posed for a publicity photo with the president’s daughter, Lynda Bird Johnson, who at the time was dating the actor George Hamilton. Presley and Johnson at first seem to be the oddest of couples—but they had more in common than their separate celebrity worlds would suggest. Both became national figures who challenged—whose very lives disrupted—the historically toxic characterization of poor whites.1

  When Elvis stormed onto the national scene in 1956, he seemed to be doing everything he could to act nonwhite. He openly embraced black musical style, black pompadour hair, and flashy outfits that had been associated with blacks as well. His gyrations caused his critics to compare his wildly sexualized dancing to the “hootchy-kootchy,” or burlesque striptease, and the rebellious zoot suit crowd. His phenomenal fame and adoring fans helped to propel him to The Ed Sullivan Show, and from there to the silver screen. He soon owned a stable of Cadillacs. Elvis had achieved what no white trash working-class male had ever dreamt possible: he was at once cool and sexually transgressive and a “country boy.” No longer a freakish rural outcast, as in the past, Elvis was a “Hillbilly Cat,” someone many teenage boys wished they could be.2