White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  Lyndon Johnson’s sudden elevation to the office of chief executive on November 22, 1963, came as a great shock to the nation. Eerily replaying what had happened a century earlier, a second unelected Johnson entered the presidency after a shocking assassination. But this time, instead of the sorrow-laden, war-weary Lincoln, the nation had lost the vigorous, photogenic, East Coast elite John F. Kennedy. In the wake of tragedy, the seasoned southern politician pursued an aggressive legislative agenda in favor of civil rights and social reform—the most dramatic foray since FDR. The “Great Society,” as his vast array of programs became known, called for the elimination of poll taxes and voting discrimination, the promotion of education and health care funding, and daring new programs in an effort to eradicate poverty. Yet what made LBJ different from his Democratic predecessor was the necessity that he reinvent himself by shedding the predictable trappings of a southern backwater identity—which he did without unlearning his famous Texan drawl. The accidental president had to transform how he was perceived on television, how he was judged by Washington reporters, how he was received as a national leader. Though Johnson had a proven record as a New Dealer and modern progressive, on the national stage he was still regarded as a regional figure. He refused to go easy on white rule in the South. In his 1965 inaugural address, he made progressive change a matter of national survival. He wanted to use his powers to work toward broad social equality.3

  In many ways, Johnson’s insistence on change echoed what the sociologist Howard Odum had prescribed in earlier decades: southerners had to free themselves from their misplaced nostalgia for the Old Confederacy. He wasn’t afraid of modernity. “I do not believe that the Great Society is the ordered, changeless, and sterile battalion of ants,” Johnson put it bluntly upon inauguration in 1965. Mindless conformity, whether Soviet or southern in style, was stifling and repressive.4

  His heroes had not been Andrew Johnson or James K. Vardaman; Franklin Roosevelt was the politician he most admired. During the Depression, Johnson was a strong proponent of rural electrification, and he ran the jobs corps program, the National Youth Administration, in Texas. He had no patience for country-bumpkin antics either. LBJ loved modern technology, campaigned across Texas by prop plane before World War II, and was the first to use a helicopter in his Senate campaign of 1948. That year, winning in a close race, he presented himself as a worldly politician, jettisoning the folksy style of his opponent, whom a Johnson aide described as “old hat, old ways, old everything.” As majority leader of the Senate, and during his vice presidency as chairman of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, it was Lyndon Johnson who first promoted “stepping into the space race” and making it a national priority to put a man on the moon.5

  There were no red suspenders in this southern boy’s closet, no blustering race-baiting to mark his career. The public had no difficulty understanding the high moral tone of LBJ’s presidential oratory. He despised the false rhetoric of those Dixiecrats who feigned class solidarity with poor whites—rhetoric that typically involved angry appeals to white supremacy. As president, when he advocated civil rights, Lyndon Johnson spoke the language of brotherly love and inclusiveness. In spite of all this, the old country-boy image still haunted him.6

  • • •

  Presumably by coincidence, as President Johnson stood tall under the glare of the national spotlight, TV network executives discovered the hick sitcom. Three of the most popular shows in the 1960s were The Andy Griffith Show; Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.; and The Beverly Hillbillies. All revived the homespun, albeit unassimilable, traits of good old “Sug,” the rural pol of the 1840s. Lyndon Johnson fondly remembered Roosevelt as “a daddy to me,” and as town sheriff, Andy Griffith served as the paternal caretaker of Mayberry, North Carolina. The Andy Griffith Show had the feel of the thirties, not the sixties; it was a nostalgic rewrite of the Great Depression, featuring a town of misfits. Speaking about his role, Griffith insisted that he was not playing a “yokel”; the creator of the show described the sheriff as a clever man with a “wry sense of humor” on the order of the late Will Rogers, the good-natured Oklahoma humorist and film hero. As for Mayberry, most problems were solved around Andy’s kitchen table—reminiscent of how Americans huddled around the radio listening to FDR’s fireside chats. Outsiders were welcome in Andy’s world, where the virtues of small-town democracy shone.7

  Though the actor stopped short of saying it, Sheriff Andy was indeed surrounded by yokels, because television traded on the worst stereotypes. Mayberry’s population included the gullible gas station attendant Gomer Pyle (before he got his own show) and his cousin Goober, and Ernest T. Bass, a screeching mountaineer who went on wild rampages. As a writer for Time noted of Jim Nabors’s Gomer, the naïve enlistee “spouts homilies out of a lopsided mouth and lopes around uncertainly like a plowboy stepping through a field of cow dung.” He is a “walking disaster,” who in his subsequent spin-off show single-handedly fouls up the bureaucracy of the entire Marine Corps.8

  With the Clampetts of Beverly Hills, as the comedian Bob Hope joked, Americans had their embodiment of TV “wasteland”—a wasteland with an outhouse. Episode after episode, Granny and her kin were stymied by the science of the doorbell and the unbearable complexity of kitchen appliances, giving viewers the saddest sort of reminder of the culture shock experienced by real sharecroppers in FSA resettlement communities. Buddy Ebsen’s prime-time hillbillies appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, sketched as characters in Grant Wood’s iconic painting of 1930, American Gothic. This was yet another unsubtle allusion to the long-held belief that white trash were an evolutionary throwback.9

  The Beverly Hillbillies recast as Grant Wood’s famous 1930 painting, American Gothic.

  Saturday Evening Post, February 2, 1963

  The Beverly Hillbillies had its defenders. To the creator of the show, “our hillbillies” were clean and wholesome, and the network was actually doing a service in uplifting the image of rural Americans. “The word hillbilly,” he insisted, “will ultimately have a new meaning in the United States as a result of our show.” His optimism proved to be misplaced.10

  Jed Clampett was no Davy Crockett, even though Buddy Ebsen had in fact played the gruff sidekick to Fess Parker’s coon-capped Crockett in the fifties Disney saga. The differences between Jed and Davy were stark. Hollywood hillbillies could only be crude objects of audience laughter—mockery, not admiration. They conjured none of the frontier fantasy of the rugged individualist Crockett (or Fess Parker’s TV Daniel Boone). Nothing could redeem them. The Clampetts drove a 1920s-era Ford jalopy, and Granny sat on board in a rocking chair—a camp version of John Ford’s desperate Joad family.11

  Fess Parker’s buckskin champion was a jaunty country boy, a genial Gary Cooper–style suburban dad. All viewers understood that Parker’s Crockett represented the best qualities imagined of early America. The 1955 Davy Crockett craze caused adoring fans to mob the actor in a way that momentarily put him in a league with Elvis; coonskin caps flew off store shelves as Disney Studios staged a publicity tour. Parker, a towering Texan, even made a stop on Capitol Hill. In a photograph distributed over the wire services, then-senator Lyndon Johnson and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn struck up a pose with “Davy” and his rifle, Ol’ Betsy.12

  Their signature laugh track aside, sixties comedies were not purely escapist fare. They tapped into a larger anxiety amid the mass migration of poor whites who headed north and created hillbilly ghettos in cities such as Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago, and Cincinnati—which only fueled existing prejudice against “briar hoppers” (recalling the nomenclature of an Odum respondent). Writing about poor whites in Chicago in 1968, the syndicated columnist Paul Harvey drew a practical connection for his readers: “Suppose a real-life likeness of TV’s Beverly Hillbillies should move to the big city without those millions of dollars in the bank.”13

  The trio of sitcoms tapped into suspi
cions that modern America had failed to create a genuine melting pot; the cultural distance between rural and urban life, between rich and poor, was immense. Don Knotts’s slapstick character Barney Fife, Sheriff Andy’s bumbling cousin, didn’t belong in the big city any more than the corn cracker of Davy Crockett’s Almanack of 1837 did in the 1830s. Despite his drill sergeant’s unrelenting badgering, Gomer, the hapless private, failed to conform to military culture; he wasn’t fit for the Marines, let alone for white-collar corporate America. And the Clampetts may have bought a mansion in the heart of Hollywood, but they had not moved even one rung on the social ladder. They didn’t even try to behave like middle-class Americans.

  Hal Humphrey of the Los Angeles Times observed in 1963 that the joy of watching The Beverly Hillbillies was linked to the fact that “most Americans are extremely class-conscious.” No matter what the plotline, every episode pitted the mercenary banker Milburn Drysdale, his “social-climbing wife,” and “boob” of a son (a young man of questionable virility) against the low-down Clampetts. In Humphrey’s opinion, the “Joe Doakses,” or average viewers, got to see a bunch of “ragged hill people,” who were “obviously . . . inferior,” outsmarting equally undeserving “big shots.” Theirs was, in short, a contest between “snobs” and “slobs.” As far as the critic was concerned, the show’s creator had come up with a formula that camouflaged class conflict with laughs. Finally, he joked, the class-bashing TV series “cashes in on Groucho Marx’s theory of class struggle—or was that Karl Marx?”14

  • • •

  In the face of social upheaval, as so many old boundaries and prejudices shifted, Americans generally denied what they remained: highly class conscious. The interconnected civil rights movement and culture wars of the fifties and sixties were marked by social stratification. As ownership of a home in the suburbs came to represent the American dream, the most controversial housing option was, significantly, the trailer park. Segregation, then, was more than simply a racial issue. Zoning laws made it inevitable that housing would adhere to a class-delineated geography. The working class had its bowling alleys and diners, and “white trash” its trailer park slums, both of which contrasted sharply with the backyard barbecues of all-white neighborhoods in favored suburbs, zoned for the middle class. We forget that President Johnson’s Great Society programs targeted both urban ghettos and impoverished white areas of Appalachia. Vietnam has been referred to as the living-room war, yet on their black-and-white television sets in 1957, Americans had already watched a racial and class war, as angry poor whites screamed curses at well-mannered black students as they tried to enter Little Rock’s Central High School.

  It is for reasons such as these that the poor country boy Elvis symbolized a lot of things for the generation that came of age in the fifties. While whitening African American music and challenging conservative sexual mores, he retained a social identity that was close to the story line of The Beverly Hillbillies. Here was a son of a white sharecropper, suddenly catapulted to a place of wealth and fame; he purchased Graceland, a mansion outside of Memphis, where he lived with his parents. For his beloved mother he bought a pink Cadillac, and to make the house truly a home she could appreciate, he built her a chicken coop in the backyard.15

  As Elvis became the “country squire” of Graceland, middle-class Americans found themselves promoting the merits of suburbia more generally. Vice President Richard Nixon, for one, saw the expanding housing market as a powerful tool in waging Cold War diplomacy. In 1959, the world’s two superpowers agreed to a cultural exchange: the Soviets prepared an exhibit on Sputnik and space exploration, which was put on display in New York City; for its part, the United States chose an earthbound emblem of its national pride, a typical ranch-style home, which was set up in Sokolniki Park for the edification of Russian crowds.16

  Speaking at the opening ceremony in Moscow, Nixon took stock of the thirty-one million American families that owned homes, the forty-four million citizens who drove fifty-six million cars, and the fifty million who watched their own television sets. At this opportunistic moment, the vice president did his best to wear multiple hats, sounding on the one hand like a Madison Avenue ad man, and on the other as a prophet of the new middle class. Either way, he explicitly denied being representative of a shallow materialism. The real wonder of America’s achievement, he professed, was that the “world’s largest capitalist country” had “come closest to the ideal of prosperity for all in a classless society.” These words strike at the heart of the matter. For Nixon, the United States was more than a land of plenty. Democratic in its collective soul, it had nearly achieved a kind of utopia. For the first time in history, capitalism was not the engine of greed, aimed at monopolizing wealth and resources; free enterprise in the 1950s was a magic elixir that was succeeding in erasing class lines, especially through home ownership, or so he wanted it understood.17

  The Nixons sold themselves as the perfect suburban family. Not long before his Moscow trip, the vice president and his family took a trip to Disneyland, which made the front pages. During the 1960 campaign, when Nixon contested John F. Kennedy for the presidency, it was Pat Nixon who praised her husband (and included herself) as the personification of the American dream. In anticipation of her husband’s nomination, she told reporters that their success embodied the promise of the postwar generation, “where people of humble circumstances can go up the ladder through sheer hard work and obtain what they work for.” If she happened to become First Lady, she said, she would be the first “working girl” ever to inhabit the White House. Republican marketers used Pat aggressively, producing tons of campaign materials that included badges, flags, brochures, combs, jewelry, and a variety of buttons, all of which boosted Pat as the ideal suburban homemaker. Party organizers stormed the barricades of suburban shopping centers with “Patmobiles” and “Pat Parades.” Unlike a stunning young Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy decked out in “French couture,” Pat Nixon picked her clothing off the store racks and chose those items she could easily pack.18

  The Nixons hailed from Whittier, in southern California, an area of the Sunbelt that underwent dramatic changes from 1946 to 1970. As millions of Americans bought new homes, suburban enclaves arose in the orbit of metropolitan Los Angeles, Phoenix, Houston, Miami, and elsewhere. One of the best-publicized housing developments of the era grew in Levittown on the outskirts of New York City. The Levitts thought big, putting up 17,400 houses and attracting 82,000 residents to their Long Island development. This sweeping success led them to construct two massive subdivisions in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and Willingboro, New Jersey. As skilled promoters, the Levitts did more than simply build homes. Like their earliest progenitor, Richard Hakluyt of old Elizabethan England, they were planting self-sustaining colonies in the hinterland. The Levitts imagined suburbs as middle-class consumer outposts, geared for leisure activities: baseball fields, bicycle pathways, and swimming pools complemented commercially zoned areas for shopping centers.19

  The key to the Levitts’ system was not just cheaper housing, but homogeneous populations—in their phrasing, “stabilized” neighborhoods. They meant racial and class homogeneity, which led them to endorse “restrictive covenants” prohibiting owners from selling their homes to black families. The Levitts knew the South, because their first large-scale project was an all-white facility for wartime workers in Norfolk, Virginia. By planting suburbs in quasi-rural areas, the Levitts recognized that the value of land was not determined by industry or commerce. As isolated outposts, land values were tied to the class status of the occupants. Buying a home here required the male breadwinner to have a steady income—a mark of the new fifties middle class.20

  Levittown was dubbed a “garden community.” But the new style of tract homes uneasily occupied this rustic space. During the fifties, the pastoral image of suburbs was applied to all kinds of bedroom communities. Popular magazines featured wives tending their gardens, husbands grilling at their
barbecues. This was a fanciful recasting of the Jeffersonian ideal: suburbanites were the new, let us say, “backyard yeomanry.” To add to the Jeffersonian call for exurban procreative strength, the new suburbs acquired unsubtle nicknames like “Fertile Acres,” owing to the high birthrates in young families. Yet many critics saw uniform homes and neat lawns as hollow symbols—a far cry from genuine democratic virtues.21

  Instead of eliminating class distinctions, suburbs were turned into class-conscious fortresses. Zoning ordinances set lot sizes and restricted the construction of apartment buildings, emphasizing single-dwelling homes to keep out undesirable lower-class families. In Mahwah, New Jersey, for example, the local government attracted a Ford plant to the town, and then passed an ordinance that required one-acre lots containing homes in the $20,000 price range, ostensibly meaning that low-paid workers in the plant would have to live elsewhere. In New York’s Westchester County, the board of education agreed to build a deluxe school in a wealthy neighborhood, while doing nothing for schools in depressed-income areas where lower-class Italian and black families lived. In Los Angeles, suburbs were appraised by the Federal Housing Authority along class lines: high marks were given to places where gardening was a popular hobby, and low marks to places where poor whites raised food in their backyards. Elvis’s mother’s chicken coop would have been frowned upon.22