White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  Hazel Bryan is the ugly face of white trash in Will Counts’s famous photograph taken on September 4, 1957.

  Will Counts Collection, Indiana University Archives

  The day after the photograph appeared, Hazel Bryan made herself visible once more, telling newsmen positioned outside the school that “whites should have rights, too.” If black students were let into Central High, she declared provocatively, then she would walk out. She knew enough about the social hierarchy in her adoptive hometown to understand that the reputation of working-class whites hinged on the system of segregation. Permeable racial boundaries would pull down people like her even further. A principal at Central High said that Hazel was known to have been beaten by her father, was emotionally unstable, and was not one of the “leading students” by any measure. As a troubled girl—a bad seed, one might say—she confirmed her dubious class origins by her antics.44

  Benjamin Fine of the New York Times compared Hazel Bryan to one of the frenzied girls who attended Elvis Presley concerts. (Some of the reporters at Central High even egged on the high schoolers to dance rock and roll in the streets.) During the first attempt to usher the black students into the school, a student ran down the hall yelling, à la Paul Revere, “The niggers are coming.” Parents outside began screaming for their children to flee. A group of girls stood at a window, shrieking. Under the direction of teachers, the majority gradually filed out of the building, though some, including Hazel’s best friend, Sammie Dean Parker, later claimed to have leapt from the second-floor window.45

  Two new schools had been built in Little Rock: Horace Mann High for black students, and R. C. Hall High (nicknamed “Cadillac High”) for the wealthy families on the west side of the city. Only Central High, built in the 1920s and catering mostly to working-class families, however, was selected for desegregation. Armis Guthridge of the Capital Citizens’ Council, the lead spokesman for antidesegregation forces, willfully fanned the flames of poor white resentment when he announced that the rich and well-to-do were going to see to it that the “only race-mixing that is going to be done is in the districts where the so-called rednecks live.” “Redneck” was a loaded term, as he well knew. His purpose was to remind the white working class of the city that the school board elites looked down on them.46

  Arkansas governor Orval Faubus also exploited class rift. He distanced himself from the “Cadillac crowd” and constructed himself as the victim of upper-class arrogance. The national media painted him as the “hillbilly” from Greasy Creek, in the Ozarks. Time caught him entertaining visitors as “milk dribbled down his chin”; he could be heard “belching gustily” like a backcountry rube. A large photograph in Life identified as the governor’s “kinfolk” one Taylor Thornberry, a cross-eyed, crazy-looking man in overalls. At a private meeting in Newport, Rhode Island, away from the unfolding drama, President Eisenhower tried to convince Faubus to accept the court-ordered desegregation plan; the southern governor left the meeting angry and humiliated. He later admitted that he knew full well that Eisenhower’s advisers had thought him as nothing more than a “country boy.”47

  From the start of the crisis, Faubus used dual fears of racial and class violence to justify ordering the Arkansas National Guard to Central High School. In his announcement the day before the school year opened, he claimed to have reports of white “caravans” ready to descend upon Little Rock from numerous outlying areas. Whether or not a race war would arise from the conflict, he let it be known that white thugs, rabble-rousers, and rednecks were contending for a place in history.48

  Taylor Thornberry, the cross-eyed kin of Orval Faubus, as depicted in Life magazine (1957). His features underscored Faubus’s hillbilly and degenerate roots.

  Life magazine, September 23, 1957 Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

  Faubus loved playing the redneck card. His continued defiance infuriated Eisenhower, who dispatched the 101st Airborne Division and federalized the Arkansas National Guard. Military protection ensured that the nine black students slated to attend Central High were not barred. On the national stage, and standing before the cameras, the governor of Arkansas embodied the southern stereotype to a tee. He was a complete caricature of folly and backwardness. A reporter for Time accused him of “manufacturing the myth of violence” and then “whipping up” a mob to make it a reality.49

  Little Rock was the most important domestic news story of 1957. It transformed the Central High neighborhood into a newsroom, attracting reporters from the major newspapers, magazines, and television networks. By the end of September, the number of press people had grown from a handful to 225 highly visible journalists and cameramen. The standoff between the courts and the governor—the “crisis” environment swirling about the school grounds—grabbed the world’s attention. On September 24, when President Eisenhower gave a televised speech announcing that he would send troops to the Arkansas capital, 62 percent of America’s television sets were tuned in. As mobs descended, reporters were themselves targeted for violence. A black journalist, Alex Wilson, was beaten and kicked, the attack recorded on film. A Life photographer was punched in the face and then carried off in a police wagon and charged with disorderly conduct. “Thugs in the crowd” pushed his colleagues, said newsman John Chancellor, and heckled them with nasty slurs. One reporter took the precaution of disguising himself. He rented a pickup truck and wore an old jacket and no tie. For a reporter to go undercover safely, he had to alter his class appearance, passing as a poor white workingman.50

  The media easily slipped into southern stereotypes, depicting the “many in overalls,” “tobacco-chewing white men,” or as one New York Times article highlighted, a “scrawny, rednecked man” yelling insults at the soldiers. Local Arkansas journalists similarly dismissed the demonstrators as “a lot of rednecks.” Unruly women who stood by became “slattern housewives” and “harpies.” One southern reporter said it outright: “Hell, look at them. They’re just poor white trash, mostly.” In Nashville, mob violence erupted that same month, after the integration of an elementary school. There, a Time reporter had a field day trashing the women in the crowd: “vacant-faced women in curlers and loose-hanging blouses,” not to mention a rock-throwing waitress with a tattooed arm. One obnoxious woman yelled to no one in particular with reference to the African American children: “Pull their black curls out!”51

  These were all predictable motifs, serving to distance rabble-rousers from the “normal” good people of Arkansas and Tennessee. Even President Eisenhower, in his televised speech, blamed the violence on “demagogic extremists,” and assumed that the core population of Little Rock were the law-abiding, taxpaying, churchgoing people who did not endorse such behavior. If the women in curlers and the waitress boasting her tattoos reminded readers of trailer trash, the rioting rednecks were more like the wild-eyed, off-his-rocker Ernest T. Bass of The Andy Griffith Show. By 1959, the Times Literary Supplement acknowledged that it was the “ugly faces” of “rednecks, crackers, tar-heels, and other poor white trash” that would be forever remembered from Central High.52

  Despite the embarrassment he caused, Orval Faubus did not disappear. Freed from the national media spotlight, he secured reelection in 1958, and went on to serve three more terms. As a governor who refused to lay down his arms, he continued to portray himself as a staunch defender of white people’s democratic right to oppose “forced integration.” Praising his “doggedness,” one southern journalist traced Faubus’s characteristic strength to his Ozark mountain days, when he trudged five miles, dressed in overalls, to a dilapidated school. A hillbilly could get ahead down here. Thus Faubus strategically accepted a loss of support from among the better classes, who resented redneck power in any form. Like Mississippi’s Vardaman and his own state’s Jeff Davis before him, Orval Faubus used the threat of poor white thuggery to stay in power. And it worked.53

  In the same year that Little Rock
consumed the news media, Hollywood produced a feature-length film that capitalized on the redneck image. Starring Andy Griffith and directed by Elia Kazan, A Face in the Crowd was a completely differently vehicle for Griffith than his subsequent television role as the friendly sheriff. It was a dark drama that followed “Lonesome Rhodes,” a down-and-out man discovered playing guitar in an Arkansas jail, and traced his rapid rise into the national limelight as a powerful and ruthless TV star. For reviewers, Griffith’s performance was a cross between Huey Long and Elvis Presley—a hollering, singing “redneck gone berserk with power.”54

  The plot of A Face in the Crowd was only a part of its story. The surrounding publicity focused on Kazan’s directing technique. To get Griffith into character, he exploited the actor’s childhood memories of being called white trash. In this way, it was an unusual film, and it offered a two-part message about class. First, it reminded audiences of the danger in elevating a lower-class redneck above his accustomed station and giving him power—for the redneck personality on-screen was a volatile mix of anger, cunning, and megalomania. Second, Kazan’s exploitation of the backstory on Griffith delivered a stern rebuke of southern culture, where the poor were treated like dirt.55

  Kazan tried his hand at another southern story, this time set during the Depression. Wild River (1960) concerned the TVA, as the construction of a dam was displacing an old matriarch and her family who were living on an island in the Tennessee River. The matriarch’s sons were shown as lazy and oafish, unwilling to work or leave the island, and dependent on the black sharecroppers who farmed their fields. The daughter was a bit trampish, more than willing to sleep with the TVA agent because she saw him as her only ticket off the island. A group of surly whites beat up the agent while the local sheriff and his deputy looked on. As in the earlier film, Kazan provoked a news story when he cast real poor whites to play the extras. The “white trash squatters” of the film lived in a place called Gum Hollow, which was an existing shantytown literally situated on the town dump in Cleveland, Tennessee. Community leaders were furious at the appearance of such unappealing men in the movie. Kazan gave in to pressure and reshot the offending scenes, this time hiring what the townspeople referred to as “respectable” unemployed. In this strange episode, proud small-town arbiters of morality refused even to acknowledge the extreme poor.56

  While Kazan’s films reached middle- and upper-brow audiences, another film of the era was geared for drive-ins and became a smash hit in 1961. This was the second incarnation of Poor White Trash, which had first been released under the title Bayou in 1957 and flopped. An aggressive and slick marketing campaign turned this turkey into a hit. Exploiting the new title, the production company placed provocative ads in newspapers: “It exists Today! . . . Poor White Trash.” To entice prurient adults, the cagey promoters warned local communities that no children would be permitted to see the movie. But the film turned out to be less lurid than voyeuristic. Its most fascinating scene featured a massively built poor white Cajun (played by Timothy Carey, an actor from Brooklyn) performing a wild, almost autoerotic dance. Learning his moves from Elvis, the sweaty, shaking giant doubled as a frightening ax-wielding bully from the swamps. Oversexed and violent was the featured poor white, a primal breed.57

  Of all the films that belong to this cultural moment, To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) was the most highly regarded, and offered the most damning picture of poor whites. Based on Harper Lee’s bestselling novel, it tells the story of a small southern town in the thirties. The movie highlights the limits of justice in a society where law and order give way to a defunct code of southern honor. A black man, Tom Robinson, is falsely accused of raping a poor white girl, Mayella Ewell. Watching the trial, the audience becomes the jury, one might say, forced to choose between the hardworking family man and the pathetic, ill-educated girl. Does race trump class, or does class trump race? This is the choice the audience must make. Robinson represents the worthy, law-abiding blacks in the community. He is honest and honorable. The Ewells are white trash.58

  Viewers never see the Ewells’ dilapidated cabin, which in the novel Harper Lee describes as the “playhouse of an insane child.” Nor do viewers see the white trash family picking through the town dump. Lee’s eugenic allusions are muted in the film, but the viciousness of Mayella’s father, Bob Ewell, is underscored. He spits in the face of Atticus Finch, Robinson’s heroic, morally impeccable defense attorney played by Gregory Peck, and he attempts to murder Finch’s two children. Of course, nothing could be more insidious than child murder. There is only one possible verdict for Bob Ewell. Just as Atticus Finch shoots a “mad dog” in the street, the same fate awaits the vicious, vengeful poor white villain in the film’s denouement. It is not the father who resorts to violence, though; it is his ghostly neighbor, Boo Radley. A social outcast with a troubled past, Radley acts the part of a guardian angel, saving the children on Halloween night.59

  The Ewells may have been caricatures, as the New York Times movie critic directly claimed, but they were familiar ones. Hollywood did not expose the seamy economic conditions of poor whites so much as emphasize their dark inner demons. By the fifties, “redneck” had come to be synonymous with an almost insane bigotry. The actor playing Bob Ewell was scrawny, and one reviewer even called him “degenerate,” suggesting the persistence of the older hereditary correlation between a shriveled body and a contracted mind. Sensationalizing redneck behavior did not just occur on the big screen, however. In Nashville, in 1957, the racist troublemaker at the head of the mob (with an affected southern accent) was a paid agitator from Camden, New Jersey.60

  For filmmakers, the allure of redneck characters was doubled-edged. On the one hand, they were ready-made villains; on the other, they were men without inhibitions. Unrestrained and undomesticated, they stood in sharp contrast to the boxed-in suburbanite and could occasionally be appreciated for their earthy machismo. Sloan Wilson’s male protagonist in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), another novel made into a Hollywood film, starring Gregory Peck, was a pale imitation of the primal Cajun doing his dance to drumbeats. James Dean, Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando, and even Timothy Carey, as poor white trash, were all unreformed Americans, undomestic and unconventional. They planted a wild seed, taunting conformist male spectators who might be itching to break loose.61

  “Redneck” and “white trash” were often used interchangeably, though not everyone agreed that the two were synonymous. In A Southerner Discovers the South (1938), Jonathan Daniels had insisted that not all humbly born southern men were “po’ whites.” He gave as examples Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, southern folk whose “necks were ridged and red with the sun.” He thus divided the poor into two camps: the worthy, hardworking poor who strove to move up the social ladder, and the vulgar and hopeless who were trapped on its lowest rung. His worthy poor, having the “stout, earthy qualities of the redneck,” borrowed from the older class of yeoman, a category that no longer meant what it once had. That said, Daniels’s observation was not historically accurate: as we know, Jackson was vilified by his enemies as a violent, lawless cracker, and Lincoln was disparagingly termed a poor white “mudsill.” But even Daniels had to admit that many other southerners defined the redneck as one who was “raised on hate.” He despised blacks and demeaned “nigger lovers.” In the mold of Bob Ewell, he stood prepared to stick a knife in the back of any who crossed him. That, then, was the label that stuck.62

  • • •

  And what about the hillbilly? Though redneck and hillbilly were both defined by the American Dialect Society in 1904 as “uncouth countrymen,” the following regional distinction was offered: “Hill-billies came from the hills, and the rednecks from the swamps.” Like rednecks, hillbillies were seen as cruel and violent, but with most of their anger directed at neighbors, family members, and “furriners” (unwelcomed strangers). Like the legendary Hatfields and McCoys in the 1880s, they were known for feuding and explosive bouts of
rage. When they weren’t fighting, they were swilling moonshine and marrying off their daughters at seven. Like the squatter of old, they were supposedly given to long periods of sloth. Stories spread of shotgun marriages, accounts of barefoot and pregnant women. In a 1933 study of an isolated community in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, a woman being interviewed blurted out that marriage meant she was “goin’ to have her number” (of children). “I done had mine,” she explained. “Fifteen. Nine living and six dead.”63

  Hollywood released Mountain Justice in 1938, a film based on the actual murder trial of “the Hill-billy girl” Ruth Maxwell, who had slain her father in self-defense when he came at her in a drunken rage. In coverage of the trial, Maxwell’s home of Wise County, Virginia, was described as a place where “slattern women and gangling men take up the dull business of living.” Warner Brothers made the film both hokey and violent. The film’s technical adviser told the studio to ship in “six coon hounds, 30 corncob pipes, 43 plugs of chewing tobacco,” and over a thousand yards of calico—all to make sure that a very dim portrait of mountain ways was presented. Advance promotion promised a “Gripping Melodrama of Lust and Lash.” The most shocking on-screen moment occurs as Ruth’s father towers over her with an enormous bullwhip.64

  The thirties and forties saw the popularity of Li’l Abner as well as Paul Webb’s cartoon strip The Mountain Boys. Webb’s work was converted into a slapstick film, Kentucky Moonshine (1938), featuring the popular Ritz Brothers comedy team—it was a hillbilly version of The Three Stooges. A trio of New Yorkers disguise themselves as hillbillies, appearing in long, unkempt black beards while wearing tall conical hats and ragged pants (held up by ropes) exposing their dirty bare feet. The Grand Ole Opry radio station got its start in the same decade, and music groups appeared with names like the Beverly Hillbillies. Minnie Pearl, known for her famous hillbilly greeting, “Howdee,” began her career on the Opry in the 1940s, and later became a star of the long-running television series Hee Haw. She was by no means an authentic mountain gal. “Minnie” was born into a wealthy family, was well educated, and crafted a naïve persona that made her vaudeville act a success. The hillbilly “Minnie” was so out of touch with mainstream America that she wore her trademark hat with the price tag still attached.65