White Trash
Page 35
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Amid the reconstruction of classes taking place in the 1970s, the political status of twentieth-century ethnics endured a series of changes, beginning with President Nixon’s attempts to appeal to a different breed of “forgotten Americans” than those embraced by FDR’s New Deal. Those whom Nixon wished to connect with were the “White Lower Middle Class” identified by Pete Hamill in a 1969 New York magazine article. They were the alienated “rabble,” and Nixon promised to embrace the “Silent Majority” as the backbone of America—hardworking and true. Michael Novak, in The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1972), took the argument one step further, claiming that ethnic Americans were better Americans, because they understood the traditional values of loyalty, love of the flag, and hard work, and they did not expect government to provide unfair special assistance (as they imagined blacks were doing).11
The welfare system was one of the issues dividing Americans at this time. Some Nixon supporters acknowledged that there were hardworking people among welfare recipients who only occasionally took government assistance; but there were others, less deserving, whom they saw as permanently trapped in a cycle of dependence. Critics of welfare tended to see the issue as a racial one, but the reality was different. Among the “forgotten masses” were an estimated 17.4 million poor whites, and the majority of them lived in the South. In 1969, women took the lead in the welfare rights movement when a group of the disaffected in Beaufort, South Carolina, refused to be silent over delays in receiving their food stamps. One Mrs. Frazier, who had organized a day care program, led the “welfare mothers” in a visually powerful protest. At the same time as a group of wealthy women were holding their annual Beaufort historic homes and gardens tour, she organized a tour of poor homes. In the larger national debate, though, Nixon’s supporters were seen angrily complaining about how welfare “breeds weak people.” Poverty was once again being blamed on questionable breeding, and hard work was proclaimed as the means through which strong families put down solid roots and achieved upward mobility. To Frazier, welfare and day care were necessary if one were to be able to hold a job and feed a family. Starvation was a real danger—indeed the poor in South Carolina were still battling parasites like hookworm.12
During the ethnic revival that urbanites celebrated in the 1970s, hardworking Greeks and Italians and Chinese propped up family tradition, as neighborhood restaurants in Chinatowns grew in popularity. The celebratory impulse over ethnic cooking was a middle-class phenomenon, and poverty was softened when it could be seen through the hazy glow of times gone by. The ethic of hard work itself was now engrafted onto ethnic and family genealogical trees. Past poverty was no encumbrance; roots, whatever they were, were not a stain upon the present. In summing up Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers (1976), an affectionate story of the ethnic life of Jews on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one reviewer concluded, “Everybody wants a ghetto to look back on.”13
When it led to social mobility, ethnic identity was seen as a positive attribute. Unappealing (or un-American) idiosyncracies were cleaned up; the food, literature, music, and dress promoted; and the whole ethnicity set apart from the diseased and dirty huddled masses who came through Ellis Island. Heritage, like historic memory itself, is always selective. Ethnics and poor folk can be admired from afar, or from a temporal distance, as long as doing so ensures the supremacy of the middle class in the narrative. People can choose to treasure those parts of their heritage that they see as favorable and wish to keep, jettisoning what unpleasant truths they would prefer to forget.
The same impulses would soon be used to refashion the redneck and embrace white trash as an authentic heritage. It was moonshiners known for trippin’ whiskey and outrunnin’ the law who started the rough and wild sport of stock car racing. By the seventies, with money from Detroit automobile companies and celebrity drivers, an outlaw sport had become NASCAR, the tamer pastime of arriviste middle-class Americans. Meanwhile, country crooners Johnny Russell and Vernon Oxford released the hit singles “Rednecks, White Socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer” (1973) and “Redneck! (The Redneck National Anthem)” (1976). Vernon Oxford defined “redneck” as “someone who enjoys country music and likes to drink beer.” In 1977, the year Elvis died, the new queen of country rock music, Dolly Parton, was featured in the elite fashion magazine Vogue. “Redneck chic” (the cleaned-up redneck) reached Hollywood in the 1981 film Urban Cowboy, in which Jersey boy John Travolta took on the role of hard-hat-wearing, honky-tonk-loving Texas two-stepper Buford Davis. In 1986, Ernest Matthew Mickler’s White Trash Cooking was published, celebrating low-down lingo and rural recipes. When Mickler, a country singer as well as a caterer, gave his book to his seventy-two-year-old aunt, she remarked, “Well, that’s what they call us, ain’t it?”14
The transition to white trash acceptance or accommodation was not as smooth as it might seem. While Dolly Parton made over-the-top “floozydom” fashionable, and combined the burlesque of blonde bombshells Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield with Daisy Mae of Li’l Abner fame, her public identity did not escape the taint of white trash degradation. “You have no idea how much it costs to make someone look this cheap,” Parton told a reporter in 1986. The Hollywood blockbuster Deliverance lacked even an ounce of delicacy, but offered up instead one of the most devastating portraits of rude hillbillies since the eugenics movement faded from view. White middle-class readers of the novel and film audiences wrote fan mail to author James Dickey, praising the four intrepid Atlanta adventurers as if they were old-time pioneers overcoming wilderness dangers while escaping the clutches of white trash savages. A former student of Dickey’s wrote fawningly to his mentor, apparently oblivious to the dehumanizing tone of his letter. He was an ardent backwoods hiker, he said, “though I carry no bow and there are no rednecks awaiting me at the top for me to stalk and kill.” He could not differentiate, in moral terms, between the thrill of taking on the mountains and the thrill of sending mountain men to their deaths.15
Class hostility persisted. Many southern suburbanites had no sympathy for the white trash underclass in their section. They drew a sharp class line between the lower-class rednecks and the “upscale rednecks.” Lillian Smith, a Southern novelist and civil rights activist, identified the places where these toxic feelings stewed. Like the blue-collar ethnics in northern cities who switched their allegiance to the Republican Party, marginally middle-class southerners hated the “weak, lazy, good-for-nothing ones who whine all month until the relief check comes in.” Seeing themselves as hardworking and self-reliant, the upwardly mobile sons of white trash parents believed, as Smith put it, that “he is responsible for himself and himself alone.” The same self-made man who looked down on white trash others had conveniently chosen to forget that his own parents escaped the tar-paper shack only with the help of the federal government. But now that he had been lifted to respectability, he would pull up the social ladder behind him.
So suburban white animosity toward blacks was repeated in the treatment of poor whites. Smith found that the formerly poor southern white and the upwardly mobile immigrant population had something in common: “What everyone has always wanted in this country, what most came here for, was to get away from all those others who smell bad, are sleeping in a shanty, and are eating fatback and are going to loaf tomorrow because there is no job to go to.” Moving up meant staying ahead of those still trapped in the “poverty ditch.” But rather than help others escape destitution, this new addition to the middle class deeply resented a government that wasted money on the poor.16
Democrat Robert Byrd of West Virginia fit this mold. Newly elected as the Senate whip in 1971 by beating the patrician Edward Kennedy, he was, as the New York Times Magazine quoted, the “po white kid that could climb to the seat of the mighty and whip millionaires.” An orphan, a former butcher and grocer who boasted having Lyndon Johnson as his patron, Byrd made his mark by attacking welfare, rioters, and communism. He hired investigat
ors to kick cheaters off the welfare rolls in Washington, DC. Rioters, he declared with marked callousness, deserved to be mowed down, and looters shot on sight “swiftly and mercilessly.” Byrd made himself one of the most hated men in the Senate, where he was compared to Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, and Uriah Heep—the obsequious, greedy, upwardly mobile clerk in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. After Byrd became whip, one top Senate aide remarked that Democrats would now have to look up at the “pinched Mephistophelian features of a redneck who made good.”
Byrd referred to people on welfare as “fornicating deadbeats.” He even appeared unsympathetic to children obtaining government assistance: if they were merely hungry, but not starving, they did not merit aid. As a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, Byrd conveniently distinguished welfare recipients in the District of Columbia (mostly black) from the deadbeats of his home state of West Virginia. Thus he made no effort to root out welfare cheaters among the mountain whites; they were his ticket into politics. In his first run for office, he courted the hillbilly crowd by playing fiddle tunes in the backseat of a car as he went from shack to shack. Reenacting the old tale of the Arkansas traveler, he cleverly played both roles in the nineteenth-century drama: the poor white and the ambitious politician. The New York Times declared Byrd to be the “embodiment of poor white power.” He was Lillian Smith’s angry redneck, who had “hacked his way out of the bushes” of poverty. As a symbol of political intolerance, he was as ruthless as they came.17
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At the other end of the spectrum was the Georgian Jimmy Carter, a liberal Democrat who, when elected in 1970, appeared on the cover of Time as one of the “new southern governors.” Though decades removed from odious southern politicians like James Vardaman and Eugene Talmadge, Carter still had to run a “redneck” campaign in order to win. He could not ignore the example of Alabama governor George Wallace, who could ignite the white man’s rage. To capture the votes of blue-collar and rural voters, Carter painted his equally liberal opponent Carl Sanders as a corporate lawyer out of touch with the average man. Nicknaming Sanders “Cuff Link Carl,” Carter’s staff devised a television commercial with a closed country club door and a voice-over saying, “People like us aren’t invited. We’re too busy working for a living.” Carter’s team circulated the ugliest pictures of their candidate they could find in order to make him look like a poor country boy—in some he was riding a tractor. His money came from the honest trade of peanut farming, and from a warehousing operation—or so the logic went. Jimmy Carter was not one of the “Big Wigs” in Atlanta or Washington.18
During the runoff election, Sanders’s team went on the offensive, producing flyers with photographs of the run-down homes of the tenants on Carter’s peanut farm. The flyer’s caption played off Carter’s own slogan: “Isn’t it time someone spoke up for these people?” The most damning of the opposition flyers had Carter climbing into bed with a racist leader. Here Carter was drawn as a clownish, barefoot redneck—the absurdity exacerbated by his polka-dotted suit. The point was that he was a leopard who could change his spots, manipulating his class identity just enough to satisfy politically conservative voters. The attack was not far from the truth: Carter was okay with alienating black voters in the primary, but in the general election he shifted, toning down his redneck appeal.19
As a politician, Carter was forced to endure a screening of Deliverance in Atlanta in 1972. He remained wary of its promoters’ claim that the film was good for the state. Indeed, James Dickey and Jimmy Carter were two Georgians who had absolutely nothing in common. Carter was a Baptist and had a teetotaler wife, while Dickey was an outrageous alcoholic and an egomaniac, born to wealth. Haunted by insecurity after a pampered and effeminate youth, Dickey reinvented himself as the child of hillbillies—one of the many lies he told about himself. His North Georgia relatives were actually large landowners, whose past holdings included a considerable number of slaves.20
Dickey’s novel, published in 1970, was a tortured exploration of lost manhood, an attempt to recover his “inner hillbilly.” On the surface, the novel (and film) is about four men on a canoe trip in Appalachia. When the chubby bachelor Bobby (Ned Beatty) is raped in the movie by one of the mountain men, he is called a “sow” and told by his attacker to “squeal like a pig.” In the psychosexual thriller, the dandified city folk aren’t merely given their comeuppance; they are forced to rediscover their primal instincts. Dickey saw this as a good thing, and his hero ends up a stronger man. In one interview, the novelist admitted that the lure of the backcountry was to him the possibility of one’s becoming a “counter-monster,” behaving as men did who lived in remote parts, “doing whatever you felt compelled to do to survive.” In the novel and film alike, the city men commit two murders, conceal the death of one of their traveling companions, Ronny Cox’s character Drew, and make a pact never to reveal what happened on their ill-fated trip. Rechristened as blood brothers, the surviving trio carry their dark secrets away with them.21
Drew had to die. He was the only one of the four Atlanta businessmen who showed any compassion for rural people. He reached out to the idiot-savant teenager after their banjo-and-guitar duet. (Lonnie, the character in the novel, was supposed to be an albino.) The film’s message was clear: sympathy was a sign of weakness that city boys had to overcome. Only by resorting to violence and taking a vicarious plunge into the uncensored psyche of the backwoodsman could they recover their feral redneck roots.22
Dickey’s story had its giant appeal because the search he described found expression elsewhere in American society. NASCAR offered the same kind of allure, as Tom Wolfe wrote in Esquire. Men without inhibitions who lived for the momentary pleasure of danger had no fear of the consequences of their actions. North Carolinian driver Junior Johnson was not just a “hero a whole people or class can identify with,” he was a “rare breed” who had gone from whiskey running in the isolated hills and hollows of his home state to stock car racing. He had it all: money, a split-level house, a poultry business. He might have exchanged his overalls for a windbreaker with the collar up, and “Slim Jim” white pants, but this “breed of old boy” proved something major by driving at 175 miles per hour with a kind of madness that was “raw and hillbilly.” That was the appeal.23
The macho star of Deliverance, Burt Reynolds, went on to make a southern-accented film that was an homage to the stock car racer’s way of life. In Smokey and the Bandit (1977), Reynolds’s character lived for the chase and ran from the law, while his female companion (played by Sally Field) was a runaway bride—both of them rejecting civilization’s restraints. The Reynolds of this film was a modern-day squatter like good old Sug, respected because he refused to knuckle down and join the daily grind of working to get ahead. Smokey and the Bandit was the second highest grossing film in 1977, but most of its popularity was in the South and Midwest. Adding to the mix, in 1979, CBS launched The Dukes of Hazzard, the plots of which revolved around rebel moonshiners decked out in a bright red racing car, and a sexy kissing cousin named Daisy, whose trademark was her high-cut jean shorts. Denver Pyle was cast as Uncle Jesse, known for his overalls and countrified homilies; Pyle had previously played Briscoe Darling Jr., the surly father of a musical hillbilly clan in The Andy Griffith Show.24
Wannabe bandits were among the thousands of spectators at NASCAR who launched into rebel yells, drank too much, and ogled the floozy on the float with her “big blonde hair and blossomy breasts” and cheap Dallas Cowgirl outfit. They embraced a certain species of freedom—the freedom to be a boor, out in the open and without regrets. The “upscale rednecks,” the rising white trash middle class, identified with these hillbilly racers, men who had escaped the overalls and gained as much respect as could be had in accepting wads of cash from Detroit. Class structure had not changed appreciably for the rural poor: money may have made a hillbilly or two reputable, but those left in the hills were not reaping any social benefits. “Upscale rednecks�
� had no trouble spotting those below them in their rearview mirrors.25
Jimmy Carter’s presidency seemed to offer a break from past southern politicians. He was a born-again Christian and navy officer (with training in nuclear physics) who predicated his 1976 campaign on his refusal to lie to the voters. In the early days of the campaign, he gave an unusual stump speech to elementary school children in New Hampshire, proclaiming that the United States could have a “government as good and as honest and as decent and as competent and as compassionate and as filled with love as the American people.” Here was a sentimental democrat, a gospel-infused Christian populist, leaps and bounds from the anger-fueled populism of the old (redneck) South.26
Of all his predecessors, Carter probably came closest to Frank Clement’s clean-cut demeanor, but he mostly kept his religious views to personal statements. He was no gyrating entertainer like Clement, nor (at five foot seven) was he a giant-sized jokester like “Big Jim” Folsom. He preferred to compare himself to Yale graduate and Tennessee liberal Estes Kefauver. The campaign rhetoric contained a “log cabin” story that captured the family’s rise, but it left out the fact that Jimmy grew up with a tennis court in the backyard. He did express southern pride, though, gaining the support of country rock groups such as the Allman Brothers. His political handlers were sure to fashion a radio ad for the pickup truck crowd: “We’ve been the butt of every bad joke for a hundred years. Don’t let the Washington politicians keep one of us out of the White House.” The closest Carter came to acknowledging cracker roots was when he quoted the words of his supporter (his future United Nations ambassador) Andrew Young that he was “white trash made good.” That made the peanut farmer Jimmy Carter “reformed” white trash. As a black congressman from Georgia, Young was suggesting that it was possible for the old hostility between poor blacks and whites to be overcome.27