White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  “Elvis is America,” explained one member of Clinton’s staff. The fifties that Reagan had tried to recapture with nostalgic images of small-town U.S.A. was once again associated with fun-loving teenagers—less political than their parents. Clinton-the-marijuana-smoking-draft-dodger was in this way extracted from the dangerous sixties and rebranded as a child of the less contentious fifties. He wished to build a bridge to the southern working class, to make himself a son of the South in the best way imaginable. Being an Elvis fan was a more neutral place to be within a divided electorate—a youthful role that played much better than Bubba, and a hipper way for Clinton to channel his southern-boy image.26

  In 1994, Bill Clinton’s controversial reputation as white trash was reinforced by a campaign photograph of him with an Illinois mule.

  “Seen as ‘White Trash’: Maybe Some Hate Clinton Because He’s Too Southern,” Wilmington, North Carolina, Star-News, June 19, 1994

  No amount of amiability, however, could quell the hatred of conservative Republicans on losing the White House. Beltway reporters said they had never seen such vitriol before. The attacks on President Clinton seemed disrespectful of the office, highly personal, and relentless. In 1994, journalist Bill Maxwell of Florida, an African American, said he thought he knew why. He saw something familiar in the tone of the Clinton bashing, and it had to do with his being seen as white trash. Reagan press aide David Gergen and the effusive speechwriter Peggy Noonan saw their President Reagan as a transcendent father figure, partaking of the family feeling inspired by a British king. To Reagan’s admirers, Clinton was unworthy, an impostor whose upbringing besmirched the office: the prince had been replaced by the pauper.27

  To Maxwell’s mind, Clinton’s earthiness, his southernness, was seen as being bred into him from his mother, Virginia. She had published a memoir, and her story was grim: her mother was a drug addict, her childhood was one of deprivation, and she was married four times. Her appearance borrowed from trailer trash: “skunk stripe in her hair, elaborate makeup, colorful outfits and racing form in hand.” (Traces of Tammy Faye hung about her.) In the eyes of his enemies, said Maxwell, Clinton was his mother’s son, a kind of bastard breed that fell short of representing the right “pedigree for a U.S. president.”28

  By the time the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in 1998, Clinton’s enemies were primed to portray the flawed president as a character in a Tennessee Williams play. “Slick Willie” had finally been caught in a tawdry sexual escapade suited to a trailer park—he had befouled the Oval Office. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr claimed that his official investigation was not about sex, but about perjury and the abuse of power, yet his final report mentioned sex five hundred times. Harper’s Magazine contributing editor Jack Hitt claimed that Starr was intent on writing a “dirty book,” recording (and relishing) every trashy detail of a sad soap opera. President Clinton’s legal team countered that Starr’s sole purpose was to embarrass the president. This was white trash outing on the grand national stage. Impeachable offenses demanded the “gravest wrongs” against the Constitution, or “serious assaults on the integrity of the process of government,” if they were to rise to the standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” By recording every salacious detail, Starr was trying to equate high crimes with low-class lewdness.29

  Conservatives were apoplectic at the thought that Clinton’s misdeeds could be compared with those of Thomas Jefferson—the DNA of the third president’s male line was tested the same year as the Lewinsky story broke. Science could now determine that the master of Monticello (or at least a Jefferson male with regular access to her—and who else could that be?) fathered the children of the Monticello slave Sally Hemings, the much younger half sister of Jefferson’s deceased wife. Distraught commentators twisted the facts of the case, offering up an odd collection of rationales in order to exonerate the third president from charges of immorality. One, Sally was beautiful (and Monica was cheap). Two, Clinton was an adulterer (and Jefferson was a widower of long standing). Three, Jefferson was a brilliant man whose words elevated him above his bodily urges (and the merely glib Clinton was unable to rise above his unimpressive origins). To conflate the impulses of Jefferson and Clinton was a leveling that upright Americans should not countenance.30

  Another editor saw the Lewinsky episode differently. After Clinton survived the impeachment ordeal and emerged stronger and more popular, he looked for explanations. If hating Clinton was irrational, then so was loving him. It was the “Elvis principle,” the journalist concluded, that subliminal desire all Americans have for kings. JFK had Camelot; Reagan was Hollywood royalty; Clinton and Elvis (“the King” to his millions of fans) were “rags to riches” monarchs. The kind of kings Americans looked up to were men with a hard-to-explain sex appeal and a gentle hubris. The point was that a little white trashiness could be a blessing in disguise. In the appearance-driven world of modern American politics, arrogance of style carried weight, and repressed, suit-and-tie candidates such as Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis were not in the same league as Clinton. To exude that redneck chic—to have a little Bubba—was better than being a dull, invisible, cookie-cutter politician indistinguishable from the pack.31

  Figuring out Clinton remained a favorite pastime. In 1998, looking on with horror at the trumped-up presidential adultery scandal, the novelist Toni Morrison drew her own conclusions. The violation of privacy, the ransacking of the presidential office when he was “metaphorically seized and body searched” was for her the kind of treatment black men faced. No matter “how smart you are, how hard you work,” you will be “put in your place.” Clinton had overreached. He was “our first black president,” Morrison mused. The “tropes of blackness” were apparent in his upbringing in a single-parent and poor household, and in his working-class ways, his saxophone playing and love for junk food. This Clinton really was Elvis-like. He was not the redneck Elvis who still had devotees in the 1990s, but the “Hillbilly Cat” Elvis of the 1950s, the youth who transgressed the boundaries between black and white—something that was only possible to do in comfort among the lower ranks of southern society.32

  Clinton’s title of “first black president” was reaffirmed at the 2001 Congressional Black Caucus Dinner. When Barack Obama ran for president in 2007, Andrew Young, the Carter adviser who had been a friend to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said that Clinton was “every bit as black as Barack.” How strange was that: the son of a Kenyan was less black than a Bubba from Arkansas? Young was treating blackness as a cultural identity, and Obama’s childhood in Hawaii and Jakarta lacked Dixie roots. Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post, a southerner, saw confusion in figurative language, writing that all one had to do was to replace the sax with a banjo and Clinton became a pastiche of “white-trash tropes.” Journalist Joe Klein pushed the trope further in Primary Colors (1996), his thinly veiled novel about Clinton, who is called Jack Stanton in the book. Stanton violates the sexual taboo, sleeping with an underage black female, fathering an illegitimate child. In the Mike Nichols film based on Klein’s book, President Bubba was played by the unpolished John Travolta, instead of someone like the squeaky clean Tom Hanks. Was this fellow Stanton a symbol of blackness, or was he trailer trash?33

  • • •

  Clinton’s embarrassing second term evidently wasn’t read as a cautionary tale among Republicans, who plunged ahead with their own (effectively) white trash candidate in 2008, Alaska governor Sarah Palin. The devastatingly direct Frank Rich of the New York Times referred to the Republican ticket as “Palin and McCain’s Shotgun Marriage.” Did the venerable John McCain of Arizona, ordinarily a savvy politician, have a lapse in judgment here? Slate produced an online video of Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, painting it as a forgettable wasteland, a place “to get gas and pee” before getting back on the road. Wasilla was elsewhere described as the “punch line for most redneck jokes told in Anchorage.” Erica Jong wrote in the Huffington Post, “Wh
ite trash America certainly has allure for voters,” which explained the photoshopped image of Palin that appeared on the Internet days after her nomination. In a stars-and-stripes bikini, holding an assault rifle and wearing her signature black-rimmed glasses, Palin was one-half hockey mom and one-half hot militia babe.34

  News of the pregnancy of Palin’s teenage daughter Bristol led to a shotgun engagement to Levi Johnston, which was arranged in time for the Republican National Convention. Us Weekly featured Palin on the cover, with the provocative title, “Babies, Lies, and Scandal.” Maureen Dowd compared Palin to Eliza Doolittle of My Fair Lady fame, in getting prepped for her first off-script television interview. Could there be any more direct allusion to her questionable class origins? The Palin melodrama led one journalist to associate the Alaska clan with the plot of a Lifetime television feature. The joke was proven true to life two years later, when the backwoods candidate gave up her gig as governor and starred in her own reality TV show, titled Sarah Palin’s Alaska.35

  Palin’s candidacy was a remarkable event on all accounts. She was only the second female of any kind and the first female redneck to appear on a presidential ticket. John McCain’s advisers admitted that she had been selected purely for image purposes, and they joined the chorus trashing the flawed candidate after Obama’s historic victory. Leaks triggered a media firestorm over Palin’s wardrobe expense account. An angry aide categorized the Palins’ shopping spree as “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast.”36

  The Alaskan made an easy and attractive target. Journalists were flabbergasted when she showed no shame in displaying astounding lapses in knowledge. Her bungled interview with NBC host Katie Couric represented more than gotcha journalism: Palin didn’t just misconstrue facts; she came across as a woman who was unable to articulate a single complex idea. (The old cracker slur as “idle-headed” seemed to fit.) But neither did Andrew Jackson run as an “idea man” in an earlier century, and it was his style of backcountry hubris that McCain’s staffers had been hoping to revive. Shooting wolves from a small plane, bragging about her love of moose meat, “Sarah from Alaska” positioned herself as a regular Annie Oakley on the campaign trail.

  It was not enough to rescue her from the mainstream (what she self-protectively called “lamestream”) media. Sarah Palin did not have a self-made woman’s résumé. She could not offset the “white trash” label as the Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton could. She had attended six unremarkable colleges. She had no military experience (à la navy veteran Jimmy Carter), though she did send one son off to Iraq. Writing in the New Yorker, Sam Tanenhaus was struck by Palin’s self-satisfied manner: “the certitude of being herself, in whatever unfinished condition, will always be good enough.”37

  Maureen Dowd quipped that Palin was a “country-music queen without the music.” She lacked the self-deprecating humor of Dolly Parton—not to mention the natural talent. The real conundrum was why, even more than how, she was chosen: the white trash Barbie was at once visually appealing and disruptive, and she came from a state whose motto on license plates read, “The Last Frontier.” The job was to package the roguish side of Palin alongside a comfortable, conventional female script. In the hit country single “Redneck Woman” (2004), Gretchen Wilson rejected Barbie as an unreal middle-class symbol—candidate Palin’s wardrobe bingeing was her Barbie moment.

  Her Eliza Doolittle grand entrance came during the televised debate with Senator Joe Biden of Delaware. As the nation waited to see what she looked like and how she performed, Palin came onstage in a little black dress, wearing heels and pearls, and winked at the camera. From the neck down she looked like a Washington socialite, but the wink faintly suggested a gum-chewing waitress at a small-town diner. Embodying these two extremes, the fetching hockey mom image ultimately lost out to what McCain staffers identified as both “hillbilly” and “prima donna.” She was a female Lonesome Rhodes—full of spit and spittle, and full of herself.38

  Steve Brodner’s caricature of Sarah Palin as the celebrity-seeking hillbilly, which appeared in the New Yorker in 2009.

  New Yorker, December 7, 2009

  Sex formed a meaningful subtext throughout Palin’s time of national exposure. In terms of trash talk, daughter Bristol Palin’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy was handled rather differently from Bill Clinton’s legendary philandering. Bloggers muddied the waters by spreading rumors about Sarah’s Down syndrome child, Trig: “Was he really Bristol’s?” they asked. A tale of baby swapping was meant to suggest a new twist on the backwoods immorality of inbred illegitimacy. Recall that it was Bill Clinton’s mother, Virginia, whose pedigree most troubled the critics. The legacy held: the rhetoric supporting eugenics (and the sterilization laws that followed) mainly targeted women as tainted breeders.39

  Sarah Palin’s Fargoesque accent made her tortured speech patterns sound even worse. Former TV talk show host Dick Cavett wrote a scathing satirical piece in which he dubbed her a “serial syntax killer” whose high school English department deserved to be draped in black. He wanted to know how her swooning fans, who adored her for being a “mom like me,” or were impressed to see her shooting wolves, could explain how any of those traits would help her to govern.

  We had been down this road before as citizens and voters. “Honest Abe” Lincoln was called an ape, a mudsill, and Kentucky white trash. Andrew Jackson was a rude, ill-tempered cracker. (And like Palin, his grammar was nothing to brag about.) The question loomed: At what point does commonness cease to be an asset, as a viable form of populism, and become a liability for a political actor? And should anyone be shocked when voters are swept up in an “almost Elvis-sized following,” as Cavett said Palin’s supporters were? When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win.40

  By the time of the 2008 election, Americans had been given a thorough taste of the new medium of reality TV, in which instant celebrity could produce a national idol out of a nobody. In The Swan, working-class women were being altered through plastic surgery and breast implants to look like, say, a more modest, suburban Dolly Parton. While American Idol turned unknowns into overnight singing sensations, the attention-craving heiress Paris Hilton consented to filming an updated Green Acres in The Simple Life, moving into an Arkansas family’s rural home. Donald Trump’s The Apprentice, billed as a “seductive weave of aspiration and Darwinism,” celebrated ruthlessness. In these and related shows, talent was secondary; untrained stars were hired to serve voyeuristic interests, in expectation that, as mediocrities, they could be relied on to exhibit the worst of human qualities: vanity, lust, and greed. In 2008, Palin underwent an off-camera “Extreme Makeover”—to borrow a title from one of the more popular such shows. McCain campaign advisers bought into the conceit of reality TV, which said that anyone could be turned into a pseudo-celebrity; in this instance, their experiment had the effect of reshaping national politics.41

  After 2008, a new crop of TV shows came about that played off the white trash trope. Swamp People, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Hillbilly Handfishin’, Redneck Island, Duck Dynasty, Moonshiners, and Appalachian Outlaws were all part of a booming industry. Like the people who visited Hoovervilles during the Depression, eyeing the homeless as if they were at the zoo, television brought the circus sideshow into American living rooms. The modern impulse for slumming also found expression in reviving the old stock vaudeville characters. One commentator remarked of the highly successful Duck Dynasty, set in Louisiana, “All the men look like they stepped out of the Hatfield-McCoy conflict to smoke a corncob pipe.” The Robertson men were kissing cousins of the comic Ritz Brothers in the 1938 Hollywood film Kentucky Moonshine.42

  Kissing cousins. The comic Ritz Brothers from Kentucky Moonshine (1938) and their heirs, the male cast of Duck Dynasty, the highly popular A&E reality TV show.

  Reality programming subsists on emotion-producing competition and outright sca
ndal. The long-running Here Comes Honey Boo Boo was canceled in 2014, but only after it was discovered that Mama June Shannon was dating a convicted child molester; she next revealed that the father of two of her daughters was an entirely different convicted sex offender who had been caught in a sting on NBC’s voyeuristic To Catch a Predator. Though her young daughter Honey Boo Boo was the headliner, June was the real star of the show, the new face of white trash. No longer emaciated and parchment colored, as white trash past was imagined, she was a grossly overweight woman and the antithesis of the typical mom who prettified her grade-school daughter and dragged her to child beauty pageants. June claimed to have had four daughters by three different men, one whose name she claimed she could not remember. Her town of McIntyre, in rural Georgia, is a place of stagnant poverty: one-quarter of its households are headed by single females, and in 2013 the median family income in McIntyre was $18,243.43

  As the gap between rich and poor grew wider after 2000, conservatives took the lead in white trash bashing. In Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005), the economist and Hoover Institute fellow Thomas Sowell connected the delinquency of urban black culture to redneck culture. The book begins with a quote dating to 1956: “These people are creating terrible problems in our cities. They can’t or won’t hold a job, they flout the law constantly and neglect their children, they drink too much and their moral standards would shame an alley cat.” His assumption was that readers would associate the quote with a conventional racist attack. But it was aimed at poor whites living in Indianapolis, and reflected “undesirable” southern whites who lived in northern cities.