White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  37.On the “coon-flavored President,” see Biloxi Herald, April 22, 1903; “Vardaman at Scranton,” [New Orleans] Daily Picayune, June 24, 1903. For “coon-flavored miscegenationist,” see “Correspondence: A Mississippian on Vardaman,” Outlook, September 12, 1903; also see “Lynch Law, and Three Reasons for Its Rule,” [New Orleans] Times-Picayune, March 21, 1904; “Southern Democrats Berate President,” New York Times, October 19, 1901; J. Norrell, “When Teddy Roosevelt Invited Booker T. Washington to Dinner,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 63 (Spring 2009): 70–74; and Dewey W. Grantham Jr., “Dinner at White House: Theodore Roosevelt, Booker T. Washington, and the South,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 17, no. 2 (June 1958): 112–30, esp. 114–18.

  38.For Roosevelt’s comment on Vardaman’s “foul language” as “kennel filth which the foulest New York blackguard would not dare to use on the stump,” and his “unspeakable lowness,” see Theodore Roosevelt to Lyman Abbott, October 7, 1903, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. He voiced similar views in a letter to the muckraking journalist Ray Stannard Baker; see Roosevelt to Ray Stannard Baker, June 3, 1908, in The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Elting Morison, 8 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951–54), 6:1046–48. For controversy over Vardaman’s dog insult, see “The Vardaman Campaign,” Macon Telegraph, August 31, 1903; “It Is Not Denied,” “And This Man Wants to Be Governor!,” The Biloxi Daily Herald, July 31, August 5, 1903; and two untitled articles in The Biloxi Daily Herald, July 22, August 1, 1903; “Vardaman Wrote It,” New York Times, August 16, 1904.

  39.On rednecks and hillbillies, see “Vardaman, the Saint,” [Gulfport, MS] Daily Herald, March 3, 1911. On “dirty” democracy and the people, see “Vardaman at Scranton,” [New Orleans] Daily Picayune, June 24, 1903. On Vardaman as a “medicine man,” see William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973; originally published 1941), 143.

  40.See John M. Mecklin, “Vardamanism,” Independent (August 31, 1911): 461–63. On the symbolic meaning of the “cracker cart” or “critter-kyarts” as the cracker’s usual form of transportation, see “Work Among the ‘Poor Whites,’ or ‘Crackers,’” Friends’ Review (March 22, 1888): 532–33. For an Afro-American newspaper’s pointed criticism of Vardaman’s racism, see “That Devilish Old Vardaman,” Topeka Plaindealer, August 15, 1913. On the problem of poor white illiteracy in Mississippi, see S. A. Steel, “A School in the Sticks: Problem of White Illiteracy,” Zion’s Herald, December 30, 1903; and “Governor Vardaman on the Negro,” Current Literature 36, no. 3 (March 1904): 270–71. On the importance of pitting poor whites against blacks, see John Milton Cooper Jr., “Racism and Reform: A Review Essay,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 55, no. 2 (Winter 1971): 140–44; and Kirwan, Revolt of the Rednecks, 212.

  41.Percy, Lanterns on the Levee, 148–49.

  42.For accounts of Roosevelt’s visit and speech, see “President Denounces Rape and Lynching,” [Columbia, SC] State, October 26, 1905; “Gala Day in Little Rock. President on Race Problem,” Charlotte Daily Observer, October 26, 1905; “Twelve Doves of Peace Hover over Roosevelt,” Lexington Herald, October 26, 1905. On rebuking Davis, see “The President’s Most Important Speech,” Macon Telegraph, October 29, 1905; “Governor Jefferson Davis,” Morning Olympian, December 6, 1905; “Can’t Train with Roosevelt Now,” Fort Worth Telegram, December 6, 1905. For comment that Roosevelt avoided being shot by Vardaman, see “Vardaman Outwitted,” New York Times, November 1, 1905; and William B. Gatewood Jr., “Theodore Roosevelt and Arkansas, 1901–1912,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 32, no. 1 (Spring 1973): 3–24, esp. 18–19; also see Mrs. Wallace Lamar, “Roosevelt Wrongs His Mother’s Blood,” Macon Telegraph, October 26, 1905; and Henry Fowler Pringle, “Theodore Roosevelt and the South,” Virginia Quarterly Review 9, no. 1 (January 1933): 14–25.

  43.On Roosevelt’s view of Washington’s educational project, see Theodore Roosevelt to L. J. Moore, February 5, 1900, in Morison, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 2:1169; Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 97.

  44.Theodore Roosevelt to Cecil Arthur Spring-Rice, August 11, 1899, in Morison, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 2:1053; Roosevelt, “The World Movement,” in The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Herman Hagdorn (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1924), 14:258–85; Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race, 39, 42, 64, 148; also see David H. Burton, “The Influence of the American West on the Imperialist Philosophy of Theodore Roosevelt,” Arizona and the West 4, no. 1 (Spring 1962): 5–26, esp. 10–11, 16.

  45.Roosevelt, of course, wrote an account of his Amazon expedition; see Theodore Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wilderness (New York, 1914). For a detailed account of his trip, see Candice Millard, River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey (New York: Doubleday, 2005). And for the best discussion of Roosevelt’s rugged masculinity, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 170–215.

  46.On the composition of the Rough Riders, see Gary Gerstle, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Divided Character of American Nationalism,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 1280–1307, esp. 1282–83, 1286–87.

  47.Frederic Remington, “Cracker Cowboys of Florida,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 91, no. 543 (August 1895): 339–46, esp. 339, 341–42, 344; for a similar portrait, see “Florida Crackers and Cowboys,” [San Francisco] Daily Evening Bulletin, May 5, 1883.

  48.Theodore Roosevelt to Owen Wister, April 27, 1906, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 5:226–28; “Br’er Vardaman,” Biloxi Herald, January 21, 1902.

  49.Roosevelt took the concept of “race suicide” from University of Wisconsin professor Edward Ross; see Theodore Roosevelt to Marie Van Horst, October 18, 1902. This letter became the “famous race suicide letter,” and was reprinted as the introduction to Van Horst’s book The Woman Who Toils (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1903); also see Theodore Roosevelt, “On American Motherhood,” March 13, 1905, speech given before the National Congress of Mothers, in [Supplemental] A Compilation of the Messages and Speeches of Theodore Roosevelt, 1901–1905, ed. Alfred Henry Lewis, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1906), 576–81; Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race, 15, 147, 152–55, 157; Laura L. Lovett, Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890–1938 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 91–95. The majority of fearmongers who worried about “race suicide” never based their claims on statistical data; see Miriam King and Steven Ruggles, “American Immigration, Fertility, and Race Suicide at the Turn of the Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 20, no. 3 (Winter 1990): 347–69, esp. 368–69.

  50.Report of the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders’ Association, in Harry H. Laughlin, Scope of the Committee’s Work, Eugenics Record Office Bulletin, No. 10A (Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, NY), 16, as quoted in Julius Paul, “Population ‘Quantity’ and ‘Fitness for Parenthood’ in the Light of State Eugenic Sterilization Experience, 1907–1966,” Population Studies 21, no. 3 (November 1967): 295–99, esp. 295; also see Theodore Roosevelt to Charles Davenport, January 3, 1913, Charles Benedict Davenport Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia (Digital Library, #1487); and Theodore Roosevelt, “Twisted Eugenics,” Outlook (January 3, 1914): 30–34; Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race, 158–60.

  51.For his criticism of the new income tax and for his other proposals for mothers, see Theodore Roosevelt, “A Premium on Race Suicide,” Outlook (September 27, 1913); Roosevelt also supported the idea of a “very high tax on the celibate and childless”; see Kathleen Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life (New York: V
intage Books, 2004), 312; also see “Mother’s Pensions in America,” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 9, no. 1 (May 1918): 138–40, esp. 139. On “fit” mothers, see Jessica Toft and Laura S. Abrams, “Progressive Maternalist and the Citizenship Status of Low-Income Single Mothers,” Social Science Review 78, no. 3 (September 2004): 447–65, esp. 460. Some jurists saw the pensions as working similarly to eugenics, preventing “the child’s poverty” from reaching a “menacing state”; see Susan Sterett, “Serving the State: Constitutionalism and Social Spending, 1860s–1920s,” Law and Social Inquiry 22, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 311–56, esp. 344.

  52.“Eugenic Mania,” Pacific Medical Journal (October 1, 1915): 599–602; Steven Selden, “Transforming Better Babies into Fitter Families: Archival Resources and the History of the American Eugenics Movement, 1908–1930,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 149, no. 2 (June 2005): 199–225; Daniel J. Kelves, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985), 59–62, 91–92; Matthew J. Lindsay, “Reproducing a Fit Citizenry: Dependency, Eugenics, and the Law of Marriage in the United States, 1860–1920,” Law and Social Inquiry 23, no. 3 (Summer 1998): 541–85; Mark A. Largent, Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 13–95.

  53.Kelves, In the Name of Eugenics, 44–46, 103; Anne Maxwell, Picture Imperfect: Photography and Eugenics, 1870–1940 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2008), 111; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000), 157–58; Jan A. Witkowski, “Charles Benedict Davenport, 1866–1944,” in Davenport’s Dream: 21st Century Reflections on Heredity and Eugenics, eds. Jan. A Witkowski and John R. Inglis (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2008), 47–48; Barbara A. Kimmelman, “The American Breeders’ Association: Genetics and Eugenics in an Agricultural Context, 1903–13,” Social Studies Science 13, no. 2 (May 1983): 163–204.

  54.Davenport wrote his brother in 1924 that if immigrants were allowed to overrun the country, in two hundred years New York and the North would be transformed into Mississippi. Here he used southern backwardness as his model for the menace of foreign immigration. See Charles Davenport to William Davenport, February 11, 1924, Box 33, Charles Benedict Davenport Papers, 1876–1946, American Philosophical Society, as cited in Kelves, In the Name of Eugenics, 94. He saw the failure to segregate the sexes in the poorhouse as primarily a southern problem; see Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1911), 67, 70–71, 74, 182, 200. On Mississippi, see Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 81, 92. Davenport wanted to use the U.S. Census to collect data on human bloodlines and use that information to identify in each county the “centers of feeblemindedness and crime and know who each hovel brings forth”; see Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, 1, 80–82, 87–90, 211–12, 233–34, 248–49, 255, 268. Eugenicist and sociologist Edward Ross (who coined the term “race suicide”) also believed that migration to the city produced a different and better breed. He argued that long-skulled people moved to the city, while the broad-skulled and mentally inferior stayed in the countryside; see Edward Ross, Foundations of Sociology (New York, 1905), 364.

  55.On Davenport’s reference to women with big hips, and for a reference to horse breeding, see Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, 1, 7–8. For Alexander Graham Bell’s argument at the Fourth Annual Convention of the American Breeders’ Association, see “Close Divorce Doors If Any Children. Prof. Alexander Graham Bell Considers Plan to Produce Better Men and Women,” New York Times, January 30, 1908; W. E. D. Stokes, The Right to Be Well Born, or Horse Breeding in Its Relations to Eugenics (New York, 1917), 8, 74, 76, 199, 256; also see “W. E. D. Stokes on Eugenics,” Eugenical News 2, no. 2 (February 1917): 13. On the focus on “human thoroughbreds” and the “unborn,” also see “A Perfect Race of Men: According to Prof. Kellar the Success of Eugenics Depends on Rules Made by Custom,” New York Times, September 27, 1908. It was Mary Harriman’s daughter, also named Mary, both a student of eugenics and a horse lover, who encouraged her mother to donate money to Davenport’s Eugenics Record Office. Her brother William Averell Harriman was a horse breeder, and the daughter Mary also bred cattle. See Persia Campbell, “Mary Harriman Rumsey,” Notable American Women, 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary, vol. 1, eds. Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul Boyer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971): 208–9.

  56.A Michigan legislator proposed a measure for killing by electricity children considered hopeless cases; see S. T. Samock, “Shall We Kill the Feeble-Minded?,” Health (August 1903): 258–59. W. Duncan McKim, M.D., Ph.D., called for a method of elimination of the very weak and very vicious by carbonic acid gas asphyxiation in his Heredity and Human Progress (New York, 1900), 188–93. On executing the grandfather, see Kelves, In the Name of Eugenics, 92. For a similar argument that degeneracy should be stopped at the grandfather, see John N. Hurty, M.D., “Practical Eugenics,” Journal of Nursing 12, no. 5 (February 1912): 450–53. On sterilization laws and categories, see Paul, “Population ‘Quantity’ and ‘Fitness for Parenthood,’” 296; and Paul Popenoe, “The Progress of Eugenic Sterilization,” Journal of Heredity 25, no. 1 (January 1934): 19–27, esp. 20. On Taussig, see Thomas C. Leonard, “Retrospectives: Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 4 (Autumn 1905): 207–24, esp. 214.

  57.For examples of the argument that whites, especially white women, had an instinctual aversion to blacks, see an article by the chancellor of the University of Georgia, Walter B. Hill, “Uncle Tom Without a Cabin,” Century Magazine 27, no. 6 (1884): 862; Reverend William H. Campbell’s book, Anthropology for the People: A Refutation of the Theory of the Adamic Origins of All Races (Richmond, 1891), 269; “The Color Line,” New York Globe, June 1883; “Race Amalgamation,” American Economic Association. Publications (August 1896): 180; and “The Psychology of the Race Question,” Independent (August 13, 1903): 1939–40; Ellen Barret Ligon, M.D., “The White Woman and the Negro,” Good Housekeeping (November 1903): 426–29, esp. 428; and Mencke, Mulattoes and Race Mixture, 105, 107–8; also see Stokes, The Right to Be Well Born, 86, 222–24, 230. On checking husbands before marriage, see Mrs. John A. Logan, “Inheritance, Mental and Physical,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 24, 1904. On eugenic marriages, see “Wants to Be a Eugenic Bride,” New York Times, November 3, 1913. On a novel about eugenic marriage (Courtship Under Contract: The Science of Selection), see “Book Reviews,” Health (February 1911): 43. On a eugenic school for female orphans in Louisiana, see “Quits Society for Eugenics,” New York Times, August 29, 1913. On a eugenic registry, see “Superman a Being of Nervous Force . . . Eugenic Registry Plan Would Develop a Race of Human Thoroughbreds, It Is Argued—Elimination of the Unfit,” New York Times, January 11, 1914; and Selden, “Transforming Better Babies into Fitter Families,” 206–7, 210–12. On the important role of women in the eugenics movement, see Edward J. Larson, “‘In the Finest, Most Womanly Way’: Women in the Southern Eugenics Movement,” American Journal of Legal History 39, no. 2 (April 1995): 119–47.

  58.By 1928, nearly four hundred colleges and universities were offering eugenics courses; see Steven Selden, Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999), 49. Goddard classified morons as having the mental age from eight to twelve; see Henry H. Goddard, “Four-Hundred Feeble-Minded Children Classified by the Binet Method,” Journal of Psycho-Asthenics 15, no. 1–2 (September and December, 1910): 17–30, esp. 26–27. On the moron and sexual deviance, see Edwin T. Brewster, “A Scientific Study of Fools,” McClure’s Magazine 39, no. 3 (July 1912): 328–34. On the fecundity of feebleminded women, see “The Unfit,” Medical Record (Ma
rch 4, 1911): 399–400; and Martin W. Barr, M.D., “The Feebleminded a Sociological Problem,” Alienist and Neurologist (August 1, 1913): 302–5. On feebleminded girls as a menace to society, see “The Menace of the Feebleminded,” Colman’s Rural World (June 25, 1914): 8. On female morons becoming prostitutes or slovenly housekeepers with hordes of children, see George S. Bliss, M.D., “Diagnosis of Feebleminded Individuals,” Alienist and Neurologist (January 1, 1918): 17–23; also see Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 77, 107; Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, 233–43; and Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 20–29.

  59.On the continuing fears of miscegenation, see William Benjamin Smith, The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn (New York, 1905), 5, 8, 11–14, 17–18, 74; Robert W. Shufeldt, M.D., The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization (Boston, 1907), 73–74, 77–78, 103–4, 131. Between 1907 and 1921, Congress proposed twenty-one bills against miscegenation; see Robinson, Dangerous Liaisons, 82.

  60.For Goddard using the same metaphors as Reconstruction writers for white trash, see Henry Herbert Goddard, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (New York, 1912), 66, 71–72. On reducing taxpayers’ burden, an argument used in Indiana, which passed one of the first sterilization laws in 1907, see “Feeble-Minded Women,” Duluth News Tribune, March 12, 1904; Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, 259; Kline, Building a Better Race, 49, 53; Kelves, In the Name of Eugenics, 72. On morons as needed for manual laborers, see Lewis M. Terman, The Measurement of Intelligence (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), 91. This was the argument of Albert Priddy, superintendent of the asylum involved in the Buck v. Bell case; see Gregory Michael Dorr, Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 132.