White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

15.Marling, “Elvis Presley’s Graceland,” 74, 79–81, 85, 89.

  16.For Elvis becoming a “country squire,” see “Presley Buys $100,000 Home for Self, Parents,” [New Orleans] Times-Picayune, March 24, 1957. On Nixon’s trip, see “‘Made in U.S.A.’—In Red Capital,” U.S. News & World Report (August 3, 1959): 38–39; Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 72–73; Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 10–12.

  17.“By Richard Nixon,” New York Times, July 25, 1959.

  18.Charles Hillenger, “Disneyland Dedication: Vice-President and Other Celebrities Help Open Six New Attractions at Park,” Los Angeles Times, June 15, 1959; Mary Ann Callan, “Says Pat Nixon: ‘It’s American Dream,’” Los Angeles Times, July 27, 1960; James McCartney, “Campaign Push Starts for Pat: Republicans Feel Pat Nixon May Hold the Key to the Election,” Pittsburgh Press, September 1, 1960; Patricia Conner, “Women Are Spotlighted in 1960 Presidential Campaign,” Lodi [CA] News-Sentinel, November 1, 1960; Marylin Bender, “Home and Public Roles Kept in Cheerful Order,” New York Times, July 28, 1960; also Martha Weinman, “First Ladies—In Fashion, Too? This Fall the Question of Style for a President’s Wife May Be a Great Issue,” New York Times, September 11, 1960.

  19.Becky M. Nicolaides, “Suburbia and the Sunbelt,” OAH Magazine of History 18, no. 1 (October 2003): 21–26; Eric Larrabee, “The Six Thousand Houses That Levitt Built,” Harper’s Magazine 197, no. 1180 (September 1948): 79–88, esp. 79–80, 82–83; Boyden Sparkes, “They’ll Build Neighborhoods, Not Houses,” Saturday Evening Post (October 28, 1944): 11, 43–46. For Levittown as a “vast housing colony,” see “New Model Homes to Be Opened Today,” New York Times, April 3, 1949; Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 234–37; and Thomas J. Anton, “Three Models of Community Development in the United States,” Publius 1, no. 1 (1971): 11–37, esp. 33–34.

  20.Sparkes, “They’ll Build Neighborhoods,” 44. Though the Levitts removed the restrictive covenant, they continued to discriminate against black families; see “Housing Bias Ended,” New York Times, May 29, 1949; and James Wolfinger, “‘The American Dream—For All Americans’: Race, Politics, and the Campaign to Desegregate Levittown,” Journal of Urban History 38, no. 3 (2012): 230–52, esp. 234. For the Norfolk housing facility, see Larrabee, “The Six Thousand Houses That Levitt Built,” 80; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 234.

  21.For the symbolic weight given the barbecue, see Kristin L. Matthews, “One Nation over Coals: Cold War Nationalism and the Barbecue,” American Studies 50, no. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2009): 5–34, esp. 11, 17, 26; and A. R. Swinnerton, “Ranch-Type Homes for Dudes,” Saturday Evening Post (August 18, 1956): 40. Also see Lois Craig, “Suburbs,” Design Quarterly 132 (1986): 1–32, esp. 18; Ken Duvall, “Sin Is the Same in the City or the Suburb,” Toledo Blade, December 6, 1960. On “Fertile Acres,” see Harry Henderson, “The Mass-produced Suburbs: I. How People Live in America’s Newest Towns,” Harper’s Magazine 207, no. 1242 (November 1953): 25–32, esp. 29. On lawn mowing as husbandry, see Dan W. Dodson, “Suburbanism and Education,” Journal of Educational Sociology 32, no. 1 (September 1958): 2–7, esp. 4; Scott Donaldson, “City and Country: Marriage Proposals,” American Quarterly 20, no. 3 (Autumn, 1968): 547–66, esp. 562–64; and Harry Henderson, “Rugged American Collectivism: The Mass-produced Suburbs, II.,” Harper’s Magazine (December 1953): 80–86.

  22.Frederick Lewis Allen, “The Big Change in Suburbia,” Harper’s Magazine 208, no. 1249 (June 1954): 21–28. On the way class reinforced racial segregation, see “Economic Factors May Keep Suburbia Segregated,” [Lexington, KY] Dispatch, June 19, 1968. On Mahwah and Westchester, see Dodson, “Suburbanism and Education,” 5–6. On the class strategies of zoning, see Carol O’Connor, A Sort of Utopia: Scarsdale, 1891–1981 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1983), 30–42, 159–65; also Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003), 202–8, 231; and Becky M. Nicolaides, “‘Where the Working Man Is Welcomed’: Working-class Suburbs in Los Angeles, 1900–1940,” Pacific Historical Review 68, no. 4 (November 1999): 517–59, esp. 557. On neat lawns and gardens as class markers, see William Dobriner, Class in Suburbia (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963), 23.

  23.See Wolfgang Langewiesche, “Everybody Can Own a House,” House Beautiful (November 1956): 227–29, 332–35; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 205, 235, 238.

  24.Because home construction relied heavily on banks and other such institutions, lenders had tremendous power in reinforcing racial and class stratification; see “Application of the Sherman Act to Housing Segregation,” Yale Law Journal 63, no. 6 (June 1954): 1124–47, esp. 1125–26. For the residents’ obsession with property values, see Henderson, “Rugged American Collectivism,” 85–86; Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic, 202, 212–13. For lack of variety in suburbs, see Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg, “The Challenge of the New Suburbs,” Marriage and Family Living 17, no. 2 (May 1955): 133–37, esp. 134; David Reisman, “The Suburban Dislocation,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 314 (November 1957): 123–46, esp. 134. For Lewis Mumford’s critique, see Penn Kimball, “‘Dream Town’—Large Economy Size: Pennsylvania’s New Levittown is Pre-Planned Down to the Last Thousand Living Rooms,” New York Times, December 14, 1952; and Vance Packard, The Status Seekers: An Exploration of Class Behavior in America and the Hidden Barriers That Affect You, Your Community, Your Future (New York: David McKay Co., 1959), 28.

  25.On the Bucks County Levittown, see “Levitt’s Design for Steel Workers’ Community,” New York Times, November 4, 1951; David Schuyler, “Reflections on Levittown at Fifty,” Pennsylvania History 70, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 101–9, esp. 105. On the trailer park, see Don Hager, “Trailer Towns and Community Conflict in Lower Bucks County,” Social Problems 2, no. 1 (July 1954): 33–38; and Andrew Hurley, Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 195–96.

  26.For one of the first references to trailer trash in reference to war workers, see Mary Heaton Vorse, “And the Workers Say . . . ,” Public Opinion Quarterly 7, no. 3 (Autumn 1943): 443–56. For the homemade trailers as “monstrosities,” see Harold Martin, “Don’t Call Them Trailer Trash,” Saturday Evening Post 225, no. 5 (August 2, 1952): 24–25, 85–87; Allan D. Wallis, “House Trailers: Innovation and Accommodation in Vernacular Housing,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 3 (1989): 28–43, esp. 30–31, 34; “Trailers for Army Areas,” New York Times, March 19, 1941; Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in the Sunbelt Cities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 107–10; Hurley, Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks, 203; “Trailers for Army Areas,” New York Times, March 19, 1941; and see Lucy Greenbaum, “‘Trailer Village’ Dwellers Happy in Connecticut Tobacco Field,” New York Times, April 13, 1942.

  27.See “Agnes Ernest Meyer” (1887–1970), in Notable American Women: The Modern Period, eds. Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 471–73; and Agnes E. Meyer, Journey Through Chaos (New York, 1944), x.

  28.Meyer, Journey Through Chaos, ix, 373–74.

  29.Ibid., 196–99, 210, 216.

  30.See Alexander C. Wellington, “Trailer Camp Slums,” Survey (1951): 418–21. For trailer camps and idle wastelands as part of the fringe zone around Flint, Michigan, see Walter Firey, Social Aspects to Land Use Planning in the Country-City Fringe: The Case of Flint, Michigan (East Lansing: Michigan State College, 1946), 8, 32, 42, 52, 54. “Photograph of Mobile Homes, Described as ‘Squatters,’ in Winkelman, Arizona” (1950), Arizona Archives and Public Records, Arizona State Library. For earlier references to trailerites as squatters and the trailer as the “family kennel,” see “200,000 Trailers,” For
tune 15, no. 3 (March 1937): 105–11, 214, 200, 220, 222, 224, 226, 229, esp. 105–6, 220. The squatter allusion continued to hold sway; see Keith Corcoran, “Mobile Homes Merit More Respect,” [Schenectady, NY] Daily Gazette, April 14, 1990.

  31.See John E. Booth, “At Home on Wheels: Trailer Exhibition Stresses Comfortable Living,” New York Times, November 16, 1947; Virginia J. Fortiner, “Trailers a la Mode,” New York Times, April 27, 1947; “Trailers: More and More Americans Call Them Home,” Newsweek (July 7, 1952): 70–73, esp. 70; Martin, “Don’t Call Them Trailer Trash,” 85. Some six thousand trailers were being used on college campuses in 1946; see Milton Mac Kaye, “Crisis at the Colleges,” Saturday Evening Post 219 (August 3, 1946): 9–10, 34–36, 39, esp. 35.

  32.Allan D. Wallis, Wheel Estate: The Rise and Decline of Mobile Homes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 116. On zoning restrictions, see Emily A. MacFall and E. Quinton Gordon, “Mobile Homes and Low-Income Rural Families.” (Washington, DC, 1973), 38–40; Robert Mills French and Jeffrey K. Hadden, “An Analysis of the Distribution and Characteristics of Mobile Homes in America,” Land Economics 41, no. 2 (May 1965): 131–39; Lee Irby, “Taking Out the Trailer Trash: The Battle over Mobile Homes in St. Petersburg, Florida,” Florida Historical Quarterly 79, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 181–200, esp. 188, 194–96; Hurley, Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks, 235–41, 254, 256, 258.

  33.Dina Smith, “Lost Trailer Utopias: The Long, Long Trailer (1954) and Fifties America,” Utopian Studies 14, no. 1 (2003): 112–31.

  34.“Trailers Gaining in Popularity in U.S. but Urban Planner Asserts Community Opposition Is Growing,” New York Times, July 17, 1960; “Mobile Homes—Today’s Name for Residence on Wheels,” Sarasota Herald-Tribune, January 19, 1961. Vickers v. Township Comm. of Gloucester Township, 37 N.J. 232, 265, 181 A.2d 129 (1962), dissenting opinion at 148–49; for a discussion of the case, see Richard F. Babcock and Fred P. Bosselman, “Suburban Zoning and the Apartment Boom,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 11, no. 8 (June 1963): 1040–91, esp. 1086–88; also see “Would Forbid Trailer Parks: Council Group Acts,” Milwaukee Journal, December 14, 1954.

  35.Anthony Ripley, “Mobile Home ‘Resorts’ Make ‘Trailer Park’ a Dirty Word,” New York Times Magazine, May 31, 1969, 25, 48; “Fess Parker’s Dollars Ride on Wheels,” [Bowling Green, KY] Park City Daily, November 11, 1962—a news story written by Erskine Johnson, Hollywood correspondent, for the NEA; also see “Giant Man, with a Giant Plan,” Tuscaloosa News, March 28, 1969; and “Fess Parker Rides Again,” [Fredricksburg, VA] Free Lance-Star, October 3, 1970.

  36.Morris Horton, “There’s No Crack in Our Picture Window,” Trailer Topics (May 1957): 7, 74, 76; Agnes Ash, “Trailer Owners Staying Put,” Miami News, July 24, 1960; also see “The Mobile Home Isn’t So Mobile Any More,” Business Week (March 16, 1957): 44–46.

  37.Douglas E. Kneeland, “From ‘Tin Can on Wheels’ to the Mobile Home,” New York Times Magazine, May 9, 1971. In 1941, a white community in Detroit had erected a wall between themselves and a black community in order to receive FHA approval for mortgages; see Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 209.

  38.See “A Sociologist Looks at an American Community,” Life (September 12, 1949): 108–19; Robert Mills French and Jeffrey K. Hadden, “Mobile Homes: Instant Suburbia or Transportable Slums?,” Social Problems 16, no. 2 (Autumn 1968): 219–26, esp. 222–25; Bailey H. Kuklin, “House and Technology: The Mobile Home Experience,” Tennessee Law Review 44 (Spring 1977): 765–844, esp. 809, 814; MacFall and Gordon, “Mobile Homes and Low-Income Rural Families,” 46. On the high depreciation rate of trailers, see Jack E. Gaumnitz, “Mobile Home and Conventional Home Ownership: An Economic Perspective,” Nebraska Journal of Economics and Business 13, no. 4, Midwest Economics Association Papers (Autumn 1974): 130–43, esp. 130, 142. One of the worst trailer parks in Denver was described as follows: “Called ‘Peyton Place,’ many of the trailer pads are empty. One is littered with an old porcelain toilet bowl from some forgotten departure. The place is for sale and the sign, in misspelled English, read ‘vacancy’”; see Ripley, “Mobile Home ‘Resorts,’” 48.

  39.For prostitutes in trailers at military and defense installations, see “Syphilis and Defense,” New York Times, November 29, 1941. Even before the war, there were rumors of a “rolling bordello” traveling between trailer camps in Florida, and racy stories in newspapers, such as that of a man traveling with both his wife and his mistress; see “200,000 Trailers,” 220, 229. For the association of trailers with immoral behavior, see Kuklin, “House and Technology,” 812–13; also Alan Bérubé and Florence Bérubé, “Sunset Trailer Park,” in White Trash: Race and Class in America, eds. Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray (New York: Routledge, 1997), 19; Orrie Hitt, Trailer Tramp (Boston: Beacon, 1957). Similar titles included: Loren Beauchamp, Sin on Wheels: The Uncensored Confessions of a Trailer Camp Tramp (1961) and Glenn Canary, The Trailer Park Girls (1962). On the cover of Cracker Girl, it read, “She was his property; to keep, to beat, to use”; see Harry Whittington, Cracker Girl (Stallion Books, 1953). The psychologist Harold Lasswell listed “trailer nomadism” along with other sources of degeneracy, such as alcoholism, drugs, gambling, and delinquency; see Harold Lasswell, “The Socio-Political Situation,” Educational Research Bulletin 36, no. 3 (March 13, 1957): 69–77, esp. 75.

  40.“The Mobile Home Market,” Appraiser’s Journal 40, no. 3 (July 1972): 391–411, esp. 397; and “Planners Approve City Trailer Parks for the Homeless,” New York Times, March 23, 1971.

  41.Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic, 202–8, 228, 231, 240–41, 404. On the migration from rural to metropolitan areas, see Pete Daniel, “Going Among Strangers: Southern Reactions to World War II,” Journal of American History 77, no. 3 (December 1990): 886–911, esp. 886, 898. On television and tribalism, see H. J. Skornia, “What TV Is Doing to America: Some Unexpected Consequences,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 3, no. 3 (July 1969): 29–44.

  42.Counts was working for the afternoon Arkansas Democrat when he took the picture, which made his photograph the first to appear. Johnny Jenkins published a similar photograph the next day in the Arkansas Gazette. See Karen Anderson, Little Rock: Race and Resistance at Central High School (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 2; Peter Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 262; David Margolick, Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 1–2, 36–37, 59–61, 63, 152–54.

  43.Margolick, Elizabeth and Hazel, 38–39, 41. On the rural white migration into Little Rock, see Ben F. Johnson III, “After 1957: Resisting Integration in Little Rock,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 66, no. 2 (Summer 1007): 258–83, esp. 262.

  44.Margolick, Elizabeth and Hazel, 70–71, 88.

  45.Benjamin Fine, “Students Unhurt,” New York Times, September 24, 1957; Fletcher Knebel, “The Real Little Rock Story,” Look, November 12, 1957, 31–33, esp. 33; Margolick, Elizabeth and Hazel, 37, 105; Daniel, Lost Revolutions, 263; and Phoebe Godfrey, “Bayonets, Brainwashing, and Bathrooms: The Discourse of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 62, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 42–67, esp. 45–47; and Belman Morin, “Arkansas Riot Like Explosion,” [Spokane, WA] Spokesman Review, September 23, 1957.

  46.For Guthridge’s remarks, see “Some Bitterness,” Arkansas Gazette, September 1, 1957; C. Fred Williams, “Class: The Central Issue in the 1957 Little Rock School Crisis,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 56, no. 3 (Autumn 1997): 341–44; Graeme Cope, “‘Everybody Says All Those People. . .Were from out of Town, but They Weren’t’: A Note on Crowds During the Little Rock Crisis,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 67, no. 3 (Autumn 2008): 245–67, esp. 261.

  47.Roy Reed, Faubus: The Life and Times of an American Prodigal (Little Rock: University of Arkansas Press, 1997), 358; “The South: What Orval Hath Wrou
ght,” Time (September 23): 1957, 11–14, esp. 12–13. Also see Williams, “Class: The Central Issue,” 344; “Orval’s Iliad and Odyssey,” Life (September 23, 1957): 28–35; Anderson, Little Rock, 68; and Don Iddon, “Faubus of Little Rock: ‘The President Underestimated the Ruthless Ambition of This Hillbilly Who So Far Has Always Won in the End,’” [London] Daily Mail, September 26, 1957.

  48.Benjamin Fine, “Militia Sent to Little Rock; School Integration Put Off,” New York Times, September 3, 1957; “Speech of Governor Orval E. Faubus, September 2, 1957,” http://southerncolloqrhetoric.net/resources/Faubus570902.pdf. The original speech is located in the Orval Eugene Faubus Papers, 1910–1994, Series 14, Box 496, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AK; and David Wallace, “Orval Faubus: The Central Figure at Little Rock Central High School,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 39, no. 4 (Winter 1980): 314–29, esp. 324.

  49.Anthony Lewis, “President Sends Troops to Little Rock, Federalizes Arkansas National Guard; Tells Nation He Acted to Avoid Anarchy,” New York Times, September 25, 1957. On Faubus manufacturing the myth of violence, see “Arkansas,” Time (September 30, 1957): 17–19; “Little Rock Sputnik Is Burning Itself Out,” Washington Afro-American, October 22, 1957.

  50.John Chancellor, “Radio and Television Had Their Own Problems in Little Rock Coverage,” Quill (December 1957): 9–10, 20–21; Jack Gould, “TV: Reality in the South,” New York Times, September 26, 1957; Harold R. Isaacs, “World Affairs and U.S. Race Relations: A Note on Little Rock,” Public Opinion Quarterly 22, no. 3 (Autumn 1958): 364–70, esp. 366–67; and “A Historic Week of Civil Strife,” Life (October 7, 1957): 37–48, esp. 38–39.

  51.For local journalists calling them rednecks, see Cope, “‘Everybody Says All Those People,’” 246–47, 267. For “many in overalls,” see Chancellor, “Radio and Television,” 9. For the “rednecked man,” see Homer Bigart, “School Is Ringed: Negroes Go to School in Little Rock as Soldiers Guard the Area,” New York Times, September 26, 1957. For the women in the Nashville mob, see “The South: What Orval Hath Wrought,” 12, 15. For the crowd as white trash, see Stewart Alsop, “Tragedy in the Sunshine at Little Rock,” Victoria Advocate, September 26, 1957 (reprinted from the New York Herald Tribune). Another portrayal of the mob as a “motley crowd of poor whites” is in the syndicated columnist Bob Considine’s “Anatomy of the Mob—II,” St. Petersburg Times, September 16, 1957; Considine, “The Anatomy of Violence—1: Mob Actions Help Cause of Integration,” Milwaukee Sentinel, September 14, 1957. On calling women “slattern housewives” and “harpies,” see Considine, “Riffraff of Little Rock Is Giving City Bad Name,” Milwaukee Sentinel, September 12, 1957. An Afro-American newspaper claimed that Governor Faubus had inflamed a mob of “Arkansas hillbillies”; see “Ring Out the False, Ring in the True,” Baltimore Afro-American, December 29, 1959.