White Trash

by Nancy Isenberg

  28.Roy Blount Jr., Crackers: This Whole Many Angled Thing of Jimmy, More Carters, Ominous Little Animals, Sad Singing Women, My Daddy and Me (New York: Knopf, 1980), 210, 221. Norman Mailer wrote about the campaign film shown at the Democratic convention that covered the parodies of Carter’s famous smile (such as Alfred E. Neuman on the cover of Mad Magazine); see Norman Mailer, “The Search for Carter,” New York Times Magazine, September 26, 1976, 20–21, 69–73, 88–90, esp. 69. And there was even an Associated Press news story on Carter’s dentist, see Fred Cormier, “That Famous Carter Grin Doesn’t Need Toothpaste,” Ocala Star-Banner, February 7, 1980.

  29.On Carter’s tenacity for his roots, see John Dillin, “Jimmy Carter: Forces in His Life,” Boca Raton News, August 1, 1976 (reprinted from the Christian Science Monitor); Robert D. Hershey Jr., “Carter’s Family Linked to Royalty by British Publication on Peerage,” New York Times, August 12, 1977. For Carter’s fascination with his own roots, also see Wooten, Dasher, 62. On the fact that the “details” of Carter’s colonial Virginia heritage were as sketchy and improbable as Alex Haley’s, see Douglas Brinkley, “A Time for Reckoning: Jimmy Carter and the Cult of Kinfolk,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 29, no. 4 (December 1999): 778–97, esp. 781. And on the centrality of Carter’s Georgia roots as crucial to his self-fashioning, see F. N. Boney, “Georgia’s First President: The Emergence of Jimmy Carter,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 72, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 119–32, esp. 119, 123.

  30.See Phil Gailey, “Meet Billy Carter,” [St. Petersburg, FL] Evening Independent, July 15, 1976; Huber, “A Short History of Redneck,” 158. On selling mobile homes, see “Billy Carter,” [Henderson, NC] Times-News, September 23, 1981; also see Stanley W. Cloud, “A Wry Clown: Billy Carter, 1937–1988,” Time (October 10, 1988): 44.

  31.Blount, Crackers, 93, 131–32.

  32.On Shrum, see Mary McGrory, “Ex-Carter Speech Writer Says Jimmy Lies,” Boca Raton News, May 9, 1976. On poor women, see David S. Broder, “Life Isn’t Fair,” Telegraph, July 25, 1977. Carter displayed the same dichotomy on welfare, calling for greater health care for poor rural women, yet emphasizing that government cannot “solve all our problems.” As one New York Times reporter noted, Carter’s Dixie conservatism was part of a tradition that “embraces a certain fatalism about social inequalities and the natural pecking order more readily than do Northern liberals”; see Hendrick Smith, “Carter’s Political Dichotomy: Beliefs Rooted in Southern Democratic Traditions Seem to Counteract His Compassion for the Poor,” New York Times, July 16, 1977; and Andrew R. Flint and Joy Porter, “Jimmy Carter: The Re-Emergence of Faith-Based Politics and the Abortion Rights Issue,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 35, no. 1 (March 2005): 28–51, esp. 39.

  33.For a sample of the stories of the rabbit affair, see Chicago Tribune–New York News Syndicate writer Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover, “Laughing with the President—Or at Him,” St. Petersburg Times, September 1, 1979; “Banzai Bunny ‘Just a Quiet Georgia Rabbit,’” Montreal Gazette, August 31, 1979; “Carter and Peter Rabbit,” Lewiston Evening Journal, August 31, 1979; Louis Cook, “About the Rabbit . . . ,” Bangor Daily News, August 31, 1979; Valerie Schulthies, “Monster Rabbits Strike Terror in Many a Heart,” Deseret News, September 1, 1979; Ralph de Toledano, “The Great Rabbit Caper,” Lodi [CA] News-Sentinel, September 20, 1979. For Carter telling the story, see “Questions Get Tough When Carter Meets the Press,” Palm Beach Post, August 31, 1979; “A Tale of Carter and the ‘Killer Rabbit’; President Orders Photograph,” “Carter Describes Foe: ‘Quiet Georgia Rabbit,’” and “Rabbit Photo Kept Secret,” New York Times, August 29, August 31, and September 5, 1979. For a release of the “clearest picture” of the rabbit duel, see “The Famed Rabbit Attack,” Gainesville [FL] Sun, June 23, 1981. Tom Paxton wrote a satirical song, titled “I Don’t Want a Bunny Wunny,” playing on the theme of a mock duel or battle: “President Carter saved the day; / Splashed with the paddle, rabbit swam away. / Jimmy was a hero, felt it in his bones, / Said in the words of John Paul Jones.”

  34.On Reagan’s visit to Ireland, see Jacobson, Roots Too, 16–17. When Reagan gave a speech at the dedication of the Carter library, he called Carter’s personal story the “story of the South,” clearly the opposite of what Reagan stood for. On Reagan not understanding the South, see Frederick Allen, “Jimmy Carter, a Son of the South Who Bore the Region’s Burdens,” [Wilmington, NC] Star-News, October 5, 1986. On Reagan’s acting skills and the Nancy Reagan “pigsty” rumor, see Bob Schieffer and Gary Paul Gates, The Acting President (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1989), 170, 181, 375. Kitty Kelley wrote that Nancy Reagan wanted “‘a return of dignity,’” as if “the Carters had been jugheads in blue jeans who prodded cattle through the halls”; see Kitty Kelley, Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 296–97. On Reagan’s “media reflexes,” see Lance Morrow, “The Decline of Oratory,” Time (August 18, 1980): 76, 78, esp. 76.

  35.Patrick Buchanan, “Reagan Offers Hope to Blacks,” Chicago Tribune, September 2, 1980.

  36.Blount, Crackers, 5. On Bakker at the White House, see Dudley Clendinen, “Spurred by White House Parley, TV Evangelists Spread Word,” New York Times, September 10, 1984. For the “Pass-the-Loot Club,” see Sandy Grady, “Camera Double-Crossed Bakker,” Spokane Chronicle, September 22, 1989. On the forty-five-year sentence, see June Preston, “Bakker Given 45 Years, $500,000 Fine for Fraud,” Schenectady Gazette, October 25, 1989. By 1987, the PTL broadcast on 165 local stations covering 85 percent of the national TV market; see Charles E. Shepard, Forgiven: The Rise and Fall of Jim Bakker and the PTL Ministry (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989), 239.

  37.For the “Bible school dropout,” see Preston, “Bakker Given 45 Years”; for the Bakkers’ extravagant lifestyle, see Elizabeth LeLand, “Jim and Tammy Bakker Lived Life of Luxuriant Excess,” Ocala Star-Banner, May 24, 1987; Richard N. Ostling, “Of God and Greed: Bakker and Falwell Trade Charges in Televangelism’s Unholy Row,” Time (June 8, 1987): 70–72, 74, esp. 72. On living in a trailer and later excesses, see Shepard, Forgiven, 35, 110, 133, 180, 201, 249, 264, 551.

  38.On Jim Bakker’s use of his poor class background in his religious message, see Richard N. Ostling, “TV’s Unholy Row: A Sex-and-Money Scandal Tarnishes Electronic Evangelicalism,” Time (April 6, 1987): 60–64, 67, esp. 62. On prosperity theology, see “Jim Bakker,” in Randall Herbert Balmer, Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2004), 50–52; and Axel R. Schafer, Countercultural Conservatives: American Evangelicalism from the Postwar Revival to the New Christian Right (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 125. On the “cheesy” nature of the Jim and Tammy show, see Brian Siang, “Jim & Tammy Faye’s Fall from Grace Is Perfectly Clear,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 8, 1987.

  39.On Tammy’s drug addiction, see “Tammy Bakker Treated,” [New Orleans] Times-Picayune, 1986; and Ostling, “Of God and Greed,” 72. On sex scandals and Hahn revelations, see Associated Press story, “Playboy Interview with Jessica Hahn,” [Spartanburg, SC] Herald Journal, September 22, 1987; Horace Davis, “Hahn’s Story—In Hahn’s Words,” Lakeland [FL] Ledger, October 9, 1987; “Fletcher Says Bakker Bisexual,” Gadsden [AL] Times, December 5, 1988; “As He Faces Likely Indictment, New Sex Accusation: Bakker Says Christianity in Disarray,” Ellensburg [WA] Daily Record, December 5, 1988; “Bakker Defrocked by Assemblies of God,” Lodi [CA] News-Sentinel, May 7, 1987; Montgomery Brower, “Unholy Roller Coaster,” People, September 18, 1989, 98–99, 102–4, 106, esp. 104; Mary Zeiss Stange, “Jessica Hahn’s Strange Odyssey from PTL to Playboy,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 6, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 105–16, esp. 106; “The Jessica Hahn Story: Part 1,” Playboy, November 1987, 178–80; “The Jessica Hahn Story: Part 2,” Playboy, December 1987, 198; “Jessica: A New Life,” Playboy, September 1988, 158–62.

  40.On sending out the appeals for money on the first of the month, see Montgomer
y, “Unholy Roller Coaster,” 106; Nicholas Von Hoffman, “White Trash Moves Front and Center,” Bangor Daily News, April 8, 1987. Hoffman’s editorial appeared alongside a cartoon of Satan meeting with his minions, holding a paper marked “T.V. Evangelicals.” Satan is saying, “Then it’s agreed. The hostile takeover will not be attempted. The enterprise in question being too sleazy for our consideration.” For the typical viewers of televangelist shows, see Barry R. Litman and Elizabeth Bain, “The Viewership of Religious Television Programming: A Multidisciplinary Analysis of Televangelism,” Review of Religion 30, no. 4 (June 1989): 329–43, esp. 338. For President Reagan cultivating televangelists, see Jeffrey K. Hadden, “The Rise and Fall of American Televangelism,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 527 (May 1993): 113–30, esp. 126.

  41.“Tammy Faye Bakker,” in R. Marie Griffith, “The Charismatic Movement,” in Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, eds. Rosemary Skinner Keller and Rosemary Radford Reuther (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2006), 463; Shepard, Forgiven, 6–7, 30–31, 152–53; and William E. Schmidt, “For Jim and Tammy Bakker, Excess Wiped Out a Rapid Climb to Success,” New York Times, May 16, 1987.

  42.Parton told Roy Blount that the reason for her outrageous appearance was that she had nothing as a child and, having acquired money, “I’m gonna pile it all over me.” Roy Blount Jr., “Country’s Angels,” Esquire (March 1977): 62–66, 124–26, 131–32, esp. 126; Pamela Wilson, “Mountains of Contradictions: Gender, Class, and Region in the Star Image of Dolly Parton,” South Atlantic Quarterly 94, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 109–34, esp. 110, 112, 125; Pamela Fox, “Recycled ‘Trash’: Gender and Authenticity in Country Music Autobiography,” American Quarterly 50, no. 2 (June 1998): 234–66, esp. 258–59; Dolly Parton, My Life and Other Unfinished Business (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 59.

  43.Griffith, “Tammy Faye Bakker,” 463. On the Tammy Faye Bakker dolls being sold for $675 at the Heritage USA gift shop, and for $500 from the doll maker herself, see “Tammy Faye Dolls Selling for $500,” [Wilmington, NC] Star-News, May 19, 1987.

  44.Roger Ebert, “Tammy Faye’s Story Captured in Documentary,” January 24, 2000, RogerEbert.com; Renee V. Lucas, “The Tammy Look: It’s Makeup by the Numbers,” Philly.com, April 8, 1987.

  Chapter Twelve: Outing Rednecks: Slumming, Slick Willie, and Sarah Palin

  1.Margo Jefferson, “Slumming: Ain’t We Got Fun?,” Vogue (August 1, 1988): 344–47; Mike Boone, “Magnum’s Oh, So English Chum Higgins Is Really a Texas Redneck,” Montreal Gazette, June 19, 1982.

  2.Lewis Grizzard, “In Defense of Hillbillies and Rednecks,” [Burlington, NC] Times-News, December 3, 1993. On Grizzard’s reputation, see “Columnist Grizzard Dies After Surgery,” [Schenectady, NY] Daily Gazette, March 22, 1984. For “redneck” becoming a term of endearment, see Clarence Page, “Getting to the Root of Redneck,” Chicago Tribune, July 16, 1987; and Larry Rohter, “To Call a Floridian a ‘Cracker’ in Anger May Be a Crime,” New York Times, August 19, 1991.

  3.Celia Riverbark, “‘Hey, Do You Know Me?’: The Definition of Redneck Depends on Your Point of View,” [Wilmington, NC] Star-News, August 23, 1993.

  4.Stacy McCain, “One Thing Gingrich Is Not, Is a Redneck,” Rome [GA] News-Tribune, November 27, 1994; and in syndicated column “Hart to Heart,” Jeffrey Hart, “What’s Behind David Duke?,” Gadsden [AL] Times, October 31, 1991.

  5.One reviewer of Chute’s second book remarked, “If Ms. Chute’s characters were Southern, we’d call them poor white trash”; see Mary Davenport, “Chute Novel Finds White Trash Up North,” [Wilmington, NC] Star-News, May 29, 1988. Scholars have identified the genre as “Rough South,” of which Allison has figured prominently, but the regional name is inaccurate given that Chute’s subjects are rural families in Maine. For a discussion of the genre and how these novelists write from “within” their class, see Erik Bledsoe, “The Rise of Southern Redneck and White Trash Writers,” Southern Cultures 6, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 68–90, esp. 68.

  6.Carolyn Chute, The Beans of Egypt, Maine (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1985), 10–11, 21, 23–25, 92, 100, 114–16, 122–24, 134–35, 156, 174, 189.

  7.Ibid., 135–36, 165, 175, 177–79, 181, 192.

  8.Ibid., 3, 46–47, 122, 116.

  9.Ibid., 3.

  10.See Peter S. Prescott, “A Gathering of Social Misfits: Six New Novels Take a Walk on Life’s Weirder Shores,” Newsweek (February 25, 1985): 86; and David Gates, “Where the Self Is a Luxury Item,” Newsweek (June 13, 1988): 77. Chute emphasized that she was “so close to these people—they were my people”; see Ellen Lesser and Carolyn Chute, “An Interview with Carolyn Chute,” New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly 8, no. 2 (Winter 1985): 158–77, esp. 161, 174. For other interviews highlighting her experiences with poverty, see Donald M. Kreis, “Life Better for ‘Beans of Egypt’ Author Carolyn Chute,” Lewiston [ME] Daily Sun, March 6, 1985; and Katherine Adams, “Chute Dialogics: A Sidelong Glance from Egypt, Maine,” National Women’s Studies Association Journal 17, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 1–22.

  11.Lesser and Chute, “An Interview with Carolyn Chute,” 158, 160, 164–67, 177. For her husband as “coauthor,” see Dudley Clendinin, “Carolyn Chute Found Her Love and Her Calling in Maine,” Gainesville [FL] Sun, February 3, 1985. On the influence of her husband, see “Illiterate Mate Inspires Maine’s Carolyn Chute,” [Lewiston, ME] Sun Journal, September 16, 1991. For a realistic portrait of Maine poverty, see Leigh McCarthy, “Carolyn Chute Took a Bum Rap on Poverty,” Bangor [ME] Daily News, September 24, 1985.

  12.In 1985, Chute distinguished herself from rednecks. Doing public readings, she wrote, “gives me a chance to see some people that aren’t [slaps her neck with her hand to indicate ‘redneck.’] I wouldn’t mind if rednecks showed up, that would be all right. I just don’t like to see them brushing their teeth out my window.” See Lesser and Chute, “An Interview with Carolyn Chute,” 163. But in 2000, she wrote, “But being a redneck, working class—or, more accurately, the ‘tribal class,’—I am proud of that.” See “An Interview with Carolyn Chute,” New Democracy Newsletter (March–April 2000), in Newdemocracyworld.org; Charles McGrath, “A Writer in a Living Novel,” New York Times, November 3, 2008; Carolyn Chute, The Beans of Egypt, Maine: The Finished Version (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1995), 273, 275; Gregory Leon Miller, “The American Protest Novel in a Time of Terror: Carolyn Chute’s Merry Men,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 52, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 102–28, esp. 103; Dwight Gardner, “Carolyn Chute’s Wicked Good Militia,” Salon.com, February 24, 1996.

  13.Chute explains that Reuben Bean’s immaturity comes from social disadvantages; he “was at a childish level, not in his intelligence but in his emotional development.” See Lesser and Chute, “An Interview with Carolyn Chute,” 169. Chute also said in another interview that the minimum wage produces genuine male rage and that women were better able to endure than men. See “Chute’s Book Is a Real American Classic,” [Norwalk, CT] Hour, February 21, 1985.

  14.Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina (New York: Plume, 1992), 12, 22–24, 69, 80–81, 91, 98–99, 123.

  15.Ibid., 102. Chute also talked about the shame of using food stamps. “But in the little stores they were kind of mean to us. Food stamps, you know, ugh. They come right out with it. I got to the point where I didn’t want to go to the store anymore, I was so embarrassed. I really dreaded going. There was a lot of times when Michael and I were eligible for food stamps that we didn’t go, because I felt so humiliated by it.” See Lesser and Chute, “An Interview with Carolyn Chute,” 169.

  16.Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina, 309.

  17.For his July Fourth speech, see William Jefferson Clinton, “What Today Means to Me,” Pittsburgh Post Gazette, July 4, 1993.

  18.Ibid. On Clinton standing up to his stepfather, see Ron Fournier, “Early Lessons Serve Him Well,” B
eaver County [PA] Times, January 20, 1993. On The Man from Hope film, see David M. Timmerman, “1992 Presidential Candidate Films: The Contrasting Narratives of George Bush and Bill Clinton,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 26, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 364–73, esp. 367.

  19.Mike Feinsilber, “But Others Say, ‘You’re No Thomas Jefferson,’” Prescott [AZ] Courier, January 17, 1993.

  20.On describing Clinton as a poor sharecropper, see Todd S. Purdum, “If Kennedy’s Musical Was ‘Camelot,’ What’s Clinton’s?,” New York Times, January 17, 1993. See AP photograph of Clinton with the mule George in Centralia, Illinois, July 21, 1992, in Brian Resnick, “Campaign Flashback: Bill Clinton in Summer ’92,” National Journal; and Josh O’Bryant, “Well-Known Democratic Mule of Walker Dies,” Walker County [GA] Messenger, May 14, 2008.

  21.Roy Reed, “Clinton Country: Despite Its Image as a Redneck Dogpatch, Arkansas Has Long Been a Breeding Ground of Progressive Politics,” New York Times Magazine, September 6, 1992; Peter Applebome, “Suddenly Arkansas’s Being Noticed, but a First Glance Can Be Misleading,” New York Times, September 26, 1992; Hank Harvey, “Arkansas Needs Clinton’s Candidacy,” Toledo Blade, October 4, 1992; Molly Ivins, “Clinton Still a Kid from Arkansas,” [Wilmington, NC] Star-News, July 15, 2004; Randall Bennett Woods, J. William Fulbright, Vietnam, and the Search for a Cold War Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 280.