Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Three generations of imbeciles are enough. —Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Buck v. Bell (1927) n 1909, at the National Negro Congress in New York City, W. E. B. Du Bois gave a provocative speech on the reception of Darwinism in the United States. In the published version of the speech, “The Evolution of the Race Problem,” Du Bois declared that social Darwinism had found such favor in America because the very idea of “survival of the fittest” ratified the reactionary racial politics that already prevailed. The Harvard-trained scholar underscored, with more than a touch of irony, how the “splendid scientific work” of Darwin endorsed an “inevitable inequality among men and the races of men that no philanthropy ought to eliminate.” Du Bois’s argument went this way: if one accepted the racist assumption that blacks are of “inferior stock,” then it was pointless to “legislate against nature”; proving the supremacy of the white race needed no help from politicians, because any form of philanthropy would be “powerless against deficient cerebral development.” 1 For the social critic Du Bois, it was one short step from the racism contained in the Americanization of Darwinian selection to the realization that white rule had corrupted the normal course of evolution. Instead of allowing the best (whether black or white) to rise, racism had actually undermined the Darwinian argument. It had not only not improved the white race, but a false hegemony had led to “the survival of some of the worst stocks of mankind.” As much as the lower class of whites remained where they had always been, one found throughout the U.S. South “efficient Negroes,” able and productive, being trampled under the heels of elected officials who supported white vigilante justice and propped up the heinous lynch law––catering to the interests of the unreconstructed white trash of the postwar South. 2 Du Bois reasoned that by denying equal education across racial lines, in preventing the laws of evolution from operating freely in the South, white political hegemony had reapplied the “evils of class injustice.” White supremacy, as a thesis, lacked any basis in science, while it wreaked more and more havoc upon a perverse, fear- and hate-based class system. Despite popular claims that the white race was destined for global dominance, it was, Du Bois assured, in decline. Among the “many signs of degeneracy” was the overall reduction in birthrates. Thus any threat of white deterioration came “from within.” Yet when Democrats gained control of the southern states in 1877, after a decade of black enfranchisement, they invariably blamed Republican egalitarians for producing social chaos and triggering white downward mobility. By refusing to hold up the mirror to themselves, Du Bois contended, southern whites were failing to see their own degeneracy.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  On the advertising campaign, see [Hopkinsville] Kentucky New Era, October 9, 1961; and “Compromise with Sin,” Lewiston [ME] Daily Sun, June 23, 1962. 58. Lisa Lindquist Dorr has shown that the politics surrounding rape were more complicated. In her study of Virginia, the reputations of the white woman and the accused black man were taken into account. So the film and Lee’s novel, for dramatic effect, paint a much more skewed picture. This serves to make the white trash characters even more insidious, because the Ewells demand the protection of the code of honor without deserving it. See Lisa Lindquist Dorr, White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 79, 115–19. 59. In the novel, Lee offers this scathing portrait of the Ewells: “No economic fluctuations changed their status—people like the Ewells lived as guests of the country in prosperity as well as in the depths of the depression. No truant officers could keep their numerous offspring in school; no public health officer could free them from congenital defects, various worms, and diseases indigenous to their filthy surroundings. . . . The Ewells gave the dump a thorough gleaning every day, and the fruits of their industry (those that were not eaten) made the plot of land around their cabin look like the playhouse of an insane child.” Lee also has Atticus Finch offer a different definition of white trash, one decoupled from poverty, as anyone, rich or poor, who tried to cheat a black man or treat him unfairly; see Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (New York: HarperCollins, 1999; originally published 1960), 194–95, 253. 60. Though the film muted its eugenic theme, one reviewer saw Bob Ewell as a “degenerate father” and the daughter as a “poor white trash type”; see syndicated columnist Alice Hughes, “A Woman’s New York,” Reading Eagle, February 23, 1963. The New York Times called the portrayals of Bob and Mayella Ewell “almost caricatures”; see Bosley Crowther, “Screen: ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’” New York Times, February 15, 1963. For the tangled career of John Frederick Kasper, the paid agitator from New Jersey, see John Egerton, “Walking into History: The Beginning of School Desegregation in Nashville,” Southern Spaces (May 4, 2009).

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  The rallying cry in this new advice literature extended to “hygienic” marriages: the selection of sexual partners with healthy skin, good teeth, well-formed and vigorous bodies. One had to steer clear of the “ill-born,” who produced nothing but “poor and feeble stock.” Could America’s future be derailed through the infusion of bad blood? A would-be wit put it this way: “Noble sires, we fondly think, only to be surpassed by us, their noble sons. With what reverence we revert to our parent stock! With what pride we talk of blood! With what jealousy we guard against its contamination!” 10 Race and healthful inheritance were part of a single discussion. In 1843, the Alabama surgeon Josiah Nott declared that the mulatto, as a hybrid, was the “offspring of two distinct species—as a mule from the horse and ass.” Mulattoes were “faulty stock,” a “degenerate, unnatural offspring, doomed by nature to work out its own destruction.” They were doomed because, like mules, they were prone to sterility. (It was a ridiculous theory, of course.) He compared mulattoes to consumptive parents, assuming that they had inherited a defective internal organization. Not content to confine his remarks to a mixture of Anglo- Saxon and Negro, he echoed the words of the leading English authority on the subject, Sir William Lawrence, that “the intellectual and moral character of the European is deteriorated by the mixture of black or red blood.” 11 A similar doctrine of hereditary suicide had already been applied to American Indians. Jefferson’s paternalistic projection of acculturated Natives was no longer endorsed by most Americans by the 1840s. A starker and dogmatic ideology took hold, arrogantly nationalistic. Native American tribes, a biologically degraded race, could no longer coexist with their Saxon superiors. In 1844, with a cold nonchalance, one writer captured the mood: “They retire before the axe and plough like the forests they once inhabited. The atmosphere of the white man is their poison. They cannot exist among us.” The “red man was doomed to utter and entire extinction.” This belief was not new, just more publically accepted. Henry Clay had privately voiced the same conclusion twenty years before as secretary of state. 12 • • • Both Texas and California loomed large in fashioning the Anglo-Saxon fantasy. Jackson subaltern Sam Houston, the first elected president of Texas, was a charismatic promoter of the region’s freedom fighters. White Texans were, in his words, the embodiment of “Anglo-Saxon chivalry.” Though the real force behind independence came from a filibuster, a private army of young men directed by their greed for land, Houston saw victory in racial terms. Every Texan had “imbibed the principles from his ancestry,” his “kindred in blood,” and was spurred on by his “superior intelligence and unsubduable courage.”

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  Irenaeus, the second-century Bishop of Lyons, says that some of them believed that the pneumatikoi could become better than Jesus and attain direct union with God. On the other hand, the psuche was simply the principle of physical life. All things which lived had psuche; it was something which human beings shared with the animal creation and even with growing plants. The psuchikoi were ordinary people; they had physical life, but their pneuma was undeveloped, and they were incapable of ever gaining the intellectual wisdom which would enable them to climb the long road to God. The pneumatikoi were a very small and select minority; the psuchikoi were the vast majority of ordinary people. It is clear that this kind of belief inevitably produced spiritual snobbery and pride. It introduced into the Church the worst kind of class distinction. So, the heretics whom Jude attacks were people who denied the oneness of God and split him into an ignorant creating God and a truly spiritual God. They denied the uniqueness of Jesus Christ and saw him as only one of the links between God and human beings, and they created class distinctions within the Church and limited fellowship with God to the intellectual few. The Denial of the Angels (3) It is further implied that these heretics denied and insulted the angels. It is said they `reject authority, and revile the glorious ones' (verse 8). The words `authority' and `glorious ones' describe ranks in the Jewish hierarchy of angels. Verse 9 is a reference to a story in The Assumption of Moses (see above, page 181). If Michael, the archangel, on such an occasion said nothing against the prince of evil angels, clearly no one can speak evil of the angels. The Jewish belief in angels was very elaborate. Every nation had a protecting angel. Every person, even every child, had an angel. All the forces of nature, the wind and the sea and the fire and all the others, were under the control of angels. It could even be said: `Every blade of grass has its angel.' Clearly, the heretics attacked the angels. It is likely that they said that the angels were the servants of the ignorant and hostile creator God and that Christians must have nothing to do with them. We cannot quite be sure what lies behind this; but, to all their other errors, the heretics added the despising of the angels, and to Jude this seemed an evil thing. Jude and the New Testament We must now examine the questions regarding the date and the authorship of Jude. Jude had some difficulty in getting into the New Testament at all; it is one of the books whose position was always insecure and which were late in gaining full acceptance as part of the New Testament.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  But southern politics thrived on such symbolism. It was rooted in the inherited revulsion to both the real and the imagined dregs of society, whether white or black. When the low-down dared to speak up, reach across the color line, the hereditary leadership class of the South simply could not stomach their overreach. Mongrels and scalawags were conjoined twins, then, fusing the associated threats of racial and class instability. After the Civil War, and with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting slavery, unreconstructed white southerners imagined an almost gothic landscape in their midst, a theater of sexual deviance overseen by defective leaders. The Fourteenth Amendment appreciably added to those fears, granting equal protection under the law to black male voters, while divesting former Confederates of their right to hold office or even vote. It was a world turned upside down, as buffoons ruled the Republican kingdom. Of course, few white southern Republicans actually fit this manufactured tabloid image, yet the label stuck. Scalawags were assumed to be white trash on the inside, regardless of the wealth (or wealth of political experience) they might accrue. 32 As the Reconstruction era ended, so-called men of inherited worth were returned to political power across the South. In the 1880s, the white North and South reconnected. The “redeemed” cracker became a hardworking farmer, while others praised the unsullied mountaineer, both capable of education and having risen enough that they would no longer be a burden on the southern economy. For a brief moment, reconciliation stories were popular, and previously warring sides in the national drama entertained bright prospects for domestic harmony. 33 Cracker Joe (1883) was written by a New Englander. The title character’s story was set in Florida, and used love and forgiveness to overcome past wrongs and resentments. Joe, a “born Cracker,” runs a successful farm. He defies his heritage by exhibiting shrewd ambition. He is a “go-ahead” man, an avid reader with a phenomenal memory. He calls his wife, Luce, “the whitest woman, soul and body, I ever did see,” suggesting that he is not quite white, but “only a cracker, you know.” (Like the family in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred, Joe is a half-breed, his mother of “good blood.”) He is forced to make amends with the son of the wealthy planter whom he had tried to murder more than a decade earlier, and for his part, the planter’s son must reclaim his father’s dilapidated mansion and spoiled lands, saving his legacy in the only way possible, by marrying the daughter of a New York carpetbagger.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  6 Slang tends to enter the vocabulary well after the condition it describes has existed. And so the presence of squatters predated the word itself. In Pennsylvania, as early as the 1740s, colonial officials issued stern proclamations to warn off illegitimate residents who were settling on the western lands of wealthy proprietors. Twenty years later, with little success in curbing their invasion, courts made the more egregious forms of trespass a capital crime. Yet even the threat of the gallows did not stop the flow of migrants across the Susquehanna, down the Ohio, and as far south as North Carolina and Georgia. 7 British military officers were the first to record their impressions of this irrepressible class of humanity. As early as the 1750s, they were called the “scum of nature” and “vermin”; they had no means of support except theft and license. The military condemned them, but also used them. The motley caravan of settlers that gathered around encampments such as Fort Pitt (the future Pittsburgh), at the forks of the Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela Rivers, served as a buffer zone between the established colonial settlements along the Atlantic and Native tribes of the interior. A semicriminal class of men, whose women were dismissed as harlots by the soldiers, they trailed in the army’s wake as camp followers, sometimes in the guise of traders, other times as whole families. 8 Colonial commanders such as Swiss-born colonel Henry Bouquet in Pennsylvania treated them all as expendable troublemakers, but occasionally employed them in attacking and killing so-called savages. Like the vagrants rounded up in England to fight foreign wars, these colonial outcasts had no lasting social value. In 1759, Bouquet argued that the only hope for improving the colonial frontier was through regular pruning. For him, war was a positive good when it killed off the vermin and weeded out the rubbish. They were “no better than savages,” he wrote, “their children brought up in the Woods like brutes, without any notion of Religion, [or] Government.” Nothing man could devise “improved the breed.” 9 “Squatter” or “squat” carried a range of disreputable meanings. The term suggested squashing, flattening out, or beating down; it conjured images of scattering, spinning outward, spilling people across the land. Those who recurred to the term revived the older, vulgar slur of human waste, as in “squattering a soft turd.” By the late eighteenth century, in the time of the influential Buffon, squatting was uniformly associated with lesser peoples, such as the Hottentots, who reportedly convened their political meetings while squatting on the ground. During the Seven Years’ War, British forces used the tactic of squatting down and hiding when fighting Native Americans—essentially imitating their foe’s ambushes. Lest we overlook the obvious, squatting—sitting down—was the exact opposite of standing, which as a noun conveyed the British legal principle of securing territorial rights to the land. The word “right” came from standing erect. One’s legal “standing” meant everything in civilized society.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  If an operation be meant, then Ego and Manifold must both be existent prior to that collision which results in the experience of one by the other. If a mere analysis is meant, there is no such prior existence, and the elements only are in so far as they are in union. Now Kant's tone and language are everywhere the very words of one who is talking of operations and the agents by which they are performed. [287] And yet there is reason to think that at bottom he may have had nothing of the sort in mind. [288] In this uncertainty we need again do no more than decide what to think of his transcendental Ego if it be an agent. Well, if it be so, Transcendentalism is only Substantialism grown shame-faced, and the Ego only a 'cheap and nasty' edition of the soul. All our reasons for preferring the 'Thought' to the 'Soul' apply with redoubled force when the Soul is shrunk to this estate. The Soul truly explained nothing; the 'syntheses,' which she performed, were simply taken ready-made and clapped on to her as expressions of her nature taken after the fact; but at least she had some semblance of nobility and outlook. She was called active; might select; was responsible, and permanent in her way. The Ego is simply nothing: as ineffectual and windy an abortion as Philosophy can show. It would indeed by one of Reason's tragedies if the good Kant, with all his honesty and strenuous pains, should have deemed this conception an important outbirth of his thought. But we have seen that Kant deemed it of next to no importance at all. It was reserved for his Fichtean and Hegelian successors to call it the first Principle of Philosophy, to spell its name in capitals and pronounce it with adoration, to act, in short, as if they were going up in a balloon, whenever the notion of it crossed their mind. Here again, however, I am uncertain of the facts of history, and know that I may not read my authors aright. The whole lesson of Kantian and post-Kantian speculation is, it seems to me, the lesson of simplicity. With Kant, complication both of thought and statement was an inborn infirmity, enhanced by the musty academicism of his Königsberg existence. With Hegel is was a raging fever. Terribly, therefore, do the sour grapes which these fathers of philosophy have eaten set our teeth on edge.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  (“Briar hoppers” was a variation on the old English slur of “bogtrotters,” aimed at the Irish.) 54 To Odum’s respondents, the twentieth century had had little effect. Poor whites were still adjudged a breed apart, an ill-defined class halfway between white and black. Under no circumstances did they ever socialize with, let alone marry, respectable whites. To another of Odum’s correspondents they were like a mule to a horse or a hound to a dog; whereas dogs were “respectable,” hounds were “ornery.” As dyed-in-the-wool racists said of all blacks, it was said of white trash that, like the leopard, he could not change his spots. 55 How could educated Americans have denied the effect of such persistent prejudice in distorting the southern class system? The reason is actually rather obvious: a fear of unleashing genuine class upheaval—which even the liberal elite were loath to do—led significant numbers to blame the poor for their own failure. Odum saw differently, and was instrumental in reframing the meaning of rural poverty. He argued that poor whites had a culture—what he called “folkways.” He did not think that they had to remain hapless pawns. Nor did their upward path mean merely imitating the middle class; they could shape a viable existence by drawing on their own folk values, rather than striving to be a lesser version of the white-collar class. The solution for poor folk rested on giving them access to education, allowing them to become self-sufficient. This demanded restructuring the South’s resource management. The region had to develop a more diverse and technologically advanced economy and agricultural system, which in turn would require a more highly skilled population of workers. But transforming every man and woman would be a long uphill battle, of course. One of Odum’s respondents put it bluntly: “No one knows what to do with him.” As long as he appeared stuck, he would remain no less a feature of the static South than the gully and the mule. 56 • • • It would take the Tennessean James Agee to probe the meaning of “poor white” on a truly meaningful level. In his powerfully drawn, enduringly evocative Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), Agee attempted to toss the source of the white trash fetish back onto the middle class. The unusual book included the chaste still life–style photographs of Walker Evans, and addressed what Odum’s slow-to-change cohort refused to do: interrogate how an interpreter imposed his values on the subject.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  JEROME. By a most subtle syllogism He proves them to be the sons of murderers, while to gain good character and reputation with the people, they build the sepulchres of the Prophets whom their fathers put to death. ORIGEN. Without just cause He seems to utter denunciations against those who build the sepulchres of the Prophets; for so far what they did was praiseworthy; how then do they deserve this woe? CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxxiv.) He does not blame them for building the sepulchres, but discovers the design with which they built them; which was not to honour the slain, but to erect to themselves a triumphal monument of the murder, as fearing that in process of time the memory of this their audacious wickedness should perish. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. Or, they said within themselves, If we do good to the poor not many see it, and then but for a moment; were it not better to raise buildings which all may see, not only now, but in all time to come? O foolish man, what boots this posthumous memory, if, where you are, you are tortured, and where you are not there you are praised? While He corrects the Jews, He instructs the Christians; for had these things been spoken to the former only, they would have been spoken, but not written; but now they were spoken on their account, and written on ours. When one, besides other good deeds, raises sacred buildings, it is an addition to his good works; but if without any other good works, it is a passion for worldly renown. The martyrs joy not to be honoured with money which has caused the poor to weep. The Jews, moreover, have ever been adorers of saints of former times, and contemners, yea persecutors, of the living. Because they could not endure the reproaches of their own Prophets, they persecuted and killed them; but afterwards the succeeding generation perceived the error of their fathers, and thus in grief at the death of innocent Prophets, they built up monuments of them. But they themselves in like manner persecuted and put to death the Prophets of their own time, when they rebuked them for their sins. This is what is meant, And ye say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the Prophets. JEROME. Though they speak not this in words, they proclaim it by their actions, in ambitious and magnificent structures to their memory.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. He foretels, that as their fathers killed the Prophets, so they also should kill Christ, and the Apostles, and other holy men. As suppose you had a quarrel with some one, you might say to your adversary, Do to me what you are about to do; but you do not therein bid him do it, but shew him that you are aware of his manæuvres. And in fact they went beyond the measure of their fathers; for they put to death only men, these crucified God. But because He stooped to death of His own free choice, He does not lay on them the sin of His death, but only the death of the Apostles and other holy men. Whence also He said, Fill up, and not Fill over; for a just and merciful Judge overlooks his own wrongs, and only punishes those done to others. ORIGEN. They fill up the measure of their fathers’ sins by their not believing in Christ. And the cause of their unbelief was, that they looked only to the letter and the body, and would understand nothing spiritual in them. HILARY. Because then they will fill up the measure of their fathers’ purposes, therefore are they serpents, and an offspring of vipers. JEROME. The same had been said by John the Baptist. Wherefore as of vipers are born vipers, so of your fathers who were murderers are you born murderers.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  30 Tugwell went on the lecture circuit, did radio shows, and wrote articles. In the New York Times, he outlined the RA’s program in terms of the four “R’s”— retirement of bad land, relocation of rural poor, resettlement of the unemployed in suburban communities, and rehabilitation of farm families. In his activism, though, Tugwell was not really a Jeffersonian. In his worldview, the farm was not some sacred space for cultivating virtue; it was more often an unrewarding struggle with “vicious, ill-tempered soil.” As a result, farmers suffered from overwork, bad housing, and an “ugly, brooding monotony.” Instead of healthy yeomen, Jefferson’s theory had produced generations of “human wastage”; wishing for universal home ownership was but a foolish dream. 31 Tugwell was nothing if not controversial. Understanding that most tenants could not vote because of poll taxes, he made their elimination one of the requirements for states to get homestead loans. Changing the South required shifting the balance of power—his agency would enable poor whites to challenge the status quo. While cynical politicians continued to dismiss them as “lazy, shiftless, no-account,” Tugwell sought to make them into a politically visible constituency. Here was a proactive federal agency. 32 The opposition to his programs came from vested interests, specifically large- scale agribusiness and southerners resistant to any attention to (or attempts to subvert) the class order. Representing this crowd was Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, who mouthed the conventional wisdom that “simple mountain people” didn’t deserve electricity, refrigerators, or even indoor privies. Simple meant primitive, a people incapable of aspiring to a creditable way of life. 33 To a range of critics, Tugwell was a “parlor pink” (i.e., a liberal with communist leanings). Republicans mocked him by using lines from a popular song of 1933, “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?” Tugwell was “a dream walking,” all airy philosophy. The government’s liberal darling could be seen “winking at Marx” and at the same time “kissing the foot of Madison” for having given him the idea of a super-flexible Constitution. Somehow, in combining these two disparate historical personae, Tugwell was wearing a “Russian wig under a Founder’s hat.” Another journalist noted that “Tugwellism” was less about the man than about the times, that is, a contest about class politics and who could claim to represent poor whites. On the surface, this forty-three-year-old Ivy Leaguer, with a cool, “carefully-studied informality of appearance,” projected an air of haughtiness and seemed to regard humanity as something for “experimentation.” To Tugwell’s critics, then, nothing about him suggested a bona fide understanding of rural America. 34 Tugwell, however, refused to engage in a theatrical debate over what it meant to be a “man of the people.”

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  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.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  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.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  The “acting president” had a skill few politicians possessed in that he was trained to deliver moving lines, look good for the camera, and project the desired tone and emotion. Since true eloquence had died with the advent of television, Reagan was less the “great communicator” his worshippers claimed than he was an actor with carefully honed “media reflexes.” He came to office rejecting everything Carter stood for: the rural South, the common man, the image of the down-home American in bare feet and jeans. Reagan looked fantastic in a tuxedo. A rumor made the rounds in 1980 that Nancy Reagan was telling her friends that the Carters had turned the White House into a “pigsty.” In her eyes, they were white trash, and every trace of them had to be erased. 34 In a 1980 newspaper piece, one prominent Reagan supporter with strong conservative credentials made a rather dubious argument about rednecks. Patrick Buchanan charged that urban blacks had been lured into the poverty trap by government, and that black men had been shorn of the pride that came from being family providers. His hope was that they might switch their support to Reagan and form a new “Black Silent Majority.” Casting the poor as pawns of the “professional povertarians,” Buchanan revived the old attack against Rexford Tugwell of the New Deal for being the poor man’s puppeteer. The most remarkable of Buchanan’s prescriptions was that urban blacks should see their way to imitating the rednecks whose pickups featured a Reagan bumper sticker and whose sleeves sported the American flag (he should have said Confederate). Putting poor blacks and rednecks in the same boat, Buchanan made bureaucracy the enemy of all. 35 • • • If Jimmy Carter’s election made one of Roy Blount’s friends cry out, “We ain’t trash no more,” that feeling was sadly deflated by 1987. That year’s biggest public scandal was the fall of Reverend Jim Bakker. Rising from obscurity, Bakker and his wife, Tammy Faye, had built a televangelist empire out of the Charlotte, North Carolina, PTL (“Praise the Lord/Pass the Love”) Television Network that was estimated to reach thirteen million homes; they also opened the highly profitable twenty-three-hundred-acre Heritage USA Christian theme park. Along with Liberty University founder Jerry Falwell and Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) founder Pat Robertson, Bakker had joined leading conservative religious leaders who made an appearance at the Reagan White House in 1984. Three years later, after an FBI investigation (in which the PTL was known as the “Pass-the-Loot Club”), he was convicted of all twenty-four charges of fraud and conspiracy. The judge was so disgusted that he sentenced the unscrupulous pastor to forty-five years in prison. In the end, he served a five- year term. 36 Bakker was described as a “Bible school dropout,” and his story revealed a man who not only fleeced his followers, but led a grossly extravagant life.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  At one point, Bacon rounded up the wives of Berkeley supporters—his phalanx of “white aprons”—to guard his men while they dug trenches outside the fortified capital of Jamestown. The women were meant to represent a neutral zone (white aprons standing in for a white flag, the sign of truce). They were too valuable a resource for either side to waste. 68 One of the most dramatic moments in the trial of the rebels involved Lydia Chisman. In a scene that resembled Pocahontas’s dramatic gesture (whether or not true) to save John Smith, Chisman offered up her own life for that of her husband, confessing that she had urged him to defy the governor. Her plea fell on deaf ears, and her husband, who was probably tortured, died in prison. While Berkeley damned Chisman as a whore, the female rebels were largely able to avoid the most severe penalties. In English law, the wife and children of a traitor were subject to an attainder in blood—the loss of all property and titles. But widows Bacon and Chisman were permitted to regain their estates. Both remarried, Bacon twice and Chisman once. 69 How could such a catastrophe occur and yet the women evade punishment? Though Governor Berkeley had hoped to confiscate as much property as he could from the rebels, his reckless pursuit of vengeance led to his downfall. The royal commissioners, their authority reinforced by the ships and troops sent to quell the rebellion, quickly turned against the governor. They insisted that the king’s pardon was universal, they overturned many of Berkeley’s confiscations, and they called for his removal. To preserve the colony, peace and justice had to be restored. One of the ways to restore order was to show mercy to rebellious wives. 70 These facts matter. Keeping the land and widows in circulation was more important to the royal commissioners than impoverishing unrepentant women. In 1690, English playwright Aphra Behn wrote a comedy based on Bacon’s Rebellion, aptly titled The Widow Ranter. The plot centers on a lowborn, promiscuous, cross-dressing, tobacco-smoking widow (she wrongly thinks smoking is a sign of good breeding) who twice marries above her station. Despite her uncouth ways, she knows her worth. As she tells a newcomer to the colony, “We rich Widdows are the best Commodity this Country affords.” 71 Fertility was greatly prized in colonial America. Good male custodians were needed to husband the land’s wealth. Widows were expected to quickly remarry so that their land did not go to waste. Some women used this practice to their advantage. Lady Frances Culpeper Stevens Berkeley Ludwell (1634–95) married three colonial governors, including William Berkeley. She bore no children and was consequently able to keep a tight rein on the proceeds of the estates she inherited.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  The North’s mudsills seemed like royalty compared to the South’s truly mud- bespattered swamp people. 53 Mud could well be the central image in sizing up the cost of this war to Union and Confederate sides alike. There was no glamour, only tedious muddy marches, food shortages, foraging (which often entailed stealing from civilians), and the inhuman conditions that prevailed in fetid muddy camps. Union and Confederate dead alike were hastily laid to rest in shallow, muddy mass graves. 54 But it was the “foul mudsill” in wartime propaganda that captured the political imagination on both sides. “Mudsill” joined other Confederate slurs for Union men: vagabonds, bootblacks, and northern scum. And we mustn’t forget Jefferson Davis’s insult of choice: “offscourings of the earth.” By adopting such a vocabulary, rebels could imagine northern soldiers as Lincoln’s indentured servants, low-class hirelings. To convince themselves of easy victory, Confederates insisted that the Federal army was filled with the “trash” of Europe, rubbish flushed from northern city jails and back alleys, all brought together with the clodhoppers and dirt farmers from interior sections of the Union. For their part, northerners perceived the bread riots, desertions, poor white refugees, and runaway slaves as firm evidence of a fractured Confederacy. In this way, North and South each saw class as the enemy’s pivotal weakness and a source of military and political vulnerability. 55 Both sides were partially right. Wars in general, and civil wars to a greater degree, have the effect of exacerbating class tensions, because the sacrifices of war are always distributed unequally, and the poor are hit hardest. North and South had staked so much on their class-based definitions of nationhood that it is no exaggeration to say that in the grand scheme of things, Union and Confederate leaders saw the war as a clash of class systems wherein the superior civilization would reign triumphant. Union men had a way of identifying “white trash” with the dual bogeymen of southern poverty and elite hypocrisy. They saw secession as a fraud perpetrated against hapless poor whites. A Philadelphia journalist had the best, or at least the most original, putdown of the Confederacy’s overproud social system when he directed Jeff Davis’s government to put a slave on their five-cent stamp; for only then, he argued, would “poor white trash” be able to “buy the chattel cheap.” But he didn’t let his fellow northerners entirely off the hook either. Little separated northern mudsills from southern trash. Neither class gained much when reduced to cannon fodder. 56 CHAPTER EIGHT Thoroughbreds and Scalawags I Bloodlines and Bastard Stock in the Age of Eugenics It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. . . .

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  In New York’s Westchester County, the board of education agreed to build a deluxe school in a wealthy neighborhood, while doing nothing for schools in depressed-income areas where lower-class Italian and black families lived. In Los Angeles, suburbs were appraised by the Federal Housing Authority along class lines: high marks were given to places where gardening was a popular hobby, and low marks to places where poor whites raised food in their backyards. Elvis’s mother’s chicken coop would have been frowned upon. 22 In this and other ways, the federal government underwrote the growth of the new suburban frontier. Tax laws gave homeowners who took out mortgages an attractive deduction. Government made it profitable for banks to grant mortgages to upstanding veterans and to men with steady jobs. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill, created the Veterans Administration, which oversaw the ex-soldiers’ mortgage program. Together, the FHA and the VA worked to provide generous terms: Uncle Sam insured as much as 90 percent of the typical veteran’s mortgage, thereby encouraging lenders to provide low interest rates and low monthly payments. Along these same lines, when potential buyers queued up for Levittown homes, the builder initially privileged veterans. With such perks, it became cheaper for “desirable” white men to buy a home than to rent an apartment. And rather than lift up everyone, the system tended to favor those who were already middle class, or those working-class families with steady incomes. 23 Suburban subdivisions encouraged buyers to live with their “own kind,” constantly sorting people by religion, ethnicity, race, and class. The esteemed architectural critic Lewis Mumford described Levittown as a “one-class community.” In 1959, the bestselling author and journalist Vance Packard summed up the suburban filtration process as “birds-of-a-feather flocking.” As we have so often seen, the importance of animal stock, and of “breed” generally, remained on the tip of the American tongue when idiomatic distinctions of class identity were being made. 24 In 1951, the Levitts opened their second development, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, after U.S. Steel decided to build its Fairless Works in the area. It attracted steelworkers, as well as a community of construction workers who established a trailer camp. Although little actually separated the two working- class communities—the families were stable and had about the same number of children—the Levittowners felt that their community was a “symbol of middle- class attainment,” while the camp’s residents were labeled “trailer trash.” To expel the trailer families, local officials quickly passed ordinances. Offended local residents dismissed the trailer families as “transients,” saying that they should be “gotten rid of as soon as possible.” One of the arguments marshaled against the trailer enclave will sound familiar: the preservation of property values. The construction workers were deemed trash not because of their class background per se, but because they lived in trailers. It was their homes on wheels that carried the stigma.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  He felt the English were too charitable, an opinion he based on observing German settlers in his own colony, who worked with greater diligence because they came from a country that offered its poor little in the way of relief. When he talked about the poor, he sounded like William Byrd. In complaining about British mobs of the poor that raided the corn wagons in 1766, he charged that England was becoming “another Lubberland.” 25 Most men wanted a “life of ease,” Franklin concluded, and “freedom from care and labor.” Sloth was in itself a form of pleasure. This was why he contended that the only solution to poverty was some kind of coercive system to make the indigent work: “I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.” The poor’s instinct of being “uneasy in rest” had been impaired; so what they needed was a jolt (of electricity?) to work again. 26 Here we see the double meaning inherent in Franklin’s theory of forced migration. In his projected model of emigration, a continental expanse populated by fertile settlers would allow people to escape the onus of working for others. Parents and children would work for themselves, stripping away a culture of subservience that was part and parcel of being of the meaner sort. But with newfound liberty, their fate rested on the most impersonal of forces: survival of the fittest. The harsh environment of the frontier forced settlers either to work hard or perish. Only the more frugal, fertile, and industrious would succeed, while the slothful and incompetent would have to keep moving or die. If Franklin valued the middling sort on the frontier, he was already their champion before he wrote “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind.” The “middling people” of Pennsylvania were, he had written, the “Tradesmen, Shopkeepers, and Farmers.” He had no desire to eliminate the “Better Sort,” of course, but he rejected the idea that if some were “better,” everyone else was automatically “the meaner Sort, i.e., the Mob, or the Rabble.” In a pamphlet of 1747, “Plain Truth,” he demonstrated that the middle had a crucial role to play for the colony. That year Delaware was invaded by an irregular French and Spanish force. Franklin wrote to warn his fellow Philadelphians, especially the Quakers, that the same fate awaited them unless they organized a voluntary militia. He called for a “militia of FREEMEN,” by which he meant men of the better and middling sorts, working together to defend their property and their colony.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  " In good faith, Geburon," said Oisille, " that sort of love might well be called cruelty." "I am surprised," said Simontault, "that he did not ravish the lady at once when he saw her in her shift, and in a place where he was master." " He was not picksome but gluttonous," said Saffre- dent. "As he intended to have his fill of her every day, he had no mind to amuse himself with nibbling at her." "That is not it," said Parlamente. "A ruffian is always timorous. The fear of being surprised and losing his prey made him carry off his lamb, as the wolf carries off a sheep, to devour it at his ease. ' * Notwithstanding what is said in the prologue to the fourth day respecting the recent origin of this tale, it is found m several writers of earlier date. It is identical, for instance, with a fabliau hv Rutebeuf entitled Fr'vre Denise (See Fabliaux de Legrand d'Aussy), iv. 383, and has some resemblance to No LX. of the Cent Nouvelles 'Nouvelles. The Queen of Navarre's tale has been copied by Henry Stephens, in his Apology for Herodotus, by L'Etoile, in his journal of the reign of Henry HI., anno 1577, and by Malespini, in his Ducento Novellc, No, LXXV. 2g8 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE [Novel t,2. " I cannot believe he loved her," said Dagoucin, " nor can I conceive that so exalted a passion as love should enter so cowardly and villanous a heart." " Be it as it may," said Oisille, " he was well punished for it. I pray God that all who do the like deeds may suffer the like penalties. But to whom do you give your voice .'' " " To you, madam," said Geburon, " for I know you will not fail to tell us a good tale." " If new things are good," replied Oisille, "I will tell you one which cannot be bad, since the event happened in my time, and I have it from an eye-witness. You are doubtless not ignorant that death being the end of all our woes, it may, consequently, be called the beginning of our felicity and our repose. Thus man's greatest misery is to wish for death and not be able to obtain it. The greatest ill which can befall a criminal is not to be put to death, but to be made to suffer so much that he longs for death, while his sufferings, though continual, are of such a nature as not to be capable of abridging his life. It was in this way that a gentleman treated his wife, as 3'ou shall hear." NOVEL XXXII. A. husband surprises his wife m flagrante delicto, and subjects her to a punishment more terrible than death itself.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  In three months he had become enthusiastically American, “America is the greatest country in the world”, he assured me from an abysmal ignorance; “any young man who works can make money here; if I had a little capital I’d be a rich man in a very few years; it’s some capital I need, nothing more.” Having drawn my story out of me especially the last phase when I divided up with the boys, he declared I must be mad. “With five thousand dollars”, he cried, “I could be rich in three years, a millionaire in ten. You must be mad; don’t you know that everyone is for himself in this world: good gracious! I never heard of such insanity: if I had only known!” For some days I watched him closely and came to believe that he was perfectly suited to his surroundings, eminently fitted to succeed in them. He was an earnest Christian, I found, who had been converted and baptised in the Baptist Church; he had a fair tenor voice and led the choir; he swallowed all the idiocies of the incredible creed; but drew some valuable moral sanctions from it; he was a teetotaler and didn’t smoke; a Nazarene, too, determined to keep chaste as he called a state of abstinence from women, and weekly indulgence in self-abuse which he tried to justify as inevitable. The teaching of Jesus himself had little or no practical effect on him; he classed it all together as counsels of an impossible perfection, and like the vast majority of Americans, accepted a childish Pauline-German morality while despising the duty of forgiveness and scorning the Gospel of Love. A few days after our first meeting, Willie proposed to me that I should lend him a thousand dollars and he would give me twenty-five per cent for the use of the money. When I exclaimed against the usurious rate, twelve per cent being the State limit, he told me he could lend a million dollars if he had it, at from three to five per cent a month on perfect security. “So you see,” he wound up, “that I can easily afford to give you two hundred and fifty dollars a year for the use of your thousand: one can buy real estate here to pay fifty per cent a year; the country is only just beginning to be developed”, and so forth and so on in wildest optimism: the end of it being that he got my thousand dollars, leaving me with barely five hundred, but as I could live in a good boardinghouse for four dollars a week, I reckoned that at the worst I had one carefree year before me and if Willie kept his promise, I would be free to do whatever I wanted to do for years to come.