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.

Page 103 of 253 · 20 per page

• 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.

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

  In certain quarters, this Gnostic belief went even further. Gnostics were people who had gnosis, knowledge. Some held that real Gnostics must, therefore, know the best as well as the worst and must enter into every experience of life at its highest or at its deepest level, as the case may be. It might almost be said that such people held that it was an obligation to sin. There is a reference to this kind of belief in the letter to Thyatira in the book of Revelation, where the risen Christ refers to those who have known `the deep things of Satan' (Revelation 2:24). And it may well be that John is referring to these people when he insists that `God is light and in him there is no darkness at all' (i John r:5). These particular Gnostics would have held that there was in God not only blazing light but also deep darkness - and that an individual must penetrate both. It is easy to see the disastrous consequences of such a belief. (c) There was a third kind of Gnostic belief. True Gnostics regarded themselves as spiritual people in every sense, as having shed all the material things of life and released their spirits from the bondage of matter. Such Gnostics held that they were so spiritual that they were above and beyond sin and had reached spiritual perfection. It is to them that John refers when he speaks of those who deceive themselves by saying that they have no sin (i John i:8-To). Whichever of these three forms Gnostic belief took, its ethical consequences were perilous in the extreme; and it is clear that the last two forms were to be found in the society to which John wrote. (2) Further, this Gnosticism resulted in an attitude to men and women which inevitably destroyed Christian fellowship. We have seen that Gnostics aimed at the release of the spirit from the prison house of the evil body by means of an elaborate and mysterious knowledge. Clearly, such a knowledge was not for everyone. Ordinary people were too involved in the everyday life and work of the world ever to have time for the study and discipline necessary; and, even if they had had the time, many were intellectually incapable of grasping the involved speculations of Gnostic theosophy and so-called philosophy.

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

  The American solution to poverty and social backwardness was not what we might expect. Well into the twentieth century, expulsion and even sterilization sounded rational to those who wished to reduce the burden of “loser” people on the larger economy. In Americans’ evolving attitudes toward these unwanted people, perhaps the most dramatic language attached to the mid-nineteenth century, when poor rural whites were categorized as somehow less than white, their yellowish skin and diseased and decrepit children marking them as a strange breed apart. The words “waste” and “trash” are crucial to any understanding of this powerful and enduring vocabulary. Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system. It is not only directed by the top 1 percent and supported by a contented middle class. We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity. The poor, the waste, the rubbish, as they are variously labeled, have stood front and center during America’s most formative political contests. During colonial settlement, they were useful pawns as well as rebellious troublemakers, a pattern that persisted amid mass migrations of landless squatters westward across the continent. Southern poor whites figured prominently in the rise of Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party, and in the atmosphere of distrust that caused bad blood to percolate among the poorer classes within the Confederacy during the Civil War. White trash were dangerous outliers in efforts to rebuild the Union during Reconstruction; and in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when the eugenics movement flourished, they were the class of degenerates targeted for sterilization. On the flip side, poor whites were the beneficiaries of rehabilitative efforts during the New Deal and in LBJ’s “Great Society.” At all times, white trash remind us of one of the American nation’s uncomfortable truths: the poor are always with us. A preoccupation with penalizing poor whites reveals an uneasy tension between what Americans are taught to think the country promises—the dream of upward mobility—and the less appealing truth that class barriers almost invariably make that dream unobtainable. Of course, the intersection of race and class remains an undeniable part of the overall story. The study presented here reveals a complicated legacy. It’s not just a question of labeling the bottom at any given time. Rationalizing economic inequality has been an unconscious part of the national credo; poverty has been naturalized, often seen as something beyond human control. By this measure, poor whites had to be classified as a distinct breed. In other words, breeding was not about the cultivation of social manners or skills, but something far more sinister: an imposed inheritance.

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

  It was “mudsill” democracy that the Confederacy would decry as it made its case against the North. By 1861, mudsill democracy had seeped into portrayals of the mudsill Union army—meant to be a foul collection of urban roughs, prairie dirt farmers, greasy mechanics, unwashed immigrants, and by 1862, with the enlistment of African-American Union troops, insolent free blacks. All in all, they were Davis’s waste people, the “offscourings of the earth.” 11 In 1858, Hammond had publicly aired his ideas before the U.S. Senate in a speech that proved to be widely popular. Its most enduring critique concerned the fixed character of class identity. In all societies, “there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life.” With fewer skills and a “low order of intellect,” the laboring class formed the base of civilized nations. Every advanced society had to exploit its petty laborers; the working poor who wallowed in the mud allowed for a superior class to emerge on top. This recognized elite, the crème de la crème, was the true society and the source of all “civilization, progress, and refinement.” In Hammond’s mind, menial laborers were, almost literally, “mudsills,” stuck in the mud, or perhaps in a metaphoric quicksand, from which none would emerge. 12 If all societies had their mudsills, then, Hammond went on to argue, the South had made the right choice in keeping Africa-descended slaves in this lowly station. As a different race, the darker-pigmented were naturally inferior and docile—or so he argued. The North had committed a worse offense: it had debased its own kind. The white mudsills of the North were “of your own race; you are brothers of one blood.” From Hammond’s perspective, their flawed labor system had corrupted democratic politics in the northern states. Discontented whites had been given the vote, and, “being the majority, they are the depositories of all your political power.” It was only a matter of time, he warned ominously, before the poor northern mudsills orchestrated a class revolution, destroying what was left of the Union. 13 Jefferson Davis and James Hammond spoke the same language. Confederate ideology converted the Civil War into a class war. The South was fighting against degenerate mudsills and everything they stood for: class mixing, race mixing, and the redistribution of wealth. By the time of Abraham Lincoln’s election, secessionists claimed that “Black Republicans” had taken over the national government, promoting fears of racial degeneracy. But a larger danger still loomed. As one angry southern writer declared, the northern party should not be called “Black Republicans,” but “Red Republicans,” for their real agenda was not just the abolition of slavery, but inciting class revolution in the South.

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

  He had no ambition for honor or glory; his wartime trajectory was predictably downward. Deserting, Stubbs lied to the Yankees that he was a Union man. Returning to Virginia in 1866, he became a scalawag and found he had a talent for “nigger speaking.” He defended Negro suffrage not on any high-principled stand, but on his low-down motto: “every man for himself.” Stubbs knew the carpetbaggers had no respect for him, but he didn’t care, as long as a generous supply of whiskey accompanied their snubs. He was rewarded with a county clerk position, without having to improve himself. In his unsentimental journey up the Republican ladder, he learned that his “rascality” was increasingly tolerated as he rose in the world. 28 “The Autobiography of a Scalawag” was a beautiful burlesque of the self- made northern man’s story of hard work and moral uplift. Stubbs was a far cry from the hereditary leadership of the Old South, whose education, refinement, and honorable bearing were legend even in defeat. He was a gross materialist, someone who lacked forethought, who lied and cheated to get ahead. He was a powerful reminder that elite southern Democrats still despised the lower classes. As one North Carolina conservative declared in 1868, the Republican Party was nothing more than the “low born scum and quondam slaves” who lorded over men of property and taste. When southern Democrats called for a “White Man’s Government,” they did not mean all white men. 29 The scalawag was the Democrats’ version of white trash. Just ask ex– Confederate colonel Wade Hampton, who in 1868 was still eight years from being elected governor of South Carolina. He was a hero of the “Redeemers,” whose movement ultimately toppled Republican rule in the southern states, and he must be credited with the most memorable insult of all, as his words traveled all the way to England. Knowing his husbandry, Hampton invoked the best- known usage of “scalawag” as vagabond stock, “used by drovers to describe the mean, lousy, and filthy kine that are not fit for butchers or dogs.” The scalawag was human waste with an unnatural ambition. He was biologically unfit, and at the same time a skilled operative who stirred the scum and thrived in the muck. 30 Thomas Jefferson Speer, a real scalawag, gave a speech that year proudly defending his “kine.” In contrast to Hampton, he was a former Confederate who had turned Republican, served in the Georgia constitutional convention, and would later sit in the U.S. Congress. Speer was unashamed of his common school education, admitting that he was “no speaker.” He had opposed secession, however, and believed that the terms of defeat offered by the Union had been magnanimous. A native Georgian whose “ancestors’ bones reposed beneath this soil,” he asserted that he was a “friend of the colored race.” 31 Like his own rather fortunate naming, T. J. Speer understood that “scalawag” was just a name too.

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

  A black journalist, Alex Wilson, was beaten and kicked, the attack recorded on film. A Life photographer was punched in the face and then carried off in a police wagon and charged with disorderly conduct. “Thugs in the crowd” pushed his colleagues, said newsman John Chancellor, and heckled them with nasty slurs. One reporter took the precaution of disguising himself. He rented a pickup truck and wore an old jacket and no tie. For a reporter to go undercover safely, he had to alter his class appearance, passing as a poor white workingman. 50 The media easily slipped into southern stereotypes, depicting the “many in overalls,” “tobacco-chewing white men,” or as one New York Times article highlighted, a “scrawny, rednecked man” yelling insults at the soldiers. Local Arkansas journalists similarly dismissed the demonstrators as “a lot of rednecks.” Unruly women who stood by became “slattern housewives” and “harpies.” One southern reporter said it outright: “Hell, look at them. They’re just poor white trash, mostly.” In Nashville, mob violence erupted that same month, after the integration of an elementary school. There, a Time reporter had a field day trashing the women in the crowd: “vacant-faced women in curlers and loose-hanging blouses,” not to mention a rock-throwing waitress with a tattooed arm. One obnoxious woman yelled to no one in particular with reference to the African American children: “Pull their black curls out!” 51 These were all predictable motifs, serving to distance rabble-rousers from the “normal” good people of Arkansas and Tennessee. Even President Eisenhower, in his televised speech, blamed the violence on “demagogic extremists,” and assumed that the core population of Little Rock was the law-abiding, taxpaying, churchgoing people who did not endorse such behavior. If the women in curlers and the waitress boasting her tattoos reminded readers of trailer trash, the rioting rednecks were more like the wild-eyed, off-his-rocker Ernest T. Bass of The Andy Griffith Show. By 1959, the Times Literary Supplement acknowledged that it was the “ugly faces” of “rednecks, crackers, tar-heels, and other poor white trash” that would be forever remembered from Central High. 52 Despite the embarrassment he caused, Orval Faubus did not disappear. Freed from the national media spotlight, he secured reelection in 1958, and went on to serve three more terms. As a governor who refused to lay down his arms, he continued to portray himself as a staunch defender of white people’s democratic right to oppose “forced integration.” Praising his “doggedness,” one southern journalist traced Faubus’s characteristic strength to his Ozark mountain days, when he trudged five miles, dressed in overalls, to a dilapidated school. A hillbilly could get ahead down here. Thus Faubus strategically accepted a loss of support from among the better classes, who resented redneck power in any form.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  There was at St. Martin-des-Champs, at Paris, a prior, whose name I will not mention, because of the friendship I once bore him. He led so austere a life until the age of fifty, and the fame of his sanctity was so strong throughout the kingdom, that there was no prince or princess who did not receive him with venera- tion when he paid them a visit. No monastic reform was effected in which he had not part ; and he received the name of the " Father of true monasticism." He was elected visitor of the celebrated society of the Ladies of Fontevrault, who were in so much awe of him that when he came to any of their convents the nuns trembled with fear, and treated him just as they might have treated the king, hoping thereby to soften his rigour towards them. At first, he did not wish that such deference should be paid him ; but as he approached his fifty-fifth year, he at last came to like the honours he had refused in the beginning ; and coming by degrees to regard himself as the public property of the religious societies, he was more careful to preserve his health than he had been. Though he was bound by the rules of his order never to eat meat, he granted himself a dispensation in that respect, a thing he would never do for anyone else, alleging as his reason that the whole burden of the brethren's spiritual interests rested upon him. Accord- ingly, he pampered himself, and to such good purpose 2 I 5 TFIE HEPTAMRRON OF THE [ATovel 22. that from being a very lean monk he became a very fat one. With the change in his manner of living a change took place in his heart also, and he began to look at faces on which he had before made it matter of con- science to cast his eyes casually. By dint of looking at beauties, rendered more desirable by their veils, he be- gan to lust after them. In order to satisfy his unholy passion he changed from a shepherd into a wolf ; and if he found an Agnes in any of the convents under his jurisdiction, he failed not to corrupt her. After he had long led this wicked life, Divine goodness, taking pity on the poor misused sheep, was pleased to unmask the villain, as you shall hear.

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

  But among all that Christ did and suffered during His mortal life, the example of His most holy Cross is, above all other things, proposed to Christians for their imitation. He Himself says, “If anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mt 16:24). St. Paul also, speaking as though crucified with Christ, and exulting only in His Cross, says (Gal 6:17), “I bear the marks of the Lord Jesus in my body,” being a diligent follower of the example of the Cross. Now among all that is conspicuous in the Cross, poverty is everywhere apparent. So utter, indeed, was the destitution of our Lord upon the Cross that He suffered even bodily nakedness and exclaims in the person of the Psalmist (21:19), “ They parted my garments among them, and upon my vesture they cast lots.” Now men imitate this nakedness of the Cross by voluntary poverty, especially when they renounce the revenues of their possessions. Thus St. Jerome, writing to the priest Paulinus, says, “Now that you have heard the counsel of our Saviour: ‘If you would be perfect, go, sell all that you have and give to the poor and come, follow Me,’ put His words into practice and, stripped of all things, follow the nakedness of the Cross. So shall you more easily and more speedily scale Jacob’s ladder.” A little further on, he adds, “It is no great thing for a man to wear a sad and pallid countenance, to make a display of fasting, and to wear a beggarly cloak if, at the same time, he draws a princely income from his property.” Hence we see how truly those are enemies of the Cross of Christ who impugn poverty and, savouring earthly things, deem that material possessions tend to Christian perfection, and that the abnegation of such possessions detracts from such perfection. Now that we have considered certain points in the life of Christ, in His birth, in His manhood, and in His death upon the Cross, let us proceed to reflect upon His teaching. In the instruction which He gave both to His disciples and to the multitudes, He began with poverty as a foundation, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Mt 5:3). St Jerome explains these words as follows: “By the poor in spirit are to be understood they who, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, have the will to be poor.” As St. Ambrose says, on the Gospel of Luke, “Both Evangelists mention the beatitude of poverty in the first place. And indeed poverty is the first in order of virtues, and the mother and producer of all others. For he who spurns earthly riches shall merit such as are eternal, neither can he deserve to receive the reward of the Kingdom of Heaven, who is possessed by the spirit of covetousness.”

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

  THEOPHYLACT. Pilate however proceeds in a more gentle way: Pilate then went out unto them. BEDE. It was the custom of the Jews when they condemned any one to death, to notify it to the governor, by delivering the man bound. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxxxiii. 4) Pilate however seeing Him bound, and such numbers conducting Him, supposed that they had not unquestionable evidence against Him, so proceeds to ask the question: And said, What accusation bring ye against this Man? For it was absurd, he said, to take the trial out of his hands, and yet give him the punishment. They in reply bring forward no positive charge but only their own conjectures: They answered and said unto him, If He were not a malefactor, we would not have delivered Him up unto thee. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. cxiv) Ask the freed from unclean spirits, the blind who saw, the dead who came to life again, and, what is greater than all, the fools who were made wise, and let them answer, whether Jesus was a malefactor. But they spoke, of whom He had Himself prophesied in the Psalms, They rewarded Me evil for good. (Ps. 39.) AUGUSTINE. (de Cons. Evang. iii. 8) But is not this account contradictory to Luke’s, who mentions certain positive charges: And they began to accuse Him, saying, We found this fellow perverting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute to Cæsar, saying that He Himself is Christ a King. (Luke 23:2) According to John, the Jews seem to have been unwilling to bring actual charges, in order that Pilate might condemn Him simply on their authority, asking no questions, but taking it for granted that if He was delivered up to him, He was certainly guilty. Both accounts are however compatible. Each Evangelist only inserts what he thinks sufficient. And John’s account implies that some charges had been made, when it comes to Pilate’s answer: Then said Pilate unto them, Take ye Him, and judge Him according to your law. THEOPHYLACT. As if to say, Since you will only have such a trial as will suit you, and are proud, as if you never did any thing profane, take ye Him, and condemn Him; I will not be made a judge for such a purpose. ALCUIN. Or as if he said, Ye who have the law, know what the law judgeth concerning such: do what ye know to be just. The Jews therefore said unto him, It is not lawful for us to put any man to death. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. cxiv. 4) But did not the law command not to spare malefactors, especially deceivers such as they thought Him? We must understand them however to mean, that the holiness of the day which they were beginning to celebrate, made it unlawful to put any man to death. Have ye then so lost your understanding by your wickedness, that ye think yourselves free from the pollution of innocent blood, because ye deliver it to be shed by another?

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

  In 2008, Palin underwent an off-camera “Extreme Makeover”—to borrow a title from one of the more popular such shows. McCain campaign advisers bought into the conceit of reality TV, which said that anyone could be turned into a pseudo-celebrity; in this instance, their experiment had the effect of reshaping national politics. 41 After 2008, a new crop of TV shows came about that played off the white trash trope. Swamp People, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Hillbilly Handfishin’, Redneck Island, Duck Dynasty, Moonshiners, and Appalachian Outlaws were all part of a booming industry. Like the people who visited Hoovervilles during the Depression, eyeing the homeless as if they were at the zoo, television brought the circus sideshow into American living rooms. The modern impulse for slumming also found expression in reviving the old stock vaudeville characters. One commentator remarked of the highly successful Duck Dynasty, set in Louisiana, “All the men look like they stepped out of the Hatfield-McCoy conflict to smoke a corncob pipe.” The Robertson men were kissing cousins of the comic Ritz Brothers in the 1938 Hollywood film Kentucky Moonshine. 42 Kissing cousins. The comic Ritz Brothers from Kentucky Moonshine (1938) and their heirs, the male cast of Duck Dynasty, the highly popular A&E reality TV show. Reality programming subsists on emotion-producing competition and outright scandal. The long-running Here Comes Honey Boo Boo was canceled in 2014, but only after it was discovered that Mama June Shannon was dating a convicted child molester; she next revealed that the father of two of her daughters was an entirely different convicted sex offender who had been caught in a sting on NBC’s voyeuristic To Catch a Predator. Though her young daughter Honey Boo Boo was the headliner, June was the real star of the show, the new face of white trash. No longer emaciated and parchment colored, as white trash past was imagined, she was a grossly overweight woman and the antithesis of the typical mom who prettified her grade-school daughter and dragged her to child beauty pageants. June claimed to have had four daughters by three different men, one whose name she claimed she could not remember. Her town of McIntyre, in rural Georgia, is a place of stagnant poverty: one- quarter of its households are headed by single females, and in 2013 the median family income in McIntyre was $18,243. 43 As the gap between rich and poor grew wider after 2000, conservatives took the lead in white trash bashing. In Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005), the economist and Hoover Institute fellow Thomas Sowell connected the delinquency of urban black culture to redneck culture. The book begins with a quote dating to 1956: “These people are creating terrible problems in our cities. They can’t or won’t hold a job, they flout the law constantly and neglect their children, they drink too much and their moral standards would shame an alley cat.”

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

  CHAPTER 12 Refutation of the Error Contained in the Last Chapter, Together with An Exposition of the Truth That Good Works, Done Under Vow, Are More Meritorious Than Those Performed Without Any Such Obligation CHAPTER 13 Refutation of the Arguments Adduced in the Last Chapter CHAPTER 14 Arguments Against the Perfection of Religious Whose Possessions Are Not in Common CHAPTER 15 Refutation of the Errors Quoted in the Last Chapter CHAPTER 16 An Answer to the Arguments Which Are Brought Forward Against the Propositions Contained in the Preceding Chapter THE END REFUTATION OF THE PERNICIOUS TEACHING OF THOSE WHO WOULD DETER MEN FROM ENTERING RELIGIOUS LIFE CHAPTER 1 Object of the Author in Undertaking this WorkTHE religion of Christ appears to aim chiefly it diverting the attention of mankind from material things, in order to concentrate their thoughts on the spiritual. Therefore Jesus, “the Author and finisher of our faith,” at His coming into this world, proposed to His faithful followers the contempt of earthly things. He taught this lesson both by His life and by His words.He taught it by His life. To quote St. Augustine (De catechizandis rudibus), “the Lord Jesus, when He became man, despised the good things of earth, in order to show that they are contemptible. He likewise endured all those earthly trials which He has commanded us to bear, so that, from the chances of this world, we may neither expect happiness, nor fear unhappiness. He rejected all appearance of noble birth; for, although at the time of his conception the virginity of His Mother was intact and although she remained for ever inviolate, yet was she espoused to a carpenter. He did not will that any should glory in the splendour of an earthly city; therefore was He born in Bethlehem, the least of the cities of Judah. He to whom all things belong, and by whom all things are made, became poor that so none of those who would believe in Him might dare to be lifted up by earthly wealth. He came to point out the way of humility; therefore He refused to be chosen King by men. He who gives food to all, Himself hungered. He by whom all manner of drink was created, was thirsty. He who has made Himself our road to Heaven, was weary and wayworn. He who set an end to our sufferings, Himself was crucified. He died, who raised the dead.”

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

  I answer that, As stated above [2419](A[1]), in one way, to sin against the Holy Ghost is to sin through certain malice. Now one may sin through certain malice in two ways, as stated in the same place: first, through the inclination of a habit; but this is not, properly speaking, to sin against the Holy Ghost, nor does a man come to commit this sin all at once, in as much as sinful acts must precede so as to cause the habit that induces to sin. Secondly, one may sin through certain malice, by contemptuously rejecting the things whereby a man is withdrawn from sin. This is, properly speaking, to sin against the Holy Ghost, as stated above [2420](A[1]); and this also, for the most part, presupposes other sins, for it is written (Prov. 18:3) that “the wicked man, when he is come into the depth of sins, contemneth.” Nevertheless it is possible for a man, in his first sinful act, to sin against the Holy Ghost by contempt, both on account of his free-will, and on account of the many previous dispositions, or again, through being vehemently moved to evil, while but feebly attached to good. Hence never or scarcely ever does it happen that the perfect sin all at once against the Holy Ghost: wherefore Origen says (Peri Archon. i, 3): “I do not think that anyone who stands on the highest step of perfection, can fail or fall suddenly; this can only happen by degrees and bit by bit.” The same applies, if the sin against the Holy Ghost be taken literally for blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. For such blasphemy as Our Lord speaks of, always proceeds from contemptuous malice. If, however, with Augustine (De Verb. Dom., Serm. lxxi) we understand the sin against the Holy Ghost to denote final impenitence, it does not regard the question in point, because this sin against the Holy Ghost requires persistence in sin until the end of life. Reply to Objection 1: Movement both in good and in evil is made, for the most part, from imperfect to perfect, according as man progresses in good or evil: and yet in both cases, one man can begin from a greater (good or evil) than another man does. Consequently, that from which a man begins can be perfect in good or evil according to its genus, although it may be imperfect as regards the series of good or evil actions whereby a man progresses in good or evil. Reply to Objection 2: This argument considers the sin which is committed through certain malice, when it proceeds from the inclination of a habit.

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

  2 White trash southerners were classified as a “race” that passed on horrific traits, eliminating any possibility of improvement or social mobility. If these Night of the Living Dead qualities were not enough, critics charged that poor whites had fallen below African slaves on the scale of humanity. They marked an evolutionary decline, and they foretold a dire future for the Old South. If free whites produced feeble children, how could a robust democracy thrive? If whiteness was not an automatic badge of superiority, a guarantee of the homogeneous population of independent, educable freemen, as Jefferson imagined, then the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were unobtainable. Jefferson’s language of upward mobility had lost ground in the antebellum South. Jacksonian celebrations of the intrepid backwoodsman faded from view as well. By the 1850s, in the midst of fierce debates over slavery and its expansion into the West, poor whites assumed a symbolic role in sectional arguments. Northerners, especially those who joined the Free Soil Party (1848) and its successor, the Republican Party (1854), declared that poor whites were proof positive of the debilitating effects of slavery on free labor. A slave economy monopolized the soil, while closing off opportunities for nonslaveholding white men to support their families and advance in a free- market economy. Slavery crushed individual ambition, inviting decay and death, and draining vitality from the land and its vulnerable inhabitants. Poor whites were the hapless victims of class tyranny and a failed democratic inheritance. As George Weston wrote in his famous pamphlet The Poor Whites of the South (1856), they were “sinking deeper and more hopelessly into barbarism with every succeeding generation.” 3 Proslavery southerners took a different ideological turn, defending class station as natural. Conservative southern intellectuals became increasingly comfortable with the notion that biology was class destiny. In his 1860 Social Relations in Our Southern States, Alabamian Daniel Hundley denied slavery’s responsibility for the phenomenon of poverty, insisting that poor whites suffered from a corrupt pedigree and cursed lineage. Class was congenital, he believed, and he used the clever analogies of “runtish forefathers” and “consumptive parents” to explain away the plight of impoverished rural whites. For Hundley and many others, it was bloodline that made poor whites a “notorious race.” Bad blood and vulgar breeding told the real story of white trash. 4 Hundley’s ideology appealed broadly. Many northerners, even those who opposed slavery, saw white trash southerners as a dangerous breed. No less an antislavery symbol than Harriet Beecher Stowe agreed with the portrait penned by the Harvard-educated future Confederate Hundley. Though she became famous (and infamous) for her bestselling antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Stowe’s second work told a different story. In Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), she described poor whites as a degenerate class, prone to crime, immorality, and ignorance.