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 Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  In the Roman Catholic Church, the position of James was finally settled by the Edict of the Council of Trent; but in the Protestant Church its history continued to be troubled, and indeed became even more troubled, because Luther attacked it and would have removed it from the New Testament altogether. In his printing of the German New Testament, Luther had a contents page with the books set out and numbered. At the end of the list, there was a little group, separate from the others and with no numbers assigned to them. That group consisted of James, Jude, Hebrews and Revelation. These were books which Luther held to be secondary. Luther was especially severe on James - and the adverse judgment of a great scholar on any book can be a millstone round its neck forever. It is in the concluding paragraph of his Preface to the New Testament that Luther's famous verdict on James can be found: In sum: the gospel and the first epistle of St John, St Paul's epistles, especially those to the Romans, Galatians and Ephesians; and St Peter's first epistle, are the books which show Christ to you. They teach everything you need to know for your salvation, even if you were never to see or hear any other book or hear any other teaching. In comparison with these, the epistle of James is an epistle full of straw, because it contains nothing evangelical. But more about this in other prefaces. As he promised, Luther developed this verdict in the Preface to the Epistles of St James and St Jude. He begins: `I think highly of the epistle of James, and regard it as valuable although it was rejected in early days. It does not expound human doctrines, but lays much emphasis on God's law. Yet to give my own opinion, without prejudice to that of anyone else, I do not hold it to be of apostolic authorship.' He then goes on to give his reasons for this rejection. First, in direct opposition to Paul, and the rest of the Bible, it ascribes justification to works, quoting Abraham wrongly as one who was justified by his works. This in itself proves that the epistle cannot be of apostolic origin. Second, not once does it give to Christians any instruction or reminder of the passion, resurrection or Spirit of Christ. It mentions Christ only twice. Then Luther goes on to state his own principle for testing any book: `The true touchstone for testing any book is to discover whether it emphasises the prominence of Christ or not ... What does not teach Christ is not apostolic, not even if taught by Peter or Paul. On the other hand, what does preach Christ is apostolic, even if Judas, Annas, Pilate, or Herod does it.' On that test, James fails. So Luther goes on: `The epistle of James however only drives you to the law and its works.

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

  The featured illustration had an unusual caricature of Jefferson Davis, reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s antihero in Gulliver’s Travels. Here the Confederate president, in a dress and bonnet, is tied down by southern Lilliputians—tiny slaves. Either way, he is unmanned by greedy planters or female rioters. His wrists are chained, his dress unraveling—a sure sign that the Confederacy has had its mask of gentility removed. 38 Wealthy women of the South often displayed indifference to the starving poor. When a group of deserters and poor mountain women ransacked a Tennessee resort in 1863, Virginia French, one of the guests, described the “slatternly, rough, barefooted women” who raced to and fro, “eager as famished wolves for prey.” Both shocked and amused, she wrote, “Two women went into a regular fist fight & kept it up for an hour—clawing & clutching each other because one had more than the other!” She found it equally bizarre when another woman stole Latin theology and French books. When asked directly, the thief justified her booty as the act of a good mother: “She had some children who were just beginning to read & . . . she wanted to encourage em!” An illiterate woman thus assigned value to the literary treasures she had taken. This might have aroused some sympathy, but for French the scene was simply more evidence of “Democracy—Jacobinism—and Radicalism” in its rudest form. The women were “famished” and had “tallow” faces, the men were “gaunt” and “ill- looking,” but the southern planter’s wife remained unmoved. White trash soiled all they touched, and deserved contempt, not pity. 39 Class insularity prevailed among Richmond’s elite women too. By early 1865, First Lady Varina Davis had become “unpopular with the ladies belonging to the old families,” a clerk close to her husband confided to his diary. Those of “high birth” had decided to shun her and talked behind her back, remarking on her father’s supposed low-class origins. There were stories widely circulated of government officials and their wives dining on delicacies while the people starved. 40 In contemplating the demise of the Confederacy, other writers expressed more dramatic concerns. Class reorganization would reduce honored mothers to the station of “cooks for Yankee matrons,” convert beloved wives into washerwomen for “Yankee butchers and libertines,” and transform devoted sisters into chambermaids for “Yankee harlots.” No matter how the situation was sized up, the fact that poor rural women had already lost everything scarcely mattered, because their suffering counted little compared to the unsullied women of the ruling class. 41 • • • A different kind of symbolism hovered over Abraham Lincoln, who in unflattering descriptions was crowned the president of the mudsills. Though he was born in Kentucky, not far from Jefferson Davis’s birthplace, Honest Abe’s backcountry roots became fodder for his enemies. The one thing that separated Lincoln and Davis was class origin. Southern newspapers described Davis as one “born to command.”

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

  In the ancient world, every individual was thought of as consisting of three parts. There was the soma, the body, the physical part. There was the psuche, which is often translated as soul; but we must be careful, because it does not mean what we mean by soul. To the Greeks, the psuche was the principle of physical life. Everything which had physical life had psuche. Psuche was the life principle which human beings shared with all living creatures. Finally, there was the pneuma, the spirit; and it was the spirit which was possessed only by human beings and which made them kin to God. The aim of Gnosticism was the release of the pneuma from the soma; but that release could be won only by long and arduous study which only the intellectuals who had time on their hands could ever undertake. The Gnostics, therefore, divided people into two classes - the psuchikoi, who could never advance beyond the principle of physical life and never attain to anything else than what was to all intents and purposes animal living; and the pneumatikoi, who were truly spiritual and truly akin to God. The result was clear. The Gnostics produced a spiritual aristocracy who looked with contempt and even hatred on lesser mortals. The pneumatikoi regarded the psuchikoi as contemptible, earthbound creatures who could never know what real religion was. The consequence was obviously the annihilation of Christian fellowship. That is why John insists throughout his letter that the true test of Christianity is love for one another. If we really are walking in the light, we have fellowship with one another (1:7). Whoever claims to be in the light and hates a fellow Christian is in fact in darkness (2:9-11). The proof that we have passed from dark to light is that we love each other (3:14-17). The marks of Christianity are belief in Christ and love for one another (3:23). God is love, and whoever does not love does not know God at all (4:7-8). Because God loved us, we ought to love each other; it is when we love each other that God dwells in us (4:1012). The commandment is that those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also, and those who say they love God and at the same time hate their brothers and sisters are branded as liars (4:20-I). The Gnostics, to put it bluntly, would have said that the mark of true religion is contempt for ordinary men and women; John insists in every chapter that the mark of true religion is love for everyone. Here, then, is a picture of these Gnostic heretics. They talked of being born of God, of walking in the light, of having no sin, of dwelling in God, of knowing God.

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

  He was a West Pointer, a man of letters and polite manners. Lincoln, by contrast, was a rude bumpkin, the “Illinois ape,” and a “drunken sot.” Lincoln’s supposed virtue, his honesty (or honest parents), was code for a suspect class background. In 1862, a close ally, Union general David Hunter, told Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase that Lincoln was born a “poor white in a slave state.” He judged Lincoln too solicitous of slaveholders in the border states, “anxious for approval, especially of those he was accustomed to look up to.” His Kentucky home made him white trash, and his chosen residence in Illinois made him a prairie mudsill. Confederates had an easy time equating midwesterners with dirt farmers; to one Virginia artilleryman, they were all “scoundrels, this scum, spawned in prairie mud.” 42 The mudslinging battle, however, ended up working in favor of the Federal side. Republicans and Union officers wore the mudsill label as a badge of pride, and made it a rallying cry for northern democracy. This strategy began even before Lincoln was elected. At a large rally in New York City, Iowa’s lieutenant governor gave an impassioned speech in which he praised the “rail splitter” as the best farmer for the job—a man willing to protect the “mudsill and mechanic.” And he joked that every Republican in his state had “made up their minds to cultivate mudsill ideas.” 43 The New York publication Vanity Fair used satire to turn the tables on Confederate class taunts. Their writers not only deflated the southerner’s gallant self-image, but also had a field day defending his “groveling” foe with “lobby ears”—the mudsill. (“Lob” was another word for a rustic knave.) Imitating southern speechifiers and hack journalists, the magazine described Lincoln as the chief magistrate of the “Greasy Mechanics and Mudsills of the barbarian North.” In Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (1863), Lincoln, as caricatured, is literally a mudsill—stuck in the mud and unable to reach Jefferson Davis in Richmond. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 21, 1863 Jefferson Davis’s stilted oratory was equally subject to Vanity Fair’s withering satire. In a mock proclamation given after the First Battle of Bull Run, Davis issues an edict saying that his army would leave Washington in the dust, hang the “besotted idiot” Lincoln from the nearest tree, and topple New York City, turning the Seventh Regiment into body servants for Confederate officers. In his grandiose vision of easy victory, this parody of Davis declared that “mudsill soldiers” would offer little resistance, for “they will fly before us like sheep.”

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

  She achieved the American dream not because of her beauty, education, or talent, but because of having fashioned a cable TV personality that refused to partake of the fine manners of her social betters. Tammy Faye was the rejection of everything Pat Loud (of An American Family) and middle-class propriety stood for: emotional restraint, proper diction, subdued dress, and obvious refinement. Nor was she rustic, or the embodiment of old-fashioned yeoman simplicity. She embraced her garish self from head to toe. Her tawdry excess made her beloved among her poor white fans and unredeemable in the eyes of middle America. The irony is that her white trash “roots” were hardly pure, if not wholly contrived. Her fake eyelashes and thick coat of makeup were part of a strange masquerade, consistent with the renegotiation of class identity that came with the expansion of mass media in the 1980s and 1990s. She said she borrowed her style of eyelashes from Lucille Ball . . . and Minnie Mouse. “In terms of broadcast hours,” Roger Ebert claimed, “she lived more of her life on live TV than perhaps anyone else in history.” Her public self appeared a composite of bad clichés—she was no closer to projecting authenticity than The Beverly Hillbillies. Tammy Faye was campy (mostly by accident), and more than anything else a creature of the surreal world of television that she loved. 44 CHAPTER TWELVE Outing Rednecks T Slumming, Slick Willie, and Sarah Palin A dangerous chasm in the classes is alive and well in the United States of America. Don’t let anybody tell you it’s not. —Carolyn Chute, The Beans of Egypt, Maine (revised, 1995) he Bakker scandal was not enough to stop the stampede toward white trash and redneck chic that prevailed in the eighties and nineties. Margo Jefferson in Vogue called the new rage “slumming.” One of the most surprising confessions in this vein came from John Hillerman, the American actor who played the prim and proper English butler Jonathan Quayle Higgins III on Magnum, P.I. Hillerman said that when he received fan mail from England, where he was claimed as one of their own, he wrote back, “I hate to disappoint you, but I’m a redneck from Texas.” 1 A growing chorus sought to clean up the image, to make “redneck” a term of endearment. Lewis Grizzard, who made a name for himself as a redneck journalist, thought it was time to stop mocking rednecks. He praised the 1993 antidiscrimination ordinance in Cincinnati that made hillbilly a protected class, and he hoped that Atlanta would pass a similar law for rednecks in anticipation of the 1996 Summer Olympics. In Florida, a man was charged under the Hate Crime Statute in 1991 for defaming a policeman by calling him a cracker. For Grizzard, “redneck” meant “agriculturalist,” a person like his father who worked outside and acquired an uneven tan before there was sunscreen.

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

  Another portrayal of the mob as a “motley crowd of poor whites” is in the syndicated columnist Bob Considine’s “Anatomy of the Mob—II,” St. Petersburg Times, September 16, 1957; Considine, “The Anatomy of Violence—1: Mob Actions Help Cause of Integration,” Milwaukee Sentinel, September 14, 1957. On calling women “slattern housewives” and “harpies,” see Considine, “Riffraff of Little Rock Is Giving City Bad Name,” Milwaukee Sentinel, September 12, 1957. An African-American newspaper claimed that Governor Faubus had inflamed a mob of “Arkansas hillbillies”; see “Ring Out the False, Ring in the True,” Baltimore Afro-American, December 29, 1959. 52. “Eisenhower Address on Little Rock Crisis,” New York Times, September 25, 1957; Jack Gould, “Little Rock: Television’s Treatment of Major News Developments Found Superficial” and “The Face of Democracy,” New York Times, September 15 and 26, 1957; Richard C. Bedford, “A Bigger Bomb,” Journal of Higher Education 29, no. 3 (March 1958): 127–31; Daniel, Lost Revolutions, 267; and “Tragedy at Little Rock,” Times Literary Supplement, August 28, 1959, 491. 53. On his political success in Arkansas, see Reed, Faubus, 251, 352, 357; Daniel, Lost Revolutions, 283; Paul Greenberg, “Orval Faubus Finally Blurts Out Truth of His Defiance That Led to the Racial Crisis in Little Rock in 1957,” [Washington, DC] Observer-Reporter, June 1, 1979; “The Faubus Victory,” Lakeland [FL] Ledger, July 30, 1958; “Faubus Unperturbed by Crisis,” [Hopkinsville] Kentucky New Era, September 20, 1957; Anderson, Little Rock, 77; Thomas F. Pettigrew and Ernest Q. Campbell, “Faubus and Segregation: An Analysis of Arkansas Voting,” Public Opinion Quarterly 24, no. 3 (Autumn 1960): 436–47. Faubus had Jeff Davis in mind, because he wanted to be the “first Arkansas governor since Jeff Davis to be elected to a third term.” In the end, Faubus served six terms from 1955 to 1967. He also defended his actions based on polls. See Wallace, “Orval Faubus,” 319, 326; and “Segregation Wins on Arkansas Poll,” New York Times, January 29, 1956; “The Mike Wallace Interview: Guest Orval Faubus,” September 15, 1957, transcript, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 54. Gilbert Millstein, “Strange Chronicle of Andy Griffith,” New York Times, June 2, 1957; “A Face in the Crowd,” Berkshire [MA] Eagle, June 6, 1957. 55. Millstein, “Strange Chronicle of Andy Griffith.” 56. On the film Wild River, see Henry Goodman, “Wild River by Elia Kazan,” Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (Summer 1960): 50–51; Robert Murray and Joe Heumann, “Environmental Catastrophe in Pare Lorentz’s ‘The River’ and Elia Kazan’s ‘Wild River’: The TVA, Politics, and Environment,” Studies in Popular Culture 27, no. 2 (October 2004): 47–65, esp. 55. And on the controversy in Cleveland over Gum Hollow, see “Southern Pride Ends Movie Roles for ‘White Trash,’” Ocala Star-Banner, November 15, 1959. 57. On the aggressive marketing campaign, see syndicated article by Hollywood correspondent Erskine Johnson, “‘Bayou’ Film, Bust in 1957, Released Under New Title,” [Florence, AL] Times Daily, December 11, 1962; and Jim Knipfel, “The Brooklyn Cajun: Timothy Carey in ‘Poor White Trash,’” The Chiseler, chiseler.org/post/6558011597/the-brooklyn-cajun-timothy-carey-in-poor-white (2011).

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

  Farming was arduous work, with limited chance of success, especially for families lacking the resources available to Jefferson: slaves, overseers, draft animals, a plough, nearby mills, and waterways to transport farm produce to market. It was easy to acquire debts, easy to fail. Land alone was no guarantee of self-sufficiency. 14 If the ruling elite at the Virginia constitutional convention were unwilling to grant poor men fifty acres to become freehold citizens, they were quite content to dump the poor into the hinterland. With the opening up of the land office in 1776, a new policy was adopted: anyone squatting on unclaimed land in western Virginia and Kentucky could claim a preemption right to buy it. Like the long- standing British practice of colonizing the poor, the Virginians sought to quell dissent, raise taxes, and lure the less fortunate west. This policy did little to alter the class structure. In the end, it worked against poor families. Without ready cash to buy the land, they became renters, trapped again as tenants instead of becoming independent landowners. 15 Public education accompanied land reforms. In bill no. 79, for the “General Diffusion of Knowledge,” Jefferson laid out a proposal for different levels of preparation: primary schools for all boys and girls, and grammar schools for more capable males at the public expense. For the second tier, he called for twenty young “geniusses” to be drawn from the lower class of each county. Rewarding those with merit, he devised a means of social mobility in a state where education was purely a privilege of wealthy families. 16 Writing of his plan in Notes on the State of Virginia, his wide-ranging natural history of his state, he chose a rather unsavory allusion to describe the reform. His handful of lucky scholars would be “raked from the rubbish,” leaving the majority to wallow in ignorance and poverty. “Rubbish” was his alliterative variation on the ever-present theme of waste people. He wasn’t anticipating Teddy Roosevelt’s Bunyanesque allusion to muckraking journalists, but rather was invoking the older, Elizabethan meaning of raking the muck of a bad crop. The “rubbish” designation showed contempt for the poor, a sad reminder that very few were capable of escaping the refuse heap. But the bill failed to pass: the Virginia gentry had no desire to pay for it. They had no interest in raising up a few stray kernels of genius from the wasteland of the rural poor. 17 The education reform bill had little chance of passing, but its companion piece for funding workhouses did. As was the case with England’s poor laws, the bill penalized those who “waste their time in idle and dissolute courses,” loitering and wandering or deserting their wives and children: such people were “deemed vagabonds.” The solution for poor children was not education, but hiring them out as apprentices. Jefferson made a minor change to the existing law, which dated to 1755: the poor would no longer wear identifying badges.

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

  If the newcomer is only passing through, give him all the help you can - though he is not able to stay more than a couple of days with you, or three if it is unavoidable. But if he wants to settle down among you, and is a skilled worker, let him find employment and earn his bread. If he knows no trade, use your discretion to make sure that he does not live in idleness simply on the strength of being a Christian. Unless he agrees to this, he is only trying to exploit Christ. You must be on your guard against men of that sort. The Didache even invents the word Christmonger, trader in Christ, Christemporos, to describe this kind of person. John was entirely justified in warning his people that the wrong kind of wandering prophets might come claiming hospitality and in saying that they must on no account be received. There is no doubt that, in the early Church, these wandering prophets became a problem. Some of them were heretical teachers, even if they were sincerely convinced of their own teaching. Some were simply plausible rogues who had found an easy way to make a comfortable living. That is the picture which lies behind 2 John. The Clash of Ministries But the situation behind 3 John is in some ways even more serious. The problem figure is Diotrephes. He is the man who will have nothing to do with wandering teachers and who seeks to cast out anyone who dares to give them a welcome. He is the man who will not accept the authority of John and whom John brands as a domineering character. There is much more behind this than meets the eye. This was no storm in a teacup; it was a fundamental split between the local and the travelling ministry. Obviously, the whole structure of the Church depended on a strong, settled ministry. That is to say, its very existence depended on a strong and authoritative eldership. As time went on, the settled ministry was bound to become frustrated under the remote control of even one so famous and venerable as John, and to resent the possibly upsetting invasions of wandering prophets and evangelists. It was by no means impossible that, however well- intentioned they were, these travellers could do far more harm than good. Here is the situation behind 3 John. John represents the old apostolic control from a distance; Demetrius and his band of missionaries represent the wandering prophets and preachers; Diotrephes represents the settled ministry of the local elders, who wish to run their own congregation and who regard the wandering preachers as dangerous intruders; Gaius represents the good, well-meaning man who is torn in two and cannot make up his mind. What happened in this case we do not know.

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

  After settlement, colonial outposts exploited their unfree laborers (indentured servants, slaves, and children) and saw such expendable classes as human waste. The poor, the waste, did not disappear, and by the early eighteenth century they were seen as a permanent breed. This way of classifying human failure took hold in the United States. Every era in the continent’s vaunted developmental story had its own taxonomy of waste people—unwanted and unsalvageable. Each era had its own means of distancing its version of white trash from the mainstream ideal. By thinking of the lower classes as incurable, irreparable “breeds,” this study reframes the relationship of race and class. Class had its own singular and powerful dynamic, apart from its intersection with race. It starts with the rich and potent meaning that came with the different names given the American underclass. Long before they were today’s “trailer trash” and “rednecks,” they were called “lubbers” and “rubbish” and “clay-eaters” and “crackers”—and that’s just scratching the surface. Lest the reader misconstrue the book’s purpose, I want to make the point unambiguously: by reevaluating the American historical experience in class terms, I expose what is too often ignored about American identity. But I’m not just pointing out what we’ve gotten wrong about the past; I also want to make it possible to better appreciate the gnawing contradictions still present in modern American society. How does a culture that prizes equality of opportunity explain, or indeed accommodate, its persistently marginalized people? Twenty-first-century Americans need to confront this enduring conundrum. Let us recognize the existence of our underclass. It has been with us since the first European settlers arrived on these shores. It is not an insignificant part of the vast national demographic today. The puzzle of how white trash embodied this tension is one of the key questions the book presumes to answer. • • • America’s class language and thinking began with the forceful imprint left by English colonization. The generations of the 1500s and 1600s that first envisioned the broad-scale English exploitation of America’s natural environment employed a vocabulary that was a mix of purposeful description and raw imagery. They did not indulge in pretty talk. The idea of settlement had to be sold to wary investors; the planting of New World American colonies had to serve Old World purposes. In grand fashion, promoters imagined America not as an Eden of opportunity but as a giant rubbish heap that could be transformed into productive terrain. Expendable people—waste people—would be unloaded from England; their labor would germinate a distant wasteland. Harsh as it sounds, the idle poor, dregs of society, were to be sent thither simply to throw down manure and die in a vacuous muck. Before it became that fabled “City upon a Hill,” America was in the eyes of sixteenth-century adventurers a foul, weedy wilderness—a “sinke hole” suited to ill-bred commoners.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Dmitri Nabokov (the ending in ff was an old Continental fad), State Minister of Justice from 1878 to 1885, did what he could to protect, if not to strengthen, the liberal reforms of the sixties (trial by jury, for instance) against ferocious reactionary attacks. “He acted,” says a biographer (Brockhaus’ Encyclopedia, second Russian edition), “much like the captain of a ship in a storm who would throw overboard part of the cargo in order to save the rest.” The epitaphical simile unwittingly echoes, I note, an epigraphical theme—my grandfather’s earlier attempt to throw the law out of the window.

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

  It was the evening of a regatta at Kingston. He had been asked to lunch on one of the big yachts. I heard the officers talking of it. They said he was asked because he knew more about tides and currents along the coast than anyone, more even than the fishermen. The racing skippers wanted to get some information out of him. Another added, “he knows the slants of the wind off Howth Head, ay, and the weather, too, better than anyone living!” All agreed he was a first-rate sailor “one of the best, the very best if he had a decent temper—the little devil.” “D’ye mind when he steered the gig in that race for all? Won? av course he won, he has always won—ah! he’s a great little sailor an’ he takes care of the men’s food too, but he has the divil’s own temper—an’ that’s the truth.” That afternoon of the Regatta, he came up the ladder quickly and stumbled smiling as he stepped down to the deck. I had never seen him like that; he was grinning and walking unsteadily: I gazed at him in amazement. An officer turned aside and as he passed me he said to another: “Drunk as a lord.” Another helped my father down to his cabin and came up five minutes afterwards: “he’s snoring: he’ll soon be all right: it’s that champagne they give him, and all that praising him and pressing him to give them tips for this and that.” “No, no!” cried another, “it’s not the drink; he only gets drunk when he hasn’t to pay for it”, and all of them grinned; it was true, I felt, and I despised the meanness inexpressibly. I hated them for seeing him, and hated him—drunk and talking thick and staggering about; an object of derision and pity!—my “Governor”, as Vernon called him; I despised him. And I recalled other griefs I had against him. A Lord of the Admiralty had come aboard once: father was dressed in his best; I was very young: it was just after I had learned to swim in Carrickfergus. My father used to make me undress and go in and swim round the vessel every morning after my lessons. That morning I had come up as usual at eleven and a strange gentleman and my father were talking together near the companion. As I appeared my father gave me a frown to go below but the stranger caught sight of me and laughing called me. I came to them and the stranger was surprised on hearing I could swim. “Jump in, Jim!” cried my father, “and swim round.” Nothing loath I ran down the ladder, pulled off my clothes and jumped in. The stranger and my father were above me smiling and talking; my father waved his hand and I swam round the vessel. When I got back, I was about to get on the steps and come aboard when my father said:

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

  He echoed a previous Virginia governor when he denounced the place as the “sinke of America, the Refuge of Renegadoes.” He meant by this a commercial sinkhole, and with the loaded term “renegadoes,” a bastion of lawless, irreligious men who literally renounced their national allegiance as well as their Christian faith. Though there were but few ministers to guide them, the real apostasy of the people was said to be their refusal to be good taxpaying Britons. 30 Virginians constantly aimed to keep their neighbor in line. A surveying team was dispatched in 1710, but failed to settle anything. The same was attempted in 1728, when William Byrd II accepted his commission to lead a joint expedition. He endured trying months navigating the Dismal Swamp and met with residents, mocked them mercilessly, and lustily eyed their women as much as he coveted the fertile land beyond the Dismal Swamp. He instructed his men to beat drums and shoot off guns to determine the size of the swamp, and crudely compared the sound to that “prattling Slut, Echo.” Such petulance reflected his general feeling that the dark, mysterious Carolina terrain would never give up her secrets. Yet Byrd was undeterred. A man of letters as well as an amateur naturalist, he wrote two versions of his adventure: one was the less censored “secret history,” the other a longer, more polished tract called “The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina.” 31 For Byrd, Virginia was an almost Eden-like colony, and a far cry from her uncivilized neighbor. In a bemused letter of 1726, written just two years before he began his tour of North Carolina, he described himself as a man resting underneath his “fig tree,” surrounded by “my Flocks and my Herds, my Bond- men and Bond-women.” Part feudal squire, part modern Abraham, Byrd portrayed his colony as a bucolic retreat far from the “Vagrant Mendicants” roaming the “island of beggars”—by which he meant England. He pretended that poverty did not exist in Virginia; his slaves were both dutiful and productive. A well-ordered society, based on slavery, had not only allowed him to indulge a pastoral dream but had also kept poor whites at bay. 32 Things were different in Carolina. Just across the ill-defined border was an alien world where class authority was severely compromised. Byrd’s little band of land commissioners were “knights-errant” embarked on a grand medieval crusade. When people emerged from their huts, staring as a flock at the strangers from Virginia, “it was as if we had been Morocco ambassadors.” Having brought a chaplain along on their journey, they were able to christen children and marry men and women from place to place along their route. Byrd and his party of superior Christians sprinkled holy water on the heathen Carolinians. 33 Or so he fantasized. In fact, the Carolinians proved resistant to religion and reform.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  From other, stranger torments that beset him in the course of his short life, he sought relief—if I understand these matters rightly—in religion, first in certain Russian sectarian outlets, and eventually in the Roman Catholic Church. His was the kind of colorful neurosis that should have been accompanied by genius but in his case was not, hence the search for a traveling shadow. In his youth he had been intensely disliked by his father, a country gentleman of the old school (bear hunting, a private theatre, a few fine Old Masters among a good deal of trash), whose uncontrollable temper was rumored to have been a threat to the boy’s very life. My mother told me later of the tension in the Vyra household of her girlhood, of the atrocious scenes that took place in Ivan Vasilievich’s study, a gloomy corner room giving on an old well with a rusty pumping wheel under five Lombardy poplars. Nobody used that room except me. I kept my books and spreading boards on its black shelves, and subsequently induced my mother to have some of its furniture transferred into my own sunny little study on the garden side, and therein staggered, one morning, its tremendous desk with nothing upon its waste of dark leather but a huge curved paper knife, a veritable scimitar of yellow ivory carved from a mammoth’s tusk. When Uncle Ruka died, at the end of 1916, he left me what would amount nowadays to a couple of million dollars and his country estate, with its white-pillared mansion on a green, escarped hill and its two thousand acres of wildwood and peatbog. The house, I am told, still stood there in 1940, nationalized but aloof, a museum piece for any sightseeing traveler who might follow the St. Petersburg-Luga highway running below through the village Rozhestveno and across the branching river. Because of its floating islands of water lilies and algal brocade, the fair Oredezh had a festive air at that spot. Farther down its sinuous course, where the sand martins shot out of their holes in the steep red bank, it was deeply suffused with the reflections of great, romantic firs (the fringe of our Vyra); and still farther downstream, the endless tumultuous flow of a water mill gave the spectator (his elbows on the handrail) the sensation of receding endlessly, as if this were the stern of time itself. 5The following passage is not for the general reader, but for the particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he understands me. My old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any question of property. My contempt for the émigré who “hates the Reds” because they “stole” his money and land is complete. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes. And finally: I reserve for myself the right to yearn after an ecological niche:

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

  Back in London, he charged Culpeper with leading an uprising, and as a result in 1680 Culpeper was tried for treason. 25 In an unexpected development, the proprietor Lord Shaftesbury came to Culpeper’s defense. He delivered an eloquent oration before the Court of King’s Bench, arguing that a stable government had never legally existed in North Carolina. Anticipating Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Shaftesbury concluded that the colony remained effectively in a state of nature. Without a genuine government, there could be no rebellion. Commentary like this merely underscored northern Carolina’s outlier status. 26 Culpeper’s Rebellion was something less than a servile insurrection. The poor settlers’ rallying cry of “noe Landgraves, noe Casiques” filled the air, yet we cannot call theirs strictly a war of the poor against the rich. Miller’s agenda was to stop smuggling and force his fellow Englishmen to participate in the British colonial trade system. His targets were those, including modest farmers, who depended on smuggling to survive. Class power, in this instance, was about those who benefited from a greater reliance on the imperial orbit of influence. But Miller had also asserted an unconstitutional claim to the governorship and, by applying heavy-handed tactics, failed to command respect within the political community. Indeed, he was known for his foul mouth and drunken oaths against the king, which resulted in charges of sedition and blasphemy. He was at best a poseur, at worst a crude bully. In the end, North Carolina’s aristocratic leadership proved as dubious as the made-up titles of landgraves and caciques. 27 A history of misrule continued to haunt North Carolina. Governor Seth Sothell, who served from 1681 to 1689, engrossed as many as forty-four thousand acres for private gain. He was eventually banished from the colony. Nor was this unique. From 1662 to 1736, North Carolina went through forty-one governors, while its sister colony saw twenty-five. After 1691, in an effort to enhance stability, the government in South Carolina appointed the deputy governor for North Carolina. When a rebellion against Governor Edward Hyde ignited in 1708, Virginia governor Alexander Spotswood went to war against his southern neighbor. Their conflict triggered renewed hostilities from the Tuscarora Indians, who resented unceasing English encroachment on their lands. 28 In 1711, South Carolina intervened, sending Captain John Barnwell north to put down the Tuscaroras. Barnwell expected to be awarded a large land grant for his service. With his expectations unmet, he turned the tables and incited the Indians to attack several North Carolina settlements. Even before his betrayal, though, he felt little identification with the colonists, writing that North Carolinians were the most “cowardly Blockheads [another word for lubber] that ever God created & must be used like negro[e]s if you expect any good of them.” 29 Governor Spotswood of Virginia lashed out against Albemarle County as a “common Sanctuary for all our runaway servants,” and censured its “total Absence of Religion.”

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

  39 By the 1850s, poor whites had become a permanent class. As nonslaveholders, they described themselves as “farmers without farms.” Small- scale slaveholders tended to be related to large planters, a reminder of how much pedigree and kinship mattered. Slaveowners had unusual financial instruments that situated them above nonslaveholders: they raised slave children as an investment, as an invaluable source of collateral and credit when they sought to obtain loans. Whether they stayed put or moved west, poor whites occupied poor land. Nearly half left the Atlantic South for Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, and elsewhere, and still poor whites as a percentage in the original slave states remained fairly constant. The safety-valve theory did not work. 40 • • • The label “southern white trash” was not, as some would argue, a northern creation alone. While the “po’” in “po’ white trash” may have been derived from slave vocabulary, it clearly resonated among southern elites who dismissed the poor (as Jefferson did) as “rubbish.” The unlikely duo of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Daniel Hundley endorsed “good blood” to describe inherited class virtues— “veined and crossed” was the quasi-scientific description that underscored the power of intergenerational resemblance. 41 Alabama’s Hundley was never as famous as the Connecticut-born Stowe, but he was not a typical southerner either. After receiving his law degree from Harvard in 1853, he married his Virginia cousin (in the southern fashion), and was sent to Chicago by his father-in-law to manage the family’s real estate. Before he wrote about poor whites, he witnessed the Panic of 1857, which flooded Chicago with the unemployed. After Lincoln was elected, he returned to Alabama, remaking himself into an ardent defender of secession and the southern way of life. 42 Hundley claimed that genuine southern gentlemen were of Cavalier blood, an invented royal lineage superior to ordinary Anglo-Saxons. He even reduced Jefferson to a half-breed of sorts: royal Cavalier on his mother’s side, hearty Anglo-Saxon on his father’s. Hundley’s archetypal southern gentleman was akin to an Arabian horse: six feet tall, strong and athletic, at home hunting and roaming the countryside. In his taxonomy, the white classes were divided into a descending order of bloodlines: Cavalier gentry sat at the top, Anglo-Saxons filled the middle and yeoman classes, and those he called “southern bullies” and “white trash” sat feebly at the bottom. These lowest forms traced their lineage only to the convicts and indentured servants of Jamestown; they were the befouled heirs of poor vagrants, or those from the back alleys of old London. 43 For her part, in the plot of her novel Dred, Stowe divided poor southern whites into three classes.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  If Mademoiselle found herself seated too far at the end of the huge table, and especially if she lost precedence to a certain poor relative who was almost as fat as she (“Je suis une sylphide à côté d’elle,” Mademoiselle would say with a shrug of contempt), then her sense of injury caused her lips to twitch in a would-be ironical smile—and when a naïve neighbor would smile back, she would rapidly shake her head, as if coming out of some very deep meditation, with the remark: “Excusez-moi, je souriais à mes tristes pensées.” And as though nature had not wished to spare her anything that makes one supersensitive, she was hard of hearing. Sometimes at table we boys would suddenly become aware of two big tears crawling down Mademoiselle’s ample cheeks. “Don’t mind me,” she would say in a small voice, and she kept on eating till the unwiped tears blinded her; then, with a heartbroken hiccough she would rise and blunder out of the dining room. Little by little the truth would come out. The general talk had turned, say, on the subject of the warship my uncle commanded, and she had perceived in this a sly dig at her Switzerland that had no navy. Or else it was because she fancied that whenever French was spoken, the game consisted in deliberately preventing her from directing and adorning the conversation. Poor lady, she was always in such a nervous hurry to seize control of intelligible table talk before it bolted back into Russian that no wonder she bungled her cue. “And your Parliament, sir, how is it getting along?” she would suddenly burst out brightly from her end of the table, challenging my father, who, after a harassing day, was not exactly eager to discuss troubles of the state with a singularly unreal person who neither knew nor cared anything about them. Thinking that someone had referred to music, “But Silence, too, may be beautiful,” she would bubble. “Why, one evening, in a desolate valley of the Alps, I actually heard Silence.” Sallies like these, especially when growing deafness led her to answer questions none had put, resulted in a painful hush, instead of touching off the rockets of a sprightly causerie.

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

  What, then, was this contemporary thought and philosophy with which the false prophets and mistaken teachers wished to align the Christian faith? Throughout the Greek world, there was a way of thinking to which the general name of Gnosticism is given. The basic belief of all Gnostic thought was that only spirit was good and that matter, the material world, was essentially evil. The Gnostics, therefore, inevitably despised the world since it was matter. In particular, they despised the body, which, being matter, was necessarily evil. Imprisoned within this body was the human spirit. That spirit was a seed of God, who was altogether good. So, the aim of life must be to release this heavenly seed imprisoned in the evil of the body. That could be done only by a secret knowledge and elaborate ritual which only true Gnostics could supply. Here was a train of thought which was written deep into Greek thinking - and which has not even now ceased to exist. Its basis is the conviction that all matter is evil and that spirit alone is good, and that the one real aim in life is to liberate the human spirit from the vile prison house of the body. The False Teachers With that in our minds, let us turn to i John and gather the evidence as to who these false teachers were and what they taught. They had been within the Church, but they had withdrawn from it. `They went out from us, but they did not belong to us' (i John 2:19). They were people of influence, for they claimed to be prophets. `Many false prophets have gone out into the world' (I John 4:I). Although they had left the Church, they still tried to disseminate their teaching within it and to deceive its members and lead them away from the true faith (i John 2:26). The Denial of Jesus' Messiahship

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

  Like Justice Taney in the Dred Scott decision, he believed that pedigree could be used to distinguish worthy citizens from the waste people. He ruled that sterilization was the appropriate recourse in order to curb “generations of imbeciles” from reproducing. Holmes argued that sterilization was a civic duty, saving the nation from being “swamped with incompetence.” He echoed what the English had argued in the 1600s: the unfit would either starve or be executed for some crime, so sending them to be sterilized was the humane option, as being sent to the colonies had been centuries before. 69 Carrie Buck (of Buck v. Bell) had been chosen for sterilization on the order of Priddy, because she was one of “these people”—that “worthless class” of southern whites. She was, in a word, a perfect specimen of white trash. While Carrie Buck was the plaintiff, her mother and daughter were on trial too. Carrie tested at the “moron level” and her mother slightly lower, according to the highly biased experts. Her illegitimate child, examined at seven months, was termed feebleminded—this was based on the observations of a Red Cross worker and on a test administered by Estabrook. The experts’ pedigree chart proved degeneracy as well as sexual deviance: Carrie’s mother was a prostitute, and Carrie had been raped by the nephew of her adoptive parents. Her rapist went unpunished, and yet she was sterilized. 70 • • • Eugenics suffused the culture of the twenties. Social classes were ranked according to levels of inheritable potential. At the top was the new professional “master class.” Many believed that intelligence was inherited and that tests of schoolchildren proved that the brightest pupils were those whose parents were highly educated professionals. This elite had to be not just mentally but also physically fit. At the Second International Congress of Eugenics in New York, in 1921, two statues were put on display at opposite ends of Darwin Hall in the Museum of Natural History. One was a composite of the biometric measures of the fifty most athletic men at Harvard, the other an amalgam of one hundred thousand doughboys of World War I—in other words, the “average American male.” The Harvard specimen was the decidedly more impressive of the two. A new word was coined for the cognitive elite: “aristogenic”—what we would call a genetic leadership class. One was once again born to a station, as in the traditional meaning of aristocracy, but it was not because of family name or wealth. Now it was the endowment of inborn qualities that marked off the superior class. 71 Carrie Buck and her mother, Emma (1924). Carrie, her mother, and Carrie’s illegitimate daughter were all put on trial in Buck v. Bell (1927). Their crime was one of pedigree—a defective breed perpetuated over three generations. Arthur Estabrook Collection, M.

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

  But the Greeks could not stand against the disciplined Romans, and in 146 Bc Lucius Mummius, the Roman general, captured Corinth and left it a desolate heap of ruins. But any place with the geographical situation of Corinth could not remain in that devastated condition. Almost exactly Ioo years later, in 46 BC, Julius Caesar rebuilt the city, and Corinth arose from the ruins. Now Corinth became a Roman colony. More, it became a capital city, the metropolis of the Roman province of Achaea, which included practically all Greece. In those days, which were the days of Paul, Corinth's population was very mixed. (i) There were the Roman veterans whom Julius Caesar had settled there. When a Roman soldier had served his time, he was granted citizenship and was then sent out to some newly founded city and given a grant of land so that he might become a settler there. These Roman colonies were planted all over the world, and always the backbone of them was the contingent of veteran regular soldiers whose faithful service had won them the citizenship. (2) When Corinth was rebuilt, the merchants came back, for the city's situation still gave it commercial supremacy. (3) There were many Jews among the population. The rebuilt city offered them commercial opportunities which they were not slow to take. (4) There was a sprinkling of Phoenicians and Phrygians and people from the far east, with their exotic customs. Farrar spoke of `this mongrel and heterogeneous population of Greek adventurers and Roman bourgeois, with a tainting infusion of Phoenicians; this mass of Jews, exsoldiers, philosophers, merchants, sailors, freedmen, slaves, trades-people, hucksters and agents of every form of vice'. He characterizes Corinth as a colony `without aristocracy, without traditions and without well-established citizens'. Remember the background of Corinth, remember its name for wealth and luxury, for drunkenness and immorality and vice, and then read i Corinthians 6:9- io. Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers - none of these will inherit the kingdom of God. And this is what some of you used to be. In this hotbed of vice, in the most unlikely place in all the Greek world, some of Paul's greatest work was done, and some of the mightiest triumphs of Christianity were won. Paul in Corinth Paul stayed longer in Corinth than in any other city, with the single exception of Ephesus. He had left Macedonia with his life in peril and had crossed over to Athens. He had had little success there and had gone on to Corinth, where he remained for eighteen months.

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

  The main interest of Matthew is in the Jews. Their conversion is especially near and dear to the heart of its writer. When the Syro-Phoenician woman seeks his help, Jesus' first answer is: `I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel' (15:24). When Jesus sends out the Twelve on the task of evangelization, his instruction is: `Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel' (10:5-6). Yet it is not to be thought that this gospel by any means excludes the Gentiles. Many are to come from the east and the west to sit down in the kingdom of God (8:11). The gospel is to be preached to the whole world (24:14). And it is Matthew which gives us the marching orders of the Church: `Go therefore and make disciples of all nations' (28:19). It is clear that Matthew's first interest is in the Jews, but that it foresees the day when all nations will be gathered in. The Jewishness of Matthew is also seen in its attitude to the law. Jesus came not to destroy, but to fulfil the law. The least part of the law will not pass away. People must not be taught to break the law. The righteousness of the Christian must exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees (5:17-20). Matthew was written by one who knew and loved the law and who saw that even the law has its place in Christian life. Once again there is an apparent paradox in the attitude of Matthew to the scribes and Pharisees. They are given a very special authority: `The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it' (23:2). But at the same time there is no gospel which so sternly and consistently condemns them. Right at the beginning, there is John the Baptist's savage denunciation of them as a brood of vipers (3:7-12). They complain that Jesus eats with tax-collectors and sinners (9:11). They ascribe the power of Jesus, not to God, but to the prince of devils (12:24). They plot to destroy him (12:14). The disciples are warned against the leaven, the evil teaching, of the scribes and Pharisees (16:12). They are like evil plants doomed to be rooted up (15:13). They are quite unable to read the signs of the times (16:3). They are the murderers of the prophets (21:41). There is no chapter of condemnation in the whole New Testament like Matthew 23, which is condemnation not of what the scribes and the Pharisees teach, but of what they are. He condemns them for falling so far short of their own teaching, and far below the ideal of what they ought to be.