Contempt

Passages

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

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

  6 Let us be clear, then. Besides being a fabrication of his family’s history, Haley’s book applied a kind of logic that was downright conservative. He construed himself as one of an African nobility, and he held that ancestry said a lot about what a person could become—and pass on. Roots was too good to be true, which was why Haley, who pitched his story to the networks before he had even written it, was eventually exposed as a hoaxer and a hustler. 7 Haley’s Roots demonstrated how easy it was to invent a pedigree. Fictional family trees were all the rage. James A. Michener, arguably the most popular of twentieth-century historical fiction writers, produced a primarily white version of Roots in his novel Chesapeake (1978). Michener followed several families of varying class backgrounds and tied their destinies to a landscape dotted with geese and blue herons. The white trash lineage he covers originates with one Timothy Turlock, whom Michener describes as “small, quick, sly, dirty of dress and habit,” and the father of “six bastards.” After an undistinguished life in England, Turlock was unceremoniously dumped on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the 1600s, and lived in a swamp. 8 Multiple generations later, little had changed for the Turlock clan. Amos Turlock was a toothless crank living in a trailer in the 1970s. As one reviewer put it, “feral marshlanders” anchored the entire narrative. The Turlocks remained one with their terrain. Amos surrounded his trailer with tacky statuary of Santa and the Seven Dwarfs; he derived the greatest pleasure in finding his way around the game warden and ranging about with his extra-long (illegal) Twombly gun that he used to hunt geese. The Turlocks of Michener’s historical reinvention were all cunning—savage survivalists. 9 As sweeping narratives and small-screen histories accompanied the nation’s bicentennial celebrations of 1976, it should come as no surprise, then, that the founders themselves provided a dynastic saga worthy of a miniseries. The Adams Chronicles traced the path of a crusty New England farmer, John Adams, to the presidency, and carried forward with his descendants, three generations’ worth. The Chronicles led up to the accomplished Henry Adams, a strong-minded historian whose life crossed into the twentieth century.

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

  And the worst of it all is that the highest function of man has been degraded by foul words so that it is almost impossible to write the body’s hymn of joy as it should be written. The poets have been almost as guilty in this respect as the priests: Aristophanes and Rabelais are ribald, dirty: Boccaccio cynical while Ovid leers cold-bloodedly and Zola like Chaucer finds it difficult to suit language to his desires. Walt Whitman is better though often merely commonplace. The Bible is the best of all; but not frank enough even in the noble Song of Solomon which now and then by sheer imagination manages to convey the ineffable! We are beginning to reject Puritanism and its unspeakable, brainless pruderies; but Catholicism is just as bad. Go to the Vatican Gallery and the great Church of St. Peter in Rome and you will find the fairest figures of ancient art clothed in painted tin, as if the most essential organs of the body were disgusting and had to be concealed. I say the body is beautiful and must be lifted and dignified by our reverence: I love the body more than any Pagan of them all and I love the soul and her aspirations as well; for me the body and the soul are alike beautiful, all dedicate to Love and her worship. I have no divided allegiance and what I preach today amid the scorn and hatred of men will be universally accepted tomorrow; for in my vision, too, a thousand years are as one day. We must unite the soul of Paganism, the love of beauty and art and literature with the soul of Christianity and its human lovingkindness in a new synthesis which shall include all the sweet and gentle and noble impulses in us. What we all need is more of the spirit of Jesus: we must learn at length with Shakespeare: “Pardon’s the word for all!” I want to set this Pagan-Christian ideal before men as the highest and most human too. Now one word to my own people and their peculiar shortcomings. Anglo-Saxon domineering combativeness is the greatest danger to Humanity in the world today. Americans are proud of having blotted out the red Indian and stolen his possessions and of burning and torturing negroes in the sacred name of equality. At all costs we must get rid of our hypocrisies and falsehoods and see ourselves as we are—a domineering race, vengeful and brutal, as exemplified in Haiti; we must study the inevitable effects of our soulless, brainless selfishness as shown in the world-war.

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

  In Thomas Jefferson’s formulation, nature assigned classes. Nature demanded a natural aristocracy—what he termed an “accidental aristoi.” The spark of lust would direct the strong to breed with the strong, the “good and wise” to marry for beauty, health, virtue, and talents—traits that would be bred forward. One significant difference between Jefferson’s master class and the eugenicists of the early twentieth century was the former’s singular focus on the male making his selection, and the latter’s urging the middle-class woman to carefully inspect the pedigree of the man she hoped to marry. Marriage has always been connected to class status: today’s online dating services are premised on the eugenic notion that a person can find the perfect match—a match presumed to be based on shared class and educational interests. In 2014– 15, a series of television commercials for eHarmony.com was sending the same message: that no “normal” middle-class applicant has to be stuck with a tawdry (i.e., lower-class) loser. And as the historian Jill Lepore has pointed out in the New Yorker, the entrepreneurial Dr. Paul Popenoe began his career as a leading authority on eugenics, before moving on to marriage counseling, and eventually launching computer dating in 1956. Some dating services have been quite blatant: the website Good Genes promised to help “Ivy Leaguers” find potential spouses with “matching credentials,” by which was meant a similar class pedigree. 2 The rule of nature was supposed to supplant artificial aristocracy with meritocracy. At the same time, though, it allowed people to associate human failures with different strains and inferior breeds, and to assign a certain inevitability to such failure. If, in this long-acceptable way of thinking, nature ruled, nature also needed a gardener. The human scrub grass had to be weeded from time to time. That is why squatters were used as the first wave of settlers to encroach on Indian lands, then were chased off the land when the upscale farmers arrived; in time, policing boundaries extended to segregation laws, and after that to zoning laws, separating the wheat from the chaff in the creation of modern suburbia. Class walls went up in the way property values were modulated in carefully planned towns and neighborhoods. It was easy for nineteenth-century Americans to equate animals and humans. Stallions were like elite planters, and naturally given the best pastures; the weak tackies, like white trash, lazed about the marshlands. While it is not discussed very often, our society still measures human worth by the value of the land people occupy and own. The urban ghettos, no less than the trailer parks on devalued land on the city’s edges, are modern representations of William Byrd’s Dismal Swamp: an unsafe, uncivilized wasteland that is allowed to fester and remain unproductive. Location is everything.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  They cannot save themselves from the power of the flame [much less save the nation], There is no blazing coal for warming Nor fire before which to sit! 15 “This is how they have become to you, those [astrologers and sorcerers] with whom you have labored, Those who have done business with you from your youth; Each has wandered in his own way. There is no one to save you. Isaiah 48 Israel’s Obstinacy 1 “H EAR THIS, O house of Jacob, you who are called by the name of Israel And who come from the a seed of Judah, You who swear [allegiance] by the name of the LORD And invoke the God of Israel, But not in truth (sincerity) nor in righteousness [with moral and spiritual integrity]. 2 “For they call themselves [citizens of Jerusalem] after the holy city And depend on the God of Israel; The LORD of hosts is His name. 3 “I have declared the former things [which happened to Israel] in times past; They went forth from My mouth and I proclaimed them; Suddenly I acted, and they came to pass. 4 “Because I know that you are obstinate, And your neck is an iron tendon And your brow is bronze [both unyielding], 5 I have declared them to you long ago; Before they came to pass I announced them to you, So that you could not say, ‘My idol has done them, And my carved image and my cast image have commanded them.’ 6 “You have heard [these things foretold]; look at all this [that has been fulfilled]. And you, will you not declare it? I proclaim to you [specific] new things from this time, Even b hidden things which you have not known. 7 “They are created now [called into being by the prophetic word] and not long ago; And before today you have not heard of them, So that you will not say, ‘Oh yes! I knew them.’ 8 “You have not heard, you have not known; Even from long ago your ear has not been open. For I [the LORD ] knew that you [Israel] would act very treacherously; You have been called a transgressor and a rebel from birth. 9 “For the sake of My Name I refrain from My wrath, And for My praise I restrain Myself from you, So that I do not cut you off. 10 “Indeed, I have refined you, but not as c silver; I have tested and chosen you in the furnace of affliction. 11 “For My own sake, for My own sake, I will do it [I refrain and do not completely destroy you]; For how can My Name be defiled and profaned [as it would if My chosen people were completely destroyed]? And I will not give My glory to another [by permitting the worshipers of idols to triumph over you].

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  37 “For by your words [reflecting your spiritual condition] you will be justified and acquitted of the guilt of sin; and by your words [rejecting Me] you will be condemned and sentenced.” The Desire for Signs 38 Then some of the scribes and Pharisees said to Him, “Teacher, we want to see a sign (attesting miracle) from You [proving that You are what You claim to be].” 39 But He replied and said to them, “An evil and adulterous generation [that is morally unfaithful to God] craves and demands a [miraculous] sign; but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah; [Luke 11:29–32 ] 40 for just as J ONAH WAS THREE DAYS AND THREE NIGHTS IN THE BELLY OF THE SEA MONSTER , so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. [Jon 1:17 ] 41 “The men of Nineveh will stand up [as witnesses] at the judgment against this generation, and will condemn it because they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and now, something greater than Jonah is here. [Jon 3:5 ] 42 “The Queen of the South (Sheba) will stand up [as a witness] at the judgment against this generation, and will condemn it because she came from the ends of the earth to listen to the wisdom of Solomon; and now, something greater than Solomon is here. [1 Kin 10:1 ; 2 Chr 9:1 ] 43 “Now when the unclean spirit has gone out of a man, it roams through waterless (dry, arid) places in search of rest, but it does not find it. 44 “Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it arrives, it finds the place unoccupied, swept, and put in order. 45 “Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and make their home there. And the last condition of that man becomes worse than the first. So will it also be with this wicked generation.” Changed Relationships 46 While He was still talking to the crowds, it happened that His mother and brothers stood outside, asking to speak to Him. [Mark 3:31–35 ; Luke 8:19–21 ] 47 Someone said to Him, “Look! Your mother and Your brothers are standing outside asking to speak to You.” 48 But Jesus replied to the one who told Him, “Who is My mother and who are My brothers?” 49 And stretching out His hand toward His disciples [and all His other followers], He said, “Here are My mother and My brothers! 50 “For g whoever does the will of My Father who is in heaven [by believing in Me, and following Me] is My brother and sister and mother.” Matthew 13 Jesus Teaches in Parables 1 T HAT SAME day Jesus went out of the house and was sitting beside the sea [of Galilee].

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  " Truly, monsieur," she returned, " your goodness makes my malice greater. What greater proof would you have than that a man like him has never had any amour imputed to him. Be assured, monsieur, that but for the vain and presumptuous idea with which he has flattered himself of becoming my servant, he would not be without a mistress at this time of day. Never did a young man live so solitary as he in good company ; and the reason can only be that his heart is set so high that his vain hope stands him in stead of everything else. If you believe that he conceals nothing from you, swear him as to his amours. If he tells you that he loves another, why then believe him ; I am content you should ; but if not, be assured that what I say is true." The duke approved of his wife's suggestion, and tak- ing the gentleman into the country, said to him, " My wife continues still to speak to me of you to the same purpose, and mentions a circumstance which gives me some suspicion. To be plain with you, it excites surprise that you, a young and gallant man, have never been known to be in love ; and this very thing makes me fear that you entertain the sentiments you have been charged with, and that the hope you cherish is so pleasing to you that you cannot think of any other woman. I pray you, Sez'tnth day.] QUEEiV 01^ NA VARRE. 529 then, as a friend, and order you as a master, to tell me truly do you pay your court to any lady in this world ?" The poor gentleman, who would fain have concealed his love as carefully as he would have preserved his life, seeing his master's extreme jealousy, was constrained to swear to him that he loved a lady so beautiful that the beauty of the duchess and of all the ladies of her suite was mean in comparison, not to say ugliness and defor- mity ; at the same time, he besought the duke not to in- sist on his naming the lady, because the intimacy be- tween him and his mistress was such that it could only be broken by whichever of the two first disclosed it. The duke promised he would never press him on that point, and was so satisfied with him that he behaved more graciously to him than ever. The duchess per- ceived it, and employed her usual artifices to find out the reason ; nor did the duke conceal it from her. Strong jealousy was now added to her thirst of ven- geance, and she besought the duke to insist that the gentleman should name his mistress, declaring that if he refused to do so, her husband would be the most credulous prince in the world to put faith in so vague a statement.

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

  Raper and Ira de A. Reid, “The South Adjusts—Downward,” Phylon 1, no. 1 (1st quarter, 1940): 6– 27, esp. 24–26. 51. In this collection of letters, nine of the forty-six used the word “shiftless”; others used related terms. Benjamin Burke Kendrick and Thomas Abernathy thought “shiftless” would be a better term than “poor white.” See B. B. Kendrick to Howard Odum, March 10, 1938, and Thomas Abernathy to Odum, April 6, 1938. For “fuzzy,” see Charles Sydnor to Odum, March 12, 1939; for others on “shiftless,” also see Frank Owsley to Odum, March 27, 1938, Haywood Tearce to Odum, March 19, 1938, A. B. Moore to Odum, April 29, 1938, Earle Eubank to Odum, March 23, 1938, Read Bain to Odum, January 21, 1938, D. B. Taylor to Odum, January 25, 1938; and on “indolent, shiftless class,” see Dudley Tanner to Odum, January 25, 1938. See Howard Washington Odum Papers, 1908–82, Folder 3635, Special Collections, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 52. The word “shiftless” goes back to the 1500s meaning helpless, without resources, lazy, without a shift or shirt; see Oxford English Dictionary. On the shiftless behavior of Virginia planters and Louisiana slaves, see Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States (New York, 1861), 106, 373. For “shiftless” as a New England term, see “Shiftless,” Ohio Farmer, December 17, 1896; also see “‘Farmer Thrifty’ and ‘Farmer Shiftless,’” Maine Farmer, June 4, 1870. On the typical shiftless tavernkeeper, see Gail Dickersin Spilsbury, “A Washington Sketchbook: Historic Drawings of Washington,” Washington History 22 (2010): 69–87, esp. 73. On shiftless deserting husbands, and a bill passed in New York in 1897 called the “Shiftless Fathers Bill,” see Michael Willrich, “Home Slackers: Men, the State, and Welfare in Modern America,” Journal of American History 87, no. 2 (September 2000): 460–89, esp. 469. On eugenics and “shiftless,” see Irene Case and Kate Lewis, “Environment as a Factor in Feeble-Mindedness: The Noll Family,” American Journal of Sociology 23, no. 5 (March 1918): 661–69, esp. 662; Leonard, “Retrospectives: Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era,” 220; Kelves, In the Name of Eugenics, 48–49; and Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, 81–82. On the shiftlessness of poor whites in fiction, and the association of shiftlessness with tenancy and transiency, see William J. Flynt, Poor but Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989), ix, 63, 90, 160, 293. On shiftless vagabonds, see “Causes of Poverty,” Genesee Farmer and Gardner’s Journal, March 10, 1832; Todd Depastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 15, 102; and W. J.

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

  The combination of climate and an unhealthy diet doomed them. Eating swine, they contracted the “yaws,” and their symptoms matched those of syphilis: they lost their noses and palates, and had hideously deformed faces. With their “flat noses,” they not only looked like but also began to act like wild boars: “Many of them seem to grunt rather than speak.” In a “porcivorous” country, people spent their days foraging and fornicating; when upset, they could be heard yelling out, “Flesh alive and tear it.” It was their “favorite exclamation,” Byrd said. This bizarre colloquialism suggested cannibalism, or perhaps hyenas surrounding a fresh kill and devouring it. How could these carnivorous swamp monsters be thought of as English? 37 Byrd left behind few practical ideas for reforming the godforsaken wilderness he had explored. Only drastic measures would work: replacing lubbers with Swiss German settlers and draining the swamp of its vile murky waters. He mused that colonization would have had a better outcome if male settlers had been encouraged to intermarry with Indian women. Over two generations, the Indian stock would have improved, as a species of flower or tree might; dark skin blanched white, heathen ways dimmed. Here, Byrd was borrowing from the author John Lawson, who wrote in A New Voyage to Carolina that men of lower rank gained an economic advantage by marrying Native women who brought land to the union. While he was at it, Byrd also condemned unrefined whites for marrying promiscuous Englishwomen right off the boat. He even suggested, satirically, of course, that social problems would disappear if the poor were more like bears and spent six months each year in hibernation: “’Tis a pity our beggars and pickpockets could not do the same,” he wrote. 38 Byrd’s views, if colorfully expressed, were by no means his alone. An Anglican minister named John Urmston reported that his poor white charges loved their hogs more than they did their minister. They let the hogs into their churches to avoid the heat, leaving “dung and nastiness” on the floor. In 1737, Governor Gabriel Johnson of North Carolina referred to his people as “the meanest, most rustic and squalid part of the species.” As late as the 1770s, a traveler passing through North Carolina found the residents to be the most “ignorant wretches” he had ever met. They could not even tell him the name of the place where they lived, nor offer directions to the next family’s home. Insular country people greeted travelers with incredulous stares and looked upon them as “strange, outlandish folks.” These rural poor were a people untethered from reality. 39 Shocking as it is for us to contemplate, large numbers of early American colonists spent their entire lives in such dingy, nasty conditions. The sordid picture conveyed here is an unavoidable part of the American past.

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

  Just as Atticus Finch shoots a “mad dog” in the street, the same fate awaits the vicious, vengeful poor white villain in the film’s denouement. It is not the father who resorts to violence, though; it is his ghostly neighbor, Boo Radley. A social outcast with a troubled past, Radley acts the part of a guardian angel, saving the children on Halloween night. 59 The Ewells may have been caricatures, as the New York Times movie critic directly claimed, but they were familiar ones. Hollywood did not expose the seamy economic conditions of poor whites so much as emphasize their dark inner demons. By the fifties, “redneck” had come to be synonymous with an almost insane bigotry. The actor playing Bob Ewell was scrawny, and one reviewer even called him “degenerate,” suggesting the persistence of the older hereditary correlation between a shriveled body and a contracted mind. Sensationalizing redneck behavior did not just occur on the big screen, however. In Nashville, in 1957, the racist troublemaker at the head of the mob (with an affected southern accent) was a paid agitator from Camden, New Jersey. 60 For filmmakers, the allure of redneck characters was doubled-edged. On the one hand, they were ready-made villains; on the other, they were men without inhibitions. Unrestrained and undomesticated, they stood in sharp contrast to the boxed-in suburbanite and could occasionally be appreciated for their earthy machismo. Sloan Wilson’s male protagonist in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), another novel made into a Hollywood film, starring Gregory Peck, was a pale imitation of the primal Cajun doing his dance to drumbeats. James Dean, Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando, and even Timothy Carey, as poor white trash, were all unreformed Americans, undomestic and unconventional. They planted a wild seed, taunting conformist male spectators who might be itching to break loose. 61 “Redneck” and “white trash” were often used interchangeably, though not everyone agreed that the two were synonymous. In A Southerner Discovers the South (1938), Jonathan Daniels had insisted that not all humbly born southern men were “po’ whites.” He gave as examples Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, southern folk whose “necks were ridged and red with the sun.” He thus divided the poor into two camps: the worthy, hardworking poor who strove to move up the social ladder, and the vulgar and hopeless who were trapped on its lowest rung. His worthy poor, having the “stout, earthy qualities of the redneck,” borrowed from the older class of yeoman, a category that no longer meant what it once had.

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

  The typical recipients were women “covered in rags and filth, and a dozen greasy and dirty little ‘innocent prattlers’ in train.” Perhaps the most damning assessment came from Marcus Sterling, a Union officer turned civilian administrator. After working as a bureau agent for four years in rural Virginia, he wrote a final report in 1868. While he believed that black freedmen had made great progress, were “more settled, industrious and ambitious” as a result of federal intervention, and eager to achieve literacy with “honest pride and manly integrity,” the same could not be said of that “pitiable class of poor whites,” the “only class which seem almost unaffected by the [bureau’s] great benevolence and its bold reform.” In the race for self-reliance, poor whites seemed to many bureau agents never to have left the starting gate. 11 Agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau were not alone in offering a grim prognosis for poor whites. Journalists from major newspapers headed south, sending back regular dispatches and publishing monographs for curious northern readers. Prominent articles appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Putnam’s Magazine, and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. The New York Times published a series of essays on the subject: in 1866, its anonymous correspondent authored a scathing exposé of white poverty, accompanied by the innocuous title “From the South: Southern Journeyings and Jottings.” Writing for the Chicago Tribune and Boston Advertiser, the Illinois-based reporter Sidney Andrews expressed his unvarnished views of wretched whites, which he reissued as a book, The South Since the War. After having been a correspondent for the Cincinnati Gazette, Whitelaw Reid compiled his unsympathetic observations in a travelogue, After the War: A Tour of the Southern States. Finally, John Trowbridge produced The South: A Tour of Its Battlefields and Ruined Cities, which focused a harsh lens on rural whites. 12 All of the above were published in the single year of 1866. Yet one of the most talked-about books in those wobbly years came out before the war had officially ended. Down in Tennessee (1864) was also a travel account, its author the New York cotton merchant and novelist James R. Gilmore. His argument was unique because he distinguished between “mean whites” and “common whites,” arguing that the latter class was enterprising, law-abiding, and productive citizens. They stood in sharp contrast to the shiftless, thieving, and brutish mean whites, whose homes reminded him of a “tolerably-kept swine-sty or dog-kennel.” Though he identified this group as a minority, they were still a dangerous class, he said, owing to their infectious character; they were a diseased segment of the prostrate South, a “fungus growth” on the body of society, “absorbing the strength and life of its other parts.” 13 All of these writers had a common desire: to unravel the enigma of the southern racial and class system in order to prognosticate about its uncertain future.

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

  It certainly allows for, even encourages, exploitation. Through a process of rationalization, people have long tended to blame failure on the personal flaws of individuals— this has been the convenient refrain of Republicans in Congress in the second decade of the twenty-first century, when former Speaker of the House John Boehner publicly equated joblessness with personal laziness. Another former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, captured headlines at the end of 2011 when he seemed ready to endorse Jefferson’s Revolutionary-era solution to poverty by making schools into workhouses. Gingrich: “You have a very poor neighborhood. You have students that are required to go to school. They have no money, no habit of work. . . . What if they became assistant janitors, and their job was to mop the floor and clean the bathroom?” It was only in the midst of the Great Depression that the country fully appreciated the meaning of downward mobility. At that time, when a quarter of the nation was thrown out of work, the old standby of blaming the individual no longer convinced anyone. 5 For the most part, daily injustices in average people’s lives go ignored. But that does not mean that poor people are numb to the condition of their own lives. Politicians have been willfully blind to many social problems. Pretending that America has grown rich as a largely classless society is bad history, to say the least. The “1 percent” is the most recently adopted shorthand for moneyed monopoly, bringing attention to the ills generated by consolidated power, but the phenomenon it describes is not new. Class separation is and has always been at the center of our political debates, despite every attempt to hide social reality with deceptive rhetoric. The white poor have been with us in various guises, as the names they have been given across centuries attest: Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay- eaters. Tackies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White niggers. Degenerates. White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people. They are blamed for living on bad land, as though they had other choices. From the beginning, they have existed in the minds of rural or urban elites and the middle class as extrusions of the weedy, unproductive soil. They are depicted as slothful, rootless vagrants, physically scarred by their poverty. The worst ate clay and turned yellow, wallowed in mud and muck, and their necks became burned by the hot sun. Their poorly clothed, poorly fed children generated what others believed to be a permanent and defective breed. Sexual deviance? That comes from cramped quarters in obscure retreats, distant from civilization, where the moral vocabulary that dwells in town has been lost. We think of the left-behind groups as extinct, and the present as a time of advanced thought and sensibility.

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

  25 • • • The trailer occupies an important, if uncertain, place in the American cultural imagination. Representing on the one hand a symbol of untethered freedom, the mobile home simultaneously acquired its reputation as a “tin can,” a small, cheap, confined way of life. When you live in a trailer, you are literally rootless, and privacy disappears. Neighbors see and hear. At their worst, such places have been associated with liberty’s dark side: deviant, dystopian wastelands set on the fringe of the metropolis. Trailers had been controversial since the 1930s. Aside from the sleek streamlined capsules that traverse the open road, these rickety boxes tend to be viewed as eyesores. Almost as soon as they were turned into permanent housing, many were associated with slums built on town dumps. As an object, the trailer is something modern and antimodern, chic and gauche, liberating and suffocating. Unlike the dull but safe middle American suburb, trailer parks contain folks who appear on the way out, not up: retired persons, migrant workers, and the troubled poor. This remains true today. Prior to World War II, the first generation of trailers were jerry-rigged contraptions built in backyards, expressly used on hunting and fishing trips. When they hit the road in the thirties, right when Okies took to their jalopies along Route 66, one journalist called them “monstrosities,” shanties on wheels. War changed that. Faced with a severe housing shortage, the federal government purchased trailers for soldiers, sailors, and defense workers. As many as thirty- five thousand trailers were drummed into service, and because military and defense installations were everywhere, trailer towns suddenly popped up in unexpected places from Maine to Michigan to Texas. In places like Hartford, Connecticut, defense workers living in “trailer villages” were easily compared to colonists and gypsies. 26 The most remarkable account of trailer camps formed in defense centers came from the talented reporter Agnes Meyer of the Washington Post. Her dispatches as a “war correspondent on the home front,” as she called herself, were compiled and published as a book titled Journey Through Chaos. Well- bred American women were not supposed to see “chaos” up close. Indeed, though her family considered higher education inappropriate for a young female, Meyer graduated from Barnard College, studied at the Sorbonne, published a scholarly work on Chinese painting, and became the first woman hired by the New York Sun. Momentously, she went on to marry a multimillionaire who decided to purchase the floundering Washington Post. Their daughter, Katharine Meyer Graham, grew up to be the most influential editor of the family’s paper. 27 In 1943, Agnes Meyer was on a fact-finding expedition when she traveled to twenty-seven war centers.

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

  Location determines access to a privileged school, a safe neighborhood, infrastructural improvements, the best hospitals, the best grocery stores. Upper- and middle-class parents instruct their children in surviving their particular class environment. They give them the appropriate material resources toward this end. But let us devote more thought to what Henry Wallace wrote in 1936: what would happen, he posed, if one hundred thousand poor children and one hundred thousand rich children were all given the same food, clothing, education, care, and protection? Class lines would likely disappear. This was the only conceivable way to eliminate class, he said—and what he didn’t say was that this would require removing children from their homes and raising them in a neutral, equitable environment. A dangerous idea indeed! We have always relied—and still do—on bloodlines to maintain and pass on a class advantage to our children. Statistical measurement has shown convincingly that the best predictor of success is the class status of one’s forebears. Ironically, given the American Revolutionaries’ hatred for Old World aristocracies, Americans transfer wealth today in the fashion of those older societies, while modern European nations provide considerably more social services to their populations. On average, Americans pass on 50 percent of their wealth to their children; in Nordic countries, social mobility is much higher; parents in Denmark give 15 percent of their total wealth to their children, and in Sweden parents give 27 percent. Class wealth and privileges are a more important inheritance (as a measure of potential) than actual genetic traits. 3 Lest we relegate discredited ideas to the age in which they flourished, we can admit that eugenic thinking is not quite dead either. The poor can starve “a little,” says Charlotte Hays, and there are surely others who feel the same way. The innocuous-sounding term “fertility treatment” enables the wealthy to breed their own kind, buying sperm and eggs at “baby centers” around the country. Abortion and birth control, meanwhile, are for evangelical conservatives a violation of God’s will that all people should be fruitful and multiply, and yet this same fear of unnatural methods of reproduction does not engender opposition to fertility clinics. Antiabortion activists, like eugenicists, think that the state has the right to intervene in the breeding habits of poor single women. Poor women lost state-funded abortions during the Carter years, and today they are proscribed from using welfare funds to buy disposable diapers. To modern conservatives, women are first and foremost breeders. This was tellingly displayed during the Republican primary debates in 2012, when candidates boasted about the size of their families, each trying to outdo the last, as the camera panned across the podium.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  My father had money in his account which belonged to me but he was very reluctant to send it because he wanted me to come home to come home, as he said, and settle down, and whenever he said that I thought of the sediment at the bottom of a stagnant pond. I did not, then, know many people in Paris and Hella was in Spain. Most of the people I knew in Paris were, as Parisians sometimes put it, of le milieu and, while this milieu was certainly anxious enough to claim me, I was intent on proving, to them and to myself, that I was not of GIOVANNrS ROOM 33 their company. I did this by being in their company a great deal and manifesting toward all of them a tolerance which placed me, I believed, above suspicion. I had written to friends iFor money, of course, but the Atlantic Ocean is deep and wide and money doesn't hurry from the other side. So I went through my address book, sitting over a tepid coffee in a boulevard cafe, and decided to call up an old acquaintance who was always asking me to call, an aging, Belgian- bom, American businessman named Jacques. He had a big, comfortable apartment and lots of things to drink and lots of money. He was, as I knew he would be, surprised to hear from me and before the surprise and the charm wore off, giving him time to become wary, he had invited me for supper. He may have been cursing as he hung up, and reaching for his wallet, but it was too late. Jacques is not too bad. Perhaps he is a fool and a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both. In some ways I liked him. He was silly but he was so lonely; anyway, I under- stand now that the contempt I felt for him involved my self-contempt. He could be un- believably generous, he could be unspeakably stingy. Though he wanted to trust everybody, he was incapable of trusting a living soul; to make up for this, he threw his money away on people; inevitably, then, he was abused. Then he buttoned his wallet. Mocked his door, and retired into that strong self-pity which was, James Baldwin 34 perhaps, the only thing he had which really belonged to him. I thought for a long while that he, with his big apartment, his well- meant promises, his whiskey, his marijuana, his orgies, had helped to kill Giovanni. As, indeed, perhaps he had. But Jacques' hands are certainly no bloodier than mine. I saw Jacques, as a matter of fact, just after Giovanni was sentenced. He was sitting bundled up in his greatcoat on the terrace of a cafe, drinking a vin chaud. He was alone on the ter- race. He called me as I passed.

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

  Tensions between the cotton-producing Gulf states and the more economically diverse border states were genuine. We tend to forget that an estimated three hundred thousand white southerners, many from the border states, fought for the Union side, and that four border states never seceded. In Georgia, throughout the war, dissent from Davis’s policies was significant. Richmond was tasked with smoothing over the ever-widening division between slaveholders and nonslaveholders caused by conscription and food shortages. Claims to homogeneity were more imagined than real. 7 The Confederacy built upon the South’s prewar critiques of Yankee attributes. The Yankee gentry was allegedly composed of upstarts who lacked southern refinement. Their “freedom” was really low-class fanaticism. As one Alabama editor transparently put it in 1856: Free society! We sicken at the name. What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon- struck theorists? All the northern, and especially the New England states, are devoid of society fitted for well-bred gentlemen. The prevailing class one meets with is that of mechanics struggling to be genteel, and small farmers who do their own drudgery, and yet are hardly fit for association with a southern gentleman’s body servant. 8 At a parade in Boston in that year, supporters of the first Republican presidential candidate, John C. Frémont, embraced the “greasy mechanic” slur as a badge of honor by displaying it on one of their banners. 9 All the lurid name-calling had a specific purpose. Turning the free-labor debate on its head, proslavery southerners contended that the greatest failing of the North was its dependence on a lower-class stratum of menial white workers. Ten years before he became president of the Confederacy, Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi had argued that the slave states enjoyed greater stability. Recognizing that “distinctions between classes have always existed, everywhere, and in every country,” he observed that two distinct labor systems coexisted in the United States. In the South, the line between classes was drawn on the basis of “color,” while in the North the boundary had been marked “by property, between the rich and poor.” He insisted that “no white man, in a slaveholding community, was the menial servant of anyone.” Like many other proslavery advocates, Davis was convinced that slavery had elevated poor whites by ensuring their superiority over blacks. He was wrong: in the antebellum period, class hierarchy was more extreme than it ever had been. 10 James Henry Hammond, South Carolina’s leading proslavery intellectual, coined the term “mudsill” to describe the essential inferiority of the North’s socioeconomic system.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Quite a feature of émigré life, in keeping with its itinerant and dramatic character, was the abnormal frequency of those literary readings in private houses or hired halls. The various types of performers stand out very distinctly in the puppet show going on in my mind. There was the faded actress, with eyes like precious stones, who having pressed for a moment a clenched handkerchief to a feverish mouth, proceeded to evoke nostalgic echoes of the Moscow Art Theatre by subjecting some famous piece of verse to the action, half dissection and half caress, of her slow limpid voice. There was the hopelessly second-rate author whose voice trudged through a fog of rhythmic prose, and one could watch the nervous trembling of his poor, clumsy but careful fingers every time he tucked the page he had finished under those to come, so that his manuscript retained throughout the reading its appalling and pitiful thickness. There was the young poet in whom his envious brethren could not help seeing a disturbing streak of genius as striking as the stripe of a skunk; erect on the stage, pale and glazed-eyed, with nothing in his hands to anchor him to this world, he would throw back his head and deliver his poem in a highly irritating, rolling chant and stop abruptly at the end, slamming the door of the last line and waiting for applause to fill the hush. And there was the old cher maître dropping pearl by pearl an admirable tale he had read innumerable times, and always in the same manner, wearing the expression of fastidious distaste that his nobly furrowed face had in the frontispiece of his collected works. I suppose it would be easy for a detached observer to poke fun at all those hardly palpable people who imitated in foreign cities a dead civilization, the remote, almost legendary, almost Sumerian mirages of St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900–1916 (which, even then, in the twenties and thirties, sounded like 1916–1900 B.C.). But at least they were rebels as most major Russian writers had been ever since Russian literature had existed, and true to this insurgent condition which their sense of justice and liberty craved for as strongly as it had done under the oppression of the Tsars, émigrés regarded as monstrously un-Russian and subhuman the behavior of pampered authors in the Soviet Union, the servile response on the part of those authors to every shade of every governmental decree; for the art of prostration was growing there in exact ratio to the increasing efficiency of first Lenin’s, then Stalin’s political police, and the successful Soviet writer was the one whose fine ear caught the soft whisper of an official suggestion long before it had become a blare.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  GIOVANNI'S ROOM 61 had often walked this street, sometfanes, with Hella, towards the river, often, without her, towards the girlsof Montpamasse. Not very long ago either, though it seemed, that morn- ing, to have occurredin another life. We were goingto Les Halles for breakfast. We piledintoa taxi,the fourof us, unpleasantly crowded together,a circumstance which eUcited fromJacques andGuillaume,a seriesof lewd speculations. This lewdness was particularlyre- volting in thatitnotonly failed of wit,itwasso clearly an expression of contempt andself-con- tempt;it bubbledupwardout ofthemhke a fountainof black water.Itwas clearthat they were tantalizingthemselveswithGiovanni and me andthis setmyteeth onedge. But Giovanni leaned backagainstthe taxiwindow, allowing his arm to press my shoulderhghtly, seeming to saythat weshould soon beridoftheseold men and should notbedistressed thattheirdirty water splashed — we would havenotrouble washing it away. Xook,' said Giovanni, as wecrossedtheriver. This old whore, Paris, as she tinmsinbed, is very moving.' Ilooked out, beyond his heavy profile, which was grey— from fatigue and from the hght of the sky above us. The river was swollen and yellow. Nothing moved on the river. Barges were tied up along the banks. The island of the city widened away from us, bearing the weight of the cathedral; beyond this, dimly, through speed 62 JamesBaldwin and mist, one made outthe individual roofs of Paris, their myriad, squat chimney stacks very beautiful and varicolored underthepearly sky. Mistclung to theriver, softeningthatarmy of trees, softening thosestones, hiding the city's dreadful corkscrew alleys anddead-end streets, clinging like a curse tothe men who slept be- neath the bridges — one of whomflashed by beneath us, very blackandlone,walking along theriver. 'Some ratshave gonein,'saidGiovanni, 'and now other rats comeout/ He smiled bleaklyand looked at me; tomysurprise,hetookmy hand andheld it. Have you eversleptundera bridge?' he asked. 'Or perhapstheyhave soft bedswith warmblankets underthe bridges inyour country?' I did not knowwhatto do about my hand; it seemed better to do nothing, TMot yet,'I said, T)ut Imay. My hotelwants to thisow meout.' I had saiditlightly, witha smile,out of a desire toputmyself,in terms of an acquaint- ancewith wintry things, on an equal footing with him. Butthefact thatI had saiditas he held my hand made it sound to me unutterably helpless and soft andcoy. ButI could not say anything to counteract this impression: tosay anything morewould confirm it. I pulledmy hand away, pretending that I had done soin order to search for a cigarette. Jacques ht it for me. Where do youlive?'he asked Giovanni,

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

  Once and once only I tried to hint to her that her sweetness to Smith might do him harm physically; but the suspicion of reproof made her angry and she evidently couldn’t or wouldn’t understand what I meant without a physical explanation, which she would certainly have resented. I had to leave her to what she would have called her daimon; for she was as prettily pedantic as Tennyson’s Princess, or any other mid-Victorian heroine. Her brother Ned, too, I came to know pretty well. He was a tall, handsome youth with fine grey eyes: a good athlete, but of commonplace mind. The father was the most interesting of the whole family, were it only for his prodigious conceit. He was of noble appearance: a large, handsome head with silver grey hairs setting off a portly figure well above middle height. In spite of his assumption of superiority, I felt him hide-bound in thought; for he accepted all the familiar American conventions, believing or rather knowing that the American people, “the good old New England stock in particular, were the salt of the earth, the best breed to be seen anywhere....” It showed his brains that he tried to find a reason for this belief. “English oak is good”, he remarked one day sententiously, “but American hickory is tougher still. Reasonable, too, this belief of mine”, he added, “for the last glacial period skinned all the good soil off of New England and made it bitterly hard to get a living and the English who came out for conscience sake were the pick of the Old Country and they were forced for generations to scratch a living out of the poorest kind of soil with the worst climate in the world, and hostile Indians all round to sharpen their combativeness and weed out the weaklings and wastrels.” There was a certain amount of truth in his contention; but this was the nearest to an original thought I ever heard him express and his intense patriotic fervor moved me to doubt his intelligence. I was delighted to find that Smith rated him just as I did: “a first-rate lawyer, I believe”, was his judgment, “a sensible, kindly man.” “A little above middle height”, I interpreted and Smith added smiling, “and considerably above average weight: he would never have done anything notable in literature or thought.” As the year wore on, Smith’s letters called for me more and more insistently and at length I went to join him in Philadelphia. * * * NEW EXPERIENCES. Emerson, Walt Whitman, Bret Harte. Chapter XIII.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  by no means meagre, of malicious knowledge I had drawn on it when I called him up to borrow money. I knew that Jacques could only hope to conquer the boy before us if the boy was, in effect, for sale; and if he stood with such arrogance on an auction block he could certainly find bidders richer and more attrac- tive than Jacques. I knew that Jacques knew that Jacques' this. vaunted affection for me was involved with desire, the desire, in fact, to be rid of me, to be able, soon, to despise me as he now despised that army of boys who had come, without love, to his bed. I held my own against this desire by pretending that Jacques and I were friends, by forcing Jacques, on pain of humiliation, to pretend this. I pretended not to see, although I exploited it, the lust not quite sleeping in his bright, bitter eyes and, by means of the rough, male candor with which I conveyed to him his case was hopeless, I compelled him, endlessly, to hope. And I knew, finally, that in bars such as these I was Jacques' protection. As long as I was there the world could see and he could GIOVANNI'S ROOM 41 believe that he was out with me, his friend, he was not there out of desperation, he was not at the mercy of whatever adventurer chance, cruelty, or the laws of actual and emotional poverty might throw his way. Tou stay right here' said Jacques. Ill look at him from time to time and talk to you and that way Til save money— and stay happy, too.' 1 wonder where Guillaume found him,' I said. For he was so exactly the kind of boy that Guillaume always dreamed of that it scarcely seemed possible that GuUlaume could have found him. 'What will you have?' he now asked us. His tone conveyed that, though he spoke no Eng- lish, he knew that we had been speaking about him and hoped we were through. *Une fine a Veau* I said; and *un cognac sec* said Jacques, both speaking too quickly, so that I blushed and realized by a faint merriment on Giovanni's face as he served us that he had seen it. Jacques, wilfully misinterpreting Giovanni's nuance of a smile, made of it an opportunity. *You're new here?' he asked ui English. Giovanni almost certainly understood the question, but it suited him better to look blankly from Jacques to me and then back again at Jacques. Jacques translated his question. Giovanni shrugged. 1 have been here a month,' he said. I knew where the conversation was going and I kept my eyes down and sipped my drink. — 42 James Baldwin It must/ Jacques suggested, with a sort of bludgeoning insistence on the light touch, *seem very strange to you/

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

  There were clearly Gnostics in these communities who claimed special knowledge of God but whose conduct was a long way from the demands of the Christian ethic. 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. This produced an inevitable result. It divided people into two classes - those who were capable of a really spiritual life, and those who were not.