Talking Trash

One could say of the United States in the twenty-first century that there has never been a society so divided by class yet in such denial about it. The word class is rarely uttered either by journalists or politicians. Though it merely describes people of the same income and social status, class cannot be separated from the history of capitalism and its creation of owners and laborers. Americans once acknowledged the fact. During the labor movement that extended from the end of the Civil War to the 1970s, workers referred to themselves as workers or employees, not as the associates or partners of their wage-suppressing bosses. They defined themselves in opposition to capitalists, a term reserved for those who invest in the means of production and hire labor. Unions like the United Mine Workers of America and the Industrial Workers of the World engaged in defensive class warfare, enduring unprecedented violence and legal repression through the First World War.

The language of class began to fade after the Second World War. Leaders in politics and business put forth the notion that all Americans are capitalists with an equal stake (if not an equal share) in the social system. They confuted consumption with freedom and set this conception of the United States against the austerity of the Soviet Union. Conservative economists like Milton Friedman and James McGill Buchanan asserted that when owners and investors pursued their interests they served the common good. Daniel J. Boorstin published The Americans: The Democratic Experience (1973), in which he excised class conflict from the nation's past. Since that time and the decline in unionization that followed, the differential in income and wealth between those at the top and bottom has diverged to the point that even conventional economists say it risks financial collapse.

Two recent books reintroduce class into the discussion of American history and our present crisis. In White Trash: The 400-Year Untold Story of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg speaks to Boorstin's milquetoast complacency and to all previous historians who sought to diminish or ignore the deep inequalities between whites throughout the history of the United States, in colonial ventures, the Civil War, and in reality TV. J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis is equally compelling but in a different sense. It's an up-from-poverty tale that occludes the history, perpetuation, and destructiveness of class conflict.

White Trash is a pageant of the dispossession and hatred that poor whites have endured since the founding of Jamestown. They have been known as waste people, crackers, hillbillies, and mudsills (a word for the loadbearing columns or posts sunk into the muck at the bottom of a structure). Isenberg has a great eye for stories that illustrate moments in the development of the idea she follows—that poor whites built the British colonies and the United States but endured constant revulsion at their imposed condition, whether we observe them closing ranks around Nathaniel Bacon in 1676 or Jimmy Carter in 1976. The book's central point is not surprising, but its vibrant writing and nimble analysis perform a much-needed service by wrapping in a single package the pieces of a scattered story. The book's power lies in its overall effect, the consistent historical presence of a people always visible but misunderstood. They served as soldiers enlisted from the distant provinces to fight the territorial wars of the United States, as well as the nation's forgotten farmers and miners. They were the beneficiaries of the New Deal and Great Society and later opponents of those very policies. They showed violent hostility to African-Americans and Native Americans, yet were themselves abused and maligned.

The final chapters are the strongest, where we learn about the origins of the trailer park, how...