Isenberg notes that, by 1931, twenty-seven states had passed sterilization laws, with targets outlined in thirty-four categories, in order to “stamp out” the genetically inferior.
The rise of “scientific” eugenics in the United States, fueled by World War I, further legitimized and institutionalized ideas of the innate inferiority of poor whites. She also demonstrates how the lives of poor whites brought them into opposition with the Confederacy through army desertion, raids of warehouses and depots, conspiracies with slaves in maroon communities, and even the establishment of the Free State of Jones in Mississippi. Isenberg shows how the southern plantocracy’s approach to poor whites differed from those of the northern elites-intentionally keeping the lower class of whites “utterly ignorant,” as Chancellor William Harper of South Carolina put it. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The circumstance of superior beauty is thought worthy of attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other animals why not in that of man?” Others noted that poor whites in the South had sunk to such a miserable level that “bad blood and vulgar breeding” had turned them into an irredeemable “notorious race.” These proto-eugenicists argued that poor white people were not only poor, but also ugly, because of their breeding. Isenberg shows how the “waste people” of the British Empire were transformed into landless squatters, with names like lazy crackers and hillbillies deployed to justify their impoverished status.Įarly promoters of the backwardness of the poorer classes of white people drew their inspiration from popular animal husbandry journals. This white servant class was fostered as a “racial and class barrier between the slaves and landed elites.” Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, however, exposed the real problems the colonial rulers had maintaining that barrier.Īlthough white, this underclass was never bestowed with the full rights given to middle- and upper-class whites in either the colonial administrations or after the American Revolution. From the beginning, Isenberg argues, a permanent underclass of whites was essential to the new ruling class, as laws required one white servant for every six slaves purchased.
Her book begins in colonial America-where surplus poor people were sent by the British Empire to form what Richard Hakluyt envisioned as “one giant workhouse.” In the colonies, aristocrats extended the empire’s system of class hierarchy with the introduction of chattel slavery.
They are renamed often, but they do not disappear.” These are the people at the center of Nancy Isenberg’s newest book, White Trash.
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