England sent prostitutes and criminals with great British accents. They sent homeless flea ridden orphans and the impoverished unemployed. In the 1500s, England sent masses of people they didn’t want to the New World as though sweeping grime under the rug. Shipping “the idle and unproductive” away was a solution to England’s social problem: what to do with the abhorrent and inconvenient lower strata of society.
The New World settlements were an early dumping ground for the unwanted, and with these “waste people,” the British also dumped the mentality that there are people who are expendable. 400 years later, Americans are still working on overcoming the idea that there are people who do not matter, as evidenced by social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and LGBT Rights. For this reason, Nancy Isenberg’s new book White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America is significant and timely.
Isenberg chronologically retells the story of the American underclass, and guiding her reader through thoughtfully organized evidence, she lays out an argument for an institutionalized class system that sets out to maintain and exploit an underclass. She explains “Not only did Americans not abandon their desire for class distinction, they repeatedly reinvented class distinction” (310). These reinventions reflected the culture of the moments in which they emerged. But if we accept that history repeats itself, perhaps the most menacing and dangerous reinvention of class distinction was the eugenics movement of the late 19th/early 20th century.
Isenburg explains “During Reconstruction, Republicans designated white trash as a ‘dangerous class’ that was producing a flood of bastards, prostitutes, vagrants and criminals” (180). So the idea that America could be improved though specified breeding and sterilization grew popular as means of controlling and reducing the white trash and dangerous class. The ideas became movements and “As early as 1867, secret societies began to form, like the Knights of the White Camelia…Members swore to marry a white woman, and they agreed to do everything in their power to prevent the ‘production of a bastard and degenerate progeny'” (183). This social exclusivity movement inevitably resulted in an increase of tension, contempt, and divide between the classes.
We can argue that the eugenics movement might be the most dangerous expression of class distinction not for what it was a century ago, but for what it will be should history repeat itself. With the current climate of resurgent populism, a presidential candidate spewing ethnic hated, and the outrage of the social justice movements, it’s not difficult to image how eugenics might rear its ugly head once again. But this time, with a centuries worth of cloning and genetic engineering research at its disposal, eugenics would emerge as more deadly then it ever could have been in the late 1800s.
Isenberg’s work insists we examine America’s blemished past and acknowledge that upward mobility is not for all. She requires we investigate class in America and the engines of the economy that stratify and oppress. She closes her work with the warning “The sad fact is, if we have no class analysis, then we will continue to be shocked at the numbers of waste people who inhabit what self-anointed patriots have styled the ‘greatest civilization in the history of the world.'” But of course mere shock is not the worst of what waits in the wings for Americans if we do not truthfully examine our past and realistically forecast our future.
