Slavery and racism are hardly discounted in this book, but she maintains her focus on poor whites. Isenberg moves confidently forward, through, for example, the class issues that undergirded the Civil War and the popular eugenics movement, favored by Theodore Roosevelt, that marked many as targets for sterilization. It was the stigma of landlessness that would leave its mark on white trash from this day forward.”įrom this beginning, Ms. “Land was the principal source of wealth, and those without any had little chance to escape servitude. “Puritan religious faith did not displace class hierarchy, either the early generations of New Englanders did nothing to diminish, let alone condemn, the routine reliance on servants or slaves,” she observes.

This was hardly a land of equal opportunity. They would rather drink rum than clear an acre of pine trees.Īmerica did not develop a House of Lords, yet we imported the rigging of the British class system, Ms. Others were “roguish highwaymen, mean vagrants, Irish rebels, known whores and an assortment of convicts shipped to the colonies for grand larceny or other property crimes.” Others were simply lazy - “idlers,” in the lingo of the time. “During the 1600s,” she writes, “far from being ranked as valued British subjects, the great majority of early colonists were classified as surplus population and expendable ‘rubbish.’” Nor did most come to escape religious persecution. Yet she demonstrates that most early settlers did not buy into these destinies. Isenberg writes, through the “beliefs of those principled leaders molded in bronze - the John Winthrops and William Penns - who are lionized for having projected the enlarged destinies of their respective colonies.” She subverts this hagiography at every turn, starting at the beginning.Īmerica’s colonial beginnings tend to be viewed, Ms. We are eager consumers of the national hagiography. Isenberg contends that adults in America are spoon-fed their history as if they were toddlers. It’s an analysis of the intractable caste system that lingers below the national myths of rugged individualism and cities on hills. Do not come to her book to learn about the Wobblies. Zinn, she is not interested in crusaders and labor organizers and politicians of a socialist bent.

Isenberg presents an alternative interpretation of American history. Like Howard Zinn in “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), Ms.

White trash nancy