WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Today we’ll revisit our interview with historian Nancy Isenberg about her book, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. But there’s a twist – I’ve re-edited the program to make use of a broader musical perspective, feeling like I had betrayed the spirit of the program in my original choices.
Isenberg’s 2016 book dissects the stereotype “white trash” by discovering its inherited roots in the nation’s class-oriented founders – really, simply put, the British made us do it. That’s a gross simplification but it’s the right place to start. The United States of America is founded on a class hierarchy brought to these shores by its colonizers and is an unremitting element in our social organization, our culture, and our politics. You gotta be able to say you’re better than someone or you’re no one.
And speaking of becoming better than…we’ll examine the way animal husbandry and breeding extended to the early 20th century’s belief that the traits of those labeled waste people, alleged to be laziness, criminality, insanity, epilepsy, alcoholism, pauperism, and so on, could be eliminated via the pseudoscience of Eugenics. A quick aside: here in Bloomington at Indiana University there have been some core faculty very supportive of eugenics – notably Alfred Kinsey and Hermann Muller. Muller was a Nobel Prize winning geneticist who was a professor at IU from 1945 to his retirement in 1964. Muller liked to use the term “voluntary” eugenics.*
The idea of shaping the great unwashed via so-called science was accompanied by what Isenberg calls “horizontal mobility” – you wouldn’t move up in the world, but you could move West, for a time. And as a “waste” person, it didn’t matter how that worked out for you. But that’s about the extent of actual mobility for all us trash. Upward mobility is a proven fiction – empirically, your economic class at birth defines your economic future in America.
This history of how this nation was built – its laws and criminal codes (vagrancy, anyone) – make plain that the fix is to be rendered through the manipulation of people branded lesser than, not by developing equitable material conditions for all people.
To begin we’ll introduce something from our extended conversation that didn’t make the first radio edit – Isenberg’s response to a recent myth-making apparatus about race and class (and empire) – the smash hit Broadway musical Hamilton.
*”Biology and Culture: Science and Society in the Eugenic Thought of H. J. Muller.” Garland E. Allen. BioScience, Mar. 15, 1970, Vol. 20, No. 6 (Mar. 15, 1970), pp. 346-353. Oxford University Press
Guest
Nancy Isenberg is the T. Harry Williams Professor in American History at Louisiana State University. Among her other books is Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr. She joined me via telephone long before the ubiquity of Zoom.
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An Extended Interchange Conversation with Nancy Isenberg (81 minutes)
Interchange – Dynamite Has No Politics: The Anarchism of Lucy Parsons
Interchange – Freedom to Exit: The Libertarian Use of Market Ideology
Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924
The Masks of Democracy: A Conversation with Nick Xenos
MUSIC
“House Carpenter” Clarence Ashley and Tex Isley from 1966
“Blew” Nirvana 1989
“State of the Union” Marlon Craft 2021
“Gloomy” Creedence Clearwater Revival 1968
“Engine Joe” Slobberbone 1997
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young
