You Might Be a Redneck: A Review of “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America”

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class system, history, nancy isenberg, u.s. history, white trash

The timing of Nancy Isenberg’s new book could hardly have been better. When White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America was released this summer, Donald Trump had just clinched the Republican nomination, largely behind the support of frustrated, disenfranchised working class whites. Thousands of panicked liberals rushed to Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and bought Isenberg’s book, anxious to learn more about America’s so-called underclass and the role it might play in disrupting the Republic. The New York Times deemed the book “necessary,” and Oprah Winfrey’s O Magazine called it “eye-opening.”

I had high hopes for White Trash, even though the book’s full title is a little misleading. The story of poor whites in America is hardly “untold,” as evidenced by the 125 pages of footnotes and bibliographic information in the back of Isenberg’s book. It’s also not earth-shattering news that America has a class system modeled after England’s, and that the British settled the colonies with “lubbers,” “rubbish,” and other people they deemed expendable.

Still, I was anxious to read White Trash because I agreed with Isenberg’s assertion that economic and social class in America is largely overlooked by the media, as are the concerns of working class whites (until about five weeks ago, that is).

I expected a lively, thought-provoking read about the role of class and inequity in American history. Unfortunately, while some parts of White Trash were informative, I did not find the book to be particularly engaging. At times, I was also confused as to whom Isenberg considers to be “White Trash.” Are they mountain people living on government checks and procreating at will? Are they poor dirt farmers and land dwellers in the South? Are they blue collar workers in the Rust Belt? Are they middle-class “Bubbas” who try to stay true to their redneck roots? Is it all of the above?

Obviously, some of these groups are more disadvantaged and downtrodden than others. Isenberg at times lumps them all together in an effort to cover the full scope of rural, poor white culture. Elvis Presley, Bill Clinton and Tammy Faye Bakker are all famous but for very different reasons. Isenberg tries to stitch them and others together as symbols of the white underclass. She does not do this very convincingly.

In my mind, White Trash contains two parts. The first covers about 350 years of Colonial and American history, from the settlement of Jamestown by debtors and “waste people,” to Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. This part of the book is very informative, though it sometimes suffers from the Isenberg’s dry, academic writing style. I found the chapter about the eugenics movement of the early 20^th Century to be particularly interesting.

The second part of White Trash is basically a laundry list of pop culture fads, government assistance programs and colorful political figures of the past 80 years. At times, the writer seems disgusted by phenomenon like the Bakkers’ PTL scandal and the reality TV show, Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo. In another passage, she chides Hollywood and Deliverance author James Dickey for vilifying hillbilly culture. It is unclear at times whether Isenberg is defending or judging poor whites.

Isenberg has said in recent interviews that the main purpose of her new book is to debunk the myth of the “American Dream” and class mobility in the U.S. White Trash does make a strong argument that most Americans are stuck in the social class into which they are born. However, I think that message sometimes gets lost as the author attempts to cover more than 400 years of history in only 320 pages.

 

Donald Trump’s Big Red Book of History

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donald trump, george washington, gorbachev, history, revolutionary war, ronald reagan, soviet union, stalin

NEW YORK, NY (Aug. 25, 2016)–Less than 80 days before the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump has announced the publication of a new book, The Trump Big Red Book of History.

At a press conference Thursday inside the Trump Tower, Trump praised the new book as “an inside look” and “the real story” about the history of Western Civilization. Unlike previous books published by the presidential candidate and real estate billionaire, Trump said he did not use a ghost writer, noting that he didn’t need one and did not want to share royalties that he expects will be “huge.”

Trump added that he has been working on the book for years and that the publication date has nothing to do with his bid for the White House.

“They say that history books are written by the winners, and that’s very, very true,” Trump said. “Look, I’m a winner. I’ve always been a winner. And so I wrote a history book.”

Below are three exclusive excerpts from Trump’s new book, which can be purchased at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com beginning next week:

The Revolutionary War

One thing about America, one thing that made us so, so great, was that we didn’t take crap from anybody. King George—you know about him? He was the ultimate insider. He didn’t just benefit from the system, he was the system. That’s how they did things back then, with kings and queens and the Earl of Sandwich and all. They controlled everything, and everyone.

And, you know what King George did? He did what they all do. He did what Hillary wants to do if she becomes president. He raised the people’s taxes. But Americans in those days wouldn’t stand for it. They didn’t take anything lying down. They got together and they wrote up this document called the Declaration of Independence. It’s a beautiful, beautiful document. It’s my favorite thing to read, right behind the Bible.

So George Washington got on a ship to take this Declaration of Independence to King George, because in those days there was no such thing as Next Day Air. And as Washington was leaving Boston Harbor, he saw these guys dressed up like Indians dumping boxes of tea into the water. And he smiled a big smile. Do you know why? Because George Washington knew right then that we were gonna win the war. Because nobody tells Americans what to do. At least not back when we were great.

The Soviet Union in World War II

Stalin was a bad guy, okay? A bad, bad guy. Nobody’s arguing that. But you know what Stalin did really well? Do you know what he did better than almost anybody else? He never gave up. He was tough! He was a very tough guy. Even when the Germans were knocking on the door of the Kremlin back in 1940-whatever-it-was, Stalin said, “You people are completely out of line. We’re gonna push you back across the border where you belong!”

Another thing about Stalin was he was extremely competitive. No one got the best of Stalin. He looked at Hitler and he said, “Oh, you’re gonna kill six million people? Well, guess what? I already killed 10 million people!” That was Stalin for you. Always competing.

And you know what they did after Stalin died, in his honor? They went into Berlin and they built a wall. And you know something else? They made the Germans pay for it.

The Reagan Revolution

Speaking of walls, here’s a guy who liked to tear walls down. And you know what? He tore down walls very, very well.

Of course, he had a little help.

In the 1980s, when my net worth was only somewhere around $500 million, I met President Reagan in the White House. He didn’t have to meet with me, but he did. He was a very gracious man, and very bright. He looked great in a navy blue suit! Just being around this guy, you could tell he was going to do big, big things with this country.

We started talking about Russia. And I said, “you know, Mr. President, the Russians have a lot of natural resources. Lots of oil, lots of coal, and I’m sure they have other things. They’re tough negotiators, but they could be wonderful business partners, especially with the right guy in charge.”

Reagan nodded, the way he always did. He seemed to be in deep thought. Then he spoke.

“They got a new guy in there, you know,” he told me. “Seems like a sharp guy. You think I should give him a call?”

The guy was Gorbachev, of course. And I told the president, “that’s exactly what you should do. Make the call. Make the first move. Get leverage. Keep him on his heels.”

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Revisionist History: Trump in Gettysburg

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1863, civil war, donald trump, gettysburg, gettysburg address, history, humor, lincoln, politics, satire, Stephen Roth

On the afternoon of November 19, 1863, Donald Trump stepped off the train in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to deliver what would become one of the best-known speeches in American history. There to dedicate the Soldier’s National Cemetery just a few months after Union armies defeated Confederate forces in the nation’s bloodiest battle, the President approached the podium, unbuttoned his grey overcoat and removed an iPad mini, on which he had jotted a few “appropriate words” to honor the fallen.

Here is what the president said:

“This is really beautiful, really fantastic… What a crowd! What a crowd!

Eighty-some-odd years ago—I’m thinking 85, but it might have been longer than that. Anyway, a long, long time ago, some very great men got together and they formed the most powerful nation ever known in the history of the world. This nation was so great, nobody had ever seen anything like it. And you know what made it so great? Top-notch people, for one thing. The very best and brightest. Just fabulous, first-rate people. Also, freedom and this idea that everyone was equal. Even the lowliest street sweeper—some filthy guy who probably made in six weeks what I spent on my last haircut—was every bit as important as a very successful businessman with a huge, diversified real estate portfolio. This was the kind of thinking that made this nation so, so great.

Anyway, now we’re in a civil war, right? And not just any war, but the biggest, bloodiest war ever known to man, because this is the American Civil War. And, as you know, Americans don’t do anything half-assed. I wasn’t here back in July, but I understand this place was a real mess. Bunch of bombs going off, mutilated bodies all over place. Just a major, major battle. A real hell-hole, they tell me. That’s why I’m here today—to honor the dead and, you know, thank them for their service.

You know, I was thinking on the train how, even though these men lost their lives, they’re actually winners. Real winners. Because what they did here at Gettysburg really set the tone. We’ve had so many good things happen in the last few months, it’s been actually amazing. Did you see what Grant did to them at Vicksburg? Did you see that? We’ve got full control of the Mississippi now, which is huge. And we’ve got some plans for those Confederates next year. I don’t wanna to give too much away, but let’s just say it’s gonna be a very hot summer next year in Georgia. A very long, hot summer.

Look, I gotta go. You people have been outstanding. Southern Pennsylvania is a fabulous place. Let me just close by saying these lives were not lost in vain. We’re gonna take Richmond next year. W’re gonna take our country back, folks. We’re gonna remind them why government of the people, by the people, is the best way to do things. Because it’s the American way. Thank you, and God bless.”

Painful to Recall, Impossible to Forget

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9/11, attacks, current events, history, new york, sept. 11

What were you doing the moment you learned that two jet airliners had hit the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001? I posed that question this morning on Facebook, and this response from a high school friend sent a chill down my spine:

“I was in my Manhattan apartment, which was above a fire station. Despite seeing the second plane hit on live TV, I still headed for work, where I knew I’d have a landline phone and internet access. As I left my building, I saw the fire engines roar out of the station, heading downtown. Hours later, when I returned, candles and flowers already adorned the sidewalk in front of the station, and teary-eyed people stood around comforting each other. Just about all of the men I watched depart never made it back.”

My own recollections of that day are not nearly as powerful, but they are as crisp in my mind as if they had happened last week. My wife and I had returned from our honeymoon just a few days prior, and were settling into our life together in south Kansas City. The morning of Sept. 11, I got into my car around 7:30 a.m. and turned on the local sports talk radio show. The discussion about the Chiefs’ home opener quickly turned to a plane that had crashed into the World Trade Center. From the way it was being reported, I thought that a small aircraft had hit the skyscraper. When I arrived at The Kansas City Business Journal, my coworkers were watching a television in the conference room, which beamed footage of smoke and fire coming from the North Tower. Moments later, a very large commercial jet hit the South Tower, and all of us rushed into the newsroom to figure out how to cover the story from our eighth floor office in the middle of the country.

The rest of the day was a flurry of phone calls to public officials and updates to our web site, punctuated by one tower collapsing, then the other, then the attack on the Pentagon, then the crash in Pennsylvania. At one point, all the government buildings in our city were closed and cordoned off from traffic. It sounds silly now, but it seemed very possible that, at any moment, a hijacked airliner could suddenly crash into downtown Kansas City. At some point I returned home from work, and we watched the news late into the evening.

Thinking back on the events of that day, it’s hard to believe that it happened 12 years ago. The memories are still fresh, still painful, and most of what I experienced came from television footage. I can only imagine what it was like to be in New York or Washington on that day. Sept. 11 changed everything. Its anniversary is another annual reminder that we still have yet to recover from it.

Image from Washingtonpost.com.

A Window into History

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fais island, gettysburg, history, july 4th, patriotic, west point, world war II

The July 4 holiday and this week’s 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg has me thinking about my family’s own history of military service. My father served in Vietnam, and my grandfather was in the Pacific Theater in World War II. Both graduated from West Point. I never enlisted in the military, but I have always been extremely proud of my family’s West Point ties and am grateful that Dad and Grandad never winced (at least not in front of me) when I opted to major in journalism at Mizzou instead of joining the Long Grey Line.

As a kid, I loved listening to my grandfather’s stories about the war in the Pacific. That is a credit to his brand of storytelling, because Grandad saw no combat and, as far as I know, never had to dodge bullets from an oncoming Japanese Zero. For much of the war, he commanded an antiaircraft battalion. By the time he was shipped out, the U.S. had established air superiority over much of the Pacific and had little need for antiaircraft protection. Most of Grandad’s stories about the war were wry, humorous tales about bouncing from base to base and, later, island to island, usually after most of the fighting was over.

My favorite was his account, told with a slightly ironic glint in his eye, of the December 1944 Liberation of Fais Island, a tiny speck on the map near the Caroline Islands. Don’t be alarmed if you never heard of Fais Island in your study of World War II history. As Grandad describes in his memoirs, it was a small operation:

In December, after the lagoon at Ulithi had been free of any enemy presence, a Japanese submarine managed to enter the anchorage but fortunately did only minor damage. This immediately pointed suspicion to a small phosphate island about 60 miles east of Ulithi, which aerial reconnaissance indicated might have a small Japanese radio station. Further close-in offshore observation located a small native population, and from them we learned that there was a small detachment of Japanese there. This island was called Fais… about which very little was known, other than it had been an active phosphate mine like so many of the other small islands of the Caroline Group.

In order to remove any possible threat to the security of the anchorage at Ulithi, a small detachment from the 81st Division… landed on the island without opposition and, after securing the safety of the natives by collecting them in a small area near the beach, began the search for the Japanese. None were discovered on the first day, but on the second day, they disclosed their position by opening fire from a well-concealed cave. One prisoner was taken but the other died in the cave. Two others were found in another part of the island, but they had committed suicide… as it turned out, a radio station was found and destroyed, but it is not known whether it had ever been used for Japanese military intelligence.

The natives were happy to be free of the restrictions imposed by the Japanese on their fishing privileges and freedom of movement on the island. After a small ceremony celebrating the liberation of the island with speeches and native dancing, and the donation of many “K” and “C” rations, which the natives liked, the small task force departed.

During patriotic holidays, we recall those crucial turning points in our country’s history like Gettysburg and Normandy and Iwo Jima. But, for every famous battle, there have been hundreds of mostly forgotten operations that also contributed to the war effort. Some of them, like Fais Island, were almost bloodless.

My grandfather died in 1999 at the age 96. I often think about sitting at the candlelit dinner table in his home, hanging on every single word as he told stories about the war, most of them involving troop movements or training exercises. They might have been short on action, but those stories, told with Grandad’s droll delivery, were for me a window into history. I am smiling right now just thinking about them.