Michael: Alright, Kevin, pop quiz. What’s the most American idea you can think of? Kevin: Oh, easy. The American Dream. Land of opportunity, all men created equal, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. It's the whole package. Michael: Exactly. The foundational myth. And what if I told you that from the very first ships that crossed the Atlantic, America was designed to make sure that dream was impossible for millions of people? Kevin: Whoa, that's a bold claim. That sounds like the opposite of everything we're taught in school. Where is this coming from? Michael: It's the central argument of a really provocative and widely acclaimed book by historian Nancy Isenberg called White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. Isenberg is a distinguished professor, and she basically spent years in the archives to argue that the whole idea of a classless America is our nation's greatest and most persistent fiction. Kevin: So she's calling out the entire national story. That's gutsy. I'm intrigued. This book must have stirred up some controversy. Michael: It absolutely did. It challenges deeply held beliefs about American exceptionalism. And this fiction she talks about, it starts with the very stories we tell ourselves, the ones we learn in elementary school.

Kevin: You mean like the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving? The friendly dinner party with the Native Americans? Michael: Precisely. Isenberg argues that our national history is built on what she calls "selective memory." We take these complex, often brutal historical moments and sanitize them into feel-good fables. The Thanksgiving story, for instance, is presented as this beautiful moment of cooperation. Kevin: Right, a symbol of two cultures coming together peacefully. Michael: But it completely erases the reality of what was happening. It ignores the disease, the violence, the land theft, and the fundamental power imbalance. Isenberg points to other myths, too, like the story of Pocahontas. The Disney version is a romance, a story of cultural exchange. The reality is far darker—it's a story of a young girl being used as a political pawn in a brutal colonial conflict. Kevin: That makes sense. We pick the parts of the story that make us feel good and ignore the rest. But how does this tie into class? Weren't the early colonists all just trying to survive together? Michael: That's the core of the myth. The idea that everyone who came here started on a level playing field. Isenberg unearths these incredible quotes from the time that show what the English elites really thought of North America. One 16th-century adventurer described it as a "pestilent and overgrown wasteland," a "sump" only fit for "ill-bred commoners." Kevin: A sump? Like a drain? That’s… not exactly the shining city on a hill. Michael: Not at all. From the very beginning, there was a clear hierarchy. There were the well-bred gentlemen who financed and led the expeditions, and then there was everyone else, who were seen as disposable labor. The idea that "all men are created equal" was a beautiful, revolutionary sentiment, but for a huge portion of the population, it was never meant to apply to them. Kevin: It’s fascinating because that instinct to caricature class differences has never really gone away. I'm thinking of those 1960s TV shows. You had the idealized middle-class family in Ozzie and Harriet, but then you had a whole slate of shows like The Beverly Hillbillies or Green Acres that were entirely built on making fun of poor, rural people. Michael: Exactly! Isenberg points to that exact phenomenon. She critiques another author who claimed everyone in the 60s saw themselves in Ozzie and Harriet, suggesting a unified, classless society. Isenberg’s response is, "Were they not watching The Beverly Hillbillies?" The Clampetts were portrayed as simple-minded, uncivilized buffoons who stumbled into wealth. It’s a classic example of using humor to reinforce class boundaries. Kevin: So this isn't a modern problem. It's a 400-year-old habit of looking down on a certain class of people, and it's been embedded in our culture from the start. Michael: It's baked into the very foundation. The myth of a classless society isn't just an innocent mistake; Isenberg argues it's a deliberate cover story. And what it's covering up is even more shocking.

Kevin: Okay, if the myth is a cover story, what's the real story? What was the actual purpose of sending all these people across the ocean? Michael: This is where the book gets truly mind-blowing. Isenberg argues that English colonization wasn't primarily about religious freedom or glorious adventure. It was a massive, state-sponsored social engineering project. The goal was, to put it bluntly, to take out the trash. Kevin: Hold on. Take out the trash? What does that even mean? Michael: In the 16th and 17th centuries, England had a massive poverty problem. The cities were overflowing with the unemployed, vagrants, and people they considered "idle" and "unproductive." They were seen as a drain on society, a source of crime and unrest. Promoters of colonization, like Richard Hakluyt, came up with a brilliant, if horrifying, solution. Kevin: Let me guess. Ship them to America? Michael: Exactly. They framed it as a win-win. England gets rid of its "surplus population," its "human waste," and the colonies get a supply of cheap labor to work the land. There's a quote from another promoter, John White, who said colonies should be the "drains" of the state, to "drain out the filth." They were literally talking about people as if they were sewage. Kevin: That is incredibly bleak. It's like they were trying to recycle human beings. They saw these poor people not as individuals with potential, but as a resource to be exploited or a problem to be disposed of. Michael: And the reality for those who were sent was a nightmare. The story of the Jamestown colony is a perfect, brutal example. We hear about John Smith, but we don't hear about the "Starving Time" in the winter of 1609-1610. The colony was so mismanaged, so focused on extracting wealth for its investors, that they completely failed to plan for survival. Kevin: I've heard of this. It was bad, right? Michael: It was apocalyptic. The colonists ran out of food and ate their horses, then their dogs, cats, rats, and even the leather from their shoes. And when that was gone… they resorted to cannibalism. Archaeological evidence has confirmed it. They were digging up fresh graves to eat the corpses. One man was executed for killing and eating his pregnant wife. Kevin: My god. That’s the reality of the "New World" for these people? Not opportunity, but literal cannibalism just to survive? Who was benefiting from this? Michael: A tiny elite. The investors back in London and the handful of gentlemen running the colony. For the vast majority, who were indentured servants, life was brutal and short. Before 1625, something like 80% of the 6,000 people who came to Virginia died. They were promised land and a new start, but what they got was starvation, disease, and a system of forced labor that was just a hair's breadth away from slavery. Kevin: So the class system wasn't just an idea they brought with them; it was the entire operational model of the colony. A few people at the top get rich, and a massive, disposable underclass does the dying. Michael: Precisely. And this model got replicated. Look at the Carolinas. The philosopher John Locke, the great champion of liberty, helped write the constitution for Carolina. And what did it create? A rigid, aristocratic society with a hereditary class of landless laborers called "leet-men." Their children would inherit their status, forever tied to the land. It was a system designed to prevent social mobility, not encourage it. Kevin: So even the guy who wrote about life, liberty, and property was designing a system to keep poor people poor forever. That’s a staggering contradiction. This history is so much darker and more deliberate than I ever imagined.

Kevin: This is all fascinating, but these are attitudes from hundreds of years ago. How does this legacy of seeing people as "human waste" or "filth" actually show up today? Michael: That's the final, and perhaps most relevant, part of Isenberg's argument. The language changed from "offscourings" to "squatters" to "crackers," and eventually, to the term we know today: "white trash." But the underlying prejudice remained. In the 20th century, this prejudice got a scientific-sounding makeover with the eugenics movement. Kevin: Right, the horrifying idea of "improving" the human race by controlling who gets to have children. Michael: Yes, and poor whites, particularly in the South, were a primary target. They were labeled "feebleminded" and "degenerate," and seen as a threat to the nation's genetic stock. This culminated in infamous court cases like Buck v. Bell in 1927, where the Supreme Court upheld the forced sterilization of a woman deemed "unfit," with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously declaring, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Kevin: That's chilling. It's taking that old colonial idea of "bad blood" and turning it into state policy. But in more recent times, the identity seems to have shifted. It's not just a slur anymore, is it? Michael: It's become something much more complex. Isenberg tracks how, in the late 20th century, the "white trash" or "redneck" identity started to be reappropriated. It became a kind of cultural brand, sometimes worn as a badge of honor, a symbol of authenticity against a phony, middle-class world. Kevin: I can see that. You have figures like Dolly Parton, who is a genius at playing with that image. She's glamorous and brilliant, but she never runs from her poor, rural roots. Michael: And she has that incredible quote Isenberg highlights. When a journalist commented on her "cheap" look, Parton shot back, "You have no idea how much it costs to present yourself to others with this cheap look." It perfectly captures the constructed nature of it all. It’s a performance. Kevin: And then you have the flip side of that performance: reality TV. It feels like we're still putting these caricatures on display for entertainment, just like with The Beverly Hillbillies. Shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo or Duck Dynasty turn a certain lifestyle into a spectacle for the rest of the country to gawk at. Michael: It's the modern-day equivalent of the 19th-century travelogues where writers would go into the backwoods to report on the strange and "savage" ways of the poor. It reinforces stereotypes while pretending to celebrate authenticity. And, of course, this has massive political implications. Kevin: How so? How does this play into politics today? Michael: Politicians have learned to weaponize this identity. They can appeal to a sense of being forgotten or looked down upon by coastal elites. Figures like Sarah Palin masterfully played the "hockey mom" persona, positioning herself as an authentic outsider fighting against a corrupt establishment. It taps directly into that 400-year-old resentment of being seen as disposable or looked down upon. It proves that class, in America, has never just been about economics. It's about culture, identity, and a deep-seated sense of place in a hierarchy we pretend doesn't exist.

Kevin: Wow. So, when you connect all the dots—from the sanitized myths of the Pilgrims, to the brutal reality of Jamestown, to the politics of today—it paints a very different picture of America. Michael: It really does. I think the most powerful takeaway from Isenberg's White Trash is that class in America has never been a simple ladder that you can climb with hard work. It's a deeply ingrained cultural and historical system of exclusion. We've just gotten very good at not talking about it. We use language about merit and opportunity to mask a reality that has always been about breeding, land, and inherited status. Kevin: It’s like a national blind spot. We’re obsessed with race, as we should be, but we’re almost allergic to talking about class, especially when it comes to white poverty. Michael: And that's Isenberg's final, haunting point in the epilogue. She writes about our obsession with putting labels on people we want to ignore, telling ourselves, "They are not like us." But her conclusion is simple and profound: "But they are," she writes. "What's more, like it or not, they are a fundamental part of our history." Kevin: That really reframes everything. The story of "white trash" isn't a separate, weird side-story of America. It is the American story, or at least a huge, ignored part of it. It’s the uncomfortable truth sitting right under the shiny surface of the American Dream. Michael: Exactly. Acknowledging it doesn't diminish the ideals of the country, but it forces us to be honest about how far we've always been from living up to them. Kevin: It definitely makes you wonder, what other national myths are we still buying into today without even realizing it? It’s a powerful question to sit with. Michael: It is. And we'd love to hear what you think. Does this change how you see American history? What modern examples of these class dynamics do you see? Let us know on our social channels. We're always curious to hear your perspectives. Kevin: This is Aibrary, signing off.