It is part of our national creed that the opportunity to achieve and improve ourselves is not predetermined at birth; that upward mobility, while hard, is possible. We are not the British, after all, trapped in some "Downton Abbey" hell of self-aware stratification -- we rebelled against all that, right?
Nancy Isenberg, a professor of history at Louisiana State University, has authored a gritty and sprawling assault on this aspect of American mythmaking. Ours is very much a class-based society, she argues, and had been long before Occupy Wall Street or Bernie Sanders, long before we were a country at all. In "White Trash" Isenberg takes a very particular look at class in the United States, examining the white rural outcasts whom politicians from Andrew Jackson to Donald Trump have sought to rally, but who otherwise have remained vilified, shunned, targeted and kept apart, both physically -- in poorhouses and trailer parks, through eugenic science and discriminatory public policy -- and in the nation’s cultural imagination, where they have inspired mockery, kitsch and unceasing grimaces.