From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   The White-Minstrel-Show Version of History   
   By KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON, Aug 20, 2016   
      
   A familiar tale about class in America gets a poor retelling in a new book.   
   Nancy Isenberg has produced, in White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of   
   Class in America, a dreadfully stupid and lazy book. It is badly written,   
   poorly conceived, and incompetently executed. Isenberg would join the long   
   line of American debunkers    
   and would-be debunkers of a familiar and surpassingly tedious sort: “Sure,   
   Americans sent a man to the moon, but what about the United Fruit Company in   
   Guatemala back in 1954? Huh? Huh?â€�   
      
   Isenberg’s argument, if we may be so generous as to call it that, is this:   
   The American culture was not born ex nihilo on July 4, 1776, and in the   
   English parts of the New World colonists reproduced some form of the English   
   class structure; the freedom-   
   seeking Puritans were not alone, but were joined by all manner of riff-raff   
   dispatched by English powers as a form of domestic social hygiene, making the   
   United States a kind of Australia before there was an Australia; the United   
   States today is not a    
   society without class divisions.   
      
   Well, raise my rent.   
      
   Virginia was named for an English queen and its settlement was sponsored by a   
   knight. Its basic law was a royal charter, and its economy was shaped in no   
   small part by indentured servitude and chattel slavery. These are not   
   egalitarian arrangements, and    
   they did not produce egalitarian outcomes. This is not “untold history.â€�   
   This is history told, and told, and told again. Life in early-17th-century   
   Jamestown, Isenberg tells us, was not unlike the world of William   
   Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice;    
   what we are to take from the fact that an English settlement was culturally   
   consistent with the work of an English playwright working at approximately the   
   same time (1596 in this case) is anybody’s guess.   
      
   About 20 pages in, I found myself thinking: “I wonder when we get to   
   NASCAR?â€� Obviously, you cannot have an intellectually lazy and   
   cliché-ridden book about white-trash culture without NASCAR, preferably with   
   a tangential report on the box-office    
   performance of Smokey and the Bandit in 1977. That would be like having a   
   batty and ignorant book on African-American culture without fried chicken and   
   watermelon. Rest assured, you’ll get your NASCAR, your Dukes of Hazzard, and   
   more.   
      
   But it’s a while coming. The structure of the book reeks of sophomore-level   
   procrastination. Perhaps this will be more obvious to you if you’ve ever   
   been obliged to write something long and complicated on a deadline and   
   performed poorly. (Not that I    
   would know anything about that.) The first chapter of the book is the book   
   essay, a distillation of the book’s argument that usually is submitted to   
   publishers as part of a book proposal. You aren’t supposed to publish the   
   book essay, but Isenberg    
   seems to have done that or something quite close to it. So what we have is a   
   brief version of the book’s overall argument, followed by a series of   
   half-thought-out chapters in which we are treated to reports on Thomas   
   Jefferson and class, the Civil War    
   and class, the Great Depression and class, each connected only vaguely, if at   
   all, with the others, and an epilogue.   
      
   You will not be surprised to learn that Jefferson had attitudes about class   
   that were more or less characteristic of a man of his day, and that popular   
   attitudes toward the subject changed slowly over time in response to   
   historical events. It may be that    
   all of this could add up to an illuminating account of class differences in   
   the United States, and maybe even an account of persistent social injustice of   
   a kind, but, if it does, that has escaped Isenberg entirely.   
      
   She does not even seem to read her own sentences, at least as they relate to   
   one another in sequence, e.g.: “[Benjamin] Franklin was not sympathetic to   
   the plight of the poor. His design for the Pennsylvania Hospital in 1751 was   
   intended to assist the    
   industrious poor, primarily men with physical injuries.â€� I found myself   
   blinking and rereading that sentence, and wondering how and why a man who was   
   not sympathetic to the plight of the poor should design a charity hospital for   
   their benefit. It is    
   true that Franklin, like charitable men before and after and now,   
   distinguished between different kinds of poor people, between the so-called   
   deserving poor and ordinary bums, partly as a moral exercise and partly as a   
   kind of philanthropic triage,    
   resources being limited. But there is not an ordinary reading of the English   
   words “was not sympathetic to the plight of the poorâ€� that describes a man   
   who undertook to relieve the plight of the poor through charitable works.   
      
   Franklin particularly perplexes and vexes Isenberg. He was a fugitive from an   
   apprenticeship to his older brother (a form of indenture) and was from a   
   family of modest means. Isenberg writes: “He had arrived in Philadelphia in   
   1723 as a runaway, meanly    
   dressed in filthy, wet clothing.â€� Given this fact, she is scandalized by   
   Franklin’s later complaints about “vagrant and idle personsâ€�   
   congregating in Philadelphia. (The more things change . . .) One wonders   
   whether Isenberg has ever been to    
   America. Franklin, as Isenberg might learn from reading Isenberg, was a man   
   who began with very little and who managed to rise in Philadelphia — and   
   rise and rise until he became its most celebrated resident — despite being   
   an outsider to the Quaker    
   mafia that ran the place and having no real connections to the â   
   œProprietors,â€� the Penns and allied families who dominated the colony   
   socially and economically. How did that happen? Isenberg knows: “Quaker   
   patrons,â€� including the lawyer Alexander    
   Hamilton (no relation to that guy Aaron Burr shot), “a non-Quaker leader of   
   the Quaker Party,â€� along with “liberal Friends, who were not exclusive   
   about who should wield influence within the political faction of the Quaker   
   Party.â€� Which is to say,   
    Franklin rose in no small part through his own hard work and cunning but was   
   also enabled by an open, liberal, cosmopolitan, commercial society in which   
   one’s original station in life was not necessarily one’s final station —   
   i.e., he rose because    
   of the very American order whose liberality this daft book was written to   
   debunk.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)