American literature has abandoned poor whites

By Joe Bageant

Dear Joe,

First of all, please, I apologize my poor English. I’m writing to you from Spain where we have a very deficient education system and a natural tendency to fail on learning foreign languages.

Now, after being intentionally modest, I have to say that I’m an avid reader of your work and that your Deer Hunting with Jesus has been an inspiration for my end of graduate essay, a kind of a small thesis. The subject of my essay is the relation between literature (and also popular culture in general) and America’s white underclass. The main idea is to see which image of the white low classes is being exported from the US and how, for example, Europeans like me receive it.

On literature I found out that during the first half of the Twentieth Century, American authors used to talk about the poor whites, especially the most representative novelist of that era (Faulkner, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Caldwell). So, there was a quite general interest on portraying that reality from the canonic literature. But, after the forties, this interest seems to vanish (at least as a major theme.

As I said before, this is about the foreign reception of American literature). So, my essay took a new turn and now I’m trying to find the reasons of the loss of interest in the poor whites. Is it because is something that is wanted to be ignored? What happened that make the Joads from “Grapes of Wrath” (being an epic image of endurance in front of social injustice) turn into Clethus from “The Simpsons” (a mere caricature, the image of a “loser”)?

Well, I just thought that maybe you can give some clues or just your opinion about that, from your inner view as an American and as a journalist. (I don't know, maybe I’m completely wrong, this is all bullshit and I have to rewrite my whole essay.) Anyway, thanks a lot for just reading this e-mail and please, keep writing on your blog, we're following it from far away.

Yours sincerely,

Pol

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Pol,

I have wondered about that very thing myself since the middle 1970s. As far as I can tell, there are any number of factors at work. Here are some thoughts, a sort of chronology:.

-- The Dust Bowl made the plight of displaced and poor rural whites unavoidable. They rose in the public consciousness during the Great Depression, thanks to sensitive writers, artists, etc. and in no small part due to the Roosevelt administrations' funding of writers and artists to document American society and the times. Making work for the arts benefited us all. Back then, everything that made it into the media, be it print or other, did not have to turn a corporate profit to be produced or published.

-- World War II created boom times for urban America. Some of the white rural poor moved toward the cities and the jobs.

-- After the war 22 million rural Americans were pushed off farms by government and corporate planning so they could work in industry. They did not rush happily toward The New American lifestyle, as portrayed in the official national storyline. Nearly all white rural soldiers surveyed in 1945 said they wanted to return to their family farms or rural homes. Neither corporate America nor the administration wanted to see the wartime prosperity (profits) end. The best way to accomplish that was to put rural Americans into the industrial work force. Once they were migrated to the cities and towns and working in industrial production, they provided two things. Cheap labor and a market for industrial products. Before the war 45% of Americans lived on small farms. Ten years after the war less than 10% lived on farms.

-- However, rural Americans were poorly educated.The U.S. government census considered a fourth grade education to be literate at the time. More than a quarter of the rural migrants did not even meet that standard. They suffered from poor education because the oligarchies at the local, regional and state level did not want to pay taxes for schools, particularly in the south. The cities had long ago embraced public education.

-- These uneducated rural whites became the foundation of our permanent white underclass. Their children and grandchildren have added to the numbers of this underclass, probably in the neighborhood of 50 or 60 million people now. They outnumber all other poor and working poor groups, black, Hispanics, immigrants.

-- Because they are not concentrated in given neighborhoods, etc., they are pretty much invisible as a group in America. But because they are nevertheless encountered individually in society, we get representations of them as the hillbilly or white trash next door. Or the redneck stereotype as the butt of humor -- the people whose social skills do not resemble what is supposed to be the white Anglo norm. And in truth, they do not conform to the middle class behavior models presented by the media and the Corporate States of America as examples for approved societal behavior. They are not obsessed with their credit scores, they are always in the informal mode, they are rule breakers, and in short, they do not behave like property of the state. So they are useful as a bad example. Usually they are portrayed as having a southern accent, which for good reason is associated with a lack of education and sophistication.

-- However, because they cannot be encountered in aggregated numbers, they cannot be seen by the rest of America as a distinct culture. Only as nonconforming individuals as an object of ridicule. And in a sense, fear. Because what is left of the middle class is afraid of falling into that white underclass.

Which brings us back to the subject of the poor white underclass not being represented in America literature.

What literature? All I see these days is shallow crap. Real literature help us understand the world and the human condition. Obviously, that is no longer America's cup of tea.

I could write much more on the topic, but it's complex. So this is the best distillation I can do in an email.

In art and labor,

Joe