Joe Bageant writes about the white underclass in America in his latest book, Rainbow Pie: A Memoir of Redneck America (Portobello Press, 2010):
“When World War II began, 44 per cent of Americans were rural, and over half of them farmed for a living. By 1970, only 5 per cent were on farms. Altogether, more than twenty-two million migrated to urban areas during the post-war period. If that migration were to happen in reverse today, it would be the equivalent of the present populations of New York City, Chicago, Miami, Philadelphia, Boston, and Saint Louis moving out into the countryside at a time when the U.S. population was half of its present size.
In the great swim upstream toward what was being heralded as a new American prosperity, most of these twenty-two million never made it to the first fish ladder. Stuck socially, economically, and educationally at or near the bottom of the dam, they raised children and grandchildren who added another forty million to the swarm. 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. Even as the white underclass was accumulating, it was being hidden, buried under a narrative proclaiming otherwise. The popular imagination was swamped with images that remain today as the national memory of that era. Nearly all of these images were products of advertising. In the standard depiction, our warriors returned to the land kept free by their valor, exhilarated by victory, and ready to raise families. They purchased little white cottages and Buick Roadmaster sedans, and then drove off into the unlimited horizons of the ‘land of happy motoring’. A government brochure of the time assured everyone that ‘An onrushing new age of opportunity, prosperity, convenience and comfort has arrived for all Americans.’ I quoted this to an old World War II veteran named Ernie over an egg sandwich at the Twilight Zone Grill near my home in town. Ernie answered, ‘I wish somebody had told me; I would have waved at the prosperity as it went by.’
According to this officially sanctioned story of the great post-war migration, these people abandoned farm life in such droves because the money, excitement, and allure of America’s cities and large towns was just too great to resist. Why would anyone stay down on the farm when he or she could be ‘wearing ten-dollar shoes and eating rainbow pie’? One catches a whiff of urban-biased perception here; but then, the official version of all life and culture in America is written by city people. Our dominant history, analysis, and images of America are generated in the urban centers. Social-research institutions, major universities, and the media — such as ABC, HBO, PBS, and the Harvard University sociology department — are not located in Keokuk, Iowa; Fisher, Illinois; Winchester, Virginia; or Lubbock, Texas.
I grew up hard by the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and West Virginia, and am a product of that out-migration; and, as I said, grew up watching it happen around me. I’m here to tell you, dear hearts, that while all those university professors may have their sociological data and industrial statistics verified and well indexed, they’re way off-base; they’ve entirely overshot the on-the-ground experience. In fact, they don’t even deal with it. You won’t be surprised to hear that the media representation of the post-war era — and, let’s face it, more people watch The History Channel than read social history texts — it is as full of crap as an overfed Christmas goose.
My contemporaries of that rural out-migration, now in their late fifties and mid sixties, are still marked by the journey. Their children and grandchildren have inherited the same pathway. The class competition along that road is more brutal than ever. But the sell job goes on that we are a classless society with roughly equal opportunity for all. Given the terrible polarization of wealth and power in this country (the top 1 per cent hold more wealth than the bottom 45 per cent combined, and their take is still rising), we can no longer even claim equal opportunity for a majority. Opportunity for the majority to do what? Pluck chickens and telemarket to the ever-dwindling middle class?”
Read the rest of this excerpt at Alternet.
My Comment:
I’ve enjoyed Bageant’s writing and the insights it offers into rural Americans of the kind the media elites tend to reflexively dismiss. The last of the racial insults still permissible in public is “white trash” or “red-neck.” Sarah Palin’s immense unpopularity with the liberal intelligentsia boils down to her evident origins in this class, although Palin herself is certainly middle-class. Nonetheless, the deeply class and race-based commentary about her has pigeon-holed her as one of “them”.
Yet Palin’s following is middle-class and generally educated, skilled and successful. Why then are they conflated? That’s what puzzles me.
Bageant’s underclass, as he portrays it, truly is functionally illiterate and on the verge of desperation.
If anyone ought to threaten the intellectual elites, it ought to be a gun-toting, tattooed, out-of-work chicken -plucker. But that’s not the group that shows up for the Tea Parties. And it’s not the one the media is busy painting shades of black.
So why the conflation?
My guess is it’s because the establishment most fears a coalition of these two white groups – the underclass and the middle-class. That coalition, cutting across class and prone to nativism, will be the group that has a real chance to topple the establishment.
Which is why the elites are doing their best to split the white middle-class (and upper middle-class) from the working class. That is what the deployment of the class-based rhetoric amounts to, It is a challenge to the middle-class suburbanite – do you want to be one of them (the rednecks) or one of us (the educated elites)?
Posed in those terms, the elites believe the challenge will pry away the accountants and soccer moms from the chicken-pluckers.
Let’s hope they’re in for a surprise.
