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141 " By 1760, only 5 percent of white Georgians owned even a single slave, while a handful of families possessed them in the hundreds. "
― Nancy Isenberg , White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
142 " from fathers cohabiting with daughters, to husbands selling wives, to mothers conniving illicit liaisons for daughters. The danger came from a growing population that had stopped disappearing into the wilderness. Reid was appalled by the filthy refugees living in railroad cars, an uncomfortable foreshadowing of twentieth-century trailer trash. "
143 " Indeed, it was not the United States, but Liberia, a country founded by the British and former American slaves, that first established universal suffrage for adult men, in 1839. "
144 " As late as 1842, “squatter” was still considered a “term, denoting infamy of life or station,” of a lesser rank than the class-neutral “settler. "
145 " democracy of manners,” which was not the same as real democracy. He meant that voters accepted huge disparities in wealth but at the same time expected their elected leaders to “cultivate the appearance of being no different from the rest of us. "
146 " Superior ability” was not “the exclusive possession of any one race or any one class,” he said. Reacting to Adolf Hitler’s Aryan fantasy, Wallace predicted that even a “master breeder” might over generations raise a group of people with the same skin, hair, or eye color, but he would just as likely produce a group of “blond morons. "
147 " North Carolina forged a lasting legacy as what we might call the first white trash colony. "
148 " Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system. It is not only directed by the top 1 percent and supported by a contented middle class. We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity. "
149 " The public had no difficulty understanding the high moral tone of LBJ’s presidential oratory. He despised the false rhetoric of those Dixiecrats who feigned class solidarity with poor whites—rhetoric that typically involved angry appeals to white supremacy. As president, when he advocated civil rights, Lyndon Johnson spoke the language of brotherly love and inclusiveness. In spite of all this, the old country-boy image still haunted him. 6 "
150 " Populated by what many dismissed as “useless lubbers” (conjuring the image of sleepy and oafish men lolling about doing nothing), North Carolina forged a lasting legacy as what we might call the first white trash colony "
151 " The argument of this book is that America’s class history is a more complicated story than we’ve previously considered. The past informs the present. "
152 " waste people,” and later “white trash,” marginalized Americans were stigmatized for their inability to be productive, to own property, or to produce healthy and upwardly mobile children "
153 " Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind” (1751), one of his most important treatises, Franklin predicted that Americans would double in population in twenty years. "
154 " In the American colonies and in England, the unmarried man of means was a scandalous figure. He was ridiculed as a hermaphrodite, as half man, half woman; "
155 " sharecropper’s rhythmic chant (circa 1917): “I’d druther be a Nigger, an’ plow ole Beck, Dan a white Hill Billy wid his long red neck.”36 "
156 " Class status was still based on family name in Pennsylvania, for the top tier was dominated by the Penn, Pemberton, and Logan families—the proprietors and Quaker elites. "
157 " Slavery ruined the “industry of our White People,” he confessed, for they saw a “Rank of Poor Creatures below them,” and detested the thought of work out of a perverse pride, lest they might “look like slaves. "
158 " In Grant’s estimation, the war was fought to liberate nonslaveholders, families exiled to poor land, who had few opportunities to better themselves or educate their children. “They too needed emancipation, "
159 " critics charged that poor whites had fallen below African slaves on the scale of humanity. They marked an evolutionary decline, and they foretold a dire future for the Old South. "
160 " Northerners, especially those who joined the Free Soil Party (1848) and its successor, the Republican Party (1854), declared that poor whites were proof positive of the debilitating effects of slavery on free labor. "