Editing White trash (section)

==History==
In the early 17th century, Virginia Governor [[Thomas Dale]] requested more colonists to work in the fields. It was difficult to find local workers, since those wealthy enough to emigrate to the colonies often became landowners instead. In response, King James sent felons and vagrant children (around a hundred of each) to Virginia.<ref>Shannon, Fred. ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=j6XZAAAAMAAJ Economic History of the People of the United States].'' (New York: Macmillan, 1934). pp. 73–79</ref><ref name="American History Central">{{cite web |title=The Headright System in Colonial America: 1618–1779 |url=https://www.americanhistorycentral.com/entries/headright-system-in-colonial-america/ |website=American History Central |access-date=1 June 2024 |date=August 29, 2022}}</ref>

By 1617, the [[Virginia Company]] instituted the [[Headright|headright system]], bestowing 50 acres of land to anyone who sponsored an [[Indentured servitude|indentured worker]]'s passage to the colony. The Plymouth Company followed suit, as did other colonies, including [[Province of Maryland|Maryland]], [[Province of Georgia|Georgia]], [[Province of North Carolina|North Carolina]] and [[Province of South Carolina|South Carolina]]. This helped poorer European workers come to the colonies but it also had the effect of incentivizing planters to sponsor large numbers of workers (and later, enslaved Africans) in exchange for expanding their land rights. Once their indenture was complete, these workers often became landowners themselves, though they were usually given poorer, undeveloped land on the [[American frontier|Western frontier]]. Others were unable to afford their independence and carried on working for planters as free wage laborers.<ref name="American History Central" /><ref>Hofstadter, Richard (1971). ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=zO4ulIkeKX8C&pg=PA36 America at 1750: A Social Portrait]''. Knopf Doubleday. p. 36. {{ISBN|978-0-307-80965-0}}</ref>

To meet demand, British gangs sometimes organized kidnappings, paid for by planters and speculators, to increase the numbers shipped overseas — amounting to thousands of unwilling migrants sent to North America by the middle of the century.<ref>Zug, Marcia (31 August 2016). [https://inside.sfuhs.org/dept/history/US_History_reader/Chapter1/The%20Mail-Order%20Brides%20of%20Jamestown,%20Virginia%20-%20The%20Atlantic.pdf "The Mail-Order Brides of Jamestown, Virginia"] (PDF). ''The Atlantic'' – via Google Scholar.</ref><ref name="American History Central"/> [[Political prisoner|Political]] and [[Prisoner of war|military prisoners]] were also sent as indentured servants to the colonies as a result of [[List of Irish uprisings|insurrections in Ireland]]. [[Oliver Cromwell]] sent hundreds of [[Irish Catholics]] to British North America during the [[Irish Confederate Wars]] (1641–1653).{{sfnp|Painter|2010|pp=41–42}}

In 1717, the [[Parliament of Great Britain]] passed the [[Transportation Act 1717|Transportation Act]] to regulate the system of [[Penal transportation|shipping convicts as indentured servants]] to North America. This had previously operated for about a century under the [[royal prerogative of mercy]], though was open to exploitation. One of the Act's stated aims was to increase the availability of laborers for the colonies. It also allowed the willing transportation of children as young as 15 on eight-year contracts of indenture.<ref>Beattie, J. M. ''Crime and the Courts in England 1660 - 1800''. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986, pp.189-90.</ref> In 1720, the Act was amended to allow merchants to be paid for transporting felons.<ref>{{Cite web |title=The Proceedings of the Old Bailey |url=https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/about/punishment#transportation |access-date=2024-05-31 |website=www.oldbaileyonline.org}}</ref><ref>Hostettler, John. ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=hogc8SihCjoC&pg=PA157 A History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales].'' Hook: Waterside Press, 2009. p.157</ref> By the time penal transportation ceased during the [[American Revolutionary War]] (1775–1783), some 30,000–50,000 people had been transported to the [[New World]] under the law.<ref>Ekirch, Roger (1987). ''Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718-1775''. New York: Clarendon/Oxford University Press. p. 27. {{ISBN|978-0-19-820211-0}}</ref>

In total, 300,000 to 400,000 people were shipped to the North American colonies as indentured servants (between 1/2 and 2/3 of all white immigrants), serving up to seven years. While they expanded the populations of the colonies, and enriched the planter class, the systems of headright and indenture also expanded the lower class and the use of [[Slavery in the United States|chattel slavery]].<ref>Christopher Tomlins, "Reconsidering Indentured Servitude: European Migration and the Early American Labor Force, 1600–1775," ''Labor History'' (2001) 42#1 pp. 5–43</ref>{{sfnp|Painter|2010|pp=41–42}}<ref name="American History Central" />

Many of the poorer whites sent to the Western frontier, as well as those who settled in the backcountry of some southern states, were called "waste people", "squatters" and "crackers". They did not have title to the land they settled on, and had little access to education or religious training, if any.<ref name="Drinkard 2014" />{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|pp=105–132}} These people &ndash; trappers, miners, and small farmers of the backwoods &ndash; brought with them the "customs, routines and beliefs" of the old country, including ethics and morality which were adapted to fit their new environment. These included concepts of personal honor and the desire to protect the community, which Wyatt-Brown suggests developed into an abhorrence for race-mixing.{{sfnp|Wyatt-Brown|2007|pp=32-34}}

===Early 19th century===
The first use of "white trash" in print to describe the Southern poor white population occurred in 1821.{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|p=135}} It came into common use in the 1830s as a pejorative used by the [[house slave]]s of "quality folk" against poor whites.{{sfnp|Wyatt-Brown|2001|p=13}}{{efn|In 1833, [[Fanny Kemble]], an English actress visiting Georgia, wrote: "The slaves themselves entertain the very highest contempt for white servants, whom they designate as 'poor white trash'."<ref>[[Fanny Kemble|Kemble, Fannie]] (1835) ''Journal''. p. 81</ref><ref>{{harvp|Wray|2006}} suggests that the term may have originated in the Baltimore-Washington area during the 1840s, when Irish and blacks were competing for the same jobs. ([https://books.google.com/books?id=LX0oi9tz2H8C&pg=PA41 pp. 42] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160624092542/https://books.google.com/books?id=LX0oi9tz2H8C&pg=PA41&lpg=PA42 |date=June 24, 2016 }},[https://books.google.com/books?id=LX0oi9tz2H8C&pg=PA41 p.44] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160610173508/https://books.google.com/books?id=LX0oi9tz2H8C&pg=PA41&lpg=PA44 |date=June 10, 2016 }}). The quote from Kemble is reprinted in [https://books.google.com/books?id=LX0oi9tz2H8C&pg=PA41 page 41] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160611021531/https://books.google.com/books?id=LX0oi9tz2H8C&pg=PA41&lpg=PA41 |date=June 11, 2016 }} of the book.</ref>}} This term achieved widespread popularity in the 1850s,{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|p=135}} and by 1855, it had passed into common usage by upper-class whites, and was in common usage among Southerners of all races throughout the rest of the 19th century.<ref name="Newitz p170">{{cite book |last1=Newitz |first1=Annalee |author-link1=Annalee Newitz |last2=Wray |first2=Matthew |editor=Hill, Mike |date=1997 |title=Whiteness: A Critical Reader |publisher=New York University Press |isbn=978-0-8147-3545-9 |page=170 |chapter=What is 'White Trash'? Stereotypes and Economic Conditions of Poor Whites in the United States |chapter-url=https://archive.org/details/whitenesscritica0000unse/page/169/mode/1up?view=theater |chapter-url-access=registration}}</ref>

In 1854, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote that slavery not only produces "degraded, miserable slaves", but also "a poor white population as degraded and brutal as ever existed in any of the most crowded districts of Europe". She said the [[plantation system]] forced these whites to struggle for subsistence, becoming an "inconceivably brutal" group resembling "some blind, savage monster, which, when aroused, tramples heedlessly over everything in its way". Beyond economic factors, Stowe traces the existence of this class to the shortage of schools and churches in their communities.{{sfnp|Wray|2006|pp=57–58}}<ref name="Machado 2017">{{cite web |url=https://southernstudies.olemiss.edu/study-the-south/revisiting-deliverance/ |title=Revisiting Deliverance: The Sunbelt South, the 1970s Masculinity Crisis, and the Emergence of the Redneck Nightmare Genre |last=Machado |first=Isabel |publisher=Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi |date=June 19, 2017 |access-date=March 5, 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190306111541/https://southernstudies.olemiss.edu/study-the-south/revisiting-deliverance/ |archive-date=March 6, 2019 |url-status=live}}</ref> In her second novel ''Dred'', Stowe describes the poor white inhabitants of the [[Great Dismal Swamp]], on the border between Virginia and North Carolina, as an ignorant, degenerate, and immoral class of people prone to criminality.{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|p=137}} [[Hinton Rowan Helper]]'s influential 1857 book ''[[The Impending Crisis of the South]]'' describes the region's poor Caucasians as a people of lesser physical stature who were oppressed by the effects of slavery and would be driven to extinction by the South's "cesspool of degradation and ignorance".<ref>Helper, Hinton Rowan (1968) [1857] ''[[The Impending Crisis of the South]]''. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press; quoted in {{harvp|Isenberg|2016|p=137}}</ref> Historian Jeffrey Glossner of the [[University of Mississippi]] writes: "While their voices are often unheard, we can gauge the broader importance of their presence through the social, political, and cultural developments of the period."<ref>Glossner, Jeffrey (July 12, 2019) [https://networks.h-net.org/node/11465/discussions/4297558/poor-whites-antebellum-us-south-topical-guide "Poor Whites in the Antebellum U.S. South (Topical Guide)"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190712192401/https://networks.h-net.org/node/11465/discussions/4297558/poor-whites-antebellum-us-south-topical-guide |date=2019-07-12 }}, H-Net</ref>

===During the Civil War===
During the [[American Civil War|Civil War]], the [[Confederate States of America|Confederacy]] instituted conscription of all men between the ages of 18 and 35, to raise soldiers for its army – this was later expanded to all men between 17 and 50. There were numerous exemptions, including for any slave-owner with more than 20 slaves, political officeholders, teachers, ministers and clerks, and men who worked in valuable trades. Poor white trash Southerners had little opportunity to avoid the draft, sometimes served as paid substitutes, and were looked down on as cannon fodder. Poor southerners said that it was a "rich man's war", but "a poor man's fight." While upper-class Southern "cavalier" officers were granted frequent furloughs to return home, this was not the case with the ordinary private soldier, which led to an extremely high rate of desertion among this group, who put their families' well-being above the cause of the Confederacy, and thought of themselves as "Conditional Confederates". Deserters harassed soldiers, raided farms and stole food, and sometimes banded together in settlements, such as the [[Free state of jones|"Free State of Jones"]] (formerly Jones County) in Mississippi. When found, deserters could be executed or humiliated by being put into chains.{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|pp=159, 163–65}}

Despite the war being fought to protect the right of the Southern elite to own slaves, the planter class was reluctant to give up their cash crop, cotton, to grow the corn and grain needed by the Confederate armies and the civilian population. As a result, food shortages, exacerbated by [[inflation]] and hoarding by the rich, caused the poor of the South to suffer greatly. This led to food riots of angry mobs of poor women who raided stores, warehouses, and depots looking for food. Both the male deserters and the female rioters put the lie to the myth of Confederate unity, and that the war was being fought for the rights of all white Southerners.{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|pp=165–66}}

Ideologically, the Confederacy claimed that the system of slavery in the South was superior to the class divisions of the North, because while the South devolved all its degrading labor onto what it saw as an inferior race, the black slaves, the North did so to its own "brothers in blood", the white working class. The leaders and intellectuals of the Confederacy called this "mudsill" democracy, while they lauded the superiority of the pure-blooded Southern slave-owning "cavaliers" over the sullied Anglo-Saxon upper class of the North.{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|pp=157–60}} Some of the military leaders of the North, especially Generals [[Ulysses S. Grant]] and [[William Tecumseh Sherman]], recognized that their fight was not only to liberate slaves, but also the poor white Southerners, so they took steps to exploit the class divisions between the "white trash" population and plantation owners. An Army chaplain wrote in a letter to his wife after the Union [[siege of Petersburg|siege of Petersburg, Virginia]] that the war would "knock off the shackles of millions of poor whites".{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|pp=157–60, 172}} After the Civil War and his presidency, in 1879 during his world tour, Grant said that he had hoped that the war would have freed the "poor white class" of the South from "a bondage in some respects even worse than slavery", but concluded "they have been as much under the thumb of the slave holder as before the war".<ref>[[Ronald C. White|White, Ronald C.]] (2016) ''American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant''. New York: Random House, pp.608-609 {{isbn|978-0-8129-8125-4}}</ref>

===During Reconstruction===
After the war, President [[Andrew Johnson]]'s first idea for the [[Reconstruction Era|reconstruction of the South]] was essentially a "white trash republic", in which the aristocracy would maintain their property holdings and an amount of social power, but be disenfranchised until they could show their loyalty to the Union. The freed blacks would no longer be slaves, but would still be denied essential rights of citizenship and would make up the lowest rung on the social ladder. In between would be the poor white Southerner, who while occupying a lesser social position, would essentially become the masters of the South, voting and occupying political offices, and maintaining a superior status to the free blacks and freed slaves. Emancipated from the inequities of the plantation system, poor white trash would become the bulwark of Johnson's plan to rebuild the South.{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|pp=176–78}}

Johnson's plan was never put into effect, and the [[Freedmen's Bureau]], created in 1865, was authorized to help "all refugees and all freedmen", black and white alike. The agency did this despite Johnson's basic lack of concern for the freed slaves the war had supposedly been fought over. Even though they provided relief to them, the Bureau did not accept Johnson's vision of poor whites as the loyal and honorable foundation of a reconstructed South. Northern journalists and other observers maintained that poor white trash, who were now destitute, were still victimized by poverty and vagrancy. They were seen as "loafers" dressed in rags and covered in filth who did no work, but accepted government relief. They were seen as only slightly more intelligent than blacks. Cotton merchant and novelist James R. Gilmore, who had traveled throughout the South, differentiated poor whites into two groups: "mean whites" and "common whites". While the former were thieves, loafers, and brutes, the latter were law-abiding citizens who were enterprising and productive. It was the "mean" minority who gave white trash their bad name and character.{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|pp=177–80}}

A number of commentators noted that poor white Southerners did not compare favorably to freed blacks, who were described as "capable, thrifty, and loyal to the Union". Marcus Sterling, a Freedmen's Bureau agent and a former Union officer, said that the "pitiable class of poor whites" were "the only class which seem almost unaffected by the [bureau's] great benevolence and its bold reform", while in contrast black freedmen had become "more settled, industrious and ambitious". Sidney Andrews saw in blacks a "shrewd instinct for preservation" which poor whites did not have, and [[Whitelaw Reid]], a politician and newspaper editor from Ohio, thought that black children appeared eager to learn. ''[[Atlantic Monthly]]'' went so far as to suggest that government policy should switch from "disenfranchis[ing] the humble, quiet, hardworking Negro" and cease to provide help to the "worthless barbarian", the "ignorant, illiterate, and vicious" white trash population.{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|pp=179–80}}

During the Reconstruction Era, white trash were no longer seen as a degenerate breed which lived in the backcountry wilderness, but were brought into the mainstream of society, where they developed the reputation of being a dangerous, unintelligent class of criminals, vagrants and delinquents. They were seen as immoral, engaging in [[incest]] and prostitution, pimping out family members, and producing numerous [[in-bred]] bastard children.{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|pp=180–81}}

===Post-Reconstruction===
One of the responses of Southerners and Northern Democrats to Reconstruction was the invention of two myths: the "[[carpetbagger]]s" and the "[[scalawag]]s". The first were those Northern Republicans said to have invaded the South to take advantage of its people; and the second were those Southern whites who betrayed their race by supporting the Republican Party and Reconstruction. The scalawag, even if they came from a higher social class, was often described as having a "white trash heart". They were decried as "Black Republicans", and were accused of easily mingling with blacks, inciting them to seek social equality. Democrats responded with ''[[Autobiography of a Scalawag]]'', a parody of the standard "[[self-made man]]" story, in which a white trash southerner with no innate ambition is nevertheless raised to a position of middling power just by being in the right place at the right time, or by lying and cheating.{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|pp=182–86}}

After Reconstruction governments were "[[Redemptionists|Redeemed]]", and Southern states returned to "local control" &ndash; i.e. white supremacist rule &ndash; some Southern conservatives in power expressed their desire to "conserve" the Blacks, and many African Americans, having no real alternative, accepted their protection as their best available option.  This exposed a class-based fracture in the Southern white population. The aristocratic Governor of South Carolina, ex-Confederate General [[Wade Hampton III]], said that the "better class of whites" approved of this policy, but that "the lower whites are less favorable". A Black member of the Virginia Assembly in 1877 was reported  by Democratic politician [[Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry]] as saying that "he and his race relied for the protection of their rights & liberties, not on the 'poor white trash' but on the 'well-raised' gentleman". In 1890, the editor of a Black newspaper editorialized that the demand in the South for [[Jim Crow laws]] did not come from the "best people of the South", but from the "worst class of whites" in that region. {{sfnp|Woodward|2002|pp=49-50}}

Around 1890, the term "redneck" began to be widely used for poor white southerners. State legislator Guy Rencher, a self-proclaimed "redneck", claimed the term came from his own "long red neck".{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|pp=187–90}}

[[File:Typical native farmers.jpg|thumb|upright=0.9|Puerto Rico (circa 1899): "The farming class is about on a par with the poor darkies down South, and varies much even in race and color, ranging from Spanish white trash to full-blooded Ethiopians."]]

===The "New South"===
From the 1890s until the turn of the century, the [[New South]] movement introduced industrialization, primarily in the form of hundreds of [[cotton mill]]s across towns, villages and hamlets with flowing water to power the mill. The poor whites who had not already become [[sharecropper]]s or [[tenant farmer]]s on cotton plantations moved into housing provided by the mills, and every member of the family, down to children as young as 6, worked at the mill, often from before dawn until after dark, for daily wages about half those paid for similar work in the North. Deprived of sunlight, working on badly ventilated mill floors, eating a diet which was no better than they had consumed before becoming industrialized, the mill worker became a notable physical type:

<blockquote>A dead white skin, a sunken chest, and stooping shoulders were the earmarks of the breed. Chinless faces, microcephalic foreheads, rabbit teeth, goggling dead-fish eyes, rickety limbs and stunted bodies abounded &ndash; over and beyond the limits of their prevalence in the countryside. The women were characteristically stringy-haired and limp of breast at twenty, and shrunken hags at thirty of forty. And the incidence of tuberculosis, of insanity and epilepsy, and, above all, of [[pellagra]], the curious vitamin-deficiency disease which is nearly peculiar to the South, was increasing.{{sfnp|Cash|1991|page=200}}</blockquote>

The societal organization of the mills, in large part located just outside already organized municipal boundaries, was informed by that of the plantations, with the head of the mills replacing the planter as master. The mills provided rented housing and "[[company store]]s" where goods could be bought and charged against future earnings, putting the worker in the company's debt. Mills also had churches and schools, where workers paid the wages of the parson and the teacher. These mill workers attracted a new bevy of insulting and disdainful names, such as "lint-heads", "cotton-tails", "factory rats", and "cotton-mill trash".{{sfnp|Cash|1991|pages=201-202}}

===Eugenics===
{{main|Compulsory sterilization#United States}}

Also around 1890, the [[American eugenics movement]] turned its attention to poor white trash. They were stigmatized as being feeble-minded and promiscuous, having incestuous and inter-racial sex, and abandoning or mistreating their children. Eugenicists campaigned successfully for laws that would allow poor rural whites to be involuntarily sterilized by the state, in order to "cleanse" society of faulty genetic heritages.<ref name="Drinkard 2014"/> In 1907, [[Indiana]] passed the first eugenics-based [[compulsory sterilization]] law in the world. Thirty U.S. states would soon follow their lead.<ref>Lombardo, Paul A. ed. (2011) ''A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era''. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. {{isbn|9780253222695}}. [https://books.google.com/books?id=FAB-6RzKAQIC&pg=PR9 p. ix]</ref><ref>Indiana Supreme Court Legal History Lecture Series, "Three Generations of Imbeciles are Enough:"Reflections on 100 Years of Eugenics in Indiana, at [http://www.in.gov/judiciary/citc/special/eugenics/index.html In.gov] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090813203713/http://www.in.gov/judiciary/citc/special/eugenics/index.html|date=August 13, 2009}}</ref> Although the law was overturned by the [[Indiana Supreme Court]] in 1921,<ref>[http://www.bioethics.iupui.edu/Eugenics/SMith%20vs%20Williams.pdf ''Williams v. Smith'', 131 NE 2 (Ind.), 1921, text at] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081001183035/http://www.bioethics.iupui.edu/Eugenics/SMith%20vs%20Williams.pdf|date=October 1, 2008}}</ref> in the 1927 case ''[[Buck v. Bell]]'', the [[Supreme Court of the United States]] upheld the constitutionality of the [[Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924]], allowing for the compulsory sterilization of patients of state mental institutions.<ref>Larson, Edward J. (1996) ''Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South''. pp.194-195. Baltimore; Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press. {{ISBN|978-0-8018-5511-5}}; citing ''[[Buck v. Bell]]'' 274 U.S. 200, 205 (1927)</ref>

===The Depression===
[[File:Migrant Mother (LOC fsa.8b29516).jpg|thumb|right|upright=0.9|[[Dorothea Lange]]'s 1936 photograph of [[Florence Thompson]], a migrant worker in California during the [[Great Depression]], along with three of her children. The photo is known as ''[[Migrant Mother]]'']]

The beginning of the 20th century brought no change of status for poor white southerners, especially after the onset of the [[Great Depression in the United States|Great Depression]]. The condition of this class was presented to the public in [[Margaret Bourke-White]]'s photographic series for ''[[Life (magazine)|Life]]'' magazine and the work of other photographers made for [[Roy Stryker]]'s Historical Section of the federal [[Resettlement Agency]]. Author [[James Agee]] wrote about them in his ground-breaking work ''[[Let Us Now Praise Famous Men]]'' (1941), as did [[Jonathan Daniels]] in ''A Southerner Discovers the South'' (1938).{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|pp=206–230}}

A number of [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]]'s [[New Deal]] agencies tried to help the rural poor to better themselves and to break through the social barriers of Southern society which held them back, reinstating the [[American Dream]] of upward mobility. Programs such as those of the [[Subsistence Homesteads Division]] of the [[United States Department of the Interior|Department of the Interior]]; its successor, the Resettlement Administration, whose express purpose was to help the poor in rural areas; and its replacement, the [[Farm Security Administration]] which aimed to break the cycle of [[tenant farming]] and [[sharecropping]] and help poor whites and blacks to own their own farms, and to initiate the creation of the communities necessary to support those farms. The agencies also provided services for migrant workers, such as the [[Arkies]] and [[Okies]], who had been devastated by the [[Dust Bowl]] and forced to head west toward California, bringing all their belongings by car.{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|pp=206–230}}

Important in the devising and running of these programs were politicians and bureaucrats such as [[Henry Cantwell Wallace|Henry Wallace]], the [[United States Secretary of Agriculture|Secretary of Agriculture]]; [[Milburn Lincoln Wilson]], the first head of the Subsistence Homesteads Division, who was a social scientist and an agricultural expert; and [[Rexford G. Tugwell]], a [[Columbia University]] economics professor appointed as the first head of the Resettlement Agency. Tugwell understood that the status of tenant farmers would not change if they could not vote, so he campaigned against [[poll tax]], which prevented them voting, since they could not afford to pay it. His agency's goals were the four "R's": "retirement of bad land, relocation of rural poor, resettlement of the unemployed in suburban communities, and rehabilitation of farm families".{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|pp=206–230}}

[[Arthur Raper]], an expert on tenancy farming, published his study ''Preface to Peasantry'' (1936), in which he explained why the south's system held back the region's poor and caused them to migrate. [[Howard W. Odum|Howard Odum]], a [[University of North Carolina]] sociologist and psychologist, wrote the 600-page ''Southern Regions of the United States'', which became a guidebook for the New Deal. Journalist [[Gerald W. Johnson (journalist)|Gerald W. Johnson]] translated Odum's ideas in the book into a popular volume, ''The Wasted Land''. In 1938, Odum mailed questionnaires to academics to determine their views on what "poor white" meant to them. The results were similar to the popular views of "white trash" that had been held for many decades, indicating perceived character flaws in poor whites: "purposeless, hand to mouth, lazy, unambitious, no account, no desire to improve themselves, inertia", but, most often, "shiftless".{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|pp=206–230}}

==="Trailer trash"===
[[Caravan (trailer)|Trailers]] got their start in the 1930s, and their use proliferated during the housing shortage of [[World War II]], when the Federal government used 30,000 of them to house defense workers, soldiers and sailors, especially around areas with a large military or defense presence such as [[Mobile, Alabama]] and [[Pascagoula, Mississippi]]. Reporter [[Agnes E. Meyer]] of ''[[The Washington Post]]'' travelled throughout the country, reporting on the condition of the "neglected rural areas", and described the people who lived in the trailers, tents, and shacks there as malnourished, illiterate, and ragged. The shipyard workers who came to Mobile and Pascagoula were "subnormal swamp and mountain folk" whom the locals described as "vermin"; elsewhere, they were called "squatters". They were accused of having loose morals, high illegitimacy rates, and of allowing [[prostitution]] to thrive in their "Hillbilly Havens". The trailers themselves &ndash; sometimes purchased second- or third-hand &ndash; were often unsightly, unsanitary, and dilapidated, causing communities to zone them away from more desirable areas which had schools, stores, and other necessary facilities.{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|pp=240–247}}

In the mid-20th century, poor whites who could not afford suburban-style [[tract housing]] began to purchase mobile homes, which were not only cheaper, but which could be easily relocated if work in one location ran out. Through a combination of choice and local [[zoning laws]], these people gathered in trailer camps, and the people who lived in them became known as "[[trailer trash]]". Despite many of them having jobs, albeit sometimes itinerant ones, the character flaws perceived in poor white trash were also applied to so-called "trailer trash", and trailer camps or parks were seen as being inhabited by retired persons, migrant workers, and the poor. By 1968, a survey found that only 13% of those who owned and lived in mobile homes had [[White-collar worker|white collar]] jobs.{{sfnp|Isenberg|2016|pp=240–247}}{{clear left}}