Editing White trash (section)

===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}}