Editing White trash (section)

===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}}