[Photo from the Library of Congress]The 2016 presidential campaign and election of Donald Trump high

[Photo from the Library of Congress]The 2016 presidential campaign and election of Donald Trump highlighted the plight of poor, white Americans. Trump’s campaign focused on this “forgotten” group, which, he argued, had been left behind by the rest of America. We thought this dovetailed nicely with our latest show, The Melting Pot: Americans & Assimilation, as a reminder that assimilation is a struggle along socio-economic levels, as well as ethnic and national lines.Nancy Isenberg is the T. Harry Williams Professor of History at Louisiana State University. Her recent best seller, “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America,” exploded in popularity as many Americans sought to understand Trump’s poor, white voter base. In her book, Isenberg confronts the question of assimilation in American culture, and how, in addition to immigrants and racial minorities, poor whites also struggled in their search for an American cultural identity.Isenberg writes of this search during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s:“No matter whether it is cast as urban or rural, religious or secular, Anglo- or other hyphenate, the search for national belonging is never new. Despite the nasty cultural memory jarred loose by the retrogressive message in Deliverance (and especially the horrific rape of Ned Beatty’s character), the backcountry of America never completely lost its regenerative associations. Appalachia remained in the minds of many a lost island containing a purer breed of Anglo-Saxon. Here, in this imaginary country of the past, is where the best of Jefferson’s yeoman ‘roots’ could be traced. Most of all, there was a raw masculinity to be found in the hills. A larger trend was turning America into a more ethnically conscious nation, one in which ethnicity substituted for class. The hereditary model had not been completely abandoned; instead, it was reconfigured to focus on transmitted cultural values over inbred traits.An inherent paradox added to the confusion over the nature of cultural identity. Modern Americans’ largely blind pursuit of the authentic, stable self was taking place in a country where roots could be, and often were, discarded. In the American model, assimilation preceded social mobility, which required either adoption of a new identity or assumption of a class disguise in order to insert oneself into the desired category of middle class. Yet by the late 1960s the middle class had become the most inauthentic of places: the suburbs provided indelible images of foil-covered TV dinners, banal Babbittry, and bad sitcoms. People took part in staid dinner parties, evocatively portrayed in The Graduate, where the talk was of a career-making investment in plastics-and what better stood for inauthenticity than unnatural products invented by chemists? There was a growing awareness that middle-class comfort was an illusion. Two sociologists ironically concluded that the few authentic identities still claimable in 1970 existed in the isolated pockets of the rural poor: Appalachian hillbillies in Tennessee, marginal dirt farmers in the upper Midwest, and ‘swamp Yankees’ in New England” (p. 270-71).In other words, many Americans outside the upper-middle class had to assimilate before they could realize the American Dream of class mobility. Do you agree with Isenberg? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below, and then head over to check out our new show on assimilation in America.~ Aran -- source link

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