What impacted that have on you . Ms. Isenberg she was a very unusual person. She came to the university of wisconsin. She had to create a space for us in History Program and that she was someone who was very aware not only of gender and class and racial issues in all the things she wrote about but i think she imparted to me that you also have to understand the politics of academia and the way in which politics in general, we like to believe in america that we are free agents and we are able to sort of carver own destiny, part of our carve our own destiny part of her own destiny, but we do not always good to make the decisions that we want to. She wanted to think about the larger ways culture, politics, the law shaped the way people think even though they might not be aware of it, but to take that into account in do not just take things as given. Challenge them. See if it is really true. That is something that has really motivated me throughout my career, even when you read good history, i want to make sure i look at the end notes make sure i look at the research. I do not want to just take the consensus. I want to see if it is true and that any argument you make has a firm historical foundation. Mr. Lamb how hard was it to name the book white trash . Ms. Isenberg it started out with various names. Then it was going to be the american breed and then it got back to be white trash. I think part of the reason it needs to be that name is a because it is the one today that is most familiar. People have misconceptions on what it means. I think people are curious about it and that is why i wanted to write the book. I think people throw around that work without really knowing where it comes from. When i began to do more and more research, and as you know, i talk a lot about british colonization, which is not what people have never really paid attention to in talking about white trash. Most people start in the antebellum south. I found aban older history and i thought it was important to Pay Attention to language. I talk about all of the vocabulary because i think we miss something about how people think about poverty if we do not understand the language and what those words mean. Mr. Lamb we have all of those words available to put on the screen, which we will do now and there are lots of them white trash austerities offscourings, lubbers crackers, clay eaters. Where did those terms come from . Ms. Isenberg this is what is so curious. You will find each generation changing the vocabulary. The term i paid a lot of attention to is waste people. That goes all the way back to the elizabethan period who put forward the first proposal to convince Queen Elizabeth the first on the importance of colonization and what the colonies would be useful. We have a whole mythology on how we think america was founded. We usually like to talk about puritans, the city upon a hill which president obama referred to this at the democratic convention. Reagan invokes that metaphor. In fact, the majority of people that came to the new world came out of economic desperation. They fell into categories of convicts, indentured servitude who were, this is not labor contracts. Essentially, they were a form of slave labor in this sense that they did not have the right to leave. They would sign up for an indentured term that could go from anywhere between seven to nine years and the large majority of them were children. That is something that we forget about. We forget about the exploitation of child labor, which we know was legal in this country all the way up to 1919. Waste people, the definition of the term was literally dumping the poor somewhere else. They were a burden on the british economy. In fact, that notion of waste has all of those negative, tatians that you can bring to negative connotations that you can bring to mind. Elizabethans, one of the things that is refreshing and disturbing about them, they are very clear. They do not conceal anything under the enlightenment. They are very forthright and direct about what they mean about waste. That is when i began to see that there was a connection, that these notions of ways, expendable people, surplus population and how, the other day theme i highlighted is the importance about how waste people are connected to the lan. This is something that historians know but we also lose sight of the fact that land or being landless is the most important definition about whether you have civic value economic value. Mr. Lamb where do you live in what you do fulltime . Ms. Isenberg i am a history professor at Louisiana State university. I really enjoyed new orleans. I enjoy my colleagues. We have a really, i think, supportive department. And i have, like a lot of academics, i have taught at several places, the university of tulsa iowa, i had a postdoctorate at william and mary. I think in a way, this is probably the one thing i have in common with my subjects, i have a bit of a back a bond vagabondness. Mr. Lamb you mentioned your mother in the preface. Why . Ms. Isenberg even though you are a historian, it is amazing how you may not know the details of your familys background. My mother told me and with my sister we visited her perver birthplace in taxes texas and i was curious how she ended up getting there. Her father essentially have a job for transporting laborers from canada down to chaos. That jimmy is telling because it is a part of one of the stories i am telling them i talk about indentured servitudes. This idea that rather than thinking of america in the way we like to think of it, the most positive way an exceptional society, that we broke free of the class system at the time of the revolution, the land of opportunity and affordability. In fact, as a argue, when Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, and this continues to be part of the way we think and he be a pattern of how the real pattern about how people define themselves economically, they really promised horizontal mobility and the ability to keep moving. If you fail somewhere, to move somewhere else. That to me present it is with what my book was about. Mr. Lamb where did you grow up and where did you go to college . Ms. Isenberg i grew up in south jersey near philadelphia. I went to college at Rutgers University and then went to graduate school at the university of wisconsin, madison. Mr. Lamb i want to run some video. This is jumping way ahead from where we started. People my age and maybe a little younger will remember lucille ball. This is for my movie you write about in 1953 call the the long long trailer. [video clip] and then we sold it. Isnt it a beauty . Lets look inside, just for fun. That is 1 million at least. I never thought of buying it. I know we could never afford that, but as long as were here, lets look at life. Come on, darling. Mr. Lamb a big yellow trailer. [laughter] ms. Isenberg right. I talk about that movie because it fits into a really important phenomena we tend to ignore. When we think about postworld war ii, this is where sociologists and historians have found United States was able to establish a more stable middle class, and part of the measure of being in the middle class, if we think about how we emphasize landownership, that continues to be an important defining feature. Even today, upward mobility is about owning a home. We had suburbia, the track homes. We have the government backing mortgages so that more people who would not have been able to buy a home are able to buy a home. I quote Richard Nixon saying, finally, capitalism has made it possible to create a classless society. What is happening at the exact same time, we have a new form of the lower class that indepth identified as living in a trailer. What we would prefer to today as even trailer trash. What i argue is the trailer has this kind of conflicting identity. One is the idea of freedom. You know, you do not have to own a home. You can be on the road. Then there is of course this other notion of the trailer that is associated with trailer trash in which the poor, and the reason the term begins begins during world war ii where poor workers were housed in trailers all across the country. What we see is the trailer market is constantly trying to upgrade, compete with what becomes the dominant pattern. By 1968, only 30 of People Living in trailers over middleclass jobs. There begins to be another phenomena as we know, not only are trailers sold brand new as it is assumed that they are secondhand thirdhand. Sociologists discovered in the late 1950s, 1960s, there begins to be hillbilly haydays. Where are they located . They are located on the margins and the worst land of cities and urban areas. At the same time we have the growth of suburbia, but we see there is a class sound society zoned society in trailer trash become the mark of poverty in the United States even if we are at the moment where america seems to be becoming more of a middleclass society. Mr. Lamb Andy Griffith, from a movie from 1957 sang a lot of things that i want your reaction to them. Did youu eat your eggs this morning . Just picked up another million. Thisll whole country is just like my flock of sheep. Rednecks, crackers hillbillies shutins everybody has got to jump when someone else blows the whistle. They do not know it yet, but they are all going to be mine. I own them. They think like i do. [laughter] only they are even more stupid than i am, so i have to think for them. Ms. Isenberg that is an incredible movie. It is one of my favorite movies. Essentially, and it is a kind of conflicting response about how people felt about that movie. On the one hand they saw the character of any griffith who starts out with someone that is in jail, a musician in arkansas who has discovered is discovered and he is turned into this demagogue, this person who is going to be a will to manipulate everyone because he thinks like them, talks like them and what is he drawing on . He is drawing on, something a highlight in the book, this pattern, this tradition about how we think about populism, how we think about democracy. It becomes really important in southern politics, this idea that what we want in america is, and this is sort of come i quote in the stallion who came to United States in 1949 who said, what we want america is not a real democracy because we accept huge disparities of wealth. We want a democracy that matters. What we want our celebrities or our politicians to do is act like us, pretend to be like us, and this idea of a stage performer, performer, idea of sounding as if you can invoke the feeling, the voice, the attitude even the dialect of the average american, is something that unfortunately politicians have taken advantage of for a long time in this country. You can take it all the way that to enter jackson because he was the first one that the campaign biography, the first one that turned into the candidate for the common man. In fact, he was a fairly successful slave owner, wealthy. He was no longer one of the common man, but what he did have in common is he was always sounding like the common man because he slammed oats just like crackers. [laughter] ms. Isenberg that idea of talking to the people has a dark side of the demagogue that committed duly people but its something in our american tradition that we are supposed to think, they are more authentic. We are supposed to think they are more real or that we have a direct connection to them, but unfortunately, with every stage of the mass media or how campaigns of an orchestrated, it does not necessarily guarantee that you were going to get a more honest, authentic candidate. Mr. Lamb what is going on here in this clip . This is from 1979. It is now deceased senator byrd from west virginia. He got a law degree at American University and got his diploma by john f. Kennedy. What is going on here is he is a senator. [video clip] ms. Isenberg robert byrd. This is what of the most Amazing Things i discovered researching this book. When he went on the campaign trail to get elected essentially, he would go from hill peoples homes, get them in the backseat and he would play the fiddle for them. And that idea of saying, i am one of you i come from the same background. I think he was even an orphan. What i found so striking about that was that he becomes one of the most powerful people in washington, but he was drawing on this other tradition, i talk about the story of the arkansas traveler which goes all the way back to the 1840s where it was the elite public best politicians that needed to get on where it was the only politicians that needed to get on horseback. He is traveling, whats to get a drink and a squatter has a drinking barrel and he says, can i have a drink, sir . In the sweater ignores him. In order to get the attention of a slaughter, which is a metaphor of getting his book, he has to grab the fiddle and play his tune, which is that same thing i just talked about, relate to that person on their terms, show them that you are one of them. I think in his case, i am really glad you showed that clip because he really knew how to play the fiddle. [laughter] mr. Lamb heres another one from 1992 and he is very much similar to bill clinton playing some elvis stuff. [video clip] mr. Lamb how important was this to him . Ms. Isenberg it was crucial. The news media, even though they only seem to revive the nasty stories about the clintons, but they also seem to have forgotten is when bill clinton was running, he was viciously attacked as white trash, not only from republicans but the media who mocked him, a fun of him, and as we know, he had to sort of find a way, how can i make myself acceptable so that people will not dismiss me . What he started doing was he started tapping into the ghost of elvis. He even invoked it on the campaign tour. There he is playing the Heartbreak Hotel and he is also drawing on the southern tradition of house all the politicians, you probably remember Floyd ClementFrank Clement who was in the running to be Vice President and he put on a wild show, a baptist preacher, people comparing him to elvis, this idea that yes, i am a southerner. There is something uniquely american about being able to communicate with music and able to say, here is the more Positive Side we can associate with the poor whites. That they have this musical tradition or that somehow that can make bill clinton more acceptable if he invokes elvis as opposed to a redneck or white trash. When the Monica Lewinsky scandal breaks in the report is put together with 500 mentions of sex, he is really equating high crimes and misdemeanors with lowerclass losers. That is how he went after bill clinton. So, he does not ever quite escape, and that is one of the things i highlight. Even though there are attempts to make white trash and poor whites a longer tradition, know this is important because he is seen as able to escape a toxic connotation, but even so, even when it is given a more populist spin still, the negative connotations seem never to emerge. To emerge. Mr. Lamb in your lifetime, what politicians do you think has been honest . Ms. Isenberg honest. That is a really difficult question to measure. I think, because i have written about jefferson and madison, you know madison tended to become a he is kind of interesting because he could be ready to write the people and tell people what he thought and he did not seem to wind up with a list of enemies that seemed to hurt other politicians. He knew how to present his ideas. I would say on the one hand, he is honest, but even madison could not be honest because when he thought about writing an essay, critiquing slavery, it was going to be published in one of the major newspapers, he realized he could not do it. He had to hold it back. It is in his notes but it never gets published. That is something politicians even at that time before television, the internet, before we had people with cell phones following you and catching everything you say they are always aware of their constituency. Medicines case in ma disons casey was in virginia. There is an awareness that, what can they say that people will listen to . At the time he thought, this cannot be said at this moment. Maybe at another point, you can presented in a way that they will accept. I do not like he immediately will that politicians are more liars than average americans. [laughter] mr. Lamb why is that hollywood . What role did they play over the years with your thesis . Ms. Isenberg no, hollywood and thumb, that is what i wanted to do with this book. There are a lot of politics in it. I am a legal historian so i have discussions of important legal cases i think have to be understood because of their widespread influence and laws that do matter, laws about power, you cannot ignore the law and will but i also think we have to embrace the way in which forms of mass media do shape widespread american thinking on certain issues. One of the historians who i worked with directors was an amazing rutgers was an amazing historical historian. He says for the first time americans were suddenly hearing the same songs,s statistics the same advertisements, so that kind of nationalizes america that they know how the shared culture that they now have a shared culture. We have to recognize its power but we do not have to exaggerated. People, everything they watch, they are being indoctrinated. It is not purely propaganda. I think most scholars are cautious about using the word on will have to recognize what do not justify themselves, they are shaped from the day they are born. Not only from the parents of the world they are a part of is going to define how they look at the world, how they speak, how they think. We have to not marginalize Popular Culture and the it does not have an influence, particularly when we are talking about class. Mr. Lamb 1962, this was a television show. [video clip] i want to explain about this chandelier. Napoleon bonaparte plan campaigns around it. We are just plain folk. We do not mind a few things being secondhand. [laughter] you can throw them away. We do not use those things in Beverly Hills. Now, you listen here. I do not care how those folks are in Beverly Hills. We are going to be clean. Yes, maam. We aint going to lower our standards. Ms. Isenberg that to me, irene ryan that came out of this montville tradition mo audville tradition upper class educated, it became a stage act. It became a role that people play. I think that seeing a sh