Mudsills* vs Blue Bloods

Trump has set up an altar of sorts in the Oval Office (2025).

There is a strong class system in the United States, and a strong prejudice encouraging male Americans of Northern European descent, especially those of British descent, to be the powerful ones on top.
That’s why—when we’ve “cast” candidates for the role of U.S. President (by voting for them)—they’ve been male, and had at least one parent who was of Northern European descent.

Both the Right, and the Left, seem to be fighting against the class system.
Who knew that when Graydon Carter (and Spy Magazine) called Trump a “short-fingered vulgarian” in the 80’s they’d help to bring a crass real estate developer into the White House?
Who knew that when candidate Kamala Harris (in her run for the presidency) called for more people to obtain college degrees, less citizens would come out to vote?

Last year, I read Rotten Bodies: Class and Contagion in 18th Century Britain, by British author Kevin Siena.
This book reveals the English perspective on Britain’s colonization of North America.
The 2019 book explains how the British upper crust dealt with the British, Irish and Scottish vagrants who wandered the cities and countryside.
During the 1700s, the government essentially used vagrants to populate the 13 colonies, and thereby reduce the prison population.
(It wasn’t until the 1840s that British intellectuals began to deal seriously with the British class system. Let’s just say real social change is taking a while.)

Tattooed Barbie (2011). Today, around 33% of US adults are inked.

I just finished White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg.
This 2016 book describes how the class structure in the U.S. has kept its’ Anglo-Saxon plebs under control, from colonial times through this century.

I learned from these two books that it wasn’t just prejudice against black and brown people, that fed the class system in Europe.
For centuries, the European elite believed that there were two types of people—the people of “good blood,” and the people of “bad blood”—and sometimes people with “bad blood” could look similar to you.
Giving alms boxes to the poor at Christmas was one thing.
Associating with them, was quite another.
Obviously, this attitude toward people who didn’t own property carried over to the New World.

Trump being interviewed while sitting in a garbage truck (2024).

Class-conscious Republicans have elevated Trump, possibly because they identify with him?
In the last days of the 2024 campaign, this all became clearer when it seemed each side was talking about the opposing side as “garbage.”
MAGA has chosen Trump to fight against “educated elitists” who they assume look down on them.
The Left dislikes Trump because he’s acting against their cherished fantasy that America is a classless melting pot.
It’s a big mess of people—sometimes ones who are essentially in agreement—fighting each other over scraps.

Some Right-wing pundits have acknowledged that Donald J. Trump isn’t a particularly good representative for the Anglo-Saxon “cause.”
Trump is one of our very few Presidents to be the child of immigrants.
(Andrew Jackson’s parents immigrated from Ireland in 1765.)
Trump’s mother was a servant girl, who immigrated as a teenager from Scotland.
His father was a first generation American.
Both of Fred Trump’s parents were born and raised in Germany.
When Trump chose to marry, his first, and his third, wives were both Slavic adult immigrants.
Only his middle wife (Marla Maples) was born in this country (the state of Georgia), and that was his shortest marriage.
(Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson would have been aghast! Is Donald Trump afraid of American DNA?)

Babs Johnson’s trailer in 1972’s Pink Flamingos. Middle-class couples sometimes drive their children past trailer parks, and tell them: “This is NOT where we want you to live. 

Unlike other “developed” nations, the citizens of the U.S. live in a country without a safety net.
It’s estimated that around 26 million Americans have experienced homelessness.
Since the 1970s, we’ve lived in a country in which it takes two salaries to buy a house and/or raise a family. 

In The Hidden History of the American Dream: The Demise of the Middle Class—and How to Rescue Our Future, by Thom Hartmann, Hartmann describes how the 40th President, Ronald Reagan, began to destroy the middle class, from 1981-1989.
Back in the early 1980’s, the middle class controlled almost 22% of the nation’s wealth. Today, it controls under 5% of the wealth.

Since the late 1770’s, the United States has lied to the rest of the world, and portrayed itself as a classless society.
However, America has never been that.
The Englishmen who planned the colonization of North America saw this land as one giant workhouse where they could send their orphans, debtors, vagabonds, and convicts.
In Nancy Isenberg’s book White Trash, she mentions how the third US President Thomas Jefferson (in one of his public education proposals) planned that a few lucky scholars be “raked from the rubbish,” and be educated above grade school level.
(Jefferson used the word “rubbish” to describe poor men who didn’t own property.)

Urbanites confront hostile locals in 1972’s Deliverance.

When Jefferson spoke of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” he wasn’t speaking about everyone.
He was only referring to white property-owning males, preferably, Englishmen.
It’s a certainty that many of our Founding Fathers thought of poorer communities as “waste people.”
It wasn’t until 1830 that all states dropped owning property, as being necessary in order to vote.

The Civil War was about class, in addition to being about slaves.
Confederate leaders argued that the planter class was born to rule, and that Northerners were degenerates for not believing in their Southern “utopia.”
Southern plantation owners, newspaper editors, and politicians argued against the education of “offscourings,” “mudsills,” crackers, hillbillies, and swamp people.

The 36th President, Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973), explained the Southern Dixiecrat mentality to his White House staff:

If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell. Give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

Americans seem angry at the class system, but the Right, and the Left, are in conflict over solutions.
Right-wingers believe they are fighting the educated elite; they want white, property-owning Northern Europeans to be honored as those with the “best blood.”
Left-wingers are sick of the empty promises of DEI departments, and the Democratic Party; they want real change, not just adherence to slogans and political correctness.

*The term “mudsill” was coined by US Senator James Henry Hammond (according to Nancy Isenberg, on page 157 of White Trash) to describe the innate inferiority of Northerners, to the plantation elite of the South. According to Hammond (1807-1864), “mudsills” were the “urban roughs, prairie dirt farmers, greasy mechanics, and unwashed immigrants” who infested Northern cities. 

“Bad” Blood and Rotten Bodies

Although the Bible preaches (in Leviticus 19:33-34), “to not vex strangers,” and “love them as thyself,” groups have acted with prejudice toward perceived foreigners.
Migrants (foreigners we deal with close-up) have generally been viewed with more distain than people in other nations (foreigners far away).
Also, people in “higher” social classes may perceive the “lower orders” as strangers.
Society has long worried about being polluted by “bad blood.” 

From left to right, laundress (Louise Hampton), undertaker (Ernest Thesiger) and housemaid (Kathleen Harrison)—bargain over deceased Scrooge’s possessions- with rag picker “Old Joe” (Miles Melleson), in a British lobby card for 1951’s A Christmas Carol.

In Rotten Bodies: Class and Contagion in 18th Century Britain, Kevin Siena describes how British doctors saw the blood in “plebian” bodies.
In a 1659 treatise, Dr. Thomas Willis stated that “depauperated [or impoverished] blood was ‘lifeless’ and ‘a poor thin juice.’”
One hundred years later (1764), Dr. James Grainger postulated that Creoles developed “wasting diseases” because of a “watery poverty of the blood.”
As late as 1841, Dr. George Leith Roupell claimed that “pauper’s lifestyles were deleterious to sanguification [the production of healthy blood].”
For generations, British doctors held to the prejudicial notion that the corrupted blood of the poor endangered “higher” classes.

Rotten Bodies was written just before COVID-19 hit; it explains how Brits were terrified of possible epidemics and plagues during the 1800’s.
These fears resulted in “plebians” being removed to workhouses, hospitals, slums, and prisons—as a type of human garbage.
This fear also resulted in undesirables being “transported” to the American colonies, and (later) to Australia.
(“Transportion” is the term used.
It was a punishment used for many crimes—from stealing, to performing an illegal marriage.) 

Dustman Alfred P. Doolittle (Stanley Holloway, center) sings about being one of the “undeserving poor,” in his song “ With a Little Bit of Luck” (1964’s My Fair Lady).

The musical My Fair Lady is based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play, Pygmalion.

Siena recounts, in chapter five (“Jail Fever and Prison Reform”) of Rotten Bodies, how the birth of the U.S. (in 1776), set off a “public health disaster” in the British prison system.
Thousands of debtors, petty thieves, disrupters, and fallen women—who’d been sentenced to transportation to the thirteen colonies as indentured servants—were stuck in overcrowded prisons, or placed on decrepit prison ships.*
Hundreds died of jail fever while authorities figured out how to strand convicts in Australia.
(Australia was a more permanent solution than America, since colonial America indentured servants sometimes escaped, or returned to Britain after their sentences were up.)

A disheveled Moll is on trial in The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders, a mini-series based on Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel.

Both Moll (Alex Kingston) and Jemmy (Daniel Craig, on left) end up being transported to America.

Jane Austen’s England, by Roy and Lesley Adkins, also deals with transportation, focusing on the era when Jane Austen lived.
This book mentions Elizabeth Smith, who was transported to the colonies, in 1774, for a seven-year sentence.
(Smith had stolen 12 pounds of sugar, worth 4 shillings.)
I wonder how many descendants of Ms. Smith have learned how she ended up in America.
Or did she return to Britain?

For over three hundred years, transportation was used to deport British criminals from British soil to British possessions (the 13 colonies, the Caribbean, and Australia, but seldom to Canada).
Numbers are difficult to come by.
According to one estimate, about 40,000 convicts were sent to the colonies between 1533-1776.
However, another account says that over 52,000 convicts were transported between 1718-1776 alone!
Those totals seem rather low.
(Between one-fifth, and one-seventh, of the convicts transported, died en route of jail fever or small pox.
After they arrived at their destinations, hundreds died in the colonies, of disease, or from abuse.) 

Poster for Captain Blood, starring Errol Flynn as Peter Blood—an Irish doctor sentenced to life as slave in the Caribbean (1680’s) for treason.

(Dr. Blood escapes and becomes a pirate.)

The poster art was created by Alex (Flash Gordon) Raymond.

Transportation wasn’t just used to punish thieves and prostitutes.
Those considered “treasonous” against the King—either for speaking up against his policies, or for religious reasons—were punished by being sent to America.
Carpenter and Puritan, John Coad, wrote the memoir, A Memorandum of the Wonderful Providences of God to a Poor Unworthy Creature.
This book details Coad’s experiences during the Duke of Monmouth’s Rebellion in 1688.
He was wounded during the rebellion, and ended up being transported to Jamaica.
The character, Dr. Peter Blood—in the 1935 swashbuckler Captain Blood—is partially based on John Coad.

Famed cinematographer, James Wong Howe (The Rose Tattoo and Hud).

Anti-miscegenation laws prevented Howe from marrying his wife (author Sonora Babb), until 1948.

According to an IMDb mini-biography, the couple searched for three days, until they found a judge who was willing to marry them.

Returning to the subject of blood, the U.S. Senate worried about “pollution” when it debated the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
In Reece Jones’ book, White Borders, he describes how Senator John Franklin Miller (1831-1886) argued for the Act, saying that the U.S. should “keep pure the blood which circulates through our political system” and not allow “the debasement of our civilization through the injection. . . of a poisonous, indigestible mass of alien humanity.”

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 wasn’t repealed until 1943!
(Besides severely limiting Chinese immigration, this law (that lasted over sixty years) prevented Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens, or voting.)
In the end, it finally was repealed (says Jones in White Borders)—not for moral reasons, but because China was our partner in WWII.

An issue discussed in White Borders, and Rachel Maddow’s Prequel, is how the American eugenics movement greatly influenced Adolf Hitler, and his credo that immigrants and Jews were “a poison in the body” of Germany.
Hitler lauded the American Johnson-Reed Immigration Act in Mein Kampf.
He had a copy of American fake scientist Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916) in his bunker, when he committed suicide.

The 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act had two major goals, but only one was clearly expressed in the legislation.
Goal One was to limit Asian immigration to the U.S.; that one was crystal clear.
Goal Two was to shift the immigration flow back to Northern Europe, and away from Southern and Eastern Europe; that goal was disguised.
The “trick” was to implement a quota system built on the 1890 census.
The largest share of “immigrant slots” went to Britain at 65,721, a quota seldom used up.
Where the Act had the greatest effect was in limiting Italians, Greeks, Poles, Bohemians, Hungarians, and Romanians.
For example, 222,260 Italians were allowed to enter the country in 1921, but only 2,662 Italians were allowed in 1925.
(Data from Round Trip to America and White Borders.)

Portrait of Dr. Charles Richard Drew.

Dr. Charles Richard Drew (1904-1950) was an American surgeon and researcher who specialized in preserving and storing blood for transfusions.
His innovative techniques and systems (especially with blood plasma) kept thousands of U.S. and British soldiers alive during WWII, and continue to save lives today.

Dr. Charles Drew was Black.
In 1942, he resigned as his post—as Medical Director of the American Red Cross—after his organization refused to change its’ unscientific policy of segregating blood by the “race” of the donor.
The Red Cross did discontinue this policy six years later (1948) after it finally ruled that there was no reason to segregate blood.

* “More than 60% of those found guilty at Old Bailey in 1774 [the chief criminal court of London] were transported [to the 13 colonies].” (page 147, Rotten Bodies: Class & Contagion in 18th-Century Britain, Kevin Siena, Yale University Press, 2019).