On Andrew Johnson

(Letter)

25 April 2013

Dear WV,

I was shocked to read the epithet “poor white trash” in the most recent (#1022) issue of Workers Vanguard. “Poor white trash” is a phrase, along with “trailer trash,” that one hears frequently in this sick society, a phrase that implicitly expresses contempt for the poor and powerless. Some of this “trash” will certainly become brothers and sisters in the fight for the liberation of humanity.

Of course the phrase was not used in quite this way in your article on the Emancipation Proclamation. It was used to refer to Andrew Johnson and his ilk, which, if any humans can be thought of as “trash,” they are certainly fine examples. But in a decent, i.e., socialist, society the phrase itself will surely be relegated to the blighted past when society was tormented by the poison of bourgeois ideology.

A WV reader from Boston

WV replies:

It is true that Marxists—who seek to win the downtrodden to unite behind the multiracial working class—do not throw around the epithet “poor white trash.” As our reader indicates, the term was used in the article specifically to describe President Johnson: “Johnson had an all-consuming hatred of black people. He was a former slaveowner with the mentality of poor white trash, a racist appeaser of remnants of the slavocracy” (“150 Years Since the Emancipation Proclamation, Part Two,” WV No. 1022, 19 April).

It would have been correct to say that Johnson had the mentality of what the lords of the lash called “poor white trash.” Poor whites were worth less to the planter aristocracy than were black slaves. Johnson was raised in an impoverished white family and was steeped in the limitations, prejudices and ambitions of his social class. For a while, he was able to partially transcend his origins. He began his political career as a champion of the poor laborer. Starting in the 1840s, he fought for granting free land to farmers (part of the Homestead Act of 1862). As a staunch Unionist during the Civil War, he demanded severe punishment of those Southerners who had brought on the war. When he assumed the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination, many thought that bloody retribution might be the order of the day. But the war had changed everything.

When, after the war, Johnson realized that black people would have to be included in any dispensation that benefited poor whites, he did a 180-degree turn. As our article stated: “Johnson was really fearful of a link-up of black and white poor. The idea of real social and political equality repelled him.” He dealt terrible blows to the fight for black equality. In Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (1935), W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that Johnson represented “the tragedy of American prejudice made flesh; so that the man born to narrow circumstances, a rebel against economic privilege, died with the conventional ambition of a poor white to be the associate and benefactor of monopolists, planters and slave drivers.”