Coda

Summary

This book has worked to show how, across generations and across movements and genres, American authors have represented poor white southerners as out of step with what is going on in middle-class Americans’ lives. In the late nineteenth century, a period awash in social and personal improvement schemes of all stripes, poor white southerners were routinely depicted as unimprovable – as “less plastic to civilization than any other race in America,” as Clare de Graffenried wrote in the Century in 1891.¹ During the interwar period, a time profoundly shaped by the modernist credo “make it new,” poor white southerners were frequently pictured as unmodern. At midcentury, as civil rights activists scored victories against racially unjust social, political, and commercial systems, poor white southerners were often presented as unprogressive. At the end of the twentieth century, amid a health and wellness craze – step aerobics, the Thighmaster, Jazzercise, and the Abdominizer were all popular in this era – poor white southerners were routinely portrayed as unhealthy. And today?