This is a wee postscript to previous post.
Nancy Eisenberg’s White Trash has many telling direct quotes.
My favourite is a remark made by Lyndon Johnson when he encountered a group of “homely” women holding up racist signs in Tennessee:
I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. 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.
LBJ was a very shrewd observer of how politicians “played” poor white voters by deploying “the race card”.
To his credit, Johnson always detested such behaviour and did not himself campaign that way.
Eisenberg’s book is full of interesting asides; typically, they correct common misconceptions.
For example, she notes that LBJ – not JFK – was the instigator of “stepping into the space race”, that Johnson never wore a ten-gallon cowboy hat – his was a modified, more photogenic, five-gallon version, with a narrower brim – and that LBJ was the first US politician to use a helicopter – in his 1948 Senate campaign.