A Poor View
“WASTE PEOPLE. OFFSCOURINGS. LUBBERS. BOGTROTTERS. RASCALS. Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters. Tackies. Mudsills … Hillbillies. Low-downers … Degenerates. White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people … From the beginning, they have existed in the minds of rural and urban elites….” So notes Nancy Isenberg in her influential cultural history, White Trash: the 400-Year-Old Untold History of Class in America. Isenberg’s fierce focus rarely strays from the South, but as she stresses, the reach of the idea of waste people is as wide as the Republic. In the Adirondacks no less than in the Deep South or Appalachia, a rural underclass has been a fact of life since the first decades of recorded European history. Booms and busts will tweak the numbers but impoverishment itself is as reliable a feature of our region as the iron skies of winter.
What does change from one era to the next is how we see Adirondack poverty—how we choose to represent it. Rural poverty is a hot button all over the country now. From somber findings from the Brookings Institute to a new, scrupulously researched monograph from Protect the Adirondacks!, from The New York Times to special series by North Country Public Radio and Mountain Lake PBS, from bestsellers like Hillbilly Elegy to poverty-themed symposia and conferences in Plattsburgh and Lake Placid, the subject owns the spot. But that spotlight’s on the present. These pages take up something else. Not poverty itself, but the imagery, the spin, the gauze of rhetoric that comes between us and the thing itself.
Framed by image-makers past and present—county and regional historians, travel writers, wilderness ideologues, reporters, painters, marketeers—the Adirondack
