Adirondack Life – September 2019

46 ADIRONDACK LIFE September + October 2019

How outsiders

saw struggling

Adirondackers—

if they saw

them at all

“WASTE PEOPLE. OFFSCOURINGS. LUBBERS. BOGTROTTERS. RASCALS.

Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters. Tackies. Mudsills ... Hillbillies. Low-down-

ers ... 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 mono-

graph from Protect the Adirondacks!, from The New York Times to special series by North

BY AMY GODINE

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