Early in your introduction, you state that the central goal of Masterless Men is “situating poor white Southerners into America’s broader political economy.” Why is this such an important thread in US history?
Poor and working-class whites have almost always been left out of our country’s narrative because in many ways acknowledging their existence is a denial of the American dream, a festering wound in the heart of American exceptionalism. Poor whites in the South have been written out of history for a very political reason: the idea of a “solid white South,” wherein all classes of whites vote the same way and have the same interests, allows the propagation of the Confederate “Lost Cause” narrative, as well as the incorrect (but persistent) notion that all whites are elevated by racism.
This historical lie allows the extremely high levels of inequality between whites in the region to be minimized and generally ignored. Simultaneously, it psychologically unites white Southerners today over a mythical, romanticized, “shared” past as proud Confederates.
In reality, class dissent among white Southerners has a long and radical history, as does interaction and political cooperation between poorer whites and blacks, whether during antebellum times and early Reconstruction or during Populism or even the Civil Rights Movement.
There are few people in this country who know about poor white Communist factory workers attempting to overtake cotton mills in the 1920s and ’30s in the Carolinas, or the names of white Southern activists from the 1950s and ’60s. This kind of information is written out of history — for a very specific political purpose.