THE WHITE-MINSTREL-SHOW VERSION OF HISTORY: Kevin D. Williamson reviews (read: eviscerates) Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class:

She does not even seem to read her own sentences, at least as they relate to one another in sequence, e.g.: “[Benjamin] Franklin was not sympathetic to the plight of the poor. His design for the Pennsylvania Hospital in 1751 was intended to assist the industrious poor, primarily men with physical injuries.” I found myself blinking and rereading that sentence, and wondering how and why a man who was not sympathetic to the plight of the poor should design a charity hospital for their benefit. It is true that Franklin, like charitable men before and after and now, distinguished between different kinds of poor people, between the so-called deserving poor and ordinary bums, partly as a moral exercise and partly as a kind of philanthropic triage, resources being limited. But there is not an ordinary reading of the English words “was not sympathetic to the plight of the poor” that describes a man who undertook to relieve the plight of the poor through charitable works.

Franklin particularly perplexes and vexes Isenberg. He was a fugitive from an apprenticeship to his older brother (a form of indenture) and was from a family of modest means. Isenberg writes: “He had arrived in Philadelphia in 1723 as a runaway, meanly dressed in filthy, wet clothing.” Given this fact, she is scandalized by Franklin’s later complaints about “vagrant and idle persons” congregating in Philadelphia. (The more things change . . .) One wonders whether Isenberg has ever been to America. Franklin, as Isenberg might learn from reading Isenberg, was a man who began with very little and who managed to rise in Philadelphia — and rise and rise until he became its most celebrated resident — despite being an outsider to the Quaker mafia that ran the place and having no real connections to the “Proprietors,” the Penns and allied families who dominated the colony socially and economically. How did that happen? Isenberg knows: “Quaker patrons,” including the lawyer Alexander Hamilton (no relation to that guy Aaron Burr shot), “a non-Quaker leader of the Quaker Party,” along with “liberal Friends, who were not exclusive about who should wield influence within the political faction of the Quaker Party.” Which is to say, Franklin rose in no small part through his own hard work and cunning but was also enabled by an open, liberal, cosmopolitan, commercial society in which one’s original station in life was not necessarily one’s final station — i.e., he rose because of the very American order whose liberality this daft book was written to debunk.

Read the whole thing. And for a far better look at the same topic, check out J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy.