The actions of the world’s most famous out-of-work
politician has led to a revival of a poisonous phrase that somehow has eluded
the language police. Certain Clintonian behavior-the pilfering of White House
knickknacks that belonged to the People of the United States; the appearance of
pay-to-play pardons-has inspired unfriendly citations of the phrase “trailer
trash.”
Howie Carr, the acerbic
Boston Herald writer and tormentor of all Kennedys, set the tone for the
post-Presidential Clinton chronicles on the very day that White House furniture
began making its way north to Chappaqua. In a Jan. 21 Herald column, Mr. Carr offered a fond farewell to Mr. Clinton with
the following terms of endearment: “The man’s pure T trash, as they say in the
South.” (Presumably Mr. Carr means the region that had been known, until free
trade and the global marketplace came along, as the Land of Cotton, and not the
southern section of his home city.) Mr. Carr continued: “You can take the boy
out of the trailer park, but you can’t take the trailer out of the boy.”
I have no idea how familiar Mr. Carr is with trailer parks,
although it seems fair to say that he believes the residents of such places
have a good deal to learn from their social betters in the housing projects of
Southie. I, however, can speak with some authority on the subject. Not only is
my native borough of Staten Island the proud home of New York City’s only
trailer park, but-ye readers of genteel disposition, avert thine eyes-my own
parents are ensconced, and quite happily, in a snowbird trailer park in
Florida. And yet, as far as I know, they managed to get through their public
tour of the White House a few decades ago without taking so much as a towel,
and they certainly haven’t accepted cash money in exchange for pardons.
(Believe me, I tried. But I’m still serving time for that engine I blew on
their station wagon back in 1978.)
I spent a couple of days in their trailer park in late
January and didn’t meet anybody who looked like they might one day run off with
White House property, or shake down Asian businessmen, or suffer convenient
memory lapses. For the most part, my parents’ neighbors were men who served in
World War II or Korea and their wives. They all had either their own teeth or
reasonable facsimiles; nobody was married to a blood relative; their clothes
were clean (although unfashionable enough to inspire screams of disdain on
Seventh Avenue); and they spoke with great fondness about organized labor and
the need for unions.
Oh, yes: And they all voted for George W. Bush. This latter
fact would hardly have come as a surprise to the President himself. James
Carville once famously dismissed Paula Jones in the same way Mr. Carr dismissed
Mr. Clinton-as trailer trash-but Mr. Bush delighted in telling his aides last
year that he was winning what he affectionately called “the double-wide vote.” Perhaps one day, in
some election yet to come, Democratic operatives will learn to speak with just
a bit more reverence for white working-class people who happen to make their
residence in double-wides. Or even single-wides.
One wonders what the trash-talkers would make of two dead
politicians who are about to reappear in the public consciousness, thanks to
terrific new biographies that are beginning to appear in bookstores. Alfred E.
Smith was reared in circumstances that might best be described as the urban
equivalent of a trailer park, and Thomas P. O’Neill was the son of a
working-class family that lived in a white ethnic ghetto. The manner in which
they lived-Smith in particular-no doubt would offend the very same people who
look with such disdain on the trailer-parkies.
Historian Robert Slayton tells Smith’s story in Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of
Al Smith, while journalist John A. Farrell of the Boston Globe chronicles O’Neill’s journey from the streets of
Cambridge to the halls of the U.S. Capitol in Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century. (Consumer alert: I wrote a
blurb for Mr. Slayton’s book and will be introducing him at a book party on
March 15.)
Smith and O’Neill spent their careers working on behalf of
the people they knew-if not personally, then through their real-life,
street-level experience. It is impossible to imagine either one dismissing poor
or working people as “trailer trash.” Quite the contrary: Once, when Smith was
presiding over a hearing about the construction of public beaches on Long
Island, a witness complained that the project would wind up attracting “the
rabble.”
“The rabble?” replied this son of the Lower East Side. ” I’m the rabble.”
Imagine somebody talking like that today.
Follow Terry Golway via RSS.
