White trash : the eugenic family studies, 1877-1919 / edited and with an introduction by Nicole Hahn Rafter.

Date:
[1988]
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: White trash : the eugenic family studies, 1877-1919 / edited and with an introduction by Nicole Hahn Rafter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    3 FRANK W. BLACKMAR The Smoky Pilgrims* Preface Frank Blackmar regarded his study as a contribution to the Juke-Ishmael tradition, claiming that the Smoky Pilgrim family, or tribe, though much smaller, resembles the other two (p. 59). Like Dugdiile's Hereditary Pau¬ perism and McCulloch's Tribe of Ishmael, this study focuses on pauper characteristics; and like his two predecessors, Blackmar had direct contact with living family members. In this case, however, such contact was the au¬ thor's sole source of information. Compared to the Jukes and Ishmaels, the Smoky Pilgrims were a small family indeed. Blackmar describes it as now numbering ten persons, hint¬ ing that he has knowledge of others, but gives information only on the cur¬ rent clan. The discussion is organized around the family's two habita¬ tions, perhaps to give an impression of different family strains. In fact, the Smoky Pilgrims consisted of three generations of one family so tightly knit as to pass daily to and fro between the two homes. Blackmar blames the small size of his sample and his meager records on the family itself: Only those who have had dealings with this class of people know how difficult it has been to ascertain this much truth (p. 64). Blackmar's lengthy introduction establishes two themes. The first, with a kind of inverted patriotism, holds that large eastern cities have no monopoly on social corruption. A resident of Lawrence, Kansas, which evidently was the setting for this study, the author argued that rural areas of the great West have their own social evils. Conditions in the West actually encour¬ age development of the tramp family because the strongest desert the country for the city, leaving behind a social residuum that cannot compete in the struggle for existence. Blackmar's second theme concerns the need to intensify social control in rural areas, where isolation, monotony, and lack of supervision encourage pauper and criminal characteristics [to] develop quite rapidly. More stringent restrictions, especially on loutish country boys who are permitted to run at large, will raise the level of morality. Reading The Smoky Pil¬ grims, one gets the decided impression that its professorial author had at some point been humiliated by rough youths of the region to which he was, clearly, very much attached. Blackmar demands, in an argument uninte- grated with the genealogical part of his study, that such boys be brought under much tighter discipline. Despite its hereditarian overtones, The Smoky Pilgrims concludes by ad¬ vocating environmentcil solutions, specifically extensive institutionali- • Originally published in American Journal of Sociology 2 (January 1897): 485-500,
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