TRAILER PARKS
- 'TRAILER TRASH'
OR A WAY OF LIFE? -
G'day folks,
In 1954, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz starred in The Long, Long Trailer, a movie about
two newlyweds who decide to spend their honeymoon in a trailer. The film,
basically a goofy prop comedy in the style of I Love Lucy, was “frankly witless,” according
to the New York
Times that year, and the trailer a “contrivance strictly for
‘yaks.’” The shower head seems to attack Arnaz, and the trailer’s tilt turns
Lucy’s attempt to cook eggs into slapstick. By the mid-fifties, the trailer, a
modern cousin of the covered wagon, had been a fixture on the roads for a
couple of decades, but ideas about the kinds of people who had them were still
evolving. Though the movie was ostensibly about a middle-class couple looking
for a luxurious getaway, it drove home the idea that there was something
hilariously ill-fated, indeed absurd, about choosing trailer life.
The trailer has always held a special place in the
American imagination.
Once a symbol of freedom and mobility, it
became — through waves of economic hardship and discrimination over the course
of the 20th century — a testament to the limitations of the so-called land of
opportunity. Stated another way, trailers became the province of the have-nots,
and along the way, the pernicious myth of “trailer park trash” became core to a
set of stereotypes about lower-class white people.
“In the forties and fifties, we were thought of as
trailer trash,” says an interviewee in the documentary
“Suburbs on Wheels: A History of American Trailer Parks.” “I don’t know if
people didn’t want anything to do with us because we lived in these little
buildings, but we just stuck together, we hung together, we stuck up for each
other.”
The “little buildings” started as vessels designed to
be pulled by cars, which were, in the years following World War I, suddenly
abundant. Between 1922 and 1929, car production essentially
doubled, from 2.27 million automobiles to 4.45 million. Although the
Interstate Highway System wouldn’t be authorized for another generation, more
cars meant more movement. In particular, it meant that families could travel as
they hadn’t been able to before.
Trailer parks began as resting places for these newly
mobile travelers. They were a safe place to stop, and many also accommodated
tents. At the time, many trailers were homemade, built according to simple
plans, though the manufacturing of trailers had been growing since the 1930s.
Of
course, that was also the period of the Great Depression, when many were forced
into a life of destitution and itinerancy. This was the era when the trailer
park acquired its reputation as “trashy.” As more and more people used rolling
domiciles as permanent homes, the once glamourous capsules went from
representing freedom to representing its opposite: confinement and a lack of
opportunity.
Trailer
living became an even more entrenched way of life during World War II, when
mobile home parks were used to accommodate factory workers, “sturdy families
who’ve answered the call of production,” according to a government film
advertising the Defense Housing Program.
Even as the
trailer was repurposed for patriotic ends, those who lived in them were seen as
low-class, even “squatters.” As Nancy Isenberg points out in her 2016 book White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History
of Class in America, the trailer industry attempted to rehabilitate
its image in the late 1940s by doubling down on advertising the units as
“trailer coaches,” with ample space set among well-kept neighbors. The
manufacturing industry even “pressed for improved trailer ‘parks’ — an image
that conjured well-manicured, family-friendly garden sites and was meant to
cast off the temporary-sounding, refugee-bearing trailer ‘camps’ of World War
II,” Isenberg writes.
The tension that the trailer represented — a strange
duality of freedom and confinement — was borne out, according to Isenberg, in
the pulp fiction of the time, which established a few enduring trailer park
tropes. Novels with titles like Trailer
Tramp and The
Trailer Park Girls peddled stories of sexual deviance and, in
particular, “easy” women engaging in no-holds-barred sex in the liminal world
embodied by the “edge of town.”
Through these representations, the “freedom” of the
trailer park was recast as rootlessness, even lawlessness. As Isenberg writes,
“At their worst, such places have been associated with liberty’s dark side:
deviant, dystopian wastelands set on the fringe of the metropolis.” The trailer
is a bundle of contradictions: As an object, Isenberg writes, “the trailer is
something modern and antimodern, chic and gauche, liberating and suffocating.
Unlike the dull but safe middle American suburb, trailer parks contain folks
who appear on the way out not up: retired persons, migrant workers and the
troubled poor. This remains true today.”
As the century wore on, the trailer had a hard time
competing with another wave of marginally more permanent affordable housing: the
tract house. In the 1950s, developers began building out American suburbs, and
the prefabricated housing options offered by construction companies like Levitt
& Sons became the centerpiece of the postwar American Dream. And as
Isenberg is careful to note, the Federal Housing Authority did not even begin
insuring mortgages for trailer homes until 1971, which meant that owners faced
“hidden fees and penalties” that offset their supposedly cheap price tags. This
also made trailer residents a target of resentment, since they weren’t paying
property taxes.
Moreover, since desirable plots of land were used for new
suburban home construction, trailer parks were often consigned to unappealing
lots, which has led to them being the biggest victims of natural disasters.
All of these factors contributed to the American
notion of the trailer park. But historical factors aren’t the only relevant
ones to consider. As writer Emily Colucci argues
on the blog Filthy Dreams,
the “trash” in trailer trash, and at the center of a broader “trashy” aesthetic
and sensibility, is in fact a form of excess. We see trash as overflow or
excess, so we are more likely to see the trailer park as lurid and its denizens
as inessential to the functioning of the community.
Though Lucy and Desi were arguably just cruising
American highways in search of honeymoon adventures in The Long, Long Trailer, they
were also part of a tradition of rendering ridiculous a life lived, even
temporarily, in a substandard, socially unacceptable way. As Isenberg deftly
establishes throughout White
Trash, representation matters. With almost no cultural images of
dignified life on the inside of a trailer, or in the often close-knit
neighborhoods that trailer parks become, Americans cling instead to the simple,
outmoded ideas about trailers and their inhabitants that they’ve held for
nearly a century.
Clancy's comment: My father used to say, 'Home is where you hang your swag'. So, each to their own, eh?
I'm ...
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