In the introduction, I analyze visual artists’ depictions of poor white people that were produced in the 1890s and the 1930s—periods of economic depression—in order to make the case that representations of poor white southerners often serve as barometers of the cultural anxieties gripping members of the middle class. Works by two American artists—E. W. Kemble, an illustrator best known for the drawings he produced for the first edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Walker Evans, a photographer who collaborated with James Agee on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—illustrate how unflattering depictions of poor whites act as foils for higher-status white people’s desired self-conceptions. This analysis models the methodology I use throughout this study by establishing how representations of poor white southerners can serve as windows onto the middle-class (and occasionally upper-class) people who create and consume them.