the female's fecundity. These patterns of behavior, and the sexual casualness they imply, may have become a stereotype, but the perception nevertheless continued into the 20th century and remains an important part of the idea of how white trash people – such as "trailer trash" – behave. Political ramifications Northerners claimed that the existence of white trash was the result of the system of slavery in the South, while Southerners worried that these clearly inferior whites would upset the "natural" class system which held that all whites were superior to all other races, especially blacks. People of both regions expressed concern that if the number of white trash people increased significantly, they would threaten the Jeffersonian ideal of a population of educated white freemen as the basis of a robust American democracy. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, the transcendentalist and pre-eminent American lecturer, writer and philosopher of the mid-nineteenth century, poor people of all kinds – including poor white Southerners – lived in poverty because of inherent traits in their nature. The poor were "ferried over the Atlantic & carted to America to ditch & to drudge, to make the land fertile ... and then to lie down prematurely to make a spot of greener grass..." These people Emerson referred to as "guano" were fated to inhabit the lowest niches of society, and he specifically excluded them from his definition of what an American was. Emerson's "American" was of Saxon heritage, descended from the Danes, Norsemen, Saxons, and Anglo-Saxons, known for their "excess of virility", their "beastly ferocity", and – at least in Emerson's eyes – their beauty. These were not traits that were shared by the poor white Southerners. Americans may have degenerated somewhat in comparison to their ancestors, one of the weakening effects of civilization, but they still maintained their superiority over other "races", and white Southerners of all kinds, but especially poor ones, were themselves inferior to their countrymen from New England and the north. Some, such as Theodore Roosevelt, saw poor "degenerate" whites – as well as the mass of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe (those from northern Europe having been accepted in the Anglo-Saxon white race) – as being a major part of the problem of "race suicide", the concept that poor whites and unwanted immigrants would eventually out-procreate those of the dominant and superior white "race", causing it to die out or be supplanted,