The “little buildings” started as vessels designed to be pulled by cars, which were, in the years following World War I, suddenly abundant. “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.” 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.

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. The trailer has always held a special place in the American imagination. 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. 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. 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.

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.

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