In 2016 J.D. Vance released a memoir of his formative years as a member of a hillbilly family just trying to survive. His story was about overcoming obstacles as he eventually made it out of his small town to attend college and Yale Law School.
At the time, it was overwhelmingly praised as a reflection of poverty and the problems the poor face in this nation. It was so popular that liberal Hollywood took notice and Netflix released a movie version of the memoir directed by mega star Ron Howard that starred big hitters Glenn Close and Amy Adams.
While the book remained on Amazon’s best seller list since its publication, there has recently been a seismic shift towards criticism as Vance made the fateful decision to accept the Vice Presidency nomination from Donald Trump. What was once called courageous and insightful is now called generic, over simplified and insulting.
Why did the reviews change?
Because the people described in Vance’s memoir were once the bread and butter of the Democratic Party. Having one of their own defect and run on the Trump ticket is scary as it could draw support from those who grew up like him.
In many ways, Vance is an interesting conservative. The quote that came to mind while reading is, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
The problem is this quote does not come from a conservative icon like Ronald Reagan, but from Germanborn political theorist Karl Marx. While much of the current political rhetoric today is about race, at its heart “Hillbilly Elegy” is a story of class struggle.
Vance writes in the introduction, “In our race-conscious society, our vocabulary often extends no further than the color of someone’s skin—“Black people,” “Asians,” “white privilege.”
Sometimes these broad categories are useful, but to understand my story, you have to delve into the details. I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) of the Northeast. Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots Irish descent who have no college degree.
To these folks, poverty is the family tradition— their ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.” Vance even suggests that in some ways that the white migrants who traveled the “Hillbilly Highway” out of Appalachia sometimes had more in common with Black families that came north during the “Great Migration” than they did with the Midwesterner Yankees in Ohio.
In many ways “Hillbilly Elegy” is two separate narratives being told at the same time.
The first is the story of a hillbilly child enduring horrific circumstances until he could finally escape and make good.
The other story is about the culture.
Vance writes about, “the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It’s about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages a social decay instead of counteracting it.”
The main story is Vance’s upbringing.
Before he was born, his family came from the hollers of Appalachian eastern Kentucky and traveled the “Hillbilly Highway” to Ohio during the 1930s and 40s. Like so many others from the region, they settled in Ohio but kept one foot back in the mountains. Vance grew up between the two regions, living most of his life in Middletown, Ohio, but spending free time and connecting more with Jackson, Kentucky, where his people were from.
His upbringing might as well be a twisted Grimm’s fairytale, and not a Disneyfied version.
His father abandoned him as a baby, leading his mother to bring home a string of men as new fathers, none of which lasted long. His mother eventually became an addict. While his family had good people, his childhood was full of poverty, domestic abuse, violence, drugs, alcohol and worst of all, a profound sense of hopelessness.
His salvation was his grandparents who even though were at times violent. His grandmother’s language would make a sailor blush, but she loved him unconditionally and pushed him to be the best person he could be. Their home was his refuge and when with them he thrived, but when away struggled. After almost dropping out of high school, Vance moved in with his grandmother and turned around his last two years.
Vance did well enough to get accepted to Ohio State University, but in the most impressive self-aware moment of his life, he realized he was not prepared enough to succeed in college. In a decision that changed his life, he instead joined the Marines. Not only would the Corps teach him about life, but it would pay for his education. As a college professor, I wish more would follow this example especially as we debate who should pay for college.
The Marines taught Vance to be a man and take responsibility. When he graduated, he then enrolled in Ohio State where he did well enough to be accepted into Yale to study law.
His chapters at Yale read almost like a recruitment flyer as Yale could not ask for a better endorsement of its culture and philosophy of learning (Ohio State not so much). While he struggled with what he compared to survivors’ guilt of making it, he also thrived once again, especially with help from certain professors and most importantly his girlfriend who later became his wife.
For Vance, Yale was almost a foreign country where everyone spoke a different language and he wrestled with how and why he was able to join this new world when so many like him cannot.
Woven throughout his narrative are suggestions but mostly questions about why. Vance takes on subjects that are taboo, mostly that of culture. While he does not say it, I believe Vance would agree that this applies to Black America as well as hillbillies.
He writes, “Doing better requires that we acknowledge the role of culture. As the liberal senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued, ‘The central conservative truth is that it is cul- ture, not politics, that determines the success of a society.’ I agree, and my view that there will never be a purely government- based solution to the problems I write about has remained largely unchanged.” While Vance loves his people, he is also criti-cal of many aspects of the culture that needs to change if the generational cycle of poverty, violence, drugs and hopelessness are ever going to be broken.
Published by Harper-Collins, New York, J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Criintroducing sis,” 272p, is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Bookshop, Target and Walmart.
James Finck is a professor of American history at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. He can be reached at HistoricallySpeakingl 776@gmail.com. mailto:776@gmail.com
