Hillbilly Elegy; J.D. Vance’s Bootstrap Tale of America’s Lost Values
U.S. Marine veteran and Yale-educated attorney J.D. Vance is, by his own admission, living the American Dream. According to his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance had to overcome his own Appalachian culture to get there.
Vance’s Elegy is a classic pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps tale of certain failure overcome by good, old-fashioned hard work. Vance describes his background in detail, starting with the explanation “To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart.” The author describes what this means as an obstacle and how he navigated the world of the successful to change his destiny. But while Vance’s tale of success is admirable, his sweeping generalizations about why people are not successful- particularly hillbillies, in his estimation- comes off as simply anecdotal moralizing.
To Vance, the Appalachian workers and families that migrated to manufacturing centers in the mid-twentieth century have both admirable and undesirable qualities. He notes the cultural traits of “an intense sense of loyalty, a fierce dedication to family and country” and contrasts that with a dislike of outsiders. He also expounds on what he sees as a lack of a real work ethic among Appalachians and this becomes a central theme of his argument.
As evidence of hillbilly culture, Vance uses anecdotes from his family, namely his grandparents, mother and father, along with extended family and neighbors. His grandparents were America-loving, gun-toting, foul-mouthed, but hard-working. His mother battled drug addiction and his biological father was not in his life until Vance’s teenage years. His neighbors in the Appalachian enclave of his childhood home, Middletown, Ohio, are described as volatile and prone to domestic disturbances, as well as welfare abusers.
As an ‘out”, Vance reminds readers at the outset, that this book is a memoir, not an academic exposé on the failings of Appalachian Americans. That said, he posits that there are cultural problems that keep hillbilly individuals and families from finding financial and career success using a few personal anecdotes and generalizations. He asserts that in Middletown, “30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and [you will] find not a single person aware of his own laziness.” Here Vance makes an assertion (30% of young Middletown men work less than 20 hours/week) with no context as to who these young men are, and what reason there is for their part-time status. They could be high school students or they could be college students are Miami University, Middletown Campus who work part time or they could be diligent men who are simply unable to find full time work in a struggling town. Without context, Vance leaps to the presumption of laziness.
Regarding Appalachians as welfare abusers, Vance offers a story about a childhood neighbor of his grandmother who “was a lifetime welfare recipient…never having worked a day in her life,” and who reportedly asked favors from Vance’s grandparents and sold her food stamps for cash. Vance states the woman’s welfare benefit status and working status of her entire adult life as fact with no other context than to portray her as a villain, a theft of our tax dollars.
When working a job at a neighborhood grocery store, Vance again uses anecdotal evidence to prove the laziness and theft of working-class whites. He states that “they’d buy two dozen-packs of soda with food stamps then sell them at a discount for cash,” assuming that that was true, and was a widespread problem. According to Vance, customers using food stamps would also “ring up their orders separately, buying food with food stamps and beer, wine and cigarettes with cash.” What the author fails to explain is that this is not fraud at all, this is how the system works: food stamps are only for food, but Vance levies an obvious judgement about how poor people are spending their own cash. His grocery store anecdote ends with a lament about how these same people were using their cell phones in the store and how he could only dream of such luxuries.
A fourth example of the perceived failings of hillbilly culture is described in the author’s summer job before moving to Connecticut to attend Yale Law School. Vance gleefully tells the tale of how he enjoyed working hard in a tile warehouse. That contrasts with two fellow employees who were lazy, called off work far too often and took excessive breaks. Vance sums up his warehouse observations stating the problem that there are “Too many young men immune to hard work.”
Added to Vance’s indictment of working-class ills, is his view of addiction. Detailing his mother’s addiction and first steps at recovery, Vance talks of arguments he had with his mother about whether addition was, in fact, a disease, “or an excuse for people whose decisions destroyed a family.” In these passages, his language to describe addiction and its causes is rather hostile and transparent, including using quotation marks around the term disease in reference to addiction.
Vance is not completely unsympathetic, he often speaks forlornly about the obstacles his Appalachian family worked to understand and overcome, and he doesn’t exclude himself from that work. But the common denominator in every negative tale about white working-class defeat is personal failings.
Mr. Vance’s social views harken back to the early 1800s when William Holmes McGuffey published his McGuffey Reader. McGuffey’s texts, informally codified the middle-class, American, protestant ideal: the value of hard work, the denunciation of laziness and the idea of success being the manifestation of good character. Vance agrees that the closing of manufacturing plants and the loss of jobs is a tough situation, but he also insinuates that people of good character do not use welfare, always have full-time work (or are engaged full-time in looking for it) and are principled enough to avoid addiction. In Vance’s world, there is no allowance for mental illness, disability, a lousy job market, the departure of sole bread-winners from families, or any other such catastrophes.
The McGuffeyian heroes of the author’s tale, himself and his grandparents, for all their flaws, embodied the working-class ideal. Tough times “didn’t excuse failure” to the Vances. Straight out of a McGuffey morality tale, they were “old-fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking.”
Vance’s rise to Yale Law School, his published articles (and now, a book), and his well-paying job at a California investment firm are often presented throughout the narrative with a downhome, “aw-shucks” kind of incredulity. With some exceptions, his path to success is described in quite ordinary terms and without revealing the many connections and lucky circumstances that likely got him where he is today. Interestingly, Vance notes his receipt of Pell Grants, subsidized student loans, a needs-based scholarship to Yale, and “in-part [,] the old-age benefits that Mamaw generously shared with me.” In addition to his own and his grandmother’s government assistance, the author reveals that he earned extra money in college by gambling, playing online poker. Vance, as the social critic, is much more likely to chastise other poor people who used government relief and potentially even gambled with it.
After presenting his judgement of the personal failings of working-class whites (and just a dash of his own hypocrisy), Vance isn’t entirely indifferent to the challenges of poverty. He notes that he did have mentors along the way. He notes that conservative society, to which many Appalachian people align themselves, exhibits a mistrust of basic institutions. This manifests in a mistrust of higher education, which contributes, in the author’s view, to a lack of effort and a lack of working towards a better life.
In looking for solutions to the cultural and economic problems of Appalachian communities, Vance admits that the a clear “fix” is not readily apparent. One could even say that he is downright pessimistic, saying, “I don’t think that solutions (as most understand the term) really exist.” He uses himself and a few other acquaintances as examples of hillbilly people who have achieved his vision of success, and sticks to the work-ethic as the most potent solution.
Candidly, Vance does acknowledge that government institutions, like Section 8 housing, Children Services have many needs for reforms that could help improve the changes for children’s success. He also seems to take some of the onus off of the individual for solutions as he suggests that youth can be empowered by their communities to succeed. Vance also includes Christian churches as an institution that can impart a sense of belonging and of purpose. (At first read, it can seem odd that only one religious tradition seems to be endorsed as capable of teaching values, but perhaps this is because Vance’s target of an Scots-Irish Appalachian audience, a group that nearly all profess a Christian faith.)
Although Vance laments hillbilly distrust of institutions, he also says that governments and corporations should not be blamed for working-class problems. “We created [these problems], and only we can fix them…[The solution] starts when we when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”
J.D. Vance is not a policy wonk. His book isn’t meant to paint a scene of satisfying solutions to the problem of poverty in his little corner of the world. Even when he quotes studies or articles, there is always his reminder at the beginning of the book that this is indeed a memoir, nothing more.
But in the same breath, his book is presented as an Appalachian elegy, a work of literature to lament and mourn a dying way of life, of a people in peril. His diagnosis of this terminal condition is lack of belief in hard work, a tendency to put the blame on someone else.
While he claims to not know the solution, Vance continually judges the symptoms along the way. And with himself positioned as the hero of the story, his climb to success is subtly suggested as the cure-all to hillbilly sloth, cynicism and apathy. In Vance’s memoir-cum-morality tale, one only needs to follow the moral reclamation and lived values of the author in order to claim a slice of the American Dream.
