White Trash, Hillbillies, and Middle-Class Stereotypes | LAWCHA
White Trash, Hillbillies, and Middle-Class Stereotypes by Jack Metzgar on September 25th,
During election years white people who do not have bachelor’s degrees (the increasingly common definition of “the working class”) become both a somewhat exotic who-knew-they-were-here-and-in-such-large-numbers object of discussion and a target for freewheeling social psychologizing. Thus, it is more than a little refreshing to see two books attempt to tackle the more exotic side of Donald Trump’s beloved “the poorly educated.” White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by LSU historian Nancy Isenberg, is a progressive-leaning account of the disdain shifting groups of white workers and vagrants have suffered throughout U.S. history. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by Silicon Valley executive J.D. Vance, is a politically conservative account of Vance’s rearing by a drug-and-alcohol-addicted mother, rough but loving grandparents, a wonderful sister, a reliable aunt, and the U.S. Marines. Hillbilly Elegy is by far the better book.
classlabor history bookspoliticsrace and classWorking Class Perspectives Looking for More?
ToniGilpin
This is great, Jack. I haven’t yet read either book but have read several commentaries on both, from right and left, and have been made uneasy by those critiques but wasn’t sure why. I had thought after reading a few dismissals of Vance’s book from the left that I wouldn’t bother with it but now I will pick it up. What you suggest about the virtues of his book reminds me of a quote I have on my desk from Harriette Arnow, someone else who told nuanced stories about the complicated people referred to as “white trash.” She said: “I memorized some verses from Corinthians. ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.’ And some versions read ‘love.’ I substituted ‘sincerity’ and used it as a text for writing…That’s a good text for anyone. Or leave it as it is. Because usually we love or have charity for the people of whom we write, for our characters.” So anyone who writes about people — historians included — needs to have that love (even for the figures we despise, paradoxically) to tell the story right, I would argue. So in your view Vance has that, even if he lacks the proper perspective, and so that makes him worth reading. Thanks for the review!
Toni: “worth reading”? Don’t bother. The book is a travesty. Dwight Billings
is a thirty-one year old graduate of Yale Law School and a principal in a
Silicon Valley investment firm. He is also a political conservative and a
self-described “hillbilly.” Vance was haphazardly raised by an unstable and
abusive, drug and alcohol-addicted single-mother in Middletown, Ohio, a Rust
Belt town “hemorrhaging jobs and hope.” His childhood was full of emotional trauma
and economic insecurity. Vance says he wrote Hillbilly Elegy to explain how he overcame the obstacles of his
childhood and the surrounding despair of his community. He attributes his success
to his severe but loving hillbilly grandparents who preached the value of hard
work and the American Dream of upward mobility as well as to an empowering
stint in the Marine Corps. His other purpose for writing in these troubled
economic times is to deliver a jeremiad to the white working class, especially
those of Scots-Irish descent with ties to Appalachia. Here he speaks like the
stern but loving father-figure he never had. It is one thing to write a
personal memoir but quite something else—something exceedingly audacious—to
presume to write the “memoir” of a culture. Vance notes
that “Noble-winning economists worry about the decline of the industrial
Midwest and the hollowing out of the economic core of working whites” but more
important, he contends, is “what goes on in the lives of real people when the
economy goes south.” There is nothing wrong with that question, of course, but
his answer points in the wrong direction. The real problem, he says, is about people
“reacting to bad circumstances in the worst possible way. It’s about a culture
that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.” It’s often said
that you can’t judge a book by its cover but in this case you can. All you really
need to know about Hillbilly Elegy can
be learned from who has endorsed it on the back cover: Reihan Salam, Peter
Thiel, and Amy Chua. Salam is the rightwing editor of the National Review. Thiel is the libertarian venture capitalist, hedge
fund manager, and co-founder of PayPal who recently endorsed Donald Trump at
the Republican National Convention. Amy Chua, Vance’s mentor in law school, is
the author of a controversial, best-selling book advocating harsh childrearing
practices, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger
Mother. With her husband Jeb Rubenfeld, Chua also wrote The Triple Package which purports to
explain why some ethnic/cultural groups are more successful than others because
of a sense of superiority, impulse control, and motivating levels of
insecurity. Having backers like these—and conservative columnist David Brooks
who recently proclaimed in the New York
Times that Hillbilly Elegy “is
essential reading for this moment in history”—helps to explain the
extraordinary but undeserved attention Vance’s book is getting.* Since Vance’s hillbilly losers are portrayed
as the opposite of Chua and Rubenfeld’s winners, his endorsements also help to explain
Vance’s bottom line: “Public policy can help, but there is no government that
can fix these problems for us. . . These problems [drug addiction, teen pregnancy
and illegitimacy, the lack of a work ethic, the inability to face the truth
about one’s self, etc.] were not created by governments or corporations or
anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them.” Vance’s fix, the usual
neoliberal fix, is fix thyself. There is, of course, nothing new here. Hillbilly Elegy is the pejorative Moynihan
report on the black family in white face. But its compelling and at times heart-rending
memoiristic style, appearing when there is considerable interest in the anger
and alienation of the white working class and its presumed support for Donald
Trump, is likely fueling much of the book’s popular success. **
image of an Appalachian barn on the side of a dirt road is on the book’s front
cover. But Vance knows little about contemporary Appalachia—certainly not the region’s
vibrant grassroots struggles to build a post-coal economy. He has only visited
family members in eastern Kentucky or attended funerals there. His inventory of
pathological Appalachian traits—violence, fatalism, learned helplessness,
poverty as a “family tradition”—reads like a catalog of stereotypes Appalachian
scholars have worked so long to dispel. (See works by Henry Shapiro and Anthony
Harkins for the origins of these persistent stereotypes and how they have been
deployed for more than a century.) Vance’s
Appalachia is refracted thru the distorted lens of his own dysfunctional family
experience. It makes as much sense as generalizing about Italian Americans from
of Hillbilly Elegy, however, is not
Appalachia but the experience of Appalachian out-migrants. This topic has been expertly
documented by serious scholars such as Chad Berry, Phillip Obermiller, and Harry
Schwarzweller, James Brown, and Garth Mangalam among others, but their research
does not inform Hillbilly Elegy. Vance
claims his authority to speak to and about this regional group on the basis of
being a Scots-Irish descendant of Appalachia whose maternal grandparents migrated
from the Kentucky Mountains to the Midwest for industrial work. They were
rough, foul-mouthed, and violent. Vance describes his beloved grandmother—his “Mamaw”—as
a “pistol-packing lunatic” who “came from a family that would shoot at your
rather than argue with you” (p. 25). He claims that one of his Vance ancestors
set off the Hatfield and McCoy feud and he seems to relish telling how his
Mamaw once tried to kill his grandfather by setting him on fire with gasoline after
he had passed out drunk. Nonetheless, his grandfather made a good living as a
steelworker and he and his wife provided the “love and stability” Vance’s mother
could never offer. Vance believes that their demands for hard work, discipline,
and a love of America as the greatest country on earth enabled him to become, in
my words, a little engine that could. I tell my
students in Appalachian studies courses to beware of two intellectual
tendencies in writings about any group—essentialism
(“this is the essence of what they are like”) and universalism (“everyone in the group is like this”). Vance heaps on
both. I also warn them not to ontologize their neuroses. I picked up this
advice from Arthur Mizman’s psychoanalytical study of Max Weber which contended
that Weber was guilty of trying to reconcile his childhood angst about the irreconcilable
conflict between his pietistic mother and businessman father by writing The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Not to ontologize one’s personal and family neuroses by projecting them onto a culture
or a regional group is good advice unless one is as brilliant a cultural
analyst as Max Weber. J. D. Vance is no Max Weber.
* On August
7, 2016, Hillbilly Elegy ranked
number nine on the New York Times list
of hardcover, nonfiction best-selling books. ** For why
Vance says he both loves and is terrified by Donald Trump, see Rod Dreher’s
interview with him, “Trump: Tribune of Poor White People,” at http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/trump-us-politics-poor-whites/.
White Trash, Hillbillies, and Middle-Class Stereotypes | LAWCHA
White Trash, Hillbillies, and Middle-Class Stereotypes by Jack Metzgar on September 25th,
During election years white people who do not have bachelor’s degrees (the increasingly common definition of “the working class”) become both a somewhat exotic who-knew-they-were-here-and-in-such-large-numbers object of discussion and a target for freewheeling social psychologizing. Thus, it is more than a little refreshing to see two books attempt to tackle the more exotic side of Donald Trump’s beloved “the poorly educated.” White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by LSU historian Nancy Isenberg, is a progressive-leaning account of the disdain shifting groups of white workers and vagrants have suffered throughout U.S. history. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by Silicon Valley executive J.D. Vance, is a politically conservative account of Vance’s rearing by a drug-and-alcohol-addicted mother, rough but loving grandparents, a wonderful sister, a reliable aunt, and the U.S. Marines. Hillbilly Elegy is by far the better book.
classlabor history bookspoliticsrace and classWorking Class Perspectives Looking for More?
ToniGilpin
This is great, Jack. I haven’t yet read either book but have read several commentaries on both, from right and left, and have been made uneasy by those critiques but wasn’t sure why. I had thought after reading a few dismissals of Vance’s book from the left that I wouldn’t bother with it but now I will pick it up. What you suggest about the virtues of his book reminds me of a quote I have on my desk from Harriette Arnow, someone else who told nuanced stories about the complicated people referred to as “white trash.” She said: “I memorized some verses from Corinthians. ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.’ And some versions read ‘love.’ I substituted ‘sincerity’ and used it as a text for writing…That’s a good text for anyone. Or leave it as it is. Because usually we love or have charity for the people of whom we write, for our characters.” So anyone who writes about people — historians included — needs to have that love (even for the figures we despise, paradoxically) to tell the story right, I would argue. So in your view Vance has that, even if he lacks the proper perspective, and so that makes him worth reading. Thanks for the review!
Toni: “worth reading”? Don’t bother. The book is a travesty. Dwight Billings
is a thirty-one year old graduate of Yale Law School and a principal in a
Silicon Valley investment firm. He is also a political conservative and a
self-described “hillbilly.” Vance was haphazardly raised by an unstable and
abusive, drug and alcohol-addicted single-mother in Middletown, Ohio, a Rust
Belt town “hemorrhaging jobs and hope.” His childhood was full of emotional trauma
and economic insecurity. Vance says he wrote Hillbilly Elegy to explain how he overcame the obstacles of his
childhood and the surrounding despair of his community. He attributes his success
to his severe but loving hillbilly grandparents who preached the value of hard
work and the American Dream of upward mobility as well as to an empowering
stint in the Marine Corps. His other purpose for writing in these troubled
economic times is to deliver a jeremiad to the white working class, especially
those of Scots-Irish descent with ties to Appalachia. Here he speaks like the
stern but loving father-figure he never had. It is one thing to write a
personal memoir but quite something else—something exceedingly audacious—to
presume to write the “memoir” of a culture. Vance notes
that “Noble-winning economists worry about the decline of the industrial
Midwest and the hollowing out of the economic core of working whites” but more
important, he contends, is “what goes on in the lives of real people when the
economy goes south.” There is nothing wrong with that question, of course, but
his answer points in the wrong direction. The real problem, he says, is about people
“reacting to bad circumstances in the worst possible way. It’s about a culture
that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.” It’s often said
that you can’t judge a book by its cover but in this case you can. All you really
need to know about Hillbilly Elegy can
be learned from who has endorsed it on the back cover: Reihan Salam, Peter
Thiel, and Amy Chua. Salam is the rightwing editor of the National Review. Thiel is the libertarian venture capitalist, hedge
fund manager, and co-founder of PayPal who recently endorsed Donald Trump at
the Republican National Convention. Amy Chua, Vance’s mentor in law school, is
the author of a controversial, best-selling book advocating harsh childrearing

practices, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger
Mother. With her husband Jeb Rubenfeld, Chua also wrote The Triple Package which purports to
explain why some ethnic/cultural groups are more successful than others because
of a sense of superiority, impulse control, and motivating levels of
insecurity. Having backers like these—and conservative columnist David Brooks
who recently proclaimed in the New York
Times that Hillbilly Elegy “is
essential reading for this moment in history”—helps to explain the
extraordinary but undeserved attention Vance’s book is getting.* Since Vance’s hillbilly losers are portrayed
as the opposite of Chua and Rubenfeld’s winners, his endorsements also help to explain
Vance’s bottom line: “Public policy can help, but there is no government that
can fix these problems for us. . . These problems [drug addiction, teen pregnancy
and illegitimacy, the lack of a work ethic, the inability to face the truth
about one’s self, etc.] were not created by governments or corporations or
anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them.” Vance’s fix, the usual
neoliberal fix, is fix thyself. There is, of course, nothing new here. Hillbilly Elegy is the pejorative Moynihan
report on the black family in white face. But its compelling and at times heart-rending
memoiristic style, appearing when there is considerable interest in the anger
and alienation of the white working class and its presumed support for Donald
Trump, is likely fueling much of the book’s popular success. **
image of an Appalachian barn on the side of a dirt road is on the book’s front
cover. But Vance knows little about contemporary Appalachia—certainly not the region’s
vibrant grassroots struggles to build a post-coal economy. He has only visited
family members in eastern Kentucky or attended funerals there. His inventory of
pathological Appalachian traits—violence, fatalism, learned helplessness,
poverty as a “family tradition”—reads like a catalog of stereotypes Appalachian
scholars have worked so long to dispel. (See works by Henry Shapiro and Anthony
Harkins for the origins of these persistent stereotypes and how they have been
deployed for more than a century.) Vance’s
Appalachia is refracted thru the distorted lens of his own dysfunctional family
experience. It makes as much sense as generalizing about Italian Americans from
of Hillbilly Elegy, however, is not
Appalachia but the experience of Appalachian out-migrants. This topic has been expertly
documented by serious scholars such as Chad Berry, Phillip Obermiller, and Harry
Schwarzweller, James Brown, and Garth Mangalam among others, but their research
does not inform Hillbilly Elegy. Vance
claims his authority to speak to and about this regional group on the basis of
being a Scots-Irish descendant of Appalachia whose maternal grandparents migrated
from the Kentucky Mountains to the Midwest for industrial work. They were
rough, foul-mouthed, and violent. Vance describes his beloved grandmother—his “Mamaw”—as
a “pistol-packing lunatic” who “came from a family that would shoot at your
rather than argue with you” (p. 25). He claims that one of his Vance ancestors
set off the Hatfield and McCoy feud and he seems to relish telling how his
Mamaw once tried to kill his grandfather by setting him on fire with gasoline after
he had passed out drunk. Nonetheless, his grandfather made a good living as a
steelworker and he and his wife provided the “love and stability” Vance’s mother
could never offer. Vance believes that their demands for hard work, discipline,
and a love of America as the greatest country on earth enabled him to become, in
my words, a little engine that could. I tell my
students in Appalachian studies courses to beware of two intellectual
tendencies in writings about any group—essentialism
(“this is the essence of what they are like”) and universalism (“everyone in the group is like this”). Vance heaps on
both. I also warn them not to ontologize their neuroses. I picked up this
advice from Arthur Mizman’s psychoanalytical study of Max Weber which contended
that Weber was guilty of trying to reconcile his childhood angst about the irreconcilable
conflict between his pietistic mother and businessman father by writing The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Not to ontologize one’s personal and family neuroses by projecting them onto a culture
or a regional group is good advice unless one is as brilliant a cultural
analyst as Max Weber. J. D. Vance is no Max Weber.
* On August
7, 2016, Hillbilly Elegy ranked
number nine on the New York Times list
of hardcover, nonfiction best-selling books. ** For why
Vance says he both loves and is terrified by Donald Trump, see Rod Dreher’s
interview with him, “Trump: Tribune of Poor White People,” at http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/trump-us-politics-poor-whites/.