Americans have always been suckers for a good political log cabin story, and JD Vance rang the bell with his 2016 bestseller Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.
Vance was praised for his candor and for calling attention to the impoverished region. He was criticized for overstating his connection to the “hillbillies” and for reducing Appalachia’s complex socioeconomic woes into a morality tale that fit his political ends. The book sold millions of copies and was the basis for the 2020 movie directed by Ron Howard.
Less than two years later, Vance was elected to the U.S. Senate in Ohio, his home state, and had emerged as a celebrity on conservative talks shows as a man-of-the-folks with a law degree from Yale and a resumé fattened in Silicon Valley with help from far-right tech billionaire Peter Thiel. Now, Vance is even better recognized as Donald Trump’s running mate. With an ability to stay on message superior to the man he appears to admire, Vance just might hold the key to Team Trump’s attempt to regain the White House.
For all his espoused connections to Appalachia, reading his book and listening to Vance has convinced me he understands the real challenges the region’s people face about as well as the fly-in journalists, documentarians and politicians who visit there. They come for the poverty, but rarely stay long enough to get to know the people.
For a much more accurate and balanced understanding of Appalachia, and by extension Vance and his made-for-TV origin story, I recommend Alan Maimon’s 2021 book Twilight in Hazard: An Appalachian Reckoning. The journalist and author, who won national awards for his work at The Las Vegas Review-Journal, spent five years as a reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal writing stories in Hazard County as a one-man bureau before cutbacks closed its doors.
It’s important to note that Maimon’s book isn’t a direct dressing down of Vance’s memoir. Vance is referenced on just three pages, but Maimon wastes little time blowing the doors off the old log cabin tale that included life lessons from crusty grandparents living in Breathitt County, Kentucky, deep in the heart of Appalachia.
“Mamaw and Papaw are from Eastern Kentucky, J.D. Vance is not, and only possesses vague memories of spending weekends and summer vacations there as a kid,” Maimon writes. “That is to say that almost none of the book actually takes place in Kentucky. It is largely set in the Appalachian diaspora, a fascinating place, to be sure, but not Appalachia itself. The message: He made it out. Why can’t the rest of you lazy Appalachians? When we ask this question we misunderstand the region’s problems.”
It’s pretty clear that Vance’s goal wasn’t to better understand those problems, but to exploit them. The region’s problems have long been easily exploited by Democrats and Republicans alike — and they certainly were by Trump. But whether it’s government handouts or bootstrap bromides, real change remains elusive for the poor, in part because the rich don’t mind all that much.
“Saying Eastern Kentucky is poor is not a generalization,” Maimon writes. “It is a fact-based statement. Saying all Eastern Kentuckians are poor is the generalization. In reality, some are incredibly wealthy, and that is important to portray, because it is impossible to understand the struggles of the region without acknowledging the socioeconomic inequities that arise from having a regional ruling class. The people at the top of the Eastern Kentucky financial ladder, everyone from the late mayor of Hazard to the coal executives who live in mansions and vacation in exotic locales, are integral to the story of how power has been gained and exerted in the region. But that type of investigation wouldn’t make for entertaining prime-time television. It would only feed fears of class warfare.”
But there’s a lot of reckoning going on these days in Appalachia and, to some scholars, writers and poets, Hillbilly Elegy has become a touchstone for tone deafness about the region and its people. Look no further than the pages of Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy for plenty of thoughtful examples. Edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll, the content is as moving as it is bruising.
For all of Vance’s complaints about the unwillingness of the people to help themselves, historian T.R.C. Hutton observes, “At no point does Vance suggest that Kentucky and Ohio residents might benefit from higher wages, better health care, or a renewed labor movement. That would run in the face of his bootstrap thesis. … Such concepts would interfere with Vance’s aims in writing Hillbilly Elegy, for the book is primarily a work of self-congratulation — a literary victory lap — and a vindication of a minimalist safety net.”
I think Dwight Billings had it right in Appalachian Reckoning when he concludes, “The great danger and ultimate tragedy of Hillbilly Elegy is not that it perpetuates Appalachian stereotypes. It is that it promotes toxic politics that will only further oppress the hillbillies that J.D. Vance professes to love and speak for.”
If the Trump-Vance ticket prevails in November, this clapboard facade is what will pass for compassionate leadership in the White House.
John L. Smith is an author and longtime columnist. He was born in Henderson and his family’s Nevada roots go back to 1881. His stories have appeared in New Lines, Time, Readers Digest, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, Reuters and Desert Companion, among others.
