In Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance narrates his experience growing up in a Middletown, Ohio as the son of a drug-addicted mother and the grandson of Appalachian migrants who traveled the “hillbilly highway” to the industrial Midwest to find jobs and opportunity in the mid-twentieth century. In the passage below, he describes the “hillbilly” culture in which he grew up:
How does Vance explain what he sees as the decline of Middletown’s white, working-class community? And what do you think of his statement above that “To these folks, poverty is the family tradition”?
February 20, 2019 at 1:49 pm
JD Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy, sees the hillbilly culture and the “social rot” that comes with as the root cause of Middletown’s white working class community. He believes that the root of the issues are not primarily macroeconomic trends, such as the drop in manufacturing jobs throughout the 21st century, but a population of young men “immune to hard work.” He recounts examples from his past to bolster this claim. For example, a young man he worked with who had a baby on the way, would skip work and when he eventually got fired for his mishaps, refused to take any agency. I think that Vance’s description of the lack of agency in hillbilly culture does a good job summarizing the root problem: “There is a lack of agency here—a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself.” This feeling experienced by the hillbilly population helps to explain the social decay and lack of work ethic exhibited. Vance also notes that hillbilly culture proliferates the decay of itself instead of counteracting it; for example many choose to simply drop out of the labor force instead of relocating for better opportunities, and men suffer from a crisis of masculinity due to the lack of agency promoted by the culture. Overall, it can be understood from Vance’s writing that Middletown’s white working class community is one who has given up on itself and refuses to do anything about it as they do not take agency for their own misfortune.
Vance’s statement, “the these folks, poverty is the family tradition,” is powerful in that it gives insight into how this population views the world. Poverty is all the population in Middletown knows, with generations of family members, mainly poor Irish and Scottish immigrants, having been blue collar workers, doing jobs that require little to no education. The American Dream has never been a true reality for this population, and as each generation fails to obtain upward mobility, the future becomes bleaker. Vance summarizes this well: “The statistics tell you that kids like me face a grim future—that if they’re lucky, they’ll manage to avoid welfare; and if they’re unlucky, they’ll die of a heroin overdose, as happened to dozens in my small hometown just last year.” Vance brings up this point to stress the psychological impact that “spiritual and material poverty has on children,” and how difficult this tradition of poverty makes upward mobility.
February 20, 2019 at 11:46 am
I think that Vance’s explanation of the decline of Middletown’s white, working-class community all ties back to the idea that the people he grew up around are very focused on continuing tradition, and are not receptive to and don’t have access to change. In the opening of the book, Vance comments how Scottish-Irish Americans have remained “unchanged compared to the wholesale abandonment of tradition that’s occurred nearly everywhere else.” (Vance, 3) They have grown up in the same communities as their parents and grandparents. Although they might have similar aspirations as all American children, like Vance comments regarding dreams of becoming a vet, an astronaut, or professional athlete, many are subconsciously aware that they will end up working in the factories where their predecessors worked. There is a lack of access to employment opportunities that can pull them out of poverty, and enable them to move out of these impoverished areas. This results in a hopeless mindset in a victim frame, leaving many individuals without the motivation to work or extend themselves in education, like Claire discusses with ‘Bob’ at the tile factory. While there is no trust in the system, there is a trust in tradition – that they will be able to secure jobs at these factories. Vance speaks to this when he quotes a Middletown high school teacher who says, “You have those who aren’t doing very well in school, and when you try to talk to them about what they’re going to do, they talk about AK. ‘Oh, I can get a job at AK. My uncle works there.’ It’s like they can’t make the connection between the situation in the town and the lack of jobs at AK.” (Vance, 55) This faith in tradition has wronged this community, as there is a belief that the jobs that once amply supported the community will exist forever, while in reality they are disappearing because of an economy shifting to outsourcing. This tradition, paired with a political sphere and evolving economy that has abandoned these communities and job types, has not enabled or encouraged upward mobility. As the tradition continues, this impoverished state will only continue for these communities. So while Vance says, “To these folks, poverty is the family tradition,” I believe he is speaking to a depressing acceptance of the position that his community has found itself in, from a faith in what has worked for generations before but has rapidly declined because of uncontrollable outside forces.
February 19, 2019 at 8:38 pm
Although Vance’s depiction of the poor in Appalachia is often problematic, the core of his argument may also be understood as an important comment on the ever-decreasing social mobility of people born into the lower-middle class, or working class, in America. Moreover, an analysis of the psychological effects, and culture that can stem from vast class inequalities. The decline of the white working-class in his home town, Middletown, is the manifestation of greater class divides in America. In the quote presented for discussion, Vance states, “To these folks, poverty is a family tradition-”. This can be viewed through two separate frameworks. It may, at first, be understood as his relatively negative perception of Appalachian Hillbilly culture. However, it could also be conceptualized as his analysis of the inability of working-class citizens to overcome the large disparity of income levels between classes in America. Subsequently, for individuals born into poverty, remaining there for generations is more realistic than achieving the “American Dream”. In the early pages of Hillbilly Elegy Vance also states, “I want people to understand the American Dream as my family and I encountered it” (Vance, 2). Meaning, the American Dream we all perceive as being possible is, in fact, not realistic for many. Additionally, Vance discusses peoples’ assumptions that he must be a genius in order to have escaped the impoverished circumstances he was born into, which sheds light on the sad reality that social mobility in these communities often feels like a miracle. It is easy to focus on his problematic descriptions of the poor in these Appalachian communities, because it reflects caricature framing put forth by Kendall. Moreover, building off of what Claire mentioned, Vance describes the generic working-class employee, exemplified by Bob, as someone who feels they cannot escape their condition, regardless of hard work. In the eyes of the worker, they are victims and feel as though they deserve more, and in the eyes of the public, they are the lazy and undeserving poor. As a result, Bob is the recipient of contempt, rather than understanding. Ultimately, I understand how many people take issue with how Vance depicts “Hillbilly culture”, as it pertains to the welfare system and broad generalizations about people living in these circumstances. However, it does not mean we cannot glean a powerful message of just how difficult it is becoming to distance yourself from the working-class you may have been born into and how that can influence generations of individuals.
February 19, 2019 at 8:01 pm
I completely endorse Caroline’s point regarding the decline in Middletown’s community, and also wanted to elaborate and add onto the last part of the comment, regarding “poverty being a family tradition.” To me, this also means (even though this may be obvious and very simple) that the white working class Americans, of Scots-Irish descent, know nothing else. Vance describes the path completely clear-cut– from day laborers to machine workers, and we also see another common “path,” if you will, in his experience with the tile industry. When Vance describes his experience with “Bob” and the tile industry, he recounts the story as commonplace within his community, and is able to recall the overarching reaction of most “Bobs” of the working-class whites in his hometown. They get fired, and then act as if something had been “done to them.”
To me, this raises a point that always is in the back of my mind when discussing class and race within American culture/America– and that is the cyclical nature of all of it (in terms of mobility, the paths of these Americans from generation to generation, and opportunities, etc.) Reconnecting back to the idea that this class of people know nothing else, it is because it is all a cycle– due to (this is all possible and theoretical) upbringing, geography, ethnicity, and previous access to money, etc. there is no possible way to break the cycle, and for Bob to either make it out of the tile business, or for him to learn that he cannot not show up to work and then not be fired– and that it is nobody’s fault but his own. Hand-in-hand with the lack of education– there is a lack in access to education, and all of these factors are interconnected. Thus, when Vance says “tradition,” that word really struck with me, because of how much is underneath that statement, and how much can tag along with that.
As a final thought, I also believe (and Vance opens up his Chapter 4 about Reagan) that a lot of these factors and Vance’s life story/experience within and about Appalachia connects to contemporary politics and election outcomes. Whenever I talk about this with my parents, my dad always said how polarized and extreme the candidates and campaigns had become– and votes were cast because people wanted change– a.k.a people wanted to break the cycle, or break the “tradition.”
February 19, 2019 at 5:04 pm
Vance approaches the root of the decline of Middletown’s white, working-class community in terms of community pessimism. In describing the trend, he compares the lives of his current neighbors to that of his own, marked by optimism and a new sense of collegiate worth. He explains that this widespread hopelessness has, in part, an association with the Great Recession and its economic implications. However, he goes on to describe that the predominant contributor to this thick negative mindset is more of a deep cultural sense of neglect by the ideal nation to which they presumably “belonged.” Particularly, a neglect stemming from, what seems to me, a feeling of being victims of the manifestation of “squeeze framing.” He explains this as feeling “trapped in two seemingly unwinnable wars, in which a disproportionate share of the fighters came from our neighborhood, and in an economy that failed to deliver the most basic promise of the American Dream—a steady wage” (Vance, 189). In a sense, this excerpt reflects the framing type by drawing its “middle class” inaccuracies from lack of benefit that maintains the existence of the “poor” or “rich.” In a broader sense, Vance attributes the difference between his outcome and that of the declining white, working class community of Middletown to an appreciation and sense of connection (or lack of) with the country. To Vance, lacking unison with “the core fabric of the American society” undermines one’s motivation to maintain a “working-class community.” For, it is one which faces continual decline: “There is a cultural move¬ment in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day” (Vance, 188).
As for his statement about poverty being the family tradition, I do understand why he uses this as a way to explain the cultural tendencies among the group. In this way, the “folks” are tagged with a relatively unrewarded persistence of “blue-collar” work. But, in a way, I also think that it perpetuates the typical stereotype/caricature of the “undeserving poor” in common episodic framing. By associating poverty with a generational, traditional connotation, they fit into this negative representation of the poor by seeming to reinforce the culture of poverty.