Multiple people have recommended I read J.D. Vance’s
book Hillbilly Elegy which came out a few years ago. I’ve resisted, primarily because I don’t particularly
like its title. But Vance has been in
the news a lot this year, particularly since he eked out a victory in the
Republican primary for a U.S. Senate seat from Ohio earlier this year. The book was a best seller and made him a lot
of money.
Elegy is his memoir, a very readable sociology text
about “hillbilly” culture, in which he plays the lead role of the “despite the
odds” success story, complete with a law degree from Yale.
The setting of this story is the rural hills
hugging either side of the Ohio River -- “greater” Appalachia if you will –
towns and farms that never recovered from the Great Depression. They migrated along what became known as the “Hillbilly
Highway” back and forth between home and the factory towns in central Ohio and
western Pennsylvania. Their collective
story does not stand alone, in many ways it mirrors the Great Migration of Black
Americans from the South to the big cities of the North, and the refugee/immigrants
from forever-at-war Europe to the steel mills and automobile plants of the once
mighty industrial Midwest. Vance
acknowledges these similarities but is careful not to equate them.
Vance grew up in poverty, with a drug using mother
and an absent father, along with a string of stepfathers most of whom did not hang
around long. His saving grace was a “colorful”
grandmother. His success wasn’t a case of luck. He worked hard and methodically to escape his
upbringing without repudiating it, most of the people in the book have not.
While Vance’s book is a very good sociology text
(recommend), it is important to keep in mind it is also the pre-campaign
autobiography of a wannabee politician.
It succeeds on one level, it proves that he has a compassion for working
class people, and that he understands “their” problems. What it clearly does not do is give the
reader a clue as to what he would do as a U.S. Senator.
