First published in 2016, J. D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy offered his personal perspective on the story of Appalachia’s hill people. Widely reviewed and praised, the memoir spent months on bestseller lists. Director Ron Howard made it into a feature film. The book and film gave Vance a national profile and served as launchpad for his ascent to Ohio senator and Republican nominee for vice president.
Vance is a descendant of Scots who were transported to Ireland to subdue the Catholic natives. Many of these emigrated to the American colonies. Uncomfortable with the hierarchies of New England and the plantation culture of Virginia and the Low Country, the Scots-Irish settled in Appalachia, where they acquired the moniker “hillbillies.” (There are several versions of the name’s origin.)
Popular perceptions of hillbillies have varied from malignant to courageous to comic. The murderous feuding of the Hatfields and McCoys has been the subject of movies, TV shows, novels, histories, and cartoons. The 1972 film Deliverance portrayed hillbillies in the worst possible light as insular, homicidal, banjo-picking primitives.
In the 1941 biopic Sergeant York, hillbilly hero Alvin York—the most-decorated soldier of WWI—embodied the brave, God-fearing people of the hill country. Ma and Pa Kettle of the popular movies of the 1940s and ’50s and their TV successors, the Clampetts (the “Beverly Hillbillies”) seemed country simpletons. Wise in their own folk ways, these hayseeds turned the tables and made snobs and city-slickers the butt of the joke.
The subtitle of Vance’s book, A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis, made clear that Vance intended more than reflections on his own life. Hillbilly Elegy is a political tract. It spells out Vance’s views on present-day hillbilly culture and the forces that mire the people of Appalachia in poverty and economic malaise.
Son of a dysfunctional mother and a changing cast of stepfathers, Vance credits Mamaw, his maternal grandma, as the major influence on his life. Mamaw fused the Clampetts’s folksy acumen with the integrity of Sgt. York and the violent proclivities of the feuding Hatfields and McCoys. “When she was around twelve,” he writes, “Mamaw almost killed a man.”
To the stereotype of the moonshine-swilling, shotgun-toting hillbilly, Vance adds a new twist: the feckless disposition of hillbillies is due not to moonshine but to those who’ve taken a shine to government handouts. “I have known many welfare queens” he writes. “Some were my neighbors.”
The notion of “welfare queens” was popularized by Ronald Reagan in his 1976 presidential campaign. It became a favorite trope of conservative critics of government aid to the poor. Welfare queens were pictured as an urban scourge comprising a mass of single mothers who gamed the system to live in indolent luxury.
The queens were mostly a chimera. America has the stingiest system of public assistance in the industrial world. Despite the plethora of individual anecdotes, a significant portion of welfare recipients are physically or mentally disabled and can’t work. The vast majority don’t luxuriate in regal splendor but scrape by. They live in public projects carefully cut off from middle-class neighborhoods, or in deteriorating trailer parks, or in substandard apartments. They are overwhelmingly the victims of murder and violent crime. They make up the majority of the imprisoned.
Vance proudly asserts, “I am a hill person.” It turns out, he’s not, though his ancestors were. Vance’s family’s roots are in the small town of Jackson, Kentucky. His Mamaw and Papaw left Jackson in their teens to join the poor-white version of the Great Migration to better their lot in the industrial Midwest.
They settled in Middletown, Ohio, where Papaw found a good job in a steel factory. They bought a house, acquired modern appliances, and lived what was, on the surface, a middle-class, 1950s-style existence. Behind the living-room blinds, Mamaw and Papaw fought in the furious style of old-fashioned hill-country feuds.
Raised and educated in Middletown, Vance spent summers in Jackson. He never lived in Jackson in the sense of making it his home, but Jackson provided a childhood refuge from his mother’s troubled life. It allowed him to interact with cousins and relatives and feel part of an extended family.
As his book goes on, the hillbilly factor ceases to be center stage and moves to the wings. After his great-grandmother’s death, Vance notes “how rarely we returned to Kentucky.” His mother’s chronic mental and emotional instability came to the fore.
“Mom cared deeply about enterprises of the mind,” Vance writes. She earned a nursing degree, encouraged J. D.’s love of learning, and married a third time. The family moved to an Ohio farm “where they had a combined income of over a hundred thousand dollars.”
It all fell apart. Mom and her new husband engaged in furious fights. At one point, her uncontrolled rage led J. D. to think she intended to kill him. There was another divorce. J. D. ended up reconnecting with his birth father and went to live with him and his family on a well-run farm in eastern Kentucky.
There was no drinking, no temper tantrums. Caring, upright, a steady provider, this father “built a home with an almost jarring serenity.” Vance credits this transformation from the man who walked out to his embrace of evangelical Christianity. Up to this point, Vance’s exposure to religion hadn’t gone beyond Mamaw’s casual bible-reading.
Vance extrapolates from his father’s reformed life to the premise that, in contrast to the unchurched, “Religious folks are much happier.” He cites definitive support for this from an “MIT economist.” But there’s not a lot of happiness in his father’s homophobic, creationist, end-of-times fundamentalism.
After another stint of living with his mom, Vance returned to his father. It didn’t work out. Good man that he is, his father’s fundamentalism got to the point where Vance “could no longer take it anymore.”
The back-and-forth of Vance’s living and not living with his mother goes on in deadening detail. She becomes a drug addict and is institutionalized. Vance wonders whether addiction, as some observers claim, is a “disease” or “an excuse for people whose decisions destroyed a family.” He decides, “It’s probably both.”
His mother recovers, remarries (it gets hard to follow the serial spouses), and relapses into a downward spiral. “It was a prescription pain pill (or many of them) that had done this to her.” If Vance ever clued into how Purdue Pharma deliberately targeted Appalachia for a deluge of OxyContin pain pills, he makes no mention. To him, the cause of the ongoing epidemic of addiction that killed hundreds of thousands and destroyed their families remains with users, not suppliers: an excuse for people like mom brought down by “bad life decisions.” Vance ended up living with Mamaw. In his telling, her sturdy character stands in contrast to the addiction and parasitism common throughout Appalachia. He credits a three-year stint living with her for “turning my life around.” Profane and mercurial, his mother was insistent on Vance’s succeeding in school, which instilled a sense of direction he never had before. (It’s not until late in the book that he reveals that he changed his last name to Vance to honor Mamaw.)
It also initiated an awakening that shaped Vance’s political views. His Damascene moment came when he worked part-time at the checkout counter of a local grocery and observed a “large minority” on public assistance who sold their food stamps at a discount, used the cash to buy beer and cigarettes, and talked on cell phones while waiting in line.
Silent about the majority who used the stamps to feed their families and stave off malnutrition, Vance focuses on deadbeats and “welfare queens” content “to game the system.” If they didn’t get rich, they got to enjoy the spoils of cigarettes and cell phones. These petty larcenies convinced Vance the fact that “the policies of Mamaw’s party of the working man—the Democrats—weren’t all they were cracked up to be.” Vance either didn’t know or ignored that the Democrats were in the process of cutting programs intended to ease the plight of the poor, put a floor under the working class, and expand educational opportunities for a broad swath of Americans.
Beginning with Gary Hart in 1984, the so-called New Democrats moved away from the party’s New Deal working-class base to appeal to the rising technocratic elite, hard-charging entrepreneurs, and white-collar suburban voters. They cheered on the trade agreements that delivered the coup de grace to the country’s industrial base, supported the deregulation of Wall Street, joined in dismantling the welfare state, initiated the “war on crime” that swelled the numbers of Black and Latino people behind bars, and showed blasé indifference—at times outright contempt—for the religious and social values of blue-collar communities.
Vance gives the Republicans a pass. He ignores the central role of the “Reagan revolution” in turning the country’s “wealth gap” into a Grand Canyon. While adept at mouthing a middle-working-class patois, Reagan was the lead paladin of Milton Friedman’s trickle-down economics. In practice it was “gush-up” economics that further enriched the already rich and super-rich. When the day of reckoning arrived with the Great Recession, it was the high-flying mortgage brokers and financial wizards who filled the checkout line for a government handout that ran into the billions.
While Vance bemoans the ruinous decline of the region’s once-bustling downtowns, he omits the role of Walmart in sucking the life out of local merchants with rock-bottom prices and welfare-level wages; the same with national chains like CVS and Walgreens that drove the corner pharmacies out of business and reaped big-time profits from dispensing opioids, for which they would eventually pay billions in fines.
Vance frames a two-page litany of the “irrational behaviors” that imprison hillbilly country in a perpetual cycle of poverty and failure in terms “we” and “ours:” “We spend our way into the poorhouse,” "We don’t study as children,” “We choose not to work,” “Our kids go to foster care,” “Our kids perform poorly in school,” etc. As indictments mount, it becomes clear that what Vance means to say is “they” and “theirs.” He’s moving on—and up. Looking back, he offers an anodyne, generic valedictory on the world he was raised in: “Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and faith.”
The bell tolls for those left behind. The ringing Vance hears is a starting bell. After the account of an upbringing scarred by family trauma and struggle, the story becomes a classic Horatio Alger tale of a poor boy’s ascent from hardscrabble youth to wealth and success.
Living with the novelty of the safe, steady environment Mamaw provides, Vance becomes the industrious student he never was. He graduates from high school and plans to go to college. Intimidated by the application process and recognizing his own personal inadequacies, he joins the Marine Corps. Serving in the Marines is transformative. Vance develops the physical and mental discipline he was lacking. He is sent to Iraq, where he serves in a public-affairs capacity and is “lucky enough to escape any real fighting.” Back in the states, he becomes the “media relations officer” for a large military base. Equipped with his Marine Corps experience, Vance enters Ohio State University and graduates “after one year and eleven months…with a double major, summa cum laude.” The next stop is a professional and existential leap from the familiar surroundings of the Midwest to the country’s most prestigious law school, the sanctum sanctorum of the legal profession: Yale.
Vance feels entirely out of place. He goes into tedious detail about just how out of place. At times, he gilds the hillbilly. It strains the bounds of credulity to believe that after serving as a Marine public-affairs officer, a media liaison, and graduating from a major university, he only now learned “that you needed to wear a suit to a job interview” and “that certain cities and states had better job prospects.”
All’s well that ends well, as Vance becomes editor of the Yale Law Review, meets a beautiful, intellectually gifted fellow student who in time becomes his wife, and learns the lesson of “social capital”—i.e., that professional and personal networks are the most valuable assets bestowed by Ivy League institutions.
Vance still wrestles with the demons of his childhood. He describes himself, accurately, as the victim of ACE: “adverse childhood experiences.” The psychological scars of those years aren’t easily overcome, but he eventually puts them behind him.
Hillbilly Elegy ends on the cusp of Vance’s plunge into politics. At the start, he lamented the growing “industry of conspiracy-mongers and fringe lunatics writing all manner of idiocy.” He indicted “the message of the right” for alleging: “It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s.” In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, Vance was a bitter critic of Donald Trump, calling him an “American Hitler…an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs.” By the time of his 2023 run for the senate, Vance was singing from a different hymnal. As Trump explained, Vance was “in love” with him and was “kissing my ass” to get his endorsement in Vance’s successful run for the senate. The buss proved bountiful. Whether moved or amused by Vance’s wanton political opportunism, Trump chose him as his 2024 running mate.
Vance is all in with Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen. He shares Trump’s blanket villainization of immigrants as “rapists and murders,” his labeling of Democrats as “socialist and communist,” and his description of his opponent as “dumb,” “a socialist lunatic” who can’t match his good looks. If the Trump ticket wins the election, Vance will be next in line behind the oldest president in American history. If they lose, he’ll go back to the senate with a dramatically heightened profile and a shot at the Republican nomination in 2028.
Another autobiographical volume is undoubtedly in the works. Vance will have the chance to delve into his lucrative years as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. He’ll also have the opportunity to explain how he reconciles his religious conversion to Catholicism and admiration for its social teaching with his political conversion to the views of a race-baiting, immigrant-bashing, misogynist, convicted sex-offender billionaire.
Whichever way the election goes, the newest chapter in Vance’s rise to wealth, celebrity, and political prominence will most likely be an encomium, not an elegy. He is now a Capitol Hill man. The journey from the want and welfare-ridden obscurity of Appalachia to presidential running mate will celebrate the American saga of a poor country boy made good: Horatio Hillbilly.
