Wall Street Journal Book Review - Hillbilly Elegy

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This section contains book reviews from the New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.

It also contains an article from the September issue of The Atlantic Magazine which deals with two books -- “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America” by Nancy Isenberg as well as “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis” by J.D. Vance.

Fortuitously, both “White Trash” and “Hillbilly Elegy” were proposed simultaneously as Reading Liberally topics by John Karls on 8/5/2016, with “Hillbilly Elegy” being voted at our Aug meeting as the focus for our Sep meeting.

However, both books bear on the same imbroglio and The Atlantic article offers a thoughtful analysis of both.
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johnkarls
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Wall Street Journal Book Review - Hillbilly Elegy

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Wall Street Journal – 7/27/2016


The Forgotten Americans: At Yale Law, The White Working-Class Author Wanted To Fit In, But He Didn’t Know How To Use a Butter Knife or What Sparkling Water Was

By Emily Esfahani Smity -- an editor of the Hoover Institution’s Defining Ideas and author of “The Power of Meaning: Crafting A Life That Matters” which will be published next year.


In the late 19th century, a fight broke out between the Hatfields and McCoys along the border of Kentucky and West Virginia. The dispute, which originated in part over a pig, grew into a bloody conflict over each family’s honor, with many murders over several decades. J.D. Vance, a distant descendant of the Hatfields, sees echoes in the present day of the tribal mind-set that inspired the original rivalry and believes that it keeps people like him from thriving in 21st-century America.

Mr. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” is a beautiful memoir but it is equally a work of cultural criticism about white working-class America. Social scientists have long studied the problems plaguing this group—like joblessness, divorce and addiction. But Mr. Vance has lived them, and he offers a compelling explanation for why it’s so hard for someone who grew up the way he did to make it. He focuses, in particular, on people from Appalachia, a vast territory that spans from New York to Alabama, where, he writes, “the fortunes of working-class whites seem dimmest.”

The major reason they’re struggling, Mr. Vance writes, is not because of growing income inequality or free trade. It’s because of culture. Mr. Vance beat the odds: He currently works at an investment firm in Silicon Valley. But he had to reject a big part of who he was and where he came from to succeed. “Though we sing the praises of social mobility, it has its downsides. The term necessarily implies a sort of movement—to a theoretically better life, yes, but also away from something,” he writes. “When you go from working-class to professional-class, almost everything about your old life becomes unfashionable at best or unhealthy at worst.”

Mr. Vance’s old life wasn’t easy. His father was in and out of his life and his mother was addicted to prescription drugs. He was raised 40 miles north of Cincinnati by his grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw, who were originally from Breathitt County, Ky., nicknamed “Bloody Breathitt” thanks to its history of blood feuds.

In the late 1940s, Mamaw and Papaw had joined the great migration of Appalachians to the industrial Midwest in search of a better life. The pair seemed to find it in Middletown, Ohio, where Papaw worked for Armco steel. They moved into a nice house, their children attended decent public schools and they could even afford the occasional vacation. They were living the American dream. Except for one problem: Mamaw and Papaw couldn’t leave Appalachia behind and adjust to middle America.

In Middletown, the Vances were considered unruly outsiders and expected to assimilate into their new culture. But they revolted against the expectations that they would be polite, civil members of their community. The result was chaos.

One time, when a store clerk was slightly rude to their young son (the author’s uncle), Papaw threatened to break his neck. “The man apologized,” Mr. Vance writes, “and the Vances continued with their Christmas shopping as if nothing had happened.” Another time, Mamaw was the one making the threats, promising to kill Papaw the next time he came home drunk. When he did, she doused him with gasoline and lit him on fire after he passed out. (He lived.)

Such stories, Mr. Vance wants readers to see, contain a lesson about upward mobility. Beyond working hard, you also have to adopt the norms and habits of the social station you hope to achieve. In Breathitt, social capital was accrued by stubbornly sticking up for yourself and your family. But when those values were lived out in Middletown, they didn’t bring status and success. They brought misery.

Mamaw and Papaw’s marriage started deteriorating, and the violence at home took a toll on their children, especially on Mr. Vance’s mother, who cycled through several husbands and boyfriends throughout his childhood. When the author was around 12, she was arrested for violently threatening to kill him.

Though Mr. Vance was living in Ohio, his family culture remained pure Appalachia, and he got into many fights trying to defend his family’s honor. “It was on that honor,” he writes, “that nearly every element of my happiness depended as a child.” He believed doing well academically was for “sissies” and nearly flunked out of high school. It was Mamaw and Papaw who saved him. Beyond providing him with a relatively stable home away from his mother, Mr. Vance’s grandparents, who had resolved their marital problems, also instilled in him hope about his own future. “Never be like these [expletive] losers,” Mamaw would tell him, “who think the deck is stacked against them. You can do anything you want to.”

After high school, Mr. Vance joined the Marine Corps, where he learned discipline. But when he got to Yale Law School, by way of Ohio State University, he faced the same hurdle that his grandparents and mother had faced in Ohio. He was expected to smoothly navigate a foreign culture—the cocktail parties, the job interviews and the other social rituals of upper-middle class life. He didn’t know that he should wear a suit to interviews, how to use a butter knife or what sparkling water was.

“I lived among newly christened members of what folks back home pejoratively call the ‘elites,’ ” he writes, “and by every outward appearance, I was one of them: I am a tall, white, straight male.” In fact, he was a total outsider. Yet he also understood that in order to advance, he had to adapt to his new culture, which often meant doing the opposite of what his instincts were telling him to do. “I was able to escape the worst of my culture’s inheritance,” he writes; “And uneasy though I am about my new life, I cannot whine about it: The life I lead now was the stuff of fantasy during my childhood.”

”Hillbilly Elegy,” published during an election in which much has been promised to white working-class voters, is a riveting book, but it has a sobering message. “I don’t know what the answer is, precisely,” Mr. Vance writes of the problems faced by the white working class, “but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”

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