JD Vance’s ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ rings false

This is one of two essays on the topic of “Hillbilly Elegy.” Seen an opposing point of view: “JD Vance’s ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ rings true.”

I have a few things in common with JD Vance, vice presidential nominee and the author of the best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” We both grew up dirt poor. We both ended up at Ivy League schools, Yale for him and Harvard for me, and somehow, we both made our way into America’s urban, professional class. While he and I are cut from similar cloth, we look at the world including our kinfolk — blue-collar people who originated in the Appalachian South — and see wildly different things.

Since Vance was announced as Donald Trump’s running mate, his 2016 book has shot back to the top of the charts. In it, he shines an unforgiving light on hillbilly culture, using his own family as examples. I’ll never forget the description of his uncle taking an electric saw to a man, nearly killing him because the fella called him a son of a b—-, or the scene in which his grandparents trash a pharmacy after a clerk chastised their boy. To a young Vance, who was raised in central Ohio by relatives who’d migrated from east Kentucky, this was normal behavior. To the rest of us, these people seem unhinged.

Were his book strictly memoir and his politics less extreme, I’d applaud Vance without reservation. His writing is beautiful, and he treats his damaged relatives with compassion. Rather than stop there, at his story’s natural limits, his memoir goes on to make broad generalizations about Appalachian families:

“Our homes are a chaotic mess. We scream and yell at each other like we’re spectators at a football game. At least one member of the family uses drugs — sometimes the father, sometimes the mother, sometimes both. At especially stressful times, we’ll hit and punch each other. We choose not to work when we should be looking for jobs. Sometimes we’ll get a job, but it won’t last. We’ll get fired for tardiness, or for stealing merchandise and selling it on eBay, or for having a customer complain about the smell of alcohol on our breath.”

Since “Hillbilly Elegy” was published eight years ago, Vance’s familial dysfunction has risen to the level of obsession. He now seems to fetishize a false ideal of “nuclear family” that I thought ended with Sen. Joe McCarthy. In recent years, Vance has called childless women miserable, LGBTQ+ people groomers, and no-fault divorce a “great trick” played by the sexual revolution. In one bizarre video , he says parents should have more power in the democratic process than non-parents.

This unsettling worldview aside, I don’t want Vance’s relatives to be the only hillbillies you know, so I’ll tell you about ones who raised me in and around Roanoke. Some are troubled — a cousin who turned tricks to fuel her drug habit, an aunt who was thrown from a balcony by her boyfriend during one of their epic brawls — but they are the minority. Most work their rumps off to make ends meet. They’re stern with their children but not abusive. They’re under-educated but whip-smart. And while they’ll tie one on after work or maybe even smoke a blunt, nearly all steer clear of the hard stuff.

Ultimately, though, no one family, neither mine nor Vance’s, can represent the entire Appalachian South. The region is roughly the size of Greece with about 16 million inhabitants. To gauge how it’s doing, we have to look at data, and a decent source is the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), which has been coordinating federal investments in the area for nearly 60 years. In that time, there have been some huge changes.

In 1960, over 30% of people in the area covered by the ARC lived in poverty. By 2018-2022, that figure plummeted to 14.3%, just two points above the national average.

(An important sidebar: The ARC covers some areas outside the Appalachian Mountains, including parts of Mississippi, and omits areas that are part of Appalachia, including Roanoke city, Roanoke County and much of the Shenandoah Valley. The politics behind this is an interesting topic for another day.)

Not surprisingly, the counties that still have sky-high poverty rates are concentrated in east Kentucky, southern West Virginia and far southwest Virginia, where communities are struggling to find their footing as the coal market declines.

In the rest of the region, people don’t earn quite as much as the U.S. average but close. Many are making enough to stay in their homeland rather than move away. That alone is a sea change from two generations ago, when the hillbilly highway ushered a stream of people out of the Appalachians in search of work. Today, populations are growing in the mountains of Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. This part of Appalachia is experiencing a boom of sorts.

Just look at the Great Smoky Mountains. They comprise the nation’s most popular national park with 13.3 million visits in 2023. Nearby Asheville, North Carolina, has become a tourism mecca and is showered with accolades, including the coveted Beer City USA title four years in a row. That designation and the town’s charms helped win over Sierra Nevada and New Belgium, which now have East Coast breweries there, and Asheville’s success has rubbed off on other mountain cities. Breweries, cideries and distilleries can be found all over now, including the area around my hometown of Roanoke, which has over a dozen breweries and five distilleries, some of which export products across the eastern U.S.

Many people are tempted to dismiss success in places such as Asheville and Roanoke because they were never beholden to King Coal, but even in the poorest parts of Appalachia, there are signs of hope.

In 2020 the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve was created in southern West Virginia, boosting area visitations by over 510,000 people. Today, the park pulls $96 million into a corner of Appalachia that’s been decimated by coal’s collapse.

Over in the far southwest corner of Virginia, the Crooked Road, a bluegrass and old-time music trail, leads tourists from one coal county to another. Since its inception in 2004, travel expenditures in the area have nearly doubled to $1.2 billion.

And in Pikeville, Kentucky, a little company called BitSource is turning stereotypes on their head by training former coal miners to be coders. Their goal is nothing short of rebranding the area as “silicon holler,” a center for coding, data centers, fulfillment houses, customer service facilities and other tech services that could be situated anywhere but that benefit from our affordable land and labor.

Speaking of computing, try Googling the word “visit” and any of these places — Asheville, Shepherdstown, Chattanooga, Greenville, Roanoke, Knoxville, Galax, Berea or Staunton. The results give a peek at the new Appalachian South. From legal moonshine to bands that merge punk rock and bluegrass, we’re using our heritage to innovate, our ready workforce to attract employers, and our natural resources to draw tourists by the millions.

Sure, inside and outside Appalachia, some people are raised like JD Vance, but his story shouldn’t define a region where he never actually lived. Instead, let’s take back some of his spotlight and shine it on the hillbillies who are truly reviving the Appalachian South.

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Mark Lynn Ferguson has written about Appalachia for nearly fifteen years. He splits his time between Alexandria and Roanoke, where he leads a magazine and shop called Woodshed: An Appalachian Joint .

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