An hour before his murder, Canadian filmmaker Hugh O’Connor paid a young coal miner in Jeremiah, Kentucky, ten dollars for the use of his image in an exhibition film destined for the 1968 World’s Fair. Covered in coal dust and cradling his child, the miner “had an expression of total despair,” O’Connor’s film crew remembered, “It was an extraordinary shot—so evocative of the despair of the region.” The miner lived in a rented cottage among half a dozen other families set in a small clearing of land owned by Hobart Ison, who offered the cottages for ten dollars a month. For the price of a month’s rent, the miner traded his image to a man whom his landlord would soon shoot and kill.
Ison, armed with a revolver, discovered O’Connor and his crew of five on his land just minutes after the filmmakers concluded their final shot. Ison ordered the men off his property but, weighed down by their equipment, the crew could not escape before Ison opened fire. He put one bullet in the camera, and a second in Hugh O’Connor’s chest. According to O’Connor’s producer, the fiilmmaker fell to his knees calling out to Ison, “Why did you have to do that?” before dying moments later.
The film company that hired O’Connor sent funds to Kentucky to help the commonwealth’s attorney prosecute Ison, but its influence and wealth had little return in Letcher County. Even though Ison was known as an eccentric in Jeremiah, he enjoyed enormous community support after his arrest. “Streams of people came to visit Ison in jail before he was released on bail,” Calvin Trillin wrote in the New Yorker. “Women from around Jeremiah baked him cakes.” After an unsuccessful jury selection—no locals would even entertain the idea of Ison’s guilt—a judge ordered the trial moved to nearby Harlan County. The first trial resulted in a hung jury, and Ison struck a deal, pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter, midway through the second. He served one year in prison and died ten years later in 1978 at the age of eighty.
In 1999, Kentucky filmmaker Elizabeth Barret released Stranger with a Camera, a documentary exploring the context of the murder. In answering the film’s central question—what brought these two men face-to-face on that day in 1967—Barret examines the impact of Appalachian “poverty pictures”: images of lurid white poverty intended to shock middle-class audiences. Their creators often cited “poverty pictures” as a necessary catalyst for social change, exposing the alarming conditions of inequality in Appalachia. In reality, Barret argues, outsiders often “mined images in the way the companies mined the coal.”
What becomes of people, Barret’s documentary asks, when they become a wellspring for the nation’s pity or disgust? One answer lies in Barret’s interview with Mason Eldridge, the miner filmed by O’Connor just before his death. Eldridge is sincere, open, and friendly, but never lifts his eyes to Barret’s camera.
One man lowered his eyes, another lifted his gun. Both responses, Barret suggests, are reactions to exploitation and shame. The visual archive of Appalachia created in the 1960s focused exclusively on the region’s deprivation. In the process of its creation it provided the raw material for a new moral position about the lot of the poor. The belief that poverty is a character flaw—a demonstration of moral weakness—hangs over every image of a barefoot child or unemployed miner.
“The American dream has become a nightmare,” the BBC announced in a 1967 documentary about eastern Kentucky. To be Appalachian was to be heir to a distinct kind of wretchedness, endlessly performed before an international audience. This created layers of shame in communities like Jeremiah. The more well-to-do often came to resent the poor for acting as the enticement for those with greedy cameras. “The ties that bind communities together are not always positive,” Barret observes.
As the local with a camera, Barret has a connection to both Ison and O’Connor that is painful and real. Her interviews with O’Connor’s family and colleagues are among the film’s most wrenching scenes, precisely because they possess a clarity about O’Connor’s death that Barret and her community will never—and perhaps should never—experience. All are sympathetic to the suffering caused by the willful misrepresentation of a community. They forgive. But for all the soul-searching performed by Barret, it is one of O’Connor’s Canadian colleagues, Colin Low, who delivers the most electrifying lines in the documentary: “A camera is like a gun,” he explains, “It’s threatening. It’s invasive; it is exploitative…and it’s not always true.”
I thought about Stranger with a Camera often last year, believing that the time had come to experience, as Barret did, what it’s like to live among so many people who have snapped and have put their pain and resentment in the service of terrible outcomes. Their politics will kill good people. If a camera is a gun, then surely a vote can be too.
But I also thought about Barret’s work for another reason. Outdated theories about a culture of poverty in Appalachia, honed in the 1960s, had become popular once more thanks to Hillbilly Elegy. Much like the visual archive generated during the War on Poverty, Elegy sells white middle-class observers an invasive and exploitative story of the region. For white people uncomfortable with images of the civil rights struggles and the realities of Black life those images depicted, an endless stream of sensationalized white poverty offered them an escape—a window into a more recognizable world of suffering. This intimacy, both now and then, does not equal less contempt, just more value for the viewer and creator.
In some cases the parallels stretch back further, to the exaggerated stories of mountain life created by local color writers during the Hatfield and McCoy era. Appalachian Studies scholar Jordan Laney recently described the experience of reading Hillbilly Elegy while preparing snippets of local color for her class. “How did journalists and correspondents for the New York Times as well as scholars not catch these acts of generalizing and aggrandizing on behalf of elite readers?” she asks. “How did we trade in the breadth of diversity the region has to offer for one view? While reading Hillbilly Elegy I thought, here is how. This is how places and people become caricatures of themselves, ourselves.”
Men who shirk employment and women who lack the appropriate amount of shame for their illegitimate children populate the world of Elegy. Instead of attending church, the people of Elegy worship material desires beyond their means and use welfare fraud in the service of their doomed pursuits. “This is the reality of our community,” Vance writes. “It’s about a naked druggie destroying what little of value that exists in her life…Our homes are a chaotic mess. We scream and yell at each other like we are 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, all in front of the rest of the family, including young children.”
His use of the world “we” transforms the personal reality of his difficult childhood into a universal experience. The broadest point made by Elegy on the basis of this experience is that “public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us. These problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, only we can fix them.”
The argument that corporations did not help create the problems of Appalachia is stunningly ahistorical, but not even the most problematic claim Vance makes.
The National Review, which employed Vance as an occasional contributor, was positively gleeful about the book’s release. Their review, one of the first, all but explicitly congratulated the author for at long last proving that white Appalachians have “followed the black underclass and Native Americans not just into family disintegration, addiction, and other pathologies, but also perhaps into the most important self-sabotage of all, the crippling delusion that they cannot improve their lot by their own effort.” The American Conservative also helped sustain the first wave of publicity for the book in the summer of 2016, and took particular relish in republishing comments from liberal-leaning and nonwhite individuals in praise of it.
“Would you believe,” columnist Rod Dreher excitedly shared, “that two other liberal correspondents who wrote to praise Vance are black and gay—one of them is an immigrant—and both identified Vance’s discussion about moral agency among the poor as critically important?” For many conservatives, the beauty of Elegy was not just what it said about the lot of poor white Americans, but what it implied about Black Americans as well. Conservatives believed that Elegy would make their intellectual platforming about the moral failures of the poor colorblind in a way that would retroactively vindicate them for viciously deploying the same stereotypes against nonwhite people for decades.
It is not possible, in my view, to separate Elegy from the public persona crafted by Vance over the course of his book tour, his numerous engagements as a political pundit, and his still-forming plans to revitalize the region through venture capitalism and a possible run for political office. The most interesting trait conveyed by this persona is its overperformed humility.
Despite graduating from Yale, authoring a best-selling book about the region, and commanding what he calls a “preposterous amount of money” for public speaking engagements, Vance consistently denies claims that he is acting as an “expert” about Appalachia and, to a lesser extent, the Rust Belt. He is simply an individual burdened with the dual identity of both cosmopolitan elite and hillbilly everyman, performing what he calls his “civic responsibility” to contribute his talent and energy to solving social problems.
“It’s an indictment of our media culture that a group that includes tens of millions of people is effectively represented by one guy. I feel sort of uncomfortable being the guy,” he told the Washington Post. He bemoans this trend as he appears on major news networks analyzing the region’s white working class, and as he delivers TED talks about Appalachia. He is so uncomfortable being the spokesperson for a region whose personal experiences have become symbolic of the realities of millions that he recently sold the film rights to Elegy to Ron Howard.
Perhaps Vance is an incredibly rare breed of humble venture capitalist turned regional memoirist turned social reformer. But perhaps it is wise to consider if this humility is just a strategy. By framing his celebrity as “reluctant,” Vance shores up an image of his insight as accidentally and authentically profound and not, for example, shaped by his three years writing for a conservative publication, or his mentorship under controversial figures like Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and the entrepreneur and political activist Peter Thiel.
Of course, Vance makes no secret of his conservative leanings, but he displays a remarkable tendency to opt himself in and out of the genealogy of conservative writers on race and poverty as it suits his purpose. Using pseudo-academic theories of “brain drain”—including citations—he justified the belief shared in a New York Times op-ed that venture capitalism might stimulate the region. But when he was pressed on social media about the negative implications of his framework, Vance stated, “I don’t infer that [the region] suffers from brain drain. My point was simply to discuss the attraction of home.” The “accidental profundity” granted to Vance must be gratifying, if not something of a backwards compliment, but it also allows him to escape more explicit associations with other controversial work and theories.
In early 2017, the conservative intellectual and white supremacist Charles Murray embarked on a campus speaking tour funded by the American Enterprise Institute, where he is a senior fellow. University communities protested Murray’s presence on their campus forcefully, leading to a particularly tense incident at Middlebury College in Vermont. Murray’s lectures refreshed observations he shared in his now five-year-old book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, though he adapted them to our current political moment. Many protesters, however, were alarmed by the scientific racism standing at the center of his career as a public intellectual.
Best known for co-authoring 1994’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, Murray made his name peddling what the New York Times called “racial pornography.” His belief that African Americans are genetically predisposed to lower intelligence, manifested through IQ testing, became part of the lexicon of the culture of poverty through his suggestion that many forms of government assistance harmed society by encouraging the overpopulation of the intellectually undesirable. “For women near the poverty line in most countries in the contemporary West, a baby is either free or profitable, depending on the specific terms of the welfare system in her country,” he wrote.
Murray, like many other conservative social scientists, enjoys playing an old game in which he occasionally flips his script to contempt for poor white individuals in order to mitigate the racist origins and applications of his beliefs. Coming Apart, for example, proved to be less controversial than The Bell Curve, although he frequently uses the success of the former to re-affirm the latter. He recently told author and podcaster Sam Harris that he not only stands by The Bell Curve’s conclusion, he feels that his evidence is stronger and more relevant than ever.
Disruptions of Murray’s invited talks at Middlebury and elsewhere ignited a widespread debate about free speech and the twenty-first-century university. Some pragmatic observers of this debate suggested a telling workaround to mitigate campus controversy. Columnist Louis Shucker, for example, wrote in the Reading Eagle that “Perhaps a better selection would have been J.D. Vance, author of the best-selling Hillbilly Elegy.” The implication is that while the two share similar beliefs about poverty and race, Vance is baggage-free in a way that Murray is not.
Let us give him some baggage, then.
Vance uses an enduring myth about race in Appalachia and parts of the Rust Belt to give Hillbilly Elegy its organizational logic. It is, in essence, the magic that transforms Elegy from a memoir of a person to the memoir of a culture. Central to Elegy is Vance’s belief that both historic and modern white Appalachian people share a common ethnic ancestry in the form of Scots-Irish heritage. He connects this belief, in turn, to his claim that shared ethnic heritage has endowed contemporary white Appalachians with certain innate characteristics that hold the key to understanding why their home is, as he puts it, a “hub of misery.”
The shared culture of Appalachia, he writes, is one that “increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.” It’s worth noting that my distinction—“white Appalachians”—is not one that Vance uses. In the world of Elegy, all Appalachians are white.
He writes in the introduction, “The Scots-Irish are one of the most distinctive subgroups in America. As one observer noted, ‘In traveling across America, the Scots-Irish have consistently blown my mind as far and away the most persistent and unchanging regional subculture in the country. The family structures, religion and politics, and social lives all remain unchanged compared to the wholesale abandonment of tradition that’s occurred nearly everywhere else.’”
This observation, presented as an endorsement of Vance’s construction of Scots-Irish whiteness, comes from a blog post written for Discover magazine in 2012 entitled “The Scots-Irish as Indigenous People,” by a writer named Razib Khan. It argues that bracketing all white people together in discussions of white privilege leads to “perverse situations.” As an example, the post offers the hypothetical case of Malia Obama, who would be able to “benefit from affirmative action” due to her race, while the “child of a poor family from Appalachia who was white would not gain any preference.”
Vance continues, “This distinctive embrace of cultural tradition comes along with many good traits—an intense sense of loyalty, a fierce dedication to family and country—but also many bad ones. We do not like outsiders or people who are different from us, whether the difference lies in how they look, how they act, or most important, how they talk.” This shared Scots-Irish ancestry and the traits that it endows, Vance argues, means that “the culture of Greater Appalachia is remarkably cohesive.” This cohesion, in turn, has caused white Appalachians to reproduce, almost literally, negative social outcomes in isolation.
“We pass that isolation down to our children,” he writes, invoking visions of genetic heredity. He points out that “many of us have dropped out of the labor force or have chosen not to relocate for better opportunities. Our men suffer from a peculiar crisis of masculinity in which some of the traits that our culture inculcates make it difficult to succeed in a changing world.” He concludes his introduction with the hope that readers might gain from his memoir an appreciation for “how class and family affect the poor without filtering their views through a racial prism.” This is a remarkable statement, because the only way to truly understand Hillbilly Elegy is through a racial prism, one that centers a mythical form of whiteness that has a dangerous history.
In his willingness to present white Appalachians as a distinct ethnic entity, Vance has placed himself in a disturbing lineage of intellectuals who relished what they presumed to be the malleable whiteness of Appalachia for its ability to either prove or disprove cultural beliefs about race. This belief manifests in two ways. The first, which we’ve already begun to unpack, is the more modern and recognizable conservative impulse to discount the links between structural racism and inequality. Why can’t poor Black people get ahead? It’s not racism or the structural inequality caused by racism, many conservatives argue, because then what would explain the realities of poor white people?
The lives of poor white people, especially those with the additional burdens of addiction or legal issues, become the empirical proof for conservatives that we have based our attention to racism on fractured logic. The irony, of course, is that even as we become the ambassadors of this colorblind worldview, poor white people can’t escape the generic moralizing of their betters, who got a head start honing their brand of arrogant tough love and hard truths on Black communities.
The second manifestation of this belief is more complicated and requires us to go back in time to discover how white Appalachians were transformed, in some intellectual circles, as a race or “stock” unto their own and the consequences that followed. Vance didn’t invent this particular fiction, he simply exploits it to provide his narrative with a cohesiveness and cultural weight that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Why does that matter? There’s a phenomenon that occurs in Appalachia in which writers and other creatives who anchor their work in ideas about the unique genetic or cultural qualities of Appalachians also harbor close associations with eugenicists. Yes, eugenicists.
It turns out that if you create and sell a version of Appalachia as a place filled with defective people, eugenicists start paying attention to your work. The esteem, as you’ll learn, isn’t unilateral. I’m going to give you three examples—and no prizes for guessing that the mutual appreciation between Vance and Charles Murray is among them—but each episode is separated by enough time and space to demonstrate that this is both a pattern that persists and a pattern that should be stopped.
What’s up with the culture of Appalachia? The first thing we should pull apart is that there’s really no such thing as “Greater Appalachia,” a term Vance likes to use. Maintaining flexible definitions of Appalachia is appropriate. The boundaries of the region reflect tensions between political, cultural, and geographic definitions. But the use of the term “Greater Appalachia” in Elegy is telling. Like so much of Elegy, “Greater Appalachia” is the invention of a particular political moment that has been recycled to serve a different political moment. “Greater Appalachia” is connected to a 2012 work of popular history by Colin Woodard called American Nations. Woodard, by way of explaining contemporary political divisions and particularly the rise of the Tea Party, posits that America is not one nation, but eleven.
Each nation, according to Woodard, possesses a “dominant culture” that holds clues for understanding positions on everything from gun control to racial equality. One such nation is “Greater Appalachia.” Woodard writes, “Founded in the eighteenth century by wave upon wave of settlers from the war-ravaged borderlands of Northern Ireland, northern England, and the Scottish lowlands… it transplanted a culture formed in a state of near constant danger and upheaval, characterized by a warrior ethic and commitment to personal sovereignty and individual liberty.”
Elegy invokes other popular histories as well, particularly Virginian politician Jim Webb’s 2004 book Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. Although Webb is a Democrat, he shares with Vance a history of military service. Webb uses this tradition as a starting point for his exploration of Scots-Irish culture. Born Fighting is largely a recuperation and celebration of Webb’s Scots-Irish “redneck” roots, which he credits for his successes in military and political leadership. Like Vance, Webb maintains that the people of Appalachia have unique genetic qualifications that have produced innate traits and characteristics. Webb, however, is more laudatory of these than Vance and even goes so far as to state that “no other group has been more denigrated, attacked, and even feared by America’s evermore connected ruling elites” than the Scots-Irish.
Webb’s work relies on shaky historical foundations but exploits a very real turn in scholarship, primarily among a segment of Civil War historians, which sought to explain class differences among white people in a slave-holding society. Starting in the 1980s, Civil War historians Grady McWhiney and Forrest McDonald pioneered the “Celtic thesis,” which argued on the basis of remedial research that more than half of white Southerners, prior to the Civil War, were of Celtic stock. Because of this, the thesis suggests, the Civil War might be best understood not as a rejection of slavery, but as a clash of white ethnicities as Anglo-Saxon elites in the North attempted to forcibly impose their worldview on a largely Celtic South.
If you think that tangentially plugging into academic scholarship exonerates Vance, I have bad news. McWhiney and McDonald, with their emphasis on shared white ethnic heritage and their mitigation of white supremacy as a feature of antebellum life, became the favorite historians of white nationalist groups. McWhiney even participated in the founding of his own hate-group, the League of the South, which recently came to Pikeville, Kentucky, to rally with Nazis in defense of white families. Both McWhiney and McDonald eventually denounced the League of the South, but not before helping to legitimize a particularly virulent strain of neo-Confederate thought still in currency.
Writer John Thomason observes in the New Inquiry that, “Even as Vance wags his finger at the vices of his fellow hillbillies, he cannot help but to insist on the innocence of their whiteness.” In constructing the Scots-Irish—the hillbillies in Hillbilly Elegy—as a race unto their own, Vance can argue that it’s simply their innate characteristics that have set them on this destructive path that culminated in the election of Donald Trump, not their racism. This is highly alarming and, as Thomason argues, makes racial determinism “more palpable to audiences that might normally be on guard against white nationalism.”
Vance appears to take particular relish in using inaccurate constructions of Appalachian whiteness to complicate universal notions of white privilege. As he told Ezra Klein from Vox, “The problem, as I see it, is that we haven’t necessarily developed a great vocabulary to describe disadvantage in a newer, much more culturally diverse country…it’s not just that talking to that kid [a young person from West Virginia] about white privilege is not an especially useful way to understand his real disadvantage. It’s that it actually makes it harder for him to see the disadvantages that other people face.” The idea that confronting racism risks irrevocably alienating individuals of all races is both a common and predictable strain of thought among conservatives, but it becomes more sinister when it is propped up by the belief that the white individuals in question represent a disadvantaged race unto themselves.
In Elegy and in Vance’s comments about Elegy’s subjects, white Appalachians take on the qualities of an oppressed minority much in the same way that conservative individuals view African Americans: as people who have suffered hardships but ultimately are only holding themselves back. This construction allows conservative intellectuals to talk around stale stereotypes of African Americans and other nonwhite individuals while holding up the exaggerated degradations of a white group thought to defy evidence of white privilege.
Vance drags the Obama family into discussions and sets them against poor white Appalachians. In his interview with Ezra Klein, he noted, “One of the points I tried to make is that if you’re asking the son of a West Virginia coal miner to check his privilege or to appreciate ways that, say, Barack Obama’s daughters are going to be privileged or underprivileged relative in certain ways, I think you’re asking too much from basic cognition,” echoing the blog post comments he cites in Elegy. It is telling how infrequently individuals who are both Black and Appalachian appear in his remarks. While bemoaning our basic cognition, he takes liberties with his own by refusing to acknowledge that not all West Virginians or coal miners are white.
Is it true that white Appalachians share a common Scots-Irish heritage and does this heritage inform our social position in the modern world? The answer to both questions is an emphatic “no.” Apart from myths and legends, there is no basis for the belief that historic or contemporary white Appalachians share a distinct culture informed by their homogenous ethnic heritage. In fact, fighting that myth has been the life’s work of many Appalachian historians.
The myth that Vance draws upon, borrowed from American Nations, Born Fighting, and other popular histories, often goes something like this. Once upon a time, during some indeterminate period usually in the eighteenth century, white people who weren’t pilgrims came to America. Those of Irish or Scottish origins were attracted to the eastern mountains because mountains were in their blood or some other romantic nonsense. These groups settled there and became the Scots-Irish.
The mountains, in turn, provided powerful insulation against the forces of the modern world and allowed the Scots-Irish to retain “old world” characteristics such as a clannish or tribal family structure, peculiar forms of speech, and the general traits of an “honor” or “warrior” culture that included a propensity for violence and feuding. Over time, this shared heritage became the presumed basis for certain ethnocultural deficiencies due to over-and interbreeding.
The work of modern Appalachian historian Wilma Dunaway provides a sharp corrective to the myth, which she calls the “ethnic homogeneity thesis.” Her scholarly work is filled with insight, drawn from primary sources of the Appalachian frontier and archaeological evidence, that eighteenth-century Appalachia was a fusion of a variety of European ethnic groups and other groups that reflected African and indigenous descent.
Archaeologists also address this myth in their work. Audrey Horning writes in her work on migration, “The southern upland region attracted settlers not only from the British borderlands… but from all over North American colonial regions as well as from France, the Palatinate and West Africa, while later drawing from eastern and southern Europe.”
Scots-Irish heritage is real, but the exaggerated dominance of its influence in the region is often put into the service of a variety of outcomes. In the early twentieth century, reformers utilized the belief that Appalachians were of “pioneer stock” in the application of a new social order that sought to curb the influence of “undesirable” people and modernize the nation.
“They didn’t want something that looked good. They wanted to show the worst side. They took pictures. Well, you’ve seen them. I know why they do it. You see, movies are made about the South. They’ll be hillbillies and the rough people of the South, when you see the movies. And, well, people outside the South were viewing this community here. If it had been all spic and span and beautiful buildings, well, it wouldn’t have been interesting to anybody.”
This quote comes from a man who was interviewed by historians in the 1970s. He’s describing a photograph taken by Lewis Hine of a school that he and my great-grandfather attended. My maternal great-grandfather was born in Loyston, Tennessee, in 1896. In the 1930s, Hine accepted a commission from the federal government to photograph Loyston residents before the government seized the land to facilitate the construction of rural development projects. The 1920s and 1930s became a critical decade in the construction of the “mountain white,” a peculiar specimen thought to stubbornly resist social and even genetic progress. A new class of reformers deployed both visual and graphic images of white Appalachians to demonstrate the dangers of clinging to the past in an age of what the government hoped would be unprecedented modernization.
Hine, best known for his photographs that exposed the horrors of child labor, was not the only photographer commissioned to document the poor. The government employed a fleet of photographers, many through the Farm Security Administration (FSA). This form of visual cataloging complemented the agency’s aim to resettle individuals living on “sub-marginal” land as part of a larger New Deal effort to modernize America. The government justified its actions in the name of progress and leveraged the consolidated power of the federal government to modernize the rural poor by force if necessary.
Hine worked directly for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), an agency best known for creating government-owned power generating facilities. Most of Loyston proper is now at the bottom of a man-made lake—sometimes called the Loyston Sea—created by the TVA’s Norris Dam project in 1936. My great-grandfather’s land, however, was not submerged. Finding itself with surplus land, the government transferred ownership to the state of Tennessee for the creation of a state park at the site of the new lake. This was consistent with the government’s broad aim to put sub-marginal land into the service of the public good.
The problem, of course, was that the government had the sole authority to determine the definition of “sub-marginal.” Many residents, like the farmer quoted above, believed that the government, through selective photographic documentation and biased sociological studies, intentionally created a narrative that suited its purpose. My family was fortunate. Rural developers, photographers, and a new class of sociologists found them uninteresting on the whole and they simply relocated, without the promised assistance, to a community several miles away. Beyond Tennessee, some families met a much darker fate.
The FSA’s fleet of photographers produced social documentation of enormous cultural significance. We are all familiar, for example, with Dorothea Lange’s photographs of dust bowl migrants, and many brilliant photographers honed their skills with the FSA. Gordon Parks, a magnetic African American photographer, credited it with forcing him to “take a hard look backward at black history; to realize the burdens of those who had lived through it.” This experience, Parks remarked, made him “much better prepared to face up to that history yet to be made.”
Several of the subjects of FSA photographs became symbolic of their particular historical moment. Lange’s “migrant mother,” Florence Owens Thompson, became a visual representation of the strength of motherhood in the wake of enormous social upheaval. The African American cleaner, Ella Watson, the subject of Parks’s American Gothic, became a symbolic representation of the unequal treatment of Black Americans during an age of progress.
Less is known about the subjects of Arthur Rothstein’s first assignment with the FSA. Rothstein would later become a prolific photographer with tenures at Look and Parade magazines, but in 1936 he was twenty-one years old and among the first photographers sent on assignment by Roy Stryker, the head of the FSA’s photographic unit. Rothstein’s assignment was to document families living in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, soon-to-be-evicted for the construction of a new national park.
Momentum to establish a national park in the area had existed for some time. The government authorized Shenandoah National Park in 1926, much to the enthusiasm of local Virginian businessmen and politicians, but progress on construction moved slowly because approximately five hundred families lived at the designated site. The state began to slowly acquire the necessary land through eminent domain, and in 1928, Virginia passed the Blanket Condemnation Act, which streamlined the state’s acquisition of the 200,000 acres slated to become national park land.
Much like projects in the Tennessee Valley, the government framed the relocation of farmers as a benevolent process that would move residents geographically, but also temporally, from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. As you might imagine, then, expert opinion that confirmed this perception was in high demand.
The passage of the Condemnation Act brought many strangers with cameras to the Shenandoah Valley. Surveyors, social workers, academics, doctors, and photographers arrived to assess the residents and initiate the eviction process. In 1933, journalist Thomas Henry and University of Chicago sociologist Mandel Sherman released Hollow Folk, a book that purported to be a sociological study of the very people the government aimed to displace.
Their work largely follows a pattern of casting mountaineers as a primitive, isolated, and backwards people with a homogenous white ethnic identity and monoculture degraded through idleness and inbreeding. They write, “Social evolution presumably still goes on but so slowly do groups go forward under their own power that no movement can be discerned through generations.” These less evolved individuals, the experts argued, could only be saved through the intervention of outsiders.
Henry and Sherman were assisted by the state’s social workers, who helped them order the residents of the Shenandoah Valley into discrete geographical family units—the “hollows” of Hollow Folk—which they then scaled from most evolved to least evolved. They designated “Colvin Hollow,” their quasi-fictitious name for Corbin Hollow, as the least evolved and most degraded.
Henry and Sherman, with no small amount of assistance from area social worker Miriam Sizer, described the residents of Colvin Hollow as living in primitive squalor, subsisting on a diet of weeds and small vermin, and overrun with illegitimate children. According to the two writers, these individuals knew little of the “outside world” and did not include in their basic vocabulary more modern words like “post office.”
The ghosts of Henry and Sherman would like you to know that they were not eugenicists. That really doesn’t matter, however, because eugenicists loved their work, filled as it was with lurid descriptions of white mountaineers’ degraded “pioneer stock.” Virginia was already at the forefront of the American eugenics movement thanks to the efforts of the Eugenics Records Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. The New York collective helped Virginia’s politicians draft sterilization and racial integrity laws. In 1927 the fruits of their labor blossomed when the infamous Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell effectively legalized compulsory eugenic sterilization nationwide, which was practiced in Virginia until 1979.
According to Charles Davenport, the director of the Eugenics Record Office, Virginia’s mountains were filled with mongrels of “a combination of the worst traits, a badly put together people.” Many individuals thought to fit that description, like Carrie Buck, ended up at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, where they were sterilized to, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, “prevent our being swamped with incompetence.”
Into this environment stepped Arthur Rothstein, objective documentarian. Or was he? In 2011, Rothstein’s work in the Shenandoah Valley became the subject of Richard Knox Robinson’s film Rothstein’s First Assignment. Robinson, himself a photographer, saw in Rothstein’s photographs striking parallels to the narrative embedded in Hollow Folk. Rothstein extensively photographed, for example, the residents of “Colvin Hollow,” including the mother of four illegitimate children who so captivated Hollow Folk’s authors.
Robinson suggests it was as if Rothstein used descriptions of subjects in Hollow Folk to guide his photographic eye, a not-unlikely crutch for a new photographer to use. Ignoring the presence and evictions of more “modern” residents who owned gas stations and restaurants, Rothstein delivered a photographic portfolio that shored up a narrative of the Shenandoah Valley as a place forgotten by time and progress.
Curiously, the mountaineers identified by both Rothstein and the authors of Hollow Folk as the most degenerate lived in the area of the Shenandoah Valley closest to developed areas of the future national park, where wealthy businessmen hoped to accelerate evictions to begin the expansion and new construction of vacation resorts. Many of them even worked at the Skyland Resort, which hoped to offer luxury accommodation to visitors of the new park.
What became of these mountaineers following their evictions was not widely known until Robinson set his documentary in motion. Although the government successfully relocated some mountaineers, others were destined for the Colony. This process appears to have begun during the writing of Hollow Folk, during which time the authors had frequent contact with area physicians and social workers.
Roy Sexton, an area doctor, wrote to Horace Albright, the Director of the National Park Service, “After the survey is done, we’ll Colonize the worst of the bunch”—a sinister play on the eugenics institution’s abbreviated name. Robinson found that the state authorized the institutionalization of at least eleven members of the family that populated “Colvin Hollow” at the Colony, nine of them children. Rothstein was present when social workers took two children away for institutionalization, photographing them just days prior.
In the early 1990s, the National Park Service funded a series of archaeological studies of the Shenandoah Valley. One focused on the settlement sites vacated by evicted residents. In Corbin Hollow, archaeologists found mass-produced furniture and toys, modern medicines, records, specialized farm equipment, shoes, an assortment of diningware, and even an automobile.
The most moving discovery, to me, was a Maxfield Parrish calendar for 1931. Parrish was a particularly striking illustrator known for his modern and vibrant colors, who often incorporated innovative drawing techniques to give his illustrations a three-dimensional feel. He was, in other words, an artist of his time, and the residents of Corbin Hollow decorated their home with his art because, contrary to belief, they were people of their time as well.
And with that we have our first example of the strange bond between up-and-comers on the Appalachia circuit and salivating eugenicists. And it will keep happening. Kelli Haywood, the Public Affairs Director of Whitesburg, Kentucky, radio station WMMT, recently argued that people in Appalachia dislike J.D. Vance because he “airs our dirty laundry.” For me, this couldn’t be further from the truth. I don’t dislike Vance because I get embarrassed when he talks about “hillbilly culture.” I dislike him because I think about children stolen from their parents. I think about white nationalist flyers that proclaim, “Appalachia is white, Scots-Irish, proud.”
But the combination of dirty laundry and Whitesburg makes a nice set up for the next section, where we’ll meet Vance’s predecessor, Harry Caudill, a genteel lawyer from Whitesburg who showed the problems of Appalachia to the world and ultimately came to advocate for very disturbing solutions to them.
Before 2016, the last time the nation took such an obsessive interest in West Virginia’s politics was in 1960, when John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey did battle during the state’s Democratic primary. Kennedy had had a promising but unconvincing first primary result in Wisconsin in April—his win came courtesy of the state’s substantial Catholic population—and West Virginia was next.
Kennedy campaigned throughout the entire state and by most accounts developed a genuine attachment to the people there, whom he often commended for their resilience in the face of economic distress. The people of West Virginia, in turn, awarded Kennedy with a victory in the state’s primary. His win in a state with a small Catholic population helped convince the Democratic establishment that he could be a viable presidential candidate and the rest, as they say, is history.
Images captured during Kennedy’s presidential campaign stops in West Virginia left an enduring impression on the nation. As Ronald Eller writes, “Kennedy’s visible alarm at the conditions of the Mountain State and the attention given to economic issues in the presidential campaign lured dozens of journalists in the months that followed the election. Stories of human tragedy, personal struggle, cruel injustice, and heroic perseverance abounded in Appalachia and provided grist for a growing media mill of articles about poverty in America.”
In August 1960, Julius Duscha wrote in the Washington Post, “Much of the Southern Appalachians is as underdeveloped, when compared with the affluence of the rest of the nation, as the newly independent countries of Africa.” His essay, “A Long Trail of Misery Winds the Proud Hills,” hinted at what would become a decidedly Cold War-era twist on long-standing narratives of Appalachian otherness: Appalachia as a third world within the heart of America.
This twist applied a particular post-war logic to the problems of Appalachia. If America was willing, this logic implied, to use its abundant wealth to help develop African countries striking out from their colonial pasts, then shouldn’t it apply the same effort and offer the same assistance to poor Appalachians at home? The myth of Appalachia as homogenous and white went far in capturing the attention of the nation. Photographers, journalists, and reformers stuck closely to this myth in capturing stories of an “other America” that would help fuel what would become the nation’s War on Poverty.
Into this moment came Kentucky writer and attorney Harry Caudill, a born and bred Appalachian spokesperson who had a storied career as the voice of a misunderstood region. In 1967, Caudill helped prosecute Hobart Ison for the murder of Hugh O’Connor, but in the early 1960s, he was at work on his exposé of coal mining, which he first published in 1962 in the Atlantic with the provocative title “The Rape of the Appalachians.”
Strip mining—the excavation of coal through the surface of soil and rock rather than via subterranean means—had recently become an established method of extraction in eastern Kentucky. This had resulted in broad changes to the landscape and labor practices in coal communities. Environmental destruction became more rampant. Strip mining also required fewer miners, which led to widespread unemployment. Communities and landowners attempted to curb this practice through the courts, arguing that strip mining was an “unusual and wholly unforeseen method” of extraction inconsistent with the terms of existing coal leases. The courts sided with coal companies, and Caudill went on the warpath.
“The cumulative effects of the wrecking of a coal-filled mountain stagger the imagination,” he wrote in “The Rape of the Appalachians.” His article largely attends to the realities ushered forth by strip mining, including its toxic effects on vegetation, waterways, wildlife, and people. He spared no restraint in holding “absentee corporations” accountable for “the physical destruction of the land and the abject impoverishment of its people,” labeling the coal industry’s control of eastern Kentucky a relic of a “laissez-faire century.” Caudill quickly expanded his article into a book, which became 1963’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Distressed Area.
Just a year prior, socialist writer Michael Harrington had released an influential study of poverty, The Other America: Poverty in the United States. The book primed the nation and its politicians to seek out previously unacknowledged communities on the brink of economic annihilation. Dwight Macdonald, a cultural critic, summed up the collective response to Harrington’s work in the New Yorker by writing, “In the last year we seem to have suddenly awakened, rubbing our eyes like Rip Van Winkle, to the fact that massive poverty exists.” The extent of poverty, Macdonald commented, “is difficult to believe in the United States of 1963, but one has to make an effort, and it is now being made.”
Caudill became the spokesperson for Appalachia and a translator of white mountain poverty to the nation. Night Comes to the Cumberlands became a commercial success and the New York Times and other influential publications sent reporters to Kentucky to confirm Caudill’s descriptions of the region. Caudill often relied on romantic and problematic notions of Appalachia and its people to give his stories of regional exploitation their bite. He enjoyed the spotlight, taking visiting reporters on “poverty tours” near his Whitesburg home.
Almost everything about Caudill’s persona—his middle-class profession, his wholesome family life, and his eloquence—challenged dominant perceptions of the region. This is precisely why the press found him irresistible. The press embraced Caudill, much like Vance, because he could be both of the people and above the people. At his best, Caudill was a formidable enemy of the coal industry, leveraging his influence to expose and arrest the destruction of land by corporations. But he could also be vicious toward the poor, particularly after federal assistance came to the region.
Both Caudill and Vance set themselves to the task of drawing the nation’s attention away from social unrest and racial inequality at a particular moment in time and refocusing it instead on the conditions of white poverty. For Caudill, that moment was the War on Poverty, the popular name for the flurry of legislation adopted by the Johnson administration in the mid-1960s designed to combat both urban and rural poverty. Architects of this legislation intended solutions to poverty to be race-neutral, but the administration’s emphasis on Appalachian poverty provided many social reformers with problems that seemed, to their relief, far distant from those entwined with the civil rights movement.
Kennedy’s commitment to addressing Appalachia’s poverty became part of his legacy, adopted by the Johnson administration as part of the Great Society agenda, when the new president declared “an unconditional war on poverty in America.” In April 1964, Johnson traveled to Appalachia to fulfill Kennedy’s pledge to revisit the area. His “poverty tour” also included stops in Chicago and Pittsburgh, but the press images from Johnson’s stop in Martin County, Kentucky, provided the public relations magic that transformed the War on Poverty from a series of related legislation to an agenda with a deep moral purpose.
Black and white photographs of children playing in bare shacks, restless with hunger, and tended to by parents aged beyond their years, captivated the nation. Life magazine featured twelve pages of these images in the January 31, 1964, issue under the title “The Valley of Poverty.” Life intended the images to serve as an indictment of “a wealthy nation’s indifference.” “Their homes are shacks without plumbing or sanitation,” the article explained, “Their landscape is a man-made desolation of corrugated hills and hollows laced with polluted streams. The people, themselves—often disease-ridden and unschooled—are without jobs and even hope.”
These images worked, much like Elegy works today, by offering middle-class white viewers a glimpse into a world that feels both familiar and alien. This world unburdens the white viewer from the fatigue of thinking critically about race, a mercy expressed in Elegy in its dismissal of the “racial prism.” Poverty pictures allowed comfortable white Americans to consume the difference embedded in the images while believing they were engaging critically with pressing social issues. In 1964, this attention complemented the War on Poverty’s logic and design.
When people asked Adam Yarmolinsky, one of Johnson’s economic advisors, if the War on Poverty had a color, he responded, “Color it Appalachian if you are going to color it anything at all.” Appalachian historian John Alexander Williams notes, “The youthful volunteers who staffed the anti-poverty offices and community actions programs of the Kennedy-Johnson years were, like the religious and benevolent workers of the last century, fleeing events in the lowland South, namely the rise of Black Power…the liberal television commentators and welfare bureaucrats who displayed Appalachian poverty to the nation took obvious relish in the white skins and blue eyes of the region’s hungry children.”
The press rarely used images of poor Black Appalachians in their exposés of regional poverty. Public support for the War on Poverty depended on getting white, middle-class Americans to care about poverty, and projections of white poverty worked best in this regard. This led to an overabundance of images and stories about white poverty and, according to Ronald Eller, “helped establish a pattern of critical but superficial commentary that would sustain the image of Appalachia as a problem area for years to come.” Sound familiar?
Reformers, photographers, the press, and politicians flocked to Appalachia to find the form of poverty they needed and wanted to see. The peculiar privilege of serving as the face of poverty had benefits—the Appalachian Regional Commission is in many ways a success story. But it also created a new consumer demand for sensational stories that helped the nation form opinions about who they imagined the deserving and undeserving poor to be. The War on Poverty did not succeed in coaxing the nation from its prejudices, but it proved that the poverty industry—capturing visual or graphic images of poverty, serving as a politician tasked with administering federal aid—could be profitable.
Although attitudes toward Appalachian poverty were highly problematic, they often appeared benevolent compared to attitudes toward African American poverty. The Moynihan Report of 1965, to use just one example, remains a particularly searing, biased, and unfair indictment of African American families. The Department of Labor commissioned the report from sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan and intended to use his findings in the development of War on Poverty economic policy. The resulting study, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, is a remarkable example of the culture of poverty framework in action.
Moynihan concluded that the foundations of the nation’s African American family were so weak, there was nothing but a “tangle of pathology” in place of a social structure. Every quality that was idealized in the world white middle-class families inhabited was absent in Black families. Black fathers were either not present or emasculated by bread-winning Black mothers, a perverse phenomenon that primed young children, particularly boys, for a life of low ambition, drugs, and crime. Moynihan’s report had little utility for the Johnson administration after civil rights activists denounced it. But conservative politicians and intellectuals resurrected it in the 1970s and 80s. They used Moynihan’s findings—now stacked against a decade’s worth of social trends ripe for malleable interpretation—to argue that public assistance programs did more to undermine Black family life than improve it.
You might be asking, “Why does Hillbilly Elegy sound kind of like the Moynihan Report?” One reason is that white Appalachians became persona non grata after the War on Poverty failed. The nation began to see them as individuals who had absorbed an unprecedented amount of federal aid and done nothing with it except continue to be poor. Hillbillies had wasted taxpayer money, a cardinal sin that placed them in the ranks of the undeserving poor, an often racialized category that nevertheless has always welcomed white individuals thought to be, as Caudill once said, the “dregs” of society.
The other reason Elegy sounds like the Moynihan Report is that the white people who are outspoken in their beliefs about the culture of poverty simply don’t count poor white Appalachians as part of their tribe. As Elegy makes clear, it’s satisfying to imagine us as a different culture, even a different genetic specimen, than “good” white people. Just look at headlines proclaiming us to be “members of America’s forgotten tribe” if you want to understand how easy it is to naturalize this outlook. Both of these asinine positions, unfortunately, came to reshape Caudill’s thinking about Appalachia and its problems.
The same year that Moynihan completed his report, a new leader in the American eugenics movement emerged. “Is the quality of the U.S. population declining?” asked Stanford scientist William Shockley in a November 1965 edition of U.S. News and World Reports. After clarifying that he was not speaking of individuals who are “substantially retarded” and do “very little breeding,” Shockley explained, “The real cause of worry is people of somewhat higher ability but still, say, near the bottom of the population in the ability to reason and plan ahead…not only are they dull but they need help to survive. Most cannot advance and some are a threat to other people.”
Asked what role genetics played in high incidences of “Negroes on crime and welfare relief rolls,” Shockley answered that “if you look at the median Negro I.Q., it almost always turns out to be not as good as the median white I.Q….is there an imbalance in the reproduction of superior and inferior strains? This we do not know.” With the help of wealthy benefactors, Shockley would make it his mission to find out.
The L.A. Times wrote of him, “Shockley strayed well beyond the confines of established genetics into the shoals of eugenics. He suggested that welfare and relief programs prevented natural selection from killing off ‘the bottom of the population’: ‘with improvements to technology…inferior strains have increased chances for survival and reproduction at the same time birth control has tended to reduce family size among superior elements.’”
By the 1970s, Shockley had been largely disowned by the mainstream scientific community. Although he continued to advance his theories, he was incredibly sensitive to accusations that he was a racist. In 1974, for example, he debated the African American psychiatrist Frances Cress Welsing. It was a mortifying experience for Shockley in which he attempted to refute any racist underpinnings in his obsession with eugenics. He preferred to label himself a “raceologist,” an objective observer of the differences between races.
It’s here that we re-discover Caudill, disillusioned by the failures of the War on Poverty. Rather than stimulating the ambition of Appalachians, Caudill believed that a decade of government assistance had only rendered mountain people more complacent and dependent on social welfare. He became convinced this dependency had something to do with their defective genes. In Night Comes to the Cumberlands, shared ethnic ancestry within Appalachia gave the region a sense of romantic and noble mystery. A decade later it was, to Caudill, a source of the region’s woe.
Caudill began to follow Shockley’s career closely, clipping newspaper articles about his work. In 1974, he sent Shockley a fan letter in which he confessed, “The poverty that is associated with our region is accompanied by passivity and dependence and I see no present hope for allaying it. I have come full circle in my thinking and have reluctantly concluded that the poverty that called into being the Appalachian Regional Commission is largely genetic in origin and is largely irreducible.”
By that point in his career, Shockley was openly advocating coercive sterilization for the “genetically unfit.” It appears that he saw in Caudill’s letter the potential to once again attempt to mitigate his racism by examining dysgenics, the spread of defective genes, in a predominately white population. Hoping to pilot a study that would legitimize his research and lead to federal funding for his sterilization program, Shockley agreed to meet Caudill in Kentucky to discuss the genetic fitness of white Appalachians.
The two men called their meeting the “Whitesburg Conference.” It took place at Caudill’s home and members of Shockley’s inner circle attended, including J.W. Kirkpatrick, a Ku Klux Klan financier, and Robert Travis Osborne, a segregationist. Their agenda, outlined earlier by Kirkpatrick, was to establish a pilot program in Whitesburg to “test a limited number of people representative of a group of a couple of generations of mountaineers with apparent low intelligence to determine if dysgenics is taking place.” There seemed to be little doubt among participants that the study would yield their desired results. If all went according to plan, Kirkpatrick shared, “the sterilization plan will be an outgrowth of the pilot program and can be implemented at some point after the pilot program has been completed and evaluated.”
“As I remember Harry Caudill repeated several times his grave concern that welfare programs in Appalachia which were intended to rehabilitate the people into more productive members of society were not going to be fruitful because of the brain drain,” Kilpatrick wrote. “If extensive research confirms that observation, then there should be drastic revisions in the projects for welfare and rehabilitation now being carried out…as well as further consideration to Dr. Shockley’s proposal of sterilization on a voluntary basis for money.”
After the conference, Caudill repeated his recommendations to Shockley in a follow-up letter. Apparently the people of Appalachia, although deemed unfit by Caudill, were intelligent enough to understand the often sinister purposes of intelligence testing because much of Caudill’s advice concerned how to not raise suspicions about the true nature of the study. “I suggested that we avoid the term ‘intelligence test’ simply because by doing so we might avoid some critical and troublesome newspaper publicity,” he wrote, identifying a particular county where people “are breeding down to idiocy.” He offered suggestions that sound very close to an endorsement of bribery to bring school officials on board by engaging them as paid consultants. This was, in essence, how much of the research in Hollow Folk took place as well.
Fortunately, funding for the study and subsequent sterilization programs did not materialize and Shockley and Caudill never met again. For some time, however, Caudill continued to correspond with Shockley and other eugenicists, including Nathaniel Hirsch. Caudill wrote to Hirsch months after the Whitesburg Conference that “during the Johnson years when anti-poverty programs were in vogue I once told a federal official that the best way to fight poverty would be to move an army camp into the region. My theory was that the soldiers would get the mountain girls pregnant to the everlasting benefit of the region as a whole. I still think the suggestion was sound.” One can believe he did indeed make such a remark. Night Comes to the Cumberlands is full of sexist descriptions of “rangy, narrow-minded, stubborn, and clannish” women who “continued to multiply with all the astounding efficiency which has marked their history in the Southern hills.”
It’s difficult to know what to make of Caudill’s early work in the region given his open association with eugenicists in his later life. Much in his correspondence with these individuals seems to indicate that he always felt this bias toward poor white mountaineers and simply adopted a more modern language, provided by dysgenics, to express his views. It isn’t hard to locate shadows of these beliefs in his older work. The Lexington-Herald Ledger revealed much of this correspondence publicly, drawn from Caudill’s personal papers housed at the University of Kentucky, during the fiftieth anniversary year of Night Comes to the Cumberlands in 2013. Caudill passed away in 1990, but his wife, Anne, called the publication of the correspondence a deliberate attempt to “besmirch” her husband’s legacy by emphasizing a “minuscule” episode from his past.
Anne Caudill writes, “After further correspondence, he became dubious about the direction of the discourse and dropped it.” To put her framework in modern terms, Anne Caudill argued that her husband was simply engaging in the “marketplace of ideas” and, as part of his civic responsibility to his people, felt inclined to cast his net widely for solutions to their problems. Although she knew her husband better than we ever will or could, it must be noted that Harry Caudill wouldn’t be the last person to deflect a willingness to elevate problematic and dangerous theories in the service of encouraging self-help.
Shockley died an embarrassment in 1989, but certain aspects of his work and legacy live on. An organization called The Pioneer Fund provided financial assistance to Shockley’s non-profit Foundation for Research and Education of Eugenics and Dysgenics and publicized his work in white nationalist circles. Despite this wealthy benefactor, Shockley conducted surprisingly little scientific research and overspent his research grants on free speech crusades.
In the 1990s, The Pioneer Fund came under public scrutiny after it was revealed that a number of the sources used by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein for The Bell Curve were researchers affiliated with the organization. “Many of The Bell Curve’s most important assertions which establish casual links between IQ and social behavior, and IQ and race, are derived partially or totally from the Mankind Quarterly—Pioneer Fund scholarly circle,” wrote Charles Lane in the December 1994 issue of the New York Review of Books.
Even without this direct link it would not be difficult to place Shockley as a not-distant intellectual ancestor of Charles Murray. Murray, who once burned a cross during what he described as a teenage prank, maintained the soundness of his borrowed research despite its provenance. The scientific community widely condemned The Bell Curve and Murray left the academy to become a pubic intellectual on the subject of race science.
The New York Times wrote in 1994 that “Shockley receives only one guarded paragraph in the 845 pages of The Bell Curve. Yet his old pronouncements are everywhere…The more elegantly written Bell Curve has the same drift. Shockley bequeathed its authors their self-congratulatory tone as well: He boasted about raising ‘questions that are usually swept under the rug’ as they do about taboos. Mr. Murray and Mr. Herrnstein also emulate Shockley by asserting expertise in academic disciplines (like genetics) outside their own and by protesting too much against those who might accuse them of making a fetish of race.”
And this is where we pick up the story of Vance again, sitting across the stage from Charles Murray at the American Enterprise Institute in October 2016. Our second example of this strange bond quickly transitions to the third. The camaraderie performed by the pair was, in some ways, an outgrowth of their mutual appreciation. Vance cited Murray’s Coming Apart approvingly in Elegy and often in interviews, and Murray found Elegy riveting as well. The occasion of their talk was an hourlong conversation about the decline of the white working class, and Vance appeared eager to tell Murray what he clearly wanted to hear about the genetic dimensions of this decline.
Over laughs and jokes, the pair discussed their “pretty clean Scots-Irish blood” while getting to the heart of what “hillbilly culture” actually is. “It’s worth noting,” Vance explained, “that if you look at ethnographic studies of this area you find that the Scots-Irish are disproportionately represented in this area of the country…so there’s definitely a sort of ethnic component to what’s going on in these areas.” He continued, “There’s something to be said for the fact that Scots-Irish culture is both unique and regionally distinct but it’s also spread pretty far and wide.” Murray, who in the darkest corners of his brain still likes to believe he’s a social scientist, nodded and smiled at this conflicting package of attributes that wouldn’t pass a freshman essay—regionally distinct but spread far and wide!—as if it was the truest fact he’d ever heard.
Murray, who also claims Scots-Irish ancestry, was quick to point out, “and our leading characteristics though, which I learned long before I read Hillbilly Elegy, is being drunk and violent.” More laughs. A week after the incident at Middlebury College, in which student protestors shut down Murray’s lecture, Vance made it a point to credit him for his theories on “brain drain” in his New York Times op-ed about why he was moving back to Ohio.
John Thomason notes that “Vance cites racist-thinking far more directly than even his critics have indicated. The very first end-note references Razib Khan, a writer who the New York Times dropped as a regular science contributor after Gawker revealed his ‘history with racist, far-right online publications.’ Charles Murray…the most famous racial determinist in contemporary America is cited approvingly.” It’s a chilling exercise to consider why individuals who are happy to deconstruct Black life down to the smallest data-point and to savage critics who disagree find J.D. Vance to be a savant in cultural studies, a field coincidentally held in poor regard by most conservative thinkers.
There are many authors who have written about the people and problems of Appalachia and similar environments who don’t have eugenicists for pen-pals and mentors. Some of them even anchor frank discussions of social problems within moving personal stories. Otis Trotter’s Keeping Heart, a memoir about growing up poor, sick, and Black in Appalachian Ohio springs to mind, as does Rick Bragg’s All Over but the Shoutin’. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is the story of a dysfunctional West Virginian family and finding the courage to leave. Linda Tate, in Power in the Blood, tells of the re-discovery of her Cherokee roots, and Creeker, by Linda Scott DeRosier, is yet another memoir about coming of age in Appalachia.
“No book about Appalachia has gotten this much attention since Harry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands was published in 1963,” the Daily Yonder wrote of Elegy. Amazon tries to sell me Elegy if I view the page for Night Comes (and vice versa), and instructors are now pairing the texts together in their Introduction to Appalachian Studies courses. Imagine what it feels like to understand that if someone decides to purchase a book about Appalachia, there’s a 100 percent chance they’ll be recommended not one but two books used by their authors to win the esteem of white supremacists and eugenicists.
Living with this fatigue is real. In the age of Hillbilly Elegy, a book applauded by the National Review for proving that signs of white distress “have gone neglected as LGBTQ identity politics and Black Lives Matter antics” have monopolized the nation’s attention, we’re told to be grateful that Vance has returned Appalachia to the nation’s conscience. But I don’t want Appalachia to be used as a siphon to suck attention away from LGBTQ politics and Black Lives Matter, movements that also flourish here. I don’t want to lose race in discussions of class. I don’t want to keep talking about “brain drain” when millions of smart, capable, and good people still call the region home. I don’t want anything that Vance could ever give the region, which works out, because he’s far more interested in taking.
A neutral observer might say that the best course of action is simply to ignore the Elegy phenomenon as best we can. You must understand that isn’t possible. Vance is in our schools, our libraries. He is at our graduations. He is on our timelines and in our newspaper. He is a member of our faculties, with new honorary degrees. He’s like the monster from It Follows. The best we can do, as community columnist Jillean McCommons suggests in the Lexington-Herald Ledger, is “turn that anger into your next writing project. Write about your people. Tell your story. Answer with pen and pad.”
Last year, my alma mater, a state school outside of Appalachia, selected Elegy as required reading for all incoming freshmen and paired its selection with a financial arrangement with photographer Shelby Lee Adams to sell his Appalachian poverty pictures. Known for posed and stylized black and white portrait work of mountain families, Adams has made a career photographing the poor. Among Appalachians, he is controversial. Like many photographers before him, including Arthur Rothstein, he favors images of poor, often disabled, individuals in contexts that he frequently manipulates.
Adams often photographs the same families over time, and has developed what he presents as an insider status among his impoverished subjects despite his own solidly middle-class upbringing and training at the Cleveland Institute of Art. His most forceful claim to this status appears in his Appalachian Lives through the ghost of Hobart Ison, the man who murdered Hugh O’Connor.
Among the photographs, Adams tells a story. One day he finds himself down a holler in Kentucky, photographing a family and their trailer. As he works, the owner of the property—this time, a woman—arrives and orders him to leave. In this version of the “stranger-with-a-camera” story, Adams has a less heated exchange with the property owner, who nevertheless menaces him by asking him if knows what people do to nosy photographers in Letcher County. Not only is he aware, Adams defiantly tells the property owner that Hobart Ison—whom he refers to as Hobert Isom in his text—is his third cousin.
Adams’s subjects become active participants in his version of the legend by helping drive away the property owner so he can continue taking their pictures. In their conversation after the encounter, Adams reports that the family provided its blessing to sell their images “for a thousand dollars apiece,” confronting and ultimately dismissing in smug fashion questions of exploitation in Adams’s arrangements with his subjects. My former university insisted that Adams’s work “is the photographic analog of J.D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy…the author and the photographer tell corresponding stories through different means.”
This is true, but not in the way that my alma mater insists that it is. The shared story and analogues at work are not about people, but about power. It reflects how credibility falls easily to those given the privilege of defining who or what Appalachian is. It also shows the rewards that fall to individuals, universally men and exclusively white, regardless of the company they keep. It is the power to grant yourself permission for continued exploitation of vulnerable subjects. It is the power to have your work selected as emblematic of a cultural moment by individuals and organizations that didn’t care one iota about Appalachia until their gaze could fill the region with pathologies.
Vance is a well-educated person of means with a powerful platform who has chosen to accept a considerable amount of fame and wealth to become the spokesperson for a region. Since he is such an enormous fan of personal responsibility, I am thrilled to hold him responsible for his asinine beliefs and associations. Appalachian blogger Kelli Haywood, in her essays on Elegy, objects to the individuals who claim that Vance isn’t authentically Appalachian because he migrated outside the region. I don’t give a damn about geography, but I’ll note that Vance has transcended one of the most authentically Appalachian experiences of them all: watching someone with tired ideas about race and culture get famous by selling cheap stereotypes about the region.