CHARLESTON, W.Va. Newly appointed Vice President JD Vance built his Wednesday night speech at the Republican National Convention around his own Appalachian roots, but it wasn’t the first time he shared his personal story.
Long before he was a U.S. senator from Ohio, Vance rose to prominence on the wings of “Hillbilly Elegy,” a best-selling memoir that many thought captured the essence of Donald Trump’s political resonance in a white rural America ravaged by unemployment, opioid addiction, and poverty.
The 2016 book sparked a fierce debate in the region. Many Appalachian scholars thought it trafficked in stereotypes and blamed the working class for its own struggles, without giving enough weight to the decades of exploitation by coal and pharmaceutical companies that figure prominently in Appalachian history.
Some of the resentment provoked by the book crossed party lines.
“Many of us born and raised Appalachian natives are highly sensitive to the fact that attacking rednecks is the final frontier of accepted prejudice in America,” said TJ Litafik, a Republican political consultant from eastern Kentucky and Trump supporter.
Litafik said he would vote for Trump regardless of who he chose as vice president, but Vance was nowhere near the top of his list. This is partly because Vance had strong words to say against Trump at the time the book was published, even once suggesting that he could be “America’s Hitler” in a text message to a former colleague room that later became public.
Litafik, who read “Hillbilly Elegy,” subtitled “Memoirs of a Family and Culture in Crisis” and saw the 2020 film adaptation, said Vance may come across as condescending to some voters. But he called the senator “dynamic and intelligent” and said Vance’s accomplishments are undeniably impressive.
“I think for me and a lot of my friends, JD Vance is kind of an enigma,” Litafik said. “We appreciate some of his recent convictions, but based on past history, there is hesitation there.”
He said he’s open to giving Vance a chance if he’s willing to show his commitment to rural and blue-collar Americans by protecting them from policy proposals like those that would roll back Medicaid expansion, especially for drug treatment.
Vance was raised by his grandparents in Middletown in southwest Ohio, while his mother, who he introduced during his speech Wednesday, struggled with an addiction he said he left behind 10 years ago. He spent significant time traveling to Kentucky with his grandparents to visit family and said he hoped to be buried in a small cemetery in the mountains there.
He promised in the speech to be “a vice president who never forgets where he came from.”
Many conservatives loved the book. Among them were some who lobbied for Vance to be Trump’s pick for vice president. They include Donald Trump Jr.; Kevin Roberts, who leads the Heritage Foundation; and Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA.
In an interview before Vance was selected, Kirk, an Illinois native, said he thought the book and film were excellent.
“It’s incredibly persuasive and he lived the experience that many Trump voters lived,” he said. “So this is not about talking down to Trump voters or people in the Midwest. He grew up in southwest Ohio, in Appalachia, you know, raised by his mother, and understands how that part of the world stopped working. And now he also, of course, has an agenda and a vision and a passion to try to bring it back to prominence and greatness.”
Roberts, a native of Lafayette, Louisiana, said she couldn’t put the book down after discovering it, so true was the story of her own life.
“I think it’s one of the most important books written in the last 20 years,” he told The Associated Press before Vance’s selection. “Not because he is in the Senate. It is an authentic portrayal of an experience that tens of millions of Americans have had.”
Some critics recognize Vance’s right to tell his own story. They have problems when he makes sweeping generalizations.
At one point, for example, Vance describes his grandmother’s violent reaction when his grandfather came home drunk after she threatened to kill him if it happened again. In another scene, his grandparents swear at a store employee and break a toy after one of their children was told not to play with it without paying.
“Destroying store merchandise and threatening a clerk were normal for Mamaw and Papaw,” Vance wrote. “That’s what Appalachian Scots-Irish people do when people mess with their kid.”
Ray Jones, judge executive of Pike County, Kentucky, and former Democratic state senator, said he acknowledged nothing about his family’s experience in “hillbilly elegy.”
“Maybe that’s his life story, but I thought the general representation of people in eastern Kentucky was offensive,” said Jones, whose grandparents were union coal miners. “I don’t think this book is a fair representation of the people of this region, and certainly not the hard-working men and women here.”
“The book paints people from this region as white trash, and that’s simply not true,” he said, before adding, “Your story is obviously appealing to people who aren’t from here.”
Neema Avashia, a public educator and author from West Virginia who now lives in Boston, said she was disturbed by the book’s tone, its lack of representation of nonwhite Appalachian residents, and what she called its “sweeping generalizations.” about working-class whites. .
Avashia responded with her own memoir, “Another Appalachia,” about growing up Indian-American and queer in a chemical plant community in West Virginia.
“People can write memoirs about whatever they want — it’s their life,” Avashia said. “I think what I really started to struggle with was trying to draw boundaries in terms of claiming a kind of knowledge around culture and characterizing, like, whole groups of people.”
“I would never say that my Appalachian story is the Appalachian story. It’s an Appalachian story. It’s called ‘Other Appalachians’ for a reason. It’s ‘other’ because there are many.”
Avashia said the book’s popularity “is rooted in the desire to have your prejudices confirmed.”
Vance, whose office did not return a request for comment Wednesday, acknowledged some criticism. He recently told The New York Times that he distanced himself from “hillbilly elegy” so he wouldn’t “wake up in 10 years and really hate everything I’ve become.”
Sam Workman, a professor of political science at West Virginia University, called the book “poverty porn.” He said the reception has more to say about the disconnect between intellectual experts in academia, politics, the media and the rural working class than anything else.
“’Hillbilly elegy’ was so popular in the beginning, and then suddenly everyone now doesn’t like it, because in some ways they realize the rabbit is out of the hat,” said Workman, who directs WVU’s Institute for Policy Research and Public Affairs. “It’s really about many liberal intellectuals being caught off guard as to the true purposes of the ‘Hillbilly Elegy’. It was the first foray into a really potent conservative political career.”
In the wake of the book’s popularity, Vance founded a charity called “Our Ohio Renewal” that he said he would use as a vehicle to help solve the scourge of opioid addiction that he lamented in the book. He closed the non-profit organization shortly after winning the Senate nomination in 2022.
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Smyth reported from Columbus, Ohio.
