The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
A ‘hillbilly’ Yalie tells of the pain of the folks back home
For those of us struggling to understand what’s happening in America’s heartland, why so many members of the white working class are hurting and, yes, why they overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump to be our president, listen to J.D. Vance.
Vance, who grew up in economically troubled Ohio but beat the long odds and made it to Yale Law School, wrote “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” before Trump became the Republican presidential nominee on his way to the White House.
However, Vance’s book has become a surprise big hit nationwide and required reading for anybody who wants to figure out “what’s going on.”
When Vance came to the Omni New Haven Hotel at Yale Feb. 1 to address a ballroom filled with curious Yale students, Trump had been in office for just 12 days. Meanwhile, “Hillbilly Elegy” was continuing its run atop the New York Times list of nonfiction best sellers.
But just as in his book, which never mentions Trump, Vance made few references to the new president in his speech. This probably disappointed those in the crowd expecting fireworks between the conservatives on hand — Vance had been invited there by the William F. Buckley Program at Yale — and the many liberals on campus.
Instead, Vance concentrated on letting us know about the deprivations and resentments of millions of white middle-class Americans in the “Rust Belt.” These are the people who put Trump over the top in his narrow victory over Hillary Clinton.
Vance said their resentment is about feeling like “a cultural outsider,” not liking nor trusting the “elites” such as Barack Obama, Clinton and people who work for Northeastern media outlets.
Vance told us that when he came to New Haven and Yale Law School in 2010, “I felt like a foreign species.” (In his book he wrote, “I felt like my spaceship had crashed in Oz.”)
Vance was the first person in his nuclear family to go to college and the first in his extended family to attend graduate school. Nobody else from his high school class in Middletown, Ohio, had made it to the Ivy League.
In one of the few comical scenes of “Hillbilly Elegy,” which Vance recalled during his talk, he wrote about attending a career networking dinner at an unnamed fancy restaurant in downtown New Haven.
When he arrived that night, he wrote, he found himself “staring slack-jawed at the fineries of the restaurant and wondering how much they cost.”
“The linens on the table look softer than my bedsheets,” he thought to himself. “I need to touch them without being weird about it.”
When a waitress asked him if he wanted tap water or sparkling water, he ordered the sparkling without knowing what it was. “I took one sip and literally spit it out. It was the grossest thing I ever tasted.” He told the waitress: “Something’s wrong with that water.”
Another hurdle for our country boy was the wine choice. Vance told us during his speech, “A waitress asked me, ‘Would you like Sauvignon blanc or Chardonnay?’ I said to myself, ‘This woman is screwing with me. Stop with the funny French words.’ But I just said ‘Chardonnay’ because it was easier to pronounce.”
He also wondered as he sat at the table why on earth anybody would need more than one butter knife.
“When you’re trying to impress people and get a job,” he said, “not knowing how to conduct yourself in these environments can cause problems.”
“This is why kids like me often don’t do well,” he noted. “There were things I didn’t know when I got to Yale. I didn’t have the softer knowledge about being an adult: how to balance a checkbook, how to shop for a car. I grew up in an environment where such financial decisions weren’t part of my life.”
Vance said he lacked “social capital.” He defined this as “what people derive from their networks. Yale students have the career office and fraternities. They’re not sending out resumes. This is how successful people operate: They rely on a network to get access to people.”
The scenes Vance describes in “Hillbilly Elegy” are far, far removed from the fine restaurants of downtown New Haven and the Gothic structures of Yale.
“I grew up poor, in the Rust Belt, in an Ohio steel town that has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember,” he wrote in his book’s introduction.
“Kids like me face a grim future,” he noted. “If they’re lucky, they’ll manage to avoid welfare; if they’re unlucky, they’ll die of a heroin overdose, as happened to dozens in my small hometown just last year.”
Vance’s grandparents, “Mamaw” and “Papaw,” had left the coal town of Jackson, Kentucky, in the late 1940s and raised their family in Middletown, Ohio, where “Papaw” got a good-paying job with Armco Steel, the town’s biggest employer. Vance wrote that Middletown at that time “exemplified the economic expansion of the manufacturingbased Rust Belt town.”
As late as the 1980s, Vance noted, Middletown still had a bustling downtown with restaurants, a pharmacy with a soda fountain, a movie theater, a Kmart, a local grocer and a shopping center.
But this is how Vance described Middletown today: “little more than a relic of American industrial glory. Abandoned shops with broken windows line the heart of downtown.” The pharmacy is long gone, along with the movie theater. What’s left is payday lenders and a cashfor-gold store.
“A street that was once the pride of Middletown today serves as a meeting spot for druggies and dealers,” he wrote. “Main Street is now the place you avoid after dark.”
As businesses folded, jobs vanished. In 1989, Armco Steel merged with the Japanese corporation Kawasaki and fewer people were being hired. The residents can no longer depend on lucrative careers making steel in their hometown.
Vance also wrote about recently revisiting Jackson, which he found as “heartbreaking” as present-day Middletown. “Nearly a third of the town lives in poverty, a figure that includes about half of Jackson’s children. An epidemic of prescription drug addiction has taken root.”
But Vance embraces the word “hillbilly” and is proud to be “a hill person” from Appalachia. “I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast,” he wrote. “I identify with the millions of workingclass white Americans of ScotsIrish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty is the family tradition.”
Vance wrote about the consequences of poverty in his own childhood. “I was the abandoned son of a man I hardly knew and a woman I wished I didn’t.” His mother was addicted to alcohol and then prescription drugs and heroin.
“Mamaw” and “Papaw,” who had his own drinking problems for many years until he beat that addiction, raised J.D. Vance. He said their love rescued him and gave him “a fair shot at the American Dream.”
But Vance told his Yale audience, “I saw emotional trauma in my family. I saw police handcuff my mom and take her off in a cruiser.”
He cited a study showing four in every 10 working-class people experience multiple instances of childhood trauma. “Then they don’t do well at school, they use drugs or alcohol and treat their children the same way they were treated.”
Vance did finally address Trump’s election win. “Whether you think he’ll be a great president or the worst ever, we should be mindful that so many people feel left behind. And not just whites. We have a working class immensely unhappy with the direction of our country.”
When a student asked Vance if he will move back to his hometown area to combat that region’s “brain drain,” Vance replied, “I did move back to Ohio in the last couple of weeks! You need to think how you can contribute to the community that raised you. We owe something to our families and communities that nurtured us. Go back and make a difference.”