By Ray Jones
Hillbilly Elegy –
a memoir of a family and culture in crisis by JD Vance (2016). William
Collins, paperback, 264pp. ISBN: 879-0-00-822056-3, £9.99.
JD
Vance is still in his 30s, a Yale Law School graduate, a venture capitalist and
a self-confessed conservative Republican in the USA. So why should his story be
of interest to us? Because, as he says, he “grew up poor” in the Rust Belt in
an Ohio steel town from a family that has its roots in the south eastern
Kentucky coal country.
The fact that the US steel and coal
workforce have been devastated in modern times forms the backdrop to Vance’s early
life. It has helped to form the culture that he describes in his fascinating,
if not always pleasant, story.
Violence, drugs, unemployment and family
turmoil are prominent in Vance’s account of Hillbilly culture; along with a
sense of ‘honour’ that reminds one irresistibly of {The Godfather} and the
Mafia.
Vance tells an anecdote of what happened
when his Uncle Pet, who owned several small businesses, was called a
“son-of-bitch” by a delivery driver. Pet took the insult literally as an insult
to his beloved mother. When it was repeated he dragged the driver from his
truck and beat him unconscious before taking an electric saw and running it up
and down his body.
Uncle Pet never went to jail because the
driver, who survived, was a Hillbilly too and refused to talk to the police or
press charges.
Vance’s grandfather (Papaw) and
particularly his grandmother (Mamaw) loomed large in his early life and came
from Hillbilly ‘royalty’. This seems to mean that they were famous for
resorting to extreme violence in what was seen in the community as a good
cause.
Even in a violent society they were called
“crazy” – a term that seems to have had an element of admiration attached.
Mamaw routinely carried a gun around and
nobody messed with her. When she banned Vance from seeing “unsuitable” friends
she reinforced the order by threatening to run them over in a car if he did,
saying: “No-one would ever find out.”
Whilst one is reading this book you have
to remind yourself sometimes that he is talking about the 1980s and ‘90s not
the 1880s or even the 1930s. The adult Vance seems to reject all this of course
but sometimes you wonder…
Vance claims that Mamaw and Papaw saved
him from fully accepting the feeling of apathy and worthlessness that he thinks
is the main reason why Hillbillies so rarely realise the ‘American Dream’ (even
when he defines that only as having a nice house, a secure job and a steady
family). They gave him, he thinks, some security in a family where his mother
was a drug abuser with a string of partners.
The Marine Corps, he says, carried the work of his
grandparents further by showing him he could achieve things he had thought
impossible for him.
From his time in the Marines, where he
served time in Iraq (although never at the really sharp end), he went to
college with Government assistance and then to the prestigious Yale Law School
to become a successful lawyer.
Sadly Vance concludes that poor whites
basically just need to have the confidence to pull themselves up by their boot
straps. He rejects the evidence of the economic and class roots of the problems
that he himself presents. He forgets, as a previous reviewer has said, that to
pull yourself up by your boot straps one must first have boots.
Because a few individuals, like Vance,
with luck, talent and determination can ‘make it’ does not mean most people
can. History proves otherwise.
As you may imagine, this book went down a
storm with the mass media and the ruling class. It reinforces their class
prejudices and never mentions the real solutions of revolution and socialism.
For others it may expose the American
nightmare that workers and the Left in the USA face, and which we have echoes
of in Britain.
I came across this book in my local
library; perhaps it’s worth looking in yours.
