The year 2013 brought the publication of “Coming Apart: The State of White America,” in which sociologist Charles Murray argued that the white working class was not only economically challenged but dissolving in an acid of social dysfunction. Poor and working-class whites suffered from a decline in marriage, an increase in out-of-wedlock births, a rise in substance abuse and criminality, and an erosion of the work ethic and male workforce participation. The book was a brilliant and readable work of scholarship, but its graphs, statistics and commentary about methodology made it abstract and of interest mainly to public policy wonks.
This year appeared a valuable counterpoint, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.” Author J.D. Vance described growing up in Middletown, Ohio, a town populated largely by descendants of poor Appalachian whites who had relocated there during the post-World War II industrial boom but had fallen upon hard times. The narrative was intensely personal. Vance brought to life a cast of hillbillie transplants: Meemaw his profane, whip-tongued grandmother; Papaw, his hard-drinking grandfather who raised him as a son; his exasperating, drug-addled mother; a distant father who had turned around his life by seeking recourse in evangelical religion; and a whole cast of siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins.
While Vance acknowledges the impact of impersonal forces such as America’s industrial decline, he sees the misery that surrounded him largely as the consequence of poor decisions and a cultural inheritance ill-suited to contemporary society. Vance’s world was one in which families quarreled and screamed with one another incessantly, where women had children out of wedlock, and where men resorted to fisticuffs (and worse) to defend family honor. It was a world in which fathers deserted wives and children, where drugs and alcohol wrecked jobs and drained cash, where people made impulsive and ill-thought financial choices that left them without reserves to survive inevitable misfortunes.
Vance describes himself as a conservative, and he rejects the anti-poverty nostrums of the left. Take his attitude toward payday loans, for example.
To [Ohio state legislators] payday lenders were predatory sharks, charging high interest rates on loans and exorbitant fees for cashed checks. The sooner they were snuffed out the better. To me, payday lenders could solve important financial problems. My credit was awful, thanks to a host of terrible financial decisions (some of which weren’t my fault, many of which were), so credit cards weren’t a possibility. If I wanted to take a girl to dinner or needed a book for school and didn’t have money in the bank, I didn’t have many options. … A three-day payday loan, with a few dollars of interest, enabled me to avoid a significant overdraft fee.
On the other hand, Vance finds the conspiratorial, anti-government rhetoric of the white working class to be unhelpful as well. “There is a cultural movement,” he says disapprovingly, “to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents every day.”
While Vance vaguely alludes to the power of government to both help and do ill, he says people need to take responsibility for their own actions. Their lives will not fundamentally improve until they dispense with self-defeating behavior.
As chaotic as Vance’s life was as a youth, it could have been far worse. He grew up in a lower middle-class family, not a poor one. His mother was a nurse. Her drug addiction was not the result of material deprivation — rather, her relentless search for drugs rendered her unable to care for her children. Vance’s grandfather was a factory worker but, despite his alcoholism, he enjoyed long-term job stability. Many Vance kinsmen owned cars, or had family members with cars, and could afford to visit relatives in eastern Kentucky with some regularity. Ohio hillbillies also were blessed with strong kinship groups that functioned as networks of mutual support. If a parent fell prey to drugs or wound up in jail, there usually were aunts, uncles or grandparents to step in.
Others may read “Hillbillie Elegy” differently, but I came away with the impression that poverty doesn’t cause social dysfunction, social dysfunction causes poverty. Because Vance’s hillbillies are white, we can view their condition more dispassionately than we can African-Americans with their history of slavery, Jim Crow and discrimination. Just as sociologist Charles Murray did in “Coming Apart,” Vance eliminates the variable of race/ethnicity from consideration. The ineluctable conclusion is that culture matters. Culture influences how people respond to the vicissitudes of life.
Ultimately, as Vance proved through life-changing decisions to join the U.S. Marines and then pursue a college education, people can rise above their surroundings. But it sure helps a struggling child to have a grown-up — grandparents, in his case — to provide love, encouragement and guidance.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.