In law school at Yale, Senator JD Vance of Ohio organized study sessions with classmates to examine “Social Decline in America.” His fellow scholars served as a de facto focus group for his hit book Hillbilly Elegy.
One reading assignment Vance ordered was a lengthy essay in The Nation that was published in the mid-1930s about migration of poor, white people from the Southern states to the Motor City to work in the momentarily revived automobile factories during the Great Depression.
It was titled “The Hill-Billies Come to Detroit.”
“For months now, the companies have been sending their labor agents to recruit hill-billies from Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana and Alabama,” the Nation article says. “These hill-billies are for the most part impoverished whites, ‘white trash’ or a little better, from the rural regions.”
The author — Louis Adamic — writes that these migrants “of unsophisticated mien” would be “employed at simple, standardized tasks in a production department, for which very little or no training is necessary, at 45 or 50 cents an hour . . .”
Critics have suggested Vance — in his Hillbilly book — trashed his own Kentucky-Ohio roots by blaming later generations of that sub-culture for their own troubles today with poverty, drugs, and violence, as if macroeconomics had nothing to do with the trap doors beneath their lives.
In addition, the word “Hillbilly” in Vance’s title also struck some as an ethnic or cultural slur. Does the piece in The Nation nine decades ago reveal the seeds of Vance’s low opinion toward his own people?
“The hill-billies, with their extremely low standard of living and lack of acquaintance with modern plumbing, are looked down upon,” the Nation article states. “Petty landlords and realtors who have rented their vacant houses to the hill-billies complain that their tenants, unappreciative of modern appliances, are damaging their properties.”
Vance, Donald Trump’s Republican vice presidential candidate, came to suburban Detroit last week to speak in Macomb County at the Shelby Township cop shop with grim-faced lawmen lined up behind him. But he said nothing about how that essay in The Nation inspired his current thinking.
Instead, the 40-year-old Senate rookie preached about many other things. Ostensibly rallying to “back the blue” in their fight against crime, Vance ranted against “migrant criminals,” not from the old Confederacy but from foreign lands. “They rape our children,” Vance said of these “illegal aliens.”
The young fellow from Middletown, Middleamerica, also revealed that “the world is on fire” and that the city of Minneapolis burned down in 2020 (after a cop murdered George Floyd, a Black man, before a live audience and video phones).
Vance said Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, the vice president, is to blame for police deaths because she encouraged “open season on American police officers” (during the Black Lives Matter movement that followed Floyd’s death).
Vance called Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, “a radical human being that comes from the far-left wing of the Democrat Party.” He said Walz “abandoned” his National Guard unit before it deployed to the Iraq war.
And he also told reporters how to do their jobs.
“Show a little bit of self-awareness,” he said, without irony, as he told them to question Harris more harshly. Harris last month replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.
“The media honeymoon is disgraceful,” Vance said. One reporter asked Vance about his criticism of Harris for not choosing as her running mate governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania because Shapiro is Jewish.
QUESTION: “Do you have any evidence to support that assertion that a person who is married to a Jewish man is somehow antisemitic or bowing to antisemites?”
VANCE: “Well, I reject the premise of the question. I did not say that that was the only reason that Kamala Harris didn’t choose Josh Shapiro. So you should, you know, take a little less DNC talking points when you ask your questions and ask a real question.”
In that several generations from that white, Southern migration still live and vote in Michigan, one of the “real questions” to ask young master Vance might have been: How much did “The Hill-Billies Come to Detroit” influence your thinking and is it fair that your critics fault you for an ethnic slur?
The Nation article itself is ambiguous and filled with half-baked analysis. Even its date is confusing in internet archives. An old-style “dateline” shows it filed from Detroit on January 25 of an unnamed year. The publication date is listed as February 13, 1934.
However, several context clues in the copy suggest it appeared a year later, after the car business picked up in 1934. It refers to past labor unrest in Toledo in 1934 and the author predicts of Detroit:
“Despite prophesies of impending trouble in 1935, there is no possibility of any great upheaval in the motor industry during the current, high-production season.”
One of his many observations — some of them astute — is that imported southern men as well as local young women were being hired in the auto plants to discourage the union movement among Detroit’s veteran male workers, both native and foreign-born.
The article describes how “stool pigeons” in factories ratted out union organizers and even searched pockets of coats for union literature. What is clear is that the piece was published before the General Motors sit-down strike in Flint in 1936-37 and the formation of the United Auto Workers in 1937.
“Absolutely no danger of a general auto strike this year, nor anything resembling real trouble,” the article states. “. . . The automobile manufacturers’ labor policy is this: The industry must not be unionized . . . It is all very, very clever, and it will take the labor movement, such as it is, some time to devise the strategy and tactics to cope effectively with this latest of dirty tricks played upon the workers by the automobile tycoons and their brain guys.”
Another hole in the story is the utter absence of African-Americans, who were also in the midst of the same geographical relocation from many of the same states for auto jobs.
In that the author himself was an immigrant to the United States from the Austro-Hungarian empire, it is curious that he overlooked this. (During the Red Scare of the McCarthy era, Adamic died of a murky suicide after having been accused of serving the Soviet Union as a spy.)
In that Vance is well-educated, glib, and full of self-confidence, it would be good to hear his more considered thoughts about migration — both internal and external — and how economic churn disrupts lives and cultures while giving novice politicians a chance to exploit fear of the “other” who will move in and “take your jobs” and “rape our children.”
But, instead, in suburban Detroit, Vance came across as callow and shallow, talking too fast, acting like the snottiest kid on the high-school honor roll running for a seat on the student council.
Even his trim beard flecked with gray — his serious, 19th Century look — made him appear to be a student in costume for the school play about Abraham Lincoln.
Most of his points were in the tone of Trump — personal insults, lies, and petty mockery. Unless Trump fires the amateurish Vance before the election (“Yuh FIE-ud!”) it will be interesting to see Vance debate the more experienced governor, who is quick with a quip.
Walz might parry Vance’s sucker-punches aimed below the belt and thrown after the bell. Or, in the meantime, Vance might mature in the few weeks before the Nov. 5 election. When it is over, win or lose, he may have time to work on his next volume of American sociology.
But, instead of the toxic title term “Hillbillies,” he could at least modernize his vocabulary, lest he again offend anyone. How about “Dixo-Americans,” an academic-sounding label he could toss around with scholarly authority among his old study buddies at Yale.
