The publication of Hillbilly Elegy by
JD Vance in 2016 was hailed for its inside look at the life of working-class
White Americans from the rust belt. His parents moved from Appalachian Eastern
Kentucky to Middletown Ohio in the southwestern quadrant of that state. I grew
up in Cincinnati, the major city of the region thirty miles south of Middletown
and on the banks of the Ohio River which was the Mason-Dixon Line dividing
North from South and free states from former slaveholding states.
Vance’s story became interesting to me when, based on the popularity of his book and financial support from Silicon Valley tech mogul Peter Thiel, he came out of nowhere to win an Ohio US Senate seat in 2022. He obviously was acclaimed in conservative circles when they drafted him to run for the Senate. But Hillbilly Elegy also aroused considerable interest on the left as Democrats sought to understand White working-class voters who had trickled away from them since the 1960s.
Today I want to call your attention to
another book written about the White working class in rust-belt Southwestern
Ohio: Paper Girl by Beth Macy. Hillbilly Elegy was noted for ‘its
raw, emotional portrait of growing up in and eventually out of a poor community
riddled by drug addiction and instability.’[1]
Unfortunately it fell into the long tradition of ‘blaming the victims’ who are
products of an alleged ‘culture of poverty.’
Beth Macy grew up in Urbana Ohio less than 50
miles from Middletown where the landscape turns from rolling hills into the
Midwestern prairie. Its inhabitants include some from Appalachia but many who
have been there for generations. The cities do share the characteristics of
places left behind by de-industrialization. Both were one company-dominated
towns. A city of around 50,000 population, Middletown was the home of Armco
Steel, a company that held its own into the 1960s. Urbana never had more than
15,000 people, but it was home to Grimes Manufacturing whose founder invented
the airplane navigational systems still used today.
Both towns were severely affected by the
flight of capital and automation that are characteristic of capitalism in the
industrialized Global North since the fall of communism. Macy reported that by
2015 Grimes employed about one-third of the workforce that it had in 1970s.
Middletown is only about 30 miles from where I grew up. On visits back home I
had heard of the decline of Armco as part of the regional gloom and doom
stories. I heard that Armco was bought out and had completely shut down its
operations in Middletown sometime before the turn of the century.[2]
But the explanations that Vance and Macy
offer about the sources of the problems of the White working class could not be
more divergent. Vance tells a story of strong support from his grandparents
that helps him to overcome his mother’s drug addiction in an environment of
poverty and personal tragedy. His grandparents pushed young J.D. to get an
education and pull himself up by his bootstraps. He blames Hillbilly culture
for the hardship he sees around him. In doing so takes the side in policy
debates of the those who argue that it’s a ‘culture of poverty’ and bad
individual decisions that cause the poor to remain poor.
In Paper Girl Beth Macy takes
the opposing side in that debate. As she tells her own story of an alcoholic
father who was on and off the sauce and in and out of work. She anchors her
success story on a mother who was there for her, public schools that still
functioned reasonably well and the Pell Grant that paid for her college
education. Macy taps a rich vein in policy debates that argue that poverty
arises from the structural constraints of the de-industrializing economy.
Without becoming too wonky Macy chronicles
the incapacity of local government to address the social problems produced by
loss of manufacturing jobs and the tax base to support public services. She is
especially concerned about the diminished support for education at all levels.
She would not have been able to go to college without the Pell Grant she
received. Those grants still exist, but grantees were demonized as ‘welfare
recipients’ by Republicans in the 90s and vastly reduced the program from the
early 80s when Macy received one.[3]
Another big difference between Vance and
Macy’s sagas is the question of race. Vance largely elides race, because his
concern is with his peeps, the Hillbillies, or the ‘White’ working class. Vance
talks about how the White working class turned to Richard Nixon in the 1960s
because they resented people seeing people on welfare while they worked hard
every day.[4]
We know that the resentment about welfare occurred in a period when Black
people were clamoring for civil rights and social services in the 1960s. The
Black ‘welfare queen’ cheating the system at taxpayers’ expense became the
posters child for conservatives wishing to slash government spending.
In defense of Vance some critics have pointed
out that his hardworking White folks resented all people that they perceived to
be welfare cheaters. But Nixon also built his 1968 campaign on law and order,
which had two targets: the urban Black rebellions of the day, and the
anti-Vietnam War movement. He rode to victory on those issues. And
anti-Blackness was central to the defection of Whites of all classes from the
Democratic Party.
The serious move to cut government spending,
though always a Republican position, would not emerge more saliently until
later paving the way for Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy. Vance doesn’t take a deep
dive into the roiling political climate of that day or the role that race
played in it, because that’s not the story he’s interested in telling. All of the cities and towns of any size in
southwestern Ohio have Black communities. Middletown and Urbana are no
different. And though residential segregation could keep the races apart to
some extent, at least by high school kids were in the same buildings. Urbana is
small enough that neighborhoods were racially integrated.
The region has a rich history regarding race:
both uplifting and tragic. Cincinnati is the economic metropole of the region.
In the early 19th century anti-Black rebellions occurred on three
occasions. The 1829 uprising resulted in over 1,000 Black people being run out
of town by White vigilantes. In 1841 racist Whites obtained a cannon and fired
on the Black settlement along the Ohio River killing several people. But there
was also a significant abolitionist movement in the city and the areas up and
down the river around it were also ports of call for slaves striving to be
free.[5]
Escaped slaves usually ventured farther north
to get as far as they could away from ‘slavecatchers. The Underground Railroad
featuring outposts all the way into Canada are all over the state of Ohio.
Urbana is one such community. Macy shares how the town’s pro-slavery residents lamented that it was a ‘black abolition
hole.’[6]
Macy spent a lot of time in Urbana a few
years ago when her mother’s health was declining. Her 40th high
school reunion occurred during that time. She was alternately astonished and
depressed at how conservative most of her old friends were, and how they could
laud Donald Trump, but then wrench and wring their hands when his racism was
pointed out.
Black people are present in Macy’s Urbana. Pam
Bullard, her first Black teacher in second grade stopped class when she heard a
student mutter the ‘n’ word. She wrote it on the board in capital letters and
held an impromptu lesson on it. She left an indelible impression, apparently
wasn’t reported, and thus was able to keep her job.
Her high school classmate, Mark Evans, after
many years was able to get an Underground Railroad historical marker placed in
the city in 2013. As the class reunion approached Evans fell out with classmate
Dave Curnutte. An avid Trump supporter, Curnutte had posted pro-Trump memes on
the class of ’82 Facebook page. Evans responded that Curnutte was a racist,
setting off viral exchanges that almost derailed the reunion. The two were able
to reconcile over drinks with a group of classmates, but Curnutte remained
puzzled. He told Macy he couldn’t ‘understand why Evans remained so obsessed
with racism.’ He ‘miss(ed) the old friend Mark.’[7]
There are several other vignettes that
demonstrate the ways in which White and Black people can live alongside one
another yet reside ‘psychologically’ in different worlds. Urbana in this regard
is a microcosm of an entire country in which most White people don’t want to
have hard conversations about race.
But the need to have meaningful conversations
go beyond race. Macy ends the book relating an interview she had with David
Axelrod, Barack Obama’s chief consultant for his campaigns and presidency. Macy
was lamenting about the low percentages of poor people who vote. Axelrod
observed that people don’t vote because they don’t see that the system works
for them. He asked ...
How do we reestablish a dialogue with people about what’s
going on in their lives that
is respectful and from which policymakers can
learn, but also that we as Americans
learn
about each other not as menacing people but as
our neighbors?[8]
What a message to leave with readers! But
Macy chooses to end the book by blaming only Donald Trump for duping the American
people. After masterfully illustrating the impact of neoliberal policies
supported by both parties since the 1990s, she could have indicted the entire
political establishment.
Still, many who read Paper Girl will
come to their own conclusions. If they are among those frustrated by the status
quo they have two choices. They can
become the fodder for those on the right who continue to tap into America's
rich vein of racism to blame POC for White folk’s problems. Or, they might look
to democratic socialists who understand that reforming capitalism as we now know
it is the way to improve the lives of most of us.
[1] Krause, Eleanor; Reeves,
Richard V. (September 2017). "Rural Dreams: Upward
Mobility in America's Countryside". Washington D.C.: Brookings
Institution. pp. 12–13
[2] I
didn’t have time to research the fate of Armco, but I’m sure that at the very
least it’s a shell of the company it once was.
[3]
Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America.
New York: Penguin Books, 2025, pp. 12, 82.
[4]
J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy. New York: Harper-Collins Publishers, 2016, P.
140
[5] John
Kiesewetter (July 15, 2001). "Civil
unrest woven into city's history". The Cincinnati Enquirer. William
Cullen Bryant (1994). "The Cincinnati Mob: August 10, 1836". Power for
sanity: selected editorials of William Cullen Bryant, 1829-1861.
Fordham Univ Press. p. 49. Andrew
Robert Lee Clayton (2002). Ohio: the
history of a people. Ohio State University Press. p. 26. Cincinnati is the home of the ,’Freedom Center,’ the
National Undedrground Railroad Museum.
[6]
Macy, p. 31.
[7] Ibid.,
p. 228
[8] ‘David
Axelrod Interview,’ with Beth Macy, November 26, 2024.
