CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — Newly-minted vice presidential candidate JD Vance drew on his own Appalachian roots in his speech to the Republican National Convention Wednesday night, but it wasn’t the first time he’s shared his personal story.
Long before he became a U.S. senator for Ohio, Vance rose to prominence with “Hillbilly Elegy,” a bestselling memoir that many said captured the essence of Donald Trump’s political resonance in a rural white America plagued by unemployment, opioid addiction and poverty.
The 2016 book sparked a fierce debate in the region, with many Appalachian scholars saying the book traded on stereotypes and blamed the working class for its own problems without giving enough weight to the decades of exploitation by coal and pharmaceutical companies that play a major role in Appalachian history.
The outrage triggered by the book partly crossed party lines.
“Many of us who were born and raised in Appalachia are just very aware that denigrating hillbillies is the last frontier of accepted prejudice in America,” says TJ Litafik, a Republican political consultant from eastern Kentucky and Trump supporter.
Litafik said he would vote for Trump no matter who he picked for vice president, but Vance was nowhere near the top of his list. That’s in part because Vance was fiercely anti-Trump at the time of the book’s release, even once suggesting that Trump was “America’s Hitler” in a later-published text message to a former roommate.
Litafik, who has read “Hillbilly Elegy,” subtitled “The Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” and seen the 2020 film adaptation, said Vance could seem condescending to some voters. But he called the senator “dynamic and intelligent” and said Vance’s accomplishments were undeniably impressive.
“I think to me and many of my friends, JD Vance is an enigma,” Litafik said. “We welcome some of his recent convictions, but there are concerns because of his past.”
He said he would be willing to give Vance a chance if he demonstrated his commitment to rural and working people in the United States by protecting them from policy proposals that would, for example, roll back the expansion of the Medicaid program, particularly for drug treatment.
Vance grew up with his grandparents in Middletown in southwest Ohio while his mother, whom he introduced during his speech Wednesday, battled an addiction that he said she left behind 10 years ago. He spent a lot of time traveling to Kentucky with his grandparents to visit family and said he hoped to be buried in a petite mountain cemetery there.
In his speech, he vowed to be “a vice president who never forgets where he came from.”
Many conservatives were excited about the book, including some who supported Vance becoming Trump’s vice president, including Donald Trump Jr., Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, and Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA.
In an interview before Vance’s selection, Kirk, who is from Illinois, said he thought both the book and the film were excellent.
“He’s incredibly persuasive and he’s had the experience that a lot of Trump voters have had,” he said. “So he’s not talking down to Trump voters or people in the Midwest. He grew up in southwest Ohio, in the Appalachians, you know, he was raised by his Mamaw, and he kind of understands why that part of the world isn’t working anymore. And now, of course, he also has an agenda and a vision and a passion to try to bring it back to prominence and greatness.”
Roberts, who is from Lafayette, Louisiana, said he couldn’t put the book down after he discovered it because it was so true to his own life story.
“I think it’s one of the most important books of the last 20 years,” he told the Associated Press before Vance’s election. “Not because he’s in the Senate. It’s just such an authentic portrayal of an experience that tens of millions of Americans have had.”
Some critics acknowledge that Vance has the right to tell his own story, but they take issue with his making sweeping generalizations.
At one point, for example, Vance describes his grandmother’s violent reaction when his grandfather came home drunk after she threatened to kill him if it happened again. In another scene, his grandparents berate a store clerk and smash a toy after one of their children is told not to play with it without paying.
“It was normal for Mamaw and Papaw to destroy merchandise in the store and threaten clerks,” Vance wrote. “This is what Scotch-Irish Appalachians do when people molest their child.”
Ray Jones, a district judge in Pike County, Kentucky, and a former Democratic senator, said he did not recognize his family’s experiences in “Hillbilly Elegy” at all.
“Maybe that’s his life story, but I found the general portrayal of the people of Eastern Kentucky offensive,” said Jones, whose grandfathers were both union members in the coal mines. “I don’t think the book is a fair portrayal of the people of this region, and certainly not of the hard-working men and women here.”
“The book portrays the people of this region as white scum, and that is simply not true,” he said, adding: “His story is obviously compelling even for people who are not from here.”
Neema Avashia, a West Virginia educator and author who now lives in Boston, said she was troubled by the book’s tone, its lack of representation of Appalachia’s nonwhite population and what she considered “sweeping generalizations” about working-class white people.
Avashia responded with her own memoir, “Another Appalachia,” about growing up as an Indian-American and queer woman in a chemical plant community in West Virginia.
“People are allowed to write memoirs about whatever they want – it’s their life,” Avashia said. “I think what I really started to struggle with was trying to draw boundaries when it came to claiming some kind of expertise about culture and characterizing whole groups of people.”
“I would never say that my Appalachian story is the Appalachian story. It is an Appalachian story. It is called ‘Another Appalachian Country’ for a reason. It is called ‘another’ because there are many of them.”
Avashia said the book’s popularity was rooted in a desire to have one’s own prejudices confirmed.
Vance, whose office did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday, acknowledged that there was criticism. He recently told the New York Times that he distanced himself from “Hillbilly Elegy” so as not to “wake up in 10 years and really hate everything I’ve become.”
Sam Workman, a political science professor at West Virginia University, called the book “poverty porn.” He said the book’s reception had more to say about the divide between intellectual experts in academia, politics, the media and the rural working class than anything else.
“‘Hillbilly Elegy’ was so popular at the beginning, and suddenly nobody likes it anymore because they realize that the rabbit was kind of pulled out of the hat,” said Workman, who directs WVU’s Institute for Policy Research and Public Affairs. “It’s really about a lot of liberal intellectuals being caught off guard by what the true intentions of ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ were. It was the first foray into a really powerful, conservative political career.”
Due to the book’s popularity, Vance founded a charity called Our Ohio Renewal, which he intended to apply as a means to combat the scourge of opioid addiction that he had lamented in the book. Shortly after winning the Senate nomination in 2022, he shut down the nonprofit.
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Smyth reported from Columbus, Ohio.
