CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Newly minted vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance based his speech Wednesday night at the Republican National Convention on his own Appalachian roots, but it wasn’t the first time he’s shared his personal story.
Long before he became a senator from Ohio, Vance rose to fame with the wings of “Hillbilly Elegy,” a bestseller that was considered a success by many. captured the essence of Donald Trump’s political resonance in a rural, white America ravaged by unemployment, opioid addiction and poverty.
The 2016 book sparked a heated debate in the region, with many Appalachian scholars arguing that it stereotyped and blamed working-class people for their own problems without giving enough weight to the decades-long exploitation by coal and pharmaceutical companies that figure prominently in Appalachia’s story.
Some of the outrage the book sparked crossed party lines.
“A lot of us, born and raised in Appalachia, are just very sensitive to the fact that bashing hillbillies is the last frontier of accepted prejudice in America,” said TJ Litafik, a Republican political consultant from eastern Kentucky and a Trump supporter.
Litafik said he would vote for Trump regardless of who he chose as vice president, but Vance was not at the top of his list. That’s partly because Vance had strong words for Trump when the book was published, even suggesting he could be “America’s Hitler” in a text to a former college roommate that later became public.
Litafik, who read “Hillbilly Elegy,” subtitled “A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” and saw the 2020 film adaptation, said Vance could come across as condescending to some voters. But he called the senator “dynamic and intelligent” and said Vance’s accomplishments are undeniably impressive.
“I think J.D. Vance is an enigma to me and a lot of my friends,” Litafik said. “We appreciate some of his recent convictions, but based on history, there’s a hesitation.”
He said he wants to give Vance a chance if he wants to show his commitment to rural and working-class Americans by protecting them from policy proposals like the one to roll back expanded Medicaid, particularly for drug-treatment benefits.
Vance was raised by his grandparents in Middletown, in southwestern Ohio, while his mother, whom he introduced in his speech Wednesday, struggled with 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 small cemetery in the mountains.
In his speech, he promised to be “a vice president who never forgets where he comes from.”
Many conservatives loved the book. Among them were those who lobbied to make Vance Trump’s vice presidential nominee. They include Donald Trump Jr.; Kevin Roberts, who heads the Heritage Foundation; and Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA.
In an interview before Vance was selected, Kirk, an Illinois native, said he thought both the book and the film were excellent.
“It’s incredibly compelling, and he’s lived the experience that a lot of Trump voters have had,” he said. “So it’s not a disparagement of Trump voters or people in the Midwest. He grew up in southwest Ohio, in Appalachia, you know, raised by his Mamaw, and understands how that part of the world has stopped working. And he now also has an agenda and a vision and a passion to try to make it prominent and great again.”
Roberts, a native of Lafayette, Louisiana, said he couldn’t put the book down after discovering it, so true was it to his own life story.
“I think it’s one of the most important books written in the last 20 years,” he told The Associated Press before Vance was selected. “Not because he’s in the Senate. It’s just such an authentic representation of an experience that tens of millions of Americans have had.”
Some critics acknowledge Vance’s right to tell his own story. What they have a problem with is when he makes sweeping generalizations.
At one point, for example, Vance describes his grandmother’s violent reaction to his grandfather coming home drunk after threatening to kill him if it happened again. In another scene, his grandparents curse at a store clerk and break a toy after one of their children is told not to play with it without paying.
“Destroying store merchandise and threatening a saleswoman were normal for Mamaw and Papaw,” Vance wrote. “That’s what Scotch-Irish Appalachians do when people mess with your child.”
Ray Jones, chief judge of Pike County, Kentucky, and a former Democratic state senator, said he saw no resemblance to his family’s experiences in “Hillbilly Elegy.”
“Maybe that’s his life story, but I found the overall portrayal of the people of eastern Kentucky offensive,” said Jones, whose grandfathers were both union miners. “I don’t think that book is a fair portrayal of the people of this region, and certainly not the hardworking men and women here.”
“The book portrays people from this region as white trash, and that’s just not true,” he said, before adding: “His story is clearly compelling to people who aren’t from here.”
Neema Avashia, a social educator and author from West Virginia now living in Boston, said she was uncomfortable with the book’s tone, its lack of representation of nonwhite Appalachians and what she called “broad generalizations” about white working-class people.
Avashia responded with her own memoir, “Another Appalachia,” about growing up as an Indian-American and gay man in a chemical plant in West Virginia.
“People can write memoirs about whatever they want — it’s their life,” Avashia said. “I think I really started to struggle with trying to draw boundaries in terms of claiming some kind of expertise around culture and characterizing entire groups of people.”
“I would never say that my Appalachian story is the Appalachian story. It is an Appalachian story. It is called ‘Another Appalachia’ for a reason. It is ‘another’ because there are many.”
Avashia said the book’s popularity is “rooted in a desire to have your biases confirmed.”
Vance, whose office did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday, has acknowledged some 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,” saying its reception says more about the divide between intellectual experts in academia, politics, the media and the rural working class than anything else.
“‘Hillbilly Elegy’ was so popular in the beginning, and then all of a sudden everybody doesn’t like it anymore because they realize the rabbit fell out of the hat,” said Workman, who directs WVU’s Institute for Policy Research and Public Affairs. “This is really about a lot of liberal intellectuals being surprised by the real goals of ‘Hillbilly Elegy.’ It was the first step in a really powerful conservative political career.”
On the heels of the book’s popularity, Vance started a charity called “Our Ohio Renewal” which he said he would use as a means to solve the scourge of opioid addiction he had deplored in the book. He the non-profit organization closed shortly after securing the 2022 Senate nomination.
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Smyth reported from Columbus, Ohio.