Summary
Vance began attending Ohio State in the fall of 2007. Luckily, Middletown was easily within driving distance from his school, meaning that Vance could visit family whenever he wanted. But Vance also had a whole new world of friends, most of whom had grown up in southwest Ohio as well, keeping him busy. Vance notes a phenomenon called “brain drain,” which refers to the trend that people who are able to leave struggling cities do so and often never go back. Sure enough, Vance loved Columbus and had no plans to move back to Middletown anytime soon. For the first time, he felt in control of his destiny, thanks to the sense of independence he’d gained in the Marines.
Even with the help of his GI Bill, Vance needed about twenty thousand dollars of tuition, so he got a job at the Ohio Statehouse working for a senator. It wasn’t enough, so he got another job at a nonprofit that helped abused and neglected children, a mission to which Vance could relate. These jobs, in addition to his schoolwork—not to mention his habit of drinking late at night, then rising early to run—contributed to Vance’s exhaustion. It was only when he ignored a case of mono and ended up in the emergency room that he realized he was not taking care of himself. Even Vance’s mother was worried, and she had good cause to be, since ignoring the mono had landed Vance with a staph infection. He was instructed to rest and went back to Middletown.
While he stayed in Middletown, it became clear to Vance—and to his mother—that things had changed. Vance got closer to Aunt Wee and felt uncomfortable staying with his mother, which meant making polite conversation with husband number five. He couldn’t reconcile the two sides of his mother: the mother that drove to Columbus to take him to the hospital and the addict who had betrayed her family several times. Eventually, Vance lost the will to continue supporting his mother out of self-preservation.
Although Vance had to quit his low-paying yet prestigious job at the Ohio Statehouse, one of the bills he saw debated before he left was an effort to curb payday-lending practices. The senator for whom Vance worked disapproved of the bill, and Vance agreed with him, as he believed payday loans could help responsible people living paycheck to paycheck get by sometimes. Nonetheless, several senators voted for the bill, as they saw payday lenders as predatory and irresponsible. “The lesson?” Vance writes. “Powerful people sometimes do things to help people like me without really understanding people like me.”
At age twenty-four, Vance felt self-conscious about being too old to be a sophomore in college, so he buckled down, determined to graduate early. After one year and eleven months at Ohio State, Vance graduated with a double major, summa cum laude. Although his family insisted he attend his graduation ceremony, he bypassed the handshake with the university president and quickly left the stage. “On to the next one,” he thought, planning to attend law school the next year. In order to save money for this plan, Vance moved back home and stayed with Aunt Wee, counting these months as some of the happiest in his life.
This optimism, however, contrasted starkly with the pessimism of Vance’s neighbors back in Middletown—these neighbors were facing the aftermath of the Great Recession. A significant part of his family’s and community’s identity comes from patriotism, and in fact, so-called “Bloody Breathitt” earned that nickname not because of legendary feuds like the Hatfields and the McCoys, but rather because its World War II draft was fulfilled entirely by volunteers. Yet people in Middletown and all across the Rust Belt had few heroes in 2009 America; certainly not President Obama, whom they regarded with suspicion, and even the wars in which the country was engaged seemed unwinnable. “If Mamaw’s second God was the United States of America, then many people in my community were losing something akin to a religion,” Vance writes.
Vance uses President Barack Obama as an example of this communal loss of faith. Many Americans believe that Obama was not born in America. Others believe he is Muslim. Vance recognizes that many people blame racism for these myths, but he argues that Obama represents everything that is alien to hillbillies: Ivy League schools, a neutral accent, a metropolitan upbringing, faith in meritocracy, and being a family man. “President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them,” Vance postulates. He argues that Obama connects with so many insecurities of working-class whites, threatening them where it hurts.
Much of the misinformation about Obama is due to a widespread distrust of the media, which promotes skepticism of important societal institutions, the presidency being only one of them. Included in this skepticism is meritocracy itself. “If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it’s hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all?” Vance blames a tendency amongst working-class whites to blame society for their misfortune. However, he also notes that conservative rhetoric fails to encourage engagement from this demographic, instead encouraging them to blame big government for their problems and grow detached. According to a Pew study, working-class whites are the most pessimistic group in America, with 42 percent believing their lives are less economically successful than their parents.
Analysis
Although the Vance who begins this chapter seems like a whole new man, the same problems that plagued his childhood in Middletown rear their ugly head again here. Vance begins by catching up the reader with his newfound success: he is enrolled at Ohio State University, making new friends, and working for a senator he respects in the Ohio legislature. Indeed, it seems as though this Vance is thriving for the first time. However, when a bad case of mononucleosis lands him in the hospital, he is forced to accept his mother’s help. In reflecting on this experience, Vance describes his mother as a complex, contradictory character he is unable to fully comprehend. Being sick and at home, Vance says, “meant trying to understand how Mom could be such a contradiction—a woman who sat patiently with me at the hospital for days and an addict who would lie to her family to extract money from them a month later.” This is a recurring motif in Vance’s life: the dual nature of his mother, and of all addicts.
Thus, this chapter marks Vance’s distancing from his mother, which will last nearly the entire rest of the book. In fact, Vance actually describes his decision to stay away from his mother as coming from his human instinct of “self-preservation.” This statement harkens back to one of the book’s most disturbing ironies: that Vance’s mother, who is supposed to protect him from harm, is his greatest threat. Of course, this irony makes Vance’s strained relationship with his mother all the more painful, as he realizes how dangerous she is to him chiefly when she cares for him, as she does when he comes down sick with mono.
Aside from this painful relationship, Vance hits his stride in this chapter, working hard to succeed in school and at his numerous jobs. As he does so, he also embraces his inner sociologist, returning to an authorial voice that he establishes earlier in the book, wherein he uses his first-hand experiences to comment on broader social phenomena. A case in point is his account of the bill discussed on the Ohio Senate floor while he interned there. Vance remembers how many of the legislators supported the bill curbing payday lenders because they believed those lenders took advantage of poor people. Vance plays devil’s advocate here, arguing that payday loans are crucial to the financial survival of even responsible, hard-working Americans. By concluding that powerful people sometimes fail to understand the people they’re trying to help, Vance returns to an authoritative tone as a capable social observer.
Vance truly hits his stride when he touches on a theme that is at the heart of the entire book: that the white working class is experiencing an identity crisis. A particularly helpful example Vance uses is President Barack Obama, who represents everything the average white, working-class hillbilly is not. This is an idea that is key to Vance’s survey of hillbillies, both on a widespread, cultural plane and on a personal one. In a previous chapter, he theorized that Mamaw’s hatred for his mother’s boyfriend, Bob, was due to the fact that he reminded her of the lower-class hillbilly roots from which she wanted to escape. However, in this chapter, Vance argues that, because working-class hillbillies like Mamaw cannot identify with Barack Obama as a leader, they are losing faith in social institutions and thus losing hope for themselves. These seemingly contradictory conclusions actually strike at the heart of Vance’s argument: that hillbillies are experiencing an identity crisis, not knowing whether to believe they can transcend their circumstances and achieve the American Dream (like Mamaw did) or to retreat into and take pride in their own communities insofar as they are distinct from the rest of America.
To illustrate this, Vance invokes a metaphor comparing Rust Belt and Appalachian patriotism to a religion. Indeed, the theme of the American Dream has recurred throughout the text, since Mamaw and Papaw believed their children would succeed on a higher level than they did. Since this turns out not to be true, they, like so many of their fellow hillbillies, are left wondering what happened to the America they used to know. People such as Mamaw took patriotism so seriously that it became as much a part of their identities as their religion, Vance argues. Left with few elements of the America they once thought was infinitely worth fighting for, these working-class hillbillies suffer from an identity crisis, as they have lost a fundamental piece of their identities.
