J.D. Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy, defines a certain segment of the rural / Appalachian cultural group through the lens of his own family history and his own right-wing views of it. When he applies these views to the culture as a whole, our mainstream media love it because it confirms certain well-entrenched stereotypes.
But as a community focused on effective political organizing, we need to go beyond stereotypes to real history and an in-depth, detailed understanding of this culture and the various elements of it that could be turned to our favor.
This interview with Max Fraser, author of the book Hillbilly Highway, might help to start us in that direction. I haven’t read the book yet, but the article definitely makes me want to.
According to the author, migration along what he calls the “Hillbilly Highway” has had a significant effect on our national culture and current conditions, so understanding this history could give some insight into new approaches to political organizing and alliance-building.
The book “tells the story of the eight million poor and working-class white people who fled the Upper South for the Rust Belt between roughly 1900 and 1970.”
The historic under-development of the rural South, the destructive toll that resource-extractive industrialization took on traditional rural livelihoods, the dislocating effects of state-initiated modernization projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority, all combined to displace an ever-growing number of people across the broad region.
✂️
[M]illions of these rural white southerners began moving north along the hillbilly highway.
The author says this particular migration is not as well known as the Black Great Migration and the Dust Bowl Migration because it was not caused by “social catastrophes,” but was an outgrowth of “the ‘dull compulsion of economic relations’ – which functions as something like the inalterable background scenery to life under capitalism.”
In the couple decades after World War I, Midwestern employers very aggressively began to recruit white southerners to come work in northern factories, and they did so in large part because they were convinced that these rural migrants would make for an ideal workforce.
✂️
[T]hese ideas stemmed from and reanimated long-standing stereotypes about southern “hillbillies” being a uniquely impoverished, degraded, and reactionary group in American society.
✂️
But time and again such notions proved to be misleading if not flat-out science fiction.
He goes on to describe the pivotal role played by “hillbillies” in the famous Goodyear sit-down strike in 1936.
Regarding the complex history of this cultural group and its role in our current cultural conditions he states:
Mobility had a double-meaning for many Transappalachian migrants; it both defined them as outsiders in the new communities they moved within, and granted them access to opportunities they did not have at home and privileges that were simultaneously denied to others because of race or nativity.
✂️
This tension between marginalization and mobility is really the central dynamic of the story I tell in Hillbilly Highway. Ultimately, the possibility of social mobility – the promise, or bribe, embedded in that shared whiteness – does, I think, have the effect of largely assimilating Tranasappalachian migrants into the cultural mainstream that had once rejected them
✂️
And of course, when the industrial economy on which that social order rested began to decompose in the decades after 1960, the promise of mobility that the hillbilly highway had held out since the turn of the twentieth century would become one of the emerging Rust Belt’s many casualties.
It appears to me that this book might be able fill in some of the aspects of rural / working class culture that are puzzling to those outside of it.
I’m hoping Hillbilly Highway will give us some insight on how we can tap into historically progressive elements of the culture that have been lost along the way. Please check out the interview. There’s a lot of interesting information in it. And I’m looking forward to reading the book.