PDF Summary:Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance
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1-Page PDF Summary of Hillbilly Elegy
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis examines the spiritual and social decline of the Appalachian white working class through the life story of its author, JD Vance. Growing up in a post-industrial Ohio town, Vance encountered the symptoms of community and familial dysfunction—drug and alcohol abuse, unstable marriages, lack of education, and evasion of hard work—that underscore the failing values of the culture from which he came.
Although Vance eventually escapes the poverty and dysfunction of his roots, attending college and Yale Law School, he finds that even economic mobility can never permanently erase the social markers of his hillbilly upbringing.
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Key Themes
Beyond just being the story of JD Vance’s life, Hillbilly Elegy is a broader social commentary and a critique of hillbilly culture. Vance argues that hillbilly culture, as lived and practiced in post-industrial towns across Appalachia like where he grew up, has come to celebrate self-destructive and antisocial behavior. He contends that this behavior and a certain set of attitudes are severe hindrances that prevent white working class people from acknowledging the problems in their families and their communities and make it difficult for people to succeed outside of that culture.
Aversion to Work
Growing up, JD saw that many people in his community viewed work with disdain and struggled to hold down a steady job. His community was plagued by high levels of unemployment, indebtedness, welfare dependency, and poor work habits. JD recalls one young man with whom he worked at a summer job. The man would consistently take hour-long bathroom breaks, call out sick at least once a week, and was chronically late. Eventually, he was fired. Yet when this happened, the man blamed his employer for the situation, claiming he’d been treated unfairly—there was no sense of personal responsibility, no willingness to account for how his own actions had led him to this point.
Blame-Shifting
JD makes the case that hillbilly culture has become resentful and insular, all too willing to blame the rest of the world for its problems instead of taking an introspective look at itself. Rather than taking responsibility, JD saw that many of his drug-addicted and impoverished friends and neighbors chose to blame the government (and often President Barack Obama specifically). One friend quit his job because he refused to wake up late, then took to social media to bemoan the sluggishness of the “Obama economy” for his unemployment.
In examining his own political affiliations later in life, JD saw that movement conservatism— while ideologically and rhetorically rooted in the ethic of personal responsibility—too often just provided its adherents with targets to blame, instead of solutions for self-improvement. Popular religion reinforced the same themes. JD saw how fundamentalist Protestantism, for example, gave people no concrete answers for life’s most pressing issues. It instead gave them a convenient list of bogeymen to fear and oppose—usually LGBT people, liberal college professors, the federal government, abortionists, and feminists. As long as you had disdain for the “right” people, you were a good person.
Culture of Honor
Too many in JD’s community, particularly males, lived by an outmoded “code of honor” that demanded violent retribution be meted out to anyone who offered the slightest insult or sign of disrespect. Growing up, he heard stories about how close relatives had beaten and shot people in the course of disputes. This was celebrated as a noble cultural characteristic, and JD became an ardent practitioner. When a boy broke up with his sister, he saw it as his duty to violently attack the young man. When someone insulted his grandmother on the schoolyard, his sense of family loyalty and honor compelled him to start a fight. Looking back, JD now sees this behavior as self-destructive: the rest of the world does not resolve mild disputes or disagreements through violence. Growing up in this world stops young people from knowing how to resolve conflicts in a healthy way and renders them unable to function outside of it.
Poor Education
Today, as an Ivy League-educated white collar professional, JD is able to look back soberly at just how much of an exception he is: how little emphasis his community and his culture placed on education. A college education was a distant and remote pipe-dream, certainly not something parents prepared their children for or treated as an expected life experience. No one JD knew had gone to a four-year college; and 20 percent of the town’s high school freshman cohort wouldn’t go on to graduate in four years. With hindsight, JD attributes this poor record of educational attainment to a culture of low expectations. Children saw poverty, high unemployment, and drug addiction all around them growing up, often in their own immediate families. With such poor models of adult behavior, they never came to expect much from themselves.
Pessimism
Throughout his childhood and teenage years, JD saw how his community was infected by a gloomy pessimism and fatalism that encouraged people to abandon any hope that their material condition could ever improve. This attitude only encouraged indifference and apathy, as well as poor work ethic: if things will never get better, there’s no point in working hard to try to improve your lot in life. Indeed, surveys show that working-class whites are the most pessimistic demographic group in America today. This speaks to a deep spiritual and cultural decline in the community.
Economic Mobility, Social Stagnation
When he went to Ohio State and then to Yale Law School, JD learned to be a keen observer of how successful people thought and behaved versus how people in his community looked at the world. Having now lived in both worlds, he saw that true mobility in America was defined by more than wealth: social mobility mattered more than economic mobility. Even during periods where his family was earning good money and living in relative material comfort, they maintained all the same destructive social attitudes and dysfunctional modes of conflict resolution that were the inheritance of their hillbilly culture. From high divorce rates to domestic discord, they never made the transition to true middle-class standards of respectability.
Social Capital
Later on, in the white-collar professional world, JD discovered how much he truly had lacked in social capital—the networks of relationships that enable individuals to function and succeed. This lack of social capital put him and his community at a severe disadvantage and still represents a major barrier to social mobility in America.
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PDF Summary Introduction
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A resentful, insular culture that blames the rest of the world for its problems (or just denies their existence) instead of taking an introspective look at itself.
A “culture of honor” that demands the resolution of disputes through violence or, at best, harsh verbal abuse. These modes of conflict resolution may work in the hillbilly culture, but they leave these people utterly unprepared for a life outside it.
A destructive tendency to indulge in conspiracy theories that discourage meaningful participation in 21st-century society. These conspiracy theories can be both political and religious in nature. On the political side, for example, the widespread acceptance of “birtherism” (the belief that Barack Obama was born outside the U.S. or that he is a secret Muslim). On the religious side, Vance laments the strong hold that Young Earth creationism and disbelief in the theory of evolution have within this community.
A gloomy pessimism and fatalism that encourages people to abandon any hope that their conditions will ever improve. This attitude only encourages indifference and apathy, as well as poor work ethic: if things will never get better, there’s no point...
PDF Summary Part One: A Hillbilly History
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The wave of migration was so common that stretches of U.S. Route 23 and Interstate 75 became colloquially known as the “Hillbilly Highway.” The numbers of people on the move were immense: by the 1950s, 13 percent of Kentucky residents had left the state.
Culture Clash
As with any wave of migration, the hillbilly migrants brought their own culture and set of traditions to their new homes in the industrialized Midwest. Appalachian transplants established their own communities in these industrial towns and cities, often to the alarm of the more established middle class Ohioans.
The migrants from Kentucky seemed to be people from an entirely different world. For the more bourgeois Midwesterners, the hillbillies were alien and destructive to community values:
They had too many children; they brought their extended families into their homes for visits that lasted too long, upsetting the peace, quiet, and normalcy of the community; and they were coarse, profane, and prone to violence.
The Toy Store Brawl
In one illustrative example, Vance recounts a story that subsequently became family legend. His grandparents were in a department store in Middletown with their...
PDF Summary Part Two: A Childhood of Dysfunction
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JD had an early childhood exposure to his mother’s pattern of unstable and unhappy relationships with men. JD was forced to witness frequent screaming matches between his mother and adopted father; physical violence between the couple (with the one stipulation being that Bob couldn’t hit first); and brutal verbal abuse.
There was also a reckless financial profligacy and a total lack of regard for saving and thrift, behavior that JD would come to see as a consistent feature of hillbilly culture. This was despite the fact that the household income exceeded $100,000: hardly a small sum in rural Ohio. Bev and Bob racked up thousands of dollars in credit card debt, spending lavishly on items that they didn’t need, like new cars, new trucks and even a swimming pool. The deteriorating financial situation hastened the demise of this fragile marriage. Bob and Bev separated and another father figure in JD’s life (his legal father in this case) was gone.
Needless to say, all of this began to take a toll on JD. His grades at school declined and he began to put on weight, while suffering from severe stomach aches. He also had trouble sleeping, out of fear of being awoken by the...
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Learn more about our summaries →PDF Summary Part Three: Growing Up
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A Watershed Moment
After one of his mother’s characteristic outbursts, she decided to make it up to her son by taking him out to buy some football cards. During the ride to the mall, JD said something to her (he doesn’t recall now what exactly it was that he said) that set off his mom’s trigger-hair temper.
She reacted with a level of fury and violence that even JD, for all he’d seen, could hardly fathom. She accelerated the car and threatened to kill the both of them, then pulled the vehicle over and attempted to savagely beat her son.
JD managed to escape the car and run to a nearby house, where the woman at home called the police. Before the police arrived, Bev had managed to kick down the woman’s door and drag JD, who was screaming for help, onto the front lawn. Bev was ultimately arrested, violently resisting as the cops put her in the squad car.
In the aftermath, JD’s mother would retain nominal custody of the children, but with the tacit agreement that JD could live with Mamaw whenever he wished.
Class Differences
As an adult, JD notes his mother’s trial as his first exposure to America’s class differences.
Even as a child, he observed that the...
PDF Summary Part Four: The Teenage Years
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Soon, Bev’s behavior began to take a turn for the worse. She was arrested during a domestic squabble with Mamaw that (once again) spiraled out of control. She also started abusing prescription drugs—to which she had easy access as a nurse—around this time, stealing from her patients to feed her addiction. Ultimately, she was fired for rollerblading through the emergency room. Evidently, her substance abuse had altered her mental state to the point where this seemed like a normal and appropriate thing to do.
She was transformed into a person completely unable and unwilling to conform to the basic norms and standards of adult behavior. Eventually, she had to go to rehab in Cincinnati, where JD and his sister Lindsay would visit her on weekends. These visits showed JD the true horrors of American addiction, but they also gave him key insights into why his mom was the way she was. For example, she revealed to him that she had turned to drugs to escape her financial stress and to cope with the loss of her father.
The family therapy sessions at the treatment center also brought to light resentments and wounds that had been long-simmering between Bev and her children. One...
PDF Summary Part Five: The Marines
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With his tumultuous home life growing up and the instability that came from his mother’s lifestyle, this sense of being loved and valued meant everything.
JD was grouped together with people who came from outside the hillbilly culture he’d known all his life. There were black and Hispanic kids, rich people from the Northeast, Catholics, Jews, and even atheists. These fellow Marines brought with them a set of values and experiences that JD had never known growing up in Middletown.
Discovering Potential
The Marines didn’t just physically whip JD into shape (although they certainly did that). They helped him adjust his attitude and broader expectations about life. They showed him the true potential that he had.
Every time he managed to keep pace on a grueling march; every time he endured the drill sergeant’s screaming; every time he completed a daunting physical obstacle, he was learning to believe in himself and discover just how deeply he’d underestimated his own capabilities.
He was overcoming the learned helplessness of his youth. All his life, he had been taught (and seen from the examples of most of the adults in his life) that his choices didn’t...
PDF Summary Part Six: Higher Education
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JD, however, had occasionally relied on payday loans to cover basic expenses, as had many people in his community. JD believed that without them, such people would have overdrawn their bank accounts and faced potentially worse financial consequences than the interest from the loans.
For him, the problem was that well-meaning politicians were pushing measures that would actually harm the very people they were intended to help. In examining his political evolution, JD sees this as another experience that cemented his commitment to free-market conservatism and his rejection of welfare state liberalism.
Deep Pessimism
In stark contrast to his own success and upward mobility, JD also started to examine some of the problematic political views of the folks back home in Middletown during this time.
The community was a bastion of traditional patriotism—Middletown sent lots of its kids to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, as they had in Vietnam, Korea, and both world wars. But for all their outward love of country, people at home were imbued with a deep pessimism about the United States and their future role within it. Indeed, **working-class whites have the lowest...
PDF Summary Part Seven: Coming to Terms
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Common ACEs included being sworn at or insulted; being pushed or grabbed; witnessing a lack of support among family members; living with substance abusers; and exposure to people who were clinically depressed or suicidal. Looking back, JD realized that he had experienced all of these situations during the course of his childhood.
He saw that he wasn’t alone. Over half of children growing up in working-class households had experienced at least one ACE. The contrast with non-working-class people, among whom only one in ten experienced an ACE, was stark.
Children with ACEs are likelier to suffer from anxiety and depression, performly poorly in their studies, and experience unstable relationships—tragically, the pattern of dysfunction in these children’s lives perpetuates itself generation after generation.
As adults, people replicate the instability they themselves witnessed as children. Thus, JD’s mother descended from being a salutatorian of her high school to the multiple marriages and drug addiction of her adulthood. Even people like his sister Lindsay, his cousin Gail, and his Aunt Wee, all of whom managed to achieve stability, struggled through periods of...
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PDF Summary Conclusion
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Hillbillies must wake up, reform the parts of their culture that lead to self-destructive behavior and make them unable to succeed in broader society, and start taking responsibility for the state of their communities and their families.
In JD’s interpretation, public policy may help around the margins, but fundamentally, this is not a crisis the government can solve. There is no tax incentive that can be created to fight spiritual poverty; bureaucrats can’t devise a program to force family members to treat one another with respect. The problems arose from the deep roots of hillbilly culture; they will only be solved by people within that culture.