Even without this direct link it would not be difficult to place Shockley as a not-distant intellectual ancestor of Charles Murray. Murray, who once burned a cross during what he described as a teenage prank, maintained the soundness of his borrowed research despite its provenance. The scientific community widely condemned The Bell Curve and Murray left the academy to become a pubic intellectual on the subject of race science.
The New York Times wrote in 1994 that “Shockley receives only one guarded paragraph in the 845 pages of The Bell Curve. Yet his old pronouncements are everywhere…The more elegantly written Bell Curve has the same drift. Shockley bequeathed its authors their self-congratulatory tone as well: He boasted about raising ‘questions that are usually swept under the rug’ as they do about taboos. Mr. Murray and Mr. Herrnstein also emulate Shockley by asserting expertise in academic disciplines (like genetics) outside their own and by protesting too much against those who might accuse them of making a fetish of race.”
BRAIN DRAIN REDUX
And this is where we pick up the story of Vance again, sitting across the stage from Charles Murray at the American Enterprise Institute in October 2016. Our second example of this strange bond quickly transitions to the third. The camaraderie performed by the pair was, in some ways, an outgrowth of their mutual appreciation. Vance cited Murray’s Coming Apart approvingly in Elegy and often in interviews, and Murray found Elegy riveting as well. The occasion of their talk was an hourlong conversation about the decline of the white working class, and Vance appeared eager to tell Murray what he clearly wanted to hear about the genetic dimensions of this decline.
Over laughs and jokes, the pair discussed their “pretty clean Scots-Irish blood” while getting to the heart of what “hillbilly culture” actually is. “It’s worth noting,” Vance explained, “that if you look at ethnographic studies of this area you find that the Scots-Irish are disproportionately represented in this area of the country…so there’s definitely a sort of ethnic component to what’s going on in these areas.” He continued, “There’s something to be said for the fact that Scots-Irish culture is both unique and regionally distinct but it’s also spread pretty far and wide.” Murray, who in the darkest corners of his brain still likes to believe he’s a social scientist, nodded and smiled at this conflicting package of attributes that wouldn’t pass a freshman essay—regionally distinct but spread far and wide!—as if it was the truest fact he’d ever heard.
Murray, who also claims Scots-Irish ancestry, was quick to point out, “and our leading characteristics though, which I learned long before I read Hillbilly Elegy, is being drunk and violent.” More laughs. A week after the incident at Middlebury College, in which student protestors shut down Murray’s lecture, Vance made it a point to credit him for his theories on “brain drain” in his New York Times op-ed about why he was moving back to Ohio.
John Thomason notes that “Vance cites racist-thinking far more directly than even his critics have indicated. The very first end-note references Razib Khan, a writer who the New York Times dropped as a regular science contributor after Gawker revealed his ‘history with racist, far-right online publications.’ Charles Murray…the most famous racial determinist in contemporary America is cited approvingly.” It’s a chilling exercise to consider why individuals who are happy to deconstruct Black life down to the smallest data-point and to savage critics who disagree find J.D. Vance to be a savant in cultural studies, a field coincidentally held in poor regard by most conservative thinkers.
There are many authors who have written about the people and problems of Appalachia and similar environments who don’t have eugenicists for pen-pals and mentors. Some of them even anchor frank discussions of social problems within moving personal stories. Otis Trotter’s Keeping Heart, a memoir about growing up poor, sick, and Black in Appalachian Ohio springs to mind, as does Rick Bragg’s All Over but the Shoutin’. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is the story of a dysfunctional West Virginian family and finding the courage to leave. Linda Tate, in Power in the Blood, tells of the re-discovery of her Cherokee roots, and Creeker, by Linda Scott DeRosier, is yet another memoir about coming of age in Appalachia.
“No book about Appalachia has gotten this much attention since Harry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands was published in 1963,” the Daily Yonder wrote of Elegy. Amazon tries to sell me Elegy if I view the page for Night Comes (and vice versa), and instructors are now pairing the texts together in their Introduction to Appalachian Studies courses. Imagine what it feels like to understand that if someone decides to purchase a book about Appalachia, there’s a 100 percent chance they’ll be recommended not one but two books used by their authors to win the esteem of white supremacists and eugenicists.
Living with this fatigue is real. In the age of Hillbilly Elegy, a book applauded by the National Review for proving that signs of white distress “have gone neglected as LGBTQ identity politics and Black Lives Matter antics” have monopolized the nation’s attention, we’re told to be grateful that Vance has returned Appalachia to the nation’s conscience. But I don’t want Appalachia to be used as a siphon to suck attention away from LGBTQ politics and Black Lives Matter, movements that also flourish here. I don’t want to lose race in discussions of class. I don’t want to keep talking about “brain drain” when millions of smart, capable, and good people still call the region home. I don’t want anything that Vance could ever give the region, which works out, because he’s far more interested in taking.
A neutral observer might say that the best course of action is simply to ignore the Elegy phenomenon as best we can. You must understand that isn’t possible. Vance is in our schools, our libraries. He is at our graduations. He is on our timelines and in our newspaper. He is a member of our faculties, with new honorary degrees. He’s like the monster from It Follows. The best we can do, as community columnist Jillean McCommons suggests in the Lexington-Herald Ledger, is “turn that anger into your next writing project. Write about your people. Tell your story. Answer with pen and pad.”
Last year, my alma mater, a state school outside of Appalachia, selected Elegy as required reading for all incoming freshmen and paired its selection with a financial arrangement with photographer Shelby Lee Adams to sell his Appalachian poverty pictures. Known for posed and stylized black and white portrait work of mountain families, Adams has made a career photographing the poor. Among Appalachians, he is controversial. Like many photographers before him, including Arthur Rothstein, he favors images of poor, often disabled, individuals in contexts that he frequently manipulates.
Adams often photographs the same families over time, and has developed what he presents as an insider status among his impoverished subjects despite his own solidly middle-class upbringing and training at the Cleveland Institute of Art. His most forceful claim to this status appears in his Appalachian Lives through the ghost of Hobart Ison, the man who murdered Hugh O’Connor.
Among the photographs, Adams tells a story. One day he finds himself down a holler in Kentucky, photographing a family and their trailer. As he works, the owner of the property—this time, a woman—arrives and orders him to leave. In this version of the “stranger-with-a-camera” story, Adams has a less heated exchange with the property owner, who nevertheless menaces him by asking him if knows what people do to nosy photographers in Letcher County. Not only is he aware, Adams defiantly tells the property owner that Hobart Ison—whom he refers to as Hobert Isom in his text—is his third cousin.
Adams’s subjects become active participants in his version of the legend by helping drive away the property owner so he can continue taking their pictures. In their conversation after the encounter, Adams reports that the family provided its blessing to sell their images “for a thousand dollars apiece,” confronting and ultimately dismissing in smug fashion questions of exploitation in Adams’s arrangements with his subjects. My former university insisted that Adams’s work “is the photographic analog of J.D. Vance’s book Hill
billy Elegy…the author and the photographer tell corresponding stories through different means.”
This is true, but not in the way that my alma mater insists that it is. The shared story and analogues at work are not about people, but about power. It reflects how credibility falls easily to those given the privilege of defining who or what Appalachian is. It also shows the rewards that fall to individuals, universally men and exclusively white, regardless of the company they keep. It is the power to grant yourself permission for continued exploitation of vulnerable subjects. It is the power to have your work selected as emblematic of a cultural moment by individuals and organizations that didn’t care one iota about Appalachia until their gaze could fill the region with pathologies.
Vance is a well-educated person of means with a powerful platform who has chosen to accept a considerable amount of fame and wealth to become the spokesperson for a region. Since he is such an enormous fan of personal responsibility, I am thrilled to hold him responsible for his asinine beliefs and associations. Appalachian blogger Kelli Haywood, in her essays on Elegy, objects to the individuals who claim that Vance isn’t authentically Appalachian because he migrated outside the region. I don’t give a damn about geography, but I’ll note that Vance has transcended one of the most authentically Appalachian experiences of them all: watching someone with tired ideas about race and culture get famous by selling cheap stereotypes about the region.
PART III
LAND, JUSTICE, PEOPLE
In 1967, the sheriff of Pike County, Kentucky, ordered a raid on the home of community organizers Karen and Joseph Mulloy, a young couple affiliated with a number of anti-poverty and anti-coal programs. To the delight of law enforcement and the county’s political elite, the raid unearthed “a Communist library out of this world” that included Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. The sheriff, the appropriately named Perry Justice, ordered the arrest of Joseph, his neighbor Alan McSurely, and his friend Carl Braden for sedition against the government of Pike County.
This was the second time that Braden found himself charged with sedition in Kentucky. In 1954, he and his wife Anne helped purchase a home for an African American couple, Andrew and Charlotte Wade, in Louisville. The swift backlash, which included an attempt by white neighbors to dynamite the home, prompted Braden’s arrest. The pretext? They were attempting to overthrow the commonwealth by igniting a race war. The court convicted Carl Braden and sentenced him to a term of fifteen years. He served eighteen months in prison, and forty-two days in solitary confinement, before the Supreme Court, ruling on a case in Pennsylvania, determined that charges of sedition were only applicable in federal matters, not state or local. During the 1954 trial, the Bradens lost approximately 800 books, seized by law enforcement, and spent $40,000 in legal fees.
Over a decade later, Perry Justice alleged that the Mulloys and McSurelys, with the assistance of Braden, were attempting to “take over Pike County from the power structure and put it in the hands of the poor” by using mountain people and anti-poverty workers to “promote causes aimed at downgrading and maybe overthrowing the Government.” The commonwealth charged them with “teaching or advocating criminal syndicalism against the state,” an ambiguous legal tactic most often reserved to harass labor unions and their supporters. Although Pike County officials knew sedition charges were unconstitutional, the Mulloys and McSurelys were indeed attempting to help poor individuals in the mountains seize power from the wealthy. In other words, they were engaging in one of the finest and oldest Appalachian traditions.
One of the most offensive “Trump Country” essays I have encountered came courtesy of Kevin Baker in the March 2017 issue of the New Republic. It’s a painfully smug attempt to effect a kind of gotcha by juxtaposing historic Appalachian labor uprisings against our presumed present complacency. Look at how far the radical have fallen, Baker seems to argue, setting Blair Mountain insurrections against the tepid and polite applause for coal interests at a televised Bernie Sanders rally. But we are not accountable to Baker’s narrow definition of radical, which nods in limp recognition at men with guns, but excludes individuals like the Mulloys, McSurelys, and the Bradens.
A flaw of popular narratives of Appalachia is the willingness of authors to describe destruction and social decline in lurid detail while remaining wholly uninterested in the people who challenged it. To the National Review, Appalachia is the “white ghetto,” a place filled with “the unemployed, the dependent, and the addicted.” To me, Appalachia is a battleground, where industry barons, social reformers, and workers wage a constant war that is passed down through generations, often reflecting inherited struggles that feel repeated and never-ending.
When I imagine our history, I see photographs. You might notice that visual cues populate this volume, which is an artifact of both my peculiar way of thinking and also of the frequency with which photographers, journalists, and visual artists come to document us. References to challenging ways of seeing or looking at Appalachia appear in many projects created by Appalachians as opposed to those that are about Appalachians. It is often second nature for many of us to inject the language of visual literacy into our work because we’re accustomed to serving as passive subjects for others and ultimately just want to be seen as we truly are.
So like any good host, let me conclude our visit by dragging out our family photo album to show you Appalachia as I see it. Here is Anne Braden, dressed in black, with her neat pocketbook and tilted head at her husband’s sedition trial. Here is Myles Horton, a labor and civil rights activist from Tennessee, flanked by Rosa Parks and Septima Clark. Here is Robert Payne, a disabled African American miner who helped lead one of the largest wildcat strikes in history as president of the Disabled Miners and Widows organization. Here is Eula Hall, with her big, teased hair and her finger pointed in the face of every bureaucrat that stood in her way. Here is Huey Perry, poised to lead a hundred-car-long funeral procession to mark the death of his community action group. Here are my grandparents, here are your grandparents. Here is Judy Bonds, fishing with her grandchildren after her shift at Pizza Hut, before she became the face of anti-mountaintop-removal activism. This is who we are. This is who we have been all this time.
TO SAVE THE LAND AND PEOPLE
There is a single figure in the photograph I see in my head that is otherwise cluttered with the artifacts of ruined land—slender and crooked branches, deep ravines—and industrial equipment. The figure is an elderly woman, sixty-six years old and aged even beyond that by poverty, with a dark-colored kerchief on her head and a walking stick by her side. She stands before a bulldozer with her head bowed.
She is sitting in the next frame. Depending on the angle of the photographer—Bill Strode working for the Courier-Journal out of Louisville—the bulldozer is still visible but so are trees ripped from the earth by their roots. In one image her kneeling frame even appears underwater because the shadows of equipment and the shadows of dead things engulf her small body.
The final frame is perhaps the last one Strode captured before police arrested him for documenting the woman’s protest. A uniformed officer has his hands hooked beneath her arms. A man in a dark suit, looking wholly out of place on a ravaged mountain, supports her feet. She is limp. The middle of her body sags beneath the two men because, although she is light, she has forced them to carry her down a steep mountain.
This is how I see Ollie Combs, who in 1965 sat in front of the Caperton Coal Company’s bulldozers to protest their abuse of her land. A legal loophole gave Caperton ownership of the minerals beneath Combs’s land and the land surrounding it, and although she owned everything above ground, exploitive land deeds entitled coal companies to extract these minerals by any means necessary, including the destruction of her home and property. I see Ollie Combs in jail, on Thanksgiving, eating alone.
There is another image, uncaptured, that should haunt your memories. Testifying against coal companies in eastern Kentucky, young wome
n described watching bulldozers rip through a family cemetery. Alice Sloan, a Kentucky-area educator, described how Bige Richie pleaded with the coal company to spare the grave of her child: “The bulldozer pushed over the hill and she begged them not to go through the graveyard. And she looked out there and there was her baby’s coffin come rolling down the hill. One man said he wouldn’t go through and push it down. The other said, ‘Hell, I will,’ and he took the bulldozer and went right on through.”
The struggle to prevent the wholesale destruction of land by strip-mining coal companies in eastern Kentucky gave rise to the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People. This grassroots organization was established after an eighty-one-year-old preacher named Dan Gibson used armed resistance to route bulldozers off his family land in Knott County, Kentucky, in 1965. Ollie Combs was a member, as were many elderly Kentuckians who tried to protect the land while their children and grandchildren were fighting in Vietnam. Like coal companies, the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People went about its business by any means necessary. It waged painfully slow legal challenges through the courts, but members also engaged in more militant forms of action and in illegal methods of protest such as industrial sabotage.
The fringe group Mountaintop Gun Club, for example, rented private surface land for $1 from concerned landowners. In return, the club established shooting ranges on threatened land in the hopes that the presence of armed individuals might deter coal companies from taking the land by force. Members of the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People described parts of eastern Kentucky in the late 1960s as a war zone where armed residents faced off daily against coal operators.
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia Page 9