U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, former president Donald Trump’s pick for vice presidential running mate, is from Ohio. But he calls Kentucky “home.”
Vance has long touted his ties to Kentucky, starting on the very first page of his New York Times bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy.”
“I always distinguished ‘my address’ from ‘my home.’ My address was where I spent most of my time with my mother and sister, wherever that might be. But my home never changed: my great-grandmother’s house, in the holler, in Jackson, Kentucky,” Vance wrote in the book.
The 39-year-old senator rose to fame with the 2016 memoir, which many Americans tapped to understand the support Trump garnered in his surprise presidential election win that year.
A New York Times review of the book called it a “a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass that has helped drive the politics of rebellion, particularly the ascent of Donald J. Trump.”
Vance was a critic of Trump around the time of his book’s release, once comparing him to Hitler. But “Hillbilly Elegy” drew interest for its rendering of a rural America that formed the foundation of Trump’s political base.
Vance’s tune has changed in recent years. He was one of Trump’s most ardent supporters after the 2016 election, and he scored the former president’s endorsement during his 2022 Senate race, where he won in a crowded GOP field and beat his Democratic opponent by six percentage points.
And on Monday, he was announced as Trump’s running mate in this year’s election.
Vance’s 2016 bestseller, which vaulted him onto the political scene, received plaudits in national media and sparked vigorous discussion about the state of the nation’s “Rust Belt” and Appalachian regions.
But criticism from Kentuckians and other Appalachians has been strong since the book’s publication.
Chris Green, who leads the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center at Berea College, said people were drawn to “Hillbilly Elegy,” because of its quintessential “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” story line.
Vance was born in Middletown, Ohio, to a mother who struggled with addiction, and he was largely raised by his grandmother, a tough-as-nails self-described hillbilly from Breathitt County. In the book, he describes spending summers there, as well as the family grave site nestled in its hollers.
Green said in an interview Monday that many Appalachians grew frustrated with the broad brush Vance used to paint the region.
“His experience is real, but one can’t claim to speak for all of a people based on one’s real experience unless one goes and does a much larger study,” Green said. “I saw people from all over Appalachia who said that some of the claims of the book weren’t their experience. They were really angry that he was playing on it and assuming he had authority.”
Kentucky author Silas House has also criticized the work.
“I hope people who read it seek historical and cultural context. Every family story has value, but I wish he’d told that story without generalizing an entire place and people to fit his agenda,” House told POLITICO in a 2022 interview.
In addition to the book, Vance has continued to tout his ancestral homeland as one that informs his politics. At a recent conservative conference, he chided American “elites” for their condescension toward people who live in places like Breathitt County, which ranks among the 10 poorest counties in the country.
“Our elites love to accuse the residents there of having white privilege. Go to Breathitt County, Kentucky, and tell me that these are privileged people. They’re very hardworking, and they’re very good, and they are people who love this country — not because it’s good, but because in their bones they know that this is their home and it will be their children’s home, and they would die fighting to protect it.”
Beyond his rearing in Ohio and Kentucky, the book also tracks his successes at Ohio State University and later Yale Law School, where he was mentored by professor and author Amy Chua, who penned the nonfiction bestseller on parenting “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.”
Before his selection as vice presidential nominee, Vance become the face of the nascent “New Right,” a tangled set of political movements dissatisfied with both progressivism and traditional Republican politics. He rose to prominence during his book tour in a different political mode, though: as both a genial translator for and mild critic of the Trump-voting American.
“Our faith in our country fell so far, so fast, that many support a man whose very slogan — ‘Make America Great Again’ — implicitly argues that a central tenet of my childhood was false. Our mistrust of those in power has swelled to the point that many will support Donald Trump, who offers a slogan about greatness with little substance to support it,” Vance wrote in the Washington Post in 2016
Green said that some of the successful marketing tactics around the book could prove useful on the campaign trail.
“I think he will play up this sense of being a person who’s from the harder side of America that the liberal elite have ignored,” Green said.
This story was originally published July 15, 2024 5:19 PM.
