A young Silicon Valley investor with a law degree from Yale, Vance grew up in poverty in the depressed steel town of Middletown, Ohio, as he writes in his acclaimed memoir out this year, Hillbilly Elegy. Perhaps no one has better explained how a billionaire Manhattan reality TV star won the support of coal miners in West Virginia and steelworkers in Pennsylvania than J.D.
Poor whites got some help thanks to the New Deal and the Great Society, but they still represent a sizable, often derided, strain of American society, and American politics too. As she writes in this year’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, the white poor-referred to over the decades as “offals,” “crackers,” “mudsills,” “rednecks” and more-have a troubled past going back to their early years in the country as indentured servants considered lazy and stupid by British colonizers.
To understand where those grievances come from, Nancy Isenberg argues you have to look to the long, but often overlooked, history of wealthy elites oppressing poor white people in America. For Vardaman, democracy, no matter how “dirty,” belonged to the people, and he (as their representative) had the right to say anything he wanted. Best Trump historical comparison: Governor (and later Senator) James Vardaman of Mississippi exploited the fear of poor whites, pitted them against blacks and attacked a sitting president, Theodore Roosevelt, with slurs about his pedigree. Does America need to be “made great again”? No.
Favorite book read this year: “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” by Oscar Wilde.
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