New Delhi: It was the memoir Hillbilly Elegy published in 2016 that set James David Vance on his path to success, and since then, there has been no looking back. On Monday, Republican Party nominee and former president Donald Trump declared the 39-year-old junior senator from Ohio as his running mate for the November presidential elections.
Born in a poor, dysfunctional family in a Rust Belt town in Ohio, Vance went on to study at Yale Law School after graduating from Ohio State University with a degree in political science and philosophy.
Vance, who once referred to Trump as “America’s Hitler,” was first elected to the US Senate in 2022 with a term slated to end in 2028.
From a blue-collar bard to a proponent of ‘Make America Great Again,’ Vance’s memoir, which was also adapted into a film in 2020 by the same name directed by Ron Howard and starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close, is back in the spotlight.
The memoir is a personal tour of Vance’s life, where he writes about his family history of poverty, drug abuse, and failed relationships.
In his memoir, he credits his grandmother for supporting him and ensuring that he left his hometown to join Ohio State University and later, Yale Law School.
The memoir, which delves into the “social isolation, poverty and addiction that afflict poor white communities,” resonated with blue-collar Americans and quickly became an Amazon top ten bestseller and a New York Times top bestseller.
It was described as a “provocative” read by the New York Post.
In an interview with the Associated Press in 2016, Vance said the idea to write a memoir first crossed his mind when he was studying at Yale.
He was surprised to see that not many like him studied at the university, which led him to write the book. “I was very bugged by this question of why there weren’t more kids like me at places like Yale… why isn’t there more upward mobility in the United States?” he was quoted as saying.
In an interview with NPR that year, he said, “I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) of the Northeast. Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty’s the family tradition. Their ancestors were day labourers in the southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and mill workers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks or white trash. I call them neighbours, friends and family.”
He went on to add, “So the point I’m trying to make, ultimately, is that these folks have been poor for a very long time. In a lot of ways, intergenerational poverty is something that they inherited and that they’ve lived with as part of a family tradition.”
The success of Vance’s memoir catapulted him to the status of a hero among blue-collar Americans who took a liking to his idea of ‘Appalachian values’ — loyalty and love of country.
However, he surprised most when he decided to run for the Senate in 2021.
Now, with his elevation as Trump’s running mate, Vance’s critics are pulling out his old tweets, posting passages from the book, and questioning his new persona.
For instance, the editor of MediaTouch.com posted a tweet by Vance from when he ran for the Senate. It read, “Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this, I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.”
Now, with Vance set to become the second youngest vice president after Richard Nixon, if the Republicans trounce the Democrats, his memoir and path to power are sure to warrant deeper inspection.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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