By Lennard J. Davis
JD Vance has climbed to his current position as former President Donald Trump’s running mate, in part, by selling himself as a hillbilly, calling on his Appalachian background to bolster his credentials to speak for the American working class.
“I grew up as a poor kid,” Vance said on Fox News in August 2024. “I think that’s a story that a lot of normal Americans can empathize with.”
Indeed, the book that brought him to public attention was his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” In that book, he claims his family carried an inheritance of “abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma.”
“Poor people,” he proclaimed in a 2016 interview with The American Conservative, are “my people.”
But there’s a bit of a shell game going on when it comes to Vance’s poverty credentials.
Vance did come from a troubled family. His mother was – like so many Americans, whether they’re poor, middle class or rich – addicted to painkillers. In the book, Vance searches for an explanation for his traumatic relationship with his mother, before hitting on the perfect explanation: His mother’s addiction was a consequence of the fact that her parents were “hillbillies.”
The reality – one that Vance only subtly acknowledges in his memoir – is that he is not poor. Nor is he a hillbilly. He grew up firmly in Ohio’s middle class.
In my forthcoming book, “Poor Things: How Those with Money Depict Those without It,” I detail how Vance’s work is actually part of a genre I call “poornography.” Created mainly by middle- and upper-class people for like-minded readers, this long line of novels, films and plays can end up spreading harmful stereotypes about poor people.
Though these works are sometimes crafted with good intentions, they tend to focus on violence, drugs, alcohol, crudeness and the supposed laziness of poor people.
Peering at all the poor people
When you think about novels and films about the poor, you come upon the great classics: Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist,” Emile Zola’s “Germinal,” James Agee and Walker Evans’ “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” Jack London’s “The People of the Abyss” or John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”
Yet all these monuments to the suffering of the poor were written by authors who were not poor. Most of them had little to no knowledge of the lived experience of poor people. At best, they were reporters whose source material was meager. At worst, they simply made things up, recycling stereotypes about poverty.
For example, John Steinbeck had some contact with poor people as a reporter. But as he wrote about migrant camps for “The Grapes of Wrath,” he relied heavily on the notes of Sanora Babb – herself poor and formerly homeless – who traveled to migrant camps throughout California for the Farm Security Administration. Babb’s boss – a friend of Steinbeck’s – had secretly shown the author her notes, without her permission.
Babb would go on to also write a novel based on her experiences, which was bought by Random House. But the publishing house killed it after “Grapes of Wrath” came out, and it wasn’t published until 2004, when the author was 97 years old. That year, she told the Chicago Tribune – correctly, I might add – that Steinbeck’s work “isn’t as accurate as mine.”
Bettmann/Getty Images
Then there’s London, whose “The People of the Abyss” is seen as a faithful portrayal of the lives of the British poor. But London, who went “undercover” to craft a sordid account of England’s urban poor, nonetheless maintained a comfortable apartment. He kept a stash of money sewed into his ragged coat and conveniently escaped for a hot bath and a good meal while pretending to pass as a pauper. The result is a book laden with put-downs of the English working class, who are cast in eugenicist terms as a degenerate race.
When you look at the books or films created by people who grew up poor, the tone and focus often shift dramatically.
Instead of a fixation on the tawdry side of life, you see works that explore the things that bind all people together: family, love, politics, complex emotions and sensual memories.
You only have to open Richard Wright’s “Black Boy,” Agnes Smedley’s “Daughter of Earth” or Justin Torres’ “We the Animals” to see their protagonists’ appreciation of beauty and ability to experience profound pleasure – yes, all while experiencing poverty.
Wright recalls how, as a child, he would play in the sewer, where he would spend hours fashioning all manner of detritus into toys. The young Smedley loves to stare through a hole in her roof to gaze at the sky. And Mike Gold, author of “Jews Without Money,” sings a paean to an empty, garbage-strewn lot in his neighborhood that doubled as his beloved playground.
Hillbilly cosplay
Vance, on the other hand, fills his book with selections from the greatest hits of “poornography” – violence, drugs, sex, obscenity and filth.
But Vance himself was never actually impoverished. His family never had to worry about money; his grandfather, grandmother and mother all had houses in a suburban neighborhood in Middletown, Ohio. He admits that his grandfather “owned stock in Armco and had a lucrative pension.”
He falsely introduces himself to his Yale classmates as “a conservative hillbilly from Appalachia.” Over the course of the book, he confuses himself – and the reader – by variously saying that he is middle class, working class and poor.
In order to justify his memoir as something more than a tale of a drug-addicted mother and a son who went to Yale, he fashions a grand theory that being a hillbilly does not have to be related to social class – or even living in Appalachia.
To Vance, hillbilly-ness becomes kind of a cultural trait, tied to a family history and identity, not class. His grandmother, he writes, “had thought she escaped the poverty of the hills, but the poverty – emotional if not financial – had followed her.”
AP Photo/Jeff Dean
Bootstraps redux
In developing his grand theory, Vance takes readers very close to the now-debunked notion of a culture of poverty, in which the poor are responsible for their situation and their attitude toward work is passed along from one generation to the next.
A dependence on government handouts, according to the theory, undergirds this culture. Vance pines for an imagined glorious past of his slice of America. His neighbors in Middletown had lost – thanks to the welfare state – “the tie that bound them to their neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me.”
But Vance finds himself in a dilemma: Are these people simply lazy? Or are they the victims of a system that encourages them to watch TV and eat bad food as they collect welfare or disability checks?
Several times he refers to people who live on welfare as “never [having] worked a paying job in his life.” He seems to fully buy into the notion that people are poor because they are lazy freeloaders.
He “solves” the problem with the age-old critique of poor people: They got there because of “bad choices.” He mentions a friend who although having a job that paid a steady income nevertheless quit it because he didn’t like getting up early.
“His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made,” he writes, “and his life will improve only through better decisions.”
No platform, no voice
And so the GOP’s young standard-bearer for the working classes simply repeats the same bootstrap rhetoric that’s been peddled for decades.
But it’s not simply a question about believing a politician or not. That would be a fool’s game.
Rather, the issue here is what I call “representation inequality,” by which I mean that one identity group – in this case, poor people – don’t get to represent themselves.
What has happened – whether it’s in politics or in publishing – is something called “elite capture,” in which those with cultural capital and power assume the right to speak for and represent the powerless.
In so doing, dangerous stereotypes and tropes get developed with serious political consequences. Just because you drink Diet Mountain Dew doesn’t mean you do get to speak for those in the mountains.
Our political and educational system elbows out most poor people. First-generation students – like myself, and like many of my students at the University of Illinois in Chicago, where I teach – have a harder time staying in school, have more food insecurity and homelessness, and will often not benefit from the normal boost education offers. They tend to have a much harder time ascending the stratified ranks of culture and politics, becoming the published authors and elected officials who might provide representational equality.
As political scientist Nicholas Carnes points out in his 2018 book “The Cash Ceiling,” only 2% of congressional lawmakers worked in manual labor, the service industry or clerical jobs before getting involved in politics. So it’s no surprise that when the wealthy want to pass certain laws, they’re much more likely to get passed.
In July 2024, The New York Times reported that Vance’s Yale law professor and author Amy Chua read an early version of what became “Hillbilly Elegy,” one that was more geared to an academic audience and grounded in political theory. She prodded Vance to change his manuscript, telling him that “this grand theory [about America] is not working.”
I would argue that his “grand theory” about the poor doesn’t work, because the poor – unlike many other identity groups – don’t have a platform to articulate and promote their own needs and political vision.
Instead, we’re stuck with people like Vance, who offer bromides at best and fatalistic narratives of doom at worst.
Lennard J. Davis is Distinguished Professor of English, Disability Studies and Medical Education at the University of Illinois Chicago.
The Conversation arose out of deep-seated concerns for the fading quality of our public discourse and recognition of the vital role that academic experts could play in the public arena. Information has always been essential to democracy. It’s a societal good, like clean water. But many now find it difficult to put their trust in the media and experts who have spent years researching a topic. Instead, they listen to those who have the loudest voices. Those uninformed views are amplified by social media networks that reward those who spark outrage instead of insight or thoughtful discussion. The Conversation seeks to be part of the solution to this problem, to raise up the voices of true experts and to make their knowledge available to everyone. The Conversation publishes nightly at 9 p.m. on FlaglerLive.
Tony says
Diaper Don and Shady Vance seem to only appear on fox entertainment where they get spoon fed questions and still go off the deep end.
middie says
I too grew up in Middletown Ohio and my friends have told me about Vance. My mother was born and raised in Jackson County, Kentucky, so i am more then familiar with what he describes as being poor. What he is describing is true, there are degrees of poverty. His was what we would describe as a life of never being sure of the next days meal . He had to face every day with uncertainly. Its a small miracle that he survived. A lot of people brought up in Middletown had a hard time just surviving. J.D. Vance’s life is something that everyone, rich or poor, should emulate and understand that what he made out of this “trial of life of hardship” is to be admired.
Laurel says
middle: Omg. Please….!
He had billionaire Peter Thiel help him to *survive.* Every “hillbilly” has that option, right?
Vance is incredibly socially awkward, and he has no conscience about lying. He will do what a more moral Pence would not do, which is exactly why Trump, with the Heritage Foundation’s blessing, chose him.
PaulT says
The Fox habit is shared by a large proportions of ambititious Republican politicians. When Ron DeSantis was our local House rep he spent most of his time in office camped as a ‘contributor’ on Fox and our current District 6 Repulican rep Mike Walt has followed suit. It’s the safe zone where no one questions the truthiness of their statements. And we all know how DeSantis reacts to any of the Florida press who have non – sycophantic questions, he runs to the Florida legislature and demands they pass new laws to protect him.
UbiQ says
And why dont the poor have their soapbox?
Anyone?
Laurel says
UbiQ: Assuming you are middle class, how many lobbyists do you have?
Tony Mac says
Another Look At Mr. James David Vance or Will the Real JD Vance Please Stand Up
He was born James Donald Bowman on Aug. 2, 1984, in Middletown, Ohio, an industrial city 30 miles north of Cincinnati and 20 miles south of Dayton. (So, not really Appalachia)
Long before J.D. Vance became the Republican nominee for vice president, he was known as Cpl. James D. Hamel, a combat correspondent in the Marine Corps, serving from 2003 to 2007.
Vance’s biological parents, Donald Bowman and Bev Vance, divorced when he was a toddler. He was later adopted by his mother’s new husband, Bob Hamel, and changed his name to James David Hamel. The name change preserved his nickname, JD
Vance claims he took his grandparents’ surname, Vance, in 2014, prior to his marriage to Usha Chilukuri. However, while the Yale Law School Alumni Association has him listed as graduating in 2013 as James David Hamel, the 2012 Yale Law Journal (October 2012, Volume 122, Number 1) has him listed as J.D. Vance, one of 58 other editors.
So exactly when and how Vance/Hamel actually changed his name remains somewhat of a mystery at this point. In most cases, you must file a petition with your local court to change your name. To do so, you may need to file paperwork and appear before a judge to complete the process. There is no record of a name change petition in Connecticut, Ohio or Kentucky. No reporter has ever asked how Vance accomplished this process or if his Social Security information is listed as Hamel or Vance.
The Law Practice
Vance graduated Yale Law in 2013, so his name on the degree would be James David Hamel, not JD Vance. In fact, the Yale Law School Alumni Association lists him as J.D. Hamel. So why does the Yale Law Journal show him as J.D. Vance in 2012 when he says he did not take that name until 2014? There is no record of such a name change in any Probate Court in Connecticut Ohio, Illinois or Kentucky. Considering the way Republicans and the media hounded Barack Obama about his true “Live” birth certificate, one would think the media would be more tenacious about Vance/Hamel background.
Interestingly, there is no record of Vance/Hamel ever belonging to the Bar Associations in Kentucky, California, Ohio, where he lived, or Illinois. His biography indicates he practiced as a lawyer for Sidley and Austin, but does not give the location of the office in which he legally practiced law nor the names of any clients he may have represented. There appears to be no record of Vance/Hamel passing the Bar exam anywhere.
So, this sketchy background calls for some answers:
Where and when did Hamel change his name officially to Vance 2012 or 2014?
Where and when did he pass the Bar exam?
Does his Social Security identification show him as Hamel or Vance?
Vance clerked for Judge David Bunning of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky. Did he take the Kentucky Bar?
This mutt doesn’t have a clue as to what he really believes, so much so that he doesn’t even know his actual name!
I purposefully waited until Kamala Harris named her vice-presidential pick to continue this dialogue, foreseeing the “apples to apples” stories that might follow i.e. Walz vs Vance. Set that aside for the moment because I want to revisit the reasons for Vance’s multiple name changes and the timing thereof.
True, he wrote under the name Hamel while in the Marines; no doubt about it. When I was a journalist in the Air Force, I wrote under my present name as well. Still do, actually. While many people may not feel it is important to trace the timeline of his name changes, it begs the question of when and how he did so. Because two things cannot be true – he was one of 58 editors of the Yale Law Journal in 2012 as JD Vance, yet claimed he changed his name to Vance in 2014. One is not a correct statement or more succinctly – one is a lie or an attempt to “misinform” the voters. Why this is important, I’ll elaborate herein.
If changing one’s three times seems trivial but deceptive, what else is in the background of a man who seeks to be next in line to be President?
Vance claims he got a “full boat” ride in Yale Law. Possible – but doubtful. I can attest from personal experience that this may be a fabrication. Full disclosure – my son is a Yale Law School graduate, also an Articles Editor of the Law Journal, a Harvard undergrad, SAT scores of 1600, a National Merit Scholar, a Rhodes Scholar nominee and yet – he still is paying off student loans from Yale. Vance must have had incredible academic credentials to garner a full ride or – some “angel” actually paid for his tuition. A full ride at Yale practically doesn’t exist. Loans, yes; scholarships, a few. Maybe Peter Thiel, his financial backer in the Ohio Senate campaign, had something to do with it. Who knows?
The other issues I’ve already covered– did he pass the bar and where and when? His bio says he “practiced” law at Sidley & Austin but does not indicate the type of law nor the locations. Not in the California Bar listing. Not in the Kentucky Bar Association listing. Worked at Sidley Austin – no location. Not in the Ohio Bar Association listing. Did this guy pass the Bar exam anywhere? No registration in Illinois.
So why does this all matter and is it important to actually substantiate the background of the Republican Number Two candidate?
Billy B says
Probably graduated from T-rump university – MAGNA – SCUM – LOUDMOUTH !!
Middie says
[comment disallowed. Disinformation.—FL]
Sherry says
Tony Mac. . . If you have not already done so, you should really, really send this information to CNN/APNEWS/PBS/The Guardian/Politico/The Hill/BBC/Washington Post/ProPublica/The Atlantic. . . surely one of those news organizations still have good investigative reporters. Something is not right here!
Watch the excellent series “Suits” on Netflix. . . sounds like the same story.
Clark says
Was a combat journalist and never saw any combat. He bragged about this fact.
Pierre Tristam says
Correction: he was a PR flacker—a public affairs guy who wrote media handouts. Let’s please not confuse that with journalism.
Laurel says
Tony Mac: Thank you, yet again! You do your research.
Unfortunately, the Trumplicans will make numerous excuses for Vance the way they have for Trump. Let the soul twisting begin!
I just hope there are enough voters who have had enough of the far right, extremist lies.
We just got a letter from Trump begging for money. That idiot is still running against President Biden! That tells me he cannot run against Harris – Walz, as neither is mentioned.
Whathehck? says
Thank you for your research.
X.H.M.L. says
Hi there,
According to https://apnews.com/article/election-2024-republicans-vice-president-vance-name-359c3d1361c94f5d2d1e9798b7854477 :
“He was born James Donald Bowman in Middletown, Ohio, on Aug. 2, 1984, his middle and last names the same as his biological father, Donald Bowman. His parents split up “around the time I started walking,” he writes. When he was about 6, his mother, Beverly, married for the third time. He was adopted by his new stepfather, Robert Hamel, and his mother renamed him James David Hamel.
When his mother erased Donald Bowman from his and her lives, the adoption process also erased the name James Donald Bowman from the public record. The only birth certificate for Vance on file at Ohio’s vital statistics office reads James David Hamel, according to information provided by the state.”
According to Wikipedia, here is his birth certificate:
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:J._D._Vance_Birth_Certificate.jpg
It seems that he actually was not born with the surname “Bowman” but already as “Hamel”?
(And not as James Donald but already as “James David”?)
And that her mother was already married to Robert Hamel when he was born, according to this birth certificate?
Best regards,
Xavier H.M.L.
Deborah Coffey says
The problem with JD Vance (or whatever his REAL name is) is that he has no idea WHO HE IS. In his 40 years, he has never taken the time to honestly self analyze and evaluate. What he DID master is blaming “others” and “other things” for his complete lack of character. In 2016, JD Vance called Trump “America’s Hitler.” To what does he owe his 180 degree turnaround? Greed? Thirst for power? Love of attention? He can’t tell you…because he has no idea WHO HE IS. But, we do! He is a liar of the nth degree; he lies to himself until he believes his own lies and then, he lies to everyone else as if the lies are truth. He’s a perfect mate for Donald J. Trump…clones.
Laurel says
I knew something was wrong when Trump waited until the Republican Convention to announce his running mate. No vetting time. Done deal.
Pogo says
@As stated
VP Harris chose a great running mate — Gov Walz.
POS Trump chose a cunning mate — POC Vance; as always, Trump chose himself.
Laurel says
Pogo: Nah, Trump didn’t choose Vance, he didn’t even know his name when he first introduced him.