Hillbilly Elegy? More Like Bra-Hopper Tragedy.

Vice President J.D. Vance ventured East last month and gave a speech telling the good people of Jaipur, India, the story of Middletown, Ohio. They must have been a little confused, because who in India gives a rat’s ass about Middletown, Ohio? I know lots of people in Centerville, Ohio who don’t give a rat’s ass about Middletown.

Per usual, the Harvard-educated lawyer leaned like a drunk to a lamppost on his humble heritage as a “hillbilly.” Alas, as a grandson of Middletown royalty, such as it was, I’m afraid I must correct him on several levels.

First of all, proper term is “bra-hopper.” Short for “briar-hopper.” That was the term moneyed Middletonians used to describe the Appalachian refugees who came to town to work in the molten filthy furnaces at Armco Steel during the heart of the last century. That was the term my grandfather would have used very quietly when he was head of public relations and personnel at Armco, around 1950. Quietly, because he recruited people like Vance’s family and relied on them to make the rolling mill go.

I read Vance’s book years before he became a political creature. I began with great enthusiasm. I’d once hoped I might write a book on Middletown someday, but that window seemed to have shut with the death of my father and his brothers. And I was happy someone would tell the story of that town, which I agreed, was an important story of America. I was especially glad to read that story from a Middletown working-class perspective. But the book was terrible. Lots of people liked it but anyone who knew Middletown or Appalachia, whose stories and pathologies Vance conflated about as falsely as a writer can, knew how dishonest it was—its misrepresentation gathering steam as it went along. When I finished, I threw the book across the room, something I have never done to a book before or since.

It was one thing to lie to your fellow Americans, who often actually appreciate being lied to, the same way families like family myths.

But to go halfway around the world, and spin cracker barrel tales like this one to unsuspecting foreigners!

Let’s examine the yarn Vance told India paragraph by paragraph:

I come from—and I’m biased—the greatest state in the Union, the state of Ohio: a longtime manufacturing powerhouse in the United States of America. My home, specifically, is a place called Middletown. Now, it’s not a massive city by any means—it’s not Jaipur—but it’s a decent-sized town and a place where people make things, which has been a point of pride in Middletown for generations. 

(Jaipur, pop 4.4 million; Middletown, pop. 48,000.)

It’s filled with families like my own, some of whom called us “hillbillies”—Americans who came down from the surrounding hills and mountains of West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky to cities like Middletown in pursuit of the manufacturing jobs that were creating widespread prosperity for families all across America. They came to Middletown in search of what we call back home “the American dream.”

Yes, Middletown boomed during World War II when America sent endless steel across oceans for battle, and in the postwar years when most of the rest of the developed nations of the world were on their back. No, none of those bra-hoppers, if you’d asked them, would have told you they were chasing the “American Dream” to work around vacuum furnaces all day. If they could have laid tongue to it, they would have told you that after generations of hopeless misery in the even more dangerous and less prosperous coal mines, they thought they’d give this fresh hell a try.

In Middletown, my parents raised me, my grandparents raised me. They taught us to work hard. They taught me to study hard, and they taught me to love God and my country and always be good to your own. 

Well what happened, J.D.? You turned out more dishonest than my Middletown roots prepared me to know a person could be.

My granddad, who I called “Papaw” growing up, he typified that. Late into life, he worked as a steelmaker at the local mill, and I know India has a lot of those. Papaw’s job gave him a good wage, stable hours, and a generous pension. All that allowed him to support not just him and my grandmother but his own daughter and grandkids with him. Now, by the time I came around, money was awfully tight, but he worked hard to make a good living for all of us. 

In this paragraph is contained the whole MAGA myth, and the whole MAGA shell game. Reliable, good-paying blue-collar jobs from the late 1940s, through the 1950s and into the 1960s. The good old days—mysteriously disappeared “by the time I came around.” Why was money suddenly “awfully tight,” J.D.? What happened between Papaw’s generation and yours?

Now, I know Papaw and Mamaw were grateful for the way of life their country made possible. Their generation bore witness to the formation of America’s great middle class, and by creating an economy centered around production, around workers who build things, and around the value of their labor, our nation’s leaders then transformed their country and made thousands of little Middletowns possible. 

Boy, the way Glenn Miller played. Songs that made the hit parade. Guys like us, we had it made. Those were the days.

The government supported its labor force.  We created incentives for productive industries to take root and struck good deals with international partners to sell the goods made in the United States of America. 

And, now the lying begins. Middletown didn’t prosper because of government incentives. It prospered because Japan’s cities were in ruins. European industry was in ruins—my grandfather visited Germany after the war with an American delegation of industrialists and came back shaken by the destruction he’d seen. America owned the world by default.

But as America settled in to world historic prosperity it generated, our leaders began to take that very prosperity and what created it for granted. They forgot the importance of building, of supporting productive industry, of striking fair deals, and of supporting our workers and their families. 

And now we move from lies to utter horseshit. My own generation witnessed what happened next: a revitalized Japan came in here and kicked American businesses’ asses with better and cheaper cars and better and cheaper electronics. It all took place over about 10 exciting years that we now call the 1970s. By 1979, the American president was going on TV asking Americans to save money by turning down the thermostat and wearing sweaters, and to say nice things about their country. And the layoffs at Armco were well underway.

And as time went on, we saw the consequences. In my hometown, factories left, jobs evaporated. America’s Middletowns ceased to be the lifeblood of our nation’s economy. And the United States—as it became transformed, those very people—the working class, the background of the United States of America—were dismissed as backwards for holding on to the values their people had held dear for generations. 

That last sentence, like J.D. Vance’s cobbled-together populist “philosophy,” is what Oz called the Tin Man: a clinking, clattering collection of caliginous junk. It holds no water and conveys no truth and no mentally or morally coherent person could form his lips to say it.

Now, Middletown’s story is my story, but it’s hardly unusual in the United States of America. There are tens of millions of Americans who, over the last 20 or so years, have woken up to what’s happening in our nation. But I believe they woke up well before it’s too late. 

(So this must mean they’re woke?)

Look here: My dad used to talk a lot about how everyone in Middletown was “so goddamn mad”—in the grill room at the Brown’s Run Country Club and the old-guys’ lunches at Mike’s restaurant out by the mill and in the letters section of the Middletown Journal—about how the steel jobs had gone and the once-great economy there had collapsed. They blamed lots of people for their troubles—foreigners chief among them. 

And now one of their native sons is going around the world scolding those foreigners—first Europeans, then Chinese “peasants,” now Indians—for stealing the 1950s from America, and all those great and stable jobs that were rightfully ours.

You’d think Middletonians would be happy. But I think they’re smarter than that. Bra-hoppers might not have Harvard educations, but they know a bullshitter when they see one—especially one of their own. They might have appreciated being looked in the eye and lied to by Trump because at least someone looked them in the eye. But they know in their bones that Armco—now AK Steel, bought by a Japanese company and sold five years ago to another American one—is never coming back anything like it was, tariffs or no. And when J.D. Vance flames out, what will remain?

You know, maybe I’ll write that Middletown book yet.