Summary
Vance begins Chapter Four by filling in the details of the town where Mamaw and Papaw moved, and where Vance himself grew up: Middletown, Ohio. Although Vance notes that the Middletown in which he grew up bore relatively few differences from the one to which Mamaw and Papaw moved in the 1950s, it was also not so different from the town from which they came: Jackson.
As a child, Vance sorted the town into three geographic regions: the area where the “‘rich’ kids” lived; the housing projects near Armco, which were informally segregated into poor whites and poor blacks; and finally, the area where Vance’s family lived. “Looking back, I don’t know if the ‘really poor’ areas and my block were any different,” he writes, “or whether these divisions were the constructs of a mind that didn’t want to believe it was really poor.”
And indeed, the line between outright poverty and the kind of working-class poverty Vance’s family experienced in Middletown is becoming more blurry. Middletown’s once-booming areas of business are now largely empty storefronts and payday loan lenders, or in Vance’s words, “little more than a relic of American industrial glory.” Vance chalks this gradual decay up to “rising residential segregation,” arguing that “bad neighborhoods no longer plague only urban ghettos; the bad neighborhoods have spread to the suburbs.”
Vance blames federal housing policy such as Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act, or George W. Bush’s ownership society, which encouraged homeownership, but at a “steep social cost.” With housing prices on a sharp decline, people buying homes are quickly trapped in one house or area.
In Vance’s view, this was a contributing factor to Middletown’s decay, but perhaps the most significant factor was the declining importance of its beloved Armco, which merged with Kawasaki in 1989 and became AK Steel. For many in Middletown, including World War II veterans who resented Japanese influence on their beloved steel plant, this merger symbolized a changing, more globalized world they didn’t recognize.
But while Armco had been so central to Middletown’s older generation of hillbilly migrants, their children overlooked AK Steel as a job option, dreaming big but failing to understand what it would take to achieve higher success than their parents. “‘You have the kids who plan on being baseball players but don’t even play on the high school team because the coach is mean to them,’” said one Middletown High School teacher. The children of Middletown took Armco for granted even as its job offers dwindled in number.
Vance’s Mamaw and Papaw, at least, believed that “‘[Vance’s] generation will make its living with their minds, not their hands.’” Still, Vance and his peers had little to no precedent for doing so, with 20 percent of Middletown’s public high school entering freshmen dropping out before graduation. “It’s not like parents and teachers never mention hard work,” Vance writes. “Nor do they walk around loudly proclaiming that they expect their children to turn out poorly. These attitudes lurk below the surface.” He cites a 2012 report that found “working-class whites worked more hours than college-educated whites,” which Vance denounces as “demonstrably false,” blaming this result on the fact that this report was compiled based on surveys, rather than actual statistics—”essentially, they called around and asked people what they thought.” According to Vance, many working-class whites like to talk about how hard they’re working rather than actually working.
In part, Vance blames this trend on a false, collective belief that those who succeed are either lucky or smart. In first grade, Vance’s teacher played a game with his class: she would say a number, and each student would have to volunteer a math equation that equaled the given number. One day when the given number was 30, Vance earned two pieces of candy as a reward for his answer, “50 minus 20.” He was stunned when the next student answered, “10 times three,” earning three pieces of candy.” Vance, along with most of his class, had never learned multiplication. That day, Papaw dutifully began tutoring Vance in multiplication. “In other words, despite all of the environmental pressures from my neighborhood and community, I received a different message at home,” he writes. “And that just might have saved me.”
Analysis
In this chapter, Vance returns to his original storytelling structure by alternating between personal stories from his childhood in Middletown and broader sociocultural observations. This structure fits the scope of Vance’s subject matter here, as this chapter provides the crucial pivot from his account of the intrafamilial brutality that defined his family’s acclimation to Middletown, told mostly through second-hand accounts, to this firsthand account of Middletown’s decay. Nonetheless, Vance peppers his own personal experience of the school system in Middletown and Papaw’s nostalgia for Armco’s powerful grip on the American steel industry, thus allowing for a balance between the socioeconomic trends at the core of his book and the more personal accounts that bolster those trends.
One of the salient effects of such a structure is the emergence of the American Dream’s breakdown as a theme. Whereas we learn earlier in the book that Mamaw and Papaw’s belief in the American Dream would conflict with the impact of their familial discord on their children, we see here that larger systemic forces would limit the career options for their grandchildren as well. Certainly, Vance sees the tragic irony in this turn of events, since Armco, once a beacon of economic hope to the Rust Belt, is eventually taken for granted as a fallback by Middletown’s youth.
Armco, and later AK Steel, thus serves as a symbol of the generational breakdown that Vance illustrates. Whereas Papaw and Vance’s uncle once considered themselves lucky to work at Armco, their grandchildren would consider working for the company to be below them (although, as Vance writes, many of them would adopt their grandparents’ attitude once the job hunt actually began). Exacerbating the intergenerational dissonance of Armco’s image over the years was the emergence of Kawasaki as its eventual savior, a factor that earned the scorn of Middletown’s older generation while likely meaning little to their grandchildren.
This chapter also marks the first time that the decay Vance attributes to Jackson, Kentucky rears its ugly head and makes a home in Middletown. Until this chapter, Middletown serves as a bastion of upward mobility and a middle-class lifestyle for the Vances. However, Vance’s description of the formerly thriving storefronts replaced by payday loan lenders and cash-for-gold stores sounds more like the Jackson we heard about earlier in the book. “As I grew up, I noticed that the tennis court lines faded with each passing month, and that the city had stopped filling in the cracks or replacing the nets on the basketball courts,” Vance writes. This decay, so similar to the Jackson, Kentucky that Vance describes, only bolsters his argument that hillbilly culture moved with the migrants that sought better lives in cities like Middletown, rather than being left behind in places like Jackson.
Ironically, just as it introduces a decaying Middletown, this chapter also initiates Vance’s journey from that crumbling middle-class setting to the Ivy League. We learn that Vance initially struggled with multiplication in school and that he often felt too stupid to succeed. The introduction of academic success as a personal struggle for Vance departs from the largely personal, familial portrait we’ve received thus far, and foreshadows the eventual milestone to which Vance alludes at the start of the book: his matriculation to Yale University.
