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(The reviewer is a rightwing jackass so the positive review must mean
that this obviously Marxist book must be really good.)
NY Times Sunday Book Review, Dec. 10 2017
What the People of Appalachia Want
By J. D. VANCE
RAMP HOLLOW
The Ordeal of Appalachia
By Steven Stoll
410 pp. Hill & Wang. $30.
Appalachia is among the most discussed and written-about geographies in
the United States. Its beautiful scenery inspires nostalgia for the
country’s unspoiled natural past. Its people, their attitudes and their
politics were the subject of countless articles and essays in just the
last year. Its persistently high rates of poverty have flummoxed honest
observers and policy wonks, and confirmed the biases of thinkers across
the political spectrum.
Onto this saturated terrain steps Steven Stoll’s “Ramp Hollow: The
Ordeal of Appalachia,” a historian’s look at where Appalachian
deprivation comes from. The author, an academic from Fordham University
in New York, confronts his subject as you’d expect a history professor
to do — his book is meticulously researched and draws on much of the
rich scholarship dedicated to the region. But those who associate
“academic” with “dry” will be pleasantly surprised; the book’s prose is
light and readable. Though I sometimes found myself lost in the timeline
that sprawls from feudal England to modern America, I thought Stoll told
a complicated, multicentury story well.
Much of “Ramp Hollow” will be familiar to those interested in the
history of Appalachia and its leading analyses. There’s treatment of how
the “hillbilly” evolved in mainstream consciousness: originally a noble
outsider, valiantly resisting the excesses of modernization; eventually
a backward peasant, unable to adjust his behaviors and attitudes to the
realities of the economy. Stoll blisters at the extraction industries of
timber and coal, arguing that they take from the land without giving
anything back to the mountains or its people. Development agencies, from
the World Bank to the Appalachian Regional Commission, fare little
better in Stoll’s estimation, because they cling to the idea that the
poor will be saved by “the same thinking that made them poor in the
first place.”
Stoll’s thesis is built around the concept of dispossession, a theme he
returns to repeatedly throughout the book. English peasants dispossessed
by the practice of enclosure, an early ancestor of private property
rights; Native Americans dispossessed of land by American settlers;
Appalachians dispossessed of their subsistence farms by coal mining
operations. He rolls his eyes at the idea of an economy constantly
progressing in stages — from the hunter-gatherers to the agrarians to
the industrialists. It’s a story we tell ourselves even though, Stoll
argues, there’s little evidence to support it. It does, however, serve
to justify the dispossession at the heart of much of the American economy.
The narrative Stoll substitutes is less linear. Subsistence farming
isn’t a relic of the past but a way of life made nearly impossible in
Appalachia, not because of historical progress but because of
dispossession. Farmers grew what they could, hunted what they could,
consumed what they needed and exchanged the rest to satisfy various
wants and needs. But population growth and the demands of
industrialization overwhelmed the ecological base that subsistence
farmers depended on. This drove people to wage-earning work, which in
turn accelerated the disappearance of the subsistence farm. The old
homestead might have been tough, but it provided the necessities of life
along with independence. The wage-based economy, on the other hand,
fostered dependence, powerlessness and the privation that comes with
depending on the boom-and-bust cycle.
If you couldn’t tell already, Stoll has a viewpoint. He explains that he
favors “democratic socialism” and a “reinvention of the nation-state.”
As a conservative, I often have a different viewpoint. Stoll’s
criticisms of the market economy are sometimes needlessly polemic.
Capitalism has its problems, of course. But “Ramp Hollow” is sometimes
so earnest that it ignores obvious complications for its core thesis.
Undoubtedly, a lot of West Virginia families suffered in the
boom-and-bust coal economy of the early 20th century. But the wealth
created in the capitalist economy didn’t just enrich the coal barons, it
also enabled the development of new technologies, medicines and
professions that made many lives materially better. Over the 20-year
period from 1920 to 1940, for instance, child and maternal mortality
dropped precipitously in West Virginia.
The book’s great strength is that it acknowledges something our politics
often fails to: that not everyone wants the same things or possesses the
same preferences. Stoll discusses the difference between “lowlanders”
and “highlanders” of Appalachia, implicitly revealing the importance of
culture. “Mountaineers needed to think differently about how they did
things” about the rapidly changing nature of commercial agriculture, he
writes. “But they approached the landscape with longstanding assumptions
that they could not (or would not) adjust or abandon.”
For many, a better future — the American dream, you might call it —
isn’t about yachts and private jets, but about simpler pursuits: family
comfort instead of wealth, stability instead of dynamism and a life
rooted in a thriving community rather than individual achievement. Our
public policy sometimes ignores this, pretending, for instance, that
struggling people just need a good educational or work opportunity to
achieve some measure of success in the modern economy. But maybe they
need something different — emotional skills that their traumatic family
life deprived them of; a social community or civic organization that
behavior or circumstance destroyed. Or, as Stoll encourages us to
consider, maybe they don’t want “success” in the modern economy at all.
Maybe they just want a warm fire and a nice garden. “Ramp Hollow”
reminds us that integrating some people into the modern economy will
always be a difficult challenge, even as Stoll questions the wisdom of
such an integration in the first place.
I disagreed with much of this challenging, interesting and engrossing
book. But it made me think. And that, it seems to me, is the whole point.
J.D. Vance is the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” and a contributing opinion
writer for The Times.
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