After having his racist claims about Haitian immigrants challenged as lies, J.D.
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J.D.
It was a remarkable confession of dishonesty from a politician.
Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance at a campaign event on Sept. 25, 2024 in Traverse City, Michigan.Scott Olson/Getty Images
Was Vance also creating stories back in 2016 in his bestseller?
Vance grew up poor.
Vance frames the book as a chronicle of overcoming severe economic disadvantage.
But the details of Vances own writing dont point to a childhood of material deprivation.
Instead despite the myriad troubles faced by his mother with substance abuse Vance was raised in middle-class comfort.
At one point, his parents enjoyed a six-figure income.
Straight out of high school, the young man known then as J.D.
Vances military service was honorable.
Vance was unusually gifted at PR.
entered Yale four years older than many of his classmates, with tricks up his sleeve.
I think hes a self promoter, says Davis.
And what, at Yale, is the thing you’re able to do to really promote yourself?
Its being a poor person.
That was his unique selling card.
In fact, Vance recalls presenting himself to other classmates as a conservative hillbilly from Appalachia.
Thielinvested millionsto install Vance in the Senate.
The central conceit ofHillbilly Elegyis already a stretch.
Vance wasnt raised in Appalachia.
He was born and brought up in Middletown, Ohio, a small city on the road to Dayton.
His mother was also born in these suburban Ohio flats.
Vances exposure to Appalachia was as a young vacationer, visiting relatives.
He has this notion that being a hillbilly is kind of genetic, Davis says.
You see, I grew up poor, in the Rust Belt.
These folks read lower class in a cultural sense.
But theres something important missing from Vances rags-to-riches tale.
That is the rags part.
Vance emerges in the pages ofHillbilly Elegyas a rich persons idea of a poor person.
(His primary self-reported marker of teen impoverishment is an inability to afford clothes from Abercrombie & Fitch.)
The deceit is consequential, because J.D.
IN ECONOMIC REALITY, Vance and his immediate kin were far from poor, themselves.
Start, asHillbilly Elegydoes, with the patriarch of Vances story, his mothers father.
Jim Papaw Vance was a steel worker, a rigger, at Armco in Middletown, Ohio.
refers to it only obliquely, Armco was a union shop, and his grandfather was a union man.
Papaw started work there beginning in the late 1940s, earning a wage that J.D.
describes as unfathomable to kin back in Kentucky hill country.
The new Ohio arrivals soon owned their two-story,four-bedroom, 2,000 square-foothouse across from a leafy public park.
J.D.s uncle, Jimmy, was born in 1951, and described his upbringing to J.D.
Papaw drank and his grandparents fought, sometimes physically, and ultimately split up.
But even that separation wasnt devastating, financially.
Mamaw kept the house.
Papaw got his own place.
By the time J.D.
was born, Papaw was off the sauce and his grandparents had reconciled.
Papaw Vance would retire on a lucrative pension and also owned stock in the steel company.
His grandparents treated him to steak dinners.
In addition to bringing young J.D.
back to their old hometown in Kentucky they also took him on out-of-state trips to Texas and South Carolina.
Are you feeling the poverty yet?
The parents had a rocky relationship and split when J.D.
By the time J.D.
was in kindergarten, his mother had remarried a man named Bob Hamel, who legally adopted J.D.
The boys legal name became James David Hamel.
The young family was on a roll, financially.
J.D.s mom had gotten a nursing degree.
Its unclear if Vance adjusted that sum for inflation when he was writing in 2016.
If he had, his parents made at least $130,000 in todays money.
If he hadnt, the figure would be north of $217,000.
Either scenario would have put them into the upper middle-class in Southern Ohio in the early 1990s.
Are you feeling the poverty?
It is true that Vances mom began cracking up when he was a tween.
His parents overspent their large income, and racked up significant debts.
Vances mothers marriage to Bob failed and he soon left J.D.s life.
She was physically abusive to her son.
After one scary incident, she was arrested, and he had to testify.
But here, too, Vance family wealth helped steer the outcome.
This disruption aside, J.D.
remained in material comfort, despite the brief indignity of living in a duplex apartment.
(Vance also recalls visiting a low-income dental clinic.)
Family stepped in to brighten the fortunes of the young J.D.
During the troubles, Jimmy flew J.D.
and his older, half-sister out for an extended vacation on the West Coast.
that gay people werent out to molest him.
As J.D.s home life continued to roil, the family weighted sending J.D.
to live in Napa, permanently.
Vances mom cycled through boyfriends, but they were all gainfully employed.
There was Steve who was nice and had a good job.
And Chip, a local cop who liked to fish.
I never felt mistreated, J.D.
recalls, by any of the men she brought into our home.
And around this time, Vances biological dad came back into J.D.s life.
His Dad had remarried and immersed himself in a life of evangelical Christianity.
He also did not lack for resources.
His father lived in what J.D.
spent every other weekend and many holidays with his biological dad.
In 1997, when J.D.
would have been about 13, his Papaw died.
Vance was a teenager.
But he didnt worry about money.
Im not sure who paid the bills he writes, adding in a parenthetical, (probably Mamaw.)
Vance resisted in an outburst so angry that his mom found him a therapist.
Operationcheer up J.D.also saw his Mamaw take J.D.
on new vacations to California and Las Vegas.
instead decided to move in with his dad on the rural acreage.
His father, stepmother, and half siblings welcomed him.
He had access to a predictable, loving home.
That was enough to have J.D.
move in with Mamaw permanently.
Shed always give me money on paydays, almost certainly more than she could afford.
writes, adding, I never cared about the money.
Of his new life with his grandma, J.D.
insists: We were poor.
But what did that actually mean?
Vances markers of his deprivation werent actual markers of poverty using food stamps, or living in subsidized housing.
He moved into his grandmas big house, across the street from the park with a tennis court.
His Mamaw continued to use her late husbands health benefits from his steel job.
also writes with shame of having loafers from K-Mart.
His Mamaw dropped $180 on a graphing calculator for his math class.
And in the chapter after bemoaning how poor he was, J.D.
Where did the money come from for golf lessons?
Mamaw helped me pay.
Where did the clubs come from?
His nice set of McGregors were a gift from from his generous great-uncle Gary.
He adds: Its almost like he puts on poverty like you put on makeup.
Consider how Vance casts hispleasant middle-class neighborhoodas if it were a ghetto.
Mamaw died in 2005.
Nonetheless, Mamaw was hardly penniless.
There was generational wealth to be passed down after the sale of the home.
Vance himself received a sixth of Mamaws estate.
After publication, a spokesperson for Vance responded with a statement attributed to Vances aunt Lori Meibers.
She adds that when J.D.
to buy her groceries.
and into his early life.
(The WIC program supports women at up to 185 percent of poverty until a child turns five.)
The spokesperson also asserts that Vances mother briefly moved the family into an income-controlled apartment; that J.D.
An email to Vances book editor, now at Simon and Schuster, pinged back with an out-of-office reply.
In truth, it seems, J.D.
wasnt a real hillbilly.
And he wasnt really poor.
The dark distortions ofHillbilly Elegyare not lost on Lalka, the Tulane professor, who writes: J.D.
Vance ran good peoples names through mud that he barely stepped foot on.
From his somewhat precarious perch on the middle class, however, J.D.
looked down his nose at those in actual poverty.
In an extended portion of the book, J.D.
writes about his job at a local grocery, where he recalls being an amateur sociologist.
For Vance, this sociology sounds like middle-class sneering at the poor.
recalls it, hed formed deep class resentments toward those living off government largesse.
How much of this was true-to-life?
In one concerning passage, Vance recalled noting the taxes that came out of his paycheck.
If this story sounds familiar, you may have lived through the Reagan era.
Around the same time.
a neighbor began renting out their house to Section 8 tenants, and J.D.
recalls his Mamaw was furious that it might drive down property values.
Hillbilly Elegyincludes cartoonish depictions of poor excess.
This was my world, J.D.
writes, a world of truly irrational behavior.
We spend our way into the poorhouse.
Thrift is inimical to our being.
Whose interest does the story serve?
Thomas, a sociology professor at the University of Mississippi, nodding at Vances promoters in the billionaire class.
And you’re able to too if you just make all the right choices like he did.
What these yokels require, by gum, is more of that Protestant work ethic.
This story has been updated to include comment from a Vance spokesperson and some additional context from his book.
