12/6/2017 What the People of Appalachia Want - The New York Times

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BOOK REVIEW | NONFICTION

What the People of Appalachia Want

By J. D. VANCE DEC. 6, 2017
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

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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

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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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A version of this review appears in print on December 10, 2017, on Page BR14 of the Sunday Book
Review with the headline: Homestead Blues.

© 2017 The New York Times Company

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