After having his racist claims about Haitian immigrants challenged as lies, J.D. Vance made a shocking admission on live TV to CNN’s Dana Bash: He was happy “to create stories,” he said, in order to drive media attention to what he described as “the suffering of the American people.”
It was a remarkable confession of dishonesty from a politician. But it was even more shocking coming from Vance — a man who was catapulted into national prominence on the strength, and supposed credibility, of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which purports to shine a spotlight on hidden American suffering. Was Vance also “creating stories” back in 2016 in his bestseller?
In light of Vance’s admission, a close re-reading of Hillbilly Elegy by Rolling Stone uncovers a hollow claim at the center of the book. Namely that J.D. Vance “grew up poor.”
Vance frames the book as a chronicle of overcoming severe economic disadvantage. But the details of Vance’s own writing don’t 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. And he was spared economic distress by a broad safety net of extended family that provided him with frequent out-of-state vacations, golf lessons, a modeling audition, and therapy. Most importantly, he benefited from a buffer of generational wealth created by his “Papaw,” who retired with a “lucrative pension” from his union job at the local steel plant.
In addition to this central sleight of hand, the memoir also includes at least one anecdote, presented as Vance’s personal experience, that appears to have been resurrected from an infamous Ronald Regan attack on welfare recipients. “He’s just recycling old Republican saws, or tropes,” argues Lennard Davis, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Davis is the author of the forthcoming book, Poor Things: How Those With Money Depict Those Without It.
In the pages of his book, Vance presents a dim view of the actual poor, whom he refers to as “welfare queens” and accuses of “gaming” America’s too-generous social services. And as he campaigns in 2024, Vance is wielding his book as both a shield and a cudgel, using the tale of his hardscrabble youth to distract from the fact that he’s now a multi-millionaire member of the Senate, while simultaneously lashing out at the “elites” for looking on his kind with contempt. At a recent event with fellow millionaire Tucker Carlson, Vance complained that “our leaders used my book to try to look down on their fellow citizens, rather than maybe learn something about their fellow citizens.”
Before diving into the disconnects between Vance’s framing of his life in poverty and the details that undercut that claim, it’s important to consider the context of Vance’s book.
Straight out of high school, the young man known then as J.D. Hamel entered the Marines, eager to reinvent himself from the “pudgy, longhaired kid” he’d been in high school. Vance’s military service was honorable. Full stop. He was not a warrior — “I was lucky to escape any real fighting,” he recalls of his service in Iraq. Instead, Vance served as “a public affairs marine” who often acted as a press escort, or as a documentarian, writing dispatches about or taking photos of fellow service members at work. (Notable given his recent, racist lies about the immigrants to Springfield, Vance’s duties took him to the Caribbean. “I had seen, in Haiti,” he recalls in his book, “a level of poverty I never knew existed.”)
Vance was unusually gifted at PR. He capped off his four years in the service by stepping up to replace a captain (“eight pay grades higher than I was,” he writes) to serve as “media relations officer” for Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, in North Carolina. Well before Vance completed his undergraduate degree at Ohio State or began law school at Yale, he’d already been awarded a “commendation medal” in public relations from the military.
J.D. entered Yale four years older than many of his classmates, with tricks up his sleeve. “I think he’s a self promoter,” says Davis. “And what, at Yale, is the thing you can do to really promote yourself? It’s 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.” And under the mentorship of Yale Law professor Amy Chua — author of her own best selling memoir about “tiger moms” — Vance began crafting Hillbilly Elegy.
Following graduation — as other ambitious Yale Law classmates were trying to make a name for themselves pursuing clerkships with Supreme Court justices — J.D. Hamel was using book publishing as a product launch for his new brand, which he’d chosen when he’d gotten married in 2014. He opens his memoir with the five words: “My name is J.D. Vance.”
Though it purports to unpack the afflictions of the nation’s white “underclass,” Vance’s memoir served to put a shine on his own rising star among the elite. And it was uncommonly successful, selling millions of copies and even spawning a Ron Howard adaptation film on Netflix.
By the time the book was published, Vance was already under the wing of a venture capitalist billionaire, Peter Thiel, who blurbed his book — as did the world’s then-richest man, Bill Gates. Thiel invested millions to install Vance in the Senate. And Vance is now under the wing of anther rich, powerful leader in Donald Trump — who has put Vance in a position, at age 40, to become the youngest vice president in the history of the United States, a heartbeat away from the Oval Office — in spite of, or perhaps because of, his pattern of dishonesty.
The central conceit of Hillbilly Elegy is already a stretch. Vance wasn’t 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. “The guy is from north of Cincinnati,” says Rob Lalka, a Tulane University business professor who has researched Vance’s life for his recent book, The Venture Alchemists. “There are no hills, much less hillbillies.”
It was Vance’s grandparents who’d moved away from the mountains of Kentucky — as teenagers searching for a better life in the years after World War II. Vance’s exposure to Appalachia was as a young vacationer, visiting relatives. This famously has not stopped Vance from identifying as Appalachian — “a hillbilly at heart,” he writes — based on a perceived inheritance of dysfunctional family traits. “He has this notion that being a hillbilly is kind of genetic,” Davis says.
Perhaps recognizing he had more work to do to establish himself as an sympathetic figure, Vance also writes in the introduction that readers should care about his story because he’d experienced the American dream. “You see, I grew up poor, in the Rust Belt.” Vance insists Hillbilly Elegy is “the real story of my life,” and that he wrote the book because “I want people to understand what happens in the lives of the poor, and the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children.”
This tale of “poverty” sells because of the chaos of addiction and occasional violence that unfolds in his family life, as well as the uncouth habits of his kin — who have teen pregnancies, tote guns, suffer from “Mountain Dew mouth,” and swear like sailors. These folks read “lower class” in a cultural sense.
But there’s something important missing from Vance’s rags-to-riches tale. That is the “rags” part.
J.D. Vance emerges in the pages of Hillbilly Elegy as a rich person’s 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. uses his false credential of poverty — this “stolen valor,” if you will — to recycle right-wing claptrap about why the disinhibited poor lack the character to better their condition. “I call poor-nography,” says Davis, placing Hillbilly Elegy in a long line of “stories about poor people that are written by middle class people” that invariably appeal to a “litany of assembled myths and stereotypes” about the actual poor.
IN ECONOMIC REALITY, Vance and his immediate kin were far from poor, themselves. Start, as Hillbilly Elegy does, with the patriarch of Vance’s story, his mother’s father. Jim “Papaw” Vance was a steel worker, a “rigger,” at Armco in Middletown, Ohio. Although J.D. 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-foot house across from a leafy public park. J.D. describes his grandfather’s taste in new cars as well as vacations his grandparents enjoyed to Niagara Falls and the Atlantic Coast. J.D.’s uncle, Jimmy, was born in 1951, and described his upbringing to J.D. as that of a “typical middle-class” family; Jimmy saw his life reflected in the suburban comforts of Leave it to Beaver.
There were problems. Papaw drank and his grandparents fought, sometimes physically, and ultimately split up. But even that separation wasn’t devastating, financially. Mamaw kept the house. Papaw got his own place. The Vances raised three children, and each eventually launched into the professional class, finding jobs in sales (James), radiology (Lori), and nursing (J.D.’s mom, Bev).
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. J.D.s family had access to private Armco Park,”the nicest, most exclusive recreation spot in town,” J.D. recalls. 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?
J.D. Vance was born James Donald Bowman, son of Don Bowman, his biological father and his mother’s second husband, an experienced machinist. The parents had a rocky relationship and split when J.D. was a toddler. By the time J.D. was in kindergarten, his mother had remarried a man named Bob Hamel, who legally adopted J.D. The boy’s legal name became James David Hamel.
The young family was on a roll, financially. J.D.’s mom had gotten a nursing degree. His new dad Bob was in trucking, making a “great salary” that meant “we had plenty of money,” J.D. recalls. By the time he was 9 years old, his parents moved away from Middletown to Ohio farm country, where they enjoyed a combined income of “over a hundred thousand dollars.”
It’s 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 today’s money. If he hadn’t, 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. Vance recalls that his parents went on a spending spree of “new cars, new trucks, a swimming pool.”
How about now? Are you feeling the poverty?
It is true that Vance’s mom began cracking up when he was a tween. His parents overspent their large income, and racked up significant debts. Vance’s mother’s 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. J.D. claims he lied in court to protect her — at the wink-and-nod encouragement of “the town’s highest-power lawyer” whom his grandparents “were paying a lot of money.”
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. Uncle Jimmy, who’d started his career with Johnson & Johnson, had left Middletown and now lived in Northern California, in the heart of wine country, Napa.
During the troubles, Jimmy flew J.D. and his older, half-sister out for an extended vacation on the West Coast. They visited a winery, and toured San Francisco, including the Castro district where an older cousin educated J.D. that “gay people weren’t out to molest” him. As J.D.’s home life continued to roil, the family weighted sending J.D. to live in Napa, permanently.
Vance’s 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, Vance’s 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. Vance doesn’t write about his dad’s profession, but according to his obituary, Bowman ran his own “construction business,” Bowman Construction & Excavating.
His father lived in what J.D. describes as a “modest house” — on an immodest amount of land: 14 acres, including a pond, “stocked with fish,” a barn, a chicken coop, and “a couple” of fields for cows and horses. 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. This sent his mom into a spiral that ended with her checking into a rehab center, the Cincinnati Center for Addiction Treatment, for a months-long stint, paid for by his grandmother. Vance’s older sister had recently graduated from high school, and took care of him in their mom’s house during that time. His mom’s boyfriend Matt, a firefighter, or her friend Tammy would drop off food, to make sure they got fed. Vance was a teenager. But he didn’t worry about money. Nor did he, in his adult life, ask hard questions about how he and his sister stayed afloat. “I’m not sure who paid the bills” he writes, adding in a parenthetical, “(probably Mamaw.)”
When J.D. was to start high school, his mom was out of rehab she wanted to take him to live with her at Matt’s home in Dayton. Vance resisted in an outburst so angry that his mom found him a therapist. Operation cheer up J.D. also saw his Mamaw take J.D. on new vacations to California and Las Vegas.
J.D. 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. But J.D. soon rejected this life, he writes, because his father’s strict religion looked down on rock music, especially J.D.’s favorite Led Zeppelin, and Vance worried his “nerdy” obsession with Magic: The Gathering might be seen by his dad as satanic.
Leaving his biological dad “heartbroken,” Vance decided to move in with his grandmother, but also bounced around with his mom and Matt in Dayton. He then briefly moved in with his mom’s next husband — her boss at a dialysis center, who was also not poor — and lived for a while in Miamisburg, a suburb of Dayton.
It was during his early high school years that his mom swung by Mamaw’s suddenly, and demanded J.D.’s urine for a pee test. That was enough to have J.D. move in with Mamaw permanently. J.D. writes that his relationship with his mom that era that followed was less emotional than financial; despite her descent into bad relationships and addiction, she remained employed. “She’d always give me money on paydays, almost certainly more than she could afford.” J.D. 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? Vance’s markers of his deprivation weren’t actual markers of poverty — using food stamps, or living in subsidized housing. He moved into his grandma’s big house, across the street from the park with a tennis court. His Mamaw continued to use her late husband’s health benefits from his steel job. Late in the book, Vance reflects: “I never went hungry, thanks at least in part to the old-age benefits that Mamaw generously shared with me.”
“Poor” to J.D. seemed to mean the way his grandma looked to his friends (dressing in jeans and a men’s T-shirt and smoking menthol cigarettes) as well as his lack of access to brand name clothing. “I didn’t wear clothes from Abercrombie & Fitch or American Eagle,” he writes, adding with a lawyerly caveat: “Unless I’d received them for Christmas.” (J.D. was so salty at not having access to choice drip that he writes about it twice, including it in his catalog of teen resentments, which included riding the bus to school and “being mad that my clothes didn’t come from Abercrombie.”) J.D. also writes with shame of having loafers from K-Mart. The horror.
Mamaw insisted J.D. get work — not to help pay the bills but so that he could “learn the value of a dollar,” something that had so far eluded him in his upbringing. (He writes that his mamaw “never accepted” any money from him, until years later when she had mounting health care costs and he was earning adult money in the military.)
Moreover, when it was important to J.D.’s development, there always seemed to be a little extra cash in reserve. His Mamaw dropped $180 on a graphing calculator for his math class. And in the chapter after bemoaning how “poor” he was, J.D. details how he started taking golf lessons junior year with an “old golf pro,” in hopes of making the varsity high school golf team. 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.
Vance enacts the central deception of his book by jumbling the chronological order of his tale and interspersing armchair analysis of the problems of his purported white underclass. “He does this kind of shell game, smoke and mirrors thing where he moves events around,” says Davis, “and tries to put them in an order that make them look right.” He adds: “It’s almost like he puts on poverty like you put on makeup.”
Consider how Vance casts his pleasant middle-class neighborhood as if it were a ghetto. “Looking back, I don’t know if the ‘really poor’ areas and my block were any different, or whether these divisions were the constructs of a mind that didn’t want to believe it was really poor.” As part of playing up how underprivileged this area was, Vance writes that he lived “within walking distance” of abandoned factories and warehouses. He also lived about eight blocks from a club that bills itself as “one of the premiere private golf courses in the Miami Valley,” established 1922.
Mamaw died in 2005. And J.D. writes that the accounting of the estate revealed she’d paid for his mom’s rehab, and made numerous loans to her that were never repaid. 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 Mamaw’s estate.
After publication, a spokesperson for Vance responded with a statement attributed to Vance’s aunt Lori Meibers. “J.D. did grow up poor, and any suggestion otherwise is a lie and an insult to our family,” she says. As evidence that “life was tough for J.D.,” Meibers refers to details of Vance’s upbringing that do not appear in his memoir — for example that “money got so tight that they even had to give his dog up for adoption.” (Vance attributes the loss of his dog, in the book, to an inability to train the animal.) She adds that “when J.D. lived with Mamaw, his room didn’t even have heating or air conditioning, and she often relied on J.D. to buy her groceries.” Meibers continues: “My mom lived on a fixed income and was poor for the last decade of her life, including when she shouldered the burden of caring for JD, his sister, and his mother as she struggled with addiction. My dad’s pension was meant to help a couple make ends meet in retirement — it wasn’t meant to support a whole family of five.”
A spokesperson for Vance adds several other claims of difficult living that do not appear in Hillbilly Elegy, including that Vance’s mother was enrolled in the Women, Infants, and Children program when she was pregnant with J.D. 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 Vance’s mother briefly “moved the family into an income-controlled apartment”; that J.D. often attended school “without enough money to pay for lunch”; and that Mamaw eventually received nutrition support from Meals On Wheels.
Vance’s publisher, Harper, did not respond to queries from Rolling Stone about whether it continues to stand by the memoir in light of Vance’s admission of making up stories. An email to Vance’s book editor, now at Simon and Schuster, pinged back with an out-of-office reply. Chua, the Yale Law professor who mentored Vance — taking pride in being the book’s “authorial godmother” — did not respond to an interview request.
In truth, it seems, J.D. wasn’t a real hillbilly. And he wasn’t really poor. The dark distortions of Hillbilly Elegy are not lost on Lalka, the Tulane professor, who writes: “J.D. Vance ran good people’s 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. He maintained this pose in his memoir, in which he uses right-wing ideology and tired tropes to blame the poor for their own condition: “I have known many welfare queens,” he writes, “some were my neighbors, and all were white.”
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. He describes their efforts to “game the welfare system,” but he then includes descriptions of people following the law — by using food stamps to buy food and paying separately for non-groceries like alcohol with cash.
As J.D. recalls it, he’d formed deep class resentments toward those “living off government largesse.” And he describes, as real-life experiences, tales that read like they sprang to life from a Paul Ryan stump speech, about the “large minority” of his community that was “content to live off the dole.”
How much of this was true-to-life? In one concerning passage, Vance recalled noting the taxes that came out of his paycheck. He then grouses about watching how “our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else.”
If this story sounds familiar, you may have lived through the Reagan era. The Gipper had an inflammatory, racist stump speech in which he’d invoke a tale of a “strapping young buck” (i.e. a Black person) who would use food stamps to “buy a T-Bone steak,” while, Regan told his listeners, “you were waiting in line to buy hamburger.”
J.D. also quotes his grandmother as talking like a GOP think-tanker: “I can’t understand why people who’ve worked all their lives scrape by while these deadbeats buy liquor and cell phone coverage with our tax money.” 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 Elegy includes 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. We buy giant TVs and iPads…. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being.”
Through the lens of J.D.’s condescension, there’s not a policy answer to poverty caused by the bad morals of people like his mother — “consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful.” There’s only a cultural fix, which is to be more like Mamaw — “old-fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking.”
“Whose interest does the story serve?” asks J.T. Thomas, a sociology professor at the University of Mississippi, nodding at Vance’s promoters in the billionaire class. “He want us to believe that he, a person who came from really humble origins, has somehow ascended” to the highest echelons of wealth and power. “And you can too — if you just make all the right choices like he did.” It’s a myth as old as America, but Thomas insists: “We know, that’s not how that works.”
In short, J.D. ventriloquizes the judgments of the rich, to make them seem as if they are coming out of the mouth of a poor person. “He sells a story in Hillbilly Elegy about high poverty and joblessness. And the way to fix these problems is to make choices like what I made,” Thomas says. “And to pursue things like a nuclear family, rather than a dysfunctional one, and really ground yourself in organized religion, specifically Christianity, if you can get it.”
In short, what these poor people need isn’t help with childcare costs, or reinvestment in local manufacturing, or tax policy that favors their interests over the wealthiest. 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.
From Rolling Stone US
