Washington Monthly - September/October 2023 - 123

The
Appalachian
Trail
In the first half of the 20th century, 8 million
poor rural whites fled the border states for
Great Lakes cities. Brash and suspicious of
government, they played an underappreciated
role in the collapse of the New Deal order.
By Colin Woodard
T
he United States is an awkward federation of regional cultures, a fact that has
defined everything from our constitutional arrangements and partisan political
geography to the existence of " red, " " blue, " and " purple " states that have been divided
into rival sections since colonization. So when a huge number of people from
one region suddenly migrate to another, it tends to cause friction and conflict in the
short and middle term. The cultural mores, religious affiliations, and political attitudes
of the newcomers often differ from those of their established neighbors, as
can ideas about child-rearing, social conduct, freedom, liberty, and justice. The experience
changes everyone.
Scholars have rightly focused on two really big 20th-century examples: the Great
Migration of African Americans from the Deep South to the cities of the Great Lakes
region and from Tidewater to the Northeast (in which 6 million took part); and the
Dust Bowl exodus, which saw at least 250,000 " Okies " abandon the southern Great
Plains for Southern California. Both migrations had profound social and political effects
for their homes, old and new.
A third 20th-century migration has received comparatively little attention despite
being the largest of all: the movement of 8 million poor rural whites from the Upland
South to the industrial cities of the Great Lakes between 1910 and 1969. These selfdescribed
" hillbillies, " driven from their home region by large-scale economic transformations
and forced displacements by coal companies and federal dam projects,
were seen as a scourge on the midwestern factory towns they poured into, depressing
wages, disrupting the peace with drinking and boisterous church services, and letting
their children run wild. Unlike the aforementioned migrants, they typically kept
closely tied to their home region, migrating back and forth with the seasons of the
year and resisting assimilation. And they may have played a role in the subsequent
collapse of the New Deal order and Democratic electoral margins in the Midwest.
This Greater Appalachian migration is the subject of the historian Max Fraser's debut
book, Hillbilly Highway, a scholarly examination of the phenomenon from its origins
at the turn of the 19th century to the transformation of the politics of its signature
musical genre-country-by the turn of the 20th. Fraser, a scholar of American
labor, cultural, and political history at the University of Miami, has delivered a readable
and enlightening academic account that sympathizes with the migrants as the
Washington Monthly 123
Hillbilly Highway:
The Transappalachian
Migration and the Making
of a White Working Class
by Max Fraser
Princeton University Press, 320 pp.
Washington Monthly - September/October 2023

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