Washington Monthly - September/October 2023 - 124

underdogs of the tale, a group he argues
was misunderstood and unfairly maligned
by both the midwesterners they'd
moved in with and the Democratic Party
they arrived supporting.
As Fraser writes,
Scorned for their rural attachments
and southern cultural identifications,
stigmatized by the urban middle
classes who increasingly came to
dominate the worldview and policy
agenda of the Democratic Party,
these " hillbillies " had always represented
something of a working-class
" other " at the heart of the New Deal
order. As that order began to decompose
in the decades after the 1960s,
long-standing divisions of class and
culture etched into the terrain of the
Transappalachian migration would
prepare the ground for one of the
most profound and far-reaching realignments
of class politics in modern
American history.
Maybe so, but Fraser's account is
framed too narrowly to allow him to conclusively
prove this tantalizing thesis.
Hillbilly Highway doggedly focuses on
its core subjects, the rural migrants who
moved from West Virginia, Kentucky,
Tennessee; the western portions of Virginia,
North Carolina, and South Carolina;
and the northern third of Georgia
and Alabama to Chicago, Muncie, and
key industrial cities in Ohio and Michigan
during the first six decades of the
20th century. We learn about the push
factors that kicked off the migration-
the mechanization of agriculture and
loss of small family farms to coal mining
firms, timber operators, and the dams
and artificial lakes of the Tennessee Valley
Authority-as well as the jobs, conditions,
and challenges they faced in the
unfamiliar urban environments of Detroit,
Akron, and Cincinnati. Fraser interviewed
dozens of surviving migrants,
and their accounts help bring alive realities
of long-distance interregional travel
in the early and mid-20th century, life
in company mining and timber towns in
Appalachia, and tensions with rapacious
employers north of the Ohio River.
124 September/October 2023
But the story doesn't really show us
how these people came to be in Greater
Appalachia in the first place, how and
why their distinctive culture and associated
values came to be, and why their
resource-rich home states-often controlled
by people from this same regional
culture-were such awful places to
make a living. If it had, a number of allegedly
surprising discoveries that Fraser
makes in the documentary and oral
history evidence would have been anything
but and the overall account would
have been more powerful.
F
raser commences his analysis near
1900, when these distressed rural
farming communities were almost entirely
populated by the descendants of
lowland Scots and Scots-Irish settlers
who had colonized much of the Upland
South and Ohio Valley in the 18th and
early 19th centuries. Theirs was a culture
that had formed in those war-torn borderlands
of the British Isles where civic
institutions were weak, governments
were literally out to kill you, and you
had to protect your kith and kin yourself.
British North American colonial
leaders and land barons often sought
to recruit them to settle (and thereby
guard) their frontiers from the Indigenous
peoples whose land they were
taking, just as Elizabeth I had done in
her conquest of Ulster centuries earlier.
This was-and is-a culture that
prizes individual autonomy and personal
freedom, and is skeptical of government,
public institutions, and elites of
all sorts. The dominant religious ethos
focuses on the hereafter (not the depraved
here and now), one's personal relationship
with the divine, and the oratorical
gifts of unschooled, personally
charismatic preachers presiding over
extremely autonomous churches. It can
also be pretty violent: At Nationhood
Lab, a project I run at Salve Regina University,
we recently showed that the region's
white gun homicide rate over the
past decade is almost triple that of what
I call " Yankeedom " -the northern tier
of the Northeast that was first colonized
by New Englanders and their descendants-and
more than quadruple that
of greater New York City (which was first
colonized by the Dutch and has carried
certain attributes common to Golden
Age Amsterdam ever since).
These values led, in policy terms, to
a laissez-faire, deregulated environment
in many of the states these white
working-class migrants moved away
from: West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee,
and-with the laissez-faire-minded
Deep South-the Gulf states and Arkansas.
Taxes and wages were low, social
services and environmental regulations
were weak, and schools and clinics
were poorly funded. (All of these things
are still true.) It was a great place to be a
rapacious company. Officials and legislators
weren't going to cause much fuss if
you wanted to strip-mine the land, poison
the water, and pay your workers badly
or with scrip that could only be used
at overpriced company stores in company
towns. Thus the people of West Virginia
and Kentucky could be desperately
poor at the very time they were producing
the lion's share of a coal-dependent
nation's coal and the coal companies
were making annual returns as high as
25 percent.
Fraser's account does a great job of describing
the on-the-ground consequences
of all this. Land grabs by timber and
coal companies or the TVA between 1900
and 1950 resulted in southern Appalachians
going from more than 90 percent
rural to just 30 percent. Even those who
kept their farms had to rely on side gigs
as poorly paid wage laborers in the mining
towns, textile mill villages, and lumber
camps that spread across the region.
When those jobs began drying up-
unsustainable forestry and mining practices
wiped out the resources-migrants
began looking north, which means most
of them were already familiar with industrial
labor, if not urban living. (In
the coalfield regions, company towns-
literally owned and controlled by a single
company-outnumbered
independent
incorporated ones by a ratio of five
to one.)
Much of Hillbilly Highway is about the
tensions between the Transappalachian
migrants and the midwesterners they
settled among, but Fraser doesn't show
Washington Monthly - September/October 2023

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