Hillbilly Elegy: Chapter 15 Summary & Analysis

Although Vance had promised himself to never help Bev again, he was unable to turn her away when she called him asking for his assistance. Her most recent husband kicked her out upon discovering that she’d stolen and sold his family heirlooms to buy drugs. So Vance drove from Cincinnati—where he was living with Usha, whom he’d recently married—and paid for his mother to stay in a motel room. He was frustrated to find himself at a rundown motel filled with drug addicts, but he recognizes that “upward mobility is never clean-cut, and the world [he] left always finds a way to reel [him] back in.” Vance also recently started coming back into the Christian faith, so he was willing to show his mother extra kindness and sympathy.

Vance turns his attention to a question he often receives: is there anything that might “solve” the problems of the hillbilly community? He is skeptical of this question, for he recognizes in it a desire to find a “magical public policy solution.” Public policy, he upholds, is ill-suited to address these sorts of problems, which have to do with “family, faith, and culture.” At best, he thinks governmental policies can put a “thumb on the scale […] for the people at the margins,” helping them ever so slightly to rise out of poverty. He points to a study that showed that places like Utah, Oklahoma, and Massachusetts provided the most amount of opportunity for working-class young people. Vance notes that these findings did not surprise him, considering the fact that these areas of the U.S. tend to have strong communities comprised of cohesive families (think, for example, about the Mormon presence in Utah).

Despite the fact that he doesn’t think policy change is the best way to address the problems of the working-class, Vance mentions that there are some small-scale measures that the government can take, like building policies “based on a better understanding of what stands in the way of kids like” him. This would mean, for example, implementing policies that recognize that “the real problem” for most working-class children is not what happens at school, but what happens at home. Vance argues that Section 8 housing would be more successful if the low-income houses were placed into more affluent communities, rather than isolated within already impoverished neighborhoods. Doing so would encourage lower-income kids to “rise up.” Unfortunately, Vance argues, Middletown appears unwilling to adopt this strategy, clearly preferring to keep poor people “cut off from the middle class.”

The biggest obstacle standing in the way of working-class upward mobility, Vance asserts, is not a lack of policy but rather an unawareness of the community’s prevailing attitudes. When he was a kid, he explains, everybody around him thought it was feminine to do well in school. If a boy succeeded academically, others called him a “sissy” or a “faggot.” This attitude discouraged hard work, and Vance makes it clear that this terrible situation can hardly be addressed by a “new law or program.” Rather, the community itself needs to find a way to alter the way it thinks about upward mobility and intellectual ability.

One day Vance was driving with Usha when another car cut them off. At the next stoplight, Vance opened his door and started to get out, ready to go scream at the other driver and, if necessary, fight him. But then he stopped, calmed himself down, and shut the door. Usha was proud of him for resisting the impulse to violently defend his honor. And though Vance himself was glad to have acted level-headedly, he brooded for the next several hours, turning the situation over in his mind. This, he says, is the effect of having lived for 18 years in a community that praised violence in the name of honor.