Hillbilly Elegy: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Vance explains that Middletown’s inhabitants used to view the town as a highly respectable community. These days there are plenty of white people and plenty of black people, Vance writes, and the population is largely conservative, though “cultural conservatism and political conservatism are not always aligned in Middletown,” especially considering the fact that people like Papaw were so committed to the Democratic party, or “the working man’s party.” Although the town was still thriving in the 1980s, it soon embarked upon a steep economic decline. “Today downtown Middletown is little more than a relic of American industrial glory,” Vance writes. He explains that families are trapped in increasingly destitute living situations because of the declining housing market. After Presidents Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush both implemented policies encouraging home ownership, many Middletown residents bought houses that have now accrued so much debt that they’re unable to sell them, since nobody would want to pay off so much of somebody else’s mortgage.

To make matters worse, with manufacturing moving overseas, the worth of Armco steel plummeted, even when the company merged with Kawasaki, a Japanese motorcycle company that essentially saved the town’s largest employer from having to close its doors. Vance admits that he and his friends were unaware of this economic strife when they were growing up. They appreciated Armco’s influence, since most of their fathers worked there, but did not aspire to work there themselves. Their elders reinforced this sentiment—“Your generation will make its living with their minds, not their hands,” Papaw told Vance. In keeping with this, high school kids came to see Armco as an easy safety net, a place they could always fall back on. This attitude still prevails in Middletown, as one teacher at the local high school informed Vance. “It’s like they can’t make the connection between the situation in this town and the lack of jobs at AK [Armco-Kawasaki],” she told him.

Vance points out a contradiction in the idea that working-class Middletown kids should aspire toward something greater than manual labor. He writes that, though teachers never said so aloud, there was a palpable sense when he was growing up that he and his friends were destined for academic failure. “It was all around us,” he writes, “like the air we breathed.” In order to attain a career and intellectual work, it was necessary to go to college. And Vance knew nobody at all who had attended college. To make matters worse, when a Middletown kid failed to do well in school, there were no consequences. Parents and teachers alike would reason the failure away, saying, “Well, maybe she’s just not that great at fractions.” In this way, a strange narrative emerged that portrayed successful people as either lucky or born with incredible talent. Vance notes that—unfortunately—hard work doesn’t factor into this conception of success.

When Vance was in first grade, his teacher would choose a number and each student would deliver an equation that equaled that number. One day Vance said, “Fifty minus twenty,” which won him two pieces of candy. As he swelled with pride, he heard another student say, “Ten times three.” Vance was incensed—he didn’t even know what multiplication was. “I didn’t understand the difference between intelligence and knowledge. So I assumed I was an idiot,” he says. Seeing his frustration, Papaw sat him down at the end of the day and taught him multiplication. From then on, they practiced math together once a week. And though Bev wasn’t good with numbers, she took Vance to the public library before he could read, got him a library card, and showed him how it worked. “In other words,” he writes, “despite all of the environmental pressures from my neighborhood and community, I received a different message at home. And that just might have saved me.”