J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Roots

Photo: Gaelen Morse/Reuters

In his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, published in 2016, J.D. Vance stated “To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart.” He continues:

I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) of the Northeast. Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty is the family tradition…Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends and family.

This claim to white working class Scots-Irish identity has been an important part of Vance’s projected image as a politician, first as a Republican senator in Ohio and now as the GOP’s vice presidential nominee. In his speech to the Republican convention in Milwaukee, he told his story of a boy growing up in poverty with an absent father and drug-addicted mother, who was mostly raised by his Appalachian hillbilly grandmother “who could barely walk but was as tough as nails.” From this story he extrapolated the lessons and values he learned as the basis of a populist Trumpist worldview and vowed he would be “a vice president who never forgets where he came from.”

This stuff is catnip to conservatives, extolling the virtues of up-by-your-bootstraps individualism and disavowing government support for impoverished Americans. Those who pressed Trump to select Vance as his vice presidential sidekick have emphasised this storyline.

Cooler assessments of Vance’s hillbilly story as well as some angry ones by Appalachian natives, have questioned its content and import and his commitment to working class Americans. In all of this his “Scots Irish” identity is often mentioned but rarely analysed and merits more attention.

Scots Irish

The Scots Irish in the US today are a barely visible community, certainly not in comparison to what we term Irish Americans. While almost 39 million people signified Irish heritage in the 2020 national census, just under 800,000 thousand selected Scots Irish. The disparity in numbers can be misleading though, concealing different histories of settlement and assimilation.

Protestant peoples, mostly Presbyterian, from Ulster and Scotland emigrated to the US in large numbers in the 18th century, especially in the later part of the century, making up a significant portion of the “new nation” as it existed at that time. They mostly moved beyond the Eastern cities the famine Irish would settle in from the 1840s, going westward as part of the pioneering exodus and Southward into the Appalachias.

They would play an important part in the Revolutionary War army and events that established the US as a nation. Their fingerprints are on the Declaration of Independence – 5 of the 38 who signed it had direct Ulster Protestant family connections. General George Washington is reported to have said “If defeated everywhere else I will make my last stand for liberty among the Scotch-Irish of my native Virginia.”

During the Civil War many Scots-Irish fought on both sides, including illustrious figures such as Union General Ulysses S. Grant (with Ulster ancestry linked to Dergenagh, near Ballygawley in County Tyrone) and Confederate General “Stonewall” Jackson (whose Ulster origins are certain though the geography is disputed).

Much of this eighteenth century history of the Scots Irish and of the mythologies that feed off it – of pioneers such as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett and of “a lost cause” due to the Civil War defeat – are I suspect not well known in Ireland, where the popular imagination has been fed on stories of Irish Catholic migration in the 19th century and its legacies through to today. Are many people in this country today aware that at least 17 (that’s a conservative estimate) of America’s 46 presidents are of Scots Irish Protestant ancestry?

Many people in Northern Ireland are well aware, especially among Unionist communities who have looked to the Scots Irish in the US as a diaspora that can provide sustaining myths – see the murals in Belfast and elsewhere celebrating Confederate generals - for a community perceiving itself as besieged and disenfranchised. Hence the recent efforts to establish organisations and networks linking with Ulster Scots in the US to create an affinity with “Ulster Scots Americanism.”

Vance’s appointment as Trump’s vice presidential nominee has been noted with interest by Northern Irish newspapers of a Unionist persuasion. A Newsletter editorial was headed “JD Vance is a reminder of the historic Ulster influence in the United States.” It concludes “Neither Senator Vance nor indeed the Scottish American Mr Trump himself have shown much interest in Northern Ireland. Even so, the Scots Irish are a community that unionists could tap into.​”

Confederate Army Mural in Northern Ireland

Hammerhead Micks

That may sound fanciful to Irish and Irish American observers who have long had a diplomatic and lobbying foothold in Washington that Unionists could only envy. But while the Scots-Irish may not register an ethnic consciousness in the same numbers or with the same visibility as Irish Americans, nor should they be dismissed as a meaningful entity in the shifting world of American identity politics.

There are many signs of common religious and political ground shared by Protestant Scots Irish and Catholic Irish Americans today. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former advisor and “from a blue-collar, Irish Catholic” background, is certainly attuned to that commonality. He has described the Trump movement as

People who punched out of the system and guys serving in the military, people who are the backbone of civil society in America, coaching little leagues, supporting the church, working class Scotch-Irish in the South and blue collar Irish Catholics in Pennsylvania, Iowa and Michigan. Hammerhead Micks, or as Hillary calls them ‘deplorables.’

Bannon’s depiction of conservative Irish American Trump voters portrays them as “real Americans” whose values and way of life are under threat and as the wellspring of an authentic but despised Irishness.

Many Protestant Scots Irish and Catholic Irish Americans share a common opposition to abortion and this has proved a source of significant voting support for Trump in many Southern and mid-Western states, including the swing states in the forthcoming election. The appointment of Vance as the Republican vice-president nominee is symbolic in this regard – once an evangelical Protestant he converted to Catholicism in 2019.

The Appalachian Myth

Over time many Scots Irish sloughed off any residual “Irish” identification, the better to assimilate. An interesting exception to this general pattern is the strong and continuing association of Scots Irish identity with the immiserated white working class peoples of the Appalachia region. It is this association and its sustaining mythology that J.D. Vance is tapping into with his hillbilly story.

What has been called “the Appalachian myth” – of an “other America”, a “forgotten America” – has nineteenth century roots, when popular commentaries on the region focused on its geographical and cultural isolation. In the twentieth century this myth took on more distinctly racial as well as class connotations with the perception that the region was so peculiarly isolated as to be ethnically homogenous, predominantly made up of white Scots-Irish peoples who had not fully assimilated into a white mainstream America. It has been described as at once a “pioneer society” and an “internal colony” of isolation and poverty, a narrative of self-indigenization that sets this population apart.

The notion of “ethnic survival” has been critiqued and dismissed by scholars and yet it persists, deployed by politicians like Vance who want to claim some form of white working class authenticity. It has also been a rich source of popular culture representations, where the connotations of an isolated people readily play into gothic and horror genres – see, for example, the film Deliverance from 1972 or the Wrong Turn series of films in the early 2000s that depicted Appalachians as inbred cannibals eating liberal city folks.

And so, the Scots Irish peoples of Appalachia have become linked into the white grievance politics of a divided and partisan America in recent years. In this politics, the narrative goes, the white working class are the “real Americans” (echoing Bannon) and most misunderstood victims of economic, political and cultural disenfranchisements. They are the most overlooked and disrespected, described as the “final frontier” of accepted prejudice in America.

The working class and underclass people of Scots Irish descent – sometimes referred to as hillbillies (there are contested claims that this term is of Ulster Scots origin) – are the quintessential victim grouping in this narrative. In part this is because they conveniently fit into a white nationalist narrative of settler colonialism that conservatives would rather promote over the liberal narrative of a nation of immigrants. Trump’s rallies are symbolic sites for the staging and amplifying of the settler narrative as the true origin story of America and of real Americans. 

A Hillbilly President?

This population was prominently represented in 2016 when J.D. Vance published his memoir Hillbilly Elegy. That the book quickly became a bestseller suggests many Americans were looking for an explanation of Trumpism. However, while proving to be a popular narrative the book was also widely criticised, perhaps most sharply by Appalachians, as dealing in stereotypes of “white trash” and blaming working class peoples for their impoverished conditions. Some charged that it was exploitative “poverty porn.” More measured critiques argued that Vance did not give enough attention to the region’s long history of environmental despoliation and rapacious capitalism, from coal to pharmaceutical companies.

I doubt such pushback will affect the popularity of Vance’s hillbilly story. Indeed, it is now aimed at and will reach an even larger number of people and could become the compelling origin story for the 48th president of the US.

(Note: A shorter version of this article titled “J.D. Vance and What his ‘Scots Irish Hillbilly’ Identity Means for America” was published in the Irish Independent on 20 July 2024. )

Liam Kennedy is Professor of American Studies and Director of the UCD Clinton Institute.