>> in 1979 c-span was created by public service by television companies and today we bring you unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the supreme court and public policy events in washington, d.c. and around the country, c-span is brought to you by your cable or satellite provider. >> and today more programs from the recent virginia festival of the book, first up, authors discuss the stereotypes and reality of life in appalachia. [inaudible conversations]

>> hi, everyone, thanks for joining us this morning. i expect that we are -- are we rolling? we are rolling, hopefully. i haven't seen him. yes, okay. good, hi, good morning, everyone. on behalf of virginia humanities which produces the virginia festival, the book, i would like to welcome you to appear -- appalachia, we have a couple quick notes to get through pertain to go this event. first, we want to thank the city of charlottesville for this conversation and for hosting us. this program is being broadcast on the city's government access channel, charlesville tv 10 and stream lived on the city's facebook page, so if anybody is listening or watching at home and wants to see it via facebook

it's at charles city hall is the handle. because this is a recorded event, during q&a portion to have discussion, please raise your hand, a volunteer will then come to you and hand you a microphone before you ask your question. that takes care of announcements. please silence cell phones at this point in time, however, we encourage you to tweet about the event using #va book 2018, so by all means take the lessons that you receive from our authors here, share them with people. you should have received program evaluations, fill these out before you leave. they'll be used to provide very useful information that keeps festival free and open to public. you didn't get an evaluation or if you have to leave quickly, you can do this online at vabook.org/survey.

please support the authors you see here today and the authors that you encounter throughout the festival as well as book sellers, there are books for sale that we can after the event one of our guest today is a local book seller, i would expect that she would encourage you to do the same. >> shop local. [laughter] >> the authors will be able for book signing after the program. okay, let's get started, so introductions, elizabeth, the author of what you are getting wrong of appalachia. in the table in front.

he's a professor of history in fordham university. his writing appeared in harper's mag steve -- magazine and new heaven review. we have wendy welch. she's also the author and editor of three previous books including the little bookstore of big stone gap and she runs a bookstore in southwest virginia, imagine where that is. i want to kind of seed a thought at the start of this event just to get us thinking about some of context that we will be getting into in detail. in he is i say, james baldwin has some thoughts about how art and story is often placed comfort ahead of gater understanding and that inturn can weaken our ability to deal

with the world and ourselves as we are -- he concludes essay with a thought that i tried to bear in mind when encountering works of history, whether they reach back hundreds of years and dealing with contemporary issues and he has line that we really hope will rob us of our myth and give us our history. all of these books give us history often by the difficult work of robbing us of our myths. to get started i'd like to ask everyone to share stories for the three books, concerns and ideas for these first books take shapes and if we can go to wendy. >> the origin story of my book is anger. i had recently moved from tennessee to texas with my partner just as the 2016 presidential election started

hotting up. i consumed every piece of media that i could about what was happening in appalachia, what the feeling was and what the predictions were and the stories were atrocious it reminded of phenomena when reporters and journalists and photographers went to the mountains to mine misery and so i wanted to study that phenomena from the ground and the presidential election gave me the moment, the other thing that was happening as i made small talk people, business leaders, everyone we wanted to talk to me about hilly billy ideology. what is wrong with your people?

why do they misbehave, why can't they get it together? and that made me angry when i went on job interviews, this book was in my face and when i tried to make new friends, this book was in my face and when i opened the newspaper his face was in my face. [laughter] >> and so i very happily connected to a publisher in ohio who is having similar feelings about the rust belt because people can't tell rust belt and appalachia apart. that's how my book was born. [applause] >> i will interject quickly, i expect that we will probably talk a little bit about jaidi's book. steven. >> i don't have a story that's anywhere as entertaining as

that. my book started 10-12 years, i was trying to understand american capitalism and i wanted to write about people losing their land, dispossession as an essential element of how capitalism develops and grows and i could have written a book about american indians, i could have written a book about the greatest disposition in the history of north america but it was too vast and too general and when i went looking for a story about dispossession that people don't often think about or consider to be about capitalism and something that i myself did not understand, there were the southern mountains and a complicated story about how a white settler culture at one time was considered nearly heroic and then lost its land. i said to write about appalachia as case study, in some ways it

took over my life as it took years to understand it as very much an outsider. my book is really about capitalism. i was putting those things together and there was the southern mountains. so i hope you like the result. [applause] >> my book was born out of kindness. there's a pastor at a church that shall remain nameless that i would do anything for, this is a lovely, love my man and he came to me about two years after a little bookstore was about and he said, little bookstore if somebody sums it up in a review they say it's a triumph of the human spirit. can you do for foster parents what you did for bookstores, i was like pardon, we need more foster parents and we are not getting them and it's going to kill us all, would you write about it, would you write a book about it?

and i'm thinking monogram self-published staple, we will sell 80 copies to people who are already fostering. it's an important story but it's not going to get outside of the parameters of the people who are playing in the sand box because other people don't want to hear it, how do you tell a story nobody wants to hear, so we settled on a blog and that also got us passed the anonymous part where foster parents can talk without being judged because if you are a faster parent you are already judged, the next word out of your mouth doesn't matter, if you say i'm a foster parent, the person talking to you has some view. so let's do this blog, he said, that's fine, you are remembering that this man is a pastor. we set up a blog, editing other people's stories, i really love to work with other people's stories, i love to help them shape and it's exciting for them. so i had 4 or 5 people that i was working with, we were shaping the stories and the

appalachia conference was holding near tennessee, i said this is perfect, we will launch the blog, the people will feel sense of accomplishment and mission, the grant will be over and we will all be happy. any of you have been to the appear -- appalachia study event? you're doing book associated with the project, i said, no, she said, would you like there to be, i called the pastor, dude, totally cheating to get a book deal. that's how the book came about. >> sure. [applause] >> somebody started off with a question for another sort of question for everyone, so each of these books exists directly

or indirectly in a certain tension with other older accounts of appalachia, both steven and elizabeth write about local color essay that is depict appalachia and residents as something other and they also get into how those depictions affect -- have affected the region and its people. steven, there's a line that i want to flag from apollo, you write aspersions of stupidity, backwards, volatility coincided with the seizure of the environment. tell us about the relationship with these sorts of narratives, bias, misleading, misperceived and that environmental seizure? >> can we have the screen put down?

great, if we could do that. >> can you talk louder, please. >> sure, sure, i would be happy to. >> okay. >> sure. when people ask me, what is this book about, i said it's how daniel boone became hill billy. it's how the people from the southern mountains kind of slid down a culture radiance, in effect, people who life close to environments very often administrative authority called them savages even though it's the way that most people have lived over the last 10,000 years. in fact, agrerions are the largest class in history. it's easy for us to forget that and forget in fact, how to talk about them and how they actually lived. so an image like this, i could have showed you daniel boone with all of the people behind them, the picture, painting by thomas. instead, kind to have best image, documentary image that i

could find depicting these poor white folks, they are poor but sufficient. so the remarkable thing is 50 years, excuse me while i go through the entire thing, in 50 years we get to the georgia cracker. and so i wanted to understand how it is that this happened, how this intellectual process took shape and how it coincided with the rise of ebbing -- extracted industry and you can actually watch it as people again to understand that there was a great deal of wealth to be pulled out of appalachia, the role that is the pioneers played was the ones that rolled with daniel boone was basically obscured poor whites of the south

coincided with american foreign policy, they were there to dispossess indians, before they became dispossessed they were dispossessors and they were there to play that role and as long as they played the role they were the pioneers, they were heros, they what were francis wrote about in the overland trail. just a few years later, they became grotesque, degenerate, their physical characteristics were grossly invented, they were racialized. group of poor white can become separate race on the process of having them delegitimize so they could be pulled out of hollows to be given to coal and lumber companies. the travel writing was part of that, it wasn't a conscious attempt. it was almost like everybody was watching and seeing what was happening. by the way, at the same time, the people in the mountains were in their own ways not doing all that well.

their own agriculture and their own way of life was, in fact, suffering at the same time. let me leave it at that. >> sure, okay. elizabeth touches on those moments. what you're getting wrong about appalachia, when the process begins, writers, photographers, journalists, social scientists, partially doing quotes here, they all traveled to valley, families being displaced and elizabeth writes specifically about hollow folk, a group that depicts mountaineers as isolate and backward and where it gets complicated in elizabeth's book,

she brings in a photographer that goes in hallow folk and takes pictures of a number of the same subjects, specifically in this case elizabeth, i wonder what do these people who are coming into the area often from -- from outside of the -- what do they see, what do they miss and how do their depictions in hallow folk in the photographs, how do they damage, what are the ways in which they damage appalachia. >> actually if i have a -- i thought a clip from hallow folk that i could read, what happens in 1930's and it matches very clearly the arc of appear deputy appalachia history, poor people from the richness of the land, the industry is the best known example but natural beauty tourism, do development is part

of that story as well and the consolidated power of the froth thought that it would be beneficial to the people of the region especially to politicians and owners if there was a natural park and so national park was born, it was facilitated through the 1924 blanket condemnation act through the domain through removal of people from their homes, in order to do that, industry sprung up around them, photographers and journalists, some ployed by the federal government came to the valley to assess the people that lived there, the university of chicago sent social scientists to come and document the condition of life in the valley and in the mountains and almost, you know, most significantly to me the leaders of the american movement were watching all of this unfold and salivating with interest and so all of these forces come

together, photographer name authored rostein created a visual portfolio that matched what social scientists -- the textual portraits that they were extracting from the region. they sent them to director of national park service who gleefully proclaimed that after the study is done we will colonize the worst of the bunch which was a play on the name for colony and that's indeed what happened to them, many of them children were taken from the land that they lived on and they worked, it happened to be not in some isolated far away land but 2 miles from one of the most wealthy resorts in the area which was eager to expand to serve the national park and so the face of the valley for almost two generations were entangled with the fate of the

american ugenics movement in order to make people who were wealthy even wealthier and that's the story of the mountains so often. >> wendy, you're taking on, you know, a subject that is very much a pressing contemporary issue, that's one that we -- it's not that there are many, you know, news rooms in america that have a reporter that's assign today cover adoption, fostering, nor the circumstances that really create the challenges that inform both the systems. what are the way in which depictions of appalachia have informed and have affected adoption and foster care. >> okay, this is ugly.

what steven and elizabeth have been talking about in the stereotypes and the presumptions is very well known and very well felt by the people those are aimed at, right, we are smart enough to know when we are being stereotyped, one of the awful, awful elements of foster care and adoption is the vengeance factor by people who enter it because it's hard to set up, okay, so if i say what's the most important industry in appalachia, how many of you are going to say coal, right, okay, coal has directed our past and is rightly or wrongly, i think, elizabeth tackled this really well engrained in some of the ways that arguments play out. so if you are suspicious of the government and the government is going to pay you to look after someone else's family, the worst

thing you can be in central, rural appalachia is bad to your family, it's not anymore, the worst thing you can be is bad to your family, so all of a sudden here is this big, bad government that's going to pay you to look after someone else's family, you the moral high ground, the community high ground, it's hideous, it's absolutely hideous and the first time i hid it when i was researching and the first time i went back and explained to some of the people i was talking to, they said, you can't say that, nobody is going to listen to you, it's not okay to say that, but the really hideous thing is what you guys are describing is what the people in the region are taking advantage of and holding the kids hostage for and the first time kids become collateral damage in a war between adults, you know,

we've all seen the divorce stories, right, now write it with a culture versus the government and the kids in the middle, western civilization is doomed and it should be. [laughter] >> sorry. [laughter] >> we are going to -- so one of the -- one of the things i have about working with the history is it seems that much of the radical power of historical research and writing is in the ability it has to articulate something that's been overlooked or has been buried, white-washed, overwhelmed by other powerful forces, so i want to ask some questions about kind of breaking with previously published histories, i'm going to start with steven, so steven early on writes that his book is predicated on the collision between two forms of economy and

appalachia, one is represented by corporations, the other is manifested in families and farms which are a result of agriculture and farms, so writing about the latter, families and farms, steven writes that the household is this basic unit for communities, reproduces skills and traditions, transmits, ecological knowledge, no other human institution does these things and then 70 pages later steven talked about how there's no shorthand for how material and there's powerful moment where he writes this language seems like an artifact of capitalism and tendency to eliminate all competing economic forms.

where i'm interested here is, you know, capitalism is also shaping our ability to tell other people's stories. it's shaping the language that we use to relay what we understand about the past. this has huge ramifications for you as a writer and as historian and researcher, so can you tell me about the challenges portraying appear -- appalachia through lens that isn't a capitalist one? >> it's very difficult. i mentioned the notion of savagery as closely associated with people who are -- who i call -- who are called agrerians, campesinos, they love money and they doind depend on money, you see the difference. money is attribute in the household and it's not -- the household can't be organized around making money but we and i don't mean the people in this

room, we have a really hard time understanding that we basically have two speeds, there's the savage and then there's the noble savage, one can be accused of either one, anthropologists understand this. in general public, either you're saying that this is a stage of human evolution that -- that thank goodness we left behind because they were so poor, starving which, of course, is never true, or you're accused of saying that this was a golden age, they had -- they had virtues that we have lost, you know, and, you know, they were giants in the past and they were happy and sufficient and strong and that wasn't true. how do we see people for how they actually were and how they lived. writing about american indians it's the very same problem. what i tried to do is i really

tried to use anthropologist as much as possible specialist economic anthropologists and to write about them in the most -- in a way that essentially described their sufficiency, sufficiency is not wealth and not poverty, it's not anything that you want, it's having anything that you need and i try to kind of open up their material world, a key idea in the book is this idea of ecological base and how it is that all agregrians no matter where they live or where they were grew up in an area called natural resources that they did not have to buy and they did not have to invest money in because they could not. so there's no fishing village without a fishery, right? there's no agrerian farm, these

things cost nothing but they produce commodities that you then, in fact, can sell. so just to come to the point what i found is when you attach people to their landscape and show how they lived on an actual tangible way, we are teaching people exactly what an agrerian is, we lost the language, in some cases our grandparents, certainly our great grandparents were farmers, most of the people can tell you about the old country or the mountains or coming from the great plains or something like that, right? it wasn't that long ago for us, even if it was 200, 400 years ago, that's nothing. we are talking about people living this way for 10,000 years, i will leave it at that. >> we lost some language, we are going to jump, come forward a bit in time because we've also, you know, in the course of language we replaced with other

terms, other ways of framing history that can be problematic for entirely new reasons. elizabeth, much of your work in your work evolves what you call the trump country genre of capitalism. i had a colleague that referred to coverage of 2016 as drive-by journalism and trumplandia and occurs over and over again in a lot of contemporary news coverage. journalism is charged with pieces of what joined the historical. what does trump country writing lead out of contemporary history and what do we risk in those mentioned? >> they reset the clock in

appalachia in a way that really unfair and unethical. the history of appalachia started in 2016u and that is all you need to know. it hasn't always been called appalachia. people have always lived here, our history goes back than one president, longer than two years and it's important for us to know, how to understand how we got to the place. just to piggy off of the capitalism which is one of my favorite things to talk about as well, i think it's important to understand that whenever you see these narratives that rise at the top, we have to understand that there's a considerable amount of wealth and power behind them. i don't think that the individual reporters are making bank off of writing bad stories about trump land but a publisher might b i think a media

conglomerate might be, i think that any time that you see these powerful narratives come to us, we have to think who is profiting from them. this is where our minds should be oriented to, who is making money off of the trump country narrative, it's not the people in appalachia, unfortunately i wish they did make more money, it's the people who are telling people to write them and who are advertising on the back of them and who benefit from them in expedient way by doing slight of hand that says that poor people is what is holding country back, not rich people, it's always the poor people and not the other way around, that's my concern when i think about narrative in appalachia because narrative is so important and stories that we tell ourselves that make sense in the world and your place in the world and we have almost very little control over them in

this moment in time and i would like to change that. >> something that came up in a conversation, elizabeth, bankruptcy filings and one of the incidents we talked about connected to that, there's a meeting of coal industry executives and interest on which an individual throughout a joke at the expense of a reporter name ken, jr., who is a leading reporter on issue of coal economy in west virginia and essentially said, well, he won't have a job for very much longer, won't that be good for everyone in this room. i mean, these -- yeah, these sort of concerns are very present. i think that to that end, i'm going to turn to wendy, wendy, writing about topics that is not only maybe at risk of disappearing from a lot of contemporary reporting and

dialogue, but in many cases largely absent from those things, i mean, you know, you said that when we -- you said in the previous conversation with me that you didn't really consider yourself an expert on foster care and adoption when you set out to write fall or flies, how do you orient yourself in that world to write with authority? >> you could talk to people, you sit down and say, here i am, who wants to talk to me and the social workers once they knew it was safe blue, they had stories they wanted to tell, the foster parents didn't, they didn't want to talk to anybody no matter what, but in talking about, you know, elizabeth had -- in west virginia university had a list of writing in appalachia that had been done before, the narrative on foster kids is absent unless it's boyeristick,

i think the author is still living so that's all i'm going to say. if there are books, there are very good books, turning stones, and random family in new york city, that's where you find narratives that are driving foster care, foster care reform and adoption, but when you look at it in appalachia, i wanted to come in on something steven had said about food and, one of the stories in here is that the place called cattle ranch, the fibbing name the social workers give it, i don't know the lady that runs it knows the name. she only takes teenagers, there's something called permanent placement, acknowledgment that the child is no longer cute enough to get

adopted in a nutshell, when you turn 12, the next best thing to get is permanent adoption placement. think of yourself when you were 13? how much rejection could you take? this kid just got told we will look for a permanent placement for you because that's the best thing we could do for you, okay, so we start there. then the kids went to this place that shall remain nameless and i disguise the woman who runs it and they joined five or six other kids one of whom is in a vegetative state but he's there because the two brothers are there and a child in a vegetative state in foster care, how ugly can i get, a child in a vegetative state is money in the bank for foster parent, it just is, i'm sorry, it just is, but that child needs somewhere to be, somebody has to do it, so, you know, immediately we want to blame the foster parent, okay.

so we start there. the children in cattle ranch were being taught to farm potatoes and canned beans and they didn't slaughter their own hogs but they had hogs and they were doing the bacon and potato and bean canning and they were teaching life scales to the kids so when they graduated from high school they could get out there and get a job, that's why this woman was considered a desirable foster home, she had no emotional investment in these kids, right, they were worker bees, she actually charged them rent for living there. they got fast-food jobs and had shared car and some graduated from high school. the night shift and day kids rotated the cars, and the only person who had the own room in the house was the biological daughter of the family. now we are all right now consigning this woman to the seventh layer of hell, the

foster system likes her and the social workers like her because the kids are safe, their beds are their own, they eat 3 meals a day, they've got shoes an warm clothes and not on the street shooting up and if any come home drunk or high, she disciplines them in an appropriate way, right, so we've got this agrarian history that's playing out because the social workers are saying, okay, that's good, we've got it. >> can you say -- could you say more about -- i didn't quite understand about how foster care is perceived in the mountains? i didn't quite how it's perceived by the people around -- people in the communities in which there are foster parents, is it -- understandable way of making a living or something more sinister? >> there's no one thing you can

say about foster care that fits every situation, but perceived in some cases as a cash cow, it's perceived in some cases as god's destiny for you to make the world a better place and conceived in some places as a necessary evil because you're supposed to be able to take care of your own family in appalachia and in african-american communities in appalachia, foster care is almost unheard of because you -- that's wrong taking somebody else's kids is wrong on every level and we have to talk in such generalities here because it's a quick slice, but the cash cow necessary evil or god's will. >> so i want to ask wendy a question about the fire fly and kind of in part reference to how

we have -- we have the sort of cattle ranch episode and details concerning who runs it are not disclosed in, of course, this book. so this is from the introduction to wendy's book, under the heading who is telling the stories and why. so wendy writes, you know, she introduces the four social workers who are -- who occur throughout the course of the book and she writes, they will be guide and composite characters, penalties are based on key social workers i came to know well but the words of these characters speak come from many workers interviewed during the year, i spent gathering the 62 separate oral histories represented in the book to protect and frame inquiry that makes it flow, the social workers are combined and took these four plus a few others. certainly from the -- from a journalism perspective composite characters is a phrase that

immediately introduces questions of credibility and concerns about that, i'm curious how this approach enabled what felt like for you the best telling of the story. >> so dale is the key who unlocked the door. how many of you work in corporate structure? dale went to his supervisor and said i've got this journalist story-telling lady that has written this nice book and she's willing to interview more people so we can get more foster parents and the supervisor said, that's a wonderful idea, i never want to hear about it again. [laughter] >> with that dubious

denialability dale went out to inviting foster workers to call me, he gave them my number and e-mail, sent them to blog, if you want to talk, talk to her. and once they knew they were safe, they blew. okay, so in order to tell the individual stories it would be, you'd have to set up each particular situation and the stories that people told me tended to fall into patterns, i had fiver different foster parents tell me exactly the same story of something that had happened to them and tell me i couldn't tell it because they would be too recognizable in the community and when you -- when you start to realize where the patterns of the stories are falling, it's just the individual nuances that make the story interesting that are different, you start to combine the stories, all of the old-wise foster workers are dale, all of the angry foster workers are

katie and all the fired, i just got here and i'm going to change the world less than three years into the job social workers are barbie. barbie had a lot to say, a lot of the barbies had a lot to say. it was a story-telling convenience that made the book easier to understand because if i've gotten into the nuances of each individual story, first of all, people would have been identifiable and we are not going there and secondly, in order for people who are interested enough to pick up the book and read it but who are not themselves workers in the system, that was enough detail. >> tell me very briefly about the risks that identifiability poses in the stories? >> we pulled one story, jillian e-mailed me and said, i think we need to pull the story, we pull a story from the book because we thought the woman who told it was too much at risk. god help us, it involved a

shotgun and a guy up on the mountain, anyway, it was a terrible story. and without the shotgun, it was awry peated story so we pulled the shotgun episode out, the -- ask me your actual question again. >> sure, what would the risk for someone who is identified directly in course of this book? >> right, okay, first of all, it's the judgment and then there was the actual physical threat and then, of course, in appalachia, in people who have learn today manipulate the system for their financial benefit, they are suing, we were more afraid that someone would believe the story was about them and threaten to sue than we were of the actual physical threats and that's why so much of the book is scrambled, why the names are made up and characters composited and a few of the stories have a similar of one

story, protagonist from a story so they are all represented. >> okay, so there was a bit of a response to this earlier, i would like to talk about the fourth book in the room with us, jaidi vance, sounds like many of you have read in which vance says he wrote the book because i want people to understand what happens in the lives of the poor and the psychological impact that spiritual impact have on children. and so i'd like to point out that steven note vance got out, necessity of leaving and emphasis on strong and compromising grandmother. if meaningful work and decent occupation only exist elsewhere,

than most appear -- appear >> i would like to ask about what they see in vance's book, what perils of having popular and very sort of narrow account of life in appalachia, what risks that really pose for us? [laughter] >> so i -- one of the things that drives me crazy about hill billiology, he's conservative person, that's fine, he set politics aside to write from the heart. this is not a luxury that i think steven and i in particular are granted but i would like to point out that when you blame poverty on the poor, especially

when you make money doing it that is your politics. when you have a set of politics that say the failures that are olding us back as a country are rooted in certain individuals and in this case white but we all know who normally gets criticism of that sort, those are your politics and so hill-billyology does not set politics aside, it's politics are everywhere and politics are historical because it's politics reach right back into the past to the people that i talked about in valley who were wanting to find a way to get rid of these specificky -- pesky people that were living in the mountains, author of night comes to the tumberlands.

politics right back to 1994 to charles murray, there's imprints of politics all over this book, it's not said anything aside, in fact, it's thrown open the door to bring these politics right back into our living rooms and most concern, most concern to me to our classrooms, there are people, good people, liberal people in universities across the country who would never think of signing something by charles murray to the class, hill-billiology is great. you don't have to like it, it's a marketplace of ideas, it's the conversation that this can generate, it's the ideas that we can talk about, it's a prompt, that's all it is, it's a prompt, very dangerous, very, very dangerous and people don't have, you know, deconstruct that because appalachia is something that we want to see and think about when there's a problem.

appalachia is not a place, it's a problem. and that is the enduring narrative in our enduring place in the world like people like jd.vance. >> that was great, really great. yeah, on a more granular level in the book, the one thing that really caught my attention immediately when i just opened it up is the story of the couple who worked in the tile warehouse where you remember he cannot understand why they don't show up for work, and ultimately they lose their job, they are a couple and they say the job is something above middle-class income and they gave this up and sort of -- this is the problem, it's these people don't want to work, nobody in appalachia wants to put in an honest day's work. what really upset me is he doesn't know anything about these people. he has no idea what's going on in their private lives, even assuming that this actual happened and i don't want to question him, it's how in the

world could he draw conclusions on people whose profit life, he's a very particular kind of narrater and he's narrating a story from his own experience and, yes, everything that he writes about is deeply political in the sense that he is showing how it is possible through a kind of -- it's a story, stories are not rags to riches, they are rags to middle class respectability. but in these stories someone luck and pluck, the whole series was called luck and pluck, he got luck and pluck and his luck is his grandmother and his pluck is just, well, his pluck and he pulls himself up, other people, they lack luck and pluck and they're not going the make it. how do you reproduce even what

he did, right? at one point in the book, at the end of the book he says, there's a sentence and it's almost exact, he says, public policy can help, but public policy can't really help, there is no government program that's going to save appalachia and basically destroys the notion that there's any larger policy or social solution to the problem leaving only his relationship to his grandmother as the -- as the solution. there's a book i want to urge on all of you, i think it's very close to what elizabeth has written and it's by john called power and powerlessness in appalachia and he's the real deal, he comes right out of the -- of the mountains himself, an actual genius, scholar, in fact, he basically talked about three different realms of powerlessness and i give this to you because ultimately i think that's what we are talking about

and even with the trump voter is different reactions to powerlessness but powerlessness just like vance's book is something that has to be understood historically, the first realm of power is when sort of like what happens in this room, there's a very open conflict over some social situation and one group wins and the other group loses but it's all out in the open as actual conflict. the second realm, we understand that, right, party a basically dominates party b, the other is what -- is what you described where it was the journalist who loses job, how can you manipulate the press or eliminate altogether changing what it is the people know and see and therefore think about a social situation. the third realm of powerlessness is when party a can make party b see the world from their point

of view whereas essentially you take on the thoughts and the feelings of the people who are doing the manipulating or else, even if you're aware of that, you know this is -- this is where your bread is buttered. these are the job creators and we can't question the job creators and i'm really interested in what all of you think about powerlessness plays out in the things that you've written. >> so on april 7th, j.d.vance and i are going to be on a panel together. [laughter] >> in cincinnati at the appear -- appalachian study association, he's the product of his grandmother's care. and i find myself in the terrifying position of being an apologist for j.d. vance, a nuance thing that can't happen

in seven minutes or in a discussion like this, so please don't hear me say that i am apologizing for j.d. vance, i will be happy to talk to you about this, in fact, we will probably go get some lunch, if there's something going right in rural places it is the individual people who for one reason or another become emotionally invested in their kids, don't care if you started for money, don't care because god told you to, not because you were mad, if you emotionally invest in your kids, you're doing good for future generations. j.d. vance's grandmother invested in him. he may have turned out to be a scum bag but j.d. vance's grandmother invested in him but he's the reason that he's a

walking functioning adult now, the reason he went to yale. i don't care -- no, do i care, i do care deeply what j.d. vance said and i think elizabeth is right specifically the ugenics approach, what came out of the good is that there was an emotional investment in an individual and that's where they cared about the most in the whole story, screw the politics, screw the economics, there was a woman who said i will not let the kids --ly not let them go down and that's where good stuff happens, the little points of light inside rural areas where people say, i will not let this kid go down. i hope you didn't hear me say i like hill-billiody. he chronicled a woman who

invested in her family even when it cost her a lot to do and even though she was a flawed human being and that's all i have to say about that. >> we actually had more than the seven minutes. we had significantly more time. [laughter] >> in fact, i would like to open up the questions here, we have people with microphones in the room. they can bring them to you, just throw your hand up if you have a question. great, it looks like we have a couple, in fact, we have a number of questions. >> hello, my name -- can you hear me? my name is terrence, i'm a hill billy that you're talking about and i grew up in west virginia, i came to hear what people had to say, i have a question for you because i haven't read your book but i'm confused about what you're saying that people come in and take over the land, i mean, my grandmother lost the

leg when the timber people came, my father lost his life when the coal people came in, it slowly killed him. i watched him die for 20-some years, okay, i remember when the war on poverty came to try to save us poor people and they were given orange juice that tasted like antifreeze. [laughter] >> i got out of there, okay. >> yeah. >> well, my question is, you're talking about like -- i know they took over the valley over 50 families displaced, but you seem to be talking about that in your book from what i read from the reviews and i don't understand that because that never happened around where i'm from, i understand the people wanted so they didn't need to buy it, the people didn't need to buy the land to get down the trees so they just paid you a few bucks and cut down a few trees and left, where does that fit in because that confuses me? >> there's basically a number of

different ways in which people were dispositioned. i understand that not every family who lived in a log cabin ended up losing their land and going down in living in a coal or lumber camp, not everybody did. but those who were left behind who lost those woods lost the entire way they made a living. [inaudible] >> so it happened in a number of different ways, sometimes they never owned the land in the first place, so if you go back to the period between about 1840's and 1870's, when the first investors in capital, the people who basically took over from george washington's generation, they were interested in the actual extraction of resources from the mountains, they were very different. george washington was a passive investor. he never even visited his landment when the other generation came in, they needed to figure out a way to get the people off of it or as you say to get them the minerals from

underneath it. so what they did was they went to the county and state records, basically county records and they found, oh, you actually don't own this land at all, you have been writing deeds on it, you've been trading it around and there was basically two different deed systems, one that was a mountain deed, well, whatever -- [laughter] >> there were mountain deeds and then there were official deeds but we are talking about figuring out who actually has rights to land and a judge saying, i'm going to give this land, since there's a dispute, i am going to give the land to this owner and not this owner. that was outright blatant kind of dispossession that took place in the courts. another way of doing it was you actually described which is if, in fact, you claimed to own this farm, but i can cut all of the woods around it, i can make it impossible for you to live there so that you will then go down and move into the logging camp

and mining camp and do the work down there because you cannot maybe taken your life as you had it before and many of the people in the mountains were incapable or just unwilling. >> the camps with. >> not that big for the miners to live in. [inaudible] >> they weren't that big -- >> no. i drove through the places. they are little coal-mining community and there's no way all the workers lived on those places. now, that's where -- i understand in other places -- [inaudible] >> the rich guy on the hill. [inaudible] >> made room for a number -- the ways in which not -- he's not trying to explain every individual case. i want to make sure we have time for one more question. i really do -- we can talk afterwards, that'll be great. more questions. >> i have a question about the secrecy and i understand in faster care situations when you're dealing with minor

children that's an issue, but in the greater realm, in the greater realm of these stories, i think it's really important to start naming names, i can share stories, i'm a descendant of people who were dispossessed from the land, ii recently moved to the area, i'm the one with the plate that says, descendant. i also am the daughter of a man who my father's family is from orange county near here. the mother had 14 children, they for various reasons were all put in foster care but the foster care system as i could see it now that i know as later in life i've learned these things, the foster care system was really a replacement for slavery, these children were sent out to work on farms and they were sent all over and the more i dig, i have come across some churches, they deny they had anything to do

with the system, i found the church's name on land deeds and they've denied having any activity in that area but i have their name on the court records, so my question is what can we do about the secrecy, why don't we -- i think adam cohen try -- tried to address that with imbeciles. something had to be done post civil war that replaced slavery that ran the big estates and i think this is the way it was done and i think that the attitudes we have in this country towards people in appalachia is very much the same attitudes we have now towards single mothers, those children were not born in virginal circumstances but we don't give credit to the grandmothers and the mothers who are raising children and trying to do the right thing so what can we do

about the secrecy in bringing these things more current for everyone? >> okay. i think i like to think modestly that i've started something. i'd like to think that the interest in appalachia and the specifics of writing about foster care for the first time will launch more people writing about it more. i'm going to deviate from what you asked because it'll relate on what they have been talking about. what i actually fear most and this is where people look at you and say, you're crazy, that's never going to happen, what i fear most is that the future of foster care is going backward and it's going toward a place where we are going to see a return to work houses and they're not going to be called that, there's no way america is ever going to call anything a work house, but the -- the foster care group homes we have now, individual group homes where people have 8 to 15

children in their home or licensed group home and larger institutional group homes are in many ways directed to teach the children life skills and that includes a lot of work. so i -- i think the future is going backwards and i think we are going towards places where those who are in convenient are gathered to be harnessed in some way for the good of the greater society but i think -- i think it's going to be hidden with foster kids because the minute you say what's going to happen, people get real bad, they will be comments on facebook. [laughter] >> so to answer your question about secrecy i don't think it will help, blaming names will hope, i think destroying the system will help, i think individuals stepping up will help and i think they probably

have things to say. >> i have a quick practical thing to add, i think blowing secrecy will help. i would suggest that if you're new to the area contact lawmaker or representative, in a historical context laws changed deemed to be changed to get the information you get. records probably still exist but privacy laws that exist, contact lawmaker, i'm new to virginia too, it's not good, but it could be changed and also before writing about appalachia, there's bipartisan support for movement about people who were institutionalized in virginia, in the area, you might be surprised, you know, where the politics go on this issue and so there's room toage -- to agitate on the issue. >> i'm sorry, we really need to -- i would like to honor the time we have with our guests and also enable more questions, so if we could please give us your

question in a direct way as possible, thank you. >> i lived in appalachia for about 12 years in the coal fields of eastern kentucky and also southwest virginia and we haven't talked much about coal and i see coal as being a trap in the coal fields of kentucky and west virginia or in virginia, probably west virginia because the students whom i work with, almost all of the parents, as far as all male parents worked in the oil fields and that was basically the only job there was and, of course, what happened was the person worked on the coal field until they got black lung and many of the students would say, well, my father is on black lung and so i think that coal, if some of you could approach coal and whether that was a trap or not, it was kind of a double-edged sword. it was a way to get out of po

poverty but also a trap, it's the way i look at it. >> yeah. [laughter] >> and i would say by design. yeah. so you take someone's woods, you pay them less than the value of their land, and then they can't remain or you buy their mineral rights so then taking the coal out of it requires to rip up the entire mountain and then you say, well, you can go down live in the coal fields, the stories that i've seen people would go down and would say, we want to make enough money so we can go back up on the ridge and the neighbors would say, oh, yeah, we said that too, we have been there for three years and then what happens is that the companies were living in a place where there was very little government and the counties were -- were basically kind of subcontracted all kinds of governmental services to the

coal companies, the sheriffs and the police basically were there to serve the coal companies and there was so little money flying around that the coal companies they made to their own money, script, very little coins, when you mentioned money you have enormous amount of control. you don't have enough to live over the winter, i will advance you what you need against your wages and pay you little tokens and it won't be enough, i will write down the difference of what you owe me and now you're in debt, if you leave, the sheriff will come after you and therefore you're not going anywhere. a trapped door is what i think of it, slammed shut behind. >> eastern kentucky, central appalachia is one of the most concentrated areas of prison growth in the united states and has been for at least three decades and so this is the pattern of substitution when the coal mines die, the land is ruin, the workforce is captive

and so it's prime area for prison to be constructed because there's compliant workforce, sub par lands and there's a base to hide people that we do not value in this country and so that's the story of coal now and central appalachia prison growth. >> one more question and then -- okay and then we will allow people to talk. >> hi, steven, the question is for you, i was in new port, virginia last sunday for two hour service in solidarity for the community as the mountain valley funds coming through and my question over these last couple of years despite what's been going on on eminent domain and i think you've given me the seeds for for that but the question is how can a corporation come in and, again, i would like to perpetuating the story of the coal industry, a small community, four

generations, people lived in wonderful little town and now the cutting started two weeks ago, i think, and lawsuits around eminent domain but the companies with the money keep -- keeps allowing this to happen and i don't know if as citizens we have the power to be effective enough, my question is around eminent domain and how the corporations can keep that void, thank you. >> well, i don't know the exact story so i can't comment on what's happening in that town. eminent domain is the notion that the government can essentially condemn a piece of land, pay you market value because there's a greater social value to that land than you're giving it, right, it's not a terrible idea. it's how we get, you know, roads and canals and things like that and highways. all right. but what happened in west virginia is way beyond eminent domain. it's really a sere of laws and

relationships between the state and corporations in which localities were evacuated of any authority over what happened there, in other words, coal company would not come in in 1800 and invest money in a coal mine if the town could vote all kinds of regulations or if they wanted to could say, no, you can't mine coal in this county or in this town. so the state need today take over a degree of the sovereignty or autonomy of those towns in order for it to begin to make deals with the coal companies who then benefited by have clients, they only need today convince legislature and in some case it is governor of what their plans were, that deal was made and no one else in the state would be able to change it. i'm just a historian. that's what i would say. it's not imminent domain which is supposed to be a much more

transparent social process but it's supposed to result in something that's no for private industry but purely for the public good, we use that word but it's really a relationship between the state and the corporations. >> so i want to thank everyone for coming, i want to thank elizabeth, steven and wendy. [applause] >> please virginia humanities implores you evaluation forms, i implore you, if they have time, i'm sure, the authors will be happy to speak with you. thank you. [inaudible conversations]