>>. [inaudible conversation] hi everyone, thanks for joining us. i expect that we are, are we

rolling? we are rolling. i haven't seen him. yes, okay, good. good morning everyone. on behalf of virginia humanities which produces the virginia festival of the book, welcome to appalachia contemporary portrayals. my name is brendan fitzgerald, editor of the review. we have a couple quick notes to get through pertaining to this event . first we want to thank the city of charlottesville as sponsor for this conversation and for hosting us. this program is being broadcast on the city's government access channel, charlottesville tv 10 and a streamed live on the city's facebook page, so if anyone is listening or watching at home and wants to see us on facebook at charlottesville city hall.

because this is a recorded event during the q and a portion, please raise your hand. a volunteer will come to you and hand you a microphone before you ask your question. excuse the announcements. a couple more logistical issues. please silence your cell phones at this point in time. however, we encourage you to tweet out the event using the hashtag #vabook2018 so take the lessons you received from our authors, share them with people. you should have received program evaluations, fill these out before you leave. they will be used to provide information that helps keep the festival free and open to the public. if you didn't get an evaluation or if you have to leave quickly you can do this online at va book online/survey. support the authors you see here and the authors you

encounter through the festival as well as our local booksellers, there are books for sale that we can peruse after the event. one of our guests today is a local bookseller, i expect she would encourage you to do the same's shop local's the office will also be available for signing after theprogram. okay, let's get started. elizabeth the author of what you are getting wrong about appalachia . this book is on the table in front, elizabeth catte is a historian and owner of castle historical consultants. she holds a phd in history from tennessee university and lives in stanton virginia . steven stoll is the author of ramp hollow, that's this one. he's a professor of history at fordham university and is the author of great delusion and alarming the greener. he's writing is in harpers

magazine and the new haven review and we have wendy welch who is the author of fall or fly, a story of foster care and adoption in appalachia and is also the editor or editor of three previous books including big stone gap and she runs a bookstore in virginia. i want to kind of seed a spot at the start of this event to get us thinking about the topics we will be getting into in detail. in his essay mass culture and the creative arts, james baldwin has thought about how art and stories often place our comfort ahead of a greater understanding and that in turn and weaken our ability to deal with the world as it is and ourselves as we are. he concludes this essay with the thought that i tried to bear in mind when

encountering the works of history, whether they reach back hundreds of your years or dealing with contemporary issues and he says we are in the middle of an immense metamorphosis that we hope will rob us of our myths and give us our history. all these books about history often by doing the difficult workof robbing us of our myths . to get started, i like to ask everyone to share the origin stories of these three books. when and how did the concerns and ideas for these books 1st take shape and if we could go and start with elizabeth then go to stephen and 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 elections started heating up. i consumed every piece of media i could about what was happening in appalachia during the election .

what the feeling was, what the mood was, what the prediction was and the stories were atrocious. it reminded me of the phenomenon that happened during the war on property when journalists and photographers went to the mountains to mine misery and so i wanted to study that phenomenon on the ground up and the presidential election gave me that moment but the other thing happening was as i made small talk and got to know people in the university community, business leaders, evil i hoped would be my colleagues, everyone wanted to talk to me about hillbilly elegy and they wanted to know what i thought about this book and they weren't curious what i thought about it, they wanted me to answer for it. what is wrong with your people? why do they vote against their own interests? why do they misbehave, why can't they get it together? that made me angry went i when i went on job interviews

and when i tried to make new friends, this book was in my face and when i tried to understand about politics, this book was in my face and when i opened the newspaper, his face was in my face so i happily collect connected to a publisher in ohio who was having similar feelings about the rustbelt because people can't tell the rust belt and appalachia apart and she was kind enough to give me a platform to workthrough these feelings . andthat's how my book was born .[applause] >> i'll interject quickly, i expect we will probably talk a little bit more about jd vance's book so we will try not to let that comment. >> i don't have a story anywhere near as entertaining about that. i started 10 or 12 years ago, i was trying to understand american capitalism and wanted to write about people using their land and disposition as an essential element of how capitalism

develops and grows and what is essential to it and i couldn't read a book about american histories, i could have written a book about the greatest dispossession in the history of north america but it was too fast and too general and when i went looking for a story about dispossession that people don't often think about or considered to beabout capitalism, something i myself did not understand . those were the southern mountains. a complicated story about how a white settler culture at one time was considered nearly heroic and then lost. and then i set out to write about appalachia as a case study but it took over the book and in some ways it took over my life . and i dedicated years to trying to understand it as very much an outsider so my book is really about capitalism. i'm an environmental historian and a historian of political economy so i was

putting those two things together and there was this underground so i hope you like the results. [applause] >> my book was born out of kindness. there's a pastor and a church that shall remain nameless who i would do anything for. this is a lovely man and he came to me years ago after a bookstore without and he said a little bookstore, it summed it up in arrive you as the triumph of the humans.. he said can you do for foster parents what you did for bookstores? pardon? he said we need more foster parents and we are not getting them and it's goingto kill us all , would you write a book about it. and i'm thinking monograph

self published, center stable. we will sell 80 copies to people who are already fosters. it's an important story but it's not going to get outside the parameters of the people already playing in the sandbox because the other people don't want to hear it. how do you tell a story nobody wants to hear? we settled on a blog and that also got us past the anonymous part where foster parents could talk without being judged because if you are a foster parent, you are already judge . the person talking to you as some of you up. so i said let's do this blog and he said that's fine. you're remembering this man is a pastor. we set up the blog, i started editing other people's tories. i love to work with other people's stories, help them shape stories, it's exciting for me. we were shaping their stories and the appalachian

association was holding its annual conference near my home in johnson city tennessee and i said to the pastor this is perfect. we will launch the blog, these people will feel a sense of accomplishment, the grant will be over and we will all be happy so we do that and if any of you have been to the city association, they put out this huge book of all the things that are going to happen. phone rings and jillian berkowitz says i note with interest you're doing a blog appalachian stories about adoption and foster care, is there a book associated? number she said would youlike there to be ? i called the pastor and i said that was cheating, training to get a book deal and that's how the book came about. [applause] >> i'm going to start off with a question for everyone. each of these books exists directly or indirectly in a certain tension with other, older counts in appalachia.

both stephen and elizabeth write about travel writing, local color essays that depict appalachia and its residents as something other. and they also get into how those depictions affect, have affected the region and its peoples. stephen, there's a line that i want to flag from ramp hollow. you write that aspersions of stupidity, backwardness and volatility coincided with the seizure of the environment. tell us about that relationship, the relationship between these sorts of narratives, these biased, misleading, this perceived and that environmental seizure. >> can we go to the screen? that's awesome. sure, i'd be happy to. sure.

the class when people ask me what is this book about i said it's how daniel boone became hillbilly. it's how the people from the southern mountains slid down what i call cultural gradient. in effect, people who live close to their environments often have administrative authority, they call them savages even though it's the way most people have lived over the last 10,000 years. in fact, agrarian's are the largest class in human history but it's so easy for us to forget that and to forget in fact how to talk about them and how they lived . so i could have showed you daniel boone rolling through cumberland gap, with all the people behind them, that picture painted by thomas hardwick but this is kind of the best image, this documentary image thati could find . they're poor but they are sufficient.

so the remarkable thing is that inside 50 years, excuse me while i go through my entire thing. inside 50 years we get to this. we get to the georgia cracker. 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 extracted industry at the same time and you can actually watch it as people begin to understand that there was a great deal of wealth to be pulled out of appalachia. so the role that those pioneers played, the ones who rolled with daniel boone , were basically obscured. there was a moment in which the poor whites of the south essentially coincided with the kind of american foreign policy which is, they were there to displace the indians

and before they became dispossessed, they were this possessors. they were there to play that role and as long as they play that role, they were the pioneers, they were heroes, they were whattransit apartment wrote about . but just a few years later they became grotesque, degenerates. their physical characteristics were kind of grossly invented, they were racialized. a group of poor whites in the united states could essentially become a separate race as a process on the way of having them delegitimize so they could be pulled out of those hollows and could be given to coal and lumber companies. so 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. at the same time the people in the mountains were in

their own ways not doing all that well. their own agriculture and way of life was suffering at the same time . >> okay, great. elizabeth also touches on the same matter very explicitly and for me one of the most effective moments of what you're getting wrong about appalachia is elizabeth writing about the seizure of land use to create what is now shenandoah national park. when that process begins, writers, photographers, journalists , social.scientists, i'm partially doing scare quotes here. so they all document families that are being displaced and elizabeth writes specifically about hollow fold which is a book about a journalist and sociologists that predicts them as backward. where this gets interesting and complicated in elizabeth's book is that she also brings in a photographer who goes to many of the same locations in thehollow full 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 outside of it, what do they see, what do they miss and how do their depictions in hollow fold in the photographs, how do they damage, what are the ways in which they damage appalachia? >> i thought i had a quote from hollow full on my phone i could read but essentially what happened in the 1930s and it matches clearly the arc of appalachian history which is the process of severing poor people from the richness of the land around them and that takes many shapes, the extracted industry is thebest example but natural beauty to raise them . the development is part of that story as well and in the 1930s the consolidated power of the federal government thought it could bebeneficial

to the people of the region . specifically politicians and business owners if there was a natural national park so the shenandoah natural park was born. it was facilitated through the blanket condemnation act through eminent domain through the removal of people from their home . and in order to do that, industry sprung up around them. photographers and journalists, some employed by the federal government came to the valley to assess the people that lived there. the university of chicago sent total scientists to come and document the condition of life in the valley and the mountains and most significantly to me, the leaders of the american eugenics movement were watching all of this unfold and salivating with interest. so all these forces come together, a photographer named author rothstein created a visual portfolio of the shenandoah valley that matched what social scientists, the textual

portrait they were extracting from the region. they sent them to horace albright, 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 the lynchburg colony, the eugenics institute in lynchburg and that's 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 faraway land but two miles from one of the most wealthy resorts in the area which was either to expand to serve the national park. so the fate of the shenandoah valley for almost 2 generations were entangled with the state of the eugenics movement with colonization , again. in order to make people who were wealthy even wealthier and that is the story of the

mountains so often . >> wendy, you're taking on a subject that is very much a pressing contemporary issue. it's one that wendy and i discussed previously, that there are many newsrooms in america that have a reporter who is assigned to cover adoption, fostering, or the circumstances that really create the challenges that inform both those systems. what are the ways in which depictions of appalachia have informed and have affected adoption and foster care? >> okay, this is ugly.

what stephen and elizabeth have been talking about and the stereotypes and presumptions is well known and well felt by the people those are aimed at. 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 this is layered, it's hard to set up. if i say what's themost important industry in appalachia, how many of you are going to say whole ? coal has directed our past and is rightly or wrongly, i think elizabeth tackled this really well, ingrained 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 aftersomeone else's family , the worst thing you can be in central, rural appalachia is bad to your family. it used to be telling the

revenue or they had a still. the worst thing you can be as bad to your family so all ofa sudden , there's this big bad demand government is going to pay you to look after someone else's family. you got the moral high ground, economic high ground and you got the community high ground. it's absolutely hideous and the first time i hated it when i was researching and the first time i went back and explained this to some of the people i was talking to, they said you can't say that, nobody's going to listen to you, it's not okay to say that but the 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. the first time the kids become collateral damage in war between adults, we've all seen the divorce stories. now write it with culture versus government and the kids in the middle. western civilization is

doomed and it should be. sorry. >> going to -- one of the things i have about working with the history of the place is it seems to me much of the radical power of historical research and writing is in the ability to articulate things that have been overlooked or buried, whitewashed, overwhelmed by other powerful forces. i want to ask some questions about breaking with previously published histories. stephen, so stephen early on in ramp hollow writes that his book is predicated on the collision between two forms of economy in appalachia, one represented by corporations, the other manifested in families and farms which are

the result of agriculture itself . so in writing about the latter , stephen writes the household is this basic unit for agrarian communities. the right about how it reproduces skills and traditions, transmit that ecological knowledge and it q into adulthood. no other human institution doesthese things . and then 70 pages later, stephen talks about how there's really no shorthand for how material or money moves through ahousehold . and in a powerful moment writes this paucity of language seems like an artifact of capitalism and its tendency to eliminate all competing economic forums. where i'm interested here is 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 a historian and a researcher so can you tell me about the challenges of portraying appalachia through a lens that isn't a capitalist one? >> it's really difficult. i mentioned this notion of savagery as closely associated with people who are what i call, who i call agrarian. librarians are peasants, settlers, people who live close to their environments, produce commodities, sell stuff because they love money, they just don't depend on money. see the difference? this money is an attribute to the household . the household can't be organized around making money that we, i don't mean people in this room but we as a society have a hard time understanding that we basically have two seeds. there's the savage and then

there's the noble savage. ifind that one and the accusedof either one . as apologists understand this . and anthropologists don't. but in the general public, if you're either you're saying this is a stage of human evolution that thank goodness we've left behind because they were sopoor and they were always starving which of course is never true . or you accused of saying that this is a golden age. that they had virtues that we have lost. >> and they were giants in the past and they were happy and sufficient and strong. and that wasn't true. this is how they actually were and how they live. writing about american indians is a problem. so what i tried to do is i really tried to first of all use anthropologists as much as possible, especially economic anthropology and to write about them in the most, in ways that essentially

described their sufficiency so sufficiency is not wealth and not poverty. it's not anything that you want, it's having everything that you need. and i tried to kind of open up the material. a key idea in the book is this idea of an ecological base and how it is that all agrarian's no matter where they live, they were drew upon a large area of what we call naturalresources that they did not have to buy . and they did not have to invest money in because they could not . >> though there's no fishing village without a fishery. and there's no agrarian farm without a vast forest where you can hunt, forage foods and graze cattle as an example. these things cost nothing but they produce commodities that you then in fact himself. just to cover the point, what i found is when you attach a people to their landscape and

show how they lived on it it as an actual tangible way, it can effective teaching people what an agrarian is and to come back to your point, we lost thislanguage. even though in some cases , our grandparents, our great-grandparents were farmers, most of the people in this room, they tell you about the old country, coming from the great plains or something like that. wasn't long ago for us, even if it was you hundred, 400 years ago, that's nothing. we're talking about eagle living this way for 10,000 years. >> so we lost some language, we're going to jump forward in time. because we've also, in the course of language we've replaced it with other terms, other ways of framing history that can be problematic for entirely good reasons. so elizabeth, much of your

work in your book, is episodes, narratives and voices that counter all the trump genre of journalism. a colleague at cj are who referred to a lot of the coverage of the 2016 elections as drive-by journalism in the trump landy you and this term refers over and over again. in a lot of contemporary news coverage. >> journalism's charged with creating pieces of what join the historical record. so what does trump country writing leave out of contemporary history and what do we risk by those mentions? >> i think the trump country narrative is sort of reset the clock on appalachia in a way that's really unfair and almost unethical. trump country says the history of appalachia started in 2016 and that is, that's

bad enough, that's all you need to know. appalachia has existed for quite a long time. it has always been called appalachia but again, if you look in the book, people have always lived here. where a few years back longer than presidents, longer than two years and this is important for usto know and to understand how we got to the place . >> just to piggyback off the subject of capitalism which is one of my favorite things to talk about as well, it's important to understand whenever you see these narratives that rise to the top we have to understand there's a considerable amount of wealth and power behind them. i don't think the individual reporters are making bank out of writing bad stories about from land but a publisher might be, a media conglomerate might be, i think jd vance might be. anytime you see these powerful narratives come to us, we have to think who is

profiting from them. that is where our mind should be oriented to, who is making money off the trump country narrative? it's not the people in appalachia. i wish they did make more money, it's the people who are telling people to write them and are advertising on the back of them and who benefit from them and in an expedient way by disguising their politics and by doing the sleight-of-hand that says poor people is what our holding our country back, it's always the rich people who fail society, not the other way around so that's my concern when i think about narratives in appalachia and those are stories that tell ourselves that help us make sense of the world . we have almost very little control over them at this moment in time andi'd like to change that . >> something that came up in a conversation is the bankruptcy filings of west virginia.

and one of the incidents we talk about connected to that is there's a meeting of co-industry executives and interests during which an individual throughout a joke at the expense of a reporter named ken roy junior who is a leading reporter on issues of cole and economy in west virginia. and essentially, said you won't have a job for very much longer so won'tthat be good for everyone in this room . these sorts of concerns are very present . i think that to that end, i want to turn to when the. wendy, you've charged yourself with writing about a topic that is not only may be at risk of disappearing from a lot of contemporary reporting and dialogue. but is in many caseslargely absent from those things . you said that in a previous

conversation with me that you didn't consider yourself an expert on foster care and adoption when you set out to write "fall or fly" so how do you orient yourself in that world in order towrite about authority . >> you go talk to people. sit down and say here i am, who wants to talk to me and the social workers once they knew it was safe, 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 elizabeth, when i went to your us west virginia you had this list of scholarship and writing in appalachia that had been done before. the narrative on the foster care is absent on the left. it's voyeuristic and it's largely absent in appalachia. there's a book called another suitcase. i think the author is still living so that's all i'm going to say.

but the only book that touches on this in appalachian environments. there are very good books, there's one called turning stones and one called random family by adrian leblanc that evokes new york city and that's where you find the narratives that are driving foster care, public care reform and adoption but when you look at it in appalachia and i wanted to comment on something stephen said about foraging for food andthings like this . one of the stories in here is a place called cattle ranch, that's the nickname the social workers get it. i don't think the lady who runs it know she's got a nickname. this woman only takes in teenagers. there's something called permanent placement in foster care. it's an acknowledgment that the child is no longer cute enough to get adopted in a nutshell. when you turn 12, the next best thing you can get to adoptedis permanent placement . think of yourself when you were 13.

>> how much rejection could you take? >> and this kid just got cold we're going to look for a permanent placement for you because that's the best thing we can do for you so we start there. then these kids went to this place that shall remain nameless that i decided the woman who runs it, they'd be doing five or six other kids, one of whom is in a vegetative state but he's there because his two brothers are there. and a child in a vegetative stateand a foster care , how ugly can i get? >> the child is in a vegetative state and its money in the bank for the foster parents. i'm sorry, it just is but that child needs somewhere to be. somebody's got to do it so he immediately want to blame the foster parents. 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 harms and they were doing the bacon and potato and being canning and they were taking life skills to these kids when they graduated from high school they could go out there and get a job and that's why this woman was considered a desirable foster home area that she had no emotional investment in these kids. they were worker bees, she charged them rent for living there. they got fast food jobs and had a shared car and the night shift in the morning shift . some of them were graduated from high school. the kids rotated the clock. and the only person who had her own room in the house was the biological daughter of the family. now, we are already out and fighting 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 three meals a day, they've got shoes and warm clothes and they are not out on the street shooting up and if any of them come home drunk or high, she disciplines them in an appropriate way. we've got this agrarian history that's playing out still cause the social workers are saying okay, that's good. we've got it. >>. >> could you say more about, i didn't quite understand about how foster care is perceived in the mountains. i didn't quite understand how it's perceived by the people around it. people in the communities in which there are foster parents . is it an understandable way of making a living or is it something more sinister? >> there's no one thing you can say about foster care that fit every situation is perceived in some cases as a cash cab. it is perceived in some cases as god's destiny for you to

make the world a better place and it's perceived in some places as a necessary evil because you are 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 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 such a quick life, but cash cow, necessary evil. or god's will? >> i want to ask when the question about a power play and kind of import in reference to how we have these sort ofcattle ranch episode . details concerning who runs it or not disclosed in the

course of this plug. though this is from the introduction to wendy's book, under the heading who is telling the stories and why. so when he writes, she introduces the four social workers who are, who recur through the course of this book and she writes they will be your guide to this inquiry and their composite characters. the personalities are based on those social workers i came to know well. but the words come from many workers interviewed during the year i spent gathering is 62 separate oral histories represented to protect anonymity and also to frame the inquiry in a way that makes it flow, the social workers are combined into these 4+2 others. certainly from the, from a journalism perspective, composite characters is a phrase that immediately introduces questions of credibility and concerned about. >> so i'm curious how this approach enabled what felt

like for you the best telling of this story? >>. >> so dale is the name we gave the pastor and dale is one of the composite characters and he was the key that unlocks the door. dale went to his supervisor, how many of you work in a corporate structure? dale went to his supervisor and said this journalist storytelling lady who's written a nice book and she's willing to allow an interview people and tell their stories so we can get more foster parents to come and be foster parents and the supervisor saidthat's a wonderful idea, i never want to hear about it again . so with that dubious deniability behind us, dale went out and started inviting foster workers to call me. he gave them my phone number, gave them my email.

he sent them to the blog and said if you want to talk, sure. and once they knew they were safe, they blew. okay, so in order to tell the individual stories, it would be, you have to set up each particular situation and the stories that people told me, tended to fall into patterns. i have five different foster parents tell me almost exactly the same story of something that had happened to them and tell me i couldn't tell it because it would be too recognizable in the community. and when you start to realize where the patterns of the stories are falling and it's the individual nuances that make the stories most interesting that are different, you start to combine stories. all of the old wives foster workers, all the angry foster workers are cody. all the staff foster workers are best and all that fired up, i just got here and i'm going to change the world less than three years into the job workers are barbie. that's how the composite characters gathered together.

barbie had a lot to say, all the barbies have a lot to say it was a storytelling convenience that made the book easier to understand because if i'd gotten into the nuances of each individual story, you would have been identifiable and we're not going there. actually, in order for people who are interested enough to pick up the bookand read it but who are not themselves working in the system, that was enough detail . >> tell us briefly about the risks of that identify abilityposes . >> we pulled one story, jillian, she said i think we need to pull this story. we thought the woman who told it was too much risk. it actually god help us, it involved a shotgun and a guy on the mountain, anyway, it was a terrible story. and without the shotgun, it

was a repeated story so we pulled the shotgun out. ask me your actual question again. >> what would the risk be to someone who was identified jointly? >> so first of all there's a judgment and then there was the actual physical threat and of course in appalachia in people who have learned to manipulate the system for their financial benefits, they are suing. we were more afraid that someone would believe a story was about them and threatened to sue then we were of the actual physical threats. that's why so much of the book is scrambled. why the place names are all made up and the characters are composited and a few of the stories that are similar have a detail, a protagonist from thesecond story and a placement from the third story since they are all represented . >> so there was a bit of a response to this earlier so

let's have a fourth book in the room with us, jd fences hillbilly elegy which it sounds like many of you have read . and which vance says he wrote the book because quote, i want people to understand what happens in the lives of the poor and thepsychological impact that spiritual poverty has on their children . jd vance also reviewed stephen's book for the new york times and so i'd like to point out what stephen notes in "ramp hollow", a number of things about jd vance's book including vance got out other quotes, the most unsettling currents in hillbilly elegy life and the necessity of leaving an emphasis on a strong and uncompromising grandmother. if meaningful occupation only exist elsewhere most

appellations would be abandoned. if escape depends on someone who rises above the despair andabuse, most will be stuck . i'd like to ask everyone here about the perils that they see in vance's book . what's perils does having this one very popular and very sort of narrow account of life in appalachia, what risk does that pose for us? >>. >> so one of the things that drives me crazy about hillbilly elegy is that people when they appraise the book they say he's conservative person, that's fine but he said his politics aside to write some heart. this is not a luxury but i think even then i in particular grant are granted. >> but i would like to point out that when you blame poverty on thepoor, especially when you make money doing it, that is your politics . when you have a set of politics that say the failures that are holding us back as a country are rooted in certain individuals and in

this case whites but we all know who normally gets criticism about that for it, those are your politics. and so elderly elegy is not a deep political text. it's not text that is set in any form of politics aside. it's politics are everywhere and its politics are historical because it's politics reach right back into the past to the people that i talked about who are wanting to find a way to get red of these pesky deviant people that were living in the mountains that reaches right back to the 1970s, to the people that harry carl, the author of night comes to the cumberlands invited to whitesburg kentucky to see if they could set up a sterilization clinic in eastern kentucky to fix the gene pool. it's politics reach right back to 1994 to charles murray seliger. there are imprints ofpolitics all over this book .it does

not set anything side aside, in fact it's thrown open the door to bring these politics right back into our living rooms and is of most concern to our classrooms, there are people, good people, liberal people and universities across the country who would never think of assigning something about charles murray to their class were saying hillbilly elegy is great. it's just what we need. were going to have meaningful conversations about this book, you don't have to like it but it's a marketplace of ideas, it's the conversation that this can generate, it's ideas we can talk around. it's a prop, that's all it is. it's very dangerous and people don't have the chops to deconstruct that because appalachia issomething we only want to see and only want to think about when there's a problem. appalachia is not a place, it's a problem . and that is the enduring narrative andour enduring place in the world for people like jd vance . >> that was great.

>> on a more granular level with this book, the one thing that really caught my attention immediately when i just opened it up is the story of the couple who work in the title warehouse. >> you remember, he cannot understand why they don't show up for work. but ultimately they lose their job but they are a couple and he says this job is something about the middle-class income and they gave this up and he sort of says this is the problem. these people don't want to work. nobody in appalachia wants to put in an honest days work but what really upset me is she doesn't know anything about these people. she has no idea what's going on in their private lives. even assuming that this happened and i don't want to question him, how in the world. if you draw a conclusion on people whose own privatelife and struggles he has no concept about whatsoever .

so it's a very particular kind of narrator. and he's narrating a story from his own experience and yes, it's everything that he writes about his deeply political. in the sense that he showing how it is possible through a kind of, it's a ratio out her story.you remember horatio hauser store junior, the stories are not rags to riches. they are rags to middle-class accessibility. but in the stories one through life in the plot, these stories were called locked and the plot and that's jd vance. in his luck is, it is grandmother. and his plot is, well, it's his flock and he pulled himself up but other people, they lack lot and block and they're not going to make it. how do you reproduce even what he did? at one point in the book at the end of the book he says there's a sentence and it's almost exact. there's public policy can

help but public policy can't really help you there is no government program that's going to save appalachia. he 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 solution. >> there's a book i want to urge on all of you. i think it's close to what elizabeth has written and is called power and powerlessness in appalachia. he's the real deal. he comes right out of the mountains. himself and an actual genius, rhodes scholar in fact and he basically talks about three different realms of powerlessness. and i give this to you because ultimately i think that's what we're talking about. and even with the trump voter, is different reaction to powerlessness but

powerlessness just like vance's book is something that has to be understood historically. the first realm of powerlessness is when sort of like what happens in this room, there's a very open conflict over some social situation and one group and the other group loses but it's all out in the open, its actual conflict. the second realm, we understand that. party a, basically dominate party. the other is what you described where and with the journalists who lose this job is agenda setting. how can you manipulate the press were eliminated altogether. what is the people know and see and think about a social situation. >> the third realm of powerlessness is when party a can make party be see the world from their point of view. where essentially you take on the thoughts and feelings of the people doing the manipulating. and if you're aware of that, this is where your bread is

buttered. you can't question the job creators. and i'm interested in what all of you must think about powerlessness and how it plays out in the things that you've written? >>. >> so on april 7, jd vance and i are going to be on a panel together. >>. >> in cincinnati. at the appalachian studies association . and he is the product of his grandmother's care. and i find myself in the terrifying position of being an apologist for jd vance which, it is a nuanced 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. when i am going to say and if you don't understand, they

don't have to buy my book. i'll be happy to talk to you about this. we're probably going to get lunch tomorrow. >> if there is something going right in foster care in appalachia, 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 from money, don't care if you started because god told you to, if you emotionally invested in your kids, you are doing good for future generations. jd vance's grandmother invested in him. he may have turned out to be a scumbag, but jd vance's grandmother invested in him and that is the reason that he's a walking, functioning adult now. it's the reason he went to jail. i don't care -- no, i do care what jd vance said and i

think elizabeth is right about manythings, particularly the eugenics approach . what came out of the good is that there was an emotional investment in an individual and that's what i care about the most in that whole story. through the politics, screw the economics. therewas a woman who said i will not let these kids go down . and that's where the good stuff happens. it's 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 hillbilly elegy. i hope you didn't hear me say i like jd vance as politics or approach, i think he's been detrimental to appalachia. he chronicles a woman invested in her family even when it cost her a lot to do it and even though she was a flawed human being so that's all i have to say about that. >> we had more than those seven minutes.

we have significantly more time. we do. and so i'd like to open up the questions here. we have people with microphones in the room that can bring them to you, just throw your hand up if you have a question. we have a couple. we had a number of punches. >> can you hear me? my name is terrence fight and i'm the believe you are writing about. i grew up in southwestern virginia and i came here to hear what you people have to say because i kept picking up hillbilly elegy and i thought it was terrible. i have a question for you but i'm confused about this where you're seeing people come in and take over the land. my grandfather lost a leg when he ever people came in, my father lost his life and

the coal people came in, it slowly killed him. i watched him die for 20 something years. i remember when the war on poverty came to try to save us poor people and they were giving us or juice that tasted like antifreeze. so i got out of there, okay? my question is, you're talking about, i know in the shenandoah valley over the land 500 families were displaced but you seem to be talking about that in your book from what i read from the reviews but that never happened around where i'm from. i understand the people wanting to buy, the people didn't need to buy the land, to cut down the trees so they just cut down the trees and left. where does that fit in because it confused me? >> there's basically a number of different ways in which people were dispossessed. not every family who lived in

a long cabin and it up losing their land and going down and living in a coal or lumber camp, not everybody did but those were left behind who lost those woods, lost the entire way thatthey had made a living . so it happened a number of different ways. sometimes they never owned the land in the first place. if you go back to the period between the 1840s and 1870s, and the first investors, 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, passive investor.>> so when his other generation came in, they needed to figure out a way to get the people off of it or as you say, that the minerals from underneath it. what they did was they went to that county and they went to the state records. basically county record an

account you don't own this land at all. you've been writing these on. you've been trading around and there was basically two different these systems. one that was amount indeed or whatever, anyway, sure. there were mountain deeds and then there were officially but we're talking about figuring out who actually has rights to land and a judge saying i'm going to give this land, because there could be a dispute. i'm going to live the land to this owner and not this owner so this was an outright kind of dispossession that took place in the courts but another way of doing it was you actually describe which is if in fact you claim to own this farm but i can always around, i can make it impossible for you to live there. so then you will then go down and you will go into the logging camp and into the mining camp and you will do the work down there because you can maintain your life as you had before. and many of the people in the mountains were incapable just lazy. >>.

>> inaudible. >> i wrote through these places for a living, there were communities and there's no way all workers who lived on them. after i live. iunderstand there are other places . while you go down. >> i think these are things that may be room for the ways in which he's not trying to lay a blanket story to explain every individual case. i want to make sure we have time for the last question you can talk afterwards, that would be great . more questions. >> i have a question about the secrecy and i understand in foster care situations when you're dealing withminor children that's an issue but in the greater realm , in the greater realm of these stories, i think it's important to start naming names. i can share stories on the

descendents of people who were dispossessed from their land and shenandoah national park. i will the area so you will recognize my car, i'm the one with the national park lake says descendents. i also am the daughter of a man who my father's family or county interior, my mother had 14 children. they for various reasons they were all put into foster care. the foster care system as i could see it now that i know as later in life i've learned things, foster care was a replacementfor slavery . these children were sent out to work on farms and they were all over and the more i did, i have come across some churches. they denied they had anything to do with the system. ifound the church's name on land deeds . and they denied having any

activity in that area but i have their name on the court record. so my question is , what can we do about this secrecy? i think adam cohen tried to address this with in the cell and i applaud that book. but this was all part of a greater economic system, because something had begun post civil war to replace the slavery that ran these big estates. and i think this is the way it was done. and i think that the attitudes we have in this country for people and appalachia is very much the same attitudes we have now toward single mothers. those children were not born in virginal circumstances, but we don't give credit to the grandmothers and 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 like to think modestly that i started something. >> ..

what i actually fear most and this is one of the thing for 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 is going toward a place where we are going to see a return to work houses and the not going to be called that. there's no way america is ever going to call anything a workhouse. the foster care group homes we have now come individual group homes where people at eight to 15 children in their home and her license group home and large institutional group homes are in many ways directed to teach the children life skills.

that includes a lot of work. i think the future is going backwards and i think were going towards places where those who are inconvenient are gathered to be harnessed in some way for the good of the greater society that is inconvenience begins by them. i don't think that's limited to foster kids but but i think its going to be hidden with foster kids because the minute you say what's going to happen, people get real mad. they might not do anything about it but will be comments on facebook. so to answer question of secrecy, i don't think it will help. i don't think naming names. i think destroying the system will help. i think individuals stepping up will help, and to think they probably have things to say. >> i have a quick, practical thing to add. i think blowing secrecy helps. i would suggest if you're new to the area contact your lawmaker or represented. some of the laws we need to be

deemed to be changed so you can get information the informatioo get. the records probably still exist but there are privacy laws that regulate them. contact your regulator and find at the school day. i'm kind of new to virginia, it's that good but could be changed. before writing about appalachia i wrote about reparations. surprisingly there's bipartisan support for a reparations movement of the 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 to agitate and advocate on the issue. >> so i'm sorry, we really need to come i like to honor at the time we have with our guests and also enable more questions. if we could please give us your question in as a correct way is possible it would be helpful. thank you. >> i lived in appalachia for about 12 12 years in the coalfs in eastern kentucky and also southwest virginia.

we haven't talked much about cold and icy cold as being a trap in the coalfields as kentucky and west virginia and virginia, probably west virginia, too, because the students with whom i work almost all of the parents, male parrots, all worked in the coalfields of those basically the only job that was. what happened was the person worked in the coalfields until they got black lung and many of the students with whom i worked when i inquired about with the pair did, they would say my father, he's on black long. so i think cole, if some of you could approach called and whether that was a trap or not pickles cut of a double-edged sword, way, way to get out upon the but also a trap, leased the way that i look at it. >> yep. [laughing] and i would say by design.

yeah, so you take someone's words, you pay them less than the value of the land, and then they can't remain. or you buy their mineral rights, so that then taking the coal out of it requires to rip up the entire mountain and then you say, well, you can go down and live in the coalfields. the stories i've seen, people would go down and they would say we just want to make it a fun so we can go back up on the ridge. the neighbors would say yeah, we said that, , too, we've been hee for three years. what happens is the companies were living at a place where there was very little government, and the counties were basically kind of subcontracted all kinds of governmental services to the coal companies. the shares in the police were basically there to serve the coal company and the soul of money around that the coal companies, they make to their own money, script. very often little coins.

when you made your own money you have enormous amount of control. you don't have enough to live over the winter, i will eventually to need against your wages. then i will pay you little tokens and it won't be enough. i will write down the difference of what you only now you're in debt. if you leave the sheriff, after you so, therefore, you are not going anywhere. so, yes, i think a trap door exactly how i think of it. it just slammed shut behind them. >> i would quickly add that 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 now. this is the pattern of substitution when the coal mines daikon the land is ruined. the workforce is captive and despondent, , so it's a prime aa for a prison to be constructed because there's a compliant workforce, sub par land at a place to hide people that we do

not value enough. that's the story of cold now in central appalachia is the story of a prison growth. >> one more question and then, okay, and then we will allow people to get books and talk to the authors. >> stephen, this question is for you. i was in newport virginia last sunday for two hours service in solitary for that community as a mountain valley pipeline is coming through. my question over these last couple of years, is around imminent domain. i think you've given me the seats for that but the question is how can a corporation, income etiquette i feel like we're perpetuating the store the tappan with the coal industry, small community, for generations, people live in this wonderful little town and now the cutting started two weeks ago i think, and there are lawsuits around imminent domain but the companies with the money

keeps, keeps allowing this to happen. i don't know if us as citizens,, doesn't seem like were able to have the power to be effective enough. my question is rent imminent domain and how these corporations can keep that going. thank you. >> i don't know the exact story so i can't comment on what's happening in that town. imminent domain is the notion that the government can essentially condemn a piece of land, how you market value because there's a greater social value to the land then you're getting it. it's not a terrible idea. it's how we get roads and canals and things like that and highways. but what happened in west virginia goes way beyond eminent domain. it's really a series of laws and relationships between the state and corporations. in which localities were evacuated under any authority over what happens happened the. in other words, coal company would not come in in 1900 and 1d

this money in a coal mine if the town could vote all kinds of regulations or if they wanted to could say you can't mine coal in this county are in this town. so the state needed to 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 having clients. going to get to convince the legislator or in some cases the governor of what their plans were. that it was made and nowhere else in the state would be able to change it. i'm just a historian. and so that's what i would say. it's not so much eminent domain, which is supposed to be a much more transparent social process but it's supposed result in something that's not for private industry but purely for the public good. so we use that word but it's really a relationship between the state and the corporations.

>> i want to thank everyone for coming. i want to thank elizabeth and stephen and wendy. [applause] >> please, virginia humanities employs you to fill out your evaluation forms. i implore you, peru's the books pick if they have time i'm sure the authors will be happy to speak with you. thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> booktv is on twitter and facebook and we want to hear from you.

>> i thought they were huffing glue like everyone else because they said these things that sounded utterly supremely racist and finance but they would say if we get the right candidate our messages close the border, build the wall even, bring the troops home, all that kind of stuff. they believed if they got the right candidate to say these things, they could get in gain power. i thought they were nuts until about 2016 summer. turns out they were in a way right. they knew back then that white voters in america would be willing to accept this ideology, this mindframe, if conditions were right. suddenly conditions were right. >> when does he start doing his i'm going to start uniting all these into a party? i think the always wanted to,

but it was never really the right time because he's a young guy. you've got to sort of become a known entity in the far right and then he tried to start his own thing. he was relatively well known back in 2012, 2013 because of this thing called white student union that he started at towson university in maryland and it spread to a few campuses until the colleges said rightly so this is not good. they knew to have a faculty advisor, all student need a faculty advisor, and this thing had a faculty advisor wigley and they said no, you cannot be this faculty advisor. after that he can decided to form this political party which was a traditionalist workers party which at that time it was like a proto-fascist, it had had elements of far left ideology. it was very prounion and workers

and all this kind of stuff. >> kind of populist. >> very populist. but he never, i guess you look at the movement itself and realize we're too small and fractured for us to be able to gain any kind of semblance of power. i think at the time the seed of, form something that is something started and he started reaching out to other groups. he's a talkative convincing guys that he was able to pretty early start growing the pie. pipe. he went to skinheads in pennsylvania. he would to skinheads in california and recruited them. he went to the league of the south, in the south, and was able to recruit some of them. and then finally he came across jeff scoop who was the leader of the national socialist movement which is a large neo-nazi pageantry, dress-up and ss uniforms we talked about. he was also looking for more members.

that's what all this comes down to pick it comes down to recruiting. i have 15 guys, you had 20 guys, let's have 35 guys. so they were able somewhat to put aside all their ideological differences. for a group of people who all exist in that one scene on the far right, they have a lot of differences. they can agree on very little, but they still manage to get together some and that's what we are now. there's an alliance of sorts. >> you can watch this and of the programs online at booktv.org. >> i've got to say that's been an exciting last 30 minutes or an hour or so. the transition is always kind of a mixed time. we hate to see our great leaders go and we welcome to see our new leaders, so we