coming. [applause] thank you so much for coming. if you need a book they are at the registers. >> thank you all.

to get through pertaining to this event, so first we want to thank the city of charles bell as a sponsor for this conversation and for hosting us.

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evaluations. fill these out before you leave, please. they will be useful to help keep the festival free and open to the public. if you didn't get an evaluation or have to leave quickly, you can do this online at vabook.org/survey. please support the authors today and those that you encounter throughout the festival as well as the local booksellers. there are books for sale that we can peruse after the event. one of our guests today actually is a local bookseller and i would expect she would encourage you to please do the same. >> shop local. >> the authors will be available for a book signing after the program. okay. let's get started. so, introductions, elizabeth catte is the author of what they were getting wrong about appalachia. all three are lined up on the table in front. it

she's a public is torn from east tennessee and co-owner pitchh yields a phd in public history from middle tennessee state university and currently lives in stanton virginia. "ramp hollow" this one. he is a professor of history at the university and the author of the great delusion and learning the earth. his writings have appeared in harper's magazine, a quarterly at the new haven review. and we have wendy welch the author of "fault or fly the story of foster care and adoption in appalachia." she's also the author and editor of three previous books including the bookstore of big stone gap and she runs a bookstore in southwest virginia. i want to see the thought at the start of the event to thinking about some of the topics.

in his essay, james baldwin has some thoughts about how the stories of device or comfort ahead of the greater understanding and that can weaken our ability to deal with the world as it is in ourselves as we are. he concludes with a fought but i try to bear in mind when encountering the works of history and what they have reached back over hundreds of years or what we are doing with contemporary issues. all of these books give us history often by the difficult work. to get started, i'd like to ask everyone to share the stories for these three books. when a when and how did the concerns and the ideas for this books first take shipwrecks if we

could start with elizabeth and then go to stephen and windy and hear from everyone. >> the origin orchestra of my s anger. i had recently moved from tennessee to texas with my partner just as the 2016 president election started hotting up.rt i consumed every piece of media that i could about what was happening in appalachia during the election, how and what the feeling was, what the mood was, what the predictions weree and the stories were atrocious. it reminded me of the phenomenon that happened during the war on poverty when reporters and journalists and photographers went to the mountains to mine misery. and so wanted to study that phenomenon from the ground up in the presidential election could be that moment but the other thing that was happening as i made small talk and got to know people and the university committee, business leaders, people i hope would be my colleagues compare view and what her too me about "hillbilly elegy." [laughing]

and he wanted to know what i thought about this book and they weren't curious in what i thought about it. the wanted me togy answer for i. 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? and that may be angry when it went on job interviews, this book was in my face and when i try to make new friends this book was my face and when i try to understand about politics this book was in my face and would open the newspaper his face was in my face. [laughing] and so i i very happily connecd to a publisher in ohio who is having similar feelings about the rust belt because people can't tell the rust belt and appalachia apart. she was kind enough to give me a platform to work through some of these feelings and that is how my book was born. [applause] >> i'll just interject quickly.

i expect we will probably talk more about j. d. dances book. we will try to not let that dominate. >> i don't have a story that's it when you're as entertaining as that. my book started maybe ten or 12 years ago i was trying to understand american capitalism and wanted to write about people losing their land, dispossession as w an essential element of how capitalism develops and grows and what essential to. i could've written a book about american indians. i could have written a book about the greatest dispossession in history of north america, it was too vast and to general. when it 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 nott understand, there were the southern mountains and a complicated storyou about how a white settler culture at one time was considered nearly

heroic and then lost its land. i set out to write about appalachia as a case study but it took over the book and some ways it took over my life as i i dedicated years to try and understand it as very much an outsider. so my book is really about capitalism, which i'm environmental historian and a method for storing of political economy. so i was putting those things together and that 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 who i would do anything for. this is a lovely, lovely man eddie came to me about two years after the bookstore was out and he said, the bookstore, if someone sums it up they say it's a triumph of the human spirit. he came to me and he said can

you do for foster parents what you did for bookstores? pardon? he says,m 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 monograph self publish table. we will sell 80 copies to people who are already fostering. it's an important story but it's the core to get outside the parameters of the people who are already playing in the sandbox because the other people to want to hear. how do you a story nobody wants to hear? we settle on a blog and that also got us past the anonymous park or foster parents could talk without being judged. because if your faucet. you already judge. the next word of your mouth doesn't matter. so i said let's do this blog. he said that's fine. you are remembering this man is a pastor. we set up the plug. i started editing of the

people's stories. i really, really love to work with other people's stores. i love to help them to shape the stories. it's exciting for me. i had for five people is working with and where shipping their stories and the appalachian studies 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. the people will feel a sense of accomplishment. the grant will be over and we will all be happy. so we do that at any of you have been to the appalachian studies association know they put out this huge book of all the things that are going to happen. my phone rings. this woman says i note with interest your doing a blog about appalachian stories on adoption of prosecutor is there a book associate with the project? i said no. she said, would you like there to be? [laughing] i called the pastor and i said duty, that was totally cheating to get a book deal. [laughing] and that's of the book came

about. [applause]e] >> i'm going to start off with a question for another sort of question for everyone, each of these books exists directly or indirectly in a certain tension with other older accounts of appalachia. both stephen and elizabeth write about travel writing, , about local color essays that depict appalachia and its residents as something other. they also get into how those depictions affect come have affected the region and its people. stephen, there's a line that it want to flag from "ramp hollow," a moment where you're right that aspirations of stupidity backwardness and volatility coincided with the seizure of environment. tell us about the relationship. tell us about the relationship

between 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, i'd be happy to. >> 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 kind of slipd down what i call a cultural gradient. in effect people who live close to their environments very often administered authority called them savages, even though it's the way most people have lived overs the last 10,000 years. in fact, aquarians are the largest class in human history. but it's an easy for us to forget that and then to forget, a fact how to talk about them and have actually lived.

so an image like this i could've showed you daniel boone rolling through cumberland gap with all the people behind them, , that picture, painted by thomas art beckett. but instead this is kind of the best image, that of documentary image that i could find depicting these poor white folk. they are poor but they are sufficient. so the remarkable thing is that inside 50 years, excuse me while through my entire thing. inside 50 years we get to this. 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 extracted industry at the same time. you can actually watch it as people begin to understand that there was a great deal of wealth to be pulled out of appalachia. the role that those pioneers

played, the ones who rolled with the daniel boone, was basically obscured. in other words, 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 dispossessing him just before they themselves became dispossessed, they were this possessors. ..or >> say 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 the hollows and given to coal and lumber companies.

so, that's 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. the people in the mountains were in their own ways not doing that well. their own agriculture and their own way of life was, in fact, suffering at the same time. >> let me leave that there. >> great. and elizabeth touches on specifically and for me one of the most effective moments of what you're getting wrong about appalachia. elizabeth is writing about the seizure of land what is now shenandoah park. when that process began, writers, photographers, journalists, social scientists, i'm partially doing scare quotes here, they all travel to shenandoah valley and document families displaced and elizabeth writes specifically about hollow folk, that depicts

mountaineers as primitive and backwards. 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 hollow folk and takes picture 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 folk in the photographs. what are the ways in which they damage appalachia? >> i want to see if i actually have a -- i thought i had a little clip from hollow folk on my phone that i could read. but essentially what happened in the 1930's and it matches clearly the art of appalachia

history, separating poor people from the richness of the land around them and that takes many shapes. and the industry is the best example, but natural beauty, tourism. dedevelopment is a part of at that story as well and in the 1930's the consolidated power of the federal government thought it would be beneficial to the people of the region, to politicians and business owners if there was a national park so the shenandoah national park was born. it was facilitated through the eminent domain, the conservation act, and through removal of people from their homes. 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 the 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 eugenics movement were watching all of this unfold and salivating with interest. so these forces come together, a photographer named arthur rothstein created a visual portfolio of the valley hatching what social scientists, the portraits they were constructing from the region and they sent them to the national park service who gleefully said we would colonize, and what happened to many of them, many of them children were taken to the land that they lived on and they worked, that happened to be not in some isolated faraway land from two miles from one of the

most wealthy resorts in the area, which was eager to expand to serve the national park, and so the fate of the shenandoah valley for almost two generations was-- to make people wealthy even wealthier and that's the story of the mountain so often. >> wendy, you're taking on, you know, a subject that is very much a pressing contemporary issue, it's one that, you know, we-- wendy and i discussed previously. it's not that there are many, you know, news rooms in america that have a reporter who is assigned to cover adoption, fostering, owe circumstances that really create the challenges that inform, that inform both the systems.

what are the ways 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 and the stereo types and presumptions is very well-known and well-felt by the people those are aimed at, right? we're smart enough to know when we're being stereo typed and presumed. the awful, awful elements of adoption and fostering is the vengeance factor by the people who enter it. this is layered, it's hard to set up. if i say what's the most important industry in appalachia, how many of you are going to say coal? all right, okay. coal has directed our past and is rightly or wrongly, i think elizabeth tackles 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. they useded to be telling the revenuers, they had a still was the joke about that. 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, the man, government to pay you to look after someone else's family. you've got the moral high ground, you've got the economic high ground and you've got the community high ground. it's hideous, absolutely hideous and first time i hit it when i was researching and the first time i went back and explained this to some of the people i was talking to, you can't say that, nobody's going to listen to. 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. sorry. [laughte [laughter] >> we're going to -- so, one of the things i have about working with the history of the place, it seems like much of the radical power of historical research and writing is in the ability it has to kind of articulate something that's been overlooked or has been buried, whitewashed, overwhelmed by other powerful forces. so i want to ask some questions about kind of breaking with

previously published histories. and steven, so steven early on in hollow writes it's predicated on the collision of two forms of academy in appalachia. one is represented by corporations and the other manifested in families and farms and resulted in agriculture itself. so, you know, writing about kind of the latter, families and farms, steven writes that the household is this basic unit for communities, and he writes the household spreads the risk of ventures and reproduces skills and traditions and translates vast economical logic, no other human institution does these things and then 70 pages later, steven talks about how there's really no shorthand for how material or money moves through a household, and there's a

powerful moment where he writes this paucity of language seems like an artifact of capitalism and tendency for all competing economic forms. where i'm interested here, 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 a historian and as a researcher. so can you tell me about the challenges of portraying appalachia through a lens that isn't a capitalist one? >> yeah, it's really difficult. i mentioned this notion of savagery. as closely associated with people who are, as i call, who are called egrarions, they're peasant settlers, people who live close to their environments, produce

commodities and sell stuff, they love money, they don't just depend on money. you see the difference? money is an attribute to the household and it's just not-- the household can't be organized around making money, but we, and i don't mean people in this room, but we as a society have a really hard time understanding that we basecle have two speeds. like i said, there's the savage and there's the noble savage. i find one can be accused of either one. anthropologists understand this, right. and other anthropologists don't accuse them, but in the general public, either you're saying that this is a stage of human evolution, that thank goodness we've left behind because they were so poor and always starving, which is never true, or you're accused of saying that this is a golden age, that they had virtues that we have lost, you know. and you know, there were giants in the past and they were happy and sufficient and strong, and

that wasn't true. had we seen people for how they actually were and how they lived, writing about american indians is the very same problem, the very same problem. so what i try to do, i try to, first of all, use anthropologists as much as possible, especially economic anthropologists and to write about them in the most -- in a way 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 try to kind of open up their material world. a key idea in the book is this idea of an ecological base and how it is that all egrarions, no matter who they are awhere they live, drew on natural resources they did not have to buy and did not have to invest money in because they could

not. so there's no fishing village without a fishery, right? and there's no agrarion farm without a vast forest where you can hunt, forage food and graze cattle as an example. 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 was when you attach people to their landscape and show how they lived on it in an actual tangible way, it's in effect if we had people teaching exactly what an egrarion is. we've kind of lost the language. in some cases our grandparents, excuse me, our great-grandparents were farmers and most people in this room could tell you about 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're talking about people living this way for 10,000

years. so i'll leave it at that. >> so we've lost some language, we're going to jump, jump forward a bit in time because we've also, in the course of different language we've replaced it with other terms, other ways of framing history that can be problematic for entirely new reasons. so elizabeth, much of your work in your book, raises narrative, episodes and journalism-- i had a colleague who recover recovered-- covered elections in 2016 as drive-by journalism and in contemporary news coverage. journalal is charged with pieces of historical record.

what does -- that risk in that mention? >> i think that the trump country narrative sort of resets the clock on appalachia and in a way that's really unfair and almost unethical. the trump narrative, the history of appalachia started in 2016 and that's, you know, that-- and that's all you need to know. appalachia has existed for quite a long time, it hasn't always been called appalachia, but again, if you read steven's book it's -- people have always lived here and our history is back longer than one president, longer than two years and this is important for us to know, to understand how we got to the place. just to piggy back off 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 to 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, and stories about trump land, but he think a publisher might be. i think a media conglomerate might be. i think that jd vance might be. i think that anytime that you see these powerful narratives come to us, we have to think who is profiting from them. this is where our mind should be oriented to. who is making money off of the trump country narrative. it's not the people in appalachia. it's, you know, unfortunately, i wish they did make more money, it's not the people who are actually writing them. it's the people who are telling people to write them and advertising on the back of them and who benefit from them in an expedient way by disguising their politics and by doing this slight of hand that says that poor people are what is holding our country back, not rich people. it's always the poor people who fail society and not the other way around. so that's my concern when i think about narratives in

appalachia, it's the stories that we tell ourselves that help us make sense of the world and my place 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'd like to change that. >> something that came up in a conversation, elizabeth and i had a couple of days ago, is the bankruptcy filings of the west virginia gazette mail and one of the incidents we talked about connected to that is there's a meeting of coal industry executives and interests during which a individual threw out a joke at the expense of a reporter named ken ward, jr. who is a leading reporter on issues of coal economy in west virginia. and essentially said, well, you know, he won't have a job for very much longer, so, won't that be good for everyone in this room? i mean, these, yeah, these sorts of concerns are very present. i think that kind of to that

end, i'm going to turn to wendy. wendy, you've charged yourself with writing about topics that not only is maybe at risk of disappearing from a lot of contemporary reporting and dialog. but is 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 or adoption when you set out to write, how did you set yourself in that world in order to write about it with authority? >> you talk to people and sit down and say, here i am, who wants to talk to me and the social workers, one thing was safe blew, blew like volcanos and they had stories they had to tell. the foster parents didn't, they didn't want to talk to anybody no matter what, but in talking about-- elizabeth had, when i went to

hear you at west virginia university, you had a list of scholarship and writing in appalachia that had been done before, the narrative on foster kids is absent unless it's voyeuristic and it's largely absent in appalachia. there's a book called another suitca suitcase. i think the author is still living so that's all i'm going to say, but that's the only book that touches on this in an appalachia environment. if there are books-- there are very good books, "turning stones" and one called "random family" adrian leblanc set in new york city, that's where you find the narratives driving foster care, foster care reform and adoption, but when you look at it in appalachia, i want today comment on something steven had said about foraging for food and things like that. one of the stories in here is of a place called cattle ranch,

that's what the workers, i don't think the lady who runs it knows it's a nickname. and it's for foster care, basically, the child isn't cute enough to be adopted. and when you turn 12 the next best thing is permanent placement. think of yourself when you were 13, right? how much rejection could you take? right? okay. and this kid just got told, we're going to look for a permanent placement for you because that's the best thing we could do for you, okay? and we start there and the kid went to the place that much remain nameless and i disguised the woman who runs it and join five or six other kids, one of whom is a vegetative state, but he's there because his two brothers are there and a child in vegetative state in foster

care, how ugly can i get? it's money in the bank for a foster parent, i'm sorry, it just is, but that child needs somewhere to be. somebody's got to do it so, you know, we immediately want to blame the foster parent, okay. so we start there. and the children in cattle ranch were being taught to farm potatoes and can 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 stills to the kid so when they graduated from high school they could get out there and get a job and 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 they had a shared car and the night shift and the morning shift kids. some were graduated from high school. the night shift and the morning

kids rotated the car and the only person who had her own room was the biological daughter in the family the we're all con signing this woman to the layers in hell. the foster kids system liked her, the kid are safe. the beds are their own, three meals a day, shoes, warm clothes and they're not on the street shooting up. and if even comes home drunk or high she disciplines them in an appropriate way. we've got this history that's playing out still because the social workers are saying, okay, that's good. that's good. we've got it. >> can i ask a question. >> yeah, please. >> could you say more, wendy, about, about i didn't quite understand, about how foster care is perceived in the mountains? i don't -- i didn't quite understand how it's perceived

about the people around, people in the communities in which there are foster parents, is it a way of making a living? >> there's no one thing to say about foster care in every situation, but it's perceived in some cases as a cash cow. it's perceived in some cases god's destiny for you to make the world a better place and it's 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 that's wrong, taking somebody else's kids is wrong on every level and that-- we have to talk in such generalities here because it's such a quick slice, but the -- cash cow necessary evil, or

god's will. >> so i would ask wendy a question fall or fly and part in reference to how we have the cattle ranch episode and details concern runs it or not disclosed in the course of this book. so this is from the introduction of wendy's book, under the heading who is telling these stories and why. so wendy writes, you know, she introduces the four social workers who are-- who recur throughout the course of this book and she writes, they will be your guides for your inquiry and they are composite characters, their personalities are based on key social workers i came to know well, but the works these characters speak come from many workers i interviewed gathering 62 oral histories represented in this book. to protect anonymity and frame

the inquiry in a way that makes it flow, the social workers are combined into these four, plus a few others. >> certainly, from a journalism perspective, composite characters is a phrase that immediately introduces questions of credibility and concerns about that. so i'm curious how this approach enabled what felt like for you the best telling of this story? >> so gail is-- dale is the name we gave the pastor and he was the key that unlocked the door. he was the supervisor-- how many of you work in a corporate structure? dale went to his supervisor i've got a story telling lady she's written a nice book and

tell the story so we can get more foster parents to be more foster parents. the supervisor says, that's a wonderful idea, i never want to hear about it again. so, with that, you know, dubious deniability behind us, dale went out and started inviting foster workers to call me. he gave them my phone number, gave them my e-mail, he sent them to the blogs and said, if you want to talk, talk to her. and once they knew they were safe. they blew. okay. 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 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 they would be too recognizable in the community. and when you start to realize where the patterns of the stories are falling and it's just the individual nuances that make the story the most interesting, that are

different, you start to combine the stories. so all of the old wives foster workers are dale. all of the angry foster workers are cody. all the sad foster workers are beth and all of the fired up, i just got here and change the world less than three years into the job social workers is barbie. >> barbie had a lot to say, all of the barbies had a lot to say. it was a story telling convenience that made it easier to understand. if i had gotten into the nuances of each story, the people would have been identifiable and we're 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 just very briefly about the risks that identifiability poses in these

stories. >> we pulled one story, gillian e-mailed me and i think we need to pull the story, it was too much at risk, god help us, it actually involved a shotgun and a guy up on the mountain who had-- anyway, it was a terrible story. and without the shotgun, it was a repeated story so we pulled the shotgun out. so the-- ask me your actual question again. >> sure. what would the risk be to someone who is identified directly in the course of this book? >> right, okay. so first of all, there's a judgment and then there was the actual physical threat and then, of course, in appalachia, in people who have learned to manipulate a system for their financial benefit, they're 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 place names are all made up and the characters are composited and a few of the stories that are similar have a detail from one story, a protagonist from the second story and a placement from the third story so they're all represented. >> okay. so there was a bit of a response to this earlier so i'd like to talk about the fourth book in the room with us, -- 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 the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on our children. and also reviewed steven's books for the new york times and so i'd like to point out that steven notes in ramp hollow, a number of things.

and the most unsettling currents, why the necessity of leaving and emphasis on a strong and uncompromising grandmother. if meaningful work and decent occupation are only elsewhere, most appalachians will be abandoned, someone who rises above despair and abuse, most would be stuck. i'd like to ask everyone here with the barrels that they see in vance's book. what perils does having this one very popular and very sort of narrow account in appalachia, what risk does that really pose for us? >> one of the things that drives me crazy about that book, he set-- he's a conservative person and that's fine, but he set his

politics aside to write from the heart. this is not a luxury that steven and i in particular are granted. when you blame poverty of the poor especially when you make money doing it, that's your politics. so you have a set of politics that say the failures holding us back as a country are rooted in certain individuals, in this case, we all know who normally gets criticism of that sorts, those of your politics. and so it's not a de-political text, not setting any form of politics aside. it's politics everywhere and its politics are historical because its politics reach right back into the past to the people i talked about in chando chandota-- shenandoah valley of the people wanting to get rid of the pesky

people in the mountains, back to the 1970's, the author of "night comes to the crumb ber land", invited to kentucky to see if they could set up a sterilization clinic in kentucky to see if they could fix the gene pool. and it's back to -- there are imprints of politics all over this book. it's not set anything aside. it's opened the door to bring the politics right back in our living rooms and of most concern to me, in our classrooms, there are people, good people, liberal people, and universities across the country who would never think assigning something with charles murray to the class. this is what we need and we need to have meaningful conversations about the book, but it's a marketplace of ideas and it's the ideas that we can talk around. it's a prompt, that's all it

is, it's a prompt. very dangerous, very, very dangerous and people don't have the chops to deconstruct that because appalachia is something that 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's the enduring narrative and our enduring place in the world for people like jd vance. >> that was great. i really agree. yeah, on a more granular level in the book. one thing that really caught my attention immediately when i opened it up, is the story of the couple who work 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're a couple and he says that this job is something above the middle class income and they gave this up and he sort of said, this is the problem. these people don't want to work. nobody in appalachia wants to

put in an honest day's work. what upset me, he doesn't know anything about these people. he has no idea what's going on in their private lives. even assuming this happened, i don't want to question him, what, how in the world could he draw conclusions on people whose own private lives and struggles he has no concept about whatsoever. he's a very particular kind of narrator and he's narrating a story from his own experience and, yes, it gets everything that he rights about is deeply political in the sense that he's showing how it is possible through a kind of-- it's a horatio alger story. you remember horatio alger, they're not rags to riches, they're rags to middle class respectable. and in the stories, luck and pluck. a whole series was called luck and pluck. and he's got luck and pluck and

his luck is his grandmother and his pluck is well, just his pluck. [laughter] >> he pulls himself and other people today lack luck and pluck, they're not going to replace it. and how do you reproduce what he did. at the one point at the end of the book, there's a sentence and 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, so basically, he basically destroys the notion that there's any larger policy or social solution to the problems, 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 very close to what elizabeth has written and it's called power and powerless in appalachia and he's the real deal, he comes right out of the

mountains himself, an actual genius, a 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, it's different reactions to powerlessness, but powerlessness just like vance's book is something that has to be understood historically. the first realm of powerlessness, happens in this room, there's open conflict over some social situation and one group wins and the other group loses, but it's out in the open, it's actual conflict. the second realm-- so we understand that, right? party a basically dominates party b. the other is what you described where it was the journalist who loses his job. is it genter setting. can you eliminate the press

altogether? and what people see 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. where 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 and the panelists think about powerlessness and how it plays out in the things you've written. >> so on april 7th, jd vance and i are going to be on a panel together. [laughte [laughter] >> in cincinnati at appalachia 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 is, it's 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 for jd vance. what i'm going to say and if you don't understand it. you don't have to buy my book to talk to me, i'll be happy to talk to you about this, in fact, we're probably going to go get some lunch. if there is something going right in appalachia, in rural places, it's 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 if you started because god told you to, don't care if you started because you were mad, if you emotionally invest in your kids, you're doing good for future generations. jd vance's grandmother invested

in him and now, he may have turned out to be a scumbag, but jd vance's grandmother invested in him and that's the reason that he's a walking, functioning adult now, right? it's the reason he went to yale. i don't care-- no, i do care, i do care deeply what jd vance said and i think that elizabeth said was right 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. screw the politics, screw the economics. there was a woman who said i will not get these kids-- him and his sister, i will not let them go down. and that's where good i think so this happen. it's the little points of light in rural areas that say i will not let this kid go down. i hope you didn't hear me say i

liked the book or jd vance's approach, i think he's been detrimental to appalachia, what i like he chronicled a woman who invested in her family even when it cost her a lot to do it and even though she's a flawed human being. that's all i have to say about that. >> we actually have more than the seven minutes. >> other stuff to talk about. >> we do. in fact, i'd like to open it up to questions here, we have people with microphones in the room and they can bring them to you, throw your hand up if you have a question. great, and we have, it looks like one-- we have a couple in fact? we have a number of questions. >> hello, my name is-- can you hear me? is that too close? >> my name is terrence sikes and i'm a hillbilly you're writing about, i grew up in southwestern virginia and i came here to hear what you

people had to say because i kept picking up hillbillyelogy, and it was a terrible book. people were taking over the land. my grandfather lost a leg, when the timber people came in. and my father lost his life. when the coal people came in, 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 gave us orange juice that tasted like frickin' anti-freeze. i got out of there, okay? my question is, you're talking, i know in the shenandoah valley they took over the land, about 500 displaced, but you seem to be talking about that in your books, i don't understand that, that never happened from where i'm from. i understand the coal people

wanted under deed they didn't need to buy it, and the people didn't need to buy the land to cut down the trees, they paid you a few bucks and cut down the trees and left. where does that fit in? because that confuses me. >> there's basically a number of different ways that people were-- i understand that not every family who lived in a log cabin ended up losing their land and going down and living in a coal or a lumber camp. not everybody did, but those who were left behind who lost those woods lost their-- the entire bay that they had made a living. >> how did they lose, why, i don't understand how it happened? >> so, it happened 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 the 1870's, when the first investors with-- in capital. people who basically took over from george washington's generation, they were interested in the actual

extraction of resources from the mountains. george washington was a passive investor, never visited his land. when the other generation came in, they needed to figure out a way to get people off of it or as you say get the men ralls from underneath it. what they did was, they went to the county and they went to the state records, basically county records and they found, oh, you actually don't own this land at all. you've been writing deeds on it and trading it around. 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're talking about figuring out who actually has rights to land and that a judge saying, i'm going to give this land-- since there's a dispute i'm going to give the land to this owner and not this owner, so that was a kind of outright blatant dispossession that took place in the courts. another way of doing it was, as you actually described, which

is, if in fact, you claimed to own this farm, but i can cut all the woods around it, i can make it impossible for you to live there so you will then go down and move into the logging camp and into the mining camp, and you'll do the work down there because you cannot maintain your life as you had it before. and many of the people in the mountains were incapable or just unwilling. >> but those camps were not that big for the miners who live in and to me, that story i don't understand. >> they weren't that big? >> no, because i drove through these places in virginia, little coal mining communities and no way all the workers lived on those places. now, that's where i lived. i understand that other places and, the rich guy that lives on the hill and-- >> i think it made room for a number-- the ways in which not -- he's not trying to lay a blanket story to explain every individual case. i want to make sure we have

time for everyone else to have questions. i appreciate you bringing that up. >> why don't we talk afterwards. >> more questions. >> i have a question about the secrecy and i understand that in foster care situations with children that's an issue. in the greater realm of these stories, i think it's important to start naming names. i can share stories, i'm a descendent of people dispossessed from their land in shenandoah national park and i recently moved to the area so you'll probably recognize my car. i'm the one with the shenandoah national park place that says dece descende descendent. i'm the daughter of a man, my father is from orange county here, their mother had 14 children, they for various reasons, this he were all put into foster care. the foster care system, as i could see it, now that i know later in life, have learned these things, the foster care

system was really a replacement for slavery. these children were sent out to work on farms and sent all over. and the more i dig, i came across chups, they deny they had anything to do with the system. i've 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 this secrecy? why don't we-- i think that adam cohen tried to address this with imbeciles, and i applaud that book, but this is part of a greater economic system because something had to be done post civil war to replace the slavery that ran that's biggest states. 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 pretty much the same attitude that we

have 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. what can we do about the secrecy in bringing these things more current for everyone. >> i think -- i like to think, modestly that i've started something. i 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 and one of the things i fear most, this is one of the things, people go 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're going to see

a return to work houses. it's not going to be called that. there's no way that america is going to call anything a work house, but the foster care group homes we have now, individual group homes where people have eight to 15 children in their home, and are licensed for a 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're going towards places where those who are inconvenie inconvenie inconvenient are gathered to be harnessed in the good of the greater society that is inconvenienced by them. i don't think that's limited to foster kids, but i think it's hidden the most with foster kids. minute you say what's going to happen, people get real mad. they might not do anything about it, but by gosh and by

golly there will be comments on facebook. to answer your questions about secrecy, i don't think that naming names will help. i think that destroying the-- i think that individuals stepping up will help and i think that they probably have this i think so to say. >> i have a quick practical thing to add. i think that blowing secrecy is help. if you're new to the area contact your lawmakers and representatives, in historical con flex -- context, some of the records probably exist, but there are laws. i'm new to virginia, too, it's not good, but it could be changed and also, before writing about appalachia, i wrote about reparations and surprisingly, there's bipartisan support for a represent separations movement about people who were institutionalized in the eugenics institutions in the area so you might be surprised. you know, where the politics go on this issue, and there's room

to agitate and to advocate on the issue. >> so-- i'm sorry, we really need to-- i'd like to honor the time we have with our guests and enable some more questions so if we could please give us your question in as direct away as possible, it would be very helpful. thank you. >> i lived in appalachia for about 12 years in the coal fields of eastern kentucky and 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, too because the students with whom i worked almost all of their parents, as far as the male parents all worked in the colefield and that was basically the only job there was and so, of course, what happened was the person worked in the coal fields until they got black lung and many of the students with whom i worked when i inquired about what their parent did, they would say, well, my father is a-- he's 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, kind of a way to get out of poverty, but it was a trap, at least the way i look at it. >> yep. [laughter] >> yeah, and i would say by desi 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 that then taking the coal out of it requires to kind of rip up the entire mountain and then you say, well, you can go down and live in the coal fields. so the stories i've seen, people would go down and they would say, well, we just want to make enough money so we can go back up on the knob, on the ridge. and neighbors say, yeah, we

said that, too, we've been here three years. >> the company was living in a place there was very little government and the counties were basically kind of subcontracted all kinds of governmental services to the coal companies. the sheriffs and the police were basically there to serve the coal companies and so little money flying around that the coal companies, they made their own money, scrip, very often very little coins. when you make your own money you have an awful lot of control. you will not have enough in the winter, i'll advance you what you need against your wages and i'll pay you two little tokens and it's not enough. i'll write down the what you owe me and now you're in debt. if you leave, the sheriff will come and a trap door i think of it, it slammed shut behind them. >> and i would quickly add to 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 now, and so, this is the pattern of substitution. when the coal mines die, the land is ruined and the work force is captive and despondent. and so it's a prime area for a prison to be constructed because there's a compliant work force, there's subpar land and there's a place to hide people we do not value in this country and so that's the story of coal now and central appalachia is the story of prison growth. >> one more question and then we'll allow people to look at books. talk to the authors. >> hi, steven. this question is for you. i was in newport, virginia last sunday for two hours service and solidarity as the mountain valley pipeline is coming through. and my question the last couple of years the fight has been going on surrounding eminent domain and i think you've given

me the seeds for that, but the question is, how can a corporation come in and again, i feel like perpetuating the story that's happened with the coal industry, to the small community, four generations, people lived in this wonderful little town and now the cutting started two weeks ago, i think, and there are lawsuits around eminent domain, but the companies with the money keeps allowing this to happen and i don't know if as a citizen, it doesn't em zoo -- doesn't seem we have the power to be around enough. my question is eminent domain and how the corporations can keep that going. >> i don't know the exact story when 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 roads and canals and things like that, and highways. all right. 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 of any authority over what happened there. in other words, a coal company would not come in in 1900 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, you can't mine coal in this county or 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 benefitted by having far too clients. and they needed to convince the legislature and sometimes the governor what their plans were,

that was made and no one in the state would be able to change it. >> i'm just a historicalion. laugher lau. [laughter] it's not so much eminent domain, it's a transparent process that's supposed to result in something not for private industry purely for the public good. we use that word, but it's really between the state and the corporation. >> so i want to thank everyone for coming, i want to thank elizabeth, steven and wendy. [applaus [applause] >> please, fill out your evaluation forms and i implore you, peruse the books. if they have time, i'm sure the authors will be happy to speak with you. thank you. [inaudible conversations]

>> this weekend on book tv's after words, abc news chief white house correspondent jonathan carl provides a behind the scenes look of the trump presidency, request his new book "front row at the trump show." . >> he knows the reporters, he reads the stories, he watches news coverage. he wants privately called, tevo, was the greatest invention of mankind, because he has the shows on dvr and watches and sees how he's being portrayed. i recall him at one point, phil rocker with "the washington post," a really good reporter, at press conference, the

president made reference that phil had written before the new york primary in 2016 about the staten island ferry and about, you know, phil basically went and interviewed people on the staten island ferry and found there were a lot of people who really liked donald trump and he wrote this story about it. i mean, i didn't even see the story. you know, trump not only saw the story and read it, this has now been a couple of years earlier and he becomes president and goes through all he's been through and he sees phil rocker, not a household name by the way, a great reporter we all know him. yeah, the story about the staten island ferry, it's a wonderful story. it's mind blowing. >> you can see the entire intervi intervi interview abc news onthan carl on c-span's book t vchv.

>> television has changed since c-span began 41 years ago, but our mission continues to provide an unfiltered view of government already this year, coverage and impeachment and now coronavirus coverage. you can watch all on television, on-line or listen on our free radio app. and be part of the national conversation through c-span's daily washington journal program or through our social media feeds. c-span created by private companies, and brought to you by your television provider. >> the u.s. senate is about to golf in for a short pro forma session, occurring every three days while members are working from home. right now senators are not scheduled to return to capitol

hill until april 20th. live coverage of the u.s. senate here on c-span2. the presiding officer: the senate will come to order. the parliamentarian will read a communication to the senate. the parliamentarian: washington, d.c., april 2, 2020. to the senate: under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable john cornyn, a senator from the state of texas, to perform the duties of the chair. signed chuck grassley, president pro tempore. the presiding officer: under the previous order, the senate stands