How the Hillbillies Remade America
A massive and forgotten migration reshaped the liberal approach to poverty and realigned America’s political parties.
On April 29, 1954, a cross section of Cincinnati’s municipal bureaucracy—joined by dozens of representatives drawn from local employers, private charities, the religious community, and other corners of the city establishment—gathered at the behest of the mayor’s office to discuss a new problem confronting the city. Or, rather, about 50,000 new problems, give or take. That was roughly the number of Cincinnati residents who had recently migrated to the city from the poorest parts of southern Appalachia. The teachers, police officials, social workers, hiring-department personnel, and others who gathered that day in April had simply run out of ideas about what to do about them.
“Education does not have importance to these people as it does to us,” observed one schoolteacher. “They work for a day or two, and then you see them no more,” grumbled an employer. “Some don’t want modern facilities—if they have a bathtub, they don’t use it,” another meeting attendee claimed. And the charges they leveled only descended from there: “They let their children run wild.” They left their trash in the street and refused to go to the doctor. They misspent what little money they had. They fought and drank with abandon. Some were even rumored to disregard “laws here, such as it being a felony to have sexual relations with a member of their own family or with a girl who consents.”
Marshall Bragdon, the long-serving executive director of an advisory commission to municipal government known as the Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee, had conceived of this daylong “Workshop on the Southern Mountaineer in Cincinnati,” as the gathering was billed. Though he did not like what he heard, he was hardly surprised. A key objective of the workshop, Bragdon would explain, was to “de-stereotype the city man’s and urban agency’s views of and attitudes toward hill folks,” so that they might be better able to assist this growing population of poor rural newcomers to the city. As the litany of complaints poured forth during the workshop’s opening bull session, it was clear that there was much de-stereotyping to do.
The 1954 Cincinnati workshop is a little-known episode in 20th-century American history, yet it would prove to be extraordinarily consequential. In its aftermath, municipal coalitions in a host of midwestern cities that were likewise on the receiving end of an influx of white migrants from the Appalachian South were inspired to take similar action. The workshop introduced new and influential ways of thinking about poverty in the postwar city, which would circulate broadly within liberal policy-making circles and, before long, would even come to shape the development of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.
At the same time, the Cincinnati workshop also revealed a yawning cultural divide separating the middle-class professionals in attendance from the white working-class objects of their reform-minded concern, one that was replicated throughout the region and in Washington, and that would only grow deeper and wider over the decades to come. Although none of the workshop participants was overheard talking about a “basket of deplorables,” the resonance between their descriptions of their new hillbilly neighbors and that more recent political malapropism—which might have cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election—is unmistakable. Then, as now, liberalism found itself confronting a white working-class problem at least partially of its own creation. The sequence of events set in motion by the 1954 workshop offers important insights into our current political impasse—and into the lessons the modern Democratic Party has failed to learn for more than half a century.
In the two decades that followed World War II, when the great 20th-century migrations out of the rural South were at their zenith, the “hillbilly ghetto” appeared as a suddenly ubiquitous and more and more problematic feature on the landscape of the urban Midwest. In neighborhoods such as Over-the-Rhine and Lower Price Hill in Cincinnati, Uptown in Chicago, Stringtown in Indianapolis, Briggs and the Cass Corridor in Detroit—and in similar neighborhoods in smaller cities and towns across the region—growing clusters of poor southern white newcomers alarmed longer-term residents and amplified concerns about an onrushing crisis of the American inner city.
Residents of these hillbilly ghettos, as they were commonly referred to by public officials and in media accounts at the time, stood out for their rural mannerisms and regionally alien cultural markings, for being, as Cincinnati’s director of health education put it, “different—different in speech, in dress, in culture, in habits and mores, in education, in social status, in work experience, and in health.” The neighborhoods themselves, meanwhile, were marked by rates of unemployment, housing insecurity, poverty-related medical issues, and crime and policing that more closely resembled predominantly Black urban neighborhoods such as Avondale, Paradise Valley, and Bronzeville than the postwar era’s growing middle-class suburbs.
That the inhabitants of the hillbilly ghetto were white confounded many of their mid-century contemporaries, who struggled to reconcile them with their more familiar bigotries. “The so-called hillbillies, who now constitute a major slum problem in several midwestern cities … are about the only sizable group of white, Protestant, old-line Americans who are now living in city slums,” opined a columnist for Fortune. “The trouble with the latter, as with the rural Negroes, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans, is that they simply don’t know how to live in cities.”
Marshall Bragdon may have felt more sympathetic to Cincinnati’s Appalachian migrants, but otherwise he largely agreed with that assessment. The 1954 workshop was intended to focus the city’s attention on what Bragdon called “the struggle for urban adjustment,” which, as he saw it, had left Cincinnati’s rural newcomers ill-prepared to succeed in the industrial city and was turning neighborhoods such as Over-the-Rhine and Lower Price Hill into intractable and dysfunctional pockets of poverty.
Believing that most city agencies “don’t know how to help the migrants,” Bragdon invited Roscoe Giffin, a sociologist based at Berea College, in Kentucky, to help set the workshop attendees straight. In his talk, Giffin explained that the “pathological quality” of the city’s hillbilly ghettos could be attributed to a series of “culturally determined patterns of behavior which the Southern Mountaineers bring with them when they come to live north of the Ohio River”—among them a low regard for “formal education,” an instinctual emphasis on fulfilling “immediate” needs and desires, a “clannish” hostility toward outsiders, and a “fatalistic” resignation to present conditions. These behaviors, Giffin noted, had originated as natural and even rational adaptations to their impoverished rural circumstances. But they became counterproductive and self-defeating “when such people came to live around Liberty and Sycamore Streets of Cincinnati.” The solution, Bragdon and Giffin counseled the assembled city representatives, was time, understanding, and, above all, patient instruction in the expectations of modern urban society. “The basis of all human-relations work with all people,” Giffin reminded his audience, “is that you have first to accept them as they are before they are willing to modify their behavior.”
The workshop proved to be a hit. The Cincinnati residents in attendance appreciated their new insights into the root causes of hillbilly pathology (“It gave me the positive side,” one social worker remarked; “my previous observations of them had been only on the negative”) and were further gratified to be reassured that it was the migrants’ behavior, and not the city itself, that was in need of “modification.” News of the workshop spread quickly through networks of municipal officials, and soon copycat workshops were being staged in other cities across the region, many featuring Roscoe Giffin as an invited speaker.
“Urban adjustment,” meanwhile, became the prevailing paradigm for addressing the overlapping issues of migration, poverty, and inner-city decline. In 1957, Chicago created a Committee on New Residents—the first public body of its kind in the country—“based on a recognition of the adjustment problems presented by the migration to Chicago of Southern Whites, Negros, Puerto Ricans and American Indians seeking increased economic opportunity.” Detroit followed suit with its own Committee on Urban Adjustment shortly thereafter, designed “to try to change some of the values, attitudes, and behavior patterns … of the existing and continually arriving members of the rural lower class.”
The Ford Foundation picked up on the urban-adjustment framework as well. Ford was then at the leading edge of the behavioral revolution in mid-century social-science research (its Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences opened at Stanford the same year the Cincinnati workshop was held), and Bragdon and Giffin’s focus on the more psychological and attitudinal ramifications of rural-to-urban migration struck a chord. Ford would agree to fund an expanded version of the Cincinnati workshop at Giffin’s home institution of Berea College in the summer of 1958, which brought representatives from seven midwestern cities down to Kentucky for three weeks to “study the mountaineer migrants in their native habitat.”
The Berea workshop became, in the words of Ford’s Director of Public Affairs Paul Ylvisaker, “the first real entry point” for the foundation’s growing programmatic engagement with the complex of issues surrounding “community disorganization” and the unfolding urban crisis. The Berea workshop was restaged annually for the next nine years, during which time delegates from more than two dozen cities would attend. Subsequent initiatives spearheaded by Ylvisaker’s Public Affairs Division at the beginning of the 1960s, such as the Great Cities School Improvement Program and the Gray Areas Program, would funnel tens of millions in foundation dollars toward a variety of municipal efforts aimed largely at “citifying the in-migrant population” clustered in the country’s declining urban core. “I had the sense that we were dealing with people problems, not bricks and mortar and not power-structure problems so much, and that we were witnessing the vast migration into the central city—and I shifted at that point, to a concern with the migrant flows and what could be done about that,” Ylvisaker would reflect in a later interview. “Appalachia gave us a chance to touch off the concern with the whole process.”
By the time Ylvisaker was tapped to sit on the White House’s Task Force on Poverty, convened in early 1964 to begin drafting the legislative foundations of a massive federal campaign to eliminate poverty, it was undeniable just how far and wide the ideas first introduced a decade earlier in Cincinnati had resonated. Ylvisaker’s Gray Areas Program—in its spatial focus on inner-city ghettos populated overwhelmingly by poor rural migrants, and in its programmatic emphasis on replacing deficient migrant cultures with more efficacious forms of “community action”—was the clearest prototype for what became the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, signed into law by Johnson that August. “A lot of the ideas that ended up actually in the legislation,” noted William Capron, who worked on the task force with Ylvisaker and oversaw domestic spending in Johnson’s Bureau of the Budget, “really were developed out of the Ford experience.”
As unlikely as it may have seemed when Bragdon first convened his skeptical colleagues in the spring of 1954, the hillbilly ghetto had helped set in motion a series of events that had culminated in the enactment of one of postwar liberalism’s most ambitious social-policy experiments.
There were always other ways to think about the issue of urban adjustment, of course. Southern Appalachian migrants in Cincinnati, like other groups of rural migrants and low-income residents in the city, were also contending with limited employment options, predatory slumlords, and overcrowded and under-resourced public schools—not to mention an openly hostile police force, which by the middle of the 1950s was arresting white Appalachian natives at roughly four times the rate they appeared in the city’s general population. In Detroit, 10 years after pouring into the Arsenal of Democracy in search of wartime defense work, migrants from the rural South made up fully half of the population crammed into the city’s blight-ridden downtown core, an area already riddled with “thousands of dwellings in various stages of decay and deterioration, the majority of which are utterly unfit for human habitation,” according to the city’s charitable agencies. In Uptown—“seedy, dreary, congested, despairing,” as the Chicago Daily News would describe it, “Appalachia in Chicago”—more than one in four apartments lacked adequate plumbing, and residential overcrowding was exceeded only in the poor Black neighborhood of Lawndale. By the time the Johnson administration was rolling out the War on Poverty, fewer than half of Uptown’s adult residents were able to secure full-time work.
In its focus on “culturally determined patterns of behavior” as opposed to structural factors such as these, the urban-adjustment framing introduced at the Cincinnati workshop consistently mistook the symptoms of the postwar urban crisis for its causes. Instead of recognizing the already accelerating flight of jobs and tax revenues to the suburbs as an early preview of larger-scale disruptions to come, officials used urban adjustment as a rationale for blaming rural poor people for their inability to adapt.
In this way, urban adjustment also anticipated the notion of a separate and self-perpetuating “culture of poverty,” first introduced by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis in 1959 and then widely popularized by the journalist and social critic Michael Harrington over the next few years. Lewis developed his influential theory in ethnographic studies of poor families from Mexico and Puerto Rico. But the catalog of pathological behaviors and attitudes that he identified among his subjects—“a strong feeling of marginality, of helplessness, of dependence and inferiority”; “a lack of impulse control, a strong present-time orientation with relatively little ability to defer gratification and plan for the future, a sense of resignation and fatalism”—in many cases directly echoed Giffin’s portrayals of maladjusted Appalachian migrants.
Before long, a distorted and punitive version of Lewis’s ideas would win both liberal and conservative adherents and find its way to the very center of postwar social policy, first as a means of explaining why certain groups of people became dependent on social assistance and then as an argument for curtailing or altogether eliminating those very forms of public support. As it did, the urban-adjustment framework’s earlier focus on the cultural habits of the rural poor, broadly defined, gave way to the culture of poverty’s near-singular association with the more and more distressed Black inner city.
The consequences of that shift would reverberate to the present. For poor Black communities, the racialized discourse around poverty would be an unmitigated disaster. The slow death of federal poverty-reduction programs begun under Richard Nixon, the massive expansion of a racially targeted war on urban street crime during the 1970s and ’80s, and the culminating assault on welfare “as we know it” during the Clinton years would all be executed under the logic of eradicating a culture of poverty that was said to be the defining hallmark of a new Black underclass.
The new preoccupation with race would also further obscure the one redeeming feature of the urban-adjustment framework. In its focus on the common circumstances confronted by populations of the rural dispossessed clustered around the margins of affluent society—Black, white, Hispanic, and otherwise—urban adjustment held out the prospect of a more materially grounded kind of analysis, one that might have seen beyond the cultural or racial explanations for poverty and grasped the larger social and political forces beginning to undermine the postwar economy. The window for turning the language of urban adjustment into a multiracial, bottom-up politics of the poor, though, was always small. By the end of the ’60s, it had been shut for good.
As a final consequence of all this, the white poor and working classes would come to occupy a more marginal position in the worldview of Democratic liberalism over subsequent decades. After playing a crucial role in catalyzing liberal attention to the social effects of the postwar urban crisis, the hillbilly ghettos of the urban Midwest largely disappeared from view after the formal launch of the War on Poverty. Meanwhile, as deindustrialization, automation, off-shoring, and new waves of import competition brought ever-widening devastation to the blue-collar workforce of the country’s industrial heartland, professional-class interests elevated by the new knowledge-and-service economy moved to the center of the Democratic Party’s agenda. These “New Democrats” offered the occasional promise to retrain out-of-work miners and factory hands as computer programmers—but in downwardly mobile white working-class communities throughout the region, precious little came of it. Instead, right-wing politicians from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump would find a rich soil in which to plant the seeds of populist resentment, creating one of the more consequential class realignments in modern American political history.
Hillary Clinton had these voters in mind, back in 2016, when she wrote off “half of Trump’s supporters” as a “basket of deplorables.” Whatever truth there was in her description of the “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it” nature of Trump’s base—and subsequent events would indicate that there was clearly some truth to it—it was the wrong message for the moment, easily construed as casually elitist and politically tone-deaf. Rightly or wrongly, Clinton seemed more interested in modifying the behavior of these voters than in trying to understand the material foundations of their grievances. When about a quarter of white working-class Obama voters forsook Clinton for Trump in that fall’s election, it was hard not to attribute the results at least in part to Clinton’s failure to convince that portion of the electorate that the party had anything to offer them beyond condescending disregard.
If anybody seems to have learned the lessons of Clinton’s faux pas, it is Joe Biden. Since entering the White House, Biden has done more than any Democratic president of the past 75 years to reinvigorate American industrial policy, all while steering its focus toward those parts of the Midwest and South that suffered the effects of deindustrialization most acutely and where the Republican Party has made the most gains among working-class voters. Might this be enough to overcome liberalism’s decades of pathologizing poor and working-class whites? Recent polling suggests that Biden faces an uphill battle among these voters in crucial midwestern swing states. But to paraphrase Roscoe Giffin, a party has to first understand where it’s gone wrong before it will be willing to change its behavior.
This essay is adapted from Max Fraser’s book Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class.
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