The Paradox of Place: Making Sense of “Displaced Appalachia”

The fall after I turned 18, I moved from my hometown in Pikeville to the town of Bowling Green for college. The drive was less than five hours, an easy trip down the Cumberland Parkway anytime I needed a weekend at home. But despite being within state lines, and a mere one county outside what the ARC designates as the Appalachian region, something about Bowling Green felt like I had dropped onto a different planet. 

Maybe it was the accent, the way I slurred my vowels and lost the g from any -ing verbs. Or how my classmates, nearly without fail upon learning of my hometown, said, “Oh, you’re from Pak-veeuhl?” Maybe it was the way I received remarks from professors that I had done exceptionally well in class that semester, almost as if it was a surprise. Whatever it was, I couldn’t shake the sense that a kid from Appalachia wasn’t expected in this space, so far from the mountains. And there was a more nefarious feeling that maybe I’d be better off if I went home. 

“I couldn’t shake the sense that a kid from Appalachia wasn’t expected in this space, so far from the mountains. And there was a more nefarious feeling that maybe I’d be better off if I went home. ”

While studying the history of Appalachian media representation at MIT (talk about feeling like an outsider!), I discovered that my experience fit into another, paradoxical, trope: that Appalachian people won’t survive if they stay in the mountains, but they won’t fit in if they leave.

Displaced Appalachia: Diaspora, Place-Boundness, and Inability to Assimilate

Conceptions of Appalachians as a displaced people originated significantly later than those of Degradation and Violence - around the mid- to late 1940s, to be exact. The image was primarily a result of Appalachian enlistment in the military during World War II and the mass migration from the region into cities following the war’s end. As the boom in industrial work and subsequent decline in coal production drew a growing number of Appalachian people away from the mountains and into cities such as Cincinnati, Detroit, and Chicago, urban-dwellers began to feel threatened in both their job security and cultural norms. The primary way in which Appalachians were portrayed in the 1940s and 1950s, then, was that they were “out of place” and a disturbance in the city, and that they needed to go back to their mountain homes where they “belonged.” Distaste for Appalachians was so strong, in fact, that historian Anthony Harkins writes that “job listings that announced ‘No Southerners need apply’ and restaurant owners who refused to serve ‘hillbillies’ were not uncommon.” A 1951 survey of Detroit residents asking which groups were “not good to have in the city” determined that “poor southern whites” and “hillbillies” were high on the list of undesirables, second only to “criminals” and “gangsters.” 

The “problem” of Appalachian migrants reached the national stage in the late 1950s through a barrage of articles in nationally circulated magazines. One such article, titled “Down from the Hills and into the Slums,” not only stresses that the mountain migrants are “badly out of sync with urban ways” but also accuses them of being a dangerously backward and criminal group guilty of “shootings, child neglect, rape…[and] incest.” A similar article featured in a 1958 issue of Harper’s Magazine, titled “The Hillbillies Invade Chicago,” describes the city’s Appalachian migrants as “proud, poor, primitive, and fast with a knife” as well as “clannish…disorderly, [and] untamed to urban ways.” Even more egregiously, “their habits – with respect to such matters as incest and statutory rape – are clearly at variance with urban legal requirements.” The author further cites a Chicago Sunday Tribune editorial which compares the “Southern hillbilly migrants” to a “plague of locusts” and describes them as having “the lowest standard of living and moral code (if any), the biggest capacity for liquor, and the most savage tactics when drunk, which is most of the time.”  Through these articles, it became clear that Appalachian “hillbillies” were an unwelcome, even repulsive, presence in the cities and that many urbanites found them incapable of assimilating into city culture.

Aware of the tension between urban-dwellers and Appalachian migrants occurring across the country, popular media made attempts to profit from the “fear and fascination” surrounding southern mountain people. By far the most successful of these attempts was the CBS sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies, which ran for eight years, was the highest-rated show of both 1962 and 1963, and gained a rabid following both in the U.S. and abroad. The series tells the story of the mountaineering Clampett family, who suddenly become millionaires after discovering oil on their land and move into a Beverly Hills mansion. The show’s intrinsic humor stems from the Clampetts’ displacement: Although they are now wealthy, they remain largely ignorant, unmodern, and unable to decipher or integrate into their new California culture. Harkins provides examples of the Clampetts’ confusion surrounding modern living in the show’s early run: “In one early episode, Jed asks why the ‘electric meat grinder’—a kitchen disposal—does not work properly and believes he can use a telephone simply by shouting into it while it lies on its cradle.” 

Beyond these jokes about modernity, though, lies a deeper conflict between urban Californian and rural “hillbilly” values. This occurs in many forms: through Jed, who symbolizes a “pure” mountain culture and unwavering traditional value system; through Jethro, who attempts to embrace California culture to eternally disastrous results; and through Granny, who is most explicitly uncomfortable in her new surroundings and often disparages the consumerist California lifestyle. In fact, Granny is most often intended to provide a more general critique of 1960s consumerism, “expos[ing] the vapidness and uselessness of the lifestyles of Beverly Hills, and by extension, of much of comfortably affluent American society.”  And yet, despite all their admonition of Beverly Hills culture, “the Clampetts never leave this den of hedonism and greed for longer than a few weeks nor do they reshape their social environment in any meaningful way. Instead, they remain strangers in a strange land with little sense of purpose, no longer working the land yet unwilling to become part of or to transform the commercial society around them.” Thus, despite any cultural critique meant to be implied by the Hillbillies, its ultimate message is one of incompatibility between the mountains and the outside world.

However, depictions of Appalachian migrants have often contained an inherent contradiction – claiming that while Appalachians can never truly belong in the city, they also can’t stay put in their mountain homes, which are too hopeless and degraded for survival. Such is the case in the 1984 film adaptation of Harriette Arnow’s novel The Dollmaker, which portrays a family of Appalachian migrants who are forced to leave their homes for the city but are either unwilling or unable to assimilate into their new culture. 

The film’s protagonist, Gertie, portrayed by Jane Fonda, is immediately cast as an outsider as she and her family arrive in Detroit, and she spends the rest of the film uncomfortable and out of place in her new home. The need for assimilation is constantly stressed throughout the film, as her five children, too, face discrimination and hardship. In one scene, Gertie meets with the teacher of her oldest son, Reuben, who she fears is unhappy at school. The teacher responds, “You hillb – you Southern people who come up here…Don’t you realize that it will be a great change for your children?” However, the family still struggles to assimilate, and the sudden and tragic death of Gertie’s youngest daughter is the breaking point in which she decides that the family must earn enough money to return home. Gertie uses her homespun talents to carve dolls out of wood and finally sells enough to return to the mountains. Thus, The Dollmaker takes the contradictory position that mountaineers cannot survive in the city, despite the city being their only hope to return to the mountains.

The fascination surrounding displaced Appalachians has not disappeared in recent times, although the framing has shifted a little. Attempting to rekindle the excitement garnered by The Beverly Hillbillies in the 1960s, CBS proposed a new reality show titled The Real Beverly Hillbillies in 2002 which would transplant a real-life Appalachian family into a Beverly Hills mansion. To cast the show, CBS launched what critics dubbed a “hick hunt” in the rural South, even circulating fliers offering a $1000 reward for tips leading to a suitable family throughout many of Kentucky’s poorest counties.  These fliers specified the type of family executives had in mind – “Parents in their 40s with children ages 17–25. Grandparents and other kin invited” – and offered up to $500,000 to the family willing to relocate to California.  Many in the region found the search and the show itself to be offensive, a plot detailed by the Center for Rural Strategies in Whitesburg, Kentucky:

The concept of the show was simple: Take a poor family from rural America and set them up in California with all the trappings of affluence. Then let the cameras roll as the family copes with rich neighbors, electronic gadgets, and cultural clashes. "Imagine the episode where they have to interview maids," said one CBS executive. 

Ultimately, production on the show was cancelled, thanks in large part to the Center for Rural Strategies’ campaign against the show. Interest in a reality show about displaced hillbillies, however, was not cancelled, as a new show on mountain migrants appeared on a different network in 2014. Reelz’s Hollywood Hillbillies escaped the pre-production backlash that had foiled CBS a decade earlier by selecting a young, rural YouTube star for the role. Michael Kittrell, known on YouTube as “CopperCab,” went viral in 2010 after posting a three-minute rant titled “GINGERS DO HAVE SOULS!!”  Hollywood Hillbillies is the “story of what happens next” after he and his family move from Georgia to Los Angeles to expand his brand.  The show clearly intends to tell a “fish out of water” story, capitalizing on the Kittrell family’s unfamiliarity with the world of Hollywood and characterizing them as a family of outrageous country bumpkins:

Hollywood Hillbillies chronicles the hilarious antics of internet superstars Michael “The Angry Ginger” and his “Mema” as they trade in their simple country living in Georgia for the bright lights of Hollywood. With the fame and fortune from more than 150 million YouTube views, Michael, his grandma Mema, aunt Dee Dee, uncle “Big” John, and the rest of the clan are ready to take Hollywood by storm. The question is not whether they are ready for LA, but rather is LA ready for these outrageous Hollywood Hillbillies? 

Hollywood Hillbillies aired for 23 episodes and quietly ended production due to poor ratings. 

 
Despite their apparently poor reception, series such as The Real Beverly Hillbillies and Hollywood Hillbillies are predicated on an underlying belief that Appalachian “hillbillies” do not belong in the outside world – even when, as in The Pride of Jesse Hallam and The Dollmaker, there is a concurrent belief that the outside world is all that will save them.

Rooted: Celebrating the Place and People of Appalachia

While popular media says that Appalachians have to leave the mountains to survive, I want to highlight all that connects us to our place – even for those of us who have left. Here are a few of my favorite stories from The Appalachian Retelling Project that do just that. 

I spoke with Lauren May, creator of the popular Instagram account Must Love Herbs, about how she’s using Appalachian traditions like cooking and gardening to combat stereotypes of the region. 

Contributor Erinn writes about the connection she feels to her home in Appalachia even after moving across the state.

Tipper explains why she never wanted to leave Appalachia, even when others expected that she should.

And Rachel meditates on her move from Kentucky to South Carolina and her belief that she is fated to one day return home. 

Like any place, Appalachia is a mixed bag of experiences, and there are a million reasons someone might choose to leave - or stay. But I believe I can speak for many of us navigating life outside the region when I say that the mountains are a part of you wherever you go, and that’s something to be proud of.