James Branscome’s new book, “Annihilating the Hillbilly Redux,” will be published on June 6, 2026.
When I published “Annihilating the Hillbilly” in 1971, the manifesto argued that the stereotyping of Appalachian people was not folklore but a tool. Coal operators, federal agencies, national media, and political elites used the hillbilly caricature to blame mountain people for conditions created by absentee ownership and extractive industries. The image was a weapon. The essay first appeared in the Journal of the Committee of Southern Churchmen, edited by my former Berea College professor Dr. James Y. Holloway. Fifty-five years later, the weapon is still in use, and the conditions it justified have only deepened.
I have spent the half-century since documenting what happened next. My book “Annihilating the Hillbilly Redux,” releasing June 6 on Amazon, brings together 37 chapters of reporting across that span — from the Mountain Eagle of Whitesburg, Kentucky, where I have been a contributor since 1973, through the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, American Heritage, Business Week, the Daily Yonder, Cardinal News, the Lantern, and West Virginia Watch, among many others. The argument that runs through all of it is straightforward: Appalachia’s and Eastern Kentucky’s struggles are not the result of cultural failure or individual choice. They are the predictable outcome of how institutions chose to operate in the region.
The numbers tell the story plainly. The sixty counties of Central Appalachia — 30 in Kentucky, 16 in West Virginia, seven in Virginia, seven in Tennessee — lost approximately 49,100 people between 2020 and 2025. In Kentucky’s coalfield counties, the losses ran 2.5 percent. In West Virginia’s coalfields, they ran 5.0 percent. The projections through 2050 are worse: Harlan County, projected to lose 44.6 percent of its remaining population. Breathitt County, 39.4 percent. Buchanan County, Virginia, 48 percent. These are not slow demographic adjustments. They are the final stages of a region being emptied.
The Appalachian Regional Commission has spent approximately $30 billion dollars in the region since 1965. Twenty-five billion of that went to highways. The remaining $5 billion supported people programs across 60 years. For comparison, post-Hurricane Katrina recovery in Louisiana drew well over $100 billion dollars in a fraction of the time. The federal response to extraction, displacement, and structural collapse in Appalachia has never approached the scale of the underlying damage.
Starting with the TVA
The Tennessee Valley Authority, founded as a New Deal experiment in democratic regional development, became something else entirely. In its pursuit of the cheapest possible coal for the cheapest possible electricity, TVA introduced and aggressively expanded strip mining across eastern Kentucky and the western Kentucky coalfields — including the Paradise generating station and surrounding mines that John Prine memorialized in song. The agency could have insisted on safe deep mines, which would have preserved both jobs and the mountains. It chose instead to drive a market for surface extraction that hollowed both. The agency that was supposed to model an alternative path for the region instead became the most reliable customer of the practices that destroyed it.
And now the next chapter is being written before the previous one has been finished. Across the Appalachian states, former mine land and virgin parcels are being targeted by industrial-scale data centers serving the artificial intelligence boom. The environmental impacts are deep — water consumption at scales that strain regional supply, electricity demand that drives up residential rates for the same households living next to the facilities, particulate and noise pollution that mirrors the patterns of coal era externalities. The job creation is modest and largely temporary, concentrated in construction and short-term technical roles. The same patterns of absentee ownership, externalized environmental costs, and minimal local benefit that defined coal extraction are being replicated by the cloud computing industry. The region is being recolonized for its electricity and its empty land. Local communities are being told, again, that this represents opportunity.
The question my book asks is not whether Appalachia can be saved through cultural reform or individual resilience. J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” offered that answer to millions of readers. It was the wrong answer in 2016, and it remains the wrong answer now. The question is whether American institutions will ever take responsibility for what they have done to the region — and whether the next generation of institutions will choose a different path.
Three ideas
I propose a three-part policy framework for that different path, scaled to Central Appalachia specifically rather than to the broader rural United States.
First, an Ascend Central Appalachia talent-attraction program, modeled on West Virginia’s Ascend program. The West Virginia version, launched in 2021 by a public-private partnership led by Brad Smith — former CEO of Intuit and now president of Marshall University in Huntington — and his wife Alys, has drawn nearly 1,000 new residents to the state through cash incentives, free outdoor recreation, and community-building support. Participants receive $12,000 plus benefits; the program reports a retention rate above 96 percent. A version scaled for Central Appalachia would specifically target the coalfield counties whose population losses are most acute, with structural support for housing, childcare, and broadband.
Second, a contemporary Appalachian Homestead Act, modeled on the 1862 legislation that opened the American West, transferring land currently held by absentee corporations into the hands of people willing to settle and build communities in the region. The legal mechanisms exist. What has been missing is political will.
Third, a time-limited Universal Basic Income experiment scaled to the specific economic challenges of Central Appalachia. A regional pilot, run for five or seven years, testing whether direct income support can stabilize communities, reverse outmigration, and provide the floor that decades of policy has refused to construct.
These are not utopian proposals. They are mechanisms that have been used elsewhere, in other regions facing other crises, with measurable results. They cost a fraction of what is being spent on highway projects that serve through-traffic rather than the communities they pass through. They could begin tomorrow if the federal and state governments chose to begin.
The mountains do not need to be saved through the heroic exertions of the people who live there. They need to be treated, finally, as a region whose institutions failed it — and as a region whose recovery requires the same scale of public investment and creative policy that the country has marshaled for every other place it has chosen to value.
What my book documents, across 55 years of reporting, is that the choice has always been there. Appalachia has never been beyond saving. It has been beneath bothering to save.
That is the real elegy. And it is one Kentucky and the nation still have time to correct.
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.
