2025/03/01 by Timothy J. Lombardo · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy #Race, History, and American Society
paper · doi:10.1215/15476715-11521294
openalex publication_date 2025/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
In Hillbilly Highway, historian Max Fraser tells the story of one of the largest population relocations in twentieth-century US history. While years of scholarship on the Great Migration has traced the relocation of hundreds of thousands of southern African Americans to cities in the North and West and produced pathbreaking works of African American, political, urban, and labor history, relatively few historians have examined the concurrent migration of poor, rural southern whites to cities primarily in the Midwest. While much more attention has been paid to the white Okies that departed the Great Plains for the West during the Great Depression, nearly the same number of white migrants left southern Appalachia for midwestern industrial cities in the mid-twentieth century. By Fraser’s estimate, at least eight million poor white southerners left rural and economically marginalized areas in the upper South for major industrial cities like Chicago, Cincinnati, and Detroit as well as smaller ones like Muncie, Indiana, and Canton, Ohio, among others. This migration was often circular: Rural whites returned to the South in much higher numbers than African Americans did. As Fraser argues, however, both those who stayed and those who returned played a little-recognized role in remaking midwestern cities, reshaping postwar politics, and forming a “class apart” from the rest of the broader white working class. Impressively researched and convincingly argued, Hillbilly Highway is a groundbreaking work of labor, urban, and political history.Taking its name from the network of roads that carried white southerners between the upper South and Midwest, Hillbilly Highway shows how the creation of Transappalachia—a region Fraser defines both by this mobility and the unique southern character of its people—reshaped twentieth-century US history. Through six chapters, Fraser traces the impact this migration had on the region’s industrial development, the maturation of the labor movement, the postwar urban crisis, and the political realignments of the 1960s and 1970s. Putting Transappalachian migrants at the center of his analysis, Fraser not only directs attention toward an overlooked population relocation but also upends a number of long-held misconceptions about the role poor southern whites played in labor, urban, and political history. For example, despite being recruited by midwestern industrialists and scorned by union leaders for their supposed docility, Fraser explains that white southerners were often more militant than stereotypes suggest. “They walked away from poorly paid jobs, confronted abusive bosses, and went out on strike with their coworkers,” he argues (75). Indeed, Fraser shows that Transappalachian migrants, rather than being hostile to organized labor, were often eager supporters of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s. He offers a similar challenge to long-established narratives about the urban crisis when he turns his attention to the so-called hillbilly ghetto of the post–World War II era. While historians typically contextualize the urban crisis as an outcome of the African American Great Migration, communities like Chicago’s Uptown, Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine, Indianapolis’s Stringtown, and Muncie’s Shedtown grew into “problem areas” of concentrated white poverty during the years of the Transappalachian migration. Fraser shows that this white urban poverty was not only a prominent concern for locals but also played a significant role in the formation of liberal antipoverty policy. According to Fraser, the early development of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty focused intently on poor southern whites in the urban Midwest and provided liberals with “a way of talking about urban poverty as a problem of culture without talking about the politically explosive issue of race” (148).As the example of the hillbilly ghetto suggests, shared whiteness did not spare Transappalachian migrants from assumptions of difference that separated them from native-born midwesterners and the broader white working class. “Far from a monolithic category of identity,” Fraser argues, “the experience of the hillbilly ghetto made clear that for some urban residents, whiteness was a much more contingent and ambiguous position during these years” (111). While Fraser acknowledges that white migrants generally prospered more than their African American counterparts, he nevertheless shows how stereotypes and prejudice against white southern rurality created a distinctive working-class experience in the urban Midwest. This examination of class formation represents one of the most crucial and revelatory contributions in Fraser’s book. He deftly shows how the process of cyclical migration and urban alienation were integral parts of white working-class proletarianization in Transappalachia. The back-and-forth combined with the hostilities faced in the urban Midwest “[set] Transappalachia apart as a distinctive group in midcentury American society” (48). While Fraser’s final chapter examines how Transappalachian migrants ultimately melded into a more conservative, white midwestern culture through the popularization of country music, he nevertheless complicates the evolution of white working-class conservatism by showing how “hillbilly music” was first stripped of its regional and distinctive class origins. Overall, then, Max Fraser has written a compelling and convincing account of a significant but overlooked aspect of modern American labor and working-class history that historians of the rural South, urban Midwest, and US politics will have to contend with for some time.