In his first solo rally since becoming Donald Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance vowed to an audience in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, that he would “fight for every single worker in this country.” The promise fit with the image Vance has created for himself as embodying the American Dream. Although he grew up in a suburb of Cincinnati, Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy recounts his escape from Appalachia—which, by Vance’s account, is a den of alcoholism, drug abuse, welfare fraud, poverty, single mothers, and absent fathers—to establish himself among the elite.
On its face, Hillbilly Elegy appears like a standard “bootstraps” narrative, but understanding the book within its historical context reveals it is actually a radical work that deploys many of the same historically anti-Black tropes that have long been used to attack welfare. For decades, conservatives like Vance have criticized welfare programs under the guise of defending the nuclear family. Yet, welfare cuts have failed to deliver on promises of keeping nuclear families together.
In reality, the true goal of conservative appeals to “family values” is mobilizing white working-class Americans by exploiting their racial anxieties. In the process, conservatives have painted a deceiving picture of Republicans as champions of the white working class—precisely the image that Trump and Vance hope to capitalize on.
In the mid-to-late 19th and early 20th centuries, government assistance was a privilege reserved for white Americans.
In 1861, Congress approved pensions for Union soldiers wounded in combat and families of soldiers killed during the Civil War. White Americans’ access to government assistance increased over the ensuing decades, as Congress extended pensions to all disabled Union veterans (regardless of whether their disability was service-related) and started programs providing financial support to widowed white mothers.
Meanwhile, Congress offered and then denied Black Americans government assistance. Founded in 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau provided aid to recently emancipated slaves. But Congress refused to renew the Bureau’s charter in 1872, partly due to fears that offering aid to Black Americans threatened white supremacy. That forced Black Americans to rely on their churches and community funds for financial relief.
Government assistance remained racially exclusive during the Great Depression. The power of Southern Democrats in Congress compelled President Franklin D. Roosevelt to deny Black Americans access to New Deal programs. Local governments would administer them—which in the South meant racist, segregationist governments that would exclude Black residents from benefits. In addition, Social Security omitted domestic and agricultural workers—occupations disproportionately occupied by Black Americans.
Read More: When Southern Segregationists Gave Black Residents One-Way Bus Tickets North
Over the next three decades, however, the federal government increasingly expanded government assistance to include Black Americans. Congress amended the Social Security Act to include agricultural and domestic workers in 1950, outlawed racial discrimination in welfare programs through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and transferred control over Social Security distribution from state-run programs to the federal Social Security Administration in 1972. Doing this meant that Black Americans had greater access to government assistance by the 1970s.
Yet, just as social safety net programs became more equitable, politicians began questioning the efficacy of welfare, specifically for Black families. In 1965, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan published The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, popularly known as the Moynihan Report. It sought to understand the root causes of Black poverty. The report, however, downplayed the role of enslavement and Jim Crow, and instead blamed the higher prevalence of female-headed Black families. It argued that Black mothers prevented Black men from “play[ing] the role” of heads-of-household and financial providers as “required by American society.”
The Moynihan Report claimed that the increasing amount of welfare flowing to Black Americans strongly correlated with the “disintegration of the Negro family structure” as Black mothers turned to government assistance after inevitably failing to provide for their families. Welfare, in other words, inadvertently kept Black families trapped in poverty by encouraging matriarchy and offering an alternative to breadwinning fathers who would support their families.
Moynihan’s conclusions proved useful for the rising right wing of the Republican Party. By the late 1960s, defending racial segregation and employing explicitly racist tropes alienated most voters. Nonetheless, white working-class Americans felt anxious about the effects of programs that promoted racial uplift—including welfare—as they perceived the government to be taking money from them to give to others, even as they needed help.
The Moynihan Report offered a way for conservatives to reach these voters. Over the ensuing decades, portraying welfare programs as threatening the nuclear family gave conservative Republicans—perhaps most notably President Ronald Reagan—a way to tap into these voters’ racial anxieties, and peel them away from the historically pro-labor Democratic Party.
Conservative intellectuals continued to provide a patina of academic legitimacy for this political campaign. Economist Milton Friedman speculated that welfare programs had effectively ended poverty by encouraging widespread fraud by “welfare queens.” Reagan popularized this racially coded concept in the 1970s, which most listeners interpreted to mean Black, single mothers who exploited the welfare system by having multiple children to maximize their benefits. For Friedman, welfare queens showed that welfare systems impeded nuclear family formation by creating fraudsters who disavowed their family responsibilities.
Other conservative academics conceded that poverty existed, but still accused welfare of disintegrating the nuclear family. In his 1980 book Losing Ground, far-right political scientist Charles Murray charged that welfare threatened to bring white families down to the level of poverty associated with Black families. It did so by “increasing” the number of families that consisted of “a young mother with children and no husband present.”
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, conservative academics gained a new ally in the religious right, which was alarmed by what it perceived as an all-out assault on “traditional” values and the nuclear family. The most prominent face of that movement was Jerry Falwell Sr., who co-founded the Moral Majority in 1979 to advocate for social conservatism and help candidates committed to it. In his 1980 book Listen, America!, Falwell asserted that the family was a “God-ordained institution” and the foundation of “a healthy and prosperous nation.”
Read More: J.D. Vance’s Vision of Appalachia Is Nothing New
Yet, Falwell claimed that the family was under assault—and not just by those advocating the Equal Rights Amendment, women in the workplace, and equal rights for LGBTQ Americans. The assault also came from the federal government, which undermined the family by giving their tax dollars to people who lacked a “work ethic.” Falwell conceded that welfare was “not always wrong.” The problem was that welfare encouraged immoral behavior, which, in the case of welfare queens, referred to sex outside marriage and laziness.
This rhetoric only intensified during the 1980s and early 1990s, as Republican candidates formed a powerful coalition of mostly white voters by portraying Democrats as stealing from average Joes and giving the money to supposedly undeserving welfare recipients.
This message paid off in 1994, when Republicans won unified control of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Once in power, they enacted the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. This law put conservatives’ rhetoric into practice, claiming to facilitate the formation of economically self-sufficient families by ending welfare as an entitlement program, implementing welfare-to-work programs and time limits on receiving benefits, and enhancing enforcement of child support.
Yet, the law failed to substantially reduce the percentage of single-parent households and lift families out of poverty. Instead, it increased the number of single mothers working low-wage jobs and worsened racial wealth inequality by making welfare a less reliable and accessible source of income, as well as returning control of aid distribution to state-run agencies.
But this failure did little to change conservative rhetoric, as demonstrated by Hillbilly Elegy. Vance invoked both Friedman and Falwell in arguing that welfare programs had turned Appalachians into lazy “food stamp recipients” who disavowed their “Christian duty” to financially provide for their families and instead defrauded welfare programs. He also repeated Falwell’s moral panic—despite no evidence that it had come true over the previous 35 years—by describing poor Appalachian men “[leaving] a trail of neglected children [and] cheated wives.” Moreover, as if confirming Murray’s fears, Vance wrote that “welfare queens” were not only “lazy black mom[s] . . . some were my neighbors, and all were white.”
Vance has crafted his political career and life story around this rhetoric because it remains an effective strategy for mobilizing white working-class Americans. His success attests to the persistence of the racial anxieties, racial stereotypes, and questions of who deserves government assistance that have long undergirded conservatives’ appeal to the family. However, like his predecessors, Vance seems uninterested in solving these problems or helping the white working class whom he claims to represent. Instead, he exploits this rhetoric, methodically crafting his rags-to-riches story in an attempt to ascend to one of our nation’s highest public offices.
Joshua Howard is a Ph.D. student in Emory University’s Graduate Division of Religion. His research covers late-20th-century and contemporary American evangelicalism, Christian nationalism, and the nuclear family.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
