The Appalachian Trail.

• Author: Woodard, Colin
• Position: ON POLITICAL BOOKS

Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class

by Max Fraser

Princeton University Press, 320 pp.

In the first half of the 20th century, 8 million poor rural whites fled the border states for Great Lakes cities. Brash and suspicious of government, they played an underappreciated role in the collapse of the New Deal order.

The United States is an awkward federation of regional cultures, a fact that has defined everything from our constitutional arrangements and partisan political geography to the existence of "red," "blue," and "purple" states that have been divided into rival sections since colonization. So when a huge number of people from one region suddenly migrate to another, it tends to cause friction and conflict in the short and middle term. The cultural mores, religious affiliations, and political attitudes of the newcomers often differ from those of their established neighbors, as can ideas about child-rearing, social conduct, freedom, liberty, and justice. The experience changes everyone.

Scholars have rightly focused on two really big 20th-century examples: the Great Migration of African Americans from the Deep South to the cities of the Great Lakes region and from Tidewater to the Northeast (in which 6 million took part); and the Dust Bowl exodus, which saw at least 250,000 "Okies" abandon the southern Great Plains for Southern California. Both migrations had profound social and political effects for their homes, old and new.

A third 20th-century migration has received comparatively little attention despite being the largest of all: the movement of 8 million poor rural whites from the Upland South to the industrial cities of the Great Lakes between 1910 and 1969. These self-described "hillbillies," driven from their home region by large-scale economic transformations and forced displacements by coal companies and federal dam projects, were seen as a scourge on the midwestern factory towns they poured into, depressing wages, disrupting the peace with drinking and boisterous church services, and letting their children run wild. Unlike the aforementioned migrants, they typically kept closely tied to their home region, migrating back and forth with the seasons of the year and resisting assimilation. And they may have played a role in the subsequent collapse of the New Deal order and Democratic electoral margins in the Midwest.

This Greater Appalachian migration is the subject of the historian Max Fraser's debut book, Hillbilly Highway, a scholarly examination of the phenomenon from its origins at the turn of the 19th century to the transformation of the politics of its signature musical genre--country--by the turn of the 20th. Fraser, a scholar of American labor, cultural, and political history at the University of Miami, has delivered a readable and enlightening academic account that...