Review: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc on Arlie Russell Hochschild’s “Stolen Pride”
Hochschild’s is a sociology about absence and its many costs
I sometimes write on the top floor of an old Vermont woolen mill near its once necessary river. I fell for the space because I grew up in a New England factory town and my strongest ties connect to such buildings. I am always drawn to them, to what their emptiness holds still.
I learned about the power of absence from my father, an industrial laborer who became a union organizer for the Chemical Workers Union. He usually worked in the shipping department, but he earned time-and-a-half scrubbing the tanks where vinyl chloride was produced. My father’s observations taught me how to look for what I might not readily see.
After picking me up from my friend’s apartment on a winter’s night, he might notice the locked front doors of St. Cecilia’s, the French Catholic church that rose above the tenements surrounding it. Workers’ earnings had paid for that big church and their hands had built it. If its doors remained open on a night like this, cold people could get warm, and tired people could find a much-needed seat. The forests we passed on drives to visit faraway cousins were also dense with opportunity: trees in need of cutting, trails in need of clearing, tasks that could teach unemployed young people. These observations were clues, which strengthened our bond of companionable silence. Everyone, he said, needs to be of use.
This “feeling of use,” the personal pride that is bound to it, and its systemic origins, is what the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild is seeking to make visible in Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right. The book, which is set in eastern Kentucky, grew out of her longstanding interest in emotion and its material conditions. Care gaps. Wealth gaps. Equality gaps. Health gaps. She pays close attention to what we tell ourselves, what we do and don’t express about the circumstances of our lives, and how our emotional logic fares against the facts of forces beyond our control. She is alert to cultural narratives that run against or beneath what appears in the news.
In this sense, Hochschild’s is a sociology about absence and its many costs: the absence of time that accompanies lengthening American workdays (The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home and Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work); the absence of supports for caregiving and intimate life (Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, and The Outsourced Self: What Happens When We Pay Others to Live Our Lives for Us). Over the last decade, she’s become interested in how emotion operates in politics, especially among the white, rural, blue-collar men who were longtime Democrats. In her 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, which began to map some of the emotional terrain of the Tea Party, Hochschild came up with the concept of “deep story.” She’d spent years traversing Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana, a region poisoned by petrochemicals, trying to understand why its inhabitants resisted basic environmental protections to clean up the land they lived on and loved. Deep stories underly commitments and perceptions that can seem counterintuitive; they resist facts and moral precepts, and tend to be told in metaphor. “We’re not fully aware of them. They’re dreamlike,” she says. Every one of us has them.
Now she’s crisscrossing the hollers of the Appalachian town of Pikeville, Kentucky, a town of about seven thousand, in one of the poorest congressional districts in the nation, as well as one of the whitest. Monuments to loss are everywhere, some easier to see than others.
Coal camps were long closed but their remains stood as reminders. Rumbling tipples that once sorted and cleaned coal now stood silent, like giant long-legged crickets. But as jobs were leaving, a drug crisis was coming in.
Alert to what she might be missing, she tunes us into the seasonal rhythms of meaning by quieting down.
Long moderate, this 5th Congressional district became one of the most conservative in the nation, 80 percent of its residents voting for Donald Trump in 2016 and again in 2020. Pikeville shared the same vulnerabilities as other red states—poverty, jobs lost to globalization, underfunded schools, poorer health, higher risk of accidents, and lower life expectancy. Matthew Heimbach, a young neo-Nazi who becomes one of Hochschild’s subjects, requests a permit to hold a Unite the Right march in Pikeville. He promised beleaguered locals a way to reframe what was happening to them: they had not suffered losses, they’d been robbed. Hochschild analyzes the invitation of the far right by paying attention to what she might be missing. As she speaks with individuals and couples, they cross back and forth, and what might look like ruins become recognized as sites of love. Alert to what the deafening election cycles might be missing, she tunes us into the seasonal rhythms of meaning by quieting down.
How does the longstanding neglect of what desperately needs attention and repair become justification for what the powerful decide to abandon? What does it mean if we no longer can see what was abandoned? What happens when the people who were abandoned themselves don’t live in the truth of their own experiences?
Stolen Pride is a book that shows how gaps get filled by meaning of one kind or another. She invites us to think of a “pride economy,” much like interest earned on a bank account, initially resilient to rate fluctuations, until the funds run out altogether. After that, every week incurs a penalty fee. Early on, she describes how Pikeville’s major industries, coal and oil, were once heralded as key national assets—high in the pride economy—and later as places of contamination and flattened mountains--low in the pride economy. The blows have piled up so steadily that even the meaning of what has disappeared changes during the time she spends on the same roads, driving around.
We hear people in conversation, doing what people do—revisiting happy memories, remembering old wounds, defending decisions, celebrating others, overriding feeling, discovering new feelings with this stranger. We can almost hear Hochschild listening. She returns us to each character again and again, as she picks up the thread of the conversation and connects it to public discourse, drawing on the work of other scholars. She shows how decisions driven by the priorities of corporate profit are reframed by racists and ideologues into things that other people have taken—stolen jobs, stolen health, stolen pride.
Hochschild does identify a few “bridge-crossers” among the “biographical patterns related to pride and shame”: people who felt above shame, which enabled them to reach out to others easily, and people who had been, in a sense, forged in shame’s fires—folks who’d hit bottom, worked through their shame, and rose up. Tommy Ratliff’s stepfather’s first job loss was as a coal-mine guard; the second, logger in a lumberyard; by the time he lost a spot on a minimum-wage crew cutting grass on the highway, he was behind on his taxes. Ratliff’s parents were drinking and fighting, and when they sold half their property he fled. His own losses, which led into alcoholism, involved withdrawals more modern than coal mines shutting down: a job at a Kellogg factory, which he found through a small church; a young wife who left after they had a baby; his addicted brother, who moved into an extra room in the house Ratcliff became unable to afford after a head-on collision kept him out of work. Three days into a twelve-step program, his head hung low, he watched a colony of carrier ants on the patio. One carried a dead ant equal its size. “That dead ant was useless, not doing its part, being a load instead of carrying a load,” Ratliff said. He determined to be useful. It was slow going. He earned a bachelor’s degree, remarried, now lives in a rented trailer. He met James Browning at the rehab center where he worked.
Browning grew up in Turkey Creek, a holler of ninety-eight people. Between the ages of eight and eleven, he’d been abused by two men, and he kept it a secret. That secret “collided,” Hochschild writes, with the then-stealth marketing of OxyContin. Lax state regulation made it easy for doctors to prescribe 50 percent more OxyContin in Kentucky than in states with more regulation. By 2015, 29 percent of Pike Country residents directly knew or knew of someone who’d died of an overdose. Ratliff helped Browning through the homeless shelter, the first job, community college, and training as a counselor. Browning now takes recovering people rock-climbing on his beloved Appalachian hills. He identifies with the landscape’s scarred beauty, its peaks lopped-off from logging and mining, leaving what remains more prone to flooding. “A lot of us are addicted to things other than drugs, like to things politicians say,” he told Hochshild. Of Matthew Heimbach, and his Unite the Right pitch, Ratcliff’s observation saw the same impulse at work: “that guy’s selling white nationalism as a quick fix to make a guy who’s down on himself feel like he’s strong and going places. With racism, that guy would just be handing anyone like I was another drink.”
Repair work is slow. Damage itself is dynamic, even if its expression appears static, or our alertness to it dulls over time. There are injustices so deferred that the very idea of the harm has changed. There is repair work so overdue that it becomes surprising that it gets tended. As it turned out, the people of Pikeville protected themselves from further division and assault.
The mayor of Pikeville gave Heimbach his permit, but collaborated carefully with local and state police, Fish and Wildlife, the Sheriff’s office, the National Guard, and even the FBI to keep a lid on things. Only about a hundred white supremacists marched, not the thousands that Homeland Security was predicting, and most of them, like the smattering of counter-protesters, came in from elsewhere. Some locals stayed home out of fear, some just wanted to look the other way. Three people were arrested and a grenade got tossed, but it didn’t explode. The town took certain lessons from its history of being used by outside forces.
There are times when the threat of division brings a community together. While Pikeville’s people did not always have solutions for their many challenges, they knew what they were not. Heimbach had to look further afield to find an audience for his movement: he took his failures in Pikeville and make it Charlottesville’s trial run.
When I first moved into this latest factory space, a pandemic transplant from New York City, I had time on my hands. I’d lost so many people I loved, and—I thought—my old city. During the day, I’d wander across the bridge and around the little town on the other side. Sometimes I’d cross to collect or drop off a book at the town’s tiny library, which I found unfriendly compared to other beloved libraries. True, I was a newcomer. In my newness, I became a bridge-crossing regular for a while.
There were holes in the concrete of the bridge so big you could put your hand through them, which I did. There were spots covered only by what looked like chicken wire. When trucks rumbled past, the bridge shook. I took notice of stories of collapsing bridges in distant places. I knew it could happen here. I kept crossing. In my back and forth, the new things became familiar, and other details appeared. Some days, I joined a man who paused in the middle of the bridge and watched the water. He rarely spoke, and when he did, we chatted about the rising and falling water levels. Once we watched a determined kayaker trying to launch over mud and rocks.
Callers from New York admire the exposed planks of wood of behind me on Zoom. The studio’s walls are beautiful, with delicate flecks of gray and pale yellow paint. The previous tenants scraped off the countless previous layers while on a methamphetamine bender. Fire destroyed the original mill, which sat on the banks of the river, and the space I sit in now was reconstructed on higher ground. My first writing studio in New York was a small cement box in a building in Chinatown where sweatshops were still operating. When I squeezed into the elevator with the other working women, early in the morning, I anchored myself in a laboring world I was simultaneously fighting to leave. Next came a large studio in a canning factory in Gowanus that had been repurposed for artists. The concrete floors felt familiar, although they were polyurethaned to an unnatural shine.
A new bridge went up to replace the crumbling one, a post-pandemic infrastructure project. Some of the construction trucks had Trump stickers. On New Year’s Eve my landlord, who lives in the building, gathered friends and made a toast to the old bridge from the new bridge. There is only one bridge now. I asked when it had happened, the inauguration of the new bridge.
“No ceremony,” my landlord said. “They just opened it. They had barricades and they just took them down.”
A train passes beneath the second-floor window of my new place twice a day. My father had hopped trains and I used to indulge myself thinking of it as a wanderlust that connected us, but as I watched the train from my second-floor window, I was reminded of what I always knew: how dangerous it was. He’d hopped trains during the Depression. Before that, he’d moved frequently during his childhood from tenement to tenement. Apartments were lost to fire, to evictions, because they could not afford the rent.
My father never romanticized ruins, not like I do. One day late in his life we took a drive. Here was the bar where he had hidden, protected by the bartender, who kept a straight face when the police who had been chasing him came inside. His childhood friend Dougie’s family owned such a bar. Before school, waiting for Dougie, he’d watched the workers come in for their morning shots. I remembered other drives. We would park away from local workers’ tenements, and they peeked out of curtains and shooed us off, or told us to come back later, or pointed to us to use the door through the back. At their own kitchen tables, they whispered. My father listened more than he talked.
At those factories’ gates he could no longer enter, he’d squat down to my height, hand me a stack of flyers, and point out a man standing inside.
“When I tell you, run as fast as you can to that man and give him these,” he’d say.
It felt good to be of use.
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc is a journalist who is finishing a book for Random House about death and comedy. She has written for Book Post on women comedians, Hacks, and the fiction of Anna DeForest.
Molly Fischer, in The New Yorker, interviews Wesleyan University President Michael Roth, one of the very few administrators in higher education who has called for universities to organize and resist Trump administration efforts to force academic change by threatening mandated federal financing. Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber, the only other one I know about, appears today on the New York Times’ Daily podcast. The Rutgers University Senate ten days ago passed a resolution calling for a “Mutual Defense Compact” of Big Ten universities “in defense of academic freedom, institutional integrity, and the research enterprise,” which was today echoed by the University of Indiana, Bloomington, Senate. Rutgers’s resolution is currently under consideration by their president, Jonathan Holloway.
Writing in LitHub, bookseller Josh Cook has called on publishers and booksellers to resist any administration instructions to institute rating systems for books or to collect advance publishing information to assist book removal efforts on “harmful content” grounds. A Texas law requiring book venders to rate books for sexual content was held unconstitutional by an appeals court in 2024. Josh Cook also calls for publishers and booksellers to “deplatform” right-wing ideas. We considered his advocacy on this issue in a Notebook a couple of years ago.
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Sounds like an interesting and needed book.
Adrian Nicole Leblanc’s words are always a balm to my soul. Glad to see her here - and can’t wait for that standup book!