The Invention of the Appalachian Hillbilly

 Roosevelt went on to imply that the government had the right to take the lands of the Tennessee Valley because their owners had failed to use the land for its highest good.  (Can’t make this crap up.)

In our politically correct culture where even the mildest criticism of a societal group can earn someone the label of racist, it remains open season on rural America.  When Barack Obama famously spoke of rural Pennyslvanians in 2008 as “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” and are prone to “anti-immigrant sentiment”, he was simply describing the stereotype that Americans have come to accept about that segment of our population that makes its home in the region known as Appalachia.

The Appalachian Regional Commission identifies the Appalachian Region as “a 205,000-square-mile region that follows the spine of the Appalachian Mountains from southern New York to northern Mississippi. It includes all of West Virginia and parts of 12 other states: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.  Forty-two percent of the Region’s population is rural, compared with 20 percent of the national population.”