Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

“How can you talk about the poor child without addressing the country that let her be so? It’s a relatively new way of thinking for me. I was raised to put all responsibility on the individual, on the bootstraps with which she ought to pull herself up. But it’s the way of things that environment changes outcomes. Or, to put it in my first language: The crop depends on the weather, dudnit? A good seed’ll do ’er job ’n’ sprout, but come hail ’n’ yer plumb outta luck regardless.” 

Smarsh points out how the impoverished believe that hard work is the key to success, and therefore a person is responsible for his or her own position in life. If a person remains poor and struggling, then it must be his or her fault, and that person is likely to internalize this shame. However, one of Smarsh’s main arguments in the book is that environment and opportunity have an outsized influence on the trajectory of a person’s life as well. This quote in the Prologue sets up that argument to play out through the rest of the narrative.

“When I found your name, in my early adulthood, I don't think I'd ever heard the term ‘white working class.’ The experience it describes contains both racial privilege and economic disadvantage, which can exist simultaneously. This was an obvious, apolitical fact for those of us who lived that juxtaposition every day. But it seemed to make some people uneasy, as though our grievance put us in competition with poor people of other races. Wealthy white people, in particular, seemed to want to distance themselves from our place and our truth. Our struggles forced a question about America that many were not willing to face: If a person could go to work every day and still not be able to pay the bills and the reason wasn't racism, what less articulated problem was afoot?”

Smarsh points out the contradiction of the poor white class in America. More than any other group, working class white people and their inability to succeed economically through multiple generations is a clear argument against the feasibility of the American Dream. For this reason, the white working class makes other classes uncomfortable—they represent “failure” with no apparent reason, because race and work ethic both seem to be in their favor.

“We would be able to map our lives against the destruction of the working class: the demise of the family farm, the dismantling of public health care, the defunding of public schools, wages so stagnant that full-time workers could no longer pay the bills. Historic wealth inequality was old news to us by the time it hit newspapers in the new millennium.”

Smarsh explains how the socioeconomic divide between the working class and the middle class widened during her childhood and young adulthood. Making a living became, if possible, even harder than ever for people born to poor families.