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

“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. Smarsh’s family and their working-class peers felt this divide most acutely and suffered most, such that by the time it became national news inequality was simply their way of life.

“But the American Dream has a price tag on it. The cost changes depending on where you’re born and to whom, with what color skin and with how much money in your parents’ bank account. The poorer you are, the higher the price. You can pay an entire life in labor, it turns out, and have nothing to show for it. Less than nothing, even: debt, injury, abject need.” 

Here, Smarsh lays out her analysis of the American Dream succinctly. In essence, the American Dream is sold to everyone as achievable so long as one works hard. However, the truth is that it is much, much more difficult to attain economic security and success if one is born into a poor family. It costs more physically, emotionally, and financially. 

“Work can be a true communion with resources, materials, other people. I have no issue with work. Its relationship to the economy—whose work is assigned what value—is where the trouble comes in. My family’s labor was undervalued to such an extent that, while we never starved or went without shelter in a chronic way, we all knew what it was like to need something essential—food, shoes, a safe place to live, a rent payment, a trip to the doctor—and go without it for lack of money.” 

Again, Smarsh points out that her family did not stay in poverty due to lack of work ethic. In fact, work ethic is something they value highly. However, the American economy is structured to value the work of some people more highly than others. The hard, physical labor of Smarsh’s family was undervalued to such a degree that her parents and grandparents struggled throughout their lives.

“Poverty makes motherhood harder, and motherhood makes poverty harder. Single mothers and their children are, by far, the poorest type of family in the United States.” 

Throughout the book, Smarsh pays extra attention to the experience and difficulties facing impoverished women. Here, she points out that a poor mother faces unique struggles. A woman without resources trying to raise a child faces unique difficulties, making it even more unlikely that she will be able to escape poverty than her male or childless counterparts.

“When she told me the story, it was about a day she barely survived because of my dad’s absence. I see it now as a day she barely survived because society valued productivity and autonomy more than it valued women and children.” 

Illustrating her point that poor women are among the most disadvantaged demographics, Smarsh recounts a story where her mother, recovering from childbirth, nearly died because she was unable to afford medical care or help with her children. This is the direct result of her role as a poor mother being so devalued by the economy. Her life was at risk because there was no way for her to get help when she needed it.

“What was still preventable in the 1980s would, in a couple decades, become manifest; what once was treatable would become deadly. I'm not sure my immediate family's brushes with death when I was a kid—mom's hemorrhage in childbirth, Grandma's collapsed lung, Dad's chemical poisoning—would be survived today. Mom would have been less healthy going into labor, Grandma would have been sent home too soon for lack of insurance, Dad would have been given a cheaper and less effective treatment. The mortality rate for poor rural women, in particular, has risen sharply over my lifetime. Health insurance had been around for a long time, of course, but the power of that industry had swelled up fast, transforming access to care and all the costs that come with it.” 

Smarsh points out that, for all the difficulties her family faced when she was growing up, the impoverished in modern America have a harder time still. The programs and opportunities that were shrinking when Smarsh was young have continued to do so. She argues that living poor has become much more dangerous, and potentially lethal, due to changes to public health systems and insurance policies. Instead of dealing with the debt incurred by medical treatment, the poor today are more likely to die of treatable conditions.

“But as all sorts of stereotyped groups know, the popular image—selected or fixated upon by someone more powerful than you—doesn’t tell you much about the life. For one thing, anyone who has lived it knows that what matters less than the trailer is where the trailer is parked.”

One of the main social problems Smarsh points out is that the middle and upper classes have no idea what life in poverty truly means. Instead, they have only stereotypes to describe the lives of people without means. These, in turn, are dangerous as they do not give any idea about what life is actually like without money to afford a home or stability.

“We thus benefitted from our skin color in ways that are hard to perceive by three white people working a field together, no other human being, town, or structure in sight to the horizon—a complicated mix of privilege and disadvantage.” 

Smarsh points out the unique contradiction of being both poor and white. Although her socioeconomic class benefited in certain ways from skin color, these benefits are difficult to acknowledge or understand when they are struggling to pay for food and shelter. Smarsh rightly describes this as a “complicated mix of privilege and disadvantage”—the contradiction exists in the lives of thousands and thousands of people in America.

“When I was well into adulthood, the United States developed the notion that a dividing line of class and geography separated two essentially different kinds of people. I knew that wasn’t right because both sides existed in me—where I was from and what I hoped to do in life, the place that best sustained me and the places I needed to go for the things I was meant to do. Straddling that supposed line as I did, I knew it was about a difference of experience, not of humanity.”

The contradiction between the promise of the American Dream and the reality of so many people unable to escape poverty has led to the idea in U.S. culture that some fundamental difference exists between people of different classes. Smarsh decisively debunks this, as she is one of only a few people who walks in both worlds. To assume that people in different classes differ in humanity is to ignore the true problem: flaws in the socioeconomic system that give preference to wealth and skew against the poor.

“To be made invisible as a class is an invalidation.”

Poor white people are rarely portrayed in American media, and when they are, it is often as harmful stereotypes. As a result, the white working-class experience is essentially discounted both from a political perspective as well as a social perspective. This invalidates the experience of thousands of people, including Smarsh’s family, contributing to the general sense of hopelessness many in poverty feel.

“Our sense that our struggles were our own fault, our acceptance of the way things were, helped keep American industry humming to the benefit of the wealthy.” 

Again, Smarsh emphasizes how much working-class people believe in personal responsibility, a mindset reinforced by politics and social systems in order to keep the poor people poor for the benefit of the rich.

“Class, like race and all the other ways we divide ourselves up to make life miserable, is what I'd later learn is a ‘social construct.’ That's what my family calls bullshit, and there are places in a person that bullshit can't touch.” 

Smarsh confronts the idea that class is a crutch used to explain the social system without offering solutions or explanations for why the divide exists. This divide does not exist naturally but is imposed by society. 

“Stealing was wrong, I'd been taught in church and everywhere else, but I had a feeling that the money system was wrong, too. I didn't think the world owed me everything, but it also seemed the world wouldn't give me anything that I didn't reach out and grab for myself. To do so, though, was both a mark of moral failure and something that could ruin my life, if I got caught.” 

As a young teen, Smarsh struggles to reconcile what she has been taught is right and wrong with the reality she lives in. She knows it is wrong to take things, but also her experience proves that she will not get anything that she does not take for herself. It is part of the system that teaches poor people that they are owed nothing and shouldn’t try to take anything—the result is that they have nothing and are able to gain nothing.

“For the women in my family and their daughters, the constant moving was about staying safe from violent men and finding new ways to pay the bills. Leaving sad places behind, they seized on the promise of new ones. But they knew well enough that tomorrow’s promise would end up yesterday’s sadness. Unlike women in so many sad stories, they always found a way to leave. But in matters of house and home, they often had nowhere to go, and the same cycles would begin again.” 

Smarsh explains why the women in her family find it so difficult to stay in one place. They habitually move, trying to escape bad situations, abusive men, towns with no opportunities, and sad memories. However, they also habitually are forced back into the same patterns no matter where they end up. Smarsh is proud that her female relatives always have the will and ability to leave harmful situations, but knows that, without help and opportunities, they cannot break the cycle.

“Being broke has a way of separating families: Unaffordable children put on trains and sent west as farm labor. Divorced dads without gas money stuck across town from their kids. Children driven north to live with an aunt after a hurricane floods a low-lying ward the city didn’t tend to.”

One of the side effects of poverty is that it is difficult for families to stay together. Children often move between relatives at different times depending on who is able to care for them. This is true even in Smarsh’s life, as she lived for several years with Arnie and Betty when her situation with her mother and stepfather became difficult. Although she was happy with her grandparents, she still felt the pain of separation from her mother.

“Like my mother, I came to know firsthand the relationship between place of residence and place of schooling. Attending eight schools by ninth grade taught me that, if you can hold your center without going crazy, you’re the same person wherever you go, even as the scenery changes. That scenery is shaped, in part, by money and class.”

Although higher education can provide opportunities to impoverished people to change their circumstances, Smarsh points out that one’s access to education very much depends on geography. For poor children in rural areas, good schools are hard to find and it is even harder to stay at a single school for any length of time due to transient lives.

“Class and its implications for literacy and access decide what feminism looks like in action.” 

Smarsh spends some time analyzing the contradictory messages about feminism that poor white women experience. Although they are rarely told that their abilities are different from their male counterparts, more is expected of them and they are given less in return. “Feminism” as a concept is tied to education, which is a privileged thing in and of itself. Therefore, poor white women do not think of feminism as an answer to their situation. In a very real way, poor women are left out of feminism because they lack the education and opportunity to take part.

“Economic power is social power. In the end, for all her hard work and tenacity, the poor woman lacks both.” 

Smarsh returns to the extra difficulties women experience simply by being females in poverty. They lack both economic and social standing, and also fight against inherent biases against their gender. As a result, the fight for progress or the betterment of their circumstances is often a losing battle.

“They had a confidence in their own intuition, a sort of knowing deeper than schooling can render and higher than the dogma of a church. If they could bear the pain of experiencing their world long enough, without numbing themselves, they had what you might call ‘powers.’” 

Smarsh here describes the unique power and mindset she witnessed in older men and women in her socioeconomic class. It is the power, above all, of survival. They have been through so much stress and pain simply as a matter of course given their impoverished situation that, having reached old age, they understand more about survival than most. This gives them a certain wisdom and invulnerability. 

“Economic inequality is one cultural divide that causes us to see one another as stereotypes, some of which allow the powerful to make harmful decisions in policy and politics. That separation is experienced intimately, though, as distances we might not realize are related to class.” 

Given that the socioeconomic divide is reinforced by stereotypes, those in power have a skewed view of the disadvantaged classes. This in turn leads to policies and systems that are ultimately more harmful than helpful to those most in need of health. In some cases, these policies are meant to create difficulties for those in the working class as a way to encourage upward mobility by penalizing poverty. However, these systems are counterproductive, only serving to hurt those who are already hurting.

“Perhaps most important to our family’s happier endings was that, while Betty had plenty of good excuses to become a bitter, cynical person, she had somehow preserved her natural outlook on the world: that justice is worth fighting for, and the notion of a better life is always worth a shot.”

Smarsh credits much of her success and positives in the lives of many of her family members to her grandmother Betty, who managed to maintain a sense of hope despite her hard life. She always believed in working for justice and trying to improve one’s life, no matter the roadblocks or setbacks along the way. This simple belief pushed Smarsh to pursue her goals and allowed Betty to help many people at her job at the Wichita courthouse.

“There are many complicated reasons why so few people cross a socioeconomic divide in any lasting way, but one of the reasons is simple: It is painful crossing.” 

In one of the most brutally honest quotes in the entire book, Smarsh explains that on top of all of the other factors that prevent people from crossing the socioeconomic line, it is a painful process to do so. She worked herself to exhaustion in college trying to make ends meet and sacrificed much in her life to attain her education. If she had fallen seriously ill or suffered a major injury, she might have been unable to bear the stress and pain of crossing, or may have been physically unable to put in the work required.