American Hero

On the biggest weekend of elite motor racing (Monaco, Indianapolis, and Charlotte), I thought I would I look back to a another time when racers could be millionaires but never on one night of even after multiple seasons.  Even so, southern stock car drivers were on the rise, and their life stories were part of the changing world of automobile racing.

In 1965, Tom Wolfe opened a door for exploring how the automobile transformed southern culture and by extension American culture.  With quick wit and devastating precision, he described a South looking both backwards and forwards at the exact same moment.  Wolfe profiled legendary stock car racer, Junior Johnson, but in doing so left a snapshot of the southern United States during radical change.  Even in the article, “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson, Yes!,” Wolfe does not always seem to understand the possibilities the changes have unleashed. 

Esquire, March 1965

Praising Johnson at the very moment that Johnson’s hero status to “good old boys” was most contested, he covered Johnson’s last NASCAR Grand National (an early name for the Sprint Cup) race running an “independent” car make, Dodge.  Junior Johnson’s fame came from his David versus Goliath status in 1963 when he won the Grand National championship running a Chevy while the “Ford teams” had manufacturing help from Ford Motor Company (something I'll blog more about in the future). 




Wolfe caught Johnson right before the racer betrayed the little man, David, to join Goliath.  He highlighted the bootlegger tradition for stock-car racing because Johnson’s family made it a business, which the sport adopted as an important part of its lore and sadly folks only seemed to remember that aspect.  But the Esquire magazine article shined a light on the non-bootlegger trajectory of NASCAR.  Junior Johnson was not the last American hero because he “tripped” moonshine for his family; he fit Wolfe’s understanding of hero because he stood for a rugged individualism that did not cower in the face of giants, real or imagined.  By 1965, however, none of the “heroes” were Davids. The irony of writing Johnson’s story as a hero at that exact moment meant that Johnson’s worshipers remembered his past, even as he moved forward.  The article revealed a series of complex, contested notions about the American south.

Wolfe opened the article describing that at 10 a.m. on Sunday morning while stuck in traffic headed to North Wilkesboro racetrack he heard a preacher on the radio and an Aunt Jemima grits advertisement and the Gospel Harmonettes singing “If you dig a ditch, you better dig two . . .” and “three fools in a panel discussion on the New South.”  According to Wolfe, the three fools would have “General Lee running the new Dulcidreme Labial Cream factory down at Griffin, Georgia."  Right there, as if we are sitting in the car with him, in the the car’s radio the entire South could be encapsulated by preaching, food, gospel music, and arguments over a "new" South versus "the old" South, “and all of it, all of that old mental cholesterol, is confined to the Sunday radio.”    Fire-and-brimstone preachers, gospel music, and the glories of the old South mixed into the new brought to the listener through the technological advancement of the portable radio in the advanced technological achievement, the automobile.  The irony suggested powerful change was underway in the South, in particular, and the nation more generally.  The region had become consumers of religion, food, politics, and cars.  Of the four, the most intriguing consumption involved the automobile because the other three were often southern made but the car was foreign in so many ways.  Southerners, however, adopted it and made it their own.  Wolfe sensed that profound change when he noted that “a wild new thing, the Southern car world,” had been unleashed on the land in the form of traffic-jammed highways as he was “heading down the road on my way to see a breed such as sports never saw before, Southern stock-car drivers.”

In the glitz and glam and high-tech cars of today, Ron Howard was on the Speed Chanel this morning, Tom Wolfe saw the change coming in the mid-1960s.  Heroes are what we make them, and sometimes, we make them into our imagined selves.  

NASCAR prayers

In an academic world, scholars stake out their intellectual tuft and spend the rest of their careers tending to that spot of ground.  Not everyone follows this model, but most often if someone diverts from her chosen speciality, questions are asked about how the new interest ties into the old one.  In my case, I entered the academy studying religious cultures in the U.S.  Since most of the focus for the past twenty years has been with issues like the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of the "religious right," those subjects filled up my writing time and my bookshelves.  But I have always loved cars, particularly race cars.  Since I grew up about a mile, as the crow flies, from Richmond International Raceway, NASCAR has filled my imagination.  On occasion, I wondered if I could combined my intellectual interest with my "hobby" interest.  More often than not, someone told me that I would ruin any academic life I might have if wrote about NASCAR before I established myself as a scholar of the Civil Rights Movement, so I tinkered away on the latter and longed for the former.

One Saturday evening several years ago, while watching a Sprint Cup race, I realized that NASCAR is the only nationally televised event that shows both an innovation (prayer) and the National Anthem.  All other sporting events show the National Anthem, and even Major League Baseball has added a variation on the seventh-inning stretch during the World Series, but none of the other major sport leagues has a prayer.  What struck me that night, and has dogged some of my research agenda since then, is that in the late 1940s up through the 1970s ministers in the American South often fought against sport car racing, NASCAR in particular because of Sunday afternoon racing.  Bill France, Sr., a driving force behind NASCAR's formation and its elevation to national prominence, recognized the liability early on and had a local pastor open races at his Daytona track.  Since the mid-1980s, local pastors from the area around the event track's town have spoken an invocation before every NASCAR sanctioned event.

Last Saturday night at the start of the Sprint Cup All-Star event in Charlotte, Joe Gibbs, former NFL coaching great and team owner of Joe Gibbs Racing, did his now-annual duties of praying the invocation.  Gibbs has never been afraid to share his faith publicly, and on this night like others before, Gibbs witnessed to the saving power of Jesus Christ and the importance of the substitutionary atonement for all sinners, for himself as much as for those sitting in the stands holding their Budweiser and Miller Light cans.  The prayer is a razor-sharp version of witness tracts that Evangelicals and Fundamentalists alike leave in public bathrooms or an unsaved neighbor's house.  The event passed like so many before it --- prayer, anthem, racing, product endorsement on pit road and in victory lane --- with no fanfare or commentary.  Evangelical Protestantism's marriage to NASCAR appears seamless, but that has not always been the case and most likely isn't now.  Since NASCAR's Sprint Cup series does not race on Easter or Mother's Day, there is a cultural understanding to the invocation.  The spectators know it will be given, take off their hats and bow their heads, to ask for a safe race.  More ritual than rite, the invocation is a formality, except for those who do the praying.