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.
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| Esquire, March 1965 |
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.
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