“White Knuckle Ride”: Stock Cars and Class Identity In The Postmodern South 

Bud Moore, whose ramshackle racing shop sits across from a dilapidated textile mill in Spartanburg, South Carolina, seemingly represents the epitome of stock car racing. A veteran of World War II who fought at Omaha Beach, Moore played a pivotal role in the early history of auto racing. Since 1946, Moore has built engines for some of NASCAR’s legends, including Joe Weatherly, Ricky Rudd, and Dale Earnhardt. Displaying the testosterone-rich image of racing, Moore rejects many of the sport’s recent innovations, such as “cool suits” that aid in lowering the up to 120 degree temperatures inside the cars on hot two-hundred -mile-an-hour Sundays. The crusty Moore dismissed such concerns in an interview with sports writer Peter Goldenbrock. “Cool suits are for pansy asses,” he says (147-49).

Driver and car-owner Junior Johnson, Tom Wolfe’s “Last American Hero,” also evokes for many observers the rural roots and outlaw character of the sport. Johnson represents a time when, as he reminded the editor of the anthology Racing Stock, stock car racing meant dirt tracks and connections with “the people in the whisky business.” Describing a sport whose fan base had a specific class identity, Johnson told an interviewer in the early 1970s “people who go to races are more of the people who work in factories” while “people that go to the golf game are people that work in an office or own the factories.” Speaking of the latter, allegedly well-heeled crowd, Johnson said, “If you could interest them, it would be good” (3,10).

Johnson must be pleased at the state of the sport in the twenty-first century. Traditionalists to the contrary, viewing contemporary stock car racing from Bud Moore’s racing shop or the life and times of Junior Johnson would lead to a misunderstanding of the phenomenon. Corporate sponsors, not moonshiners, have moved the sport away from the dirt tracks.

Ironically, the national media, fans, country music tributes, and the organization of NASCAR itself insist on identifying the sport with both its rural southern past and its proletarian origins, disregarding its social and demographic transformations that began in the early 1970s.  The recalcitrance shown by fans, the media, and NASCAR itself in retaining this image suggests that stock car racing serves as an important tag of regional identity for southerners in the changing South. Cultural representations of stock car racing represent the commodifying of an American region and offer a window into understanding the construction of contemporary southern identities, especially masculine identity.

Along with class and gender, a thoroughgoing examination of racial politics would seem requisite for understanding identity construction in the southern context. NASCAR certainly does not represent an exception. At least in the popular imagination of both southerners and the larger culture, the smell of rubber sizzling on pavement at Talladega or Bristol has literally been a “white-knuckle ride.” The politics of “race at the races” have always been understated, but very real. Pete Daniel has, with wry irony, described the original drivers as “not exactly liberal on matters of race” (91-93).

Nevertheless, this article focuses on the role that NASCAR has played in the construction of class and gender identity, rather than the story of the exclusion of African-Americans from the sport. Implicit is the notion that the current southern bourgeoisie, more often that not, elides rather than deploys race in its effort to construct social identity in the changing South.

Analysis of journalistic  coverage of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign stop at the legendary Southern 500 in Darlington, South Carolina, underscores the class identity configurations embraced by NASCAR fans in recent years. Examples reveal how the media collaborate with white southerners in this identity construction. In an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article entitled “Fast Cars and Presidential Races,” reporter A.L. May refers to stock car racing as “the cultural heart of the blue-collar South.” May insists that stock car racing has a uniquely southern identity, that its primary celebrants are “working class” and that, despite persistent boos and even a plane flying overhead trailing anti-Clinton messages, the crowd at the event had a divided mind over their choice for President due to their “blue collar” concerns with the economy. May consistently evokes the rural roots of NASCAR, calling stock car racing “as uniquely southern as sweet tea, country music and grits” and repeating the oft-heard contention that the sport was “started 40 years ago by Appalachian bootleggers like Junior Johnson.” The alleged “outlaw” spirit connected with the sport’s origin underscores May’s construction of the stock car race as the playground of the working-class South.

 The transformation of NASCAR at the end of the twentieth century suggests that May had it wrong. Studies of contemporary stock car racing’s fan base suggest that the sport has become the pastime of the prosperous South. An August 1994 survey in Business Week found that over 60% of self-proclaimed NASCAR fans had an income of over $30,000 a year. Of those, about half had an income of $50,000+. 1994 figures for NASCAR merchandise sales topped six hundred million dollars, suggesting that an enormous portion of the fan’s disposable income goes to purchase caps, t-shirts gaudy with the colors of favorite drivers, and beer coolers stamped with car numbers, team names and manufacturer logos (74). By February of 1997, Business Week could describe the average NASCAR fan as “young, college educated and relatively affluent” (85).

Leisure and sport always contain some element of escape from the intertwining variables of economic fate and social status. This has been true throughout the history of the sport in the South. Pete Daniel describes stock car racing in the early 1950s as an opportunity for both fans and drivers to escape the rigors of the textile time-clock and the drabness of rural life in wild and boisterous weekends that included sex, alcohol and, of course, very fast cars (91-93). Drivers themselves reveled in this New South opportunity to escape the farm and the mill even as they expressed nostalgia for the life they left behind. Legendary “stock racer” Cale Yarborough, who grew up on a tobacco farm in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina, described the South of his youth as “nothing but cotton mills and farms and hard work” and remembered how he had thought that “there had to be a better way to make a living than digging around in the dirt and picking tobacco worms off leaves by hand.”  While describing his rise from poverty to the status of racing legend, Yarborough revealed an abiding nostalgia for his rural roots by describing to an interviewer the ways in which “Tobacco is beautiful” and waxing eloquent about the Carolina lowcountry as a land of “great cypress swamps and water oak swamps . . . rich in timber and cotton and tobacco and soybeans” (xiii, 8).

Stock cars, driving them or watching them, has long provided escape for the southern working class. The new and surprising element seen in fans of the sport is the willingness to maintain the semblance of proletarian class origins even as they benefit from the massive economic transformations of late twentieth century southern culture.  The self-described “rednecks,” May noted at Darlington, fly the Confederate battle flag and enjoy the appearance of country music superstars like Tammy Wynette. Reveling in the “redneck” identity, most of these fans are really what Charles Reagan Wilson calls “the southern yuppie.”  As Wilson argues, this new social group on the southern scene participates in the quintessence of postmodernism, “a sense of limitless cultural possibility” (152). Cultural identities become a commodity that the southern yuppies’ income allows them to purchase. The multi-million dollar NASCAR souvenir/apparel industry, for example, allows this group to identify with their favorite racing folk hero and the usable rural past that many of these drivers represent. Wilson could have been writing of this phenomenon in his general description of postmodern identity surfing: “Places survive only as collectibles” (153).

The New York Times also reported on Clinton’s Labor Day weekend foray into an allegedly “working class” South. The Times took a perspective similar to the Journal-Constitution, although reporter Michael Kelly had no illusions about how much support the future President received from the crowd. “Roaring chants” of “We want Bush, We want Bush” greeted Clinton as he stood to give the traditional call for speed: “Gentlemen, start your engines.” Kelly noted that no one heard Clinton’s voice as it “was drowned out by a long, lusty chorus of boos.”

Kelly makes the point that “This South—the overwhelmingly white, masculine world of stock car racing—is profoundly Republican.” Ronald Reagan, after all, had a much different reception than Clinton, as did New England Yankee George Bush in 1988 and 1992. But this crowd hardly fits the stereotype of the “country-club” Republicans. Kelly describes sections of the infield as islands of rowdiness “where Confederate flags flew from car antennas and the air was thick with the smell of grilling hamburgers, suntan oil and hops, young women in neon bikinis paraded and posed to the accompaniment of varied shouts and noises of male approval.” Kelly’s account differs from May’s in that he draws no conclusions about the economic location of these rowdy fans. In fact, he points to evidence that some of this rowdiness represents an assumed identity. One of  Kelly’s interviews, a respectable middle class Darlington salesman, held up a sign during the event that proclaimed “Redneck Race Fans for Bush.”

Journalistic observers of  NASCAR can hardly be blamed for rendering the sport as a southern, rural, and raunchy phenomenon. They are simply taking part in a larger cultural phenomenon that the sport and its corporate sponsors have helped to shape. NASCAR has used the tools of modern consumerism to promote itself as just such a “working class” phenomenon.

May called NASCAR “as southern as . . . country music,” noting that when Ronald Reagan appeared at the Southern 500 in 1980, Richard Petty and Tammy Wynette flanked the first President to ever visit a NASCAR-sanctioned event. In a single moment, country music, stock car racing, and the working class white conservatism of “Reagan Democrats” became symbolically linked. Many observers have noted such connections among these phenomena. Don Cusic, for example, has argued that the struggle for class respectability has been a consistent theme in both stock car racing and country music (32). The connection between NASCAR and country music appears most clearly in the 1996 souvenir compact disc Hotter than Asphalt. Containing paeans to stock car racing from such country-rock notables as Lynyrd Skynyrd, Waylon Jennings, and Hank Williams Jr., the NASCAR-sponsored project elaborates on a number of common themes in the cultural representation of the sport. Often subsumed under gendered representations of the southern male self, the undertone remains a defiant assertion of working class identity.

Lynyrd Skynyrd’s contribution to the CD, a song entitled “White Knuckle Ride,” celebrates a sense of freedom and male independence long-associated with both stock cars and southern-fried rock and roll. The song’s narrative concerns a driver on the NASCAR circuit who remembers his roots even in the midst of success. The lyrics evoke the by-gone days of NASCAR as Skynyrd ‘s musical persona reminisces about his days “down at the old dirt track.” Changes in the sport are recognized, as when Skynyrd sings of having “a big time sponsor.” At the same time, the narrator insists that he remembers his roots: “I ain’t any different from the way I used to be.” The chorus celebrates the masculine ethos of the South, an ethos in which nothing, except perhaps Dame Fortune, can hinder the independence of the southern male: “White knuckle ride/I’m gonna leave ‘em all behind/If I don’t run outta gas/and my tires will last/I’m gonna take that checkered flag.”

Hank Williams Junior’s offering, “Down in Hueytown,” praises the “Allison boys” of Alabama whose driving prowess made “Hueytown” into “sacred ground.” Told from the perspective of a crew member from  “a trailer in the country on the side of a hill,” this rural character’s trials with bill collectors cause him “to find out quick you’ve gotta be your own man.” NASCAR gives him the opportunity for both independence and success on the Winston Cup circuit: “We beat ‘em in Charlotte and Birmingham, Daytona, Talladega, and Rockingham.” Attachment to NASCAR, in the “Bocephus’” account, equals male independence. This sense of independence has a regional connection, as when Williams’s musical persona tells us that his decision to “be my own man” comes about because “down in Alabama you gotta do what you can.”

The construction of masculinity connected with stock car racing resonates with very traditional views of manhood in the American South. However, much more than a sense of independence is at stake in much of the celebration of NASCAR. Class anger, rather than simply a celebration of male freedom, intermingles with the gendered language of stock car fandom.  Hank Jr.’s evocation of “the trailer in the country on the side of the hill” summons up an entire dark world of economic shadows on the southern sunbelt. Williams’s musical persona suggests angry defiance against the whole panoply of the American class system combined with a willingness to use the speed and power of the automobile culture to subvert that system. The irony of adopting such a stance in a sport dominated by America’s corporate culture perhaps explains why bourgeois southerners have turned to NASCAR in such numbers. The ironies reflect their own anxieties. Adopting a sport with the roughneck character of stock car racing provides a salve, a way to free oneself of the latent ambiguities, and perhaps the latent guilt, of southern yuppiedom.

Connections made between the sport, a particular construction of “manly independence,” and class representation found their incarnation in the late Dale Earnhardt. Known as “The Intimidator” due to his black-clad-persona and hard-driving style, Earnhardt has a fan base utterly single-minded in its devotion to the man Sports Illustrated once called,  “a resurrected Confederate soldier.” H.A. “Humpy” Wheeler, owner of the Charlotte superspeedway, saw in Earnhardt the personification of southern working-class anger. The celebration of the Kannapolis, North Carolina, native, Wheeler says, grew from the frustration of “people from the country” who have been forced by economic changes to drive in newly urban areas. They, Wheeler opines, identify with the “Intimidator” attitude everytime they must get behind the wheel (qtd. in Hinton 71-73).

Surely there is more to the Earnhardt phenomenon than post-agrarian road rage. Racing’s “man in black” once described many of the new drivers on the Winston Cup circuit by saying, “They ain’t never seen the kind of rough racing I’ve had to do all my life just to survive.” Reporter Ed Hinton called this kind of rhetoric “a direct tug on the heartstrings of an angry, hard-knocks segment of workaday America.” More likely, Earnhardt’s “Ironhead” persona meant a great deal to a suburban South anxious to maintain some attachment to its rural roots. Earnhardt, a ninth grade dropout who regularly described his early days in NASCAR as filled with extreme poverty, represented a last stand for those who want to use stock car racing as a tie to a rough-neck southern past, even if they themselves have little connection to that past. Earnhardt’s love of hunting and fishing combined with his four-hundred-acre farm in Mooresville, North Carolina, completed the image. Choosing to cheer for Earnhardt asserted the ideal of “manly independence” in a new southern world where suburban streets and “Evian” have replaced dirt tracks and moonshine. Indeed, the consumer culture that created this new world offers the possibility of constructing the old.  Earnhardt, ironically, fit well into this new consumer world. “Dale Earnhardt, Inc.” turned its namesake’s image into a marketable commodity, selling hard-driving masculinity in the form of a #3 stamped on t-shirts, ball caps, beer coolers, and bumper stickers. Suburban southerners can have, for a small portion of their disposable income, a connection with a genuine, hunting and fishing “good old boy.” Pete Daniel has argued that contemporary drivers have become “icons of capitalism, identified as much with a product as with their own names.” But much more attractive to a new generation of fans has been the tendency of drivers to be identified with certain attitudes from what Daniel calls “the untamed part of racing,” its rowdy rural past. Such a connection no longer functions as an escape from the mill spindles or the cotton rows, but rather from the inanity of corporate office politics and the lazy tedium of the golf links. This makes the drivers more effective “icons of capitalism,” and fans are ultimately purchasing identity.

The consumer of constructions of “manly independence” is not limited to one option. Contemporary race fans can, for example, choose to connect themselves with Jeff Gordon and his very successful “Rainbow Warriors” racing team. In Gordon, we are far from W.J. Cash’s notion of a “helluvafella.” Gordon’s privileged upbringing sets him apart from Earnhardt and “the King” who worried about success getting him “above his upbringing.” Moreover, Gordon represents an evangelical version of masculinity in a contemporary culture, segments of which define manhood more by the standards of “Promise-Keepers” than by feats of hunting and drinking. His unusual degree of youthful success likely makes him very appealing to an equally successful New South whose lives are much easier than earlier generations of hardscrabble southerners. The Gordon phenomenon has certainly received the attention of those concerned about the fast pace of change in the New South.  Southerners shopping for NASCAR’s untamed past have been less than pleased with Gordon’s popularity. Intense, seemingly irrational, dislike has been the response of many fans to both Gordon and the “New NASCAR” he represents. Hatred for Gordon has extended to the Internet where one site allows race fans to purchase a video of Gordon hitting the wall. The differing version of manhood that Gordon represents has even led some to accuse him of homosexuality. One such group sells T-Shirts at the Charlotte Motor Speedway bearing the legend “Fans Against Gordon,” the beginning letter of each word capitalized in order to clearly convey the message.

NASCAR has thus become a theatre for contemporary southerners to enact dramas of gender and class. The willingness to move between class identities in leisure activities opens a whole array of questions on the protean nature of social status in societies driven by technological capitalism. NASCAR also suggests the frightening prospect that a corporate and consumer culture can co-opt traditional class markers, including class-based constructions of masculinity, and then use them for its own purposes. NASCAR continues to grow in national popularity, reminding us of the perilous nature of attempting to preserve identities amidst the vicissitudes of commodity capitalism. The creation of a “working class culture,” as E.P. Thompson taught us to recognize, can function as a powerful weapon in the hands of the economically and socially marginally (350-375). But what happens when working class culture no longer belongs to the working class?

W. Scott Poole

Department of History

College of Charleston

Charleston, SC 29424-0001

Works Cited

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