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Southern Culture Has Become American Culture

The old Confederacy got only as far north as Pennsylvania, but its great-grandchildren have captured America’s culture. Between 1910 and 1970 more than 11 million Southerners pulled up stakes and settled in the North, mostly in the industrial Northeast and Midwest, and in Western boom states like California and Washington. Meanwhile, another internal migration caused the almost overnight transformation of the South’s traditional rural landscape. In just two decades between 1940 and 1960, roughly 9 million Southern farmers, well over half the region’s total agricultural force, left the cotton patches of the Mississippi Delta and the wheat fields of the Southern plains for cities like Houston, Dallas, Richmond, and Atlanta.

These two migrations, from South to North and from farm to city, amounted to a major turning point in American cultural history. They’re why jazz and the blues graduated from being regional “race music” to being the stuff of PBS documentaries and college courses. They’re why white Manhattanites travel to Harlem to eat “soul food” at the landmark restaurant Sylvia’s and why the whole nation is involved in a never-ending debate about the varieties of barbecue. They’re why Southern folk music has become “American roots” music. They help explain why Wal-Mart, once just a small Southern chain, represents American consumer culture in Argentina and Brazil, China and South Korea.

In the mid-twentieth century the arrival of Southern rural traditions in the urban marketplace created a new breed of Southland culture that exploded onto the national scene. At the same time, the millions of white Southerners planting new roots in the North introduced the rest of the country to their conservative religious and political culture and to once-regional pastimes like stock car racing and country music. The consequences have been revolutionary.

Surprisingly, though, while the effects of the black Southern migration have garnered considerable academic attention, only recently have historians considered the importance of that other stream of Southern country migrants. The significance of their travels is apparent everywhere. NASCAR ranks as one of the most popular and lucrative spectator sports nationwide, claiming some 40 million fans, staging races from Chicago to Phoenix, and recently closing a $2.8 billion television deal with NBC and Fox. And recording industry executives have long ceased to laugh at what Northern sophisticates once ridiculed as “hillbilly” music. With the sole exception of rock music, annual country-music sales over the past decade have rivaled or outstripped all other genres, including pop, rap, hip hop, R&B, and jazz. At the same time, mainline Christian churches in every region find themselves steadily eclipsed by their fundamentalist and charismatic competitors, which formerly bore a distinctly Southern profile and were widely regarded as dying. More and more, it appears, Southern culture has become American culture.

It is one of history’s ironies that white Southern culture never stood a chance of becoming nationally ascendant until the Old South itself became a relic. And that didn’t occur until quite recently. Although the former Confederate states were hardly immune to economic and social changes after the Civil War, the region’s fundamental social and economic landscape remained remarkably much the same in the 1920s as it had been in the 1860s. Southern boosters like the brash young journalist Henry Grady were heralding the emergence of a “New South” as early as 1886, but the historian Jack Temple Kirby reminds us that this vision was largely predicated on “hyperbole and fraud.” Well into the twentieth century “the region remained rural and poor.”

All of this changed with the coming of the New Deal and World War II. Federal subsidy programs initiated in the 1930s helped spur crop reductions and land consolidations that forced millions of tenant farmers off the land, while technological innovations in the 1940s and 1950s—chemical pesticides, fertilizers, the mechanical cotton picker—swiftly transformed Southern agriculture from a labor-intensive endeavor to a capital-intensive one. These structural developments, in addition to a massive infusion of federal defense and research dollars during World War II and the early Cold War, helped thrust the South into the modern age.

In 1920 the population of nearly every Southern state was at least two-thirds rural, a figure all the more remarkable when we remember that the U.S. Census qualified towns of just 2,500 as urban. By 1960 everything had changed. Industrial work had out-stripped farming for more than a decade, and in eight Southern states a majority of citizens now lived in urban areas, where they were swiftly closing regional gaps in education and income. In short, the South finally started to resemble the rest of the country. Paradoxically, it was at just this historical moment that Southland culture matured and circulated nationally.

Why then? Pete Daniels, a leading student of that culture, has written that “having worked outdoors in harmony with the seasons most of their lives,” many white and black migrants “resented confining hourly jobs that demanded discipline and regularity. Each day they faced the whip, chair, and pistol of corporate management that punished them for displaying any residue of wildness. They chafed at punching a time clock and at other constraints that challenged their will, and they longed for escape, if not retribution.” One means of escape—and retribution—was stock car racing, a sport that had evolved from outlaw origins during the Depression into a wildly popular industry by the early 1950s.

Early racers were, strictly speaking, not stock car racers at all. They were professional “trippers,” drivers in the liquor racket who used expensively souped-up automobiles to outrun revenue agents. Trippers drove every variety of car, but they generally preferred 1939 and 1940 Fords, with easily available spare parts that could be modified for greater speed and better suspension, and with generous trunk space to accommodate their cargo. Trippers tended to be mountain folk and thus had had to master the blind curves and nonexistent shoulders of old hill-country roads. Dexterity and speed were imperative; losing the race meant prison.

Many trippers took to racing for sport and occasionally for prize money in their spare time. Some early NASCAR greats like Junior Johnson and the Flock brothers—Bob and Fonty—got their start hauling homebrewed whiskey for their parents and only gradually found themselves drawn to the racetrack. Even as his competitive racing star ascended in the 1950s, Johnson faithfully plied his talents for the family business. He was arrested in 1956, served 11 months for liquor trafficking, and returned to the track in 1959 in time to participate in a fierce NASCAR run at Charlotte, North Carolina, where he drove another contestant into a wall.

Informal car racing flourished in the 1940s, when war production gave Southerners unprecedented capital to put into cars and wagers. Tim Flock, an early NASCAR Grand National champion and younger brother to Bob and Fonty, insisted that modern stock car racing was inaugurated immediately after the war in a “cow pasture right outside Atlanta, Georgia,” where drivers competed for cash prizes that could total as much as $20,000. For the most part these early races were rowdy affairs, their fans notorious for boozing, womanizing, and supremely proficient cursing.

It took a visionary to realize the commercial potential of stock car racing in a modernizing South. William Getty France, a service station owner in Daytona Beach, Florida, and an occasional participant in so-called outlaw races, understood the appeal this raffish new sport held for the country migrants in their newfound factories. On December 14, 1947, he convened a summit of three dozen leading mechanics and racers to form a sanctioning body for stock car competitions. Thus was born the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR). “Big Bill” France became the organization’s first president.

From its inception NASCAR embodied the split personality of postwar Southland culture: at once urban and market-oriented, yet still close to its rural, precommercial roots. Locked at first in tough competition with four other sanctioning organizations, France’s NASCAR sponsored standard races featuring modified cars, but it also launched a 150-mile contest at Charlotte whose participants were allowed to drive only automobiles that were “strictly stock”—that is, wholly unenhanced. The ploy was a great success with many fans, who enjoyed seeing professionals race the same cars an ordinary consumer could own. It was an even bigger hit with the car companies; they quickly recognized the marketing potential in NASCAR and invested accordingly. Keeping his eye on commercial strategy, France also enforced stern discipline. Even such driving legends as Tim Flock, Lee Petty, and Red Byron found they could pay a high price, in cumulative points lost, if they participated in unsanctioned races or otherwise bucked Big Bill’s authority.

Yet if NASCAR was big business, its success was intimately related to its self-styled reputation as a place of last refuge for Southerners who missed the wild pulse of old country ways. So NASCAR promoted its drivers as cowboys on wheels, drinkers, skirt chasers and partygoers, whose much-publicized (and often exaggerated) debauches offered spectators to behave just as raucously—or at least to dream of it. Drivers like Curtis Turner gave NASCAR fans plenty of legend to revel in. Decked out in his trademark silk suits, Turner partied with movie stars and burned through enormous sums of money—$6,000 a month, according to some sources. Smokey Yunick remembered spending “a lot of time with Curtis, drinking, chasing women, racing, raising hell, teaching people how to turn around in the middle of the road at 60 miles an hour, putting cars in swimming pools.”

Over the years, as its fans climbed the socioeconomic ladder, NASCAR angled for a more respectable image. In the 1950s it banned women from the pit, thus drawing to a premature close the racing careers of drivers like Sara Christian, Louise Smith, and Ethel Flock Mobley. As the organization steadily moved North, where millions of white transplants demonstrated as much enthusiasm for the sport as their Southern cousins, it began to look less like itself. By 1960 the Southern circuit had eight paved courses; in the 1970s officials introduced organized prayer services at the start of races. In time the tracks came to resemble big-city sports arenas. At Darlington, South Carolina, spectators who can afford $500 tickets are now ushered off to the Azalea Terrace; others vie for even more expensive chairs in the President’s Suite or the Fourth Turn Club. In perhaps the most conspicuous example of NASCAR’s self-reformation, drivers are now fined for fighting.

If skeptics had any lingering doubt about NASCAR’s stature as a national pastime, the coverage of the Daytona 500 put the issue to rest. NBC bumped its coverage of the Winter Olympics in Utah in favor of the race at Daytona Beach. The decision reflected NASCAR’s immense profitability to its sponsor networks. In 2001 NEC’s stock car ratings jumped 34 percent over the previous year; among men earning $75,000 and more, a phenomenal 74 percent. NASCAR is no longer a Southern phenomenon.

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