The genesis of NASCAR is intrinsically intertwined with the clandestine world of moonshining in the American South, a narrative that epitomizes the audacity and ingenuity of those who navigated the treacherous terrain of both the law and the racetrack. As we embark on this riveting exploration, we shall delve into the historical tapestry of stock car racing, illuminating how a high-stakes race against federal agents during the Great Depression transformed into a legitimate sport that has captivated millions. The episode artfully chronicles the evolution from the illicit whiskey trade to the structured yet fiercely independent realm of NASCAR, highlighting the mechanical prowess and rebellious spirit that forged its identity. Furthermore, we shall encounter the indomitable figures who shaped this sport, from the audacious moonshiners to the shrewd Bill France Sr., whose vision brought order to the chaos. So, fasten your seatbelts as we navigate the winding roads of this enthralling saga, where the thrill of the chase meets the grit of survival, setting the stage for a cultural phenomenon that remains deeply embedded in the American ethos.

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Takeaways:

• The genesis of NASCAR can be traced back to the clandestine whiskey trade of the American South, which revealed a fascinating interplay between necessity and innovation.
• The evolution of stock car racing is a rich tapestry woven from the threads of rebellion, mechanical ingenuity, and the unyielding spirit of its early drivers.
• Bill France Sr. played an instrumental role in transforming NASCAR from an outlaw pastime into a legitimate sport, establishing structures that ensured both safety and profitability for participants.
• The transition from moonshine runners to professional racers encapsulates a broader narrative of American culture, highlighting the tension between individualism and authority.
• The iconic figures of NASCAR's early days, such as Red Byron and Herb Thomas, represent a diverse array of archetypes that shaped the identity of the sport.
• NASCAR's journey from a grassroots movement to a nationally recognized phenomenon reflects the complexities of commercialization and the preservation of its rebellious roots.

Sources and Further Reading

Bechtel, Mark. He Crashed Me So I Crashed Him Back: The True Story of the Year the King, Jaws, Earnhardt, and the Rest of NASCAR's Feudin', Fightin' Good Ol' Boys Put Stock Car Racing on the Map. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010.

Branham, H. A. Big Bill: The Life and Times of NASCAR Founder Bill France Sr. Charlotte, NC: Racemaker Press, 2010.

Edelstein, Robert. Full Throttle: The Life & Fast Times of Racing Legend Curtis Turner. New York: Overlook Press, 2005.

Fielden, Greg. NASCAR: The Complete History. Lincolnwood, IL: Publications International, 2003.

Howell, Mark D. From Moonshine to Madison Avenue: A Cultural History of the NASCAR Winston Cup Series. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997.

McKim, Buz. The NASCAR Vault: An Official History Featuring Rare Collectibles from Motorsports Images and Archives. Atlanta, GA: Whitman Publishing, 2007.

Menzer, Joe. The Wildest Ride: A History of NASCAR. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

Newman, Joshua I., and Michael D. Giardina. "NASCAR and the 'Southernization' of America: Spectatorship, Subjectivity, and the Confederation of Identity." Journal of Sport & Social Issues 32, no. 3 (August 2008): 253–78.

Pierce, Daniel S. Real NASCAR: White Lightning, Red Clay, and Big Bill France. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Thompson, Neal. Driving with the Devil: Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of NASCAR. New York: Crown Publishers, 2006.

Yunick, Smokey. Best Damn Garage in Town: The World According to Smokey. Daytona Beach, FL: Carbon Press, 2001.

Hello, y'.

All.

It's me.

It's me.

It's Dr. G. Imagine this.

The air is thick with the scent of pine and damp earth.

There are no street lights out here, no pavement, just a winding dirt road that twists through the darkness like a snake.

It looks from a distance like any other family car, but it's not.

The back seat has been ripped out, the floorboards reinforced, and the suspension is groaning under the weight of 130 gallons of untaxed corn whiskey sloshing around in glass jars.

The driver, a young man barely out of his teens, knows every rut, every hairpin turn, every blind curve of this road by heart.

He has to.

Because up ahead, he sees the faint telltale glint of a roadblock.

Its federal agents, revenuers, as they're called.

But he doesn't panic.

He doesn't even slow down.

Instead, he reaches down, kills his headlights and plunges the car into total blackness.

And now he's driving purely from memory, a ghost in the machine, navigating the treacherous path at speeds that would terrify a sane man in broad daylight.

This isn't a race for a trophy or a cash prize.

At least not yet.

The stakes right now are much, much higher.

If he wins, he makes enough money to feed his family for a month during the bleakest days of the great depress.

If he loses, he goes to jail.

That high stakes, high speed chase through the dark hills of the American south that is the primordial soup from which NASCAR was born.

Welcome to Star Spangled Studies.

I'm your Host as always, Dr. G. And today we're beginning a two part deep dive into one of America's most popular, most misunderstood, and maybe one of the most culturally significant sports in.

In the United States.

We're telling the story of the national association for Stock Car Auto Racing, or as the world today knows it, nascar.

And in this first part, we're going to argue that NASCAR's foundational DNA, its mechanical ingenuity, its archetypal heroes, its rebellious spirit and its deep seated suspicion of authority was forged not on the Polish racetrack, but in the illegal whiskey trade of the American South.

The skills, the cars, and the very attitude that would define stock car racing for generations were all products of this desperate, dangerous and distinctly American enterprise.

So we'll trace that incredible journey.

We'll start with the hidden haulers, with the moonshiners and their souped up Fords.

We'll meet the visionary and very much autocratic figure of Bill France Sr. Who saw the potential for a legitimate sport in this chaotic world.

We'll introduce the first generation of hard nosed stars who put their lives on the line.

And we'll witness the moments that drag the sport, probably kicking and screaming out of the backwoods and towards the mainstream.

This is the story of how white lightning and red clay created a sporting empire.

So buckle up.

This is part one.

From moonshine to mainstream, the unlikely history of nascar.

So let's go.

To understand nascar, you first have to understand moonshine.

And to understand moonshine, you have to understand the American south.

In the early 20th century, distilling excess corn into whiskey was a generations old tradition in Appalachia.

A way for farmers to turn a perishable crop into a stable, valuable commodity.

Suddenly, this regional tradition became a national and highly illegal enterprise.

Why, you ask?

Well, because the government immediately slapped heavy taxes on legal liquor for impoverished farmers.

Especially now, during the great depression, making and selling untaxed whiskey wasn't just a tradition anymore.

It was an economic lifeline.

Places like Wilkes County, North Carolina became legendary.

They proudly called themselves the moonshine capital of the world.

As historian Daniel Pierce argues in his phenomenal book, Real White Lightning, Red Clay and Big Bill France, the story of the sport's origins is fundamentally more about economic survival than jaw dropping speed.

The racing part of this came later.

But first there was the business of bootlegging.

And the most important tool of that business was, of course, the automobile.

This is where we get the term stock car.

A bootlegger's vehicle had to look completely stock on the outside, like the standard right off the lot production model.

And this was to avoid any suspicion of law enforcement just by looking at the car.

But underneath that unassuming stock exterior, it was a marvel of outlaw engineering.

The back seat and the passenger seats were ripped out to make room for cases of mason jars filled with the moonshine.

Mechanics would install hidden compartments and even modify the fuel tanks to smuggle extra gallons of fuel to go a little bit further on the road.

Most importantly, they needed to handle the immense weight of their cargo.

100 gallons of whiskey is well over £800.

To keep the car from sagging and giving itself away, basically so the car doesn't lower too close to the ground, mechanics had to install ultra Stiff rear suspensions.

And then there was the speed.

The talented mechanic was, as one of our writers put it, a bootlegger's best friend.

They took the era's most potent engine, the Ford Flathead V8, and worked magic on it, making it faster and more durable than anything the police themselves had on the road.

These were the original sleeper cars, Plain on the outside, ferociously powerful on the inside.

It was born in these hidden workshops, where the penalty for mechanical failure wasn't just a lost race, it was a prison sentence.

The legendary crew chiefs of nascar's golden age, men like Smokey yunnik, who were famous for their mastery of the rulers book's gray areas, were the direct descendants of these backwoods mechanics.

The outlaw spirit of nascar is as much mechanical as it is behavioral.

Of course, a fast car is nothing without a skilled driver.

The winding, unpaved roads of appalachia became a brutal training ground.

The men, and they were almost all young men who transported the whiskey, were called runners or trippers.

They learned to handle their heavy loaded cars at 80 or 90 miles per hour in the dead of night, often without headlights on roads that would challenge a modern rally car driver.

The necessity of evading the law honed their skills to a razor's edge.

One former federal agent, a man named Joe Carter, recalled the futility of trying to catch these runners.

By the time they got to be 14 years old, they could outrun any officer I knew.

They learned how to drive, and they knew every curve.

Though some of them got killed doing it.

No one embodies this connection between moonshining and racing more than the legendary junior Johnson.

Johnson, who would go on to become one of nascar's greatest drivers and team owners, grew up in the family business in Wilkes county.

He famously summed up the difference between his two professions with a quote that really gets to the heart of the matter.

Quote, moonshiners put more time, energy, thought and love into their cars than any racer ever will.

Lose on the track and you go home.

Lose with a load of whiskey and you go to jail.

End quote.

For these drivers, racing for fun on a weekend afternoon was a natural extension of their weekday work.

They'd gather in cow pastures and on makeshift dirt tracks to see whose car was fastest and who was the best driver, Settling arguments that began often on the midnight whiskey runs.

As journalist Neil Thompson wrote in his book Driving with the Devil, the skills needed to outrun federal agents with a load of corn liquor transferred perfectly to the red dirt racetracks of Dixie.

This was the raw, untamed and thrilling world of grassroots stock car racing.

Before it even had a name, before it had any written down rules, and long before it had a sustainable future.

This informal racing circuit grew slowly but wildly popular across the south.

The races were chaotic, the rules changed depending on which track you were on, and the drivers were often at the mercy of shady promoters.

It was common for a promoter to collect all the ticket money from the spectators and then simply disappear before the final race.

The leaving the drivers with nothing for their efforts and their risks.

The sport was thrilling, but it was also unsustainable.

And here's where things begin to change.

Enter William Henry Getty France, better known as Bill France Sr.

If the moonshiners were the heart of stock car racing, Big Bill France was its brain and its iron will.

Standing at an imposing 6 foot 5, he was simply known to everybody as Big bill.

Daytona was already at this point, a mecca for speed, famous for the land speed record attempts that had been made on its hard packed sand.

France quickly immersed himself in the local racing scene, both as a driver and as a promoter.

France saw what everyone else saw, a passionate fan base and daredevil drivers.

But he also saw what was missing from this organization, as well as legitimacy, maybe most importantly, guaranteed prize money.

He knew that for a sport to survive, let alone to grow, it needed a governing body.

It also needed a unified set of rules, no matter which track you were on.

It needed a structured championship and it needed the trust of both drivers and fans.

And having guaranteed money for winning races certainly helps that with the drivers.

It took place at the Ebony Bar on the rooftop of the Streamline Hotel in Daytona Beach, a location now revered as the sport's birthplace.

He brought together about 35 of the ERA's most influential figures.

And this included drivers, car owners, mechanics and promoters from across the South.

For three days, they debated, they argued, but ultimately hammered out a vision for the future of their sport.

There would be a standardized rule book, a point system to crown the eventual national champion, and insurance for the drivers.

Crucially, NASCAR itself would guarantee the purses and ensuring that drivers who risked their lives on the track would actually get paid.

Now, initially, NASCAR's top division was for modifieds.

These were older cars that had been heavily altered for racing.

But France's real vision was for the fans to see cars on the track that looked just like the ones that they drove on the street.

The rules were simple and clear, designed to keep the cars as close to showroom models as possible.

The rear seat cushions had to be removed, but the front seat had to be intact.

Headlights were taped over and doors were strapped shut, but the engines and transmissions had to be stock for the model being used.

This was the birth of the win on Sunday, sell on Monday philosophy, the idea that a victory on the racetrack would directly translate to sales in the showroom, a concept that would fuel manufacturer involvement for decades.

But in creating this orderly new world, Big Bill revealed a fundamental paradox that would define NASCAR for the next 75 years.

This sport, born from fiercely independent rebels who made a living defying federal authority, could only be professionalized under the rule of an absolute autocrat.

Big Bill France ran NASCAR with an iron fist.

He used a vaguely worded catch all rule, punishing any actions detrimental to stock car racing to justify a wide range of authoritarian decisions, like stripping Lee Petty of a championship for competing in a non NASCAR event.

Years later, when drivers led by the charismatic Curtis Turner tried to form a union to bargain for better pay and insurance, France's response, as you would expect, was swift and brutal.

He famously declared to all the drivers, quote, gentlemen, before I have this union stuffed down my throat, I will plow up my track at Daytona beach and plant corn.

End quote.

To the press, he was even more blunt when he said this.

No known teamster member can compete in a NASCAR race, and I'll use a pistol to enforce it.

France didn't eliminate the outlaw spirit of stock car racing.

He simply made it clear that he was the only law that mattered.

This deep seated tension between the sport's rebellious, individualistic image and the dictatorial reality of its governance was baked in from the very beginning.

It was the necessary compromise to bring the wild boys of the backwoods into the national spotlight.

With the rule book in hand and a championship now to chase, NASCAR needed the last piece of the puzzle.

Heroes and its first generation of stars were not polished media trained athletes.

They were tough and grizzled and often drove cars.

They owned and maintained themselves.

They were men who perfectly embodied the sport's gritty transition from this backwoods pastime to a professional competition.

Robert Byron, known as Red.

During World War II, Byron served as a flight engineer on a B24 bomber on a mission over the Aleutian Islands, his plane was shot down.

He survived the crash, but suffered a catastrophic injury to his left leg, which was nearly amputated and left him in a hospital for almost two years.

Most men would have been grateful just to walk again, but Red Byron was determined to race.

When he returned to the cockpit, his leg was so weak that that his crew had to build a special steel stirrup bolted directly to the clutch pedal so he could operate his car.

In this rig.

This wounded warrior didn't just compete, he dominated.

Red was the embodiment of the quiet toughness and sheer grit of that first generation.

He always gave credit to his mechanic, the legendary Red Voight, once saying, quote, redvoat is the reason I win.

He put these motors together like a watch, end quote.

It was a testament to the fact that from day one, this is a sport of both driver and machine.

And in conjunction to that mechanic, if Red Byron was the sport's stoic hero, its first true superstar was Herb Thomas.

Thomas was a former tobacco farmer and sawmill operator from North Carolina.

Thomas is perhaps best remembered for his iconic car, the fabulous Hudson Hornet.

This gave the car a much lower center of gravity, which translated onto the race course.

With superior handling on these rough and rutted dirt tracks that made up most of the NASCAR schedule, Thomas and his Hornet were nearly unbeatable.

His success was a Proof of concept for the entire NASCAR industry.

The Hudson Motor Car company was the first manufacturer to fully embrace this idea of win on Sunday, sell on Monday ethos, pouring resources into this racing program in the hopes of selling more cars.

Herb Thomas wasn't just winning races.

In the end, he was selling cars and proving that NASCAR could in itself be a powerful marketing tool.

But the early fields were filled with a fascinating diversity of characters, creating the dueling archetypes that would define NASCAR heroes for decades to come.

On one end of the spectrum was Lee Petty, a shrewd, calculating businessman from Levelcross, N.C. and Petty wasn't always the fastest driver, but he was often the smartest.

He raced for points and for profit, meticulously managing his equipment to make sure that he was there at the end.

I have to finish among the first five to break even.

After that, I'm going in the red.

Petty was the prototype of the professional racer who understood that, first and foremost, racing was a business.

On the complete opposite end was a man named Curtis Turner, nicknamed Pops for his habit of popping competitors out of his way.

Pops Turner was the living embodiment of the hard driving, hard partying, moonshiner spirit at the heart of nascar.

A timber baron from Virginia who made and lost several fortunes, Pops Turner was a flamboyant showman on and off the track.

Stories of his wild antics are legendary, like the time he supposedly landed his airplane on a small town's main street just to pick up some more whiskey.

He raced with a thrilling all or nothing style that ended in the victory lane or sometimes in a crumpled heap of metal.

These pioneers weren't a monolithic group of good old boys.

They were complex figures who established the templates for future generations of stars.

Red Byron was the wounded warrior.

Herb Thomas was the dominant professional.

Lee Petty was the calculating businessman.

And Curtis Turner was the charismatic outlaw.

These rivalries and fan loyalties that would propel the sport's growth were born from the clashes between these foundational archetypes.

But two events in the first decade would fundamentally alter its trajectory, signaling the end of its infancy and setting the course for its modern, commercial future.

The first was the construction of a track so fast and so ferocious and that it changed the very nature of the race car itself.

The second was a rebellion that determined who would hold the power in the sport forever.

So the track I mentioned was the Darlington raceway.

Its creator was a south Carolina farmer named Harold Brassington, who, after a visit to the Indianapolis 500, came home with the dream of building a paved speedway in the heart of the rural south.

He bought a 70 acre plot of farmland, and he began to build.

An early problem arose when the man who sold him the land insisted that a track not disturb his favorite minnow pond.

To accommodate this, Brassington had to make one end of the track much tighter and more steeply banked than the other, giving the oval its unique egg like shape.

It was an event on a scale the sport had never seen.

The purse that day was a staggering $25,000, more than four times any other race of that year.

A massive crowd of 25,000 fans showed up and an unheard of 75 cars entered the race.

What followed was not so much a race as an automotive marathon of survival.

The track's abrasive asphalt surface acted like a cheese grater on the tires of the cars of those days.

Cars that started fast, blew out their tires and crashed.

The race became a brutal test of endurance.

The winner happened to be a journeyman from California named Johnny Mance.

He had qualified dead last, but his car owner had made a brilliant strategic decision.

They fitted their Plymouth with hard compound truck tires.

While everyone else's tires were shredding, Manta's tires held together.

He drove a steady, conservative race and won by an incredible nine laps.

Darling then quickly became nickname the track too tough to tame.

This was more than just a new venue, though.

It was an evolutionary leap.

It effectively ended the era where a slightly modified family sedan could be competitive.

To survive 500 miles at Darlington, you needed specialized engineering, you needed a professional pit crew, you needed a real strategy.

It was a great filter, pushing the sport away from its amateur roots and demanding a new level of professionalism.

A decade later, another event would prove to be just as pivotal for not just the sport's technology, but for its politics.

But they still lacked the basic protections like health insurance or a pension plan.

Curtis Turner, the charismatic wild man we described, decided to do something about it.

Along with fellow champion Tim flock, he attempted to organize the drivers into a union affiliated with the powerful national teamsters.

Big Bill saw this as a mortal threat to his authority.

A driver's union would mean collective bargaining, a say in the rules, a challenge to Big Bill's absolute control.

His reaction, one could say, was volcanic.

He banned Turner and Flock from NASCAR for life.

While the ban was eventually lifted four years later, the message was crystal clear.

There would be no union in nascar.

The drivers for Big Bill were not partners in this enterprise.

They were independent contractors and they would compete on Bill France's terms or they would not compete at all.

These two events, the race at Darlington and the crushing of the union, were bookended to NASCAR's formative decades.

Darlington filtered out the amateurs and forced the sport to professionalize its equipment and its organization.

The union fight filtered out any notion of collective driver power and solidified the sport as a top down corporate entity.

Together, they closed the book on the pure, chaotic, moonshine fueled era.

The stage was now set for something bigger, richer and far more commercial.

So we've traveled from the dark, winding roads of prohibition era Appalachia to the hot, abrasive asphalt of Darlington Raceway.

We've seen how the desperate work of hauling illegal whiskey taught a generation of young men how to build fast cars and drive them on the absolute edge.

We've witnessed how the vision of one man, Big Bill France Sr.

Took that raw, rebellious energy and channeled it into an organized professional sport.

We've even met the first heroes of the sport, Red Byron, Terb Thomas Lee Petty, Curtis Turner.

Men who etched the archetypes of the NASCAR star on the red clay of those early tracks.

This origin story is in so many ways the quintessential American story.

It's a tale of grassroots innovation born from economic hardship.

It's about a group of outsiders looked down upon by much of the country, creating their own vibrant and thrilling culture.

And it's a classic American drama with the tensions between rugged individualism and the need for structured authority.

These early years of NASCAR hold up a mirror to the very specific slice of southern working class American identity.

An identity that was to be packaged, polished and later sold to the rest of the nation.

But that raises a crucial question.

What happens when this raw, regional and rebellious sport gets its first taste of real money and national exposure?

What is gained and what is lost when the moonshine runners are replaced by corporate pitchmen and the dusty dirt tracks give way to the gleaming super speedways when they're broadcast in living color?

And those questions are where we will pick up our story next time.

Thanks for listening to Star Spangled Studies.

I hope you've enjoyed this episode.

Please subscribe.

Leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform.

Be sure to join us next time for part two of Moonshine to Mainstream, where we will explore NASCAR's exploration explosive journey from a Southern spectacle to a national phenomenon covering the rise of corporate sponsorship, the reign of the king Richard Petty, and the arrival of the intimidator Dale Earnhardt, and the challenges that face the sport in the 21st century.

Thanks for coming to our spangled studies.

I'm Dr. G, and I'll see y' all in the past.

Sam.