Concrete Expressionism: Harley Earl, William France, and NASCAR Aesthetics
2023; Wiley; Volume: 56; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/jpcu.13191
ISSN1540-5931
Autores Tópico(s)American History and Culture
ResumoIt is not a secret that stock car racing attracts white southern males (Hurt), an element of which continues to flaunt antiquated sentiments of race, gender, and regional superiority (Loewen).1 In fact, NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) resists the inclusiveness initiatives prevalent in other sports, clinging to what scholars refer to as “paleo-conservative whiteness” (Newman and Giardina 101). Further, the sport's popularity outside the South, although more subdued, suggests that such attitudes are not regionally exclusive. So, what is it about the sport of stock car racing that is so attractive to an American audience, and why does a significant portion of that audience cling to anachronistic attitudes and behaviors? Straightforward explanations of the sport's popularity persist. Perhaps culture guru Tom Wolfe set the foundation in 1965 when he identified the fan base as the “good old boy,” a young white Southern male with a “taste for speed, and the guts” (138) of drivers like Junior Johnson, whose erstwhile profession as mobile distributor of white lightening (aka “tripper”) earned him a stint in the penitentiary. Wolfe's uncomplicated linkage of the sport to outlaws and their souped-up rides undergoes modification but not displacement. For although purists might cringe at the sport's surrender to commercialization (Howell 139–42), lament its infiltration by good ole boy pretenders (Charity), and recoil at its addiction to carbon's gratuitous combustion (Beekman 93), its cache of delinquency persists. Stock car racing, and the NASCAR organization that promotes it, continues to celebrate its unsublimated testosterone and death-defying hooligans, or in other words, a “certain depravity” (Clarke 21). Indeed, this founding myth substantiates a wider scholarship that identifies a “southernization” of American politics, said to be a neo-liberal turn devoted to aggressive individualism (Newman and Giardina). Yet, Wolfe's depiction remains incomplete at best. As for the testosterone, the formative years of stock car racing were replete with formidable female drivers (Wise). And as for their male colleagues, the deployment of the most modest of racing ensembles, including driver Fonty Flock's Bermuda shorts, hardly communicated machismo. In fact, the sport's legacy contains a healthy portion of wholesome family participation, including cheesy tributes that exploit the family album motif (Branham). Further, open-wheeled cars on complex courses are faster and more dangerous than stock cars' closed canopies on oval tracks. Indeed, NASCAR notoriously resists speed technologies like fuel injection and ground effects, and instead focuses on the race cars' resemblance to family vehicles—with the illusion of trunks in which vacation luggage, including Bermuda shorts, can be stored. There is a disconnect between stock car racing's reputation and its reality, a phenomenon Jim Wright refers to as the “NASCAR Paradox” (41). This article argues that the allure of stock car racing actually belies its mythology. To understand NASCAR demands attention to its aesthetic component, whereby its macho creation myth serves as a pretext behind which pragmatic Americans (especially southern white males) indulge in an otherwise scary enchantment with beauty (and the sublime as a bonus). Exquisite postwar mobile sculptures offer an attractive combination of beauty and manly utility, so NASCAR exploits the cover it can provide for the otherwise “effeminate” body designs, especially reassuring to a postbellum southern culture fraught with anxieties regarding race and gender. Ironically, NASCAR's macho image facilitates an alternative to machismo. And it is this aesthetic surrender to “weakness” that necessitates the exaggerated, almost caricaturist, elements of virility and discrimination that persist in the sport. Indeed, following Alfred Adler's groundbreaking work, recent scholarship substantiates that “men tend to overcompensate, in a sense of overdoing gender, and in so doing inadvertently reveal themselves to be sensitive to threats” (Willer et al. 1016). This article discusses the rapid and pervasive introduction of beauty to the production of automobiles as an especially challenging “threat” to pragmatic American men. And while this concentration on design permeates the industry, the focus here is on its most visible proponent, General Motors' Harley Earl. Earl's Art and Color Studio, the mecca of American automotive design, was widely referred to as “the beauty parlor” (Gartman 84), suggesting an association with “feminine” considerations and thus threat of emasculation. The beauty parlor is a frivolous place, incongruent with masculine pragmatism, and thus susceptible to psychic repugnance. So, Earl, General Motors, and American car manufacturers pursue an antidote providing “self-consistency” to a male clientele that is drawn to stylistic features otherwise considered sissy. Stock car racing—and specifically the NASCAR version that appears after World War II—provides an exquisite context for the safe indulgence of aesthetic inclinations. So here what might be considered straightforward machismo is actually the product of a perceived threat to it. Tom Wolfe's encomium to Junior Johnson begins interestingly. Rather than seduce his reader with references to racing, he invokes the fan pilgrimage: “Cars, miles of cars, pastel cars, aqua green, aqua blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn and Baby Fawn Lust cream-colored cars are all going to the stock-car races” (72). But then he quickly moves on to Johnson, without any connection to the fanciful creations that initially caught his eye. Wolfe does not consider that the “dreamboats” in which the fans travel are crucial to their attraction to the NASCAR pastime, despite assurances from NASCAR pioneers that “the spectators could relate to those cars as they were just like their personal rides” (McKim). Wolfe's concentration on the drivers misses important connections to their cars, and thus to Harley Earl, who was responsible for the various shades of aqua shared by race drivers and their patrons alike. Having initially introduced the postwar style elements in the 1948 and 1949 Cadillacs, Earl began using his innovations on the more affordable 1950s Oldsmobiles and Chevrolets. He replaced the abrupt welded corners that characterized conventional mass-produced metalwork with sculptural transitions made possible by new techniques in the stamping of sheet metal (Fisher A-7). Ornamental trim and a variety of bright, lively colors, often applied in two-toned motifs (also ubiquitous in race vehicles) and carried into the interior, allowed the impression of personalization. Additionally, Earl's creations employed progressively mushier suspension systems that created an illusion of levitation and detachment from the road (Marling 15). Whether through intuition or contrivance, however, Earl sensed the vulnerability of his “purposeless” designs to the “counterproductive” influences of emotion, and thus “femininity.” He adopted a decidedly “masculine” comportment to deflect suspicions regarding the weak and gratuitous nature of his endeavors and to allow men to guiltlessly enjoy them. He is an artist, but he notoriously resists the stereotype. Frank Q. Hershey, one of his closest design associates, sees Earl's exaggerated bravado as an attempt to retain the respect of the “hard-talking blacksmiths” with whom he works, particularly the Fisher Brothers, who regularly use homophobic terms to describe the design studio (Gartman 84). According to Hershey, Earl cultivates a “conservative” image, in part to deflect the animosities he arouses among technicians, especially engineers: “They were all jealous of him, because they wanted to design the cars. Well, engineers can't design cars, and they thought, well, he's a goody-good, doggoned pantywaist because he's a doggoned artist, see?” (Hershey, vol. 1, 77). Importantly, Earl was not only concerned with the blacksmiths. He understood that his success in expanding the American proclivity for beauty depended on a widely accepted sense of its compatibility with no-nonsense utility. In the world of unadorned machines, masculinity supplements the implacable stoicism demanded of their sustenance. In the world of attractive automobiles, that same masculinity must be redeployed to assuage any lingering pangs of irresponsibility that accompany one's attraction to the discretionary. This deliberate cultivation of masculinity manifests in numerous arenas, including Earl's hiring of women designers at GM. It is doubtful that their employment represented sincere feminism on his part. First, only nine women worked in GM's design division at the end of his tenure in 1958, raising suspicions that he was more concerned about his own notoriety than about substantive advances for women in the automotive industry. And although they studied at elite schools like the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Earl frequently asked them to design exaggeratedly gendered “fem cars” for GM's exhibitions. According to one of the women designers, the company created fem cars “to advertise that they had women in design” (Vanderbilt 34). In any case, only a few women designers worked at GM, and they were often isolated from their male counterparts. While scholars interpret Earl's treatment of women as exploitative and symbolic (Gartman 166), the women designers themselves considered his antics tolerable distractions that they endured in the name of opportunities to create meaningful designs. As designer Suzanne Vanderbilt explained, “it was because we wanted to do more than just decorate” (35). Designer Vanderbilt also noted that Earl belied his macho reputation when working with her and her female colleagues and explained that he had sincere respect for the women's contributions “in spite of stories that you hear” (34). Thus, the fem cars were likely repositories of tastes that Earl shared but was reluctant to fully claim as his own. He was open to “feminine” perspectives and designs, even though he may have been indifferent to women's position in the industry. Earl did not consider the women mere window dressing. Rather, they provided cover for men's attraction to design elements that might otherwise be viewed as frivolous, and they helped deflect consumer anxieties that would have otherwise been directed at Earl himself. Perhaps most telling regarding Earl's efforts to connect masculinity to automotive design was his co-optation of an extremely popular GM-sponsored boys club.2 Before his involvement, the club served to smarten the image of industry amid an abandonment of its romantic past, where formerly unreliable open cockpit amusements were transformed into drab but comfortable mechanized cabins, the public availability of which was facilitated by a full embrace of mass production. Concerned about potential skilled labor recruitment problems, GM's body division resurrected the ancient guild concept and its association with master craftsmen. The Fisher Body Craftsman's Guild challenged boys aged 12–20 to build from scratch, using wood, metal, and textiles, a working model of an ornate Napoleonic carriage—a rendering of which also served as the logo for the Fisher Body Division. However, under Earl's influence, Fisher automotive bodies transitioned from primarily a mechanism to primarily a sculpture, and automotive design demanded commensurate artistic training. Scholars detect a “tension of near opposites” between artists and technicians that “reflected an often uncomfortable transition within the company and the automotive industry as a whole” (Oldenziel 85). Of course, Earl represented the new perspective and thus saw the Guild as another means to transform American attitudes about machines. In 1937, just before his pivotal “Y-Job” concept car debuted, he usurped control of the Guild and shifted its focus from the benefits of craftsmanship to the value of art. For the first time, boys were able to choose between submitting either the traditional carriage or one of their own “free designs.” Quickly thereafter design eclipsed “craftsmanship” in the official judging criteria, the largest proportion of which was devoted to “artistic merit” (Jacobus 97). Less concerned about a transition from craft to mass production, Earl responded to new tensions by redeploying the masculinity that the Guild's previous concentration on Napoleonic carriages had already cultivated. To indulge the inclination to enhance machinery with dreams and creativity, automotive design exploited its manly legacy. Earl's “feminized” considerations are relocated in the tradition of carriages and tools. The aesthetic appeal becomes a boy thing when attached to cars, and this is the context in which NASCAR is most appreciable. “Stock car racing” is a misnomer—if, that is, “stock” references a vehicle like those in dealership inventories. The more accurate term is “production-based” car (Shackleford 3), which refers to a vehicle that, while for the most part bereft of the costly components of purpose-built race cars (e.g., Indy and Formula One Cars), nevertheless achieves performance distinctiveness through ingenious reconfigurations of more accessible parts. Fabled mechanic Red Vogt's claims about “building” his Fords of the 1930s are no exaggeration. Even William France, the founder of NASCAR and self-proclaimed guardian of adhering “strictly” to mass-manufactured machines, admits that “strictly stock is a nice idea but it won't work in our races” (Jaderquist 18). Therefore, the sport itself, like the term “stock,” is more image than reality, as “form” clearly obscures “content.” Of course, Americans consistently substitute one for the other—most prominently an illusion of equality amidst a reality of disparity. So, the stock car's semblance of modesty is unsurprising in a particularly American pastime. The captivating image is that of normalcy and authenticity that belies the race vehicle's exceptionalism. Unlike the mystical Formula One machines and their regal pilots, the stock car's attractiveness is ironically antithetical to the distinctiveness of the racing mechanism and is instead dependent upon the race car's domestic appearance. Thus, American stock car racing has the reputation of “blue collar instead of blue blood” (Wilkinson 10). There is nothing like pretentiousness to ignite American indignance. That Daytona Beach is the crucible of stock car racing can be explained by the locale's earlier association with more pretentious motorsports.3 Daytona, in fact, displaces the adjacent Ormand Beach, and its eponymous hotel, respectively the site and sanctuary of a peregrinate cadre of what ordinary folk considered feckless, often foreign, aristocrats who in the early years of the twentieth century migrated annually to the “measured mile” to set land speed records in costly and outlandish novelties. A visiting “high society” reporter dismissed the local spectators as a “sprinkling of open-eyed and open mouthed ‘crackers’ and ‘pickaninnies,’” who were barely tolerated by the itinerant aficionados, the “fashionable men and women who make up most of the winter population” (“Straightaway Records Smashed in Florida” 386). William France gained notoriety as the enterprising local gas station proprietor who instigated the eviction of the likes of Ormond's Sir Malcolm Campbell and the exotic Diesel-Duesenbergs in favor of the pedestrian Ford coupe with its reliable and accessible flathead V-8 engine. It was France's “construction” of a 3.2-mile hybrid sand and road course at Daytona that elevated the public beach over the private resort. Soon, bootleg whiskey displaced French champagne, and the mythical basis of NASCAR's provenance was solidified. Indeed, the populist “occupation” of the beach is literal and lasting, as Daytona continues to permit family cars to cruise the beach. However, prewar stock car racing does not contain all the ingredients sufficient to substantiate its eventual aesthetic relevance. During this time, Harley Earl's revolutionary designs, due in no small part to their cost, did not register widely with consumers whose automotive habitat remained utilitarian. In fact, this earlier iteration of racing is a more straightforward concentration on the mechanism, and thus on the sport's dangers. Rather, it is only after the war that the stock car's illusion of domesticity is altered and refined in a way that instigates aesthetic considerations—and catapults racing to unprecedented popularity. Thus, William France and his prewar peers in stock car promotion continued to focus on tinkering with the venerable flathead engine and mostly gratuitous bodily accoutrements. The race vehicles become known as “modifieds,” as their technology progressively diverges from that of normal cars. Of course, for the duration of the war automobile production was effectively halted as manufacturers pivoted to the war effort, a move that necessitated even more attention to modifying older race vehicles. Hence, despite attracting fans with an illusion of authenticity, the cars were not yet considered pretty. Significantly, the postwar era introduced new variables into the stock car domain that prompted the sport's reliance upon aesthetic factors. The first was the monotony and staleness of the race cars. Despite the postwar return to vigorous productivity and competition among the Detroit manufacturers, all 52 winners in the 1948 inaugural NASCAR season were some version of a prewar Ford model. Additionally, due to the extended use of trucks, ambulances, and other exogenous components, there was a growing sentiment that the vehicles were becoming “souped-up jobs with plenty of speed and power but not much beauty” (Jaderquist 46). The second development is to a great extent responsible for the first, and it is here that Harley Earl's influence is pivotal. During the war, he was commissioned to revive and refine camouflage techniques first used during World War I. Fittingly, he concentrated on the flamboyant “dazzle” variety that overwhelms rather than evades the eye. After the war, Earl redoubled his efforts to dazzle US automobile consumers with a multitude of daring and unprecedented shell designs (he was the first to sculpt auto designs in clay). Indeed, the entire postwar American auto industry joined Earl's campaign to camouflage the machine beneath not only dazzling body elements, but with suspension and other amenities designed to separate the occupants altogether from the hidden machinery. His Oldsmobile Rocket sent its occupants into outer space, while his Chevrolet Bel Air relocated them in a tony California neighborhood. The postwar segregation of the machines from their attractive shells transformed the auto industry and is the foundation of this critical assessment of stock car racing. NASCAR founder William France understood the allure of the new designs, and he eventually adapted racing to accommodate and exploit them. He anticipated the demise of the modifieds and undertook vigorous experimentation with the sport. Although the modifieds retained popularity briefly after the war, France's 1948 inaugural NASCAR rule book acknowledged equivocation regarding the modifieds with an insert devoted to a new “roadster” class of vehicles, an unconditional surrender to the “hot rod” motif that allowed almost unlimited latitude regarding engine and chassis modifications. As for appearance, the cars needed only to be “neatly painted” (Whitlock 58). This class of race cars, however, did not succeed, and France soon dispatched it (Fielden 20). A year later France undertook an alternative experiment which proved a successful move away from the hotrods. He characterized the new class of race vehicles as “strictly” stock, ostensibly a reversion to pre-modified simplicity. Yet like the prewar coupes, the simplicity quickly became more superficial than real. The next year proved yet again that the concern for authenticity was disingenuous, as the new division's cars were equipped with “beefed-up suspensions and frames, stiffer springs, double shocks, gutted interiors, and special wheels, among other things” (Huntington 153). Thereafter, more permissive rules and more vigorous corporate involvement ensued, resulting in unprecedentedly complex race vehicles. Perhaps the most egregious disparity between respecting stock looks and stock mechanics occurred in 1966 with Junior Johnson's “yellow banana,” which under the skin bore no resemblance to a production Ford. Just as “production based” is a more accurate term for the prewar stock car, “late model” is a more accurate substitute for France's postwar term, “strictly stock.” The only durable and consistently regulated NASCAR specification is that the race vehicles look like new passenger cars. The 1950 Rule Book specifies that vehicles must represent models no more than 4 years old, a window that NASCAR narrowed to 3 years in 1955 (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing 27). Additionally, while the rules regarding mechanics are selectively enforced and quickly relaxed,4 the ironclad component of the “strictly stock” division, which in 1950 became more plausibly named “Grand National” division of NASCAR, is an insistence that the vehicles outwardly resemble the newest emissions of the automotive design studios. Revisiting NASCAR's foundational meeting of 1947 from the aesthetic perspective is revealing. The conventional interpretation is that France employed the event to “bring order to the mayhem” (Clarke 21) and to convince and cajole either a resistant or naive racing community that there needed sanctioning authority to control purses, enforce regulations, and insure drivers. However, the meeting's minutes reveal that the only contentious issue was Earl's insistence upon the cars' appearance (“Minutes of the First Meeting” 8, qtd. in Shackleford 77). He condemned the old guard's concentration on the race machinery at the expense of outward appeal, disparaging their stubborn attachment to what he considered a “jalopy” motif. Even though it took another year to introduce the late models, France's sensitivity to the cars' domestic illusion, as well as its controversial status, was apparent. While his selection of legendary racer, Cannonball Baker, as NASCAR's first commissioner represents a concession to the old guard, that he chose Harley Earl as Baker's successor vindicates his deeper sensitivities. Similarly, while the first NASCAR championship trophy features a 1939 Ford, by 1957 the most coveted souvenir in NASCAR is the Harley J. Earl Trophy, awarded to the winner of the Daytona 500. Fittingly, the crowning decoration forsakes racing entirely in favor of Earl's Firebird I concept car. The transition from the modifieds of the prewar period to the late models afterward was definitive. It differentiated the generic stock car and the specific NASCAR and was crucial to the latter's success. France's redefinition of “stock car” refined the image upon which the sport's popularity depends. The stock car became a celebration of Earl's newly accessible, highly attractive, and disarmingly fanciful body styles of the postwar era. Indeed, the success of stock car racing is due to France's recognition that the new body styles are the attraction. Stock car racing is dedicated to the beauty parlor, and its success thereafter is dependent upon the extent to which it could exploit the public's sense of artistry in their own vehicles.5 Where modifieds accommodate the machine with alterations to the shell, the stock car's emphasis on the authenticity of the shell reinforces the impression, however, ill-founded, of comprehensive integrity. By transforming cars into artworks, Earl facilitated NASCAR's mission to turn image into reality. It is the shell to which fans have access, and that compelling identification takes precedence over their attractions to mechanisms or drivers, both of which are far more obscured in stock cars than in other forms of auto racing. In fact, NASCAR vehicles' internal components are often poached from other makes and models, and unlike the itinerant and conspicuous pilots of Formula One vehicles, NASCAR drivers endure fan vitriol when they change allegiances. Fans bombarded “King” Richard Petty with hate mail when he moved from Plymouth to Ford. Comments such as “Go to Hell,” “TRAITOR,” and “You're a stinking Ford driver!!!” exemplify the ire fans directed at the legendary driver (Richard Petty Collection, Box 40). In this light, the customary opprobrium of race “purists” regarding NASCAR is comprised of elements that actually serve its success. A NASCAR race is an art exhibit intended to reinforce its patrons' aesthetic sensibilities. So, it is important that the performance space allows fans' continuous observation, at the expense of the challenging corners and obstructive terrain of Formula One courses. The purists complain that NASCAR drivers “only turn left,” and that tri-ovals are banked steeply enough to avert deceleration, yet it is these features that ensure uninterrupted visual access to the performance. Despite William France's prior conviction that, “stock car races not held on dirt are nowheres near as impressive” (Thompson 233), his conversion to paved tracks is evidence of his commitment to connecting with the normal driving experience. Even NASCAR pit stops reinforce the illusion of shared experience, as they resist available racing technology and continue to employ manual jacks and lug nuts. France's transition to late models is recognition of the allure of Earl's and his postwar colleagues' designs. The near immediate decline of modifieds in the wake of race cars resembling Earl's creations shows that it is the “illusion” that is powerful. As Earl and France understand implicitly, the illusion can overpower pragmatic, parsimonious affinity for function. “Win on Sunday, buy on Monday” depends almost exclusively upon discretionary acquisition. Nonetheless, because the new vehicle can be justified for its utility relieves the American (male) consumer of the stigma of frivolousness. In his Third Critique, Kant describes beauty as “purposiveness without purpose.” He explains that beauty is pleasing because, like his utilitarian practical reason, it is susceptible to the human inclination to “categorize.” But beauty is even more pleasing than practical reason because its purposiveness is pure, bereft of mundane applications, and thus more imaginative. A stock car is an ingenious and cautious experiment in Kant's liberal beauty, as any aesthetic and thus “purposeless” diversion it inspires can be safely grounded in rapid transit, a most purposive and “practical” endeavor. Here, it is important to consider the relevance of the South regarding racing. Dan Pierce asserts that NASCAR is the “most southern sport on earth” (9). Yet he is less authoritative when he attributes its success to the rigid paternalism of William France, who is said to have channeled plantation autocracy in rendering his organization “more typical of a cotton mill than a modern, billion-dollar professional sporting enterprise” (9). That NASCAR grew into a lucrative national operation belies Pierce's depiction of it as anachronistically patriarchal and regionally limited. Indeed, France tyrannically resisted driver unionization, but his leadership style was surely not responsible for his sport's popularity. More likely, if in fact the South is preternaturally inclined to NASCAR's allure, a “transcultural” attraction is nonetheless generated whereby southern inclinations find sympathetic reception elsewhere (see Alderman et al.). A more sensible argument, then, would be that whatever southerners find attractive about NASCAR resonates, albeit less intensely, throughout the country. Rigorous scholarly attempts to analyze NASCAR's southern origins are “rare” (Hurt 121). The common explanation is that car racing is popular by default, because for southerners there is nothing much else to do since the “ball and stick sports” of the North are unavailable or unpopular (Shackleford 105–7). The argument goes that, since there remains in the South “little excitement besides moonshining” (Pierce 9), it is the illicit production of liquor, and even more so its distribution, that inspires recreational possibilities among car owners and clever mechanics dedicated to outrunning the revenuers (Johnson and Wilson 207). A contrarian explanation suggests that NASCAR is instead primarily entrepreneurial and thus an expression of a “New South” economy of a more northern persuasion (Hall). None of these explanations, however, satisfactorily specifies just what it is about stock cars that resonate with a southern audience, much less explains the enduring popularity of the sport despite the expansion of ball and stick alternatives in the region. Craig Thompson Friend is the exception that does undertake an evaluation of the particulars, contending that there are specific components of the NASCAR experience that are attractive to a southern clientele. He connects NASCAR to the robust literature regarding the postbellum southern male ego and the concern that perhaps “all the talk about the Southern gentleman's strength and chivalry had been mere bravado” (Silber 620). Friend links NASCAR to the robust southern interest in hunting and football, in so doing substantiating the conventional impression of NASCAR as partially sublimated testosterone: “[car] racing, competing in football, making a big kill—such activities were the early twentieth century's equivalent of proving manhood in antebellum dueling or sharpshooting” (xix). So, it is a damaged potency, concentrated in white southern males, that seeks a virility boost available in the patronage of aggressive and violent sport—of which Friend includes NASCAR. How
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