Quote Originally Posted by Alexamateo
If the story is to be believed, when Bill France disqualified Glenn Dunnaway in the very first strictly stock race, he was able to prevail when challenged in court by saying what was done with the springs was something a bootlegger would do to alter their cars, and it aided in swaying the court's opinion. This would seem to indicate that any association with the illegal alcohol business was certainly frowned upon by polite society. I am sure France wanted to downplay any association in the beginning because he wanted decent people as paying customers at his races.
The legal basis for sports sanctioning bodies operating as businesses to establish and enforce their own regulations was, from all I have been able to gather, already a well-established point by 1949. This was scarcely the landmark legal precedence that NASCAR has always made it out to be. It was more a case of NASCAR -- for which one may substitute Bill France -- was not expecting this tactic and was taken by surprise. Bill France ran NASCAR much as any businessman ran his business in the South in those days -- his way or literally the highway. The courts in the South were very much in agreement with this philospohy, with drivers and owners being considered "independent contractors" -- they still are, in fact -- and , therefore, bound by any rules that the organization established in order to operate. What would have been unusual in this case would have been if NASCAR had lost.

It should be noted that until very recently NASCAR in its own writings regarding its creation and that of stock car racing pointed fails to mention the involvement of "moonshiners" in the sport, any mention being obscure, oblique, and brief. Only at some point during the late-Seventies and into the Eighties did the "moonshiners" get any "official" mention by NASCAR and it was probably not until the period around its 50th anniversary that NASCAR began to quietly promote the romantic legend and support the mythology of the "moonshiners." Apparently, this was prompted as much by self-interest than any acceptance of the "moonshiners" as a part of NASCAR's origns given that such a mythology was literally very good for business.

The official story that forms the basis for the founding of NASCAR is not that those "moonshiners" in the Piedmont regions of Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virignia needed someone to take over the organization of their existing efforts to race stock cars, but rather that those poor, yeoman racers needed someone to ensure that they received the fruits of their labor from the wily, unscrupelous promoters who so often took the money and ran, leaving the poor drivers without a cent. NASCAR built this into a legend that was and is readily accepted as an article of faith, the con man promoter fleecing the poor drivers. The irony, of course, is that NASCAR was established by and for race promoters, any efforts to protect the interests of the drivers being secondary at best. NASCAR was first and foremost a business and France simply provided a better business model for the promoters.

The general social hypocrisy of much the South during the developing years of Southern stock car racing, the first decade and a half after WW2, meant that, among other things, the illegal liquor business was both soundly condemned while also being strongly supported in many communities. It should not be overlooked that there was a very strong, vocal element within the South that were bitterly opposed to the use of alcohol, legal or otherwise. Keep in mind that part of the problem was the transportation and sell of alcohol legally bought in one place for sell elsewhere where its purchase was forbidden. While the "Thunder Road" mythology certainly contained grains of truth, the reality of the illegal liquor business was one that required a great deal of romanticizing for the most part given its often harsh, even squalid nature. It was, keep in mind, an illegal activity, a criminal enterprise. In the all too usual romaticizing of the "moonshine" business, that "organzied crime" was all involved and that implies is often skipped over less it spoil a good story.

So, iwhile t seems that while France and NASCAR did keep up appearances and frown upon the very idea of "moonshiners" and their activities by keeping them at arm's length, France was also willing to create business arrangements with those in the illegal alcohol trade to keep his business afloat, especially in the very early years of NASCAR when cash flow was an issue. It is difficult to think that France was unaware of the business interests of a number of those who built tracks and promoted races using NASCAR sanctions, especially given that France was often a partner in the tracks that were built or part of the promotion team for the events held at those tracks. Just saying....

Quote Originally Posted by Alexamateo
I wonder if it was only later that it became romanticized, probably starting with Tom Wolfe's article on Junior Johnson, The Last American Hero. At its core, wasn't that article essentially a highfalutin' PR piece because Johnson was switching to Fords?
The entire romantic legend created by journalists using the notion of the "noble moonshiner" as racing driver and Southern working class hero probably does get pinned on Wolfe. There seems to be an increase in the number of articles that mention the correlation of "moonshine" and stock car racing in the wake of the Wolfe article, an early trickle soon becoming a flood, the notion then being well-established by the early Seventies among the journalists.

To consider the Wolfe article on Johnson as a PR piece due to Johnson's switiching to Ford might be an anachronistic stretch. Given that the article appeared many months after the switch from Ray Fox and MOPAR to Banjo Matthews and Ford difficult to understand the PR value of the piece. Besides, it is a bit difficult to imagine Wolfe as a Ford PR flack and being capable of sticking to the party line. Re-read the article and you might be a sense of what that means. When the article appeared, it was quite a sensation among the racing set. NASCAR did not take kindly to the article until sometime later when it realized that any mention in an East Coast liberal high-brow magazine a good thing.