Driving with the Devil

Driving with the Devil:  Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of NASCAR
© 2006 Neil Thompson
411 pages

Oh Rapid Roy that stock car boy

He's the best driver in the lan'

He say that he learned to race a stock car

By runnin' shine outta Alabam'
(Jim Croce, "Rapid Roy")

Today’s NASCAR is big business on par with the NFL, but it didn’t  start out that respectable.  The inventors of the sport were backwoods rebels, supplying populations with forbidden liquor.   Savvy drivers and genius mechanics combined to outwit the law by night, and each other on the weekend -- but as their sport grew, it attracted big money and men who wanted to turn out the rabble and put it on par with Indy car racing. Driving with the Devil opens with sections on the Scots-Irish, Prohibition, and the rise of car culture before focusing on one man’s campaign to wrangle or impose order on an increasingly popular sport in the postwar years.  Who knew whiskey and racing would make such a good combination?

Early American history is besotted with liquor,  distilled beverages being  the chief source of income for many pioneers and a frequent source of conflict between  the people and the government. In an age of meager transportation options, distilling corn or other grains into potable beverages was the only way to sell produce inland, and attempts to impose taxes on said liquor kicked off more than one rebellion, including the famed Whiskey Rebellion of 1791.  Long before Prohibition barred the production and sale of alcohol, Americans had a history of fighting for their untampered tippling.  During Prohibition, liquor continued to be produced in the mountainous woodlands of the mid-south, and delivered to urban centers through young men desperate to escape rural poverty – desperate enough to risk their life and freedom speeding or sneaking through unlit paths through the hills and woods to places like Atlanta.   Bootleg driving put special demands on cars; not only did they need to be faster than the revenuers, but they needed to handle high speeds on rough roads without destroying the cargo.   Boys and men fascinated by the new machines developed a culture of study and tinkering, learning to master and improve the engines that Ford had wrought. Not content to exhibit their work or drink in the flush of adrenaline by night, drivers and mechanics began pitting their talents against one another in farmfields, racing for bragging rights and money.

Auto racing already existed as an organized sport before these bootleggers’ races;  the American Automobile Association organized races for the same reason Henry Ford did, to popularize automobiles.   The racecars used there, however, were specially and solely designed for racing:  the bootleggers were racing ‘stock’ cars, factory-built for consumers, and then modifying them to their own needs.  Bootleggers weren’t the only ones racing, but their nightly practice gave them a leg up – as did their organizations. Raymond Park, who operated one of the most notorious north-Georgia bootlegging operations, also fielded one of the first racing teams -- which included a wizard with Ford engines named Red Vogt, and two superb drivers,  Lloyd Seay and Roy Hall, the latter a man with such a following that he inspired two songs.   Running races wasn't just  backwoods fun, though; Parks and men like Bill France realized money could be made organizing and promoting the races. This was an uphill battle, what with the law watching their drivers and World War 2 suspending automobile production and sending drivers out into the wild blue yonder -- literally, as one driver joined a B-29 crew.  Racing was a dangerous sport, too, to both drivers and spectators: during one race a blowout sent a car into the crowd, with seventeen hospitalized and one buried. Not all deaths happened on the course: after winning a national championship, wheeling idol Lloyd Seay was shot in the woods over moonshine finances.

Slowly but steadily, France's organization drew in the majority of drivers,  attracted by his larger cash rewards, his talent for producing races that were genuine shows, and the opportunity of winning acclaim by racing against the biggest names.  France's forcefulness, that energy that helped make  his races a success, was also directed against drivers who wouldn't play ball, either by cheating on him by racing in other leagues, or cheating in the races with illegal modifications.  Eventually France would succeed in creating an institution, NASCAR, that had cleaned itself up for the big-city newspapers: the bootleg heroes were either playing nice, dead, or had gotten tired of fighting with Big Bill.  Either way, the ranks were filling with drivers outside the cast of whiskey-trippers, as young men around the South and even outside it wanted to try their hand at racing for cash.

Watching billboards race around in circles has never sparked my interest, but Driving with the Devil certainly  held it.  There is immediate attraction in the cast of characters,  poor farmboys making a living by running from the law, delivering liquid refreshment through skill, adrenaline, and more than a little luck. Admirable, too, are the mechanics like Vogt who were introduced to new machines and so devotedly studied them that they created a weapon on wheels  -- and the delightful chaos of '39 Fords tearing circles in red dirt,  careening over cliffs or into lakes, has lot more appeal than modern racing.  This is the story that Neil Thompson delivers, ending as 'modern' NASCAR with its paved oval tracks and truly national appeal is taking off.  As a story, it's superb, but as a book it has few issues under the hood. Thompson chronically repeats himself,  and sometimes to absurd levels. Towards the end, for instance, cited facts occur twice within a single page turn. A little editing would fix that, but somewhat more questionable are the historical allusions Thompson makes, like having Hitler refer to Lindbergh as the leader of American Fascism. This defamation is taken seriously by Thompson, who also believes the KKK supported Prohibition out of racial motives, when it was part of their full complement of social police hypocrisy. When it comes to writing about the whiskey and racing, however, he sticks closer to the facts.

Great fun!

Related:

• "Racing Extinction with Leilia Munter", a recent episode of StarTalk Radio with an..environmental-activist-NASCAR- driver?
   Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of StarTalk Radio: Do you know what NASCAR stands for?
   Eugene Mirman, cohost: National Auto....'moonshine' is in there, isn't it?
• Last Call: the Rise and Fall of Prohibition, Daniel Okrent

Fighting Traffic

Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City
© 2008 Peter Norton
396 pages

Stroll into the middle of any American city today, and provided you are not in Detroit, odds are better than not you will be sent flying by a car. Streets are the province of the constant flow of automobile traffic, and anything else -- bicycles, horses, skateboards, pedestrians -- is most unwelcome. This is a comparatively recent development, however;  for most of human history,  streets were an integral part of the human landscape, the site of markets and ad hoc playgrounds. Fighting Traffic details how streets became instead traffic sewers, moving the most cars as quickly as possible, and does so with impressive heft. Its scope is more massive than its size, as in the course of rendering a social history of the urban fabric, Norton also details the shifting evolution of economic and legal  assumptions that policy became a manifestation of.

The automobile was a novelty in human history,  not just for its speed but for its cheapness.  Although horse-drawn wagons and carriages took up as much space per vehicle as cars, if not more,  horse teams were so expensive that their ownership was not universal. Even so, cities throughout history have had congestion problems and attempted to deal with them through legal means. Mass-produced automobiles, however, became so popular in the early 20th century that even the poor owned them, and  they flooded city streets. As their numbers increased, so to did the fatalities they inflicted, driven at speed by people unaccustomed to such power.  The rising spike in deaths prompted public outcry and attempts to bring the beast to heel -- and so began the war.  At the same time that concerned citizens were attempting to curb the car,  automobile owners and auto manufacturers were mobilizing to expand its horizons.

The battle that emerges throughout the two decades of the 1910s and 1920s has a fascinating cast of players who frequently switched sides on one another. The auto lobby first used citizen-groups like safety councils to begin shifting the responsibility of reducing fatalities to pedestrians. In urging for laws to define the rules of the road, they managed to turn ageless human behavior -- crossing the street -- into a crime called jaywalking.  The safety councils were unreliable allies, however, eventually insisting that the safety of the community was most imperiled not by ambling pedestrians, but the reckless speed of the drivers.  The nascent traffic control movement was then employed with good effect;  in the early days policemen were charged with keeping the roads in good order, but they were soon usurped by engineers. The changing world of the 20th century had come to favor their like; cities were now tied together by massive engineering projects like gas pipelines and water mains.  In the wake of their success, why not treat the streets like a public utility, one run by experts?   The reign of engineers would accomplish much in driving people out of the streets; the implementation of synchronized traffic signals so spurred the rate of traffic that pedestrians were forced by survival instinct to cower at the crosswalk until given sanction to pass by the new machines.  But tasked with making transportation more efficient, the engineers eventually stood their ground against the auto lobby:  cars, after all, are far from the most efficient mode of transportation.  They don't use space terribly well, and they require parking -- acres and acres of parking!    

The continuing and rising popularity of cars, however, made victory seemingly inevitable.  Not that cars had triumphed merely owing to the free market; they were, after all,  given a free hand and their roads public financing whereas the trolleys were stifled by regulation. Once cars took to the road in numbers, they effectively destroyed any room for other choices.  The book leaves off at the start of the 1930s, before traffic masters like Miller McClintock began their dream of "gashing through" the cities with auto-only highways,  but even so their triumph was accomplished in physical fact and in law and culture.  Fighting Traffic's history of the city's initial conquest by the automobile impresses with its thoroughness and organization;  Norton is almost lawyer, building a case point by point and constantly reinforcing it.  His ambition was not merely to deliver a history of the city's driven evolution, but to examine how opposing social groups overcome one another in the political sphere, using modes outside the law -- like the clubs' use of organizations like the Boy Scouts to shame pedestrians for not obeying their new signal masters, and of course the newspapers.  The scholarly bent makes it slightly daunting for lay readers, but it's worth digging into.

Related:

• Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do, Peter Vanderbilt
• Getting There: The Epic Battle Between Road and Rail, Stephen Goddard
• Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Kay

Getting There

Getting There: the Epic Struggle  between Road and Rail in the American Century
© 1996 Stephen Goddard
366 pages

Regardless of the status of George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, and William Pitt, each man of power traveled at the same speed as the people they governed: no faster than a running horse. But in the early-mid 19th century, the industrial revolution began producing modes of transportation that would shrink continents, reducing journeys of months into a solitary week. Trains first shriveled the distance and their spans allowed for unprecedented economic growth. That growth produced rail's first rival, the automobiles -- and the highways they drove on.  Their competition produced a clear winner in the American  20th century: while the rail lines withered in neglect and passenger service vanished almost entirely,  highways covered the landscape.  But their struggle was not a fair fight between equals, as both looked for government support and the highwaymen's superior politicking created a fixed game. Getting There is a history of how the rail barons squandered public trust,  failed to unite in the face of potent opposition, and continued to flounder as they were supplanted in the lobbying court by a coalition of highwaymen and automobile manufacturers.  The status of the great highways as money pits, however, and the fracturing of that opposing coalition present an opportunity for rail to rally, in Goddard's view.

Goddard begins with a brief history of rail transportation's origins before the struggle between the two ensued, a history pitched toward demonstrating how the rail companies' early success led to abuses of the public, and thus to opposition --  -- both by popular movements, like the Grange movement of farmers protesting high rail prices in the midwest, then by the Interstate Commerce Commission, the first government institution designed to oversee any part of the economy. The ICC proved first tepid, then tyrannical, and for most of the book plays the part of a 'bad ref' or crooked umpire, working the game against  trains and for the highwaymen. While regulations forced  rail companies to quote the same price for hauling freight regardless of circumstances, unregulated truck drivers could change their rates at their own discretion: rail companies were forced to write to D.C. for permission, and by the time said clearance arrived, the opportunity for hauling would have already vanished.  Ironically, the rail companies were partially complicit in their troubles: they promoted the first 'good roads' measures so that trucks would take unprofitable short runs off of their balance streets -- and so that automobiles would relieve the burden of passengers. Those measures would prove to be another unearned advantage  for the automobile industry and highways: while rail companies created and maintained their own lines and stock, car companies, and later car drivers, were given such infrastructure, the funds coming from American taxpayers.

Although the history of American rail is checkered with self-serving episodes, the automobile industry fares no better, as their deliberate campaign to destroy trolley lines in the city and replace them with buses demonstrates. Forcing the rails' decline and letting the infrastructure fall into scrap would be egregiously unwise, in Goddard's view. He outlines the problems of our highway-and-auto dominated system: destruction of cities,  the financial albatross of maintenance, and pollution among them.  While he doesn't launch into an extensive plea for a rail renaissance, he sees one as inevitable -- if government will get out of the way and stop propping up the trains' competitors.  Getting There proves an expansive history -- brimming with detail, but never plodding, and covering social life as well as business and politics.

Related:
Waiting on a Train: A Year Spent Riding Across America, James McCommons
Straphanger: Saving Our Cities from the Automobile, Taras Grescoe
The Great Railroad Revolution: A History of Trains in America, Christian Wolmar
Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Keay

Traffic

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us)
© 2008 Tom Vanderbilt
402 pages

 Take a brain adapted to move a bit over a hundred pounds of flesh at speeds under 20 miles per hour, and have it instead try to move several tons of metal through an environment which didn’t exist a hundred years ago, at speeds hitherto unimaginable. What happens? Well, we’ve only had a few decades to see, but so far the introduction of cars as the predominant form of transport has produced interesting results, like congestion and road rage. In Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do,  Tom Vanderbilt examines the psychology of driving, and learns some lessons about being human on the way.

Traffic is a dense book, more a survey than a piece with a specific point to make. There are nine chapters, each with a general theme -- "How Traffic Messes With Our Heads", "Why You're Not as Good a Driver As You Think You Are" -- and content spans the gamut from trivial to potent. Driving is such an expressly different experience than our brains evolved to take in that Vanderbilt believes  we find it difficult to be 'human' behind the wheel. Although driving seems like simply an act of moving around, we're detached from the experience and from each other; drivers can't communicate with one another beyond some simplistic forms of expression (the horn and the finger).  It's also a tremendously complicated procedure: road systems are complex physical objects even without factoring in interacting with hundreds of other drivers, and we are expected to be able to respond to more stimuli per minute than nature would have ever expected to throw our way. On the potent side, this work could help concerned citizens create more sensible transit policies:  there's an entire chapter on how the expansion of roads simply leads to the expansion of congestion. Traffic always swells to match the volume of roads available, so building more roads will only create more congestion. Creating a safer system can happen by making it appear more dangerous, by removing traffic lights, signs, and even road striping.  Humans seem to operate with a particular risk threshold, and when the environment becomes "safer" (thanks to lights, stripes, and so on), we drive more recklessly. This is why roundabouts are safer than four-way cross intersections regulated by traffic lights; when people are forced to take responsibility for themselves and use intelligence to navigate their environment, they pay more attention and accidents fall dramatically.  Counter-intuitive revelations abound in Traffic: bikers may be better off not wearing helmets, because cars take less care when passing a helmeted biker. Often we can arrive at a destination more quickly by slowing down and interrupting globs of congestion.

All told, an interesting book. While it may suffer from the generalized subject, there are some gems in here for  those interested in the subject.

Related:
Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Kay

Asphalt Nation

Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back
© 1997 Jane Holtz Kay
418 pages

Lord, Mister Ford, I just wish you could see what your simple horseless carriage has become!

It seems your contribution to man has to say the least gotten a little out of hand --

Well, lord, Mister Ford, what have you done?

("Lord, Mister Ford", Jerry Reed)

The United States is in ways a nation without a history. Relatively young, it came of age in the early industrial period, where access to profoundly powerful technologies shaped its growth in a way not seen in Europe or Asia, where new influences worked against what was already there. This is most obviously seen in a comparison of dense, almost compact European cities, and their American counterparts, which sprawl out for mile after dreary mile and -- with some exceptions for cities which date to the 18th century --  often lack a distinctive center. This radically different urban landscape is the mark of the automobile: while Europe's cities were built for people, America's cities and now its sprawl are made for cars. Americans embraced the automobile like no other nation, and now after a century of giving it dominion, are slowly waking up to the price. No green and pleasant land, we are a nation covered in asphalt and mired in traffic. In Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Kay examines the consequences of the United States' self-made dependency on the car,  explains how it came to be that way, and offers ways for recovering a sensible approach to urbanism.

Although some of the costs of the automobile are obvious -- pollution; the economic drain of cars on private households to pay for insurance, maintenance, and gas;  and thousands of lives each year -- the greatest harm is more subtle, in deforming the urban landscape. The automobile's effect on American urbanism has been marked by purposeful decentralization and the rise of sprawl, a disaster for the nation. Not only does sprawl create manifestly hideous cityscapes, but it drives cities into bankruptcy as they attempt to cover greater areas with less efficiency. Public transportation becomes especially inefficient. As jobs move away from city centers, those who can't afford transportation to get there are stuck living in areas with few opportunities for work, leading to inner city decay. Once vibrant city centers become home to nothing but poverty and despair.


It didn't have to be this way. After cataloguing the damage, Hay launches into a history of American car use and the rise of a "car-ridden" society.  Although the automobile matched the United States' strong individualistic tendencies nicely, the success of the automobile is far from a triumph of the free market.Cars and the roads they require have always been heavily subsidized by the government: in the 1930s, building the infrastructure for automobile transportation was seen as a way to put people to work. The car companies themselves were proactive about ensuring their dominance, as General Motors eagerly bought up trolley lines and promptly closed them down, allowing its line of buses to flourish. Holtz's history section  can be depressing, as it catalogs the slow decline of American urbanism and the rise of congestion, but it must be read. Every chapter is a lesson in where we went wrong, one that might allow us to find our way back. Interestingly, the rise of the automobile fits into the pattern Neil Postman identified regarding technology;  at first, it was merely a tool to be used, then one with a central role in our lives...and now, for Americans, one our society has become fundamentally dependent on.

The final chapters devote themselves on recovery. Reining in the automobile will be a difficult task, and may prove to be a long term challenge for the 21st century, just as establishing the car's preeminence marked the 20th. First, we stop the ever-increasing expansion of roads, reexamine zoning policies that encourage sprawl and the destruction of our cities; begin restoring transit like trolleys and trains; begin rolling sprawl back and restoring our urban centers; and finally, begin "depaving America",  beginning with the elevated highways that cut cities apart.  The car should also be put in its proper place by no longer being so heavily supported by the official policies of the government.

There's never been a timelier moment for this book, except for perhaps in the 1970s when the oil crisis offered Americans a chance to reconsider their relationship with the automobile. Today the United States is facing a prolonged recession and a difficult century ahead. The infrastructure required for our asphalt nation is an enormous economic liability, one we would do well to shed ourselves of. Ending sprawl and restoring life to the cities will allow government to function efficiently and restore that sense of community that Robert Putnam mentioned in his Bowling Alone. Asphalt Nation is thorough, its author never shrill. I not only recommend it: I think it a must-read.

Related:

• The Geography of Nowhere: the Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape; James Howard Kunstler
• Technopoly, Neil Postman
• Bowling Alone: the Decline and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam
• Crabgrass Frontier: the Surburbanization of the United States, Kenneth Jackson
• Suburban Nation: the Rise of Sprawl and Decline of the American Dream; Andres Duany,  Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck
• "Lord, Mister Ford!"; Jerry Reed