Car Troubles

Critical Studies of Automobility and Auto-Mobility

Jim Conley, Arlene Tigar McLaren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754677727
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317169802
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

Car Troubles central premise is that the car as the dominant mode of travel needs to be problematized. It examines a wide range of issues that are central to automobility by situating it within social, economic, and political contexts, and by combining social theory, specific case studies and policy-oriented analysis. With an international team of contributors the book provides a coherent and comprehensive analysis of the global phenomenon of automobility from the Anglo world to the cases in China and Chile and all the elements that relate to it.

PART 1
Cultures of Automobility

Chapter 1
T-Bucket Terrors to Respectable Rebels: Hot Rodders and Drag Racers in Vancouver BC, 1948–1965

Catharine Genovese

The experience of auto-mobility has a vast range of manifestations in diverse cultural practices. Drag racing is only one cultural expression that emerged with the development of the automobile. But it illustrates in a particularly dramatic form the process by which communities in specific contexts negotiated and constructed both the car’s seductive appeal and its troubles. While the car provided opportunities for power, speed and excitement for young, white workingclass men, their creative modification of cars troubled the wider community, symbolizing rebellion and outlaw behaviour on the streets. This case study shows how a drag racing community struggled over meaning, rules and regulations in the face of public disapproval, and how it sought resolution between paradoxes of automobility (e.g., danger and safety, the outlaw and the respectable, freedom and regulation, the magical and the mundane) by policing its own boundaries and seeking to create a respectable hot rodder identity. In their active negotiations with the wider community and transformation of their own identities, this relatively powerless group exercised agency through auto-mobility practices in multiple social sites and contributed to cultural meanings and technological innovations during a time of rapid expansion of automobility.

The movie Rebel without a Cause (1955) established drag racing as a symbol of youthful rebellion in the United States, and young working class males in Vancouver, BC, were a part of this transnational movement. The impact of the automobile on North American society has been integral in the development of modernity and its urban and suburban landscapes. With its celebration of speed and excitement, drag racing contributed to the growing interest in the automobile. The defining features of drag racing in its early stages are captured by the National Hot Rod Association: two high-stepping coupes blast off the starting line in the 1950s in a quarter-mile celebration of acceleration (NHRA 2001). Drag racing is a sport that grew out of hot rodding and the desire of hot rodders to compete against like-minded performance enthusiasts in a professional forum. Hot rodders modified whatever vehicle they could get their hands on, stripped it down for speed, performance and a particular look and competed in events with or without official sanction.

The popular view portrays the establishment of drag racing and hot rodding in North America after World War II as a natural, linear progression resulting from the coincidence of automobiles, ingenuity and opportunity. “Illegal street racing had been around as long as the automobile, but it took off after World War II, when GIs with enhanced mechanical skills and a love of speed and danger returned to civilian life” (NHRA 2001, 19). Such depictions view drag racing as an inspiring example of American know-how, creativity, and the utility of capitalism to satisfy the emotional needs of the individual. But the development of drag racing cannot be explained simply by emotional drives or commodity consumption, and it has not been a straightforward march towards ever-increasing speed records. In Vancouver it was also a story of transforming rebels into respectable citizens. The British Columbia Custom Car Association (BCCA) was arguably the first club in Canada to interpret and develop the guidelines provided in Hot Rod magazine to begin their own club and eventually become the state-sanctioned owners of Mission Raceway Park in Mission, BC (Mission Raceway Park 2005).

The period 1948–65 merits scrutiny as the period when drag racers and hot rodders across North America developed an internal bureaucracy to counter negative portrayals in the media and public derision, and to deflect unwanted attention from government and law enforcement officials. In doing so, the movement changed from rebel protest to respectable accommodation. The outcome of this shift would be social tolerance and opportunities for some members to capitalize economically on the sport. Unlike Derek Simons (this volume), I do not examine the historical and ontological origins of speed. Instead, based on documentary evidence and interviews with 12 Vancouver-area hot rodders and related stakeholders, I provide a case study of how a group’s interest in speed was intertwined with a social and legal context. As the group negotiated this context, they defined a legitimated, respectable and authentic identity – the ‘true hot rodder’ – which included both their interest in speed, and their desire to perfect technical performance and driver skills.

The movement began after World War II in Southern California with the publication of Hot Rod magazine and the formation of the sport’s primary governing body, the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA), and extended quickly throughout North America. The BCCA in Vancouver, BC, was one of the groups receiving, interpreting and reinterpreting the NHRA’s edicts through Hot Rod magazine. Hot Rod magazine was where the enthusiast community, street racers and the public learned what it was to be a true (read safe) hot rodder. The hot rod movement sought to distinguish itself from those involved in the ‘traffic light grand prix’: mainly youths, who raced main thoroughfares, injuring and killing themselves and innocent bystanders (Smith 2006). Harry Desilva wrote in his 1942 book, Why We Have Automobile Accidents that,

Present day youth has developed nocturnal habits which from a safety standpoint are highly undesirable … Nowadays a young man thinks he must borrow the family car, collect a group of friends and rush all around the country looking for entertainment. Often encouraged by alcoholic refreshments he is lured into demonstrating to his companions how fast ‘the old bus’ will go, with disastrous results. (DeSilva 1942, 205)

Since the general public did not recognize the distinction between drag racing and street racing, its negative glare was cast towards both.

Thus far the limited historiography available on the subject of hot rodding has focused on the structure of its governing bodies, technological aspects of the sport activity, and the significance of the message being distributed. In his analysis of the culture and technology of drag racing from 1950 to 2000, Robert Post (2001) examines how the technological quest for speed drives the sport of drag racing. Bert Moorhouse (1991, 39) asserts that “[t]o counter bad publicity and the effects this might have on the sport and the burgeoning economic interests” associated with it, the emerging governing apparatus “aimed at incorporating street racing into the serious activity” of drag racing. My research seeks to uncover the ways in which a Canadian club understood, construed and utilized the guidelines from Hot Rod magazine on club formation and how the club established drag racing and hot rodding in Vancouver as a legitimate sport and enthusiasm. I examine how the information, received from the magazine, was reconstructed to enable members of one hot rodding club in Vancouver to become respectable rebels who could pursue their sport as they desired, and who would become capable of reaping the economic benefits of their enthusiasm.

Although many popular historical books with exciting pictures focus on hot rodding and drag racing, critical historical work on the rise of drag racing has been less forthcoming. Traditionally, historians assumed that ‘popular culture’ was less significant socially than ‘high culture’. They made inherent class distinctions between high culture as art and popular culture as mass-produced commodity that gauges success by commercial accomplishment (Storey 1997). In the 1990s cultural historians became critical of such a distinction that implied people were “cultural dopes” lacking the ability to assess what is meaningful or important and “thus at the economic, cultural, and political mercy of the barons of the industry” (Fiske 1998, 504). John Fiske (1998, 505) argues persuasively against the image of the cultural dope, contending that “despite the homogenizing force of the dominant ideology,” subordinate groups have utilized the diversity of capital to produce an exponential number of voices and this variety of voices allows these people to compare and decide on the capitalist forms to which they choose to relate. Historians have since stepped away from this homogenous view and do not see the social world as a dichotomy between the high and the low. They are more inclined to take Stuart Hall’s (1998) position that emphasizes a dialectic between the two alternative poles of containment and resistance and the social space within which these two poles are constantly coming together and being superimposed upon each other while society negotiates from within to determine quotidian practices. Additionally, far from seeing popular culture as only the “expressive culture” of the masses, recent works are beginning to relate popular culture to power and “recognizing that popular culture cannot be defined in terms of its intrinsic properties but must be conceived in relation to the political forces and cultures that engage it” (Joseph and Nugent 1994, 15).

Historical and ethnographic studies have begun to examine the car within the cultural and political context of specific communities (see, for example, Miller 2001). Given the epoch-making impact of the automobile, Gilroy (2001) notes, it is imperative to examine how black communities respond and participate in its consumption. In particular, he explores how cars are uniquely linked in the lives of black communities to their “broadest political and economic hopes” (82). Other studies, highlighting the interaction between the social and technological, examine how specific groups are active participants in the social construction of the automobile. Kline and Pinch (1996) show that during the early decades of the twentieth century farm people in the rural United States used and modified the car in ways not anticipated by manufacturers. In particular, the authors argue that because competence in operating and repairing machinery was central to their masculinity, farm men opened up the ‘black box’ of the car, reinterpreting its function and using it for varied purposes such as grinding grain. The authors adopt the concept of ‘interpretative flexibility’ to reflect the process in which specific social groups change technologies by investing them with new uses and meanings. By the early 1950s, the authors contend, such flexibility had disappeared as farm people used cars as intended by manufacturers. This chapter illustrates that interpretative flexibility persisted in the 1950s as urban and suburban workingclass men turned the automobile to their own purposes of self-expression, in the form of hot rodding, and consequently contributed to changes in its technology. In this process, they also developed and transformed their identities.

The enthusiasm of these young men for drag racing cannot be understood in traditional narratives that see popular cultural signifiers as essentialized customs applicable to the entire community. The North American drag racing community’s identity was not monolithic and the quotidian practices of the group continued to redefine the values, language, and interpreted traditions of the community. Additionally, new members coming into the group contested existing practices and power structures to produce new cultural expressions within the racing community. These new expressions presented themselves to the public at the strip and on the street. The constant evolution and redefinition of the expressions of culture and community through practice and language resulted in the transformation of members of Vancouver’s BCCA from problematic teenagers into respectable citizens, professional sportsmen, and in some cases, business managers (Carey 1996).

Drag racing’s early development as a popular cultural form entails one of the central, defining production commodities of modernity and reveals trends and social attitudes that continue to shape reaction to the automobile to the present. This history of drag racing begins with the mass production of the car, as it was in part the impetus for the hot rod. Henry Ford began his groundbreaking assembly line production of the Model T before World War I with the professed intention of making it available to the common man. But as Warren Susman (1984) points out, Ford did not realize that the common man did not want to feel common. In his drive to mass produce and mass market a commodity that utilized the assembly line, slick new advertising techniques and a state-sponsored system of highways and roads, Ford failed to perceive that, “mechanical perfection, although desirable, was not enough” (Susman 1984, 140). Ford’s assembly line did, however, lay the foundation for certain people – especially young white males – to purchase mass produced cars and use their interpretative flexibility for self expression.

Although ‘hot rodding’ or modifying cars began soon after Ford supplied them, the specific date of the transformation of drag racing from hobby to sport is difficult to ascertain. As Wally Parks, the most famous editor of Hot Rod magazine said, “street racing has probably been around since the first two owners of horseless carriages lined up to see whose mount was fastest” (NHRA 2001, 13). By 1948, enthusiasts across North America were modifying their cars for looks and more importantly, for speed, following the trends of the emerging California car culture. The Southern California Timing Association (SCTA), established in 1937, began organizing drag racing on the flat, dry salt lakes that were the safest, most reliable areas to test their vehicles (Post 2001). The hot rod apparatus that Moorhouse (1991) describes consisted of the SCTA membership, who after WWII would leave the dry lakes to find decommissioned airstrips, form the NHRA and become the writers and editors of Hot Rod magazine. With these modifications, street racing intensified and public attention to it grew, as illustrated by a number of high profile articles in publications such as Colliers, Life and the New York Times (Moorhouse 1991). Widespread popular media coverage of hot rodding and street racing was testament to the number of racers, fans and public attention that the enthusiasm was attracting, and a demonstration that drag racing was not just a fad.

Initially, Vancouver hot rodders represented trouble to law enforcement and society, as uncontrolled youth on the streets. The automobile enabled young people to cruise around in public without adult supervision; it was easily modified for style to project personal taste, and it could be ‘hopped-up’ for speed. As Conley argues (this volume), the car has often represented freedom, in this case encompassing all that was important to postwar society. Like other cities across North America, Vancouver had its share of street racing. Local police and the RCMP were constantly breaking up clandestine street races across the Lower Mainland in Tsawwassen, up and down Burnaby Mountain, at Marshland Avenue in Burnaby, at Port Kells in Surrey, and on the Lougheed Highway near Mission. Some of these locations were hardly developed at the time; few people were around, and drivers had many opportunities to race illegally. These races occurred in addition to the daily incidents of racing that the police claimed they were encountering on major thoroughfares. The newspapers are dotted with reports such as an 1 October 1952 article in The Vancouver Sun, where the BCCA urges parents to curb young drivers, and the rodders themselves have told of crashes, rollovers, cars in ditches, and drivers hurt or killed (Warren 2005; Jeboult 2004). Cities across North America were experiencing a moral panic over juvenile delinquency and the images of hot rodders as youth alienated from the larger community found in cautionary films such as Hot Rod Rumble (1957), The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow (1959) and Dragstrip Girl (1957) (Moorhouse 1991). A Martens’ 1950 play, Drag Race: A Teenage Play in One Act depicted drag racers as unrepentant teenagers who only became penitent when they realized that the young man they were racing against had been killed.

Most hot rodding and drag racing enthusiasts realized that control, safety and accommodation would be the only way to counter the negative publicity and state oppression of their sport. To give their own members a forum for discussion, the racers and rodders in California began publishing a magazine, Hot Rod, which would become the voice of the drag racing enthusiast community. Hot Rod’s readership, which began at 5,000 monthly in 1948, grew rapidly to 200,000 monthly across the United States and Canada by the end of 1950 (Moorhouse 1991, 41). The California racers who wrote and edited Hot Rod clearly believed that they had become respectable, and their aim was to promote hot rodding and racing as a reputable enthusiasm and professional sport. Hot Rod magazine’s role in the promotion of the enthusiasm and its inherent safety would be clarified when in 1949, the New York Times ran a statement from Thomas W. Ryan, the Director of the New York Division of Safety who said,

Possession of the ‘hot rod’ car is presumptive evidence of an intent to speed. Speed is Public Enemy No. 1 of the highways. It is obvious that a driver of a ‘hot rod’ has an irresistible temptation to ‘step on it’ and accordingly operate the vehicle in a reckless manner endangering human life. It also shows a deliberate and premeditated idea to violate the law. These vehicles are largely improvised by home mechanics and are capable of high speed and dangerous maneuverability. They have therefore become a serious menace to the safe move...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1: CULTURES OF AUTOMOBILITY
• PART 2: RISK AND REGULATION
• PART 3: INEVITABLE AUTOMOBILITY?
• PART 4: BEYOND THE CAR
• Index