Dickey’s story had its giant appeal because the search he described found expression elsewhere in American society. NASCAR offered the same kind of allure, as Tom Wolfe wrote in Esquire. Men without inhibitions who lived for the momentary pleasure of danger had no fear of the consequences of their actions. North Carolinian driver Junior Johnson was not just a “hero a whole people or class can identify with,” he was a “rare breed” who had gone from whiskey running in the isolated hills and hollows of his home state to stock car racing. He had it all: money, a split-level house, a poultry business. He might have exchanged his overalls for a windbreaker with the collar up, and “Slim Jim” white pants, but this “breed of old boy” proved something major by driving at 175 miles per hour with a kind of madness that was “raw and hillbilly.” That was the appeal.23
The macho star of Deliverance, Burt Reynolds, went on to make a southern-accented film that was an homage to the stock car racer’s way of life. In Smokey and the Bandit (1977), Reynolds’s character lived for the chase and ran from the law, while his female companion (played by Sally Field) was a runaway bride—both of them rejecting civilization’s restraints. The Reynolds of this film was a modern-day squatter like good old Sug, respected because he refused to knuckle down and join the daily grind of working to get ahead. Smokey and the Bandit was the second highest grossing film in 1977, but most of its popularity was in the South and Midwest. Adding to the mix, in 1979, CBS launched The Dukes of Hazzard, the plots of which revolved around rebel moonshiners decked out in a bright red racing car, and a sexy kissing cousin named Daisy, whose trademark was her high-cut jean shorts. Denver Pyle was cast as Uncle Jesse, known for his overalls and countrified homilies; Pyle had previously played Briscoe Darling Jr., the surly father of a musical hillbilly clan in The Andy Griffith Show.24
Wannabe bandits were among the thousands of spectators at NASCAR who launched into rebel yells, drank too much, and ogled the floozy on the float with her “big blonde hair and blossomy breasts” and cheap Dallas Cowgirl outfit. They embraced a certain species of freedom—the freedom to be a boor, out in the open and without regrets. The “upscale rednecks,” the rising white trash middle class, identified with these hillbilly racers, men who had escaped the overalls and gained as much respect as could be had in accepting wads of cash from Detroit. Class structure had not changed appreciably for the rural poor: money may have made a hillbilly or two reputable, but those left in the hills were not reaping any social benefits. “Upscale rednecks” had no trouble spotting those below them in their rearview mirrors.25
Jimmy Carter’s presidency seemed to offer a break from past southern politicians. He was a born-again Christian and navy officer (with training in nuclear physics) who predicated his 1976 campaign on his refusal to lie to the voters. In the early days of the campaign, he gave an unusual stump speech to elementary school children in New Hampshire, proclaiming that the United States could have a “government as good and as honest and as decent and as competent and as compassionate and as filled with love as the American people.” Here was a sentimental democrat, a gospel-infused Christian populist, leaps and bounds from the anger-fueled populism of the old (redneck) South.26
Of all his predecessors, Carter probably came closest to Frank Clement’s clean-cut demeanor, but he mostly kept his religious views to personal statements. He was no gyrating entertainer like Clement, nor (at five foot seven) was he a giant-sized jokester like “Big Jim” Folsom. He preferred to compare himself to Yale graduate and Tennessee liberal Estes Kefauver. The campaign rhetoric contained a “log cabin” story that captured the family’s rise, but it left out the fact that Jimmy grew up with a tennis court in the backyard. He did express southern pride, though, gaining the support of country rock groups such as the Allman Brothers. His political handlers were sure to fashion a radio ad for the pickup truck crowd: “We’ve been the butt of every bad joke for a hundred years. Don’t let the Washington politicians keep one of us out of the White House.” The closest Carter came to acknowledging cracker roots was when he quoted the words of his supporter (his future United Nations ambassador) Andrew Young that he was “white trash made good.” That made the peanut farmer Jimmy Carter “reformed” white trash. As a black congressman from Georgia, Young was suggesting that it was possible for the old hostility between poor blacks and whites to be overcome.27
As much as he rose above the dirty politics of the Nixon years, Carter’s Sunday school teacher persona could go only so far. His image problem was cleverly summed up by fellow Georgian Roy Blount Jr. in the book Crackers (1980). Rather than find his inner redneck as James Dickey had, Carter ran on everything he wasn’t: “He wasn’t a racist, an elitist, a sexist, a Washingtonian, a dimwit, a liar, a lawyer . . . an ideologue, a paranoid, a crook.” He was always in denial. By taking the “meanness and hambone out of the redneck,” Blount reasoned, Carter was left without “force or framework.” And no matter how liberal, how tolerant and accommodating he appeared, Carter’s redneck shadow followed him. In that shadow the media lay in wait, preoccupied with Jimmy’s toothy grin, his strange duel with a swamp rabbit, and, most notably, his redneck doppelg?nger—brother Billy.28
Carter was the perfect candidate of the seventies, because he was someone who came to politics with “roots.” He ran as the man from tiny Plains, as one who loved the land, loved his kin, and treasured his local community. That simple heritage was his calling card, and as a profile in the Christian Science Monitor concluded, “Few cling to their roots with more tenacity.” Like Alex Haley, he was obsessed with his family’s genealogy. He successfully cultivated his “common man” origins until a British publication on the peerage released a startling twenty-three-page finding on the Carter family lineage in 1977. Instead of descending from indentured servants, the president had one of the most significant family histories in the English-speaking world: he was related to both George Washington and the queen of England. The New York Times projected that his fellow Americans would find this discovery “amusing.” It tempered the British announcement with a reminder to readers that some of the Carters in old England were poachers, the American equivalent of would-be moonshiners. Noble blood or hillbilly moonshiners? A spokesman for the British study, Debrett’s Peerage, invoked eugenic thinking when he claimed that the Carter family had produced “intelligent to brilliant” people. The family line had its share of “sleepers,” the expert confided, and it was from those less successful branches that Jimmy’s brother Billy had acquired his less fine attributes.29
That said, Billy Carter was no sleeper. He became a redneck luminary, and tourists poured into the Carters’ hometown of Plains looking for autographs and photographs with the down-home celebrity. He began producing his own beer, Billy Beer, and hired an agent to coordinate talks he gave around the country. He was known for voicing ornery, uncensored opinions. Billy smoked five packs of Pall Malls a day, and his code name on the CB radio was “Cast Iron,” for his iron-gutted ability to drink anything and a lot of it. He was no “Holy Roller,” no celebrant of the “Lost Cause.” When asked what side he would have fought on in the Civil War, Billy joked, “I’d probably hid out in the swamp.” In 1981, after his brother left office, Billy was peddling mobile homes.30