Photo credit: Creative Commons
January 26th was The Dukes of Hazzard Day, so we went looking for “Cooter” who portrayed the wild, unshaven mechanic in the TV series – a.k.a former Congressman Ben Jones (Dem. GA). We found him in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia with a little help from his wife Alma Viator who has been a friend of Hollywood on the Potomac for many years. Together, they are the proprietors of “Cooter’s Place,” the “Dukes of Hazzard” museum, and shops in Sperryville, Virginia; Gatlinburg and Nashville, Tennessee. They also founded “Dukesfest,” a huge annual gathering of “Dukes” fans.
Alma Viator and Ben Jones Photo credit: Neshan H. Naltchayan for HOP July 2012
The Dukes of Hazzard premiered on CBS in 1979 as a television comedy about two good-old-boy cousins in the rural south and their souped-up 1969 Dodge Charger known as the General Lee. The show was known for its car chases and stunts and the General Lee, which had an orange paint job, and a Confederate flag across its roof and the numbers “01” on its welded-shut doors. The General Lee also had a horn that played the first 12 notes of the song “Dixie.” The final episode originally aired on August 16, 1985, but the show resurfaced as several TV specials and a 2005 movie starring Johnny Knoxville, Seann William Scott and Jessica Simpson.
“Dukes of Hazzard started 37 years ago,” Jones told Hollywood on the Potomac. “We actually started filming in the fall of 1978 down in Georgia. We did 5 episodes, which in fact became the pilot for the show. Then in January of 1979, 37 years ago on this date, the show came on the air. Within just a few weeks it was right at the top of the ratings. It was an amazing, extraordinary success from the get go. [Who would have known] that when we started filming this thing back in the fall of 1978 that 37 years later it would continue to be extremely popular, not just in the United States but all over the world, in any number of languages, and that it was going to be an enormous hit. Back in those days, there was no Internet and there was no cable or satellite dishes. That was just in its infancy then. There were only really 3 networks. It was public television and independent stations all over the country, but really, there was only ABC, NBC, and CBS. On Friday nights on CBS, as many as 40 million people were watching the Dukes and Dallas and then Falcon Crest. It was just huge.”
“Then there were hundreds of different merchandise items: Toys and cars and puzzles and lunch boxes and bed sheets and window curtains. Dukes of Hazzard was a merchandising bonanza,” Jones added. “We remained at the very top of the ratings for several years. It played for 7 seasons, but during those years it started to become syndicated across the country and then around the world. It’s been shown in over 50 countries now and a number of languages. Then of course cable came along and satellite dishes and all of that, so the show has had a very long and healthy life. Then came VHS and we did video games and then came DVDs. I think my experience is that the show is as popular as ever and has become a permanent part of Americana – much like, I don’t know, any number of things like The Wizard of Oz – those kind of shows that just aren’t going to go away and thus become ever more popular. Our show does that as each generation comes along and discovers it. It’s very much alive in the present and continues to find and develop a new audience every day. Our show, because there’s very little family programming now where it’s just good clean fun, is a show the whole family can watch and enjoy together. There’s very little programming like that now and as a result, The Dukes of Hazzard has been kept on the front burner. Now it’s about DVDs and we can’t sell enough of them. It keeps on going and that’s a remarkable thing. I think back on some of the other shows that were on at that time and basically they just disappeared and have been forgotten, but our show continues to find a new audience. It’s been a great ride.”
“I went on to do other things. I was elected to congress in 1988. The show went off the air in 1985, then I ran for congress in ’86 and almost won. Then in ’88 I was elected and then in 1990 I was reelected to congress. Then after that, I was redistricted, so that was the end of my political career,” he explained. So we asked: “How much do you think that being a famous TV star assisted in getting you elect to Congress?” “Well, I’m not sure,” he answered. “Of course Ronald Reagan was elected to the presidency in 1980 while the show had just begun as a matter of fact. Of course he was reelected, so he was the best known politician, but I believe so – that it helped to be in Hollywood. Fred Grandy was elected two years before me and I’d been in a movie with Fred back in the ’70s. Fred was on The Love Boat. He played Gopher and he was elected to the congress from Iowa in 1986. When I was elected we knew each other and he sent me a note that said, ‘An actor elected in ’86, an actor elected in ’88. At this rate we’ll take over the institution in a couple of hundred years.’ Anyhow, Fred had a real fine congressional career and then I think he ran for governor in Iowa and didn’t quite make it. He’s gone on to do other things. Of course Fred Thompson was elected to the senate from Tennessee. He was originally a political guy and worked with Howard Baker at The Watergate hearings. He was the attorney there for Senator Baker and became well known, then later started acting and his career just took off. We just lost Fred a couple months ago. There were others: Sonny Bono who was an actor and a singer who was elected to congress from California. So I think it didn’t hurt that I was on the Dukes of Hazzard, but at first I was treated as a novelty. You can’t just get by on your notoriety or popularity as an actor though; you have to be able to have a full understanding of policy and the politics. It’s a hard job. It’s a tough job representing 600,000 plus people.”
Ben Bradlee, Fred Thompson and Bill Cohen at The Watergate reunion Photo credit: Janet Donovan
“What was different for me was that I didn’t have a background being on a town counsel or as a county commissioner or in the state legislature, so it was all new to me,” he explained. “I was good on my feet and accustomed to the public I guess and to dealing with the public, so that part of it was helpful. But the rest of it’s just hard work. You’re dealing with any number of issues that come before the congress, but you’re also advocating on behalf of 600,000 people. That’s the way I looked at it. I represented them and all of their dealings with the federal government. We were very very good at constituent services. It’s almost an impossible job. You work 20 hours a day and it would pile up faster than you could deal with it. I enjoyed it thoroughly and I just thought of it after some years as another part of my show business career. It was another gig I did. It was a good gig and I learned a lot. I was in congress at an extraordinary time. I guess every year is an extraordinary time, but I was there when the Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall came down and the first Persian Gulf War happened and any number of other things like that –Tiananmen Square in China and the enormous oil spill in Alaska. I saw that up close and personal. It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience for me, but afterwards I just went back to doing what I do which is acting and writing and singing. There’s no doubt that when you’re in congress or any kind of politics, most of the decisions that you make, about half of the people in the district are not going to like it because the way politics is designed. In this country, we only have two parties which I’ve always thought strange. The greatest country in the world, the most creative and entrepreneurial society in the history of the planet and we only have two choices when it comes to what direction we’re going to take. At any rate, about half the people are mad at you all the time. Being on The Dukes of Hazzard, I guarantee you was a whole lot more fun than politics and I’ve never met anybody yet who hadn’t seen the show or loved it or has great fond memories of it.”
T.H. Ben Jones and Rep. Jim Moran Photo credit: Neshan H. Naltchayan for HOP July 2012
We asked former Rep. Jones to weigh in on politics today and in particular on this Presidential election cycle: “The political career is one thing. I still stay involved. I think of myself as an independent now, but I care about what our government does and I put my two cents worth in at every opportunity; I still have that part of me. I’m always going to be ‘Cooter’ to millions of people and that’s all over the world. I think we all realized early on on the show that the show’s going to outlast all of us and that anything else we did in our careers was going to be over shadowed by that kind of popularity. I’m not banking on anybody. I’m a little disappointed in the choices frankly and I am very disappointed in the Democratic party which I’ve worked for and helped and served as a member of congress and was a part of the Whip organization there. Here, I think essentially is the problem with American politics right now: We only have two choices. The Democratic party is going to the left, getting more and more involved in identity politics and special, social interests and sexual politics and forgetting its roots of the working man, the blue collar people, the small farmers, the small business people. It seems to me that the Democratic party has become an urban party and the Republican party has become more the heartland party. The Republican party tends to go to the right, with its special interests on the right, the Democratic party is drifting left toward special interests on the left; and the public interests – the great middle American here who just wants to see these problems solved and compromises and working together to solve extremely difficult and complex problems in our country – are not being represented. I think the country’s looking for a problem solver and that I think accounts for some of the interest there is in Donald Trump who appears to be a plain spoken problem solver.”
Ben Jones
“He’s also a ham,” he acknowledged, “and has television experience and all of that. I don’t know where he stands right now. I would support someone like John Kasich who is a Republican from Ohio because he has enormous experience. I say he’s going to run strong in New Hampshire as others have faded. I think people might give him a second look because I’ve known him, served with him, and found him to be a reasonable guy; a budget guy who was chairman of the budget committee, but who also had great experience in foreign affairs. He also is the Governor of Ohio, which is a state that either side pretty much must win. I think he would be great….. a blue collar Republican. I wouldn’t call him a conservative, although the Republican party is by its nature the conservative party in this country right now. I consider myself an Independent who’s looking for somebody who is just a straight shooter and is not a demi-God and who can be trusted.”
Political correctness……
On Bernie Sanders: “I like Bernie, but Bernie is a bit to the left for me. I like Bernie personally. I think he’s a very honorable and a very bright guy, but his politics are very representative of that urban thinking which tends to not relate really to the heartland of America, in my opinion. He’s not going to get a lot of votes around here. Out here in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, the Democratic party is disappearing because it has gone so far to the left on social issues. It just does not relate to blue collar folks out here. To farmers and ordinary working people, small business people, I think the party’s got a problem. I think the country has a problem. It’s become polarized. Most of us don’t live on the left or the right. We live out here in the real world and there’s no party like that, which is just a party given to solving the enormous problems. We’ve got a gigantic deficit and enormous debt in this country. Plus, it’s a very dangerous world right now. I don’t know. I’m one of those people who really is an Independent on this. If anything, I become more of a centrist, more of a moderate, and more of a conservative. I guess that happens when you get old. That appears not to have been the case at many points in the last few years, the comity between the two parties, the word is comity. There’s some comedy. C-O-M-E-D-Y. Comity, C-O-M-I-T-Y, means getting along to solve the problems, to working together despite your differences, to finding compromise. That’s what’s been lacking. I remember Tip O’Neill (former Speaker of the House) – I loved that guy. Tip would go over to see Ronald Reagan after hours and they would work things out. I despise political correctness. I think it’s a neurosis of some sort – a national neurosis which is designed to silence people and to shame them. It’s just gone way way way too far. Political correctness is just an absurdity in my opinion and it’s un-American. We’re about thinking freely and saying what we believe deeply. We’re dealing with that now with The Dukes of Hazzard for the simple reason that it had a Confederate battle flag on top of the car.”
The last comment was the perfect lead in to the recent Confederate flag flap. On June 17th of 2015, nine African-Americans were shot and killed during Bible study at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C. The white suspect, Dylann Roof, posed in photographs with Confederate flags. While many state and local lawmakers and national retailers are stepping up efforts to remove the emblem from public sight, others continue to defend its use and sale. Ben Jones is on the defenders side: “You don’t want to get me started,” he told Hollywood on the Potomac. “Listen. It’s real simple. It is real simple. Any symbol means different things to different people. We recognize there are 70 to 80 million Americans, almost 1 in every 4 Americans had an ancestor who fought for the Confederacy for the southern cause. We understand this as family and I’m one of them – the people who fought for the south and was destroyed by that. We understand the people in the context of their time, why they did what they did in their time 150 years ago. They were very courageous and very dedicated people who sacrificed a lot. The South was destroyed by the war between the states. Totally destroyed. There was no marshal plan to rebuild the South. In fact the South because of that, stayed behind the rest of the country for a long long time.”
“As one who was in the Civil Rights movement 50 years ago now, over 50 years ago, we changed the South and in turn we changed the country. We made enormous progress. The South does rise. It continues to rise. It is the most progressive part of the country,” said Jones. “It’s come further. It has the fastest growing economy of any section of the country and I was a part of that as a congressman and all of us working together, black, white, red, brown, yellow, in Atlanta to bring the international Olympics to the South. We’ve come a long way and now we’re being smeared. Our families are being insulted. We are talking about my grandfathers and my great grandfathers and their pictures are on our walls, their names are in our bibles, and we put flowers on their graves. We are not ashamed of them. We are proud of them. This nonsense about the Confederate battle flag is the most divisive thing that has happened. It is un-American. It is cultural cleansing. To me it’s the next thing to fascism and only one side is being presented in the media. Of course we’re furious about this. My friend Andy Young – Andrew Young the Reverend Andrew Young – who was also twice mayor of Atlanta, a congressman, ambassador to the United Nation, and Dr.King’s closest associate is a good friend of mine and I just went and did a conference with him, a forum at Morehouse College. He took the same position that I take; that this is the antithesis of a civil rights movement. That this is not what Dr. King was talking about at all. He was saying that he had a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the former slave owners would dine together at the table of brotherhood. This throws a monkey wrench into that. This tries to destroy that. This says that anyone displaying this flag is a racist, is a hateful person, who’s ancestors were guilty of treason. That’s insane. He said at the end of that that during the Civil Rights movement for all those years that it was based in Atlanta, it was him and Dr. King and the others, that the subject of the Civil War and the Confederate flag never even came up. It wasn’t part of the discussion. This is political correctness gone berserk and everybody’s buying into it.”
The cast of The Dukes of Hazzard
“People died for what they believed was the cause,” he said decisively. “Slavery was a Northern enterprise. I’m sorry. It was run out of Wall Street and it started the trade up in Newport and Boston and places like that and Providence. The trade was run out of New York harbor and that’s where the cotton money went. The cotton went into the mills in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The profits went to Wall Street. This is very well known. If anybody does their homework, this was a national sin. This was not the Southern sin. It was a much more complicated situation than what we’re hearing now. In the end, I’m not going to change my ancestors. I was in the Civil Rights movement, I’m very very proud of that, but I don’t remember anybody talking about Confederate flags then. In our show, which was on in the ’80s and continues to be shown all over the world, that flag is there and we never had one complaint. Yet when this wave of cultural cleansing started, one of the first things that happened was that our show was taken off the air. Now we’re being castigated where 40 million people a week watched this show and loved it. They were of all colors. I’ve never met a black person in the South that doesn’t watch The Dukes of Hazzard. It’s simply that the flag means different things to different people. This has got to stop. We’re not going to stop fighting and stop saying what we think. We’re not going to be intimidated by this. We may be marginalized. We may be castigated. We may be called these things, but we’re not going to change who we are and how we feel.”
We finished our conversation on a lighter note: We talked about what his life is like today. “Well today we’ve got drifts of snow still here, so it’s slow going around here. We’re digging out from under snow. I get up and I write and I read and I work on my music. We’ve’ just got a great life here in the country. Our stores are closed now in the winter on Mondays and Tuesdays here, but we’ll open tomorrow at Cooter’s Place’ in the country and just have a big old time with it. I involve myself in a lot of different things and I’ll probably hopefully this week later get over to the studio, if I can get out of all this snow and get over the hill over in the Shenandoah Valley. I’m just finishing up a new CD project. We have our website to deal with and our Facebook and all those kind of things. I’m low-tech, but I’m picking up on it. I go around and I speak to different groups. I’ll be 75 this year and it’s hard to believe that because I’m still a kid. I don’t get it. I don’t know who that old guy in the mirror is. Life is also about children and grandchildren. I’ve been very blessed that way and my wife Alma, whom I think is one of the most extraordinary people in the world in my opinion, and I have such a good life together. We’re partners in everything that we do. That’s what my days are like. Come on out here. It’s not far; we live in Rappahannock County which is one of the most beautiful places in America – right in the heart of the Blue Ridge. There are only 7,000 people in this county and there are no stop lights. We have great artists here, great people, great farms and tourist things. Just a wonderful place. We’re both very grateful that the good Lord planted us here.”
Video courtesy of Tim Sidden:
