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What Did The Dukes of Hazzard Really Say About the South?

7 minute read

“Someday the mountain might get ’em / But the law never will.” –Waylon Jennings

In the end, it was neither the law nor the mountain that got them Duke Boys. It was TV Land, which pulled reruns of The Dukes of Hazzard–whose muscle car the General Lee was emblazoned with the Confederate flag–amid the controversy after the racist massacre in Charleston whose perpetrator had posed with the banner. (The network hasn’t given a reason, but the timing is tough to overlook.) The move prompted an outraged reaction from costar John Schneider: “The Dukes of Hazzard was and is no more a show seated in racism than Breaking Bad was a show seated in reality.”

From many other folks, I expect, the reaction was more like: “Someone was rerunning The Dukes of Hazzard“? If you grew up with the show as I did, your memories probably mostly involve jean shorts, cars jumping over ponds and “Enos, you dipstick!” Was there really anything else to it?

The show’s no longer on TV Land, but you can watch the pilot free on Amazon (where subsequent episodes are $1.99 a pop). So I did.

It is still as gloriously shiny and empty as a collectors’ metal lunchbox, a Southern-fried cartoon (which later became an actual cartoon) jacked up with ’70s T&A. The plot involves the Dukes hijacking a shipment of illicit slot machines from Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane in order to save an orphanage; there’s a climatic prison escape involving a blow-up doll. The dialogue includes Luke’s immortal line, “Bo, you drive like my Aunt Fanny whips apple butter!” (Sidebar: They’re cousins. Isn’t it our Aunt Fanny?) There are some notable performances–Sorrell Booke’s gluttinously avaricious Boss Hogg, especially, is like Big Daddy filtered through John Waters–but the sensibility is more Tennessee Ernie Ford than Tennessee Williams.

But Dukes is also a fascinating document of its time in history–both TV and American. Dukes premiered in 1979, at the height of jiggle TV (Three’s Company, Charlie’s Angels) and the Carter-era pop fascination with Southern good-ole-boy stories (Convoy, Smokey and the Bandit). It was still firmly the post-Watergate era, in which the suspicion of The Man became mainstream, and some of the most popular screen heroes were charming rogues whose broke laws enforced by corrupt authorities (Han Solo, say, or many of Burt Reynolds’ ’70s roles). But the Reagan revolution, and its embrace of America’s past, was just a year away.

So the first messages you get from Waylon Jennings’ theme song are also the most essential: Bo and Luke were “good ol’ boys” but they were also “fightin’ the system.” They were traditionalists, but they were also rebels. The Duke boys weren’t political, but they were at least small-c conservative–they stood for old ways and ancient traditions.

And the show came along at a time when conservatism was figuring out a different way to present itself, not as the establishment but as the underdogs, the outsiders–essentially repurposing the hippie ideas of the people vs. the power into the little folks vs. the big government. (First Blood, which came out a few years later, cast Reagan-era icon Rambo as a solder betrayed by the powers-that-be–including, like the Duke Boys, a venal Southern sheriff.) Even the little things, like the Dukes’ bow-hunting, are about anti-government individualism: poor folks need food, and “Jesse don’t take kindly to no government assistance. He’d rather starve.”

This isn’t William F. Buckley’s elitist conservatism, standing athwart history and yelling “Stop!” It’s leaning out the window of a Dodge Charger and yelling “YEEEEHAWWWW!”

So about that rebel flag. The Dukes pilot doesn’t talk about it directly, but it does allude to the Civil War, in a scene that explains why Uncle Jesse (Denver Pyle) gave up the 200-year-old family moonshine business to save his nephews from jail: “They fought everybody from the British to the Confederacy to the U.S. government to stay in it.” On the one hand, the Duke boys’ car is the General Lee; on the other hand, their ultimate enemy–Jefferson Davis Hogg–is named for the president of the CSA.

There’s nothing about slavery or states’ rights in there, but the mythmaking is familiar enough. The Dukes fly the Confederate flag, the setup assures us, but they’re outside any negative ideas you have about the Confederacy. They’re just little guys going up against a succession of big guys. Just’a good old boys! There’s nothing overt there about the flag–and the series didn’t dwell on it after that–but it’s very much part of the “history not hate” message that led, by now, to a majority of American whites seeing the flag as a symbol of pride while most black Americans see it as one of racism, according to a CNN poll.

Of course, Ben Jones–the former Georgia congressman who played the Dukes’ coconspirator Cooter and now owns a chain of Hazzard-themed museums–recently insisted, “in Hazzard County there was never any racism.” More accurately, there just wasn’t much race. The black characters in the pilot are limited to a construction worker with no lines in the first chase scene, and a small part for the Dukes’ friend Brodie–played by Champ Laidler, credited with two episodes in total. (Later, there would be a minor recurring role for the African American sheriff of a neighboring county.)

That’s not to say The Dukes of Hazzard was some kind of diabolical historical whitewash so much as it was a network TV series in 1979, trying to pull in viewers nationwide for a story about the South without touching anything that inflamed people a decade or a century before.

So Northerners get a funny story of backwoods tricks played on backwoods hicks, loaded up with getaway music and casual stereotypes. (“If you weren’t my cousin, I’d marry you,” Bo tells Daisy in the pilot. “When did that ever stop anyone in this family before?” she asks him.) Southerners get a populist version of pride and rebellion without baggage. The kids get car chases with CB radios. The grown-ups get Daisy on a roadside in a bikini and/or Bo and Luke with their shirts unbuttoned to the waist. (There are more ’70s hormones floating around Hazzard County than during happy hour at the Regal Beagle.)

It may be right to say that no one ever tried to write politics into The Dukes of Hazzard, racial or otherwise. (Though there was a lot more politics in the pilot than I would have thought: there’s an election going on for Sheriff, and Coltrane went crooked when he lost his pension after a local bond initiative got voted down.) But that doesn’t mean it isn’t about them all the same. You can’t feature the flag of Dixie and not be about the South and race, like it or not, even if only by passively feeding into the argument that the flag is only about family pride, good ol’ boys and good ol’ times.

Does that mean the show should have been pulled off the air? I am a white man from the North: there may be no opinion on the Confederate flag less relevant than mine. But as someone who believes that pop-culture history is important history all the same, I agree with the Washington Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg, who argued for reading and watching Gone with the Wind despite and because of its race problems, as “a valuable document of the way the Lost Cause curdled into a regional religion.” The Dukes of Hazzard–like any TV in our past–is part of us, whether we watch it or not.

But you’re also not a killjoy if you watch it, get a kick out of it–and yet are weirded out by the awesome stunt car flying the flag of slavery. The Duke boys, like Waylon told us, wouldn’t change if they could. But the times, they change anyway.

LIFE Watches TV: Classic Photos of People and Their Television Sets

Radio Corporation of America (RCA) executives watch a brand new invention called television, their New York offices before introducing the product to the public, 1939.
Radio Corporation of America (RCA) executives watch a brand new invention called television, their New York offices before introducing the product to the public, 1939.Carl Mydans—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Writer Russell Finch enjoys a smoke, a bath and a TV show in 1948
Writer Russell Finch enjoys a smoke, a bath and a TV show in 1948George Skadding—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Men gather to watch TV through a store window in Pennsylvania in 1948.
Men gather to watch TV through a store window in Pennsylvania in 1948.Ralph Morse—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
A boy watches TV in an appliance store window in 1948.
A boy watches TV in an appliance store window in 1948.Ralph Morse—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Sisters at St. Vincent's Hospital in Erie, Penn., watch a program on a new local TV station, 1949.
Sisters at St. Vincent's Hospital in Erie, Penn., watch a program on a new local TV station, 1949.Ralph Morse—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Watching a Western on TV in 1950.
Watching a Western on TV in 1950.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
A group of swimmers at an indoor pool watch the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Jacob Malik, filibustering in the UN Security Council in 1950.
A group of swimmers at an indoor pool watch the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Jacob Malik, filibustering in the UN Security Council in 1950.George Skadding—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Grade school kids in Minneapolis watch a video "classroom lesson" on TV while the city's public schools are on strike in 1951.
Grade school kids in Minneapolis watch a video "classroom lesson" on TV while the city's public schools are on strike in 1951.Francis Miller—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
A rapt audience in a Chicago bar watches the 1952 World Series between the Dodgers and Yankees. (The Yankees won.)
A rapt audience in a Chicago bar watches the 1952 World Series between the Dodgers and Yankees. (The Yankees won.)Francis Miller—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Six-year-old girls use a "Winky Dink" drawing kit on their home TV screen as they watch the kids' program, 1953. The show, which aired for four years in the 1950s, has been cited as "the first interactive TV show," especially in light of its "magic drawing screen" — a piece of plastic that stuck to the TV screen, and on which kids (and, no doubt, some adults) would trace the action on the screen.
Six-year-old girls use a "Winky Dink" drawing kit on their home TV screen as they watch the kids' program, 1953. The show, which aired for four years in the 1950s, has been cited as "the first interactive TV show," especially in light of its "magic drawing screen" — a piece of plastic that stuck to the TV screen, and on which kids (and, no doubt, some adults) would trace the action on the screen.Walter Sanders—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
A performing chimpanzee named Zippy watches TV in 1955.
A performing chimpanzee named Zippy watches TV in 1955.Michael Rougier—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
An adopted Korean war orphan, Kang Koo Ri, watches television in his new home in Los Angeles in 1956.
An adopted Korean war orphan, Kang Koo Ri, watches television in his new home in Los Angeles in 1956.Allan Grant—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Milwaukee fans watch the 1957 World Series, when their Braves beat the Yankees in seven, behind three complete-game victories by the gutsy Lew Burdette.
Milwaukee fans watch the 1957 World Series, when their Braves beat the Yankees in seven, behind three complete-game victories by the gutsy Lew Burdette.Francis Miller—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
A railroad worker's family watches TV in a trailer at a camp for Southern Pacific employees in Utah in 1957.
A railroad worker's family watches TV in a trailer at a camp for Southern Pacific employees in Utah in 1957.Frank Scherschel—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
An awe-struck baseball fan is seized with utter delight as he watches the Braves win their first and only World Series while based in Milwaukee in 1957.
An awe-struck baseball fan is seized with utter delight as he watches the Braves win their first and only World Series while based in Milwaukee in 1957.Francis Miller—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
A traveling businessman watches TV in a hotel room in 1958.
A traveling businessman watches TV in a hotel room in 1958.Nat Farbman—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Tenant farmer Thomas B. Knox and his family watch Ed Sullivan and ventriloquist Rickie Layne on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1958.
Tenant farmer Thomas B. Knox and his family watch Ed Sullivan and ventriloquist Rickie Layne on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1958.Ed Clark—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Picketers watch TV in a tent outside the gates of a U.S. Steel plant in Gary, Indiana, during a strike in 1959.
Picketing workers watch TV in a tent outside the gates of a U.S. Steel plant in Gary, Indiana, during a strike in 1959.Francis Miller—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, watch the 1960 GOP convention in Chicago from their hotel suite.
Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, watch the 1960 GOP convention in Chicago from their hotel suite.Hank Walker—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
The Kim Sisters — a Korean-born singing trio who had some success in the U.S. in the 1960s — watch television in Chicago in 1960.
The Kim Sisters — a Korean-born singing trio who had some success in the U.S. in the 1960s — watch television in Chicago in 1960.Robert W. Kelley—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
LBJ watches TV during the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.
Eventual VP candidate Lyndon Johnson watches TV during the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.Thomas D. McAvoy—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
A "Three-Eyed TV Monster" created by Ulises Sanabria which permits simultaneous two- and three-screen viewing, 1961.
A "Three-Eyed TV Monster" created by Ulises Sanabria which permits simultaneous two- and three-screen viewing, 1961.Francis Miller—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Astronaut Scott Carpenter's wife, Rene, and son, Marc, watch his 1962 orbital flight on TV.
Astronaut Scott Carpenter's wife, Rene, and son, Marc, watch his 1962 orbital flight on TV. Carpenter's was NASA's second manned orbital flight, after John Glenn's, and lasted nearly five hours.Ralph Morse—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Die-hard New York Giants fans watch the 1962 NFL championship game against the Packers outside a Connecticut motel, beyond the range of the NYC-area TV blackout, December 1962. Green Bay won, 16-7.
Die-hard New York Giants fans watch the 1962 NFL championship game against the Packers outside a Connecticut motel, beyond the range of the NYC-area TV blackout, December 1962. Green Bay won, 16-7.John Loengard—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
A crowd watches John F. Kennedy address the nation during the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962.
A crowd watches John F. Kennedy address the nation during the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962.Ralph Crane—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Frank Sinatra watches his son, Frank Jr., 21, emcee a TV show, 1964.
Frank Sinatra watches his son, Frank Jr., 21, emcee a TV show, 1964. John Dominis—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Different CATV (Community Antenna Television) stations available to subscribers in Elmira, New York, in 1966.
Different CATV (Community Antenna Television) stations available to subscribers in Elmira, New York, in 1966.Arthur Schatz —The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Actress Diahann Carroll and journalist David Frost watch themselves on separate talk shows. Carroll and Frost were engaged for a while, but never married.
Actress Diahann Carroll and journalist David Frost watch themselves on separate talk shows. Carroll and Frost were engaged for a while, but never married.Bill Ray—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

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