Rodger Brown – Southern Changes

Pax Coca-Cola

Rodger Brown — Tue, 01 Dec 1992 05:00:04 +0000

Pax Coca-Cola

By Rodger Brown

Vol. 14, No. 4, 1992, pp. 21-26

I grew up on Coke, so when they built the World of Coca-Cola in 1990, I knew that sooner or later I had to pay a visit. It was not something I wanted to do, but I felt compelled. The gallons of Coke I had drunk during my life at the movies, at McDonald’s, and during Thanksgiving dinners, had somehow magnetized me. I was drawn to the place. At the same time that I felt attracted to the World of Coca-Cola, I was also repulsed. Through the 1980s I had associated Coke with apartheid in South Africa, thanks to a very visible boycott campaign. And Coke’s global ubiquity represented, to me, a kind of cultural denaturing, where the once-profound concepts of life, refreshment, joy and reality were rendered into a carbonated solution and sold by the bottle. Recently, with a notebook in one hand and my ambivalence in the other, I made my pilgrimage.

The World of Coca-Cola is located in a $15 million Lego-postmodern funhouse on Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. near Underground in downtown Atlanta. It is described in a brochure as a “tribute” to a “unique product and the consumers who have made it the world’s favorite soft drink.” But there are more facets to Cokeworld than its function as a shrine. It is part company museum, corporate theme park, and Willy Wonka dream factory: where Wonka’s place has rivers that run chocolate and gum that tastes like a whole meal, Cokeworld has geysers that flow with free soda and a version of history that equates the success of Coke with the triumph of democracy.

Also like Willy Wonka’s fantastic chocolate factory, Cokeworld is full of hi-tech rube goldbergs.The first one is the Lasergate, the turnstile on the ground floor. When I went to Cokeworld, I bought a ticket for $2.50 at the front desk. I was directed to the elevator, but first had to pass through the Lasergate. A blinking red message on the Lasergate instructed me to lay my ticket under the laser scanner. I heard a click and went on through the turnstile.

But it was an illusion. I was waiting for the elevator to take me to the third floor, where my adventure was to

Page 22

begin, when three older women approached the Lasergate and stood puzzled, trying to read the fast-blinking message. When it looked as though they couldn’t decipher it, a red-sweatered monitor told them to just go on through. The Lasergate was not locked. The whole procedure was unneccessary. The ticket, the laser scanner, and the turnstile are all parts of a ritual of privileged entry, a gesture that we have crossed the threshold from the everyday world to a sacred one.

The sacred nature of Cokeworld is declared by a gargantuan Coke bottle cut-out painted by Georgia folk artist the Rev. Howard Finster, Man of Visions, which hangs by the Lasergate. Rev. Finster instructs us in his scrawled message across the bottom, speaking of salvation but implying the World of Coca-Cola: “….Wake up your soul and be made whole. Go right in Gods great fold. Everything Free, not bought or sold. You need no money the streets are gold, as I get told.”

In his work, Finster often links cold Coca-Cola with Heaven and defines Hell as a place where there “ain’t no cold Coke.” But in his last phrase “as I get told” he reveals that our belief in the perfect Cokeworld is based on faith and the syrupy rhetorical magic of advertising; and as we pass the Lasergate and ride the elevator to the top, we are encouraged to set aside skepticism and for an hour accept Cokeworld’s bogus abolition of private property (“Everything Free, not bought or sold.”

In the 1950s, Robert Woodruff, the late philanthropist and head of the Coca-Cola Company, called Coke the “essence” of capitalism. He was referring to the fact that everyone involved with the product, from the bottlers to the vendors, made easy profits. But there is another sense in which Coke is the essence, or the syrup concentrate, of capitalism, and that is in its advertising. Throughout its corporate history, Coke advertising has been in the avant-garde of advertising strategies in order to stimulate greater levels of consumption. This history of spiritual and alchemical conjuration is on display at The World of Coca-Cola.

Page 23

The first encounter at the top of the World of Coca-Cola is with The Bottling Fantasy, a clanking, hissing, idealized bottling machine. On the Bottling Fantasy, bottles with labels from around the world travel in an unstoppable loop, endlessly being filled and emptied and filled again. The effect intended is mythical. Here the production of the elixir is continuous, unstoppable, eternal and global. The Bottling Fantasy is also a defining statement, a metaphor, revealing that Cokeworld is itself actually a gigantic simulated bottling plant: the lore and legend of Coca-Cola equals the syrup and soda water—and we, the visitors, are the bottles.

Once past the Bottling Fantasy, I begin to play my role as bottle. I am filled with Cokeworld’s brew of nostalgic advertising and sanitized, selective corporate history. While I am being glutted with the overwhelming load of familiar Coke images, I realize a curious shift has taken place. All this stuff, this detritus from ad campaigns of the past, was once presented free of charge to entice me, us, others, to drink Coke. But now I pay money to see it. The ads and promotional items have become magical entertainment, and for the admission price I can experience a comfortable feeling of nostalgic displacement; I can enter into the untroubled, idyllic dreamscape of Cokeworld, where all the cheeks are ruddy, every day is a day off, and every Coke a mini-vacation.

Even in the carefully stitched fabric of Coke’s selective history, if I look closely, I can spot the seams, the patched-over stains. I can’t blame the conjurers of Cokeworld for presenting a selective version of the origin and evolution of Coke through these past 100-plus years since that first 1886 batch was brewed there in Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta. After all, you can’t expect to parade thousands of school children past displays of boiling coca leaves. While the one-time cocaine content of Coca-Cola is the company’s most notorious non-secret, there is no display in Cokeworld about it. But you can’t miss the references to the invigorating effects of “coke” when looking at the early promotional materials. Tucked in the middle of one display case is the very first ad for Coca-Cola which appeared in the Atlanta Journal in May 1886. It reads “The New and Popular Soda Fountain Drink, containing the properties of the wonderful Coca plant and the famous Cola nuts.”

I also see an 1898 copy of the promotional Coca-Cola News which featured a Poet Laureate’s Corner, where bottlers penned paeans to Coke syrup. One submission, “Specially written from the heart—by one who KNOWS that Coca-Cola is all, and MORE than is claimed for it,” is rife with the language of dope and addiction:

Happy Happy those who find
One that body tones and mind.
Stronger! stronger! grow they all
Who for Coca-Cola call.
Brighter! brighter! thinkers think
When they Coca-Cola drink.

Even with the coca derivative long-since replaced by increased caffeine content, I can’t help but think of Coca-Cola as a gigantic drug cartel.

By the time the coca derivatives were removed around the turn of the century, the Coca-Cola logo decorated 2.5 million square feet of American building facades, and 10,000 in Cuba and Canada, according to the Coca-Cola company. They were spending half a million dollars on advertising. Those sums quickly increased, and it was up to caffeine and such chubby, cherubic sex symbols of the era as Hilda Clark to take over the stimulant duties of the coca dope.

Just as I can’t really blame Coke for not wanting to trumpet the original cocaine content, I also can’t blame them for downplaying the fact that for its first 15 years or so, the drink was marketed as a “remarkable therapeutic agent,” a cure for headaches, melancholy, insomnia and hysteria. The narrative of Coke’s history presented in Cokeworld mentions that Coca-Cola was just one of a number of patent medicines brewed by “Doctor” Pemberton, such as Botanic Blood Balm and Triplex Liver Pills, but the beverage’s scruffy relations are quickly laughed aside. To me, however, this is an important point for understanding how Coke and Coke’s advertising continues to operate today.

The heritage of Coca-Cola (which was originally green) as a patent medicine places it firmly in the tradition of the Medicine Show, where some liquid concoction, some snake oil, some dope is sold to the public with the promise that along with its consumption will come all sorts of desired benefits. Originally, Coca-Cola promised relief for head-

Page 24

ache and fatigue. Today the product promises, along with life and joy, world peace. Coke itself is used as advertisement for a certain social and cultural attitude, a sort of liberal pluralism and internationalism based not on a shared mother tongue, class consciousness, or code of human rights, but a common taste for the same brand of pop, uniting us all in a vast international cargo cult: The World of Coca-Cola!
All this becomes clear to me as I notice that Coke ads and Coke history fizz with more than entertainment value. They are the dominant motifs in Cokeworld’s presentation of American, and international, social history.

Once I leave the first gallery, guided by the helpful and ebullient red-sweatered monitors, I experience yet another of Cokeworld’s ironic confessions of intent. There on the atrium bridge, I can, as the tour booklet instructs, “step inside a giant Coca-Cola can,” touch the video screen and activate a videodisc that plays selected snippets of America’s past. These snippets summarize the social history of a period, “interwoven with the history of Coca-Cola and The Coca-Cola Company.”

So grandiose is Coke’s self-image that the company does not settle for celebrating its success with mere numbers. There are, of course, plenty of novelty stats: 700,000 Coke vending machines in Japan! All the bottles ever made stacked side by side on a fourlane would wrap around the earth 81 times! But Coke’s boldest boast is its victory as a cultural icon that transcends history, equalizes class distinctions, vaporizes national boundaries, and unites all time, space, and life in a multidimensional Pax Coca-Cola.

Cokeworld’s “History in a Can” makes of politics a dance of trends, a smooth, sweet evolution of changing clothing styles and a progressive perfection of society toward the ideal Soda Fountain on the Hill. Using clever trivia, quick cuts of archival film footage and diverse, effective soundtrack, the video nuggets can history, presenting profound moments in history and equate them with developments in the alternate ever-happy unreality of Cokeworld. The effect is insidious: historical information is simplified, flattened and neutralized. As I gulp down these “Logo”-centric lessons, fascinated with the touch-screen videodisc technology, I occupy a stereotypical postmodern landscape of desire, where issues of power are suppressed, and entertainment is celebrated.

In “The New Woman,” for example, I learn that the amount of material used to make a woman’s outfit shrank from 19 1/4 yards to seven yards in 15 years, that in the 1920s women were filling new jobs, and that Coca-Cola developed the six-pack that was just perfect for those new home ice-boxes.

In “Hard Times” I’m told that in the 1930s millions were unemployed, movies became popular, and Coca-Cola advertising reflected that ol’ irrepressible human spirit

In “Festival of Dreams” I learn that immigrants by the millions came to America, and their dreams helped “weave that deeply textured tapestry we call the American expe-

Page 25

rience.” I also learn that, “These were days when the Coca-Cola company was having its own share of dreams come true…” Among those Cokedreams-come-true was the setting up of bottling plants in Nicaragua. (The U.S. Marines, in this version, don’t exist.)
And finally, in canned history lesson called “The Stopwatch and The Factory,” I hear about Henry Ford, Frederick Taylor, the assembly line, “the tyranny of the clock,” and the improved working conditions brought about by unexplained and long-finished “labor struggles.” But most important, this was when the trademark hobbleskirt bottle was introduced. The bottle is described with a phrase that is tossed off by the narrator, but which captures the essential contradictory dream logic of Cokeworld’s sacral profanity: “It was mass produced uniqueness.” While Coca-Cola’s own marketing efforts did much to spread Coke throughout the world, it was World War II that catapulted Coke into a position of global prominence, and made it a standard of democracy equal to, if not greater than, the Stars and Stripes. During the war, Robert Woodruff, the legendary head of Coke during the company’s global march, quickly found a way to get unlimited supplies of tightly rationed sugar by making Coca-Cola for the GI’s. According to a series of articles in The New Yorker in February and March of 1959, Woodruff convinced the U.S. military and the soldiers themselves that Coca-Cola was a symbol of all the sunny Saturday afternoons and dates at the soda fountain that they were fighting for. To the soldiers and the world, Coca-Cola soon became not just a symbol of the essence of American privilege and leisure, but also the magic elixir without which that leisure didn’t even exist.

The writer of The New Yorker articles, E.J. Kahn, reported that Woodruff persuaded the government that Coca-Cola bottling plants were a necessary part of an army’s hardware.

Woodruff was so successful that when General Eisenhower landed on North Africa, he ordered eight bottling plants shipped in to provide Cokes for his desert armies. And at the time of Japan’s surrender, six bottling plants were included with the first wave of American occupational troops. Before WW II there were five bottling plants overseas. By the end of the war, there were 64! And most of them were shipped there at government expense. This wartime trend gave Coke an almost unbeatable edge over any competition. Coke was such a part of the war effort that when the fighting was over, 30,000 empty coke bottles were recovered from the lagoon of one pacific island alone.

A few short years after V-E Day, European communists were decrying “Coca-Colonialism.” Critics described the drink as “halfway between the sweetish taste of coconut and the taste of a damp rag for cleaning floors.” Another equated it to “sucking the leg of a recently massaged athlete.” French wine makers forced passage of an anti-soda pop law to prevent Coke’s widespread distribution. This action caused one Georgia representative to announce that he and friends were swearing off French dressing.

The European opponents of Coca-Cola stood no chance. Coke won. And the Black Gold from the South continues to flow, an unstoppable gusher: if the amount of Coke already drunk were to flow from Old Faithful at that geyser’s current rate, it would spew for 1,577 years.

One trace of Coke’s military legacy on display at the World of Coca-Cola is a small but enormously telling mention that at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, Coke products provided at the event were delivered on a refurbished military landing craft.

The international popularity of Coca-Cola is perhaps the most significant justifying factor for the hybrid museum/amusement park/reeducation camp that is Cokeworld. This international character is trumpeted in the movie “Every Day of Your Life,” a 13-minute hallucination in which “the world comes into focus,” where the Wonderland through which we have just wandered is summarized and repeated at high bone-buzzing volume. In the movie, one of the current chief Cokeheads, Don

Page 26

Keough, appears on screen with all the full-face High-Definition avuncular terror of something produced in Oz.
Keough begins by repeating Rev. Finster’s original false promise that Heaven/Cokeworld transcends the ugly reality of money, property, and power: “You know, in the final analysis, Coca-Cola doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to you, to anyone and everyone who has ever shared a moment with a Coke.” Keough then spins out more of the illusory rhetoric about the extended family of pop that has been the theme throughout Cokeworld. “Coca-Cola is so natural to the different cultures and lifestyles in nearly 170 countries around the world. Everyday more than a million people earn their livelihood from Coca-Cola …. the largest production and distribution network in the world.”

During the film, we take a trip around Cokeworld on the back of a Coke delivery truck. We pass Arabs on camels, Kenyans in the highlands, Thai in Bangkok and Japanese at faux-rock concerts, all with a ready wave for the happy Coke delivery men. The music is equally as diverse as the cast of characters, ranging from opera, to rock, soft pop, jazz and generic-ethnic. Coke’s abduction of diversity 20 years ago (remember “I’d like to buy the world a Coke”?) has since inspired many other ad campaigns (most recently the United Colors of Benetton), but no other product, except, perhaps, Michael Jackson, can yet claim real success equal to Coke’s.

In “Every Day of Your Life,” the religious significance of Coke as a sort of quintessential primordial ooze is highlighted in a thunderous, cacophonous segment where the image on screen show workers silk-screening the words “Coca-Cola” onto crates, while a dramatic rhythmic drone pounds through the StereoSurround system with a chorus chanting “Life!” It is as though we are witnessing creation itself in the birth of the Logo(s).

This gesture of appropriating Life itself is Coke’s ultimate act of hubris. Over the past few decades Coke copywriters have successfully usyruped the language of spirituality, carefully exploiting all the nuances of the metaphor of “thirst,” and claiming for Coke all that some claim for religion: the quenching source of joy, rebirth, happiness, satisfaction, and life. The language of Coke’s advertising resonates with evangelical imagery and even includes an esoteric mystery sect of those who know the magic formula. “Only one real Coke flavor,” declares the Rev. Finster.

It is at the end of my tour through the World of Coca-Cola that the image of us visitors as bottles in a bottling plant is made literal. As the movie “Every Day of Your Life” ends, Mr. Keough invites us to have a Coke, on him. I leave the theater and enter Club Coca-Cola, where I’m offered the entire variety of Coke products, as much as I can stomach. Here is a rare treat: in the “Tastes of the World” I can sample soft drinks “not available in the U.S.” In Club Coca-Cola, the cultural diversity of the world is once again transmuted into a simple diversity of flavors. School kids dash from spigot to spigot shouting, “Come here and taste Thailand! Did you try Japan?”

But it’s not over yet. I go down from Club Coca-Cola, wiping my chin and marvelling over some of the supersweet brews drunk overseas, into the Trademart. This is the last stop in the grand bottling fantasy: here I have the Coca-Cola logo applied to me on a cap, sweatshirt or T-shirt

Once again, the reversal that led me to pay to see old Coke advertisements and to be bottled with Coke’s messages, now would have me paying money for copies of the logo, so that true to the song that is echoing in my head as I leave Cokeworld (rather, exit from one Coke dimension into another-I can never leave the world of Coca-Cola), that refreshing beverage and its sanctifying imprint can accompany me everywhere, every day of my life.

Rodger Brown is author of Party Out of Bounds: The B-52s, R.E.M. and the Kids Who Rocked Athens, Ga.

Dogpatch, USA: The Road to Hokum

Rodger Brown — Wed, 01 Sep 1993 04:00:05 +0000

Dogpatch, USA: The Road to Hokum

By Rodger Brown

Vol. 15, No. 3, 1993, pp. 18-26

In May of 1968 cartoonist Al Capp motored into the Ozarks of north Arkansas smoking custom-rolled cigarettes, wearing dark glasses and a tailored English suit, and glibly dissembling for a pack of reporters. Capp’s trip to the Ozarks was national news. Dogpatch USA, the first theme park based on his wildly successful comic strip Li’l Abner, was finally open for the tourist trade. The Lt. Governor was there. Miss Arkansas was there. With the snip of a ribbon and a slug of Kickapoo Joy Juice, Al Capp declared Dogpatch finally “real,” and began welcoming the first of an expected torrent of tourists.

The boom was even bigger than anticipated. “Tourists here in Droves; ‘No Vacancy’ signs go up,” the Harrison Daily Times declared. Local motel owners held a “council of war” to find a way to accommodate the tourists who were flocking into the rugged landscape of The Dogpatch Zone at a rate of five thousand a day, coming to see blacksmiths, beekeepers, shinglemakers, and the surreal hillbillies of Al Capp’s world famous comic strip come to life. What most of the visitors didn’t fully realize, however, was that they were participating in a moment rich with a sort of postmodern poetics which has since become commonplace: The Arkansas syndicate that built Dogpatch USA was peddling colonial stereotypes as family entertainment, and at the core of the park’s attraction was a complex melody conjured by the dueling banjos of simulation and authenticity.

Today, Dogpatch USA’s place in American cultural history has been forgotten. A year or two ago I heard there was a theme park based on the Li’l Abner comic strip where area residents dress up like Capp’s hillbilly burlesques. With an Arkansan now sitting in the White House and hillbilly motifs being revived in editorial cartoons, I began to wonder why the park hadn’t gotten more attention than the few dismissive mentions in Ozark guidebooks. I made some calls, got directions, and at the opening of tourist season this summer I went to visit.

“Nearly everything is going wrong,” said Shirley Cooper, Dogpatch USA’s general manager. Shirley is from the nearby town of Deer. She used to sell her quilts at Dogpatch. Then park employees began to leave and Shirley was asked to fill in and help with an inventory control system. Then she was made director of accounting. Then director of personnel. Now, after a financial crisis and a crippling exodus by long-time staff, Shirley runs the place.

It was mid-May. Dogpatch was opening two weeks late, and the delay had sparked pessimistic scuttlebutt up and down Arkansas’ Scenic Highway 7, along which Dogpatch is located. From 140, north to 76 Country Boulevard in Branson, and across the Ozark Mountain Country from Booger Hollow Trading Post to the seven-story statue of

Page 19

Christ at Eureka Springs, the rumors had been rampant in the tourism industry that finally, after all these years, Dogpatch USA is roadkill.

“I don’t know why, but every year there’s rumors that the park’s not going to open,” she said.”They say it’s gone bankrupt or Dolly Parton bought it, or Johnny Cash bought it. But none of it’s true. And this year, everyone was sure this was it because we’re behind schedule. But we’re still here.”

Dogpatch USA is a classic American roadside attraction. It’s a basket of cornpone and hillbilly hokum in a beautiful Ozark mountain setting. Nearby is a waterfall, limestone caverns, and a spring that flows clear and steadily into a creek that has powered a gristmill for more than 150 years. There are rides and gift shops, and at the heart of the park is a trout farm where visitors can catch and cook rainbow trout, “the gamest of all inland fish.” The decor is bumpkin kitsch. The faux-illiterate signs along Dogpatch’s macadam footpaths read like a Po’ Folks menu: “Onbelievablee delishus Fish Vittles Kooked fo’ Sail.”

Dogpatch opened in 1968, but its history, in a generous sense, begins about a hundred years earlier. The daisy chain of alluded identities springs from the work of post-Civil War local color writers, weaves through the tumultuous and calamitous periods of industrialization and colonization of the Appalachians, the displacement of mountain populations to the cities, and cataracts up over the turn of the century when, in 1900, the word “hillbilly” first appeared in print, toting on its wiry back a croker sack full of iconography—squirrel rifles, corn cob pipes, floppy felt hats, feuds, a degraded language, and depraved life—stock sufficient to justify the plunder. Out of this crashing surf where industry and the marketplace met the mountains, Li’l Abner was born.

Capp’s creations linked him permanently to the history of the Southern mountains, even though his only experience in the South before creating his cartoon was limited to a hitchhiking trip to Memphis when he was fifteen. Born in New Haven, Connecticut to Latvian parents, Capp had lived his entire life in Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania. Instead of being grounded in experience or research, Capp’s hillbillies came from the public cultural archive. Li’l Abner was inspired, Capp’s wife Catherine once said, by a hillbilly band they saw in Manhattan.

Li’l Abner was the first comic strip to star mountaineers as main characters, but Capp’s hillbilly compote was certainly not unique. His versions of hillbillies were consolidated forms drawn from a widespread tradition of mountaineer caricatures: there’s the voluptuous rag-clad ‘tater sack sexkitten; the grizzled corn-cob pipe smoking visionary crone matriarch; the lay-about ineffectual pappy; and the clodhopping oblivious proto-Jethro Li’l Abner, the all-American country boy—part Alvin York and Abe Lincoln, a little Sambo in whiteface, and Paul Bunyan with a drawl.

Li’l Abner first appeared in 1934, two years after the publication of Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, and within a few years the cartoon was a contender with Dick Tracy, Blondie and Little Orphan Annie, as America’s number one comic strip. In the mid-1940s, the United Feature Syndicate reckoned that Capp had 27 million readers. The U.S. population at the time was only about 140 million. By the late 1940s, Capp was something of a hero to intellectuals and artists. Capp’s writing had been compared to Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Dickens, Dostoevski and Rabelais, and his artwork was compared to Hogarth and Daumier. John Steinbeck said Al Capp deserved the Nobel Prize for literature. In 1951, Marshall McLuhan

Page 20

wrote in The Mechanical Bride that “[Capp’s] keen eye for political, commercial, and social humbug is the result of a critical intelligence which is notably lacking at the more respected levels of writing . . . . The criticism which is embedded in his highly parabolic entertainment therefore, has a complexity which is the mark of vision [Cited in Asa Berger, Lil Abner: A Study in American Satire. Twayne Publishers, Inc.; New York. p. 167.].

Al Capp definitely had a vision, but it was a twisted one. “All comedy,” Capp once said, “is based on man’s delight in man’s inhumanity to man. I know that is so, because I have made forty million people laugh more or less every day for sixteen years, and this has been the basis of all the comedy I have created. I think it is the basis of all comedy.”

For the first decade and a half of Li’l Abner’s existence, Capp was rarely aggressively political; instead, his satire was of the order of high-powered social spoofing. Capp, who grew up poor, set up a productive formula for a seemingly endless series of quasi-class comedies by pitting his Dogpatchers, whom he called his “family of innocents,” against the businesspeople, gangsters and high society bourgeoisie of urban, capitalist America. Politicians were lampooned through blowhards like Senator Jack S. Phogbound (“Good old Jack S.”), and businessmen were mocked through characters like the piggish J. Roaringham Fatback, whose achievements were listed in Who’s Who in American Pork. Capp was antagonistic to cityfolk, but Capp’s agrarian rustics fared no better. Capp’s characters occasionally expressed utopian longings for happiness and peace, but, ultimately, their desires went unfulfilled, nobody was redeemed. Capp’s nihilism, his pessimistic realpolitik, never provided any answers. His world had no stable center; both oppressors and the victims of oppression were equally degraded.

In addition to his more pointed social satire, Capp

Page 21

was also a ribald, lascivious, one-man carnival society. Puns and sexual allusions showed up consistently in the strip. Li’l Abner was full of jugs and shithouses and boners and melons, enough phallic shadows and labial knotholes to earn him a condemning eight pages in the report from a 1951 New York State Joint Legislative committee investigating the comics, and an expose in Confidential magazine: “Al Capp Exposed: The Secret Sex life of Li’l Abner.”

Capp’s social satire through the 1940s and early 1950s was considered a bracing corrective to the bourgeois domesticism and the Bam-Zowie! action strips that dominated the comic pages. In the late 1940s, Capp was branded a radical after he introduced shmoos, little blobular creatures that willingly, gleefully, sacrificed themselves for the good of humanity, solving all the problems of want and need which, in Capp’s view, are the root causes of war and social injustice. The shmoos, weirdly, helped solidify Capp’s public image as a liberal: “[A]ll the McCarthyites were down on me,” Capp explained to The New Yorker, in 1963. “Shmoos were Socialistic, they said. Shmoos were a blatant and treacherous attack on capitalism.”

Capp’s image as a liberal survived until the 1960s, even though he succumbed to the pressure of McCarthyite conformity, killed off the shmoos and married off Li’l Abner to Daisy Mae. Capp revived the shmoos in 1963, but in his comments to the New Yorker, he revealed the lack of purposeful commitment in his once-iconoclastic strip: “McCarthy was coming to power when I created shmoos, and those were inconceivably terrible times. They got worse and worse, until eventually the only satire possible and permissible in this democracy of ours was broad, weak domestic comedy. That’s why I married off Li’l Abner and began to concentrate on him again. I was absolutely sure that to keep on with political satire-with things like shmoos-would be to commit suicide, and I asked myself, seriously, ‘Al, what use would you be dead?’ I really believe that it’s the duty of the satirist to stay alive—to duck—until it’s safe to come out and possible to be useful again. Society’s finally free for satire now, and that’s one reason I brought back shmoos. At present, shmoos can reasonably occur. [“The Shmoo’s Return,” The New Yorker. October 26, 1963.]

In the 1960s, as he said, Capp returned to pointed satire. By that time, however, the world was a different place and instead of using the revived shmoos to satirize American affluence, he used them to criticize what he called “this insane business of foreign aid we’re in—this nonsense of give, give, give, with no strings attached.”

THE CLOSEST THING to an official history of Dogpatch USA is a gigantic scrapbook the size of an interstate exit sign which Shirley Cooper hauled out from behind some overstuffed file cabinets. The scrapbook’s brown leatherette cover was embossed with small gold letters “DOGPATCH USA.” The huge codex swelled with newspaper articles, brochures and telegrams—the public history of the park—meticulously collected, clipped and pasted into the book by the founders of Dogpatch from the first public announcement of their intentions in 1967.

“‘Dogpatch USA’ Slated for Marble Falls Area,” the headline read in the Harrison Daily Times on January 3, 1967. Al Capp ‘Excited.'” “Dogpatch Leads Way for Big Boost To Prosperity of Harrison Region.” The clippings were faded and yellowed relics of a long-dead enthusiasm. Outside Shirley Cooper’s office, the Dogpatch of 1993 was a ragged remnant of its original state: long gone are the surrey rides, the live bear acts, the celebrity visits. But the story told by the scrapbook was of another world, one where Nehru jackets were the edge, the U.S. was rushing troops to South Vietnam, Newton County was the poorest county in Arkansas, the second poorest in the nation, and Li’l Abner Yokum was coming to the rescue.

The idea to build a theme park based on the “Li’l Abner” cartoon came from a couple of Harrison businessmen. One, Jim Schermerhorn, owned a burglar alarm company and was a fanatical spelunker. The other, O.J. Snow, was a real estate appraiser, salesman and developer who had flown B-17 bombers as a pilot with the 91st Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force during World War

Page 22

II, who, since the war, had built nearly 300 homes and businesses. The men’s inspiration to build a tourist attraction in the Ozarks did not just pop into their heads uninvited. They had watched as the Corps of Engineers in the late 1950s dammed the wild White River forming Table Rock Lake just across the state line in southern Missouri. They had seen the crowds attracted to the nearby outdoor drama Shepherd of the Hills, based on Harold Bell Wright’s turn-of-the-century inspirational novel. They’d seen the increasing numbers of fishermen and their families driving into the country. And since 1960, they’d watched a woman named Mary Herschend and her sons, Jack and Peter, turn some clapboard storefronts and a limestone sinkhole called Marvel Cave into a successful tourist attraction: a simulacrum of a nineteenth century mining town called Silver Dollar City.

Snow became the first president of Recreation Enterprises. The group included men involved in a wide range of businesses: asphalt, construction, residential development, timber, cattle and banking. Most of the investors had families that went back at least one generation in Harrison. A few others were from Oklahoma or Kansas, but had lived for many years in the area.

When Snow”s group petitioned Capp in 1966 for permission to use his comic as the park’s theme, they got lucky. Capp was in the mood to sell. Just the year before, after being asked for years by beverage makers to let them use the name Kickapoo Joy Juice, Capp had finally cut a deal with the National NuGrape Co. of Atlanta. (A couple years earlier, Pepsi had come out with its hillbilly soft drink, Mountain Dew.) After licensing Kickapoo Joy Juice, Capp then accepted Snow’s proposal, again after years of resisting offers by other theme park developers.

Although Dogpatch was originally located in Kentucky, Capp was willing to dissemble for a percentage of the gross. The Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock declared after the park’s announcement: “Ozarks of Arkansas Fit Al Capp’s Dogpatch Image.” The writer said, “Capp has never told the exact location of Dogpatch, the comic strip hillbilly community that is just a notch below a garbage heap and which could be in any backwoods mountain region. But he told newsmen during the weekend that he had once traveled through the Ozarks and this was ‘just about the section that I imagined.'”

Not everybody was as delighted as Snow and his partners with Al Capp’s imagined region. Arkansas had long suffered under the pens of yankee scribes, and a theme park populated by make-believe barefoot hillbilly morons was not entirely welcome. The day after Snow made his announcement, two officials with Arkansas’ Publicity and Parks Commission protested that Dogpatch USA would undermine the image of the state. They said the state would gain more from a project more like the Ozark Folk Center which had then just recently received a million dollar federal grant. The two officials said they thought a display of “indigenous folkways and crafts” might better serve to increase long-term tourist interest and create a more favorable image to attract investment.

The news of Dogpatch USA also inspired an angry and insightful response from a Gazette reader in Little Rock. “Perhaps this will draw many tourists to the state; but it will create a poor image of the state and especially the pioneer—the so called Arkansas hillbilly. This same hillbilly is our ancestor who built a state out of a wilderness. Mr. Snow’s project will make Arkansas the laughing stock of the nation. Is this the kind of publicity we want?

“It has taken almost 100 years for the state to ‘live down’ the image created by ‘Three Years in Arkansas’ and ‘A Slow Train Through Arkansas;’ then came Bob Burns with Grandpa Snazzy to bring back the bewhiskered, barefoot, tobacco-chewing, ignorant hillbilly. To further clinch the idea, came the Little Rock Central High School episode of 1957. Now, we have a group of business men who wish to keep this image before the public. Why?

“Where did the Arkansas hillbilly originate? In the mind of a ‘back east’ writer who knew even less about the natives of Arkansas than this writer knows about the inhabitants of Mars … These ignorant hillbillies left us the heritage of integrity, independence and pride. Do we want to trade it for a mess of pottage?”

The answer, obviously, was “yes.”

Page 23

Soon after that letter appeared, a Daily Times editorial declared: “The “Li’l Abner comic by Al Capp has been popular over the years, and I think Arkansas would advance its image as a state which can spoof its own foibles by adding a Dogpatch USA.” Another editorial in the Harrison daily declared: “Dogpatch is going to draw people like honey draws bears and these people will have money to spend. Let’s get them to spend it here!” Still another editorial voice in The Fort Smith Southwest American sided with Dogpatch. “…we think the fears probably are groundless … [W] e don’t think there’s much—if any—danger that the state’s image will suffer as a result of that sole undertaking.”

Al Capp did what he could to finesse the controversy. During one visit to the area when Dogpatch was being built he said, “I’m so glad I never saw all you attractive people before I drew you. All I knew about the Ozarks was what I’d seen in movies made by people who’d never seen anything but Hollywood …. The Ozarks, where the girls are so pretty and the men can speak so well! Dogpatch USA seems to combine the old rustic flavor with the best kind of plumbing and windows that let the sun in.”

In The Informer and Newton County Times, published in the county seat of Jasper, a writer said Dogpatch was the best thing to happen to that part of Arkansas. “It will be a shame if this county doesn’t prepare itself for the untold millions of people who will be coming to visit Dogpatch. Many a fortune can and will be made over a span of a few years by serving the visitor to Dogpatch. It is going to be the ‘fun place’ of the South for sure. To coin a hippie phrase, Dogpatch is going to be a ‘happening.'”

Indeed. And what was happening was an effort by monied interests in Harrison and Little Rock to take advantage of the poverty and beauty of the region in a gesture of bold cultural politics, taking a set of nationally known hillbilly stereotypes, building a real fantasy hillbilly comic strip village, then charging admission, thereby contributing significantly to a fate predicted in a letter to the Gazette by a woman from Eureka Springs, and fulfilled in the recent spate of hillbilly editorial cartoons aimed at Bill Clinton. The woman despaired: “Is Arkansas doomed to be a caricature state—a Dogpatch state?”

The boomers of Dogpatch represented their project as harmless tourism, doing nothing but good. But tourism is not so harmless. Tourism isn’t simply entertainment a way to spend idle hours and extra cash. The tourist “attractions” are part of a dynamic of cultural iconography. Tourism offers a means by which people

Page 24

can assess their world and define their own sense of identity. The ways of the tourist are also the ways of the postmodernist; for both, time has accelerated and space has compressed, making nearly all points on the globe and in history accessible, variable, available to mix and match on an itinerary to suit your taste. The unstable and contingent character of reality in the tourist aesthetic was quickly recognized by the people in the area around Dogpatch USA when it was first being built in 1967-68. A vernacular deconstruction was carried out in the pages of the small town newspapers. The local debate was filled with discussion of the issues of simulation and authenticity.

Just before Dogpatch opened, the Harrison Daily Times reported on construction progress and puzzled over the theme park’s weird identity, using a convoluted logic and lay-lit-crit vocabulary: “The layout of the town is a new idea and is completely original. Al Capp has never before drawn the entire town. The stage settings for the musical comedy and motion picture Li’l Abner, were frankly artificial and fragmentary. Hence, Dogpatch USA at Marble Falls, will be a new creation itself, the first Dogpatch to ever exist. Physically, then, the park will originate, not reproduce, Dogpatch.”

Another quintessentially postmodern gesture at Dogpatch was a malicious irony that signified on the historical and economic forces behind not only Dogpatch USA, but the history of both Ozark and Appalachian mountaineers: The first railroad to run in Newton County was the one laid in 1968 at Dogpatch. The county was the poorest in the state, but the track didn’t link it to the rest of the country. Instead, the railroad ran in a circle around the circumference of Dogpatch USA, a fabulistic hillbilly funland. The irony wasn’t lost on the people in the area. The editor of a local paper wrote: Thanks to Dogpatch, Newton County now has a railroad—no train yet, just a railroad. All over the country railroads are diminishing and here in Newton County one is being built for the first time. Can you top that?”

When Dogpatch opened, it featured craftsfolk from the Ozarks displaying and selling their skills and products. It presented these “authentic” people in an “inauthentic” stereotyped context of moonshine, overalls and feudists. For example, they hired W.H. Smith, the head of the Arkansas Beekeepers Association, to play J. Goodbody Sweetpants and run the Honey House on Cornpone Square. And not only was Dogpatch the “authentic” version of the cartoon place, but was also presented at the same time as a version of a real, historic place. The issues were so confusing that in another article, a Dogpatch official said, “the objective of Dogpatch [is] ‘to restore the culture of the days of the past, maintain the culture of today and provide recreation for all age groups without destroying any of the natural beauty of the valley.'” The equating of Dogpatch with genuine mountain culture was also evident in a statement by Capp: “You don’t meet a nicer batch of people than here in the real Dogpatch.” The “real” Dogpatch? In the same breath, Capp added, “Until today I had thought of Dogpatch as sort of a pleasant re-run of an old Bob Burns movie. But now—isn’t it the most fantastic thing you’ve ever seen?” But what were they seeing? The trade magazine Amusement

Page 25

Business

in 1967 had already picked up on the weirdness. “The Marble Falls setting and some of the old buildings at the site already looked remarkably like the comic strip scene.”

Which came first? The Marble Falls setting or the version in the newspaper? And which version makes the other valid? Does Li’l Abner make Marble Falls the “real’ Dogpatch? Or does Marble Falls, because it looks like “the comic strip scene” make Li’l Abner a legitimate version of mountaineer culture? Such manufactured confusion is how stereotypes get perpetuated and used as substitutes for the more actual: it’s the classic pattern for the flim-flam: there’s enough reality to convince someone to accept the genuine fake. This masterful blurring of the lines between the authentic, the replica and the hegemonic lampoon is, to me, Dogpatch’s claim to a place on the National Register. Restored to its original condition, it could easily serve as a living classroom, illustrating lessons for schoolkids in the dynamics of cultural politics and internal colonialism.

Dogpatch USA opened on May 17, 1968. Only a few weeks later, the U.S. Department of Interior’s Board of Geographic Names approved “Dogpatch, Arkansas,” as the name for the community served by the (former) Marble Falls post office. Dogpatch had been put on the map; its reality was official.

The park opened just as Capp, the one-time anti-McCarthyite hero, was embarking on a public speaking campaign that would permanently bury his reputation as a liberal. In 1967 he lambasted Joan Baez via a Li’l Abner character named Joanie Phoanie. From 1968 to 1970, he was a popular campus lecture guest—a fiery and witty, anti-welfare, anti-hippie, pro-war speaker students loved to hate. On the stump he had solutions for everything—On welfare mothers: “Chastity belts.” On the Vietnam war: “I say shoot back.” On Kent State: “The real Kent State martyrs were the kids in uniform.” Capp even praised former Arkansas segregationist governor Orval Faubus and Dogpatch’s first general manager, as being “prematurely right.” In 1970 Capp switched parties from Democrat to Republican and contemplated a challenge to Ted Kennedy for the Senate. Capp’s campus blitzkrieg came to a humiliating end when, in 1971, he was caught up in a scandal when he pleaded guilty to a Wisconsin student’s charge of “attempted adultery.”

Capp went into seclusion. By the mid-1970s, newspapers across the country were dropping Li’l Abner as Capp’s keen satirical vision grew confused and his once-clever voice became merely bilious. Capp, emphysemic and confined to a wheelchair, finally killed the strip in 1977. Capp himself died two years later. By this time, Dogpatch USA had fallen from its glory days when it was

Page 26

run by Faubus and hosted visitors from hit TV shows like Petticoat Junction. By the end of the decade, the park was renting itself out for weddings and hosting such tourist magnets as the regional arm wrestling championship. In 1980, Dogpatch USA went bankrupt.

But today there are indications that the fortunes of Dogpatch are beginning to improve. Forty-five minutes to the north is the throbbing pump of the region’s latest tourist boom, the glittering neon capital of neo-country: Branson, Missouri. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as Silver Dollar City became a popular attraction, more and more country music acts were drawn to Branson. In 1983, Roy Clark put his name on a marquee and Branson’s retro-rockets ignited. Following Clark were Conway Twitty, Roger Miller, Mel Tillis, Ray Stevens, George Jones, Micky Gilley, Jim Stafford, Johnny and June Cash, Andy Williams, Merle Haggard. Branson by the 1990s has become the Hillbilly Las Vegas, a contender for Nashville’s title of Music City USA. The flocking of road-weary stars to Branson prompted Waylon Jennings to say, “This has gotta be country music heaven. Most of the people I thought were dead are up here singing.”

Dogpatch USA, located on the out-of-the-way winding Scenic Highway 7, couldn’t successfully compete with Silver Dollar City and the country music theaters in Branson. Ironically, however, the thriving country music showcases in Branson and Silver Dollar City’s mile-high attendance figures are now contributing to Dogpatch’s survival.

“No doubt about it, Branson has been a blessing,” said Melvin Bell, who has owned Dogpatch for six years. Mr. Bell bought the park from a group of investors who bought it after the park had been seized in bankruptcy by a Memphis bank in 1980.

“We’re on the route to Branson, so we have all the tour buses coming up Scenic 7. Dogpatch is becoming the place to stop.”

Mr. Bell said that the fact that the Li’l Abner cartoon no longer runs has had a negative effect on Dogpatch, but its dubious legacy should be good for a more years.

“Most of the people who go to Branson grew up with Li’l Abner,” Mr. Bell said. “So from that standpoint and the next ten or fifteen years, I would imagine, you’ve people who are familiar with it and once they see it they want to stop. Our numbers are looking better. From now on, we’re going to be more aggressive.”

Such are the vagaries of American tourism. What once simulated life, lives again. “Hillbilly,” as a crowd pleaser, still works. To quote a billboard along the approach to fabricated nineteenth century mining town Silver Dollar City, “You’ve got a great past ahead of you.”

Rodger Brown is author of Party Out of Bounds: The B-52s, R.E.M., and The Kids Who Rocked Athens, Georgia. He is completing a Southern travelogue to be published next fall.