Did you know that Ben Jones, the guy who played Cooter on “The Dukes of Hazzard,” is also the guy who initiated the series of events that led to Newt Gingrich resigning as Speaker of the House?
Beware of that Crazy Cooter comin’ atcha, indeed.
Now I really want that replacement for the “Dukes of Hazzard” lunchbox that I’d had elementary school that I’ve been wanting forever now.
Jones, 84, died on Sunday at his home in Rappahannock County, in the eastern foothills of the Blue Ridge; according to his wife, he was waiting to start watching his Atlanta Braves play a Sunday matinee when he had a heart attack.
Born in North Carolina in 1941, Jones enrolled at the University of North Carolina in the early 1960s hoping to become a writer, before acting with the Carolina Playmakers and getting himself involved in the civil rights movement, participating in several lunch counter sit-ins that saw him attacked by members of the KKK and arrested by racist local cops.
His theatrical career post-UNC landed him gigs at playhouses across the country, including the Kennedy Center, in addition to supporting roles in several films, including “Smokey and the Bandit” and an independent film, “The Moonrunners,” that would go on to serve as the basis for “The Dukes of Hazzard.”
“The Dukes of Hazzard” ran on CBS from 1979-1985; at its height, the show drew 40 million viewers per week on Friday nights, running as the opening act to the even more popular TV drama “Dallas.”
Jones’ transition to politics actually began when he was still portraying Cooter Davenport, the aw-shucks mechanic sidekick to the Duke Boys, the show’s lead characters, two cousins on probation for running moonshine who were eternally battling the crooked county commissioner, Jefferson Davis “Boss” Hogg, in the fictional Hazzard County, Georgia.
Jones served as the president of the Georgia chapter of the Screen Actors Guild, then as chairman of the Georgia Film Commission, before making his first run for Congress in Georgia, losing a 1986 race to Republican incumbent Pat Swindall.
After Swindall was indicted on perjury charges, Jones challenged the incumbent again in the 1988 cycle, and won the rematch, by a 20-point margin, ahead of winning a second term in 1990.
Jones was gerrymandered out of his seat in the 1991 congressional redistricting, so Jones ended up regrouping and challenging Gingrich, who was on the verge of becoming the Speaker of the House, in a race for a different U.S. House seat in Georgia in 1994.
Jones would end up losing, but during the course of the race, he filed an ethics complaint against Gingrich alleging that Gingrich had used tax-exempt groups for political purposes.
It took three years, but Gingrich was ultimately reprimanded by the U.S. House, in 1997, and ordered to reimburse the House $300,000 for the cost of the investigation.
Gingrich was stung by the overwhelming margin in the reprimand vote – the final tally was 395-28 in favor of reprimand – and his status in the House Republican caucus was damaged beyond repair, leading to intraparty challenges to his continued service as House Speaker, and ultimately, his resignation in 1998, after the failures of the GOP in the 1998 midterms.
Jones and his wife, Alma Viator, settled in Rappahannock County in 1998, and a year later, they opened a museum dedicated to “The Dukes of Hazzard,” and later opened theme stores and organized a run of “Dukes”-themed reunions, including one in Nashville in 2006 that drew more than 100,000 fans.
The uncomfortable part to this obituary: Jones, member of the NAACP since his days at UNC in the 1960s, decided to take a public stand in 2015 against the decision by Warner Bros. to no longer manufacture merchandise depicting the Confederate flag, which had been featured prominently atop the General Lee, the 1969 Dodge Charger driven by Bo and Luke Duke as they tried to evade Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane and his inept deputies.
Jones dismissed any association between the Confederate flag and slavery, and tried to dismiss the controversy that arose after the mass murder at a Black church perpetrated by a White nationalist photographed posing with a Confederate flag.
Jones, in TV interviews, attributed the association between the Confederate flag and slavery to a “wave of political correctness” and called it a “cultural cleansing.”
The disappointment there is in wondering how much those comments were based on Jones wanting to continue sales of “Dukes of Hazzard” memorabilia to people that he might have assumed skewed culturally White nationalist.
I prefer to remember Ben Jones as the guy who actually stared down White supremacists and racist cops at lunch counters in Chapel Hill and helped us get rid of Newt Gingrich to the guy who wanted to be able to sell me the replacement for the lunchbox that I had in fifth grade.
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Chris Graham
