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Presumably by coincidence, as President Johnson stood tall under the glare of the national spotlight, TV network executives discovered the hick sitcom. Three of the most popular shows in the 1960s were The Andy Griffith Show; Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.; and The Beverly Hillbillies. All revived the homespun, albeit unassimilable, traits of good old “Sug,” the rural pol of the 1840s. Lyndon Johnson fondly remembered Roosevelt as “a daddy to me,” and as town sheriff, Andy Griffith served as the paternal caretaker of Mayberry, North Carolina. The Andy Griffith Show had the feel of the thirties, not the sixties; it was a nostalgic rewrite of the Great Depression, featuring a town of misfits. Speaking about his role, Griffith insisted that he was not playing a “yokel”; the creator of the show described the sheriff as a clever man with a “wry sense of humor” on the order of the late Will Rogers, the good-natured Oklahoma humorist and film hero. As for Mayberry, most problems were solved around Andy’s kitchen table—reminiscent of how Americans huddled around the radio listening to FDR’s fireside chats. Outsiders were welcome in Andy’s world, where the virtues of small-town democracy shone.7
Though the actor stopped short of saying it, Sheriff Andy was indeed surrounded by yokels, because television traded on the worst stereotypes. Mayberry’s population included the gullible gas station attendant Gomer Pyle (before he got his own show) and his cousin Goober, and Ernest T. Bass, a screeching mountaineer who went on wild rampages. As a writer for Time noted of Jim Nabors’s Gomer, the na?ve enlistee “spouts homilies out of a lopsided mouth and lopes around uncertainly like a plowboy stepping through a field of cow dung.” He is a “walking disaster,” who in his subsequent spin-off show single-handedly fouls up the bureaucracy of the entire Marine Corps.8
With the Clampetts of Beverly Hills, as the comedian Bob Hope joked, Americans had their embodiment of TV “wasteland”—a wasteland with an outhouse. Episode after episode, Granny and her kin were stymied by the science of the doorbell and the unbearable complexity of kitchen appliances, giving viewers the saddest sort of reminder of the culture shock experienced by real sharecroppers in FSA resettlement communities. Buddy Ebsen’s prime-time hillbillies appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, sketched as characters in Grant Wood’s iconic painting of 1930, American Gothic. This was yet another unsubtle allusion to the long-held belief that white trash were an evolutionary throwback.9
The Beverly Hillbillies recast as Grant Wood’s famous 1930 painting, American Gothic.
Saturday Evening Post, February 2, 1963
The Beverly Hillbillies had its defenders. To the creator of the show, “our hillbillies” were clean and wholesome, and the network was actually doing a service in uplifting the image of rural Americans. “The word hillbilly,” he insisted, “will ultimately have a new meaning in the United States as a result of our show.” His optimism proved to be misplaced.10
Jed Clampett was no Davy Crockett, even though Buddy Ebsen had in fact played the gruff sidekick to Fess Parker’s coon-capped Crockett in the fifties Disney saga. The differences between Jed and Davy were stark. Hollywood hillbillies could only be crude objects of audience laughter—mockery, not admiration. They conjured none of the frontier fantasy of the rugged individualist Crockett (or Fess Parker’s TV Daniel Boone). Nothing could redeem them. The Clampetts drove a 1920s-era Ford jalopy, and Granny sat on board in a rocking chair—a camp version of John Ford’s desperate Joad family.11
Fess Parker’s buckskin champion was a jaunty country boy, a genial Gary Cooper–style suburban dad. All viewers understood that Parker’s Crockett represented the best qualities imagined of early America. The 1955 Davy Crockett craze caused adoring fans to mob the actor in a way that momentarily put him in a league with Elvis; coonskin caps flew off store shelves as Disney Studios staged a publicity tour. Parker, a towering Texan, even made a stop on Capitol Hill. In a photograph distributed over the wire services, then-senator Lyndon Johnson and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn struck up a pose with “Davy” and his rifle, Ol’ Betsy.12
Their signature laugh track aside, sixties comedies were not purely escapist fare. They tapped into a larger anxiety amid the mass migration of poor whites who headed north and created hillbilly ghettos in cities such as Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago, and Cincinnati—which only fueled existing prejudice against “briar hoppers” (recalling the nomenclature of an Odum respondent). Writing about poor whites in Chicago in 1968, the syndicated columnist Paul Harvey drew a practical connection for his readers: “Suppose a real-life likeness of TV’s Beverly Hillbillies should move to the big city without those millions of dollars in the bank.”13
The trio of sitcoms tapped into suspicions that modern America had failed to create a genuine melting pot; the cultural distance between rural and urban life, between rich and poor, was immense. Don Knotts’s slapstick character Barney Fife, Sheriff Andy’s bumbling cousin, didn’t belong in the big city any more than the corn cracker of Davy Crockett’s Almanack of 1837 did in the 1830s. Despite his drill sergeant’s unrelenting badgering, Gomer, the hapless private, failed to conform to military culture; he wasn’t fit for the Marines, let alone for white-collar corporate America. And the Clampetts may have bought a mansion in the heart of Hollywood, but they had not moved even one rung on the social ladder. They didn’t even try to behave like middle-class Americans.
Hal Humphrey of the Los Angeles Times observed in 1963 that the joy of watching The Beverly Hillbillies was linked to the fact that “most Americans are extremely class-conscious.” No matter what the plotline, every episode pitted the mercenary banker Milburn Drysdale, his “social-climbing wife,” and “boob” of a son (a young man of questionable virility) against the lowdown Clampetts. In Humphrey’s opinion, the “Joe Doakses,” or average viewers, got to see a bunch of “ragged hill people,” who were “obviously . . . inferior,” outsmarting equally undeserving “big shots.” Theirs was, in short, a contest between “snobs” and “slobs.” As far as the critic was concerned, the show’s creator had come up with a formula that camouflaged class conflict with laughs. Finally, he joked, the class-bashing TV series “cashes in on Groucho Marx’s theory of class struggle—or was that Karl Marx?”14
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