Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (15 page)

"Have you seen the photos in the hallway back there?" he asked me. I'd seen
them. Like a lot of people in the Atlanta suburbs, the Williamsons support
conservative politicians. When the local congressman, Newt Gingrich, was
elected speaker of the house, they went to Washington to do a barbecue for the
Republican revolutionaries who were taking over the Capitol, vowing to cut
all the pork out of government. There are some pictures of Newt in the back
hall near the restrooms; with those big nostrils and fleshy jowls, he looked like
something the Williamsons might have spread-eagled over the coals. John is
definitely not conservative in his politics, and his sensitivities were on edge
since the Monica Lewinsky affair was just busting out, so when he came back
to the table looking like the ribs were disagreeing with him, I assumed he had
seen Newt grinning down from the wall.

He asked me, half-joking, "How can you eat in a place like this?" I told him
it was easy: In the South, we try to remember that the pigs are nonpartisan.

Every political party from the Whigs and the Mugwumps to the Republicans and the Democrats has used barbecue as a way to gather voters, thank
supporters, and pass the hat. It's an old tradition in our politics, right up there
with stump speeches and influence peddling. In some states, like Georgia and North Carolina, barbecues are an almost expected part of the election season.
I believe it was a Raleigh newspaper editor who observed that "no man has
been elected governor of North Carolina without eating more barbecue than
was good for him." Low cholesterol or high voter approval ratings? Southern
politicians have been trying to work out that dilemma for years.

We've had barbecue people who become politicians. Until recently, the
mayor of Augusta, Georgia, was a man named Larry Sconyers, whose principal claim to fame was that he ran the city's best-known barbecue joint. He
might have been the only mayor in America who wore a gold pig ring and a
gold pig necklace and drove a car with a license tag that read "No. i Pig." A little farther east, in Columbia, South Carolina, they've got Maurice Bessinger of
Maurice's Piggie Park, who ran for governor and lost, and more recently lost
a lot of business by wrapping himself in the Confederate flag.

We've also had politicians who became barbecue people. After he made his
reputation as a field general for Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Lee Atwater
used his fame to do what any red-blooded Carolina boy wants to do: he
started playing guitar in a band and opened a chain of barbecue restaurants
called Red, Hot and Blue.

We've had august bodies of lawmakers turn their energies to the important
task of ensuring the quality of barbecue. In 1986, South Carolina legislators
passed a "truth in barbecue" law requiring restaurants to disclose whether
they used authentic hardwood smoke or attempted to hoodwink the public
with gas. This was a case of worthwhile government regulation.

We've also had barbecue restaurants figure in important legal precedents.
Isn't it curious that the two most conspicuous challenges to the Civil Rights
Act of 1964 involved eateries that specialized in the South's two most renowned
dishes? In Atlanta, it was Lester Maddox refusing to serve fried chicken to
black folks at his restaurant, the Pickrick, and then chasing them away with
pick handles. He rode the notoriety all the way to the governor's mansion. In
Birmingham, it was Ollie McClung and his son filing suit against the U.S. government rather than serve pig meat to blacks in the dining room at Ollie's Barbecue. The McClungs won a ruling in federal district court but lost an appeal
before the U.S. Supreme Court. Unlike Lester, who closed his restaurant
rather than desegregate, Ollie had the good sense to remain open. I stopped by
a few years ago and witnessed a bustling interracial crowd at lunchtime.

This intermingling of barbecue and politics isn't a story just for people who
grew up saying "y'all." Take Newt Gingrich. As you probably know, Gingrich
is an adoptive Southerner, "an army brat" who grew up mostly in Pennsylvania. When he moved to Columbus, Georgia, as a teenager, he developed a keen interest in politics and apparently absorbed the local conviction that pulled
pork is one of the surest ways to a voter's heart. Isn't it funny how newcomers
to the region become some of the most devoted practitioners of its folkways?

Gingrich began his career as a history professor at West Georgia College
and soon became one of the most popular faculty members, in part because
of the barbecues he threw for students at his house. Sometimes he'd even dig
up part of the yard to cook a pig. Clearly this was a man who craved approval.
Is it any wonder that when he became House speaker he celebrated with a big
pig-pickin' catered by his favorite Republican pit masters?

Like the pigs, most barbecue joints are nonpartisan. But there are exceptions-restaurants whose owners have such obvious leanings that they become known as much for their political loyalties as for their sliced pork plates.
I ran across a dramatic example of the phenomenon in the town of Ellijay, in
the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia. Ellijay is small, population 1,200, but it
has not one but two political barbecue joints. One is unabashedly Democratic, the other stridently Republican. They sit about six miles from each
other beside the Appalachian Highway, which was renamed for a politician,
naturally; it's now the Zell Miller Mountain Parkway.

The Republican place is Poole's Bar-B-Q and Pig Hill of Fame. You may
have seen a photo of this establishment. Behind the restaurant, there's a hillside studded with plywood pigs with names painted on them. The first time I
drove past, I thought it was some folk artist's idea of a barbecue graveyard, "an
Arlington National Cemetery for pork," with little memorials to the pigs who
made it all possible. The truth is more mundane: If you give the proprietor
five bucks, he'll put up a pig with your name on it. The owner is Oscar Poole,
a Methodist minister who retired to the mountains and tools around town in
his Pigmobile, a 1977 Volare customized with a snout and pointed ears. That
was good enough for the Gilmer County GOP, and they made Oscar their
chairman. Every time Pat Buchanan rears up and runs for president, he goes
to Ellijay and does an appearance at Poole's and cracks a few jokes about political pork.

The Democratic barbecue place is-and I'm not kidding here-the Pink
Pig. Oscar Poole, who remembers the McCarthy era with great nostalgia, tells
folks that it's actually the Pinko Pig. But barbecue aficionados know that the
pinkness only refers to the smoke ring. The Pink Pig is run by a former truck
driver named Bud Holloway. Over the years, he's cooked fund-raising barbecues for Democrats like senators Zell Miller, Max Cleland, and the late Herman Talmadge. But the Democrats he's closest to are Jimmy and Rosalynn
Carter. Holloway moonlights as a carpenter and helped the Carters build a cabin in the woods nearby, where the former president liked to hole up and
write. The Carters drop in with the Secret Service every now and then to eat
barbecue. Holloway has photos of them in the restaurant, and he cannot bear
it when customers occasionally are so boorish as to bad-mouth his friends.
After Carter left the White House, Holloway told me, "people would come in
and say ugly things about him, and I'd have to ask them to leave."

I was happy to see that when Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Atlanta
newspaper called Bud Holloway for a reaction. The owner of the Pink Pig was
quoted right beside Andrew Young and Bishop Desmond Tutu. Two admirable men to be sure, but I wonder if they can cook a pig?

Probably half the men who have occupied our nation's highest office knew
something about pig-pickins, starting with George Washington and continuing through to our current George, Dubya. Washington hosted barbecues at
Mount Vernon and is known to have made one of the first American references
to a public barbecue in his diary. He wrote that he was going up to Alexandria
for three days for a barb-i-cue (he spelled it with an "i," setting a precedent for
all the misspellings that would appear on restaurant signs in future generations). The diary entry is from 1763, so we can only hope that the father of our
country still had his natural teeth and could enjoy gnawing the ribs.

By the time Andrew Jackson took office a few decades later, political barbecues had become a bona fide political institution. There's an editorial cartoon
from the 1830s showing Jackson's enemies turning him on a spit. Old Hickory
appears as a pig, complete with hoofed extremities and a curly tail. The cartoonist apparently knew that Tennesseans prefer pork.

The president who perfected the political barbecue was probably William
Henry Harrison, a Virginia native who won fame as an Indian fighter at the
Battle of Tippecanoe in the Northwest Territories. Every history student
learns his slogan: "Tippecanoe and Tyler, too." It was the most honest part of
his campaign. Harrison's candidacy in 1840 was a triumph of image-making.
His handlers wanted to persuade voters that Tippecanoe was a man of the
people like Jackson, so they staged enormous barbecues across the country,
erecting log cabins as the centerpiece, to symbolize their man's humble roots.
Never mind that Harrison grew up in a plantation manor. The barbecues
were festive and entertaining, and voters loved them. Well, not all voters. One
abolitionist minister, the Reverend J. D. Long, disapproved of what the spectacles implied about the values of the electorate: "There is not much difficulty
in the South in raising money for a barbecue, or to buy whiskey for political
purposes; but when the funds are wanted for a library, that is quite another
question."

Many years after Harrison died in office, my hometown of Atlanta, always
eager to suck up, tried to impress another president in a most peculiar way.
William Howard Taft, our largest chief executive, visited in i9o9, and the city
threw him a banquet that was commensurate with the awesome presidential
circumference. They served boo people and had to hold it in the new Municipal Auditorium. Among the thirty-two dishes on the menu was barbecued
possum. The record does not show whether Taft was impressed or horrified by
this offering of smoked marsupial.

The modern president who made the most of barbecue-as food and symbol-was undoubtedly Lyndon B. Johnson. LBJ loved to show off his ranch
for the same reason politicians of Harrison's time liked to claim a log cabin
birth. The ranch advertised LBJ's roots in the dirt of the Texas Hill Country.
As if that weren't enough to make the point, Johnson liked to take visitors out
for a spin in his Lincoln Continental, driving so fast that he'd cover the
speedometer with his Stetson so reporters couldn't see how high the needle
was climbing. Some journalists said that he'd drink a beer or two while he was
speeding and toss the cans out the window, but Johnson denied that. He said
Lady Bird would kill him if she thought he was a litterbug.

In his five-plus years in office, Johnson hosted more than one hundred barbecues on the LBJ Ranch. One of the most memorable was the first one he
staged for a visiting head of state, the chancellor of Germany, who came in
1963, a little more than a month after the Kennedy assassination. The media
was quite amused by the prospect of such an event, coming so soon after the
Eastern sophistication of the Kennedy years. One New York paper dubbed it
"barbecue diplomacy."

There's a good retelling of this barbecue in a recent book, LBJ's Texas White
House, by Hal K. Rothman. Before LBJ became president, his barbecues were
usually pretty down-home affairs, with lots of gingham and fiddle music and
corny comedy from an emcee by the name of Cactus Pryor, who reminded
everyone of Will Rogers-it sounds to me like the scene from "Oklahoma"
where they sing "The Farmer and the Rancher Should Be Friends." But now
Lyndon Baines Johnson is the leader of the free world, and it dawns on his entourage that maybe they should strive for a more presidential tone. I mean,
the chancellor wouldn't welcome them to Germany in lederhosen, would he?
So Cactus Pryor, of all people, "the humorist" suggests that they show the
world that Texans aren't a bunch of cowhands by inviting Van Cliburn down
to perform. The acclaimed pianist had grown up in Fort Worth and quickly
agrees to come. Only when he gets to the ranch, he finds out that they want
him to perform in blue jeans and a red checkered shirt like the rest of the help. Maybe they wanted to put him to work basting the brisket before he took the
stage. Cliburn protested that he always performed in a tux. When no one
could find a tux, he consented to wear a business suit. In the end, the barbecue
and the concert were a tremendous success, "although it was probably the last
time Cliburn ever played in a basketball arena." Because of the cold weather,
the event had to be moved at the last minute from the ranch to the Stonewall
High School gymnasium.

I was interested to see that our current president has tried to revive this tradition of presidential barbecues in Texas. In November aooi, George W. Bush
had Vladimir Putin down to Crawford for a summit conference at his ranch.
After the barbecue, some students were allowed to ask the Russian president a
few questions, and one of them wanted to know his opinion of the mesquitesmoked tenderloin. Here's his answer, as provided by the translator: "I had a
hard time imagining how could a living person create such a masterpiece of
cooking." I'm a little concerned about that "living person" part. Do dead persons cook in Russia? If you ever get over there and see barbecue on the menu,
perhaps you'd better take a pass.

As far as I can tell from this historical review, there is no correlation between presidential greatness and great barbecue. In fact, one of our most exalted presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt, may have set the standard for the most
pathetic attempt at alfresco state dining. In 1939 he actually served hot dogs to
the king and queen of England. It was unimpressive food, but clever political
imagery. FDR was trying to show America that our partner in the fight against
Hitler was, if not a regular George, at least willing to eat like one from time to
time. I would hope that the president knew enough from his extended stays
in Warm Springs, Georgia, not to call his little weenie roast a barbecue. I
wouldn't be so sure about Eleanor.