I know that we all have a lot more to worry about these days than what happened to The Cracker Barrel Old Country Store restaurant franchise when it attempted to change its corporate logo without consulting its most devoted clientele, but strangely enough, this tiny blip on the radar of the vast panorama of American cultural history actually bears enormous significance—which makes it a useful topic not only for this blog but for your composition classroom as well, especially if you are making popular culture a focus of your teaching this year. So, let's have a look of the whole fiasco.
What happened is very simple: like Anheuser-Busch's disastrous attempt to expand its consumer base to younger GEN Z beer drinkers by hooking up with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney a few years ago, the top brass at The Cracker Barrel decided that the restaurant chain's traditional logo—featuring an overalls-clad old codger (based on the uncle of the restaurant's founder) seated next to a tall barrel suggestive of an old-timey country store—needed to be scrapped in order to attract younger consumers. The result was a clean new design featuring the words "Cracker Barrel," with the man-seated-by-a-barrel erased. Then all hell broke loose.
First, Cracker Barrel stock crashed, with about a hundred million dollars of corporate value lost in a single market session, and then both Trump Sr. and Jr. weighed in, along with a good portion of the MAGA faithful, denouncing the logo change as yet another instance of "woke" America run amok. Even the fact that The Cracker Barrel's CEO—a recent hire—is a woman, got caught up in the frenzy, with accusations flying that there was DEI-related conspiracy behind the scrubbing of a white male from the logo. The ensuing outrage was so intense that, after a brief attempt to explain and defend the new logo, The Cracker Barrel brass caved, scrapping the new design and scurrying back to the old one.
Now, you hardly need to be told that the intensity of the reaction against the abortive new logo is yet another signifier of the culture war going on in America today. But I want to go a bit further here and connect The Cracker Barrel affair with something that I explore in some depth in the 11th edition of Signs of Life in the U.S.A., something that happened over half a century ago when CBS abruptly cancelled most of its popular rural-themed programing (shows like The Beverly Hillbillies and Hee Haw) and replaced them with hip new urban programs like All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The motivation for this cancellation (known by industry insiders as "the rural purge"), was just like that behind The Cracker Barrel logo redesign: namely, to appeal to younger, more urban and diverse, consumers. But instead of there being an immediate explosion of outrage against the cancellations that might have compelled CBS to reverse course, there was instead a slow accumulation of resentment against a "mainstream" popular culture that continued to marginalize rural American tastes during the half century that followed, a resentment that finally exploded in the first decade of the new millennium with the creation of the Tea Party, and the subsequent emergence of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.
Another way of putting this is that popular culture and political science go hand in hand. People are deeply invested in their pop cultural preferences, and if we want to understand just what is going in America today, we need to look beyond the usual political news items and analyses to what is happening in popular culture—today, and in the years that brought us to where we are now.
The updated 11th edition of Signs of Life in the USA: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers is available now.
Image courtesy of Mike Mozart via Wikimedia Commons
