Watching ‘All In The Family’ For The First Time

In the library in my city, one can check out a wide selection of DVDs, from feature films, to documentaries, to foreign films, and whole seasons of a television series. One day I noticed a few DVDs of the series All In The Family. I vaguely remember watching the show as a kid, and I’ve heard a lot about how great a series it is, so I decided to check out a few seasons worth of shows. During that week I was on an “All In the Family” binge. I found it to be a very funny, very touching, and very socially conscience show. I looked up youtube and found that you could find whole episodes of the show in that site. I’ve always heard it said that television is just a vast wasteland with no redeeming value, but a show like “All In the Family” challenges that notion. For a show that first aired over thirty years ago, All In The Family is still a very relevant and entertaining show and it still challenges us with problems that remain thirty years later.

The show began on Tuesday, January 12, 1971, with the following disclaimer:

“The program you are about to see is All In The Family. It seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns. By making them a source of laughter we hope to show, in a mature fashion, just how absurd they are.”

Norman Lear and his partner Alan Yorkin had taken the idea of “All In The Family” from a British comedy called “Till Death Us Do Part” about a bigoted blue-collar worker named Alf Garnett. Fred Silverman, the head of CBS, was looking to replace shows like “The Beverly Hillbillies”, “Mayberry RFD” and “Green Acres” with shows that would appeal to younger audiences, so he give Lear and Yorkin a chance to produce thirteen episodes of the show as a midseason replacement. To prepare for the reaction to the controversial subjects that “All In the Family” would deal with, the switchboards at CBS were put on alert when the first episode was aired. The initial episodes, though, garnered low ratings and there was talk about canceling the show. Summer reruns started word of mouth and its initial episodes won 3 Emmys. When it returned for a full season in the Fall of 1971, it was a popular hit, becoming the top rated television series for six consecutive seasons.

Watching these shows on DVD, I’m amazed at the range of subjects that this show dealt with. Racism. Homosexuality. The Vietnam War. Labor strife. Gun control. Watergate. Rape. Draft resistence. Women’s equality. When I think of the shows that preceded “All In The Family”, like “The Beverly Hillbillies”, I realize just how different this series must’ve seemed to the audiences of the early 1970s. What I like about this series, though, is how this show could be socially relevant and still be entertaining and funny. I’ve seen quite a few movies and television series from the late 1960s and early 1970s that try to be political, but are boring and a bit overly serious.

“All In The Family” manages to be both politically relevant and entertaining because the four main characters are so funny and endearing. Archie Bunker, Edith “Dingbat” Bunker, Michael “Meathead” Stivic, and Gloria Stivic are very likable and funny people, in spite of all their prejudices, weaknesses and frailties. Archie Bunker is a bigot, but he’s also a loving husband and father. Many of the episodes begin with Archie expressing some bigoted opinion of his, and the rest of the episode puts him in the position where his prejudice is challenged by some circumstance. In one of the episodes that I watched, Archie Bunker goes on television to give an editorial against gun control. When Archie and his family go to a bar to celebrate his appearance on television, they are held up to gun point by some muggers. In a famous episode that I watched on youtube, Sammy Davis Jr. visits the Bunker home after he leaves a briefcase in Archie’s taxi cab. Archie usually is uncomfortable around African Americans, but he has also been a big fan of Sammy Davis Jr. and is thrilled to have him in his house. I wanted to watch it because it is one of the most famous episodes in the series’ run. Here is a segment from that episode.

It’s not just Archie that makes the show. Edith is a lovable and kind woman. Though she may seem like a submissive woman who puts Archie’s interests over her own, Edith is able to stand up for herself when she has to. In one episode that I watched, Edith gets into a fight with her daughter Gloria because Gloria felt that Edith was a doormat. In the end of the episode, Edith puts her foot down and prevents an argument from Gloria and Meathead from escalating to a point of no return. In another episode, Edith defies Archie and stays at a job that Archie wants her to quit. I like Edith’s kindness and her ability to see the good in people.

Michael “Meathead” reminds me a lot of myself when I was younger. Earnest, a bit bookish, very liberal and sure of himself. My favorite parts of many of the shows are when “Meathead” is debating Archie Bunker on some political issue. I used to have these same type of political debates with my father and with various conservative friends during my teens and my twenties. Though the show is a fairly liberal show, it doesn’t hesitate to deflate some of Meathead’s self-righteousness, even though he and Gloria are the liberal spokespeople in the show. In the early episodes, Meathead is a bit of a male chauvinist, until his clashes with Gloria teach him to be more sensitive to the prejudices that women face. One of my favorite Meathead episodes occurs when he is tempted to have an affair with Bernadette Peters, but he runs away before anything happened. I’ve only watched up to Season 6, but it seems that Meathead’s relationship with Gloria grew more as equal partners than in the early episodes.

Part of that has to do with the evolution of Gloria. In the first season, Gloria is actually kind of boring to me, more prone to lecture and to spout feminist ideas. In the later seasons, Gloria is funnier and more human. In that episode where Gloria gets into a fight with her mom, I like how Gloria grows to respect Edith and sees the wisdom behind the “Dingbat” facade. When Gloria gets pregnant, she is very forceful and asserts herself with her husband.

One of the things I most admire about the series is how it tackles serious issues. It is a comedy that risks dealing with very serious subjects, and it can be funny one minute and deadly serious the next minute. In one episode, Archie finds a swastika sprayed in the front of his door. It turned out that the grafitti was meant for a Jewish man a few houses away. A man from the Jewish Defense League, a vigilante group, visits the Bunker home to protect them, and Michael and the vigilante get into a heated debate on the merits of violence as a deterrent to antisemitism. When I listened to the Jewish vigilante defend his violent tactics as the only means of protecting the Jewish people in a hostile world, it made me think of the arguments I often hear from the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Two episodes deal with the sad issue of rape. In one episode, Gloria almost gets raped when she walks alone one Saturday morning near a construction site. When they report the crime to the police, the officer relates how rape victims are often treated in court at that time, which intimidates women from ever reporting the crime. Edith relates to her daughter how as a young person she was almost a victim of a rape and that Gloria had a responsibility to report the crime so that other women do not become victims. In another episode, Edith is attacked by a rapist, and Gloria reminds her mother of the responsibility to identify the rapist who was caught and to put him in jail. Both episodes challenge the prevalent notion that somehow the rape victims were responsible for being raped due to the way they dressed or where they chose to walk. The episodes were very powerful because horrible things happened to television characters that I grew to care about. When I was in college, I remember women’s student groups organizing “Take Back The Night” walks to assert a woman’s right to walk in safety in night classes. Sadly, in Afganistan, Iran, and the Sudan, sexual violence is used as a way of controlling women.

Racism is a frequent subject of the show. Lionel Jefferson, an African American, becomes friends of the Bunkers, and he frequently makes sarcastic remarks after hearing some of Archie Bunker’s bigotry. Lionel’s father is just as prejudiced against whites as Archie is prejudiced against African Americans, and he challenges both their prejudices when he first dates a white woman, then marries an interracial bride. The arguments between George Jefferson and Archie Bunker are some of the most entertaining parts of “All In The Family”. I especially appreciate the fact that Lionel’s in-laws are an interracial couple because I am in an interracial marriage. In 1967 Richard and Mildred Loving won the Supreme Court case that won the legal right for interracial marriages in all fifty states, and shows like “All In the Family” helped make it more acceptable to middle America.

At the time “All In The Family” was on television, America was going through great changes. I’m sure the average American had a hard time adjusting to Watergate, the Vietnam War, the oil crisis, inflation woes, terrorist threats, the problems of integrating the races, the feminist and gay rights movement. Some of the changes were good, some were bad. Many people criticize “All In The Family” for glorifying Archie Bunker’s bigotry, but I don’t think the show does so. When I watch the show , I see a man who is scared of changes in society that he really doesn’t comprehend. Rob Reiner once said that All In The Family showed that “people can be ignorant and still have loving, human qualities.”The point of each episode in “All In The Family” is to challenge Archie’s prejudices, and it seems that Archie slowly grows. A great example of this is the episode where Mike invites a draft dodger to the Bunkers’ home for a Christmas dinner.

My early childhood was spent in navy bases, so I had a rather sheltered life. When my dad retired from the navy and I lived with civilian families, I first encountered racism. I met Filipinos who didn’t like Chinese. Chinese who didn’t like Vietnamese. Vietnamese who did not like Mexicans. Mexicans who did not like African Americans. African Americans who did not like whites. Whites who did not like gays. And so on. Archie Bunker’s diatribes sound very familiar to me, as I’ve heard similar things coming out of the mouths of various people. I think everyone has some sort of prejudice. It’s only a bad thing when one doesn’t try to learn and overcome whatever prejudices a person has. I think that’s the main lesson that I learned from “All In The Family”.

Youtube interviews with Carrol O Connor, Jean Stapleton and Rob Reiner

Charles Dickens and His Influence on Social Activists

I’ve never read Charles Dickens. I was never assigned to read any of his books during high school or college. I’ve watched various Christmas Carol movies, but had not really watched any other versions of a Charles Dickens book. A few months ago my wife and I watched an old 1930s version of A Tale of Two Cities with Ronald Colman and we both loved it. Soon after I then read an essay by George Orwell that talked about how subversive a writer Dickens was and how his stories attacked most of English institutions for their apathy towards the poor. It turns out that many radicals and social activists have been influenced by the books of Charles Dickens for his sympathy for the poor and for his critique of the British capitalist system.

In a collection of Orwell essays called All Art Is Propoganda: Critical Essays is an essay that Orwell wrote on Charles Dickens. Dickens is one of Orwell’s favorite writers and Orwell examines the particular aspects of Dickens work that appeals so much to him. Orwell finds Dickens to be a writer full of literary invention, who can create memorable characters that appeal to the common reader and not just the intellectuals. The most important characteristic that Orwell found is that Charles Dickens writes from a moralist point of view who consistently sides with the underdog in all his works. Orwell would write:

But in his published work there is implied a personality quite different from this, a personality that has won him far more friends than enemies. It might have otherwise, for even if Dickens was a bourgeois, he was certainly a subversive writer, a radical, one might truthfully say a rebel. Everyone who has read widely in his work has felt this. Gissing, for instance, the best of the writers on Dickens, was anything but a radical himself, and he disapproved of this strain in Dickens and wished it were not there, but it never occurred to him to deny it. In Oliver Twist, Hard Times, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never been approached.

Charles Dickens had a strong social conscience that was reflected in his life as well as his writings. He made public speeches and organized fund-raisers to benefit fellow artists and the downtrodden. Dickens collaborated with Angela Burdett-coutts, the heiress to the Coutts banking fortune and the second wealthiest women in England, on several charitable projects, notably the Urania Cottage project to help retrain and rehabilitate fallen women. Dickens wrote articles against the New Poor Law for the deleterious effect it had on the poor. On his trip to the United States, Dickens angered many Southerners when he criticized the slave system. The wealthy initially reacted unfavorably to his Christmas Carol because they felt it was an economic fable against the merchant class. A good summary of Dickens political views in the context of his society are found in Jane Smiley’s book Charles Dickens:

Charity and charitable enterprises were at the very heart of Victorian life and constituted the main way in which those unable to take care of themselves were taken care of by society. Very few social services as we know them were provided by the government- rather, churches and privately supported charitable institutions, upholding a wide variety of theories and methods, provided education, sustenance, sometimes employment, and care for those in need. Dickens did not uniformly support all of these institutions, especially not those sponsored by Evangelical groups. The combination of puritanical narrowness and crabbed strictness opposed Dickens’s instinctive sense that true charity was an outgrowth of kindly benevolence and good cheer. He had his own theories about the failures of his society and their proper alleviation and he was frequently in sympathy with radical political ideas. At the same time, he deeply distrusted social unrest, including incipient revolutionary movements, labor strikes, or any potential violent confrontation between classes. Social order was his highest goal, a social order that recognized the responsibility of all to all and made plenty of room for the pleasures of life- entertainment, good fellowship, good food and drink, congenial surroundings, familial affection. While he feared social unrest, he deplored any means by which the moneyed classes might shirk their social responsibilities: harsh poor laws, legal obfuscation, bureaucratic incompetence and red tape, failure to attend to public works and public sanitation, or simple personal selfishness and profligacy. It can be fairly argued, in this context, that Dickens never shirked his. His mode of life demonstrated that he lived by play as well as work, believed equally in the value of each, and promoted the value of both for all members of Victorian society.

Charles Dickens’ concern for the poor inspired many other radicals beside George Orwell. Dorothy Day, the radical Catholic activist, was inspired by Dickens’ social conscience. In Robert Coles’ book Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion, Coles observes:

Novelists also figured predominantly in her life, especially, as already noted, the nineteenth century ones, Dickens, Dostoievski, and Tolstoy. She loved Dickens’s effort to bring the poor to the attention of his readers, Dostoievski’s religious fervor and philosophical subtlety, Tolstoy’s largeness of mind and heart.

Howard Zinn was introduced to Charles Dickens works at the age of ten, when he received a set of Dickens’s books from a coupon offer by the New York Post. Zinn would write about Dickens in his book You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train

I did not know where Dickens fitted into the history of modern literature because he was all I knew of that literature…

What I did know was that he aroused in me tumultous emotions. First, an anger at arbitrary power puffed up with wealth and kept in place by law. But most of all a profound compassion for the poor. I did not see myself as poor in the way Oliver Twist was poor. I didn’t recognize that I was so moved by his story because his life touched chords in mine.

How wise Dickens was to make readers feel poverty and cruelty through the fate of children who had not reached the age where the righteous and comfortable classes could accuse them of being responsible for their own misery.

Today, reading pallid, cramped novels about ‘relationships’ I recall Dickens’ unashamed rousing of feeling, his uproariously funny characters, his epic settings- cities of hunger and degradation, countries in revolution, the stakes being life and death not just for one family but for thousands.

Dickens is sometimes criticized by literary snobs for sentimentality, melodrama, partisanship, exaggeration. But surely the state of the world makes fictional exaggeration unnecessary and partisanship vital. It was only many years later after I read those Dickens novels that I understood his accomplishment.

The praise that George Orwell, Jane Smiley, Dorothy Day and Howard Zinn have given to Charles Dickens have inspired me to start reading his books. I just checked out a book-on-cd of his book “Hard Times” and have enjoyed listening to it so far. I end this blog with a quote of Dickens that I found in the Annotated Christmas Carol. In a letter of April 4, 1844, Charles Dickens wrote:

I have a great faith in the poor. To the best of my ability I always endeavor to present them in a favourable light to the righ; and I shall never cease, I hope, until I die to advocate their being made as happy and as wise as the circumstances of their condition, in its utmost improvement, will admit of their becoming.

The first scene of A Tale Of Two Cities

An audio book of A Christmas Carol

Masterpiece Classic’s The World of Charles Dickens for PBS