jan 1, 1971 - All in the Family

Description:

In January 1971, Americans met a new television character. Archie Bunker was a gruff, blue-collar veteran, prone to bigoted and insensitive remarks, who often berated his wife and bemoaned his daughter’s marriage to a hippie. Disdaining the liberal social movements of the 1960s, Archie expressed a conservative, hardscrabble worldview. Although to many viewers he seemed out of touch, which was the producer’s intent, as the main character of the half-hour comedy All in the Family Archie became a folk hero to many working-class Americans in the 1970s; he said what they felt. At the opening of each episode, Archie and his wife Edith sang “Those Were the Days.” The song celebrated a bygone era, when “girls were girls and men were men.”

Archie Bunker proved to be more than a comic grouch with retrograde politics. The wildly popular All in the Family captured a national search for order. Archie’s feminist daughter, liberal son-in-law, and black neighbors brought a changing world home. Not all Americans were as resistant to change as Archie. Most ordinary people were simply sorting out the consequences of a tumultuous era. The various upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s challenged Americans to think in new ways about race, gender roles, sexual morality, and the family. Vietnam and the Watergate scandal had produced a crisis of political authority. An “old order” had seemingly collapsed. But what would take its place was not yet clear.

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