In the early 1970s, the most popular show on television was “All in the Family,” a sitcom produced by legendary writer and producer Norman Lear.
The show traced the ups and downs of the Bunker family, and was a groundbreaking show for its day. While sitcoms in the 1960s – shows like “Gilligan’s Island,” “Bewitched” and “I Dream of Jeannie” – were typically escapist and establishmentarian in tone and content, “All in the Family” portrayed in a realistic way the issues and problems then roiling America: racism, drug use, the war in Vietnam, female inequality, pre-marital sex and, more generally, the social revolution that was then transforming American life.
Archie Bunker was the patriarch of the Bunker family, and served as a sort of spokesman for a certain slice of the white working class of his day. His comedic foil for most of the show’s run was Michael Stivic, his daughter’s husband and representative of the lefty “counterculture” of the era.
While Norman Lear has never made a secret of his politics, which are left-leaning, he also treated Archie Bunker with a certain respect, and even affection. While Bunker’s racism was portrayed as retrograde and outdated, Archie himself was portrayed as a good-hearted but flawed human being. That humility and humanism kept the show from seeming too preachy most of the time, though it could occasionally flirt with the edge of sanctimony.
Archie Bunker saw the America that had made him changing in ways both profound and irrevocable, and the changes made him uncomfortable, but I always got the sense that underneath the bluster was a grudging respect, and even admiration, for what the younger generations were doing.
Much was made in the 1960s of the supposed “Generation Gap” between the baby boomer generation and their parents, the World War II “Greatest Generation,” and the story since then has settled into a standard form. That story, at least as told by conservative culture warriors, goes something like this:
“America in the wake of the Second World War was unified and strong like it had never been. The 1950s were the high water mark of American life – prosperous, socially cohesive, and traditional in its culture. Television shows like ‘Leave It to Beaver’, ‘Ozzie and Harriet,’ ‘Father Knows Best’ and so on, portrayed this world. Beginning in the mid-1960s, however, the hippies vandalized that world until it was broken beyond repair, and the result was broken families, race riots, social disintegration and a lost war in Southeast Asia.”
I think the actual situation was more complicated than that.
For one thing, the seeds of the civil rights movement were arguably planted in the minds of the Archie Bunker generation, in the aftermath of the War. Black and white GIs came home from two continents after defeating two racist powers to an America where a significant fraction of their fellow citizens could not vote because of the color of their skin, and where blacks could not even use the restrooms that whites could use. Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, there was a book called “The Negro Motorist Green Book” that informed black travelers where they could and could not get service. I can imagine that The Greatest Generation perceived echoes of the Nazi racial purity laws and ideology in the de jure apartheid regime in the southern United States.
The glaring hypocrisy of that situation was a big motivator for the boomers’ parents to challenge the structures of oppression that kept so many of their fellow citizens from enjoying full rights in their own country.
Neither did the boomers have a monopoly on opposition to the Vietnam War.
I once asked a friend who was an early boomer how her parent’s generation talked about World War II when she was a child, and she said that most of the conversations were about how to prevent such a catastrophe from ever recurring.
It has been observed many times that no one hates war more than people who’ve actually been to one, and the boomers’ parents had spent their youth walking through entire ruined cities where rotting, unburied corpses outnumbered the living, watching their friends die horrible deaths, while others at home comforted mothers and wives who had lost someone in the fighting.
So while the Boomers were undoubtedly the largest contingent of the anti-war left, their parents were a significant factor as well.
The revolution in gender roles was similarly rooted in the wartime experience of the boomers’ parents. As a result of severe labor shortages during the war, enormous numbers of women entered the workforce and performed skillfully in many jobs that had traditionally been held by men, and the memory of that played a significant role in the push to overturn salary and other discrimination that women experienced once the war ended.
So, Archie Bunker’s generation was more than a monolithic opponent of the reforms of 50 years ago; they were also a large part of the impetus behind those movements.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand.

Sharing is caring!