12 January 1971 -- All in the Family Premieres

“Those Were the Days” -- Lee Adams (Lyrics) and Charles Strouse (Music)

On this day in 1971, American television viewers met what would quickly become their favorite family, the Bunkers. From then until 8 April 1979, we tuned our televisions to CBS a total of 205 times -- typically 24 evening each year -- to peer into their lives for thirty minutes. We call All in the the Family a sitcom. Nonsense! We would be far more truthful in remembering this groundbreaking series as America looking into a mirror. All in the the Family reminded us of whom we are.

Let’s take a look at the four individuals living at 704 Hauser Street in the New York City borough of Queens.

Archie Bunker on the America that Was

Dramatis Personæ

Archie Bunker (Carroll O'Connor) -- Pater familias of the Bunker clan, Archie is a relic, an artifact from an earlier time in which people were classified by race, gender, ethnicity, occupation, class, and religion. In those halcyon days, people knew their places in society and were happy to remain there. Archie means well, but he is disturbed and bewildered by the changing society, a world in which women become surgeons, African-Americans become neighbors, and males wear their hair long. In his discomfort, Archie verbally assaults a changing society and the English language with eager vigor.

Edith Bunker (Jean Stapleton) -- Like her husband, Edith too is a person out of time. But unlike Archie, Edith does not react to a world she did not understand with fear and rejection, but with tolerance and kindness. Superficially, Edith seems, to use Archie’s favorite term for his devoted wife, a “dingbat.” She is unlearned, usually clueless, and slow on the uptake. Yet, despite her lack of education and intelligence, Edith possesses a wealth of wisdom as deep as the ocean itself. When everyone loses their way in a maze of ego, anger, ideology, or self-deception, it will always be Edith’s simple yet profound common sense restoring balance. Edith is the moral and ethical center for this family.

Gloria Stivic, née Bunker (Sally Struthers) -- Archie and Edith’s only child, daughter Gloria, is always a woman in transition, trapped between undeveloped potential and duty to family. Gloria knows herself capable of much, much more, but her putting husband Mike through graduate school and caring for their young son binds her to a menial employment and podding housework. She sacrificed so that husband and son could thrive. Gloria cultural modernity, her embrace of feminism, her frank sexuality horrifies Archie, still his love remains absolute. Gloria adores her father but, to his eternal confoundment, she ever refuses to compromise her values for his peace of mind. In her daughter, Edith recognized urges that she, as a young woman, had repressed and admires Gloria’s evolution. Gloria is the most pragmatic of the Bunkers.

Michael Stivic (Rob Reiner) -- Archie’s son-in-law and arch-nemesis Michael personifies everything the older man fears about the newly disjointed world. Michael -- or “Meathead” as Archie calls hims -- is a hippy, a liberal, an intellectual, a war protestor, an atheist from a Polish Catholic background (a triple disqualification in Archie’s view), and a layabout. Worst of all, Michael is married to Archie’s daughter, and no man is good enough for Gloria, especially one like Michael! Political and social issues often drive the plot of All in the Family by forcing Michael and Archie into opposite arguing camps. Yet for all their differences, Michael and Archie have far more in common than either admits or even realizes. Both are too uncompromising, too self-righteous, too easily angered. Michael is easily the most intelligent person in the room, and he knows it. Even so, his vision can be curiously narrow at times. Gloria comes to share Michael liberal leanings, but for all his intellectual prowess, he is frequently far more shortsighted and less liberal than she. For example, perhaps the only opinion Archie and Michael hold in common is a belief in the male-headed household. Gloria, occasionally with the assistance of her mother, bitterly shatters this sexist conceit. Michael is gradually submerging into realm of academia, a path slowly and tragically alienating him from the Bunker family of which he has become an integral part. He is the last to recognize this calamity and does so only when the damage is too great to heal.

Michael, Archie, Edith, and Gloria

Using these four individuals as foils, All in the Family explored issues rarely or never before explored or even discussed on American television. Divorce, menopause, impotence, homosexuality, racism, miscarriages, terrorism, anti-war sentiments, political corruption, feminism, religious bigotry, rape, sexism, breast cancer, misogyny, and a host of other normally taboo topics were handed with all the candor and dignity they deserved.

So long as scholars study cultural history, All in the Family will own a chapter in the textbooks. Now let’s roll the opening credits. Edith and Archie would sing for us.

“Those Were the Days” -- Lee Adams (Lyrics) and Charles Strouse (Music)

Boy the way Glen Miller played

Songs that made the hit parade.

Guys like us we had it made,

Those were the days.

And you knew who you were then,

Girls were girls and men were men,

Mister we could use a man

Like Herbert Hoover again.

Didn't need no welfare state,

Everybody pulled his weight.

Gee our old LaSalle ran great.

Those were the days.