Archie Bunker's America

IN JANUARY 1971, a new sitcom called All in the Family appeared on CBS television. Its central figure was Archie Bunker, a white, working-class, World War II veteran from the Astoria section of Queens. The show’s humor derived from Bunker’s poorly articulated bigotry and resentment against the social changes of the 1960s—feminism, the counterculture, youth and antiwar activism, legalized abortion, expanded roles for minorities, open homosexuality—and his confrontations with those new forces in his own family and neighborhood. The sitcom was one of the first to deal openly with such controversial topics, and it struck such a chord with American viewers that it was the number-one rated show for the first five of its eight years on the air.