Friday A/V Club: He wasn’t really the character created by the late Norman Lear. But the advertisers did all they could to obscure that.
Archie Bunker, the slur-spewing outer-borough dad on the CBS sitcom All in the Family, was probably the most famous character to be created by Norman Lear, the TV writer/producer who died this week at age 101. People remember Archie as a reactionary, but did you know he backed that liberal lion Ted Kennedy for president?
OK, so strictly speaking that’s actor Carroll O’Connor, not the character he played on the show. But the folks who shot that spot during the 1980 Democratic primaries did everything they could to suggest this was Archie Bunker speaking to voters. If you doubt that, look at the clapperboard at the start of the video—it says “Green Archie A,” not “Green Carroll A.”
Here’s what historian Rick Perlstein wrote about the Bunker pitch in his 2020 book Reaganland:
Carroll O’Connor played Archie Bunker on All in the Family, a character intended by his creator, Norman Lear, to represent the quintessential ignorant, racist working-class clown. Ironically, however, white working-class men adopted Archie as a hero. In 1972, some sported “Archie for President” buttons. O’Connor’s commercials for Ted Kennedy deliberately played to this misreading, in an attempt to reach out to white ethnics in the outer boroughs. Sporting an Archie-like canvas jacket, sounding far more Queens-like than he usually did off-camera, O’Connor fixed the viewer’s gaze and said, “Friends, Herbert Hoover hid out in the White House, too, responding to desperate problems with patriotic pronouncements. And we got a helluva depression. But I’m afraid Jimmy’s depression is gonna be woise than Herbert’s….I trust Ted Kennedy. I believe in him. In every way, folks.”
Dyed-in-the-wool All in the Family fans might be puzzled by those Hoover references, given that Archie used to open every episode by singing the line “Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.” But then again, this was 1980, and by that time All in the Family had mutated into Archie Bunker’s Place and the opening theme had become an instrumental. And those blue-collar Democrats that the ad was aimed at would’ve backed Franklin Roosevelt over Hoover anyway (or their parents did).
O’Connor cut another Kennedy commercial (“Green Archie B”) that was slightly more explicit about the fact that this was an actor speaking (“I’ve seen some oddities, offstage as well as on”). Yet another advertisement featured O’Connor/Bunker declaring that “Carter equals Reagan equals Hoover equals Depression.” Contrast those with the TV ad that O’Connor cut for New York Mayor John Lindsay’s presidential campaign in 1972: In that one, O’Connor wears a tie, identifies himself by name, doesn’t put on a Queens accent, and—maybe most importantly—backs a candidate who never had a shot at the Archie Bunker vote.
Oh, and about those “Archie for President” buttons: When the Democrats picked a vice-presidential nominee at their 1972 convention, one delegate did vote for Archie Bunker. Another one voted for Chairman Mao. I’m telling you folks, the Democratic coalition was wider back then.
(For past installments of the Friday A/V Club, go here. For another edition involving a Norman Lear show—specifically Good Times—go here. Ron Jones wrote an essay that Lear’s company adapted into an after-school special called The Wave; to see Jones complain that Lear’s team turned his anarchist warning into a reassuring liberal fable, go here.)
