 I'm delighted that we have Oscar Wim Wienberg here with us today to share some of his work on all of the family. Oscar Wienberg holds a PhD in history from Abo Academy University. He's working on a political history of television entertainment in the 1970s United States. His work focuses on mass media and modern political history and has appeared in PS political science and politics European Journal of American Studies and thinks tids grift. And now here's where we're going to run up against the limits of my finish. He's a columnist for please Oscar, could you say it? That place. Yes. And has written for venues such as Made by History at the Washington Post, Vasa Bladet, and the Public Broadcasting Corporation in Finland. So take it away Oscar. Thank you. And I do want to start by noting that I would have loved to actually be in Boston for this, but I'm really happy that at least we have the virtual options nowadays. So I want to start by congratulating you all at MIT. I know that you just unionized. So congratulations on that, the grad students. And also I know that tomorrow is the thesis presentation day. So congratulations on making it that far in the semester as well. So I'm just going to start sharing my screen here and go to the presentation. So my dissertation and my work is focused on all in the family, but it's really a bigger story about television entertainment and politics in the 1970s and beyond. And so today I'm going to focus on under the title of Archie Bunker Goes to Washington, on how television remade politics into entertainment in this era and the implications for American politics of this transformation. And so for the talk today, I'm going to start by giving the sort of structures of broadcasting that you need to know and understand for this story to make sense. And then we'll move into the political structures that enables television to have this huge influence in the 1970s. And then we'll get into the campaigns and how all in the family and television entertainment was changing. American politics will go through electoral campaigns, then into legislative campaigns and end up with grassroots campaigns and then some conclusions at the end of that. So to start off, we need to understand how broadcasting worked and looked in 1970s United States. And so by the end of the 60s, television was in something of a paradigm shift in the middle of a paradigm shift. Les Brown, the television writer, noted that the established systems was seriously troubled by economic uncertainty, harassment from Washington and the threats of new technology. So this is the last decade of what television historians have called the network era that stretches up until the late 70s. And what we mean by that term is, of course, that the three television networks, CBS, NBC and then the perennial loser, ABC, really dominated all broadcasting. And although they only were allowed to own and operate five stations, they really dominated the National Association of Broadcasters and thus the whole industry. But as the case is, the affiliate stations, of course, is the first sale that the networks make. They're selling the programs to the affiliate stations and the affiliate stations then are running it nationally. So there's always, I feel, a need to highlight the role of the affiliate stations in this. And often they also had interests, even if their economic interests trumped any political interests. But then the third part that is critical to understanding this story is the role of independent producers in the 1970s. And this is not just as it often is told, it's a story about Norman Lear being extremely powerful, vis-à-vis the networks because of the success of his shows, not just All in the Family, which was the most popular show on television for five consecutive years. But he also had top 10 hits such as Sanford and Son and Maude Goodtimes later on the Jeffersons, one day at a time. He was really printing cash for CBS in the 1970s. But it's not just the story of Norman Lear being a genius in television production. It's more a story of structures again. So in the 1970s you just have new regulatory action from the FCC, which has pushed through what was called often the Westinghouse rule, which included two distinct regulations. So the first one and the most important in this context was the financial interest and syndication rule. The second one was the prime time access rule, but both intended to circumscribe the influence of the networks to reshape broadcasting. And the importance of the financial interest and syndication rules was that it limited the amount the networks were allowed to own of the programs, which enabled independent production companies, such as Grant Tinker and Mary Tyler Moore's MTM Enterprises and Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg's Spelling Goldberg Productions, and pertinent to this talk, especially Norman Lear and Bud York in stand-in productions, enable them to rise to prominence. Indeed, Lear later explained that without the fins and rules, we might never have been able to build a company we built. And this is critical to understand that Lear had a unique position as a producer in relation to the networks, and that enabled him to take certain stands that hadn't been taken before by television entertainers or producers, which is key for the whole story. And so the second thing, of course, is the political structures. Let's see if I can move over to the next slide. So when we get to the 1970s, the New Deal coalition, the coalition that had guaranteed democratic dominance in American politics since the 1930s, and which was, in essence, an economic coalition crumbled under its own weight during the 1960s, especially with the tumult of the civil rights movement. This was a coalition that included in the Democratic Party both racial minorities and the segregationist South. So naturally it sort of crumbled during the 1960s and instead gave way for coalitions built on emotions, identity, and experiences. And along with technological advances, this shift then transformed the United States from a politics of parties to a politics of personality. One could say that it moved from the age of the party machine to the age of the consultant. Now, part of this in terms of the sort of real lived experience of political campaigns is that the nominating process is opened up. So in the 1960s, as late as 1968, Hubert Humphrey was nominated as the Democratic Party candidate for president without having run in a single primary during the year. And after that, the nomination process is opened up and the primaries become much more important, which of course democratizes the process, but also gives a special weight to party activists who are going to volunteer and actually walk around the snowstorms in New Hampshire trying to get people to vote. But it also opens up for media campaigns and turns media into an even more important factor in US politics as you campaign around the nation in state primaries and caucuses. And then the third part of this transformation is a story about fundraising, which especially becomes important in the mid 1970s as the Watergate scandal unravels and Congress moves into try to put limits on fundraising and sort of make it more transparent the system, which again makes individual donors more important, but also in a funny turn of events makes Hollywood more important as the money coming from Hollywood isn't viewed with suspicion or the same suspicion as for example oil money from Texas that fueled Lyndon Johnson's political career. So the historian John Farrell noted that by the time Tip O'Neill rose to Speaker of the House in 1977, in too many places the Democratic Party had been reduced to an organizational shell replaced in its traditional function by television campaign technology and the personal appeal of telegenic candidates. And this is part of this process is why television becomes important. And part of this process is also caused by television. Okay, so at this point, I'm going to show you a little clip of all in the family just to give you a sense of the show if you're not familiar with it from before. Let's see if I can get to the, there we go. Oscar, I think you have to share that specific window, maybe we're still seeing your PowerPoint window, you're still seeing the power slide. Okay, let me hold on and try to make it work. Are you now seeing Archie Bunker? Yes. Okay. So Archie in this clip is meeting his future son-in-law for the first time. This is an early season, but it's a flashback episode where he meets Mike for the first time. Okay, so there you have the origins of that famous phrase of Archie Bunker's calls his son-in-law, a meathead. But I also want to show that clip because it gets to the point of how political all in the family was. And that was really something new in American television. The 60s, the sitcoms of the 60s were more likely to be about flying nuns or talking horses or Andy Griffith walking down to the lake to fish with his son. So all the family represented something completely new in television entertainment and as it became the most popular show on television, it of course saw a bunch of imitators and sort of set the tone of a lot of television entertainment in the 1970s. So as all in the family becomes this phenomenon of television entertainment and as it rises to the top of the ratings and Archie Bunker becomes an icon in American society, politicians start to turn to all in the family and try to figure out how they can use this show, this character to their advantage. And in electoral campaigns, this is a pattern throughout the 1970s and beyond. And the first one to really recognize the power of Archie Bunker is John Lindsay, the liberal, the quintessential limousine liberal mayor of New York, former Republican who in 1972 is going to run for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party. He has a reputation as strong on television. He has a reputation as being able to use celebrity supporters in his campaigns. Robert Moses calls him a matinee idol. Robert Wagner, the former mayor of New York says in a not so veiled reference to Lindsay says, I'm still not a movie star, but then New York is not a movie. And another challenger in New York, Mario Pococchino calls him the actor. And so Lindsay really has this reputation of being a star on television. But what he uses Archie Bunker or Carol O'Connor, the actor, playing the role, what he uses him for in his campaign shows a keen understanding of not just celebrity, but of the show and the character and how you can sort of make political gains on that connection that viewers have with their favorite shows. So Lindsay spokesperson explains that he can't actually endorse him in character, that is Carol O'Connor can't endorse him in the character of Archie Bunker, but he uses some language that will make it recognizable. And indeed Carol O'Connor records these television ads for Lindsay and he explicitly plays on the character. He blurs the lines between himself, the actor, a very liberal actor, one should note, and this very conservative character that he's playing on television. One of the ads, he starts by saying, hello, I'm Carol O'Connor. But then he sort of moves into Archie territory, both in how he speaks and puts a cigar in his mouth. He says, if you are a young American, listen to an old fashioned one. So he's really portraying himself as that beloved character and not as the actor. Now, Martin Nolan, the political journalist noted immediately following these ads that they indeed tell a lot about politics, media manipulation, and American culture. Now, John Lindsay, if anybody is familiar with his 1972 run, knows that it wasn't successful. Indeed, when he told friends he was going to run, one of them said, John, you're going to be a fucking disaster. So Lindsay abandons his campaign after poor showings in Florida and Wisconsin. And many historians have sort of neglected or rejected the importance of Archie Bunker as a part of the politics or the political campaigns by pointing out that this conservative character spoke for the liberal Lindsay and assuming that since Lindsay didn't go far, Archie Bunker clearly wasn't giving any sort of political weight to the campaign. Nixon, however, disagreed and especially Nixon's campaign staff. Dwight Chapin, one of his strategists in the summer of 1972, warned the Nixon campaign in a memo. Liberals created Archie and look at the power Archie has with that segment now. His main concern was the attention and endorsement from the actor could attract, and especially if he used that character as a part of the endorsement. Indeed, Chapin warned in the memo that Carol O'Connor doing McGovern commercials is not an impossibility. And instead, Nixon wanted to get the Archie Bunker endorsement. According to sources, they wanted to paper the country just before the election with photos of Nixon and Archie Bunker shaking hands. But obviously, Carol O'Connor, as I mentioned, was a liberal actor and never even considered endorsing Nixon. What has been lost from the historical record is that he did indeed campaign and make commercials for McGovern in the fall campaign against Richard Nixon. And if we look at the press and how they pay attention to this, we can clearly see that McGovern, who was a shrewd campaigner and had strong connections in Hollywood, Warren Beatty was one of the sort of the ghost in the machine of his 72 campaign. And he had stars from rock musicians to actors and television stars all over his campaign. But he didn't want to use Carol O'Connor as just another big Hollywood star. Instead, he recognized what Lindsay had recognized before him, and that is the sort of working class appeal of the character and the strong connection viewers had with the character. And the press reinforced this. So following the endorsement, the press reported Archie Bunker is casting his vote for McGovern. An associated press headline read Archie Bunker backs McGovern. Political reporter Walter Mears of the AP even highlighted the support of Archie Bunker before that of former vice president and McGovern rival in the primaries, Hubert Humphrey. And in these commercials that O'Connor did, he again plays on his identity and the identity of Archie Bunker. So he starts the ad by saying, hello, I'm Carol O'Connor, a conservative man speaking against radicalism, against the radicalism of the present administration. So even though the support came from the liberal actor, it was a presented as an endorsement by a conservative character. I as a conservative man, O'Connor concluded, I'm going to vote with confidence for Senator George McGovern. Now again, I must stress O'Connor wasn't a conservative man at all. He was a liberal, but he played the most iconic conservative around in 1972. And you see in the outtakes of these advertisements that O'Connor really recognizes the need to play himself as a conservative. One of the outtakes, he exclaims in frustration when he flubs a line, never mind, I got to get the conservative in. And in these 62nd ads recorded, he describes himself as conservative again and again and presents the Nixon administration as an example of radicalism again and again. Now these were broadcast as part of telephones where the candidate answered questions from viewers. And O'Connor's advertisements were hailed as the catchiest one. Now McGovern himself introduced one of them saying, the only thing we ask is that all of you who like Archie Bunker vote for George McGovern and Sergeant Shriver. So you have the candidate himself blurring these lines. Now I'm going to show you here another clip, hopefully the share screening will work fine in this. This is not Lindsay and it's not McGovern, it's a little bit later, it's a Ted Kennedy ad from 1980, but it gets at the same sentiment of how they're using Carol O'Connor in the ads. Friends, Herbert Hoover hid out in the White House too, responding to desperate problems with patriotic pronouncements and we got a hell of a depression. But I'm afraid Jimmy's depression is going to be worse than Herbert's. I'm supporting Senator Kennedy because he's out there facing issues, inflation, sky-high prices and almost worthless dollar unemployment. I trust that Kennedy. I believe in him in every way folks. Kennedy for president. Okay so in that short clip you can see how he tries to get the viewers thinking about all in the family by comparing Jimmy Carter to Herbert Hoover in the opening of all in the family. Archie Bunker sings about how we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again. So he's literally getting the viewer to think about the character as well as well as how he stressed as Archie Bunker in that ad. So these early attempts by Lindsay, by McGovern and later by Kennedy are examples of how candidates who are good at television, who are building their campaigns on television, have strong connections in Hollywood, are familiar with celebrity politics, how they are using all in the family. But it's not just a question of sort of pioneers in show biz politics turning to the character and here we could consider Jimmy Carter to understand the importance of Archie Bunker and the way television entertainment is changing, changing politics. So Jimmy Carter did not care about Hollywood at all. All of his aides talk about how little value he saw in courting stars in Hollywood. But even if Carter did not care about Hollywood, the Democratic Party cared about Hollywood. And Carter himself, when he visited Hollywood for fundraisers at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in 1976, told an audience full of stars such as Sidney Poitierre, Faye Dunaway, and Carol O'Connor that he had a responsibility to bypass the big shots, including people like you. And he didn't want to build his campaign on television stars or movie stars. And yet prominent stars campaigned for the Democratic candidate. Carol O'Connor teamed up with Rob Reiner in public service television advertisements for the voter registration drives of the Democratic Party, where the two the two actors again played the characters from the show and sort of played on the animosity of their characters. Saying like if you if people like you are going to register and vote, I'm going to register and vote just to even the score. And then when Carter comes into the White House, you see during the inauguration weekend, these events celebrating Carter, which again have a very solid emphasis on television. You have performances by Red Fox from Sanford and Son, Freddie Prince from Chico and the Man, and then Gene Stapleton and Carol O'Connor from from all in the family. And indeed, Carter's strategists become convinced that they have found something special in Hollywood and in television and even go so far as kind of naively exclaiming that no one in the White House before has ever treated television as a great American institution. Only months into Carter's tenure, Norman Lear is on the phone to the White House to offer his help to get the Democrat in the White House to sort of use television for his for his own benefit and to make him succeed in in governing. So the electoral campaigns are showing signs of going beyond traditional celebrity politics or show based politics and incorporating the show and playing on the connection of of the show and how the viewers relate to the characters, intentionally blurring the lines between entertainment and news between fact and fiction. The same pattern is evident in legislative campaigns. So here we're going to look at some liberals on Capitol Hill. We're going to look at Peter Odino and Herbert Harris. We're going to look at Frank Church. We're going to look at Holtzman. And their attempts to use the show on Capitol Hill to promote a certain agenda. So Frank Church is really the first member of Congress to turn to all in the family to promote an agenda. So Frank Church is a rather media savvy senator and he serves as the chairman on the committee on aging. And when all in the family features an episode in which Edith, the wife of Archie Bunker finds an old man who has escaped from a nursing home and come and invites him into her house until he can find a permanent permanent residence with his girlfriend. And in fact, the show features explicit debates around the situation of the elderly in the United States. And indeed, the director of the show had experiences with his own mother aging that he wanted to incorporate into the show and make the show tackle an issue of importance and relevance in American life at the moment. So Frank Church then coordinates with the production company and especially with a woman called Virginia Carter who is brought into the production company to handle these sort of political relations. And then he is able to use that connection to promote ideas around aging that he shares with the writers and producers of the show at an elite audience in Washington. So in his role as chairman of the committee on aging, Church invites his colleagues and a selection of high-profile champions for the elderly to an advanced screening of the All in the Family episode in Washington, which is organized in coordination with tandem productions. The guest list included prominent authorities on social security and aging, such as Arthur Fleming, Eisenhower's former secretary of health, education and welfare. There was Jack Osofsky of the National Council on Aging and Edwin Kaskowitz of the Gerontologist Logical Society. And of course the entire committee on aging. And he screens this episode to illustrate in an engaging manner these sort of challenges facing the aging. And following the screening, the senator's staff then requests the script to circulate among members of the committee who missed the event. It was scheduled at the same time as Watergate hearings. So they wanted to make sure everybody's getting the point here. And also making sure that viewers' reactions and viewers' letters to the production company was forwarded to the senator's staff and then circulated among these audiences. And then Church takes to the floor of Congress to praise the episode. And in fact, he says that they made many of the points which the Senate Committee on Aging and I, as its chairman, attempt to make in reports and speeches. And then he highlights some of these saying, the special impact of high food costs upon the elderly, the fact that Medicare covers only 42% of the health care costs of older Americans, and the fact that the average social security benefit is less than the official poverty level. So a very sort of detailed political discussion taking place on primetime, most popular show on television, and then is being used on Capitol Hill. Now, Rodino and Harris, together with Elizabeth Holtzman, who has introduced rape shield legislation in Congress a little bit later in 1977, take a page out of Church's playbook. And they again collaborate with the production company to show an episode, an episode called Edith's 50th birthday, in which the character of Edith Bunker faces a sexual assulter in her house. And they use that show, which generates a lot of attention to promote this rape shield bill that is pending in Congress. So again, they coordinate with Virginia Carter at Tender Productions to organize an advanced screening in Washington that is attended by legislator, advocates, and volunteers at local rape crisis centers. Harris and Rodino also connect with Tender Productions to have Gail Abarbenel, who works at the Santa Monica Rape Treatment Center, and who had sort of consulted on the process of making the episode, speak at this event. And indeed, she praises the episode, saying it's a warm and caring portrayal of the impact of this crime on a victim and her family. And it can stimulate the kind of open discussion of the true nature and ramifications of rape that we have only recently been able to do with breast cancer and similar hidden major problems. Now, at this event, Virginia Carter attends and acknowledged that the intention when they're doing these shows is to entertain you, to make you laugh, to educate you, and make you cry. So again, these legislators are turning to entertainment because of the connection people have, the stories, they know these characters. The experiences of Edith Bunker being threatened with sexual assault in her own house is hitting the audience in a way that hearings in Washington do not necessarily do on a regular basis. And that's why they're turning to a popular entertainment show. Now, we're going to move on to the grassroots campaigns. And here we have Gene Stapleton speaking at an Equal Rights Amendment rally. We're also going to mention Carol O'Connor being part of these events, as well as other television stars such as Valerie Harper from the Marital La Morte show, Alan Aldo of Mash and Ed Asner also of the Marital La Morte show. So when the show premiered in 1971, the character of Edith Bunker was pretty much dismissed in reviews as sort of a dim-witted wife. And even Frances Lear, the feminist wife of the producer Norman Lear, acknowledged that she initially wasn't sure of Edith Bunker at all. And this was a challenge to the writers. The writing room was almost exclusively male at this point. But they wanted to be a part of the conversation and Norman Lear himself identified as a feminist and wanted to make sure that they sort of stay on the women's movement and keep up with with the changes in society. So what he does is he hires Virginia Carter from the National Organization for Women to the production company. She has no experience of television and her role is to make sure that the scripts sort of deal with these subjects in a way that is promotes an agenda. Excuse me. So over the years, Edith Bunker develops into a feminist icon. She refuses to always assume the subservient role. The character finds job outside of the home. She even challenges her husband and asserts herself in the home. And generally critical report on women and minorities on television by the United States Commission on Civil Rights by the end of the 70s acknowledged that Edith Bunker stands up to Archie in defining what is right and wrong. So they start changing that character and how she's written and how she engages on the show with these kinds of issues. And as they does that, the character becomes this icon and indeed Jean Stapleton becomes a political figure in her own right. Now in sharp contrast to Carol O'Connor and Rob Reiner who both came to the show with strong liberal politics, Jean Stapleton described herself as a fairly apolitical person. And talks about already in 1972 talks about or expresses a belief and a hope that her character does not represent the average woman in the United States. But in this environment of liberals and feminists at the production company Stapleton finds herself as a part of the women's movement. And she describes it as finding himself herself in this nest of activists out in LA. And so she became an activist in her own right and indeed a key ally in the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment. And the Equal Rights Amendment is passed by Congress in 1972, sent out to the states for edification and becomes this key political struggle of the 70s and especially something of a cost celebrity for Hollywood liberals. But there is also a swift mobilizing in opposition, most notably by Phyllis Schlafly and the Stop ERA movement. And what the proponents of the ERA recognize early is the value of celebrities. So at these rallies and gatherings, you often find television stars. I've already mentioned Harper and Alda and Asner. There's also from Happy Days, Henry Winkler takes part in these Charlie's Angels Kate Jackson. So these are clearly not very political shows, Happy Days and Charlie's Angels. And yet you have the actors out there campaigning for the amendment. But Jean Stapleton brings something particular to the issue. She brings the character of Edith Bunker. So even if it's a fictional representation, she brings the perspective of a housewife to the movement and is appointed by President Ford and then reappointed by President Carter as a commissioner on the National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year, which gives her even more prominence in these circles. And she carefully researches the issues ahead of interviews. She works with activists and just to get the stuff right because she knows that she's getting opportunities and she's getting media coverage that not everybody has the opportunity to get. She goes on talk shows at rallies. But in stark contrast to Valerie Harper or Carol Burnett, she's able to connect her activity to the character, the beloved character of Edith Bunker. So she usually connects it by talking about the character. She says, of course, Edith Bunker would support ratification of the 27th Amendment to the Constitution because it is a matter of simple justice and Edith is the sole justice. And she even goes as far as doing advertisements in the voice of Edith Bunker. And in contrast with other actors, she refuses on all talk shows to do the Edith voice or appear as Edith. But in these ads for the ERA, she says, as Edith Bunker, I don't have equal rights. As Gene Stapleton's, I don't either. And she talks about being Archie's lovable dingbat on all the family and saying that it's not a it's not a laughing matter to be treated like a second-class citizen and promotes the ERA in person and in advertisements. And again, she's using that not necessarily as a Hollywood actress, but as the character. So some conclusions from this and how this is changing U.S. politics. Now, of course, McGovern didn't win in 1972. Frank Church didn't succeed in his crusade for bold new welfare legislation, and the feminists fighting for the ERA also face defeat. So clearly, all in the family isn't some sort of a magic silver bullet that will just change politics or convince voters. But what it does instead is that it changes politics as it engages, educates, promotes, mobilizes and organizes not only voters, but legislators and indeed donors as well. And in this way, it sort of changes how television works and promotes these changes to the structures of politics, of the way campaigns work, of the way institutions work, and of the ways campaigns work. So you have this change that is making show politics into some sort of show business, where it's dependent on the same consumer demands. It's getting media driven, celebrity or personality focused. It's getting to be demands of entertainment in politics of itself. And you see this as well with with the Watergate hearings where you have people calling into the networks and suggesting that bring back John Dean or some other witness, or you could change a storyline here or there, that the lines that divide politics from entertainment are rapidly blurring in the 1970s. And part of the reason they are blurring is because politicians and actors, producers, are intentionally blurring them to promote their agenda, to promote their candidates, and to promote their legislation. So at this point, I want to thank you all for following along and invite you to come with questions. Thank you. We usually do applause at the end, but we'll do it right now. In particular, I didn't mention this in the beginning, but Oscar is in Finland and he's doing this from midnight to 1.30 in the morning. So thank you so much for that. Do we have any questions? I've got like a dozen questions on my notepad here, but I don't want to take over. Do we have any questions lined up out there besides mine? Ready to go? I do have one from Ed Schapa, who was not able to attend today, but he wrote ahead. And I'm going to read it to you. He says, I'm sorry, I'm unable to attend your talk, but I wanted to ask about the causal claim embedded in this sentence from your abstract, very specific. Television entertainment in the 1970s thereby remade political life and its image paving the way for our current moment of mediated show biz politics. That's the quotation. And Ed asks, I wonder what you make of Neil Postman's theoretical argument in amusing ourselves to death that it is the epistemology of television that is the enabling agent here. That is, it is the medium itself that turns us into spectators and content into entertainment. The three TV shows you mentioned, I think he's referencing all the family mash and Mary Tyler Moore show, are symptoms of a much larger historical phenomenon, one that Lance Strait has updated for the digital age in his work, amazing ourselves to death, Neil Postman's brave new world revisited. Well, I would say that that that's a great question. And it brings up these sort of larger, larger questions around entertainment and how these developments come. And I guess at a media seminar, Marshall McLuhan is going to pop up at some point, but the question of whether the medium is the message and and stuff like this. I would say that in my research, what I've found is that we should pay attention to these structures. And especially as Michael Shudson notes that the power of television does not come from the technology of television. It comes from this conviction of people in Washington that television matters. And this is something that I go into more detail in the dissertation is that with all in the family, these conversations around television entertainment move from the television pages and from the talk shows into the op ed pages. And you see people engaging with television. I'm talking here about political elites engaging with television because they become convinced. And it's also, you know, the third person effect in that they become convinced not that we are falling for all in the family or like we are manipulated by entertainment, but it's always the other people like the common people are very susceptible to these appeals of entertainment. So I guess my my answer would be that I would point at these individual actors and individual campaigns that are turning to to entertainment television and how they reckon with the power of television rather than finding the explanations in the medium itself. Especially as we look at the 1970s, which is clearly a transformation period in this larger sort of transformation that he's referencing. So I mean, do you see all in the family is signaling a kind of sea change in so far as people are thinking about the effects of television in positive terms, as opposed to strictly negative it makes children violent towards attention spans. And also outside of I mean, I think that previously the way that TV was spoken of in positive terms was often around a kind of notion of uplift of artistic, you know, if you could get more opera and and more Picasso on TV, unless my mother the car, the common whipping boy of people who hate TV in the 50s and 60s, that we could elevate the taste standards of Americans, this sort of thing, or even some of the things that you've made up points to in the bass, waistline speech. Do you think all in the family is a kind of pivot text for that new way of conceptualizing TV in a positive light? Well, I would say yes, yes, in many ways. And this is something that you see with with all in the family and the talent more show and then matters as they gain popularity is that you see more and more attention. If television was seen as low brow before you get this idea of quality television, this especially refers to the MTM enterprises and their productions, not just Mary Tyler Moore, but also Bob Newhart show and other shows like that, in that cultural elites try to make a sort of separation between the low brow of television and then this quality television to sort of make it acceptable for themselves. And this is something that is also critical in the development of PBS at the same time period. So I would say that it's very important in that it allows it allows a broader public to view it as sort of respectable and to watch television. And a lot of this is driven by cultural elites, by cultural critics who are making exceptions for these kind of shows. And I should also note that the early conversation, the earliest conversations around all in the family focus almost exclusively on the issue of prejudice and the question of whether this bigoted character is making it better in the US by ridiculing prejudices and racism, or if he's making it acceptable to engage in such behavior in such language. And so there is this conversation about, oh my god, what is this show doing to our society as well. But it soon becomes so popular that the conversation sort of shifts to wait a minute. If everybody's embracing this and like falling for it, how can we as politician or political actors make it work for our benefit. And that takes us to Nixon. I'm just going to remind people in our attendee group that you can type in questions into the chat for us. I mean, what you were just saying about this sort of initial concerns about is this making bigotry more acceptable, or is this appealing to conservatives, not just to liberals and so on, brings me back to the part of the talk where you talk about Nixon seriously considering could this guy, could Carol O'Connor do advertisements for me. And I mean, of course, he would do anything to get elected pretty much. But is he, does he understand, do you mind, does he understand it's satire, but he'd just think, well, most people aren't going to get that because they're not as smart as I am, they'll be fooled. But he sees that it's satirizing conservatives, right? Right. And Nixon sees it. And indeed, Nixon comes across all in the family sort of by happenstance. He's watching a ball game and it's rained out and they're airing a rerun of all in the family. And that's where you get this famous tape because obviously he was recording every conversation in the Oval Office. But you get this tape that has been shared on social media and other sort of venues, where he rants about the show because it makes the hard hat Archie that is look bad. And also in his view, it glorifies homosexuality. It's a show where Archie's very sort of masculine and viral friend is revealed to be gay. And much of the scholarly conversation on Nixon and all in the family has sort of focused only on this conversation where he's angry and his aides, especially Haldeman and Ehrlichman are sort of playing on his anger and agreeing and talking about like one of them has been following the show and says that this is a theme like they're making fun of you and your supporters on this show. But then the other conversations Nixon had about the show sort of tend to have been fallen out of the historical record. And I found that the most interesting ones are conversations he has with aides about the show where he's actually laughing at Archie Bunker and he's laughing at Norman Lear. And here it's reason to remember that Nixon had very close friendships in Hollywood, especially with the conservative comedy producer Paul Keyes, who he had a relationship going back to the 62 campaign. And apparently in conversation with Keyes and other friends in Hollywood, he has become convinced by 1972 has become convinced that even though the producers are out to get him and ridicule him, it's not working. It's backfiring. So he's drawing on this public conversation that rages throughout 1971 about whether the show, the agenda of ridiculing bigotry is working or not. And as he becomes convinced of this, he indeed starts to hail Archie Bunker and see him as an endorsement of his publics and somebody who makes it acceptable or even popular to espouse the values of Nixon's silent majority and hold them in one conversation. I think it's Haldeman even exclaims that Archie Bunker is the best advertisement we could have ever done. So that's why and that's how Nixon comes to embrace Archie Bunker and then why they attempt so strongly make an attempt to win over Carol O'Connor. And indeed, again, drawing on those connections in Hollywood tries to pressure O'Connor to endorse Archie Bunker, to endorse Richard Nixon. I mean, bless you for finding all the references to All in the Family in the Nixon recordings. And you're absolutely right. Most people point to that one comment about the gay character who briefly appears on that one episode of the show and have no idea that there are other moments when All in the Family comes up in these White House discussions. This is kind of amazing. I'll just put in a plug for the experimental documentary, R. Nixon, which uses that audio to great effect in this terrific film. I wonder if you could talk more about John Lindsay and why his campaign failed. Is it because it's too early in the rise of this celebrity politics and the shift that you're talking about post-68 and the political machine to the sort of age of the consultant and the politics of party, the politics of personalities, you put it. Because on the one hand, from a strictly political perspective on paper, of course, Lindsay should have lost because he couldn't control the unions in New York. And in other words, he had made mistakes in New York City that showed that he wasn't qualified to be president, perhaps. But on the other hand, if celebrity had already become this so important, which I think it had, that was part of how he got elected because he was just really handsome and people compared him to the Kennedys all the time. Robert Moses, who at that point must have been maybe a hundred years old, you can imagine his horror that this matinee idol, as he put it, was mayor and so on. So, especially with Carol O'Connor actually doing ads for him, I'm not saying that would be enough to carry him into the White House, but he really got wiped in Florida and I guess also in Wisconsin. And should he not have done better or really just that this is too early and he's like a prototype that failed and then we have these other versions of this new invention that win. Well, I think there's two sort of main factors to consider. And the first one is that John Lindsay is joining the Democratic Party in 1971. Only months before he announces his campaign for the nomination of president, he's joining the party that he wants to lead in effect. And this means that he is almost entirely reliant on television. He doesn't have the infrastructure within the party to build a campaign. And I do think that even as entertainment and television has become important by 1972, we're not talking 2016, you're not able to sort of springboard a television image into a successful campaign. And also, if we're drawing the sort of comparison to 2016, the parties are still much stronger in 1972. So he really needs those sort of the infrastructure within the party and he doesn't have that. So that's, I think, one of the key reasons of his facility. And then the other part is that he's really running in a field that's fairly crowded already. And he's running to be the liberal candidate, which means that he's facing McGovern, he's facing Shirley Chisholm. And then you have more sort of mainstream Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie. And the main interest for much of the liberals is finding the one champion who can guarantee that George Wallace isn't going to be a factor in determining who the eventual nominee is. So I think this also hurts his attempt to sort of springboard himself into the nomination via television in that people who might have been convinced by his campaign in another context now are worried. And he comes in only in Florida. So McGovern has sort of head start as of being the liberal standard bearer. And I think this plays into the failure as well. Thanks. That's really helpful. I mean, especially, well, there's a lot of interesting things in there, but just the kind of notion that the city political machines are receding faster than the party machines. So that you can be a or just movie star, etc., whatever. But if the, as a newcomer to the Democratic Party, you couldn't pull it off on that front. We have a question in the chat from Michael Sokola, who asks, why do the political parties institutionally approach hot button politics via entertainment TV, seeking to co-op them so differently in the early 1970s and the late 1960s? It seems like a very quick turnaround in sensibility. It does. And indeed, it does even within like the company of CVS. So in the late 1960s, you have Robert Wood coming in as the new president and fairly quickly engages in the confrontation of the Smothers Brothers comedy hour where the Smothers Brothers, well, they did work with, but they're also driving a radical politics in the views of Wood. And it ends up with him not only canceling the show, but firing the Smothers Brothers. And I think they eventually sue and win the case. But that's late 1960s. And then only two years later, you have this, this very radical show on television and Wood is being hailed as this genius for bringing it to the air and to CVS. So that is indeed a very fast turnaround just within CVS. And I, the reason television historians has written a lot about this and the reasons are in particular this recognition that you need to find the right kind of audience, not the biggest possible audience. So this change in the business model where you're recognizing the advertising world doesn't necessarily value a senior citizen living on social security the same as they value a young affluent suburbanite. So this makes the change possible within television. And then the political parties in the late 60s are sort of hesitant, I think, to engage directly, especially with these variety shows, the Smothers Brothers, but also Laughin because they're so unpredictable. And then you have Nixon in the 68 campaign going on Laughin, which Hubert Humphrey doesn't dare to and avoids it. And the reason Nixon does it is because his old buddy Paul Keys is the producer of Laughin. And so in that way, it's a very safe environment for him to sort of experiment with new forms. And then I think the Democrats just become really sort of shut out of television by Nixon. He's very eager to do press conferences or other things like televised addresses and use up that airtime because he's the president. So in the early 70s, Democrats are almost forced to find new ways of attracting media attention because the doors to the broadcasters are pretty much shut on them. And this is something that they fight in the courts as well on whether or not they have the right to equal time or to reply when the president makes televised addresses and so forth. So I would say that the change is rapid both within broadcasting and politics, but it also reflects this reality of new innovations in broadcasting and then within the political world needs to find new avenues to get airtime and media attention. Yeah, I think I would add to that the town halls that Nixon did as he was campaigning where they're very tightly stage managed and controlled and they were sort of feeding him the questions and the Democrats were kept out. And instead of running campaign, he did campaign ads, of course, too, but he was doing his own sort of homemade TV shows. And why did he do that? Because his media guy, Roger Ailes, suggested that this would be a really great way to promote himself. And we can continue from that. Again, going back to sort of point about television being important because important people think television is important. The publication of selling of the president, which makes the case that it's really these very choreographed television productions that is the reason Nixon wins the election. Now, you can argue about whether that's the case or not. But the fact that this book by Joe McGinnis makes that case and becomes so popular means that television becomes all important in the eyes of the strategists the same way that Nixon's conviction in 1960 that he lost the election because of television becomes this thriving factor in how he uses television in 68. So it doesn't really matter how it was. It matters how they perceived it have been. Right, right. That's a really good way to put it. I mentioned Roger Ailes in particular to point to the relevance of this work to later developments and what you indicate in thinking about the rise of showbiz politics and so on. But I wonder if you could bring us up to the present in certain ways. We have a question in the chat. Do you think TV has become nowadays is from Aguinaldo Mello overheated in McLuhan's terms of hot versus cold? In other words, McLuhan saw TV as a cool medium. And he's suggesting that maybe it is now a hot medium in light of recent elections being defined by the influence of other media as well. And the question is getting at what TV had in the 70s that it doesn't have now. So you could talk a bit about McLuhan if you want. But it's also just an opportunity to bring us from 1972 up to the last couple of presidential elections and to think about the long-term implications of this research that you're doing. Right. Well, I think that something that's important to note right away is, of course, that television when you move out of the network era, you have so many more outlets and so many more hours to fail. And as it's profit-driven, you look at how are you going to fill these hours and especially as 60 minutes makes television news profitable. And you get executives demanding that television news is to be profitable and how that changes that industry. So by the 1990s, you have a fairly insightful, I think, commentary in the New York Times that these shows of crossfire and I'm blanking on the name of one of the other ones, the McClough group, that these shows and the concept is familiar to all of us, I think, where you have talking heads pushing the liberal side and the conservative side. And then they, in heated exchanges, engage in these often cultural war issues. They're fairly cheap to produce compared to running a news business and having the infrastructure of correspondence and so forth. And my point of the insightful New York Times point is that they recognize that this is all in the family of today. We've only changed Archie Bunker into Pat Buchanan, but they're still like the same sort of conflict is now proliferating within television news and not just television entertainment. And the same thing with somebody like, you know, Rush Linbaugh is also compared fairly frequently in the late 80s and early 90s to Archie Bunker in moves conversation. And then of course, as we go into the 2000s, you have another person who has been frequently linked to Archie Bunker and that is Donald Trump, who performs this role of reactionary voice on television. And Trump makes this very clear that it's not a question of just liberals, conservatives are as eager to use television, even as they can bash television for showing Ellen coming out of the closet in the 1990s, or Dan Quayle criticizing Murphy Brown for having a baby without a father. The same conservative politicians, Newt Gingrich, your Rudy Giuliani, your Bob Dole, are making cameo appearances on television shows to sort of heighten their appeal. So this development is a development where the arena is growing bigger and it's even more important to be in the arena. And I think the last 20 years are showing us just how important it is to be constantly engaging with the sort of the culture war issues that keeps coming up. And then to the question briefly on what 1970s television had that TV today doesn't have, I think one of the key differences is, of course, the case of independent companies that enabled Lear to engage these shows because he was so important for the network that he really, really enjoyed unique leeway. And even prominent producers like Carl Reiner couldn't have the same influence, or like the permission to engage issues in the same way, which we saw with the new Dick Dykes show. So that's one thing. And then the other thing is the immediacy of All In The Family. So they're writing the episodes and weeks later they're shown to a third of the population. That's something that I connect strongly with the success of All In The Family outside of television, the success sort of in the culture, in the politics. And of course today, the production time of scripted television entertainment is so much longer and the audience is so much smaller that you can't necessarily reach beyond the show in the way that Norman Lear and All In The Family was able to do. And instead you get a situation where Fox News, 99% of Americans are not watching Fox News on any given Sunday. And yet it's able to be such an important factor in political conversations because of how outrageously it engages the issues and then sort of forces political journalists to take it seriously and thus inflates its role in American politics today. And then, you know, if something quite outrageous or when something inevitably quite outrageous happens on Fox News, it's going to be recirculated in pieces via social media in ways that are harder to count than the viewing audience of Fox, so that we can't always just say, well, there's X number of people watching Fox. And therefore, you know, if that number of people doesn't vote for this candidate, like you can't, those causal relationships are always difficult. But when you can't actually chart all of the circulation of that material because it goes beyond TV, it makes it very hard to gauge to gather data and to kind of figure out what's going on, right? Right. And that's, even the clip I showed of All In The Family, it was uploaded by the production company. So even today, like pushing these old shows onto YouTube and thus reaching audiences again and again. And the sort of infrastructure, the media infrastructure has changed so enormously since the 1970s that the conversations, and you, of course, see this on shows that they're very aware of how they can reach beyond the actual show. And especially, you know, variety shows or talk shows, where they're clearly pushing certain costs from the shows on to social media. And I'm thinking here of something like Late Night with Seth Meyers, where you have the closer look become a phenomenon, or you have Jordan Klepper doing those Trump rally interviews become a phenomenon separate from the actual broadcast show. Yeah. And I mean, it's great to bring up Late Night because then you get into, circles back to what you're saying about production time changing and how, you know, scripted shows, production time has gotten so much longer. So how do you respond to contemporary events and be immediately salient? Whereas Late Night because of the constant churn of production can pull in things that immediately as they happen and put them out. And, you know, in entertainment, the only example I can think of that would be even close to that would be South Park, where they can actually really get stuff on the show right away, not always too great a fact. And it's not always smart when it's smart, it's very smart. But they can be because the production is so cheap and kind of quickly generated because of the kind of animation they're doing. They can sort of be on top of new things happening much more quickly than almost any other show. And last we're running out of time, but I just wanted to say like we started to get at issues that were thinking about all the family specifically in the context of the TV industry and changes and so on. And so first there's like the issue of production time changing and turnaround of episodes. There's the issue of ownership and just like regulations that enable independent production companies to exist. And without those regulations, the companies don't exist. So that, you know, now the only the closest thing to an independent TV production company that, you know, owns its own product is basically Dick Wolf, who I don't think most of us would think of as a scrappy little independent along the lines of MTM, but he owns all of his shows, right? And the third thing I would just say, and this gets us into like genre issues and the kind of into the weeds of TV studies in a certain way, is just thinking about changes in the sitcom and the kind of not just like the rise of the reality, but just thinking about the move from episodic to seriality within comedy, right? Not just within drama, which is the most obvious go to. And just pointing to like the fact that Edith or conceptualizations of Edith, you know, sort of shifted over the life of the series points to something that that was happening that was sort of radical, even as on the surface, the show had a reset every week, like every episodic sitcom did every week. And I think we could also point to the Mary Tyler Moore show doing a similar kind of thing, where I'm just noting that by season three, the characters, the characters are evolving so much and Mary is become like they're dealing with the fact that she's the only woman who works in the newsroom explicitly, pretty often. And she learns that the previous producer in her position got $50 less a week in, you know, 1972 is a lot of money than she did. And her boss Lou Grant says it's because you're a woman, you know, and that like that is a change in the political orientation or shift in the orientation of the series. That is both overt and subtle at the same time. So anyway, if we put all the family in sort of context of the history of genre and it even adds another really interesting complicated layer to what we're what you're talking about. Absolutely. And all in the family and the Mary Tyler Moore show, the Mary Tyler Moore show actually premieres a couple of months earlier than all in the family. And there's always over the 1970s, there's this understanding that these two shows represent sort of both represent quality television, but different forms of quality television, whether Mary Tyler Moore show is perhaps less directly engaging in somebody would say that all in the family is this shouting version of the Mary Tyler Moore show that everything is, is as Norman Lear would say, living at the top of our lungs and the end of our nerves. And that distinction is important. But on the family also, obviously, as popular show on television, it gets all of these imitators and also spin offs that the tandem productions are able to to produce and sell. But I would say that it's important also to look at like developments in production techniques. So what Norman Lear is doing is, for example, doing it on videotape because it's cheaper or the way he's going back to an earlier era of multi camera shows or or the way they're doing to sort of run throughs and then cutting the show out of that. So bringing sort of the the stage tradition back to television. And these these innovations linger. And then as we get into the 21st century, you can see this again, the same pattern with something like the office, then having this enormous influence on these mockumentary type shows. And it's not just a question of popularity. It's also a question of like, how is this working on our bottom line? Like, what are we? Why are we turning to these innovations? And how are we benefiting from doing it? So I think always when we're talking about television, it's really important to keep in mind like people are are getting the main point of this is to sell soap, right? And people are getting money. All right, well, we've we've now hit our 630 threshold, like a TV show, it's time to sign off. Thank you so much again, Oscar. And thank you all of our graduate students for coming and our outside attendees and so on. It was great. And thanks again. Thank you all.