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Archie Bunker burst on-screen snorting and bellowing about "spades" and "spics" and "that tribe." He decried miniskirts, "bleeding heart" churchmen, food he couldn't put ketchup on and sex during daytime hours. He bullied his "dingbat" wife Edith and bemoaned his "weepin' Nellie atheist" daughter Gloria. Above all, he clashed with his liberal, long-haired son-in-law Mike Stivic, a "Polack pinko meathead" living in the Bunker household while working his way through college.
No matter that Archie tripped up on his own testiness and lost most of his arguments. He mentioned what had previously been unmentionable on TV. As played by Carroll O'Connor, he was daringly, abrasively, yet somehow endearingly funny.
With his advent, a mass-media microcosm of Middle America took shape, and a new national hero—or was it villain?—was born. It was not long before more than 50 million people were tuning in to Archie's tirades each week, making Family the highest-rated series on TV.
Yorkin and Lear repackaged excerpts from Family as an LP album and a book of Bunkerisms. Archie Bunker T shirts and beer mugs appeared. Well before Archie received a vote for the vice presidency at this summer's Democratic Convention, Columnist William S. White revealed that Washington politicos were talking about a "Bunker vote," reflecting a lower-middle-class mood of anger and resentment at a tight economy and loose permissiveness. In the White House, Richard Nixon watched an episode in which Archie's attack on "airy fairies" was blunted by the discovery that one of Archie's pals, an ex-football star, was homosexual. "That was awful," said Nixon. "It made a fool out of a good man."
Fool? Good man? Yorkin and Lear soon learned what it might have felt like to be Cadmus, the legendary Greek who sowed dragon's teeth only to see them spring up from the ground as armed men fighting each other. From the dragon's teeth of Archie's vocabulary, the producers reaped a crop of ethnic spokesmen, psychologists and sociologists, all armed with studies and surveys and battling each other over whether Family lampooned bigotry or glorified it. The debate seemed rather top-heavy for such light humor, but that was precisely the issue: whether Family was not all the more dangerous because it made bigotry an occasion for cozy chuckles and portrayed Archie as an overgrown boy, naughty but ultimately harmless.