Reviews in American History

In November 1972, CBS television broadcast two episodes of a sitcom in which the main character, a 47-year-old grandmother, wrestled with her choices following her unexpected pregnancy, and finally decided to terminate it. This abortion storyline in Maude aired two months before the Roe v. Wade decision, but took place in New York, where abortion was already legal. The episodes prompted a firestorm of protests. Catholics marched on CBS's New York headquarters and blockaded the limousine of the network's vice chairman; two local affiliates refused to air the episodes; and the executive director of a group called Stop Immorality in TV—headed by, among others, Phyllis Schlafly—decried Maude and similar shows for assaulting "the family's basic sense of decency" and holding up "morality, decency, devotion to God, family, duty and country" to "mockery and laughter" (p. 92). It would be almost four decades before a main character on a television show would again go through with an abortion.

Maude's showrunner was Norman Lear, the brilliant and provocative auteur behind All in the Family (and later, Sanford and Son, Good Times, and The Jeffersons, among other shows). L. Benjamin Rolsky, in The Rise and Fall of the [End Page 605] Religious Left, argues that Lear is an underappreciated figure in the culture wars and an astute interpreter of the religious right. Rolsky believes that scholars have not given enough attention to the liberal countermovements that arose in opposition to the Christian Right, and he focuses in part on Lear and the organization he founded, People for the American Way, to correct this imbalance. His book is one of several recent works that demonstrate the centrality of mass media, both liberal and conservative, to the story of the culture wars.

Rolsky uses Lear as a case study to examine the ways in which the medium of television became a contested political space. The book focuses on the "religious left," which, in Rolsky's formulation, included many varieties of ecumenical liberals. Lear, in his telling, exemplifies the interfaith activism of Americans who tried to resist the Christian Right. By urging tolerance, the separation of church and state, and civic engagement, Lear and other members of the spiritual left wanted to mobilize their fellow citizens against those who had a narrower, more exclusionary view of Americanism.

Lear, who was a non-religious but spiritual Jew, grew up in Connecticut during the Depression listening to the hate-filled radio speeches of the notorious anti-Semite Father Charles Coughlin. After flying more than fifty missions in the European theater in World War II, Lear returned to the United States and entered the television industry. By the late 1960s, he had grown disappointed with the escapist fare on the nation's networks. He resolved to produce a show with contemporary relevance, one that would help Americans grapple with and perhaps resolve their fears and hatreds. In All in the Family, which debuted in 1971, Lear tried to create a televisual space that would serve as an alternative to televangelists' sermons—an electronic classroom where Americans could gather to learn about liberal values. Archie Bunker, the bigoted patriarch of the family, was put forward as a figure of ridicule to make viewers think hard about their own prejudices and intolerance. At the same time, Lear tried to create some audience empathy for Archie by showing him as a product of...