Missionary Renegade: Democracy Now! Daily Digest: A Daily Independent Global News Hour with Amy Goodman & Juan González for Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Democracy Now! Daily Digest: A Daily Independent Global News Hour with Amy Goodman & Juan González for Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Democracy Now! Daily Digest: A Daily Independent Global News Hour with Amy Goodman & Juan González for Tuesday, October 25, 2016
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Tom Hayden (1939-2016) on Vietnam War: We Must Challenge the Pentagon on the Battlefield of Memory

Legendary civil rights and antiwar activist Tom Hayden died Sunday in Santa Monica, California, after a lengthy illness. He was 76 years old. Hayden spent decades shaping movements against war and for social justice. In the early 1960s, he was the principal author of the Port Huron Statement, the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS. The statement advocated for participatory democracy and helped launch the student movement of the 1960s. In 1968, Tom Hayden became one of the so-called Chicago 8 and was convicted of crossing state lines to start a riot after he helped organize protests against the Vietnam War outside the Democratic National Convention. For more, we air a speech Tom Hayden gave last year at a conference in Washington, D.C., titled "Vietnam: The Power of Protest."

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Legendary antiwar activist Tom Hayden died Sunday in Santa Monica, California, after a lengthy illness. He was 76 years old. Tom Hayden spent decades shaping movements against war and for social justice. In the early '60s, was the principal author of the Port Huron Statement, the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS. The statement advocated participatory democracy and helped launch the student movement of the ’60s. Tom Hayden was also a Freedom Rider in the Deep South and helped create a national poor people's campaign for jobs and empowerment. He also organized in Newark, New Jersey; among his books, Rebellion in Newark: Official Violence and Ghetto Response. In 1968, Tom Hayden became one of the so-called Chicago 8. He was convicted of crossing state lines to start a riot after he helped organize protests against the Vietnam War outside the Democratic National Convention. In 1982, Hayden entered electoral politics, first winning a seat in the California State Assembly, later in the California Senate.

We turn now to a speech Tom Hayden gave last year at a conference in Washington, D.C., titled "Vietnam: The Power of Protest."

TOM HAYDEN: I want to start off by saying how many of you I love very much and known for such a long time, and I only hope that there’s enough minutes and occasions here for us to get to know each other again, because we have really been through a lifetime. Today, we’ll have plenty of time for discussion, for panels, for observations. And at 4:00, we’ll gather to march to the King Memorial. And I want to just say a word about that. I know that Ron Dellums is going to speak to this.

But why was that—why was that chosen? It’s because, in keeping with trying to make sure our history is told accurately, we have to tell it ourselves. And we have to recognize that Dr. King became a martyr because of his stand on Vietnam, not only because of his stand on race, justice, economic poverty. And there’s been a tendency over the many decades to make Dr. King a monument to nonviolence alone, and we need to remember that he was attacked by The New York Times and by The Wall Street Journal and by The Washington Post for being out of place. They wanted to put him back in his place and say nothing about Vietnam, take no stand on Vietnam. There were threats that he would lose funding. There were threats of all sorts. And to distort that, to forget that, to ignore that, his monument would be shaped in a certain way to serve certain interests, but not others, is a disservice to truth. And we have to march there and vigil there and commemorate him as a leader and a martyr for all of us, for peace, justice and civil rights, not only in the United States, but around the world, and persist in making sure that his whole story, including the campaign to end poverty in the United States, is told each and every year and in all of our schools and curriculum. So that’s the purpose.

This is a way of saying that the struggle for memory and for history is a living thing. It’s ongoing. It does not end. Even today, people are debating and reassessing the history of abolition of slavery, the role of slave resistance, the role of the Underground Railroad, the role of the abolitionist direct action movement, the role of the radical Republican politicians, the role of international politics in what came about, and the role—how it was derailed by the assassination of President Lincoln, the ending of the possibilities of Reconstruction, which were not taken up again until 1960, and the coming of Jim Crow. Each generation has to wrestle with the history of what came before, and ask: Whose interest does this history serve? How does it advance a legacy of social movements? How does it deny that legacy? We don’t know.

But we do know that we are here for the very first time as such a broad gathering of the movement against the Vietnam War. It’s been 50 years since Selma, 50 years since the first SDS march. So, it was a time that changed our lives, nearing a second Reconstruction before the murders of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy. Then came the budget cuts, the end of the war on poverty. Then came the Watergate repression. And we became a generation of might-have-beens. Like Sisyphus, our rock lay at the bottom of the hill.

We gather here to remember the power that we had at one point, the power of the peace movement, and to challenge the Pentagon now on the battlefield of memory. We have to resist their military occupation of our minds and the minds of future generations. Memory—memory is very much like rock climbing, the recovery of memory. Each niche towards the summit is graphed inch by bleeding inch and has to be carefully carved with tools that are precise in order to take the next step. Falling back is always possible. But as Dr. King himself said on his last night, there is something in humans that makes us aspire to climb mountains, to reach that majesty, if only for a moment. We are mountain climbers.

President Obama has reminded us to remember, he said, Selma, Seneca Falls and Stonewall. But not Saigon, not Chicago, not Vietnam. We have to ask ourselves collectively why that omission exists, and realize that only we can restore a place in the proper history of those times. We suspect that there was a reason, that it has to do with the programming of amnesia, that there are very powerful forces in our country who stand for denial, not just climate denial, but generational denial, Vietnam denial. There are forces that stand for ethnic cleansing, but not just ethnic cleansing, but also for historic cleansing. And that is what has happened. It serves their purpose because they have no interest in the true history of a war in which they sent thousands to their deaths and, almost before the blood had dried, were moving up the national security ladder and showing up for television interviews to advertise what they called the next cakewalks. Only the blood was caked.

There came a generation of career politicians who were afraid of association with the peace movement, who were afraid of being seen as soft, who saw that the inside track was the track of war. Our national forgetting is basically pathological. Our systems—politics, media, culture—are totally out of balance today because of our collective refusal to admit that the Vietnam War was wrong and that the peace movement was right. In the absence—in the absence of an established voice for peace in all the institutions, the neoconservatives will fill the foreign policy vacuum. Am I right? Will it not? Will it not advise both parties? I think, though, that American public opinion has shifted to a much more skeptical state of mind than earlier generations, but the spectrum of American politics and media has not.

So we can never forget that, of course, it was the Vietnamese resistance and their sacrifice that led to our awakening, along with the civil rights movement at home. It began with handfuls of young people, black students who led Freedom Rides, sit-ins. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was the first to resist the war. Julian Bond, who’s sitting here, was rejected after being elected to the Georgia Legislature. Muhammad Ali was stripped of his boxing titles. It also began with the Vietnam Day Committee in Berkeley, growing out of teach-ins, out of SDS, that called the first march, the draft resistance. There had never been a peace movement like the one in 1965 that arose out of the civil rights movement and came just weeks after Selma. At least 29 would die at the hands of police while demonstrating for peace.

I’d like here to introduce Luis Rodriguez and Rosalio Muñoz and Jorge Mariscal from the Chicano Moratorium, where four died, including Gustav [Montag], Lyn Ward, José Diaz and Rubén Salazar. Rubén Salazar was an early Juan González. Rubén Salazar was a great reporter for the Los Angeles Times who served as a journalist in Vietnam before he started critical reporting on the streets of Los Angeles. And he was shot by the sheriff’s deputies. I don’t know if he’s here, but is Alan Canfora here? Alan, please stand. Alan was wounded at Kent State. Four died at Kent State, two at Jackson State two weeks later. And every year, these two groups of people have observed memorials, have fought for their place in history, are coming up on their 50th anniversary commemorations and are here today to learn from us, as we’ve learned from them, the importance of organizing, organizing, organizing around the politics of memory. So, thank you for being here, and we will remember. We will not forget.

We will not forget the eight who sacrificed their lives by self-immolation. We will not forget the students who helped end the war by shutting down so many campuses. We will not forget the veterans who took the risk of standing up to their commanding officers and resisted from within the military. We will not forget this because this was something like a Du Bois characterization of the general strike by slaves who, through noncooperation, walked off plantations across the South when they saw the futility of any other alternative and chose to simply walk away and join the Union army. What happened at the end of the Vietnam War is that people walked away. The campuses shut down. Four million students walked away. The military was described by Marine colonels in military histories as being on the verge of collapse. They walked away. The counterculture walked away. We all walked away.

It might have been otherwise, if King and Robert Kennedy had not been assassinated. We might have been united, at least for a moment, at least for a moment. We might have elected a president. We might have ended a war. But instead, we were relegated to wondering what might have been. We lost any basis for our unity, and thus we have not come together since that time. The question for us is whether today we can unify, when we never could unify before. Can we do that for the memory of our movement and for the meaning that it holds for future generations? I hope so. I pray so. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Legendary civil rights and antiwar activist Tom Hayden, speaking last year in Washington, D.C., on the 50th anniversary of the first major anti-Vietnam War protest. It was a conference called "Vietnam: The Power of Protest." Tom Hayden died Sunday at the age of 76 in California. You can go to democracynow.org to watch all of our interviews with Tom, including a discussion about participatory democracy, from Port Huron to Occupy Wall Street. You can also see our interview with him about his last book called Listen, Yankee!: Why Cuba Matters.

Yes, when we come back, though, we go to the man who revolutionized sitcom television: Norman Lear. Stay with us. ... Read More →

TV Legend Norman Lear on the Black Panthers, Nixon's Enemies List & What Gives Him Hope

We continue our conversation with the 94-year-old legendary TV producer Norman Lear, the focus of the new "American Masters" documentary, "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You." We spoke to him in studio last week about how his work landed him on Richard Nixon’s enemies list, the Black Panthers and what gives him hope.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: "Those were the Days," the theme song to Norman Lear’s hit show All in the Family. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we return to our conversation with the television producer, longtime political activist Norman Lear. Tonight, PBS will premiere the American Mastersdocumentary, Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You, the first documentary about the 94-year-old legend, who, because of his work, landed on Richard Nixon’s enemies list. I asked Norman Lear how he ended up there.

NORMAN LEAR: I got lucky. I think I just got lucky. Well, he’s on tape—you know, I think we used the tape in the American Mastersdocumentary—where he’s talking about, with Haldeman in his office—he’s talking about "that show that makes fun of a good man." Those were his words, and he was talking about that Archie Bunker, though he didn’t remember the name, character. And he was talking about we were lauding homosexuality, and homosexuality brought down the Greek, you know—

AMY GOODMAN: Empire.

NORMAN LEAR: Empire. It was—it was Nixon at his—at his Trumpish.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you have Bea Arthur playing Maude.

NORMAN LEAR: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: You have Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton, this astounding duo. Talk about them as people and your work with them—Carroll O’Connor very much, to say the least, the absolute opposite of Archie Bunker.

NORMAN LEAR: Yes, Irish Catholic liberal.

AMY GOODMAN: And how could he tolerate doing this?

NORMAN LEAR: He must have had a very difficult time, in two ways. One, as an intellect, he was speaking like somebody—the antithesis of a smart man, let alone an intellect. And he didn’t like most of the scripts. And the best example of it was—and we have it in the American Mastersdocumentary—a story that took place entirely in an elevator, a half-hour in an elevator, stuck between floors with a Hispanic woman who was about to give birth and who, in the fearful moment of a stuck elevator, did give birth. And I wanted to see that baby born on Archie’s face. I just was in love with that from the moment that it dawned on us to do something like that.

AMY GOODMAN: Of course, he’s turning away at the beginning, turning away. He doesn’t want this to happen.

NORMAN LEAR: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: He’s telling her, "Just wait! Wait!"

NORMAN LEAR: Yes, yes, yeah. Because she’s Hispanic, he’s saying, "Stoppo! Holdo!" But when it finally happened, the expression on Archie’s face when he hears the baby cry—first, he’s alarmed the baby isn’t crying. Then the baby cries.

AMY GOODMAN: "Make that baby cry." And you see him, out of the corner of his eye, starting to look.

NORMAN LEAR: Yeah. Then he says, "It’s a boy." And I don’t know. Golden. Golden.

AMY GOODMAN: Good Times and The Jeffersons.

NORMAN LEAR: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the Black Panthers coming to visit and this show, Good Times.

NORMAN LEAR: Well, the Panthers came simply to say, "The only black man on television with a family has to work two and sometimes three jobs, Can’t you"—you know, it wasn’t anything like "can’t you." They just damned us, because, you know. But what came out of that was we have the Jeffersons next door. We’d only just found what’s-his-face to play George Jefferson. And I knew we were going to have something great. And we decided, as a result of that, we’ll have him move on up. We don’t have to do a black family as—we’ll do one that—you know, he was in the cleaning and drying business. Now, suddenly, he’ll have three or four stores, and he’s moving on up.

AMY GOODMAN: Sherman Hemsley played—

NORMAN LEAR: Sherman Hemsley, yeah. And it was Ja’net Dubois, who played the neighbor on the show, who came up with the song "Moving On Up," which is kind of an anthem. I hear it everywhere now.

AMY GOODMAN: You did a lot of television. You changed television. But you also started the advocacy group People for the American Way. I daresay if you were starting new organizations now, given this presidential election year, you might be doing the very same thing. But talk about what is People for the American Way and why you moved away from TV for that for a while.

NORMAN LEAR: Well, in 1980 or '79-and-a-half, I started—I became very aware of the amount of TV evangelicals proliferating on the tube—you know, Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority and Pat Robertson, who even ran for president for a while, and Jimmy Swaggart and so forth—and mixing politics and religion. And I had learned in civics class—the crime of the moment in education for me is they don't teach civics anymore. But when I was a boy, I learned to love my Declaration of Independence—and I underline "my"—and my Constitution and my Bill of Rights, because they were the protections Americans needed in a free society where everybody is equal under the law. And so I was dedicated to that as a result of those civics classes and learning, when my father was sent away, from Father Coughlin, who proliferated on radio and hated Jews and viciously anti-Semitic, viciously anti-FDR, and—

AMY GOODMAN: Extreme—I mean, he was a real powerhouse on radio.

NORMAN LEAR: A powerhouse, yes, a powerhouse. And he had raised anti-Semitism, you know, to an enormous height. But I had my civics class, which taught me I was protected by the documents that came from our Founding Fathers. I underline the word "Fathers," because mine was away. I think that’s the time I fell in love with Founding Fathers, looking, needing, wishing for a father.

AMY GOODMAN: I just watched the—another documentary that you’re in, that you were the reporter for, and that’s—

NORMAN LEAR: Yeah, America Divided.

AMY GOODMAN: America Divided series. And I wanted to play for a moment America Divided, where you are the correspondent investigating gentrification and displacement here in New York City, then going undercover to expose racial discrimination in housing. In this clip, you speak with The New York Times investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones.

NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: And then you have this myth that if a lot of black people move into a neighborhood, the property values go down. That’s actually true. It’s true, though, because of the way the federal government rated integrated neighborhoods. But we’ve come to believe it’s true because black people just don’t keep up their properties. So you see the way that a reality can be fueled by a myth.

NORMAN LEAR: Reality can be fueled by a myth.

NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: Yes, absolutely.

NORMAN LEAR: And is our government doing anything about that?

NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: Well, we have fair housing laws now. We don’t have fair housing yet. I don’t think we realize how much effort went into creating segregation. We had cooperation from individual homeowners all the way up to the federal government to reorder our society in a way that harmed black Americans and helped white Americans. So you have to break it up. You have to do what you did to create it.

AMY GOODMAN: So that’s The New York Times investigative journalist—New York Times Magazine investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. You do an astounding job in this—in this—

NORMAN LEAR: Oh, thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: —episode of America Divided that’s now on Epix. You came home, in a sense. You lived here in your life in New York.

NORMAN LEAR: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: When were you here?

NORMAN LEAR: I was here when my father got out of prison. We came to New York. We lived here for about two-and-a-half years. I went to Weaver High School. No, that was in Hartford. I went to Tilden High School.

AMY GOODMAN: Samuel Tilden High School.

NORMAN LEAR: Yes, Samuel Tilden High School.

AMY GOODMAN: And here you’re exposing what the Black Lives Matter movement talks about a lot. I mean, they’re talking about, you know, African Americans killed by police officers, but structural racism in our society, and housing is a crucial part of that, how segregated we are. New York, what, like the third most segregated major city in this country.

NORMAN LEAR: Well, and it’s one thing to read about it and understand it’s going on. It’s quite another thing to go into it, to sit in a lobby of a building with 14 or so tenants, family representatives, who are—were paying $600, are now paying $1,900 or something, crazy figures, escalated rentals. And they still were wanted out because of gentrification. And so, because they had long leases, the landlord had chosen to "fix," in quotes, these steps, this wall, that thing—all to cause dust, raise debris and so forth. And people were getting sick, literally getting sick. And I’m sitting with these families and—I mean, the wonder is that I raided my refrigerator last night and had a good night’s sleep. How do we human beings live with that?

AMY GOODMAN: And you actually, undercover, go in to try to get an apartment after an African-American actor—

NORMAN LEAR: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —who is deeply affected by this, you know, goes in, and they say, you know, "That apartment we advertised, it’s not available." And you go in soon—

NORMAN LEAR: Yeah, there was an apartment and a studio apartment. There were two apartments—

AMY GOODMAN: Right.

NORMAN LEAR: —for me. And there was nothing for him, one day later.

AMY GOODMAN: And you go in one day later. How did you feel about this? This is not back then.

NORMAN LEAR: I feel terrible.

AMY GOODMAN: This is now.

NORMAN LEAR: You know, I do not understand about how I can feel the way I feel, do what I do, but it is nothing compared to what has to be done. I don’t know why I’m not out on the streets. I don’t know why I haven’t been arrested yet. I don’t know why enough is not enough.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you still want to accomplish, Norman Lear?

NORMAN LEAR: Another hour and a half talking to you.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, that would be a pleasure, but I think there is a person who’s waiting to take you out right away. But as you take on all these issues, what gives you hope?

NORMAN LEAR: I don’t know. Congenitally, I don’t want to wake up any morning I’m without hope. I mean, that’s where I—I see hope in your face. I see hope in the person who greeted me coming in. You know, I don’t wake up in the morning without hope.

AMY GOODMAN: Norman Lear, veteran legendary television and film producer, political, social activist, philanthropist. The new PBS American Masters documentary, premiering tonight, is called Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You, chronicling his life and the creation of the hit shows All in the Family, Good Times, Maude, Sanford and Son and The Jeffersons. Norman Lear is founder of several nonprofits, including People for the American Way.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. That does it for our broadcast. I will speaking on Thursday at 7:00 at Arizona State University in Tempe at 7:00, then on Saturday morning here in New York at the New York Press Club’s 2016 Journalism Conference at the Kimmel Center. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.

Watch More || 'Just Another Version of You': The Life, Art and Activism of Legendary TV Producer Norman Lear ... Read More →

Just Another Version of You: The Life, Art and Activism of Legendary TV Producer Norman Lear

Ninety-four-year-old legendary TV producer and longtime political activist Norman Lear has led a remarkable life. He helped revolutionize sitcom television with a string of hit shows including "All in the Family," "Sanford and Son," "The Jeffersons," "Good Times" and "Maude." In 1999, President Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Arts, saying, "Norman Lear has held up a mirror to American society and changed the way we look at it." Norman Lear is also a longtime activist, earning him a place on Richard Nixon’s enemies list and the scorn of the Christian right. His life, art and social activism is the subject of the new "American Masters" documentary, "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You," which premieres tonight on PBS. We spoke with Norman Lear in studio last week.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the legendary TV producer and longtime political activist Norman Lear. At 94 years young, Norman Lear has led a remarkable life. He helped revolutionize sitcom television with a string of hit shows, including All in the Family, Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons, Good Times and Maude. In 1984, he became one of the first seven television pioneers to be inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame. In 1999, President Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Arts, saying, quote, "Norman Lear has held up a mirror to American society and changed the way we look at it."

Yes, Norman Lear is also a longtime activist, earning him a place on Richard Nixon’s enemies list and the scorn of the Christian right. In 1981, he created the progressive advocacy group People for the American Way, in part to monitor the religious right. The late Jerry Falwell once described Lear as the "No. 1 enemy of the American family."

Well, Norman Lear is the subject of the new American Masters documentary on PBScalled Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You. It premieres tonight on PBS. This is a trailer.

PHIL ROSENTHAL: Television can be broken into two parts: before Norman and after Norman.

GEORGE CLOONEY: This is a period of time where we were at our—probably our greatest change socially. Mainstream television was one of the last things to jump, and the first person to force it over that hill was Norman.

JON STEWART: All in the Family was the greatest.

DICK CAVETT: Do you have a quick answer for the people who say the show reinforces bigotry?

NORMAN LEAR: Yes. My quick answer is no.

ARCHIE BUNKER: [played by Carroll O’Connor] I never said a guy who wears glasses is a queer. A guy who wears glasses is a four-eyes. A guy who is a fag is a queer.

ROB REINER: We used to say it’s too hip for the room.

JOHN AMOS: There weren’t any African Americans on TV at that time. And I didn’t want to disparage a black family.

J.J. EVANS JR.: [played by Jimmie Walker] She’s the fuse that sets off Kid Dyn-o-mite!

ESTHER ROLLE: There are lines that were meant for you to say because you were black.

JIMMY SWAGGART: It’s time for God’s people to come out of the churches and change America!

NORMAN LEAR: I was concerned about what I was seeing on television, mixing politics and religion. So I thought, I want to take the flag back for all of us.

BILL MOYERS: He called me and said, "Guess what! I own the Declaration of Independence."

AMY GOODMAN: The trailer for Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You. It premieres tonight on PBS. Well, last week, Norman Lear joined us in our New York studio for a conversation about his work, his politics and his activism. I began by asking him what the title Just Another Version of You means to him.

NORMAN LEAR: Well, that’s been my bumper sticker for a number of years. And when Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, who produced and directed the film—and, I think, did a brilliant job—they happened to see my bumper sticker one day, and they were studying my life and so forth, and they said, "That’s going to be the title, if you don’t mind, of the documentary." And that’s the way I feel about it, you know? We are versions of one another in our common humanity, whatever our color, whatever our ethnicity, whatever, you know, on the surface makes us individuals. In terms of our common humanity, we are copies of one another.

AMY GOODMAN: Your father, Herman, had a huge influence on your life. Talk about him.

NORMAN LEAR: Well, his absence certainly did. He was sent to prison when I was nine years old. And that has, in a sense, haunted me and inspired me.

AMY GOODMAN: Why was he in prison?

NORMAN LEAR: He was selling some fake bonds or something. My mother—I remember my mother saying, "Herman, I don’t like those men. I don’t like those men." And "Stifle," my father said, as Archie said all those years later, and went off to Oklahoma. He was going to bring me back a 10-gallon hat. He was arrested when he got off the plane. Two nights later, my mother was selling all the furniture, and we were moving. We couldn’t afford to live in Chelsea. She was too ashamed to live in Chelsea.

AMY GOODMAN: Here, in New York.

NORMAN LEAR: Massachusetts, Massachusetts.

AMY GOODMAN: Oh.

NORMAN LEAR: Yeah, in Chelsea. And at that moment in time, my mother—my dad away, my mother selling the furniture, I’m going to live with an uncle. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do next. Some big, mature fellow puts his hands on my shoulder and says, "Well, Norman, you’re the man of the house now," at which point I think I began to understand the foolishness of the human condition.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about how you got into television.

NORMAN LEAR: Well, I had one—I was a kid of the Depression. I had one uncle, Jack, who used to flick me a quarter. That was something. You know, it just knocked me out that an uncle flicked me a quarter. He was, he said, a press agent. I didn’t know what a press agent was, but that was my role model. I wanted to be a press agent. I went to California to do that. And our wives—my wife and my cousin became great friends. Her husband wanted to be a comedy writer. They were going to the movie one night. We wrote something together. They came home about 10:15. We went out to a night club and sold it. And my half of $40 was, you know, half of what I made in a week. So, we started to write comedy.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to the documentary Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You.

NORMAN LEAR: American Masters, Just Another Version of You, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: American Masters, yes. This is Rob Reiner, who played Mike Stivic, Archie Bunker’s son-in-law, on the iconic show All in the Family, talking about the reaction to this series. And it’s followed by a clip of All in the Family.

ROB REINER: The headline is "All in the Family Introduces the World to Foul-Mouthed Archie Bunker." "CBS rolled the dice last night with a new situation comedy, All in the Family which will either be the biggest hit of the season or the biggest bomb." So, there you go. That’s what it says. Eight. We did eight seasons.

MICHAEL STIVIC: [played by Rob Reiner] You know, you’re right, Archie? You’re right: The British are a bunch of pansies—pansies, fairies and sissies. And the Japanese are a race of midgets. The Irish are boozers. The Mexicans are bandits.

ARCHIE BUNKER: And you Pollocks are meatheads.

AMY GOODMAN: Reinforcing stereotypes or challenging them?

NORMAN LEAR: Well, I think for people who understood—and most people did—challenging them. That’s why they laughed at them.

AMY GOODMAN: So talk about All in the Family.

NORMAN LEAR: And, you know, those people who thought Archie had it right, and wrote letters—and we received, you know, thousands of them—I can’t recall a single letter that said, "Right on, Archie," that didn’t—wasn’t followed by "But you sons of [bleep]" or "you (worse than that)" or "Why don’t you go back where you came from, Jew commie?" or whatever the hell that, you know, they could find. And my point being that nobody misunderstood that Archie was, you know, the fool of the piece.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how you came up with All in the Family and when it went on the air.

NORMAN LEAR: Well, I didn’t come up with—well, I did come up with it. I was doing The Martha Raye Show in New York, and a fellow by the name of Phil Sharp, who did—who did—I’m trying to remember the situation comedy at the time with Joan Davis, The Joan Davis Show. And he was being divorced, with four kids. I was being divorced, with one kid. I was having a terrible time in my divorce. I asked him how it was going with his. He said, "I’m fine. All she wanted was my reruns, my Joan Davis reruns," at which point I said, "Well, I’m only doing live"—to myself, "I’m doing live television. I’ve got to do something that I own." So I decided to do a situation comedy, which I had never considered doing before.

And at that moment, my partner Bud Yorkin was in London and wrote me about this show called—I forget. Johnny Speight was the—was the producer-writer. And I heard about that and decided I would do an American version of that. And that was—this was about a bigoted father and a son-in-law and so forth. And I grew up with that. My father used to call me the laziest white kid he ever met. And I would say, "You’re putting down a whole race of people to call me lazy?" "That’s not what I’m doing. You’re the dumbest white kid I ever met."

AMY GOODMAN: Well, that actually goes well with this next clip from the documentary. You’re appearing on a CBS talk show, and you’re questioned about the use of stereotypes and racial epithets in All in the Family.

ANNOUNCER: CBS News presents Look Up and Live. Today, "Laughter: Hurt or Heal?"

RABBI MEYER HELLER: I have to say I have to feel that the laughter hurts, that the repetition of these stereotype terms that we thought had died tends to be hurtful and harmful to the public good.

GEORGE CROTHERS: Well, Mr. Lear?

NORMAN LEAR: I’ve heard all these epithets. If they had died, where had they gone to? I don’t—do you really believe that All in the Family resurrected them from death? I saw—my mission is to entertain. I chose to entertain with what I consider real people.

AMY GOODMAN: Norman Lear, what about that?

NORMAN LEAR: I’m a serious man. I was a serious boy. But I did have a sense of humor. I think I mentioned earlier I learned the foolishness of the human condition very early in life. I chose to deal with it, but in a serious way. Before All in the Family came along, I guess the—you know, the kind of a problem they were dealing with on Petticoat Junction and Beverly Hillbillies and so forth: The roast was ruined, and the boss is coming to dinner. Oh, my goodness, does the family have a problem! We dealt with the things that were going on in our family, extended families, the neighbors across the street, up the street, whether it’s menopause or economic problems or, you know, health problems, hypertension in black males. The things that crowded our newspapers and our imaginations, we dealt with it.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think Archie Bunker would have voted for Donald Trump?

NORMAN LEAR: I think of Donald Trump as the middle finger of the American right hand. The American people, you know, we are—in a democracy, the democracy depends on an informed citizenry, which would be a well-led and informed citizenry. I don’t think we have a media, generally, that informs. It yells. It screams. It does bumper sticker. It doesn’t do anything in context. We don’t get the news in context. And the American people, aching for leadership, are tossed a Donald Trump, and I think they say, "OK, take this." And they’re saying, with that middle finger, "Take this," to the rest of us.

AMY GOODMAN: let’s go to another clip from Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You. This is American Masters. This is CBS’s Mike Wallace speaking to Norman about his sometimes tense relationship with the networks.

MIKE WALLACE: What’s your beef against the networks?

NORMAN LEAR: I spend hour upon hour arguing with the censors about the tiniest things. The network often takes the position that Norman Lear and the others in the creative community, I mean, how can they do this? How can they bite the hand that feeds them? I consider that the creative community are the hands that feed.

MIKE WALLACE: And they’re biting your hand.

NORMAN LEAR: And they’re biting our hands.

AMY GOODMAN: So, there you are, talking to the late Mike Wallace. What about your relationship with the networks?

NORMAN LEAR: My relationship with the individuals, one on one, was pretty good. We understood each other. We were in different—you know, it was—I think it was H.L. Mencken who once said, "Nobody ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people." To some degree, the establishment lives with that and makes its decisions on behalf of of the American people with that in mind. I disagree. I think, you know, we are provably not the best educated, but we’re wise of heart, and we understand a lot more than we’re given credit for. I’m talking about the population generally. So, what we were doing troubled the establishment only because it hadn’t been done before. But we were living it. We didn’t invent any subject we weren’t living with.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you get flack from the networks at the beginning, like "This isn’t going to work"?

NORMAN LEAR: Oh, yes, yes, yes. And I made the show originally for ABC three years before, 1968. And they—I made it twice, each time with Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton in the leads, different young people. They laughed like hell, I heard from everybody. I was in the room a couple of times, and I could see. But they didn’t put it on. They were afraid of it. CBS and the person that was the new leader, Bob Wood, put it on with a—what do you call it?—advisory, warning people that if they watched it, you know, they might not like it, or they’d be frightened by it, or—I can’t remember those—

AMY GOODMAN: Or they might change?

NORMAN LEAR: Or they might change. So, the last argument we had, we had—they wanted to cut something. New York was on the air three hours before California. They were threatening to cut one line from the show. I said, "If you cut it, I’m out of here. I won’t be back." I wasn’t so brave as that sounds. I had an offer, a three-picture deal at United Artists as a result of a film, Cold Turkey, I had just finished, so I was in good shape. The network, at the last minute, decided they would leave it in.

AMY GOODMAN: OK. What was the line?

NORMAN LEAR: And there wasn’t one state that seceded from the—Archie comes back from church, having been upset by—didn’t like the minister, didn’t like the sermon, left the church early. The kids thought they had the house alone. They were upstairs. They walked in. The kids heard them, come running down the stairs. It was clear what was happening.

AMY GOODMAN: They were married.

NORMAN LEAR: And they were married. And Archie said, "11:00 of a Sunday morning." They wanted that line out. But why? Of course, I said they’re married. But it will cause the audience to picture what he’s talking about at 11:00 of a Sunday morning. Well, but they knew that when they went upstairs. I mean, they—had to come out. I thought, if I gave in to that, I would be giving in to silly forever. And that’s why I said no. And it was—I was almost on my way out of the office. We were working on the script for the fourth episode when I got a call saying they left it in.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, that takes us right into reproductive rights—

NORMAN LEAR: Yes, it does.

AMY GOODMAN: —and Maude. Maude was a spinoff, right, of All in the Family?

NORMAN LEAR: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s turn, in 1972, to an episode of your show Maude which tackled the issue of abortion—a few months before Roe v. Wade became the law the land.

CAROL TRAYNOR: [played by Adrienne Barbeau] Look, there’s only one sensible way out of this. You don’t have to have the baby. It’s legal now.

VIVIAN CAVENDER HARMON: [played by Rue McClanahan] You know, she’s right. It’s legal in New York state. You better give that a thought.

MAUDE FINDLAY: [played by Bea Arthur] I have given it a thought. Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. I just don’t know!

NORMAN LEAR: The euphemism for "censor" was "program practices." And the Program Practices Department simply didn’t want to deal with abortion.

AMY GOODMAN: "Simply didn’t want to deal with abortion." What happened? What happened with this episode of Maude?

NORMAN LEAR: Well, there was a wonderful man, William Tankersley, who was the head of Program Practices. And I don’t know. I said we just had to do the episode. As a result of his talking with me, we added—we made it a two-parter. We added a character, a woman, a friend. She didn’t appear in any other show. She was there for the purpose of being a mother of four children she couldn’t afford, pregnant with a fifth. She would no more think of having an abortion. So she represented in real life the other side of that discussion. On Maude’s side, she said to her husband at the closing of the first—of that episode, the second episode, "Walter, do you think I’m doing the right thing?" And he said, "Maude, in the privacy of our own home and our own lives, you’re doing the right thing." That’s the way the two sides were represented, and that was a result of the conversations with Tankersley.

AMY GOODMAN: Legendary television producer Norman Lear, tackling the issue of abortion on network television in 1972, before Roe v. Wade. When we come back, we discuss Norman Lear’s activism with him, his fight against the Moral Majority and how he ended up on Richard Nixon’s enemies list. Stay with us.

Watch More || TV Legend Norman Lear on the Black Panthers, Nixon’s Enemies List & What Gives Him Hope ... Read More →
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