TV Quote of the Day (‘All in the Family,’ As Archie and Sammy Davis Jr. Discuss the Races and Slavery)

Archie Bunker [played by Carroll O’Connor]: “Now, no prejudice intended, but, you know, I always check with the Bible on these here things. I think that, I mean if God had meant for us to be together, he'da put us together. But look what he done. He put you over in Africa, and put the rest of us in all the white countries.”

Sammy Davis Jr.: “Well, he must’ve told him where we were, 'cause somebody came and got us.”— All in the Family, Season 2, Episode 21, “Sammy’s Visit,” original air date Feb. 19, 1972, teleplay by Bill Dana, directed by John Rich

This is easily one of the most memorable episodes of this ground-breaking comedy.

Quote of the Day (T.H. White, As Merlin Warns Arthur About ‘Popular Agitators’ in His Kingdom)

“You have become the king of a domain in which the popular agitators hate each other for racial reasons, while the nobility fight each other for fun, and neither the racial maniac nor the overlord stops to consider the lot of the common soldier, who is the one person that gets hurt.” —English novelist T.H. White (1906-1964), The Once and Future King (1958)

Written like another epic with mythical overtones, The Lord of the Rings, during WWII, The Once and Future King became the basis of the musical Camelot. 

The image accompanying this post comes from the original 1960 Broadway production, with Richard Burton as reason-guided King Arthur and Roddy McDowall as Mordred, the conniving son who will become a stand-in for the “popular agitators” who put the realm at risk.

Tweet of the Day (Chipper Jones, on Hank Aaron’s ‘Class and Integrity’)

“I can’t imagine what Hank Aaron went through in his lifetime. He had every right to be angry or militant.....but never was! He spread his grace on everything and every one he came in contact with. Epitome of class and integrity. RIP Henry Aaron! #HammerinHank”—Former Atlanta Braves All-Star third baseman Chipper Jones, tweet of Jan 22, 2021

I agree with this well-meaning tribute by Chipper Jones to fellow Braves great Hank Aaron, except for that second sentence. The African-American slugger was indeed “angry” about the torrential abuse rained on him by bigots for breaking Babe Ruth’s career record for home runs.

Wouldn’t you be, if the FBI needed to investigate death threats against you and kidnapping threats against members of your family?

Wouldn’t you be, if you had obeyed one of the cardinal rules of American society—to succeed, work hard—only to grasp that for countless unseen cowards, this was not enough?

Wouldn’t you be if, decades after praising two of your heroes (Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella) for proving to the world that “a man’s ability is only limited by his lack of opportunity,” major-league baseball was still making painfully slow progress in placing minorities in managerial and front-office positions?

It would have been more correct for Jones to tweet, then, that Aaron was not as angry as he had every right to have been about the rancid racism he experienced for decades. 

I not only, like Jones, “can’t imagine” what Aaron went through, but how he restrained himself from saying anything more scathing about John Rocker’s 1999 Sports Illustrated interview than that he had “no place in my heart” for the prejudiced pitcher's infamous comments about gays and minorities.

In other respects, Jones is correct: Aaron did epitomize grace, class and integrity—and so much more. Though physically gifted (the young Alfonso Soriano was praised for strong, quick wrists that reminded many of “Hammerin’ Hank”), he realized it wasn’t enough.

This meant that, as teammate Dusty Baker told the New York Daily News’ Jesse Spector in 2007, Aaron exercised “total recall” on how he had fared against every pitcher he ever faced—"line out, walk, all kinds of stuff.”

And so, quietly, without the flair for the moment displayed by contemporaries Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, Aaron mounted his inexorable assault on Ruth’s hallowed career HR record. (By the way: Aaron achieved that mark in an era of pitcher dominance and competition from African- and Hispanic-American players excluded in Ruth’s era—and without the performance-enhancing drugs used by Barry Bonds.)

Along the way, he not only posted other offensive records (most RBIs, total bases, extra-base hits, and All-Star Game appearances) but demonstrated excellence in other aspects of the game, stealing 20 or more bases six times and winning three Gold Gloves for his defensive play in the outfield.

Hank Aaron was enshrined in Cooperstown because of these astounding career totals. But he is universally mourned because he was a model of dignity, dependability and perseverance. I am just sorry for younger fans who, unlike me and others of my generation, were not fortunate enough to see him play.

Flashback, August 1619: Slavery, the American Genocide, Takes Root in Virginia

“Virginia has a long history to confront. Our nation’s experience with slavery began there, when some 20 captive Africans arrived on a warship in Jamestown in 1619. Black bondage existed in Virginia for close to a century longer than black freedom has. Slavery made colonial Virginia prosperous, creating a plantation society founded on tobacco production, social and economic stratification, and unfree labor. It also produced a class of white owners whose daily witness to the degradations of bondage instilled in them a fierce devotion to their own freedom. They were determined to be the masters not just of their households, their estates, and their laborers, but also of their society, their polity, and their destiny. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, George Mason—slaveholders all. That so many of the Founding Fathers, including the leaders of the Revolution and the authors of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, were slaveholders is both an irony and a paradox…. The nation conceived in liberty was also the nation conceived in slavery. The state of Virginia and the country it did so much to create were born out of a set of conflicting commitments that have destabilized the republic ever since.” —Drew Gilpin Faust, historian and former President of Harvard University, “Race, History, and Memories of a Virginia Girlhood,” The Atlantic, August 2019 issue

For an institution whose seeding, harvesting and uprooting has resulted in consequences down to the present day, little documentation exists about the creation of slavery. What we do know is that, four centuries ago this week, what Jamestown settler John Rolfe (husband of Pocahontas) called “20 and odd Negroes” disembarked at what is now Hampton, Va. The area’s name was different back then: Point Comfort, almost cruelly chosen for the conclusion of its trans-Atlantic odyssey. 

As described in this post on “The First Africans” on the Web site Historic Jamestowe, it all began with natives of present-day Angola being captured and marched 100 to 200 miles to the slave-trade port of Luanda, where the whole jostling, chained, confused group of 350 were shipped off to Vera Cruz, Mexico, aboard the San Juan Bautista. Approaching the Gulf of Mexico, the ship was attacked by two English privateers, the White Lion and the Treasurer, which carried off 50 to 60 Africans. 

The White Lion made it to Virginia with only a third of this human contraband. This hideous mortality rate was emblematic of the larger “Middle Passage”, from 1500 to 1866, saw 12.5 million Africans transported across the Atlantic, with 1.8 million of these dying enroute, their bodies tossed into the ocean. 

What began as a solitary crime in West Central Africa would end in a genocide that for 250 years would be excused by religion, nourished by commerce, and inscribed by law. The African slave trade and the American settlements that grew from it destroyed not just people but their religion, language, families and hope. Only a total war would eradicate it. But the carcass of slavery left the lingering stench of slavery.

Improved technology boosted both the efficacy of carrying so much human cargo (low clearance to preclude slaves from standing, nets to prevent them from escaping overboard) and their use in the New World (the cotton gin increased demand for both land and slave labor). Now, technology may aid in counting the true costs of slavery: digitization of bills of sale, manumission papers, emancipation notes, bonds, auction notices and other assorted items; spreadsheets to crunch the data in these materials; software to write the analysis; and the Internet to share the results.

In another sense, though technology may advance the study of slavery, it will take something more basic to understand what slavery has done to the American soul. It began through exploitation of captives, survived through the fears of their owners, and has seeped enough into America’s soul to poison through racism the descendants of masters, slaves, and all in contact with them—in other words, all of us.

(The image accompanying this post is of what may be the most famous TV depiction of slavery—LeVar Burton as Kunta Kinte, in the 1970s TV adaptation of Alex Haley’s Roots.)

Joke of the Day (Donald Trump, in Debate Mode, on the Birther Issue)

“When you talk about healing, I think I’ve developed very good relationships over the last little while with the African-American community. I think you can see that. I feel that they really wanted me to come to that conclusion, and I think I did a great job and a great service, not only for the country, but for the president, in getting him to produce his birth certificate.” —Donald Trump to Lester Holt in last night’s debate with Hillary Clinton, on whether his promotion of the false “birther” issue against President Obama contributed in any way to racial healing, quoted in Amanda Hoover, “Donald Trump Had ‘Nothing’ to Say About ‘Birther’ Issue to People of Color,” The Boston Globe, Sept. 27, 2016

I got in a bit late last night, but I still felt compelled to watch for a few minutes the first debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The response I came in on was the above. My immediate reaction was simple: What the hell was that?

Normally, whenever I post a “Joke of the Day” or a quote clearly intended to be humorous, it comes from a stand-up comic or a sitcom. But five years ago, as the last Presidential election geared up, political hypocrisy so overwhelming it made me burst out laughing led me to put up a post about Newt Gingrich, that paragon of faithfulness, giving a pledge of marital fidelity—for the fourth time in his life.

I never thought I would see the likes of it again in my lifetime. But I hadn’t reckoned with this election or this nominee.

And so, I offer this to you, Faithful Reader. You and I have desperately needed a laugh for a long time, and Trump—bless his little heart and his big mouth!—has come through for us, in a hu-u-u-u-ge way.

This Day in Film History (‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Opens)

December 25, 1962—To Kill a Mockingbird, adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller by Harper Lee, premiered in Los Angeles on Christmas Day. More than anything, the date related to Hollywood’s traditional need to open films so that they would be fresh in the minds of members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as they nominated films for Oscars.

But for many viewers over the years, the timing seemed especially fortuitous. The hero of the novel and film, Atticus Finch, embodied Christian virtues—justice, nonviolence and the Golden Rule.

In the American Film Institute's 2003 listing of the top 100 movie heroes of all time, Finch outranked the likes of Indiana Jones, James Bond, Rick Blaine, Will Kane, Clarice Starling, Rocky Balboa, Ellen Ripley and T.E. Lawrence. You’ll notice that all of these other figures are handy with their guns or fists.

Mockingbird hints that Finch, too, could have been among this company (he does, after all, gun down a rabid dog with one shot, even though he hasn’t picked up a firearm in years). But this Southern attorney makes the list not because of his physical prowess but his moral authority.

So immense and continuous are the idealism and integrity of Atticus that a post by one blogger, Bob Ratcliff of “Think and Believe,” takes issue with the notion that the attorney is a “Christ-like figure.” Atticus doesn’t quite cut it by this standard, he notes, because he is “unceasingly noble.”

Such figures, he notes, generally work best when their embodiment of Martin Luther’s deus absonditus (hidden God) is concealed. Or, as Ratcliff explains more fully in yet another post:

“Usually, Christ figures are not overtly religious, nor are the films in which they appear.  The best Christ figures are flawed and fallen creatures like you and me, and hence don’t represent Christ’s fully loving life. Yet something about their story–often the way they die–mirrors Jesus self-emptying, self-giving love, and this is what makes them Christ figures.”

All excellent points. Still, some aspects of this hero’s life, especially as embodied by Gregory Peck (who, according to this Huffington Post interview with Mary Badham--Atticus’ daughter Scout on film—“was Atticus, there's no two ways about it”), presented several examples of Christ in action:

*Never harm the least of God’s children. Atticus warns his children that it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird because they “don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy... but sing their hearts out for us.” Or, as Jem puts it: “Atticus says cheating a black man is ten times worse than cheating a white.” Because they are at the bottom of Southern society in every way possible, a crime against African-Americans finds them especially vulnerable.

*Forbearance in the face of ridicule. Atticus knows that he is derided all over Maycomb for defending African-American Tom Robinson on rape charges. But he holds no bitterness toward lifelong neighbors and friends who shun him for his role in the case.

*Nonviolence. Like Christ in Gethsemane, Atticus not only refuses to use force against those who ridicule him or even threaten his life, but forbids its use by those who would defend him. Thus, he makes Scout promise that she won’t get into fights in school over this, despite the “ugly talk” she’s sure to hear.

*Teach children. For many, Christ is at His most approachable when he draws children to Him. Atticus' sense of responsibility to his children is doubled not just because, as a widower, he has no wife to help him, but because he is the primary defense against Scout and Jem absorbing the same false values that define the Jim Crow South. 

*Willingness to endure mob threats. On his way to the Cross, Christ is continually spat on, beaten, and ridiculed. His response: “Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.” At the jail, an angry mob is ready to do in Atticus himself, not just his client, for a defense that, by the white male Southern code, is an unpardonable offense. But Atticus does not flinch. He is willing to stand alone, as Christ did. Here, the rabid-dog scene becomes a metaphor for fighting the infection of racism. Everybody else hides inside the house. Even the town sheriff, unsure of his own shooting ability, won’t pull the trigger. It is left to Atticus—on the deserted street of a Southern town, and in court—to stand alone against a threat. Indeed, as I noted in a prior post, Atticus' determination to provide a positive example for his children is so fierce that his quiet but firm defiance even puts Jem and Scout in jeopardy when they encounter a lynch mob at the jail, ready to seize Tom Robinson--and Atticus, if he doesn't step aside.

Atticus is based on Harper Lee’s own father, Amasa Coleman Lee, an Alabama attorney, newspaper owner, and state legislator, who had defended two black men who were convicted and hanged. The experience was, evidently, a searing one for him, as he never took on another criminal case.

The lack of emotional complication or moral searching in Atticus that, according to Ratcliff, might have made him more of a “Christ figure” can be best understood in the instance of Amasa Lee, who did not support civil rights for blacks until late in life (and who, on a personal level, was even more personally unbending than Atticus in his refusal to wear weather-appropriate garb on a steamy Southern golf course). 

By contrast, the only hint of a human fault on the part of Atticus in Horton Foote's sensitive screenplay comes in that rabid-dog scene, when, after shooting the animal, he pauses in quiet self-satisfaction, with Peck’s face registering a moment of pride: After all this time, I still have it. (It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine Rock Hudson--the original studio choice to play Atticus--adding this, or other similar small but telling moments, to his portrayal.)

And yet, the need to create such a moral superhero is all too understandable. Peck’s Atticus was followed four years later onscreen by another lawyer of heroic dimensions: Paul Scofield’s Thomas More, in the adaptation of the Robert Bolt play A Man for All Seasons. 

In one sense, despite being in the more distant time and locale of Tudor England, More is more understandable to most contemporary viewers in his initial refusal to stay silent rather than openly defy the Oath of Supremacy that would make Henry VIII supreme head of the Church in England. The author of Utopia has no desire to be a martyr; it is forced on him.

But Finch and More became heroes of a dark time—the Sixties—when people needed men of intelligence and responsibility against the forces of state-imposed racism and authoritarianism.

Moreover, at a point when the family and organized religion came under assault, they demonstrated that, despite confusion in their own households engendered by their indomitable determination, an upright conscience was the one family birthright that could not be dispensed with.

Song Lyrics of the Day (Rodgers and Hammerstein, “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught”)

“You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.”-- “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught,” from South Pacific, music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II

I hate to say it, but after a year I still haven’t seen the wondrous Kelli O’Hara as Nellie Forbush in South Pacific. And, just as inexcusable, I haven’t had a chance to view the DVD of Reba McIntyre in the role.

No matter. I’ll get to one or the other. Like innumerable kids over the years, I saw the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical on a high school stage—specifically, at my alma mater, St. Cecilia High School, 35 years ago, just before I started there. The briskness and verve of the show, even when performed by theatrical nonprofessionals, remain with me all these years later.

Constant performances, however, still possess the danger of inuring us to the shock and challenge present at its Broadway premiere on this date in 1949. A bit less than halfway through their 16-year collaboration, Rodgers and Hammerstein did something especially audacious: They examined how “The Good War,” fought to defeat Nazi notions of a master race, was waged by people of essentially good heart who were caught up in their own contradictions concerning what sociologist Gunnar Myrdal called “The American Dilemma.”

True, Myrdal’s account concerned “The Negro Problem,” but it was all too easy for audiences to make the easy transfer from prejudice against those with yellow skin in the South Pacific to those with black skin at home. And, to the credit of lyricist and composer, their song hit home.

All these years later, it is easy for some, such as critic Stefan Kanfer, to dismiss “Carefully Taught” as an “achingly self-conscious editorial.” But it raised the issue of homegrown American racism in a way that hadn’t been done so bluntly on Broadway since—well, since another collaboration of Hammerstein, this time with Jerome Kern: Show Boat, with its theme of miscegenation.

Hammerstein had a well-deserved reputation for working slowly (which you would, too, if you worked on the book and lyrics for a show), and at one point director Joshua Logan had to come out to his Pennsylvania farmhouse for some consultation and friendly prodding. If you look at “Carefully Taught,” you might wonder why the process took so long. It’s short and without the linguistic wordplay that, for instance, Stephen Sondheim has been known to pen.

The character who sings the song, Lt. Joe Cable, is supposed to be a product of Philadelphia high society, but that seems to be more like a device to underline the distance between himself and his Polynesian love. For in the way he talks, this communications officer could be an almost classless representative of the country whose mission he’s attempting to fulfill—plainspoken, fundamentally decent, but all too human as he confronts a world he never knew existed.

Cable sings the lyrics to Nellie Forbush, the other American caught in a complicated interracial romance. On this one level, he’s on the same emotional frequency as this self-described “cockeyed optimist.” She’s just told him she can’t help the way she feels about the half-Polynesian children of French planter Emile: she’s just born that way.

Cable’s insistence that she is wrong—that if such actions are the result of environment rather than genetics, they can be overcome—points Nellie toward a way out of her dilemma.

To be sure, Rodgers and Hammerstein had to tone down some aspects of their characters, as originally published in James Michener’s original Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of interrelated stories, Tales of the South Pacific. Postwar audiences would have looked askance at Emile’s eight mixed-race children by four different unmarried women (in fact, I imagine Rush Limbaugh might do the same thing today), so the songwriting team reduced the number to two children from Emile’s union with one wife (conveniently dead).

But even what they did write was an unmistakable challenge. Their prior collaborations, though artistically daring, had never tackled serious social issues before. Now, such an issue—prejudice—drove the plot and subplot. As an audience member, you couldn’t escape from it.

Many people wanted desperately to do so. Even before the show opened, the songwriters had to rebuff attempts to soften the message of “Carefully Taught” or even excise it altogether. Even well into the show’s run into the 1950s, South Pacific could still raise hackles, particularly in the South.

Two Georgia legislators charged that, because it promoted interracial marriage, “Carefully Taught” represented an “underlying philosophy inspired by Moscow.” Hammerstein responded simply that he was surprised to hear that anything smacking of kindness and humanity “must necessarily originate in Moscow.”

No wonder a nation bent on a mission to save the world from totalitarianism in the 1940s and 1950s would embrace Rodgers and Hammerstein—their musicals represent, in a way, the triumph of Western Civilization in general and the American Century in particular. Oklahoma, for instance, considers the opening of the West, and though The King and I is written from the standpoint of a 19th-century British woman in Siam, it might as well be an American following WWII.

In this regard, “Carefully Taught” stands as emblematic of the songwriters’ liberal belief that deep down, people are all alike, that the force of circumstance—history, if you will—can be made to yield before the deepest instincts of the human heart—not just love, but freedom. Nellie and Lt. Cable are cockeyed optimists, but perhaps also, as events through the rest of the century and into this one would prove, innocents abroad.

Quote of the Day (Richard Wright, on the Communist Party)

"It was not courage that made me oppose the (Communist) party. I simply did not know any better. It was inconceivable to me, though bred in the lap of Southern hate, that a man could not have his say. I had spent a third of my life traveling from the place of my birth to the North just to talk freely, to escape the pressure of fear. And now I was facing fear again, though I had no notion that I was slowly adding fagots to a flame that would soon blaze over my head with all the violence of the assault I had sustained when I had naively thought I could learn the optical trade in Mississippi."—African-American fiction writer and memoirist Richard Wright (1908-1960), Black Boy (American Hunger) (1944)

(This past September 4 marked the centennial of the birth of African-American novelist-memoirist Wright. I don't know how I overlooked it, nor, even more surprisingly, why major media—including newspapers, libraries and bookstores—did. His 1953 novel, The Outsider, might stand as a useful label for his entire life—the agony that blew him around the world like a leaf, searching vainly for a place where he could reconcile race, personal aspiration, intellectual openness, and security.

For more than 60 years, many, of not most, of the students assigned Wright's 1945 memoir Black Boy have been under the impression that it was the story as he intended to write it. They do not know that they have been reading only half of what he intended. In 1977, Harper and Row came out with the missing second half of the book, American Hunger. Finally, in 1991, in its edition of Wright's works, the Library of America put the two halves together, and it's this version that I've been marveling at for the last several days.

The memoir begins with four-year-old Wright accidentally burning his family's home in Natchez, Miss., and for the rest of the book Wright found himself singed by the world.

It was Wright's tragedy to be piercingly honest, at times agonizingly doubtful about his ability, and, in the end, deeply alienated from virtually every environment in which he found himself. He even started off with the odds against him, on a plantation in Natchez, Miss.—in the heart of the sharecropper system that was reducing the African-American population to a stage not very well advanced beyond the stage they had escaped.

In his great elegy "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," W.H. Auden addressed the great (by then deceased) poet with, "Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry." In Wright's case, mad, racist America hurt him into Communism. The results were not as happy as in Yeats' case.

The attempt to "learn the optical trade" that Wright briefly mentions in the passage above was disrupted by two co-workers when they realized he intended to better himself. Their harassment ended with Wright looking elsewhere.

Eventually, Wright found himself part of the John Reed Communist Party chapter in Chicago. In the end, he tired of mysterious party hacks who appeared out of nowhere to enforce intellectual conformity. It was this half of the manuscript of American Hunger, describing his savage disillusionment with Communism (including a climactic public assault by two white Communists at a party, with two black Communists looking on without lifting a hand) that Wright agreed to delete in order to make it more acceptable to the Book of the Month Club.

The amputation of this second half of the memoir led Wright to complain in his journal about Communist political pressure on the Book-of-the-Month Club. Indeed, his case seems more than a little reminiscent of how T.S. Eliot, in his editorial capacity at Faber & Faber, came to reject George Orwell's Animal Farm. Both editorial decisions were made in 1944, before the onset of the Cold War, when the U.S.S.R. was still the indispensable ally of the Americans and the British against Nazi Germany.

Much of this section of the memoir appeared in an essay Wright had published in The Atlantic Monthly called "I Tried To Be a Communist." In 1950, Wright, along with Alfred Koestler, Andre Gide, Stephen Spender, and other left-wing intellectuals, contributed to an anthology called The God That Failed, about their breaks with Communism.

Wright's memoir ends with him sitting at his typewriter, alone, unsure what will happen as he flings his words out into the world. That sense of isolation informed the rest of his life. He could not become a Communist, but he withdrew from organizations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom that he suspected were CIA-funded. He moved to France, hoping to find acceptance there as an African-American, but came to feel increasing misgivings about that nation's treatment of its Algerian colony. He died in 1960, worn out from a lifetime of contention, paying the price for his independent streak.

His ideological trajectory illustrates bloggers' simultaneous craving for community and need for the independence that ensures their work will have lasting value. The latter will often only come through the alienation that left Wright hungry for company and acceptance.)