Archie Bunker was, of course, the protagonist of Norman Lear’s TV show “All in the Family.” To the great delight of most American viewers, it ran from 1971 through 1979. Archie did some kind of work in a warehouse, involving the use of a forklift, if I remember correctly. Whatever his job was, it paid enough for him to own a two-story house and a car, and support his wife and daughter, neither of whom was employed. I think he belonged to a union, though it played a minimal role in his life. The point of his existence, so far as I could tell, was to defend his territory, whether it was his recliner, his house, his neighborhood, or his role as The Man of the House. The show revolved around his efforts to get used to the social changes of “the ‘60s” as exemplified by the behavior of his daughter and son-in-law and his neighbors and other family members.
Archie, of course, does not die in the series; his wife does, and the kids move out, and Archie buys a bar and starts another, less successful series. By now, if he had survived, he would be in his 80s. But, given recent demographics, we must conclude he did not survive. Non-college-educated middle-aged white men, we are hearing these days, are dying younger. They are dying of various kinds of more-or-less legal addictions, or suicide, or cardiovascular problems. Or they are dying, according to some commentators, of “despair.”
This isn’t unique to the US. Russian men have been dying like flies at least since the 1960s. Alcoholism is the most notable cause, but cardiovascular problems are also an issue. As long ago as 1962, when I wrote a paper on it, Russian men were also having difficulties getting or staying married, apparently because, according to a Russian woman sociologist, they were such lousy husbands. For men, in almost every society, not being married shortens the lifespan. (For more information, try the Current Digest of the Russian Press, a really great English-language periodical compilation of Russian news and commentary. Back when I wrote that paper, it was the Digest of the Soviet Press, and was absolutely essential to any intelligent look at Russian society.)
So anyway, people looking at current white male mortality in the US are trying to make sense of these phenomena, so far without any comparative glances toward Russia. The situation is slightly different here—middle-aged white women without college degrees are starting to die younger, too, whereas Russian women so far are still doing a lot better than their male counterparts. But in both places, the marriage rate and the fertility rate have declined. Analysts have been looking at all of these changes through an economic lens, and calling these increased mortality statistics “deaths of despair.”
Which brings us back to Archie Bunker, a member and exemplar of pretty much the last generation of American men without college education who could achieve and maintain a middle-class standard of living and pass it on to their kids. These men thought of themselves as “men who work with their hands,” whose regular and well-paid employment involved brawn rather than brain. That employment depended not only on the physical brawn of individual workers, but on the economic and political strength of their labor unions.
Those unions declined for several reasons, one of which is directly related to Archie Bunker: their members increasingly maintained conservative cultural values and supported the politicians who espoused those values, most notably including Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. And Reagan in particular began a concerted long-term program to destroy those unions. Weaker unions led to fewer successful liberal politicians supported by unions; more conservative law-making bodies led to more anti-union legislation, which in turn led to even weaker unions, and so on.
This vicious circle began as long ago as the Great Depression. Union members and leaders weren’t paying attention to demographic trends. As a result, they sold out Black workers for White workers, female workers for male workers, younger workers for older workers, industrial workers for craft workers, and contingent workers for full-time permanent workers. In the meantime, the workforce was getting Blacker and more Hispanic, more female, younger, more industrial, and more contingent. And they kept making contracts that promoted this deal with the devil, by giving management more and more control over who could join a union in the first place.
A personal sidelight—I started trying to join a union in the late 1970s. I went through two or three organizing campaigns, in my dual career as a teacher and a lawyer. I signed a couple of cards, went to a bunch of meetings, and in the end, got nowhere. But now I am a proud member of AFSME. How did I do that? Gentle reader, I retired! So now I belong to AFSCME Retiree Local 32, as a result of having spent more than 20 years as an adjunct in the state university system of Illinois. While I was actually working as an adjunct, I couldn’t join, because the union had made a deal with the universities to allow only people teaching 3 or more courses per term to join. I would gladly have taught three or more courses per term, but I was never given the chance. As usual, the people who needed union representation the most never got it. Union membership is now usually a sign that a group of workers has achieved power, rather than a move toward getting it.
So, getting back to Archie, he was in his forties when the show was running. Probably not long afterwards, his body started to show signs of the wear and tear that twenty-plus years of physical labor will ultimately exact. He may have been one of the lucky ones, officially diagnosed as “disabled” and allowed to quit work and still get a regular income of sorts, either from the company, the union, or Social Security. Or maybe he was too proud to admit he couldn’t do the job he had spent his adulthood doing, so he just kept on doing it until he reached age 65 (that would have been in the early 1990s) and could collect Social Security. And bought the bar, and kept working at that until the neighborhood changed and he no longer knew how to talk to the customers.
Margaret Meade, in Male and Female, talks about the roles of the two genders as follows (I’m paraphrasing):
1. In every society, men and women do different things with their lives.
2. From one society to another, those things may vary. In some societies, men farm and women brew beer; in others, women farm and men hunt; in yet others, men brew beer and women hunt.
3. But in every society, without exception, whatever it is that men do is more highly valued than whatever women do.
Meade doesn’t go on to what I consider the more important batch of social laws these days:
4. When men become unavailable to do whatever “men’s work” is in that society (usually because they are off fighting a war, or have been killed off doing it), women will step in to do as much of it as possible.
5. But they will never receive as much compensation or social status for doing it as the men got for the same work.
6. When, for whatever reason, women become unavailable to do “women’s work,” it either won’t get done at all, or will be done by low-status men (like doing “KP” in the army.)
7. And when, on the other hand, it is “men’s work” that becomes unavailable, women will go on doing women’s work.
8. And men will do nothing, or at any rate nothing useful. They may play, or watch, sports. Or drink. Or take opiates. Whatever they do, they will demand, and often get, the same deference and services from their women that they used to get for doing “men’s work,” as a consolation prize for not having any “men’s work” to do.
And ultimately they will die, probably at younger ages than before.
This time around, it appears that they may take their wives and sisters and daughters with them. Middle-aged non-college-educated white women are dying younger too, perhaps because they have finally accepted the insignificant value that their society assigns to women’s work. Once upon a time, a woman who was a good cook and seamstress and homemaker and child-rearer could take pride in those achievements. Today, she is expected to be able to earn a good living, and take care of those other household tasks around the corners and between the cracks of her “real” job. Those tasks may still need to be done, but they don’t really matter much.
We see the consequences of that diminishing value in juvenile courts that deal with neglected children. When a father abandons his children for 18 years, that’s nothing surprising. When a mother leaves the kids alone for three hours, the neighbors and the police and the courts step in with loud alarums. Fathers may leave with distressing frequency, but mothers will usually stay with the children and raise them, often by heroic exertions. But when mothers leave, as they began to do in the 1980s, lured away by drugs, only another woman can fill in, usually a grandmother, or an aunt, or a great-grandmother. We are rapidly running out of those heroic older women, and there is no one left to replace them except the underfunded, understaffed agencies we assign to care for abandoned children. When fathers leave, no one is surprised or knocked off balance. When mothers leave, it is a social catastrophe.
To answer the original question, it was the economy that killed Archie Bunker and his brothers and sons and grandsons, by depriving them of “men’s work.” But we know that Edith predeceased him, and she died because, while her work remained, its value had vanished.