Social Issues Addressed
Bonanza is uniquely known for having addressed racism, not typically covered on American television during the time period, from a compassionate, humanitarian point-of-view.
Bigotry, and specifically anti-semitism, was the subject of the episode "Look to the Stars" (Season 3, Episode 26; original air date March 18, 1962). A bigoted school teacher (oblivious to his prejudice) routinely expels minority students. When he expels the brilliant Jewish student Albert Michaelson, a scientific genius whose experiments on the streets of Virginia City often cause commotion, Ben Cartwright steps in and confronts Norton on his bigotry. Ashamed, the school teacher vows to reform. A coda to the episode reveals that Michaelson went on to win the Nobel Prize for Physics.
In the episode "Enter Thomas Bowers" (Season 5, Episode 30; original air date April 26, 1964), the Cartwright family helps the opera singer Bowers, an African American freedman, after he encounters prejudice while in Virginia City to perform. Bowers winds up arrested as a fugitive slave. At the beginning of the episode, Adam is shown to be outraged at the Supreme Court's Dredd Scott v. Sandford decision (placing the time as 1857), which he discusses with his father. According to David Dortort, sponsor General Motors was anxious about the episode. As producer, Dortort ensured that the episode re-aired during the summer rerun seasons, though two TV stations in the South refused to air it.
In the The Wish episode, directed by Michael Landon, Hoss protects an African American former slave's family when confronted with racism after the American Civil War. In The Fear Merchants episode, discrimination against Chinese immigrants who attempt to assimilate in American society is addressed.
Read more about this topic: Jamie Hunter Cartwright
Famous quotes containing the words social, issues and/or addressed:
“If you give me your attention, I will tell you what I am:
I’m a genuine philanthropist—all other kinds are sham.
Each little fault of temper and each social defect
In my erring fellow creatures, I endeavor to correct.”
—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)
“How to attain sufficient clarity of thought to meet the terrifying issues now facing us, before it is too late, is ... important. Of one thing I feel reasonably sure: we can’t stop to discuss whether the table has or hasn’t legs when the house is burning down over our heads. Nor do the classics per se seem to furnish the kind of education which fits people to cope with a fast-changing civilization.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“A guide book is addressed to those who plan to follow the traveler, doing what he has done, but more selectively. A travel book, in its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply.”
—Paul Fussell (b. 1924)