I recently revisited Father Knows Best, the comfy ’50s family sitcom. Much to my surprise, I got served a heaping didactic dose of Cold War history. A soon-to-be-released DVD set of the series’ first season includes extras like Robert Young’s home movies and interviews with the all-grown-up actresses who played Cathy/Kitten and Betty/Princess. But the history lesson comes in the craziest extra of all—a previously un-aired episode, “24 Hours in Tyrantland,” made at the behest of the Treasury Department and the AFL-CIO to promote war bonds.
Father Jim comes home with news of the local bond drive and tries to enlist the kids in selling savings bonds to their classmates. Kitten says her grade-school classmates aren’t thinking about retirement yet. Princess says she’s too busy. Bud says his friends don’t have the scratch for matinees and malts, much less bonds. Dad decides to teach them just how lucky they are to be able to take freedom for granted and he bets them that they can’t make it for twenty-four hours under a tyrant.
With $18.75 each in the balance (we’re told that’s the cost of a $25 U.S. savings bond back then), the kids eagerly shake on it. They’re issued numbers, given work orders, awakened at five a.m., and fed raw carrots and burnt toast for breakfast; but most importantly, they’re forbidden newspapers and unmonitored phone calls from the outside world, and told they cannot organize a labor union or hold any unauthorized meetings. They even learn that laws and clock time are mutable in the hands of a dictator. Big Brother has overthrown Big Daddy. The kids balk but don’t relent until the very last moment when Betty finally understands just how much peace and freedom cost and they all volunteer to help Daddy.
Lest I seem too glib or dismissive, let me admit that the episode was a lot less jingoistic and stilted than I assumed it would be, and I found myself surprised at Jim and Margaret’s realistic doubts and missteps in the course of their parenting/lesson. (Perhaps because I haven’t seen the show in probably thirty years, I took the title a little literally.) But it’s still a weird vehicle for a civics lesson. At the end of the “24 Hours in Tyrantland” episode, after Betty takes off for a hayride (a code word for gang activity?) and Bud and Cathy for friends’ houses, Jim and Margaret turn to face the camera and give one final pitch for U.S. Savings Bonds as their actor selves, though still standing in the Andersons’ living room and with his hand resting on the small of her back. Then, for added freakiness, the camera cuts to George Meany, the burly president of the AFL-CIO (and who’s sporting some crooked Buddy Holly glasses), for another speech about freedom.
