> This is really strange, Dave. I just replied
>to Sam's post about his source for the redneck
>dialect and I mentioned how the L'il Abner
>character was not prejudiced. I read the comic
>strip from about 1940 until it ended, and I
>don't recall anything racist in it. However,
>that was a time when racism was almost
>acceptable, and as a dumb kid, I might not have
>caught it. I was about 16 before I realized
>that racism was fundamentally wrong.(But that's
>another story.)

Well, here's the deal. I just went and found the book again and looked up the Al Capp part. Here's the story basically as Asimov tells it, and you can take it how you will.

Asimov says he met Capp in 1954. He says their friendship was never tremendously close, but they did enough things together and talked often enough so I'd be willing to say the two were "friends". He says the friendship reached a "dreadful" climax in 1968. But to explain, he has to go into one of his patented Asimovian detours.

Which he then does--and it's all about how Asimov is a liberal, both by choice and out of necessity (having grown up a Jew in the pre-WWII era when Jew-hating was in vogue and not too many people felt that bad about Hitler at first because they saw him as a bulwark against communism and it wasn't seen as the horrible thing it is now to hate Jews anyway.) He then goes on a long speil (I hate to call it a "tirade" but to many it would come off that way) about how conservatives like the world the way it is (or more likely, how it was 50 years ago) and don't like people who aren't like them and don't care much about the welfare of others. He praises Roosevelt (and says he disapproved of him only when he wasn't liberal enough) and says that liberalism began to fade after WWII, reaching a low in the Reagan era where "it became de reguer not to tax but to borrow; to spend money not on social services but on armaments. The national debt more than doubled in eight years and interest payments on the loans soared to over $150 billion a year. This did not immediately affect people. Rich Americans grew richer in an atmosphere of deregulation and greed, and poor Americans--But who worries about poor Americans except people branded with the L-word that no one dared mention anymore?"

Then he goes on to say that he watched people turn from liberals to conservatives as they grew older, such as Robert Heinlein (whom he says would fancy himself more of a Libertarian than a conservative. Asimov defines Libertarian thinking as "I want the liberty to grow rich and you can have the liberty to starve" and says that it's easy to believe that nobody should have to rely on society for support when you yourself happen not to need it.) and, finally getting back to the point, Al Capp.

He says until the midle 1960s, Capp was a liberal, "as one could easily tell from his 'Li'l Abner' comic strip." As late as 1964, at a get-together, Asimov says he and Capp were both denouncing Barry Goldwater's attempt at gaining the precidency.

Then "overnight" he became a conservative. Asimov writes "What impelled this, I don't know. I admit that the 'New Liberals' of the 1960s were sometimes hard to take; that they laid themselves open to derision as long-haired, unkempt kooks; and apparently they bothered Al beyond reason, as he turned hard right."

He describes a post 1964 gathering, where "Al Capp held the floor and was absolutely acid in his comments on the African-American writer James Baldwin, for instance, on other prominent African-Americans, and on the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements generally. I listened with horror and raised objections, of course, but Al swept them away."

He said after that, his friendship with Capp was over, but he continued to read the Li'l Abner strip. About this, he writes "What bothered me most was that his new attitude made itself strongly felt in 'Li'l Abner'. His characterization of 'Joaney Phoney' as a stereotype of liberal folksingers was vicious. Worse yet, he began a long series of strips that contained what seemed to me to be very thinly veiled attacks on African-Americans."

Asimov says he finally got fed up and wrote a letter to the Boston Globe, which said in it's entirety "Am I the only one who's grown tired of al Capp's anti-black propaganda in his comic strip 'Li'l Abner'?"

The Globe ran the letter inside a ruled rectangle that made it very prominent. The very next day, Al Capp called him up. "Hello Isaac, what makes you think I'm anti-black?" To which Asimov replied "Why, Al, I've heard you talk on the subject. I *know* you are." Then Capp threatened to sue him for libel unless he called off the Black Panthers. When Asimov told him he had nothing to do with the Panthers, Capp insisted that he write a retraction to the Globe.

Asimov called his lawyer, who laughed the whole thing off. He said Capp couldn't sue Asimov without sueing the Globe for publishing the letter, and that he was a public figure and that what he did was fair game for comment. So apparently the whole thing just sort of went away.

He goes on to note that the strip declined in popularity "perhaps as a result of what I considered his misuse of it" and that it was also overshadowed by a young Charles Shultz and his "Peanuts", "which brought a new sophistication to the comic strip that outmoded Al's slapstick (and Al was openly resentful of this)." Then I guess some scandal involving Capp and a female undergraduate put an end to his lecture career, and when he died in 1970, nobody continued the strip.

Asimov then goes off on a completely different tangent, but that's basically the whole Al Capp story as he tells it. He gives no direct evidence of any anti-black propaganda in Li'l Abner except to basically say it was plainly there for anybody to see. So you can make of the whole story what you will, I guess.

>
> I also was an avid reader of Asimov. His non-
>fiction was almost a good as his sci fi.

I much prefer his non-fiction, actually. His SF is good, but he was really at home doing his science essays, I think.

-- Dave