Mad Men, page 5
In establishing the Drapers as the prototype post–World War II family, Mad Men creates a palette that enables the show to explore ideas at the heart of what it meant to be an American family during the era and the tenets of the postwar, booming-economy American Dream. Don is a successful business executive and his status is reflected in every facet of his life, from Betty’s culture and beauty to his virility and manliness as a father of a growing family. The home, television, automobile, suit, and attitude all reveal that Don personifies the American Dream.
Draper is representative of the powerful new national economy and culture at its very best—at least on the surface. Like the soft underbelly of the United States, Draper is not what he appears to be. He has a drinking problem, is often narrow-minded, resorts to violence and intimidation, and protects a secret past. These challenges serve as a kind of mirror for what the nation faced at the same time: racism, sexism, homophobia, violence, murder, and warfare.
As a talented ad man, Don creates words and images that play on the ideas that he also lives. He is both a creator and consumer of culture. His agency gauges its success on the skill that is required to reflect the nation back onto itself via visual and written communication to symbolize an idea that they can then associate with a consumer good. In Episode 3.2 (“Love Among the Ruins”), Draper’s mantra about advertising is revealed: “If you don’t like what is being said, then change the conversation.” Yet, this notion of marketing also goes a long way in explaining the American Dream. The United States might be splintered by seismic events and incidents from assassinations and race riots to antiwar rallies and violent clashes between police officers and activists, but it could still change the conversation to its economic might, global cultural influence, and military prowess.
Managing and manipulating the American Dream narrative dates back to the earliest uses of the term, which exist far back in time. Despite its long history, though, historian James Truslow Adams introduced the term “American Dream” into the nation’s lexicon in 1931 at the height of the Great Depression in his book The Epic of America. For Adams, the Dream centered on the freedom people had to determine their place in the world. As the decades of the mid-twentieth century unfolded, however, the idea morphed to encompass many related philosophies, most often focusing on wealth and the acquisition of consumer goods, particularly in comparison to what one owned versus other people. As a result, the American Dream soon became entangled with broader notions of what it meant to be successful in a capitalist system (Samuel 2012).
As the United States developed as a consumerist society from the early 1900s, the American Dream evolved as well. We can certainly look back on the way advertising changed in the 1900–1910 period and identify that era as foundational since advertising then emerged as the most pervasive technique for promoting the budding consumer culture (Batchelor 2002). After this early period and over the course of the next several decades, the consumer-based culture solidified and expanded so that by the 1930s, the stranglehold was complete. The Great Depression might have slowed the consumer’s ability to purchase goods and services, but the ad industry continued to launch campaigns.
In the post-1945 era the concurrent ideas of the American Dream and the “American Way of Life” merged in a sea of consumerist behavior that linked purchasing power with what it meant to be a productive member of society. These factors also had consequences globally. According to scholar Joel Spring, “After World War II, the ‘American Way of Life’ became a major theme in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union” (2010, 73–74). Because the two ideas dovetailed, schools took up the cause, essentially training young people to be consumers. Consequently, advertisers responded by increasing efforts at young people, particularly teenage females, just as the industry had done with older female consumers across its history. Raising a nation of happy consumers—at least among white Americans—meant that the nation’s economic power would be forever tied to what people bought and how much of their incomes went into consumer goods.
As marketing and advertising grew more ubiquitous, the federal government reasoned that it could use similar techniques in its battle against Communism and for the democratic system. America not only continued to teach its own citizens how to be fervent consumers in the Cold War era, but also the federal government embarked on a series of programs that would demonstrate the power of the consumer-based economy to the rest of the world. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, for example, launched the “People’s Capitalism” campaign, one in a series of similar propaganda and advertising programs created after World War II to display the superiority of the American way versus the evils of Communism in the Soviet Union and its satellite nations.
Advertising became a tool in the war between capitalism and socialism. On the home front and abroad, the Eisenhower administration worked with the Advertising Council, a nonprofit organization that coordinated the efforts. Under the leadership of Ted Repplier, the Ad Council ran strategic marketing campaigns at home and globally. “These campaigns,” explains historian Dawn Spring, “were designed to create an appearance of consensus, yet they were tightly controlled from the top down and were carefully orchestrated at every level, from grassroots activities to print advertisement” (2011, 4). Repplier’s group coordinated the initiatives, essentially using business, government, and media sources to run campaigns on behalf of the United States.
Interestingly, given America’s commitment to democratic ideas, many leaders looked aside as government-sponsored groups promoted free enterprise around the world using propaganda. In late 1955, Repplier gave a speech proclaiming the Cold War stood as “the world’s largest advertising contest.” He saw American efforts in this area as compulsory, given the Soviet Union’s own push toward selling its system abroad” (Spring 2011, 145). Large corporations and advertising firms worked with Repplier, the Eisenhower administration, and the Ad Council to push America’s messages, from McCann Erickson and Procter & Gamble to General Motors.
From the 1930s through the mid-1970s, groups like the Advertising Council and others, including independent organizations, launched efforts to establish, stabilize, and then cultivate the idea that consumption-based societies were the most fruitful and democratic. Historian Lawrence R. Samuel calls the American Dream the nation’s “secret weapon, something that was stronger than any army even though it was just an idea” (2012, 50). The ability to spread the idea of consumerism via the propaganda of the American Dream and American Way of Life enabled the country to stand in stark contrast to the dreary, empty shelves lining the Communist world. The Soviet Union did not have the financial means or coordination to thwart the American advertising industry, especially as the business world teamed with the federal government. As a result, the disparity between abundance and scarcity remained an important ideological weapon throughout the Cold War.
Doing the Work
Mad Men’s aura of mystery is driven in part by Draper’s hidden past. In the Season 6 finale, Episode 6.13 (“In Care Of”), Don exposes that history—first in a client meeting with Hershey, and then later to his children. When the armor falls, the powerful ad man is left vulnerable, which costs him his partnership. The weakness and breakdown taking place during a client meeting force his colleagues to remove him from the agency. For Draper, the loss is not about money or its trappings; he spends the entirety of Season 7 trying to get back to “the work,” which is his fulfillment of the American Dream—doing the work that one loves.
Draper’s emphasis is always on doing “the work.” In Episode 7.7 (“Waterloo”), the finale of part I of the show’s final season, Don confronts his colleague Ted Chaough, who is suffering a kind of malaise or existential crisis: “You don’t have to work for us, but you have to work. You don’t want to see what happens when it’s really gone.” When Don is at his best—not drunk, philandering, running roughshod over his underlings, or sneaking out of the office to catch midday movies (though this is a form of cultural education)—“work” equals winning and winning the client’s business is akin to gaining their love, the distorted vision of love that Draper never quite grasps or achieves.
Don’s interaction with the American Dream contrasts with the other characters, who outwardly hold more traditional views, centered on attaining an imagined lifestyle, consumer goods, or wealth. For Pete Campbell and Roger Sterling, in contrast to Draper, the American Dream means living up to a family history of power and wealth. Sterling, for example, does not understand Draper’s moodiness, given the lifestyle the younger man has attained via advertising. In Episode 1.4 (“New Amsterdam”), Roger complains that younger men do not know how (or why) to drink, explaining, “Your kind with your gloomy thoughts and your worries . . . you’re all too busy licking some imaginary wound.”
As a whole, the “New Amsterdam” episode is filled with both wounds and characters interacting with the American Dream. Pete must lower himself to his father and brother in hopes of getting financial support for a New York City apartment, even though the family money is all gone. Then he again buries his manhood when the couple takes the down payment from Trudy’s parents, whose wealth comes from hard work, not inheritance. At the same time, Pete attempts to assert himself at Sterling Cooper, which causes Don to fire him. In a complicated and ironic twist, it is only his family name and standing that force Roger and Bert to save the young man. Although now wealthy, Don does not understand the power or prestige of “old New York” money. Sterling Cooper cannot afford (literally) to offend the power base.
Placed within the backdrop of a 1960s advertising agency, the self-created stories and roles the employees play in and out of the workplace expose the real power of image. For example, senior partner Bert Cooper plays the role of eccentric, punctuating important decisions by pruning his bonsai tree and referencing Ayn Rand, rather than raising his voice. Viewers do not see the “real” Cooper, how he got to his powerful position or pieces of his personality that might counteract the image he crafts. However, one does get the sense that things like the Japanese art and asking that people take their shoes off in his office are props in Cooper’s self-creation. His American Dream is tightly linked to the ability to project a specific image of leadership and power.
As is often the case in Mad Men, Draper’s interaction with nostalgia is more complicated. While most of the key figures from the first season reveal some degree of romantic yearning for the past, such as a drunken Roger Sterling regaling Don and Betty with war stories in Episode 1.7 (“Red in the Face”), all of Don’s memories are negative. From a narrative perspective, the lead character’s anti-nostalgia accomplishes two related tasks. First, as Don’s story develops, the viewer recognizes that his adult discretions are derived from a horrific, violent youth, in some ways softening them or providing a bit of justification. Also, exposing Don’s past in snippets enables Weiner to give the character an aura of mystery and danger.
The running storyline of Don dealing with his past as Dick keeps viewers off-kilter. In Episode 4.1 (“Public Relations”), he lives in a rundown apartment that is dark and foreboding with none of the trappings that most “typical” newly single, wealthy men would flaunt. When he hires a prostitute, he asks her to slap him harder and harder, which shows viewers the depths of his self-loathing. He might be the creative genius behind the new agency of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce and interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, but inside, he is still little Dick, a young boy dealing with the ramifications of an abusive, gruesome past.
Portraying Draper as a mystery also makes a statement about his quest for the American Dream. Once the viewer finds out that “Don Draper” is actually Dick Whitman and realizes the lengths he journeyed to erase his past life, one might assume that he did so to establish his shot at a normal life, filled with a quest for consumer goods that defined the American Dream in the late 1950s and early 1960s. However, in many instances, Draper is shown to have little care for money or its trappings. The most blatant example comes at the end of Episode 1.8 (“The Hobo Code”). Although Midge Daniels refuses Don’s offer to run off with him to Paris, he still leaves behind the $2,500 bonus he earned. While she sleeps, he slips out of the apartment unseen.
Years later, when Don and Megan separate for the final time, he writes her a check for $1 million (Episode 7.9, “New Business”). Megan, bitter and callous, takes the money, though her anger is at a squandered career and the new lows she has reached after Don’s junior colleague Harry Crane attempts to seduce her with offers of work. Crane giving Megan the casting couch treatment is straight out of the stories about what actresses in the 1960s had to endure and could be interpreted as his attempt to get back at Megan (whom he’s always had a crush on) and Don (who has barely hid his contempt for the younger man for years). Megan’s American Dream is instant wealth, but the money cannot hide the internal agony she feels about her career fizzling out.
The contrast between what Don wants and his indifference to wealth is significant—Dick risks everything to become Don, yet avoids the trappings of consumerism that drive his colleagues and competitors. His pursuit is more self-centered, hurtling toward some skewed vision of freedom. In “The Hobo Code,” the viewer sees that young Dick learns at the knee of a hobo that stays overnight at his family’s farm. From this odd mentor, the displaced youngster—a self-described “whore child,” with no strong ties to home—learns that “I had a family once; a wife, a job, a mortgage. I couldn’t sleep at night tied to all those things. Then, death came to find me. . . . One morning I freed myself, with the clothes on my back. . . . Good-bye. . . . Now, I sleep like a stone.” The message stays with Dick as he transforms to dapper Don. But dapper Don is also dour Don, a man perpetually in fear that he will be unmasked.
At the end of the episode, Don’s commitment to his own existential search for meaning, despite how he seems on the surface, surfaces when he engages in a discussion with the beatniks at Midge’s apartment in Greenwich Village. They blame him for being part of the establishment (“with them”) and working in advertising to “invent the lie.” One (in hippie fez, nonetheless) even mocks “the adman” by announcing, “I wipe my ass with the Wall Street Journal.” Don smirks through most of the exchange and then drops an existential bombshell, declaring, “There is no big lie. There is no system. The universe is indifferent.” Defeated, the more vocal beatnik sulks, “Man, why’d you have to say that?”
Spanning the Sixties
For a decade stamped with terms like “hippie” and “free love” and immortalized in pulse-pounding yet poignant songs such as “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” the 1960s turned out to be a great era for corporate America. For many, particularly families headed by white mid-level-managerial types, the thriving business world provided a way of life that seemed unprecedented at the time, powered by a 50 percent gain in real income over the span. The extremes provide a stark dichotomy of what “the sixties” meant for those living through the era—on one hand, college students and young people resisted the economic and military system, but in contrast, their parents and elders reaped the rewards of the capitalist system and consumer-driven society it yielded.
The power of the corporate model solidified and expanded during the 1960s. As a result, the New York Stock Exchange took on greater importance and gave those closely watching its every movement a daily scorecard touting the nation’s might. In early 1966, for example, the New York Times reported that the Dow Jones industrial average “crossed the magic 1,000-mark . . . a historic peak” (Carmical). The industries fueling the move were ones that symbolized the nation’s capacity as a technological and manufacturing superpower, including defense, television, oil, automobiles, and steel. Even as Wall Street continued to flirt with the “magic” figure, analysts and other commentators debated what it meant for organizations and the national economy from a psychological perspective. One side in the debate worried that moving past 1,000 meant that the economy needed a contraction, while the other saw the move as a reason to push for continued growth (Vartan 1966).
For workers up and down the corporate ladder, business growth equaled higher wages and increased opportunities. The government released figures revealing that personal income for 1965 jumped to a record $550.5 billion. Certainly, economists and business analysts realized that President Lyndon B. Johnson’s domestic stimulus package, dubbed the “Great Society,” had much to do with the strength of the economy, as did the increased costs of the war in Vietnam. Other indicators of American power included the many corporate mergers taking place in the 1960s, while closer to home, Congress took measures to raise the national minimum wage and women’s pay, which helped countless families and individuals (Carmical 1966).
Mad Men’s consideration of the American Dream is particularly thoughtful when looking at how the idea changed from the Kennedy Camelot era to the grittier later decade of Vietnam and antiwar protests. Several of the characters physically change as a visual reminder of the national makeover represented by these vastly different influences. Roger Sterling and Ted Chaough grow sideburns and moustaches. Stan’s change, though, could be considered the most dramatic. He transforms from slick-haired frat boy to bead-wearing, bearded leftist. Ironically, Stan is basically a stoner in either guise, just becoming more obvious as the decade progresses and drugs grow mainstream (touted in several episodes as a means to jumpstart creativity).
Perhaps the most consistent thread across these two halves of the 1960s was the steady commitment to the American economic engine and growing fascination with ideas related to the new term being popularized: “mass consumption.” As writers, analysts, and other commentators delved into the topic, they realized that consumer spending drove prosperity. With the Great Depression still fresh in their minds, people were keen to understand the roots of the affluence and whatever it might take to ward off another economic downturn.
