How Mad Men deals with history
As a depiction of history, Mad Men has been criticized on a number of grounds. Daniel Mendelsohn contends that it is “unattractively smug” in its “self-positioning” to the present. In other words, it goads 21st century viewers to feel superior to the piggish barbarians of this era, in which “every man is a chauvinist pig…every white person a reflexive racist.” Another critic calls Mad Men “an unpleasant little entry in the genre of Now We Know Better.”
Another criticism is that Mad Men deals superficially with the tumult of the 1960s. Mendelsohn faults Mad Men for doing little more than making “lazy allusion[s]” to this era’s racial upheaval. “Race,” he insists, “never really makes anything happen in the show.” One writer asserts that the show “nods” to larger events and structural forces but “doesn’t engage with its characters’ surroundings: we know Civil Rights ‘happens,’ but we have no idea why.’”
But it is exactly these traits that make Mad Men’s historical sensibility unique and compelling. It is not a show about history but about how people go through their lives in the midst of historical change. The characters’ focus is, at almost all times, on themselves: work, family, romance, trauma, etc. They also have little understanding of why things like Civil Rights or Vietnam are happening, which is the point. Their interest in these events is peripheral, and they offer cursory “whaddya gonna do” or “that’s terrible” type comments on them before returning to their lives. In a Season 3 episode, Betty Draper encounters the family maid, a black woman named Carla, listening intently to a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. after the murder of four black girls in Birmingham. She sighs and then off-handedly remarks: “I hate to say this, but it’s really made me wonder about Civil Rights. Maybe it’s not supposed to happen right now.”
In a similar moment in Season 5, Roger Sterling grimaces at the news from Selma and says that this is why there needs to be a voting rights bill. Alluding to the Civil Rights Act, the avuncular, Ayn Rand-loving executive Bert Cooper responds: “They got everything they wanted, what more do they want?” Roger’s vague sympathies for the Civil Rights movement do not, of course, prevent him from performing in blackface during his wedding.
This mixture of sympathy, frustration, and insensitivity captures white Americans’ ambivalence toward the Civil Rights movement quite well. Outright racism is much rarer on the show than subtle prejudice, unexamined assumptions, and blithe ignorance. This presages the attitudes that would prevent so many white Americans from reckoning with the history of race in the coming years. Peggy Olson, for example, holds standard liberal views about the black freedom struggle, but she nonetheless glances nervously at her purse when a black secretary, Dawn Chambers, stays the night with her after King’s assassination.
