In some ways, the challenge is particularly difficult for this portion of the syllabus, as we are considering the late '50s culture in which a comfortable suburban conformity was both presented as the aspirational norm, and fretted over as evidence of the softening of the rugged, individual American male, who was supposed to be a bulwark against totalitarianism of all stripes. As Thomas Frank argues in The Conquest of Cool, it was American business and its embrace of a new form of advertising that found a way out of this conundrum -- a way to sell the products of the affluent society as an emblem of a new kind of individualism (what Robert Bellah and his co-authors label "expressive individualism" in Habits of the Heart). American business embraced "hip", Frank explains. "What happened in the sixties is that hip became central to the way American capitalism understood itself and explained itself to the public." (Frank, 26)
The conquest of cool (as a culture, as a way of thinking) has been so complete that it can be difficult to put it aside, and imagine other ways of being in the world. Richard Florida offers a thought experiment in the opening chapter of The Rise of the Creative Class as one imaginative technique:
Take a typical man on the street from the year 1900 and drop him into the 1950s. Then take someone from the 1950s and move him Austin Powers-style into the present day. Who would experience the greater change? (Florida, 1)
Florida runs through the technological change that our first time traveler would experience -- cars, airplanes, supermarkets, home appliances, advances in medicine -- before concluding that the first man would find the "social world of the 1950s remarkably similar to his own" (2). Florida's second time traveler, however, would find a radically transformed social world. There would be obvious social changes -- women and non-whites in position of authority, increased ethnic diversity, same-sex couples in the open -- but also changes of attitude, as "individuality and self-expression would be valued over conformity to organizational norms" and "people would seem to be always working and yet never working when they were supposed to." The second time traveler, Florida concludes, would "continually suffer the painful feeling of not knowing how to behave", would be witness to a "deeper, more pervasive transformation" of society, and moreover would have to learn how to adjust to constant change, to a time when "flux and uncertainty themselves seem to be part of the everyday norm" (3-4).
Mad Men gives us glimpses of these kinds of time travelers -- Peggy's secretary Olive in "My Old Kentucky Home", or Mrs. Blankenship dead at her desk in season four -- "she was an astronaut," Cooper says in describing her passage through transformations in American culture.
My own sense of this cultural transformation, however, comes from a more personal source. Although I was born in 1969, I grew up in a place that retained the vestiges of three distinct traditional cultures (Cajun Catholic, rural African American, Appalachian), with an overlay of a national mass-media culture that was rapidly gaining ground. Lafayette, Louisiana and the surrounding area, known as Acadiana, is one of the least transient places in the country, as this 2002 New York Times article explores. There is a cultural mindset that is more resistant to change than the national culture. The conquest of cool is not complete in South Louisiana.
To the extent that these trends are true today, they are even more pronounced in older generations. My father's father did move. He was born sometime in the late 1910s in a rural area outside of Texarkana, Arkansas. He had a third grade education. His family was so poor that he often did not have shoes. During the Depression, he moved to Louisiana to find work in the oil fields -- physically demanding, dirty, dangerous work. '50s suburban conformity -- a brick house in a good neighborhood, with inside plumbing, appliances, money for vacations -- was a triumph -- an achievement of luck, initiative, and strenuous effort. The value of expressive individualism was utterly foreign to him. He lived until 1991, a time and culture traveler like Mad Men's Mrs. Blankenship, who found some accommodation with technological change, but could not fathom cultural change. Cool had no meaning to him.
Mad Men only offers us glimpses of characters as out of step with cultural change as my grandfather. Instead, it asks us to travel through the transformation with people who are in various stages of transformation, and who are contributing to the transformation through their personal choices, and their work in advertising. I'll explore this more thoroughly in my next post.
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