By 1910, cities around the world were bustling with cars and teeming with skyscrapers, sewer systems, bridges, electricity, and countless astonishing feats of engineering. Public health was vastly improved. Child mortality was plummeting. Life expectancy was growing. For many, everyday life now had much more space for leisure, creative pursuits, and the possibility of self-discovery and expression.
In 1957, the now-iconic American sitcom Leave It To Beaver debuted, depicting an idealized version of American suburban life: children getting into mild but ultimately harmless and instructive mischief; reliable, well-adjusted men working nine to five and mowing the lawn on weekends; dutiful, uncomplicated women taking their children to school and doing chores around the house; a car in the garage; a TV set in front of the couch; and few if any people of color or queer folks to complicate things. It was “wholesome,” clean, easy.
Fifty years later in 2007, the hit cable drama Mad Men debuted, depicting that same era in American life but painting a wildly different and more complicated portrait of the time. Even amid great material wealth and professional success, nearly every character above 30 lives a double life. Seemingly every man has a raging alcohol problem, is a remorseless womanizer, and neglects his family. Women and people of color suffer daily from the stark limitations and injustice of their place in society. Gay people hide away in shame, even from their loved ones and closest confidantes.
In Mad Men, everyone does their best to project a Leave It To Beaver life to those around them. And yet, on the inside, they live a much more nuanced, subversive, sorrowful life. They all seem to recognize that life is not as clean or easy as they had been told.
The show’s main character Donald Draper exemplifies this gilded reality more than any other. Draper quite literally steals another man’s name and identity. He buries his true self to live another man’s life. He is Don Draper to the world. He is Dick Whitman only to himself and those he can not hide from. By the finale, his duplicitous life fully catches up to him. He is a shell of himself, racked with depression and shame. He can no longer bear the weight of his fraud. He is in need of an awakening, a new path.
In contrast, those on Mad Men younger than 30 or so seem to reject this Leave It To Beaver lifestyle altogether, plunging headlong into the new possibilities of the 1960s. They listen to “scandalous” music, smoke weed, have premarital sex unapologetically and openly, and advocate for equality. They challenge old ideas and customs at the workplace and in their personal relationships. They dream of all the ways society can and should free itself. To them, that Leave It To Beaver lifestyle is a prison limiting them from their highest potentials and fullest expressions.
At the turn of the decade, many in the United States, like Draper, outwardly projected The Story of Progress: new housing developments in the suburbs, new conveniences around the house, domestic stability, and expendable income. But in truth, for many, their inner worlds and perhaps the entire social fabric felt as if they were bursting at the seams.
Some desperately clung to the old ways. But more than ever, the new generation was calling in, even insisting on, a new way.
