Mod mad world of '64: year of Mad Men's fourth season
The crew at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce may have eluded their London-based bosses by starting their own agency as Season 3 of Mad Men ended, but they couldn’t escape the British pop-culture invasion. Or other political, social and artistic changes hovering like clouds over their world.
As Season 4 cranks up Sunday, it’s Thanksgiving 1964. President Lyndon Johnson, elected by a landslide, has ordered the first bombings in North Vietnam. The slaying of three civil-rights activists in Mississippi lingers in the news. There’s talk of a “generation gap.”
Still — while the lives of the show’s characters may be in turmoil — the outlook isn’t totally bleak yet, suggests Rice University history professor Allen Matusow, author of The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (University of Georgia Press). A lot brews under the surface, he says, but cultural revolution hasn’t arrived. (The first anti-war protests and race riots occurred in 1965.)
“All the movements of the 1960s that brought turmoil hadn’t actually begun,” Matusow says. “People were still wearing ties.”...
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As Season 4 cranks up Sunday, it’s Thanksgiving 1964. President Lyndon Johnson, elected by a landslide, has ordered the first bombings in North Vietnam. The slaying of three civil-rights activists in Mississippi lingers in the news. There’s talk of a “generation gap.”
Still — while the lives of the show’s characters may be in turmoil — the outlook isn’t totally bleak yet, suggests Rice University history professor Allen Matusow, author of The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (University of Georgia Press). A lot brews under the surface, he says, but cultural revolution hasn’t arrived. (The first anti-war protests and race riots occurred in 1965.)
“All the movements of the 1960s that brought turmoil hadn’t actually begun,” Matusow says. “People were still wearing ties.”...