The Historical Sensibility of Mad Men

After bouncing around to multiple streaming services in the last few years, the brilliant show Mad Men recently settled at HBO, so my wife and I decided to rewatch it. Compared to our first viewing, we saw ourselves more in the creeping middle age of Don and Joan than the up-and-coming careerism of Pete and Peggy. While the show ended in 2015, before the rise of Trump, we felt somewhat consoled by observing fully realized characters go through another period of violent disorientation.

One of the biggest changes for me was that since the mid-2010s I’ve begun a career as a professional historian. In our rewatch, I was impressed by the show’s unique historical sensibility, which critiques the world the characters inhabit without condescending to them or pandering to its mostly liberal audience. It depicts the stark realities of race and gender in 1960s New York while allowing for the possibility of change.

The show excels at examining how real people (albeit, extremely good-looking people) experience history as a backdrop to their personal and professional lives. History, in Mad Men, shapes the air around the characters, occasionally intrudes to seize control of the story, and nevertheless slowly changes each person. History is also experienced as something beyond the characters’ control and understanding. Like real human beings, they respond with a mix of bewilderment, accommodation, grumpiness, opportunism, and, occasionally, a full embrace of change. 

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 21^st 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. 

Don Draper, meanwhile, is surprisingly empathetic with black people, possibly given his background as an outsider. But he also, like most white Americans at the time, scoffs at Cassius Clay renaming himself Muhammed Ali and roots for the more racially acceptable Sonny Liston to flatten Ali in their 1965 bout. Pete, the haughty scion of a WASPish family, evolves into the show’s most enlightened character on race, less out of an awareness of black people’s experiences but because of his sense of propriety and decency. He blanches at Roger’s blackface act and presses Sterling Cooper to hire black employees, start advertising to black consumers, and drop racist clients. These are nuanced depictions of real, flawed people navigating the history of race in complex ways, changing in some respects but not others.

Mad Men’s characters pay attention to history mainly when it impedes on their lives. Their privilege as white, wealthy urbanites allows them to insulate themselves to an extent. Still, certain events, like assassinations or the Cuban Missile Crisis, break through the regular drama. When King is assassinated in 1968, each character has an authentic reaction that embodies who they are. Megan Draper, representing a younger and more socially conscious generation, is deeply shaken, as is Don’s daughter Sally. Roger Sterling, reflecting a hint of sadness, remarks: “The man knew how to talk. I don’t know why, but I thought that would save him. I thought that would save all of us.” Pete, in his best moment, berates a co-worker for focusing on how much money Sterling Cooper will forfeit from lost TV commercials. “This cannot be made good…it’s shameful. It’s a shameful, shameful day!” he raves, demanding that his co-workers pause their lives and reckon with a historical tragedy.

But even within these crises, the characters feel that history is beyond their control, and, presumably like many contemporary viewers, they long for things to return to “normal” without being able to define what that means. This often means shutting out that world or moving to the suburbs. It also means carrying on with work, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis episode when Don and company scheme to avoid a merger and other employees fret about their jobs and the end of the world with equal gravity. In this episode, an anonymous paramour proposes a toast to Betty: “to not thinking about things.” In the midst of horror and transformation, this is the preference of most characters on screen. 

While Mad Men deals with all kinds of crises, including racial ones, black characters are rare on the show. Critics understandably want to know more about figures like Dawn and Shirley, the capable secretaries trying to manage being the only black employees at the firm. Black characters largely exist in the background in subordinate roles; they are elevator operators, stable boys, moving men, maids, and so on. With some exceptions, white characters hand off their horses or children and leave their plates or trash with little more than a nod to the black underclass. Modern liberal viewers want the black characters to speak up, stand up for themselves, and so on against the obliviousness or prejudice of white characters.

However, this restraint demonstrates the brilliance of Mad Men’s treatment of the history of race. It depicts the racial order of the American North in its normal functioning and hints at how black characters navigated it. In one scene in season 3, Pete awkwardly questions the elevator operator, Hollis, about the TV-buying habits of “Negroes.” When Pete pauses the elevator so he can further interrogate Hollis, he is oblivious to Hollis’ fear that he might say the wrong thing and get fired. Hollis sputters “I don’t want to get into trouble” before telling Pete that he doesn’t even watch television because “We’ve got bigger problems to worry about than TV.” When Pete avers that every American will soon have “the American dream,” Hollis merely glares at Pete before turning the elevator back on. 

Through these small interactions, including its first scene, the show reinforces the message that there is much more to its black people’s inner lives than can be expressed in a racist society. Like the white characters, they experience history as terrifying and bewildering, but from a very different vantage point. Moreover, these scenes show how there is still a vast gap between sympathetic whites like Pete and black people, a gap that the white characters show little interest in bridging. This is not a marginalization of race but a nuanced depiction of the racial hierarchy outside of the Jim Crow South.

Even more than race or the Cold War, Mad Men is a show about gender. It begins with relentless depictions of chauvinism at the workplace and at home, but things change. The male characters’ philandering has consequences. While one early episode centers on the scandal of a divorced new neighbor, by the end of the show almost every character is divorced (often multiple times). 

Women, moreover, gradually gain power at the workplace as the show progresses. Peggy briefly ends up as Don’s supervisor, a position to which he begrudgingly submits for a short time. Instead of giving female characters overtly progressive lines or girl-boss moments, the show’s writers let women’s history play out through their characters, trusting the viewers without spoon-feeding them. 

Consider Joan Harris. Joan embodies the early phases of the feminist movement, but in a non-political way. She evolves from a flirty office manager who advises younger women on how to land a husband, to an abused wife deprived of her career, to a partner at the firm who nevertheless faces constant ogling and dismissiveness, to an independent entrepreneur and single mother. Nonetheless, in the final episodes her career advancement is capped by her new firm’s tolerance of sexual harassment and its dismissal of her as a serious account woman, showing the limits of women’s advancement at the time.

Joan’s arc, however circumscribed, would not have been possible without larger social changes in the 1960s. But Joan, like most people, cares little about the context. She pursues independence, dignity, and wealth for herself, and she does not feel she owes anything to other women. This is a far more believable and rich character than a self-consciously feminist employee of Sterling Cooper might have been. This is the show’s historical sensibility at work; history creates new opportunities and challenges for the characters, but they don’t fully understand why or necessarily care. Instead, they forge ahead in their lives. Lest we moderns think we are better than our forebears, we should recall that the 2010s witnessed a similar form of “Lean In” feminism that emphasized career advancement for well-off women, who were expected to accommodate rather than challenge gender hierarchies.

There are, to be fair, some moments of comeuppance against the sexism of the show’s male characters which demonstrate shifting social dynamics. In Season 4, a chauvinist copy writer named Joey makes a lewd cartoon of Joan. Peggy, by now an established copy-writer with her own team, first asks Don what she should do. Don curtly tells Peggy that she’s in charge and can fire anyone she wants, and Peggy proceeds to dismiss Joey in an intensely cathartic scene (especially for the viewers). It’s a feminist act, but not a conscious one. The changing place of women at the workplace enables Peggy to be in this position, but she does not advocate for women as women as she ascends the career ladder.

Immersion, Not Escapism

Showrunner Matthew Weiner insisted that audiences are not meant to feel superior to the characters, or if they do they are missing the point. History also impedes on our lives in ways that are hard to understand and harder to control. We have our own biases and foibles, and our society is slipping back into the sexism and racism depicted in Mad Men, defying any smug sense of superiority for the present audience. Mad Men ran from 2007-2015, roughly the Obama years, when it was tempting to look back on  previous generations with disdain. This is no longer the case. In fact, my reaction to rewatching the show in 2026 was that for all the flaws of America in the 1960s, the country never elected someone as reprehensible as Donald Trump. 

Mad Men’s place in shows about history is also unique. There are many excellent TV series that depict history in dramatized fashion: Band of Brothers, Say Nothing, Miss Americana, and Death by Lightning are but a few. The main critical question for these programs, from a historian’s perspective, is how faithfully they reproduce history while remaining engaging as entertainment.

Mad Men, however, is a different kind of show that calls for a different analytical frame. Its purpose is not to comprehensively depict the history of the 1960s; in fact, the viewer does not learn much about Civil Rights, Vietnam, or the feminist movement. It puts people in the foreground and history in the background, but not in a way that makes history into mere “décor.” Rather, the show demonstrates how history reshapes people’s lives, perspectives, and interactions, often without them fully realizing that things have changed. If we are honest with ourselves as contemporary viewers, this is how most of us experience change in the present. This is not escapism but immersion into the experience of living history.

Featured image is "Elizabeth Moss as Peggy Olsen, Jon Hamm as Don Draper," Frank Ockenfels/AMC 2013. Fair use.