There has been a lot of press about the show's historical accuracy. The New York Times has a blog devoted to the show, that's where I learned that the producers hired Westchester County's official historian to verify all the details, including the arrangement of chairs at the meetings of the Town Council of Ossining. The Wall Street Journal recently ran this piece about the stubborn perfectionism about the costume designer: /http://magazine.wsj.com/hunter/the-partnership/threads-of-the-story/. I've read dozens of other articles, all fascinating, many just reinforcing my own theories about the subtext, literary and historical value of the series.
One theme that fascinates me is the onset of multiculturalism in New York City. Bigotry is still rife among the characters, of course. This past week's episode centered around the Cassius Clay/Sonny Liston fight. Harry sells tickets to the closed-circuit screening of the fight, and since he got the tickets gratis his colleagues accuse him of acting like a Jew. Don Draper's delightful secretary, Miss Blankenship – one of the best additions to the show I have to say – says that if she wanted to watch two negroes fight she'd throw a dollar bill onto the sidewalk.
But in other, less obvious ways, the characters' intolerance is softening. Peter Campbell, the youngest member of the new agency Sterling Cooper Draper Price, has been cursing a lot recently. When his wife told him she was pregnant he said "Jesus Mary and Joseph." A few episodes later he responded to some unpleasant news by saying, "Judas H Priest." Both exclamations seemed odd coming from a character like Peter. He's the quintessential Manhattan WASP, prep school and Dartmouth grad. In one of the earlier seasons someone mentioned that his mother was a Van Cortland... or maybe a Dykman, one of the landed 17th century Dutch families whose names are on so many uptown streets and Bronx parks. The name Campbell is Scottish, maybe Presbyterian, like George H Bush, the kinder and gentler Protestants.
Peter likes to think he gets the people he's selling products to. New York was, and still is, a very Catholic town; everyone curses, we all pick up our neighbors' more colorful phrases. Pete's unguarded expressions sound like they come from a working class Catholic, not a Park Avenue WASP. My take is the writers are showing us, bit by bit, ethnic expression by ethnic expression, the cultural hodgepodge (that a Dutch word?) that is New York City. Peter's language, his use of the vernacular, is a reflection of his surroundings, not of his conscious mind. If he were being guarded he never would have said it.
Peter, like his wife Trudy and so many other characters on the show, changed - or evolved or grew up - right before our eyes on the Kennedy assassination episode. Don and Roger changed then too because they were about to lose their absolute grip on absolute power. Season 4 takes place in 1965. The country is changing, and, consciously or not (though probably not), Peter is changing with it. He's making his own way, doing whatever it takes to succeed, holding his own with Roger Sterling, his overtly racist boss. In a subplot of the show's first season, a Jewish department store heiress approaches Sterling Cooper, a WASP agency, partly because she wanted WASP customers. That season took place in 1960. Little by little, with subtle and sometimes blatant story lines, the writers of this show are showing us the many ways the country was changing. Harry Crane has slipped a few Yiddish words in this season. He's the firm's media buyer, and when he came back from a business trip to LA he used the word bupkes, Yiddish for nothing. It was a throw away line, but some of us more astute viewers (read New York Jews) picked it up. He used another Yiddish word, goniff, in a subsequent episode, referring to the media sales guys at CBS in NYC. This change in his character's attitude and vocabulary is the writers' acknowledgement to the growing power of the media and the many Jews who work it, as well as the WASP elite's gradual acceptance of Jews in society (to an extent) and business.
I don't think the writers have made any mistakes. The show this season, especially with less January Jones, is just about perfect.
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