Amid the many scenes from Mad Men that still linger in one’s mind, one of the oddest (at least to modern eyes) is the moment where the Drapers, on a rare family outing together, happily discard all their trash after a picnic. Taking place in season two, episode seven—entitled “The Gold Violin”—the year of this particular nonchalant act on the part of the Drapers is meant to be in 1962. A different world from the “Don’t Be A Litterbug” one that we know today. Considering that popular discourse loves to place all responsibility for the current climate crisis on baby boomers, this scene is especially topical. And yet, being that the chemicals and technologies we’ve come to know as categorically detrimental (e.g., pesticides, nuclear power, Teflon, etc.) were still new and deemed beacons of “progress” rather than implements of destruction that only corporations would benefit from in the long-run, maybe it’s unfair to blame boomer consumers who didn’t know any better at the outset.
In fact, so “uncouth” were they with regard to environmental etiquette that they needed a campaign to tell them not to litter. Thus, people such as Don (Jon Hamm), Betty (January Jones), Sally (Kiernan Shipka) and Bobby (played by Aaron Hart in the second season) tossing their trash onto the ground like it was nothing would not be out of the ordinary for the (lack of) social mores of the day. Complete with Don chucking his beer can into the distance like a football and Betty shaking out their trash-filled picnic blanket onto the grass without a second thought. It’s not as though there was a nearby garbage can handily available, after all. For these were in the days before there was much initiative on the part of the government to regulate its population “correctly” disposing of waste, with fines for littering coming later. While, on the one hand, it can be taken as a sign of “barbaric” Silent Generation and boomer comportment, on the other, it’s apparent they couldn’t see the full weight of the mounting effects of “modern convenience,” including the Santa Barbara oil spill (which would ultimately bring about the first Earth Day in 1970), until the end of the 1960s. According to environmental historian Adam Rome, “I think [the oil spill] was one of the ultimately most important in a series of accidents or problems that made people realize that a lot of the modern technologies that seemed miraculous…posed unprecedented risks to the health of the environment and ultimately to ourselves.”
These were risks that the corporation never wanted the average American consumer to take note of. Indeed, the real reason the Keep America Beautiful campaign was even started served as part of a deflection from the real issue: corporations needing the consumer to keep buying shit over and over again by building it not to last. Ergo, more waste from manufacturing and packaging. So of course there was bound to be more potential for littering.
Per Mother Jones’ Bradford Plumer, “Keep America Beautiful managed to shift the entire debate about America’s garbage problem. No longer was the focus on regulating production—for instance, requiring can and bottle makers to use refillable containers, which are vastly less profitable. Instead, the ‘litterbug’ became the real villain, and KAB supported fines and jail time for people who carelessly tossed out their trash, despite the fact that, clearly, ‘littering’ is a relatively tiny part of the garbage problem in this country (not to mention the resource damage and pollution that comes with manufacturing ever more junk in the first place). Environmental groups that worked with KAB early on didn’t realize what was happening until years later.” When the indoctrination had already taken hold anyway. Americans held themselves accountable for being pieces of shit while corporations and their head honchos kept laughing all the way to the bank as a result of the misdirection.
As for Mad Men’s creator, Matthew Weiner, born in 1965, he likely would have still been witnessing casual, cavalier littering in his own childhood. For it wasn’t until 1971 that the first vehemently guilt-tripping Keep America Beautiful ad came out—the one with the famous “crying Indian.” Preying on the germinal phenomenon of white guilt, the ad has been described as one of the greatest ever made. We’re talking Don Draper-level shit. Focused on a Native American (played by an Italian, obviously) canoeing through trash in what turns out to be oil rig-filled waters, a narrator says, “Some people have a deep, abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country.” At this instant, the Native American finds himself at the side of a highway as someone throws a bag of trash out their window that explodes open as it lands at his feet. Here the narrator concludes, “And some people don’t.” Read: and some oblivious white yuppie cunts like the Drapers don’t. To that point, it’s appropriate that Sally, in this particular picnic scene, asks her parents if they’re rich. Betty, ever the avoider of real topics, replies, “It’s not polite to talk about money.” Nor is it polite to throw trash wherever one pleases, but Betty and Don hadn’t yet gotten the literal (litter-al?) message. Along with the rest of their generation and the one that they had just begat.
At the end of the “crying Indian” PSA, it’s declared, “People start pollution. People can stop it.” Ironically, the “people” who actually could stop it—corporations (legally deemed people, in case you forgot)—are not held accountable in any way in such ads that place all responsibility on the individual a.k.a. consumer to “do their part.” And yet, trying to put all the onus on the consumer to “self-regulate” feels like a small drop in an oil spill-filled ocean of what could actually be done if corporations weren’t a bottomless pit of profit-seeking.
While this moment of littering in “The Gold Violin” is an accurate re-creation of what would have gone down in 1962 after a picnic, it’s also a larger statement from Weiner (who co-wrote the episode) about the false veneer of perfection that existed in those days in general and in the lives of Mad Men’s characters in particular. Because, beneath the surface, it was all a steaming garbage heap waiting to spew forth. For example, although Don has just bought a shiny new convertible to match his shiny new success at the agency, the bubbling up of consequences resulting from his latest affair with Bobbie Barrett (Melinda McGraw) is about to explode his marriage as he once knew it. Elsewhere, Sal (Bryan Batt) invites Ken (Aaron Staton) over to his apartment for dinner, where his wife, Kitty (Sarah Drew), is made to feel like the third wheel—giving her that evermore uneasy sense about Sal that doesn’t crystallize until episode two of season three, when he does his Ann-Margaret in Bye Bye Birdie impression for her. Then there’s Bert Cooper’s (Robert Morse) acquisition of one of Rothko’s signature “red square” paintings. Prompting Ken, Jane (Peyton List), Harry (Rich Sommer) and Sal to enter his office without permission while he’s away so that they can view it. Although Sal, as “an artist,” claims that it “has to” mean something, Ken counters, “I don’t think it’s supposed to be explained… Maybe you’re just supposed to experience it.”
This idea that existence is dominated by total chaos as opposed to some “deeper meaning” would come to define the 1960s and beyond. Even as corporations did their best to insist that all chaos—especially of the environmentally-related variety—was simply the result of poor individual “manners” and “self-control.”
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