The early Mad Men years

The early Mad Men years

by digby

This excerpt from Fortune Magazine 1955 (via Brad Delong) is instructive:

The executive’s home today is likely to be unpretentious and relatively small–perhaps seven rooms and two and a half baths. (Servants are hard to come by and many a vice president’s wife gets along with part-time help. So many have done so for so long, in fact, that they no longer complain much about it.)
[...]
The large yacht has also foundered in the sea of progressive taxation. In 1930, Fred Fisher (Bodies), Walter Briggs, and Alfred P. Sloan cruised around in vessels 235 feet long; J. P. Morgan had just built his fourth Corsair (343 feet). Today, seventy-five feet is considered a lot of yacht. One of the biggest yachts launched in the past five years is the ninety-six-foot Rhonda III, built and owned by Ingalls Shipbuilding Corp., of Birmingham, Alabama. The Rhonda III cost half a million dollars to build, and the annual bill for keeping a crew aboard her, stocking her, and fueling her runs to around $130,000. As Chairman Robert I. Ingalls Jr. says, only corporations today can own even so comparatively modest a craft. The specifications of the boat that interests the great majority of seagoing executives today are “forty feet, four people, $40,000.” In this tidy vessel the businessman of 1955 is quite happily sea-borne.


This was a different psychology, wasn't it? Certainly, there didn't seem to be the whining and petulance --- and angry demands for obeisance and gratitude --- that is so prevalent among the billionaires today. Humility is totally out of fashion in our culture --- success means spending more time bragging about your success than actually achieving it. We are a shamelessly self-promoting lot.

But more importantly it proves that this job creator myth is a total crock. As Paul Krugman noted:

According to modern conservative dogma, this kind of punishment of “job creators” should have brought economic progress to a screeching halt. Yet according to Fortune, executives continued to work hard — and the postwar generation was actually a period of economic progress that has never been matched.

Somehow, John Galt never made an appearance.


There was a lot wrong with this era. I have no wish to go back to it. But the hard luck years of the depression and the horrors of WWII and Korea did at least force the business leaders of their day to recognize that they weren't the modern equivalent of mythic warrior heroes. You'd hope it wouldn't require living through the worst depression and bloodiest wars in history to prove that, but from where we sit today it appears that's what it takes.


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