Journalist and author Susan Jacoby has written an important and illuminating book. The Last Men on Top, a Kindle single, makes an argument that is long overdue. The thesis: the generations of American men born between 1910 and 1935, the so-called “last men on top” celebrated as the greatest generation and mocked as Mad Men, have been caricatured and robbed of their true nature and humanity. Liberals, conservatives, pop culture, and established historians are all guilty of this.
The Last Men on Top is a nonpartisan argument that is the result of an intellect that can handle subtlety and nuance, and in our ongoing war about the sexes it is a tonic. Jacoby argues men born between 1910 and 1935, that is, both the men who fought and won world War II and those who missed that war but came of age in the 1950s, were far more humane and vulnerable than they have been depicted in history and popular culture. What makes Jacoby’s argument so powerful is that she is a feminist—a sharp and even-handed feminist. Jacoby, 57, went to work as a journalist for the Washington Post. She is clear and precise in her recounting of what the world of women was like before feminism and the sexual revolution and the birth control pill. In her early working days—and for decades before—men would openly comment on a female colleague’s looks and what she was wearing. A woman who stayed at home to raise children was one divorce away from being completely destitute. If a family had male and female children, the males were encouraged to be lawyers and doctors and the females were taught homemaking.
This kind of Don Draper atmosphere is easy to satirize, as is demonizing the men who were making the rules back then. But as Jacoby argues, “the last men on top deserve better than they are receiving from popular culture today.” Jacoby explores the dashed dreams and frustrations of the men of the era. Jacoby’s father, an accountant who went broke from a gambling debt and had to go to work for her father, once wrote her a note saying he envied her because she had a job doing what she loved—indicating that he did not like being an accountant. Mr. Jacoby, like many other men of the first half of the 20th century, was not able to follow his heart’s desire. The Depression and World War II made it impossible. Even during the prosperous and so-called boring 1950s, many men were under tremendous pressure to provide for a large family, all while doing jobs that they may have hated. Jacoby:
I would like to see just one scene in Mad Men in which a hard-working husband and father, whatever his job, is gulping coffee in his kitchen at 4:30 on an icy January or February morning. This man warms up his car and then heads for work, while his wife, children and dog snuggle under their blankets.
They also, and to me this is the most poignant part of The Last Men on Top, were capable of great tenderness and selflessness towards the women they loved. It was in these passages that I most recognized my own father, who came of age in the 1950s and would have done anything to make sure my mother was happy. Jacoby remembers her father bringing her mother little presents when he couldn’t afford to give her more, something I witnessed my own father do. “My nieces need to know more about that side of the last men on top,” she writes, “and those of us old enough and young enough to remember are best equipped to tell the story.” Jacoby thinks that that’s not likely, however, arguing that the mocking that modern cultural elites express towards older generations of men is partly fueled by their own resentment and frustration that the sexual revolution has turned many men into selfish bums—but the idea that men were better in the bad old days is just too much to bear. It would mean “turning back the clock.”
Except, it wouldn’t. By seeing the last men on top as fully complex human beings, including the depression, weakness, and sorrow that goes with being human, as well as the self-sacrificing that is usually only attributed to women, we can stop claiming that there is nothing from that era worth saving. Of course women were not as free back then. But not all the men were demons. Jacoby notes that as a young woman she learned to try “to avoid those guys who delivered lascivious critiques of your clothes and the body beneath them when you walked into the office.” Yet unlike most liberals, Jacoby acknowledges another side to the coin:
But you also remember, if you happen to be in the right place at the right time, men of the same generation who went out of their way to help you, to serve as mentors, to show you the ropes, even to warn you about which men in the office hated ambitious women and would try and trip you up. These members of the war generation were not looking for any sexual favors in return, and they got no points from their own bosses for extending the hand of professional friendship to women.
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