acknowledgments

Even though I am too young to remember much about the 1960s, in writing this book I found it impossible to escape the feeling that I was writing about my temporal homeland. By this I mean more than that Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones remained almost hegemonic radio fixtures in my hometown well into the 1980s. For me and, I assume, for others my age, the sixties are the beginning of the present, the birthplace of the styles and tastes and values that define our world. Music, movies, ads, clothes, and writing from before that era sometimes seem to us like artifacts an incomprehensibly naive age.

This feeling was driven home for me by the astonishing changes that went on in American culture while I was writing The Conquest of Cool. When I started on this project back in 1990, the enthusiasm of corporations for youth culture in the sixties seemed like a curious and slightly obscure topic. But as I worked, the subject became less and less distant. Beginning in 1991–92 (when Nevermind ascended the Billboard charts and Tom Peters’s Liberation Management appeared), American popular culture and corporate culture veered off together on a spree of radical-sounding bluster that mirrored events of the 1960s so closely as to make them seem almost unremarkable in retrospect. Caught up in what appeared to be an unprecedented prosperity driven by the “revolutionary” forces of globalization and cyber-culture, the nation again became obsessed with (of all things) youth culture and the march of generations. It was as though we were following the cultural stage directions of a script written thirty years before. People in advertising began referring to and even swiping from the great ads of the creative revolution. In business literature, dreams of chaos and ceaseless undulation routed the 1980s dreams of order and “excellence.” “Theory Y” made a triumphant comeback, decked out in any number of new vocabularies of transgression derived from sources like Zen and the historical left. Even the publications devoted to the menswear industry showed signs of a renaissance: after embracing the commodification of deviance with such enthusiasm as to put readers clearly in mind of the trajectory of GQ in the late 1960s, Details magazine won the plaudits of media observers and saw its editor promoted in 1994 to head Condé Nast.

While my subject is arguably one of considerable current interest, my approach will seem antiquated to many. The Conquest of Cool is a study of cultural production rather than reception, of power rather than resistance; it does not address the subject of consumer evasiveness except as it is discussed by advertising executives and menswear manufacturers; it has little to say about the effectiveness of particular modes of popular resistance to mass culture, how this or that symbol was negotiated, detourned, or subverted. While cultural reception is a fascinating subject, I hope the reader will forgive me for leaving it to others. Not only has it been overdone, but our concentration on it, it seems to me, has led us to overlook and even minimize the equally-fascinating doings of the creators of mass culture, a group as playful and even as subversive in their own way as the heroic consumers who are the focus of so much of cultural studies today.

Strangely enough, the works of these lively capitalists were nearly as difficult to track down and quantify as the subjective impressions of TV viewers must be. Television advertising in particular proved difficult to research, since old commercials are only cataloged, indexed, and made available at a very limited number of institutions, and the few archives of broadcast advertising that do exist are, for the most part, made up of the exceptionally successful commercials which sponsors and agencies want the public to see. To gather a sampling of more representative commercials is a formidable task, and one in which I was not entirely successful. Fortunately, the Center for Advertising History at the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, has made a monumental effort in this regard, compiling reel upon reel of commercials for Pepsi, Alka Seltzer, Marlboro, and Federal Express, and conducting lengthy taped interviews with just about everyone ever associated with the production of these companies’ advertising. I am also grateful to the Museum of Broadcasting in New York and the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago for allowing me to clock so many hours on their premises staring at reels of television commercials from the fifties and sixties.

More valuable still were the recollections and comments of a number of people with firsthand knowledge of the industries in question. For their time and assistance, I wish to thank Jerry Fishman, John Furr, George Lois, Quinn Meyer, and Charlie Moss. A number of advertising agencies, including DDB-Needham, Young & Rubicam, J. Walter Thompson—Chicago, and Wells, Rich, Greene/BDDP (to whom I am particularly indebted), kindly permitted me to rummage through their files of clippings and to screen old commercials.

A handful of libraries have amassed impressive advertising collections. The J. Walter Thompson archives at the William R. Perkins library of Duke University are remarkably thorough, and the Fairfax Cone papers at the Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago were also useful. Of course, no study of this kind can be completed without several weeks in the New York Public Library, and to their unbelievably dedicated staff as well as that of the Miller Nichols Library at the University of Missouri—Kansas City I wish to express my appreciation. I must also acknowledge the crucial assistance of Bridget Cain and Nathan Frank in the early stages of my research on the menswear industry.

In the sixties, television was only beginning to surpass magazines as the advertising showplace of note, and to get a feel for the consumer dreams of the decade, there was no substitute for simply slogging through old mass-circulation publications like Life and Ladies’ Home Journal issue by issue. For help in that project and in transforming what I found there into the “Hip/Square” study that makes up this book’s appendix, I am immensely obliged to my wife Wendy Edelberg.

The Conquest of Cool is substantially derived from a dissertation I wrote at the University of Chicago in 1994, and I wish to thank Leora Auslander, Michael Geyer, and especially Neil Harris for their patience with the strange enthusiasms of my graduate-student days and their assistance in transforming what was a slow and plodding idea into one with zip and impact. Doug Mitchell, my editor at the University of Chicago Press, has provided the encouragement and direction without which this project would never have been completed. Readers of my criticism of contemporary culture in the Baffler, the Chicago Reader, the Nation, and In These Times will be familiar with many of the ideas I apply here to the culture of the 1950s and 1960s. The many opportunities I have had to discuss these themes publicly have only strengthened and sharpened them, so I must thank my colleagues at the Baffler, Steve Duncombe, Greg Lane, Dave Mulcahey, Matt Weiland, Keith White, and Tom Vanderbilt, whose criticism and suggestions shaped everything in these pages. For myself I claim any and all errors of fact, theory, or interpretation that lurk herein.