



Carnation Instant Breakfast or Life cereal? CGC employees or the SCDP team? On the one hand, this episode is pretty relentless in its insistence on division. It’s either them or us: New York or Los Angeles, Joan or Pete, Humphrey or Nixon, demonstrators or cops. Don reminds Megan that she’s Canadian, not a US citizen. Avon Cosmetics faces a choice between getting groovier and waxing nostalgic. Joan think she’s on a date, but it turns out to be a business meeting. She then replaces Pete at breakfast, while Carnation replaces breakfast itself. Not both. One or the other.





And yet, in California, “everyone shares”—at least according to Don’s drugged fantasy of a hippie Megan. Don has always been two rather than one: Don Draper and Dick Whitman, husband and lover, outsider and insider, ethical hero and repellent antihero. And his preference for both/and turns out to govern this episode as much as either/or. Ted shuts Pete up with the assertion that “we’re all working together: all agency business is your business.” Peggy, after fighting bitterly with Joan, rescues her. And of course, the episode ends with the overcoming of a bitter conflict. A shared identity for the agency replaces a string of separate names and letters in a new prospect of togetherness: Sterling Cooper & Partners. “Partners” in the name does double work: the word itself is a compromise that requires both sides to give up their individual identities, and what it conveys is an assertion of their new identity as partnership rather than opposition.





But what can be shared, exactly? “The whole world is watching,” chant the protestors at the Chicago Democratic Convention as they are brutally beaten by the police on national television. We watch Don, Megan, and Joan watching, sharing the televised experience of the Convention with millions of others. But this is togetherness without amity, without concord, without partnership. Megan is scared, Joan horrified, Don dismissive. The experience of network television news joins but also separates, inviting us to enter the common world of public life from the privacy of our living rooms. And the world it allows us to share is a scene of violence and discord.



The agency’s partnership doesn’t do much better at accomplishing togetherness. It’s not an image of harmonious values, or a unity that either transcends or blends differences. The name is a working solution precisely because, as Jim puts it, it’s “equally offensive to all.”







And so this episode moves us past the simple binaries that organize so much experience—butter or margarine, cereal or instant breakfast, Democrats or Republicans, hippies or housewives—to bring into focus instead the troubling, sometimes even sinister, task of togetherness. It is during this episode that the Democrats officially embrace a pro-war platform, meaning that the contest between Nixon and Humphrey is not much of an opposition after all, but a choice between war and war. Even voting turns out to be one of those choices that does not fall into the easy logic of either/or.







On a smaller scale, this episode repeatedly explores the strange fudging of togetherness, the fragile, uneasy, disturbing attempt to unite across the usual binaries of us and them. Megan identifies with the protestor whose skull is cracked by the police, only to find Don disparaging—scornful not only of the protestors but also of Canadian Megan herself, unable to vote. And yet, Megan and Don manage to cross these divisions to revive feelings of connectedness anyway (Don says, “I miss you,” and seems to mean it), and both find it difficult to end the connection by hanging up their expensive long-distance phone call—to fall back into two separate worlds out of a shared experience that feels terribly precarious, always capable of drowning in the magnitude of their differences.





The intriguing Bob Benson also creates commonness out of division. He has been studiously learning about sales success from business gurus. He then tries to put the advice into practice, using clichés to inspire Ginsberg to join him in making the pitch to Manischewitz. But if he starts with painful banalities to jolt Ginsberg out of what he thinks is simple stage fright, he eventually succeeds when he learns that Ginsberg is tortured by feeling split into two, guilty for colluding with capitalist thugs and pigs. “There is no harm in this!” he cries. “Manischewitz are good people. They’re your people. And they sell wine for religious ceremonies of all faiths.” Stressing both the singularity of group belonging (“your people”) and the universalist aspiration to transcend singularity (“all faiths”), Bob makes Ginsberg whole again, at the same time that he imagines the distinctively Jewish Manischewitz as a product for all peoples. This is the goal of all advertising—to reach beyond limited demographics to an ever wider world of consumers—just as it is the goal of a liberal democracy—to unite a people across divisions of race and religion. At the same moment that democratic processes are dissolving into violent conflict, salesman Bob is uniting self-divided Ginsberg and uniting with him, holding out his hand in a gesture that is part support, part enactment of the amity possible across groups, part profit motive. The handshake between the partners that ends the episode offers an echo of Bob’s connection to Ginsberg in another uneasy makeshift of togetherness.





Even self-interested Pete manages to work up an alliance, a spectacularly ironic camaraderie with the Chicago demonstrators. Our first inkling of this is his anger at the agency’s new name, which he calls “a gravestone to our resistance.” Horrified at Don’s capitulation to the enemy, he then takes up a joint, a gesture of common cause with hippies and Chicago demonstrators. Pete as antiwar protestor? This is laughable, of course, except that all togetherness in this episode is brittle and strange, worked out of conflicting values and aspirations that never harmonize into a common vision.



