Bush and Obama, Wars and Economy: Power and People in an Age of Limits and Loss 587Excuse me, let me tell you something... When America opened up the
floodgates and let all us Italians in, what do you think they were doing it
for? ‘Cause they were trying to save us from poverty? No, they did it
because they needed us. They needed us to build their cities and dig their
subways, and to make them richer. The Carnegies and The Rockefellers:
they needed worker bees and there we were. But some of us didn’t want
to swarm around their hive and lose who we were. We wanted to stay
Italian and preserve the things that meant something to us: honor and fam-
ily and loyalty... and some of us wanted a piece of the action. Now we
weren’t educated like the Americans, but we had the BALLS to take what
we wanted! And those other folks, those other... the, the JP Morgans, they
were crooks and killers too, but that was the business right? The American
Way.Given Tony’s understanding of how big business evolved and what it
meant, and how difficult it was becoming to manage the economy in a new
era, it should not be surprising that he would make speeches like that. And
it also helps explain why the series creator, David Chase, titled the controver-
sial final episode “Made in America.”
Tony Soprano’s business many not have been legal, but it was surely part
of the American economy and had to deal with the same problems as other,
legitimate, businesses. Don Draper had it easier in that he only had to conceal
who he really was because he had stolen his identity from a dead soldier in
the Korean War. His business affairs, however, were totally above board,
though in many ways, absent the violence, no different than those of the
Sopranos. Mad Men, created by Matthew Weiner, who wrote for The Sopranos,
studied one of the most overtly Capitalist institutions of the postwar era—
advertising. Draper and his colleagues were the intellectual heirs of Edward
Bernays, and took his ideas and created an even larger economy than ever
before. While part soap-opera with the handsome but troubled alcoholic
Draper having various affairs while other office partners had their own sexu-
al relationships, Mad Men was an excellent history lesson in postwar American
history, especially economic development. With the postwar boom, as we
have seen, more people had more money to buy more things. So advertisers
stepped in to tell them what they should buy and why they needed it, and