Robert Brustein
THE MADISON AVENUE VILLAIN
Throughout the history of American dissent-in order
that the complex problems of a large and multifarious society
may be more simply apprehended-political, social, and eco–
nomic conflicts have been given the shape of an allegory, usually
inaugurated on a stage of national grievance by a malevolent
Mr. Badman from the East. In the past, dissident groups like
the
J
acksonians, Silverites, Populists, and Marxists generally
identified this allegorical Vice as the grasping Wall Street
financier who coldly victimized a wide-eyed American Every–
man; but recent critics, while preserving the same hero, have
changed the nature of the allegory by substituting a new
villain. Today, Mr. Badman has softer features, a more subtle
profession, and more centrally located New York headquarters:
the Wall Street villain has yielded the stage to the villain from
Madison Avenue. The old allegory, despite its simplistic charac·
ter structure and hysterical climaxes, was a crude but viable
dramatization of the economic motivation behind American so–
cial evils; the new one, though more sophisticated in approach,
merely muddies the issues, weakens the power of dissent, and
deflects attention from the true source of current abuses. Begin–
ning with a comparison of the two allegorical villains, I intend
to analyze the origins of the new allegory in order to show how
it fosters and encourages serious evasions among certain groups
of American spokesmen.
The Wall Street villain is today totally obsolete, surviving
as an ominous
persona
only
in
the Communist press, but he was
