THE MADISON AVENUE VILLAIN
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once a crucial figure in American plays, novels, movies, manifes–
toes, and newspapers of radical persuasion. There he was almost
invariably characterized as a monster of greed and avarice, for,
while originally inspired by such magnates as Morgan, Carnegie,
and Rockefeller, he soon became less a portrait of a living person
than a Marxist-Socialist symbol of capitalist abuse. Everyone
over thirty can remember that porcine Banker, Oil Magnate, or
War Profiteer who used to hover hungrily over exploited millions
in
his
top hat and cutaway coat, his fat lips curled around a
long black cigar,
his
chubby fingers groping money bags, his
cruel eyes reflecting dollar signs. This was the Robber Baron of
popular cartoons, the personification of the sweat shop, the trust,
and the shady deal-self-made, vulgar, domineering,
his
empire
constructed atop the prostrate bodies of the poor.
The Wall Street villain quietly expired as a national scape–
goat some time during World War II, leaving the Madison
Avenue villain as
his
only heir. But while the latter is now accused
of practices just as shadowy as the Robber Baron's, he is a figure
of much greater depth and complexity, and comes equipped
with a personal life of substantial pathos. The reasons for this
can be found in his origins: the Madison Avenue villain was
first created not by angry radicals to symbolize economic abuse
but by unimpassioned social scientists as an image of social–
psychological behavior. Thus, the Madison Avenue villain is an
evolutionary figure (still in the process of evolving) who starts
out, quite harmlessly, as an object of sociological study, and who
retains many of these earlier characteristics to the present day.
In this guise, he is clearly no match for his fearful predecessor.
His individual powers, for example, are not very strong, for he
is
less a business executive than an account executive, less a self–
made man than a man without a self. Rather than being marked
by physical blemishes, he is natty to the point of narcissism–
sleek and feline in his Ivy League suit, Brooks Brothers shirt,
and Oppenheimer haircut. And as for his education, instead of
being unread, he might almost be called an intellectual
manque
