THE MADISON AVENUE VILLAIN
579
not made and that people do not need. The greedy financier
could be stigmatized for his accumulation of wealth in a time
of poverty and want, but the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit is
only a superfluous man in a culture of abundance:-a
Mittel–
mensch
in
his
function, taste, and class.
It is
this
mediocre quality that makes it so inappropriate
to
identify him with a radical evil-he almost always works in
a subordinate capacity. The Wall Street villain was the un–
disputed boss of a large business empire, solely responsible for
decisions which he alone could make. But the Madison Avenue
villain, no matter how exalted his title, is only a salesman–
which probably accounts for his anxious and over-affable man–
ner. One may wonder how such a cipher came to be the per–
sonification of Madison Avenue treachery; yet, there is really
nobody else to blame. The Madison Avenue organization seems
to have no boss--no Ford or Gould or Vanderbilt to invest the
firm with a strong human identity. Run by hordes of faceless,
trembling vice-presidents, the typical agency or network has the
quality of an anonymous oligarchy. Policies seem to develop
almost organically, rather than being initiated by individuals,
and in place of decisions, changes are made through "expres–
sions of feeling." This notorious lack of individual responsibility
in
policy making
2
can no doubt be explained by the complicated
corporate structure of modem organizations, but it is more
likely explained by the fact that the Madison Avenue organiza–
tion has no real autonomy. For if the Madison Avenue villain
is only an agent or a salesman, in this he typifies his entire firm.
Both the communications and advertising industries are basic–
ally sales organizations-client's middlemen whose major func-
2. Demonstrated by the agility with which Madison Avenue can pass the
buck. After Minow's "wasteland" speech, for example, the ad agencies
expressed, in private, their resentment that the F.C.C. chairman was
meddling in areas that concerned only the advertisers, their agencies,
and the networks. But in public, they praised the speech for "touching
all the bases" and being "right on target"-and promptly blamed
everything on the networks.
