680
ROBERT BRUSTEIN
tion is to market goods in the most profitable manner possible.
To · criticize the techniques of Madison Avenue is,. therefore,
only to badger the salesman for policies approved by the com–
pany and necessary to its survival. Yet, even some of the most
severe indictments of the mass media stop short of this simple
perception, choosing to probe a rotten branch of the tree with–
out examining its cankered roots. To account for the
obtusen~
of these critics, one must understand the conditions under which
the new allegory found its form.
The demise of the Wall Street villain is easy enough to
understand. It is difficult to work up much indignation against
a symbol of corpulent and inequitable wealth when multitudes
of obese Americans now spend their leisure clipping coupons.
Prosperity, full employment, and social insurance had eradicated
conspicuous poverty; the old tycoons and their sons had softened
their unpleasant image by becoming statesmen and foundation–
philanthropists; the autocracy of family empire had been re–
placed by the pseudo-democracy of big profit-sharing corpora–
tions, making every stockholder a self-interested defender of
capitalism; and trade unionism had triumphed, developing its
own forms of gangsterism and exploitation.
The founders of the old allegory, the radical intellectuals,
had changed also. By the time the Cold War and Stalinist
Russia fixed the nation's attention on an enemy beyond its walls
rather than on its own domestic problems, the most influential
dissenters had already abandoned Marxism. Socialism was losing
most of its frustrated supporters. And when McCarthyism made
any criticism of the American system a trifle dangerous,
all
or–
ganized radical activity appeared abruptly to cease. Anxious to
dissociate themselves from a discredited or ineffectual political
position, many of these old radicals turned rigid and defensive
-"frozen," according to William Barrett, "into some publicly
correct attitude of anti-communism whose political content ·was
allowed to degenerate into variations on the chant that com–
munism was bad." Thus, the energies of ex-radicals were now
