OpEdNews - Page 3 of Article: Award Winning author, journalist and humorist, Burton H. Wolfe is Interviewed

It turns out that a follower of Henry George's single tax theory, Lizzie Maggie, produced the precursor of the Monopoly game in 1904 as "The Landlord's Game." Using it as an educational tool through the same kind of entertainment Monopoly provides, Lizzie roasted the greedy acquisition of more and more property by landlords, real estate moguls, the railroads, etc.

That was quite a different purpose than providing fun via the Monopoly game of today in acquiring more and more property until the game is won that way or, as Shelley Berman put it, until you experience the fun of wiping out your friends. As the game spread across the U.S. under different names, including the name "Monopoly," traditionally the players fashioned their own boards and rules.

The purported "inventor" of the Monopoly game as produced by Parker Brothers, Charles Darrow, joined with his wife in a group, mostly Quakers, playing the game in the Philadelphia-Atlantic City area. The Quakers had collectively put together the same board with all the same names, and had created the same rules, as exist today in the Monopoly game produced commercially by Parker Brothers.

Darrow saw the potential for making a fortune from it, copied the board and the rules, and passed off the game to Parker Brothers as his own invention. When the top officers of Parker Brothers learned the truth, they told Darrow to keep his mouth shut and they would all earn a fortune from this game that was stolen by them; and so they have.

I put the whole story into print in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and other writers for other periodicals picked it up from there and summarized what I had written. This was typical of the kind of pioneering journalism I practiced in the 1960s and 1970s. It is also typical that even with the kind of exposé I generated, you cannot eradicate a lie once it becomes part of a culture.

There is a plaque at Broadway and Park Place in Atlantic City commemorating "Darrow's invention" of the Monopoly game, and the mass periodicals - New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly - continue repeating the myth that Darrow invented the Monopoly game, which is the equivalent of saying he invented fire and the wheel; and no amount of letter writing and telephone calling by Anspach and myself, no amount of excoriating the media and Atlantic City government prostitutes, can induce them to eradicate the Big Lie and tell the truth for history.

This is why I define Monopoly in the way I have, and this is an example of why I define many words in the cynical style I have used, in Lucifer's Dictionary.

Norm:

Can you tell us how you found representation for your book? Did you pitch it to an agent, or query publishers who would most likely publish this type of book? Any rejections? Did you self-publish?

Burton:

I submitted the book to at least fifty literary agents, all but one of whom declined to try to market it. The agent who took it on gave up after a dozen rejections. Eventually I submitted the book to around 100 prospective publishers. Most rejected the book with the usual "not quite right for us." Some of the editors, however, commented that they found the book to be as funny as it is truthful and even described it as "a great book."

Some said they felt Bierce's Devil's Dictionary had exhausted the potential market. Others offered no reason for not publishing the book. None would admit what I have always suspected: that the book is so controversial and pinches so many teats of so many of American society's sacred cows that there was too much fear of boycotting or other repercussions. A program for authors offered by the BookSurge division of Amazon.com offered me a way to get the book into print in both online and quality paperback versions even while using the name of a small press I started and then abandoned in the 1970s: Wild West Publishing House.

Norm:

How would you describe the quality of journalism today?

Burton:

In some ways it is more accurate than that which existed in the days of so-called "yellow journalism." But hundreds of the stories and ideas of most critical importance to humanity are being not only censored but also blocked from dissemination altogether, and the would-be authors of them are being blacklisted.

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