Sunday, February 15, 2015

A Nation Of Promoters Runs Out Of Things To Promote

This item from today's New York Times struck me as having implications that go far beyond the issue of who deserves credit for Monopoly, the Parker Brothers board game that allows each of us to embrace their inner 1% for the duration of the game (which, as anyone who has played it knows can go on forever).  Briefly, the article describes how the game was created not by Charles Darrow during the Depression, as is popularly believed, but by a woman named Elizabeth Magie Phillips many years earlier.  In her version of the game, there were two ways of playing:  an "anti-monopolistic" version, which taught the rewards of shared wealth, and a "monopolistic" version, which rewarded players who focused on their self-interest.  Darrow created his own take on the "monopolistic" version, and sold it to Parker Brothers, which also purchased the rights to Phillips' game as well to protect themselves from lawsuits.  In the end, however, her version of the game faded into obscurity, and Darrow's version went on to become a fixture in American households up to the present.

The relationship between Phillips and Darrow in the birthing of Monopoly is an example of a dynamic that reoccurs throughout American history--one person creates something new and valuable, and another person finds a way to sell it to the public.  This dynamic is what interested Stephen Sondheim so much in Addison and Wilson Mizner, the brothers whose role in the Florida land boom of the 1920s led Sondheim to work for decades on a musical version of their lives, one which finally made it to the stage first under the title "Bounce" and later as "Road Show."  Sondheim, as an artist himself, had more respect for Addison than Wilson, and the show (which I saw in its incarnation as "Bounce") very much reflects that respect.  One doesn't have to go back that far in our history, however, to find that dynamic:  Steve Jobs and Bill Gates embody it just as well.

The problem with this dynamic, however, is that it is typically the person who promotes, not the person who creates, who by virtue of their focus on money to the exclusion of everything else reaps the material rewards of the creation.  This was certainly the case in the creation of Monopoly; Darrow got a royalty agreement with Parker Brothers that made him a millionaire, while Phillips made next to nothing (and even less than that, if legal fees are counted). It's also significant that, although Phillips two-faced version of the game, with its emphasis on the pros and cons of pursuing wealth, had been around for decades before Darrow came along, it was Darrow's focus on the monopolistic side of the game that allowed him to sell it to Parker Brothers and made it a hit with the public.

The fact is that we are a nation of suckers, willing to be sold anything as long as we can be convinced it benefits each of us, and no one else.  We don't want to worship the people with talent, because talent is a kind of aristocracy.  You can't buy or make talent.  You can't even steal it.  But you can come close to it when you steal someone's idea, which surely is the case in Darrow and Parker Brothers' conduct toward Phillips.  They knew how to take what she had created and make it popular and profitable, even though Phillips had given birth to the idea as a kind of morality play.  Darrow and Parker Brothers, sadly, had a better understanding of Americans; they pay lip service to values, but prefer the kind that fold up in wallets and purses.

That is why the people we worship the most are not talented people, but salespeople.  To be sure, we pay lip service to talent, but the ones we really like are the ones that we think will help us make money.  This goes a long way toward explaining why the legend of Charles Darrow lives on, while Elizabeth Magie Phillips has faded into near obscurity.  As the Times article states:
Roughly 40 years have passed since the truth about Monopoly began to appear publicly, yet the Darrow myth persists as an inspirational parable of American innovation. It’s hard not to wonder how many other buried histories are still out there — stories belonging to lost Lizzie Magies who quietly chip away at creating pieces of the world, their contributions so seamless that few of us ever stop to think about the person or people behind the idea.
I find myself wondering whether this has something to do with the decline in creativity within our own country.  Why invent something, if someone else will reap all the rewards of its creation?  And especially why create now, at a time when the resources of our country are controlled by only a handful of people, who are in a position to demand all the rewards--in return for nothing.

As I said a moment ago, we are a nation of suckers, and the salespeople who service them.  Unless we can find ways to truly reward the innovators, unless we give the Elizabeth Magie Phillipses of the world a chance to shine, unless we can come to terms with the idea that talent is the only justifiable way in a democracy to have any aristocracy at all, we may not be much of a nation for very long.

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