Amalgamated Political Fiction
Nollson, John
John Nollson AMALGAMATED POLITICAL FICTION Ezra Platt Lincoln, an employee of the Department of Agriculture, had temporarily retired on the proceeds of his best-selling Washington novel. His book...
...but instead of handing out dimes, he would hand out free paperback copies of his own latest novelistic effort...
...From writing table to press to bookshop to mail-order book club, Lincoln's Amalgamated Political Fiction soon acquired a dominant position in the writing and marketing of Washington novels...
...The scheme was elegantly simple...
...Ezra Platt Lincoln died in Lawrence, Kansas, in the heart of the wheat-growing country that had produced the theme for his first commercial success...
...Before the Soil Conservation Service brought matters under control, the price of Wonder Bread had soared to 11 dollars a loaf-when you could get it at all...
...On his desk was the half-completed manuscript he had been working on-about the first test-tube baby to become the first transsexual President of the United States...
...In fact, Lincoln's Washington novel factory was a showplace of efficiency, and quickly established a certain notoriety...
...Within the publishing industry itself, APF was known simply as the "octopus," its tentacles slowly reaching even into foreign capitals where labor was cheaper and government papers even more readily accessible...
...Such writers could, under Lincoln's scheme, become indentured novelists...
...Lincoln thus became a living hero to federal bureaucrats of literary bent...
...The film version had been a commercial blockbuster, an enormous stimulus to paperback sales...
...Moreover, Lincoln insisted on a five-day work week, so that his workers were free to discuss the week's progress when they gathered at their tennis clubs over the weekend...
...Aspiring novelists, who thought they had a wholly original plot, were routinely beaten into print by Amalgamated Political Fiction...
...Every so often, there would be a hideous industrial accident, for pieces- of hair and clothing were forever being tangled up in the typewriters...
...In less than five years, it became possible to think of Amalgamated Political Fiction as a trust, then as an international cartel...
...Lincoln had suspected that the labor pool was enormous for there were, throughout the Washington metropolitan area, wives of bureaucrats, elected officials, and untenured professors who had been working away on novels-but to little effect...
...Between the clanging of typewriters and the ringing of bells, the noise could become quite overwhelming...
...His book was a teeth-clenching thriller about a resourceful investigator from the Soil Conservation Service who managed to arrest the spreading wheat blight which threatened the world's supply of Wonder Bread...
...Like the Standard Oil Trust, his endeavors gave economic historians something to write about, for it was a unique period in the history of literature and of high finance...
...Properly organized, it could become the basis of a new, vertically integrated industry...
...Still, small communities were shocked to discover what some of their inhabitants-especially the notorious #387-91-189 of Muncie, Indiana-had been up to in 1922...
...In return for their signing over the rights to the unique idea contained in their individual efforts, Lincoln provided a work space, paper, corrccto-type, a typewriter, and sharpened pencils-and a guarantee that he would pay $.25 for each completed page of manuscript...
...They were drawn to Lincoln's mill by the prospect of cash earnings...
...Brutality and efficiency were the essence of the system, and repeated visits by representatives of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration failed to bring about any amelioration in working conditions...
...In this manner, the papers of the Federal Meteorological Service of the late 1930s were fashioned into a thrilling tale of how polyethylene came to replace natural rubber in the construction of weather balloons...
...For each writer was signed on as an independent contractor, with the Internal Revenue Service to scratch its head over the tax-shelter implications of the scheme...
...people were getting sick of such works, and then sick from them...
...The din was deafening...
...The nation, upon reading even the fictionalized account produced by Lincoln's factory, was appropriately incensed...
...Ironically, it was Ezra Platt Lincoln himself who grasped the fact that assembly line techniques could be applied to the writing and publishing of Washington novels...
...Not even the personal assurances of the President that the blight would eventually be eliminated could stem the tide of mass hysteria...
...Through a series of intricate financial maneuvers and brilliantly executed futures trades on the New York Literary Exchange, Lincoln secured exclusive rights to all patents and formulas concerning Washington novels...
...The pages were neatly filed in bins by the number assigned to each writer...
...Rather, under Lincoln's direction, they would be brought together in a single place and welded into a disciplined labor force, with all the economies of scale that would inevitably result...
...The Washington novel, previously the preserve of journalists and convicted felons, was taken over by the people who knew Washington best, the men and women who made it work, the indefatigable soldiers on the front line of administrative law and procedure...
...For supply soon began to overrun demand...
...His picture began to appear throughout federal office buildings, providing inspiration to those who sought fulfillment through creativity...
...At the end of the day, clerks tallied the output and paid the wages...
...There were no names, of course, every individual being identified solely by an eight-digit number...
...He established his factory in a nearby suburb and began a massive advertising campaign to recruit a proper labor force...
...Somehow, Lincoln acquired the old records of the now defunct Selective Service System, dating from the early 1920s, especially those detailing every disqualification for military service related to alleged homosexuality...
...These Lincoln had purchased at federal surplus sales-usually the ancient records of some obscure government agency, records which would have otherwise been sold as waste paper and reduced to pulp...
...Smaller competitors were ruthlessly run out of business...
...By turning out ten acceptable pages of copy a day, the women of Washington could return home with an additional $2.50...
...Lincoln, grown fabulously rich, went off to a mountain retreat, with a Delphic promise that a sequel would soon be forthcoming-involving the same hero-this time concerning his efforts to isolate the pernicious bacillus that was slowly destroying the nation's reserves of creamy peanut butter...
...Large racks of paper were strung overhead, and finished copy was retrieved by a corps of pre-teenage children -most of them belonging to the workers- who ran to pick up each completed page after its author rang a bell...
...No longer would the industry be the domain of widely-scattered individual entrepreneurs, working in isolation...
...Whole shopping centers were set ablaze by enraged children and panicked mothers as the nation's store of Wonder Bread began gradually to decline...
...As his labor force expanded, Lincoln required ever larger quantities of raw materials...
...The first step was the incorporation of Lincoln's holding company, Amalgamated Political Fiction...
...The work was done at long tables, each 75 feet in length, and about five feet wide...
...For the fact was that the bureaucrats who ran OSHA had more than their share of wives and girlfriends at work in Lincoln's literary factory, and they were not about to close it down because of an occasional broken fingernail or smashed pinky...
...Lincoln himself journeyed personally to both Peking and.Moscow and established, in both places, writers' collectives which produced the first novels of bureaucratic intrigue within the Kremlin and the Forbidden City...
...And so Lincoln's dreams of a political novel cartel were dashed...
...And the piece-rate system Lincoln employed was the best sort of motivation...
...And since Lincoln always paid in cash at the end of a day's work well done, there were no problems of taxation and withholding and health insurance...
...Just as at the dawn of the industrial revolution in 18th-century England, the initial work force was composed of women...
...Lincoln had once exclaimed) could not cope with the exponential growth in supply...
...But under Lincoln's direction, the papers were spread out at work tables, and children from the inner city were given gainful employment by arranging them in neat piles and cutting out every other paragraph, such that the documents would tell an exciting story of their own...
...Each day, large vans would arrive at his freight dock and enormous crates of government documents would be unloaded...
...The old archives of the Bureau of Fisheries Management became an exciting novel of one man's struggle to have fishnet manufactured from nylon, rather than string, and of how the vast fortunes accumulated in the making of string fishnets were wiped out by the bone-crushing onslaught of modern technology...
...All were immediate bestsellers on five continents...
...Even as Lincoln aspired to a true global monopoly on the sale of contemporary political fiction, the fundamental laws of economics eventually overtook his Faustian ambitions...
...As an energy-conservation measure, Lincoln provided mechanical typewriters only...
...No more the courtside complaints about writer's block...
...Even the establishment of a mail-order book club in China ("If every Chinese read only two political thrillers a month, we could sell 24 billion copies a year in China alone...
...In fact, the market for his books collapsed altogether in 1993, when something akin to an epidemic swept the Western hemisphere...
...Thus the London novel, the Paris novel, the Rome novel, and the Seoul novel all came to be mass-produced...
...Now here was a vast reservoir of creative energy with enormous financial potential...
...Typewriters were placed at two-foot intervals, and the writers were seated on metal folding chairs...
...All that remained was the arrival of a single-minded, visionary genius who could take hold of that inchoate possibility and mold it into a potent cultural and economic force...
...Lincoln, to be sure, had made his fortune...
...And, like the original John D. Rockefeller, he lived on well into his nineties...
...At such times, the bodily injuries could be horrible to behold, but not even the stench of blood or the heart-rending cries of pain halted production...
...Turn-of-the-century papers of the Office of Marine Mammalian Species told a shocking tale-surely shocking to the modern sensibility-of how the federal government actually encouraged and subsidized the harpooning of whales and the clubbing of infant seals...
...Thus, the income to be derived from each individual project-and who did not think that income would be so derived?-was available immediately, rather than being deferred until some vague date in the future...
...Indeed, anyone who was anyone had a wife hard at work on a potential best-seller...
Vol. 12 • November 1979 • No. 11
