Last time I discussed the famous board game Monopoly. The official history of the game says that in 1933 or ‘34, an unemployed Pennsylvanian named Charles Darrow invented Monopoly out of thin air and marketed it himself successfully, later selling it to Parker Brothers and then kicking back to enjoy a lifetime of royalties--a classic tale of rags to riches in the true American tradition.
         The real history was suppressed by Parker Brothers in the 1930s, while Monopoly was possibly saving the company from bankruptcy during those otherwise lean years. But the pesky truth emerged forty years later, during a court case that stretched from the mid-1970s to the early 80s.
         In 1974, an economics professor named Ralph Anspach invented Anti-Monopoly, a game in which players break up monopolistic companies. General Mills, Inc. (at that time, owner of Parker Brothers) cried foul, claiming that it owned not only the name “Monopoly,” but also anything resembling that name. General Mills sued Anspach and won, banning Anti-Monopoly from the market and causing 40,000 games to be buried in a Minnesota landfill. But Anspach won on appeal, and that ruling was later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. During this legal battle, the ironic truth emerged that Monopoly itself had been stolen in the first place, so General Mills was on shaky ground in claiming it had been wronged.
         The real history of the game goes back at least to 1903, when a young Quaker named Lizzie Magie applied for a patent on The Landlord’s Game, which she had invented as an entertaining way to explore the evils of domination in land ownership. Magie was a firm believer in the “single tax,” a then-popular idea whereby all government services would be funded by a single tax, on land alone. The idea was that land ownership enabled huge concentrations of wealth, and that a single tax on land would create a more equitable distribution of the earth’s bounty. Magie’s game rules stated that “the object of this game is not only to afford amusement to players, but to illustrate to them how, under the present prevailing system of land tenure, the landlord has an advantage over other enterprisers, and also how the single tax would discourage speculation.” The Landlord’s Game bore many similarities to the Monopoly we know today, and Magie received her patent in 1904.
         Over the next thirty years, the game spread largely by word-of-mouth in the eastern United States. It was played by Quakers, college students, single tax advocates, and people such as socialist economist Scott Nearing--who was forced out of his position in Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. Sixty-five years later, Nearing explained in a letter to Anti-Monopoly creator Anspach that The Landlord’s Game “was used to prove the anti-social nature of monopoly.”
         In the three decades after the appearance of The Landlord’s Game, many players altered the rules, and the game evolved. Instead of only paying rent (as in Magie’s rules), players began holding auctions to buy properties. In an era of widespread “handyman” skills, many players made their own game sets and labelled them with familiar properties from their own towns and cities. The game gradually came to be called “Auction Monopoly,” and then simply “Monopoly.”
         There was a kind of taboo against marketing the game commercially, since the game’s enthusiasts (and informal developers) were mostly opposed to capitalism. But in the late 1920s, a man named Dan Layman began taking steps to market the game. He called it Finance, because lawyers told him that the name “Monopoly” was in the public domain--since the very same game was already being played in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts as Monopoly.
         While Layman’s Finance was working its way to market, a Quaker named Ruth Hoskins learned a homespun version of Monopoly in Indianapolis. She moved to Atlantic City in 1929, and after the stock market crashed, the game was quickly picked up by the Quaker community there. The Atlantic City Quakers replaced the Indiana property names with local names, and by late 1930 the Atlantic City Monopoly board--the board we know today--was established.
         Some friends of Hoskins taught the game to a hotelkeeper from Pennsylvania named Charles Todd. Todd and his wife in turn taught it to Charles Darrow, now considered the “inventor” of the game in the official history. In a 1970s deposition, Todd stated that “the first people we taught it [Monopoly] to was Darrow and his wife Esther...It was entirely new to them. They had never seen anything like it before and showed a great deal of interest in it.” Darrow was out of work, with a family to feed. He saw a golden but tainted opportunity, and became rich by claiming to have invented something that had simply fallen into his lap.
         Darrow got a patent on Monopoly, and later sold this patent to Parker Brothers. Documents released decades later during the Anti-Monopoly trials show that while Parker Brothers may have been duped by Darrow initially, the company soon knew the truth--a 1935 letter from Parker Brothers President Robert Barton to Darrow states that the company had learned that the game developed from an earlier game that had been around for years, and that Darrow had simply appropriated the name “Monopoly.” But Monopoly was already an instant bestseller, and the company had no desire to part with it. Instead, Parker Brothers acted quickly to suppress the truth and to establish an ironclad monopoly on Monopoly.
         Officially, the company continued to accept Darrow’s claim that he had invented the game. Next, Parker Brothers bought Lizzie Magie’s patent on The Landlord’s Game, since that game was the direct precursor of Monopoly and a court could very conceivably have ruled that Magie owned the rights to Monopoly. The now gray-haired Magie had remained steadfast in her beliefs; she was uninterested in money but wanted The Landlord’s Game to reach a wider audience due to the social and political lessons it could teach. She hoped or somehow believed that Parker Brothers would get her game out into the big world. She naively sold her patent to Parker Brothers for $500, without receiving any formal assurance that the company would act to popularize The Landlord’s Game. Patent in hand, Parker Brothers sold a few hundred copies of the game and then eased it into a quiet death.
         Dan Layman’s game Finance was a bigger problem. Ruined by the Depression, Layman had sold his patent for a mere $200 to a game manufacturer named David Knapp. Knapp knew the true history of Monopoly and threatened to reveal it, so Parker Brothers paid him $10,000 for the rights to Finance and for a promise of silence. Parker Brothers then changed Finance to make it look like a spin-off from Monopoly.
         Finally, Parker Brothers embarked on a mission to find and buy up original homemade game sets--which according to the official history were not supposed to exist. The company had some success in this, but it was spectacularly successful in its public relations campaign to insert the official history into the mind of the American public. Major publications such as Time, Life, The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, and The Atlantic Monthly all swallowed the romantic story of Darrow’s genius hook, line, and sinker. This bogus history is still repeated today in the instructions that accompany every game sold--notwithstanding the testimony and documents that emerged in the Anti-Monopoly trials of the 70s and 80s. Why let the truth get in the way of a good story?
         Despite its checkered history, Monopoly is still a great game that I love to play. I like the collaborative process of negotiation in trying to frame “deals” between two or more players--deals that all can agree to. I enjoy role-playing, and fluctuate myself between “nice guy” and “greedy tycoon.” The paradox of trying to help other players through mutually beneficial deals, while simultaneously plotting how to bankrupt them, is especially intriguing. I marvel at how people’s differing personalities are revealed--this game can really reflect the human soul and human relationships. I am particularly struck by the bittersweet ambiguity of winning--in Monopoly, winning is for me an ultimately empty experience. After the thrill and joy of negotiation and competition, with victory there’s now no one left to play with. The game is over, you have all the money and all the property, you own it all, but it’s lonely at the top. Yes, there’s a lot going on in this board game, and Lizzie Magie’s deeply felt lesson still shines through all the changes in the game, and through all the years.
 
 
 
 

        The above article is the second of a two-part series; click here to go back to the first article: Monopoly.
 

         (Brian wishes to thank investigative journalist Burton H. Wolfe for his remarkable 1976 article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, “The Monopolization of Monopoly.” Wolfe’s article, and much else, can be found via links from http://boardgames.tqn.com/cs/monopolyhistory/)