[ Lizzie Magie and Monopolys Anti-Capitalist Origins (1903) ]
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THE LANDLORD’S GAME  
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Sasha Archibald
January 10, 2024
The Public Domain Review
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_ Lizzie Magie and Monopoly's Anti-Capitalist Origins (1903) _

The board for Lizzie Magie’s 1906 version of The Landlord’s Game,
Courtesy of LandlordsGame.info

 

There are few cases of creative and intellectual theft more egregious
than the origins of the billion-dollar grossing Monopoly. The short
version: a brilliant woman economist invented an anti-capitalist board
game that was stolen by a lying, opportunistic man and repackaged as
capitalist family fun.

In early 1933, Richard Brace Darrow went to a dinner party where he
was taught a new game. He had such a good time, and waxed so
enthusiastic, his hosts typed up the game’s rules and sent Darrow a
copy. Then Darrow proceeded to draw his own version, on a circular
piece of oilcloth. (The version he’d played at the dinner party had
also been homemade — mass-produced board games were not yet an
ordinary commodity.)

Darrow was a heater salesman who’d lost his job and times were lean.
He decided to take his prototype and pitch the game to Parker
Brothers. The rules were exactly the same as those his friends had
shared, down to the misspelling of Marven Gardens as Marvin Gardens.
Parker Brothers didn’t bite right away, but then they did, and
Darrow became a millionaire.

Included in every new Monopoly box for decades was a story about how
Darrow invented the game while tinkering around in his basement — a
self-made man who saved himself from poverty through ingenuity and
hard work. Darrow and Parker Brothers stuck to this story, even to the
point of suppressing contradictory evidence. Parker Brothers bought up
early homemade versions of Monopoly, presumably to have them
destroyed, and somehow maneuvered their patent despite existing
patents. Everyone in Darrow’s social circle knew the truth and some
tried to say so. They were ignored.

Perhaps Darrow quelled his conscience by imagining the game had no
inventor. In fact, with a bit of effort, he could have tracked her
down. She was still alive, and still making games. As was later
detailed, Darrow learned the game at the Todds’ house, and the Todds
learned it from a friend, Eugene Raiford. Eugene learned it from his
brother, Jesse. Jesse learned it from Ruth Hoskins, who taught at a
Quaker School in Atlantic City. Ruth learned it in Indianapolis, from
someone named Dan Laymen, who had played it in his frat house in
college. The frat brothers who taught everyone else to play were Louis
and Ferdinand Thun. They learned it from their sister, Wilma, who
learned it from her husband Charles Muhlenberg. Charles learned the
game from Thomas Wilson, who learned it in his college economics
class, with the radical Wharton/UPenn economics professor Scott
Nearing. (Nearing played the game with his students until he was
fired, in 1915, for criticizing industrial capitalism.) The trail ends
here, for Nearing learned the game directly from its remarkable
inventor, Elizabeth Magie, or Lizzie, who filed a patent for it in
1903.

Lizzie Magie’s original patent for The Landlord’s Game, filed in
1903 and granted in 1904 — Source
[[link removed]].

Lizzie Magie was a provocative, whip-smart nonconformist. Piqued about
her dismal salary as a young working woman in the late nineteenth
century, she caused a national furor by taking out an ad
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in a major magazine, describing herself as a “young woman American
slave” for sale to the highest-bidding suitor. She filed many
patents, not just on Monopoly (which she called The Landlord’s
Game), but other games too, and also for a mechanical device that
improved the ease of typing — all this at a time when the number of
patents filed by women was miniscule, less than 1%. Born in 1866,
Magie didn’t marry until she was forty-four, and had no children.
She wrote poems
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performed in dramatic theater, taught college-level courses in her
home, corresponded with Upton Sinclair, and studied economic theory.
Her father was close friends with Abraham Lincoln. Both father and
daughter were devout followers of the teachings of economist Henry
George, whose 1879 treatise Progress and Poverty made the case for a
single tax, on land. Like her fellow Georgists, Magie believed that
ownership of nature was not possible — the earth was not something
that could be owned. Land could, however, be “rented”, thus
comprising the single tax. Magie designed The Landlord’s Game to
teach and proselytize the principles of Georgism.

At first Magie self-published her game, producing a small number of
copies she sold to friends. A few years later, she found a publisher
in the Economic Game Company, who helped The Landlord’s Game find an
audience in “pockets of intellectuals along the eastern seaboard”,
writes [[link removed]] Mary
Pilon, and in Scotland, where Magie debuted a version she called Brer
Fox and Rabbit.

As the game’s popularity spread, bootlegs sprang up, including the
version at the Todd’s dinner party. Monopoly changed in its
telephone-like peregrinations. Most of the property names were
altered, often in ways specific to the town in which the game was
being played. Someone thought to group properties with colors, and the
Quaker players, to make the game less raucous, eliminated both dice
and the bidding that preceded a property purchase. Darrow hired a
graphic artist to draw the now-iconic “Go” and various pictograms,
and Magie herself kept fiddling, updating her patent with new
properties and rules.

Most of these changes were superficial, but one was not. Magie’s
original concept included two sets of rules representing the
difference between a Georgist and capitalist economy. By one set,
players tried to produce equity through a single land tax, such that
wealth was evenly distributed and winning the game a collective
achievement. By the other, players tried to build monopolies and
fleece their opponents. As is obvious, Darrow favored set two. What
Magie intended as a forecast of disaster became Monopoly’s sole
objective.

In November 1935, George Parker visited Magie and finally offered to
buy her patent. The offer wasn’t about restitution, but rather part
of a corporate strategy to absorb games that threatened Monopoly’s
monopoly: Easy Money, Finance, Inflation, and, of course, Magie’s
Landlord’s Game. To sweeten the deal, Parker promised that his
company would not only market The Landlord’s Game, but also develop
two new games of Magie’s design. Magie agreed, and Parker Brothers
did as promised, though without much oomph. The Landlord’s Game
received little press, and Magie’s subsequent games, King’s Men
and Bargain Day, fared poorly. Monopoly, on the other hand, went
global.

Illustrations from Charles Darrow’s patent for Monopoly, filed on
August 31, 1935 — Source
[[link removed](US2026082).pdf&page=1”_blank].

Parker Brothers president Robert Barton later admitted, “Whether
[Darrow] got it all from Magie Phillips, whether he got it from
somewhere else, we didn’t know. And we cared very little.” Darrow
glibly lied, Parker Brothers pretended ignorance, and the collusion
worked perfectly for decades. After the umpteenth interview in which
Darrow repeated Monopoly’s fake origin story, in 1964, one of his
former dinner party friends wrote a letter to the show’s producer,
WRCV-TV in Philadelphia. He described precisely where Darrow got the
game, and noted the irritation of everyone involved. The letter writer
concludes [[link removed]], “There is nothing to be
gained by writing you this letter except, perhaps, to vent my feelings
and point out . . . that everything in this world is not what it seems
to be.”

This entire story would have been lost had Parker Brothers not decided
to pursue legal action against a Berkeley economist, Ralph Anspach,
who began marketing a game he called Anti-Monopoly in 1973. Parker
Brothers (by then owned by General Mills) sent Anspach a frightening
cease and desist letter. Anspach thought the grounds ridiculous: no
one would ever confuse his scrappy Anti-Monopoly (originally
christened “Bust the Trust”) with the global sensation Monopoly
— so rather than ceasing and desisting, he began digging up the
history of the game, to see if there were grounds to contest Parker
Brothers’ copyright claim. Indeed, there were. When Anspach realized
Parker Brothers was defending a patent built on a house of cards, he
took the company to court. The role of Lizzie Magie was a happy
research surprise. As for the flip flop at the center of the story —
a homemade, anti-capitalist game created by a woman becomes a
mass-produced uber-capitalist game that profits a man — that part
wasn’t much of a surprise at all.

 

* Anti-monopoly
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* board games
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* monopoly
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