You Must Be The Monopoly Gal

PETER: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh. Today on the show, we’re taking a long view on the rise and fall of America’s middle class.

ED: Before the break, historian Richard White was making the case that for 19th century Americans it was enough to, well, have enough. And that people back then didn’t set out to make vast fortunes. But 100 years later, people’s aspiration had changed.

CHILD: Uncle, when we grow up, we want to be just like you– rich.

UNCLE: Well, boys, I’ll tell you my secret. Built hotels on Boardwalk.

ED: These our commercials for the board game Monopoly airing in the 1980s and 1990s.

TV ANNOUNCER: Monopoly’s been bringing people together for almost 50 years. That’s how long we’ve been wheeling and dealing together, building hotels together, and going to jail together.

MAN IN COMMERCIAL: Corner the market in utilities. You can’t lose.

ED: Whether or not Monopoly brought your family members together or, more likely, drove them apart, one thing is clear. It has to do that 50 years part. They had their history all wrong. Our producer Kelly Jones caught up with the author of a new book about Monopoly. Here’s Kelly to tell us what she learned.

KELLY JONES: The common story about Monopoly’s origins is a classic rags to riches tale. And it goes like this. In the 1930s, a despondent and unemployed man named Charles Darrow invented the game to make himself feel better about being poor. Ultimately– and this is the part of the story that is true– Darrow became the first millionaire board game inventor when he sold it to Parker Brothers– living the very dream Monopoly celebrates.

But Mary Pilon, author of The Monopolists, says that Darrow didn’t invent Monopoly. It was invented by a woman a few decades earlier. And it was originally called Landlords.

MARY PILON: The game dates to a woman named Elizabeth Magie. And she gets a patent for her Landlord’s game in 1904. And she’d originally devised the game as a teaching tool to protest against monopolies and the monopolists of her time.

KELLY JONES: Elizabeth, or Lizzie Magie was a devout follower of anti-monopolist crusader Henry George. He was the author most famously of Progress and Poverty, a book that sold millions of copies in the 1880s and ’90s. At the time, the only book that sold more was the Bible.

MARY PILON: And the core of his argument was something called a land value tax or a single tax. And his basic idea was that people should own 100% of what they made or created, but that things found in nature, like land, should belong to everybody.

KELLY JONES: George’s efforts kick started progressive reforms around the turn of the century. But when he died in 1897, his followers were concerned that they wouldn’t be able to keep his movement afloat. At the time, Lizzie Magie had been delivering anti-monopolist lectures in her Maryland living room. She felt a strong responsibility to keep the single tax message alive, and lo, the game of Landlords was born.

MARY PILON: And much like Monopoly today, you pick a token, although the charms and things wouldn’t have been there. And you try to make your way around the board gathering properties. And her original board had railroads. It had to “go to jail.” It had public park instead of free parking. So it’s not wildly dissimilar from what a lot of us know as Monopoly today.

KELLY JONES: But the Landlord’s game was different in one crucial way. Magie’s game had two sets of rules. In the monopolist rule set, the goal was to gobble up all the property you could and drive your opponents into bankruptcy. But in the second anti-monopolist, single tax inspired rule set, every player benefited when one player benefited.

There were no taxes on essential utilities. All rent was first paid to a public treasury, not a private property owner. That public treasury eventually got used for things like making the railroads and college free for everyone, and raising wages– that fistful of dollars you get for passing go.

The game was declared over in just five rounds. It might seem weird to have invented a game that you have to play twice. But the two rule sets we’re supposed to teach through stark contrast the merits of spreading wealth versus the evil of hoarding it for oneself. According to Magie–

WOMAN AS MAGIE: There are those who argue that it may be a dangerous thing to teach children how they may thus get the advantage of their fellows. But let me tell you, there are no fairer minded beings in the world than our own little American children. Let the children once see clearly the gross injustice of our present land system. And when they grow up– if they are allowed to develop naturally– the evil will soon be remedied.

KELLY JONES: The two rule sets lasted for a couple of decades. Magie renewed the game’s patent in 1924. But by then, it was clear which rule set was the most popular. And even as capitalism’s boom and bust cycle showed it’s ugly side in 1929, the monopolistic rules prevailed.

MARY PILON: They allow us a context for role playing. And I think that this idea of being able to throw around property and a lot of money at a time when the middle class didn’t have a lot of that, and it was very much struggling, there’s a fantasy aspect to that I think made Monopoly really, really appealing.

KELLY JONES: Charles Darrow, the guy usually credited with inventing the game, capitalized on the appeal of this fantasy to depression era Americans down on their luck. His board game was just landlords without Magie’s single tax rules. He called it Monopoly and sold it to Parker Brothers in 1935. The same year, Parker Brothers bought up Magie’s patent for just $500, cornering the market on financial board games, and essentially securing a monopoly on Monopoly.

Mary Pilon says it wasn’t simply the very real prospect of poverty that made middle class Americans want to play at being rich, because as middle class prosperity returned after World War II, Monopoly continued to enjoy huge popularity. In fact, at that very time, tiny irons, thimbles, Scottie dogs, and top hats became staples of American households.

MARY PILON: The middle class needs a nice refrigerator. And they need nice appliances. And you have the rise of suburbs and things like that. And Monopoly very much becomes like another ubiquitous household item.

KELLY JONES: In the second half of the 20th century, aspiration to wealth was coming to define the American dream. More and more it was a part of what it meant to be middle class. Monopoly, the cunning, cruel, and, according to Lizzie Magie, evil version of the game perfectly embodied the new American dream. And if you wanted to keep up with the Joneses, you’d better have a hotel on Boardwalk.

[MUSIC – “SOMEBODY LOSES, SOMEBODY WINS”]

ED: Kelly Jones is one of our producers. Helping her tell that story was Mary Pilon, author at the new book, The Monopolists.