You Must Be The Monopoly Gal

Ed Ayers: Now, everyone knows that American millionaires live on Park Place, but did you know that sometimes they get sent to jail, they don’t pass go, and they definitely do not collect $200?

Nathan Connolly: I thought you were going to discuss insider trading there for a second but you’re actually talking about the rules of Monopoly, aren’t you?

Ed Ayers: Quiet, Nathan. I’m just going to buy up the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Speaker 9: Uncle, when we grow up, we want to be just like you. Rich.

Speaker 10: Well, boys, I’ll tell you my secret. Build hotels on boardwalk, [crosstalk 00:20:58].

Ed Ayers: These are commercials from Monopoly that aired in the 1980s and ’90s.

Speaker 11: Monopoly has 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.

Speaker 12: Corner the market and utilities. You can’t lose.

Speaker 13: Share a smile [crosstalk 00:21:17] …

Ed Ayers: Whether or not Monopoly brought your families together or, more likely, drove them apart, one thing is clear, and it has to do with that 50 years part. These commercials had their history all wrong.

Ed Ayers: Producer Kelly Jones caught up with the author of a book about the origins of Monopoly. Here’s Kelly to tell us more.

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 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 that 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 McGee. She gets a patent for her Landlords game in 1904. She had originally devised the game as a teaching tool to protest against monopolies and the monopolists of her time.

Kelly Jones: Elizabeth, or Lizzie, McGee 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: The core of his argument was something called a land value tax, or a single tax. 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 McGee 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: 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. Her original board had railroads, it had “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 Landlords game was different in one crucial way. McGee’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. 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. The public treasury eventually got used for things like making 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.

Kelly Jones: It might seem weird to have invented a game that you have to play twice but the two rule sets were supposed to teach through stark contrast, the merits of spreading wealth versus the evil of hoarding it for oneself.

Kelly Jones: The two rule sets lasted for a couple of decades. McGee renewed the game’s patent in 1924 but, by then, it was clear which rule set was the most popular. Even as capitalism’s boom and bust cycle showed its ugly side in 1929, the monopolistic rules prevailed.

Mary Pilon: They allow us a context for role-playing. 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 was very much struggling, there’s a fantasy aspect to that 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 McGee’s single tax rules. He called it Monopoly and sold it to Parker Brothers in 1935. The same year, Parker Brother’s bought up McGee’s patent for just $500, cornering the market on financial board games and essentially securing a monopoly on Monopoly.

Kelly Jones: 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, Scotty dogs, and top hats became staples of American households.

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

Kelly Jones: In the second half of the 20th century, the 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 McGee, evil version of the game perfectly embodied the new American dream. If you wanted to keep up with Joneses, you better have a hotel on Boardwalk.

Ed Ayers: Producer Kelly Jones. Helping her tell that story was Mary Pilon, author of the book “The Monopolists.”