Nostalgia comes to call with the opening of a box filled with silver trinkets, brightly colored cards, and plastic pieces of real estate. It offers a flight of fancy where, for a time, one could be lord of many manors. If unlucky, we would end up behind bars; if savvy, we would become as wealthy as Rich Uncle Pennybags.
The board games of our yesteryears act as Proustian madeleines, pastimes that perhaps shaped our worldviews. The most prevalent of these was Monopoly, which taught “To the victor belong the spoils.” Played by everyone from Jerry Hall and Mick Jagger to Carmela and Tony Soprano, it scratches an itch to wheel and deal that few of us can reach in real life. The game is sufficiently redolent of unbridled capitalism that, in 1959, Fidel Castro ordered the destruction of every Monopoly set in Cuba, while these days Vladimir Putin seems to be the ultimate aficionado. The cardboard board is as famous as the curvaceous Barbie, but its true origin has purposely been relegated to the shadows.
For generations, the story of Monopoly’s Depression-era birth delighted fans almost as much as the board game itself. The tale, tucked into the game’s box along with the Community Chest and Chance Cards, was that Charles Darrow sold the game to Parker Brothers and lived lavishly ever after. The trouble was that the story is as mythical as George Washington and the cherry tree.
In the case of Monopoly, the term “mother of invention” is not just a nod to the feminine, as its genesis can be traced to a woman. Elizabeth Magie, a Quaker, was born in Macomb, Illinois; her father, James, was an abolitionist who accompanied President Lincoln as he travelled around Illinois debating politics with Stephen Douglas. Elizabeth stated, “I have often been called a ‘chip off the old block,’ which I consider quite a compliment, for I am proud of my father for being the kind of an ‘old block’ that he is.” James ran for public office on an anti-monopoly ticket—an election he lost, but his message was not lost on his daughter.
Elizabeth supported herself as a stenographer, barely able to scrape by on her salary of ten dollars a week. To draw attention to the plight of unmarried women being exploited in the workplace, she purchased a newspaper advertisement where she offered herself for sale as a “young woman American slave” to the highest bidder. Due to her notoriety, in 1906 she obtained a job as a journalist. Despite the difficulty of supporting herself without a husband, Magie was reluctant to walk down the aisle. She described marriage as “a germ” and likened it to “a disease.” Her philosophy was not just related to the economic ills of capitalist society: “What is love? Nobody knows.” She said matrimony was not for her unless she could see her spouse only once every three days. She did not want anyone to interfere with her ability to retreat into her den and spend hours with her books. She commented, “Personally, I love solitude, and were I married I could not enjoy this luxury.” Apparently, she met the man who fit this bill; four years later she married Virginian businessman Albert Phillips, who, at age fifty-four, was ten years her senior. The marriage raised eyebrows—a woman who had remained single well beyond the sell-by date and a man becoming the husband of a wife who had publicly expressed skepticism of the institution of marriage. In her spare time, she created a game based on economist Henry George’s anti-monopoly beliefs. She felt this venue would convince people of the evils of corporate greed.
Magie’s brainchild—the Landlord’s Game—featured a path that allowed players to circle the board in contrast to the linear path popular at the time. It included money, railroads, properties, and the three words that have endured for more than a century after Elizabeth scrawled them: “Go to Jail.” Its Chance cards had quotations such as John Ruskin’s, “It begins to be asked on many sides how the possessors of land became possessed of it,” and Andrew Carnegie’s, “The greatest astonishment of my life was the discovery that the man who does the work is not the man who gets rich.” She created two sets of rules: an anti-monopolist set in which all were rewarded when wealth was created, and a monopolist set in which the goal was to build a fortune by destroying the nest eggs of your opponents. Her dualistic approach was intended to demonstrate that the first set of rules was morally superior. Magie hoped that her brainchild would serve as a rebuke to the land barons of the Gilded Age. The game made its way to Atlantic City Quakers, where they altered the property names from Elizabeth’s Manhattan ones to those from their neck of the woods.
The man who received credit for creating Monopoly was a Pennsylvanian named Charles Darrow, who was not an inventor, but an opportunist. During the Depression, Darrow and his wife Esther were introduced to Magie’s game by another couple, and a light bulb went off. He asked his friend Franklin Alexander to create illustrations such as Mr. Monopoly—based on J. P. Morgan—and the whistle-blowing cop. Darrow sold the reinvented product to Parker Brothers for seven thousand dollars plus residuals. By 1936, the board game had garnered millions, saving not only Darrow but also the game company from financial ruin. Fortunately for the Darrow descendants, they kept the original game in their possession until 1992, when Malcolm Forbes purchased it for a princely sum. Parker Brothers gave the mother of the invention a onetime payoff of five hundred dollars.
At first, the then-elderly Elizabeth was pleased with the purchase. She hoped the company would turn her “beautiful brainchild” into a popular way of disparaging greedy monopolists. She was infuriated when she discovered they had a different game plan. To add insult to injury, Darrow and the proprietors made sure Magie’s name had as little connection as possible to the lucrative blockbuster. When journalists questioned how he had come up with the phenomenally successful game, his stock response was, “It’s a freak. Entirely unexpected and illogical.” Darrow had monopolized Monopoly. In 1936, amidst the media frenzy surrounding “the inventor” and the nationwide Monopoly craze, Magie lashed out. She gave an interview to The Washington Post where she expressed anger at the appropriation. Gray hair tied back in a tightly coiffed bun, she held up the board from The Landlord’s Game and Parker Brothers’ Monopoly to illustrate their shared DNA. She stated that although the company had the rights to her three-decade-old patent that had passed into public domain, they did not give credit where credit was due. They had kidnapped her child and passed it off as their own. They never righted the wrong. One of Elizabeth’s last jobs was at the US Office of Education; here her colleagues knew her as an elderly typist who claimed ownership of Monopoly. She died in 1948, a widow with no children—and an aborted legacy. Her obituary made no mention that she was the mother of Monopoly. In contrast, the Charles Darrow myth persisted as an inspirational parable of rags-to-riches ingenuity, his niche secured as a Depression-era Horatio Alger. Darrow became an industry legend for inventing a story rather than for inventing an economic eureka.
Elizabeth Magie would be pleased with her posthumous recognition. However, she would be gobsmacked at the changes time had wrought. There is now an app for Monopoly, as well as an electronic banking edition introduced in 2006 that features debit cards instead of cash, with tokens including a Segway and a flat-screen TV. She would be equally astounded that her game even played a role in history. In World War II, Monopoly boards, by that point a symbol of capitalism and America, were used to conceal maps sent by the Allies to prisoners of war.
During her lifetime the game had proliferated, selling just over two million copies in its first years of production. Currently, at least one billion people in 111 countries have played Monopoly, with an estimated six billion little green houses manufactured. The iconic board has undergone many face-lifts: it has adopted the streets of almost every major American city, and versions have been branded by financiers (Berkshire Hathaway), sports teams (Chicago Bears), television shows (the Simpsons), automobiles (Corvette), and farm equipment (John Deere). There have been odd sets as well: the Disney Villains, the Walking Dead, and Sun-Maid Raisins. One incarnation that would send the Quaker founder reeling is the bling version created by San Francisco jeweler Sidney Mobell, made of eighteen-karat gold and diamonds and valued at two million. Even more disturbing would be Ghettopoly, whose main “playa” is a far cry from the usual top-hat-wearing mascot. Instead there is a bandana-wearing African American male holding an Uzi and a bottle of liquor. A sample token is a marijuana leaf, while a typical Chance card reads, “You got da whole hood addicted to crack, collect $50.”
Monopoly continues to wield its hold; after all, who can resist the endorphin rush of bankrupting friends and family? And for all the capitalists in training, the seed is planted that if they can put into practice the principle of the game, they too can become the contemporary rich Uncle Moneybags, a megalomaniac billionaire who married an Eastern European model and lives in baronial splendor. Its premise can be summed up by Gordon Gekko’s famous line in Wall Street: “The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”
As for Charles Darrow, who misappropriated a Quaker woman’s brainchild, the final epitaph could be: “Do Not Pass Go—Do Not Collect $200.”