This Day in History: February 6th

Today in History: February 6, 1935

For a game that’s based on cut-throat tactics and ruining your fellow players, it’s probably no great surprise that the origins of the game Monopoly, or at least how big business acquired the rights to the game, are as shady and heartless as making your oldest friend cough up his last dime to pay rent for landing on Boardwalk. With four hotels.

The game that would morph into Monopoly ironically began as a game where the object was to resist monopolies and to share the wealth collectively. It was created in 1906 by Lizzie Magie, who was heavily influenced by Henry George’s proposal of a single tax on land as an effective way to discourage monopolies.

She envisioned her game, which she called “The Landlord’s Game,” as a way to spread the idea that no-one could really “own” the land, so that its “ownership should be held in common by society, which also would prevent monopolists from extracting unearned “rent.”

The game became very popular, especially with progressive Quakers and college students. Players made their own boards, often adding the names of their own local streets to personalize their gaming experience. From its inception through the 1920s, the game’s moniker had gone from “The Landlord’s Game,” to “Auction Monopoly,” finally settling on “Monopoly,” but its philosophy had remained the same.

Until the greed kicked in.

A spoilsport named Dan Layman, who had enjoyed playing Monopoly while a student at Williams College in Reading, Pa, decided he was going to market his own version of Monopoly, which he called Finance.

Louis Thun, Layman’s dorm mate, attempted to patent and sell his version of Monopoly in 1931. A patent search revealed that Lizzie Magie had patented the game in 1904. Thun’s attorney advised him not to proceed, as patents are for inventors, and Thun did not invent the game. Thun had come up with several “unique” rules, which he quickly copyrighted.

And then, in a six degrees of separation kind of thing, a friend of a friend who taught Dan Layman how to play Monopoly taught the game to a hotel manager in Germantown, PA named Charles Todd, who said:

The first people we taught it to after learning it from the Raifords 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 asked me if I would write up the rules and regulations and I wrote them up and checked with Raiford to see if they were right and gave them to Darrow – he wanted two or three copies of the rules, which I gave him and gave Raiford and kept some myself.

Darrow, of course, is Charles Darrow, the man often credited with inventing the game of Monopoly, who claims the game is his “brain-child.” Parker Brothers was producing 20,000 copies of Monopoly weekly within one month of signing Darrow on. To avoid any complications, Parker Brothers systematically bought off the copyrights or patents of any other existing Monopoly games so they could create a … monopoly. Life imitating art is such fun.

Monopoly became the world’s best selling board game, and put Parker Brothers on the map. It made Charles Darrow a very rich man. So, how did Lizzie Magie fare in all of this?

Parker Brothers bought her patent for The Landlord’s Game for $500 in 1932, with the stipulation that the company would continue to sell it. The company did publish The Landlord’s Game but put no effort into promoting its sale. By 1939, the game was being pulled from store shelves and destroyed.

A meeting between Parkers Brothers president Robert Barton and Lizzie Magie may give us a little insight as to why:

“So, Barton met with Lizzie Magie, he testified, and asked her if she would accept changes in her game. According to Barton’s recollection, she replied like this: “No. This is to teach the Henry George theory of single taxation, and I will not have my game changed in any way whatsoever.”

For John Droeger of San Francisco, the lawyer taking his deposition, Barton explained why in his opinion Lizzie Magie answered that way: “She was a rabid Henry George single tax advocate, a real evangelist; and these people never change.”

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