American Game
Elisa Person
Sept 2021
Growing up, Monopoly was my sister and I’s favorite game. Every family game night, we would play Monopoly until one of us quit because we were losing. Eventually, our parents got tired of us cheating, and they stopped playing with us. After that, my sister and I would hole ourselves in our room for hours on end playing Monopoly. I, of course, always won and would put my sister in debt. Even as an adult, Monopoly is still my favorite game as I got the new version of Monopoly, Ms. Monopoly, for my eighteenth birthday. It was after I received that game that I dug deeper into the background behind the original version. The man credited with inventing the popular board game was named Charles Darrow. During the Great Depression, the heater salesman from Germantown, Pennsylvania, was unemployed and poor, as much of America was at the time. To support and entertain his family, Darrow created the game Monopoly in his basement. In 1935, after selling over 5,000 versions to friends and family, Darrow sold his game to Parker Brothers, gaining an incredible fortune. Darrow’s story is the epitome of the American Dream. A poor, hardworking man turned his idea into a fortune even during the largest economic recession in history. This story is the story that Parker Brothers and Hasbro have been marketing, convincing the American population that this game serves as proof that the American Dream does exist.
However, a lawsuit in the early seventies between Professor Ralph Anspach and Parker Brothers over Anspach’s new game called Anti-Monopoly revealed a different version of the infamous Darrow story. This version included a woman named Elizabeth Magie, or Lizzie. Magie, a stenographer, grew up learning from her father about Henry George and his ideas of anti-monopolism, land value tax, and taxing the rich. In 1903, she applied for a patent for her invention, the Landlord’s Game. The game served as a protest against monopolists such as Andrew Carnegie, who became rich while making others poor. The circular game board included the Poor House, the Public Park, a Henry George quote, and the iconic “Go to Jail” phrase found on the original version of the Parker Brothers Monopoly game. With the game board came two sets of instructions: one that rewarded everyone for the wealth created and another that allowed the creation of monopolies. It is the latter set of rules that gained popularity among progressives, college students, and Atlantic City Quakers. As more people bought and created homemade versions of Magie’s game, Darrow learned how to play, “modified” it, and sold it to Parker Brothers thirty years after Magie’s patent.
Magie’s game of progressiveness and anti-monopolism has become a game of capitalism, greed, and unequal welfare distribution, and it sits in almost every American house, carrying along with it an inaccurate fairytale of its creation. It has been almost fifty years since Anspach’s discovery, and the story of Lizzie Magie is still overshadowed by the inaccurate story of Charles Darrow. In fact, in Hasbro’s debut of Ms. Monopoly, a game intended to empower women, there is no mention of the game’s true inventor. Hasbro’s lack of acknowledgment of Magie’s role in inventing the game negates its homage to women. Unfortunately, this is not the first instance of men being falsely credited for the actions of women. Whether it is the discovery of the structure of DNA or the invention of wireless communication, women’s names and legacies have been lost in translation to single stories written by a patriarchal and profit-based society.
References
Doepker, Rachel. “Monopoly Patented.” Business Reference Services, Library of Congress. Feb. 2009.
“Ever Cheat at Monopoly? So Did Its Creator: He Stole the Idea from a Woman.” NPR. 3 Mar. 2015.
Pilon, Mary. “Monopoly Was Designed to Teach the 99% About Income Inequality.” Smithsonian. 1 Jan. 2015.
---. “Monopoly's Inventor: The Progressive Who Didn't Pass ‘Go.'” The New York Times. 13 Feb. 2015.
Elisa Person is from Seattle, Washington and studies in the College of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.