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Monopoly: The World's Most Famous Game — and How It Got That Way, by Philip
E. Orbanes. Da Capo, 2006, 288 pages.
Beside the Boardwalk by Bruce Ramsey
I've long had a soft spot for the board game Monopoly. In the summer of 1982, in a bonfire of neurons, I programmed the game in Atari Basic, so that my 48k computer would field three players against me: Archibald, Beatrice, and Charlie. I was also a business news reporter, and I knew that the game, which was supposed to mimic the world of business, really did not.
| | Bruce Ramsey
is a journalist in Seattle. |
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There are all sorts of things wrong with it. Your opportunity to buy is based on luck, and prices are fixed. You rent where you're ordered to rent, not where you want to. Your object is the creation of a land monopoly, which is not something generally possible in the real world, nor is the bankrupting of all your opponents. The most realistic part of the game is the trading of properties and the demonstration of inflation by the expansion of the money supply. (Most of these ideas are discussed in a 2004 posting on the Mises Institute web page by Benjamin Powell of the economics department at San Jose State.) It's fun to bankrupt your opponents at Monopoly — but it's not how you get ahead in real life.
I always wondered about the political beliefs of the game's inventor. Now I know. Philip Orbanes' book tells the story.
The first version of the game was patented in 1903 by Elizabeth Magie, a public stenographer. She called it the Landlord's Game. The names of the properties were different, but it had a continuous path around the board (a feature she patented), and it had four railroads, Chance and Luxury Tax, Jail, and a Go to Jail square.
Magie was a devotee of Henry George's theory of the Single Tax and intended the game as an aid to teach the inequity of monopolizing land. She never produced it commercially, but handmade copies were used in a Georgist community: Arden, Delaware. There the game was played by a young professor of economics at the Wharton School, Scott Nearing. The professor took it back to his class and played it with students for many years. Nearing was a socialist who would later become a Communist, though the party eventually expelled him. He was famously fired by Wharton for his left-wing activities and in 1917 was prosecuted, though not convicted, under Woodrow Wilson's Espionage Act, for opposing World War I. Nearing lived until 1983, when, at age 100, he committed slow suicide by refusing to eat. He was a leftist all his life.
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| Monopoly is like the Pledge
of Allegiance — it has littleknown
left-wing roots. |
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Back at Wharton, one of his students had been Rexford Guy Tugwell, another socialist. Tugwell played the Landlord game with students as a kind of capitalistic teaching aid. During the early New Deal, Tugwell was hired as undersecretary of agriculture in a department administered by the leftist Henry Wallace. He later was made head of the Resettlement Administration and got his face on the cover of Time. John T. Flynn credited Tugwell with being the New Deal's emblematic planner and the man who sold Wallace on "the theory of State Planning for the well-being of all the people." "Monopoly" has a whole chapter on Tugwell.
From him, the game spread to others, and finally to Charles B. Darrow, a onetime plumber, radiator repairman, and steam engineer. Darrow devised the look of the Monopoly board, with the color codes for the properties, the imagery of the trains, and so on, and he put the game on the market. Darrow was not an ideological guy; he was trying to make some money by selling a game. And he did. He sold the rights to Parker Brothers. They soon found out about the original inventor, then named Elizabeth Magie Phillips, who had filed an amended patent in the 1920s, and they had to buy the rights from her.
So Monopoly is like the Pledge of Allegiance — it has little-known left-wing roots. And it's still one of the great board games.
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