The Game Of Monopoly Was Invented In 1903 By A Feminist Against Corporate Malfeasance
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/sunday-review/monopoly-goes-corporate.html?_r=0
Monopoly was invented in 1903 by Lizzie Magie, a feminist living in Washington DC.
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Seventeen years before women could vote, Ms. Magie, a fiery stenographer, poet, sometime actress and onetime employee of the United States Postal Service’s dead-letter office, ginned up a game that mirrored what she perceived to be the vast economic inequalities of her day. She called it the Landlord’s Game and saw it as an educational tool and gamy rebellion against the era’s corporate titans, John D. Rockefeller Sr., Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan.
Ms. Magie was an ardent follower of Henry George, who advocated a single tax on land. She cleverly designed two sets of rules: one in which the object was to get rich quick, the other as an anti-monopoly game in which all players benefited from wealth created. Historical evidence suggests that the more vice-laden monopolist game resonated with earlier players. “It is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences,” Ms. Magie told The Single Tax Review in 1902. “It might well have been called the Game of Life, as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is the same as the human race in general seem to have, i.e., the accumulation of wealth.”
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From Ms. Magie’s patent, the “monopoly game” spread among left-wing intellectuals for decades. It was embraced in Arden, a single tax bohemian enclave that attracted Upton Sinclair and the radical scholar Scott Nearing. Rexford G. Tugwell, a Columbia University professor and member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “brain trust,” played and taught the game. Members of the administration of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia of New York played it, as did Ernest Angell, an attorney and chairman of the board at the American Civil Liberties Union, according to his son, Roger Angell.
Atlantic City Quakers introduced some of the greatest modifications to the early monopoly game. The Quakers, who value silence, scuttled the auction system of property acquisition in the 1930s and instead put fixed sale prices on the board, which made it easier to play with children. And the Quakers replaced drab pawns with miscellaneous objects, later mass-produced by Dowst, a Chicago-based company that created Cracker Jack prizes.
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Without realizing it, Mr. Anspach’s Anti-Monopoly, a game that heralded trustbusters and railed against OPEC during the 1970s, was a return to the game’s progressive roots. Mr. Anspach fully researched the game and its origins during the course of a 10-year legal battle that, among other things, called into question whether Parker Brothers had illegitimately monopolized Monopoly. The suit ultimately reached the Supreme Court, and in the end, Mr. Anspach won the right to sell his Anti-Monopoly game.
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