Lesson on the Tablecloth

The Landlord's Lesson

Eli: January fifth, 1904. Elizabeth Magie, Lizzie on the paperwork, is granted U.S. Patent 748,626 for a board game. She'd filed the year before. Her drawing still sits in the National Archives. It's a square track with no finish line, just a loop. Properties line the sides. There are railroads, utilities, play money. And the corners hold Jail, a public park, and a space she called Mother Earth. The name on top: The Landlord's Game.

Mara: A listener read that Monopoly started as a game meant to show how unfair landlords are, and asks who really invented it. Today's angle is how an anti-landlord teaching tool was co-opted into capitalism's favorite game.

Eli: Hold on to that loop with no finish line. Magie meant it as a lesson about rent, and the lesson didn't stay hers for long.

Mara: And Mother Earth is the corner that later became Go.

Eli: The whole board was an argument. Magie followed the economist Henry George, a school of thought called Georgism: the value land gains because a community grows around it belongs to that community. She wrote that her first aim was 'simply to work out a demonstration of how the landlord gets his money and keeps it.' and according to the National Women's History Museum, her targets were the big monopolists of her day, people like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

Mara: So the town should get it back?

Eli: That's it. And she'd been teaching it in evening classes, frustrated by how few people she reached. A game could travel further.

Mara: George's fix, in his 1879 book Progress and Poverty, was a single tax. Tax land, and only land, and let that one tax shift the load onto wealthy landlords. Magie built a switch for it right into her rules. At any point, a vote of at least two players puts the single tax into operation, to 'prove how the application of the Single Tax would benefit everybody.'

Eli: Two votes. That's a lot of faith in whoever's winning.

Mara: There's another way to read those rules, Eli. Mary Pilon and Dan Sullivan point to two rule sets in the same game. In one, everybody was rewarded when wealth was created. In the other, the goal was to build monopolies and dominate opponents. On their reading, it's a comparison, both outcomes on one board, so players could see each.

Eli: And on Magie's own telling, it was a demonstration of the landlord's take. Even so, a game about land-grabbing can still be won by grabbing land.

The Folk Board and the Salesman

Mara: The patent put Magie's name on paper. It couldn't stop people drawing their own boards.

Eli: And they did. It became a folk game: no publisher, no shop, just people copying a board by hand and passing the rules on by word of mouth. It turned up at the Wharton School of Finance and Economy, at Harvard, at Columbia. An economics professor at Wharton took it up while he taught, and students made their own copies. Years later he wrote that he'd always called it Landlords.

Mara: Of her two rule sets, one account says: 'People liked the monopolist rules better.'

Eli: Which reads like a drift: folk networks favoring the cutthroat mechanics over cooperative taxation, an anti-landlord lesson turning into a celebration of piling it up. By the thirties, Quakers in Atlantic City had their own board, with their own streets. Max Carter, on a Quaker podcast, says According to Max Carter, they dropped the auctions because haggling ran against the Quaker practice of one fair price. One player pulled values from Atlantic City tax records and painted the board on an oilcloth tablecloth. Her pieces were things lying around the house, including a thimble from her sewing kit.

Mara: Fixed prices, local streets, a thimble, and nobody has a full list of who added what. That's the board Charles Darrow met. At a game night in 1932, a friend who played the Atlantic City version hosted Darrow, a Philadelphian, and his wife. They were hooked. Darrow wanted the rules in writing. The host later testified that Darrow 'asked a lot of what I thought were pretty dumb questions.'

Eli: Darrow wrote in 1935 he made it 'for the sole purpose of amusing myself.'

Mara: His rules, by the account of the player who'd taught his hosts the game, were carbon copies made by the host's wife. Darrow's board kept the Atlantic City street names, down to the local spelling mistakes. That's commercial appropriation: a board a whole community built, sold under one name. He sold hand-painted oilcloth copies for four dollars each.

Eli: And Parker Brothers rejected it in 1934 as too long and complicated.

Mara: He kept selling homemade copies anyway, about five thousand of them.

Eli: Meanwhile Magie had long picked public fights over money. In 1906, struggling on ten dollars a week as a stenographer, she bought an ad offering herself as a 'young woman American slave' to the highest bidder, mocking marriage as a woman's only option. 'We are not machines,' she said. 'Girls have minds, desires, hopes and ambition.' And she still held a patent on a looping board with Jail in the corner.

The Five-Hundred-Dollar Buyout

Mara: In 1935, Parker Brothers bought the rights to Darrow's game, and sales skyrocketed. The company helped him go after a patent, and he filed that August. But Magie's patent was already on file.

Eli: The woman who once put herself up for sale to mock marriage as women's only option was about to get an offer.

Mara: November 1935. The company's founder visits Magie, then seventy. He offers to buy her second Landlord's Game patent, along with two other games she'd made. She accepts five hundred dollars. No royalties. That's a patent buyout: buying up a rival's rights so nobody can use them to challenge yours.

Eli: An anti-monopoly inventor.

Mara: And Darrow's side moved fast. On the last day of 1935, he got U.S. Patent 2,026,082. The company's president, Robert Barton, later admitted: 'Whether Darrow got it all from Magie Phillips, whether he got it from somewhere else, we didn’t know. And we cared very little.' Put in that order, the purchase reads like insurance: five hundred dollars to neutralize potential patent challenges to Darrow's Monopoly, rather than to spread her teaching tool.

Eli: In January 1936 she told a Washington paper it was okay 'if she never made a dime so long as the Henry George single tax idea was spread to the people of the country.'

Mara: The patent Magie took out to spread a lesson now sat in a company's files, guarding the other game, Eli.

The Myth and the Trial

Eli: And the other game came with a story. Tucked into the box: an unemployed man in Philadelphia dreams up a game in the thirties, sells it, gets rich. A founding myth, one tidy inventor's tale with everyone else left out. Parker Brothers was still printing it in 1973: Darrow, 'like many other Americans, was unemployed at the time and he worked out the details of the game primarily to amuse himself during this period.'

Mara: Almost Darrow's own 1935 line about amusing himself.

Eli: Magie didn't let it sit. In January 1936 she gave interviews to two Washington papers, angry and hurt, holding up her Landlord's Game boards beside a new Parker Brothers one. In notes Ralph Anspach later took from her unpublished diary, she calls Darrow a crook who stole her game, and says the company's founder promised to pay her what Darrow got. It never happened. Her supervisor wrote in 1939 that everyone in her office was outraged the company published only the monopoly side.

Mara: Then 1973. Ralph Anspach, an economics professor, spends four hours in traffic during the oil price hikes and gets home cursing the oil monopolists at dinner. In his words, 'my eight year old son says dad you are a really poor loser.' Anspach answers with a game, Anti-Monopoly. Parker Brothers comes after the name, and a decade-long trademark fight follows, where his defense meant showing the name came out of a folk game. Digging for that case, he found Magie's patents and the game's folk roots.

Eli: Including the Atlantic City Quaker boards Darrow had copied.

Mara: He also found the company had been buying up rivals. Folk versions first hit the market in 1932, with a game called Finance, and Parker Brothers bought that up too. Stephen Ives, who writes on the game's history, says Robert Barton practiced a 'catch and kill' approach, out to erase any record of The Landlord's Game because the company's claim rested on shaky legal ground.

Eli: In 1957 Barton wrote her game 'was the basic game for both FINANCE and MONOPOLY.'

Mara: So the box said one thing, the company's own paper said another, and the name on the 1904 patent was the one that dropped out.

Eli: That paper trail gets read three ways. Mary Pilon's reading, and Magie's own: she's the inventor, because her patent already had the loop, the corners, the property sets and the critique. Darrow's, and Hasbro's: he made the modern game, with the Atlantic City board, its look, and the mass hit.

Mara: And Ralph Anspach's, which the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals also holds: a folk game, its rules and names shaped by dozens of uncredited players over three decades.

Eli: Whichever reading, a lesson about rent became the game of bankrupting everyone at the table. And Magie's name came back through her own interviews and a professor's lawsuit.

Mara: So who invented Monopoly? The Landlord's Game is its direct precursor, the base it was built on. Elizabeth Magie drew that game up by 1903 to show how landlords profit, and patented it. Folk players reshaped it for three decades, a collective invention, built up across a network rather than in one head. Charles Darrow copied the Atlantic City version and sold it. Darrow and Parker Brothers made millions. Magie's reported income from the game was five hundred dollars.

Eli: And that January 1904 drawing reads differently now: the loop, the jail, Mother Earth, three decades before Darrow's name went on a box. Still open: the names of most folk players who added rules between 1904 and 1930, and whether Darrow believed the game was rightfully his. Archive finds or his own letters would change the picture.

Mara: Listeners can look up Elizabeth Magie.

Eli: Follow culture with us, as credit gets contested across more episodes.

Mara: Thanks for spending this time with us. I'm Mara.

Eli: And I'm Eli. Until next time, this has been Angle.