The Monopolists Page 11

  In November 1935, George Parker, now almost seventy years old, traveled from Salem, Massachusetts, to Arlington, Virginia, on a rare business trip. His mission: to visit Lizzie and her husband, Albert.

  Although George and Lizzie had been born in the same year, they could not have been more different. George was a wealthy, famous, and successful businessman about to embark on a happy retirement. Lizzie was an aging educator still clinging to Henry George’s theories and still struggling to publish her short stories and games.

  George told Lizzie that his company had come across a copy of her Landlord’s Game, and while he didn’t appreciate its political messages, he wanted to purchase her patent. As part of the deal, he promised to publish not only the Landlord’s Game but also two more of Lizzie’s games. She was elated. Finally her ideas about economics and politics were going to reach a mass audience—and under the banner of one of the most prestigious game companies in the world.

  Lizzie and George signed a deal. She received five hundred dollars. And no residuals.

  Two days after the ink had dried on the agreement, Lizzie sent a message to George.

  FAREWELL TO MY BELOVED BRAIN-CHILD

  Farewell, my beloved brain-child. I regretfully part with you, but I am giving you to another who will be able to do more for you than I have done. I shall do all I can to add to your success and fame, which will, in some measure, add to my own. I charge you do not swerve from your high purpose and ultimate mission. Remember, the world expects much from you. And remember, and be proud, that though others have fought for your possession I would not yield you to them utterly. It was not until the great game king, George S. Parker, did us the honor of seeking you out and offered you a broader opportunity than I could ever do that I would part with you, and I do so now only because I believe that it will be both to your interest and mine as well as to the credit of your new manager, who, I trust will not forget the hope with which he has inspired me. I hope from time to time, to do something for you myself, through Mr. Parker. And now good bye and good luck! My blessing goes with you, my beautiful brain-child.

  On the back of the message, Lizzie scribbled, “This may amuse you, Mr. Parker, but it is something I keenly feel. E.M.P.”

  Lizzie had high expectations for the future of the game she had held so close, and she clearly revered Parker. The critical holiday season was near, and through the sale of the Landlord’s Game, she might once again propel her name and ideals into the spotlight.

  Four years after Parker Brothers published Monopoly, it published a version of Lizzie Magie’s Landlord’s Game. The game, like its inventor, Lizzie Magie, faded into obscurity. (The Strong)

  When a prototype of the Parker Brothers version of the Landlord’s Game arrived at Lizzie’s home in Arlington, she was delighted. In a letter to Foster Parker, nephew of George and the company’s treasurer, she wrote that there had been “a song in my heart” ever since the game had arrived. “Some day, I hope,” she went on, “you will publish other games of mine, but I don’t think any one of them will be as much trouble to you or as important to me as this one, and I’m sure I wouldn’t make so much fuss over them.”

  The 1939 Landlord’s Game board. (Tom Forsyth)

  Much to Lizzie Magie’s dismay, the other two games that she invented for Parker Brothers, King’s Men and Bargain Day, received little publicity and faded into board game obscurity. Her newer, Parker Brothers version of Landlord’s Game appeared to have, as well. And so did Lizzie Magie. One of her last jobs was at the U.S. Office of Education, where her colleagues knew her only as an elderly typist who talked about inventing games and who, as one of a handful of remaining followers of Henry George, taught some single tax classes out of her home. The once-popular single tax meeting and lecture circuit that had spanned New York City, Philadelphia, Atlantic City, and Washington, D.C., had all but faded out of existence.

  As part of her deal with Parker Brothers, Lizzie Magie was briefly featured as an inventor of games, but over time her connection to Monopoly faded away.

  After the Landlord’s Game’s disappointing return to the market, Lizzie once again wrote an article, titled “A Word to the Wise,” for one of her beloved Georgist periodicals. Published in a 1940 issue of Land and Freedom, it read:

  What is the value of our philosophy if we do not do our utmost to apply it? To simply know a thing is not enough. To merely speak or write of it occasionally among ourselves is not enough. We must do something about it on a large scale if we are to make headway. These are critical times, and drastic action is needed. To make any worthwhile impression on the multitude, we must go in droves into the sacred precincts of the men we are after. We must not only tell them, but show them just how and why and where our claims can be proven in some actual situation.

  •

  The craze over Monopoly was going global. Buyers overseas wanted to strike up deals with Parker Brothers to publish their own local versions of the game. Victor Watson, head of the British game maker Waddingtons, called Robert Barton at his Salem office—reportedly the first-ever transatlantic phone call for both companies. Watson wanted to purchase the rights to sell a British version of Monopoly in the United Kingdom. His son Norman had become addicted to the game after playing it in late 1935, and Watson was convinced it had British appeal.

  Soon thereafter, Barton granted Watson the rights, and the two drafted a deal that allowed Parker Brothers to expand its blockbuster hit into Europe while providing Waddingtons with the opportunity for making ample profits. Previously known mostly for card games, Waddingtons substituted British locales—Piccadilly, Bond Street, Mayfair—for Atlantic City ones. “Wherever Monopoly was played,” a Waddingtons historian noted, “the players found they could not leave it alone and it became an addiction.” At the time, the stories about the game’s non-Darrow origins were not relayed to Waddingtons. Victor Watson Jr., who later took over the company, said he believed the reason was that Barton “knew all along that Charles Darrow had not invented it.”

  Parker Brothers thought that the war was over. It had squashed the competition—Easy Money, Finance, Inflation, and the Landlord’s Game—and was expanding internationally. Darrow’s riches were secured, and Lizzie Magie was content in her belief that Henry George’s ideas would soon gain broad public exposure. Someone’s assumptions were terribly wrong.

  CONFLICT, INTRIGUE, REVENGE

  “He had it handed to him on a silver platter, so to speak, and was smart enough to see the possibilities in it.”

  —EUGENE RAIFORD

  Daniel Layman, the fraternity boy turned advertising man who had sold Finance for two hundred dollars, was flipping through the pages of Time magazine one day when he saw a story about Charles Darrow and how he had invented Monopoly. Knowing that the story wasn’t true, Layman wrote a letter to the editor. Much to his surprise, Time published it in February 1936.

  When asked later whether he had tried writing to Parker Brothers, Layman said that he didn’t write to the company. “I had no complaint against Parker Brothers as such,” he said. “But I did feel that I could if I wanted to, or anybody else could, manufacture a game and call it Monopoly and do it perfectly legally and sell all I wanted under that name, that Parker Brothers couldn’t possibly stop me. That was my only feeling.”

  Darrow’s sale of the game to Parker Brothers had rattled many of its early players. In Atlantic City, Ruth and Cyril Harvey, the Quakers who had modified the game, were perplexed. How could anyone own Monopoly? The game had been around for years, casually passing from one player to the next. Whenever anyone asked Cyril about what had transpired, he used the word “stealing” to describe what had happened.

  Some angry players in the Friends community advised the Harveys to take Darrow and Parkers Brothers to court. But some of the Quakers felt that went against their beliefs. “Quakers aren’t supposed to go to law,” Cyril said. Ruth was of the same opinion. She felt that they hadn’t invented the game either, so it wasn’t
theirs to lay claim to. Other Quaker players agreed, even as the fate of Monopoly continued to distress the community.

  The Raifords, who had learned the game from the Harveys, were more emotional about losing credit for their adaptations to the game, and that difference of opinion came between the two couples. “They were more hotheaded than we were,” Cyril later said. “See, we’re Quakers and they weren’t. Sometimes other people get hotheaded quicker.”

  One morning, Ruth told Cyril that she didn’t think they should loan out their handmade game boards anymore, now that the commercial version of Monopoly was on the market. They could be doing something wicked, something morally dangerous, she said. Cyril agreed.

  The couple also stopped playing the game. “I mean, how could we?” Cyril said. “We didn’t feel safe to play on [our board],” he said, making a nod to the game’s legal uncertainty and the taboo around chance games that still lingered in some Quaker circles. Now age eleven, their daughter Dottie was “thoroughly disgusted” with what she saw. “It seemed unfair that [no] one knew my mother had made the exact board being sold in stores,” she said.

  The Harveys moved away from Atlantic City in 1937, one of many families who left the seaside town as its glamour faded and jobs in the area evaporated. The family then moved around frequently, losing pieces of their monopoly games with each shift—small casualties of relocation. One of their boards ended up in the attic of Jesse Raiford and his wife Dorothea’s daughter, Joanna, to be forgotten about for decades, collecting dust.

  Meanwhile, the Darrow press continued. His face appeared in numerous magazines, and he even went on television, making cameos on the increasingly popular game shows that proliferated in the 1950s. He and Esther went on safari and continued raising orchids, while always saving some of their Monopoly earnings in case another Great Depression hit.

  •

  One Tuesday night in 1964, Eugene Raiford turned his television to WRCV-TV to watch the evening news, announced by NBC’s popular Vince Leonard. Suddenly, a familiar face appeared on the screen. It was Charles Darrow, the man the Todds had introduced to Eugene and his wife, Ruth, decades earlier, the man with whom he’d spent nights playing the monopoly game. Darrow told the interviewer that he was the inventor of Monopoly.

  Eugene bolted upright, remembering all of the hours in the early 1930s that he and Ruth, the Todds, and the Darrows had spent rolling the dice and traversing the Atlantic City properties together. Why, he’d even explained many of the rules to Darrow.

  Eugene had heard the Darrow invention story before, but now he decided to do something about it. Calling to Ruth, he asked her to type a letter for him and started to dictate. He wanted to set the record straight.

  “In newspaper accounts in 1933 there were conflicting statements,” he dictated as his wife began typing. Then he recounted how a Princeton economics professor had used the game as a teaching tool and how one of his students had taken the game to Indianapolis, where a young teacher had learned how to play it. He recalled how she’d then taken the game to Atlantic City, where Quaker players had modified it and added local property names, and how another player there, Jesse Raiford, had added prices to the properties and then taught it to Eugene, his brother, in the fall of 1932. “We still have the houses and hotels he made for us,” Eugene stated. Finally, he described how he and his wife had gone on to teach the game to their friends the Todds, who in turn had taught it to the Darrows.

  “It was not too long after that that Mr. Darrow ‘invented’ the game and later made a business arrangement with Parker Brothers,” Eugene went on. “The newspaper accounts were correct in saying that he was an out-of-work, who thought a lot about what he could do to improve his financial situation, but were incorrect in saying he invented Monopoly. He had it handed to him on a silver platter, so to speak, and was smart enough to see the possibilities in it.”

  After Monopoly became a commercial sensation, Eugene said, those involved with the game were “naturally quite irritated but felt we could do nothing about the matter because we had not invented the game either, even though, we had a part in making the game what it is today.”

  Eugene didn’t expect to gain anything by writing his letter. He just wanted to vent his feelings and point out an example of the fact “that everything in this world is not what it seems to be.” He sent the letter off to the television station and sent a copy to his friend Charles Todd. Nothing much came of it.

  Both sets of Raifords—Eugene and Ruth in Philadelphia and Jesse and Dorothea in Atlantic City—had held on to their homemade game boards and houses, and through the years, people asked them about Darrow’s Monopoly story. “I thought your husband had something to do with that,” they’d say to Dorothea. The younger generation of Raifords sometimes liked to brag that the Raifords had invented the game, but Jesse and Dorothea always set them straight, saying that although they had contributed to the game, they hadn’t invented it and didn’t know who had.

  Years later, when Jesse and Dorothea tried to tell others about what had happened with their monopoly game, their story was usually met with skepticism. But what annoyed Dorothea the most was when people asked, “Why didn’t your husband put it on the market?” “He only made it,” she’d reply. “He had no authority, no right to put it on.” Dorothea Raiford thought about writing to Parker Brothers herself but never did, and she never played on one of Parker Brothers’ Monopoly sets.

  •

  Charles Todd didn’t hear from Charles Darrow after he handed him his written rules to the monopoly game. He found that strange—he’d thought they were becoming good friends. But Darrow seemed to be avoiding him. Then one day, Todd saw Darrow in a most unusual place—on a poster in a local bank advertising a demonstration of a great new business game called Monopoly, by Charles Darrow.

  The sight of the poster infuriated Todd. He was angry not just with Darrow but also with himself. He felt that he had placed the game the Raifords had taught him in the wrong hands and that there was no way to repair the damage. “It upset me more to know I was the one who had started the whole lie machine,” he later recalled.

  Todd was so angry that he “destroyed everything related to the game” and tried to confront Darrow. But when either Charles or Esther Darrow saw Todd walking down the street, they crossed to the other side or ducked into a store. Todd felt that he couldn’t sue Darrow over the game because he hadn’t invented it himself—he had copied it from the Raifords. Todd couldn’t understand how Darrow had received his patent.

  One night, the Todds were listening to the radio when Darrow came on to tell his by-now-famous tale about the invention of Monopoly. “Darrow went into a great long story,” Todd recalled, “weeping about how his family was starving to death and how he sat up night after night there in the basement working up this game.” Todd wrote a letter of protest to the show’s commentator, who wrote back to say that, as Todd recalled, he “did not select the people that go on his show and he had no record of anything, that they were selected for him and his job was to interview them.”

  Todd said he wrote to Parker Brothers as early as 1937 explaining how the game had been passed on from player to player, how the Todds had learned the game from the Raifords, and how they had then taught it to the Darrows. “We taught him all he knew,” Todd continued. He also noted that “monopoly” was what the game had been called when he’d played it in 1931.

  “Darrow didn’t have anything to do with originating the game,” Todd wrote. “He stole it.”

  His letter to Parker Brothers went unanswered.

  •

  Meanwhile, back in Virginia in the 1930s, Lizzie Magie had been shocked to see a version of her Landlord’s Game, now called Monopoly, appear on the market. She was even more shocked when she saw the round, bespectacled face of Charles Darrow gracing advertisements as its inventor. This was not the deal she thought she had struck with George Parker. Darrow had not invented the board game, and she knew that Parker Brothers was w
ell aware of that fact, as it had purchased her 1924 patent to the Landlord’s Game.

  In spite of the striking similarities between the two games, Lizzie’s name was nowhere to be found on the Monopoly box. Her contribution hadn’t been completely erased—her tiny patent number appeared on the game’s early sets. But few players noticed the number, and those who did had no idea of its significance.

  After her husband’s death in 1937, Lizzie would still cling to her Georgist beliefs, serving as the headmistress of the Henry George School of Social Science, which she operated out of her home. She viewed the Landlord’s Game as an extension of her teachings, and Parker Brothers’ failure to acknowledge her was a slight not only to her but also to her idol Henry George. The vast majority of Monopoly players had no clue that the game was a protest against capitalism, not an endorsement of it.

  “I conceived the game of Landlord to interest people in the single-tax plan of the great economist, Henry George,” Lizzie said to a reporter. How could Parker Brothers allow Darrow to claim that he was the game’s inventor?

  The daughter of a newsman and a onetime news maker herself, Lizzie knew how to get revenge. In the winter of 1935–1936, she communicated with reporters at the Washington Evening Star and the Washington Post.

  •

  Bombs were dropping all around the London offices of MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service. It was March 26, 1941, and earlier that month, Hitler had ordered an expansion of the concentration camps at Auschwitz. Blocking out the explosions, an agent took to his typewriter and wrote to Waddingtons, the British game company that was producing England’s version of Monopoly. On the other side of the war, Germans had realized the potency of using games as a teaching tool for the Hitler Youth, including Juden Raus (or “Jews Out”) and Bombers over England, a game that rewarded players for dropping bombs on the English countryside.