The Monopolists Read online

  In his letter, the agent recapped the conversation he’d had with Waddingtons’ top executive, Victor Watson, earlier that day and stressed the need for secrecy. Waddingtons had just been enlisted in one of the Allies’ most peculiar missions. A similar effort involving game companies was under way across the Atlantic.

  During World War II, the Allies used a variety of objects, including games, to smuggle goods in to prisoners of war. Radios were hidden in cribbage boards, silk maps in decks of playing cards, and compasses in buttons or in the lining of clothing. Table tennis sets proved to be particularly useful, as maps could be easily folded up and tucked into the handles of wooden paddles. Cigarette cases, cigars, books, cotton handkerchiefs that changed color with the aid of certain liquids, a pencil that held a map, a cigarette holder–telescope, games of Snakes and Ladders, and reversible uniforms that allowed soldiers to disguise themselves as German officers—all these came into play.

  In America, military officers purchased Monopoly boards and steamed off their top layer to create a center cavity. Inside, they placed maps. The process was tricky—some boards steamed open more easily than others—and bypassed the direct involvement of Parker Brothers.

  Other game companies participated in the war effort. Milton Bradley turned its game-making factories into ones that manufactured missiles, submachine guns, rifles, and joints used in aircraft landing gear. The company also continued to manufacture some games for soldiers—as their founder had done nearly a century earlier during the Civil War. Now under new management, Milton Bradley would become profitable in 1942 and remain successful for years.

  The Geneva Conventions allowed POWs to receive some letters and goods, including games, to help them pass the time. But relief groups such as the Red Cross did not want to risk their integrity as aid organizations by participating in smuggling activities, so the Allies set up fictitious relief agencies, such as the British Local Ladies Comfort Society and the Lancashire Penny Fund. The addresses of blitzed buildings were sometimes used as well.

  Waddingtons knew how to manufacture some of the specialized smuggled goods and how to modify the Monopoly boards in which they could be hidden.

  Clank, clank, clank went the keys of the agent’s typewriter.

  Dear Mr. Watson,

  Reference our conversation today. I am sending you, under separate cover, as many maps as I have in stock of the following: –

  Norway and Sweden

  Germany

  Italy

  I shall be glad if you will make me up games on the lines discussed today containing the maps as follows:-

  One game must contain Norway, Sweden and Germany.

  One game must contain N. France, Germany and frontiers.

  One game must contain Italy.

  I am also sending you a packet of small metal instruments. I should be glad if in each game you could manage to secrete one of these.

  I want as varied an assortment containing these articles as possible. You had then better send me 100/200 games on the straight.

  In those that are faked, you must give me some distinguishing clue and also state what they contain.

  In the above I also include, of course, packs of cards, calendars, photographs and any other ideas you have.

  I will send you in the next post some packs of cards for you to pack in fancy boxes, etc. and insert in bridge sets.

  The Germans were aware of what the Allies were up to and issued propaganda accordingly. They said that the English had “opened up a non-military form of gangster war” by violating the rules of the Hague Conventions. In order to safeguard the homeland, Germany would retaliate by opening up “death zones,” and it warned that “escaping prisoners of war, entering such death zones, will certainly lose their lives.”

  Heartwarming as the tale of Monopoly saving the lives of soldiers may be, it’s also unlikely that the games were used directly in aiding escapes. It would be virtually impossible to know the scope of the Allies’ use of Monopoly boards or how many POWs were helped by the hidden maps and goods—if any at all. No sets explicitly used for this purpose have ever been found, a fact that gives some game historians pause. However, the mission was believed to have been entirely classified, and materials related to it were destroyed as World War II ended and the Cold War began, in case it became necessary to use such tactics again.

  But the spread of this legend, as well as the United States’ embrace of Monopoly after the war, spoke to the solidified place the game had in the American psyche. Monopoly was no longer just a popular pastime; it had become representative of what was good about America and a positive symbol of capitalism.

  One theory has it that the secret service operatives smuggled maps to POWs so that they could escape in the event that the war ended in anarchy. Another holds that just the idea of plotting an escape helped prevent POWs from becoming submerged in the mental darkness that can plague wartime prisoners—giving them relief from the sense of hopelessness and stigma associated with being captured by the enemy. The board games with their smuggled compasses and maps also served as reminders to the prisoners that people on the outside were thinking of them and trying to get them out. Then, there were the actual games. “The importance of providing amusement for the forces in their leisure hours and in long periods of waiting and monotony in out of the way places,” Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote to the president of the Board of Trade, the man in his cabinet tasked with economic affairs, in the summer of 1943, “and for the sailors penned up in their ships for months together, cannot be overstated.”

  “It made an enormous difference to one’s esprit to know that there were people in England trying to help one,” John Powell Davies, a navy flier, said of the Monopoly mission. Davies was among those who spent time in Germany’s Colditz Castle prison, a high-security facility for recaptured escapees and important prisoners.

  Neither was the irony of the Get Out of Jail card lost on the prisoners, among them Lieutenant Colonel James Yule, who worked as an army intelligence officer. Captured in Norway and sent to a prison camp there, he escaped. Captured a second time and sent to Colditz, the handsome mustachioed solder aided in the escape of other prisoners. “Without Monopoly,” he later joked, “there wouldn’t be an England.”

  •

  With over one million units sold, 1946 was the single best year for Monopoly sales since Parker Brothers had introduced it a decade earlier. The growth of many companies roared after World War II, but even in that climate, the game did spectacularly well, due at least in part to demographics. A greater number of families with more disposable income yielded more board game sales.

  Analysts then, as now, marveled at a peculiar trend in board game sales: When the economy was good, sales grew, as expected. But when the economy went south—the Great Depression then, the 1970s recession and the 2008 global financial crisis in more recent years—sales were also good. The fact that games continue to sell even in depressed climates has been attributed to everything from the boredom of the unemployed to families’ need for cheap entertainment to a psychological hunger for joy in times of despair. The truth may include some combination of all of those factors.

  After the war, magazines and newspapers brimmed with advice for would-be inventors on how to become the next Charles Darrow and make a fortune in the game business. Reportedly, Parker Brothers at the time would not publish a game unless it thought that it could sell at least five thousand copies in its initial print order. A modestly successful game sold twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand copies.

  As Parker Brothers ascended in the market, so Robert Barton ascended in the ranks of the Toy Manufacturers Association, a trade and lobbying group that had formed two decades earlier. By 1941, he was a vice president of the organization, and in 1952, in Midtown Manhattan, where the association held its annual meeting, he was elected president. With his perfectly combed brown hair, long narrow face, round glasses, and immaculately pressed suit, Barton posed earnestly for hi
s portrait. By that time, he had overseen Parker Brothers for two decades, leading the company to record profits and acquiring one of the industry’s most successful games. And U.S. Census data continued to play to Barton’s advantage as families moved to the suburbs and Monopoly sets became as ubiquitous as gleaming refrigerators and blenders—another essential in the modern postwar home.

  The Toy Manufacturers Association played a critical role in voicing the concerns of game companies and ensuring that government policy worked in their favor. It was a relatively sophisticated lobbying apparatus for the time, and its methods were to be imitated by myriad industries in the coming decades.

  After World War II, the association’s annual premiere showcase event, the Toy Fair, saw a boom in attendance. More than eight hundred exhibitors flocked to magnificent hotel showrooms in New York City to display more than one hundred thousand items, including mechanical cows, air-powered helicopters, and the largest construction sets ever offered. To meet the demand, toy manufacturers stepped up their production, expanding factory space or adding staff. In 1949, Foster Parker declared that the year had been the company’s busiest to date and that there had been more interest than ever in its old standby, Monopoly.

  “A game may become popular in two months,” Kiplinger’s wrote in October 1949. “But sometimes it takes two years as in the case of ‘Monopoly.’ This is often regarded as the outstanding game in modern history. Nobody knows how many sets of ‘Monopoly’ have been sold except Parker Brothers and they don’t tell. An estimate of 4 million sets was once made, however, and the company didn’t challenge it.”

  With the introduction of television, the art of board game sales shifted from invention and innovation to promotional efforts—something that Barton was early to understand. For the first time, toy and game companies were able to reach children directly via television sets rather than indirectly through their parents in newspapers or through toy distributors. Some research has indicated that the brand loyalties and biases developed in childhood get carried into adulthood and are hard to change—seeds planted in children for when they grow up and fill the toy chests of their own offspring. Parker Brothers enlisted some of Madison Avenue’s top advertising firms to transition the business from one that relied on informal word of mouth and the casual wooing of toy distributors to one that had its products marketed on the radio and television alongside cigarettes from Philip Morris and cars from Pontiac.

  By 1959, Parker Brothers and one of its advertising agencies were spending an entire year generating elaborate campaigns to blast at consumers during the Christmas season, when the bulk of games were sold. Roughly 80 percent of the firm’s advertising budget was used from late October to late December, generating 60 percent of the year’s sales. In addition to broad-themed, national campaigns, sometimes the firm did a pointed advertising campaign, teaming up with a local department store in a metropolitan market. Parker Brothers also found that it paid to spend some of its advertising budget in January and February, when the dreary weather kept children and families huddled indoors. Decade by decade, the art and science of board game success was based more and more on marketing and less and less on costly research and development, a quiet but critical shift.

  The Parker men, dressed in suits and ties, gathered regularly around their ad agencies’ tables, laden with boxes and game boards. Edward Parker, one of the founder’s grandsons, oversaw the firm’s advertising, but Robert Barton and Channing Bacall Jr., another Parker grandson, also participated in the meetings. The company instructed its regional salesmen to pump up its holiday line as early as June and routinely bought significant blocks of airtime and print advertising space months and months ahead of its competitors.

  In the 1950s, the Parkers added a subtlety to their advertising campaigns that would have unintended consequences decades later in court. Game advertisements, they decided, should focus not only on the game itself but also on the company that had produced it. Versions of the phrase “Famous Parker Brothers Games” had been around since the firm’s earliest days but now took center stage. The company was selling not just a game but clean, wholesome family fun—and it was the best at what it did. Without realizing it, Parker Brothers was entering into the early phases of a new advertising debate: trying to convince consumers to buy products because of the name of their producer.

  Monopoly was still the company’s unofficial flagship game, but Parker Brothers was also adding other titles to its catalog. In 1959, in time for the holiday season, it introduced Risk, a game of planetary conquest, on which it lavished a massive advertising budget. Risk had been invented two years earlier in France, where it was called La Conquête du Monde, by the French film director Albert Lamorisse, best known for his 1956 film The Red Balloon. Parker Brothers had heard about La Conquête through its affiliation with France’s Miro Company. Twenty years after Parker Brothers had first introduced Monopoly, though, it was still king in the company’s eyes—a new record of longevity for a modern game title.

  THE CASE FOR ANTI-MONOPOLY

  “I start out with the idea that everyone is bad and it’s just a matter of proving it.”

  —JOHN DROEGER

  Ralph Anspach tried to push out of his mind all thoughts of the threatening letter from Parker Brothers demanding that he “cease and desist” using the name Anti-Monopoly. He continued to promote his game, which now cost $8.75. He wanted to keep expanding sales beyond the Bay Area and make the game a truly national, even international, phenomenon. By March 1974, a second production run of ten thousand units was in the works. By the end of the year, he would sell seventy-four thousand sets, and another two hundred thousand the year after.

  Ralph usually declined to comment publicly about Anti-Monopoly’s competition, but he did talk in a general way about Monopoly and games similar to it. “There’s a family of games [sold] as a simulation of money making and business activities,” he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “If one really observes the message, it is not simply money making that is emphasized, but money making by monopoly. As an economist, I know that this is illegal. These games thus glorify illegality.” He himself was hardly anticapitalist, he went on. “If anything, I’m pro-business. But I am for independent and competitive business … I also know, however, that there is more to life than making money.”

  As had been the case with Monopoly before it, Anti-Monopoly’s origins became part of its marketing tale. “We started the corporation with $5,000 and two living rooms,” Ralph said. “We took our game around to stores in the San Francisco area. Some of them took it on consignment, and some of them took a chance.” Ralph said that since they put Anti-Monopoly on the market “it was an immediate success,” and “the stores sold out of 2,000 games in 10 days.”

  Originally, Ralph had planned to take 5 percent of every sale and put it into an Anti-Monopoly foundation. He wasn’t quite clear about what exactly the foundation was going to do. Perhaps offer an annual prize to a top real-life trustbuster. Or perhaps provide funds for small businessmen who were victims of monopolies. But now, with the specter of the Parker Brothers letter hanging over his head, Ralph feared that the small businessman who needed the money might be none other than himself.

  Ralph hoped that the Parker Brothers lawyers would take a look at legal precedent and drop their threats against Anti-Monopoly. With that in mind, he asked his lawyer whether he should put a large disclaimer on his game boxes to distinguish them from Monopoly boxes. His lawyer advised against it and said that the disclaimer could be perceived in court as a tacit admission that there was, indeed, a confusing similarity between the two names. Ralph then offered to change his game’s name to Anti-Monopolism or Anti-Monopoli, but Parker Brothers refused.

  To combat the game giant on a more serious level, Ralph knew that he needed a lawyer who would be interested in going up against a corporate powerhouse and defending a counterculture board game—not an easy bill to fill. He and his wife figured that they could pay some legal fee
s, but with two kids and the costs of the new business pressing on Ralph’s modest professor’s salary, they did not want the bills to get too unwieldy.

  Ralph reached for the phone book and began to make some calls. After a few misses, he reached Warren, Rubin, Brucker & Chickering, a small firm in Oakland that had a good reputation. Bob Chickering, who specialized in trademark law, and his litigator colleague, Herb Rubin, agreed to meet with Ralph. They listened to his story with great interest. There was something intriguing about the idea of challenging an iconic American brand.

  They decided to take the case, with Rubin taking the lead. A jolly, heavyset man who kept candies on his desk, Rubin told Ralph that they would first try to work things out peaceably. That would save everyone a lot of time and money.

  Rubin then brought in John Droeger to handle the antitrust portion of the case. Having an antitrust component meant that the team might be able to argue Ralph’s case before a jury rather than a judge—something that would increase his chances of victory, his lawyers thought. Droeger had just won a big antitrust case against Dow Jones over advertising sales rates, and Rubin asked him to look into whether Parker Brothers had committed any antitrust violations against Anti-Monopoly. One mark of monopolization, Ralph’s lawyers reminded him, was using litigation as a weapon to eliminate competition. Using litigation didn’t necessarily mean that a company had violated antitrust laws, but the possibility did provide a different lens through which to view the threatening letter sent by the Parker Brothers attorney.