The Monopolists Page 15

  Ralph arrived at the Todds’ well-kept, fifteenth-floor condominium, unsure of what, if anything, would come of the meeting. The couple ushered him into their living room.

  “Now tell me,” Ralph said. “What really happened with Monopoly?”

  Todd described how he had reconnected with his childhood friend Esther Darrow and how he had taught her and her husband the game.

  Ralph asked Todd if Darrow could at least be credited with Monopoly’s design. Todd replied that his old friend deserved credit for nothing—he had copied everything off the Todds’ board. Olive Todd then stood up, walked to the corner of the room, and began rummaging through an antique chest. She pulled out an Old Maid game box and a blue oilcloth and handed them to Ralph. His heart beating fast, Ralph examined them. Was this the very set that the Todds had used to teach the Darrows the game? he asked. It was.

  A copy of a board played by Charles Todd in Philadelphia in 1932. Todd taught the game to Charles Darrow, who later sold it to Parker Brothers. (Anspach archives)

  Even more than Ruth Raiford’s board, the Todd game board looked virtually identical to the Monopoly boards stocked on store shelves and stowed in millions of homes. It had Atlantic City street names and the “Marvin Gardens” spelling error. What Darrow had later claimed was a flub on his part had actually been Todd’s mistake. And copied errors, Ralph had learned from Droeger, could be critical in proving plagiarism.

  Comparison of the Atlantic City, Todd, and Parker Brothers boards. (Anspach archives)

  “Incredible,” Ralph said as he examined the contents of the Old Maid box with awe.

  The Todds smiled.

  In the box were hand-carved houses and hotels and Chance, Community Chest, and property cards. Printed in typewriter font were directions such as “Take a walk on the Boardwalk” and “Pay visiting nurse $5.00.”

  Now Ralph had not only a direct link to Darrow but also an explanation of how Darrow had taken the game from what had essentially been the public domain. The Todds were the bridge between the monopoly games played by the Quakers and left-wing intellectuals and the man who became internationally famous for “inventing” the game. In Charles Todd’s version of the story, Darrow hadn’t created Monopoly—it had been handed to him. Suddenly, Ralph Anspach’s battle against Parker Brothers no longer felt like a lost cause.

  Much to Ralph’s relief, Charles and Olive agreed to be deposed.

  Weeks later, Ralph and the lawyers crowded into the Todds’ apartment. On clicked the recorder as a court typist began to take notes.

  In a gravelly voice, Charles Todd evenhandedly told his tale. He spoke of boards made of canvas, colored with crayons. “It’s been a long time since I’ve played the game,” he said.

  The lawyers asked Todd if he had ever called the game anything but “monopoly.”

  “No,” he said and added that the game had been “entirely new” to the Darrows. “They had never seen anything like it before and had great interest in it.”

  When Todd was shown a version of the board with Philadelphia street names, he said he didn’t recognize it. The only versions of the game that he knew were those with Atlantic City property names.

  Ralph asked Todd if he would be willing to submit the oilcloth board as evidence and tell his story under oath.

  Todd said that he had been waiting years for the opportunity.

  •

  With the Todd and Raiford interviews completed, Ralph pieced together what he had learned. Meanwhile, Ruth Anspach’s muscle problems and fatigue had worsened. Together she and Ralph sought out medical opinions. One doctor told her that she had a single lesion, but not multiple lesions or multiple sclerosis—it was not too serious, but another said she had MS. While the official diagnosis remained unclear, her illness fluctuated from day to day. Sometimes she felt completely youthful and energetic; other times she could barely get out of bed. She worried over the logistics of maintaining a household, supporting the Anti-Monopoly crusade, and not letting her boys know how sick their mother was.

  Ralph’s focus on the trial intensified as he continued to receive letters containing kernels of Monopoly history. As word about the Anti-Monopoly vs. Monopoly trial spread, he heard from many early players who remembered the game from their years at Columbia, Wharton, the University of Michigan, Haverford College, and Yale, as well as from intellectuals who had played the game while living in New York’s Greenwich Village in the late 1920s.

  The pieces of this early monopoly game resemble U.S. presidents, and college life, namely at Cornell and Haverford. (Malcolm G. Holcombe)

  One game board played on by Harvard Law students had had Boston locales. Another early player wrote, “I have always understood that Scott Nearing invented the game and have been annoyed by the fact that someone else patented it.” Ralph interviewed a married couple he had heard about from a court reporter who mentioned offhand that his boss had played the game. The Parker Brothers attorneys rolled their eyes at that, but Ralph followed up on the lead, which turned out to be useful. The couple had indeed played the monopoly game extensively with many friends in both New York and Pennsylvania. Unfortunately for Ralph, many of those friends were now deceased.

  One player saw Ralph’s advertisement in the Yale alumni magazine and wrote to say that he had played monopoly in the early 1920s in Reading, Pennsylvania, on a board that someone had brought from Princeton. “The purpose of the game was to illustrate the evils of the capitalist system,” he wrote, and also mentioned that he was a friend of Louis Thun, one of the twin brothers who had played the game at his Williams College fraternity. Ralph then knew that he had to contact Louis Thun, whom Daniel Layman had mentioned as well.

  Once again Ralph flew east. He had dinner with the no-longer-mysterious Joanna, her husband, and Dorothea Raiford. From their conversation, Ralph deduced that the game could have been brought to Atlantic City as early as Christmas 1929, just after the catastrophic collapse of the stock market. He placed ads in the Atlantic City Press and visited the Atlantic City Friends School, the small building that connected so many of the early Quaker monopoly players.

  Next he flew to Reading, Pennsylvania, where he tracked down a printer who had worked at Patterson and White, the printer that Darrow had used for his initial run of games, pre-Parker Brothers. Then came a visit with Louis Thun in the Reading area. The Thun brothers’ old friend Paul Sherk joined in the conversation. They told Ralph that they had played a game called monopoly extensively between 1916 and 1935.

  Ralph couldn’t believe it—1916 was almost twenty years before the Darrow patent and over a decade before the Atlantic City Quakers had played the game. The more Ralph kept searching, the further back the clock kept winding.

  Sherk told Ralph that his cousin had copied the monopoly game from someone who had brought it to Reading from the University of Pennsylvania in 1916. Then he pulled out a game board. It didn’t have the word “monopoly” printed on it, but it had the same circuitous path as the Parker Brothers game and was essentially the same board. Included were many of Lizzie’s Georgist touches: George Street, and Fairhope Avenue, a nod to Arden’s single-tax-colony counterpart in Alabama. It also had New York locations such as Wall Street, Madison Square, the Bowery, Broadway, and Fifth Avenue.

  Louis Thun told Ralph that he didn’t know where the game had originated. But he did remember that Robert Barton, the head of Parker Brothers, had visited him decades earlier to ask if he could buy his board. Thun hadn’t sold, but his friend, Sherk, who had also owned a board, had—for fifty dollars. Both men had been under the impression that Barton wanted the board for the Parker Brothers archives.

  The board that Ralph saw would help his case, but he still needed to find an early board with the word “monopoly” printed on it. Having the name in writing would dramatically improve his case. He also needed to trace the origins of the game back further—back to the University of Pennsylvania and Wharton professor Scott Nearing.

  According to s
everal people Ralph had spoken with, Nearing had been among the earliest players of the monopoly game, leading Ralph to wonder if he might be its lost inventor. If not, he might at least know what the game’s connection was to Lizzie Magie, the name on the 1904 patent.

  Forty years after the start of Ralph’s quest for early monopoly game boards, one would surface with the word monopoly printed across it. This board is believed to have been played 1917–1925 in Pennsylvania. (Malcolm G. Holcombe)

  After his rejection at the hands of the University of Pennsylvania, Nearing had moved to a farm, where he had lived modestly off the earth, maintaining a vegetarian diet and pacifist views decades before they became the cultural rage. Now in his nineties, he was living in Harborside, Maine. Ralph contacted him.

  Nearing told Ralph that he and his brother Guy had first played the game while living in Arden, Delaware, around 1910, and that it had been called the Landlord’s Game back then. Everyone had played the game on homemade boards, he said, but beyond that, he couldn’t recall much. He suggested that Ralph call Guy, who might be able to tell him more.

  Now Ralph wondered if Guy might be the game’s originator and contacted him. But he was too late. Guy had recently suffered a stroke that had done irreparable damage to his memory.

  Back home in California, Ralph did what most academics would and dove into library stacks to research Arden, where he was surprised to learn about its single tax origins. In his collegiate seminars on the history of economic thought, he taught about Henry George and single tax theory, with no idea, of course, of its connection to the development of Monopoly. Ralph thought that Georgism was right in some respects but off target in others, and by the 1970s a tax overhaul akin to George’s vision seemed virtually impossible. In any case, how did such staunch anti-monopolists as the Georgists end up playing a game that would become one of the most beloved corporate brands of the twentieth century? he wondered.

  Ralph spent endless hours, occasionally stroking his beard or taking a puff of his pipe, poring over anything and everything that might help his case: case law, depositions, patents, newspaper articles and books about the toy and game industry. On and on he pressed. If he didn’t get to the root of Monopoly’s history, his case could fall apart. His own curiosity had overtaken him as well, with the game occupying his mind morning, afternoon, and night.

  Among the documents that Ralph took a closer look at were Lizzie Magie’s patents for the Landlord’s Game—one from 1904 and the other from 1924. And the more he looked at the patents’ drawings of Lizzie’s game boards, the more striking their resemblance to Monopoly seemed: the Go space, the square board with its perimeter of properties, the railroads. Ralph picked up on the fact that Lizzie had infused her game with single tax principles. Oddly, her game politically resembled Anti-Monopoly more than it did Monopoly.

  There was something very strange about the Darrow patent, Ralph thought. It had shoved Lizzie Magie into the bowels of history while allowing Parker Brothers to promote its 1935 patent and the Darrow story. Could Lizzie Magie have been Monopoly’s real originator?

  One day while at his office at San Francisco State, Ralph opened an envelope from Boutwell, Crane, Moseley Associates. Lizzie’s former boss at the U.S. Office of Education, William Boutwell, now worked for his own firm and had heard about the Anti-Monopoly game and lawsuit. Boutwell’s letter described how, back in his days at the Office of Education, he had “found on my staff a pert gray-haired lady named, as I recall—this can be checked—Mrs. McKee. She was a great one for inventing games.”

  He continued, “She was also the only person I ever knew who was a devoted Henry George single-taxer. To advance the single-tax cause she invented a board game which could be played with two different sets of rules—life in a single-tax economy and life under capitalism. I remember taking the game home—she had somehow managed to have it manufactured—and playing it with friends. When one played it by single-tax rules no one could monopolize wealth, but when played by capitalistic rules money concentrated with one player.

  “She sent the game to Parker. In the office we were outraged because Parker soon published only the monopoly side of the games.”

  Boutwell concluded, “I have seen various accounts of who invented Monopoly. I’m still convinced that the game was created by the gray-haired lady in my office and she never received proper credit or compensation from Parker.”

  Immediately, Ralph picked up the phone and called Boutwell, who confirmed his written account. Furiously, Ralph jotted down notes.

  •

  Ralph found an old photograph of Lizzie in the Washington Evening Star, a face now put to the patent. Elderly in image but not in spirit, she was holding up game boards from the Landlord’s Game and another game that had the word MONOPOLY written across its center four times in bold black letters. It was 1936, and on a table in front of her was a “Darrow” board, fresh out of the Parker Brothers box. The image of Lizzie painted by the reporter couldn’t have been clearer. She was angry, hurt, and in search of revenge against a company that she felt had stolen her now-best-selling idea. Her hair was snow-white, yet her eyebrows had stayed dark brown, her face now resembling that of her father in his later years.

  The distinctive jawline of Lizzie’s youth was still on full display. Parker Brothers might have the rights to her 1924-patented Landlord’s Game, but they didn’t tell the story of her game invention dating back to 1904 or that the game had been in the public domain for decades. She had invented the game, and she could prove it.

  The Evening Star reporter wrote that Lizzie’s game “did not get the popular hold it has today. It took Charles B. Darrow, a Philadelphia engineer, who retrieved the game from the oblivion of the Patent Office and dressed it up a bit, to get it going. Last August a large firm manufacturing games took over his improvements. In November, Mrs. [Lizzie Magie] Phillips sold the company her patent rights.

  “It went over with a bang.

  In 1936, at the height of the Monopoly craze, Lizzie Magie spoke out in the pages of the Washington Evening Star against the Darrow creation story. The paper reported that she received $500 for her invention. (Anspach archives)

  “But not for Mrs. Phillips. It is understood she received $500 for her patent and she gets no royalties. Probably, if one counts lawyer’s, printer’s and Patent Office fees used up in developing it, the game has cost her more than she made from it.”

  No stranger to boldness, Lizzie had nothing to lose by speaking out against Parker Brothers and Darrow. “There is nothing new under the sun,” she said to the Washington Post in a story that ran the same day as the Evening Star interview.

  Lizzie went on to tell the reporter that if Darrow’s Monopoly spread the notion of how the single tax worked, then her work would “not have been in vain.” But the vast majority of commercial Monopoly players even then had little to no idea they were learning about single tax theory. She hadn’t played Monopoly, but owned a set, which sat in her living room alongside other games, including Mock Trial, the theatrical card game she had sold to Parker Brothers years ago.

  “At present, she is working out a new board game which she hopes will prove as successful as this astounding grandchild of her first game of finance and economics,” the Post reporter wrote.

  •

  At Parker Brothers headquarters, Barton and his team understood that Lizzie posed a problem. The Evening Star and Washington Post articles put a face on someone whom Robert Barton hadn’t thought he would ever have to deal with: Monopoly’s real originator. Darrow’s fame was unquestionable, as he appeared alongside all things Monopoly, and the game’s popularity was continuing to soar. Nonetheless, Lizzie’s claim was not only a public relations debacle but also a threat to all the work that Barton had done to gain exclusive rights to the game. Millions of dollars were on the line.

  Parker Brothers was not about to have a second Ping-Pong situation on its hands. Monopoly would remain a Parker Brothers title no matter what.
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  BARTON UNDER OATH

  “… because the game was completely worthless …”

  —ROBERT BARTON

  At seventy-one years old, Robert Barton was not eager about the prospect of being deposed in the Anti-Monopoly case. By 1975, he had long been retired from the game business and enjoyed spending his free time at his home on the water in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Barton was among the few people still alive who knew precisely what had happened with the Monopoly patent back in the 1930s. His words, which had once helped clinch the Monopoly deal—and had saved Parker Brothers from destruction—now held the potential to unravel it.

  Barton headed into compact and colonial downtown Boston. The deposition was to commence May 8, 1975, at nine thirty A.M. in the State Street Bank Building. At stake for the Anti-Monopoly team: whether or not Barton would talk openly about Monopoly’s origins and confirm the findings of their research.

  “Now, sir, on the subject of Mr. Charles Brace Darrow and the game ‘MONOPOLY,’” Ralph’s attorney, John Droeger, said, “do you recall approximately when you first became aware of Mr. Darrow and his game?”

  “To the best of my knowledge,” Barton said, “in very early ’35 or very late ’34.”

  “And can you tell us the circumstances?” Droeger asked. “Did he come to Parker Brothers, did you go to him, or were you introduced by a third party?”