The Monopolists Read online

  Through a family friend, Ralph and his sons succeeded in getting an Anti-Monopoly promotional flyer placed on a bulletin board in the offices of the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, D.C. The Anspachs thought the move would help generate publicity. Instead, it eventually aroused the interest of a postal inspector, who was concerned that the company was not delivering the goods it advertised. An inspector arrived at the Anspachs’ home and audited the Anti-Monopoly books. The Anspachs were cleared.

  Anti-Monopoly hit the market around the time that news about Watergate broke. In the ensuing weeks, details about the scandal, followed by denials from the Richard Nixon White House, unfolded day by day. Meanwhile, OPEC announced a plan to cut oil production by 25 percent. Ralph thought all the bad news boded well for sales of his antiestablishment pastime.

  He sent an early Anti-Monopoly game to famed consumer advocate Ralph Nader, saying that Nader epitomized “what the game is all about.” In Anti-Monopoly, attorneys similar to Nader were cast as heroes battling against corporate America. Ralph never heard back from the tall, lanky lawyer, but he did later learn that Patty Hearst, the newspaper heiress kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, had given her father, Randolph Hearst, a copy of the game as a joke.

  As part of its rollout, the Anti-Monopoly team fired off a blast of advertisements in the mail, introducing the new game at a suggested retail price of $7.95. Under Donner’s guidance, Ralph also purchased ads in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Berkeley Gazette.

  In October, the first order for Anti-Monopoly arrived, from the library at Slippery Rock State College in Pennsylvania. Ralph and his family and colleagues were elated. Someone was actually buying the game. Their business was taking off.

  Just as Ralph and Ruth had once coordinated political rallies, meetings, and phone trees, they now coordinated the selling of Anti-Monopoly. Ruth’s skills as a secretary for Women for Peace were put to good use, and Donner drew up a press release with the headline PROFESSOR AGAINST THE MONOPOLISTS: A “DAVID AND GOLIATH” STORY. “It’ll make me very happy to know I’m reaching a lot of people far beyond the classroom with my message,” Ralph said. “And if it makes any money, well, teachers have always been able to use a little extra.”

  Ralph, Ruth, and the rest of the Anti-Monopoly team worked out of the Anspach home, the aging madam sitting on a fault line between a stable part of the Berkeley Hills and land that was sliding toward San Francisco Bay at the rate of about an inch per year. The house was built on an incline, and just outside its windows hulked cranes and related construction equipment that served as constant reminders of Ralph’s determination to get the house back on its foundation. The interior was constantly under construction. Power tools and slabs of drywall were part of the family’s daily existence, as was a rotating cast of hippie construction workers.

  Ralph had been able to purchase the house at a discount because it was condemned due to its position on a fault line. Ralph had figured that the family wouldn’t live in the home long enough to run the risk of its sliding away. But here it was, years later, and instead of residing in the quaint Bay Area manor he had originally envisioned, he and his family were still living in the lopsided house befitting a twisted children’s fairy tale.

  Ralph’s sons loved seeing their home turned into Anti-Monopoly’s headquarters. When a toy store called to place an order, Mark and William eagerly picked up the phone to ask, “How many?” Ralph and the two boys walked up and down the hilly streets of the Bay Area, personally delivering stacks of Anti-Monopoly games to local stores.

  A negative story about the game appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. “I can’t help thinking this game would be much improved if it didn’t constantly remind the player of its classic predecessor,” the Chronicle reporter wrote. “It’s a little like living in your first husband’s house with a second husband.” Ralph was at first dismayed by the story, but he soon learned the truth of the adage that any press is good press—Anti-Monopoly sales went up dramatically. Ten days after Anti-Monopoly went on the market, all two thousand copies of its initial production run had been sold.

  By December, it was becoming clear that the company’s printing scheme was not sustainable by De Nola’s factory, which was designed to produce corrugated boxes, as orders for tens of thousands more copies of Anti-Monopoly poured in. The game had gone national and had garnered press nationally, both in large magazines and a plethora of local papers.

  Inventors of other games began contacting the family, seeking advice on how to repeat their success. Ralph announced plans to present the game to Senator Philip Hart, a Democrat from Michigan who was heading the U.S. Senate’s Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee.

  Ralph also applied for a patent. The lawyer he consulted warned him that first-time patent applications were often rejected because first-level examiners liked to take a conservative stance to “cover their flanks.” On his lawyer’s advice, Ralph wrote to game distributors to emphasize that Anti-Monopoly was produced by Anti-Monopoly Inc., which was not associated with Parker Brothers.

  On June 25, 1974, Ralph’s application was turned down. The name was deemed “likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive,” the letter from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Patent Office read. Trademarks—which protect words, logos, and taglines associated with a good—are used to distinguish one good from another, to let consumers know where a product comes from. A trademark does not entitle someone to prevent others from making the same product, but it does prohibit others from marketing a product with a confusingly similar words, logos, or taglines.

  Ralph didn’t think much about this rejection. After all, his lawyer had warned him about first-time trademark applications.

  •

  In February of that year, an unassuming envelope had arrived at the Anspach home. Inside was a letter from a law firm printed on intimidating letterhead. Although Ralph had brushed off the patent application rejection, to him, this felt like a direct threat.

  Mr. Ralph Anspach

  February 13, 1974

  1060 Keith Avenue

  Berkely [sic], California

  Dear Mr. Anspach:

  As attorneys for Parker Brothers of Salem, Massachusetts, owners of the registered trademark MONOPOLY, we are writing to you regarding the promotion and sale of game equipment under the trademark ANTI-MONOPOLY.

  We understand that you have claimed never to have been requested by Parker Brothers or General Mills to cease and desist from advertising and offering for sale game equipment under the name ANTI-MONOPOLY.

  We enclose a copy of our letter to The Computer Industry Association dated November 14, 1973 regarding this matter. We have never heard from The Computer Industry Association but assumed that a copy of our letter had been forwarded to you, if, in fact, you are not associated with The Computer Industry Association.

  You will note from the enclosure that in our opinion your use of the term ANTI-MONOPOLY on game equipment infringes on our client’s trademark rights. We further wish to advise you that your use of MONOPOLY in promotional and advertising materials adds to the damaging effect of this infringement.

  It would appear from material we have seen, and, specifically Mr. George Lazarus’ article of February 11, 1974, that this protest may be ignored. However, for the record, we request that you give us your assurance that the term ANTI-MONOPOLY will be discontinued as the name of your game equipment which would appear to be more properly TRUST-BUSTING or ANTI-TRUST as Mr. Lazarus proposes.

  Yours very truly,

  Oliver P. Howes, Jr.

  Enclosed with the letter was a copy of a 1974 column by Chicago Tribune columnist George Lazarus, headlined, PARKER BROS.—JEALOUS OF ITS MONOPOLY? The earlier letter that Howes referred to had indeed been sent to the Computer Industry Association, a group that had been promoting and selling Anti-Monopoly. But the letter had been addressed to the association, not him.

  Ralph viewed the Howes letter as a “put the fe
ar of God in you” note, and it also frightened his wife. While Ruth considered herself political and willing to take on causes, her fervor for the game did not match Ralph’s. Howes wrote on behalf of General Mills, the cereal king and Betty Crocker steward that had purchased Parker Brothers in 1968. Parker Brothers president Robert Barton, in consultation with his son, Randolph, had agreed to sell in order to diversify the family’s financial portfolio, and General Mills aspired to be a massive consumer conglomerate, part of an industry-wide trend toward mergers. Seen in a positive light, the thinking was that such acquisitions gave General Mills multiple avenues to reach consumers and allowed the company to pool resources and leverage different assets of its empire. Seen otherwise, they were creating a Frankencompany, a hodgepodge of businesses that shared little more than an earnings report.

  Regardless, Ralph was not interested in changing the name of his game. He felt that just as Monopoly used common language to convey to consumers what the game was about, Anti-Monopoly had the same right. He had two choices: Either he could stop producing Anti-Monopoly, or he could challenge Parker Brothers for the right to market his game under its current title.

  A WOMAN INVENTS

  “I’m thankful that I was taught how to think and not what to think.”

  —LIZZIE MAGIE

  To Elizabeth Magie, known to her friends as Lizzie, the problems of the new century were so vast, the income inequalities so massive, and the monopolists so mighty that it seemed impossible that an unknown woman working as a stenographer stood a chance at easing society’s ills with something as trivial as a board game. But she had to try.

  Night after night, after her work at her Washington, D.C., office was done, Lizzie sat in her home, drawing and redrawing, thinking and rethinking. It was the early 1900s, and she wanted her board game to reflect her progressive political views—that was the whole point of it—which centered on the economic theories of Henry George. A charismatic nineteenth-century politician and economist who had passed away just a few years before, George had been a proponent of the “land value tax,” also known as the “single tax.” His main tenet was that individuals should own 100 percent of what they made or created, but that everything found in nature, particularly land, should belong to everyone. Land was not meant to be seized, bought, sold, traded, or parceled into city blocks where people were forced to pay exorbitant rents. Since, however, some people did own land, they should pay a tax for that privilege. All other goods should remain strictly untaxed.

  The Landlord’s Game was a teaching tool inspired by Henry George, a popular politician, economist, and author of the 1879 Progress and Poverty. (Library of Congress)

  George’s message had resonated deeply with many Americans in the late 1800s, when poverty and squalor were on full display in the country’s urban centers. Poor immigrants and natives alike were packed tightly together in noxious slums, where they slaved long hours in dirty, dangerous factories, earning little more than a pittance. The single-taxers believed that if all taxes were eradicated except for the one on property, and the poor and the working class were able to keep more of their hard-earned dollars, poverty levels would quickly diminish. A single tax would also boost production, as workers would be happier and healthier, and force business owners to improve working conditions.

  George “is neither a ‘Communist,’ nor a free-lover, nor even an infidel, so far as can be seen,” an 1881 New York Times article stated. “But he recognizes the social disease that makes itself felt in tramps, railway riots, and the criminal classes of great cities, and is the only man who has not merely put down clearly in black and white what are the causes of the disease, but offered a cure.”

  During the 1880s, his manifesto Progress and Poverty was rumored to have sold more copies than any book except the Bible. He spoke regularly before sold-out halls, and his face was plastered everywhere—on banners, newspapers, and even cigar boxes. The list of people who were later influenced by his philosophy included Winston Churchill, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Leo Tolstoy.

  George was an ardent anti-monopolist, and many of his followers formed anti-monopoly political parties. “Chattel slavery is dead,” he once told an evening crowd at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “But labor slavery lives. That kind of slavery is increasing and social opinion is beginning to rise against it.”

  The anti-monopoly parties also served as staging areas for the women’s rights movement. At the time, the battle for women’s suffrage was already decades old, having been started by middle-class white women in Seneca Falls, New York, some forty years earlier. But it felt to many as though little progress had been made. Women still did not have the right to vote, and their accomplishments were still being routinely dismissed by most men—a problem that Lizzie would personally face throughout her life. Outspoken female activists were often stigmatized, sometimes in the name of enforcing obscenity laws.

  When George made a bid for mayor of New York City in 1886, he advocated not only the single tax but also equal pay for women, more stringent building inspections, and putting an end to police interference in peaceful demonstrations. His platform appealed to many voters, but he lost to a Tammany Hall candidate (though ahead of a young Republican named Theodore Roosevelt).

  The Georgists, as George’s followers were known, faced formidable ideological opposition in the form of industrial titans such as John D. Rockefeller, one of the richest men in history, thanks to his Standard Oil Trust. Through secret agreements and shell companies that appeared independent but were in fact operated by Standard Oil, the trust had wiped out its competition and by the late 1800s, the company controlled nearly 90 percent of America’s refined oil flows. Critics such as George noted that capitalism was good at creating wealth, but it could be lousy at distributing it.

  When Henry George died in 1897, many of his followers feared that without their magnetic leader, the ideals he espoused would be lost forever and the monopolists would take control for good. It was up to Georgists such as Lizzie to keep his message alive. She felt that the economic fate of the country depended on it.

  •

  A distinctive-looking woman in her thirties, with curly dark locks and bangs that framed her face, Lizzie had inherited the bushy eyebrows of her father. The descendant of Scottish immigrants, she had pale skin, a strong jawline, and a strong work ethic. As she aged, she took to wearing her long, wavy hair in a bun, which accentuated her finely etched features.

  In the early 1900s, Lizzie was unmarried, unusual for a woman of her age at the time. Even more unusual, however, was the fact that she was the head of her household. Completely on her own, she had saved up for and bought her home, along with several acres of property.

  She lived in Prince George County, a Washington, D.C., neighborhood where the residents on her block included a dairyman, a peddler who identified himself as a “huckster,” a sailor, a carpenter, and a musician. Lizzie shared her house with a male actor who paid rent and a black female servant.

  At the turn of the century, Washington was finally beginning to take shape out of the swamps upon which it had been built. To one side was the White House, facing the Washington Monument, and to another was the U.S. Capitol, overlooking a thicket of small homes and office buildings built along the city’s neatly organized grid system. The shouts of food-cart salesmen and bicyclists could barely be heard over the clanging of streetcars. Petty thieves thrived in the Center Market, and burlesque theaters welcomed thousands through their doors. Horses pulled wooden carts down wide, bumpy roads, leaving manure behind—a putrid backdrop for the political arguments that had become commonplace in the young republic’s national capital.

  Lizzie’s political views had been influenced, albeit indirectly, by Abraham Lincoln. In 1858, before she was born, Lizzie’s father, James Magie, accompanied Lincoln and Joseph Medill, the thirty-five-year-old publisher of the Chicago Tribune, as the lanky lawyer traveled around Illinois debating politics with Stephen Douglas.

  In ear
lier years, Lizzie’s father had worked as a printer in Newark, New Jersey, and as a city editor at the Brooklyn Daily Advertiser. He had lost a wife and an infant daughter, leaving him to raise his surviving son, Charles, on his own. But by the time he met Lincoln, he was living in Illinois with his second wife, Mary, née Ritchie, from New Brunswick, New Jersey, and working as the editor of the Oquawka Plaindealer.

  Young, bright, and ambitious, James was itching to see political change come to the country, and he believed that Lincoln was the man to bring about that change. James used the pages of his newspapers to drum up support for abolition, as well as gaining a reputation for being an arousing stump speaker. Lincoln was elected president of the United States in November 1860. In 1861, James moved to Macomb, Illinois, where he assumed editorial control of the Macomb Journal, eventually becoming its sole owner. The Southern states seceded in the spring of that year.

  James enlisted in the Union army and in the summer of 1862 began to recruit other men in Illinois for the Northern cause. He was a private and refused promotion throughout the war, even though many called him “Sergeant.” At the front, James channeled his impassioned prose into his regular letters home to his wife in Illinois. “I scarcely know where to begin or how to tell you of the scenes, the strife, and the excitements which we have passed through in the last five days,” he began one note dated January 1, 1863.