The Monopolists Read online

  Less than a week after General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and Andrew Johnson became president. His administration appointed James postmaster of Macomb, but James resigned after less than a year because he felt that Johnson had betrayed his own political beliefs and promises. Selling his interest in the Macomb Journal, James moved his family to Canton, where he purchased a half interest in the Canton Register. In 1866, Elizabeth, soon known as Lizzie, was born, to be joined a few years later by her sister, Alta. The family was solidly middle-class, with James continuing to work as a newspaperman and Mary tending to the home and children.

  As the nation rebuilt itself on top of the rubble of the Civil War, the second Industrial Revolution was under way, with technology, even more than politics, bringing about great change. The electric lamp and the telephone were invented in James’s time, to eventually transform daily life for his daughter’s generation. Cheaper steel meant more bridges, skyscrapers, and railroad tracks. Vulcanized rubber created a tire industry and new ways of thinking about transit. The telegram made those physically afar feel nearer.

  James began teaching his intellectual values to his children when they were still very young. Hoping that they would carry on his fight for equality, he told them about his early days as a politically motivated editor and about his friend Abraham Lincoln. From a young age, Lizzie had exposure to newsrooms. She also watched and listened during the years when her father clerked in the Illinois legislature and ran for office on an anti-monopoly ticket—an election that he lost.

  The steam age gave way to the motor age, built on the backs of workers who did not necessarily share in the bounty, and creating massive corporations. In Illinois, Lizzie saw this play out every day: wealthy kingpins strolling down the streets alongside child laborers clad in tattered clothing, titan landowners living lives defined by carriages and high fashion alongside ordinary farmers struggling to survive. A national debate arose: Should government bust up the large corporations that were forming, or not?

  When Lizzie was thirteen, her family suffered significant financial losses, probably due to the Panic of 1873, which had started six years earlier and was still having repercussions. It was triggered by several causes, including a fall in silver prices, railroad speculation, a trade deficit, property losses, and general economic malaise tied to the Franco-Prussian War. Lizzie had to leave school to help support her family, a fact that she lamented long into her adulthood.

  She attended a convention of stenographers with her father and soon found work in that field. At the time, stenography was a growing profession, one that had opened up to women as the Civil War removed many men from the workforce. The typewriter was gaining commercial popularity, leaving many to ponder a strange new world, one in which typists sat at desks, hands fixed to keys, memorizing seemingly illogical arrangements of letters on the new QWERTY keyboards.

  Lizzie’s father also shared with his daughter a copy of Henry George’s bestselling 1879 tome, Progress and Poverty. The early seeds of what would later evolve into one of the most popular modern board games of all time had been planted.

  •

  Around 1890, the Magies moved to Washington, D.C., where James found work in government service and helped found a church. Lizzie was his constant companion, and as time passed, the political and physical similarities between father and daughter deepened.

  “I have often been called a ‘chip off the old block,’” Lizzie said of her relationship with her father, “which I consider quite a compliment, for I am proud of my father for being the kind of an ‘old block’ that he is.”

  Like James Magie, Lizzie traveled in highly political circles. She served as the secretary of the Woman’s Single Tax Club of Washington and counted Henry George Jr., the like-minded son of her single tax idol, as one of her friends. The younger George worked as a reporter in Brooklyn and eventually served as a U.S. representative from New York.

  Lizzie found work as a stenographer and typist for the chief clerk of the Dead Letter Office, the receptacle for the nation’s undeliverable mail. Sometimes letters found their way to the office because of lousy penmanship. Other times there was no address at all. Prank letters arrived, senders unknown.

  The Dead Letter clerks, many of them women, were responsible for sorting lost envelopes and parcels, and for disposing of the unclaimed mail, either by destroying it or by auctioning off its contents. The clerks also tallied up any enclosed money and handed the funds over to the U.S. Treasury. Only workers in the Dead Letter Office had the authority to open the mail, and some became lay detectives. Through their work, stories emerged of mothers reunited with lost sons and employees at last collecting long-missing paychecks.

  The Dead Letter Office had begun hiring women in the 1860s during the Civil War. And after the war, the office continued to employ women, believing them to be more honest and “faithful in the performance of their duties than the men.” Most women who worked there were intentionally tucked away—obscure secret keepers amid the nation’s growing flow of correspondence.

  “Equal pay for equal work” was beginning to be discussed as a concept in America after the Civil War, but it wasn’t remotely close to being enforced. Women like Lizzie usually earned a fraction of what their male counterparts earned. An 1869 article in the New York Times argued that women should not make “the mistake of demanding equal payment with men” because “so long as their labor is cheaper than that of men, there will be a powerful reason for employing it.”

  In the evening after work, Lizzie pursued literary ambitions, writing poetry and short stories, and, as a player in Washington’s nascent theater scene, performed on the stage, where she earned praise for her comedic roles. Though small-framed and only in her twenties, she had a presence—the audience at the Masonic Hall exploded with laughter at her comical rendition of a simpering old maid. She also sometimes took on male roles. “She wants to fly,” James said of his daughter, “but hasn’t got the wings.”

  One sweltering Washington summer, Lizzie wrote a dozen poems, ranging from “Genius Imprisoned,” in which she described a grim scene of modern industrial life—“a dark and dingy place” where a “plain old office clock / Ticks out the tedious time” to an “imprisoned poet soul”—to “Self,” in which she pondered the relationship of the individual to others. “All, all are selfish / There is not one who does not live himself to please,” she wrote. Yet in such egoism, she went on, could be found generosity: “The happiest are those who are to others kindest / And who cause most happiness to all / The great are those who make the world / The better by their deeds.”

  The themes of pain, romance, nature, and unfairness were constants in her work. In the fall of 1892, she bound her poems into a book, My Betrothed, and printed 500 copies, the most she could afford. The title poem told the story of a man’s love for Roberta, a woman ten years his junior whom he had known since birth and loved “with burning soul and body / With impetuous desire.”

  Unusual for a nineteenth-century woman, Lizzie also dabbled in engineering. She invented a gadget that allowed paper to pass through typewriter rollers with more ease. The invention also allowed typewriter users to place more type on a given page and made it possible for documents of different sizes to be placed into the machine.

  On January 3, 1893, Lizzie went to the U.S. Patent Office to lay legal claim to her invention. As a woman, she would have been a standout in that office at any age, but at twenty-six, she was a phenomenon. Beside her and there to serve as her witness was her father, himself no stranger to the patent process, having applied for and won a few through the years (including one for a permutation, or combination, lock).

  In 1893, Lizzie Magie applied for a patent for her typewriter gadget. The daughter of a known newspaperman and a writer and stenographer herself, she was among the handful of women inventors of her time. (United States Patent and Trademark Office)

  James Magie’s witnessing of
his daughter’s patent application, which was ultimately approved, was to be one of his final acts. Less than two weeks later, he fell ill amid the January cold and died while visiting his son, Charles, in Brooklyn. Lizzie was inconsolable.

  •

  Two years after the death of her father, Lizzie published a short story titled “For the Benefit of the Poor” in the January 1895 issue of Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, one of the more prominent and popular journals of her time, counting Henry James among its contributors. The story told of an impoverished boy struggling to support himself and his invalid mother by selling bonbons in a theater. Nearly a century before the term the “Matthew effect” would be commonly used to describe the phenomenon in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, Lizzie included the pertinent passage from the Gospel of Matthew in her story: “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”

  About two years later, Lizzie’s story “The Theft of a Brain: The Story of a Hypnotized Novelist and a Cruel Deed” was published in Godey’s, a women’s magazine based in Philadelphia. An important platform for men and women thinkers, Godey’s had published authors such as Frances Hodgson Burnett, Washington Irving, and Edgar Allan Poe.

  “The Theft of a Brain” was about an aspiring novelist named Laura Lynn, who said to a friend that if she could write something that everybody read, she would be “perfectly happy.” Laura was talented and passionate, and her real difficulty was a lack of confidence. She sought out a professor, who hypnotized her into writing. Under hypnosis, she wrote a story titled “Privileged Criminals,” about a woman who was convicted of a crime she hadn’t committed. When Laura woke up, the professor told her that she had become a successful writer who was selling her short stories for five hundred dollars each. Laura was elated. She continued to write short stories for some time and then wrote a novel. But when she tried to publish the novel, she found that a plagiarized copy already existed and had become a bestseller. The plagiarist was none other than the hypnotist professor.

  “I stole the brains of other undeveloped geniuses,” he confessed.

  The plotline that Lizzie had created would soon hold eerie parallels to her own life.

  •

  Though the popularity of Henry George’s theories was ebbing with attendance at meetings and lectures dwindling and Georgist political goals stalling in statehouses and at the polls, Lizzie Magie still believed in them and taught classes about the single tax theory in the evenings after work. But she wasn’t reaching enough people. She needed a new medium—something more interactive and creative.

  At the turn of the twentieth century, board games were becoming increasingly commonplace in middle-class homes. In addition, more and more inventors were discovering that the games were not just a pastime but also a means of communication. Lizzie took out her pen and paper.

  She began speaking in public about a new concept of hers, which she called the Landlord’s Game. “It is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences,” she wrote in a 1902 issue of the Single Tax Review. “It might well have been called the ‘Game of Life,’ as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is the same as the human race in general seem[s] to have, i.e., the accumulation of wealth.”

  For Lizzie to try to put her ideas out in public so brazenly was something of a risk at that time. Most women didn’t do such things. It would be nearly two decades before women gained the right to vote, and while innovations such as the typewriter and the telephone had afforded new professional opportunities for women, common thought still held that they had little to contribute to the world of ideas. As one newspaper would put it in 1912, women may have greater longevity than men because “they don’t use their brains as much as men.”

  In 1904, Lizzie Magie patented her Landlord’s Game, the forerunner to what millions of game players would later know as Monopoly. Among other things, her patent features the phrase Go to Jail, railroad spaces, and a Public Park space that predates Free Parking. (United States Patent and Trademark Office)

  Lizzie’s game featured play money and deeds and properties that could be bought and sold. Players borrowed money, either from the bank or from each other, and they had to pay taxes.

  Like Pachisi, later known as Parcheesi, a game from the Indian subcontinent that many Americans were already familiar with, Lizzie’s game featured a path that allowed players to circle the board—in contrast to the linear-path design used by many games at the time. In one corner were the Poor House and the Public Park, and across the board was the Jail. Another corner contained an image of the globe and an homage to Henry George: “Labor upon Mother Earth Produces Wages.” Also included on the board were three words that have endured for more than a century after Lizzie scrawled them there: GO TO JAIL.

  Lizzie drew nine rectangular spaces along the edges of the board between each set of corners. A railroad was in the center of each nine-space grouping, with spaces for rent or sale on either side. Absolute Necessity rectangles offered goods like bread and shelter, and Franchise spaces offered services such as water and light. When players landed on the Luxury space, they paid fifty dollars to the public treasury to receive a luxury ticket, which yielded sixty dollars at the end of the game.

  As gamers made their way around the board, they performed labor and earned wages. Every time players passed the Mother Earth space, they were “supposed to have performed so much labor upon Mother Earth” that they received one hundred dollars in wages. Players who ran out of money were sent to the Poor House.

  Players who trespassed on land were sent to Jail, and there the unfortunate individuals had to linger until serving out their time or paying a fifty-dollar fine. Serving out their time meant waiting until they threw a double. “The rallying and chaffing of the others when one player finds himself an inmate of the jail, and the expressions of mock sympathy and condolence when one is obliged to betake himself to the poor house, make a large part of the fun and merriment of the game,” Lizzie said.

  After going around the board a predetermined number of times, players retired, but still remained in the game until the last player had completed his or her final round. The person with the most wealth at the end of the game won.

  Lizzie even created rules for when there weren’t any rules: “Should any emergency arise which is not covered by the rules of the game,” she wrote, “the players must settle the matter between themselves; but if any player absolutely refuses to obey the rules as above set forth he must go to jail.”

  From its inception, the Landlord’s Game aimed to seize on the natural human instinct to compete. And, somewhat surprisingly, Lizzie created two sets of rules: an anti-monopolist set in which all were rewarded when wealth was created, and a monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents. Her vision was an embrace of dualism and contained a contradiction within itself, a tension trying to be resolved between opposing philosophies. However, and of course unbeknownst to Lizzie at the time, it was monopolist rules that would later capture the public’s imagination.

  On some level, Lizzie understood that the game provided a context—it was just a game, after all—in which players could lash out at friends and family in a way that they probably couldn’t in daily life. She understood the power of drama and the potency of assuming roles outside of one’s everyday identity. Games like hers provided a respite from the often-dreary conditions of daily life.

  The Landlord’s Game was a sophisticated way to get players interested in the single tax theory. The goal was to obtain as much land and wealth as possible, but the means of attaining them were Georgist—even when playing by the monopolist set of rules. When players landed on an “absolute necessity” space, such as bread, coal, or shelter, the player had to pay five dollars into the Public Treasury. “This represents indirect taxatio
n,” Lizzie said. Each time a player went around the board, noted by the “Mother Earth” space, the player received one hundred dollars for having “performed so much labor upon mother earth,” Lizzie wrote, concurrent with the Georgist view that people should own value that they created on their own. While other games of the time espoused moral instruction and/or entertainment, Lizzie’s game embodied her unrelenting hope that if more people learned about George’s theories, they would become proponents of them and the world would be better for it.

  Lizzie believed that children as young as nine or ten years old could play the Landlord’s Game. “They like to handle the make-believe money, deeds, etc.,” she said. “And the little landlords take a general delight in demanding the payment of their rent. They learn that the quickest way to accumulate wealth and gain power is to get all the land they can in the best localities and hold on to it. Let the children once see clearly the gross injustice of our present land system and when they grow up, if they are allowed to develop naturally, the evil will soon be remedied.”

  After years of tinkering, writing, and pondering her new creation, Lizzie entered the U.S. Patent Office for the second time on March 23, 1903, to secure her legal claim to the Landlord’s Game. She quit her one-hundred-dollars-a-month job at the Dead Letter Office and went to work at a private firm. Soon thereafter, she opened an office of her own.

  In one of history’s coincidences, Lizzie filed her claim on the same day that Orville and Wilbur Wright filed theirs for their “flying machine.” Lizzie’s application made its way through the agency’s paperwork web more quickly than the Wrights’, and on January 5, 1904, her patent was approved. At the time, less than one percent of all patents issued in the United States went to women.