The Monopolists Page 6

  Halfway across the Atlantic, George received a telegram with the tragic news. In only three years, he and his wife had gone from having two sons to having none. As soon as George reached New York, he boarded a boat bound back to France to retrieve his son’s body, making funeral arrangements from sea. Richard was buried with his Harvard classmates acting as pallbearers.

  NEW LIFE FOR THE LANDLORD’S GAME

  “Every girl yearns for entertainment.”

  —LIZZIE MAGIE

  Lizzie Magie moved to Chicago in 1906, just two years after patenting the Landlord’s Game—now becoming increasingly known as the “monopoly game.” One of many young, professional women who were drawn to the vibrant city at the time, she lived in a flat at 307 Chicago Avenue in an era when the stinking stockyards and diseased meatpacking factories of the city were becoming nationally notorious. Thirteen years before, Chicago had hosted the glittering World’s Fair, with its large Ferris wheel offering panoramic views of the city’s growing skyline, increasingly lit by electricity. Cars would gradually replace horses on the town’s wide promenades, and large smokestacks belched with productivity. In the decades after the Great Fire, Chicago’s population had ballooned, fueled by an influx of immigrants eager to be a part of the metropolis that was challenging New York City’s supremacy.

  Finding it difficult to support herself on the ten dollars a week she was earning as a stenographer, Lizzie staged an audacious stunt that made national headlines. Purchasing an advertisement, she offered herself for sale as a “young woman American slave” to the highest bidder. The ad read:

  Intelligent, educated, refined; true; honest, just, poetical, philosophical; broad-minded and big-souled, and womanly above all things. Brunette, large gray-green eyes, full passionate lips, splendid teeth, not beautiful, but very attractive, features full of character and strength, yet truly feminine; height 5 feet 3 inches; well proportioned, graceful.

  Lizzie also said that she had “rare and versatile dramatic ability; a born entertainer; strong bohemian characteristics, can appreciate a good story at the same time she is deeply and truly religious—not pious.” She said that she didn’t go to church, but obeyed the laws of God. She was a “crackerjack typewriter, but typewriting is hell.” She didn’t mention her age: forty.

  The ad quickly became the subject of news stories and gossip columns in newspapers around the country. The goal of the stunt, Lizzie told reporters, was to make a statement about the dismal position of women.

  “Money only has a relative value,” Lizzie said. “Once $10 might have been opulence. I do not know, but $10 in a city like Chicago or New York can buy only the bare necessities of life. If we could be reduced to the character of a machine, having only to be oiled and kept in working order, $10 perhaps would be sufficient for the purpose. We are not machines. Girls have minds, desires, hopes and ambition. They see on every side women enjoying pretty clothing, comfortable homes, refined entertainment, and other luxuries. These they want also … But they cannot have them.

  “In a short time, I hope a very short time, men and women will discover that they are poor because Carnegie and Rockefeller, maybe, have more than they know what to do with. My people believe that the only way to help working girls is to get rich and give something to the poor. That is just the way not to do it. Working girls want only what they produce. If they get that they will have all they need. They can have silk underwear then.”

  Lizzie described the salary that she earned for the work she performed as “slavery of one kind or another.” She also said that men were blind to the plight of the victims that the capitalist system created.

  Despite the fact that Lizzie was forty years old at the time that she took out the advertisement, she was described by one reporter as “the girl with the gray-green eyes” and by another as “the girl of a thousand moods.” A Washington Post reporter wrote that she was “always strange and frank.”

  “I’m thankful that I was taught how to think and not what to think,” Lizzie said. “I’m thankful that I’ve got good eyesight and better brain-sight than most people have by a darn sight … I am thankful for what we have left of free speech.”

  Lizzie’s mother, Mary, described her daughter as “a woman of high ideals. Some may think she is crazy, but she isn’t. I really believe she published the notice in Chicago purely for self-advertising purposes … Elizabeth has always been what one might call eccentric. But she numbered her friends by the hundreds and they swear by her. I think she is a genius, but I can’t say I fancy being the mother of a genius.”

  Many likened Lizzie to Mary MacLane, a writer who was openly bisexual and so the subject of never-ending gossip. A pop culture legend of her time, MacLane was both hailed and scorned for her provocative views on sexuality and politics. She published an autobiography, The Story of Mary MacLane, in 1902, when she was twenty-one years old, laying out in plain language the need for women to liberate themselves from the mores of the Victorian era. “I am not good,” MacLane wrote in I Await the Devil’s Coming. “I am not virtuous. I am not sympathetic. I am not generous. I am merely and above all a creature of intense passionate feeling. I feel—everything. It is my genius. It burns me like fire.” Lizzie was among the many young women readers who were moved by MacLane’s words. “People may think Mary McLane [sic] is crazy,” Lizzie told her mother. “They will be saying the same thing about me some day.”

  Lizzie found herself besieged by a flood of responses. One man offered her $100,000. Another, a trip to Europe. A crank proposed paying her $150 dollars “to pose as a freak in a dime museum.” She looked upon these offers with contempt and pity.

  One of the most attractive offers came from an elderly couple living on a twelve-acre farm in Wisconsin. They offered to provide her with free room and board, noting that they had a piano and a good library. “If you come you may read and write and do whatever you feel like doing,” the elderly man wrote. “You can say damn once in a while.”

  Lizzie had placed her ad in part because she was in search of a benefactor, a financial angel who could provide her with the time and means she needed to develop and promote several games she was working on. “I wish to be constructive,” she said, “not a mere mechanical tool for transmitting a man’s spoken thoughts to letter paper.” She wanted an “opportunity to develop the best that is in me,” and therefore found the offer from the elderly couple in Wisconsin to be the most meaningful of those she received. On their envelope she wrote: “the highest bid.”

  One of the most flattering responses came from none other than Upton Sinclair, who immediately understood the meaning of Lizzie’s advertisement. He sent her a check for an unknown sum and invited her to meet him in New York, explaining that he might give her a writing assignment. Lizzie promptly traveled to the city and met Sinclair, finding him to be “one of the most fascinating men I ever knew.”

  Lizzie’s “slave stunt” story endured, living on in the papers years after she took out her ad, and while she did not regret her action, she did feel that she had been greatly misunderstood. She felt dazed by the furor that her advertisement had unleashed.

  One fall night, as she was going through some of the replies, she began to cry, tearing them into bits and scattering them over the floor. Some of the letters were incredibly angry, including one from a clergyman in New York who called her stunt “offensive and a disgrace against morality.” Others were intensely personal, including a note from a married man asking for Lizzie’s photograph. “I offered to sell myself to the highest bidder for the purpose of meeting some person who could place me where I belong in the ranks of the world’s workers,” she said to a reporter. “What had my appearance to do with that?”

  “Most people missed the point in my advertisement for bids,” she added. “They thought it a freak, but, on the other hand, a multitude understood and I may now have an opportunity to be heard.”

  If Lizzie’s goal had been to gain an audience for her ideas, she succeeded. Bu
t the marriage offers did not appeal to her, and in the fall of 1906 she took a job as a newspaper reporter. Some members of her family in Washington, D.C., who “at one time rather scornfully criticized Elizabeth’s action” were “now loud in their praise of her shrewdness,” one paper reported.

  Putting the mental anguish of her slave stunt behind her, Lizzie began working on a book. It was to “reveal the shadowy side of human nature,” she told the Washington Post during a visit from Chicago with her brother in Bethesda, Maryland. “Picture the fickleness of mankind and portray the insincerity of the soul. From a psychological standpoint it will probably be unique,” she said of her book.

  Lizzie told the reporter that she lamented the widespread plagiarism of her day and the fact that her generation had no Shakespeare, Dumas, Dickens, or Goethe. “Why?” she said. “Because there is an obvious lack of originality.” She described marriage as “a germ” and likened it to “a disease.” “What is love? Nobody knows,” she said. Marriage was not for her, she added, unless she could see her spouse only once every three days. She didn’t want anyone to interfere with her ability to go off into her den and spend hours plodding through books as she pleased. “Personally, I love solitude, and were I married I could not enjoy this luxury.”

  A copy of Lizzie Magie’s Landlord’s Game, 1906. (Tom Forsyth)

  Another image of Lizzie Magie’s 1906 Landlord’s Game. (Tom Forsyth)

  Lizzie kept on the feminist warpath, sometimes delivering lectures in what the press at the time called “woman’s graphic language.” As her father had felt slavery to be the defining issue of his time, so Lizzie felt women’s equality to be for her generation. More states were granting women the right to vote (including Illinois in 1913), but women were still bound by corsets and had virtually no voice in the political system.

  In 1909, Lizzie authored a paper titled “A Graphic Description of Hell by One Who Is Actually in It.” In the piece, she described the embarrassments and hardships she had gone through “because she is self-sustaining.” What she experienced from the public at large, she wrote, was in sharp contrast to the reactions of the pro-suffrage Georgist community that usually surrounded her.

  She went on, “It is hell to have a superior education and to have to work for and obey the command of ignorance.

  “To have a sensitive and refined nature and have to be forever brushing up against pigs.

  “To have an ear for fine music and have to be tortured by street organs.

  “To know that you can do some things better than other people and never have an opportunity to prove it.”

  •

  The Economic Game Company was continuing to publish the Landlord’s Game, and its popularity was spreading—mostly to pockets of intellectuals along the eastern seaboard. Its reach had become multigenerational. Some children who had watched their parents play, or even joined in, were making their own copies of the game, perhaps unaware that it was being commercially published. The game was still being taught and played in Arden as well.

  Lizzie invented a new game. Called Mock Trial, it was played with cards and its theme was justice. Humorous in tone, Mock Trial played off Lizzie’s experience as an actress and a writer. Players took on various roles and engaged in charades. In 1910, Lizzie sent her new game idea off to Parker Brothers—now an acclaimed toy company—in the hopes that George Parker would publish it. To her great delight, he did.

  Also in 1910, Lizzie ended decades of speculation about her sexual status as a fiery, feminist, single woman when, on October 27, in Chicago, she married Albert Phillips, who, at fifty-four years old, was ten years Lizzie’s senior. The union was an unusual one—a woman in her forties embarking on a first marriage, and a man marrying an outspoken feminist who had publicly expressed her loathing of marriage as an institution.

  A businessman who had been married before, Phillips was not immune to scandal. In 1889, he had been taken to court over a publication he oversaw called Climax. The publication was “devoted to the interests of a matrimonial bureau,” included photos of curvaceous women with sultry faces and exposed arms and knees, and Phillips was charged with using the mails for “fraudulent purposes by means of misleading and bogus advertisements.”

  In 1913, Lizzie’s profile as a game maker rose when a Scottish version of the Landlord’s Game was published under the name Brer Fox and Rabbit. The game featured liberal British statesman David Lloyd George, a follower of Henry George and a fellow advocate for land tax reform, as its main character. The game’s cover portrayed a forest scene, with a rabbit peeking out from behind a door on a tree labeled Land as a fox with a man’s head looked on. The board had a more streamlined design than the Landlord’s board, and its center was divided into two sections, the Public Treasury and the Bank. One corner of the board was a square split in two and labeled Chance and Poorhouse.

  Essentially, the rules of Brer mimicked the rules of Landlord’s. One difference was that in Brer, a player who became bankrupt could go to the nearest Natural Opportunity space, “where land is free, without payment of rent, and where he can earn wages to pay his debts.” Then, on his next throw, the player received one hundred pounds in wages. If that one hundred pounds was enough to pay off his creditors, he could move on. If it wasn’t enough, he had to remain on the spot until he collected enough funds. This rule meant that Brer had the potential to go on for a very long time.

  •

  Lizzie’s unusual marriage was apparently a happy one, and her change in marital status did little to stifle her theatrical bug. She continued to perform monologues and enjoyed playing pranks on her husband and others. “Her realistic interpretation of boy characters is something that’s something,” the Boston Sunday Post noted years after one of her performances.

  Nor did Lizzie’s marital status hamper her quest to have her games published and her single tax message heard. But a few years later, the latter was facing a new and challenging barrier: a fear of communism. Common land ownership, one of the main tenants of Georgism, was being viewed as a form of collectivism and therefore un-American (even though the United Stats had allied with Russia in World War I). Yet Georgism was not socialism: Karl Marx himself had spoken out against Georgism, calling its founder “utterly backward” in what Marx described as George’s attempt “to save capitalist domination and indeed to establish it afresh on an even wider basis than its present one.” But as the Bolshevik Revolution touched off the 1919–1921 Red Scare in America, leading to the mass arrests of radicals of many stripes, the distinction between socialism and Georgism became muddled in the public’s mind.

  The single tax community had also lost the support of its main financial backer, Joseph Fels. In 1914, the soap magnate and supporter of Arden had passed away, and with the family’s finances stretched thin, his widow had refashioned his foundation to be more focused on a Zionist mission. The single tax theory, which had electrified a generation of intellectuals, was starting to fade into extinction.

  •

  On April 28, 1923, Lizzie, now in her fifties and known professionally as E. M. Phillips, filed to update her Landlord’s Game patent. She used the opportunity to revise some of the game’s features.

  Though the core of the game remained the same, Lizzie added Chicago-based spaces to the board, including Lake Shore Drive and the Loop. She also added small numbers on the outside perimeter, denoting separate property groupings, and included more references to the single tax culture. There was now a George Street, a Fels Avenue, and a Slambang trolley, the latter so named because George had been opposed to the trolley monopolies of his day.

  At some point, Lizzie and Albert left Chicago to move to the Washington, D.C., area. Lizzie had left newspapers for work in menial secretarial jobs. She still had her spark and passion for the single tax theory, but from where she was sitting, no one appeared to be listening.

  In 1924, Lizzie Magie, now married and credited as E. M. Phillips, renewed her claim to her Landlord’s Game, origi
nally conceived as a single tax teaching tool. (United States Patent and Trademark Office)

  Little did she know, variations of the Landlord’s Game were continuing to spread throughout the Northeast and had become popular at several universities. At least one member of Fiorello La Guardia’s staff played the monopoly game in the early to mid-1920s, together with Ernest Angell, an attorney who later became the chairman of the board of the American Civil Liberties Union. Though now less directly tied to Georgism, Lizzie’s brainchild was still a darling among left-wingers of the day.

  Thanks to Scott Nearing, the game was still being played at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and at Columbia University in New York City, Rexford Tugwell was teaching the game to his students.

  Born in Sinclairville, New York, in 1891, the handsome Tugwell was an agricultural economist whose early work was influenced by progressives like Nearing and Upton Sinclair. Tugwell had begun his studies at Wharton under Nearing, but it was at Columbia that he completed his doctorate and developed his economic ideas, many of which centered on creating agricultural opportunities for the blighted rural areas of America after World War I. The U.S. government, Tugwell reasoned, played a crucial role in handling the issues of supply and demand for agricultural goods and therefore controlled—and could improve—the welfare of farm dwellers.

  Tugwell spread the game at Columbia in the early to mid–1920s, just as Nearing had spread the game at Wharton around 1910. In 1932, Tugwell received an invitation to join president-elect Franklin Roosevelt’s Brain Trust (a term coined for his circle of close advisers), and may have toted his Landlord’s board with him, to just a few miles away from Lizzie’s home.