The Monopolists Read online

  Tugwell’s monopoly game teachings lived on with his students and followers, among them George Mitchell, who had taught at Columbia under Tugwell and later became a significant figure in the antitrust movement. Mitchell introduced the game to his soon-to-be wife, Alice. The Mitchells’ version of the game didn’t have play money, and instead of tokens the players used miscellaneous pieces of jewelry to mark their places on the board. The couple played the game constantly while living in New York City and taught it to many friends, some visiting from out of town. Alice made more copies of the game for George’s brothers and sisters and for his sister-in-law in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. All were drawn and painted by hand and were exactly alike. And so the game spread, with its rules tweaked here and there and its spaces customized.

  The Mitchells then moved to Washington so that George could work with Tugwell on developing the New Deal. They took their monopoly game with them and played it at least two dozen times while in the capital.

  Alice’s handmade boards—like the boards made at Arden, the Wharton School, Columbia, and elsewhere—did not typically come with written rules. Whether Lizzie received any credit for these early copies of her game is not clear, but it seems unlikely.

  •

  Now going by her married name, Elizabeth M. Phillips, Lizzie took to the podium at the 1931 Henry George Congress in Baltimore. Over twenty years had passed since her slave stunt had brought her more attention than any of her games, stage roles, or poetry ever had. Women now had considerably more independence. They wore makeup, and their short hair hung loose. World War I had given some women a taste of the work force. They could finally vote.

  The Georgists had not made much progress in advancing the single tax movement since the death of its charismatic leader in the late 1890s, but Lizzie and her fellow conference-goers were undeterred. In fact, they were energized. The stock market crash of 1929 had underscored the downside of capitalism. Lizzie and the other speakers at the conference offered up orations with titles such as “Unemployment, a Challenge to Democracy” and read aloud from Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, his words seeming as fresh to them in 1931 as when they’d first heard them decades earlier. The convention chairman updated attendees on his efforts to change some of Maryland’s tax policies, and an explanation of the Landlord’s Game was offered to “those interested.”

  Nearly thirty years after Lizzie had created her game, she was still trying to breathe life into the late thinker’s ideas. But both her role as the inventor of the game and the game’s central Georgist message were about to be further obscured.

  FRAT BOYS AND QUAKERS CHANGE THE GAME

  “I wasn’t out to make a whole lot of money.”

  —BROOKE LERCH

  The Landlord’s Game may have begun as a political and educational tool, but by the late 1920s it had become a sensation in the fraternity scene at the then-all-male Williams College, an elite institution of elegant brick and stone buildings nestled in the Berkshires, in New England. Daniel Layman, a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon, one of the oldest fraternities in the world, counting Theodore Roosevelt among its members, had stumbled across a homemade variant of the game in 1927 and, along with his friends Ferdinand and Louis Thun, introduced it to his fraternity brothers, who immediately became addicted.

  The Thun brothers, who would become two of the game’s greatest enthusiasts at Williams, had played a version of what they referred to as the “monopoly game” before, and since Layman was unsure of the rules and there were no written instructions, they taught him how to play. The trio then taught some twenty-five to fifty other young men, with Layman drawing handmade boards and passing them out among his friends—including Pete Daggett, a childhood friend from Indianapolis who would later introduce the game to the Midwest. The college players always referred to their new pastime as the “monopoly game”—they were unaware that the Landlord’s Game existed.

  In June 1929, Layman graduated from Williams. The following September, he entered Harvard Business School. But that October, the stock market crashed and Layman returned to his home in Indianapolis, never to finish his studies in Cambridge.

  After being unemployed for about a year, Layman found a job at an advertising agency. But he hadn’t forgotten the fascination that he and his fraternity brothers had had with the monopoly game, and in 1931 he began to produce his own version of it, hoping to sell it on a mass scale. The board he designed measured thirty inches square, and the property names he used varied somewhat from those printed on the boards he’d played on in college—he changed Grand Boulevard to La Salle Street, for example. His game also used poker chips, printed money, and miniature houses. The idea of using houses had been introduced to him by his college friends the Thuns, who had returned from a trip to the Ukraine with sets of little houses and churches. When they played, they made each church represent five houses and called it an “apartment,” even though it had a steeple.

  Dubbing his game Finance, Layman sold it with the help of a friend through a company called Electronic Laboratories Inc. The company’s primary business was manufacturing batteries, but it also had some printing capabilities. Layman knew that he hadn’t invented Finance, but he did claim to have written its rules. These he handed off to a printer in Indianapolis, which produced a batch of rule books. Layman tucked one into every set of the game he released.

  Years before Parker Brothers published Monopoly in 1935, Dan Layman had sold his game Finance to other game companies. Parker Brothers later acquired these rights. (Tom Forsyth)

  Layman chose to name his game Finance largely because some attorney friends advised him against using the word “monopoly.” That name was already in informal use for a game being played in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, they said, and therefore could not be patented or marketed. It was also Layman’s understanding at the time that all he needed to do to obtain a copyright for his game was to have it sold over the state line—an easy enough task.

  The jargon could trip up even the savviest of inventors.

  Copyrights are intended to safeguard the unique expressions of ideas and are registered at the U.S. Copyright Office, a department within the Library of Congress. They protect creators of works such as literature, films, and musicals and generally last the lifetime of an author plus seventy years. Patents, issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, grant inventors exclusive property rights to their ideas and products as well, but they are not issued for products already in use and last for a more limited period of time. Whereas trademarks—protecting words, logos, and taglines—are also registered at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and can last indefinitely, as long as they are in active use and are renewed every ten years.

  The initial sales of Finance were strong, and in 1932, Layman’s unemployed friend Brooke Lerch began to sell the games for him. “I wasn’t out to make a whole lot of money,” Lerch later said. “I was trying to do something during the Depression.”

  For half a year, Lerch peddled Finance in and around Reading, Pennsylvania. Word of mouth fueled sales, with potential buyers calling him directly. Lerch also tried to sell Finance to Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia. One of the first department stores of its kind in the country, Wanamaker’s boasted a grand central court, high opulent ceilings, and a decor more befitting a museum than a general store of the type that most Philadelphians were accustomed to. John Wanamaker was credited with having popularized the price tag—a Quaker concept that had originally taken hold in England. Both the Quakers and Wanamaker believed that haggling over prices with self-interested storekeepers did not lead to equal shopping opportunities, so fixed prices made everyone equal in the eyes of God. Other Wanamaker innovations included an in-store restaurant and the practice of giving customers refunds for returned purchases.

  Lerch showed up for his meeting with the Wanamaker’s buyer carrying a green faux-leather board painted with the names of properties, including the Reading Railroad (the “Royal Route to the Sea,�
� linking Philadelphia and Atlantic City) and the Pennsylvania Railroad (linking New York and Atlantic City, and known for its buffet car). The game included Chance cards, which could change a player’s fortune with a single draw; Property cards, which listed property costs and rents; and miniature houses.

  To demonstrate Finance’s viability, Lerch played the game with the Wanamaker’s buyer. But the man didn’t bite. The game took too long to play, he said. Lerch then took Finance to buyers at other stores, but they questioned the game’s appeal to children. Only a few years later, in 1934 or 1935, and through the help of a good friend, Lerch would be able to place a few copies of Finance in a store’s toy department.

  Desperately needing money, Layman sold his interest in Finance to Lerch for two hundred dollars.

  That was the only money I ever got out of it, he later said. “That was a small fortune to me.” Tucking his Finance board away, he moved on. But not before teaching the game to some Quaker friends, who would modify it and change its course in the most unlikely way.

  •

  In the 1850s, a New Jersey physician named Jonathan Pitney envisioned a place for city dwellers to go to escape the dank and exhausting conditions of urban life—a health resort by the sea, a place reachable by rail. Shortly thereafter, Atlantic City was born, and its first few hundred visitors arrived. In 1870, the first section of the soon-to-be-famous Boardwalk—the first of its kind in the country—went up, and in 1875, the Atlantic City Gas and Water Company was formed, helping to turn Atlantic City into a playground for adults. At that time, water and electricity were not yet widespread public goods, and the technology seemed relatively novel and decadent. Hotels popped up like gleaming castles in the sand, along with more ordinary boardinghouses, which were the true backbone of the city, as they catered to the thousands of middle-class tourists who started pouring in, many arriving by rail from Philadelphia.

  Among those who arrived—and then took up residence—in Atlantic City were a group of Quakers, who hoped to establish a healthy, fresh-air community, complete with modest accommodations and prayer lodges. Others who decided to settle in the new resort town came from New York City; Newark and Trenton, New Jersey; and other northeastern cities, with the wealthier among them building impressive-looking homes on States Avenue. African Americans from the South arrived and stayed as well, hoping to find better economic and social opportunities in the North. But Atlantic City was no bastion of civil rights: Blacks were welcome to work at the hotels and restaurants, but they could not sleep in the hotels’ beds or eat at the restaurants’ tables.

  One of Atlantic City’s most famous landmarks, the Steel Pier, went up at the turn of the century. An unrivaled entertainment venue located on the Boardwalk, it hosted opera, theater, movies, concerts headlined by the likes of John Philip Sousa, and, later, high-diving horses and boxing cats. The Boardwalk was a mecca for marketers, who knew that they could reach millions of middle-class urbanites from all over the Northeast in one place. Ketchup maker Heinz sponsored a popular pier where tourists could get free pickled snacks. The Boardwalk was also home to a large rotating wheel designed by William Somers in 1892. A year later, George Ferris would design a similar wheel for the Chicago World’s Fair, and it would be his name, not Somers’s, that would be attached to the wheel for centuries to come.

  In 1920, Prohibition began and Atlantic City exploded with booze and vice. Bootleggers ruled roads paved with pork barrel, as questionable officials proffered payouts and threats. One could acquire alcohol in Philadelphia or New York City, but typically it could be found only in hidden, out-of-the-way speakeasies—not out in the open like in Atlantic City. Booze, gambling, sex—it was all there and all easily accessible, on the Boardwalk and in the hotels. Law enforcement looked the other way and sometimes even partook.

  Prohibition cleaved Atlantic City in two. On one side were the masters of vice and those who tolerated that vice because of the wealth pouring into the town. On the other side were the reformists, including the Quakers, who wanted Atlantic City to be a clean, middle-class getaway, not a sordid playground. They tried to avoid the clamor of the city’s proudly flaunted debauchery, but that was hard to do—their own neighbors were often among the city’s darker characters.

  By the mid-1920s, Atlantic City had more than twelve hundred boardinghouses and hotels, accommodating nearly four hundred thousand guests. Ninety-nine trains came in and out of the city daily in the summer, sixty-five in the winter. The resort was also home to three airports, four newspapers, and twenty-one theaters. It was the city that had been built by corruption and excess, a collection of immigrants trying to live in prosperity along the shore, of tailcoats and torn shirts with little in between.

  Atlantic City’s rise was a reflection of America at the time, a country experiencing mass immigration that was both remaking society and fueling a desire among a growing class of nouveaux riches to say, “I’ve made it.” Being seen on the Boardwalk, booking a room in a palatial hotel, or indulging in an illicit drink or two or three at one of the resort’s high-class entertainment joints was a way of doing that.

  Enoch “Nucky” Johnson, a bald, heavyset man with thick black glasses and checkerboard teeth, spearheaded an effort to construct the Atlantic City Convention Hall in order to bring in large events and year-round visitors. Opening in 1929, the hall began hosting the Miss Atlantic City Competition, greyhound races, and occasional indoor football games. Its facade was made of cut limestone adorned with an overload of stone sea horses, porpoises, shells, and crustaceans. Johnson himself held court in a penthouse atop the Ritz-Carlton, which offered panoramic views of the Boardwalk and the seemingly infinite waters beyond. Other, more occasional guests at the Ritz included Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Al Capone, and Lucky Luciano. Johnson’s reputation only ballooned with his work in gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging, all of which helped him build and maintain power over the Boardwalk.

  Hotels were the undisputed kings of Atlantic City, with their owners engaged in a race to create the best and grandest accommodations ever seen. On Indiana Avenue reigned the magnificent Brighton Hotel, and on Park Place and the Boardwalk shone the Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel, the first “fireproof” building in town, its construction of reinforced concrete supervised by Thomas Edison and designed by Quaker William Price, the same man who had designed the modest cottages of utopian Arden.

  Ironically, some of the city’s most famous and elegant hotels were owned by simplicity-loving Quakers and single-taxers like Price. On North Carolina Avenue was the Quaker-owned Chalfonte-Haddon Hall, which served no alcohol and was known for its elegant teas, available in posh dining rooms set with white porcelain and silver teapots. On Virginia Avenue was the Quaker-owned Morton Hotel, and nearby was the Quaker-owned Glaslyn Chatham. The St. Charles Hotel on St. Charles Place was a favorite venue among single-taxers for their regular meetings, thanks to its large porch, rocking chairs, and bay windows overlooking the sea.

  One of the largest and most magnificent hotels in town was the Hotel Traymore, described by one newspaper reporter of the day as the “Taj Mahal of Atlantic City.” The Traymore had also been designed by Price. Boasting fourteen stories, six hundred rooms, a palatial patio, and a ballroom that could accommodate four thousand, it claimed to be the first large hotel in the country to include a private bathroom in every guest unit. Its dining room offered six kinds of champagne, along with brandies and whiskeys, all served in glasses etched with frosted seashells—the same motif used in the hotel’s decadent lobby. Guests flocked to its popular outdoor deck, and at night the building glowed like a ship on the water ready to set sail.

  A bald man with a well-trimmed snow-white beard and wire-frame spectacles, Price had obtained his earliest architectural commissions through his connections to the Quaker church. A pioneer in the Arts and Crafts movement, he scorned elegance in his personal life—he felt more at home in Arden than he did in Atlantic City—but built hotels that rivaled the palaces of Eu
ropean royalty. He and other Quakers like him may have originally envisioned Atlantic City as an alcohol- and dance-free fresh-air resort, but as the profits associated with decadence soared, so too did their involvement in creating that lushness.

  Among the many institutions funded by the wealthy Quaker Atlantic City hoteliers was the Atlantic City Friends School, where pretty Ruth Hoskins, a recent college graduate, went to work as a teacher in 1929, just before the stock market crash. Hoskins brought with her a board game that she had learned in Indianapolis the winter before from her friends Pete and James Daggett. The Daggett brothers had called the game “monopoly,” and they showed Hoskins how to make her own handmade board, complete with residential properties, railroads, and utilities. All the board’s property names referenced midwestern and northeastern locales—among them Grosse Pointe (Michigan) and the Bowery (New York City). The board had Jail and Go to Jail spaces, and players received two hundred dollars every time they passed Go.

  Ruth introduced the game to other Quakers in Atlantic City, including Cyril and Ruth Harvey, who also taught at the Atlantic City Friends School. The Harveys’ six-year-old daughter, Dorothy Alice, better known as Dottie, was a student at the school, and the family lived not far from the famed Boardwalk. Many years later, Dottie would remember hearing her parents and their friends constantly playing the game and couldn’t remember a time when talk of the game wasn’t bandied about.

  Ruth Harvey created copies of the game for her friends on a long sheet of oilcloth that covered the entire dining room table. Using a small paintbrush, she drew tick lines to separate the boards’ properties. Sometimes it took her days to create a board—painting, waiting for the paint to dry, repainting, waiting. It was often sloppy work, especially since Dottie had a habit of plopping her hand down onto the middle of a board to see if it was dry. Later, Dottie referred to the memory of watching her mother make the board as “the most astounding image of my life.”