A new documentary tells the story of the popular board game | The creator, Lizzie Magie, wanted to show the negative effects of monopolies by spreading the ideas of economist Henry George
Until 1985, the official history of Monopoly it was this: it was invented by an unemployed man during the Great Depression in the United States because he was bored. Charles Darrow, for that was his name, printed copies at his own expense and, when he couldn’t give more than himself, sold the rights to Parker Brothers, a company that popularized it and made it popular. one of the most successful games in the world.
The reality, however, is much more complex.
In 1904, a woman named Elizabeth Maggie who until then worked as a stenographer registered the patent of The Landlord’s Game; in Spanish, the Game of the Landlords. Magie was then 38 years old, lived in Washington and this was not her first invention: years before she had patented a solution so that the pages would pass better through the typewriters. A writer and comedian in her spare time, the inventor was a great defender of Georgism, a political movement that advocates the creation of a single tax levied on the land.
The Landlord’s Game It was his formula to spread this idea. At the same time, and paradoxical as it may be, it became the germ of Monopoly. Its authorship would be discovered and recognized decades later, when Professor Ralph Anspach investigated the origins of the game to defend himself against a copyright infringement lawsuit. Anspach had created Anti-Monopoly and Parker Brothers wanted to prevent him from using the name. He discovered that Magie’s patent was, unlike what the company had always advertised, the first version of Monopoly. He embarked on a lengthy legal battle. The Supreme Court of the United States agreed with him: not only could he use the term, but it was free to tell the story, the result of his research.
A recent documentary on American public television —The secret history of Monopoly, available in Spanish on Movistar—check out the figure of Elizabeth Magie. Includes a posthumous interview with Anspach, who died a year ago. “It was all suspicious,” admits the professor in one of the fragments. “But it turned me on even more knowing that Those who had stolen the game were attacking me for inventing another game.”
monopolies vs. Single tax
Elizabeth —Lizzie— Magie was born in Illinois in 1866. Her father was a newspaper publisher, slavery abolitionist, and follower of the ideas of economist Henry George (i.e. Georgism). According to numerous biographies, Lizzie Magie met and soaked up these ideas at home. As an adult, she championed them through writing by publishing several short stories.
Not only that: Magie drew attention as feminist activist when put an ad in the newspaper offering himself as “young american slave intelligent, educated, refined, honest, fair, poetic, philosophical (…) and feminine above all” to denounce the inequality of opportunities for women and black people. The only truly free, he said, were the white men.
With her Landlord’s Game, Magie wanted Georgism to reach more people. “Henry George was the first to raise the tax on the value of the land. It is from the 19th century. He wrote an infamous book, which not even his most fanatical followers read, on poverty,” explains Eduardo González, associate researcher at the University College of London. “He makes an interesting analysis. There is a very important difference between classical and neoclassical economics. In classical, from Adam Smith, David Ricardo and George himself, there were three key elements: land, labor and capital. They gave rise to three social classes: bourgeois (capital), workers (work) and landowners (land). But the neoclassical one destroys the distinction between capital and land and mixes everything up. The figure of the landowner disappeared, which was pure rentierism”.
George, continues González, argues that those who appropriate the land extract rents from the rest, both of the workers (who pay rent) and of the bourgeois (who if they open a business or set up an industry also pay the landlord).
“In addition, landowners charge rent for not producing anything. Because land is a fictitious commodity: no one produces it. And its increases in value are not linked to the owner of the land, but to actions such as putting a subway entrance next to it,” keep going. “He was a capitalist, like Keynes, but he had a problem with capitalism: the rentiers. That is why he raised a tax on land value, the famous land value tax“. With this tax reverting to the public, the economist argued, all the others could disappear.
Georgist ideas —still in force, defended even in the opinion pages of the Financial Times— were launched in Arden, a small town in the state of Delaware founded in 1900 where the entire floor remains public. And that’s where Magie went to create her game. In a first non-definitive version, the inventor developed a standard Monopoly game in which everyone started with the same money and Whoever accumulated the most wealth won. In the second, Magie included the ability to play in Georgist mode, with a different instruction pack.
The main difference: the ground rent was not paid to the landlord, but to the public treasury. All of that money was used for public improvements and there was no additional tax. A village carpenter drew the board for him.
“The Game of Landlords is based on today’s prevailing business methods. Players can see this, as well as the logical result of this system: that the land monopolist has absolute control“, the instructions say. “The remedy is the single tax.”
The game offered the ability to switch to Georgist mode as long as two players agreed. The objective, as it is observed in the norms —collected in a very detailed website about its history—is to demonstrate that the single tax “benefits everyone because equalize opportunities.”
popular game
Lizzie Magie’s Landlord’s Game was popularized beyond Arden. In the following years, she reached the campuses of universities such as Columbia, Harvard and Priceton, and had a special relevance in Atlantic City, within the Quaker community. In order for the board to better reflect the reality of this city, changes were introduced and boxes were placed with the names of their neighborhoods and avenues. All this, of course, regardless of its inventor. It was a popular game.
The problem was that, during all this time, Georgian single tax anti-trust and support message watered down. The players tell the Chronicles and investigations on the game, they saw more fun that one crushed the rest (monopolistic version) than to cooperate (Georgist version). It was one of the monopoly versions (called Monopoly) that reached Charles Darrow, the unemployed gentleman who appropriated the ideahe manufactured it on his own and went to sell it to Parker Brothers, which at that time was already a major board game company.
Aware that it was spreading beyond her control, Lizzie Magie registered a new patent in 1924 (the original expired in 1920). In 1932 he released a version based on this patent. This edition was called The Landlord’s Game and Prosperity: The Game of Landlords and Prosperity, reflecting both game possibilities.
In order to cover itself against eventual demands and aware that I needed the rights to Monopoly to keep reproducing it, Parker Brothers was interested in his true story beyond what the unemployed Charles Darrow told. As the documentary explains, the company learned of Magie’s existence through the press. And, as she herself recounted in an interview in The Evening Star newspaper, her CEO went to visit her in November 1935 to convince her to give up her rights. He offered him $500 for his second patent.
Why did you accept? Magie was still committed to spreading Georgist ideas and considered an opportunity for a large company to commercialize his creation. Parker Brothers, however, printed a few hundred copies with both game possibilities—the monopolist and the georgist—and dropped this version into obscurity to focus only on the monopoly game, Monopoly. At the marketing level, they kept the Charles Darrow version and sold millions of copies. An unemployed man who had become rich from his invention was a very good story to promote a wealth accumulation game.
Maggie died in 1948. In the census it was registered as a “game manufacturer”. Her figure was missing until the creator of Anti-Monopoly, Ralph Anspach, rescued her. The documentary tells that the company came to offer him a significant amount of money to renounce the name of Monopoly and for keeping quiet and not telling the real story. “People told me that I was crazy, that I should take the money and leave,” he says in the posthumous interview. When the Supreme Court agreed with him, Anspach felt “that he had done justice” and that “Sometimes, history can change.”
Georgist ideas, for their part, continue to spread today. “There is a Georgian institute: the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. According to what they told me, it belongs to one of Henry George’s heirs who wanted to prove if his theses were correct. They have a report on which countries their ideas have been applied,” he adds. Gonzalez. Some of these countries are France, Denmark, Estonia, Australia, South Africa… “But this is like the basic income thing: the pure, pure idea has never been applied, just watered-down versions. In the Anglo-Saxon world it is very common, but it has never reached Spain.”