The History of Monopoly

We played Monopoly as kids, thrilled by the huge wads of cash we’d get at the beginning of the game. Even more thrilled by the huger wads we’d acquire throughout the game through selfish greed and ruthless speculation. But Monopoly was not originally a game that glorified selfishness and greed. On the contrary, the original Monopoly was designed to teach about the evils of speculation and rent.

Lizzie Maggie and the Landlord’s Game

Feminist writer Lizzie Magie invented the Landlord’s Game in 1903. She earned a patent in 1904, before women were legally allowed to vote in the U.S. She created the game to demonstrate the economic ills of land monopolism. In 1902, she said, “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.”

In Magie’s version of the game there was play money, a poor house and a jail. Players could also buy and sell properties. But players earned wages for the work they did as they moved around the board. And if players landed on the “Absolute Necessity” spaces, they could get bread and shelter. Or on the “Franchise” spaces, they could get water and light. Her game originally had two alternative setups. One was called Monopoly, and the goal was to create monopolies and crush one’s opponents. The other, called Prosperity, rewarded everyone when they worked together to create shared products and wealth.

Growing Popularity

By the 1920s, the game had become popular with Ivy League college students and left-leaning middle-class families. It eventually reached a group of Quakers in Atlantic City. They customized the space names with the names of places from their town, like Ventnor, Park Place, and Boardwalk. And from them, it made its way to an unemployed businessman named Charles Darrow. He brought the game to Parker Brothers as his own invention.

Parker Brothers released the game in the 1930s and it quickly became a blockbuster. They gave sole credit for its creation to Darrow, who earned millions for his effort. Magie spoke out against Darrow, and Parker Brothers, claiming she had made only $500 from her creation. But Parker Brothers suppressed her role for decades and evaded ever paying her any royalties. The true story only became public in 1973, twenty-five years after Magie’s death. It came to light during a lawsuit. Parker Brothers sued San Francisco State economics professor, Ralph Anspach, for his Anti-Monopoly game. Through research in his legal defense, Anspach rediscovered Magie. He even interviewed several older Americans who remembered playing her original version of the game.

Georgism

Magie followed Henry George (9/2/1839-10/29/1897), an American journalist and political economist. Many consider him to be the one who sparked the Progressive Era. Georgism is the idea that people (rather than their bosses) should own the value they create through their labor. Georgism also argues that natural resources and land should belong equally to members of the community. Playwright George Bernard Shaw said that Henry George was responsible for inspiring 5 out of 6 socialist reformers in the 1880s. Magie created the Landlord’s Game to promulgate George’s ideas. Her original game even had a tribute to him in the center of the gameboard.

George was a strong critic of railroad and mining interests, corrupt politicians, and land speculators. His 1868 article, “What the Railroad Will Bring Us,” argued that the boom in railroad construction would only benefit the shareholders, while throwing the rest of the population into abject poverty. His most famous book, Progress and Poverty (1879), sold millions of copies worldwide. In it, he argued that the concentration of unearned wealth by landlords and monopolists is the main cause of poverty.

George proposed municipal pension and disability systems funded through land rents. He also argued for an end of intellectual property; for state-run and free mass transit and library systems; a dramatic reduction in the size of the military; secret ballots in elections and universal suffrage for women; as well as campaign finance reform and political spending restrictions. His followers included socialists and anarchists, as well as mainstream liberals and progressives. Many influential people were inspired by his work, including Tolstoy, Helen Keller, Martin Luther King, Jr., George Bernard Shaw, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Einstein, and Joseph Stiglietz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics. However, Marx saw George’s Single-Tax concept a step backwards from the transition to communism.

The Monopoly Board: Real Estate Spaces

The space names on the modern Monopoly board are named after neighborhoods and suburbs of Atlantic City, New Jersey. In his 1972 essay “The Search for Marvin Gardens,” published in The New Yorker, writer John McPhee played a game of Monopoly while simultaneously moving through the town. The values of the different properties corresponded to the wealth of the actual communities that lived in them at the time. For example, when he landed on Vermont Avenue, one of the game’s cheapest properties, he wrote that “the dogs are moving (some limping) through ruins, rubble, fire damage, open gardens.” The more expensive Ventnor, in contrast, was a historically white and affluent suburb.

B&O Railroad

The B&O Railroad (Baltimore and Ohio) is not worth much on the modern Monopoly board, but the company was immensely wealthy and powerful during the 1800s. The B&O was run by a Robber Baron, known as John Garrett (1820-1884), who ran the giant corporation for nearly three decades.

Under Garrett, the B&O delivered the troops that put down John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. He had Southern sympathies and, at least initially, saw the B&O as a “Southern railroad.” However, his business sense told him that it would be more profitable to ally with the North, since the B&O was the main line connecting Washington, D.C. to the northern and western states. So, the B&O ultimately became more associated with the Union side in the Civil War.

In 1873, the Long Depression began, with bank and railroad failures, mass layoffs, starvation, and babies dying from hunger and disease. The depression was the worst the U.S. had ever experienced. It went on for decades. By the summer of 1877, workers were fed up, and they rose up against the bosses, starting with a rebellion of B&O workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia. When the strike spread to Baltimore, Garrett called on Maryland Governor John Lee Carroll to deploy troops to put down the protests. They slaughtered up to 22 striking workers in Baltimore. But that was just the beginning. the strike spread along the rail lines across the nation. It lasted for weeks. At least 100 workers were killed by police, national guards, and private detectives. You can read my article on the Great Upheaval here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/03/31/the-great-upheaval/

Pennsylvania Railroad

The Pennsylvania Railroad (the Pennsy) also played prominently in the Great Upheaval strike wave of 1877. When soldiers began bayonetting and shooting Pennsy workers in Pittsburgh, the workers attacked back, driving the soldiers into the roundhouse, and then set fire to it. In fact, they burned down large portions of the Pennsy’s properties in Pittsburgh. In the end, over 60 people died in Pittsburgh, alone, during the Great Upheaval.

The Pennsylvania Railroad was the largest and most powerful corporation in the world in the late 1800s. Thomas Scott, the fourth president of the Pennsy, served as assistant secretary of war under President Lincoln. He helped negotiate the Compromise of 1877, which ended Reconstruction, in the South, and gave the presidency to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, even though he lost the popular vote and possibly even the electoral college vote.

Thomas Scott

Scott also played a radical role in the evolution of the modern corporation. Prior to the Civil War, U.S. corporations were under the control of the state in which they were chartered. If it failed to obey its state’s restrictions, the state could terminate its charter. Scott figured out that if he didn’t like the rules in one state, he could simply reincorporate in another state with fewer restrictions, and then sell off his stock to the new corporation. This, in turn, allowed him to exert more influence on state legislatures by threatening to take his business elsewhere if the state didn’t give him everything he demanded, a strategy that continues to be effective today.

His use of holding companies also allowed him to disguise the actual owners of the company. For example, in the 1870s, he used holding companies to buy and consolidate railroad lines in the South, without drawing attention to himself as a Yankee carpetbagger (a potentially deadly prospect in those days). When word got out that his holding companies were owned by Yankee investors, he simply bought up local papers and ordered the editors to support his expansion plans. When the KKK started attacking the black freedmen he hired to work on his Southern railroads, rather than fighting the Klan, he wined and dined their leaders, and gave them positions on the boards of his Southern subsidiaries.

Reading Railroad

The Reading Railroad was run by another Robber Baron, known as Franklin Benjamin Gowen (you can read his complete biography here; https://michaeldunnauthor.com/take-a-ride-on-the-reading-with-franklin-gowen/). Gowen also played prominently in the violent suppression of the Great Upheaval strike wave of 1877, specifically in the Reading Massacre, when cops and soldiers killed 16 striking workers and injured over 200. Gowen also conspired with Allan Pinkerton to destroy the miners’ union (WBA) by falsely accusing them of being Molly Maguires and using an agent provocateur to get 20 innocent union organizers hanged.

You can read my article on the Molly Maguires here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/13/the-myth-of-the-molly-maguires/

and my article on the Pinkertons here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/04/union-busting-by-the-pinkertons/