AT ANYONE’S EXPENSE

Henry George must be spinning in his grave.

After only five months, Henry dropped out of high school. (Especially at thirteen, time is of the essence, and to him, school was “…for the most part a waste of time.”) He took on some odd jobs—errand boy, clerk etc.,—to try to support his impoverished family and then, in April, 1855 shipped out to see the world, or at least India and Australia. He ended up in California, where he worked as a typesetter, printer, reporter, writer and part owner of various newspapers. 

Henry George at 26,
1865, http://en.wikipedia.org

By 1861 he was married, starting a family and well on his way to becoming “a crack journalist who set out not simply to report the news but to change it.” As he put it, “I worked until my clothes were in rags and the toes of my shoes were out. I slept in the office and did the best I could to economize.”

But, his rags wouldn’t turn to riches. His drive, it seemed, had almost no bearing on his income, and it was, perhaps, these circumstances that set his radicalism in motion.

Henry spent a great deal of time wondering—‘obsessing’ wouldn’t be too strong a word—why someone like him, smart, talented, motivated and hardworking, couldn’t lift himself out of poverty. Desperate to feed his family one day, he seriously considered killing and robbing the first person he encountered. This worried him. 

Standard Oil Refinery No. 1, Cleveland, OH,
1889, http://en.wikipedia.org

He came to the conclusion that it wasn’t him. Emerging, giant corporations, like the ones that owned the recently completed transcontinental railroad, were responsible for enduring poverty.

“Corporations are artificial creations,” historian Howard Zinn observes in a doc. called The Corporation. “You might say they’re monsters trying to devour as much profit as possible at anyone’s expense.”

Monsters with an advantage, no less. In Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market, Susan Strasser notes that “[b]eginning with the founders of the New England textile industry, nineteenth-century manufacturers took advantage of the opportunities this legal form provided for concentrating wealth, creating interlocking directorates and limiting the involvement of absentee owners. Above all, the corporate form offered protection: limited liability.”

A Textile Mill at Work All Night Long in Lowell, Massachusetts,
Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of
Congress, USF34-042901-D

Protection for them not us. “In the growth of large corporations and other special interests is an element of danger. Of these great corporations and interests we shall have many,” Henry George predicted all too accurately.

Congress Under Protected Interests's
Thumb & a Rising Demon Labeled
"Cost of Living," Courtesy of the
Prints and Photographs Division,
Library of Congress, ppmsca-26367

These emerging corporations were, he further concluded, the reason progress produces poverty, a dynamic that was, to his way of thinking, “the great enigma of our times.”

It was a mystery George intended to solve: “...he made an intensive study of economic thought and emerged with a stirring, simple answer to the age-old problem of inequality: the use of the power of taxation to make land the property of all.” Society, not speculation, was responsible for the increased value of the land, so society should reap the rewards. This tax would ensure that  “...the more the landlord speculated on Property, the more he would enrich Government, and the more Government would repay Labor, which had produced the wealth in the first place.” 

Uncle Sam & a Man as "The Railroad"
with Land Grants, Franchises &
Ticker Tape from a Device Labeled
"Speculation," Courtesy of the
Prints and Photographs Division,
Library of Congress, ppmsca-26259

As noted historian of the American left Michael Kazin points out: “The fortunes being made speculating on that land...were the main source of the problem. Speculation choked off opportunity for individuals with no capital, forcing the great majority to compete for scarce wages in crowded cities.”

This single tax on land would pay for all government expenses and replace all other taxes. Not only that it would reduce the monopolistic powers of the corporation, increase competition (not lessen it) and create “a level playing field.” His concept was nothing short of a radical redistribution of wealth.

In 1870 George began to organize his thoughts. He put pen to paper between 1877 and 1879, when his book Progress and Poverty was, after numerous rejections, pretty much self-published.

Now, an evangelist in his own right, George went on a speaking tour; despite his unimposing physical presence (5’6”, balding with reddish hair), he proved to be an effective and eloquent orator and emerged as America’s most popular radical.

Henry George Depicted in a Cartoon Published During
His 1886 NYC Mayoral Campaign), Courtesy of the New
York Public Library, www.nypl.org

In 1886 eager to apply his theory to reality, in this case, American government, George ran for mayor of New York City, where he and his family had lived for the past six years. One of his opponents, in what turned out to be a three-man race, was twenty-eight-year-old Teddy Roosevelt, the youngest candidate in NYC history (and, later, the youngest president in American history).

"The Arrest of 'Boss' Tweed
Another Good Joke," Courtesy of the
Prints and Photographs Division,
Library of Congress, USZ62-34148

Addressing a full house at Cooper Union, George asserted: “The government of New York City—our whole political system—is rotten to the core…we have hordes of citizens living in want and vice born of want, existing under conditions that would appall a heathen.”

And then, rhetorically: “Work is the producer of all wealth. How does it happen that the working class is always the poorer class? Because some men have devised schemes by which they thrive on the work others do for them.”

At times, George addressed the rest of Gotham’s residents from a horse cart stopped in the middle of the street: “What we are beginning here is the great American struggle for the ending of industrial slavery.”

TR as Represented 20 Years Later
in a Puck Magazine Cartoon, "The
Infant Hercules and the Standard Oil
Serpents," http://en.wikipedia.org

He lost but beat TR, who came in third. 

That election, in Michael Kazin’s view, was not only “[t]he best opportunity to launch an American labor party,” but also “…the closest [labor radicals] came to winning the top office in any major American city or state.” Against the advice of his doctors, George ran again in 1897, making thirty speeches in twelve days and dying of a stroke four days before the election.

“[His] writings and speeches evangelized a religiously diverse mass of followers, many of whom persevered in their singular mission years after George’s death.” One of those followers was Elizabeth Magie, an iconoclastic Quaker, writer, actress (who preferred male roles) and inventor (a type writing machine). Lizzie Magie believed that Henry George’s theories were “…all heady, abstractly theoretical stuff [too complex] for plain working folks to comprehend. So [she] decided to teach it through her playtime invention, which she called ‘The Landlord’s Game.’”

The Printed Patent Drawing for the Game Board,
http://en.wikipedia.org

Her 1904 patent, as you can see above, features a hand-drawn, hand-lettered board game with spaces labeled: Absolutely Essential Bread Taxes; Absolutely Essential Clothing Taxes; Absolutely Essential Coal Taxes; Luxury $50; Free House/Public Park; and Go to Jail—No Trespassing with Mother Earth (as a starting point).

“The object of this game is not only to afford amusement to players but to illustrate...how, under the present or prevailing system of land tenure, the landlord has an advantage over other enterprisers and also how the single tax would discourage speculation,” the rules stated.

Rockefeller as Industrial Emperor
(1901 Puck Magazine Cartoon),
http://en.wikipedia.org

In 1906 Magie moved from D.C. to Chicago, where she became the headmistress of Henry George School of Social Science and in all likelihood, met her husband, a businessman by the name of Albert Phillips. (Magie and Phillips married in 1910.) The changes in the game reflected the changes in her life: The names on the homemade boards were, now, local landmarks: “The Loop,” “Lake Shore Drive” etc.

Magie sold some sets locally and presented a sample to Parker Brothers, the company that had purchased Mock Trial, one of her earlier games. 

It was “probably [rejected] because it was so politically charged,” and her political sense and sense of humor hardly slackened. In her 1924 patent application for the new version, she wrote: “Caught robbing a hen-roost-go to jail…caught robbing the public…the players will now call you Senator,” concepts that would recur and resonate years later in a verse of Dylan’s “Sweetheart Like You” (“Steal a little and they throw you in jail/Steal a lot and they make you king”).

Scott Nearing c. 1915, Courtesy
of the Prints and Photographs
Division, Library of Congress,
USZ62-82851

Magie contacted Parker Brothers not to make money so much as to increase the distribution of the game and, therefore, educate more Americans about George’s single tax theories. Word of what was by now a folk game spread by, well, word of mouth. Other Quakers and followers of George’s theories were playing her game at colleges, like Harvard, Princeton and UPenn’s Wharton School of Finance, where Scott Nearing, who later, became one of the vanguard members of the back-to-the land movement, used the game to teach his students the evils of monopoly capitalism. (Writing about Henry George’s single tax plan, Nearing pointed out that Manhattan real estate had, up to that time, increased in value a hundred million times.)

A Shot at American Industry Is a
Shot at American Democracy,
Courtesy of the Prints and
Photographs Division,
USZC4-7851

Nearing was an activist, and his political and moral sense of justice were, soon, too radical for academia. After his 1915 dismissal from the faculty of UPenn, he wrote a pamphlet, whose central thesis, that corporate interests were primarily responsible for World War I, earned him a treason trial—he was acquitted—and lifelong professional blacklisting.

Unable to teach, at the height of the Great Depression, he and his wife Helen, a concert violinist, who was no less indomitable and iconoclastic, moved off the grid to a sixty-five acre farm in Vermont, where the two of them cleared the land, using little machinery and no animals, and followed organic farming principles designed to keep their soil rich, or in today’s language, to sustain it. For the Nearings, one of America’s oldest ideals—self-sufficiency—was no ideal. It was life. The couple felled trees and chopped firewood, for fuel; built their home, out of wood and stone; and grew enough crops and plants to feed themselves. (Like many of our country’s early radicals, Scott and Helen Nearing were vegans.)

In The Making of a Radical,
Scott Nearing Lists Tolstoy as One
of His Four Most Influential
Teachers, http://en.wikipedia.org

In 1952 pushed out by the ever-expanding ski resort industry, the Nearings moved to the Maine coast and did it all over again.

Writing articles and books, all published themselves, speaking widely and constantly welcoming curious visitors to their farm, the couple advocated and exemplified “back-to-the-land/simple living” throughout their long lives (Scott, 100, and Helen, into her 90s), a philosophy that Scott always brought around to two simple but not simplistic economic concepts:

1. “Pay as you go.”

2. “Affluence is no an end in itself.”

At around the same time that Scott Nearing taught at Wharton School, in the 1910s, “...those who wanted copies of the board…took a piece of linen cloth and copied it in crayon,” one player tells us. “It was considered a point of honor not to sell it to a commercial manufacturer since it had been worked out by a group of single taxers, who were anxious to defeat the capitalist system.”

It wasn’t long before the game was a hit with residents of Delaware, Virginia, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts and states as far west as Michigan and Indiana. 

A Beautiful Night, Atlantic City, NJ, 1913–1918, Courtesy of the
New York Public Library, www.nypl.org

One player in Indiana, Indianapolis to be precise, was a Quaker by the name of Ruth Hoskins. In the fall of 1929 Hoskins moved to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where she taught at a Friends school and continued to play the game nightly with newfound friends and neighbors. Like Lizzie Magie in Chicago, Hoskins and fellow players changed the names on the boards to local ones—Boardwalk, Park Place, Baltic Avenue, where some of them lived—and rejected the idea of commercializing the game: “‘We weren’t business people,’ she explained. ‘We were schoolteachers. It was a good game the way it was.’”

Promotional Photo of Boris
Karloff as Frankenstein,
http://en.wikipedia.org

By then the rules had been altered and even changed. So had the name. No longer The Landlord’s Game, it was, first, Auction Monopoly and then, just plain Monopoly.

That’s not all. Somewhere along the way the original purpose and meaning of the game was changing, subtly, but profoundly. Capitalism, captains of industry and economic Darwinism soon eclipsed the exposure of the landlord’s advantage, the speculator’s disadvantage and the progressive reform so integral to the early game. “[While] single taxers were playing to point out the moral flaws of capitalism, others, like students in their dorms or homeowners in their drawing rooms, were reveling in the simulation of moneymaking and ruthless business practices.” 

J.P. Morgan (as photographed by
Edward Steichen, 1903),
http://en.wikipedia.org

It was every man or every player for himself. As Eric W. Martin, editor of Boardgamenews.com, succinctly put it: “The object of the game is to bankrupt all of your opponents and be declared champion.... The whole goal of Monopoly is to beat everyone else down and you stand and you’re the king of the mountain.”

In 1932 one of Ruth Hoskin’s friends marketed a version of the game and called it Finance. Another player showed the game to Charles Darrow and his wife Esther.

Charles Darrow was an engineer, heating equipment salesman, radiator repairman and plumber, who, thanks to the Depression, had plenty of time on his otherwise capable hands. 

Charles Darrow,
http://en.wikipedia.org

As soon as he saw the game “…he fell in with [its] exciting promise of fame and fortune.” With a little help from his family and friends, he cobbled together some boards of his own in his basement. “Being unemployed Darrow had plenty of time to polish the cosmetics of the game.”

Once he had finalized its design and structure of his boards (one of the earliest versions was circular), he moved upstairs and laid them out on the dining room table, where he constructed hotels and houses using leftover pine molding donated by a local lumberyard, typed up the cards, colored the boards and created icons, like the RR locomotive, the waterworks faucet, and the pointed go-to-jail finger. (Esther Darrow tells us, since “...we played [the game] on the dining room table, we all had eat somewhere else.”)

Interior Court of Wanamaker's,
Courtesy of Prints and
Photographs Division, Library
of Congress, PA, 51-PHILA, 370

As Timothy Walsh, author of Timeless Toys: Classic Toys and the Playmakers Who Created Them, notes, “Monopoly fell into the lap of a desperate man with a penchant for games and the mechanical skills to produce them.”

At first, Darrow sold sets for two dollars a piece, and, according to his son, “...it took him all day to turn out a single game,” until he borrowed money to collaborate with a friend—the owner of a printing company. 

You have to give it to Darrow. He was nervy if not solvent. One set a day became two—and over time, as many as six. Before he knew it, he had sold five hundred sets to Wanamaker’s, Philly’s big, downtown department store. 

Speaking of 'Dull,' Our Own
Calvin Coolidge (as an
Amherst undergraduate),
http://en.wikipedia.org

In 1934 he approached Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers. The companies rejected the game without much pause. Parker Brothers execs told him that playing it, they had found fifty-two fundamental flaws: It took too long—it almost was endless—and how you arrived at a winner was unclear. Plus it was dull, complicated and—let’s say it one more time—slowwwwwwwww.

As fate would have it, Sally Barton, daughter of Parker Brothers founder George S. Parker and, as if that weren’t enough for fate, wife of president Robert Barton, bought the game and told the men in her life they’d made a big mistake; the game had her at the word ‘GO.’ Maybe, some sources offer, Parker Brothers became aware of how strong sales were in stores, like Wanamaker’s, and that, too, helped convince them of the error of their ways. In any case the men reconsidered and, in 1935, bought the rights to Darrow’s “brain child” as he put it in a letter to them, which, as you now know, isn’t exactly the truth.

All Twelve Monopoly Tokens from the U.S. Deluxe Version,
http://en.wikipedia.org

Parker Brothers either believed Darrow or deceived themselves. (“Never underestimate the power of denial” and apparently, the limited liability that goes along with it.) After a patent search unearthed The Landlord’s Game and Finance, Darrow, still, came out on top. Parker Brothers “…decided to pay off Magie and others who had copyrighted commercial variants of the game, in order to have legitimate, undisputed rights to the game, and promoted Darrow as the sole inventor.”

Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt’s Orchid
Collection, Courtesy of the New York Public
Library, www.nypl.org

In late 1935, just in time for Christmas, Parker Brothers shipped 10,000 sets—a drop in the proverbial bucket. The following year, sales rose to 20,000 sets a day, 1.8 million a year. Monopoly was “an overnight sensation,” and by the late 1930’s, Charles Darrow was the first board game inventor in history to become a millionaire. “He retired at the age of 46, helped his wife Esther import exotic orchids and then spent his remaining years traveling to ancient cities in the study of archaeology.”

The truth, some say, is only what you last heard or read.

Due to WWII Rationing, a Spinner
Replaced Dice in UK Monopoly sets,
http://en.wikipedia.org

The PR boys had wasted no time launching what was to become one of the most effective spins in the history of American popular culture—and the media, never known for its discretion, sucked it right up, resulting in “a 40-year string of bogus articles on Monopoly and its origins” and a goodly number of poorly researched books. We owe Monopoly, they all tell us, to Charles Darrow.  ‘All’ includes the New York Times, whose 1967 obit. reads: “Charles B. Darrow Dies at 78: Inventor of the Game of Monopoly.” 

Lizzie Magie and The Landlord’s Game, the contributions of Ruth Hoskins and her fellow players, Finance and all the local variations made over the years in the far-flung places by friends, college students and neighbors vanished along with the Henry George’s single tax system and the original purpose of the game. 

Monopoly went on to sell 200 million sets in 103 countries and 37 languages. 

Bibliography

Bellis, Mary; “Monopoly Monopoly: Part One: The History of the Monopoly Board Game and Charles Darrow,” http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa121997.htm.

Brady, Maxine; The Monopoly Book: Strategy and Tactics of the World’s Most Popular Game.

Brands, H.W.; American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865–1900.

Burns, James MacGregor; Workshop of Democracy, from the Emancipation Proclamation to the Era of the New Deal (The American Experiment Vol. II).

“Charles B. Darrow Dies at 78; Inventor of Game of Monopoly”; New York Times, Obit, Nov. 29, 1967.

The Corporation; DVD, November 13, 2006.

Dylan, Bob; Lyrics 1962–2001.

Farrell, John A.; Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned.

Kazin, Michael; American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation.
–––––––––; A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan.
Living the Good Life; DVD, http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/lgl.html.

Morris, Edmund; The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.

“Monopoly History: The Invention of Monopoly,” ideafinder.com.

Oser, Jacob; Henry George.

Strasser, Susan; Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market.
Under the Boardwalk: The Monopoly Story; DVD, 2010.

Walsh, Tim; Timeless Toys: Classic Toys and the Playmakers Who Created Them.
Walton, Rick; Bullfrog Pops! (Google Book, Excerpt)

Waltzer, Jim; Monopoly: The Story Behind the World’s Best-Selling Game.

Wolfe, Burton H.; “The Monopolization of Monopoly,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, April 23, 1976, http://www.adena.com/adena/mo/index.htm.

“…for the most part….”; Oser, 18

“…a crack journalist….”; Kazin, 69, American Dreamers

“I worked….”; Brand, 373

“Corporations are….”; Zinn, The Corporation, DVD

“...[b]eginning with….”; Strasser, 25
“In the growth….”; Brand, 379

“…the great enigma….”; Ibid, 375
“…he made an….”; Kazin, 69, American Dreamers
“…the more….”; Morris, 344
“The fortunes....”; Kazin, 69, American Dreamers

“The government of….”; Ibid, 68, American Dreamers

“Work is the….”; Ibid, 74, American Dreamers

“What we are….”; Morris, 351

“[t]he best opportunity….”; Kazin, 72, American Dreamers

“…the closest….”; Ibid, 73, American Dreamers

“[His] writings….”; Kazin, xvi, A Godly Hero

“….all heady,….”; Wolfe, http://www.adena.com/adena/mo/mo05.htm

“‘The object of….’”; Ibid

“…probably [rejected]….”; Walsh, 48

“Caught robbing”; Ibid

“Steal a little….”; Dylan, 466

“Pay as you….”; Living the Good Life, DVD

“Affluence is….”; Ibid

“…those who wanted….”; Wolfe, http://www.adena.com/adena/mo/mo06.htm

“It was considered….”; Ibid

“We weren’t business….”; Ibid, http://www.adena.com/adena/mo/mo09.htm

“[While} single taxers….”; Walton

“The object….”; Under the Boardwalk, DVD

“…he fell in…”; ideafinder.com

“Being unemployed….”; Under the Boardwalk, DVD
“...we played….”; Ibid

“Monopoly fell….”; Walsh, 49

“…it took him…”; Ibid, 50

“…brain child…”; Wolfe, http://www.adena.com/adena/mo/mo12.htm

“Never underestimate….”; American Beauty, DVD

“…decided to pay….”; ideafinder.com

“…an overnight sensation…”; Wolfe, http://www.adena.com/adena/mo/mo12.htm

“He retired….”; Walsh, 50

“…a 40-year string….”; Wolfe, http://www.adena.com/adena/mo/mo08.htm

“Charles B. Darrow….”; Ibid, http://www.adena.com/adena/mo/mo07.htm

“…the world,….”; Walsh, 56

“‘The idea….’”; Wolfe, http://www.adena.com/adena/mo/mo05.htm