The Hidden Truth About Monopoly

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And you can learn more by following at What's Up With Hate. And we return to our American stories. Up next, a story on one of the most iconic board games ever made. We're talking about Monopoly. The most widely told story on how it came to be is that the game was invented by a former heater salesman named Charles Darrow, who created the board game amid the Great Depression and sold it to the Parker Brothers in the 1930s. But the truth is more complicated. Here to tell the real story of Monopoly is Mary Pilon, author of The Monopolist.

Take it away, Mary. How did I make it big? I know how. To play the game, I buy real estate, hotels, fancy cars, even railroads.

And I take chances. To make it big, uh-oh, you've got to play the game. I'm a Monopoly game. The story of Monopoly that I learned as a kid that was tucked in my family's board game box and millions of others was that this man, Charles Darrow, invented the game during, you know, kind of the darkest hours of the Great Depression. And then the story went that he was down on his luck. He was struggling to find work, as so many Americans were at that time. And he goes into his basement and he innovates and he creates this game to remind his family of better times, vacationing in Atlantic City. And, you know, he sells the game and it becomes this surprise hit, saving him and Parker Brothers from the brink of destruction. For decades, that's how the story was told.

The problem is it's not true. The true story actually starts with this woman, Lizzie McGee. She was born in the 1860s in Illinois. Her father, James McGee, was a really influential political thinker. He was one of the co-founders of the Republican Party.

He had traveled extensively with Abraham Lincoln during the Lincoln-Douglas debates. He was a very influential newspaper owner. And Lizzie McGee, you know, took after her father. She was very politically minded. She was really savvy. She wrote poetry.

She wrote short stories. And she was an impassioned follower of this man named Henry George. He was a huge deal in his time.

He wrote this massive bestseller called Progress and Poverty. And he was really interested in land and how we're taxing it, this thing called the single tax. And Lizzie McGee was really swept up in this and also was questioning how much money was being created in this country and how that was going to be divided. She's coming into the world of a very different generation than her father's. And a lot is happening in the country from the time that she's born. You're starting to see the rise of the monopolists. So she creates a game.

In 1904, she receives a patent for the landlord's game. And her goal is to really use this game to teach people about Henry George and single tax theory. And this game spreads, you know, among a who's who of left-wing America. And one of the groups that really loves the game are the Quakers in Atlantic City.

The Quakers, they're not big drinkers. They're not big gamblers. But they really love Monopoly. And they start having these Monopoly nights. And when people played Monopoly in the early days, they localized the board. So if you were playing in Boston, you'd have the Boston Commons.

If you were in Chicago, you would have The Loop on there. So the Quakers put Atlantic City properties on. And it's a version of this game that a man named Charles Todd plays. Charles Todd is from Philadelphia.

He learns the game in Atlantic City, so not very far away. And then he runs into an old friend. You know, he and his wife were walking and they run into the Darrows, Charles and Esther on the street. So they have a Monopoly night. And Charles Darrow learns the game from the Todds. And the next day something kind of weird happens, which is that Darrow reaches out to Charles Todd and he says, I love that Monopoly game so much.

When you have a moment, can you have your secretary type up the rules? And Todd thinks this is like a little weird because imagine if he went to someone's house and played like checkers or chess. I mean, at this point, Monopoly had been around for 30 years or so.

But nonetheless, Todd does it and he types up the rules and it's the Atlantic City version of the game. So it's that game that Charles Darrow sells to Parker Brothers, but he claims that he invented it. But it isn't long before they realize that they have a problem, which is that Charles Darrow did not invent the game. Nobody used to care who invented games. It's not like, oh, I'm going to buy a book because of the author or see a movie because of the actor or actress who's starring in it. But Darrow's story, this rags to riches story becomes like really woven with the marketing around Monopoly and the lore. But people start writing in and they're like, I played this game 10 years ago. I played this game 20 years ago. And one of the people who gets really angry about this is Lizzie McGee herself.

In the mid 1930s, she's living in Washington, D.C., and she calls up these reporters from The Washington Post and The Washington Evening Star. And she says, I got a patent for this in 1904 and 1924. This is my game. Parker Brothers realizes that they have to do damage control. George Parker himself comes back out of retirement.

He gets on a train, he goes to Washington, D.C., and they strike up this deal. And the deal is, you know what, Lizzie McGee, Parker Brothers tells her, we're going to publish three of your games, including The Landlord's Game. And at first, Lizzie McGee is elated because she thinks she's going to get credit for her contribution with one of the most famous board game companies out there.

But it's really sad. There's no evidence that Parker Brothers made any effort to acknowledge her as the inventor, pay her any residuals or publish her other games. One of the last traces we have of Lizzie McGee's life is the 1940 U.S. Census. And what I find interesting about that is, of all the different things that she did with her time, she lists her occupation as maker of games, so it was something she very much identified with, and her income as zero.

And that's kind of the last we hear about Lizzie McGee, and it isn't until decades later through this wild and crazy set of circumstances that her story is exhumed and we start to find out the truth of what happened. Monopoly's been bringing people together for almost 50 years. That's how long we've been wheeling and dealing together, building hotels together, and going to jail together.

Parker Brothers kind of fun brings people together. In the 1970s, there was a man named Ralph Anspach. He was living in the Bay Area, and he was an economics professor.

One of the big headlines then was around the OPEC oil cartels. He's one of the many people waiting in long lines for gas, and he's teaching his students and he has these two boys at home. The kids were playing Monopoly one night, and he's like, this teaches them bad things.

This teaches them, like, I don't think capitalism is about clobbering everybody else so that you can get ahead. So he decides to invent a game called Anti-Monopoly, which is a more, you know, in his eyes philosophically pleasing version of the game. He makes this game and he starts selling it, and it's this kind of counter-cultural hit, and it isn't long before he receives a cease and desist from Parker Brothers. And they say, you cannot make a game called Anti-Monopoly. We own Monopoly. And he thinks, this is crazy.

You can't have a monopoly on Monopoly. And that kicks off this 10-year-long legal battle that ultimately goes to the steps of the Supreme Court, and he becomes obsessed with researching the origins of the game. And in his work, he starts to find that there's a lot of holes in the story, and that Darrow didn't invent the game, that Lizzie McGee actually did, and he starts traveling across the country to interview people who hadn't played the games. And he becomes like this detective, you know, who pieces together the history of it all. And I wouldn't be here talking about this if not for Ralph.

He absolutely took it on full time. You know, this lawsuit strained his marriage, strained his family, strained him financially, but he really stuck to it. We now have evidence that Parker Brothers had received letters from original players, people who had been playing before Darrow. So the idea that they didn't know does not square with the facts. The other thing we see in Ralph's lawsuit is this exchange between Barton, who was the head of Parker Brothers at the time, and Darrow, where he asks Darrow, he's like, hey, you know, we're hearing that you didn't invent this game.

And Darrow waffles. Like, he just avoids the question. He refuses to give a full accounting. And then, you know, later, when Ralph's lawsuit comes up, Barton is deposed, and he testifies under oath, and he really dismisses Lizzie McGee. He kind of writes her off as a political quack, but the record shows that they knew that Darrow had not invented the game, but continued with the story. And even today, you know, Hasbro will not admit that Lizzie McGee invented the game.

It's interesting, you know, his case settled in the 1980s, and it was covered pretty widely at that time. Yet the Darrow myth really persisted. I think part of why is it's an amazing story. Who doesn't want to believe in a Cinderella story, that you can go into your basement and have a lightbulb moment and suddenly become rich?

That's as American as it gets, but it's just not true. And I think actually that the little engine that could have it is Lizzie McGee. You know, she, to me, is the innovator and the one who, against all odds, really persevered. But Lizzie McGee and Ralph Anspach never met. She died way before the lawsuit, and yet their fates become intertwined because Lizzie McGee needs Ralph as this advocate to tell her story. And Ralph Anspach needs to find the Lizzie McGee story to piece together the origins of the case. And in the Supreme Court, they uphold a lot of historical research. In the end, he won his right to sell his anti-monopoly games and won the right to talk about the game's origins, including Lizzie McGee's history, openly. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Gavin Leistrow. And by the way, thanks to intellectual property rights, it's harder and harder to steal ideas.

It can still happen, no doubt. But my goodness, only in America did we really dig down and drill deep on the idea of patent and IP rights so that lone inventor could get the reward, could go to court, and win. The story of how Monopoly came to be.

The real story, here on Our American Stories. Vyom has your back. Stop trusting amateurs. Go to vyom.com for a personalized gut professional now. Call starstargut to get $110 off any test. That's starstar488 to receive a link to the offer.

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