Lies, theft, and cover-up: the history of Monopoly you've never heard

Monopoly is one of the best-selling board games of all time. It heralds free market economics and celebrates the American dream. That's a far cry from the original intent. This week on our series Hidden Histories, we go back in time to reveal the swindling and cover ups that robbed Monopoly's inventor of her fair share and turned her scathing critique of capitalism into her worst nightmare. (This episode originally aired in 2022) Guests: Mary Pilon, author of The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Data IQ Agent Management. Most enterprises can't count their AI agents, let alone manage them. Data IQ Agent Management lets you do both from a single view. Visit dataiq.com to learn more.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Hey there. This summer break on Throughline, we're bringing you a collection of hidden histories that we hope will make you rethink how the world works. Like this story about Monopoly, the all-American board game that's urged us to own it all, turning its original message on its head. Here it is.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  My family played at Christmas Eve. That was our tradition growing up.

• 0:52Speaker 03

  Just visiting. No, no. Go to jail.

• 0:55Speaker 02

  I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, so it was cold and rainy. We had a lot of time to stay inside and play games. And nostalgia, you know, my grandmother, my parents, I played with my brother.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  You know, it was one of the rare things that really brought all the generations of my family together. And I remember as a kid, it's really exciting. I get to trade property. I get to spend money. I get to have power. I'm the youngest in my family, so the idea that I had even remotely equal footing was really exciting.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  This is Mary Pilon. She's a journalist who writes about sports and business.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  But Monopoly was not on my list at all. Who would think to question Monopoly?

• 1:36Speaker 02

  OK, the name of the game is Monopoly. Do you all know how to play the game?

• 1:39Speaker 01

  No. No.

• 1:40Speaker 04

  What?

• 1:42Speaker 02

  I think that we should review the game.

• 1:44Speaker 04

  I know the game, don't worry.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  I tried playing with my nephews recently.

• 1:47Speaker 04

  Hello, I'm Ali. I'm Zaid. I'm Taha.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  And they had a lot of questions.

• 1:53Speaker 04

  Wait, we can steal? What do they mean by mortgage?

• 1:55Speaker 02

  No, no, no, you can't steal.

• 1:56Speaker 04

  Well, how much is the rent?

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Questions that feel much bigger than a board game.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  In 2009, I was working at the Wall Street Journal.

• 2:06Speaker 05

  It was the Great Recession, the worst economic collapse since 1929.

• 2:12Speaker 06

  We didn't see it coming. I don't know who did. Dow plunged to a record low yesterday, reaching 777 points. And that is the largest single-day point loss ever.

• 2:21Speaker 07

  Nearly $2 trillion tax dollars have been shoveled into the hole that Wall Street dug, and people wonder, where's the bottom?

• 2:29Speaker 02

  And people are drawing a lot of comparisons between the economy then and the Great Depression.

• 2:34Speaker 08

  I've been effectively unemployed for over a year.

• 2:36Speaker 03

  I'm on the line, and I'm putting applications in resumes, and I'm not getting hired.

• 2:40Speaker 09

  And I've been in that house since 1982. I don't want to move.

• 2:44Speaker 08

  I've had to resort to taking my social security. The 401K drop was tremendous.

• 2:50Speaker 09

  One was 80, $88,000, and then it went down to like 50.

• 2:55Speaker 10

  And that's where the savings was.

• 2:56Speaker 09

  I'll have to work for the rest of my life.

• 3:03Speaker 05

  While writing an article about the recession, Mary Pilon was planning to mention Monopoly in passing, like...

• 3:09Speaker 02

  Blah, blah, blah. Everybody knows Monopoly was invented during the Great Depression.

• 3:13Speaker 05

  For a long time, the origin story was written right at the top of the game's rulebook. A man named Charles Darrow was unemployed and came up with the game to pass the time. In 1934, he brought Monopoly to the game company Parker Brothers, hoping to make some money off of it.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  I was looking around online, and I know this may shock people, but I wasn't finding accurate information on the internet. Things weren't adding up. There were inconsistencies in the dates, and I felt like an idiot. You know, at the paper, we were covering derivatives and securitization and all these like kind of complex, often arcane things, and I couldn't get a sentence about a board game right. So I, you know, tried to make some calls, and on a whim, reached out to a man named Ralph Anspach.

• 3:55Speaker 05

  Ralph Anspach had been involved in a trademark lawsuit back in the 1970s over a board game he invented called Antimonopoly. Mary thought he might know something about Monopoly that she didn't.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  And I reached out to him, and I said, hey, I know this sounds crazy. I'm a reporter at the Journal. I'm just trying to find out the truth about Monopoly. And he immediately got back to me, and he was like, oh, the whole story, it's all, it's all a lie.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  So...

• 4:24Speaker 02

  Why, why are we still sitting here talking about Monopoly?

• 4:27Speaker 01

  Why are we?

• 4:28Speaker 02

  We have to look at board games as cultural artifacts, the same way we look at songs, books, movies. They represent the time periods that they're in.

• 4:37Speaker 05

  Monopoly reflects some of the enduring inequities in American society and the uglier parts of our history, from segregation and redlining to capitalism run rampant. Yet it's also built on this powerful American lore, the idea that anyone with just a little bit of cash can rise from rags to riches in this country.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  And people keep buying it, even during periods where that's obviously not true. Sales actually went up during the pandemic, and Monopoly remains one of the bestselling board games in history. So what does that say about the aspirations, desires, and myths we as a country have held on to for more than a century?

• 5:19Speaker 01

  I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.

• 5:21Speaker 05

  I'm Ramtin Arablouei.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Coming up, how a critique of capitalism grew from a seed of an idea in a rebellious young woman's mind into a game legendary for its celebration of wealth, no matter the cost.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  Depending on how you look at it, Monopoly is either the American dream or the American nightmare.

• 5:47Speaker 11

  Hi, this is Nurya de las Casas from Newton, Massachusetts, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 5:55Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 5:59Speaker 12

  This message comes from Angie. When it comes to home projects, it matters who you hire. Angie has been helping homeowners find skilled pros to get their home projects done well for over 30 years. Angie's nationwide network has experts in everything, from landscaping to roofing and more. Read verified reviews, see photos of past work, and request and compare quotes to find your best price, all in one place. Download the free Angie app today or visit angie.com. That's A-N-G-I dot com. This message comes from BetterHelp. BetterHelp is in-network with more than 125 health plans, with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. Don't have eligible insurance?

• 6:44Speaker 12

  You can still get 10% off your first month. Visit betterhelp.com/NPR to explore your payment options. That's better H E L P dot com slash NPR.

• 6:56Speaker 13

  In a midterm election, it's hard to keep track of all those small, down-ballot races, so some voters are using AI chatbots to figure out who to support. Sometimes if you push back to hallucinations, the chatbot will confess that it made something up, but in other cases, you know, it will double down. What you should know about using AI for election research. Listen now on the NPR Politics Podcast.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Part one.

• 7:26Speaker 09

  How do you steal?

• 7:38Speaker 01

  It's 1879 in a small town in Illinois where 13-year-old Lizzie McGee is curled up next to the fire with a book her father gave her.

• 7:47Speaker 14

  Progress and Poverty by Henry George.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Lizzie had to stop going to school. Her family was struggling, never having recovered from the recession six years earlier. And as she dives into this book, the world begins to make a little more sense to her.

• 8:04Speaker 14

  The great cause of inequality in the distribution of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land. The ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the social, the political, and consequentially, the intellectual and moral condition of people.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  She's there, but not really there. The words transport her.

• 8:29Speaker 15

  It's the central fact from which spring industrial, social, and political difficulties that perplex the world and with which statesmanship and philanthropy and education...

• 8:39Speaker 01

  She imagines herself sitting in the audience as the author. Henry George addresses the crowd.

• 8:46Speaker 15

  It is the riddle which the Sphinx of fate puts to our civilization and which not to answer is to be destroyed. So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury, and make sharper the contrast between the house of have and the house of want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.

• 9:20Speaker 05

  Henry George is pretty much the equivalent of a rock star.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  He was huge in his lifetime.

• 9:26Speaker 05

  He'd started forming his ideas about the pitfalls of extreme wealth while traveling around the world to places like Australia and India.

• 9:35Speaker 15

  What is the current explanation of the hard times? Overproduction. There are so many clothes that men must go ragged, so much coal that in the bitter winters, people have to shiver, such overfilled granaries that people actually die by starvation. Want due to overproduction? Was a greater absurdity ever uttered? How can there be overproduction till all have enough?

• 9:58Speaker 02

  It's really important to understand that in the United States, after the Civil War at this time, there was an incredible amount of wealth being created that hadn't been seen in this country anymore. And you had a very, you had a handful of people who were controlling it.

• 10:11Speaker 15

  It is not overproduction. It is unjust distribution.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  And George is asking questions about, all this money is now coming in. Our country was ripped apart, and now it's, you know, we're rebuilding. And how does, how is it distributed? And what is the government's role in, you know, taking a cut? Or, you know, how does that, how does that pan out?

• 10:34Speaker 05

  A growing number of Americans were fed up with the monopolies of the so-called Gilded Age: railroads, sugar, oil, and the growing riches of the elite few: the Vanderbilts, Carnegie's, and Rockefellers.

• 10:46Speaker 16

  The vicious, the ignorant, and the millionaires.

• 10:51Speaker 05

  Lizzie's dad, James McGee, a staunch progressive who traveled with Abraham Lincoln during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, strongly backed the ideas of Henry George.

• 11:01Speaker 16

  We cannot shut our eyes to the fact that all over the country, there is a feeling of restlessness and discontent among working men on account of their supposed meager pay compared with the wealth which they produce.

• 11:15Speaker 05

  He understood that wealth and owning land were deeply connected. Whoever owned the land made the profits and maintained all the power. And he made sure that his daughter, Lizzie, knew it too, not just by giving her books, but by encouraging her to live a life that transcended the societal norms of the time.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  And she did.

• 11:35Speaker 14

  I have often been called a chip off the old block, which I consider quite a compliment, for I am proud of my father for being the kind of an old block that he is.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  She's involved in theater. She's writing poetry. She's writing stories. And she was an impassioned advocate for women's suffrage. So at a time when women couldn't vote, when it was dangerous for women to assert themselves in the public realm, here she is engaging a political discourse. And so she's out there. I mean, that was not a thing that women were, you know, encouraged to be doing at the time.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Professionally, she got a job as a scenographer. She dabbled in engineering and invented a whole new tool for scenography, which she went and got patented under her name.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  So she was absolutely a trailblazer.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Throughout all her adventures, Lizzie kept going back to the ideas of Henry George, to the book her father gave her all those years ago. She became friends with Henry George's son and became the secretary of the Women's Single Tax Club of Washington, a club dedicated to advancing George's central theory on how to solve inequality.

• 12:44Speaker 15

  As I say, the man that owns the land is the master of those who must live on it.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  So the single tax theory, the general idea, was that you had a land value tax, also known as a single tax. And the general idea is to tax land and only land. So then that shifts the tax burden to wealthy landlords. Anybody who lives in New York or Los Angeles or a high-rent neighborhood, I'm sure, is kind of nodding, nodding their head at that.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Nodding head.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  And that message really resonated with Americans in the late 1800s because, you know, this was at a time when poverty and squalor are very much on display in urban centers. And that's part of why I think he had such a big audience. And they sometimes called themselves the anti-monopolists. Those were people who wanted to break apart monopolies, break apart these, you know, concentrations of power, whether it's railroads, banking, steel. And this continues on and on.

• 13:45Speaker 15

  The monopoly of the land gone, there need be no fear of large fortunes. For when everyone gets what he fairly earns, no one can get more than he fairly earns. How many men are there who fairly earn a million dollars?

• 14:00Speaker 02

  It's about income inequality. It's about how do we tax people? How are the wealthy treated? What are we doing for those who are in poverty?

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Henry George died in 1897, but his followers made sure his ideas would live on. People both in the US and as far away as Australia were considering the single tax theory. And as for Lizzie McGee, she turned to the latest fad to get his message across:

• 14:29Speaker 01

  board games.

• 14:38Speaker 05

  Around this time, Americans were getting really into board games, like The Game of Life.

• 14:45Speaker 05

  Yes, The Game of Life that's still around today, but not quite the same.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  The Game of Life had been around for a while at that point. That was a game that was published by Milton Bradley. And The Game of Life is, the original version, is very dark. It's, it's very much about teaching kids about the morality of the world.

• 15:16Speaker 05

  Mary writes that the board had an intemperance space that led to poverty, a government contract space that led to wealth, and a gambling space that led to ruin.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  The game these days has almost none of that, but it still imparts a particular message of what one should expect out of life: a car, a job, a marriage, kids, and a house.

• 15:39Speaker 05

  With the single tax theory in mind, Lizzie McGee invented what she called "The Landlord's Game," the very first version of Monopoly.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  She gets her patent for The Landlord's Game, which is Monopoly, in 1904. Fewer than 1% of patents the United States were granted towards women.

• 16:00Speaker 05

  But she's Lizzie McGee, so she got approved.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  And she creates The Landlord's Game as a teaching tool, because it's one thing to read about these ideas, and she obviously was writing and very involved in that too. But a game is a really wonderful way to teach someone something.

• 16:15Speaker 14

  They learn that the quickest way to accumulate wealth and gain power is to get all the land they can in the best localities and hold on to it. 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.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  When you look at the 1904 Landlord's Game patent, it's striking how similar it is to what we know as Monopoly today. You've got the railroads. Obviously, you don't have cars quite the same way, so we don't have free parking, but you have park, which again, parks and land is a huge deal for Georges. And you have properties, and you go around and around.

• 16:53Speaker 14

  The object of the game is to obtain as much wealth or money as possible. When a player stops upon a lot owned by another player, he must pay the rent to the owner. The player who has the largest sum total is the winner.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  But there is one major difference from the Monopoly game we all know and play today.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  When Lizzie creates the game, she makes two rule sets.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  She makes a monopolist rule set and an anti-monopolist rule set.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  The anti-monopolist version rewarded every player when wealth was created, all for one, one for all kind of thing, while the monopolist set rewarded individual players who created monopolies to crush opponents.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  And the monopolist rule set is the version that ends up kind of taking hold among progressives. It was played by a who's who of left-wing America. It was played at several Ivy League schools. It was played by Scott Neering, who's a famous socialist professor at Wharton. And it was played by Upton Sinclair himself, who obviously, you know, The Jungle is very much a, you know, kind of the quintessential muckraking critique of a lot of what, what is going on in the country at the time.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  It spread like wildfire, and the games started to change depending on where you played.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  People localized the boards and made them their own. So if you were playing in Boston, you would have the Commons on there. If you were playing in New York, you would have Broadway. If you were in Chicago, you would have the Loop. So she is very much about, you know, creating a game that has kind of these core ingredients, these core rules and instructions, but also encourages people to, you know, in terms of the tokens, use what you have around the house, make the game your own. And that's pretty interesting, right? And that's very different than what we kind of think of as games now, which is like you go to a mass market, a big box retailer, where you buy it online, and they all come the same. She, you know, games at that time, mass manufacturing wasn't quite the same as it is now. So she also kind of cooks into this idea of making it your own.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  With people inventing their own hometown versions of the game, cash wasn't exactly pouring into Lizzie's bank account. She wasn't making money off the patent, and she wasn't getting known. But the game sure was, being played and reinterpreted everywhere.

• 19:02Speaker 17

  We are flying over a well-known eastern city that is remarkable because manufacturing is almost nonexistent, a city whose principal business is the entertainment of millions, Atlantic City, often called the vacation capital of the nation.

• 19:26Speaker 05

  In the 1930s, Atlantic City was the place for summer vacation. It was known for its nightlife. At the same time, it was home to a sizable Quaker community, who were maybe not so into all the bikes, but were really into Monopoly. Their game was gripping, fun, and a social event that drew friends together.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  And the Quakers taking on the game is really interesting because anything with dice was considered to be very taboo. And it's funny to think about Monopoly being scandalous, but back then, for the Quakers, it would have been.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Can you explain a little bit more about like, why the dice would have been taboo, like, from that Christian perspective?

• 20:04Speaker 02

  So dice, games with dice, were often considered to be taboo because they were associated with gambling, and luck, and chance, and betting. And that was considered to be very seedy and associated with a lot of other illicit activities. There was accounts where Quakers would hide their boards when their parents were coming over, you know, to make sure nobody saw that they were playing a game with dice, you know?

• 20:27Speaker 02

  One of the Quakers in Atlantic City has a lot of knowledge of real estate, so he puts fixed prices on the board with Atlantic City properties to kind of denote, you know, what the values were. And that also becomes an interesting artifact of how segregated Atlantic City was at the time, particularly for black residents, that there were segregated beaches, that they were working at hotels, that they were not allowed to eat at or patronize themselves. And so that also becomes this interesting artifact.

• 20:59Speaker 05

  A Quaker family based in Atlantic City began to share and make copies of their homemade board based on their neighborhood, with friends and even local hotels. It was spreading, and there were even spinoffs.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  There's a man named Rudy Copeland in Texas, and he sells a game called Inflation. There's a man named Dan Lehman, and he sells a game called Finance.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  And one of the people who gets exposed to the game is a man named Charles Darrow.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Charles Darrow was a self-described practical engineer from Philadelphia, a city not far from Atlantic City.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  A lot of people were coming and going from Atlantic City and Philadelphia at the time.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  One day, Darrow's wife Esther runs into her old friend, Charles Todd. They'd gone to Quaker school together, but had lost touch. They make plans to have dinner with their spouses, really fun night. And after dinner, Charles Todd suggests they come to his house sometime.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  Hey, why don't you come over? We'll have a Monopoly night. So they come over, they play the game. And then later, Darrow asks Todd, hey, that game was really fun. Can you type up the rules for me?

• 22:02Speaker 05

  When we come back, Charles Darrow takes the game and runs.

• 22:22Speaker 11

  Hi, this is Emily Smalldown from Concrete, Washington, and Longhearing Farm. Thank you so much for the show. It has kept me company through many long hours of fieldwork.

• 22:35Speaker 05

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Angie. Angie has been helping homeowners find skilled pros to get their home projects done well for over 30 years. For everything, from minor repairs to major remodels, find reviews, pricing, and booking at Angie.com or on the Angie app.

• 22:57Speaker 18

  This week on Consider This, an investigation into widespread complaints about sales tactics at mall skincare kiosks led NPR to a company in California.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Am I being recorded? Yeah. OK, delete that, and we're not interviewing. If you need anything, you can contact our legal department.

• 23:12Speaker 18

  We investigate a group that supplies mall skincare stores that left customers with thousands of dollars in bills. Listen now on Consider This from NPR.

• 23:22Speaker 19

  Midlife brings a lot of changes. Your Turn with Alison Aubrey is a new podcast to help you navigate the twists and turns. From health and relationships to creativity and purpose, we can help steer your next chapter with Your Turn with Alison Aubrey. Find it on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 23:47Speaker 09

  Part Two. Buy, Sell, Dream and Scheme.

• 23:53Speaker 05

  We left off with Charles Darrow, learning to play Monopoly with Charles Todd, who learned in Atlantic City. After that game, Darrow asks Todd to type up the rules.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  And Todd thinks this is really weird because at this point, the game's been around for 30 years or so.

• 24:07Speaker 05

  But he does it anyway.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Darrow then takes those rules and starts redesigning the board. He has a cartoonist friend help him with illustrations.

• 24:16Speaker 05

  He starts marketing it a little bit.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  And eventually, he pitches the game to big game companies Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  And he claims that he invented it.

• 24:26Speaker 05

  Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers weren't impressed and turned him down. Parker Brothers wrote back.

• 24:32Speaker 20

  Dear Mr. Darrow, our new games committee has carefully considered the game which you so kindly sent in to us for examination. While the game, no doubt, contains considerable merit, we do not feel that it is down to our line.

• 24:45Speaker 05

  They basically thought it was too complicated. But a few months later, they came back and said, wait, we do want it. And maybe they did, or maybe they needed it.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  Parker Brothers is a company that is on the brink of destruction, like many companies. There had just been a handover. George Parker hands over the reins to his son-in-law, Robert Barton. And they need a hit, and they need it fast. And so they start selling Monopoly, and they're just as surprised as anybody that this game sells like gangbusters.

• 25:17Speaker 21

  Monopoly, the great financial game, is sweeping the country because it appeals to every American's love of bargain and business dealing. Give a Monopoly party, and guests will want to play all night.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  And something really interesting happens then, too, which is that Charles Darrow becomes part of the marketing of the game.

• 25:36Speaker 22

  At the time my brainchild was born, I was far more thoroughly unemployed than I even like to imagine now. Not only unemployed from a financial point of view, but a morale point of view. I simply had to have something to do.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  Nobody used to care who invented games, right? It's not like, oh, I'm gonna buy a book because it's by a certain author, or see a movie because it has a certain star. But Darrow's Cinderella story, this fabricated notion that he goes into his basement, he's unemployed, trying to support his family, and innovates. It has this Eureka Lightbulb moment and creates this massive bestseller of a game. That is such a romantic story, even if it's not true. So the Darrow story captivates the country, as does the game.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  In some ways, it was the story the country needed at that time.

• 26:23Speaker 17

  The richest country in the world began a bitter journey downhill. The stock market buckled and crashed, and the nation's economy plummeted into the depression.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Jobs were scarce, poverty was rampant, and hope was hard to come by.

• 26:37Speaker 17

  By 1932, nearly one man out of four was unemployed.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  But here was this guy and this game keeping the so-called American dream alive.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  Charles Darrow does all these interviews, all these photo shoots, where, you know, he's telling this Cinderella story.

• 26:57Speaker 09

  And after all, a dream is a wish your heart makes.

• 27:06Speaker 05

  Inventor Charles Darrow, before he began to monopolize the field of after-dinner entertainment, was a prosperous engineer.

• 27:17Speaker 05

  When he lost his job and his money in 1930, he got along by doing odd jobs, like mending furniture.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  And they start to put it in the game itself. It's tucked in. It was tucked in the game I played.

• 27:43Speaker 20

  It was 1934, the height of the Great Depression, when Charles B. Darrow of Germantown, Pennsylvania, showed what he called the Monopoly game to the executives at Parker Brothers.

• 27:54Speaker 02

  And becomes part of the romance of the story, too.

• 27:57Speaker 20

  In its first year, 1935, the Monopoly game was the best-selling game in America. The rest, as they say, is history.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  If you think about the news industry, when you get an error and it gets picked up everywhere, it's very hard to course correct that, right? So especially back then, this is obviously way, way before the internet. So the story is all over the place. And Lizzie McGee catches wind of it. And she does not take this quietly. She calls up reporters with The Washington Evening Star and The Washington Post, and she does these interviews where she is holding up her games. She says, I have patents. I made this game.

• 28:33Speaker 14

  I conceived of the game of landlord to interest people in the single-tax plan of the great economist Henry George.

• 28:41Speaker 05

  The Washington Evening Star, January 28, 1936.

• 28:45Speaker 12

  Very likely, your grandma and your grandpa played Monopoly. Truth to tell, Mrs. Elizabeth McGee Phillips, up 2309 North Curtis Road, Clarendon, Virginia.

• 28:57Speaker 23

  Then Lizzie J. McGee of Brentwood, Maryland, took out a patent on the game on January 5th, 1904, a good three decades ago.

• 29:09Speaker 05

  Parker Brothers catches wind of Lizzie's noise. They get in touch and offer her $500 for the patent to the landlord's game, which is roughly 10 grand today. George Parker is on the verge of retirement, but to make this deal, he pays Lizzie a personal visit.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  And she's excited at first because she thinks, wow, my ideas, my idea, Henry George is long dead, but like, my game and my invention is going to be out there. And Parker Brothers is going to publish it. This is amazing.

• 29:39Speaker 05

  Two days after the agreement was signed, Lizzie sent a note to Parker Brothers.

• 29:44Speaker 14

  Farewell, my beloved brainchild. I regretfully part with you, but I am giving you to another who will be able to do more for you than I have done. I shall do all I can to add to your success and fame, which will, in some measure, add to my own. I charge you do not swerve from your high purpose and ultimate mission. Remember, the world expects much from you.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  Um, but there's no evidence they acknowledged her really as the inventor at all.

• 30:13Speaker 20

  She was a rabid Henry George, single tax advocate, a real evangelist, and these people never change.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  They published these other two games of hers and, but there's no evidence they put any marketing muscle behind them. And the Darrow story has taken hold. It is all over the place.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Which is good and bad for Darrow. Because people who had been playing the game for decades at this point see this story being spun about this new game called Monopoly, invented by Charles Darrow, and they're like, huh?

• 30:48Speaker 02

  People start to write in to Parker Brothers and they're like, this guy didn't invent the game.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Even Charles Todd, the person who taught Darrow how to play and wrote down the rules for him, wrote to Parker Brothers in disgust at Darrow's charade.

• 31:00Speaker 24

  Darrow didn't have anything to do with originating the game. He stole it.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  But his letter went unanswered. Parker Brothers doubled down on Darrow's Cinderella story.

• 31:12Speaker 05

  As for Lizzie McGee.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  Of all the hats she wore, of all the things that she did, she was a receptionist, she was a writer, she was a stenographer. She lists her occupation as maker of games and her income is zero. She dies in 1948 with this like itty bitty little obituary that you have to really look for.

• 31:29Speaker 05

  There wasn't a single mention of Monopoly in her obituary.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  And Charles Darrow gets like the New York Times treatment, hailing him as the inventor when he passes, you know, decades later.

• 31:40Speaker 15

  Charles D. Darrow, who became a millionaire by inventing the game Monopoly, died at his Bucks County, Pennsylvania home yesterday at the age of 78.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  So they have very, very different fates as a result of what happens in the 1930s.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  After World War II, you know, Monopoly has another surge because everybody comes home and wants a refrigerator and a big car and a house and a game of Monopoly. The GI Bill puts a lot of people into school. This is true of my grandparents. You know, they, my grandpa came back from World War II. He got married. They had four kids, two years apart. You live in your house, you have your car. And so there's this deep desire for quote unquote normalcy, deep desire for, uh, you know, kind of traditional American living.

• 32:51Speaker 25

  We live a decent kind of life.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  Especially kind of a white mainstream narrative. The woman stays at home.

• 32:57Speaker 25

  Even the washing didn't break a woman's back. Machines can take it.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  Kids go to school, you know, the dad gets a job. You know, with my, with my father or grandfather, it was, you know, selling pharmaceutical stuff like that. That there was this big desire to just like hunker down on Ameri, you know, American stability.

• 33:15Speaker 25

  City and school and land in active partnership provide the raw materials for life and growth, ready to build and meet a many-sided world.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  And Monopoly is great for that, right? It's, Parker Brothers is really well positioned to kind of sell the game as part of this, um, you know, apple pie image that is so popular at the time.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Monopoly has become a poet's symbol of the US and everything it stands for. There's a story about the game being smuggled past the Berlin Wall. Another one about how Monopoly helped prisoners of war escape German POW camps. Allied forces would send games of Monopoly as care packages, but the care packages were actually escape kits filled with compasses, money and maps, all hidden inside the games.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  It was literally seen as something that would save people or save people's lives.

• 34:24Speaker 02

  So Monopoly, after World War II, becomes an even more potent symbol of Americana. So there's kind of this fantasy element baked into it. And obviously, you know, that's exported.

• 34:39Speaker 25

  Lighting up a dark and foggy world. That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  I mean, keep in mind that just throughout this whole history, no one expected Monopoly to be a hit. Hits in the board game industry are extremely rare and no one expected it to be a multi-generational hit, a thing that would, you know, every 10 or 15 years like that. Like, that's insanely unusual. So by this point, Parker Brothers has a lot to gain by pumping Monopoly as a brand and as a story, which is money. They, you know, it becomes kind of their cornerstone of their games catalog and still is a huge title for Hasbro, which acquired Parker Brothers' Milton Bradley, you know, much, much later. So again, there's a lot of vested interest in Monopoly at this point.

• 35:38Speaker 05

  Which keeps the Charles Darrow myth alive and well into the 50s and 60s.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  I think the Darrow myth has a lot of resilience baked into it. Like, one of the themes of that story is if you work hard, you will, you'll get rich, you'll innovate, you'll make something that will heal the world and heal yourself.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  The true story also has these really incredible ingredients of resilience and innovation and, um, and yet the myth, you know, the myth is what ends up flying.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Coming up. Mary calls a man who brings the myth back down to earth.

• 36:23Speaker 02

  He was like, oh, I've waited 40 years for someone to ask me about this.

• 36:37Speaker 26

  This is Brendan Barlow from Kansas City, Missouri, and you're listening to Throughline on NPR.

• 36:45Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 36:49Speaker 12

  This message comes from Angie. When it comes to home projects, it matters who you hire. Angie has been helping homeowners find skilled pros to get their home projects done well for over 30 years. Angie's nationwide network has experts in everything, from landscaping to roofing and more. Read verified reviews, see photos of past work and request and compare quotes to find your best price, all in one place. Download the free Angie app today or visit Angie.com. That's A-N-G-I dot com.

• 37:22Speaker 27

  This week on NPR's Newsmakers, Hassan Piker. He's a leading voice of what he calls the insurgent left, although he denies being a leader at all.

• 37:31Speaker 28

  I've never said I'm a kingmaker. The media keep saying this, but I don't think there can be a real kingmaker in socialist politics. This is mass politics.

• 37:39Speaker 27

  Hassan Piker talks with Leila Fadl this week on NPR's Newsmakers. You can watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

• 37:47Speaker 19

  Midlife brings a lot of changes. Your Turn with Alison Aubrey is a new podcast to help you navigate the twists and turns. From health and relationships to creativity and purpose, we can help steer your next chapter with Your Turn with Alison Aubrey. Find it on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  Support comes from NPR sponsor AARP.

• 38:10Speaker 00

  Part three. How to win.

• 38:28Speaker 02

  He was living in this tiny little apartment. And I remember walking in and he just had boxes and boxes of depositions, photographs of early board games, his own notes from the case.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  During the Great Recession, Mary Pilon flew to San Francisco to meet an econ professor named Ralph Anspach, who she'd called up on a whim. She had to know more about this monopoly mystery he'd held on to for nearly four decades.

• 38:53Speaker 02

  So Ralph is very much proudly kind of an eccentric professor. He, you know, like has this wavy hair that's kind of all over the place.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Piercing blue eyes.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  The buttons on his shirt don't line up. And, you know, there's papers all over the place and that's who he is.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  As Mary spent more time with Ralph, talking to him and sifting through all those boxes, she began to piece together his story like a movie reel, playing out scene by scene.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  Born in 1926 in the free German mini-state of Danzig,

• 39:31Speaker 02

  under the shadow of Adolf Hitler's rising Nazi state.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  The son of a Jewish banker and a homemaker.

• 39:38Speaker 17

  Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  1938, New York City, became a US citizen.

• 39:45Speaker 17

  I pledge allegiance.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  Stationed in the Philippines during World War II.

• 39:50Speaker 17

  The troops blast their way through.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  Marched against the Vietnam War.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  And finally, she arrived at the moment when his path collided with Lizzie McGee's. Ralph died earlier this year, but here's the story he told Mary.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  Ralph Anspach slammed his car door shut. Finally, he was home. It had been another excruciating commute from his classroom in San Francisco to where he lived with his family in Berkeley. He stomped up the steps of his ramshackle, yet oddly majestic Victorian house, mumbling under his breath. The rush hour traffic between San Francisco and Berkeley had always been bad, but now he and the other commuters had to contend with mile-long stretches of cars backed up at exits in search of gas.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  It was 1973 and a national oil crisis had begun.

• 40:56Speaker 10

  The Middle East war produced developments all over the world today. The oil-producing countries of the Arab world decided to use their oil as a political weapon.

• 41:06Speaker 02

  The organization of the petroleum exporting countries, OPEC, led by its Arab members, had jacked up the prices of world oil, putting an end to decades of cheap energy.

• 41:15Speaker 10

  They will reduce oil production by 5% a month until the Israelis withdraw from occupied territories.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  US government price controls had gone into effect along with rationing systems. On certain days, gas sales were limited to those with license plates ending in odd numbers, and on other days, to those with plates ending in even numbers.

• 41:35Speaker 29

  People can no longer afford to run cars that do 12 miles to the gallon. Petrol stations can no longer afford to fill up cars whose tanks take 20 gallons. The American automobile, for so long the symbol of America's wealth and extravagance, is dying.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  Ralph kicked at the floorboard. "This is what happens when a monopoly has control," he thought. Pulling open his front door, Ralph called out hello to his wife, Ruth, and two sons, Mark, aged 12, and William, aged 7. He was looking forward to eating a simple dinner with his family and perhaps playing a board game with them afterward. That evening after dinner, Ralph's son suggested playing Monopoly and eagerly pulled out the familiar, long, white box out of the closet.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  As the boys set up the board and counted out the money, Ralph recalled playing his first game of Monopoly in Czechoslovakia in 1937. Monopoly had given Ralph one of his first glimpses of America, then still a far-off land that lived only in atlases and on globes, light years removed from grim Europe.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  An evening filled with much laughter, shouting, and cutthroat deal-making ensued. Happily, Ralph, Ruth, Mark, and William maneuvered their metal trinkets around the board, passed Run Down Baltic Avenue, busy St. Charles Place, and Elite Boardwalk.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  They passed go, they collected $200. They went straight to jail, they drew chance and community chess cards. William, the younger of the two Anspach boys, won the game. Little did Ralph know that this particular evening, as ordinary as it was, was about to change his life.

• 43:19Speaker 05

  The next morning, after playing and losing Monopoly, Ralph couldn't stop thinking about how real-world monopolies were taking over and, in his opinion, destroying the country. But Ralph's son, the son who had won the game the night before, was confused. He was like, wait, we had so much fun playing and I had a lot of fun winning, so are monopolies really all that bad? And for days after, his son's question haunted him. The way Ralph saw it, this seemingly harmless board game had created an alternate reality where the word monopoly was this nostalgic, fuzzy, family-friendly thing, rather than the destructive force he believed it to be. So he decided he needed to set the record straight

• 44:02Speaker 05

  by creating another board game, of course.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  He makes a game called Anti-Monopoly. And he starts to sell it, and it kind of finds an audience.

• 44:12Speaker 05

  The orders poured in, and before long, Parker Brothers came knocking.

• 44:19Speaker 20

  Dear Mr. Anspach, as attorneys for Parker Brothers of Salem, Massachusetts...

• 44:25Speaker 02

  He receives a cease and desist from Parker Brothers that says, "You have to stop making this game."

• 44:30Speaker 20

  In our opinion, your use of the term "anti-monopoly" on game equipment infringes on our client's trademark rights.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  And he says, "Wait a minute. You're claiming you have a monopoly, a monopoly? My game is called Anti-Monopoly. This doesn't make sense." And so he starts researching the origins of the case and starts to find Lizzie McGee's patents.

• 44:53Speaker 14

  Be it known that I, Lizzie J. McGee, a citizen of the United States residing at Brentwood in the county of Prince George and state of Maryland, have invented certain...

• 45:04Speaker 01

  Ralph had never heard of Lizzie McGee. After all, Parker Brothers said Charles Darrow started it during the Great Depression. But this patent was from 1904. And it seemed that Lizzie had not only dreamed up Monopoly, but Anti-Monopoly too. So why had she been erased from the story? That's what Ralph set out to figure out.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  And he starts to find these original players, people who played the game before, 1935. He goes all over the country and he finds Dan Lehman. And he gets a picture of him holding up his finance board. He finds the Todds, the couple that taught Darrow the game. He finds these Quaker players who modified the board, including the realtor who put the prices on it. And he's able to stitch together the origins of the game and what really happened. And he becomes obsessed with telling what he calls "the monopoly lie."

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Ralph took Parker Brothers to court.

• 45:59Speaker 02

  And he even has a deposition with Robert Barton, who's an older gentleman at this point. And he was the president of Parker Brothers and he oversaw the whole monopoly deal. And that case goes on for years and years and years.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  He was hoping to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  And ultimately, the Supreme Court refuses to hear his case.

• 46:24Speaker 09

  The game Monopoly has come to life at McDonald's.

• 46:27Speaker 05

  Around this time, Monopoly was poised to go even bigger with some help from another titan of industry.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  Sometimes we think of these brands, including Monopoly, as being kind of almost religious, like they have this higher purpose. But if your job is to sell games, you want to advertise, you want to market, and you want to market to people in a way that they're going to really... as many people as possible. And so how better to do that than partner with McDonald's, which is one of the most ubiquitous brands in the world?

• 47:01Speaker 16

  The game Monopoly is back at McDonald's.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  And, oh, golly, this is the year to play. So it's kind of a marriage made in heaven, right? McDonald's can play off of the nostalgia for Monopoly and the fun of games and drum up, you know, interest in getting, you know, matching pieces and such. And it's a win for Monopoly because now you're getting advertising in one of the most widely spread franchises in the world. So I think it was mutually beneficial. Obviously, time has shown that that's definitely the case.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  As Mary sat in Ralph's apartment, learning about all of this in the year 2009, she was floored by how much the things in these boxes from decades earlier, Henry George's ideas about housing, Lizzie McGee's questioning of monopolies, Ralph Anspach's critiques of capitalism, reflected the world outside.

• 48:18Speaker 30

  The signs were everywhere, but now it's official, we are in a recession.

• 48:22Speaker 31

  27% drop in the number of homes sold last month compared to June. 27%. That is terrible news.

• 48:30Speaker 30

  But the question now, when will it end?

• 48:34Speaker 01

  The housing market had plummeted, the stock market was at its lowest since the Great Depression, and many people were fed up.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  Around the time I started getting interested in the story, Occupy Wall Street was something that I was covering.

• 48:50Speaker 32

  It's our duty as Americans to fight for our country and to keep it true to serving its people. And when it doesn't do that, it's immoral not to stand up and say something.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  And the Mr. Monopoly icon became very much used and loved by protesters as a critique of capitalism. And I thought, OK, now we've come full circle. Now, like Monopoly and its iconography, has become this symbol of Wall Street excess and things. And I think Lizzie would be proud of that. Thousands of demonstrators descended on the financial district. I think what Lizzie McGee was trying to do is ask questions. Many people down there asking the question, what are the people who helped create the jobs crisis doing to help the people out of work? And I think Monopoly, the game, and what she was trying to do is assert questions to get us to think differently about things, to get us to be more observant,

• 49:43Speaker 02

  to pay more attention to things like landlords, land, money, who controls what. We're born into the world, and we just think things are the way they are. But things don't appear out of thin air.

• 50:09Speaker 33

  Amazon is now responding to a report from Congress that found it's acting like a bully of sorts to its competitors. Google is now under sharp attack. To many, it is a symbol of unchecked power. And lawmakers say Amazon and other big tech companies have a monopoly, and it's time for a change.

• 50:26Speaker 34

  Many of the practices used by these companies have harmful economic effects. They discourage entrepreneurship, destroy jobs, hike costs, and degrade quality. Simply put, they have too much power.

• 50:40Speaker 02

  There's no doubt in my mind that we are living in a gilded age.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  There's no doubt in my mind that we have huge issues in our society that need to be rethought. Despite rising inflation, major US corporations are reporting record profits as companies pass rising supply chain costs on to consumers. The pandemic brought a lot to surface in terms of, are these systems working?

• 51:10Speaker 35

  It's a lesson we learn early on. Work hard, earn a decent living, and you'll be able to afford a home.

• 51:16Speaker 30

  Some of our employees are living in their cars. Some of them are homeless. Intense demand and diminishing supply have sent home prices soaring. We are seeing record rental prices across the United States. If you're working 40 hours a week, you should be able to make at least enough to support yourself and put food on your table.

• 51:32Speaker 35

  The lack of affordable housing is turning that age-old concept upside down.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  It's a shame to waste a crisis. A crisis can also be a moment when you look at things and make changes and improvements. And I think a lot of these bigger issues you're talking about in terms of housing, I mean, the list goes on and on. Education, healthcare. To me, at least, it can feel so overwhelming. I don't know where to start. It's funny to think about, well, a game could be a place to start, especially when people are learning the game or teaching it to kids, because I do think that makes an imprint.

• 52:10Speaker 02

  I think that does shape understanding of things. For better, for worse.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  That was Mary Pilon. Her book is called The Monopolist: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  On our next installment of Hidden Histories, Tupperware. As we would say now, she was pretty much canceled. She was obliterated from the corporate history. The Rise and Fall of the Queen of Plastics. That's next week. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.

• 52:56Speaker 05

  I'm Ramtin Arablouei, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  This episode was produced by me.

• 53:02Speaker 05

  And me and?

• 53:03Speaker 22

  Lawrence Wu.

• 53:04Speaker 09

  Laine Kaplan-Levinson. Julie Kane.

• 53:07Speaker 05

  Victor Ibevez.

• 53:08Speaker 09

  Anya Steinberg. Yolanda Sangwe. Casey Minor. Christina Kim.

• 53:13Speaker 18

  Devin Kadyama.

• 53:14Speaker 05

  Amiri Tella. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Thank you to Manzi Karana, Steve Drummond, Laine Kaplan-Levinson, Devin Miller, Victor Ibevez, Dan Vois, Alyssa Nadworny, Joseph Hass, and Adam Gold for their voiceover work.

• 53:30Speaker 05

  Thanks also to Tamara Charney and Anya Grunman.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  And a special thanks to my nephews, Zaid, Taha, and Ali, for playing Monopoly with me.

• 53:38Speaker 05

  This episode was mixed by Josh Newell.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes?

• 53:46Speaker 22

  Navid Marvi. Sho Fujiwara.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Anya Mizani.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  Thanks for listening.

• 53:59Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from iXL. The first few weeks back at school set the tone for the rest of the year. iXL is designed to help kids build confidence and get up to speed fast. Covering pre-K through 12th grade, iXL offers personalized, interactive practice in math, language arts, and science. One subscription covers everything for all the kids in your home. Receive an exclusive 20% discount on an iXL membership at ixl.com/npr.

• 54:33Speaker 12

  This message comes from the Sierra Club, fighting to ensure America's public lands are protected and accessible for everyone. The Sierra Club protects places like national parks and forests through legal action, advocacy, and nationwide grassroots organizing, because the future of public lands is worth fighting for. Join the fight to keep public lands protected and accessible for everyone. Donate at sierraclub.org/npr.