The Monopolists

by Mary Pilon

  At least two years later, Lizzie published the game through the Economic Game Company, a New York–based firm that counted Lizzie as a part owner. The company produced a version of the game that was similar to what Lizzie had patented, but with signature single-taxer flair she had made a few changes. The game now included new spaces such as Oil Fields, Timberlands, Coal Mines, and Farmlands—the type of goods that George and his followers felt should not be monopolized, as they were natural resources.

  Her experimenting done, Lizzie faced what befalls all creators when their work is sent out into the world: the agony of waiting to see how it will be received.

  A UTOPIA CALLED ARDEN

  “You are welcome hither …”

  —GREETING PLACARD IN ARDEN, DELAWARE

  In the early 1900s, an unusual community was developing in New Castle County, Delaware. Known as the Village of Arden, it was a progressive utopian society based on the single tax principle, with a devotion to arts, crafts, and theater. It had a town meeting form of government, and much of its land was forest and greens, which were not taxed. Technically, the land in Arden was communal property owned by the village and could not be bought or sold. Instead, the land had a renewable ninety-nine-year lease, and the “land lease” fee was not increased because of improvements.

  Arden residents were among the first to play the Landlord’s Game. Years later, no one could remember exactly who had introduced the game to the village, but it was quickly embraced by the quirky community.

  Arden had been founded in 1900 by a stern-faced, thin-lipped sculptor named Frank Stephens and a bearded Quaker architect named William Price, both from Pennsylvania. Stephens, Price, and a number of other activists had traveled around Delaware in 1895, hoping to raise political support for the single tax movement.

  About five years later, with financing from soap magnate Joseph Fels, Stephens and Price returned to purchase a farm in New Castle County around which to design a single tax town. Connected to Philadelphia by the nearby Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, Arden was at first a summer resort, where people went to vacation simply, in tents and rustic dwellings. But as Stephens and Price spread the word about their village among their many well-educated, progressive friends and contacts, it soon blossomed into a year-round community.

  Arden’s design was heavily influenced by Price, a prominent architect in the Arts and Crafts movement. Though Price would later become most famous for the extravagant hotels he designed in Atlantic City, his dwellings in Arden were modest Craftsman homes—quaint cottages nestled in the forest. Residents would later embellish them with caterpillar-like extensions and rooms perched on top.

  Ardenites delighted in the simplicity of their village’s design and function. Large trees shaded the roads, and from one side of town came the soothing gurgle of a sparkling-clean stream. Nearby was a lush lake that made for an ideal swimming hole, where skinny-dipping and, it was rumored, free love thrived. Near the town green stood a craft shop where metalware and stitched goods were made and sold, a barn theater, and an outdoor theater where Stephens regularly staged Shakespeare productions. The town also had its own print shop and weaving studio.

  Arden’s young people were allowed an unusual amount of freedom for the time, horseback riding and hiking through the surrounding woods as they pleased. Families gathered at Arden’s ice cream parlor for refreshments and sipped water from the village’s six water pumps. The town also organized field days, which often included sprinting events for women, sack races for men, and pie-eating contests for everyone. In 1909, the women of Arden formed their own baseball team, which sometimes competed against its male counterpart.

  Everything about Arden’s operation was communal, with regular meetings held to discuss the distribution of the general community fund. How much money should go to the library? How much to roads? Women and even children were allowed to vote at the meetings.

  Famed author and socialist Upton Sinclair was among the revolutionaries who made their way to Arden—in his case, in 1910, after his own utopia in New Jersey had burned down, then been disbanded. Sinclair’s Arden home, nicknamed the Jungalow, had a large front porch overlooking the town green.

  It is very possible that Lizzie Magie, as an activist in the single tax community, visited Arden in its early years, although there are no records to prove this. Lizzie attended some of the same conferences that Stephens attended, and embraced the ideals that Arden espoused.

  Arden was both a residential town and a political destination. The community hosted conferences on women’s suffrage (Georgists would later put forward Carrie Chapman Catt as a presidential candidate) and attracted many northeastern intellectuals looking for a fresh-air retreat during the summer. Similar single tax communities were also established in Fairhope, Alabama, and Andorra, a microstate in southwestern Europe. All were fueled by the dollars of Joseph Fels.

  Fels’s dollars were instrumental in keeping Arden afloat, feeding debate among scholars about whether or not a single tax community could prosper without the help of a benefactor like him. The child of German Jewish parents, Fels was a social reformer and philanthropist who used his wealth as a Philadelphia-based soap manufacturer to promote the single tax movement and various land reforms. His most successful product was Fels-Naptha soap, which was later manufactured by Dial. Fels harbored hopes for the establishment of a Jewish homeland founded on single tax principles but felt that it was up to him to first finance smaller single tax communities to prove that the concept could work.

  As games and sports flourished among the assemblage of communists, anarchists, socialists, and single-taxers living in Arden, they came to the attention of scornful local law officials. “Gaming on the Sabbath” was forbidden, and Upton Sinclair and Scott Nearing, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance and Commerce (as it was then called), were among those arrested in 1911 for playing baseball and tennis on a Sunday. A long-standing enemy of Arden had reported the group. The athletes spent the night in jail, but the charges were eventually dropped.

  Poet Harry Kemp came to Arden to stay with Sinclair and his wife during the period when Upton was working on his book Love’s Pilgrimage. “Folk of every shade of radical opinion,” wrote Kemp, “[came to Arden to] escape the galling mockeries of civilization and win back again to pastoral simplicity.” In one of Arden’s more scandalous moments, Kemp later ran off with Sinclair’s wife.

  Lizzie Magie also reached out to Sinclair, by sending him some of her writings on Georgism and politics. Her work didn’t make it into Sinclair’s 1915 collection The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest, which included selections from his own book The Jungle and from Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, but she was acknowledged in his preface.

  Given the ideological bent of most of the rebels at Arden, it was hardly surprising that they enjoyed playing the Landlord’s Game. Even those who might not have been particularly interested in the single tax theory would have been strongly opposed to the harsh consequences of monopolies taking over in the new, chaotic modern age.

  The Arden players made their own board games out of wood, cloth, and crayon, taking pride in the fact that they were not playing with commercially manufactured materials. They often improvised as they went along, and their large wooden Landlord’s-based boards included spaces such as Wayback, Lonely Lane, the Farm, Speculation, Boomtown, and Goat Alley. The Jail was still located in one corner, but the Public Park of Lizzie’s board was now Central Park Free. Some boards also featured a space for the Bowery and one for George Street—a nod to the single-taxers’ philosophical idol. There was a Gee Whiz R.R., a Go to Jail spot, and a Lord Blueblood’s Estate. One whole row was devoted to expensive, mostly New York properties: Wall Street, Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and Madison Square. The Mother Earth space conjured up environmental concerns.

  Some of the property spaces on the earliest Landlord’s boards played in Arden and elsewhere in the early 1900s were
grouped not by color but by small numbers written on the perimeter of the board. Eventually, though, players replaced the numbers with colors.

  Sinclair and Nearing were among those who took their handmade versions of the Landlord’s Game from Arden to other locales in the Northeast, spreading the anti-monopoly game to an unknown number of players. Nearing introduced the game to his students and colleagues at Wharton as early as 1910 and played it on and off for nearly a decade. His brother, Guy, who also lived in Arden, helped spread the game as well. None of the handmade games had written rules, or if they did, they didn’t survive.

  A Landlord’s Game believed to have been played as early as 1904 in Arden, Delaware, a popular single tax enclave. (Tom Forsyth and Ron Jarrell)

  The Nearings were also among those who started calling the Landlord’s Game “monopoly” or the “monopoly game”—shorthand for what they felt was the game’s core message. “Arden was a single tax community—hence anti-Monopoly,” Nearing wrote many years later. “The game was used to show the anti-social nature of Monopoly.” Of the two different rule sets that Lizzie had described in her rule book, Nearing most likely played and taught the monopolistic, rather than the anti-monopolistic, set.

  In 1915, the University of Pennsylvania refused to renew Nearing’s contract to teach. His involvement with the anti-child-labor movement and his radical teachings had become too much for the university’s board, loaded with financiers. His ouster sparked one of the biggest controversies over academic freedom in U.S. history, and progressives rallied around the Nearing cause for decades to come.

  Nearing never knew who had invented the original monopoly game, and his ignorance was an early but significant sign that Lizzie Magie’s name had become detached from the product she had created.

  GEORGE PARKER AND THE CARDBOARD EMPIRE

  “A game … is like role playing. It’s drama. It takes you out of the situation you’re living in and puts you in a new one. A game applies, therefore, more to the libido than the superego. It’s a fantasy, not a teaching machine.”

  —MARVIN GLASS

  By the summer of 1883, George Parker was a charismatic, driven sixteen-year-old who had earned the reputation for being a ferocious player of games. He and his brothers, along with their friends in Salem, Massachusetts, spent endless hours after school and on the weekends playing dominoes, chess, checkers, Moksha Patam (an ancient Indian game later modified to become Chutes and Ladders), and other games from the Far East that had made their way to America through the help of seamen like George’s father. After the Civil War, industrialism expanded leisure time and diversion, meaning that games continued to evolve and improve as Americans’ lives did.

  During the second half of the nineteenth century, Salem was one of the world’s premier seafaring towns. George Parker grew up surrounded by people, buildings, and ships that all reflected the water and the sky—a palate of blues, grays, and whites. For over a century, young men had departed from Salem’s docks for multimonth voyages to Europe, India, Zanzibar, and Japan. The Far East locales were all but unknown to most Americans at the time, but to the Salemites these places were oddly familiar, as they had heard multiple stories about them in pubs and around dinner tables, the world seemingly shrinking with every epic voyage. Gifts from afar, such as spices, teas, fashionable clothing, and board games, were all brought home to Salem, early tidbits of globalization and the cross-pollination of ideas between continents.

  The ocean had captured the imagination of George’s father, George Augustus Parker, who worked as a captain in the shipping industry for much of his career. In 1852, at age thirty-two, Parker married twenty-year-old Sarah Hegemen. The union produced Edward in 1855, Charles in 1860, and George in 1866.

  George Jr. enjoyed a relatively privileged and idyllic childhood. By the 1870s, the United States was emerging as a great economic power, and the post–Civil War industrial Northeast was booming. Boston-area factories were at the head of industrial innovation, the dollar was gaining international clout as a currency, and the United States was a backwater colony no longer. The third-largest country in the world by population, it controlled a quarter of the world’s domestic product.

  With the rise of international commerce and shipping, the Parker family became wealthy. George Sr. shifted his business from shipping to real estate, only to lose much of his fortune in the Panic of 1873 and its aftermath, then referred to by many as the Great Depression. Shortly thereafter, George Sr. became violently ill with kidney disease and died, in 1877. Sarah Parker was left to raise three boys, including ten-year-old George, largely on her own.

  The three Parker boys looked like carbon copies of each other, with George as the smallest imprint: pale skin, brown hair with a slight wave on top, stern eyes, unimposing nose, and thin lips often pursed in a polite, almost starchy manner. Puberty made George leaner, with a longer neck and a slightly more upturned nose, but the soft features of his boyhood refused to vanish even as adulthood beckoned. His earnest appearance belied a cutthroat streak, though, perhaps born of necessity, given his status as the youngest sibling.

  Despite his growing up among people of the sea, shipping didn’t appeal to George. He wanted to become a newspaper reporter or a purveyor of board games. Games had the same ability to reach audiences as newspapers did, maybe even more, he thought. Newspapers provided instant gratification, but board games provided community and intimacy. People played them for hours and formed fond associations with them whereas newspapers were eventually discarded and inherently replaceable. Board games were intimate keepsakes.

  •

  In contrast to the games from the Far East, most American board games of the 1800s were designed to teach moral or intellectual lessons—a quality that had helped them gain societal and parental approval in the straitlaced new country. Among the first widely selling board games in the United States were Mansion of Happiness, an “instructive moral and entertaining amusement” that had been around since the early 1800s; Anagrams, a tile-based word game developed by a Salem schoolteacher in the 1850s; and Authors, a card game depicting famous nineteenth-century authors like Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, devised by a teacher whose students had helped with the design.

  George Parker found all that teaching boring.

  He and his friends wanted to play something different, something more exotic, something that was perhaps even a bit rebellious, the younger generation pushing up against the older one. “They felt that they had enough preaching in church and instruction in school,” a Parker Brothers corporate history later recounted. Even as a sixteen-year-old, George felt that there was a flaw in the thinking of most American game inventors. They thought more about education than they thought about entertainment, and they didn’t seem to realize that the country was changing. Thanks in part to technological advances, adults had more leisure time, and fewer children were working than ever before. Everyone had more time to play games, and when they did, they wanted to have fun.

  The young Parker also had an avid interest in business—as did many Americans of his time. The U.S. economy was booming and bold, new capitalists were making fortunes overnight. Giant mergers—in steel, railroads, manufacturing—had become more common, and a new generation of power brokers was joining the top echelons of society. Quaker Joseph Wharton had established his Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1881, and other elite, academic business institutions were emerging. In addition, the power of promotion was beginning to be recognized. When devising his light bulb, Thomas Edison built on the work of several inventors before him. Nonetheless, through promotional efforts and creating an integrated system for his lights, Edison had established himself as the face of the invention, a legacy that endures today.

  It was against this backdrop that sixteen-year-old George and his friends discovered and modified a card game revolving around simulated financial transactions, eventually renaming it Banking. George added a “borrowing” rule
to the game, and it was this crucial change, according to Parker lore, that would hook fans. Players could now borrow money and try to repay the loan at a 10 percent interest rate, thereby vicariously living the real-life highs of investors dancing the tightrope between risk and reward. The game reflected a national pattern: Despite being only a century old, the American financial system had already experienced several booms and busts.

  By adding the element of speculation to Banking—making it oddly reminiscent of gambling and all but allowing the practice of usury—George had made the game a lot more fun. If one couldn’t be the richest man in Salem, or even the most powerful boy among one’s brothers, one could at least beat them at Banking. In its universe, it was possible to become rich by crushing your siblings and friends. In fact, it was sometimes necessary to do so.

  At first George played the game only among his cohorts. But then one day, a friend suggested that he turn the game into a real-life experiment in entrepreneurship. Since the boys enjoyed playing the game so much, his friend reasoned, there was a good chance that it could be marketed and sold to others for a profit.

  George listened. He was only sixteen years old and still in high school, but with his father dead, his mother was relying on him and his two brothers to be self-sufficient. Should his fervor for Banking prove to be contagious and he was able to be the one selling the games he stood to profit significantly. That summer, George, his two brothers, Edward and Charles, and their friends played the game over and over, trying to perfect it.