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

19:08In 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 vice, but were really into Monopoly. The game was gripping, fun, and a social event that drew friends together.

19:29Mary Pilon: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. Can you explain a little bit more about why the dice would have been taboo from that Christian perspective? 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.

20:10Mary Pilon: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.

20:41A 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.

20:53Mary Pilon: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. And one of the people who gets exposed to the game is a man named Charles Darrow. Charles Darrow was a self-described practical engineer from Philadelphia, a city not far from Atlantic City. A lot of people were coming and going from Atlantic City and Philadelphia at the time. 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.

21:28and after dinner, Charles Todd suggests they come to his house sometime.

21:32Mary Pilon:Hey, why don't you come over and 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? When we come back, Charles Darrow takes the game and runs.

22:04Hi, this is Emily Smaldone from Concrete, Washington, and Long Hearing Farm.

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23:32Part 2. My, sell, dream, and scheme. 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.

23:47Mary Pilon:And Todd thinks this is really weird because at this point the game's been around for 30 years or so. But he does it anyway. Darrow then takes those rules and starts redesigning the board. He has a cartoonist friend help him with illustrations. He starts marketing it a little bit. And eventually, he pitches the game to big game companies Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers. And he claims that he invented it. Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers weren't impressed and turned him down. Parker Brothers wrote back, Dear Mr. Darrow, our new games committee has carefully considered the game which you so kindly sent in to us for examination.

24:25While the game, no doubt, contains considerable merit, we do not feel that game is down to our line. But a few months later, they came back and said, wait, we do want it. And maybe they did. Or maybe they needed it.

24:41Mary Pilon:Parker Brothers is a company that is on the brink of destruction, like many companies. There had just been a hand over 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 started selling Monopoly and they're just as surprised as anybody that this game sells like gangbusters. 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. And something really interesting happens then too, which is that Charles Darrow becomes part of the marketing of the game.

25:20At 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.

25:34Mary Pilon:Nobody used to care who invented games, right? It's not like, oh, I'm going to 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 and he's unemployed, trying to support his family and innovates. He has this eureka light bulb 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. In some ways, it was the story the country needed at that time. The richest country in the world began a bitter journey downhill.

26:11The stock market buckled and crashed, and the nation's economy plummeted into the Depression. Jobs were scarce, poverty was rampant, and hope was hard to come by. By 1932, nearly one man out of four was unemployed. But here was the sky and this game, keeping the so-called American dream alive.

26:35Mary Pilon:Charles Darrow does all these interviews, all these photo shoots, where, you know, he's telling this Cinderella story. And after all, a dream is a wish your heart made. Inventor Charles Darrow, before he began to monopolize the field of after-dinner entertainment, was a prosperous engineer. No matter how your heart is made. When he lost his job and his money in 1930, he got along by doing odd jobs like mending furniture. The dream that you wish will come true.

27:23Mary Pilon:And they start to put it in the game itself. It's tucked in. It was tucked in the game I played. 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. And becomes part of the romance of the story, too. In its first year, 1935, the Monopoly Game was the best-selling game in America. The rest, as they say, is history. 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.

28:01Mary Pilon: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. I conceived of the game of landlord to interest people in the single tax plan of the great economist Henry George. The Washington Evening Star, January 28, 1936. Very likely, your grandma and your grandpa played Monopoly. Truth to tell, Mrs. Elizabeth McGee Phillips of 2309 North Curtis Road, Clarendon, Virginia, then Lizzie J.

28:43McGee of Brentwood, Maryland, took out a patent on the game on January 5th, 1904, a good three decades ago. 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 ,000 today. George Parker is on the verge of retirement, but to make this deal, he pays Lizzie a personal visit.

29:11Mary Pilon:And she's excited at first because she thinks, wow, my ideas, my ideas. 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. Two days after the agreement was signed, Lizzie sent a note to Parker Brothers. 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.

29:48Remember, the world expects much from you.

29:54Mary Pilon:but there's no evidence they acknowledged her really as the inventor at all. She was a rabid Henry George single tax advocate, a real evangelist, and these people never change. They published these other two games of hers, 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. 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? People start to write into Parker Brothers and they're like, this guy didn't run the game.

30:36Even 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. Darrow didn't have anything to do with originating the game. He stole it. But his letter went unanswered. Parker Brothers doubled down on Darrow's Cinderella story. As for Lizzie McGee?

30:58Mary Pilon: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. There wasn't a single mention of Monopoly in her obituary. And Charles Darrow gets like the New York Times treatment, hailing him as the inventor when he passes, you know, decades later. Charles B. Darrow, who became a millionaire by inventing the game Monopoly, died at his Bucks County, Pennsylvania home yesterday at the age of 78.

31:34Mary Pilon:So they have very, very different fates as a result of what happens in the 1930s.

32:03Mary Pilon: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, 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, you know, kind of traditional American living. We live a decent kind of life. Especially kind of a white mainstream narrative. The woman stays at home.

32:41Even the washing needn't break a woman's back. Machines can take it.

32:46Mary Pilon:Kids go to school. You know, the dad gets a job. You know, with my father or grandfather, it was, you know, selling pharmaceutical stuff. Like that, there was this big desire to just like hunker down on, you know, American stability. 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. And Monopoly is great for that, right? And Parker Brothers is really well positioned to kind of sell the game as part of this, you know, apple pie image that is so popular at the time.

33:34Monopoly has become a potent symbol of the U.S. 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.

34:02Mary Pilon:It was literally seen as something that would save people or save people's lives. 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. Lighting up a dark and foggy world. that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

34:42Mary Pilon: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, 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.

35:23Which keeps the Charles Darrow myth alive and well into the 50s and 60s.

35:28Mary Pilon: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'll get rich, you'll innovate, you'll make something that will heal the world and heal yourself. The true story also has these really incredible ingredients of resilience and innovation. and yet the myth, you know, the myth is what ends up flying. The dream that you wish will come true. Coming up, Mary calls a man who brings the myth back down to Earth. He was like, oh, I've waited 40 years for someone to ask me about this.

36:22This is Brendan Barlow from Kansas City, Missouri, and you're listening to ThruLine on NPR. This message comes from Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort. Journey through the heart of Europe on an elegant Viking longship with thoughtful service, destination-focused dining, and cultural enrichment on board and on shore. And every Viking voyage is all-inclusive with no children and no casinos. Discover more at viking.com. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Dataiku. AI agents are transforming how enterprises work. The problem is many operate in secret. The right people rarely know what their agents are doing, if they're doing it right, or that they even exist at all.

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38:00Mary Pilon: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. During the Great Recession, Mary Pilon flew to San Francisco to meet an econ professor named Ralph Ansbach, who she'd called up on a whim. She had to know more about this monopoly mystery he'd held onto for nearly four decades. 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. Piercing blue eyes. The buttons on his shirt don't line up.

38:36Mary Pilon:And, you know, there's papers all over the place. and that's who he is. 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.

38:56Mary Pilon:Born in 1926 in the free German mini-state of Danzig, under the shadow of Adolf Hitler's rising Nazi state. The son of a Jewish banker and a homemaker. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 1938, New York City became a U.S. citizen. I pledge allegiance. Stationed to the Philippines during World War II. The troops blast their way through.

39:27Mary Pilon:Marched against the Vietnam War. 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.

39:55Mary Pilon:Ralph Onsbach 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. It was 1973, and a national oil crisis had begun. The Middle East war produced developments all over the world today.

40:32the oil-producing countries of the Arab world decided to use their oil as a political weapon.

40:38Mary Pilon: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. They will reduce oil production by 5 % a month until the Israelis withdraw from occupied territories. U.S. 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. 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.

41:17The American automobile, for so long the symbol of America's wealth and extravagance, is dying.

41:25Mary Pilon:Ralph kicked at the floorboard. This is what happens when a Monopoly has control, he thought. Pulling open his front door, Ralph called out a hello to his wife, Ruth, and two sons, Mark, age 12 and William, age 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. it.

41:55Mary Pilon: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.

42:16Mary Pilon: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. 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. 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.

43:01But 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 by creating another board game, of course.

43:37Mary Pilon:He makes a game called Anti-Monopoly. and he starts to sell it and it kind of finds an audience. The orders poured in and before long, Parker Brothers came knocking. Dear Mr. Onspock, as attorneys for Parker Brothers of Salem, Massachusetts, he receives a cease and desist from Parker Brothers that says you have to stop making this game. In our opinion, your use of the term anti-monopoly on game equipment infringes on our client's trademark rights. 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.

44:36Ralph 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.

44:58Mary Pilon: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 Tods, 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. Ralph took Parker Brothers to court. And he even has a deposition with Robert Barton, who's an older gentleman at this point.

45:35Mary Pilon: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. He was hoping to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court. And ultimately, the Supreme Court refuses to hear his case.

45:56The game Monopoly has come to life at McDonald's. Around this time, Monopoly was poised to go even bigger, with some help from another titan of industry.

46:09Mary Pilon: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. The game monopoly is back at McDonald's. 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 interest in getting matching pieces and such.

46:52Mary Pilon: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.

47:29As 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 Ansbach's critiques of capitalism reflected the world outside. The signs were everywhere, but now it's official we are in a recession. 27 % drop in the number of homes sold last month compared to June. 27 %! That is terrible news. But the question now, when will it end? The housing market had plummeted. The stock market was at its lowest since the Great Depression.

48:11And many people were fed up.

48:17Mary Pilon:Around the time I started getting interested in the story, Occupy Wall Street was something that I was covering. It's our duty as Americans to fight for our country and to keep it, you know, true to serving its people. And when it doesn't do that, it's immoral not to stand up and say something. And the Mr. Monopoly icon became, you know, 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, like, you know, symbol of Wall Street excess and things. And I think Lizzie would be proud of that.

48:51Mary Pilon: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, 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.

49:28All day, all day, all day. All day, all day, all day. All day, all day, all day. All day, all day, all day. All day, all day, all day. All day, all day, all day. 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. Many of the practices used by these companies have harmful economic effects. They discourage entrepreneurship, destroy jobs, hike costs, and degrade quality.

50:08Simply put, they have too much power.

50:12Mary Pilon:There's no doubt in my mind that we are living in a gilded age. there's no doubt in my mind that we have huge issues in our society that need to be rethought despite rising inflation major u.s 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 it's a lesson we learn early on work hard earn a decent living and you'll be able to afford a home. Some of our employees are living in their cars. Some of them are homeless. Intense demand and diminishing supply have sent home prices soaring.

50:55We 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. The lack of affordable housing is turning that age-old concept upside down.

51:10Mary Pilon: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 kind of bigger issues you're talking about in terms of housing, you know, I mean, the list goes on and on. Education, health care. To me, at least, it can feel so overwhelming. I don't know where to start. You know, it's funny to think about, like, 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. I think that does kind of shape understanding of things.

51:45Just visiting. For better or for worse. No, go to jail. This is boating.

51:54That was Mary Pilon. Her book is called The Monopolis, Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game.

52:09On our next installment of Hidden Histories, Tupperware. As we would say now, you know, she was pretty much cancelled. 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. I'm Ramteen Arablui, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me and me and Lawrence Wu, Lane Kaplan-Levinson, Julie Cain, Victor Iveas, Anya Steinberg, Yolanda Sanguini, Casey Miner, Christina Kim, Devin Kadayama, Amiri Teller. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. Thank you to Mansi Karana, Steve Drummond, Lane Kaplan-Levinson, Devin Miller, Victory Bayes, Dan Boyce, Alyssa Nadwarni, Joseph Haas, and Adam Gold for their voiceover work.

53:02Thanks also to Tamar Charney and Anya Grunman. And a special thanks to my nephews Zaid, Taha, and Ali for playing Monopoly with me. This episode was mixed by Josh Newell. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes

53:22Thanks for listening.

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