FT260


The myth

Advertised today as the game about “getting rich quick”, Monopoly was invented by an unemployed salesman (or inventor, or heating engineer) in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1934, during the Great Depression. In the typical fashion of the indefatigable US entrepreneur, penniless dreamer Charles B Darrow heroically battled through constant setbacks to eventually sell the game to Parker Bros. It rapidly became the world’s best-selling game.


The “truth”

In 1903, Georgist (see below) activist Lizzie Magie of Maryland created a board game designed to demonstrate the evils of landlordism. She called it “The Landlord’s Game” and patented it in 1904 – and again in 1924. Over the years, variants of the game, under various names, became popular amongst college students, Quakers, and progressive people, and it was one of these which Darrow copied, adapted, and named “Monopoly”. He did indeed sell it to Parker Bros in 1935 – claiming that it was all his own work – and ended up a millionaire; and a game intended to undermine the money system ended up glorifying it.

Georgism, named after Henry George (1839–97), is an economic ideology that holds that everyone owns what they create, but that everything found in nature, most importantly land, belongs equally to all of humanity. The Georgist philosophy is usually associated with the idea of a single tax on the value of land.


Sources

'Playing the Capitalist Game', Morning Star, 21 Oct 2007
Monopoly official site
'Monopoly'


Disclaimer

Hasbro, the current owner of the world’s dullest board game, continues to give the “little guy with a vision” version of Monopoly’s origins on its website. Of course, that wouldn’t be the first time that a myth had become the official truth, but if you have facts contrary to those given here, please write in; this column never claims exclusive copyright on the truth.