Washington DC, 1903. Elizabeth Magie, Lizzie to her friends, works as a stenographer by day. But in the evening, in her house in Prince George’s County, she becomes an inventor, a writer, a political teacher. Descended from Scottish immigrants, she has pale skin, a determined jaw and an unshakeable work ethic.
Her status is remarkable for the time: single by choice, she owns her house and several acres of land, bought with her own savings. She shares her home with an actor who rents a room and a Black domestic servant. Her neighbours include a milkman, a pedlar who describes himself as a “huckster”, a sailor, a carpenter and a musician.
Lizzie is intensely political. A passionate disciple of Henry George, the progressive economist who championed a single tax on land values to fight property speculation, she teaches evening classes to spread his ideas. But she isn’t reaching enough people. She needs a new medium - something more interactive, more creative.
Inspiration comes from board games, increasingly popular in middle-class homes. Night after night, after her office job, Lizzie draws and redraws, thinks and rethinks. She wants her game to reflect her progressive convictions.
The America of 1903 lives in the shadow of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Passed thirteen years earlier, in 1890, the landmark law aims to break up the monopolies strangling the American economy. The rail and steel barons, the Rockefellers and the Carnegies, see their empires threatened by this political drive to restore competition. It is against this backdrop of all-out war on the trusts that Lizzie Magie designs her game, not to entertain but to educate.
“It is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences,” Lizzie writes in a political magazine. “It might well have been called the ‘Game of Life’, as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is the same as the human race in general seem to have, ie, the accumulation of wealth.”1
The paradox is delicious: while the federal government fights monopolies in the courts, Lizzie creates a game that lays bare their relentless mechanics. Her timing is no accident. The Sherman Act is regularly in the papers, Theodore Roosevelt is leading his crusade against the trusts, and the public is passionately debating the power of big corporations.
Her game revolutionises board-game design. No more linear tracks: Lizzie creates a closed circuit on which players go round and round forever, a sort of metaphor for an economic cycle there is no escaping. In one corner, the Poorhouse and the Public Park. Opposite, the Jail. Another corner pays tribute to Henry George: “Labor Upon Mother Earth Produces Wages2”, with a picture of the globe.
Between the corners, nine rectangular spaces. In the middle of each group, a railroad, the very symbol of the monopolies the Sherman Act seeks to dismantle. The properties for rent or sale line those tracks, mirroring the magnates’ grip on the land their lines cross. The Absolute Necessity spaces offer bread and shelter. The Franchise spaces offer water and electricity, essential services already monopolised in many American cities.
Players borrow from the bank or from each other, and pay taxes. Every pass of the Mother Earth space earns $100 in wages, as the reward for work done. Ruined players end up in the Poorhouse. Those who trespass on someone else’s property go to Jail, and the three words she writes on the board will survive more than a century: GO TO JAIL. More often than not followed by “Do not pass Go”.
The jeers and teasing from the others when a player lands in jail, and the mock sympathy when someone has to head for the poorhouse, make up a large part of the fun of the game, Lizzie explains, with a touch of dark humour.
But here is Magie’s subversive genius: she creates two sets of rules. The anti-monopoly rules, in which everyone is rewarded when wealth is created: the Georgist utopia3 in action, the very spirit of the Sherman Act. And the “monopoly” rules, in which the aim is to crush your opponents and own everything: the brutal reality the law is trying to contain. Her vision embraces duality and carries its own contradiction - a tension between the legislative ideal and economic practice. Naturally, it is the monopolist version that will captivate the public, as if players would rather be the Rockefellers than the reformers.
On 23 March 1903, Lizzie walks into the US Patent Office to protect her creation: ironically, she takes out a monopoly on her anti-monopoly game. Two years later, she publishes a version through the Economic Game Company of New York, which she co-owns. The game becomes popular in left-wing intellectual circles and on campuses, the very milieus cheering on the antitrust prosecutions. That popularity spreads for three decades, reaching, among others, a Quaker community in Atlantic City that customises the board with the names of its local streets. It is this version that will reach Charles Darrow, who will wipe out every trace of the original political message, the ultimate irony for a game designed to denounce illegitimate appropriation.
Lizzie’s first version of the game
Philadelphia, 1932. A winter evening. Charles Todd and his wife Olive are entertaining their friends Charles and Esther Darrow. On the table, a home-made board game the Todds have just learned. No official box, no brand name, just a hand-made board that everyone calls the monopoly game. The dice roll, properties are bought, excitement builds. The Darrows are hooked. So hooked that Charles Todd makes them their own set and teaches them the advanced rules.
America is still choking under the weight of the Great Depression. Charles Darrow is unemployed, desperate for money to feed his family. And yet this game, where you become a millionaire by buying property, fascinates him. One day, despite all the games they have played together, Darrow asks Todd for a written copy of the rules. Todd is puzzled - he has never written them down. Nobody seems to have written them down.
The game that has been circulating for three decades, passed from hand to hand, handed down by word of mouth like a folk tradition, is about to find its usurper. Darrow improves the board with the streets of Atlantic City, adds a few illustrations, and presents the whole thing to Parker Brothers as his own creation. After an initial rejection, the publisher finally says yes in 1935.
The success is instant. In the depths of the Depression, Americans rush to buy a game that lets them own hotels on the Boardwalk of their dreams. Darrow becomes a millionaire, collecting royalties for the rest of his life.
Asked by journalists about his miraculous invention, Darrow keeps the mystery alive. He tells the Germantown Bulletin it was an accident, entirely unexpected and illogical. The story is perfect: an unemployed man invents the game of the century in his living room and gets rich. The American dream still works4.
Except that this story is (as we now know) a lie.
When Parker Brothers learns of Magie’s game in the mid-1930s, the company panics. Millions of copies of Darrow’s Monopoly have already been sold. Quietly, very quietly, Parker Brothers buys the rights to The Landlord's Game from Elizabeth Magie for $500. No royalties, just a one-off payment. They also buy the rights to two other games she invented.
At first, Lizzie suspects nothing. When a prototype of the Parker Brothers version arrives at her home in Arlington, she is delighted. In a letter to Foster Parker, George’s nephew and the company’s treasurer, she writes that there has been “a song in my heart” ever since the game arrived. She goes on to say she hopes they will one day publish more of her games, though she doubts any of them will cause them as much trouble, or mean as much to her, as this one.
But the truth eventually comes out. In January 1936, furious, Lizzie gives interviews to the Washington Post and the Washington Evening Star. In the photo accompanying the article, she holds up the boards of The Landlord's Game and of another game with MONOPOLY written four times in big black letters. In front of her, the Parker Brothers box of Darrow’s Monopoly.
“There is nothing new under the sun,” she tells the Washington Post bitterly. The Evening Star reporter writes that her game never enjoyed the popularity it has today, and that it took Charles B. Darrow, a Philadelphia engineer who rescued it from the oblivion of the Patent Office and dressed it up a little, to launch it. And he cruelly adds that, once lawyers’ fees, printers and the Patent Office are counted, the game has probably cost her more than it has earned her.
Lizzie’s two other games, King's Men and Bargain Day, sink into oblivion. So does the Parker Brothers version of The Landlord's Game. And so does Lizzie herself. She dies in 1948, a childless widow. Neither her headstone nor her obituary mentions her invention. One of her last jobs is at the US Office of Education, where her colleagues see her only as an elderly typist who talks about inventing games.
Charles Darrow, meanwhile, reaps the rewards all his life. But in 1973, the story resurfaces. Ralph Anspach, a left-wing academic sued by Parker Brothers over his game Anti-Monopoly, uncovers Lizzie’s story while preparing his defence5. The case drags on for ten years. Anspach wins, proving Magie’s role once and for all and building an extraordinary archive along the way6.
And yet, to this day, Hasbro (owner of Parker Brothers) plays down her role, crediting Charles Darrow with the official Monopoly game produced and played today. On its website in 2015, the timeline started in 1935. The carefully worded corporate accounts are remarkable for what they leave out: no Lizzie Magie, no Quakers, no thousands of anonymous players.
The supreme irony of the story, of course, is that Monopoly kept only the “monopolist” rules, the ones meant as a warning. The “prosperity” rules, where wealth benefits everyone? Forgotten. The game became a celebration of what it was meant to denounce: limitless accumulation, the ruin of competitors, the triumph of the strongest.
Generation after generation, players learn that the goal is to crush your opponents. That success is measured by everyone else going bust. Elizabeth Magie’s lessons, turned upside down, become capitalism’s board-game catechism. And the players would go even further.