This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about notable people whose deaths went unreported in the Times beginning in 1851.
When Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman in Philadelphia, learned of a new board game that was gaining popularity, he asked his friends to write down the rules and help him spice up the graphic design. In 1933, he copyrighted the game Monopoly as his own invention and began selling it in toy stores and department stores.
The real estate trading game sold more than 275 million copies, was licensed into hundreds of spin-off editions, and has become a staple of American life. It also made Darrow a millionaire. But the idea behind it couldn’t have been attributed to him. Rather, it belonged to an Illinois woman with a diverse resume that included writing, acting, engineering and work as a stenographer: Lizzie Magie.
The premise of Magie’s game, originally called “The Landlord’s Game,” will be familiar to anyone who has played Monopoly: People move their pieces around the circumference of a square board, purchasing properties that they use to charge rent to others can players. Magie patented her invention in 1904 – the same day the Wright brothers applied for a patent for their airplane – and it was published in 1906 by the Economic Game Company, which owned it.
In her patent application, Magie wrote, “Each time a player circles the field, he is said to have done so much work on Mother Earth that upon passing the starting point he receives his reward, one hundred dollars.”
Magie designed the game with two sets of rules: one that rewarded players if resources were distributed evenly, and another in which the land baron who acquired the most wealth won. In any case, she hoped players would think about the foundations of capitalist society.
Elizabeth Jones Magie was born into a political family on May 9, 1866 in Macomb, Illinois. According to Mary Pilon’s 2015 book “The Monopolists,” her father, James Magie, was an abolitionist newspaper publisher who covered the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Her mother was Mary (Ritchie) Magic.
At various times magic was a poet; a stenographer in the Dead Letter Office, where mail that was deemed undeliverable ended up; a comedic stage actress; an engineer who invented and patented a device that improved the flow of paper in typewriters; and a novelist. Her short story “The Theft of a Brain,” published in Godey’s, a women’s magazine, was about a writer who achieves success after unlocking her potential under hypnosis, only to discover that her hypnotist had plagiarized her novel.
Magic viewed The Landlord’s Game as an ideological tool: a game that would teach people the principles of political economist Henry George. The central tenet of Georgism was that people should keep everything they earned, but the government should be funded by a tax on property owners, since land legally belonged to everyone. George believed that a society funded by a single property tax would eliminate both lower-class poverty and industrial cartels.
In the rules of The Landlord’s Game, Magie explained how potential conflicts could be resolved: “Should an emergency arise which is not covered by the rules of the game, the players shall settle the matter among themselves; But if a player absolutely refuses to follow the rules set forth above, he must go to jail and remain there until he hits a double or pays his fine.”
“The Landlord’s Game” wasn’t a blockbuster hit, but it won numerous fans, including utopian Quakers in Delaware and fraternities at Williams College in Massachusetts; The game was even adapted for the British market under the name Brer Fox an’ Brer Rabbit.
It wasn’t Magie’s only creation: she invented several card games, including a role-playing game called Mock Trial, which she sold to Parker Brothers in 1910. That year she also tried to sell them The Landlord’s Game, but the company considered it too complex.
By this time she had also gained national attention for a publicity stunt she had pulled off in 1906, when she placed a newspaper advertisement offering herself for sale as a “young American slave” with “large gray-green eyes and full, passionate lips.” and “magnificent teeth,” who was “not beautiful, but very attractive,” and described herself as “honest, fair, poetic, philosophical.”
The ad was intended to be a commentary on slavery and the bleak economic prospects of single women, but instead resulted in unwanted marriage proposals and a freak show employment offer. (Magie eventually married businessman Albert Phillips at age 44.) This also led to a correspondence with the mad writer Upton Sinclair and work as a newspaper reporter.
Meanwhile, players converted “The Landlord’s Game” into homemade sets, copying the board onto wood or cloth, tweaking the rules and calling it “the Monopoly game.” As followers taught their friends to play, newcomers had no idea that the handcrafted game was Magic’s invention.
Monopoly’s ties to magic were even further lost to history when Darrow sold his version, which included the names of places in the thriving seaside resort of Atlantic City, New Jersey, to Parker Brothers in 1935, claiming he had invented it to keep his family entertained along the way to entertain the Great Depression. A plutocratic fantasy was exactly what Americans wanted at this time. Millions of copies were sold, saving the then-troubled Parker Brothers from bankruptcy and making Darrow a rich man.
Many successful games, including Tiddlywinks and Battleship, were created as commercial versions of homemade diversions, but when a game is in the public domain, any publisher can print their own version.
To suppress potential competition and establish a Monopoly monopoly, Parker Brothers acquired similar games such as The Landlord’s Game and spin-offs such as Finance.
Magie sold the rights to “The Landlord’s Game” to Parker Brothers for a flat $500, about $11,000 today; The company also agreed to publish two of its other board games: King’s Men, a tile-matching game, and Bargain Day, a shopping game. Delighted that her Georgist ideas would reach a wider audience, she wrote a letter to Parker Brothers addressing The Landlord’s Game as if it were a person: “Farewell, my beloved brainchild. Unfortunately, I’m parting with you, but I’m giving you to someone else who can do more for you than I can.”
Although Parker Brothers, which purchased Hasbro in 1991, reissued The Landlord’s Game, it soon went out of print and was eclipsed by Monopoly. Magic was not entitled to royalties and Parker Brothers promoted Darrow as the sole inventor of Monopoly.
Magie’s groundbreaking contributions to American culture and game design were erased until the 1970s, when Ralph Anspach, the creator of a game called Anti-Monopoly, brought her work to light during a trademark infringement lawsuit with Parker Brothers.
Magie died at age 81 on March 2, 1948 in Staunton, Virginia, but she lived long enough to see the enduring success of a game based on her own invention, even as her name was erased and her ideology toned down .
The Evening Star newspaper of Washington, D.C., which had interviewed Magie in 1936, summed up her view: “When the subtle propaganda for the idea of a flat tax gets through to the thousands who are now shaking the dice and talking about the ‘she believes that.’ “The whole affair will not have been in vain.”
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2024-04-13 21:37:44
www.nytimes.com
