This article is part of it It is overlookeda series of obituaries for notable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, were not reported in the Times.
When Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman in Philadelphia, heard about a new board game that was becoming popular, he asked his friends to type the rules and help him jazz 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 game, which was about real estate trading, would go on to sell more than 275 million copies, has been licensed to hundreds of spinoff versions, and has become part of the fabric of American life. It also made Darrow a millionaire. But credit for the idea behind it shouldn’t have been his. Instead, it belonged to a woman from Illinois with a versatile resume that included writing, acting, engineering and work as a stenographer: Lizzie Magie.
The premise of Magie, originally called The Landlord’s Game, will be familiar to anyone who has played Monopoly: People move their tokens around the perimeter of a square board, buying properties along the way, which they can use to charge rent to other Players. Magie patented her invention in 1904—the same day the Wright brothers filed for their airplane—and it was published in 1906 through the Economic Game Company, which she owned.
In her patent application, Magie wrote: “Each time a player goes around the board, he is supposed to have done so much work to Mother Earth, for which after passing the starting point he receives his salary, one hundred dollars.”
Magie designed the game with two sets of rules: one that rewarded players when resources were shared equally, and another where the land baron who acquired the most wealth was the winner. Either way, he hoped players would think about the foundations of capitalist society.
Elizabeth Jones Magie was born May 9, 1866, in Macomb, Ill., to a civilian family. According to Mary Pilon’s 2015 book, The Monopolists, her father, James Magie, was an abolitionist newspaper publisher who reported on the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Her mother was Mary (Ritchie) Magic.
At various points, Magie was a poet. a stenographer at the Dead Letter Office, where mail deemed undeliverable was sent. a comedic stage actress; an engineer who invented and patented a device that improved the flow of paper in typewriters. and fiction writer. Her short story “The Theft of a Brain,” published in Godey’s, a women’s magazine, was about a writer who finds success after unlocking her potential under hypnosis only to discover that her hypnotist had plagiarized her novel.
Magie conceived 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 what they earned, but that government should be funded by a tax on property owners, since land rightfully belonged to everyone. A society financed by a single land tax, George believed, 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: “If any emergency arises that is not covered by the rules of the game, the players must settle the matter among themselves. but if a player absolutely refuses to obey the rules as above laid down, he must go to prison and remain there until he has rolled a double or paid his fine.”
The Landlord’s Game was not a big hit, but it developed enclaves of fans, including utopian Quakers in Delaware and fraternities at Williams College in Massachusetts. the game was even adapted for the UK market under the name “Brer Fox an’ Brer Rabbit”.
It wasn’t Magie’s only creation: He invented several card games, including a role-playing game called Mock Trial, which he sold to Parker Brothers in 1910. That year, he also tried to sell The Landlord’s Game to them, but the company deemed it is very complicated.
By then, she had also received some national attention for a publicity stunt she had pulled in 1906, when she placed a newspaper ad offering herself for sale as a “young female American slave,” with “big gray-green eyes, full passionate lips. ” and “wonderful teeth” who “was not beautiful, but very attractive” and described herself as “honest, fair, poetic, philosophical”.
The ad was meant to be a commentary on slavery and the bleak economic prospects of single women, but instead led to unwanted marriage proposals and a job offer with a horror show. (Maggie eventually married, at age 44, Albert Phillips, a businessman.) It also led to a correspondence with the sleazy writer Upton Sinclair and work as a newspaper reporter.
Meanwhile, players were turning The Landlord’s Game into homemade sets, copying the board onto wood or cloth, tweaking the rules and calling it “the monopoly game.” When devotees taught friends how to play, newcomers had no idea that the handmade toy was Magie’s invention.
Monopoly’s ties to Magie were further lost to history when Darrow sold his version, which incorporated the names of places in the booming seaside resort of Atlantic City, NJ, to Parker Brothers in 1935, claiming he had invented it for fun his family the Great Depression. A plutocratic fantasy was exactly what Americans wanted at the time. Millions of copies were sold, saving the then-struggling Parker Brothers from bankruptcy and making Darrow rich.
Many successful games, including Tiddlywinks and Battleship, were created as commercial versions of homespun diversions, but if a game is in the public domain, any publisher can print their own version.
Trying to stifle potential competition and create a Monopoly monopoly, Parker Brothers acquired similar games The Landlord’s Game and spinoffs such as Finance.
Magie sold the rights to The Landlord’s Game to Parker Brothers for $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 agrarian ideas would reach a wider audience, she wrote a letter to Parker Brothers in which she addressed The Landlord’s Game as if it were a person: “Farewell, my beloved brainchild. I part with you sadly, but give you to another who will be able to do more for you than I have done.’
Although Parker Brothers, which Hasbro bought in 1991, reprinted The Landlord’s Game, it soon went out of print again, overshadowed by Monopoly. Magie had no claim to royalties, and Parker Brothers promoted Darrow as the sole inventor of Monopoly.
Magie’s landmark contribution to American culture and game design was erased until the 1970s, when Ralph Anspach, the inventor of a game called Anti-Monopoly, disclosed her work during a trademark infringement court battle with Parker Brothers.
Magie died at age 81 on March 2, 1948, in Staunton, Va., but she lived long enough to see the lasting success of a game based on her own invention, even if her name had been erased and her ideology diminished.
The Evening Star of Washington, D.C., which had interviewed Magie in 1936, summed up her view: “If the subtle propaganda for the single tax idea works around the minds of the thousands who are now rolling the dice and buying and sell The board of Monopoly, believes that the whole enterprise would not be in vain.’
