Ruthless: Monopoly's Secret History (Robert Stone Productions, WGBH, PBS, aired February 20, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago, on February 20, my husband Charles and I watched a fascinating episode of the long-running PBS documentary series American Experience; “Ruthless: Monopoly’s Secret History.” The “Monopoly” being referred to is the famous board game, first nationally marketed by Parker Brothers in 1935 and an instant sensation. The official history of Monopoly is it was invented by Charles Darrow, a Philadelphia electrician left unemployed by the Great Depression, whjo patented the game and sold it to Parker Brothers. The truth, as it turns out, is a lot more interesting and complicated than that. It was unraveled by, of all people, a San Francisco State University economics professor named Ralph Anspach,who ini the early 1970’s invented his own board game, Anti-Monopoly. Anspach’s game inverted the central principle of the standard Monopoly; instead of playing private real-estate speculators trying to build up monopolies, the players in Anti-Monopoly were fedran anti-trust attorneys trying to break them apart. The food company General Mills, which had acquired Parker Brothers in 1968. Sued Anspach and won an injunction preventing him from selling Anti-Monopoly and even ordering him to destroy the 40,000 copies of his game in his possession. Anspach lost in the trial court, won on appeal, then had to defend his victory all over again until in 1982 General Mills appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court eventually found in Anspach’s favor, based largely on the research he and his colleagues had done about the history of Monopoly.

It actually was invented in 1903 by Elizabeth “Lizzie” Magie (pronounced “McGee”), an activist and early feminist who was a devotée of British economist Henry George. George enjoyed a brief vogue in the last two decades of the 19th century; he wrote a book called Progress and Poverty in which he said the root of all economic evil, and specifically of inequality, was the private ownership of land. George’s argument was that land was the ultimate “free good” – there was only a certain amount of it and no one could create it – and therefore all existing taxes should be replaced with a single tax on land, the proceeds from which would be paid into a common fund for the benefit of all people. Realizing tnat not many people would be able to plopw their way through Progress and Poverty to get George’s message, Magie invented a board game she called “The Landlord’s Game,” in which players would move around a continuous-loop board and acquire properties, for which they culd charge rent if other players landed on them afterwards. Magie wrote two sets of rules for her game, one set very much like the Monopoly of today and a second set that follows George’s principles and aimed at teaching them to the players. Magie patented her version twice, one in 1904 and again in the early 1920’s, and in addition to the games made under license there were plenty of home-made versions in circulation. In 1929 a group of Quakers in Atlantic City created their own version and gave the various properties the names oif Atlantic City streets, with Boardwalk being the most expensive and prestigious. The cheapest properties,Mediterranean and Baltic Avenies,.were the Black ghettoes of Atlantic City, and the light-blue properties next to them on the board were the Jewish sections.

The Quaker version of the game made its way to Philadelphia, when a couple named Charles and Olive Todd taught it to their friends Charles and Esther Darrow. Sensing a commercial property he could exploit as his way out of the Depression, Charles Darrow wrote a prospectus for the game, filed for a patent, got it and sold the rights to Parker Brothers in 1935. Ruthless: Monopoly’s Secret History is a fascinating tale about how American capitalism can commoditize anything, including products and properties originally created in opposition to it. Certainly the history of Parker Brothers itself, with its sale to General Mills in 1968, its subsequent spinoff along with Kenner as a separate company, and then Hasbro’s acquisition of Kenner, illustrates the point Anspach (and Magie before him) was trying to make about how capitalists really don’t like competition. Instead they want to concentrate capital in fewer and fewer hands until the whole business world is a series of monopolies. In addition to showing how the giant capitalist meatgrinder took a game that was intended as a critique of capitalism and turned it into a celebration of it, writer-director Stephen Ives, a 30-year veteran documentary filmmaker for PBS, also made the point that what the commercial mega-success of Monopoly says about this country is that it is one that prizes ruthlessness and the total economic destruction of all rivals, When he made that point towards the end of the film, he phrased it in a way that could have been a description of Donald Trump, the conscience-free capitalist who ruthlessly stomps out his competitors and prides himself on his utter lack of compassion. A country that took Monopoly to its heart as much as the U.S. did from 1935 to the present day is a country that was ultimately destined to be ruled by someone like Donald Trump!