Anti-Monopoly

A professor and a freelance writer are determined to set history straight on the origin and theft of a favorite American pastime

by Burton H. Wolfe, Free Press contributor

alph Anspach and Patrice McFarland have vowed that before they die the world will know that the original purpose of the Monopoly game was to teach the evils of exploitation, that it was conceived by socialists rather than its alleged inventor, and that the giant gamesmaker Parker Brothers has no right to monopolize it.

Anspach and McFarland have experienced widespread resistance to the telling of their tale of treachery and deceit, at least in part because almost every publication about the Monopoly game's origin and purpose has been wrong, and correction is embarrassing to writers, editors, and publishers. But the determined pair plug on anyway against discouraging odds.

Anspach is a professor of economics at San Francisco State University. McFarland is a New York-based freelance writer. After massive, financially crippling litigation between Parker Brothers and himself, Anspach pursues his quest through media appearances and a book entitled The Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle. McFarland tries to spread the word through articles in the few periodicals that will publish them.

Their simple story begins with Anspach's invention of a game entitled "Anti-Monopoly" and its prankish antithesis to the Monopoly game. The preface to its rules reads:

"Your goal in this game is to break up the monopolistic groups you see on the board in front of you. For example, Fort Auto, Crystal Auto, and General Auto are three big companies belonging to the auto group that has worked out a system to keep prices high and competitiors out of the market. This is illegal, but they are getting away with it--unless you and the other trustbusting lawyers in the game can stop them."

That mission was construed as an affront by the officers of Parker Brothers, producer of Monopoly, the most successful of all privately patented board games. They were also incensed at Anspach's parodying the Monopoly game with board blocks such as "Go to Court" and "Budget Bureau: collect $100 for the budget when you pass this space." So they sued Anspach, claiming that no one could use the name "Monopoly" in any rival game because Parker Brothers possesses an exclusive copyright and patent.

In the course of defending himself in the lawsuit, Anspach uncovered a series of long-buried facts. to begin with, the Monopoly game, in its original form, was called "The Landlord's Game." It was invented and patented in 1903 by Lizzie J. Magie, a follower of Henry George and his single-tax theory, as a means of teaching the evils of exploitation by landlords and the capitalist business system prevalent in America.

Over the years a number of socialists such as Scott Nearing, known as the "father of environmentalism," changed the name of the game to "Monopoly." They drew up their own game boards, using street and utility names from their cities and towns. By the eary 1930s a group of Quakers in Atlantic City were playing the game on homemade boards containing the same names as on the commercial Monopoly board: Boardwalk, Park Place, Mediterranean Avenue, Baltic Avenue, etc.

One evening in 1932 an unemployed salesman, Charles Darrow, joined the Atlantic City Quakers for a Monopoly game session. Recognizing the commerical potential of the game, and unsympathetic to the Quakers' view that it was not meant to be used for profit-making, Darrow copied the board and presented it to the president of Parker Brothers, Robert Barton, as his (Darrow's) own invention.

Barton was not long duped. But instead of producing and marketing Monopoly in the only legal way permissible, as a game in the public domain like chess and checkers, he fraudulently obtained a private patent and told Darrow to keep his mouth shut. Monopoly soon became the most widely purchased and played board game of all time other than chess and checkers, earned more than a billion dollars for Parker Brothers, and made Darrow a millionaire.

As the mass media have presented the Monopoly story for the past 60 years or more, it is a Horatio Alger-type chapter in the history of capitalism and free enterprise: down-and-out man invents game, gamesmaker Parker Brothers is saved from bankruptcy by its popularity, and millions of Americans enjoy themselves in wiping out friends by rolls of the dice and trade maneuvers leaving them with all the property on the board.

Once Anspach uncovered the true story and opposite purpose of the game, and Patrice McFarland learned of his discovery, the pair began writing to publishers--as had the Atlantic City Quakers before them--in an effort to correct false history. They have experienced scant success in their quest. Slick magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, which published articles containing the false Darrow invention story, have refused to correct and revise the misinformation. When Robert Barton died in February 1995, in his obituary the New York Times repeated, as it has many times, the false statement that Darrow invented Monopoly ("they may as well say he invented fire and the wheel," one of the Quaker originators commented), and Barton legitimately acquired exclusive rights to the game from Darrow.

Though Anspach eventually prevailed in the lawsuit against him and continues to market Anti-Monopoly, Parker Brothers retains its fraudulent patent and the Monopoly game is monopolized by the giant corporation, Hasbro, of which Parker is a subdivision. The acquisition of the commercial producer of Monopoly by Hasbro is fitting. Through a series of monopolistic practices, Hasbro has developed into perhaps the largest games manufacturer in the world (see accompanying article "Go to Court").

One of the most ironic aspects of the Monopoly game story is the role acquired by the American mass media in perpetuating the false version of it. That media, lest we forget, used to accuse the Soviet media of revising history. In misreporting the origin and purpose of the Monopoly game, the American mass media stands accused of its own accusation.