Throughline - Do Not Pass Go

Episode Date: June 30, 2022

There's more to Monopoly than you might think. It's one of the best-selling board games in history — despite huge economic instability, sales actually went up during the pandemic — and it's been an iconic part of American life at other pivotal moments: a cheap pastime during the Great Depression; a reminder of home for soldiers during WWII; and an American export during its rise as a global superpower. It endured even as it reflected some of the ongoing inequities in American society, from segregation and redlining to capitalism run rampant. That's because Monopoly is also built on powerful American lore – the idea that anyone, with just a little bit of cash, can rise from rags to riches. Writer Mary Pilon, the author of The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game, describes Monopoly as "the Great American Dream in a board game – or, nightmare." This week: how a critique of capitalism grew from a seed of an idea in a rebellious young woman's mind into a game legendary for its celebration of wealth at all costs. And behind that legend — there's a lie.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. My family played at Christmas Eve. That was our tradition growing up. Nine, ten.

Just visiting. No. No. Go to jail. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, so it was cold and rainy. We had a lot of time to stay inside and play games and nostalgia. My grandmother, my parents, I played with my brother. You know, it was one of the rare things that really brought all the generations of my family together.

And I remember as a kid, it's really exciting. I get to trade property. I get to spend money. I get to have power. I'm the youngest in my family. So the idea that I had even remotely equal footing was really exciting. This is Mary Pilon. She's a journalist who writes about sports and business. But Monopoly was not on my list at all. And who would think to question Monopoly? Okay, the name of the game is Monopoly. Do you all know how to play the game? No.

No. What? I think that we should review the game. No, I know the game, Dory. I tried playing with my nephews recently. Hello, I know the game, don't worry. I tried playing with my nephews recently. Hello, I'm Ali. I'm Zaid. I'm Taha. And they had a lot of questions.

Wait, we can steal? What do they mean by mortgage? No, no, no, you can't steal. How much is the rent? Questions that feel much bigger than a board game. Inflation nation. The consumer price index rose 8.6% in May to a new 40-year high. No matter who you are, no matter where you live, no matter how much you make, you're impacted by it.

8.6%, that's really a tough number to swallow here. You have to go back to 2009, 13 years ago, to find a time when these economic numbers are as bad as they are today. In 2009, I was working at the Wall Street Journal. It was the Great Recession, the worst economic collapse since 1929. We didn't see it coming. I don't know who did. The Dow plunged to a record low yesterday, reaching 777 points. And that is the largest single-day point loss ever. Nearly $2 trillion tax dollars have been shoveled into the hole that Wall Street dug,

and people wonder, where's the bottom? And people are drawing a lot of comparisons between the economy then and the Great Depression. I've been effectively unemployed for over a year. I'm on the line, and I'm putting applications in resumes, and I'm not getting hired. And I've been in that house since 1982. I don't want to move. I've had to resort to taking my Social Security. The 401k drop was tremendous. One was $88,000 and then it went down to like $50,000.

And that's where the savings was. I'll have to work for the rest of my life. While writing an article about the recession, Mary Pilon was planning to mention Monopoly in passing, like, Blah, blah, blah. Everybody knows Monopoly was invented during the Great Depression. For a long time, the origin story was written right at the top of the game's rulebook. A man named Charles Darrow was unemployed and came up with the game to pass the time. In 1934, he brought Monopoly to the game company Parker Brothers, hoping to make some money off of it.

I was looking around online, and I know this may shock people, but I wasn't finding accurate information on the Internet. Things weren't adding up, there were inconsistencies in the dates, and I felt like an idiot. You know, at the paper we were covering derivatives and securitization and all these like kind of complex, often arcane things. And I couldn't get a sentence about a board game right. So I, you know, tried to make some calls and I on a whim reached out to a man named Ralph Ansbach. Ralph Ansbach had been involved in a trademark lawsuit back in the 1970s over a board game he invented called Anti-Monopoly. Mary thought he might know something about Monopoly that she didn't. And I reached out to him and I said, hey, I know this sounds crazy.

I'm a reporter at the Journal. I'm just trying to find out the truth about Monopoly. And he immediately got back to me. He was like, oh, the whole story. It's all, it's all a lie. There's no shortage of shortages. First baby formula, now tampons. And rents are skyrocketing too, causing overall housing affordability to collapse at its fastest rate on record. Hey, look at that. Topped $8 for a regular gallon of gas. I basically just got struggle food and some popsicles. It's just bad.

These clips are from the past few months, but they could just have easily been from 2009. We're facing another so-called once-in-a-generation crisis, one that's again forcing us to reckon with all the ways that our system is letting us slip through the cracks. So why are we still sitting here talking about Monopoly? Why are we? We have to look at board games as cultural artifacts. The same way we look at songs, books, movies. They represent the time periods that they're in.

Monopoly reflects some of the enduring inequities in American society and the uglier parts of our history. From segregation and redlining to capitalism run rampant. Yet it's also built on this powerful American lore, the idea that anyone with just a little bit of cash can rise from rags to riches in this country. And people keep buying it, even during periods where that's obviously not true.

Sales actually went up during the pandemic, and Monopoly remains one of the best-selling board games in history. So what does that say about the aspirations, desires, and myths we as a country have held onto for more than a century? I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arablui. Coming up, how a critique of capitalism grew from a seed of an idea in a rebellious young woman's mind into a game legendary for its celebration of wealth, no matter the cost. Depending on how you look at it, Monopoly is either the American dream or the American nightmare. Hi, this is Nuria de las Casas from Newton, Massachusetts, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. Part 1. How do you steal? It's 1879, in a small town in Illinois, where 13-year-old Lizzie McGee is curled up next to the fire with a book her father gave her. Progress and Poverty by Henry George. Lizzie had to stop going to school. Her family was struggling, never having recovered from the recession six years earlier. And as she dives into

this book, the world begins to make a little more sense to her. The great cause of inequality in the distribution of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land. The ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the social, the political, and consequentially the intellectual and moral condition of people. She's there, but not really there. The words transport her. It's the central fact from which spring industrial,

social, and political difficulties that perplex the world, and with which statesmanship and philanthropy and education... She imagines herself sitting in the audience as the author, Henry George, addresses the crowd. ...self-reliant nations. It is the riddle which the sphinx of fate puts to our civilization and which not to answer is to be destroyed. So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury, and make sharp for the contrast. In the house of have and the house of want, progress is not real and

cannot be permanent. Henry George is pretty much the equivalent of a rock star. He was huge in his lifetime. He'd started forming his ideas about the pitfalls of extreme wealth while traveling around the world to places like Australia and India. What is the current explanation of the hard times? Overproduction. There are so many clothes that men must go ragged.

So much coal that in the bitter winters people have to shiver. Such overfilled granaries that people actually die by starvation. Want due to overproduction? Was a greater absurdity ever uttered? How can there be overproduction till all have enough? It's really important to understand that in the United States after the Civil War at this time, there was an incredible amount of wealth being created that hadn't been seen in this country anymore. And you had a very, you had a handful of people who were controlling it. It is not overproduction. It is unjust distribution. And George is asking questions about all this money is now coming in. Our country was ripped apart and now it's, you know, we're rebuilding. And how does,

how is it distributed? And what is the government's role in, you know, taking a cut? Or, you know, how does that, how does that pan out? A growing number of Americans were fed up with the monopolies of the so-called Gilded Age. Railroad, sugar, oil, and the growing riches of the elite few, the Vanderbilts, Carnegies, and Rockefellers. The vicious, the ignorant, and the growing riches of the elite few, the Vanderbilts, Carnegies, and Rockefellers. The vicious, the ignorant, and the millionaires. Lizzie's dad, James McGee, a staunch progressive who traveled with Abraham Lincoln during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, strongly backed the ideas of Henry George. We cannot shut our eyes to the fact that all over the country there is a feeling of restlessness and discontent among working men

on account of their supposed meager pay compared with the wealth which they produce. He understood that wealth and owning land were deeply connected. Whoever owned the land made the profits and maintained all the power. And he made sure that his daughter, Lizzie, knew it too. And she did. She's involved in theater. She's writing poetry. She's writing stories. And she was an impassioned advocate for women's suffrage.

So at a time when women couldn't vote, when it was dangerous for women to assert themselves in the public realm, here she is engaging a political discourse. And so she's out there. I mean, that was not a thing that women were, you know, encouraged to be doing at the time. Professionally, she got a job as a stenographer. She dabbled in engineering

and invented a whole new tool for stenography, which she went and got patented under her name. So she was absolutely a trailblazer. Throughout all her adventures, Lizzie kept going back to the ideas of Henry George, to the book her father gave her all those years ago. She became friends with

Henry George's son and became the secretary of the Women's Single Tax Club of Washington, a club dedicated to advancing George's central theory on how to solve inequality. As I say, the man that owns the land is the master of those who must live on it. So the single tax theory, the general idea was that you had a land

value tax, also known as a single tax. And the general idea is to tax land and only land. So then that shifts the tax burden to wealthy landlords. Anybody who lives in New York or Los Angeles or a high rent neighborhood, I'm sure is kind of nodding your head at that. And that message really resonated with Americans in the late 1800s, because, you know, this is at a time when poverty and squalor are very much on display in urban centers. And that's part of why I think he had such a big audience. And they sometimes called themselves the anti-monopolists. Those were people who wanted to break apart monopolies, break apart these, you know, concentrations of power, whether it's

railroads, banking, steel, and this continues on and on. The monopoly of the land gone. There need be no fear of large fortunes. For when everyone gets what he fairly earns, no one can get more than he fairly earns. How many men are there who fairly earn a million dollars? It's about income inequality. It's about how do we tax people?

How are the wealthy treated? What are we doing for those who are in poverty? Henry George died in 1897, but his followers made sure his ideas would live on. People both in the U.S. and as far away as Australia were considering this single tax theory. And as for Lizzie McGee, she turned to the latest fad to get his message across.

Board games. Around this time, Americans were getting really into board games, like the Game of Life. Yes, the Game of Life that's still around today, but not quite the same. I'm a millionaire! Be a winner at the Game of Life! From Milton Bradley. The Game of Life had been around for a while at that point.

That was a game that was published by Milton Bradley. And The Game of Life is, the original version, is very dark. It's very much about teaching kids about the morality of the world. Mary writes that the board had an intemperance space that led to poverty, a government contract space that led to wealth, and a gambling space that led to ruin. The game these days has almost none of that. But it still imparts a particular message of what one should expect out of life.

A car, a job, a marriage, kids, and a house. With the single tax theory in mind, Lizzie McGee invented what she called the Landlord's Game, the very first version of Monopoly. She gets her patent for the Landlord's Game, which is Monopoly, in 1904. Fewer than 1% of patents in the United States were granted towards women. But she's Lizzie McGee, so she got approved. And she creates the Landlord's Game as a teaching tool because it's one thing to read about these ideas,

and she obviously was writing and very involved in that too, but a game is a really wonderful way to teach someone something. They learn that the quickest way to accumulate wealth and gain power is to get all the land they can in the best localities and hold on to it. Let the children once see clearly the gross injustice of our present land system. And when they grow up, if they are allowed to develop naturally,

the evil will soon be remedied. When you look at the 1904 Landlord's Game patent, it's striking how similar it is to what we know as monopoly today. You've got the railroads. Obviously you don't have cars quite the same way. So we don't have free quite the same way. So we don't have free parking, but you have park, which again, parks and land is a huge deal for Georgias.

And you have properties and you go around and around. The object of the game is to obtain as much wealth or money as possible. When a player stops upon a lot owned by another player, he must pay the rent to the owner. The player who has the largest sum total is the winner. But there is one major difference from the Monopoly game we all know and play today. When Lizzie creates the game, she makes two rule sets. She makes a monopolist rule set and an anti-monopolist rule set. The anti-monopolist version rewarded every player when wealth was created, all for one, one for all kind of thing, while the monopolist set rewarded individual players who created

monopolies to crush opponents. And the monopolist rule set is the version that ends up kind of taking hold among progressives. It was played by a who's who of left-wing America. It was played at several Ivy League schools. It was played by Scott Neering, who was a famous socialist professor at Wharton. And it was played by Upton Sinclair himself, who obviously, you know, the jungle is very much a, you know, kind of the quintessential muckraking critique of a lot of what is going on in the country at the time. It spread like wildfire, and the game started to change depending on where you played. People localized the boards and made them their own. So if you were playing in Boston, you would have the commons on there.

If you were playing in New York, you would have Broadway. If you were in Chicago, you would have the loop. So she is very much about, you know, creating a game that has kind of these core ingredients, these core rules and instructions, but also encourages people to, you know, in terms of the tokens, use what you have around the house, make the game your own. And that's pretty interesting, right? And that's very different than what we kind of think of as games now, which is like you go to a mass market, a big box retailer, or you buy it online, and they all come the same. She, you know, games at that time, mass manufacturing wasn't quite the same as it is now. So she also kind of cooks into this idea of making it your own.

With people inventing their own hometown versions of the game, cash wasn't exactly pouring into Lizzie's bank account. She wasn't making money off the patent, and she wasn't getting known. But the game sure was, being played and reinterpreted everywhere. We are flying over a well-known eastern city that is remarkable because manufacturing is almost non-existent. A city whose principal business is the entertainment of millions. Atlantic City, often called was the place for summer vacation. It was known for its nightlife. At the same time, it was home to a sizable Quaker community, who were maybe not so into all the vice, but were really into Monopoly.

The game was gripping, fun, and a social event that drew friends together. And the Quakers taking on the game is really interesting because anything with dice was considered to be very taboo. And it's funny to think about Monopoly being scandalous, but back then for the Quakers, it would have been. Can you explain a little bit more about why the dice would have been taboo from that Christian perspective. So dice, games with dice were often considered to be taboo because they were associated with gambling and luck and chance and betting. And that was considered to be very seedy and associated with a lot of other illicit activities.

There was accounts where Quakers would hide their boards when their parents were coming over, you know, to make sure nobody saw that they were playing a game with dice, you know. One of the Quakers in Atlantic City has a lot of knowledge of real estate, so he puts fixed prices on the board with Atlantic City properties to kind of denote, you know, what the values were. And that also becomes an interesting artifact of how segregated Atlantic City was at the time, particularly for Black residents, that there were segregated beaches,

that they were working at hotels that they were not allowed to eat at or patronize themselves. And so that also becomes this interesting artifact. A Quaker family based in Atlantic City began to share and make copies of their homemade board based on their neighborhood with friends and even local hotels. It was spreading, and there were even spinoffs. There's a man named

Rudy Copeland in Texas, and he sells a game called Inflation. There's a man named Dan Lehman, and he sells a game called Finance. And one of the people who gets exposed to the game is a man named Charles Darrow. Charles Darrow was a self-described practical engineer from Philadelphia, a city not far from Atlantic City. A lot of people were coming and going from Atlantic City and Philadelphia at the time. One day, Darrow's wife Esther runs into her old friend Charles Todd. They'd gone to Quaker school together, but had lost touch. They make plans to have dinner with their spouses, really fun night. And after dinner, Charles Todd suggests they come to his house sometime.

Hey, why don't you come over and we'll have a Monopoly night? So they come over, they play the game. And then later, Darrow asks Todd, hey, that game was really fun. Can you type up the rules for me? When we come back, Charles Darrow takes the game and runs.

Hi, this is Emily Smalldown from Concrete, Washington and Long Hearing Farm. Thank you so much for the show. It has kept me company through many long hours of fieldwork. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, offering over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Thank you. Bonvoy portfolio of over 30 hotel brands around the world. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Part 2. Buy, sell, dream, and scheme. We left off with Charles Darrow learning to play Monopoly with Charles Todd, who learned in Atlantic City.

After that game, Darrow asks Todd to type up the rules. And Todd thinks this is really weird because at this point the game's been around for 30 years or so. But he does it anyway. Darrow then takes those rules and starts redesigning the board. He has a cartoonist friend help him with illustrations. He starts marketing it a little bit. And eventually, he pitches the game to big game companies Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers.

And he claims that he invented it. Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers weren't impressed and turned him down. Parker Brothers wrote back, Dear Mr. Darrow, Our new games committee has carefully considered the game which you so kindly sent in to us for examination. While the game no doubt contains considerable merit,

we do not... They basically thought it was too complicated. But a few months later, they came back and said, wait, we do want it. And maybe they did. Or maybe they needed it. Parker Brothers is a company that is on the brink of destruction, like many companies. There had just been a handover, George Parker, hands over the reins to his son-in-law, Robert Barton,

and they need a hit and they need it fast. And so they started selling Monopoly, and they're just as surprised as anybody that this game sells like gangbusters. Monopoly, the great financial game, is sweeping the country because it appeals to every American's love of bargain and business dealing. Give a Monopoly party and guests will want to play all night. And something really interesting happens then too, which is that Charles Darrow becomes part of the marketing of the game. At the time my brainchild was born, I was far more thoroughly unemployed than I even like to imagine now.

Not only unemployed from a financial point of view, but a morale point of view. I simply had to have something to do. Nobody used to care who invented games, right? It's not like, oh, I'm going to buy a book because it's by a certain author, or see a movie because it has a certain star. But Darrow's not like, oh, I'm going to buy a book because it's by a certain author or see a movie because it has a certain star. But Darrow's Cinderella story, this fabricated notion that he goes into his basement and he's unemployed and trying to support his family and innovates. It has this eureka light bulb moment and creates this massive bestseller of a game.

That is such a romantic story, even if it's not true. So the Darrow story captivates the country, as does the game. In some ways, it was the story the country needed at that time. The richest country in the world began a bitter journey downhill. The stock market buckled and crashed, and the nation's economy plummeted into the Depression. Jobs were scarce, poverty was rampant, and hope was hard to come by. But here was this guy and this game keeping the so-called American dream alive. Charles Darrow does all these interviews, all these photo shoots where, you shoots where he's telling this Cinderella story.

And after all, a dream is a wish your heart made. Inventor Charles Darrow before he began to monopolize the field of after dinner entertainment was a prosperous engineer.

No matter how your heart is made. When he lost his job and his money in 1930 was a prosperous engineer. No matter how your heart is... When he lost his job and his money in 1930, he got along by doing odd jobs like mending furniture. The dream that you wish will come true. And they start to put it in the game itself. It's tucked in. It was tucked in the game I played.

It was 1934, the height of the Great Depression, when Charles B. Darrow of Germantown, Pennsylvania, showed what he called the Monopoly game to the executives at Parker Brothers. And becomes part of the romance of the story, too. In its first year, 1935, the Monopoly game was the best-selling game in America. The rest, as they say, is history. If you think about the news industry,

when you get an error and it gets picked up everywhere, it's very hard to course-correct that, right? So, especially back then, this is obviously way, way before the Internet, so the story is all over the place and Lizzie McGee catches wind of it. And she does not take this quietly. She calls up reporters with the Washington Evening Star

and the Washington Post. And she does these interviews where she is holding up her games. She says, I have patents. I made this game. I conceived of the game of landlord to interest people in the single tax plan of the great economist Henry George. The Washington Evening Star, January 28, 1936.

Very likely, your grandma and your grandpa played Monopoly. Truth to tell, Mrs. Elizabeth McGee Phillips of 2309 North Curtis Road, Clarendon, Virginia, then Lizzie J. McGee of Brentwood, Maryland, took out a patent on the game on January 5th, 1904, a good three decades ago. Parker Brothers catches wind of Lizzie's noise. They get in touch and offer her $500 for the patent to the Landlords Game, which is roughly $10,000 today. George Parker is on the verge of retirement, but to make this deal, he pays Lizzie a personal visit.

And she's excited at first because she thinks, wow, my ideas, my idea. Henry George is long dead, but like my game and my invention is going to be out there and Parker Brothers is going to publish it. This is amazing. Two days after the agreement was signed, Lizzie sent a note to Parker Brothers. Farewell, my beloved brainchild. I regretfully part with you, but I am giving you to another who will be able to do more for you than I have done. I shall do all I can to add to your success and fame, which will, in some measure, add to my own. I charge you do not swerve from your high purpose and ultimate mission. Remember, the world expects much from you. Um, but there's no evidence they acknowledged her, really, as the inventor at all.

She was a rabid Henry George single-tax advocate, a real evangelist. And these people never change. They publish these other two games of hers, but there's no evidence they put any marketing muscle behind them. And the Darrow story has taken hold. It is all over the place. Which is good and bad for Darrow.

Because people who had been playing the game for decades at this point see this story being spun about this new game called Monopoly invented by Charles Darrow, and they're like, huh? People start to write into Parker Brothers, and they're like, this guy didn't run the game. Even Charles Todd, the person who taught Darrow how to play and wrote down the rules for him,

wrote to Parker Brothers in disgust at Darrow's charade. Darrow didn't have anything to do with originating the game. He stole it. But his letter went unanswered. Parker Brothers doubled down on Darrow's Cinderella story. As for Lizzie McGee? Of all the hats she wore, of all the things that she did, she was a receptionist, she was a writer, she was a stenographer. She lists her occupation as maker of games, and her income is zero. She dies in 1948 with this, like, itty-bitty little obituary that you have to really look for. There wasn't a single mention of Monopoly in her obituary.

And Charles Darrow gets, like, the New York Times treatment, hailing him as the inventor when he passes, you know, decades later. Charles B. Darrow, who became a millionaire by inventing the game Monopoly, died at his Bucks County, Pennsylvania home yesterday at the age of 78. So they have very, very different fates as a result of what happens in the 1930s. Assembly line, she's making history, working for victory. Rosie, the riveter, keeps a sharp lookout for sabotage. After World War II, you know, Monopoly has another surge because everybody comes home and wants a refrigerator and a big car and a house and a game of Monopoly. The GI Bill puts a lot of people into school.

This is true of my grandparents. You know, my grandpa came back from World War II. He got married. They had four kids, two years apart. You live in your house, you have your car, and so there's this deep desire for quote-unquote normalcy, deep desire for, you know, kind of traditional American living. We live a decent kind of life. Especially kind of a white mainstream narrative. The woman stays at home. Even the washing needn't break a woman's back. Machines can take it.

Kids go to school, you know, the dad gets a job. You know, with my father or grandfather, it was, you know, selling pharmaceutical stuff. Like, there was this big desire to just, like, hunker down on American stability. City and school and land in active partnership provide the raw materials for life and growth, ready to build and meet a many-sided world. And Monopoly is great for that, right? Parker Brothers is really well positioned to kind of sell the game as part of this apple pie image that is so popular at the time.

Monopoly had become a potent symbol of the U.S. and everything it stands for. There's a story about the game being smuggled past the Berlin Wall. Another one about how Monopoly helped prisoners of war escape German POW camps. Allied forces would send games of Monopoly as care packages, but the care packages were actually escape kits filled with compasses, money, and maps, all hidden inside the games. It was literally seen as something that would save people or save people's lives. So Monopoly, after World War II, becomes an even more potent symbol of Americana. So there's kind of this fantasy element baked into it. And obviously, you know, that's exported.

Lighting up a dark and foggy world. That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. I mean, keep in mind that just throughout this whole history, no one expected Monopoly to be a hit. Hits in the board game industry are extremely rare. And no one expected it to be a multi-generational hit. A thing that would, you know, every 10 or 15 years like that. Like that's insanely unusual. So by this point, Parker Brothers has a lot to gain by pumping Monopoly as a brand and as a story, which is money. They, you know, becomes kind of their cornerstone of their games catalog and still is a huge title

for Hasbro, which acquired Parker Brothers, Milton Bradley, you know, much, much later. So again, there's a lot of vested interest in Monopoly at this point. Which keeps the Charles Darrow myth alive and well into the 50s and 60s. I think the Darrow myth has a lot of resilience baked into it. Like one of the themes of that story is if you work hard, you'll get rich, you'll innovate, you'll make something that will heal the world and heal yourself. The true story also has these really incredible ingredients of resilience and innovation. And yet the myth, you know brings the myth back down to earth.

He was like, oh, I've waited 40 years for someone to ask me about this. This is Brendan Barlow from Kansas City, Missouri, and you're listening to ThruLine on NPR. Part 3. How to win. He was living in this tiny little apartment, and I remember walking in and he just had boxes and boxes of depositions, photographs of early board games, his own notes from the case. During the Great Recession, Mary Pilon flew to San Francisco to meet an econ professor named Ralph Ansbach, who she'd called up on a whim. She had to know more about this monopoly mystery he'd held onto for nearly four decades.

So Ralph is very much proudly kind of an eccentric professor. He, you know, like has this wavy hair that's kind of all over the place. Piercing blue eyes. The buttons on his shirt don't line up and, you know, there's papers all over the place. And that's who he is. As Mary spent more time with Ralph, talking to him and sifting through all those boxes, she began to piece together his story, like a movie reel, playing out scene by scene. Born in 1926 in the free German mini-state of Danzig,

under the shadow of Adolf Hitler's rising Nazi state. The son of a Jewish banker and a homemaker. 1938, New York City. Became a U.S. citizen. Stationed in the Philippines during World War II. The troops blast their way through. Marched against the Vietnam War. And finally, she arrived at the moment when his path collided with Lizzie McGee's. Ralph died earlier this year, but here's the story he told Mary. Ralph Onspot slammed his car door shut.

Finally, he was home. It had been another excruciating commute from his classroom in San Francisco to where he lived with his family in Berkeley. He stomped up the steps of his ramshackle yet oddly majestic Victorian house, mumbling under his breath. The rush hour traffic between San Francisco and Berkeley had always been bad, but now he and the other commuters had to contend with mile-long stretches of cars backed up at exits in search of gas. It was 1973 and a national oil crisis had begun. The Middle East war produced developments all over the world today. The oil producing countries of the Arab world decided to use

their oil as a political weapon. The organization of the petroleum exporting countries, OPEC, led by its Arab members, had jacked up the prices of world oil, putting an end to decades of cheap energy. They will reduce oil production by 5% a month until the Israelis withdraw from occupied territories. U.S. government price controls had gone into effect, along with rationing systems. On certain days, gas sales were limited to those with license plates ending in odd numbers, and on other days, to those with plates ending in even numbers. People can no longer afford to run cars that do 12 miles to the gallon.

Petrol stations can no longer afford to fill up cars whose tanks take 20 gallons. The American automobile, for so long the symbol of America's wealth and extravagance, is dying. Ralph kicked at the floorboard. This is what happens when a monopoly has control, he thought. Pulling open his front door, Ralph called out a hello to his wife, Ruth, and two sons, Mark, age 12, and William, age 7. He was looking forward to eating a simple dinner with his family and perhaps playing a board game with them afterward. That evening after dinner, Ralph's son suggested playing Monopoly and eagerly pulled out the familiar long white box out of the closet. As the boys set up the board and counted out the money,

Ralph recalled playing his first game of Monopoly in Czechoslovakia in 1937. Monopoly had given Ralph one of his first glimpses of America, then still a far-off land that lived only in atlases and on globes, light years removed from grim Europe. An evening filled with much laughter, shouting, and cutthroat deal-making ensued. Happily, Ralph, Ruth, Mark, and William maneuvered their metal trinkets around the board, passed rundown Baltic Avenue, busy St. Charles Place, and William maneuvered their metal trinkets around the board, passed run down Baltic Avenue, busy St. Charles Place,

and elite boardwalk. They passed go, they collected $200, they went straight to jail, they drew chance at community chess cards. William, the younger of the two Ansbach boys, won the game. Little did Ralph know that this particular evening, as ordinary as it was, was about to change his life. The next morning after playing and losing Monopoly, Ralph couldn't

stop thinking about how real world monopolies were taking over and, in his opinion, destroying the country. But Ralph's son, the son who had won the game the night before, was confused. He was like, wait, we had so much fun playing and I had a lot of fun winning, so are monopolies really all that bad? And for days after, his son's question haunted him. The way Ralph saw it, this seemingly harmless board game had created an alternate reality where the word monopoly was this nostalgic, fuzzy, family-friendly thing, rather than the destructive force he believed it to be. So he decided he needed to set the record straight by creating another board game, of course. He makes a game called Anti-Monopoly,

and he starts to sell it, and it kind of finds an audience. The orders poured in, and before long, Parker Brothers came knocking. Dear Mr. Onspock, as attorneys for Parker Brothers of Salem, Massachusetts. He receives a cease and desist from Parker Brothers that says you have to stop making this game. In our opinion, your use of the term anti-monopoly on game equipment infringes on our client's trademark rights. And he says, wait a minute, you're claiming you have a monopoly? A monopoly? My game is called anti-monopoly. This doesn't make sense. And so he starts researching

the origins of the case and starts to find Lizzie McGee's patents. Be it known that I, Lizzie J. McGee, a citizen of the United States residing at Brentwood in the county of Prince George and state of Maryland, have invented certain... Ralph had never heard of Lizzie McGee. After all, Parker Brothers said Charles Darrow started it during the Great Depression. But this patent was from 1904.

And it seemed that Lizzie had not only dreamed up monopoly, but anti-monopoly too. So why had she been erased from the story? That's what Ralph set out to figure out. He starts to find these original players, people who played the game before 1935. He goes all over the country and he finds Dan Lehman. And he gets a picture of him holding up his finance board. He finds the Todds, the couple that taught Darrow the game. He finds

these Quaker players who modified the board, including the realtor who put the prices on it. And he's able to stitch together the origins of the game and what really happened. And he becomes obsessed with telling what he calls the monopoly lie. Ralph took Parker Brothers to court. And he even has a deposition with Robert Barton, who's an older gentleman at this point. And he was the president of Parker Brothers, and he oversaw the whole monopoly deal. And that case goes on for years and years and years. He was hoping to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court.

And ultimately, the Supreme Court refuses to hear his case. We reached out to Hasbro, the company that now owns Parker Brothers and the Monopoly brand. We didn't hear back by the time we published. But we know that around this time, Monopoly was poised to go even bigger. The game Monopoly has come to life at McDonald's, with a McDLT, Coca-Cola, or $1 million. With some help from another titan of industry. Sometimes we think of these brands, including Monopoly, as being kind of almost religious, like they have this higher purpose. But if your job is to sell games, you want to advertise,

you want to market and you want to market to people in a way that they're going to really as many people as possible. And so how better to do that than partner with McDonald's, which is one of the most ubiquitous brands in the world. The game Monopoly is back at McDonald's. And oh golly, this is the year to play. brands in the world. So it's kind of a marriage made in heaven, right? McDonald's can play off of the nostalgia for Monopoly and the fun of games and drum up, you know, interest in getting, you know, matching pieces and such. And it's a win for Monopoly

because now you're getting advertising in one of the most widely spread franchises in the world. So I think it was mutually beneficial. And obviously time has shown that that's definitely the case. As Mary sat in Ralph's apartment learning about all of this in the year 2009, she was floored by how much the things in these boxes from decades earlier, Henry George's ideas about housing, Lizzie McGee's questioning of monopolies, Ralph Ansbach's critiques of capitalism, reflected the world outside. The signs were everywhere, but now it's official We are in a recession. 27% drop in the number of homes sold last month compared to June. 27%. That is terrible news.

But the question now, when will it end? The housing market had plummeted. The stock market was at its lowest since the Great Depression. And many people were fed up. Around the time I started getting interested in the story, Occupy Wall Street was something that I was covering. It's our duty as Americans to fight for our country and to keep it, you know, true to serving its people.

And when it doesn't do that, it's immoral not to stand up and say something. And the Mr. Monopoly icon became, you know, very much used and loved by protesters as a critique of capitalism. And I thought, OK, now we've come full circle. Now, like, Monopoly and its iconography has become this, like, you know, symbol of Wall Street excess and things. And I think Lizzie would be proud of that. Thousands of demonstrators descended on the financial district. I think what Lizzie McGee was trying to do is ask questions.

Many people down there asking the question, what are the people who helped create the jobs crisis doing to help the people out of work? And I think Monopoly, the game, and what she was trying to do is assert questions to get us to think differently about things, to get us to be more observant, to pay more attention to things like landlords, land, money, who controls what. We're born into the world and we just think things are the way they are, but things don't appear out of thin air. Amazon is now responding to a report from Congress that found it's acting like a bully of sorts to its competitors. Google is now under sharp attack. To many, it is a symbol of unchecked power. And lawmakers say Amazon and other big tech companies have a monopoly, and it's time for a change.

Many of the practices used by these companies have harmful economic effects. They discourage entrepreneurship, destroy jobs, hike costs, and degrade quality. Simply put, they have too much power. There's no doubt in my mind that we are living in a gilded age. There's no doubt in my mind that we have huge issues in our society that need to be rethought. Despite rising inflation, major U.S. corporations are reporting record profits as companies pass rising supply chain costs on to consumers. The pandemic brought a lot to surface in terms of, are these systems working? It's a lesson we learn early on.

Work hard, earn a decent living, and you'll be able to afford a home. Some of our employees are living in their cars. Some of them are homeless. Intense demand and diminishing supply have sent home prices soaring. We are seeing record rental prices across the United States. If you're working 40 hours a week, you should be able to make at least enough to support yourself and put food on your table. The lack of affordable housing is turning that age-old concept upside down. It's a shame to waste a crisis. A crisis can also be a moment when you look at things and make changes and improvements and I think a lot of these kind of bigger issues you're talking about in terms of housing

you know I mean the list goes on and on education health care to me at least it can feel so overwhelming I don't know where to start you know it's funny to think about like well a game could be a place to start especially when people are learning the game or teaching it to kids. Because I do think that makes an imprint. I think that does kind of shape understanding of things. For better or for worse. No, go to jail. This is go to jail. That was Mary Pilon.

Her book is called The Monopolis. That was Mary Pilon. Her book is called The Monopolis, Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game. That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and...

Lawrence Wu. Lane Kaplan-Levinson. Julie Kane. Victor Ibeez. Anya Steinberg. Yolanda Sanguini. Casey Miner. Christina Kim. Devin Katayama. Amiri Tuller. Backchecking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. Thank you to Mansi Karana, Steve Drummond, Lane Kaplan-Levinson, Devin Miller, Victor Ibeez, Dan Voice, Alyssa Nadwarni, Joseph Haas, and Adam Gold for their voiceover work. Thanks also to Tamar Charney and Anya Grunman. And a special thanks to my nephews Zaid, Taha, and Ali for playing Monopoly with me.

This episode was mixed by Josh Newell. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes... And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org or hit us up on Twitter at ThruLine NPR. Thanks for listening. This message comes from NPR sponsor Grammarly. What if everyone at work were an expert communicator? Thank you. secure AI writing partner that understands your business and can transform it through better communication. Join 70,000 teams who trust Grammarly with their words and their data. Learn more at Grammarly.com. Grammarly. Easier said, done.