Throughline - Lies, theft, and cover-up: the history of Monopoly you've never heard

Episode Date: August 6, 2026

Monopoly is one of the best-selling board games of all time. It heralds free market economics and celebrates the American dream. That's a far cry from the original intent. This week on our series Hidden Histories, we go back in time to reveal the swindling and cover ups that robbed Monopoly's inventor of her fair share and turned her scathing critique of capitalism into her worst nightmare. (This episode originally aired in 2022) Guests: Mary Pilon, author of The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board GameSupport public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey there. This summer break on ThruLine, we're bringing you a collection of hidden histories that we hope will make you rethink how the world works. Like this story about Monopoly, the All-American board game that's urged us to own it all, turning its original message on its head. Here it is. My family played at Christmas Eve. That was our tradition growing up. 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. You know, 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 of my family. So the idea that I had even remotely equal footing was really exciting. This is Mary Palan. She's a journalist who writes about it. sports and business.

But Monopoly was not on my list at all. Um, 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 games.

No, I know the game, don't worry. I tried playing with my nephews recently. Hello, I'm Uli. I'm Zade. I'm Thaha. And they had a lot of questions. Wait, we can steal? What do they mean my mortgage?

I don't know. You can steal. How much is the rent? questions that feel much bigger than a board game. 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. They'll plunge to a record low yesterday, reaching 777 points.

And that is the largest single-day point loss ever. Nearly two 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 and 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 80, 88,000, and then it went down to, like, 50. 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 Palin 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. And he was like, oh, the whole story, it's all, it's all a lie. 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 on to for more than a century? I'm Randabed Fattah. I'm Ramtin 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 Nudia de las Casas from Newton, Massachusetts. And you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Part one. 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 consequently 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. It is the riddle which the sphinx of fate puts to our civilization, and which not to answer is the be destroyed. So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes to build up great fortunes to increase luxury and make sure 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 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 cold 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 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 it distribute it? And what is the government's role and, you know, taking it 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, Carnegie's, and Rockefellers. The vicious, the ignorance, and the millionaires. Lizzie's dad, James McGee, a staunch progressive who traveled with Abraham Lincoln during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, strongly back 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.

Not just by giving her books, but by encouraging her to live a life that transcended the same. societal norms of the time. And she did. I have often been called a chip off the old block, which I consider quite a compliment, for I am proud of my father for being the kind of an old block that he is. She's involved in theater. She's writing poetry.

She's writing stories. And she was an impassioned advocate for women's suffrage. 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 woman's

single tax club of Washington, a club dedicated to advancing Georgia'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 ideas 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 are a high-rent neighborhood, I'm sure, is kind of nodding, nodding your head at that. Notting head. And that message really resonated with Americans in the late 1800s because, you know, this is at a time when poverty and swallor 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-monopoulists. Those were people who wanted to break apart monopolies, break apart these 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? 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 the single tax theory. And as for Lizzie McGee, she turned to the latest fat 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. 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 a 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 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 Landlords Game Patent, it's striking how similar it is to what we know is Monopoly today. You've got the railroads. Obviously, you don't have cars 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 Georgius. 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 in play today. When Lizzie creates the game, she makes two rule sets. She makes a monopolist rule set and an anti-monopist rule set. The anti-monopolis 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 Nearing, 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 roles 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 where 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 the vacation capital of the nation. In the 1930s, Atlantic City 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 bites, 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, like from that Christian perspective? So 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 spin-offs. 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 in 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. This is Emily Smalldon from Concrete, Washington, and Long Hearing Farm. Thank you so much for the show. It has kept me company for many long hours of field work. 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, 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 into 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 a 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 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 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 lightbul 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 better 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.

By 1932, nearly one man out of four was unemployed. But here was this guy, end this game, keeping the so-called American dream alive. Charles Darrow does all these interviews, all these photo shoots, where, you know, he's telling this Cinderella story. Inventor Charles Darrow, before he began to monopolize the field of after-dinner entertainment, was a prosperous engineer. When he lost his job and his money in 1930,

he got along by doing odd jobs like mending furniture. And they start to put it in the game itself. tucked in. It was tucked in the game I play. It was 1934, the height of the Great Depression, when Charles B. Dero of Germantown, Pennsylvania showed what he called the Monopoly game to the executives at Parker Brothers. And it 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 2.309 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 landlord's game, which is roughly 10 grand 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 part of 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. But there's no evidence they acknowledged her, really is 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. 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. All the day long, where the rain has shine, she's a part of the assembly line, she's making history, working for victory, Rosie. The riveter keeps a sharp look out 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. My grandparents, you know, my grandpa came back for 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 didn't break a woman's back. Machines can take it. Kids go to school.

The dad gets a job. With my father or grandfather, it was selling pharmaceutical stuff. 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, you know, Apple Pie image that is so popular at the time.

Monopoly has become a poignant 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 simple 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. 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, the myth is what ends up. up flying. Coming up, Mary calls a man who 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. 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 Pillon 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 sun of

The son of a Jewish banker and a homemaker. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 1938, New York City became a U.S. citizen. I pledged allegiance. Stationed to 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 Onspaq 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 1970. 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 have 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 him 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-ears removed from grim Europe. An evening filled with much laughter, shouting, and cut-throat deal-making ensued. Happily, Ralph, Ruth, Mark, and William maneuvered their metal trinkets around the board, past run-down Baltic Avenue, busy St. Charles Place,

and elite boardwalk. Too much? 260! They passed Go, they collected $200. I'll take it. They went straight to jail. They drew chance in 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 Monopoly 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. Anspark, 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 of 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. And 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 Tots, 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. The game monopoly has come to live. Around this time, Monopoly was poised to go even bigger, 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. 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 widely spread franchises in the world. So I think it was mutually beneficial. And obviously time has shown that that's definitely the case. With Monopoly Millionaire, live the life of a millionaire.

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, 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 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, okay, 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 Medea was trying to do is ask questions. Many people down there asking the question, what are the people who help 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 bull 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, high 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 aid. 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 onto 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 to afford a system. 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. The 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, 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 for worse. That was Mary Pilan.

Her book is called The Monopolis, obsession, fury, and the scandal behind the world's favorite board game. On our next installment of Hidden Histories, Tupperware. As we would say now, she was pretty much cancelled. She was obliterated from the corporate history. The rise and fall of the Queen of Plastics.

That's next next. week. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. I'm Ramtin 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 Ivelyez. Anya Steinberg. Yolanda Sanguini. Casey Minor. Christina Kim. Devin Kottiyama. Amiri Tala. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin vocal. Thank you to Monci Karana, Steve Drummond, Lane Kaplan Levinson, Devin Miller, Victor Ben-Veyes, Dan Boyce, Alyssa Ndwarney, 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 Navid Marvi, Shoe Fujiwara, Anya Mizani. Thanks for listening.