Review by New York Times Review
THE NATIONAL CARD GAME of the World's first market democracy naturally turned out to be poker, in part because money is its language, raison d'être and means of keeping score. Our favorite board game, of course, is Monopoly, which has also gone global, and for similar reasons. Played by everyone from Jerry Hall and Mick Jagger to Carmela and Tony Soprano, it apparently scratches an itch to wheel and deal few of us can reach in real life. The game is sufficiently redolent of capitalism that in 1959 Fidel Castro ordered the destruction of every Monopoly set in Cuba, while these days Vladimir Putin seems to be its ultimate aficionado. What dyed-in-the-wool free marketeer invented this cardboard facsimile of real estate markets, and who owns it now? From whose ideas did it evolve? These are the questions Mary Pilon, formerly a reporter at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, proposes to answer in her briskly enlightening first book, "The Monopolists." For decades the official story, slipped into every Monopoly box, was that Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman, had a sudden light-bulb moment about a game to amuse his poor family during the Depression. After selling it to Parker Brothers in 1935, he lived lavishly ever after on the proceeds. To trace how far removed this was from the truth, Pilon introduces Elizabeth Magie. Born in 1866, she was an unmarried stenographer whose passions included politics and - even more rare among women of that era - inventing. In 1904 she received a patent for the Landlord's Game, a board contest she designed to cultivate her progressive, proto-feminist values, and as a rebuke to the slumlords and other monopolists of the Gilded Age. Her game featured spaces for railroads and rental properties on each side of a square board, with water and electricity companies and a corner labeled "Go to Jail." Players earned wages, paid taxes; the winner was the one who best foiled landlords' attempts to send her to the poorhouse. Magie helped form a company to market it, but it never really took off. The game appealed mostly to socialists and Quakers, many of whom made their own sets; other players renamed properties and added things like Chance and Community Chest cards. Even less auspiciously for Magie, many people began referring to it as "monopoly" and giving it as gifts. Then in 1932, Charles Darrow received one with spaces named for streets in Atlantic City. No light bulb necessary. In November 1935, eight months after Darrow and Parker Brothers made their deal, the company persuaded Magie to sell them the Landlord's Game patent for $500. The contract provided no residuals, but she hoped the famous game company would turn her "beautiful brainchild" into a popular way of disparaging greedy monopolists. The company had other ideas. Pilon has found long-lost documents revealing that it wanted Magie's patent only to help "seal its hold on" Monopoly. It marketed the Landlord's Game lackadaisically at best, and made sure Magie's name had as little connection as possible to its lucrative blockbuster. Many of the iconic illustrations, probably including Mr. Monopoly and the whistle-blowing cop, were drawn as a favor to Darrow by his friend Franklin Alexander, a cartoonist who had studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but his contributions, too, were overlooked. Pilon presents evidence that Darrow's and Parker Brothers' patent maneuvers, such as postdating a key document and possibly destroying others, not only stiffed likely profit-sharers but kept most Monopoly lovers from knowing the game originated as "a protest against capitalism, not an endorsement of it." Their slick expropriation of Magie's ideas was something like pretending today that Sid Vicious was marketing Acuras when he covered "My Way" in 1978 - that indeed this was why he composed it. The Darrow-as-inventor propaganda held sway until Ralph Anspach, an economist at San Francisco State University, began to scrutinize it decades later. The rumpled professor, fed up with OPEC during the 1973 oil embargo, designed a game called Anti-Monopoly to help people understand how treacherously anyone who had cornered a market could behave. Like Magie, he believed "making money wasn't a crime, but ... monopolizing a product or industry and crushing one's opponents was." Anti-Monopoly players were "trustbusters" who earned points for breaking up monopolies and performing other acts of public service. Parker Brothers' demand that Anspach cease and desist triggered his furious counterattack. While researching aspects of Monopoly's development at The Journal and The Times, Pilon combed libraries, attics and brains for artifacts and perspectives relating to dozens of variants. Aside from the occasional anachronism or dropped-thread transition, she has woven a plush, often humorous tapestry of board-game and social history. Even passages devoted to sick children during the Depression fail to deflate her book's buoyancy. Her empathy lies with Magie, Anspach and other creative progressives, but she also plays fair by the Darrow and Parker families. "The Monopolists" closes on a rousing or melancholy note, depending on how the reader feels about capitalism, trademarks and intellectual property rights. It certainly measures the lengths to which one corporation has gone to sell the idea that a shrewd legalistic crusade was really a heartwarming parable - all part of its effort, as Anspach complained, to "monopolize Monopoly." JAMES McMANUS is the author of "Positively Fifth Street." His new collection of stories, "The Education of a Poker Player," will be published in October.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 22, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
In the 1970s, an economics professor went to court against Parker Brothers, arguing that the company had monopolized Monopoly. Ralph Anspach had designed an anti-Monopoly board game but received a threatening letter from Parker Brothers claiming the name infringed on their trademark and asking him to stop using it do not pass Go, do not collect $200. It kicked off a years-long, David-versus-Goliath court battle that led Anspach to discover the strange and complicated origins of one of America's favorite games. As New York Times reporter Pilon details in this surprising account, the game dates back to the early twentieth century, when single-tax evangelist Lizzie Magie designed an educational game called the Landlord's Game. But her contribution became largely lost to history, and an out-of-work salesman passed it off as his invention during the Great Depression. The book abounds with interesting tidbits for board-game buffs but treats its subject seriously. After reading The Monopolists part parable on the perils facing inventors, part legal odyssey, and part detective story you'll never look at spry Mr. Monopoly in the same way again.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
With more twists and turns than an Agatha Christie mystery, reporter Pilon reveals the tumultuous history of Monopoly, the iconic board game first created by Elizabeth Magie to draw attention to the economic theories of Henry George (a 19th-century politician and economist who advocated that land was not meant to be seized and couldn't be owned). Pilon chronicles the game's evolution through pop culture, including its crucial adoption by Quakers in Atlantic City, and the fervent players who modified the game to include local landmarks such as Ventnor Avenue and Boardwalk. The product then fell into the hands of an unemployed Charles Darrow, who patented it; Parker Brothers propagated his rags-to-riches story as though he were the originator of the game. To add to the drama, Pilon also relates the story of Ralph Anspach's Anti-Monopoly, a game designed to present a different point of view, which Parker Brothers went out of its way to squash (including a very public burial of 40,000 copies of Anspach's version). Dry concepts such as brand identity and copyright are deftly woven to create a compelling and seamless story that many readers will find more entertaining than the game itself. Agent: Deborah Schneider, The Gelfman Schneider Literary Agency. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Board games connote innocent entertainment, but journalist Pilon's social history of Monopoly reveals a less-benign chronicle of power, deception, and avarice, and a tale of small vs. mighty, in which the righteous do not always prevail. Separated by 70 years, its two protagonists each invented a game as a vehicle to broadcast economic beliefs, and both found themselves at odds with the powerful game company Parker Brothers. Monopoly's invention was long ascribed to one Charles Darrow, but its direct antecedent was the brainchild of feisty activist, feminist, inventor, and poet Lizzie Magie, an adherent of antimonopolist economist Henry George. In the early 1900s, Magie created The Landlord's Game as an instructive political statement and an amusement. In the 1970s, economics professor and activist Ralph Anspach developed his own didactic board game called Anti-Monopoly. Targeted by Parker Brothers, Anspach fought back, unearthing the hidden past here rounded out by Pilon. Readers may want a scorecard to manage the large cast of players, particularly during the journey of the early game from Lizzie Magie to Charles Darrow via utopians in Delaware, fraternity brothers at Williams College, and Quakers in Atlantic City. VERDICT Thoroughly researched and deftly paced, this fascinating narrative is at once legal thriller, folk history, underdog story, and expose of corporate greed, and deserves a wide readership among fans of Monopoly, critics of monopoly, and all who enjoy a good story well told.-Janet Ingraham Dwyer, State Lib. of Ohio, Columbus (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In her debut, New York Times sports reporter Pilon deftly explores the origin of the Monopoly board game. For as much enjoyment and strategic suspense as the game inspires in its players, the author reports on its flip side: Monopoly's problematic, serpentine roots. Inventor Lizzie Magie, an outspoken Washington, D.C., stenographer and activist, based her "Landlord's Game" on personal progressive political views and those of 19th-century politician, economist and "magnetic leader" Henry George and his radical "single tax theory." Yet, as the author notes, Magie's name would soon become disassociated from the game. Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman, would eventually take credit for Monopoly's creation with his own controversial appropriation of the game and, with its blockbuster success, rescue a near-bankrupt Parker Brothers Company. Pilon also explores the work of competitive Parker rival Milton Bradley, and she looks at later appropriations of Monopoly in the early 1930s. It's certainly surprising how Darrow and Parker Brothers were able to receive a patent for Monopoly "given the two Landlord's Game patents that had come before it." Sketchier still were Parker Brothers swift payoffs to creators of pre-Darrow Monopoly game incarnations (including Magie). However, the intrigue and litigious melodramatics hardly end there, as more questions on the authenticity of Parker's version of the game continued to surface. Pilon invests this surprisingly contentious chronicle with a dynamic mix of journalistic knowledge and subtle wit, adding a compelling chapter on a San Francisco economics professor's invention of the "Anti-Monopoly Game," which drew the ire of Parker Brothers and incited even more antagonistic trademark-infringement lawsuits. Contemporary gamers interested in exploring the early genesis of their pastime will find Pilon to be a readable, entertaining tour guide. A fascinating, appealingly written history of an iconic American amusement. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
