For a game of MonopolyFunskool conducted the first leg of the All India Monopoly Championship in which Akshay Gandhi emerged the winner. Equipped with an unbeatable business sense, but do not have the resources to put it to use? For years, the game of monopoly has played a major role in honing the business skills of children and adults alike who are hooked to the game. It's all about money and how wisely you invest it. Then, what if you stood a chance to win real money in a championship that determines who plays the game the best?
The Monopolization of Monopoly Lizzie J. MagieOn March 23, 1903, Lizzie J. Magie, a young Quaker woman living in Virginia, applied to the US Patent Office for a patent on a board game she had invented as an easy, fun-filled method of teaching the evils of land monopolism. Lizzie Magie was an ardent follower of the single tax movement originated by Philadelphia-born Henry George, who began preaching in San Francisco circa 1869 that the economic rent of land and the unearned increase in land values profited a few individuals rather than the majority of the people, whose very existence produced the land values. He therefore advocated a single tax, on land alone, to meet all the costs of government. He thought this would erode the power of monopolies to suppress competition, and equalize opportunities. That was all heady, abstractly theoretical stuff for plain working folks to comprehend. So, Lizze Magie decided to teach it through her playtime invention, which she called "The Landlord's Game." She got her patent on January 5, 1904. It's registered as number 740,626 in the US Patent Office. Copies of the original game board are still available. The board for Lizzie Magie's game bears a striking resemblance to the one now labeled "Monopoly", except that names, drawings, colors and the like are different. It is painted with blocks for rental properties such as "Poverty Place" (land rent $50), "Easy Street" (land rent $100) and "Lord Blueblood's Estate " ("no trespassing - go to jail"). There are banks, a poorhouse, and railroads and utilities such as the "Soakum Lighting System" ($50 for landing on that) and the "PDQ Railroad" ("fare $100"). And of course there is the well known "Jail" block. The properties on Lizzie Magie's board were for rent only, not acquisition. Otherwise, the game was played much like the Monopoly of today. You might not think so if you read and compared only the rules introductions to Lizzie Magie's and Parker Brothers' games. Lizzie Magie's reads like this: "The object of this game is not only to afford amusement to players, but to illustrate to them how, under the present or prevailing system to land tenure, the landlord has an advantage over other enterprisers, and also how the single tax would discourage speculation." But the introduction to Parker Brothers' Monopoly reads approximately like this (depending on the year of your set): "The idea of the game is to buy and rent or sell property so profitably that one becomes the wealthiest player and eventually monopolist... The game is one of shrewd and amusing trading and excitement."
The Monopolization of Monopoly The Landlord's GameIt was not entirely that way, though they played it partly for amusement, for the original game players: Quakers, single taxers and college people such as Professor Scott Nearing, who acquired a copy of The Landlord's Game around 1910 and took it with him to the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Finance. Socialist economist Nearing (author of such books as Poverty and Riches, The American Empire, Democracy is Not Enough ) was already a radical destined to be fired from his teaching job for supporting early child labor laws. Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who amassed his wealth partly through child labor in his factories, was on the University of Pennsylvania board of trustees and he demanded, as a price for his funding the school, that Nearing be thrown out. Nearing then went on to become the grand old man of the ecology movement. Sixty-five years after Nearing first played Lizzie Magie's game, he explained in a letter to Ralph Anspach: "The game was used to prove the anti-social nature of monopoly." Along with students at Wharton, Nearing played The Landlord's Game with his brother, Guy Nearing, who lived in the Henry George single tax community of Arden, Delaware. As the students and single taxers played the game, they began a process - continued right up to 1976 - of altering the rules. The main change was that instead of merely paying rent when landing on a property block, the players could hold an auction to buy it. They also made their own game boards so that they could replace the properties designated by Lizzie Maggie with properties in their own cities and states; this made playing more realistic. As they drew or painted their own boards, usually on linen or oil cloth, they change the title "Landlord's Game" to "Auction Monopoly" and then just "Monopoly". Gradually, through the students and Quakers and single taxers, and their friends and relatives, the game of Monopoly spread to parts of Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Indiana and even as far away from its East Coast origin as Austin, Texas, where Ralph Anspach discovered early game boards 50 years later. Among the earliest players, circa 1915, was Rexford E. Tugwell, then an economics student at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. Later Rex Tugwell was a professor there and at Columbia Univeristy; then he became one of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's brain trusters and governor of Puerto Rico. One of Tugwell's students who played Monopoly while it was being developed as a folk game, Priscilla Robertson, wrote about it to Anspach in 1975 from her present home in Kentucky: "In those days those who wanted copies of the board for Monopoly took a peice of linen cloth and copied it in crayon. It was considered a point of honor not to sell it to a commercial manufacturer, since it had been worked out by a group of single taxers who were anxious to defeat the capitalist system." But that ain't the way Charles B. Darrow viewed it when he started playing the game in 1933, after it was already developed to its basic, present form by hundreds of people who preceded him. |