On & Offline

Musings and Maunderings

G*O*D
Turb [free book]
DrugTest
Advice To Young Poets

lighght

Mailto:: rur42 at yahoo.com

 
Monopoly Invented By Socialists
So says a piece in Washington Free Press by Burton H. Wolfe

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

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

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

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

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

Business as usual.
posted by degustibus at 1:37 AM