Amanda (72:56)
Okay, that's Easy Money. Fun for the whole family. Which makes me think it's time for us to get down to brass tacks here. It's time for us to talk about the granddaddy of capitalist games, a game that I have never once successfully finished despite playing it so many times in my life. That's Monopoly. Like a lot of these games, the object of Monopoly is to be the person at the end with the most money money, perhaps even all of the money after everyone else has gone bankrupt by giving you all of their money for rent. Ah, Landlord the game. Right. Okay, well actually that's not too far off, so put a pin in that. I'm going to start this by saying that there's an excellent episode of PBS's American Experience about this and it's called called I mentioned it earlier in the episode Monopoly's Secret History. It is a great 52 minutes of television and I will link it in the show Notes, you should definitely give it a watch if you can. And I don't want to spend 52 minutes talking about Monopoly because American experience did a better job anyway. So I'm going to give you the Cliff Notes of it all. The story begins, strangely enough, in the 1970s with economics professor Ralph Anspach. He invented a game originally called Bust the Trust that was intended to be a response to Monopoly the game. Because ultimately, if you take a step back from the cute little hotels and the game pieces of Monopoly, I always like to be the little dog, and if I couldn't have that, I would be the car. But I never ever wanted to be the iron. And I really didn't want to be the top hat either. And I'm sure you had very strong feelings too. Well, when you take all of that, all the cuteness, all the bells and whistles, all the plastic doodads that make me love a game, take the fake money out of the game, all that stuff, and you just are like, what is this game really about? Monopoly is really about buying up all the property and utilities, about widening wealth inequality, about individualism over community. The winner is the person who has transferred everyone else's wealth to himself. And that happens by creating a monopoly of land ownership. Anspach renamed Bust the Trust to antimonopoly. And in the game, all of the utilities and real estate are formerly individual businesses that now exist under single ownership. You sort of begin anti Monopoly at the end of regular Monopoly game players. I can't even believe this. This is amazing. Game players are the federal caseworkers bringing federal indictments against these businesses in order to break them up into their original components. And believe it or not, the game was actually so successful that a year later, General Mills, the food company who at this point in the 70s also owned Parker Brothers Wild. They sued an Spock over his use of Monopoly in the name of the game, claiming trademark infringement. And to be fair, I don't want to victim blame here. He had it called Bust the Trust. He changed to Anti Monopoly. He kind of knew that this was coming, I think. Well, well, American experience goes into the legal. Into the whole legal case, and you should watch it to learn the rest of the story. But it turns out, and here's the interesting part for me, that the key to Anspach's case was proving who really invented Monopoly, because it wasn't Parker Brothers. Now, for years, the story of Monopoly was that a man named Charles Dallow from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, had invented Monopoly after losing his job during the Depression and so he made this game. He sent it out to all of the major game companies, including Parker Brothers. Everyone said no, they didn't think anyone would want to buy it. So he just starts making it himself, printing it himself and selling it to different stores, including John Wanamaker's in Philadelphia. And it's a hit. So two years later, after seeing all these strong sales sales, Parker Brothers buys the game from Darrow. And that should be the end of the story, right? Except that it's not the truth. Well, the truth is, yes, that Parker Brothers bought it from Darrow. And it is true that Darrow was out there selling it himself. But that's where the truth ends. The true story of monopoly begins in 1903 when political badass, progressive, inventor, feminist, writer, poet, actress, basically all around Amazing person, Lizzie McGee creates a game called Wait for It. Wait for it. Are you ready? The Landlord's Game. Yes. I really did download an air horn sound effect for this moment. McGee was not only a feminist, she was also a loud and proud activist for Georgism. Georgism, also known as the single tax movement, was popularized by Henry George in the late 1800s. Basically, he and other Georgists believed that land ownership was exacerbating economic inequality. If you owned land, you made money off of everyone else who didn't own land via rent or selling that land to them. And it didn't seem right since land wasn't something made by people, it existed before people. Yet if you somehow had land, you had an instant economic advantage, often for life, over those who had never owned land. Notice how this is kind of opposite of all of the level playing field lessons of the board games we've discussed already. Furthermore, Georgists were reacting to the era of the robber barons like Rockefeller and Carnegie, who were creating monopolies while stomping on workers and the environment. Yes, even then, people were aware of pollution and its impact on quality of life. A tiny group of people seemed to have it all, while the vast majority of people had almost nothing. Georgists believed that rather than taxing income or having a sales tax, the government should collect taxes solely based on land ownership. Assessing the tax owned on a piece of land based on its size, location and usefulness. Any money left over after using that tax money to fund the government would be distributed to the people. And this would redistribute wealth and allow all people to enjoy the benefits of the land, which once again, no single human had made. Land, the argument was, should be a communal property, since it was there before human humans even existed. The Landlord's Game, designed by Lizzie McGee, known Georgist, was intended to show players why these land monopolies were bad for society, while demonstrating the single tax as a good solution. The Landlord's game could be played two different ways. In the first version of the rules, it was played essentially like modern day Monopoly. Players competed to be the last person with money at the end, right? Winner takes all. But in the second version of the rules, which was the demonstration of the single tax, instead of paying rents to the landlords, the rent would actually go into the public treasury which was in the center of the board where it would be reinvested in the community, AKA the players. So nobody ever ran out of money or worried about it. So no one specific won in that version of the Landlord's Game. Everybody kind of won just by having a good time. In the American Experience episode, game designer Eric Zimmerman said, quote, it perhaps de emphasized our traditional pleasures dominating other players, coming out ahead, being the winner in favor of critical points about how economy and the social fabric is structured, structured and might be structured differently. And once again, McGee, like Milton Bradley, was using gameplay as a means of teaching players the values that mattered to her. Gaming scholar Patrick Chagoda said in American Experience, quote, I get why Elizabeth McGee would have wanted to make the Landlord's Game to teach people about the single tax because games are such a powerful way of, of internalizing a new set of rules, of practicing it, of experiencing it in a hands on fashion. Lizzie McGee actually patented the Landlord's Game and it was the first patent by a woman for a board game in US history. Well, despite that patent, the game moved around college campuses and communities where people created their own handmade versions of the game board, adapting it to reflect their own geographical landmarks. And over time, players stopped using the second version of the rules, focusing instead on the first version with its winner take all objectives. In the 1930s, the Landlord's Game became very popular with the Quaker community in Atlantic City who renamed it with Atlantic City location like Boardwalk, park place, Atlantic Avenue, etc. The first time I went to Atlantic City I was like, oh my gosh, all the streets here are named after Monopoly. But in fact it was the other way around. These names actually remain a part of modern Monopoly. And if you look at the street names and their prices today on the board, they actually reflect the segregation of Atlantic city in the 1930s with the lowest priced purple properties. The first ones that you encounter on the board actually being the neighborhoods where the black community lived in the 1930s, with the higher Priced properties, referring to more middle class and then affluent neighborhoods. As you move around the game board. In 1932, a friend had Charles Darrow over to his house. And you probably recognize that name because he's the alleged inventor of Monopoly from the beginning of this story. Well, by now we know this isn't true, right? So this friend has Darrow and his wife over, and he, along with his wife, they. They play a version of the Landlord's game, specifically the Atlantic City version. Strangely enough, that couple never hung out with Darrow and his wife ever again. In fact, they only hear from him one time, ever, when Darrow reached out kind of rudely to ask for the rules of the Landlord's game, which he then turned into his own game and started selling as Monopoly. In fact, that friend sees a poster at the bank inviting people to come spend an afternoon with Charles Darrow, the inventor of Monopoly, and he's like, what? And the rest is history. At one point, Magee and her husband took legal action against Parker Brothers, who placated her with $500 and the promise to release the original version of the Landlord's game, which they did, but only via a small and forgettable print run. And of course, they also, as part of that, got her to sign away her rights to Monopoly. So most people have no idea that she invented Monopoly. The story of this game, of this quintessentially capitalist game that is Monopoly in itself. It shines a spotlight on many of the dark sides of American history, right? Wealth disparity, the erasure of women and other marginalized people, Individuality at the expense of others and, you know, just generally being shitty and opportunistic, right? All of these things feel relevant. Even now with housing being unaffordable, like low key. I've kind of given up on ever owning a house. House. And a time when Shein and Temu and all of the other fast fashion brands steal from artists and designers every single day. Billionaire fuckboy idiots buying entire elections. Like, wow, I guess some stuff really never does change, right? The story of Monopoly. We are the story of monopoly even in 2024. And furthermore, like the other games we have discussed, Monopoly reinforces the false idea that we all start off at the same place with the same advantages and with the right combination of luck and skill or hard work, if you prefer, we can end up rich too. No one mentions, of course, that all of the wealth that you do accumulate will come at the expense of other people literally transferring what they own to yourself. But we do play this game over and over again. Heck, there are even, like, Disney Princess versions and Peppa Pig versions of Monopoly getting kids in. Young generations have played it at this point. And if games really do teach us about how life works and the values we should use to make decisions as adults. But maybe Monopoly isn't such a great game for children to play. Is this version of society what we want everyone to accept as the right version? In the American Experience episode, historian Bryant Simon mused, it's an interesting question. If Monopoly creates a misguided view about the United States, and maybe the way to think about it is, what if the original game had caught on? Would that have paved the way for an alternative political vision of America? That puts a lot on a game. But I think capitalists have always wanted to tell a story about how in America, some people get ahead and other people fall behind. And that's either luck. That's the roll of the dice. That's because they didn't play the game the right way. It's just like Monopoly. I mean, when you think about it that way, Monopoly becomes a really heavy game. And really all of these games that we've discussed, they become really, really damaging, right? Because they tell us the way you win is by buying the most stuff or having the most money at the end, or maybe tricking everyone else you're playing against out of their money as well. And I don't know if people would have really loved playing the second version of the Landlord's game and everybody left feeling good all the time if it would have held people's interests. I have no idea. But it is interesting that what we see is that year after year, some of these games, they stick around forever, right? Teaching us these flawed messages. Or we'll see a game like Mob Madness be successful. And then there's all these copycat games that essentially send the same story, right? And as I said earlier, I don't think that the executives at Milton Bradley or Parker Brothers or Tycho or anyone else who made these games were sitting around like, huh, what if we created a game that gets people really brainwashed into consumerism? They weren't thinking that. They were thinking, like, let's sell things that people will buy. But what if they had not stopped the conversation there and said, how will this impact future generations? How will this impact the way children perceive the world around them? How will this affect their own priorities and values? Values? What's valuable to them in this world? What their goals are down the road? That's a bigger question, right? Like, why didn't that happen, because those matter a lot more to me. But that's never where the toy industry is going, right? That's not where the conversation goes. It's all about what can we sell and how much of it can we sell. It's not dissimilar to fast fashion. Thinking about all of this, taking this journey through board games, well, it's no wonder that we have such complex and sometimes destructive relationships with shopping and clothing and credit cards. It's no wonder that accumulating wealth and stuff is the goal with those with the most being seen as heroes by many. And of course, in that version of the world where we see capitalism as the only right operating system system, we're all worrying about money and how much we have or don't have at any given moment. And that is why we should only play Scrabble and Boggle. No, that's not true. There are plenty of great games out there. I'm not even saying you shouldn't play these games, but thinking about how these games impact us, mentally, impact children mentally, and having conversations about that during gameplay and afterwards, or even adapting the rules, all of this stuff, it's inside our brains. All this consumerism stuff, capitalism stuff, winner takes all, the winner has all, the most stuff, all of that is inside our brains, dropped in there years and years ago. And it's going to take a lot of work to untangle that. Recognizing it, naming it, that's step one in making these changes. But we can't give up and say, well, I can't help it, this is bigger than me. And go place an order on Amazon. Because we can help ourselves and we can help one another. When we start talking about it in a weird and totally accidental way. This takes me full circle to my conversation about no buy year. Because my version of that starts with untangling these things of letting ourselves see a different version of happiness, a different objective of the game, and a different winner of the game. Thanks for listening to another episode of Clotheshorse. If you liked what you're hearing, leave a Rating a review. Subscribe, tell your friends you know all the stuff. Just a reminder that the merch shop is open@closehorsepodcast.com and there are even a few iron on transfers that are on sale until the end of the year, which is basically like one day away. If you'd like to support my work financially, you know, gotta, gotta pay for that $75 mall madness game somehow. There are many ways you can do that, and you can find all of those@closehorsepodcast.com in the show notes and in my profile on all the social media platforms. Lastly, but of course, never leastly, thanks to my other half, Dustin Travis White, for trying to help me figure out how to play Meet Me at the Mall and for our music and audio support. I will talk to you all in two weeks. I'm taking next week off and when I'm back, we'll get back into our series about inclusivity and slow fashion. Bye.
