Book Review
The Monopolists
by Mary Pilon
I’ve read several books on the history of computing. A common thesis is many of the ideas in modern computers came from a hippie ’60s counter-culture movement that gradually got co-opted by the same corporate power structure that they were rebelling against. See: “What the Doormouse Said” by John Markoff, or “The Innovators” by Walter Isaacson.
One of the subplots of that thesis is that there was no single inventor of The Computer. It was the accumulation of many small ideas from people of diverse backgrounds. The process of assigning patents for those ideas was more about who had the best lawyers negotiating for them.
“The Monopolists” focuses on the history of Monopoly, but ends up exploring many of the same themes of innovation and intellectual property.
The book starts up in late 19th Century America. The board game culture is all about teaching educational & moral lessons. An amateur finance enthusiast named Lizzie Magie wants to teach people about Henry George’s single tax theory, where we would only tax land ownership. So she creates The Landlord’s Game, a board game where you travel around the board buying up property. The game incentivizes players to buy up as much land as possible and charge exorbitant rents. She wants to show how this leads to massive wealth inequality.
The game spreads for decades, from household to household. Each player tweaks the rules a bit. The book has some great pictures of homemade early boards. (They made me nostalgic for when I was a nerdy kid and made a Cosmic Wimpout board out of wood and canvas. Do people make homemade board games anymore?) Some Quakers in Atlantic City name the spaces on the board after major Atlantic City neighborhoods. Pilon even traces the history of the game’s iconic art.
Then Parker Brothers shows up in the ’30s and claims that Charles Darrow invented Monopoly from scratch. They obtain a patent and trademark.
Parker Brothers is the evil empire of this book: as both as a destroyer of history with archives that they won’t make public to researchers (boo!), and as a legal bully who sues amateur board game inventors (hiss!).
So if they’re a destroyer of history, how do we know about this? Much of the back half of the book answers that question. Ralph Anspach, a college econ professor, creates a game called Anti-Monopoly in the ’70s. Parker Brothers tries to shut him down. In the ensuing court case, he tries to prove their patent and trademark invalid by tracking down people who had played the Lizzie Magie and Quaker versions of the game.
There’s a long courtroom drama. Anspach spends years fighting the case. I mostly felt sad and tired about it. We have a body of intellectual property law that grants huge privileges to a lone inventor. It encouraged Parker Brothers to spend much effort maintaining that myth. History research is hard enough without corporations actively covering things up.
