But her one pet cause was the single-tax policies championed by Henry George, the progressive economist. George might not be a household name today, but he certainly was in the late 19th century people claimed his Progress and Poverty had outsold every book but the Bible, and he was popular enough that he made a sizable showing in the New York City mayoral election. She even took out an ad in several national newspapers advertising herself as a “White Female Slave” for the highest bidder, in order to call attention to the state of gender inequality at the time. The short stories she published had heavy undertones concerning the evils of competitive capitalism. An outspoken feminist and progressive, most of her public statements and creations had a political purpose. This was very intentional on Magie’s part she wasn’t just “some housewife” who had come up with a board game on a lark. Many of the features of Monopoly can be clearly seen in her game, including Jail, Railroads, and the Luxury Tax. “The object of the game is not only to afford amusement to the players, but to illustrate to them how under the present or prevailing system of land tenure, the landlord has an advantage over other enterprises and single tax would discourage land speculation.” Magie’s game, she hoped, would show players that scrambling for properties and charging each other exorbitant rents caused more harm to the community than good. But while the rules are almost identical, the ideals behind the two games were very different. There are some minor differences between The Landlord’s Game and our familiar Monopoly, most notably that in Magie’s version, the game was over after everyone had gone around the board five times, saving everyone involved a lot of time and trouble. Perhaps most damningly, the gameboard features several spaces that have carried over unchanged into Monopoly, including the railroads placed at the center of each side, and the space marked “Go to Jail,” sending a player’s token to be imprisoned on the opposite corner (which, by the way, you had to pay $50 or roll doubles to escape). In Magie’s game, players move around the board buying properties and paying rent on their opponents’ spaces, trying to accumulate more money than their opponents. And for good reason: the Monopoly we know today is a near-carbon copy of an earlier game, The Landlord’s Game, designed by a Prince Georges County Maryland stenographer named Elizabeth Magie - except that while Monopoly’s goal is to bankrupt your opponents, The Landlord’s Game was intended to show players the evils of monopolies.Įlizabeth Magie received a patent for The Landlord’s Game in 1904, and its description of the game’s rules will ring a lot of bells for anyone who has played Monopoly. However, the game would have already seemed very familiar to intellectuals, leftists, and Quakers across the Northeast. The game was hugely popular, selling two million copies in its first two years in print. The official history of Monopoly states that the game was invented in 1935 by Charles Darrow, a man down on his luck during the Great Depression, who was catapulted to fame and fortune through his invention of a simple board game. The true inventor of Monopoly, Lizzie Magie.
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