by Mary Pilon
Critics argued that the finding of the appeals court disregarded the basics of trademark law. By 1983, “shredded wheat,” “elevator,” and “aspirin” had been deemed generic because they had become commonplace terms, but Formica, Teflon, and Coke had been upheld as trademarks. An already confusing body of law had become even more so.
In the wake of the Anti-Monopoly decision, trademark lawyers and lobbyists took to Capitol Hill to push for legislation that would strengthen copyright protection for corporations. Fearful of succumbing to Parker Brothers’ fate, companies began airing advertisements that stressed that they represented a specific brand. One brochure stated, “So please: copy things, don’t ‘Xerox’ them.”
Republican senator Orrin Hatch of Utah argued that quality brands were under fire because of the decision and proposed an amendment to the federal trademark laws that would outlaw the consumer motivation test, which asked people why they bought a certain product and had helped earn Ralph his victory. The provision was tucked into a bill that protected the manufacturers of semiconductor chips from piracy, and it easily passed. In the eyes of Ralph and Carl Person, the new law made it easier for a company to lay claim to something that otherwise would be perceived as generic, and hurt competition. “People were afraid all of the other marks would go the way of Monopoly,” Person said, years later. “It just helps the rich get richer.”
As part of its agreement with Parker Brothers, Anti-Monopoly could not reopen litigation in the matter, but Person ensured that Ralph’s right to sell Anti-Monopoly would still be protected under the new act in what became known as “the Anti-Monopoly amendment.” (Ralph later joked that because of the law’s backers, it should have been called the “pro-Monopoly” amendment.) The longer-term concern, however, wasn’t one of trademark protection for Anti-Monopoly as much as it was one of fair use. If a game inventor wanted to create a new game that made some kind of comment on Monopoly, it could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees just to get the idea started, a fate that befalls many tech entrepreneurs today.
And even after the Supreme Court outcome, Ollie Howes and the other Parker Brothers attorneys held that the Ninth Circuit appeal ruling applied only to the Ninth Circuit region. Howes knew that Ralph could sell Anti-Monopoly anywhere he pleased, but the court had not yet ordered that the Darrow Monopoly trademark be canceled, and other inventors did not enjoy the same freedom regarding the Monopoly trademark that Ralph was guaranteed.
Had Ralph never pursued his Anti-Monopoly case until the end or taken a settlement of some kind, it’s extremely unlikely that Monopoly’s true history would have been unearthed, or at least not as fully. Even so, the beloved Darrow legend lives on. It only makes sense. The Darrow myth, while largely a false narrative, is irresistible, an inspirational parable of American innovation. It’s a “nice, clean, well-structured example of the Eureka School of American industrial legend,” the New Yorker’s Calvin Trillin wrote in 1978. “If Darrow invented the story rather than the game, he may still deserve to have a plaque on the Boardwalk honoring his ingenuity.” It’s hard not to wonder how many other unearthed histories are still out there—stories belonging to lost Lizzie Magies who quietly chip away at creating pieces of the world, their contributions so seamless that few of us ever stop to think about their origins.
Commonly held beliefs don’t always stand up to scrutiny, but perhaps the real question is why we cling to them in the first place, failing to question their veracity and ignoring contradicting realities once they surface. And in the case of Monopoly, there didn’t seem to be any reason for the public to question its creation story in the first place. If Ralph’s legal battle had percolated even a few years later than it did, several of the key players he needed to testify to win his case would have been dead, their witnessing of the truth lost.
As the revelations of the game’s controversial origins gained more attention in the courts and in the press, Parker Brothers quietly began to massage its Monopoly history. A 1985 version of the Monopoly rulebook opened with the header “The 30s, the Depression, and Darrow” and said that Darrow had “presented” a game called Monopoly to Parker Brothers executives. Similarly, a 1988 history called The Monopoly Companion, written by a former head of Parker Brothers’ research and development department, acknowledged that Darrow had not invented the game, but didn’t fully discuss his limited contribution to it. In 1996, on the official Monopoly website, Hasbro Inc., which purchased Parker Brothers in 1991, wrote, “It all started back in 1933 when Charles B. Darrow of Germantown, Pennsylvania was inspired by The Landlord’s Game to create a new diversion to entertain himself while he was unemployed.” And even in 2014, on Hasbro’s website, a timeline of the game’s history begins in 1935. While clever and lawyerly, these corporate retellings are most illuminating in what they don’t mention: Lizzie Magie, the Quakers, the dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of early players, Ralph Anspach, and the Anti-Monopoly litigation. Perhaps the care and keeping of secrets, as well as truths, can define us.
Some argue that Parker Brothers, and later Hasbro, has been an able steward of the game, and that we owe the consistency and potency of the brand to these companies. “Would the world have been better off with Monopoly in the public domain?” said game historian David Sadowski in an interview. “I think not. Most likely, there would’ve been a plethora of competing games, with differing rules and visual signatures.” Perhaps, but then again, games like checkers and chess, which have long been in the public domain, act as counterpoints to that argument. Consumers are consistently able to obtain those games in standardized versions.
The Monopoly case opens the question of who should get credit for an invention and how. Most people know about the Wright brothers, but don’t recall the other aviators who also sought to fly. The adage that success has many fathers but we remember only one rings true—to say nothing of success’s mothers. Everyone who has ever played Monopoly, even today, has added to its remarkable endurance and, on some level, made it their own. Games aren’t just relics of their makers—their history is also told through their players. And like Lizzie’s original innovative board, circular and never-ending, the balance between winners and losers is constantly in flux.
While Lizzie Magie’s 1904 patent clearly laid the foundation for what most people today know as Monopoly, many others modified it, and Charles Darrow brought it to the world’s attention. Does Monopoly belong to Lizzie? The Quakers? The Darrows? Parker Brothers? Or all of the above and anyone and everyone who plays it?
Now well into his eighties, Ralph has retired as a professor but still oversees Anti-Monopoly, which is currently being published by University Games. Once a year, he and some of the other surviving original board members meet for dinner in San Francisco, just as they did in the 1970s, when they had fewer wrinkles but more anxiety about the game’s fate. Ralph’s sons, Mark and William, intend to carry on the business and legal affairs of Anti-Monopoly Inc. for another generation.
Most important to Ralph, the outcome of the Monopoly legal battle preserved his right to freely talk about the game and its history.
His silence, Ralph said, “is not for sale.”
WHAT BECAME OF THEM
“The court’s reference to Darrow as the inventor or creator of the game is clearly erroneous.”
—THE U.S. COURT OF APPEALS, NINTH CIRCUIT
Ralph Anspach is retired and has finished a memoir entitled An American Professor Fought the 1948 Arab Jihad to Destroy Israel at Birth and Explains Why It Continues. He is happily remarried and he and his wife Silvia split their time between the Bay Area, France, and New Zealand. Anti-Monopoly games are still for sale at antimonopoly.com, but while the game has sold well overseas, Ralph and the representatives at University Games, who handle Anti-Monopoly’s sales in the United States, say they’ve had a hard time finding distribution in the States due to agreements between Hasbro and big box retailers. A computerized version of Anti-Monopoly is slated to be released
by Webfoot Games.
Ruth Anspach retired in Queens, New York, and she enjoyed spending time with her family in Manhattan. She never lost her interest in progressive politics. She died in March 2012.
William Anspach graduated from Harvard Law School and currently represents labor unions in New York City. He wrote his law school admissions essay about the Anti-Monopoly battle. He is happily married to his wife, Ronit, an urban planner, and keeps busy chasing after their baby boy, Leo.
Mark Anspach is an anthropologist and social theorist affiliated with a research center in Paris, where he earned his doctorate after graduating from Harvard College. Much of his work explores the ritual aspects of economic exchange.
John Droeger continued to practice law in the Bay Area for years and is now retired in Arizona.
Carl Person still practices law at his own firm in New York City and is credited by many for revolutionizing the paralegal field. He has run for many public offices over the years, including New York attorney general and mayor of New York City. Among his pending legal matters is an antitrust suit against Google Inc.
Charles Darrow died in 1967.
Esther Darrow died in 1991. She was survived by several family members who recalled her as a loving mother and grandmother.
Richard “Dickie” Darrow died in 1971.
William Darrow continued to live and work as a farmer in Pennsylvania until his death in 2006. His children continue to play the game from time to time.
Franklin Alexander died at the age of ninety-five “with a smile on his face,” according to his family. He worked on political cartoons into his eighties. He is survived by his two daughters, Lyn Russek and Mimi Simson, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren, including his grandson Hal, who e-mailed me on a whim wondering if I knew whether or not his grandfather had drawn the Monopoly art.
Robert Barton retired after the sale of Parker Brothers to General Mills and died in 1995 at the age of ninety-one.
Randolph Barton is retired and still lives in Massachusetts. He spends his time with various philanthropic organizations, with his family, and at a second home in Maine.
Jay Walker, years after sabotaging a Monopoly tournament, became one of the biggest stars of the first dot-com boom as the founder of Priceline.com. By 2000, the Forbes 500 was placing his net worth at $1.6 billion dollars, at the time one of the fastest ascents to the fabled list ever. The bubble burst, and Walker’s fortune dwindled to only a few hundred million dollars. His roommate and fellow Monopoly player, Jeff Lehman, went on to become the president of Cornell University and is currently the vice chancellor of New York University in Shanghai.
Parker Brothers is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hasbro Inc., as is Milton Bradley. No former Parker employees who worked in marketing or research and development are on the Hasbro payroll. Through a spokeswoman, Hasbro declined to make its executives available for interviews for this book and declined to provide any photographs or images of its Monopoly game boards. My lists of over two hundred fact-checking questions and follow-up contact attempts went unanswered. When Hasbro purchased Parker Brothers in 1991, it’s likely that it also purchased a trove of George Parker’s diaries and neatly organized game library, which it has declined to make available to researchers for decades, as it declined my request to access them.
Monopoly continues to be among the bestselling commercial board games of all time and lives on in its classic cardboard incarnation, as well as on iPhone, iPad, and other digital platforms, well over a century after Lizzie Magie drew her original game. In an effort to keep the old brand relevant, Hasbro hosted a vote in 2013 that resulted in fans ousting the iron token and introducing a cat. In 2014, it sought out favorite “house rules.”
Lawmakers continue to push back the year of expiration of the so-called Mickey Mouse Protection Act. The estates of everyone from Sonny Bono to George Gershwin have weighed in on how long after a creator’s death an estate can continue to claim copyright. Under the Copyright Act of 1976, a copyright lasted for the life of an author plus fifty years, or seventy-five years if the work was corporately authored. Since then, copyright protection for works created before 1978 (like Monopoly) has been extended to ninety-five years from the publication date (in the case of Monopoly, 2030). One side of Congress felt that extending copyright protection helped the economy by ensuring that works were preserved and protected overseas. If artists were incentivized to create their own works, the thinking went, they would be less likely to rehash old ones. Opponents saw the extension as a boon to those who currently held the marks at the expense of the public.
Lizzie Magie died in 1948. She and her husband, Albert, as well as her father, mother, and grandfather, are buried alongside each other in Arlington, Virginia, neither her obituary nor her headstone making any mention of her game invention. While she did not have any children, several of her extended family members maintain a genealogy of their connection to the Landlord’s Game and the founding days of the Republican Party.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
—MARCEL PROUST
The Monopolists is the result of more than five years, five apartments, four laptops, jobs at two newspapers, hundreds of miles run to train for three marathons, a Great Recession, research trips to ten states, two Olympics, and hundreds of gallons of coffee. There was high-fiving and heartbreak, tears and triumphs, weddings, funerals, baby showers, and even a few board game nights. In the process of reporting this story, I hacked off over a foot of hair in one anguished swoop, sold off many of my material possessions, was confronted by law enforcement for falling asleep in public places, was charged parking fines, found Monopoly money in my linens when doing laundry, fretted about finances, had nightmares about the various aspects of the story—including one exclusively about semicolons—and felt an eerie sense of connection with my characters, who also became obsessed with Monopoly and its curious origins in a twisted Nancy Drew way that perhaps bordered on unhealthy. I loved, I lost, I learned, I wrote.
They say that writers suffer so their readers don’t have to, but so do those dear souls who are close to writers, who empower, encourage, and rip apart story structures in the name of friendship and generosity. I can’t say I always completely understand it, but I’m incredibly grateful nonetheless.
Finishing The Monopolists was a true battle of endurance that I never could have even dreamed of attempting without an incredible and gracious group of people.
SOURCES
I’m incredibly grateful to Ralph Anspach and the Anspach family for taking the time to tell their story. Ralph endured hours and hours of interviews and more fact-checking e-mails and phone calls than he or I ever imagined, and was enthusiastic and upbeat through the whole process. Mark and William, too, were kind enough to meet with me and answer my questions, and I was grateful that I could spend time interviewing Ruth Anspach before she passed away in 2012.
Thanks are also due to Richard Biddle and Edward Dodson with the Henry George School in Philadelphia, the New York Public Library, the New York Historical Society, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, New York University, the library at Swarthmore University, the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Elwyn School, Ancestry.com, the Atlantic City Historical Museum, the New Jersey Historical Society in Newark, WorldCat, Google Books, the Delaware Historical Society, the Smithsonian, the United States Postal Service, the Library of Congress, NYU Game Center, Nerd Nite, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Arden Craft Shop Museum and the kind residents there, Mike Curtis, Bruce Whitehill, David Sadowski, Becky Hoskins, Phil Orbanes, the Allphin family, Byron Coney, Malcolm G. Holcombe, the Strong Museum, Jonathan Will, Roger Angell, Calvin Trillin, Tim Walsh, Christian Donlan, Ian Brown, Jesse Fuchs, Alfred C. Velduis, Stephen Pavlisko, Jeff Lehman, Jay Walker, Richard Stearns, Christian Thee, Evan Kalish, Marty Schwimmer, Zach
ary Strebeck, Neil Wehneman, Jim Esposito, Carl Person, the Magie family (John Q. Magie and William Magie in particular), and BoardGameGeek.com.
Thomas Forsyth has gone above and beyond as a game researcher and friend. Many thanks to him, and find him online at landlordsgame.info.
CHEERLEADERS
My mother, Carol, believed in me, gave me blank notebooks, and lived a courageous life. My father, Myron, is a fantastic father who never questioned why his offspring was spending her time writing about board games. My older brother, Andy, and awesome nephew, Quint, keep me in check, and I love them dearly for it. They taught me how to play Monopoly, and so much more.
Thank you to Aunt Ronda Pilon and Uncle Bob Roschke (and Chicago’s best bookstore, the Bookworks), Larry and JoAnn Morse, Michael Morse, the Guernsey family (Carol, Daniel, Aidan, and Owen), the Renfro family (Guy, Linda, Sarna and the Beckers, Trystan, Tal, and Gabe), Jim and Carol, Grandma Maxine, Aunt Jan Nakagawa, and Uncle Steve. From diapers to drafts, my family has been unwavering.
This project simply never would have happened without my power literary agent, Deborah Schneider, and fearless lawyer, Kim Schefler. From the start, they believed in the story and me, and I can’t thank them enough for their expertise and friendship.
From the moment we first met at their offices in the Flatiron Building, where Darrow and Barton had done their deal eighty years before, the crew at Bloomsbury USA have created a tremendous home for this book. Nancy Miller and her team embraced this story from the start, and I’m indebted to them. Thanks are due to also to Lea Beresford, Laura Phillips, George Gibson, Sara Mercurio, and Nathaniel Knaebel.