This article is part of overlookeda series of obituaries beginning in 1851 about prominent people whose deaths were not reported in the Times.
Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman in Philadelphia, learns about a new board game that is becoming popular and asks a friend to help him spice up his graphic design by typing out the rules. In 1933, he copyrighted his invention, the game Monopoly, and began selling it in toy and department stores.
The game, which involves real estate transactions, has sold more than 275 million copies, licensed hundreds of spinoffs, and become part of the fabric of American life. It also made Darrow a millionaire. But the credit for the idea behind it should not be his. Rather, it belonged to Lizzie McGee, a woman from Illinois with a multitalented career that included writing, acting, engineering, and work as a stenographer.
The premise of Magie's Game, originally called The Landlord's Game, is familiar to anyone who has played Monopoly. People can move tokens around a square board, buying real estate along the way and using it to charge rent to others. players. Magee patented her own invention in 1904, the same day the Wright brothers applied for a patent for the airplane, and in 1906 Magee patented her Economic Her Game, which she was the owner of. Published through the company.
“Every time a player circles the board, he is performing a tremendous amount of labor on Mother Earth, and he is compensated for this in the form of wages after he passes the starting point,” Magee wrote in his patent application. You will receive $100.”
Maggie designed the game with two rules. One is to reward players if resources are distributed equally, and the other is that the land lord who has acquired the most wealth is the winner. In any case, she wanted players to think about the underpinnings of capitalist society.
Elizabeth Jones McGee was born in Macomb, Illinois on May 9, 1866 into a political family. According to Mary Pillon's 2015 book, The Monopolists, her father, James McGee, was an abolitionist newspaper publisher who reported on the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debate. Her mother was Mary (Ritchie) McGee.
At various points, Maggie was a poet. A stenographer in a dead letter office receives mail deemed undeliverable. She is a comedic stage actress. An engineer who invented and patented a device that improved the flow of paper in typewriters. And a novelist. Her short story, “The Theft of a Brain,'' published in the women's magazine “Godey's,'' is about a successful writer who unlocked her potential through hypnosis, only to discover that her novel had been plagiarized by a hypnotist. It was about noticing things.
McGee devised The Landlord's Game as an ideological tool, a game that taught people about the principles of political economist Henry George. The central tenet of Georgism is that people should keep everything they earn, but because land rightfully belongs to everyone, the government should be funded by taxes on property owners. That was it. George believed that a society funded by a single land tax would eliminate both lower class poverty and industrial cartels.
In the rules for The Landlord's Game, Maggie explained how potential conflicts can be resolved: However, if a player absolutely refuses to follow the above rules, he will go to jail and have to stay there until he throws a double or pays a fine. ”
Although The Landlord's Game was not a huge hit, it did win some fans, including the utopian Quakers of Delaware and the Fraternity Brothers of Williams College in Massachusetts. The game was also adapted for the British market under the name “Bler Fox and Bler Rabbit”.
It wasn't Maggie's only work. She invented several card games, including a role-playing game called “Mock Trial”, which she sold to Parker Brothers in 1910. That year, she also tried to sell “Landlord's Game”, but the company was too complicated.
By then, she had also gained national attention for a publicity stunt she performed in 1906. That's when her newspaper ad advertised her as a “young female American slave” with “large gray-green eyes and passionate lips.” She described herself as “she is not beautiful, but very attractive”, has “great teeth” and is “honest, fair, poetic and philosophical”.
The ad was intended to be a commentary on slavery and the bleak economic prospects for single women, but instead led to unwanted marriage proposals and offers of employment in a freak show. (Maggie eventually married businessman Albert Phillips at the age of 44.) This also led her to correspond with the tasteless writer Upton Sinclair and to work as a newspaper reporter. .
Meanwhile, players were converting The Landlord's Game into a homemade set, copying the board onto wood or cloth, tweaking the rules, and calling it “The Monopoly Game.” When the hobbyist taught his friend how to play, the novice had no idea that the homemade game was Maggie's invention.
Monopoly and McGee's relationship was further lost to history in 1935, when Darrow sold a version to Parker Brothers that incorporated the name of the lively beach resort of Atlantic City, New Jersey. He claimed to have invented it to entertain his family in the days of Monopoly. Great Depression. The fantasy of plutocracy was exactly what Americans wanted at the time. It sold millions of copies, saved the struggling Parker Brothers from bankruptcy, and made Darrow a millionaire.
Many successful games, including Tiddlywinks and Battleship, were created as commercial versions of homespun repurposings, but any publisher can print their own version if the game is in the public domain.
In an effort to quell potential competition and establish Monopoly's monopoly, Parker Brothers acquired a similar game, The Landlord's Game, as well as spin-offs such as Finance.
McGee sold the rights to The Landlord's Game to Parker Brothers for a flat fee of $500, which is now about $11,000. The company also agreed to publish her two other board games, the tile-matching game King's Men and the shopping game Bargain Day. Delighted that her Georgian ideas would reach a wider audience, she wrote a letter to Parker Brothers in which she talked about The Landlord's Game as if it were a human. Ta. I'm sad to say goodbye to you, but I'm leaving you for someone who will do more for you than I ever could. ”
Parker Brothers, which was acquired by Hasbro in 1991, reprinted The Landlord's Game, but it soon went out of print again and was overshadowed by Monopoly. McGee had no claim to royalties, and Parker Brothers promoted Darrow as the sole inventor of Monopoly.
McGee's groundbreaking contributions to American culture and game design were erased until the 1970s. That's when Ralph Anspach, inventor of a game called Anti-Monopoly, unearthed her work during a legal battle with Parker Brothers over trademark infringement.
Maggie died on March 2, 1948, in Staunton, Virginia, at the age of 81, but even if her name was erased and her ideology toned down, she was determined to ensure that the games based on her inventions endured. I lived long enough to see him achieve great success.
The Washington, D.C., Evening Star newspaper, which interviewed McGee in 1936, summarized her views as follows: Now that she is on Monopoly's board of directors, she feels that her entire business was not in vain. ”