This is being circulated around the members of my Quaker meeting house, titled “The Quaker Origins of Monopoly.” I am still researching the author.
It was this week — early November — in 1935 that a woman named Elizabeth “Lizzie” Magie Phillips agreed to sell Parker Brothers the patent for her version of the board game Monopoly. Lizzie Magie had invented the game back in 1903, although she called it The Landlord’s Game, and in 1904 she was issued a patent.
It was a game intended to teach a strong moral lesson. Magie was a young Quaker woman and a follower of Henry George, a political economist.
George was the author of Progress and Poverty (1879), which at the time was a huge bestseller, selling more than three million copies, a big number for its day. He argued that poverty was a direct result of monopolies placed on land and resources, and that it was immoral for a few people to own natural resources — especially land — and then rent them out. Not only was it unethical, he said, but it also would hurt the American economy. His solution was called the “single tax” theory — he thought that everyone should have an equal share in the land where they lived or worked, and pay a single, equal tax on it.
So Lizzie Magie invented a board game that showed how the evils of the current economic system — how landlords could become wealthy by buying a piece of land and then charging rent. The board looked very similar to the modern Monopoly board, with railroads in the corners, properties along the sides, some stops to pay property tax or improvement taxes, public utilities, and a jail square. She explained that the point of The Landlord’s Game was “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 how the single tax would discourage land speculation.”