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Elizabeth J. Magie Phillips (née Magie; b. May 9, 1866, Macomb, Illinois – d. March 2, 1948, Arlington, Virginia) was an American game designer, writer, feminist, and Georgist. She invented The Landlord's Game, the precursor to Monopoly, to illustrate teachings of the progressive era economist Henry George.[2]
Elizabeth J. Magie was born in Macomb, Illinois, in 1866 to Mary Jane (née Ritchie) and James K. Magie, a newspaper publisher and an abolitionist who accompanied Abraham Lincoln as he traveled around Illinois in the late 1850s debating politics with Stephen Douglas. After moving to the D.C. and Maryland area in the early 1880s, she worked as a stenographer and typist at the Dead Letter Office.[3] She was also a short story and poetry writer, comedian, stage actress, feminist, and engineer. At the age of 26, Magie received a patent for her invention that made the typewriting process easier by allowing paper to go through the rollers more easily. At the time, women were credited with less than one percent of all patents. She also worked as a news reporter for a brief time in the early 1900s. In 1910, at age 44, she married Albert Wallace Phillips. They had no children.[2]
Magie was an outspoken activist for the feminist movement, and Georgism, which reflected her father's political beliefs when she was young.[2] Georgism refers to the economic perspective that instead of taxing income or other sources, the government should create a universal land tax based on the usefulness, size, and location of the land (Single tax). Then, after funding the government, the left over money would be distributed to the people. Many progressive political leaders at the time supported this economic perspective as it motivated people to cultivate land, redistributed wealth to people of low socioeconomic standing, eradicated the idea that landowners or landlords held the power and monetary value of the land that citizens used, and let people own all of the value and benefits of their creations.[4] This belief became the basis for her game known as The Landlord's Game.[2]
Furthermore, she believed that women were as capable as men in inventing, business, and other professional areas. In the 1800s, this belief was considered both novel and radical.[citation needed] When she worked as a stenographer, she was making around $10 which was not enough to support herself without the help of a husband. In order to bring the struggles of women in the United States to the public's attention, she bought an advertisement and tried to auction herself off as a "young woman American slave" looking for a husband to own her. This advertisement was meant to show the position of women and black people in the country, emphasizing the fact that the only people that were truly free were white men. The ad Magie published became the talk of the town. It spread rapidly through the news and gossip columns around the country. Magie made a name for herself as an out-spoken and proud feminist.[5]
Magie first made her game, known as The Landlord's Game, popular among friends while living in Brentwood, Maryland. In 1903, Magie applied to the US Patent Office for a patent on her board game. She was granted U.S. Patent 748,626 on January 5, 1904. Magie received her patent before women were legally allowed to vote.[6]
The Landlord's Game was designed to demonstrate the economic ill effects of land monopolism and the use of land value tax as a remedy for it. Originally, the goal of the game was to simply obtain wealth. In the following patents, the game developed to eventually have two different settings: one being the monopolist set up (known as Monopoly) where the goal was to own industries, create monopolies, and win by forcing others out of their industries and the other being the anti-monopolist setup (known as Prosperity) where the goal was to create products and interact with opponents[citation needed]. The game would later go on to be the inspiration for the game Monopoly.
In 1906, she moved to Chicago. That year, she and fellow Georgists formed the Economic Game Co. to self-publish her original edition of The Landlord's Game. In 1910, the Parker Brothers published her humorous card game Mock Trial. Then, the Newbie Game Co. in Scotland patented The Landlord's Game as "Bre'r Fox and Bre'r Rabbit;" however, there was no proof that the game was actually protected by the British patent.
She and her husband moved back to the east coast of the U.S. and patented a revised version of the game in 1924. As her original patent had expired in 1921, this is seen as her attempt to reassert control over her game, which was now being played at some colleges where students made their own copies. In 1932, her second edition of The Landlord's Game was published by the Adgame Company of Washington, D.C. This version included both Monopoly and Prosperity.[7]
Magie also developed other games including Bargain Day and King's Men in 1937 and a third version of The Landlord's Game in 1939. In Bargain Day, shoppers compete with each other in a department store;[8] King's Men is an abstract strategy game.[9]
Magie died at the age of 81 in 1948. She was buried with her husband Albert Wallace Phillips, who had died in 1937, in Columbia Gardens Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.[10] Magie died without having any children.[11] At her death, she was not credited for the impact that she had on the board game community and American culture.[12]
Magie's game was becoming increasingly popular around the Northeastern United States. College students attending Harvard, Columbia, and University of Pennsylvania, left-leaning middle class families, and Quakers were all playing her board game. Three decades after The Landlord's Game was invented in 1904, Parker Brothers published a modified version, known as Monopoly. Charles Darrow claimed the idea as his own, stating that he invented the game in his basement. Magie later spoke out against them and reported that she had made a mere $500 from her invention and received none of the credit for Monopoly.[7]
In January 1936, an interview with Magie appeared in a Washington, D.C. newspaper, in which she was critical of Parker Brothers. Magie spoke to reporters about the similarities between Monopoly and The Landlord's Game. The article published spoke to the fact that Magie spent more money making her game than she received in earnings, especially with the lack of credit she received after Monopoly was created. After the interviews, Parker Brothers agreed to publish two more of her games but continued to give Darrow the credit for inventing the game itself.[12]
Darrow was known as the inventor of Monopoly until Ralph Anspach, creator of the Anti-Monopoly game, discovered Magie's patents. Anspach had researched the history of Monopoly in relation to a legal struggle against Parker Brothers regarding his own game, and discovered Darrow's decision to take credit for its invention, despite his having learned about it through friends. Subsequently, Magie's invention of The Landlord's Game has been given more attention and research. Despite the fact that Darrow and the Parker Brothers capitalized on and were credited with her idea, she has posthumously received credit for one of the most popular board games.[2]
It was only after her death that the impact Magie had had on many aspects of American culture and life began to be appreciated. First and foremost, she helped to popularize the circular board game. Most board games at the time were linear; a circular board game that concentrated on interacting both socially and competitively with the opponents was a novel idea. Her board game not only laid the foundation and inspiration for Monopoly, the most famous board game in the United States, but also provided entertainment that taught about Georgist principles, the value in spreading wealth, and the harmfulness of monopolies (this aspect of her game was absent from the Darrow version of Monopoly).[7]
She also contributed to pressure for women's and black people's rights, through educating others about these concepts, inventing board games at a time when women held less than one percent of US patents, and publishing political material in newspapers to speak out against the oppression of women and black communities in the United States.[2]
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Overlooked No More: Lizzie Magie, the Unknown Inventor Behind Monopoly
Magie’s creation, The Landlord’s Game, inspired the spinoff we know today. But credit for the idea long went to someone else.
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
When Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman in Philadelphia, learned about a new board game that was becoming popular, he asked his friends to type up the rules and help him jazz up the graphic design. In 1933, he copyrighted the game, Monopoly, as his own invention and began selling it in toy stores and department stores.
The game, which involved real estate trading, would go on to sell more than 275 million copies, has been licensed in hundreds of spinoff editions and has become part of the fabric of American life. It also made Darrow a millionaire. But credit for the idea behind it should not have been his. Rather, it belonged to a woman from Illinois with a versatile résumé that included writing, acting, engineering and working as a stenographer: Lizzie Magie.
The premise of Magie’s game, originally called The Landlord’s Game, would be familiar to anyone who has played Monopoly: People move their tokens around the perimeter of a square board, buying real estate along the way, which they can use to charge rent to other players. Magie patented her invention in 1904 — the same day that the Wright brothers filed one for their airplane — and it was published in 1906 through the Economic Game Company, of which she was an owner.
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In her patent application, Magie wrote, “Each time a player goes around the board he is supposed to have performed so much labor upon Mother Earth, for which after passing the beginning-point he receives his wages, one hundred dollars.”
Magie designed the game with two sets of rules: one that rewarded the players when resources were shared equally, and another where the winner was the land baron who acquired the most wealth. Either way, she hoped that players would think about the underpinnings of capitalist society.
Elizabeth Jones Magie was born on May 9, 1866, in Macomb, Ill., to a political family. According to Mary Pilon’s 2015 book, “The Monopolists,” her father, James Magie, was an abolitionist newspaper publisher who reported on the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates. Her mother was Mary (Ritchie) Magie.
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At various points, Magie was a poet; a stenographer at the Dead Letter Office, where mail considered undeliverable landed; a comedic stage actress; an engineer who invented and patented a device that improved the flow of paper in typewriters; and a fiction writer. Her short story “The Theft of a Brain,” published in Godey’s, a women’s magazine, was about a writer who finds success after unlocking her potential under hypnosis only to discover that her hypnotist had plagiarized her novel.
Magie conceived of The Landlord’s Game as an ideological tool: a game that would teach people about the principles of the political economist Henry George. The central tenet of Georgism was that people should keep all that they earned, but that the government should be funded by a tax on real estate owners, since land rightly belonged to everyone. A society funded by a single land tax, George believed, would eliminate both lower-class poverty and industrial cartels.
In the rules of The Landlord’s Game, Magie explained how potential conflicts could be resolved: “Should any emergency arise which is not covered by the rules of the game, the players must settle the matter between themselves; but if a player absolutely refuses to obey the rules as above set forth he must go to jail and remain there until he throws a double or pays his fine.”
The Landlord’s Game wasn’t a blockbuster hit, but it developed pockets of fans, including utopian Quakers in Delaware and fraternity brothers at Williams College in Massachusetts; the game was even adapted for the British market under the name “Brer Fox an’ Brer Rabbit.”
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It wasn’t Magie’s only creation: She invented several card games, including a role-playing one called Mock Trial, which she sold to Parker Brothers in 1910. That year, she also tried to sell them The Landlord’s Game, but the company deemed it too complex.
By then, she had also received some national attention for a publicity stunt she had performed in 1906, when she placed a newspaper advertisement offering herself for sale as a “young woman American slave,” with “large gray-green eyes, full passionate lips” and “splendid teeth” who was “not beautiful, but very attractive,” and describing herself as “honest, just, poetical, philosophical.”
The ad was meant to be a commentary on slavery and the bleak economic prospects of single women, but it instead led to unwanted marriage proposals and an offer of employment with a freak show. (Magie ultimately did get married, at the age of 44, to Albert Phillips, a businessman.) It also led to correspondence with the muckraking writer Upton Sinclair and work as a newspaper reporter.
In the meantime, players were converting The Landlord’s Game into homemade sets, copying the board onto wood or cloth, tweaking the rules and calling it “the monopoly game.” When devotees taught friends how to play, newcomers had no idea that the handmade game was Magie’s invention.
Monopoly’s ties to Magie were further lost to history when Darrow sold his version, which incorporated the names of locations in the thriving beach resort of Atlantic City, N.J., to Parker Brothers in 1935, he claimed that he had invented it to entertain his family during the Great Depression. A plutocratic fantasy was exactly what Americans wanted during that era. Millions of copies were sold, saving a then-struggling Parker Brothers from bankruptcy and making Darrow a rich man.
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Many successful games, including Tiddlywinks and Battleship, were created as commercial versions of homespun diversions, but if a game is in the public domain, any publisher can print its own version.
Looking to squash potential competition and establish a Monopoly monopoly, Parker Brothers acquired similar games The Landlord’s Game and spinoffs like Finance.
Magie sold the rights to The Landlord’s Game to Parker Brothers for a flat $500, about $11,000 today; the firm also agreed to publish two of her other board games, King’s Men, a tile-matching game, and Bargain Day, a shopping game. Delighted that her Georgist ideas would reach a wider audience, she wrote a letter to Parker Brothers in which she addressed The Landlord’s Game as if it were a person: “Farewell, my beloved brainchild. I regretfully part with you, but I am giving you to another who will be able to do more for you than I have done.”
Although Parker Brothers, which Hasbro bought in 1991, reprinted The Landlord’s Game, it soon fell out of print again, eclipsed by Monopoly. Magie had no claim on royalties, and Parker Brothers promoted Darrow as Monopoly’s sole inventor.
Magie’s landmark contributions to American culture and game design were expunged until the 1970s, when Ralph Anspach, the inventor of a game called Anti-Monopoly, unearthed her work during a legal battle over trademark infringement with Parker Brothers.
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Magie died at 81 on March 2, 1948, in Staunton, Va., but she lived long enough to see the enduring success of a game based on her own invention, even if her name had been erased and her ideology toned down.
The Evening Star newspaper of Washington, D.C., which had interviewed Magie in 1936, summarized her view: “If the subtle propaganda for the single tax idea works around to the minds of the thousands who now shake the dice and buy and sell over the ‘Monopoly’ board, she feels the whole business will not have been in vain.”
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