Do NOT Pass GO! (Classic)

like that. It may surprise you to know that the inventor of the game imagined a far gentler, kinder pastime, But as I learned researching the history of Monopoly, her ideals and her name were squeezed out of the origin story. So take a break from your own gaming to listen again to a classic cautionary tale featuring the voice talent of Helena Bonham Carter as the inimitable Lizzie McGhee. Whatever

you do, do not pass go. In September twenty nineteen, the toy and game giant Hasbro struck a blow in the battle of a women's rights. Although it's not quite clear which side they were on, they published mus Monopoly, putting a new spin on their classic board game. The tagline for this new version was the first game where

women make more than men. They're not kidding. Female players start the game with more Monopoly money than male players, and they get two hundred and forty dollars each time they pass go, rather than the traditional two hundred dollars for the Why exactly is not clear, some sort of joke. It wasn't even a consistent joke. Some of the chants and community chest cards paid out more cash to mail players. So what is the message? Women have been unfairly treated,

Women need help to win. We don't actually know what feminism means. There is, however, one feature of the game that's hard to criticize. Instead of buying properties from around Atlantic City as in the classic game, players invest in inventions that were developed by women, such as Marion Donovan, the inventor of the leak proof diaper, Anna Connolly, the inventor of the external fire escape, and Heady Lamar, the film star who in the nineteen forties co invented frequency

hopping radio transmissions, a precursor to today's Wi Fi. In mus Monopoly, each square represents one of these inventions. For example, instead of buying the prestige property boardwalk you could invest in chocolate chip cookies invented by Ruth Wakefield. And it's hard to argue with the sentiments expressed in Hasbro's advertisement for his Monopoly, which begins with the simple text women

hold just ten percent of all patented inventions. The mus Monopoly game was widely derided as a confusing mass of mixed messages, but the mus Monopoly advert asks a simple, powerful question, isn't it time that the inventiveness of women was finally acknowledged and rewarded? Well? Isn't it? I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. You may be familiar with the traditional story about the origins of Monopoly.

I remember reading it myself as a child, which isn't surprising since the story itself was for decades included in every game box. The story goes as follows. In nineteen thirty three, the Bleakest Depths of the Great Depression, an unemployed steam radiator repair man from Philadelphia named Charles Darrow was struck with an idea to create a new board game about property trading. It was an act of desperation because Darrow had no money, and a family to feed.

But it was also an act of inspiration, since the game sprang fully formed from the bread of its creator. Darrow drew out the game board on a sheet of oilcloth. The board featured the familiar street names of Atlantic City, where Darrow once enjoyed taking his wife and children on vacation. It was a nostalgic decision aimed at cheering up a family that had fallen on hard times. The Darrows loved the game, suspecting that he'd created something valuable. Charles Darrow

tried to interest the big board game distributors. Milton Bradley turned him down, so did Parker Brothers. However, they later reconsidered when they saw how popular Darrow's homemade sets were. With the backing of Parker Brothers, Monopoly became a smash hit. Charles Darrow's fortune was assured, as was his reputation as the creator of one of the most successful games in the world. But as the journal historian Mary Pilon says in her book The Monopolists, the story wasn't exactly true.

That's putting it kindly, because, as Pilon's book makes perfectly clear, the story I read in my game box isn't true at all. The game of Monopoly did not come to Charles Darrow in a flash of inspiration. It was taught to him by his friends Charles and Olive Todd in nineteen thirty two. The Todd's plane on a board with go jail free parking and go to jail at the four corners, with chance and community chest, with the electric company and the waterworks, and street names from around Atlantic City.

When drawing up his monopoly board, Charles Todd even made a mistake in the spelling of Marvin Gardens, swapping in an eye to become Marvin Gardens. Charles Darrow's monopoly board would later use not only the same squares in the same configuration, with the same deed values, it would even repeat the same spelling error. After several evenings, pleasantly whiled away with the game.

because they felt their idea had been stolen. They knew all along that Monopoly had never belonged to them in the first place. They had been taught the game by their friends, the brothers Jesse and Eugene Rayford. Jesse and Eugene had been the ones who named squares on the board after areas in Atlantic City, but they hadn't invented Monopoly either. The ha'd adapted a version they had been taught by Ruth Hoskins, who was a trainee school teacher. So did Ruth Hoskins invent the game? No, It was

circulating widely in the nineteen twenties. It was even popular in economics departments. One influential player Scott Nearing was a socialist economics professor at the Wharton School who used a version of the game to teach the evils of corporate monopolies. This game was called Monopoly, and the square board had plenty of recognizable elements with forty spaces, including chants, jail, go to jail, and numerous properties. But there were two

ways to play the game. It could be played competitively, as players tried to monopolize groups of property and bankrupt their opponents, or it could be played cooperatively, with resources paid into the public purse, utilities supplying services for free, and each player's resources growing over time. The cooperative game was, of course, very dull, But monopoly wasn't invented at the Wharton School. Professor Scott Nearing learned it in the utopian

community called Arden in Delaware. Arden had been founded in nineteen hundred and organized according to the principles of the economist, journalist, and social reformer Henry George. Henry George's most famous idea was that all land and natural resources ultimately belonged to society as a whole, so whoever owned them should be paying a hefty tax, and it was Henry George's idea of this single tax that the Arden version of Monopoly

was designed to explore this game. The progressive Heaven or capitalist Hell version of Monopoly was called the Landlord's Game. Did the radical folk of Arden invent the Landlord's Game? No, It was dreamed up by a remarkable woman named Lizzie McGee. And is Lizzie McGee celebrated on the US Monopoly board. I think you can guess the answer to that question.

Cautionary tales will return in a moment. Unlike Charles Darrow, the man who claimed to have invented Monopoly, Lizzie McGhee was a true original.

unusual at her age. Working as a stenographer, she had little prospect of acquiring material comforts, Yet she had saved and bought herself a home and a substantial parcel of land near Washington, d c. Lizzie's father had been a journalist and campaigner, the editor of an abolitionist newspaper, and a devoted supporter of Abraham Lincoln. She too was politically active. Like the community at Arden, Lizzie McGee was a Georgist, a committed follower of the ideas and ideals of Henry George.

She was friends with Henry George Junior, the son of the great Man himself, and she was the secretary of the Georgist organization, the Woman's Single Tax Club of Washington. Henry George had died suddenly in eighteen ninety seven while running to be the mayor of New York City. One hundred thousand people lined up to pay their respects to his funeral casket. His followers, including Lizzie McGhee, had felt bereft and determined to carry on the fight for Georgist policies.

But what could McGee do a progressive and a capitalist world. A woman in a man's world. She was desperate for social change, but felt frustrated in what she could achieve. Mary Polon's description of her conjures a powerhouse of creativity. McGee wrote poems about unrequited love. She wrote essays on Georgist taxation. She wrote stories too, including one.

sold by Milton Bradley. But Lizzie McGee herself had been almost forgotten, and so had the subversively educational version of her game. It turns out that when people play board games, they'd rather try to crush their opponents than all accumulate resources together without obstacle or incident. No single person created Monopoly any more than a single person created chess or poker. But if you wanted to pick out the one creative soul who who deserved the most credit, there is no

question that it would be Lizzie McGee. So how come it was Charles Darrow and not McGhee who became known as the lone genius who invented Monopoly? Remember the advertisement for mus Monopoly. Hasbro, the company that absorbed Parker Brothers, began with a lament. Women hold just ten percent of all patented inventions. This situation is finally improving. Women made up less than ten percent of patent holders born in the nineteen forties, but more than fifteen percent of patent

holders born in the nineteen seventies. As millennials take over the process of patenting, who knows, we might get as high as twenty percent before long. In fact, we're on course to achieve gender parity in patents as early as the year twenty one thirty five. Cheer up, So why has progress been so slow? One of the scholars who's been searching for answers is the economist Lisa Cook of

Michigan State University. Professor Kok studies why certain groups of people seemed to be shut out from the innovation economy, in particular African Americans and women. For many decades, women had less than equal access to high quality education, especially technical education. For example, in the early nineteen fifties, Eleanor Ostrom wanted to study economics at UCLA, but she was

rejected because she didn't have the mathematical skills. She didn't have the mathematical skills because as a schoolgirl, she had been steered away from the subject because of her gender. Thankfully, Eleanor Ostrom had the last laugh. In two thousand and nine, she was the first woman to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics. It was astonishingly late for the profession to recognize the first female laureate, but as Linostroum was

quick to say, she wouldn't be the last. As a result of both overt and subtle discrimination, women have been underrepresented in technical subjects such as mathematics, economics, and engineering. That is changing, but slowly. Between nineteen seventy and twenty fourteen, the proportion of PhDs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematical subjects that were rewarded to women more than quadruple. And if a lack of educational opportunity is a problem, so

too is a lack of mentors. A huge study conducted by a team of economists led by Raj Chetti of Harvard found that young people were far more likely to become inventors if they could see other inventors around them, especially if their own parents were inventors. Gender matters here. For example, female inventors seem to be far more inspiring to girls than male inventors are, and since there are fewer women inventors around to inspire girls, the problem is

a self perpetuating spiral. Indeed, Chetti and his colleagues estimate that if young girls had the same exposure to female inventors as young boys did to male inventors, they would innovate more than two and a half times as much as now, and the gender innovation gap would be less than half as big. That's why them as monopoly set and advertising campaign, with its celebration of women inventors, is so important, But among the female inventors credited on the board,

Lizzie McGhee is conspicuous by her absence. It is an astonishing missed opportunity. But it's also a mystery. How did Lizzie McGee find herself so comprehensively the air brushed out of history? And why don't the publishers of monopoly want to acknowledge her more than a century later? Could it be perhaps that they're a little ashamed? Cautionary tales will be back in a moment. Lizzie McGee broke the mold

in so many ways. It wasn't just her politics, her defiance of traditional values in refusing to marry when young, her far reaching creativity as a poet, actor, novelist and essayist. She actually had the determination to follow through on her dreams despite all the obstacles. It's easy to assume that Charles Darrow and Parker Brothers were able to lay claim to Monopoly because Lizzie McGee didn't have a patent, but

she did. In fact, she had two. The earlier one is for an improvement to a type rolla, But it's the patent for the Landlord's Game that deserves to be remembered.

your face doesn't fit. For example, Lisa Cook's own cousin, the chemist Percy Julian, was repeatedly turned down for jobs as an academic and as a corporate researcher because he was black. Eventually, Julian became the first African American to run a large corporate laboratory. At Gliddon, he developed techniques for producing hormones such as estrogen and courtzone, and earned several patents. In nineteen fifty, Percy Julian was named Chicagoan

of the Year by the Chicago Sometimes. It was the same year that infuriated that a black man had moved into a nice white part of Chicago, racists tried to burn down his house. If you're suffering from discrimination, as both women and African American inventors were throughout the twentieth century, then Professor Cook's work makes it clear having a patent might not be enough. A patent isn't much good if nobody respects it. Consider the case of Garrett Morgan. He

was born in the eighteen seventies. He was a gifted inventor, developing products as varied as a gas mask, a traffic light, and hair straightening cream. But he was also African American, which didn't fit America's idea of what an inventor should look like. In one dramatic incident. In nineteen sixteen, Morgan and his brother led a rescue of several victims of an underground explosion near Lake Erie. The rescuers used Morgan's

invention of a firefighters smoke Hood. Officials awarded medals to the eight members of the rescue party, but not to the Morgan brothers themselves, and while a publicity about the daring rescue helped boost sales of the smoke Hood, several Southern cities canceled their orders when they discovered that Morgan was black. Morgan often concealed his race, even using surrogates to pretend to be him when he was trying to

sell his inventions. You can't blame him. Lizzie McGhee didn't have to fear being firebombed like Percy Julian, or having her wares boycotted like Garrett Morgan. But she did have to fear being ignored. Her game wasn't selling and she wasn't thriving. She was frustrated at having her freedoms and opportunities constrained by her gender. A couple of years after patenting the Landlord's Game, she took out a newspaper advertisement offering herself for sale.

By the time Monopoly had become a best seller more than thirty years after McGee filed the patent for the Landlord's Game, she was an unconventional old woman with unconventional political ideals, still trying to get the world to pay attention to the case for progressive single taxation. She was no match for Charle Darrow, the smooth talking family man

peddling his version of the American dream. Darrow charmed the Todds into giving him the monopoly rules in every detail, charmed the artist Franklin Alexander into donating the designs that gave Monopoly its clean, modern look, charmed Parker Brothers into treating him as a creative genius, and charmed the press into repeating his tale of creativity and adversity, carving this fictional origin story in stone with the help of the

publicists at Parker Brothers. In nineteen thirty five, Charles Darrow put that story in writing to the president of Parker Brothers. It is hard to imagine that the company believed him. They must have understood that he was lying to them. One internal memo acknowledged that Darrow had appropriated the name Monopoly, and added, frankly, and I think without prejudice that the

original trading game came out in nineteen oh two. Nevertheless, Parker Brothers applied for a patent on Monopoly and managed to secure it with remarkable speed. Then came the business of acquiring the rights to rival games. Parker Brothers came to an arrangement with Milton Bradley about their game Easy Money, and paid a large sum for the rights to the game finance. They sued the publisher of the game inflation, yet somehow Parker Brothers ended up paying him at least

ten thousand dollars. Relative to the wages of the day, that's half a million dollars, which does suggest that Parker Brothers didn't really want to put their patent to the test. Charles Darrow kept telling journalists the story of his moment of inspiration, and people such as Charles and Olive Todd,

while irritated, didn't feel able to pursue the matter. After all, while he knew Charles Darrow hadn't invented the game, they knew they hadn't invented it either, So that just left Lizzie McGhee in one corner, an elderly left wing feminist desperate to teach the children of the world the merits of the single tax system through her obscure board game. In the other corner, a smooth talking Charles Darrow with a tale to tug at heartstrings, and a host of

sharp suits from Parker Brothers. It was no contest. One November day in nineteen thirty five, traveling from Salem, Massachusetts, all the way to Arlington, Virginia, George Parker himself, the seventy year old founder of Parker Brothers, paid a call to the house of Lizzie McGee Phillips, mister Parker, do come here.

Two days after the agreement, she even wrote letter addressed to her creation.

have some sympathy for Darrow. He had been in a difficult place. His son, Dickie, had been disabled by scarlet fever and had severe learning difficulties. Few schools would take Dickie, and the ones that would were expensive. Charles had no job and no income. He really was desperate for money. As a plausible charmer with a good story and somebody else's idea, he managed to make his name and his fortune. Lizzie McGee was desperate too. She was desperate for social

and political change. She was desperate for the freedoms and opportunities that would have been hers without question, had she been a man, And she was desperate for her game to reach the audience it deserved. As her father once said of her.

I like that she really is expecting him. She's been expecting him for her whole life. Do come in too much?

Julia Barton, edited the scripts. Starring in this series of Cautionary Tales are Helena Bonham Carter and Jeffrey Wright, alongside Nazar Alderazzi, Ed Gochen, Melanie Gutteridge, Rachel Hanshaw, Cobner, Holbrook Smith, Greg Lockett, Massaia Munroe and Rufus Wright. The show would not have been possible without the work of Mea LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Kell Fame, John Schnaz, Carli mcgliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Roster, Maggie Taylor, Daniella Lakhan and Maya Kanig. Cautionary

Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review.