Many of us grew up hearing the famous story of Monopoly: how Charles Darrow, a down-on-his-luck salesman, invented the classic board game during the tough times of the Great Depression. The tale goes that he sold his clever creation to Parker Brothers, turning his fortune around and giving families endless hours of fun. It’s a powerful American story of innovation, and it’s the one millions have believed about the origins of this beloved game.
But the real history of Monopoly is much more fascinating and full of unexpected turns than that familiar account. Long before Darrow, a brilliant woman named Lizzie McGee created “The Landlord’s Game” – the true precursor to Monopoly – with a purpose far beyond simple entertainment. Her game was designed to teach important ideas about how land and wealth work, quietly spreading across the country years before it became a household name. Get ready to hear the inspiring, surprising truth behind one of America’s most iconic games.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
And we returned to our American Stories. Up next, a story on one of the most iconic board games ever made. We’re talking about Monopoly. The most widely told story on how it came to be is that the game was invented by a former heater salesman named Charles Darrow, who created the board game amid the Great Depression and sold it to the Parker Brothers in the nineteen thirties. But the truth is more complicated. Here to tell the real story of Monopoly is Mary Pilon, author of “The Monopolist.” Take it away, Mary. How…
Did I make it big? I know how to play the game.
I buy real estate, hotel, that’s your cars, even railroad, and I get to…
Make it big.
Who! You’ve got to play the game. My Monopoly game.
The story of Monopo that I learned as a kid, that was tucked in my family’s board game box and millions of others, was that this man, Charles Darrow, invented the game during, you know, kind of the darkest hours of the Great Depression. And then the story went that he was down on his luck. He was struggling to find work, as so many Americans were at that time, and he goes into his basement, and he innovates, and he creates this game to remind his family of better times vacationing in Atlantic City. And, you know, he sells the game and it becomes the surprise hit, saving him and Parker Brothers from the brink up destruction for decades.
That’s how the story was told. The problem is, it’s not true.
The true story actually starts with this woman, Lizzie McGee. She was born in the eighteen sixties in Illinois. Her father, James McGee, was a really influential political thinker.
He was one of the co founders of the Republican Party.
He had traveled extensively with Abraham Lincoln during the Lincoln-Douglas debates. He was a very influential newspaper owner. And Lizzie McGee, you know, took after her father. She was very politically minded. She was really savvy. She wrote poetry, she wrote short stories, and she was an impassioned follower of this man named Henry George.
He was a huge deal in his time.
He wrote this massive bestseller called “Progress and Poverty,” and he was really interested in land and how we’re taxing it. This thing called the single tax, and Lizzie McGee was really swept up in this and also was questioning how much money was being created in this country and how that was going to be divided.
She’s coming into the world, you know, of a…
very different generation than her father’s, and a lot is happening in the country from, you know, the time that she’s born.
You’re starting to see the rise of the monopolis. So she creates a game.
In nineteen oh four, she receives a patent for “The Landlord’s Game,” and her goal is to really use this game to teach people that Henry George and single tax theory. And this game spreads, you know, among a who’s who of left wing America. And one of the groups that really loves the game are the Quakers in Atlantic City. The Quakers, they’re not big drinkers, they’re not big gamblers, but they really owe Monopoly.
And they start having these Monopoly knights.
And when people played Monopoly in the early days, they localize the boards, so if you were playing in Boston, you’d have the Boston Commons; if you were in Chicago, you would have the Loop on there. So the Quakers put Atlantic City properties on, and it’s a version of this game that a man named Charles Todd plays. Charles Todd is from Philadelphia. He learns the game Atlantic City, so not very far away, and then he runs into an old friend, you know him. He and his wife were walking, and they run into the Darrow’s Charles and Ester on the street.
So they have a Monopoly Knight.
And Charles Darrow learns the game from the Todds, and the next two some of the kind of weird happens, which is that Darrow reaches out to Charles Todd and he says, “I love that Monopoly game so much. When you have a moment, can you have your secretary type up the rules?” And Todd thinks this is like a little weird because imagine if he went to someone’s house and played like checkers or chess.
I mean, this point, Monopoly had been around for thirty years or so.
But nonetheless, Todd does it, and he types up the rules, and it’s the Atlantic City version of the game. So it’s that game that Charles Darrow sells to Parker Brothers, but he claims that he invented it. But it isn’t long before they realize that they have a problem, which is that Charles Darrow did not invent the game. Nobody used to care who invented games. It’s not like, oh, I’m going to buy a book because of the author or see a movie because of the actor actress who’s…
starring in it.
But Darrow’s story, this Rags to Rich’s story, becomes like really woven with the marketing around Monopoly and the lore. But people start writing in and they’re like, “I played this game ten years ago, I played this game twenty years ago.”
And one of the people who gets really angry about this is Lizzie McGee herself.
In the mid nineteen thirties, she’s living in Washington, D.C., and she calls up these reporters.
From “The Washington Post” and “The Washington Evening”…
Star, and she says, “I got a patent for this in nineteen oh four.”
“In nineteen twenty four, this is my game.”
Parker Brothers realizes that they have to do damage control. George Parker himself comes back out of retirement. He gets on a train; he goes to Washington, D.C. And they strike up this deal. And the deal is, “You know what, Lizzie McGee,” Parker Brothers tells her, “We’re going to publish three of your games, including ‘The Landlord’s Game.'” And at first, Lizzie McGee is elated because she thinks she’s going to get credit for her contribution with one of the most famous board game companies out there. But it’s really sad: there’s no evidence that Parker Brothers made any effort to acknowledge her as the inventor, pay her any residuals, or publish for other games. One of the last traces we have of Lizzie McGee’s life is the nineteen forty U.S. Census, and what I find interesting about that is, of all the different things that she did with her time, she lists her occupation as maker of games, so it was something she very much identified with, and her income at zero. And that’s kind of the last we hear about Lizzie Veghee. And it isn’t until decades later, through this wild and crazy set of circumstances, that her story is exhumed, and we start to find out the truth of what happened.
Monopoly has been bringing people together for almost fifty years. That’s how long we’ve been wheeling and dealing together, building hotels together, and going to jail together.
Together.
In the nineteen seventies, there was a man named Ralph Onsback. He was living in the Bay Area, and he was an economics professor. One of the big headlines en was around the OPEC oil cartels. He’s one of the many people waiting in long lines for gas, and he’s teaching his students, and he has these two boys at home.
The kids were playing Monopoly one night, and…
He’s like, “This teaches them bad things,” which is them like, “I don’t think capitalism is about Clobb or everybody else.”
so that you can get ahead.
So he decides to invent a game called “anti Monopoly,” which is a more, you know, in his eyes, philosophically pleasing version of the game. He makes this game, and he starts selling it, and it’s this kind of countercultural hit, and it isn’t long before he receives a cease and assist from Parker Brothers, and they say, “You cannot make a game called anti Monopoly. We own Monopoly.”
And he thinks this is crazy.
“You can’t have a monopoly on Monopoly,” and that kicks off this ten year long legal battle that ultimately goes to the steps of the Supreme Court, and he becomes obsessed with researching the origins of the game, and in his work he starts to find that there’s a lot of holes in the story, and that Darro didn’t invent the game, that Lizzie McGee actually did. And he starts traveling across the country to interview people who hadn’t played the games, and he becomes like this detective, you know, who pieces together the history of it all.
And I wouldn’t be here talking…
about this if not for Ralph. Like, he absolutely took it on full time. You know. This lawsuit strained his marriage, strained his family, strained him financially, but he really stuck to it. We now have evidence that Parker Brothers had received letters from original players, people who had been playing before Darrow, so the idea that they didn’t know does not…
square with the facts.
The other thing we see in Ralph’s lawsuit is this exchange between Barton, who is the CEO of Parker or the head of Parker Brothers at the time, and Darrow, where he asks Darrow. He’s like, “Hey, you know, we’re hearing that you didn’t invent this game,” and Darrow waffles like he just avoids the question. He refuses to give a full accounting, and then, you know, later when Ralph’s lawsuit comes up, Barton is deposed, and he testifies under oath, and he really dismisses Lisi Niguee.
He kind of writes her off as a political quack.
But the record shows that they knew that Darrow had not invented the game, but continued with the story. And even today, you know, Hasbro will not admit that Lizzie McGhee invented the game. It’s interesting, you know, his case settled in the nineteen eighties, and…
it was covered pretty widely at that time.
Yet the Darrow myth really persisted. I think part of why is its an amazing story. Who does want to believe in a Cinderella story that you can go into your basement and have a light bulb moment and suddenly become rich?
That’s as American as it gets. But it’s just not true.
And I think actually that the little engine that could of it is Lizzie McGee. You know, she, to me, is the innovator and the one who, against all odds, really persevered. But Lizzie McGee and Ralph Onsback never met. She died way before the lawsuit, and yet their fates become intertwined because Lizzie McGee needs Ralph as this advocate to tell her story, and Ralph Onsback needs to find the Louzy mgee story to piece together the origins of the case, and in…
The Supreme Court, they uphold a lot of historical research.
In the end, he won his rights to sell his “anti Monopoly” games and won the right to talk about the game’s origins, including Lizzy McGee’s history.
Openly. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Gavin Leshtrow. And by the way, thanks to intellectual property rights, it’s harder and harder to steal ideas. It can still happen, no doubt. But, my goodness, only in America did we really dig down and drill deep on the idea of patent and IP rights so that…
lone inventor could get the reward, could go…
to court and win the story of how Monopoly came to be, the…
real story here on our American Stories.
Did I make it big? I know how to play the game.
I buy real estate, hotel, that’s your cars, even railroad, and I get to…
Make it big.
Who! You’ve got to play the game. My Monopoly game.
The story of Monopo that I learned as a kid, that was tucked in my family’s board game box and millions of others, was that this man, Charles Darrow, invented the game during, you know, kind of the darkest hours of the Great Depression. And then the story went that he was down on his luck. He was struggling to find work, as so many Americans were at that time, and he goes into his basement, and he innovates, and he creates this game to remind his family of better times vacationing in Atlantic City. And, you know, he sells the game and it becomes the surprise hit, saving him and Parker Brothers from the brink up destruction for decades.
That’s how the story was told. The problem is, it’s not true.
The true story actually starts with this woman, Lizzie McGee. She was born in the eighteen sixties in Illinois. Her father, James McGee, was a really influential political thinker.
He was one of the co founders of the Republican Party.
He had traveled extensively with Abraham Lincoln during the Lincoln-Douglas debates. He was a very influential newspaper owner. And Lizzie McGee, you know, took after her father. She was very politically minded. She was really savvy. She wrote poetry, she wrote short stories, and she was an impassioned follower of this man named Henry George.
He was a huge deal in his time.
He wrote this massive bestseller called “Progress and Poverty,” and he was really interested in land and how we’re taxing it. This thing called the single tax, and Lizzie McGee was really swept up in this and also was questioning how much money was being created in this country and how that was going to be divided.
She’s coming into the world, you know, of a…
very different generation than her father’s, and a lot is happening in the country from, you know, the time that she’s born.
You’re starting to see the rise of the monopolis. So she creates a game.
In nineteen oh four, she receives a patent for “The Landlord’s Game,” and her goal is to really use this game to teach people that Henry George and single tax theory. And this game spreads, you know, among a who’s who of left wing America. And one of the groups that really loves the game are the Quakers in Atlantic City. The Quakers, they’re not big drinkers, they’re not big gamblers, but they really owe Monopoly.
And they start having these Monopoly knights.
And when people played Monopoly in the early days, they localize the boards, so if you were playing in Boston, you’d have the Boston Commons; if you were in Chicago, you would have the Loop on there. So the Quakers put Atlantic City properties on, and it’s a version of this game that a man named Charles Todd plays. Charles Todd is from Philadelphia. He learns the game Atlantic City, so not very far away, and then he runs into an old friend, you know him. He and his wife were walking, and they run into the Darrow’s Charles and Ester on the street.
So they have a Monopoly Knight.
And Charles Darrow learns the game from the Todds, and the next two some of the kind of weird happens, which is that Darrow reaches out to Charles Todd and he says, “I love that Monopoly game so much. When you have a moment, can you have your secretary type up the rules?” And Todd thinks this is like a little weird because imagine if he went to someone’s house and played like checkers or chess.
I mean, this point, Monopoly had been around for thirty years or so.
But nonetheless, Todd does it, and he types up the rules, and it’s the Atlantic City version of the game. So it’s that game that Charles Darrow sells to Parker Brothers, but he claims that he invented it. But it isn’t long before they realize that they have a problem, which is that Charles Darrow did not invent the game. Nobody used to care who invented games. It’s not like, oh, I’m going to buy a book because of the author or see a movie because of the actor actress who’s…
starring in it.
But Darrow’s story, this Rags to Rich’s story, becomes like really woven with the marketing around Monopoly and the lore. But people start writing in and they’re like, “I played this game ten years ago, I played this game twenty years ago.”
And one of the people who gets really angry about this is Lizzie McGee herself.
In the mid nineteen thirties, she’s living in Washington, D.C., and she calls up these reporters.
From “The Washington Post” and “The Washington Evening”…
Star, and she says, “I got a patent for this in nineteen oh four.”
“In nineteen twenty four, this is my game.”
Parker Brothers realizes that they have to do damage control. George Parker himself comes back out of retirement. He gets on a train; he goes to Washington, D.C. And they strike up this deal. And the deal is, “You know what, Lizzie McGee,” Parker Brothers tells her, “We’re going to publish three of your games, including ‘The Landlord’s Game.'” And at first, Lizzie McGee is elated because she thinks she’s going to get credit for her contribution with one of the most famous board game companies out there. But it’s really sad: there’s no evidence that Parker Brothers made any effort to acknowledge her as the inventor, pay her any residuals, or publish for other games. One of the last traces we have of Lizzie McGee’s life is the nineteen forty U.S. Census, and what I find interesting about that is, of all the different things that she did with her time, she lists her occupation as maker of games, so it was something she very much identified with, and her income at zero. And that’s kind of the last we hear about Lizzie Veghee. And it isn’t until decades later, through this wild and crazy set of circumstances, that her story is exhumed, and we start to find out the truth of what happened.
Monopoly has been bringing people together for almost fifty years. That’s how long we’ve been wheeling and dealing together, building hotels together, and going to jail together.
Together.
In the nineteen seventies, there was a man named Ralph Onsback. He was living in the Bay Area, and he was an economics professor. One of the big headlines en was around the OPEC oil cartels. He’s one of the many people waiting in long lines for gas, and he’s teaching his students, and he has these two boys at home.
The kids were playing Monopoly one night, and…
He’s like, “This teaches them bad things,” which is them like, “I don’t think capitalism is about Clobb or everybody else.”
so that you can get ahead.
So he decides to invent a game called “anti Monopoly,” which is a more, you know, in his eyes, philosophically pleasing version of the game. He makes this game, and he starts selling it, and it’s this kind of countercultural hit, and it isn’t long before he receives a cease and assist from Parker Brothers, and they say, “You cannot make a game called anti Monopoly. We own Monopoly.”
And he thinks this is crazy.
“You can’t have a monopoly on Monopoly,” and that kicks off this ten year long legal battle that ultimately goes to the steps of the Supreme Court, and he becomes obsessed with researching the origins of the game, and in his work he starts to find that there’s a lot of holes in the story, and that Darro didn’t invent the game, that Lizzie McGee actually did. And he starts traveling across the country to interview people who hadn’t played the games, and he becomes like this detective, you know, who pieces together the history of it all.
And I wouldn’t be here talking…
about this if not for Ralph. Like, he absolutely took it on full time. You know. This lawsuit strained his marriage, strained his family, strained him financially, but he really stuck to it. We now have evidence that Parker Brothers had received letters from original players, people who had been playing before Darrow, so the idea that they didn’t know does not…
square with the facts.
The other thing we see in Ralph’s lawsuit is this exchange between Barton, who is the CEO of Parker or the head of Parker Brothers at the time, and Darrow, where he asks Darrow. He’s like, “Hey, you know, we’re hearing that you didn’t invent this game,” and Darrow waffles like he just avoids the question. He refuses to give a full accounting, and then, you know, later when Ralph’s lawsuit comes up, Barton is deposed, and he testifies under oath, and he really dismisses Lisi Niguee.
He kind of writes her off as a political quack.
But the record shows that they knew that Darrow had not invented the game, but continued with the story. And even today, you know, Hasbro will not admit that Lizzie McGhee invented the game. It’s interesting, you know, his case settled in the nineteen eighties, and…
it was covered pretty widely at that time.
Yet the Darrow myth really persisted. I think part of why is its an amazing story. Who does want to believe in a Cinderella story that you can go into your basement and have a light bulb moment and suddenly become rich?
That’s as American as it gets. But it’s just not true.
And I think actually that the little engine that could of it is Lizzie McGee. You know, she, to me, is the innovator and the one who, against all odds, really persevered. But Lizzie McGee and Ralph Onsback never met. She died way before the lawsuit, and yet their fates become intertwined because Lizzie McGee needs Ralph as this advocate to tell her story, and Ralph Onsback needs to find the Louzy mgee story to piece together the origins of the case, and in…
The Supreme Court, they uphold a lot of historical research.
In the end, he won his rights to sell his “anti Monopoly” games and won the right to talk about the game’s origins, including Lizzy McGee’s history.
Openly. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Gavin Leshtrow. And by the way, thanks to intellectual property rights, it’s harder and harder to steal ideas. It can still happen, no doubt. But, my goodness, only in America did we really dig down and drill deep on the idea of patent and IP rights so that…
lone inventor could get the reward, could go…
to court and win the story of how Monopoly came to be, the…
real story here on our American Stories.
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