Monopoly Had Anti-Monopolist Origins.

Thomas E. Forsyth

The game of Monopoly has been around for a long time. The accepted story is that an out of work man named Charles Darrow invented the game during the Great Depression. He sold it to to Parker Brothers Games and became wealthy.
But the truth is that Monopoly began years earlier as The Landlord's Game and was meant to teach people about social injustice. In 1904 Lizzie Magie, a stenographer and typist at the Dead Letter Office, received a patent for the game, a square board with nine rectangular spaces on each side, set between corners labeled “Go to Jail” and “Public Park.”
"Players circled the board buying up railroads, collecting money and paying rent. She made up two sets of rules, “monopolist” and “anti-monopolist,” but her stated goal was to demonstrate the evils of accruing vast sums of wealth at the expense of others. A firebrand against the railroad, steel and oil monopolists of her time, she told a reporter in 1906, “In a short time, I hope a very short time, men and women will discover that they are poor because Carnegie and Rockefeller, maybe, have more than they know what to do with.” "
Magie found a publisher to sell the game but handmade bootleg copies of the game were made and it was a Quaker iteration that Darrow copied and sold to Parker Brothers in 1935. Darrow and Parker Brothers made a fortune off the ripped off game.
In the 1940 census, taken eight years before she died, Magie listed her occupation as a “maker of games.” In the column for her income she wrote, “0.”

More: Smithsonian 

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