The board game Monopoly was invented when America’s Gilded Age was in its final death throes. The game’s inventor, Lizzie Magie, named it “The Landlord’s Game.” But as she said, “It might well have been called the ‘Game of Life,’ as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is… the accumulation of wealth.”58
Lizzie was a Georgist (one who follows the teachings of economist Henry George), and believed that things found in nature, particularly land itself but also things like mineral wealth, are part of the commons and thus should really be owned by “we the people,” not private profiteers.
It was an ideology directly born out of the times—the Gilded Age—when Robber Barons used monopolies in steel, oil, rail, and finance to dominate the American economy. They built vast fortunes by owning all the stops on the Monopoly board of America, while working people’s conditions collapsed to the point where we went into the Great Depression.
Carnegie, Astor, Rockefeller, Morgan, and a few dozen other recognizable names built massive monopolies while ruthlessly destroying any upstart that dared try to compete. There was big money to be made in post–Civil War America, now crisscrossed by the railroads. The nation’s GDP nearly doubled, growing at the fastest rate ever. But that wealth didn’t trickle down; they’d mastered monopoly.
The rest of America was going bankrupt.
In the census of 1900, per capita income was less than $5,000 annually in today’s dollars.59 And more and more Americans who were once self-employed had their lives uprooted and were thrown under the juggernaut of the Robber Barons. In 1850, prior to this so-called Gilded Age, most Americans worked for themselves. But by 1900, the majority of Americans worked for someone else—in many cases the monopolists.
In his 1888 State of the Union Address in which President Grover Cleveland said the “citizen is… trampled to death beneath an iron heel,” he also called out the corruption of Congress by the Robber Barons.
“We discover that the fortunes realized by our manufacturers are no longer solely the reward of sturdy industry and enlightened foresight,” he said, “but that they result from the discriminating favor of the Government and are largely built upon undue exactions from the masses of our people.”60
President Cleveland’s 1888 reality was our most prominent Founding Father’s worst fear. On December 20, 1787, Jefferson wrote to James Madison about his concerns regarding the first draft of our new proposed Constitution, namely that it didn’t include a Bill of Rights and, in particular, include a “restriction of monopolies.”
And this was why Lizzie Magie invented that early version of what we today call the board game Monopoly. It was her hope, and that of many, that the stranglehold of the Economic Royalists of the era could somehow be broken. She said, “Let the children once see clearly the gross injustice of our present… system and when they grow up, if they are allowed to develop naturally, the evil will soon be remedied.”61
Early on, even before Parker Brothers acquired the patent on Monopoly, turning it into the game we know today, well-to-do college students would play the game in fraternity houses at the behest of far-left economic teachers such as Scott Nearing, whose autobiography was titled The Making of a Radical. The game was meant to answer a question about the current economy.
An early instruction manual for the game of Monopoly in 1925 reads, “At the start of the game every player is provided with the same amount of capital and presumably has exactly the same chance of success as every other player. The game ends with one person in possession of all the money. What accounts for the failure of the rest, and what one factor can be singled out to explain the obviously ill-adjusted distributions of the community’s wealth which this situation represents?”62
It was a similar question asked by Henry George, whom Chrystia Freeland refers to in her book Plutocrats as “the most famous American popular economist you’ve never heard of.”63
George was the author of the book Progress and Poverty, in which he sets out to answer a fundamental question of the Gilded Age: Why are so many people living in poverty while others are getting so rich in an expanding economy?
George writes in Progress and Poverty, “The present century has been marked by a prodigious increase in wealth producing power.” Yet, working people were not sharing these gains.64
“We are coming into collision with facts which there can be no mistaking,” George writes. “From all parts of the civilized world come complaints of industrial depression; of labor condemned to involuntary idleness; of capital massed and wasting; of pecuniary distress among businessmen; of want and suffering and anxiety among the working classes.”
He goes on, “Some get an infinitely better and easier living, but others find it hard to get a living at all. The ‘tramp’ comes with the locomotives, and almshouses and prisons are as surely the marks of ‘material progress’ as are costly dwellings, rich warehouses and magnificent churches.”
America was split in two. Not between North and South, but between the Robber Barons and everyone else.
Eventually, the nation learned the lesson that not only is the accumulation of vast amounts of wealth in the hands of an elite aristocracy not good for working people, it’s also not good for economies as a whole, which is exactly what the game Monopoly teaches us.
But first, it took a horrific crash.
The period from the 1870s through the late 1890s, when the Economic Royalists came out of the Great Crash of 1857 and Civil War still in power, were the longest, deepest, and most brutal Great Depression in American history, far worse than what we saw in the 1930s. And at the same time, the rich got richer in a way that wasn’t again seen until today. America in that era more resembled Victorian England than that idealistic, egalitarian society envisioned by our revolutionary Founding Fathers.
The peak of the crisis was the crash of 1893.
A fifth of American workers lost their jobs. And countless lost their savings, too, as more than 150 national banks failed alongside more than 170 state banks and 177 private banks. It was the worst economic depression the nation had ever suffered.
What the Robber Barons failed to understand is that by crushing the middle class, they signed their own suicide pact as well. They destroyed their consumers—or their playing partners on the board game of Monopoly. And when working people hit rock bottom and can no longer afford to buy anything in the economy, then everything shuts down.
Eventually, future generations heeded Lizzie Magie’s advice in the game Monopoly. The Robber Barons were crushed during the Progressive Era of the early 1900s, and FDR rebuilt the middle class with the New Deal.
But as the cycles would again have it, a second dark period of Royalist rule began in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan moved in to the White House.
CHAPTER 5
Reagan Kidnapped the Jetsons
MS. MORNIN: That’s good, because I work three jobs and I feel like I contribute.
THE PRESIDENT: You work three jobs?
MS. MORNIN: Three jobs, yes.
THE PRESIDENT: Uniquely American, isn’t it? I mean, that is fantastic that you’re doing that.
In a 1966 article, TIME magazine looked ahead toward the future and what the rise of automation would mean for average working Americans.