True, we had to take the smug symbol of riches all the way to the United States Supreme Court before we prevailed, enduring six years of being banned from the market and having 40,000 of our games buried in a garbage dump as an arrogant but ill-fated object lesson to other challengers of the Monopoly monopoly. All that's described in the book but another big part of it tells how the law suit stimulated me to check out the background of Monopoly and how I was almost squashed by the skeletons which started to rattle out of the closet. My detective work wasn't as easy as winning Monopoly when you own the good properties because I was up against a mom and apple pie legend about the origins of Monopoly. Central casting in this epic tale was the rags to riches story of a man named Charles Darrow, a supposedly gutsy victim of the Great Depression who invented Monopoly to feed his pregnant wife and kids but was then catapulted into countless riches as the creator of the most popular, privately-owned board game in history.
One mystery phone call on a TV show triggered the hunt which eventually unmasked our hero as an impostor and proved that the whole legend was a corporate- sponsored fraud fabricated to save the business from bankruptcy. I also discovered that Parker Brother's Monopoly was based on a folkgame named monopoly which had been originated by a woman, Elizabeth Magie. Not only that but it had been played on personalized, homemade boards all over the eastern United States for twenty-three years before our folk hero arranged to become a proud papa.
The Monopoly in your closet is the Atlantic City version of this folkgame. It was created by some ingenious Quakers who taught school in Atlantic City. Apart from some designs made by a graphic artist, Darrow's sole contribution to the invention was to copy the Quakers' creation with the faithfulness of a medieval monk transcribing a sacred text. The original work was then suppressed as part of a business scheme to dump Monopoly's real world competition and the nation's media, from Sports Illustrated to The New York Times was conned into trumpeting the fake story.
Yes, ironically enough, the game in which players rip off tenants and utility users and dump competing players right off the board with their monopoly muscle was itself illegally monopolized by means of a fraudulent patent monopoly. And the engineers of the fraud laughed all the way to the bank as they raked in monopoly profits and gouged you and me for a cool billion dollars. And nobody knew about it until Monopoly decided to push Anti-Monopoly off the market--and this book came to be written.
