PBS explores ‘Monopoly’ history

More than a spin of the dice, the “American Experience” (9 p.m., PBS, TV-PG, check local listings) documentary “Ruthless: Monopoly’s Secret History” operates on a number of tracks. It explores the ways a game about cornering a fictional real estate market has shaped millions of young players. It also glances back at the game’s strange history, a past replete with fraudulent claims, a perversion of the game’s initial message and a vicious attempt at a real monopoly practiced by the Parker Brothers company.

“Ruthless” begins in the 1970s, when left-leaning professor Ralph Anspach created a game called Anti-Monopoly, which became popular with college students and young people eager to challenge the “winner-take-all” ethos of the popular board game. Parker Brothers ordered him to cease and desist, based on their sole ownership of the game. Anspach decided to fight back and dig into the history of

Monopoly’s development and challenge the game’s mythology and copyright.

What he discovered was beyond the wildest dreams of an anti-capitalist. The earliest version of Monopoly was created in 1904 by a feminist agitator named Lizzie Magie and called The Landlord’s Game. She hoped to use the board game to popularize the teachings of Henry George, a popular radical writer who theorized that a single, very heavy tax on land itself could fund a socialist utopia and curtail real estate speculation.

Over the years, The Landlord’s Game was copied and adapted, and by the 1930s, a version of it named Monopoly had been modified to resemble the Monopoly we recognize now, right down to its street names — from Baltic to Boardwalk — taken from Atlantic City, New Jersey, street maps.

Parker Brothers had bought Monopoly from a man named Charles Darrow, who claimed he dreamed it up by himself during unemployment. Darrow’s origin story helped fuel Depression-era fascination with Monopoly and was part of the reason it became so popular during hard times.

Parker Brothers soon discovered that Darrow had lied. But rather than lose a lucrative monopoly on Monopoly, they acquired the rights to all the other existing games that might have predated Darrow’s sale (and tall tale).

What Parker Brothers did not count on was the emergence of the tenacious Anspach, who mortgaged his home several times over to fight what he saw as a corporate bully. The battle to sell Anti-Monopoly would go all the way to the Supreme Court, where the little guy eventually prevailed.

“Ruthless” does a great job of excavating the game’s peculiar backstory. It may go a tad overboard when it argues that playing Monopoly teaches children to be ruthless. There’s no saying that they might not show equal savagery in a game of checkers, hide and seek or duck-duck-goose. And even an activist like Lizzie Magie discovered that it was hard to make a didactic game about social equality seem like fun. ›

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