Elizabeth Magie Phillips, known as Lizzie Magie, was born in the United States in 1866 and was a passionate feminist and activist for social equality through the redistribution of wealth. She's responsible for creating the board game we now call Monopoly, which she originally named "The Landlord's Game."

Today's Monopoly, with its memorable small figurines and play money, is based on acquiring real estate. Players move around a board, buying and trading properties while scaling up and developing them with houses and hotels and collecting rent from their opponents. The winner is the person who accumulates the most property and money at the end, while the loser is driven into bankruptcy.

Everyone plays, everyone wins

Yet, this wasn't the way Lizzie Magie intended the game to be played. "In Magie's game, there were two rule sets: One that was about breaking up monopolies, and another showed how awful monopolies are. And that's the rule set that we play with today," says Mary Pilon, author of the book "The Monopolists." The first set of rules for the game was unfortunately lost and Monopoly became a game of greed rather than a critical look at monopolies as something harmful, as Lizzie Magie intended.

Her set of rules was based on the "Single Tax" economic theory, also known as Georgism, proposed by US economist Henry George (1837-1897), who suggested taxing land based on its size and usefulness and location and then redistributing the revenue to the people after the government got its part. In "The Landlord's Game," all players were supposed to pay taxes on their property. So if someone earned money, the profits would be redistributed, and everyone would benefit in the end.

However, this wealth distribution aspect of the game never caught on. In today's game, the winner is whoever has the most property, while the loser ends up broke.

In 1904, Magie was given a patent for "The Landlord's Game." Its popularity spread among East Coast students, and it was eventually given the name Monopoly. 

Fast forward to the 1930s, when a group of Quakers played a game with the unemployed salesman Charles Darrow. Darrow was delighted. He copied the game, passed it off as his own creation, ignoring the existing patent, and sold the rights to game manufacturer Parker Brothers. 

According to Parker Brothers, over 275 million copies had been sold worldwide as of 2010. Magie's anti-capitalist game made the unemployed salesman a millionaire, while she herself was left empty-handed.

New discoveries

Author and journalist Mary Pilon brought this story to light in 2009, when she was working on an article about Monopoly for the Wall Street Journal. During her research she began to uncover mysterious aspects of the game's history.

"Darrow's patent was too professional and artistic for an unemployed salesman," Pilon told DW. "And no one had the right dates. Was it 1924, 1931 or 1934? It was all a lie."

The only living person who knew about the game's true history at the time was economics professor Ralph Anspach, who invented the game "Anti-Monopoly." Anspach was embroiled in a legal battle with Parker Brothers over his game in the 1970s when he accidentally found out that Lizzie Magie, and not Charles Darrow, had invented Monopoly.

"I waited for 40 years for someone to ask me," Anspach is said to have told Pilon when she contacted him. Pilon quickly realized that everything she had read on the Internet about the history of Monopoly was wrong. And so, she turned her article into a book project and spent five years digging through archives across the USA to find the truth.

Ahead of her time

Elizabeth Magie Phillips was born into a politically active household in Macomb, Illinois, in 1866. Her father, James K. Magie, was a newspaper publisher and abolitionist who campaigned to abolish slavery, which was ratified just one year before Lizzie Magie was born. 

Magie was also politically active decades before women could vote in the USA. When she moved to Washington, DC, with her family around 1890, she joined the "Woman's Single Tax Club" in the spirit of Henry George. 

In Washington, Magie worked as a post office stenographer. She kept her brown, curly hair short and had a variety of hobbies and professions. She published essays, poems and short stories, appeared on stage in the theater and, at the age of 26, patented a device she invented that allowed paper to slide more easily through typewriters. 

At some point, her father gave her a copy of Henry George's "Progress and Poverty." In the work, George lays the foundation for Magie's game when he writes: "What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power." The sentence was a great inspiration to Magie.

The height of social inequality

The Washington, DC, in which Magie lived at the end of the 19th century was characterized by industrialization, inequality and upheaval. According to the 1900 census, in just 20 years the city grew from 178,000 to almost 280,000 inhabitants. While industrial magnates such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan amassed wealth, the working class lived in precarious conditions. 

Magie spoke out against this harsh reality. In one of her poems, she described industrializing Washington as a "dark and dreary place" where "everyone is selfish." This view is reflected in her game, as well.

"It is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences," she said of "The Landlord's Game" in a 1902 issue of the "Single Tax Review." "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 same as the human race in general seem[s] to have — the accumulation of wealth."

Magie fought for her game

Ironically, Charles Darrow and Parker Brothers amassed a fortune with Monopoly, even amidst a global economic crisis. Magie, who was already an elderly woman at the time, heard about it in the press.

"Lizzie was furious," says Pilon. And she fought back. She went to the press herself with the original game board and her patent, for which she had received only a few hundred dollars at the time.

The game manufacturer then made a deal with her, which Ralph Anspach later called a "cover-up." according to Pilon: Parker Brothers offered to publish two of Magie's games as compensation. "But there is no evidence that this ever happened,” says Pilon. "And Parkers Brothers still won't acknowledge that Lizzie Magie invented the game."

One wonders what Lizzie Magie would think of today's world in which social inequality is growing and politicians like Donald Trump appear to be playing Monopoly with the world. According to the latest data from the non-governmental organization Oxfam, the top 1% of the world's population owns more wealth than the bottom 95% combined.

"I feel like Lizzie would be very critical of today's time, especially when it comes to income inequality," says Pilon. Elizabeth Magie died in Staunton, Virginia, in 1948 at the age of 81. She lived long enough to see the success of her game, but not to see her work recognized.

This article was translated from German.