美国国家公共电台 NPR--'Throughline': There's more to the board game Monopoly than you might think

'Throughline': There's more to the board game Monopoly than you might think

Transcript¹

Monopoly is one of the best-selling board games in history — sales went up during the COVID-19 pandemic. The game is built on powerful American lore²: anyone can rise from rags to riches.

LEILA FADEL, HOST:

As inflation has increased to a 40-year high, home prices and rent has been on the mind of many Americans. And it just so happens that wealth, rent and land are topics many people first learn about when they play the game Monopoly. Today, Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei at NPR's history podcast Throughline take a look at one of the bestselling board games in history. It turns out, there's more to passing go than people think.

(SOUNDBITE OF FIRE CRACKLING)

RUND ABDELFATAH, BYLINE³: It's 1879 in a small town in Illinois, where 13-year-old Lizzie Magie is curled up next to the fire with a book her father gave her.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR #1: (As Lizzie Magie) "Progress And Poverty" by Henry George.

ABDELFATAH: Lizzie had to stop going to school. Her family was struggling, never having recovered from the recession six years earlier. And as she dives into this book, the world begins to make a little more sense to her.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR #1: (As Lizzie Magie) The great cause of inequality in the distribution of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land. The ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the social, the political and, consequentially⁴, the intellectual and moral condition.

ABDELFATAH: She's there, but not really there. The words transport her.

MARY PILON: It's really important to understand that the United States after the Civil War. At this time, there was an incredible amount of wealth being created that hadn't been seen in this country anymore. And you had a very - you had a handful of people who were controlling it.

ABDELFATAH: This is Mary Pilon, author of "The Monopolists: Obsession⁵, Fury, And The Scandal Behind The World's Favorite Board Game."

PILON: And George was asking questions about - all this money is now coming in. Our country was ripped apart. And now it's - you know, we're rebuilding. And how does - how is it distributed? And what is the government's role in, you know, taking a cut? Or, you know, how does that pan out?

RAMTIN ARABLOUEI, BYLINE: A growing number of Americans were fed up with the monopolies of the so-called Gilded⁶ Age - railroads, sugar, oil - and the growing riches of the elite⁷ few - the Vanderbilts, Carnegies and Rockefellers.

ABDELFATAH: Among those fed up was Lizzie's dad, James Magie, a staunch progressive who traveled with Abraham Lincoln during the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR #1: (As Lizzie Magie) Ownership of land is the great, fundamental fact.

ABDELFATAH: He strongly believed in the ideas Lizzie was reading about and understood that whoever owned the land made the profits and maintained all the power. And he made sure that his daughter Lizzie knew it, too - not just by giving her books, but by encouraging her to live a life that transcended⁸ the societal norms of the time. And she did.

PILON: So she was absolutely a trailblazer.

ABDELFATAH: As an adult, Lizzie kept going back to the ideas of Henry George, to the book her father gave her. She became friends with Henry George's son and became the secretary of the Woman's Single Tax Club of Washington, a club dedicated⁹ to advancing George's central theory on how to solve inequality.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

PILON: So the single tax theory - the general idea was that you had a land value tax, also known as a single tax. And the general idea is to tax land and only land. So then that shifts the tax burden to wealthy landlords. Anybody who lives in New York or Los Angeles or a high-rent neighborhood, I'm sure, is kind of nodding their head at that.

ABDELFATAH: Nodding head.

PILON: And that message really resonated with Americans in the late 1800s because poverty and squalor are very much on display in urban centers. It's about income inequality. It's about, how do we tax people? How are the wealthy treated? What are we doing for those who are in poverty?

ARABLOUEI: With the single tax theory in mind, Lizzie Magie invented what she called The Landlord's Game, the very first version of Monopoly.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

PILON: And she creates The Landlord's Game as a teaching tool - because it's one thing to read about these ideas. But a game is a really wonderful way to teach someone something.

(SOUNDBITE OF DICE¹⁰ RATTLING)

PILON: When you look at the 1904 Landlord's Game patent, it's striking how similar it is to what we know as Monopoly today.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR #1: (As Lizzie Magie) The object of the game is to obtain as much wealth or money as possible. When a player stops upon a lot owned by another player, he must pay the rent to the owner. The player who has the largest sum total is the winner.

ABDELFATAH: The board game was a hit. It spread like wildfire and players started coming up with hometown versions, changing the rules to fit where and how they lived. But this also meant Lizzie wasn't making any money or fame from it.

ARABLOUEI: Enter Charles Darrow, who lived just outside Atlantic City, where the game was especially popular. It was the Great Depression. Darrow was unemployed¹¹. And after playing the game with some friends, he decided¹² it might be his ticket to a better life. So he tweaked the game a bit and eventually pitched his version to the game companies Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers.

PILON: And he claims that he invented it.

ARABLOUEI: Both turned him down. They basically thought it was too complicated. But a few months later, Parker Brothers came back and said, wait; we do want to do it.

PILON: Parker Brothers is a company that is on the brink¹³ of destruction, like many companies. And they need a hit, and they need it fast. And so they started selling Monopoly. And they're just as surprised as anybody that this game sells like gangbusters.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR #2: In its first year, 1935, the Monopoly game was the bestselling game in America. The rest, as they say, is history.

ARABLOUEI: Darrow became the face of Monopoly, along with his supposed rags-to-riches story.

PILON: So the story is all over the place. And Lizzie Magie catches wind of it. And she does not take this quietly. She calls up reporters, and she does these interviews where she is holding up her games. And she says, I have patents. I made this game.

ARABLOUEI: Parker Brothers catches wind of Lizzie's noise. They get in touch and offer her $500 for the patent to The Landlord's Game, which is roughly 10 grand today.

PILON: But there's no evidence they acknowledged her really as the inventor at all. She dies in 1948 with this, like, itty-bitty little obituary¹⁴ that you have to really look for.

ARABLOUEI: There wasn't a single mention of Monopoly in her obituary.

PILON: And Charles Darrow gets, like, The New York Times treatment, hailing him as the inventor when he passes, you know, decades later. I think the Darrow myth has a lot of resilience baked into it. Like, one of the themes of that story is if you work hard, you will - you'll get rich. You'll innovate¹⁵. You'll make something that will heal the world and heal yourself.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

PILON: Depending on how you look at it, Monopoly is either the American dream or the American nightmare.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

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1 transcript   

n.抄本，誊本，副本，肄业证书

参考例句：

• A transcript of the tapes was presented as evidence in court.一份录音带的文字本作为证据被呈交法庭。
• They wouldn't let me have a transcript of the interview.他们拒绝给我一份采访的文字整理稿。

2 lore   

n.传说；学问，经验，知识

参考例句：

• I will seek and question him of his lore.我倒要找上他，向他讨教他的渊博的学问。
• Early peoples passed on plant and animal lore through legend.早期人类通过传说传递有关植物和动物的知识。

3 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

4 consequentially   

adv.必然地

参考例句：

• In the construction of hydroelectric power station, eco-environment will be consequentially destroyed to some extent. 在水电站建设中，生态环境必然遭到一定程度的破坏。 来自互联网
• It was because of these subjective and objective reasons that it consequentially retreated from the history. 正是由于这些主观和客观的原因，注定它必然要退出历史舞台。 来自互联网

5 obsession   

n.困扰，无法摆脱的思想(或情感)

参考例句：

• I was suffering from obsession that my career would be ended.那时的我陷入了我的事业有可能就此终止的困扰当中。
• She would try to forget her obsession with Christopher.她会努力忘记对克里斯托弗的迷恋。

6 gilded   

a.镀金的，富有的

参考例句：

• The golden light gilded the sea. 金色的阳光使大海如金子般闪闪发光。
• "Friends, they are only gilded disks of lead!" "朋友们，这只不过是些镀金的铅饼！ 来自英汉文学 - 败坏赫德莱堡

7 elite   

n.精英阶层；实力集团；adj.杰出的，卓越的

参考例句：

• The power elite inside the government is controlling foreign policy.政府内部的一群握有实权的精英控制着对外政策。
• We have a political elite in this country.我们国家有一群政治精英。

8 transcended   

超出或超越（经验、信念、描写能力等）的范围( transcend的过去式和过去分词 )； 优于或胜过…

参考例句：

• He wanted assurance that he had transcended what was inherently ambiguous. 他要证明，他已经超越了本来就是混淆不清的事情。
• It transcended site to speak to universal human concerns. 它超越了场所的局限，表达了人类共同的心声。

9 dedicated   

adj.一心一意的；献身的；热诚的

参考例句：

• He dedicated his life to the cause of education.他献身于教育事业。
• His whole energies are dedicated to improve the design.他的全部精力都放在改进这项设计上了。

10 dice   

n.骰子；vt.把（食物）切成小方块，冒险

参考例句：

• They were playing dice.他们在玩掷骰子游戏。
• A dice is a cube.骰子是立方体。

11 unemployed   

adj.失业的，没有工作的；未动用的，闲置的

参考例句：

• There are now over four million unemployed workers in this country.这个国家现有四百万失业人员。
• The unemployed hunger for jobs.失业者渴望得到工作。

12 decided   

adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的

参考例句：

• This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
• There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。

13 brink   

n.(悬崖、河流等的)边缘，边沿

参考例句：

• The tree grew on the brink of the cliff.那棵树生长在峭壁的边缘。
• The two countries were poised on the brink of war.这两个国家处于交战的边缘。

14 obituary   

n.讣告，死亡公告；adj.死亡的

参考例句：

• The obituary records the whole life of the deceased.讣文记述了这位死者的生平。
• Five days after the letter came,he found Andersen s obituary in the morning paper.收到那封信五天后，他在早报上发现了安德森的讣告。

15 innovate   

v.革新，变革，创始

参考例句：

• We must innovate in order to make progress.我们必须改革以便取得进步。
• It is necessary to innovate and develop military theories.创新和发展军事理论是必要的。