The Anspach Decade

In the spring of 1973, a forty-six-year-old economics professor at San Francisco State University named Ralph Anspach went to the dining table where his sons played board games and decided that he hated Monopoly. He hated it as a game. He hated it more as a teaching tool. The whole point of the thing — that you won by driving everyone else out of business and acquiring all the wealth on the board — was, in his professional opinion as an economist, the opposite of what a healthy economy was supposed to do.

So Anspach made a different game. He called it Anti-Monopoly. The board started with everyone already monopolised, and the players had to work — through prosecutions, through anti-trust busts, through cooperation — to break the monopolies up and restore a competitive market. He patented the design, found a small printer in Berkeley, and began selling it.

Within two years he had sold roughly two hundred thousand copies. Within three years he was in federal court, defending himself against a trademark infringement suit brought by Parker Brothers — by then a subsidiary of the breakfast-cereal giant General Mills.

He would still be in court ten years later. He would lose his sabbatical, mortgage his house, watch seven thousand of his games seized and destroyed by court order, fight all the way to the Supreme Court, and eventually win. In the process, almost incidentally, he would surface every piece of historical evidence about Lizzie Magie, the Atlantic City Quakers, the Indianapolis players, and the actual lineage of the Landlord’s Game — establishing on the legal record the story that Mary Pilon would tell to a popular audience forty years later, and that we have been retelling on this Diary for the last three weeks.

This is the part of the story without which none of the rest is on the record.

The first part of this series introduced Lizzie. The second part covered the Atlantic City Quakers and the folk versions. This one is about the man who, by losing a decade of his life to a lawsuit he did not start, recovered the names of everyone in the first two parts.

[IMAGE PLACEHOLDER — A photograph of Ralph Anspach with his Anti-Monopoly game, circa 1974. Anspach’s personal papers and photographs are held at the Special Collections of the University of California, San Francisco. We have not yet secured a freely-licensed reproduction.]

A game that made an argument

Anti-Monopoly was not subtle. The opening state of the board placed all property in the hands of monopolists. The “Trustbuster” cards — which players could earn — broke up monopolies. The win condition was a competitive market: properties distributed across players, no single owner with controlling interest in any sector. Where Monopoly taught players that the goal of capitalism is to bankrupt your friends, Anti-Monopoly taught that the goal of capitalism is to keep markets honest enough that no one gets bankrupted in the first place.

It was, in other words, the kind of game Lizzie Magie would have approved of — although Anspach in 1973 had no idea who Lizzie Magie was. He thought he was inventing something new. He thought he was inventing the opposite of Monopoly. He had no way of knowing that what he was actually doing was reinventing the second of Lizzie’s two rulesets — the Single Tax set, the cooperative set, the set Parker Brothers had quietly buried in 1939.

The game sold. People sent letters. Schoolteachers used it in their classrooms. A few economics professors put it on their syllabi. Anspach, who had been planning a quiet career in academia, found himself running a small game company out of his house.

In 1974 Parker Brothers’ lawyers sent him a letter. Anti-Monopoly, they argued, infringed on the Monopoly trademark. The names were too close. The product would confuse consumers. Parker Brothers demanded that Anspach cease publication and destroy his existing inventory.

Anspach wrote back. He said no.

The countersuit

A trademark exists, in American law, only if the term it claims is distinctive — if it points to a single source. A term that has become generic, that the general public uses to refer to a category rather than a specific product, cannot be trademarked. Aspirin, escalator, and thermos are the canonical examples: all once registered trademarks, all eventually ruled generic and lost by their original owners.

Anspach’s countersuit, filed in 1974, took this principle and ran with it. He argued that Monopoly was generic — that it referred to a category of board game, played in many variants by many people, before Charles Darrow ever sold it to Parker Brothers in 1935. Therefore, he argued, Parker Brothers’ trademark had never been valid in the first place. There was nothing to infringe.

The legal theory required him to prove the prior existence of Monopoly-the-game-category before Monopoly-the-Parker-Brothers-product. The corporate story said no such prior existence had ever occurred. Charles Darrow, the corporate story said, had invented the game on his kitchen table in 1932. There was no prior art.

Anspach took a sabbatical from his teaching post and went looking for prior art.

The hunt

He started, as anyone in 1974 would have started, at the United States Patent and Trademark Office in Crystal City, Virginia. He searched the patent records for board games filed before 1935. He found Lizzie Magie’s 1904 patent. He found her 1924 patent. He read them. He realised — sitting in a reading room in Virginia, alone — that the patent for what Parker Brothers was selling as Monopoly had been filed thirty-one years before Charles Darrow’s. He photocopied the patents and went looking for the inventor.

Lizzie Magie was, by then, dead twenty-six years. Her grave in Arlington was unmarked. But her last known address was on file. Through a chain of city directories, neighbourhood interviews, and a phone call to a surviving relative, Anspach reconstructed the basic outline of her life: the patents, the Single Tax politics, the 1936 newspaper interviews protesting Darrow’s claim, the five hundred dollars from Parker Brothers in 1935, the no royalties.

This was already enough, in Anspach’s view, to win the case. But it was not enough to satisfy him. He wanted to know who had played the game between Lizzie’s 1924 patent and Charles Darrow’s 1935 one. He wanted to know exactly how the game had travelled. So he kept looking.

He went to Indianapolis, where he found Daniel Layman, by then in his sixties, who confirmed having played the Landlord’s Game with the Thun brothers at Williams College in the 1920s, having brought it home, having published Finance in 1932, having sold it to Knapp Electric, and having watched Parker Brothers buy Finance out from under him in 1935. Layman, Anspach said later, was relieved to be asked. He had been telling this story for forty years. No one had ever taken him seriously.

He went to Reading, Pennsylvania, where he found surviving family members of the Thun brothers, who confirmed Layman’s account. He went to Atlantic City, where the Friends School was still standing and where some of the Quaker families from the 1929 era still had relatives in town. He talked to people who remembered playing the game on hand-drawn boards before 1935. He talked to people who remembered the names — Hoskins, the Raifords, the Harveys — that Pilon would later put back into the published record.

And then, almost by accident, he found Charles Todd.

Charles Todd, in 1976

Todd was eighty-eight years old. He was living in Pennsylvania, in retirement, in poor health but lucid. Anspach’s investigators tracked him down through the Quaker network. When Anspach’s lawyers took his deposition in 1976 — forty-four years after the dinner in Germantown — Todd’s memory was sharp. He remembered the Darrows coming over. He remembered Esther Darrow being more enthusiastic about the game than Charles. He remembered being asked to type up the rules. He remembered typing them up. He remembered handing over a hand-drawn copy of the Atlantic City board.

He testified, under oath, that Charles Darrow had not invented Monopoly. He testified that the version Darrow had taken to Parker Brothers in 1935 was substantially identical to the Atlantic City Quaker version Todd had taught him three years earlier. He named names. He gave dates.

The deposition was the single most important document in the case. It was the testimony of a primary witness to the actual transmission of the game, given by a man who had no financial stake in the outcome and no reason to lie. It was, in legal terms, devastating to Parker Brothers’ case.

It also — and this is the part that has nothing to do with the lawsuit — established for the historical record exactly how the game had moved from Atlantic City to the rest of the country. Without Charles Todd’s 1976 deposition, Mary Pilon’s 2015 reconstruction of the Atlantic City chapter would have been guesswork. With it, the chapter is documented.

Charles Todd died in 1980. His deposition is, as far as anyone knows, the only sworn first-hand account of the Germantown dinner that exists.

[IMAGE PLACEHOLDER — The first page of Charles Todd’s 1976 deposition, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Case No. C-74-529. The full deposition is part of the Anspach case file held at the National Archives, San Francisco branch.]

The first trial, and the destruction

The first trial took place in 1976 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, before Judge Spencer Williams. Despite the prior-art evidence, despite Todd’s deposition, despite Layman’s testimony, Anspach lost.

The judge ruled that Parker Brothers’ trademark on Monopoly was valid. The judge ruled, further, that Anti-Monopoly infringed on it. The judge ordered Anspach to cease distribution. He ordered Anspach’s existing inventory destroyed. Roughly seven thousand boxes of Anti-Monopoly were trucked to a landfill in northern California and bulldozed under.

Anspach was, by his own later admission, financially and emotionally wrecked. He had spent more than a year of full-time research on the case. He had taken on a second mortgage on his house. His wife Ruth had taken a second job. The judgment included a damages award against him that he could not pay. By the standards of any sensible person, the lawsuit was over. He had lost. He was bankrupt. The thing to do was to fold up the company and go back to teaching.

He appealed instead.

The Ninth Circuit, 1979

The appeal was heard by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1979. The three-judge panel reviewed the trial record — including the Todd deposition, the Layman testimony, the patents — and reached a conclusion almost diametrically opposed to Judge Williams’s. They ruled that the lower court had applied the wrong legal test. The proper test for a generic trademark, the appeals panel held, was not whether the term was originally distinctive, but whether it was distinctive now, to the consumer, at the point of purchase. If a consumer, asked what Monopoly was, would answer “the Parker Brothers board game,” the trademark was valid. If they would answer “a category of board game,” it was generic.

The Ninth Circuit ordered the case retried under this new test.

Anspach went back to work. He commissioned consumer surveys. He gathered evidence on how ordinary players described the game. He paid for it himself. The retrial took place in 1981. This time he won.

The court found, on the evidence of the surveys and on the evidence of the prior art Anspach had assembled, that Monopoly had become a generic term in the public mind, and that Parker Brothers’ trademark was therefore invalid. Anti-Monopoly was free to continue trading. The seven thousand destroyed boxes were not coming back, but the company was no longer in violation of anything.

General Mills appealed to the Supreme Court. In 1983 the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. The Ninth Circuit ruling stood. Anspach had, finally, won.

It had been ten years.

The Trademark Clarification Act, 1984

Within twelve months of Anspach’s Supreme Court victory, Congress passed a piece of legislation called the Trademark Clarification Act of 1984. It was, in its substance, a single-purpose bill: it changed the legal test for genericism back to the one Judge Williams had applied in 1976, and explicitly overturned the Ninth Circuit’s ruling. It was, by some accounts, drafted with input from General Mills’ lawyers. It was sometimes called, with varying degrees of irony, the Monopoly Act.

The effect was that Monopoly, as a brand, was returned to Parker Brothers’ control. Anti-Monopoly was permitted to continue under the precedent of Anspach’s win, but no future challenger would be able to use the same legal strategy. The corporate ownership of the Monopoly trademark was, going forward, secure.

But — and this is the part of the story that survived — the factual record established during the ten-year case was untouched. The patents Anspach had unearthed were still public documents. Charles Todd’s deposition was still in the case file. Daniel Layman’s testimony was still on the record. Parker Brothers could no longer be challenged on its trademark, but it could no longer credibly claim that Charles Darrow had invented the game alone in 1932 either.

The legal victory had been clawed back by Congress. The historical victory was permanent.

What he lost

Anspach kept his house. He kept his teaching post. He kept his marriage. He kept his small company, which continued to publish Anti-Monopoly (and which his sons later inherited and which still operates today). On any narrow reading of the ten-year case, he won.

But he never wrote the academic books he had planned to write. He never took the sabbatical to Europe his colleagues had taken. His health, by the 1990s, was visibly worse than it had been in 1973. The decade in court took the decade his career might otherwise have had. Most accounts describe him afterwards as warm, funny, and tired. Mary Pilon, who interviewed him extensively for The Monopolists, described him as the only person she met during her research who had paid for the truth in the only currency that mattered: years of his own life.

Ralph Anspach died on the twentieth of April, 2022. He was ninety-five.

[IMAGE PLACEHOLDER — Ralph Anspach, late in life, photographed at his home in San Francisco. Several public obituaries from April 2022 carried family-released photographs which we have not yet cleared for use.]

What we owe him

Without Anspach’s lawsuit, the prior history of the Landlord’s Game — Lizzie Magie’s patents, the Atlantic City Quakers’ modifications, the Indianapolis branch, Charles Todd’s dinner with the Darrows — would still be folk knowledge passed between hobbyist historians at game collectors’ conventions. It would not be on the legal record. It would not be at the National Archives. It would not be available to journalists like Mary Pilon as a documented body of evidence forty years later.

Everything we wrote in Part One and Part Two of this series rests, ultimately, on the case file Anspach assembled between 1974 and 1983. He did not set out to write the history of the game. He set out to defend his own right to publish a different game. But in the course of that defence he did the archival work that, fifty years later, allows anyone to write that history accurately. The patents he photocopied. The witnesses he found. The depositions he took.

When we publish our recreation of The Landlord’s Game, we will name him in the credits. After Lizzie Magie and the Atlantic City Quakers, before our own studio, the credits screen will read: Historical record recovered by Ralph Anspach, in the course of Anti-Monopoly, Inc. v. General Mills Fun Group, Inc., 1974–1983.

Without that line, none of the rest is documented.

The next entry in this series is the last: a final piece on what we are doing differently in our recreation, and why. The patent on the title screen. The two rulesets. The names on the box. The credits roll. The kind of object we are trying to make.

We will publish it when the game is closer to ready.

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Sources & further reading

Primary sources

• Anti-Monopoly, Inc. v. General Mills Fun Group, Inc., 611 F.2d 296 (9th Cir. 1979). The first major appellate decision in the case. Available via Justia.
• Anti-Monopoly, Inc. v. General Mills Fun Group, Inc., 684 F.2d 1316 (9th Cir. 1982). The second appellate decision, post-retrial.
• Charles Todd deposition, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Case No. C-74-529 (1976). Held at the National Archives, San Francisco branch.
• Daniel Layman testimony, same case file (1975–1976).
• Trademark Clarification Act of 1984, Pub.L. 98–620. Available via Congress.gov.

Books

• Ralph Anspach, The Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle (Anti-Monopoly, Inc., 1998). Anspach’s own first-hand account. Indispensable for this period — no other source gives the day-to-day texture of running a board game company while suing General Mills.
• Mary Pilon, The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game (Bloomsbury, 2015). Chapters 9–14 cover the Anspach decade. Pilon interviewed Anspach extensively in his last years.
• Philip E. Orbanes, The Game Makers: The Story of Parker Brothers (Harvard Business School Press, 2003). The Parker Brothers / General Mills side, written with archival access to the company’s files.

Articles

• “Ralph Anspach, who fought Monopoly and won, dies at 95,” The New York Times, 28 April 2022.
• Mary Pilon, “Monopoly’s Inventor: The Progressive Who Didn’t Pass ‘Go,’” The New York Times, 13 February 2015. The piece that introduced Anspach’s case file to a popular audience.
• Christopher Ketcham, “Monopoly Is Theft,” Harper’s Magazine, 19 October 2012.
• Andrea Sachs, “The Antimonopolist,” Time, 28 February 2005.

Archives

• National Archives, San Francisco branch — holds the full Anti-Monopoly case file, including the Todd and Layman depositions.
• University of California, San Francisco, Special Collections — holds Anspach’s personal papers, donated by his family in 2023.
• landlordsgame.info — Thomas Forsyth’s archival site continues to be the best public-facing index of materials surfaced during the Anspach case.

A note on images

This entry leans more heavily on placeholder image markers than the previous two. The 1970s and 1980s do not yet have the freely-licensed visual record that the 1900s and 1920s do — most photographs of Ralph Anspach, his game, the trial, and the destruction of the Anti-Monopoly inventory are still under family or news-organisation copyright. Final-edition reproductions will be sourced through Anspach’s estate, the UCSF archives, and the news organisations that covered the case.

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Part one of this series, on Lizzie Magie, is here. Part two, on the Atlantic City Quakers, is here. The fourth and final part — on what we are making, and why — will be published as the game itself nears release.