NEW PLACE, SAME PLACE, Shakespeare's Place

“I grant him bloody, Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful, Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin

That has a name.”
Prince Malcolm describing Macbeth, Act IV, Scene 3

In Shakespeare's tragedy of “Macbeth”, Prince Malcolm is the answer to the question 'what should Hamlet have done?' Like the 'unhappy Dane', Malcolm was the spoiled son of a King. When his father is murdered by Macbeth, the boy suffers indecision, just like Hamlet. But Malcolm wastes little time in methodically isolating and murdering his uncle.  If there was one thing William Shakespeare was familiar with, it was the eternal human tendencies for greed and self justification. I mean, after he was dead, it brought down his own house, for God's sake.

The 'immortal bard' was born in the English midlands town of Stratford-upon-Avon, where the the road - or in old English the 'strat', which gives us our modern word 'street' – forded the river Avon, about 22 miles south-east of modern day Birmingham. At 19 William married a Stratford girl. But it was a very unpleasant place to live. Stratford was the final destination for herds of sheep from the rolling Cotswold county just to the south, which were fuel for a 16^th century agro-chemical industry. Stratford was dotted with noisy, stinking slaughter houses and reeking tanneries, which produced meat and wool and glue and soap and leather and a myriad of other animal by-products the world has forgotten it ever needed. Shakespeare's father was a glove maker, and his raw material was sheepskin. As a layer of smog envelopes modern cities, the residents of Stratford lived under a permanent cloud of stench and flies.

Perhaps the flies explain why a good Catholic boy like William left Stratford, abandoning his wife and children, to pursue a career then viewed as sinful – in the theater. Against all odds he became a success, so well paid on the London stage that in 1597 he was able to pay sixty pounds for a 17 acre estate at the corner of Stratford and Chapel streets, in the middle of Stratford.  It had two gardens, two small orchards, two barns and outbuildings. The house itself was  the second largest house in Stratford, a two story Tudor stucco and beam affair, with a brick foundation - even the cesspit was brick. Though it was already a hundred years old, it was still called called “New Place”, and William deposited his wife and two daughters here, while he returned to London.

But even then the theater was a tough way to make a farthing. Between 1603 and 1610 the London theaters were closed more often than they were open, because of plague. New Place, with its gardens and the mulberry tree William had planted himself, became a sanctuary where he composed his last play, “The Tempest” - about an old man named Prospero, who is exiled on an island with his daughter, and a son-of-a-witch who makes his life miserable. To keep his sanity William often returned to London to go drinking with his friends William Burbage and Ben Johnson. But he was not a spring chicken anymore. He was in fact an ill man. And in 1616, at the age of 53, just two months after marrying his youngest daughter to the guy who owned the liquor store next door, William Shakespeare died. In his will William left his wife, Ann Hathaway, his “second best bed”, but he left the house it sat in, to his eldest daughter and her doctor husband.

The trouble was, none of William's children's children had children who had children. Call it the Shakespeare curse, but within a hundred years his blood line had dried up completely. In 1702 the house and garden was sold to Sir John Clopton, whose family had originally built the house before Columbus left for America. John gutted it to the exterior walls and then rebuilt it. But he regularly allowed the public in to tour “Shakespeare’s garden” next door, including the mulberry tree. Then in 1757 John Clopton died suddenly and his family was forced to sell the house and garden to pay his debts. The buyer this time had no connection to the house, nor any interest in Shakespeare. He was an arrogant neuveau riche Bishop from Chester named Francis Gastrell. We will pause here for a moment so you can boo and hiss this villain’s entrance upon the stage.

Done? Okay. Francis (above) inherited his money when his father, the previous Bishop of Chester, died in 1748 without a will. And he needed one because Daddy had been a very acquisitive clergyman who left behind a lot of investment properties. Now, you might ask how a man of God had obtained all that money – I would - but that is another story. This story is about his son, Francis.

The courts sold the old man's property, and then divided the money between his two sons. It took a few years, but by the time he was 50 Francis was finally “independently” wealthy.  Like any good upwardly mobile Englishman of his time, he used his money to mobile upward further. In 1752 he married the daughter of a Baronet , and then he retired.. Upwardly mobile Englishmen did not “labor” for a living. Even Bishops. In 1756, Francis bought New Place in Stratford as a vacation home. And the first thing he noticed was the crowds of tourists who still expected to wander about in Shakespeare's garden. Except Francis saw it as “his” garden. He put up a fence. And padlocked the gate. Francis saw no reason he should allow strangers on “his” private property. Of course at the same time he saw no reason why he should be paying taxes on “his” property, either.  Does any of this sound like rich bastards around today? You're damn right it does.

The local merchants recognized that keeping the town looking nice was an investment in the tourist trade, which even in 1760 was proving profitable. And keeping the poor off the streets kept Stratford looking prosperous and safe, not to mention it being the “Christian” duty of every believer to help the poor.  But Bishop Francis Gastrell did not see why he should care about the poor. In fact he asked for a tax cut, arguing that he didn't live in Stratford year-round (he wintered in Lichfield) and should not have to pay the poor taxes when he was not in residence. The town council disagreed. The poor did not stop needing food just because Francis was out of town. Francis still owed his forty schillings for the “Poor Tax”. And that made Francis angry. So he cut down Shakespeare's mulberry tree.

Oh, when challenged he explained the 150 year old tree had cast a shadow over the house, making it feel dank and dark. Like Tudor houses don't all feel dark and dank.  But while the entire town went into shock, one man showed Francis how to turn his problem with the tourists into a gold mine. His name was Thomas Sharpe, and he was a local clock maker. He bought the corpse of Shakespeare's tree, at firewood prices, and carved it into Shakespeare mementos, which he sold to the tourists – clocks, statues, medallions, trinkets and cameos (above). He sold so many and he made so much money, that he was accused of fraud. Sharpe was forced to issue a statement. “I do hear by declare and take my solemn oath, upon the four Evangelists, in the presence of the Almighty God, that I never worked, sold, or substituted any other wood than what came from, and was part of, the said tree.”

But rather than sell tickets to the garden for a few days each week in the summer, when he wasn't in town anyway, Francis Gastrell went the other way. To protest his “Poor Taxes”, he boarded up the house (above) and refused to pay any taxes at all. He was a Tea Party thinker before there was a tea party. Of course this meant his servants were now unemployed and without a residence – in other words, poor. Besides being insulted by Francis' treatment of their citizens, the Stratford council did not agree with Francis' morality or his logic. The house might not be occupied, but it was still in the town, so there were still taxes to be paid.

In 1759, just three years after he bought it, Francis Gastrell had “Shakespeare's” house pulled down to make a political point. It was dismantled and burned, so nobody would profit from even the wreckage. Then, according to the London Gazette and Journal, “Upon completion of his outrages on the memory of Shakespeare ...Francis Gastrell departed from Stratford, hooted out of the town, and pursued by the excretions of its inhabitants.” The council even passed an ordnance that no one named Gastrell would ever be allowed to live in Stratford, ever again – not that there is a line of wandering Gastrells waiting at the city gates, but the law is still on the books

And that is why, if you go to Stratford-upon-Avon today, and you should if you can, you will see the house where Shakespeare was born, and the cottage where his wife, Ann Hathaway was born. You can visit their graves in the local church (above). You can visit his garden, where you will see a plaque where the mulberry tree once stood. But the house he owned, where he died, where Ann died as well, is long gone, thanks to an arrogant selfish jackass who could boast to the world, not that “I built that”, but “I destroyed that”.

But then, that is the only achievement of selfish people.

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ADDICTED - Tobacco Evolved to Kill

 

I was surprised to learn that the tobacco plant did not evolve until just after the last ice age, only about 8,000 years ago. Its innovative strategy for survival against the surge of new insects and herbivores the warmer weather had created, was the elevated production of an insecticide called nicotine. It's bitter taste discouraged any hungry herbivores. And if swallowed, it sicken and killed any bugs or small mammals.

But this strategy for defense played right into the human trait of becoming addicted to things that are bad for us. By 2,000 years ago the Mayans were using tobacco to get a rush from nicotine. But their favored method of delivery – as an enema – limited the distribution of the drug, not to mention the mobility of the users. Still, the way these two life forms meshed together, like gears in a machine - a plant which produced a poison to protect itself and a creature which tended to become addicted to poisons – may be the ultimate proof that humans bring out God's sense of humor. Which makes sense since it seems that humans seem to bring out God.

In 1492 Columbus arrived, uninvited,  in the new world and the natives presented him with a canoe filled with fruit and “dried leaves”. The natives were probably hoping Christopher would set the boat on fire while sitting in the canoe and smoking the leaves. Instead the Spaniards ate the fruit and threw the leaves away; no word on what they did with the canoe.

However a later Spanish explorer, Rodrigo de Jerez, who was in Cuba dreaming of gold and the good life, tried “drinking” the smoke from the burning leaves. He was immediately addicted. When he brought his new addiction back to Spain with him, he was arrested and thrown into a dungeon. When he was finally released 7 years later, the streets of Seville were crowded with addicts merrily puffing away in public. Ironic, huh.

By 1577 English physicians were recommending tobacco as a treatment for toothache, worms, lockjaw and oddly enough, cancer. In 1603 they petitioned the king to make tobacco a controlled substance, not because it was unhealthy but because they were not getting their cut of the profits. And in 1610 Sir Francis Bacon made a note that he really wanted to quit smoking but was finding it really hard to do. It would take another three hundred and fifty years before the American Medical Association would come to the official conclusion that nicotine is addictive.

In 1612 John Rolf harvested Virginia’s first crop of tobacco. Three years later his first shipment hit the streets of London. The result was similar to the introduction of crack cocaine in American inner cities in the 1980’s. By 1618 there were “…7,000 shops, in and about London, that doth vent tobacco”, according to Mr. Barnaby Rich, a tobacco addict.

As the weed spread around the globe, many governments set a zero tolerance level. Sultan Murad IV executed 18 smokers a day for ten years. It did not work. Czar Alexis sent first time smokers to Siberia with their noses slit. Second time smokers were executed. That did no good.  In China if you were caught carrying tobacco with the intent to distribute the penalty for a first offense was decapitation. There is no record of any second time offenders, so in that regard the zero tolerance worked. And yet, the weed still thrived as a personal sin, even in China. Those who advocate the standard American approach of punishment first, toward cocaine and marijuana, might want to consider the Chinese failure with tobacco. Not even the real threat of a painful and certain death would make smokers stop smoking. 

Lung cancer was first described in 1761 by, appropriately enough, Giovanni Morgagni. He was the inventor of pathology. He described it as a rare affliction. And even a century later, the disease accounted for only 1% of all cancers.

However, less than a century after that, (by 1927) as cigarette smoking became more common, lung cancer had climbed to 14% of all autopsies. Dr. Fritz Lickint made the first statistical link between smoking and lung cancer in 1928. Five years later the prestigious “Journal of the American Medical Association” began carrying advertising for cigarettes in their own publication. And, oddly  enough, research into smoking and cancers began to fade from the pages of that publication as soon as the tobacco money appeared.

The addictive quality of tobacco should have been obvious from the actual advertising campaigns used to sell cigarettes. “Not a cough in a (rail) car load”, “More Doctors Smoke Camels than any other Cigarette”, “L and M cigarettes. Just what the doctor ordered”... "Making smoking 'safe' for smokers” (who else would it be safe for?), and my favorite,  “We're tobacco men ... not medicine men”.

And the rationalization approach was also big along Madison Avenue, the advertising venue of choice in mid-twentieth century America. "When smokers changed to Philip Morris, every case of nose or throat irritation--due to smoking--either cleared up completely or definitely improved”, “That must be why my mother started smoking Pall Mall's when she was 15”. And then there was the confusing yet illogical approach. “39,468 dentists say, "Smoke Viceroy Cigarettes.” Who cares what dentists say about lung cancer? If those catch phrases didn’t drive people away from tobacco, nothing could.

Consider the particular brand of cigarettes called “Marlboro”. It was first introduced in 1924 and marketed as an upscale cigarette for women (“Mild as May”). It struggled as an “also-ran” until Phillip Morris reintroduced it as a filtered cigarette.

The new advertising campaign featured a craggy faced cowboy working the range, with the theme music from “The Magnificent Seven” swelling underneath. By 1957 Marlboro was the best selling cigarette in the world. The only problem was that the original “Marlboro Man”, Carl Bradley, actually smoked a different brand of cigarettes (“Kools”). Luckily for Phillip Morris, Carl was thrown off a horse into a pond and drowned before anybody found that out.

Of the approximately one dozen men who replaced Carl in print and television ads over the next forty years, three of the "Marlboro Men" died of lung cancer (Wayne McLaren, David McLean and Dick Hammer). By the 1970’s the brand was unofficially known as “Cowboy Killers”. But that didn't seem to hurt sales. I used to smoke them myself.

Today, with 1/3rd of the world’s population still smoking tobacco, chewing tobacco or inserting tobacco enemas, 4,000 Americans still die each year (5.4 million world-wide) from tobacco caused cancer, strokes, or house fires caused by smoking. The number of fires caused by tobacco enemas is thought to be insignificant, but I remain suspicious of this method of nicotine delivery.

Under heat Cigarettes (or little cigars) convert the nicotine fortified tobacco contained in modern cigarettes into 60 various carcinogens, and 96% of all lung cancer patients each year describe themselves as moderate to heavy smokers.

These figures mean that smoking tobacco has killed far more people than smoking marijuana. And yet, despite this, we still send people to prison for selling the “gateway drug” while the only tobacco related criminals in jail are those caught avoiding state cigarette taxes. Yea, God must be having a real laugh over his experiment with tobacco.  Not so much his experiment with humans.

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THROWING THE DICE - Inventing Monopoly

 

I know of only three ways to win at the game of Monopoly. First you buy or trade to get a monopoly of all four railroads and the three orange properties; St. James Place, Tennessee Avenue and New York Avenue. On average, players land on the oranges more often because they are just after the Jail. Then you build three houses on each, no hotels. This gives you a return on your investment about every ten times your opponents roll the die. 

The only way to give yourself a better chance of winning is to either become the banker and embezzle your way to victory, or get the other players to adopt a house rule which subtly favors you, and then apply it mercilessly. Real Wall Street bankers play this way all the time. 

Surprisingly few people notice the fundamental capitalistic lesson in Monopoly, which is that you play it with dice. Chance always determines the short term outcome of events, much the same way that derivatives always explode, because sooner or later everybody rolls snake eyes. 

As proof of this consider what happened to the lady who invented the game of Monopoly. Her name was Elizabeth “Lizzie” Magie Phillips, a bright, well educated and determined Illinois Quaker lady, who in her late twenties was looking for a cause. See, Quakers had a long history as abolitionists, and the abolition of slavery after the Civil War, left them with an identity crises. “Lizzie”  found her new cause in the rantings of a self taught economist with two first names.

All you need to know about Henry George is that in the 1870's he owned a newspaper in San Francisco, and in 1886 he ran for mayor of New York City, coming in second,  but still beating Republican Teddy Roosevelt  in his first run. In short, all his life George was a square peg in search of a round hole. He did not believe in free trade, he didn't like Asians, he liked paper money but he hated taxes - income taxes, sales taxes, and capital gains taxes. He sounds very Republican, doesn't he? Well, he was a Socialist- Catholic- Trade Unionist, who thought government should be supported solely by property taxes. But if you think a government supported only by property taxes is a good idea, I suggest you talk to a member of any school board in America.

“Lizzie” Magie was a Henry devotee, and as the 19^th century drew to a close, she was living in a interracial community of Brentwood, Maryland, and looking for some way to popularize her hero's ideas. Possessing that odd combination of whimsy and discipline required to design games, Lizzie came up with a joyless plaything she called “The Landlord's Game”. “Children of nine or ten,” she assured potential customers, “can easily understand the game and they get a good deal of hearty enjoyment out of it...The little landlords take a general delight in demanding the payment of their rent.”

Lizzie's innovation was that unlike previous Victorian board games, her's had no beginning or end. It was an endless loop. The four corners of her board were labeled Absolute Necessity - Coal Tax, Public Park, Jail and a globe encircled by a banner reading “Labor Upon Mother Earth Produces Wages”. Properties along the straightaways were four railroads, a Water Franchise, four Luxury Lanes, and Easy Street, Lonely Lane, Legacy, the Poor House and Lord Blueblood's Estate (No Trespassing, go to jail), and three other Absolute Necessities – Clothing, Shelter, and Bread. Every time you passed the Labor space you got a hundred bucks, and every time somebody landed on a property it went up for auction. In 1902, “Lizzie” took her new game to America's king of games, George S. Parker

When this George was sixteen he had invented a card game called Banking. Players borrowed money from the bank and the draw from the 160 card deck determined how successful they would be. George invested $40 to print up 500 decks of Banking cards, and sold 488 of them. With that $100 in profit he built an empire, hiring his brothers and issuing similar card games called Klondike Gold Rush and War in Cuba. So,  when Lizzie approached him, George found her a kindred spirit and offered a considered critique of “Landlords”. Basically, he said it stunk. “How do you end this game?” he asked, voicing a concern millions of players would repeat over the next 100 years as 2 in the morning approached with no winner in a Monopoly game.  But he also urged her to get her game copyrighted, which Maggie did. She was granted U.S. Patent 748,626 on 5 January 1904.  In 1906, the brothers hit it big with George's new card game Rook. Frustrated and almost unnoticed, Lizzie packed her bags and moved to Chicago. And there she started her own game company.

She was supported by other Quakers and followers of Henry George, and in 1906, in Chicago, they formed the Economic Game Company, to publish and distribute the Landlord's Game, with a few modifications. She added a bank, wages, and public transportation in the center of the board. Lizzie kept in contact with the Parker Brothers, who, in 1910, published her new card game called Mock Trial. Game design wasn't a living, but then Lizzie wasn't in it for the money.  She was on a mission. Which is probably why what happened next had little to do with Lizzie.

In 1915 economists Scott Nearing was the most popular lecturer at the Wharton School of Business at Pennsylvania State University. Eventually the trustees would fire him for being a radical, but then eventually the American Communist Party would expel him the same reason. But before he was fired, Nearing introduced The Landlord's game to his students, and they set about spreading it from one fraternity brother to another. Future "new dealer" Rexford Guy Tugwell introduced a shortened version the game (called Monopoly Auction) to his classmates at Columbia graduate school of Economics. Another Nearing student, Daniel W. Lyman, started marketing his own shortened version of the game (called Finance) in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he labeled the rental properties with local street names and added Chance and Community Chest cards.

In 1929, school teacher Ruth Hoskins learned the game from her brother, who was friends with Daniel Lyman. Later that year she got a job teaching at the Friends (Quaker) School in Atlantic City, and she introduced the game to her students. When she drew up her version of the game board, she named the properties after streets her students lived on in Atlantic City. But unfamiliar with the area, she misspelled the name of a suburb, Marven Gardens  with an "e" was a combination of two town names – Margate City and Ventor City). She misspelled it as Marvin with an "i" Gardens. And, since her Quaker students objected to auctions on religious grounds, the game was changed again, so that landing on a property first gave you the sole right to buy it, for the price listed on the deed. After that anyone landing there had to pay rent. Once again the game proved very popular.

Ruth's student who lived in Marven Gardens was Charles Todd. He had suggested naming the railroads after real lines. The game's B and O was the Baltimore and Ohio, while the Reading was the Philadelphia and Reading railroad. The Pennsylvania Railroad was for many decades the largest railroad in the world, and while The Short Line was not a specific road, it was the general title for any short commuter rail line. Just as the Great Depression began in earnest in 1932, Charles Todd introduced the game to two new friends who were in a very rough spot.

William Darrow had been a domestic heater salesman in Philadelphia, until the Depression wiped out his livelihood. His was now working at odd jobs, and his wife Esther was pregnant, and one look at the game Monopoly Auction, convinced William that this could be his salvation. Charles Todd would later testify that “Darrow asked me if I would write up the rules and regulations, and give them to Darrow.” Whereupon, Darrow asked for two or three copies, which Charles gave him. And with that, William Darrow was on his way to being a millionaire.

Charles drew up the game board on oil cloth (copying Ruth's misspelling), his wife and son filled in the colors, and a graphic artist then added the icons of Jake the jailbird and Police Officer Edgar Mallory on the Go to Jail cards. The little rich guy with the top hat, Uncle Pennybags would come later, after Charles copyrighted the game under his own name in 1933 before selling it to Parker Brothers in 1936 as his own invention, which it was not.

The marketing department at Parker Brothers made Monopoly the most popular game in America, and made William Darrow a multimillionaire. He spent the rest of his life traveling the world in luxury. 

Of course, eventually the lawyers at Parker Brothers realized they had a problem with “Lizzie”. Remember her? But this also gave them power over Darrow. So, first they pressured him to give them the free and clear rights to publish the game outside of the United States,  in exchange for taking over all legal costs of defending William against copyright infringement. William Darrow caved under just a little pressure. All that remained was to get Maggie to sign over her rights to her Landlord's Game.

The new president of Parker Brothers, Robert Barton, later testified that he asked Lizzie if she would agree to some changes in her game. He testified later that her answer was “No. This is to teach the Henry George theory of single taxation, and I will not have my game changed in any way whatsoever." 

So being a good businessman, Barton stopped pushing. Instead he bought Lizzie's rights for a measly $500, and an agreement to publish her new version of The Landlord's Game. The third edition of the Landlord's game was shipped to stores all over the United States in 1939. But then Parker Brothers did nothing to promote it. After a few weeks all copies of the Landlord's Game were called back to Parker Brothers and destroyed. By the time Lizzie realized she had been snookered, it was too late. And her game, was quickly forgotten.

In a way, she had just gotten a lesson in the game she had invented. And Parker Brothers had just gotten a great big Get Out of Jail Free card. And that is the real lesson in Monopoly.

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