"The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle." - Eric Hoffer |
This Week in History presents summaries of a few selected historical events for each calendar week of the year. |
November 4 - It's raining women, hallelujah! (1924) When it rains, it pours. On this day in 1924, after a drought of 148 years since the founding of the nation, America elected not just one but two women as state governors. If someone had planned better, the country could have chosen a female governor decades earlier, striking a blow for equality but more importantly making it easy to decide whom to put in the history books as the first female elected as her state's chief executive.
The contenders for that honor are Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming and Miriam Ferguson of Texas.
Nellie Tayloe, a kindergarten teacher in Nebraska, met lawyer William Ross during a visit to her relatives in Tennessee. They married in 1902 and moved to Wyoming, where William launched a law practice and became involved in Democratic Party politics. Wyoming was heavily Republican and William failed in several attempts to be elected to various offices.
In 1922, his luck changed and the Wyoming electorate responded to his progressive platform of aiding struggling farmers, bank reforms, Prohibition, abolishment of child labor and protection of miners and women in the labor force. He was elected governor and took office in 1923. Just a year and a half later, William suddenly died and the Democratic Party nominated his widow to succeed him in a special election.
Nellie Ross, in an era which expected women to be demure homemakers rather than ambitious politicians, didn't campaign. Nevertheless, the citizens of Wyoming voted for her and she continued her husband's policies during her term of office as governor.
In 1926, this time as a respected politician, Nellie Ross delivered speeches, kissed babies and pressed the flesh while running for re-election. She lost her bid but continued to be active in the Democratic Party, even receiving votes for nomination as the vice-presidential candidate in the 1928 election. Ross became the vice chairperson of the Democratic National Committee and headed its Women's Division until she was appointed Director of the U.S. Mint by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Once again, she had made history, the first woman to be responsible for the design, production and distribution of the nation's coinage from 1933 to 1953.
After retiring from the Mint, Ross traveled the world and wrote magazine articles. She made history yet one more time: when she died in 1977 at the age of 101, she was the nation's oldest former governor.
Anyone who has read the works of the late great Molly Ivins or who follows current events knows that the formula "Texas plus politics" equals some wild and crazy stuff. The life and times of Miriam Ferguson show us that the Lone Star state has been two-stepping with extremists and bitter political feuds for at least a century.
A native Texas gal, Miriam Wallace was ahead of the curve for her generation of women. Instead of settling right in to the expected life of marriage and children, she first sought an education, attending Salado College and Baylor Female College. On New Year's Eve of 1899, she married James Ferguson, a lawyer and banker. In 1914, he ran for governor as a Democrat against Prohibition and won.
His first term seemed to go smoothly enough but after winning re-election in 1916 controversy erupted. He got into a grudge match with his erstwhile rival for the 1914 Democratic nomination, William Mayes, former lieutenant governor, newspaper publisher, and dean at the University of Texas. Mayes' newspaper had published scathing criticisms of Governor Ferguson and in return he vetoed the university's funding unless it would fire Mayes. With both sides loaded for bear, and loaded with allies in politics and government, the spark of ire was fanned into a firestorm.
It ended with James Ferguson being impeached on sundry charges of misappropriation and corruption and removed from office. Even worse, in his opinion, he was barred from again seeking state office.
In many places, that might make a politician slink off out of the public eye. This being Texas, it just made James vow to redeem his name and get even with his antagonists. He might be barred from running for governor again but his wife wasn't.
Miriam Ferguson entered the race promising voters that with her they would get a "two-for-one" deal in the governorship, with James providing stewardship and guidance to his wife. A key plank in the "Ma" (and "Pa") Ferguson platform was opposition to the tyranny of the powerful Ku Klux Klan in the state. One of her campaign slogans was "Make a choice: the bonnet or the hood" (the bonnet being the hats Miriam always wore like all proper ladies of the time).
Miriam Ferguson handily won and indeed did get legislation passed directed against the Klan. She also issued a breathtaking number of pardons, not just on humanitarian grounds but as a way to relieve the tremendously overcrowded prisons. This being Texas, she was naturally accused of corruptly selling pardons for cash. No charges were formally filed against her but nevertheless she lost her bid for re-election.
Yet again, this being Texas, a couple of defeats and a lifetime ban on office weren't about to deter Ma and Pa from regaining respect and the governorship. In 1932, Miriam was again on the ballot and once again, she won. She unsuccessfully pushed for a state corporate income tax as part of her populist agenda and resumed her liberal issuance of pardons. This time around, it didn't cause much of a fuss because every convict that was released saved the state money during the hard times of the Great Depression.
The Fergusons withdrew from public life for some years after Miriam's second term. In 1940, she tried once again with a strongly populist and progressive agenda; she made a respectable showing but failed to gain a third term as Texas' chief executive.
With that, the Fergusons faded away into retirement, leaving to others the task of keeping Texan politics colorful, to say the least.
However historic the elections and inaugurations of these two women were, there's more to the story (history has an annoying way of doing that). Neither of them was the first woman to serve as a governor.
Carolyn Shelton served as the unofficial "acting governor" of Oregon for one weekend in 1909. Her boss, Governor Earle Chamberlain, left Shelton, the chief of staff, in charge when he departed to assume his new seat in the U.S. Senate; the incoming governor was ill and unable to take office until Monday so Shelton was supposed to act as governor on Saturday and Sunday in the event that something critical arose (nothing did). The story has a happily-ever-after ending: former governor Chamberlain and former "acting governor" Shelton married in 1926.
In New Mexico, the Secretary of State, Soledad Chávez de Chacón, officially served as acting governor during the last week of June and first week of July of 1924 while Governor James Hinkle was out of state to attend the national Democratic Convention.
Our winner of the contest to be the first elected female governor in America? That would be Nellie Tayloe Ross. Although she and Miriam Ferguson were elected on the same day, Ross was sworn into office on January 5, 1925, in accordance with Wyoming law, fifteen days before her Texan counterpart. However, Ma Ferguson wins the runner-up prize for being the first female governor to serve more than one term in office.
Bonus fun fact: the U.S. Mint produced coins for 43 foreign countries, from 1875 to as recently as 2000, using its expertise and facilities to help nations lacking the ability to strike their own. For example, Panama, which uses American dollars as its sole paper currency, freely mixes American coins with U.S. Mint-produced Panamanian coins of exactly the same metals, sizes and denominations as our coins but with Panamanian images and text.
November 5 - Go directly to jail, do not pass Go (1935)
Boardwalk and Baltic Avenue, the Short Line railroad and the Water Works company, a top hat and a thimble: if you haven't guessed Monopoly by now, you probably were never a child. To be fair, you may have been a child in one of 110 countries other than the U.S. where Monopoly uses local street names, landmarks and businesses in lieu of a layout based on historic Atlantic City, New Jersey.
For those few who have absolutely no knowledge of the game, the player's goal is simple: utterly crush your opponents by driving them into bankruptcy. Considering that Parker Brothers, the game's manufacturer, acquired it in 1935 at the height of the Great Depression when millions of Americans were bankrupt, it's puzzling that it rocketed to success. Perhaps people back then enjoyed the odd sensation of winning and holding all of the money for a change instead of holding an eviction notice like in real life.
Monopoly is a journey back in time. Since the game was released on this day in 1935, the publishers have never raised the prices of properties to match inflation, so we can still buy Baltic Avenue for $60 and Boardwalk, the swankiest address on the board, sells for a mere $400. Even with development, the addition of houses and hotels to properties, the total play money of $20,580 included with the game suffices for buying, renting, and developing all of the properties on the board.
Generations of young would-be Warren Buffets and John D. Rockefellers have tossed the dice and worked their cunning strategies for seizing all the money of their friends and families. Probably very few have realized that the game is an economic life lesson: wages (the $200 you receive when passing Go) will not let you survive if the other players own all of the properties.
Teaching that lesson was the goal of the inventor of the original game, The Landlord's Game, upon which Monopoly is based. Elizabeth Magie, a progressive socialist and Quaker, created the game to teach the principles of Georgism, an economic system which would tax economic rent (primarily land) instead of the wages of labor. By showing people, through play, how raw capitalism ultimately leads to powerful monopolies and extreme concentration of wealth, she believed they would see that an alternative was necessary.
In Magie's version of the game, the players were encouraged to play once through using rules similar to those we know from Monopoly. Magie's attitude toward crony capitalism was made apparent in various ways, such as the Chance card which said
Caught robbing the public--take $200 from the board. The players will now call you 'Senator'.
For the second game, players would follow the "progressive" rules, using assorted taxes, public benefits, civic ownership of utilities, and so on. In that game, the winner would be decided when the lowest ranking player doubled his or her original wealth (meaning everyone would have prospered, to varying but limited degrees). In theory, players would learn that there was a better way to live in which the success of the least also improved the welfare of those who had the most. As she put it,
Let the children once see clearly the gross injustice of our present land system and when they grow up, if they are allowed to develop naturally, the evil will soon be remedied.
In addition to her unusual motivation in creating the game, Magie introduced a radical design element to board games: continuous play. Prior games had designated start and end points, unlike Landlord/Monopoly which has the players continuing around and around until one player achieves the game's goal.
Magie was an astonishing woman for her era, when female roles were assumed to be limited to housekeeping and childrearing. Born in 1866, over the course of her life she would work as a stenographer, game designer, engineer, comedian, actress, literary writer and journalist.
She patented The Landlord's Game in 1904 and in 1924 filed a new patent for an improved version, the one illustrated above. She self-published and sold both, rather than selling the rights to a large manufacturer. The game had limited commercial success but was often copied and altered in a do-it-yourself manner by fans at home.
The tale of the commercial road to Monopoly matches the greedy machinations found in the game itself. Charles Darrow learned of the game from friends, playing a homemade version featuring the Atlantic City landmarks familiar to us today. He created some new graphics for the board and a few other tweaks and copyrighted it in 1933. He self-marketed his version, called Monopoly, and eventually Parker Brothers became interested.
Parker Brothers had Darrow file a patent for the game rather than just a copyright for the style and imagery of the board. Darrow swore out an affadavit that he was the sole creator of the game but Parker Brothers soon discovered that Magie actually created the original game and owned the patent for it. The company negotiated with her and eventually bought out her patent and agreed to market several other games she invented, as well as The Landlord's Game (and they did live up to the agreement).
As for Darrow, he ultimately had to confess to Parker Brothers that he had not actually invented the game. His royalty agreement with the company was revised to reflect that but in return they assumed his legal liability for defense of his patent.
Others had also played Magie's game and then modified, tweaked, renamed and marketed it under various names. When Parker Brothers sued, some threatened to testify in court that they had played the original game years before Monopoly, jeopardizing its patent.
Although most of the claims and counterclaims were settled by Parker Brothers in the 1930s, the murky legalities of the origin haunted them as late as the 1970s and 80s, when they lost a suit against the maker of the game Anti-Monopoly. The ancient disputes and conflicting claims were dragged out again and ended with Parker Brothers losing their trademark on the name Monopoly. With the patents long expired, copyright and trademark were the sole protections for the company's monopoly of Monopoly. They bought the trademark back from the winner of the lawsuit, so once again their monopoly remains intact.
November 8 - Thou shalt have no gods that are not imperially approved (392)
Did you ever wonder why there were no Olympic Games for more than 1500 years? Just like in our modern times, holier-than-thou types in the Roman Empire had a way of squelching other people's fun.
At the tail end of the 4th century, the reigning emperor was Theodosius I (347-395 AD). His rule was troubled and turbulent, to say the least. At that time, the empire was ruled in an often tension filled way: there was an emperor for each half, East and West, of the empire. In theory, it was a unified realm but in reality the emperors often worked harder to enhance their own authority than to support their imperial peers. To make things even more confusing, as well as more fraught with internal power struggles, each emperor had a junior co-emperor to assist him in his rule and designated to succeed him upon his death.
Add to this mix the uprisings and invasions of the so-called barbarians adjacent to the Empire, the machinations of ambitious generals who thought the loyalty of their own armies could gain them one of the thrones, and the fractious populations within the Empire who bickered and fought over religion and ethnicity. Perhaps with all of that the Empire could have used a dozen emperors instead of just four.
Theodosius plunged himself into and also found himself dragged into civil wars. By the time everything was sorted out, he was the sole remaining emperor of both East and West. Nevertheless, his troubles weren't over. During the previous era of strife and unrest, Theodosius had made peace with the Goths, allowing them to settle within Roman borders but obligating them to provide military services to the empire. That didn't sit well with the people of Thessalonica and riots broke out. Enraged by his subjects' truculent defiance, Theodosius ordered the Goths to slaughter everyone, a massacre of thousands.
One of the most powerful Christian leaders of the day, Bishop Ambrose of Milan (later St. Ambrose), was appalled and excommunicated the emperor. Previously, Theodosius had had a mixed record on his treatment of both pagans and non-conforming Christian sects. Under the withering scorn of Ambrose, he became quite the scourge of all those who refused to worship the approved deity in the approved manner. He issued a flurry of decrees on religion over a few years. Among the imperial edicts were the disbandment of Rome's sacred Vestal Virgins, conversion of traditional holy days of Roman gods into regular work days, prohibitions against converted Christians returning to their former faiths, and a ban on any public display of non-Christian rites or rituals. That last proscription included the Olympic Games, which had honored the Greek gods.
On this day in 392, Theodosius made Nicene-creed Christianity the sole allowed religion in the entire Roman Empire, prohibiting the worship of any pagan gods (Jews were granted an exemption but if they converted to Christianity they would be harshly treated as apostates if they relapsed into Judaism).
With that, the future course of Europe would yoke the power of the state with the power of the church for more than a millennium to come. Paganism was essentially dead and Christianity was on the rise, for better or for worse. And that's the news for this week in history. Goodnight, and have a pleasant tomorrow.