Heather Cox Richardson:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman. Today, we’ve got a summertime topic for you. We pondered what we wanted to talk about today. And here we are in August, summer isn’t over, but it’s looming the end of it, perhaps on the horizon. And we thought, “Wouldn’t it be great in late summer to take you into a discussion of something that is not super-serious?” And so we decided that what we would like to discuss today is board games.

The history of board games, what board games show and mean. And to be honest, there are a lot of really goofy board games. At any rate, we wanted to talk about board games and how they’ve evolved over time and what they actually can tell you about the United States at the time when they came out and also, in some cases, about the United States now.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and it’s worth pointing out that for all the fact, we started to talk about games in general. It turns out there are many, many different categories of games. We narrowed it down to board games, and then it turns out that there are many, many different kinds of board games. We’re actually going to be talking about a specific kind of board game. And that’s the kind of board game that has, if you will, a contest or a race from one point to another, and you want to be the winner.

And that itself is a really interesting concept. If you contrast it with the idea of say, cooperative games, which are where you make teams and people try to work together to solve a mystery, for example, or games that are games of strategy that are not designed to be a race. These are racing games, and they do in fact, tell us a lot about America.

Joanne Freeman:

They do indeed. Now, I have to ask you, Heather, we have in front of us here a list of the top 11 best selling board games right now on Amazon. I’ve only heard of a few, but I need to know Heather, if you have heard of any of these either. I gather that the number one best selling board game is Connect 4, which sounds like an old game to me, but I have no idea what it is.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Oh, man. We still play Connect 4.

Joanne Freeman:

You know that one?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Oh yeah, Connect 4. The reason it’s busy right now, I think, probably, is that there was on Twitter a video clip of a dog playing Connect 4. It’s where it’s a…

Joanne Freeman:

The dog can play it, I can too.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, I wasn’t entirely convinced the dog was making good decisions, but it’s a stand in which you drop poker chips sort of into patterns to see if you could put four of them in a row without being stopped.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, okay.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s kind of fun, actually.

Joanne Freeman:

It doesn’t sound bad. The second one is Candy Land, which I do remember playing. Do you remember that? There’s like little gingerbread plastic men you move around. That’s kind of in the vein of the ones we’ll be talking about today that you move around a board and go forward and go backward.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Weirdly, I never played Candy Land and I’m not sure that it was in my house as a kid. I do know Candy Land because I believe Candy Land was invented by a woman who worked with children who were immobilized by polio.

Joanne Freeman:

Wow.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And it was her way of giving the children something to do and to give them the ability to move, even though they were at that time on.

Joanne Freeman:

Wow. I love that. I have to say a lot of these games on here. I don’t know. I love the fact that one is Bingo and the other is Zingo!, with an exclamation point. I don’t know what Zingo! is. One of the names on there we will be talking about later and that is not surprisingly Monopoly. But maybe we should start with one that actually I didn’t necessarily know about before we began.

And I was trying to think rummaging through my mind to come up with something early American. And I think they were playing with cards in early America. But as far as board games go, I was having a hard time thinking of anything in that realm. And as it ends up, there is something called the Game of Goose, which falls into the lines of what we’ve already talked about. That it sort of was a race game. I think there were 63 spaces and you did various things. You rolled die and you went ahead or backward. It’s the basic format of a lot of games ever after.

And just the themes changed or the topic or in one way or another, you could be racing towards anything or away from anything. It was the format, but apparently it was very popular. It got first created in the late 15th century. So we’re talking way back and it began first in Spain, in Italy and the 16th century, it spread to England. And then not surprisingly, by the way, 18th century, it became American.

And we have evidence that the Game of Goose was known about in early America. And I was laughing about this with Heather even before we began taping, because it just reminds me it’s so modern in its way. Apparently in 1798, the games was obviously available in Philadelphia because that year Vice President Thomas Jefferson wrote to his daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph about a gift list that she had sent to Jefferson to bring back to her children.

And one of the desired gifts was the Game of Goose. And Jefferson writes a letter back and says, “All your commissions shall be executed, including the Game of the Goose if we can find out what it is.” And what I love about that is it’s like every father in the world whose kid says, “I want the super duper bubblegum shooter,” the father has to sort of decide, “What is that? How do I know what that is?”

And here is Jefferson, “Oh, okay, got it. Game of the Goose.” I’m fighting Game of the Goose, which apparently he did. He said later in a letter again to his daughter that the children, “I am afraid they’ll have forgotten me. However, my memory may perhaps be hung on the Game of the Goose, which I am to carry to them. So they may forget me, but I’m going to redeem myself because I’m bringing them the Game of the Goose.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

What’s interesting about the idea of a board game that involves die and racing is it says a lot about who would use it. So it doesn’t necessarily have the same kind of negative connotations of gambling, for example, that you would have on cards that are held secretly. And it also doesn’t have the connotations of needing to be extraordinarily educated to play them well like West, for example, or Bridge those card games that were popular about the same time.

So it’s the kind of game that you could see a family having or somebody wanting their kids to have, because it teaches them basic math skills, but also doesn’t endanger their souls if you will. And the whole idea of those racing games then becomes a really easy way to create educational games, where they teach people something.

Joanne Freeman:

So, oddly enough, on the one hand you could say that these race games have a kind of democratic component to them because everybody is rolling the die and everybody’s moving ahead or backward and you don’t need special knowledge to play these games. You need patience and you need to know how to take turns. And yet I think almost all of the games that we’re talking about today, there’s actually nothing really democratic about the premise of the game. They’re all about racing and somebody wins. Right?

And so you’re all on an even keel until someone due to luck or chance or something, some last minute smart move ends up winning. So yeah, they’re perfect to play with a family because you all start out in the same, it equalizes the family. And if you’re all playing fairly, these are the sorts of moments when a father loses or a mother loses or a kid always wins.

And I’m sure most people listening have some kind of a memory of the weird kind of equalizing dynamic of playing board games.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That whole idea of using a race game to inculcate various ideas about a society has stayed with us ever since. And I had to laugh when I was reading about the Game of Goose by thinking about all the games that we had as kids that were designed to teach us one thing or another, not all of which we loved. And what really jumped to mind, and I’m so happy that I set you up for this Joanne is that my father who in the 1970s was very concerned about the environment. He was an early environmentalist, brought home a game called the Game of Smog. And do you know-

Joanne Freeman:

Weee!

Heather Cox Richardson:

Do you know the great beauty of that is that nobody had the heart to throw it out when he was alive. And certainly not after he died. And many, many, many years later, it’s still in my parents’ home. And many, many, many years later I came down and found that at that point, grown niece and her friends were playing the Game of Smog. And she’s like, “We’re learning all kinds of cool stuff here.” Literally at least 50 years after it come home and never been opened.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s hilarious and also interesting. It’s going to relate to something we’re going to talk about in a little bit, which is that, first of all, I do think if a game is too teachy preachy that probably kids are going to walk away from it. But I also think it’s an obvious point, but over time, and particularly if you’re talking about a lapse of decades, the sort of ethos changes enough and young people have a different culture and different expectations that things that might have been totally horrific or nerdy to you when you were a kid in this case are cool.

The environment matters a lot and here’s the Game of Smog. So you can never [inaudible 00:10:01].

Heather Cox Richardson:

I’m sorry. It still cracks me up, the Game of Smog.

Joanne Freeman:

I know. It’s totally true.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The idea of using games to reflect a society and also to instruct people in how to behave really is the whole central idea of board games really encapsulated by things like The Game of Life or The Game of Monopoly or any of the games that we’re going to be talking about that reflect the growing concept of both democracy and also capitalism.

So early on in the United States, people began to imitate the Game of Goose and to produce their own variations on it. And as early as 1812, one of the variations that was produced was called the Mansion of Happiness by the mid 19th century, the Mansion of Happiness had become a popular American game. And how it takes you from the beginning of the game to happiness is going to evolve through American history as that game changes. And many people are going to know the way it’s going to come out as The Game of Life.

So the Mansion of Happiness originally meant that you would move through a mansion and you would get help from moral spaces. And those moral spaces would have piety, honesty, sobriety, and gratitude. And then you would be thrown backward by vice spaces. So you get thrown backward by audacity, cruelty, a modesty or in gratitude. And what jumps out to me about that is how much it echoes, what Louisa May Alcott did in Little Women, where the women, the girls at that point make their own game in which they move forward through life according to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Where they move forward or they move backward.

Joanne Freeman:

It’s so much of that moment. You mentioned a little earlier, Heather, the sort of moral component that these games are sometimes teaching you. The fact that you have these qualities here that are the key to the game and that you could play that game and it would be a game and it would not feel necessarily preachy. Right? That you were playing a game. You were moving, forwarded backward with a toy. Someone wins, someone loses.

And yet what you’re aiming for is, “Oh, I hope I get honesty and not audacity,” as you’re advancing on the board. But certainly the existence of this game very much feels of the moment when it came out, sort of mid 19th century.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It does. And the reason I mentioned Louisa May Alcott, who wrote Little Women in 1868, Louisa was a bestseller in 1868 is because in that very period, we have the rise of Milton Bradley. So by 1860, Milton Bradley, who was about 23 years old then, a man from Springfield, Massachusetts had produced a lithograph of Abraham Lincoln, but it was a lithograph of Abraham Lincoln without a beard.

So it did very well at first, but as soon as Lincoln grew a beard, it became outdated. So after he did the Lincoln portrait, he began to experiment with board games and he took a look at that old Mansion of Happiness and decided that he should craft his own new game, that he called The Checkered Game of Life. So we have a direct line here from the Goose, to Mansions of Happiness, to The Game of Life.

And as he described it, he said, “I, Milton Bradley have invented a new social game.” Interesting words, social game. In addition to the amusement and excitement of the game, it is intended to forcibly impress upon the minds of youth, the great moral principles of virtue and vice.

Joanne Freeman:

Look at that amusement, excitement, moral principles, all in one bundle. Now Bradley’s game. The Checkered Game of Life was longer than the sort of goose games we’ve been talking about. It had 100 spaces like the Mansion of Happiness. There were half good spaces and half bad spaces, but in Milton Bradley’s version, each player began in infancy. And if they were lucky, could either advance towards positive outcomes near the top of the board, like happy, old age or wealth or bad ones like prison or suicide. That’s a little shocking.

Actually, that’s kind of morality slapping you in the face there, regardless of what we think about the bad outcomes on that board game, it ended up being a huge success. It sold 43,000 copies by the end of its first year on the market. And this is happening as the Civil War is intensifying. Maybe that’s a time when people are particularly eager to escape into games. I don’t know, but it did very well.

And in the end, Milton Bradley became a leading proponent of the kindergarten movement.

Heather Cox Richardson:

One of the things that I love about this early version of life though, is that one of the key social changes that happens with the Civil War is that people stop believing that they can control the outcome of their lives, that they can go in and sort of be these great individuals and change everything because the war shows them with the advent of more than 2 million men fighting either in the army or the Navy, that you could be the most moral guy in the world. And you can’t see the artillery shell coming at you and you can’t have any influence over whether or not the railroads are moving.

This really is reflected in the literature and how the literature goes from really heroic individuals that you have before the Civil War to these sort of mass images after the war that you see in places like Sister Carrie, where the hero of Sister Carrie basically is never in control of anything. I mean, his entire life gets changed when an unexpected breeze blows a safe door shut. So that change from we are in control of our lives to we’re really not.

Joanne Freeman:

Is reflected-

Heather Cox Richardson:

No.

Joanne Freeman:

… control.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s right. It’s just whatever the dice is going to roll. And you’re not really responsible for how the dice rolls. You’re either going to be lucky enough to have wealth and a happy old age, or you’re going to end up in prison or killing yourself as the figure in Sister Carrie does at the end of the book. Oops, that was a spoiler. But I suspect anybody who was going to run out and read Sister Carrie already has.

One of the lessons here is that certain board games become enormously popular not just because they reflect escapism or they reflect a way to spend time, but they feel to people as if they might be reflecting part of their lives.

Joanne Freeman:

For more CAFE history content check out Time Machine, a weekly column by our editorial producer, David Kurlander inspired by each Now & Then Episode.

Heather Cox Richardson:

You can receive the Time Machine articles through the free CAFE brief email sign up at cafe.com/brief.

Joanne Freeman:

One of the really interesting things about board games to me is that on the one hand they’re kind of mindless, but on the other hand, they’re really imprinting ideas on you in one way or another. You just may not realize it. That to me is fascinating. That’s right along the lines of what we’re talking about here with the various people inventing these games, but it’s a sneaky kind of imprinting of ideas because you play the game and your friends play the game and it prints on you all of these ideas that make perfect sense and probably even uses or reflects common anxieties on the parts of kids.

So that they’re like in the mix and they want to take part in it. Games are a really interesting, conscious and unconscious way of reckoning with any society. But here we’re talking about American society.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Absolutely in 1959… Milton Bradley had died in 1911, but executives from the company ask a freelancer, a guy who had invented toys, games himself, a man named Reuben Klamer to come up with a new version of life for its 100th anniversary. And so he updated it to change it from being The Checkered Game of Life, to being The Game of Life in 1960. And in place of that moralism of the original game, now there was a plastic spinning wheel in the game board. Think of the technology of the post four years. They’ve actually been able to manufacture a plastic spinning wheel in the middle of the game and the life developments that got you toward your future were things like adopting a girl and boy, collecting presence, jury duty, lose a turn.

And at the end of the day, the final space is not wealth and a happy old age. The final space is that you will be a millionaire tycoon.

Joanne Freeman:

I just love that. It’s so wonderful. It’s so of that moment.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and also of that moment, Joanne was the Jingle.

Joanne Freeman:

The Jingle. Yeah.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The Jingle sounds very much like another popular image at the time, which was The Monkees, Last Train To Clarksville. And I wonder if there’s anybody on this podcast, other than me who would like to sing that.

Joanne Freeman:

Now I cannot sing the entire thing. I will confess readily that as we began talking about this and deciding what we were going to talk about, which games that conversation for me was on the one hand, a matter of thinking of games. And on the other hand, in the back of my brain, various Jingles playing endlessly, they’re just in there.

And this was one of those cases. It was like, “Of course, we’re going to talk about The Game of Life.” And what I had before sitting down here was, (singing). That was what was in my head. Now I listened. I went to find the commercial so that I could be well informed for you, the listening public. And it does kind of have this weird wacky.

One of our producers actually is the one who said, it kind of sounds like The Monkees, Last Train To Clarksville. It’s like one kid says, “I got a car.” And the chore says, “You got a car.” Someone says, “I’ll be a star.” “You may go far.”

Speaker 3:

That’s life.

Joanne Freeman:

It’s kind of wacky and kind of 60 ish. Actually very much of that moment, you could be famous, become a star. You could get a fancy car or become a millionaire tycoon. That’s very much a particular kind of a game that as you just said, Heather, it’s not piety. Piety is not on that board.

Heather Cox Richardson:

No, but what is a heteronormative upwardly, mobile, largely white society. It mirrored the way people who purchased that game wanted their children to think about their futures. She’s one of the reasons we’re going to get such a crisis. When in fact those kids do go off to college and discover that the world is not the way their parents wanted them to think about it.

So we’re going to end up with the 1960s and the 1970s, but The Game of Life was in that period almost a snapshot of what the 1950s and the 1960s looked like to a certain group of people.

Joanne Freeman:

Think about the ultimate message there too. Just as we’re saying, these games don’t require knowledge. They require a little luck. They require knowing how to take turns. And the ultimate point of this game is anyone can be a millionaire. You can play this game and at the end, “I’m a millionaire.” As though that’s a goal, an achievable goal that you’re talking about every time you play the game.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, it’s something desirable. You’re not going to see that in a moral game from the middle of the 19th century.

Joanne Freeman:

No it’s desirable, but it’s also being made as though it’s familiar and achievable.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And achievable. That’s right. And interestingly, when you put it that way, I was going to joke and say that it wasn’t a very popular game, but the fact that it sold at least 50 million copies of that game. And remember America today has about 330 million people in it. That idea that everybody can move their way up to become a millionaire tycoon. I mean, it permeates. In contrast to that though we have my favorite game as in, I hate to play it. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that.

I was the youngest kid. So I always lost and it goes, it’s in terminable. And I know that there’s a whole bunch of listeners out there who know exactly what game we’re going to mention have set it up that way. And that’s Monopoly.

Joanne Freeman:

Now, when you said your favorite, you’re talking in high sarcasm.

Heather Cox Richardson:

No, I’m talking about the history of it.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, the history is your favorite, but the game is not.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The game, I never liked it all. But the history is fabulous because The Game of Monopoly, as we know it, actually had its roots, not in the more recent past, and not even in the 20th century. It has its roots in the Single Tax Movement of the late 19th and early 20th century. And the argument behind that Single Tax Movement, which was associated with Henry George was a reformer out of New York, was that everybody in the late 19th century is trying to figure out why some people are rich and some people are poor.

And when I say, everybody’s trying to figure it out, there’s all these best selling books and there’s columns and newspapers. And everybody’s like, “Well, wait a minute, why do we have these extremes of wealth? And how can we adjust them? Because we know it’s not okay to have in Carnegie own everything and his workers own nothing.”

And yes, I’m exaggerating, but that’s the theme. So how do you fix that in a way that’s fair, in a way that doesn’t destroy the whole idea that everybody in America has created equal. So what do you do? And they come up with all kinds of different schemes, but Henry George’s plan was to impose a tax on land. And the idea behind that was he maintained that the reason there were such enormous inequalities of wealth in late 19th century, America was because of the price of land.

And his argument was this, “Dirt is just dirt. Land doesn’t matter. Land is just land, no matter where you are.” I mean, with some limitations, obviously you don’t want to swamp land, but land is land. But what makes land valuable are the people that live on it. So an acre of land in New York City is much more valuable at that time than an acre of land in Nebraska.

So in order to even out the inequalities in society, the way to do that is to recognize that a acre of land in New York is valuable only because of the social value that has been ascribed to it, by all those people who live on it. So what you need to do is tax that creation of value. And if you tax that creation of value so that an acre of land in New York was no more valuable than an acre of land in Nebraska. You could get rid of the extremes of wealth.

It was called a Single Tax Movement and it was extremely popular, but it was also hard to understand. So this woman named Elizabeth Magie was born in Macomb, Illinois in 1855. And she became a follower of Henry George. And she wanted to help people understand how it worked. So she invented a game called the Landlord’s Game.

Now that I’ve explained that the theory behind this is that where your land happens to be as random and it’s only given value by what’s on it. All of a sudden Monopoly makes sense. Right?

Joanne Freeman:

Absolutely. I mean, here is Magie describing what you just described, Heather. She describes the game as being a practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences. 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 seems to have, which is the accumulation of wealth.

So she had two sets of rules for her game to make that point. She had an anti-monopolist set of rules in which all players received payouts from properties and a monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush your opponents. So in her mind, you do the former game, you play the former game and it’s making the point that she supports here of Henry George, or you play the monopolist version, which shows the downside of the current way of people focusing on money in a way that highlights unfairness and inequity.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The version of the game that became Monopoly is actually not the same as her Landlord’s Game. And we didn’t inherit the much more communal version of it. We inherited the, “Let’s get all the money and we’re going to have a big winner version. And we’ll explain how we got there.” But I do think it says something that is the smallest youngest kid in a family. I hate a Monopoly because I always, always, always lost. And that was what she was trying to show with her monopolist version, that the game was rigged against the weaker people in that game.

And so in a way I was the perfect candidate to play the historical version. And I suspect there’s a lot of people like that, because you lost that game. The minute somebody bought boardwalk and park plays and then the game went on for six more hours-

Joanne Freeman:

Forever and ever.

Heather Cox Richardson:

… where you got crushed into the dust and you ended up, I don’t know, promising, you were going to do the that’s right. That’s right. Promising you were going to do the game, the dishes forever and all that kind of stuff. It’s unfair. And that idea is parallel to what happens with that game, which I find fascinating. So of course-

Joanne Freeman:

It actually makes me angry.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Me too. Me too, because the game was rigged. So what happens is the Landlord’s Game does minorly well, but she never attempted to brand the game because she wanted people to have it. And in 1932, a guy who was out of work, a guy from Philadelphia named Charles Darrow played a version of the game at a friend’s house and he created his own version of it. And in 1935, he sold it to Parker Brothers.

So Parker Brothers then goes to Magie and asks to buy her patent on the thing for $500 without telling her about- without telling her about Darrow’s version of the game, they’d been buying up any patents of similar games so they could bring out their version of Monopoly. She sold the patent and two days after she sold it, she wrote to the founder of Parker Brothers and said, she hoped that her political and moral messages would remain central to the branding of the game.

And she said, “Farewell, my beloved brain child. I regretfully part with you, but I am giving you to another who will be able to do more for you than I have done. I shall do all I can to add to your success in fame, which will in some measure add to my own. I charge you do not swerve from your high purpose and ultimate mission. Remember the world expects much from you.”

Joanne Freeman:

Now I have to give the nasty ending. So Darrow’s version of course is an instant runaway success. It sells 278,000 copies in its first year, more than 1,750,000 the next year and Magie who by this point is the head mistress of the Henry George School in Clarington, Virginia. Obviously to say that she is not amused is to put it lightly.

She knows of the quasi theft of her game by Darrow. And of course he becomes credited as the creator of Monopoly. The Washington post commented on this at that time and said, “Magie, it originally intended her game to popularize the Single Tax principles of Henry George. Ironically its present success is due not to this moral, but to its opposite, the competitive instincts of back to normalcy America.”

So indeed the sort of ultimate painful irony that the precise thing that she was preaching against comes back and robs her of credit for her game. And the profit from this slightly reconfigured version of her game. Monopoly has now been licensed locally in more than 103 countries, printed in more than 37 languages. And as of 2015, it was estimated that the game has sold 275 million copies worldwide.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So a takeoff of Monopoly that we wanted to cover is called Hot Spa.

Joanne Freeman:

I had a mixed response to what I’m about to talk about here. And I want to hear your thoughts about this too, because I think it’s actually it’s right in line with what we’re talking about, reflecting society. And for example, why those 20 year olds love playing the Game of Smog, which was not exciting to you. So we had this game of Hot Spa, which emerged in 1967 and it was meant to be a Jewish version of Monopoly.

It sort of converted itself, tongue in cheek. Now my memory of the game, I still have it somewhere in my apartment, in the back of a closet. I remembered it was like Monopoly, but it was funny and we played it all the time and it sort of felt like nudge, nudge, wink, wink, look at us playing Jewish Monopoly. That was sort of my take on it.

But when you read a little bit about how the game adapted itself now, however many decades later, I’m going back and learning about it. I was a little horrified. I have now changed my thinking about Hot Spa. So the Jewish version of Monopoly had a bank, but it was called the Pushka, the kitty. Rather than going to jail, you experienced sous.

So there’s a lot of Yiddish in the game, which I actually kind of love. But as far as you winning things or buying things or having the money to do things, players could land on squares, offering vacations in Miami or the Catskills, sleepaway camps, a nose job, a mink stole a bar mitzvah, a gold plated hoo-ha mason set joining a country club, which was not something that a lot of Jews could do at the time or a college education.

Now, as I was rereading this and thinking about this in preparation for today, what I did not have in my head was, “Wait, you can roll the dice and get a nose job. And that’s supposed to be granted.” It was aimed at Jews and Jews are playing it, but that does not sit well with Joanne in 2022.

Joanne in whatever 1970 something year who was playing this, honestly just didn’t think about it very much. And so it’s interesting just even in my own personal experience that I am now not as pleased with this game as I was before. I find certain aspects of it funny and other aspects of it vaguely offensive.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well for what it’s worth, I’d never heard of it. And when I was looking through our notes and looking it up, I think it’s racist as hell.

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I mean, I am horrified.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s what I’m saying.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I’m trying to think of what I would’ve thought had I seen it in the 1960s. I think what it would’ve done, I think it would’ve made me think that Jews were totally different from me.

Joanne Freeman:

Totally different and focused on money in a different way.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, what jumps out to me is the less money than the cultural trappings, the mink coat and the trips to Miami or whatever it was you said. That’s something that was absolutely alien to Heather and Maine. And I would’ve thought that who are these people? I would’ve nothing at all in common with them, which is bonkers when you think about the fact that my closest friends now are Jewish, but the time it would’ve seemed like these are somehow alien beings.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s what I keep going back to. So the game is reflecting postwar, American Jewish bourgeoisie, and all of these things. A mink store, then we’re ship in a country club. All of these things that Jews at that point are seeking some of which they couldn’t necessarily have had before. All of these things in a sense are markers of a sort. I think Jews playing this game back in the day, would’ve understood the meaning and humor of that, but also wouldn’t have been offended at it, even though it’s a game as you put it so nicely and bluntly, Heather, it feels racist as heck.

I really landed on nose job. I mean, it’s like every cliche in the world it’s stunning to me because this is my personal experience that I’m looking at the difference between being a kid in the ’70s, the early ’70s and thinking one thing and being the adult me now and thinking, “Holy smoke, how did I not see all of this?” It really shows you how games and the times can change so dramatically even in the course of a lifetime that I absorbed, whatever I was absorbing in the ’70s and now I really can’t swallow it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And then there is Mystery Date.

Joanne Freeman:

Mystery Date.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Which I confess. I don’t think I had heard of either-

Joanne Freeman:

Really?

Heather Cox Richardson:

… when you mentioned it.

Joanne Freeman:

At all?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Maybe it’s one of those things that was on the horizon somewhere. I certainly never played it. And when we were looking at what we would talk about, we were killing ourselves, laughing over Mystery Date. You played it right, Joanne?

Joanne Freeman:

I played it. I did not own it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That just sounds like you played it in an underground. Here’s where we go to play Mystery Date.

Joanne Freeman:

I thought you did. I think it was like a marriage and dating oriented game. And I can’t imagine my parents buying it for me, but it was at friends’ houses that I played Mystery Date. And of course I remember the theme song, which is how this came back. What game should we talk about The Game of Life Monopoly? And I say, “Mystery Date.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s exactly how it came up. That’s right. What is the theme again?

Joanne Freeman:

(singing).

Speaker 4:

It’s Mystery Date, the thrilling new Milton Bradley game of romance and mystery. That’s just for you.

Joanne Freeman:

And that’s the game, right? The game is again, there’s pieces on a board. You roll die, you move around from space to space and in different spaces, you collect different accessories or outfits or something so that you’re dressing yourself up for some kind of an occasion. And then at a certain point, you open a door to see who your date is. And you pray that you have gotten dressed up in the right way so that you match whatever it is your date is planning to do.

So there’s like a date dressed up in a tuxedo. He’s clearly going to a formal dance. If you’re dressed up in Dud’s carrying a bowling ball, it’s not going to work out for you. And there was a formal dance date, a bowling date, a beach date, a skiing date, and a date who was known at the time as the Dud.

And so it was a game of dressing yourself up to please the guy behind the door and then failing if you didn’t please him. He decided the evening and you were hoping to figure out the right things to wear so that he would be happy and you would go off and he would be your perfect Mystery Date. And kind of like with Hot Spa, thinking back to this, I’m like, “Holy smoke. What is that game teaching me?” Right?

I never had two thoughts about the fact that, well, you got to find the right things to wear. And of course you want the best Mystery Date.

Heather Cox Richardson:

What’s the issue with the Dud.

Joanne Freeman:

There were versions apparently of Mystery Date because they could keep updating it with different versions of the hunky men who you’re supposed to date. I think the initial Dud was dressed up in ratty clothes and seemed kind of messy and unkempt.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Given the option, I don’t want any of the formal dance, bowling beach or skiing options. So I’m like, “Sure, I’d give a shot at the dud because the other four are out.”

Joanne Freeman:

I know.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So I’m sitting there looking at that thinking we’re probably talking someone who goes to the library.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, I was going to meetings carrying books, if you’re carrying books I’m going with him.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s right.

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah. I’m not going to want to go with the… And all of the images, formal dance man and beach man ski man. They’re just the exact Ken Doll version.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It reminds me of, I don’t know if you were part of this and you might have been when Russell Johnson who played the professor on Gilligan’s Island died a few years back. I got a whole bunch of underground messages from other women going, “Am I the only one who had a crush on him?”

Joanne Freeman:

No, I was not part of that.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But it does really attempt to impose on women who might not fall into the 1950s, 1960s mold a way of looking at their romantic options that is really circumscribed. If your option is the skiing date, the beach date, the bowling date of the formal date, and anybody else is a Dud. You’re making really clear assumptions about what you think is an appropriate way for women to behave and to dress.

Joanne Freeman:

It’s assuming it’s taking away any chance for, like, we were just saying the reading man, the professor, the whatever, there are no options other than these options. And I was certainly not the only kid playing that game and thinking I don’t fit into that. I don’t fit. Now, I have to say it’s worth noting that all of the dates on Mystery Date are white.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And yet look at the time, it’s released in 1965, which is right at that cusp where we’re going to go from the proper girls to the girls that are breaking all the rules. You can see here, not only the attempt to draw lines around the way women behaved, but also as this game continues to sell into the ’60s and into the ’70s, an attempt really to try and make sure women don’t start to go with the hippie movement and to burn their bras and to all the things that are going to make them unattractive to the bowling date, the beach date, the skiing date and the formal date.

I mean, you don’t have here the protests, the Vietnam War date. Although think how much fun we could have writing that.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, it’s true. We could make up some great dates. That would be of the time.

Heather Cox Richardson:

We could totally do a historical game like that.

Joanne Freeman:

We could.

Heather Cox Richardson:

We totally could where you do the Mystery Date for each era. And the one that would jump to mind for me is every time you watch Gone with the Wind, which was the movie was produced in 1939, you look at it and you think, “Who would choose Ashley Wilkes over Rhett Butler, right?” But at the time that was what you wanted a man who didn’t work with his hands, who was very culture and very mild-

Joanne Freeman:

Thoughtful.

Heather Cox Richardson:

… spoke and thoughtful. I didn’t actually see it until I taught it in graduate school and obviously was not a huge fan. And I remember thinking, “Wait a minute, Ashley Wilkes, he’s the hero?” Like-

Joanne Freeman:

I know.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That happen in the mid 1980s. So you think about the way that what society suggests is an appropriate match has changed so dramatically over time.

Joanne Freeman:

I have to add in only because I can’t believe this went into my head. The early American version of Mystery Date. So obviously the desirable dates, the dance date and the ski date of the bowling gate. Those all would’ve been very stable, settled people. There would only be a handful of careers that would be acceptable. What’s interesting to me about that is who would’ve been the Dud date. And I think that’s pretty clear that would’ve been a person and there was even a name for it at the time.

That person was known as “a mushroom gentleman,” a mushroom gentleman was someone you didn’t know where his background was. He was growing up, no roots in the dark. Who the heck was he? You didn’t want to trust that person. If Mystery Date was created in 1798, the bad guy would be mushroom gentleman.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That would represent

Joanne Freeman:

That’s great.

Heather Cox Richardson:

He’s not part of a community. You don’t know his background. For all you know he’s a con man. Exactly.

Joanne Freeman:

But I love that.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah. It kind of sums up so much in two words. We already are partly on our way to creating Mystery Date for other moments in time. History Mystery Date. Oh. Okay. So the fun of all this has been looking at how this concept of racing to beat somebody says a lot about different eras in American history in which they made those and what the ultimate goal was.

Joanne Freeman:

What do you race for?

Heather Cox Richardson:

In that kind of in a race game. Like I say, that’s only one of the many kind of games there were, but the idea that you’re trying to beat somebody to a happy old age or to a gazillion dollars or to the beach date says a lot about America.

Joanne Freeman:

It does. And it’s just an interesting kind of mind game where every time you sit down to play Mystery Date, you’re just thinking, “Who’s going to be, can I get the good date?” Or you sit down to play one of these other board games, Life or Monopoly, and you’re thinking, or the Mansion of Happiness I want, I get to this.

And if you grow up with that, if you grow up with every time you sit down to play a game, that’s the ultimate goal in some part of your consciousness, that just becomes a good thing and automatically good thing.

And it really isn’t going to be till you’re an adult and you start thinking about these things that you might start to undo some of the sort of autopilot assumptions that get planted in your head, like the idiotic Jingles from the ’70s that will never leave my head that get planted in your head and you don’t realize they’re there until you question them.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And I always loved when we are playing board games, the anarchist who’s like at the end of the game, “Well I won.” And the anarchist is like, “Really? I thought I won. Look, I got all the pieces that were under a half an inch high, or I got everything that was-”

Joanne Freeman:

Monopoly.

Heather Cox Richardson:

… I can… Exactly, exactly the people who really thought… I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I am going to outside the box. But they were usually not the ones that were the official winners in those games, which says something about what board games do.

Joanne Freeman:

And says something about the different ways in which people can play them.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Our conversation continues for members of CAFE insider.

Joanne Freeman:

Heather and I take you behind the scenes of each episode in a special segment of Now & Then that we call backstage.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So join us backstage and get an inside. Look at the thoughts we’re wrestling with as we prep for our weekly conversations,

Joanne Freeman:

Head to cafe.com/history to join.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s cafe.com/history.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s it for this episode of Now & Then. If you like what we do, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It makes a big difference in helping people find the show. Your hosts are Joanne Freeman and Heather Cox Richardson.

The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The editorial producer is David Kurlander. The audio producer is Matthew Billy, the Now & Then theme music was composed by Nat Weiner. The CAFE team is Adam Waller, David Tatasciore, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noa Azulai, and Jake Kaplan. Now & Then is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network.