The ‘Monopoly Myth’, a Review of The Monopolists

Commerce & Business, Leisure activities, Old technology, Popular Culture, Retailing history, Society & Culture

Monopoly: (n.) a market situation where one producer (or group of producers acting in unison) controls supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted; “exclusive possession” of the commodity is customarily implicit in the term [www.businesssdictionary.com; www.en.oxforddictionaries.com]

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As a kid my favourite board game wasn’t Monopoly, it was an old Milton Bradley game called Pirate and Traveler, however I certainly did play Monopoly an awful lot of times growing up (and it seemed like every game went for an interminably long amount of time!). So, having clocked up that amount of wasted Monopoly game-time, I was more than mildly interested to revisit my youth via a recent book on the universal and ubiquitous board game, and even more intrigued that its author, Mary Pilon, presents a radically different take on the genesis and development of Monopoly to what hitherto was been the received orthodoxy.

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Pilon’s book starts with two very different Americans, one an out-of-work Eastern Seaboard “average Joe” wallowing in the depths of the Depression, the other a fairly nondescript, left-leaning economics professor at a Californian public university –Charles Darrow, the individual identified as the putative inventor of Monopoly, and Ralph Anspach, the man who almost inadvertently exposed Darrow as the faux inventor of the game. The unemployed Darrow learned the game from friends during his enforced leisure time…then with the germ of an idea in his head, got other friends to provide artwork (especially political cartoonist FO Alexander) and a written set of rules. Darrow crafted a version, copyrighted it and eventually sold “his” game of Monopoly (without acknowledging or recompensing the contributions of his friends) to games manufacturers Parker Brothers who mass-produced and distributed it – and the rest is blockbuster games sales history!

Ralph Anspach comes into the story in 1973, six years after Darrow—made a multi-millionaire by the runaway success of Monopoly—had died. Anspach is an avowed anti-monopolist, by conviction a “trust-buster” who is mightily annoyed at the OPEC oil cartel’s stranglehold over that essential world commodity at the time (the 1973 Oil Crisis). He pursues his ideals by creating an Anti-Monopoly game in opposition to Parker Brothers’ über celebrated game. Parker Brothers sues Anspach for breach of copyright and so begins nearly ten years of legal battles with Parker Bros (in fact by this time the company was controlled by the General Mills corporation)…Anspach’s tireless research for the case leads him to the true, albeit convoluted, origins of Monopoly.

The Monopolists recounts Anspach’s monumental efforts and endlessly time-draining “detective work” in minute detail. Anspach traces the game back to one Elizabeth (Lizzie) Magie (long pre-dating Darrow), and here’s where the story gets really interesting! Magie, an independent-thinking, politically progressive Midwestern woman, was a staunch supporter of Henry George. George was the author of Progress and Poverty, a widely influential text which fuelled the introduction of the Progressive Era in the US (1890s-1920s). George advocated the introduction of a Single Tax on land and property (AKA Land Value Tax). Ms Magie invented and patented a board game in 1903-1904, called the Landlord’s Game, based on Georgist principles of wealth redistribution. Magie’s game was in her words, “a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all the usual consequences” [Single Tax Review, 1902], the Landlord’s Game was intended to educate Americans about the dangers of unbridled capitalism (ie, ultimately resulting in the monopolisation of business, benefitting only one player).

When I played Monopoly in the 1960s the takeaway message for me always aligned with the “Gordon Gecko/Greed is Good” world view…gold standard instruction on how to win at capitalism! Pilon points out the fundamental irony of Magie’s “thought-child” – once Parker Bros got their hands on Monopoly, the company left not a single stone unturned in the pursuit of eliminating any rival claims to “their game”. Monopoly, under the aegis of Parker Bros, a game with the sole raison d’être of annihilating all business competitors, leaving a solitary victor, was the complete opposite of what the game’s prototype inventor intended it to be! Moreover, to further underscore the irony, the game became controlled by a company (Parker Bros) that “fought tooth and nail to maintain its own monopoly over it”.

Back to Ralph Anspach’s anti-monopoly crusade – as well as introducing or reintroducing Lizzie Magie to the world, the economics professor’s years of searching, digging in archives, interviewing people of interest across the United States, word-of-mouth, friend-of-a-friend, sometimes down blind alleys, etc, revealed that the games (or games) of Monopoly had been played in various forms and under various names for decades before Charles Darrow’s Pennsylvanian neighbours introduced him to the game. Pilon ties together all the threads of Monopoly’s antecedents – as unearthed by the indefatigably never-say-die Ralph Anspach. What came to light was that Magie’s game, either in its original published form (‘The Landlord’s Game’) or in derivative ‘backyard’ versions, had been played (prior to the publication of Darrow’s Monopoly) as follows:

among members of the early 20th century rural community of Arden (Delaware), an “alternative lifestyle” arts and crafts colony of “Single Taxers” (including the influential writer Upton Sinclair and the radical economist Scott Nearing who spread the word about Magie’s game to other locations)

among members of the Quaker community residing in Atlantic City in the 1920s (many Quaker families held “Monopoly nights”)

among left-wing university students and college “frat boys” on the Eastern Seaboard

among couples and families in urban Philadelphia (including those neighbours who first taught the game to Charles Darrow)

Unbeknownst to Lizzie Magie, many versions of her ‘Landlord’s Game’ had sprung up in the North-East of the country, often these early, widely dispersed players made their own homemade versions of Monopoly using hand-painted oil cloths, local street names and substitute tokens. In addition George Layton created and sold his own commercial version (which he called ‘Finance’) in the early 1930s. By the thirties a version of the game had spread to Texas – Rudy Copeland’s published board game of ‘Inflation’.

Parker Brothers’ whole claim on Monopoly was based on the contention that the game had no precedents to its 1935 patent with Darrow. Anspach’s pains-taking spade work proved that the game in various guises and forms existed “in the Public Domain” years and years before the Parkers and Darrow came on the scene!

Pilon injects many diverse strands in the narrative, even Abraham Lincoln makes a brief (oblique) appearance in The Monopolists – in the late 1850s Lizzie’s father James Magie, a newspaper editor and abolitionist, was an instrumental part of Lincoln’s political campaigns for office…this digression has a very tenuous connexion with Monopoly! The various currents traversed by the author takes the story beyond the purview of being a straightforward account of plagiarised copyrights and game inventions. The book illuminates the position of women in late 19th/early 20th century American society by positing what made Magie stand out from others of her sex at the time and what she was able to achieve – taking on a number of vocations and pursuits, retaining her autonomy and avoiding the “marriage trap”, becoming an inventor (in addition to the Landlord’s Game she held patents for inventions in the realm of stenography as well).

The three Parker Brothers

Another strand follows the career of George S Parker, the founder of the eponymous games empire. Parker published his first board game (‘Banking’) at 17, and from the get-go was determined to establish a monopoly, systematically building up a catalog by buying up other manufacturers’ games (leading him headlong into an ongoing rivalry with fellow games giant Milton Bradley). In Parker’s zeal to totally tie down the company’s ownership and control of Monopoly, the company even went round buying up old (Pre-Parker) Monopoly sets. Eventually George Parker talked Lizzie Magie (by this time now Elizabeth Magie Phillips) into parting with her patent for the Landlord’s Game, and paying her a pittance for it with no residuals (despite inventing the archetypical business game Magie lacked business acumen and naively trusted Parker’s intentions to do the right thing by her and her invention, which he didn’t!)

The author takes the reader on another diversion, straying away from the origin controversy to surprisingly explore Monopoly’s role in World War II! The US Military purchased Monopoly sets to be sent to POWs detained in German prisons (and elsewhere in Europe). The intent behind this practice had a dual purpose: to boost morale for the imprisoned soldiers, but also a practical one –

Coda: The after-affects of Ralph Anspach’s 1983 victory over Parker Brothers in the US Supreme Court (including the ruling that the word monopoly was in fact generic) hasn’t brought any sense of closure to supporters of Elizabeth Magie Phillips. The public acknowledgement warranted her as the true and original inventor of Monopoly has not been forthcoming. Pilon points out that in the 1980s Parker Bros “quietly began to massage its Monopoly history”…a 1988 history of the company by a former Parker Bros R & D head admits that Darrow was not the game’s inventor, but neglects to mention Lizzie Magie. Similarly, on the official Monopoly website in the Nineties, Hasbro, Inc, which purchased Parker Brothers in 1991, starts the Monopoly story at 1933 with Darrow and scantly acknowledges the influence of the Landlord’s Game (again without mentioning Lizzie by name!) No plaque for Lizzie’s prototype of the Monopoly game exists anywhere (although there is one in Atlantic City recognising the contribution of that city’s Quaker players to the invention of the game!)

FN: Mary Pilon’s research for The Monopolists is nothing if not thorough. In the end-piece she includes a long, long list of acknowledgements of her sources, helpers and supporters, she even gives a hearty shout-out to coffee shops in seven different cities (I said she was thorough!)…one very notable exception missing from the author’s acknowledgement of research help is Hasbro! Hasbro denied Pilon’s request to access the Parker Brothers’ archives and outright refused to answer any of the many fact-checking queries she submitted to the world’s largest toy and games company. Zero marks to Hasbro for the cause of corporate transparency…ummm, given how much she gleaned from other sources, I wonder what else they didn’t want her to discover?

The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game, by Mary Pilon [Bloomsbury New York: 2016 p/b ed.]

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Pirate and Traveler with some modifications and an updated, aviation emphasis eventually morphed into a similar game called Pan American which I played with equal relish. The idea of these two games was to spin a number or roll a dice, collect a destination card and progress from one city to another city somewhere in the world. When you completed a requisite number of destinations, you hightailed it back to a home base city (Godthab, Greenland), first one there was the winner! The games educated me on political geography and I learnt the distance (in miles in those days) between different places on the world map
with Atlantic City street names on the earliest editions of the Monopoly sets (later editions of the game utilised New York City streets and London streets on their boards)
a comparison of the visuals of Magie’s original 1904 patented game and Darrow’s 1935 patented Monopoly reveals profound continuities…Darrow’s replicates essential features of Magie’s – a square board, a space “for the emblematic GO TO JAIL”, a “Public Park” space (anticipating the Parkers’ “Free Parking”), ‘chance’ cards, the use of tokens representing money, deeds and properties
Parker Bros, when taking on Darrow’s game, accepted and promoted the myth that Darrow had fed them, ie, HE invented the game from his own head in the early 1930s, and that there were NO precedents for it
by a remarkable happenstance of history Lizzie filed her patent claim on the same day in 1903 as the infinitely more famous Wright brothers filed their “flying machine” patent
interestingly Magie devised two versions of the Landlord’s Game – version 1, the objective was to crush all of your opponents (= the contemporary game of Monopoly produced by Parker Bros), and version 2 – the objective was to create wealth for all to share
the three Parker brothers (especially George) were evangelically zealous about this because, as the author explains, the company had been “badly burnt” twice before with two products that they had thought that they held exclusive control and ownership of – ‘Tiddlywinks’ and ‘Ping Pong’

Planning for Suburban Bliss, a Template for the Sydney Garden Suburb: Haberfield, NSW

Built Environment, Heritage & Conservation, Local history, Town planning

In previous blogs I described one architect’s attempt to bring his vision of an ideal garden suburb to fruition – Walter Burley Griffin’s shaping of a suburb and a community (Castlecrag) out of Sydney’s Middle Harbour bushland. Griffin’s Castlecrag project was in fact not the first attempt at a model suburb in Sydney. Preceding it by a decade or more were three separate experiments at Daceyville, Haberfield and Rosebery. Each were very different in nature and purpose to Griffin’s “democratic utopian” vision for the remote, leafy North Shore promontory. This post will address the first of these garden suburb concepts to be launched, in the inner-west suburb of Haberfield.

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Background: Slum city
In the aftermath of the gold rushes in the 19th century, the larger cities in Australia, especially Sydney, experienced surges in population. This brought with it social problems and dire health and hygiene implications for the inner city urban centre. Around the city terrace buildings were flung up with masses of people corralled together within them. Sanitation issues – a lack of sewerage, dirty alleys with no drainage, poor ventilation, toxic substances, infectious diseases, systemic poverty and low wages, made for slum creation. This mirrored the same problem facing town authorities elsewhere overseas. Almost inevitably, the appalling health conditions around the overcrowded inner city led to an eruption of Bubonic plague in Sydney in 1900◈
– this starkly brought home to city planners the extreme perils of life in Sydney’s slums.

The British Garden City Movement
Reformers in Britain around the turn-of-the-century, observed the Dickensian effect industrialisation was having on contemporary British cities and were determined to do something about it…the British Garden City Movement (BCM) was the outcome. As an antidote to the dystopian urban landscape of Victorian Britain, proponents of BCM advocated a new, greener type of community. Spearheading the movement was social reformer Ebenezer Howard whose influential 1898 book To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform book pointed the way.

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A synthesis of town and country virtues
Howard called for a new approach to urban planning, illustrated by his “Three Magnets” diagram (above) in which the best of town and countryside were combined in the one community. His radical new societal model envisaged “networks of garden cities that would break the stronghold of capitalism and lead to cooperative socialism” [‘Ebenezer Howard’, Wikipedia
, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Two English garden cities based on Howard’s ideas soon materialised, Letchworth Garden City (proclaimed as the world’s first garden city – from 1904) and Welwyn Garden City, both in Herefordshire (English West Midlands). Integral to BCM cities like Letchworth and Welwyn were formal garden plans. Although limited in their success they did inspire similar community projects in cities as geographically disparate as Canberra and Riga [‘Garden city movement’, Wikipedia,http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

Haberfield, the Federation Suburb
It was John Sulman, an immigrant architect from the UK, who was instrumental in spreading the BCM ideas in Sydney. Sulman pioneered the practice of town planning in Australia and promoted garden city principles as seen in Canberra’s Civic Centre. Real estate agent Richard Stanton sought to apply those principles to the part of the area of the old Dobroyde ‘Farm’ Estate (about 6km west of Sydney’s CBD) which he purchased from the Ramsey family.

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⇧ Early map of the area with Ramsey St located between the two coves, Iron & Long

Stanton’s covenant for Haberfield
1901, the year after the Sydney Plague’s initial outbreak, Stanton launched his plans for a healthy, model residential suburb free of the pernicious squalor infecting the inner city…the property agent laid down a covenant for his new garden estate which future lot-buyers had to accept⌖ – cottages would be of single-storey◘, modest but of good quality (bricks and stone, slate or tiles); allotments would be of generous size; there would be integrated drainage and a sewered system on all lots; streets would have rows of planted trees; gardens would be established before owners occupied their lots; there would be no hotels, factories or corner shops. Stanton’s catch cry for the estate was “slumless, laneless and publess!” As the estate commenced in the year of Australian Federation, 1901, and because pro-Federation Stanton named many of the early streets after contemporary politicians (comprising most of the members of the inaugural Federal (Barton) cabinet), the label Federation suburb stuck to Haberfield[‘Haberfield Heritage Conservation Area’ (Ashfield Municipal Council, Development Control Plan 2007), www.state-heritage.wa.gov.au].

Stanton & Son , Summer Hill (architect: JSE Ellis)

From a blot on the landscape to middle class dreams
Stanton was clearly not trying to create a housing community for the working class, his new garden estate was intended to attract the aspirational middle class home purchaser. Turning “Ramsey’s Bush” into a better lifestyle community, a better class of suburb, made sure that it would not develop the slum-pattern at that time of much of the city to its east. The entire Dobroyd area was still only sparsely settled by 1900 (there were large chunks of bush and scrub being used as a rubbish dump). It was showing signs of becoming a haven for transients with the presence of vagrants (many made unemployed in the 1890s depression), some indigenous people and a “Gypsie camp” in Alt Street…hence Stanton’s haste to alter the landscape [Jackson-Stepowski, Sue, ‘Haberfield’, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/haberfield, viewed 19 Jul 2018].

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Classic Haberfield Federation (Tressider St)

To avoid the unsightly rows of tenements most everywhere else in the inner-west, dwellings had to be detached…in the original (200 hectares) estate they were characteristically double-brick and sat on their own block of land with a size minimum 50′ x 150′. Initially, total house cost was set at £40 (raised to £50 the following year). All houses had front verandahs and the roofs were either slate or Marseilles tile [‘Haberfield, New South Wales’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

To create a garden suburb along the lines of the British model, Stanton, working with his associate WH Nichols, meticulously planned estates that would deliver space and fresh air to residents who could connect with nature, the covenant decreed that fences between neighbours were to be low so as to make the effect of a continuous garden. Streets were to be relatively wide (the “no lanes” credo), houses set back from them and there was to be a strict separation between the suburb’s commercial and residential strips [‘Haberfield – The Model Garden Suburb’ (Joshua Favaloro, Haberfield Association), www.haberfield.asn.au].

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Stanton & Son’s real estate reach extended across Sydney – advertisement for land at Maroubra, 1918 (State Library of NSW)

The Estate agent and councillor took a holistic view of the property business…marketing and selling properties was only part of Stanton’s business scope. In his work in developing Haberfield and other estates Stanton took a vertically integrated approach. Going beyond the standard estate agent’s purview, the company in addition provided term finance, building materials, fixtures and fittings and landscape gardeners [Jackson-Stepowski, op.cit.].

Architect on board
The many dwellings erected on Stanton’s Haberfield estates were the antithesis of the “kit home”, they were all individually designed (and therefore each one was a little different, but still each was harmonious with the whole)…Stanton and Son had the services of its own company architect, John Spencer-Stansfield [ibid.]. The architectural firm of Spencer-Stansfield and Wormald constructed around 1,500 (Fed/bungalow styles) houses in Haberfield and the adjoining areas.


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Memorial sculpture to RPL Stanton, Haberfield

Stanton’s success in bringing his particular vision of an ideal suburb to life, getting things done, was no doubt made easier by his twice being elected as Mayor of Ashfield (Haberfield’s council area) during this period.

Things didn’t turn out quite so well for Richard Stanton in the end. Despite his success in developing Haberfield as a desirable residential location for homebuyers and in his company’s track record in house sales right across metropolitan Sydney (by 1924 he had eight suburban offices), he took a huge hit in the Depression (like so many in business), his investments stagnated and he died in debt during WWII [Terry Kass, ‘Stanton, Richard Patrick Joseph (1862–1943)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/stanton-richard-patrick-joseph-8626/text15071, published first in hardcopy 1990, accessed online 18 July 2018].

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Federation continuities
A saunter through the streets of Haberfield today reveals the extent of Richard Stanton’s legacy. The 1900s bungalows – both the Californian and the Arts and Crafts style (such as the Bunyas above, in Rogers Ave) – still survive and in their original form. And unlike the neighbouring suburbs of Summer Hill and Ashfield, Federation Haberfield has avoided the blight of having block-to-block rows of multi-level units and flats dominating its streetscape.

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Ramsey Street (1910s-20s) (Source: State Lib. of NSW)

PostScript: Subdividing Dobroyd
Stanton followed the original Haberfield Estate with a second estate south of Ramsey Street (St David’s Estate) in 1902…by 1912 the company had opened up three more estates (including Dobroyd Point) for settlement in the suburb. In 1905 a rival land agent, the Haymarket Land, Building and Investment Company entered the turf, opening up part of its Dobroyde Estate as well as the new Northcote Estate (designed by another Sydney realty luminary of the day, Arthur Rickard, who was also involved in the selling of the Dobroyd Point Estate). Haymarket LBI Co was less prescriptive than Stanton & Son in its earlier subdivisions permitting some narrow weatherboard houses [Ramsey Family History, ‘The Dobroyde Estate’, http://belindacohen.tripod.com/ramsayfamilyhistory/].

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see the earlier posts ‘The Wizard of Castlecrag I: Utopia in a Garden Suburb’, ‘The Wizard of Castlecrag II: Keeping Faith with the Landscape’, ‘Dreaming the Ideal Community: the Brilliant Collaboration of Mahony and Griffin’, September 2014

The Rocks and the waterfront areas of the city were the initial eruption points for the plague (Ashfield was also affected)

revised in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-Morrow

Howard’s own influences were Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian novel, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 and Henry George’s equalitarian treatise on political economy, Progress and Poverty

the ‘e‘ was later dropped

Dr David Ramsey was one of the early land-holders in what became Haberfield, known informally for many years as “Ramsey’s Bush”. Haberfield’s main road, Ramsey Street, which bisects the suburb from east to west, is named for him

prospective homeowners were given interviews in an office in Ramsey Street where they could propose what design they wanted for their home – which had to conform with the covenant to be approved to go ahead

◘ Stanton breached his own covenant designed to safeguard the single-storeyed character of Haberfield’s homes when he built the disproportionately large, two-storey ‘Bunyas’, [‘The Dobroyde Estate’, op.cit.]

 

WB & MLM Griffin and the Canberra Federal Capital Project: A Democratic City Lost?

Biographical, Built Environment, Heritage & Conservation, Social History

Mention the name Walter Burley Griffin and people in Australia will think, especially since last year’s lavish Capital Centenary celebrations, of Canberra. In the Australian psyche the American architect is largely associated with the planning of the capital in Canberra 100 years ago. However, there was a lot more to the Australian story of Walter Burley Griffin (WBG) and his wife Marion Lucy Mahony, than the seven frustrating years they spent in Canberra, but I will concentrate in this blog on the Canberra chapter of his life in Australia (and that of his wife).

Early Griffin project {Carter House Evanston, Illinois}

In 1911 Griffin was a young Midwestern architect living in Chicago, working within the modernist style of the Prairie School and making inroads in the profession. The Illinoisan was establishing himself in his own practice and building up a portfolio of important commissions in America. Walter’s wife and architectural partner, Marion Mahony Griffin (MMG), found out about Australia’s Federal Capital Design Competition and badgered him into completing the plans for entry (they only just made the extended deadline for entry submission by the tightest of margins!).

WBG’s design for the capital-to-be was selected in 1912 as the winning entry. No small part in Griffin’s success was due to the exemplary quality of the plan and perspective presentations superbly rendered by Marion. They comprised 14 immense ink on satin drawings, the standard size was five feet wide by two-and-a-half feet (some even were a staggering eight feet by up to 30 feet long!). Some of the amazing drawings and paintings were done in triptych fashion, opening out into three-hinged panels in the style of Japanese woodcut prints [National Archives of Australia (Your Momento To), “Unearthed Griffin treasure returned to the Archives”, Issue (July 2011)]. Fred Bernstein has described the effect of MMG’s beautiful drawings thus, “the rugged Australian landscape seemed to embrace Griffin’s buildings”… and this was despite the fact that MMG had never set eyes on the country [F A Bernstein, “Rediscovering a Heroine of Chicago Architecture”, New York Times, 20 January 2008].

A second factor that worked to the Griffins’ advantage was that whilst other competitors in the national capital design competition (there were 137 entries in all!) failed to take into account the topography of the site in their presentations, the Griffins’ submission managed to harmonise with the site’s landform and natural features [National Archives of Australia, “A vision for a democratic capital”, www.naa.gov.au.

BELOW {MMG: Ink on satin painting – the city from across the valley}

With a little help from our compatriots? Ultimately, the support of the Australian Minister for Home Affairs, King O’Malley, was decisive. The colourful O’Malley, himself an erstwhile American like the Griffins, as the minister with overall responsibility for bringing the new national capital to fruition, made the final decision in favour of WBG’s submission against concerted opposition from within the Australian community [Alasdair McGregor, “Rebels & Gilt-spurred Roosters: Politics, Bureaucracy & the Democratic Ideal in the Griffins’ Capital”, a paper delivered in A Cultivated City, (Seminar, 2 May 2013)]. Unfortunately for Griffin, O’Malley’s support for WGB’s plans for the capital was not sustained beyond the original decision. It transpired that O’Malley was in reality prepared to use a hotchpotch of the three leading designs for the purpose of implementation (the Griffins, the second place-getter from Helsinki and the third from Paris) [“An Ideal City? The 1912 competition to design Canberra”, www.idealcity.org.au]. My hunch is that the manoeuvrable and expedient O’Malley probably considered Griffin’s city plan of no greater merit than the Finnish and French bids, but it was the sublime quality of Marion’s artwork presentation that tipped the scales in the American architect’s favour.

Over a year passed after the contest victory before WBG received an invitation to come to Australia. During this interval the Department Board in Melbourne set up by O’Malley had persuaded the minister into allowing them to rework the Griffin plan. Only after an outcry from the architectural community at this amateur effort at town planning, did the Government reverse this and reinstate the Griffins’ winning plan [‘City of Dreams – Designing Canberra’ (2000 documentary)]. Upon his arrival in 1913 Griffin initially received a warm reception from the Australian press, Advance Australia introduced him to the public as “Walter Burley Griffin – Architect and Democrat”. Walter’s optimism at the outset was understandably pronounced, saying “I have planned a city not like any other city in the world. I have planned it not in a way that I expected any government authorities in the world would accept.” Unfortunately in the fullness of time this faith in the Australian power-brokers was to prove sadly misplaced.

Griffin then returned to the US to put in place provisions for the maintenance of his Chicago practice during the Griffins’ absence from America. During this time WBG spent a long while waiting round for an invitation from the Australian Government to return and start work on Canberra, which he was obviously keen to do. It was only after a change of government in Melbourne (then the interim national capital) in 1914, that the new Home Affairs Minister, William Kelly, finally invited the Griffins to return and paid for their passage [G. Korporaal, “Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin were drawn together on Canberra”, The Australian, 9 March 2013]. Marion and Walter established bases for their work in both Sydney and Melbourne.

Blueprint for a “Democratic Capital”

In accepting the Federal commission Walter had the highest hopes for his vision of what Canberra could become, the realisation of the idea of a democratic city. This political element of the Canberra project was important to Griffin in itself. Politically, the Griffins were idealistic liberal progressives, followers of radical political economist, Henry George, whose egalitarian single tax on land struck a resonant cord with his fellow Americans, especially his tenet that the value of land should be owned equally by all citizens. WBG attempted to put this tenet into practice when appointed Federal Capital Director of Design and Construction, exerting his influence on the Government – when residential plots were first opened up in the ACT, land was not sold. Instead it was offered up for rent on 99-year leases [K Williams, “William Burley Griffin”, www.prosper.org.au]. Having a chance at shaping the Canberra experiment was an overriding priority for WBG, so much so that when offered the chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of Illinois shortly after winning the Australian prize, he declined it [“Walter Burley Griffin in his Own Right”, US PBS broadcast documentary, www.pbs.org. WBG’s blueprint envisaged the new Federal Capital as an “irregular” amphitheatre with a centrally located parliamentary triangle, surrounding artificial lake with a concentric pattern of residential streets moving away from the centre.

The Lake

Griffin’s grand plan for the new capital city was however cynically undermined from the start. Even before WGB had set foot in Australia, a specially-appointed departmental board pressured O’Malley into making changes to WBG’s Canberra design [“Canberra – Australia’s Capital City”, www.australia.gov.au]. Instead of making Mt Kurrajong a public space and placing Parliament House lakeside in the valley below, as Griffin wanted to do (part of WBG’s scheme for the democratisation of the capital), the bureaucrats positioned Parliament on the mountain (Capital Hill). In a spooky parallel with what was to happen to Jørn Utzon and his design for the Sydney Opera House half-a-century later, the Griffins met with continual bureaucratic interference and obfuscation, and eventually became disillusioned.

Canberra: the winning blueprint

For sure Griffin rubbed certain people in the government and the public service the wrong way, but there was clearly a coordinated attempt to sabotage the implementation of his “vision”. Some working on the Canberra project decried his plan as being vastly extravagant and incapable of ever being brought to fruition [Peter Harrison, “Walter Burley Griffin” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 9 (1983)]. He was further criticised for “poor administration of the project”. The situation was further complicated by funding for Canberra starting to dry up due to the priorities of the war, and by injudicious comments by WBG himself in the middle of World War I opposing Australia’s participation in it. The progress of WBG’s work was also subject to the vicissitudes of alternating national governments during the war years, as he waxed in and out of favour with every new minister appointed. In the end WBG had had enough, the forces of dissent had won, and he resigned his post as Director of the Federal Capital program in 1920, removing himself from all further involvement in the Canberra project. Walter’s architect brother-in-law, Roy Lippincott (who accompanied the Griffins to Australia), described the experience as “seven years of struggle and slander” [McGregor, op.cit.]. Virtually none of WBG’s designed buildings for the Capital were ever completed (the only structure by erected by Griffin was a monument to a general killed in the Gallipoli Campaign), and both his extensive lakes scheme (only implemented after heavy modification nearly half-a-century later) and his railway proposals were not taken up.

GSDA Sydney Office, 35 Bligh Street

The Griffins: Architectural Life after Canberra – Sydney, Melbourne, private practice and the GSDA

In the late 1910s, as implementation of the plan for Canberra and construction of works stalled, Walter could see the writing on the wall, but interestingly the wilful WBG didn’t pack up and return to Chicago where there was plenty of work for him and the likelihood of a chair in architecture at the university. Instead, the Griffins turned more to developing their Australian private architectural commissions. Marion took charge of the couple’s New South Wales office in Bligh Street, Sydney, whilst Walter ran the newly created Melbourne office, seeking out new residential projects in the southern city to shore up the couple’s finances.