How many stories have been collected so far?

The Agricultural Innovation and Heritage Archive has already collected about 40 stories from individuals and families in states around the country. By the end of the month, anyone will be able to browse all of the stories that have been accepted so far into the archive.

I’m reading every story and looking at every photo and video clip that comes in and am excited to make these available online for all to read soon—they’re too interesting to keep to myself.

Photo. Cate and Mat E from Vioqua, Wisconsin, shared a story about the importance of energy on their farm. “This past summer during the August rains, when our area was hit hard by straight-line winds, power was knocked out for 3 days… Growing vegetables on a small scale, sustainably, is difficult but it’s also what our community supports,” they wrote.

What’s your initial reaction to the process of using the web to collect these stories?

We created the Agricultural Innovation and Heritage Archive thinking that digital tools and social media could change the tools of the curator (and maybe history itself). In the past, curators independently researched topics and found objects for museum collections largely through personal contacts. Inviting the general public into part of the process is an attractive innovation in collecting history.

So far it seems to be working.

By that, I mean that the public is helping to fill in parts of the story of American agriculture. In her story “Walking the Beans,” Sharon C. from Illinois provides interesting insights into an important story that never makes it into the history books. It seems simple but to hear it first hand from a participant is really important.

Sharon even provided a list of her morning activities before walking the beans which, she notes, begins “about daylight:”

1. “Get out of bed.
2. Put on some light weight clothing
3. In kitchen, breakfast, make lunch-get thermos with ice water (very important)
4. Take some cutting device—long handle hoe, or homemade–long handle with cutting device attached for cutting weeds from between plants in each row
5. Get in the truck—Time to head to field and get started”

With each submission of a story from the public, there’s always more to learn. What changes have you noticed in agriculture that affect your life, landscape, and what you eat? Do you have stories related to farm auctions, crop insurance, or buying seed? How has your family seen farm financing change?

I hope people will dig into their photo albums, think about their past, and reflect on how agricultural life and work have changed.

One thing that has struck me as I read the entries to the archive is the diversity of agriculture. This sounds silly, of course; I know farming happens in every state of the Union and the experience is broad. But reading these stories makes it more real. It keeps me humble as a curator. We shouldn’t just look at big or well-known history, we need to think about everyone’s experiences.

What kinds of stories are you looking for?

We want to understand agricultural innovation and many people have responded with stories of change sparked by innovations, inventions, and new processes. Stories about insect proof sprinklers, cow waterbeds, self-propelled sprayers, and crop tracking systems are a testimony to the diversity of American innovations.

Within the theme of innovation, I am less interested in stories that celebrate a particular product or service. Instead, we are interested in the personal experiences related to these innovations. How did they change life on an American farm or ranch? What was the motivation for a new idea? We don’t want just new products but how those changes affected people, your community, and you individually.

A photo from Myra G’s story.

Myra G. in Californian really hit a homerun with her story “Two Generations Realizing the American Dream.” Hearing about the relationship between daughter and father and the surprising transfer of knowledge from commercial jewelry manufacturing to salad green production is amazing. For an historian of technology, this looks like a great possible dissertation topic or a fascinating book endeavor. Here’s a quote from her story about washing and bagging organic salad greens with the help of her mechanically-savvy father:

“My dad separated our salad packing into individual steps and figured out how to do each one most efficiently. With materials that came mostly from the junkyard, he quickly created a very efficient system: As the washed and dried salad was inspected, it was pushed down into a basket that rested on a scale. The scale was rigged to a bicycle bell that would ring when it hit four ounces so no one had to watch the scale.”

Walter P’s reminiscence of being sent to his grandparents farm in Pace, Mississippi, is incredibly vivid and moving. Sharecropping is a topic that many historians have examined but this personal perspective of the experience is rarely told. I hope that he can find some photographs of the participants to give it even more power.

“I also remember my day in the sun picking cotton with my grandparents and other pickers dragging a long sack, listening to the work sounds of my African American heritage,” wrote Walter.

Any advice for those who would like to add their story?

I hope to encourage more people to follow the example of people who have submitted oral histories they have collected from friends or community members. This interview with Masa K., a Hawaiian cowboy, is a great example. Get the photo album out of the attic and sit down with a relative or friend and talk about the past. Maybe some teachers can have their classes do this as a project. History is interesting and important. Share those photographs and stories with us. Some will be stories of success, some failures, and some just everyday experiences. We really want to hear about all your personal experiences of farming in America.

 [A version of this post appeared on the National Museum of American History's blog, O Say Can You See? on April 18th, 2013]

Paul Bardole improved his tractor by building a cab to protect himself from the elements.  Stories like Bardole’s will help the museum preserve the history of American agriculture.

Today, March 19th, 2013, the National Museum of American History launched a new online initiative that aims to crowdsource the past seventy years of American agricultural history. First announced in January in Nashville, the Agricultural Innovation and Heritage Archive is an online repository designed to collect and preserve the history of modern farming and ranching. Online visitors to the archive have the ability to submit their own personal stories about the transformation of American agriculture. On April 15th, 2013, the museum will unveil a public archive where visitors can explore the submitted stories.

Information gathered through the Agricultural Innovation and Heritage Archive will be used by the Smithsonian’s staff to help prepare new exhibitions like American Enterprise. Over the next few months, several entries will be featured on our the exhibition blog. Additionally, all accepted submissions will be preserved and made publicly available on the archive’s website, creating a new online database for students, researchers, and scholars. If you’d like to learn more about the archive, take a look at O Say Can You See’s interview with exhibition curator, Peter Liebhold, or head over to the archive’s homepage and submit your own story!

I’ve never seen my career ambitions ending with a marriage or, as some of my friends call it, a “MRS degree.” In this economy, it almost seems impractical to give up working just because you’ve said “I do.” However, when I scanned a book, Life with Teena, published by Seventeen Magazine in 1945, I found that 66% of the over 1,000 girls surveyed did not believe they would work after they got married. That led me to a whole host of other questions about how women got to where they are today – with female CEOs and female secretaries of state. Were teenage girls in 1945 really happy to be a housewife and not have a career outside of the house? Was it their decision?

Life with Teena answered these questions in the way only a statistical study of thirteen to eighteen year old girls can – with facts. Yes, these teenage girls said overwhelmingly that they did not want to work after they got married, but they also said that they worked for their spending money (“pin money” the book called it) and their college tuition. College options, however, were still limited for women across the country and so the survey presents girls’ dreams more than the actual reality.

Life with Teena was the result of a market survey of white, middle-class teenage girls and what they bought in 1945. The booklet that turned the raw data into the charming character of Teena was used to persuade retailers, manufacturers, and advertisers to pay more attention to the spending power of teen girls.

Jobs for these girls were similar to those teenage girls have today; the number one job for girls Teena’s age was to babysit (53%) with another 25% clerking or selling goods. These jobs, Life with Teena shows, were for their own enjoyment money – 90% said they kept all of their income for their own uses, which varied from movies to novelties to saving. The fictional character Teena was a creation of what Ellis’ saw Seventeen’s readership as: white, middle-class with a white-collar father and a mother that stayed at home.

Life with Teena is part of a larger collection at the Archives Center of the National Museum of American History named after the first marketing director of Seventeen Magazine, Estelle Ellis. Seventeen Magazine hired Ellis four years after she had graduated from college to promote the teenage girl, an unexplored market up until then. This was what prompted her to undergo the study of teenage girls across the country (naturally though, only white-middle class girls). What the study and Teena showed was that teenage girls did spend money and, just as importantly, that they were a market unto themselves. Also in the Ellis Collection are the other magazines Ellis worked at, like Charm, Vogue and Glamour, in addition to her work at Kimberly-Clark on their feminine hygiene and family-planning materials. In all, the Ellis collection spans from 1942 to 2004 with over sixty-two boxes of materials.

After her success at Seventeen, Ellis helped to launch a new magazine, Charm, aimed at working women. This survey of working women’s shopping habits shows a diverse range of women who worked outside the home and had spending power.

Briefly, pawning is a form of collateral lending. Prospective borrowers bring to a pawnshop “movable property” – that is, an item they can physically take to a pawnbroker, like a piece of jewelry, an iPod, or a leather jacket. This is a “pawn.” A pawnbroker will typically loan a pawner about one-third of the resale price of the collateral. But often this amount is much less, especially when it comes to items such as electronics, which quickly become obsolete and can be purchased new almost as cheaply. Unlike other forms of credit, pawnshop loans are typically for small amounts, set at simple (rather than compound) interest rates, extend over very brief amounts of time, and can be obtained immediately.

When I pawned a gold chain at a Philadelphia pawnshop (part of researching my book), I received $40 in cash, was charged 3% interest per month, and was given five months to pay it back. If I didn’t pay back the loan (which I did), the collateral – my chain – would have been “unredeemed.” In that case, I would keep the $40 free and clear, but the pawnbroker would become the new owner of my chain, and could resell it or melt it down as he saw fit to recoup his money and ideally realize a profit. This form of lending has been practiced since at least fifth-century China and became popular across Europe during the Middle Ages.

During our conversation, Nancy asked me if I knew where she could find an original pawnshop sign. A cluster of three balls on a stalk symbolizes pawnbroking, and there are various theories about its origins. The most convincing, I think, is that it derives from the motifs decorating the coats of arms of Medieval families in the banking business. Gold “bezants,” or disks, represented money and were part of many official crests. Here’s an example of the professional coat of arms of British pawnbrokers:

The coat of arms of the Pawnbrokers of Great Britain, featuring the design motif of three balls. (Detail from the illustration “Balls or Roundels as a Symbol of the Money-Lenders,” in Raymond de Roover’s article, “The Three Golden Balls of the Pawnbrokers,” from the Bulletin of the Business Historical Society, 1946.).

Because so many people were illiterate, shopkeepers typically hung three-dimensional signs at their entrances representing the goods or services they provided within. Hence, the gold disks, rendered in three dimensions, became balls. Here is a detail of William Hogarth’s 18th-century print, “Gin Lane,” showing pawnbroker S. Gripe’s sign prominently displayed:

The three balls, shown here hanging outside an 18th-century London pawnshop, became the universal symbol of pawnbroking. (Detail from William Hogarth’s “Gin Lane,” first published in London in 1751 and reissued in The Original Works of William Hogarth, 1790.)

When pawnbrokers established themselves in American cities in the early 19th century, they used these same signs, which would have been quite familiar to immigrants who had seen them in their home countries. An early example is this 1828 advertisement from a city directory for Philadelphia pawnbroker Stephen Blatchford, which contains a depiction of his sign of the three balls:

Because the sign of the three balls would have been easily recognizable to European immigrants, early American pawnbrokers often used it in advertisements to attract customers. (Advertisement for Stephen Blatchford’s County Money Office, in Desilver’s Philadelphia City Directory and Stranger’s Guide, 1828.)

What is remarkable is how enduring this symbol became, hung outside of pawnshops throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.

Throughout the 19th century pawnshops were an important part of the urban landscape, and they could not be missed. Their windows were crammed with unredeemed collateral and the sign of the three balls hung prominently outside, often painted bright gold. (Illustration from the article “The Pawnbrokers of New York,” published in The Great Republic Monthly, 1859.)

The business of pawnshops changed relatively little over time. This New York City pawnshop from the 1920s looks remarkably similar to the one shown above, dating from over a half a century earlier. (B. Berkowitz Loan Office. New York, ca. 1924. From the George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.)

Given that the sign of the three balls is now disappearing from the commercial landscape, what were the odds that I might know of a pawnshop that still had (and would part with) their original sign? Or did I have any other ideas? As it happened, being an intrepid flea market and antiques junkie – which might explain my interest in pawning to begin with – I knew of a possible source, but it was a long-shot. Many years ago I came across an old pawnshop sign in an antique shop in a small town in upstate, New York. I’d always regretted not buying it, but at the time I just could not imagine what I might do with it. I remembered the town but not the name of the shop, and didn’t even know if it was still in business and if so, whether they still had the sign. What were the chances?

When I finally found a phone number and called the proprietor (the shop has no website), I explained what I was looking for and why. He said he would check his stock and get back to me. And lo, within a few days I received the happy news – he did still have the sign, and he was setting it aside for me. It is likely from the Binghamton, New York area, probably dates from the Depression era, and has all the indications of being handmade by a professional sign maker or metal worker.

The next weekend I hit the road with packing material in the back of my car and a check in hand, thrilled at the prospect of rescuing this humble, yet extremely significant object. (I would come to find out later that this sign would be one of the last things leaving the antique shop — after decades in business, the proprietor closed his doors not long after my rescue mission, dispersing the remainder of his inventory at auction). By the time I was able to finally deliver the sign of the three balls to the Smithsonian in July, I had become quite attached to it. But I was still happy to donate it to the exhibition, knowing that it has found its place as an important icon in the history of Americans’ economies and will be seen by countless numbers of people – many of whom know nothing of the history of pawnbroking, and others who, as pawners, know it quite well.

The author, Wendy Woloson, holding the pawnshop sign she rescued from a now-defunct antique shop in upstate, New York. At one time an essential way for a pawnbroker to advertise his services, the sign has now become an important artifact in the American Enterprise exhibition.

Last spring, I was given the most unique assignment in my graduate school education:  visit the Hasbro board game factory in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts.  The factory, a maker of many beloved games, is a place of colorful aspiration. Gleaming red tiny houses, ready to mark your real estate, tumble out of sorting machines into plastic bags. Rolls of pink, green, blue and golden yellow paper wait to be cut into Monopoly money that will make your fortune. Bright glossy cards that will determine your career are methodically shaped by die-cutters. Game of Life boards are stacked up as high as my chest, a multi-color bonanza blazing a pathway of life’s possibilities. Yet amongst the color and glee, there is an unsettling feeling. It’s all too quiet in this factory– not a quiet due to low-noise machines, but a quiet that suggests this factory is not as busy as it once was, or even now, should be.

Brown graduate students pose with historic versions of The Game of Life at the Hasbro Archives. From left: Emily Bryant (author), Emily McCartan, and Anna Wada.

The past three years have marked a significant downward trend in the sales of board games. At Hasbro, the country’s biggest board game manufacturer, volume has declined considerably and the number of factory employees has decreased. The culprit (perhaps not hard to guess) is digital games, as people forgo folding cardboard games for foxy game apps on their phones, computers, and gaming systems. $15.9 billion of revenue in digital game software and content was generated in 2010, which includes downloads of full video games as well as social games. Compare this to the $1.17 billion in revenue for Hasbro’s Games & Puzzles category in 2011– a ten percent drop from their sales the year before. Yet board game companies adapt, and Hasbro is trying to stay relevant.  Hollywood is one way; did you see the movie Battleship?  Monopoly the movie is in script-writing phase.  Another way embraces the digital, and many board games now have “zAPPed” editions, an “app-enhanced” game that integrates the popularity of digital apps with traditional board game play.  Hasbro also has a new strategic partnership with Zynga, the maker of popular digital social games like Farmville and Words with Friends, and wants to create co-branded merchandise.

Hasbro’s new, “zAPPed” editions of Life and Monopoly integrate with Apple iOS devices like the iPad. Photo courtesy of Business Wire.

Board games and video games have a shared history. The Magnavox Odyssey Video Game Unit (1972), one of the first home video game systems, came pre-packaged with physical accessories such as dice, decks of cards, play money, and poker chips.

Still, the experience of a digital game is inherently at odds with one of a traditional board game. When given a choice, would you play an Angry Birds board game over the digital one? Board games require an amount of time set aside to play, and at least two people. They also take up physical space, and require that those two people be in the same space to play. On your phone or tablet however, the game is instantly accessible. It is portable and played independently, for as little or as long as you’d like. When you tire of it, there’s another multitude of games you can immediately switch to. For a modern age, the decision of board game or digital game seems like a no-brainer.

Before electronic devices, Americans found ways to play board games on the move. In this 1956 photo, two Bracero workers sit outside and play checkers at a camp in California.

But that’s what board game companies want to change. They want to remind us of the benefits of playing a bona-fide board game. It’s social interaction they are selling, not the plastic bits and pieces. Sprawled out on the rug or seated intently around a table, playing board games is where bonds are formed and a mutual experience is created. Hasbro in particular adheres to this message, and their website includes a section called “Host your Own Family Game Night,” where visitors can find game recommendations, tournament brackets, tips and recipes. “Laughter, family bonding, learning and life skills,” are gained from family gaming, the website states. In a project where we’ve been asked to look at board games that teach us about business, perhaps the game’s content is not the sole instructor. The critical learning comes from the interactions with those you are playing with.

Sources

Braden, Donna. “The Family that Plays Together Stays Together: Family Pastimes and Indoor Amusements, 1890-1930.” In American Home Life, 1880-1930. Foy, Jessica and Thomas Schlereth, ed. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992.

Digital game sales statistics from marketing research company The NPD Group and The Entertainment Software Association
http://www.theesa.com/facts/salesandgenre.asp

Hasbro Games and Puzzle sales statistics from Hasbro Corporate Information Financial Press Releases: http://investor.hasbro.com/releases.cfm?ReleasesType=Quarterly+Financials&Year=

Family Game Night
http://www.hasbro.com/games/en_US/familygamenight/

zAPPEd editions
http://investor.hasbro.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=647883

Hollywood
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/ridley-scotts-monopoly-movie-hires-229944

Partnership with Zynga
http://investor.hasbro.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=647693

It was the summer of 2008 and my partner Sissy Estes and I were working on new ideas for our client, GEICO. Very early into it we felt the most motivating factor in getting someone to switch his or her car insurance was cold hard cash. We thought if we could bring to life the savings incentive…we might be on to something. But how do we make that interesting?

We came up with Kash – the stack of money with the googly eyes. He was a stack of $5 bills ($500 being the average amount of savings) that appeared, usually out of nowhere, and stared at you, coaxing you to call GEICO.

As we prepared our presentation for GEICO, Sissy and I started to talk about other details of the campaign. Should he talk? No. Too cheesy. Should he sing? Nah. But what about music? The right song that played when he appeared could be great and make the idea a bit more dynamic. We decided to recommend a modern remake of Cameo’s “Somebody’s Watching me.”

We presented several campaigns, but Kash was the winner. Ted Ward, who runs the advertising department at GEICO, warmed up to the idea quickly and saw the simplicity as a success.

Here’s a script from that meeting.

An early prototype of Kash.

We had to get the character just right. So we hired Stan Winston, one of the finest model makers in the world to explore options for Kash and landed on the character you know today.

The final design for GEICO’s Kash.

As we entered into production that fall, the economy took a turn for the worse. Now, I wish we could say we saw it coming and that’s why we created this icon. And maybe Ted did, but I can tell you I sure didn’t. When the campaign broke, Kash had hit the sweet spot of simplicity and strategy in an uncertain economy. It seemed that money was on everyone’s mind, and Kash served as the perfect reminder for savings.

The music ended up being a major component of the work. We hired Mysto and Pizzi, through Agent Jackon – two up and coming producers, from Queens, New York. Their video for the track, featuring Kash has over 4.5 million views:

And the track is still offered free on Geico.com.

We’re also proud of how Kash became part of modern culture. People dressed up as Kash for Halloween and shaped their birthday cakes in his likeness.

A collection of Kash “culture”: (from top left) a Halloween costume, a boy scout’s derby car, a politician’s laptop, a cake, and a school campaign.

Kash appeared in skits on David Letterman, The Colbert Report and The Tonight Show and was even mentioned in an episode of 30 Rock along with all the stars of GEICO’s advertising.

GEICO continues to create advertising that people enjoy and want to be part of. Much of their latest work can be seen here.

Labor Day, in its origins a nineteenth-century celebration of the dignity of work, swiftly evolved into today’s pleasant pause at the end of summer before the coming of new, chillier seasons and life indoors. Arguably a response (in the United States, Canada, and an assortment of other countries) to the widespread socialistic celebration of Mayday, which coincides with the age-old rituals of spring, Labor Day sets off the New World, or at least North America, from the traditions of the Old.

Conflicting accounts trace the first American Labor Day to the inspiration of a local New Haven, Connecticut machinist, Matthew Maguire, or to that of the influential leader of the Carpenters’ union, Peter McGuire. In both accounts, 1882 became the key moment when the American Federation of Labor (AFL), a movement of craft unions and local central labor federations, solidified their young and fragile institutions. Largely German and Irish in most places, these unions and federations had traditions of summer holidays, and the institutional support to make the day’s events successful combinations of speech-making, beer drinking, and family fun.

In the era of bitter and often violent conflict between labor and capital, Republican and Democratic parties competed, especially at the local level, for workingmen’s votes. These votes had been especially crucial for Democrats, who claimed the loyalty of the lower classes since at least the presidency of Andrew Jackson, a loyalty later reaffirmed by the connections of craft unions with local political decisions on urban construction projects of all kinds. However, waves of strikes from the early 1880s to the middle 1890s found Democratic officials, at the behest of manufacturers and merchants, calling out the police against strikers, thus threatening political loyalties. The Pullman Strike of 1894, where the army was used for the first time against striking workers (including the highly organized railroad engineers), seemed to push the problem to the breaking point.

The strike, led by future Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, was crushed, Debs himself imprisoned. Within days after the strike’s end, Democratic president Grover Cleveland rushed a bill recognizing Labor Day through Congress. Not a single elected official in Congress voted against this measure – a fitting symbol for the claim, accurate or not, that American society was unique for its social compact between rich, poor, and middle classes. President Cleveland himself chose the September date in order to set the American holiday off from European Mayday. An AFL resolution of 1909 declared the first Sunday to be the proper Labor Day, perhaps because Sunday holidays had long been popular for workers enjoying beer in picnic areas outside cities where Sunday sales were banned. Eventually, all states and the District of Columbia affirmed the holiday status for their residents. Although Labor Day was originally celebrated on Sunday, in 1968 Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. The act moved several federal holidays, including Labor Day, to Mondays.

Like other labor and political cartoonists, Mike Konopacki draws to express the ideas of the movement. He writes that he created this cartoon to make the point that: “Over the last 30 years, Labor Day has lost its original meaning. It no longer celebrates the labor movement that created it. This cartoon intends to remind the viewer of Labor Day’s union roots. It also reminds us of the purpose of the labor movement in a capitalist society; protection of our Constitutional and democratic rights. The constitution does not guarantee the Bill of Rights in the workplace. Only a labor contract protects freedom of speech and press, the right of peaceable assembly, the right to petition for the redress of grievances, equal justice under law and due process. Unfortunately, with a return to corporate domination of government, much like the nineteenth century era of the Robber Barons, our democracy and workplace rights are in serious jeopardy.” Cartoon by Mike Konopacki

In the 1984 pilot episode of The Cosby Show, Bill Cosby’s Cliff Huxtable lectures his son Theo about his poor grades. Theo blithely tells him that it doesn’t matter, because he’s not going to college. He’s going to “get a job like regular people – work at a gas station, drive a bus, something like that.” Cliff spies a teachable moment in a Monopoly game open on Theo’s desk: taking a handful of paper money from the box, he gives Theo a $1200 monthly salary, and then starts deducting expenses for taxes, rent, clothes, and food, until Theo has nothing left. Theo continues to protest that “maybe I was born to be a regular person and have a regular life,” unlike his doctor-and-lawyer parents. Cliff immediately shuts down this idea as “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” He and Theo eventually hug it out as Theo agrees to try his best.

In games like District Messenger Boy, first published by McLoughlin Bros. in 1886, players raced one another to rise from a lowly messenger boy to become a banker or company president, trying to avoid setback spaces like “laziness” or “embezzlement” and land on “honesty” or “intelligence” instead. Before telephones and computers, messenger boys were the essential communication link between businessmen in the same city. A lucky few found connections and opportunities to move up in the business world, inspiring rags-to-riches stories of self-made success.

It hardly seems coincidental to me that, in the first episode of a ground-breaking show about an affluent, professional African-American family, the father uses a Monopoly game to teach his son about upholding the promise and responsibilities of the opportunities he’s been given in life. In researching the history of American business board games, I’ve been most intrigued by how the visions they portray resonate across the many dimensions of our society. Many of these games are at heart “American Dream” stories, expressing the same values that Cliff Huxtable expects his son to live by. 1886’s District Messenger Boy is about pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. The goal of 1955’s Careers is to find work that maximizes your wealth, fame, and happiness; in the Game of Life, released in 1960, you want a good salary so you can retire to Millionaire Acres. Dozens of games, from Grocery Store in the 1880s to Payday in 1970, are about budgeting your funds to buy the trappings of a comfortable life (“Figure $200” for clothes and shoes, Theo tells Cliff, handing him Monopoly bills, “I want to look good”). Even Monopoly follows this script, as players rise from a meager $1500 in starting capital to become the tycoon of a real estate emprire.

Shopping games have long been popular with Americans: they combine lessons about personal budgeting with fantasies of having plenty of money to buy things. As Americans’ consumer habits have changed over time, shopping games have stayed up-to-the-minute. Park and Shop, created by Parker Bros in 1955, involves finding a strategically-located parking spot at a shopping mall, during the era when for the first time most middle-class American families had cars and malls were emerging as a one-stop shopping destination.

The key expectation of the American Dream is that people can advance their fortunes by being hardworking, skillful, and lucky. Board games over the last hundred and fifty years have reinforced this notion so strongly that, as The Cosby Show demonstrates, they have become a shorthand for talking about success. On the flip side, however, these games can also illustrate how people have historically been left out of this “mainstream” vision. The games we studied in this project were, until the late 20th century, marketed almost exclusively to white, middle-class Americans, and the values, social rules, and sense of possibility they share reflect that population. While it’s hard to know exactly who actually played these games at any given period of history, circumstantial clues that suggest to me that business board games, especially in their early boom years between 1880 and 1940, often shut out many non-white and non-middle class people. Most transparently, the illustrations on board games before the 1970s show almost exclusively white people, and when people of color do appear it is as offensive caricatures and even targets of violence. But there were also more implicit systemic barriers: a color-lithographed board game cost more than a generic deck of cards or set of dominoes. Learning to play Monopoly means digesting a long rule booklet, while checkers takes skill and strategy but doesn’t require reading. And at its most basic level, the rules themselves, and their narratives of success achieved through a combination of strategy and luck, could ring hollow for Americans constrained by social prejudice and economic disadvantage.

Careers, like the Game of Life, features a variety of professions from which players can choose, trying to become the most “successful” by the end of the game (in Careers, players define their own success formula as a combination of wealth, fame, and happiness). When it was first published by Parker Bros. in 1955, Careers let players imagine themselves in new and glamorous professions like uranium prospecting, space exploration, and engineering, as well as politics and Hollywood. Later versions were updated with new kinds of jobs (ecology, sports, teaching) that matched changing ideals of a fabulously successful or virtuous career.

The injustices that limit people’s access to opportunity and success had by no means evaporated when the Huxtables appeared on American televisions in 1984, and they are certainly still with us today. I hear, in Theo’s comment about “regular people,” a clear critique of a society where black physicians and attorneys were still exceptional rather than “regular”. But what struck me most powerfully about the Monopoly scene was the casual way in which a successful African-American man used the classic board game of American business strategy to make a profound point about how success and opportunity need not, ultimately, be limited by race or class. Theo’s lesson, and ours, is that expanding access to the American Dream is an ongoing project that relies on luck, yes – but also on hard work and the belief that it can be in your grasp.

How do you become successful as a toy inventor? Reuben Klamer, who developed the 1960 Game of Life, suggests inspiration, perseverance, serendipity, and a good sense of humor. Serendipity refers to his chance encounter with the “Checkered Game of Life” in the archives of the Milton Bradley Company, one day after he was tasked to create a new game for the company’s centennial celebration. While he did not open the dusty contents of the box, he was “electrified – by the word ‘life.’ It occurred to me that the word ‘life’ would be a valuable name for a new game concept.” Thus was the Game of Life invented.

This was not the first time that someone had developed a game about life, however. As Jill Lepore points out in her New Yorker article, the “New Game of Human Life” was printed in England by the 1720s, a game based on the Christian notion that “life is a voyage in which travellers are buffeted between vice and virtue.” Milton Bradley then published The Checkered Game of Life in 1860. An instructional game based on Puritan ethics, the winners were players who reached a Happy Old Age through leading a virtuous life.

Checkered Game of Life Image © The Strong Museum.

Another publisher, Selchow & Righter, published a game titled “Stepping Stones: The Game of Life” in 1920. The rulebook points out, “Where is there a Real American Boy who does not wish to do big things – to make a success of his life – when he grows up so that his Mother and Father will be proud of him?” For this Game of Life, the goal was to climb the corporate ladder and earn a place in the President’s Office.

“Stepping Stones: The Game of Life.” Image courtesy of the Hasbro Archives.

The Checkered Game of Life was eventually removed from the market, its Puritan morals perhaps too “preachy” and outdated for a society centered on capitalistic values. Still, its title inspired Reuben Klamer to come up with the revamped 1960s version of the Game of Life. Its goal was closer to that of Monopoly: to bankrupt other players and emerge as a millionaire tycoon. Although tactical decisions and the revenge feature determine smaller successes and failures along the way, everything ultimately depends on luck with the spinner, the Wheel of Fate.

“The 1960 Game of Life.” Image © The Strong Museum.

At a time when television was an affordable and popular source of entertainment in the U.S., Klamer knew the game had to be visually appealing in television advertisements. Artist Bill Markham, who worked under Reuben Klamer at the time, helped create a prototype based on Klamer’s ideas for a three-dimensional, circuitous game track with a spinner. This became the first three-dimensional board game made in plastic, and the two filed a patent for it in 1960.

Klamer, with his background in engineering and marketing, further advised the company on working with plastic and reducing production costs, and came up with a promotional plan featuring the popular TV personality Art Linkletter. This helped pave the way for one of the first paid television commercials in the game industry (an early example from the 1960s is up on YouTube). Klamer still owns the rights to the Game of Life today, and must approve all revisions.

Today, there are 26 international language editions of Life produced in 59 different countries. The only localized version is the Japanese edition (Jinsei Ge-mu), which makes references to current events and customs unique to Japanese life, such as New Year’s celebrations, an imperial wedding, going on a hot-spring tour, holding a concert at the Tokyo Dome, even buying a nuclear bomb shelter on sale. The Takara Tomy Company, which distributes the game today, speculates that the original popularity of the game grew from its representation of the American Dream – in the 1960s, American life was idolized among the Japanese as symbolic of wealth and success.

Invention does not necessarily begin from a blank slate. Life has been re-invented many times, reshaped to fit cultural peculiarities and changing attitudes towards success. Drastic changes have been made to the Game of Life over the years, unlike Monopoly, whose iconography and overarching goal has remained consistent since 1935. Inventors may find inspiration from past games, innovate existing concepts, imagine new designs to help convey them, and devise new marketing strategies for the appropriate audience. As the playing field for the games business increasingly centers on digital games and the global marketplace, the next inventors of the Game of Life may be well on their way. What you need is to balance skill, strategy, and a good bit of luck.

Sources:

Andrews, Peter. “Games People Played.” American Heritage Vol 23-4, 1972

Couzin, Mary. “Reuben Klamer on Success, Careers and The Game of Life.” Global Toy  News. June 17, 2011.

Jensen, Jennifer. “Teaching Success Through Play: American Board And Table Games, 1840-1900.” Magazine Antiques, December 2001.

Klamer, Reuben. The Game of Life: An Inventor’s Chronicle. Hasbro/Milton Bradley Special Edition, 2010.

Lepore, Jill. “The Meaning of Life.” The New Yorker, 21 May 2007.
Walsh, Tim. Timeless Toys: Classic Toys And the Playmakers Who Created Them. Missouri: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2005.

Whitehill, Bruce. Games: American Boxed Games and their Makers 1822-1992. Pennsylvania: Wallace-Homestead Book Company, 1992.

“What’s Jinsei Game.” Takara Tomy.

The cartoons in question came to the museum in 1975, when Alfred Bloomingdale (grandson and heir to Lyman G Bloomingdale, co-founder of Bloomingdale’s department store) donated his collection of fifty-eight original cartoons to the National Numismatic Collection (NNC).  Between the 1950s and 1970s, these cartoons delighted a multitude of readers when reproduced in The New Yorker, Playboy, and syndicated newspapers around the country. In the 1960s, Bloomingdale was an entrepreneur for the newest form of currency, the credit card. He started the company “Dine and Sign” for convenience; one small piece of plastic eliminated the need for him and his friends to carry large sums of money while out on the town. Apparently there was a market for partiers because by 1967, “Dine and Sign” was acquired by Diner’s Club and eventually Bloomingdale became president and chairman of that company.

Although the names of these cartoonists are not the artists we recognize from history books, their characters and cartoon strips are so ingrained in popular culture that many of us will recognize their work. Among the more famous cartoonists in our collection are Mel Lazarus, recognized for his know-it-all students and their prim teacher in the cartoon, “Miss Peach,” Bil Keane and the whimsical antics of family life in “Family Circus,” Dic Browne and “Hi and Lois” (a spinoff from “Beetle Bailey”), George Lichty and his sometimes political strip “Grin and Bear it,” and Jack Cole and his painterly cartoons of busty ladies seen in “Playboy Magazine” (risqué for his day). People say they read Playboy for the articles, but really they read it for the cartoons.

Each artist found a unique form of expression with simple tools. In this “Grin and Bear It” cartoon by George Lichty, a character says “Foreigners draining away our gold is bad enough, Adele… but if they start gobbling up our credit cards we’re in real trouble!” Lichty’s ink and brush show expressive quick strokes. The lines of the plump women in their furs undulate with the motion of the brush while the stippled grey in the ground (cleverly produced with a dry brush over the texture of the paper) produced a grey tone from the black ink. The visual speed of the drawing emphasizes the skill and care used.

Speed of hand is also present in this drawing, created for the Wall Street Journal. “People are getting suspicious of cash. We’re gonna switch to credit cards.” The expressive element in this drawing does not come from the thick and thin line as before. In this cartoon the line is relatively even; it may have been done with a ruling pen. The visual charm in this drawing comes from patterns of lines: the grain in the wood, the checkers in the sports coat, the diamond in the waste paper basket, and of course the “faces” on the bills that read like money without offering a clue about the denomination.

In the next drawing, a customer proclaims that “In a democracy, a man has a right to ask for credit no matter how many times he’s been refused credit.” Notice the handwritten caption, the flamboyant washes, the forced perspective that gives the illusion that the bar to has great depth, and the scribble of lines coming together in a very painterly style. The artist used washes to define the business man, the bartender, the bar, and the bar stool.

When I look at these drawings, it is the sure hand of the artists that truly impresses me. The proficiency the artists show comes from constant practice.  The artists drew the same characters in different storylines over and over again; some created at least a cartoon a day for years in their work with syndicated newspapers.  The medium was black indelible ink and a brush or pen. Ink is an unforgiving medium; blobs, blotches, and drips cannot be erased, so the artists could not fix major problems (although they made some changes with a bottle of correction fluid). Since these cartoons were made for reproduction, the artists could cover minimal mistakes, and although we can see evidence of a problem in the original work it would not reproduce in the papers, journals, or magazine.Keep looking; the skilled artists who made these drawings grappled with changes in credit and debt in American social life with limited words, a spare pallet, and solid drawing skills. The cartoons illustrated prevalent American ideas, fears, excitement and disbelief pertaining to credit and its usage in the mid 20th century. The artists foresaw a “future” where average Americans no longer did their commerce with paper bills and coins and even the most mundane shopping of goods and services could be purchased with a slide of a plastic card.