The Podium - Spring 2022 by Belmont Hill School

The

Podium Volume VII • Edition I

MAY 2022

All opinions and ideas expressed in The Podium are the personal opinions and convictions of featured student writers and are not necessarily the opinions of The Podium staff, the Belmont Hill History Department, or the Belmont Hill School.

Published by the Belmont Hill School 350 Prospect Street Belmont, MA 02478

Printed by Belmont Printing Co.

The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

Letter from the Staff Dear Reader, Albert Einstein once said, “wisdom is not a product of schooling but the lifelong attempt to acquire it.” This sentiment is echoed by us, the writers and editors of Belmont Hill’s Student Magazine, the Podium. We yearn for your words, your ideas, and your creativity. Your essays enlighten, they explore, and most importantly, they expand the coffers of our collective intellect. To our writers, we thank you for your rigor, perseverance, and commitment to the ideals that this editor stands for. Your works will be woven into the collective tapestry that we call our history; they will become a beacon for future scholars to understand our being. You paint a picture, spin a story about our individualism, our collectivism, and creation, and develop the texts which will inspire future students, teachers, and leaders. We thank you for your contribution to the intangible chronicle of our time that we call the Podium. You are appreciated, your words are treasured, and you will all be remembered. Edition I will contain Barrett Cosgrove’s essay on Stalin’s consolidation of Russian power, Riley Goodman’s exploration of the strategic use of espionage in the Cold War, and Morris Smith’s Monaco Prize-winning exploration of the evolution of board games into popular culture. Additionally, you will begin to understand our school’s wide-ranging views through op-eds such as Will Nolan’s on activism from athletes, Turner Rayment’s on United States climate action, and Alex Lo’s on NATO’s policy on Russia. Finally, a number of miscellaneous articles are contained inside written by the podium staff on wide-ranging issues. This article’s data analysis focuses on issues of American policy, voting, and world issues. Thank you for taking the time to crack open the deeply enlightening pages of this historic Podium edition.

The Podium May 2022 • Volume VII • Edition I

Presidents

Sam Atalla ‘23 Andrew Asherman ‘23 Cole Sparks ‘24 Executive Editors

Max Glick ‘24 Max Wagner ‘23 Podium Staff

Ezra Lee ‘25 Cooper Nelson ‘23 Nate Voss ‘24 Magazine Designer

Sam Atalla ‘23

www.the-podium.org

— The Podium Staff 3

May 2022

Content Opinion Pieces 7 Is The World Flat? Action Before Influence NATO’s Folly

William Nolan ‘23

Turner Rayment ‘23

Alex Lo ‘23

Research Papers 12 Leisure and Lessons: The Transformation of Board Games into Mass Media

Morris Smith ‘22

Stalin’s Consolidation of Power in the Soviet Union

Barrett Cosgrove ‘24

Riley Goodman ’24

The Sub-Par Soviet Espionage of the Cold War

Data Analysis 48 US Foreign and Domestic Policy

The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

Max Glick ‘24 Max Wagner ‘23 Nate Voss ‘24

Miscellaneous Essays 52 Should Stolen Artifacts in Museums Be Returned? Should the Electoral College Be Abolished?

Max Glick ‘24

Ezra Lee ‘25

Student Art 58 First Place — Advanced Photography First Place — Drawing & Painting Second Place — Drawing & Painting Oil Painting on Black Paper Pencil on Paper

Rafael Rodriguez Montgomery ‘22

Kailen Richards ‘22

Luke Caroll ‘22

Jake Ma ‘27

Daniel Xie ‘24

Credits: • Photography on front cover by Sam Atalla ‘23 • Artwork on 1st page by Daniel Xie ‘24

May 2022

Nominations For Research Papers and Essays Op-Eds Blame Shall Not Fall Upon the Speaker, But On the Reader Breaking the Greenhouse with Government Policy

James Hurd ‘23 Connor Smirl ‘23

Global Economy The FDA and Pharmaceutical Regulation Government Regulation

Arec Keomurjian ‘22 Daniel Rashes ‘22

Thank you to the History Department for their assistance in identifying strong essays and papers. Their dedication to The Podium is vital to the success of the final publication.

The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

OPINION PIECES

May 2022

IS THE WORLD FLAT? William Nolan ‘23 Athletes should be able to speak out on social and political issues. Like every human, they have thoughts, beliefs, and opinions. Just playing on a professional sports team should not disallow them from speaking out on these beliefs.

athletes are paid to promote products or services, whether or not they truly believe in them. If people are unaware that an athlete may be sponsored, they might take the words of this athlete as their true beliefs when they are actually being paid to say those things. So, for this reason, I think it is important that athletes state their sponsors so that people are aware that this athlete’s thoughts are not his own, but a company’s.

However, theirs is a ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ situation. Athletes are in a unique situation in which they have much more influence than a normal person. Because of this, more people will be listening to what they have to say. They will certainly be subject to more criticism for what they think, while also being able to influence others’ thoughts. For example, when Kyrie Irving said that he believed the world was flat, he definitely faced much criticism, and I certainly thought of him differently after I found out. Another example comes with Aaron Rodgers, who, early this season, mentioned that he was unvaccinated. While this is perfectly fine, as it is his own choice, he faced backlash for his decision. While these two men definitely faced criticism, they assuredly also influenced others’ beliefs as well. Thus, with their greater influence, they must be careful with what they say, as they have the power to change others’ thoughts and opinions.

So, athletes definitely should be allowed to speak on their beliefs. But, even if they are allowed to, should they? I think this one depends. If you’re an athlete, there is a high risk for you with very little reward involved. Sure, you can say what you think, but why would you? If you’re a player like Aaron Rodgers, by speaking out on his own beliefs, he will most definitely alienate many people, some a part of his fanbase. No matter what your thoughts are, there will always be someone who disagrees with you, and, while that should not affect the way they cheer for you on the field, it probably will. Why lose some of your fans, when you can just say nothing? While I’m sure the athletes don’t care, maybe their organizations and teams do. So, for this reason, I think that athletes should not speak out on their beliefs to the general population.

Another concern that could be brought up is the idea of sponsorships. With sponsors, The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

ACTION BEFORE INFLUENCE Turner Rayment ‘23 As the second largest producer of CO2 emissions, behind only China, the U.S. has an undisputable responsibility to both change their course of action and set the standard for others in terms of reducing its carbon footprint. Adding to this responsibility, the U.S. unequivocally has a great deal of global influence, and it would be irresponsible not to harbor this sway for the improvement of society and saving our future generations.

examples that will continuously work to lower our carbon emissions. Only once the U.S. faces its own actions and internal practices can we look to influence other nations and create substantial long term global progress. Climate change seems to have taken a backseat in public perception thanks to other issues such as the global pandemic and the ongoing war in Ukraine. Even with these international tragedies, we cannot stand idle on the issue of climate change. That is why it is more important than ever for the U.S. to become a main advocate for sustainable climate practices and new sources of renewable energy lest we continue to let these pressing issues manifest and grow until they present themselves as the number one threat to society and are too overgrown to manage.

Climate change, regardless of what some politicians and science deniers have to say, is here to stay. Given our immense contribution to this ongoing phenomenon, as well as our international influence, we first need to make an example of ourselves before we begin to transition into serving as a global arbiter over the topics of climate change and renewable energy. We can do this by creating tax cuts and incentives on renewable sources of energy such as solar, wind, nuclear, and hydroelectric. Furthermore we need to put in place a firm and well monitored carbon tax to dissuade companies from environmentally damaging processes well at the same time making more sustainable mediums more affordable. Lastly, the government needs to support and create broader climate change actions similar to the Green New Deal, which addresses climate change with concrete

Addressing climate change is a cost that pays for itself. If mankind continues to let greenhouse gas emission run rampant and not change our actions, rebuilding and cleaning up after the many severe effects of climate change, such as rising sea levels, wildfires, droughts, and other natural disasters, will prove to be even more costly than dealing with problems now. If we do nothing for too long, there will be no earth to clean up and mankind will destroy itself.

May 2022

NATO’S FOLLY A Blunder that Might Make Europe Lose More than a Game Alex Lo ‘23

On February 22nd, Russia invaded Ukraine, initiating a longstanding conflict that has tested the strength of NATO. The Russian invasion force has exhibited little distinction between civilian and military targets. The engagement has cost the lives of more than a thousand Ukrainian civilians with nearly twice that wounded. Given the Cold War idea of NATO—an organization aimed at preventing the expansion of Russia on the European continent—one may think that Europe could have steered clear from this brutal conflict by accepting Ukraine into NATO earlier. However, an acceptance into NATO would have caused an even earlier Russian attack. US and Europe’s prior interest in accepting Ukraine into NATO only invigorated Russia to engage in war preparations. NATO should not accept countries bordering Russia due to Russia’s firm stance in maintaining strategic depth and its belief that war is justified in response to closer NATO movements.

miles. With Putin at the helm, the country desires to return to its former strategic depth. Russia fears closer missile placements and Western military bases placed even closer to their borders. Accordingly, Russia feels that the absence of European influence in its buffer states is vital to the security of its nation. To these ends, the country vehemently opposes any NATO involvement in these countries and would attempt to thwart plans for a bordering country to enter NATO. This situation could stir diplomatic and economic conflict that would be detrimental to Europe as a whole. In the worst case, Russia could even initiate military operations around its borders as purely defensive. Indeed, Russia believes it is acting the same way as the NATO countries have responded to mounting military buildup close by, which they believe justifies war. They feel Western precedents allow them to invade as they did with Ukraine. As a concrete example, after the rise of Castro’s communist Cuba, the US felt threatened by Castro’s communist ideology and connections to Russia—not to forget, the proximity of Cuba to American soil. As a result, the US intervened. As the US initiated the Bay of Pigs Invasion to drive Castro from

Russia fears the increasing Western presence around its borders, feeling obligated to keep bordering countries free from NATO. During the Cold War, major Russian cities were more than 1,000 miles away from NATO forces. However, today distances are less than 500

The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

power, Russia feels it is acting similarly in its attempts to remove Zelensky from power. In that sense, Russia is unwilling to have NATO countries on the border—even if it means war. If NATO accepts a bordering country, Russia believes it has history on its side and is in the right to engage militarily. Tensions could even rise as they did in Cuba to a confrontation akin to the Cuban missile crisis—however, we cannot know if diplomatic meetings will be as successful. Ultimately, the costs outweigh the benefits in the acceptance of countries bordering Russia into NATO. Although acceptance into NATO would benefit the individual countries themselves in military support and economic support, confirmation would likely never happen. Russia would attempt to intervene in the country’s affairs, even to the point of war. With the vast nuclear arsenals at the fingertips of many NATO countries and those around Russia, nuclear war could begin at any minute. It is in the best interest of the US and NATO to avoid accepting a bordering country in order to prevent a large-scale nuclear war.

May 2022

RESEARCH PAPERS

The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

Leisure and Lessons:

The Transformation of Board Games into Mass Media Monaco Prize-winner Morris Smith ‘22 Introduction and Primary Themes The board games stacked in the corner of one’s family room might at first glance seem unnoteworthy, but deeper investigation reveals that games are meaningful cultural artifacts illuminating the evolving values of the societies in which they are created. From elite origins in antiquity, board games developed over time into mass media uniquely capable of putting players into a first-person perspective, both as consumers of social information and as cultural actors. The attributes of board games as a mode of communication and societal persuasion make possible a more active—and potentially more engaging—relationship with ideas than what many other forms of mass communication allow. These features may be effectively demonstrated by discussion of the origins of board games and the firstperson qualities inherent to gameplay, and by examination of how board games transformed into a genre of mass communications during the rapid technological and social changes in America during the 19th and early 20th centuries, a remarkable time when board games began to find their full expression as mass media.

ago.1 The oldest dice thus far found are a collection of 49 delicately carved stones discovered at the 5000-year-old Başur Höyük burial mound in southeast Turkey. These early Bronze Age stones were painted in green, red, blue, black, and white, and radiocarbon dating traced them back to 3100-2900 BCE.2 This type of Bronze Age polychromy signifies the owners’ prosperity because such rare and expensive pigments served as markers of affluence.3 Similarly, carved dice have also been unearthed at ancient archeological sites in Syria and Iraq as isolated, solitary objects that had been previously thought to represent counting stones. The Başur Höyük finding confirmed that these tokens were, instead, game pieces.4 These discoveries trace the concept of board games to an origin in the Fertile Crescent, known to be one of the birthplaces of societies that began to practice and organize around agriculture at large scale.5 The beginnings of permanent urban settlements, multi-layered social organization, commercial trade, decorative arts, law, science, engineering, and mathematics can all be linked to this region as one of the core propagating global sites of complex social structure.6 Board games, too, may be counted as another of the foundational contributions to world culture by this “Cradle of Civilization.”

Origins Board games have been a favorite pastime of cultures dating back to when game pieces were invented, approximately 5000 years 13

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Archeological findings indicate that board games were played among the upper classes of Mesopotamia.7 Several beautifully crafted boards were uncovered in 1928 by British archeologist Leonard Wooley in the ancient Sumerian cemetery of Ur. Other archeologists working across the Middle East have found additional versions of this so-called “Royal Game of Ur,” the first known complete board game. Wooley’s discovery, dated c.2600 BCE, revealed wooden boards, each featuring a face of 20 squares richly inlaid with shell, precious lapis lazuli, and red limestone. Five of these squares display flower rosettes and are thought to have been particularly lucky. Other squares show piercing eyes, circled dot patterns, and varied arrays of five dots. The boards resemble a possible precursor to backgammon.8 These design elements may seem inconsequential, but they demonstrate that the Sumerian elite had sufficient leisure time to play board games, the power and resources to marshal artisans to craft and manufacture games, and the ability to disseminate Sumerian ideas and culture throughout regions where archeological evidence of these games can be found. When Wooley discovered the game boards in Ur, the mechanics of gameplay remained mysterious. Then, in the early 1980s, British philologist Irving Finkel translated a c.177 BCE Babylonian clay tablet and ascertained that it described the gameplay of the Royal Game of Ur.9 According to Finkel’s translation, two players used five game pieces, competing to move from one end of the board to another.10 There is evidence that these games were widely recognized, at least among the ruling and upper classes. A passage from a 7th century BCE cuneiform military dispatch recovered from the remains of the library of King Assurbanipal of Assyria alludes to the Royal Game of Ur with a pun that has no preliminary introduction, suggesting that the metaphor must The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

have been unmistakably recognizable in the way that a chess or checkers metaphor might be today.11 This dispatch is addressed to the king himself and describes the commander’s confidence in winning an ongoing battle, predicting his impending victory by relating it to a strategy to win this board game: “Your troops, well-being falls to [them]; Let them go out from House 5, House 6, House 7: Alone I will make my exit, and get as far as the…”12 The numbered “houses” allude to three of the spaces on the game board.

personified by the player in additional episodes of gameplay. Gameplay, in turn, held the potential to influence the beliefs and perspectives of the player, as we can observe in the case of the Assyrian military commander’s dispatch to King Assurbanipal where the commander presented his real-life conflict through the language and viewpoint of the Royal Game of Ur. The Emergence of Mass Media Two key dimensions identify the transition of a mode of communication into a mass medium: range and durability.14 Movabletype printing was the original mass medium. Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the movable-type printing press in 1440 initiated waves of knowledge and ideas that propagated across Europe.15 Printed materials could be transported with ease across a wide geographic range, and the capacity of the printing press to duplicate many copies allowed text to become “fixed” for broader dissemination. Movable-type printing is an exemplar of how a new mass communication technology could not only transmit information but also potentially reshape and re-direct societies.16

The structure of play of the Royal Game of Ur models the Mesopotamian focus on siege warfare, as players fought for mastery of a central row of twelve spaces, employing offensive and defensive strategies that either blocked adversaries’ pieces or jumped over them. Linear game piece movement along this central row may reflect a corresponding linear geographic mindset formed by the dependence of these “hydraulic” empires on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the primary resources for commerce, shipping, irrigation, and other essentials of daily life.13 Board games subsequently multiplied during their five millennia of existence into a wide variety of designs. When examining the history of games, the game boards and pieces themselves, and any preserved records of their rules, form the primary sources that offer revealing narratives about the past. These myriad game concepts are all determined by the culture in which they evolved. Nevertheless, even with this variety, as we can see from the Royal Game of Ur, board games from the very beginning could center the player in a role-playing simulation in which cultural information and values could be absorbed and then repeatedly

Many media fulfill the definition of mass media beyond mass-printed books, including media within the realm of popular culture. Photography, broadcast media, greeting cards, popular music, movies, and even advertising have also evolved into mass media and have joined the marketplace of ideas. Consider the motion-graphic Burma-Shave advertisements that dotted the highways in the early 20th century United States: these billboards were placed sequentially along the road to be read 15

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as motorists drove past, reaching millions.17

unimaginable in prior periods. Well before Henry Ford invented the mass assembly line in 1913, several advances in manufacturing saved time and energy, allowing goods to be made at lower costs, greater efficiencies, and rising production volumes.19 The steam engine, the cotton gin, and the telegraph are prime examples of transformative inventions during this age of machines.

Similarly, board games also evolved into mass media. Indeed, the expensively decorated Royal Game of Ur game boards and pieces were durable, but they were few and not pervasively distributed. With neither the capacity nor intent to reach large audiences, most board games during much of the five millennia since their appearance were typically played only by elites. This hurdle to widespread access was much like the one that written media encountered before the invention of the movable-type printing press. It was only through the technological innovations of the Second Industrial Revolution during the 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States that board games became prolifically accessible, transforming into mass media and joining the marketplace of ideas.

Innovations in mass production and image printing were the most crucial industrial tools that nascent board game producers during this period would exploit.20 Increasingly sophisticated papermaking and printing technologies made the publication of intricately composed board games less expensive and newly accessible to the lower and middle classes. The technological innovation of chromolithography allowed colorful and graphically complex game board prints to be more efficiently produced.21 Chromolithography was invented in 1837 by the French printer Godefroy Engelmann.22 In this process, separate stones were used for individual colors. A print could be passed through the press sequentially for each color, keeping all layered images aligned. Chromolithography made possible multicolored printing without the time-consuming painting and tinting by hand that had been previously necessary for multi-color prints.

The American Industrial Revolution’s Impact on Board Games Just as the process of modernization and the invention of the movable-type printing press set the stage for print media to become widely distributed, so, too, did 19th-century American social development and advancing industrial technologies allow board games to become as easily reproducible as printed books. The United States during this period was marked by accelerating population growth that included shifts from rural settings to urban ones, and then from urban to suburban.18 Immigration contributed to population booms among major cities such as New York, Chicago, Cleveland, and Boston. Industrialization allowed the fabrication of products that once took lengthy and laborious effort to be, instead, factory-produced at speeds The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

In the United States, chromolithography was pioneered and improved in the industrial Northeast. In 1846, a mere nine years after Engelmann’s invention, Richard March Hoe perfected the rotary lithographic press, nicknamed the “Lightning Press” because of its ability to print far more quickly than previously 16

manufactured presses.23 While searching for a lucrative use for his new chromolithographic press, an entrepreneur named Milton Bradley was inspired to produce and market his new board games beginning in the 1860s.24

to substantial changes in the ways that goods were distributed, as the advent of the concurrent “transportation revolution” allowed products to be shipped all across America at far greater speeds with the growth of the railroad system. These revolutions also led to a spread in consumerism because innovations offered even rural and small town customers access to niche goods and services that might never have been available to them previously.27 These changes, along with the increased number and pervasiveness of advertisements in print media during this era, appealed to prospering middle and lower classes that had more money to purchase goods designed for entertainment and more leisure time outside of work hours to enjoy pursuits such as board games.28

As the movable-type printing press did for the written word, the lithographic press and its technological successors such as chromolithography did for the board game. Production became more efficient and lower in cost, and the audience that games could reach expanded dramatically. Lithography helped to catapult board games from an activity of the few into a new role as a mass medium for the many. Not only did printing technology put less expensive board games within financial reach of broad swaths of the American population, advancing postal technology, scale, and organization also brought improved accessibility to goods delivered by mail as well as more intentional targeting of rural areas for advertising. Small towns previously beyond the easy reach of national brands were now readily accessible through innovations in the United States postal system. These innovations included bulk mail rates that facilitated catalog delivery, rural free delivery (RFD), and parcel post, which allowed an affordable method of sending larger parcels, including boxed board game sets.25 Brands such as Sears and Montgomery Ward took full advantage of these mail delivery improvements to create a consumer revolution spearheaded by the rise of mail-order catalogs.26

While the industrial changes of the 19th century paved the way for improved efficiency of manufacture and ease of delivery of board games to a population in economic transition, social changes also contributed to the increased accessibility and desirability of board games. Improved living standards, attributable to more advanced housing, electricity, cooking, and sewage technologies, left many free to indulge in new leisure activities. Even the simple advent of cleaner home lighting options allowed families and communities to gather in the evenings where dim and smoky lighting had often discouraged social activities before.29 These changes coincided with the focus of work moving away from the home, allowing the home to take on a heightened role as the center of leisure pastimes. Average weekly earnings increased during this period, while prices for mass-produced goods decreased. These factors contributed

These new developments were a part of the collective “market revolution” that led 17

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to flourishing consumer interest in items that facilitated entertainment: cards, game tables, and nighttime lighting sales increased, spurred on by the concept that entertainment could be purchased as goods.30 Simultaneously, the common, or public, school system was expanding throughout 19th century America, spurred on by the growth of the economy and the population. One of the goals of such common schooling was the moral education of children: schools were expected to provide a uniform curriculum and infuse their teaching with moral lessons demonstrating the types of expected behaviors. Textbooks of that era taught: “…love of country, love of God, duty to parents, the necessity to develop habits of thrift, honesty and hard work in order to accumulate property, the certainty of progress, and perfection of the United States.”31 Board games also took on this responsibility of moral education. Therefore, it is unsurprising that leading board game developers of the time, most notably Milton Bradley, assumed roles as educational theorists.32

century is marked by the publication of The Mansion of Happiness: An Instructive Moral and Entertaining Amusement in 1843 by W. & S. B. Ives of Salem, Massachusetts. Lithography had become a popular medium by this time, and the technology could quickly reproduce multiple single-color impressions of Ives’s board game, which were then tinted in watercolors by hand before being packaged for sale. The game was deeply influenced by the Second Great Awakening, an early 19th century period of Protestant religious revival in the United States, the primary component of which was a shift away from a Calvinist belief in predestination toward the concept that individuals could choose to save their soul from damnation.33 This ideal, moreover, expressed itself in evangelical Protestant media as attempts to improve the moral values of American society. The Second Great Awakening’s religious and didactic infrastructure included print media, revival music, and even board games. The Mansion of Happiness focused on teaching Puritan values and featured a 66-space board around which players would race. Each of the board’s spaces portrayed simple moralistic virtues and vices, with the goal of reaching eternal salvation at the end of the track, manifested as the titular “Mansion of Happiness.”34 Landing on virtuous spaces such as piety, honesty, temperance, gratitude, humility, or generosity propelled players further along the board. In contrast, vice spaces such as idleness, audacity, immodesty, or cruelty hindered a player’s progression toward their objective.35 The instructions for playing The Mansion of Happiness include the following verse at the head, highlighting

American Puritanism Embodied in Board Games The inception of America’s history of mass production of board games in the mid 19th The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

the emphasis on piety: At this amusement each will find, A moral fit t’improve the mind: It gives to those their proper due Who various paths of vice pursue And shows (while vice destruction brings) That good from every virtue springs Be virtuous then and forward press, To gain the seat of happiness.36

to the promoted cultural values of the game. These characteristics make The Mansion of Happiness one of the earliest mass-produced examples of “persuasive gaming,” where real and theoretical systems are modeled and players interact with the model, molding beliefs and opinions during gameplay. Ian Bogost of the Georgia Institute of Technology noted: …games and simulations are systems of interlocking parts and behaviors. The world is also made of interlocking parts and behaviors. This parallel structure gives games a unique purchase on representing how things work in the world. And because games are representational, they can also depict how things should work— that is, they can make arguments about which worldly behaviors are desirable or undesirable.40

The game caught on quickly with an American population who had more leisure time but for whom Christian piety remained an essential value, and The Mansion of Happiness was considered wildly successful after selling 4000 copies in its first ten months.37 So popular was the game that copies were brought along with settlers as they attempted to trek the Oregon Trail.38 Even the gameplay mechanics reflected a Puritanical moral viewpoint. Since dice were associated with Satan, gambling, and moral failure, and therefore were not an appropriate mechanism to move players forward in The Mansion of Happiness, a spinning device called a “teetotum” was developed instead. The pin-and-plate teetotum Ives created for this game was an ivory dowel sharpened to a point and inserted into an octagonal ivory plate.39

While The Mansion of Happiness was produced at a new industrial scale, it yet retained a fundamental feature of board games traceable back to the Royal Game of Ur: players could be cultural actors in the first-person in addition to being consumers of social information. This fundamental paradigm would continue to be followed in many subsequent American board games. Milton Bradley’s Impact on American Board Games: Individualism, Self-Reliance and Upward Mobility Although the early 19th century brought the innovations and social shifts necessary for the initial rise of the board game industry, it would not be until the latter half of the 1800s that American board games truly began to be

Overall, The Mansion of Happiness was a didactic simulation in miniature in which players were exposed not only to the specific beliefs the game was designed to communicate but also served as cultural actors modeling success or failure as functions of how closely each player adhered 19

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produced and marketed at mass scales. This explosion of growth was primarily because of the efforts of one man, Milton Bradley.41 Bradley was born in 1836, and his early life was full of displacement and migration as his father frequently moved the family from place to place, searching for better economic opportunities. Nineteenth-century America was a time when comparatively widespread upward social mobility became possible. Alexis de Tocqueville described this new social environment: When social conditions are nearly equal, men are constantly changing their situations in life: there is still a class of menials and a class of masters, but these classes are not always composed of the same individuals, still less of the same families…at any moment, a servant may become a master, and he aspires to rise to that condition.42

deteriorating moral and social order into a “chromo-civilization.”44 Bradley, however, wanted to obtain a chromolithographic press not as an avenue for artistic expression but for commercial ventures reflecting the times, taking advantage of the growing popularity of the medium. In search of a press, Bradley sought out his friend, George Tapley, a bookbinder in Providence, Rhode Island, and Tapley immediately arranged for one to be shipped to Bradley in Springfield, Massachusetts. Now a chromolithographer, Bradley obtained a precious image on which he hoped to capitalize: a portrait of a smoothly shaven man who would later become the United States President, Abraham Lincoln. Shortly after, however, Lincoln grew a beard before assuming the presidency, rendering Bradley’s inventory of prints worthless. Despondent over his business plan’s utter failure, Bradley again contacted his old friend Tapley, who visited and offered to play a board game with the down-on-hisluck Bradley. Playing games with Tapley sparked ideas in Bradley’s mind, prompting him to immediately set to work creating his own board game that same year, which he published using his chromolithographic press in 1860 as The Checkered Game of Life. Despite the earlier success of Ives’ The Mansion of Happiness, games were still often frowned upon since prevailing American beliefs of the day presumed that idle time should not be used for play but instead for “seeking a state of grace.”45 Bradley thought that by preserving a moral element in his game and tapping into the remnants of the

Bradley assumed his father’s migrant lifestyle, frequently moving in search of opportunity and working furiously to improve his station in life. Bradley explored many different avenues for upward social mobility, one being his acquisition of a chromolithograph press. The chromolithograph press offered a technology to mass-produce multi-color written documents, images, or illustrations, or “chromos” as they had popularly become labeled.43 Some viewed these crowd-pleasing chromos as a debasement of high art and culture, so much so that the editor of The Nation, E.L. Godkin, decried this widespread dissemination of inexpensive, duplicative imagery as representative of America’s The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

Second Great Awakening, he could sway customers to buy it as an instructional gift for their families. Moreover, while his game was imbued with lessons on morality, Bradley also introduced an innovative new emphasis on judgment and decision-making alongside the element of chance.46

potentially encountered in life, and players were challenged to devise strategies to escape or skirt these dangerous traps.48 Like The Mansion of Happiness, Bradley’s game also rejected dice to determine gameplay since they were still viewed as a sinful instrument of gambling. Instead, Bradley designed his own teetotum for the game, a simple cardboard hexagon with a wooden pin through the center, which could be spun like a top to determine how many spaces a player could advance.

Bradley’s innovation was incorporating the developing American ideals of individual sovereignty and self-determination into his game. Many aspects of these ideas can be traced to the influence of Transcendentalism on Bradley. Transcendentalism was a movement born in New England c.1836, and two of its key tenets were the belief in the power of the individual and the value of self-reliance. Both concepts were explored in media of the time, including The Checkered Game of Life. The primary goal of this game was to teach players about various moral shortcomings that they might face in real life and the importance of actively avoiding them. Bradley, however, also adopted many aspects of Transcendental philosophy, advancing these concepts in his works related to the kindergarten movement, childhood education, and play.47

One striking difference from the mechanics of play of earlier American games, such as The Mansion of Happiness, was Bradley’s introduction of player decision-making into The Checkered Game of Life. Movement across the game board was determined not only by the teetotum’s spin but also by the player’s choice of what direction to take. Although some of the game board’s squares display lithographed hands that point the player in a specific direction, most squares required the player to choose what the player believed to be the most advantageous path. This decision-making feature captured the public’s attention, contributing to the success of the game.

In The Checkered Game of Life, gameplay consisted of a character moving across a board representing life to eventually reach “Happy Old Age” (described on the game board as the ripe old age of 50 years.) The game board presented many obstacles to the players, each representing a moral deficiency

Although Transcendentalism as a movement was already on the wane by 1860, some of its essential influences on American selfperception persisted, the most important of which were the concepts of individualism and self-reliance mirrored in Bradley’s game. 21

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Players not only inhabited a role during the game, they could also observe their opponents’ level of success or failure as those opponents adapted their gameplay through individual choices within Bradley’s simulated version of the normative social constructs and values of the time. Moreover, as game after game was played, this group dynamic constituted an iterative process of absorbing the cultural values promoted by The Checkered Game of Life while concurrently testing outcomes of individual decisions to maneuver through those cultural values.

spaces included “School,” “Influence,” “Fame,” “Honesty,” “Industry,” “College,” “Government Contract.” Informed by his religious upbringing and motivated by the concepts of individual sovereignty and upward social advancement, Bradley created a form of persuasive gaming that immediately fascinated the American public, and The Mansion of Happiness went on to sell 40,000 copies within months.50 Gilded Age Concepts in American Board Games As the 19th century neared its conclusion, American society became increasingly secularized, individualistic, and materialistic as wealth became the defining characteristic of success for many. Some ideals of Protestant America followed a parallel path. There was a prevailing promotion of the belief that the acquisition of material goods was a sign of God’s blessing, and that being a good Christian and a good capitalist were fundamentally consonant. These developments were among many that ushered in the tumultuous Gilded Age in America, an era characterized by unprecedented economic progress and prosperity marred by corruption, inequality, financial speculation, and economic crises and panics.51 Naturally, these significant issues were explored by mass media publishers of the time, including board game makers.

The game spaces in The Checkered Game of Life also embodied Alexis de Tocqueville’s vision of the American Dream and the quest for upward social mobility that motivated both Milton Bradley and his father. Children were considered central to mobility aspirations in lower- and middle-class family life in the United States since a coveted social goal was to secure improved economic and social standing for future generations.49 Familial transfer of goods as well as character were deemed essential components of upward mobility, and Bradley’s games modeled these beliefs. Ives’ earlier The Mansion of Happiness game board displayed spaces that define a Puritan moral vision of success or failure: “Justice,” “Piety,” “Temperance,” “Passion,” “Immodesty,” “Charity,” “Prudence,” and “Cruelty.” In contrast, Bradley’s The Checkered Game of Life spaces reveal an evolved definition of American success that was rooted not only in moral behavior but also in a conviction that disciplined perseverance and individual ambition could lead to upward mobility: game The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

Within democratic societies, power ostensibly lies within the hands of the people. Therefore, mass media are powerful tools that can be wielded to affect public opinion through the marketplace of ideas. With their emergence as mass media in America, board games joined this marketplace of ideas and were put to use as a means of communication 22

and social influence. Instead of adult males serving as the sole audience to be influenced, board games were aimed more generally at all family members. This included not only adult men but also women and children, who together as families spent their expanded leisure time socializing in their increasingly well-lit home parlors.52 Board games, thus, offered avenues for social and political ideas to be widely and deeply disseminated.

Bible.54 Followers of George’s principles came to be known as Georgists, and while they believed individuals should be entitled to profit from their work, they also advocated that profit obtained from a public source, referred to as the “Commons,” should be divided equally among the public through the use of the Single Tax. George’s concepts conflicted with the Gilded Age’s ascendant ideals, and adherents of both viewpoints used mass media to advocate for their positions.

Not all were pleased by the nation’s shift towards rampant capitalism during the Gilded Age, especially given that hard-earned income was also seen as being siphoned away as taxes levied by unaccountable bureaucracies to be put to murky uses. Social theorist Henry George became demoralized by the seeming paradox of extensive poverty in America despite so much wealth. In his 1879 treatise Progress and Poverty, George outlined his theory of land and labor, proposing a single land value tax on privately held lands as a remedy to better balance economic resources between wage earners and landowners: Deduction and induction have brought us to the same truth: Unequal ownership of land causes an unequal distribution of wealth. Because unequal ownership of land is inseparable from the recognition of individual property in land, it necessarily follows that there is only one remedy for the unjust distribution of wealth: We must make land common property.53

Enter Lizzie Magie, a Georgist and aspiring board game creator. In 1904, while living in Brentwood, Maryland, Magie published The Landlord’s Game, conceived to warn of the ills of unfettered capitalism. The game consisted of players moving around a square board’s edges, buying and selling properties as they advanced on the board.55 Players started on the square titled “Labor Upon Mother Earth Produces Wages,” and progressed around the gameboard, spending money on Absolute Necessity spaces marked “Fuel,” “Shelter,” “Food,” and “Clothing,” while trying to earn honest wages in Natural Opportunity to Labor spaces marked “Farmlands,” “Coal Mines,” “Oil Fields,” and “Timberland,” all the while paying increasing rents to owners of spaces such as “Boomtown,” “Rickety Row,” “Slambang Alley,” and “Grand Boulevard.” The game’s ultimate goal was to send the other players spiraling into bankruptcy, with the winner finishing as the richest and sole remaining player. The ruthless crushing of opponents modeled,

Progress and Poverty was wildly popular and sold over three million copies in the 1890s, more than any other book other than the 23

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through first hand role-playing, the cruelty of an unrestrained capitalist system. Magie’s game, however, also included her innovation of a second tier of rules for alternative persuasive gameplay. Instead of giving the land monopolist absolute power, players under this alternative set of rules were provided with funds at the start of the game, with cooperation among players encouraged, and gameplay continued without the landlord acquiring rental income. This “Single Tax” version of the game was devised to persuade players that George’s economic ideas could benefit everybody by equalizing opportunities and raising wages.56 Magie’s game, thus, differed fundamentally from those like Milton Bradley’s. While The Checkered Game of Life gave each player sole individual power over their own actions, The Landlord’s Game offered players a simulated experience of how uncontrolled competition hindered overall social success, and how maximal benefit could be achieved through cooperation instead.

across the game board. Consumers of ideas gleaned from The Landlord’s Game might exclaim, “I landed in the Poor House!” or “I won a monopoly!” Players could learn through gameplay both how prevailing business methods theoretically functioned and how alternative economic structures might operate. Under the Single Tax version of Magie’s game, for example, players could vote to cooperate, socializing their unearned income and achieving egalitarian prosperity for everyone. The Landlord’s Game was embraced by the inhabitants of the progressive village of Arden, Delaware, one of several utopian American communities that sprang up built upon George’s Single Tax principle. It was in Arden that Lizzie Magie met resident Upton Sinclair and other progressive luminaries.57 So powerful were the lessons that could be derived through first-person experience during persuasive gameplay that radical economist Scott Nearing, also a member of the Arden community and one of the most popular professors at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, incorporated The Landlord’s Game into his curriculum. He later wrote that: “the game was used to show the anti-social nature of monopoly.”58 Liberal economist Rexford G. Tugwell, a member of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust,” also used the game in his Columbia University economics classroom, and it became a hit among left-wing intellectuals on other college campuses as well.59

If elements of Magie’s game remind one of another, it is no coincidence: The Landlord’s Game eventually evolved through unexpected twists and turns into the popular game of Monopoly. Magie’s game provides an illuminating example of how board games offered publishers the opportunity to disseminate cultural, economic, and political values through the marketplace of ideas. Although a primary purpose of a game is amusement, consumers of games are more than just passive recipients of ideas. Games are the only mass medium that can potentially engage users by putting them in the first person as they make decisions to drive themselves The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

It may seem surprising that Magie’s socialist game evolved into Monopoly, a board game that even today serves as a popular symbol 24

of laissez-faire capitalism. The remarkable story of this transformation begins with the acquisition of Magie’s game by the Parker Brothers through a circuitous route.

he both marketed games of his invention and distributed games from other sources. By 1887, Parker became the sole distributor for W. & S. B. Ives, the first American board game publisher and an industry powerhouse. Parker was soon joined by his brothers to form the Parker Brothers company. Capitalist ideas inspired the competitive nature of many of this era’s board games. The rags-to riches story was a key motivator of the American lower class, notably popularized by Horatio Alger’s stories focused on youth of humble origins rising to a middle-class lifestyle.63 Success in this era was measured not only by social and moral standing but increasingly by wealth accumulation. Although Alger’s aspirational novels fortified an egalitarian success parable that was never universally realized, the prevailing opinion of the American public considered this “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps” concept as an essential component of the American Dream.64

Parker Brothers, the Great Depression, and the Evolution of Monopoly George Parker had always been fascinated by games, and as he grew up, his career began to revolve around them.60 In his early years in Salem, Massachusetts, Parker began creating his own original games. As a 16-year-old in 1883, he modified an older moralistic game by including lettered cards, adding a borrowing rule, and introducing a new objective of becoming the richest player by obtaining loans and winning stock speculations. This goal resonated deeply with the many Americans of the time who were captivated by the prospects of wealth, and Banking became his community’s new favorite game. Part of Parker’s success as a game creator can be attributed to his ability to write clear, understandable game instructions that allowed him to communicate to a mass audience.61 He was also a natural salesman, and in the weeks before Christmas, 1883, Parker sold all 500 copies of the first production run of his game. The popularity of Banking can be traced partly to the American public’s growing trust and confidence in the nation’s banking system.62 Banking propelled Parker into his immensely successful game business and was the foundation for an enterprise that was to produce a variety of cherished board games for subsequent generations of players.

Seeing the success of these stories, George Parker and his brothers developed a game with a similar rags-to-riches theme to appeal to ambitious rural and urban lower classes, including the waves of poor immigrants arriving on American shores. The Office Boy, introduced by Parker Brothers in 1889, placed the players as the plucky protagonists in their own Horatio Alger story: beginning as a lowly corporate office boy, players moved around the hexagonal board with their primary goal to amass material goods and advance their career through promotions to mail carrier, then shipper, then salesman, then junior partner, and then head of the branch. The goal was to reach the center space, winning by becoming Head of the Firm.65 Gone

Using his profits from Banking, Parker founded his own company through which 25

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were the earlier moral references on the game boards of The Mansion of Happiness and The Checkered Game of Life: in sharp contrast, The Office Boy’s game board related success exclusively to business acumen. Game spaces such as “Promptness: Advance to Carrying Mail,” “Integrity: Advance to Jr. Partner,” “Negligence: Go Back to Stock Boy,” and “Profitable Business: Advance to Wealth” highlight these newly defined American aspirations.

This newly formed Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) later served as the setting for Frank Norris’ immensely popular 1903 novel, The Pit. Centering on an obsessive wheat speculator in the trading pits of the CBOT and the aftermath of his greed, Norris’ novel was meant to protest the dire social consequences of relentless economic change.69

Stories and games like The Office Boy became so popular partly because of the rise of middle-class wealth and the emergence of vast fortunes in Gilded Age America. Free market capitalism offered the allure of upward social mobility through prosperity and riches, and successful board games of this period connected with the hopes and aspirations of players who used gameplay to learn about and simulate riding this newly apparent pathway to material success and status.

Once again, George Parker demonstrated his aptitude to capitalize swiftly on American’s changing attitudes and fascinations, and he used this popular book as inspiration for the 1904 game of Pit.70 Parker’s game allowed players to trade commodities such as wheat, barley, oats, and flax, until winning by gaining a “corner” on the market.71 In that same year, Parker met President Theodore Roosevelt and discovered that Pit was among the favorite games in the White House, prompting Parker’s realization that his games could touch the lives of Americans of every class. The game became the Parker Brothers’ first million-unit seller, and the company became immensely profitable.72

This pathway existed because of technology and innovation driving immense growth and centralization of American industry in the late 1800s, known as “Big Business.”66 A parallel economic trend captured the public’s imagination in the late 1800s: the tremendous rise in the volume of agricultural commodities transported from across the Midwest to Chicago for storage and then shipment to the more urbanized East Coast. This was a form of Big Business known as “Big Agriculture,” fueled by an influx of labor and capital from abroad.67 The first American commodities exchange was established in 1848 to facilitate efficient, standardized methods to exchange products and capital between farmers and merchants.68 The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

The commercial success of Parker Brothers, however, failed to prepare the company for the disastrous plummet in sales at the inception of the Great Depression. Household budgets were decimated, and consumers were not buying games. In 1933, after 26

three successive years of diminished sales numbers, the corporation suffered a $100,000 loss.73 Turning desperately from one idea to another in search of a new success, Parker settled on a little-known real estate board game that had come to be informally called “the monopoly game” as it was passed around among friends and neighbors. The Landlord’s Game had lost its anti-monopolistic message as game players found Magie’s Georgist vision of economic redistribution less compelling than the versions of gameplay in which players could mercilessly crush each other in a reflection of a profoundly ruthless capitalist society around them.

all of its manufacturing resources behind the production of this single game.76 The return of dice as game pieces, displacing the pious teetotums of the earliest American board games, solidified the complete transition away from the promotion of Puritan values to the new, dominant emphasis on wealth acquisition. Seventeen-year old Parker Brothers employee, Louis Vanne, recounted: Parker Brothers…rewrote the rules so it made them a little, not so complicated. The orders from the stores…they were going crazy…That’s all we did was Monopoly. Didn’t make any other game for two years. Because they couldn’t supply the demand. 77

This game was sold to Parker Brothers in 1935, not by Lizzie Magie, but by a man named Charles Darrow. By the 1930s, The Landlord’s Game had devolved from a legally patented and manufactured game into numerous informal homemade variations, with people exchanging sets they had created themselves and explaining varied rules casually by word of mouth. Darrow learned of “the monopoly game” and took advantage of its diminished popularity and scattered provenance to sell a hastily submitted patent to Parker Brothers, who renamed it Monopoly.74

Monopoly became the most successful patented board game of all time and carried Parker Brothers through the severe economic challenges of the Great Depression.78 One reason for the explosive popularity of the game during this era was that Monopoly offered players, first-hand, a way to learn the mechanics of capitalism and real estate speculation while also indulging in the escapism of virtual competitive wealth accumulation when such opportunities were then even further beyond the reach of many than before. Philip Orbanes notes: The game was initially thought to be too complicated for most players because of its reliance on financial calculations. It succeeded, though, because it arrived at a time when most people could only dream of handling large amounts of money, let alone acquiring property. Because it forced players to calculate like landlords, the game offered

Parker Brothers eventually learned of Darrow’s deceit but decided to move past Darrow’s deception when the company realized they could acquire Magie’s legitimate patent to The Landlord’s Game for a paltry sum and no royalties in a one-sided deal that became known as the “billion dollar Monopoly swindle.”75 In 1935, Monopoly by Parker Brothers took off, selling at the rate of 35,000 games per week as the company put 27

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them much-needed vicarious pleasure.79

of the game was published, removing sexist artwork and the rule mandating that the strength of female characters be less than that of males.82 In 2020, game publishers announced additional changes in response to ongoing protests against racism and police violence.83 In Dungeons & Dragons gameplay, one of the first steps to creating a character is choosing the character’s “race,” yet darkskinned characters had been portrayed as inherently evil. Wizards of the Coast reformed these stereotypes, making orcs and dark elves just as morally and culturally complex as other game characters. The game still requires villains, but as principal rules designer Jeremy Crawford stated: “It’s just they will be villains because they have made villainous choices, not because they were born villainous.”84

Edward Parker, a grandnephew of George Parker, recalled: “During the Depression, people did not have enough money to go out to the shows… So they stayed home and played Monopoly. It also gave them a feeling of wealth. But what kept it going is the chance for individual gain. It appeals to the competitive nature of people.”80 Monopoly, despite the profound challenges represented by the realities of the Great Depression, continued to model the elements of a frayed American Dream, attempting to persuade players that hard work, cunning, economic acumen, and a bit of luck were still all that was needed for anyone to achieve upward mobility.

Conclusion Evolving from their early beginnings as elite pastimes in the ancient world, board games today fulfill the definition of mass media because they convey durable messages to a broad audience, transmitting social and cultural concepts in compelling ways to hundreds of thousands of people daily through the marketplace of ideas. American technological and social developments of the 19th and early 20th centuries transformed board games into mass media. Games have served as bellwethers of cultural change in America, from Puritan morality all the way to ideals of self-determination and upward mobility in the 19th century, and from the splendor and tumult of the Gilded Age all the way to the capitalistic boom and bust of the early 20th century. The Mansion of Happiness and The Checkered Game of Life illuminated

Board Games in the Present Even with the advent of video games, board games today continue to be immensely popular. The industry is growing at an annual rate of 13% despite supply chain disruptions related to the COVID-19 pandemic and a steep decline in the variety of social settings, such as board game cafes, that facilitate community gameplay.81 Tabletop games continue to evolve in ways that reflect changing social values. Wizards of the Coast, publisher of the popular tabletop role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons, has begun to reform some inherently bigoted rules from the 50-year-old game. In 2014, the 5th edition The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

the moral facets that defined American “success” of their time. The subsequent, more marketoriented games Pit, The Office Boy, and Monopoly characterized success exclusively in terms of wealth acquisition, which even the socialist The Landlord’s Game did by emphasizing economic prosperity, albeit through alternative pathways. The success and popularity of these games highlight the central societal importance of the ideas they communicated and promoted. Board games are unique among mass media in their ability to convey ideas by putting game-players in the first person. This ability allows players to interact with concepts directly, rather than just through passive assimilation of information, and then test outcomes of decisions made within a game’s cultural construct by engaging in multiple episodes of persuasive gaming. Analyses of board games merit a place within any study of the cultural history of mass media.

Endnotes Peter Attia, “The Full History of Board Games,” Medium (Medium, September 5, 2018), accessed December 7, 2020, https://medium.com/@peterattia/the-full-history-of-board-games 5e622811ce89. 2 Brenna Hassett and Haluk Sağlamtimur, “Radical ‘Royals’? Burial Practices at Başur Höyük and the Emergence of Early States in Mesopotamia” Antiquity, Cambridge Core (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, June 27, 2018), accessed December 19, 2020, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/ article/radical-royals-burial-practices-at basur-hoyukand-the-emergence-of-early-states-in mesopotamia/23E69D907B072E3789DC5B4F72108AC6. 3 Harikleia Brecoulaki, “‘Precious Colours in Ancient Greek Polychromy and Painting: Material Aspects and Symbolic Values,” Revue Archéologique 57, no. 1 (Paris, France: 2014), p. 3, accessed December 7, 2020, https:// doi.org/10.3917/arch.141.0003. 4 Rossella Lorenzi, “Pieces of Earliest Games Recovered: Photos,” Seeker (New York, NY: Group Nine Media, August 14, 2013), accessed December 7, 2020, https://www.seeker.com/pieces-of-earliest-games-recovered-photos-1767701926.html. 5 N.S. Gill, “The Fertile Crescent and Its Importance in Ancient Times,” (ThoughtCo: October 16, 2020,) accessed December 27, 2020, https://www.thoughtco. com/fertile-crescent-117266. 6 Joshua J. Mark, “Fertile Crescent,” (Horsham, UK: Ancient History Encyclopedia), accessed December 30, 2020, https://www.ancient.eu/Fertile_Crescent/.

Rossella Lorenzi, “Oldest Gaming Tokens Found in Turkey,” August 14, 2013, accessed December 29, 2020, https://www.seeker.com/oldest-gaming-tokensfound-in-turkey 1767702348.html. 8 Game-board, Babylonian Room, Museum number 120834, The British Museum (London, UK), accessed December 17, 2020, https://www.britishmuseum.org/ collection/object/W_1928-1009- 378. 9 Irving L Finkel, “On the Rules for the Royal Game of Ur,” in Ancient Board Games in Perspective: Papers from the 1990 British Museum Colloquium (London, UK: British Museum Press, 2005), pp. 16-32. 10 Tablet, Museum number 33333,b, British Museum, (London, UK), accessed December 7, 2020, https:// www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_Rm-III6-b. 11 Finkel, “Royal Game of Ur,” p. 25. 12 Ibid, p. 31. 13 Christine Bichsel. “Water and the (Infra-)Structure of Political Rule: A Synthesis.” Water Alternatives 9, no. 2 (2016), pp. 356–372. 14 W. J. T. Mitchell, Mark B. N. Hansen, and John D Peters, “Mass Media,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 266-279. 15 “Johannes Gutenberg,” Biography.com (A&E Networks Television, June 16, 2020), accessed December 7, 2020, https://www.biography.com/inventor/johannes-gutenberg. 16 Sam Neill, “Books and Marshall McLuhan,” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 41, no. 4,

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pp. 311-19 (Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1971), accessed April 3, 2020, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4306112. 17 “Burma-Shave Sign,” National Museum of American History, (Washington, DC), accessed December 10, 2020, https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/ search/object/nmah_844941. 18 Thomas Schlereth, Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, (NY, NY: Harper Perennial, 1991) pp. 7-12. 19 Ibid, p. 57. 20 James J. Shea, and Charles E. Mercer, It’s All in the Game. (New York, NY: Putnam, 1960). 21 Margaret K. Hofer, The Games We Played: the Golden Age of Board & Table Games (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003), pp. 14-15. 22 “The Development Process from Lithography to Chromolithography,” Having a Look at History of Graphic Design, (April 4, 2012), accessed December 7, 2020, http://havingalookathistoryofgraphicdesign.blogspot. com/2012/04/development-process-form lithography-to.html. 23 Harald Sack, “Richard March Hoe and the Second Printing Revolution,” SciHi Blog, September 16, 2020, accessed December 15, 2020, http://scihi.org/ruchardmarch-hoe/. 24 Kelli Wood, “A History of Play in Print Board Games from the Renaissance to Milton Bradley,” Digital Scholarship@UNLV, Center for Gaming Research, (Las Vegas, NV: UNLV University Libraries, 2018), accessed December 27, 2020, https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/occ_papers/44/. 25 Schlereth, Victorian America, p. 155. 26 Office of the Inspector General, United States Postal Service, 100 Years of Parcel Post Report Number RARC-WP-14-004, (Arlington, VA: December 20), accessed December 8, 2020, https://www.uspsoig.gov/ sites/default/files/document-library-files/2015/rarcwp-14-004_0.pdf. 27 Robert J. Keith, “The Marketing Revolution,” Journal of Marketing 24, no. 3 (1960): 3538, accessed April 13, 2021, doi:10.2307/1248704. 28 Clarence D. Long, “Wages and Earnings in the United States, 1860-1890, National Bureau of Economic Research, No. 67, General Studies, Pp. xvii, 169, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 337 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), p 48, accessed January 2, 2020, https://www. nber.org/system/files/chapters/c2497/c2497.pdf 29Jane Bro, “Artificial Light: How Man-Made Brightness Has

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Changed the Way We Live,” The Independent, (Independent Digital News and Media, October 23, 2011), accessed December 7, 2020, https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/artificial-light-how man-made-brightness-has-changedway-we-live-and-see-forever-2282563.html. 30Fred Nadis, “Gilded Age Leisure and Recreation,” Encyclopedia of Recreation and Leisure in America (Encyclopedia.com, December 30, 2020), accessed December 7, 2020, https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/ encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/gilded age-leisure-and-recreation. 31 J.W. Stearns, “The Public Schools and Morality,” Journal of Proceedings and Addresses of the National Educational Association (1886): 81–90, accessed December 8, 2020, https://books.google.com/books?id=-FZJAQAAMAAJ. 32 Jennifer L. Snyder and Tom Anderson, “A Critical Examination of Milton Bradley’s Contributions to Kindergarten and Art Education in the Context of His Time,” Thesis, Florida State University, 0AD, accessed December 8, 2020, http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_migr_etd-0373. 33 Donald Scott, “Evangelicalism, Revivalism, and the Second Great Awakening, The Nineteenth Century, Divining America: Religion in American History”, TeacherServe, (National Humanities Center, October 2000), accessed March 24, 2021, http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/ nkeyinfo/nevanrev.htm. 34 Jenny Kile, “Treasured Find: 1843 Mansion of Happiness Board Game,” Mysterious Writings, March 26, 2018, accessed December 7, 2020, https://mysteriouswritings.com/treasured-find 1843-mansion-of-happiness-board-game/. 35 Marian S. Carson Collection, and W. & S.B. Ives, “The Mansion of Happiness: An Instructive Moral and Entertaining Amusement,” (Salem, MA: W. & S.B. Ives, 1843), accessed December 8, 2020, https://www.loc.gov/ item/85116226/. 36 “Game Rules: The Mansion of Happiness,” Library of Congress, Marian S. Carson Collection, and W. & S.B. Ives, (Salem, MA: W. & S.B. Ives, 1843), accessed December 1, 2020, https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbc0001. 2017carson88414/?sp=5&r=-0.447,-0.007,1.933,1.382,0. 37 Jill Lepore, The Mansion of Happiness: a History of Life and Death (New York, NY: Vintage, 2013), p. 45. 38 Barbara MacPherson Burgess, “Journals, Diaries, and Letters Written by Women on the Oregon Trail 1836-

1865,” Thesis, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, (Manhattan, KS: Kansas State University, 1984), accessed December 8, 2020, https://core. ac.uk/download/pdf/33371233.pdf. 39 “Teetotum: The Mansion of Happiness”, Library of Congress, Marian S. Carson Collection, and W. & S.B. Ives. Salem, MA, 1843, accessed December 1, 2020, https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbc0001.2017carson88414/?sp=12. 40 Ian Bogost, “Persuasive Games, A Decade Later,” in Persuasive Gaming in Context (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), p. 30. 41 Shea, It’s All in the Game, p. 57. 42 Alexis de Tocqueville, Henry Reeve, and John C. Spencer, Democracy in America (New York, NY: J. & H.G. Langley, 1840), p. 190. 43 Schlereth, Victorian America, p. 194. 44 E.L. Godkin, “Nation,” Nation, September 24, 1874, pp. 201-202, accessed December 7, 2020, http:// web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=3&sid=66adc175-14fc-4186-a3d9f769ef87681a%40sessionmgr4008. 45 Shea, It’s All in the Game, p. 48. 46 Douglas A. Guerra, “Both In and Out of Games,” in Slantwise Moves: Games, Literature, and Social Invention in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), pp. 27-61. 47 Jennifer L. Snyder and Tom Anderson, “A Critical Examination of Milton Bradley’s Contributions to Kindergarten and Art Education in the Context of His Time,” Thesis, (Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University, 0AD), accessed December 8, 2020, http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/ FSU_migr_etd-0373. 48 Game board: The Checkered Game of Human Life, New York Historical Society Museum and Library, Liman Collection, Object Number 2000.496b, accessed December 9, 2020, https://www.nyhistory.org/exhibit/ checkered-game-life-1. 49 Christina De Bellaigue, “Great Expectations? Childhood, Family, and Middle-Class Social Mobility in Nineteenth-Century England,” The Journal of the Social History Society (Taylor & Francis, February 2, 2019), accessed December 7, 2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1478003 8.2019.1574051. 50 Shea, It’s All in the Game, p. 57. 51 Gary Richardson and Tim Sablik, “Banking Panics of the Gilded Age,” Federal Reserve History, December 4, 2015, accessed December 16, 2020,

https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/banking-panics-of-the-gilded-age. 52 Schlereth, Victorian America, p. 155. 53 Henry George, “The True Remedy,” Progress and Poverty, Chapter 25, 1879, accessed December 2, 2020, http://www.henrygeorge.org/pchp25.htm. 54 Fred Niklason, “Henry George: Social Gospeller,” American Quarterly 22, no. 3, 1970 pp 649- 64, accessed December 12, 2020, doi:10.2307/2711617. 55 Game board: The Landlord’s Game, The Strong National Museum of Play, Object ID 118.8609, accessed December 9, 2020, https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/_/iAG vEdGChNEsXQ. 56 Game Rules - The Landlord’s Game - Economic Game Company, January 5, 1904, accessed December 13, 2020, https://landlordsgame.info/games/lg-1906/lg1906_egc-rules.html. 57 Mark Taylor, “Utopia by Taxation: Frank Stephens and the Single Tax Community of Arden, Delaware,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 126, no. 2 (2002), pp. 305-325, accessed April 10, 2021, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20093532. 58 “Monopoly’s Anti-Capitalist, Socialist Roots as a Teaching Game at Wharton,” The Alfred West Jr. Learning Lab (Philadelphia, PA: The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, March 23, 2016), accessed March 24, 2020, https://simulations.wharton.upenn.edu/2016/03/10/ monopoly/. 59 Mary Pilon, “Monopoly Goes Corporate,” The New York Times (New York, NY: The New York Times, August 24, 2013), accessed December 7, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/sunday-review/ monopoly-goes-corporate.html. 60 Philip Orbanes, The Game Makers: the Story of Parker Brothers, from Tiddledy Winks to Trivial Pursuit (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2004), p. 69. 61 “Salem Brothers Incorporate Game Company,” Mass Moments, MassHumanities, accessed December 12, 2020, https://www.massmoments.org/moment-details/salem-brothers-incorporate game-company.html. 62 Rae Mann, “American Board Games and the Nineteenth Century,” GameArchive, May 21, 2015, accessed December 10, 2020, https://gamearchive.as.ua.edu/ american-board-games-and the-nineteenth-century/. 63 Stefan Kanfer et al., “Horatio Alger: The Moral of the Story,” City Journal, June 18, 2019, accessed December 19, 2020, https://www.city-journal.org/html/hora-

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tio-alger-moral-story 11933.html. 64 Edward Pessen, “Equality and Opportunity in America, 1800-1940,” The Wilson Quarterly (1976- ) 1, no. 5 (1977), pp. 136-142, accessed March 26, 2021, doi:10.2307/40255293. 65 Parker Brothers, Inc. and Marian S. Carson Collection, The Office Boy, (Salem, MA: Parker Bros, 1889), accessed December 9, 2020, https:// www.loc.gov/item/97196328/. 66 Ross Levine, “Financial Development and Economic Growth: Views and Agenda,” Journal of Economic Literature 35, no. 2 (1997), pp. 688-726, accessed April 3, 2021, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2729790. 67 Yair Mundlak, “Economic Growth: Lessons from Two Centuries of American Agriculture,” Journal of Economic Literature 43, no. 4 (2005), pp. 989-1024, accessed April 13, 2021, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4129381. 68 “Understanding the History of Commodities Markets and Futures Market,” UniversalClass.com, accessed January 15, 2021, https://www.universalclass.com/articles/business/investments/understanding-the-history-of commodities-markets-and-futures-market.htm. 69 Morton Rothstein, “Frank Norris and Popular Perceptions of the Market,” Agricultural History 56, no. 1 (January 1982): pp. 50-66. 70 Orbanes, The Game Makers, p. 37. 71 “Pit Card Game, Bull and Bear Edition,” National Museum of American History, Museum Accession Number 1986.0814, accessed January 15, 2021, https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_323758. 72 Orbanes, The Game Makers, p. 38. 73 Ibid, p. 85. 74 Mary Pilon, “The Secret History of Monopoly: the Capitalist Board Game’s Leftwing Origins,” The Guardian, (Guardian News and Media, April 11, 2015), accessed December 28, 2020, https://www.theguardian. com/lifeandstyle/2015/apr/11/secret-history-monopoly-capitalist game-leftwing-origins. 75 Ralph Anspach, Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle: during a David and Goliath Battle, the Inventor of the Anti-Monopoly Game Uncovers the Secret History of Monopoly (Bloomington, In.: Xlibris Corp, 2007). 76 Orbanes, The Game Makers, p. 99. 77 John J Fox, “Audio File Transcript Parker Brothers Oral History Project Collection,” ed. Julia Novakovic, Christopher Bensch, and Nicolas Ricketts, Preservica (Strong Museum of Play), accessed January 15, 2021,

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https://museumofplay.access.preser vica.com/ uncategorized/IO_f569eb46-07d0-471e-bb57b64204e51232/. 78 Ellen Terrell, “Monopoly Patented,” Monopoly Patented: This Month in Business History (Business Reference Services, Library of Congress, February 2009), accessed December 7, 2020, https://www.loc.gov/rr/ business/businesshistory/December/monopoly.html. 79 Philip Orbanes, “Everything I know About Busines I Learned from Monopoly,” in the Harvard Busines Review, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, March 2002), accessed April 14, 2021, https:// hbr.org/2002/03/everything-i-know-about-business-ilearned from-monopoly. 80 Mary Pilon, “Parker Brothers: From Depression to Boom,” in Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), pp. 100-106. 81 “Board Games Market - Global Outlook and Forecast 2021-2026,” Research and Markets - Market Research Reports - Welcome (Arizton Advisory & Intelligence, December 2020), accessed February 19, 2021, https:// www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/5228437/board games-market-global-outlook-and-forecast. 82 Gendy Alimurung, “How Dungeons & Dragons Somehow Became More Popular than Ever,” The Washington Post (Washington, DC: WP Company, April 25, 2019), accessed December 7, 2020, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/how-dungeons-and-dragons-somehow became-more-popular-than-ever/2019/04/18/fc226f56-5f8f-11e9-9412daf3d2e67c6d_story.html. 83 “Diversity and Dungeons & Dragons,” Features | Dungeons & Dragons (Wizards of the Coast, June 17, 2020), accessed December 23, 2020, https://dnd.wizards.com/ articles/features/diversity and-dnd. 84 Andrew Limbong, “‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Tries To Banish Racist Stereotypes,” NPR (NPR, June 29, 2020), accessed January 21, 2021, https://www.npr. org/sections/live-updates-protestsfor-racial-just i c e / 2 02 0 / 0 6 / 29 / 8 8 4 8 24 2 3 6 / d u n g e o n s - d ra g ons-tries-to-banish-racist-stereotypes.

Bibliography Primary Sources: Fox, John J. “Audio File Transcript Parker Brothers Oral History Project Collection.” ed. Julia Novakovic, Christopher Bensch, and Nicolas Ricketts. Preservica, Strong

Museum of Play, Rochester, NY. https://museumofplay. access.preservica.com/uncategorized/IO_f569eb4607d0-471e-bb57-b64204e51232/. Game board: Babylonian Room, Museum number 120834. The British Museum, London, UK. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_1928-1009-378. Game board: The Checkered Game of Human Life, New York Historical Society Museum and Library, New York, NY. Liman Collection, Object Number 2000.496b. https://www.nyhistory.org/exhibit/checkered-gamelife-1. Game board: The Landlord’s Game, The Strong National Museum of Play, Rochester, NY. Object Number 118.8609. https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/_/ iAGvEdGChNEsXQ. Game board: The Mansion of Happiness: An Instructive Moral and Entertaining Amusement, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Marian S. Carson Collection, and W. & S.B. Ives. 1843. https:// www.loc.gov/item/85116226/. Game Rules: The Landlord’s Game - Economic Game Company. January 5, 1904. https://landlordsgame.info/ games/lg-1906/lg-1906_egc-rules.html. Game Rules: The Mansion of Happiness, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Marian S. Carson Collection, and W. & S.B. Ives. Salem, Massachusetts: W. & S.B. Ives, 1843. https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbc0001. 2017carson88414/?sp=5&r=-0.447,- 0.007,1.933,1.382,0. Godkin, E.L. “Chromo-Civilization.” Nation 19, no. 482, September 24, 1874. http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=3&sid=66adc175-14 fc-4186- a3d9-f769ef87681a%40sessionmgr4008. Parker Brothers, Inc, and Marian S. Carson Collection. The Office Boy. Salem, MA: Parker Bros, 1889. https:// www.loc.gov/item/97196328/. “Pit Card Game, Bull and Bear Edition.” National Museum of American History, Washington, DC. Museum Accession Number 1986.0814. https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_323758. Tablet: Museum number 33333,b. British Museum, London, UK. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_ Rm-III-6-b. Teetotum: The Mansion of Happiness. Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Marian S. Carson Collection, and W. & S.B. Ives. Salem, MA, 1843. https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbc0001.2017carson88414/.

Secondary Sources: Alimurung, Gendy. “How Dungeons & Dragons Somehow Became More Popular than Ever.” The Washington Post. WP Company, April 25, 2019. h t t p s : / / w w w.w a s h i n g to n p o s t .c o m / e n te r t a i n ment/how-dungeons-and-dragons-somehow became-more-popular-than-ever/2019/04/18/ fc226f56-5f8f-11e9-9412daf3d2e67c6d_story.html. Anspach, Ralph. Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle: during a David and Goliath Battle, the Inventor of the Anti-Monopoly Game Uncovers the Secret History of Monopoly. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris Corp, 2007. Attia, Peter. “The Full History of Board Games.” Medium. Medium, September 5, 2018. https://medium. com/@peterattia/the-full-history-of-board-games5e622811ce89. Bichsel, Christine. “Water and the (Infra-)Structure of Political Rule: A Synthesis.” Water Alternatives 9, no. 2 (2016): 356–72. “Board Games Market - Global Outlook and Forecast 2021-2026.” Research and Markets, Arizton Advisory & Intelligence, December 2020. h t t p s : / / w w w. re s e a rc h a n d m a rke t s .c o m / re ports/5228437/board-games-market-global outlook-and-forecast. Bogost, Ian. “Persuasive Games, A Decade Later,” in Persuasive Gaming in Context. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. Brecoulaki, Harikleia. “‘Precious Colours in Ancient Greek Polychromy and Painting : Material Aspects and Symbolic Values.” Revue archéologique 57, no. 1 (2014): 3. https://doi.org/10.3917/arch.141.0003. Bro, Jane. “Artificial Light: How Man-Made Brightness Has Changed the Way We Live.” The Independent. Independent Digital News and Media, October 23, 2011. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgetsand-tech/features/artificial-light-how man-madebrightness-has-changed-way-we-live-and-see-forever-2282563.html. Burgess, Barbara MacPherson. “Journals, Diaries, and Letters Written by Women on the Oregon Trail 18361865.” Thesis, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication Manhattan, KS: Kansas State University, 1984. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/33371233.pdf. “Burma-Shave Sign.” National Museum of American History Washington, DC. https://americanhistory.

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si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_844941. Crowley, D. J., Peter Urquhart, Paul Heyer, and Logan Robert. “Writing and the Alphabet Effect.” Essay. In Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society. London, UK: Routledge, 2018. De Bellaigue, Christina. “Great Expectations? Childhood, Family, and Middle-Class Social Mobility in Nineteenth-Century England.” The Journal of the Social History Society. Taylor & Francis, February 2, 2019. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1478003 8.2019.1574051. “The Development Process from Lithography to Chromolithography.” Having a Look at History of Graphic Design, April 4, 2012. http://havingalookathistoryofgraphicdesign.blogspot. com/2012/04/development-process form-lithography-to.html. “Diversity and Dungeons & Dragons.” Features | Dungeons & Dragons. Wizards of the Coast, June 17, 2020. https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/diversity-and-dnd. Finkel, Irving L. “On the Rules for the Royal Game of Ur.” Essay in Ancient Board Games in Perspective: Papers from the 1990 British Museum Colloquium, 16–32. London, UK: British Museum Press, 2005. George, Henry. “The True Remedy.” Progress and Poverty, Chapter 25, 1879. http://www.henrygeorge.org/ pchp25.htm. Gill, N.S. “The Fertile Crescent and Its Importance in Ancient Times.” ThoughtCo, October 16, 2020. https:// www.thoughtco.com/fertile-crescent-117266. Guerra, Douglas A. “Both In and Out of Games.” Essay in Slantwise Moves: Games, Literature, and Social Invention in Nineteenth-Century America, 27–61. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Hassett, Brenna, and Haluk Sağlamtimur. “Radical ‘Royals’? Burial Practices at Başur Höyük and the Emergence of Early States in Mesopotamia.” Antiquity, Cambridge Core. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, June 27, 2018. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/ article/radical-royals-burial-practices at-basur-hoyukand-the-emergence-of-early-states-in-mesopotamia/. Hofer, Margaret K. The Games We Played: the Golden Age of Board & Table Games. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003. “Johannes Gutenberg.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, June 16, 2020. https://www.biography.com/ inventor/johannes-gutenberg.

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Kanfer, Stefan, Peter Boettke, Troy Senik, and Naomi Schaefer Riley. “Horatio Alger: The Moral of the Story.” City Journal, June 18, 2019. https://www.city journal.org/html/horatio-alger-moral-story-11933.html. Keith, Robert J. “The Marketing Revolution.” Journal of Marketing 24, no. 3 (1960): 35-38. doi:10.2307/1248704. Kile, Jenny. “Treasured Find: 1843 Mansion of Happiness Board Game.” Mysterious Writings, March 26, 2018. https://mysteriouswritings.com/treasured-find1843-mansion-of happiness-board-game/. Lepore, Jill. The Mansion of Happiness: a History of Life and Death. New York, NY: Vintage, 2013. Levine, Ross. “Financial Development and Economic Growth: Views and Agenda.” Journal of Economic Literature 35, no. 2 (1997): 688-726. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/2729790. Limbong, Andrew. “‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Tries To Banish Racist Stereotypes.” NPR. NPR, June 29, 2020. https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial justice/2020/06/29/884824236/dungeons-dragons-tries-to-banish-racist-stereotypes. Long, Clarence D. “Wages and Earnings in the United States, 1860-1890. National Bureau of Economic Research, No. 67, General Studies. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 337. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961. https:// www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c2497/c2497.pdf. Lorenzi, Rossella. “Oldest Gaming Tokens Found in Turkey,” Seeker. Group Nine Media, August 14, 2013. https:// www.seeker.com/oldest-gaming-tokens-found-in-turkey 1767702348.html. Lorenzi, Rossella. “Pieces of Earliest Games Recovered: Photos.” Seeker, Group Nine Media, August 14, 2013. https://www.seeker.com/pieces-of-earliest-games-recovered-photos 1767701926.html. Mann, Rae. “American Board Games and the Nineteenth Century,” GameArchive, May 21, 2015. https:// gamearchive.as.ua.edu/american-board-games-andthe-nineteenth-century/. Mark, Joshua J. “Fertile Crescent” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia. https://www. ancient.eu/Fertile_Crescent/. “Monopoly’s Anti-Capitalist, Socialist Roots as a Teaching Game at Wharton.” The Alfred West Jr. Learning Lab. The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, PA, March 23, 2016. https://simulations.wharton.upenn.edu/2016/03/10/monopoly/. Mundlak, Yair. “Economic Growth: Lessons from Two Centuries of American Agriculture.” Journal of Eco-

nomic Literature 43, no. 4 (2005): 989-1024. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4129381. Nadis, Fred. “Gilded Age Leisure and Recreation.” Encyclopedia of Recreation and Leisure in America, Encyclopedia.com, December 30, 2020. https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and maps/gilded-age-leisure-and-recreation. Nicklason, Fred. “Henry George: Social Gospeller.” American Quarterly 22, no. 3, 1970. doi:10.2307/2711617 Office of the Inspector General, United States Postal Service. 100 Years of Parcel Post Report Number RARCWP-14-004, December 20, 2013, Arlington, Virginia. https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/document-library-files/2015/rarc-wp-14- 004_0.pdf. Orbanes, Philip. “Everything I know About Busines I Learned from Monopoly,” in the Harvard Busines Review. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, March 2002. https://hbr.org/2002/03/everything-iknow-about-business-i-learned-from-monopoly. Orbanes, Philip. The Game Makers: the Story of Parker Brothers, from Tiddledy Winks to Trivial Pursuit. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2004. Pessen, Edward. “Equality and Opportunity in America, 1800-1940.” The Wilson Quarterly (1976-) 1, no. 5 (1977). doi:10.2307/40255293. Pilon, Mary. “The Secret History of Monopoly: the Capitalist Board Game’s Leftwing Origins.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media. London, UK, April 11, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/ apr/11/secret-history-monopoly-capitalist game-leftwing-origins. Pilon, Mary. “Parker Brothers: From Depression to Boom.” essay in Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016. Richardson, Gary, and Tim Sablik. “Banking Panics of the Gilded Age.” Federal Reserve History, December 4, 2015. https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/ banking-panics of-the-gilded-age. Rothstein, Morton. “Frank Norris and Popular Perceptions of the Market.” Agricultural History 56, no. 1 (January 1982). Sack, Harald. “Richard March Hoe and the Second Printing Revolution.” SciHi Blog. September 16, 2020. http:// scihi.org/ruchard-march-hoe/. “Salem Brothers Incorporate Game Company.” Mass Moments, MassHumanities. https://www.massmoments.org/moment-details/salem-brothers-incorpo-

rate-game company.html. Schlereth, Thomas. Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life. New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 1991. Scott, Donald. “Evangelicalism, Revivalism, and the Second Great Awakening,” Divining America: Religion in American History. TeacherServe, National Humanities Center. Research Triangle Park, NC, October 2000. http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/ nkeyinfo/nevanrev.htm. Shea, James J., and Charles E. Mercer. It’s All in the Game. New York, NY: Putnam, 1960. Snyder, Jennifer L., and Tom Anderson. “A Critical Examination of Milton Bradley’s Contributions to Kindergarten and Art Education in the Context of His Time.” Thesis, Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University, 0AD. http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_migr_etd 0373. Stearns, J.W. “The Public Schools and Morality.” Journal of Proceedings and Addresses of the National Educational Association. Washington, DC: 1886. https://books.google.com/books. Taylor, Mark. “Utopia by Taxation: Frank Stephens and the Single Tax Community of Arden, Delaware.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 126, no. 2 (2002). http://www.jstor.org/stable/20093532. Terrell, Ellen. “Monopoly Patented.” This Month in Business History, Business Reference Services, Library of Congress, February 2009. https://www.loc.gov/rr/business/businesshistory/December/monopoly.html. Tocqueville, Alexis de, Henry Reeve, and John C. Spencer, Democracy in America. New York, NY: J. & H.G. Langley, 1840. “Understanding the History of Commodities Markets and Futures Market.” UniversalClass.com. https://www. universalclass.com/articles/business/investments/ understanding-the-history of-commodities-markets-and-futures-market.htm. Wood, Kelli. “A History of Play in Print Board Games from the Renaissance to Milton Bradley.” In Center for Gaming Research Occasional Paper Series: Paper 44. Las Vegas, NV: UNLV University Libraries, 2018. https:// digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/occ_papers/44/.

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STALIN’S CONSOLIDATION OF POWER IN THE SOVIET UNION January 7, 2022 | 20th Century World History Barrett Cosgrove ‘24 Stalin is one of the most notorious and ruthless dictators in all of history. He ruled over the Soviet Union for more than three decades, between 1922 and 1953, in which time he converted it from a socialist republic into a vast communist totalitarian regime that was one of the greatest industrial and military powers of the 20th century.1 During Stalin’s rule, he formed an incredibly vast and influential cult of personality that gave him intangible amounts of power and influence by not only establishing himself as the political leader of the Soviet Union, but also as the ideological and military leader of the state.2 Moreover, Stalin used propaganda to consolidate power by controlling the flow of information in the Soviet Union so that he could unknowingly indoctrinate citizens with his ideology and thinking.3 Likewise the notorious Great Purge, in which both officials and civilians alike were imprisoned and killed, was used to eliminate any political and ideological opposition to the Stalin regime.4 Consequently, Stalin used the terror he created during the Great Purge to force Soviet citizens into complaince and to further integrate Stalinist ideology into their daily livess.5 Stalin was ultimately able to consolidate power in the Soviet Union and become one of history’s most notable and ruthless dictators by building a cult of personality, running extensive propaganda The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

campaigns, eliminating potential threats to his regime during the Great Purge, and by creating an environment of fear and terror to force his people into submission. Stalin built his cult of personality by establishing himself as the political, intellectual, and military leader of the Soviet Union.6-7 Before his eventual rise to power, Stalin wanted to become a Communist intellectual similar to that of Marx or Lenin.8 For this reason, Stalin spent his time avidly studying both Communist philosophy and history in order to join the ranks of other Soviet intellectuals.9 Over time, Stalin slowly gained prominence as both a state official and an intellectual, a prestige that very few could reach, as well as one that would be particularly useful to him in the future.10 When Stalin finally took power 1922 after the death of Lenin, he was able to present himself as not only the new political leader of the Soviet Union but as the new ideological leader of the state as well.11 As the intellectual leader of the state, Stalin produced his own ideological dogma and rewrote the history of the Russian revolution to further legitimize his position as the rightful successor of Lenin.12 With Stalin’s new version of Soviet history, it was nearly impossible to question his legitimacy as Lennin’s successor and as the rightful leader of the Communist party. 36

Furthermore, Stalin used propaganda produced by the Soviet state to become a symbol of not only the Communist party but the Soviet state itself.13 Thus, to question Stalin’s authority was to question the authority of both the Communist party and the Soviet state itself.14 Consequently, as Stalin’s cult grew, he began producing more and more of his own political and ideological dogma that made him the face of progress in the Soviet Union.15 Perhaps the most significant and important evolution of Stalin’s cult came as the byproduct of World War 2.16 Stalin, before the outbreak of war with Nazi Germany in 1941, had protrayed himself as a benevolent yet strong leader.17 However, Stalin used the war to create a new warrior archetype as a military and strategic genius.18 An example of this archetype in practice can be seen during Stalin’s radio address on July 3, 1941, in which he stated, “In order to insure rapid mobilization of all the forces of the peoples of the USSR, and to repulse the enemy who has treacherously attacked our country, a State Committee of Defense has been formed in whose hands the entire power of the State has been vested. The State Committee of Defense has entered on its functions and calls upon all our people to rally around the Party of Lenin-Stalin and around the Soviet Government so as self-denying to support the Red Army and Navy, demolish the enemy and secure victory. All our forcesfor the support of our heroic Red Army and

our glorious Red Navy! All forces of the peoplefor the demolition of the enemy! Forward to our victory!”19 Stalin’s call to arms is a primary example of his military archetype in action, in which Stalin, like a great general, called upon his people to rise up and fight against the Nazi threat. Stalin heavily used speeches and other forms of state propaganda to inspire the Soviet people in their fight against the Germans with Stalin himself as the face of the war effort.20 The victory of the Allies in 1945 solidified Stalin’s warrior archetype and further legitimized Stalin’s authority by establishing him as the military genius who led the Soviet people to victory.21 Ultimately, by the end of the war, Stalin had been guaranteed unquestionable loyalty and faith from his people. However, maintaining a cult as large as Stalin’s was not an easy task, and that’s where the Soviet propaganda machine came into place.22 Propaganda, which Stalin prolifically used throughout his time in power, not only helped him build one the greatest personality cults of any dictator ever, but it also helped Stalin control the hearts and minds of his people.23 Under Stalin, the Soviet state carefully and meticulously produced propaganda that coincided with Stalin’s goals as a ruler.24 Through Stalin, all forms of media were weaponized and truth itself was monopolized by the Soviet state.25 The composition of entire newspapers, television, art, and radio, 37

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amongst other media, were completely owned and altered by the Soviet state in order to distribute propaganda and disinformation unknowingly to the Soviet people in mass.26 As stated in the Soviet-owned Newspaper the Pravada, “For our fatherland! This call fans the flame of heroism, the flame of creative initiative in pursuits and all fields of our rich life. For our fatherland! This call arouses millions of workers and alerts them in the defense of their great country.The defense of the fatherland is the supreme law of life. And he who raises his hand against his country, he who betrays his country should be destroyed.”27 Stalin found a way to implement state propaganda into all corners of life through the incredibly advanced propaganda machine that he built within the Soviet Union.28 By heavily implementing propaganda into the daily lives of Soviet citizens, Stalin was able to control the truth itself and to spread whatever message or narrative he desired, this being because there was no real news in the Soviet Union, only Stalin’s version of it.29 Despite the general success of Stalin’s propaganda and disinformation campaigns, Stalin still remained fearful that those around him would try to usurp his power and he thus sought to eliminate any and all threats he perceived to the Soviet state and his absolute power within it.

labor camps.30-31 The purge itself was a violent and barbaric campaign led by Stalin in order to eliminate all political opposition to his regime.32 Anyone who questioned Stalin’s authority or who he perceived as a threat was swiftly dealt with.33 Artists, politicians, intellectuals, and other groups of citizens were all targets of the purge.34 Despite the gruesome nature of the purge, Stalin and other officials framed the purge as an anti-corruption campaign.35 As stated by Nikolai Ezhov, a Soviet official, “The task of the organs of state security is mercilessly to destroy all this band of antiSoviet elements, to protect the toiling Soviet people from their counterrevolutionary raids, and once and for all, to finish with their subversive work to undermine the foundations of the Soviet state.”36 Stalin and other high ranking party officials, such as Nikolai Ezhov, framed the Great Purge as a necessary step for the Communist party to rid itself of all it’s anticommunist influences, but this was far from reality. Many party officials targeted during the purge were condemned, jailed, and executed under the pretense of completely and utterly fabricated crimes so that Stalin could quickly and publicly eliminate his enemies without controversy or contradiction.37 In addition, the trials officials were subjected to were just as artificial as the crimes they were accused of, with fixed juries, fake evidence, and in many cases with fake confessions that were forced out of those on trial.38 Stalin ultimately used these shame trials to eliminate any party official he wanted without a moment

During the Great Purge, which occurred between 1936 and 1938, millions of Soviet citizens were either killed or imprisoned in The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

of hesitation, which allowed Stalin to completely reshape the Communist party and to further legitimize his power as a whole.39 However, Soviet officials were not the only group targeted during the Great Purge. Stalin selectively targeted certain enthinc groups within the USSR and other independent states under Soviet control.40 During the Great Purge around 700,000 to 1,000,000 people were systematically executed by the Soviet state, around 111,000 of which were Poles.41 During this period, Poles were 34% more likely to be arrested than regular Soviet citizens and 78% of Poles who were arrested were eventually executed.42 Soviet officials such as Vsevolod Balytskyi, the Chief of the Ukrainian NKVD, even went as far to blame the Poles for the famine that had struck Ukraine during Collectivization and claimed the Poles they had imprisoned and executed were in fact spies, which was yet another complete and utter lie.43 Not only was the Soviet state clearly responsible for the Ukrainian genocide but the “Polish spies” they were killing were just ordinary citizens, who like many Soviet officials were tortured and forced to confess to crimes which they did not commit.44 By creating this narrative, the Soviet state not only justified their systematic execution of more than a hundred thousand Polish people, but they also created an excuse for the genocide Stalin iniated in Ukraine through his failed Collectization plan. However, Poles were not the only ethnic group targeted

by Stalin. Aproxiately 36% of those killed in the purge belonged to independent Soviet controlled states, in which people were twenty times more likely to be executed than other Soviet citizens.45 The only ones spared from Stalin’s carnage were Communist and certain diplomats backed by the Soviet government, but those who were spared were few in number relative to those killed.46 The Great Purge without exception inspired terror in Soviet citizens, however, Stalin did not waste this opportunity to capilize on the fear of his own citizens. The Great Purge and other violent policies employed by Stalin created an environment of fear, which not only discouraged opposition towards Stalin’s regime but also motivated cooperation and loyalty to the Communist party. The Great Purge is perhaps the greatest example of how Stalin was able to create and capitalize on fear.47 The systematic wide scale arrest and execution of Soviet government officials and citizens alike created an environment of fear that permeated the Soviet Union for years.48 The scale of the Great Purge was unquestionably massive as more than a million people were either killed or imprisoned in Stalin’s notorious labor camps, the Gulags, which naturally affected the lives of countless other citizens.49 Stalin was well aware of the fear he inspired and wanted to fully capitalize on it.50 Stalin reasoned that to truly control his people they would not only have to love him but fear him as well.51 Fear became the main motivator for compliance in Stalin’s regime,

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further solidifying his position and unquestionable authority as the leader of the Soviet Union.52 The Great Purge ultimately made citizens completely and utterly terrified of defying the Soviet state in a way due to the certainty and severity of their punishment for doing so.53 Many Soviet citizens consequently lived in fear under Stalin, worried that any misstep would get them killed or sent away to a Gulag.54 Soviet officials also felt a great degree of pressure from the purge, as Stalin eliminated anyone he feared could or would provide political opposition to him.55 Thus, disagreeing with Stalin was a near death sentence. Furthermore, many of those killed by Stalin had been Bolsheviks long before the November Revolution, which not only further legitimized Stalin’s authority but it showed that he could and was willing to kill anyone he pleased.56 Stalin himself justified the purge as a costless strategy that insured the security of the Communist party, despite his clear motivation to insure his longevity in power.57 In the end, however, Stalin used fear as yet another mechanism to secure his goal of total and unavvdulterated authority in the Soviet Union through his often brutal and vicious actions. Ultimately, Stalin was able to consolidate power in the Soviet Union through his cult of personality, use of propaganda, the Great Purgee, and the fear and terror he inspired in his own people. Stalin through his extreme and often costly decisions, in which the loss of human life was often a consequence, was able to secure control of the Soviet Union until his eventual death in 1953 and to cultivate one of the greatest and most feared global superpowers of the 20th Century by rapidly industrializing and modernizing the Soviet Union.58 Although Stalin himself has been dead for more than half a century, the ruthlessness and prestige that he displayed while in power is what made him one of the most notable and important dictators in all of modern history. In the wake of Stalin’s legacy, it is important to remember the cruelty and heartlessness that certain men are capable of when their power is not put into check and the atrocities that will undoubtedly happen as a result. For this reason, we can learn from Stalin the importance of holding our leaders accountable for both the lives and well-being of their citizens and the horrible consequences of not doing so.

Endnotes Hiroaki Kuromiya, “Stalin and His Era,” The Historical Journal 50, no. 3 (2007): pp. 711-724, https://doi. org/10.1017/s0018246x07006322, 711. 2 Tucker, Robert. “The Rise of Stalin’s Personality Cult.” The American Historical Review, vol. 84, no. 2, Apr. 1979, pp. 347–366., https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/84.2.347. 3 Corbesero, Susan. “History, Myth, and Memory: A Biography of a Stalin Portrait.” Russian History 38, no. 1 (2011): 58–84. https://doi.

org/10.1163/187633111x549605. 4 Gretty, J Arch, et al. “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence.” The American Historical Review, vol. 98, no. 4, Oct. 1993, pp. 1017–1049., https:// doi.org/10.1086/ahr/98.4.1017. 5 Gretty, J Arch, et al. “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence.” The American Historical

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Review, vol. 98, no. 4, Oct. 1993, pp. 1017–1049., https:// doi.org/10.1086/ahr/98.4.1017. 6 Tucker, Robert. “The Rise of Stalin’s Personality Cult.” The American Historical Review, vol. 84, no. 2, Apr. 1979, pp. 347–366., https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/84.2.347. 7 Pisch, Anita. “Stalin Is like a Fairytale Sycamore Tree — Stalin as a Symbol.” Essay. In The Personality Cult of Stalin in Soviet Posters, 1929-1953: Archetypes, Inventions and Fabrications, 292–93. Acton, A.C.T.: Australian National University Press, 2016. 8-12 Tucker, Robert. “The Rise of Stalin’s Personality Cult.” The American Historical Review, vol. 84, no. 2, Apr. 1979, pp. 347–366., https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/84.2.347. 13-18 Pisch, Anita. “Stalin Is like a Fairytale Sycamore Tree — Stalin as a Symbol.” Essay. In The Personality Cult of Stalin in Soviet Posters, 1929-1953: Archetypes, Inventions and Fabrications, 192–93. Acton, A.C.T.: Australian National University Press, 2016 19 Iosiff Stalin, “Brothers and Sisters!”, 3 July 1941, Washington: Embassy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. 20-21 Pisch, Anita. Ibid. 22 Tucker, Robert. Ibid. 23-26 Corbesero, Susan. “History, Myth, and Memory: A Biography of a Stalin Portrait.” Russian History, vol. no. 1, 2011, pp. 58–84., https://doi. org/10.1163/187633111x549605. 27 Pravada, “For the Fatherland!”, 9 JUNE 1934, Washington: Government Printing Office.28 Corbesero, Susan. 28-29 “History, Myth, and Memory: A Biography of a Stalin Portrait.” Russian History, vol. 38, no. 1, 2011, pp. 58–84., https://doi.org/10.1163/187633111x549605. 30 Gretty, J Arch, et al. “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence.” The American Historical Review, vol. 98, no. 4, Oct. 1993, pp. 1017–1049., https:// doi.org/10.1086/ahr/98.4.1017. 31 Snyder, Timothy. “National Terror.” Essay. In Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, 89–107. New York: Basic Books, 2012. 32-33 Corbesero, Susan. Ibid. 41-51 Snyder, Timothy. “National Terror.” Essay. In Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, 89–107. New York: Basic Books, 2012. 52 Thurston, Robert W. “Fear and Belief in the USSR’s ‘Great Terror’: Response to Arrest, 1935-1939.” Slavic Review, vol. 45, no. 2, 1986, pp. 213–234., https://doi. org/10.2307/2499175.

Corbesero, Susan. Ibid. Thurston, Robert W. Ibid. 57 Snyder, Timothy. Ibid. 58 Hiroaki Kuromiya, “Stalin and His Era,” The Historical Journal 50, no. 3 (2007): pp. 711-724, https://doi. org/10.1017/s0018246x07006322, 711. 53

54-56

Bibliography 1) Corbesero, Susan. “History, Myth, and Memory: A Biography of a Stalin Portrait.” Russian History 38, no. 1 (2011): 58–84. https://doi. org/10.1163/187633111x549605. 2) Gretty, J Arch, et al. “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence.” The American Historical Review, vol. 98, no. 4, Oct. 1993, pp. 1017–1049., https:// doi.org/10.1086/ahr/98.4.1017. 3) Hiroaki Kuromiya, “Stalin and His Era,” The Historical Journal 50, no. 3 (2007): pp. 711-724, https://doi. org/10.1017/s0018246x07006322, 711. 4) Iosiff Stalin, “Brothers and Sisters!”, 3 July 1941, Washington: Embassy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. 5) Nikolai Ezhov, “Operational Order,” 30 July 1937, Mina zamedlennogo deistviia: Politicheskii portret KGB. 6) Pravada, “For the Fatherland!”, 9 JUNE 1934, Washington: Government Printing Office. 7) Pisch, Anita. “Stalin Is like a Fairytale Sycamore Tree — Stalin as a Symbol.” Essay. In The Personality Cult of Stalin in Soviet Posters, 1929-1953: Archetypes, Inventions and Fabrications, 292–93. Acton, A.C.T.: Australian National University Press, 2016. 8) Snyder, Timothy. “National Terror.” Essay. In Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, 89–107. New York: Basic Books, 2012. 9) Thurston, Robert W. “Fear and Belief in the USSR’s ‘Great Terror’: Response to Arrest, 1935-1939.” Slavic Review, vol. 45, no. 2, 1986, pp. 213–234., https://doi. org/10.2307/2499175. 10) Tucker, Roberct. “The Rise of Stalin’s Personality Cult.” The American Historical Review, vol. 84, no. 2, Apr. 1979, pp. 347–366., https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/84.2.347.

May 2022

THE SUB-PAR SOVIET ESPIONAGE OF THE COLD WAR January 7, 2022 20 Century World History th

Riley Goodman ‘24

What comes to mind when you think of spies? Action heroes like James Bond or Jason Bourne? Unlike these fictional, gunslinging, muscle-car-driving, girl-getting spies that captivated audiences in theaters, real spies have had a perverse effect on history. Perhaps the most significant era of espionage occurred during the Cold War. By the end of World War II in 1945, American-Soviet relations were at an all-time low—distrust sparked paranoia, which escalated into excessive defensiveness. The capitalist Americans were the immoral enemies of the communist Soviets, and vice versa. Conflicting viewpoints between the two superpowers divided the world—either you agreed with the good guys or were a bad guy. The rising East-West tensions unofficially marked the start of the Cold War, a 45-yearlong (1946-1991) political and idealistic standoff between the Americans and the Soviets. The Cold War produced some of the most iconic moments from the twentieth century: President Ronald Reagan’s address at the Berlin Wall; the Space Race; the Cuban Missile Crisis; and the Berlin Airlift. The Cold War also caused massive global conflicts, such as the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Each of these massive events were shaped by espionage. Spying influenced everything—from preventing allThe Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

out nuclear war to collapsing nations. The Americans and the Soviets were incredibly invested in Cold War-era espionage—they aimed to obtain anything that would provide them with a tactical advantage over the other. During the Cold War, Soviet espionage was vastly ineffective due to negligent, substandard leadership, recurrent inaccuracies in reporting, and widespread paranoia and fear. Although they had the technical advantage over the Americans, Soviet intelligence was destined for failure from the beginning. To understand the inefficiency of Soviet Cold War espionage, one must first evaluate the Soviet intelligence agencies of the time. Modern neurologists have analyzed Premier Joseph Stalin’s personality as incredibly paranoid, control-needing, stubborn, and power42

hungry. From the 1920s and 30s, up through the Second World War, Stalin grew wary of his Anglo-American allies and sensed tensions growing between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the West. Stalin worked tirelessly to install undercover agents high up in the British and American governments in response to his growing paranoia. These “moles” would become valuable to Stalin in the early 1950s, when he merged the military intelligence and the foreign intelligence service, thus creating the “small” Committee of Intelligence (KI), which would become the Committee for State Security (KGB) in 1954. As the Soviet equivalent to the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Stalin created the KI as a more streamlined, centralized intelligence agency tasked with the majority of the duties surrounding Soviet intelligence. Stalin’s severe paranoia sparked his desire to eliminate what he called, “estimated intelligence”, or unverifiable, unreliable information, and thus, the agency was tasked with filtering such information out. The “small” KI was Stalin’s Spying Frankenstein, an experimental organization that he brought to life, which revealed Stalin’s habit to transform multivoiced, contradictory data into a more concise, hardline picture. Although set upon a direct pathway to success, the KI would eventually succumb to the very thing it sought to eliminate from the Soviet intelligence collection system: a surplus of information, a large amount of which was “estimated”. The “small” KI would become revitalized in the form of the KGB after the agency was buried in an avalanche of intelligence around the time of Stalin’s death. Stalin’s paranoia drove him

to create intelligence agencies, but paranoia also prevented him and his successors from utilizing their intelligence effectively. Soviet espionage was limited by its leadership, which led to many tactical errors and embarrassments. As a stubborn and paranoid leader, Joseph Stalin was reluctant to accept information obtained from his intelligence agencies. Stalin’s poor leadership of his intelligence agencies and disregard of their reports were common throughout his time in power. For example, he was informed well in advance of the German invasion of the Western USSR in 1941, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, both by his intelligence agencies and by his allies—the British and the Americans. Stalin’s disregard of intelligence surrounding Barbarossa resulted in over fourteen million Soviet casualties. Further, prior to the Cold War, poor leadership escalated WesternSoviet tensions. In 1941, during the height of World War Two, Stalin spied heavily upon his allies and financial aids: the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK). Once they found out about Stalin’s spying, they were outraged, and as Author John Lewis Gaddis said, this “furthered the notion of Western statesmen that Soviets shouldn’t be trusted.” According to a Soviet intelligence veteran, “The most difficult task of intelligence is not to obtain information, but to get its findings and conclusions across to the leadership,... [especially] ones that contradict...deep-seated beliefs and perceptions.” Strangely, Stalin’s blunders with Barbarossa and the West did not get across to him; in fact, the case was nearly the opposite, as towards the end of Stalin’s 43

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life, he rarely even read the KI’s reports, which were intended to help him make decisions.

from 1977-1978, the US government knew that the Soviets were primarily focused on them and would go to great lengths to do so. “We, the United States, are the primary targets of the Soviet espionage effort…the CIA report estimates that Soviet defense programs… [would] cost $130 million...” Despite their advantages, the KI was not always correct in their reporting, and often, their reports worsened tensions between the US and the USSR. They reported that the US was trying to create coups in Egypt and nationalist uprisings in Germany. The Soviets even believed that the US would drop a nuke on Korea, and that despite their hopes for a peace agreement, the US was attempting to collapse the Soviet Peace agenda with propaganda. None of the three scenarios were confirmed or ever came to fruition, but they only worsened tensions and paranoia in Moscow. Additionally, the KI occasionally would intentionally report misinformation. Because of his quicktempered unpredictability, KI officials tended to “lean on the safe side” in their analysis, so as not to upset Stalin. While Stalin was alive, intentionally or not, KI officials associated his fears and assumptions with Soviet foriegn policy, and how they were supposed to operate. The KI operated in a paranoia-like state because of Stalin’s paranoia-fueled testiness, and because they believed there was no way to rekindle Soviet-American relations in the near future. Evidently, the KI’s reporting, whether it was accurate or misinformation, spurred further Soviet paranoia, and ultimately pushed on the Cold War, when peace could’ve been made much earlier. Accentuated by constant paranoia, the combination of poor leadership and inaccurate intelligence would lead to one of the biggest intelligence blunders

Soviet leadership of intelligence agencies did not improve after Stalin’s death. Before his passing in 1953, Stalin “collectivized leadership” in Moscow, which was an attempt to prevent another one-leader style of government. Furthermore, the Cold War era is notorious for the distrust it created within governments. Officials were generally much more paranoid of the people around them, as they did not know who they could trust—anyone could be a spy. Between the commonality of paranoia and fear, and Stalin’s collectivized leadership, Stalin’s successors were more interested in their own political survival. In this way, Stalin passed his paranoia down to his successors, making political progression much more difficult for the Soviets. Like a newborn deer to a lion, the newly-created KI collapsed quickly, as its potential for usefulness was rapidly eradicated by Stalin’s paranoia, and his inadequate, negligent leadership. While Stalin’s leadership severely limited the KI’s potential, their reports also were commonly inaccurate. The plague of inaccuracies in the KI’s reporting were the cause of many tactical blunders. With their sights set on Western Europe, the US, and the North Atlantic Trade Organization (NATO), the KI was set upon a direct path to successfully dominating American intelligence. Stalin’s work to obtain moles proved effective, as his efforts provided the Soviets with an ample number of loyal, trustworthy, and consistent sources of information who were able to relentlessly steal state secrets from the Western governments, primarily the US. According to a report from the American Intelligence Journal The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

of the Cold War: the Berlin Airlift.

the real reason—oppressive Soviet rule. In this way, the information the KI relayed to Moscow never depicted the whole truth, as they feared what would happen if they were truthful. Furthermore, Stalin and his subordinates, unwilling to accept reality, often disregarded the KI when delivered with accurate, wellcited, evidence-supported information. Most importantly, Soviet intelligence was simply incapable of successfully evaluating the airlift’s probability for success, and they failed to convey the importance of the Airlift plans to their leadership in the first place. The embarrassment that was the Airlift could have been easily prevented at multiple times, but Soviets at every level failed to do so. This series of repeated “miscommunications” caused the Blockade to fail, and placed shame on the Soviets on the international stage.

The extent of the Soviet Intelligence’s failure during the Cold War was apparent during the Berlin Airlift—an intelligence mistake that was easily foresee-able and avoidable. Following the end of World War II, the Allied forces divided both Germany and its capital, Berlin, into quadrants—one for each of the allies: the US, the UK, France, and the USSR. The Blockade lasted for nearly a year, between June of 1948 and May of 1949, as the Soviets cut off all transit between West Berlin (US, UK, France) and West Germany in an effort to force the West out of Berlin. In response to the Soviet’s Blockade of West Berlin, the West provided West Berlin support with supplies through a massive airlift. The Blockade was Stalin’s gamble for two objectives: to force Western forces out of Berlin without war and to delay the West from merging their zones, and notably, he failed to achieve both of these goals with the Blockade. This raises multiple questions surrounding the Soviets. How were the Soviets defeated in the first major international display between the East and the West? How could they not have seen the Airlift coming? The blame for the national embarrassment in Berlin is on Soviet intelligence agencies and their leaders. Before their defeat, Soviet intelligence forces blamed popular resistance to Sovietization in East Germany on West Berlin-based hostile forces, rather than stating

Intelligence played a crucial role in influencing the events and outcome of the Cold War. Soviet espionage during the Cold War was predominantly ineffective. Inadequate leadership, erroneous information, and the commonality of paranoia, amongst leaders and spies alike, were the root causes of failure for Soviet intelligence. An event like the Berlin Airlift is a superb display of faulty Soviet espionage, as it was an enormous embarrassment for the USSR as a whole. Had Soviet espionage been more efficient and effective, the Cold War would likely have played out much differently 45

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than how history truly did. Such thoughts almost make one wonder: How different would the modern-day be if Soviet espionage was successful?

Endnotes

BRENNAN, MARY C. “THE COLD WAR WORLD.” In Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace: Conservative Women and the Crusade against Communism, 13– 30. University Press of Colorado, 2008. https://doi. org/10.2307/j.ctt1d8h9s3.5 2 Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum. n.d. “Timeline of the Cold War.” Truman Library. Accessed December 7, 2021. https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/ public/TrumanCIA_Timeline.pdf 3 Birt, Raymond. “Personality and Foreign Policy: The Case of Stalin.” Political Psychology 14, no. 4 (1993): 607–25. https://doi.org/10.2307/3791377 4 GADDIS, JOHN LEWIS. “Intelligence, Espionage, and Cold War Origins.” Diplomatic History 13, no. 2 (1989): 191–212. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24911815 5 Haynes, John Earl, and Harvey Klehr. 2000. Venona : Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. Yale Nota Bene. New Haven [Connecticut]: Yale University Press. 6 GADDIS, JOHN LEWIS 7 ZUBOK, VLADISLAV. “Soviet Intelligence and the Cold War: The ‘Small’ Committee of Information, 1952–53.” Diplomatic History 19, no. 3 (1995): 453–72. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/24912398 8 Murphy, David E. “Spies in Berlin: A Hidden Key to the Cold War.” Foreign Affairs 77, no. 4 (1998): 171–78. https://doi.org/10.2307/20049039 9 Strauss, Bob. 2019. “A Brief History of the KGB and Its Origins.” ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/

history-of-the-kgb-4148458. 10-13 ZUBOK, VLADISLAV. 14 GADDIS, JOHN LEWIS. 15 Smithsonian and Marcus Jones. 2014. “Operation Barbarossa: A Deadly Turning Point in WWII.” Smithsonian Associates. https://smithsonianassociates. org/ticketing/tickets/227352 16-17 GADDIS, JOHN LEWIS 18-22 ZUBOK, VLADISLAV 23 Schrecker, Ellen. “Soviet Espionage in America: An Oft-Told Tale.” Reviews in American History 38, no. 2 (2010): 355-361. doi:10.1353/rah.0.0207 24 “SOVIET ESPIONAGE OPERATIONS.” American Intelligence Journal 1, no. 2 (1977): 13–13. http://www. jstor.org/stable/44326777 25-26 ZUBOK, VLADISLAV. 27 Langwald, Katharina. 2021. “The Importance of Western and Soviet Espionage in the Cold War.” E-International Relations. https://www.e-ir.info/2021/04/14/the-importance-ofwestern-and-soviet-espionage-in-the-cold-war/. 28-30 ZUBOK, VLADISLAV. 31 North Atlantic Trade Organization (NATO). n.d. “Declassified: The Berlin Blockade, 24-Jun.-1948.” NATO. Accessed December 16, 2021. https://www. nato.int/cps/en/natohq/declassified_136188.htm. 32-34 Murphy, David E.

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Bibliography

1) Birt, Raymond. “Personality and Foreign Policy: The Case of Stalin.” Political Psychology 14, no. 4 (1993): 607–25. https://doi.org/10.2307/3791377 2) BRENNAN, MARY C. “THE COLD WAR WORLD.” In Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace: Conservative Women and the Crusade against Communism, 13– 30. University Press of Colorado, 2008. https://doi. org/10.2307/j.ctt1d8h9s3.5 [Book] 3) GADDIS, JOHN LEWIS. “Intelligence, Espionage, and Cold War Origins.” Diplomatic History 13, no. 2 (1989): 191–212. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24911815 4) Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum. n.d. “Timeline of the Cold War.” Truman Library. Accessed December 7, 2021. https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/ public/TrumanCIA_Timeline.pdf. 5) Haynes, John Earl, and Harvey Klehr. 2000. Venona : Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. Yale Nota Bene. New Haven [Connecticut]: Yale University Press. https://search-ebscohost-com.libdb.belmont-hill.org/ login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=52850&site=eh ost-live [Book] 6) Langwald, Katharina. 2021. “The Importance of Western and Soviet Espionage in the Cold War.” E-International Relations. https://www.e-ir. info/2021/04/14/the-importance-of-western-and-

soviet-espionage-in-the-cold-war/. 7) Murphy, David E. “Spies in Berlin: A Hidden Key to the Cold War.” Foreign Affairs 77, no. 4 (1998): 171–78. https://doi.org/10.2307/20049039 8)North Atlantic Trade Organization (NATO). n.d. “Declassified: The Berlin Blockade, 24-Jun.-1948.” NATO. Accessed December 16, 2021. https://www. nato.int/cps/en/natohq/declassified_136188.htm. 9) Schrecker, Ellen. “Soviet Espionage in America: An Oft-Told tale.” Reviews in American History 38, no. 2 (2010): 355-361. doi:10.1353/rah.0.0207 10) Smithsonian and Marcus Jones. 2014. “Operation Barbarossa: A Deadly Turning Point in WWII.” Smithsonian Associates. https://smithsonianassociates. org/ticketing/tickets/227352. 11) “SOVIET ESPIONAGE OPERATIONS.” American Intelligence Journal 1, no. 2 (1977): 13–13. http://www. jstor.org/stable/44326777. 12) Strauss, Bob. 2019. “A Brief History of the KGB and Its Origins.” ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/ history-of-the-kgb-4148458. 13) ZUBOK, VLADISLAV. “Soviet Intelligence and the Cold War: The ‘Small’ Committee of Information, 1952– 53.” Diplomatic History 19, no. 3 (1995): 453–72. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/24912398

May 2022

DATA ANALYSIS

The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

US FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC POLICY Max Glick ‘24, Max Wagner ‘23, Nate Voss ‘24 As always, when new presidents move into the White House, much scrutiny is placed on the decisions made that influence the foreign and domestic policy of the United States. This trend has been quite evident during the Biden Administration, which has faced many diplomatic struggles ranging from the handling of the pandemic to the withdrawal from Afghanistan. For this edition of The Podium, we decided to ask Belmont Hill their views on United States foreign and domestic policy. The first area examined was voting. There has been a lot of public debate about voting, be it who should vote, what restrictions should be placed on voting, or fraudulent elections. The first question asked to the school was if the voting age should be lowered by two years to 16. The result was a resounding “No” with almost 81% of respondents agreeing that the voting age should not be lowered. Additionally, members of The Podium explored voting rules in other countries such as Australia, where voting is mandatory. When asked to the school, a majority of 78% voted against mandatory voting. A large majority of those who answered yes to one of the questions on voting, said yes to both, suggesting that views on the importance of simply higher voting numbers are general, covering both a wide range of ages as well as voting requirements. One of the greatest issues facing the US today comes in the realm of foreign affairs. Last August, after months of drawbacks of troops across the nation, the US military left Afghanistan nearly 20 years after the initial decision to move in. This was a hotly debated topic last summer. The question posed to the school allowed respondents to express their views on if the extraction was executed well, could have been executed better, or should not have been done at all. 75% of the BH community thought that the withdrawal should have happened but was executed poorly. 49

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The other major foreign policy issue facing the US right now is Ukraine. Russia invaded their Western neighbor in late February. Ukraine has put up a stiff resistance with billions of dollars in aid from Western nations. Many political commentators and politicians have suggested removing Russian president Vladimir Putin. President Biden, a proponent of the idea, said “this man cannot remain in power”. The question of whether the US should attempt to instate a new Russian leader was then asked to the school. 70% of Belmont Hill respondents said no. The Podium also asked BH their opinion on whether Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was a part of a larger attempt to reestablish the Soviet Union. A slim majority of 58% believed that Putin aimed to remake the USSR. This was the closest margin on any poll in this edition.

question were all only from one respondent and ranged from Iran to Canada the US itself. Overall, the poll helps to illustrate Belmont Hill’s and the nation’s views on a variety of American policies.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has also reignited Americans’ fears about malicious nations abroad that target the US and the Western world at large. In the poll, respondents could select which nation they believed posed the greatest threat to the United States. There were two frontrunners in the results; those being China at 71% and Russia at 16%. Both of these are the obvious choices, with US fears of China mounting for the past decade due to their incredible economic rise and renewed fears in Russia after their Ukrainian invasion. The third most popular answer was North Korea, though it only received 3.5%. North Korea has been blatantly testing its nuclear capacity for the past few years. The nation was a focus of the foreign policy of the Trump Administration, with two summits held aiming to disarm North Korea, though talks eventually failed. Other responses to this The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

May 2022

Miscellaneous Essays

The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

SHOULD STOLEN ARTIFACTS IN MUSEUMS BE RETURNED? Max Glick ‘24 Many museums around the world contain works taken from other cultures. While some displays of foreign pieces are without controversy, most of them are a relic of the Western world’s colonial past and oppression of those they colonized. Most cases of this stem from European colonialism, especially the Third Wave of Imperialism from the mid nineteenth century to 1914. Hundreds of thousands of works stolen from other cultures are in European and American museums today, with the majority coming from former colonies in Africa and Asia. UNESCO estimates that “90% of African cultural heritage is located overseas”, with well over 100,000 pieces being in French museums alone.

later, the French forces in Egypt were defeated at Alexandria by an Anglo-Ottoman force, and were forced to turn over the Rosetta Stone along with other artifacts collected on the trip, to the British. The Elgin Marbles, on the other hand, were simply taken from the Acropolis in Athens by British explorers under claimed permission from the Ottoman government of Greece, though no evidence of that has been found. Both currently reside in the British Museum in London as remnants of the former British Empire. There are several points on both sides of the argument on whether these pieces should be repatriated. Those who believe that the works should be returned often cite that this is ‘morally correct’ and follows the moral laws of property; that if someone steals something, no matter how long ago it occurred, the stolen goods should be returned. In addition, many of these objects have a deep significance to the cultures where they are originally from, an example of which are the many statues stolen from temples in Southeast Asia. The retention of these artifacts also continues the ideologies of colonialism, whether it be racism, social darwinism, or other forms of oppressing

The most famous examples of stolen artifacts are the Rosetta Stone and Elgin Marbles. Both are held at the British Museum in London. The Rosetta Stone is inscribed with a royal decree in Ancient Greek, Demotic, and Egyptian Hieroglyphs. The Stone became a key in understanding the Egyptian Hieroglyphic language. It was first unearthed in 1799 by a team of archaeologists and historians brought on Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt. Two years 53

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The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

those that Europeans conquered. In addition, attitudes towards colonialism have been shifting over the past fifty to seventy years, with it now being widely recognized as an awful time in world history.

Also, universal museums are cheaper to visit as it is far less expensive for one to visit Europe than Africa or Asia. In addition, many artifacts were somewhat legally taken, with leaders of colonized peoples often forced to or tricked into signing away their cultural heritage. Another argument for keeping the artifacts is that many of the ancient kingdoms from which these pieces were taken, no longer exist and their territories span across several countries, making a return difficult and tension-raising. So far, little progress has been made in returning artifacts to their home countries. Both sides of the argument have compelling points that have merit. While pressures are present from international organizations and the artifacts’ home countries, it is ultimately up to the museums on whether to return parts of their collections, a situation that is possible but very unlikely.

However, many reasons also exist on the other side of the argument. The main one stems from “universal museums”, such as the Louvre in Paris or British Museum in London. These museums often have massive amounts of resources and the best curators and conservators to keep the pieces intact and maintain their original beauty. Most of these universal museums are in Western Europe, where conflict nowadays is rare, unlike in many of the countries where the pieces originate and if they were returned, there is a much greater threat of damage. Universal museums also allow for visitors to see artifacts from all over the world, which lets more people experience and be educated on different world cultures.

May 2022

Should the Electoral College Be Abolished? Ezra Lee ‘25 The Electoral College of the United States is a body of presidential electors who are mandated by the Constitution to meet every four years for the explicit intent of choosing the President and Vice President. Each state is required to nominate electors in an equal number to its congressional delegation, according to the processes outlined by its law. There are currently 538 electors, and one candidate must get an absolute majority of 270 votes or more to be chosen for president and vice president. The United States House of Representatives has a contingent election to pick the President and the United States Senate to elect the Vice President if no candidate receives an absolute majority.

people in counting a state’s population? In 1787, around 40 percent of people living in the Southern states were enslaved Black people who couldn’t vote. James Madison from Virginia, where over 60 percent of the population was enslaved, knew that neither enslaved people having no vote, nor one equipollent to a white person, would fly in the south. The final result of this controversial discussion was the three-fifths compromise in which three-fifths of the enslaved Black population would be counted toward allocating representatives and electors and calculating federal taxes. Four distinct but connected concerns are discussed in debates between supporters and opponents of the existing voting system:

Initially, The Electoral College offered the Constitutional Convention with a middle ground between two major proposals: popular presidential election and presidential election by Congress. Determining precisely how many electors to assign to each state was another sticky point considering the divide was between slave-owning and non-slaveowning states. It was identically tantamount to the issue that plagued the distribution of seats in the House of Representatives: should or shouldn’t the founders include enslaved The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

• Indirect election • Disproportionate voting power by some states. • The winner-takes-all distribution method (as chosen by 48 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia). • Federalism. There have been five United States presidential elections in which the prosperous presidential candidate did not receive a plurality of the 56

popular vote, including the 1824 election (the first election the popular vote was counted), the 1876 election, 1888 election, 2000 election, and most recently, the 2016 presidential election between Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump. There have also been complaints about exclusive focus on sizably voluminous swing states, discouragement of turnout and participation, obscuring disenfranchisement within states, lack of enfranchisement of U.S. territories, advantage predicated on state population, and disadvantage for third parties. Over 700 endeavors to alter or abolish the system have been submitted in Congress since 1800. These conceptions’ proponents stated that the electoral college system does not allow for direct democratic election, favors smaller states, and permits a candidate to win the presidency without receiving the most votes. None of these ideas have gained the needed two-thirds congressional approbation and three-quarters state support to transmute the Constitution. Whether or not we should perpetuate to utilize the electoral college in the United States is a highly controversial topic. If it were facile, we would probably have already switched to the popular vote; however, because it is such an arduous process to transmute something inscribed in our Constitution, endeavoring to change it [for proximately the 800th time] does not seem promising or prosperous considering the very inauspicious first 700 trials.

May 2022

Student Art

The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

Rafael Rodriguez Montgomery ‘22 First Place — Advanced Photography Winter 2022 Art Show

Daniel Dumile, commonly known for his stage name MF “Metal Face” Doom, was a highly celebrated British-American rapper and music producer. Doom’s signature mask, which are seen in Rafael’s photography, was based off of the fictional Marvel character “Doctor Doom”. This villainous persona portrayed the rapper as an enemy to the industry that cast him aside, making him a well known figure in alternative and underground hip hop during the early 2000s.

May 2022

Kailen Richards ‘22 First Place — Drawing & Painting Winter 2022 Art Show

Kailen Richards’ award winning painting showcases a realist style by using shadows to bring a tangible scene to life. Realism was first used by Gustave Courbet in France during the early 1850’s. Realism revolts against Romanticism, which expresses emotions and vivid imagination, by casting the subject under a realistic and scientific light

The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

Luke Caroll ‘22 Second Place — Drawing & Painting Winter 2022 Art Show

Artists have been creating landscape pieces since the start of time, portraying the natural beauties of this world, ranging from snowcapped mountains to wave-crashing coasts. In comparison with typical landscape pieces, Luke Caroll took a minimalist approach. Luke uses a bright contrast between the sun-stricken plain and the gloomy sky to intensify the image of the lone standing tree.

May 2022

Jake Ma ‘27 Oil Painting on Black Paper

One of Jack Ma’s two impressionist oil paintings exhibits a colorful barn standing next to a river near vibrant yellow trees. His second painting shows a gloomy wheat field with rolling hills in the background.

The Podium • Volume VII • Edition I

Jake Ma ‘27 Oil Painting on Black Paper

Impressionism began in the late 19th century, brought to life by Parisian painters such as Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir who embraced modernity and rejected classical painting styles. Impressionist painters focused on reflecting the world around them through their art.

May 2022

Daniel Xie ‘24 Pencil on Paper

Daniel Xie described his pencil drawing as displaying a surrealist technique. Daniel’s drawing depicts a bird laying its eggs in the bell of a saxophone. Surrealism appeared after World War I as artists tried to interpret themselves through illogical scenes and pieces of art.

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