Be it on an individual or organizational or global level, life is punctuated by times of crisis. A state of uncertainty confuses “normal” forms of reasoning and acting. Although predominantly associated with negative affect, crises serve as a catalyst for creative exploits.
Out of the Great Depression in the United States emerged two of the world’s classic family board games. Elizabeth J. (Lizzie) Magie first received a patent in 1904 for her Landlord’s Game which was designed to highlight the evils of capitalism and illustrate the ideas of Henry George, the author of Progress and Poverty (1879).
For a quarter of a century, her game was played in progressive circles until a variant version was developed by Quakers in Atlantic City, NJ in the early 1930s. Sold to Parker Brothers during the Depression, Monopoly became a commercial success.
On May 30, 1953 The New Yorker published an article that drew attention to the sudden acclaim of a new board game and spelled out the “history of Scrabble, the biggest thing in games since Monopoly and maybe the biggest thing ever.” Invented as Lexico in 1933 (according to the Hasbro history timeline), renamed Criss-Cross Words five years later, Scrabble became popular in America during the early 1950s.
This week, nine decades after the first version of the board game was presented at Queens, New York, a Scottish Gaelic version titled Scrabble Gàidhlig was launched in anticipation of the Christmas sales. Sparking the initiative was an effort to prevent a linguistic crisis and halt the rapid decline of the language.
Jackson Heights
Alfred Mosher Butts was born on April 13, 1899, in Poughkeepsie where he was educated. He then took a degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania in 1924. Having returned to New York City, he settled in Jackson Heights, Queens, and started work for Holden, McLaughlin & Associates, a firm on Lexington Avenue founded in 1930 that specialized in public housing, schools and hospitals.
Hit by the Great Depression, he was laid off from his job in 1931 and fell on hard times. Out of work for quite some time, extremely bored and in need of hard cash, he set out to develop a game that would involve skill as well as chance. He also grasped the need for family distraction during these bleak socio-economic times.
A lifelong lover of crossword puzzles and anagrams, Butts designed a word game by which players were handed nine random letter tiles and tasked to form the highest scoring terms possible. There was no playing board. The score was based on the length of the word, with bonuses possible, depending on the particular letters used. Alfred named the game Lexiko and tried to sell it to established manufacturers, but failed.
He continued to refine the game by decreasing the number of tiles to seven and adding a board that assigned point values to each letter based on how common its usage was in the English language (he made that calculation after a lengthy study of the front pages of The New York Times). He called this version Criss-Cross Words. Again, there was no commercial interest for his endeavors by mainstream manufacturers.
On Sunday nights during the dark days of Depression, Butts would invite relations and friends to his apartment and play the game together. Their enthusiasm encouraged him to perfect both the game and its design. He continued looking for improvements after being re-hired at his old firm and brought Criss-Cross to a wider audience by taking the game to the social basement rooms of the Community Methodist Church on 35th Avenue and 81st Street.
In 1938, Butts filed a patent for the game. The location of the word game’s humble origin in Queens is today commemorated with a street sign that includes the Scrabble value for each letter of 35th Avenue as a subscript.
Butts established a following of friends and acquaintances, selling sets in small numbers. When board game addict James Brunot encountered Criss-Cross, he was impressed. The latter, a retired social worker and former Director of the War Relief Board living in Newtown, Connecticut, struck a deal with Butts in 1948 to take over its manufacture and pay the inventor a royalty.
Newtown, Connecticut
Brunot devised the iconic color scheme (pastel pink, baby-blue, indigo and bright red) and introduced the fifty-point bonus for using all seven tiles to make a word. More importantly, he renamed the game Scrabble, pulling the tag out of thin air largely because it was a name that had never been copyrighted. He received his copyright on December 1, 1948, and trademarked Scrabble Brand Crossword Game on December 16, 1948.
Having formed a partnership called The Production & Marketing Company, James and his wife Helen ordered wooden counters from Germany and lettered and numbered them on a hand-operated stamping machine. They worked from the living room and basement of their Newtown home.
The boards were produced for them by Selchow & Righter of 200 Fifth Avenue which was then one of the biggest game manufacturers in the country. The firm’s pride was their brand-name Parcheesi (Pachisi in Asia; Ludo in Europe), probably the oldest trademarked game (1869 and 1874) in existence.
The Brunots did some advertising in the Saturday Review and elsewhere, but they depended mostly on word of mouth to spread Scrabble’s fame. For the first three years their operation lost money. Selling a few games a week at three dollars a set, it took four years to reach the two-hundred mark.
Uncertain about future developments because of slow sales, they took a brief break from production in 1952. On return two massive orders were awaiting them.
Forced to increase the workforce, they moved to larger premises by renting the former Flat Swamp district schoolhouse in Dodgingtown, Fairfield County, CT. It was there that Scrabble boards, boxes and individually stamped letter tiles were put together. What had caused the unexpected turn in commercial fortune and this sudden interest in a rather obscure game?
Herald Square, Manhattan
In 1852 Lazarus Strauss, his wife Sara and their three sons Isodor, Nathan and Oscar Solomon migrated from Otterberg, Bavaria, to the United States. In 1854 they relocated from Philadelphia to
rural Talbotton, Georgia, where Lazarus opened a general store.
In 1863, driven by growing anti-Semitism that questioned the loyalty of Jewish merchants to the Confederacy, the Strauss family moved to Columbus. Following the Civil War, Lazarus re-settled in the city of New York and opened an importing business under the name of L. Straus & Sons. Negotiating with Rowland Hussey Macy, a Quaker born in Massachusetts, Lazarus secured a basement spot selling crockery in Macy’s department store at Sixth Avenue on the corner of 14th Street.
The crockery section developed into Macy’s successful glass and china department. In 1888 Isidor and Nathan acquired a percentage of Macy’s and by 1896 the brothers had gained full ownership of the business, opening its flagship department store on Herald Square, Manhattan, in 1902.
Their younger brother Oscar attended Columbia Law School and made a diplomatic career, serving as the United States Minister to the Ottoman Empire in the late 1880s and later served as Ambassador to
Turkey. Isidor and his wife lost their lives in the Titanic tragedy in 1912. Their grandson Jack Isidor Strauss served as the company’s Chief Executive from 1939 to 1956 and was responsible for Macy’s massive expansion in the United States during the mid-1900s.
While on holiday in 1952, Strauss encountered a Scrabble game and was intrigued. He became instantly hooked. On return to New York City, he placed a large order with Brunot and began stocking the game in his stores nation-wide. Scrabble became the rage and board game lovers started queueing outside Macy’s doors. Once Jack Strauss had decided to promote the game during the Christmas season, popular demand went through the roof.
Rhode Island & Isle of Lewis
The Brunot team needed additional space, so the firm moved to larger premises once more. The owners rented offices in the then-newly constructed Wheeler Shopping Centre, Newtown, which became headquarters of the production and marketing company. In 1952 they contracted Selchow & Righter Company to sell the standard edition of Scrabble for them. By early 1953, thirty-five employees working in two shifts produced as many as 6,000 sets a week.
Orders soon ran into the hundreds of thousands, outpacing the capacity of the small factory. In 1953, more than a million sets of Scrabble were sold and nearly four million the following year. Scrabble had arrived and was there to stay. Soon after The New Yorker reported on the new phenomenon.
In 1972, Selchow & Righter acquired the Scrabble trademark from Brunot who retired soon after. Six years later the company published its first Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD). Unlike standard dictionaries, this game supplement lists words limited to between two and eight letters without their accompanying pronunciations, etymologies or definitions.
Whilst the German-Jewish department store of Macy’s had turned Scrabble into a smash hit in the United States, the game’s popularity was maintained and internationalized by three Polish-Jewish brothers named Hasselfeld. In 1923 they founded Hasbro Company in Providence, Rhode Island, which would develop into a leading toy firm (its first success was the creation of Mr Potato Head in 1952). Selchow & Righter had changed hands in 1986 being taken over by Coleco Industries. When three years later this company was declared bankrupt, Hasbro purchased its assets which included Scrabble.
In 1994 Hasbro announced plans to remove nearly 300 “offensive” words from the Scrabble dictionary. The list ranged from ethnic slurs to inappropriate words like “turd, fart, fatso or redneck.”
This puritanical intervention split the Scrabble community. Hasbro compromised and published two officially sanctioned dictionaries, one for recreational use and the other for clubs and tournaments.
The age of political correctness in Scrabble seems over and the compilers of the OSPD today (the seventh edition was published in November 2022) are more concerned with the inclusion of new terms such as “selfie or hashtag” than with the exclusion of words that are deemed to be controversial.
Alfred Mosher Butts had died in 1993 and did not become rich from his invention, but he was able to enjoy the worldwide popularity of Scrabble which today is sold in more than 120 countries and available in twenty-nine languages and counting. The latest edition has just been introduced to Scotland.
The Goidelic language of Scottish Gaelic has been spoken since at least the thirteenth century. It was at one time the nation’s main language, native to the Gaels of Scotland. Since the 1707 Act of Union, it has been in decline and today only small pockets of native Gaelic-speakers survive in the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Concerns having been raised about the future of the language.
Gaelic Scrabble was launched by the cultural centre An Taigh Cèilidh – known to locals in Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides as the “Gaelic Café” – to keep the declining language alive.
The board game has been produced in association with London-based Tinderbox Games following the company’s versions of the game in Welsh, Irish, Latin, Icelandic and Faroese. As a competitive game, a teaching tool and a means of battling screen addiction, Scrabble is alive and well.
Nollaig Chridheil!
You can support the New York Almanack by buying Scrabble or the Scrabble Dictionary through this link.
Illustrations, from above: Scrabble tiles; an early design of a Criss-Cross board (later known as Scrabble) by Alfred Butts; Scrabble’s place of birth in Jackson Heights, Queens; Alfred Butts at the Scrabble game’s factory in Fairfax County, CT, in 1985 (AP); playing Scrabble ca. 1960s; and the new (2023) Scottish Gaelic version of Scrabble.
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