HENRY GEORGE
for
J.G.B. and L.A.B.
children of
Three generations ago Henry George electrified great
numbers of our ancestors on both sides of the
This was especially true,
and early true, in
The influence of George
on the
In one respect like Progress
and Poverty itself, the present biography was begun in
Although the effort that follows is a historical biography, my first incentive was a moral, rather than a historical, appreciation of Henry George. At an early stage of the investigation a professor of literature addressed me in a lowered voice one day, in the Huntington Library cafeteria, to inquire what is wrong with the argument of Henry George. He always gave a little time to Progress and Poverty, in the annual cycle of teaching, he said, and every year he was embarrassed because he knew no satisfying reply to the reform idea he thought must be mistaken. The question reassured me, because I had begun at about the same place. By that time, which was during the war summer of 1944, I was committed to examine the circumstances of Henry George: to try to discover the sources of his somehow persuasive and disturbing book, and to report the reactions of acceptance, rejection, and criticism with which his contemporaries did him honor. For a decade, Henry George has wearied me many days, but those days have always been interesting ones, and I retain the conviction with which I started, that moral problems are the most important problems to which an historian can address himself.
It would be wrong to try
to reduce to some formula the
We shall of course discover a few exceptions along the way. The most glaring one will be Henry George’s Californian attitude toward Chinese immigration. But his liberal first principles inform every one of the major items of the economic program he conceived on the West coast: absolute free trade, the abolition of private-property values in land, the repeal of discriminatory taxes, and the public ownership of telegraph lines and other public utilities. The same principles underlay also the eight books he wrote, two in California and six in New York; and they are at the moral center of all the main causes for which he labored and fought, after Progress and Poverty was published: land reform in the British Isles, the labor party of 1886-8 in the United States, the exposing of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in New York politics, the single-tax movement, the establishing of a free-trade policy for the Democratic party, the Bryan candidacy of 1896, and the party he called the Democracy of Thomas Jefferson.
The reformer’s many
undertakings were linked on a chain of consistent purpose, but much of the
fascination of his life derives from the incredible largeness and flexibility
with which at different times and in different situations he appeared the same
actor in contrasting roles. During the Civil War he was a Republican but at
other times a Democrat; between 1886 and 1896 he was, successively, a party
bolter, a
Time, money, access to books and manuscripts, and the sympathy of family and colleagues are needed to write a book. For enough of the first and second, and for a wealth of the third and fourth, I am more grateful than I can say.
Serious expenditures on
behalf of this research and writing began while I was a member of the faculty
of
In addition to the summer and autumn of 1944, I had time largely free from duty during the university year 1949-50. This was made possible, after only four years of service at the Johns Hopkins, by that university’s uncommonly generous policy toward members of the faculty. For a travel grant and other assistance during that year, I am indebted to the American Philosophical Society.
The libraries I have
called on have been many. Though for years I have been accustomed to handsome
treatment by library people, the quick responses I received to letters of
inquiry concerning George materials, the aid efficiently given during stop-over
visits, have been for me a revelation of efficiency and help. For this kind of
accommodation, I owe thanks, on the West coast, to the California State
Library, both the main institution in
For library hospitality
sustained over long periods of investigation, my first West coast debt is to
Stanford. At the
Without any one of the libraries just mentioned, this biography would be less complete. Without the Library of Congress, especially the manuscript and newspaper materials, the book would be shorter than it is but would have taken a longer time to write. Without the unique Henry George Collection, given by Anna George de Mille to the New York Public Library, the book would not and could not have been written at all.
During the course of a decade — in the libraries, among colleagues in the universities, and among those I have consulted as participators in the Henry George movement — I have accumulated obligations which are quite as personal as professional. I should have liked to turn a phrase for each person in the list below; I hope that anyone who sees his name there will remember what he did, over and beyond the call of ordinary obligation, for I shall not forget. I am recalling ideas suggested, manuscripts, articles, and books turned up I had not the knowledge to seek for, uncommon courtesies and encouragements, criticisms that made a difference — and other forms of generosity. I thank: Thomas A. Bailey, Peter J. Coleman, Thomas I. Cook, Henry E. Cottle, Albert J. Croft, Father John Tracy Ellis, Ralph H. Gabriel, John D. Hicks, Robert C. Hill, Richard Hofstadter, Louis C. Hunter, Jeter A. Iseley, Sherman Kent, Edward Kirkland, Frederic C. Lane, Arthur S. Link, Will Lissner, Clarence D. Long, Margaret Lough, J. Rupert Mason, Broadus Mitchell, Fulmer Mood, Sidney Painter, Claude W. Petty, Belle Dale Poole, M.D., Robert E. Riegel, J. E. Wallace Sterling, Carl B. Swisher, Paul S. Taylor, Francis J. Thompson, and Louis B. Wright. For the memory of Anna George de Mille, Henry George’s youngest child, who answered every question I asked, and who enthused over the idea of my book, though she was writing another, I am deeply grateful.
Six associates, who
otherwise would appear in the list above, have rendered freely those
time-consuming professional services by which scholars help one another.
Professors Merle Curti of the
The responsibility for what follows is mine alone. But whatever achievement may be discovered there is to be attributed, in a proportion for which the words above are far from sufficient, to those who are named, and to others, whose help may have been less in amount, but whom I no less sincerely thank.
C.A.B.
The
Now, thirty-seven years later, I equally thank the Schalkenbach Foundation, publishers of the works of Henry George, for this second reprint edition. I hope it will draw many new readers, including those whose governments are in flux, to George’s ideas on economic justice.
C. A. B.
Preface, vii
Part
One: A
1839-1855 A Boy from a
1855-1857
1858-1861
New Californian: Immigrant and Wage Earner, 34
1861-1865 Suffering and Exaltation, 49
1865-1868
San Francisco Editor versus
1869-1871
Fighting Monopoly and Pledging Utopia, 105
1871-1874
Trying Out Radical Ideas:
The
1872-1875
Rounding Out an Editor’s Thought: The Post’s Utopia, 196
IX
1876-1879
From Isolation: Speaking and Writing in Time of Crisis, 230
1879
Before the World: Progress and Poverty, 265
Part Two: A CHRISTIAN EFFORT, 1880-1897
1880-1881
In the Tide of Idea and
1881-1882
Prophet in the Old
Country:
1884-1885
Prophet in the Old
Country:
1882-1886
Not without Honor in His Own Land, 417
1886
Conquest in
1887
No National Labor Party To Lead, 482
1888-1890 The Father of the Single Tax, 508
xviii 1890-1897 Christian Democrat to the End, 552
1890-1897
The Martyrdom of Henry George, 588
The Triple Legacy of
Georgism, 620 Notes on the Sources, 637 Index, 683
A
A
Boy from a
A man’s world contains the world he knew
as a boy, and when things are right the legacy is strength-giving, a resource
for life. Surely it was good fortune that Henry George was born and brought up
in
It is hard to think that
he could have had a more appropriate heritage. Had he been blessed to be born
to the inspired circle of the
Better for George’s first
growth, it is reasonable to think, than even the community of the
Transcendentalists could have been, was the bustling city where the great
Declaration and the federal Constitution were written. In
Above all the place of
his origin gave George as birthright the right to speak for the people of the
world’s great cities. Philosopher of the land though he became, he was always a
city man. The burden of the present history is to tell how he executed that
spokes-manship, first in
Life began for Henry
George on
Though born the oldest
son, Henry never knew an uncrowded household. At the time of his birth the
family numbered six. Besides the parents and year-old sister Caroline, there
was an older sister perhaps in her teens, Harriet, whom his father had adopted
during his earlier marriage. Then there was Mrs. George’s sister Mary Vallance,
an arthritic, who was to be the beloved Aunt Mary of thirty years of raising
the George children, and who seemed to Henry the very embodiment of sacrificial
love. During the 1840s and ’50s there came eight children more. A year after
Henry, Jane, a lively girl and in time a great student, always his favorite
sister; then four other girls, two of whom died in infancy, and three boys. The
boys were too much younger than Henry for companionship, though family legend
has it that they worshipped him, and that five-year-old Morris cried the most
bitterly of anyone when he sailed away to
Back of the growing
family known genealogical lines were short, but even so we may guess that they
were more than average length for that time and place. Henry’s two grandfathers
had come as immigrants of the later eighteenth century, and both had married
and succeeded in the city. His father’s father had been born a Yorkshireman and
trained a seaman under British colors. In
On the maternal side,
Henry’s grandfather John Vallance had been brought as an infant from
Unfortunately Margaret
Pratt Vallance was widowed at forty and died a decade before her daughter,
Henry’s mother, had married and settled. But her children and their families,
two or three of them in
Before marriage,
The kind of living that the devoted father of the family could make for wife, sister-in-law, and nine children has been variously estimated by students of Henry George, but always with emphasis on poverty and insecurity, and with some implication that hard times during childhood embittered the mind of the future social critic and reformer. And indeed the solemn picture can be darkly drawn: the man who denied Ricardo suffered as a child from pressure of population in the family: the economist who offered to cure depressions was brought up in a household pressed by the crisis of the late ’30s and early ’40s; and as a teen-ager he was thrust from his parents’ home by the hard times of 1857.
But these unshaded lines
sketch too impressionistically from the surface, and the picture requires
lightening. Before 1831 Mr. George had been a clerk in the Customs House. Then
he turned to publishing. Although there is no record of the business’s income,
there is of its activities: Mr. George’s firm operated a bookstore, and for
some time it had the depository of the General Episcopal Sunday School Union,
the Bible and Prayer Book Society, and the Tract Society. Church publishing was
a going business in
But abandoning one’s own enterprise is hard, and the point of change fixed the memory of poverty in the family mind. The father now became an ascertaining clerk; and, with seven or eight dependents, his government salary was $800 a year. Yet this austere statistic requires both understanding and revision. Besides his office duties, Mr. George took on extra work at Parkinson’s, the finest restaurant in the city, probably doing some bookkeeping.
From this source he made about $250, more than enough for a year’s house rent. Also by the ’50s his salary had risen to about $1100. Though it is true that the depression of 1857 caused him many anxieties, this was not until after Henry had left home; and then apparently Mr. George’s only immediate deprivation was his side earnings, a loss he felt he could bear. In 1859 a government economy measure withheld one month’s salary at the Customs House. The real risks of his job were political, and they did not materialize for him, as a Democrat, until 1861. Altogether his ordinary income of $1300 or $1400 during the ’50s, when Henry was of an age to worry about such matters, compares very favorably with the incomes of clergymen and teachers at the time. The whole period of Henry George’s childhood and youth was happily one of prevailingly low prices and rising standards of living; and Mr. George seems to have made a fair living. At darkest estimate it was genteel deprivation, not want or catastrophe, that pressed upon the George family during Henry’s childhood years.
This impression is
confirmed by the way in which the family lived. Their first home, the house on
Letters to Henry written
after he had left home in his teens tell us most of what we know about how life
was lived in the place where he grew up. Of course the house was congested.
With
The family’s pleasures
were pretty seasonal. Puritanical though they were, their Christmases combined
festivity with worship: excitement, surprises, toys, guests, and turkey made
the order of the day. They celebrated the Fourth of July with the enthusiasm
and noise and fireworks which were habitual and appropriate in
Looking backward we may
reasonably associate much of the goodness of their life together with the
domestic capacities of the mother and aunt, and with the steady habits of the
father. Yet if asked the older Georges would have attributed the family’s
solidarity not to themselves but to their Heavenly Father’s guiding hand. The
family Bible on a pedestal table made a shrine at home, and there they all
repaired for morning and evening prayers. Even a skeptical friend of Henry’s
later teens said that Richard George’s family worship affected him deeply; and
probably three out of four of the letters written to Henry in
The historic well where
they refreshed their faith was
A family could hardly
have found more ways to become closely attached to a city church than the ways
that connected the Georges with this one. Mrs. George’s mother was buried in
the crowded church lot; her father and two brothers-in-law served as vestrymen;
and her nephew George Latimer was called to the ministry there. But no member
of the Vallance family served
The Georges’ absorption
in
To sense the power of it,
a word about Episcopal Church history is required. During the first half of the
nineteenth century, the American Episcopalians, like the Church of England
people, divided into
This momentum carried
forward into Henry George’s day and life. During the first quarter of the
nineteenth century St. Paul’s became the largest parish in the state; new
parishes of the Low Church kind proliferated from it in the Philadelphia area;
and, under the rectorship of a man inspired by John Wesley, the early Sunday
school developed. Yet the climax of evangelicalism and Americanization in the
parish waited for the rector of the Georges’ own time. This was Dr. Richard
Newton, English-born American-trained member of a family of clergymen, his sons
better remembered than himself. Dr. Newton conducted the services with ‘almost
rural simplicity’; there was no bowing during the recitation of the creed, and
there was much attention to Sunday school work and strong support for foreign
missions, especially one in Liberia about which Henry heard a great deal. Year
after year he preached a popular series of sermons on personalities of the
Bible — and just possibly Henry George’s address on Moses, given on three continents
during the last two decades of the century, was in some degree an echo of his
pastor’s voice. Any radicalism that Dr. Newton may have entertained seems to
have concentrated on church polity, where he took and debated very advanced
grounds for an Episcopalian. Like his church generally, he took no prominent
role in the slavery controversy; apparently he acquiesced in the institution
and did no more for the Negro than sending assistance to
It is impossible to look
forward to any period of Henry’s adult life, least of all to the twenty years
after Progress and Poverty, and not believe that a main line of
evangelical feeling runs continuously from the spirit of
In the shorter view,
though, scraps of evidence tell us that Henry as a youngster bucked the current
of piety at home. He was never confirmed at
Yet he was not to delay
long in making a Christian commitment. And as for his loyalty to the church in
which he was reared, he made an almost unconscious declaration in
The story of Henry George
in school, though it is very short, gives the first line of individual record
along which to follow his boyhood growth. After learning the R’s at home under
the school teachers of the family, he was sent at about six to a private school
in the
At the age of nine he changed to the Episcopal Academy of Philadelphia, which next to the older Friends’ schools was as historic as any in the city. It was housed in a handsome eighteenth-century building, and it represented the social and intellectual character of Episcopalianism generally. In the years just preceding Henry’s attendance, the curriculum had been reformed under the leadership of Bishop Alonzo Potter as chairman of the board. Modern languages, penmanship, drawing, and ‘graphics’ were offered the younger boys; a Divinity Department taught Latin, Greek, and Hebrew to the older students; and there was instruction in science as well. Unfortunately we have no way of following Henry’s course in this curriculum, three years and a half from February 1849 to June 1852, and no knowledge of the grades he made. Most likely his studies were all elementary, possibly with some beginning work (if so, all he ever had) in foreign languages.
For no plain reason the boy did not do well at the Academy and became so unhappy that he asked to be withdrawn. The family remembers that he was uneasy because his father paid only a reduced tuition fee, the same as for sons of Episcopal ministers. But the full fee was only $60 a year, and there were many free scholars. Possibly Henry used the fee question to cover some resistance to school piety, or to the Divinity Department looming ahead; or not unlikely at age thirteen he felt self-conscious at the Academy, coming from the Southwark District and being associated with sons of the city’s mansions. Whatever the reason, his withdrawing asserts for the first time a disinclination, which became lifelong, for education that was not vocational, or practical in some immediate way. Knowledge as tradition and cultivation, though in time he was to become a reader of poetry and the literature of ideas, never at any stage of his development appealed to Henry George.
After Henry left the academy, Mr. George placed him under a coach, a Mr. Henry Lauderbach, to prepare him for the public high school. This led to a half-year of good study. The pupil enjoyed the teacher; and the teacher found the boy apt and well equipped in basic knowledge. Much later Henry George looked back on this interval as the most effective part of his education, and in due course he tried to arrange to have his own son study under the same man.
The last stage of his
formal education proved very brief. On
Amply, perhaps more amply
than any other American city at the time,
By the time he reached
his middle teens he was reading at least a little history and contemporary
thought. A diary which is dated 1855 but which includes entries from the next
few years contains notes on Emerson’s new essays, the now famous Representative
Men. Under a heading for English history, Henry listed dynasties and
sovereigns: and, under American history, events from 1487 to 1777, and the
presidents and vice-presidents from
Much the same applies to
the other varieties of his young experience in
A good heritage and culture were Henry George’s during his childhood, not glittering and not overrich, yet more historic, more deeply informed by principle and tradition, and more varied and ample than first statements about family income, and austerity, and his own schooling would naturally suggest.
Out of school Henry found a job with Asbury and Company, importers of china and glass. They paid him $2 a week for long hours of copying papers, wrapping parcels, and running errands, and he stuck it out for a year or so, performing to satisfaction. Then he moved to a clerkship in a marine adjuster’s office. ‘Don’t you remember our conversations about the pitiful sums of your weekly earnings?’ his mother asked years later, when it was his brother Val’s turn to be dissatisfied, making $1.50 a week.
The way out was the water
route. Though breaking from the family circle at age fifteen sounds pretty
extreme for a proper George, going to sea was really not at all unnatural. It
was only one step from his father’s office to the offices where Henry had his
first jobs, and one step more from clerking in a maritime business to a ship’s
deck. As a little fellow Henry had loved the sea stories his father told from
the lore of Captain George — particularly the patriotic ones of his
grandfather’s valor during the War of 1812 — and father and son had roamed the
At the point of decision
making, Henry’s diary takes on a flavor of secrecy and conspiracy. Yet it is
more likely that the elder Georges fooled the boy, by being undeceived, than
that he brought off anything very secret. The fact that his cousin, who within
a few weeks was to be ordained a minister, sat in on the conference, makes it
pretty clear that family affairs never slipped out of adult supervision. At any
rate, when Henry broached the matter, his parents, who had had a recent
experience of his being willful around the house, did not object too much; and
the arrangements of detail were made rather between Mr. George and Captain
Miller than by Henry himself. He was to sail as foremast boy. In the hope that
he would not have too good a time and want to go to sea again, the father asked
that things not be made too soft. As his mother later reviewed the matter: ‘We
had perfect knowledge of the Captain and he promised to watch and protect you
as a brother which he did.’ On Sunday, 1 April, the day before leaving,
Thou Henry still art young,
And does not see the wonder Thou wilt tread The buoyant deck, and look upon the flood,
Unconscious of the high sublimity . . .
Blest be thy passage o’er the changing sea Of life; the clouds be few that intercept The light of joy. The waves roll gently Beneath thy bark of hope, and bear thee safe To meet in peace, thine other father, — God.
The blurs and creases and turned down corners of the good paper on which this message is inscribed are the first signs of record that Henry was interested in Florence Curry, who was the daughter of a family friend, or in any girl.
The youngster bucked up
in
The vessel, though
twenty-five years old, was good size for then — 586 tons register, 1200 tons
burden — and the outward cargo comprised half a million feet of lumber for
Australia. The normal crew, Henry had understood beforehand, was nineteen men:
fourteen able seamen, the cook, the steward, two mates, and the captain. On
this trip the foremast boy, and possibly also the carpenter, was extra. The
crew, the members of which Mr. Miller had some trouble picking up, was a
properly mixed lot, men from the
Henry George’s fifteen
months on the Hindoo became the natural occasion of his doing his first
sustained writing. There was opportunity to mail letters at only three points:
before sailing from
Best of all the
youngster’s mind reached out, noticing things and putting them down with
clarity and force and economy of word. For instance, the story in his Sea
Journal of the Fourth of July in the
Not often in the journal
did he turn from the facts to the feeling of what he saw. But we may look
ahead, near to journey’s end, to see that at sixteen he could express an
emotion and an impression too. On
Outward bound the Hindoo
swung far southeast. Far out of sight of land all the way, the vessel rounded
the
According to his Sea
Journal, the sailors planned to leave the Hindoo in
Three days of tension
passed aboard the Hindoo, riding anchor well out in Hobson’s Bay. Then
as the crew had wanted, the American consul was brought aboard. Seated on the
booby-hatch, he heard grievances and commitments. ‘Some complained of bad
food,’ Henry recorded without stating his own judgment, ‘others of bad language
and threats used to them by the officers, and some of blows and one of sickness
caused by falling from aloft.’ The consul found in favor of the ship’s master;
and Captain Miller followed the judgment by saying that once the cargo was
unloaded, ‘he would pay them their wages and let them go in peace.’ Yet
authority somehow lost power. The sailors demanded the captain’s promise in
writing; he refused, and the men refused to work. The struggle ended with the
striking sailors’ being convicted and taken to prison ship for a month’s hard
labor. The lumber was discharged and ballast taken aboard, doubtless at lower
cost to the business venture than paying sailors’ wages from
We gather that, though
legal right seems to have been all on the side of the young captain, Henry
George tacitly sympathized with the strikers. Perhaps it was simple shock and
resentment at first seeing maritime law, or any kind of labor law, in action.
Or it may have been more: Henry may have felt some truth in the sailors’
incidental complaints and have judged Sam Miller too truculent in young
authority. We may take the word of Henry George, Jr., and Anna George de Mille
that his championing sailors’ rights, as an editor nearly twenty years later,
connected in his mind with unforgettable scenes in Hobson’s Bay. In 1840,
American enlightenment, in the person of Richard Henry Dana, had begun stating
the facts and making the fight for seamen, demanding that they be treated
essentially like other laborers and citizens. Henry George, in this as much as
anyone Dana’s successor, made his background observations in
Though the Hindoo
lay over nearly a month, Henry went to Melbourne only once, just long enough to
remember at his visit of 1890 the city’s earlier San Francisco-like appearance:
‘its busy streets, its seemingly continuous auctions, its crowds of men with
flannel shirts and long high boots, its bay crowded with ships.’ When the time
came for economic writing, he always had an eye for what was going on in
In the Sea Journal, a
couple of periods of being becalmed, one of them at the crossing of the
equator, were the only matters of note for the remainder of the outward voyage.
Then, in one of his most effective passages, he described the approach up the
The Hindoo lay
nearly all of December and the first half of January in
In port the captain and
the foremast boy were free to be friends and have their fun together. They
suffered a little from change of diet at first, but the weather was beautiful,
and during the ten days before Christmas they visited both
For the return voyage
once again new sailors had to be signed, and Henry noticed that, though they
came from more diverse origins than the outgoing crew, almost to a man they had
been in the
The worst of the return
voyage came at the very start, when adverse winds kept the Hindoo three
weeks beating down the eighty-six mile stretch of the
During the first month
the cook sickened and died, and for a few days the captain gave Henry duty in
the galley, a job he hated. Otherwise the voyage home lacked much event. The
monkey kept him company, and, says Henry, prevented the cockroaches from
crawling on his face while he slept. On 13 April the Hindoo rounded the
It was a browned and much
grown-up young fellow who returned to the
Of course the first
question was a job, but finding one was slow. Some unnamed errand took him on
an overnight trip to
As printer’s apprentice
the boy learned fast. After eight months he could set 4000 ems a day ‘on common
news work,’ an amount which would earn a journeyman printer about $10 a week, he
boasted. He made friends and picked up ideas. ‘Henry George was a remarkably
bright boy always in discussion with other boys in the office,’ Ned Wallazz
tells us. ‘He got into the habit of appealing to me (I am seven or eight years
older) for support as to his dates and facts, historical and political.’ This
was 1857, the year when
The dimness and distance
of his prospects in the printing office were matched by a certain
incompatibility at home. Not that there was a sharp break, nor that the Georges
failed to allow leeway for a lad in his later teens. Jo Jeffreys, one of
Henry’s more spirited contemporaries, gives us an attractive description of how
Henry entertained his friends in the attic bedroom, the gaslight dim and books
spread around, with hours on hours of talk. When the host drowsed off, the
friends filed out and let him rest. But Henry had not been home long when his
father quarreled with him about the hours he kept; and he and his mother
argued, not far from election time, about slavery. In this Democratic family
the parents condoned slavery as sanctioned by Scripture, and they rejected
abolitionism in the way President Buchanan did, as an altogether exaggerated
and impractical movement. Henry retorted that his mother’s attitude rested ‘on
policy not principle,’ and that the ownership of human beings gave slave
masters too much power. Henry George was thinking of home and church in 1857, we
may be sure, when he recalled much later, ‘how over and over again I have heard
all questions of slavery silenced by the declaration that the negroes were the property
of their masters, and that to take away a man’s slave without payment was as
much a crime as to take away his horse without payment.’ Very likely Henry’s
going one Sunday to the
During his months at home
Henry’s most particular friends were Ned Wallazz, of King and Baird’s, Joseph
Jeffreys, who was about to take up the study of law, and two old chums, the
brothers Charles and Collins Walton. All shared in the Lawrence Society. Now,
as apparently not before the voyage to
Yet the Lawrence Society’s original interest in books and ideas persisted, and the boys did compositions on serious subjects. From 1857 we have two contributions by Henry, the very earliest known essays of his writing. The first deals with Mormonism. With a gay ‘Ho Brothers’ for salutation, Henry launched into denunciation: polygamy, he said, exposed the Mormons to incredible temptations; and their organizing and colonizing activities created for the leaders of the movement extra temptations, to exploit the common membership. (Was this already recurrent theme, that power corrupts, so soon even a half-serious idea with Henry George?) To his moralizing without benefit of facts Henry added unflattering estimates of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young; and he ended by arguing that the Latter-day Saints should somehow be brought to submit to government authority. Except for his antislavery feeling, this bit of social judgment is the first instance in the record of Henry George’s proposing to change the ways of men.
His other Lawrence Society composition concerns ‘The Poetry of Life,’ and it takes us closer to the inner man. Poetry, said Henry, belongs to him who sees life round and who nurtures the divine flame. It is denied to those whose views are narrowed ‘to the sole end of wealth.’ He alone knows the poetry of life who can withdraw from the noise and hustle, and ‘who strips the idols of common adoration to their nakedness, [and] views man as he was created, a being a little lower than the angels, but crowned in glory and honour, as a being awful in his powers and sublime in the rightly directed use of them.’ Poetry occurs in the universal experiences: in the hopes of youth, ‘in the first dawning of love,’ in ‘the fierce struggles of man with his fellows,’ at last in death itself. ‘If we would view men and things in their true effects and relations, we must withdraw from the turmoil and let the soul take her stand.’
We could easily say that as first essays the Lawrence Society papers, certainly the ‘Mormonism’ one, are better forgiven and forgotten. But the Sea Journal of 1855 and 1856 places them from the outset in the sequence of Henry George’s writing; and they demand notice as they fix the point of turning from the clear flow of descriptive expression, which first came bountifully to him, into more turgid channels of thought and writing. Aboard the Hindoo at fifteen and sixteen he had written with little self-consciousness, for himself alone, about external things; but now, and for a while in the future, self-consciousness and self-assertiveness were the order of the day. It may or may not be significant that Henry’s reading pieces of Emerson — exhortations toward self-expression, every line of them — occurred almost certainly between writing the Sea Journal and the Lawrence Society essays. As of 1857, the important thing is that, nearly a decade before he began to earn his living by his pen, Henry George had spontaneously phrased his boy’s thoughts in both the precise and objective and the hortatory and subjective modes of expression common in his day. It is only normal that at eighteen he was yet making no effort toward that difficult goal: welding the two together into a powerful tool of expression and persuasion. It would take a quarter-century and the writing of a great book to do just that.
Besides family, job,
friends, and ideas, Henry had time for one other interest, Florence Curry and
her family. The family as a whole was important to him: the widowed mother,
Mrs. Rebecca Curry, who heard his troubles; the older daughters, Martha and Emma,
especially Emma who wrote him when
On seeing the family
depart, Henry was quite as desolated as
His determination to go
West, at a time to depend on circumstances and the advice of his friends,
became the more important on 10 June. On that day he quarreled with the
job-room foreman at King and Baird’s and had to quit. Possibly he was given
extra courage by the latest word from the Currys: one of their friends, the
editor of the
For a short while he made
do in
By fall the hard times had hit and he knew it. In a letter written but not sent to a brother in the Lawrence Society, Henry grieved: ‘The times are damned hard, and are practically getting worse every day . . . There are thousands of hard-working mechanics now out of employment in this city. And it is to the fact that among them is your humble servant, that you owe this letter. If you will send on without delay the V. you owe me, you will be doing the State a service by lessening the pressure of the hard times upon one of the hard-fisted mechanics who form her bone and muscle.’ And Henry demanded also to be told of any rich men or corporations his friend happened to know (‘I should much prefer the latter, especially if their rules and regulations are a little lax’) who might want ‘a nice young man of my well known talents and capacities.’ He was ready for a canal boat, he said, if only it would pay.
Yet even at this moment
of anxious temporizing, Henry saw better things ahead. If we may trust a much
later recollection, he had learned by the time of the Boston trip that a steamer
was being fitted out in the Philadelphia Navy Yard for lighthouse service on
the Pacific coast — a marvelous chance for a free passage. With his parents
fully in counsel, he wrote to Congressman Thomas B. Florence, a Philadelphian
who was interested in navy business. He wanted to become an ‘ordinary seaman or
first-class boy’ on the Shubrick, he petitioned. His father backed him
up with a personal appeal; and Mr. Florence promised to help. In addition Henry
besought his uncle Thomas Latimer to influence people in the Lighthouse Bureau
in
The pressure moved the
wheels. About six weeks after the approach to Representative Florence, Henry
George was appointed steward of the bright new craft. The only hitch was that
he was obliged to sign for a full year’s service; but even this was sweetened
by a promise of $40 a month, much the best he had ever earned. He could now
make his way to the Currys if he chose; or he would probably have a chance to
settle into federal-government service, as his father had. Certainly he would
see his married cousin James George, an older contemporary who was fairly well
situated now as bookkeeper in a
Things moved fast. Henry had to leave suddenly three days before Christmas; his orders came so late that there was no time for proper farewells. A picture was taken, disappointing compared to the daguerreotype of 1855. Though Ned Wallazz learned what was happening in time to write Henry a letter, Jo Jeffreys missed him, calling on the evening of departure. The lovable scamp, now his best friend, comforted the family by lending a picture he had, better than the new one, for duplication.
The parting was hard for the affectionate pious family. Aunt Mary and sister Caroline put solemn thoughts into their good-by letters, like those of 1855: their hopes that nephew and brother would do nothing dishonorable, and their faith that the day would come soon ‘when our dear Henry will be one of the lambs of Christ.’ Yet we may cheerfully doubt that in the rush such thoughts were said aloud. More likely spoken were the things the parents chose to write: they were completely satisfied with the job on the Shubrick, and they were confident that it would lead to good results. Though in a New Year’s letter the mother said how dreadfully she had missed Henry on Christmas day, she admitted that if she could she would not now wish him back: ‘I want you to be something and somebody in the world.’
As for the young man’s own view of how he would succeed in the future, he set himself in entire seriousness a thirty-seven point introspective examination of capacities. He used the scheme of phrenology, the fad and pseudo-science of the day. He judged himself to be ‘large’ or ‘full’ on the points of amativeness, combativeness, destructiveness, self-esteem, firmness, secretiveness, conscientiousness, hope, and individuality. Correct so far, we may judge, according to the record of his early years. He found himself lacking or ‘small’ in concentrativeness, acquisitiveness, mirthfulness, and calculation. Accurate again, he seems, though of all men he would be ‘concentrative’ in future years. He contradicted himself with his ‘large’ for caution; there is room to question his ‘moderate’ for language; and one would wish that he had not left blank the spaces on veneration, benevolence, and ideality, among others.
His one-word answers he enlarged by free self-characterization. He included the following comments: ‘An ardent, devoted, and constant lover; he will defend the object of his love with boldness, protect his or her rights with spirit. Will feel much stronger attachment than he will express ... Is not very fond of children . . . Chooses as his friends the talented, intellectual and literary, and avoids the ignorant ... Is extremely fond of travelling. Has an insatiable desire to roam about and see the world and afterwards to settle down ... Is patriotic and ready to sacrifice all in defence of his country . . . May get angry quickly, but, unless the injury is deep or intended, cannot retain his anger . . . Will be more likely to make a general than a critical scholar. May have bold and original ideas upon a variety of subjects yet will not without effort or excitement have a train of connected thoughts upon any . . . Is qualified to meet difficulties, overcome obstacles, endure hardships, contend for privileges, resent insults and defend his rights to the last . . . Desires money more as a means than an end ... Is inclined to enter largely into business and push his projects with so much energy and zeal as to appear rash and nearly destitute of caution; yet will come out about right in the end, and will seldom fail entirely in his projects, though he may be obliged to retrace his steps.’
In like vein of assurance Henry wrote his parents, aboard the Shubrick on 6 January, the eighteenth day from home, and asked them not to share the letter outside the family. After requesting them to write Mrs. Curry that he would see her soon, he declared: ‘I know my dear parents that you felt deeply the parting with me — far more so than I did. But let the fact that I am satisfied and that my chances are more than fair comfort you. As for me, for the first time in my life, [I] left home with scarcely a regret and without a tear. I believed that it was my duty both to myself and to you to go, and this belief assuaged the pain of parting.
‘I am now about setting out for myself in the world, and though young in years I have every confidence in my ability to go through whatever may be before me. But of that I will say nothing, let the future alone prove ... I remain your Loving child.’
New Californian: Immigrant and Wage Earner 1858-1861
Just to be taken on the crew of the Shubrick was a promise of adventure for Henry, and it gave an assurance of safety for the comfort of the people at home. Named for the admiral who was chairman of the Lighthouse Bureau, the vessel was a ‘first’ in two or three particulars. She was the first tender in the lighthouse service to be sent to the Pacific coast, and the first to be powered with steam. She was a hybrid, with a square-rigged foremast, yet was accounted good-looking, with black hull and funnels, and great red side wheels. She was armed with half a dozen cannon, and with a hot-water gun specially designed to discourage prowling Indians. Henry’s father went over the vessel with him and met certain members of the crew, a few days before sailing.
The start was auspicious,
and so were the first three days at sea". But on Christmas day, at a point
off Hatteras, the Shubrick ran into such a storm as Henry had never
experienced on the
Shubrick put into Charlotte Amalie, the port of St. Thomas, one of the Virgin Islands, for refueling and refitting.
To spare his parents anxiety Henry made no mention of the hurricane. To them he admitted no more than ‘head winds and a rough sea’ so far — a not very successful ruse, for, when news of the storm came out in the Evening Journal, or ‘Evening Disturber’ as Collins Walton called the paper, it excited the Georges greatly. Writing home Henry slipped into the peaceful pictorial vein of the Sea Journal, and his description is not to be improved upon: ‘Here I am this winter’s afternoon (while you are gathered around the parlour stove, perhaps thinking and talking of me) sitting in the open air in my white sleeves almost roasted by the sun. I wish that you could view the scene which surrounds us. The noble mountains rising from the water, covered with perpetual vegetation of the tropics and varied in colour by the shadows of the clouds which seem to climb their sides; and the little town with its square red-roofed, Dutch houses and white forts, surrounded by the palm and cocoanut trees which line the head of the bay; the ships and steamers which deck the harbour; and the boundless sea stretching away to the edge of the horizon, glittering in the sunlight — form a picture which I know you would enjoy.’
While the Shubrick
lay in the harbor, Henry had an interview with the commanding officer.
Apparently before leaving
Rounding
Again a failure to report
to his parents was a covering up of unfortunate events. There was reason, for
this time the crew of the Shubrick faced a more appalling danger than a
storm at sea. Yellow fever was raging in
This was Henry’s first
knowledge of tragic death. It turned him to his pen immediately, and in time he
made it an event in his literary life. In two letters to
Yet the event grew on
him, and in time, with the encouragement of the interest in the occult which
prevailed in
Within an hour of the Shubrick’s
putting in, 27 May, James George met him and took him home. At once his letters
began to indicate that he was ready for anything, and not too strongly
determined for
All this projecting took for granted both that he would disregard his father’s advice to stay more or less permanently in government employment, and that he could somehow make himself free of his commitment to a full year of service — seven months to go — aboard the Shubrick. According to family record, the eighteen-year-old steward enlisted the sympathy of Ellen George, his cousin’s wife. At their home he went to bed, and she herself went to interview Captain de Camp. One may imagine a woman’s story of an ailing youngster who needed care, and one may think that the three concerned — Henry, cousin, and ship’s commander — all acted in full knowledge that desertion was a habit that had been more or less condoned in San Francisco Bay since Gold Rush days, when sailors, even sailors in the United States Navy, had hit for the mountains in droves. Whatever the pretense, the captain accepted Henry’s ‘retirement’ without effort to bring him back. Though the record of the Shubrick showed other desertions, it made no mention of Henry’s leaving; and the only damaging document in the dossier is an envelope addressed to him from Philadelphia and sent back with the marking, ‘Run away.’ His mother worried, and his father moralized a little; but it was his friend Jo Jeffreys who summed up the episode. ‘I think you did make a decided “jump” when you left the Shubrick so suddenly, though I hope you did not do so before you received what was due you. You must have been in a state of great anxiety when waiting for the expected visit of Captain de Camp, though I think the fact does credit to your ingenuity.’ Presumably Henry never received any of his accumulated wages.
Certainly the young man
was in a risk-taking state of mind, and
Henry acted that way,
quitting the Shubrick, and now his cousin did the same. The
responsibility of wife and young children notwithstanding, James George
abandoned his bookkeeping and entered a
Yet Henry sailed from
He had a very good time,
at least for a while, and he seems to have thought there might be a prosperous
future in the store. Thrusting his chest out a bit, he had printed a business
card which brought a desirable reaction from Jo Jeffreys: ‘It looks quite
important for you, old fellow. I wish I could lend you $500.’ Even members of
the family who disliked the venture got some exaggerated ideas; Uncle Joseph
van Dusen’s firm considered sending the George cousins a shipment of
But a
The one visible increment
of the northern venture was a good start on his later famous set of chin
whiskers. Years afterward he told audiences that on the voyage to
One phase of his affairs,
his relations with the Currys, the northern trip had clarified completely.
During the summer Martha, the oldest sister, had come with her new husband to
Yet Henry delayed
writing, and perhaps never wrote again to Florence Curry. When he took passage
to
During the winter of 1858
and 1859, moreover, a series of hard events underscored the fact of personal
isolation. On his return to San Francisco the boy had the comfort and security
of visiting Ellen George, who was teaching school until decision could be made
that she should take her children and move to Victoria. Apparently Henry’s
trouble with James did not change his relationship with Ellen. But in February,
James’s business having improved, she went to join him; and presently Henry
learned that she had taken sick and died in
Henry owed Jo a great
debt for understanding and counsel. Wishing him luck when he left
On the side of his West
coast career, moreover, the year following his leaving
A stroke of luck saved
him for the winter. By pure accident Henry met in San Francisco David Bond, an
old friend from King and Baird’s. The printing-house connection led to a
printing-house job. Henry was soon at work in Frank Eastman’s office, at $16 a
week, the best wages he had ever made. There was no reason not to luxuriate a
little. He settled comfortably in the What Cheer House, a temperance hotel for
men which he described as ‘the largest if not the finest hotel in the place.’
Nine dollars a week paid for ‘a beautiful little room and first-class living.’
It was a grand relief. At this stage of great satisfaction with
For two or three months — about long enough for Mr. George to congratulate his son on returning to his trade and to confess his own reverses — this pleasant situation held. Then, coincidentally with Ellen’s departure, business slackened in the Eastman shop and Henry lost his job. He got by for the rest of the winter as a weigher in a rice mill. But in the hard spring of 1859 the mill closed, and on top of this Mrs. Curry wrote that, even if she heard of newspaper jobs in Oregon, she was ‘afraid that your free spirit would be disgusted’ with the work.
Evidently Henry was too
discouraged to write home. We have only the unnecessarily shamefaced
confession, decades later, that for a couple of months he was ‘in fact what
would now be called a tramp.’ Like thousands before and since, he set out for
the gold country, for
The new job this time was
with a weekly newspaper of a kind that flourished with peculiar exuberance in
Months earlier, while he
was working at Eastman’s and living at What Cheer House, young George had had
an urge to do a lot of reading, some of it the new literature of California;
and now working on the Home Journal he had special reason to expand that
interest. In the first instance the need to read had come from within himself,
after a year at sea and at storekeeping; and the hotel he lived in gave him
easy access to a collection of books famous in
To the satisfaction of
discovering books in
Not only his work but the
incidentals of his life indicate that by now George was becoming fond of the
state where he had chosen to try his fortune. By temperament Henry was the kind
of young man to delight in the spectacle
In this kind of life the
young immigrant’s 1859 gave way to i860; and i860 meant in his anticipation
September and the age of twenty-one, when he would cease to be an apprentice
and as a journeyman could command twice as much as his present $12 wages. In
this case the realization proved no less than the hope. When he did come of age
he promptly joined the typographical union, and during a short interlude off
the Home Journal he earned his first full
But an immigrant is an
individual with two loyalties of place, and in Henry George’s case the home
loyalty, though it was a declining one, had vigorous spokesmen in the persons
of his mother and his sisters. Naturally the womenfolk could not be easily
reconciled to Henry’s absence. During his first year away the
Two events worked some
reconciliation among his people to his being away. One was the secession of
The other event of
reconciliation was entirely personal, and had occurred about six months
earlier: Henry confessed faith and joined the church. During his early months
in
Neither the humble little
church in
Suffering and Exaltation 186 r — 1865
During the Civil War the choices that
young men of military age had to make were of course less prefigured than in
our day. The draft was less certain; and no area of federal activity, from
taxes to artillery, was as tightly organized then as now. But we should err if
we slipped into saying that for Henry George’s generation the anxieties of
1861, the ultimates we phrase as the downfall or survival of civilization,
seemed less tragic than the anxieties of 1917, 1941, and 1950 have seemed to
people of our own day. Though there had been a generation of crying ‘wolf’
between North and South, perhaps no nation that has experienced war was ever so
unready as the
In George’s case
awareness of abolitionism in the East gave meaning to the national tragedy, as
he viewed its slow unfolding from a distance. As the son of an office-holding
Democrat he might in easier times have found the party battles of the new state
of his residence to be interesting, and the dominant position of his father’s
party to be entirely to taste. Recent
too young and too new in
the state to know or care. Certainly he pitched his political concerns at the
national and moral level appropriate to his personal history in
Of course he voted for
Abraham Lincoln, and we can imagine his home thoughts when letters told him
that the older and younger members of the family were at sixes and sevens,
variously for
Nor did
He estimated that joining
the army in
All the rest of his life the Civil War was to be for Henry George not a bitterness personally experienced but a tragedy viewed in perspective and deeply felt. Another passage in the same letter should be quoted here, partly because the time of writing was yet so near his religious training and his conversion, and partly because it shows how very early, and also how self-propelling, he was in searching for a Christian point of view on the fratricidal war. ‘Truly it seems that we have fallen on evil days. A little while ago all was fair and bright, and now the storm howls around us with a strength and fury that almost unnerves one. Our country is being torn to pieces and ourselves, our homes, filled with distress. As to the ultimate end I have no doubt. If civil war should pass over the whole country, leaving nothing but devastation behind it, I think my faith in the ultimate good would remain unchanged; but it is hard to feel so of our individual cases. On great events and movements we can philosophize, but when it comes down to ourselves, to our homes, to those we love, then we can only feel; our philosophy goes to the dogs, and we but look prayerfully, tearfully, to Him who hath more care for us than for all the sparrows.’
Meanwhile during the
spring and summer of 1861, the sale of the California Home Journal had
put Henry George out of his job, and he had risked a business adventure. The
opportunity he seized represented neatly the state of affairs in
He pushed for a policy of
literary-interest and human-interest journalism, like that to which he was
accustomed on the Home Journal. To the bright young sister who wras
now teaching school he addressed a request, the day before
He had his way on Evening Journal policy, and Jane actually contributed a few letters, very feminine and bluestocking, during the summer and fall. In June the paper announced a circulation of 3000, a good number to grow on, and for an early-summer season, Henry George’s hopes ran high.
At just this point
letters from
One hazard was passed,
yet month by month life was becoming infinitely complicated. In August the Journal
paid the partners only $6 a week apiece. As a small journal, which could not
afford the new telegraphic news service, it confronted mounting wartime
disadvantages. Unpaid bills forced Henry to set up a cot in the office and
return to austerities reminiscent of
But it was not hope of
business success which was really directing Henry’s course in the hard fall of
1861. He had no adequate answer for his parents, who, when they learned how the
Evening Journal was actually going, changed their minds about the wisdom
of remaining in
Annie Corsina Fox had entered his life on the evening of 12 October, a year earlier. Reluctantly Henry had let a friend persuade him to go to a party that night at the home of a Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Flintoff and Mrs. Flintoff’s mother, Mrs. Henry McCloskey. He had almost balked at the door. A huge crowd, a singing tenor, and altogether more show and side than he had ever been accustomed to quite chilled him off. Then his eye lit on the dainty person to honor whom on her seventeenth birthday the party was being given. ‘Let’s go in,’ proposed Henry George.
The girl who attracted
him completely came from a British and Irish overseas background. As one of two
children of the marriage in Australia of Elizabeth McCloskey to a major in the
British army, Annie Fox had already behind her a story of domestic tragedy and
much moving about. Her parents’ marriage had broken early. The known facts are:
the McCloskeys were pure Irish and Catholic, and Major Fox a redcoat Anglican;
Mrs. Fox had married at sixteen, and her husband was twenty years older; after
a short while they separated and he disappeared completely; and a few years
later, when Annie was ten, the young mother died of what the family called a
broken heart. For the little girl this meant a bringing-up by her grandparents,
coming and going with grandfather Henry McCloskey, who was a contractor,
railroad builder, and speculator. After
Henry George, Annie was engaged to be married to some man about whom the family records tell us nothing — an unhappy commitment according to the little that is said. In her own much later retrospect her whole situation in the FlintofT household was miserable, and she a very lonely girl.
She and Henry reached an
understanding almost at once. Though the grandmother died, apparently in
December i860, two or three months had been long enough for the old lady to
approve the match in family councils, as Annie must have known. And at that
time — these were still $3o-a-week Home Journal days for Henry — Annie’s
uncle, Matthew McCloskey, who also lived in
During the winter and
afterward the young people kept constant company. We are told that they took
walks and memorized poetry; and the man instructed the girl in the meaning of
the national calamity. Their engagement was no secret to people who knew them
in
By all the signs, love would have marched straight to the altar, and with the blessings of the McCloskeys, perhaps as early as the summer of 1861, had it not been for Henry’s hard times and his father’s. But the shortage of funds was a fact; and to a bad time of frustration, and to a head whirling with affairs and anxieties, we owe the Millennial Letter, from which Henry’s ideas on the Civil War and his sense of his own patriotic obligation have been quoted. To be sure he still refused to share with anyone at home the fact of the existence of Annie Corsina Fox; but everything else he poured out, and the concerns of young love penetrated every line he wrote.
Of course it is not at all unique to discover a young man suffering a season of sorrows. The war years, and the whole romantic century, abounded in them. It is scarcely less unusual that Henry took the comfort he needed, when the facts of life failed to square with hope, from mankind’s ancient comforting beliefs: the promise of immortality and the promise of Utopia. Yet the letter is engaging, because the boy wrote into it a connected estimate of his roles in life, as citizen, son, and Christian, and as a man of personal ambition. And the ideas and attitudes the writer displayed are important because they exhibit the faith and hope from which moral and intellectual growth — and in time the writing of a great book — sprang.
The passages quoted below will not be injured, nor their meaning twisted, by some rearranging and omitting of phrases and sentences, as the punctuation indicates. Henry began by saying how impatient he felt, as his affairs stood still and he could not make them move, and he drew from a great sea poem:
Storm or hurricane,
Anything to put a close
To this most dread monotonous repose.
What he thought the good society ought to be he called the millennium: ‘How I long for the Golden Age — for the promised Millennium, when each one will be free to follow his best and noblest impulses, unfettered by the restrictions and necessities which our present state of society imposes upon him — when the poorest and meanest will have a chance to use all his God-given faculties, and not be forced to drudge away the best part of his time in order to support wants but little above those of the animal.’
George applied local
color to his vision of the Golden Age. First, he pictured unselfish family life
as showing what human energy rightly disposed might mean. James George’s new
marriage furnished a lovely illustration: ‘His wife is one of those women who
makes the happiness and well-being of their husbands and children an art and a
study. Whenever I go there in the evening I always find them together — a
pretty, happy family.’ Then, the
The brother admitted to Jane homesickness in his emotions, a need for the old assurances and security. ‘At night when I lie down and think of the old times — when I wake sometimes at midnight, and I can almost feel the kisses that seemed to press my brow a minute or two before, and the voices that I heard in my dreams seem to linger in my ears yet, and I almost cry with mingled pleasure and pain . . . But it will be soon, not so very far off either I hope, though at present I cannot count the time.’
In a climactic passage, which he perhaps felt none too safe in writing, and yet pushed a little hard, Henry inserted a paragraph, his first recorded discussion of the idea of immortality. ‘What a glorious thought it is, that at last all will be over — all trial, all care, all suffering forever finished; all desire filled, all longing satisfied — what now is but hope become a reality — perfect love swallowing up all in one boundless sea of bliss. How the old hymn that we used to sing in Sunday School swells and peals through the mind, when one thinks of and realizes its meaning as a living truth, like a glorious burst of heavenly music, telling of the joys of the redeemed and freed.
“Oh that will be joyful . . .
To meet and part no more.”
What a thought. What a picture! With all we love or have loved here “to meet and part no more” — one unbroken family around His Throne. Can we be unhappy long, if we believe this?’ Although all George’s future passion and his sophistication about the idea of immortality had still to be born, his lifelong fascination with it had arrived this early.
With this passage the writer had explored almost every individual escape available to a young man who feels overwhelmed: to join the army, to strike it rich, to live by the soil, to go back home, to die. The fact that he did not even hint at the alternative which made his life famous — that a Christian or a democrat may strive to transform society, not wait but work to see the Golden
Age arrive — shows how far short he was, at twenty-two, from being generally reform-minded as in the future. His only conclusion was for personal action: ‘We must struggle, so here’s for the strife.’ It contained no economics except individualism, and no dedication except to self and the few he loved.
Within a month of the writing Henry tried some new moves. With two partners he dropped out of the Evening Journal, while the three who remained bought the shares of the sellers, on credit. He and Annie must have made their decisions together. At the moment of his selling out, she refused to leave San Francisco when Sister Corsina McKay of the Los Angeles convent — whom she loved so much as to have taken her name —- invited her back for some duty, presumably teaching again in the school. And also simultaneously, Henry confessed his love to Jane, at first to her alone, to sound out the situation at home.
The sister’s reply makes
perfectly plain why he had kept up the deception toward
The intense courtship
displeased Annie’s guardian, who happened to be a real-estate developer. He
troubled to make inquiries in
After a night of much
praying, Annie Fox decided that she could not bear to remain where she was, and
told Henry that she had better go to
Before evening the groom
made what preparations he could. He borrowed money and clothes and arranged
with the James Georges for a couple of weeks board in the home he admired so
much. Isaac Trump agreed to go to the Flintoff door and ask for ‘Mrs. Brown.’ That
was the secret signal. Carrying not much more than the books of poetry they
loved, Annie rode off with Henry; and they went with Ike and Ike’s fiancee for
a wedding supper at a restaurant. At about nine they proceeded to the Bethel
Methodist Church of Henry’s membership. A handful of friends, including Mrs.
George, although James could not come, attended the ceremony. Out of
consideration for both bride and groom, the minister read the Episcopal
service; and on Annie’s finger her husband slipped a ring that had belonged to
Mrs. McCloskey. The couple announced their marriage in the newspapers, and a
month or so later in
For three weeks Henry got
by on substitute printing. Then from a friend came word of a job in
Altogether typical of the
coming decades, the couple had an easier time in
Back in
On the
Not unrelated to the values in life ultimately expressed in Progress and Poverty, all this devotion was raised to acute consciousness at midsummer, about the time of the Second Bull Run. Word of the sudden death of Jane George struck the newlyweds as though they lived next door. Typhoid fever had taken her. Henry kept his grief to himself one night while he worked at the press; then he told Annie, and wept. ‘Henry,’ wrote the mother, ‘how her mind developed! It was too much for her frail body. She read too much — nearly every day at the library besides bringing home books.’
second, the year of
As of 1863 the career and
money sides of life demanded most of the attention of the man of the family.
Little episodes demonstrate that the recent part-proprietor of the
On the political side of
life, one senses from these Civil War years in
For a future journalist
as well as social thinker,
Though perhaps George
would have become reform-minded earlier if he had worked for the Bee and
not the Union, it was probably better for him as a journalist that he had
his first experience on the larger newspaper. And also the
All things considered,
the years 1862 and 1863 in
A personal conflict,
however, suddenly caused him to leave the city and deprived his small family of
their pleasant situation. Here once more, as at King and Baird’s printshop and
in James George’s store, Henry George fell out with his boss. Whose fault it wras
is not known. Henry George, Jr., tells us that like the quarrel in
As if to play for a
repetition of the good luck of 1858 when he had gotten a new job so easily,
George again took a room at the What Cheer House. But no David Bond appeared.
The contemporaries second, the year of
As of 1863 the career and
money sides of life demanded most of the attention of the man of the family.
Little episodes demonstrate that the recent part-proprietor of the
On the political side of
life, one senses from these Civil War years in
On the
Not unrelated to the values in life ultimately expressed in Progress and Poverty, all this devotion was raised to acute consciousness at midsummer, about the time of the Second Bull Run. Word of the sudden death of Jane George struck the newlyweds as though they lived next door. Typhoid fever had taken her. Henry kept his grief to himself one night while he worked at the press; then he told Annie, and wept. ‘Henry,’ wrote the mother, ‘how her mind developed! It was too much for her frail body. She read too much -— nearly every day at the library besides bringing home books.’ In the Millennial Letter, addressed to Jane less than a year earlier, Henry had discussed immortality as though it were a promise, a rosy vague extension of lives already filled. But now he had to believe, he told his wife as he paced the floor, that the soul of the individual conquers death, and outlasts it, and proves it of no avail.
Altogether the fourteen
months from the Millennial Letter to the birth of the baby had contained about
all the crises to which young people are subject, and some of the strains had
been extreme. Yet all had been the kinds that time does conquer, and in a
backward glance the first and second years of marriage — especially the earlier
if he had worked for the Bee and not the Union, it was probably
better for him as a journalist that he had his first experience on the larger
newspaper. And also the
All things considered,
the years 1862 and 1863 in
A personal conflict,
however, suddenly caused him to leave the city and deprived his small family of
their pleasant situation. Here once more, as at King and Baird’s printshop and
in James George’s store, Henry George fell out with his boss. Whose fault it
was is not known. Henry George, Jr., tells us that like the quarrel in
As if to play for a repetition of the good luck of 1858 when he had gotten a new job so easily, George again took a room at the What Cheer House. But no David Bond appeared. The contemporaries of Pacific secession and fondness for the Confederacy, and under his administration the state made considerable economic, though inconsiderable military, contributions to the Union cause. For all the immediate, patriotic objects of the governor, George the young printer of course had perfect sympathy. At the same time, as is well known, the future president of the Central Pacific took West coast command in the planning and arranging — the famous contact-establishing, contract-making, and statute-passing business in state and nation — that prepared for the transcontinental railroad. Though we have no contemporary comment from George, it is impossible to think that he did not hear a great deal of gossip about Stanford at this time. It is reasonable to assume that the respect which his future philosophy allowed for the role of the imaginative and aggressive capitalist in an industrial system, and the grudging admiration George never denied the man, stemmed in part from personal knowledge of the governor whose humble fellow townsman he had been.
For a future journalist
as well as social thinker,
Though perhaps George
would have become reform-minded who speak of very good times in
Precisely so with Henry
George. When Annie and the baby came on he moved from a good hotel to a shabby
one; later they took rooms in a private house and finally wound up in a
second-story housekeeping flat. George could locate no proper job. His old
newspaper, the Evening Journal, had nothing better for him than
soliciting subscriptions. And his good friend Trump, who had come down from the
mining country out of work, had no better scheme than peddling clothes
wringers. For a few days George put the two selling projects together,
miserably tramping from house to house in
Only in the spring of
1864 did he turn up anything which at all suited him, a six-month job on the Daily
American Flag. This was another forgotten paper of the same class as the Home
Journal and the Evening Journal. It was owned and edited by one D.
O. McCarthy, an Irishman of vigorous anti-slave and unionist ideas like James
McClatchy’s. But at best the job was stopgap, and George thought again of going
into business in the mining country, perhaps
The venture could hardly have been more awkwardly timed, or less successful. In December, the month of starting operations,
Annie George was pregnant, seven months or so along. The following is Henry’s diary entry for Christmas day, 1864. ‘December 25. Determined to keep a regular journal, and to cultivate habits of determination, energy, and industry. Feel that I am in a bad situation, and must use my utmost effort to keep afloat and go ahead. Will try to follow the following general rules for one week:
‘1st. In every case determine rationally what is best to be done. ‘2nd. To do everything determined upon immediately, or as soon as an opportunity presents.
‘3rd. To write down what I shall determine upon doing for the succeeding day.
‘Saw landlady and told her I was not able to pay rent.’
In January the question became literally that of having enough to eat. Some days there were twenty-five cents apiece for the partners to take from the printing-office till. Dinners for the Georges and for Ike Trump who ate with them dropped into a routine of cheap fish, corn meal, milk, potatoes, and bread. They continued to get milk by persuading the milkman to trade it for printed cards. Annie George took in sewing as long as she was able, and she carried all her trinkets, except the McCloskey wedding ring, to the pawnshop. Then on the morning of the twenty-seventh she was delivered of her second child, Richard. Possibly she really heard what she thought she heard, the doctor’s orders: ‘Don’t stop to wash the child; he is starving, Feed him.’
On this day of anguish, in a dismal rain, occurred the event often told of Henry George. In his own words: ‘I walked along the street and made up my mind to get money from the first man whose appearance might indicate that he had it to give. I stopped a man — a stranger — and told him I wanted $5. He asked what I wanted it for. I told him that my wife was confined and that I had nothing to give her to eat. He gave me the money. If he had not, I think that I was desperate enough to have killed him.’
The ordeal lasted for weeks. In February George surrendered to Trump his interest in the printing establishment with the understanding that, if a sale brought in any money, he would have a share. Next, about the first of March, Henry had several days of typesetting; and Annie paid $9 rent by the earnings of her needle. At this point $20 a week, if they could only have it regularly, looked about ideal to the wife and mother.
The need to redirect his life, which these hard times compelled him to acknowledge, is better expressed in Henry George’s words than in any possible rephrasing. ‘I am afloat again, with the world before me. I have commenced this little book as an experiment — to aid me in acquiring habits of regularity, punctuality, and purpose ... I am starting out afresh, very much crippled and embarrassed, owing over $200. I have been unsuccessful in everything. I wish to profit by my experience and to cultivate those qualities necessary to success in which I have been lacking. I have not saved as much as I ought and I am resolved to practice a rigid economy until I have something ahead.
‘1st. To make every cent I can.
‘2nd. To spend nothing unnecessarily.
‘3rd. To put something by each week, if it is only a five-cent piece borrowed for the purpose.
‘4th. Not to run into debt if it can be avoided.’
In the matter of getting on with people, George planned:
‘1st. To endeavour to make an acquaintance and friend of everyone with whom I am brought in contact.
‘2nd. To stay at home less, and be more social.
‘3rd. To strive to think consecutively and decide quickly.’
In this time of greatest trouble Henry George made the trial upon which hinged the decision of his lifetime. His diary dates the event to the hour, on the afternoon of 25 March 1865: ‘After getting breakfast, took the wringing machine which I had been using as a sample back to Faulkner’s; then went to Eastmans and saw to bill; loafed around until about 2 p.m. Concluded that the best thing I could do would be to go home and write a little. Came home and wrote for the sake of practice an essay on the “Use of Time,” which occupied me until Annie prepared dinner.’
The ‘Use of Time,’ which marks George’s decision for a writing career, was the first essay he had tried since the trifling days of the Lawrence Society almost a decade earlier, and the first sustained writing since the very private Millennial Letter. He was writing clearly again but there is little in the essay to indicate either that the young man’s natural skill as a writer had held up or that it had declined, in recent years. We do learn something about his values in life. As in 1861, money for himself occupied front position in his mind. Not just $20 or $30 a week but wealth was what he wanted, in an amount to open the doors to good things: ‘more congenial employment and associates,’ opportunities ‘to cultivate my mind and exert to a fuller extent my powers,’ and real capacity ‘to minister to the comfort and enjoyment of those whom I love most.’ Sizing up his present predicament, he felt remorse for the hours he had idled. ‘If, for instance, I had applied myself to the practice of bookkeeping and arithmetic I might now have been an expert in those things; or I might have had the dictionary at my fingers ends; been a practised, and perhaps an able writer; a much better printer; or been able to read and write French, Spanish, or any other modern or ancient language to which I might have directed my attention, and the mastery of any of these things would give me an additional, appreciable power, and means by which to work my end, not to speak of that which would have been gained by exercise and good mental habits.’
The young man, now twenty-five, recognized of himself that, entirely apart from the hazards of unemployment, he would never be satisfied to earn his living by his trade. He did not deceive himself into thinking that writing would build a sure bridge from poverty to riches, and he was not especially idealistic about that calling. Yet feeling his own way forward he did begin to generalize a notion of human capacity — a pretty democratic notion — which he would enlarge in his greatest writing. As he put it now: ‘To secure any given result it is only necessary to rightly supply sufficient force. Some men possess a greater amount of natural power than others and produce quicker and more striking results; yet it is apparent that the majority, if properly and continuously applied, are sufficient to accomplish much more than they generally do.’ So for himself George determined that, ‘I will endeavour to acquire facility and elegance in the expression of my thoughts by writing essays or other matters which I will preserve for future comparison. And in this practice it will be well to aim at mechanical neatness and grace, as well as at proper and polished language.’
A little surprisingly, because nothing previous, unless it be membership in the printers union, indicates conviction or idea on behalf of labor, George made his next piece of writing a plea for working men. He did this in a communication to the editor of the new Journal of the Trades and Workmen, the short-lived first labor paper to be published on the Pacific coast. ‘We, the workers of mankind,’ he began, live in the brightest day that has ever dawned for the ‘like of us.’ Without bothering to justify his optimism, but complimenting the editor, George estimated the service a labor journal could render: ‘At a time when most of our public prints pander to wealth and power and would crush the poor man beneath the wheel of the capitalist’s carriage; when one begins to talk of the “work people” and “farm servants” of this coast, and another to deplore the high rate of wages [this was true of the Alta California] ... I, for one, feel that your enterprise is one which we should all feel the necessity of, and to which we should lend our cordial support.’ Hortatory but innocent of program, the piece contains little foretaste of future ideas, and no suggestion of an economist’s analytical powers in the making. Only the simple identification of himself with a cause appears: in his very first published writing Henry George spoke for laboring men’s improving their economic situation.
While some time was to pass before the opportunity came to develop this vein, another effort of 1865 assures us that the paper in the Journal of Trades and Workmen was no sport, no misrepresentation of present interests. This text is lacking, but George’s own word tells us that he did an ‘article about laws relatinsr to sailors.’
o
It appears that in hard times his memory had brought back the struggle of the crew and captain of the Hindoo in Hobson’s Bay, and that he now made his first plea for maritime labor.
George’s second
publication, which came out only a week after the first, shifted the scene of
thought and elevated the level of publication. This time he did a ‘Plea for the
Supernatural,’ quite in the California mode of being fond of the esoteric, and
it was printed in the distinguished literary journal, the Californian,
where Mark Twain and Bret Harte and ‘a lot of other bright young writers’ were
appearing. Using the first person singular, George wrote of a psychological
event during a voyage on the
There is no way to tell
whether, in the writer’s mind, the story was completely fictional or was
developed from an experience of his own aboard the Hindoo, but we can be
fairly sure that the ‘Plea for the Supernatural’ is not to be read as a very
literal confession of belief. In a short interval George cashed in two or three
times on
Within a fortnight of
George’s debut in the
It is a comment on the excitement of the day that the letter was printed, not in the regular edition but apparently in an extra, though perhaps it went no farther than proof. An editor’s line explained that the ‘stirring article’ had been contributed by a printer. Under the heading, ‘Sic Semper Tyrannisl’ George pictured the wounded president against the ‘glitter and glare’ of the theater. ‘They have struck down the just because of his justice, and the fate they have fixed upon him shall be theirs.’ Retributive justice and Christian atonement, George mixed his moral ideas. ‘What a fitting timel Good Friday! At this very moment . . . sounds the solemn wail of the Tenebrae. Now . . . again has Evil triumphed, and the blood of its victim sealed its fate ... As a martyr of Freedom— as a representative of the justice of a great Nation, the name of the Victim will live forever . . . Abraham Lincoln will remain a landmark of the progress of the race.’
It was an impulsive way
to break into newsprint. Yet despite all crudities, ‘Sic Semper Tyrannis!’ won
for the writer his first job as a newspaper reporter. The Alta
commissioned him to describe the
Then unsolicited, Henry George wrote another letter, a very thoughtful one, and it was printed as a front-page editorial of the Alta in the regular Sunday edition, 23 April. The title was simply ‘Abraham Lincoln.’ ‘No common man, yet the qualities which made him great were eminently common . . . He was one of the leaders who march alone before the advancing ranks of the people, who direct their steps and speak with their voice . . . Hot blood called him slow, and cold blood called him hot; but the universal current, tempered by the moods and springing from the hearts of the times, pulsed through his veins . . . No other system could have produced him; through no crowd of courtiers could such a man have forced his way . . . And, as in our time of need, the man that was needed came forth, let us know that it will always be so, and that under our institutions, when the rights of the people are endangered, from their ranks will spring the men for the times . . . Let us thank God for him; let us trust God for him; let us place him in that Pantheon which no statue of a tyrant ever sullied — the hearts of a free people.’
Passion had evoked, and a
week had brought from incoherency into coherency, the political affirmations of
the young printer who had just one month earlier determined to write. In the
common anguish he had turned from faddish supernaturalism, in which he could
never have reached maturity, to the folk mysticism which democracy does
produce. Unknowing of course, but in common with many of the great men of
contemporary letters and as early as any, he had made a small but eloquent
contribution to the legend of the fallen
The end of the war and
his being so little employed very soon provided the occasion of George’s
nearest approach to service in a military force.
Not that this was pure
impulse with George, for in this undertaking money was offered at last, after
two lean years. The Alta agreed to take any newsletters he would write
from
But that evening the
Brontes expedition, so called from the name of the vessel to carry the force,
collapsed by reason of the Brontes. Provisions were inadequate; and word
got around that the scheme involved seizing a French transport, and possibly
even an American mail vessel off
For Henry George the
episode meant that a zealous, foolish impulse had been frustrated, and that now
he must find some new direction for taking his second step into journalism. His
mind was not at all changed about
A literary historian,
Professor Franklin Walker, has noted accurately the incorrigible romanticism of
Henry George in this period of utopianism and adventure seeking before he
became an editor. His mind shared much of the American common lot. With just as
much correctness an economic historian might observe that George’s periods of
unemployment in 1859 and 1861 and 1864 and during his crisis of 1865 were more
the normal than abnormal thing for young men in
He had not suffered uniquely, but he had been hurt, and the crisis at the time of Richard’s birth was unforgettable. The unique thing in George’s case of course is that during Civil War years he reached a high intensity of self-awareness, and an awareness of ideas. His writing shows that he was beginning to see his own reverses as part of a social process, as part of the situation of all laboring men. He was beginning to see poverty in the light and shadow cast by Civil War aims, by Christian ideals, and by the ideals of the national heritage.
San Francisco Editor versus California Ideas i865—1868
-1-
In December 1865 Henry and Annie George
returned to
It was a printing, not a
writing, job. Probably some friendship or connection accounts for a bit of
preferment: at any rate the work was state printing, getting out the documents
of the biennial session of the legislature, which opened on 4 December. George
was pleased, and he now wrote his sister Caroline in much the same tone as he
had written Jane when happy about an earlier new job: 'I am, for the present,
only ambitious of working, and will look neither to the right nor to the left
until I have “put money in my purse” — something it has never yet contained. I
have abandoned, I hope, the hand to mouth style of living, and will endeavour,
if not absolutely forced to do so, to draw no drafts on the future.’ In accord
with his recent resolutions about being social and making contacts, George in
An early incident of that program tells the story of Henry George’s first positive response to a specific economic idea. One
William H. Mills, later a high official of the Central Pacific Railroad, addressed the Lyceum in favor of the protective tariff. He spoke with knowledge of the laisser faire economists in the back of his mind — Smith, Ricardo, and Malthus. But the American nationalist, Henry C. Carey, was his mentor, and Mr. Mills stressed ideas familiar in California: that a protective tariff was ‘best calculated to produce the broadest industrial skill of our people, develop the natural resources of the country . . . confer the highest intelligence . . . and generally confer industrial and commercial independence upon the country.’
These had been Henry George’s own Republican ideas. We have his acknowledgment that, when the Confederate raiders were destroying trade, he considered ‘their depredations, after all, a good thing for the state in which I lived . . . since the increased risk and cost of ocean carriage in American ships [then the only way of bringing goods from the eastern states to California] would give to her infant industries something of that needed protection against the lower wages and better established industries of the Eastern states . . .’ He had even regretted that the federal constitution prevented a state tariff.
But the protective argument backfired that night in the Sacramento Lyceum. Mr. Mills gave the audience a favorable comparison of the nationalism of the tariff with the cosmopolitanism of free trade. Then, according to the speaker’s recollection and friendly judgment of his opponent, George thought fast on his feet. The young printer asked the audience to reject Mr. Mills’s preference. He pleaded that protective tariffs were causing ‘antagonism between the nations,’ and had ‘augmented their selfishness’ and ‘made standing armies and vast navies necessary to the peace of the world.’ He contrasted ‘free trade, as an evolutionary force,’ one which ‘made nations dependent, promoted peace among them, and urged humanity on towards a higher plane of universal fraternity.’
It is sometimes forgotten that free trade was the economic dogma second in prominence to the dogma about land in George’s ultimate economic teaching and preaching. The episode in the Sacramento Lyceum gives chronological first place to free trade. Though we have no evidence from which to explain the inner reasons for a crucial change in Henry George’s mind, the voicing of that change does fix the date of his first taking initiative in economic thought;
he did this a year earlier than his first writing about land policy, and two or three years ahead of his first questioning the rightness of private property in land. Nothing could have been more characteristic of George as an economic thinker than this beginning. Now as later his economic perceptions were inseparable from moral perceptions, in the working of his mind, and economic ideas once accepted assumed with him the force of moral law.
During this nine-month
period in
By midsummer, a year
after the fiasco of the Brontes expedition, he had his second try at
journalism. This time the
He was reaching out in every direction and, had he continued free-lancing and supporting his family this way and that, he would probably have tried a novel soon. He considered going east, after all. Yet he felt that he could manage the transition into the kind of life he wanted better where he had made a beginning than where he would have to start at scratch. As he put the matter to his father: ‘I want if possible, to secure some little practice and reputation as a writer here before going, which will not only give me introduction and employment there, but help me in going, and enable me to make something by corresponding with papers here. If I do not overrate my abilities, I may yet make position and money.’ He was not being too optimistic. The editor of the Union commended him strongly for the ‘Proletarian’ articles, calling them ‘clearly, forcibly, and elegantly written, evincing just views, thinking power, good taste, and excellent command of effective expression.’ Henry George promised to make ‘a valuable aid in the editorial staff of a daily journal,’ this editor believed.
The wanted opportunity
came in November. On the fifth of that month an independent Republican paper,
the
A public disagreement
between prominent people thirty years later, about who deserved the honor of
having introduced Henry George to editorial writing, tells us something about
that debut. Undoubtedly James McClatchy, the first editor of the Times,
for a short term absent from the
Noah Brooks, the second
editor-in-chief of the Times, claiming to have been Henry George’s
Columbus, seems rather to have been his second discoverer but to have been
actually the first to advance him to place and responsibility. At any rate,
after McClatchy quit the Times, George returned to the composing room
without other assignment, and he was there when a foreman called him to Mr.
Brooks’s attention. At first meeting the editor held off. He thought that the
young man’s writing on affairs might have been plagiarized; and, as he noticed
the unimpressive physique, the thinning hair, he was skeptical. But very soon
he had George regularly on editorial work; and shortly, after a death on the
staff, George became the third-ranking editor. This rise accounts for a major
event of George’s life, occurring in June 1867, when a disagreement with the
directors caused Noah Brooks and his first assistant to quit, as McClatchy had
done. At that point, at the age of twenty-eight, Henry George became managing
editor of the most interesting paper in
Unlike
Radical Republican politics and journalism has been much discussed of recent years, often in terms of Thaddeus Stevens, as having lacked the sweetest disposition, as having been needlessly unforgiving toward the recent enemy, and as having incorporated so many self-seeking and corrupt special interests of North and West as to have invalidated its claim to speak a true national idealism. Even after the most adverse judgment of the movement as politics, however, individual Radicals do still command respect as idealists and reformers. Senator Charles Sumner belongs among the sincere tramplers of the vintage; and so does Representative George W. Julian of Indiana, the abolitionist who continued to fight for human equality, as spokesman for land reform and women’s rights. Especially when considering the Pacific coast, where the Radical Republican frame of mind naturally lacked much interest in the persecution of defeated Confederates, the idealism of the movement demands high rating. In the West as in the East, Radicalism had power to ignite consciences even against Republican party leadership, and sometimes did.
In this area of opinion
the Times began. Its editorials demanded reforms reminiscent of the
labor propaganda of the
The Times’ turning to Wells, we may note, was like Henry George’s later habit of studying that economist’s federal and New York state papers; and probably it set the habit for him. The same may be said of the newspaper’s coming out in favor of a slow and socially conscious policy of paying the federal debt from the Civil War years. Very rapid payment, however gratifying to creditor interests, would, the editorial page said, penalize the present generation which has already borne an incredible burden of war suffering. Too fast payment would raise taxes, restrict immigration and land settlement, and generally constrict the economy — a forceful argument which appealed to George, and which twentieth-century readers will understand.
Enough has been selected
from the comment of the Times on national issues, before George took
over editorial responsibility, to represent its line of thought and to suggest
the heterodoxy of its Republicanism. The paper is so remembered in the larger
history of journalism in city and state. Though it never made money, it
achieved a reputation for good writing. And, under its too rapid succession of
notable chief editors — McClatchy, Brooks, George, and Dr. Lewis Gunn, three of
whom reached fame in the field of writing — the paper stirred the community.
The power-conscious proprietors of the Bulletin, the city’s most
entrenched newspaper and a dull one, admitted some admiration of the Times,
while George was editor. When the paper failed, in 1869, an
Being on the Times,
then, meant for Henry George that his first editorial responsibility occurred
in a vortex of idealism and eco-nomic-mindedness, as was very appropriate to
his own ideas. We shall need to return to his leading editorials of 1867 and
1868 to see how he developed those attitudes. But, wheels within wheels, this
phase of his thought cannot be studied with proper understanding of his
intellectual growth unless it be connected with his opinions at the time
concerning important state matters.
Specifically, these were
the questions of labor supply and wages, and of land settlement, land policy,
and landed property, and they comprised the very essence of current history in
the state. Though earlier in life, beginning in
-2-
It will do no harm to say
again what Californians have been saying happily for nearly a century, that
during the ten years (and more) after the Gold Rush the state accomplished some
of the most incredible feats of social and economic building of
nineteenth-century history. How could one think differently from the Methodist
missionary, the Reverend Mr. William Taylor who, in the year of Henry George’s
arrival, reviewed
What is easily forgotten
about early days in optimistic
Henry George’s life and
thought would have been vastly different and his writing would have been less
substantial if the regional discussions had not come rapidly down to earth and
sometimes been done in a very expert way. In general, the economics of
colonization was the appropriate language. Not differently from Iowa and
Minnesota at the time, California was reliving, as all American communities
have, the old story which had begun on the East coast two centuries earlier:
settlement first, with labor and capital risked in hope and expectation; then
stages of economic growth toward community productivity, solvency, and a degree
of independence. But uniquely
This set the frame of
economic thought and made natural a rapid development of ideas. Broadly
speaking, the 1850s produced promotional economic literature; and the 1860s
produced the first sustained flow of economic self-criticism and particularism.
Of course these two types of ideas overlapped: a certain amount of criticism,
like Bushnell’s, cropped up early; and promotion kept up in the ’60s, as it has
ever since. Nevertheless a distinction of attitude between the ’50s and ’60s is
valid. American history bears a long-run analogy: during the period commonly
called colonial, from Queen Elizabeth to George III, first, a century of
promoters from Hakluyt to Penn advertised
Two illustrations from
1851 will show how early and how naturally, once gold and climate were
discovered,
At first
twentieth-century glance, the Southerner’s scheme seems preposterous. By
provision of its constitution
A contrasting northern
instance of blueprinting an ideal future in
At least as early as
Henry George’s arrival in
Earlier than the social
criticism of the ’60s, the mordant writing of Hinton Rowan Helper tells us all
we need to know about the arrival in California of the economic objector’s
point of view. The famous North Carolinian’s California book, The Land of
Gold, Reality versus Fiction, published in Baltimore in 1855, won him less
reputation than The Impending Crisis in the South, partly because in
California he made his one-man attacks for the losing not the winning side. If
others were promoters, he was the demoter of
Though there is no
evidence that George ever read Helper or Seyd, or even knew of Werth or
Gadsden, his protest and his utopianism about
Three books of the decade
sum up the advance of regional economic analysis. Beginning in 1863, their
chronological order is also the order of their importance in policy discussion,
as follows: John S. Hittell, The Resources of California comprising
Agriculture, Mining, Geography, Climate, Commerce, etc., etc., and the Past and
Future Development of the State (Roman, 1863, and many later editions);
Titus Fey Cronise, The Natural Wealth of California (Bancroft, 1868);
and Bentham Fabian, The Agricultural Lands of California; A Guide to the
Immigrant as to the Productions, Climate, and Soil of Every County in the State
(Bancroft, 1869). All these were published in
Were this a general
history of economic thought in California, a dozen reasons could be discovered
for a close examination of all these regional descriptions, histories, and
programs. As we are concerned, however, with the frame and setting of one young
editor’s discovering his role, we may be guided by the time factor. In 1867,
when George took over the Times, Hittell’s was the only one of the three
major economic descriptions of the decade already in print. That writer’s own
words indicate that he regarded himself as a promoter, and he was much like
Seyd and other writers of the ’50s, although he was also much more critical
than they. ‘I write of a land of wonders,’ he said. ‘With many drawbacks, which
have been set forth clearly and unreservedly,
On the critical side, no
other regional analyst was quite so severe as was Hittell, and he spoke more
strongly in the first than in the later editions of his book. In that edition
he demanded no less than a transformation of the state’s economy. What was
wanted may be understood by analogy with the Radical Republican program for
reconstructing the South. To replace the instability of the economy created by
the Gold Rush, the Alta California writer — and, more mildly, the others
also — proposed to encourage social growth based mainly on homestead
agriculture, and also on diversified, settled, and productive industries. With
variations of their own, Hittell and the others offered the northern conception
for the state, not different in principle from Werth’s, but now rendered in
detailed blueprints. A grand increase in farming, to put to use the state’s
promising soil and climate, was their principal idea. From that would flow food
for the cities; there would be rural markets for industry; and prosperity and
loyalty would flourish among the people. Hittell proposed this without
especially idealizing farm life, and he certainly did not slip over into
radical ideas about property in land. He hoped for prosperity in the mines as
on the farms; and he saw the future arriving with deep digging already
displacing placer mining, and with more capital equipment being taken into the
Sierras. His goal for
Thus, for the long term,
the grand strategy of
This was the general
position of economic expectation at which the three principal regional writers
converged in agreement, all of them bringing out books within short years of
George’s beginnings as writer and editor. Strikingly they agreed also about the
point indicated for surgery. The situation of land distribution and land
policy, they all said, was the festering sore — the specific removable cause of
Settlers, he charged, had
been driven unjustly from the land they occupied, with such disastrous results
for themselves, and with such a huge destruction of values, that fifty years of
peace would be required to place
Since so much of the
story in the next few chapters develops the idea of the magnitude of land
problems and the seriousness of land policy in California, we need to notice,
at this point of Henry George’s entering the debate, only that there were
present in the state several varieties of political opinion on the matter, and that
opinion reflected several facets of actual abuse. McClatchy’s Bee was
already as aware of the problems of land monopolization as any of George’s
papers would ever be — McClatchy himself had taken personal part in squatter
riots near
Viewing the state-wide problem (outside the cities) in the most general way, and with the guidance of recent historical research, we may picture a mountain phase and a valley phase of the land question. In the Sierras, the gold miners had set the pattern of landholding in their own way, without benefit of official surveys, registrations, or the taking of titles. Squatting on domain lands, they had simply established mining districts and district regulations, on an entirely voluntary basis. These procedures were well adapted to placer mining, a stage in which men were many and capital goods few. In due course we shall find Henry George praising the mining-district regulations as democratic, and as a successful system of landholding in use, rather than in ownership. But to Hittell and his conservative kind such arrangements were insecure and adverse to capital investment, and unfavorable to permanent settlement and family life in the mountains. Presently Congress did pass a law of the kind Hittell believed in, and freehold tenures, a protection to mining-company investments, became the normal thing in the mountains.
As for the agricultural
valleys of the state, Hittell reviewed hard conditions and unintelligent
policies. As present-day scholars agree, many of the richest and most
convenient farm lands had been granted before 1846, in large and unsurveyed
holdings which were intended for Mexican cattle ranchers; these holdings had
been recognized by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; and the federal legislation
of 1851 had provided that the Spanish and Mexican grants be examined and confirmed.
Thus some of the causes of land aggregation were inherited from
Hittell’s answer to the problem of the aggregation of agricultural lands was the same as his answer to the unusual situation in the mountains. Apply the traditional American system of fee-simple ownership, he advised, and he suggested no further steps in land reform. He did recommend minor reforms of other kinds for stimulating California’s economy: to cut out the ‘forestalling’ or cornering practices of the merchants of San Francisco, which placed unnatural restraints on trade; and to change the West coast habit of depending too much on long-term big-credit operations in business. He also proposed policies, not his alone, which George would later resist strenuously: reducing the interest rate and reducing the rate of wages. Hittell was a deflationist, all round, and one who put much reliance on laisser faire. His argument for fee-simple ownership, without further steps to break up the big holdings, rested on that basis. Security of ownership, and a reputation for security, would bring to the state an adequate flow of new settlers and new investment, he believed, and in that way California would soon have the ‘permanent improvement, and all these blessings of inestimable value which come only with fixed and happy homes, and the best regulated social order.’ In a free, secure market he expected the oversized landed estates to break up by reason of transfers of title, which would occur through sales and inheritances.
To sum up: in 1866 and
1867, when the San Francisco Times was taking hold, the problem of land
monopolization in the state had been thoroughly discussed. Since by this time
the federal courts had at long last given a series of rulings on the Mexican
titles, and since, as we have seen, Congress had decided on fee-simple
land-holding in the mineral-bearing region, the conservative, laisser faire
answer to the land problem was due to have an extensive trial. The problem of
insecure titles had been reduced; the problem of engrossment remained. In
But at this point, when
discussion of land issues might conceivably have quieted for a period, a
political situation blew up in San Francisco which, had it been so intended,
could hardly have been more accurately designed to heighten the implications of
land-title problems before the public eye. A legacy from the Spanish past, this
particular land problem wras a little different and a little more
spectacular than any such problem ever faced by any other city in United States
history — unless possibly Los Angeles is a rival in this respect as in others.
The public question arose: Did San Francisco as a community own in perpetuity
the land onto which urban growth was inevitably pressing it? If possibly Yes,
would the rising values of the land actually accrue to the city’s credit? Or,
if the answer was No, must land speculators and with-holders, in a particularly
unsavory spot, make a killing according to an American custom which was
especially active in
To understand how a
question of publicly owned land could arise in practical affairs, we must take
a last glance at how the
This decision bore a
moral suggestion of
But Americans arriving in
Long before 1866 the
courts made durable law of the early ad hoc actions concerning pueblo
domains: private holdings were ruled to be valid as they had devolved through
the city’s officers from a royal grant of
Today the fraction of the
pueblo lands that remains in actual public ownership is Golden Gate
Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, and for many years one of the most
beautiful places of public enjoyment in the country. More important than the
park, for Henry George or for any reflective mind, from this legacy of
Henry George’s navigating
the many-forked stream of California economic discussion waited, of course, on
his assuming responsible control of the Times, in the summer of 1867.
The first editorial he did, while working under McClatchy’s supervision, has a
present-day interest because it concerned American relations with
So likewise Henry George
in 1866. He saw the analogy between
Before George assumed
control, the Times took an editorial line on the economic problems of
the state that in some respects paralleled and in others departed from the
Hittell line maintained in the
As for steps that would
help to keep the present labor force in
To the Times’ way of thinking, labor’s best hope of improvement lay in the long-run benevolent operation of impersonal economic forces — in the growth of technology and in the supply-and-demand processes of the employment markets. It lay very little in trade unionism or in labor legislation; and the working man’s best chance for advancement was to be found in education for the masses and in some participation in the co-operative movement. On the point of improving the condition of seamen — and we can only guess that George was the writer on the subject — the Times did take a fighting pro-labor stand. Yet it acquiesced in the Chinese coolie immigration, and in general pattern of policy, the Times stood quite close to the Alta in 1866 and early 1867.
When George took charge, the editorial concern of the Daily Times enlarged with respect to matters of land more than it changed in any other way. We cannot say that this meant that the managing editor had discovered his ultimate focus of interest. It is more likely that the award of the outside lands to the city and city and state politics forced the matter on George, or rather on the Times, than that he took great initiative. For now that the lands were legally in San Francisco’s domain, the question was whether the city and the state legislature, between which authority was shared, would conserve them for the public good, or whether they would permit another round of distribution to engrossers and graft.
In July 1867 was formed a
Pueblo Land Association, the one object of which, according to its
advertisements, was to defeat land grabbers by securing the ‘free distribution
of the unappropriated lands of the
Henry George’s Times
went no further than the Alta when, on 31 August, it applauded Senator
Conness and approved the work of the Pueblo Land Association to keep out the
speculator. Thus far it was on the common line. The paper’s liberalism came to
the fore when it supported the bill drawn up by the association for the state
legislature. More than just providing for homestead lots, the Pueblo Land
Association would have established several sizable permanent city-owned areas:
two 500-acre parks, a 200-foot drive and six plazas along the beach, and space
for public schools, a college, firehouses, charitable institutions, and
churches. The association wanted land classified for commercial use to be
auctioned, and the remainder to be distributed gratis as home lots, to those
who would build houses worth $200 or more. These proposals sound very much like
the future Henry George, and the Times praised them, in an editorial of
14 December and at other times, as promising
But the idea was too
advanced, required too much state restriction on business operations, for
Though, in the final step, the state legislature did approve Order no- 733> the result was not as bad as the Times had anticipated. ‘A powerful organized interest has moved both bodies, and stripped the people of their land,’ said the paper, on 25 March, in first hot grief. ‘The consequence is that the city of San Francisco, with the richest patrimony of any city on the continent, will be compelled to buy back, for public uses, a few of her eight thousand acres.’ On this point the editorials in the Alta expressed great satisfaction; titles had been rendered firm, that paper noted, and some reservations for public use, including a 1000-acre park, would serve the city well. When the politics of the matter had cooled, the Times acknowledged some satisfaction in the park. From editorials of this time we may note that in the beginning George’s ideas about urban land came close to land-use planning; and we may anticipate that, though in the modern sense he never became an economic planner, this affinity of ideas would always persist.
In the education of Henry
George the cardinal suggestion of the San Francisco pueblo-land problem
was of course that the public ownership of land had and could become an actual
issue in politics: he learned this almost certainly before he had even heard of
the Ricardian theory of rent, or of any proposal, after Ricardo, to capture
economic rent for the public. The pueblo-land question had an incidental
effect of making contact for him in
On other phases of the land
problem, the Daily Times under George had its say, piecemeal as the
controversies arose. A series of editorials in March explained and approved
proposals before the legislature, which were more or less identified with
ex-Governor
The young editor threw
his weight, too, on the level of national policy. On
This complaint against the Morrill Act makes a good resting point for the first phase of the development of the editor’s ideas about land and land policy. Entering objection, he had shown accuracy and insight. Today high authority supports George’s judgment. Professor Paul Gates’s researches have recently shown that the Morrill Act has been honored above its deserts; that while doing something for education that law also strengthened a most undemocratic landlordism in American society.
George also showed reach
of mind. In the editorial last quoted, discussing the wasteful hurried
distribution of
Watching this fast
development in the young editor, we have seen no reason yet to call him a
radical, or to say that he differed from, more than he resembled, his
contemporaries of the conservative
Though the time would come, Henry George was not yet ready to buck with opposite theories either the wages-fund theory or the iron law of wages. But he was willing to debate with the Alta. How ignorant that paper was, answered the Times of 9 August, to think that a result ‘detrimental to the interests of the workmen . . . would be a great boon to the State at large.’ The ‘fundamental principles of political economy’ protested such an absurdity. Then followed, I think for the first time, Henry George’s economy-of-abundance ideas which he later developed in his books. ‘The interests of the State are the interests of its citizens — the greater the rewards which labor receives, the higher the estimation in which it is held, the greater the equality of the distribution of earnings and property, the more virtuous, intelligent and independent are the masses of the people, the stronger, richer, and nobler is the state. Free trade, labor-saving machinery, co-operative organizations, will enable us to produce more cheaply, and with a positive increase of wages; but it would be better for California that she should retain only her present sparse but independent and comfortable population, than that she should have all of England’s wealth and millions with all of her destitution and pauperism.’ It would be interesting to know what writers or books George had in mind as the sources of his ‘fundamental principles of political economy.’ Perhaps he had drawn on some ideas of Wells or had been influenced by Henry Carey. His editorial reads more like the 1930s than the 1860s, and more like Henry George’s future books than like the British treatises on economics which might have come most readily to hand for reference.
The Times of course celebrated early in 1868, when the state legislature passed an eight-hour law, and almost simultaneously Congress prescribed eight hours as the working day for federal employees. The state law had too little force to deserve much praise; but even so the Times was happy that it had become policy to promise working people leisure, ‘in which to learn, to think, to plan, and to invent.’ Since labor’s human rights had been an article of George’s social faith from the time he began to have one, there was nothing new in his holding this opinion; but it was important for his development that at the time when he was achieving stature as an editor and was entering into prominent controversy, he asserted simultaneously land-reform ideas and pro-labor ideas, just as his Jacksonian predecessors had done.
Outside the orbit of
questions of the California economy, yet not far afield, and nearly as
important for George as he entered his career, a number of questions tangential
to land and labor came up in 1867 and 1868. Railroad policy was one. Before he
took control of the Times, the paper had criticized the federal
government’s donation of lands to the projected, now building, transcontinental
line. The Times professed satisfaction that there should be some public
subsidy, as the roads were sure to benefit western growth; but it gave reasons
why bond credit would have been a sounder procedure than huge gifts of land.
Federal assistance should be extended ‘with a view mainly to reclamation,’ it
said on 2 March 1867, ‘and not to enable corporations or individuals to take
advantage of its munificence to promote selfish speculative designs’ — a
proposition which, in the light of railroad history and economics, seems not to
have been as obvious then as it is today. Rates were another problem involving
government policy. That tariffs on California’s new and still unconnected lines
were five times as high as in the East, though operating expenses were only a
little more, was the Times’ opinion. After George took control, the
paper spoke for a rate-fixing commission in the state, on the order of a
But he did not halt with
the immediate. In a way that was prophetic, both of national events about to
occur and of his own development as thinker, he discussed the conflict of
interests natural within the railroad business — and in more recent times, in
all big business — between the managers and the owners of corporations. The Times
considered the proposals of state ownership of railroads which were being
advanced in
This was George’s first
pronouncement on the public ownership of railroads: an archaic half-way
proposal brought forward from the Jacksonian day of
Of the many signs, in the
Times, that Henry George, still under thirty, was growing fast and
gaining confidence as a commentator on economic affairs, none is more
convincing than a series of editorials on a question somewhat removed from the
main concerns of the California economists. These were printed under the
heading, ‘The Currency Question,’ during the last days of April and early in
May 1868. Here George set forth a very full elaboration of the paper’s
established idea that paying the Civil War debt should be a gradual process and
should not be hastened and made upsetting to those who, by living and working
through the war period, had already paid dearly. Questions of public debt and debt
policy are always complex, and notwithstanding that at the time of writing
George had still ahead of him most of his lifetime’s reading in economic
treatises, he wrote his editorials in language that was about as technical as
any he ever used. It seems wise to discount his own assertion, late in life,
that he had been the original author of the ideas of federal finance which he
developed in the Times. Not unlikely he owed, and later forgot, a debt
of ideas to John A. Ferris, a
The nub of the Times’ proposal — and a point which has a familiar ring in 1955 after a dozen years of Defense Bonds — was that United States bonds and United States money be made readily convertible, the one into the other medium of credit, the bonds to be purchasable in the ordinary routines of business by any who wished to buy. Like the Ohioans, the Times plotted a mid-course between such currency contraction as was national policy at the moment, and such impulse for paper-money inflation as certain
Mid-westerners were
beginning to demand. As a Californian and as a pro-labor editor, George had two
governing reasons to believe in gold and silver as being the only sound money
desirable for the long-run policy of the country. The silver-and-gold-producing
state never used any other kinds. And, from the days of Andrew Jackson’s
struggle with the Bank of the
Very skillfully, within these lines of commitment, George argued in the Times for discontinuing the national banknotes (this meant reducing the powers and profits of bankers), for making the greenbacks issued by the government the one paper currency, for bringing the greenbacks gradually into equal value with gold, and for having federal money always convertible into bonds at a minimum interest rate, and bonds convertible into money. Interconvertibility would mean that all the people would have resort, in foul economic weather or fair, to a place of safe investment and a just return on savings; and that, in expanding times or as they wished, people could shift from federal credit into private investment and business operation. This was rough-hewn equilibrium economics indeed, by today’s understanding of that subject; but equilibrium economics it was, a vein which George explored no further until the very end of his career as writer. His intention of 1867, to promote the people’s independence from bankers as credit monopolizers and manipulators, is apparent in the terms of the articles.
In August 1868, with a good first crop of economic opinions raised, Henry George quit the Times. He did so without a summary or valedictory such as he came later to like to write, whenever occasion offered. But he could have made a considerable claim. He had taken a Radical Republican paper and maintained to the end its essential politics. A May editorial had regretted that President Johnson would probably not be convicted in the impeachment trial. Yet in the same month the Times denied being the ‘organ’ of any group and claimed to be ‘an independent paper,’ committed to ideas generally like those of Horace Greeley. This self-judgment rings true to the paper’s record of wanting co-operation with reform-minded Democrats, and true to the economic policies of the paper. The notions of Liberal Republicanism, already forming in the East in the minds of such men as Greeley and David Ames Wells, better express the direction of George’s Times than does any other political line.
Though there is no ground
yet for talking about any system of Henry George’s ideas, he himself was
perfectly aware that he was finding a role in a tradition of protest. On his
first Fourth of July as editor — under the title, ‘To What Are We Drifting’ —
he placed the Times in the current from Andrew Jackson. Only the iron
will of that fighter in the White House, he had the paper say, had dethroned
the second Bank of the
Within the not narrow area of his regional perceptions, Henry George did do a summary of his thinking of 1867 and 1868. This was his justly famous article, ‘What the Railroad Will Bring Us,’ written in anticipation of the great coming event. It was the leader in the fourth issue, October 1868, of the Overland Monthly, the new journal which — with the masthead phrase, ‘Devoted to the Development of the Country’ — quickly achieved stature as the best of the California magazines, in form and style much like the solid eastern reviews. Appearing there, Henry George was keeping company with his recent boss, Noah Brooks, one of the editors, and with John S. Hittell, Mark Twain, and Bret Harte, whose ‘Luck of Roaring Camp’ had appeared in an earlier issue.
A complacent Californian, George took for granted all the material bounties and developments commonly claimed for the state.
The Great West he
conceived as the richest part of the country, and its resources such as to
command a flow of capital and labor from abroad ‘like pent-up waters seeking
their level.’ The Central Pacific and Union Pacific system, when completed,
would just about fulfill the speculator’s hopes.
From regional patriotism
to regional utopianism, George moved with the current around him. ‘What
constitutes the special charm of
But he did not relax his
anxieties and criticisms. Working from the economics of the Times, he
quarreled in the
The sum of his judgment
he rendered as a warning: nostalgia for what was passing, and fear and hope
mixed, for what would come.
These were accurate
prophecies of 1868. Depression and
Fighting Monopoly and Pledging Utopia i869-1871
-1-
The fewness of the Henry George letters extant for the years 1867 and 1868 accords with the impression of his life given by the job on the Daily Times. He was at the grindstone, writing, reading, thinking, and deciding. Doubtless he was too busy, and in off hours too wrapped up in his own family, to send to the people in Philadelphia the old amount of detail about Annie, the children, and himself. And there were complications also.
The
As for George’s quitting
the Times, on 12 August, we are told no more than that he was refused an
increase in salary, and that the separation occurred with good will on both
sides. The next two events, which seem almost to contradict each other, require
factors of long-range planning to explain. Within a week George took a managing
editorship with the
paper; and within two
weeks he had broken up his household and sent Annie and the three children on
to
Certainly the letter she
sent him from
‘Harry darling, all is
happiness around me, but I am not happy, for “my heart is over the sea.” ’
Paying $15 a week, Annie contributed something to the family’s maintenance
while she rested. Mr. George, just seventy, was in the coal business now with a
little office opposite
Before long, with an eye
to the possible future, Annie began to size up the situation in
Whatever the tug and pull
on Henry of those for the most part cheerful letters from an unwell wife, there
was always the chance of such bad news as reached him in the late fall, and not
from Annie alone. Ned Wallazz, the old friend of King and Baird days, wrote
that he was alarmed. The George family doctor had ‘clapped the cups’ on Annie
George’s temples. (The old practice of bleeding ill persons continued, in certain
places, late in the nineteenth century.) Wallazz and his wife thought Annie to
be right in doubting the doctor’s diagnosis of epilepsy, and in being
dissatisfied with the treatment she was getting. It seemed to them that she was
afflicted with some disorder of heart or brain, or possibly of the stomach, and
that Henry should stop the cupping. This report fitted all too well with what
Annie herself was writing: she once overheard the doctor say ominous things,
when he thought her to be unconscious. Her last letters to
Meanwhile, on the coast,
Henry George’s working for the Chronicle must not be pictured as though
he were managing editor of that big paper today. Only three years of life were
behind it, and those not as a regular newspaper but, under the title of the Daily
Dramatic Chronicle, as a ‘theater house bill’ supported by advertising and
circulated without charge. It had never lacked cleverness, however, and now
under Charles de Young it had a large spark of ambition added. When, according
to the editorial page of
Immediately the paper changed its name to the Daily Morning Chronicle and branched out into general journalism; and in its editorials we see Henry George loosening his tightest Republican attachments. Not that the Chronicle was Democratic. But an editorial of 3 September, for instance, announced that it would avoid partisanship as a curse. Look at the Times and the Examiner, it invited; though the two report identical events and affairs in the South under Reconstruction, they are equally destined to come up with absurdly opposed judgments. Working for this paper, George, the former abolitionist now seeking the middle truth, said the same moderate things about the Negro as President Lincoln had said. Editorials explained that while the Negro deserved economic freedom as much as any man because his labor belonged to himself by right, he should probably not be assimilated into the American social and political community — he was not ready for that.
There was preparation in this for one of the main events of George’s next year, 1869: the change of mind that made him an early opponent of the policy of admitting Chinese labor on the West coast. The Times had been fairly friendly toward coolie immigration; and, generally, in the East and in the West, a correspondence existed between those who favored Chinese admission, often Republican businessmen who wanted cheap labor, and those who persisted in elevating the southern Negro, the Radical Republicans. In this frame of reference, George’s inching out of extreme Republicanism, and out of the Radical line about Reconstruction, fitted him for the future. It would have been an almost impossible thing for a journalist on labor’s side not to come to hate the coolie immigration; and in the future it would be hard for him to avoid the web of racism, and easy for him to prefer the Democratic to the Republican line. The Chronicle represents a softening-up stage in certain of its editor’s first ideas.
Yet George did not shift
opinions quickly, or change parties in time for the election of 1868. He worked
for the Chronicle until late fall, and, with the recommendations of the
paper, he voted Republican for one last time. Though the Chronicle
asserted its character as a ‘bold, bright, fearless, and truly independent
paper,’ it announced that it could only prefer ‘Grant and peace’ to ‘
In one respect George’s
brief editorship molded the Chronicle into permanent form. In September
and early October the paper hit harder at land speculation and made more of it
as a public issue than the Times had ever done. In a three-day series of
editorials beginning on 8 September, it attacked the San Francisco Bulletin,
which a year earlier had stood about where the Times had stood in
regard to the pueblo-land problem. Now the Chronicle charged the Bulletin
with having followed the Alta into the camp of the speculators. The Bulletin's
point that taxation would force land aggregations to fall apart sooner or
later, and that ‘the purchase of land by capitalists, if pursued in a liberal
spirit, may [through sales] prove beneficial to the people,’ Henry George
scored as ‘a Jesuitical defense of land grabbers.’ He claimed the
Henry’s leaving the Chronicle
dismayed Annie — she was ready to blame somebody’s spite on the newspaper staff
— and her whole attitude enlarges the doubt that husband and wife had any
deep-laid plan to move them permanently away from San Francisco. Though nothing
much is clear about the break, it is altogether unlikely that George would
under any conditions have gotten along well politically with de Young. And
surely the husband must have felt impelled to take the chance when a new
opportunity of journalism availed to send him across the continent. At any
rate, almost before Annie knew what was happening, Henry was at her side in the
old
-2-
George crossed the
continent in the employ of the
Sitting beside a
talkative driver, during the cold ride on the ‘mud wagon’ stagecoach which
connected the two railroads, George took the opportunity to ponder what
American business and engineering were accomplishing, and the costs. As he
summed up, the citizen and the ticket purchaser had plenty of reason to
complain. With Central tariffs at ten cents a mile in coin, and
His assignment for the
He decided to try to come
back in 1868. He doubtless forecasted improving political weather for Democrats
in
The difficulty was that
Nugent was being cold-shouldered in
For this biography few
missing documents would be more welcome than some undiscovered memoir by
Nugent, saying how and why he happened to assign to Henry George the job of
negotiating the Herald's independent way into the Associated Press in
But he was doubtful from
the start about doing business with the Associated Press. Thinking that time
would be lost if he went direct to that headquarters, he approached first the
people at
His first expedients were
rapid, loose-jointed, and ethically dubious, but effective. He returned to
On this basis Nugent
launched the new
George expected to win,
but he did not rate the enemy low or expect him to yield without a fight. In
1869 the Associated Press was a new organization, but neither youth nor small
size made it tender; it was a hard-boiled youngster not yet civilized up to its
natural responsibilities. Specifically, the AP was a trade association: it
pooled equally the cable and telegraph news received by its members, seven
leading papers of
But protest had come to very little; and, according to the AP’s friendly historian, that organization, at the time George confronted it, presented a very stony face indeed.
To make things completely
difficult, moreover, the AP had recently elected as its general agent the
hard-fisted James W. Simonton of
At the start of his
mission George learned from a confidant that Simonton was opposing a contract
with the Herald, and that factor became a part of the report to Nugent.
Next the story was that Simonton had learned, by bribing Western Union George
guessed, that the Herald’s news was being sent from Philadelphia; and
then that Simonton had come on from New York ‘to lay traps.’ But he did not
learn about George’s
George estimated a close
understanding between the Associated Press and
And in the lion’s den he
did succeed in establishing new operating connections. A ‘supplier’ of
dispatches was found, evidently a member of the staff of the New York Sun;
and the New York Herald gave its namesake access to its ‘specials’ and
to the Havana news.
The inauguration of
General Grant made the occasion. George went down to
Then came the humiliation
of being tricked. The AP papers in
Actually there was very little he could do beyond threatening. This event was the time, and might reasonably be accounted the immediate cause, of George’s dissolving whatever attachment he may have had left to the Republican party. In the Herald George’s correspondence gave Grant no higher credit than for ‘the best of intentions.’ The new cabinet he called ‘astonishing’; and, about the new appointments generally, he said, ‘There are many, of whom I confess I am one, who dislike to see enormous wealth and political power joined.’ To a friend who twitted him about his old party connection, George declared that he was no longer a Republican.
Back on the job in
In the second half of
April, after three months of somehow doing the job for the Herald,
Yet he was not too
frustrated to be enraged, or so utterly helpless as to think the sentence as
good as executed. During recent weeks his feeling had become greatly mixed
about his employer. Nugent kept him constantly in arrears as to salary and
working funds. He sent no instructions or letters; an occasional telegram and
payment was all that George’s long reports drew from
Though George’s advice
did not set the course for Nugent, or save the Herald or even sustain
his connection with his employer, the counsels he gave were sound. His
prediction that the news gathering he and Hasson had been doing could be
maintained proved accurate. Fifteen months later, this associate was to join
forces with John Russell Young to found the American Press Association. Exactly
as George now said, they were going to be able to give the Associated Press a
run for its money and to crack through the
At the same time he was
advising Nugent, George himself, still in
George made free to go to
the public. He ordered printed 6000 copies of his history of the case, and he
distributed many among
The
So ended Henry George’s
battle against the Goliath of contemporary journalism. The defeat confronted
him with questions — they appear in his letters of spring and summer — about
what he should do next. Continue in
David had not succeeded, but his missiles had stung, and he was ready to deliver more from a western angle of firing.
-3-
The fight with the
monopolies does not tell the whole story of Henry George’s half-year in
Philadelphia and New York; nor does that fight compounded with the newspaper
writing we have noticed and with the obligations and anxieties which attended
his visits with the family in the Third Street house tell all. Yet the total
excitement of these things together does seem to go far in explaining the
climactic personal event of the sojourn. This was the famous vision and dedication
of his life which occurred on a sidewalk of
There is a disappointing
lack of testimonial about how George held up psychologically under the
pressures of 1869. Thirty years later John Russell Young retained an impression
that his friend had been breezy, openhanded, and western, and also unusually
thoughtful and serious, and anxious to make friends among fellow journalists,
during the long battle. The only contemporary indication we have, aside from
George’s own letters already drawn upon, is a phrenological chart, the second
and last in the book, which was recorded in humor by ‘Professor John Hasson.’
But it tells about a physical and nervous condition which was not amusing, and
accords with the strains to which George had been subjected. He was very light,
down to 113 pounds, and so tense he could sit at table no longer than fifteen
or twenty minutes. It is hard to endorse Has-son’s finding that George lacked
self-confidence, but perhaps the friend had perceived doubts or hesitations
which do not appear in the letters to
We know, from George’s
own retrospect of the vision, that part of the background lay in an emotional
reaction against the cities he visited. Of course he had not been in
When in 1883 he did put
into writing his memory of the vision, he made it very private. ‘Because you
are not only my friend but a priest and a religious,’ he wrote to Father Thomas
Dawson, an Irish brother in reform, ‘I shall say something I don’t like to
speak of — that I never before told anyone. Once in daylight, and in a city
street, there came to me a thought, a vision, a call — give it what name you
please. But every nerve quivered. And there and then I made a vow. Through evil
and through good, whatever I have done, and whatever I have left undone, to
that have I been true.’ He spoke less as a mystic, more as a pledged reformer,
when he told the story to the people of
The occurrence is not to be doubted, yet from tardy testimony there is little opportunity to examine it. Remembering the Millennial Letter of 1861, and recalling the Lincoln editorials of 1865, it is best to observe simply how capable George was of intense social feeling, of intense identification of himself with public situations. In this sequence the vision of 1869 becomes the culminating event of a series — there was to be only one more, and that one soon and a kind of supplement to this.
In another man, the
vision and dedication might have led to drafting blueprints for a new utopia.
But escape to alabaster cities was not George’s way. Typical of his own
realism, he set himself rather, while still in
Evidently he found time
to do the thinking during his weeks in
Arguing this way George succeeded in avoiding a racial opposition to Chinese immigration. He particularly said that individually the Chinese were known to be intelligent and teachable. But from San Francisco he knew also that the coolies really could not be considered as though they were free individual settlers like other immigrants; they were unfree transient laborers transported from and committed to return to a culture which he believed to be ‘in petrifaction.’ Mainly he conceived the Chinese immigrants, in the Malthusianism of the common mind, to be the advance party of an unlimited labor force, a threat to free workers more terrible than the Negro slave trade had ever been.
The writer submitted his
essay in the form of a letter to the editor of the Tribune, and on
The Chinese letter was
George’s biggest intellectual effort during the hectic half-year in the East, a
very limited expression of his spiritual commitment, and yet an important first
step in his study of economic processes. It was to influence his coming
-4-
When arrangements were
made and Henry George put his foot on the train for
Yet George left
His personal papers
contain notes he made on the western trip; probably he intended them for
rendering into Tribune articles. This time — 1869 was the year of
completing the transcontinental link — he liked the Union Pacific better than
in 1868.
But when he reached
Even political hopes were disappointed. By August some campaigning within the Democratic party proved that George would not be nominated for the legislature. To be sure this was less than a defeat. As Annie wisely wrote: it had been too much to expect that he would be chosen; he had been a Republican; he must keep courage. Nostalgia and waiting, and catch-as-catch-can, were Henry’s fate for the summer and fall of 1869. ‘There is nothing out here like the old-fashioned farmhouses of the Eastern States,’ he wrote a sister: ‘There is some magnificent scenery and beautiful country; but the people have not been here long enough to make it a country like the East.’ He had an opportunity to eke out an existence when, for reasons unknown, the Bulletin hired him to write a few editorials. But before long he was doing a short turn at the printer’s case again. One compensation, it must have seemed a pathetic one, was leisure and some chance to read, more than he had had for four or five years.
Exactly the reverse of
the year before, family events now supplied about the only bright spots in
Henry George’s history. The politics of the city presently associated him with
his Irish uncle-in-law, Matthew McCloskey, from whom he had been estranged since
the event that forced him and Annie to elope. Their reconciliation gave joy to
all concerned. And in
For the husband, the
upturn came when to his amusement he was appointed for the period of a friend’s
illness to be acting editor of the
But before long Henry
George was voicing on the Monitor, as he had in the Times, his
own preferences. He spoke in behalf of Mayor McCoppin; and he spoke against the
Bulletin, in which he now discovered a ‘Hanglo-Saxon’ slant. His reply
to that paper, when it deplored the way in which Irishmen were getting into
city politics, must be noted, because it gives us his own estimate of the
political arena he wished to enter. One-quarter to one-half of
In anticipation of Henry
George’s fight of 1886 and 1887 with Archbishop Corrigan, which almost led to
the banning of Progress and Poverty to Catholic readers, there is rare
irony that George now used a tiny Catholic paper to voice for the first time
his proposition that every individual has a natural right to land. Of course
this was not new as a general idea: labor reformers and others since
Two editorials in one
issue of the Monitor, that of
It sounds almost as
though Henry George was already at the point of denying that land should be
held as private property. The major premises were laid. But when he came to the
second editorial of 11 September, ‘The Land Question in
Specifically, for the one
state, he proposed: first, that big land aggregations should bear ‘full
taxation’; second, that there be set by constitutional amendment a sliding
scale of land taxes, higher rates for large estates and lower for small. The
two implements were designed, of course, to cut the same way. By keeping
assessments at full value, and by raising rates on large aggregations, George
hoped to squeeze out the monopolizers, force the land back into public hands,
and open it for proprietor-farmers to take over. This is quite different from
his ultimate proposals. Yet in boldness, philosophical assumptions, and faith
in the power of government, George had made a sizable step into his future; and
his pledge for the poor, made in
Later George looked back on this period, or rather on the entire two years between his return to California and his important writing of 1871, as the passage of a traveler westward across the high plains. A long course lay behind him, and he was pledged to distant goals. Immediately ahead lay the mountains of thought which were the hazard of his journey.
-5-
In the period since he
had left the Times, George’s
The Immigrant Union was a
brand new body, and its principal spokesman was its president pro tem,
Caspar T. Hopkins, who was also president of the California Insurance Company
and something of an intellectual and writer as well. He never reached Hittell’s
stature in this respect, but he is referred to as the well-educated son of an
Episcopalian bishop and the author of a none-too-success-ful patriotic textbook
in civics; he was an occasional lecturer at the
A year earlier Henry
George had predicted in the
The Immigrant Union’s
diagnosis was different from Hittell’s, principally because it was quite a bit
more critical than his.
To renew the energies of
the state’s economy, the writings of
The Immigrant Union thus
put itself behind the northern utopia for the state: its goal a society of
owner-farmers at center, a diversified commercial, mining, and manufacturing
economy surrounding. Asking for immigrants with cash, it was fair-minded enough,
on the home front, to ask also that
There is no need to
praise as altruistic the union’s exhortation to sell cheap; but a sincere
idealism does appear in that part of the propaganda which differed most
considerably from the old Hittell and Alta line. The Immigrant Union
opposed the importation of Chinese laborers. Quite clearly this was President
Hopkins’ idea, and his feelings resembled Henry George’s own. As a Lincoln
Republican, and as a writer on civics who believed ‘that had the American
people, South as well as North, been alike trained in the principles of
American government, the Civil War would not have occurred,’ Hopkins now
pursued a logic like that with which George has made us familiar. He would
exclude the Chinese rather than have coolie labor stratified into a permanent
peonage in
At first survey the
program of the Immigrant Union may seem too sinall-farm-minded to fit
comfortably under the designation Hamiltonian, which we applied to the first
round of regional economics. But the aim again was a balanced economy, farms and
industry and commerce. Furthermore the means, which the Immigrant Union
proposed to use, involved the action of the state, and of voluntary groups
within the state, in an almost neo-mercantilist pattern. In comparison with the
earlier solvers of
The scheme as a whole —
deny as Hopkins did that it represented any conspiracy of land grabbers —
conformed perfectly with the general interests of property. Even the plan of
holding down the asking prices of farm lands was a means of sales promotion,
and a shoring up of basic values. In these features lay the vulnerability of
the plan to attack, from Jeffersonian premises. Given the newness of
-6-
It was inevitable that Henry George should want to quarrel publicly and prominently with Immigrant Union economics. What apparently was a chance meeting of late summer, 1869, with the governor of the state, led to opportunities for him to do just that.
The Democratic incumbent
of
Shortly after the
meeting, a recommendation by Governor Haight secured George a new editorship.
Though this one lasted only from September 1869, to the middle of the next
February, and the newspaper was suburban and not important, the event was big
enough to restore Henry George to a proper job as editor, and moreover to
launch him as a Democratic party newsman and as a political thinker into the
bargain. Although not every personality of the
and the election of 1871 was coming into sight. His claim to a liberal’s loyalty was a big one: principally that he and his party had brought about the repeal of certain railroad subsidies, and by doing so had reversed an ominous trend. The governor had also aligned himself with such projects as providing a state board of health and a fish commission and helping the state university. He proposed a special auction sale of valuable lands for the university — a truly Henry George way of securing to the state the actual present value of public lands.
So connected, George the
editor tackled the state’s Hamiltonians once more. Though he took caution, now
as before and always, to acknowledge the good that railroads and all manner of
new technology were doing
But beyond these obvious
stages of agreement, the Transcript differed from the Immigrant Union
right down the line. All the means the
In editorials of October,
November, and December, however, George made his indictment plain and tough.
The Immigrant Union would serve as a front for the land aggregators themselves,
he said; and its operations would add to
George’s own solution was straight anti-monopoly and laisser faire. Assess great landholdings at full value, he said as he had said on the Monitor; then tax collection would begin the squeeze on aggregators to make them release their holdings at prices low enough to be attractive. Let all taxes except land taxes be reduced. With these charges down the immigrants would come, without state bureaus and outlays, said the Transcript: in due time the happy letters of new citizens would supply California’s advertising, and the movement of free immigration would flow according to the true drawing power of the state’s resources and charms.
The editor of the Transcript refused to be appeased by the prolabor plank of the Immigrant Union. The Alta and the Bulletin were keeping to their old opinion about coolies. There was no real break in the conservative front. George had thought through the Chinese immigration problem first, and he intended to make political capital of the ideas of exclusion. Now he conceived the notion of asking for a statement from the highest possible authority. Writing to John Stuart Mill, he particularly mentioned the old argument addressed to American working men in behalf of admitting the coolies. It was that this form of labor would affect the economy in the same way as new machinery did: the Chinese would do the work Americans disliked to do and raise the standard of living for all. Would the author of the Principles of Political Economy be so good as to comment?
On this particular point
most definitely, but also in a general way, Mill’s long and generous letter,
sent from his hideaway at
On other points Mill’s
agreement was less complete. Where George could find nothing but faults in the
Chinese as a social group, unsavory and unassimilable in
George printed the letter in full in the Transcript of 20 November, and, unlike other editorial writing, he signed his comment. He urged that the ‘nine-tenths’ predominance of the coolie element among the California Chinese justified labor’s anti-Chinese attitudes, by Mill’s own standards. He yielded little relevance to Mill’s hortatory comments. On the point of the Chinese children, though they had good natural capacity, he thought that their living in a miniature China and a sordid one, right in San Francisco — the ugly beginning of today’s Chinatown — would prevent them indefinitely from becoming assimilable into the common social and political life. After stating his reservations about Mill’s reservation, George added a grateful tribute to the generous economist.
He had brought off a
journalistic coup, and more. For the first time Henry George stood as a
leader for a cause, in his home community. The
Indeed he had now fixed
on an idea of policy which he was to hold for life as peculiarly his own. Up to
a quarter century later, even after Chinese exclusion had become national
policy by virtue of acts of Congress, George would be arguing the morals of the
matter. At this time his friend and follower of illustrious name, William Lloyd
Garrison II, opposed him. That he was a racist, George denied. In his words of
1893: ‘To your proposition that the right to the use of the earth is not
confined to the inhabitants of the
Still separated from his
family, still wrestling the problems he had tackled in
This time George was
riding in the lovely foothills where the eye is drawn west, above the flats on
which
‘Like a flash the reason
seemed to light my brain,’ said Henry George again, about a quarter-century
after the event. Although the illumination must have been almost as emotional,
certainly more hopeful, than the
With a little exercise of
the imagination we can try to recapture the milling ideas of a dissatisfied
editor, that day as he sought refreshment in the
There is, indeed, no
reason to question George’s assertions, late in life, that in 1870 he had taken
nothing from either Adam Smith or the French Physiocrats, who are known for
assigning high place in the economic process to the land and its tillers. And
he might as well have included in the denials the writings of David Ricardo,
the author of the widely accepted law of rent which he himself would soon
accept. George, the
Partly on this account, and partly because of the man’s transparent sincerity, we read with sympathy George’s defense, in his posthumous work, The Science of Political Economy, of the independence of the Oakland illumination. ‘It is a mistake to which critics who are themselves mere compilers are liable, to think that men must draw from one another to see the same truths or to fall into the same errors. Truth is, in fact, a relation of things which has to be seen independently because it exists independently.’ George was always an idealist in the philosophical as well as in the colloquial sense of the word: to him true ideas were real and permanent entities, available to right thinkers and the private property of none.
Yet the unanswered question persists of a present debt to classical economics, not unlikely to John Stuart Mill. All that is certain is that in the East George had read Mill for wage theory, and found what he could use. Certainly the Principles, in the early and current editions, contained the prevailing theory of rent; the book even contained a friendly presentation of the notion of land nationalization, which at this very time Mill was beginning to advocate on the ground that rent ought to be a public, not a private, income.2 I just hazard the guess that from his reading George had actually picked up some notions of rent theory, that they were in reserve in the back of his mind. He could easily have done this, any reader could, without realizing at first — the British economists
2 See Mill, Principles, 1864 edition, Ch. xvi. How
interested George would have been had he known that, in 1868, his senior in
land reform, Congressman George W. Julian, had like himself sought Mill’s
advice. In reply the liberal economist had approved Julian’s 'endeavoring to
prevent the sale of public lands to mere speculators.’ Mill often thought, he
said of himself, 'that it would be much better if a new country retained all
its lands as state property, giving, as we do in India, leases renewable
forever at rents guaranteed against any augmentation except by a general
measure . . . According to my own notions, absolute property in land, even when
owned by the cultivators, is a prejudice and an abuse.’ Mill to Julian,
themselves did not — that a rent theory drawn primarily from considering English rural landholding might apply more radically to American land, especially land in the vicinity of a rapidly growing city. George could quite naturally have failed to sense at first acquaintance the moral dynamite that resides in rent theory for Americans who — different from the British economists — reject as wrong any preference for a class-structured society.
If the
-7-
Henry George had been too
big a man for the
At last after nearly two
years, family life could be restored to proper footing. ‘My poor darling you
have been having a hard time,’ wrote Annie, when she received the glorious
news. She was inexpressibly glad to be coming back to
Though storms loomed
ahead, for 1871 would be election year, there were many promising things about
the job. George began with a ‘fair salary’ and a tender of one-fourth of the
company’s stock. The battle he had first fought for Nugent was now won. Before
the end of April the opposition telegraph, which he had predicted, had actually
materialized: the
The fun spread to
Meanwhile the Reporter moved in on a concession, even a monopoly, of its own. The legislature passed a bill — ‘your bill,’ George’s father called it — which authorized the publication ‘of certain legal notices in a state paper.’ This preference assisted the Reporter through and beyond George’s term of editorship; later, a Republican legislature repealed it in resentment after a different set of owners and editors had taken over. We do not know how important or unimportant the subsidy was to the paper’s income or George’s. However low the estimate, it makes an interesting preliminary to the state appointment, in some degree a sinecure, which was to sustain him after 1875, while he was writing Progress and Poverty.
On two fronts of his
economic thinking especially, the editorship of the
The governor’s attack denied any hostility to corporations ‘in their proper sphere,’ but he was old-line Democrat from first to last. ‘We object,’ he urged a friend, to the corporations’ being turned ‘into agencies of public plunder, and we object to placing the government into the hands of their managers and making the people their serfs and tributaries.’ To Haight it was ‘inexplicable that men claiming to be imbued with the democratic principles of the olden time should fail to denounce and resent this monstrous system of taxing out of existence farmers and small property-holders in order to add to the surplus of those already enriched out of the public treasury and the public domain.’ In this line Haight set up his case against railroad subsidies.
George went with him. In
the Reporter the editor made no effort to build on the archaic idea he
had ventured in the
When a rival paper said that railroads were ‘essentially private property as much so as a wagon, a hotel, or steamboat,’ George answered with a justification of state regulation which might equally have served to justify state ownership. ‘Railroads are a peculiar species of property, exercising peculiar privileges, and in favor of which certain concessions are made ... No individual can build a railroad without obtaining from the state a grant of rights and powers that do not belong to individuals, and can only be exercised by them by virtue of the authority of the State. And furthermore, there is this difference between a railroad and other kinds of property. A railroad is from its very nature a monopoly, that is, its existence makes competition impossible. A railroad is not only a common carrier, subject to all the duties of a common carrier, but it is a common carrier with a monopoly of the business. Thus to the other titles by virtue of which the state may control and regulate railroads is added the highest right — the right of necessity.’
This ‘right of necessity’ to regulate corporate monopolies was not theoretically satisfying as a point of rest for a democratic ponderer of the ethics of property. Yet like nearly everything else in George’s mental history in 1869 and 1870, it shows an advance in his apprehending industrial-age problems — in this case the role and sphere of public utilities.
As for taxation, except
to protest the complexity and costs of
George puzzled and
discussed the incidence of taxation on social classes. All citizens are
affected by the federal war taxes, he agreed, but the large payers feel them
only as a railroad feels a tax which it passes on in larger fares. Taxes really
fall where the tax gatherer never visits, the garrets of the cities, the child
laborers at the
In certain aspects of
economic questing and answering, Henry George on the Reporter changed
rather the intensity than the direction of his ideas. Sometimes there was a new
dogmatism added, for instance this: ‘Free trade is the great NEED of
George deserves credit
for being able to keep his eyes open and to make important and truthful
observations about social conditions. On one crucial point, an editorial of the
Reporter said that, although the wages paid to American working men had
increased of recent years, their real earnings were diverted more to taxes and
bought fewer goods and services than in earlier times. This was a hard but not
a commonly admitted truth; forty years later a brilliant California-trained
academician proved it statistically. And, in another issue, the Reporter
quarreled with the advice of
In the summer of 1870
Once more George drew
strength from John Stuart Mill. Proimmigration newspapers were charging him
with having garbled or otherwise misrepresented the Mill letter, as he had
printed it in the
A very large part of the story of George as editor of the Reporter, indeed, is his effort to give the party the imprint of his own mind. As we have already seen in the instance of the Immigrant Union, this was partly a business of saying ‘No.’ The Reporter criticized Governor Haight again when the administration showed reluctance to recognize the full force of the Fifteenth Amendment, on ratification. Teaching the Democratic party lessons mainly involved saying ‘Yes’ to reform, however; and this meant going beyond Governor Haight’s own field of fighting the Central Pacific Railroad.
George’s central theme of argument in the reform vein of thought was the idea of the unfinished Civil War — the obligation of the country to effect more completely its war ideals. Only the Democratic party could become the vehicle, he said in many an editorial: right ideas of reconstruction should be applied across the land, by no means in the usual terms of Reconstruction in the South. A few lines from the Reporter will chart the moral situation as he saw it. ‘We have despoiled the South of its state freedoms, now what of our own?’ ‘Swindle after swindle; corruption after corruption, is constantly coming to light; so tainted has the moral atmosphere in Federal circles become that it is literally thought no harm to steal.’ On the Fourth of July only the ‘graver thoughts’ came to the editorial mind: a present crisis, a ‘crucial test of our institutions . . . land dearer . . . class distinctions sharper . . . colossal fortunes . . . mammoth corporations ... We have lost that high regard for law.’ In this condition, the editor pleaded, the country should not belittle political parties; it should recognize that Democrats and Republicans do stand for different principles. To the Democratic party he credited four attitudes as right: a determination to limit the federal government; a racism (unqualified and acknowledged, this once) ‘that this government was instituted by and for white men and their posterity forever’; faith in free trade and opposition to tariffs; a fixed enmity to all monopolies. Richard Henry George, now signing himself ‘Old Pop,’ could hardly have judged more accurately than he did when he wrote about having shown the Reporter to some good old Jackson Democrats. ‘Many worme congratulations I have received that I have a son so bold to stand so firm for the good old Democratic Principals.’
By all the signs of
editorial performance George at midsummer 1870, after half a year, was filling
to satisfaction the job for which Governor Haight had called him to
The story came out later.
From San Francisco there appeared, one day, in the office of the Reporter,
‘an honest old gentleman’ who wanted to buy ‘a controlling interest in a good
Democratic paper.’ The bidder denied any wish to change policy and offered good
money. George was willing. (What he told Mill, about this time — that he was
working out his ideas about the universal causes of poverty — is the only sign
he gave, that he had other interests than journalism pressing.) As Governor
Haight was out of
Though the ex-editor of the Reporter and agent of the American Press Association must have been piqued at being tricked by a railroad henchman, he who had had no money now had some; and no purchase had bought his lasting silence.
-8-
Two years earlier
George’s article in the
The first, entitled The
Subsidy Question and the Democratic Party, consolidated into sixteen
closely written pages the ideas he and Governor Haight shared on that bitter
question. Written to support the governor’s fight for re-election, it used laisser
faire theory against big business, and in behalf of labor and the small
people — the opposite of twentieth-century habits of thought. George demanded,
of course, that the railroad companies rely on private resources, with little
or no staking by the government. His more doctrinaire ideas he embellished with
quotations from the Democratic Review of 1837; and the practical results
of government handouts and politics he illustrated from unappetizing recent
history, especially from the case of the
Though Governor Haight
was defeated by a Republican, Newton Booth, that event did not put the idea of
the pamphlet too much on the losing side. In
In the other pamphlet, Our
Land and Land Policy, George reached a new level of intellectual
achievement. A 48-page booklet, as published for 25 cents in
The title of it is big
enough to be right for the first two-thirds, the remembered portion of the
text; it is too modest for the scope of the whole. Beginning with a colored map
which indicates by bands across the country the routes of the western railroads
and the share of the domain granted them as subsidies — an alarming generosity
of the government — George made a Malthusian-minded presentation of
Though we may bypass his
statistics, we must not miss the common sense of his ideas, or the naturalness
of his doing what he was doing. He had had an intuition that landholding had
everything to do with the distribution of wealth. Very well, he was checking
the data and reporting. He wrote in part from his old editorials; he also
ventured new vistas of criticism. From the vast totals of Land Office figures,
which included desert and waste, he cut down to the size of 450 million acres
the actual ungranted and available part of the domain which might still be
settled by farmers. This meant 12 acres per American, in 1870; or, according to
his population predictions, if distributed among the new Americans of the next
decade, 33 acres apiece; or again, 12 acres apiece among the new Americans from
1870 to 1890. Of course his population estimates ran too high. But his
essential prophecy was true:
In the second chapter George shifted from the general picture of federal resources and federal policy to a detailed analysis of ‘The Lands of California.’ This was the strongest criticism yet. Where Hittell had been satisfied to find fault mainly with the confusion of titles, George cut deep. In the greatest federal-land state in the union, and a thinly settled one, he found and said that ‘a large part
3 George’s Malthusianism here was
conventional but not unstudied. He knew the old predictions of Elkanah Wilson
and thought they set the right pattern for population study. On this kind of
thinking, see Joseph J. Spengler, ‘Population Prediction in Nineteenth-Century
of the farming is done by
renters, or by men who cultivate their thousands of acres in a single field.’
Remembering his writing for the Times, George spoke again of the pueblo,
and of
The recapitulation of the
These two, the first and
second, chapters make a devastating indictment of a national policy and a state
situation. Except locally, however, the edition caused hardly more than a
ripple of policy comment in 1871, no more than the letter against Chinese
immigration as printed in the Tribune. Major recognition waited for
later times; perhaps the first such acceptance was Hubert Howe Bancroft’s still
unequaled history of
Yet for the development
of an intellect the third, fourth, and fifth chapters of Onr Land and Land
Policy — the part of the book not comprehended by the title and quite
naturally not noticed by students of the domain — are more revealing than is
the critical realism of the earlier chapters. Facts combined with moral
indignation against monopolizers were not enough for this writer. Why fight
land engrossment? How phrase, how justify the ideas of the
To establish a base for logical reasoning, the author set up textbook definitions and assumptions from classical economics: land, wealth, labor, and so on. Only one of the definitions needs detain us, it is a little special: land is ‘that part of the earth’s surface habitable by man not merely his habitation but his storehouse upon which he must draw for all his needs, and the material to which his labor must be applied for the supply of all his desires . . . On the land we are born, from it we live, to it we return again — children of the soil as truly as is the blade of grass or the flower of the field.’ To Henry George, land included resources and location, and it had poetic meaning not separate from the economic. These factors blended now into an article of lifelong belief.
So also emerges a second idea — not as sharply and freshly as the wages-fund idea when he was thinking out Chinese immigration, but with similar, and more lasting, utility for reform purposes — the labor theory of value, common to classical economics. Perhaps twentieth-century readers should be warned, as George’s contemporaries would not have needed to be. There was nothing unusual that George should insert in his book, quite interstitially and without self-consciousness, that wealth is ‘the equivalent of labor,’ and that private property in goods is justified because it represents accumulated toil, either one’s own or someone else’s for which value has been given in exchange. In 1871 more complicated modern theories of wages and of prices were being developed, but they had not displaced the old labor theory in the economists’ kit of tools; and likewise, though Marx had by now used the labor theory in building his system, that system had not been rendered into English-speaking — and had not reached Henry George’s — awareness. In other words: the labor theory of value was not yet either outmoded or rendered suspect by having kept company with revolution. Like that other commonplace of British middle-class thought, the contract theory of government on which the American Revolution hinged, this theory stated ethical common sense. In the ordinary parlance of the textbooks it was kept reasonably disinfected and unexciting to readers; but the germ of social heterodoxy and protest always lurked in it just the same, not for Marx alone but for any thinker.
In Our Land and Land
Policy Henry George, putting two and two together, began to make history
with economic ideas. Value occurs in land, he now said — remember that his
definition of land excluded improvements made by man’s labor — by reason of
scarcity. And value in land means power: the ‘power which its ownership gives
of appropriating the labor of those who have it not.’ An increase in land
values, he pushed on, does not increase the wealth of a community; an increase
affects the distribution of goods, not their production. It raises social
classes. To the owners of land of heightened value, purchasing power does flow;
from the users of such land, higher payments are demanded. In such terms, a
year and a half or more after the experience, George found formulas and context
for the
Into the fabric of fact and theory of Our Land and Land Policy, moreover, the author assimilated the kind of utopianism he had put into ‘What the Railroad Will Bring Us,’ and the ideas of the universal rights of men which he had put into the editorials of the Monitor. The following will illustrate his blend of religion with economics and politics: ‘The right of every human being to himself is the foundation of the right of property. That which a man produces is rightfully his own, to keep, to sell, to give, or to bequeath, and upon this sure title alone can ownership of anything rightfully rest. But man has also another right, declared by the fact of his existence — the right to use so much of the free gifts of nature as may be necessary to supply all the wants of that existence, and as he may use without interfering with the equal rights of anyone else, and to this he has a title as against all the world. The right is natural; it cannot be alienated. It is the free gift of the Creator to every man that comes into the world — a right as sacred, as indefensible as his right to life itself.’
Lengthening his
democratic vistas in the directions he had promised, George discovered that
inequality of opportunity in
‘We are not called on to give to all men equal conditions, but we are called upon to give all men an equal chance. If we do not, our republicanism is a snare and a delusion, our chatter about the rights of men the veriest buncombe in which our people ever indulged.’
Doing Our Land and Land Policy had taken the author back to first principles, and it had also taken him far into his future of reasoning, preaching, and reforming. Yet a caveat is required: the little book is not, as some have thought, Progress and Poverty in miniature; it is the great book in embryo only if the figure of speech allows for change in embryonic growth. The crucial difference is that in 1871 Henry George affirmed the homestead policy as about adequate for implementing American principles of equality. He did separate himself from the 160-acre tradition: 80 or 40 acres now seemed to him a better norm, more naturally what an owner-farmer could cultivate; and, Westerner that he was, he knew that homesteading did not work for cattle and sheep raising.4 But the exceptions prove adherence to the homestead rule; and, though George threatened non-conforming theory on one page — saying that there is ‘in nature no such thing as fee simple in land’ — he said on the next page that ‘it is also true that the recognition of private ownership in land is necessary to its proper use — is, in fact, a condition of civilisation.’
Differing from most land
reformers, George was already prepared — though the ‘single-tax,’ properly so
called, lay sixteen years in the future — to cope with the owners of land
already monopolized. In Our Land and Land Policy he first built into
extended argument the lesson of history discussed in
For immediate action at federal level, Our Land and Land Policy recommended that grants from the domain be restricted to farms for proprietor-settlers, according to the terms of his judgment. He thought that railroad lands not yet fully transferred could be recaptured for the public. And, broadening his assault on the col-
4 Let the cattlemen and sheepmen have access to the domain as a public commons, he recommended, a sound idea, we now know, if backed up with due payments and restrictions against overgrazing. See Our Land and Land Policy, 99, 100.
5 George’s increased facility
with economic ideas in this pamphlet might suggest a recent large amount of
reading. But in a letter to David Ames Wells,
lege grants, he assured his readers that ‘the earnings of a self-employing, independent people, upon which the state may at any time draw, contribute the best school fund.’
At state level, Our
Land and Land Policy proposed cutting down the protection
Refocusing in conclusion,
George sketched again the narrowing lines with which he had diagramed the
domain in the West and placed them on a larger canvas. According to
up-to-the-minute statistics, conditions in the industrial East, especially
Read as a whole, the famous criticism of land policy and the little-noticed passages of theory and reform, George’s pamphlet reveals previously unrealized capacities for gathering and systematizing information, and like capacity for setting into pattern his proposals and reasons for economic and social change. It displays also the overwhelming contemporaneousness of the author’s mental operations. He had the strength, at this stage, of being up to date; he may possibly have fortified himself from articles of 1871 by the Treasury official, E. T. Peters, some of whose statistics he certainly borrowed from official sources. He had a corresponding weakness: the author who knew so little of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine as to say that the founding fathers of the country had had no ideas like his own about land still had some reading to do to tighten his case.
Yet makers of history are not often writers of it, and George in Our Land and Land Policy was arriving as an original thinker. As a critic, as an editor and writer informed on public affairs, as an influence in the Democratic party, as a tractarian he had arrived.
Trying Out Radical Ideas:
The
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In
the amazing
surges of energy which have always given a special character to
But many newcomers to
With profits flowing into
Then, with a swifter
impact on the state than any reverses of the preceding decade, bankruptcies in
1875 brought on new economic troubles with a vengeance. Hard times raised a cry
for deep reform. The legislature did nothing that made a difference.
Henry George’s career, as
constructive successful newspaperman from 1871 to 1875, and as toiling author
of Progress and Poverty from 1875 to 1879, corresponds to the phases of
California history, precisely. He started his
Indeed George was
politician as well as political thinker and writer that year, and his hopes for
state office rose higher than in 1869. In February a supporter urged him to be
candidate for the secretaryship of state. ‘If I run for anything it will be for
Congress,’ he countered in humor, ‘but whether for the upper or lower house I
have not decided.’ In June he served as secretary for the Democratic state
convention, which met in the assembly chamber in the capitol and passed
resolutions according to his inclination; and then he did run for a seat in the
state legislature. Henry George, Jr., has it, as we may well believe, that the
Central Pacific went for the scalp of the man whose opposition to subsidies had
not been quieted by purchase money. But until election night George thought he
would win. Then, according to the same witness, who should have been in bed at
the time, his father came home agitated. ‘Why,’ he told his family in loud
voice, ‘we haven’t elected a constable.’ Meanwhile George did some magazine
writing again. The February 1871 issue of the
This time the symptoms
suggested cardiac or circulatory difficulties, and most likely something of
that kind had been at the bottom of her earlier troubles. Fortunately she did
not suffer as much during this visit, and family adjustments were easier in
Yet probably he would
have decided to remain in
Some flattering
responses, actually, had come to him from the East, on an intellectual not a
political plane. Congressman Julian had skimmed Our Land and Latid Policy
and promised to do more: ‘A glance has shown me how well and thoroughly your
work has been done,’ he wrote, and ‘It is timely too.’ Better than this was a
letter from David A. Wells, who, since George had first known his writings as
favorite material for the
Perhaps the most ingratiating response of all came from Mr. E. T. Peters, some of whose statistics George had incorporated into his own. Mr. Peters not only wrote in appreciation of Our Land and Land Policy, but also in his own writing, as George correctly said to Wells, took ‘substantially the same ground in regard to the essentially appropriative nature of land values.’ And so it was, in general, with all the response of eastern appreciators of Our Land and Land Policy: they gave him the strength of knowing that, as he tried to apply to land policy the logic of liberal economic thought, he did not march alone.
Only from
In
In both
Thus newspaper
recognition would seem to have compensated for political defeat, for Henry
George in 1871. More than that, there occurred at year’s end in
Tackling
-2-
Such a chance as he had
dreamed of came at last, late in the year, at the time of the change of
administration in
While, pending
examination of the editorial page, we must reserve judgment about the
appropriateness and rightness of the Post in its time and place, we may
notice at the outset that, at least as a business venture, the newspaper
conformed well with
The risks were great; the
entrepreneurial spirit ran high. If Henry George had not had sufficient
personal experience to warn him, he could have read in the Call the
business hazards of new journalism. Five years earlier this successful parvenu,
now the Post’s competitor, had estimated the situation:
Like the
For the bargain price,
the partners offered a fairly good-looking paper, with all the essentials and
some of the trimmings. The telegraphic news, American Press Association
service, went in the middle of the front page; and the editorials began in the
left column of that page and carried over into two columns of the second. On
Saturdays a ‘Labor Review of the Week’ addressed itself to the main body of
citizens the Post wanted to catch. For the first few weeks the sheet was
pretty small, four pages, ioi/£ by 14 inches; and the print was tiny, though it
was no harder to read than the print of the other
What were the chances of
capturing
As he spoke privately so
he performed publicly in the columns of his newspaper. His pilot editorial in
the first issue of the Post, on the ‘Great Work of Reform,’ demanded ‘a
union of the good men of both parties’ and a four-point program for the nation.
First, something like economy in government’; second, lower taxes; third, a
reformed civil-service system; and fourth, a reverse of
But he nationalized rather than localized his argument; and he never talked down to working-men readers. Nor did he sustain party shibboleths. While he announced that ‘in the higher, wider sense of the term we are Democrats, and the Post will be Democratic,’ he insisted that for 1872 at least, while Reconstruction conditions persisted, the Democrats were fated to lose, and that they should not try a separate ticket. They had everything to gain by joining with liberal and free-trade Republicans. So, eleven months before the election, early enough to be noticeable in the Liberal Republican campaign, George went all-out for a fusion. Win or lose, the campaign would create a greatly needed new party, he believed, an assurance for the future of the Republic.
Although, as we shall
need to understand later in some detail, George never abandoned thinking and
writing about
Henry George, the editor and proprietor, who now threw himself as he did his newspaper into the campaign, did so as a man of some power and influence, more than he had ever been before. His paper had already proved solid and strong. In less than its first month it had had to increase in size to allow for the amount of advertising ‘now crowding upon us’; and in less than two months it had ventured an occasional eight-page edition. Very soon it made the double-size issue a regular Saturday event. Perhaps success derived from the one-cent policy. The Post believed both that it had confirmed what had already been proved for the East, namely, that low price and mass appeal brought in the advertising, and that it could assert ‘without egotism’ that no other penny paper anywhere had ever carried so much news, or featured such attractive presswork, or depended so little on reprinted material.
The clinching evidence of
success followed quickly on a surprise notice,
Nor were wifely hopes too high. The Post dwindled under Thompson. Two months after selling, George and Hinton were given an opportunity to buy back the newspaper at a bargain price. They took a new third partner, this one on less than equal terms; and they started again, as they announced on 10 June, happily convinced that the control of the paper was theirs for as long as they pleased, and that they could make it succeed in every sense. The lucky timing of events on the Post worked out as neatly as could be: George took the saddle again just at the moment when the national-party conventions were becoming immediate business.
The local Democrats
improved the coincidence. Along with exmayor McCoppin, Henry George was chosen
a delegate from the fourth district to the national convention in
Restored to his editorial
chair, during the summer and fall George made sage economic comments in the Post.
That ‘the South has been made the Ireland of America’ was one of them. But the
political spirit — which brought him to forecast at mid-July that
October, when defeats in certain state elections required open pessimism. Then, when the killing ‘rout — utter irretrievable’ occurred at the general election and Grant was returned to office, an editorial soberly questioned whether or not American democracy could ever succeed, given the limits set by the narrowness and prejudices of party-bound voting.
Within a month, having
rendered its tribute to
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George’s important
advance during the early 1870s, as an original thinker on
With newspapers, as with
gold mines, increasing production called for larger outlays and heavier
capitalization, and Henry George accepted the necessity with a true Californian
alacrity. Six weeks before election he wrote Whitelaw Reid, Young’s successor
on the Tribune, that he wanted more telegraphic news exclusive for the Post:
‘We have very frequently to counteract the Administration tendencies of
Simonton’s news and keep up the spirit of the Greeley people by drawing on our
own private wire which we keep coiled up in a box.’ This overture failed,
though without injuring his improved relations with
During 1873 the Post sped up production by contracting for the afternoon use of the Chronicle’s new ‘lightning press,’ a piece of machinery which would print 30,000 papers as quickly as the old press would 12,000. Before the Post’s second birthday, a fifth enlargement increased the size to 171^ by 25 inches. The regular edition now contained four pages of eight very long columns; and, for one of its eight-page issues, the Post claimed to have produced the largest daily ever printed in California and, it believed, except for a few issues of the New York Herald, the largest ever anywhere in the United States. By the time the paper reached full size it maintained many regular departments: Telegraphic, Police Court, Amusements, Stocks, Mining Notices, Commercial and Financial, and so on. Perhaps the Post was a little on the sensational side, as the editor’s mother thought, bracketing in that respect with the Chronicle, and differing from the Alta California and the Bulletin; but by twentieth-century standards it seems quite sober. About half the space was taken by advertising.
We have to take from where we can find them the facts about how Henry George in his middle thirties carried the roles of editor and proprietor, and tribune of the people. His last office on the Post was a small room piled high with papers, magazines, and Congressional Records, and untidy with cigar ashes; he had a baize-covered sofa there, where he slept nights when he could not get away, or caught a cat nap as needed. He made a lively boss, and an interesting one. The male secretary who took his dictation recalls that, temperamentally high-strung, George drove himself incessantly and could be sharp with his associates. But the remembered events speak most of little-disciplined work habits, amusing to behold, and good deeds and generous attitudes, which endeared him to those around him. His editorials arrived habitually late; his door was always open. On one occasion he rescued by a reach from his own balcony a sailor in delirium tremens who was hanging from an adjoining one; and another time he tickled his associates by taking a shot of whiskey to buck himself for a temperance address. The stimulant more than worked, and he delivered a speech on land taxation.
A good fellow among journalists, he was elected to the Bohemian Club, becoming not a charter member but a regular one as early as the second week or so of that famous society’s life; and very soon he became a trustee. Here he had the association not only, notably, of fellow newspapermen from the journals he attacked, but also of men of future fame — Samuel Clemens, Ambrose Bierce, and the future senator and conservationist leader, Francis G. Newlands. It is pleasant to catch so earnest a man having fun under the motto, ‘Weaving spiders come not here’; and to learn that he participated in the ‘high jinks’ and other foolery at the club’s Russian River encampment.
Though the early San
Francisco Post years were among George’s hardest as husband and father,
because Annie and the children stayed long in Philadelphia, we do find them all
together at last in 1874, as happy as they ever were while the children were
young and before George’s greatest successes. They lived that year in the
Mission District; and George rode to and from work on a bony horse which cost
him many jokes and jibes. For him it was a time of pride in the three
youngsters: especially in Richard, the child of the poverty of 1865, who now
began to anticipate his future as artist and wished to send pictures home to
his grandparents in
Crusading spelled success; and success stimulated the brainwork of the crusader. Of George’s whole life, the years on the Post were the time when his mind ranged the most freely, when he made his decisions and developed his ideas the most independently and pragmatically. His strategy cannot be called simple. Rather than just reasoning forward along lines laid down during his march with the Haight administration, and diagramed in The Subsidy Question and Our Land and Land Policy, George turned certain sharp corners, as we shall see in the next section of this chapter, and he penetrated new terrain of general economic ideas. But short of these major changes, as liberal editor he advanced also his modes of political thinking, and notably developed a number of policy convictions, as he discussed issues current in the state and in the city.
To his own surprise, the
new administration of Republican Governor Booth pleased him, even while his
disillusionment about liberal fusionism was still sharp after the
Certainly cross-party
reformism was the political method Henry George now made his own, in state
affairs. Late in 1873, though he had recently criticized the governor for
failing to live up to his inaugural address, he supported Booth when the
legislature chose him for the United States Senate, ‘as coming nearer to being
senator by common consent’ than any Californian had ever been. The editor
likewise approved and criticized as he pleased the new ‘Dolly Vardens’ in
California politics, the independent Republican followers of Booth who won
control of the assembly in 1873. With like freedom, as occasions arose, George
supported the intrusion of Grangers in state politics, yet sometimes criticized
them sharply; and again, he backed independent fighters of land monopoly,
notably John W. Days and Pascal Coggins. We may look far forward to Henry
George’s own candidacies to be mayor of
On the side of economics,
regional and other, George withdrew after 1872 from some of the old insistences
of his days on the Times, the Transcript, and the Reporter.
He gave the figures, and rejoiced, along with his old opponents in the debate
on immigration policy, when trainloads and shiploads of newcomers poured into
He even softened his
comment on the railroad monopoly. True, Stanford and his associates had by now
consolidated and expanded their control of
So far as concerned
industry or business, not landholding, Henry George’s anti-monopolism
concentrated now on the objections to consolidating too much power in the hands
of too few people, and most of all on the evils of absentee ownership and
control. Be it remembered that his reading clientele was largely Irish. When
the question came up of Vanderbilt control possibly extending to the West coast
railroads, George preferred Stanford; and when there arose a likelihood that
capitalists of St. Louis and San Francisco (this group under the lead of Caspar
Hopkins, of the Immigrant Union) would combine to put through the Atlantic and
Pacific railroad to compete with the Union Pacific and Central Pacific, the Post
balanced judgment. For a while it presented advantages that might be gained
from this competition of roads; then it considered a second possible new road.
But throughout it feared the debts and burdens of an unnecessary installation.
The several
Without coming to clear-cut
opinions on the immediate and practical problem, the Post took a turn at
analyzing the more general and underlying issues of railroad economics and
regulation. Accepting a lead from an Atlantic Monthly article, George
endorsed the opinion that a cut in federal tariffs and taxes would do more to
save the public’s money than would rate regulating by states, Granger style.
Then George renewed his earlier probing toward public ownership. ‘Irresistibly’
railroad monopolism was forcing the country ‘on the horns of a dilemma,’ he
said, ‘one of which we must choose — either the government must own the
railroads, or the railroads must own the government.’ But this dilemma he
evidently envisaged as still at some distance in the future, and not yet
clear-cut; at any rate he allowed himself editorial leeway to go afield again
and reconsider his old
Indeed George
editorialized with force and determination in favor of the government ownership
of only one public service — the one indicated to him by General William Orton
in 1869. With wire communication he unquestionably had experience on which to
draw,, and recently he had had stunning good luck. Because his American Press
Association had the use of the railroad wires, it had grown from
Yet, although the Post lived and profited by this success, and occasionally took advantage of it by printing words of self-congratulation for having defeated the Western Union-Associated Press combination, and although, perhaps more than George knew, the American Press Association was cutting sharply the profits of the Bulletin and the Call, the paper’s own situation was precarious. In spite of firm assertions that the telegraphic news came through freely and completely, there remained cause for embarrassment when the AP papers charged that Henry George, San Francisco’s attacker of railroad subsidies and monopolies, was himself depending on a railroad monopoly and was receiving a subsidy — all this by the simple compromising fact of receiving news from the wires of the Central Pacific Railroad.
Under these circumstances, George declared strongly for public ownership. He was not alone, and the position he took is not at all to be thought of as indicating socialistic doctrines. In the second issue, and in one of the Post’s few editorials ever to praise Ulysses S. Grant, that of 5 December 1871, it commended the President for asking Congress to establish telegraph service within the operations of the United States Post Office. Then and thereafter the Henry George argument for a postal telegraph was simple and obvious: telegraphy indicates a national monopoly; the competitive duplication of wires is wasteful; government operation promises low and reasonable rates and assures access to the wires, without discrimination or favoritism, to any and all.
This policy of the Post
was ‘academic’ only in the sense that the
The Post took it as a body blow to nationalization, when David A. Wells wrote at length on the other side. Henry George’s editorial reply to this recently sympathetic correspondent gives the pattern of his own lasting conviction, not about the telegraph alone but more generally about whatever monopolies are produced by industrial technology. According to the Post: ‘The government should be restricted as nearly as possible to the preservation of order and the administration of justice, leaving everything else to private enterprise — in a word it should only do for the people what they cannot do for themselves . . . The progress of invention has created certain great and necessary businesses which are in their very nature monopolies, in which competition does not operate to secure good service at a fair price.’ Besides a national postal telegraph, this editorial recommended the municipal distribution of water and gas; and, a little waveringly, as in other editorials, it spoke for the public ownership of railroads.
Henry George’s comment,
here, makes him one of the earliest observers in the
-4-
The policy ideas so far presented from the history of the Post, mainly from 1872 and 1873 but some of them from later years, probably go far toward accounting for the success of the paper. Had the editor been willing and content to operate mainly in such directions, and had he not ventured into salients of his own, the Post might well have turned out to be for Henry George the way into a long*San Francisco career in liberal journalism. With the sagacious and practical idealism he was displaying in matters of national and regional politics, such a career, which perhaps in the end would have had much in common with the careers of Horace Greeley and David A. Wells, would seem to have been a reasonable possibility.
But the moderate and sagacious side of Henry George was only half. And, as the Post up to the national election displayed mainly that side, so the Post in 1873 and after evoked the other side. This was the more individual and inspired Henry George, the man of the visions of 1869 and 1870, the man of ideas not yet fully comprehended and expressed, and the man of special intensity. This emergence — which now led George to assert the economic proposition of his lifetime — was bound to come. But its occurring when it did was a response to criticisms which hit him, first right and then left, during the election year.
Just a month after the Post
had been started a new trade journal had been launched in
To editor Will Green as
to Caspar Hopkins, land withholding represented an injury to
To call a man a sympathizer with the ‘Commune,’ in the early 1870s, amounted to less than calling a man a communist eighty years later, but it was not a matter for Henry George to take lightly. Not unlikely the touch carried extra annoyance, because in actual fact George in recent issues of the Post had spoken favorably of giving the working men ‘internationalists’ a hearing.
His reply to Green shows the point charged against him: was not his paper actually propagandizing for the public ownership of land, while dishonestly pretending to believe in private ownership? The Post said on 2 January 1872 what George had said in Our Land and Land Policy, that private property in land must be understood and accepted as necessary, even though it cannot be called logical. This time, putting the crux of the matter in italics, George focused the paradox more sharply than in Our Land and Land Policy. 'That the land of a country rightfully belongs to all the people of that country; that there is no justification for private property in land except the general convenience and benefit; and that private rights in land should always be held subordinate to the general good.’ At a meeting held the next month under the auspices of the ‘Internationalists’ of San Francisco — which probably signifies a branch of the Marxist International Workingmen’s Association — George in the opening address criticized strongly the principle of the nationalization of land and developed an argument that private property is necessary to have full production from the soil. Foretaste of much to come, he assailed ‘Internationalist’ ideology and commended rigorous land taxes as the best means to harmonize large private holdings with democratic rights and interests.
Interestingly, it was a
friendly critic, well to the left of Will Green to be sure but not at all of
the Marxist complexion, who drew George along the hard road of judgment and doctrine.
Assemblyman John R. Days of
Of course the Days bill closely resembled George’s own earlier proposals, and George now gave a great deal of space and favor to the assemblyman and his ideas. The Post printed the news — and observed that no other paper did so — when the graduated license tax got 19 ayes to 46 nays on the question to engross. In Henry George’s opinion this was encouragement and warning: ‘Let the friends of land reform labor and wait. Who would have thought a few years ago slavery would now be a thing of the past?’
In May 1872, George met
Mr. Days, and political affinity led to personal friendship. Mr. Days lent
George books on English and Irish social discontent; and, before long,
apparently late that summer, he persuaded George to give a Sunday-afternoon
address before a
George brought up the nagging problem that afternoon. He phrased his paradox negatively, though, and apologetically. At least according to Mr. Days’s impression, he said that although the logic of men’s equal rights to the gift of the Creator indicated that landed institutions should be different from present private holding, not until the millennium destroyed ‘the old savage, selfish instincts’ in man would the common ownership of land come into being. But the chairman thought that the speaker was contradicting himself. In his closing remarks Mr. Days put it to the audience that ‘every argument’ George made showed that he ought to disbelieve in private property in land. The afternoon ended without a conclusion of the matter. But Mr. Days’s reminiscence closes with a debater’s triumph and a friend’s tribute: ‘From that day to the day of his death Mr. George openly opposed by word as well as argument private property in land.’
True, but not the whole significant truth about the author of Progress and Poverty. George never again spoke of private property in land as a necessity of civilization or agriculture; he never again assigned common property in land to the millennium, as something not to be achieved in practice. Yet neither did he now speak dogmatically, or even loudly, about this radical doctrine. One searches the Post in vain for a clear-cut recognition of land nationalization as unreservedly right in principle, or as a practical alternative to private property, as John Stuart Mill was now beginning to preach, or as George himself was going to say in Progress and Poverty, half a decade later. Rather one finds oblique criticisms. For instance this obiter dictum in an editorial: ‘A false treatment of land ownership is putting into the hands of one class the wealth that belongs to all.’
As for what the new belief fostered in the way of policy thinking, George pondered harder than before, and somewhat differently, the role of land taxation in economic reform. This problem is so special that it must be deferred a few pages, to the final section of this chapter. The new belief encompassed also a great effort, by the
Post, to expose the facts of
Specifically, the
newspaper always made a business of reporting, in almost ‘believe it or not’
spirit, spectacular cases of land engrossment. Typical was a report from the
As to policy specifically, George continued from Our Land and Land Policy his old habit of condemning the agricultural-college grants; and he named and smote with words the big speculators in federal scrip. As in the case of railroads, so with landholding he condemned the most vigorously the abuses of absentee ownership. On the other hand, he was not too single-minded to give the wiser speculators their due: for example, when Miller and Lux provided irrigation on certain lands and offered it for sale in small farms at reasonable prices, the Post had a word of praise.
Likewise when new
legislation came up for review and comment, George was not restrained from
speaking for measures that would increase homestead farming in the historic
Jeffersonian pattern. During the first month of the Post George praised,
as a measure that ‘would be worth more in securing the liberties of the people
and the perpetuity of our institutions than all the rest of the constitution,’ the
amendment to the United States Constitution wanted by California Congressman
Coghlan: ‘The public land of the United States shall not be disposed of except
to actual settlers thereon, for homestead purposes only, and in quantities
limited by general laws.’ And during 1872 and after, when his mind was quite
made up on the issue of principle, the Post spoke, as proposals came
before the state legislature, for such reforms as limiting a holder’s
‘possessory rights’ to 160 acres and requiring purchasers to pay cash for state
lands. These were just such reforms as the
Had the homestead policy
really worked, truly and broadly distributing the resources of the country
among the people, without flagrant privilege, George would have had little
excuse in
-5-
In 1888, when Henry George had become a world figure, a learned and friendly critic explained in the Harvard Law Review that the famous single-tax doctrine really comprised two ideas and that the two were separable. First, it contained the contention of egalitarian logic, that all men have a natural right of access to the gifts of the Creator’s bounty. And second, the proposition, which the critic thought less well grounded and certainly separable, that economic rent was just the right flow of credit which ought to be captured, in this case by taxing land values, for the sole or principal financial support of the state, with generous welfare services included.
There is no reason to be
forward and to try prematurely to match wits with a
The years of the Post
happened to be important years in state and national tax history. In 1872 and
1874 were published Wells’s thoughtful
In those days, before the income tax had become anything more than a war-emergency measure, or else a threat of socialism, property taxes were the main source of revenue everywhere. They were levied on nearly everything. In California this meant not only real estate, land and buildings being treated alike, but also personal property; and personal property included both visible property in goods and capital equipment, and invisible property, such as mortgage notes — which multiplied the tax burden on real estate — and other commercial paper. A common rate was enacted by the legislature: it had risen to a high of $1.25 per $100 valuation in 1864 and had tapered under $1.00 in 1870 and 1871,
Besides the property
taxes
From Dr. Fankhauser’s
record of condition and complaint, it is easy to judge, as George judged, that
real-estate taxes involved the biggest stakes and the most sizeable abuses in
the
This thought impinged on
Section 13 of Article xi of the constitution of 1849, a clause that had been
designed by southern members of the
These provisions meant two very substantial barricades to protect property in land from being distributed. Land taxes must always be low, or at any rate no higher than the assembly would impose on any and every kind of property; and, second, the provision about
1 Concerning the southern influence on the taxation provisions of the 1849 constitution, Senator William A. Gwin, former Mississippian and leader at the Monterey convention, said that delegates ‘from settled portions of the State, who had great land grants and represented those who had vast grants of land from Spain and Mexico, would not listen to any proposition that would subject their real estate to taxation and the onus of supporting the state, while the great bulk of the population, the newcomers, had no real estate, in fact nothing that could be taxed, and nothing could be collected from them except a poll tax.' Gwin called the local election of tax officers a guaranty against oppressive taxation on large landholders. Gwin Memoirs, MS, 28-9, UCBL.
assessors and collectors
prevented any officials unsympathetic to landholders, say from the mining
districts or from the cities, from intruding into the agricultural or ranching
areas of
In this passage the Second Report of the Commissioners to Revise the Laws for the Assessment and Collection of Taxes in the State of New York, published in 1872, came through with incomparable support for tax reformers. Now George and George’s kind had a firm point from which to depart, for writing new editorials and designing sharper programs. The New York commission reasoned from propositions like those of Adam Smith that any taxes anywhere should have the three qualities of being equal, or just, in incidence; and ‘certain,’ or plain and aboveboard in operation; and economical to administer. It condemned forcefully personal-property taxes, and especially those on negotiable instruments of indebtedness. Wells and his colleagues favored instead, first, taxes on real estate, ‘lands and buildings, at a full and fair market valuation’; second and third, they recommended corporation taxes and a building-occupancy tax. Their whole design favored simplification and reduction of structure. As if addressed to Article xi of the California constitution, the Wells report condemned, as ‘one of the greatest obstacles which stands in the way of a reform of local taxation in the United States . . . the theory that in order to tax equitably and uniformly it is necessary to subject all property to assessment.’
Wells sent George a copy of the Second Report soon after its release. Though not accepting it whole hog — there was too much argument, to suit George, in favor of taxing capital improvements on land; and Wells opposed tax rates scaled according to ability to pay — George quickly absorbed the m?»in ideas into his own arsenal. An early editorial note in the Post fired the report at the Call, because that paper favored taxing all kinds of property; and the Post praised Wells for distinguished service to the country.
In the
Like the
As George was to do for the rest of his life, and as the Wells report had just done, the Post speaking for reform made much of the question of the incidence of taxation. Who pays the collector, and who really pays the taxes? Doubtless the nature of this problem was not as universally apprehended in George’s day as in ours. But nothing could be plainer than that the Post’s second main tax proposal could not be passed on to others; and as now there was then a powerful argument that the paper’s first proposal, land-value taxation, deprives the first payer and no one else. Beginning at once, and never changing his mind, George made and remade that argument — that economic rent regardless of tax policy always and everywhere flows automatically from producers to landholders, and to capture it from the owners is to take from them alone. When they pay, the credit has already reached its point of accumulation, and it cannot be demanded again from other members of the economy. So the Henry George line, which may be qualified a little but can hardly be upset.
The Post’s announcement
of a three-point scheme started much, not quite all, the discussion an editor
could have wanted. Among his neighbors in
There was reminder of the
past and there was unanticipated future, both, for Henry George in the
objections now raised by the little Catholic journal in which he had first
tried to be very philosophical about the land problem. The Monitor said
that land-value taxation would make land a drug on the market. No, replied
George on
The debate that George’s
tax ideas might have stirred in
When the Chronicle
and Examiner, and later certain inland papers, raised that objection,
the Post answered by running two lines of distinction, the first between
the farmer who owns and operates land and improvements of the size a family can
manage, and his neighbor, the speculator-owner of unimproved arable land; and
the second, between the owners of rural land and the owners of city land. The
working owner of a family-size farm, the Post told the
When the same delta-area journal protested that George’s plan would do ‘little to persuade men to seek homes in the unpeopled solitude,’ the Post agreed, with a twist and a difference from the usual American complacence about going to the frontier. Men take their families into the solitude only when they cannot get lands that they can use and afford near their neighbors, and that will be available to the schools and churches which people everywhere want. When another paper objected that all farmers want more land, whether or not they cultivate it decently, the Post observed that land value taxation would change all that, to make living more compact. ‘Settlement would be closer, cultivation would be better, the cost of transportation and exchange would be less, and the farmers and the state at large would be richer.’
While George’s editorials were explaining to farmers the advantages of eliminating buildings and all improvements from the tax-collector’s schedule, he was saying also that land-value taxation would fall more heavily, and make for more social and economic reconstruction, in the cities than in the country — in two ways. First, it would take away from the urbanite absentee owners of farmlands the rents they were accustomed to receive from the country. George believed that as many members of this class would yield ownership — that is, permit themselves to be expropriated — as would find it worth while to retain title for the sake of the return from whatever capital they might have put into improvements. Second, land-value taxation would capture for the public the economic rent of urban sites. To be sure the Post predicted little in the way of owners’ yielding ownership here. Rather it foresaw proprietors’ being compelled to use capital to build on vacant lots and to improve their buildings when sites increased in value: all in order to collect the surplus with which to pay the new tax, and at the same time have interest and profit on money invested and risked.
Here the prospect was painted rosy. The early gainers from land-value tax, the Post said, would be laboring men. There would be much new work for the building trades, and a general stimulation to industry and commerce. Figuring that an ordinary house lot cost more than the house built upon it — roughly $1000 to $1500 for the lot, $1000 to $1200 for the house (a radically different ratio, as well as different figures, from today) — George believed a building boom to be implicit in his plan for a tax-free home lot for every city family.
George invited his
In all this reasonableness,
conceived as pro-labor and pro-capitalist both, Henry George did not lose sight
of the fact, nor was he less than candid, that his plan would radically alter
property relationships and change the structure of society. In an editorial of
In
Of any element in
As for the other
George’s recent
acknowledgment of virtue in Leland Stanford to the contrary, he must have been
surprised as well as stimulated when the Central Pacific’s Sacramento Record,
once his own Reporter, came out, while discussion about land policy was
heaviest, with a diagnosis and interpretation of the situation very much like
his own. Under the general title, ‘The Farms of California,’ the railroad
newspaper brought out fourteen heavily statistical articles between 27 October
and 14 November 1873, which had been worked up from the tax figures of the
state Board of Equalization. Each article surveyed landholding in three or four
counties, forty-eight in all. Farms were classified according to size, average
holdings were calculated for each classification, and the name of every holder
of more than 500 acres was listed. Editorial comments along the way pointed up
the more particular findings. Examples are: there was much land engrossment in
Los Angeles County, but not as much in that area of Mexican grants as in some
other places; Colusa County in the north, where the Bidwell estate was
situated, and Kern County in the south, where 13 persons owned 487,908 acres,
were the counties where aggregation created the highest-average holdings; and
there was one holding — it must have been the Jacks estate, which had also caught
Henry George’s eye — of 334,100 acres in Monterey County. At mid-series the Record
printed a table of recapitulation which was printed also by the
Because these findings
give much the best control point from which to view objectively the land
situation in
The
Number of Farms |
Class by A creage |
Total Acres This Class |
23>315 |
100-499 |
4,663,000 |
2,383 |
5°°-999 |
i,787>25° |
1,126 |
1,000-1,999 |
1,689,000 |
363 |
2,000-2,999 |
834,000 |
189 |
3,000-3,999 |
? |
IO4 |
4,000-4,999 |
458,000 |
236 |
5,000-9,999 |
1,852,000 |
158 |
10,000-19,999 |
2,670,000 |
122 |
20,000 or over |
8,782,000 |
stands today in the
singular position of a state which was admitted into the Union on the express
principle of opposition to slavery yet which has contrived to blunder into a
line of action which could not have been better calculated to build up a slave state
had it been the carefully matured plan of some far-seeing Southern politician.’
Again like the Post, the railroad newspaper blamed land monopolization
for the slow settlement of
At the point of
recommending action, 5 November, the Record retained the role of broad
investigator and judicious selector. It considered and dismissed the
The Record’s own proposal — which it called the one ‘feasible plan’ because no amendment to the constitution was required — began with a voluntary convention of all the principal landholders of the state. Let them agree on a scale of low prices, none to be higher than $5 an acre and preferably not higher than $2.50; and let them bind themselves to sell a given proportion of their lands at the low prices, say one-fourth, or one-half, or two-thirds of their total holdings. Then let the legislature set up a commission to dispose of the land in parcels. The landholders should be willing to act, the Record concluded, because nothing less than the filling up of the state waited their decision; prompt action would ease tensions and advance the interests of all Californians.
The fact that the
railroad newspaper stepped ahead of the Post and did a journalistic
‘first’ by systematically exposing
The Record
articles and the comment of the other papers, coming to a climax of discussion
during the first week of November 1873, raised to the highest intensity of any
time during Henry George’s
As events developed, the
report of that committee in the spring, at the close of the biennial session of
1873-4 — the last during George’s career as a big newspaper editor in
California — supplies one of the best indications we have of the reach, and the
limits of the reach, of Henry George’s ideas in the region where they were
first proposed. In a passage of opening eloquence, which Henry George approved,
the committee used words that might as well have been his own: ‘Those who own
the soil of any country make all others who live therein pay tribute for living
in their native land.’ The committee took perspectives on history which sound
like the later Henry George: in the
For the plan of action,
however, the committee followed the
Besides being out front
in the general direction of the legislature’s attention, the Post could
and did claim that the governor thought about as it did — his biennial message
followed the Record’s report by only a month. And plainly Henry George
enjoyed the association of ideas when the Colusa Sun, Will Green’s old
paper, bracketed him with Governor Booth, the two as leaders in
The sum and structure of George’s writing on land institutions and land taxation, his identifying himself and the Post with the two connected but different reform-ideas — no private property in principle, land-value taxation in practice — all amounted to a far more deeply considered position in 1874 than in 1871, when he brought out Our Land and Land Policy and launched the Post. When the Sun made fun of his ethic that ‘land belongs to him who will use it,’ George reduced to the irreducible his new-found dogmas: ‘The foundation of all property rights is the right of man to himself . . . The great principle for which we are contending is the right of the producer to the full fruits of his labor. But rent (for land, not improvements) is legalized robbery; to demand a price for unused land is legalized blackmail; and the land-grabber is a worse enemy of the state than the horse thief or footpad.’
The Post never quailed, late in 1874, when the Yreka Union, which belonged to Democratic State Senator William Irwin — who was to become governor the next year and was to do Henry George a great favor — said that the Post's tax scheme would lead to the public ownership of land. This time George admitted openly the equivalence of full land-value taxation with landholding by the state. Said the Post: ‘We only propose taxation instead of state landlordism, because it is more consistent with the ideas and habits of our people, and could be more easily carried out.’ Citing John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith to testify that a land tax cannot be shifted from the owner, and asserting as moral principle that the value of land ‘belongs to the whole community’ because the community creates that value, Henry George had now carried the Post as far in this direction of theory as he could possibly go. Once he even proposed practical state landlordism as the right solution for a particular abuse. When General Bidwell’s 23,000-acre holding in Butte County appeared to be a fraud, George recommended that the United States, as reversionary owner, assign the estate to California, and then that the state rent the lands, the proceeds to go to the public schools.
The
Rounding Out an Editor’s Thought: The Post's Utopia 1872-1875
-1-
During
the ’80s and
the ’90s, Henry George’s decades of world recognition and wide influence, the
author of Progress and Poverty was saluted sometimes as the
American economist, the one man who better than any other summed up the
condition and the spirit of his country. Sometimes also, too frequently for
comfort, he was greeted with contempt. The Duke of Argyll tagged him the
‘Prophet of San Francisco,’ and writers in the British quarterlies and American
professors of economics were the ones who habitually snubbed him. Of course
George’s ideas were the principal reason for their rejecting him. But in the
eyes of such people, George’s background and training, and his evangelical
fervor, helped justify distaste and distrust. Why respect a man preaching the
reconstruction of society whose school of economics had been
The irreducible truth was, of course, that at no stage of his career did George achieve just the same reassuring kind of recognition as a professional economist may claim. He had no membership in the guilds of scholars — in the social-science associations which were formed in the ’70s, or the professors’ organizations in the ’80s and ’gos — the connections that give kudos and some security to men of learning. He had no university certificate or at-
tachment. Nor did time
and place fall right for him to be a member of one of those rare fraternities
of mind which now and again join creative men into epoch-marking circles.
Nothing was ever available to him like
Yet the American newspaper has been a mighty institution of education and intellectual achievement, famously so for Philadelphians and New Yorkers — for the Franklins, the Careys, the Greeleys, the Danas, the Raymonds of American mind and leadership. The history of the development of Henry George’s mind may be read fairly as a case in point. Between 1872 and 1875, especially, on the Post, his writing broadened and deepened and strengthened. We have already seen him as a student of government documents and of the leading journals; so likewise in a broader reading of the Post we discover a thinker taking sides on books and general ideas. Philosophy, in the sense of the main thought currents of his age, was not too weighty for him to tackle. So also economics, going beyond the range of California’s immediate concerns; so politics, conceived as institutions as well as party conflicts; and so again the links of ideas which cross-connect the main chains of social thinking.
-2-
From the beginning,
George had as an editor always coupled his critiques of land monopoly with the
plea for free trade, the very first article of his personal economic faith. In
his own Post he enlarged upon the free-trade idea exactly at the time
when he was changing his opinion about private property in land. The staples of
The editor did not
hesitate to drop from the general to the concrete, and to fight questions where
local interests were concerned. He ridiculed the early orange growers of
On the industrial side,
he explained with satisfaction that the
But George did not permit
anti-tariff to be degraded to a purely regional level. The Post always
presented free trade as a universally desirable policy, and as a cause with a
meaning and a theoretical justification. By this time the studying editor
understood that America’s school of nationalistic economics — which Henry C.
Carey had been maturing in book and newspaper writing for four decades — was
his enemy set of ideas. And a Post review of an antitariff book by a
By reason of his taking up certain problems directly, and of the implications of what he said about industry and trade, writing for the Post carried George far toward rounding out his conception of the roles of capital and the capitalist, and of those of labor and the trade-union movement, in the economy. No need to recapitulate how his crisis thinking of 1869 and 1873 had brought him through the rough-hewing stage of this phase of his ideas. As of the key year, 1873, his prime loyalty to working men — whom he practically identified with the citizenry at large — remained as always the anchor of his thought; and also by now he had decided that there was no contradiction in believing that great virtues and great faults were interwoven in the going practices of the private ownership and operation of capital. Though at this time the large swing of his thought favored the individual free enterpriser — and asserted that the businessman as much as anyone would gain from land-value taxation — one or two local matters turned him toward public utilities again, and toward new exceptions to the rule of private ownership.
Both illuminating gas and
water distribution came into
1 As when he proposed building dams in the Sierras, from which water could be released to the farmlands below. ‘Make the land benefited pay the expense, and give the people interested the management.’ SF Post, 6 May 1875.
whether
George took on the role of the muckraker, and his findings were startling. Water cost one-seventh to one-sixth as much as the rent of an unfurnished house in San Francisco; the city was obliged to have its sewers cleaned by hand at 50 cents a barrel, instead of by flushing; the operating costs of hydraulic elevators ran much too high. Comparing San Francisco with the East and the Middle West, the newspaper called attention to the fact that several cities now owned and operated their own water works at rates a fraction of San Francisco’s; and contrasting itself with other papers, the Post noticed that the others criticized San Francisco’s water situation when the legislature was not in session, but kept quiet while it was meeting. An editorial said that the Post could produce proof that the Spring Valley Company had ‘fixed’ the Call and the Bulletin in friendly editorial attitudes. ‘There is not in the world so outrageous, so exacting, so soulless a monopoly, as the Spring Valley Water Company.’
At first the Post
did not want
At the showdown in
As in the matter of land monopoly, so in that of water monopoly, George marched with other reformers. It is not too much to call him an early municipal socialist. That is, he was a leader of the one, very limited, type of socialism which has been widely and willingly assimilated into American life, as today’s situation of city utilities across the land — considerable public ownership and much control — indicates.
As for Henry George’s
thought on the labor movement, his writing in the
This is George’s maximum
Marxism. The mild flirtation lasted for two or three editorials, no longer, and
took place shortly before the International Workingmen’s Association moved from
The stand of the Post
was for labor rather than of the labor movement, and against abuses rather than
against capitalism or capitalists. This is dramatized by its role in what it
called the ‘
While its editorial page
discussed general questions of maritime labor policy, the Post, abetted
by the protests of the
We have now gone far enough to see that the editor of the Post envisaged the economy as divided by a boundary. In front lay the area of competitive business. In general he regarded conditions there as sound, and, in the tug and pull of capital and labor, he believed private enterprise capable of producing abundant goods for all. Behind the boundary line, in the area of monopolism, George pictured a predatory situation. Of course his several reform proposals had a single strategy, which was to put an end to private operation there. He counted on two of his tactics, free trade and land-value taxation, to push back the boundary. Then, where the boundary could not be moved and natural monopolies could not be denied, he made his proposals for public ownership at appropriate national or local levels.
If present-day readers
feel that George’s total picture of the economy as it was working was pretty
dark, and his means for brightening it quite extreme — even disregarding the
Marxist coloration of 1871 and 1872 — they may be assured that contemporaries
other than Will Green sometimes thought so too. Picking up one of the Post's
obiter dicta on the distribution of wealth, for instance, the
One understands that
George’s critics thought him radical. And yet on fair and complete reading of
the Post there can be no doubt of his sincere belief in business and
capitalism. Commenting on something Herbert Spencer had said, George was able
to agree,
As for the ordinary
operations of the business system, George had ideas which followed a middle
lane, or rather moved in dual lanes, of reform and high-powered entrepreneurial
activity. In 1875, the year of specie resumption, the old critic of the
national banking system reverted to policies he had put into the
Though long an opponent
of the San Francisco Hamiltonians for deflation, George now admitted — while
the national depression was growing but before the
While he thus asked for
more spread and democracy in the policies and institutions of banking and
credit, George also admired the going machinery of free private banking. He
never boggled at mere bigness of operation. The suspicious may better be told,
ahead of the story, that the Post was booming on a loan which had bought
a wonderful new printing press. But, before this, in 1872 the paper compared
the mighty enterprise of
William C. Ralston, the
head of the Bank of California, and speculator of speculators, entranced him.
When, the day after his bank had been forced to close by the run introduced by
the crash of the Comstock bonanza, the body of that handsome man was found in
As equal to an Olympian,
George loved a generous capitalist. While few in early
-3-
Henry George’s very
earliest ideas had been Christian, and his first teen-age resistance to these
ideas had been directed at evangelicalism’s intensity. In
From the middle years with the Post, however, we have his son’s word that Henry George experienced a deep renewal of religious feeling. Parenthood was part of it. The father who took the boys out on the bay and read poetry and discussed affairs in the family circle now insisted on morning and night prayers for the children and encouraged hymn singing at home. New faith, Henry George, Jr., says, was born of his finding himself, stabilizing his ideas. ‘He had turned from a religion that taught either of a Special Providence on the one hand or of a merciless fate on the other. Now all the fervour of his spirit went forth in the belief that social progress is governed by unchanging and beneficial law.’
While the Post confirms in a large way the son’s impression, it suggests also a good deal more: a complicated mind and conscience; a mood not always optimistic; and an inclination to move, explore, judge, and choose among the crowding thought currents of the decade. Editorial comment on books and ideas, and occasional book reviews which, though not signed, were almost certainly written by George, supply the evidence that his mind was reaching out in philosophic and religious, as well as in economic and political, directions.
What the later Post
had to say, for instance, about the man of intellect George had once praised
without stint, tells much of the arrival of an almost absolutistic
philosophical point of view. Though still pleased to speak of John Stuart
Mill’s activities in behalf of land reform, to say that the English libertarian
‘endorsed the principles upon which to tax nothing but land is based,’ Henry
George discovered a failure of nerve in Mill. He could not understand a
reformer’s logic which carried so far with his own, yet stopped short of
speaking for an actual taking over of the income of land for the community.
George was wise enough to acknowledge the rightness of a certain amount of
moral relativism. Mill’s saying that private property in
Mill’s death, and the posthumous appearance of an American edition of his Three Essays on Religion, widened the gap of thought. The Post’s review, which was a kind of summing-up of the old master, described the book’s skepticism as something which fell short of either atheism or faith, a state of mind too condescending and too reserved to be inspiring or even very interesting. For George, the noblest British lion had left the stage a mouse. The human and moral qualities he now admired he stated in a review of Senator Charles Sumner’s collected volume of prophecies, Prophetic Voices about America; he praised the abolitionist’s ‘manliness,’ his ‘Miltonic intensity,’ and his capacity for combining with ‘severe public virtue and eminent legislative capacity, a genius for art and letters.’
In reviews of the two huge histories by the two able and patriotic historians of the same surname, George displayed appreciations appropriate to the writings. It tvas not the old neighbor of Independence Hall in him alone but also the patriotic idealist who was stirred by George Bancroft on the American Revolution. And the Californian in him responded to Hubert Howe Bancroft’s record-making achievements as writer of Hispanic American and Pacific coast history. That a San Franciscan could now produce and publish such monuments of learning elicited from George a statement of the ideal which we know he had cherished as a personal ambition, at least since Our Land and Land Policy: ‘There is no work so great as a great book . . . And a book like this, which brings to a condensation and a summary any branch of human knowledge, which focuses, as it were, into a grand intelligible picture the scattered rays of experience and research, has the strongest promise of immortality.’
While current history
writing gratified George, current popular science and scientific philosophy
troubled and challenged him. Under the editorial heading, ‘Scientific
Materialism,’ on
Along with asserting his
own idealism — a theistic kind which might be spelled with a capital ‘I’ —
George rediscovered and asserted also some of the more particular values of his
religious upbringing. The recurring pessimism, which was a part of his new
maturity, he first conceived in quite material terms: that
His new breadth and depth
involved more world awareness than at any stage of his career so far. Reaching
out from the comparisons between
International goodwill
sometimes fostered deeds of kindness. In 1874 the offices of the Post
were used by a committee — promoted also by the Examiner — which raised
$300 for the relief of striking agricultural workers in
‘Citizen of the world’ —
his daughter’s favorite phrase for him. Truly George’s mind had adopted such a
sentiment while he edited the
-4~
It would be a formula which overlooked facts already presented in detail to say that the political ideas of Henry George of the Post were equal to the sum of his economics and his religion. Yet, outside the area of party loyalties, inherited and acquired, there would be truth in the proposition. In George’s own words, written for the Fourth of July 1874: ‘The great American Republic must be a republic in fact as well as form; a Christian republic in the full grand meaning of the words . . . till time shall come when warships, and standing armies, and paupers and prisons, and men toiling from sunrise to dusk, and women brutalized by want, and children robbed of their childhood shall be things of the dark past.’
There is utopianism but
no fully developed conception of government explicit in the Post. All
governments, European and American, the editor eyed with suspicion. The comment
just quoted followed an editorial of a few days earlier, one that had been
inspired by a German report telling of six million men under arms in Europe,
‘kept in a state of idleness at the expense of producers that they may be ready
to cut each other’s throats.’ Though not at all a pacifist, George always
thought that men put at arms, and held in readiness when not needed,
represented incredible waste and immorality. In 1874 he condemned the army of
the
Next to an inflated
military, a civilian bureaucracy disturbed him most. He criticized customs
houses everywhere, especially the
Yet the anxieties of a Jeffersonian failed to move George to the last ditch of opposition to the machinery of government. He had a bit of Thoreau in him, not a great deal. As political philosopher, he spoke on the Post in established dual character, that of visionary combined with patriot, in the old Manifest Destiny style. As a reformer he believed always that government must be ready to make mighty changes in society, and as Manifest Destiny man he asserted confidence that the American federal system could be extended almost indefinitely. The constitution of 1787 was so designed as to be right, he said, for any population, into the ‘hundreds and perhaps thousands of millions,’ and right for any land mass up to ‘a grand federation of the whole continent and perhaps the world, bringing into reality the long dream of peace and brotherhood.’
To be elastic but not
overburdened was George’s idea of how a large government in
Though moral
generalizations came spontaneously from Henry George, much blueprinting of what
government ought and ought not do,
With correct history the Post
remarked that the period of the American Revolution had meant a reaction
against one-man power, but that in the nineteenth century the pendulum had
swung back. It cited Governors Haight and Booth to show that a responsible
man’s high authority protects the people, Andrew Jackson style, and his veto
gives security from the anonymous corruption of legislators. In that vein the
paper preferred to have the state pay well for good administration, and it picked
a little quarrel with the Bee to demonstrate the point. When the
Sacramento paper congratulated California on having less expensive public
servants than Great Britain, the Post estimated contrariwise that,
though under the English system California might pay the governor $40,000 or
$50,000 (a fancy estimate), and San Francisco pay the mayor $10,000 or $20,000,
the sheriffs in every county would not be collecting $40,000 over and above
their small salaries, and city supervisors would not be spending $20,000 to be
elected to an office with a $ioo-a-month salary. One fears that George was more
correct in his
As improvement for
Governmental efficiency and responsibility meant much to George, but more important to him were the politics of economic legislation and the effectiveness of public opinion. Six months before the Post was started, it will be remembered, he had been beaten in the election in which Haight went down; and his article on ‘Bribery in Elections’ was his response to that defeat. Here for the first time he took up the final major reform idea of his lifetime, the Australian ballot. Later, at full tide of his public leadership, he would make this reform the third corner of his triangle of reform: he would urge secret voting as the needful political leverage by which to lift the economic reforms, land-value taxation and free trade, into high politics.
In the
— direct bribery would be
eliminated. The Australian procedure would have the extra advantage, George
foresaw accurately, of encouraging independent, split-ticket, voting. As Anna
George de Mille notes with pride, her father’s
His stand was taken. But George did not assign much space in the Post to ballot reform; and he was selective, as many kinds of proposals were offered, about strengthening democracy by extending or refining political machinery. He approved, but only mildly, the notion of primary elections, intended to reduce the power of insiders in the parties. At this stage he was cool to votes for women. ‘We are not advocates of female suffrage, nor particular admirers of the strong minded.’ But he did hope that the feminist movement ‘with all its froth and all its absurdities’ — these were the days of Lucy Stone, as well as of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Clara Barton
— would promote the cause of equal pay for equal work. Economic improvement for women he really wanted, then perhaps political rights. Let women be cashiers, bookkeepers, and store clerks, the Post said — let them even be barbers, since the Chronicle wanted them. At top level, George recommended that women be chosen for seats on the school boards and for superintending positions in the school system. And in 1874, when George W. Julian and John Stuart Mill made news as friends of woman suffrage, the San Francisco Post softened to say that ‘we care very little’ whether they vote or not.
The new device of
democracy which intrigued George most at this period was proportional
representation. He argued that in
Once a legislature was
elected, George, in his role of editor and utopian, would have had it meet in
almost constant session. The
Such tenets doubled and
redoubled — over and above the necessity posed by the land-value taxation idea
— the reasons the Post had for desiring a new constitution for the
state. Here George’s thought was far from unique; for constitutional reform was
in the air. During the session of 1873-4, for instance, the
-5-
The characteristic ideas
of what we have been explaining as the Post’s utopia have all been
reported: free enterprise without private monopolism, free trade, equal
opportunity, an economy of abundant production for all, a Christian state, an
idealistic culture, an efficient government, a democracy uncorrupt and
sensitive to the people’s needs. What George wanted was remote enough from
things as they were in
Part of the explanation
lies in the Post’s financial success. Readers must have liked what they
were getting. Another part is the influence moral imagination may command in a
community, even though it fails to reach its ultimate goals. The
In the first month of the
existence of the paper, the Post smelled out corruption in the
George did not prosecute, and perhaps considered himself the winner at the moment. He was described as a hero in the other papers; and there followed some kind of a police investigation of gambling and a degree of improvement in the situation. But reform did not cut deep enough to outlast a change of department administration. In the winter of 1874-5 the Post moved again, this time concentrating on the new chief of police, whose name was Cockrill. In the Post’s own words and specifications: ‘We have a plain duty to perform in exposing a Chief of Police who has disgraced his office and his constituents.’ It is common knowledge that faro playing ‘is conducted by friends of the Chief or his friends’ friends, and that he fails to prosecute.’
Such a comment invited a suit for libel. But evidently court action was just what George wanted, as an opportunity to display the facts. At any rate he was ready, when Cockrill sued, to print a facsimile of a receipt which connected the chief’s liquor business with the operator of a well-known faro table; and he also printed a facsimile of a promise, put in writing by Cockrill before election but not made good, that if elected he would appoint a certain Negro to a position as detective — a trafficking in offices which alone, George said, should put the chief in jail.
According to the Chronicle’s news story, when this ‘rare and racy’ case came up, Cockrill, the plaintiff, acted ‘slightly nervous and anxious,’ and his counsel ‘continually interposed objection to the testimony offered.’ Meanwhile George, as defendant, ‘amid considerable commotion among the sporting part of the spectators,’ carried his role as if he himself were plaintiff. Apparently the reforming editor had an easy time. Though the judge ruled that the Post had not proved to be fact the exact phrases of its editorial, the court allowed that there could be ‘no moral doubt that Cockrill was paid for conniving at gambling’ in San Francisco. Further, the action brought evidence of ‘dozens’ of Chinese gambling houses in operation, the Post said; and the paper welcomed the next step, an investigation by a grand jury. This kept up the fact finding for an extra three weeks. Then, as an ‘ignored bill,’ the case of ‘Henry George and W. M. Hinton, misdemeanor, libel,’ was finally disposed of.
The grand jury commended to its successor a fresh review of the evidence of gambling, and of possible connections of the police with that gambling. This fell short of full victory, yet the Post was fairly satisfied. The ‘grand jury expresses the sentiment and belief of the whole community,’ it said. Wheels within wheels, the Post had connected Chief Cockrill with the Fitch-Pickering-Simonton papers; and the editorial silence of those two, the Call and Bulletin, is tacit acknowledgment of a score by George.
Meanwhile, during the
year 1872 especially, George displayed a commando-type of attack on other
widely dispersed areas of civic wrong. Late in October, on the eve of the
national election, less than a year after the ‘Bribery in Elections’ article,
the Post condemned out of hand the newly compiled Great Register of the
voters of San Francisco. It estimated 10,000 voters listed who had left the
city, and 15,000 more listed in the wrong wards; and said that unless a
voluntary organization would send challengers to every voting place, any amount
of repeat voting would be possible. Within a month the Post blasted at
the city hospital for bad food, bad nursing, and stealing from the patients;
and very soon it renewed with force an old demand that the city’s
The Post's
original charges against the school had been incompetent management, waste and
graft, and an average cost of $263.50 a year to keep each boy in a school which
was a crime breeder. During the first ten days of December, on the occasion of
an inspection by the city supervisors, the newspaper ran a new series of
revelations. It also produced some very liberal suggestions. Developing a
reform idea from
Most of George’s
campaigns to clear out nests of civic corruption are self-recommending, and
favorable judgment need not be withheld because the bulk of the evidence,
though with occasional flashes of confirmation, comes from the Post. But
one case at least is more complex. In this instance the institution where he
alleged graft was the
The professor, who was a
brother of John Swinton, the
Ideally a liberal editor
would have recognized that Gilman, who arrived in the fall of 1872 from the
Unfortunately, there was
no ideality in these respects on either the
A crescendo of
editorials, early in 1874, sounded the battle. The main thing was the Post's
allegation that the state had been swindled and the eight-hour law broken, in
the building of North Hall, on the new
George came face-to-face with
university problems, and perhaps confronted Gilman and some of the regents
personally, in February 1875, when an assembly committee investigated his
charge of fraud. His contention was that Regent Merritt had unfairly arranged
for business associates of his own to have the building contract, and that they
had profited mightily. There are of record nearly 500 pages of assertion and
counter-assertion before the committee, but even so it is not clear how right
or wrong George was in charging dishonesty to the Board of Regents. Yet it is
certain that his article opened the investigation; and that, though the
investigators refused to sustain him, the obstreperousness of the
The antagonism in
-6-
The one instance in which
the Post’s reformism did not pay, so far as the evidence tells, occurred
in July 1874, not without drollery. In
The affair proved not too
trivial. The Post printed ‘a little secret history’ which revealed that
an intermediary had made it known that if the paper would oppose local option
it would receive material benefits from the liquor dealers. Doing the opposite,
the Post was boycotted in places where it hurt: saloon and grocery-store
sales stopped, and many Germans dropped their subscriptions. In one week 1101
subscribers were lost and 959 new ones taken, and the Post started
printing lists of stopping and beginning subscribers. After a week of this the
Methodist Christian Advocate saluted the Post as the only San
Francisco paper ‘not ruled by the liquor interests,’ and Henry George’s paper
became known as being for temperance. Not a prohibitionist journal, it did
print an estimate that the city of
Thirty-odd years later a
friend of Henry George said that the attack on the liquor interests marked the
beginning of the end of George’s regime on the
At the time the Post
was being printed on the Chronicle’s press, the fastest in
How did George and Hinton
swing the deal? Twenty-four years later the business manager and partner
testified that John Percival Jones, mining operator and speculator, who had not
very long before moved from
Just exactly why the senator, a Republican, should have ventured so much in the Post there is no evidence to tell us. George’s editorial praise for his hard-money principles does not seem to explain such an interest. If he bought in so that he might later take over the paper, he acted slowly; and if he bought to promote George’s main ideas, he acted disloyally in the end. The San Francisco Bulletin had a Machiavellian explanation, that Jones merely ‘wanted a paper to throw mud.’ When that newspaper observed that if such was the senator’s purpose, he had selected well, the Post simply denied that Senator Jones had a controlling interest, and denied also that he exerted or tried to exert any influence on policy.
On George’s side, over and above the business connection, there appears a feeling, like his old attitude toward Governor Haight, that Senator Jones was a man of power who could be led into paths of righteousness. Shortly after the new press had been installed, the Post said that it believed that Senator Jones thought as it did on the points of free trade, land-value taxation, and the functions of government; and it saluted him as the senator who could, if he would, make himself the Cobden or Bright of the United States. So far as meets the eye it was the editor advising the senator, rather than the politician using the newspaper, which describes the relationship between Henry George and J. P. Jones for the remainder of George’s editorship.
No more in private than in public, so far as the record goes, did George intimate that there was any limit on his enthusiasm for what the new investment had bought. The summer and fall of 1874 were full of excitement for a naturally impatient man. Only in October, after three months of hopes deferred, did the telegram come which announced completion and shipment of the press. It had been built in Henry George’s native city by the firm that only a decade earlier had constructed the first press which would print in one operation both sides of the sheet as it came off the roller — the web-perfecting press. Meanwhile, as George wrote his mother, there was a plant to get ready and business expansion to manage. He had ‘fire engine and boilers built and a new class of type made,’ and anticipated that very soon the Post as enterprise would ‘either burst up or get rich.’
The climax came at the
turn of the year. On 28 December the Post moved along
The expansion took place
at a time of readjustment in journalism in the state. The
Meanwhile in late summer
the Post Publishing Company, as the business was now styled, ventured the
ultimate move into competition with the Fitch, Pickering, and Simonton group.
On 20 August, one week before the crash of the Bank of California, it launched
the
Though naturally there
was a conformity of ideas with those of the Post, yet by announcements
made and by areas of affairs omitted from the editorial page, it is plain that
a more general and less opinionated paper than the Post was intended.
Begun a week before a state election, the Ledger purposely omitted
taking a party stand. Although operating painfully close to the promise of
little advertising, the Ledger put up a good front. In October, after
only two months of life, the page size was doubled to 25 inches by 17 inches, a
bigger sheet than the Post. Like the Post it surrendered early
the one-cent bargain, its price being raised to fifteen cents (a
Imagination went into the paper, and particularly into the Sunday edition — Sunday journalism was still new and little developed in the age of Grant. Before the Bullock press, the Post had made a regular feature of its double-size Saturday editions: it included a bit of fiction and several departments of general appeal, such as the theater, for week-end reading. Now it turned that enlargement into the Sunday Ledger, and that edition was included in the subscription arrangements of both the Post and Ledger.
Pictures were the
exciting thing about the new Sunday paper. Possibly taking a hint from a recent
attempt in San Francisco to publish an illustrated weekly — a failure which the
Leslies article said indicated an open
area for journalism — George and his associates spread across the front page
pictures which were a vast improvement over the blurred little cuts then
familiar in newspapers.
Not forgetting his
principal stock in trade, Henry George solicited and received — too late for
publication — from John Swinton of the
The expansion of the Post
Publishing Company outran Henry George in November 1875. The Bullock press had
gone into operation half a year ahead of the closing of the Bank of California,
and the Ledger had been started one week ahead. Perhaps the large
general factors of financial crisis are sufficient explanation of failure; more
than likely some fault lay in George’s individual decisions to expand, and yet
again expand. Four years later, summing up his
At the moment he lacked this much philosophy. A woman visitor at the Post’s office discovered Henry George in tears. Senator Jones, when he bought the new press, had promised, George told her, never to ask the editor to advocate a measure he did not believe in; but now ‘he has asked me to do that very thing and I will not do it.’ Retribution may have been possible. George considered himself free to insert in the Post such an exposd of the senator’s bad faith as ‘would have ended all hopes of his getting anything’ from the property. Mr. Hinton persuaded him not to try this, for the sake of the working staff, and in the end George wrote a sportsmanlike editorial, 27 November, which began, 'Circumstances which I cannot control . .
In
Joseph T. Goodman,
appropriately from
At the moment of his exit, the Sacramento Bee hoped that George would continue to contribute to the Post — and in fact the paper did carry on an anti-monopoly line of fire — and even George himself was not sure how deeply policy would be changed. Writing to Swinton a month later, on 27 December, he expressed uncertainty about Goodman’s taking the letters which he himself had invited: ‘How much radicalism they would print I cannot tell. They look on me as a pestilential agrarian and communist, and will avoid what they call my hobbies. But though they do not know it, the very aggressiveness and radicalism of the Post was its strength. In making a paper that will not offend gunnybags they will kill it, as you will in time see . . .’
This letter, and one other to the same man, are George’s real valedictory on a passage of his life. It will not hurt to put together sections from the two: ‘Since I last wrote you a change has come over the spirit of my dreams. From running two dailies and two weeklies I am down to none. It is the old story, so I won’t weary you with it, and in fact have not much heart to repeat it. The Ledger under ordinary circumstances would have been a success. Its reception was all that could be asked — but the extraordinary stringency induced by the failure of the Bank and intensified by the Virginia fire cut to nothing the advertising which a new paper can get, while depriving us of all aid. So we went down. And then while credit was strained and resources exhausted, the big fish in the Post company, John P. Jones — reached out — and took it in. A couple of months ago I reluctantly consented to put the price of $36000 on the interest held by myself and partner. Now I just take a walk . . .
‘If I never do anything more I have the satisfaction of knowing that I perceptibly affected public thought, and planted ideas which will some day [change ?] into action . . .
‘As for being depressed I am not — twenty four hours is enough to cry over spilt milk . . .
‘It is all in a lifetime, and I have seen too much to think I can certainly tell what is good and what is evil fortune . . .’
From Isolation:
Speaking and Writing in Time of Crisis 1876-1879
-1-
Twice
before he
had the Post, George did pieces of writing by which he intended to raise
himself into public prominence and leadership. Yet, though both the
But intimations along the
way tell us that no stage of pressure of work or of the enjoyment of success
ever quite banished from his mind the urge to do a bigger, more developed and
philosophical, presentation of the ideas in Our Land and Land Policy. If
Hubert Howe Bancroft, ally of the
It is one thing to plan a noble book, and to envisage fondly, but at a comfortable distance in the working future, the ideas it will
sjo
develop. It is altogether a different thing, many an author has found, to abandon accustomed routines and sources of income, to find the necessary books, to isolate one’s self, to face the blank pages, and chapter by chapter to fill them with the symbols of persuasive thought. In this case more than a year and a half went by, after George lost the Post, before he concentrated heavily, and about two years and a half before he concentrated exclusively, on undertaking the full austerities of authorship. Though, within all the circumstances we know, it is easiest to think that he considered himself committed, from the moment when Senator Jones let him down, to go ahead early with the major effort, we have no absolute evidence on the point. Doing several other things briefly, he was perhaps trying alternatives to composition, or was making up his mind. But it seems more likely that he was fortifying himself for the task.
In the spring of 1876 he wrote his father that he was going to try a new method of self-expression. He had done enough writing for the moment, he said, and enjoyed a good reputation for what he had done. He would not return to journalism for some little while. ‘Now I propose to see if I cannot do a little speaking.’ He intended to focus his intellectual energies. ‘Now I want to concentrate, get fixed easily as to money, and study and think, and then when I get ready I will come prominently before the public again in some way or other.’ Half a year after leaving the Post he was already reading law, and he hoped to be admitted to the bar sometime, though he might never practice.
In the season of finding himself, his family seemed especially dear. Annie and he were now more than ever lovers, he said in the letter just quoted, and together they took infinite pride in the three children. Little Jane was turning out the brightest of the lot; the boys they believed to have the makings of ‘noted men’; all had bank accounts in their own names. ‘God has been too good . . . There has never been a point in my life when I have been so happy.’ To Annie herself, Henry wrote a letter about Abelard and H£loise. Abelard’s way was the way he loved her, he confessed, with passion blended with a wish to lead his darling into knowledge of truth.
Even the money side
seemed smooth. To
Certainly he now
discovered a very satisfactory way to pay his bills. On losing the Post,
he had immediately gone up the river to
Henry George himself
tagged the inspectorship a sinecure intended to give him leisure for study and
writing. But this was the long view taken many years after the event. At least
at first there were arrangements to be made, duties to be learned, jobs to be
deputized; and for a little while the new office holder worked hard,
politically and otherwise. After taking charge, 15 January, and setting up an
office at
But George was not simply
the honored man of thought, and soon his own letters reveal a very human
mixture of motives. In one of these he begged a friend, an assemblyman from
Yet even on the
unimproved original terms the new job pleased and intrigued him. The
During the first year he gave considerable attention to the job. This meant learning the operation of the testing devices as well as the operation of the law, and gathering from far and near what information he could about the most successful mechanisms and procedures. His brother Val often traveled with him and, it seems, very largely took over the mechanical operations George himself might have given much time to.
Of course the money was the first delight. He made $52.50 one early day in the field and wrote Annie that surely he would average out $500 a month for the first year. Pleasant ideas burgeoned with the spontaneity of the spring: he would learn to dance, as much for his own sake as his wife’s; they would take a little vacation together; the family would visit Philadelphia and see the Centennial Exposition; they would buy the little house they wanted, even if they did have to pay by installments.
Not one of these dreams
came true. Even so they represent a short intense period of relaxation between
two big efforts. We catch him breaking his rule against writing only once
during this time. In a long letter to the editor of the Bee, later
printed as an eleven-page pamphlet, George made an interesting case for
personal journalism. A state senator had introduced a bill which would have
required newspaper articles to be signed. Entirely correct, reasoned Henry
George: in present American practice the editorial ‘we’ signifies not the
thinking writers but the interests of the proprietors. Moral questions aside,
proprietary journalism lessens the energy of the journalist and deprives him of
kudos. Everybody knew Starr King, wrote George, but nobody knew Henry Watson,
his old boss, the editor of the
But even this mild degree
of personal participation in affairs was unusual for about a year. Next to the
job, Henry George’s studies took right of way, though not too strenuously at
first. ‘I am converting the august position I hold into a sort of state
Perambulator,’ he wrote the new dear friend, Dr. Edward Taylor, who had
recommended books. ‘What I read now is on the wing.’ He had bought Oliver
Wendell Holmes’ new edition of
Release from pressure and
being away from home afforded rare opportunities to notice little things, and
to write of whatever came to mind. There was time to be amused while he and Val
were driving a two-horse buggy on an inspection trip inland, in the direction
of
To Annie he had intimate
things to say, often. After listening to a debate in
-2-
The national event of
November 1876 as naturally turned George toward his plan to develop himself as
speaker as it drew him away from his aloofness to political affairs. Before the
nomination of Tilden, he preferred the Democratic candidate Senator Allen
Thurman of
He had to do some hard
thinking, accordingly, when the Tilden and Hendricks Central Club of San
Francisco, an organization of young men of advanced opinions, invited him to
make ‘the keynote of the canvass of
George proceeded a hard way. In a 12,000-word address he stated a persistent issue of American politics, in the perspective he had taken on the editorial page of the Post. ‘The question involved in this election is not as between two men; it is not as between two parties. It is between two great policies of government, and your vote, or even your refusal to vote, must be its answer. Between the policy of Alexander Hamilton and the policy of Thomas Jefferson you are called on to decide. You have tried the one . . . Will you continue it, or will you try the other?’ Back of Hamiltonianism and Jeffersonianism George pictured the eternities of ‘Have’ and ‘Want’; and, in the same rough-hewn way, he identified the great political divisions of history — from ‘the Right and Left of the French Assembly, the Cavalier and Roundhead of the England of Charles I’ to present-day party alignments.
One passage through which passion still glows denied that the Civil War should be blamed for the country’s present moral predicament. ‘Many things the war may teach us, but not to distrust the manly qualities of our people. Many are the lessons we may read in its million graves, but not the lesson that the virtues of our blood have run out . . . The object of telling you that these things are due to the war is to induce you to quietly rest in the belief that they will remedy themselves in time . . . No; it is not the war that is responsible for all this . . . Our public service is corrupt because the natural result of our laws has been to engender corruption; our industry [particularly our shipping] is oppressed because our laws have prevented its natural development; the masses are becoming poorer and the few richer, because the whole tendency of our system of finance and taxation is to make $100,000 more profitable in the hands of one man than in the hands of a hundred.’
It was a writer’s speech, and George was to need a long time to learn not to take too many risks of chilling his audience with perspective and morality. And another episode of about this time tells us that as a speaker he had other frailties to conquer. Called to the platform from a seat on the floor by the audience at a Democratic rally, he held back at first, then ran across the rostrum, hat in hand, and said what came to mind — without good voice control, and with awkward stance and gesture.
Yet his prepared address
caught on. The original audience had ordered it printed and circulated, and the
Democratic State Committee asked him to stump the state. There is every
indication that he loosened up and performed with flare and effect. He was able
to simplify his ideas for delivery from the wayside platform. A newspaper from
At campaign’s end George
received the compliment of being invited to give the principal address at the
closing Democratic rally in
The Democrats had given
George his first experience as a speaker, and the next speech has the look of the
According to the Alta,
‘myriads of small flags were thrown across the principal streets,’ thousands
turned out on the evening of July third, and the next morning everyone was up
early for the
The California Theater, the place of the main event, was decorated in keeping. Outside a huge transparency of George Washington and inside a magnificent state seal were made the centers of the festooning. Three thousand people jam-packed the auditorium, and an orchestra played at intervals. No occasion could have been more to the speaker’s inclination at the time and he spoke of his childhood love for Independence Hall, the words with which this book opens.
Though the oration is as
much too long for a twentieth-century reader as hints suggest that it was for
the afternoon crowd in the theater, and though the periods of the speech were
rounded off in the rococo of the Victorian age, its structure and its ideas do
command attention, the more so because they indicate Henry George’s near future
as both speaker and writer. Whether or not he so intended, the address took the
same broad form as the great syllogism of politics set forth in the Declaration
of Independence. In 1776 Jefferson and his colleagues had made the natural
rights of man their major premise. In the oration, George began with human
liberty — so had preacher Stebbins the year before. ‘It is meet that on this
day the flags of all nations should mingle above our processions ... In keeping
this day to liberty, we honour all her sacred days . . . From every land have
been gathered the gleams of light that unite in her beacon fire.’ At
The Declaration comes to
a climax with the assertion that when a tyrant abuses the natural rights of his
subjects, his true authority is dissolved by the wrongdoing. The patriots of
1776 believed that they were merely taking what belonged to them. Henry George
asserted that modern
Through these channels of reason George arrived at his conclusion: the American revolution must be completed in economic life. ‘The assertion of the equal rights of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is the assertion of the right of each to the fullest freest exercise of all his faculties, limited only by the equal right of every other. It includes freedom of person and security of earnings, freedom of trade and capital, freedom of conscience and speech and the press. It is the declaration of the same equal rights of all human beings to the enjoyment of the bounty of the Creator — to light and to air, to water and to land. It asserts these rights as inalienable — as the direct grant of the Creator to each human being, of which he can be rightfully deprived neither by kings nor congresses, neither by parchments nor prescriptions —
neither by the compacts of past generations nor by majority votes.’
‘The
Wry comments at this
point accurately suggest the serious problems Henry George had to solve if he
was going to become more than a campaign speaker. Merely stating what listeners
want to hear, and doing it better than they themselves do, would not suffice
for George’s larger intention. Nor was his handicap simply that of being
heterodox. As an economist in the making, an economic proposer always, he had
still to train himself to speak familiarly and interestingly in the elucidation
of fairly complicated ideas. One might exaggerate to say that his problem was
unique;
Earlier in 1877 he had
tried his skill, just once, at lecturing on economics. The invitation had come
from the
George understood that a chair of economics was about to be set up, and that he was mentioned for the place. Perhaps also some appeasement was intended to remove irritations remaining from the battle with President Gilman. On this occasion Henry told Annie George that he wished for no title in the world, unless it was that of ‘Professor.’
Perspective on George’s own lecture is gained by noticing that Mr. Hopkins had chosen to speak on ‘The Relations of Commercial Speculation to Legitimate Business.’ Rarely has the Protestant ethic of dedication to work been more tightly joined to the spirit of capitalism than by this son of a bishop. ‘Build a railroad or write a book,’ he admonished the young people, selecting two activities he himself had tried; avoid ‘stock-gambling’ and ‘note-shaving’ as no more worth while than games of chance. Since right thinking according to this lecturer amounted so largely to accepting the standards of business and property, it seems not unreasonable that in his turn George chose to speak for labor.
But by no means exclusively so. A title could hardly have been more neutral than the one at the top of his manuscript, ‘The Study of Political Economy.’ And, whether or not there really was a professorship hanging in the balance, the lecturer proceeded as formally as if there were. He crossed the bay with his good friend Assemblyman James V. Coffey. President Le Conte entertained them with other distinguished guests at lunch, and then introduced the lecturer. The audience included members of the faculty and students, perhaps forty of whom were women.
With Progress and
Poverty still two years in the future, it would have required an informed
listener indeed to sense the full meaning of the discontent George voiced, that
afternoon, against economic ideas all but universally accepted in the
Anglo-American world. Present readers may recall that he had once put second
thoughts about John Stuart Mill, far less admiring than first thoughts, into an
editorial. Now he spoke still more sharply. He said that political economy must
be viewed as a laggard study, and that it had made ‘no substantial improvement’
since Ricardo. (Americans had not yet learned of William Jevons.) In the larger
history of economic thought, this
The main trouble with economics, specified George, lay in the fact that theory fell short of the natural usefulness of the subject. For ‘the science which investigates the laws of production and the distribution of wealth concerns itself with matters which among us occupy more than nine-tenths of human effort and perhaps nine-tenths of human thought.’ More than that, the study of economics goes far to explain the rise and fall of nations, and even ‘the mental and moral as well as the physical states of humanity.’ (A number of remarks indicate that during the early authorship of Progress and Poverty George was more nearly an economic determinist than before or after.) What a study, what a tool for the welfare of state and nation, mused George, political economy ought to become.
He assured the students that it was not a dismal science at all, but truly a ‘simple and beneficent study’ available to everyone. The old writers had indeed gone in for needless hair-splitting; they had neglected the most important of all economic questions, the recurrent phenomenon of depression. Worst of all, economics had arrayed its laisser faire ideas against improvement and reforms in behalf of the working classes.
All this could be changed, and must be. Though economics demands ‘the habit of careful thought,’ it is perfectly available to those who need it most. Let working men study, demanded George, and be deluded no longer, either by too much laisser faire or by ‘the absurdities of protection and the crazy theories usually designated by the name of socialism.’ The lecturer concluded where the author of Progress and Poverty would conclude, with a plea that economic truths be studied and laid to heart as continuous with the other truths of human life. ‘You will see that the true law of social life is the law of love, the law of liberty, the law of each for all and all for each: that the golden rule of morals is also the golden rule of the science of wealth; that the highest expressions of religious truth include the widest generalizations of political economy.’
George had given a
splendid lecture, and one which three years later his publishers did well to
have printed in Popular Science Monthly, as a kind of advertisement for Progress
and Poverty. He had ranged a broad field, yet kept focus and direction; he
had been critical without limit, yet also idealistic. The address must have
been much better geared to his audience than the Fourth of July oration. It is
easy to credit the lecturer’s own two-way impression ‘that his utterances had
been well received by the students, but by the authorities with a polite and
dignified quietness that made him think that he might not be invited to lecture
again.’ After the event his connection at
From the historical angle of vision which seeks out the gathering ideas of Progress and Poverty, the two addresses of this year become luminously important. Henry George, Jr., applies to them a figure of speech from oratory, which confirms a reader’s impression that the ideas of the two ought to be read consecutively. The university lecture he calls an ‘exordium,’ proposing a change in economic thinking, and the Fourth of July speech a ‘peroration,’ demanding practical measures. It may be seen too, that, though neither address specified as concretely as the Post had done just what practical measures George recommended, the two together prefigured, in a rough sketch more natural in the form of lectures than in that of editorials, the total pattern of the coming book.
-3"
But this makes George’s
advancing work as author seem easier, and his total course seem plainer, than
they really were. The summer of 1877 he did spend in the way a writer likes to
do. He took his family across the
But in the latter part of
1877 occurred the famous Sand Lot riots in
George refused to go
along. He detested
Before long,
nevertheless, events drew him into affairs. The clamor in
Among the leaders were
two good friends: James Maguire, recently George’s colleague in the Tilden
campaign, a future judge and congressman; and John M. Days, the same who had
recently tried to connect George with Kearneyism and who in 1872 had been
midwife to his formal declarations against private property in land. There were
also John Swett, school superintendent for years, at the moment a high-school
principal, and John Vallance George. Altogether a group of twenty or thirty
came together on Sunday afternoons to talk seriously. As in later days in the
The group seems to have been in the first instance a study and discussion group exclusively. They read and debated, we are told, ‘the economic parts of Our Land and Land Policy,’ which of course comprised the only presentation in book form, so far, of Henry George’s theory. Doubtless the questions and answers helped clear the mind of the working author. But only a short time passed before the members wanted more than just talk among themselves; and one meeting, when about thirty were convened in one of the city courtrooms, decided to set up a formal organization. They elected an Irish-born lawyer to be president; and one Patrick J. Murphy, a newspaperman trained on the Post, became secretary. Thus was born the Land Reform League of California, the first of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of its kind the world around.
Organization meant an
appeal to the troubled public, and a meeting; and, for Henry George, having a
following meant the obligations of leadership and a return to public speaking.
He was obliged to put manuscript aside to prepare a keynote address. There was
no need, this time, to diagnose without prescription, as in
Where he had blamed the
great economists for refusing to go, he himself now ventured. ‘Why Work Is
Scarce’ anticipated in detail the chapter on ‘The primary cause of recurring
paroxysms of industrial depression,’ in the coming book; and it set the pattern
of analysis he was to hold for life and to apply in the depression of the
1890s, with very little change. He began with the proposition that the time had
come for economists to look for general and underlying causes of economic
upset. He phrased as current history very nearly the same thought he had
phrased as prophecy before the railroad had been finished: ‘Under our very
eyes, a highly civilized community has risen on virgin soil. From a social
condition that was nearer equality than anywhere else existed, we have seen the
rich and the poor separate.’ What common cause explains, he wanted to know, the
tragic conditions in new
The speaker worked toward his solution, ‘The Great Cause’ of depression and poverty, through a series of negations. Anyone’s talk about an imbalance between supply and demand for labor, or an oversupply or underconsumption of goods, he dismissed as high-sounding cant. (The ‘disequilibrium’ known to present-day economists was not his problem.) Nature provides two hands for every mouth, he noticed; and on a desert island a man can provide for his own. Robinson Crusoe had become favorite reading with George, and he used it effectively. Reverting to his old observation that the greatest wealth, the highest technology, and the largest populations appear together in the same areas of the modern world, he argued that in the correct relation those factors should produce the highest standards of living in history. George refused on the platform, as at other times since 1872, to blame different results on any inherent struggle between capital and labor. Those two together ‘represent the human elements in production’; the only other element is the world’s God-given fertility, the annual cycle of the seasons, the universal burgeoning of life. ‘There is no conflict between capital and labor — and that there is popularly supposed to be arises from a want of exactness in the use of words.’
George managed eloquence of argument — but we cannot imagine surprise for any listener — as he asserted at climax that ‘The Great Cause’ of depression was monopoly. Mainly, not exclusively, land monopoly, he said: resource monopoly, without mention of industrial monopoly, is what he chose to stress, in this oratorical simplification of his ideas. ‘All history shows that the fact which ultimately determines the social, the political, and consequently the intellectual and moral condition of a people, is the tenure of the land . . . Truly the earth is our mother.’ He pleaded, as in the Post, that the only correct policy was to reassert the natural right of the people of California to the land of California, to reapply to the land and water, in even more positive form, ‘the equitable doctrine that in earlier days we applied to the land . . . the doctrine that no one can hold more than he can reasonably use, and for no longer time than he does use it . . . This is called agrarianism. Do not be frightened at the word ... It does not mean warfare against society . . . Agrarianism is the true conservatism.’ Late in the lecture, answering a question, he spoke of confiscating land values: ‘Nay, the confiscation is in the present system.’
On a rostrum, economic
diagnosis, akin to accusation, comes easy, but the doctor’s prescription is
hard to deliver. Once again George thought and spoke in three’s, but this time
he made his program more consolidated than in the Post. First, he said,
addressing himself to
In this address, as always in the future, George’s analysis of depression came up with institutional and moral failure. That is, he believed that job opportunities were withheld and poverty induced by reason of wrong-headed policies and exploitative institutions, rather than because of mechanical flaws in the operation of capitalism. Actually he was ahead of his time and with the future in making the general proposition that depressions are a natural product of the going system and should be anticipated. But also he was different from the future main line of business-cycle analysts who would find depressions inherent in the frictions of economic operations narrowly regarded. ‘Why Work Is Scarce’ should be read, George wrote John Swinton, ‘as an attempt to put into popular form a great truth which marries political economy with common sense, and which once appreciated is the key to all the social evils of our time. Of course the exigencies of a popular lecture prevent the exhibition of truth in its full form, but the truth is there which can be worked out by anyone who will catch it . . . The seed that I have for years been sowing is springing up on every hand ... I can see what I never expected to see, the result of my work. Where I stood alone thousands now stand with me. The leaven is at work. And there can be but one result. But the struggle will be long and fierce. It is now only opening.’
Besides making the
advance he mentioned to Swinton, that of connecting his economic analysis with
a political program, George’s ‘Why Work Is Scarce’ address marks a step also in
his shifting from mainly regional to more generalized habits of social thought.
To be sure he said many things that only Californians would have understood.
His observations about land titles, for instance, sound like a page from the
debates of 1867; and one fellow journalist, E. A. Waite, who held a friendly
judgment about the speaker — ‘Henry George writes a very vigorous article . . .
has some motive about him’ — complained at this point that George had borrowed
without due acknowledgment ideas he himself had put in a San Francisco magazine
article. On the other hand, George was compelled by his distaste for
In political essence, Henry George and the Land Reform League of California were making that most difficult of all democratic efforts: they were making the appeal of reason and dispassion to men already inflamed. The nature of the effort put enormous strain on George’s powers as a speaker, and a story, from the day of his first delivering ‘Why Work Is Scarce,’ indicates that he was a little overwhelmed by the task. He went with Mrs. George to the hall to rehearse, and he met a clergyman there. When this experienced speaker told him that his speech would go over the heads of a working-class audience, George took offense. But that evening there was a very small turnout, and he was upset. According to a witness ‘he kept his eyes on the paper and seemed to be so nervous he was almost frightened.’
Nevertheless the address
did catch on, and one of Henry George’s hardest years, 1878, does mark his
first success — dimly prophetic of the decade of the 1880s — in using the
spoken word to render his ideas into general currency. He repeated ‘Why Wages
Are Low’ in
Not until his next
speech, however, the fourth and last one of the series between the campaign
addresses of 1876 and his completing Progress and Poverty, did George
strike just such an appealing vein of eloquence as promised a successful future
on the rostrum. In June 1878, though he was at the one-third-of-the-way stage
of drafting his book, George accepted the invitation of the new Young Men’s
Hebrew Association in
The appeal he made lay in his rendering into the language of tradition and emotion his own enlarging social thought. ‘Everywhere in the Mosaic institutions is the land treated as the gift of the Creator to his common creatures, which no one has the right to monopolize. Everywhere it is, not your estate, or your property, not the land which you bought, or the land which you conquered, but “the land which the Lord Thy God giveth thee” — “the land which the Lord lendeth thee” . . . [Moses] not only provided for the fair division of the land among the people, and for making it fallow and common every seventh year, but by the institution of the jubilee he provided for a redistribution of the land every fifty years, and made monopoly impossible.’
George made the quality
of leadership the main theme of the address. His mind had sprung to that
problem when
In lines of thought which run strikingly in the same direction as certain ideas of Reinhold Niebuhr’s modern commentary, George praised the Jews for their religious practicality, for having ‘sternly repressed’ any too abstract ‘tendency to take the type for the reality,’ and for refusing to make too much of the comforting idea of immortality. After their sojourn in Egypt — for which the members of the Y.M.H.A. were free to substitute ‘California’ — the Jews who followed Moses had found power to assert ‘a God of the living as well as of the dead; a God whose inimitable decrees will, in this life, give happiness to the people that hold them and bring misery among the people that forget them.’
With an intensity that moved his audience, George built up the proposition that the concern of Moses — and of Puritan and Covenanter — had been to lay the foundation of a social state in which deep poverty and degrading want should be unknown. George’s final word praised Moses’ calling — and obliquely his own. ‘Of something more real than matter; of something higher than the stars; of a light which will endure when suns are dead and dark; of a purpose of which the physical universe is but a passing phase, such lives tell.’
So combining in one
speech the qualities of sermon and oration, George hit at last a vein of emotion
that could lift men’s hearts. In due time, six years or so, ‘Moses’ would
become a favorite address. We shall find Henry George giving it again and
again, a kind of sustaining piece, especially good for Sundays, and
particularly acceptable in
But this was not for
-4-
Yet George did make one more try for practical influence. In March 1878, a short time before the legislature passed the act which made the constitutional convention possible, he wrote Assemblyman Coffey how anxious he was for the convention to be called at once. The ex-editor of the Post could not have thought otherwise; and, book or no book, he was only being true to old principles when, a month later, he brought out a broadside ‘To the Voters of San Francisco.’ In that way he announced candidacy for the convention.
Though he built his
platform in somewhat more specific terms than the Fourth of July oration, as a
whole he made his manifesto general, more like that speech than like the heavy
argument in ‘Why Work Is Scarce.’ On taxation he declared simply for shifting the
burden ‘from those who have little to those who have much, from those who
produce wealth to those who merely appropriate it, so that the monopoly of land
and water may be destroyed . . . and an end put to the shameful state of things
which compels men to beg who are willing to work.’ Appropriately in political
more than in economic language, he favored a ‘dignified’ resistance to Chinese
immigration, and the designing of a ‘symmetrical and responsible’ government
for
Yet, having stepped forward, a man of principle for the constitutional convention, George soon decided that he did not really care whether he was elected or not. Mainly, not entirely, the candidates for seats lined up either for the Workingmen’s party, or against it, the conservative opposition fusing Democrats and Republicans into a big ‘Nonpartisan’ bloc. George could not go with the fusion. And when the Workingmen offered him a nomination he made issue with the stipulation they required, that their nominees pledge themselves to follow the party line in every respect, and even agree beforehand to resign, should occasion arise and party ‘constituents’ so demand. Nettled by this, George went before the appropriate meeting and answered with a resounding ‘No.’ Reporting to John Swinton in New York, he said that if elected he was sure to be flanked by monopoly on two sides, and the success or failure of his candidacy would mean very little.
The nomination he did
accept came from a Democratic Nominating Convention, an element not absorbed in
the state’s polarization of politics. But even here George entered an
exception. He told the convention that a certain clause of their platform,
which favored a long period for redeeming real estate taken by the state for delinquent
taxes, would not help homesteaders and would favor land withholders. He would
not pledge that plank. ‘Upon the land grabbers who have carved up the soil of
The short story of
George’s candidacy for the constitutional convention, then, adds definition to
the longer story of his having made himself a solitary, a cynic about present
politics, an idealist for the principles he would not compromise. The story’s
end discovers the voters letting him retain his solitude. Henry George, Jr.,
has it that the whole Democratic ticket was beaten at the polls,’ which is
literally true of
So, while others wrote a new fundamental law for the state, Henry George worked on his manuscript. For two and a half years his activities had been narrowing; now, for the third and fourth quarters of 1878 and the first of 1879, the exact period of the convention, he concentrated completely. Apparently with embarrassingly little to distract him at the inspector’s office, and with not a single speech to write, and no editorials, he forged ahead to his conclusion.
George worked mainly at
home, in surroundings he would remember with nostalgia during
Within doors the caller just cited, a bibliophile come to see George’s library, gives us a glimpse of such domestic turmoil as many a writer at the age of forty has had to live with. There were four children now, from Henry, Jr., at sixteen, down to Annie Angela, the baby named for her mother and the Feast of Angels, the day of her birth in 1877. The visitor found nothing special among the library’s 300 books, except the owner. Working in a saffron-colored dressing gown, George babbled with comment, criticism, and appreciation of the books around him. General dishevelment far from obscured the sweet good-feeling in the household.
For the time being a kind of puritan Bohemian, Henry George took to his sofa for reading. He wrote whenever he could, frequently at night when sleep refused to come. When he could not work he took his troubles to the bay, where wind and water relaxed him. He kept notebooks, he rough-drafted, he rewrote and revised. Under the slogan, ‘Hard writing makes easy reading,’ he took the most time for the analytical passages. More than would seem possible, he used the inexperienced help of his wife and oldest child. Mrs. George checked the manuscript, and Henry, who had finished school now and was studying shorthand on the side, acted as amanuensis. But the final manuscript copy of Progress and Poverty, now deposited in the Library of Congress, is every line done in Henry George’s own hand, very neat and clear and with few emendations, a huge piece of painstaking. Nerves must have been tight sometimes in the home which produced the book, but the children record a good and happy time during the months of composition.
No isolation is quite
complete, and even during this interval George depended on his friends, most
especially Edward Taylor. Their acquaintanceship dated from George’s days on
the
Dr. Taylor did much more. With a quick appreciation of the size of George’s task, he urged the writer to think big. From a mind that knew and treasured literature and suffered because his own poetry seemed not equal to the cry within, he helped George with leads and ideas. His one certified specific contribution to Progress and Poverty is the stirring poem of exhortation at the opening of Book vm, wherein George sets forth his alternative proposals for doing away with private property in land. Dr. Taylor asks:
Shall we in the presence of this previous wrong,
In this supremest moment of all time,
Stand trembling, cowering, when with one bold stroke These groaning millions might be ever free?
In the first edition of Progress and Poverty the poem was made anonymous, apparently at the author’s request; later George insisted on entering a credit line. To suggest what other passages in Progress and Poverty may be due to Dr. Taylor would be guesswork. Yet any reader of all Henry George’s works who senses how much richer than the others this book is, in quoted passages of poetry and prose, is likely to credit this intellectual friend with a considerable contribution. George’s lifetime gratitude to him accords better with such a debt than with a minor one.
In San Francisco George had the benefit also of expert help from one or two other associates, of whom John Swett, the principal of the Girls’ High School, is least anonymous. Mr. Swett may have been the member of the Land Reform League who sometimes brought John Muir to the meetings: at any rate the two were friends, and the great naturalist and conservationist knew and was much stirred by Henry George at this period. At the stage of proofreading Mr. Swett combed over Progress and Poverty for errors in expression and grammar — needlessly, he says. Not completely convinced by George’s ideas, this friend understood the book as a product of the time and place. ‘It really seemed as if the foundations of society were breaking up. A part of George’s book took its tone from these hard times.’ Another member of the league remembers talking with George about how it had taken Herbert Spencer twenty-five years to get a respectable hearing, and recalls George agreeing that Progress and Poverty had better be directed to influencing the twentieth century.
Outside
According to recent standards of biographical procedure, there should now be some description and exposition of George’s library, some analysis of the books he is known to have worked with, as determinants or conditioners of Progress and Poverty in gestation. Unfortunately George’s own collection of books was dispersed and we have no list of it. His son says that he had about 600 volumes, twice as many as the estimate cited above; and we know that, in addition to it and the Taylor library, he drew on the State Library in Sacramento and used four libraries in San Francisco — the Odd Fellows, the Mercantile, the Mechanics, and the Free. (What Cheer House is not mentioned at this time.) Lacking much evidence about
George’s borrowings, the reader is referred back to chapters 111 and viii, especially, for some account of his earlier reading, and forward to chapter x, where he will find a little detective work on what George read while he was composing, based on evidence within Progress and Poverty itself.
-5“
We have seen how George
was affected by the rise of the
But during the early
months of 1879, when Progress and Poverty was finished and the new
constitution was submitted for ratification, George undertook a more active
role. For this reason the political background now requires a little further
sketching in. By 1879, emotions had been thoroughly aroused, anti-labor
defenses had been marshaled, and what a recent scholar calls
Readers of a generation
more familiar than Henry George’s was with the phenomenon we call fascism will
not need long explanations. Behind
While Henry George’s
energies drained off in the Land Reform League, Dennis Kearney’s organization
succeeded in drawing together trade-union elements and locals of the national
Workingmen’s party, and it became a large and potent thing. Not only in the
Hence the red scare.
Largely thanks to the new biography of John S. Hittell by Professor Claude W.
Petty, it is possible to visualize how the psychology of fear transformed
conservatives into suppressors. Hittell’s employer, Frederick MacCrellish,
proprietor of the
Hittell attached the name
of ‘Kearneyism’ to every brand of
A part of the price paid
by the state was, naturally, the stifling of moderate and liberal opinion. As a
kind of control point, for observing the ineffectiveness of Henry George’s
voice in state affairs, we have the effort of a new weekly newspaper, Hall's
Land Journal, to represent, in a more progressive variation, the
middle-of-the-road conservatism that Caspar T. Hopkins had expressed a decade
earlier. (President Hopkins at this time was cultivating the California Social
Science Association, but would return to the printed discussion of state
affairs in the
In the face of this kind
of situation, Henry George decided to launch a new newspaper. The immediate
occasion was the adjournment of the constitutional convention in
For the first time
George’s political goal coincided with those of the majority of
But the heart of the matter was the constitution itself. The plainest thing about it was its extreme length; in this respect it differed utterly from the principles of simplicity and flexibility advanced by George in the Post. Concerning real-estate taxation, it contained a procedural requirement, Article xm, Section 2, which has pleased twentieth-century single-taxers, indeed, because it prescribed an arrangement they have had to fight for elsewhere, for instance in New York and recently in Pennsylvania. ‘Land and improvements thereon shall be separately assessed . . . [and] land, of the same quality and similarly situated shall be assessed at equal value.’ But this did not make Henry George a friend for the constitution. To him another provision about land, Article xvn, Section 2, was the crucial thing: ‘The holding of large tracts of land, uncultivated and unimproved, by individuals or corporations is against the public interest and should be discouraged by all means not inconsistent with the rights of private property.’ ‘Not inconsistent with the rights of private property’ — this clause, conservatively interpreted, could protect the speculator and withholder against the policies George desired, even more effectively than the equality-of-taxation clause in the constitution of 1849.
On 5 April, Henry George’s new paper, a weekly, The State, began to appear. Perhaps Sir William Jones’ poem, ‘The State,’ suggested the name. George seems to have loved this poem, for he had inserted it in his very first printed piece, in the Journal of Labor and Workmen, fourteen years earlier; and now he printed it again, on the front page of the first issue. A few lines are worth quoting, for they will help capture George’s own mood:
What Constitutes a State?
Not high raised battlement or labored mound,
Thick wall or moated gate;
Not cities proud with spires and turrets crowned . . .
No: — Men, high-minded men With powers as far above dull brutes endured In forest brake or den As heart excel cold rocks and brambles rude . . .
These constitute a State;
And sovereign Law, that State’s collected will . . .
Sits empress, crowning good, suppressing ill.
George’s editorial
‘Salutatory,’ hard by the poem, announced ‘a Democratic paper’ but denied that
the State started with any backers, partisan or financial. ‘It will not
shrink from supporting the right because it is unpopular, nor cringe to wrong
because it is strong.’ The editor sounded as though he meant to stay in
business, whether or not the constitution was ratified. Though ‘not as big or
as good a paper as many would want to see . . . it is as good and as big as I
can now make it. If it succeeds it will grow.’ George promised to proceed
according to the lessons he had learned on the Post and had tried to
preach. He would run signed articles. He would not regret the lack of outside
funds: $200,000 not earned in journalism would spoil the independence of the State,
he said. This first issue won a flicker of recognition from his old critic, the
Colusa Sun: ‘We have been growing stupid of late,’ that paper admitted,
from lack of fire and originality in the
While the Alta
called the State communistic, George swung into editorial sympathy with
the
There is no need to comb
the editorials of the State, as we did the Post, for ideas which
often reformulated the convictions of the earlier paper, or which drew on the
arsenal of the unpublished book manuscript. Amply and strongly against
ratification, George argued the merits of having a short constitution and a
short ballot, as in the interest of working men most particularly. At points of
greatest difference from
Most of this poured out
in the five issues of the weekly that preceded the ratification vote. It is
fair to suppose that
Writing to John Swinton,
he pretty much summed up the issue of a dozen years of trying to influence
George admitted nothing except coincidence in common between himself and the ‘capitalists who are fighting this constitution . . . They fear and dislike me. They look on me, as the man who is the head of the anti-constitution committee expressed it — as a man more dangerous in the long run than a hundred Kearneys ... I make no friends with them; but on the other hand I am losing the confidence of the men who ought to be my friends. If I were a demagogue all I would have to do would be to go in and shout, and I could be popular with the only men I can be popular with. But I would be false to my firmest convictions.’
Contrary to the charges of the red-baiters, George denied the least ‘glimpse or gleam of communism or socialism’ in the document. ‘Vacquerel, the only real communist in the convention, is fighting it; the real and thoughtful socialists . . . are opposing it;
men like Chas. A. Sumner
[the old friend on Nugent’s Herald],
As for the winners, George emphasized that the great strength of the new constitution belonged to the Grangers, ‘a class which as you know is the one least likely to accept radical ideas. It is warmly supported by men who hold five, twenty, fifty thousand acres of land.’ George spoke of the Grangers in almost the same way as liberals speak of the Associated Farmers in California today, and for his eastern reader he carefully differentiated them from the discontented farmers of the Middle West — ‘for we have not in California in any considerable proportion that class of small farmers who settled the West side by side in quarter sections.’ Politically and for the moment only, George agreed that the Kearneyites stood with the Grangers. But, he went on, ‘The so called workingmen in the convention did not make a single point — in fact they had no intelligent idea of what a constitution should be or what would benefit the working classes; they simply fell in with the Grangers because by this combination they thought to make a party which would carry the next election and give them the offices. That is their highest idea.’
Beside the working men, among those who said yes to the Grangers’ constitution, George placed ‘the great railroad monopoly,’ which also expected to have its own way. ‘They made the Commission section,’ he told Swinton, with reference to a board of railroad commissioners to whom the constitution assigned broad but toothless powers to supervise the railroads of the state. In the State he had been even more specific: ‘Astute lobbyists and manipulators are kept in the constant pay of the Central Pacific Railroad, which has organized corruption into a perfect system,’ and which succeeded in placing friends of monopoly in the convention.
A more unrelieved picture of the politics of self-interest and jobbery than George’s would be hard to turn up. ‘The constitution is repugnant to the business classes on account of its scheme of taxation; to the corporations on account of the d—d fool clauses regarding corporations; and to all the more intelligent classes because of its want of coherency, precision, and every quality which should be shown in a Constitution; to me and men like me it is chiefly repugnant because giving no real reform it will if adopted but block the way to reform . . . The very rich class have nothing whatever to fear from it. Though they have to a great extent got themselves worked up by the shadow of that bugbear which they call “communism.” The men who have most to fear are men who want reform which will go to the very foundation of the social structure, and who have an intelligent idea of what they want.’
For George personally,
all this amounted to more than a mood of discouragement and defeat, and more
even than a sense of being at the moment displaced in a community where he had
risen high and gone down. It represented his permanent judgment of affairs in
To the younger Henry George, in days on the Post and the Reporter, the railroad monopoly had seemed dangerous but not overwhelming. It might have appeared tyrannous, or Machiavellian, on many occasions, but the leadership had seemed admirable on others; and the system had proved almost benevolent to the American Press Association. Likewise only short years before 1879 the land monopoly had seemed not impossible to break, and the water monopoly had appeared to be subject to the democratic process. But now all the monopolies had entrenched themselves, and at the age of forty George saw no hope of change.
At this point, friends
far and near told George that he had better leave
In November 1876, when Samuel J. Tilden missed clear-cut victory at the polls, and the California Democrats were routed, Henry George had written his mother that political defeat was as good as victory for such as he. ‘In fact, I think better, as a man of my mind has a better chance of coming forward more rapidly in a minority than in a majority party. However, about all such things, I am disposed to think that whatever happens is for the best. Talent and energy can nearly always convert defeats into victories.’
In 1879 George was
reduced close to being a one-man minority with a program, in
Before the World:
Progress and Poverty 1879
-1-
The very size of Progress and Poverty — 563 pages in the standard edition — demanded qualities of authorship which Henry George had had no earlier occasion to exercise. Even the many chapters that drew on the thought and phrases of old editorials and recent speeches required him to make associations of ideas hitherto unmade, and to weld structures of logic at culminating heights above any he had ventured before. There were also new areas to fill in, weak spots to strengthen and develop. This is especially true of the first, second, and third ‘books,’ and the tenth and final one, where he made his great dissents from classical economic doctrines, offered a revision of the theory of economic distribution, and made the strongest affirmations of his own social faith.
In a true sense, accordingly, the total argument came out new. Though George’s reform contentions remained the same as in the Post in 1873 and after, and the same as in the addresses, his new completeness and definiteness, and the fresh assimilations of scholarship — the infrequent miracle that a living book had been born — put the author’s ideas on a new footing altogether.
Readers of this
biography, who may pick up Progress and Poverty still bearing in mind
George’s fifteen years of writing and speaking about
865
temporaries did, how
intimately the book bears the marks of the region of its birth. To be sure the
text is strewn with
In
In Progress and Poverty, fantasy takes the form of incorporating Mrs. Browning’s sonnet of the working children, rather than statistics, to convey a situation; it takes the form of quoting a bit of Hindu lore, and recurring to the quotation as a leitmotiv in a music drama, to renew for the reader the author’s main diagnosis of social evil. ‘To whomsoever the soil at any time belongs, to him belong the fruits of it. White parasols and elephants mad with pride are the flowers of a grant of land.’ No exercise of the author’s imagination worked more effectively than the decision to abandon a humdrum title — he had announced before publication a forthcoming work on the ‘Political Economy of the Social Problem’ — for the famous one. To twentieth-century readers, the Victorian oratorical quality of Progress and Poverty at certain climaxes is likely to be distasteful; but this is a simple reflection of George’s age, and of his own public speaking during the period of writing.
The work makes many
levies on social thinkers not previously tapped by George, or certainly not
marshaled in force. Where in newspaper days he drew on John Stuart Mill’s text,
and we can be sure of little else in economics, Progress and Poverty
shows, as we shall see in some detail, knowledge and use of Ricardo, and in
some degree of Adam Smith (though not a thorough knowledge yet, if ever), and
of Malthus, Cairnes, Fawcett, Herbert Spencer, and others. In the less economic
and more historical and sociological passages, the book indicates interesting
leads or borrowings taken, notably, from Sir Henry Maine and Walter Bagehot and
Sir William Jones, contemporary British lions of social research and theory,
two of them students of India. Like many a Californian in business, to make his
borrowings George went straight to the resources of the mother country. A few
American economists, like Perry of Williams and, most notably, Francis Amasa
Walker, did offer him something usable. But in the main it was the famous
English thinkers, contributors to the ideas and policies of liberalism,
asserters of laws and uniformities in society comparable to the laws of physics
and biology, who gave him intellectual capital to draw on. He sought no farther
than the
For reasons of analogy at least, and because just possibly a philosophical writer may have influenced him profoundly, a chapter from Thomas Henry Buckle’s already famous History of Civilization in England demands mention. This was Buckle’s brilliant ‘Examination of the Scotch Intellect during the Eighteenth Century,’ which we know George pondered carefully. Commenting on Adam Smith, the historian noted that the great economist had written his two treatises from quite separate premises about human nature, and had never reconciled them. ‘In his Moral Sentiments, he ascribes our actions to sympathy; in his Wealth of Nations, he ascribes them to selfishness.’ Buckle explains that Smith wrote with one hand as though men lived in great and religious concern with affairs outside themselves, and so evoked the highest principles and the deepest emotions; with the other hand he wrote as though self-seeking were the only motive in the world.
We would have to
disregard much in Henry George’s life to suppose that the reading of Buckle’s History
of Civilization taught him for the first time that the poles of human
action are far apart, and that a philosopher needs to relate them to one
another. Even when he was a youngster, he alternated between cool description
and intense exhortation; and the letters and editorials and speeches of the
Whether this be true or not, certainly the ‘Scotch Intellect’ chapter expresses the central philosophical problem which every economist who rejects materialism must in some way face, and which was present and immediate with George while he was writing. The strictly economic reasoning in Progress and Poverty rests squarely on the nineteenth century’s common, hedonistic and selfish pleasure-pain psychology.1 And the reform reasoning rests on the vastly different Christian and democratic presumptions of the author’s life of faith. George’s dual role as economist and as reformer makes acute the tension between the two assumptions about the nature of man, in the pages of the book.
The whole architecture of
Progress and Poverty, indeed, is arranged to accommodate this duality.
In the large the book may be envisaged somewhat on the order of the
1P and P, 204, 217.
question completely: it presents the question of the failure of modern men to deal justly with one another.
George’s moral question is suspended here, without the solution his moral faith had to offer, while the succeeding 450 pages take up what we shall call Progress and Poverty's ‘economic syllogism.’ This is the well-remembered core of the book, the part which criticizes and tries to amend accepted economic theory, which reviews and finds to be lacking all current programs of social reconstruction, and which offers George’s own program. Though the economic syllogism occupies the larger part of the text, it is really the minor one of the two sequences of thought. It particularizes the nature of the social question posed in the introduction, and it names a possible economic procedure to solve that question. But it has no reach of thought to assure the reader that humanity has the power to follow through, to make good its economic insights and actually replace moral evil with moral good.
In entirely specific terms, the essential argument of the economic syllogism begins in Book in, where George for the first time systematized his ideas on ‘The Laws of Distribution’ in economic life. The place of this elaborate and important piece of writing, in the syllogism, is that of first premise. The essential proposition is that rent — an increment of monopoly not earned by individuals — always and everywhere opposes and reduces wages and interest, the returns which the economy makes for labor’s toil and for the investment of capital. The second premise of the economic syllogism, in Books iv and v, is historical rather than theoretical like the first. It incorporates the depression ideas of the address, ‘Why Work Is Scarce,’ and asserts that the forces of industrial economy operate observably to enlarge the take of land ownership, and that that creates unbalance, poverty, and depression. The conclusion of the syllogism appears in Book vi, ‘The Remedy,’ and is justified in Books vii, viii, and ix, the ‘Justice of the Remedy,’ the ‘Application of the Remedy,’ and the ‘Effects of the Remedy.’ In this long passage Henry George made his classic presentation of the necessity to do away with private property in land; and he suggested his alternatives to private property and painted the utopia that would follow if economic rent were taken for the public benefit.
Had Henry George been an ordinary nineteenth-century believer in the idea of social progress as a nearly automatic process, he could reasonably have submitted the argument of Book in through Book ix, the economic syllogism, and could have spared himself bothering with the rest. Then the reform would have been proposed and argued within the limits of economics, and the tacit assumption would have been made that the simple common sense of mankind could be counted upon to provide adequately for mankind’s betterment.
But any such optimistic presumption would, as we know, have been quite false to Henry George’s feeling. Progress and Poverty's, introductory statement fairly represents his judgment that the world’s morality had fallen short. Accordingly the book would have fallen short, also, if the opening presentation of the social question had not been followed somewhere by social assurance — by something more than a technical answer to the question of poverty. The economic syllogism itself produces a program far more drastic than reformers ordinarily contemplated, and one that would have been more upsetting to the economic order than any reform ever adopted by a modern government at peace. This indicates the purpose served by Book x and the Conclusion of Progress and Poverty: the completion of the primary sequence of the book’s thought. Hereafter, to distinguish it from the economic syllogism, we shall call this sequence — comprising the opening and the closing sections — Progress and Poverty's ‘moral sequence.’
Like the economic one, the moral sequence is stated in three parts. The premise at the beginning is social injustice, asserted not as theory but as plain fact. The second premise, withheld until after the economic case for reform has been fully argued, is pure theory, unadulterated democratic idea. ‘Association in equality is the law of progress,’ is Henry George’s irreducible formula in this passage; he phrases the doctrine of equal opportunity for all men as a datum of universal moral law. The antithesis he discovers between social fact and social theory he presents as a tragic contradiction, and very nearly a complete one.
His resolution of the problem indicates why Progress and Poverty’s moral sequence of thought may not be called a ‘moral syllogism’ instead. A syllogism leads to a sure conclusion, or synthesis, of the premises. Henry George is not sure that mankind will solve the question of poverty: he says only that we have the power to try to solve it. No historical necessity compels the fulfillment of the moral law; and this argument makes him entirely different from Marx, and makes Progress and Poverty a book opposed to all materialistic and deterministic social ideas. The conclusion, we may anticipate, is a conditional one. If men will but turn to God, and seek His help, the moral law may be made to rule. On condition of God-given righteousness, and only on that condition, equal economic justice will prevail in industrial society, or anywhere.
In a passage near the end of Progress and Poverty the ancient battle of Ormuzd and Ahriman is woven into the fabric, a splendid touch of design. For the struggle of good with evil, present in all history, was to Henry George the process that reduces economics and religion to common terms.
-2-
Books 1 and 11 of Progress
and Poverty, George’s ground-clearing preliminary, develop in strength the
criticism of classical economics he had ventured in
The matter of the two books is much less controversial today. It is a refutation of ideas he himself had once accepted, first, the old wages-fund theory of employment and, second, Malthusian population theory. These two were the main components, of course, of the ‘iron law of wages’ — the name socialists gave to the hard presumption of classical economics, that wages tend always to be depressed to subsistence level. The ‘dismal science’ was dismal because its doctrines of employment denied hope to the masses of men.
In his nf wspaper criticism of the wages fund, George had said that that theory, since it made employment depend on a special reserve of capital accumulation, attributed too much authority to the capitalist. He now developed this thought into a series of counterpropositions. According to Progress and Poverty: wages are paid after labor has been rendered and value has already been added to the materials being prepared or moved to market, whether or not the product has been sold. Not so much a capitalist’s reserves — money in the bank — as current labor, for instance the labor applied in food production, sustains working men while their product is in process. And, ultimately, the people’s needs are what keep the economy in motion: ‘The demand for consumption determines the direction in luhich labor will be expended in production.’2 This prepares for George’s important labor-employs-capital argument in Book v, on distribution.
Stating his criticism of the wages fund was much easier in Progress and Poverty than in the Post, because during the interval, in 1876, Francis Amasa Walker, already the distinguished director of the census and a professor at Yale, had brought out a first-class monograph on The Wages Question. Time has recognized Walker’s book as a kind of classic because it gave the crushing blow, at least so far as American academic economics was concerned, to the wages-fund idea. Progress and Poverty credits it as a ‘most vital attack,’ even though George disliked the residue of Malthusianism contained within its thought. More than he had any way of knowing while he was writing, George was in line with the protest that was rising in both Britain and America, as he thus early condemned the wages-fund idea.
The standing of Thomas Robert Malthus’s population doctrine, four score years old in 1879, has always been debatable in America; the broad domain, the uncrowded population, the shortage of labor, the nation’s mood of optimism, the doctrine’s unfriendliness to democracy all held against it. It is still being debated. Before Progress and Poverty, the nationalistic economists of the Carey school, notably Henry C. Carey himself, had been the chief spokesmen for the opposition; and the writing of a member of that school, Professor Francis Bowen of Harvard, came out in powerful criticism at the same time that George’s book was published. But this represented minority resistance. The more because classical economics was accepted so universally, American professors, for instance, had no united front of resistance to Malthusian theory; rather the opposite. No one better represents the fear and dread the doctrine could inculcate among those who accepted it than Henry George himself, up to about 1872. His argument in the letter on Chinese immigration, and his correspondence with John Stuart Mill, in 1869 and 1870, will recall that stage of his thought.
Now he wrote at length with the ardency of a man who has changed his mind. George answered Malthus mainly by drawing
2 See P and P, 58, 74, 75.
on the American treasury of belief in the power of enterprise, know-how, and freedom to provide for the masses. His argument resembles today’s national attitude toward the underdeveloped economies of the non-industrial areas of the world, but George was more dogmatic. In his own words: ‘There is not a single case in which the vice and misery can be traced to an actual increase in the number of mouths over the power of the accompanying hands to feed them . . . Nowhere can want be properly attributed to the pressure of population against the power to procure subsistence in the then existing degree of human knowledge . . . everywhere the vice and misery attributed to overpopulation can be traced to the warfare, tyranny, and oppression which prevent knowledge from being utilized, and deny the security essential to production.’8 In the grand strategy of Progress and Poverty, the need to drive Malthus from the temple of accepted ideas amounts to more than just clearing the way for the coming proposal of economic reform. It concerns the sequence of moral thought as well. As in the Post, the author envisages in Malthusian ideas a phase of materialism and determinism. To George this seemed the more serious because he sensed (accurately, as Professor Richard Hofstadter’s report on Social Darwinism in America shows) that people’s increasing acceptance of evolution was at the moment fortifying the anti-democratic population doctrine he attacked. In his own warning: ‘The support which is given to Malthusian theory by the new philosophy of development, now rapidly spreading in every direction, must be noted in any estimate of the sources from which this theory derives its present strength.’
With the start, then, of
having laid a barrage at the
First a paragraph is in order concerning the method of economic reasoning available to George. In his day statistics had hardly entered general economics. Accordingly there is nothing surprising in the fact that, even in his treatment of rent, and with all the com-3 P and P, 106, 123.
pleteness George intended
for Progress and Poverty, he said nothing quite so empirical as he had
said years earlier in the Post: that in
He was able to open the third book’s argument at good pace, because he had inserted in Book i his critical definitions of the economic terms that were fundamental to all he had to say. There, in the manner of a textbook writer, he elucidated the three factors in production — land, labor, and capital — to which he assigned the three elements of distribution — rent, wages, and interest. (Other writers had more than he to say about profits; George said more than many did about interest, but not entirely to the neglect of profits, as we shall see.) In the same place the author rejected with contempt the economists of the chair, especially the American ones, who confused in their writings the distinction, so plain and necessary to him, that prevents land from being classified as capital. Labor, with or without the assistance of capital, combines with land — the term defined to include site and resources, and to exclude improvements — to create wealth, George said once more; and capital is that portion of man-made wealth which is returned to production or exchange with a purpose to procure more wealth. In setting up his primary definitions, the author sieved and examined the ways in which Smith, Ricardo, McCulloch, Mill, Wayland, H. C. Carey, and F. A. Walker used the terms, and he declared himself essentially a follower of Adam Smith.
Coming to the center of
the problem of how the current product of the economy is distributed, George
stated, more amply and formally than ever before, the image he had held, since
the
4 P and P, 222.
type found more
frequently in
As Produce = Rent -f Wages + Interest Therefore, Produce — Rent = Wages + Interest.’
In the author’s own recapitulation: ‘Wages and interest do not depend upon the produce of labor and capital, but upon what is left after rent is taken out . . . And hence, no matter what be the increase in productive power, if the increase in rent keeps pace with it, neither wages nor interest can increase.’ 5
In this passage George exercised an author’s prerogative of turning his reader’s attention in the direction he wanted it to go. In the bit of algebraic formalizing just reported, he could, had he chosen, have set up an opposition between wages and rent-plus-interest, as a Marxist would have done. This would have changed the equation to:
Produce — (Rent -f Interest) = Wages.
The reasons why he chose the opposition he did, between rent and wages-plus-interest, and thus pitted workers and investors together against landholders, not workers against landholders and capitalists, he did not explain until the next book, on the ‘dynamics,’ or the social phenomena which affect distribution. At this point concerned only with ‘statics,’ or mechanical operations of the flow of wages, rent, and interest, he simply arranged the argument in such a way as to bring 10 the reader’s attention the opposition he would later make the very center of his protest and his program.
Familiarity with the childhood of George’s ideas will excuse us from paraphrasing the chapters on ‘Rent and the Law of Rent’ and ‘Wages and the Law of Wages.’ Besides saying that those two elements are separate from one another in economic thought, and are separate from interest, George set down, quite concisely, his understanding of their derivation and nature. Quite naturally the new thing about the treatment of rent and wages, in Progress and Poverty, is the author’s enlarged scholarship, rather than any revision of his main concepts. Now for the first time he developed his own perceptions from the most famous of all sources of rent theory. The law of rent, set forth sixty years ahead of Progress and Poverty in David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, has proved the most durable idea of classical economics, able not only to hold its own into Henry George’s day but to survive even into ours. Though George did not find Ricardo as quotable as John Stuart Mill, his own phrasing of the law of rent, with the surrounding text, catches the essential doctrine. Quote Progress and Poverty: ‘The ownership of a natural agent of production will give the power of appropriating so much of the wealth produced by the exertion of labor and capital upon it as exceeds the return which the same application of labor and capital could secure in the least productive occupation in which they freely engage.’6
Not the first or last radical to take something of Ricardo’s hard-headed businessman’s analysis as a base from which to make an un-Ricardian leftward departure, George was just the man to appreciate the law of rent. He, who had a decade earlier perceived economic rent in an almost visionary way, while he contemplated the growth of a new city, now made his own the ideas of the British economist whose findings had been mainly a commentary on Britain’s rural landholding. In the words of Progress and Poverty, Ricardo’s law has the rightness of ‘a geometrical axiom,’ and ‘authority here coincides with common sense.’ Ricardo had instructed Mill; and Mill had assisted George, early in his economic education. Now, as George assimilated Ricardo, the linking-up of the nineteenth century’s principal rent theorists was well accomplished.
Into the discussion of rent, George introduced the conception of the margin of productivity. Marginalism was a piece of economic sophistication at which he had only hinted earlier, and one a little too technical to have been incorporated effectively in editorials or in platform speaking. Ricardo had reasoned that the differentials of higher and lower rent are set by the differing advantages of pieces of land. But the British economist had conceived a hierarchy of land values governed sometimes by mineral values but usually by the fertility or non-fertility of the soil (the British milords becoming the richer, according to the agricultural productivity of their estates, as demand for foodstuffs increased in the cities). Progress and Poverty’s conception is broader. It contemplates natural resources as creating different land values, but, true to George’s perception, it includes also urban-site values. George’s conception of the margin of productivity, moreover, placed a movable floor under his hierarchy of values; or rather, it made an escalator of the steps. As population increases, reasoned the author, later-choice lands are drawn from idleness into use, at the new margin of productivity. This process enhances the value, that is to say the rent, of the more advantageous earlier-choice lands, whether those lands be in the country or in the city.
A later section of the present chapter will be a more convenient place than this is to explain a little how George’s use of the idea of the economic margin placed him in the advance guard of English and American economic theory in 1879. Here it is necessary simply to see the strength that marginalism adds to Progress and Poverty’s opposition between rent and wages-plus-interest. A crucial passage must now be quoted, from the chapter on rent: ‘To say that rent will be the excess in productiveness over the yield at the margin, or lowest point, of cultivation, is the same thing as to say that it will be the excess of produce over what the same amount of labor and capital obtains in the least remunerative occupation.
‘The law of rent is, in fact, but a deduction from the law of competition, and amounts simply to the assertion that as wages and interest tend to a common level, all that part of the general production of wealth which exceeds what the labor and capital employed could have secured for themselves, if applied to the poorest natural agent in use, will go to land owners in the shape of rent. It rests in the last analysis upon the fundamental principle, which is to political economy what the attraction of gravitation is to physics — that men will seek to gratify their desires with the least exertion.’ 7
The idea of the margin, indeed, becomes the unifying theme which runs through the several chapters on distribution. As regards wages, the writer’s only other new important thought is the development of a comparison — a fairly autobiographical one — between wage earners and capitalists, stating first their similarities. Workers such as the superintendents of new ventures earn the highest wages because they like capitalists are risk takers, George put down, and like them deserve their winnings within reason. The wages of ordinary crafts largely affect others, because movement from like job to like job is easy — not different from the flow of credit. All wages are affected by employment at the lowest level. But, in a poignant passage which calls to mind 1865 and 1866 in Henry George’s life, the author speaks of the unhappy rigidities of society which make the position of a laborer so different, and so much more painful than a capitalist’s. There is no average of well-being, no basic wage rate always available on the job market, comparable to the interest rate. And the author who rejected the components of the iron law of wages nevertheless added that even favorable conditions in the labor market have no capacity to increase labor’s total take from production, as compared with rent or interest. He wryly objected ‘that both Smith and Ricardo use the term “natural wages” to express the minimum on which labor can live; whereas, unless injustice is natural, all that the laborer produces should rather be held as his natural wages.’
This line of thought brought George back to the margin of productivity, as he phrased his none too cheerful ‘law of wages.’ ‘Wages,’ says Progress and Poverty in italics, ‘depend upon the margin of production, or upon the produce which labor can obtain at the highest point of natural productiveness open to it without the payment of rent.’8 In less formal terms: those workers who go in and out of jobs, and whose last resort is the use of unoccupied land, comprise the group on the margin — the peripheral group in the whole picture of economic distribution. Before the Civil War, Henry George’s predecessors in land-and-labor reform had demanded homestead land free, as an escape from unemployment in the cities. They had believed, mistakenly, the scholarship of today asserts, that the vacant land of the frontier offered a practical solution of their problem. But, in Progress and Poverty, George, who had never thought very well of the American West as an escape from trouble, now pictured the very difficulty of going to marginal land as the measure of the general predicament of labor.
The return to capital, which is the remaining one-third of the distributing system, as Henry George examined it, gave him the most trouble to explain. He took three chapters to do so, instead 8 P and P, 213.
o£ one, as in the cases of rent and wages. Part of the author’s difficulty was due, to be sure, as the text correctly notes, to the unsolved confusions of the subject. Economics books were full of subdivisions but lacking in agreement about the return to capital of interest and profits, about the overlappings of those two with rent and the wages of superintendence, and about the replacement and increase of capital goods from produce. These were practical problems, though with implications of theory about which nineteenth-century economics was much less concerned than is modern, especially Keynesian, economics.
But over and above the technical difficulties, George’s effort to formulate a ‘law of interest’ was a doubly crucial operation. Though in the wages fund he had rejected a major doctrine about capitalism, he remained always an ex-capitalist and a believer in capitalism; and this required of him, if not a conventional rationalization, then a fresh and independent one in favor of interest taking. Again, though his historic bouts with Marxists lay in the future, he had already reacted against socialism; and accordingly he had special reason, when speaking about interest, to justify it morally against the socialistic idea that interest is a steal from labor. All this adds up to a necessity for George to be as sharp and definite as possible, in this passage of the book.
George began with another
round of rejecting classical doctrine. What Nassau Senior had said, and Mill,
had adopted for his own, the absurd proposition that ‘the profits of the
capitalists are properly the remuneration of abstinence,’ particularly annoyed
him. Regarding the characterization as untrue of the capitalists of his own
knowledge, and one which in general assigned the capitalist an inappropriately
passive role — guarding portfolios instead of doing things — George himself
took off in an opposite direction. Referring to the high interest rates of
Suggestively enough another San Franciscan was commenting on the point, at just the time George was writing. Alexander del Mar, who ten years earlier had been director of the United States Bureau of Statistics, whose career had embraced an international education, editorial positions on the national magazines, and insurance-com-pany work investigating and predicting the interest rate, and who at this time was making himself the active leader of Caspar Hopkins’ Pacific Social Science Association, early in 1879 gave a lecture on ‘Usury and the Jews.’ The coincidences are remarkable. Mr. del Mar addressed the same Y.M.H.A. that had invited George’s lecture on ‘Moses’; the date was 11 February 1879, a matter of weeks before the completion of Progress and Poverty; and the lecture reviewed the whole history of thought about interest — Biblical ideas, medieval opposition to usury, and the modern acceptance of interest, including also the lecturer’s own theory.
Mr. del Mar came up with
a proposition which, though it sounds a little bizarre today, was not out of
line with old doctrine, had a special appropriateness in California, and
contained a suggestive echo of Old Testament ideas. He said that the generative
powers of nature supply the justification of a basic return of interest to
invested capital. Capital accumulation, most particularly when put into food
production — the planting of a stand of olive trees say, or the introduction of
new strains of livestock — increases and wins a return to the investor by
reason of the cycle of life.
Progress and Poverty incorporates this idea, not as
the whole but as part of its theory of interest. In 1885, when Henry George’s
fame had soared to international height, Mr. del Mar charged — while denying
any other likeness of thought to George — that in Progress and Poverty
George had ‘adopted the author’s postulate with reference to the origin of
interest, but has nowhere given him credit for it.’ The charge is very
plausible; the blame for pillaging which it attaches to George is nevertheless
conjectural. Is it a plagiarism to pick up a public lecturer’s idea, especially
if the idea is kin to one’s own thinking? And even to ask this question assumes
that George attended the lecture or heard about it; and it assumes that
February 1879 — or the later date at which the lecture was published — was not
too late to incorporate a borrowed idea into a text all but ready for the
printer. The other possibilities of borrowing are two: the first, that George
knew
Mar’s theory of interest
had entered the domain of general discussion in
At any rate the book’s
explanation and justification of interest begins on the rural side and speaks
of the passage of time during which wines mature and irrigation ditches
multiply the productivity of a piece of land. This kind of planning and
investment deserves reward, says Henry George. Then, in continuous reasoning
and illustration with reference to phenomena almost equally typical of
But not to let capital and capitalism go free, and seem to be justified outside their desirable orbit, by Progress and Poverty, George troubled to do an extra chapter, ‘Of spurious capital and of profits often mistaken for interest.’ He would not permit readers of his book any possible chance to misunderstand his saying Yes to interest and capital, as signifying approval of private monopoly or monopoly gains, of whatever kind. Some called those profits interest, but he called them monopoly thieving. Progress and Poverty affirms George’s old proposition in the Post, though it does not develop it, that the monopolies created by technology, such as railroads and communications, should be transformed into government-owned and operated businesses; and it even ventures to propose that government go in for railroad building.10 In this line of thinking, George condemned by name contemporaries presently under Kearneyite attack, the Stanfords and Floods, as men who operated beyond the pale of sound policy, and contrary to proper moral and capitalistic usage.
Though the chapters on interest make Progress and Poverty an aggressively pro-capitalist book, it is a limited, principled, truly free, and competitive capitalism which he here justifies, and one which acknowledges the primacy of labor. ‘It is not capital which employs labor, but labor which employs capital.’ We may bring alongside a sentence from a near-by portion of the book: ‘Capital is, as is often said, but stored up labor, it is but a form of labor, a subdivision of the general term labor; and its law must subordinate to and independently correlate with, the law of wages so as to fit cases in which the whole produce is divided between labor and capital without any deduction for rent.’ George is not here talking about utopia but proposing a rationale for the large part of the business economy which seemed to him sound and durable. For the rest he was as ready as with the system of landholding to contemplate far-reaching change, to substitute public for private monopoly.
But this anticipates. To round out distributive theory, he drew up a ‘law of interest’ to stand alongside his laws of rent and wages. ‘To sum up, the law of interest is this: The relationship between wages and interest is determined by the average power of increase which attaches to capital from its use in reproductive modes. As rent arises, interest will fall as wages fall, or will be determined by the margin of cultivation.’11 It will be noticed that this generalization covers both the agriculture side, from which del Mar justified interest, and the commercial and industrial sides, to which George extended the justification.
In drawing Book in to a conclusion, the author undertook confidently the obligation of his logic, to fit into a pattern covering the whole of distribution the three laws — of rent, wages, and interest — he had offered. Yet, before we follow him in this piece of mosaic fitting, a final preliminary is still required. To comprehend George on distribution we must bear in mind explicitly what has been
10 P and P, 410, 454.
11P and P, 202.
implicit in the report
above, and what he makes explicit at the end. This: that as he discusses the
return to land, labor, and capital, he is talking about the proportiotis of
the total economic product as they are channeled into total rent, total wages,
and total interest. Absolute amounts (whether money wages or real wages or
interest payments) and market rates (whether an annual per centum on
capital or an hourly sum for a given type of labor) are not the object of the
inquiry. That is to say, when George contemplates a rising ‘rent line’ pressing
against interest and wages, he does not assume that when land ownership
receives more than earlier, wage earners must certainly receive either less
money or fewer goods or a lower rate of pay per hour, or that capitalists must
lose out on interest. Progress and Poverty specifically allows the
possibility — not, George might have said, an actuality in
In his own words, then: ‘The harmony and correlation of the laws of distribution as we have now apprehended them are in striking contrast with the want of harmony which characterizes these laws as presented by the current political economy. Let us state them side by side: 3
The Current Statement The True Statement
RENT depends on the margin of RENT depends on the margin of cultivation, rising as it falls and cultivation, rising as it falls and
falling as it rises. falling as it rises.
WAGES depend upon the ratio WAGES depend on the mar-between the number of laborers gin of cultivation, falling as
and the amount of capital de- it falls and rising as it
voted to their employment. rises.
INTEREST depends upon the INTEREST (its ratio with wages equation between the supply of being fixed by the net power
and demand for capital; or, as of increase which attaches to
is stated of profits, upon wages capital) depends upon the
(or the cost of labor), rising margin of cultivation, falling
as wages fall, and falling as as it falls and rising as it
wages rise. rises.’
The ‘margin of cultivation,’ the base of George’s whole thought about distribution, is a moving boundary line across the world’s resources, separating the used from the unused. As he had now shown the importance of that boundary he was ready to proceed, in grander style than in any earlier writing, to land economics and land institutions, the favorite fields of his thought.
-3-
Book hi, which the present chapter envisages as the first premise of an economic syllogism, asserts a natural opposition between rent on one side, and wages and interest on the other. It assumes, but does not examine the nature of, a relentless war between the two. For making clear the syllogism, the first premise may be stated as follows: Right economic theory sees an eternal tension, not localized in time or place, between rent and the other forms of economic distribution.
Books iv and v, here grouped as stating the second premise, assert that increasing pressure makes that tension ever more acute. That is, they argue that in the industrial economy land ownership naturally and irresistibly takes from non-owners more and more rent (in pace with the retreat of the margin of cultivation to later-choice lands). To establish a perspective of approach to the matter of the two books, we may formulate tentatively in advance the second premise of the economic syllogism: Correct observation and opinion attribute the deprivations of society, and its spasms of unemployment, to the power of one class of ownership to draw unto itself society’s mounting surplus in the form of rent.
This new phase of the argument is opened under the signpost, ‘The dynamics of the problem yet to seek.’ ‘I have displayed the special, unearned and automatic nature of economic rent,’ observes the author with a glance back at Book in, and ‘without farther ado moral sense calls for confiscating it as public revenue.’ Yet moral decision he let wait upon a full description, not of the blueprint drawn by lines of theory alone, but also of the fires that drive the mechanism and the result that occurs. ‘To say that wages remain low because rent advances is like saying that a steamboat moves because the wheels turn around. The farther question is, What causes rent to advance? What is the force or necessity that, as productive power increases, distributes a greater and greater proportion of its produce as rent?’
This is the point at
which the twentieth-century reader, accustomed to connect closely the how with
the why of social phenomena, notices especially the lack of statistics in Progress
and Poverty. Surely, the thought is natural as we turn the pages today, the
next section will come up with great columns of figures — perhaps taken from
something over and beyond the Sacramento Record’s expos£ of California
landholding — a cold record of the landlords’ marching privilege. But instead
this is the passage of the book in which George relies perhaps more heavily
than anywhere else on the sheer intensity of a decade of reflection and
analysis. Here he inserts Mrs. Browning’s eloquence of the children’s weeping,
and John Stuart Mill’s startling doubt that any mechanical inventions had ever
yet ‘lightened the day’s toil of any human being.’ In the words of the book,
‘the universal fact’ was too tragic and too obvious to want elaboration, ‘that
where the value of land is highest, civilization exhibits the greatest luxury
side by side with the most piteous destitution. To see human beings in the most
abject, the most helpless and hopeless condition, you must go, not to the
unfenced prairies and the log cabins of new clearings in the backwoods, where
man single-handed is commencing the struggle against nature, and land is yet
worth nothing, but to the great cities where the ownership of a little patch of
ground is a fortune.’ The margin below the margin of cultivation, in the cities
— the memory of
In the first cycle of
presenting this phase of his argument, the author spoke in a quieter tone than
he had in the Post. Whereas in the newspaper he had denounced the
Millers and Lux’s and the Jacks’s by name, in the book he spoke of villainy,
rather than of personal villains, in land engrossment. Looking across the seas,
he took testimony from the sober historians, Henry Hallam and Thorold Rogers,
and from the Cambridge economist, Henry Fawcett, M.P., that changes in wage
rates had raised the standard of living of British labor little, if at all,
since the Middle Ages. He borrowed also those scholars’ round estimates of land
values and rental incomes multiplied many fold in recent times — a fact about
nineteenth-century
George does seem justified in presuming that people believed quite generally that rents were rising. A glance stolen forward to the reviews of Progress and Poverty, many of them mentioned in the next chapter, would show that this principal assertion was little questioned when all else was challenged. To be sure, critic after critic would deny what George said about wages, or rather would deny what it was easy to mistake him as saying, for it proved more natural and easy to argue that real wages were rising under industrialization than to discuss precisely George’s argument that wages and interest were losing proportionately to rent. But there was hardly a handful of reviewers in the world wide lot who chose to deny that rent was increasing by leaps and bounds.
Meanwhile George named population growth and the cities’ concentrations of technology and skill as the dynamics which were forcing up rent, and in his belief would always do so. Of course to the fighter of Malthus these were potentially, and in some degree, actually benevolent forces. As always a good San Franciscan, George put in the book his patriot’s vision of cities rising from the bare earth, each city ‘the heart, the brain of the vast social organism which has grown up from the first settlement’ of each region. For all that George said about the warping and blighting effects of overcrowded cities and underdeveloped countryside, and about how speculation and land withholding twists and unnaturally compresses the processes of land occupation, he had perfect faith in the essentials of city growth. Though he admired the Christian achievements of the Middle Ages, he had nothing in common with the neo-medievalism of Ruskin and Morris, and never wished to escape into a pre-industrial past. For him there was hardly such a thing as diminishing returns from having more and more labor available in a modern city, given an increasing accumulation of technology. Not just ideally, but as a present goal within society’s grasp, George envisaged, here with special eloquence, an economy of abundance made possible by the growth of society and science.
This drawing together in economic thought of ideas first stated in the preface, accumulated poverty versus accumulated progress, swings the logic of the book very close to making reform proposals. George could, in his own phrase, ‘without more ado’ have delivered his formulas. But instead the reader is carried forward once more, with the discussion of the city factors that enhance rent to assist him, into Book v’s presentation of George’s depression-and-poverty analysis. Here the propositions of the lecture, ‘Why Work Is Scarce,’ are given again, in ample treatment.
As we saw in the last
chapter, those propositions, considered by themselves, seem dated and a little
crude when compared with the twentieth century’s elaborate scholarship on
business cycles. But in the book’s context, of a vigorous author attacking a
subject neglected by earlier economists, this chapter, entitled ‘The primary
cause of recurring paroxysms of industrial depression,’ has great force. The
argument is restated that poverty and hard times flow, not from rent as
an economic phenomenon, for that is set forth as inevitable in any society, but
from rent as captured by private landholders, in a stratified society.
With copious
In summary, Book iv of Progress and Poverty matches Book ill’s theory with some examination of actual conditions, and opinion about conditions; and Book v draws condition and theory to common focus. This completes the second premise of the economic syllogism. To repeat the first premise: Rent opposes interest and wages, always and inevitably in the logic of economics. The second premise may now be rephrased, as follows: The actual observable compulsions and sufferings of society confirm theory, and show land monopolization — supplemented by monopoly in other forms — to be the bottom cause of the inequities of modern society.
-4-
In a reformer’s mind, when theory and fact of abuse coincide, the need to propose and to act becomes compulsive. But even in Book vi, ‘The Remedy,’ Progress and Poverty mounts slowly to its climax. First there is a side tour of observations, calculated to clear
•
vistas for the big proposal. Selecting a vein of thought much like the one which occurred prominently in the United States in the years before the New Deal, when certain intellectuals, journalists among them, bade farewell to reform, the author argued that the crisis of his day demanded deeper change than current reforms even contemplated, much less could be expected to bring into effect. As in the Post, he reviewed the going proposals for government economy, for more and better education, for the co-operative movement, for ‘governmental direction and interference’ in economic affairs, and found them all to have their points of strength, yet each and all to fall short of need.
Though conceding that
‘the ideal of socialism is grand and noble; and it is, I am convinced possible
of realization,’ he objected that such a state of society cannot be
manufactured — ‘it must grow. Society is an organism, not a machine.’ Not
unlikely following the thought of his friend Charles Nordhoff, he said that
‘the only force that has ever proved competent for [socialism] — a strong and
definite religious faith — is wanting and daily growing less.’ Again, while
George was drafting Progress and Proverty, an old National Reform
Association man, Lewis Masquerier, had renewed in a book the pre-Civil War plea
of organized labor for a national policy of inalienable homestead lots, a
method of economic security. Progress and Poverty refutes this reform
also, in George’s old way; 14 and so it rounds off in style the
author’s long but friendly debate with the
Commenting on two possibilities for economic amelioration which were before the public in 1879 —the two which between then and now have apparently done more than other efforts of policy to level the distribution of income in America — George achieved no great success as prophet. Reviewing once more the pros and cons of the income tax, he dismissed that reform as too inquisitorial and too discouraging to accumulation, for the United States.15 About trade unions, his judgment conforms better with the future. He acknowledged that great combinations of working men might actually increase wages at the expense of rent. ‘The advance of wages in particular trades by combinations of workmen,’ he wrote,
14 P and P, 81Q-25.
“ P and P, 318.
‘has nowhere shown any effect in lowering wages in other trades or in reducing the rate of profits.’16
Yet, opposite to Marx, George contended that working men, as they succeed in raising particular wage rates, advance into ever greater difficulties as they reach for higher successes. He thought, truthfully for his own day — and a generalization about American labor that perhaps held up until the New Deal — that the kind of union which can demand and win large wage gains is a small and exclusive union, and that such gains do not extend to unskilled labor; and he argued that only a ‘general combination,’ such as the ‘Internationals’ proposed, could press back the rent line to make great and general differences in labor’s income. But he believed that ‘such a combination may be set down as practically impossible, for the difficulties of combination, great enough in the most highly paid and smallest trades, become greater and greater as we descend the industrial scale.’ Doubtless thinking of Dennis Kearney, George stated a matter still important in the days of John L. Lewis: ‘As even the man who would fight for freedom, must, when he enters an army, give up his personal freedom and become a mere part in a great machine, so must it be with workmen who organize for a strike. These combinations are, therefore, necessarily destructive of the very things which workmen seek to gain through them — wealth and freedom.’17 George hated strikes and he hated bosses, and he wrote in certainty that he had a better plan than unionism for solving labor’s most important problem.
After all the preliminaries, the author took only a two-page chapter to present ‘The True Remedy’ — which is the conclusion of the economic syllogism — and he required only six words for the formula, ‘We must make land common property.’
Wherein lay the compulsion? ‘We have traced the unequal distribution of wealth which is the curse and menace of modern civilization to the institution of private property in land . . . There is but one way to remove an evil — and that is, to remove its cause . . . Every step has been proved and secured . . . Deduction and induction have brought us to the same truth ... I [now] propose to show that the laws of the universe do not deny the natural aspirations of the human heart; that the progress of society might be, and,
16 P and P, 308.
17 P and P, 311, 313-14.
if it is to continue, must be, toward equality, not toward inequality; and that the economic harmonies prove the truth perceived by the Stoic Emperor —
"We are made for cooperation — like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth.” ’18
Now almost ready for his
reform proposal, George circled once more. He asserted again everyman's
equality with respect to the Creator’s work: ‘The equal right of all men to the
use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air — it is a right
proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men
have a right to be in this world, and others no right.’ Also Progress and
Poverty repeats the author’s old contempt for the facing-both-ways people
of British land reform. John Stuart Mill as land nationalizer is classified, as
in the Post, along with the soft anti-slavery reformers in
To strengthen this passage
of the book, the author now exhibited knowledge, and knowledge of scholarship,
concerning primitive peoples, which the editor of the Post had not
displayed. No admirer he, said George about himself, of the myth of the noble
savage. Yet he preferred, to the justice rendered at the seat of the
In support of his own standards of morality, he found useful the writings of Sir Henry Maine and Emile Laveleye, and a Cobden Club volume on Systems of Land Tenure in Various Lands which was slanted toward the Irish question. From these sources he garnered the propositions that primitive societies hold their lands in common, and that private property in land, like private property in slaves, derives from conquests. As George summed up the history lesson: ‘Historically, as ethically, private property in land is robbery. It nowhere springs from contract; it can nowhere be traced to perceptions of justice or expediency; it has everywhere had its birth in war and conquest, and in the selfish use which the cunning have made of superstition and law.’
18 P and P, 326, 327, 328.
While twentieth-century criticism would not permit a land reformer today quite such glibness as this, about the origins of tenure, George cannot be called anything worse than glib for having made these generalizations. And, following an opinion he had put in the Post, on one point of the contemporary history of land tenure he shows superiority of insight. Contrary to frequent assertion, in his day and since, he said that the South now, after Emancipation and Reconstruction, was actually and tragically not very different from before: the planters’ ‘ownership of the land upon which the freed-men must live gives them practically as much command of labor as before, while they are relieved of responsibility, sometimes very expensive.’ The most recent and realistic scholarship about land-holding in the post-Civil War South reverses older interpretations, and agrees in substance with those of Henry George. A new serfdom, growing from land and resource monopolization, sums up George’s anxiety for the whole of Western, and particularly British and American, civilization.
No reader should be
surprised to be told that when, after 403 pages, Progress and Poverty
proposes a ‘simple yet sovereign remedy’ for poverty, the remedy is not the
single tax by name, and that it is only in some degree the future single tax in
spirit. (The phrase, ‘one single tax,’ does slip into the book in glancing
allusion to the physiocrats of
At the crucial point of telling readers how a revolution in property holding could be brought off by a people’s representative government, George called first for land nationalization. ‘We should satisfy the law of justice, we should meet all economic requirements, by at one stroke abolishing all private titles, declaring all land public property, and letting it out to the highest bidders in lots to suit, under such conditions as would sacredly guard the private rights to improvement.’ Doubtless the author was thinking of the nationalization movement in England when he mentioned this possible policy; at any rate to assure readers that he was guilty of no vagary he called on Herbert Spencer, the popular philosopher then, for support.
Because of the events of a dozen years following, especially because of George’s book against Spencer in 1892, there is no other passage in Progress and Poverty so crammed with the human comedy as the sober quotation from Social Statics. Though it is not often noticed about him, Herbert Spencer in 1850 had declared for owner-compensated land nationalization in the little book which had since become famous. Now, not knowing that he had caught his authority napping, or that he would bite if disturbed, George quoted in accurate fullness as follows: ‘Instead of being in the possession of individuals, the country would be held by the great corporate body — society . . . Instead of paying his rent to the agent of Sir John or His Grace, [the farmer] would pay it to an agent or deputy agent of the community. Stewards would be public officials instead of private ones, and tenancy the only land tenure. A state of things so ordered would be in perfect harmony with the moral law.’ George reluctantly admitted that Spencer wanted the landowners paid, whenever the state might take over, but he predicted that the English philosopher would presumably not stick to this, as it was ‘undoubtedly a careless conclusion which he upon reflection would reconsider.’19 A prophecy could hardly have been more mistaken.
Only after offering the alternative of land nationalization, and doing so as a kind of hedge against any possible charge of idiosyncrasy, does George renew from the Post and the lectures his own preferred solution: ‘It is not necessary to confiscate land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent . . . We already take some rent in taxation. We have only to make some changes in our mode of taxation to take it all.’ The book does not quite say that all rent, or nearly all rent, ought to be taken, though it presents that choice, the position which became George’s own in the later controversy; it does say that ‘all taxation save that on land values’ should be abolished.20
No doubt existed in the author’s mind that all or most of the annual value of a community’s land would provide handsomely for public needs, even though all other revenues were abolished. To the author of the scheme, such a reallotment of funds, and added to that the shift of balance in society which the reallotment would
19 P and P, 401, 402. See Spencer, Social Statics,
20 P and P, 403-4.
bring about, would suffice to achieve the goals of socialism without the growing pains. The appropriation of rent would ‘raise wages, increase the earnings of capital, extirpate pauperism, abolish poverty, give remunerative employment to whoever wishes it, afford free scope to human powers, lessen crime, elevate morals, and taste, and intelligence, purify government, and carry civilization to yet nobler heights.’
Though many were to disagree with George’s proposal, his contemporaries were not to say that its enactment would fail to provide lavishly for any government’s expenditures. The probability of the present day, that the cost of twentieth-century wars and social services exceeds the amount of economic rent which arises in the economy, measures one of the great differences between Henry George’s time and our own.
-5"
Rapidly, once the economic syllogism — of theory, abuse, and reform — had been rounded, Progress and Poverty turned the corner into ways and means, and the transit to utopia was short. This leads to George’s inquiry, appropriate for all seekers and questers to pursue: What are the laws of civilization? To what goals may humanity reasonably aspire? That is to say, Progress and Poverty's economic syllogism reaches to join the moral sequence; and the two connect in the affinity without which neither one would have much life.
Naturally George had to
draw on imagination, not British scholarship, to round out from the ideas of
the Post his design for freedom. Now strengthened by Book m’s analysis
of distribution, he said that taxation which took all rent would eliminate
speculative pressure on land and would permit the rent line to drop somewhat;
this in turn would increase the earnings of labor and of capital. But the main
thing in this passage was to illustrate the many, many gains the people could
expect. In one shining paragraph a new community splendor is suggested: not
common dining rooms, according to the family man who was writing, but
libraries, universities, and parks and other civic improvements beyond anything
conceivable in the present order -— the city as pueblo imagined once
more. As we read we visualize economic rent flowing past and beyond the reach
of the mansion dwellers on Nob Hill and on
Does it make sense, Progress and Poverty now asks, a utopia trying to be practical, a republic of democracy and economic justice some time soon? Not perfect love but justice among men George chose as his goal. Could a fair balance between economic collectivity and security, and individualism, be enacted? Such are the inquiries that underlie the book’s last roundup of the informed opinion of the age.
The key ideas here are
the two broadest conceptions of common parlance in nineteenth-century social
thought, the twin concepts of progress and civilization. In Progress and
Poverty they are connected with a third, possibly following Tocqueville,
the concept of association. In George’s rendering, civilization is the sum,
progress is the process, and association the method of social improvement. The
terms are used to draw together all manner of human achievements: social and
individual ones, material and intellectual, practical and aesthetic. ‘All these
improvements, therefore, in man’s powers and condition, we summarize in the
term civilization. Men improve as they become civilized, or learn to cooperate
in society.’ George’s definitions win the highest praise from the distinguished
scholars — otherwise no admirers of his — who are the principal historians of
the idea of civilization in the
Once more Progress and Poverty moves carefully, and keeps a little apart from English thought, and especially from moral tones of social Darwinism. The book goes a certain distance again, indeed, with the age’s most prominent social thinker, then qualifies as follows: ‘That civilization is an evolution — that it is in the language of Herbert Spencer, a progress from indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent, heterogeneity — there is no doubt;
but to say this is not to
explain or identify the causes which forward or retard it.’ In complete moral
dissent from dominant British and German habits of thought, George entered the
opinion that the age’s inclination to justify overseas expansion, as though the
name of evolution and the science of
True progress, Progress
and Poverty asserts, is neither automatic nor exclusive. Remarking a
phenomenon of history greatly developed by Arnold Toynbee of the present day,
George observed that many of the world’s civilizations are interrupted ones,
like those of
To justify confidence,
George resorted to his heritage of democratic and Christian faith. ‘Association
in equality is the law of progress,’ and in this axiom the author found
sufficient interpretation to explain the failure of some civilizations, and the
power of others to advance. In later
The eloquent Book x, ‘The Law of Human Progress,’ from which some of the ultimates of George’s thought have just been drawn, brings to a logical conclusion the moral sequence. The Introduction had stated, in advance of demonstration, that material progress in present society creates poverty; and Book x now added that the longer history of man shows that a better outcome is possible.
Near the end, Book x affirms also that God’s law rightfully belongs in human affairs. Through the book, the ancient concept of unwritten, immutable law — embedded everywhere in American thought, up to and including George’s day — appears variously as economic law, moral law, the law of nature, and the law of God. In the final fusing of Book x, Henry George reaffirmed the faith which he had proclaimed in Berkeley, and doubtless many times less formally, that there is to be realized in man’s affairs a uniformity, ‘a law,’ which connects even the operations of political economy with Christ’s teachings by Galilee. ‘Political economy and social science cannot teach any lessons that are not embraced in the simple truths that were taught to poor fishermen and Jewish peasants by One who eighteen hundred years ago was crucified — the simple truths which beneath the warpings of selfishness and the distortions of superstition, seem to underlie every religion that has ever striven to formulate the spiritual yearnings of man.’
The closing lines of the book, as George took it for printing to his friend, Hinton, reached a similar climax.21 Some years later George wrote his father about completing the manuscript, in the dead of a March night. The letter says that faith flooded him then. As he put down his pen, he dropped to his knees, weeping. He had done all he could: ‘the rest lay in the Master’s hands.’
-6-
How good a book had Henry George written? Because the present biography could be described as a historical review of Progress and Poverty, and because Part Two will discuss the reception of George’s ideas in a way I believe proportionate to Part One’s discussion of origin and development, I feel no need to follow the delineation just completed with a clause of simple praise or dis-
21 Compare P and P, 549, the point at which George first closed the manuscript, with 523, the passage quoted.
praise. But there are certain aspects of the work which, though the reviews missed them, seem important; and certain omissions from the book, which,-being omissions, could not affect his contemporaries in a positive way, yet invite designation in the vein of might-have-been.
I have nothing left over to add to what I have already said about the evolution of George’s economic ideas between his little first book and his big second one. But from the change of his reform ideas there are consequences to be noted. In Our Land and Land Policy he had regarded as roughly equivalent the old land reform and his new one: either a full application of the homestead policy, or land-value taxation, or the two combined, comprised his recommendation for democracy in 1871. In 1879 George’s full and final shift to the logically more perfect system — or systems, if we regard the choice between land-value taxation and land nationalization as equivalent — had an implication which renders Progress and Poverty less a political tract, at least for the United States, and more exclusively a piece of social criticism and universal prophecy, than it might otherwise have been, or needs to have been.
In Progress and
Poverty the main line of reasoning, to justify the strategy of land-value
taxation, is the proposition (in Book viii, ‘The Application of the Remedy’)
that ‘great changes can best be brought about by old forms.’ This is a general
idea not to be taken for granted. And in this case ‘old forms’ mean that Henry
George was proposing that local government undertake the burden of a social and
economic transformation in
grasps to Progress and
Poverty’s thought that a revolution in property rights might be brought
about by
Yet the difficulties of
such a thought confuse even George’s text. The paradox, not to say
contradiction, of passages on adjoining pages in Book ix, ‘The Effects of the
Remedy,’ will illustrate. Here Progress and Poverty says, first, that
under land-value taxation, ‘Society would thus approach the ideal of
Jeffersonian democracy, the promised
‘Does this seem
practical?’ George asks. The present writer thinks that, where practicality
rather than theory is the question, by comparison with Our Land and Land
Policy, Progress and Poverty comes off second-best. Had the author retained
in Progress and Poverty his inclination of eight years earlier to
classify land according to availability and location and economic potential,
and had he admitted the rough-hewn rightness of the 160-acre — or 80-acre —
homestead as democratic policy for the well-watered farming regions, George
would likely have avoided some of the indifference and opposition of farmers,
which were so much more frequent than displays of sympathy, during his later
years. Again, had he permitted his driving mind to range freely once more into
land classification, he might have named certain residues of domain land for
which a developmental policy of nationalization — the lands were already
federal property — would have been best.
In sum, had Progress and Poverty produced multiform applications of ‘the remedy’ in Book vm, instead of making such a complete commitment to land-value taxation, one can imagine the later George supplying ideological support for the practical but none-too-philosophical-minded Roosevelts and Pinchots of the actual conservationist movement. And plainly, if Progress and Poverty had proposed such compromises, or rather such variant applications of the same reform, there would have remained room enough for attempts at land-value taxation: all the cities, and any rural areas so inclined, would have been as available as ever, to tax reform by the state legislatures. Altogether Progress and Poverty’s willful concentration on land-value taxation displays an astonishing blind-spot toward American conditions George knew well — a blindspot toward domain policy, and toward the federal-and-state-and-local distribution of tax power and practice.
While my estimate is that the political science of the book invites pragmatic criticism, I venture also that its economics was stronger, and more up-to-the-minute, than economists frequently admit. Apart from the critical handling of the wages-fund and Malthusian theories, and the extension of Ricardo’s law, judgment on this point turns on George’s use of the concept of the margin — ‘the margin of cultivation,’ on which he hinged his general ideas of distribution.
The history of the
marginal idea has not been written. As has been indicated, Ricardo has
gradations of fertility as the influence controlling rent, in the chapter Henry
George studied; but this is the idea without the word ‘margin.’ Not unlikely
George took the phrase ‘margin of cultivation’ — he also spoke of a ‘margin of
productivity,’ and at least once of the ‘margin of building’ on the edge of a
city — from Henry Fawcett’s text; but this is uncertain, for the same phrase
appears in John Stuart Mill, who atributes it to Dr. Thomas Chalmers, the
Scottish theologian. We can rule out as unavailable to George the French and
German scholars who seem to have been the earliest to wield the idea; and there
is no sign that George had even heard of William Jevons’ fundamental and
mathematically reasoned-out work in marginal economics, Theory of Political
Economy, which was published in
This accumulating background considered together with the well-known development of marginal conceptions during the decade or so after Progress and Poverty, makes the more important George’s decisive use of the word and idea, in 1879. Moreover John Bates Clark, who two decades later at Columbia became the leader of the neo-classical group of economists in the country, himself acknowledged that George’s point ‘that wages are fixed by the product which a man can create by tilling rentless land’ caught his
eye, and suggested to him
that he ‘seek a method by which the product of labor everywhere may be
disentangled from the product of cooperating agents, and separately
identified.’ For the reasons that academic economists have mostly opposed or
disregarded George (Clark opposed him in a debate at Saratoga, 1890), and that
George made no effort to develop further the line of theory he used so early
and so strikingly,
In the history of
American academic ideas, the next-door neighbor, or rather twin, of the
marginal concept in economics is the frontier interpretation of American
history. Like Ricardo’s law of rent, Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier idea,
first stated in 1893, survives criticism and lives on from one generation to
the next, though at present in reduced circumstances. Here again, Progress
and Poverty anticipated a master idea in social science. Though the book as
a whole argues against much reliance on frontier settlement as an economic safety
valve for
governed
Discovering predecessors
of Turner, and tracing the lineage of his ideas, has become a too frequently
repeated operation to render very interesting the observation that George
preceded him. So did many others. But a recent scholarly finding, that the Italian
land economist, Achille Loria, segments of whose thinking much resemble
George’s, largely contributed to the Turner hypothesis, sharpened in the
present writer’s mind the natural question: Could Turner have distilled a
historical theory out of the air of commonly held ideas and not owe a debt,
heretofore not noticed, to the most popular and exciting book on economic life
and policy, published during the period of the distilling? Other indications to
the contrary, Professor Turner’s biographer, Dr. Fulmer Mood of the
Having ventured criticism
of certain points of the political science and the economics of Progress and
Poverty, the writer may review briefly one or two other things. Somewhat
akin to George’s blindspot, in 1879, with respect to the special character of
American government, there is a conspicuous absence, still, of the claim he
might have made that certain of the fathers of the
Again related to the shortcomings of Progress and Poverty as a political tract, George failed to notice the awkwardness of saying that the land belongs to all the Creator’s children, without also recognizing that this argues for the internationalization rather than the nationalization of land, and without observing that land-value taxation in, say San Francisco, if imposed by city or state government, would appropriate values created by all the peoples of the Pacific, not to say of Europe and the United States east of the Sierras. The economic advantage of great cities derives from the whole area of their trade. To be sure George’s dedication to free trade relieves him a little at this point. But the point is more than a quibble; and the author who explored so many lines of ethical logic ought to have noticed that only a world organization with power to tax, or at least to distribute the proceeds of land-value taxation, would fit well his ideal scheme.
Yet the present writer
believes that these practical or detailed shortcomings, as they are omissions
rendered visible by the moral standards of Progress and Poverty itself,
have one effect of displaying the ethical magnitude and elevation of the work
as a whole. If the book is a devastating attack on land monopoly, as intended,
it is also a moral
-7-
While the manuscript was
at Hinton’s print shop — and the writer himself was setting some of the type —
George became discontented to end Progress and Poverty as he had brought
it in, with a final appeal to Christian ethics. The death of his Aunt Ann, in
Only his own words, which are richly autobiographical, will do to convey the thought. ‘My task is done . . . Yet the thought still mounts . . . Behind the problems of social life lies the problem of individual life . . . Out of this inquiry has come to me something I did not think to find, and a faith that was dead revives.
‘The yearning for a further life is natural and deep. It grows with intellectual growth, and perhaps none really feel it more than those who have begun to see how great is the universe and how infinite are the vistas which every advance in knowledge opens before us — vistas which would require nothing short of eternity to explore . . .
‘When we see that social development is governed neither by a Special Providence nor by a merciless fate, but by law, at once unchangeable and beneficent; when we see that human will is the great factor, and that taking men in the aggregate, their condition is as they make it; when we see that economic law and moral law are essentially one, and that the truth which the intellect grasps by toilsome effort is but that which the moral sense reaches by quick intuition, a flood of light breaks in upon the problem of individual life. These countless millions like ourselves ... do not seem so much like meaningless waste.
‘What then, is the meaning of life — of life absolutely and inevitably bounded by death? To me it seems intelligible only as an avenue and vestibule to another life. And its facts seem explainable only upon a theory which cannot be expressed but in myth and symbol, and which, everywhere and at all times, the myths and symbols in which men have tried to portray their deepest perceptions do in some form express.’24
Two pages later there is the superb selection from Plutarch with which Progress and Poverty closes. Dr. Taylor may have helped George find it, but this is a kind of passage he himself might well have discovered: ‘Men’s souls, encompassed here with bodies and passions, have no communication with God, except what they can reach to in conception only, as by a kind of obscure dream. But when they are loosed from the body, and removed into the unseen, invisible, impassable, and pure region, this God is then their leader and king; they there, as it were, hanging on him wholly, and he-holding without weariness and passionately affecting that beauty which cannot be expressed or uttered by men.’
Pleading immortality Henry George was neither instructing his readers in an article of faith, nor was he speaking —as certain critics would say — in a way not related to the text preceding. He was asserting an idealism bigger than that of most reformers. He was saying in the most intense language he knew that this is God’s world and we are His children, and that those who believe, with passion and without fear, have a resource to overcome even the resources of selfishness and evil.
On that assumption Henry George made his appeal. Within two decades incredible numbers of Irishmen and Scots, Englishmen and Americans, and representatives of every civilization would understand him, and would respond.
24 P and P, 553, 555, 557-8, 561.
A CHRISTIAN EFFORT
In
the Tide of Idea and
-1-
There
are tides
and currents in man’s awareness of mankind’s affairs, and in today’s retrospect
we can see that 1879, the year of Progress and Poverty, marks as well as
a date can the beginning of a mighty flow. ‘That was when the civic conscience
awoke in 1879,’ wrote Jacob Riis twenty years later, in remembrance of the war
on the
To see the matter in a
national perspective, we may glance backward and forward, half a century each
way. Of the hundred years beginning with the age of
est thing to a general strike in our history; the rapid growth and rapid decline of the Knights of Labor, and the emergence of the American Federation of Labor; agrarian protest in South and West more organized and effective than in any earlier day; immigration on a scale and of a type unprecedented in history; and Congress's first round of monopoly regulation, the famous railroad and antitrust legislation of 1887 and 1890. Assimilating strains and anxieties, Americans were seized by incredible fears that the country had come to the brink of disaster; and yet most national leaders asserted that economic individualism contained all the wisdom needed to guide us toward the good life Andrew Carnegie extolled. It was a disturbing time for reflective minds.
Every one of the events just listed represents a development in an area of life or thought with which Henry George had long been familiar; and we shall have to return to them all, because his activities of the ’80s either influenced or were influenced by every one. But George had not written Progress and Poverty for Americans alone, and, as quickly as the book was recognized at home, in a few cases more quickly, it was recognized overseas as well. Early in the ’80s it reached British, Continental, and antipodean horizons. In its own day perhaps more readily than now, readers and reviewers understood that Progress and Poverty belonged in a context of thought and theory not confined by national boundaries, though the ideas were characteristically American, and belonged in a time sequence longer than that of the usual problem book of a depression era, though Progress and Poverty was that as well.
To estimate the career of
the book at all proportionately, 1864 is not too early to begin, on the
American side, with the little-remembered great book of a
And simultaneously, just two years ahead of Progress and Poverty,
Lewis Henry Morgan of
upstate
The fact that neither
Marsh nor Morgan ever approached a popularity comparable to George’s does not
mean that ideals of organization or conservation were remote from public
questions in their day. Related to Man and Nature in purpose, the famous
report on the Public Domain by Thomas Donaldson was published as a
congressional document in 1879; and almost simultaneously John Wesley Powell’s
like-minded Report on the Lands of the Arid Region made its appearance,
also in
While Congress was
investigating and the United States Geological Survey beginning its work,
moreover, the universities were staking out wide new interests in the condition
of the land and the economy. Harvard and Cornell were unusual in having professors
interested in forestry. But the land-grant colleges with their agricultural and
mining studies were building up, and government experimental farms were being
started. And whereas the
American higher learning. That profession, in fact, probably did more than the other new professions in the social sciences — those in history, sociology, and political science — to begin in earnest during the ’80s the modern-age practice of colleges: the cultivation of professorial experts in the affairs of the Republic, as well as of experts in the humanities and in the natural sciences.
From many and diverse
directions poured the writings which made the decade as great in the history of
the social mind as in the history of the social conscience. Parkman brought out
Montcalm and Wolfe, a climax in his study of rival empires; George
Bancroft concluded his half a century task of writing an idealistic history of
the United States; and Hubert Howe Bancroft completed the seventh and final
volume of his History of California, economic life included — these last
two histories known and appreciated by George. While veterans rounded off their
studies, men in their forties asserted themselves. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,
still a professor and about to become a judge, ventured in his lectures on the Common
Law the new pragmatic doctrine; Henry Adams launched his incomparable nine
volumes on the History of the United States during the Administrations of
Jefferson and Madison; and a visitor from Oxford, James Bryce, composed his
famous treatise on the American Commonwealth — for the California
chapter of which he acknowledged a large debt to Henry George. In this same
decade able young men stepped forward, also. Woodrow Wilson did his
parliament-minded doctoral dissertation on Congressional Government; and
John Bates Clark pushed steadily ahead with his articles, and brought out the
book, The Philosophy of Wealth, which marked his young leadership among
academic economists. In a fullness not yet sufficiently studied or understood,
the ’80s mark a formative and creative decade in social scholarship in
Concerning
At the line where social
thought challenged social condition,
Of course the international coincidences of the awakening of social conscience were no coincidences at all. They were variants, rather, of the social and intellectual transformations that followed on the industrialism, the empire building, and the democratic assertions in some degree common to all the nations of Western civilization. Yet no individual case of similarity is more arresting than the parallel between Henry George and his future most distinguished convert. Exactly in 1879, halfway round the world from George, Leo Tolstoy put down in his Confession that he had found a way out of spiritual inadequacy — that he had discovered something better than the common beliefs in natural progress and human perfectibility which had beset his thought so far. Except for Tolstoy’s turning to Christian love and non-violence, and the international social Christianity his change represents, the Henry George story after 1879 would have been a far less broad and interesting one, and the two decades which remained to him would have been much less effective than they were.
Of some of the great books, great men, and changing ideas of his mature career, Henry George became aware about as soon as anyone could. Of others — Tolstoy among them for some years — he knew as little as a man from Mars. Yet, Platonist who knew little Plato, from before 1879 the author of Progress and Poverty believed the ideas he apprehended to be universal truths of unlimited validity and dawning light; and this idealism had present meaning for him. It is wiser to read as practical belief on his part, rather than as airy peroration, those late words in his book: ‘The truth that I have tried to make clear will not find easy acceptance. If that could be it would have been accepted long ago. If that could be, it would never have been obscured. But it will find friends — those who will toil for it; suffer for it; if need be, die for it. This is the power of Truth.’
As if to confirm the
sincerity of this we have a letter of 1879 to George W. Julian, the elder
statesman of anti-slavery and land reform whom George admired most. The letter
follows their becoming acquainted while Julian visited
-2-
Immediately on completing
his manuscript, George had sent a copy to Appleton and Company.
Thus began the author’s
two-and-a-half-year struggle for recognition. The first step was taken for him
by one of his brothers. Advised by William Swinton, Thomas George peddled the
manuscript in
We know already the
second step. William Hinton, George’s old partner, now back in the printing
business, offered the credit and facilities of his shop, so that George could
go ahead with a small author’s edition. Beginning in mid-May, both Henry
Georges, senior and junior, set type; so did printer friends; and even Dr. Edward
Taylor, who also read proof, joined them at the case. Hinton’s generosity
amounted to risking $1000 to $1500, whatever the cost of the plates, which the
Though altogether the summer of 1879 must have been an anxious one for George — he had now dropped his newspaper, and his state job was bringing in little — there must also have been compensation and excitement in the work of every day. Besides enriching Progress and Poverty by adding the conclusion on immortality, the author loosened up the tight mid-section of the book. He subdivided ‘The Remedy’ into the ‘Justice of the Remedy,’ the ‘Application of the Remedy,’ and so on as we have seen. He entered new mottoes and revised details as the typesetting progressed; and he had the solace of friends around him and the encouragement of their faith. Typographically, and as a total piece of manufacture, the result of the summer’s work was very impressive: 500 beautifully printed copies solidly bound in dark cloth covers. ‘It will not be recognized at first,’ George wrote his father as he sent an early gift, ‘maybe not for some time — but it will ultimately be considered a great book, will be published in
both hemispheres, and will be translated into different languages.’
Appreciation of the book
grew in Mr. Appleton also. Reading the manuscript had kept him awake at night,
he confessed to a friend of Henry George, but because Progress and Poverty
tore to pieces ‘all the recognized authorities on political economy,’ he had
not at first dared to publish. But now, with the plates all made, his fears
diminished. ‘It appears to me it will create some sort of a sensation anyway,
and I don’t think we shall lose anything by publishing it.’ Accordingly within
a couple of weeks of the time when copies of the
During the fall of
waiting — and George had an anxious time about the delayed safe arrival of the
plates — a few responses to gift copies came in. With the exceptions of George
W. Julian and Sir George Grey, the land reformer who was the first statesman of
Probably the most
encouraging word out of the
From nearer home George
received the encouraging private comments he might have expected from John
Swinton of the
Nordhoff’s tribute, received in December when time was running short on the position of gas-meter inspector, led George to write back about his present troubles and his brighter hopes. ‘You speak of the intellectual poverty of this coast. You can hardly understand how deep it is, for of course you came into contact with the highest people, and they must have seemed to you relatively far more numerous than they really are. This is bad enough; but what is worse is the moral atmosphere — at least in the circles in which I have moved and lived.’ By this George meant California’s materialism, and he confessed that if Progress and Poverty should succeed and opportunity come to him, he would choose to do two more books: the first ‘a brief political economy,’ and the second ‘a dissection of this materialistic philosophy which, with its false assumption of science, passes current with so many.’ The chapters he had done on civilization, he said, amounted to no better than the skeleton of an argument, and he had much more to say.
A month later, in a kind
of postscript to these reflections, George told Nordhoff of the anxieties he
suffered at the time of the
First indications were
anything but cheerful. Though he expected much of the eastern reviewing to wait
on the
To be sure Horace White,
who as editor of the
The
By stroke of either luck
or arrangement, Dr. Edward Taylor, the author’s consultant and great friend,
did the review for the Californian, the new monthly with an old name
which now succeeded to the
The friendly California
papers commented on the San Francisco edition; but the adverse reviews all
followed Appleton’s publication, and one may reasonably interpret the delay to
mean that the author’s old enemies would have disregarded Progress and
Poverty pretty unanimously had not New York recognition forced their
attention. Yet in all reasonableness some sympathy is due the reviewers for the
conservative newspapers on the coast. They could hardly be expected to salute a
future classic as delivered from the pen of a gadfly editor; and the argument
went over their heads. Thirty odd years later Dr. Arthur N. Young recovered in
interviews some of the
Other newspapers, not
nearly as friendly as the Examiner, disposed of the need for judgment in
the way that paper did, by praising Henry George as a Californian of
achievement and by omitting real comment. Yet from the side of Republican
journalism, in the columns of the Central Pacific’s Record-Union of
Yet the troubled author must have had a moment of glee in February when a Dr. Montague Leverson, who announced himself an old student of John Stuart Mill and a writer of economics, and who was being obstreperous in the discussions of the Pacific Social Science Association, caused a ripple through the press by a splash in the weekly Argonaut. Leverson himself saluted Progress and Poverty as ‘the book of the half-century’; and then proved his sincerity by withholding a primer of economics he was writing until he could assimilate the ideas he now accepted. His piece in the Argonaut led to an open letter from one who signed himself ‘Ex Rebel.’ What are you Republicans and ex-abolitionists going to say now, demanded the Southerner, with an irony made possible by the moral of Progress and Poverty. ‘You scoffed at vested rights, you preached human equality . . . Now the spirit you have fostered turns on you in turn. And I am curious to see whether men of your class are going to join in the march, or are going to make a stand against it.’
At about the same time
George received another
But this anticipates and
reaches afield. The sum of Henry George’s situation, in late winter and as 1880
advanced to spring and summer, was pretty discouraging in
Dr. Taylor, who had gone
to
He felt that he must go east somehow.
-3"
Though George remained in
Publication in New York,
which came off according to schedule in January 1880, shifted the question of
George’s future from whether Progress and Poverty would be published to
whether or not publication would succeed before the wider world. And also,
though the writer’s anxieties were many, it brought the comfort of new allies.
The newspapers that should be reviewing Progress and Poverty, he wrote, were ‘afraid of it, and would do it no justice.’ So at Mr. Appleton’s request he had engaged a writer to do an essay on the book, and the result so pleased him that he was going to make it the lead article for April. George of course acceded, though his twenty-five dollar half-payment of the writer’s fee hurt at the moment; and the result was a handsome survey article in the most appropriate journal in the country. Four appearances within six months in Popular Science Monthly — two articles of his own, two about his book — may be accounted generous publicity for a previously unknown writer.
And in fact the first resistance against Progress and Poverty did begin to yield. In February Appleton reported that reviews ‘very good generally’ were coming in, but sales were few; and in March, that the first edition of 1000 copies was nearly exhausted and 500 more would be printed. By the end of that month, A. J. Steers, a youthful employee of the firm, succeeded in persuading Mr. Appleton that a cheap edition — to be issued at $1, half the regular price — would be appropriate and successful. Naturally this delighted Henry George, the more because young Steers wrote that his mind had been fired by the principles of the book.
Meanwhile on 14 March Progress
and Poverty had had its best newspaper criticism so far, ten and a half
columns by M. W. Hazeltine in the New York Sun. Receiving that
newspaper’s recommendation that the country take Progress and Poverty as
a very serious book prompted George to share with a friend a flash of hope, on
the anniversary of sending the manuscript to New York. ‘After the toil and pains
of the writing came the anxiety, the rebuff, the weary waiting; and I have
longed that by this day at least there might be some sign that the seed I had
tried to plant there had not fallen by the wayside. This review is that sign;
it secures for my book that attention which is all I ask.’ Just a bit earlier
the
Later spring and early
summer brought mixed voices but a growing response. Patrick Ford’s Irish
World, the leading Irish newspaper in
The difference between
the New York Times and the Irish World indicates the completely
unsettled standing of Progress and Poverty half a year after
This was the eastern
situation when George made up his mind to leave
From Winnemucca George
wrote back to
Probably the
Quite likely Henry George’s
being alone in New York was the occasion of starting the scrapbook collection,
later kept by other hands, in which are gathered together hundreds of reviews
of his books and notices of his public addresses. The collection helps us to
perceive a regional pattern which was quick to develop in the reviewing of Progress
and Poverty. Most of the early reviews came from the industrial northeast,
and occasional ones came from the South, while journals in the
At the same time, the
newspapers and magazines of
Authentic secular voices
of
Private comment rather
than public gives a hint that the year 1880 contained just a beginning of
George’s career of winning, more than readers and friends, real converts to his
ideas — and that sometimes the opposite happened. We learn from certain letters
that George was in contact, again, with David Ames Wells, and that the
economist who had once been a kind of mentor sent some criticism of Progress
and Poverty, and discussed the ‘moral inertia’ which prevents reform ideas
from doing their logical work. Though George’s trying to see Wells in
Confidence was growing, at least by fits and starts.
-4-
On first arrival in New
York George had the excitement and pleasure of meeting people who wanted to see
him, and to whom he was important. Professor Youmans and Patrick Ford, the two
editors most concerned, both treated him warmly, and he liked them both. He learned
at once that though he might be disappointed in sales so far, Appleton’s was
willing to go ahead with the cheap edition; and very soon the word came that
part of the German edition — the translation was to appear first in
installments, according to German habit — would be out in September. At
Youmans’ suggestion, George ran up to
But in the nature of the
case it was a grim situation he had to ride out. Back in San Francisco Annie
was having a hard time. Within less than a month she moved from the
He could not protect the
boys from the strain, and given the situation it is characteristic of him that
he did not try — rather used the situation for education in the school of life.
To fifteen-year-old Richard, who was doing undistinguished work at school, he
made the same recommendation his father had made to him after the trip to
In
But George’s most
reassuring friendship at this time was with John Russell Young — the one intimate,
according to Anna George de Mille, who never fully adopted her father’s ideas.
In the latter months of 1880 Young lost both child and wife; and the two lonely
men took
The first invitations
George received to appear in public in
George’s grand reaction to the campaign and the campaigning took him back to his mood of 1871 and 1872, in a fresh disillusionment about political parties. ‘Yes; look at the Republican Party, and look at the Democratic Party. It is pot and kettle. I am done.’
He fared no better as an election-time journalist than as campaign speaker. Youmans turned down the article he had asked for, and George regarded the event as a not very big ‘stumble’ but a disturbing one.
Real relief for a man at
sixes and sevens seemed to come just after the election, when
The agreement between
employer and employee pledged George to anonymity and secrecy, and gave Hewitt
freedom to use as his own whatever data George’s investigations might produce.
George asked, and understood that he was promised, $50 a week for three hours a
day — he thought that he should be paid a journalist’s wages — ‘till the thing
is done or either of us is dissatisfied.’ For a fortnight at least George
worked in the Hewitt house on
This little event demands
attention, though it can be told from George’s side only, as more than just a
disappointing episode in his period of difficult adjustment in the East. Memory
was to carry over six years and to intrude a personal element when George and
Hewitt became opposing candidates for the mayoralty of
Actual events were different. Year’s end 1880 marked a low point in George’s personal condition; and presently when the situation did improve the change occurred to George as author not as Democrat. First he was invited in a very engaging way to do an article for the Christmas Bee again. McClatchy’s specifications called for an essay as good as anything Henry George had ever done. Though he chose an awkward title, ‘Political Economy the Framework of Political Science, Brains not Muscle Rule the World,’ George wrote a philosophical piece. The idea was anti-materialism again. He condemned all such economic determinism as he himself had verged on, before Progress and Poverty. He asserted that politics is a bigger and more inclusive part of life than economics, but that economics sets the problems of politics. Immigration, canals, railroads, taxes, and so on, he specified from the current scene. The essay illustrates an economic interpretation of political issues, and a non-materialistic understanding of economics. As he liked to do, he placed on the working men the responsibility for bringing into being the Golden Age — a thought especially appropriate to this period of Henry George’s life.
At about the same time
George realized a little money by public lecturing, a hope long deferred. He
was proud to be invited to perform in a ‘star course’ at
Accident or incident or
improvement, the early winter brought George an invitation to an elegant dinner
of
To be sure these threads
of hope spun much more rapidly than they wove. John Russell Young, who had to
go abroad, took a dozen copies of Progress and Poverty and placed them
in ‘a smoky little bookstore’ in Haymarket, where he knew the proprietor and
knew that the great men of
In
The lawyer’s initiative
led to a couple of lectures by George in
Meanwhile he had recovered from the writing ‘stumble’ with Youmans, and if not in the Popular Science Monthly at least in Appleton’s Journal he had an article in June, and one, ‘The Common Sense of Taxation,’ in the North American Review for July.
This marks the beginning
of his long and happy connection with the country’s oldest and most authentic
national magazine. With all this going on he achieved sufficient momentum to be
gay when William Graham Sumner wrote a demolition review of Progress and
Poverty and The Irish Land Question in Scribner’s. ‘The thing
begins to draw fire,’ he gleefully wrote
With a little money at
last he completely and definitely disconnected from
Doubtless all this good
will connected in his mind with a compliment he had just received in
-5-
The story of Henry
George’s reception and adjustment in
Actually the first year
and a half of Progress and Poverty’s life failed to raise any great
amount of response overseas. But what reaction did come is the more worth
noticing because it displays a quality of attitude on the European side which
would prove consistently different from the American. Over there first-rate
minds more quickly took Progress and Poverty seriously and judiciously;
and high-level journals, once they noticed George, more frequently estimated
him to be important, however much they rejected his ideas. From George’s own
point of view, one of the best reviews he ever had came from
The writer was Emile de Laveleye, the distinguished Belgian scholar and socialist of the chair, whose studies included history and law and philology as well as economics, and from whose writing on the history of property George had drawn for passages in Progress and Poverty. Laveleye gave no full endorsement; his important specific reservations — offered in context of saying how different American affairs were from European — were that rent is a passive rather than active cause of poverty; that George had overlooked national debts and armaments as main causes of labor’s hardships; and that George failed to express the exploitative power of capital, as for instance French investment in Africa. Even so, the tenor of the review was friendly, and it specifically underwrote the main thesis of George’s economic syllogism. In Laveleye’s own word: ‘All economists admit that rent increases in proportion to the progress of civilization, so that on the other hand wages and interest tend to the minimum.’ The new book had instructed him and caused him to reflect, the professor graciously acknowledged. He advised George to fight for an American policy of granting public lands in no more than temporary tenure with reversion to the domain written into the deed, as sounder than permanent-freehold policy.
In
On the German side,
comment on Fortschritt und Armuth began in 1881, following on the
Giitschow translation. Staude, the publisher, did what he could to force
attention: he distributed free copies to members of the Reichstag, the Economic
Council, and to many newspapers. Sales were small, and the total number of
reviews apparently not great. But the kind of response characteristic of German
learning Progress and Poverty did receive. In 1881, long, scholarly, and
balanced criticisms appeared in two of the most learned journals. One of them
was by Adolph Wagner, the famous
Again we have run ahead of Henry George’s own story, and yet only far enough to understand that in looking overseas George was not merely searching out a terrain of conflict but was also taking a direction in which he had achieved some appreciation and could expect a fighter’s chance to speak and be heard.
We have no way to trace
in close detail how George became involved in the Irish struggle of 1881. In a
sense this involvement had been written into his future by his past: by his
marriage, by his participation in Democratic politics, and most compulsively by
the Irish associations in
John Barry and the rest —
which had brought him to understand the land troubles of the new state and old
But just after election
the current did flow. One of the events of the end of 1880 that helped lift
George from the pit of his troubles was the arrival in New York of Michael
Davitt, the fiery Fenian leader of the Irish Land League. This new organization
was driving Anglo-Irish affairs into such tension as never before; and on his
visit Davitt made what the historian of the movement designates as a most
memorable address. Working out from the slogan, ‘The land for the people,’
Davitt told a Cooper Union audience that, ‘We have declared on a hundred
platforms that it is our intention to shoot Irish landlordism, and not the
landlords.’ Davitt was a man of tremendous pressure and power but little
theory, and he led that kind of movement. The Irish situation in 1880, like the
George turned Davitt’s
way as needle to near-by lodestone. He called on the visitor and was pleased to
win a promise that Davitt would push Progress and Poverty in
No richer in factual data
about
The
The next stage of
George’s identification with the Irish problem came on the crest of this wave
of reviews. During the winter he had done a piece or two for the Irish
World; and this developed his connection with the explosive and sensational
editor, Patrick Ford, who had made himself the principal organizer of some 2500
American branches of the Irish Land League, and had raised hundreds of
thousands of dollars. To George, writing in January to another Irishman, Ford
had become a hero: ‘not a politician but a single-hearted devotee to
principle.’ And it must have been Ford who secured for George the invitation
that presently took him on his first speaking tours in the East. During March
he went to Boston to address a Land League branch; and in May to Montreal, with
stops at Rutland and St. Alban’s on the way north, and at Ottawa and Toronto
and towns in upstate New York, returning. Making $25 or $50 a night he was
sometimes satisfied and sometimes dissatisfied with his performances. He knew
that lecturing was not the best thing for him, he confessed to Taylor who had
opposed much speaking in
This rounds out the story
to the summer of 1881, a little beyond the time of George’s other big
audiences,
In July a man who was
presently to be about as influential in George’s life as Dr. Taylor, and who
ranks among the first four or five associates of his lifetime, sought him out.
The elderly Francis G. Shaw of
Naturally George responded with emotion. He was deeply touched at being taken for what he wished to be, a transmitter of the old anti-slavery spirit to new needs and new times. But he suggested that instead of purchasing newspaper space Mr. Shaw subsidize distributing 1000 copies of Progress and Poverty to the public libraries. The author persuaded his patron, also, that if the gift to the libraries must be anonymous there ought to be cards acknowledging that the books came from someone other than author or publisher. ‘It is the moral refinement,’ George urged, ‘an answer to those who have stigmatized the book as incendiary and communistic.’ Making the necessary arrangements led to one of the most affectionate and delightful friendships of George’s lifetime — presently to high-minded talk about the Hindu Gita and other literature of India, and later to good correspondence and further subsidy as we shall see.
Almost simultaneously, but not early enough to have affected George’s opposition to Mr. Shaw’s purchasing newspaper space, another way opened to get Progress and Poverty into newsprint. By a decision made by members of the staff, the mass-circulation newspaper Truth asked the author’s permission to serialize the book. Louis Freeland Post, the editor who conducted the negotiations, tells the story; and he etches a sharp portrait of George on the day they met. He noticed that the economist was wearing a long-tailed coat which enhanced his shortness of leg and breadth of torso, and that black cloth made prominent his brick-red beard and circle of hair. There might be a little strangeness in Henry George’s manner, Mr. Post decided, but the man had confidence, and a personality not to be resisted. An important conversion was being made at the interview, but George did not know this until later.
Back of the invitation to serialize Progress and Poverty lay personal enthusiasms which the book and the author had stirred. A writer of short stories for Truth, who had heard and met George, urged the step; and he was seconded by a composing-room foreman, a New Zealander of Irish and Maori blood, who had perhaps known George in San Francisco. These two persuaded Post to read The Irish Land Question and more, and Post was fired as Mr. Shaw was by the recrudescence of the abolitionist spirit he thought now dead. The editor maneuvered Truth’s proprietor into a wish to publish Progress and Poverty in several installments. That was the proposal — permission asked but no money paid or promised — when the author came in. Of course George acceded: it meant that during months when he would be out of the country a newspaper sympathetic with labor would spread his doctrine. Truth, with a circulation of from 75,000 to 100,000, would carry Progress and Poverty beyond the normal reach of public libraries, to a clientele his hopes embraced.
Meanwhile had come just
the recognition of talent and opportunity George was most ready to seize. In
September the Irish World invited him to go at once as correspondent to
The surrounding circumstances could hardly have been more favorable. Word was just arriving that, after months of being ‘dead as a log,’ the sale of the Kegan Paul edition of Progress and Poverty was picking up. And Henry George had heard too that Alfred Russel Wallace, the great geologist and evolutionist nearly equal to Darwin, who had almost completed his own book on Land Nationalisation before he heard of Henry George, had endorsed Progress and Poverty as ‘undoubtedly the most remarkable and important book of the present century.’ This was the first of the handsome salutes from high place which encouraged Henry George’s later life.
Family arrangements had
to be made. School was the decision for Richard this time. For Henry there was
a chance to go to Harvard, but his father favored a job on the
To make his farewells,
Henry George went down to
On 15 October, a
Saturday, the correspondent and his ladies were ready. They sailed that day on
the steamship
Prophet
in the Old Country:
-1-
The
As of the ’70s, on the
economic side the Irish situation compares with
Parnell, the acknowledged Irish leader in Parliament after 1875, was a Protestant and a property holder and never a Fenian. But always a patriot he associated somewhat with laboring-class elements and with persons more radical than himself, and presently he was identified with the Irish Land League.
If Parnell represented
the upper-class side of Irish protest, and much of the fascination of
leadership, Michael Davitt, who was still more of the heart and center of the
Land League, represented the common substance. Davitt derived from
working-class origins (as a child he lost an arm in a textile factory), he had
been for years a Fenian, and in 1880 he had been elected to Parliament— in a
membership, sometimes interrupted by jail sentences, which would last for
nineteen years. This man better than anyone else exhibits the paradoxes of
1881. He voiced
In the large, though the
In all truth the prospect
in 1881 could not be called promising. In the last four years agricultural
prices had brought
Unfortunately the stand
of British politics in late 1881 was as little encouraging as the economic
situation. The Irish pressures had built up while Disraeli was still in power.
But the six-year Conservative government ran out in 1880 (and the extraordinary
leader died the next spring), and the Conservative party’s impulse for
humanitarian legislation did not include the urge to change the institutions of
land, in
But the painful months of
decision — which coincided with Henry George’s first year in
Meanwhile anguish piled
on anguish in
Then at mid-1881
Had Irish politics, both
parliamentary and outdoor varieties, followed amiably in the logic of
Parliament’s strong action, Henry George might have had the happy but
inappropriate task of reporting for the Irish World a deep improvement
in the land to which he was assigned. Indeed the Irish members of Parliament
had been surprised at
We know now that a turning point in Irish social history had been reached. In due course the peasants were going to assimilate gradual land reform and abandon more revolutionary goals. By November 1881, in fact, the new land courts were clogged with thousands of applicants, even in the regions where the Land League was strongest. Henry George’s arithmetic for the Irish World, estimating that if sixty-five decisions were reached a day, the business would be complete by a.d. 2154, pictures the situation. Before long, however, the Irish Land League was going to disintegrate, more because reforms were removing the need for it to survive, than because the government had prosecuted it.
But this state of affairs
had not arrived when Henry George reached
To the No Rent Manifesto
Henry George’s employer in
Had he still been in
-2-
George’s tickets read for
No one interfered
directly while he searched for bearings. He took in the sights, and his first
letter for publication in the Irish World mentioned the impressive
houses of
At first he concentrated all efforts to visit the famous prisoners in Kilmainham. Three days of waiting seemed interminable; and he wished he could alternate the irony of Dickens (in the manner of the description of the ‘circumlocution office’) with the eloquence of Mill on liberty, to convey his feeling of how the jail was operated and to what purpose. At last he was permitted a few minutes with the prisoners, political talk forbidden, out of their daily ration of a quarter-hour for visiting. He and Parnell managed to communicate about present politics by seeming to discuss the persecution of the early church and the triumph of Christianity. Perhaps, as George believed, they deceived ‘the gold-banded chief warden.’ The correspondent came out deeply impressed with the quality of Parnell — not a durable impression as we shall see; and he was gratified a little later, on visiting the Parnell country home, to realize the privileges the leader had risked for his country.
Immediately on arrival in
Even Annie George, a
non-political woman thus far, caught the spirit. In December, when her husband
had gone off to
Meanwhile George himself,
greatly admiring the women and their work, had cut to the inner operations of
the resistance. His findings could not be put in the paper, he wrote Ford after
three weeks in
The writer expressed no repugnance for the conspiratorial procedures of the Irish. He seems to have had none to express, except for the crime and terror which the Land League disavowed and at least on the surface discouraged. But he did become very critical of the looseness of the underground’s organization and the waste in its handling of funds. ‘Sometimes it seems to me,’ he wrote Ford with respect to his impressions of both Irish radicals and a group of British socialists, ‘as though a lot of small men had found themselves in the lead of a tremendous movement, and finding themselves being lifted into importance and power they never dreamed of are jealous of anybody else sharing the honor.’
To see the root of the matter, George traveled west into King’s County to witness a group eviction. He described it eloquently for the Irish World: a miserable group of tenants were driven from their hovels, then readmitted as caretakers, while a land agent, a sub-sheriff, three priests, 150 police, and a company of soldiers stood by to see that nothing went amiss. Such was the t estimony of continuing land crisis and of coercion as George reported them. Yet his political comments show that within a couple of months he pretty well realized that the Land League movement was just about collapsing, and that the No Rent Manifesto was a failure.
In the nature of the case
George’s assignment involved more than ordinary reporting, it involved what
naturally accompanies an exportation of American funds and American interest.
‘Radi-calization’ is the word George selected to express Ford’s and his own
intention to influence events. Yet there were many limitations on how much he
could say. It was not simply that detectives followed his every move always
with the threat of more than watching, but there was also the sense which grew
on him that the Irish World represented an American influence not
altogether wanted in
Ford had wanted immediate arrangements made for him to lecture in the city. But among those in charge doubts occurred, and hesitations postponed the event about a week. Yet when the lecture did come off, at mid-November in the Rotunda, it was a personal triumph. According to the speaker, the affair gave Dubliners the first opportunity in a long time to show their feelings, and at the end they went ‘wild with enthusiasm.’ Leaving the building he fought off men who wanted to unhitch his carriage and draw him through the streets. Tribute in such a form seemed undemocratic to George. But when the affair was over he feared that he had brushed aside a demonstration which would have won him much attention in the papers.
Though he gave no other
speech in
The most interesting
ideological discovery of George’s first few weeks in
Hardly less interesting
to George than the fact of the tradition was a second discovery, namely, that
besides Clonfert a sizable and important number of the clergymen of the island,
rather than the Land League or any other secular group, were making themselves
the present-day disseminators of the idea. Not long before he landed in
Bishop Nulty especially
gratified George because he spoke publicly and independently, making his own
application of Christian conscience to affairs. On this point the diocesan
letter was very specific. In a passage which George chose to remember — and to
use in his later conflicts with an American archbishop — Nulty asserted that he
exercised as bishop no divine right to direct his flock in their conceptions of
civil rights and political economy. Rather he advised them in paternal concern
for their temporal welfare. To the visiting American believer in a commonwealth
based on Christian principles, the Bishop of Meath represented the best
influence at work in
A little awkwardly,
however, this warm appreciation on George’s side led to embarrassments. When
his reports about Dr. Nulty, or more strictly when garbled versions of those
reports were printed in the Irish World, the bishop was seriously put
out. Yet George felt free to use the bishop’s ideas, when he decided from
something heard at an interview that Dr. Nulty really favored the No Rent
movement. George took the liberty of having the diocesan letter distributed by
the Ladies Land League; and before Christmas it was printed and posted, all
over the land. Doubtless George regarded this cross-connecting of ideas and
politics in
The episode ended some weeks later. When Nulty had finished reading Progress and Poverty, he wrote handsomely that he believed it to be ‘the best book ever written on political economy since the Wealth of Nations.’ Yet there was dismissal in his comment that George’s strength lay in ‘scientific writing,’ and that his thinking ran too deep for great success in journalism. In retrospect of his connection with the Bishop of Meath, George felt that he had learned, from one of the best and strongest, something about the ‘timorousness of prominent men’ and the unfreedom of churchmen.
In this vein, after three
months of observing in
Even so, George retained the impression that the parish priests were not complacent, and that they served the cause of resistance and in a degree offset the conservatism of the majority of bishops — an opinion sustained by modern historical research. In the history of George’s opinions, about how reform may be achieved, though the Catholic Church in Ireland failed to come up to his conception of what Christian performance should be, what he saw on this visit represented his first interest since childhood in church efforts of size and consequence. Henceforward we shall find him, so different from during the California years, always ready to regard the commitment and vitality of the churches, both Protestant and Catholic, as containing an enormous potential for social justice, a potential that should be able to be put to practical effect.
-3-
By the end of January 1882, George’s three-month contract with the Irish World had run out. Lacking notice he continued and was paid for his weekly letters. His relationship with his employer and editor remained satisfactory, even though his $60 a week was not enough. Hotels and travel, though Mrs. George and the girls did not move about as much as he did, took all he earned. His greatest discouragement, he confessed to Francis Shaw, was with his own performance. ‘I have never felt so dissatisfied with myself as since I have been here.’ He was swamped with people to see, things to do, and letters to write. He would have given much to have Harry to take his dictation and act as general secretary. ‘Nor have my letters to the World satisfied me. In short I have felt to use one of our expressive Americanisms “all up in a heap” ever since I have been here.’ The constant strain on the ‘perceptive faculties’ was the heart of the trouble, he decided, and he regretted that his mental habits were not good for quick work of a large sort.
This did not mean that he wanted to hurry home. He preferred to return no sooner than the fall lecture season — early for the season, he decided, as a wave of Irishmen could be expected to cross the ocean to explain Ireland to listening Americans. He hoped that he would be able to earn enough quick money on the platform to afford time later on for writing the handbook of political economy he planned, to be done according to the governing ideas of Progress and Poverty.
For all his doubts about
himself in a foreign land, George’s confidence increased that events in the
Naturally he liked to go
to
What he now wanted was a
cheap English edition, parallel to the
About every phase of
publishing Henry George kept in constant communication with his wealthy patron
on
But Mr. Shaw was ready to
do still more for Progress and Poverty. The £100 had hardly gotten
across the
So when late in June he received £300, the author concluded very special publishing arrangements. A sympathetic new friend and a Radical, James C. Durant, undertook to print an 88-page quarto edition of Progress and Poverty, bound in paper; and Kegan Paul, Trench and Company agreed to act as the distributors. The price was fixed at sixpence. At the same time George managed to buy in the plates of The Irish Land Question, and at an extra outlay of fifteen pounds to have 15,000 copies printed, with a four-page tract by Mr. Shaw himself included, for distribution at threepence.
Free copies of both Progress and Poverty and The Irish Land Question were sent to every member of Parliament, and to Land League organizations, working-men’s clubs, and newspapers in long lists — the last intended to bring out reviews in the provincial press and so to force the attention of the metropolitan newspapers.
George wished that there
had been enough money to send copies to the libraries also, as in
Mass-scale publication
was the one piece of essential business, over and beyond his work for the Irish
World, that George had planned for the trip. But to his present
satisfaction, as the year before in
Again as in
The earliest important
new connection George struck up in
Circumstance forbade
George’s ever knowing Karl Marx personally, nor could he ever have known Das
Kapital well had he had the inclination. In 1882 the great author of modern
socialism was out of
As a guest in the Hyndman
house on
Hyndman soon discovered the nature of George’s resistance. The guest proved ‘as exasperating as Kropotkin’ to the socialist by reason of his ‘bump of reverence ... of cathedral proportions,’ and because he could not be induced ‘to admit that he only captivated his audience by clever manipulations agreeably put.’ This estimate of George’s mental operations is retrospective. As of the moment, George tried and persisted in a counter-offensive. Though he observed and was amused by Hyndman’s humorless formal manners, and though he understood the man’s surrender to Marxist ‘mental influence’ — ample signs of a stiff-necked personality — George did not have the capacity to give up arguing his own case. He even persuaded himself that he was winning a little against his host’s materialistic philosophy.
The skirmish for
ascendancy does not mean that either man foresaw that one day they must break.
Certainly they maintained common fronts in several different directions. Their
minds met when Hyndman showed George a discovery he had made in the British
Museum, a lecture by Thomas Spence, dated 1775, ‘The Real Rights of Man,’ which
declared for common rights in land and for land-value taxation. George turned
it over to the Irish World for publication; and he made an effort to
have an article by Hyndman published in
There was intellectual
drama in the drawing-room event. Three years earlier, working on his manuscript
in
During the
In the spring,
journalistic duty led to a trip to
One suspects that the costs of this expedition were borne in part by Mr. Shaw’s subsidy, which certainly helped purchase some English outfitting for the family at about the same time.
Six weeks or so after
returning from
Yet for future
understanding, and because Land Nationalisation was a considerable event
in the cross-connecting of Henry George’s ideas, and because Alfred Russel
Wallace was a very special person, the exchange between scientist-reformer and
journalist-reformer demands a filling-in of background. George would have been
exhilarated to know that a year earlier letters had passed between Wallace and
Charles Darwin about Progress and Poverty. Wallace had explained to the
senior scientist that the book’s anti-Malthusianism involved no rejection of
such use of population doctrine as they both had made in their scientific
writing. ‘Mr. George, while admitting the main principle [of Malthus] as
self-evident and as actually operating in the case of animals and plants,
denies that it ever has operated or can operate in the case of man, still less
that it has any bearing whatever on the vast social and political questions
which have been supported by a reference to it.’ To which
Beginning with the persuasion that George’s anti-Malthusianism did not offend science, Wallace let Progress and Poverty affect his
Land Nationalisation considerably. He quoted at length, and he wrote an extra chapter: ‘Chapter VII. Low Wages and Pauperism the Direct Consequences of Unrestricted Private Property in Land.’ One of Wallace’s interesting findings was that during the ’70s Professor J. E. Cairnes, an Irish follower of Mill whom George had cited on interest, had published ideas in ‘quite independent accordance with the special views of Mr. George — an accordance which must add greatly to the weight of their teaching.’ Wallace had been more acute than George in noticing this support.
As his own goal the
naturalist announced that he would set forth conclusions ‘reached by an
examination of the actual condition of the people’ of the British Isles; and he
asserted that in comparison Progress and Poverty set forth general
theory. He believed that the two books reinforced one another. For, ‘if, as I
maintain, [my] conclusions have now been demonstrated by induction from the facts,
that demonstration acquires the force of absolute proof when exactly the same
conclusion is reached by a totally distinct line of deductive reasoning founded
on the admitted principles of political economy and the general facts of social
and industrial development.’ Though it is possible to say of Wallace that he
was too much of a humanitarian to be a fully effective scientist, and too much
of a naturalist to be a great expert in social questions, there can be no doubt
that his book’s endorsement strengthened George’s intellectual credit in
Meanwhile George had had
an invitation and spent an evening which indicates that in
‘We started on Irish
affairs with the soup,’ the guest of honor wrote Patrick Ford, ‘for Bright
asked me point blank what I thought of what I had seen in Ireland, and I had to
tell him, though it was not very flattering. We kept it up to
Altogether George was
entranced by the personable statesman and was ready as many were to see in him
the man of
In the same area of
intellect as the conversation with the distinguished Radicals, George found his
first opportunity for magazine writing in
When the article
appeared, by chance a month after the horrifying
The summer of 1882, when
George returned to
According to J. L. Garvin, Chamberlain’s masterful biographer, speaking of the end of the calendar year 1882, Progress and Poverty ‘electrified’ the cabinet member. And ‘the effect on Morley was the same. They both read likewise the simultaneous plea of Alfred Russel Wallace for nationalisation of the land, and they compared ideas from time to time. They believed that the whole English land question, with its urban aspects of housing, overcrowding, ground rents, and the rest, may have to be “the great business.” Chamber-lain was against nationalisation; he thought it predatory; but he was keener than ever for multiplying small owners on the soil, for breaking up big estates to the extent required, and began to meditate on taxing urban property to abolish the slums. To promote social reform in general, he aimed especially at taxing wealth automatically increased in towns by the growth of the community without effort to the owner . . . He would levy on all “unearned increment” and bear hard upon comfortable possessors of slum property.’
‘A book had been born’ is
this same writer’s phrasing for what occurred. ‘Reborn, in
-4-
According to George’s
letters in the Irish World, not very much happened in
George knew in detail also, what he could say only privately, that with the disintegration of the Irish Land League and the No Rent impulse, new dangers were confronting the cause of amelioration in Ireland. He understood that, with the more responsible leadership in jail, the less responsible elements were rising. With the passing months, terror broke out in many places. To Francis Shaw, George wrote no more cheerfully than to pledge that ‘We must “spread the light” without [the Leaguers]. But sure as we live, the light is spreading.’
Secretly at top level meanwhile, the Liberal government was taking steps along lines not inconsistent with what George had heard at the Reform Club dinner. Though the cabinet was still divided, and the prime minister himself was immersed in the budget, Gladstone permitted the Radical president of the Board of Trade to go ahead with what became this government’s last effort for a general settlement in Ireland — the Liberals’ last effort prior to the climactic decision of Gladstone’s third government, in favor of Irish Home Rule. Though ill-starred from the beginning, the scheme that Joseph Chamberlain now arranged scarcely deserves the bad reputation it has gathered under the dark misnomer of the treaty of Kilmainham.
It was no more nor less than a political bargain between the government and the Parnellites in jail. The crown would release the Irish leaders from Kilmainham; and they would pledge themselves to support, instead of No Rent and the destruction of landlordism, such moderate reforms as had already been enacted or might in the future be worked out along lines of law and order. For the jailed leaders this meant accepting the program of the Land Act of 1881, which was precisely what great numbers of their countrymen were doing in practice; and for Britain it meant a policy of reduced coercion, a step in the direction Radicals and prime minister alike wanted.
So much outlines what may be called the practical side of the matter. Before considering other aspects, it should be stated that later, in midsummer, though the treaty of Kilmainham still distressed him, Henry George had the fairness to say that the government’s land reforms were actually taking hold and doing good.
Conceding this much, he
did not retract his deeper criticism. For
For a man of his sympathies the appalling thing about Kilmain-ham was what it did to Irish politics. The Irish leaders’ accepting the bargain, their acting individually in such a way as to demoralize more radical associates and to undermine ‘radicalization’ upset Henry George extremely. As early as January he had begun to revise downward his admiration of Parnell. Now he suffered a real disillusionment, and when the Bishop of Meath said that by acquiescing in the treaty of Kilmainham the parliamentary leader had become an apostate, George bitterly concurred. He had reverted to his earliest, long-distance impression about Parnell, the estimate he had put in the Bee in 1879: ‘an educated Dennis Kearney.’
The treaty of Kilmainham
was an event of policy, and the better-remembered tragedy which coincided with
it, the
On the fourth of the
month, two days after the cabinet decided to release the prisoners, Lord
Frederick Cavendish, a moderate, and a relative and favorite of the prime
minister, was appointed chief secretary of state for
Henry George had been in
The news came to George
by telegram from Dr. James Kelly, the medical man and patriot at whose home he
had been staying in
According to George’s reports of Sunday’s events, Davitt was the writer of the manifesto to the Irish people which the three leaders issued that day. They denounced the murders and called for due punishment of the criminals; once the manifesto was written it was submitted to the Parnellite members of Parliament; then it was signed by the three — Davitt, Parnell, and Dillon — and released for publication. Only much later was it suggested that George had been the real author.
The purpose of writing and publishing the manifesto was of course to persuade the public to disassociate the politics of Irish protest from the assassination, a purpose toward which George was peculiarly sympathetic. His news report suggests rather than specifies that the three leaders took for granted that the murder had been committed by a secret society, and that that society was not the Fenian brotherhood but some organization unknown to them. Not by reason of any intimation from George himself, but because of a letter written a full half a century later by a priest who remembered the event, did Anna George de Mille recently make public the suggestion that the manifesto was really her father’s idea and phrasing. She offers the possibility but refuses to endorse it, in her biography. I am inclined to think the suggestion quite probable. As Father Dawson said, phrases in the manifesto do sound like George; and it certainly would have been natural for him to act as a sort of public-relations man for the group that day. Indeed the role would have been practically prescribed for him, by his job as Irish World correspondent. According to Davitt, moreover, George presently went so far in the same vein as to embarrass him toward fellow Fenians, by attributing to him a more complete repudiation than he liked of the idea of some necessity for physical force in a revolutionary movement.
Speaking in another
instance for moral coherence between ends and means, George pleaded that
Parliament should exercise forbearance. In the Irish World, he made
himself one of the first to say that the English reaction was not vindictive;
and he chose to hope, as Lady Cavendish was the noblest to do, that the deaths
in the park would become martyrdoms for reconciliation — the
At first there was room for hope; the government refused to be stampeded. But by early summer cabinet and Parliament took the old course of tightening the screws. A Prevention of Crimes Act was passed, the effect of which George himself was soon to feel. Hopes sank for any early or rational solution of the Irish problem. ‘I never felt more like celebrating the Fourth of July than this year,’ he commented in the columns of the Irish World.
Under these
circumstances, George’s appreciation of Michael Davitt increased. He liked the
fact that this leader was not sold out of his old Land League-ism as the men of
Kilmainham were; and he was more attracted as he sensed that Davitt might make
up his mind for a program very like, possibly exactly like, his own. He was
delighted, before May was out, to report that the Irishman would promote the
coming cheap edition of Progress and Poverty — he had read the book four
times, twice in Portland Prison. And George was gratified also that Davitt was
willing to take the chair at the meeting he himself was scheduled to address in
As the affair turned out, teamwork proved to George’s disadvantage for once. Davitt arrived late, and when he came on the platform received an ovation and took time for a stirring pronouncement on Kilmainham — the event which sliced down to paper thinness his already none-too-stout connection with Parnell. All this stole Henry George’s show. The principal speaker of the evening was left with only fifteen minutes, and with injured feelings about an opportunity lost in Liberalism’s home city.
But he was compensated
within a fortnight. In a much noticed speech at
George’s excitement and, this once, his uncommon indifference about compensation for landholders are both easy to understand. He believed that his full ideas would prevail in time, anyway; and he saw in Davitt a great and dynamic leader to bring the essentials forward in discussion and thought. When Davitt went very soon to New York, George wrote ahead urging that he be given money and backing, and yet warned Ford to play down the idea that he had become ‘disciple’ or ‘trumpet’ of Henry George.
George foresaw American
events but could not control them. Before Davitt landed, Parnellites in
Naturally this event
turned him toward
Henry George’s course as
journalist was meanwhile changed by an invitation which attracted him. Bishop
Duggan of Clonfert proposed that he visit the Carmelite priory at Loughrea in
The two men met in
After detraining at Ballinsloe, they hired a cart to take them cross-country to Loughrea. But they paused first to call on Matthew Harris, a Land League man who had been arrested when Parnell was, and they watched the police watch them. The next fifteen miles struck them as beautiful but depressing. The soil looked wonderfully rich, but it was little occupied, and they noticed where old farmsteads had once made it fruitful. Now cattle and sheep, not men, occupied the land; they talked with a sheepherder along the way about his work and wages. Coming into the village at last, they noticed the relief huts put up by the Land League, and counted seven police ‘fortresses’ or huts placed in interesting nearness to one another. They drove to the one hotel in Loughrea.
But they were given no chance to enter. ‘I arrest you under the Crimes Act as a suspicious stranger,’ was the police officer’s formula. The two men had to remount. Preceded, flanked, and followed by police, they drove to headquarters like a military funeral, Joynes said, ‘a sight for all beholders.’ George felt that the schoolmaster was unbearably embarrassed, but he himself was more amused than anything else. ‘The whole thing struck me as infinitely ridiculous.’ He wished that Mr. Paul had come with him to Loughrea.
The sight-seers were
detained three hours. Their bags were searched and copies of the Irish
World, The Irish Land Question, and Mr. Shaw’s A Piece of Land were
turned out; Joynes squirmed while the officers spelled their way through a bit
of doggerel he had written. They were allowed no dinner, nor given prison bread
and water when they asked for it; but a policeman brought glasses of milk at
his own expense, against the rules George assumed. When at last a resident
magistrate came, Mr. Joynes’ statement of who he was turned the trick for
release, actually too fast to suit Henry George, who enjoyed dramatizing the
American factor in his own case. When asked whether he was a subject of the
At last the couple had their night’s sleep in the hotel; and the next morning they visited the priory. This gave opportunity for reflection as they saw the sandaled Carmelites, vegetarians by rule, leading their ancient life of Christian communism on Irish soil. During the course of the day they noticed how the soldiers and policemen ‘savarmed’ about, and they estimated that Loughrea was supporting about the equal of its population in this kind of law and order. They visited little shops that belonged to some resident ‘suspects’ who had been thrown in jail. They chose the cool of the evening for the next leg of their journey, the short distance to Athenry where they planned to take the train. ‘Had a very pleasant drive,’ Henry George wrote his wife, ‘and didn’t get arrested, much to my disgust — for I want to see this Englishman in jail again — though the police dogged us pretty well.’
In Athenry the sight-seeing was permitted first, but they did not escape ‘the Bastille.’ Looking around, George counted one water pump, which was adequate for the population, and twenty-six constables and at least fifty-six soldiers, to keep order. The two men called on the village priest and visited the abbey. Before going to the station George bought a collar button, as it chanced in a store operated by a lady Land Leaguer. Minutes later, as they were about to board the train, George was approached by a sub-inspector, a polite man with hair parted in the middle (the victim noted), and was arrested under the Crimes Act for the second time in three days. Though Joynes was not picked up, he stayed with George by his own choice.
This time the police took George direct to the magistrate’s own residence. The writer on Irish social controls noticed that the judge was a gentleman landlord, living in the midst of rural beauty but not ready for duty. He was away from home when the prisoner arrived, and on return not free for court business. The party was obliged to go back to town. Magistrate Byrne was brought over from Loughrea, and at George’s suggestion he called the session in the railway hotel. The officer charged association with suspicious characters, and offered evidence that the prisoner had had some connection with Parnell and Davitt. Some of George’s notes on the Land League were read in court. George laughed aloud at certain charges.
After the judge had
lectured and discharged him, George handed around copies of The Irish Land
Question to judge, sub-inspector, and constables. He had two copies of the Irish
World with him, the issue that told how the priest of
Because Henry George’s
arrests made international news, James Russell Lowell, then the American
minister in
Whatever his disrelish
for Henry George and Progress and Poverty, Lowell detested the
Prevention of Crimes Act of 1882. Stimulated by pressure from
Naturally George, who had
managed to get just about what he wanted, did what he could to keep the matter
alive. Within days after his release he wrote President Arthur reciting the
events of his arrests, and he urged that other innocent Americans had been much
more harassed. With intention to criticize Lowell — that is, of saying to the
highest authority what he had already said in the Irish World — George
asked that the government be more forward than in the past to watch and speak
for the rights and freedoms of American citizens. George’s following-up kept
the events of Loughrea and Athenry active as state-department and
foreign-office business, and kept them reappearing in the journals through
September and into October — that is, until after he reached home. In the end
he received by way of
As the dramatization of
an idea is an essential part of presenting it, the Irish arrests must be rated
as a real triumph of Henry George’s visit to
-5-
After the adventure in
western
Up to the middle of
September, however, the major British newspapers and magazines had made a
record of neglecting to review Progress and Poverty which exceeded that
of the papers and magazines of the eastern
On 6 September the
George must have been
astonished, therefore, at the event of 14 September, the full-size review in
the same newspaper. Though the reviewer began with the comment that George
would have ‘no reason to regret the temporary inconvenience which he has
suffered’ in
The columns devoted to Progress and Poverty were mostly summary, and loaded with quotation. There was friendly, or at least neutral, explication of the critique of wages-fund and Malthusian doctrines; and George was praised as an American who refused alike to take the road of a Carey toward a special economics for the United States, and to blame poverty on the political institutions of the old world. George’s Ricardian assumptions, and his logic of economic distribution, the review passed lightly by. It acknowledged the community between Progress and Poverty and Social Statics on land nationalization; and its one sharply adverse comment was to place George’s work in line with the utopian tradition, and to say that despite Thomas More and Brook Farm the world spins on unaltered.
The conclusion of The Times review requires quoting: ‘Mr. George’s idea will long be found in the book only; nevertheless, Progress and Poverty well merits perusal. It contains many shrewd suggestions and some criticisms of economic doctrines which future writers on political economy must either refute or accept. Mr. George’s reading has evidently been wide; he has reflected deeply; he is an acute reasoner, and he is the master of an excellent style. The readers of his book may dissent from his statements and conclusions without regretting the time they have spent over it, and, if conversant with economic doctrines and interested in the problems of social science, they will find in its pages much to ponder with ease and much that is highly suggestive.’
Naturally the author was
transported. He cabled at once to Francis Shaw, saying that the great paper had
been ‘exceedingly appreciative’ and that the review would lead the provincial
press to give the book attention; and he sent a copy to Dr. Taylor, as
concerning the book the A Ita had said would not be read. Probably John
Russell Young, now
Besides The Times
review, which was the fourth and final public triumph of the visit, George won
victories of the spoken word during the month before he sailed, and one of them
was to produce enormous reverberations. This was his address, ‘Land
Nationalisation,’ before the Land Nationalisation Society, which invited him to
make his first platform appearance in
But the inner interest of the meeting derives from a listener, a twenty-five-year-old critic, who dropped in late. Since the critic was
George Bernard Shaw, he must tell the story himself. As he wrote Hamlin Garland a quarter of a century later, he knew at once that the speaker must be an American, for four reasons: ‘Because he pronounced “necessarily” — a favorite word of his — with the accent on the third syllable instead of the first; because he was deliberately and intentionally oratorical, which is not customary among shy people like the English; because he spoke of Liberty, Justice, Truth, Natural Law, and other strange eighteenth-century superstitions; and because he explained with great simplicity and sincerity the views of the Creator, who had gone completely out of fashion in London in the previous decade and had not been heard of there since. I noticed also that he was a born orator, and that he had small plump and pretty hands.’
But Shaw’s mind caught
unquenchable fire that evening. He listened while George spoke about the rents
of
When George at last got
his family in health aboard ship, 4 October at Queenstown, he had a warm
invitation he had not been able to accept from Thomas Walker, a manufacturer,
to visit him at his home in Birmingham. By a small subsidy of the popular
edition of Progress and Poverty, Mr. Walker had already indicated that
he might become a second Francis Shaw to Henry George. George had an invitation
also from Professor F. Max Muller, the great Orientalist, to come to
Prophet
in the Old Country:
-1-
Fourteen
months in
the United States, from October 1882 to Christmas the next year, thrust upon
Henry George a succession of events and recognitions that added up to a vast
elevation of his position at home. His personal history in 1883 confirms
handsomely the opinion he had used to persuade Mr. Shaw to subsidize the
low-cost English edition of Progress and Poverty — that
Yet, again in agreement
with his foresight, American gains did not affect his standing in
in the spring of 1883.
These were published as a book later the same year, and then on his return
published again in
Rather than American
gains giving his reputation new force in
He had left the
Except that in Britain
lecturing was less well paid and less organized than in the United States, that
was the kind of invitation now the best for Henry George. Accepting the
newspaper would have required him to settle in
The source of the
invitation he accepted was the new Land Reform Union, an organization set up in
Probably the most
distinguished members were Miss Helen Taylor and two clergymen, the Anglican
Stewart Headlam, he who spoke for the motion at the Land Nationalisation
Society meeting just before George left London, and Philip Wicksteed, the
scholarly Unitarian, about whom more presently. The Land Reform Union contained
also sympathetic journalists and publishing-house people: William Saunders and
James Durant, and William Reeves who was soon to bring out another cheap
edition of Progress and Poverty. Two members are recognizable as men of
wealth, George’s admirers Thomas Briggs of
With the advantage of present hindsight on the making of modern Britain, Henry George’s rising influence will be plainer if we notice a couple of younger members of the Land Reform Union about whom he could have known very little, much less have suspected their distinguished futures. One of these, who may or may not have been an early joiner, was Sidney Olivier, a recent graduate of Oxford who within a few years would be a Fabian tractarian on ‘Capital and Land,’ and four decades later secretary of state for India in Ramsay MacDonald’s first Labour government. During the late autumn of 1882 this young civil servant wrote a letter which supplies a rare insight into how a very sophisticated and intellectual Britisher could react both to Progress and Poverty and to his own class’s ordinary reaction.
‘I would remark with respect to the main thesis of the book,’ he said to Graham Wallas, ‘that it is all very well to poke fun at Henry George and his deduction of the immortality of the soul from the sound theory of property in land, in which I do not think you will have any fear that I shall follow him — indeed he does not himself point out the connection, but I am anxious to see, what I have never yet seen, some other argument than the pooh-pooh one, which is all one is generally treated to except when the “whatever is, is best” is assumed . . . I have no wish to champion George, who has a rhapsodical and unchastened style, strongly suggestive of the pulpit, and who starts with ideas of the Divine Purpose and Final
Causes exceedingly incongruous in such a treatise, but inasmuch as his book has brought the question into general notice of others than readers of Mill and Spencer, I think he is to be thanked.’
If George had any way at
all of sensing that Progress and Poverty was beginning to disturb the
young, the able, and the heterodox among Britain’s intellectuals, the instance
known to him was Philip Wicksteed. At the age of thirty-nine, Mr. Wicksteed was
already a distinguished man, the vigorous minister of the important Little
Portland Street Unitarian chapel. But he had yet written no book to indicate
that he would achieve fame as one of
Though they met once or
twice, there is no evidence that Henry George ever learned much more about his
influence on Philip Wicksteed than this first response indicates. Yet at the
very time when George was making his second visit in
This runs ahead of the
story, for the
Though George could no
more know all the present than foresee the future impulses that would stem from
his books in
Meanwhile the less pretentious recognitions, and very reassuring ones, multiplied also. Mr. Walker wrote in the spring of 1883 that he had distributed about 100 copies of Progress and Poverty among Liberal party workers in Birmingham, and that he had taken the chair at a couple of meetings to discuss the book. He asked permission to have a summary made for working men. ‘Anything for the cause,’ Henry George replied. A few months later, Mr. A. C. Swinton, who was particularly generous in writing George about how his books were being received, reported that the London Society of Positivists was assigning their fortnightly discussion time to
Progress and Poverty for as long a period as they might need to do a thorough study.
This was notable company, though not exactly Henry George’s own kind. It included Professor Beesly and Frederic Harrison, leaders of the cult, the latter a speaker and writer on social problems and one to be more forceful than logical when he praised and dispraised George. John Morley’s Fortnightly Review, which it will be remembered had displayed a real interest in Henry George in 1882, still retained much of its old Positivist flavor.
According to the many
indications that came to him, the time was right for George to return to
-2-
The hospitality of
admirers gave George a speaking role in
Much more now in
Much the same was true of
criticism from the universities. In
As the
George himself understood very well that the measurements of his book and of himself being taken principally in London meant much, and that favorable or unfavorable they signified — as John Russell Young had told him — a day of his own in the highest court of public opinion. By early March the hearing had gone so far that there was no reason why he should not boast a little when writing to an intimate. ‘The animals are getting stirred up’ over there, he said to Dr. Taylor.
In November the Contemporary Review led off the series of criticisms. Though this monthly lacked the antiquity and the associations of power of some of the other journals, it was rising into liberal influence and prestige. The November issue contained a twenty-page critique of Progress and Poverty by Emile de Laveleye, who had done the review in La Revue scientifique more than two years previously. This time the Belgian scholar shifted the weight of his comment away from the earlier degree of approval; he made a pretty evenly balanced series of observations, pro and con. The socialist in him found many faults with George’s pro-capitalist ideas: with the book’s justification of interest and other rewards to investment, with what Laveleye called George’s exaggeration of the increment of land values (even in California), and with his under-appreciation of the profits taken in the mining lands by reason of capital monopoly (apart from site monopolization). Laveleye criticized as insufficient George’s answer to the wages fund; and he repeated his original counter-proposition, that the best land reform would be lease tenures from the state.
The professor pretty well restricted his praise to specific points this time. He applauded George for adopting Ricardo’s law — ‘which may be looked upon as a demonstrated truth’; he seconded Progress and Poverty’s anti-Malthusianism; and he agreed that George had a right to claim Herbert Spencer on his side of the argument, and even suggested that John Locke and others could be claimed also. Not a materialist, Laveleye approved George’s attaching social protest to the ideas of religion. How else, he queried, could the good society be brought to being?
Except for a private communication which this reviewer presently sent the author, it would be hard to say to which side his judgment leaned. But he assured George that in his net opinion Progress and Poverty was a book to be admired, and he offered compliments on the huge success of the English editions.
In January, two months
after the Contemporary, the Quarterly Review, the Edinburgh
Review, and the Modern Review all had their say. With complete
fidelity to the loyalties of their journals, the reviewers in the Quarterly
and the Edinburgh spoke their respective Tory condemnations and Whig
objections to Progress and Poverty. The Modern of course was
different. It assigned the criticism to George Sarson, M.A., who endorsed the
book as timely for
Unfortunately for the
quality of the result, the Quarterly Review elected a very brash young
writer to answer Henry George. Though its contributors had included Tories of
the highest talent, ranging from Sir Walter Scott to the Earl of Salisbury,
this time it let William Hurrell Mallock speak the Conservative mind. The son
of a rector and a graduate of
The Quarterly Review
essay — for ‘criticism’ is hardly the word for forty immoderate pages —
presumed that British institutions were at stake. To Henry George, Mallock
granted no element of truth, but only surface brilliance of writing and a
demagogue’s appeal. The writer nevertheless took trouble to assure readers of
the Quarterly that Progress and Poverty was wrong, point by point
along the whole line, the critical passages and the utopian ones the same. The
suggestive thing about the review is the incitement in its tone, and the
apprehension it voiced in fear of
‘False theories, when
they bear directly upon action, do not claim our attention in proportion to the
talent they are supported by, but in proportion to the extent to which action
is likely to be influenced by them; and since action in modern politics so
largely depends on the people, the wildest errors are grave, if they are only
sufficiently popular. How they strike the wise is a matter of small moment; the
great question is, how they will strike the ignorant.’ Mallock believed that
the recent visitor had excited the discontented of
The Edinburgh Review, historic carrier of the Whig tradition, recorded less anxiety and included more in the way of actual criticism. In a combination which must have given ironic satisfaction to Henry George, this quarterly reviewed together Progress and Poverty and Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics, published as far back as 1850, the two under the heading, ‘The Nationalisation of Land.’ Taking George’s ideas to be sufficiently valid to speak of the good and the bad, the reviewer praised the passage against Malthus as excellent, the best in the book; and he acknowledged as common truth George’s basis in Ricardo’s law of rent, and quoted a recent version of that law by Professor Thorold Rogers. He rejected George’s theory of distribution, however, and, not stopping to quarrel with the analysis of margins, he counter-proposed that British law and practice recognized sufficiently the difference between property in land and property in things. He said that land nationalization would lift no burden of rent from the land occupiers, and would likely be harder to bear than present landlordism. ‘The payment, instead of going into the pocket of the proprietor, is diverted into the coffers of the State. The dramatis personae only are changed; the plot and the outcome of the drama are the same. It is only a new way to pay old rents.’
This comment meant, of
course, either that the reviewer had not caught, or that he chose to dismiss,
the public benefits George asserted would follow from transferring economic
rent into the coffers of the community. To the
In defense of all
property rights he rendered his general judgment of the book. Again a quotation
is required, for these concluding comments supply a special revelation of the
anxieties which knowledge that Progress and Poverty was being read
stirred up in
Though the
An immediate by-product
of the review appeared in the conservative St. James Gazette, to which
Herbert Spencer addressed an angry letter. The philosopher utterly repudiated
the association of his name and ideas with Henry George’s, and he asserted that
Social Statics had only pointed out a difference between the ‘purely
ethical’ and the practical views of property in land. Reserved for nearly a
decade later was the debate that Henry George would make of that highly
arguable distinction. At the time the ruction in the St. James Gazette
publicly knocked a weak support from under George’s argument in Progress and
Poverty, and it perhaps diminished the connection between land
nationalization and land-vaue taxation. The letter was widely reprinted in
Along with the reviewing
came the public discussions of Progress and Poverty. The way in which
some of these discussions were reported to George, and how they encouraged him
to return to
For an important example,
early in 1883, Alfred Marshall gave a series of three lectures in the city of
The one ‘real value’ which the university man acknowledged in
George was his ‘freshness
and earnestness’ — ‘he is by nature a poet, not a scientific thinker.’
Professor Marshall concluded the series by calling himself a ‘more moderate
defender’ of property in land, and making a number of recommendations. For the
elevation of living standards he proposed late marriages and universal
education; and he thought that new countries would gain by some application of
Laveleye’s plan of fixed-term land tenures, held from the sovereign state. This
was a rejection of Henry George ideas, quite completely, and yet another act
that admitted the American radical to high debate in
Ten years later
pronouncements by Alfred Marshall would have been the weightiest of their kind,
but in February 1883 the
Altogether naturally he
was an early reader of Progress and Poverty, and one who, though he
discovered ‘fallacies and crude conceptions,’ would take it seriously. We gain
a peep into opinion making about Henry George as we learn that Professor Henry
Fawcett, visiting at Professor Jowett’s, asked Toynbee about Progress and
Poverty, confessing that he himself had not read it. One would like to know
the young man’s brief reply; and one would like to know also how much attention
He was invited to repeat
those lectures in
Toynbee himself very largely
defeated the critical purpose of the lectures. He spoke extemporaneously and
overlong. Although an economist’s learning shines through the text, his
objections to Progress and Poverty’s analysis — which largely assert
inconsistencies in the book’s wage theory — are complicated and difficult even
as printed, and must have been nearly impossible to understand from the
platform. On the other hand, the disturbed conscience of the speaker, and his
leaning backward to be sympathetic with Henry George’s ends, and to do no more
than oppose his means were transparently clear. The first lecture, ‘Mr. George
in California,’ was I think the first commentary since Dr. Taylor’s to picture
George adequately against his proper background, and to present Progress and
Poverty as thought developed from Our Land and Land Policy. Toynbee
concluded less with counterblast than with alternative reforms. Workers’
insurance, city-subsidized housing, and so on, he said, would be sounder for
The record of these very
exciting meetings, and the comment made about them, combine to create an
impression of remarkable tribute rather than resistance offered Progress and
Poverty by Toynbee. In his peroration the speaker admonished the well-to-do
members of the audience not to resist democracy. ‘It is violent, I know; it is
stormy at times, but it is only violent and stormy like a sea — it cleanses the
shores of human life.’ To the working men present he admitted the guilt of
Shortly after the lectures, Philip Wicksteed wrote George in happy irony that the Toynbee lectures had been a huge success: they had cleared out the publisher’s stock of Progress and Poverty. Toynbee’s ‘concessions,’ according to this expert witness, were ‘large and significant, and his defense of private property in land half-hearted and feeble.’ Kegan Paul followed up with a form letter, widely distributed, which referred to the lectures and invited readers of Progress and Poverty to organize reading and discussion groups in every town, to diffuse Henry George’s ideas.
Presently the news went
out that Toynbee’s exhaustion of the lecture day had not been due to the one
exertion, but that that effort had been too much for a chronic condition. He
died in March of ‘brain fever.’ The Economist of
Exhaustive work in the
historical sociology of ideas would be required to trace, from the January of
the criticisms in the major reviews, and of the Toynbee lectures, until the
next December, when George returned to
Only a lengthening and spreading public interest in George could explain the many efforts made, month after month, to refute his writings. In Macmillan’s Magazine for July, for example, Sir Henry Fawcett had an article, ‘State Socialism and Land Nationalisation,’ which he had designed as a chapter for a new edition of his textbook Manual of Political Economy, and which was presently issued as such. Taking a moderate position, Sir Henry inveighed against George for proposing to confiscate land values without compensating the landlords. This was a Liberal point of view. A second denunciation from the pen of Mr. Mallock appeared in the October Quarterly Review. In form this was a criticism of Hynd-man’s England for All, but in the main it amounted to a fresh attack — and a less flashy and a more considered piece of writing than the January review — on Progress and Poverty. This article Mr. Mallock soon combined with others to make a book, Property and Progress, the most elaborate answer to Henry George ever written. When the Quarterly article appeared, unsigned according to usage, an English friend of Henry George attributed it to the Marquis of Salisbury and was worried about the effect.
Even from journals in which more favorable things had been said, signs appeared, in late 1883, of rising resistance to George. In December, the month of his arrival, the Contemporary Review, which had published the Laveleye criticism, perhaps compensated a little by carrying an article by Samuel Smith, a Liberal M.P. Writing on ‘The Nationalisation of Land,’ this earnest man asserted that the time had now come when ‘leading statesmen can no longer keep quiet on the subject,’ for the George and Wallace movement was really ‘as absurd as a South Sea Bubble.’ And the Fortnightly, in midcourse of a series of articles intended to blueprint a program for the Radicals, denied that the proponents of land nationalization had shown adequately that their surgery would produce gains to justify their operating on the economy. ‘The only difference would be that the increase in the value of the land would go to the new holders.’ The Radicals should work toward the principle of ‘the right and duty of the state to fix within certain broad limits the extent, and to control the conditions, of private ownership.’ Parliament should vest in local authorities ‘the power of expropriating for public purposes, on payment of fair compensation, and adequate securities being taken against the possibility of extortionate demands.’ So qualified the Fortnightly.
In sum: the Irish journey
had won George his first sizable recognition in
Before the end of 1883,
moreover, a more definite reaction occurred than just a cooling off among
Liberal journals. A backfire started. Printed materials were circulated and
public meetings called, answers in kind to the propaganda efforts on the Henry
George side. A
So negative reasons, as
well as the positive ones urged by his friends, made late 1883 an appropriate
time for Henry George to speak for himself again in
He traveled this time
with his older son. The winter voyage, and the hardship and expense of lecture
traveling, suggested that Mrs. George and the girls stay home. The three and
Richard went to
For the voyagers all went
pleasantly. Harry who had been unwell suffered only one difficulty — to satisfy
a huge appetite. He reached
The English visit began
at high speed and in good running order. Landing in
After being in the
metropolis only a few days, George was able to write his wife and Dr. Taylor
that he had sold his British rights in the book for £400, and that with the
advance from his American publishers he had had $3600 from the book before a
copy had been sold — ‘considerable difference from P & P.’ He
had been paid £50 royalties from earlier British publications too. It was
happiness to send $200 home at once, half for Annie to draw on and half for
himself, and to tell her to regard $100 as her ‘own personal private money to
use as you may choose.’ He could say now that he would pay all his debts,
whether in
At the request of a
working men’s association, Henry George went out of
Lecturing started under a
heavy schedule. Beginning in
Objection to his
anti-compensationist argument was of course familiar to George at home, in
To adjust effectively the
internal divisions of the Land Reform Union required, if not new theory, at
least fresh tactical thinking and a pronouncement from Henry George. This need
made the first lecture a doubly important event. Contrary to recent habits of
preparation, George gave up the couch and took to the writing desk, as in the
days of first platform appearances in
John Ruskin had been
scheduled to introduce the speaker. This arrangement followed shortly on a
report to George that the famous essayist and art professor had called Progress
and Poverty ‘an admirable book’ — which may have been George’s first
knowledge of the existence of a somewhat kindred spirit. But illness prevented
Ruskin’s coming, and the chair was occupied by Henry Labouchere, who was the
wittiest Radical in Parliament and one of
Taking the rostrum the
speaker abandoned his manuscript and whispered to Thomas Walker to pull his
coattails if he talked too long. With American directness Henry George urged
the moral logic of equal opportunity; and as in the Land Nationalisation
Society speech he illustrated landlordism from the city about him. Quite as
dogmatically as in
The
After the opening
lecture, he swung west to
There could be no doubt
of instant excitement in the smaller cities. Even before reaching Birmingham
George was writing Annie about how wonderfully he was being received. He sent
money again, and promised more, and let his mind race to the pleasantest
conclusions: at home time free for writing, a summer’s trip to
As he crossed the country, lines of comment followed him. The new Social Democratic paper Justice applauded warmly and consistently; and when Social Problems was published that paper carried an entirely approving review. According to Dr. Lawrence, this trip marked the ‘height of socialist enthusiasm for his cause.’ The other side of the coin was represented by an event of harsh rebuke for academic people fond of Progress and Poverty. Before January was out, Lord Fortescue exposed in The Times the fact that Henry George’s book was being used in the City of London College as a textbook, with the result that the book was withdrawn from use.
About the time the
lecturer reached the
Henry George the public speaker of 1877 or 1878, and perhaps of any time earlier than this visit, might well have failed. He tells the story well. ‘The consciousness of opposition which always arouses me,’ he wrote to Mr. Walker, ‘gave me the stimulus I needed to overcome physical weakness, for I was in bad trim from loss of sleep, and I carried the audience with me, step by step, till you never saw a more enthusiastic crowd.’ At the end he used a platform device which he had tried before and was beginning to make habitual. He called for a vote on compensation, and the whole audience except three went with him. ‘Of the effects at the time there could be no doubt, and I hear of the most gratifying effects upon those who did not go.’
But audiences are more
suggestible than individuals of mind and experience, and George learned
immediately that his unwillingness to compensate landlords was cutting off
sympathies which were both useful and dear to him. Immediately after the
Perhaps George was
affected by the learned man. At any rate he had sympathy and humor to draw upon
when his
Flexibility was George’s virtue under this pressure, and he held up well. He did not mind too much being told, as he worked his way north, that John Bright and Frederic Harrison had spoken against him. They were not the kind he much hoped to affect. But he was grateful to learn that Joseph Chamberlain had recently announced for land-value taxation in the cities, in order to have capital for public investment in housing for working men.
Chamberlain he still
regarded as
-4-
Crossing into
The first part of the
trip, which bypassed the major cities, revealed much. The chairman at one of
George’s meetings was a minister, named Macrae, who told of having lost his
kirk by reason of a landlord’s power. At the conclusion of an address in Skye,
a member of the audience arose to ask what the visitor proposed to do with the
landlords. George had no knowledge of the questioner as landlord, absolutely no
notion of his fame for having deprived his tenants of oystering in certain
waters near by. The reply, which brought the house down, was pure chance:
George proposed to do what one does with an oyster — open it, take out the
fish, and throw away the shell. The trip through the
The outlying places
revealed characteristic signs of social discontent, but it was the return trip,
the last ten days of February and the early days of March when George was in
Glasgow and Edinburgh and the smaller cities of the industrial Lowlands, which utterly
confirmed in his own mind the accuracy of his two-year-old prophecy, that
Scotland was readier to receive his ideas than either Ireland or England. The
actual economic situation there still awaits a scholarly investigator, but
there is little reason to think either that James Joynes and other associates
of Henry George were wrong in saying that the condition of the crofter was
particularly bad, or that statistics would fail to support the proposition that
rents were huge in both country and city, and were largely monopolized among
the Scottish gentry.
George’s schedule called
for an initial appearance in the region in
The challenge evoked a
unique response. Five hundred persons remained in the hall to form a society to
propagate Henry George’s ideas; and a week later, 25 February, George returned
to
A chain of development
had been started. The Scottish Land Restoration League spread rapidly to the
cities where George had just lectured — to
In the descending lineage of Henry George ideas, two developments are indicated. First, the Land Restoration League marks some definition, in action, of Henry George’s preference for destroying private property in land by means other than land nationalization and by a method clearly different from socialism. But for 1884 this was a clarification rather than a separation, and there appeared as yet no serious conflict of these related ideas. Second, the Land Restoration League indicates that the three impulses — land-value taxation, land nationalization, and socialism — at that time definitely continued to march abreast, as they were going to do until 1887.
Indeed two of the most
memorable events of the Scottish Land League’s first decade are that it
launched the pilot career of Keir Hardie in labor politics and supported him in
making his 1892 candidacy the first to put a socialist in Parliament. That is
to say, Henry George’s British mission signifies an American impulse behind the
Scottish labor movement, which became historic in making the modern Labour
party, and in forging the character of twentieth-century
-5-
There were two or three
ordinary public meetings before George reached
Though in their recent correspondence Professor Muller had mentioned, in writing of opinion at Oxford, that his colleague,
Bonamy Price, an economist, had been very critical of Progress and Poverty, he had said also that this kind of expert opinion did not change his own mind. And the professor could hardly have been more generous in honoring his American guest. He insisted that father and son would find his guest rooms more pleasant than a hotel; he would have as additional house guest, Mr. George E. Buckle, the new editor of The Times (and future biographer of Disraeli); he would provide an opportunity for the visiting Americans to see Oxford; he would have a group for dinner before the lecture, at which he expected a large attendance.
Perhaps George would have been more comfortable had his host tried less hard. Tired for weeks beforehand, he could not sleep the night before the lecture. Thanks to this ordeal we have, from a letter to Annie, an extra insight into the strains and tensions of the situation. Here we are at Max Muller’s: a beautiful place, splendid man, nice family, everything charming only I am suffering from my old enemy sleeplessness. I hardly got any sleep last night; have been like a drowned rat all today and now tonight it is as bad as ever until in desperation I have got up and started to write . . . I am to lecture before a magnificent audience of University people tomorrow night. The only thing I fear is my condition. Well, good night.’
In the Clarendon assembly
hall the next evening George made no effort to present new learning or new
criticism, such as had given body to his one earlier university lecture at
Berkeley seven years before. He tried a simple inspirational address, in moral
challenge not different from the ‘Scotland and Scotsmen’ lecture in Glasgow. He
told the students that it cost £250 a year to attend Oxford; he contrasted the
situation of the poor; he proposed that educated men work through land reform
for England’s social betterment. Possibly no choice of subject and no tone of
presentation could have been right to engage this particular audience.
Certainly he chose with little understanding, and he made a tactical blunder when,
cutting his remarks short at twenty minutes or so, he asked for questions from
the floor. To
First Alfred Marshall,
who had come to
Though Professor Muller
apologized, and a tutor wrote at once how sorry he was ‘for the personal rude
treatment you had to endure by being baited by a mass of howling simpletons,’
George must have felt pretty grim about going next to
We are lucky to be able to see the visit through the bright eyes of Mary Gladstone, the prime minister’s daughter. She had been well prepared for the week end. She had read Progress and Poverty the previous summer and had discussed it in the family. The reputation she had heard of it, as ‘the most upsetting, revolutionary book of the age,’ had not put her off. While reading she had agreed with it ‘at present,’ and when she finished she confessed to her diary ‘feelings of deep admiration — felt desperately impressed, and he is a Christian.’
The young woman met Henry
George at a
1 In his autobiography (Life, Journalism and Politics,
At the more liberal
university he had regained his composure. Professor James Stuart was in charge,
a friendly host who knew Progress and Poverty well enough to
differentiate between the morality of the book, with which he agreed, and the
economics of it, with which he frequently disagreed. At this Sunday afternoon
social event he was taking the critical line, making an effort to ‘convert’
Henry George, according to our witness. ‘But, alas, [George] far more nearly
converted us. He deeply impressed us with his earnestness, conviction and
singleness and height of aim. I don’t think we made the faintest impression on
him and he was very quick and clear in argument. Helen and Mr. Sedley Taylor
and Mr. Butler and the son of George sat mum throughout. I made 2 or 3
desperate ventures and got red as my gown, but felt crushed. Perhaps Prof.
Stuart hardly stood quite to his guns. Walked to chapel with the man and he
told me of his horrid
At the Monday evening lecture Miss Gladstone sat with her host and with Arthur Lyttelton, her father’s secretary. All three, she says, ‘were struck ... At first it seemed very doubtful whether he would be heard, and he was not well or up to the mark. Still on the whole, considering that the audience disagreed with him and were undergraduates, his fate was better than was expected, and certainly he has a good deal of the genius of oratory about him, and sometimes the divine spark — he is a man possessed and he often carried one away. Questions were asked him of all kinds at the end. He did not flinch and had a wonderful way of leaping to his feet and answering with great spirit and manliness.’
The immediate observation
of another woman, the sister of William Clarke of Fabian history, confirms Miss
Gladstone and makes additions. ‘Confronting what promised to be a very hostile
audience he stood like a lion at bay,’ this lady felt, ‘and fairly cowed his
opponents. Evidently he carried a great part of his audience with him, for I
think
Poor George went on to
He had planned to have a
free month for a trip to the Continent before going home, but under pressure
the time melted away. Harry went to
The last week in
At top level of London
Society, Lady Stepney, who had been Mary Gladstone’s companion in reading Progress
and Poverty, had George to tea. She gathered again the
In a few days before 6 April, George made the concluding speeches of the visit. At a large meeting in Shoreditch Hall and at a hotel meeting of London Scots, he urged that Scotland was now as ready for leadership in reform as ever in the past; and at a farewell banquet by the Land Restoration League, in Piccadilly, he heard Stewart Headlam praise him for having applied religion and the moral sense to public affairs.
Acting on an invitation
arranged by Michael Davitt, he went off to
-6-
Without affecting the
British story we may withhold until a later chapter, as we did George’s
American months between the Irish trip and the trip just accounted for, the
narrative of home events from April until November 1884. George’s third British
visit, made in the service of the Land Restoration League and spent all, except
for a few days, wholly in Scotland, makes a two-month codicil to the history of
the second visit rather than a separate story. Thereafter a break does occur,
and the later visits in
At the moment of
departure, and during the months of his absence from
Meanwhile the friendly
publishing house, Reeves, in some sense replied by bringing out a hundred-page
biography, the first ever written of Henry George. Dedicated ‘In Remembrance of
the Campaign of 1884,’ and saluting him as a ‘
Henry George made a
general policy of refusing to reply to criticisms. But the April 1884 issue of
the Nineteenth Century, which thus far had paid no attention to his
work, reached him on the eve of sailing for
George’s followers of the
Scottish Land Restoration League begged him to reply to the article. They were
pretty practical advisers: the duke was titular chief of the clan of
Yet, though the opposed
articles of noblemen and visitor to
George equaled his opponent’s brilliance. To contradict the peer’s assertion of what landlords do to improve soil and village, capital and community, George asserted his personal observations of poverty in Skye, the terror of landlords across Scotland, and the degradation of workers — all of them ultimate payers of rents — in Glasgow and Edinburgh. The reformer had his own vein of irony which might be considered of the Jacksonian variety. Stating the presumption of equality, he asked his Scottish adversary as mental exercise to ‘put the bodies of a duke and a peasant on a dissecting-table, and bring, if you can, the surgeon who by laying bare the brain or examining the viscera, can tell which is duke and which is peasant.’
George’s friends at least thought that he had won handsomely the exchange of fire. They reprinted the two articles together, ‘Property in Land’ or ‘The Peer and the Prophet,’ in a half a dozen or so editions in London, New York, and Copenhagen; and they happily adopted ‘The Prophet of San Francisco’ as a favorite designation of their own. For years we shall find the author discovering people, William Lloyd Garrison II among them, who were first attracted to Henry George when they happened to read the Nineteenth Century article.
In the
Another winter trip confronted him. George sailed in November, again taking Harry and leaving the ladies of the family behind, with arrangements too hastily made and too incomplete to be very satisfactory. When he went aboard the Germanic details of his speaking schedule, payment, and even the question whether or not he would go first to Glasgow or run down to London were all unsettled. But he departed in confidence. He had written no lectures, he wrote Annie, but was ready to improvise according to the occasion. On the voyage he enjoyed especially the electric light over his berth, apparently his first experience of the new invention.
From
The trip through
On the brighter side he
had the satisfaction of understanding his audiences better and of improving his
acquaintanceship with the conditions of the country. He remerfibered a lesson
learned in embarrassment the year before, that political talks were not
acceptable on Sundays. This time he made a custom of his lecture on ‘Moses’ for
Sunday-evening and other appropriate occasions — and he was now ready to speak
on ‘The Eighth Commandment’ and two or three other Biblical topics in addition.
In
Back in
During the week before 24
January, his last abroad, George spoke at important places:
In respect of social
drama the last appearance in
That same afternoon, in
what seems to have been staging for effect and symbol, socialists of the
Hyndman-Morris inclination held a meeting of their own near by. They so
distributed their literature, and so arranged their speakers as not to compete
with George, but to increase the size of the day’s demonstration. Thus George’s
departure from the
In
But the important thing —
in
-7-
One more event, which
occupied one of his very last hours in
Of course they diverged
somewhat. Hyndman charged George with relying too much on land nationalization,
and asserted in socialist style that truly the landlord plays the humble role
of sleeping partner, in contrast to the aggressiveness of capitalists. Hyndman
denied the validity of the idea of ‘natural rights.’ Henry George countered
according to his opposite ideas. And yet he accepted still the identification
of land nationalization with his own cause; and he agreed — as he had said in
the
Yet there is considerable
paradox that the author of Progress and Poverty should have maintained a
common front with the Social Democratic Federation people, through his first
three visits to
But of his enormous
influence among them there can be no doubt. To add to Bernard Shaw’s
impression, we have the authoritative testimony, first, of Sidney Webb. That
scholarly leader’s little book of 1890, Socialism in England, credits
the ‘optimistic and confident tone’ of George’s writing, and ‘the irresistible
force of its popularization of Ricardo’s law of Rent’ with having ‘sounded the
dominant “note” ’ of Fabianism. Webb credits George with having reached also
As Webb estimated the
influence of George’s Ricardianism, Edward R. Pease, the member of the Fabian
Society who became its historian, asserted the power that George’s political
philosophy gave to reform in
In other words: Progress and Poverty's moral sequence and its economic syllogism, both, took hold in non-Marxian circles favorable to labor.
The most immediate
practical results occurred, as was natural in the structure of British
politics, not as a result of trade-union or Fabian efforts but through the
pro-labor ‘Lib Lab’ movement among the Radicals of the Liberal party. Shortly
after George’s third visit a parliamentary commission on housing for the
working classes reported the economic and public-health conditions of the
industrial cities. It was a two-party commission. Sir Charles Dilke, Joseph
Chamberlain’s associate in Radical leadership, was chairman; from the
Conservatives,
In the main report itself
the crucial evidence of Georgism was the recommendation, urged by Mr. Codings
and supported by a majority, that vacant city funds be taxed at a rate of say 4
per cent on capital value, and that the proceeds be used as capital to be
invested in public housing. This proposal to shift taxes from the income of
land to the capital value of land, known as the American system, would have
been an innovation in
For 1885 the report
signifies that Henry George’s ideas had reached farther into the policy making
of Parliament than they ever had into the policy of the legislature of
Twelve years after George’s third British visit, in the year of his death but written in no expectation of that event, J. A. Hobson, the distinguished liberal economist and journalist, never a socialist, wrote for the Fortnightly Review an appraisal of ‘The Influence of Henry George in England.’ The article’s sweep of course includes the later visits which identified George with British Radicalism, opposed him to Hyndman socialism, and built some bridges of light traffic with the Fabians. But nearly everything that Hobson said could have been said of the influence of the author of Progress and Poverty and Social Problems without regard for his later books, and of the public speaker of 1882, 1884, and 1885. After more than half a century Hobson’s authority is still good, and his findings command endorsement.
‘The real importance of Henry George,’ wrote Hobson, ‘is derived from the fact that he was able to drive an abstract notion, that of economic rent, into the minds of “practical” men, and generate therefrom a social movement . . . Keenly intelligent, generous and sympathetic, his nature contained that obstinacy which borders on fascination, and which is rightly recognized as essential to the missionary . . .
‘Although the thinking members of the working classes had never thoroughly accepted [the] laisser faire theory of the doctrinaire radical and the political free trader, they had unconsciously absorbed some of its complacency and its disbelief in the need for governmental action. Henry George shook this complacency, and, what is more, he gave definiteness to the feeling of discontent by assigning an easily intelligible economic cause . . . years of gradually deepening depression brought rural land questions more and more to the front and that divorcement of the people from the soil, which formed the kernel of the social problem according to George, assumed increasing prominence . . . Moreover, George’s ability enabled him to fully utilise that advantage which land grievances possess over most other economic issues, their susceptibility to powerful concrete local illustration . . .
‘But George’s true influence is not rightly measured by the small following of theorists who impute to landlords their supreme power of monopoly. Large numbers who would not press this extreme contention are disciples of Henry George because they regard unqualified private ownership of land to be the most obviously unjust and burdensome feature in our present social economy. The spirit of humanitarian and religious appeal which suffuses Progress and
Poverty wrought powerfully upon a large section of what I may call typical English moralists. In my lectures upon Political Economy about the country, I have found in almost every centre a certain little knot of men of the lower-middle or upper-working class, men of grit and character, largely self-educated, keen citizens, mostly noncomformists in religion, to whom Land Nationalisation, taxation of unearned increment, or other radical reforms of land tenure, are doctrines resting on plain moral sanction. These free-trading Radical dissenters regard common ownership of and equal access to the land as a “natural right,” essential to individual freedom. It is this attitude of mind which serves to explain why, when both theoretic students of society and the man in the street regard Land Nationalisation as a first and a large step in the direction of Socialism, organized Socialists regard the followers of Henry George with undisguised hostility and contempt . . .
‘No doubt it is easy to impute excessive influence to the mouthpiece of a rising popular sentiment. George, like other prophets, cooperated with the “spirit of the age.” But after this first allowance has been made, Henry George may be considered to have exercised a more directly powerful formative and educative influence over English radicalism of the last fifteen years than any other man.’
Not Without Honor in His Own Land 1882—1886
-1-
After
each of
his three visits to the
His first British
success, however, did not prepare him for the welcome he received when he
returned to
fairly be attributed to a change in the climate of American opinion, to some new awareness in the country of underlying tensions and economic injustices. Perhaps there is no better symbol of this, apart from George himself, than the emerging voice of Henry Demarest Lloyd. During the summer of 1882 a famous article in the Atlantic Monthly, ‘The Political Economy of Seventy Three Million Dollars,’ advanced that lawyer a sizable step toward his powerful book of the next decade, Wealth versus Commonwealth. Plainly a conscience-stricken state of mind was represented by certain educated-class elements which helped celebrate Henry George’s return in 1882.
The lead in celebration was taken by Irish partisans. People in the office of the Irish World assumed charge but were careful to include non-Irish elements. Felix Adler and one or two others from the Ethical Culture Society shared in the planning; and, in the name of all that he considered appropriate, Mr. Adler urged against extravagance. ‘Why waste all that money on a banquet? Why not use it to buy a library for Mr. George?’ But others wanted a splash; and Louis Post favored such an event as would make publicity for Henry George.
The group finally agreed on a banquet at Delmonico’s. This proved to be the second but principal event of the welcome home. The first was managed by the Central Labor Union of New York, of which Mr. Post was the legal counselor, and which four years later would be the instrument of bringing Henry George into his greatest political campaign. On 20 October the CLU gave its own reception in Cooper Union’s somewhat church-like auditorium. Banners for ‘Land, the Common Property of the People,’ were hung on the walls; a trades-union man spoke; and the returning hero replied that the flame had been lighted, ‘the fire is burning on, and in a few months there will be a great movement all over the civilized world.’
Nothing was spared for
the banquet next evening. Many prominent men signed the invitation. Besides Patrick
Ford, Louis Post, and Thomas Shearman, who must have been the moving spirits,
Henry Ward Beecher and Thomas Kinsella, preacher and editor, both from
As Louis Post had feared would happen, the guest of honor arrived late, nearly an hour late, and his shoes lacked polish. The guests were lined up, 170 strong, and were presented to him by Algernon Sullivan, lawyer and wit of the city. ‘How did you get them to come?’ George hissed at Louis Post, when opportunity offered. When at last the company was seated they were rewarded with twenty-eight items of food and drink, according to the menu card in French. It was a Delmonico’s party done in the style of that day, and the charge was $10 a person.
Stories are told of the
evening’s cross-purposes and confusions. ‘What part of
Happily the event did not frighten George out of enjoying the situation in more ways than one. There is suspicion of irony blended with the flow of conviction in the speech in which the hero of Loughrea admonished this particular circle to consider, ‘gentlemen, how this city would grow, how enormously wealth would increase, if all taxes were abolished which now bear on the production and accumulation and exchange of wealth. Consider how the vacant spaces on the island would fill up, could land not improved be improved by him who wanted to improve it, without the payment of prices now demanded.’
It was ‘a good deal like
going to sleep and waking up famous,’ George wrote Dr. Taylor about the
double-headed reception. He felt greatly reassured for the future. He expected
to pay his debts and live well, he confessed to this most intimate friend. He
planned to settle in
George had known before
leaving
Overseas George had
demurred at first, at this last allocation. He considered the society too much
a Professor Sumner and David Ames Wells kind of organization; and the only
comfort he could derive was to think how ‘very annoying’ the gift would be to
Sumner, whom George of course knew to be the one who had ‘sat down on the book
in an anonymous diatribe in Scribner’s.’ But in the month of Loughrea
and Athenry the result proved more desirable than a professor’s irritation; a
Excellent, wrote George.
‘You have kicked up a row. And of all the things we want to do, to kick up a
row is first and foremost. For when the row begins those who most bitterly
oppose us serve the cause the most.’ He chuckled at the thought that the people
at home should know that the ‘ “Socialistic seducer” of the Society for the
Propagation of Sumnerian Political Economy is of the bluest
Presently the death of
Francis Shaw affected Henry George in much the same way his life had. George
received a legacy of $1000 early in 1883. It was the first such event in his
life, and very timely. For, contrary to hopes that had mounted while he was in
While there are no other
letters to compare with the historical interest of Miss Peabody’s, many either
had personal meaning or else indicated the spread of George’s ideas on the wave
fanning out from
The
On the eastern side of
the hemisphere, from places as widely separated as
The letter from farthest
afield, from the old friend in the legation at
Though in one sense Henry
George’s actual position was about as wide open as it looked from
This came from John W.
Lovell, who headed the publishing house bearing his own name, and who wanted to
bring out a twenty-cent Progress and Poverty in the paper-bound Lovell’s
Library. He himself sympathized with the working-class movement and was
personally interested in the socialist community at
There is a suggestion
that George was the readier to go ahead with Lovell because he felt that
In the spring the
question of more translations of Progress and Poverty came up. When the
editor of the New York Swedish paper, Svenska Arbitaren, wanted to
publish as a booklet the Henry George articles he had recently run, translated
from the weekly Leslie’s, the author tried to negotiate a Swedish
translation of his principal work. Perhaps these exchanges explain the edition
that was actually published in Upsala in 1884. Meanwhile George’s old friend
and first translator urged an American German-language edition. It should be
done in Roman characters, Giitschow advised, echoing Lovell, and it could be
made to undersell the imported Staude edition. Giitschow argued that the
election of 1880 had proved the importance of the German vote, and that George
should not be discouraged that German socialists did not like him, for the
socialists represented no more than a small minority of the immigrant Germans.
Sound advice or unsound, the German-language edition of Progress and Poverty
was never published in
-2-
The situations and
developments described above may be characterized, all of them, as the passive
side of Henry George’s history after the tour in
Part of the answer is to
be found in the persons and groups he chose as followers, from among those who
came forward to befriend him or seek his help. Another part is to be discovered
in his new writing — in the ideas and policies he felt most ready and anxious
to advance. Immediately, and apparently without benefit of invitation from any
publisher, he set to work on the book he had long intended, an attack on
industrial monopoly and a defense of free-trade policy. Three years later he
would develop from this beginning a powerful manifesto, his second or third
most important writing, Protection or Free Trade. But from first to last
this effort was bedeviled by obstacles and misfortunes, and the first
difficulty was the not unpleasant one of being requested to do other things.
Before year’s end, 1882, magazines on both sides of the
For the North American, to which it will be recalled he had contributed in 1881, he did two articles. The first, which was published in March, concerned ‘Money in Elections’; it broadened out, from decade-old editorials in the San Francisco Post and from his similar article in the Overland Monthly, the writer’s argument that the Australian secret ballot was needed in America to help defeat the political machines. Eastern cities were the worst seats of political corruption, he now asserted, but state governments in the West were about as bad. ‘Sparsely settled Nevada is notoriously a rotten borough,’ observed this old associate of Senator Jones, ‘and Kansas,
Nebraska, Colorado, and other new states are little better.’ In respect of political ethics, old Britain was more truly democratic than America, George now believed.
The second North American article of 1883, ‘Overproduction,’ was published in December. It renewed from Progress and Poverty his stern criticism of those who would use that idea as the explanation — and the explaining away — of depressions, and of course renewed also his proposition of land-value taxation as the answer. The two articles together may be thought of as bridging the gap between George’s first writing for this magazine and his several articles of 1885 and 1886, when the North American began to look surprisingly much like a regular outlet for Henry George.
While in the North American the reformer of 1883 seems to be a man gaining in strength and acceptability, in Leslie’s, a more popular magazine, he appears in the role of insurgent. During the early months of the year, Harper’s Weekly, the rival of Leslie’s, ran a series by William Graham Sumner — connected essays on contemporary history. Immediately gathered and reprinted under the still-remembered book title, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, Sumner’s commentary is well described by his biographer as setting forth ‘with extraordinary coldness’ the professor’s full conception of laisser faire; and Professor Hofstadter characterizes Sumner’s ideas at this stage as the most uncompromising example of Social Darwinism in the history of that movement.
The Yale sociologist named few books or persons whose ideas he opposed, but from first to last he condemned any and all who wanted the government to regulate social conditions; and many passages indicate that he bore Progress and Poverty specifically in mind. Entirely in line with the Scribner’s review in 1881, Sumner’s ideas on the nature of civilization differed completely from the egalitarianism and from the plea for religion as an influence toward co-operation that are voiced in Progress and Poverty. In quite as extreme a degree as William Mallock, though of course from the roots of a more individualistic defense of property, Professor Sumner represented the rejection of Henry George by the mind which all but officially spoke for America’s prevailing current of social thought.
Henry George’s invitation from Leslie’s did not contemplate a debate with Sumner, nor did he try such a thing. He was asked simply to prepare a series of articles on general questions related to capital and labor, and to the condition of the people. A competitive venture rather than a controversy was the proposition, and naturally it appealed to him. When he learned that Sumner was being paid $50 apiece for his articles, George demanded and received $100 for his own. Leslie’s contracted for thirteen essays.
As a preliminary the magazine gave him a good announcement on 31 March and printed a striking portrait. Leslie’s even endorsed Progress and Poverty to the point of saying that it had ‘not merely shaken to their very foundation theories previously accepted, but it has popularized, and is popularizing, political economy as previous to its publication would not have been possible.’ George’s essays would be called ‘Problems of the Times.’ With such a send-off, the series appeared in late spring. Then, like Sumner’s, the essays were published as a book, early the following winter. Belford, Clarke and Company, a Chicago house, brought it out, under the title Social Problems; and, as we have seen, Kegan Paul followed suit. On both sides of the water the book made money for the author.
Although a British reviewer was not wrong in observing that Social Problems presented again the main ideas of Progress and Poverty, the more important fact in the context of 1883 is that this book marked a shift in the author’s emphasis which accorded with his present location in the industrial Northeast, and with his interest and connections in Great Britain. For the first time since working out his larger economic ideas in the San Francisco Post, he made a strong statement of his opposition to private industrial monopoly, and of his belief in public ownership. In the autobiography of Henry Hyndman, where the ultimate judgments of George are very adverse, the socialist was nevertheless pleased to claim part of the credit for George’s having written Social Problems, and pleased to say that in this one book there exists a certain beginning of socialistic wisdom never quite fulfilled by the writer. What Hyndman did not know, of course, and what few readers of Henry George’s books have known, is that, though the emphasis on the socialization of industry is light in Progress and Poverty, the author had actually been consistent for sixteen years in asserting that natural industrial monopolies ought to be publicly owned and operated. In that degree George had long been a state socialist; and now, as he considered private corporations becoming larger and mightier than sovereign states, he stated the possibility that ‘a revolutionary uprising might be necessary to turn out the praetorians who were doing the corporations’ bidding in government office.’
To his notion of California days, of what the nation-size natural monopolies actually were, the telegraph system and the railroads, he added the telephone; and, discussing the local monopolies natural in the economy of the modern city, he added electricity to the items previously specified, which were water, heat, and gas. In these areas George was as ready as anyone for socialization. Though he defended the policy by saying that government ownership involves fewer risks of corruption than private monopolism, he did not abandon his old belief that the number of public enterprises ought to be kept at a minimum. In this line of thought he urged again that lowering the tariff would reduce monopolism and increase competition — an argument which made Social Problems a preparation for the book already in process, Protection or Free Trade.
In answer to Sumner, whose ideas concerning the tariff were startlingly like his own, the writer in Leslie’s turned irony on the Yale professor’s defense of a social ‘elite’ in America. Though always qualified about social theory derived from Darwin, George did insert in Social Problems the thought — which Professor Eric Goldman calls Reform Darwinism — that biological and social evolution means eternal change; and he observed that in the present hour ancient creeds were dissolving and ‘old forces of conservatism’ were ‘melting away.’ He renewed his charge that the churches were too complacent about modern poverty. Social Problems was a fighting book. However critical of aggrandizers, professors, clergymen, and others, it was written with confidence that forces powerful in the world were on the author’s side.
Not directly with Sumner, but tangentially with a still more imposing economist of Yale derivation, the articles in Leslie’s stirred up controversy and took a measure of Henry George. It was the fifth essay, on ‘The March of Concentration,’ which challenged the authority, even the integrity, of General Francis A. Walker, who of course held as high a rank as any American economist. In Progress and Poverty he was the admired author of The Wages Question; in the academic world he had just become president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he was president also of the American Statistical Association and would soon he first president of the American Economics Association. A large part of his distinction derived from the service he rendered as director of the United States Census; and it was on account of certain data in the Census of 1880 that the argument between Walker and Elenry George began. George did not necessarily try to provoke a fight, but he must have known that he was taking chances when he denounced certain statistics about landholding which had just appeared in the Compendium of the recent census.
A parallel-column statement there indicated that the average size of all farms in the United States had dropped from 153 acres in 1870 to 134 acres in 1880. In George’s condemnation this piece of information was ‘not only inconsistent with facts obvious all over the United States and with the tendencies of agriculture in other countries, such as Great Britain, but it is inconsistent with the returns furnished by the Census Bureau itself.’ Whether he knew it or not, George was criticizing General Walker’s own personal interpretation of the data, as well as the data themselves. In an article in the Princeton Review, which presently was to be reprinted in the census volume on the Statistics of Agriculture, the academic man asserted that landholding in the United States was in cold numerical fact ‘highly popular,’ or democratic according to Jeffersonian aspiration. In criticizing the Compendium, George said that it was the more blameworthy because the official averages would be interpreted as confirming popular belief that America was making progress away from land aggregation and toward the goal of the family farm. The census should be doubly careful not to misinform the people in a sensitive area of policy, the critic said.
In the columns of Leslie’s, General Walker replied in unveiled contempt. Paying no attention to the disparities in the tables of figures to which George referred, he gave a short lesson in how averages are computed, which included the following blundering sentence: ‘There has been a greater increase, on the whole, in the number of farms below 153 acres than in the number above 153 acres. And, consequently the average size has been reduced.’ He said he would be ‘happy to resort to a more elementary statement, illustrated with diagrams, if desired.’
George allowed himself more relish than he might have, in demolishing the census director’s careless principles of arithmetic; and then took more space still to elaborate the inconsistencies in the census figures. This reply, and Walker’s rebuttal, and Henry George’s final word amount to twenty-five book pages. But, half a year later, in the preface of a new census volume, General Walker, not retracting his judgments about landholding, admitted that the earlier figures had contained disparity and error. The Compendium placed in parallel columns, as comparable, acreage figures for 1870 and 1880 which should not have been compared — in one instance the cultivated lands of the farms were represented, and in the other the farms’ full size. Elsewhere the new volume admitted that the earlier one had not counted fully the large-acreage holdings in the West.
The controversy with Walker ended a clear success for George, but the victory did not lie in any invincible formulations of the trend of American landholding. George’s best work in that field lay twelve years buried and forgotten in Our Land and Land Policy; and he would venture the subject again, three years later, in an article in the North American Review. At that time, though admitting that great holdings were being subdivided, he would insist that increases in land values were more and more favoring the owners, to the disadvantage of the community. Henry George’s success in the duel in Leslie’s Magazine was that he had at last confounded the attitude of contempt and disregard with which scholars in the United States had quite consistently treated him.
Very soon the general himself indicated the change. In May, just coincidentally with the beginning of the argument in Leslie’s, he was lecturing at Harvard, giving the talks he soon revised into the little book, Land and Its Rent. In August — exactly parallel with Sir Henry Fawcett’s similar article in the Macmillan’s Magazine in England — he brought out an article, very nearly the same as a chapter in his forthcoming book, ‘Henry George’s Social Fallacies.’ Really reviewing Progress and Poverty this time, General Walker described himself as ‘Ricardian of Ricardians’ who thought that ‘under perfect competition the labourer would become the residual claimant on industry.’ The worker and not the landlord. Even considering the actual economic world, where competition is less than perfect, Walker said that the radicals, George most especially because he had been too much influenced by California conditions, had pushed beyond reason the idea that the landholder takes a great share of the product of the economy. Also he made a critical parry against George’s general proposition that technological progress raises rent. He answered that modern transport sometimes decreases rents, as when a railroad brings to city market the product of distant fields, and so reduces the value of less fertile agricultural land not so far from the city. On the other hand, at a point where he might have been captious, he acknowledged truth in George’s rejection of the wages fund, though it was stated in language much more dogmatic than his own; and he made no serious objection to George’s case against Malthusian doctrine.
For the decade of the ’80s, the article and chapter could be called the official American academic review of Henry George’s main ideas. Not only did Walker state his own objections, but he also cumulated the overseas reviews. Quoting the condemnations of the Quarterly Review and the Edinburgh, he rejected without sympathy George’s affirmation of all men’s right to the economic product of land — the moral sequence of Progress and Poverty. Comparing recent treatments of rent, he reported a rising scale of radical protest. Leroy-Beaulieu envisaged rent ‘as no more than the merest mole on the industrial body,’ Walker said; Mill diagnosed ‘an open sore, a real, appreciable, and considerable drain on the vitality of the state, which should be checked by stringent surgery and cautery’; while George indicated rent to be ‘a cancerous evil . . . with only one possible result and that in no very distant future.’ By implication General Walker’s own position lay between those of Leroy-Beaulieu and Mill — closer to Mill’s but nevertheless far from that of Progress and Poverty. Seven years would pass, and the first successes of the single-tax movement be achieved, before George’s ideas would again receive such close scrutiny and estimation by any American scholar.
A letter in Henry George’s own papers, written by a member of the assembly of Rhode Island and a future governor of that state, suggests a personal reason why Walker changed his attitude toward George. Early in 1883 this reformer, apparently speaking as a friend, told the census director that some economist ought to give Progress and Poverty a serious review. So perhaps conscience, or love of controversy, or both effected the change. Dr. Garvin, the Rhode
Islander, wanted George, in turn, to reply to Walker’s critique; but Henry George refused.
With so much lightning playing about him, there is no wonder that George felt he must put the Leslie’s articles into book form without delay. During the run of the contracted series, moreover, the magazine’s editorial page had turned savagely against him; and he was notified that the proprietor, Mrs. Leslie, would allow him to make no contributions to the journal beyond the thirteen agreed upon, and that she would not permit him to publish a book under the title of the series, ‘Problems of the Times.’ Fortunately he was able to talk amicably with the representative of the firm who had negotiated the contract, and he escaped any danger that Leslie’s would block publication under the other title.
To the end Social Problems was hard to produce, though it became profitable. The author worked until the very eve of his big lecture tour in England and Scotland to complete the revision and enlargement of the manuscript.
-3-
The report on Henry George in the States during 1883 has indicated, so far, the signs that came to him of new recognition at home, and the ideas that came to his mind as the most important ones to express in new articles and books. As it seems fair to call Social Problems socialistic within certain boundaries, and fair also to discover in the free-trade manuscript an intention to educate readers into major doctrines of free enterprise, George was at this stage confirmed in his earlier character of prophet of the mixed economy. But these data fall short of formulating adequately George’s own notion of where he stood, and where he thought he should go, in his developing career.
As we know, he interpreted the welcome home in October 1882 to indicate that he would have no more trouble making money to support his family. Though the small audiences he had and the low fees he collected during an immediate, short lecture tour in the Middle West were disappointing, he did not let himself be discouraged. After the $1000 legacy from Mr. Shaw, about the year’s income we know only that Leslie’s paid him $ 1300 and that he must have received something useful, perhaps in three figures, perhaps in four, from royalties on Progress and Poverty and The Land Question. The fact that money received from previous writing came in, probably his principal source of income, while he was doing his fourth book, must have been encouraging to him and have lessened his regrets that work on the free-trade manuscript had to be deferred.
During the spring he made a major decision which indicates, as well as continuing optimism, an unusual degree of freedom of action. He was approached in March by Allen Thorndike Rice, of the North American. Would Henry George launch a new weekly, a political and economic journal? The proposition was that an investor would put up $25,000 and hold 55 shares of stock; George would be given 45 shares and would be made editor at a salary of $75 a week to start and $100 as soon as the paper began to make expenses. He would be given full editorial control; and, as George himself noted, the job promised to solve his ‘bread and butter question for good.’
Yet he refused the offer for reasons that seem shallow: the Leslie’s articles had to be done, the free-trade book was on his mind, he was not ready to take charge of the new office. The refusing mood was on him. A little later the same spring he made up his mind not to try to lecture in California during the summer. And presently he refused to consider at a low salary an otherwise attractive appointment as commissioner of the new New York Bureau of Labor Statistics, which at the moment was pending before the state legislature. Whether or not he had a right to be so certain, he believed that if he were to nod Governor Grover Cleveland would nominate him. ‘I could make something of the place,’ he pondered, and added that at $5000 he would have taken it. But when $2500 was indicated he lost interest.
Why did he turn away from New York opportunities in the kinds of work that had sustained him in California — journalism and state office? If they had not quite satisfied him there, and if he had learned the perfidy of a journal’s creditors in San Francisco, at least the present offers were made in terms that honored him, and a job in New York would have assured him a long season of being prominent before the nation. A very important reason for refusing doubtless was just what he said, because he was overburdened and needed freedom for thought. And another lay in his interest in
Britain, though the invitation to return there had not become compelling when he turned down Mr. Rice.
To these I add the guess that possibly the controlling reason for his not taking important jobs was that for the first time he was making promising contacts with the American labor-union movement. This was the sector of society that was the most important of all, in his scale of values. And now labor unions, Henry George, Jr., says, urged him for the New York commissionership; and presently the veteran member of the California printers’ union became a new member of the Knights of Labor in New York. Very soon he opened a correspondence with Terence Powderly, who as grand master workman was the famous international leader of that order. This proved to be the beginning of a long association between union leader and intellectual-for-labor.
Here an analogy suggests itself. George’s concerning himself in 1883 with labor-union leadership and ideology, while he was finding his way into influence in the United States, is reminiscent of his situation a year earlier overseas, when his being concerned in Irish protest led directly to influence in English and Scottish affairs. Terence Powderly himself derived from Irish origins, and so also did great numbers of the Knights of Labor; and Michael Davitt had become a knight while in the United States, and had transplanted a bit of the organization to his own side of the water. Why should George not travel an Irish route to prominence in the United States as well as in Britain? If foresight had not suggested this tactic, then an event of April 1883 certainly did so. As Davitt had done, in 1882, Terence Powderly now said things which halfpromised that he would become a follower of Henry George. Delighted with a public statement the grand master workman made, which went beyond the agrarian plank in the Knights of Labor platform, George wrote congratulations: ‘I need hardly say how thoroughly [your statement] accords with my own earnest belief.’ George happily sent clippings to Thomas Walker in Birmingham.
To Powderly himself he sent further advice and counsel. ‘I believe that the promulgation by you of those views marks an epoch in the labor movement. They will powerfully aid in bringing about, among the working classes, that discussion of fundamental principles so much needed, and without which nothing else can be accomplished.’ George went on to criticize the little newspaper of the Knights of Labor; and he urged such new editorial boldness as would attract attention and build up the union. ‘There is a widespread consciousness among the masses that there is something radically wrong in the present social organization. All that is needed to weld this feeling into a power which will at length become irresistible is concentration and enlightenment.’ Very delicately George led along into the tariff question. Identifying himself to a Pennsylvanian as a native of that state and as a one-time protectionist, but one who had been converted, he begged Powderly not to tie up with high-tariff doctrine. ‘The great injury done by the protective theory seems to me to be that it sets workingmen to barking up the wrong tree.’ George ended with assurances that the area of agreement between them far exceeded their differences, and that he had no wish to press those differences.
Powderly did his share in the rapprochement. He agreed that his union’s journal needed improvement; and, about the tariff, he believed that their two positions were very much closer than George understood. Within a week or so of hearing from George, Powderly tried to call in New York; and failing he invited a visit at his own home in Scranton.
The connection thus begun bore most of its fruit in the later ’80s rather than in 1883, but it produced certain results immediately. At midsummer George refused an invitation to speak before the now renamed Irish National League; and to Powderly he explained his reasons, at the same time sounding out the depth of their agreement. Dropping the word ‘land’ signified a loss of nerve among Irishmen, George believed, an accent on nationalism and a withdrawal from old ideas of economic transformation. ‘I regret to say that among the Irish leaders there have been none able enough and strong enough to stand firm.’
Not nationalism but internationalism of protest was the thing, urged George — protest from all who suffer. In this direction his track of thought closely paralleled the socialist one, yet did not do so exactly. ‘The only class in my opinion worth considering in any country is the class which these proposed measures [of the Irish National League] totally ignore — the laborers. Not that they are the only class worth thinking about, but until they are affected nothing general or permanent can be obtained . . . While I sympathize with the Irish people in their political oppressions I have no faith in mere political movements of any kind. When I see how much misery and degradation there is in our own country I cannot think that any mere political change would do anything to improve the condition of those classes of the Irish people who most desire our sympathy and need our aid.’
Powderly perhaps failed to answer this letter, but a couple of weeks later, in August, he and George met and talked, probably for the first time. The occasion was a Knights of Labor picnic in Baltimore, where they spoke together before a festive gathering of 3000 persons, colored and white in one audience. Powderly urged that the unions must grow; and George pleaded that working men and the women of their families must get into politics. Eight-hour and other strategy would raise the level of the unskilled worker, he said: raise the marginal worker and you raise all. How ideas do take hold was his satisfied impression after the meeting.
Incidentally the Maryland excursion included personal as well as political satisfactions. Henry and Annie George ran up to Em-mitsburg to visit the sister who was located temporarily in the mother house of the Sisters of Charity. Annie had not seen her for nearly twenty-five years, and Henry had never seen her. But after this brother and sister-in-law corresponded occasionally; and he sent presents, and in due course even asked the nun’s advice, when he was having his famous trouble with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.
Before August had passed, Henry George, back in New York, had the opportunity to make his ideas public when a committee of the United States Senate held hearings there on labor conditions and affairs. On the day he testified, the room in the Post Office building was crowded ‘with the disciples and admirers of the witness,’ according to the Tribune; and indeed many of the questions asked him were more than respectful, almost deferential in tone. Several witnesses — Louis Post, Charles Frederic Adams, a lawyer, Robert Blissert, a tailor, and Heber Newton, and there may have been others — expressed ideas very like his own.
Asked at the beginning of his testimony whether or not labor was actually being reduced to a worse condition, he replied cautiously that it was not possible to judge. But he said that discontentment was on the increase, and that social catastrophe might come soon — a not inaccurate prophecy just three years before 1886.
When questioned what he would do to improve things if he were made ‘dictator of the universe, or at least of the world,’ George said that he would not do much — dictators could not go far ahead of the people. He agreed that the constitutional powers of Congress would have to be enlarged to enact on a national scale the program he believed in; he acknowledged that a general land-value tax could not be reconciled with the circumscribed powers of Congress to enact direct taxes. But he thought the federal government would do much if it eliminated tariffs and established a government-owned telegraph as in England. He told the committee his story of fighting the Associated Press and Western Union in 1869.
Pressed rather hard on public ownership, he agreed, yes, that his ‘idea of communal ownership of land,’ as the question was phrased, was in some degree a socialistic proposition. Specifying less particularly than at other times what industries should be community-owned, he spoke perhaps more dogmatically than ever before, on that subject. ‘Practically I think the progress of events is towards the extension and enlargement of businesses that are in their nature monopolies, and that the State must add to its functions continually.’ About this hearing, the New York Tribune observed sourly that the federal government had no business concerning itself with such problems, and that, anyway, each senator could have a copy of Progress and Poverty at lower expense than a traveling investigation. But the committee members themselves accepted George’s recommendation that they hear from Mr. Heber Newton, which of course meant they would be confronted by a clergyman testifying in the same vein.
As in England during that very season — the Land Reform Union gathered in 1883 — so in America the followers of Henry George began to draw together, even on a national scale. Borrowing a name from the history of the pro-labor and anti-slavery movement thirty-five years earlier, Louis Post and others set up the American Free Soil Society. A year later the Free Soiler, newly started as an organ of the society, looked back to 1883 and admitted that first progress had been slow. But the members had become acquainted, and the work would catch on. ‘We aim to elevate the working poor and to save the middle class from destruction.’
However modest were the early numbers, the fellowship of the Free Soil Society involved a pleasant savor of the Bohemian, a taste none too frequent in Henry George history after his earlier San Francisco days. A group of New Yorkers who had been gathering for dinner and talk at ‘Dirty Dick’s,’ or Pedro de Beraza’s at 29 Center Street, decided to do more. In a place which acquired its charm, according to reminiscence, from excellent spaghetti and a cobwebby appearance, and the presence of rats, a noble document was drawn. The group pledged themselves to work ‘by peaceable methods’ to achieve the remedy of Henry George; and they invited new members to join the Free Soil Society without ‘distinction of race, sex, nationality or creed.’ Heber Newton became treasurer; Charles Frederic Adams, secretary; and A. J. Steers, George’s first New York disciple and the person who had told Father McGlynn about Progress and Poverty, was a charter member. There were other lawyers, and members of the Irish World staff; and the entire George family down to Jennie Teresa, who was hardly sixteen, belonged.
The organization had some igniting power from the start. From San Francisco, where the first Henry George organization, the Land Reform League, still carried on, George’s old friend, Judge Maguire, wrote that the league would reorganize into twelve ward groups of the Free Soil Society. William Hinton, John M. Days, and M. R. Leverson, names to stir George’s nostalgia and loyalty, were on the move, the judge reported. By the next spring the Free Soiler could list eighteen vice-presidents, each from a different state, the future distinguished Judge Jackson H. Ralston of Maryland among them. George must have been referring to the Free Soil Society when he wrote ‘Dear Comrade’ Joseph Labadie that what was ‘most needed is the propagation of ideas, and for that we want an organization which will serve as a standard and rallying point, rather than numbers. This organization will I hope serve at least as a beginning.’
Besides his principal writings and organizational activities, many incidentals of George’s life in 1883 indicate the priority of his concern with labor. Somehow he learned, for instance, about Laurence Gronlund; George was told that this socialist immigrant was living on $5 a week while earning $10, and was saving $3 a week toward publishing a book of social protest. This was the later important Cooperative Commonwealth, which actually came out in 1884. George certainly did not anticipate that Gronlund would become a severe critic of his own work, nor was he warned against Gronlund by the uneasiness he felt concerning Hyndman. He simply spoke warmly of the man and expected that his book would be ‘a rendition of German Socialism’ — as indeed it was — ‘a needed thing.’
From a quite different direction, that is, from the papers of Professor Richard Ely, who was still on the Johns Hopkins faculty and still at an early stage of his famous career, we learn that at this time Gronlund was speaking just as warmly of Henry George — as a friend whom he grouped with Heber Newton and John Swinton. And Mr. Newton, who was, as we have just seen, a leading member of the Free Soil Society, was also interested in a new New York journal of a new movement, the Christian Socialist. These threads weave into common design. The Henry George impulse, like many if not all native American protests, interfiliated with other impulses, some of them of foreign origin. Such a cross-connecting, to be expected in any period, was never more natural than during the early stages of the ‘new immigration’ of the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Yet, as the fall of the year came on, though many admired him, and though he had made some money and refused opportunities to make more, Henry George had not yet really got his ‘feet down’ in a practical way. And then a series of distressing events occurred. He lost his parents — his father in his eighties and his mother in her sixties. Simultaneously he ran out of funds and felt terribly at loose ends for a period of weeks.
At midsummer he had taken a resort vacation, at Budd’s Lake, New Jersey. He had the best rest in years — the first vacation since the studying summer of 1877 in Sausalito. For money he meant to sell his free-trade manuscript for newspaper serializing before book publication, hoping to repeat the financial success of ‘Topics of the Times’ in Leslie’s. But unaccountably the manuscript disappeared when it was about half done; and all at once he found himself down to his last $25. He regretted intensely that he had no newspaper to edit and wished from the heart that he had not refused Mr. Rice’s invitation.
Personal distress made the invitation of the Land Reform Union, to lecture in England and Scotland, seem doubly important; it meant earnings and the chance that succeeded so well, to sell Social Problems to a second publisher. But it also meant more than money.
It meant reputation and authority and power. In late 1883 the question with Henry George was: How great might his influence become in the world? In the United States he had hit upon the element he wished to affect first, which was organized labor. But he had by no means achieved influence equal to that which he had reached in England.
As the scheduling of the second and third visits to Britain worked out, the summer-and-autumn interval at home in 1884 proved too short for George to determine how new successes in England and Scotland had affected his standing in the United States. There can be no doubt about the longer run. The British tour of 1884 did build up George toward his spectacular entrance into politics. But the intermediate steps were by no means clear-cut; and warning signals again went up that mounting popularity overseas did not promise immediate acceptance at home.
While abroad he had been heard lecturing by one of the partners of Brooks and Dickson, the lecture agency. To George’s enormous satisfaction the firm proposed a handsome contract for a six-months tour in the United States. The agency offered to bear all expenses for Mr. and Mrs. George and a secretary; and George could choose to take either $800 a week or 60 per cent of the net receipts. The decision demanded pondering. He was elated to be offered what Ingersoll was paid — $200 per lecture — and he admitted that he would have taken less. But he thought also that the agents must be anticipating a real ‘George boom’; and he considered how miserable Annie would be, so he wrote her, should she soon discover ‘$1000 a night coming in and me getting only a paltry $200.’
So, while he was still abroad and riding the excitement of the meetings that gave birth to the Land Restoration League, he chose the option of 60 per cent. His mind rushed forward to visiting California again, to hoping that Harry would continue as his secretary. He even let himself be sad that the time had passed when he could put a carriage at the disposal of his parents and do other things to give them pleasure. At any rate Jennie could have a pony, he said.
But after a fortnight back in America such hopes were cruelly disappointed. He was welcomed home again at a working men’s meeting in Cooper Union, and once more given a dinner on the second night — this time not such an affair as the one at Delmon-ico’s. But the opening Brooks and Dickson lecture, delivered at the New York Academy of Music on ‘The Eighth Commandment,’ turned out a miserable fiasco — the first and last lecture under that marvelous contract. The audience hardly sufficed to pay the incidental costs.
George did make about ten speeches during the spring and summer, but he made only one during the fall before sailing; and this meant that he gave up lecturing, for 1884, as a method of supporting his family. By the testimony of American admirers and contemporaries — Messrs. Post, Newton, and Charles Frederic Adams — his method of extemporizing produced irregular results at this stage, sometimes ineffective and sometimes inspired. To San Francisco George wrote, immediately after the Academy of Music failure, that the tide had turned quickly against him, and that certain debts he had expected to pay would have to stand awhile longer.
George’s metaphor would have been more accurate had he said that no tide had risen. His method of speaking was best adapted, and brilliantly adapted, to audiences already in emotional rapport and willing to be swayed. In this respect America was not as ready to receive Henry George and assure him success on the platform as Britain was. Much the most significant audience he addressed, during the lean summer and fall of 1884, was a congress of the Episcopal Church, in Detroit. Heber Newton, who was becoming a kind of American Stewart Headlam, invited him. There, as a man of faith addressing men of faith on the question, ‘Is Our Civilisation Just to Workingmen?’ Henry George succeeded well. The speech was reported in the Churchman and was generously received. But there were not many audiences of that kind and intensity in the United States — or if there were, George was slow to discover them.
With few opportunities to speak, the other choice must have been completely obvious, that he now return to work at his desk. Anxiety or struggle about the decision was happily removed by Thomas Walker, his British Francis Shaw, who presently advanced him money. First George finished off the reply to the Duke of Argyll and then returned to work on Protection or Free Trade.
By the arrangement of Mr. Walter Cranford, a new friend and follower of the Brooklyn group, the writer and his family spent the summer on a Long Island farm near Jamaica, three miles from a railway. The season served the same purpose as the summer in Sausalito. George did some reading and hard thinking. Doubtless governed by experiences in Britain, he decided that he deeply opposed Marxism, and that some day he would have to write an answer to that brand of doctrine. But for the time being he concentrated on the manuscript. By fall it was about finished, he said, and once more he entertained hopes of serial publication and of profits in the not too distant future. For the winter he returned to Brooklyn, taking the house at 267 Macon Street. ‘I wish I had a pension or some bonds,’ he said.
This was the season of the Cleveland-Blaine campaign, the one that stirred the Irish immigrant element more deeply than perhaps any other election in our history. Ultimately 1884 would mean much to George, for after a quarter of a century the party of his inheritance and loyalty, once again a reform party, returned to power. But at the time he was completely bored, and completely inactive, even more remote from campaign activities than he had been in 1880. The Irish World went for Blaine, fully protectionist in the Irish way; and the Republican inclinations of certain of his associates may have been the principal factor that kept George quiet. But at least one friend thought he ought to seek office himself. To Nordhoff of the Herald on 24 October 1884, Henry George replied, ‘I think I can be quite as useful outside of Congress as in and I would not now seek a nomination in any way . . . But I quite as fully appreciate your kindness and esteem as though I wanted [to run].’
Though he was not to feel the same way in the campaigns of 1888 and 1892, George was not satisfied with Grover Cleveland as candidate and leader this first time. General Butler he regarded as quite an insincere leader of the Greenbackers. Not since childhood had he felt so little personal stake in the quadrennial decision. Sailing for Liverpool the day before election, he did take the trouble to pair with a Blaine man, so in a sense he voted for Cleveland; and in Britain he wrote an article saying that the Democratic victory must ultimately bring the realities of the tariff question back into politics.
But this was all. For Henry George the third trip to Britain, in behalf of the Scottish Land Restoration League, was an escape into political reality.
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About that trip we need to recall only a few points. Not at all an occasion of recession in Henry George’s influence in Britain, it was nevertheless a less exciting tour than the one preceding. It was a time for consolidating gains rather than adventuring first thrusts into the world of ideas and politics; and though he did not break the connections of 1882, George was already abandoning fusion tactics with socialists and Irish nationalists. More precisely, he was inviting social protest under his own banner, that of the Land Restoration League; and, outside that movement, he now preferred to accompany rather than to combine with radicals whose philosophy or lack of philosophy he disapproved.
At home to stay in 1885, George followed the same policy as in Scotland. His being in a less class-conscious state of mind than earlier placed no obstacles on his picking up threads, again, with the Knights of Labor. But this did not lead to much before 1886, George’s political year; and his first tactic was to return to the lecture platform. This time immediate results were better than in 1884, and perhaps another twelve months of the recession of the middle ’80s helped account for increased interest in his ideas. But he retained the doubts which had assailed his courage in England, about whether or not public speaking would do as a way for him to earn his living.
Thanks to a little series of letters, we are able at this stage to look behind the scenes at one of Henry George’s more important lecture appearances in inner America. The host who entertained him at Burlington, Iowa, in April 1885, tells us that a year earlier a sizable number of Henry George men, not of the laboring classes, were known to one another. In the group there were a judge, a lawyer, an Episcopal rector, and ‘myself a lifetime student of political economy,’ according to Mr. David Love. When George came to town, however, he lectured under the auspices of the Knights of Labor. Because he gave ‘The Crime of Poverty,’ one of his reprinted addresses, it is possible to say that he treated a small-city audience to the same kind of eloquence he used in London and Glasgow. He utilized his most telling platform devices: he illustrated low wages from a fresh report of Michigan statistics; he mentioned child labor as he had seen it within a short distance of Burlington; he retold the story of the degradation of working men in England, and made comparison with Crusoe’s island. In the end he reflected on the ‘utter absurdity of this thing of private property in land,’ and invited his audience to consider what would happen in their ‘little town’ should land-value taxation be instituted. ‘You could have a great free library; you could have an art gallery; you could get yourselves a public park.’ The speaker was disappointed that only 400 people turned out, on a Saturday, at 50 cents apiece; but he was appeased to find the Congregational Church crowded, the next night, to hear the ‘Moses’ address.
Mr. Love himself rounds out the story of Henry George’s impact on Burlington. Perhaps a dozen men were now confirmed, ‘with more or less clearness,’ as followers of the recent speaker; about fifty ( others followed at a greater distance. In widening circles among the Knights of Labor and among sympathizers with Irish protest, George was being ‘constantly discussed.’ A newspaper at Mt. Pleasant and a German one at Keokuk were advocating Progress and Poverty; and a clergyman near by had been presenting the book at the meetings of a reading society. Mr. Love said that in his own second thinking he preferred George because, unlike the socialists and unlike the churchmen, George made no effort to change men’s natures but only to change the operation of the laws of economics. His own group was abandoning their Free Soil Society affiliation, he reported, and was joining with the Knights of Labor instead.
It seems fair to assume that Burlington represents the impact of Henry George in many towns. On the other hand, as he himself discovered, a growing curiosity about his ideas did not mean any such wave of interest as overseas. On this trip he would have welcomed opportunities to go to Minnesota and Michigan, but he was not invited. He did stop at Indianapolis. A not very large audience which paid 50 cents a seat raised the question whether he was charging too much; and, as he had to stay over a day, on invitation to address the state legislature, he decided to experiment. He announced a second public lecture at a 10-cent charge, but he drew in few more hearers than at the regular rate. ‘I will do good even if I don’t make money,’ he wrote Annie at this time. But he said also, ‘That will be my policy in the future in lecturing — to have big audiences and to produce an effect.’ And in final judgment he added: ‘This trip is conclusive to my mind. There are everywhere people who want to hear me; but they do not anywhere amount to enough to make good lecture audiences.’ So he would not go to Canada or lecture at all unless circumstances indicated big audiences. ‘I will try something else. All the books sent here were sold.’
At home on Macon Street, George headed into several months of quiet work. His prior commitment was to the unfinished Protection and Free Trade manuscript, and by fall it was so far revised that he was able to sell parts for installment publication in newspapers. Meanwhile he had a lead article in the July issue of the North American Review. This was a dialogue with David Dudley Field, a lawyer and reformer of the law, who was not too opposed to George to draw out his ideas considerably. The article stated clearly Henry George’s intention to create both opportunities for labor and opportunities for investment. As definitely as anything in print, it showed that his scheme of taxation was economically equivalent to the public ownership of land; and a passage included the words, ‘the single tax upon land values.’ This I believe to be his first use of the phrase in print, with the definite article included. Though the phrase of course lacked any of the political connotations it would gather in 1887 and 1888, its appearance in the North American is one of several signs that George was now particularizing his program and being careful to make clear its differences from other reforms.
Though he wished when he could to tackle a new book, on money, George did a great deal of writing for the North American later in 1885 and in 1886. One of the articles was a potboiler purely, on ‘England and Ireland,’ for which he drew on his experiences abroad. But another, printed in April 1886, seems doubly important as it indicated, over and beyond his own effort, an effort by Mr. Rice to give unusual prominence to Henry George’s ideas. In each issue beginning in January, the North American carried articles about American landholding. The first, by Thomas P. Gill, was as severe as George. The ‘landlord and tenant laws’ of the states, according to the investigator, were ‘implements for extracting rent as simple, terrible, and brutally candid in their design as a revolver in the hand of a peremptory road agent.’ The February article listed the federal land grants which had been made to corporations since 1862, and let the figures speak; and in the March North American two writers replied, making an argument much like General Walker’s versus Henry George, three years earlier. This remarkable series — four articles in January, February, and March — gave the writer of the concluding article a splendid chance for a climax.
For the occasion George wrote ‘More about American Landlordism,’ the article mentioned above as the place where he conceded something to General Walker’s argument, that the average size of American farm holdings was falling rather than increasing. But he allowed this to be no more than a technical concession. Visualizing the process of land acquirement as a Californian who had seen New York and London, George returned to his original point that concentration and monopoly in landholding was becoming an ever more universal truth. That speculators and railroads disgorged and distributed to settlers he admitted, and those changes brought the acreage figures down. ‘But while this division is going on, the ownership of land may be in reality concentrating and landlordism increasing . . . What would be a small market garden would be a very large city lot . . . Where each house was once surrounded by a garden and orchard, a lot of twenty feet front now carries family upon family, living, on top of each other, in tiers . . . The ownership of square feet now enables [one] to live in luxurious idleness on the toil of his fellow citizens.’
Turning from urban landlordism to rural, George made a powerful criticism, not his first but an early one, of the American theory of the agricultural ladder — the idea, more prevailing then than now, ‘that tenant-farming is, in the natural order of things, the intermediary stage through which “agricultural laborers” are enabled to pass into a condition of landowners.’ George condemned the agricultural ladder as ‘just the reverse’ of truth. Following his old thought about the South since the Civil War, the article presents farm-tenancy as a form of labor’s bondage rather than an emancipation into ownership. ‘More about American Landlordism’ was Henry George’s final piece of writing about land policy and land problems in the United States.
At about the time the article appeared, the author abandoned his desk for a short period of travel in the Middle West and in Pennsylvania. In Ohio he made several addresses, which included a debate on free trade against a labor-union man. But this was not a lecture tour of the kind which had recently baffled him, and all the speaking seems to have been incidental.
During this trip he visited a famous brownstone mansion in Cleveland for the first time, in what seems to have been a response to a call made not long before in his own home in Brooklyn. The caller had been Tom Loftin Johnson, who had made up his mind by then to be a complete follower of Henry George. The story of his decision resembles that of many others: he had read first Social Problems, which was sold to him by a railway vendor, and had gone on to Progress and Poverty. But Johnson was no ordinary convert. Thirty-one in 1885, and entirely inexperienced in politics, he was an American industrial monopolist, in the historic age of the monopolists. He had already behind him enough of his career as inventor, entrepreneur, and owner, in street railways and steel, to have become a man of wealth and power. When he read George’s books he instructed a lawyer to refute them if he could; and, when that effort failed, he decided that no refutation was possible. We are free to imagine the satisfaction the traveler had, by reason of the distinguished hospitality of Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, and of the dedication and promise of Tom Johnson’s commitment.
Before he moved from private life to public, in the amazing summer of 1886, George did one more notable job. It combined the activities of the field with those of the study. He was commissioned by the North American Review to do a series of articles on ‘Labor in Pennsylvania.’ Naturally the assignment suited him: a study in his home state, and in a segment of the economy where subsoil resources were monopolized, and where the labor force was drawn from remote parts of the world. Invading Pennsylvania was a little like invading the Duke of Argyll’s lands, and a little like studying again California’s regional economy. Going in the month of May, he was thrilled by the beauty of the countryside, and he wished that Annie were with him.
But he went to see economic realities, and he observed and talked his way through industrial parts of the state he had not seen before — through Hazelton, Pottsville, Harrisburg, Altoona, Johnstown, and Pittsburgh. The timing meant that he collected his data during the very month of the historic wave of strikes, the biggest and most spontaneous in American history, which was punctuated by the bomb burst in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. But George seems not to have been much affected by the emotion of the movement; he enjoyed the assignment and reached an over-all judgment that the condition of the state was bad but not at all hopeless.
His economic findings he took to Brooklyn to write up at his convenience, and the resulting articles were published during the fall and winter. He kept to the tone of objective study and moderate recommendation. Though America’s anti-radical panic after Haymarket was represented, even in the journal for which he was writing, by articles telling readers that revolution was breeding in the heavy air, Henry George reverted to the fact-finding phase of his mental operations which had governed his economic reporting on the West coast. Rather than the man with a reform, he became for the most part the student of conditions. He wrote in cold statistics about many facets of the state’s economy. Drawing from publications of the state Bureau of Labor Statistics, he indicated how labor’s low wages were rendered the more inadequate by unemployment in the mine fields. But he discovered few danger signals of radicalism. He reported that while working men were concerned about their situation they were not rabid, and he thought them cautious about using or approving the strike as a weapon of economic advantage.
Of course the writer’s dispassion meant no abandonment of his habitual moral judgments or of his formulas. In these articles, as he had not done in Progress and Poverty, he incorporated figures on child labor, and he displayed pages of affidavits by miners whose real wages had either declined or not improved by having immigrated from Great Britain. He compared company-owned houses in Pennsylvania with the huts he had seen in Ireland, mine owners’ mansions with Irish manor houses, and the coal and iron police with the Irish constabulary. He raised the question whether or not bringing the ‘Huns’ to the coalfields involved the same danger as allowing the Chinese in California, but decided not, for he noticed that Hungarian immigrants had already organized effective unions. He urged the necessity for laboring men to take the initiative and think and act with care.
Free-trade policy was his first advice this time. He castigated the state’s tariff tradition as superstition, a bondage of ideas which the unions must learn to cast off. Wages were brought low, he said, not by reason of imports but by the competition of laborers for jobs.
He returned to his familiar land-monopoly diagnosis, but did so with uncommon brevity and force.
In contrast with his predecessors in the North American, the panicky contributors on the labor crisis in the June issue, George was analytical and restrained. In contrast with aggressive trade unionists, and in completest contrast of all with the country’s fringe of Marxists, Henry George’s preference in 1886 as always was for political methods, rather than non-political, to bring about changes in society.
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Meanwhile George had actually completed Protection or Free Trade. His negotiations of the fall of 1885 led to a fairly satisfactory result. Though some newspapers, which he hoped would serialize certain chapters, refused entirely, and others insisted on price reduction or on cutting down the size of the installments, half a dozen papers did contract to print. They stretched across the continent: the Brooklyn Eagle, the New York Star, the San Francisco Examiner, the Louisville Courier, the Charleston News and Courier, and the Toronto Globe. A little later the London Star, run by George’s friends, carried parts of the book also.
Because, to the shame of American liberalism, there has been no strong habit in the United States of writing and working in behalf of international freedom of trade, certainly nothing to compare with the vigor of the protectionist tradition from Alexander Hamilton through the Carey school of economists, it is worth while to notic° that peddling Protection or Free Trade brought in to George agreeable testimony of good will. In San Francisco William Hinton acted for his ex-partner; and when he had sold the rights to publish he wrote also that Judge Maguire and others of the city were busy ‘propagating the faith as handed down to them from Henry George with true apostolic fervor.’ From the South, Henry Watterson, accepting for the Courier, wrote in a friendly way; and the editor of the Charleston paper, the remarkable F. W. Dawson, asking for a price reduction, quite pleaded to have the serialization, for the good of the region. George was pleased to have about $3000 coming from the newspapers. And of course he believed, as he did about Progress and Poverty, that publication would help mightily to force a great question on the political parties, and on the attention of the people.
Book publication waited on revision, however, and was delayed until about the time of George’s visit to Ohio during the spring.
A new firm, Henry George and Company, was the publisher. By family and friends this organization was understood to represent a partnership between the author and his younger son, for Richard was all there was of the ‘and Company.’ The timing of events, and future events, suggest the possibility that Tom Johnson had some quiet role as guarantor; but perhaps George’s recent take from the newspapers explains all that needs explaining about how capital was obtained. The purpose of the firm was to bring under George’s own personal control all present and future questions of profits, propaganda, and the subsidization of his writings.
For the book which was the first to come out under the new auspices, the author chose the opposite of the inductive procedure he had used in the Pennsylvania labor articles. He was entirely conscious of doing thu. A letter of 14 September 1884 in which he rejected a suggestion from Dr. Taylor, his old intimate, expresses the decision completely. ‘My view of the matter is the reverse of yours,’ wrote George. ‘I do not think induction employed in such questions as the tariff is of any use. What the people want is theory: and until they get a correct theory into their heads, all citing of facts is useless.’
For the actual text, the author-publisher relied heavily on propositions, reminiscent of the San Francisco Post, such as protection is ‘repugnant to moral perceptions and inconsistent with the simplicity and harmony which we everywhere discover in natural law.’ In an autobiographical passage he alluded to his conversion to free trade, in the Sacramento lyceum meeting of 1866. As earlier — in Progress and Poverty and in many places — he represented free trade and land-value taxation as the two sides of one true coin of right policy. Together not separately, he said with an argument more fully developed than before, they could be used to open the resources of the world to all who would invest or work.
At first glance, the middle ’80s would seem to have been an unlikely time for so doctrinaire and uncompromising a book. Not only had a quarter of a century of Republicanism built a whole series of tariff walls into the structure of national legislation, but one year of Democratic control had shown no wish to take them down. More than that, for a writer to be for labor and against protection amounted almost to a contradiction in political terms. George could have wanted no alliances with such free-trade economists as his old opponent, William Graham Sumner, if only because the professor opposed labor unions — as an Lsue of freedom — from first to last. Nor was there comfort from old friends of Liberal Republican days. David Ames Wells is remembered as saying in frustration, of the work of the tariff lobbies in the ’80s: 'This is the revolution. It will take another revolution to overthrow the leadership now established by business men.’
Yet in a closer view, the timing of Protection or Free Trade, even the dogmatism which announced for the principles of the Physiocrats as more thoroughgoing than those of the house of Adam Smith, seems not so strange after all. Though so far as the world knew in 1886, Grover Cleveland possessed no impulse to return to first Democratic principles, against the tariff, there is a possibility that George had a notion that inclinations were actually different at the White House. Not unlikely the working author learned from Thomas Shearman about an interview as early as 1883, in which Cleveland made a confidential statement of distaste for the national tariff policy. And from another direction of encouragement, though he himself was not involved, George must have known when George Haven Putnam, the publisher, called a meeting of free traders and revenue reformers in 1883. As we have already seen, though George regarded the New York Free Trade Club as not his kind, he had accepted membership when Poultney Bigelow got him in. In sum, a certain gathering of anti-tariff sentiment had occurred; and now, as in California against the land monopolizers, he was not entirely isolated in his thinking. Once again, Henry George was simply more vigorous, more articulate and doctrinaire, than others were.
When the book appeared, reviewers made just about such a comment as the one above, but they did so with an adverse twist of meaning. In the new Political Science Quarterly, George B. Newcomb said that George attached free trade too closely to land-value taxation, and the two were set forth as too complete a panacea for readers with intellectual tastes. Though Newcomb was not altogether unfriendly, he protested George’s ‘rhetorical method’ and said, much as German scholars had said of Progress and Poverty, that a larger use of historical data would have made a more effective argument. In the Chicago Dial, Albert Shaw pooh-poohed the book, but the New York Critic, a somewhat similar paper which had been friendly to Progress and Poverty, gave a favorable notice and selected for praise George’s stand for the international copyright. Quite naturally the newspapers were for the most part adverse and spoke in accordance with their editorial policies.
Yet this book, next to Progress and Poverty, is the one of George’s writings least to be judged by immediate reactions and momentary standards. If its ideological quality offended early readers, the book showed long-run strength which seems to have drawn from that very quality. There appeared an immediate German translation, and there were later Danish and Spanish ones; and though disappointingly no early edition was published in England, Kegan Paul did bring one out in 1903, when the sands were running low on a period of Conservative government. Protection or Free Trade is the George book which has the unique history of being printed entire in the Congressional Record, and being distributed gratis by the hundreds of thousands through the United States mails. By then, when the book was six years old, some 200,000 copies had gone out from Henry George and Company.
Protection or Free Trade is the climax of the effort of Henry George to find a place for himself on the national stage, before he was drawn into politics. Britain had received him and considered him, and partly adopted him, as the author of Progress and Poverty. But his native land had required an apprenticeship longer by three or four years.
As he now emerged to real prominence, the record made the man of 1886 a man of paradoxes indeed: a radical land theorist, but one who denied the homestead farm as a safety valve for working men; a spokesman for labor, but one who protested more strongly than anyone else the national policy commonly believed to protect American working men; a local-government Jeffersonian, but one who spoke for government’s playing a strong role in economic affairs, and sometimes for the federal government’s doing so. His course in politics would not be easy.
Yet he was quite as ready for recognition at home now, as he had been for recognition in the British Isles a little earlier. His mind had tackled the acknowledged realities of the nation’s economic life; he had been accepted in the highest places of journalism; he had forced the attention of a few ranking academic men; he had been heard a little in the forums across the land. He had established durable connections in the labor movement; and he had acquired loyal friends among the upper middle class. No one else in the United States would have filled quite the same specifications.
Conquest in New York City: Labor Leader and Almost Mayor 1886
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Henry George never acted more exactly in accord with his idealistic conceptions of history than he did in late 1885 and during 1886. One day, not too far in the future, he was saying over and over again, Americans will be affected by Progress and Poverty and Protection or Free Trade and right theory will bring about changes in national policy. Simply realize the hard facts about the condition of labor was the assertion between the lines of the Pennsylvania articles; then hysteria will pass and justice be done.
If George could be optimistic and idealistic about the United States, he could feel that way about Great Britain also. To be sure the British election of 1885 proved to be hard on the Radicals. And presently, as Gladstone in his third government came out for Irish Home Rule, and as this created the occasion of Joseph Chamberlain’s famous exit from Liberalism into Unionism, two tendencies in British politics w'hich George approved — generosity toward Ireland and generosity toward the laboring classes — separated themselves from one another. In time the process strengthened such pro-tariff impulses and such Conservatism as George heartily opposed. Yet even while new and strong currents of politics were beginning to eddy in unwelcome directions, he distilled hope from news across the sea.
‘A little knot of thorough-going “Land Restorationists" have been
elected to the new Parliament,’ he wrote triumphantly, late in 1885, to Josephine Shaw Lowell — his patron’s daughter, and James Russell Lowell’s daughter-in-law. He correctly envisaged in the handful of members, and in like-minded land nationalizers and about twenty others who would go with them, a concentration of energy that would impel British opinion and affect legislation.
Particularly James Durant, his London friend and publisher, encouraged optimism. During his last tour in Britain, Durant had told him that among circles of young men where George had previously been scorned, he was now respected. Would he consider coming to live in England? He might well assume leadership in a new parliamentary party, the publisher said; and he might become editor of a big new paper, at a salary of, say, £1000 a year.
This preceded the election of 1885. After it, early in 1886, Durant again offered enticements to bring George across the ocean and give him an established role. If he would come to London, he could count on time free for a certain amount of writing; a £300 guaranty-fund would be set up, as a kind of re insurance; he would be free to go outside the city for occasional lecturing, on subjects to his taste. Durant even suggested titles, old and new: ‘Why do men starve?’ ‘Why work is scarce and wages are low,’ ‘Free Trade and Fair Trade,’ ‘The Coming Revolution,’ and ‘Christian Socialism.’ In the old country, the invitation pleaded, Henry George could assume at once a certain leadership and power.
This was a little overwhelming. But as the Ohio tour indicated, George’s fortunes were picking up at home, and writing for the North American must have been profitable in money as well as prestige. George quickly decided that he could not go immediately to Britain, or ever go to stay very long; but he did not easily say no to another visit. Even in midsummer, when the possibility of his becoming mayor of New York had dawned, he reverted to Durant’s invitation and seriously considered a trip that very autumn.
To his more intimate British friend, Thomas Walker, George explained his strategy a little, as matters developed. The real reason for bringing out Protection or Free Trade in the way he did, setting himself up as publisher, he wrote, was to prepare the way for starting a completely independent paper in New York. He intended something much bigger than the Free Soiler of 1884, or the quite similar little Spread the Light, a Journal of Social Progress and Tax
Reform, which lasted a few monthly issues in 1886. (This journal used the phrase, ‘the single tax reform,’ in the September number.) Now he was anxious to be ready in force, whenever his hope of Cleveland’s victory might be realized — the hope that a new era of political discussion would open, and advanced economic ideas could be considered once again, in a climate friendly to growth. Protection or Free Trade was ‘a part of my scheme for the U.S.,’ he told Walker. ‘Then comes the paper . . . Then I think I can show you that the good seed has been growing here.’
To one of his British correspondents, Richard McGhee, who as leader of the Scottish Land Restoration League and a member of Parliament ranks as the first consistent follower of Henry George to achieve a role in a national legislature, George gave just a hint, in early June 1886, that his ‘scheme for the U.S.’ might include something practical, over and beyond the ideological effort. The time would soon be ripe for entering politics at home, he wrote, as though that vague statement were sufficient to explain his not accepting the invitations to England.
This was a month before the idea of a great mayoralty campaign arose in labor-union circles in New York. There is no sign earlier than midsummer that George made any practical political moves at all, or even discussed such possibilities among his immediate colleagues. Then, when overtures were made to him, he did go to Tom Johnson and a very few others, by that time with a perfectly concrete situation in mind.
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Apparently there is no document to date the day on which the spark flashed between the cathode of the Central Labor Union and the anode of George’s own political charge. Joseph Jackson, a reporter for the Herald, claims to have made the original alignment between the two. At a meeting in a hat store in the Bowery, he advised a group of trades-union men that they should concentrate all political energies to elect a mayor. The name of George came up. After someone objected that the reformer was disqualified because he resided in Brooklyn, Mr. Jackson made an inquiry. ‘By the way, Mr. George, where are you living?’ he asked the question as casually as he could. ‘In Harlem, on Pleasant Avenue.’ ‘You’ll do.’ ‘Do for what?’ ‘You’ll find out later,’ Jackson answered, ‘it’s a little secret just now.’ As Louis Post is the recorder of the conversation, the story seems entirely plausible.
The fluid situation in which the contact occurred we have glimpsed in the preceding chapter. It would be difficult to exaggerate the complexities of labor’s situation in the United States in
1886. The factors of grievance, accumulating in strikes; the factors of ambition, exhibited as the Knights of Labor expanded and the Federation of Labor was born; and the surrounding anxieties and tensions, drawn to focus by the Haymarket affair — all denoted a condition of energy, hope, cross-purposes, and fear. It may fairly be said that an impulse to political action was as natural in trade-union history in 1886 as Henry George had always believed it to be. But not since Jackson’s day had independent labor parties in the East accomplished anything significant at the polls; and, if George had in mind Joseph Chamberlain’s success as pro-labor humanitarian mayor of Birmingham, he must have known also that his old friend John Swinton represented the hazard of labor politics in New York. In 1874 that maverick of radical thought, Presbyterian and socialist, had run for mayor as candidate of the Industrial Political Party and had received a mere handful of votes.
The obvious similarity of what was occurring in New York and the nation in 1886, to what had been so bitter to George in San Francisco and California during 1877 and after, must have struck the prophet of depression and reform. There was hunger in the streets, and fear of revolution in the newspapers. For days after the bombing and the bloodshed in Chicago, 4 May, the metropolitan papers carried stories of the event and the consequences of it. Quite naturally the prosecution of the anarchists and the decisions of the Illinois courts became a particularly touchy matter in New York City, and they remained so through the executions of November
1887, and afterward — and were a recurring tragic leitmotiv during the whole period of George’s political emergence.
Though the dominant reaction to all this was so generally like the California red scare of 1877, there were also, of course, more liberal reactions. As Professor Henry May has observed in his study of Protestant social thought, the year 1886 designates one of the three social ‘earthquakes’ of the final quarter of the nineteenth century, which had the effect of arousing numbers of American Christians to the horrid conditions of labor around them. (The earlier ‘earthquake’ occurred in 1877, the later one from 1892 to 1894.) In the crisis of 1886, spiritual leaders of the quality of Washington Gladden and Edward McGlynn rose in their pulpits to lament and prophesy.
Other literature was converging with pulpit literature in this stream. Journals of religion gave increased attention to social problems; novelists turned again, after the lull that followed antislavery, to writing about social issues. And in the universities likewise, occasional conspicuous scholars, such as Ely of Johns Hopkins, who in 1886 brought out a book on American socialism, and young Professor Edmund James of the Wharton School, addressed themselves to the problems and patterns of industrial poverty.
Organized labor itself had a real role, not only as the object but as a creator and participator in the new social sympathy. This is nowhere better indicated than in the sizable, intelligent, and informing collaborative volume, The Labor Movement the Problem of the Day, which, published in 1887, estimated the large situation of 1886 precisely. The editor and compiler was George E. McNeill of Massachusetts, who had been brought up a shoemaker and an abolitionist, and who had reached fame as a trade-unionist spokesman for the eight-hour day. Of recent years he had been an active Knight of Labor, and at present was doing all he could to reconcile the new AF of L with the older K of L. During the coming fall, exactly parallel with George, he would run an unsuccessful campaign to be mayor of Boston. It is a little surprising that, though the Fabian tracts which were just appearing in England have been so much appreciated, the volume McNeill edited is now a forgotten piece of American social literature.
Henry George’s assignment in this manifesto was the twenty-third chapter, ‘The Land Question.’ Of course he did a condensation rather than any revision of his ideas; and the significance of the chapter is that, after American labor had for half a century entertained the homestead idea as its one theory about land policy, following the ideas of George Henry Evans and the Working Man’s Advocate, George at this stage of his history was permitted to strike for his own particular scheme. He was being admitted not only to trade-union thinking but into distinguished independent company as well. In chapters surrounding his own, for instance: Mr. McNeill himself spoke for restricting the hours of women’s and children’s labor, a familiar line of trade-union policy; Professor James did an essay on the need to reform the conspiracy laws to prevent their operating against the unions; Franklin H. Giddings — who was still on the Springfield Republican but would soon launch his distinguished career in sociology — had an excellent chapter on labor history; and Heber Newton contributed ‘Industrial Education.’ In this circle, George’s chapter, the most theoretical one in the book, may be read as one sign of his arrival at a point he had been aiming for when he began correspondence with Powderly in 1883 — a position of recognition and influence in molding labor thought.
In New York City the Central Labor Union of course represented labor’s capacity to combine; and questions of loyalty and attachment counted heavily in that circle. Mr. Jackson tells us that as soon as Henry George’s name came up at the hat-store meeting, questions were asked. But the quarter-century-old membership in the printer’s union put him in the record as a craft-union man, and his membership in the Knights of Labor certified him as belonging to the still more numerous, and more political, branch of the labor movement. It is easy to understand that George suited the CLU well when a political leader was needed.
From George’s own side the rapprochement would not be as easy. An Irish element had assisted him into the Knights of Labor, though; and the history of the Central Labor Union showed that the organization had been established, only four years earlier, by an Irish refugee tailor ‘for the purpose of sending greetings to the workers of Ireland in their struggle against English landlordism.’ (The timing permits conjecturing whether an Irish World article by Henry George incited the gathering.) But during the years since 1882 elements less acceptable to George had entered the CLU. Marxist members of the Socialist Labor party sometimes gave addresses; and a class-conscious goal was written into the official appeal. In the organization’s own words: ‘The concentration of all unions into one solid body for the purpose of assisting each other in all struggles — political or industrial — to resist every attempt of the ruling classes directed against our liberties, and to extend our fraternal hand to the wage-earners of our land and to all nations of the globe.’
From the beginning the organization had matched vigor of words with forwardness in action. It was the first in the United States to use the boycott in a large way, the new Irish weapon of economic coercion; it made itself the central-strategy body of the New York strikes in 1886; it interfiliated with craft unions, with independent bodies, and with assemblies of the Knights of Labor. It made a rule that none but working men were eligible to join; and, apparently at the suggestion of Louis Post, its legal counsel, it was first to adopt and promote Labor Day as an annual holiday. When a new constitution was drawn up in 1886, the CLU brought together 207 unions, and it represented about 50,000 working men in New York, Brooklyn, and Jersey City.
Politics had been the CLU’s unsuccessful department, so far. In its year of birth, 1882, candidates had been nominated for Congress, Louis Post among them. But after that election seemed to prove that members of trades unions voted for the nominees of the major parties according to individual preferences, the union withheld in 1884. Thus the nomination of Henry George in 1886 represents a strand of personal succession from the candidacy of Louis Post, the author of Labor Day, to the candidacy of Post’s friend, the author of Progress and Poverty.
On 2 July 1886, occurred the event which swung the Central Labor Union back to political activity. The place was the law court of J udge George C. Barrett.
During the spring the union had won a remarkable victory over a keeper of a music and beer garden. This was George Theiss, an employer whom the waiters and bartenders unions by themselves had at first been unable to bring to terms. But the CLU’s boycott had worked; and part of the settlement to which the proprietor acceded obliged him to pay the union $1000 as costs.
The matter came to law when Mr. Theiss denounced the commitment as an extortion and illegal. A grand jury acted first, then the criminal court, presided over by Judge Barrett. Mr. Post represented the working men. But the lawyer for the employer, using the rhetoric of the freedom of capital, won the case and won a devastating decision. The judge sentenced five CLU men to terms in Sing Sing, none shorter than eighteen months. To be sure clemency was exercised after 100 days by Governor Hill, who commuted the sentences on the ground that Mr. Theiss’s payment ‘seemed to lack many of the elements necessary to constitute “extortion” as it had been previously interpreted in the courts.’ But by that time, in October, the Central Labor Union had returned to politics in force.
Labor’s first response to the Barrett decision was a Cooper Union mass meeting on 7 July. Addresses were made by John McMackin, the union leader who would soon take direction of the mayoral campaign, and by John Swinton, who for four years now had been bringing out a labor weekly under his own name. Four days later the Central Labor Union set up a committee on political ways and means, and that committee in turn proposed a conference to take place in August. The committee envisaged what the twentieth century has known as ‘united front’ politics. Specifically, it proposed a meeting of delegates — one delegate for each 100 members of the supporting organizations — from all the unions in town and from such friendly political bodies as the Anti-Monopolists, the Greenback party, and the Socialist Labor party. Presumably the hat-store episode occurred at some stage of the warming-up for the conference, during the month of July.
In February 1884, while George was making speeches in Scot: land, John Swinton’s Paper had nominated him for President of the United States, and Louis Post for Vice-president, on a platform of the principles of Progress and Poverty. Now on 1 August, Swinton again spoke first. ‘It May Be a Boom,’ the editor headed his pronouncement. ‘A fitter candidate could not be found. He is as true as steel. He embodies the aspirations of the masses. He is a worker, a printer, a unionist, a Knight of Labor, a man of business experience; and it will not be held against him that he is a native of the country, and the most renowned living American author, it may be a boom.’ John Swinton’s must have been the paper which Henry George, Jr., says his father refused to take seriously when Richard interrupted an office conference to bring in the exciting forecast.
But very rapidly the nomination ceased to be at all unlikely. The Central Labor Union called for a clean sweep of the city’s offices: ‘Honest men can be elected to administer the affairs of government and the laws can be enforced by the rich and poor alike.’ On the scheduled day the convention met in Clarendon Hall, more than 400 strong; and it voted, 362 to 40, to fight an independent political campaign. Within two weeks an organization had been blueprinted. A platform was drawn. Planks announced for ‘freesoil ideas’ and for labor’s more familiar and less doctrinaire demands: an effective eight-hour system, the abolition of child labor, and the like. There was no loud sound of socialism, and up until 20 August, no names were announced. On that day a committee called. Would Henry George accept a labor nomination for the office of mayor of New York?
George took a week to answer. To say yes he would have to put behind him for the time being all thought of going to England, and of course would have to defer still longer the writing of his primer of economics. But there is in the Henry George collection a memorandum in his own handwriting entitled ‘John Swinton and His Friends’ which gives an uncomfortable modern-sounding reason for his hesitating about united-front politics. Would he become a front-man merely, less than a true leader, possibly the puppet of forces which denied his own ideals?
Henry George’s anxieties are voiced in comment on a little book of political travels, which Swinton had brought out in 1880 — that is, after the intimacy of their correspondence between California and New York. Swinton, he noted, is ‘widely known as a thorough going communist, in full affiliation with all those European destructives who come to New York when they find their own countries too hot to hold them, and who are plotting to bring about the destruction of society.’ The memorandum is undated, but it represents George’s attitude of 1883 and after, as we have seen it.
The invited candidate’s reply to the labor convention naturally avoided phrasing any such issue. First of all George stated his general convictions broadly, along lines straight from his earliest California-based thinking. Labor should be active in politics, he said, and there ought to be a political party democratic in the fullest meaning of the word. His second proposition was at least as old with him as the Post, but one senses reinforcement from his British experiences. Municipalities are the place to start reform, he asserted, for we must ‘address ourselves to what is nearest at hand.’ One point, of seven in his message, went to land-value taxation. Applying that idea in New York, taking the ‘immense values created by the growth of the population,’ could bring into existence the most beautiful and healthful of cities. Defeat held no fears for him,
George said, in concluding, but he would not be involved in a movement that might prove to have little popular support at the polls. So he fixed a condition which was then unique in the history of American vote-getting. Yes, he would accept candidacy for mayor if and when the new political organization would present petitions signed by 30,000 men who would pledge themselves to work and vote in his behalf.
As he doubtless wanted, the immediate effect was to slow down and to intensify the labor effort. In September there had to be meetings at every level of organization. To bring funds to the CLU an assessment was placed on all participating organizations, at the rate of twenty-five cents for each individual member. The petition rolls had to be prepared, circulated, and signed. Time was required, and dedication by a great number of people.
But even while energies were being tested and gathered, there were ample signs that George had not demanded too much. On Labor Day he reviewed a parade and received an ovation — the first American demonstration for him to outdo the reception home from Ireland four years earlier. Perhaps the most convincing testimony of labor’s mounting political spirit is that of Samuel Gompers. Writing after almost forty years of opposing the American Federation of Labor’s entering politics, Gompers recalls 1886 in his autobiography. At first he resisted even this political impulse, he says, but on second thought, ‘I appreciated the movement as a demonstration of protest. The campaign was notable in that it united people of unusual abilities from many walks of life and that it proved a sort of vestibule for many who later undertook practical work for human betterment. Many leaders in the constructive work of the following years were recruits of the Henry George campaign.’ Presently Gompers became chairman of the city organization of Henry George Clubs and took charge of the speakers bureau. By October he was making speeches every day, convinced in spite of himself that he was marching toward a great victory.
On 23 September occurred a major step in the consolidation between candidate and party. A second general conference at Clarendon Hall made the nomination formal, and it endorsed a new platform written by Henry George himself. Frank Ferrell, a Negro prominent in the Knights of Labor, presented it; and the New York World caught the spirit of the document in saying that it was an epitome of Progress and Poverty. The new party -— some months were required to establish its name as the United Labor party — now departed altogether from the eclecticism of the original platform. On the economic side, there was a denunciation of monopoly in the old and eloquent way. The new platform demanded that values created by urban growth — land values and the monopoly values of utilities alike — should be channeled to the people. As in San Francisco, George called for the reconstruction of city government, and especially for simplifying court procedures. Again as in California he spoke for a constitutional convention, in order to open the avenues for reforms not to be made in any other way. Asserting as always the principle of equality implicit in the Declaration, George reduced the first platform’s emphasis on social class; and he appealed for the support of all citizens.
Though formality and finality of acceptance still waited on the great number of signatures, the Clarendon Hall platform brought the union of man and movement close to completion. George may have intended real reservation in an if clause he inserted in an interview, which the New York Sun printed on 24 September just after the convention. ‘I have not sought any nomination, and if I accept one it will be only for the sake of advancing principles I believe in.’ But a Tribune reporter described him as entirely at ease in his office, dressed in a Prince Albert coat and surrounded by friends, and in an optimistic frame of mind. Would he be able to put his theories into practice, if elected, the reporter inquired. No, not very well as mayor. But election would greatly advance his ideas, George said, and he would not be surprised to receive 90,000 votes. He was counting on the support not of labor alone, but also of men of independent mind, such as Father McGlynn, James Redpath (now of the North American, later of lecture-bureau fame), and Poultney Bigelow, all of whom were already committed.
In private fact George made his own irrevocable commitment in a conference with an enemy. Here we have his own account which, though he did not render it until 1897, and then it was objected to, seems to tell the essential truth. While still free to withdraw from the campaign George was sought out by William Ivins, the city chamberlain and a personal friend of the Democratic mayor in office, William R. Grace. As a man of wealth, education, and interest in reform, Mr. Ivins represented the more civilized branch of New York’s Democrats, as well as the party in a general way.
The two men met for dinner in a German restaurant in Lafayette Place. ‘We sat down in a private room, unattended, and smoked some cigars together.’ According to the candidate’s memory eleven years later, Mr. Ivins spoke entirely to the point: Henry George could never become mayor of New York, no matter how many votes were cast for him — he ‘could not possibly be counted in.’ So the Democrats proposed a deal. If George would refuse the nomination, Tammany and the County Democrats would have him elected to Congress from a district they controlled — perhaps this meant Congressman Hewitt’s — and, in the interval, George could visit Europe. Mr. Ivins’ denials of 1897 said that he could have offered no seat in Congress, because he had no such party authority; that he went to George not to bribe but to befriend; and that he told him that he would be snowed under if he ran, not counted out.
The common area of the two stories is that the two did meet, that Mr. Ivins did suggest that George run for Congress, and that a representative of Mayor Grace did say that George would surely lose if he persisted as candidate. This supplies sufficient agreement as to fact to make it unnecessary to question George’s story of his own reply. ‘You tell me I cannot possibly get the office. Why if I cannot get the office, do you want me to withdraw?’ To which Mr. Ivins did not deny answering: ‘You cannot be elected but your running will raise hell.’ Then Henry George ended the interview. ‘You have relieved me of embarrassment. I do not want the responsibility and the work of the Mayor of New York, but I do want to raise hell! I am decided and I will run.’
By September’s end, at war with the country’s most powerful machine, George tried a tactic from the fight of 1882 in Ireland. He sounded out the new archbishop of New York. Himself an intimate now of the powerful Father McGlynn, George had every opportunity to understand the interfiliations which, to his advantage, tied his old friends of New York’s Catholic and Irish element with his new friends of the labor movement. Likewise he must have understood equally well the loyalties which, to his disadvantage, cross-connected both sets of friends with his new enemy, Tammany Hall. At the moment Father McGlynn was still forbidden, under a ruling given by Archbishop McCloskey, to speak on Irish land affairs. But he had announced for Cleveland in 1884, and he was anything but a cowed or politically indifferent man. If he were free for politics, George would have an incomparably valuable political ally.
The new archbishop, Michael Corrigan, had had as yet no reason for fresh action within the premises. Yet surely, when Father Mc-Glynn supplied George with a letter of introduction, both of them must have understood that they were approaching the most authoritarian kind of archbishop, different in ideas from the Bishop of Meath, and in temperament from a McCloskey or a Cardinal Gibbons. Archbishop Corrigan belonged, as definitely as Bishop Mc-Quaid of Rochester, to a type of churchman frequent in Ireland and traditional in French Canada. On the other hand, he and McGlynn had been collegemates together in Rome; and it is just conceivable that George made his call actually believing that the archbishop could be brought to say that he would not interfere if McGlynn chose to participate in labor politics.
Certainly George proceeded as though he believed in such a possibility. But, while Corrigan received him courteously, he refused to discuss any phase of the coming campaign except the problem of Edward McGlynn. Thus George learned at once that if the preacher were to enter the campaign he would be suppressed. George tried to explain that the ideas he held about property involved no conflict with church doctrine. But here he confronted a closed mind; through all that followed, Corrigan never comprehended, and apparently did not try to comprehend, George’s distinctions between property in land and property in things. George fared no better when he tried to persuade the archbishop that priests as citizens should exercise the same right to speak in behalf of a labor candidate as in behalf of a Democrat. Whatever success the meeting had for George lay in its plain revelation of a rough road ahead.
Acting as though their business were not closed, George sent Corrigan a copy of the diocesan letter of the Bishop of Meath, which he himself had distributed in Ireland. (The archbishop’s father had come from County Meath.) ‘By its incidental allusions,’ George explained, the day after the interview, the letter showed that the Irish bishop ‘fully shares the views I hold with respect to property in land.’ George also sent copies of all his books. ‘If you will do me the honor to look over them you will see clearly that there is nothing in them inconsistent with any of the teachings of religion and I think you will agree with Cardinal Manning, who declared to me that there was nothing in the principles I have advocated in regard to the treatment of the land that the Church has ever condemned.’
Before he closed George switched his letter from persuasion to threat. ‘If you should step in now, and prevent [Father McGlynn] from expressing his sympathy with the organized labor associations of this city, it will seem to that great body of citizens as if you use your ecclesiastical authority for the purpose of breaking up a movement which has for its aim the destruction of political corruption and the assertion of popular rights.’ Very soon John Mc-Mackin, the Catholic chairman of the Clarendon Hall conference, clinched the threat with a protest of his own, that Father McGlynn should not be forbidden to campaign.
By the early days of October the lines of political division were pretty clear, and the forces were gathering in mass. On the second of the month, days ahead of George’s formal acceptance, he was nominated by non-labor people, some 2300 who crowded into Chickering Hall. Two Episcopalian clergymen took the front: John Kramer, who presided, and Heber Newton, who made a speech. Three intellectuals, all professors at least in name, gave addresses: David Scott, of City College; Daniel de Leon, future socialist leader who at this time was a lecturer at Columbia; and Thomas Davidson, the wandering philosopher who had been one of the founders of Fabianism in Britain, and who would later assume a role as transmitter of moderate socialist ideas to this country. But the great climax of the evening came when Father McGlynn took the platform. Although already forbidden to speak, he had told no one, not even Henry George. He poured out his feeling ‘as if he expected that night to be his last.’ The Chickering Hall meeting voted through the nomination with a roar.
The formal consequences of the many beginnings, Henry George’s acceptance on 5 October, had the character of a dedication and a festival. Again the place was the somber, be-pillared meeting room on the basement floor of Cooper Union. The huge petitions, tied in blue ribbons and displayed on the platform, looked like gifts of some overwhelming kind. The Reverend Mr. Kramer presented the Chickering Hall resolution. The chairman, Mr. McMackin, said briefly that Henry George had received such a nomination as had never been made anywhere before.
Replying, George offered a line of personal history. Once earlier he had had political ambitions, he admitted; but another career had come to him, ‘that of pioneer — that of men who go in advance of politics.’ He did not want to be mayor, but he had been told that he alone could unite the forces of labor. He would fight uncompromised as he had been nominated without restriction. The speech voiced the same civics he had made his own in San Francisco. He would not be corrupt; in office he would enforce the laws equally for all; he would work to have the mayor’s office transformed into a seat of powerful and responsible leadership. At peroration he spoke, I think for the first time in public, about the New York vision and dedication of 1869. He renewed the pledge: he would do all that lay in him to improve the life of such people as he had noticed for the first time when he was far from home, a visitor from a land of aspirations tramping the incredible streets of America’s great city.
George had made a moving address, its thought entirely consistent with his past. If there had been any August danger that he might fall into being a captive candidate, dominated by unions or used as cover man for ideologies not his own, the danger was now passed. By October he had made himself the captor — the writer of the platform, the leader of 30,000 by their pledges, the establisher of tone and feeling. In whatever way he might choose, he could now raise hell as he had told Mr. Ivins he would do, in the politics of New York City.
-4-
For two months and more the initiative had all lain with the labor party; and that situation did not change at once, or change much, after 5 October. As of the end of September, hopes had soared fastest and highest in John Swinton’s Paper. Henry George would capture the mayoralty this year. Would he not go right up the ladder, as van Buren and Cleveland had done, that paper queried, and take the governorship next, and then the Presidency? As the campaign got under way Swinton’s saluted the George movement as the bringer of new forces, and said that a New York victory would lead to a great uprising of the masses. Meanwhile the nominee himself had accepted as real the possibility that he might discover in the end that he had done more than fight an educational campaign, and had actually become the mayor of New York.
It is safe to interpret as a sign of the control of the huge city’s politics by the machines that neither Democrats nor Republicans nominated a candidate earlier than the middle of October. As late as 7 October, Congressman Abram S. Hewitt, the distinguished man of business and philanthropy who six years earlier had hired Henry George as ghost writer, wrote to Tammany Hall’s new boss, Richard Croker, that he preferred not to be re-elected to the house, because he felt ‘old and weary’ (he was sixty-three), and that he would change his mind only if he were persuaded that ‘in the judgment of your organization the public interest will best be served this way.’ Two days later Hewitt believed that Tammany’s decision for him was another term in Washington. But a week afterward Croker’s insistence had made him the Democratic party’s choice for mayor; and in his speech of acceptance he claimed for his candidacy the one real alternative to socialism, anarchism, and nihilism — New York’s escape from scenes like Paris under the Terror.
At the middle of the month precisely, the Republicans nominated Theodore Roosevelt. The future Progressive was now twenty-eight and six years out of Harvard — since graduation he had lived awhile in the Bad Lands, written three books, and served three years in the state legislature. As opponent of George he offered, in more aristocratic, youthful, and brighter version, many of Hewitt’s qualities — wealth, distinction of background, education, a record free of corruption. True, the directions of his reformism in Albany were less promising for labor than Hewitt’s record in state and nation. But Roosevelt now as later brought special charm into popular politics. Though from first to last the campaign tended to become a duel between George and Hewitt, the Times and the Tribune as Republican papers remained loyal to their young man; and Roosevelt’s attack kept doubly alive the doubt whether enough votes would go to Hewitt to prevent George from winning a stunning victory.
Republican efforts and motions for the three short weeks of the mayoralty campaign provide some of the most telling illustrations we have, of New York’s loyalties, anxieties and needs. In a way quite comparable to George’s experience with the San Francisco Alta and its editors Hittell and McCrellish during the red scare of 1877 and after, the New York Nation and Evening Post, dominated by the fiery reformist Republican, E. L. Godkin, swung entirely to Hewitt and against political labor. Using words calculated for incitement, the Nation wondered, in the last October issue, what the result would be should Henry George bring ‘the Anarchists and Socialists and Strikers and Deadbeats of every description within
10,000 or 20,000’ of victory. To Roosevelt’s mind this was party perfidy, which he described in his own way: ‘Godkin, White, and various others of the better element have acted with unscrupulous meanness and a low, partisan dishonesty which would disgrace the veriest machine heelers.’
But the young candidate had no illusions about his capacity to win back Republican turncoats. Confessing his most private expectations to Henry Cabot Lodge and one or two others, Roosevelt foresaw that he would lose thousands of votes to the Democrats; and he refused to estimate how many to the labor party. Even now there is little evidence from which to guess about the number of Republicans who wanted Henry George, and voted for him. We know simply that some interesting members of the party did do so.
There were echoes of anti-slavery, for instance, surely welcome to the recipient, in a letter written on the stationery of a post of the Grand Army of the Republic. This assured George that a lot of the ‘old boys’ were on his side. There must have been Republicans among such groups as the Columbia College Alumni for Henry George Club; and nowhere is incidence and connection of Republicanism more likely than among the sixty or so Protestant clergymen — compared to about forty Catholic priests — known to have been favorable. These ministers represented many denominations, spaced as far apart as Universalist and Episcopalian. From a different corner of the religious field, Robert Ingersoll declared that Republicans particularly ought to vote for Henry George.
The simultaneous candidacy of Allen Thorndike Rice, proprietor and editor of the North American Review, for a seat in Congress, gave George his best chance to say that Republicans and labor men could be allies. One remembers the root of George’s loyalty to Mr. Rice, and he expressed it openly in a letter to the Tribune, which was intended as endorsement. ‘Mr. Rice in throwing open the pages of the North American Review to the full expression of radical thought on social subjects has done more to bring moral support to the cause of the downtrodden than all our members of Congress put together.’
From a most unlikely source we have a revealing peepsight into an area of sympathy, not followership, for Henry George, at very high level. Coincidentally with the heat of the campaign, Rutherford B. Hayes had come from Ohio for a meeting of the trustees of the Peabody Fund for education in the South. As the ex-president tells the story, he buttonholed his fellow trustees, and inquired what they thought. Robert C. Winthrop, of the first family of Massachusetts, ex-congressman and ex-senator but always scholar and orator, replied that the labor candidacy had his ‘hearty sympathy . . . it is a protest against the wrongs that have been growing up, and are now threatening the life of the Republic.’ Chief Justice Waite approved the comment, and so did Bishop Whipple; and Dr. Samuel Green, one-time mayor of Boston, ‘wished success to Henry George, whom he believed to be a thoroughly sincere, honest man, with the welfare of his fellow men at heart.’ So at least four of the twelve Peabody trustees, five if we count the Republican ex-president, presumably not one of them an accepter of Progress and Poverty, were favorable to George’s candidacy. No such Olympian attitude would have been natural in any group predominantly Democratic.
Certainly so far as local Democrats were concerned, whether of the Tammany Hall or of New York’s County Democracy variety, there was increasing cause for panic. During late October the labor campaign moved with amazing vigor. Party headquarters were set up at the Colonnade Hotel. John McMackin, the Knight of Labor, and Catholic, who had taken the chair at the principal preliminary meetings when the CLU had charge, became campaign manager; and Samuel Gompers took charge of uniting the efforts of the Henry George Clubs, which sprang up in great unlisted numbers. On 20 October the George organization was reported to have set up twenty-four districts, each with its leaders and workers, some of them having meetings every night.
At that point labor had a windfall. A minor Democratic machine, Irving Hall, abandoned Hewitt and, out of hatred for Tammany, dropped into George’s basket. To Henry George it was an apple none too sweet. But when the formal nomination was tendered he was present, and he delivered an address which promised reform — and denied any other commitment. Though never departing from his principal role as intellectual and moral standard-bearer, George himself did succeed in making a number of sizable contributions to the practical and organizational effort. He channeled money into the campaign treasury from as far as San Francisco, in the touching case of his devoted translator, Herr Giitschow; and he tapped purses as fat as those of Tom L. Johnson and August Lewis, a New York trader and manufacturer recently converted to his ideas.
Campaign time also brought in such return payments from Britain as visitors could make — from people whom George had aided or counseled during his missions overseas. On 25 October, for instance, according to a newspaper account, ‘a venerable, white-bearded gentleman in spectacles,’ whom George introduced as ‘the most eminent British naturalist,’ spoke for the candidate. He was glad to do so, Alfred Russel Wallace said later, somewhat ruefully: ‘I tried my best to be forcible, praised George, and said a few words about what we were doing in England, but I could see that I did not impress them much.’
Even before the campaign proper began, by ironic coincidence on the day on which he called on Archbishop Corrigan, George met Eleanor and Edward Aveling, daughter and son-in-law of Karl Marx, who were over from England and at the moment house guests of George’s publisher, John Lovell. Though entertaining reservations about him as thinker, they liked George, and reasoned from Social Problems that he was almost the right kind. In speeches before socialist groups they favored and supported the labor candidacy. Apparently a little later than the Avelings, George met Sidney Webb, and the two established a durable, not intimate, friendly connection.
How welcome or unwelcome such socialist attention was, even when it was Fabian, George does not say. But plainly his feelings were hurt when Michael Davitt, in America on one of his many visits, passed him by. The veteran of the Land League wrote that he could not interfere in an American election, nor did he really think that George should win. Thus cropped out again the old touchy problem of international radical politics, and perhaps also an Irishman’s persuasion that power corrupts. But George would have liked more generous treatment — it would have diminished the effect of the opposition of Archbishop Corrigan and the hierarchy generally. Though there was no lack of endorsement by the heterodox — in rapid succession by Terence Powderly, Felix Adler, and Robert Ingersoll, for assorted examples — none could have seemed more natural or just than the one he wanted and was denied, from the fighting old Land Leaguer.
The most heartening thing was the volunteering of the masses. Building on the September success in getting the 30,000 signatures, the October campaign rapidly became a new phenomenon of crowds and excitement. One is reminded of the age of Jackson; but this surpassed the rallies and marches of 1828 and 1840, as the industrial age — big-city life and the new immigration — now made possible. An illustration in Leslie’s Weekly of 30 October gives a good idea of what occurred on many nights. George is portrayed speaking outdoors, center; he stands with three other men in an uncovered, unhorsed tailcart; the four are shown knee-deep in a horizonless sea of standing working men. There are signs raised aloft: ‘An Injury to One is the Concern of All.’ ‘No More Rings No More Halls.’ ‘Vote for George.’ The picture’s feeling of disturbance is heightened by torches flaming and smoking in the background. Until the end, even the weather seemed friendly to labor, dry and mild and favorable to meetings and marchings. The campaign history says that many able speakers stood up on carts as George did, on the East Side, night after night, not infrequently several times an evening.
At the moment of the Democratic and Republican nominations, the labor leaders decided that they had to have a daily paper. The Central Labor Union had felt such a need since July; and in the interval the George movement had had the backing of the Irish World, John Swinton’s Paper, and the socialistic Volkeszeitung, weeklies all three. Not a single metropolitan daily came out for George. In response, the New York Leader was thrown together in just five days. The Volkeszeitung lent physical facilities; the Central Labor Union subscribed $1000, and the paper became known as its organ. But financially the Leader was no unilateral effort: the carpenters’ union subscribed $1500, and other unions $100 apiece.
There was no trouble either, about gathering the necessary manpower. Louis Post, the most appropriate person, both because of his experience with Truth and his old connections with CLU and Henry George, and because he had defended the Theiss boycotters, took charge. But he had the help of many volunteer journalists, some of them from the conservative papers. From the first issue on 19 October, the paper achieved good character, not a sensational one, as news purveyor — at about the intellectual level of the San Francisco Post under George. During the two weeks before election, circulation zoomed to 50,000 or more, and perhaps held that number for a few days. To the reader of today, the Leader offers an amazing display of high energy and quality of talent placed at the service of the labor party.
Just as the paper began to appear, Abram Hewitt dutifully took up the outpouring challenge. In accepting the nomination he at first made efforts to be disarming: he acknowledged great need for reform in the city, and he drew on his record in Congress to recommend himself for labor’s votes. But from justifiable claims for past performance, the Democratic candidate moved immediately into the name-calling for which Roosevelt censured him. Under pressure, we are told, from Croker, whose new career hinged on winning this campaign, Hewitt descended through vulgarism to malice, as he described himself as a son of poverty and as the only present choice for New York to avoid revolution, ‘nihilism’ (a particularly strong fear-word in 1886), and terror.
George thought he knew how to deal with this kind of procedure. Let us do what Lincoln and Douglas did, he proposed: meet in face-to-face debate. We can acknowledge at the start that the mayor’s office does not control tax policy. This would render us the freer to discuss whether land-value taxation signifies what you say it does, the destruction of society, or what I say, its democratization. On what basis, George inquired in an open letter, would Mr. Hewitt meet him? Several times, or once or twice in the city’s largest halls? The challenge was printed in the Leader and everywhere noticed in the press of city and nation.
Hewitt declined without regrets. The public discussion of public issues had never before been so considerable, he dryly observed, and the voters knew well enough the differences between Henry George and Abram S. Hewitt. Then the Democratic candidate pressed a question of his own, a little hard to answer: If Mr. George sincerely means to put into effect his ideas about property, why does he not contest my seat in Congress? Hewitt commended Andrew Carnegie’s recent book, Triumphant Democracy, to those who believed that present methods of government had failed. He returned to the proposition that the Democratic party must save New York from anarchy and chaos.
George answered, and challenged a second reply, in the newspapers. Hewitt’s practical question he let go with the observation that he could never afford to undertake the costs of a campaign for a seat in Congress. George did not need to say that the present campaign came to him self-generating and largely self-financing; and perhaps he did not wish to spell out for criticism his idea that any campaign in which he participated would be primarily educational and symbolic, and only secondarily a fight to win office. He concentrated now on Hewitt’s proposition which infuriated him. Tammany save society from what, he demanded. Did Mr. Hewitt understand how city officers buy votes, and at the moment were doing so, by the old bribery of hiring men for public works, on the eve of an election?
This brought out Hewitt’s final statement. The Democrat denied, first, that his voters were being influenced corruptly; and he demanded second, that George elucidate certain questions of his social theory. Why tax a poor man’s land? Why relieve from taxation a rich man’s capital investments? These were the same old questions as those put by the outlying newspapers of California in 1873, the same ones put by the Sacramento Record-Union in reviewing Progress and Poverty. At this stage Hewitt’s part in the exchange of question and answer ended. He ignored George’s final challenge, to appear at a meeting in Chickering Hall, where he would be given half the time if he wanted, to counter a statement of George’s ideas. In a third letter and in many speeches, George willingly elucidated the economics of his proposals.
Henry George had been unable to bring his opponent onto a public platform, and yet he had succeeded in having a debate. So his contemporaries, at least, understood the open letters in the newspapers. The New York Tribune, for one, assumed a judicial air in sizing up results. ‘Mr. George’s [second] letter is not quite parliamentary in tone but it is terribly severe because so much of it is true,’ that paper editorialized. Leslie’s, though it could say in one issue that ‘what all crime is in practice, Georgism is in theory,’ retreated now to a position of balancing judgments. George had proved himself the ‘hardest hitter,’ Hewitt ‘the most skillful fencer,’ it estimated. George was right about corruption in New York, and Hewitt correct in saying that present political institutions would be adequate to solve social problems; George had justly ridiculed Hewitt’s partnership in reform with Tammany, but Hewitt was as right in denouncing George’s theories. Thus a philistine editorial page at bay. The sixty or so relevant excerpts, which were reprinted in Public Opinion from newspapers across the land, at least suggest that the panic reaction to George was pretty well limited to the city where the campaign was fought.
After the open letters Hewitt carried on his campaign quietly. He addressed half a dozen or so meetings, none of them very large. His real work was done by Tammany and its allies.
George made everything possible of his forensic opportunities. He took the occasion of the Chickering Hall meeting, to which he had dared Hewitt to come, to speak as he had in London about the community’s right in the land. Illustrating concretely from well-known local conditions, he called New York the most crowded city in the world, and deplored with eloquence the space held empty by private owners. ‘We want all the buildings we can get. I think that every American citizen ought to have a separate house . . . We are all creatures of the Creator ... I say that the right to land is one of our inalienable rights.’ Perhaps more perfectly than any other event in his American career, this Chickering Hall address represents the battle as Henry George loved to wage it — his mind at play, his audience sympathetic, his major ideas being visibly drunk in with emotion by thousands as he performed.
From five to ten meetings a day, as October came to a close, was almost a routine performance for Henry George. Speeches before labor unions, immigrant groups, and clubs; noontime appearances at factory gates; and evening addresses out of doors — these were the characteristic events. On 16 October, for example, he addressed: a meeting of French Americans, a group in Abingdon Square, an assembly of Broadway railroad workers, and, at eleven in the evening, a crowd in Sulzer’s Harlem River Park. On 25, 26, and 27 October he addressed at least seventeen meetings: four were meetings of cigar workers, two were other unions, one was an immigrant group, one a Columbia College Alumni club, and one a meeting of spiritualists. Strenuously courting the support of groups or organizations of Frenchmen, Germans, Bohemians, Irishmen, and Jews, George made himself the exception to the rule, recently stated by Professor Oscar Handlin, that reformers of this period did not much appeal to the new immigrants, or get their interest and votes. At a meeting of the Uptown Bohemian Henry George Club, the candidate said that he was very proud to be endorsed by ‘Germans, Austrians, Russians, Polanders, Scandinavians, and Irish.’
At campaign’s close, the arrival in the city of Terence Powderly brought into focus the most disturbing issue of loyalty then at stake, the one George had discussed with Archbishop Corrigan. The Grand Master Workman arrived at a stage of being intensely burdened with his dual role as labor leader and Catholic layman. He was fresh from the conferences with Cardinal Gibbons in Baltimore which had decided that, as Catholic scholarship now makes perfectly plain, American Catholics need not be excluded from the Knights of Labor, as French Canadians were. In New York, Powderly met Father McGlynn. Since the one speech, this most dedicated of all Henry George men had kept silence under discipline, except for a single interview. He was quoted then as having declared that Henry George was inspired ‘by the same love of justice as was taught by Christ,’ and that he believed the candidate to be ‘peculiarly a man of destiny . . . Destined to be President of the United States.’
What would Catholics do who felt the least bit the same way as Father McGlynn? How would the Irish voters perform, on 2 November? The Irish World continued for George; the Irish Herald went for Hewitt. Several times during the last days of the campaign, Powderly spoke for Henry George. He literally took a seat beside the dynamic priest. He and Father McGlynn rode in a barouche together, shortly before the poll, an open and purposeful symbol of Catholics for the labor party. On election day he went about with Henry George, from polling place to polling place, to observe how things were going.
Meanwhile, however, Archbishop Corrigan’s side had acted, not altogether quietly. After Father McGlynn had given his interview, a Tammany Hall official had turned in alarm to the vicar-general, Monsignor Thomas S. Preston. What would he say to the question whether the Catholic clergy favored Henry George for mayor? The reply was as definite as the archbishop’s discipline: ‘The great majority of the clergy in this city are opposed to the candidacy of Mr. George. They think his principles unsound and unsafe, and contrary to the teachings of the church . . . His principles, logically carried out, would prove the ruin of the workingmen he professes to befriend.’ The vicar-general’s letter was widely circulated by Tammany Hall, and was even passed out to the congregations leaving the churches on the last Sunday or two before the election.
For the final Saturday night of the campaign, 31 October, labor planned a vast demonstration. Samuel Gompers was placed in charge. The hope for Tuesday was 90,000 votes to win; and the plan called for a parade of 88,775 to pass before Henry George in a reviewing stand in Union Square. But the weather changed that night: a cold downpour set in, and the police failed to prevent traffic snarls. Estimates of actual participation vary from 25,000 to 70,000, as the number of men and women who did march — ‘intrepidly, a very real symbol of the spirit in back of the campaign.’ Perhaps the campaign history’s figures are as accurate as any:
30,000 in the ranks, 10,000 watchers in Union Square, two hours required to pass the reviewing stand.
At a rally afterward, the Knights of Labor cheered Powderly on the platform; and the trades-union men shouted for Gompers. Gompers relishes remembering how he answered Hewitt’s charge that labor was fighting a class battle. Class warfare was not the goal, but true democracy, he told the crowd.
Confidence prevailed on Saturday night — after the storm, after the parade, and after the vicar-general’s letter. The very last words were said on Monday evening, at Cooper Union. Powderly made a speech then, a kind of ultimate endorsement by a Catholic. Though not scheduled, the crowd demanded George, and the candidate spoke briefly, full of hope for victory.
At the close of the campaign’s labors, George’s party had its peculiar difficulties to provide the machinery which parties had to provide for election day — ballots and boxes, in that period before the Australian ballot was adopted. Watchers and inspectors had to be organized in numbers. Labor suffered its greatest disadvantages, opposite Tammany, in this part of the effort; but, thanks partly to
Irving Hall, arrangements were ready in time. The election-eve advice of speakers for George, and the last editorials of the Leader, urged working men to be sure to vote. Be careful to get your ballots, and allow no dishonest tactics, they were counseled. In case of being ruled out as disqualified, or of being offered a bribe, they were to report and protest the offenders through regular channels of the law.
The recorded vote of 2 November follows: Hewitt, 90,552, a figure just the size of labor’s highest hope for George. George, 68,110, a figure just about equal to Godkin’s worst fears — a labor vote so large as to come within 10,000 or 20,000 of winning. Roosevelt, 60,435.
Tuesday at midnight George conceded defeat — admitted a setback rather. ‘This is the Bunker Hill,’ he told disappointed campaign workers. ‘We have hit a fire that will never go out . . . This has been but a skirmish that prepares our forces for the battles that are to follow.’ He blamed for labor’s loss ‘the perverted and unscrupulous press,’ and said that if there had been a fair vote ‘I would be elected mayor tonight.’ The campaigners gave him round on round of cheers.
George would have more to say later, and, more bitterly than he, others would speak for him, about having been cheated of victory. But immediately there were more hopeful things to concern him. Less than a week after the vote a labor meeting was called, to take place in a hall which would seat 1600. But 4000 people appeared, and the crowd shouted for five minutes when George came to the front of the platform to speak. The meeting endorsed the principles of the campaign platform and set up a temporary committee to carry on. Thus the United Labor party was born. A brass band and a body of marchers escorted George back to his hotel.
The enthusiasm was by no means limited to those recently first drawn into politics. Ninety men turned out for a post-election meeting of the Henry George Journalist Club; and that organization transformed itself into the Henry George Press Club, for permanent operations. A Social Reform Club of New York was founded also. About half the members were trades-union men, remembers Samuel Gompers, who himself sat on the advisory board. But the memorable names are Lyman Abbot, Felix Adler, Hamilton Holt, William Dean Howells, Mary E. J. Kelly, Josephine
Shaw Lowell, Albert Shaw, E. R. A. Seligman, and the Reverend W. S. Rainsford. Though ‘not a believer in everything Henry George advocates,’ this famous clergyman said in a Thanksgiving sermon at St. George’s, still he was grateful for the campaign, ‘because it stirred the people up to a true sense of citizenship, and the movement has just begun.’ Commenting on some of this carry-over, John Swinton’s Paper spoke in pride of having been the first paper ever to nominate Henry George for President. The Leader professed contempt when the New York Herald, recently for Hewitt, proposed Henry George for Congress. ‘Mr. George has more important work in hand.’
As for the retrospect, the bitterness and the blame for losing out to Tammany, the most that came from party headquarters about possible cheating was an announcement that a law committee wished to receive ‘complaints of bribery, intimidation, or other illegal conduct.’ Apparently only a handful of cases were reported. Henry George himself waited until 1897, until his second mayoralty campaign, before he said much more in public than he had said on the evening of his defeat. At that time he made it plain that when he spoke about unfairness he was speaking about such crimes as stuffing ballot boxes with illegal votes, and stealing legal ones from them. But, as of 2 November 1886, it is necessary to consider that he may have been thinking of the Roman Catholic hierarchy when he spoke of unfairness in the election. ‘On a square vote I would undoubtedly have been elected,’ he wrote his dear friend Giitschow, without explanations, two months after the election.
Certainly Poultney Bigelow, the literary friend who will be remembered as belonging to New York’s highest and most informed circles, put the blame for George’s defeat squarely on the church. Henry George Mr. Bigelow estimated to have been ‘too credulous and kindly to detect the machinery by which he had been defeated,’ but he himself was unqualified in saying that George’s ‘noisy Land League supporters howled themselves red in the face until the Sunday before election day, and then from every pulpit came a soft whisper more potent on the Tuesday after than Moses on Mount Sinai.’
Bad consciences and resentments among Catholics themselves go some distance to confirm Mr. Bigelow’s hard judgment. Michael Davitt, though he had held his distance from George, took home to Archbishop Walsh of Dublin such a picture of cross-purposes and defiance of authority within the archdiocese of New York as he hardly dared to put into words. The messages he bore, from the most venerable clergymen and from laymen worthy of respect, he said, were intended to enlist the sympathy of Cardinal Manning and others, in hope that Rome would be moderate toward Father McGlynn. Davitt’s sense that the George campaign had created great moral trouble within American Catholicism was later confirmed by Thomas Sugrue, a Catholic independent. In 1886 many Irish Americans learned, according to this writer, that Catholic loyalty and American citizenship require a different reconciling from the one offered — in the form of clerical bossism — by Archbishop Corrigan and his colleagues.
Concerning the kind of misuse of power first suggested by George in his after-election complaint, the perversion of the press, neither the journalist ex-candidate nor any other participator in the campaign, so far as I know, ever followed up with a specification of changes. But criminality at the polling places has been charged to Tammany by the biographers closest to George — by Louis Post, and by Henry George, Jr., who was twenty-four in 1886; and the assertion has gained rather than diminished with the years. Father McGlynn’s biographer says that the beloved priest’s appearance at one polling place caused that set of election officials not to manipulate the vote, as they had expected to do. And, a few years ago, relying on a witness who had spoken in detail, Anna George de Mille enlarged the indictment.
Mrs. de Mille’s star witness is Charles Edward Russell, well-known social novelist and journalist and occasionally a public servant. He had been a reporter in 1886, and he recalled George as a ‘Little Red Rooster,’ because of his appearance and temperament. He remembered also his own opinion of 1886, shared by ‘skilled observers,’ that the labor party was ‘impelled irresistibly by the revolt of the workers and the propertyless,’ and that it would win. With such recollections, and with a persisting strong economic interpretation of events, Mr. Russell accepted, and placed in his own autobiography as an important truth, a remark that came to him from Richard Croker: ‘They could not allow a man like Henry George to be mayor of New York. It would upset all their arrangements.’ Mr. Russell puts down, as his own opinion, that, ‘When the last vote had been deposited that day, Henry George was elected mayor of New York. In the next three hours he was deprived of his victory by the simple process of manipulating the returns.’
Other students of Tammany Hall hold the same, or very similar, opinions. According to Gustavus Myers: ‘if the reiterated statements of reputable eye witnesses are to be believed,’ frauds occurred in the mayoralty election of 1886 to surpass all other occasions. Lothrop Stoddard believed that the Tammany machine had to put on ‘the last ounce of pressure’ in the precints, and had to bring in repeat voters and illegal voters from Philadelphia and Jersey City, in order to win. More recently Professor Allan Nevins, as scholarly biographer of Hewitt, has taken the more moderate, but it seems to me not more logical, position, that, yes, there may have been vote switching by the tabulators, but, no, there could not have been enough switching to cause a difference of result. Professor Selig Perlman, as historian of labor, is much more suspicious.
There remains, of course, no heap of yellowed ballots for the present writer to count, to settle the doubt forever. I have uncovered no new testimony, nor discovered secret confessions of wrong-doing. My own judgment, I should say inclination, is that the big cheat could have occurred and probably did. But we shall never know certainly whether George or Hewitt received the larger number of legal votes.
At this distance in time certain characteristics of New York’s mentality, morality, and politics of 1886 seem more memorable than the issue — the two-year term as mayor which ended Abram Hewitt’s political career. The city’s voters clearly were in no condition, and most especially the Catholic voters were not, to give the hearing of reason and fair judgment to Henry George as candidate for office. Yet, despite the mentality of panic, and despite the possible cheat, George the loser achieved a triumph which was both numerical and moral. Seventy thousand votes for labor were unprecedented.
The triumph justified hopes for a further effort.
No National Labor Party To Lead 1887
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Shortly after the mayoralty election Henry George told a newspaper reporter that his own plan was to buy some ink and pens, and get back to his writing.
In a certain sense he had no choice. He was a defeated candidate, an ex-journalist, and a free-lance writer. What came next, except by his pen, depended first of all on invitations he might receive, on organizations which might volunteer — not very much on himself alone. In a way it was like 1881, when, the author of a new book, he was waiting opportunities to match his ideas. Now he rested a moment on a high platform of history, known the world around, but waiting nevertheless for situations to arise that would decide his course.
They were not slow to appear. Shortly after the New York City vote he went to Boston to speak for the mayoral candidacy of George McNeill, his recent editor as compiler of The Labor Movement the Problem of the Day, who presently polled 3000 votes. Before Christmas George had many invitations to speak, many more than he could accept if he were going ‘to keep our ranks firm’ at home, he explained to Thomas Walker.
He did leave New York for an immediate brief speaking tour in the province of Ontario, however; and three months later he took another trip, going through the small cities of northern Ohio, lower Michigan, and Wisconsin, and on to Burlington and Kansas
48a
City and return. This second effort was both encouraging and discouraging. He had three or four college audiences, including those at Ann Arbor and Madison (which a candidate for the master’s degree in history, Frederick Jackson Turner, attended); and he made about $1000, the best yet. On the other hand, he faced some thinly occupied halls and his performances did not always satisfy himself. He enjoyed being celebrated and being offered pleasures along the way. In Boston it gratified him to make his appearance in Faneuil Hall, and in Montreal there was the fun of a sleigh-ride, and of wearing fur cap, gloves, and coat provided by the hotel manager. A little change of scene, some compliments, and relaxation were just in order.
But the ex-candidate could not escape a winter of high pressures. After 2 November the talk about George for President increased mightily; and, far from being confined to John Swinton’s and other papers which had campaigned for him, it was conceived more frequently in fear of his running than in hope. Leslie’s Weekly, which may be drawn on again for a sampling of ordinary sentiment, said that the recent elections demanded to be understood, for the country as a whole, as more important than most between-presidential contests. Whereas the usual thing, as in 1874 and in 1882, was for the dominant party’s control of Congress to give way to the other party, this time the voters had indicated a deeper change: they had shown that the labor movement exerted a greater pull over its members than did loyalty to the old parties. City politics in New York was not unique, thought Leslie’s: anywhere in the United States, or throughout the country had he been candidate for President, Henry George would have received a proportionate vote. The New York Sun, World, and Times, and the Boston Post, the Springfield Republican, and the Macon Telegraph were only the ranking newspapers among those prompted by the vote of
68,000 to speculate on the chances of the Henry George wave rising to presidential force by 1888.
George himself must have known beforehand, must have approved, and must have felt committed when Father McGlynn contributed ‘The Labor Party View’ of the situation to a North American series on the ‘Lessons of the New York City Election.’ Henceforth there would be a ‘new Land and Labor Party,’ the priest declared, and it would remain ‘utterly distinct from all other parties.’ Moreover it would advance ‘on the same platform and under the same leader to repeat, at the earliest possible moment, in the State and in the Nation, this magnificent canvass, and to more than repeat the moral victory of the late municipal election in New York.’ Not since 1872 had Henry George had anything to do with party irregularity at national level.
McGlynn’s article appeared in December. For the time being no more aggressive political role was required of the leader than trying to keep ‘our ranks firm’; and he had included in his valedictory to his campaigners the most natural advice about how to carry on. Education was the essence, he said: ‘Thought precedes action and controls action . . . [We need] little societies, little branches, little clubs that shall educate, that shall discuss, that shall rouse and stimulate thought. That is the power.’ The excandidate urged that social reform be fused with political, and that the Australian secret ballot be part of labor’s demand. His suggestions amounted to saying that New York’s recent excitement would be transformed into a durable movement if New Yorkers would now do what Britishers had done in 1882 and 1883 — organize and discuss the ideas of Progress and Poverty. This led to the Land and Labor Clubs.
An early sign that all elements would not consolidate easily, however, appeared before November was out, in the tame-spirited little organ of the Knights of Labor. In the Journal of United Labor, published in Philadelphia, Terence Powderly praised George’s vote as ‘a triumph unparalleled in our history,’ and he claimed credit for the Knights as having made a great contribution. But for himself he declined membership in any continuing labor party and said that he would make no more partisan speeches; and, for the order, he declared that the Knights of Labor should now revert to the old principle of staying out of politics altogether.
To a twentieth-century reader it is a little surprising to discover the recent mayor of Scranton making such anti-political pronouncements, and doing so months before Samuel Gompers began his well-known iteration of the same idea. But doubtless George and his colleagues in New York discounted the influence of an out-of-state leader who lacked the capacity for firm control over the rank and file of his order; and surely they understood also that, as the church hierarchy was now sustaining its attack on George, the Roman Catholic Grand Master Workman would need to be extra cautious.
At the close of 1886, about the time Henry George himself was making speeches in Canada, the continuing party organization lay in the hands of a small committee. Father McGlynn was chairman, and John McMackin and Professor David B. Scott, whose place was presently taken by James Redpath, were the other members. Early in January a county convention, 340 present, met in Clarendon Hall. It gathered the representatives of local supporting organizations; and, in three sessions spaced a week apart, it produced an organization intended to be permanent and designed for national expansion, the now definitely named United Labor party. The platform committee worked under the chairmanship of Daniel de Leon. In this capacity the Columbia lecturer introduced as program a reaffirmation of Henry George’s own Clarendon Hall platform of the preceding September. Perhaps there is a suggestion of socialist influence in some new phrases and tones of the platform, and the party name does seem to represent a concession made to that side of Henry George’s support. But at the moment of launching the new party, as at the moment of George’s taking over the mayoralty campaign, ideological dominance as well as political force lay with Henry George. Despite the discomfort which we have perceived in George’s attitude toward socialists, and uneasiness which can be seen on the other side in the attitudes of the Marxist Workingmen’s Advocate of New Haven, as in England the followers of Henry George and the socialists continued to march alongside in reasonable peace.
Soon George’s old plan to have a newspaper of his own involved him critically in just this relationship. Immediately after the election he turned to old friends for aid and advice about launching the paper. He corresponded with John Russell Young, who had been the first to suggest his undertaking a journal in New York; and from that friend he took the idea of calling it the Standard — the name Mr. Young had intended for the paper which had not materialized, after he quit the Tribune in 1869. George also consulted Thomas Briggs of London; and from that source received a loan of $1000, the money with which to start operations. This presented a question of business procedure. Briggs would rather have been a stockholder than a creditor. But George preferred the more old-fashioned, independent, and personal way of doing business— journalistic business at least — and so he stuck to Henry George and Company, and Mr. Briggs accepted the arrangement. The decision put Henry George in debt, but otherwise assured him independence, and he was ready to take the chance. The first issue of the Standard appeared on 8 January 1887, two days after the ULP convention gathered in Clarendon Hall.
Though the Standard was a weekly, it threw Henry George into some degree of competition, and necessarily into a delicate relationship, with the daily Leader, which had now outlived its original campaign function by a full two months. To this situation has been traced the ultimate break between New York Georgism and New York Marxism: the story has been told that the socialists captured the Leader away from the recent candidate, and that this led to the founding of the Standard. But, as well as disregarding the previousness of George’s commitment to a new paper, the story as told overlooks the fact that after the election there occurred a period of active co-operation between George and the Leader.
Certainly, as will presently appear, George used the Leader during the month of December to return Archbishop Corrigan’s fire. Then, when the Standard did begin and George hired away Louis Post to be an editor, he urged that others carry on the daily. This is not to say that the Leader’s transition, at this point, to doctrinaire socialist editorship, in the person of Serge Schevitsch, could ever have pleased George greatly. On the other hand, the New York socialists were still riding the labor party’s kite; and, in his moment of seeming great strength, George would have had no reason to foresee in the Russian emigr£ a future opponent of significance. For the early months, nearly the first half, of 1887, the Standard, with an economic-reform policy like that of the old San Francisco Post, and the Leader, with a socialistic one, rubbed along without editorial combat, two highly hopeful journals of social reconstruction, equally the organs of the United Labor party.
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By Henry George’s standards, Archbishop Corrigan represented a worse political abuse, even, than Tammany’s rumored skullduggery at the polls, and a more subversive influence than a Russian socialist at an editor’s desk. During the campaign the archbishop had suspended Father McGlynn from his priestly offices, and a little later he issued a pastoral letter which continued the suspension. More alarming than that, the pastoral letter condemned as morally wrong the ideas about property advanced by Henry George and accepted by the recalcitrant clergyman.
A personal letter from Archbishop Corrigan to Cardinal Manning, now printed, justifies our picturing the New York churchman actually scanning the gift volumes Henry George had sent him. He had read a bit, the archbishop wrote; but what he said confirms the opinion of those contemporaries, Archbishop Walsh especially, who believed that he had not appreciated the general character or gathered the distinctive meanings of Progress and Poverty. Corrigan’s misunderstanding of the book, indicated in the terms of his pastoral letter, and the presumption of authority in his public censure, both, infuriated George. He replied to the archbishop’s letter, as if against all the forces of ignorance and the subversion of religion and freedom, in the Leader for 8 December 1886.
This made front-page news. Behind the news (we know now, but Henry George at the time had no way of knowing), upper members of the Catholic hierarchy in the United States and Great Britain were consulting among themselves about the two-in-one problem, the discipline of Edward McGlynn and the ideas of Henry George — and simultaneously they consulted also about whether Catholics should finally be denied, or be permitted, membership in the Knights of Labor. The fact that two new cardinals from this continent, Gibbons and Taschereau, were going to Rome in the spring to receive their birettas, gave extra urgency to these discussions; there would be policy making at ultimate levels. The seniority of Cardinal Manning, his interest in social questions, and the fact that he was a member of the Sacred Congregation of the Inquisition are doubtless the factors that account for his advice and counsel being especially sought concerning American affairs.
The correspondence of ranking churchmen, some of it recently made public, reveals complete agreement among Catholic leaders that Father McGlynn would have to be disciplined seriously for defying his archbishop’s orders. On this point Corrigan’s decision, if not all his accompanying judgments, may be thought of as final. On the other hand, he and Bishop McQuaid of Rochester definitely lost out on the issue of the Knights of Labor. Cardinal Gibbons’ more liberal disposition prevailed here. Estimating correctly that the order was rapidly losing its growing power, and would soon wither, the church decided against an overt policy of excluding Catholics from union membership.
As for the issue which concerns us principally — what the church’s ruling would be about the ideas of Henry George — the story is very complex. While as we have noticed Davitt assumed a role of intermediary, on McGlynn’s side, between American insurgency and Cardinal Manning, Archbishop Corrigan made his own request that the English cardinal speak publicly against George’s philosophy. Manning refused to do just this; and the refusal may be presumed to represent in some degree the personal sympathy for George which had sprung up in 1885 when the two had met in London. Doubtless it represented also a degree of community of thought between Cardinals Manning and Gibbons — for Gibbons now estimated George, as he did the Knights of Labor, as a waning phenomenon more likely to diminish if Catholic authority disregarded it, rather than challenged it, in public.
But while Cardinal Manning held back against Corrigan’s request, he was forced to consider more vigorously than he ever had, Henry George’s ideas. Only a month after the New York vote he wrote Monsignor Preston a letter which it would have pained George to see. The best the cardinal said for the reformer was a brief passage of personal appreciation. The point of the letter was Cardinal Manning’s admission that when he had spoken favorably of Henry George’s ideas he had read only Social Problems (the book the Marxists liked), and had not realized as he now did the degree of radicalism in Progress and Poverty.
The sum of the matter, in the beginning of 1887, was that under the drive of a dynamic but an undiscriminating archbishop, one uncommonly deficient in humility, high Catholic authority was beginning to take serious notice of Progress and Poverty, and of Henry George’s writings as a whole. It was a late reaction — later than the notice taken by academicians in England and America, and five years after the Irish Land League crisis — but hardly the less serious on that account. If Archbishop Corrigan’s pastoral letter actually represented right Catholic thinking, then George’s writings ought to be forbidden to all Catholic readers: and that is the issue to which the matter rose before the year was far advanced. On arrival in Rome, Cardinal Gibbons discovered a real likelihood that Progress and Poverty would be placed on the Index of Prohibited Books — as completely denied to Catholic readers as the writings of Machiavelli and Rousseau were, or those of Karl Marx, among George’s contemporaries.
The cardinal from Maryland, the state which carried the tradition of the famous Toleration Act of 1649 and had America’s longest record of a mutually respectful Catholic-and-Protestant adjustment, did what he could to avoid that result. Gibbons spoke for Henry George to the degree of saying that property in land is different from property in things; and he rallied resistance to prohibiting Progress and Poverty. A year later, after Father McGlynn had been excommunicated and after Henry George’s political career had been ruined, the New York Herald printed a statement by Cardinal Gibbons against placing Henry George’s works on the Index.
Just possibly that publicity is partly responsible, along with the action of 1892 which ultimately restored Father McGlynn to his priestly offices, for today’s lack of understanding, especially among George’s admirers, that Archbishop Corrigan more nearly had his way than not — that the works of Henry George were actually denounced by the Congregation of the Inquisition. This anticipates by two years. But the transition from unlimited political hopes for Henry George in 1886 to political rejection in 1887 is nevertheless the point to interpolate in the Henry George story the events which illustrate the most determined and effective force against him. They have very recently been stated in the precise and detailed scholarship of historians at the Catholic University.
Early in 1889, as the writings of Fathers John Tracy Ellis and Henry J. Browne now make clear, the question of placing George’s writings on the Index came up once more. As we shall see, Terence Powderly, though by that time a leader with a command much smaller than in 1886, was then swinging again into the Henry George orbit of thought. Whether or not on that account, the Holy Office acted. It ruled the American radical’s writings to be ‘worthy of condemnation’ — in principle as complete a censure as placing the work on the Index would have been. Rather than risk publicity and an American reaction, however, the cardinals (in their own words) ‘decided to refrain from a published condemnation.’ This meant that the bishops were informed of the Inquisition’s ruling and could act within the premises according to their individual discretion. Presumably this condemnation, and the possibility of action, holds to the present day. At very lowest estimate, the principles of Archbishop Corrigan’s pastoral letter of November 1886 were quietly endorsed by the highest authority.
For 1887, George was confronting this situation in the making. How intensely he felt about the archbishop’s censorship is indicated by the fact that he risked the first several issues of his new newspaper — literally its new life or early death — on the most emotional of all public questions: Catholic authority versus individual political freedom. In this paper his first-issue ‘Salutatory,’ a general editorial, seems shriveled and unimportant beside his several-column signed piece on ‘The Case of Dr. McGlynn.’
In prose as sober as his emphasis was sensational, Henry George reviewed the background and development of the case. He told of Father McGlynn’s service as chaplain in the Civil War; he praised, but did not play up as much as a Protestant controversialist might do today, the priest’s fondness for public schools and his indifference to parochial ones; and he reviewed also McGlynn’s role in 1882, when he had spoken at ‘the darkest hour of the land movement in Ireland.’ This led to a Protestant’s denunciation. Henry George charged Archbishop Corrigan with a ‘barefaced attempt’ to use the Catholic Church as a political machine. Clergymen should have political convictions, he repeated. Let McGlynn be for Grover Cleveland, or for whomsoever, let him follow his conscience where it might lead. He quoted — and five months later reprinted in full — the diocesan letter of the Bishop of Meath, the one disavowing any authority in a bishop to control the economic thinking of his flock, yet advising them morally to consider private property in land as exploitative and wrong. Catholic political opinion had been freer in Ireland during the crisis than in New York under Archbishop Corrigan, George taunted.
He sustained into February this kind of heavy assault. In one issue he quoted the Irish World as saying that every one of the
35,000 Catholics estimated to have voted for George had done so knowing that he braved the displeasure of the archbishop. The Standard carried the attack even onto doctrinal grounds: it argued that the church’s historic affirmations of the rights of private property did not correctly extend to land. Like the Leader in October, when that paper presented in full Hewitt’s replies to George’s letters, the Standard now printed complete statements from the opponent’s side. A front page was spread with documents and statements when Father McGlynn was summoned to Rome to have his case adjudicated, and he refused to go. American politics were being directed by a foreign power, the Standard observed. Reminiscent of California days, George mixed irony with argument in his editorial onslaught. Archbishop Corrigan, an official in America, whose residence was called a palace, he mused, whose perquisites came to about $40,000 a year, whose authority was as princely as his title.
Among dozens of newspaper reactions to the Standard, few were as friendly as the Sacramento Bee, now in the hands of his old friend’s heirs — to this day a Catholic family. And few were as practical and accurate as the New York Commercial Advertiser, which thought that ‘Mr. George had succeeded in giving mortal offense to the one great body of his supporters without gaining fresh accessions.’ Though for the first month the circulation of the Standard boomed, blowing up to 40,000, it soon became apparent that George’s anti-clericalism was going to be expensive. In the spring the paper lost money, and the proprietor blamed low sales on Catholic pressure. Only after midsummer, when George and the United Labor party had entered a new campaign, did the tide turn and the Standard make a little profit.
George, nearing fifty, is thus very reminiscent of George at thirty and at forty on the Pacific coast. He first committed himself all-out on a public question involving a principle. He then hitched his newspaper to that judgment, and, not uncheerful in daring, waited for whatever might result.
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Meanwhile during the early months of 1887, Father McGlynn, as if in compensation for being a storm center of disruption and conflict of principles, rendered services which made more cohesive and enthusiastic the New York groups that still chose to follow Henry George.
The most aggressive organizer of the United Labor party, he also founded, and became president of, the Anti-Poverty Society. The occasion of this new beginning was one of the many public meetings held to protest the Church’s disciplining of the priest. On 29 March McGlynn delivered an address which became famous, ‘The Cross of the New Crusade,’ a mighty appeal for social Christianity. The meeting led to consultations in the office of the Standard; and one member of the staff, Thomas M’Cready, seems to have taken the initiative. Immediately a New York organization was bom, and before long branches were started in the near-by cities. As an effort to combine in individual evangelical fervor and intimacy the seldom-combined moral energies of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews (all others were invited), the Anti-Poverty Society must be accounted a unique phenomena in American religious history.
According to its own announcement, the object of the society was ‘to spread by such peaceable and lawful means as may be found most desirable and efficient, a knowledge of the truth that God has made ample provision for the need of all men during their residence upon earth, and that involuntary poverty is the result of the human laws that allow individuals to claim as private property that which the Creator has provided for the use of all.’ A membership certificate was devised. It centered, in the background, a Maltese cross set within a six-pointed star; in the foreground a figure of Liberty pointed to those symbols. ‘God wills it’ became the society’s slogan.
Regular meetings began in May. Henry George and Edward McGlynn spoke frequently, sometimes together as at the first meeting, which occurred in Chickering Hall, and sometimes one without the other. George, who became vice-president, gave the society a rousing welcome in the Standard. Catholics and Protestants had joined, the first report said, and thousands had turned out for whom no seats were left in the great hall. Campaigners of 1886 as different as McMackin and de Leon, Redpath and Lovell, Post and M’Cready, all appeared; and the announcements offered welcome to men of all faiths — from Spiritualists to Deists,
Buddhists, or Mohammedans. One notable early figure was Hugh O. Pentecost, Congregationalist minister of Newark, who now took the first of his many stations on a winding trail of nonconformity and social Christianity. Pentecost soon assumed a prominent place among Anti-Poverty speakers, and told the society that what the apostle Paul had done to give direction to first-century Christianity, Henry George was doing in the present moment of history.
The president and vice-president both wished to avoid any character of having established a new denomination. The purpose of Anti-Poverty was to arouse conscience and thought, said George, not to do charity or substitute for church. But the meetings were held on Sunday evenings, and they included rousing music directed by a loyal devotee of McGlynn who had followed him from the post of choir director at St. Stephen’s. The addresses could as well have been called sermons; and there was something very church-like about the taking of collections, which critics called the anti-poverty program of the collectors. Truly the Anti-Poverty Society contained in its history much of the come-outer element and the home-missionary spirit, both familiar in the record of nineteenth-century evangelicalism in the United States. As the leader of the movement, the excommunicated McGlynn could possibly have brought about a major schism in the Catholic Church had he chosen to do so, so massive and so sympathetic with him was lay opposition to the clericalism of Corrigan and his kind.
As for the social critic around whose ideas of a modern Christianity the cross of the new crusade was conceived, the Anti-Poverty Society was a reassuring thing. Henry George, whose family circle joined Catholic and Protestant in spiritual unison, and who himself had long urged that a common religious faith is needful to sustain deep social purpose and morality, naturally envisaged political results to come from the Anti-Poverty Society. In 1887, more deeply even than during his work as missionary in Britain, and in a more sustained way than during the mayoralty campaign, the religious and the political fused in the Henry George movement. During the next campaign, which as we shall see he fought that fall, upstate and in the city both, he pronounced his second effort in labor politics to be ‘deeply religious,’ and in fact ‘no political movement in the ordinary acceptation of that term.’
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At the present time, when labor thought in this country signifies very little in the way of social doctrine and suggests no connotation at all of evangelical feeling, and when Americans have long since been rendered suspicious of united-front politics, it is easy to say that Henry George’s labor party of 1886 and 1887 contained from the outset disparities sure to lead to discussion. There would be tensions among similar groupings today: businessmen with working men, craft-union men with industrial-union men, Christian elements in council with Marxist ones, old-family New Yorkers with new immigrants.
The mayoralty campaign, drowning out the discordancies, perhaps justified the thought in 1886 that a labor party could overcome or override them. At home and in charge of the situation, Henry George himself had much less reason than in Britain, at any rate, to be concerned by the ideological irritations between his neighbors in social thought and himself. As late as June 1887, we have his publicly expressed judgment that labor’s common purposes would prevail, and that the new party would surely march in solidarity to the victories it set out to win.
He said these things in the lead article in the North American Review that month. Discussing the pragmatism of politics, Henry George chose words much like the now famous ones used a few years earlier by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., to describe the influences that mold the law. Great public issues, said the possible labor candidate for the presidency, naturally follow what men ‘are thinking about, and feeling about.’ The Republicans had lost the gleam. To George, the recent crop of third parties and protest groups — Greenbackers and Prohibitionists, trade unionists and Grangers — had the merit of new life and morality, but they were short on ideas and were too narrowly based to justify hopes of winning office. Particularism must yield, the writer said, to the broader needs of the economy.
The article as a whole gathered many of the ideas of George’s old political editorial writing, especially those he had put into the Post during the early stages of the 1872 campaign. In very general terms he now proposed for the nation such large and broad acceptance of his own social ideas as he had been able to command from those who wanted him to be mayor in 1886. Henry George could hardly have made a plea less particularly concerned with land-value taxation than he did in this North American article — it was really a labor manifesto for 1888.
Possibly one reason for the absence of particularism was the recent appearance in the Ohio River valley — where Liberal Republicanism had once flourished, and where anti-slavery Republicanism had for the most part risen — of a rival labor party. This was the Union Labor party, a new national organization, which gathered in late winter in Cincinnati. It was an assortment of Grangers, Knights of Labor, Greenbackers, and others. At that time, the Standard estimated the new party as having low potential, and George’s editorial page was only slightly discomfited by the competition it offered — a first judgment amply justified by later events. But the Union Labor party did not die at once, and by summer a skeleton organization had been set up even in New York City, and John Swinton’s Paper shifted loyalty to it. Despite the differences between them, there must have been personal hurt for George in Swinton’s action, and cold comfort that John Swinton’s Paper presently expired.
During the very month in which the North American pronouncement appeared, moreover, signs of disharmony cropped out within the United Labor party’s own ranks. It was a crucial time. The party’s state convention was looming up for midsummer, and that was the occasion when, according to Father McGlynn’s best planning, the George party must take a critical forward step. The nominations to be made for state office would signify United Labor’s going outside the one-city area of the party’s beginnings into statewide operations, without which there could be no national campaign — Henry George for President — in 1888.
As might have been considered almost inevitable, the disintegration began at the seams between the Socialists and the party leaders. For an early indication, an editorial in the Leader of 28 June, presumably by Schevitsch, disparaged Henry George’s ideas in favor of Laurence Gronlund’s. That Danish-born writer, once admired and encouraged by George, had brought out Cooperative Commonwealth in 1884. There he had said about the same thing as Progress and Poverty said about land, but the author went on into a pretty definite Marxism; and in 1887 he enlarged the difference between himself and George by publishing a pamphlet entitled The Insufficiency of Henry George’s Theory. Even as the Leader endorsed this line, however, it acknowledged its own debt and loyalty to George the thinker and the leader of the United Labor party. The Standard made no response, but we have Henry George’s word of five months later that the early efforts of the socialists of New York City to make the labor party their own had seemed to him beyond all bearing.
The showdown came late, in August, less than two weeks before the state convention assembled in Syracuse. John McMackin, as chairman of a meeting of the county general committee, took the initiative. The Manhattan socialists, as members of the Socialist Labor party, were vulnerable under the rule of the United Labor party which excluded from membership any who belonged to other parties, though that rule had been waived for the SLP up to now. The exception had been justified on the ground that the SLP was no party in the ordinary sense of the word, and this principle had been endorsed by a county executive committee as recently as 24 July. (There was considerable interlocking between SLP and Central Labor Union membership.) In the ruling of Chairman McMackin, on 5 August, however, ULP’s toleration of SLP membership could last no longer: ‘I shall have to rule that according to the constitution all parties which have nominated and run candidates are political parties, and are comprehended by the letter of the section.’ For United Labor party success, he went on, ‘we cannot afford to tolerate Greenback, Irish, German, or Socialist factions ... We must stand for American ideas as American citizens.’
A follower of McGlynn against the archbishop, up to now an asserter of labor’s unity, McMackin retained a solid majority of the county committee on his side. But the CLU, where the party had originated a year earlier, was badly shaken; and the ULP’s assembly-district organizations, which by now had been extended widely into Brooklyn as well as in Manhattan — and local organizations had been established upstate also, in Albany and Buffalo — were some of them split wide open. It is clear that many hated the break within, and wanted George, or whoever could succeed, to restore the united front. The socialist Leader and Volkeszeitung felt injured but did not yet abandon loyalty to George or party.
This was the occasion when Samuel Gompers, wearying of the battle of ideas and fearing disturbance in the American Federation of Labor, seceded from labor-party politics, for life. His first impulse, though, was just the opposite. The Jewish president of the AF of L had stood by George in the fight with Archbishop Corrigan; and in the present row within the party he proposed first that the rival ideological elements ‘give over the campaign to the trade unions.’ For the moment he contended for the merging of labor union and labor party. Then he withdrew. ‘The Federation of Labor as an organization is keeping its hands off this fight. The questions involved are purely political, not strictly affecting labor matters and call simply for individual expressions by men constituting the Federation. A great many of them are Socialists and very bitter towards the U.L.P. Personally I have nothing to say about the ticket.’
After this the connection between Henry George and Samuel Gompers narrowed down to a strictly personal basis. The labor man phrased his attitude toward Progress and Poverty in a personal letter of a year and a half after the 1887 campaign. ‘The reading of Henry George can do you no harm,’ he advised a friend. ‘Read the works but keep a level head. They are enchantingly written, but — I have no time to enter into an economic discussion in a letter.’ Bicycle rides together, and talk and mutual respect, were the vehicles of their later friendship; at no time did the two ever have very much in common with one another.
The party purge evoked George’s most definitive ideas about socialism. In a signed front-page editorial of 30 July he told readers of the Standard that any who knew his Protection or Free Trade were fully acquainted with how he felt. ‘I neither claim nor repudiate the name of socialist.’ Socialism and individualism are correlative as principles, he said once more; but the Marxian socialism of Hyndman and Gronlund he called incoherent mixtures of truth and fallacy. ‘The proper line between government control and individualism is where competition fails to secure liberty of action and freedom of development.’ George admitted that in pure abstract principle he preferred anarchism to socialism.
A few days before the Syracuse convention, George justified ditching the SLP. Votes from that party might have committed the United Labor party to the ‘abolition of all private property in the instruments of production . . . The truth is that state socialism, with its childish notions of making all capital the property of the state ... is an exotic born of European conditions that cannot take root or flourish on American soil.’ Privately George said that the party purge would have been ‘inevitable sooner or later,’ and he counted on such a degree of success in the coming state campaign as would carry his own ideas forward — 1887 to be a greater 1886 with respect to educating the people.
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But George was being more optimistic than conditions justified. Parties do not recover quickly from such ordeals as the United Labor party was suffering.
First of all, SLP delegates proceeded upstate from the city, in spite of all that had happened. Schevitsch and Vrooman and others went on the same train as George. In Syracuse, he himself arranged to have Louis Post become temporary chairman, instead of one who might have been soft toward the socialists. On the crucial vote the majority supported the credentials committee, and the SLP men were finally excluded. .
At the stage of platform writing, the state party pledged itself to land-value taxation, and it followed Henry George’s ideas exactly about socializing the natural monopolies. This committed the ULP to the municipal ownership of water, heat, and light utilities, and to the principle of nationalizing railroads and telegraphs, and of establishing a postal-savings system. Organizationally and ideologically, Syracuse was an unqualified Henry George convention. ‘The greatest danger that could befall this party,’ George himself said, as Gronlund and Schevitsch and others of the socialist contingent were beaten out, ‘would not be the separation of elements — but would be a continuance within its ranks of incongruous elements.’
But these decisions about platform and control only preceded the crucial one for George: should he permit himself to be nominated for the state office which headed the ticket? Had nomination for the governorship been possible — Martin van Buren’s line of rise, and Grover Cleveland’s — the answer would have been automatic. But the highest office open in 1887 was secretary of state. There was strong reason to place someone more expendable than George at the head of the slate this time, and let the real leader speak through the Standard and on the hustings. George saw the issue clearly enough, and, according to current reports confirmed by his son, had the wisdom not to want to run.
But Father McGlynn pushed him. And George himself felt that after the purge he should not put on someone else the responsibility for delivering the doctrine of the party. So he accepted the nomination. Shortly afterward he cheerfully forecasted that the ULP would poll a quarter of a million votes through the state, perhaps 100,000 in the city. It would be hard to judge whether he or the socialists who departed to launch their own campaign were guilty of the blinder hopes, or at least claims, for the future.
The United Labor slate as a whole gave the SLP men an opportunity for ironic comment. A businessman with a Wall Street address accepted the nomination for state comptroller; the remaining candidacies, for treasurer, attorney general, and surveyor, went, respectively, to a merchant, a lawyer, and a farmer. Though the lawyer was Louis Post, a year before the editor of the Leader, that paper now asserted that Henry George was heading a pro-business slate; and in the same journal John Swinton presently denied that ‘the theory of Henry George’ was in any way ‘an outgrowth of the evolution of the labor movement.’ There must have been comfort for George to learn that the campaign splintered the staff of the Leader under Schevitsch, and that many who had volunteered earlier now resigned from that paper.
On the other hand, a new consolidation occurred on the socialist side. Within about a fortnight of Syracuse, the expelled elements set up a new Progressive Labor party, for SLP men and any others who would join. The platform called for the end of private property in land, and declared that there could never be harmony between capital and labor. When John Swinton refused, the party nominated J. Edward Hall, a machinist, to head the slate. In the end the Progressive Labor party received some 5000 votes, not enough to bring remorse to those who had forced the socialists out of the ULP.
Back at home in Manhattan, George set his sights for political aggression outside his party’s now shrunken boundaries. Through his newspaper he asked for the votes of all who called themselves socialists in the general meaning of the term; he repudiated only the Marxians and Lasalleans and the Gronlund sort. In an early huge Anti-Poverty Society meeting, George voiced for the campaign the slogan of the society: ‘God wills it, God wills it,’ he said must ring abroad. Though he now gave less time, naturally, to Anti-Poverty than he had earlier in the year, the society did join in the campaign effort; and just before the vote George addressed an overflow audience, under Anti-Poverty auspices, in the Academy of Music.
As for the welcome George received, and the effectiveness he achieved among working men and immigrants, the story is a mixed one, different from 1886. He and Father McGlynn gave Labor Day addresses before a mass meeting of German workmen. Proceedings ended with a resolution condemning all, especially German Americans, ‘who flaunt the red flag.’ Later in September the printers and telegraphers spearheaded an effort to line up the unions. But this was an effort to bring the unions abreast of the United Labor party (and the Anti-Poverty Society), instead of one to bring the party into line with the unions — as the more aggressive situation had been the year before. Even allowing that George was campaigning upstate much of the time, there were fewer meetings of new Americans and working men for George to address than during the mayoral campaign. And as for the Catholic Irish, whereas during the mayoralty campaign the Irish World stood by him, now that paper joined the Irish Herald in opposition. With the Leader lost, and only the Standard to compensate, George and the ULP had not a single daily behind them in the 1887 campaign.
For the campaign upstate George did two tours west, once to Jamestown and Buffalo and once to Rochester, and he made several excursions out of the city, principally up the Hudson. Two days before a trip north he tried the stratagem he had devised against Hewitt. Governor David Bennett Hill had recently advocated equal taxation on all forms of property. This was the old error, with which George had become thoroughly familiar in California, and which David Ames Wells had attacked in New York fifteen years earlier. A public debate on the question would have been exactly to George’s taste: it would have given him a superb opportunity to win a hearing for land-value taxation, and it would also have given him a chance to square accounts with the wing of the Democratic party to which Mayor Hewitt belonged.
Unfortunately for the challenger, Governor Hill’s polite refusal yielded no such crop of newspaper comment in George’s favor, as Hewitt’s refusal the year before had done.
On the first trip clear across the state, a large audience at Buffalo surprised the candidate. But the better trip was the one that turned at Rochester, and from there swung through Canandaigua, Geneva, Ithaca, and Auburn — the ground which Mormons and revivalists had ‘burned over’ half a century before. This is the only time in his career when he ever campaigned for farm votes. Over and over again he met, as he had met from the farm-valley journals of California, the proposition that farmers would never be persuaded by land-value taxation. Reporting this phase of the tour in the Standard, George admitted that his idea had not taken hold in the country; the best he could say was that ‘the ground is ready for the seed.’
But at Geneva and Ithaca he had college audiences, and he discovered respect and admiration. Charmed by Cornell, he took time to reflect that, though the university’s timberlands, located in Wisconsin, transferred east an increment which belonged in the West, it was better to have the credit flow — under Morrill Act policy — to good education than, as might have happened, to the private uses of parvenu millionaires. He was happy to find a student Land and Labor Club, and to notice a dozen or so faculty men in the audience. Everywhere across the state clergymen took seats on his platforms — for instance in Geneva, Rochester, Marathon, Dunkirk, and Pitcher. At Rochester admirers had started a little land-value taxation weekly, The Earth. The number of votes he was winning, even in the cities, was very doubtful; but he enjoyed upstate New York, and perhaps was exhilarated by its protest tradition.
On returning to the city for the last week of the campaign, George himself was challenged to debate, and he could not refuse. Serge Schevitsch, who was an able speaker as well as vigorous editor, made the demand; and the meeting was held in an Eighth Avenue theater, with Samuel Gompers in the chair. There was humor as well as necessity in the arrangements. United Labor party people came with white tickets and were seated on one side of the auditorium; and Progressive Labor people with red tickets were on the other side. There is no reason to suspect that new elucidations or conclusions emerged at the meeting; and the report of the Tribune is entirely credible, that ‘the partisans of each debater were equally certain that their champion had by far the best of it.’ For Henry George that occasion must have presented painful differences from his platform dominance and from the make-up of his audiences twelve months earlier.
He ended the campaign saying that the attorney general’s office — Louis Post’s candidacy — meant the most of any in the campaign, in practical terms. On that office, more than on any other, depended the power of corruption in New York City. George pleaded for a great concentration of labor effort on that vote.
But in 1887 no signs appeared of a Henry George-inspired panic among the middle classes. When the votes were counted, he had 37,316 in New York City, which are to be compared with the 68,000 he received for mayor — about 55 per cent. He had 72,281 votes in all — less than 30 per cent of the quarter of a million campaigned for. The Democratic winner of the office of secretary of state received 480,000 votes, and the Republican loser, 459,000.
A sharp tapering-off of the United Labor party is what confronted the leader of that party; it might survive as a minor party, it could hope no longer to become a major one. A large part of the Catholic element rejoiced. For a moment George put on a brave face once more, and called for greater energies and new growth. But six weeks later on 19 December, under the editorial title ‘What Shall We Do,’ George revealed the deep perplexity he had no way to escape. ‘I have not definitely decided not to be a candidate for the presidency next year, in case our friends determine to put up a candidate and demand of me to serve as such.’
Henry George was not one to care too long or too much about the fate of a political party. But he had made an error of judgment, letting himself be nominated for the secretaryship of state. There is little reason to think that political results would have been much different had someone else run for that office, however, and had he himself held off until some later try. Hopes for the Presidency, hopes that he might lead a great new national party, and any hopes which assumed that the Henry George wave would roll as high in America as in Great Britain, and then higher still, were not well timed.
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By the month of New York state vote, Henry George’s reputation in the world was being affected by the currents of feeling which flowed from international and national debate over the execution of the Haymarket anarchists, which had recently been ordered by the Supreme Court of Illinois.
It is impossible to measure the influence which 1887’s wave of anti-radical passion may have had on the election. Being called a socialist, communist, anarchist, and nihilist had not prevented George from winning a very large vote in 1886. By 1887 it would seem that he must have been practically immune to injury from name-calling. Not only had his radicalism been disinfected by the purge of the ULP, but also the national anxiety, at least the issue of it, had shifted. The question of 1886 had been, ‘Shall terror of radicals spread?’ In 1887 it was, ‘Is it just to execute the Haymarket anarchists?’
Henry George’s first answer to the new question was the one natural for critically minded pro-labor people, and the one which historical investigation in our day justifies — ‘No, this is not true justice.’ The second issue of the Standard, 15 January, said that the state of Illinois would sow dragon’s teeth if it executed men not proven guilty, for the real reason that they held hateful, immoral, and foreign ideas. ‘An opinion more dangerous to society than that men who teach unpopular doctrines may be silenced by illegal convictions of infamous crimes could hardly be conceived.’ The editorial was written by Louis Post, but it represented George’s own opinion as well as that of George’s journal, and did so for many months to come.
But early in September, shortly before George began speaking upstate, the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the verdict of the lower court. George read that court’s opinion and was shaken. While others declared themselves, he and his associates pondered. Then, three weeks after the decision, he printed a changed judgment. While he did so, he protested those consequences of the decision which came under his eye and were hateful to him. He objected, against philistine suppressors of free assembly, when the police of Union Hill, New Jersey, broke up a meeting of sympathy for the condemned men. He objected, against the radicals, when speakers he called irresponsible stood up in a Central Labor Union meeting to bless the hand that threw the bomb.
Over his signature, in the 8 October issue of the Standard just a month before the election, George announced that he believed the Supreme Court to be correct. To George the unanimity of the judges, rehearing the case at a time and place apart from the event, was impressive. He no longer believed that ‘the anarchists were condemned on insufficient evidence.’ He specified that it had not been proved that any of the condemned men threw the bomb, but said that it was ‘proved beyond a doubt that these men were engaged in a conspiracy as a result of which the bomb was thrown, and were therefore under the laws of Illinois as guilty as though they themselves had done the act.’ George ended asking for clemency and commutation of the death sentence — not to make martyrs, not to feed minds with reason to think that America is ruled by violence, he said.
For the switch George was called traitor by working-class partisans in America and Europe. Ten days before the election, the Chicago Labor Enquirer reported that, when in Cincinnati for a Fourth of July oration, George had asked to have the jailed men assured that they could count on him ‘to do all in my power to set them free.’ Now observe, ‘the scholar and philanthropist is transformed into a seeker for office,’ the Chicago paper said. The New York Leader, which expired a week after the election, believed that if he had wanted to, George could have exercised such influence as would have saved the anarchists. To this day the charge of faithlessness is repeated and remade. Emma Goldman renewed it. And in the opinion of Professor Henry David: ‘The criticism he received was just. It cannot be argued that Henry George’s stand was the product of honest conviction.’
Was dishonesty and corruption really true of George, so immediately in the wake of 1886? The first clear and relevant fact, known at least in his own circle and remembered by troubled admirers, is that before he issued the 8 October editorial about the Illinois statutes and the action of that state’s highest court, he sought the opinion of a lawyer friend. One of the compliments paid him during the campaign was that Judge James G. Maguire had come on to New York from San Francisco, resigned from the
Democratic party, and made speeches in his behalf. The judge was a Catholic, and perhaps came east to build a backfire against Archbishop Corrigan. George learned afterward, if he did not know at the time, that Judge Maguire’s first opinion had been the same as his own, that the anarchists had not been proved guilty. He had said this to a group of people in San Francisco.
Now in New York George asked him to go over ‘the papers’ following the Illinois Supreme Court’s decision. We know that during the fall Judge Maguire read the briefs, the statements to the press of the convicted men, and the new decision. Just how far he had carried his work when he and George talked over the case, sat up nearly all night on it a friend says, is not clear. We know that any meeting and discussion at this time occurred under campaign pressure, between times during George’s upstate effort. There is no way to estimate in what detail the editor and candidate accepted the ideas of the judge, on faith in a friend, as he wrote the editorial. We know simply that George’s October change of mind conforms with the judge’s opinion, as it was printed in November some six weeks later.
In sum, there is every circumstantial reason to think that George changed his mind under pressure of time, under the influence of an old and trusted friend, and without having or making the opportunity to examine the law and the facts independently. This was a short-sighted procedure but not a corrupt one. If we suppose that Henry George was so human as to recognize that he would get more Catholic and middle-class votes if he endorsed the Illinois Supreme Court action, facts compel us to acknowledge that he had earlier defied these elements repeatedly; and though we might guess him to be not so completely above the recent battle with the SLP as not to transfer, from that experience to this, some distaste for radicals with German names, we are obliged to remember how unreservedly he made friends with Germans. Though events indicate that George changed his mind under pressure, there is no evidence to convict him of any form of corruption.
Doubtless the wisest thing would have been to withhold, or not to have tried to write, the editorial of 8 October. He could still have had his say about the social meaning of Haymarket and the trials, and he could have recommended clemency. His moral intuitions in this case still seem sound. In the present writer’s estimation, Henry George seems more than a little tragic: under campaign pressure he did not have the wisdom to acknowledge that he did not know about the law and the facts, and he acted simply according to his best, but not very informed and not independent, judgment.
The anguish stayed with him. The first letter he wrote after the election George directed to Governor Oglesby. He sent a copy of the editorial; he noted that he had signed no petitions questioning the justice of the Illinois courts. He simply developed the plea of the editorial for clemency. He was moved, he told the governor, by his knowledge of social injustice in the republic, and by a sense that many whose ideas deserved consideration believed that the courts had not done right. He did not want martyrs made.
Two weeks later on 19 November, when the men were dead, he printed an editorial on ‘The Chicago Tragedy.’ He printed it alongside the letter from Judge Maguire which now stated in detail that lawyer’s reasons for accepting the verdict. Tragedy to George, reasonable justice to Maguire — that is the way the Standard might have presented the two faces of the matter on 8 October, in the first place. George said that he and his friend had agreed always that the sentence should be mitigated.
A year later, to Herr Giitschow, the friend who taxed him most heavily about his reversing himself, Henry George recurred to the hard matter. ‘I would like to know whether time has changed your view of my attitude in the anarchist business. I acted then without thought about what was politic, but only of what was right, and looking back I do not see that I was wrong. I do not see that it is worthwhile to reopen that.’
By the end of 1887 doors were closed to Henry George which two years previously had been wide open, and which were still partly open in Great Britain. As Beatrice Webb has said, and the Scottish labor leaders particularly illustrate, evangelicalism — British evangelicalism not so forced and strained as that of the Anti-Poverty Society — offered a main route into labor and radical movements in the United Kingdom. So did moderate socialism and land nationalization and Lib Lab Radicalism. These corridors remained open in the island kingdom.
But in America, labor was flanked on the right by Catholicism in an unusually authoritarian, Irish, form; and on the left it was flanked by an unassimilated fringe of radical immigrants not versed in either democratic or Christian feeling. Both sides blocked George’s way, neither one respected his doctrine. The main body and center of labor was of course different. But pressure from the edges, and the strains of reorganization within, served during 1886 and 1887 to make the Knights of Labor and the Federation, both, less hospitable than before to radical ideas. The only sizable movement of moderate socialism in this country, the nationalism of Edward Bellamy, was too new and, as we shall see presently, too different from what George stood for, to serve his cause.
Such considerations make the hopes of 1887 for a great labor party — not to say a presidential victory — seem in today’s perspective to have been particularly ill-founded. But since his arrival in New York, in 1880, George had been discovering other men with other interests than those of working men who concerned themselves with his ideas. His future now lay largely among the many open spaces in the American middle classes.
The Father of the Single Tax 1888-1890
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One of the revisions of the Henry George story that this biography undertakes is to put into historical perspective the place which the single tax occupied in his life and thought. Today, two full generatons after his death, George is usually remembered as the single-tax man; and the common recollection retains little else about him unless it is an impression that, as the author of Progress and Poverty, he gave the single tax to the world in more elevated style than reform ideas are usually delivered.
These estimations by Mr. Everyman are, of course, not altogether mistaken, but they do involve such errors of limited perspective and want of information as grossly misrepresent Henry George — his ideas and his influence on history. The misapprehensions are entirely natural, for the single tax of 1888 and after became the most particular and the most organized phase of George’s communication to the public, and the name itself is not readily forgotten. Much scholarship has abetted the common errors, moreover, by a misapprehension of its own. Though economists and historians have recognized that the single tax came late in Henry George’s life, and concerned him for just one decade and during that short period occupied only part of his attention, they have been wont to say that the one reform nevertheless distills the meaning of his thought and effort — that the single tax was the essential result toward which all his ideas flowed.
No recapitulation of the Henry George story in California, or in Ireland and Great Britain, or in New York through 1887, would be in order in this chapter. But, against the common errors and against the conforming error of certain scholars, readers may be reminded: that the first large idea of economic policy which George’s mind ever seized was free trade in 1866; that, though he was stimulated by San Francisco debates over the possibility of a city’s establishing public ownership of a great share of the land it occupied, until 1873 George, the West coast editor, asserted dogmatically that traditional forms of landholding ought to be maintained; and that thereafter he contemplated not one but two or three drastic ways of escaping the harmful effects of land aggregation and monopoly. Readers are reminded also that George did not become seriously interested in taxation as a method of social improvement until his Sacramento editorship in 1870, and that thereafter he proposed three types of taxes as useful and desirable; and that even in Progress and Poverty he offered land-value taxation only as strongly as the preferred ‘application’ of his ‘remedy.’ The remedy itself was not taxation but the displacing of private property in land, by common property.
Readers should remember in addition: that George became convinced in favor of the public ownership of industrial monopolies, beginning with telegraph and railroads, before he became convinced about land; and that, concurrently with formulating his major economic proposals, he developed kindred eloquent sets of democratic political and social ideas, and of idealistic religious and philosophical ones. One may judge that the single tax, when it was offered, was logically consistent with the many phases of Henry George’s thought and effort, but one cannot believe that it assimilated or contained them all.
For envisaging in biographical perspective George’s role after 1887, no reminder to the reader is more essential than that from first to last Henry George, with only the slightest waverings of inconsistency, had always been a pro-capitalistic thinker. George was radical but not unusual as an opponent of monopoly, and he was both radical and unusual in wanting to transform the institutions of property in land. But he was always conservative as to capitalism, whenever business was competitive, and conservative as to our institutions of church and state. Such are the crosshatchings of the lines of thought which give moderate tone to the ideological portrait.
Readers of the first part of this biography will remember that by the time Progress and Poverty was published George had made himself a spokesman for what this century calls a ‘mixed economy’ and an ‘economy of abundance,’ both. And recent chapters have indicated that two books of the ’80s, Social Problems and Protection or Free Trade, made him a mixed-economy man still more completely. The earlier book called for public ownership where natural monopolies exist, the products of certain phases of machine technology; and the later one spoke for free trade and free enterprise, wherever possible. Present readers, who will be representative Americans if they believe that abundance is the principal glory of our industrial economy, and who will also be likely to accept a mixture of free enterprise and public ownership as a desirable way of doing things, will have no difficulty in understanding that when the history of Henry George separated somewhat from the history of labor, he easily discovered new middle-class followers for his ideas.
To say that the single tax was born in 1888, a late fruit in its parent’s fiftieth year, is not to say that George had not mentioned the name, more or less definitely, long before the birth. To review once more: the phrase ‘single tax,’ though without the definite article, does appear in Progress and Poverty; and George did put the phrase in print, two or three times at least, before 1887. ‘The single tax,’ as George used the words, did signify the growing particularity of his reformism after 1882. Not by accident, we may be sure, the phrase appears contemporaneously with his separting from socialism, and from land nationalization as a practical reform movement. Up to 1888 the essential element still lacking to the single tax as history knows it was any political content: there was yet absent any connection of the phrase with organization, propaganda, and vote getting. The Land Restoration Leagues overseas did not speak of the single tax, and, if possibly the Free Soil Society had done so, this was a forgotten whisper.
The change which will be delineated in the third section of this chapter, and which may be called the birth of the single tax, was that land-value taxation now became an organized effort, a new reform movement in America and elsewhere. Henry George had long cherished the idea; and in time he came to cherish the movement. Even so, events beyond his control had more to do with the development of the single tax than any efforts he sought to make.
Not even in the crucial years, 1888, 1889, and 1890 would the single tax occupy a great share of his attention and thought. A derivation from him, it would be less his concern than the concern of his followers, especially lawyers and businessmen.
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‘George, do you see the hand of the Lord in this?’ asked Louis Post on election night, 1887, as the two took a horsecar to a labor-party meeting originally planned as a celebration. ‘No,’ replied the candidate whose party had broken into pieces, ‘I do not see it, but I know it’s there.’
He himself was a shade slower than certain colleagues to acknowledge the completeness of the defeat at the polls. In the first issue of the Standard after the election, William Croasdale, who had opposed George’s running for secretary of state and who disliked the ‘whirling dervishes’ of Anti-Poverty, had a signed editorial on ‘The Driftwood Washed Away’; and two weeks later he, and then Louis Post, said that the United Labor party should abandon thought of a presidential ticket in 1888. But George himself was still not ready to abandon the plan: ‘All that we who are in these early days rallying round the cross of our new crusade care for in politics is the opportunities political action gives for missionary work.’
Still a ULP man at the end of 1887, he replied to those who wanted to know how to help the cause by giving familiar advice. If you can speak or write, do so; establish an Anti-Poverty Society in your community; have a reading club, women as well as men. Study Progress and Poverty, or Social Problems if the big book seems too difficult; and discuss Protection or Free Trade. Or help with the mechanics of propaganda: distribute tracts and recruit subscribers to the Standard.
Only to an old friend did he say things which reveal the depths of his confusion and uncertainty. Writing to Giitschow, he blamed the setback on the Catholic opposition. In the same letter, trying to be hopeful, he observed that, if he had won the number of votes he expected, he would now be embarrassed by a following of ‘half-educated men.’ ‘Now we have only those who know what they are about, and politics is of course with us not an end but only a means.’ February had come before he admitted publicly that he ‘felt as though a sand slide had made impossible the road I hoped to travel.’
George’s political anguish was of course compounded of something in addition to his regrets for the fading of the ULP. His whole experience in the East with the major party into which he had been born, and to which he had returned after nine years as a Lincoln Republican, was unpromising, in the fall of 1887, for one who might return once more. Even if his own exodus from the Democratic party for the two labor campaigns could have been overlooked, he would have discovered, in the party of Governor Hill and Mayor Hewitt and Boss Croker, little likelihood of having again the satisfactions he had enjoyed from being a Democrat for Haight and Irwin, during the ’70s on the West coast. The one hope George had recently entertained for the Democratic party, that Cleveland’s election would force the issue of tariff, remained for three years entirely unfulfilled. Continued disappointment makes intelligible both George’s interest and his wariness when a new light of economic statesmanship did appear in Washington.
The event, which came at a most effective moment for George, was President Cleveland’s state-of-the-nation address of 6 December 1887. Less than a year before the national election — the one in which George had dreamed of being himself the man to bring economic realities into politics — the President called for tariff reduction. He pictured protectionism as a breeder of monopolies. His attack was pragmatic, not in the least doctrinaire; in the address he uttered his best-remembered phrase, ‘It is a condition which confronts us, not a theory.’ The speech caught the headlines and became the biggest event of the administration’s history.
Though, to the theory-minded author of Protection or Free Trade, Cleveland’s change gave the signal that practical men would soon need theory in spite of themselves, George’s first comment was guarded. He said simply that the address was better than expected, a fair presentation of tariff realities; and, quoting his own book, he observed that the President did not realize how the tariff connects with underlying economic problems. But a week later, in the editorial quoted in the last chapter, in which George wove his way through double negatives to deny that he had decided against running for President, he came out with a fairly positive endorsement of the message. The Republican Tribune enjoyed mentioning the dilemma of the doctrinaire free traders at this point, the paradox of being for Cleveland’s cause, for reasons different from his own.
A protectionist counterblast to Cleveland from James G. Blaine, who had headed the Republican ticket in 1884 and still held the dominant influence in the party, helped George find his own position. In the first issue of the Standard of the election year, he said that American free traders could, if they would, assume the historic role of the Physiocrats a century preceding: they had the power, as leaders in ideas, to speak for the future according to their light.
While national politics opened the road back to the Democratic party for George, hostilities within the United Labor party diminished the reasons for his remaining there. His own insistence had put a free-trade plank in the labor platform, though many members opposed it; but the question was one that could be disregarded while the ULP campaigned for nothing higher than state office. The trouble was that, as 1888 arrived, Father McGlynn and others wanted to continue to let the tariff question sleep. This was treason to all that George believed about the right choice of issues for a presidential year, and in the Standard he threatened that the United Labor party might be disbanded.
Besides the immediate question of the life or death of the ULP, and his own decision whether or not to return to the Democratic party, George was dealing with a most difficult personal situation. The priest whom he had championed in his defiance of archbishop and pope had recently blurted out some incredible things. Saying that the pope in politics amounted to no more than ‘a bag of skin and bones,’ like the rest of mankind, was one of his indiscretions. Now McGlynn turned his scorn on Henry George. The Syracuse convention had charged United Labor’s executive committee to prepare for a national campaign, he said. The authority was the committee’s, and they would be sidetracked by no one, not even by the party’s first leader.
The conflict led first to a little Canossa. Henry George journeyed with a few associates and advisers to Cooper Union, where Father McGlynn and his committee had an office. No reconciliation was possible. Instead of having to make a difficult decision himself, to disband the ULP, Henry George had to accept a decision made for him. Like the socialists five months earlier, George and his associates on the Standard were read out of the United Labor party.
After this the political history of Father McGlynn, and the history of the ULP, both, are brief. From proposing to suppress the tariff issue in the party, the excommunicated priest shifted first to announcing for protection; from declaring for the minor party, he shifted second to Harrison and Republicanism; and during the summer he complicated things further by proposing No Rent resistance, Irish Land League style, against the landlords of New York City. Without George and without McGlynn, the United Labor party meanwhile held a national convention in Cincinnati, with delegates from a dozen states; and it nominated a Chicagoan, Robert H. Cowdery, for President. Henry George’s final words on labor-party politics in 1888 were to suppress a new third-party movement among his own followers, and to make wry editorial comment on Mr. Cowdery’s candidacy. He liked the man, but regarded the effort — Cowdery received 3000 votes in November — as fatuous.
With the United Labor party collapse, the Anti-Poverty Society fell into fragments also. Immediately on breaking with McGlynn, George resigned as vice-president; and the surviving organization turned against him completely. On the heels of this, which must have amounted to a Catholic-and-Protestant separation, Hugh Pentecost set up the Unity Congregation in New York. Going beyond Anti-Poverty to assume the character of a new and separate church, Unity Congregation became the religious home of many George followers, though not of Henry George’s own family. After some hesitation, because he preferred a third party, Mr. Pentecost followed George and spoke for Cleveland in the presidential campaign. Unity Congregation proved much less a political phenomenon than Anti-Poverty, but for the time being it did help sustain the evangelical phase of the George movement.
The breakups occurred in New York early in 1888. About ten months later, just before election, Henry George put his intimate, and bitter, reflections on the man who had caused them, in a letter to California. He could in no way have avoided a fight with McGlynn, he told Giitschow. ‘The truth is that the Dr. whom I first thought an exception, has all the weaknesses that seem inseparable from the life of the priest. So far from urging him forward [against church discipline] as is generally supposed, I always tried to influence him to prudence; and when I seemed to [urge], as when I advised him in the Standard not to go to Rome, it was only to pick ground for what I knew to be his determination.’ McGlynn had turned against him, George said, as early as 1887, and had tried machine building within the ULP. ‘The whole matter was a great pain and anxiety to me,’ he concluded, and it all led to ‘a selling out of the movement and our influence, for Republican money.’ Four years were to pass before the two men would have anything more to do with each other.
Once his own dazzling ambition for 1888 had been destroyed, George was happy, and generous with space in the Standard, first to justify, then to participate in, the campaign for Grover Cleveland. In late winter he said in an editorial that the decision to be made in June, the renomination or not of Cleveland, as a tariff reformer, would be a more important decision than the election in November. The nomination would return the Democratic party to first principles. He wrote an elaborate analysis of the Mills Bill. That this tariff-reduction measure, supported by the administration, would really become ‘an entering wedge,’ sufficient to open a seam for a great change, was Henry George’s endorsement. This was what a theorist could do for a President. When the nomination was actually made, the Standard gave unqualified support, and George sent personal assurances to Cleveland that a courageous stand against the tariff would not lose working men’s votes.
A series of Standard editorials wove and rewove the connections of economic logic between free-trade and land-value taxation. The pattern of ideas resembles that of the old San Francisco Post, except that George went out of his way to taunt Terence Powderly when the K of L man spoke in favor of a policy of restricting immigration. The editor stood by his old opinion that Mongolians and any others who might not be assimilated into our culture should be excluded, but he believed that the new immigrants from southern and central Europe should be made welcome, and that the Irishman who wanted American portals closed was a shortsighted protectionist twice over.
George was heartened to notice that men of mind felt as he did about Cleveland, and about tariff reduction. Seth Low, the recent Mugwump mayor of Brooklyn, who was soon to become president of Columbia and who would oppose George for mayor of New York in 1897, the Standard saluted especially, because he refused to go for Harrison, and made a public declaration for President Cleveland. ‘A foremost representative of what is really the best element in the Republican Party,’ said George. A liberal convergence was taking place, he believed. ‘To me, this Fourth of July comes with more hope than any I have known. Freedom is not here, but she is coming. It is ours to clear the way.’
His commitment notwithstanding, George had a difficult moment in September when President Cleveland released his letter of acceptance of the Democratic nomination. Though this message developed the idea of tariff duties as effecting a reduction in the hiring of labor, George could not pretend to be satisfied with the President’s thought. Accordingly he envisaged his own role much as he had pictured it in earlier days, when he had been adviser to Governor Haight and the Democrats in California, or when he had counseled the Radicals in Britain. He paid Cleveland the tribute of having political sagacity and regarded himself as playing an ideological part. ‘My great desire in this campaign,’ he said privately, ‘is to utilize it for the propagation of radical ideas. I do not think [I] ever will be content to palter with the truth, but I believe in taking every opportunity that offers to push ideas that seem to me essential.’
A month later George was campaigning again upstate, much as he had done the year before. He spoke in many of the same places: Dunkirk, Lockport, Syracuse, and Rochester, and at campaign’s end in Binghamton and Ithaca; and he went to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, as well. Once again combat raised his spirits. As the vote drew near, he felt confident ‘beyond peradventure’ of Cleveland’s re-election, and predicted that the President would carry New York, New Jersey, and Indiana, and also Connecticut, Michigan, and California. He felt equally assured that the right principles had been carried so far into the common awareness that a free-trade party would soon emerge.
Too quickly optimistic, George’s judgment oscillated extremely after the election. At first, Cleveland’s defeat and Harrison’s victory shifted him to dire expectations. But the President’s near-victory, with a popular vote larger than Harrison’s, justified a recovery of hope. From the perspective of the middle Atlantic, about a fortnight later, Henry George managed to write for publication that the gain of 1888 had been all that single-tax people ‘most desired.’ That is: ‘the opening of the great question of taxation as related not merely to the general prosperity but to the rate of wages, to the distribution as to the production of wealth . . . Our true policy [now] is simply to throw our strength from time to time with the party that comes nearest to going our way.’
Naturally the Standard was delighted when on 15 December 1888 the New York Tribune discovered ‘a good deal of Progress and Poverty’ in the state-of-the-nation address which President Cleveland delivered not long before he surrendered office. It was an accurate discovery, and a flattering one.
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Readers who have noticed that the Henry George story of 1888, as related so far, lacks the usual amount of his perennial effort to achieve utopia, have envisaged already the place the new singletax movement occupied in his life that year. It is reasonable to say that he could not have done without it. George could gladly be a Democrat again, as he had been one for more than a decade in California. But he would never, not even for a single year, confine all, or the dearest part, of his political effort into the mold of a national party.
In a way we are dealing with the splitting of a political personality. In New York, and in Ireland and Great Britain, from 1881 through 1887, Henry George’s activities had been better integrated than at any other stage of his public life. As writer of books, as missioner overseas, and as ULP leader at home, his principles and his political practices for these seven years pretty well merged into a single and consistent effort. That was the period when a just redistribution of economic opportunity seemed to him — as not before Progress and Poverty — to be attainable quite soon. He believed there could be social reconstruction in his day.
But then the old dichotomy reasserted itself. On the West coast, when the practical politics he shared with the Haights, the Booths, and the Irwins failed to satisfy him, he wrote utopian editorials, developed a system, and produced a book. Now in New York, when Grover Cleveland’s Democratic party satisfied him only in part, he turned again, but in a new way, to more doctrinaire types of political endeavor. But at this stage of life and leadership, something over and above writing and speaking was required: his reform ideas were ready to be put to work in the United States. Unless action followed speech, George believed, the ideas themselves would surely wither. ‘The political art, like the military, consists in massing the greatest force against the least resistance,’ he had said in Progress and Poverty, ‘and to bring a principle most quickly and effectively into practical politics, the measure which presents it should be so moderate as (while involving the principle) to secure the largest support and execute the least resistance. For whether the first step be long or short is of little consequence. When a start is once made in the right direction, progress is a mere matter of keeping on.’
Thomas Shearman was the man, rather than George himself, who transformed ‘the single tax’ from useful phrase into name and slogan. The corporation lawyer took the initiative on the occasion of an address before the Constitution Club of New York, in January 1887. In the antiphonies of propaganda which followed George’s defeat by Abram Hewitt, the speaker sounded a note that was just as well keyed to middle-class ears as were Father McGlynn’s proposals to the hearing of Irish working men. But the single-tax movement did not pick up as quickly, from the single-tax speech, as the United Labor party did from the efforts of the priest and his associates. The Standard, indeed, did not print the address until 28 May, five months after it was delivered; and though the three words did appear together sometimes, they seem not to have caught on immediately. While the ULP was wearing itself out, Shearman appeared in the role of student rather than leader. In October he contributed to the Standard a series of articles on ‘The Distribution of Wealth.’ Refuting an attack on George’s economics by Edward Atkinson, the New York lawyer analyzed the flow of tax money in the United States with such thoroughness as George himself had never equaled.
But, in the last issue of the Standard for 1887, just at the time when he was coming to grips with the situation created by the recent defeat, Henry George wrote an editorial under the notable heading, ‘Socialism vs. the Single Tax.’ This seems to have been the occasion when he definitely adopted the term. In a letter to William Lloyd Garrison II, moreover, he brought together with complete self-awareness the difficult double decision: to abandon labor politics, and to speak his message under the new title. ‘I went into politics reluctantly,’ he said, looking back to 1886, ‘and only because circumstances seemed to point to that as the best way, for the moment, that attention could be drawn to principle. It seems to me now that circumstances have changed.’
That the single tax was not theoretically perfect, George admitted to his friend. ‘You say that you do not see in the single tax a panacea for poverty. Nor yet do I. The panacea for poverty is freedom. What I see in the single tax is the means of securing that industrial freedom which will make possible other triumphs of freedom ... It is the old, old battle we are fighting, the same battle, of which your father in his time led the van. It is this that makes the sympathy of his son so cheering.’
In the course of about a year George worked out a justification for the new term. He made his fullest statement in the 2 March 1889 issue of the Standard, in which he spoke entirely candidly about his reservations. ‘The term single tax does not really express all that a perfect term would convey. It only suggests the fiscal side of our aims . . . Before we adopted this name, people, even intelligent people, insisted on believing we meant to divide land up . . . Since we have used the term single tax this kind of misrepresentation seems to have almost entirely disappeared . . . [It links] us to those great Frenchmen, ahead of their time, who, over a century ago, proposed the “impot unique” as the great means for solving social problems and doing away with poverty . . . Our proper name, if it would not seem too high flown, would be ‘‘freedom men,” or “liberty men,” or “natural order men,” for it is on establishing liberty, on removing restrictions, on giving natural order full play, and not on mere fiscal change that we base our hopes of social reconstruction . . . This idea is more fully expressed in the term single tax than it would be in land rent tax or any other such phrase. We want as few taxes as possible, as little restraint as is conformable to that perfect law of liberty which will allow each individual to do what he pleases without infringement of equal rights of others.’ In other sentences in the same editorial,
George said what he and his followers were often to say, that actually the single tax was a tax in name only — that is, that it was not a levy on something belonging to the payer, but a withholding of something never rightfully the payer’s own. ‘The term itself is a misnomer,’ he told a Chicago audience, after seven years, yet ‘somehow or other the name stuck.’
While the ULP faded away in 1888, the single-tax movement gained body and strength. George discouraged a meeting proposed for late spring in Chicago, which would have been the first national single-tax conference, partly because as we have seen he feared a new third-party impulse, and partly because he wished to avoid further subdivision among his followers on the subject of the tariff. But in August a meeting took place in Cleveland, for which Louis Post went out to be chairman, and George was delighted that the old-time ardor sprang up again. In the Standard he recommended that other meetings be held on a local basis, but that fees and anything like a party organization be avoided. During late summer and early fall a series of meetings were arranged in Jersey City, Newark, Brooklyn, Elizabeth, and Philadelphia; and several were held in Cooper Union. At one of them James Archibald, Irish labor leader who had been prominent when the Central Labor Union first sought out Henry George in 1886, won a huge round of applause by a free-trade declaration. But in general labor leaders were conspicuous by their absence from single-tax beginnings in New York City. Besides George himself, such men as Post, lawyer-editor, Pentecost, minister, and William Lloyd Garrison II, lawyer down from Boston, did most of the speech-making.
As defeat in the New York state election of 1887 may fairly be said to have given the signal for the single-tax movement to come alive, Cleveland’s defeat in 1888 may be judged to have given it a more specific role and function. Up until election time the movement had been as spontaneous as possible, and lack of organization had seemed to George a virtue. But when Cleveland lost, and the party of moderate reform was put out of office, solidly constructed procedures seemed necessary to keep alive the ideas and loyalties centered on Henry George. When he himself returned, at the end of 1888, from the quick trip across the Atlantic which he had intended to be a vacation, he faced up to the problem in the new terms.
Though he remained determined against third-party efforts, he was readier than usual to encourage sizable and durable reform organizations. Presently, out of what in 1887 had been the United Labor Party Association of the Tenth Assembly District, and in 1888 had been the Free Trade Club of the Ninth Congressional District, there emerged the Manhattan Single Tax Club — the first and most important organization of its kind. In this final form the organization developed into a vigorous pressure group; it became a center for civic reform generally, as well as a tax-reform effort. It operated, says Louis Post, as ‘a propaganda agent along business lines, in business circles, and by business methods.’ Thomas Shearman, Lawson Purdy, and Bolton Hall were probably its most distinguished members.
The second to start, the Chicago Land and Labor Club turned itself into the Chicago Single Tax Club, under the leadership of Warren Worth Bailey, a journalist who later became editor of the Johnstown Democrat and a congressman from Pennsylvania. The snowball rolled, and by the end of 1889 the Standard could list 131 single-tax organizations in the country. There were 22 in the state of New York, and, in the following states, the numbers of organizations indicated: Ohio, 14; Pennsylvania, 13; Massachusetts, 12; New Jersey, 9; Indiana, 6; and California, Colorado, Illinois, and Iowa, 5 each. The list shows how very largely George’s followers were established in the industrial rather than the agrarian states. There were only 12 single-tax organizations in the South, and 23 scattered through the states not mentioned.
In the early stages of growth, the single-taxers had difficulties in reaching agreement about strategy. For years, in the columns of the Standard and elsewhere, they discussed whether they ought to concentrate their combined political energies in one small state, or undertake a national campaign. If the first, the procedure would probably be to try to capture the legislature of New Jersey or Delaware, and so establish a beacon to the world, an actual one-state utopia. The other choice would be to circulate a grand national petition, which would pray Congress to raise ‘all public revenues by a single tax upon the value of land, irrespective of improvements, to the exclusion of all other taxes.’ A New York attorney, Samuel Clarke, had said in the Harvard Law Review of January 1888 that Congress had ample authority to do just that, by acting under the welfare clause.
Perhaps in strictest logic there was nothing to prevent the early single-taxers from advancing in both directions at once: toward one or several state legislatures, according to local strength, and toward Capitol Hill. Yet common sense and Henry George’s principles, alike, warned against too much dispersing of energies. George himself inclined, according to his Jeffersonian tastes, toward state-government action. But under the chairmanship of William Croasdale of the Standard, the national scheme moved faster. About 70,000 names were put on the petition in 1889. The climax of this effort came in September 1890, far ahead of the present story, when the leaders timed the first national single-tax conference to be in session to greet Henry George when he returned to New York after his trip around the world.
Though problems of organization, strategy, and procedure developed, and the father of the single-tax movement had his preferences, he did not try to establish detailed personal control. He preferred always to speak his own thoughts first, and leave the follow-up to others. In January 1889, just as the organizational effort was getting well under way, he went off on a heavy schedule of winter lecturing. He was never a man to be held down by administrative undertakings.
He went to the Middle West this time. Chicago, Des Moines, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Three Rivers, and Columbus were all on the itinerary. The best meetings occurred in Columbus, where he and Tom Johnson and Shearman were invited to address the state legislature one day, and to appear before a ministers’ union on the next. Each spoke in his characteristic manner before the legislators. George led off with general theory; Johnson talked in a businesslike way about the methods and advantages of land-value taxation; and Shearman discussed the faults in taxing personal property. George saw that his colleagues corrected any impression their hearers might have that the single tax was a device purely in behalf of labor. The ministers’ meeting, and a third one in the same city, a conference of Ohio single-tax men, all pleased George a great deal.
In Des Moines, to be sure, things were less satisfactory. He wrote
Annie about circumstances that sound like 1885: a small audience, the price of seats (50 and 75 cents) too high, and too small a return to the lecturer. His principal satisfactions there were the presence of the governor and other public men, and the compliments he received from a priest in the audience. In Minnesota, where he had wanted to go previously, he had a delightful time. He gave a lecture which satisfied him in the Opera House in Minneapolis; then he crossed the river to St. Paul and addressed a joint session of the legislature in the capitol building. Yet Charles A. Pillsbury’s showing him the Pillsbury plant seems to have been a greater climax and satisfaction, for after their interview George concluded that the country’s greatest miller was friendly to his teaching. He found single-tax groups in both Iowa and Minnesota. ‘The good cause’ is booming in the Northwest, George wrote Thomas Briggs, ‘and the next fight will be on radical free trade lines.’
If as Democrat again he needed the single tax, the single-tax man did not forget his other interests.
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It will be remembered that the New York City campaign had prevented George from going to England in 1886, even for a short visit. Though he kept up an active correspondence, and received favors both political and financial from across the Atlantic, two years passed before the question of another voyage came up in a practical way.
Then it rose suddenly and as a surprise. William Saunders, the newspaper man whom George now regarded as the prime spokesman for his ideas in the British Isles, passed through New York on his way home from Mexico. He persuaded George to cross with him, to be ashore for a couple of weeks, and then return to New York immediately. The campaign of 1888 was just over and George was tired and ready for a change. But he could hardly have refused, for Saunders seems to have paid all expenses. The voyage out was warm and pleasant.
Ashore there was no chance for rest. As the steamship Eider put into Southampton, a tender, emblazoned ‘Welcome to Henry George,’ brought a committee of members of the Radical Association and the Land Restoration League to meet their favorite
American. A crowd greeted him at Waterloo Station. And perhaps the greatest satisfaction of the trip was the attention he discovered his ideas were having when he spent several days visiting Parliament. He heard John Morley say in Commons that the landowners gained from all improvements, and that their taxes should be increased. He noticed that Saunders and Thomas Briggs ‘and the most radical of the English single tax men’ were willing ‘to go a step at a time’ with other liberals.
Even during so very short a visit George had several speeches to make, and considerable shuttling about to do. There were four or five appearances in London, and others in Glasgow and Liverpool, and a Knights of Labor meeting near Birmingham. The Liverpool meeting pleased him especially, no doubt because of his tribulation there in 1884. He discovered that the Financial Reform Association of that city, a free-trade body since 1848, was supporting land-value taxation. Introducing the American speaker, President Muspratt said that the association now believed the first reform could not be had fully without the other. Naturally Henry George was elated.
Disappointments did occur. The hurry and haste bothered the traveler, and he was sorry to miss seeing Father Dawson. There was real pain to learn that Thomas Walker, his great and well-to-do friend, of Birmingham, objected to the new single-tax emphases. ‘I cannot see finality in the land tax,’ the manufacturer wrote; and his objections led to very full, anxious, and argumentative replies from George.
Yet the visitor had no doubt, when the quick trip, his fourth, was over, that men and ideas were swinging his way in Britain. Besides the personal appreciations he received, there was the testimonial of a new textbook in economics, written with a distinct Georgist slant, by his old correspondent, J. E. Symes of University College, Nottingham. There was also the dedication of the daily London Star, to the taxing of ground values; and more lecture invitations than he could begin to accept. Before he sailed for home George knew that he was going to be invited to Australia soon; and some of the arrangements must have been completed for his next visit to England. He said in the Standard that present appreciations of his ideas could be attributed, in part, to the recent public discussion of mining royalties, and to the falling due of many London leases.
George had Christmas at home with his family, and after that three months in the United States before he recrossed the Atlantic. Besides the speaking trip in the Middle West, which was reported in the last section, he gave at Harrisburg his fourth or fifth lecture before a state legislature. The single-tax effort was moving under its own steam; and to take care of the Standard during his absence George gave full power of attorney to Henry George, Jr. He himself promised to contribute a weekly letter, the 1882 kind of arrangement with the Irish World repeated. He solved the family problem, also, as he had done during that first trip, by taking his wife and daughters with him. Richard had married and set up independently the year before. George’s affairs in early 1889, both public and private, were in tidier shape than usual.
On the British side, William Saunders took the lead again, and there was a large ‘Henry George Campaign’ committee, predominantly Radical in make-up. Yet people who were a little unhappy about certain prospects of the visit advised him most fully before he sailed. In a letter calculated to forestall the factionalism which he thought the single-tax line might provoke, Thomas Walker warned against being too doctrinaire. Land-value taxation leaves ‘a slight twinge of doubt as to whether its very glibness is not deceptive,’ he said, and he claimed the support of Charles Wicksteed, the brother of Philip, in preferring land nationalization to Shearman-style taxation — for Britain at any rate. Yet Walker rose above his anxieties to say that George would infuse realism again into British politics. With Gladstone off in trivial matters, Henry George would give a thrust in the right direction.
From the new Fabian side, George received a long letter written by his slight acquaintance, Sidney Webb. Worried lest George carry into British fields his American war on socialists, Webb supplied elaborate information on present currents of leftward ideas and politics in Britain. ‘You will find us,’ the already famous civil servant wrote, ‘making progress in a direction which may generally be called socialistic, and, on the land question in particular, ordinary Liberal opinion is fast ripening. The Radicals and the town wage earners generally hardly need your visit, except always by way of inspiration and encouragement. They are already pushing the party leaders as fast as they can.’
While Webb thus said that George’s visit was not quite necessary to those who were arranging it, he had his own ideas about the directions in which the visitor could very profitably turn. ‘What holds things back is the great class of the middle class, religious! respectablel cautious, and disliking the Radical artisan. These need your instruction most, and you are of course just the man who can give it to them, without offense or resentment. Your visit will do immense good in stirring up the bourgeoisie — especially among the dissenting sects. Pray pay them special attention and remind all your committee to bring you into contact with all the ministers around.’
About the line of disagreement which concerned him most, Webb spoke with real candor. ‘I am afraid that you will be denounced by the wilder kind of socialists. Headlam, Pease [who was a member of the Henry George Campaign committee], and others beside myself are doing all we can to induce them to keep quiet, as it would be fatal to arouse an antagonism between the radical and socialist parties. Many of us have been working for you to keep the peace between them, and to bring them into line on practical politics. Neither the socialist nor any other party is here as in America, and the real force of the socialist movement works in lines you do not at all disapprove, and which are securing daily more and more recognition. See for instance the enclosed syllabus of lectures now being given at one of the best colleges in Cambridge University. How long will it be before Harvard does this?
‘Now I want to implore your forbearance, when you are denounced as a traitor, and what not, by Socialist newspapers; and “heckled” by Socialist questioners, or abused by Socialist orators, it will be difficult not to denounce Socialism in return. But do not do so. They will be only the noisy fringe of the Socialist Party who will do this, and it will be better for the cause which we both serve, if you can avoid accentuating your differences with Socialists.’ The final advice Webb gave, compatible with his famous studies of administration, was that, in England, George could ‘safely lay much more stress on the nationalization or “municipalization” of monopolies’ than was politically feasible in America. ‘Our Civil
Service and municipal government is much better fitted to bear the strain, and the people are quite ready.’
Considering Thomas Walker and Sidney Webb together, George approached this trip with adequate prompting, that he should get ahead with the main business and let argument about procedures lapse. For the most part he acted accordingly. At the close of the tour he did debate Henry Hyndman in St. James Hall, and did permit himself a sense of victory and satisfaction that he had spoken better for the single tax than his old associate had done for socialism. Such a debate can hardly have offended Webb and his colleagues, however, for with the passing years Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation had splintered and had lost much connection with the Fabian Society. It is doubtful that George himself had anything to do with Fabians other than Webb and Pease; certainly he had nothing to say about the group. Yet an article by Frederic Harrison, which appeared in the Nineteenth Century for November, speaking of moderate socialism, gave it the character of Henry George’s Social Problems. There seems to have been still much in common between the American reformer and the British gradualists, though there was no great fondness, especially on George’s side.
As to travels and activities, this visit divides into three more or less equal parts. The first four or five weeks, in March and April, Henry George spent, except for a short excursion in Wales, in London and the vicinity. Next came an extended speaking tour in the Midlands and Scotland; and third, a trip to the Continent, principally for an international meeting of land reformers in Paris. The visit rounded off with a brief return to England and a pause in Ireland, before a mid-July passage home. Four months all together made it longer than any other visit since 1882; and of course his efforts then had concentrated on Ireland, and he had been more a journalist at that time, and hardly at all a public adviser on the problems of Great Britain.
The first ten days in London both surprised and pleased the visitor. Out of nine speaking engagements, three were before Radical Club audiences, which seemed to indicate middle-class rather than working-class interest. (A little later, after speaking before a specifically laboring men’s audience at Lambeth Baths, George wrote home that socialism had had very little influence on these people.) Five, or more than half, of the first series of speeches were before church meetings; and more often than not they were in dissenters’ chapels, just as Sidney Webb had hoped. George’s very first address, for instance, was in Camberwell Green Chapel. Two days later he lectured in the Congregational chapel at Wanstead, a suburb which reminded him of Orange, New Jersey; and very shortly he spoke at Westminster Chapel — which he believed to be the largest Congregational church in London. Several members of Parliament took part in the discussion. Thus he was able to write home that he was reaching English Liberals through the avenue of Mr. Shearman’s church. This amounted to saying that he was trying an approach to social reform new in Britain, much the same as his approach in America. The time was ripe, he added, because the Conservatives might be expected to be displaced soon, and the Liberals would return to power.
Between speeches he found time, as during the preceding November, to see people in Parliament. Seated at the press table in the House of Lords, George caught the irony of hereditary legislators listening to the testimony of working girls about the conditions of labor. Who were noblemen, the American wondered, to be judges and defendants, both, when social questions came up for decision. The visitor’s sympathy for the poor seems to have been widely understood. Letters poured in, addressed to him through campaign headquarters. Communications came from ministers and newspapermen; he received requests for interviews and invitations to write; and there was a pathetic inquiry from a boy who wanted to emigrate to America.
On the intellectual side, George took special satisfaction from conferences with the distinguished economic historian, Thorold Rogers of London and Oxford, who was reading in the British Museum. Professor Rogers told him that one reason why British industry had developed further in the north of England than in the south lay in the history of taxation: taxes on machinery in one region, and exemptions in the other. ‘Of all the thieves in the world, Professor Rogers says the landowners of England are the worst and most unscrupulous,’ George reported in the Standard. This sympathy was the more welcome, because in earlier years George, who admired and borrowed from Rogers’ findings, had thought the scholar too cautious in interpretation, and had heard that he sneered at Progress and Poverty. Now he was able to say that the professor had spoken of the single tax ‘with perfect fairness and evident sympathy.’ He pleased George also by an invitation to come to Oxford — an opportunity regretfully foregone, for it might have established a happier association than the one of 1884.
So far as the record tells, Mrs. George and the girls were very inconspicuous during the London stage of this tour. Except for a special invitation to attend a couple of balls in London on St. Patrick’s Day, so that they might see how the Irish working classes enjoyed themselves, we can only guess how they fitted in. But later, in the second, northern, stage of the trip, after George had taken nearly two weeks working his way from audience to audience, the whole family appears, having a splendid time. Some hosts arranged a picnic for them along the Roman wall, north of Newcastle-on-Tyne; and the sights of Scotland thrilled them. From the ancient capital city, Irish Annie George wrote her sister that she could not disagree with the Scots, their Edinburgh was the greatest city in the world, ‘interesting beyond compare.’ A stop at Melrose Abbey and Abbotsford interested her, but she was irritated at all the fee taking, and a little shocked to learn that Sir Walter had lived so luxuriously. As for her husband, ‘Henry George is certainly doing great work — holding wonderful meetings in a new place every night.’
George’s own excitement in Scotland seems to have been proportionate to place and previous association. Just south of the boundary he was stirred to have a speaking engagement at Alnwick, the seat of the Duke of Northumberland; and, in Campbelltown, during a short excursion into the Highlands, he felt a similar stimulation as he invaded the domain of the Duke of Argyll. ‘The Highlands are all right,’ he decided. ‘The reductions in rent and the sweeping away of arrears by the crofter commission are only whetting the appetite of the crofters for more . . . It is a good thing for the men who have hitherto stood in dread of the power of landlords ... to sit at the same table with landlord or factor — to tell their story and hear the landlord or factor tell his, and then have the commission decide against the “higher orders’’... It is a new experience, and one that bodes no good to Highland landlordism.’
The Land Restoration League, he could feel, was yielding a good crop.
During his nearly three weeks in Scotland, George for the most part toured the industrial Lowlands. He made speeches in many towns where he had spoken in 1884 and 1885 and where Land Restoration League units had been formed — in Edinburgh, Dumfries, Greenock, Paisley, and, two appearances each, in Glasgow and Dundee. Again he stressed the Bible accent; a mistake about announcing an address entitled ‘Thy Kingdom Come’ drew thousands to a hall in Glasgow a week before the actual date. This was one of George’s best speeches, and it has been reprinted and distributed from then until now.
Scotland was particularly Henry George’s country, and he discovered there vigorous ideological growth from his own previous planting. In the person of Keir Hardie, who very soon would make history as the founder of the Independent Labour party, he met the best representative of the early absorption of the ideas of Progress and Poverty into British working-class politics. Mr. Hardie told him that nine-tenths of the miners of Scotland lived in one-room houses. The report to the Standard which mentioned this also said that in Scotland the ideas of Henry George had safely passed the first phase, that of seeming alarming and revolutionary. ‘These men are nearly all men of influence in the Liberal Party here,’ the chairman of a Glasgow banquet explained to Henry George, ‘many of them capitalists and some of them landowners. I tell you this to show you how we are gaining influence as well as numbers since you were here last.’ The single tax pleased this sort of audience.
In the English Midlands, George also sensed improvement for his cause. An accident of the road, apparently, he fell in with Philip Stanhope, who was the son of an earl and himself a prominent Radical in Commons. The conversation convinced the traveler that here, for once, was a sincere radical from the noble class, one deeply convinced that the land question was the real and burning issue of the time. George enjoyed a stop in Coventry, where the guildhall caught his fancy; from here he wrote home the Lady Godiva story, with its moral about taxation. Among the public meetings, the one at Birmingham greatly pleased him. This was successful partly because Thomas Walker was known to be his champion. But the meeting was held in the great townhall and, just as he liked, a Church of
England clergyman presided, and there were other clergymen on the platform, from Unitarian to Roman Catholic. Symbols of acceptance meant much to George, on this trip especially.
The stop in Birmingham, moreover, set the stage for the third and most unusual phase of the whole tour. At the Walker home George was sought out by Michael Flurscheim, a driving personality who was an ironmaster from Baden Baden, and a writer and reformer in the German Land Liga effort. Herr Flurscheim had written to George during the autumn of 1888, to pay tribute to his leadership and to discuss reform procedures. With perhaps no more preliminary than this, the two men joined forces. Traveling a couple of weeks with the George party, Flurscheim made several addresses; and, in his own self-estimate, he succeeded better than the American in replying to socialist hecklers. In his own mind a great partnership had been established: ‘It was for me a memorable moment in which I looked for the first time into the noble clear eyes of the man to whom I owe so much, and for the first time pressed the forceful right hand of the hero who as commander in chief in the context of ideas, is leading forward.’
Though there is no indication that Henry George knew, beforehand, very much either about Flurscheim or about the ten-year-old land-reform movement in Germany, his letters do show that he had some knowledge of immediate backgrounds. Less than a week after the symbolic date, 4 July 1886, on which the Land Liga was established, Max Scheld, of Berlin, had informed him about the new organization, and told him that it greeted Henry George as its master. And recently he had received a good many letters which indicated that Europeans were interested in his books. During the preceding five years, Progress and Poverty had been translated into Swedish, Norwegian, French, and Italian; Social Problems had been translated into Dutch and Norwegian, and Protection or Free Trade into French and German. George had corresponded with most of the translators.
Sometimes his informants said that his ideas were having an effect on practical politics. About the time the Land Liga was founded, for instance, he had had a couple of letters from Norwegians. One of them spoke appealingly about the aid George’s works could be expected to render to Norway’s young and tender democratic institutions. A Danish correspondent reported that major newspapers in Copenhagen were arguing free trade in the Henry George way, and that a little single-tax newspaper was being imported and read, from Norway. The same writer described a meeting of Scandinavian economists, at which a Swedish professor, seconded by a Danish one, spoke in endorsement of George’s ideas, and of land nationalization. This is the kind of appreciation of George which the distinguished Norwegian historian, Halvdan Koht, has recently summarized as an important part of the impact of American ideas in Europe. George had had inquiries also, from interested people as far distant as Chile, and Turkey, and Siam.
Now in the English spring of 1889, Fliirscheim pressed an invitation which in a way drew these threads together. In June there would be in Paris an international conference of land reformers. George must have warmed to the promise that a group of Frenchmen would be present, men with ideas very close to his own, who regarded themselves as descendants of the Physiocrats of the eighteenth century. The invitation promised a Belgian delegation to be led by Agathon de Potter, already known to George; and Fliirscheim said there would be Germans, Dutch, Swiss, and Aus-trians as well.
Yet Fliirscheim warned George that the conference as a whole would not agree thoroughly with Progress and Poverty. The members would be more like himself, he said, in that they would think that rent and interest together, and not rent alone, deprive the producing classes and help to cause depressions. (Herr Fliirscheim had put his own theory in a book, Auf Friedlichen Wege, which appeared in 1884.) Though the warning may have been discouraging news, there is no sign of controversy between the two new colleagues. Fliirscheim thought that they got along famously, and George accepted the invitation.
When Henry George had last seen Paris, seven years earlier, as observer and participator in Irish Land League activities, his role had been a somewhat surreptitious one. This time he traveled completely in the open. Besides his wife and daughters, a number of American and British sympathizers went with him. The London Times said that 500 Americans had been expected, but that the small number who arrived did not signify that the republic was underrepresented, because the man to be chosen president of the conference was an American. The delegates convened in the Hotel
Continental, about 150 strong, and according to The Times, they were seated on gilded chairs.
In due course Henry George was actually elected honorary president. He was introduced with a tribute to his success in Britain; and, speaking with special confidence, George said in a keynote address that ‘single-tax men stand today where the anti-slavery men stood in 1856.’ Great victories might come first either in the United States or Great Britain, he could not be sure which.
As an indication of certain recognitions, widespread in Europe but limited in their political meaning, the Paris meeting does seem a high point in Henry George’s lifetime. Yet he actually attended only one or two sessions. On the second day, Jennie George came down with scarlet fever. The most the father could do, after she recovered a little, was to talk a good deal with French delegates who were especially sympathetic. He found freedom, before he left, to do some sight-seeing in the city.
At the meeting he established a friendly relationship, too, with Jan Stoffels, a follower of Fliirscheim and the translator into Dutch of Social Problems. This led to a trip to Holland, about which George became quite lyrical in the Standard. The canals, the sloping houses, the yachts, the museums, and the pictures fascinated him. But when he made an address, for which a large audience turned out in a splendid hall in Amsterdam, he was not at all satisfied. It was theory which concerned him. He decided that European radicalism, even when as friendly as this, was too much opposed to interest taking to suit his own position. Many think that interest on capital is quite wrong, he wrote home, but none knows how to capture it, except by the state operation of all business.
His own reservations to the contrary notwithstanding, he was given early reason to believe that he had been accepted as the man of the movement which the conference represented, and that the international work would go on. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, the distinguished French writer on economic institutions, though with reser vations about many of George’s ideas, presently paid tribute to Progress and Poverty, and to the author’s ‘enchanting vigor, his brilliant mind, and the apparent force of his style.’ In August the news reached George that a Universal Land Federation was being set up, and that he himself would be its leader. All who had attended the Paris conference would be members, and all single-tax organizations wherever they might be. If Mr. George would contribute the necessary references, his recent Paris friend A. M. Tou-beau requested on 22 August, the new federation would prepare a master list, covering the world, and it would include the names of newspapers.
While Jennie convalesced Henry George went back to England, keeping in touch by daily wire. The only important event in London this time was the public debate with Hyndman, which came off to his own satisfaction. Then he went to Ireland to make a couple of appearances. Michael Davitt took the chair at one of them, evidently with old injuries sufficiently mended to make the situation a friendly one. Back in England in July, George was honored by a farewell ceremonial in London, and by a farewell lecture before the Financial Reform Association in Liverpool.
During the last week abroad, the family, united in health, welcomed the voyage home. Part of their delight was anticipation of doing more traveling soon. George had been definitely asked to visit Australia and New Zealand. He would be paid £800; and he expected to bring home half, $2000, to bank in New York in 1890, after a trip around the world.
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This time a crowd was waiting to make him welcome when his vessel came into port; and there was a dinner in a Coney Island hotel. The good news was that throughout the country the singletax petitions to Congress were lengthening by hundreds and thousands of signers.
But immediately he was confronted with a crucial situation at home. It concerned his newspaper and his doctrines. Though, unlike the San Francisco Post, the Standard did not represent his whole career and livelihood, it did mean much. He was the proprietor of a good-looking newspaper, a journal of opinion which practiced his old preachment in favor of having the contributors of ideas sign their own writings. And of course the Standard was the ideological center of the single-tax movement.
But in the summer of 1889, while the movement was growing, the Standard was in danger of its life. A glance at the history of the paper is necessary. It had begun with a debt, as we know, and at first the question of financial success had concerned George deeply. Though he told Giitschow at that time that ‘on the day I started the Standard I was some thousands poorer than when I left San Francisco,’ he entertained grim hopes that the paper would support him, as his books had failed to do. We do not know much about the early financial history of the Standard, but it is clear that the pendulum swung several times during 1887 and 1888. Though the McGlynn affair lost subscribers in the long run, and the labor party defeat was a setback for the newspaper, George was able to announce at the close of 1888 that circulation was gaining. A fair number of subscriptions in Great Britain and Australia had raised sales from a low of 15,000 to about 20,000. In January 1888, when the interest was due on the Briggs note, George was able to pay; but two months later, things were very difficult. There were never any profits, yet there was always the belief that the need for the paper justified the effort.
Summing up at the time of the presidential campaign, George admitted that the transit out of labor politics had been ‘exceedingly depressing’ to the morale of the staff. As for himself, ‘the drag and worry have been indescribable, and though pressing myself to the limit of my strength I have felt that my energies have been frittered away and that I was not doing my best work. The strain for the last ten years has been very great, and has I feel made me very much older. But I have told friends that I would go through till this year, or at least until this election was over.’
Yet in the autumn of all these anxieties, the Standard was given a new lease, and a new condition, of life. Tom Johnson was just entering politics, in the campaign in which he failed for election to the House of Representatives by about 600 votes. He subscribed $500 to circulate the paper as a campaign effort; and W. J. Atkinson, a rich man in Philadelphia, did the same. The $1000 subsidy was like a shot in the arm. The autobiography of Louis Post makes plain that very soon Johnson and Thomas Shearman and perhaps others were supporting the paper regularly, and that the old day-to-day worries never recurred.
Subsidization transformed the paper into a sort of institution, and changed the nature of Henry George’s relation to it somewhat. He still presided in the rank of proprietor and editor; but in fact he was steward rather than risk-bearing capitalist, and he was chairman rather than director of the paper’s daily routine. It was a natural time for delegating duties, and for tidying up in many ways. Before the 1889 tour in Great Britain George moved the Standard’s offices to Union Square, and his household to East Nineteenth Street, near and convenient to one another. About the time he started for Australia, the essential platform of the paper was reduced to a formula and set forth in a box which appeared in the upper left-hand corner of the front page. A three-point program was announced: (1) the single tax, stated to mean land-value taxation, with all taxes on labor or the products of labor abolished; (2) free trade, defined as more than tariff reform, as world trade as free as interstate commerce in America; and (3) ballot reform, the Australian ballot, to be prepared by public authority, and to be cast by the voter in enforced secrecy.
Though these consolidations produced a less exciting paper than the fighter of 1887, they had the merit of winning approval from contemporaries who otherwise cared very little for the ideas of Henry George. The New York Tribune, which had earlier had the generosity to say that the Standard’s ‘subject matter is far above that in what usually are known as labor papers,’ printed a warm endorsement of the journal’s ballot-reform idea.
Evidently George felt at ease before he departed for the long absence of 1889, in Europe. But all too soon for peace of mind, while he was lecturing in Scotland, he began to hear of injured feelings and conflicts among the editors; and perhaps he perceived then that important differences of opinion were at the roots of the trouble. The stormiest of the discontented ones was Thomas M’Cready, who had been a leader of the Anti-Poverty Society and now had charge of a ‘Men and Things’ column of opinion of his own; and he was joined by a friend of Samuel Gompers, James L. Sullivan, who was the labor editor. The two together retained the spirit and intentions of Henry George’s campaigns of 1886 and 1887; and when Henry George, Jr., refused to print some of their contributions, they poured out their resentment to the traveling chief, to whom M’Cready was especially devoted.
But the ranking editors in New York, Louis Post and William Croasdale, moved more willingly into the new emphases and strategies of the single tax; and they took the other side. They supported Henry George, Jr., George learned; and Tom Johnson, Shearman, and August Lewis, in the role of advisers and guarantors, in turn supported them. The personal conflict came to a climax during the spring, when the ‘two strong masterful men,’ as Henry George, Jr., called M’Cready and Sullivan, descended on the George household and moved in, offering some previous invitation as excuse. Before George returned from Europe, however, Sullivan resigned from the Standard; and on his return, George fired M’Cready and sent Henry George, Jr., from New York for a vacation and a rest. Annie George’s solicitous comment was that two of her husband’s ‘coworkers have proved treacherous — I wonder how this man retains any confidence in humanity — but he does — and he goes on doing his work to the best of his ability.’
But the necessary remedy of conditions at the office opened to view, and even to public discussion, the conflict of ideas which was the serious part of the affair. In this respect Sullivan’s actions had been more decisive than M’Cready’s. The labor editor was disposed to be somewhat friendly toward the Bellamy Nationalist movement which had just appeared in the United States, and which had come to New York about the time of George’s absence. In the wake of widespread reading of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, a novel of greater social influence in America, probably, than any other except Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the new socialism took the form of clubs and journals, all dedicated to preparing for a very utopian kind of American life. The Nationalist Clubs were particularly numerous in Massachusetts, where the movement began, and in New York and California.
Sullivan, as an editor of the Standard, identified himself with the Nationalists only so far, he says, as to protest when it seemed to him that Croasdale insulted them needlessly on the editorial page. Why should not the Standard in New York take as generous an attitude toward an American brand of socialism as Henry George in England was taking toward the Fabians? Must the whittling down of Georgism go on forever — as McGlynn and Pentecost, the Marxian socialists, the Anti-Poverty Society, and the United Labor party had been pared away? These and more like them were the labor editor’s questions, as he took leave of the Standard, and of the Georgist movement, for good. His questions had considerable moral force before he weakened his case, as he did after George’s return, by issuing an absurd pamphlet, ‘Ideo Kleptomania, the Case of Henry George,’ in which he set out to prove that Progress and Poverty was a plagiarism from Patrick Dove.
Meanwhile M’Cready did his share of spreading and publicizing the controversy. He appealed to ministers who shared with him a loyalty to the evangelical spirit of Anti-Poverty, which the singletax movement had succeeded in quieting down. By turning to Hugh Pentecost, who was now editing a new journal of social reconstruction, Twentieth Century, and by publishing through him articles critical of the Standard, while he himself was still a member of the staff, M’Cready infuriated George. But the matter was a little different when he appealed to Father James O. H. Huntington, an Episcopalian priest of the Order of the Holy Cross, and a son of Bishop Frederic Dan Huntington, who had spoken for United Labor in 1887. On Henry George’s return to New York, Father Huntington prayed his ‘dear friend’ to keep the Standard open to religious elements it had previously made welcome.
What had begun as an office row, the immediate result of an editor-proprietor leaving his newspaper to go abroad, thus widened into an ordeal for the Georgists of New York. Henry George himself can hardly have needed letters from people he had recently seen in England, moreover, to understand that the troubles at home were similar if not identical with the differences of ideas which had come between him and Fliirscheim and Stoffels on the Continent, and between Thomas Walker and himself, in the instance which disturbed him most of all. But Walker did write, in an irony which must have cut, to describe the single-tax antics of ‘Dear old Cobdenite Briggs, Henry George worshipper Wood, Politician Saunders, Unpledged Recruit Reeves,’ in England. Declaring himself to be still the man who loved and appreciated Henry George better than anyone else did on that side of the Atlantic, the Birmingham patron warned that the single tax was already tending ‘to fossilize into a fetish.’ He begged George to recall that as the author of Progress and Poverty he had been the first to make ‘our movement’ a matter of religion, and urged that old bearings be not lost, and that in England men like Durant and Wicksteed be kept in council. In similar vein but with lighter touch, Thomas Davidson presently warned that George would soon be known as the ‘monotelist.’ Why not come north, invited this Fabian, and buy a farm adjoining his own, the highest house in the Adirondacks? From that doorstep he could survey Lake Champlain, and gain balance and new perspective.
Even before George reached New York City, the Standard had proceeded in a democratic way to straighten out the snarls of doctrine as it could. Now inviting rather than excluding differences of opinion, space was given to Shearman, Pentecost, M’Cready, and Croasdale, and each summed up his own judgment about the best policy for the newspaper and the movement. Shearman said that he intended to be practical, and that he regarded the single tax as a hedge against anarchism and socialism; he denied that his plan reduced the George movement to being ‘soulless, principleless,’ and he asserted that it contained the leader’s essential ideas. Cold reason was in order, the lawyer insisted, and he specified that he wanted the state to take only that share of economic rent needed for fiscal purposes, he estimated 65 per cent. The only disagreement he would admit existed between Henry George and himself was that George wanted to take nearly all the rent, say 85 or 90 per cent. Between them there would be no difference, said Shearman, if experience ever indicated that the community could use the larger return.
From the dissident side, M’Cready wrote with the greatest emotion. ‘Friends ... I think we may as well leave statistics alone and stick to facts — the eternal facts that God is an equal-loving Father, and that men have equal rights of access to His bounties.’ And when the next turn came, the minister of Unity Congregation objected to what he called the Standard's shifting to Shearmanism in Henry George’s absence. Though he denied wishing ‘organic union’ with any socialists, Pentecost did advocate such ‘sympathetic relations’ as might be possible.
Managing editor Croasdale criticized both sides. Shearman missed the philosophy of natural rights in land, he said, and became a mere tax reformer. On the other hand, Henry George men could not go with Christian socialism any more than with other varieties. Whatever socialists might say, and however well they might agree with Georgism concerning land, they could not reconcile their other goals with the individualism which Henry George asserted. Croasdale refused to state a preference between George and Shearman on the question whether 65 or 90 per cent of rent ought to be confiscated. In his opinion, the George movement’s first obligation was still as always to teach just principles of economic distribution. Other matters could wait on that.
At last in August, the master called the tune. After finishing with M’Cready, he stated his own judgments in the Standard. Toward the dissident side, while he omitted any blanket pronouncement against utopian socialism, he did object to the materialism, or threat of materialism, which he believed lay even in that phase of the socialist movement. He criticized Pentecost, saying that in his leftward course the minister had abandoned belief in immortality and had come to a position which was just about agnostic.
Facing the other side of the controveliies, George admitted a difference from Shearman. He applied to the lawyer’s 65 per cent the phrase ‘Single Tax Limited,’ a tag he had used before going to Britain; and he called himself an ‘unlimited’ single-taxer. Yet he did not press the difference very far. Limited or unlimited, the single tax was one scheme, and he and Shearman could work for it together, George asserted. He acknowledged that Shearman had brought great strength to the movement, from the moment in 1886 when he contributed money to circulate Protection or Free Trade.
During the midsummer clarification in the Standard office, George wrote a lead article on Bellamy’s Looking Backward. ‘A castle in the air, with clouds for its foundation,’ it seemed to him, ‘cool and tempting to travellers from afar ... A popular presentation of the dream of state socialism.’ He saw much good in the Nationalist movement. Large numbers of people were learning new and necessary ideas; the clubs were driving them home; and Dawn and other journals were communicating them successfully. But George’s final word, that Looking Backward was giving ‘a strong impulse’ to ‘the idea of effecting social improvement by government paternalism,’ was of course an adverse judgment.
Again a month later, commenting on remarks in Harper’s Weekly which he presumed to be written by George William Curtis, George returned to this theme. Even in such lamb’s clothing as Bellamy enclosed it, he said, socialism promoted state power. A revolution in property rights in land was desirable, he specified, but not the state management of land. In his own words in the Standard: ‘If we do not believe in laisser faire as it is general!* understood, letting things alone,’ we do believe that policy should ‘clear the ways, and then let things alone.’
In his recent letters to Walker, in his words and actions toward M’Cready, Pentecost, and Shearman, Henry George had become more completely a single taxer than Thomas Shearman ever was. He had widened his differences from the socialists, and had renewed his dependence on idealistic thought. He had not turned conservative, he had not reduced his loyalty to the broader doctrines of his books, and he had not been governed by the preferences of either branch of his followers. He had become a little more isolated, more lonely in the operations of his mind. Things would go that way for the remainder of his life.
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Having cleared the situation sufficiently at the Standard, George was free to undertake some speaking, and to go on the road again. In a couple of appearances in New York, one of them before the Manhattan Single Tax Club, he spoke on tax reform, but he by no means confined himself to that subject. After a swing upstate and to Toronto, and a debate with a congressman in Rochester, he made a party of three with Tom Johnson and William Ivins — the man who as city chamberlain had tried to dissuade him from running for mayor. They went together to Boston as leaders in the Australian ballot reform. They observed the first election in the hub city under the new system, and George wrote to his paper in delight. There had been no soliciting of votes, he said, and the Australian system must become the American one.
North of Boston George lectured in Lewiston, Lynn, Lawrence, and Worcester. In retrospect he acknowledged that single-tax organizations were growing slowly in that part of the country. Hamlin Garland was president of one in Boston, however, and Lloyd Garrison was working; and he discovered that some Brown University men were single taxers. He found people to convince him that the free-trade idea was increasing. He cheerfully reported that Looking Backward was popular and that the Nationalist Clubs were doing good work — asking the right questions and forcing discussion in New England.
During the last month of the year, touring this time in Ohio and Pennsylvania, George reported further indications of radicalism rising in the country. He noticed the fact that certain officials of the Knights of Labor and representatives of the Farmers Alliance had met recently in Cincinnati. Today we can see in such gatherings a shadow cast by the coming event of Populism; and George caught something of this meaning. He was grateful when the Knights of Labor, meeting in general assembly, declared for the single tax — he called this the most important labor event in three years. Though his enthusiasm outran his judgment — and the Journal of the Knights of Labor, if he had read it, would have indicated to him much resistance to his ideas — he had received a real compliment, and his own responses show that, after all the purges, he still kept heart for organized labor. All things taken together, when the year drew to a close George felt quite content with the achievement of 1889.
By Christmastime the speech making was almost done and he shifted his sights to the long trip, which was to start about four weeks later. Recent news from Australia was altogether encouraging. Nine hundred pounds had been raised for his campaign, and he was invited to speak for the single tax ‘in its fullness,’ and even — in that country notorious for the protective tariff — to speak for free trade as well. ‘Everywhere your name evokes the wildest cheering,’ he was told.
During the final month at home George put his affairs, public and private, in order. He paid some debts; he approved plans, suggested by Mr. Jackson Ralston and others of the Washington group, for a national single-tax meeting in 1890; and he may have had something to do with setting up the Single Tax Brotherhood of Religious Teachers, which was announced in January. This effort gathered Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist and other Protestant clergymen, and a few Catholic priests, into one organization for reform — a renewal of old procedures. As for the Standard, George wrote a new contract. He gave Croasdale full authority on the editorial side, for the period of his absence. He arranged to have Henry George, Jr., go to Washington and contribute a weekly letter.
At the point of departure from New York, Henry George received such a salute from the intellectual, professional, and upper-middle-class elements among his admirers as he had not since the Delmonico banquet of October 1882. At this dinner Lyman Abbot,
Beecher’s successor in Plymouth Church, and other clergymen paid tribute; and so did George William Curtis of Harper’s Weekly. Letters of good wishes were received from Texas Representative Roger Q. Mills and from ex-Speaker of the House John G. Carlisle, the two most prominent men in the recent Democratic effort for tariff reduction. Perhaps for the first time, university presidents joined in acclaiming him. Seth Low and E. Benjamin Andrews, the one just become the head of Columbia and the other, of Brown, joined in the pleasant send-off; and so did Professor Arthur Twining Hadley, who a decade later would be president of Yale. Terence Powderly, who was still grand master workman of the Knights of Labor but would soon begin his new career in law and federal government, more nearly than anyone else represented the kind of greeting Henry George in older days had been accustomed to receive.
This time Mr. and Mrs. George traveled without their daughters, free for a grand adventure. They routed themselves by way of St. Louis, where they visited Sister Teresa, and where Henry George was given a splendid dinner and reception, with many businessmen present. To family and followers at home, stories went back which were intended to sustain interest and morale: a meeting of a group of George enthusiasts at a Harvey restaurant stop in New Mexico; a hotbox and delay at Flagstaff; Mrs. George taking snapshots, and keeping her husband straight as to hats and clothing, typewriter and papers, all the way. At Los Angeles Henry George missed a meeting by reason of the train’s delay. He gave one speech, one hour and three-quarters long.
San Francisco warmed the Georges’ heart. Dr. Taylor and about twenty friends met the train at Martinez; and, from Tuesday through Saturday of the first week in February, they had a triumph. Standing before a paying audience in Metropolitan Temple, the very hall in which, a dozen years earlier, he had half-failed in the address which began his speaking career, he scored a platform victory. Surrounded by 100 prominent citizens, facing a full house, and greeted with pandemonium, he spoke the thoughts which must have come with the easiest spontaneity. No longer, he said, did the movement depend on one person alone. ‘It is sweet to a man long absent to be welcomed home . . . Now so well forward is the cause . . . that it makes no difference who lives or dies ... At last — at last, we can say with certainty that it will be only a little while before all over the English-speaking world, and then not long after, over the rest of the civilized world, the great truth will be acknowledged that no human child comes into this world without coming into his equal right with all.’ Perhaps this was the occasion on which the speaker was presented with verses which Dr. Taylor had written, and which were printed and distributed to honor the visit.
George addressed a free meeting for working men in the Metropolitan Temple. It was very crowded. He crossed to Oakland for a speech; and he was dined and feted on every available occasion. He had no more than three hours sleep, any of those San Francisco nights, he said. In the press he became ‘California’s Political Economist,’ and ‘The Prophet of San Francisco’ was used as a designation of honor in this place. As in days gone by the Examiner praised him cordially; and his old friends doted on his present recognition and power. A couple of hundred people waved the Georges off when they sailed, westbound, on the Mariposa — an American-built ship which the old India sailor found excellent.
California had seemed glorious and bright. During the three remaining weeks of February the tropical seas supplied the rest which the travelers needed. In a one-day stop the Georges saw Honolulu, and Waikiki and the Punch Bowl. Mrs. George thought the island spoiled from four decades earlier. In port a group of United States naval officers, some of whom professed the single tax, took the Georges to dinner; and at sea Henry George was twice invited to explain his ideas to the people in the cabin. But this was all. The long run, south and west, from Honolulu to New Zealand was extremely quiet. The Mariposa slipped by Tutuila in the dark without a pause. Only at Auckland did Henry and Annie George get a first sign of the excitement to come.
Henry George’s wish for that city was to see the seventy-eight-year-old Sir George Grey, who had spent four decades of his life as explorer, writer, and crown governor in Australia and New Zealand. During the last dozen years, and especially during 1877-9 as prime minister, he had emerged as a radical and philosophical-minded reformer. A present-day investigator, Mr. Peter Coleman, finds that, though Sir George lacked certain qualities which would have made him more effective in politics, he had a peculiar eloquence and power, not unlike Henry George’s own, to make his countrymen aware of the economic dangers of land aggregation. Certainly he recommended Progress and Poverty; and before Henry George’s arrival the book had been for a decade an influence in the land. Altogether the situation was favorable for the visitor; and we may anticipate that in years to come Henry George’s ideas would again influence New Zealand tax policy.
Immediately on the Mariposa’s putting in, Sir George took charge of Henry and Annie George. He charmed them. He took them to a gathering of the local Anti-Poverty Society and there publicly attested his belief in the visiting American’s principles. George was presented with a handsome illuminated address. A few hours later, again at dockside, the two men could hardly part: the captain had to hold the Mariposa while they talked on the wharf. ‘You have expanded a spark into a blaze of thought and unselfish conceptions which is spreading to every part and ennobling countless minds,’ wrote Sir George Grey in a letter that followed.
On 6 March the outgoing voyage ended at Sydney. Every circumstance made this landing an exciting one: Sydney was Mrs. George’s birthplace; and Australia meant rich associations for Henry George — memories of Hobson’s Bay and Melbourne, 1855; his writing about the economic problems of the subcontinent in the San Francisco Post; the origin of the secret ballot; and recently a political venture into the public ownership of railroads and communications. Henry George called the return to Australia a honeymoon, and so it truly proved.
Mrs. George was accustomed to a quiet place in the background, but this time she was presented with a red-and-gold shoulder ribbon, with ‘Welcome, Australia’s Daughter’ marked on it in large letters. In his first address Henry George, the missionary, asked for yet more return traffic in the ideas of democracy. He reported on the instances of American states adopting the Australian ballot. ‘If you can teach us more, for God’s sake teach us. Advance Australia!’ The effect of this speech, according to the Sydney Daily Telegraph, was ‘at once remarkable and indescribable.’ John Farrell, who was about to become editor of the Telegraph, the city’s largest paper, wrote to the New York Standard that George’s brilliance as orator, and the charm which did not wear thin under all the tension and pressure, pleased those who heard and saw beyond all expectation.
The reception at Sydney more or less set a pattern according to which Henry George was treated for three solid months. He was welcomed by colonial and city officials; he was managed by local committees; he was scheduled to speak frequently, and then many times induced to speak still more often; his engagements were separated only when travel required. In Sydney he was taken in charge by Charles L. Garland, member of the parliament of New South Wales and president of the Single Tax League of that colony. The two had met in England in 1889; and indeed this visit had much in common with that one. As he had under Mr. Saunders’ auspices in the mother country, George lectured most frequently before Protestant groups and in middle-class circumstances — of course the prevailing ones in Australia. During this first stop in Sydney, he appeared several times at such places as Protestant Hall, the Pitt Street Congregational Church, or at a meeting of a Presbyterian conference, while he had but one session with labor people.
After nearly a fortnight in Sydney — which must have been longer than any single stopover in any other city of his visits, unless London is the exception — George headed inland, at first west and then south. He made a dozen or so speeches, usually one a day, on the way to Melbourne, the capital of Victoria, and the city he remembered from the past. There he encountered at maximum force the principal hazard of his trip, the danger of falling out with people who would challenge his free-trade convictions and would perhaps reject him for those ideas though otherwise they might follow. As George analyzed the situation, in contrast with America, the masses were protectionist, partly he thought in protest against Great Britain. On the other hand, the landowners were the freetraders, and the people in closest touch and sympathy with home policy and ideas. But, as when dealing with the Irish in New York, George yielded nothing to the protectionists. Before a Melbourne Town Hall audience of working men, he spoke on ‘Labour and the Tariff,’ though he was advised not to do so. He surprised all concerned by winning an ovation; and he repeated the success a little later, in debate with a protectionist member of the colonial parliament.
There was more work to do, and more places to visit, than there was time to write his letters for the Standard, and accordingly our information runs a little short. Yet he was fascinated we know, and so was Mrs. George. Proud of her native land, she liked the cities better, as being neater and better kept, than American cities. In Melbourne, George ingratiated himself by reminiscing. There had been more ships in the harbor in 1855 than in 1890, he said, doubtless with a free-trade moral in mind; but he said also that a grim line of those vessels had been the transports for convicts out of England. He contrasted that grimness with the suburbs and villas now so pleasant along the waterfront, and with the changed face of the city.
After excursions out of Melbourne to places just west, George moved north to towns near Sydney, but much farther inland than he had gone on his way south. Then a week of travel took him to Adelaide, the capital of South Australia; and for the last ten days of April he was in and out of that city. The beauty of the place struck him; and so too did the power of a dour Scottish minister who was preaching the single tax there.
Before May was a week old, the traveler was back on the east coast again, where he had begun. From Sydney he went north, this time to Brisbane, capital of Queensland, where he was received by the mayor and by the Queensland Tax Reform Association. He made four or five speeches in the city. He seems to have discovered a special popularity in Marysborough, still farther up the coast. There, for one of several appearances, he was invited to talk to school children — an experience he had not had before, and one which terrified him. Along every leg of his Australian travels, various unfamiliar phenomena of nature caught his eye — the kangaroos, of course, and, here along the upper east coast, the great reef which stretches far to north and west.
On his final return to Sydney, Henry George closed the tour for which he had contracted, on the last day of May, just short of a quarter of a year after he had begun it. For that occasion he selected as his topic, ‘Protection a Fallacy, Real Free Trade a Necessity’; and the president of the Free Trade League, though denying dis-cipleship, saluted him as having made his name a household word in Australia. This can hardly have been an exaggeration. Two nights later he was honored by the mayor, who was also a member of parliament; and he was bid farewell at still another meeting in the city.
As in New Zealand, Henry George’s ideas had entered public consciousness deeply enough to make a difference. An early commentator credited two Americans with great influence on the rise of collectivism in Australia — the larger influence to Edward Bellamy, and the lesser one to Henry George. But a recent scholar discovers that Georgist ideas, in unusually doctrinaire form, were written directly into a Queensland bill which, though not enacted, had considerable importance; and that very soon South Australia, New South Wales, and Queensland all enacted taxes on unimproved land, and so set a pattern which has become permanent in Australian policy. George’s follower, Max Hirsch, kept up the effort for free trade, and his sizable book, Democracy versus Socialism, first published in 1901, is more elaborate than anything George ever wrote in setting forth the opposition of Georgist to socialist principles.
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In first planning the Australian trip, George had wanted the homeward voyage, still west bound, to include a stop in Africa. But now, at the actual point of departing, he would have liked still better to turn south and west, as he was invited, first to Tasmania, and then for a return visit to New Zealand. But he was very tired, and perhaps felt too committed to attend the coming single-tax meeting in New York to change direction. So the short stop the ship made in Colombo was the last the Georges saw of the part of the world they were so unlikely to return to. In Ceylon, as thirty-five years earlier in and around Calcutta, Henry George observed Oriental life. He visited a Buddhist temple and noticed the intelligence in the dark faces.
The run up the Gulf of Suez gave a glimpse of Sinai, and of course the African shore, but the Georges stopped neither for the Holy Land nor for Egypt. Their plans called for three weeks, later July and early August, crossing Europe, and for two weeks in England. George had agreed to a couple of speeches there. They debarked at Brindisi.
In Italy for the first time, the travelers saw the backbone of the peninsula from a railroad-car window. The romantic in George and the economist, both, were fascinated. The mountain scenery and the hamlets, which he believed to be older than Rome, seized his imagination. Then the engineering of the railroad took perspective from the type of labor which subserved its very operation — for instance, women carrying stones and mortar on their heads to masons building bridges. He compared Australian farming with the intensive olive raising of Italy. Stopping at Naples, the Georges visited Pompeii, Herculaneum, Capri, and Sorrento. George wrote home of this as a tourist, with few reflections, with little else than the delight of travel to express.
Like many Americans before and since, the Georges looked at paintings in the galleries more from duty than from satisfaction. ‘You would get sick of old masters,’ Henry George wrote Dr. Taylor, but said that they had ‘had a good time in our own way, unknown and unknowing, and working our way by signs largely.’ Mrs. George wrote Sister Teresa that St. John Lateran appealed to her more than any other church in Rome, and that she found St. Peter’s not a place to pray. She visited the catacombs. But she made no effort to get an audience with the Pope — it was hard for Americans she said, not mentioning that Henry George’s works had recently been put before the Inquisition.
From Rome the couple hurried north by way of Florence, Genoa, Venice, and Lugano. On the way out of Italy the ‘silent and soft beauty’ of Lake Como made an unforgettable impression. Their train took them through the St. Gothard to Luzerne; and by a failure of communication which may have been intentional they missed seeing Michael Fliirscheim, who had been busy with singletax writing and affairs, and who was anxious for a meeting as they passed so near to Germany. They had six days in Paris — Mr. George’s third visit and Mrs. George’s second, but the first for either with a real opportunity to look about.
There could have been no expectation that the fortnight in Britain, Henry George’s sixth visit in less than a decade, would turn into a personal or ideological triumph, as the visits of 1884 and 1889 had done. There had been no planning for that kind of tour this time. This short visit took rather the form of a general’s inspection of forces he himself had established on foreign soil but no longer commanded directly. George heard from Poultney Bigelow, who was now settled in England for writing; and not unlikely the two met and renewed old times. He certainly saw Father Huntington, who must have reported on the situation at New York headquarters, and the two went together to call on General and Mrs.
William Booth. George estimated the power of the Salvation Army more highly now than he had before, for he had seen it at work in Ceylon, and he hoped that the organization would in time become a rod and staff to him — a hope which was perhaps justified while Mrs. Booth lived, but which did not survive her early death. The Georges went to Birmingham and were entertained handsomely by Thomas Walker. The speeches this time were widely spaced: one in London, days after arrival; one in Glasgow, nearly a week later; one in Liverpool, on the eve of departure, before the Financial Reform Association once more.
This last visit in England, in 1890, confirms the picture of 1889, which showed him strongly entrenched among Radical and Protestant groups but out of the old familiarity with labor and socialist ones. Two interviews of the fortnight, however, raise new questions about old connections which were to have a bearing on his future. In London, George had a conference with Cardinal Manning, their second meeting. All that we are told about it is contained in Mrs. George’s adjective put in a letter to her sister — it had been ‘delightful.’ One wonders. A year after the event, was Henry George uninformed that the Holy Office had found Progress and Poverty worthy of condemnation? Or, just possibly, could he have gone to the interview with that information and have come away with some nod which anticipated the decision, still many months in the future, that would lift Father McGlynn’s excommunication? This seems improbable. One of the astonishing things about George’s life was his capacity to make war on ideas and policies, and yet to keep in touch with people who believed in them.
Whatever the prince of the church may have said, George’s visit with Thomas Walker produced definite results. In Birmingham the visitor was given a long memorandum, and it concerned the differences of opinion between visitor and host. George studied it while crossing the Atlantic, and he examined also a parcel of Fabian tracts which he had been given. The convictions of these Englishmen depressed him. He came home burdened with awareness of ideas he must somehow combat, on a larger scale than in the Standard office last year, and yet must do so without injuring the friends who held them.
Immediately on arrival in New York, on 1 September, he was taken to Cooper Union and presented to the first national singletax conference. He had acquiesced in such a meeting before leaving; Croasdale had taken charge, and now the show of strength was timed precisely for his return. Five hundred delegates from thirty-odd states were present, and the Single Tax League of the United States was at the moment of birth. The presence of friends, the excitement of a meeting, and work to do were reassuring things to come home to.
George plunged in. On 2 September, his fifty-first birthday, he was greeted by an assembly of 3500, and Judge Maguire from San Francisco occupied the chair. Yet, from George’s selection of subject for his own speech, one suspects a little detachment, a mood a shade different from simply wishing to acquiesce in the work at hand and from surrendering altogether to congratulation. He gave an address on free trade, not the single tax. The choice may have been directed entirely by its appropriateness for the voyager returned. But his son remembers George as having been somber at the conference. He noticed that when a voice at the birthday celebration cried out to wish him long life, George responded in intensity. ‘But not too long. Life, long life, is not the best thing to wish for those you love. Not too long, but that in my day, whether it be long or short, I may do my duty, and do my best.’
Writing about the conference in the Standard of 10 September, George noted that the ‘crank element’ had departed, now, from his following, and that the general press, more friendly than earlier, was saying that the movement had abandoned its old extremism. He said he welcomed these changes. He believed that people’s ideas were shifting, in a large way, in his own direction. He expected the movement to go forward, now, under its own power.
He himself planned to do some writing.
Christian Democrat to the End 1890-1897
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Between 1870 and 1897, Henry George wrote eight books. We are acquainted with five, already; three remain to be fitted into the story of his life. From first to last, George’s books can be remembered conveniently by decades, and in that way be classified as to type and purpose.
During the ’70s he found himself as a writer. In Our Land and Land Policy he rough-hewed his ideas; and in Progress and Poverty he polished them and gave them richness of context. During the first five years of the ’80s he directed those theories toward practice. In The Irish Land Problem he made his argumentum ad nationem; and in Social Problems and Protection or Free Trade he developed, first, the practical collectivist side, and then the free-enterprise side, of his larger economic philosophy. Finally, during the ’90s, he undertook the two tasks he had most wanted to do from the moment of completing Progress and Poverty. That is, he wrote answers to the philosophical materialism of his age, and he did a book which restated the principles of general economics in conformity with the ideas of his masterwork.
To be sure nothing turned out quite according to original plan. The ‘primer’ of economics, as he had first conceived it, ultimately became a two-volume treatise — though he never finished parts of it—The Science of Political Economy, which was published posthumously in 1898. The reply to materialism, though George
had said that he held back much of his thought on that subject when he wrote Progress and Poverty, turned out to be not a general affirmation of idealism but a critique of Herbert Spencer: A Perplexed Philosopher, 1892. And before the busy author produced either of these works he took time, first, to do a short book, The Condition of Labor. This was his famous open letter to Pope Leo XIII, which set out to reconcile the social ideas of Progress and Poverty with those of Catholic Christianity.
George’s entire writing effort of the final decade of his life reminds one of an engineering event of some years ago in Washington. When the huge Lincoln Memorial on the Mall, the marble temple which encloses the statue by John Chester French, threatened to go down because the ground around it was marshy, tons of fresh concrete were poured, to establish a sufficient foundation. Henry George had built his monument, and for a decade after 1879 it had held up beautifully, unthreatened. But experience was now persuading him that neighboring areas were unstable; and, much like the pourers of concrete into Potomac swamplands, he turned next to writing books intended to reinforce not so much Progress and Poverty itself as the terrain upon which it rested. Of the three new works of the ’90s, two extended the reach of the moral sequence of thought set forth in Progress and Poverty. Only one book attempted to reinforce the inner logic of his economic proposals, and that book he left unfinished.
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Readers who have sensed the degree of reorientation which occurred in George’s activities when he abandoned labor politics will understand the better his wish to return to first principles, and to make those principles as clear and as practicable as he was able. Yet, to comprehend more completely his compulsion to fresh thought, a backward glance is required, a little to one side of the main road of reform affairs which the last few chapters have followed. We must now consider what did not concern him very much before 1890, namely, the meaning of the less partisan and more intellectual criticisms and estimations which had cumulated along the way. Thinkers who misapprehended or seemed to misapprehend him, and people who were lukewarm toward him or else coolly indifferent, any and all who might possibly be transformed into followers or sympathizers, or whose opposition might be neutralized — such persons naturally challenged Henry George to restate the fundamentals of his argument.
The time to look back to is the middle ’80s. Though, as readers of Chapter xiv will remember, the country’s awareness of the man derived in part from earlier causes than the political campaigns in New York city and state, the excitements of 1886 and 1887 must be understood as having heightened that awareness tremendously. The United Labor party created an American atmosphere in favor of recognizing him that compares with the effect of the Irish crisis on Britain’s recognition, four or five years earlier.
As in England in 1883 and 1884, so in the United States a little later, criticisms and replies to Henry George increased to very large numbers. Individual items came out as pamphlet and book-size publications. The first such effort appeared in 1884, William Hanson’s The Fallacies of ‘Progress and Poverty’: in Henry Dunning Alacleod’s Economics, and in ‘Social Problems’ Though written by one who spoke rather against the compulsion of land-value taxation than against the merits of the case in economics, the little book seems to have disturbed George not at all. Perhaps it was too mild and glancing a blow to be concerned about, after Toynbee, Argyll, and the major British journals had struck their hardest.
By three years later, however, in the wake of the mayoralty campaign and during the year of the state campaign and of Father McGlynn’s excommunication, two more books indicated an increase in both quantity and quality of counter argument. In the instance of J. Bleecker Miller’s 200 pages, Trade Organizations in Politics, also, Progress and Robbery: an Answer to Henry George, there is little, indeed, to be said about quality. The book simply incorporated two anti-George campaign addresses of 1886, and it carried forward the name-calling of that year. But Reuben C. Rutherford’s Henry George versus Henry George, a Review, brought out by Appleton, George’s own first New York publisher, was half again as long, and in its own way made telling points of objection. Beginning with a premise, opposite to George’s own belief, that ‘Equality is a dream that can never be realized ... as undesirable as it is impossible,’ and ending with a contention that George assumed too completely the perfectibility of the social order and considered too little the evil inherent in man, Rutherford’s book illustrates the anti-egalitarian and anti-rationalistic assumptions which penetrated American criticism almost as frequently as they did British.
As might be anticipated, the year 1887 produced a good deal of Catholic commentary. Some of it cropped up far from the archdiocese of New York. For instance, Father Edward A. Higgins was requested to lecture by students at Xavier University, in Cincinnati; and his ideas about the mentor of Father McGlynn were published in a pamphlet, The Fallacies of Henry George. At a more scholarly level, the Catholic World carried an article by Father Henry A. Brann, who noticed, as Archbishop Corrigan did not, George’s distinction between private property in land and private property in things, but who condemned Henry George roundly, partly because he found him ‘essentially anti-American,’ preaching ‘a crusade against our republican rights of property.’ A third Catholic writer considered George to belong, or almost belong, in the tradition of the best utopianism. But he reserved the thought that the monastic orders of the Catholic Church were the only organizations capable of a ‘true and practical’ realization of utopia, and so in the end he dismissed George as a misleader. Still another writer, a parish priest of Pittsburgh, undertook in a pamphlet to make a kernel-sized reply to all of George’s principal economic ideas.
Occasionally criticisms came from writers of such derivations in society as George liked to think would naturally be favorable to his ideas. Two of these were George Gunton and Robert Ellis Thompson. Gunton, though better remembered for the journal he edited under his own name, was at this time simply a labor spokesman for the eight-hour program. In a Forum article of 1887, and in a book published a decade later, this writer criticized Henry George’s theory of wages (and criticized F. A. Walker’s also), and he offered a theory of his own. And the Irish World, which had turned against George when Father McGlynn defied church authority, deepened the rift by pushing the tariff question to the limit. During the election year, Patrick Ford employed Professor Thompson, whose book George had selected as target for Protection or Free Trade, to speak for the protective tariff. Along the way, the Philadelphia professor declared just as strongly against the single tax as he did against free trade; and the Irish World’s editorial page commented more savagely than did the special articles. From the point of view of the Henry George movement, the coincidence of opposition from priests, and from Irish and labor journalists, marked a real frustration. It set up a barrier beyond which George had a right to believe his ideas might carry. But the barrier held, apparently as unyielding in 1890 as three years earlier.
Among scholars, the most famous person to speak against him in this period was William Torrey Harris, the educator of St. Louis and a leader of the Concord School of Philosophy. In early September 1886, a date that indicates his decision to criticize was made before George became a candidate for mayor, Mr. Harris delivered a paper at a Saratoga meeting of the Social Science Association. His very adverse address, ‘The Right of Property and the Ownership of Land,’ was printed in the journal of the association.
Crediting Henry George with a true eloquence and with having achieved an influence on thought about equal to that of Ricardo or Malthus, Harris believed that land-value taxation, if ever put into actual operation, would lead to confiscations even greater than the amount of economic rent it intended to appropriate. The phi-losopher-critic said that George’s style of thinking should be classified with that of Herbert Spencer. Though once again there is no evidence that George himself took any special notice of a critic, this kind of article was just the sort to seem answerable. As much as five years later, when Harris renewed his criticism, E. Benjamin Andrews of Brown did come forward with a kind of defense. ‘Many of the objections raised against the George philosophy are in a way recommendations instead,’ wrote the college president in the International Journal of Ethics. While stating doubts of his own about George’s utopia, President Andrews called George ‘clear-headed’ and his economic analyses often ‘very brilliant’; and he suggested that ‘a stiff tax might be laid upon land without entirely destroying private income from rent, and involving no whit more confiscation than the forms of taxation now prevalent; in fact much less.’
Though estimations are bound to be impressionistic and generalizations must be tentative, it does seem that the middle and late ’80s were the time when Henry George was least rejected by academic economists. Representative of the new institutional and historical branch of American economic thought, Richard Ely, whose later antipathy toward George impressed his students, made respectful comments in his Recent American Socialism, a Johns Hopkins study published in 1885; and, in a textbook and elsewhere, he said appreciative things about George as a stimulator of public thought and discussion. General Walker himself clearly referred to his old opponent in his presidential address before the American Economic Association. Even while condemning the vagaries of economic protest, he advised his brothers of the guild to pay attention. ‘We ought to rejoice, with all our hearts, that the people, the whole people, are coming, for the first time, to take a deep, earnest, passionate interest in the subjects to which we have devoted our lives.’
Possibly the most revealing glimpse we can take in the academic direction is into the ideas of John Bates Clark, then of Smith College, bright rising star in neo-classical economics. The preface of his important book, The Philosophy of Wealth, was the place, 1886 the time, in which he stated the debt to George which we have already noted. In the fall of 1890, writing on ‘The Ethics of Land Tenure,’ however, Professor Clark rejected utterly the Georgist ideas that landholding is monopolistic and that the institution of private property in land operates to depress wages. That is to say, Professor Clark announced judgments different from those of George; the differences circumscribed but did not eradicate his old debt for insight into marginal theory.
Meanwhile Edward Bemis, Johns Hopkins-trained student of co-operation, made a fresh study of all of George’s books and of his writings in the early Standard. He published his findings in the conservative pages of the Andover Review. Reversing John Bates Clark’s criticism, Bemis admitted that he agreed ‘fully with George, as did Mill, and as do all economists,’ about the justice of land-value taxation, but he felt that the practical objections were overwhelming. He believed that such considerations, rather than those of theory, were what obliged conservative and radical schoolmen alike, the Sumners and Laughlins, and the Jameses and the Elys, to oppose with one voice the ideas of Henry George. The most that Bemis would concede in a practical way was that some form of land-value taxation might justly be applied in the big cities.
Replying to Clark’s article in the International Journal of Ethics, and using the dissenting title ‘Another View of the Ethics of Land Tenure,’ Simon Newcomb Patten of the Wharton School came up with a judgment close to that of Bemis. Patten rejected George’s program, yet spoke in a more friendly way than Clark did of his ethics; and he made the article mainly a plea for clearer thinking on everyone’s part, along the lines that join and separate economics and ethics.
Only the most general words are inclusive enough to cover the various intellectual, more or less non-partisan, attitudes of academicians and others toward Henry George from 1886 to 1890: recognition, interest, criticism, opposition, usually distrust, but sometimes deep sympathy. Though George’s own immediate reactions are hard to catch, it seems not too much to assume that he kept informed of current criticism; and the files of the Standard make it plain that his newspaper, at least, kept a sharp eye open for outside comment — especially for quotable items of approval. That paper reprinted in full, for example, the lawyer Samuel Clarke’s review of criticisms, friendly to George, which appeared first in the Harvard Law Review. Likewise the Standard noticed when Arthur Twining Hadley, brilliant and philosophically minded economist at Yale, said something (apparently much like Bemis’ position) that gave an opportunity for friendly comment. Even a conservative could go a considerable way with the idea of taxing urban land values and relieving capital improvements, said the Standard. The radical picture within a conservative frame was its judgment of Hadley’s position.
With a world reputation, a newspaper, and the single-tax movement, Henry George in the United States about 1890 seems, on a magnified scale, very comparable to Henry George fifteen years earlier, after he had lost the Post in California. He had gone into retirement to write, at that time, even though there were many other possibilities open to him. This time his loss was the United Labor party, the vehicle of political expression most natural to him. Whatever other occupations might offer — whether in the single-tax movement at home, or in journalism abroad, for example — none was as important to him as a return to his desk once more.
This time he had the conviction of thought already tried, and he was more accustomed to advancing than to retreating in the international warfare of ideas.
In the preceding section, occasional uncertainty has been necessary about the effect on Henry George himself of the accumulating body of criticism. It is hard to be sure how much he knew or cared, while he was busy with politics or lecturing, about any except a few of the adverse articles and booklets. But there is no doubt about the fall months of 1890, immediately following the trip around the world. He then found himself under such pressure of controversy, outside politics, as never before or after; and the common-sense assumption is the only possible one, that that pressure contributed directly to the exhaustion and illness which came at the beginning of winter.
Indeed certain things George did and said in late 1889 and early 1890, before he left New York, indicate earlier efforts to answer the rising criticism. During September, for instance, he reprinted in the Standard, from the Forum, a reply to opponents written by Thomas Shearman. The title of the article was ‘Henry George’s Mistakes.’ The ‘mistakes’ were the ideas chosen for dispute by half a dozen opponents: and the Shearman article amounted to a counterattack on the Duke of Argyll, William Mallock, Abram Hewitt, Edward Atkinson, and William T. Harris. Two months later Shearman again contributed to the same magazine an article on ‘The Owners of the United States,’ an examination of the new concentration of wealth, from a Georgist point of view. Endorsing this endorsement of his own ideas, Henry George reprinted it in the Standard, as he had the preceding article.
Drawing on a different type of reinforcement, the Standard republished from Harper’s Weekly Hamlin Garland’s now famous story with a Henry George moral, ‘Under the Lion’s Paw.’ The paper announced at the same time that Garland was doing a singletax play, ‘Under the Wheel,’ and that the distinguished playwright, James A. Herne, predicted a great reception for it.
The month of January 1890, before taking a train for San Francisco, was probably the time when Henry George wrote his reply to the most considerable piece of writing Edward Atkinson ever did against him. This was the Boston capitalist’s ‘A Single Tax on Land,’ which would be published in the Century for July, and which George must have examined in manuscript or early galleys. In this instance the argument against George was placed principally on a statistical level; and the proposition, much like Harris’s, was offered that land taxation alone could not support all the costs of government in the United States. Besides this, the critic challenged the justice of George’s remedy; and he hated the thought of the administrative procedures which he believed the practice of land-value taxation would require.
The Century gave George space for a full reply, and placed it in the same issue, alongside Atkinson’s article. Although Henry George did make deft use of logic now familiar, building his argument on the automatism of economic rent, and reassuring readers that his scheme would affect urban site-holders but disturb very little the property rights of farmers, he hardly tried to answer Mr. Atkinson in kind. He did little more with statistics than to incorporate some of Thomas Shearman’s findings. Thus he practically refused to enter into the kind of realistic controversy invited by his businessman adversary. Not from this instance alone, the impression is given that, except for Shearman, spokesmen for land reform were not very ready with facts and figures at the present stage of controversy. In the October issue of the Forum, for instance, Bishop Frederic Dan Huntington, of upstate New York, pronounced in broad but not very practical terms, in defense of George and like-minded reformers.
But it would be untrue to imply that the rising criticism of George and Georgism represented, in a general way, fact-minded people versus the philosophically minded. On the contrary, about the time George was leaving the country, two writers carried criticism right to the ground of ideas where he was always ready to answer. In February Horace White, who now had worked with Godkin for years, elected to quarrel with the single tax, largely taking issue with its premises in natural-law and natural-rights philosophy. White’s ideas were of course in current style, and the article, which was published in Popular Science Monthly, might well have led to something considerable in George’s life of controversy if he had remained in the country. In his absence Louis Post answered in the Standard.
But then, almost simultaneously, Thomas Huxley raised the same issues of philosophy, in a series of articles in the Nineteenth Century. If George departed from home just too early to debate with Horace White, his midsummer visit brought him to England when the Huxley articles were several months old. Yet we know they excited him greatly. ‘Have you seen Thomas Huxley’s articles?’ he demanded of Dr. Taylor about as soon as he returned to New
York. ‘What do you think of him as philosopher? I am itching to get at him and will as soon as I can.’
The mere titles, which the great explicator of evolution had selected, go far to explain George’s impulse: ‘On the Natural Inequality of Man,’ ‘Natural Rights and Political Rights,’ and ‘Capital — the Mother of Labour.’ The first article criticized Rousseau; but the second, which was published in February, made Henry George the modem intellectual villain. Taking up the early pages of Progress and Poverty, Book vm, Huxley ridiculed the natural-rights underpinning of the argument. Then, in the final article he restated the wages-fund and Malthusian ideas, in opposition to George’s eleven-year-old criticism. Compared with the early British reviews of Progress and Poverty, Huxley was temperate and respectful of George. But his economic presumptions were little different from, say, those of the critic in the Edinburgh Review, almost a decade earlier.
There is evidence which suggests that, within a month of mentioning the matter to Dr. Taylor, Henry George found time to rough-hew an answer to the articles. That he never finished may be explained in the short run by the pressure of demands on him in the fall of 1890, and in the long run by the fact that, after his illness and recovery, Herbert Spencer would offer a more obvious occasion for a reply to modern materialism. Yet, in Henry George’s own behalf, there is reason to regret that he did not complete immediately, and publish, his reply to Thomas Huxley. Such an essay would have placed in the record an important document in the modern collision of ideas between evolution-minded elitism and conservatism, and the natural-rights philosophy in the Jeffersonian tradition. Two or three answers to Huxley did actually get into prominent British print, one of them by a working man and one by Michael Fliirscheim. But of course George’s authority was lacking; and Huxley’s anti-democratic philosophy seems not to have been much challenged or answered.1
1 Though I have noticed no response, it is impossible to suppose that George was not troubled by an article by Goldwin Smith, famous historian of Toronto, a scholar of English origins and of Cornell connections, which appeared in the Forum for August 1890, a month before his arrival home. Calling them ‘The Prophets of Unrest,’ Mr. Smith bracketed George with Edward Bellamy and Henry Demarest Lloyd. This is a convenient point to note that George and Lloyd had come to their nearest relationship ever, not very close, in 1888. Ap-
Disturbed by the criticisms of the scientific-minded, George had hardly reached home when the attitudes of clergymen became, once more, a problem to him. In one of the sessions of the big singletax conference, a minister-member of the new Single Tax Brotherhood of Religious Teachers rose to move that such organizations as his own be given special representation in the new committee. The motion had considerable support. But it drew fire which was dangerously sharp for the stability of a new organization. Were clergymen playing politics again, new McGlynns and Pentecosts in the making? The question produced especially convincing denials from John Filmer, one of the numerous Swedenborgians in the movement. No man or woman of that persuasion, he announced, wanted any ‘recognition here on any other ground than manhood or womanhood.’
Not George, but Croasdale, spoke the opposition of the nonclergymen members, and the attitude that prevailed at the meeting. ‘We represent in this movement in America what is understood by the word “state”; they represent what is understood by the word “church.” The sound American doctrine is to let the church stand on its own bottom and let the state stand on its own bottom, each doing the work for which it is appointed, without any danger of complication or other responsibility of one for the other.’ Though it must have been painful for George to receive, a little later, a sorrowful letter from a clergyman, who promised for the future that he and his kind would take a back seat, it is plain that George’s own feeling went with the majority.
parently Lloyd offered a contribution to the Standard early that year which George did not print because he used a nom de plume. George wrote: ‘I am much gratified, however, by your appreciation and sympathy, the more so as it came at a time when an almost universal chorus was going up that I had ruined myself [over the McGlynn issue]. I was attracted to you by your striking articles in the North American Review, and tried to see you when last in Chicago, but found you were in Europe. Should you ever come to New York, I hope you will call upon me.’ When Lloyd brought out his article, ’The New Conscience,’ in the North American for September that year, the Standard reprinted it. And at about that time Thomas Davidson, of Fabian Society fame, tried to bring George and Lloyd into association in some ‘university scheme.’ But for reasons, apparently trivial at first, George and Lloyd seem never to have met. And before long Lloyd was saying that, having let George's ideas ‘lie "in soak” for a while,’ he could discover neither cause nor cure in them, for the illnesses of society. By 1890, George must have been as unwilling to be bracketed with Lloyd as we know he was with Bellamy.
By this time the Protestant social-gospel movement had more than begun in the United States; and excellent histories assure us that Henry George had had much to do with impelling it. But events of the fall prove that he personally felt no happier about clergymen without, than about those within, the single-tax movement. When a new People’s Municipal League of New York presently nominated a slate for a city election, and when socially conscious ministers assumed leading roles, George spoke out quite critically. He would vote with the League, he conceded. But, with reference to Heber Newton, he said that the reform platform had no vitality, and that he could find little heart in himself for such dilute reformism. Moderate reform had not changed San Francisco, he observed: ‘Where Casey and Cora were hanged Boss Buckley now rules.’
A sense that clergymen were soft toward doctrines he hated entered Henry George’s feeling about them. He voiced this anxiety to Father Dawson: ‘It is very sad to see the general tendency on the part of all clergymen — and it is quite as marked, perhaps even more so, among the Protestant sects even to the Unitarian — to avoid the simple principle of justice . . . This is leading [the clergymen] to the advocacy of socialism and all sorts of dangerous things, even to the acceptance and even advocacy of principles which will lead ultimately to atheism.’
George’s several-faceted concern about the role of Christian ministers in reform was matched, during this autumn of great pressures and anxieties, by yet a further concern about socialism. He sensed, correctly, that this movement was gaining in the United States. The situation had changed, not simply from the years of his collisions with Marxists of the SLP, but even from just a year-earlier. In 1889, when he had blown back at what he called the cloud stuff of the Bellamy movement, he had also welcomed the cloud as a signal of America’s social awareness. But now he felt uncomfortable, when the Bellamyites’ journal, the Nationalist, discussed the possibilities of political co-operation with single-taxers. Thousands who do not go all the way with George, said one communication to that journal, do want ‘the nationalization of land, railroads, telegraphs, etc., which is the rockbed of socialism,’ and nationalists should recognize that George was the man who alerted the country to the need for those kinds of socialization.
To be enveloped in utopian socialism seemed to George a prospect hardly more attractive than to be identified with the Marxian variety of the movement. At home the difficulties he envisaged merged with his estimate of the clergy: a danger of false thinking, and a danger of reducing the zones of reformism. But the total problem seemed to him as international, not just American; and from England he learned of it in the most personal and affecting way.
Henry George and Thomas Walker had been discussing their disagreements about social theory for two years now; and by this time Walker’s old argument, that interest on capital should be captured for the public as fully as the rent of land, had broadened, in his letters, into some vague general sympathy with socialism. The wealthy manufacturer contributed to a ‘Labor Church,’ supported the Fabian Society, and even showed some interest in Hyndman’s Democratic Federation. He continued membership in the Land Nationalisation Society, though he confessed to George that the secretary of that organization knew no better than to be fuzzy-minded between nationalization and peasant proprietorships; and through all this he kept on with the Land Restoration League, and with affirmations of devotion, despite his disagreements, to Henry George. Writing to J. C. Durant, George explained what was worrying him about his friends in England. It was ‘the wobbling, the compromising, the affiliating with socialists, and the admixture of our ideas with ideas that are directly opposed to them.’
In their correspondence of this autumn, Walker wrote long and troubled arguments of theory. In one letter he reached a conclusion very similar to that of William Torrey Harris, the Hegelian conservative. Urging George to ‘trace the result of wise expenditures of Rent by the nation,’ he said that the result would be ‘making all good things common, which in my opinion will be seen to be the flavor of your teaching.’ In an immediate reply George explained that the single tax embraced everything Progress and Poverty said in favor of capturing, for the community, the values created by the community. Do not be misled by socialism, he begged in a series of letters. ‘As for Karl Marx he is the prince of muddleheads.’ Other letters to England promised a full answer to socialism in future writings; and the next spring, after he had been ill, George told his son that he planned to use his coming ‘Political Economy’ to make that answer, as well as for other purposes.
Considering first certain differences of opinion within his own following, we have by-passed the most open sign of all that academic and general critical opinion in the United States bore heavily and personally on George, on the heels of the National Single-Tax Conference. On 5 September, as soon as he could get away from New York, he attended the annual meeting of the American Social Science Association in Saratoga. A ‘Single Tax Debate’ was the program; and speakers of opposite inclinations were scheduled, some of them old and some of them new to public discussion. Though scholars had by then organized, as at present, in national associations of economists, historians, and so on, the Social Science Association still brought together men of different kinds, nonprofessional students with professionals, and representatives of all the social studies with one another. The association combined in its learning a certain root flavor of idealism and reformism, as was appropriate to its origin and history.
The arrangements in this case indicate general fairness, if not fondness, for the single-tax movement. Besides George himself, two lawyers, Samuel B. Clarke and William Lloyd Garrison II, and a land-title expert of Boston, J. R. Carrett, were the invited speakers clearly on the single-tax side. Sure to take the negative side were Edward Atkinson, whom George had just debated in print, and William T. Harris, who was now United States commissioner of education.2 Two college economists, John Bates Clark (whose paper we have already drawn on) and the young Edwin A. Seligman of Columbia, were perhaps as certain as any to speak on that side.
Others seem to have been less predictable, and plainly a few of them provided surprises. Thomas Davidson, whom we have met as a teasing friend of George, sent a paper which went entirely against the single tax. He spoke from somewhat state-solidarist, perhaps Hegelian, grounds. ‘The true way to regard property,’ he said, ‘is as a gift of the state.’ Professor Edmund J. James, of Pennsylvania, very recent founder of the American Academy of Social and Po-
2 A side note concerning opinion, taken from a speech delivered in 1887 by Robertson James, brother of William and Henry, is in order here. While Mr. Harris was off from Concord refuting Henry George in Saratoga at that time, said Mr. James, the township famous in revolution and literature was reading Progress and Poverty as it had once read Uncle Tom's Cabin.
litical Science and soon to be a university president, pleased George and distressed Seligman by announcing a mild degree of approval. (His paper was not printed.) President Andrews took the friendly, middling position we know. He connected George’s analysis with the recent Analysis of Property under the Capitalist Regime by Achille Loria, and said that ‘an increasing number of able English and American writers share this view.’ The record of the meeting gives the impression that the single tax gained more than it lost from those who might be called the uncommitted, or not clearly committed, speakers.
The fight of the meeting, the combat which left the scars, occurred between George and the Columbia professor. Seligman was just thirty years old, with his future great standing as tax expert and economist still to be attained. The antagonism, which sprang up when he spoke, seems to have derived as much from his manner as his argument. He spoke of ‘the general science of finance’ as though it were little understood, and as though understanding were reserved to readers of scholarly literature in foreign languages. He proposed to test the single tax by what he called the standards of universality, equality, and justice, and he found it lacking. He assured the audience that professors of political economy as a group rejected it.
George was stung. ‘Let me say a direct word to you professors of political economy, you men of light and leading, who are fighting the single tax with evasions and quibbles and hair-splitting . . . You must choose the single tax, with its recognition of the rights of the individual, with its recognition of the province of government, with its recognition of the rights of property on the one hand, or socialism on the other.’
It was the anger of the reformer against the academician’s assumption of the higher judgment. Yet Seligman’s rejoinder won from George a half-apology for having called professors bartered minds. Seligman insisted that George overdid the distinction between property in land and property in things; and he said that Bellamy’s socialism had grown at George’s expense because it recognized that other values than land gained unearned increments. He demanded that social reformers ‘not offer us schemes which are repugnant to our moral sense and repellent to our logic’; and he denounced isms and panaceas of all kinds. In later writings Seligman rounded off his case against the single tax — criticizing the singleness of it, and repudiating its natural-law foundation.
The battle of wits at Saratoga was George’s third and last test by the measure of university men in America. Berkeley in 1877 was the first, and the magazine controversies with Sumner and Walker in 1883 the second. Ruefully he now wrote to Dr. Taylor that schoolmen rejected him. ‘How persistent is the manner in which the professors and those who esteem themselves the learned class ignore and slur me; but I am not conscious of any other feeling about it than that of a certain curiosity.’
In the longer perspective we know that the total situation was not as unfriendly as he said. In the letter just quoted George added that he had ‘been looking over some of the more recent politico-economic treatises. How clearly Progress and Poverty has influenced them, even though they ignore it.’ This did not exaggerate. He may have been scanning some of Clark’s writings, or Ely’s. Even the writings of Edwin Seligman, Professor Dorfman now tells us, came to show some effect of Henry George. Though a reformer’s bias must be discounted, it is worth anticipating that, a year later, when Bolton Hall as secretary of the New York Tax Reform Association was seeking support for that organization’s mild Georgism he was able to say that he had received 143 answers to an inquiry addressed to ‘leading political economists in our colleges. Of these 78 are highly favorable, including those of Bowdoin, Brown, Columbia, Harvard, New York University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Virginia, Union, Williams, and others.’
As of 1890, neither Henry George nor anyone else could count, before they became vocal, the sympathetic professors of the next generation, the young men whose minds were already being disturbed by Progress and Poverty. But the testimony of such future professional students of economics and society as Edward A. Ross, John R. Commons, and Thorstein Veblen tells us that they and their kind were affected. In the final chapter of this biography we shall encounter second-generation consciences stirred by Henry George, quite apart from any single-tax commitment; and in that afterphase professional economists were to have a considerable role.
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The obligations of the controversies just discussed — the public appearances, the writing of letters, and apparently the planning and rough-sketching of articles — bore upon George in September and October principally. During November he went off to Texas on a two-week speaking trip. On the way out he stopped a couple of days in Memphis, where he made several addresses before women’s organizations and Jewish groups which had invited him. Though he mentions one or two light audiences in Texas, there were single-tax clubs across the state — he went all the way to San Antonio — and he made $1200 or more on the tour. He was received by the mayor and council of Dallas; and he was obliged to cancel an engagement in Galveston in order to accept an invitation, and a $250 fee, to address the legislature in Austin. On the way home he stopped in Evansville, Indiana, for a speech arranged by the Central Labor Union — a kind of auspice not frequent on this journey. Altogether he had a hard trip, though doubtless also a good and reassuring one.
The chief incidental event of the fall of 1890 heightened the effect of pressures on the man, and of making high decisions. Since 1886 there had been snarled in the New Jersey courts the disposition of the so-called Hutchins legacy, $10,000 designated for Henry George. A widow’s need, and opposition in the family complicated the situation. At an early stage of the litigation a judge had ruled that the money could not be delivered, because George’s ideas were contrary to law. This amounted to a state inquisition and an Index in New Jersey. But during his own campaigning and travel, George’s lawyers had won a reversal of that decision, and at this point he was offered the remnant of his legacy left after charges had been deducted — a net amount of $435. In this autumn of controversy, however, Henry George chose to fight his own lawyer rather than take the tiny amount, because the bases of settlement did not suit him. Meanwhile giving financial assistance to the widow of his admirer, he refused the money — and would wait four years longer to win a final token of $200.
The suggestion which the story of the Hutchins case conveys, that George was in an easy position as to money, at least, while life was otherwise so complicated, corresponds with other indications.
The house on Nineteenth Street, though his daughter remembers it as shabby, was costing $1000 a year, he told Thomas Briggs, and it required two servants. It is hard to believe that his recent earnings from lectures, abroad and at home, sufficed to account for his capacity to handle such costs; but it is easy to assume, either that he was already receiving direct subsidies from his wealthy followers, or that he had been assured he could have support, whenever he needed it.
Perhaps until December 1890, any subsidy he had took the form of salary from the Standard. The contributions which Tom Johnson, August Lewis, and Thomas Shearman were making to the paper now amounted, it seems, to $7000 or $8000 a year. But George apparently did not feel that he had to depend on the weekly; and he made arrangements, during the fall, for the final surrender of his position. His nearly eight months out of the country had convinced him that the Standard could carry on without him. To the guarantors he now stated that for some time his services had been only nominal, and that he could not go back to the old weight and haul. Did they want the paper continued, he inquired, or should the Standard and its deficits be at last put to rest? He left the decision to others.
A committee was set up. Agreement was quickly reached that George should be relieved, but that the paper should be continued for the benefit of single-taxers. Accordingly a new publishing firm was formed, to take over from Henry George and Company at the end of the calendar year. Fresh capital was supplied by the sale of shares of stock; Croasdale took the editorship; and he, until his death, and then Louis Post, would carry on the paper for twenty months longer.
On 5 December, two days after announcing in the Standard the change of proprietorship and control, and just as his activities were lightening, Henry George was struck down temporarily. The trouble began with a horrible headache; and for three days he could speak hardly at all. When the doctors came they called it aphasia: ‘a slight hemorrhage in that part of the brain which presides over articulate speech.’ As he himself came to recall the experience, though he lost all power to understand or express words, he felt perfectly clear of mind from first to last.
After the first few days he was a poor patient. Permitted to be up and around the house, he paid little attention to doctors’ orders — four were consulted — to rest and not to try to write. Friends rallied round. John Russell Young called daily; Boston friends, Garrison and Louis Prang, wrote affectionate letters. From Birmingham, Thomas Walker, who had not yet replied to a long critique from George, wrote that his ‘heart stood still’ when he learned of the prostration. Very delicately he offered to take up any debt that might remain in George’s name against the Standard, and offered any other assistance he could render. To Tom Johnson, whom he had never met, Walker wrote in anxiety, lest George return too soon to harness. ‘Although I by no means accept slavishly all his conclusions, I recognize with deep gratitude that he has struck the keynote of the future universal harmony. For me, he has absolutely drawn aside the veil that hid the next stride in human progress, and has given to life a meaning and a brightness which previously it lacked.’ Could Mr. Johnson persuade George, the Englishman inquired, to permit one or two of his followers to relieve him of financial worry? Walker implied a wish to make a sizable contribution.
Johnson and Lewis had already acted. Johnson wrote that George did not need help; and George, writing five weeks after the stroke, said that he felt entirely secure for the future. Recently he had had more invitations to lecture than he could accept, he said, at $125 per engagement. The letters to Walker did not say that Tom Johnson had provided for Mrs. George, in case of her husband’s death; and it is not clear whether or not recent disagreements about ideas had anything to do with their refusing Walker.
As sensibly as generously, his rich American disciples wanted George to have a complete change of situation, and absolute separation from his desk. They selected Bermuda for a vacation. The arrangement proved just about perfect; and, amusingly, perhaps the only incongruity of the excursion was provided by Mr. Lewis’ selection of a gift. He presented George with three volumes of Schopenhauer. The voyager actually managed a volume or more —‘like a red flag to a bull,’ he said.
Mr. and Mrs. George had as traveling companions the Simon Mendelsons, who were the parents of Mrs. Lewis and Dr. Walter Mendelson, who had attended him. Only it was about as hard to keep Henry George quiet in Bermuda as in Manhattan. One singletaxer, on from New York with a bicycle, taught him to ride; and he loved the popular sport. Other single-taxers — an army chaplain and the editor of a Bermuda paper — kept him talking — more than seems likely to have been good for George. He went sailing several times with Horace White’s daughter, who became devoted to him. Except that, as an expatriated Californian, Mrs. George thought the Bermuda climate overrated, she especially loved the sojourn, and delighted in the rest her husband was getting.
For Henry George, himself, however, five or six weeks were enough, and all he wanted. By that time he felt that he must get home and be doing something, or at least preparing for work.
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‘I shall try to give a good account of the next few years if God spares me,’ George had written Durant a week before the attack. Now he returned to duty in just that mood.
After taking time to visit Harry, in Washington, he plowed straight ahead. Within less than a month he had caught up with the preliminaries of major writing: getting settled at his desk, looking over old writings on subjects about to be undertaken, making plans. He sought Dr. Taylor’s help in acquiring copies of his quarter-century-old pieces in the Overland Monthly — his memory was none too accurate about them. He considered a reprint edition of Our Land and Land Policy. Before April ended he had actually ‘got to work’ on the general treatise on political economy, which he had been contemplating for twenty years.
But on 15 May 1891, a world event in social thought and policy deflected his course. On that date appeared Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical ‘On the Condition of Labour,’ which has often been called the Magna Charta of the working man. It climaxed a series of ethical pronouncements. Leo’s earlier letters had concerned Political Power, Human Liberty, and the Christian Constitution of the State. The series, and Rerum Novarum especially, is accounted by friendly scholarship to indicate a decision by the Catholic Church, ‘in a democratic age to seek popular in place of princely support,’ and a wish to establish ‘a kind of truce of God in the industrial world, all towards a new organization of society based upon some conception of equality.’ The central thought of the new encyclical recognized that the very poor of the age were wretched and defenseless; it denied laisser faire economics of the Malthus-Spencer variety; it condemned ‘rapacious usury’; and it regretted the passing away of guilds, as the ancient stabilizers of the condition of labor. According to traditions of church thinking, Leo repudiated the strong state, and so, socialism, as a solution for labor; and equally he rejected social warfare, both the idea of class struggle and the practice of strikes by labor unions. Of course the encyclical has become established in the twentieth century as the fundamental document of Catholic policy toward capital and labor under the industrial system.
Though it offended him, so much of the encyclical conformed with Henry George’s ideas that it was possible, when he drew his thoughts together, for him to acknowledge a certain basis of agreement. He appreciated, he said, ‘the many wholesome truths’ contained in Rerum Novarum, and felt, ‘as all of us must feel, that [the pope was] animated by a desire to help the suffering and oppressed.’ This degree of confidence made his situation with Leo different from his old situation with Archbishop Corrigan and Catholics of that kind, in America and Ireland.
Unfortunately for George, the pope’s letter had altogether too little in common with Father McGlynn’s old position — or Father Dawson’s or the Bishop of Meath’s. It acknowledged class differences as unconquerable, a part of God’s plan. ‘Just as the symmetry of the human body is the result of the disposition of the members of the body, so in a state is it ordained by nature that these two classes should exist in harmony and agreement, and should, as it were, fit into one another, so as to maintain the equilibrium of the body politic.’ Leo recommended workmen’s associations, on condition that the members pay ‘special and principal attention to piety and morality’; and he encouraged a necessary minimum of state intervention in favor of fair wages, when economic need might require. Sufficient wages and adequate accumulation for all were the pope’s main answers to the problem of poverty. Obliquely but forcefully he resisted radical land reform. ‘Man not only can possess the fruits of the earth, but also the earth itself . . . And to say that God has given the earth to the use and the enjoyment of the universal human race is not to deny that there can be private property.’
Perhaps there is suspicion of megalomania in Henry George’s hot individual reaction to a document drawn up for universal reading and guidance. The ‘most strikingly pronounced condemnations of Rerum Novarum were directed against the ideas of Progress and Poverty’ he declared. Three days after the encyclical was released he wrote to Father Dawson how distressed he was: ‘You know the result in Ireland of ignoring principle.’ But very soon he had confirmation from Henry George, Jr., who was in London on a journalistic assignment, that his first fears had been correct. The young man had gone to call on Cardinal Manning. Did the encyclical contain anything against his father’s views, he had inquired. ‘His name is not mentioned,’ the cardinal replied. Did the encyclical censure the idea of the common ownership of land? ‘Smooth as satin,’ according to the caller, Manning had said that he believed it did. ‘This knocked me endways,’ wrote the son; and he had departed with no further questions. Thus the Henry George evidence does seem to indicate that not Karl Marx the materialist but a disturbing American idealist had been the great enemy in ideas, at whom Pope Leo was striking.
Making almost no speeches at all this year, George concentrated more intensely than at any time since 1878. In five months he completed his reply, The Condition of Labor, an Open Letter to Pope Leo XIII, a book a little over a hundred pages. It was published in October. Throughout the essay the author adopted such an editorial ‘we’ as few other Americans would have had either temerity or dignity to assume. He took advantage of the fact that he — unlike his more evolution-minded contemporaries — based his thinking, as much as anyone else, on religious assumptions.
In his own words: ‘Our postulates are all stated or implied in your Encyclical. They are the primary perceptions of human reason, the fundamental teachings of the Christian faith.’ Consider, he invited, what Bishop Nulty of Meath, ‘who sees all this as clearly as we do,’ has to say about property in land. ‘In this beautiful provision [of economic rent] made by natural law for the social needs of civilization we see that God has intended civilization . . . Property that in itself has no moral sanction does not obtain moral sanction by passing from seller to buyer. If right reason does not make the slave the property of the slave hunter it does not make him the property of the slave buyer . . . For the justice of God laughs at the efforts of men to circumvent it, and the subtle law that binds humanity together poisons the rich in the sufferings of the poor . . . Failing to see the order and symmetry of natural law, [socialism] fails to recognize God . . . The whole tendency and spirit of [Rerum Novarum’s\ remedial suggestions lean unmistakably to socialism . . . Did not Christ in all his utterances and parables show that the gross difference between rich and poor is opposed to God’s law? . . . Your encyclical gives the gospel to labourers and the earth to the landlords ... In your hands more than those of any living man lies the power to say the word and make the sign that shall end an unnatural divorce, and marry again to religion all that is pure and high in social aspiration.’
As he wrote, Henry George took every precaution, making an unusual form of argument, to reason as closely as possible. Father Huntington advised him, thanking God as he did so that the single tax was being presented as a law of nature; and Bishop Huntington commended the book in his diocesan paper and wished for 10,000 copies to be circulated as a tract. Proofs went out, with requests for suggestions, to Sister Teresa, Thomas Walker, John Russell Young, and William Lloyd Garrison. The son of the liberator, the most recent friend in the group, responded at once. ‘If the Pope don’t read it Christians will,’ wrote Garrison, and he urged that clergymen be bombarded with copies. John Russell Young, now in Philadelphia, never a single-taxer, had equal enthusiasm. ‘It is a masterpiece,’ he wrote, ‘and explains problems in your philosophy that never were clear in your book or your conversation. I envy you the vigor and truth and splendor of your style’ — it surpassed all since Burke, this learned man added. None was more delighted than Thomas Walker, so recently dissatisfied with his friend. The book would be ‘a crusher, a bombshell,’ he wrote. On the Catholic side, friends in San Francisco were pleased; and Father Dawson, after some thought, praised George for the ‘excellent use of a fine opportunity’ and predicted that the book would do much good, whether or not the pope would come to understand it.
For Henry George himself, there was amusement and curiosity, not much importance, in the point discussed in New York newspapers: Did the pope actually receive the letter? George learned that he did, more than once. Besides proof sent by the author in September, and a copy of the American edition, Leo received into his own hands, from the prefect of the Vatican Library, a handsome copy of the Italian edition. There followed, within a couple of years, an edition in England, the first of three, and an edition in Germany. A Swedish, and apparently a Spanish one, followed much later.
Realizing that he could expect no reply from the pope himself or from a spokesman, George had hoped simply to put pressure on all socially minded Christians. ‘What I have really aimed at,’ he told Harry, ‘is to make a clear brief explanation of our principles, to show their religious character, and to draw a line between us and the socialists. I have written really for such men as Cardinal Manning, General Booth, and religious-minded men of all creeds.’ If as author he had been a bit disingenuous, and thought beforehand to stir up such cross-purposes within the Catholic Church as occurred in New York City in 1886, George did not announce any such intention, even to his closest correspondents.
Yet on a small scale that was the result. Some American Catholics of course sympathized with George’s ethical argument, this time as earlier; and almost automatically these churchmen were obliged to raise questions of authority. Edward Osgood Brown, Catholic lawyer of Chicago, whom George had wanted to go over his manuscript before publication, said that no well-instructed Catholic supposed the encyclical to be such an utterance of the Holy See as is held infallible by Catholic doctrine. On the other side, as George reported to Father Dawson on 22 December, Archbishop Corrigan was openly proclaiming ‘that all Catholics are bound by the Encyclical as well as by a well established doctrine of Holy Writ.’ This led to as bitter a statement as George ever made, even in 1882 or in 1887, about the church. To the same friend and priest he continued: ‘Catholic priests seem so thoroughly bulldozed that they are afraid to openly deny this teaching. I cannot but despise and hope for the downfall of a hierarchy that teaches so slavish a doctrine, and time will surely bring it . . . [I] wish that the spirituality of the Church could in some way be separated from its political and corrupt machine, which turns into merchandise the efforts and sacrifices of men and women who are really God’s servants.’
Accidents of chronology now help us tie together the events of five years. Four years, to a day, before this bitter letter, Henry
George had written the same priest the hopeful news that Cardinal Manning and Archbishop Walsh were trying to get the McGlynn case reopened. Since that expectation had proved false, little that was friendly or favorable had occurred between the reformer and the church. But just a year after The Condition of Labor, 23 December 1892, George reported to Father Dawson a change. ‘Something wonderful has happened on this side of the water. The Pope has quietly but effectively sat down on the ultramontane Toryism of prelates like Archbishop Corrigan. Their fighting the public school has stopped ... I have for some time believed Leo XIII to be a very great man, but this transcends my anticipations. Whether he ever read my letter I cannot tell, but he has been acting as though he had not only read it, but had recognized its force.’
The most startling and newsworthy event of all was that Father McGlynn was now actually restored to his offices. As the priest himself presently told George the confidential story, the restoration was managed by a churchman close to Pope Leo. This was Archbishop Satolli, who had just come to the United States as papal nuncio. He invited the rebel of St. Stephen’s to put into his own words the doctrines that had caused all the trouble. The resulting memorandum of beliefs, according to the man who wrote it, simply incorporated without quotation marks ‘passages largely from [George’s] own admirable letter to the Pope and partly from the Pope’s encyclical.’ The nuncio, who was himself a theologian, submitted McGlynn’s essay to four theologians at Catholic University. When on 23 December they attested that there was nothing contrary to doctrine, Archbishop Satolli removed the censures. No retractions of economic opinion were asked, and very little, if anything, was made of McGlynn’s refusals of 1886 and 1887 to obey orders.
On Christmas Day Father McGlynn said mass three times, and in the evening addressed the Anti-Poverty Society. To his old friend, Henry George wired congratulations — an overture toward their coming reconciliation. He and Father Dawson exchanged a pleasantry about a future Cardinal McGlynn. This was far enough from what would actually happen, as the two correspondents themselves must have known. Presently Father McGlynn was assigned an inconspicuous parish up the Hudson at Newburgh.
Nevertheless the Satolli decision marked a victory for freedom within the Catholic Church, and for freedom in America. One would like to penetrate behind the scenes and understand more closely the change of ruling. Recent Catholic scholarship assumes that George’s book did have an effect within the church, and did help restore McGlynn. This seems the only plausible assumption. Yet if this is true, the outsider’s little book helped to establish a very puzzling church situation. For the Satolli decision appears to contradict utterly the secret condemnation of George’s works, by the Inquisition, three years earlier.8
Of the two policies, the Satolli decision is the one the church seems to have decided to live by. Since 1892 Catholic thinkers have contemplated as within reason George’s distinction between property in land and other private property, and seem to have been positively affected. The writings of Father John A. Ryan of Catholic University, in this century American Catholicism’s outstanding social thinker, are a case in point. This scholar rejected George’s formulas, but agreed in part on taxation and on the social nature of rent. And for decades now, individual Catholics have acknowledged deep loyalty to George without being censured and have strongly advocated his proposals.
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The Condition of Labor, though climactic, is only one instance of Henry George’s success at marshaling Christian ideas in behalf of social reform. This strength had its corresponding weakness. As he himself came close to saying to Henry George, Jr., there were whole areas of society he could not expect to reach by the use of religious and natural-rights arguments.
An illustration of this came from California. ‘There are many brilliant and many true things in Mr. George’s book,’ wrote President David Starr Jordan of Stanford, and ‘I am not objecting to the idea of the public use of land rentals.’ But this scientist and great citizen, who was readier than most scholars to speak for social improvement, could not stomach The Condition of Labor’s underlying argument. ‘A land tax is no more God-given than a beer tax!’ he protested, and said that the reformer’s metaphysics poisoned all the books he wrote.
3 The Tribune, 24 February 1894, p. 1, indicates that Archbishop Corrigan made another effort to have George’s works placed on the Index.
There is no precise name for the boundary of thought that separated George from the secular-minded, who were offended by the drafts he made on Christian and natural-rights ideas. Practical men abounded on the side opposite George. Huxley had represented them. Andrew Carnegie represented them in a different way, in 1891, in an article in the Nineteenth Century. The writing ironmaster asserted that all economists disagreed with Henry George and said also that the emergence of millionaires in America signified the well-being, not the hardship, of working men. Carnegie’s real belief was in social progress of an almost automatic sort; and Henry George’s own word which comprehended that philosophy, ‘materialism,’ though not precise was not inaccurate either. The phrase ‘Social Darwinism,’ which, as we have seen, scholars have adopted, comes close. George had had one collision with this ism in 1883, in the person of its high spokesman, William Graham Sumner. By now it was suffocatingly strong, in business and educational circles especially.
Perhaps Henry George regarded his old determination, to write a positive statement of idealism, as having been fulfilled by the letter to Pope Leo. The scope of that book makes it seem natural, at any rate, that he returned in 1892 to the polemic type of effort which he had planned and set aside two years earlier: a refutation of popular philosophy. The Huxley articles were old by now, but Herbert Spencer, whom George chose to call the ‘Pope of the Agnostics,’ offered a wide-open opportunity for controversy.
It will be recalled that George’s first fondness for Spencer, from California days, had been chilled at a London party in 1882 and had been dissolved altogether when Spencer repudiated any identification with radical land doctrine. George’s fresh occasion to give challenge came when Spencer at last changed certain writings to bring them into accord with his actual beliefs. During the early ’90s he was especially troubled by the advance of Georgist ideas into the actual practice of local taxation in Britain. In 1891 he published his little book, Justice; and the next year he brought out a redoing of his first book as Social Statics, Abridged and Revised.
In Justice he specifically said that, though the ‘equitable claim’ of each citizen to the use of the earth resided in the discretion of legislatures, the operation of that claim was in fact ‘traversed by established arrangement to so great an extent as to be practically suspended.’ For the new Social Statics the author eliminated the objection he had made in 1850 to private property in land, and he filled space by inserting certain magazine articles of 1884, which were already well known under the general title, Man versus the State. This subtracting and adding of material gave the revised book consistency with the complete laisser faire of Spencer’s later years. In George’s opinion the changes so far overshot the philosopher’s original individualism as to make ‘a new departure’ in his way of thought. Spencer was now assuming, George charged, that ‘nothing at all is needed, in the nature either of palliative or remedy.’
George understood thoroughly how popular the doctrine was, and the figure, he was attacking. But, to him, Spencer’s infidelity to his first judgment about property in land was part and parcel of the tardiness of the United States to accept Progress and Poverty. So once again the treatise on economics was left to wait, and a new book was given priority. Dr. Taylor urged caution. Henry George would be invincible against Herbert Spencer on the land question, the old friend counseled, but perhaps not so successful against the whole cosmogony of that philosopher. Yet George would not be persuaded. ‘What I quarrel with is the essential materialism of Spencerian ideas, and this seems to me to inhere in them, in spite of all Spencer’s denials.’ He simply wanted to reassert the philosophy of Progress and Poverty, he explained, and not at all to deny ‘the principle of evolution with which I do not quarrel.’ He admired Darwin and Wallace, he said, because they wisely ‘confined themselves so to speak to their muttons.’ He most specifically did want to challenge the Spencerian extension of evolution into philosophy and into public policy.
In some degree George actually achieved his difficult goal. His chapter, ‘The Synthetic Philosophy,’ explains with uncommon force the materialism and fatalism so often implicit in evolutionary thinking. His footnote illustration from the case of E. L. Youmans, whom he described as wearing his Spencerian ideas ‘like an ill-fitting coat he had accidentally picked up and put on,’ is especially telling. He had once heard Mr. Youmans denounce corruption in New York politics. ‘What do you propose to do about it?’ George had asked. ‘Nothing! You and I can do nothing. It’s all a matter of evolution. We can only wait for evolution. Perhaps in four or five thousand years evolution may have carried men beyond this state of things. But we can do nothing.’
The writer achieved a kind of magnificence, too, in the field of his original quarrel with Spencer. In a chapter entitled ‘Compensation,’ he discussed again the question whether landlords should be paid by the state whenever land might be transformed from private into public property. He could hardly have changed his own mind on the subject. And yet, to state a firm no, at this time, was of course to imply great disagreement with his own followers of the ‘single tax limited’ persuasion. Their very existence challenged his doctrine. Notwithstanding the hazard, he wrote the most eloquent plea he had ever made, for confiscation. Followers at home and abroad were so struck by the chapter that they asked for separate publication.
For his own sake, it seems unfortunate that George did not act on that particular piece of advice. Though A Perplexed Philosopher contains two brilliant chapters, it is as a whole an unsatisfactory book, the only dull one the author ever wrote. The bulk of it traces interminably Spencer’s various sayings about land, and attributes his recent conservatism to low motives. There can be little doubt that George proved Spencer to have contradicted himself, and to have displayed insincerity and even irresponsibility by keeping the old Social Statics in circulation for years after he had changed his opinions. Letters of approval from friends, notably Thomas Walker, Senator Carlisle, and Lloyd Garrison, can be understood to indicate an animus toward Spencer. But George’s attack was too long and elaborate to be interesting, and so ill-spirited as to invite reply in the same tone.
Spencer himself made no response. But two years later, readers of the New York Tribune were treated to such a comment by a group which included Professor Youmans and John Fiske. A Perplexed Philosopher was translated only once, into Russian, and it was given very few reviews. From England, J. C. Durant wrote, even before publication, that the effort would prove ‘somewhat of a waste of energy.’ The real victory of the writer, he added, was the return of a radical county council for London, several members ‘out and out Henry George men.’ From an opposite corner of the earth, Professor Joseph Le Conte assured George that what he had said about evolution was sound enough, but that he had been too hard on Herbert Spencer.
A subtotaling of George’s writings, since the trip to Australia, is in order. He had thus quickly gone as far as he was able in treating two subjects that had confronted him on his return to the country in September 1890. On the relation of Christianity to economic reconstruction, he had spoken against clericalism twice, once within his American reform movement, and once against the pope in Rome. Yet he had consistently maintained that faith is necessary for good works in society. On the dangers of evolutionary materialism to social thought, he had been equally definite. Though he challenged the mind of his age, he would remain to life’s end an idealist.
Having been so definite with those who disagreed with him, Henry George logically returned once again to his treatise. He was now more than ever obliged to demonstrate, if he could, that the ideas he pronounced did actually belong to the science of political economy — and should be introduced into the policy of nations.
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After the false starts of 1891 and 1892, and the interruptions caused by the excursions against Leo XIII and Herbert Spencer, George at last felt free in late 1892 to give much attention to the big commitment. Even so, he withdrew from affairs less completely than he had while he was doing Progress and Poverty. As we shall see, he gave time and attention to national politics in the exciting years 1892, 1894, and 1896. In late 1893 for the first time since the stroke, and again in early 1894 and during the following winter, he did a good deal of traveling and lecturing.
But he did settle at his desk for long intervals. Apropos of current hard times, he wrote an article on depression theory which was published in the North American for February 1894. It chanced to be printed next to a famous article by William Dean Howells, ‘Are We a Plutocracy?’ George’s interpretation of unemployment was no different from the ideas he had discovered in California; but the article gave him the opportunity to say that New Zealand, which he called the most prosperous place in the world at the moment, owed its advantage to a partial policy of land-value taxation.
Writing articles and lectures may help with a book while an author’s new ideas are germinating. But the restatement o£ old conceptions is useless; and one senses that, about the time of doing the depression article, George feared he would never complete the treatise. On the last day of 1894, writing to Thomas Walker who always sent him letters on Christmas and his birthday, he confessed recent discouragement. Though his courage returned, his expectations about finishing the work were several times put off. Nearly three years passed before he made up his mind he wanted ‘The Science of Political Economy’ as his title. He had waited to be sure, but he said at that time that he had made a science of the subject.
George’s anxieties do him credit. He had changed, and the situation had changed, since he had last ventured to revise economics. In ways not again possible during the ’90s, George as author of Progress and Poverty had conformed, not in ideas but by putting them on paper in the way economic ideas were usually written about. As he was a journalist then, so Malthus in his day had been a parson, Ricardo a businessman, and John Stuart Mill a civil servant; and, on the American side, Raymond had been a lawyer, and the Careys and Greeley had been editors and publishers. That is to say, big economic thinking and systematizing during the earlier nineteenth century had been non-academic, non-professional work, frequently, and had often had reformist or political purpose.
But by the time he got to work on The Science of Political Economy, the surrounding situation was different. Though we may have a good deal of sympathy for George’s feeling, that the professors displayed considerable arrogance and animus against him, there could be no gainsaying that the new academic chairs and professional societies represented an enormous growth of economic literature which was strange to him. Importations and incorporations of ideas were taking place: from Jevons, from Marshall, from Schmoller and Wagner in Germany, and from Boehm-Bawerk and others of the Austrian school, for instance. Their influence, combining with native impulses, was making economic thought in the United States an infinitely more complex thing than the classical British economics, which was the only kind George ever mastered.
The problem came up in midsummer, 1897. George’s friend, Lawson Purdy, had gotten for him, from Professor Hiram Loomis of Northwestern University, a memorandum on the Austrian economists for quick study. Though Professor Loomis wrote that he advocated the Austrians and said that he believed that, except for interest theory, their ideas actually reinforced George’s, the toiling author could find no benefit in them. In this final text, George said that if the Austrian school was based on ‘any principles, I have been unable to find them.’ At the same point he dismissed his old antagonist, Alfred Marshall, as ‘incomprehensible.’ To George the new economics was a ‘pseudo-science,’ and was ‘indeed, admirably calculated to serve the purpose of those powerful interests dominant in the colleges under our organization, that must fear a simple and understandable political economy, and who vaguely wish to have the poor boys who are subjected to it by their professors rendered incapable of thought on economic subjects.’4
Perhaps George’s mood would have been better suited for writing an essay in irony than for composing a comprehensive treatise. But the treatise is what he persisted in trying to write. Before the final few months his correspondence supplies no more than occasional indications of his progress. Besides depression theory, he tackled money and banking. He looked over his old writings, as far back as the editorials on convertible bonds and greenbacks, in the San Francisco Times three decades earlier. But he did not attempt to write up such technical matter this time. When the treatise finally appeared, the tenor of its definitions of terms and the discussions of the functions of money were governed by the old anti-inflationist convictions of the author. The opposite of ‘Coin’ Harvey, and the large silver bloc now in Congress, George wanted no dependence on money reform as a means of economic stimulation.5
While The Science of Political Economy was still in the middle stages of composition, George had separate chapters, as he wrote them, put into galley proof for distribution. Louis Post, who was now working for the Cleveland Recorder, was able to make the arrangements. This gave the author the advantage of safety (he wanted no such loss again as occurred to the first manuscript of Protection or Free Trade), and gave him unusual freedom to invite friends to read and criticize. Louis Post was asked. His new wife, Alice Thacher, a religious person who was intensely interested in
4 The Science of Political Economy, 208.
* Ibid. Bk. v.
the single tax, helped also. The author called on Dr. Edward Taylor once more, and on Lloyd Garrison — who had itad and approved George’s last two manuscripts.
Any preliminary criticisms, which might have been rendered at the stage when an author feels somewhat malleable, are not of record. But early in 1897, when George was estimating that he would probably need somewhat more than a year to finish, his intimates made comments which indicate them to have been baffled. Dr. Taylor praised ‘great thought’ and elevation of tone, once more, but said also that much of the manuscript seemed irrelevant. Tactfully the old associate enclosed a sonnet, the best he had ever written he was sure, and added that he wished no more than to leave one song that his fellow men would not forget.
But Post wrote in brutal candor. The sentences were too long — one contained 275 words — and the whole treatment lacked sharpness. George must not let himself think that the work was anywhere near done. Mrs. Post, with her Swedenborgian sensibilities at work, submitted her own separate criticism. She liked a certain opening passage on evolution, in which George discussed the special powers of reason and morality which elevate man above the animals. To the harsher criticisms, George’s simple answer was that he would stick to his guns. ‘I pit my own judgment against yours . . . and my own judgment is that this will be equal to Progress and Poverty.’
But it is doubtful that his confidence ran deep. In the latter part of the month in which these criticisms came in, the curtain dropped briefly, all too much like the attack of seven years earlier. Dizziness and nausea overcame Henry George, and utter weariness. To Dr. Taylor he wrote that he had had to stop work for a while, ‘from fear of the prostration I had in 1890.’ He resisted a doctor’s suggestion that he take a sea rest again. This meant that he was at home, not quite recovered, when the saddest possible family event occurred. His daughter Jennie came on from her home in Baltimore, with her husband and new baby, for a visit. Typhoid struck like lightning and she died in her parents’ house. The father bore the loss bravely, but the family sensed that he believed he had not much longer to live.
All this occurred in the spring of 1897, and events and conditions left sharp memories. His children noticed that Henry George reverted, again and again, to ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’ and the Scriptures.
One day, while Richard George was doing a bust of him, the father said mildly, ‘When I am dead you boys will have this bust to carry in my funeral procession as was the custom with the Romans.’
Yet George’s letters of the summer show him back at work. He carried his draft through a series of chapters on economic value, notwithstanding his incapacity to read the extensive new scholarship in that field. Presently the call came, as it had in 1886, that he run for mayor of New York. He consulted his doctors and was told that a campaign would probably kill him. But he did not refuse the nomination and meanwhile continued with his writing. Three weeks before the vote he was sending out chapters for criticism and suggestion.
By doing the two things at once he indicates that he had made a remarkable decision. He would complete his book if he could. But he would take a huge risk of never finishing, in order to be candidate. That is, at final choice he preferred to dramatize his career in an appeal to voters in the general terms of politics rather than to reargue the technical background of reform.
From all that he said and did, the present writer believes the decision represents a tacit acknowledgment by George that he was unable to weld a new system of economics. When he lay down his pen, the six chapters on money still lacked recommendations for positive national policy. Chapters on wages and rent were wanting. In many other ways the book was not complete. Perhaps George reasoned that, whether or not he ran for mayor, his life would be too short to complete the writing. Or, just possibly, he admitted to himself alone that he had made a mistake of planning — that he was not the man, after all, to venture a compendious survey.
Unquestionably The Science of Political Economy, as Henry George, Jr., had it published in 1898, does not satisfy his father’s first plan or the recent choice of title. Just as certainly, like the book against Herbert Spencer, it does contain passages of eloquence and of great logical power. The more interestingly because they had no great sympathy for Henry George otherwise, Charles and Mary Beard paid high tribute to this book’s eloquence about the nature of civilization and humanity, and George’s perception of the relation of economics to politics. ‘The body economic, or Greater Leviathan,’ he said, ‘always precedes and underlies the body politic, or the Leviathan . . .’ The author restated his religious and rationalist humanism: ‘Is it not in [the] power “of thinking things out,” of “seeing the way through” . . . that we find the essence of what we call reason? . . . Here is the true Promethean spark, the endowment to which the Hebrew Scriptures refer when they say that God created man in his own image; and the means by which we of all animals become the progressive animal. Here is the germ of civilization.’
If A Perplexed Philosopher, in 1892, was two books not one — short declarations of ideas and a long exposure of Herbert Spencer — the Science of Political Economy was several books. The parts that came intensely from the writer’s experience were good; and the parts that came from his deferred studies were neither good nor successful. In some sections the book is autobiography. One chapter, an afterthought which George slipped in late, is really a short history of Progress and Poverty 6; and other chapters in Book n, though listed as a survey of economic thought since the Physiocrats, are better understood as a review of certain books as sources of Henry George’s ideas. The book is an arraignment in part. It completes Henry George’s charge that economists in rejecting Progress and Poverty had rejected their consciences’ best judgment. Though this passage is less self-righteous than the corresponding part of A Perplexed Philosopher, the signs of a reformer’s frustrations are neither pleasant nor persuasive.
As a treatise for students and reviewers, The Science of Political Economy received about what its frailties deserved, not much consideration in the journals. Yet, a little paradoxically in view of how Henry George had been treated by Yale economists during his lifetime, a year after the author’s death the book was reviewed, considerately and wisely if not favorably, by Arthur Twining Hadley. There are no contemporary words with which to take fairer leave of the latter-day Henry George, as writer, than Hadley’s. They deserve quotation: ‘Henry George was a great preacher . . . But in proportion as George passes from the field of oratory into the field of science, his work becomes less good . . . The book has little which is really new, unless it be a somewhat commonplace metaphysics within which the author tries to frame his economic system. Subtract this, and we have simply a new edition of Progress and Poverty, less well written, plus a number of rather disconnected ut-
• Ibid. Bk. 11, ch. vn.
terances . . . For this reason it is quite impossible to review the book in extenso. This is not the first time a good preacher has proved himself a poor controversialist. Those of us who have admired George for his brilliant earlier work and for his unblemished personal character can only regret that this last book was ever written and desire that it may be forgotten as soon as possible.’
Neither Professor Hadley nor any other critic could have understood that he was reviewing an effort which had been sacrificed, rather than a text which the author thought he had mastered. The Science of Political Economy is read with comprehension of Henry George only when it is considered as a book that had several times yielded to other and more pressing interests. I think George would have been wise had he asked that it never be published; and his heirs would have served him better had they felt free either to make that decision themselves or to print the book as what it might have been if portions had been dropped and wise selections made — a distinguished series of memorial essays.
This final possible choice would have saved the book for its present best purpose. It would have preserved a conception of large strategy drawn by an aged fighter — by one who had died willingly, a volunteer on a different field of battle.
The Martyrdom of Henry George 1890-1897
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After Bermuda, during 1891 and 1892, Henry George gave a certain amount of time to the organized single-tax movement. He addressed the Manhattan Single Tax Club twice in 1891, once on the occasion of celebrating the club’s fourth birthday; and in mid-1892 he spoke before the Chicago Single Tax Club. In 1893 he traveled more than he had and made a number of speeches, some of which have been mentioned above. For a writer, and for a man who had suffered aphasia, he did a great deal of speaking during the middle ’90s, but of course less than earlier.
The most memorable meeting of the entire period occurred in Chicago, the second National Single Tax Conference. It was placed and timed in that city to take advantage of the Columbian Exposition. George had refused an invitation to speak before the Congress of Political and Social Science, held under the fair’s own auspices; and he was reluctant about having a single-tax meeting at all. Since 1890 the accomplishments of the Single Tax League of the United States, the permanent national organization, had not been impressive. But George accepted anyhow and at the meeting created a moment of drama. There he met face-to-face, for the first time since their estrangement and reconciliation, Father Edward McGlynn. At a mass meeting in the Art Institute, while the priest sat on the platform, George discussed the meaning of Archbishop Satolli’s decision. Through the nuncio, George reasoned, the old
practice of refusing Catholics freedom to preach the economic rights of man had been condemned by papal authority.
Otherwise the meeting hit the doldrums and even had special reverses for Henry George himself. A resolution favored the political reforms which were then rising in the country: the initiative and referendum, proportional representation, and votes for women. These were not points to disturb George, for he had favored them all for years, including even woman suffrage. But another resolution changed the economic program of the Single Tax League from formulas he himself had drawn in 1890. The national conference had then called for the public control and management of natural monopolies other than land — of telegraphs, railroads, city water, and gas, as proposed in Social Problems and in George’s earlier writings. The resolution of 1893 reduced this demand. Louis Post records the change as a shift from the ‘socialistic’ toward the ‘individualistic.’
George himself criticized the move more strongly. Whereas so many times he had had to contend with socialism, he wrote a California friend, ‘at this meeting there was an outcropping of what was a strong tendency to anarchism.’ It was a bitter pill. There is humor and pathos, both, in Henry George’s voting No with the minority at a single-tax conference, the last one of his lifetime.
After Chicago in the exposition year, George withdrew about as completely as in 1891 from anything like organizational effort. Louis Post became the workhorse of the single-tax movement; and Thomas Shearman kept his role as theoretician. Post crossed and recrossed the continent, partly supporting himself by lecture fees, and partly backed by subsidies from Tom Johnson and others. Some of his speeches went into his book, The Taxation of Land Values, which was first published in 1894 under another title, and later republished many times. Meanwhile Shearman was continuing his thinking and writing; and in 1895 he produced Natural Taxation, a sort of single-tax textbook which would be issued and reissued for years. It completed the effort Shearman had begun, in 1887 or earlier, to concentrate land-value taxation on fiscal needs, and to make it acceptable to the minds of businessmen. The continuing difference, between Shearman’s ‘single tax limited’ and Henry George’s ‘single tax unlimited,’ is clearly indicated by the contrast between Natural Taxation’s moderateness, and A Perplexed Philosopher s demand for abolishing private property in land, without compensation to proprietors.
Besides his work as writer, his obligations as the father of the single tax, and his concern with politics, George acquired during the ’90s yet another function to perform. It was a role of inspiration. Though the word salon is hardly right for the gatherings at Henry and Annie George’s Nineteenth Street home, the place did become a center for kindred spirits to meet and talk — to ponder, in friendship, the plight and future of mankind. Cocoa was the beverage, and the household surroundings were homely in every detail. The distinction of the place was the grand old man, as he was now, at center. His wife, his beautiful daughter in her twenties, and his lively one in her teens each had capacities to make visitors comfortable and to draw them out.
Lawson Purdy, able young lawyer then and later a civic leader, speaks of having taken Henry Adams there as early as 1889. He himself was a recent convert to Progress and Poverty, and he remembers the talk he heard about the need to believe in immortality. One day there called William Sowden Sims, about ten years out of Annapolis and an impressive figure in uniform. The future lifeguard of the British Isles wanted to meet and talk with the man whose book had ‘powerfully influenced’ his mind. ‘I can see no escape from the conclusions arrived at,’ he confessed. Another evening a half-Maori dropped in, for similar reason; and yet another evening is remembered when Robertson James, brother of William and Henry, came as an admirer of Henry George.
For their summers during this period the Georges went to Merrie-wold, in Sullivan County, where a group of single-taxers had a vacation colony. Departure for there in the spring of 1895, however, involved a wrench, for at that time the family said good-by to the Nineteenth Street house. ‘Afloat again,’ was George’s feeling. But in the fall they moved to Fort Hamilton, a high situation with a view, on the harbor side of New York. They loved the location. For about twenty months they occupied Tom Johnson’s summer home as a regular residence. Meanwhile a legacy from England, about $14,000, and a gift of a piece of land by Mr. Johnson made possible a new and beautiful home in Fort Hamilton. Done in clapboard in the spacious suburban style then popular, it was the only house the family ever owned.
More handsomely than anything she could have expected, it fulfilled Annie George’s old hope that they would some day have their own home. George himself must have felt deeply happy about the house. Here, as from the bayside houses in San Francisco, he watched the sky and water, and always the boats moving about the harbor. Then there was the reassurance of friends. August Lewis lived near by. It may be that Mr. Lewis’s brother-in-law, Dr. Men-delson, participated in the arrangements that settled Henry George at Fort Hamilton, and that the rich men who made it possible were thinking that his health demanded a change from the city.
Pathetically, the move into a house of the Georges’ own almost coincided with Jennie’s death, and then with the special anxieties, which came up in early 1897, concerning Henry George’s own condition. The handsome upstairs study, where many photographs of George were taken, never became a place of much writing; nor the downstairs living rooms the scene of many at-homes. Yet the new security must have helped account for Henry George’s remarkable serenity and confidence in 1897 — as of course it would help his family later.
While George’s more personal affairs were thus developing in patterns of old age, his connections were enlarging into literary circles where he had not penetrated earlier. Hamlin Garland in his thirties became the most remarkable personage of a whole group influenced by Henry George. Of course, if Garland’s champion, William Dean Howells of the Atlantic Monthly, had gone strongly Georgist, he would have ranked first. The older writer did call, very pleasantly, at the Nineteenth Street house. The Standard may be judged to have stretched a point, however, when it discovered in a chapter of A Hazard of New Fortunes a plain reflection of a chapter of Progress and Poverty. Howells was a sympathetic acquaintance of Henry George and apparently not much more.
But there was nothing limited about Hamlin Garland’s early interest in George and Georgism. He had been aroused by Progress and Poverty before leaving North Dakota and before Howells had become his mentor in any way. In Boston he experienced a real conversion, not unlike Bernard Shaw’s. He heard George speak in Faneuil Hall, during 1886, George’s great and critical year. In Garland’s poignant memory: ‘His first words profoundly moved me . . . Surprisingly calm, cold, natural, and direct ... he spoke as gifted men write, with style and arrangement . . . This self-mastery, this grateful lucidity of utterance combined with a personal presence distinctive and dignified, reduced even his enemies to respectful silence . . . His questions were few and constrained, but his voice was resonant, penetrating, and flexible, and did not tire the ear . . . He had neither the legal swagger nor clerical cadence; he was vivid, individual, and above all in deadly earnest. He was an orator by the splendor of his aspirations, by his logical sequence and climax, by the purity and heat of his flaming zeal ... I left that hall a disciple.’
The discipleship held. After backtrailing to the Middle West and getting out his first stories, Garland came on to New York, about the time the Georges returned from Australia. In 1890, he published ‘Under the Lion’s Paw’; and in 1891 this and other stories were gathered into Main Travelled Roads, a book which became a classic. As we have seen, the Standard reprinted certain of his writings. It discussed others, as they appeared in the magazines. And presently Garland was writing straight, non-fictional expositions of Georgism, and was making Georgist speeches before Farmers Alliances. His Jason Edwards, a none-too-successful novel of 1892, was in large degree a single-tax tract.
By this time, if not earlier, Hamlin Garland had entered the George discussion circle, and to those people he read his new stories as he composed them. Recollecting the exchange of affection and ideas, he says: ‘The Georges, whom I had come to know very well, interested me greatly ... Of course this home was doctrinaire, but then I liked that flavor, and so did the Hemes. Although Katherine’s keen sense of humor sometimes made us all seem like thorough going cranks — which we were.’
Garland’s mention of the Hemes refers to a gifted couple, Katherine Corcoran, a beautiful and distinguished actress, and her husband, James A. Herne, actor and playwright. The husband’s writings, though little-remembered, occupy about the same position in the history of the realistic drama as Garland’s do in the history of the short story and essay. The couple were close to Garland personally, for his brother Franklin played in their company; and James Herne’s loyalty to George’s ideas was enriched by his having worked his professional way in San Francisco, at the time George was writing Progress and Poverty. The earliest letters we have between George and Herne were written during the ’90s while Herne was playing on the West coast. He assured George that good seed had been planted out there, and he ventured some cultivating of the soil himself. He discussed the single tax with actors, and read ‘Under the Lion’s Paw’ to labor audiences.
For reasons, natural in his profession, Herne was at first more interested in other varieties of realism than economic for portrayal on the stage. In 1890 he had just written the play, Margaret Fleming, which now occupies a niche in history as one of the early important American dramas to discuss marriage with modern candor. Its failure makes the more notable, for this history, the success Herne scored just afterward with Shore Acres, the first Henry George drama on record. It was a down-East, local-color, family-problem play in which events hinge on the disposition of a piece of land. When he saw it, Henry George was too deeply moved even to speak to his friends after the curtain went down. Its realism surpassed Margaret Fleming, he wrote the author, yet the moral truth came through. In Mr. Herne’s own mind Shore Acres captured the language and the spirituality of old Maine; and the intensity of the situation on the stage dissolved theater traditions and made theater history.
In two or three ways the theater people were the ones, among George’s literary and artistic champions, who came to mean the most to his family and following. Through these connections they became friends with members of the now famous de Mille family, among them William, who later married Anna Angela. And Francis Neilson, who, as editor of the interesting New York Freeman of three decades ago, was the head of the best literary journal ever produced in the tradition of Georgism, gives stage people credit for inspiration in the ’90s. American actors, with whom he worked in his youth, says Mr. Neilson in his autobiography, turned him to Progress and Poverty.
Though there is no need to examine the more dilute solutions of Georgism that were to be found in American novels during the ’90s, the geographic spread of George’s influence on literary people and his knowledge of that spread have a real biographical importance. Probably the farthest contact to the east that George had with a literary American was his correspondence with a friend of a dozen years, Poultney Bigelow. The young man in his thirties was now pursuing a free-lance career, more or less expatriated, in England. He found it possible, he wrote in 1893, to insert Henry George ideas, somewhat surreptitiously, into the pieces he contributed to British and Continental journals. In the West, Henry George’s literary frontier seems to have been located in San Luis Obispo, a place just as far away as London. With Mrs. Frances Milne, poet of that city, George had a long but intermittent correspondence. An oversentimental and pious disciple, Mrs. Milne was one of several who sent George hero-worshipping verse.
Since George often visited Chicago, he may well have known about intellectuals there who loved to talk his ideas. We learn of two circles. One was a group of architects, members of a profession which was lively in that city, among whom Louis Sullivan, the early modernist, was an interested member. For the other, Brand Whitlock, at the time a young journalist, is spokesman. There was a circle of men, he says somewhat vaguely, who had read Henry George, or who, without reading him, ‘had looked on life intelligently and gained a concept of it . . . But these men were not in politics . . . and the only man in politics who understood them at all was Altgeld.’
In the case of literary people like Whitlock and Neilson, or among students like John R. Commons, reading Henry George meant discovering a loyalty that would last. Those young men signified in America an inspirational spread of his ideas, parallel and overlapping, but not confined to, the organized single-tax movement.
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At home, where examination can be more exact, we see that certain more or less literary minds were shifted by Henry George during the ’90s toward making an effort for social improvement. Among his followers overseas, on whom our perspective is more distant, the accents of the picture are different. In England and the British antipodes, where George had spoken and where political doctrine had been influenced, the results seem to have been pretty purely political. But elsewhere the story is the opposite. In Russia Georgism achieved surprisingly great ideological results, students of the literature of that country tell us, though political efforts were frustrated.
Henry George received personally the good news from the South
Pacific. Letters from Sir George Grey in New Zealand, and from Max Hirsch and others in Australia, told him of land reforms achieved and of fights against the tariff. And similarly from the mother country, such reports reached him as made it possible for George to continue hoping that Britain would be the first country to make land-value taxation national policy. In 1891 he was informed, at the request of a member of Parliament, on the occasion when the Commons came within twenty-six votes of resolving that the ground values of London ‘ought to contribute directly a substantial share of Local Taxation.’ Another report, mentioning the biggest political personalities to speak on his side so far, came to George the next year from James Durant, who himself was then a member of Parliament. Haldane spoke recently for ‘our ideas,’ wrote the old friend and publisher, and he was brilliantly seconded by Asquith. Besides these men in the Commons, Durant named others who, previously critical, he believed to be now going Georgist — Charles Harrison, the brother of Frederic, and H. W. Massingham, the journalist, among them. Also: ‘The better class of socialists — Sidney Webb and that crowd — are now all working with us, but they as well as ourselves are still opposed to the lower shades of socialism.’ The Fabians, Durant reported, ‘come from being opponents back to being supporters of our views.’
British news of this kind all came in earlier than 1895, when the Salisbury government took over. For the remainder of George’s life such optimistic reports would be politically impossible. But he did receive invitations to come again to lecture; and such news as that of work being done by a Henry George Institute in Glasgow kept him informed that his ideas were still growing in Scotland and England. The Science of Political Economy was written with Britain very much in mind.
It is hard to speak in a general way about Georgism in western Europe during this decade. The Henry George papers indicate no continuation at all from the practical undertakings of the 1889 conference in Paris. Perhaps George managed to forget that he had been elected president of an international organization of radicals. Letters to him do indicate, however, certain quickenings of interest in his writings. Translations were made into Romance languages — for the southerly lands of low industrialism and high Catholicism, where George’s ideas had so far had little reception.
Though, as we have seen, the Italian edition of The Condition of Labor came out, as was almost necessary, as early as the American edition, Progress and Poverty had been published in Italy only in 1888. A translation of the major book was brought out in Spain in 1893, not long after George had had a request for permission to translate in Havana; and in 1892 a self-styled ‘sectary’ wrote from Rio de Janeiro, requesting permission to make a Portuguese translation.
Though tardy, the Italian and Spanish translations were gains. But from France and Holland, George learned of discouragement. An admirer and translator at the University of Bordeaux (whose name was Plato) wrote sorrowfully that after ten years only 1670 copies ‘of your famous work’ had been sold. Jan Stoffels reported in 1892 that neither The Condition of Labor, which he had just translated, nor Progress and Poverty was selling at all well. Only the Anglo-Saxons are ripe for your principles, wrote the Dutchman, and England and America will have to lead the way.
Yet Stoffels should have mentioned the Scandinavian countries, for they were continuing their early show of interest. Henry George himself was kept somewhat informed, though he never visited there. In 1890 the Copenhagen publisher of Social Problems wrote that, though Norway had responded first, there was real ‘evidence of the spread of the Gospel and the progress of the Single Tax’ in his own ‘remote corner of the planet.’ This corresponds with an undated memorandum in the George collection, written by Georg Brandes, the distinguished literary critic and historian of Denmark. ‘What has made the deepest impression on my mind,’ said this student of the French philosophes and of romanticism, ‘is the profound truth that I should not be compelled to pay a tax on . . . my work, but . . . from that wealth or value which I have received from no merit or exertion on my own part.’
Unfortunately George never discovered a follower in Germany sufficiently like Walker and others in England to help him bridge the gap between reformism in the republic and reformism in the empire. Probably in 1891 and perhaps earlier, he broke with Fliir-scheim permanently. When Bernhard Eulenstein, a devotee who introduced himself by mail as a ‘strict Landliger,’ took the initiative, a new connection was established, for a moment. George may have been pleased at first by this man’s criticisms of Flurscheim, as at once too socialistic and too conservative, and by his criticism of the publishers for keeping Fortschritt und Armuth too costly for mass sale and circulation. But George can only have disliked intensely the bizarre political procedures which Eulenstein recommended. He wanted Henry George, first of all, to visit Germany and have an audience with William II. The young Kaiser had many ideas on the social question, Eulenstein said, and anyway the interview would be a grand advertisement for Landligers. Second, he proposed — to the American lecturer on Moses, now a protege of August Lewis — that in Germany the single tax be identified with the anti-Semitic party. ‘The British relies too much on his political liberty for which I do not give a fig today,’ went on Eulenstein.
For the second time George came to a cul-de-sac in his personal relations with Germans. He seems never to have made contact with Theodor Hertzka, Austrian land reformer and writer of utopian economics; and, unfortunately, he had none with Adolph Dama-schke. This younger man entered the land-reform movement the year before George died and became a devoted follower; in the twentieth century he would be an influential worker for improved urban housing, and a leader to infuse in Bodenreform a new humanity and power.
In Russia Social Problems and The Condition of Labor were published almost as soon as in the United States, and an astonishing number of Henry George’s minor writings were translated also. But Progress and Poverty was not published there until after the turn of the century; and, though George heard, some years before he died, that Count Leo Tolstoy was saying wonderful things about him, it is doubtful that he had any understanding at all of the following he had already achieved in that dark land.
Curiously enough, it was the German Eulenstein who told him in 1894 that Tolstoy was reading Progress and Poverty to his peasants. And it was the same promoter who wrote two years later that, if George would come to Berlin for a land-reform convention, timed for the exposition, Tolstoy would be present. But this was an election year at home, and in any case George would probably have refused another experience that promised to be like the Paris conference. He turned down the invitation before he heard that Tolstoy had told Jane Addams that, if George would come, he himself would ‘break his habit of never traveling,’ and come in a ‘box,’ as he called a railroad car.
But George did write to Tolstoy. The reply he received is as suggestive as the early acceptances of Henry George in England, say those by Bernard Shaw and Philip Wicksteed. It deserves a full quotation. ‘The reception of your letter gave me a great joy for it is a long time that I know you and love you. Though the paths we go are far different, I do not think we differ in the foundations of our thoughts.
‘I was very glad to see you mention twice in your letter the life to come.
‘There is nothing that widens as much the horizon, that gives such firm support nor such a clear view of things as the consciousness that although it is but in this life that we have the possibility and the Duty to act, nevertheless this is not the whole of life but that bit of it only which is open to our understanding.
‘I shall wait with great expectation for the appearance of your new book which will contain the so much needed criticism of the orthodox political economy. The reading of every one of your books makes clear to me more and more the truth and practicability of your system. Still more do I rejoice at the thought that I may possibly see you. My summers I invariably spend in the country near Tala. With sincere affection.’
One would like to picture Henry George’s going to Tala, or at least maintaining a long correspondence with Count Tolstoy. He did neither, and one guesses that he missed understanding either the Russian’s sincerity or his greatness. As, a dozen years earlier, Progress and Poverty had given faith to certain Englishmen that the power of the state could be used for social reconstruction, so, in this instance, George and his book worked a similar persuasion. Tolstoy became deeply convinced that his philosophical anarchism should yield, and that land-value taxation should be made the one exception to his distrust of all state action. He wished in 1894 that he could persuade the new tsar to assign the rent of the crown estates to the workers; and he actually prevailed on his daughter to do just that on certain family holdings. He wrote the same doctrine to a Siberian peasant, and he made the same appeal to the prime minister and Duma in 1906 and 1907. He stated his conviction in an eloquent essay of that period, ‘The Great Iniquity,’ and predicted that the Henry George idea would succeed.
Tolstoy was far from being alone with such aspirations in Russia. Long before Karl Marx became a great influence in the land, and before the wars and suppressions of this century destroyed the possibilities of humane methods of social reconstruction, Georgism entered the thought of social students and reformers. As a recent study of Russian populism of the early twentieth century indicates, George communicated both political hope and economic ideas. More than Bellamy, the American socialist, who was also known in Russia, and more than any other American, George was read and absorbed by thinkers in the Romanov empire.
George’s actual influence in Russia recalls the prophecy he made about the destiny of that land, in one of his earliest editorials. One wonders how the future rivalry he contemplated between the United States and Russia, the first political fact of our own day, might have developed or not developed, if Georgism had succeeded better, and Marxism less well, during the second and third decades of the twentieth century.
While waves of appreciation of Henry George were extending at home and abroad, in the world of thought and letters, a political tornado occurred in America. Though there were Georgists in both the West and the South, few words are necessary to explain that he individually had very little to do with the immediate building up of political discontent and protest. He visited the South only once or twice, and in the West his personal role had never been other than that of occasional lecturer. Deeply as he believed that land-value taxation would be as correct in the country as in the city, since California days his practice of politics, except for 1887, had all been urban. In campaigning for Cleveland in 1888 he had not gone so far out of his own state, even, as to speak for Tom Johnson in Cleveland. The fall of 1890, when Johnson tried again for Congress, and succeeded, was of course the time of George’s own greatest preoccupations and pressures. While the new People’s party ran candidates, he saw an opportunity for doctrine. ‘Politically things in the United States look splendidly,’ he wrote Thomas Walker that October, ‘radical free trade is rapidly gaining ground, and our single tax men everywhere are doing good work.’
When the returns came in the Populists had made startling gains: three governors in the South, two senators from the West, about fifty congressmen, and strong delegations in fifteen or sixteen state legislatures. But to George, and the Standard, all this seemed, not without reason, ephemeral. To George the great events were that Tom Johnson, as complete a free-trader as anyone, was elected to Congress, and William McKinley, whose name was attached to the high-tarifE act of the spring, had been retired. In New York, though William Croasdale, George’s successor on the Standard, was defeated, John de Witt Warner, a limited-single-taxer, was elected. Perspective does confirm George’s judgment that the election of 1890 brought to Washington a great enlargement of antitariff conviction. But of course this sentiment, like Populist sentiment, would be for the next few years only: different from George’s long-run expectation, by the later ’90s big business would consolidate, as not before, behind protectionism.
Under the old system of ‘lame-duck’ sessions, Tom Johnson did not take his seat in the House of Representatives until December 1891. George had recovered from his illness and had written The Condition of Labor by that time, and the millionaire pleasantly insisted that he come to Washington, for a bicycle ride and talk, and that he be present at the swearing-in. On this trip George began to have a little influence on federal patronage: his first and successful effort was to get Annie’s relative, Will McCloskey, a place in the Government Printing Office.
Meanwhile during the summer, though single-taxers recognized that Populist doctrines and organizations were not for them, efforts were made to have George men lined up for nominations in the Middle West, in the hope that they would be chosen in the coming big election. Thomas Shearman paid Louis Post’s expenses to go to Kansas to sound the possibilities of Professor James H. Canfield’s running for the Senate. Though the emissary decided that the move could not succeed — and the professor (Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s father) became instead the chancellor of the University of Nebraska — the trip was not in vain.
In Kansas, Post established a friendship with ‘Sockless’ Jerry
Simpson. And when that famous personage came east, in 1891, to take his seat in the House of Representatives, he visited Henry George ‘to declare his discipleship.’ He spoke at a free-trade meeting in Cooper Union and was much publicized for attending a champagne supper with millionaires present — several were singletaxers, one of them Tom Johnson. At about the same time this middle-western connection was established, George began to have letters from young Franklin Lane, future Democratic secretary of the interior. Lane reported that Georgist ideas were making headway among Scandinavian working men in the state of Washington.
The special stimulation of having Henry George men in Congress, taking an active part in national affairs, appeared first in the spring of 1892. Those members cared intensely — more in a doctrinaire way than any other group in the country — whether Grover Cleveland, if nominated a third time, would, or would not, reassume his role of 1888, as leader against protectionism. Now seemed the time of times to hit hard against that policy.
Tom Johnson, all vigor and nerve, conceived a stroke of propaganda. He arranged with five other representatives — one each from Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, Iowa, and Kansas (Jerry Simpson) — to have read into the Congressional Record, as an extension of their remarks, a section of George’s book of 1886, Protection or Free Trade. By proper arrangement the whole text would be reproduced in the Record. This did not mean free printing, but very cheap printing; and it did mean free distribution, by means of the members’ franking privilege. The trick was quickly turned. The most the Republicans could do, after failing to have the book expunged from the Record, was to have a book by George Gunton, Henry George’s old critic, distributed (not very widely) in the same way.
Henry George loved the coup. In New York he took charge of the printing. Six weeks after the vote, he was able to report that the book was coming off the press at a rate of 9000 a day. Many contributions pleased him: money from Walker for sending 10,000 copies to Britain; and funds in the United States, from Johnson principally. The thousands of copies sent to Ohio and Pennsylvania, ancient strongholds of protectionism, delighted him especially. Altogether more than a million copies went out before the election;
and according to Henry George, Jr., they were sent to all the newspapers in the country.
Hardly second to the quantity of this operation, George loved the idea that Democratic party action had been the force to put it over. A partisan vote had saved the reading into the Record, and by that token Protection or Free Trade took the color of Democratic doctrine. The press gallery of the House was stunned, wrote Henry George, Jr. Congressmen were awakening to the fact that the single tax was in politics, according to the same reporter, and he believed that the Democratic party, allowing exceptions, was ‘galloping towards free trade. Our work is to spur that gallop.’
Of course the national convention in Chicago was not so subject to stampede. As in 1888, the tariff plank caused a prolonged battle in committee; and once more the committee reported a weak and two-minded proposition. Again Tom Johnson, as mighty newcomer in politics, seized the lead. Joining with Henry Watterson, who represented the southern tradition for free trade and who had had his Louisville paper serialize Protection or Free Trade when it was first published, Johnson managed to have the tariff plank debated on the floor of the convention. He won something of what he wanted. The Democrats officially declared the McKinley Act to be a ‘culminating atrocity of class legislation.’ But the party made no such clear-cut affirmation as Johnson desired, or as would have been consistent with Protection or Free Trade.
A compromise would seem to have been all that the free-traders had a right to hope for, in the convention. But they did permit themselves to expect that ‘Mr. President,’ now nominated, would be persuaded to resume the line of his most historic message to Congress. Watterson wrote Cleveland that in Chicago he had opposed ‘what was represented as your judgment and desire in the adoption of the tariff plank,’ and he added that he did ‘not think that you appreciate the overwhelming force of the revenue reform issue, which has made you its idol.’ He tried pressure. ‘You cannot escape your great message of 1887 if you would . . . Emphasize it, amplify it, do not subtract a thought, do not erase a word.’
But Grover Cleveland was not a man to be managed. He and Watterson never spoke after this letter. Tom Johnson and Henry George approached the candidate. Probably they were not as inconsiderate as the Kentuckian, but they felt rebuffed. It can be estimated that the Georgists overstrained, alike in Congress and convention and with Cleveland, asking for more than they could demand. The impression of political opportunities lost at home is heightened by the Liberal victories in England. In that country, during the same summer, was created the Parliamentary situation already reported, which was favorable to Georgist ideas.
Shortly after the convention, Henry George on his own responsibility ordered 200,000 new copies of Protection or Free Trade to be printed. The propaganda went on. But after Cleveland’s rebuff there ceased to be heart in the effort. George retired quietly to Merriewold. For the summer he even stopped trying to keep informed about the campaign. His one remaining hope, he told Shearman during the second week of September, was that a stunning vote for Tom Johnson would strengthen the radical line.
But once again, as in 1888, his faith in Cleveland was renewed. He met the ex-president, and a remark Cleveland dropped convinced him that the candidate was not ‘crawfishing’ after all. Understanding now that Cleveland truly believed in the revenue-only idea of the tariff, George advised Johnson that ‘for the present he has gone far enough,’ and that ‘the Radical wing is on top,’ after all. To his Republican intimate, John Russell Young, George said that there was no need to go to the Populists ‘while the Democratic Party can be made to work.’
Late in October, according to this reconciliation, Henry George took a political speaking trip into the Middle West. Though he went as far as Minneapolis, as a Democrat for Cleveland, his main concern was for Ohio. He had become anxious about Johnson, whose district had been gerrymandered. As in George’s own case in 1887, possible long-run results seemed more important than immediate ones. Radical hopes reached farther than just re-election; another term in Congress, George thought, might open the way to the governorship; and the governorship in turn might lead to making Ohio the first single-tax state. Then, in 1896 or whenever might be, Tom Loftin Johnson for President.
In this frame of mind, Henry George made no concessions, either to Populist doctrine or to Populist strength. The Standard printed the Georgist criticism: that, though the party represented ‘widespread and well founded discontent,’ its platform was no better than a ‘patchwork.’ Later, when the vote was in, George attributed no deep importance to the large increase of Populist showing. Though some of his judgments seem sectarian and ungenerous, and though he was far too optimistic about certain victories he cherished, he did, in November, have much cause to celebrate. Cleveland was returned to the White House. Tom Johnson, Jerry Simpson, and John de Witt Warner were re-elected; and his old friend Judge Maguire was chosen a member of Congress from San Francisco. The Republican party is now destroyed, Henry George wrote his lady-poet admirer in San Luis Obispo, and before long the Democratic party, too, will crumble. A true party will appear. Yet the truth we work for does not reside in parties, ‘it is the progress of our idea . . . The future believe me is ours.’
A campaign year in which he allowed himself a host of exaggerated hopes was poor preparation for the political realities of 1893 and after. With the worsening depression, national politics shifted from anti-tariff to money problems and to income tax. Henry George as anxious observer and doctrinaire had no quarrel of principle with the President’s demand for the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. It was doubtless the old editor in him, once sold out by Senator Jones of Nevada, who now resented the silver lobby. And it was the old spokesman for the gold standard, and for limited greenbacks and interconvertible bonds, who opposed new varieties of inflationism. He talked and corresponded with Tom Johnson, in 1893, about bonds and paper money and, in general terms, about working out an ‘elastic currency’ as national policy. Depression exigencies by no means forced George out of the swim, but the special session of Congress of the summer of 1893 made him heartsick that opportunity for tariff reform was rapidly slipping away.
The situation came to a head in the winter, after the Fifty-third Congress reassembled. The President’s message called for a reduction in schedules of duties, and the Wilson Bill was introduced. Hope persisted for reform, and at one dramatic point Henry George had a moment of glory. He was seated in the gallery of the house, and Tom Johnson was speaking — himself a manufacturer — against the tariff on steel rails. But a member pointed to the gallery, and spoke in contempt of the ‘master’ above, directing his ‘pupil on the floor of the house.’ In reply a number of Democrats marched up the steps and shook hands with the free-trade thinker.
Later that winter, when the famous and short-lived income tax of 1894 was passed as an amendment to the tariff bill, Henry George’s ideas were acknowledged a second time. The measure was enacted, of course, by reason of the agreement of nearly every variety of liberalism: the President favored it; so did the People’s party, and farmer and labor groups generally; and Tom Johnson reluctantly agreed. But for Georgists there was very particular reason for regret, and Representative James Maguire moved an amendment. Place the tax on land values exclusively, he proposed. Make the tax fall on the states in proportion to population, precisely as the constitution requires of any direct taxation by Congress, he argued. Different from George’s opinion when once asked by a Senate committee, Judge Maguire believed a constitutional amendment to be entirely unnecessary.1
This was the first time that Henry George’s reform had been considered in a legislature as possible policy for an entire nation. George appreciated the event in those terms. The six members who voted for the Maguire amendment were twice the number he expected: Maguire, Johnson, Simpson, Warner, and Charles Tracey of New York and Michael Harter of Ohio. Though he was pleased, he did not think he saw the future coming in Washington. ‘The direct line of our advance,’ he wrote Richard McGhee of Glasgow, ‘is however in State legislation, and the single tax may in that way be brought into political issue at any time.’ When the Supreme Court threw out the new income tax, George thought the majority judges to be more right than wrong.2
The events that honored Henry George in Congress were the deeds of tiny minorities. To his distress, the fears of the summer of 1893 were more than realized during the winter. Not only did the Mills tariff wither into a ‘final defeat of long-deferred hopes,’ but the administration took the side of capital in a shocking labor
1 As we have seen, while he called income taxes second-best, George always judged them to be inquisitorial and unwise. He thought it unfair to levy either on a citizen’s earnings by labor, or on his income from capital, at least as long as there remained sources of taxation in rent. In A Perplexed Philosopher he spoke indirectly but strongly against income taxes.
2 Probably George noticed that the court reasoned much as Maguire did. It decided that the income tax was unconstitutional because it would tax income from rent (among all sources) without apportionment among the states according to population. See George, Jr., 579; compare Swisher, American Constitutional Development, 449-51.
affair. At campaign time 1892, Cleveland had said, for the ears of labor sympathizers, the right things about the recent Homestead strike. But when, in the more famous crisis of two years later, the President not only broke a strike but used such a mighty exercise of federal power to do so as no earlier administration ever had, and none has since, liberals and pro-labor people were alarmed in the extreme.
The Pullman strike and Cleveland’s ordering troops to Chicago, requires no retelling. To Henry George the issues were the gravest the country had to confront, and they were utterly plain. The President’s famous dictum, that if it took ‘the entire army of the United States to deliver a postal card in Chicago, that postal card will be delivered,’ seemed to him irrelevant and needless. His admiration went to Governor Altgeld, who protested that Cleveland was being too precipitate, and that federal troops were not necessary.
In New York George assumed the role of a kind of tribune of the people. He returned to Cooper Union, where during labor campaigns he had spoken so frequently. Perhaps 10,000 tried to hear him. Under the title, ‘Peace by Standing Army,’ he spoke for the freedom of working men. ‘There is something more important, even, than law and order, and that is liberty. I yield to nobody in my respect for the rights of property; yet I would rather see every locomotive in this land ditched, every car and every depot burned and every rail torn up, than to have them preserved by means of a Federal standing army. That is the order that reigned in Warsaw [long applause]. That is the order in the keeping of which every democratic republic before ours has fallen. I love the American Republic better than I love such order.’ Of a handful of letters preserved from those that came to George after the address, the best were from writers who were old abolitionists and wrote in that vein.
The reformer never changed his mind again, to be favorable to Grover Cleveland. He quarreled with him once more, in 1896. In an event famous in diplomatic relations, the President said some very sharp things against Britain, in the matter of the Guiana-Venezuela boundary dispute. As the question before the public was how to apply the Monroe Doctrine, we may wonder whether George remembered his own plan to intervene in Latin America, from the Pacific side, thirty years earlier. But he was a sober man now, a leader with followers in England whom he had indoctrinated in natural rights. He made an eloquent anti-imperialist speech, once again in Cooper Union. It won praise from directions not usual. ‘You have rendered your country a noble service,’ wrote Horace White, ‘your speech last night was very effective.’
Meanwhile, over a period of two years, George’s dissents and his associations with other radicals had ripened in him the most bitter feeling about the administration and the conservative branch of the Democratic party. The sympathy with Governor Altgeld in 1894 had led to a correspondence, though they had never met. George assured the governor that the issues he had fought over would surely rise again. In the summer of 1894, as the congressional elections approached, the only hope he had was the old one, that conservative blunders would lead to radical gains. ‘Does political history show any parallel to the Democratic stultification?’ he demanded of Lloyd Garrison.
Once again he rejected the third-party possibility. He would not change his mind about the People’s party, or encourage a new party of his own. When single-taxers in New York and Brooklyn made a motion toward organizing, he said publicly that he would accept no nomination if offered. ‘The Single Tax is not a party or an organization,’ he told a Tribune reporter. ‘It is a perception of a great truth.’
In Chicago his attitude made difficulties. Eugene Debs, the recent leader of the Pullman strike, Henry Demarest Lloyd, whose Wealth versus Commonwealth had just appeared, Clarence Darrow, and others had fabricated a united front of Populist and labor forces. Even single-taxers and socialists were pulling weight together in that city. But when Henry George visited, a month before the elections, he talked single-tax ideas unadulterated. According to Professor Destler’s close study, his opposition so weakened the labor and Populist alliance as to assist the coming Republican victory in Illinois.
Neither united-front, nor third-party, nor George’s own type of intra-Democratic insurgency succeeded at the polls that year. In New York, John de Witt Warner was not even nominated for Congress. Jerry Simpson and Tom Johnson, who had judged it best that George not make campaign speeches in the West, were both defeated. Of the Georgist group in Congress, only Judge Maguire survived. Champ Clark — with whom George was acquainted — called 1894 the greatest slaughter of the innocents since Herod.
The way ahead darkened suddenly, after brightness. George had no function, any longer, as adviser to congressmen. The next election seemed crucial. Professor Nevins has given us President Cleveland’s haunting fear: should the Democratic party go wrong on the money issue now, as it had once gone wrong on slavery, it might wander in the wilderness another thirty years. From his own point of view, almost as opposed as Cleveland’s to monetary inflation but governed by a different sense of history, George shared the sense of fatality.
Yet when 1896 came he could do what the retiring President could not. He could stay with the party when it named an inflationist candidate. William Jennings Bryan ‘certainly did not represent my views,’ he told Dr. Taylor. ‘But I had to take the best offered, and he came nearest it.’ He had little to say at first.
George’s situation is represented perfectly by the fact that for the campaign he resumed the role of correspondent. He was outside history, rather than in it, this time. The New York Journal hired him. He had had some slight acquaintance with William Randolph Hearst earlier, but there seems to have been no personal connection this time. His real associations were much less with the proprietor of the new paper than with Arthur McEwen, old friend and ace reporter, and with the editor-in-chief, Willis J. Abbot. Abbot was a believer in George’s doctrines and had been active in Chicago labor politics until recently.
The job took George to both the Republican and the Democratic conventions, and it allowed him freedom to write as he pleased. While in Chicago he saw much of Tom Johnson, and he heard Bryan give the ‘Cross of Gold’ address. Perhaps a letter to his employer was the first estimate he made of the 1896 leftward movement of the Democratic party — the first such movement for decades. He congratulated Hearst on committing the Journal to Bryan. The platform stops short, he said, and in certain respects he disagreed with it: he was not a silver man, and he did not like the income tax. Yet Bryan had the better cause, and he was glad to serve.
In September he spoke much more warmly. He endorsed Bryan in a letter to the Arena, and many times he said publicly how he would vote. In his belief, monopoly not gold was the cross that must be removed — and would be, if Bryan won.
Besides his writing, George did a little platform work for the candidate. He prevailed on Governor Altgeld to come east and make a speech against government by injunction, and against federal domination in any sphere of power. This proved to be a major campaign event, and thousands stood outside the hall. So far as George as a public man was concerned, moreover, it indicated a real change of style. By arranging the meeting, by sitting on the platform with Mary Ellen Lease and others, he demonstrated that he had rejoined the general forces of insurgency and change.
This was a little hard for some of the businessmen and lawyers of the single-tax movement. Not Tom Johnson, who was for Bryan, but Thomas Shearman and August Lewis of New York, George’s generous patrons, and Louis Prang and Lloyd Garrison, both of Boston, disagreed. To Garrison George explained that he believed it ‘quite as well, if not somewhat better, that some of us singletaxers should be on different sides, though I wish you and I at least were together . . . You and I can talk, after this madness is over.’ As if to act on this advice, a group of single-taxers, who differed from George, published a kind of manifesto of their views.
Despite his tolerance, the conservatism of his followers led to George’s climactic piece of campaign journalism. Under the title, ‘Shall the Republic Live,’ it was printed in the Journal on the day before the vote. It shows that he had caught the passion, and shared the exaltation, of one of America’s four or five most crucial presidential campaigns. He demanded to know of those few singletaxers, who, ‘deluded, as I think, by the confusion, propose to separate from the majority of us on the vote,’ how they expected to recognize ‘the great struggle to which we have all looked forward as inevitable,’ if not by present indications? ‘For all the great struggles of history have begun on subsidiary and sometimes on what seemed at the moment irrelevant issues . . . Would [the singletaxers] not expect to hear predictions of the most dire calamity overwhelming the country, if the power to rob the masses was lessened ever so little? . . . The larger business interests have frightened each other, as children do when one says “Ghost!” Let them frighten no thinking man.’
George’s more leftward and literary followers were thrilled. Post stood right beside him, as always. John Swinton, with whom there had been a recent reconciliation, was delighted. Hamlin Garland sent his compliments; and James Herne said that no one but the author of The Condition of Labor could have written that final article.
For George and those like him, perhaps even more than for those Bryan men who had no anxieties about silver, the campaign of 1896 achieved a special glory. Twentieth-century progressivism would draw from its dedications and gathering of forces. So, too, did Henry George, personally, just one year later. The Bryan campaign in some degree canceled for him the retirement of 1887. It returned him to politics. It prepared him to make a second campaign, a most tragic fight to be mayor of New York.
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After the battle was over the Journal offered Henry George more writing at very good pay. Because there had been no central singletax journal since the Standard died in 1892, the proposition must have been tempting. George could have $50 for a weekly column — or could contribute an occasional column at convenience — in which he would have the opportunity to address single-taxers and sympathizers with ‘absolute freedom of expression’ guaranteed.
But George refused the offer, in favor of working on The Science of Political Economy. His decision conforms also with the quiet role he retained, with respect to the single-tax movement. In recent years his organized followers had been developing the techniques of propaganda: they were starting chain letters, using singletax stickers, establishing new organizations, and so on. But George himself made only one notable exception to his general habit of keeping apart. In 1895 and 1896, he joined Post and Shearman and Lawson Purdy and others, who were trying by concentration of forces to capture Delaware — one small state to be made a pilot for the single tax. The campaign effort meant simply traveling to Philadelphia, crossing the state line, and making speeches. But George seems to have had no heart for the work. When an issue of free speech arose, he refused to dare arrest and become a member of the ‘Dover Jail Single Tax Club.’ The veteran of Loughrea and
Athenry decided that his friends had drummed up a none-too-valid case.
George held back too, in January 1897, when he began to hear rumors that he would be nominated a second time for mayor of New York. ‘Are your congratulations as to the mayoralty sarcastic?’ he demanded after a letter from Post; ‘I am a little uneasy about being pulled off my course.’ Five months later — after illness and his daughter’s death had intervened — he wrote Thomas Walker that he was giving no countenance to the proposed candidacy; and he told another correspondent that he wished his friends would abandon the idea.
The inner question, as we saw in the last chapter, was whether George should give all to the book he intended to be final, or dramatize his cause once more in a city election that would be reported round the world. The considerations in favor of politics were enlarged now because of the reorganization which had just been enacted for New York. On 1 January 1898, the old city would become the borough of Manhattan; and by combination with Brooklyn and other boroughs, Greater New York would be organized under one government, the second city in population, the most cosmopolitan city on earth. In other respects different from 1886, the mayor would hold office for four years; his patronage would be second only to the President’s; and both practically and symbolically his authority would be unique. The new blueprint of city government corresponded well with Henry George’s early ideas about city reform, as he had put them in editorials in the San Francisco Post. James Bryce saluted the coming election as of international significance; and, just after the campaign closed, an American expert called it ‘a stupendous experiment in city government, such as the world had never seen before.’
So far as Henry George’s medical advisers were concerned, to run or not to run was a black-and-white decision: either keep on writing and live, or run for mayor and die. Dr. Kelly and Dr. Leverson said the same thing. With the latter, a friend of twenty-five years standing, George discussed the decision as they walked the Shore Road at Fort Hamilton. The physician remembered the reformer’s words: ‘But I have got to die. How can I die better than serving humanity? Besides so dying will do more for the cause than anything I am likely to be able to do for the rest of my life.’ George omitted asking the advice of the physician who had attended him in 1890. When Dr. Mendelson, agitated by what he saw in the newspapers, implored his friend not to run — there have been thousands of mayors but only one Progress and Poverty, he begged — George answered that he would take that advice, ‘unless as I see it duty calls.’ But he wrote those words on 30 September, and by that time the answer must have been crystal clear in his own mind.
As in 1886, he discussed — this time hardly shared — the decision with his friends. Tom Johnson took charge, at a meeting of about thirty, in his office in New York. George allowed no one to discuss his health; and, when the book was mentioned, he said that the essentials were now complete — an exaggeration which indicates his state of mind. After the meeting he asked his wife whether she remembered his saying at the time of the Phoenix Park murders that Michael Davitt should go straight to Dublin, even though it cost his life? I ask you now, the husband went on, ‘will you fail to tell me to go into this campaign? The people want me; they say they have no one else on whom they can unite. It is more than a question of good government. If I enter the field it will be a question of natural rights, even though as mayor I might not directly be able to do a great deal for natural rights. New York will become the theatre of the world, and my success will plunge our cause into world politics.’
Annie George hesitated less than her husband had done, and the decision brought no remorse. The family noticed that the candidate’s old optimism came back, that his eye lit again and spring returned to his step. His pictures show an emaciated man, but those who knew him best recall a rekindled one.
The first obvious result of the reorganization of New York was that, contrary to what was usual, the campaigning began early in the city. Those who were first to move were reformist independents in politics, the members of the recently established Citizens Union. The union wished to be bi-partisan, but the impulse had come from liberal Republicans, and the nominee was of just that kind. President Seth Low of Columbia University was blessed with about all the advantages, and burdened with the disadvantages, that a man of wealth and education has in American mass politics. He was the heir of a clipper-ship fortune and had served in the family business; he had been reform mayor of Brooklyn and a leader in the public-charities movement. Though he gave every sign of really wanting to run, President Low took a leaf from Henry George’s book. He did not commit himself entirely until 125,000 signatures indicated that there was popular interest in his cause. Had a momentum developed from this careful preparation, there can be no question but what Greater New York would have had as first mayor — President Low was actually elected in 1901—an executive with capacities and merits in proportion to the office.
But, to the crucial question, whether Republican party regulars would vote for Low, and so perhaps smash Tammany, Boss Thomas Platt gave the answer which denied 100,000 votes. Under his orders, at the end of September, the party nominated General Benjamin F. Tracy, who had been President Harrison’s secretary of navy, and since then law partner of Mr. Platt’s son. Simultaneously, when Richard Croker returned after three years at his home in England, he dictated the Tammany ticket. Judge Robert A. van Wyck, a party hack, became the regular Democratic nominee. This left the Bryan Democrats of 1896, the groups known as the Democratic Alliance and the United Democracy, as discontented as were the Republican liberals. They were the ones who had sounded Henry George.
The situation differed from 1886, and yet was capable of being built into likeness. Devotion to Bryan and the Chicago free-silver platform had hardly the compulsion and self-consciousness that labor had had, in Henry George’s first campaign. Yet last year’s emotion did have political effect. At the meeting at which George accepted the nomination of the Democratic Alliance, Mary Ellen Lease of Kansas sat on the platform, and the candidate addressed himself to ‘Fellow Democrats, who last year voted for William Jennings Bryan.’ Though he had nearly fainted before the meeting, George put eloquence into saying that ‘into the common people would come a power that would revivify not merely this imperial city . . . but the world.’ The meeting sent greetings to Bryan. We learn as a campaign secret, which leaked to the Republicans, that Bryan approved the nomination as though George, and not Tammany’s van Wyck, were the regular Democratic candidate. A majority of the national committee are said to have felt the same way.
As in 1886 Henry George wrote his own platform, and he made it virtually the same. He stressed municipal ownership and municipal home rule, and called for tax reform and the end of government by injunction. Striving more than ever to universalize his message, he named his party ‘The Democracy of Thomas Jefferson.’ It was not a labor party, this time, though it sought the votes of labor; and it was not a single-tax party, though many but by no means all the single-taxers of New York went with their leader. George believed that this effort had the same goals as the one of 1886 — purification in politics and democratization in economics, to begin in New York, and to be spread gradually elsewhere, as politics might make possible.
The immediate enemy, now as before, was Croker’s Tammany Hall. For George this was the determining point of strategy in a campaign where little else was clear. As candidate he was concerned, though as radical Democrat not governed in his tactics, by the vast enigma, how Low and Tracy would divide the Republican vote. Memory of his last campaign must have helped him believe that neither of these two would win. His Republican opponent of 1886, who had had the support of both wings of that party, regular and liberal, was greatly concerned this time. Viewing the city election from the perspective of Washington, Roosevelt conceded ‘what the populists say,’ that his party in New York did represent ‘corrupt wealth.’ He favored Low. But he criticized the academic man sharply for not having consolidated with Platt and accused him of being ‘hand in glove with Henry George.’ The total situation, from George’s point of view, was that Tracy was a candidate to neglect, Low was one to respect but not to concede to, and Judge van Wyck was the one to defeat — for the good of city and party alike.
As was entirely natural, George’s own thoughts reached back eleven years. ‘I won the race,’ he said publicly and definitely, as he had not spoken in 1886. ‘I know, as you know, that the votes cast for me were counted out by the system that prevailed then.’ Making this early effort to establish continuity between the present campaign and his last one, George was taking long chances. What he said brought reply not from Croker but from Hewitt and Ivins. The ex-mayor was quoted from abroad as saying again that Henry George was leading forces of anarchy and destruction. The name-calling seemed to be striking once more.
This prompted George to review publicly for the first time the whole history of his relations with Hewitt, from employee to rival, and to tell the story of the Democrats’ effort to divert him from the first mayoralty campaign with an offer to elect him to Congress. George’s accusations of bribery evoked the reply of Ivins, which was discussed in Chapter xv. Whatever the exact fact about 1886 may have been, it seems unlikely that recriminations in 1897 made very effective campaigning. Certainly Mr. Hewitt’s fear words did not have their earlier power. When George demanded retractions, Hewitt returned a soft answer. He had been misquoted from overseas, he said, and had not meant what had been printed. Hewitt, whom Tammany had elected in 1886 and dropped in 1888, announced for Low this time.
Though his energies were limited, George fought an aggressive campaign and loved the fight. As in all recent years, financial support came from Tom Johnson and August Lewis. Father McGlynn wrote in a friendly way but counseled George against taking the stump too vigorously. If there was no labor support to compare with that of 1886, the shortage was somewhat filled by Jerome O’Neill, the Central Labor Union man who ran for president of the council, on the Democracy of Thomas Jefferson ticket. Apparently the strongest lieutenant George had from the Democratic party was Charles N. Dayton. A former postmaster of New York, he was expected to make a real subtraction from Tammany strength.
From single-tax ranks, besides the senior allies already mentioned, Lawson Purdy and Charles Frederic Adams were the most prominent men. Hamlin Garland, who got into the thick of the fight, tried to mobilize literary manpower. He asked Henry Demarest Lloyd for an endorsement ‘to be used in a very literary meeting we are organizing,’ at which Herne and he were going to make speeches. He hoped that Howells would return from Europe in time to take part in the campaign.
Though there appeared no special campaign paper, like the Leader, in 1897, there was less need for one. Willis J. Abbot of the New York Journal took hold as chairman of the campaign committee. Hearst gave him leave with pay. And, though the Journal supported the Tammany candidate, star writers such as Arthur Brisbane and Arthur McEwen, who contributed a splendid character study of George to the then current November Review of Reviews, spoke favorably of George in Hearst’s own paper. In general the metropolitan press behaved in a much friendlier way than in 1886. The best papers of both parties went for Low: the Times, the Tribune, the World, and the Brooklyn Eagle. Naturally the Tribune was especially eager to have George take as many Tammany votes as he could.
In his own role as speaker and leader, George tried desperately to perform as he had once performed. He was persuaded to conserve his strength by going daily, from campaign headquarters at the Union Square Hotel, to August Lewis’s downtown house for lunch and an afternoon rest. People noticed his reduced vigor, and his wife says that he became spiritually withdrawn. Despite everything, he outdid as fighter every one of his adversaries; and for a dozen days, from 16 to 28 October, his record was truly heroic. He made thirty speeches. And on five of those days, one of them the day he died, he spoke four times.
As of 8 October, professional betting odds were ten to seven in favor of van Wyck, three to one against Tracy, four to one against Low, and eight to one against George. How realistic this was at the time and whether or not George’s fortnight of hard campaigning developed any sizable current his way are of course questions not subject to present-day estimate.
For civic reformers like Heber Newton, George’s candidacy, as it was launched later than Low’s, presented a terrible contradiction. This was of course the thought, which has been shared by students since, that the two reform elements, one derived from each party, would cancel each other out. But the fear seems to have been unrealistic. There is evidence to support as fact what Theodore Roosevelt charged — a considerable mutuality between the two. The Democracy of Thomas Jefferson supported the county candidates of the Citizens Union, and the two nominees behaved with extraordinary respect toward one another. Low retracted a comment made in error about George; and George said many things which after his death the Citizens Union was able to use to indicate that if Henry George could speak again he would advise his people to vote the ticket led by President Low.
Though there is much to justify the Citizens Union claim, Henry George’s last statement about Low was perhaps the most explicit.
He was far from a merger at that time. He spoke the following words at Flushing, five days before the election, and about twelve hours before he died. ‘Let me say a word about Mr. Low. On election day as between Mr. Low and myself, if you are yet undecided you must vote for whom you please. I shall not attempt to dictate to you. I do entertain the hope, however, that you will rebuke the one-man power by not voting for the candidate of the bosses. I am not with Low. He is a Republican and he is fighting the machine, which is all very good as far as it goes. But he is an aristocratic reformer; I am a democratic reformer. He would help the people; I would help the people to help themselves.’
This valedictory echoes much of the life intention of Henry George. It is barely possible that Greater New York would have had a more creditable administrative history for the coming four years, if, on the last Friday of the campaign, the Democracy of Thomas Jefferson had shifted to President Low. But Henry George, Jr., was nominated on that day of anguish, and any other choice would seem to have been humanly impossible. Political momen-tums were too great, personal loyalties too emotional for any other choice to have been right.
On election day, the next Tuesday, President Low received 151,000 votes. Henry George, Jr., received 22,000. Justice Tracy had 101,000; and Judge van Wyck won, with a 234,000 plurality vote. The regular parties had almost twice as many votes as the reform parties combined.
Poignant letters by grieving George men tell us that some strength did shift from the Democracy of Thomas Jefferson to the Citizens Union vote. An informed contemporary believed that about 60,000 made the change. If as few as half that number did so, Low received a smaller number of votes of his own than the number who had signed the pre-campaign petitions which requested him to run.
In their own retrospect, the Citizens Union leaders believed that the death of Henry George had destroyed the Columbia president’s last hope of victory in that campaign. If George had lived, for Low to have won, the Democracy of Thomas Jefferson would have had to take about 85,000 votes that went to the Tammany candidate. And this calculation subtracts nothing from Low’s actual vote, as strength that would have belonged to George.
Altogether it seems improbable that George’s continued candidacy could have meant victory for Low and the Citizens Union in 1897.
As for the most optimistic tabulation of Henry George’s own chances, if we allow him 85,000 Tammany votes (as Low’s advisers imply they did), we may allow him 50,000 Citizen’s Union votes as well (less than our contemporary’s estimate). Such a poll, combined with what Henry George, Jr., did receive, would have made him the mayor of New York.
The only cautious estimate is that reform, by schism in the parties, could in no circumstances have won in 1897. Henry George’s belief that the fight would be a battle of symbols, one last venture in education in democratic theory and practice, seems entirely right.
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On Thursday, the day before he died, George spoke three times on Long Island. Considerable traveling was required. He appeared first at Whitestone, then at College Point, and then at Flushing, where Dan Beard, of Boy Scout fame, was in the chair. At that place he made the statement about Low, which is quoted above. At College Point he had seemed dazed and exhausted; and his final remarks, made at the Manhattan Opera House, where he arrived after most of the crowd had departed, were so rambling as to distress the audience that remained.
He died in his hotel, early the next morning, after brief suffering. Mrs. George found him in their sitting room, a hard stroke of apoplexy upon him. Dr. Kelly came and could do nothing; his Irish grief was the most uncontrolled of all. The women stood firm. The oldest son, who was to have been married within a few days, had to give first attention to the campaign. The family behaved, and the martyrdom had occurred, just as Henry George had invited, in the dignity of duty and great love.
There followed on Sunday the amazing salute, obsequies which the New York Herald called ‘unique,’ and the Times compared with Abraham Lincoln’s. ‘Call it what you will, hero worship,’ that paper said, ‘but its object was truly a hero.’ In the early morning the body was taken to lie in state at Grand Central Palace. Richard George accompanied it; and Anna Angela, now nearly twenty, insisted that she go too. Beginning at seven the mourners started the procession that lengthened with the day. Estimates of those who passed the bier vary from 30,000 to 100,000.
From three to five-thirty the public services were held. Heber Newton read the Episcopal service, his and his friend’s legacy from old St. Paul’s. Lyman Abbot spoke, and the choir from Plymouth Church sang the hymns. The later speakers were Rabbi Gottheil, John S. Crosby, and Father McGlynn. Mayor Strong and Seth Low had seats on the platform. The break of tension came when Father McGlynn declared his belief in Henry George’s ideas. The cheers of thousands rang, shocking and yet appropriate too, across the body of Henry George.
In the late-fall evening the funeral procession moved south. The open hearse was drawn by sixteen horses draped in black. The bronze bust by Richard George was carried Roman style, just as Henry George had wanted. A white rose, dropped from a Madison Avenue window, clung to the casket in the waning light. A military band had volunteered; it led the way with ‘Chopin’s Funeral March’ and ‘The Marseillaise.’ The procession passed City Hall, then crossed Brooklyn Bridge; and at the Borough Hall in Brooklyn the body was returned to the family.
The next day, privately, the interment service was read at Greenwood Cemetery. Two Episcopalian clergymen, John Kramer and George Latimer, the cousin who helped him get passage to India when he was fifteen, took charge. Father McGlynn spoke, about immortality.
Almost required, one thinks, were the words the family chose to have set in bronze on the stone that marks the grave. They come from the conclusion of Progress and Poverty. ‘The truth that I have tried to make clear will not find easy acceptance ... It will find friends . . . This is the power of truth.’
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In California, during the later ’70s, while he was studying and writing, Henry George believed that Progress and Poverty would be a book for the twentieth century. His career on the West coast, it will be recalled, had given him little reason to hope that his ideas would spread at all rapidly.
George’s change of mind, to expect immediate effects, which occurred on the heels of his first visit in Ireland and England, was no one-sided result, either of his natural optimism or of his inner shift of emphasis from a prophetic role to an almost messianic one. Events encouraged his hopes. A social revolution in his own day suddenly seemed altogether likely to occur. The questions in George’s mind during the middle ’80s were whether the United Kingdom or the United States would be the first to achieve a new economic order, and whether that change would be induced by Christian and rational measures or by doctrines of materialism and methods of violence.
But after the political setbacks of 1887, 1890, and 1894, at home, Henry George’s expectations receded almost to the original estimation. His willingness to die in 1897 recalls his thought of two decades earlier. He believed once more that his ideas would have a stronger effect on men and nations in the future than on his exact contemporaries. Calculating the risks of the campaign for the Democracy of Thomas Jefferson, he turned to Johnson. ‘Tom, wouldn’t that be a glorious way to die?’ he demanded.
The memorial services, meetings, editorials, and articles of ap-
predation, which appeared everywhere after his death, were of course the first stage of the carrying-on of the effort of Henry George. Perhaps the tribute, the personal estimate and assignment to a place in history that George would have liked best of all, however, was a private one. George W. Julian inscribed it in his diary. He spoke with as complete an authority, in the line of thought he chose, as anyone alive could have mustered. With a trembling hand the octogenarian abolitionist wrote: ‘The death of Henry George in the midst of his grand fight against political thieving has touched the hearts of the whole world as no other death has done since that of Lincoln. George was a real saint and Martyr. He was the most religious man I have ever known, with his whole heart he loved the toiling poor, and he freely gave his life as a sacrifice. He was absolutely pure and unselfish, and his exalted place among the heroes of humanity is already perfectly assured ... I think he overvalued his scheme of Land reform, but his books, and especially those dealing with the tariff, will probably influence public opinion in the years to come.’
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When the leader died he left behind three types of belief in his ideas: the fiscal-reform Georgism of the single tax, of which Thomas Shearman was still the central figure; the political Georgism which entered into many varieties of reform activity, and which Tom Loftin Johnson represented most completely; and the moral and intellectual Georgism, of which Tolstoy and Hamlin Garland were eloquent early figures. The three categories overlap, of course, but we have noticed cases of the first without the second, and of the third without the first or second. Among Henry George’s early prominent followers, perhaps Tom Johnson and Father McGlynn were the only ones who had the capacity to enter energetically into all three forms of Georgism.
In fairness to the accomplishment of the men who were Henry George’s immediate successors, it should be said that the climate of American opinion after 1897 did not favor the growth of the Georgist political effort. Had the master himself lived in vigor a dozen years longer than he did, it is impossible to suppose that he could have played, during the administrations of McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and Taft, any political part equal to the one he assumed during the Cleveland period of American history. Even the most progressive Republicans of the first decade of the present century, and there were never too many of them, were nationalistic pro-tariff men and overseas imperialists. On the home front, the advanced Republicans who fought for conservation of the federal domain and natural resources, spoke they ever so strongly in the public interest, were more concerned to have the government manage the land than they were to have the people use it. Although Henry George’s ideas may seem at first thought to have been logically perfect to give philosophical support to the con-servationism of Roosevelt and Pinchot, all three forms of Georgism were in political fact quite remote from the reforms which early Progressivism introduced in Washington.
Under the circumstances of Republican domination in the country, there can have been few choices for the legatees of Henry George to make when they asked themselves the question, in the months and years after 1897, what they should do to carry on. The natural answer was to continue with what they had been doing previously, in different localities and in individual ways, as followers of their leader while he lived. Sometimes the result was ingenuous, as in the case of Charles Fillebrown of Boston, who was a businessman devotee and one who, like William Lloyd Garrison II, regretted Henry George’s politics of 1896 and 1897. Mr. Fillebrown tried to become a sort of schoolmaster for twentieth-century Georgists. He wrote a primer, the ABC of Taxation with Boston Object Lessons; and he made a habit of entertaining at banquets professors and public men, and of presenting them with speakers for the single tax. This effort drew sharp criticism from within the single-tax movement itself.
In New York City, on the other hand, later Georgism, though conservative and fiscal-minded in emphasis, was aggressive, and it had power. The line of continuity from before 1897 descended through the Manhattan Single Tax Club; and in 1901 the Single Tax Review came to the city from the Middle West. After the death of Thomas Shearman in 1900, Lawson Purdy became a practical and thoughtful developer, in the direction of the single tax, limited. More gifted as a leader than Shearman, Purdy in time contributed to the defeat of the general property tax. During the second decade of the present century, he became the principal spokesman for the policy the city adopted, of assessing the value of land separately from improvements on the land. More than any other Georgist, moreover, Mr. Purdy has studied the administrative implications which inhere in the program of taxing land values. He has examined the bearing of taxation on land classification and land-use planning in the modern city; and he has asserted the need of cities sometimes to develop areas under a policy of public ownership.
During the early part of this century Georgists in other cities helped achieve tax reforms similar to those in New York. Under political circumstances which will be explained shortly, Cleveland adopted the system of separate assessments; and in Pennsylvania Georgists led in the fights, one of them recently, for the legislation which has brought about the higher taxation of land values and the lower taxation of buildings in Pittsburgh and certain other cities. Separate assessment has become a widespread practice in America, during the last half-century.
The sizable exception to the rule, that broader political Georgism faced impossible adversities during the decade after George’s death, occurred, as seems entirely natural, in Tom Johnson’s state of Ohio. While Henry George was living, Johnson had become a kind of field commander, west of New York at least, deploying Georgist forces at strategic centers, as his money made it possible. He had moved Warren W. Bailey, a journalist, from Chicago to Pennsylvania and made him editor of the Johnstown Democrat. The plan was to have a paper to compare with the Springfield Republican, to develop the radical side of the Democratic party. During the early ’90s, he had brought Louis Post from New York to Cleveland, it will be recalled, to carry on with newspaper work when the Standard of New York was discontinued.
After George’s death Johnson sent Post on to Chicago, to undertake a major effort. This was The Public, a liberal weekly which lasted fifteen years. Among many whom Mr. Post names, Jane Addams, Ben B. Lindsay, Lincoln Steffens, Professor Edward Bemis, and Jerry Simpson warmly supported the journal, and some of them contributed articles. The Public criticized the Roosevelt administration severely. Though Post objected to William Jennings Bryan’s ideas on the trust problem, The Public and Bryan’s own paper, The Commoner, were friendly; and Bryan once contributed to The Public an appreciation of Henry George. Though the honor of having been the most brilliant general and literary magazine of Georgist inclination should probably be withheld from The Public, in favor of Francis Neilson’s short-lived Freeman of the 1920s, The Public deserves credit for having been a substantial journal of opinion. It belonged to the political and moral traditions of Georgism, more than to the fiscal one. The single tax has been served, during the twentieth century, by a dozen or so ephemeral papers.
In his home city, Johnson personally resumed the burden of practical politics, four years after Henry George laid it down. In 1901 the Democratic ex-congressman became mayor of Cleveland; and, three times re-elected, he held that office for eight years while Washington was dominated by Republicans. Johnson used the methods of a democratic reformer, one who on George’s pattern would help the people to help themselves. He conducted public meetings in a huge circus tent; he encouraged all manner and kind of persons to speak and won a reputation for being a scrupulous presiding officer. As victor at the polls he had to go beyond George’s old role of political educator, however, and become a people’s administrator. For this he had great talent. Newton Baker’s judgment, reinforced by that of Lincoln Steffens, that Tom Johnson should be ranked as ‘the outstanding municipal executive so far produced in United States history,’ and that he made Cleveland ‘the best governed city in America,’ is probably still a true judgment today, over two decades after it was written.
On the side of policy, much of Johnson’s effort as mayor was concentrated on establishing in Cleveland a municipally owned transportation system which would render free services to the working community. Fighting Mark Hanna on this issue, Mayor Johnson did not win the battle, nor did he lose altogether. He believed in an idea George had advanced in his own mayoralty campaign of 1886, that a city’s growth, like a building made higher, is justified only when size increases efficiency and service. As a tall building includes elevators in its free services, George had argued, so a large city should supply, through a charge to be made against land values, free transportation to laborers. At the end of his campaign, Johnson did win a reduction to a three-cent fare. Though the public utility remained privately owned, the city had heard a remarkable discussion of the reasons for the public ownership of monopolies created by technology, and it had gained cheap transportation.
As for land-value taxation, Johnson made little progress earlier than his last term in office. At that time he succeeded in having a young and dedicated colleague, Frederic C. Howe, elected to the city’s tax commission. That body, first conferring with Lawson Purdy, installed the system of separate assessment; and, a little later, a new change in procedure, which placed high assessments on lands and low assessments on buildings, brought about a practical advance toward Georgist tax policy. ‘It confirmed my belief,’ confesses Howe, the reformer, ‘in the results that would follow the taxation of land values and the exemption of improvements from taxation.’
When Tom Johnson retired from office in 1909, not long before his death, his combined record as congressman and mayor made him the American who had gone farther than anyone else to advance into practical politics all three of George’s main economic proposals. His advocacy of free trade, in Congress and in Democratic conventions, and before the people; his campaign for municipally owned, free utilities; and the achievement of land-value taxation, however limited, in Cleveland, brought Georgism nearer to being established in the statute books than Henry George himself had managed in New York or California.
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By 1909 signs were increasing that Georgist efforts of the twentieth century would not be as isolated, and not as unsympathetic with main currents of politics, as they had been a few years earlier. As in George’s own day, encouragement came from across the ocean. Notably in 1906 and after, the single tax and land nationalization were taken up once more in serious English journals; and the newly victorious Liberal party, whose leaders, Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith, and Lloyd George derived many of their ideas from the Radicalism of Gladstone’s day, was more than favorable to Georgism. The famous Lloyd George budget, the taxation and social-reform features of which led to Britain’s constitutional crisis of 1909-10, contained substantial influence from the ideas of the American George. Tom Johnson and Louis Post went to England, quite in Henry George style, to do what they could to help in the fight and to share in the celebrations of victory.
One of the achievements of Johnson’s years as mayor had been the building of a team of younger associates. Councilman Frederic C. Howe and Newton D. Baker, who would become mayor of Cleveland in 1912, both of them lawyers, were the two most important members. But Brand Whitlock, whom we encountered during the ’90s in Chicago, served, after 1905, first as right-hand man, then as successor, of Mayor ‘Golden Rule’ Jones of Toledo; and he too belonged to the group. Recollections weave around political discussions which were held in Tom Johnson’s mansion, and which Clarence Darrow and Lincoln Steffens and other liberals sometimes attended. Howe tells us of the mayor’s capacity to transmit to his younger associates the ideas that impelled his own reformism. Johnson, he says, ‘had talked every phase of his philosophy through’ with Henry George himself, and he had its ‘deeper social significances at his fingertips . . . He was not a sectarian . . . His mind was a garden rather than a safe-deposit box.’
The Ohio group included several writing members. Brand Whitlock had produced a novel of political realism before he entered city politics. But Frederic Howe’s books of 1905 and 1910, The City the Hope of Democracy and Privilege and Democracy in America, which are the best of all books that have developed the Georgist critique since George, were almost certainly indebted to the reform group in which he shared. A brief quotation from Privilege and Democracy in America will be the best indication of the continuity. ‘Private land ownership is now complete,’ wrote Howe. ‘Those who come after us must come as trespassers . . . The railway question is at bottom a land question ... Two hundred thousand men from the workers of the metropolis must work for ten long years, ten hours a day, and three hundred days every year to pay the annual incomes of the few thousand men who own the land underlying the city ... It is the unskilled laborer who suffers most . . . He does not organize . . . The agricultural worker falls in the same class . . . The same is true of the salaried and professional classes.’
The year 1909 would have been a natural time for the disintegration, or at least the withering, of the Ohio group. But just when Tom Johnson quit as mayor, a gift of money from Joseph Fels, of Cincinnati, created new work for him and his associates. In a way a latter-day Francis Shaw, Mr. Fels set up a commission and assigned to the members all responsibility for distributing the money. Johnson himself became the Fels Fund’s first treasurer; Daniel C. Kiefer of Cincinnati was president; and Frederic Howe and Lincoln Steffens were members of the board. The assignment was exciting, according to Steffens, who noted that the immediate problem was to spend $50,000 a year ‘so that radical economic reforms of the system would result.’ Though this same commissioner felt obliged to explain to his colleagues, who seemed not to understand the motives of the creative artist very well, that offering a large prize would not be a good way to secure the writing of a social-protest novel, he lacked no sympathy for the spirit of the undertaking. ‘When they are thoughtful as they are today,’ Steffens wrote to Warren W. Bailey, ‘the real artists are likely to be propagandists or muckrakers.’
Thus, at the point of the Fels Fund, more distinctly than earlier the Georgist impulse entered the stream of Progressivism. By now, that movement had become a broad intellectual and moral current, which included members of both parties, and which extended itself beyond the limits of any political party. To be sure the fund supported the Single Tax Review, which represented the narrower Georgism. But it also underwrote translations of Progress and Poverty into Swedish and Bulgarian, Yiddish and Chinese, and assisted the distribution of Henry George works at home; and it helped The Public of Chicago.
The fund contributed to political protest in addition. Money was sent to Rhode Island, where George’s old admirer, Dr. Garvin, was governor. The largest contributions were sent to Oregon, because a vote of 1908 had indicated a sizable single-tax minority. W. S. U’Ren, the reform leader in that state, believed in working for political reforms, direct legislation especially, as a necessary first step to deeper, Georgist, legislation. On that basis three subsidized campaigns were fought, in 1910, 1912, and 1914; and the results were pretty crushing. Yet, although Mr. U’Ren suffered remorse that he and his associates had been too cautious and wished they had worked for ‘the full Single Tax philosophy,’ he did derive satisfaction from thinking that the campaigns had saved Oregon from a complete political reaction.
Before the presidential election of 1912, at least a few Republican conservationists awoke to Georgist theories. The star case, here, is Congressman William Kent of California, who gave Muir Woods to the United States as a national park. Never a single-taxer but a reader of George and a sympathizer, he wrote the following to Louis Post, as early as 1909, when he sent his check for The Public. ‘Inasmuch as my fear and hatred of Wall Street and its affiliated highways in other cities has driven me to seek investment in land and products of the soil, I have been brought to do a lot of thinking about this land-owning privilege which seems to me as absurd and as unjust as a privilege can be. For the sins in which I am compelled to indulge I am endeavoring to make reparation in terms of land, and hope that others will see the point and do likewise until such time as the privilege is abolished.’ A year later, when he was about to be candidate for the house, as independent Republican, Mr. Kent crossed party lines to tell Louis Post that Gifford Pinchot — Roosevelt’s appointee as chief forester, who had just been ousted by President Taft — had sought advice about building a program ‘that would stand for human welfare.’ Bowing himself out, the Westerner offered the opinion that ‘the time is not ripe for a radical assault on the land owning privilege, which I have come to believe takes up more of the result of human invention and human cooperation than any other privilege.’ But in case Mr. Post might judge action to be possible, Kent proposed that he frame a platform and send it to Pinchot, as the person ‘in a position to do more good in this country than any other man.’
During the next few years, Congressman Kent’s own ‘lot of thinking’ led him to prefer an inheritance tax to land-value taxation, and ultimately to prefer a partial nationalization of land. Especially during the session of 1915, he worked for a system of leasing the grazing lands of the domain; and he drew his ideas together in an article for the American Economic Review. ‘In my philosophy,’ he told a friend, ‘I hold that the land of the nation ought not to be in the hands of those who will not use it productively — ought not to be held by those who selfishly preclude others from the enjoyment of a privilege which ought to be national ... It may have been unfortunate for the cause that I, a radical in the matter of land tenure, should have been attacked at once as a beef baron, as a tool of the beef trust, and as a public land thief.’
The colorful and reform-minded Californian who wrote these words, and who, very much a free-trader, was later appointed by President Wilson to the United States Tariff Commission, of course represented neither the center of Georgism nor the center of his old political party. But Kent did represent with eloquence the cross-connecting of ideas, the conscience and will to act, which were the best of the Progressive movement and a true part of the Georgist one.
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Among the three great Progressive leaders, La Follette, Roosevelt, and Wilson, who gave the election of 1912 its character as a turning point in national history, there seems to have been lacking any consciousness of obligation to the ideas of Henry George. In La Follette’s Autobiography the one acknowledgment of Progress and Poverty is the terse sentence: ‘I read the book.’ More than this we learn only that he had friends who remember his saying that he really avoided Progress and Poverty for fear of falling under a spell.
Though, of the three leaders, the Bull Mooser would have been the last to borrow doctrines from his rival of 1886, we do have a story of his own platform building, which resembles the correspondence between William Kent and Louis Post. At midsummer, 1912, the Reverend Heber Newton, whom Henry George had judged to be a soft reformer, approached Theodore Roosevelt from a Georgist angle of thought. ‘I am sure you recognize, with all reformers who have the gift of vision,’ wrote the clergyman to the ex-President, ‘the fundamental nature of the land question in a reconstructed commonwealth . . . The thin edge of the wedge in this case seems to be a measure providing that all mineral resources to be discovered on and after a given date in the future should be held by the State for the people at large . . . the profits to create an educational fund for the State ... It would inevitably lead to further applications of the general principle.’ The fact that such a policy would be for the states to execute, rather than the nation, would not prevent using it for the Progressive platform, Mr. Newton urged.
Roosevelt agreed completely. ‘I am absolutely in sympathy with you on your proposition about the mineral lands,’ he replied at once, ‘and I shall forward your letter to Dean Kirchwey and ask if he cannot put in the plank substantially as you recommend it.’ Heber Newton’s proposal seems possibly to represent the origin of the Progressive party plank of 1912, which called for retaining in public ownership all domain lands that had water, forest, oil, coal, or other mineral resources.
The bearing of Georgist ideas on the Democratic campaign and victory of 1912, and on the administration that followed, is a somewhat complex problem, and one to be posed rather than solved in this book. The plainest fact is a negative one. No more than La Follette and Roosevelt did Woodrow Wilson owe conscious debts for ideas to Progress and Poverty, or to any of Henry George’s writings. Historian and political scientist, the academician president did have a set of economic ideas which combined laisser faire and control; but he had derived them from English sources principally, and apparently not at all from the American ideologue who had tried so hard to influence the Democratic party.
Yet Wilson’s political history, if not his reading and thinking one, contains essential elements of Georgism. Up to 1910, when he resigned as president of Princeton, he had been a social and religious conservative, politically inactive. But his crucial two years in New Jersey politics, the one-term governorship which comprised his amazing short cut from academic life to the White House, took Wilson through Georgist terrain. The important man who more than any other guided this transition was George L. Record, a lawyer, politician, and reformer, a Republican at this stage of his life, and the leading Georgist in the state. Though at first disliking Woodrow Wilson, Mr. Record was challenged by his campaign to be governor. Before the campaign was far advanced, the two became friends, and Mr. Record rendered services of advice and counsel which compared with the famous services to be rendered Wilson by Louis Brandeis during the 1912 campaign. Among many acts which helped make a political progressive of Wilson, Mr. Record drafted the utilities control bill which became one of Wilson’s triumphs in Trenton. Meanwhile, from across the continent, William U’Ren tutored the candidate, as Mr. Record did also, in the new ideas and practices of direct democracy. A primary law was the principal political reform of the Wilson administration in New Jersey; and in this direction the governor was particularly guided by Georgists.
The reader may already have collected in his mind several loyal believers in Henry George’s ideas, whom Woodrow Wilson called to high place in Washington. From recent connections, the new President appointed his idealistic and personable secretary, Joseph Tumulty, who was a younger member of the New Jersey Georgist group. The President’s alter ego, Colonel Edward House of Texas, exhibited in his novel, Philip Dru, Administrator, a diluted Georgist social philosophy. At cabinet level, the new secretary of the interior, Franklin K. Lane of California, was the only Georgist before 1916; but in that year Newton Baker came on from Ohio to take office as secretary of war, as the nation’s ordeal drew near. From the Middle West, Herbert Quick, Georgist mayor of Sioux City, was appointed to the Farm Loan Bureau. In a backward-looking mood, at the end of his conservationist-minded administration of the Department of Interior, Lane told a friend that he believed that Emerson, Henry George, and William James were a ‘singular trio’ in history, who in the future would be ‘regarded not as literary men but as American social, spiritual, and economic philosophers’; and he thought also that William James, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry George were ‘the three greatest forces of the last thirty years.’
As for the old associates of Tom Johnson, besides Baker, Brand Whitlock was sent at once to Brussels, and Frederic Howe was made commissioner of immigration. He would be sent in due time to Paris on a semi-official assignment concerning the peace negotiations with the central powers. Louis Post became the assistant secretary of labor. Yet before Post accepted, Warren W. Bailey solicited Lane and Whitlock and others to urge him for the full secretaryship of that department. The effort failed, but Mr. Bailey was comforted to learn that the President expressly wanted Post because he was a Henry George man. ‘Mr. Wilson thoroughly understands what Mr. Post represents,’ Bailey informed Daniel Kiefer, still the Fels Fund head, ‘and both he and Mr. Bryan frankly recognize the importance of bringing the single-tax people into closer touch with the administration.’
In 1913, as twenty years earlier, two or three Georgists entered the House of Representatives. Warren W. Bailey of Pennsylvania was one; and Henry George, Jr., still of New York, was another. Since 1897 he had edited his father’s writings and written the biography so often drawn on for this book; and, more or less as his father’s successor, he had traveled for the movement and had even visited Tolstoy. He had pursued his career as journalist and had written a book of social criticism, The Menace of Privilege, and a third-rate novel which may have been inspired by his father’s life. These new members, and Congressman William Kent also, voted with the majority, of course, on the Underwood low tariff of 1913, the first great reduction of rates since before the Civil War.
Apparently the one time President Wilson was presented with Georgist reform proposals in a large way was in 1919, long after his own program of domestic reform had been enacted and put into practice. The President sent a message to the Democrats of New Jersey, which George L. Record read as an opportunity to render a reformer’s suggestions. He proposed that the President recommend to Congress a policy of government ownership of all monopolies of federal size and interest. He specified railroads, pipelines, and resources owned by trusts. He urged federal legislation against land speculation and monopoly, a statutory limitation on the inheritance of great fortunes, and even income taxes.
Record spoke with a bluntness, and with an assumption of mutual understanding such as Henry George could never have used in addressing President Cleveland. ‘In my judgment nothing that you are proposing in the League of Nations idea, will give you a place in history as a great man, because at the end of your term you will have rendered no great and lasting service that will lift you above the average of our Presidents, and you have ignored the great issue which is slowly coming to the front, the question of economic democracy, abolition of privilege, and securing to men the full fruits of their labor or service.’
Like George, but not much like Woodrow Wilson, Record saw in economics the source of political conditions, domestic and international alike, and he drew his morals in those terms. ‘Wars are caused by privilege ... I do not criticize your going abroad . . .
But my point is that you ought not neglect the bigger domestic questions . . . You should become the real leader of the radical forces in America, and present to the country a constructive program of radical reform which shall be an alternative to the program presented by the socialists and the Bolsheviki, and then fight for it . . . You could so educate the public that you could force this radical program into the platform of the Democratic party.’
Before this letter was written, President Wilson had told Tumulty that the advanced opinions he held about land and government ownership might be right after all; and it is not unlikely that the secretary had hinted to Record that the time was ripe to urge economic reform. At any rate Tumulty himself wrote an endorsement, and speaking ‘as a Democrat,’ he pleaded, in phrases reminiscent of Henry George’s speeches half a century earlier, for a ‘realignment of parties’ and ‘a fight between the Federalist and anti-Federalist, between the Whig and Tory’ once more.
Wilson was in the midst of peacemaking when the recommendations reached him, and already the pressures were gathering which would break him within half a year. He acknowledged Record’s letter in a friendly way, but he said nothing to indicate what even his flash judgment was on the merits of the plea his Georgist colleagues had made. He seems never to have had another occasion to speak. As 1919 advanced, his preoccupation with the Treaty of Versailles, and then his illness, turned him from domestic reform for the last year of his administration and for the short remainder of his life.
The men and influences considered in this section make clear that, in larger part than has often been noticed, the idealism of the administration of Woodrow Wilson was Henry George idealism renewed.
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Returning to the terms with which the present discussion opened, the Georgism that came to Washington in 1913 was moral and intellectual, rather than political; and of course it was not fiscal Georgism.
Political Georgism, in the sense of leaders, organizations, and campaigns dedicated to Georgist ends, we may count as having passed from the scene when Tom Johnson’s career as mayor closed.
Perhaps Newton Baker’s administration of Cleveland should be thought of as a residue; and certainly the election to Congress of Henry George, Jr., and Warren W. Bailey should be considered that way. We do not need to disregard the little enclaves of Georgist communities, such as Fairhope, Alabama, which have been established in this century; nor to forget such events of the early ’20s as the introduction of several Georgist bills in Congress and the serious effort, aided by John R. Commons, to introduce a ‘farmers’ single tax’ in Wisconsin. Such programs, however, were not inclusive enough, or such successes and failures of the vote significant enough, to fit the pattern of Henry George’s campaigns in New York City, or Tom Johnson’s campaigns in Cleveland. The presidential election of 1912 had assimilated political Georgism in the larger progressive movement. The epitaph was composed on ambassadorial stationery and addressed to Newton Baker when Brand Whitlock learned, in June 1920, that he was wanted to run for President on a single-tax ticket, with Carrie Chapman Catt as running mate. ‘I may be a single-taxer, but I am not a damn fool.’
After the war, when
The quiet influence of Henry George, then, during the agony and revolution of the last four decades, is to be discovered on two levels. On the visible surface of affairs is the persevering work of the fiscal Georgists, who win occasional reforms in city tax policy. Very close to that effort, yet different, is the continuing task of the propagation of ideas, in the line which Henry George and Francis
Shaw began in 1882. The
work done in
The deeper level of Henry
George’s influence on the modern world is the one described in the earlier part
of this book but so often forgotten to be his. The participation of free
governments in the processes of social justice is now accepted everywhere as policy
to be maintained. A desire for world-wide free trade recurs in our day; and
many believe that a greater equality among the peoples of the earth, of access
to its resources, would increase mankind’s hope for mankind. For the
A DUAL DEFENSE OF THE TEXT
The footnotes above tire few in number, a tiny fraction of those first put in the text as it was written. In most cases they have been inserted at points that invite immediate and specific reinforcement. In some cases, especially in Chapter x, citations have been placed where they will help a reader who may want to find the way from this book to important passages in George’s writings.
The footnotes represent the first tactic in defending the argument. For the deeper strategy of documentation, I rely on the bibliographical notes which follow. First there is a description of those source materials which I have used from beginning to end. Thereafter, in subdivisions which correspond to the twenty chapters of text, I present the other documents which have bearing. I mention the more important rare materials, either at the point where they are first drawn on, or where they are first drawn on extensively.
This defense in depth gives up as needless the conventional Maginot Line of protective scholarship. Doubtless the best reason for abandoning footnotes for every quotation and for a great many facts is the reason of practicality which Darwin offered in the introduction to his most famous work of scientific controversy: ‘I cannot here give references and authorities for my several statements; and I must trust to the reader reposing some confidence in my accuracy.’ Any who are not satisfied with this are informed that I retain in my own possession a heavily footnoted typescript.
SOURCES USED THROUGHOUT
The principal sources of this biography are Henry George’s own writings. The unpublished materials are: his letters, his diaries and memoranda, and drafts or notes for some of his lectures. The printed writings are: his newspaper editorials and reports; his magazine articles and letters to editors; his major lectures and addresses; and his eight books.
Henry
George Collection,
Most of the Henry George manuscripts known to exist, a large number of his newspaper and magazine writings, all his books in a large collection of editions and translations, and his own and his family’s collection of what was
637
contemporaneously
written about him are deposited in the
In 1926 the library
published Henry
George and the Single Tax, A Catalogue of the Collection in the
The manuscript part of the Henry George Collection, which is deposited in the Manuscript Division of the library, divides into two approximately equal parts. One of these consists of Henry George’s correspondence, I think about 2500 pieces. About one-third of the lot concerns 1854-80, the correspondence of the period of the present Part One; and two-thirds concern Part Two. But the earlier letters, as the product of the years when George was in private life, are more revealing of the man and his ideas than those written later. The letters after 1880 are more often from George’s correspondents than to them, and are frequently humdrum stuff.
Of the second major part of the manuscript collection, about one-third consists of letters of other members of the George family. A considerable series is the correspondence of Henry George, Jr., about editing his father’s works and gathering the data for his biography. There are also sizable batches of Henry George’s lecture notes and drafts, book manuscripts, and miscellaneous memoranda and memorabilia, which include photographs. The one greatly disappointing part of the collection is the series of about thirty diaries. After the sea journals of his youth, George commonly neglected diary keeping, or else reduced his diaries to engagement books.
The printed materials
in the Henry George Collection are deposited in special cases in the Economics
Division of the library. They include newspaper files of high biographical
importance: George’s San Francisco Daily Evening Post for 4 December 1871 through 21
October 1873; and the other San Francisco papers he owned, the Morning Ledger lor 20 August through 8 November
1875, and the weekly State for 5 April through 14 June 1879; and George’s weekly
New York Standard for 8 January 1887 through 31
August 1892. Except for the file of the Post, which covers only the first half of the period of
George’s proprietor-editorship, these are complete files. But I have used the
complete file of the Post in the Bancroft Library of the
A large proportion of
the other printed materials of the Henry George Collection is made up of 29
volumes of Henry George Scrapbooks. The most valuable parts of the thousands of
clippings they contain are such sequences as the following: George’s letters of
1882 to the Irish World, which are not fully available elsewhere; certain
series of his
especially Progress and Poverty, including notices from distant and minor papers which could hardly be recovered in any other way. But many hundreds of clippings, from the years of George’s lecture travels, seem to represent nothing better than the industry of clipping services in turning up brief reports in provincial papers; and, partly because many items are undated or unlocated or both, they are of little value to history. Apparently George himself gathered the earlier and more valuable scrapbooks. I have used them; but I have preferred to study George’s editorials in the newspaper files themselves, and even to read the reviews in the original locations, whenever practicable.
The remainder of the Henry George Collection is a miscellany of books by him, of books he owned, and of photographs and other memorabilia.
The Works of Henry George
Immediately following George’s death, Henry George, Jr., set about collecting his father’s works and writing a substantial biography. The results were published in ten volumes, between 1906 and 1911, as The Complete Works of Henry George, Fels Fund, library edition (Garden City, N.Y.). The first eight volumes are Henry George’s own. His longer books require entire volumes in this edition; the shorter ones are bound with a selection of his principal addresses. In the present biography, all Henry George’s writings cited are from this edition unless other editions are indicated. Problems of text are very minor ones in Henry George studies, but there is a special interest in the original California editions of his two first books, which he wrote in that state.
Biographies and General Treatments
The Life of Henry
George
by Henry George, Jr., which was first published by itself, in
There is more life but
less event in the second biography of Henry George, which was also written by
one of his children. This is Anna George de Mille’s Henry George, Citizen of the
World,
edited by Don C. Shoemaker, brightened by an introduction by Agnes de Mille,
and published at
I have drawn on both these family biographies; and the more extensively, of course, from the earlier book.
Of the hundreds of writings about Henry George, from outside the family, it is strange that there are only two which endeavor to interpret the man in any large way. Albert Jay Nock’s Henry George, an Essay (New York, 1931) is a brilliant appreciation of character and mind; and George R. Geiger’s Philosophy of Henry George (New York, 1933) is an able study by a philosopher of generally pragmatic persuasion. Long ago I read both books with admiration, and owe them gratitude, especially for confirming my early judgment that George deserves more serious attention from scholarship than he has often received. But as I wanted to hew my own road, I have referred to those books infrequently in recent years.
Symbols for the Major Sources
In the notes which
follow I use symbols for the main sources just described, and symbols for the
library locations of other major collections. They are: HGC: manuscript in the
Henry George Collection,
George, Jr.: Henry George, Jr., Life of Henry George.
de Mille: Anna George de Mille, Henry George, Citizen of the World.
LC: manuscript in Library of Congress.
UCBL: manuscript or
rare printed item in Bancroft Library,
HL: manuscript or rare
printed item in
JHU: item in the
Hutzler Collection,
I. A BOY FROM A
Financial
Condition of the Georges. Mr. George reviewed his affairs in a letter to HG, 19
July 1858, HGC. The impression of an Jnoo salary is confirmed in a letter to HG
from his mother,
Education
of Henry George. Background materials in James P. Wickersham, A History of Education in
Pennsylvania (
II.
Decision
to go to Sea. Concerning
the decision to go and the departure, there is, over and above contemporary
materials quoted in George, Jr., a number of family letters, HGC. Those with
the following dates are drawn on: 27 February, 3 April, 5 April, 9 May, 31 May,
Between
Voyages in
March, 29 June; Emma
Curry to HG, 19 April, 19 May;
Westward Hoi HG’s efforts to win the Shubrick appointment are represented or described in letters he wrote, during the fall of 1857, HGC; to Rep. T. B. Florence, 5 October; to his uncle, Thomas Latimer, 10 October; to Captain Thornton A. Jenkins, Secretary of the Light House Bureau, 23 November
1857. The phrenological examination is printed in George, Jr., 53-5; in quoting it I have used the ellipsis to indicate breaks in the thought, which are indicated by paragraphing in the full text, as well as breaks in the quoting.
III. NEW CALIFORNIAN: IMMIGRANT AND WAGE EARNER,
1858-1861
The Voyage of the SHUBRICK. About the Shubrick and HG’s appointment as a steward, present Lighthouse Service records are not as full as those which Henry George, Jr., investigated in 1899 and incorporated in his account, pp. 56-7. But Lyle J. Holverstott, Chief of the Treasury Section, National Archives, who generously searched the remaining records, discovered that two appointments as steward were contemplated, one for a ‘middle-aged man’ at $40 per month, and one as a cabin steward at $25. Possibly HG expected the higher position, but was given the lower. His own comment is in a letter of 6 January
1858, HGC, printed in
part in George, Jr., 58. The hurricane is reported in the Philadelphia Evening Journal,
Hard
Times in
1859, HGC, the latter quoted in George, Jr., 87-8. HG’s stopgap jobs and his unemployment, in San Francisco 1858-9, are accounted for in George, Jr., 83-4, 93; and comparable experiences appear in James J. Ayers, Gold and Sunshine, Reminiscences of Early California (Boston, 1922?), 167, and in Thaddeus S. Kenderdine, A California Tramp and Later Footprints . . . (Newtown, Pa., 1888), ch. xvi.
Finding Himself. HG’s satisfaction in an opportunity to read again and his delight in living in San Francisco appear in letters to members of his family, 20 November 1859, 4 January, 18 April i860, and in a reminiscence, 'The Noble View from Telegraph Hill,’ Ms. c. 1870, HGC. What Cheer House is discussed in Joseph Weed, California as It Is (San Francisco, 1874), 144; and in articles in Hutching’s California Magazine (San Francisco), 5:206-8, 294-5 (November
1860, January 1861).
The literary papers, of the kind which hired HG, are discussed in Walker, San Francisco’s Literary
Frontier,
especially chs. v-vii; and
IV. SUFFERING AND EXALTATION, 1861-1865
Anxiety
and Love. Concerning
the San Francisco Daily Evening Journal, HG’s hope and disappointment in
1861, I draw on copy,
1861, HGC. Letters to
HG from parents, aunt, two sisters, and one brother, 10 June-
First
Residence in
Ordeal
in
1864-5, see
Hittell,
Beginning
as a Writer. I
have discovered no file of the Journal of Trades and Workmen, but HG’s first article is
clipped in HG Scrapbook 25, NYPL, excerpted in George, Jr., 159; and the paper
is discussed in Ira B. Cross, A History of the Labor Movement in California, University of California
Publications in Economics, xiv (Berkeley, 1935), 37. California’s interest in
the occult, the vein to which HG shifted, is discussed in Walker, San Francisco’s Literary
Frontier,
ch. vii. HG’s ‘Plea for the Supernatural’ is in the Californian, 2:9 (
V.
1865-1868
1. George’s
Writing and Thinking in
On
the San Francisco TIMES. HG’s decision for San Francisco appears in a letter from A. A.
Stickney, 15 August 1866 (HGC), and one to his father, 8 August 1866, George,
Jr., 172. On McClatchy’s claim to having assigned HG to editorial writing,
ibid. 173, and Sacramento Bee editorial, 18 March i8gg; on the role of Brooke, see
his own article, ‘Henry George in California,’ Century, n.s., 57:549-50 (February 1899),
and George, Jr., 174-5. On the SF Times, see Anna L. Marston, ed., Records of a
2. Economic
Thought in
Plans
and Views of the State. The moralizing estimates of the two ministers are:
William Taylor, California Life Illustrated (New York, 1858), 277; and
Horace Bushnell, Characteristics and Prospects of California (San Francisco, 1858), 13-21.
Gadsden’s southern notion is printed, from the Leidesdorff Papers, HL, in Huntington Library Bulletin no. 8 (October 1935), 173-5:
and
Land
Problems and State Development. The best historical introduction to
3. George’s
First Editorial Program: The TIMES. The Times’ position on economic questions, just before HG took
charge, is derived from editorials mainly of the first five months of 1867. The
event behind HG’s discussing analogies between American and European
developments is described in B. F. Gilbert, ’Welcome to the Czar’s Fleet, an
Incident of Civil War Days in San Francisco,’ California Historical Society
Quarterly,
26 (1947): 13-19. HG’s editorials on Russia, identified as his by internal
evidence, are in SF Times, 16, 23,
Essays and Documents,
VI. FIGHTING MONOPOLY AND PLEDGING UTOPIA, 1869-1871
1.
On the
2.
News Monopolization in
1874.
George
versus AP and
3. Vision and
Dedication. John
Hasson’s record of the phrenological examination, with comment, 1869, is
preserved, HGC. J. R. Young’s reminiscence of HG at this time is in his Men and Memories (New York and London, 1901),
11, 417-26; and HG’s reminiscences of
4. On the San
Francisco Sidelines. Copies of HG’s contract with the NY Tribune,
5. Program of
the
6.
Return to Political Journalism. On HG’s becoming acquainted with Governor Haight, and
the symbolism of the event, see: George, Jr., 207-8; de Mille, 57; Destler, American Radicalism, 5-6. On Haight, see Bancroft,
Illumination
in
7. Position as
Leading Democratic Editor. For the personal and family aspects of the move to
The
Anti-Monoply Program of the REPORTER. (1) Concerning railroad regulation, Governor
Haight summed up his position, as quoted, in a letter to L. I. Carr,
1870, HGC.
8. OUR LAND AND LAND POLICY. HG’s Subsidy Question pamphlet is now rare; no place or date of publication is indicated but the UCBL copy is marked
1871, and the NYPL
copies are identified, San Francisco, 1871. For the timeliness of it, see David
M. Ellis, ‘The Forfeiture of Railroad Land Grants, 1867-1894,’ Mississippi Valley Historical
Review,
33:27, 34-6, 38 (June 1946). Our Land and Land Policy was published in two editions
in
VII. TRYING OUT RADICAL
IDEAS: THE
1. Personal
Situation, 1871.
HG's role in the Democratic convention is indicated in Winfield J. Davis, History of Political Conventions
in
Scrapbook 3, NYPL. His
pieces in the
2. Launching
the POST.
The memorandum of HG’s partner, William Hinton, in George, Jr., 237, describes
the earliest financial arrangements. My facts and figures on the newspaper
business are from: SF Call,
2-3. Withdrawal, Return, and Prosperity. HG’s immediate success with the Post is attested by the appearance of the paper, and by announcements, printed 30 December 1871 and 9-10 January 1872. Terms of sale, in George, Jr., 238-9. Of later success, the principal announcements occur in the Post, 11 December 1872, 29 November 1873; HG’s overture to Reid in letter of 24 September 1872, Reid Mss., Herald Tribune Building, copy supplied by Professor Iseley. The report on HG’s office life is supplied from de Mille, 66-7, and Mrs. C. F. McLean, ‘Henry George, a Study from Life,’ Arena (Boston), 20:299-300 (1918); that on his club life, from HG to John Swinton, 27 March 1873, HGC, and Robert H. Fletcher, Annals of the Bohemian Club (San Francisco, 1898), 159, 167 (for access to which, and to the club’s membership record, I thank Mr. Henry L. Perry, the club’s historian); and that on his home life, from his own and his wife’s letters, 16 October, 7 November 1874, HGC.
3. Continuities of Reform Thought. HG’s attitude toward California’s liberal Republicans appears in the Post of: 8 December 1871; 1 September, 6, 12, 18 December 1873; 1 April 1874; 2 April, 21 May, 21 June 1875. For HG’s current ideas on railroad policy, ibid. 20, 26 February, 28 June, 6, 17 July, 9, 24 September, 19 October 1872; 24 January, 6 March, 13 November 1873. For an opinion he liked, see W. A. Grosvenor, ‘The Railroads and the Farms,’ Atlantic
Monthly, 38:591-610 (November 1873); concerning the Atlantic and Pacific possibility, information from Bancroft Ms., Caspar T. Hopkins, UCBL, and Hopkins ‘Memoirs,’ California Historical Society Quarterly, 27:339-41. Concerning the APA: the hard competition it gave the Bulletin and the Call is acknowledged in G. K. Fitch to J. W. Simonton, 12 May 1871, Fitch Ms., UCBL; HG’s embarrassment about APA is stated in SF Post, 24 October 1874; and his fury toward AP, ibid. 20 January 1873. His reply to Wells, proposing the public ownership of the telegraph and other utilities, ibid. 18 January 1873. HG’s acuteness in speaking of natural monopolies appears by reference to George T. Brown’s chapter on ‘The Theory of Natural Monopoly,’ in The Gas Light Company of Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, Series 54 (Baltimore, 1936).
4. Conviction against Private Property in Land. The report of the criticism in Green's Land Paper is written from the six-month file, UCBL, and the quotations are drawn from the issues of 6 January, 3 February, and 5 June 1872. HG’s socialist-meeting defense of private landholding, in SF Post, 27 February 1872. Assemblyman Days’s reformist position is indicated in his bill, 7 March 1872 (after similar resolutions introduced by another assemblyman), California Assembly Journal, 1871-2, 607; and HG’s approval, in SF Post, 8, 15 February, 29 March, 15 October 1872. Days’s memorandum, on having changed HG’s mind, in George, Jr., 230, 232-3. For instances of HG's publicizing cases of land engrossment, see the Post, 6, 16 December 1871, 3 June 1875; and for his policy recommendations, 29 December 1871; 29 January, 23 March 1872; 16 January, 24 February 1874.
5. California Taxes and American Theory. The description of the tax environment in which HG’s key reform idea was born borrows from William C. Fankhauser, A Financial History of California, Public Revenues, Debts, and Expenditures, University of California Publications, 111 (Berkeley, 1913). New York reform ideas are taken directly from D. A. Wells, E. Dodge, G. W. Cuyler, Second Report . . . (Albany, 1872), 7, 14, 35-6, 47, and passim; see also Herbert R. Ferleger, David A. Wells and the American Revenue System (New York,
1942). For a brief statement of Wells’s ideas, see his ‘Rational Principles of Taxation,’ Journal of Social Science, 6 (1874): 120-33. The Post is considered as background of single-tax ideas in Arthur N. Young, The Single Tax Movement in the United States (Princeton, 1916), 54-60.
Immediate Development of George’s Tax Proposal. The early responses of the San Francisco papers, except those taken from the Chronicle and the Call, respectively of 16 February, and 5, 12 November 1873, are traced from information in the Post, 1873-4. Essential Post editorials, discussing the application of the proposal in rural areas, appear in the issues of 22 July, 5 August, 10 October 1874, 13 March 1875; those discussing its application in urban areas, in the issues of 14 July, 10, 19 November 1873, 23 January, 13 August, 30 October 1874, 13 February, 17 November 1875.
State Capital Reactions. Governor Booth’s 1873 ideas about landholding were voiced in his message, 1 December 1873, California Assembly Journal, 1873-4, 122. The reactions of the Sacramento press are taken occasionally from reports in the Post, but principally from the journals themselves, as follows:
Bee, 27 January, 4, 29 November 1873; Union, 25 October, 4 November 1873. The Record figures, as reported in the text, correspond with those in the State Board of Equalization Report (Sacramento, 1873), 23, 27; but they differ a little from the figures Governor Booth used in his biennial address. The report of the Murphy committee of the assembly was printed, apparently in full, in the Post, 4 May 1874; and HG’s optimistic reaction appeared the next day. HG’s current fondness for Mill is represented in the Post of 17 April 1873 and 1 May 1874; and his strong statements, which are quoted, against private property in land were made in the same newspaper, 29 October 1874, 30 April, 16 July
1875.
VIII. ROUNDING OUT AN EDITOR’S THOUGHT: THE POST'S UTOPIA, 1872-1875
2. Fields for Immediate Reform. The editorials on tariff policy, drawn on for illustrations, are to be found, in the order of the text, in the SF Post for: 16 January 1874, 24 October 1873, 3 March, 3 November 1874, 27 September 1875. HG’s identification of tariff reform with free trade and the review of the Butts book appear, respectively, ibid. 22 December 1873, 5 June 1875. On the question of municipalizing San Francisco’s water system, HG’s diagnosis appears ibid. 20 November 1873, 12, 17, 22 March, 27 June, 13, 20 November 1874. Other opinions in: SF Call, 22 March, 27 June 1874; SF Bulletin, 9, 10 April 1875: SF Chronicle, 2 April 1873. HG’s economic prescriptions appear in SF Post: 6 January 1872, 2 December 1873, 28 March 1874.
Belief in Labor and Capitalism. HG’s ideas about unions, strikes, and the eight-hour program appear in SF Post, 14 June 1872, 16 July 1874. The Sunrise story is to be found ibid. October-November 1873 passim; see also George, Jr., 241, Young, Journalism in California, 79. HG’s notions about the prevention and cure of depressions appear in the Post, 15 January, 28 November 1874, 4 February 1875; his financial ideas, ibid. 23, 25 February, 5 October, 29 December 1874, 11 January, 16 July 1875; and his ideas about banking, building-and-loan, and other credit services, ibid. 5, 7 December 1871, 1 August, 24 September, 7 October 1872, 25 October 1873, 29 April, 27 November 1874, 7 July 1875. The appreciation of Ralston and other imaginative capitalists, ibid. 2 December 1872, 4 June 1874, 28 August, 13 September 1875: SF Ledger, 28 August 1875.
3. Enlargement of Personal Faith. On HG’s religious inclinations at home, George, Jr., 252. His critical reflections against moral relativism and agnosticism appear in SF Post, 1 May, 12 September 1874, 6 February 1875. His favorable response to idealistic history appears ibid. 11, 21 November 1874; and his vein of moral pessimism is represented, ibid. 8 November 1872, 15 February, 14, 16, 17, 21 June, 7 August 1873, 6 March 1875. Aspects of his international awareness, in the order of the text, appear in SF Post, 16 October 1874, 12 December 1871, 20 November 1875, 6, 10 June 1874, 14 June 1873.
4. The Just State. George’s criticisms of militarism and bureaucracy appear ibid. 13, 20 April, 23 June 1874. His dream of extended federalism, ibid. 9 July 1874; his anxieties about overgovernment, ibid. 4 April 1872, 4 June 1873, 15 November 1875: and his preferences for localized power, fixed executive responsibility, and economy, ibid. 26 March, 10 April 1872, 22 October, 26 December 1873, 17 February 1874, 27 February, 5 June 1875. For HG’s first effort for the Australian ballot, see ‘Bribery in Elections,’ Overland Monthly, 7:497-504 (December 1871), and de Mille, 65. His other ideas and reservations about electoral reform, SF Post, 4, 19 December 1871, 4 April 1872, 3, 23 January, 31 March, 13 April 1874. His wish for a new California constitution appears ibid. 13 January, 17 February, 16 March, 6 April 1874, 9 August 1875.
5. Efforts to do Good. HG’s preliminary battle with police corruption appears in SF Alta California, 10, 13 May 1873, and SF Post, 10 April 1875; see also George, Jr., 244. The story of the Cockrill affair is told in almost every issue of the Post during the three weeks beginning 10 April 1875: I draw also on the SF Call and Bulletin for the second half of the month. On the Industrial School exposure, besides the Post, 3 December 1872-10 January 1873, see George, Jr., 241-2. The frame of the story of the Post's attack on the administration of the University of California is drawn in William S. Ferrier, Origin and Development of the University of California (Berkeley, 1930); there is information in Fabian Franklin, Life of Daniel Coit Gilman (New York, 1910), 145-7, I5°> 151, 155 (unfortunately the Gilman Mss. at Johns Hopkins and Yale add nothing here); and there is much testimony, if not much conclusion, in the 'Investigation of the Alleged Frauds in the Construction of the College of Letters. Testimony Taken by the Assembly Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds,’ California Assembly Journal, 1873-4, Appendix iv (Sacramento, 1874). On the character of Professor Carr, see Merle E. Curti and Vernon Carstenson, The University of Wisconsin, A History, 1 (Madison, 1949), 180-81. See George, Jr., 208-g. Besides these background sources, I draw on the Post, especially 8, 22 January, 9, 16 March, 9 June 1874.
6. Successes and Downfall of the POST. HG’s battle with the liquor interests appears in the Post, July 1874, passim; see also Arthur Me Ewen, ‘Henry George, a Character Sketch,’ Review of Reviews, 16 (1897): 551. The plans, conditions, and achievement involved in the Post’s new plant are told from the paper’s own announcements, especially during June 1874, and October 1874-January 1875. George, Jr., pp. 247-8, note 2, says that Senator Jones's $30,000 purchased 30 of 100 shares of the newspaper’s stock, but probably this should be translated to mean 300 of 1000. The Bulletin’s unfriendly opinion of Jones is taken from the issue of 30 December 1874; and this conforms with the notion of the Call, 26 June 1874, that the Post really belonged to creditors. On the other side of the antagonism, the Post frequently denounced those papers, and sometimes predicted (4 June 1873, 19 June 1874, 7 October 1875) the fall of the Bulletin. But the Fitch Mss., Exhibits K and L, 1875, UCBL, contain a statement about that paper’s earning power. HG’s hopes for the Weekly Post and the Morning Ledger he stated to John Swinton, 6 October 1875, HGC; the account of the Ledger is based mainly on the paper itself, but see also George, Jr., 248, de Mille, 71-2. HG’s immediate reactions to the loss of his paper are quoted from letters to Swinton, 28 November, 27 December 1875, HGC; the later reminiscence, from a letter to Charles Nordhoff, 31 January 1880, HGC.
IX. FROM ISOLATION: SPEAKING AND WRITING IN TIME OF CRISIS, 1876-1879
1. Holding a Sinecure. The letters in which HG stated his satisfactions at being free of newspaper obligations are family ones, 31 March (?), 26 May 1876, HGC.
His being appointed to a state job is the subject of a memorandum by E. W. Maslin, George, Jr., *62-3; the formal record of confirmation appears in California Legislature, Senate Journal, 1875-6, 99, and the description of that event is from McLean, ‘Henry George, A Study from Life,’ Arena, 20:304. For HG’s acknowledgment that the inspectorship was a sinecure, see Science of Political Economy, 201; his discussions of the practical politics, duties, and pleasures of the job occur in letters to James Coffey, and to his wife and his mother, January-May 1876, printed in part, George, Jr., 257-9. His pamphlet, The Press. Should It Be Personal or Impersonal? was almost certainly published in San Francisco, 1876.
2. Beginning a Speakinc Career. HG’s first major speech was printed as The Question before the People, What Is the Real Issue in the Presidential Campaign? (San Francisco, 1876); the quoted passages are from pp. 3, 15, 6. The San Luis Obispo event is taken from the Gazette of that city, 9 October 1876, HG Scrapbook 6, NYPL; and HG’s improved style appears in his Ms. address, 'Why I Am a Democrat,’ HGC. Other details of his campaign of 1876 efforts, including the self-estimate quoted, from George, Jr., 268-71. HG’s 4 July address, ’The American Republic: Its Dangers and Possibilities,’ is in Complete Works, viii, 157-84, the quoted passages on pp. 157-8, 159, 160, 161, 162, 168, 170, 171, 173. The events of the 4 July celebrations are taken from the Alta California, 5 July 1876, 5 July 1877. The circumstances surrounding HG’s university lecture are related in George, Jr., 274-5; and C. T. Hopkins’ preceding address is printed, Business versus Speculation (San Francisco, 1876). HG’s own text, ‘The Study of Political Economy,’ is in Complete Works, viii, 135-53; the passages quoted, on pp. 135, 136, 140-41, 153. The lecture was first printed in Popular Science Monthly, 16:601-12 (March 1880). For the analysis by George, Jr., see p. 282.
3. Arguing with Unreason. On the immediate economic-political background, see HG, ‘The Kearney Agitation in California,’ Popular Science Monthly, 17 (1880): 433-53; and the chapter on the same subject in James Bryce, American Commonwealth (New York and London, 1895), 11, which, pp. 42gn, 444-5, draws on HG’s ‘brilliant’ article. For scholarly treatments, see: Bancroft, California, vii, ch. xiv; Cross, Labor Movement in California, chs. vi-vii; Sandmeyer, Anti-Chinese Movement in California, ch. iv; and Ralph Kauer, ‘The Workingmen’s Party of California,’ Pacific Historical Review, 13 (1944): 278-gi. Kearneyite overtures to HG are contained in a letter from T. W. Dennis and Edward Connolly, 25 August 1877, HGC; his other choices are indicated in diary and letters, HGC, partly reproduced in George, Jr., 288, 298. See also Sandmeyer, 79-80. On the gathering of the California Land Reform League, George, Jr., 293-4, and Louis F. Post, Prophet of San Francisco (New York, 1930), 46. HG’s keynote address, Why Work Is Scarce, Wages Low, and Labor Restless, was printed (San Francisco, 1885); quotations in the text from pp. 1-9, 11, 13. The Argonaut's version appeared 17, 24 August 1878. To see the ideas in the perspective of HG’s growth, compare Progress and Poverty, Bk. v, ch. 1, and his article, ‘Causes of the Business Depression,’ 1894, in Complete Works, viii, 325-31. HG’s own explanation of the address to Swinton, 2 June 1878, HGC, is quoted in de Mille, 80; Mr. Waite’s objection, referring to his article in Overland Monthly, 15: 446-55 (November 1875), is in memorandum, Bowman Mss., Newspaper Matter, p. 64, UCBL. The ‘Moses’ address is printed,
Complete Works, vn; pp. 6, 9, 13, 16, 24 are quoted. There is an account of the event in SF Alta California, 21 February 1878; and Mrs. de Mille’s comment is in ‘Henry George, The Progress and Poverty Period,’ American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2:551 (July 1943).
4. Writing While California Was Reorganized. For the origins of the constitutional convention, I draw on Kauer, loc. cit. 282-3, ar*d on Carl B. Swisher, Motivation and Political Technique in the California Constitutional Convention i8j8-i8yq (Claremont, 1930), 10-14, 17-18. HG’s original interest is voiced in letters to Coffey, 5, 28 March 1878, HGC; and his broadside appeal 3 May 1878 is preserved, HGC and UCBL. For the terms set by the Kearneyites, and HG’s refusal, see Davis, Political Conventions in California, 388, and George, Jr., 299; for the terms on which he undertook candidacy, letter to Democratic convention, 6 June 1878, HGC. On the election of delegates, slightly different figures in Kauer, loc. cit., 283, from those in Davis, Political Conventions in California, 390-92. Information on the physical circumstances in which Progress and Poverty was written is from: George, Jr., 300-305; de Mille, i|i; and undated clipping, HG Scrapbook 8, p. 25, NYPL. On the help of friends, data from: letter from the governor’s son, Samuel C. Haight, to B. W. Burgess, 12 August 1927, HGC; Linnie Wolfe Marsh, Son of the Wilderness, The Life of John Muir (New York, 1946), 182-3; J°hn Swett, Public Education in California (New York, 1911), 233-4; Judge James Maguire, address, NY Standard, 8 October 1887; Sacramento Bee, 23 August 1915; reminiscences by James H. Barry, The Bee, Annual for 190J, 4.
The Objectionable Reorganization. For the background of HG’s 1879, I have borrowed ideas, and a few editorial quotations from the Alta California, from ch. xiii, ‘The Alta and the Big Red Scare of 1877-1879,’ of Dr. Petty’s 'Gold-Rush Intellectual: John S. Hittell,’ all with the permission of the author. I draw again on the studies mentioned above as discussing Kearneyism; and on J. C. Stedman and R. A. Leonard, The Workingmen’s Party of California (San Francisco, 1878), especially chs. 11, v-vm. The economic opinion of Mr. Beale appears in his letter to R. S. Baker, 17 April 1879, R. S. Baker Collection, HL. Hall's Land Journal (Los Angeles, 1876, San Francisco, 1876-8) is drawn on, HL file. The new constitution is most readily found in Francis N. Thorpe, Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters and Other Organic Laws (Washington, 1909), 1, 412-51; but the present chapter was written with reference to the full Debates and Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of California (3 vols., Sacramento, 1880), and I am convinced that HG’s ideas were thoroughly disregarded there. Ex-governor Haight, who died before the convention began, was the only elected delegate whom I can connect with HG.
Author Rejected at Home. HG’s opinions, in the State, are reported from the paper itself. For his children’s belief, that the paper paid its way, see George, Jr., 317; de Mille, 83. His own summing up of the California situation, for Swinton, is in a letter of 6 May 1879, HGC. His denunciation of the new railroad commission refers to the Constitution, Article xii, Sections 22-3; the SF State condemned railroad influence, 5 April 1879. His later condemnations are quoted from ‘The Kearney Question in California,’ loc. cit., 446, 451-2; Social Problems, 182. For the advice his friends gave HG, see Swett, Public Education in California, 233-4; Young, Men and Memories, 11, 417-26.
X. BEFORE THE WORLD: PROGRESS AND POVERTY. 1879
1. Salient Features of the Book. This chapter might have gained in historical feeling if I had made my references to the San Francisco ‘author’s edition’ of 1879, but convenience would have been sacrificed. All page references are to Complete Works, 1; and they are valid also for the many editions which reproduce that one. A printed sheet (HGC) announced the sober title that HG first gave the book. George, Jr., p. 32 m, may be correct in supposing that the author used it to conceal the real title, until copyright was established; but it may as easily be supposed that HG first thought to make the book sound scientific, and then preferred to make it more appealing. Dr. Taylor’s early appreciation of P and P’s regional character appeared in the Californian (San Francisco, 1880-81), 1:183. For a recent exposition of the author’s broader range of thought, see leaflet of the Henry George School of Social Science, ‘Henry George the Scholar,’ by Francis Neilson. HG’s knowledge of Buckle is indicated, P and P, 92-3; and passages of Buckle which may possibly be echoed in George occur in the History of Civilization in England (London, 1873), 111, 309, 312, 314. HG’s ignorance of the Physiocrats is indicated by the little he said about them, P and P, 421-2, 431; see also his Science of Political Economy, Bk. 11, ch. iv; and Emile Rivaud, Henry George et la Physiocratie (Paris, 1907), and Charles Gide, ‘The Single Tax and the Impot Unique,’ Quarterly Journal of Economics, 5:494-5 Quly 1891).
2. The Context of George’s Critique of Classical Economics. HG’s comment on Walker’s attack on the wages fund seems adequate and just and more timely than he knew. In a review of 1869 John Stuart Mill recanted the wages-fund idea, but he failed to change the later edition of his text to express his change of mind. See Mill, Principles of Political Economy (Ashley ed.), 343-4, 991-2. HG’s objection to the Malthusianism in The Wages Fund seems timely, too, by comparison with Bowen’s anti-Malthusian article, ‘Malthusianism, Pessimism, and Darwinism,’ North American Review, November 1879, reprinted in his Gleanings from a Literary Life, 1838-1880 (New York, 1880), see pp. 356, 361-74. On the prevalence of Malthusianism, see Dorfman, Economic Mind in American Civilization, 11—111, passim. A letter of 1893, HG to Byron W. Holt, an admirer who disagreed about Malthusianism, indicates that HG refused to change his mind about the validity of P and P, Bk. 11 (letter kindly supplied by Professor W. Stull Holt of the University of Washington).
The Influence of Ricardian Theory. For the staying power, in economic thought, of Ricardo’s law of rent, see Carl M. Bye, Developments and Issues in the Theory of Rent (New York, 1940), especially 104-6. For an approving comment on a Ricardian idea which HG adopted, that rent does not enter the price-making process but is determined by price, see Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (6th ed., London, 1898), 484-5^ On radical developments from Ricardian bases, see Esther Lowenthal, The Ricardian Socialists (New York, 1911).
A San Francisco Theory of Interest. Mr. del Mar’s charge of plagiarism is contained in his Science of Money (London, 1885), g8-gn; and that book mentions his earlier writings. His lecture, which coincided with P and P’s publication, was published: Usury and the Jews (San Francisco, 1879), 16 pp. On del
Mar see C. T. Hopkins, ‘Memoirs,’ California Historical Society Quarterly, 27:345-7 (December 1948); and Dorfman, Economic Mind, in, 98-101, xxii, which wisely calls attention to this forgotten man. The possibility that del Mar and HG developed their similar ideas independently is suggested by a case that occurred later in HG’s life. In a letter of 22 August 1916 (HGC), Rend Brossidre, a French writer, told August Lewis that his own theory of interest, 'which I thought was a new one, was exactly the same as Henry George’s (in Progress and Poverty) — only I go much farther than the great author.’ HG’s interest theory in P and P drew criticisms for many years. For friendly but severe criticism, see D. M. Lowrey, ‘The Basis of Interest,’ Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Science, 2 (1892): 629-52. For friendly doubt: Bolton Hall to R. T. Ely, 19 August 1900, R. T. Ely Collection, Wisconsin Historical Society. For single-tax comment: Joseph Faidy, ‘Henry George’s Theory of Interest,’ Single Tax Review, 3 (1903): 20-23; P. H. Elback, ‘Interest and the Reform of Henry George,’ ibid. 13 (1913): 1-12; Charles A. Green, The Profits of the Earth (Boston, 1934).
3. George’s Depression Theory in Retrospect. Compare Eugen von Berg-mann, Die Wirtschaft Krisen: Geschichte der Nationaldkonimischen Krisen Theorien (Stuttgart, 1895), 353~9> and Jean Lescure, Des crises generates et periodiques de production (Paris, 1910), 474-6, with Paul Barnett, ‘Business Cycle Theory in the United States, 1860-1900,’ in University of Chicago, School of Business, Studies in Business Administration, xi, no. 3 (1938).
4. George’s Realism about the South. Compare P and P, 347, with Roger Shugg, Origins of Class Struggle in Louisiana (University, La., 1939), and with
C. Vann Woodward, The Rise of the New South (University, 1952), ch. vn.
6. George and Marginalism. For the uses of the term ‘margin’ in books from which HG may have borrowed, see: Henry Fawcett, Manual (1864 ed.), 140; (1876 ed.), 121; Millicent Garrison Fawcett, Political Economy for Beginners (1876 ed.), 97; Mill, Principles of Political Economy (Ashley ed.), 690, 716. For a learned summary of European beginnings and early American developments of the marginal ideas, see Dorfman, Economic Mind, 111, 84-7, 145, 188-205, and passim. Clark’s acknowledgment of debt to HG appears in his Distribution of Wealth, A Theory of Wages, Interest and Profits (New York, 1902), viii. For highly critical comment, see Edgar N. Johnson, ‘The Economics of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty,’ Journal of Political Economy, 18 (igio):729; see also George C. Stigler, Production and Distribution Theories, The Formative Period (New York, 1941), 302.
George as Frontier Theorist. Dr. F. Lee Benson suggested some of my inquiry on this point. Professor Mood’s findings derive from Turner’s copy of Progress and Poverty deposited in HL, and from the Minutes of the Johns Hopkins Seminar in History, 17 May 1889, JHU. Professor Merle E. Curti permits me to quote the following, from a letter written him by Turner, 5 January 1931: 'I . . . think I never read his Progress and Poverty before writing the "Frontier.” Since reading your chapter I have read the Progress and Poverty discussion of the public domain and its influence upon the question of labor and capital. It is clear that, so far as the land question and legislation on its taxation goes, he had the idea before my "Frontier”; but the single-tax conception never met with my assent.’ It seems that Turner, writing at the age of seventy, had forgotten reading done nearly half a century earlier. Elsewhere in the letter he justly claims greater breadth than George, in using the frontier idea.
XI. IN THE TIDE OF IDEA AND OPPORTUNITY, i88o-i88t
2. Publishing PROGRESS AND POVERTY. The story is told quite fully in George, Jr., 315-22; my version draws on additional letters of negotiation and arrangement with the publishers, 1879, HGC. See also McLean, 'Henry George: a Study from Life,’ Arena, 20:305 (July 1898).
Early Reception of the Book. The letters from George W. Julian, Sir George Grey, and the British Liberals, sent in response to gift copies of the SF edition, are quoted in George, Jr., 323-4, and in de Mille, 85. Professor Leslie’s letters, dated 26 November [1879], and 26 September and 24 November [1880], are in HGC; his printed observations on HG, in Fortnightly Review, 1 October 1880, New Series, 28:127, 147-9. The earlier HG letter to Nordhoff appears in George, Jr., 328-9: the later one, 31 January [1880], and Horace White’s letter, 17 December 1879, are in HGC. The earliest New York reviews were: Tribune, 5 December 1879; Herald, 15 December 1879 (these and others a little later, in HG Scrapbook 24, NYPL).
California Reviews. There is a description of ‘the reception of Progress and Poverty in California’ in Young, Single Tax Movement, 67-9. The SF Examiner and Bee reviews (apparently of 8 and 12 November 1879, respectively) are preserved in HG Scrapbook 24, NYPL; Dr. Taylor’s review is in Californian, 1:182-7 (February 1880), and there is a sketch of HG by him in Ella Sterling Cummins [Mighels], The Story of the Files, a Review of California Writers and Literature (San Francisco, 1893), 174-5. Dr. Leverson’s salute and ’Ex-Rebel’s’ letter appeared in the Argonaut of 14(?) February and 6 March 1880, HG Scrapbook 24, NYPL; comment on them in Sacramento Bee, 2 (?) February 1880. Besides the reviews mentioned, there may have appeared by April 1880 an adverse comment made in the Berkeley Quarterly (date not clear); in July 1881 that journal (2:210-23) carried a severely critical article, John J. Dwyer, 'Henry George on Taxation.’ HG’s own impressions of first responses to P and P appear in Science of Political Economy, 170-71, and letter to Dr. Taylor, 17 February 1880, HGC.
3. Eastern Reception of New York Edition. The special interest in P and P in the Appleton office during early 1880 is evident in letters to HG from the firm, 20 February, 5, 27 March, 1, g April; from Youmans, 12 March, and from Steers, 27 March, HGC. The lead article on P and P was by C. M. Lungren, Popular Science Monthly, 16:721-37; and one suspects similar strategy of publicity in the Editor’s Table of Appleton’s Journal, May and June 1881, when criticism was offered and HG replied (New Series, 10:472-4, 552-9, 569-70). The locations of the important reviews are: NY Times, 6 June 1880; NY Nation, 31: 65-6, 117-18 (22 July, 12 August 1880); Christian Register, 9 and 19 February 1880; Springfield Republican, 27 June 1880; Atlantic Monthly, 46 (1880): 847, 851, 854. Some of these are in HG Scrapbook 24, NYPL; and I draw most of the comment from minor journals from that collection. HG’s own attitudes appear in George, Jr., which prints some of his letters to Dr. Taylor, 334' 34°> 344! I draw also on letters to John Swinton, 29 April, HGC, and to
D. A. Wells, 3 April, 1, 9 December 1880, Wells Collection, LC.
4. Author’s Hard Times in New York. HG’s life in New York during 1880-81 is told mostly from letters to Dr. Taylor, 31 August, 27 September, 28 November, 4, 18 December 1880, 4 January, 6 March, 12 May 1881, HGC. Family letters are few, but HG’s to Richard George, aged fifteen, 2 September, 17 December 1880, HGC, are eloquent. So are Bigelow’s account of HG in Seventy Summers, 11, 16-17, and Young’s reminiscence, from NY Herald, 30 October 1897. HG’s campaign efforts are recounted in George, Jr., 336-8; and there is a draft of the article Youmans rejected, one may think too reformist for Popular Science Monthly, preserved in HGC. HG reviewed his relations with Hewitt in a draft letter, 1897, HGC. In his Abram S. Hewitt, With Some Account of Peter Cooper (New York and London, 1935), 418-19, Allan Nevins offers evidence which supports HG’s own idea that Hewitt had liked P and P. I have scanned the HGC draft of HG’s report done for Hewitt, and, as nearly as I can tell (the report is partly in HG’s shorthand), it contains little or nothing to justify Hewitt’s later charge that it was full of single-tax ideas. The other best contemporary documents on the Hewitt affair are HG's letters to Dr. Taylor 28 November 1880, 6 March 1881, HGC.
Securing a Foothold. On Young’s efforts for P and P in England, see his Men and Memories, 11, 423. HG’s new friendships, including Shearman’s, are attested in George, Jr., 350-51; and in letters, HG to Bigelow, 15 April 1881, and to Taylor, 25 May, 23 June 1881. As for the unpleasant side of the visit to San Francisco, a note to Dr. Taylor, 11 August 1881, HGC, indicates HG’s anxiety lest someone would 'garnishee proceeds’ of his lecture in Metropolitan Temple. The nomination for the Senate is recorded in the California Legislature Senate Journal, 1881, 46-7, 52; see George, Jr., 352m
5. PROGRESS AND POVERTY Overseas. The Laveleye review, ‘La Propri6t6 terrienne et le paupdrisme,’ La Revue scientifique, 25:708-10 (24 January 1880), was praised in the Bee, 18 February 1880; and HG immediately wrote Dr. Taylor; see George, Jr., 331. Another Belgian, Agathon de Potter, wrote HG a complimentary letter. The Economist, 38:472, reviewed the NY edition, 24 April 1880; it reviewed the British edition, 39:540-41, 30 April 1881, and at that time praised HG’s free-trade ideas while resisting his ideas about land. Statist review, 10 April 1880, in HG Scrapbook 24, NYPL. Concerning German distribution: letters, Gutschow to HG, 6 January 1881, and Elwin Staude to Giitschow, 5 May 1881, HGC. The German reviews referred to are: Wagner's in Zeitschrift fur die Gesamte Staatswissenschaft (Tubingen), Bd. 37 (1881): 619-24; one by E. Heitz (complaining of HG’s lack of proper method), Jahr-bucher fur Nationaldkonomie und Statistik (Jena), 38^9:123-6; and one by Schmoller, in Schmoller’s Jahrbuch fiir Gezetzgebung, Verwaltung, und Vokswirtschaft (Leipsic), 6 (1882):i, 354-9.
George’s Connection with Ireland. I draw on Norman D. Palmer, The Irish Land League Crisis (New Haven, 1940), for Irish and Irish World backgrounds. At first entitled The Irish Land Question (New York, 1881, and many early editions), HG’s little book later became simply The Land Question, as in Complete Works, hi. HG’s success with this book, and with NY Irishmen, he described in letters, especially those to McClatchy, 27 January, 22 February, 9 October 1881, HGC. George, Jr., tells the story fully, 341-57.
The Support of New Friends. F. G. Shaw turned to HG in a letter of 18 July 1881, HGC; HG’s letters to him, 13 September, 4, 9 October 1881, HGC, are printed in part, in George, Jr., 353-4, 403. The interest of Louis Post, at this stage, appears in his Prophet of San Francisco, chs. 11-v; for comment on his paper Truth, see Mott, American Journalism, 502. HG’s knowledge of A. R. Wallace’s endorsement appears in letters to Dr. Taylor and Shaw, respectively 7 September, 9 October 1881, HGC; see George, Jr., 354-5.
XII. PROPHET IN THE OLD COUNTRY: IRELAND AND ENGLAND, 1881-1882
1. The Condition of Ireland. For the opening paragraphs, and for background throughout, I draw especially on: Palmer, Irish Land League Crisis; John E. Pomfret, The Struggle for Land in Ireland, 1800-1923 (Princeton, 1930); and R. C. K. Ensor’s volume in the Oxford History of England, England 1830-1914 (Oxford, 1936). I have used also: Herbert Paul, History of Modern England, ill, iv; John Morley, Life of William Ewart Gladstone, 111 (New York and London, 1903). The opinions on the Irish Land Act of 1881 are drawn from: Hammond, Gladstone and the Irish Nation (London, 1938), 167; and J. L. Garvin, Life of Joseph Chamberlain, 1 (London, 1932), 336.
2. Three Months among the Irish, 1881-2. HG rendered a public report of his visit in the Irish World, beginning with a letter written 3 November and printed 3 December. He sent home also what amounts to a supplementary report, a parallel series of private letters to Patrick Ford, HGC. The one file of the newspaper, deposited in the New York Public Library, is badly damaged and broken; and I have drawn on the clippings of HG’s Irish World letters, in HG Scrapbooks, 12-13, NYPL, a collection I believe to be complete. Some letters, both public and private, are quoted in George, Jr., and de Mille; but I have gone directly to the collected sources. Annie George’s observations, written for the boys, also HGC, are quoted in George, Jr., 366, and de Mille, 101. Concerning the Rotunda lecture, HG wrote to Dr. Taylor, 20 November 1881, as well as to Ford; that letter and copy of the address, ‘Land and Labour,’ 14 November 1881, are in HGC; see George, Jr., 362. Pomfret, op. cit. 104-8, discusses the radical ideological background which HG discovered in Ireland. HG’s account of the Bishop of Clonfert’s salute is in NY Standard, 8 January 1887; and he reprinted the Bishop of Meath’s diocesan letter, ibid. 18 June 1887. HG’s difficult relations with Meath appear in letters between them, 12, 13 November 1881, 27, 28 February 1882, and in HG letters to Ford, 9, 15, 22 November, 12, 28 December 1881, HGC; and in HG letter, 2 January, in Irish World, 28 January 1882. See Palmer, op. cit. 118-20.
3. Radicalizing in England, 1882. HG’s estimations of a revolution rising in England were made in letters to Dr. Taylor, 11 January, 6 June, to Steers, 11 February, to Shaw, 28 April, 30 May 1882, HGC. His information about the sales of his books he reported to Shaw, more than to anyone else; and the account of Shaw’s subsidies is drawn from correspondence between the two men, 28 April-18 July 1882, HGC, partly printed in George, Jr., 389-91. HG’s second speech in Dublin was reported in the London Times, 12 June 1882, p. 3; his meeting with J. Morrison Davidson is reported in that writer’s Concerning Four Precursors of Henry George (London and Glasgow, 1899?), 1-2.
First Connections with Socialists Abroad. HG’s English influence, especially on the socialists, is the object of a study in process by Dr. Elwood Lawrence of Michigan State College. On the early stages, see his ‘Uneasy Alliance, the Reception of Henry George by British Socialists in the Eighties,’ American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 11:63. For immediate background see: H. M. Hyndman, Record of an Adventurous Life (London, 1911), ch. xv and passim; Max Beer, A History of British Socialism (London, 1919-20), 11, 246-53; Edward R. Pease, History of the Fabian Society (London, 1925), 23-4. For Marx's opinion of HG, as quoted, see letter no. 175, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Correspondence, A Selection with Commentary and Notes, translated and edited by Dora Torr (New York, 1934?), 394-6. Hyndman’s attitude toward HG as possible convert is stated in his Record of an Adventurous Life, 282, 290-92; and HG’s, toward Hyndman, in letter to Ford, 9 March 1882, HGC. For the drawing-room event, which under Hyndman’s auspices opposed HG to Spencer, I use HG to A. J. Steers, 25 August 1882, HGC; see George, Jr., 369-70.
Connections with Radicals and Land Nationalizers. Miss Taylor’s acceptance of P and P is related in letters, HG to Henry George, Jr., 22 March 1882, and Henry George, Jr., to F. G. Shaw, 17 April 1882, HGC; see George, Jr., 367-8, and de Mille, 102. A. R. Wallace approached HG in letters of 3, 7 June 1882; his political preferences appear in his reply to a double review of Land Nationalisation and Progress and Poverty by Professor Fawcett, reprinted in Wallace, Studies Scientific and Social (London and New York, 1900), ch. xvii. The Wallace-Darwin exchange of ideas about HG was made in letters of 9, 12 July 1881, in James Marchant, Alfred Russel Wallace, Letters and Reminiscences (2 vols., London, New York, Toronto, and Melbourne, 1916), 1, 316, 317. See also Wallace, My Life, a Record of Events and Opinions (New York, 1905), n, ch. xxxv. On the correspondence of ideas among the three writers, compare: Wallace, Land Nationalisation (1892 ed.), 172; Cairnes, Some Leading Principles of Political Economy Newly Expounded (London, 1872), 333; P and P, 20-22; and for Wallace’s identifying his thought with HG’s, as quoted, Land Nationalisation, 173-4. HG reported to Ford his associations with Joseph Chamberlain and John Morley, in letters of 6, 22, 27 April 1882; the article he did for the latter was ‘England and Ireland, an American View,’ Fortnightly Review, 37:780-94 (1 June 1882). For a kind of intellectual history, see Morley, Recollections (2 vols., New York, 1917), 1. For immediate political backgrounds, see Garvin, Joseph Chamberlain, 1, chs. xv-xvii; the passage quoted is on pp.
385-6-
4. Irish Crisis of 1882. My account of Liberal policy in Ireland during the spring of 1882 draws mainly on Hammond, Gladstone and the Irish Nation, ch. xv, and Garvin, Joseph Chamberlain, 1, chs. xvi-xvii. The London Times, 4 September 1882, p. 5, supplies the information that, up to 31 July 1882, the Land Act of 188r had operated to bring 79,455 applications before the statutory commission on fair rents; that 11,964 fair-rent agreements had been recorded, as made out of court; and that the commission had fixed 14,945 rentals. HG’s letter in the Irish World, 26 August 1882, mentions such improvements. His new attitude toward Parnell appears in letters to Ford, 6, 30 June 1882, HGC; his reports of the bitter day after Phoenix Park were printed in the Irish World, 3, 10 June 1882. My account draws also from Michael Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, or the Story of the Land League Revolution (London and New York, 1902), 357, 361, and passim. The attitudes represented there encourage the interpretation of HG’s role which de Mille indicates, p. 256, note 9, as being Father Dawson’s idea.
Identification with Davitt and McGlynn. HG’s reactions to Davitt’s speeches in England appear in his letters of May and June to Ford, Annie George, and Shaw, HGC. See George, Jr., 382, 383. For Davitt’s own statement of his land program, see Leaves from a Prison Diary (London, 1885), 11, lectures xxv-xxvn. HG’s warning to Ford, lest Davitt be made to seem too much a P and P man, appears in letters of 27 May, 27 June, 4 August 1882, HGC. McGlynn’s speech which forced the issue, and identified the speaker as a HG man, is quoted in George, Jr., 385.
Arrested Twice in Ireland. The account of the venture to Athenry and Loughrea is based on HG’s letter printed in the Irish World, 23 September 1882, and on Joynes’s letter, London Times, 4 September 1882, p. 4. Letters from Joynes to HG, 14 November, 7 December 1882, 25 March 1883, HGC, which tell of his losing a job as a result of the episode, make HG’s irony about him seem unkind. HG’s acknowledgment that Secretary Trevelyan eased his case appears in the London Times, 6 September 1882, p. 6; and his letter to President Arthur is printed, ibid. 2 October 1882, p. 8. See George, Jr., 394-5. The essential out-letters in the State Department Archive, National Archives, from which I draw the diplomatic phase of this story, are the following: Secretary of State (or acting secretary), letters or telegrams to Lowell (or to W. J. Hoppin of the legation), 18, 21, 23, 26 August, 3 October 1882, in State Department, Great Britain, Ms. Instructions, vol. 36. The essential inletters are the following: Lowell (or Hoppin) to the Secretary of State, 14 July, 22, 30 August, 9, 29 September, 17 October 1882, in State Department, Great Britain, Ms. vol. 145. This volume contains Lowell to Foreign Minister, Earl Granville, 29 August 1882; and Granville to Hopkins, 27 September 1882.
5. THE TIMES’s and Other Appreciations. J. R. Young’s response to the review of P and P in The Times was dated 26 November 1882, HGC. HG’s Land Nationalisation Society speech was reported in The Times, 6 September 1882, p. 5. Shaw wrote about it, 24 January 1905, letter quoted in Archibald Henderson, George Bernard Shaw, His Life and Works (London, 1911), 152-3. For the festive occasion of this reminiscence, a P and P dinner, see Single Tax Review, 4 (igo5):26-8. For other comment on the 1882 meeting, see: de Mille, 1!5’ 2571 William S. Irvine, The Universe of GBS (New York, 1949), 40-43; A. R. Wallace, My Life, 11, 274. HG’s reflections on having found his place in England appear in letters to F. G. Shaw, 17, 21 September, and to Father Thomas Dawson, 23 October 1882, HGC.
XIII. PROPHET IN THE OLD COUNTRY:
ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND, 1884-1885
1. English Fondness for the Absent George, 1883. HG learned about the Land Reform Union from letters from Thomas Walker, 5, 7 June 1883, HGC;
see George, Jr., 398, 422. The Olivier letter, 15 November 1882, is printed in Margaret Olivier, ed., Sydney Olivier, Letters and Selected Writings (New York, 1948), 54. Wicksteed's letters to HG, 29 October 1882, 4 February 1883, are in HGC. For data on the Economic Circle, see Charles H. Herford, Philip Henry Wicksteed, His Life and Work (London and Toronto, 1881), 193, 196, 199, 205-7; for Wicksteed’s influence in English socialism, G. B. Shaw, ‘On the History of Fabian Economics,’ in Edward R. Pease, History of the Fabian Society (London, 1925), 275-6. The lasting Georgist element in Wicksteed is discussed in Herford, op. cit. 213-14; and in Wicksteed, Common Sense of Political Economy, ed. by Lionel Robbins (London, 1933), 1, vi-vii; 11, 686-90. Hynd-man’s challenge to HG was written 6 April 1883, HGC; see comment in Destler, American Radicalism, 80-81. For the Positivist attitude toward HG, quite ambiguous, see Frederic Harrison’s address, ‘The Views on the Labour Problem of our Positivist School,’ printed as ch. iv of his National and Social Problems (New York, 1908), Pt. 11.
2. Major British Reviews of PROGRESS AND POVERTY. The figures on the sales of P and P were gathered from Kegan Paul company records by Dr. Lawrence and appear in his ‘Henry George’s British Mission,’ American Quarterly, 3 (i95i):233- The first two reviews discussed are: Laveleye, ‘ "Progress and Poverty,” a Criticism,’ Contemporary Review, 42:786-806; and Sarson, Modern Review, 4:52-80, reprinted as Land Reform Union Tract, no. 4 (London, 1884). Mallock’s review appeared in the Quarterly Review, 155:35-74 (the long quotation is from pp. 36-7); this and three other anti-George pieces by him are assembled in his book, Property and Progress or a Brief Enquiry into Contemporary Social Agitation in England (London, 1884). Mallock’s own account of his anti-radical activity, from which I quote, appears in his Memoirs of Life and Literature (New York and London, 1920), 181-2, and passim; for a sympathetic discussion of Mallock, see Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind from Burke to Santayana (Chicago, 1953), 345-57- For the Edinburgh Review criticism, see vol. 157:134-48; my quotations are from pp. 146, 148. Herbert Spencer’s letter, printed at once in the St. James Gazette, is reprinted in HG’s A Perplexed Philosopher, Complete Works, v, 58-60; that book, p. 57, contains HG’s reminiscence of the Edinburgh review.
Public Discussion and Criticism. For the British trade unionists’ discussion of HG, see Sidney and Beatrice Webb, History of Trade Unionism (New York and London, 1920 ed.), 375-6. A famous labor leader’s acknowledgment of debt appears in Tom Mann’s Memoirs (London, 1923), 27-8, 33. HG had some information concerning this kind of following, from A. C. Swinton, 22 October 1883, HGC. Alfred Marshall’s lectures were printed in the Bristol Times and Mirror, 20, 27 February, 6 March 1883, certified transcript, NYPL. Concerning Toynbee, see F. C. Montague, Arnold Toynbee, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, vn (1889), 51-2 and passim; and memoir by Benjamin Jowett, in Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution (1896 ed.), v-xix. The St. Andrews Hall lectures are printed as an appendix to this book, the quoted passage appearing on p. 318; Wicksteed's letter to HG, 4 February 1883, and Kegan Paul’s circular, HGC.
Gathering Resistance. Fawcett's article in Macmillan’s, 48:182-94 (and Fawcett, Manual of Political Economy, 1883 ed., Bk. 11, ch. xi), was answered by
A. R. Wallace in ‘The “Why” and “How” of Land Nationalization,’ Macmillan’s, 48:357-67. Mallock’s second Quarterly Review HG article appears in vol. 156:353—93. reprinted in Property and Progress, 83-166. The quoted passages from the Fortnightly Review, 1 September 1883, are from vol. 34:444, 445.
3. American Orator in England. Academic overtures to HG, before this arrival, were contained in letters from Muller, 28 February, 15 July, and in one from J. E. Symes, 22 November 1883, HGC. The Times reported the stunt arrival in London and commented on the St. James Hall speech, 6 January, p. 10, and 10 January 1884, p. 4. On these London days, see also: George, Jr., 422-7, and Lawrence, ‘Henry George’s British Mission,’ American Quarterly, 3 (1951), 236; Algar Labouchere Thorold, The Life of Henry Labouchere (London, 1913), 214: NY Free Soiler, May 1884. As to HG’s speaking procedures, as he swung into the English tour, I am indebted to suggestions of Dr. A. J. Croft, who has made technical studies of HG’s oratory; and about HG’s position in the battle of ideas, I am indebted to Dr. Lawrence’s articles, American Quarterly, 3:236, and American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 11:64-6. Professor Muller’s criticism is in a letter to HG, 23 January 1884, HGC. Punch’s HG cartoon appeared on 26 January 1884, p. 43; and the Saturday Review, 57:97 (26 January 1884) said that Englishmen were foolish to be so respectful to a quoter of the American Declaration. Joseph Chamberlain’s article appeared in Fortnightly Review, 34:775 (1 December 1883). For all stages of this trip I draw on HG’s current letters to his wife, HGC.
4. First Success in Scotland. On the condition of labor there, see Webb, History of Trade Unionism (1902 ed.), 334. There is a full account of the first Glasgow appearance in de Mille, 128-9; on the influence of the visit, see George, Jr., 434, 437, 578-9; and William Stewart, J. Keir Hardie, A Biography (London, New York, Toronto, Melbourne, 1921), 65.
5. Hard Treatment in the Universities. The first university visit is reported by Dr. Lawrence in ‘Henry George’s Oxford Speech,’ California Historical Society Quarterly, 30 (1951): 118-21, which draws on Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 15 March 1884. Max Muller’s letters arranging the visit, and HG’s letter during it, March 1884, are in HGC; this last one is quoted in de Mille, 130. The written apology came from William Unwin, 8 March 1884, HGC. For the Oxford episode, I draw also from George, Jr., 435-6; and NY Free Soiler, May 1884. The assurances HG had about Cambridge, beforehand, came from F. S. Oliver, 5 March 1884, HGC; I have caught no evidence that HG knew about a learned and temperate book against him, George B. Dixwell’s, Progress and Poverty, a Review of the Doctrines of Henry George, which Cambridge University Press had published, 1882. The comment of the premier’s daughter is from Lucy Masterman, ed., Mary Gladstone (Mrs. Drew) Her Diaries and Letters (New York. 1930), 293, 306-8. Miss Clarke’s comment, March 1884, is preserved, HGC.
Respect for a Departing Guest, 1884. Davitt’s good wishes appear in a letter to HG, 19 March 1884, HGC; Cardinal Manning’s appreciation, in George, Jr., 438, and in Shane Leslie, Henry Edward Manning, His Life and Labours (London, 1921), 353; and that of the young Gladstone group, in Masterman, Mary Gladstone, 310. HG’s letters to his wife, 25 March, 4 April 1884, HGC, supply part of the story of farewell.
6. George Attacked and Defended, 1884. The Saturday Review attack appeared 12 April and 11 October 1884, vol. 57:465-6, 58:460-61; more of the same, 1885, in vol. 59:75-6, and 60:583-4. The defensive biography was Henry Rose’s, Henry George, A Biographical, Anecdotal, and Critical Sketch (London, 1884), a book about which HG once showed some annoyance but otherwise seems to have had little to say. Concerning the author of the principal attack on HG, see George Douglas, Eighth Earl of Argyll, K.G., K.T. (1823-1900) Autobiography and Memoirs (2 vols., London, 1906), though it omits any mention of his HG affair. ‘The Prophet of San Francisco’ appeared in The Nineteenth Century, 15:537-58; and HG’s reply, ibid. 16:134-55. Both are reprinted in Complete Works, in, ‘Property in Land, A Passage at Arms between the Duke of Argyll and Henry George,’ 7-40, 41-74.
Return to Scotland, 1884-5. The narrative of this trip is based largely on HG’s letters to his wife, November-January, HGC. His idea that the press boycotted him is supported by Poultney Bigelow, who at the time was a NY Herald correspondent, in his Seventy Summers, 11, 15. The significance of the Royal Exchange meeting, London, is discussed by Dr. Lawrence, in American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 11:67; and the London Times reported the Belfast meeting, 23 January 1885, p. 9.
7. A Lasting Influence in Britain. HG’s dialogue with Hyndman appeared as ‘Socialism and Rent Appropriation, A Dialogue,’ The Nineteenth Century, 17 (1885), 369-77; see Hyndman, Record of an Adventurous Life, 267. Webb’s comments on HG’s influence of about this time appear in Socialism in England (London, 1890), 21, and History of Trade Unionism (1894 ed.), 362; and Pease’s estimate is in his History of the Fabian Society (London, 1925), 20, 21. Lib Lab interest in HG is represented in Great Britain, Royal Commission on Housing of the Working Classes, First Report (London, 1885), 42, 61, 76-81; see George, Jr., 453m Spencer’s distress at HG influence appears in Various Fragments (New York, 1898), 134-6. Hobson’s famous appreciation is in the Fortnightly Review, 62: my quotations, which I have adjusted a little in syntax and paragraphing but not in meaning, are from pp. 836-7, 839, 841-2, 844.
XIV. NOT WITHOUT HONOR IN HIS OWN LAND, 1882-1886
1. As Hero in New York, 1882. The story of HG's reception at home, as a figure of the Irish resistance, is told by participators in George, Jr., 400-401, and in Post, Prophet of San Francisco, ch. vi. I have also used Young, Single Tax Movement, 79, and de Mille, 117; and draw on HG’s letters of 23 October 1882 to Dr. Taylor and Father Dawson, HGC.
As Writer Whose Ideas Were Read, 1882-3. HG’s correspondence of June and August, 1882, while he was still abroad, especially his exchanges with F. G. Shaw, is the source of the story of the reprinting of P and P. Miss Peabody’s tribute, 4 March 1883, occurs in HGC; so do all the letters mentioned in the text, except the Joseph Labadie letter, 12 January 1883, Labadie Collection, University of Michigan. On Lovell’s interests, see Edward and Eleanor Marx Aveling, The Working-Class Movement in America (London, 1891), 193. Letters to HG from A. J. Steers, 26 September 1882, and from Lovell, 28 November, and HG to James McClatchy, 28 March 1883, HGC, bear on HG’s shift from Appleton to Lovell, publisher of cheap editions. See George, Jr., 404-5. C. D. F.
Giitschow, in a letter of 16 February 1883, and L. P. Nelson, in letters of June 1883, HGC, were the proposers of new translations of P and P.
2. Invited Contributor to Major Journals, 1883. HG’s North American articles of 1883 are located: ‘Money in Elections,’ vol. 136:201-11; ‘Overproduction,’ vol. 137:584-93. Concerning Sumner, as HG’s rival in economic journalism, I draw on Harris E. Starr, William Graham Sumner (New York, 1925), 436, and Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, ch. in. Sumner’s own What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (New York, 1883), pp. 48, 50-52, 68, 116, 134, illustrates his interest in combatting HG. HG’s contract with Leslie’s was negotiated through H. L. Bridgman, and his difficulties with Leslie’s appear in dealings with the same representative and with J. Y. Foster: letters of 7 March, 28 June, 31 July 1883; memorandum of conversation with Bridgman, 14 August 1883 — all in HGC. See also Post, Prophet of San Francisco, ch. vi. The passages used from the Leslie’s articles appear in Social Problems, Complete Works, 11, 7, 13, 15, 17, 38, 63, 188-91; see also pp. 55-6, 140, 142, 158.
Critic of Francis A. Walker. Tenth Census, Compendium, farm-acreage figures on p. 657, was the starting point of HG’s attack; Walker’s Princeton Review article is reprinted in Tenth Census, Statistics of Agriculture, xxviii-xxxi. HG’s criticism appears in Social Problems, 40-41; and the entire controversy in Leslie’s is reprinted as an appendix of that book, pp. 248-75. Walker’s concessions appear in Statistics of Agriculture, ix. HG’s concession, in ‘More about American Landlordism,’ North American Review, 142:387, 391 (February 1886). The passages specially used, from Walker’s Land and Its Rent, are chs. m-v, and particularly pp. 127-9, 141> *47®- Dr. Garvin’s effort to have the two minds meet appears in his letter to HG, 28 July 1883, HGC; and the conflict between editor and HG, in Leslie’s, 56:214, 230, 334, 366; and 57:2 (26 May, 2 June, 14, 28 July, 25 August 1883).
3. In Search of a New Career, 1883. HG’s refusals of good jobs appear in letters to Dr. Taylor, 7, 25 March, 28 April 1883, and one to his wife, 28 April, HGC. See George, Jr., 405-10. For relevant material concerning the man HG cultivated, see The Path I Trod, The Autobiography of Terence V. Powderly, edited by Harry J. Carman, Henry David, and Paul N. Guthrie (New York, 1940), 182-3. HG’s overtures to Powderly, as quoted, are contained in letters of 19 April, 25 July 1883, in the Powderly Collection, Catholic University, for access to which I thank Father Henry J. Browne, in charge. The Baltimore Sun, 2 August 1883, describes the occasion of their meeting.
Leader in a New York Group. The Senate committee hearing in New York was reported in the NY Tribune, 23, 25 August 1883; I follow also the printed testimony, Report of the Committee of the Senate upon the Relations between Labor and Capital, 1 (Washington, 1885), especially pp. 467, 480-85, 512-13. The New York beginnings of the American Free Soil Society are recorded in the Free Soiler, May, June 1884; California developments, in J. G. Maguire to HG, 2 September 1883, HGC; and HG’s hopes in letter to Labadie, 24 August 1883, Labadie Collection, University of Michigan. For reminiscent accounts of the society, see George, Jr., 406-7, and Post, Prophet of San Francisco, 47-9. HG’s connections with pro-labor writers appear in: HG to Dr. Taylor, 25 March, HGC; Gronlund to Ely, 28 September 1883, Newton to Ely, 24 September 1883, Ely Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society.
4. Lecturer Embarrassed, 1884. HG’s lecture contract with Brooks and Ditson, 25 April 1884, is in HGC; on his performance, under that contract and otherwise, see George, Jr., 442-4, and Post, op. cit. 62-3. The Detroit church-congress speech was reported in the Churchman, 25 October 1884. The events of HG’s summer, 1884, I take from his letters to Dr. Taylor and Thomas Walker, May-September, HGC.
5. Pro-labor Writer, 1885-6. The case story of HG’s lecturing, in Burlington, is based on letters: David Love to R. T. Ely, 27 June 1884, 12 April 1885, Ely Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society; HG to his wife, 3, 4 April 1885, HGC. The address there is printed in Complete Works, vm, 189-219, and in pamphlet form. Later HG letters in April voice his decision to turn to writing. HG’s earlier articles in the North American Review, written at this time, are located: the dialogue with Field, vol. 141:1-14; ‘England and Ireland,’ vol. 142:185-93 (February 1886); ‘More about American Landlordism,’ vol. 142:384-401. Compare HG’s criticism of the agricultural-ladder theory, ibid. 393, with the criticism in Lawanda F. Cox, ‘The American Agricultural Wage Earner, 1865-1900,’ Agricultural History, 22:95-114 (April 1948), and with the more favorable view in Henry C. and Anna D. Taylor, The Story of Agricultural Economists in the United States, 1840-1932 (Ames, Iowa, 1952), 820-29. HG’s Ohio and Pennsylvania travels, in the spring of 1886, are reported from his letters to his wife, April-June, HGC; on the visit with Tom Johnson and its significance, see: George, Jr., 457-8; Tom Loftin Johnson, My Story (New York, 1911), 49-51; Frederic C. Howe, Confessions of a Reformer (New York, 1925), 95-7. The ‘Labor in Pennsylvania’ articles appeared in the North American Review, 143:165-82 (August), 268-77 (September), 360-70 (October 1886); 144:86-95 (January 1887); I draw especially on 143:167, 172, 273, 368-9; 144:88, 95.
6. Author of PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE. HG voiced his hopes for the manuscript in letters to Nordhoff, 5 September, and to Dr. Taylor, 19 September 1885, HGC. Many letters, September-October, HGC, concern serialization; about the new publishing company, see George, Jr., 456. The book, Protection or Free Trade, an Examination of the Tariff Question with Especial Regard to the Interests of Labor (New York, Henry George and Company, 1886), is reprinted in Complete Works, in. For the background of tariff opinion in which HG wrote, see Ida Tarbell, All in a Day’s Work (New York, 1911), 278, and The Tariff in Our Times (New York, 1911), 141; for his own awareness of problems involved, see Protection or Free Trade, 250-52, ch. xxviii. The reviews mentioned are located: Newcomb’s in Political Science Quarterly, 1:341-3 (June 1886); Shaw’s, in the Dial, 7:389 (June 1886); Critic, new series, 5:230 (8 May 1886). A review much like Newcomb’s appeared in Jahrbilcher fur Nationaldkonomie und Statistik, 50:304 (1888). Many newspaper and other reviews are clipped in HG Scrapbooks, 8, 23, 27, NYPL. On the editions, see Sawyer, Henry George and the Single Tax, 18; on sales, George, Jr-> 573-4-
XV. CONQUEST IN NEW YORK CITY: LABOR LEADER AND ALMOST MAYOR, 1886
1. Ready for Politics at Home. HG’s information about English politics, 1885-6, appears in his correspondence with friends overseas. The urgent letters to come to England were from Durant, 24 February, 30 March 1886. HG’s revelations of his home strategy were to Walker, 4 March, 4 September 1885, 18 January 1886; and to McGhee, 4 June 1886 — all HGC.
s. The Condition of American Labor. Post’s story of a labor interest in HG appears in a political article, really a memoir, ‘The United Labor Party,’ The Public (Chicago), 14:11*7 (3 November 1911). For labor background, in this chapter, I draw on: Selig Perlman, Pt. v, chs. vii-xii, in Commons, History of Labour in the United States; Henry David, History of the Haymarket Affair (New York, 1936), especially chs. 1-11, vii; Norman J. Ware, Labor Movement in the United States, 1860-1895 (New York, 1929); and the autobiographies of the principal leaders, Powderly, The Path I Trod, especially chs. x-xii, and Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor (New York, 1925), 1, especially chs. vii-xiv. For scholarly studies of the awakening conscience of this period, see, for the churches: May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New York, 1949), especially pp. 101-3, and earlier histories in the same field by C. Howard Hopkins and Aaron Abell. Concerning the new crop of social novels, Walter F. Taylor, Economic Novel in America (Chapel Hill, 1942), 40-41; and, concerning the economists, Dorfman, Economic Mind, hi, ch. vm. The fullest treatment of the NY Central Labor Union is ch. 11 of Peter A. Speek, Singletax and the Labor Movement, University of Wisconsin Bulletin, Economic and Political Science Series, viii, no. 3 (Madison, 1917). The same author contributes the passage in Commons, History of Labor, n, from which, p. 442, I quote the CLU’s class-conscious declaration.
3. Emergence as Leader for Labor. For the Theiss case, see Speek, Singletax and the Labor Movement, 58-61. My account of the whole campaign draws on this book, though I disagree with many of the author’s judgments. I depend most of all on L. F. Post and F. C. Leubuscher, An Account of the George-Hewitt Municipal Election of 1886 (New York, 1887), which is practically a documentary history and reproduces many platforms, speeches, and other documents. Hereafter in these notes I cite the two books as Speek, and Post and Leubuscher. The key HG documents, discussed in the text, are the following, in the pages indicated in Post and Leubuscher: letter conditionally accepting nomination, 26 August, 7-11; HG’s platform for the labor party, 23 September, 13-15; speech of acceptance, 5 October, 19-29. Gompers’ self-justifying account of his participation is in Seventy Years, 1, 312-18.
Decisions Made in Private. HG’s story of the Ivins interview appears in an open letter to A. S. Hewitt, draft in HGC, printed in NY Tribune, 18 October 1897, p. 2, and in other papers, and quoted, George, Jr., 463. Mr. Ivins’ counterstatement in NY Tribune, 19 October 1897, p. 3. Frederick J. Zwierlein, Life and Letters of Bishop McQuaid, hi (Rochester, 1927), ch. xxix, gives a very full and sympathetic account of Archbishop Corrigan at this time; but Patrick J. Walsh, William J. Walsh, Archbishop of Dublin (London, New York, Toronto, 1928), 227-8, 230, justifies my comment on the churchman’s mental operations. HG's account of his interview with the archbishop is in the NY Standard’s first issue, 8 January 1887. HG’s letter challenging Gorrigan, 30 September 1886, is in the archive of St. Joseph’s Seminary, Yonkers; Father Jeremiah J. Brennan generously sent me a copy. See George, Jr., 465-6.
4. Democratic and Republican Opponents. For accounts of HG’s rivals, 1886, see: Nevins, Hewitt, ch. xxih; Henry F. Pringle. Theodore Roosevelt, a Biography (New York, 1931), 110-15; Howard L. Hurwitz, Theodore Roosevelt and
I.abor in New York State (New York, 1943), chs. iii-iv. Hewitt’s allowing his decisions about candidacy to be made by Croker appears in two letters preserved in the library of Cooper Union: Hewitt to Richard Croker, 7 October 1886, Hewitt Papers; Hewitt to R. E. Henry, 9 October 1886, Hewitt Transcripts, biography 2. His address of acceptance is in Post and Leubuscher, 32-43. Roosevelt's private opinions appear in letters to Lodge, 17, 20 October, 1 November 1886, Elting Morrison, ed., Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 1 (Cambridge, 1951), 111-13, 115- The cases cited of Republicans for HG appear in: Peter Eichele to HG, 27 October 1886, HGC; groups and individuals named in NY Leader, 26-9 October 1886; Eva Ingersoll Wakefield, cd., Letters of Robert Ingersoll (New York, 1951), 662-3; HG, in NY Tribune, 30 October 1886. The story of sympathy for HG among the Peabody trustees is from C. W. Garrison, ed., ‘Conversations with Hayes, a Biographer’s Notes,’ Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 25:377-8; see also Charles R. Williams, Life of Rutherford B. Hayes (Columbus, 1914), 11, 282-3.
Labor’s Resources. HG’s address to Irving Hall is in Post and Leubuscher,
125-7. On the support tendered by visiting Englishmen, see: concerning A. R. Wallace, My Life, 11, 107, and NY Leader, 26 October 1886; concerning the Avelings, see their book, The Working-Classcs in America (London, 1891), 184, 186-7, '93> an£l NY Nation, 43:280 (7 October 1886); and Sidney Webb to HG, 8 March i88g, HGC. The strain between the former associates appears in Davitt to HG, 4 November 1886, HGC. My estimate of the Leader is based on the file, Columbia University Library; and 011 comment in Speck, 73-5.
Tide of Battle. Hewitt’s campaign attack, and HG’s reply, which challenged a spoken debate and led to a printed one, 19-24 October, are all in Post and Leubuscher, 32-71. For comment on the campaign procedures Croker favored, see Morris R. Werner, Tammany Hall (Garden City and New York, 1928), 311-12. The contemporary comment cited is from: NY Tribune, 22 October 1886, p. 4; Leslie’s Weekly, 63:130, 162-3 (16, 30 October); Public Opinion (Washington), 2:21-4 (23 October). HG’s Chickering Hall speech is in Post and Leubuscher, 62-84. Hr. Croft’s Ms. list of speeches by HG, which I have seen with certain other parts of his Ms. dissertation on George as public speaker (Northwestern University, 1952), helps me through the maze of HG’s speaking activities. Concerning Catholic elements on HG’s side: about Powderly and McGlynn, I follow principally Father Henry J. Browne’s excellent Catholic Church and the Knights of Labor (Washington, 1949), 182-5, I9°-9S> 2'8. 222-3; and about public opinion, Florence E. Gibson, The Attitudes of the New York Irish towards State and National Affairs, 18/8-1802 (New York, 1951), 398. For Father Preston’s effort against HG, see Post and Leubuscher, 133; Speek, 85-6. On the close of the labor campaign, Gompers, Severity Years, 318-19; Powderly, The Path I Trod, 150; Post and Leubuscher, 153; NY Leader, 30 October, 1 November 1886.
5. Tiif. Results. For a tabulation of votes, and an account of labor’s immediate follow-up, see Post and Leubuscher, 168-70. For other meetings and pledges to carry on: NY Leader, 3, 8, 27 November 1886; John Swinton’s Paper, 1 November 1886; Gompers, Seventy Years, 1, 320, 434-5.
The Question of Stolen Victory. Seventeen alleged cases of illegal conduct at the polls appear in NY Leader, 4, 6 November 1886. Bigelow’s assessment of corruption is in Seventy Summers, 11. 12. For the liberal Catholic comment cited, see Davitt to Archbishop Walsh, 4 November 1887, in Walsh, William J. Walsh, Archbishop of Dublin, 229; and Thomas Sugrue, A Catholic Speaks His Mind on America’s Religious Conflict (New York, 1951), 44-5. Varying judgments or evidences of abuse at the polls occur in: George, Jr., 481; de Mille, 152; Post, Prophet of San Francisco, 79; Stephen Bell, Rebel, Priest, and Prophet (New York, 1937), 40; Charles Edward Russell, Bare Hands and Stone Walls (New York, 1933), 46-8, 50-51 (Miss Dorothy Fay Duffy, of the University of Maryland, has checked the Russell Papers, LC, and finds no mention of this point); Gustavus Myers, History of Tammany Hall (New York, 1917), 270; Lothrop Stoddard, Master of Manhattan (New York and Toronto, 1931), 86; Nevins, Hewitt, 469; Perlman, in Commons, History of Labour, 11, 453.
XVI. NO NATIONAL LABOR PARTY TO LEAD, 1887
1. George’s Highest Political Hope. Many of HG’s personal satisfactions and dissatisfactions of the winter and spring, 1886-7, are recorded in his letters, especially those to his wife, December and March-April, HGC. For a sampling of the newspapers’ speculation about HG’s becoming a candidate for president, see Public Opinion, 2:86, 188 (13 November, 18 December 1886). HG’s wish that labor organize for self-education is in Post and Leubuscher, 172-3; Powderly’s decision not to carry on with political labor is in NY Leader, 21 December
1886. The Clarendon Hall convention was reported in the NY Tribune, 7 January 1887, p. 1. The ULP, as there organized, is described in Speek, 90-96. HG correspondence with Thomas Briggs, December 1886, HGC, shows that the story of financing the new Standard given in George, Jr., 484-5, needs a little revision. There are other accounts of beginning the paper in Speek, 98-100, and by Post in The Public, 14:1174-5 (17 November 1911).
2. Roman Catholic Condemnation of PROGRESS AND POVERTY. Corrigan's condemnation of HG’s ideas is contained in pastoral letter, 19 November 1886, Zwierlein, Bishop McQuaid, 111, 7-11. His approach to Cardinal Manning is in a letter of 23 December 1886, in Leslie, Henry Edward Manning, 356-7; and Manning’s reconsidered judgment of HG is printed in Zwierlein, 111, 12-13. Archbishop Walsh’s criticism of Corrigan occurs in letters to Manning, 28 December 1886, 9 January 1887, Walsh, William ]. Walsh, Archbishop of Dublin, 227-8, 230. The surrounding labor problems, which concerned the bishops while they considered HG, I describe from the scholarship of churchmen: Browne, Catholic Church and the Knights of Labor, especially pp. 218-19, 223-5, 229> 237_53’ 25^- Allen S. Will, Life of James Cardinal Gibbons (New York, 1922), 1, chs. xix-xxi, especially pp. 336, 370-71; John Tracy Ellis, Life of James Cardinal Gibbons (Milwaukee, 1952), 1, chs. xii-xm. For the Holy Office’s ultimate condemnation of HG’s writings, 9 April 1889, see Father Ellis, Cardinal Gibbons, 1, 336, 584, note 86.
George’s Counterattack. The following issues of the NY Standard, 1887, contain high points of HG’s case against Archbishop Corrigan and his supporters: 8 January, the original attack; 22 January, the observation about
Catholic voters defying the hierarchy (which is confirmed from a source friendly to Corrigan, Hurlburt, Ireland under Coercion, 1, xliv, lvi); 29 January, the doctrinal argument; 18 June, the Bishop of Meath’s letter reprinted. The reaction in other journals is from Public Opinion, 2:288-9, 313-,4 (*5> 22 January 1887); the Standard's fluctuating popularity is estimated from data in its own columns, 12 February, 31 December 1887; and from HG letters to Richard McGhee and Giitschow, February-October 1887, HGC.
3. The Anti-Poverty Society. For a detailed account of Father McGlynn in 1887, see Bell, Rebel, Priest, and Prophet, chs. 11, in. Most of the data on the society are from the Standard, especially 7 May, 17 September, 10 December
1887. See also George, Jr., 491-2. For an estimate of Anti-Poverty’s potential for schism, see Sugrue, A Catholic Speaks His Mind, 44.
4. George’s Break with the New York Socialists. For HG’s attitude toward the Union Labor Party, see NY Standard, 12, 26 February, 9 July 1887; for the attitudes of socialist elements, John Swinton’s Paper, 31 July, and NY Leader, 5 August 1887. For an account of the midsummer change of attitudes between HG and the socialists in the ULP, see Quint, Forging of American Socialism, 44-8. HG’s private comments on the separation are in letters to Giitschow, 29 August, 25 November 1887, HGC, the latter quoted in George, Jr., 50 m. The detail of party meetings, schisms, and declarations I largely borrow from Speek, 106-17. Gompers’ role appears in Seventy Years, 1, 322; his letter, which I quote, was addressed to John O’Brian, 7 February 1889, Gompers Letterbook 3, AF of L Building, Washington.
5. The New York State Campaign. For a contemporary account of the Syracuse convention, see NY World, 16-20 August 1887; for a reminiscent one, Post in The Public, 14:1151 (10 November 1911). For older accounts, see George, Jr., 499, and Speek 127, 136-7; for a recent one, which includes an account of the Progressive Labor Party, Quint, op. cit. 48, 50-53. For my account of the canvass, I borrowed again from Dr. Croft’s checklist of HG speeches; and used the NY Standard, 3 September-5 November 1887. HG’s challenge to debate and Governor Hill’s reply are in letters of 24, 27 September 1887, HGC. The vote is given in Speek, 140; Irish Catholic reactions are stated in Browne, Catholic Church and the Knights of Labor, 285-6, 305, 307, and in Gibson, Altitudes of the New York Irish, 399-400.
6. George and the Haymarket Trials. David’s History of the Haymarket Affair is the fullest scholarly treatment; ch. x of Richard Morris, Fair Trial (New York, 1952), is a judicious brief review. The criticisms of HG in the text, for having accepted the decision of the Illinois Supreme Court, are from: Chicago Labor Enquirer, 29 October 1887 (Labadie Collection, University of Michigan); NY Leader, 11 November 1887; David, op. cit. 402. The early date of HG’s consulting Judge Maguire is indicated in H. D. Miller to Harry Wein-burger, 5 October 1931, copy in Labadie Collection; Maguire’s first opinion about the trial, in Giitschow to HG, 13-15 November 1887, HGC. My account values more highly than Professor David’s does, the influence of the Maguire opinion on HG; see History of the Haymarket Affair, 402. This takes the date of the judge’s letter, which was printed in the Standard, ig November, as the date of the influence; but the fact of the earlier consultations of the two men requires a revision of the story. The Maguire letter was not written to George but was presented by him, to clarify matters. HG’s letter to Governor Oglesby was written 5 November 1887; and his later thoughts, to Giitschow, 28 October 1888; these letters are all in the HGC.
XVII. THE FATHER OF THE SINGLE TAX, 1888-1890
2. George Excluded from the ULP. HG’s confused hopes and anxieties for his party after the 1887 defeat appear in the NY Standard, 3, 31 December 1887, 4 February 1888; and in a letter to Giitschow, 25 November 1887, HGC. On McGlynn’s arrogance and assumption of party power, data in Browne, Catholic Church and the Knights of Labor, 308; Standard, 14 January 1887. George's exclusion is discussed in an editorial by W. T. Croasdale, L. F. Post, J. W. Sullivan, ibid. 18 February 1888. The political history of the ULP, and of McGlynn, during later 1888, are taken from: Speek, 149-50, 154: Young, Single Tax Movement, 131-2; Standard, 12, 26 May, 7 July 1888; HG to Father Dawson, 6 June 1888, HGC.
The Collapse of Anti-Poverty. Data from: NY Tribune, 14 March 1888, p. 3; NY Standard, 21 January, 4, 25 February, 17 March, 7 July 1888; HG to Giitschow, 22 October 1888, HGC.
George as Cleveland Democrat. On the tariff policy, which reconciled HG to his old party, see Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland, A Study in Courage (New York, 1932), 379. HG’s analysis of the Mills Bill was printed in the Standard, 10 March 1888. His increasingly favorable comments occur, ibid. passim, especially 25 February, 10 March, 7 April, g June 1888. Those comments are strikingly close to Professor Nevins’ judgments of the bill in retrospect of half a century, in Cleveland, 385, 387-9, 391-3. For HG’s weaving tariff reform into free-imrnigration and land-value-taxation connections, see Standard, 12 May, 18 August 1888; and for his optimism following the nomination, ibid. 30 June, 7 July 1888. HG’s late-campaign ideas and efforts appear ibid. 15 September, 13, 27 October, 3 November 1888; and in letters to Thomas Briggs, 31 August, 15 October 1888, HGC. His post-election ideas appear in the NY Standard, 10 November, 8 December 1888; for support for the idea that P and P affected a presidential message, see Nevins, Cleveland, 444.
3. The Birth of the Single Tax. HG’s letter to Garrison, assessing his shift from labor politics to single tax, 14 January 1888, is in the Garrison Papers, Smith College. My account of the new reform in the pre-organizational stage is drawn from the Standard, 1888, especially 3 March, 16, 23 June, 11, 25 August, 1, 8, 15 September. At the organizational stage, after the national election, I draw on Young, Single Tax Movement, 132-4, 138-9, 215-16, and passim, and on Post, Prophet of San Francisco, 52-3, 140-41, 146. The Warren Worth Bailey Collection of manuscripts in the Princeton University Library, from which I take a little information here, would bear considerable study by an investigator of grass-roots reform during the Progressive period. On HG’s speechmaking in the Mississippi Valley: NY Standard, 19, 26 January 1889; HG to his wife, 14 January, and to Thomas Briggs, 34 January i88g, HGC.
4. Invited to Britain. The account of the brief visit of late fall 1888 is based on: NY Standard, 17 November 1888-12 January 1889; an^d on Thomas Walker to HG, 4, 11 December 1888. Symes’s A Short Textbook of Political Economy (London, 1889) follows HG’s distribution theory; but there is no direct reference to him, at least in the edition I have seen, and there are prominent references to Mill and Marshall. The letters of invitation and political evaluation, which HG received, for the big trip of 1889, are: from Thomas Walker, 13 February; from Helen Taylor, 12 April; from Sidney Webb, 8 March — all HGC.
Welcomed by Middlf.-Class Groups. HG’s debate with Hyndman, the trip’s late symbol of his new separation from old Marxist connections, is described from HG’s side in NY Standard, 13 July 1889, and in an undated letter to his wife, HGC; and, from Hyndman’s side, in Record of an Adventurous I.ife, see chs. xvm-xxi; and see also G. B. Shaw, in Essays in Fabian Socialism (London 1932), 155. HG reported his meetings and events in England and Scotland, NY Standard, 30 March-8 June 1888; and in his Coney Island address, ibid. 28 July 1888. His comments on Thorold Rogers occur in letter to Thomas Walker, 13 June 1884, HGC, and in death notice, Standard, 22 October 1890.
Accepted in Northern Europe. On the Land Liga and German Bodenreform generally, see Young, Single Tax Movement, 11-12; and Heinrich Freese, Die Bodenreform, Ihre Vergangenheit und Ihre Zukunft (Berlin, 1918). Fliirscheim’s statement about joining HG is quoted from a translation given HG, HGC. For translators, dates, and other bibliographical data on European editions of HG's works, see Sawyer, Henry George and the Single Tax, 16, 19, 21. But the list omits the French translation of Social Problems by Louis Voisson: see NY Standard, 21 January 1888, and George, Jr., 51911. HG’s information about Norway and Denmark came in letters from Tugjald Kjcnnerud, 10 May 1886, John Svenson, 24 June 1886, and Jacob Lange, 22 August 1888, HGC; for Koht’s comment, made with the Scandinavian countries in mind, see his American Spirit in Europe (Philadelphia, 1949), 202-3.
Lionized in Paris. HG’s invitation, from Fliirscheim, was dated 18 May 1889, HGC. The meeting of land reformers was reported, London Times, 12 June 1889. p. 5; NY Standard, 29 June 1889. HG discussed his Holland visit, and his ideological difficulties, ibid. 13, 27 July 1889. Leroy-Beaulieu was reported, from Journal dcs Debats, 24 June 1889, in NY Standard, 13 July 1889.
5. Ideological Purge of the STANDARD. The financial background of the paper is drawn from: HG letters to Giitschow, 29 January 1887, 22 October 1888; to T. A. Briggs, 19 January 1888; to Richard McGhee, May 1888; circular (?) June 1888, all HGC; and from NY Standard, 31 December 1887. The NY Tribune's appreciations appeared 7 January 1887; 1, 3 November 1889. HG’s knowledge of the M’Crcady-Sullivan versus Post-Croasdale conflict came from a long series of long letters, spring 1889, HGC, some from his son and some from the disputants. On the Bellamy Nationalist background, see Quint, Forging of American Socialism, ch. in. Sullivan’s ‘Ideo Kleptomania, the Case of Henry George, with Henry George’s Denial of Plagiarism from Patrick Edward Dove’ was reprinted separately from Twentieth Century, 10 October 1889, copy in Labadie Collection, University of Michigan. Outside concern in the issues of the cditorial-room fight is represented in the HGC by letters to HG from: J. O. H. Huntington, 31 July 1889; Thomas Walker, 27 June 1889; Thomas Davidson, 1G September 1889. The summary statements by the contenders were printed in the Standard, 13, 20 July; and HG’s opinions, ibid. 10, 17 August 1889. HG on Bellamy, ibid. 31 August, 28 September 1889.
6. Reaoy for a World Tour. HG’s estimates of his own growing strength at home, and his intimations of Populism, are in NY Standard, November-December 1889; Dr. Quint supplied the datum that the Journal of the Knights of Labor was critical of him. HG’s expectations from Australia were set by a letter from E. W. Foxall (Sydney), 27 November 1889; and HG’s pre-departure activities appear in personal letters, HGC, and in the NY Standard, 4 December 1889, 15, 22, 29 January 1890. See Lyman Abbot, Reminiscences (Boston and New York, 1915), 420-21. Accounts of the transcontinental trip and the Pacific voyage in: Standard, 5, 12 February, 26 March, 23 April 1890; HG to Anna Angela George, 31 January 1890, HGC; George, Jr., 523-9; de Mille, 173-6.
Triumphant in the Antipodes. My comment on HG in New Zealand borrows information from a student of New Zealand history, Mr. Peter Coleman. I have also used: James E. Rossignol and William D. Stewart, State Socialism in New Zealand (New York, 1910), especially ch. viii; Hugh H. Lusk, ‘The Single Tax in Operation in New Zealand,’ Arena, 18 (1897): 79-87; Arthur Withy, ‘New Zealand . . . the Single Tax Movement,’ Single Tax Review, 12 (1912): 1 —69; and P. J. O'Regan, article on New Zealand, in Joseph Dana Miller, ed., Single Tax Yearbook (New York, 1917), 122-7. For a survey which brings the matter to recent date: Christian Science Monitor, 17 November 1950, p. 11. Concerning the day-to-day events of the visit in Australia, there is a wealth of information in HG’s letters, and in Farrell’s, in the Standard, April-July 1890. HG Scrapbook 1 contains many Australian clippings. These sources are quoted in George, Jr., 529-38, and de Mille, 177-9. For estimates of HG influence in Australia, see: A. St. Ledger, Australian Socialism (London, 1909), 6-7, 65; Brian Fitzpatrick, The British Empire in Australia, an Economic History, i8}4~igyg (Melbourne, etc., 1941), 283-4, 364-5, 368-9; articles on South Australia and Queensland by E. J. Craigee, and on New South Wales by A. G. Huie, in Single Tax Yearbook (1917), 128-41; and a report on the pattern of site taxation, compared with other countries, in Henry George News (New York), August 1946.
7. Going Home. The story of the trip to and across Europe is told from: HG memorandum, n.d., and letters to William Saunders, 15, 28 July, and to E. R. Taylor, 16 September 1890; Annie George to Sister Teresa Fox, 21 July, 21 August (all HGC); and NY Standard, 6 August 1890. On the visit in England generally, ibid. 24 September 1890. On HG’s hopes from the Salvation Army, see George, Jr., 540; a letter from Ballington Booth, 17 March 1893, HGC, assured him of the ‘strong sympathy Mrs. Booth felt for your views and work.’ HG’s early responses to Thomas Walker’s criticisms, in letters to Walker, 23, 28 August, 25 September 1890; in a letter to J. C. Durant, 27 November 1890 — both HGC. On the single-tax meeting in New York: George, Jr., 541; Louis Post, ‘First American Single Tax Conference,’ The Public, 14:903-13 (1 September 1 g 11), and Prophet of San Francisco, 145-7; and Young, Single Tax Movement, 139-40.
XVIII. CHRISTIAN DEMOCRAT TO THE END, 1890-1897
2. In the Stream of Critical Objection. In the order of the text, the following give the titles and locations of the principal criticisms discussed: Miller,
Trade Organizations in Politics, also, Progress and Robbery: an Answer to Henry George (New York, 1887); Rutherford, Henry George versus Henry George (New York, 1887); Higgins, The Fallacies of Henry George (Cincinnati, 1887); Henry A. Brann, ‘Henry George and His Land Theories,’ Catholic World (New York), 44:810-28 (March 1887); James M. Cain, ‘Individualism and Exclusive Ownership,’ American Catholic Quarterly Review (Philadelphia), 13:82-95 (January 1888); F. L. Tobin, Notes on Progress and Poverty, A Reply to Henry George (Pittsburgh, 1887); Gunton, ‘Henry George’s Heresies,’ Forum, 3:15-28 (March 1887), and Wealth and Progress, a Critical Examination of the Labor Problem (New York, 1897); Thompson in Irish World, 24 December 1887, 21 January, 14 July 1888 (for these references I thank Dr. Alexander Butler of Michigan State College); Harris, in Journal of the American Social Science Association, 22 (1887): 120 ff., and ‘ Henry George’s Mistakes about Land,’ Forum, 3:435-42 (July 1887); Andrews, ‘Economic Reform Short of Socialism,' International Journal of Ethics, 2:281-2 (April 1892); Ely, Recent American Socialism (Baltimore, 1885), 16-27, anc* Labor Movement in America (New York, 1905), 125, 283-4, and in Christian Advocate, 25 December 1890, quoted in Young, Single Tax Movement, 3i6n; Walker quoted, ibid. 316, full address, 'The Tide of Economic Thought,’ American Economic Association Publications, vi (1891), 15-38; Clark, in International Journal of Ethics, 1:62-79 (October 1890); Bemis, 'Henry George’s Tax on Land Values,’ Andover Review, 8:592-600 (December 1887); Patten, International Journal of Ethics, 1:354-70 (April 1891); Clarke, ‘Criticisms upon Henry George, reviewed from the standpoint of justice,' Harvard Law Review, 1:265-93 (January 1888), reprinted Standard, 28 January 1888.
3. Georgists versus the Critics. Shearman's reply to certain HG critics and his next article were printed in the Forum, 8:40-52, 262-73, and reprinted in the Standard, 31 August, 9 November 1889. Atkinson’s critique, and HG’s reply, in Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, 40:385-403; Max Hirsch answered more fully for HG, in Democracy versus Socialism, Pt. v, ch. vi, ‘Mr. Edward Atkinson’s Objections.’ White’s criticism ‘Agriculture and the Single Tax,’ Popular Science Monthly, 36:481-500, was answered by Post in the Standard, 5 February 1890. Thomas Huxley’s series appeared in The Nineteenth Century, 27:1-23, 172-95, 513-32 (January, February, April 1890); and the following replies were published in England: J. D. Christie, ‘A Workingman's Reply to Professor Huxley,’ The Nineteenth Century, 27:476-83; Michael Fliirscheim, ‘Professor Huxley’s Attacks,’ ibid. 27, 639-50; Andreas Scheu, ‘Professor Huxley and His Natural Rights,’ Commonweal (London), 6:84-5 (>890). Goldwin Smith's article is located in the Forum, 9:599-614; the other sources drawn on for the footnote are: HG to Lloyd, 11 October, Davidson to Lloyd, 14 November, Lloyd to Davidson, 23 November 1888, all Lloyd Collection, Wisconsin Historical Society; and Caroline Lloyd, Henry Demarest Lloyd (New York and London, 1912), 1, 115, 301-2.
George versus Utopians and Clergymen. The conference debate over clerical influence in the single-tax movement is recorded by Post, in The Public, 14:910. HG’s current feeling about clergymen as reformers, in the Standard, 15 October 1890, and in a letter to Father Dawson, 18 May 1891, HGC. The wish of American Bellamyites to make common cause with HG is represented in the Nationalist, 3:6-7, 188 (August, October 1899, references supplied by Dr. Quint). The like-minded effort of English friends appears in Walker to HG, 23 August 1890, 2 May 1892; and HG’s resistance, in letters to Walker, 25 September, and to Durant, 27 November 1890 — all HGC.
George versus Academic Economists. The Saratoga meeting is recorded by Frank Sanborn in the Journal of Social Science (Boston and New York), 27 (1890); for background of the American Social Science Association, see Luther Lee Barnard and Jessie Barnard, Origins of American Sociology (New York,
1943), 527-607. The passages of the Saratoga discussion treated in the text appear in the Journal as follows: from James, p. 8; from Andrews, 29-30; from the HG-Seligman exchange, 34-44, 85, 89, 98. Seligman’s ultimate criticisms of the single tax appear in his Essays on Taxation (New York, 1921), 66-97, an<^ Studies in Public Finance (New York, 1925), 226-52. Post replied in Prophet of San Francisco, ch. xxm. HG’s quoted comment on academicians is in a letter of 28 April 1891, HGC; Bolton Hall’s findings, 7 December 1891, copy in Gilman Collection, JHU; and later academic acknowledgments in: Ross, Seventy Years of It (New York and London, 1936), 15; Joseph Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America (New York, 1934), 32; Commons, Myself (New York, 1934). 39-4°-
4. The Need to Settle Down. HG’s Texas tour is described in the NY Standard, 26 November 1890, and in letters to his wife, 12, 16 November, HGC. Summary of the Hutchins case, George, Jr., 509-11; detail in Judge James E. Minturn, ‘Tale of a Suit,’ Single Tax Review, 15:342-6 (November-December 1915); many documents of the case, HGC; comment, NY Tribune, 14 February 1894. HG’s general financial condition and the reorganization of the Standard appear, PIGC, in letters to Briggs, 28 September 1890, 18 November 1891, and Briggs to HG, 30 November, 28 December 1891 (when Briggs forgave his $1000 loan). For HG’s attack, I draw on Dr. Peterson’s notes, quoted in George, Jr., 541-2; and on Jennie George to Thomas Briggs, 15 December 1890, HG to Thomas Walker, January 1891, HGC. Financial arrangements appear in letters among friends: Walker to George, 26 December, to Johnson, 27 December 1890; HG to Walker, 8 January, Johnson to Walker, 21 January 1891; HG to his wife, n.d. — all HGC. The Bermuda trip is reported in NY Standard, 17 January 1891; further data in: Annie George to Henry George, Jr., 5 February 1891, notes by Simon Mendelson, n.d. — both HGC.
5. Controversialist of Leo XIII. Letters to Dr. Taylor of 3, 14, 28 April 1891, HGC, describe HG’s return to the desk. Of many editions and commentaries on Rerum Novarum, I use Oswald von Nell-Breuning, S. J., Reorganization of Social Economy, the Social Encyclical Developed and Explained (New York, •937)l Bernhard Eulenstein wrote HG, 18 April 1893, HGC, that Professor Pedrazzini of the University of Fribourg was the actual author of the encyclical. I draw on Aaron I. Abell, ‘The Reception of Leo XIII’s Labor Encyclical in America, 1891-1919,’ Review of Politics, 7 (1945)1467, 477-8, and passim. Henry George, Jr.’s report of Cardinal Manning’s comment was made in a letter to his father, 30 May i8gi, HGC; see George, Jr., 565. HG’s The Condition of Labor was published in the United States, 1891, by two firms, Doubleday and McClure and the United States Book Company; it is in Complete Works, hi, from which the following pages are quoted: 68, 3, 15, 19-20, 25, 48, 61, 70-71, 98, 104.
The Moral Support of Friends. Protestant support came to HG in the following letters, 1891, HGC: from J. O. H. Huntington, 30 July, 3 November; from Garrison, 5 September; from Young, 3 September; from Thomas Walker, 11 November. Catholic support, HGC, from: Joseph Legett, 31 October; from Father Dawson, 20 July, 16 November, 12 December 1891.
Victory for Catholic Freedom. McGlynn told HG the story of his reinstatement in a letter of 3 January 1893, HGC. The text of his statement to Satolli is printed in Sylvester L. Malone, Dr. Ediuard McGlynn (New York, 1918). I draw also on Bell, Rebel, Priest, and Prophet, ch. v; Browne, Catholic Church and Knights of Labor, 350; and John A. Ryan, Distributive Justice, especially chs. 11, vi; and ‘Henry George and Private Property,’ Catholic World, 93:289-300 (June 1911).
6. George versus Herbert Spencer. My illustrations of opposition to HG’s piety are drawn from: Jordan, True Basis of Economics (New York, 1899); Carnegie, ‘The Advantages of Poverty,’ March 1891, reprinted in Gospel of Wealth (New York, 1900), 47-82. Spencer's anxiety, before he redid Social Statics, appears in a letter to Earl of Wemyss, 10 June 1890, David Duncan, Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (New York, 1908), 299-300. HG’s Perplexed Philosopher, published in New York and London, 1893, is in Complete Works, v; my quotations are from pp. 66, 135-6. The reluctance of some of HG’s friends about the effort appears in letters of spring 1893, HGC: HG to Dr. E. R. Taylor, February and April; Durant to HG, 16 May; HG to J. E. Mills, 12 April. The satisfaction of others, in the ‘Compensation’ chapter, in: Bernhard Eulenstein to HG, 20 February 1893, HGC, and HG to Byron Holt, 27 March 1893, kindly lent by W. S. Holt; see also Harry Gunnison Brown, ‘The Perplexed Economists,’ in Henry George News, October 1946. For Spencer’s quiet reaction to HG’s attack: Duncan, Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer, 338-43; and 'Unpublished Letters’ to James A. Skilton, Independent, 56 (1904): 1169-74, 1471-8. For his friends’ open ones: NY Tribune, 23, 30 September, 12, 18 November 1894.
7. Big Treatise Not Finished. The personal and general problems that enter the story of writing The Science of Political Economy arc drawn from personal letters, HGC, in the order of the text as follows: HG to Walker, 31 December 1894: to (William ?) Burbage, 9 September 1897; to Dr. Taylor, 10 February and 8 April, and from him, 10 March 1897; from Louis Post, 3 March, from Alice Post, 5 February, to Louis Post, 6 March 1897. Technical problems are discussed in the Loomis memorandum, in Purdy to HG, 21 July 1897, HGC. For the appreciation by the Beards, see American Spirit, 367—73; compare Science of Political Economy, 15, 21, 27, 33-4. For Hadley’s criticism, Yale Review, 7:231 (August 1893).
XIX. THE MARTYRDOM OF HENRY GEORGE, 1890-1897
1. George as Dissenter within the Single-Tax Movement. Concerning HG’s speaking activities, 1891-3, and finally for 1897, I am guided again by Dr. Croft’s Ms. checklist; and I draw from letters and memoranda, March-June 1893, HGC. About the Chicago Single Tax Conference: typescript of HG speech, 29 August 1893, HGC; Post, in The Public, 14:911-12 (1 September 1911), and Prophet of San Francisco, 150; HG to J. E. Mills, 27 September 1893, HGC. Data on
Post’s activities, from Ms. autobiography, LC; on Shearman’s, from memorial
issue of Single Tax Review, 1901.
As Philosopher and Friend to Liberals. Concerning the ‘salon,’ I draw on reminiscences in the following locations: Purdy’s, in Henry George News, October 1946; Elting E. Morrison, Admiral Sims (New York, 1942), 28; Mrs. J. S. Lowell to HG, 14 December 1891, HGC. On the connection of Howells with HG, see Mildred Howells, Life in Letters of William Dean Howells (New York, 1928), 11, 21-2; the NY Standard, 12 March 1890, compared A Hazard of Neu’ Fortunes (1890), Pt. 11, ch. xii, with P and P, Bk. ix, ch. 111. Garland’s reminiscence of HG in Eaneuil Hall is in South Carolina Libertarian, November 1925, pp. 281-2; his reminiscence of the HG home, in Son of the Middle Border, 431. His Georgism in non-fiction appears in ‘A New Declaration of Rights,’ ‘The Single Tax in Actual Operation,’ and ‘The Land Question and its Relation to Art and Literature,’ Arena, 3 (1891), 157-84; 10 (1894), 52. Concerning Garland, I have benefittcd from letters generously written by Professor Eldon C. Hill of Miami University. See Walter Taylor, Economic Novel in America, ch. iv; and Grant C. Knight, The Critical Period in American Literature (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1951), 53, 56, 58, and passim. Concerning Herne: his own appreciation of his Georgist play is in ‘Art for Truth’s Sake in the Drama,’ North American Review, 17:367-8 (February 1897); I draw also on letters he wrote to HG, 29 September, 15 October 1890, 17 November 1891, HGC. On other theater Georgists, see de Mille, 187-8, and Francis Neilson, My Life in Two Worlds (Appleton, Wis., 1952), 1, 67, 241; and on the Georgism of the Freeman, see The Freeman Book (New York, 1924), 34-5, 42-3, 45-9, 159-62, and passim. On dilute Georgism in literature see Taylor, Economic Novel in America, 105, and Claude R. Flory, Economic Criticism in American Fiction, /792-/900 (Philadelphia, 1936), 171, 181, 190-95, and passim. For indications of the Chicago groups: Louis Sullivan, Autobiography of an Idea (New York, 1924), 251-2; Whitlock, Forty Years of It (New York and London, 1925), 94-6.
2. As Growing Influence Overseas. The near-success of a Georgist tax policy for London was a resolution introduced in the Commons by James Stuart, 13 March 1891 (defeated 149-26, after six and a half hours of debate), Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 3d Series, 351:933-1013; Durant’s letter, 16 May 1892, HGC, probably refers to remarks made by Haldane and Asquith concerning a Small Agricultural Holdings Bill, 5 April 1892, Hansard, 4th Series, 3:735, 737. What is said about Eulenstein in Germany is drawn from his own letters to HG, HGC:2, 26 December 1891; 9 January, 23 December 1892; 18 April, 15 May, 31 July 1893; 24 March 1894. On Damaschke, sec article in Dcr Grosse Brockhaus (Leipzig, 1929), iv, 344; among his writings, which say much in appreciation of HG, see Die Bodenreform (1918) and Geschichte der Naticnalukonomie (1920^.
Especially in Russia. For surrounding data, and much about Georgism in Russia, see M ax M. Laserson, The American Impact on Russia, Diplomatic and Ideological, lyS.f-ipry (New York, 1950), 269-90. HG's knowledge of Tolstoy’s interest in him came from letters, HGC, from Eulenstein, especially 24 March 1894, 29 February 1896; from W. L. Garrison, 11, 14 February 1897; and the one of 8 April 1896, which is quoted, from Tolstoy himself. Concerning Tolstoy’s Georgism see: Ethel Wedgwood, Tolstoy on Land and Slavery (London, 1909);
Ernest Simmons, Leo Tolstoy (Boston, 1946), 394, 501, 503-4, 651, 675; L. N. Tolstoy, ed., 'Count Tolstoy on the Doctrines of Henry George,’ American Monthly Review of Reviews, 17:73—4 (January 1898); Tolstoy Centenary Edition, Aylmer Maude, trans. (London), 21 (Recollections and Essay, 1921): 189-94 (‘Letters on Henry George’), 272-306 (‘A Great Iniquity').
3. Free-Trade Ideologue of Congressmen. HG’s political estimations of campaign time are taken from a letter to Walker, 17 October 1890, HGC; NY Standard, 6 November 1890. On Georgist efforts to influence-middle-western radicalism, Post’s Ms. Autobiography, p. 422, LC, and Prophet of San Francisco, 124. On the publication of Protection or Free Trade in the Congressional Record, see ibid. 14 April 1892, 3299-3306; Young, Single Tax Movement, 142-3; Johnson, My Story, 68-9; George, Jr., 571-4; and Henry George, Jr., letters to HG, n.d., HGC, and to W. W. Bailey, 13 May 1892, Bailey Collection, Princeton University Library. For the Democratic policy of 1892, see Official Proceedings of the National Democratic Convention (Chicago, 1892), 82-92, and Nevins, Cleveland, 491; for something of the backstage pressures on the tariff question, see Henry Watterson to Cleveland, 7 July 1892, in Nevins, ed., Letters of Grover Cleveland, 1850-1908 (Boston and New York, 1933), 631, and C. E. Russell, Dare Hands and Stone Walls, 40-43; Johnson, My Story, 71-3. HG’s alternations of hope and despair for Democratic radicalism appear in letters to Johnson, Shearman, J. R. Young, Thomas Walker, and Mrs. Frances Milne, June-July, September-December 1892, HGC. For HG’s small victories in the House, see George, Jr., 570, which refers I think to the time of the debate of 10 January 1894, Congressional Record, 53d Congress, 26 (1): 632-88; and ibid. 31 January 1894, vol. 26 (2): 1739, which is treated in Young, Single Tax Movement, 143.
Anti-Populist for Bryan. HG’s speech during the Pullman strike is reported in NY Tribune, 13 July 1894, p. 5; see also George, Jr., 577; and for background, Nevins, Cleveland, ch. xxxm, especially 624-8. Letters to HG from Tom Johnson, 10, 23 October, 7 November 1894, HGC, gave HG a close view of their political defeat. For the ambivalent roles of the single tax and HG in Illinois labor-Populist politics, see Destler, American Radicalism, 170, 172, 193, 197-211; see also Henry Barnard, Eagle Forgotten (Indianapolis, 1938), 382. HG’s decision for Bryan appears in letter to W. R. Hearst, 1896, HGC; and in public, in Arena, 16:705 (September 1896). For the nearer background of his journalism, see Willis J. Abbot, Watching the World Go By (Boston, 1934), 194, and passim. See also Mott, American Journalism, 520-24. For HG’s association with Altgeld: his letter of 14 October 1895, Schilling Collection, Illinois State Historical Society (copy kindly supplied by the, librarian), and account of the New York anti-injunction meeting, Barnard, op. cit. 380-82. For HG’s political differences of 1896 with one wing of his following: letter to Garrison, 31 October 1896, Garrison Collection, Smith College; Shearman to HG, 4 November 1896, HGC. For the political sympathy of others: letters from Swinton, 4 November, Garland, 10 November, Herne, 10 November 1896, HGC. See Post, Prophet of San Francisco, 127-9.
4. The Last Campaign. The NY Journal's offer to HG is in a letter, W. J. Abbot to HG, 1 May 1897, HGC. Concerning the single-tax invasion of Delaware, see Young, Single Tax Movement, 147-52. On the special nature of the New York City campaign, see: Bryce, ‘The Mayoralty Election in New York,’ Contemporary Review, 72 (1897):751 —60; Delos F. Wilcox, ‘The First Municipal Campaign of Greater New York,’ Municipal Affairs (New York). 2 (1898): 207. HG’s first feeling about candidacy in letters to: Post, 25 January, Walker, 27 May, T. E. Willson, 3 June 1897, HGC. The decision to act against doctors’ orders is recorded in Dr. Leverson’s notes, and in an exchange with Dr. Mendelson, George, Jr., 594-5; de Mille, 224-5. O'1 ^le preliminaries of the campaign, Review of Reviews, 16:394-7 (October 1897); for a party and machine history, see Alexander, Political History of the State of New York, in. I draw passages of HG’s opening address from George, Jr., Goo. The message to Bryan is mentioned in the NY Tribune, 6 October 1897, pp. 1-2; Bryan’s endorsement of HG was asserted in the Cuyler Ten Eyck letter to Seth Low, 24 October 1897, Seth Low Collection, Columbia University Library. Roosevelt s opinion, as stated to Lodge, 16, 29 October 1897, is in Morison, ed., Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 1. 697-8, 703-4. HG’s charges and Hewitt’s and Ivins’ denials, concerning 1886, appeared in the NY Tribune, 6 October, p. 2, 20 October 1897, P-
3. Garland’s overture to Lloyd, 19 October 1897, in Lloyd Collection, Wisconsin Historical Society. On newspaper opinion during the campaign: Abbot, Watching the World Go By, 195-6; Review of Reviews, 16:520; Leslie’s Weekly, 85:276; Public Opinion, 23:453-5, 486, 518-19, 551, 581-2 (all journals, October-November 1897). HG’s final word about Low is quoted from George, Jr., 605-6; the Citizen’s Union claim to Georgist support was elaborated for Low by Richard H. Clarke, the secretary of the Citizen’s Union, 30 October 1897, Low Collection, Columbia University. My guesses of what the election might have been, if HG had lived, are made from: estimates in Edward M. Shepard, ‘Political Inauguration of Greater New York,’ Atlantic Monthly, 81 (1898): 116; and R. W. Alsop’s opinion, sent Low, 2 November 1897, that HG’s death must have sent ‘almost the entire Democratic vote’ to van Wyck, and Low’s idea, 3 November, that, ‘If Mr. George had lived, I think there might have been a chance of success. With his death, I, personally, felt that the chances for victory had become very small’ (letters in Low Collection, Columbia University).
XX. THE TRIPLE LEGACY OF GEORGISM
1. Early Appreciation of George. Julian’s estimate is taken from G. W. Julian Journal, 1 December 1897, ^s- PP- 451-2> Indiana State Library, Indianapolis, copy supplied by Miss Lila Brady.
Lincoln Steffens (New York, 1931), chs. xvi-xvii. For Cleveland’s approach to Georgist policy, see F. C. Howe, Confessions of a Reformer (New York, 1925), chs. x, xxii, 230.
3. As Progressivism Increased: Moral and Political Georgism. The Georgist renewal in Britain is indicated, 1907-9, by many articles in the Westminster, the Fortnightly, and other reviews. The influence of HG’s ideas in English politics, 1909-10, is testified to in Charles S. Orwin and W. R. Peel, The Tenure of Agricultural Land (Cambridge, England, 1942), 41. See also accounts of Americans in England, in Post, Ms. Autobiography, 334, LC; Tom Johnson, My Story, 298. At about the same time, Henry George’s ideas were being assimilated by Sun Yat Sen into the revolutionary program in China. See Paul M. A. Linebarger, Political Doctrines of Sun Yat Sen, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, Extra Volumes, new series, no. 24 (Baltimore, 1937). 137. For the circle of reformers who followed Johnson, in Cleveland and Toledo, see Brand Whitlock, Forty Years of It, passim, and Howe, Confessions of a Reformer, 129, and passim; see also the series of articles on ‘The Civic Revival in Ohio,’ by Robert H. Bremmer, American Journal of Economics and Sociology beginning April 1949, as follows: 8:299-309, 413-22; 9:239-54, 3G9-7G, 477-82; 10:87-91, 185-206. Information concerning the Fels Foundation in: Mary Fels, Joseph Fels and His Life-Work (New York, 1916), ch. xm, and passim; Young, Single Tax Movement, ch. ix; Steffens letter to Laura Steffens, 9 April 1910, Letters of Lincoln Steffens, ed. by Ella Winter and Granville Hicks (New York, 1938), 1, 242, and Steffens to W. W. Bailey, 29 September 1910, Bailey Collection, Princeton University Library. Concerning political activities subsidized by Fels money, I draw on Young, Single Tax Movement, 1G8-83, and W. S. U’Ren in Single Tax Yearbook, 42-6. The William Kent materials used are the following: Kent letters to Louis Post, 13 April 1909 and 13 April 1910, and to T. W. Tomlinson, 18 March 1915 (?); and his 'Land Tenure and Public Policy,’ American Economic Review Supplement, 9:225 (March 1919). I draw on the manuscript material with the permission of Mrs. William Kent and her son, Professor Sherman Kent, and that of the officials of the Sterling Memorial Library of Yale University, where the William Kent Collection is deposited.
4. In Woodrow Wilson’s Day: Moral Georgism. As for the political leaders of 1912: La Follctte confessed his fear of P and P to Mr. Edward Nordmann of Madison. The letters between Newton and Roosevelt, of 30 July-2 August 1912, are in Newton Miscellany, New-York Historical Society Library. I draw general ideas about Wilson's thought from William Diamond, Economic Thought of Woodrow Wilson (Baltimore, 1944). For the New Jersey transformation of Wilson’s politics, including the Georgist influences, see Arthur
5. Link, Wilson, the Road to the White House (Princeton, 1947), chs. iv-ix; Ransom E. Noble, New Jersey Progressivism before Wilson (Princeton, 1946); Noble, 'Henry George and the Progressive Movement,’ and ‘G. L. Record’s Struggle for Economic Democracy,’ American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 8:259-63 (April 1949), 10:71-83 (October 1950); James Kerney, The Political Education of Woodrow Wilson (New York and London, 1926): Joseph Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson as I Knew Him (London, 1922), chs. v-ix. Secretary Lane's appreciations of George as a continuing force appear in letters he wrote
G. W. Wickersham, 18 November 1920, and to J. W. Hallowell, 9 December 1920; Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political, Anna Wintemute Lane and Louise Herrick Wall, eds. (New York, 1922), 368, 375. Record’s exhortation, 31 March 1919, and Tumulty’s effort to radicalize Wilson appear in Kerney, op. cit. 437-46, 448; see Record’s comment of 1930 on Wilson and the whole generation of Progressives in Noble, ‘Henry George and the Progressive Movement,’ loc. cit. 268-9.
5. Since Memory of Georce has Faded: Fiscal and Moral Georgism. Concerning the enclaves, see Charles White Huntington, Enclaves of Single Tax or Economic Pent (Cambridge, Mass., 1922). The Georgist Ralston-Nolan and Keller Bills, before Congress, 1921, were analyzed by B. H. Hibbard, Legislative Reference Library, Madison; see also S. H. Patterson, ‘The Ralston-Nolan Bill, A Proposed Tax on Unimproved Land Values,’ American Academy of Social and Political Science, Annals, 95:188-93 (May 1921). On the Grimstad Bills in Wisconsin, 1923, see Commons, Myself, 39-40, 53, 100; and his ‘A Progressive Tax on Bare Land Values,’ Political Science Quarterly, 38:41-68 (March 1922). Brand Whitlock’s dismissal of Georgist politics is in a letter of 23 June 1920, Letters of Brand Whitlock, Allan Nevins, ed. (New York, 1936), 304; see also Journal of Brand Whitlock, 612. On the bitterness of Georgists, about 1920, see Howe, Confessions of a Reformer, chs. xvii-xviii, 319; Post, Ms. Autobiography, LC: Post, Deportations Delirium of /920, a personal narrative of an official experience, introduction by Moorfield Storey (Chicago, 1923). On the Georgism of Parliament’s act of 1947, see Charles M. Haar, Land Planning Law in a Free Society (Cambridge, 1951), 163, and passim.
Editor’s Note: Among the many books about Henry George published after Professor Barker’s book first appeared, readers may want to consult:
Andelson, Robert V., ed., Critics of Henry George. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson U. Press., 1979 Cord, Steven B., Henry George: Dreamer or Realist? New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation (originally published by U. of Pennsylvania Press), 1985 Heilman, Rhoda, Henry George Reconsidered. New York: Carlton Press, 1987
Lissner, Will and Dorothy, eds., George and the Scholars. Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1991 Lissner, Will and Dorothy, eds., George and Democracy in the British Isles. New York: (forthcoming) Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1992
Noyes, Richard, ed., Now the Synthesis. New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1991 Silagi, Michael, Henry George and Europe: His Influence on Land Reform Movements. (New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, forthcoming.)
Thomas, John L., Alternative America. Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1983
Abbot, Lyman, 478, 542, 619 Abbot, Willis J., 608, 615 Adams, Charles Frederic, 435, 437, 615 Adams, Henry, 590 Adler, Felix, 418, 478 Alta California, 84, 92, 94, 112, 133, 203, 215, 224, 228, 261; prints early HG pieces, 68-9; employs him as reporter, 69, 70; low-wage and low-interest
policy, 97; in Am. Press Assn., 173; promotes red scare, 257, 260; on P ir P, 318 Altgeld, Governor James, 594, 606, 609 American Federation of Labor, 308, 456, 458, 462, 497 American Press Association, origin, 118; HG agent for, x39; his newspapers in, 139, 172; Calif, success, 173 ‘American Republic, The,’ 238-40, 653 Andrews, E. Benjamin, 543, 556, 566, 674 Anti-Poverty Society, 511; rise, 491-3; in 1887 campaign, 500; disintegration, 5*4
Appleton and Co., 328, 423; rejects and accepts P & P, 312, 314; publishes, 320-
21. 325
Argyll, Duke of, 196, 314, 331, 529; ‘Prophet of San Francisco,’ 408-9; see also ‘The “Reduction to Iniquity" ’ Associated Press, 139; Calif, journals in, 112-13, 114; monopoly, 113, 114-15; refuses SF Herald, 113, 116; repulsed in Calif., 139, 173; see also American Press Association; George, Henry: Conflicts and Protests Atkinson, Edward, 324, 518, 559-60, 565 Australia, 210, 595; HG’s boyhood visit, 21-2; P ir P in, 373; invitation to lecture, 524, 534, 542; see also George, Henry: Visitor in Australia Australian ballot, 536, 541. 546; see also
George, Henry: Political Ideals, 1870s, Political Ideas, 1886-97 Aveling, Edward and Eleanor Marx, 471
B
Bailey, Warren Worth, 521, 623, 631, 632, 634, 671
Baker, Newton D., 620, 624, 631, 634 Bancroft, Hubert Howe, 84-5, 148-9, 208, 230
Barrett, Judge George C., 459-60 Bee, 75, 193, 228, 260, 320, 491; editorial line, 61, 87; on Our Land and Land Policy, 159; friendly to HG tax program, 189; on P ir P, 317; see also McClatchy, James Beecher, Henry Ward, 331, 418-19 Bell, Alexander D., 128, 129 Bellamy Nationalism, 307, 311, 507, 541, 56i-2n., 563; among Georgists, 537; HG review Looking Backward, 540 Bemis, Edward, 557, 623 Bigelow, Poultney, 326-7, 331, 450, 463, 549, 593-4; blames Catholics for HG defeat, 479 Board of Equalization, Calif., 182; land-holding statistics, igi Booth, General William, 406, 550 Booth, Governor Newton, 146, 194, 213; ideas on land, 160; supported by HG, 170-71 Brandes, Georg, 596 ‘Bribery in Elections,’ 157, 649, 652 Briggs, Thomas A., 358, 380, 485-6, 524 Bright, John, 344, 360, 400 British Columbia, 38, 39-41 Brontes expedition, 70 Brooklyn, 327-8, 331, 441 Brooks, Noah, 76, 77, 102
Brown, Edward Osgood, 575 Bryan, William Jennings, 608, 613, 623-4, 631-2 Bryce, James, 310, 611, 653, 679 Buckle, Thomas Henry, 267-8 Bulletin, Evening, see Evening Bulletin Bushnell, Horace, 80
C
Cairnes, J. E., 360, 660 Calcutta, 23-4
California, 266; business conditions in 1858, 38-9, 41; in 1864, 63; in 1869-71, 129' >55-6; in >873-9- I5®> >7‘. 227, 229, 256, 258; regional literature, 44-6; economic promotion and criticism, 7g-89; journalism, 44-5, 51, 61, 75, 111-13, 161-3, '73. 224-5; attitudes toward Civil War, 47, 60-62; state politics in 1860-65, 49-5°. 60-61; in 1872-5, 170-71; social make up, 80, 164; taxation policies, 181-2, 184; -constitutional
limits on taxation, 182-3; constitutional convention, 1878-9, 252, 258; Constitution of 1878-9 criticized, 259-63; see also California landholding; George, Henry: Voyages, Employment and Unemployment, Civil War, California Editor, Economic Thought, 1867-79, Conflicts and Protests, While Writing P ir P; San Francisco; other place names California, University of, 206; scandal charged, 219-21; HG lecture, 240-43; HG not appointed, 241, 243 California Home Journal, 44-5 California landholding, conditions and criticisms, in 1860s, 86-9, 109; in 1870s, 160, 189, 192-3; analogy with Ireland, 126-7; Immigrant Union criticism, 129-30; Our Land and Land Policy, on, 147-8, 153; Days bill, 177; Sacramento Record investigation, 190-92; Board of Equalization statistics, 191; Assembly report, 193-4; see also California; George, Henry: Economic Thought, 1867-79; Our Land and Land Policy; Progress and Poverty; San Francisco, pueblo question Californian, HG pieces in earlier, 67, 68;
review of P ir P in later, 317 Call, Morning, see Morning Call Carey, Henry C., 198, 274 Carnegie, Andrew, 308, 474, 578 Carr, Ezra S., 84-5, 220
Casserly, Senator Eugene, 119 Central Labor Union, NY, 418, 504, 615; initiates 1886 campaign, 455, 459-60; background, 458—9; campaign organized, 462; Leader launched, 472; SLP membership, 496 Central Pacific, see George, Henry: Economic Thought, 1867-79; Railroads of Calif.
Chamberlain, Joseph, 314, 343, 361-2, 400, 414, 453; influenced by P ir P, 362; treaty of Kilmainham, 363 China, HG influence in, 680 Chinese immigration and exclusion, 41, 109; HG’s ‘Chinese Letter,’ 122-3; I|n' migrant Union policy, 130; J. S. Mill 011, 133-4; see also George, Henry: Economic Thought, 1867-79; Kearney -ism
Chronicle, 105, 113, 135, 217, 222, 224, 261; early history, 108-10; in Am. Press Assn., 139; friendly to HG tax program, 185, 186; see also George, Henry: Calif. Editor
Citizen’s Union, 612, 613-17
Civil War, see George, Henry: Civil War
Clark, John Bates, 310, 557, 565, 567, 674;
debt to P ir P, 299-300, 656 Clarke, Samuel, 180, 558, 565, 674 Cleveland, Grover, 432, 605, 608; HG’s attitude toward candidacies, 1884, 441, 454; 1888, 512-13, 515-17; 1892, 602-3; tariff ideas of, 450, 512, 516, 602-4; attacked by HG, 605-7 Coffey, James V., 241, 251, 252 Common Sense of Taxation, The,’ 331 Commons, John R., 567, 594, 634, 675, 681 Condition of Labor, The, 553; occasion and purpose, 571-3, 575; argument,
573-4; endorsements, 574; translations,
574-5, 596; Catholic reactions, 575-7; see also McGlynn, Father Edward
Conness, Senator John, 93 Conscrvationism, 199, 622, 631; P ir P not well considered for, 298; emergence parallel to P ir P, 309 Corrigan, Archbishop Michael, 126, 472, 476, 575; background, 465; misunderstanding HG, 465; refuses McGlynn 1886 campaign, 465; supported by vicar-general, 476-7; condemns HG’s ideas, 486-7; sustains discipline of McGlynn, 487-8; for placing P ir P on Index, 488-90, 57711.; attacked by
Standard, 490-91 ‘Crime of Poverty,’ 442-3, 666 Croasdale, William, 511, 522, 539-40, 551,
562, 600; in charge Standard 1890, 542; full editor, 569 Croker, Richard, 468, 473, 480, 613, 614 Cronise, Titus Fey, 84-5 Curry, Florence, 19, 23, 2g, 38, 41-2 Curry, Mrs. Rebecca and Martha and Emma, 29-30, 38, 41-2, 44, 642
D
Daily American Flag, 63 Daily Evening Journal, see George, Henry: Employment and Unemployment
Daily Evening Post see Post, Daily Evening
Damaschke, Adolph, 597 David, Henry, 504, 667, 670 Davidson, Thomas, 466, 538, 56m., 565 Darwin, Charles, 359, 427, 579 Davitt, Michael, 341-2, 359, 382, 395, 397, 406, 407, 410, 433, 534, 661; HG meet-ing, 335: in Phoenix Park crisis, 361,
365-6; Georgist, 366-8; cool to HG, 1886, 471-2; concerned in McGlynn case, 480
Dawson, Father Thomas, 121, 366, 574 Days, John W., 171, 191, 244, 261, 437; land-reform bill, 177; encourages HG belief in common property in land, 177-8
Delaware, single-tax campaign in, 610-11 de Leon, Daniel, 466, 492; writer ULP platform, 485 del Mar, Alexander, 279-81, 655-6 de Mille, Anna Angela George, 253, 366, 480, 590, 593, 618 de Mille, William, 593 Democratic party of New York City, elements in 1886, Catholic and Irish, 464; Tammany Hall, 468, 481-2; Irving Hall, 470; alignments in 1897, 613-17; see also Croker, Richard; Hewitt, Abram S.; names of other leaders Denmark, 531-2
Destler, Professor Chester A., 131, 645-6 de Young, Charles, 108 Dorfman, Professor Joseph, 567, 645, 648, 655, 656
Durant, James C., 379, 380, 410, 454, 595;
prints P & P, 354 ‘Dust to Dust,’ 37, 68, 641
E
Economist, 392; reviews P & P, 333 Ely, Richard, 457, 567; early estimation of HG, 438, 556, 674
England, see George, Henry: First English Visit, In England and Scotland,
1883-4, In Scotland and England,
1884-5, International Reformer; Land Reform Union; names of leaders
‘England and Ireland,’ 444, 666 Eulenstein, Bernhard, 596-7 Evening Bulletin, 63, 78, 112, 125, 133, ‘35- >59. 180, 203, 223, 224, 228, 261; attacked by HG, 126, 200, 218 Examiner, 108, 210, 448, 544; friendly to HG tax program, 185, 186; and P & P, S>6
F
Fabian, Bentham, 84-5 Fabianism, 311, 353, 380-81, 466, 471, 538; stimulated by HG, 376, 413-14;
friendly with HG, 1889, 525-7, 595; objectionable to him, 550, 564 Fawcett, Henry, 384, 390, 656; P (? P indebted to, 267, 285, 299; criticizes P ir P,
392-3 Fels, Joseph, 627 Ferrell, Frank, 462 Ferris, John A., 100, 142, 645 Field, David Dudley, 444 Field, Judge Stephen J., 91 Fillebrown, Charles, 622 Fliirscheim, Michael, 538, 549, 597; joins HG, 531-2 Ford, Patrick, 349, 365, 418, 555; HG’s estimate, 336 Fortnightly Review, 383, 393, 415; HG writes for, 361-2 Fox, Sister Teresa, 53, 58, 435, 543, 574 Free Soil Society, 436-7, 443 Free Soiler, 436, 454 Free Trade League, 131 Freeman, 593
G
Gadsden, James, 81-2 Garland, Hamlin, 311, 541, 559, 591-2, 610, 615, 621, 677 Garrison, William Lloyd II, 541, 565, 570, 574, 609, 622; on Chinese exclusion, 135; discovers HG, 409-10; single-taxer,
519. 52°
Garvin, Dr. L. F. C., 430-31, 627 Gates, Professor Paul W., 96, 149, 648 George, Annie Corsina Fox, 72, 165-6, 23>> 234-5, 332, 339-40, 394-5. 435; background and courtship, 53-4; religion, 57, 107; marriage, 57-9; during
George, Annie Corsina Fox (continued) 1864-5 crisis, 63-4; Monroe Leaguer, 71; illness and separation, 105-8, 123, 125, 138, 157; SF home, 169-70, 252-3, 326; in Irish affairs, 347-8; travels in UK, 529; on Australia trip, 543, 545, 547- 549; NY home, 590-91; during last candidacy, 612, 618 George, Caroline, 5, 32, 72 George, Catharine Pratt Vallance, 5-6,
47. 5°. 59. r°C-7. 394 George, Duncan ('Dunkin’), 5 George, Ellen, 38, 42 George, Harriet, 5, 6, 107 GEORGE, HENRY:
Self-Estimations: 32-3, 65-6, 67, 120-21, 210-11, 231-2, 247, 352, 373, 397-8, 411, 467, 516, 535, 617
Philadelphia Background: 3-4, 208, 225, 238; genealogy, 5-6; home, 8-10, 26-7; early religious life, 10-13, 2T 249’ *n' difference, 11-12; schooling, 13-15; reading, 10, 15-16, 29; jobs, 17, 26-8, 30; friendships, 15, 18, 26-9, 32, 38, 41-2, 43; Lawrence Society, 15-16, 27-9, 31; writing, 2 8-9
Voyages, 1855-8: to India, plan, 18-19, passage to Australia, 20-21, nearmutiny, 21-2, in Calcutta, 23-4, return, 25, writing, 20-21, 23, 25; to California, arrangements, 30-32, at sea, 34, ‘run away,’ 38, writing, 35-6, 37
Employment and Unemployment on Pacific Coast, 1858-66: venture to Victoria, 39-41; printing, SF, 43, weighing rice, 44, tramp, 44; 011 Calif. Home Journal, 44-5, foreman, 46-7, 51, 54; part-proprietor, SF Daily Evening Journal, 51-2, 54, 57; Millennial Letter, 50, 54-7; courtship and marriage, 53-4, 57-9, 64; in Sacramento printing, 58-62; irregular work, 62-4; desperation and decision to write, 64-9, 71; filibusterer, 70-71; reporter for Alta, 69, 70; in state printing, 72, 74; on SF Times, 75
Early Economic Ideas: Phila., 26-7; British Columbia, 41; in 1861, 57; wartime Sacramento, 61; free trade, 72-4, 77; influenced by Wells, 78
Civil War: influence to remain in Calif., 47; sense of obligations, 49-51; contemporary understanding of, 60-62, 68-70, 71; tradition of, in HG’s reformism, 144, 236, 337, 421; see also George, Henry: Christian Idealism, Political
Ideals, 1870s
Political Party Attachments: Demo
cratic family, 8; Lincoln Republican, 50, 62; Radical Republican sympathizer, 75; SF Democratic associations, 95; fading Republicanism, 108, 109, 117; Democratic candidacies, California, 124-5, 156—7;
Democratic party editor, 138; pamphleteer, 146, 156; secretary Calif, convention, 156; liberal Democrat, 163-4; delegate 1872 national convention, 166; party-fusionist for local politics, 170-71; campaigner for Tilden, 235-7; candidate for Calif, constitutional convention, 252; speaker, 1880, 327-8; indifferent Democrat, 1884, 441; labor-party leader, 1886-7, 461-514; Democrat again, 1888-96, 512, 515 (see also George, Henry: Democratic Party Man, 1888-96); leader of Democracy of Thomas Jefferson, 610-17
California Editor, 1866-79: SF
Times, 75-6, 78, 91-102, 105; SF Chronicle, 105-6, 108-10; SF Monitor, 125-7; Oakland Daily Transcript, 131-5, 138; Sacramento Reporter, 138-45; SF Post, 161-227; member Bohemian Club, 169, 317; SF Ledger, 225-7; SF State, 258-61 Economic Thought in Editorials, Pamphlets, Speeches, Books, 1867-79: SF pueblo land, 93-5, 103-4, 293; railroad regulation and public ownership, 95, 98-g, 140-41, 146-7, 172-3, 281-2; U.S. land policy, Morrill Act, 96, 179, homestead policy, 132, 147, 152, 179-80, 288; high wages, 97, 103-4, 142-3, 204, 279; high interest, 103, 204-5; 8-hour movement, g7, 98, 202; economy of abundance, 97, 123, 202; public ownership of telegraph, 99-100, 119, 174, 281; interconvertible currency and bonds, 100-101, 205; hard money and limited greenbacks, 101, 204; Negroes, 108-9, 2°S* Chinese exclusion, 109, 122-3, *33_5> *43—260-61; land aggregation and speculation, 109-10, 126-7, 132-3, 179-80, 239, 2go-gi; wages-fund, 122-3, rejected, 271-2; natural right to land, 126-7, 151, 178, 180-81, 239; taxation of land values, preliminary ideas,
126-7, 133, 141-2, 152, 153, idea attached to natural right, 181, 184, application in rural areas, 186-7, urban areas, 187-8, a single tax, 247, 'application of remedy,’ 291, 292-3, 302; economic rent, 136-8, 150, 184, 195, 269, law of rent, 275-7, 2®S~ 7; free trade, 142, 197-8; expectation of revolution, 142, 153, 201, 288; Malthusian and anti-Malthusian, 147. 271, 272-3, 286; labor theory of value, 150; capitalist enterprise, 172, 199, 204-6, 282; natural monopoly, 175, 19(7-201, 650; municipally owned utilities, 175, 200-201; common property in land, approach to idea, 176— 7, quiet adoption, 178, full declaration, 195, 269, ‘the remedy,’ 289, land nationalization a means, 291-2; trade unions and strikes, 201-2, 289; nature of depressions, 204, 242. 245-7, 269, 284-7: need t0 revise economic theory, 242, 269, 271, 273-4, 278, 283; fertility of nature a source of production, 246, basis of interest, 280-81; marginal theory of distribution, general, 274-5, 282-4, 299-300, rent, 275-7, wages, 277-8, interest, 278-82; socialism, 288; see also George, Henry: Economic Ideas in Later Writings
Conflicts and Protests, 1868-75: SF Herald fight with AP and Western Union, 110, 113-20, 124; contributor NY Tribune Chinese letter, 122-3, correspondent, 124; illuminations and dedication, NY, 121-2, Oakland, 135-8, 195; agent Am. Press Assn., 139, 145; writer Subsidy Question, 146, Our Land and Land Policy, 146-54; for SF reforms, water system, 199-200, police system, 216-18, Industrial School, 218-19; Sunrise scandal, 202-3; Univ. of Calif, allegations, 219-21; local option, 221-2
Christian Idealism, 1870s: renewal of faith, 206-7, 303; anti-materialism and anti-determinism, 208-9, 268, 271, 273; appreciation of moral energy, 208, 209, 250, 268-9; identification moral and economic law, 242, 249-50, 271, 290, 296; belief in immortality, 303-4; see also Condition of Labor; A Perplexed Philosopher
Political Ideals, 1870s: Christian republic, 211; federalism, 212; minimum state, 211-12, 298; strong local government, 212, 297; responsibility, 213, 215; a simple constitution, 215-16; Australian ballot, 157, 214; moderate feminism, 214-15; liberty, 238, 295; evolutionary progress, 239; equal rights, 239, 242, 270, 295; Jeffcrsonianism, 251, 298, 301-2; idea of civilization, 293-6; see also George, Henry: Civil War, Political Ideas, 1886-97; Jackson, age of
While Writing P & P: conditions of authorship, 230, 243, 250, 252-6, 313; gas-meter inspector, 232-4, 252, 258, 313, 319; public speaking, 231, for Tilden, 235-7, ‘The American Republic,’ 237-40, ‘The Study of Political Economy,’ 240-43, ‘Why Work Is Scarce,’ 245-8, ‘Moses,’ 248-50;
against Kearney, 243-4, 251 (see also Kearneyism); leader Calif. Land Reform League, 245, 2|8, 250; critical of Calif, constitution, 251, convention candidate, 251-2, opponent ratification, 258-63
Beginnings in New York, 1880-81: decision for East coast residence, 264, 320, 322; connection with Irish protest, 320, 334-6, 339-40 (see also ‘The Irish Land Question’; The Land Question)-, transcontinental travel, 322, 332; life in city, 326-7, 332; hack-writing, 328-9 (see also Hewitt, Abram S.); lecturing, 329, 331» $36-7- NY followers, 331, 337-8, 340 Correspondent in Ireland, 1881-2: reactions to coercion, 346-7, 348-9, 351-2, 360, 362, 366-70; ‘radicalization,’ 349-51,
366-8; addresses, 349, 355; criticism of Liberal policy, 363-4; in Phoenix Park crisis, 365-6; arrested in Galway, 368-72 First English Visit, 1882: HG's hope, 353; beginning mass-publication, 354-5, 373; 1882 speeches, 355, 367, 375-6; associations with social protest, socialists, 356-8, 375, land nationalizers, 359-60, Radicals, 360-61, 362; writing, 361-2; early English followers, 358, 366-8,
375-7
In England and Scotland, 1883-4; invitation, 379, 383; followers organized, 379, 401 (see also Land Reform Union; Land Restoration League); financial success, 395, 398; confiscationist vs. com-pensationism, 396-7, 399-401; principal addresses, London, 397, Liverpool, 399, Glasgow, 401, Oxford, 402-3, Cambridge, 403-4; socialist enthusiasm, 398; new friendships, 406
In Scotland and England, 1884-5: invited by Scottish Land Restoration League, 407, 410; lectures in England, 410, 411, in Scotland, 411-12, Ulster, 412; relations with socialists, 412-13; influence on Radicals, 414, on Parliament, 414; Hobson’s estimate of HG in UK, 415-16 Prominence in U.S., 1882-6: ch. xiv; as hero, 1882, 417-19; as author of P ir P, 420-23; as journalist and writer of new books, 425-7, 444-52 (see also George, Henry: Economic Ideas in Later Writings; Social Problems; Protection or Free Trade), as controversialist with F. A. Walker, 427-31; interested in labor movement, 432-8, 442, 457; leader Free Soil Society, 436-7; socialist connections and disconnections, 437-8, 442; difficulties of 1883, 438-9; reverses in lecturing,
George, Henry (continued)
435-40, 442-4; politically inactive, 441; association with Johnson, 446; wanted permanently in England, 454; plans U.S. paper and politics, 454-5
Economic Ideas in Later Writings,
1883-97: public ownership of natural monopolies, 426-7, 436; possible revolution, 426-7, 434, 435, 6og; municipalization of utilities, 427; Darwinism, 427; concentration in landholding, 427, 429, 445, 448; free enterprise, 431, 519; mixed economy, 431, 510; free trade as labor’s interest, 433-4, 447. 449’ 5>5i e>glu hours, 435; elevation of poor, 435-6; common property in land, 444, 580; single tax, 444 (see also George, Henry: Single-Tax
Leader; Single tax); trade-unionism, 447; liberal U.S. immigration, 515; a special laisscz faire, 540-41; see also Condition of Labor; George, Henry: Economic
Thought, 1867-79, Final Writing and Theory, 1891-7; A Perplexed Philosopher; Protection or Free Trade; Science of Political Economy; Social Problems Political Ideas, 1886-97: a fully
democratic party, 461, 494-5, 613; labor participation, 461; cities the center of reform, 461, 463, 611, 614; simplified courts, 463; incorruption, 467, 614; executive responsibility, 467, 611; secret ballot, 484 (see also Australian ballot); politics follows thought, 484, 494; third parties insufficient, 494-5, 520-21, 599-600, 603-4, 607; socialism and individualism ‘correlative principles,’ 497, 589; no socialism is Ameiican, 497-8; preference for local government, 522, 603, 609; liberty, 606; anti-imperialist, 607; see also George, Henry: Christian Idealism, Political
Ideals, 1870s
In New York City Campaign. 1886: ch. xv; C.LU offer of mayoralty nomination, 455, 458, 460-61; conditional acceptance, 461-2; writes platform, 462; refuses dissuasions, 463-6; formal acceptance, 466-7; supported by some Republicans, 469-70, clergymen, 469, Irving Hall, 470-71, Englishmen, 471, masses, 472, by Leader, 472, immigrants, 475-6; challenges debate, 473-5, great speaking campaign, 475-7 (for opposition see Corrigan, Archbishop Michael; Democratic party; Hewitt, Abram S.; Ivins, William; Republican party; Roosevelt, Theodore); official vote, 478; was the count fair? 478-81, 614-15; see also George, Henry: Political Party Attachments, United Labor Leader, Candidate of Democracy of Thomas Jefferson
United Labor Leader, 1887-8: chs. xv-xvi; party origins, 478; hope for Presidency, 479, 483-4, 494-5, 498, 502, 507; excursions lecturing, 482-3, 485; relations with socialists, 483, 486, their expulsion from ULP, 495-8; launches Standard, 485; champions McGlynn, 487, 4go-gi; leader in Anti-Poverty, 492-3, 514; candidate NY secretary of state, 495, 498-9, city campaign, 500, 501-2, upstate, 500-501, defeat, 502; opinion of Hay-market justice, at first condemnatory, 503-4, later moderate, 504-6, guided by Judge Maguire, 504-6, 670-71; decline ULP, 511-12, HG expelled, 513-14; see also George, Henry: Political Party Attachments, In NY City Campaign, Candidate of Democracy of Thomas Jefferson
Democratic Party Man, 1888-96; for Cleveland 1888, 512-13, 515-17; endorsement Mills Bill, 515; opposed to Populism and inflation, 599-600, 603-4, 607; hero of Congressional Georgists, 600,
604-5; promoter free trade in party, 600-604; for Cleveland, 1892, 602-3, reaction,
605-7; f°r Bryan, 1896, 608-10; Bryan ally, 1897, 613; see also George, Henry: Political Party Attachments, Candidate of Democracy of Thomas Jefferson
Single Tax Leader, U.S., 1887-93: ch. xvii; estimate of new movement, 518-19, favors decentralized growth, 520, 522; speech-making, 522-3, 525, 541-2, 543-4-568, 581, 588-9; reorganizes Standard, 536, 540, 568-9; resists Bellamy Nationalism, 537, 540-41; dominates first national conference, 550-51, out-voted at second, 588-g; little organization work, 589, 610; see also George, Henry: items referring to rent and land-value taxation; Single tax
International Reformer, 1888-97: in England, 1888, 523-4; warned about English socialism, 1889, 525-7, debates Hyndman, 527, 534; cultivates middle-class groups, around London, 527-9, 534, in Scotland and the Midlands, 529-30; continental following, 531-2, president Paris conference, 532-3, 595; in Holland, 533; resisted on ground of theory, 538, 550; center of ’salon,’ 590, and ideological influence in U.S., 591-4, in Russia, 597-9; later political and reform leadership overseas, 594-6, UK, 595, 603, Continent, 595-7
Visitor in Australia, 1890: outward voyage, 544-5; travels and lectures in Sydney, 545-6, 547, Melbourne, 546, Adelaide, 547, Brisbane, 547; permanent following, 548; return voyage and travels, Ceylon, 548, Italy, 548-9, England, 549-5°
Final Writing and Theory, 1891-7: HG the object of accumulated criticism,
1884-8, 554-6, partly from academicians, 556-8, of intense attack and defense, 1889-90, 558-61; troubled by clerical attitudes, 562-3, by socialists, 563-4; critically discussed by Social Science Association, 565-7; withdrawal from journalism, 568-9; ill, 569-71; a political economy his primary aim, 571; Condition 0/ Labor, 1891, a development of HG's idealism, 571-5, forces McGlynn issue, 575-7; A Perplexed Philosopher an attack on materialism and Spencer, 577-81; Science of Political Economy a sacrificed work, 581-6; Hearst journalist, 1896, 608-10; see also George, Henry: Economic Thought, 1867-79, Christian Ideals, Political Ideas, Economic Ideas in Later Writings; books by title
Candidate of Democracy of Thomas Jefferson, 1897: background, 585, 587, 610-12; writes platform, 613-14; charges dishonesty, 1886, 614-15; elements in support, 615; against merger with Low, 616-17; campaign effort and illness, 616-17; death and funeral, 618-19; see also George, Henry: Political Party Attachments, Democratic Party Man, 1888—
96
Collected Writings; 537-9 George, Henry, Jr., 58-9, 253, 326, 339, 394, 398, 406, 410, 419, 460, 480, 542, 573; in charge Standard, i88g, 525, 536-7; candidate for mayor, 617; congressman, 632, 634; biography by, 638 George, James, 5, 32, 38-40, 42, 55, 58 George, Jane Vallance, 5, 15, 52, 54-7, 59 George, Jennie Teresa, 105, 231, 372-3.
394, 533-4. 584 George, John Vallance ('Val'), 5, 138, 217, 233. 244
George, Richard Fox, 64, 70, 108, 169, 326, 394, 449, 460, 525, 585, 618-19 George, Richard Samuel Henry, 47, 145, 394; origins, 5, 17; career and income, 6-8, 42, 52, 60, 107; faith and character, 9-10
Germany, 531, 596-7, 672; see also Flurscheim, Max; Eulenstein, Bernhard Gibbons, James Cardinal, moderate on labor, 487-8; opposes prohibiting P ir P, 489
Gilman, Daniel Coit, 219-21, 652 Gladstone, Mary, 404-5, 406-7 Gladstone, William Ewart, 314, 406; Irish policy, 343-5, 361, 363, 364, 369, 453 Godkin, E. L., see Nation Gompers, Samuel, 479, 501, 536; in 1886 campaign, 462, 477; withdraws from labor politics, 484, 497 Grace, Mayor William R., 463 Grangers, Calif., 84-5, 205; for new constitution, 257, 262 Grant, President Ulysses S., 116, 117, 174, 264
Greeley, Horace, 61; candidacy, 1872, 165-7
Green, Will S., 176, 203 Grey, Sir George, 314, 544-5, 595 Gronlund, Laurence, 437, 495-6, 498 Giitschow, C. D. F., 319, 325, 423, 471, 506
H
Hadley, Arthur Twining, 543, 558, 586-7 Haight, Governor Henry, 128, 145, 146, 181, 213, 215, 254, 654; promotes HG, 131, 138; ideas of, 131, 132, 140; on land, 160 Hall, Bolton, 521, 567 Hall, Charles Victor, 257-8 Hardie, Keir, 402, 530 Harris, William Torrey, 556, 565 Harrison, Frederic, 383, 400, 527 Hart, Sally, 221-2
Hasson, John, 114, 117, 118, 120, 138-9 Hayes, Rutherford B., 470 Haymarket Square affair, 446, 456, 503-6, 670
Headlam, Rev. T. Stewart, 375, 380, 397, 407, 411, 526 Helper, Hinton Rowan, 83 Henry George and Company, 449, 454 Herald, NY, 111, 116, 117, 119, 316, 657 Herald, SF, 123, 124; beginnings, 111-12; fight for telegraphic news, 113-20; see also George, Henry: Conflicts and Protests
Herne, James A., 559, 592-3, 610 Hertzka, Theodor, 597 Hewitt, Abram S., 481, 614-15; employs and falls out with HG, 328-9; Democratic opponent, 468, 473-5; victory, 478; see also Democratic party
Hill, Governor David IE, 459, 500-501 Hindoo, 67; see also George, Henry: Voyages
Hinton, William M., 161, 1G5-6, 217-18,
227- 3°3. 3>3- 3*9* 437 Hirsch, Max, 548, 595 Hittell, John S., 92, 129; Calif, criticism, 18G4, 84-9; spokesman of red scare, 1878-9, 257 Hobson, J. A., on HG’s influence in England, 415— 1G, G64 Hopkins, Caspar T., 172-3, 257-8; president Immigrant Union, 128; ideas, 129-30; lecturer Univ. of Calif., 240-41 How Jack Breeze Missed Being a Pasha,’ 157. 649
Howe, Frederic C., G25, 626-7, 635 Howells, William Dean, 311, 478, 591 Huntington, Bishop Frederic Dan, 538, 5O0, 574
Huntington, Father James O. H., 538,
549’ 574 Hutchins legacy, 5G8 Huxley, Thomas, 560-G1, 578 Hyndman, Henry M., 353, 381, 393, 40G, 412, GGo; cultivates HG, 355-7; approves Social Problems, 426-7; debate with HG, 527; see also Marxism
I
Immigrant Union, Calif., origin, 128;
policy, 129-30; HG’s attack, 132-3 Income tax, 288, 604, G05 International League for Land Value Taxation and Free Trade, 402, 635 Ireland, 1881-2, ch. xii; leadership of protest, 341-2; economic condition, 342; Parliamentary policy toward, 343-5, 361, 3G3, 373; ancient critique of property in land, 350-52; see also George, Henry: Correspondent in Ireland; Irish Land League; Irish land problem; ’The Irish Land Question’; names of leaders Irish Land League, 335, 33G-7, 342, 344; No Rent movement, 345-6, 351, 363; role of women in, 347-8; underground, 348; finances, 358-9; disintegration, 363; see also George, Henry: Correspondent in Ireland; Irish land problem
Irish land problem, analogy with California, 126, 210, 320, 341; condition of, 1881, 344, 1882, 363-4, 660; see also Irish Land League; The Land Question
Irish Land Question, The,’ 320, 322, enlarged into book, 335, 658; see also The Land Question Irish World, 336, 357, 441; reviews P 5- P, 322; employs HG as correspondent in Ireland, 339, 352, 361, 368; supports Land League, 358; celebrates HG, 418; see also Irish Land League Irwin, Governor William, 195, 232 ‘Is Our Civilisation Just to Workingmen,' 440, 66G
Ivins, William, 541, 614-15; urges HG against 1886 campaign, 463-4
J
Jackson, age of, source of HG’s standards, 3-4, 77, 98, 101, 102, 145-6, 162, 167, 213. 25'. 3°7. 456 Jackson, Joseph, 455, 458 James, Professor Edmund, 457-8, 565-6 James, Robertson, 56511., 590 Jcffrevs, Joseph, 26-7, 38-9; estimate of HG, 42-3
John Swinton’s Paper, 460, 467, 472, 479, 495; see also Swinton, John Johnson, Tom Loftin, 449, 541, 609, 612, 621, 626; beginning with HG, 446; supports HG 1886, 455, 471; guarantor Standard, 535, 536, 5G9; gives HG security, 570, and home, 590-91; single-tax leader and subsidizer, 589, 605; Ohio representative, 599-605, 606-7, leader free-trade Democrats, 600, 601, 602; presidential hope, 603; subsidizer 1897 campaign, 615; leader ‘political Georgism,’ 623-5, an(l °f Ohio reformers, 626-7
Jones, Senator John Percival, 223, 227, 229
Jordan, President David Starr, 577 Journal, NY, 608-10
Journal of Trades and Workmen, 66, 68, 259’ 643
Joynes, J. L., 368-9, 380, 401; arrested with HG, 370 Julian, George W„ 77, 137m, 164-5, 215. 312, 314, 621
K
Kearneyism, early overtures refused by HG, 243-4, 251; development and reaction, 256-7; success 1879, 258-9; HG critique, 258, 261-3, 653; see also Land Reform League Kelly, George Fox, 87
Kelly, Dr. James, 3(55, 611, 618 Kent, Congressman William S., 628-9, 632, 680 Kinsclla, Thomas, .118-19 Knights of Labor, 308, 442-3, 456, 487-8, 524; HG joins and advises, 432-3; in 1886 campaign, 438-9, 484; out of politics 1887, 484—5; friendly to single tax, 542 Ki'amer, Rev. John, 4G6, 619
L
Labadic, Joseph, 422 ‘Labor in Pennsylvania,’ 446-8, 666 Labouchere, Henry, 397 La Follette, Robert, 629 Land Question, The, 374, 552; argument. 335-6; reviews, 336, 374; sales, 353; mass distributed, 354, 423; see also ‘The Irish Land Question’
Land Reform League of California, personnel, 244; program, 244-8 Land Reform Union, UK, established,
379-80, 395; ideological divisions, 396; absorbed, 402 Land Restoration League, 406. 408, 454, 530; history of Scottish, 401-2, English, 402; derivative organizations. 402; HG lectures for Scottish, 407, 410-12; Irish, 412
Lane, Franklin K., 601, 631 Latimer, George, 6, 10, 18, 619 Latimer, Thomas, 6. 16, 31 Laveleye, F.milc, 290; reviews P C- P, 333, 385, 658, 662 Lawrence, Elwood, 358, 398, 660, GO3-4 Leader, 479, 500, 504; HG organ. 1886 campaign, 472-3, 478; socialist organ ULP, 486; HG vehicle against Corrigan, 487; socialist criticism of HG, 495-G, 499
Lease, Mary Ellen, 609, 613 Ledger, Morning, see Morning Ledger Leo XIII, Pope, Rerum Novarum evokes Condition of Labor, 571-3, 675; representative of, restores McGlynn, 576 Leslie, T. E. CliHe, 314-15 Leslie’s Weekly, 223, 474-5; HG articles in, 424, 426-7, 429; sec also Social Problems
Leverson, Dr. Montague R., 318, 437, 611 Lewis, August, 471, 537, 5G9, 570, G09, 615, GiG Lincoln, Abraham, 50, G8-70 Lloyd, Henry Dcmarcst, 307, 311, 418, 561-211., 607
Lloyd George, David, 625 I.oria, Achillc, 301, 566 Love, David, 442-3 Lovell, John W., 423, 492 Low, Seth. 513, 619; HG appreciation, 51G; candidate Citizen’s Union, 612-13, G14, 61G—17, 679 Lowell, James Russell, 371-2
M
McClatchy, James, 87, 89, 92, 189, 421; HG’s friendship, 61, 76; launches HG as editorial writer, 75-6; assists P i- P, 255; sec also lire McCloskey, Matthew, 54, 57, 58, 125 McCoppin. Frank, 95, 120, 12G, 16G M’Crcady, Thomas, 492. 536-9 McEwcn, Arthur, G08, 612, 632 McGhee, Richard, 395, 401 McGlynn, Father Edward, 457, 463, 513-14, 619, 621; announces for Davitt and HG, 368; forbidden speech 011 Irish affairs, 464-5; forbidden part in 188G campaign, 465, 46G; actual campaign role, 466, 476; intercession by Davitt. 479-S0; for national ‘Land and Labor Party,’ 483; chairman ULP. 485; suspended as priest, 486-7; excommunicated, 489; championed by Standard, 490-91; leader of Anti-Poverty. 491-3; promoter HG candidacy 18S7, 499, 500; opposed to HG 011 tariff. 513; expels HG from ULP, 513-14, quits party, 514; restored priestly oflircs, 576; with HG at Single Tax Conference, 588-9 McLean. Andrew, 327 MacMackin, John, 460, 4G6, 492; campaign manager 188G, 470; leader ULP, 485; helps expel SLP, 49G McNeill, George E., 457, 482 Maguire, Judge James, 24), 437, 551; opinion on Haymarket justice, 504, 506, 670; congressman, 604-5, 608, introducer congressional single-tax bill, 605
Mallock, William Hurrell, 393. 662, 663; reviews P & P, 386-7; Properly and Progress, 408 Manning. Henry Edward, Cardinal, 406, 414, 466, 480, 487-8, 550, 573 Maritime labor, HG interest in, Melbourne harbor experience, 21-2; Sunrise scandal, 202-3 Marsh, George Perkins, 308-9 Marshall, Alfred. 384, 583-4; public criticism P & P, 389-90, 403
Marx, Karl, 471; opinion of HG, 356;
HG’s opinion of him, 564 Marxism, 142, 150, 177, 203-4, 309, 311, 412, 441, 458, 495-7, 527, 564, 599; HG’s nearest approach, 201; P & P different, 271, 289; in NY labor party, 458, 485; see also Gronlund, Laurence; Hyndman. Henry M.; Marx, Karl; Shevitsch, Serge; Socialist Labor party Meath Bishop of, see Nulty, Thomas Mill, John Stuart, 215, 358; HG's early reading of, 122, 137-8, 152, 195; on HG’s Chinese letter, 133-4, 143; land nationalizer, 137m, 194; HG’s criticism of, 207-8, 290; in P & P, 274, 276, 279, 285
Miller, Samuel, 18, 24, 25 ‘Money in Elections,’ 424-5, 665 Monitor, HG acting editor, 125-7; criticizes HG tax program, 185; see also Geotge, Henry: Calif. Editor, Economic Thought Monroe League, 70-71 Mood, Professor Fulmer, 301, 656 'More about American Landlordism,’ 429, 445, 666 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 309 Morlcy, John, 361, 362, 524 Morning Call, 112, 135, 159, 161-2, 174, 184, 200, 210, 218, 224, 228; challenges constitutionality HG tax, 186 Morning Ledger, 225-7, 279 Morrill Act, see George, Henry: Economic Thought ’Moses.’ 248-50, 411, 443, 653-4 Muller, Professor F. Max, 377, 395, 399,
402-3 Myers, Gustavus, 481
N
Nation, reviews P & P, 323, 657; attacks HG, 469
Nationalism, see Bellamy Nationalism Neilson, Francis, 593, 624, 677 Nevins, Allan, 481, 608, 658, 671 New York City, 19; impact on HG 1869, 121; reorganization, 611; see also Central Labor Union; Democratic party; George, Henry: Beginnings in New York, In New York City Campaign, United Labor Leader, Candidate of Democracy of Thomas Jefferson; Republican party; newspapers by name
New York Times, The, 468, 616; review P ir P, 322, 657
New Zealand, P & P in, 373; see also George, Henry: Visitor in Australia; Grey, Sir George News and Courier, 448; on P i" P, 323-4;
on Land Question, 336 Newton, Rev. Heber, 12, 337, 418, 435, 437- 438’ 44°’ 458. 466. 563’ 6>6. 619, 629-30
Newton, Rev. Richard, 11-12, 13 Nordhoff, Charles, 288, 315 North American Review, 469-70, 483; HG articles in, 331, 424-5, 429, 444-5, 446-8, 494-5 Nugent, John, 111-13, n8, 123-4 Nulty, Thomas, Bishop of Meath, 364, 368, 465, 4go, 573; radical idea about land, 350; relations with HG, 1881, 350-51
O
Oakland, see George, Henry: California Editor, Conflicts and Protests; Transcript
Olivier, Sidney, 390, 662; defends P & P,
380-81
Our Land and Land Policy, 146-54, 429, 552, 648; acceptance by historians, 148-9; by contemporaries in East, 158, in Calif., 159-60; compared to HG ideas in P & P, 152, in SF Post, 195; basis of Calif. Land Reform League, 244 Overland Monthly, 102, 156-7 ‘Overproduction,’ 425, 655
P
Parnell, Charles Stewart, 320, 341-2, 345— 6; HG’s estimation, 320, 347, 364 Patten, Simon N„ 557 Paul, Kegan, 330, 353, 368, 392, 395, 451 Peabody, Elizabeth, 421 Pease, Edward R., 526, 527; on HG influence, 413 Pendleton, George H., 100 Pentecost, Rev. Hugh O., 493, 514, 520, 53g. 539
Perlman, Professor Selig, 481, 667 Perplexed Philosopher, A, 553, 589-90, 6050.; background of Social Darwinism, 578-9; argument, 579-80; translation, 580; see also Spencer, Herbert Peters, E. T., 153-4, !58. 422< 648 Petty, Professor Claude W., 257, 644, 654 Philadelphia, see George, Henry: Philadelphia Background Phrenological examination, see George, Henry: Self-Estimations
Physiocracy, 513, 532; P if P not indebted, 267; Protection or Free Trade indebted, 450; single tax as, 519 Platt, Thomas, 613
‘Plea for the Supernatural,’ 67, 68, 643 ‘Political Economy the Framework of Political Science, Brains Not Muscle Rule the World,’ 329 Popular Science Monthly, 320-21, 327 Populism, 599-600, 603-4 Positivists, London Society of, 382-3;
American, 419 Post, Daily Evening, chs., vii-vm; business success, 161-2, 165-6, 167-70, 175, 216, 222; appearance, 163, 168, 226; purpose, 163-4, 222, 228; served by Am. Press Assn., 172; credit and plant expansion, 222-5; weekly, 224; HG loses, 227-g; see also George, Henry: California Editor, Economic Thought, Conflicts and Protests, Christian Idealism, Political Ideals Post, Louis Freeland, 418-19, 435, 480, 492’ 5°3> 560. 583-4. 600; arranges serialization P ir P, 338-9; founder Free Soil Society, 436; counsel for Central Labor Union, 459; editor of Leader, 472-3, of Standard, 486; chairman Syracuse convention, 498; candidate for attorney-general, 499, 502; single-tax leader, 520-21, 589; in twentieth century, 623, 626, 631, 634 Powderly, Terence, 515; early association with HG, 433-5; supports HG 1886, 476, 477, 484; withdraws from labor politics, 484-5; see also Knights of Labor ‘Prayer of Kakonah, The,' 74, 644 ‘Press. Should It Be Personal or Impersonal? The,’ 233-4, 653 Preston, Msgr. Thomas S., vicar-general, 476-7, 488
‘Problems of the Times,’ see Social Problems
Progress and Poverty, relation to other writings, 152, 268, 292, 532-3 (see also references to 265-304 under George, Henry: Economic Thought, Christian Idealism, Political Ideals); writing of, ch. ix, esp. 230, 243, 250, 252-6; analysis and estimate, ch. x; early publication, SF, 313-14, NY, 320-21, 325, London, 330, Berlin, 319, 334; early reviews, 308, Calif., 316-18, NY, 320-23, South, 323-4, New England, 324-5, Europe, 332-4; London Times review, 374-5; translations, 319, 423-4, 531, 596, 627; early sales, U.S., 323, 330, UK, 339, 353; mass distribution, U.S., 330, 420, 423, UK, 353-5. 373. 379- 382. 384. 392. 417; criticized in British reviews, 384-8, 393; discussed by Marshall, 389-90,
403-4, Toynbee, 390-92, Fawcett, 392-3; ideas condemned by Catholic authority, 487-90; acceptance in New Zealand, 545 Progressive Labor party, 499, 501-2 ‘Proletarian,’ 74, 644 Protection or Free Trade, 427, 552; beginnings, 424, 438; composition and revision, 440, 444; serialization, 448; published, 449, in Congressional Record, 451, 601-3; argument, 449-50; reviewed, 450-51, 666; translated, 451, 531 Public, The, 623-4
Pueblo, see San Francisco, pueblo question
Pullman strike, 606
Purdy, Lawson, 521, 582, 590, 615, 622-3, 625
R
Radical Republicanism, 61, 76-7 Railroads, Calif., 145; Sacramento Union's attitude, 62; SF Times' attitude, 95, 99; HG’s estimations, 102-3. 110-11, 172-3; HG’s Subsidy Question, 146; behind new constitution, 262-3; see also George, Henry: Economic
Thought; Haight, Gov. Henry Rainsford, Rev. W. S., 479 Ralston, Judge Jackson H., 437 Ralston, W. C., 95, 205-6 Rapp, A. H., 161, 165 Record, George L., 630, 632-3 Record and Record-Union, 173, 224; investigation Calif, landholding, 190-92; review P & P, 318 Redpath, James, 463, 485, 492 ‘ “Reduction to Iniquity,” The,’ 408-9, 440
Reeves, William, 380, 384; publishes biography HG, 408 Reid, Whitelaw, 124, 168 Reporter, HG editor, 138-45; see also George, Henry: Economic Thought Republican party, New York City, campaign of 1886, 468-70; campaign of 1897, 613, 616-17 Rerum Novarum, see Condition of Labor; Leo XIII Ricardo, David, 241; used in P & P, 267, 274, 276
Rice, Allen Thorndike, offers journal to HG, 432; HG’s appreciation, 469-70 Rogers, Thorold, 285, 528-g Roosevelt, Theodore, 331, 614, 629-30; Republican nominee 1886, 468; estimate of campaign, 469 Rose, Henry, 664 Ruskin, John, 397
Russell, Charles Edward, 480-81, 669 Russia, HG’s early ideas about, 92, 95, 210; influence in, 597-9 Ryan, Father John A., 577, 676
S
Sacramento, 58, 60, 61; see also Bee; California; George, Henry: Employment and Unemployment, California Editor, Economic Thought; McClatchy, James; Record; Reporter; Union; Stanford, Leland
St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Philadelphia, to, 11-12, 61 g San Francisco, 543-4; HG’s appreciation, 46, 103, 164, 253; pueblo question, 89-g1, 93-5, 103-4, >48. tj2; see also California; George, Henry: Voyages, Employment and Unemployment, California Editor, Conflicts and Protests, While Writing P & P; newspapers and magazines by name Satolli, Professor Francesco, 576, 588 Saunders, William, 379, 380, 410, 411, 419, 523-4. 525 Schevitsch, Serge, 486, 495, 498, 501 Schmoltcr, Gustav, 334 Science of Political Economy, The, 552, 595, 610; yields to other things. 581, 584, 585; intellectual environment of, 582-3; problems of authorship of, 583-
4. 585: contents and omissions, 585-6; criticism, 586-7 Scotland, see George, Henry: In England and Scotland, 1883-4, In Scotland and England, 1884-5; Land Restoration League; names of FIG associates there Seligman, E. R. A., 479. 565-6, 567, 675 Senate Committee on Labor, 1884, 119, 435-6, 665 Seyd, Ernst, 83, 85 ‘Shall the Republic Liver’ 609-10 Shannon, Professor Fred A., 149, 648 Shaw, Francis G., 340. 368, 371, 421; subsidies of P & P, 337, 354-5, 358-D. 420 Shaw, George Bernard, 311, 382, 413;
converted by HG, 376-7 Shearman, Thomas G., 331, 418-19, 450,
521, 559, 600, 609, 621; 'The Single Tax' speech, 518; textbook, 589; guarantor of Standard, 535, 536, 569; differences from HG, 539-41; see also Single tax Sherman, John A., 100 Shubrick, 31, 34; see also George, Henry: Voyages
‘Sic Semper Tyrannisl’ 68-g, 643 Simonton, James W„ 115-17, 218 Simpson, ‘Sockless’ Jerry, 600-601, 604, 605, 607, 622 Sims, William Sowden, 590 Single tax, significant occurrence of phrase, 291, 444, 454, 510, 607; ‘single tax, limited,’ 331, 539-41, 589-90; role in HG’s thought, 508-11, 517-18; clubs, 521; rival political strategies, 521-2; national conferences, 542, 588-9; in twentieth century, 621-2, 625; see also George, Henrv: Single-Tax Leader;
Shearman, Thomas; names of other leaders
Smith, Adam, Wealth of Nations, 45, 194, 195, 267, 450; used in P ir P, 274 Social Darwinism, 425, 578; see also Spencer, Herbert; Stunner, William Graham
Social gospel, 307, 563; see also Newton, Rev. Jdeber Social Problems, 378-9, 407, 552; developed from articles in Leslie’s, 425-6; U.S. publication, 426, 431; ideas, 426-7; translations, 531, 532; see also George, Henry: Economic Ideas in Later Writings Social Science Association, 565-7 Socialism, see Bellamy Nationalism; Fabianism; Gronlund, Laurence; Hyndman, Henry M : Marx, Karl; Marxism; Progressive Labor party; Socialist Labor party; Webb, Sidney; names of other leaders ‘Socialism and Rent Appropriation,’ 412-13, 664
Socialist Labor party, 458, 460, 499; expelled from ULP, 496-8; see also Marxism; Progressive Labor party Spence, Thomas, 357 Spencer, Herbert, 374, 387, 581, 676; HG’s borrowings, 204, 267. 291-2, 298; HG meeting, 357—8; repudiates land nationalization, 388-9; see also A Perplexed Philosopher Spread the Light, a Journal of Social Progress and Tax Reform, 454-5 Spring Valley Water Co., 199-200
Standard, 496, 558-g, 591-2; background, 485-6; HG organ ULP, 486; concentration on McGlynn 1887, 490-91; financial condition, 491, 534-5, 569; on Hay-market justice, 503-4; supports Cleveland, 1888, 515-16; single-tax organ, 518, 521-2; HG, Jr., in charge 1889, 525; institutionalized, 535-6; councils divided, 536-g, and composed by HG, 540; Croasdale in charge 1890-91, 542, 569; HG withdraws, 569; anti-I’opu-lism, 600
Stanford, Leland, 128, 172, 181, 254;
policy as governor, 60-61 State, The, conditions of launching, 258-9; opposed to new constitution, 259-61 Steers, A. J., 321, 325, 437 Steffens, Lincoln, 623, 626-7 Stolfels, Jan, 533, 538 'Study of Political Economy, The,’ 240-43; printed, 320-21, 653 Subsidy Question and the Democratic Party, The, 146, 648 Sullivan, James L., 536-8 Sullivan, Louis, 594
Sumner, William Graham, 420, 450, 567; reviews P ir P, 332; If'hat Social Classes Owe challenges HG, 423, 427 Sun, 116, 321, 330, 336 Sunrise scandal, 202-3, 2*6 Swett, John, 244, 254, 264 Swinton, John, 219, 226, 228, 261, 315,
33°' 438' 456. 46°. 46'. 495. 499’ Glol see also John Swinton’s Paper Swinton, William, 219-20, 312, 326 Symes, J. E., 395, 524
T
Tammany Hall, see Democratic party Taylor, Dr. Edward, 250, 313, 421, 543-4, 584; advises HG on reading, 234; assists writing P & P, 253-4; review, 317 Taylor, Helen, 355, 358, 380, 381, 399-400, 410; in Irish resistance, 347 Taylor, Professor Paul S., 84, 199, 644 Theiss, George, 439-60 Thompson, Robert Ellis, 555 Times, The, London, on HG, 373-4, 397; on The Land Question, 374; review P ir P, 374-5 Times, The New York, 468, 616; review P & P, 322, 657 Times, SF Daily, 105, 108, 109, 113; origins, 75-6; original editorial line, 76-9; HG's editorials, 91-102; see also George, Henry: Economic Thought
Tolstoy, Count Leo, 311, 597-9, 621 Toynbee, Arnold, Oxford economist, 384;
public discussion P & P, 390-92, 662 Tracy, General Benjamin F„ 613, 614, 616-17
Transcript, Oakland Daily, 144; HG editor, 131-7; see also George, Henry; California Editor, Economic Thought Trevelyan, George Otto, 371-2 Tribune, NY, 117, 468, 616; prints HG Chinese letter, 123; HG correspondent for, 124; reviews P & P, 316, 657 Trump, Isaac, 46, 58, 60, 68 Truth, 338-g, 420 Tumulty, Joseph, 631, 633 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 483, 656-7; ideas anticipated by HG, 96, 143, 147, in P & P, 300-301
U
U'Ren, W. S., 627-8, 631 Union, 58, 112, 134, 180, 224, 234; editorial line, 61-2; HG contributions, 74, 75; on Our Land and Land Policy, 159-60; on HG tax program, 190 Union Labor party, 495 United Labor party, ch. xvi; see also, Central Labor Union; George, Henry: In New York City Campaign, United Labor Leader; McGlynn, Father Edward; names of other leaders
V
Vallance, Mary, 5, 32 Van Wyck, Robert A., 613, 616-17 Venezuela boundary dispute, 606-7 Victoria, 39-41
W
Walker, Francis Amasa, 445, 557, 567, 665, 674; writings used in P if P, 267, 272, 274; controversy with HG, 427-9, 431; estimate of P ir P, 429-30 Walker, Thomas, 377, 380, 383, 395, 397, 400, 440, 530-31, 574, 601; objects to single tax, 524, 525, 538, 550; somewhat socialistic objections, 564-5; offers HG subsidy, 570 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 375. 471, 579; endorsement P & P, 339, 359; Land Nationalisation, 360 Wallazz, Ned, 26-7, 107 Warner, John de Witt, 600, 604, 607 Watterson, Henry, 448, 602
Webb, Sidney, 311, 382, 471, 527, 595; estimate of HG influence, 413; warning as to Fabianism, Radicalism, Georgism, 525-6; see also Fabianism Wells, David Ames, 152, 174-5, 325, 450; influences SF Times, 78; on Our Land and Land Policy, 158, 163; author NY tax reports, 183 Werth, J. J., 82
Western Union, deals with SF Herald, 113, 115-16; connection with AP, 115, 118, 173-4; refuses SF Herald, 117; HG’s attack, 118—19; see also George, Henry: Economic Thought, Conflicts and Protests What Cheer House, 43, 45, 62 ’What the Railroad Will Bring Us,' 102-4, 128, 145, 151, 244
White, Horace, 144, 469, 607; on Our Land and Land Policy, 159; on P ir P, 316, review, 323; on HG philosophy, 560
Whitlock, Brand, 594, 626, 634 ‘Why Work Is Scarce, Wages Low, and Labor Restless,' 245-8, 653 Wicksteed, Philip, 380, 391, 392, 397, 406, 662; debt to P & P, 381 Wilson, Woodrow, 630-33 Wren, Walter, 360, 406
Y
Youmans, E. L., 321, 325-6, 327, 579, 580 Young, Professor Arthur N., 317, 650, 652 Young, John Russell, 117, 120, 124-5, '39’ 264, 320, 322-3, 327, 330, 375, 422, 485, 57°. 574
George encouraged Young to start a new paper and join Hasson in fighting the AP. But, though Young did become president of the American Press Association and did plan a new journal, the Standard, he very soon went to Europe on a confidential mission for the government. He returned to journalism, on the staff of the New York Herald, three years later.
P and. P, 216.
P and P, 218.
While Tom Johnson Led: Fiscal and Political Georgism. On Fillebrown in Boston, see Young, Single Tax Movement, 105-6, 160-62, 244-6, 265-76, and passim; his writings are listed in Sawyer, Henry George and the Single Tax, 30-31, 58-9. On Purdy’s New York career and thought, see American Journal of Economics and Sociology, October 1917 issue dedicated to him. Concerning The Public in Chicago, I drew .from letters in the Post Collet tion, LC: Post to W. J. Bryan, 13 June igoo, 26 December 1906. 13 July 1908; to Charles Bryan, 18 July 1911. Bryan on HG, in ‘Equal Opportunity and Moral Truth,’ The Public, 7:702-4. Concerning Johnson, beyond My Story, the need for a biography is supplied only in miniature by Newton D. Baker's article in Dictionary of American Biography, x (1933), 124-5; sec n^so Autobiography of