George, Henry

GEORGE, HENRY (1839–1897). Economist, reformer, and political candidate, Henry George gained an international following in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Although he wrote a number of well-received studies, his fame rests almost entirely on one book, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Causes of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth, published in 1879.

Raised in a middle-class and deeply religious atmosphere in Philadelphia (his father was a vestryman who published religious books for the Episcopal Church), George was a disinterested student but an avid reader and frequent attendee at Franklin Institute lecturers, continuing his self-education well after leaving school at the age of thirteen. After working at a series of jobs and spending fourteen months as a foremast boy on a ship sailing to Australia and India, he returned to Philadelphia where he apprenticed as a typesetter. Fired from his apprenticeship in 1857, he found employment on shipboard again and by the late 1850s was in San Francisco. Though he struggled with poverty for a number of years, George eventually became printer and a writer for a number of newspapers, most importantly the San Francisco Times, where he rose to position of managing editor.

In 1868 George traveled to New York, where he experienced what he later described as an epiphany as he observed the chaos that resulted from the city’s technological achievements and vast wealth sitting alongside the crushing poverty of many of its working-class residents. But George’s sympathies for the poor were sharply constrained by his racial attitudes: indeed, he gained national attention for his 1869 New York Tribune article, “The Chinese on the Pacific Coast,” an explicitly racist denunciation of Chinese migrants as inferior, unassimilable, and a threat to white workers’ wages. Though George would eventually discard some of his most extreme anti-Chinese views, this article made him a leading light in California politics when he returned to San Francisco later that year.

In an 1871 pamphlet entitled Our Land and Land Policy, George argued that society had made a fundamental error in treating land as private property, but it took him another eight years to develop his ideas fully in Progress and Poverty. That book’s title captured the contrast between rapid technological growth—and associated profit for some—and the increased poverty for many that these changes also brought. George argued that working the land is a natural right and that landlords’ rents violate economic law and block, or inhibit, general community prosperity. Offering many examples drawn from his experiences in California and New York, George proposed a government tax upon land equal in value to its rent price. This tax would replace all other taxes. As a “single tax” it would fund regular government operations as well as prevent land speculation, allow the free operation of economic laws and a more equal distribution of wealth, and generate surplus revenue for funding public projects and activities. This idea of a single tax became the foundation of George’s writing in later years, a departure point for probing and expanding its implications for human conduct. Progress and Poverty was a dense work of political economy, more than five hundred pages in length. Yet it resonated with and helped shaped an antimonopoly ethos that was a key feature of the Gilded Age, and it ended up as one of nineteenth-century America’s most popular works, with only the Bible and Uncle Tom’s Cabin selling more copies.

An important dimension of George’s prominence was his connection to the Irish land struggle, which emerged with force in 1879, the year that Progress and Poverty was published. As rural Ireland exploded with rent boycotts and mass meetings, an organization called the Irish National Land League, led Michael Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell, demanded “the land for the people.” In 1881 George was dispatched to Ireland by Patrick Ford, editor of the New York-based weekly, the Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, to cover these events and he did so brilliantly, detailing for American readers the brutal repression of the movement and drawing connections between desperate conditions in Ireland and the United States, both shaped in George’s view by the private ownership of land. His growing international prominence led to a number of speaking tours in the 1880s and early 1890s, to Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand.

Combined with the growing popularity of Progress and Poverty, George’s Irish reporting also made him a hero to many American workers of Irish birth or descent, especially in New York City, where he was embraced by the Central Labor Union (CLU), formed in 1882 and soon the most important local labor body in the country. In 1886, a year marked by numerous strikes and boycotts, anti-labor repression, and an eruption of independent political activism in many locales, the CLU tapped George as its candidate for mayor. Considering that most of the city’s newspapers and business people opposed him, as did the Roman Catholic hierarchy, George did surprisingly well: he lost to the railroad magnate and Democratic Party nominee Abram Hewitt by 20,000 votes, but he ran 8,000 votes ahead of future president Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican Party candidate.

George’s base of support was diverse: some business people, for example, gravitated to his call for shifting the burden of taxation to land and his opposition to tariffs. On the other hand, New York’s Anti-Poverty Society, founded in 1887 by the maverick Catholic priest, Father Edward McGlynn, saw George’s ideas as the basis for a vigorous social gospel. Meanwhile, the Socialist Labor Party, which had supported his 1886 campaign for mayor, grew increasingly critical of him the following year, when he ran unsuccessfully for New York’s secretary of state on the Union Labor Party ticket. In the years that followed, socialists often found themselves attracted to George’s sweeping critique of the inequities in American society, while rejecting his remedy of a single tax on land.

Though suffering a stroke in 1890, George continued to write and at the time of his death in 1897 was working on what he hoped would be his magnum opus, The Science of Political Economy, though it remained unfinished. He also continued to be politically active, supporting William Jennings Bryan’s campaign for president in 1896 and, on the eve of his death, accepting a nomination by disaffected Democrats to run once again for mayor of New York. More than 100,000 mourners filed past his casket, viewed the funeral cortege on its way to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, or heard Father McGlynn’s moving remembrance. George’s ideas had appeal to highly diverse audiences, from Irish rural laborers to American trade unionists and from social gospel advocates to business people seeking to shift the burden of taxation to real estate. His trenchant critique of the social inequality that accompanied technological progress continued to resonate among a wide range of reformers long after his death.

George, Henry, Jr. The Life of Henry George. New York: Doubleday and McClure, 1900.

O’Donnell, Edward T. Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

Thomas, John L. Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Adversary Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Books by or about Henry George. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/search.php?query=%28+%28%22Henry+George%22+OR+%22George%2C+Henry%22%29+AND+1839+%29