George, Henry (1839–97)

HENRY GEORGE WAS BORN in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dropping out of school in seventh grade, he worked as a cabin boy and sailed around the world. Halfway through his second trip, he settled in San Francisco, California, and became a journeyman printer. The city was transforming from a tent encampment to an emerging metropolis before his eyes. But in the midst of the city's wealth and beauty, George also saw poverty and misery. In his leisure hours he wrote an essay that eventually became the book for which he is best remembered: Progress and Poverty, his attempt to explain the simultaneous emergence of wealth and pauperism in [Page 424]modern industrial society. Because he was unknown, George had to typeset and print the book, with the help of sympathetic friends. This original edition was eventually “discovered” and published by D. Appleton & Company in New York. An edition in England created a sensation in literate circles.

The English scientist and writer Alfred Russel Wallace declared it “the most remarkable and important book of the present century.” George was soon an international figure. Leo Tolstoy, John Dewey, and Bernard Shaw were among the multitude of George's admirers. Said Dewey, “Henry George is one of a small number of definitely original social philosophers that the world has produced. It would require less than the fingers of the two hands to enumerate those who, from Plato down, rank with Henry George among the world's social philosophers.”

After meeting Irish radical Michael Davitt in New York in 1879, and hearing of widespread peasant evictions in Ireland, George applied his theories to the Emerald Isle. Shortly thereafter he began lecturing on behalf of the Irish Land League in New England and Canada, and ultimately visited Ireland to wide acclaim. George made six lecture tours of Europe, where his ideas were more enthusiastically embraced than in the United States. In 1886 George honored the appeal of numerous labor groups and ran, unsuccessfully, for mayor of New York City. He spent the rest of his life arguing for social reform.

Labor, George argued, was the only real source of wealth in the world. With the wild land speculation in the American west, however, landowners reaped huge profits simply by holding on to land as the populations around them increased. Meanwhile, those who owned no land saw almost all their living expenses rise as a result. To combat this unhealthy social and economic bifurcation, George proposed a property tax that would confiscate the landowners’ “unearned increment”—any increase in value that did not arise from improvements made directly by the owner.

Since the value of the land was created by society and not by the landowner, society should reap the benefit. This 100 percent tax on the increased value of land, which George's followers began to call the “single tax,” would bring in so much capital, he argued, that all other taxes would be unnecessary.

The collected fees could be used to equalize wealth, raise revenue to aid the poor, and stabilize society through the creation of excellent schools, museums, theaters, and other social and cultural institutions. “Ignorance and vice, the recklessness and immorality engendered by the inequality in the distribution of wealth,” would be replaced by an “increase in wages, and the opening of new avenues of employment which would result from the appropriation of rent to public purposes,” as phrased in Progress and Poverty. As Fred Nicklason has ably demonstrated, George's vision was not simply economic but also religious in nature. George fiercely believed that “man's errors, not God's providence, caused poverty.” The right to tax land, he believed, was “natural and cannot be alienated. It is the free gift of his Creator to every man who comes into the world—a right as sacred, as indefeasible as his right to life itself.” Though the single tax was never adopted by any government, it influenced progressive tax policy in the United States, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand; inspired a large number of local and state politicians; and influenced a generation of investigative reporters, including Benjamin Flower, Ida Tarbell, Charles Edward Russell, Lincoln Steffens, and Upton Sinclair.

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