Great Reformers: Henry George

Henry Geiger

[Reprinted from MANAS, Vol. II, No. 27, 6 July, 1949]

IF, in 1949, a man like Henry George could run for Mayor in a large metropolis in the United States - as George did in New York in 1886 - and if he could nearly be elected - as George was - there would be reason for considerable hopefulness about the future of the United States as a political and social community. For George was one of America's great men, and in 1886 large numbers of Americans were able to recognize him as such. Not enough, perhaps, to place him in office, nor to institute the fundamental reforms in land policy which he advocated, but enough to make of his name a byword in the history of social thinking, and enough for his influence to filter into scores of legislative programs and by this and other means to leaven somewhat the evils of monopoly and the grasping acquisitiveness against which he contended throughout his life.

George was one of the last of the great idealists of the nineteenth century. Without any academic training to attenuate his humanity, he regarded ethics and economics as inseparable. During his lifetime, the professional economists were developing the theory that economics, as an "objective" science, could take no account of ethical values, but George was untouched by this alienation of science from life. He was a man before he was an economist, and economics, for his purposes, was nothing more than a field for the achievement of human justice. His ardor in cultivating this field caused another eminent American, John Dewey, to say:

It is the thorough fusion of insight into actual facts and forces, with recognition of their bearing upon what makes human life worth living, that constitutes Henry George one of the world's great social philosophers.

George began with an ethical principle - that the earth and its riches of land belong to no one man, but to all. An industrious man may create wealth by using the resources of the land, but in this case the value arises from the labor, and not from the earth. In George's words:

Land in itself has no value. Value arises only from human labor. It is not until the ownership of the land becomes equivalent to the ownership of laborers that any value attaches to it. And where land has a speculative value it is because of the expectation that the growth of society will in the future make its ownership equivalent to the ownership of laborers.

How did George arrive at this idea? Not from reading books, but from personal experience of the economic processes that were becoming dominant in the United States.

Henry George was born in Philadelphia in 1839, the second of ten children of an unsuccessful publisher of religious books. By the time he was fourteen years old, he was working for a living. He went to sea for a while, then learned the printer's trade and set type in Philadelphia at a weekly wage of two dollars. Restless and dissatisfied, he sailed for San Francisco in 1859. Finding no work there, he attempted gold mining, but soon returned to San Francisco, without money and in debt. He went back to printing, but found no steady job. In 1861-he was then twenty-two years old - he married Annie Corsina Fox, an Australian girl, who soon presented him with a son. He was employed in Sacramento as a printer until 1864, when, losing his job, he returned with his small family to San Francisco. Now the anguish of poverty began in earnest, for George could find no work. Of this period, he later said that he was so poor that a job of printing a few cards, enabling him to buy some corn meal for his family, saved them from starvation, On the day his second child, Richard, was born, George stopped a well-dressed stranger on the streets of San Francisco and abruptly asked for five dollars. Asked what it was for, George said, "My wife has just been confined and I have nothing to give her to eat." The man gave him the money without further question. George said years later, "If he had not, I think I was desperate enough to have killed him."

As soon as Richard had been delivered, the doctor ordered, "Don't stop to wash the child," and, indicating George's wife, said, "She is starving. Feed her!" It was after this that George set out to look for money, and met the well-dressed stranger.

George's diary shows the black mood that pervaded these days. On one occasion, he set down, "I have been unsuccessful in everything." Again, "Am in very desperate plight. Courage." After months, some typesetting work came his way. Determined to find other ways of making a living, he practiced writing. In a self-analytical essay he sent to his mother, he wrote:

It is evident to me that I have not employed the time and means at my command faithfully and advantageously as I might have done, and consequently that I have myself to blame for at least a part of my non-success. And this being true of the past, in the future like results will flow from like causes.

Driving himself to work at writing in his spare time, George began submitting his articles to newspapers and periodicals. The Californian, which regularly published Bret Harte and Mark Twain, printed George's sketch, "A Plea for the Supernatural." While working as a printer, he wrote more and more. Noah Brooks, editor of the San Francisco Times, often ran editorials written by the young man who set type in the composing room of the paper. After seven months of these efforts, he was made managing editor of the Times. In this period, George's thinking moved rapidly toward maturity. He contributed to the Overland Monthly an article, "What the Railroads Wilt Bring Us," which anticipated some of the themes that were to appear, a decade later, in his great book, Progress and Poverty. Already, he had recognized that material progress might have other effects than increasing the general welfare. He saw the power of the railroad as a land monopoly and as an instrument for graft and corruption, and wrote:

The completion of the railroad and the consequent great increase of business and population, will not be a benefit to all of us, but only to a portion.... Those who have lands, mines, established business, special abilities of certain kinds, will become richer for it and find increased opportunities; those who have only their own labor will become poorer, and find it harder to get ahead-first because it will take more capital to buy land or get into business; and second, as competition reduces the wages of labor, this capital will be harder for them to obtain.

George was now an established journalist, but a man who could hardly stay with one paper for very long. He believed too much in speaking and writing the truth as he saw it. From the Times he went to the Chronicle, where differences with the publisher soon set him at liberty again. The revived San Francisco Herald sent him East to contract for the Associated Press service, and on this mission George experienced the tactics of monopoly in the newspaper business. When the Associated Press refused its service to the Herald, George opened an office in Philadelphia and began pouring news over the wires to his paper in San Francisco. Disliking this competition, the Associated Press induced the Western Union Telegraph Company to raise its rates for Herald messages while lowering the AP rates. George went back to San Francisco, but not until he had written a slashing expose of the methods of the AP and Western Union. Among Eastern newspapers, only the New York Herald printed his article.

It was during this stay in the industrially developed East, when George was hardly thirty years old, that the young newspaper man saw the stark contrast between fabulous luxury and grinding want, side by side. In him was born a determination that made everything in human life except the fight against injustice seem petty and unimportant. His own description of this hour was published after his death:

... I shall say something I don't like to speak of - that I never before have told to any one. Once - , in daylight, and in a city street [probably New York], there came to me a thought, a vision, a call - give it any 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 I have been true. It was that that impelled me to writeProgress and Poverty and that sustained me when else I should have failed. …That is a feeling that has never left me; that is constantly with me. And it has led me up and up. It has made me a better and a purer man. It has been to me a religion, strong and deep, though vague - a religion of which I never like to speak or make any outward manifestation, but yet that I try to follow. ...

George went back to San Francisco to fight for the common rights of the common man. He began by joining with Henry H. Haight, Governor of California, against the landed might of the Central Pacific Railroad-against the policies of Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins and Colis P. Huntington. George edited the Oakland Transcript, which supported Haight, and the latter ran for re-election on an anti-railroad platform. The railroad bought the Transcript, tried to buy George, and failing, fired him; and it bought enough votes to defeat Haight. But George had his say. In a pamphlet condemning the grants of the vast areas to the Central Pacific under the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, he declared:

The largest landowners in California are probably the members of the great Central-Southern Pacific Railroad Corporation. Were the company land divided, it would give them something like two million acres apiece; and in addition to their company land, most of the individual members own considerable tracts in their own name.

In this pamphlet, Our Land and Land Policy, George developed the thesis that was later to become world-famous in Progress and Poverty. He showed that land obtains its value from society-it is the presence of people on the land which makes it valuable. Land, therefore, is social wealth, which should belong to the people to whom its value is owed. Rent for land, therefore, should belong to the entire community - it should be, in short, a tax; and George maintained that this "Single Tax," or land rent, would be sufficient to cover the costs of government. He argued:

The value of land is something which belongs to all, and in taxing land values we are merely taking for the use of the community something which belongs to the community. …In speaking of the value of the land, I mean the value of the land itself, not the value of any improvement which has been raised upon it. ...

The mere holder of land would be called upon to pay just as much taxes as the user of the land. The owner of a vacant city lot would have to pay as much for the privilege of keeping other people off it till he wanted to use it, as his neighbor who had a fine house upon his lot, and is either using it or deriving rent from it. The monopolizer of agricultural land would be taxed as much as though his land were covered with improvements, with crops and stock.

Land prices would fall; land-speculation would receive its death-blow; land monopolization would no longer pay. …The whole weight of taxation would be lifted from productive industry. The million dollar manufactory, and the needle of the seamstress, the mechanic's cottage and the grand hotel, the farmer's plough, and the ocean steamship, would be alike untaxed.

Imagine this country with all taxes removed from production and exchange! How demand would spring up; how trade would increase; what a powerful stimulus would be applied to every branch of industry; what enormous development of wealth would take place. …Would there be many industrious men walking our streets, or tramping over our roads in the vain search for employment. . . ? Go to New York . . . the best example of a condition to which the whole country is tending. …Where a hundred thousand men who ought to be at work are looking for employment ... where poverty festers and vice breeds, and the man from the free open West turns sick at heart ... and you will understand how it is that the crucial test of our institutions is yet to come.

The problem that tormented George throughout his early years was this:

Where the conditions to which material progress everywhere tends are most fully realized - that is to say, where population is densest, wealth greatest, and the machinery of production and exchange most highly developed - we find the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most enforced idleness.

Thrusting aside the usual pessimistic explanations of this condition as a necessary result of "natural" economic law, George asserted that man, as an intelligent being, ought to be able to create a social system under which the natural increase of population would make everyone richer instead of poorer. The key to natural prosperity he found in the idea of equality, and equality he saw in a just land policy. During the Transcript days and his campaign for Haight, "he was riding a mustang in the hills near Oakland and happened to ask a teamster what the land there was worth. The teamster pointed to a distant area and said, "There is a man over there who will sell some land for a thousand dollars an acre." Reflecting, George reasoned that the owner had done nothing to augment the value of the land, which was no more fertile than similar land, elsewhere, selling at a few dollars an acre. The land near Oakland would bring this price because people had settled in Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco. This unearned gain, he reasoned, "belongs in usufruct to all." This realization became for George "one of those experiences that make those who have them feel thereafter that they can vaguely appreciate what mystics and poets have called the 'ecstatic vision'."

The fortunes of the Single Tax movement and the story of George's later career may be looked up in any one of a half dozen volumes. One excellent account is that by Charles A. Madison in Critics and Crusaders (Henry Holt, 1947). A detailed biography by Anna George De Mille, George's daughter, has appeared in serial form in the Georgist quarterly, the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, starting with the April, 1942, issue. Such writers have told the story of his world-wide influence, his analysis of the Irish land question, his trips to England, where he met with immediate popularity, and his adventures in New York politics. As to politics, however, it should be recognized that in 1886 George accepted the nomination of the united labor unions in New York, not through any great eagerness to hold office, but because he believed in applying his ideas to current problems and because he felt that the campaign would have great educational value. George secured a large vote in the election, and some have claimed that he might have won if Tammany Hall had not deposited a large number of his ballots in the East River. In 1897, he allowed himself to be persuaded to run for Mayor again, this time after being warned by his physician that the excitement would kill him. Characteristically, he replied: "How could I do better than die serving humanity? Besides, so dying will do more for the cause than anything I am likely to be able to do in the rest of my life." It did kill him, for he died five days after the election.

Two passages from George's writings are especially pertinent today. Calling land reform "the greatest of social revolutions," he insisted that material progress demands a corresponding advance in moral standards:

Civilization, as it progresses, requires a higher conscience, a keener sense of justice, a warmer brotherhood, a wider, loftier, truer public spirit. Failing these, civilization must pass into destruction.... For civilization knits men more and more closely together, and constantly tends to subordinate the individual to the whole, and to make more and more important social conditions.

This insight now has verification in every part of the world. Of socialism, George wrote:

All schemes for securing equality in the conditions of men by placing the distribution of wealth in the hands of government have the fatal defect of beginning at the wrong end. They presuppose pure government; but it is not government that makes society; it is society that makes government; and until there is something like substantial equality in the distribution of wealth, we cannot expect pure government.

George, in other words, believed in equality and freedom, and he thought he saw the way to get both. Perhaps he did. Of his ideas, Madison's estimate seems just:

His system of political economy is, for all its flaws and "unscientific" emphasis, an original and positive formulation of a body or principles which has been condemned as a whole or in part by a number of the keenest academic minds but invalidated by none. And while the remedy of the single tax has failed to make its impress upon society, the philosophy underlying it has withstood the attacks of the acutest critics.

We, at least, are persuaded that a society of men animated by George's love of justice would have little difficulty in making his economic system work. And George, we think, began at the right end of the problem, which is more than his critics are doing, or have done.