Single Taxers and Political Parties

Henry George

[Reprinted from The Standard, 4 February,1888]

VINCENNES, lnd. , Jan. 25,1888.

My Dear Mr. George - I hand you a private letter I received to-day from our mutual friend Bailey. I do this because it gives voice to My own ideas on the situation. Why should you abandon the leadership of the grand army of volunteers that at your call have come to the front in every state in the Union? Why disband now? Mr. Cleveland may or may not be sincere in his cry for tariff reform. One thing is certain. His party will not do his bidding if he is. And be knew it when he wrote his message.

When you write an article in favor of a single tax on relative land values every man in your party cries "Amen." Why not keep in front? You discovered and promulgated this plan of salvation for the sons of men from temporal suffering. Why should you turn aside now and let others catch up the battle cry and claim the victory for themselves when it does come? The eyes of the world are upon you. Now it is being said that you are making a deal with the democratic party.

As one of your admirers and supporters let me earnestly admonish you to avoid even the appearance of evil.

Keep at the head of the column and keep moving. You have done enough now to leave your impress upon the history of the world. Do not dim the luster of your record by turning aside or halting, simply because a politician who happens to be president called attention to himself by writing a message that had some truth recited in it. Please take no offense at what I write, but I am in earnest and so are my neighbors.

Yours, S. W. WILLIAMS.

In the letter inclosed, Warrep Worth Bailey says:

"I never was more worried in my life than I am by the attitude of Mr. George just now . . . Our friends here are hot about his position, and it is doing the cause terrible harm, if I am any judge. At any rate, it is giving republicans a chance to charge us with a sell out to the democrats, and is making our best workers throw up their hands in sheer disgust. For my part , I can find no excuse for hesitancy, or for turning back. As you say, what we want is a platform with a land plank. If somebody else wants one with a liquor plank or a tariff plank, let them make one. That's not our business. And what could we gain by joining Cleveland in his hue and cry for lower taxes? Not a single thing that I can see. We would certainly lose our identity and our force, falling back into mere disorganized helplessness, self-conscious of the moral rottenness of the very cause to which we had made our sacrifice."

Both these gentlemen are men whom I know to be friends of the cause and friends of mine , and so far from taking offense at their frankness I welcome it as giving me opportunity to come to a better understanding not only with them, but with others who may share their feelings. Let us consider the matter.

What is it that Messrs. Williams and Bailey would really have me do? Is it not to halt instead of to keep moving - to be content with advocating the application of the single tax principle to state taxation and to refuse to advocate its application to national taxation? Is it not really to tell men that they must not go near the water until they have learned to swim? What is it that they would have me lead so gallantly in national politics? - a body of men united as to what they want in national politics? or a body of men so divided on what this year is likely to be the main issue in national politics, that in order to hold them together we must, Messrs. Williams and Bailey assume, enter national politics on what are really state issues?

As to the running of a single tax party in a national campaign without taking any ground upon the subject of national taxation, I have already fully expressed my opinion. The abandonment of the clear line of principle which it would involve was admirably pointed out by Thomas G. Shearman in the last issue of THE STANDARD. Our movement is, primarily at least, an abolition movement, and for us to refuse to take any part in an effort to abolish or reduce tariff taxes, would be to refuse to take what in a national campaign is the most obvious and the most important step on the road that must be traveled before we can reach our goal. If there are some of our friends who do not see this - if there are some of our friends who have as yet so far failed to see the harmony and beauty of the single tax principle, and are still so far under the dominion of the notion that the conditions of labor can be improved by benevolence or protection, that they want to continue our monstrous national tariff taxes until we have applied our principles to state taxation - I have no quarrel with them. I am perfectly willing to agree to disagree with them in the national field, and to work with them in the field of state politics. And I shall wish them Godspeed whenever and wherever they try to advance any part of our principles. But when there is opportunity to go further I cannot consent to lag behind with them. To refuse to lend what aid I might to the free trade side of a national contest on the tariff question would be, for me, a cowardly surrender of vital principle and a stultification of all I have said and written upon the subject since I began to think clearly on economic questions. I speak only for myself and with no imputation upon others who may see these matters differently; but for me, no consideration of policy could justify such a sacrifice of principle.

Nor, even from this standpoint, can I see the policy of such a course. If our party cannot in a national campaign take ground upon the tariff question without provoking a division in its ranks that would prove fatal to any hope of our polling the votes of the men who are agreed upon the application of our principle in the domain of state taxation, it is to my mind certain that in a national campaign in which the two great parties were struggling over the tariff question we could not possibly hold the votes of such men by ignoring the tariff question. The very fact that they feel strongly enough upon the matter to divide upon the question of expressing an opinion in a platform, is proof that their feelings would be strong enough to impel them to vote with one or the other of the two great parties in a national election in which the tariff question was clearly in issue. Knowing that one or the other of the two great parties must win the election, they would be irresistibly drawn into this contest, if not by the desire to secure success to one, at least by fear of the success of the other.

Any calculation of policy which ignores the element of perspective in human vision and the element of combativeness in human nature is certain to be a reckoning without one's host. What men are asked to "stand up and be counted" for, may be in itself something they will freely admit to be very much larger than the issue on which their votes can practically tell. But the one is remote; the other immediate. The one cannot be settled till some future time; the other must be settled now. Whether it ought to be so or not, the fact remains that our mental perceptions are subject to the law that may make a chimney pot obscure a mountain. And even if they have only the smallest inclination in favor of one of the dogs, and in most cases even without any previous inclination, men will take sides in any vigorous dog fight of which they are made spectators. Now, then, can we expect them to remain unmoved when all around them shall be raging a most exciting national contest over such a question as the tariff? In the event of such a campaign as is now probable, is it not certain that many of our friends who in February feel perfectly willing to "stand u p and be counted" will in November feel that to "stand up and be counted" would be to "throw away " their votes?

Here, in short, is the situation: Every day as it passes makes it more and more clear that the tariff question will be the great issue in the coming presidential election. There are many of us who would not consent to go into this election as a separate party organization without taking a definite stand for free trade. There are many others who would certainly abandon the party if such a stand were taken. If, therefore, we try to make a national platform and a presidential nomination we shall certainly split.

Why then should we make the attempt? If we could not poll our whole strength, our appearance as a third party in national politics would not help the cause by giving evidence of its progress, but would tend to hide that progress and enable people to say, "See how little these single tax agitators amount to." It may be said that we should preserve our organization. But we have not as yet any organization that is worth talking about in a national campaign, and such political and semi-political organization as we have would, it seems to me, be in better condition for future work if we kept out of the presidential campaign than if we went into it at the cost of serious defection, and then polled only a miserably small vote.

Mr. Williams says I am charged with making a deal with the democratic party, and Mr. Bailey that I am giving the republicans a chance to charge us with a sell-out to the democrats. Now, neither Mr. Williams, Mr. Bailey, nor anyone else, can imagine that I have any idea of proposing that the united labor party shall indorse Mr. Cleveland. The basis of these charges is that I do not take kindly to the scheme of ignoring the tariff question and running a presidential ticket any how. Messrs. Williams and Bailey can scarcely have considered what this involves. If it be assumed that our not running a ticket will be to the advantage of the democrats, it must also be assumed that our running a ticket will be to the advantage of the republicans. If, then, our refusal to run a ticket is to give rise to charges that we have sold out to the democrats. how much more certain is it that , if we do run a ticket , we will be charged with having been paid by the republicans to do so, and thus in the eyes of those who at other times might be disposed to act with us, be placed in the same contemptible position in which the Butler campaign landed the greenback labor party, that of being a mere jackal and cats paw for the republicans. Shall we not be in a much better condition to organize for future action if we take no hand in the presidential campaign and leave each individual free to do in it what he pleases, than if we come out of the presidential campaign, not only with ranks split and depleted, but with a stigma resting upon us that will effectually prevent our gaining recruits?

The trouble with Messrs. Williams and Bailey and our Chicago friends who are described as so "hot" about my position, is that they confuse the party with the principle, even if they do not indeed set party above principle. For my part I care little or nothing for party, for I regard parties not as ends but as means. I am not a political leader; and I do not aspire to be a political leader, not only for the reason that politics are not to my taste, but that I aspire to something much higher, a leadership of thought. I accepted the nomination for mayor of New York, not because I wanted either the place or the candidacy, but because, under then existing circumstances, that was the best way in which I could propagate principle and advance thought. I accepted a state nomination in the following year, because it still seemed that I could in that way do some good. But the abandonment of political leadership, or the finding myself without a party, has no terrors for me. It would not end my usefulness to the cause, nor would it end the usefulness of any man who really wants to advance a principle rather than build a political organization. For what we have to do to advance the principle of equal rights, is not so much to get men to vote as to get them to think. If we get men to vote with us who have not learned to think with us, our real gain is merely in the advertisement that such votes may give our principles. On the men themselves we cannot rely. But when we get a man to think with us, then we may be certain, not only that when the time comes to carry our principles into effect he will be found voting with us, but that he will bring others with him. In the one case we gain a vote for one election that is almost certain to leave us at the next. In the other we gain a life- long missionary.

No men better know than do Messrs. Bailey and Williams that there are other ways of arousing thought than by nominating candidates and conducting campaigns, for they both have worked with tongue and pen to propagate the principle of equal rights to land before there was any prospect of bringing that principle into politics. They, however, doubtless think that to get a principle into political discussion is the quickest way to get men to think about it. In this they are quite right. There is no way of so thoroughly arousing public attention to any principle as to bring it into politics, and because the interest excited by our national politics is wider and deeper than the interest excited by state politics, there is in the United States no way of promoting public education on any question that can be compared with that of bringing it into the issue of a national campaign.

But to bring a principle into politics, and especially into national politics, something more is necessary than to hold a convention and to nominate a candidate. The woman suffragists have been holding conventions and nominating presidential candidates for some time, but nobody hears of them during a presidential campaign. Besides the convention and the candidate, it is necessary that there should be some show of strength, some hope of success. Do our friends who insist so strenuously upon our entering national politics, upon the basis of ignoring a question which every one else will be talking about, suppose that we could do so with such a show of strength and hope of success that anybody would really think us seriously in politics? Instead of finding "the eyes of the world upon us," would we not, save in a few close states, where some interest might attach to us from the speculation as to how much we might help one of the two great parties to beat the other, be much more likely to discover that no one knew of our running? It seems clear to me that no useful purpose can be served by going into national politics under conditions that would not permit us to poll our strength, but that on the contrary the part of wisdom is that we should keep out of national politics until we can do so. And lest some of the people to whom Messrs. Williams and Bailey allude may see in this but an evidence that I have been "making a deal with the democratic party," it may be worth while to recall the fact that I asserted the same principle in the letter declaring the conditions on which I would accept the nomination of the associated labor organizations for mayor of New York in 1880, and, because "another failure would hurt the very cause we wish to help," refused to take that nomination unless 30,000 men would pledge themselves to vote for me.

But to bring a principle into politics it is not always necessary to start a new party. And what I particularly wish to point out to Messrs. Williams and Bailey is, that what makes it peculiarly difficult for the united labor party to go into national politics this year is the very thing which makes such action needless. It is, that our principles are already coming into politics.

In our recent campaign in this state it was my hope and expectation that we would poll such a large vote as, by giving us the prestige of great and rapid growth, and by showing that the Democratic party was hopelessly beaten in the state of New York unless it took up economic questions, would lead to a virtual reconstruction of parties, and enable us to enter the national campaign for a clear cut fight against protection-and I, for one, never thought of entering it in any other way. As the returns began to come in on the evening of election, and I realized how much less our vote was than I had hoped for, I was bitterly disappointed, but only for a few minutes. I felt as though a land slide had made impossible the road that I had hoped to travel. But hardly had I realized this, than my faith reasserted itself in the conviction that in some way I could not then see, other roads would be opened. And the speech of hope and cheer in which I expressed that faith to the audience in Webster hall that night was not forced-I felt it. Now, it seems to me that in the coming of the tariff question into national politics what I said that night is being justified.

I do not think so meanly of men as to imagine that Mr. Cleveland is not sincere in his "cry for tariff reform," especially since all the worst elements in his party are now combining to defeat, if they can, his nomination because of it. But whether sincere or not, it is enough that he raises the cry. What may be his motives makes no more practical difference to me than the color of his eyes or the size of his shirt collar.

Nor yet do I think that the political campaign on the tariff question which it now seems certain we are to have this year, will be any the less useful because the free trade side of it is likely to be in form merely a timid proposition for a little tariff reduction, instead of a demand for the sweeping away of the whole monstrous system of robbery and demoralization. If I had had the writing of Mr. Cleveland's message I would hardly have had him go further than he did. For Mr. Cleveland is not a propagandist; he is a practical politician. And in practical politics it is not only enough to start in the right direction; it is often best not to go at first too far. Propagandist politics are one thing; practical politics are another. If we were to-day organizing a national party with which we could only hope to promote thought by making a demonstration, I would wish to proclaim the doctrine of absolute free trade; but if there were an opportunity to enter practical politics and really struggle for mastery, I should think it wise to minimize the propositions of the party to the smallest demand that would really involve the principle.

And lest all this may seem to give color to the charges of my having made a deal with democrats to which Messrs. Williams and Bailey refer, it may be well to say that it is but a repetition of what I have said again and again to friends on both sides of the Atlantic when talking of the future of our movement and the policy that should govern it; and it may be well also to quote what I wrote on the subject before I had been called on to take part in a political movement . I quote from that chapter of Protection or Free Trade? entitled, "Practical Politics:" [begin exerpt]:

The working-class of the United States, who have constituted the voting strength of protection, are now ready for a movement that will appeal to them on behalf of real free trade. For some years past educative agencies have been at work among them that have sapped their faith in protection. If they have not learned that protection cannot help them, they have at least become widely conscious that protection does not help them. They have been awakening to the fact that there is some deep wrong in the constitution of society, although they may not see clearly what that wrong is; they have been gradually coming to feel that to emancipate labor radical measures are needed, although they may not know what those measures are. And scattered through the great body thus beginning to stir and grope are a rapidly increasing number of men who do know what this primary wrong is-men who see that in the recognition of the equal right of all to the element necessary to life and labor is the hope, and the only hope, of curing social injustice.

It is to men of this kind that I would particularly speak. They are the leaven which has in it power to leaven the whole lump. To abolish private property in land is an undertaking so great that it may at first seem impracticable. But this seeming impracticability consists merely in the fact that the public mind is not yet sufficiently awakened to the justice and necessity of this great change. To bring it about is simply a work of arousing thought. How men vote is something we need not much concern ourselves with. The important thing is how they think. Now the chief agency in promoting thought is discussion. And to secure the most general and most effective discussion of a principle it must be embodied in concrete form and presented in practical politics, so that men, being called to vote on it, shall be forced to think and talk about it. The advocates of a great principle should know no thought of compromise. They should proclaim it in its fullness, and point to its complete attainment as their goal. But the zeal of the propagandist needs to be supplemented by the skill of the politician. While the one need not fear to arouse opposition, the other should seek to minimize resistance. The political art, like the military art, consists in massing the greatest force against the point of least resistance; 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 excite the least resistance. For whether the first step be long or short is of little consequence. When a start is once made in a right direction, progress is a mere matter of keeping on. It is in this way that great questions always enter the phase of political action. Important political battles begin with affairs of outposts, in themselves of little moment, and are generally decided upon issue joined not on the main question, but on some minor or collateral question. Thus the slavery question in the United States came into practical politics upon the issue of the extension of slavery to new territory, and was decisively settled upon the issue of secession. Regarded as an end, the abolitionist might well have looked with contempt on the proposals of the Republicans, but these proposals were the means of bringing to realization what the abolitionists would in vain have sought to accomplish directly.

So with the tariff question. Whether we have a protective tariff or a revenue tariff is in itself of small importance, for, though the abolition of protection would increase production, the tendency to unequal distribution would be unaffected and would soon neutralize the gain. Yet, what is thus unimportant as an end, is all-important as a means. Protection is a little robber, it is true; but it is the sentinel and outpost of the great robber-the little robber who cannot be routed without carrying the struggle into the very stronghold of the great robber. The great robber is so well intrenched, and people have so long been used to his exactions, that it is hard to arouse them to assail him directly. But to help those engaged in a conflict with this little robber will be to open the easiest way to attack his master, and to arouse a spirit that must push on. To secure to all the free use of the power to labor and the full enjoyment of its products, equal rights to land must be secured.

To secure equal rights to land there is in this stage of civilization but one way. Such measures as peasant proprietary, or "land limitation," or the reservation to actual settlers of what is left of the public domain, do not tend toward it; they lead away from it. They can affect only a comparatively unimportant class, and that temporarily, while their outcome is not to weaken land-ownership but rather to strengthen it, by interesting a larger number in its maintenance. The only way to abolish private property in land is by the way of taxation. That way is clear and straightforward. It consists simply in abolishing, one after another, all imposts that are in their nature really taxes, and resorting for public revenues to economic rent, or ground value. To the full freeing of land, and the complete emancipation of labor, it is, of course, necessary that the whole of this value should be taken for the common benefit; but that will inevitably follow the decision to collect from this source the revenues now needed, or even any considerable part of them, just as the entrance of a victorious army into a city follows the rout of the army that defended it. In the United States the most direct way of moving on property in land is through local taxation, since that is already to some extent levied upon land values. And that is doubtless the way in which the final and decisive advance will be made. But national politics dominate State politics, and a question can be brought into discussion much more quickly and thoroughly as a national than as a local question.

Now to bring an issue into politics it is not necessary to form a party. Parties are not to be manufactured; they grow out of existing parties by the bringing forward of issues upon which men will divide. We have, ready to our hand, in the tariff question, a means of bringing the whole subject of taxation, and, through it, the whole social question, into the fullest discussion.

As we have seen in the inquiry through which we have passed, the tariff question necessarily opens the whole social question. Any discussion of it to-day must go further and deeper than the Anti-Corn-Law agitation in Great Britain, or than the tariff controversies of Whigs and Democrats, for the progress of thought and the march of invention have made the distribution of wealth the burning question of our times. The making of the tariff question a national political issue must now mean the discussion in every newspaper, on every stump, and at every cross-roads where two men meet, of questions of work and wages, of capital and labor, of the incidence of taxation, of the nature and rights of property, and of the question to which all these questions lead-the question of the relation of men to the planet on which they live. In this way more can be accomplished for popular economic education in a year than could otherwise be accomplished in decades. Therefore it is that I would urge earnest men who aim at the emancipation of labor and the establishment of social justice, to throw themselves into the free-trade movement with might and main, and to force the tariff question to the front.

[end excerpt]

The truth is that the prospect of a great national contest on the tariff question offers us an opportunity that it would be worse than folly to forego. We who have fully "seen the cat" can do no more effective work than by supporting the demand for tariff reform by showing the injustice and absurdity of all tariffs. In doing this we shall advance a principle that can only be carried to its logical conclusion by the adoption of a system of taxation that will restore to all their equal rights to land. And even those of our friends who have only partially seen the eat, and who yet believe in protection as a temporary expedient , can be far more useful to the cause, if they will take active part in the tariff discussion, than if they should made a compact to keep out of it. For not only does warm and earnest advocacy bring into clear light the fallacies of protection, but such men as Mr. Wilder cannot advocate protection without perforce doing a great deal to impress upon their hearers the truth that all men have equal rights to land.