"The Land Question" in Europe: Victim of the Great
Depression and Total War?
Edward J. Dodson
[August 2010. An edited version of this paper appears in
the
Georgist Journal, No. 115, Summer 2010]
Students of the history of the Georgist cause generally appreciate
that the First and Second World Wars had the effect of diverting
public and political attention from the plague of land monopoly and
the solutions advanced by the successors to Henry George's global
campaign of the 1880s and 1890s. Yet, those who continued the campaign
into the twentieth century did so with a deep commitment, if
increasingly from the political and intellectual wilderness.
With thousands of supporters scattered around the globe, leading
personalities within the Georgist movement remained committed to their
principles throughout these challenging decades. In many countries,
they numbered but a few dedicated souls. In Britain, there were
outright Georgists and Georgist sympathizers sitting in Parliament and
in many positions of responsibility and authority.
BRITAIN
The early 1930s proved to be the high point of opportunity for
diminishing the power of landed interests in Britain. Arthur W.
Madsen, editor of Land & Liberty during this period, began a 1934
commentary with the insight provided in Progress and Poverty by Henry
George:
"Experience has taught me that wherever the idea of
concentrating all taxation upon land values finds lodgment
sufficient to induce consideration, it invariably makes way, but
that there are few of the classes most to be benefited by it, who at
first, or even for a long time afterwards, see its full significance
and power. It is difficult for working men to get over the idea that
there is a real antagonism between capital and labour. It is
difficult for small farmers and homestead owners to get over the
idea that to put all taxes on the value of land would be to unduly
tax them. It is difficult for both classes to get over the idea that
to exempt capital from taxation would be to make the rich richer,
and the poor poorer. These ideas spring from confused thought. But
behind ignorance and prejudice there is a powerful interest, which
has hitherto dominated literature, education and opinion. A great
wrong always dies hard, and the great wrong which in every civilized
country condemns the masses of men to poverty and want, will not die
without a bitter struggle."
In 1934, in the midst of the global depression, many of Britain's
leaders feared opening the door to social democracy (or, worse,
full-blown state-socialism) by requiring the landed to carry a heavier
burden of paying the cost of public goods and services. Centuries of
domination by landed interests went unchallenged in the face of the
current crisis. What Arthur Madsen and his colleagues now understood
was that neither Labour nor Liberal party leaders were sufficiently
committed to the public collection of rent to stake their political
lives on the issue.
One significant attempt to lift the discussion out of the wilderness
and into the public consciousness occurred the previous year, with the
publication of the book, The Great Robbery, written by J.W. Graham
Peace. Peace had been instrumental in the founding of the opposition
Commonwealth Land Party in the early 1920s, but had experienced
considerable resistance to his proposals that the government purchase
agricultural land for distribution to farmers. Although the party
fielded candidates in the 1931 general election, none received
sufficient votes.
Britain's self-sufficiency in food production was also becoming a
major political issue as the Depression continued. In November of
1934, Land & Liberty reprinted an article by Arthur R. McDougal
dealing with the collapse of agriculture. McDougal called upon the
government to thoroughly analyze the causes of problems before making
policy decisions. He cautioned:
"Whatever party does declare the truth will get
plenty of support. It must go boldly forward and educate the much
deluded people that we can have a prosperous agriculture without
food taxes, subsidies or high prices simply by making rent fit
prices and not prices fit rent."
If British Georgists had any reason for hope it rested on the
presence of Philip Snowden in the government. In 1935, Snowden wrote
to Charles O'Connnor Hennessy, President of the International Union
for Land Value Taxation and Free Trade:
"There never was a time when the need was greater
than it is today for the application of the philosophy and
principles of Henry George to the economic and political conditions
which are scourging the whole world."
"The root cause of world's economic distress is surely obvious
to every man who has eyes to see and a brain to understand. So long
as land is a monopoly, and men are denied free access to it to apply
their labor to its uses, poverty and unemployment will exist. When
the land monopolists do permit the use of land they do so on terms
which extort its full economic value."
Snowden expressed his regrets at not being able to join Georgists for
their September conference scheduled to be held in New York. His
duties, he said, prevented him from leaving Britain. During these
times of financial hardship, it is amazing that a conference could be
planned at all.
In September of 1936, Georgists from around the globe made their way
to London for the Fifth International Conference to Promote Land Value
Taxation and Free Trade. One speaker, E.J. McManus of Liverpool,
England, charged Britain's successive governments with utter failure:
"Had the vast political action of the last 30 years
been right action it would have effected a more equitable
distribution of wealth. It will be difficult to find any positive
general improvement. …The wrong way has been followed and
harmful political action has been taken, and is still promoted
because certain fundamental facts have been ignored in the relations
of man to external nature, and in the economic relations that
naturally arise between men and tend to persist - relations that men
recognize as beneficial for each other, and unite to prevent being
disturbed. In consequence, not only has the end of political action
been misconceived but also, in the attempt to remove social evils
separately and by instalments, false assumptions have been made as
to the capability of the means selected to accomplish the particular
end."
The public had also failed to listen to the message left by James F.
Muirhead in his book, Land and Unemployment, published
posthumously in 1935 by Oxford University Press:
"The Old Order seems to have more or less
collapsed; the outlines of the New Order to arise out of the ruins
remains very vague. We begin to realize how much of our civilization
rested on tradition and how little on reason. We are amazed, now
that the crash has shaken the blindness from our eyes, how
preposterous were many of the conditions that we accepted
unthinkingly and even complacently."
In the United States, Joseph Dana Miller, reviewing Muirhead's book
in 1936, described it as "another book among the growing number
that seek to present the Henry George philosophy as the antithesis of
socialism."
With the threat of global war on the minds of many, S. Vere Pearson
(a physician by profession) put the situation into its proper context:
"When justice gives equal opportunities to all at
home such fears will go; discussions on disarmament will also end;
for a foreigner can do no harm in a country where true justice
reigns. Civil wars arise because of the fears fed by the injustices
so rife in society, and rulers can distract the workers from
destitution and discontent by leading them to wars abroad."
That, certainly, was what one could see happening within Britain and
in so many other countries. Reports from the continent arrived in
London throughout the 1930s and even during the war years. The story
told is one of remarkable fortitude during terrifying times.
AUSTRIA
Land and Freedom referred to a 1931 pamphlet, titled The
Problem of Unemployment, written by an Austrian, Philip Knab (who
survived the war years to continue his Georgist activism).
BULGARIA
A small group in Bulgaria, led by Boris Gudulev, founded the journal
Zemia Y Svoboda (Land and Liberty) in 1933. They translated
and published Protection or Free Trade in 1939, but no further word of
their activities was reported after the war began.
DENMARK
Sophus Berthelsen, one of the founding members of the Henry George
Society in 1902 lived long enough to help found the International
Union. He died in 1930. Another early leader of the movement, Jakob
Lange, died a few months after delivering an address on economic
liberalism at a September 1941 meeting of the Henry George Assembly in
Copenhagen.
At the 1936 London conference, the Dane, Bue Bjorner, was elected to
succeed Charles O'Connor Hennessy as President of the International
Union. Bjorner's main concern at the time was over tariffs and other
trade restrictions. Despite the closing of borders one by one to
external trade, he expressed optimism that an environment of free
trade was inevitable -- eventually:
"Even though people might not be able to see the
connection between the employment question and the true Free Trade
and land question, we have reason to believe that, when the
inability of protection to create employment becomes evident through
this displacement of the social classes, it will no longer be
possible to practise the politics of trade restrictions. So though
Free Traders may have powerful enemies, they also have strong
allies: the economic development, the future!"
Bjorner survived the war to be re-elected President of the
International Union in 1948. He died in 1950. Numerous other Danes
managed to remain active. On the eve of the German invasion of Poland,
the Danish Georgists announced that on the 2nd of September, a program
on Henry George would be broadcast over the radio in Copenhagen.
At war's end, Dr. Viggo Starcke was elected to the Danish Parliament
as a member of the Justice Party. Knud Tholstrup joined him in
Parliament the following year. Starcke became Premier in 1957, heading
a coalition government.
FRANCE
In 1931, a French researcher produced a remarkable book,
On The Triple Demism of Sun Yat-sen, that examined the Chinese
nationalists views on the land question. A small group of French
Georgists was led by A. Daude-Bancel and Sam Meyer, both of whom
delivered papers at the 1936 International Union conference.
Daude-Bancel survived the war. Meyer was arrested and sent to
Auschwitz; his death was reported in 1945 with any detail of the
circumstances.
GERMANY
Perhaps the most powerful writing produced on the European continent
during these years came from another Austrian, Bruno Heilig, whose
1938 booklet,
Why the German Republic Fell, was terribly prophetic:
"What happened in Germany will inevitably happen
anywhere that similar conditions prevail. In some Continental
countries it has happened already. The Nazi regime is not Hitler's,
the man's, achievement. Nazidom has grown organically out of a
rotten democracy, and the rottenness of that democracy is the
natural consequence of unequal economic conditions; and unequal
economic conditions obtain all over the world owing to the
instituted private appropriation of the rent of land. Therefore
every country is potentially a Fascist country. Germany is but the
type of a development which no country can escape except by the
establishment of the equal right to the occupation and use of land.
Therefore also there can be no lasting peace even after the defeat
of Nazism if the present economic structure of the civilized
countries remains. The private appropriation of the rent of land is
the deadly enemy of mankind."
Interestingly, as late as 1933, University of Vienna Professor of
Economics, A. Velleman advised Georgists in London he was lecturing at
length on Henry George and was planning to use the biography of Henry
George by George's son as a text. Whether Professor Velleman was able
to continue with his lectures as planned is not revealed in any of the
Georgist periodicals I have studied.
In 1936, the German Land Reform Union had addressed a memorial to
Reich Finance Minister Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, "urging that the land
tax be converted into a land value tax … because of its effect in
providing employment and improving housing conditions." Georgist
periodicals from that year do not indicate what response, if any, was
made by the Minister. Writing from the United States in 1942 (to which
he had come from Germany in mid-1941), Otto Juliusburger, recalled
that "[t]he Prussian landowner, Prince Eulenberg, had …
promised unqualified support to Hitler from the German landowners."
Otto Nuschke, a Vice President of the International Union since 1929
and Deputy Prime Minister of Germany, either escaped Germany at some
point in the 1930s or otherwise survived the war to re-emerge in 1945
as one of the leaders of the Social Democrats.
Rather remarkably, while visiting the New York offices of Land
and Freedom during 1936, a Dr. Arnold Schwartz advised Joseph Dana
Miller that there was "no ban on the teaching of our philosophy
in Germany." No further information on Dr. Schwartz has surfaced
during the war years; however, he survived the war.
Although not fully in the Georgist camp, the leading land reformer in
Germany during the first three decades of the twentieth century was
Adolf Damaschke. He was nominated in 1931 for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Damaschke died in 1935 of unknown causes. In 1936, the German Land
Reform Union addressed a memorial to Reich Finance Minister Hjalmar
Schacht "urging that the land tax be converted into a land value
tax…"
Franz Oppenheimer, author of The State, and a 1936 book, The Land
Reform, left Germany in 1938 to settle in the United States. He
became a co-founder of the American Journal of Economics and
Sociology and wrote for The Freeman until his death in 1943.
GREECE
In Greece, the most important active Georgist during this period was
Pavlos Giannelia, who served in the Greek diplomatic corps until 1939,
after which he sought refuge in Switzerland, and from this location
served as a special correspondent to
Land and Freedom.
HOLLAND
The Dutch Georgists looked to Harmen Kolthek for leadership. Kolthek
had served in the Dutch Parliament from 1918 to 1922 and in 1936
translated
Progress and Poverty into Dutch. Also in 1936 he made the trip
to London to attend the International Union conference, delivering a
paper on "State Interference in Industry."
Another leading Georgist in Holland, Jan Willems, was killed by the
Nazis during the war.
HUNGARY
One of the early leaders of the Hungarian Georgists, Robert Braun,
who oversaw the translation and publication of
Protection or Free Trade and Progress and Poverty,
died in 1937. Another strong leader in the movement was Julius Pikler,
an official in the Budapest government early in the century and a
physician. Pikler survived the war but died in 1952.
During the war, Charles Ravasz was finishing his degree in law at the
University of Budapest and beginning to study economics. Fellow
students stimulated his interest in Henry George's writings, and he
went on to read and absorb Progress and Poverty. Ravasz then
met Julius Pikler, by then in his seventies and retired from his
medical practice, but still the leader of the Georgists in Hungary. He
later wrote: "There were hundreds who became Dr. Pikler's
disciples and advocates of the views which he put forward…"
When the Germans occupied Budapest in 1944, Ravasz and other Georgists
joined the resistance movement. "Many of us were arrested by the
Gestapo or its Hungarian adjunct. I escaped after a few weeks in jail,"
he recalled, "but the most gifted of our set, who had the making
of a truly great statesman, Bela Papai, … was never found alive
after having been arrested. He has disappeared without trace."
IRELAND
In a 1933
Land and Freedom article, Robert Barton wrote that: "Irishmen
owe a deep debt of gratitude to Henry George. As a friend of Davitt he
toured the country during the worst period of landlordism, and
manfully fought our case for land emancipation…" Sadly, the
long-term impact of George's many visits to Ireland was almost nil. In
one of the great ironies of Georgist history, by the 1930s there was
no active movement to collect ground rent as championed by Henry
George.
ITALY
The only evidence of any interest in Georgist ideas during this
period occurred in the March-April 1931 issue of Land and Freedom.
Carlo Pagni, Editor of
Industria Lombarda, wrote: "I have the pleasure in
informing you that a complete review of 'Progress and Poverty' will be
published in the 'Giornale degli Economisti', the foremost Italian
economic review."
MALTA
Whatever efforts occurred on the island nation of Malta were
spearheaded by Ernest Geoghegan, leader of the Land Tax League. In
1932 he delivered to the government a petition favoring land value
taxation, signed by 755 citizens.
NORWAY
A handful of Georgists were active during the Depression years.
Halfdan Hansen was an early follower of Henry George and attended the
International Union conferences in the 1920s, resuming his involvement
after the war.
The Norwegian Georgist Ole Wang delivered a paper on "Access to
Raw Materials and the Need for Expansion" at the London
conference in 1936. In 1939, he broadcast a radio address in Oslo on
the centenary of the publication of Progress and Poverty. He survived
the Nazi occupation and re-emerged as an activist after the war.
RUMANIA
Only one Rumanian, Ing Barsony, is mentioned in the Georgist
periodicals issued in the 1930s. He tried unsuccessfully to launch a
Georgist periodical in the early 1930s. No further information has
surfaced on him or any of his colleagues in Rumania.
SPAIN
One of the leading Spanish Georgists, Antonio Albendin, who had
helped organize in 1913 the first international conference on land
value taxation and free trade, died in 1933.
Civil war in Spain brought great hardship to the Georgists there.
Antonio F.M. Alonso, who taught economics at the University of
Salamanca, was arrested in 1936 after returning from a trip to Russia,
and he was sentenced to life imprisonment (later reduced to six years
of house arrest). Remarkably, in 1938 he was appointed to the faculty
of the National College of Tarragona, where he used
Progress and Poverty as the text. In 1939 he brought Frank
Chodorov in New York up to date on what was happening in Spain:
"Our movement is stopped, but as soon as the war in
over it will be resumed with more courage than ever before."
Then, in 1940 he was again arrested and prevented from returning to
his teaching position.
Baldomero Argente, the translater of Henry George's works into
Spanish, was also in London in 1936, where he delivered a paper, "The
Reform of Taxation in Spain." He continued to be active during
the Franco era, his articles appearing in newspapers and economic
journals until his death in 1965.
During 1940 Land and Freedom carried two articles on the
Spanish economic situation written by Rogelio Casas Cadilla. He
survived the war, and in 1961 assisted in preparation of a new Spanish
edition of Progress and Poverty.
SWEDEN
Neither the Great Depression nor the Second World War generated any
significant interest by Swedes in the Georgist ideas. A few Swedes
were members of the International Union but contributed few articles
for publication in
Land & Liberty. One exception was Johann Hanssen, who
became active in the Georgist movement early in the 1900s and
co-founded the League of Economic Freedom in 1909. As recently as 1957
he contributed an article to the Henry George News titled "Liberalism:
Hope for a Troubled World."
SWITZERLAND
The Georgist literature makes almost no mention of communication with
active Georgists during the 1930s or during the war. Gustave Buscher
is described as an author of articles on the Single Tax earlier in the
century, and he attended the 1949 International Union conference in
England.
WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH
As the reach of Fascist governments expanded across the European
continent, Georgists were forced to curtail their activities or find
safety away from their homeland. Across the Atlantic Ocean, Georgists
did their best to monitor events in Europe. As late as May of 1939,
the editorial staff of
The Freeman warned of the dangers war posed to liberty:
"We shall hand over to a monster State every
vestige of human liberty which was wrested from it for us during the
centuries."
In August of 1939, The Freeman editors dared to compare the
state of the British empire with that of Rome near the end of its
domination. Britain, they wrote, "is suffering from … that
moral degeneracy which comes both from living without working and from
working without living." What, they asked, would Britain do
without the rents collected from its colonial subjects? Three months
later, the same editors suggested something good might come from
Britain's wartime struggle:
"Maybe it will help to break down some of the
traditions which the landed aristocrats have built up for the
vassalage of English workers. Maybe the English workers will find,
through necessity, that the land in England can, if put to use,
produce the many things they need for their livelihood - and is
worth while fighting for."
In the United States, The Freeman editors continued to hope
the scope of the war could be limited, that reform could "remove
the forces within our country that are fast propelling us into the
maelstrom." However, they acknowledged a simple fact: "Organized
murder has replaced organized living." As the United States
government increased its spending on military preparedness, The
Freeman charged that sacrifices were not universally distributed:
"When the sacrifice of the many redound to the
benefit of a few nothing less than treason has occurred. And those
who aid or make possible this private aggrandizement … are
morally guilty of conspiracy to frustrate or hamper the success of
the common cause."
Another story that caught the attention of The Freeman editors was "the
buying up of bombed areas by land speculators" in England. The
October 1941 issue reported that a government committee had been
appointed to investigate and make recommendations. Land &
Liberty's editors had weighed in to call for actual reform. In the
opinion of The Freeman,
"… the general direction of England's post-war
policy is now toward the safeguarding of its land tenure system
within the framework of a socialistic economy."
Land and Freedom reported at the beginning of 1941 that the
Georgist offices of the United Committee for the Taxation of Land
Values had thus far managed to escape damage from the Luftwaffe
bombing and the widespread fires that resulted. Land & Liberty
continued to be published, if under difficult circumstances. And,
despite The Freeman's pessimistic assessment, some fifty
Members of Parliament comprising the Parliamentary Land Values Group
in England were developing a plan to meet post-war problems, according
to a letter received by Anna George de Mille from R.R. Stokes, M.P.
That Spring, Land and Freedom heard from J.W. Graham Peace,
who wrote:
"In case you had thought us dead, let me tell you
that nearly 200 meetings were held during last year; and in spite of
the blackout and numerous other inconveniences, several open air
meetings have been held in central London often interrupted by the
barking of the A-A guns a few hundred yards away from our stand."
Late in the Spring of 1941 disaster finally struck the Georgists in
London. The headquarters of the International Union on Knightrider
Street were totally destroyed by German bombing. Even worse, all
records, manuscripts and the library were lost. Only the inventory of
publications offered for sale survived, having been safeguarded by
dispersing supplies throughout England. Quickly, new offices were
found at 4 Great Smith Street, adjoining the offices of the firm that
printed Land & Liberty. The issue planned for June of 1941
was to contain "twenty-eight of the best articles from Land &
Liberty in the past eighteen months, dealing with the economic cause
of war and with economic freedom as the basis of social justice and
world peace."
Land & Liberty's offices at 4 Great Smith Street survived
the remaining months of continued German bombing and remained
operational throughout the rest of the war.
In Britain, a clear indication that people were now looking to
government for a more secure level of well-being was the defeat in
1945 of the Conservatives and Winston Churchill in favor of the Labour
Party and Clement Atlee. During the election campaign, Atlee countered
Churchill's association of Britain's greatness with its respect for
individual freedoms:
"There was a time when employers were free to work
little children for sixteen hours a day. I remember when employers
were free to employ sweated women workers on finishing trousers at a
penny halfpenny a pair. There was a time when people were free to
neglect sanitation so that thousands died of preventable diseases.
For years every attempt to remedy these crying evils was blocked by
the same plea of freedom for the individual. It was in fact freedom
for the rich and slavery for the poor. Make no mistake, it has only
been through the power of the State, given to it by Parliament, that
the general public has been protected against the greed of ruthless
profit-makers and property owners."
The message was both powerful and timely. The British people had
endured great suffering during the war. Elsewhere across the European
continent legitimate government had to be re-established under
pressures of communist insurrection or Soviet occupation. The Old
Guard had to give ground or be pushed aside altogether. A decade
later, Harry Pollard, writing in the Henry George News (May
1954), recapped what occurred following the war:
"The Socialists in power began to do something
almost unheard of in politics. They tried to keep their promises.
They nationalized the Bank of England; the coal, electricity and gas
industries; certain sections of road transport; British cable and
wireless; civil aviation and iron and steel industry. They also set
out to control the British economy physically with the idea in mind
that they could iron out the severe fluctuations which led to the
general slump."
"The result of this type of planning -- even in a Britain
bolstered up by aid from overseas and with a world crying out for
her manufactures was not very satisfactory. In July 1949, Sir
Stafford Cripps said of the post-war situation, 'We have been trying
to deal with it by a series of temporary expedients which have led
to a series of crises as each expedient became exhausted."
"You see, they found that attempting to control an economy was
very much like trying to repair a very old bucket. As fast as one
hole is plugged another opens and lets water again. Information
received by the planners is often insufficient and out-of-date. In
order to make any reasonable attempt at all, it is necessary to rely
a great deal on personal analyses of the situation, which is another
way of saying, guesswork."
"So I believe that although socialism has failed to bring to
England an era of justice and freedom -- it has succeeded in
embarking on a journey to a destination which, unfortunately, it may
well reach."
As Harry Pollard predicted, the British people would experience some
very difficult decades trying to retain a shrinking empire while being
overwhelmed economically by the out of goods from the United States,
Germany and Japan. In desperation, British voters eventually succumbed
to the exhortations of Margaret Thatcher to privatize and untax.
After the war, British Georgists decided to publish Winston
Churchill's speeches on the land question in pamphlet form, which were
then widely distributed. Whether Churchill would take a leadership
role in calling for the taxation of land values after the war was not
known. In 1952, when Churchill returned as Prime Minister, he made the
following comments in speech he delivered in Parliament:
"I remember the old days, which were my young or
younger days, when the taxation of land values and of unearned
increments in land was a foremost principle and a lively element in
the programme of the Radical Party to which I then belonged. But
what is the situation which presents itself to us to-day? In those
days we had the spectacle of valuable land being kept out of the
market until the exact moment for its sale was reached, regardless
of the fact that its increased value was due to the exertions of the
surrounding community. Then we had the idea that, if those
obstructions could be cleared out of the way, free enterprise would
bound forward and small people would have a chance to get a home, or
to improve their existing homes, and many other things besides."
However, in 1952, the national policies governing land use were found
in the Town and Country Planning Acts. The constituency for the
taxation of land values had long disappeared.
A POSTSCRIPT
Those of us who came to embrace the same principles as Henry George
during the decades following the end of the Second World War have been
fighting against a very powerful force -- the experience and illusion
of expanding prosperity. For hundreds of millions of people around the
globe, life gradually became better, futures seemingly more secure.
This was particularly the case in the United States, but parts of the
Old World caught up and even surpassed the sense of well-being that
had come to a majority of the U.S. population.
To be sure, across the European continent the decade or so after the
war ended was anything but prosperous. However, the strength of the
United States economy was such that -- once the Soviet threat was
recognized and a counter-strategy adopted -- a global rebuilding
program became possible without the heavy burden of debt repayment.
Defeating communism also required a commitment by governments to some
level of social welfare and social democracy. Thus, despite the fact
that the driving forces behind war had been territorial conquest and
control over natural resources, the citizenry of every country where
social democracy grew put any concern for the land question out of
their minds, relegated to a past seemingly no longer relevant to their
lives.
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