Henry George

American economist and social reformer

• Born: September 2, 1839
• Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Died: October 29, 1897
• Place of death: New York, New York

George’s writings and lectures on land, labor, and economic policies expressed a popular radicalism that challenged established economic doctrines and dominant political practices, exercising a profound influence for reform both in the United States and abroad.

Early Life

An oldest son, Henry George was born into a large, devoutly Episcopalian family. His birthplace was close to Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, which would become a source of lifelong inspiration to him. His father, Richard Samuel Henry George, was a sea captain’s son whose once prosperous resources were depleted prior to his death. Accordingly, throughout his life Richard earned a steady, but modest, income working variously as a schoolteacher, a dealer in religious books, and for a longer period as a clerk in Philadelphia’s United States Customs House—a Democratic Party political appointment. Catharine Vallance, Henry’s mother, was as devout as her husband; also a former schoolteacher, she bore nine children and was proud of her descent from a close friend of Benjamin Franklin. Overall, the George household was warmly Christian and modestly comfortable. Henry George remained attached to his family all of his life.

Apart from receiving some primary instruction at home, the young George’s formal education was brief. What there was of it failed to impress him. At the age of six, he entered a small private school, and at the age of nine moved on to Philadelphia’s famed Episcopal Academy but performed poorly and withdrew. He was subsequently coached for admission to the city’s esteemed public high school—this tutoring, he later believed, providing his best educational experience. Once enrolled, however, he quit almost immediately, thus ending his formal education at the age of thirteen. When fully mature, he was to praise only vocational or practical learning, but in his early years there were other cultural advantages that derived from his regular use of the libraries of the Franklin Institute, the American Philosophical Society, and a small, convivial literary society.

Regardless of George’s formal deficiencies, they were never a handicap. Largely self-taught, reflective, ambitious, and combative, with a romantic sense of individuality and a slowly acquired ability to concentrate his energies, George would eventually meet many of the Western world’s best-educated, most learned, and most politically important figures, either directly or by debating them; at such times, George was equal to his discussion partners or debating adversaries in maintaining his own faith—and, almost without exception, he gained the respect of these men.

Two sets of events brought Henry George to youthful independence and helped pave a path toward his life’s work. In 1855, through family connections, he sailed as foremast boy on a sixteen-month voyage from New York to Melbourne and Calcutta. After returning to Philadelphia, he secured a job from which he rose to journeyman typesetter, a skill that carried a number of his famous contemporaries into journalism or writing. In the depressed economy of 1857, however, his friends and relatives were already living on the Pacific coast, and he determined to join them. With an offer for a job in his pocket, he thus started his journey west. Again, thanks to parental persuasions, he sailed as an ordinary seaman on a government lighthouse vessel, which, upon arrival in San Francisco, he deserted. He would remain in the new and bustling state of California from 1858 to 1880.

Life’s Work

Initially there was an unsteady quality to George’s California days, especially during the Civil War. Like many, he caught “gold fever” and explored northward as far as British Columbia. He weighed rice, served as a foreman, dabbled in journalism, joined in the operation of a San Francisco newspaper, and even abandoned the Democratic Party for California’s liberal brand of Republicanism, at least through the Grant administrations. Such ventures or allegiances, however, were either short-lived or failures. Consequently, along with many young eastern emigrants during the 1860’s, he suffered economic hardships, at one point verging on desperation. Nevertheless, he was establishing mature foundations.

In 1861, George married Annie Fox, a Catholic orphaned by a broken British colonial marriage, and they started a family of their own. Moreover, in March, 1865, by his own account, he determined to devote his life to writing, exploring social issues through the economic contrasts and conflicts that appeared so stark in California. Between 1866 and 1879, he pursued this course as editor variously of eight San Francisco, Oakland, and Sacramento newspapers. Editorially he advocated (and sometimes joined) movements toward free trade and public ownership and regulation of railroads, the telegraph, and municipal utilities. He sought revisions in the state’s land policies, as well as revisions in national land policy under the Morrill Act, thus encouraging more equitable land distribution both in California and in the nation.

Generally George favored trade unionism , the eight-hour day, and strikes as a last resort. He believed that high wages, leading to a greater respect for labor, would help lead to an economy of abundance. Favoring competition, he staunchly opposed its excesses or monopolies in any form. Similarly, on the then hotly debated “currency question,” he proposed an end to credit manipulations by bankers and by government and a gradual restoration of wartime greenbacks (inflated currency) to equivalency in gold: a gradual return to a hard-money policy. Distressed by the cornering of California lands by a handful of speculators and wealthy individuals and anxious to see the state continue as a utopia for the common man, he urged restrictions on immigration, particularly Chinese immigration. The issues with which he dealt were current ones, engaging wide popular attention and commentary by American and British political economists of whom George was aware and whom he acknowledged, but his faith, common sense, keen personal observations, and experienced reflections lent special force to his writings.

George’s editorials and lectures brought him notoriety. It was two books specifically, however, that won for him national and even international recognition. In 1871, he published Our Land and Land Policy, National and State (really a 130-page pamphlet) in San Francisco. In it he argued that public lands should be made more available to ordinary homesteaders (80-acre or 40-acre allotments rather than 160-acre allotments); that existing enormous landholdings should be divested and their future restricted chiefly through the fairest and most collectible of all taxes: a tax on land. Barring the rapid drift toward land monopolies and a reopening of accessibility, he predicted revolutions in Europe and America that would begin among the dispossessed peoples of their growing and spreading urban areas. Thus spoke the frail, bald, but bearded, mustachioed, flashing-eyed “Prophet of San Francisco,” a man by then inspiring pragmatic land reform movements.

In 1879, George published Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Causes of Industrial Depressions, and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth—The Remedy . Injustices were explicit in the subtitle. The remedy was nationalization of land and imposition of one single tax (later known as the “Single Tax”). Land values, George argued, as personal knowledge of stark contrasts between extraordinary wealth and dire need in San Francisco and New York convinced him, were communal, societal creations inherent in the scarcity of land. Pressures of population, production necessities, or monopolistic urges thus raised land and rental values and depressed wages. The mere possession of land often made millionaires of nonproducers or noncontributors to human welfare. A tax, therefore, on such socially created rents would allow government to redistribute such gains to alleviate want and enhance community life. George was no socialist. Indeed, because the basis of local revenues was a general property tax and because George abhorred centralization over local responsibilities, he expected local governments to fulfill these necessary functions.

Progress and Poverty earned for George international fame even greater than the fame he was enjoying at home. In 1880, he moved to New York City, there to write, lecture, and carry his message abroad. He was active among reformers, land restoration leaguers, and labor and economic circles in England and Ireland in 1882 and again in England and Scotland (with particular success in the latter) in 1884. By the end of the 1880’s, he had been active on the Continent as well as in Australia. In fact, he had, with some justice, come to believe that Progress and Poverty was the most influential work of its kind since Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776). Even Karl Marx, while critical, regarded George’s work as a significant assault upon economic orthodoxy.

Inevitably George’s prominence brought him into the political forum. After the Civil War and Reconstruction era, he had returned to the Democratic Party, though not uncritically. Although many reformers championed him for the nation’s and for New York State’s highest political offices, he either avoided selection or lost the votes. In fact, it was the politics of New York City that claimed him. His prolabor positions were well known. So too were his urban progressive reforms: an end to bossism, municipal ownership of utilities, and the secret ballot, among others. His idea for a single tax and his other economic proposals, such as free trade and antipoverty activities, also had wide currency.

Attuned to rural dissents, George was recognized also for his awareness that the future of the United States lay with the consciences of its growing urban citizenry. Nominated by New York’s Central Labor Union for the mayoralty in 1886, he lost in a hotly disputed three-way race. Afterward, he continued with his mission, writing and lecturing, until he tried once more to become New York’s mayor in 1897 as the candidate of the democracy of Thomas Jefferson. Indefatigable to the end, but exhausted from campaigning, he died on October 29, 1897.

Significance

No American reformer loomed larger in his generation nationally and internationally than Henry George. Progress and Poverty was widely translated and received a degree of attention that few other books ever have; it was in its time far more influential than the first volume of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867). George’s idealism and devotion to democracy, though professional economists found his single-tax idea flawed, did more to shake economic thinking by directing it to profound social and related political problems than anyone else’s.

In a narrow economic sense, George came close to developing the idea of marginal productivity. More practically, his ideas linked land questions with taxation and helped spawn tax reforms that were placed in effect not only in parts of the United States but also in Canada and Australia. If George represented popular radicalism, his roots were natively American, drawing from the best of the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian traditions. He was firmly procapitalist and a believer in fair competition. Despite flirtations with socialism, he had little regard for any type of governmental centralization. Rather, the somewhat utopian visions of democracy in which he placed his faith emphasized local government and local responsibilities. Finally, as he carried his ideas into the heart of the world’s greatest city, his forceful Christianity influenced most major reformers of the Progressive era that followed his death.

Bibliography

Barker, Charles Albro. Henry George. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955. The richest, most exhaustively researched, perhaps definitive biography. Coverage is meticulously chronological, but Barker makes his own careful evaluations of George’s development and ideas, both in the context of his time and in historical perspective.

DeMille, Anna George. Henry George: Citizen of the World. Edited by Don C. Shoemaker. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950. George’s daughter concentrates upon her father as a family man and devotes more attention to her mother’s role than is to be found in any other work.

Dorfman, Joseph. The Economic Mind in American Civilization. Vol. 3. New York: Viking Press, 1959. Chapter 6 places George, with depth and excellence, in a context of the economic history of Popular Radicalism between 1865 and 1918.

Geiger, George Raymond. The Philosophy of Henry George. New York: Macmillan, 1933. A close, if pedantic and somewhat ahistorical analysis. Stresses George’s pragmatism.

George, Henry. Henry George: Collected Journalistic Writings. 4 vols. Edited by Kenneth C. Wenzer. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2003. This four-volume collection brings together all of George’s journalistic writings, with annotations for each writing and introductions to each volume. Vol. 1 contains his earliest writings plus a never-before published biography written in 1884; vols. 2 and 3 contain writings from the 1880’s and 1890’s, respectively; vol. 4 contains writings he produced while visiting Australia in 1890.

George, Henry, Jr. The Life of Henry George by His Son. 2 vols. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1911. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1973. Much material later incorporated in George, Jr.’s The Complete Works of Henry George. 10 vols. Garden City, N.Y.: Fels Fund Library Edition, 1906-1911. An associate of his father from his adolescence onward, George, Jr., later a congressman, faithfully reflects paternal decisions and ideas in this memoir.

Hill, Malcolm. The Man Who Said No! The Life of Henry George. London: Othila Press, 1997. Brief (147-page) biography covering George’s ideas and the major events in his life. Although it does not contain any new information or insights, the book provides a good introduction to George.

Nock, Albert Jay. Henry George, an Essay. New York: William Morrow, 1939. A brilliant analysis of George’s character and mind.

Seligman, Edwin R. A. Essays in Taxation. 9th rev. ed. New York: Macmillan, 1921. Still readily available, this work by the foremost American authority on taxation concludes that on political, social, economic, and moral grounds, the single tax was a mistake. However, Seligman freely acknowledges its great usefulness in drawing attention to abuses of medieval land systems abroad, to inequities in the general property tax in the United States, and to unjust privilege.

Thomas, John L. “Utopia for an Urban Age: Henry George, Henry Demarest Lloyd, Edward Bellamy.” Perspectives in American History 6 (1974): 135-166. A lucid comparison of George’s utopian strains with those of two famous contemporaries.