Henry George: The Great Paradox
Daniel Aaron
[Chapter 3 of Men Of Good Hope, published by
Oxford University Press, 1951]
At the time this book was
published, Daniel Aaron was director of the American Studies program
at Smith College. He was born in Chicago in 1912.
The feeling of doubt and apprehension about the so-called benefits of
the machine economy antedates, as we have seen, the post-Civil-War
years in America. Many of General Jackson's supporters, in the words
of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., 'felt themselves the victims of
baffling and malevolent economic forces which they could not profit by
or control.' In the 1830's men were disturbed by the growing class
divisions, by the pride and the snobbery that accompanied the increase
of wealth, by the effects of aggressive individualism and the
consequent weakening of the community spirit.
The majority of the discontented during this period did not advocate
any revolutionary scheme of property redistribution, although there
were some groups who did. What seemed to attract them the most were
the movements that promised to insure equal social status and equality
of opportunity. Public education, it was anticipated, would reduce the
traditional handicaps of the poor in the race for success. Shorter
working hours would allow the operative or the day laborer more time
for self-improvement, so that he too could compete for the high
offices. Early trade-union movements (especially the interesting but
abortive flurry of activity in the 'thirties) sought not only to unite
workers against the encroachments of organized capital but also to
preserve their individuality. So, too, the community experiments of
Owen and Fourier can be seen as fruitless attempts to redeem the
frustrated and aimless citizen trapped, as the exuberant Utopians
believed, in a savage and a chaotic society.
Evidences of insecurity or 'alienation,' already discernible before
186S, became more apparent during the last hall of the nineteenth
century. And as the impersonal economic order grew less and less
concerned with the vast changes it was effecting on the American
scene, and as the business community grew increasingly irresponsible,
it became necessary, as Walter Rauschenbusch said, for the state 'to
step in with its superior Christian ethics' before unadulterated
capitalism destroyed the social order. The reform movements that
agitated the country at this time, which increased in turbulence and
finally culminated in the wild eruption in 1896, are less explainable
by Marxian dialectic than by a kind of unconscious mass awareness of
the community that it was being endangered by inhuman social forces.
One man who voiced this fear and proposed to circumvent the threat to
community welfare was Henry George. He is an arresting and important
figure in the progressive tradition, not because his program had much
practical significance but because he exerted a vast influence as a
social philosopher and caught the surge of unarticulated public
despair and hope in a single book. In an age of trusts and
millionaires, of labor violence and depression, George compounded the
agrarian radicalism of Jefferson with the humanitarian
transcendentalism of the 'forties. He revived an old American dream of
equality and plenty and made clear to hundreds of thousands the menace
and the promise of nineteenth-century industrial society.
II
Professor William Graham Sumner, who during the last three decades of
the nineteenth century rescued several generations of Yale students
from what he called 'the domination of cranks,' once wrote an essay
about a person he called 'the forgotten man.' Sumner's 'certain man
who is never thought of' was no kin to Franklin Roosevelt's lost
citizen but an unsung embodiment of middle-class business virtues, a
less flamboyant and more respectable Poor Richard, the solid citizen
who works hard, minds his business, and pays for the stupidities and
indiscretions of the masses. Sumner worried about the forgotten man
and spoke for him whenever he could, because the forgotten man,
patient and long-suffering, had no other champions. Drunkards,
criminals, and misfits successfully appealed to soft-headed reformers;
the man who lived quietly, educated his children, and paid his debts
never sank low enough to arouse their sympathies. Instead he was
perpetually robbed by the philanthropists and nostrum-peddlers. His
savings provided the capital for their absurd attempts to remodel the
world.
Sumner also took an angry pleasure in portraying the vicious,
shiftless, inefficient brother of the forgotten man. This improvident
fellow possessed all the traits of the man in the street. He was a
fool, a bungler, a band-wagon jumper. He believed that life was a
banquet and that he had a natural right to a large portion of nature's
feast. He envied the rich and wanted the advantages of wealth without
working for them. He spoke about a golden age. He flattered human
nature. In his personal life he was likely to be imprudent or
intemperate. He usually married when he was too young and always had
too many children. He could not support them. He never had any money
in the bank. He chattered a good deal about 'injustice' and paid no
taxes. He supported the crazy schemes of the Greenbackers or the
Populists or the Socialists, gave lectures on the crimes of capital
and on human equality, and dumped his badly disciplined progeny into a
world already burdened with an excess of the same breed.
These sentiments came naturally from one who made a fetish of hard
fact and whose entire life had been devoted to puncturing
abstractions. Like other armchair realists dealing with particulars
removed from their contents and carefully dusted, he sounded more
practical than he really was, and the gospel of Herbert Spencer that
he preached (with a few revisions) permitted him to consign the
drunkard to the gutter and defend the millionaire with a tranquil
conscience, assured that what God or nature had ordained, no human
scheme could modify.
It is proper to mention Sumner in these introductory remarks not
merely because he was a contemporary of Henry George and later his
vigorous antagonist, not because of the curious parallels and
contrasts of their respective careers, but because George might have
served as Sumner's horrid example of the improvident man. It was only
coincidence that the essay series in which the phrase 'the forgotten
man' first appeared (characteristically entitled 'What the Social
Classes Owe Each Other') should be answered by George himself in
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, but a poetic
significance lay hidden in George's rejoinder, which the Yale
professor undoubtedly missed.
In the first place, Henry George never made any money in spite of the
tremendous sales of his books; in fact he usually owed money and
accepted loans and gifts of cash from his friends. From his birth in
1839 until his death fifty-eight years later, he lived a
helter-skelter sort of life-working as a clerk, a sailor, a printer, a
peddler-searching for gold, sleeping in barns, agitating, writing what
Sumner would have considered nonsensical editorials, lecturing,
pamphleteering, and in general doing everything that the forgotten man
rigorously eschewed. As Sumner might have suspected, George proposed
marriage with fifty cents in his pocket. He was twenty-two years old
at the time, with no job and very meager prospects. He wore borrowed
clothes to the wedding ceremony and barely managed to keep alive
during the next five years. Like other improvident men, however, he
promptly began to raise a family and on one occasion, after the birth
of his second son in 1865, he had to beg five dollars from a stranger
to keep his wife and children from starving. It is true that bad times
had something to do with his early misfortunes, but Sumner, had he
been reviewing George's career, would have dismissed this excuse with
contempt. 'Here you have,' he might have said, 'the classic type of
the improvident man, half-educated F George's education stopped when
he was thirteen], restless and impractical, and totally devoid of
those steady habits without which no man can succeed in the battle of
life.'
Before George exploded into fame with Progress and Poverty it
is quite likely that he would have humbly accepted these Sumnerian
rebukes. He had too much of the middle-class ethic in himself not to
be ashamed of his poverty and his aimlessness, and he constantly
exhorted himself to save, to avoid running into debt. His eighteen
years spent in ante-bellum Philadelphia, before the fateful journey to
San Francisco, had stamped into him some of the morality of the Quaker
City's merchantdom, which even fourteen months aboard an old East
Indiaman could not eradicate. George's parents, like Sumner's, were
devout Episcopalians, and George was raised on the Bible and the Book
of Common Prayer and the Episcopal Sunday School books published,
incidentally, by his father. Although he drank whiskey with his
friends, played cards, and swore when away from his father's
strait4aced household, the odor of respectable Protestantism clung to
him nevertheless, and the guilty feelings he experienced during the
early California days were quite possibly induced by his earlier pious
associations.
Had his father been a more gifted man, or even a richer one, had
George's home atmosphere been less drab and more intellectually
stimulating, or had some discerning person recognized his remarkable
potentialities, George might have become an Episcopal minister like
Sumner and gone on to Gutting and Oxford. Set adrift at fourteen,
George educated himself, but with all of his wide reading he remained
an uncultivated man with a feebly developed artistic sense and the
instincts of a Philistine.
And yet Henry George did not end up in the gutter or in jail, where,
according to William Graham Sumner, improvident men usually landed; on
the contrary, he became a world4amous man. His masterpiece, Progress
and Poverty, was a work of genius, but it was also the culmination
of intense and varied experience -experience quite alien to the
bookish Sumner and far more real than the obdurate facts he professed
to deal with.
III
When George set sail for San Francisco aboard a United States
Lighthouse steamer in 1857, he had already traveled and seen more
sights than most eighteen-year-olds. Two years before he had signed up
as foremast boy on a ship captained by a friend of his father's. On
the voyage of the Hindoo he did not see the opulent and exotic scenes
he had anticipated, but he observed the unemployment in Melbourne and
watched dead bodies, covered with crows, float down the Hooghly River.
To judge from his recollections, life in the forecastle was no more
glamorous than the seamy Orient. 'There were so many cockroaches and
bed bugs on the vessel,' he wrote afterwards, 'and they got so black
and thick that you could not get a drink of water or eat a piece of
pie or eat soup without getting a mouthful of them. It was on this
trip that I began to like cockroaches for they would eat the bed bugs
up.'
George had one more short experience as a sailor after he returned
from India, but parental pressure and the advice of the
Hindoo's captain induced him to forget the sea. During the
next few years he learned the trade of typesetter, drank 'red-eye' and
smoked cigars with his friends, argued with his father and mother
about slavery, and began to weigh the possibilities of going to
Oregon. His friends there assured him that jobs were plentiful, and
since thousands of 'hard fisted mechanics'-among whom he numbered
himself-were being discharged daily from Philadelphia shops, the
prospects of high wages in the West sounded especially alluring. The
offer of a steward's berth on the Lightship Shubrick, bound
for California, settled the matter, and on December 22 he left
Philadelphia and all it contained with few misgivings. 'I know, my
dear parents,' he wrote the next month from the West Indies, 'that you
felt deeply the parting with me-far more so than I did. But let the
fact that I am satisfied and that my chances are more than fair
comfort you. As for me, I, for the first time in my life, left home
with scarcely a regret and without a tear.'
If he had known what was to await him in San Francisco and what kind
of life he was going to lead during the next decade, he might have
written less jauntily to his grieving family. But George had already
formed quite a good opinion of himself, if we can judge from a
phrenological self-analysis he made while still in Philadelphia. This
examination revealed a tendency toward rashness and over-zealousness
which needed to be checked, but it also showed that the subject
possessed an ardent, generous, and discriminating temperament, an
audacious imagination, and a fearless, resolute spirit. One notation
appearing in the phrenological report deserves special scrutiny, for
it was uncomfortably substantiated in San Francisco: 'Desires money
more as a means than as an end, more for its uses than to lay up; and
pays too little attention to small sums.'
The question of money, or rather the absence of it, figured
prominently in George's mind during the following years. He searched
for it in the Frazer River gold fields; he shifted from job to job, to
the concern of his family and friends, and he tramped around the
state. All of these discouraging experiences helped to mature him and
stock his mind with information, but they did not make him rich. What
galled him particularly, he confided to his sister, was 'the fierce
struggle of our civilized life,' and it was at this time that he began
to dream about
the promised Millennium, when each one will be free to
follow the best and noblest impulses, unfettered by the restrictions
and necessities which our present state of society imposes upon
him-when the poorest and meanest will have a chance to use all his
God-given faculties, and not be forced to drudge away the best part
of his time in order to supply wants but little above those of the
animal.
George had not yet pondered the question of why work was scarce and
hard to keep; he only knew, he wrote home in 1861, that 'the want of a
few dollars . . . keeps us separate . . . forces us to struggle on so
painfully . . . crushes down all the noblest yearnings of the heart
and mind.' Some sixteen years later he began to formulate a reason and
a solution for the dilemma, to raise the specter of poverty and lay it
to rest; but a long time of trial remained before he was ready to
announce the glad tidings to the world.
IV
After the first shock of discovering the rarity of windfalls and the
improbability of picking up gold nuggets on the streets, George
settled down to the job of staying alive. The city in which he had
chosen to make his home was rapidly losing the look of an isolated
coastal port and showing unmistakable signs of its future importance.
When George got there in 1858, San Francisco depended on the
ocean-going steamer for its communication with the outside. Two years
later George wrote to his sister Jennie about the arrival of the Pony
Express and his expectations of a transcontinental telegraph system by
1862. He thus found himself in the unusual position of watching the
evolution of a society from 'incoherent homogeneity to coherent
heterogeneity' (as his onetime idol, Herbert Spencer, phrased it) and
drawing invaluable conclusions from this phenomenon. George Bernard
Shaw, himself 'swept into the great Socialist revival' after hearing
George speak many years later, subsequently wrote of George's
California sojourn:
Some of us regretted that he was an American, and
therefore necessarily about fifty years out of date in his economics
and sociology from the point of view of an older country; but only
an American could have seen in a single lifetime the growth of the
whole tragedy of civilization from the primitive forest clearing. An
Englishman grows up to think that the ugliness of Manchester and the
slums of Liverpool have existed since the beginning of the world:
George knew that such things grow up like mushrooms, and can be
cleared away easily enough when people come to understand what they
are looking at and mean business. His genius enabled him to
understand what he looked at better than most men; but he was
undoubtedly helped by what had happened within his own experience in
San Francisco as he could never have been helped had he been born in
Lancashire.
As Shaw correctly observed, George might not have reached his
solution if he had not been a close reasoner with an ability to see
beneath the glittering surface of progress and to detect its latent
consequences. An unreflective booster might have drawn the unwarranted
conclusion that he automatically profited from the growth of his city
or section and would have accepted the coming of the railroads and the
resulting expansion of trade and population with complacence if not
delight. But George early deduced that only the property holders or
people with established businesses and special skills could expect to
benefit. 'Those who have only their own labour,' he wrote in 1868,
'will become poorer, and find it harder to get ahead.'
The responsibilities of a marriage entered into with customary
thoughtlessness may have provoked these sober reflections, and
certainly the gloom of the early war years had something to do with
them. But perhaps the real explanation was simply that Henry George
was growing up. Resisting the impulse to join the Federals, he had
taken a job as typesetter in Sacramento after his wedding. He lost
this job after quarreling with the foreman, and then he failed
completely as a clothes-wringer salesman. The operation of a small
job-printing business which followed earned him a precarious
livelihood in the middle 'sixties, but it was not until 1868 that he
secured a decently paid position on the San Francisco Times. George
emerged from these dreary and seemingly interminable misadventures a
more mature person and a more confident one. He had found out that he
could write well, a piece of information any reader of his vigorously
written log books and letters should have been able to give him, and
he sensed that his opinions, hitherto scattered and unrelated, were
beginning to shape into a coherent philosophy.
He had not yet developed his powers as a speaker, but in his
newspaper work he now came face to face with organized wealth in the
guise of autocratic railroad executives and the Associated Press
monopoly. A trip to the East in the winter of '69 not only furnished
convincing proof that no small individual concern could survive a
contest with a monopolistic and influential organization like the
Associated Press, but also illustrated for George the dramatic paradox
of wealth and scarcity which he was to exploit so brilliantly in
another ten years. In New York at this time, overcome perhaps by the
sight of so much want and misery, he experienced what he later
described as 'a thought, a vision, a call-give it what name you
please' to devote himself to the eradication of poverty. But still the
solution lay hidden. That monopoly, especially monopoly in land, had
something to do with the great paradox, he was now ready to believe;
by 1877, he became certain at last that land monopoly lay at the root
of all social and economic ailments.
V
George's disciples, the more devout ones at any rate, have attached
the same reverence to his vision and its subsequent embodiment in
Progress and Poverty that the Israelites gave to the revelation of
Moses on Mt. Sinai. His own account of the -~genesis of his ideas did
not discourage this attitude, for although he was in many respects a
modest man and disinclined to plume himself at the expense of his
movement, he occasionally gave the impression of being the Lord's holy
vessel. It would be possible, for instance-although unfair-to write
his life as hagiography, to describe his youthful follies, his
soul-searchings, his pilgrimage through the valley of the shadow, and
then to conclude with the flood of irresistible grace and the
transfiguration.
His first vision, it will be remembered, came to him in New York when
he made his vow of social dedication. The second, and perhaps more
important, vision occurred several years later when it suddenly burst
upon him that 'with the growth of population, land grows in value, and
the men who work it must pay more for the privilege.' He afterwards
described this seemingly humdrum observation as '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."' That many of his followers sensed the transcendental
origins of his book is borne out by the number of letters he received
from 'believers' all over the world, in which they thanked the
'Master' or the 'Prophet,' as many of them addressed him, for
vouchsafing his more than human message.
Putting aside these supra-rational explanations for the moment and
turning to more verifiable facts about the events immediately
preceding the writing of
Progress and Poverty, we know that George sat down to work on
September 18, 1877, after several years of active crusading against
political corruption and social cruelty. Women's rights, prison
reform, the treatment of sailors, honest elections-any issue bearing
on the rights of the underdog or having any humanitarian
implications-inspired his pen. During this period he built up and lost
a promising newspaper, inspected gas meters, campaigned for Tilden
(developing at this time his forensic talents), offended the political
scientists at the University of California by impugning the value of
'all this array of professors, all this paraphernalia of learning,'
thrilled San Francisco with a magnificent Fourth of July address, and
speculated unluckily in mining stocks. The gambler kept pace with the
seer.
In the early fall of 1877, Californians suffered from one of those
periodic economic disturbances which economic philosophers disposed of
very easily but which meant real privation for the wage earners. Denis
Kearney founded his Workingmen's party and a 'citizens' committee
retaliated characteristically by organizing a vigilance group of five
thousand volunteers armed with the traditional pick handles and guns.
At this point George began what was to be a magazine article on the
question of poverty and progress. His personal affairs were rather
unsettled, but neither the arrival of a fourth child nor the lectures
he gave in the interests of the family larder interfered seriously
with the writing of Progress and Poverty as it gradually
lengthened into a book. Dressed in a shabby robe of saffron yellow, so
a visitor described him, and surrounded by his books and papers, he
seemed quite oblivious to what someone euphemistically called the
'rolicking disorder' of his dingy house. Anyone who has tried to work
under similar conditions may well marvel at his self-possession and
inward serenity, which enabled him to write one of the most lucid and
logical of books in a house filled with small children. But George
pushed along, and at the end of fourteen months of intermittent work,
the book was done. He finished the last page in the middle of the
night. Then, as he himself records it, he flung himself on his knees
'and wept like a child.'
The finished product did not satisfy him completely. The chapters
dealing with the development of civilization were not so detailed as
he had originally intended them to be, and he had a few misgivings
about the intelligence of his west-coast audience; but George never
doubted that the ultimate reception of his book would be favorable.
Difficulties arose about getting it published, as George might have
expected, and recognition did not come immediately, but its
sensational popularity a few years later must have gratified his
vanity even if it did not greatly surprise him. He had sent a copy of
his book to his father, informing him with sublime assurance that
although Progress and Poverty might not be accepted for some
time, 'it will ultimately be considered a great book;-will be
published in both hemispheres, and be translated into different
languages.' What seems like conceit merely indicated a quiet faith in
the truths he believed his book embodied; he had simply transcribed
God's word and Nature's laws. Once published, Progress and Poverty
ceased to be a personal thing for George. There it stood like any
other natural object. One did not question a mountain or an ocean. 'My
work is done,' he wrote to a friend; 'the rest is not my business.
...I do not think anything that could be said of it could either
flatter or abash me.'
He was perfectly justified, to be sure, in attributing the success of
Progress and Poverty to its intrinsic merits, but other
circumstances had something to do with its tremendous vogue. It
appeared toward the close of a long depression and served as a kind of
literary equivalent to the bumper wheat crop of that year, which
revived America's flagging economy. The poverty and unemployment he so
bitterly arraigned, however, and the angry outbursts of a discontented
laboring class were still fresh memories to a public now thoroughly
alarmed about the growing class antagonism earlier discerned by
Theodore Parker. Writers and publicists, perhaps with the Paris
Commune in mind, hinted at vast working-class conspiracies and eyed
such a sprawling inchoate Organization as the Knights of Labor with
wonder and fear. Actually, this body, formed secretly in 1869 to
promote a friendlier public attitude toward the labor movement, had by
1879 lost any revolutionary zeal it might have possessed and was
simply a loosely joined and ineffective aggregation of wage earners
agitating for a conventional program of reform. But the Knights
augured the rebirth of a more aggressive labor spirit in the
'eighties, and George, though he usually sided with labor, did not
hesitate to point out to his middle-class audience what lay in store
for them if the movement for reform fell into the wrong hands.
Progress and Poverty was, among other things, a lecture to the
middle class on the tactics for survival. George, of course, presented
his case as a moderate and democratic American who detested violent
and illegal remedies, but he refused to minimize the dangers that
might conceivably result from stupid inaction. Civilizations advanced
or retrogressed; they did not stand still. And the dry-rot invariably
set in as power and wealth tended to become unequal. George, following
in Parker's steps, pointed out that technological progress in a
plutocratic society increased inequality and accelerated national
decay, thus giving the lie to the Andrew Carnegies, and he reminded
stubborn conservatives that their refusal to scrutinize the rotten
foundations upon which American prosperity rested endangered the lives
of their children and their children's children. He threatened them
finally with his prophecies of the new barbarians now breeding in
noisome slums who would solve in their own way the problems ignored or
mismanaged by their betters.
Had Progress and Poverty confined itself to these negative
appeals alone, it would not have evoked such a universal response.
George always emphasized the positive and constructive features of his
plan. The real success of his book lay in its warmth and optimism, in
the convincing way he demonstrated how the application of his one
simple measure -- the appropriation of rent by taxation -- would
'substitute equality for inequality, plenty for want, justice for
injustice, social strength for social weakness' and 'open the way to
grander and nobler advances of civilization.' His book, in one sense,
might be described as a dramatic poem justifying the ways of God to
man.
VI
Anyone who has read
Progress and Poverty can understand George's excitement in
undertaking so tremendous a book and his exaltation on completing it,
for it was indeed an astonishingly bold attempt. George proposed
nothing less than to explain why poverty exists and how it could be
abolished without disorganizing the economy or provoking social
upheaval.
He aimed his book, moreover, at an audience hitherto bored by the
doctrines of political economy or confused by the jargon of the
professionals, who did not write their books for the average reader.
He did not expect to reach directly the poverty-stricken and the
hopelessly ignorant. They had been deprived of their natural rights so
completely that they had lost their power to regain them without the
help of luckier men. Their amelioration had to come from above. George
preferred to address himself to a large number of business and
professional men and to artisans, merchants, and skilled workers, who
possessed the natural wit to comprehend the grand truths of the
political economy he set out to expound. Stripped of its abstract
terminology and the vicious distortions of its academic purveyors, the
science of political economy was easily grasped. In Progress and
Poverty George brilliantly succeeded in demonstrating this
contention.
The ideas expressed in his masterpiece turned out to be less original
than George had at first believed (many others had anticipated his
solution) and his economic assumptions were not unassailable, but Progress
and Poverty remains nevertheless one of the greatest popular
primers ever written. George later discounted the question of
originality as being of no importance. What really mattered, he said,
was the fact that his book placed old truths in new relations, that
'it shattered the elaborate structure that under the name of political
economy had been built up to hide them, and restoring what had indeed
been a dismal science to its own proper symmetry, made it the science
of hope and faith.' He made it at once a lesson in economics and a
message of hope. As a treatise, it unfolded with clarity, logic, and
simplicity; as an exhortation and a call to action, it throbbed with
an emotion that unquestionably sprang from the author's sincerity but
was heightened none the less by his skill as a popular rhetorican.
Progress and Poverty, with its alliterative title, its
dramatic structure, its theatrical set-pieces, fused fact and feeling
and suggested through emotion what it did not convey by sense.
George opens his book with a presentation of his famous paradox-'the
great enigma of our times,' the 'central fact from which spring
industrial, social, and political difficulties that perplex the world,
and with which statesmanship and philanthropy and education grapple in
vain.' He sketches swiftly the glaring discrepancies between want and
plenty and indicates that he will try to answer the riddle posed by
the sphinx of fate. Progress and Poverty thus begins darkly
and with a note of urgency, for the barbarians are already beginning
to stir.
Before the prophet can cut down the tree of error, much underbrush
must be removed. George is obliged to expose the false teachers who
through their economic hocus-pocus have made poverty seem inevitable
and permanent. The wage-fund theory of the classical economists-that
wages are drawn from a limited stock of capital-and the gloomy
pronouncements of Malthus, which attribute scarcity to a niggardly
nature, are reviewed and demolished. In this examination, carrying
George almost one third of the way through his book, he discusses the
issues in a quiet conversational tone and proves his points by the
kind of homely analogy most reassuring to the average reader. He
domesticates economics, removing it from the academic groves and
bringing it to the fire-sides and offices and country stores. At
intervals he stops and recapitulates, making certain that his basic
axioms are completely understood, for Progress and Poverty, as
George was fond of saying later, is a 'linked argument,' and he wants
to make sure that no doubts remain before he mounts the next step.
Having struck off the gyves of Manchester, George proceeds to
correlate and co-ordinate the laws of distribution. He has shown what
poverty is not caused by, but he must still weed out other
false distinctions and re-define such misinterpreted words as wealth,
capital, value, land, and rent before the problem of
poverty can be solved and its remedy suggested. The crux of this
section lies in his definitions. The value of anything does
not depend upon its mere exchangeability but on the degree to which it
can command the product of labor. Wealth consists of real
natural products 'modified by human exertion . . . labor impressed
upon matter' and nothing else. Capital is stored-up wealth, an
accumulation of the product of labor. But land is not the
product of labor; unlike wealth, it cannot be reproduced, and its
supply is limited. Moreover, it is the primary substance without which
there could be no wealth or capital. The value of land ownership,
then, lies simply in the privilege it confers of withholding the use
of something that is not man-made but God-made. When the rentier
commands a share of wealth -- the results of production -- by virtue
of mere owner-ship, he is taking without returning a commensurate
contribution.
George's arguments have been oversimplified here and the connections
loosely drawn, but it can be seen now where he is heading. The true
wealth producers, the wage earners, or the man 'who by any exertion of
mind or body adds to the aggregate of enjoyable wealth, increases the
sum of human knowledge or gives to human life higher elevation or
greater fullness,' are collectively drained by the evil monster George
is now ready to disclose-the Vampire of Rent. Labor and capital lie at
the mercy of rent. They receive their share of production only after
the Vampire has seized a large portion for himself.
George is now already beginning to formulate his answer to the
sphinx. Why, he asks next, does rent advance? And then he offers these
reasons. Rents go up after the increase in population reduces the
margin of cultivated land. The landholder benefits not only from the
heightened demand for an inelastic and irreplaceable commodity but
also by the imponderable values that society by its mere presence
confers. 'The most valuable lands on the globe,' he writes, 'the lands
which yield the highest rent, are not lands of surpassing natural
fertility, but lands to which a surpassing utility has been given by
the increase of population.' Every advance in culture or technology
enhances the value of land by aggravating the insatiable demand for
it. The pre-emption of large acreage by speculators is another
important cause he does not fail to mention, but the real force of his
explanations lies in its implied answer to those optimists who place
their hopes in science and technology. Increased wealth, like
population, forces down the margin of cultivation. 'This being the
case,' he concludes, 'every labor-saving invention, whether it be a
steam plow, a telegraph, an improved process of smelting ores, a
perfecting printing press, or a sewing machine, has a tendency to
increase rent.'
The problem is solved. Now George can show why periodic depressions
paralyze the country and why poverty persists as wealth multiplies.
The real enemy, he has demonstrated, is rent. Robber rent levies a
constant toll on productive labor:
Every blow of the hammer, every stroke of the pick, every
thrust of the shuttle, every throb of the steam engine, pay it
tribute. It levies upon the earnings of the men who, deep under
ground, risk their lives, and of those who over white surges hang to
reeling masts; it claims the just reward of the capitalist and the
fruits of the inventor's patient effort; it takes little children
from play and from school, and compels them to work before their
bones are hard or their muscles are firm; it robs the shivering of
warmth; the hungry, of food.; the sick, of medicine; the anxious, of
peace. It debases, and embrutes, and embitters. It crowds families
of eight and ten into a single squalid room; it herds like swine
agricultural gangs of boys and girls; it fills the gin palace' and
the groggery with those who have no comfort in their homes; it makes
lads who might be useful men candidates for prisons and
penitentiaries; it fills brothels with girls who might have known
the pure joy of motherhood; it sends greed and all evil passions
prowling through society as a hard winter drives the wolves to the
abodes of men; it darkens faith in the human soul, and across the
reflection of a just and merciful Creator draws the veil of a hard,
and blind, and cruel fate!
George's style, growing lush and almost revivalistic when he writes
of injustice or the iniquities of rent, lapses back again to cool
expository prose as he constructs an argument and clinches a point.
George now reveals his remedy for the unequal ownership of land: the
confiscation of rent by the nation. Society at last can profit from
the value that it alone confers and the Vampire, deprived of its
sustenance, will shrivel away. The owners of land, to be sure, retain
title to the property or the 'shell,' as George puts it, but the
community takes the kernel. This appropriation of rent is the famous
Single Tax which will finally do away with the necessity of any other
tax, restore the harmony of interests intended by nature, and prepare
for the glorious destiny that lies in store for the emancipated
society.
The effects of the remedy on production will, of course, be enormous
after the parasite growth is removed, but George writes even more
enthusiastically about the prevention of waste at last possible in a
povertyless society. It will no longer be necessary to spend vast sums
on charity. Vice and crime and corruption will disappear. And most
important of all, individuals who have hitherto been a drain on the
community can become active working members. George regarded men too
highly to think that the acquisitive mercenary 'men with muckrakes'
were following their natural instincts. Approbation, the esteem of
their fellows, is what they seek primarily, he insists-'the sense of
power and influence, the sense of being looked up to and respected,'
and not money for its own sake. Abolish the fear of want and the
passion now wasted in the quest for riches may be harnessed for the
welfare of the community.
By this time George has transcended the dubious mechanics of his land
tax and is now reaching the ethical and spiritual part of his
treatise, which links him with the other middle-class progressives of
his generation. Poverty is condemned, finally, not because of the
physical suffering attendant upon it, but because it brutalizes the
spirit and destroys the sympathy latent in everyone:
The wrong that produces inequality; the wrong that in the
midst of abundance tortures men with want or harries them with the
fear of want; that stunts them physically, degrades them
intellectually, and distorts them morally, is what alone prevents
harmonious social development.
Down-to-earth people may scoff at 'the dream of impracticable
dreamers,' but George assures his readers that it is really a
utilitarian consideration for men not to kill themselves with drudgery
and to release the mental power, the 'infinite diversities of aptitude
and inclination' lying unused and unrecognized. He presents an
alluring picture of a society in which human resources are conserved,
in which want and ignorance and degradation have vanished, and he asks
the property holder if the future of his children would not be safer
in such a state.
Having held forth the golden prospect of a new day, George
dramatically suspends the final apotheosis while he offers an
either/or choice to the world-to retrogress and decay or to go
forward. Progress is by no means inevitable, he argues, despite the
'hopeful fatalism' of the Spencerians, nor is there any justification
for imputing human advances to wars or slavery or famine as
exterminators of the unfit. Civilizations rise and fall; 'the earth is
the tomb of the dead empires, no less than of dead men.' Hereditary
modifications, George suspects, and changes in the nature of men
explain neither progress nor retrogression. And the line of reasoning
that attributes a life cycle to nations or races paralleling the
growth and decay of individual lives is no less superficial than all
such analogies. A community, unlike the human body, is being
constantly refreshed by new members and cannot be corrupted 'unless
the vital powers of its components are lessened.' Yet the central
truth remains: that civilizations engender their own poisons.
George has swept away the claims of racial chauvinists and boldly
asserts that human development depends largely on the matrix of
culture in which the individual finds himself, what Veblen was later
to call 'the state of the industrial arts.' This web of institutions,
this storehouse of human achievement, while it often acts as a barrier
to progress, accounts for the transmission of knowledge and 'makes
progress possible.' But still George withholds his revelation. He has
not yet explained the dynamics of civilization's mobility forward and
backward.
The answer when it does come is not anticlimactic. Nations grow or
deteriorate depending on the extent to which they make use of or
vitiate the collective mental powers. When societies are running
downgrade, mental energies are being consumed for what George calls
'non-progressive' purposes. That is to say, men's lives are consumed
in aggressive enterprises of their own or in resisting the aggressions
of others. George illustrates this thought with one of his
characteristic nautical analogies:
To compare society to a boat. Her progress through
the water will not depend upon the exertion of her crew, but upon
the exertion devoted to propelling her. This will be lessened by any
expenditure of force required for bailing, or any expenditure of
force in fighting among themselves, or in pulling in different
directions.
Mental power, in short, is most effective when men associate in
equality.
George does not minimize the importance of natural circumstances in
determining the kind and quality of a civilization. Following a lead
of Buckle's, he emphasizes the importance of physiography and admits
that uncontrollable physical phenomena-deserts or jungles or mountains
-- not only isolate men and prevent association but directly inspire
national conceits and prejudices that ultimately promote wars, 'the
negation of association.' But he attributes the chief reason for a
civilization's decline to the ever-present tendency toward inequality.
The institutions that take root at the dawn of a civilization may
later strangle it by retaining obsolete ideas and by funneling off the
benefits derived from the 'collective power' of the society to a
special class in the community. The community in turn is deprived of
the advantages achieved by men commingling in free association;
progress stops and retrogression begins:
On the one side, the masses of the community are
compelled to expend their mental powers in merely maintaining
existence. On the other side, mental power is expended in keeping up
and intensifying the system of inequality, in ostentation, luxury,
and warfare.
When a society has reached such a pass, any innovation, of course, is
considered dangerous; the rulers permit no experiment that may
ultimately unseat them, and the masses are too preoccupied with the
problem of staying alive to take up 'progressive' considerations.
The lesson for America is quite obvious. It is the inequality of
wealth that finally brings about the petrifaction of civilization,
divides society into a plutocracy and a mob, and sweeps away the
middle class for which George speaks and from which he believes most
good derives. He has revealed the cause for social decay and has
offered a plan to circumvent it. Now he presents a stark picture of
what America may expect if present tendencies are allowed to continue
unchecked. The threat follows the promise. Our boasted political
democracy has not prevented economic inequality nor can mere political
forms sustain a democracy. Tyranny sprouting out of decayed republican
institutions can be the most vicious of all, 'for there despotism
advances in the name and with the might of the people.' The very
democratic stratagems that in the equalitarian society insure popular
will become devices ideally suited to plutocratic manipulation.
Universal suffrage becomes a positive evil when granted to a
broken-down, will-less corrupt proletariat.
George does not conclude his book on this painful note; a heavenly
vision must follow the apocalypse of destruction. He is no fatalist,
no Brooks Adams charting the course of civilization's decline. 'The
Central Truth' is most reassuring despite the possible menace it
involves, for if men will only act, a utopia whose golden spires have
been seen only by a few poets and seers will become at last an earthly
habitation. Political economy, far from being the dismal science,
becomes under George's supervision 'radiant with hope,' and the reader
is pleased and comforted to discover at the end that everything George
has been discussing is subsumed under the golden rule, dear to
Christian and democrat alike. We see finally 'that the truth which the
intellect grasps after toilsome effort is but that which the moral
sense reaches by a quick intuition,' that nature is bounteous, not
stingy, and that earthly salvation lies in the minds and hearts of
men. George's eschatology is optimistic in the best transcendental
vein. His investigation has convinced him that though the race and the
individual die and the world shall someday 'resolve itself into a
gaseous form, again to begin immeasurable mutations,' a passage exists
'from life behind to life beyond.' Man at last is redeemed, and the
ways of God are justified.
VII
The almost instantaneous popularity of
Progress and Poverty had nothing to do with its originality --
or rather unoriginality, for in many ways it was a most derivative
book. Like the Declaration of Independence from which it stemmed, it
was largely an amalgam of ideas already long familiar (the echoes of
Condorcet, Comte, Fourier, Bastiat, Mill, Jefferson, Emerson, and many
others are deafening), but it was at the same time so intensely
personal and sincere and presented with such an enraptured finality
that it seemed more novel than it actually was. George had really
enlarged upon his own experiences and written a kind of sublimated
autobiography calculated to attract even those readers -- and there
must have been many -- who had neither the interest nor the ability to
follow his chain of thought.
John Jay Chapman, describing 'the New Jerusalem of Single Tax' that
George unfolded in the last chapter of Progress and Poverty,
could think of nothing else but Don Quixote:
He is rapt. He is beyond reach of the human voice. He
has a harp and is singing-and this is the power of the book.
It is preposterous. It is impossible. It is romance -- a rhapsody --
a vision-at the end of a long seeming scientific discussion of rent,
interest, and wages -- (in which discussion of his destructive
criticism of other people must be admitted to be very strong -
conclusive -- but which leaves his own work subject to his own
criticism). This burst of song, being the only lyric poetry of this
commercial period, is popular.
But with all of his facetiousness, Chapman gave more credit to
George's destructive criticism than did most of the academicians, who
never treated George as a serious economist.
George expected the hostility of the propertied interests and tried
to meet it. If he seemed carried away by the significance of his
revelation, he never dropped out of his role of the cautious advocate.
'A great wrong always dies hard,' he wrote, and George tried carefully
not only in Progress and Poverty but also in his subsequent
works to play down those ideas that were likely to antagonize his
audience if presented in too bald a fashion. For instance, if George
had proposed outright confiscation of land, it would have involved, as
he said, 'a needless shock to present customs and habits of
thought-which is to be avoided.' He did not like to hedge when great
principles were at stake, for that was not real wisdom, but he
apparently had no illusions about the social inertia holding back
reform or the stubborness of the masses. With all of his idealism and
his Jeffersonian expressions of human equality, he showed an almost
hard-boiled awareness of human stupidity, which suggests, at times,
Emerson's contemptuous opinion of the 'imbecile' mob.
No matter how outrageous the wrong, George believed, society accepted
it and grafted it into the social system:
the majority of men do not think; the
majority of men have to expend so much energy in the struggle to
make a living that they do not have time to think. The majority of
men accept, as a matter of course, whatever is. This is what makes
the task of the social reformer so difficult, his path so hard. This
is what brings upon those who first raise their voices in behalf of
a great truth the sneers of the powerful and the curses of the
rabble, ostracism and martyrdom, the robe of derision and the crown
of thorns.
He likened mankind to a great stupid bull with a ring in its nose,
all tangled up in its own rope and struggling vainly to reach the
green pastures a few yards away. Like the bull, man can only bellow
ineffectively, and he will never be able to use his great power 'until
the masses, or at least that sprinkling of more thoughtful men who are
the file-leaders of popular opinion, shall give such heed to larger
questions as will enable them to agree on the path reform should
take.' That George regarded himself as one of these prophets or
file4eaders is quite clear. Quietly and skillfully he disentangled the
bull, taking particular precautions not to alarm it and leading it by
the nose into Elysium.
The zeal, always tempered with discretion, that made Progress and
Poverty radical but somehow safe, characterized the speeches and
poverty radical he now began to make in great profusion a halting and
awkward speaker into a natural orator of extraordinary charm and
persuasiveness. His public writing had always been oratorical in tone,
mingling the plain words and simple phrasing with rhetorical
flourishes, and his speaking took on the same quality. George, first
drawn to the lecture platform in order to supplement his meager
income, grew to believe that his spoken words would gain more converts
than his written, and his short sturdy figure and his red beard and
dome-shaped head soon became familiar to people all over the United
States. But it was in the British Isles that his eloquence drew the
admission from the London Times that as an orator he was
superior to Cobden and Bright.
In the spring of 1881, afloat once more and poorer than he had been
at twenty-one, 'The Little Gamecock,' as the reporters called him,
became actively concerned with the agitation for land reform in
Ireland, and seeing an opportunity for propagandizing his own views on
the question, began to speak and write for the Irish Land League. The
pamphlet he published on this issue received considerable attention,
and in the fail of 1881, he sailed for Ireland as a reporter for the
Irish World. This trip marked the beginning of George's
enormous vogue in Ireland and England. He was quickly identified as
one of the leaders of the Irish movement, hobnobbed with celebrities,
lectured to large audiences, and returned home a year later a famous
man. His friends and well-wishers, including some New York politicians
who thought George was an Irishman, tendered him a fancy dinner at
Delmonico's.
Progress and Poverty in the meantime had been selling by the
thousands, and even though George's growing reputation brought him
little cash (he was lax about his copyrights and gave away as many
books as he sold) and he continued to live, as he said, 'literally
from hand to mouth,' he now found plenty of opportunities to write and
speak. The series in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper
appeared at this time, and he started his book on the tariff, but an
invitation by the Land Reform Union to deliver a number of addresses
in England put an end to his writing for the time being. In January of
'84, George found himself once again in London, eager to convert the
gentiles.
George Bernard Shaw, who heard George in 1882, has recorded his
impressions of the American prophet:
One evening in the early eighties I found myself-I
forget how and cannot imagine why-in the Memorial Hall, Farringdon
St., London, listening to an American finishing a speech on the Land
Question. I knew he was an American because he pronounced
'necessarily' -- a favorite word of his-with the accent on the third
syllable instead of the first; because he was deliberately and
intentionally oratorical, which is not customary among shy people
like the English; because he spoke of Liberty, Justice, Truth,
Natural Law, and other strange eighteenth century superstitions; and
because he explained with great simplicity and sincerity the views
of The Creator, who had gone completely out of fashion in London in
the previous decade and had not been heard of there since. I noticed
also that he was a born orator, and that he had small, plump, pretty
hands.
For all of his levity, Shaw attested to the importance of George as a
social revivalist, and although he and his friends outgrew the
simplicities of the Single Tax, Shaw, at any rate, never minimized his
debt to Henry George. It was enough for Shaw that George made them see
the importance of economics in the battle for reform prior to their
discovery of Marx and that he stimulated such men as Sidney Webb and
H. G. Wells to complicate the problem for themselves and pass beyond
the elementary outlines of Progress and Poverty. It was a good
thing, said Shaw, that George was not overly burdened with information
when he arrived, for 'the complexity of the problem would have
overwhelmed him if he had realized it, or If it had not, it would have
rendered him unintelligible.' As it turned out, his book served as an
introductory text to the nature of society for these budding
socialists and Fabians; without it, perhaps, they would not have
advanced so quickly to more sophisticated levels of economic thinking.
In England as well as in America George became the popular instructor
in political economy not only because he was a gifted teacher --
patient, lucid, and persuasive -- but also because he possessed to a
high degree what J. A. Hobson called a 'certain capacity of dramatic
exaggeration.' During George's first English visit in 1882, liberal
M.P.'s, non-conformist leaders, and ministers looked upon his views
with horror. Seven years later these same men were presiding over his
lectures and advocating his ideas in Parliament. No one, Hobson
believed, exercised so much influence on English radicalism in the
'eighties and 'nineties as Henry George.
George's own effectiveness and influence were not lost upon him, and
despite his modesty and his conscious desire to subordinate his fame
and fortune to the land-reform cause, he came more and more to think
of himself as God's right arm. After he had been scornfully denounced
by the Duke of Argyll as the 'Prophet of San Francisco,' his friends
happily borrowed the designation and henceforth referred to George in
terms that suggested he was more than mortal. He emerged, in the words
of one of his ardent followers, as 'the hero,' the 'commander in chief
in the contest of ideas . . . for me, and doubtless for future
generations, the greatest man of the 19th century.'
By the middle 'eighties, the Single Tax had hardened into a religion,
with George in the role of the not always genial Pope when it came to
the question of refuting minor heresies. Organized churches, he
believed, offered men 'stones instead of bread,' and from Protestant
to Catholic preached 'alms giving or socialism.' He now grew more
certain 'that the time is ripe for our doctrine, and that it is being
forced forward by a greater power than our own.' Convinced of the
truth of his own particular vision, George began to regard other
reformers who ranked their pet projects as of equal or of more
importance than his own as upstarts. He closed the columns of his
newspaper, The Standard (the parent organ of the Single Tax,
established in 1887) to rival ideas, and fired two of his editors for
insubordination. George was justified in dismissing these men on many
counts, yet he showed an impatience and an absence of generosity in
this episode not consistent with his earlier magnanimity.
The men who took the leadership in the movement at this time were
largely business and professional people. Some of them, like Thomas G.
Shearman, a successful corporation lawyer, and Tom Johnson, a
Cleveland industrialist, seemed to be more interested in the economics
of the Single Tax and free trade than in the more deeply radical
implications of George's theories, and George himself became
increasingly chilly toward socialism and its proponents as the
radicals grew more vociferous about the inadequacies of the Single
Tax.
At the beginning George had been tolerant of socialism and had agreed
with its objectives; but, he argued even then, 'it is evident that
whatever savors of regulation and restriction is in itself bad, and
should not be resorted to if any other mode of accomplishing the same
end presents itself.' The confiscation of rent, he was sure, would
bring about the benefits of socialism without inviting the dangers
likely to occur with its installation.
Realizing the looseness of the term 'Socialist' and acknowledging
that he too had been classed as one, he neither admitted nor
disclaimed the name, because he saw 'the correlative truth' in the
principles of both individualism and socialism. But he made it quite
plain that Marxian socialism as expounded by the British socialists
and in America by Laurence Gronlund was nothing more than 'a
high-purposed but incoherent mixture of truth and fallacy, the defects
of which may be summed up in its want of radicalism-that is to say, of
going to the root.' In so far as socialism increased international
solidarity and taught the advantages of associated action, he
concurred. He fully admitted that as society grew more complex, the
domain of social action would enlarge. He pointed out that much evil
had resulted from the habit of leaving to individuals what ought to be
undertaken by the state, and he called the laisser-faire
gospel of the Spencerians a 'stench in the nostrils.' Nevertheless, he
distrusted deeply the 'super-adequate' socialism that allowed the
state to 'absorb capital and abolish competition' and that saw labor
and capital as irreconcilably opposed. Super-adequate or scientific
socialism, moreover, brought up visions of the authoritarian state,
where the workers had everything provided for them, 'including the
directors themselves.' It lacked a guiding principle, and, most
important of all, it failed to define 'the extent to which the
individual is entitled to liberty or to which the state may go in
restraining it.'
It is not always easy to discover what prompted George's feelings
toward the Socialists. Some of his misgivings were in all probability
honestly arrived at, and these have been confirmed by history. And yet
his annoyance with the Socialists was not always warranted. He
complained that they tried to wreck any movement they could not
dominate and that they blurred the Single Tax by introducing
irrelevant issues, but George and his followers did not try very hard
to maintain a basis of agreement with them. His unfortunate stand
against the Haymarket Square anarchists, unjustly convicted in 1887,
alienated the Socialists even farther, and it is no wonder that they
deserted him in the same year when he ran a very poor third in the New
York contest for Secretary of State. In view of the fact that he had
nearly won the mayoralty of New York City the year before with
Socialist help, his defeat was particularly humiliating.
No man who led as active and public a life as George could avoid
making occasional blunders, and the adulation he received would have
hopelessly ruined a smaller man. George threw himself into politics
and engaged in public debates ostensibly to publicize his cause, but
he unquestionably enjoyed the limelight and the thrill of conflict.
Yet despite his piques, his unconvincing rationalizations, his
sectarian bickering, and his downright errors, his public record is
impressively good.
Unfortunately, as many of his friends continually told him, the hours
devoted to journalism and politics and the forum prevented him from
rethinking the weaker portions of his theories and from writing the
books he might have written had he allowed himself the necessary
leisure. Even so, George did manage to find time to write several
other important works besides Progress and Poverty, most
notably Social Problems (1883) and Protection or Free
Trade (1886), and his collected writings are well worth studying
as a rich and perceptive expression of American progressive
philosophy. The lesser writing of George derives, of course, pretty
much from Progress and Poverty, for he never seriously
modified any of these theories, but frequently they are specific and
concrete where the parent book is general.
VIII
The nub of George's social philosophy is his sympathetic view of man.
'To him,' as a friend wrote after his death, 'every human being, no
matter how high or how low, was an immortal soul with whom his own
immortal soul could come into sympathetic contact. It was as easy for
him to converse with a hod-carrier as with a philosopher.' This
conviction of man's innate goodness led him, as it did most of the
other middle-class reformers of Jeffersonian or transcendental
origins, to accept an oversimplified psychology that exalted
instinctive benevolence and played down human perversity, yet at the
same time it saved him from the even more naive and untenable
utilitarianism of the so-called realists who invented a dehumanized
integer they called 'man' and created a folklore of their own.
Since man was a social animal, the virtues residing within him
developed harmoniously only when he associated with others on a basis
of equality. George did not discount the importance of individual
genius, but he attributed progress to 'the larger and wider
cooperation of individual powers; to the growth of that body of
knowledge which is a part, or rather, perhaps, an aspect of the social
integration I have called the body economic.' The experience of the
race could be stored and transmitted only after individual man had
merged with the social body, the great repository of human knowledge.
Co-operation not only helped men to overcome social problems; it also
quickened the religious spirit and the springs of human sympathy and
dramatized the truth of mutual dependence. No one class could be
emancipated, he kept insisting, at the expense of another; every
person's happiness was the concern of all. And he regarded all
legislation or pressures exerted for a particular body of people as
dangerous to the interests of the whole.
According to George, it required no special knowledge to grasp these
truths. One did not have to be a college graduate to reason correctly;
indeed, he observed, 'There is no vulgar economic fallacy that may not
be found in the writings of professors; no social vagary current among
"the ignorant" whose roots may not be discovered among "the
educated and cultured."' And the successive arguments he proposed
followed logically from his initial premises about the duties and
capacities of man.
The Social Darwinists, the followers of Spencer and his school,
George felt, blurred these central truths with their specious talk of
'survival of the fittest' and 'nature's remedies,' and thereby sinned
against the divinity in man. In valuing man for his muscles rather
than his mind, in treating him like a commodity, 'a thing, in some
respects, lower than the animal,' they made themselves culpable on
practical as well as moral grounds, because, for George, the physical
strength of the human frame counted as nothing when placed against the
'resistless currents' flowing from unleashed intelligence.
The Spencerians talked of progress (and George himself grew lyrical
about technological advances) but they canceled out its human costs.
George, like Parker and the other humanitarians, did not interpret the
word 'progress' in its material sense or call progressive a
civilization that excluded so large a portion of society from physical
and spiritual benefits. Inventions and discoveries in themselves were
not unmixed blessings so far as the workingman was concerned. They
hastened the march toward monopoly; they made employer-employee
relations increasingly indirect and impersonal; they deprived the
worker of his independence; they cramped his mind and body. 'We are
reducing the cost of production,' he wrote, 'but in doing so, are
stunting children, and unfitting women for the duties of maternity,
and degrading men into the position of mere feeders of machines. We
are not lessening the fierceness of the struggle for existence.'
George no more hungered for the pre-industrial golden age than Parker
did, but he was impressed by the findings of such men as Professor
Thorold Rogers of Oxford, whose
Six Centuries of Work and Wages (a work of immense influence
among the progressives) confirmed George's contention that the
workingman had lost more than he had gained by the industrial
revolution. The great factories, housing thousands of hands, produced
with miraculous economy as compared with the old handicraft system,
and yet the modern worker performed the most monotonous labor 'amid
the din and the clatter, and whir of belts and wheels,' and had about
as much chance of becoming a master of the plant as of becoming 'King
of England or Pope of Rome.' Circumstances remote from his personal
life threw him out of work, and during the boom times he and his
fellows could increase their share only by striking or threatening to
strike.
The callous disregard for men in a country that mouthed the
sentiments of the Declaration of Independence was reprehensible on
moral grounds, but George also saw the dangerous political
consequences of such an attitude. The industrial revolution, breaking
the bonds that had formerly tied the individual to the community, had
precipitated a kind of mass alienation, and produced a type of
rootless man who could fall an easy prey to the demagogue. The
'dangerous classes politically' are not only the 'very rich' but the
'very poor':
It is not the taxes that he is conscious of paying that
gives a man a stake in the country, an interest in its government;
it is the consciousness of feeling that he is an integral part of
the community; that its prosperity is his prosperity, and its
disgrace his shame.
Men do not vote patriotically, any more
than they fight patriotically, because of their payment of taxes.
Whatever conduces to the comfortable and independent material
condition of the masses will best foster public spirit, will make
the ultimate governing power more intelligent and more virtuous.
The corollary was equally obvious. Deprive a man of that sense of
identification, facilitate the piling up of huge fortunes, aggravate
the tendency toward inequality, and you have a disoriented and
menacing proletariat.
George assumed that the tendency toward concentration, which produced
the disparities of wealth and divided society, was not necessarily an
artificial one. As men associated together in larger groups,
production naturally took place on a larger scale. But he refused to
admit that the evils following in the wake of the factory system were
either natural or inevitable. 'The concentration that is going on in
all branches of industry,' he wrote in Social Problems, 'is a
necessary tendency of our advance in the material arts. It is not in
itself an evil. If in anything its results are evil, it is simply
because of our bad social adjustments.' The whole question hinged on
whether the relation in which men a~ thus drawn together
and compelled to act together shall be the natural relation of
interdependence in equality, or the unnatural relation of dependence
upon a master.
George's trustful acceptance of the principle of bigness may seem to
contradict his defense of competition, but he had no difficulties in
reconciling the ideas of co-operation and competition. The trouble
heretofore, he argued, was the myth of the free market. A slave class
cannot be said to compete. But once assure natural rights to everyone,
then competition, acting on every hand-between employers
as between employed; between buyers as between sellers -- can injure
no one. On the contrary it becomes the most simple, most extensive,
most elastic, and most refined system of cooperation, that, in the
present stage of social development, and in the domain where it will
freely act, we can rely on for the coordination of industry and the
economizing of social forces.
When competition failed to work properly and the economic machinery
broke down, when the natural processes of concentration degenerated
into hoggish monopoly, George never blamed the defective laws of
nature. Political economists euphemistically disposed of depressions
and unemployment by inventing concepts like 'overproduction,' but to
George such reasoning was nothing less than blasphemous. How could
there be overproduction with so many wants unfilled? Fallible men
created artificial scarcity by interfering with the natural laws of
trade-strangling production through monopoly, tariffs, and other
hidden taxes-and by engaging in piratical ventures against the
community. The waste in men and machines, the vice and crime
accompanying and resulting from the 'masked war' of business, stemmed
directly from 'our ignorance and contempt of human rights.' Nature
remained bountiful. Plenty of work always remained to be done.
Clearly, then, the blame lay with man himself, and he would never pull
himself out of his mire until he took to heart the truth taught by
both religion and experience-'that the highest good of each is to be
sought in the good of others; that the true interests of men are
harmonious, not antagonistic; that prosperity is the daughter of good
will and peace; and that want and destruction follow enmity and
strife.'
The salvation of society depended ultimately on a moral revival, but
at the same time a society had to be constructed in which these
benevolent virtues might be permitted to flourish. The Single Tax,
George was certain, would transform disintegrative forces into
life-giving ones, but in the meantime, the state had to quicken the
ameliorative process. It was not the business of the state to make man
virtuous, but it did have the responsibility of securing 'the full and
equal liberty of individuals.'
George modified, with some reluctance, his earlier views on the role
of governments. To the last he retained certain Jeffersonian
prejudices against the large army and navy, expensive and
undemocratic; and the abolition of the diplomatic service, he felt,
'would save expense, corruption, and national dignity.' He urged that
we hold tenaciously to local liberties, for no outside authority,
either state or national, knew as much about local affairs as the
residents themselves. But as he observed the 'growing complexity of
civilized life and the growth of great corporations and combinations,
before which the individual is powerless,' he became convinced 'that
the government must undertake more than to keep the peace between man
and man-must carry on, when it cannot regulate, businesses that
involve monopoly, and in larger and larger degree assume co-operative
functions.' If any means of curtailing monopolies, other than federal
intervention, had presented itself, George would have preferred it,
but he could see no other.
Natural monopolies, he believed, ought to be taken over outright by
the state instead of being regulated. Such a proposal might seem
inconsistent with George's moderate views and his distrust of
socialism, but he took the stand, anticipating some of the later
reformers, 'that any considerable interest having necessary relations
with government is more corruptive of government when acting upon
government from without than when assumed by government.' The
railroads provided a notorious illustration for this argument.
Actually, the kind of governmental control George advocated really
applied the free-trade principle to keep open the channels of trade.
For, he concluded, 'if we carry free trade to its logical conclusions
we are inevitably led to what the monopolists, who wish to be "let
alone" to plunder the public, denounce as "socialism,"
and which is, indeed, socialism, in the sense that it recognizes the
true domain of social functions.' Enlarging the sphere of government,
he was perfectly aware, always carried with it an element of danger
and he dreaded the hypertrophy of federal bureaus, but he expected the
substitution of a single tax for all the myriad taxes hitherto
collected to simplify the job of government and even permit it to
extend its activities into the domain of public health, libraries,
recreation, and scientific research.
Distrusting as he did large concentrations of power, he was finally
persuaded by experience and observation that the welfare state had to
come if the democratic individualism he believed in so passionately
was to survive in America. The risks were great, but George concluded
that the only thing to do was to load the state with popular controls
and assume 'that there must be in human nature the possibility of a
reasonably pure government, when the ends of that government are felt
by all to be the promotion of the general good.'
America had no other course anyway. The frontier was gone, as George
announced some years before Professor Frederick Jackson Turner, and
with it our period of national probation. Now that we had impoverished
our soil, dumped our fertility on European shores or flushed it into
the sea, or allowed it to pass into the hands of absentee landlords,
we had to resign ourselves to the consequences. The treasures we had
exhausted during this national debauch were irretrievable. Meanwhile,
we had aroused 'the aspirations and ambitions of the masses' while
accelerating the tendencies that thwarted them, and we could no longer
fall back on the consolation that our magical republican institutions
would somehow carry us through. Forms meant nothing when the substance
was gone.
IX
Georgian philosophy spread during the 'eighties and 'nineties, taking
root especially in the British radical movement and enlisting the
support of many prominent Americans in business, politics, and the
arts. George's trips to England and his Australian tour not only
enhanced his reputation abroad but made him a more considerable figure
for those Americans who needed a foreign seal of approval to convince
them of George's greatness. After all, not many Americans were admired
by Tolstoy, Ruskin, Shaw, Wallace, and Gladstone. Even Karl Marx felt
George important enough to despise. And in this country he could claim
the friendship of Mark Twain, Howells, Henry Demarest Lloyd, Hamlin
Garland, William Jennings Bryan, Henry Ward Beecher, Samuel Gompers,
and hundreds of other prominent men and women who admired his
character and sincerity even though they may not all have accepted his
entire program. Few reformers in our history have managed to attract
so diverse a following and appeal to so wide a variety of groups whose
interests ordinarily clashed.
Ex-President Hayes, visiting New York during the first George
campaign for mayor in 1886, discovered to his great astonishment that
a considerable number of respectable Republicans-well-dressed, well4ed
men who carried gold-headed canes-planned to vote for George. The
arguments they gave for supporting a radical like George coincided
with Hayes's own views at this time: the dollar had acquired too much
power and threatened the republic; monopoly (Hayes cited the Standard
Oil trust as a notorious example) had grown too insolent. These men,
disliking George's remedies, nevertheless found themselves for the
time being on the same side as the labor unions and credited George
with being 'a thoroughly sincere, honest man with the welfare of his
fellow men at heart.' Whatever doubts he may have had about the Single
Tax, Hayes believed that George was 'strong where he portrays the
rottenness of the present system.' He placed George with the other
'Nihillsts' -- himself and Mark Twain and Howells and Abraham
Lincoln-who 'opposed the wrong and evils of the money-piling tendency
of our country, which is changing laws, Government, and morals, and
giving all power to the rich and bringing in pauperism and its
attendant crimes and wretchedness like a flood.'
But a political and economic program that tried to harmonize all
interests and rigorously excluded ideas not in keeping with the views
of its sponsors inevitably invited dissent from conservative and
radical alike. George, in his turn, felt obliged to discipline the
recalcitrant of both wings, and the skirmishes he engaged in during
his last years revealed a talent for polemics as well as a zeal for
his cause. Herbert Spencer had to be answered, and the Pope, too; and
so did the Socialists and the Populists and the false ministers.
George blundered badly in the Haymarket affair when men like Howells
and Bellamy and Lloyd behaved magnificently, and he sanctioned the
execution and imprisonment of the anarchists without studying the case
honestly or courageously. He blundered again in 1888 when he swerved
to Cleveland and broke for a time with his friend, Father Edward
McGlynn, a brilliant and incorruptible priest who had devoted himself
to the Georgian movement and had risked excommunication for his
beliefs. And yet George denounced Cleveland in 1894 against the wishes
of his friends and bitterly criticized the use of federal troops in
the Pullman strike. The Democratic party had reneged on its pledge to
reduce the tariff and opposed the income tax that George, the leading
Single Taxer, believed temporarily necessary. It had sponsored the
anti-anarchist bill, which George (although the anarchists hated him
and attacked him at every opportunity) called worse than the Alien and
Sedition Acts. Finally, Cleveland had ratified the infamous
extradition treaty with Russia and sealed the entrance to America
against such great men as Kropotkin and Reclus. George joined other
reformers and humanitarians in condemning these acts and demonstrated
that his liberalism had not been tarnished by his association with
property holders.
In 1896 he campaigned for Bryan, again grieving his conservative
backers, and toured the Middle West as a reporter for the New York
Journal. Once more his articles took on the radical tinge that
had colored the essays he had written fifteen years before. George,
like Bellamy and Lloyd, was actually neither a gold nor a silver man.
He played down the money issue and chose to interpret the election as
a struggle for power between a ruthless plutocracy, dominating their
sham republic, and the people. Bryan, for all his limitations,
represented Jeffersonian principles -- equal rights for all, special
privileges for none; all other issues of the campaign were small
compared to this. 'I shall vote for Bryan,' George confided to a
correspondent, 'with greater satisfaction and firmer confidence than I
have voted for a Presidential candidate since Abraham Lincoln.'
George had expected Bryan to win -- at least his articles give that
impression -- but he did not let the disappointment of MeKinley's
landslide discourage him. If the plutocracy still controlled the banks
and the government, reform might begin in the municipalities, and
George accepted the independent nomination for the New York mayoralty
in 1897 with the idea that once again Jeffersonian principles might be
injected into a political campaign. Exhausted already by his strenuous
efforts of the last year, and looking, according to one report, 'like
a racked and wounded saint,' George entered the New York race against
the advice of his physicians. Such a step, they assured him, would
undoubtedly kill him. He accepted the verdict quite philosophically,
telling one of them that he knew he had to die sometime and that he
preferred to die while serving the people. Five days before the
election, for which he had campaigned in his usual vigorous spirit,
George's spent body broke under the strain, and he suffered a fatal
apoplectic stroke.
The city turned out to pay tribute to the dead reformer and thousands
filed past his bier in the Grand Central Palace. They were honoring
the man, if not the theorist, and spontaneously recognizing a leader
who throughout his short life had consistently stood for what he
called 'the principle of true Democracy, the truth that comes from the
spirit of the plain people.' To his disciples, of course, George
remained a saint and a social deliverer, but his humanitarianism and
integrity carried over into groups of people who had never read the
bible of the Single Taxers and who never would.
An indefatigable corps of followers remain today, propagandizmg
Single Tax ideas and preparing for the millennium, but George's
lasting greatness, fortunately enough, does not depend upon the
validity of the Single Tax as a social panacea. 'Nobody,' as Bernard
Shaw put it so well, 'has ever got away, or ever will get away, from
the truths that were the centre of his propaganda: his errors anybody
can get away from.'
George's criterion for the good society is still valid -- a society
where the non-progressive forces do not dam up mental energy and where
monotonous labor does not deprive man of his 'godlike power of
modifying and controlling conditions.' Perhaps he asked for too much.
Most certainly his own solution for the paradox of want amidst plenty
enormously oversimplified the causes of man's plight -- a condition
George so compellingly described. But he was right in trying to strike
a balance between the claims of those who emphasized the necessity of
personal regeneration and the environmentalists relying entirely on
the results of external reform. He never divorced religion and
science, for he was certain that the deeper religious instincts of the
multitude, scarcely touched in modern society, would be reached only
through a genuinely social application of scientific principles. No
fairyland would grow up from a slag heap, no race of saints from
festering slums. The geniuses who had distinguished themselves in the
relatively short annals of human history betrayed, George believed,
the vast untapped veins of power society had not begun to scratch. He
hoped to exploit that hidden wealth by convincing his contemporaries
of the practicality of the golden rule, by showing that through virtue
men could be free.
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