Henry George and My Father

Emilia Houghton Delford

[A letter written from Duluth Minnesota, dated 7 June 1943,
to Anna George DeMille, daughter of Henry George]

My dear Mrs. DeMille:

Your letter received this morning. I cannot let you remain under the misconception that I was critical of your father's efforts or writings. My own father was too intelligent and too well educated to have approved anything along those lines that would not stand up against the test of time, although he was barely out of medical college.

I did not mean that my father helped yours write. I do know that he talked and listened. My father had many ideas that fitted in with your father's theories on Single Tax, with which I have no quarrel and my father wrote many articles himself on many subjects.

It was the theories on labor and their so-called rights that my father and Tom Sandford were wont to thrash over to which I referred. Their theories were the beginnings of the labor situation which laid the foundation for the strike of the miners. I have always blamed tom Sandford for abandoning his family to travel over the country to talk on soapboxes to "help the world". It's all right to be altruistic and to hope to make things better in this world but one's family comes first.

I know that my father gave much of his time and effort to helping your father in that tragic second campaign for the mayoralty of New York City. I believe both my father and yours should have belonged to this generation and they might have accomplished much. But not for "True Democracy". I still object to those words as they do not have a true meaning. This was a republic a few years ago and I hope to high heaven it returns to a republic when the demi-gods and bureaucrats in Washington have done with it. A democracy is not for a whole people. The minority have no rights in a democracy and so are as completely crushed as in a totalitarian state from which it is only one step removed.

Very sincerely yours,