Arden: From Theory to Practice

Bill Frank

[Reprinted from the Sunday News Journal, Wilmington, Delaware, 31 August, 1986]

Once more and as usual the few but ardent telescope-visioned supporters of the Single Tax economic philosophy are. missing a great opportunity to exploit the mission merely of the three most interesting communities in Delaware.

I refer to the villages of Arden, Ardentown and Ardencroft, about seven miles north of Wilmington.

Tomorrow happens to be the 147th birth-date anniversary of Henry George, a native of Philadelphia. Some 100 years ago, George developed the Single Tax theory when he tried to explain why there was so much progress in the United States but at the same time so much poverty.

So tomorrow afternoon, Single Taxers are holding a public meeting in Arden's open air theater to honor the memory of Henry George. But apparently they'll honor only George and no one else.

Gov. Castle was persuaded by the current Single Taxers to issue a proclamation, declaring tomorrow as Henry George Day. The governor tagged George as "a great thinker, author and statesman" who inspired the founding of the "three Ardens."

I'm sure Gov. Castle would never advocate Henry George's theory of taxation, because basically George and his followers were sure that far too many people become rich by merely owning and selling tracts of valuable land for which they pay far too little in taxes. At the same time, George theorized, far too many people pay too many high taxes out of their wages or for improvements to the land.

The Single Tax theory is deeply discussed in George's classic, Progress and Poverty. In the latter years of the last century, a group of Philadelphia Single Taxers, as his devout followers, invaded Delaware, attired in U.S. Army uniforms, without guns but armed with tracts explaining the advantages of the Single Tax to communities and individuals. They took over street corners in Wilmington and Dover and preached what was considered a far-left, radical tax theory. Some were arrested in Dover to speaking on street corners without a license. Refusing to pay a fine, about a dozen of them were thrust in the Dover jail, which was just what they wanted to attract attention to their cause.

They also sought in vain to persuade the Delaware General Assembly to reform the then-existing tax schedule for land and property improvements and to abolish taxes on wages.

One of the principal leaders of these Single Tax invaders from Philadelphia was a sculptor, Frank Stephens. When he realized that the Single Taxers' tactics produced no results, he decided to undertake a practical move.

With the help of Will Price, a Pennsylvania architect, he appealed to a Philadelphia millionaire and soap manufacturer, Joseph Fels, who was a devout supporter of Henry George, for a loan to purchase a 160-acre run-down farm north of Wilmington.

With this money and the volunteer services of Will Price, Stephens, later lovingly known at Patro, laid out and developed beginnings of present-day Arden. Stephens, an all-out Shakespeare student, chose the name Arden from the forest of Arden in "As You Like It."

The land that Stephens acquired was designated as a property not owned by anyone in particular but to be held in trust by three trustees in the public interest. Their duty was to lease acres, half acres or quarter acres to leaseholders for 99 years at a time, and to collect from these leaseholders annual land rent or what might be called land taxes.

This began in 1900. The most wonderful thing was that as Will Price designed the village, he provided for open spaces, known as village greens, and preserved the woodlands along Naamans Creek.

In about 10 years, Arden was on its way, with an outdoor theater and a community club. It attracted artists, such as Buzz Ware, philosophers and authors such as Upton Sinclair and Harry Kemp, the poet. It also attracted the nationally known "mother of American communism," Mrs. Bloor, and mil-mannered Socialists and devout Democrats and a few Republicans such as Russell W. Peterson, who later became governor of Delaware, and one or two non-bomb throwing anarchists.

The development of Arden led to Ardentown and later to Ardencroft - all due to the imagination and devotion of Frank Stephens and his son, Don, and to Henry George.

Hence it seems that the current followers of Henry George should devote their efforts on his anniversary, not so much to him but rather to the men who took his theory and put it to work in Delaware.

Henry George was a theorist. But Will Price, Frank Stephens and his son, Don, and their friends Buzz Ware, Emanuel Gerstine, the Ross family and others were practical pioneers. They should get community credit for having translated a theory to practical use in three thriving villages.