Henry George
Ralph Henry Gabriel
[From "The Evolution of the Philosophy of the
General Welfare State," Chapter 17 of the book The Course of
American Democratic Thought, published by The Ronald Press
Company, New York, 1940 and 1956]
In 1869, two years after Frothingham founded the Free Religious
Association, a young California journalist named Henry George was in
New York City attempting to establish a telegraphic news service from
the metropolis to the Pacific Coast. In intervals between work he
strolled about Manhattan fascinated by the evidences of increasing
wealth and developing culture. Cornelius Vanderbilt, creator of the
New York Central, rode about town behind as fine a pair of horses as
America afforded. Edwin Booth had returned to the stage two years
before after a voluntary exile due to his brother Wilkes' disgrace. On
February 3, 1869, the great Hamlet opened Booth's Theatre on the
corner of Sixth Avenue and Twenty-third Street, where night after
night fashionable society applauded sumptuous Shakespearean
productions. The young man from the coast was impressed by the
brilliance of New York. But he was more interested in the city's
blighted areas. Charles Dickens had once visited New York's Five
Points and had published a description which made that slum notorious
in two continents. In this area only a minority of infants had the
misfortune to survive. Here youth decayed from what the inhabitants of
the Points called with a wry picturesqueness the "tenement house
rot." Vice and crime were normal ways of life in the Five Points
and in other less celebrated slums. New York was a city of contrasts
where Henry George faced the old riddle of civilization, the apparent
partnership between progress and poverty. One day the sensitive young
Californian, tramping the sidewalks, musing, saw suddenly revealed
before him the pattern of a noble life. Many years later he told an
intimate friend what happened. "Once, in daylight, and in a city
street," he said, "there came to be a thought, a vision, a
call -- give it what name you please. But every nerve quivered. And
there and then I made a vow."[1] On that day Henry George
dedicated himself to a search for the cause which without justice or
mercy condemned little children to man-made hells. Dwight L. Moody
would have called what happened to George a conversion. William James
might appropriately have included the episode in his Varieties of
Religious Experience. But, though George experienced conversion
after the pattern of evangelical Protestantism, it was to a social
rather than to a theological faith. The change was significant. It
suggested that a new era was emerging which, in spite of its novelty,
was keeping contact with American tradition.
Neither Henry George's mood nor his objective was new to the United
States. For three decades before the Civil War that militant Unitarian
friend of Emerson, Theodore Parker, had crusaded against the slum
conditions of Boston. In the end his campaign to achieve righteousness
had been deflected and had become a part of that larger movement to
free the black man. Parker died on the eve of Sumter. But the
battalions of freedom went on triumph in the Emancipation
Proclamation. The outcome of the Civil War bred a confident hope that
humanitarian objectives could he realized with equal finality. Out of
this humanitarianism grew a new version of the doctrine of the free
individual. The gospel of wealth emphasized freedom from control by
the political State. A new rationalism, born of the religion of
humanity, established the concept of social planning and proposed the
State as the best instrument available to free men in their efforts to
destroy social evils and to further human welfare. Henry George was
only one of a growing company of postwar Americans who saw in poverty
a new slavery, which, like the old, destroyed the souls of men. On
that day in new York City George saw a vision of a new Gettysburg and
a new Appomattox.
To say that the philosophy of Henry George was the outgrowth of his
own experience is to repeat what is true of all thinking men. Yet,
perhaps in a peculiar way the events of his life conditioned his
thought. He was born in Philadelphia in 1839, three years after
Emerson published Nature. In his youth evangelical
Protestantism reached its American apogee. But Henry George's devout
father and mother worshipped after the manner of the Episcopal faith.
Family poverty prevented an advanced education while family piety
fixed in the boy's mind the accepted patterns of religious and moral
ideas. In 1855 young George, sailing as foremast boy to Australia and
to India, experienced a new freedom and gained a new perspective. When
he returned, he found the home atmosphere too stuffy, and, partly as a
consequence. sought his fortune in the California of the vigilante
days. A sailor's training and the printer's trade were his only
skills. The coarse materialism of the mining camp and the raw coast
cities erased the marks of his childhood religious training and left
him a young man's skepticism, disturbed, however, at times by
nostalgia for the old faith.
He had little success at first on the California frontier; yet, when
twenty-two and virtually penniless, he married a Catholic girl of
eighteen. Ill fortune pursued him in spite of his desperate struggles
to maintain his home. Having neither food in larder nor money in
pocket when his second child arrived, he went into the street of his
home town and begged five dollars from a stranger. George knew how it
felt to be poor and hungry. Ultimately a moderate success came, but he
never knew economic security until after Progress and Poverty
became a best seller. Four experiences conditioned his thought: his
early religious training, the frontier moods of materialism and of
individual liberty, personal poverty, and his discovery in New York
City of the social extremes possible in an industrial age. Though he
cheerfully recognized his debt to English classical economists, his
philosophy was essentially an American product.
It sprang primarily from the democratic faith. George never got
outside the bounds of that humanistic thought-pattern and from it he
derived those social beliefs that made him a crusader literally until
the day of his death. But he neither knew nor followed Emerson. Henry
George chose Thomas Jefferson for his patron saint; one of the
Californian's most cherished books was Jefferson's compilation of the
sayings of Jesus. George went back to the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment for the foundations of this thought. The doctrines of
democracy for him were those of the Declaration of Independence. He
thought in terms of equality as well as of liberty. "In our time,
as in times before," said George in 1879, "creep on the
insidious forces that, producing inequality', destroy Liberty. On the
horizon the clouds begin to lower. Liberty calls to us again. We must
follow her further; we must trust her fully. Either we must accept her
fully or she will not stay."[2] George's faith never failed.
Twenty-eight years later, on the eve of his death, lie repeated the
democrat's creed. "I believe
that unto the common people,
the honest democracy, the democracy that believes that all men are
created equal, would bring a power that would revivify not merely this
imperial city, not merely the State, not merely the country, but the
world."[3] In one essential he departed from the democratic
formula commonly accepted in the middle of the century; he did not see
the hand of God in the course of American history. "It is
blasphemy," declared George, "that attributes to the
inscrutable decrees of Providence the sufferings and brutishness that
come of poverty."[4] But Henry George's was no passive acceptance
of the democratic faith; he sought to make it a power for
righteousness in the land.
Progress and Poverty began with a religious experience in 1869
on the sidewalks of New York. As it took form in George's mind during
the next ten California years, it led him to the discovery of God, not
the God of the Methodist preachers he heard in California or of the
Episcopalian rectors he knew in his childhood, but the Author of
Nature of Thomas Jefferson and of the eighteenth-century Deists. For
the philosophy of Henry George such a God was fundamental. In the
beginning. George affirmed, the Author of Nature created the earth and
man to live upon it and He endowed man with a natural right to use the
earth. To buttress a position which was essentially his own, George
fell back upon the authority of Herbert Spencer and pointed out that
the Englishman had formulated the same idea in the first edition of
Social Statics. Upon that natural rights major premise hung
the entire philosophy of George. "It is not enough that men
should vote; it is not enough that they should be theoretically equal
before the law. They must have liberty to avail themselves of the
opportunities and means of life; they must stand on equal terms with
reference to the bounties of nature. Either this, or Liberty withdraws
her light! Either this or darkness comes on, and the very forces that
progress has evolved turn to powers that work destruction. This is the
universal law.
If George's vow to discover the cause of poverty followed the pattern
of a religious conversion, his discovery a few months later of the
answer to his question conformed to the pattern of religious
revelation. He was riding alone on horseback through a California
countryside where new land offices, erupting like pimples from the
plain, proclaimed the disease known as a boom. Everywhere men were
grabbing what they thought were the most promising spots, each hoping
that his land would soon be found in the center of a large and
flourishing city. George rode on to the hills from which he looked
back across an expanse of virgin country at cattle grazing in the
distance. To make conversation he asked a passing stranger the price
of land in the vicinity. "I don't know exactly," was the
answer, "but there is a man over there who will sell some land
for a thousand dollars an acre." "Like a flash it came upon
me," wrote George in later years, "that there was the reason
of advancing poverty with advancing wealth. With the growth of
population land grows in value, and the men who work it must pay more
for the privilege. I turned back, amidst quiet thought, to the
perception that then came to me and has been with me ever since."[6]
Every man, thought George, has a God-given right to use the earth. "Our
primary social adjustment [the private ownership of land] is a denial
of justice In allowing one man to own the land on which and from which
other men live, we have made them his bondsmen in a degree which
increases as material progress goes on. This is the subtle alchemy
that in ways they do not realize is extracting from the masses in
every civilized country the fruits of their weary toil that is
bringing political despotism out of political freedom, and must soon
transmute democratic institutions into anarchy."[7] George's
reference to anarchy was not mere rhetoric. The nationwide labor wars
of 1877 had for a few weeks thoroughly frightened the industrial East.
German anarchists were appearing in America and were beginning to
propagate their creed through pamphlet and press. Excitable persons
began talking of possible social revolution. George published Progress
and Poverty in 1879. After a discouraging start, it achieved a
great popular success. By 1905 it was estimated that two million
copies published in several languages had been sold. Henry George
proposed a cure for American social ills which, avoiding both
revolution and socialism, would conform to the tenets of the
democratic faith. As a result wage earners and insecure small
capitalists flocked to his standard. When anxious persons turned the
pages of Progress and Poverty, they discovered that the author
appeared to know his economic science. He spoke the language of
Ricardo and of John Stuart Mill and gave life to their pale
abstractions. He affirmed in phrases that all could understand that
the social crisis which seemed to threaten the United States was the
result of a failure to understand the nature of economic law.
Henry George hunted through the literature of classical economics for
the theories and principles that might be useful to him. He rejected
with the two Careys the Malthusian theory of population, but made
Ricardo's law of rent the center of his economic discussion. Like
William Graham Sumner and the other classical economists, Henry George
was an ardent free trader. Turning to history, George argued that the
reason for the failure of the ancient civilizations was the denial,
through the permitting of private ownership in land, of the most basic
of natural laws, namely, that all men must be as free to use the earth
as they are to breathe the air. Given such freedom, the Malthusian
doctrine breaks down because technological progress, George affirmed,
will outrun population. George did not propose the complete
nationalization of land but merely, as a practical measure, the
appropriation by the State of the unearned increment in value which
society itself brings about.
After the publication of Progress and Poverty, single tax
clubs appeared in large numbers in England and America. By 1905 the
pieces of "Progress and Poverty literature" from the
pen of George alone were estimated by his son to have had a
circulation of five million.
But the popularity of his social panacea is not the primary reason
for the significance of Henry George. The implications of his doctrine
rather than its formulation made 1879 an important milestone in the
history of American social philosophy. George affirmed with Mathew and
Henry Carey that, when economic laws ate understood and obeyed, they
lead to social justice. Malthus, calling in war and famine to correct
overpopulation, declared by implication that ethics has no place in
science. George assumed that science leads to meliorism; he believed
that the natural laws which underlie society will, when fully
understood, be found to coincide with those of morals. Discover
natural law, obey it, he declared, and society will be on the road to
Utopia. He was frank about his Utopianism. "But if, while there
is yet time," he said, "we turn to justice and obey her, if
we trust Liberty and follow her, the dangers that now threaten must
disappear, the forces that now menace will turn to agencies of
elevation.
With want destroyed; with greed changed to noble
passions; with the fraternity that is born of equality taking the
place of jealousy and fear that now array men against each other; with
mental power loosed by conditions that give to the humblest comfort
and leisure; and who shall measure the heights to which civilization
may soar? Words fail the thought! It is the golden Age."[8] Man,
therefore, has his destiny in his own hands. By using the State as an
instrument for taking one specific economic action, namely the single
tax, he can create a new and ethically superior society. Man can be a
social creator, taught George. The State can be transformed from a
necessary evil into a beneficent instrument. Economics can be made to
evolve from a static into a dynamic science. And ethics must be the
guide for both economic and legislative action. Henry George proposed
a nineteenth-century version of the eighteenth-century belief in the
perfectibility of man. Life Jefferson, he put his faith in reason and
in democracy. For the determinism of Malthus and Ricardo he
substituted a creative humanism.
The world has never known a prophet more sincere than Henry George.
From 1869 to 1897 his life was one unremitting crusade. He plunged in
the late '80's into political reform and made a spectacular, though
unsuccessful, run for Mayor of New York. He was called again to
political service in 1897 when he was asked to lead the fight against
Tammany Hall a second time. No longer robust, he sought medical advice
and was told by his physician that vigorous campaigning would probably
prove fatal. "But I have got to die," he replied to the
doctor. "How can I die better than serving humanity? Besides, so
dying will do more for the cause than anything I am likely to be able
to do in the rest of my life."[9] His wife, who had made his home
a singularly happy one, supported his decision. "You should do
your duty at whatever cost" was her reply to his question as to
whether to accept the proposed nomination. Five days before the
election he suffered a fatal stroke of apoplexy. A hundred thousand
mourners filed past his bier in Grand Central Palace and an equal
number failed to gain admittance. The funeral cortege that followed
his body to the City Hall and across Brooklyn Bridge to Greenwood
Cemetery was one of the most remarkable of American tributes to a
private citizen. The acclaim did not end with the century. "Henry
George,'' said John Dewey in 1933 ''stands almost alone in our history
as an example of man who, without scholastic background, succeeded by
sheer force of observation and thinking that were directed by human
sympathy, and who left an indelible impress on not only his generation
and country but on the world and the future."[10]
Henry George was the evangelist of the new rationalism. An expanding
and unregulated industrialism brought both good and evil to the
American people. In the swiftly growing cities of the end of the
century, populated by men and women drawn from the nations of the
world, indifference, greed, and lack of knowledge of how to live in
metropolitan centers compounded the evils of the time. George was a
prophet who insisted that the evils were not necessary -- an
indigenous prophet whose basic ideas came out of the American
experience. Only in America could one man see in his lifetime the
evolution from the empty frontier to the city slum. George, carrying
forward the criticism of industrialism and urbanism that found early
champions in Emerson, Thoreau and Theodore Parker, powerfully
furthered an indigenous movement for reform that achieved national
importance in the Progressive Era.
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