In the Footsteps of Henry George

George L. Record

[A speech delivered at a dinner held in honor of Charles O. Hennessy and
Anna George De Mille, New York, September 1926.
Reprinted from Land and Freedom, Vol.XXVI, November-December, 1926]

INTRODUCTION BY FREDERIC LEUBUSCHER I think everybody would like to see and hear the man who contributed so much to the political education that made Woodrow Wilson president of the United States. Over in New Jersey it is known that there was one man who, more than any other, was the leader of the progressive political movement that made a logical basis and opportunity for Wilson's entry into public life, and who, after Wilson's election as Governor, was pre-eminent in moulding the policies that the Governor supported, and that won him the confidence of the country. That man was George L. Record.

I have come over here this evening with a group of Single Tax people from New Jersey to do honor to the guests of the evening. I do not know Mrs. deMille personally, but those of us who have been active in New Jersey politics for the last twenty odd years have had very grateful reason to know Senator Hennessy. It is to the immense advantage of our state that Senator Hennessy came over there and took up his residence and interested himself in the public affairs of New Jersey. He immediately attained distinction as soon as he appeared at Trenton. Most of you have had little contact with legislatures. By reason of my professional relations as the representative of municipal bodies and my interest with our other friends in New Jersey in the practical politics of the state, I have been familiar with the legislatures of New Jersey for thirty years or more, and it is perfectly astonishing to get the measure of the average member of the legislature: I would put it the other way, to get the measure of ninety-nine out of every hundred of the members of the legislature.

If a man appears at the legislature in New Jersey and I suspect that we are no worse than in any other state if a man appears honestly and disinterestedly trying to put over something in the public interest, ninety out of every hundred members of the legislature think he is queer, and 'off his nut' and they look at him askance and say: 'What is his graft? What is he driving at?' Never by any possible chance does it enter their minds that any one can be down there at Trenton sincerely on behalf of some public interest. And into that atmosphere came Senator Hennessy, with his great intelligence and his disinterested love of the people, and with his clear power of statement. Within a very short time he was the intellectual, dominating figure of that legislature when it came to any question of real public interest. Our state profited immensely by his service, and those who were in contact with him then are glad to come here and join you in rendering him the honor his distinguished services here and abroad have brought to him. We wish him a long life and happiness. We know that as long as he lives he will do whatever he can with his great intelligence and ability to follow the ideal of the abolition of privilege and the equality of opportunity for all.

Now it is not in my opinion a proper time to discuss any of the principles of Henry George. It is a waste of time to do it with this group. But it may be worth while to consider from our different experiences what we are to do in the future. While I find as the years go by that I am more and more convinced of the truth of the principles as to the land, which Mr. George expounded, I find myself drifting away from the idea that those principles will ever be applied as a result of the direct agitation for their adoption.

"I have a notion that while it is true, as Henry George said, that here are a number of robbers and that if you would kill them off, there at the end is the big robber, the land robber, and that's a true picture economically, I have very great doubts whether it is a true picture politically. I and the group I work with in New Jersey are politically minded and we are not primarily propagandists. We are striving all the time to give this immense idea a practical political form which will get it into politics. We have run tickets and talked in the streets and from soap boxes and in halls, and we have taught the straight Single Tax and I say to you, ladies and gentlemen, that I have never been able to talk to a miscellaneous audience upon the Single Tax with any feeling that I put it over at all, and I say further that I have never seen anybody that could take a miscellaneous, untrained audience and put over the Single Tax. I have never seen it done. I have come to the conclusion that politically, that is a mistake and a wasted effort. But propaganda must go on and the propaganda must be as Mr. George said "The demand for the full reform which must never be qualified or compromised. But when you approach the domain of politics, the law of the being of politics is compromise, and it is utterly impossible in a political movement to put over an ultimate philosophy.

Now, then, if that is so, we must seek for the thin edge of the wedge. William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips went up and down this country for thirty years preaching the anti-slavery doctrine, but when it got hold of the conscience of the people and got into politics, Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison were perfectly helpless in the domain of politics. Then emerged the politician who in his heart was just as much the abolitionist, Abraham Lincoln. Yet Abraham Lincoln appeared on the scene not as an abolitionist at all. He appeared upon the scene as the advocate of the proposition that slavery must be restricted to where it existed. Garrison and Phillips could not understand that philosophy, and thought he was a traitor and a half-hearted servant, and they never appreciated him. But Lincoln was politically minded and he saw perfectly plain that the way to get the common, average man interested in slavery was to take the thin edge of the wedge and say to him "Our political party is not an abolition party. If we are successful we will not abolish slavery but will restrict slavery to where it exists." Later on, when that idea had become familiar, he added another idea "We will insist at the same time that slavery must be put in the process where the public mind will rest confident in its ultimate extinction.

Now there was the very essence of political leadership. He saw that to restrict slavery to the South you had to give a reason for holding it there, and once you gave the reason the human mind would see that if it must be restricted to the South it must be because it was bad, and therefore must be put in the process of extinction.

Now I have come to this conclusion that while it is our duty to keep up wherever we can the Single Tax idea as an educational proposition, politically it will not come about in that way. Over in New Jersey as we have run our candidates, and we have elected several of them to the legislature besides Senator Hennessy, James G. Blauvelt, Josiah Dadley and John H. Adamson as a result of our political activities on the Republican side, while Senator Hennessy exercises his political activities on the Democratic side we keep trying different plans. It is my view that we eventually have got to get possession of this government, and we have got to get it not by standing for the Single Tax, but by standing for some proposition to abridge privilege in its various forms of which the land is only one. We have the privilege that is exercised by these people who have gathered great patents together, which they hold out of use to sustain monopoly.

We have the tremendous privilege which the mass of the people never understand, that the railroads of this country are run for two purposes one for the rake-off for the bankers in handling the securities the other to run the railroads as a means of giving illegal favors and privileges to the great trusts and monopolies which these institutions control, and which favors are denied to their competitors.

So we find that there privilege is organized, and when we encounter the political machinery we do not find it subsidized by speculators in land as such, but subsidized by the possessors of privilege of some other kind than land. So if we are to develop a new political party, it has got to be by setting up the thin edge of the wedge upon which all intellectual far-seeing people can agree, and which has in it the essence of the idea in which all of us believe.

We have tried in New Jersey a plan to take a part of this great programme, to wit: that there is here in the East the Anthracite Coal Trust and that it is created and maintained by two privileges. One is that a little group of people have got all the land containing anthracite coal and the other is that the same group of people have got possession of all of the railroads that run into the coal lands. We say that the remedy is for the State or the Nation to buy enough of this land which is held out of use to suppress competition, and to lease it upon moderate royalties to competitors of the Coal Trust; and we say that that alone would be useless because the channels of transportation are held by the same group, and therefore we say, not because we are socialistic, but opposed to privilege, that we must buy and operate one of the railroads to insure equality in transportation to the competitors of the trust, and we say that that will destroy the Coal Trust. I repeat that I have never seen anyone that could state the principles of Single Tax to a miscellaneous audience and get it across, but I have never seen any audience that would not take that proposition and swallow it whole. Once you get them to see that nobody has the right to own all the land containing coal, they will see that the same rule applies to the land upon which we raise cabbages, but we don't have to say that now. The job immediately is to get people to think, and everybody hates the Coal Trust except the managers of the political parties. The rank and file of the people hate it and if you can harness that prejudice and hate and justifiable hostility up to the great idea that the Lord Almighty never created the coal lands in Pennsylvania to be held as a monopoly, you have applied to politics the fundamental principle of Single Tax, and it will grow of itself.

Now that is my contribution to the spirit of this occasion.

This is a tough time. It is low tide. There never was a time in the thirty odd years I have been in active politics when ideas were so utterly repugnant to the average man. There never was a time apparently, when people were so disillusioned, cynical and despairing as to any intellectual proposition. I tried to interest a brilliant friend along those lines, and he said, ''What is the use? When a Rudolph Valentino can drive Charles W. Elliot from the first page to the twenty-first page of the New York Times, what is the use of trying to talk to the American people about any serious subject?" And it is so. It is possible that the Great War was the natural and inevitable culmination of this tremendous force in civilization which we call privilege, and of which there are other forms beside that of land privilege. It may be that that old privilege idea has been shaken to its foundation, and I hope that this is so.

But for the moment we are passing through a wave of reaction. The brilliant ideas that were set up and held out in such wonderful language by Woodrow Wilson have proved such an utter absurdity in their results that there is a tremendous wave of re-action and of despair and hopelessness that now spreads over the mass of the people of the whole world. But that is the time for those who see clearly and who understand the truth to hold fast until the tide turns, because if this universe is organized upon moral laws, the tide must turn. And so, as we come here tonight to pay our tribute of honor, respect and gratitude to these distinguished guests of the evening, let us take heart and renew here our courage for the battles that are yet to come."