Compute and Poverty

The Most Talked-About Man: How Famous Henry George Was

10 min read

On Sunday, October 31, 1897, the body of Henry George lay in state at the Grand Central Palace on Lexington Avenue. The next morning The Sun reported that “fully 75,000 persons viewed it, and no fewer than 100,000 persons took part in the demonstration connected with this event and with the funeral which followed it.” The paper added: “Next to the funeral of Gen. Grant it was probably the greatest that New York has seen.”1

Part of the front page of The Sun for November 1, 1897. The right-hand column is headed Honor to Their Dead: Thousands Pay the Last Tribute to Henry George, Throngs View the Body.
The Sun, New York, November 1, 1897: “Honor to Their Dead. Thousands Pay the Last Tribute to Henry George.” Library of Congress, Chronicling America. Public domain.

George was not a general or a president. He was a self-educated former deckhand, typesetter and newspaperman who had written a book about land, rent and poverty.2 I suspect most people who pick up Progress and Poverty today have no idea how famous its author once was. This page is an attempt to show it plainly, with sources, and then to ask the obvious question: how does someone that well known get forgotten?

Henry George in later life, bald with a white beard, seated in a carved wooden chair beside a desk piled with papers
Henry George, 1839 to 1897. Photographic print published in 1898. Library of Congress. Public domain.

A book that found its readers

George wrote Progress and Poverty between August 1877 and March 1879 (Preface), and it was self-published at first.23 Its question was simple and uncomfortable: why does poverty persist, and even deepen, as wealth grows? “This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times,” he wrote (Introductory).4

Title page: Progress and Poverty: an inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions, and of increase of want with increase of wealth. The remedy. By Henry George. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1881.
Title page of Progress and Poverty, fifth edition, D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1881. Public domain.

The book was slow to start and then hard to stop. In England, George wrote in February 1882, his publisher Kegan Paul called it “the most astonishing success he ever knew.” At first, George reported, “no one would touch it,” and “it was a long while before they got rid of twenty copies.” Then the book “began to make its way” on its own.5 A cheap sixpenny edition did the rest.

How many copies were sold in all is hard to pin down, and the boldest claims should be read with care. A 2005 essay from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas says the book outsold every book in English except the Bible, but gives no figures behind that claim.6 The historian Peter d’A. Jones put total distribution, “at its highest estimate,” at seven million copies in ten languages.7 Even John Dewey, writing in 1927, said that “no works on political economy have had the circulation and reading obtained by his writings.”8 Whatever the exact number, it was a very large audience for a book on economics.

Famous abroad

George’s fame grew fastest outside the United States. He traveled in Ireland during the land war of 1881 and 1882, and in August 1882 local police arrested him twice, first at Loughrea and then at Athenry. Each time he was held for some hours and released. The British government expressed its regret to the American minister.9 George himself had pointed to “that great movement which has begun in Great Britain in the Irish land agitation” as proof that his question was pressing (Preface).3

When he returned to New York in 1882 he found himself, in his own words, “pretty near famous.” Labor unions packed Cooper Union to welcome him, and judges, ministers and businessmen gave him a banquet at Delmonico’s.10 By the time he went back to Britain in 1884, his son later wrote, “next to Gladstone, he was at the moment the most talked of man in England,” and he gave the reason: “more than forty thousand copies of the sixpenny edition” had been sold.11 That is a son writing about his father, so I take the comparison with some salt, but the sales figure is concrete. Jones counts six visits to Britain in the 1880s, with three long lecture tours through Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales.7

In 1890 he toured Australia. The economist John Pullen, who studied the trip in detail, counts 48 lectures and nine Sunday sermons in 38 towns and cities.12 A Single Tax League in New South Wales gave him a banquet.13 He came home by way of a trip around the world.

Asked to run

In 1886 New York’s labor movement asked George to run for mayor. He did not jump at it. He set a condition: he would accept only if “at least thirty thousand citizens should, over their signatures, express the wish that I should become a candidate” and pledge to vote for him.14 At the Cooper Union nominating meeting on October 5, bundles holding “the signatures of more than thirty-four thousand voters” were passed over the heads of the crowd to the platform.15

He lost, but not by much for a third-party candidate. The official count gave Abram Hewitt, the Democrat, 90,552 votes, George 68,110, and the young Republican Theodore Roosevelt 60,435.16 A self-taught writer on the land question had finished ahead of a future president.

Color cartoon. Henry George falls backward off a ladder propped against a building, below a plank marked Vote of the Majority, toward a heap of sprawling men and boards labeled Socialism, Crank Theories and Boycott.
Joseph Keppler, “Taking a Tumble,” Puck, November 10, 1886. A hostile cartoon: George topples off his ladder onto a pile of “Socialism,” “Crank Theories” and “Boycott.” Public domain.

The ordinary political troubles came quickly after that. His United Labor Party split over socialism, over the excommunication of his ally Father Edward McGlynn, and over tariffs, which put George at odds with the Knights of Labor leader Terence Powderly.17 When George ran statewide for Secretary of State in 1887 he received about 70,000 votes, far behind both major parties.18 In December 1890, worn out by his travels, he suffered his first stroke.19

The last campaign

In 1897 George ran for mayor again, this time for the newly consolidated Greater New York. Friends and doctors warned him. Dr. Montague Leverson, a friend since his California days, told him the campaign “will most probably prove fatal.” George answered, by the doctor’s account: “But I have got to die. 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.”20

He died on October 29, a few days before the vote. Robert Van Wyck, the Democrat, won the election.21 The funeral was the one The Sun compared to Grant’s. One newspaper quoted by George’s son put the crowd higher still: “At least one hundred thousand persons passed before his bier and another hundred thousand were prevented from doing so only by the impossibility of getting near it.”22 Crowd counts from 1897 are estimates, and partisans tend to round up, but every account I found agrees that it was enormous.

Engraving of a night scene: a dense crowd in hats fills Madison Avenue as a horse-drawn catafalque passes beneath lit windows
“The Henry George Funeral: The Catafalque at night moving down Madison Avenue,” The Illustrated American, November 13, 1897. E. M. McKay. Public domain.

A movement, not just a book

George’s readers did not just admire him. They organized. In September 1890, on his return from Australia, the “first national conference of single tax men” met for two days in the great hall of Cooper Union.23 “Single taxers,” as they called themselves, formed clubs, printed papers and ran candidates for decades.

Group photograph of several hundred men, seated and standing in rows, at the first national single tax conference
The First National Single Tax Conference, Cooper Union, New York, September 3, 1890. George is seated at the table. Public domain.

Some went further and tried to build George’s idea into a town. Fairhope, Alabama, was founded in 1894 by a party of 19 adults and nine children. The colony owned the land and issued 99-year leases, and each leaseholder paid a single tax on the land value of the lease, in return for which the colony paid his other property taxes. In 1904 the association became the Fairhope Single Tax Corporation.24 Arden, Delaware, was founded in 1900 by the sculptor Frank Stephens and the architect Will Price as a single-tax village.25 Both towns still exist. Neither became the model for the nation that its founders hoped for. The Fairhope colony could not raise enough money to buy all the land it wanted, had to admit nonmembers who disliked its rules, and in 1908 a separate town government was incorporated around it.24

Sepia photo postcard of a long wooden pier running out into the bay at Fairhope, Alabama, with a steamboat pulling away
“Fairhope Wharf. Str. General Lee leaving,” a photo postcard, 1910. Frank Stewart, Library of Congress. Public domain.

The movement also produced a board game. Lizzie Magie, a single taxer, invented The Landlord’s Game to teach George’s ideas, and it became Monopoly. That story has its own page.

Postcard of a billboard on an empty lot. It reads: Everybody works but the vacant lot. I paid $3600 for this lot and will hold till I get $6000. The profit is unearned increment made possible by the presence of this community and enterprise of its people. I take the profit without earning it. For the remedy read Henry George. Yours truly, Fay Lewis.
“Everybody works but the vacant lot”: a single tax postcard, undated, from a scrapbook at the New York Public Library. Public domain.

Who was listening

The list of people George reached is long, and I have kept to the ones I could trace to their own words or to solid scholarship.

Leo Tolstoy wrote that on the question of land, “the fore-man, the leader of the movement, was and is Henry George. In this lies his immense and predominant importance.”26

George Bernard Shaw heard George speak in London in the early 1880s and bought Progress and Poverty from a steward at the meeting for sixpence. “When I was thus swept into the Great Socialist revival of 1883,” he wrote, “I found that five-sixths of those who were swept in with me had been converted by Henry George.”27

John Dewey said “it would require less than the fingers of the two hands to enumerate those who from Plato down rank with him,” and that no one “has a right to regard himself as an educated man in social thought unless he has some first-hand acquaintance with the theoretical contribution of this great American thinker.”8

Clarence Darrow shared a stage with George in Chicago, when “Mr. George was then in the zenith of his power,” and wrote that he himself “at one time was a pronounced disciple of Henry George.”28

In China, Sun Yat-sen’s program of “equalization of land rights,” announced in 1905, drew on George. The historian Harold Schiffrin argues that Sun’s proposal was essentially George’s idea of taking rent for the public, aimed at the future growth of cities rather than at farm redistribution.29 In 1934 Albert Einstein sent George’s daughter, Anna George de Mille, a short tribute praising her father, which a Georgist journal printed.30

In Britain, a young Winston Churchill told an Edinburgh audience in 1909 that land monopoly “is by far the greatest of monopolies; it is a perpetual monopoly, and it is the mother of all other forms of monopoly.” He did not name George in that speech, but the argument is George’s.31

The critics, then and later

George had serious critics, and they deserve a fair hearing. Karl Marx read the book in 1881 and wrote that “theoretically the man is utterly backward,” because George treated rent as the main problem rather than the whole system of capital.32 Shaw, for all his debt, said “it was not possible for us to stop where Henry George had stopped,” and he and other socialists moved on to wider plans. He still wrote: “Nobody 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.”27

Darrow drifted away too. “The error I found in the philosophy of Henry George,” he wrote, “was its cocksureness, its simplicity, and the small value that it placed upon the selfish motives of men.”28 He was also funny about the faithful: “Single Taxers and Socialists never come for business; they come to use your telephone and tell you how the world should be organized.”28

These are honest objections, not smears, and they help explain the fading. A movement built on one big idea is easy to explain and easy to dismiss as too simple. A party that splits over three issues at once loses its voters. A leader who suffers a stroke at fifty-one and dies at fifty-eight leaves no successor of his stature.

How a famous man was forgotten

Even so, ordinary causes do not quite explain how a man compared with Gladstone and given a funeral compared with Grant’s could drop so completely out of what educated people are taught.

People close to the story had their own views. In 1905, only eight years after the funeral, Tolstoy complained that “people do not argue with the teaching of George, they simply do not know it,” and that the method used against him “was that of hushing up.” He added that the teaching “remains almost unknown, and of late years attracts less and less attention.”33 Dewey, more moderate, pointed to several causes at once: the fact that George’s disciples had a practical tax program “tended to obscure” from students that he was one of the great social philosophers; he “thought, wrote, and worked outside” academic circles; and “the enormous inertia of social habit and the force of tremendous vested interests have depreciated his intellectual claims.”8

I don’t think this requires a conspiracy, and I don’t blame any landowner for owning land. The game rewards holding it, and people play the game they are given. But economists Mason Gaffney and Fred Harrison have argued that the way economics was taught changed around the turn of the century, folding land into capital in a way that made George’s question hard even to ask. I lay out that argument, with its critics, on The Corruption of Economics.

George seems to have expected some of this. Near the end of his book he wrote: “The truth that I have tried to make clear will not find easy acceptance. If that could be, it would have been accepted long ago. If that could be, it would never have been obscured.” And then: “Will it at length prevail? Ultimately, yes. But in our own times, or in times of which any memory of us remains, who shall say?” (Conclusion).34

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Notes

  1. “Honor to Their Dead: Thousands Pay the Last Tribute to Henry George,” The Sun (New York), November 1, 1897, p. 1, Library of Congress, Chronicling America, https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030272/1897-11-01/ed-1/?sp=1 ↩︎

  2. Amy Farber, “Historical Echoes: Henry George, NYC Mayoral Candidate and Best-Selling, Self-Educated Political Economist,” Liberty Street Economics, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, January 6, 2012, https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2012/01/historical-echoes-henry-george-nyc-mayoral-candidate-and-best-selling-self-educated-political-econom/ ↩︎a↩︎b

  3. Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879), Preface to the fourth edition ↩︎a↩︎b

  4. George, Progress and Poverty, Introductory ↩︎

  5. Henry George to Francis G. Shaw, February 11, 1882, quoted in Henry George Jr., The Life of Henry George (New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1900), pp. 390 to 391, https://archive.org/details/lifeofhenrygeorg00geor ↩︎

  6. “Henry George: Antiprotectionist Giant of American Economics,” Economic Insights 10, no. 2, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, 2005. Index of the series: https://www.dallasfed.org/pubs/historical/ei/ ; copy filed with the Texas Legislature: https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/84R/handouts/C0402016042609001/bea2aad8-64fb-4985-a479-4721a2cfb896.PDF ↩︎

  7. Peter d’A. Jones, “Henry George and British Labor Politics,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 46, no. 2 (April 1987): 245 to 256, https://www.cooperative-individualism.org/jones-peter-d'a_henry-george-and-british-labor-politics-1987-apr.pdf ↩︎a↩︎b

  8. John Dewey, “An Appreciation of Henry George” (1927), introduction to Significant Paragraphs from Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1928), https://cooperative-individualism.org/dewey-john_an-appreciation-of-henry-george-1927.htm ; scan of the 1928 booklet: https://wealthandwant.com/HG/PP/sigpar35.pdf ↩︎a↩︎b↩︎c

  9. Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1882, Documents 199 and 200, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1882/d199 and https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1882/d200 ↩︎

  10. George Jr., The Life of Henry George, p. 400, https://archive.org/details/lifeofhenrygeorg00geor ↩︎

  11. George Jr., The Life of Henry George, p. 419, https://archive.org/details/lifeofhenrygeorg00geor ↩︎

  12. John Pullen, “Henry George in Australia,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 64, no. 2 (April 2005): 683 to 713, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1536-7150.2005.00384.x ; open copy: https://www.cooperative-individualism.org/pullen-john_henry-george-in-australia-2005-apr.pdf ↩︎

  13. George Jr., The Life of Henry George, chapter “Australia and Around the World (1890),” pp. 522 to 530, https://archive.org/details/lifeofhenrygeorg00geor ↩︎

  14. George Jr., The Life of Henry George, p. 461, https://archive.org/details/lifeofhenrygeorg00geor ↩︎

  15. George Jr., The Life of Henry George, p. 467, https://archive.org/details/lifeofhenrygeorg00geor ↩︎

  16. “The Official Canvass,” The New York Times, November 14, 1886, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1886/11/14/103996646.pdf ; summary at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1886_New_York_City_mayoral_election ↩︎

  17. “Henry George,” Wikipedia, sections on the 1886 campaign and later years (citing Robert E. Weir, “A Fragile Alliance: Henry George and the Knights of Labor,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 1997), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George ↩︎

  18. “1887 New York state election,” Wikipedia (results from the official canvass), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1887_New_York_state_election ↩︎

  19. George Jr., The Life of Henry George, pp. 541 to 542, describing the attack of aphasia on December 5, 1890, https://archive.org/details/lifeofhenrygeorg00geor ↩︎

  20. Notes of Dr. Montague R. Leverson, quoted in George Jr., The Life of Henry George, p. 594, https://archive.org/details/lifeofhenrygeorg00geor ↩︎

  21. “1897 New York City mayoral election,” Wikipedia (results from The New York Times, November 4, 1897), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1897_New_York_City_mayoral_election ↩︎

  22. Unnamed newspaper quoted in George Jr., The Life of Henry George, p. 609, https://archive.org/details/lifeofhenrygeorg00geor ↩︎

  23. George Jr., The Life of Henry George, p. 540, https://archive.org/details/lifeofhenrygeorg00geor ↩︎

  24. “Fairhope,” Encyclopedia of Alabama, https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/fairhope/ ↩︎a↩︎b

  25. “Arden, Delaware,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arden,_Delaware ; the village’s charter is published by the State of Delaware at https://charters.delaware.gov/arden.shtml ↩︎

  26. Leo Tolstoy, “Letter on Henry George (I),” translated by Nathan Haskell Dole (1903), Wikisource, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Letter_on_Henry_George_%28I%29 ↩︎

  27. George Bernard Shaw, “Tribute to the Work of Henry George,” The Single Tax Review 4 (1904), Wikisource, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Tribute_to_the_Work_of_Henry_George ↩︎a↩︎b

  28. Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life (New York: Scribner, 1932), pp. 46 to 48 and 52 to 56. Original edition: https://archive.org/details/storyofmylife00darr ; excerpt: https://cooperative-individualism.org/darrow-clarence_political-philosophy-and-views-on-henry-george-and-the-single-taxers-1932.htm ↩︎a↩︎b↩︎c

  29. Harold Schiffrin, “Sun Yat-sen’s Early Land Policy: The Origin and Meaning of ‘Equalization of Land Rights’,” The Journal of Asian Studies 16, no. 4 (1957), https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-asian-studies/article/abs/sun-yatsens-early-land-policy-the-origin-and-meaning-of-equalization-of-land-rights/6B27ABDBF57DA9D6C37F088E1776080E ↩︎

  30. Albert Einstein to Anna George de Mille, 1934, as printed in Land and Freedom (May and June 1934), reprinted at https://www.cooperative-individualism.org/einstein-albert_henry-george-and-his-principles-1934.htm ↩︎

  31. Winston S. Churchill, “Land and Income Taxes in the Budget,” Edinburgh, July 17, 1909, in Liberalism and the Social Problem (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909), Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18419 ↩︎

  32. Karl Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, June 20, 1881, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/letters/81_06_20.htm ↩︎

  33. Leo Tolstoy, A Great Iniquity (1905; first published in The Times of London, August 1, 1905), Wikisource, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Great_Iniquity ↩︎

  34. George, Progress and Poverty, Conclusion, paragraphs 4 and 5 ↩︎

Photo credits

  1. The Sun, New York, November 1, 1897, front page. The Sun (New York). Library of Congress. Public domain. Cropped to the masthead and the right-hand columns. The Library of Congress states that newspapers in Chronicling America published more than 95 years ago are in the public domain.
  2. Henry George, photographic print, 1898. Unknown photographer (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs, 2002706986). Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
  3. Progress and Poverty, title page, 1881. D. Appleton and Company (publisher). Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
  4. Joseph Keppler, “Taking a Tumble,” Puck, 1886. Joseph Keppler, Puck 20 (November 10, 1886): 174 to 175. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
  5. E. M. McKay, the funeral catafalque on Madison Avenue, 1897. E. M. McKay, The Illustrated American 22 (November 13, 1897): 625. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
  6. First National Single Tax Conference, 1890. Unknown photographer (scan via HathiTrust). Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
  7. Fairhope Wharf, photo postcard, 1910. Frank Stewart. Library of Congress. Public domain. Published in 1910, so in the public domain in the United States; the Library of Congress lists its rights status as not evaluated.
  8. “Everybody works but the vacant lot,” postcard. Unknown (New York Public Library, single tax scrapbook). Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. Cropped to the front of the card from the scrapbook page.