Henry George
Henry George was an American political economist, social philosopher and journalist. His writing was immensely popular in 19th-century America and sparked several reform movements of the Progressive Era. He inspired the economic philosophy known as Georgism, the belief that people should own the value they produce themselves, but that the economic value of land should belong equally to all members of society. George famously argued that a single tax on land values would create a more productive and just society.
His most famous work, Progress and Poverty, sold millions of copies worldwide. The treatise investigates the paradox of increasing inequality and poverty amid economic and technological progress, the business cycle with its cyclic nature of industrialized economies, and the use of rent capture such as land value taxation and other anti-monopoly reforms as a remedy for these and other social problems. Other works by George defended free trade, the secret ballot, free public utilities/transportation provided by the capture of their resulting land rent uplift, Pigouvian taxation, and public ownership of other natural monopolies.
George was a journalist for many years, and the popularity of his writing and speeches brought him to run for election as Mayor of New York City in 1886 as the United Labor Party nominee and in 1897 as the Jefferson Democracy nominee, where he received 31 percent and 4 percent of the vote respectively and finished ahead of former New York State Assembly minority leader Theodore Roosevelt in the first race. After his death during the second campaign, his ideas were carried forward by organizations and political leaders through the United States and other Anglophone countries. The mid-20th century labor economist and journalist George Soule wrote that George was by far "the most famous American economic writer" and "author of a book which probably had a larger world-wide circulation than any other work on economics ever written."
Personal life
George was born in Philadelphia to a lower-middle-class family, the second of ten children of Richard S. H. George and Catharine Pratt George. His father was a publisher of religious texts and a devout Episcopalian, and he sent George to the Episcopal Academy in Philadelphia. George chafed at his religious upbringing and left the academy without graduating. Instead he convinced his father to hire a tutor and supplemented this with avid reading and attending lectures at the Franklin Institute. His formal education ended at age 14, and he went to sea as a foremast boy at age 15 in April 1855 on the Hindoo, bound for Melbourne and Calcutta. He ended up in the American West in 1858 and briefly considered prospecting for gold but instead started work the same year in San Francisco as a type setter.In California, George fell in love with Annie Corsina Fox from Sydney, Australia. They met on her seventeenth birthday on October 12, 1860. She had been orphaned and was living with an uncle. The uncle, a prosperous, strong-minded man, was opposed to his niece's impoverished suitor. But the couple, defying him, eloped and married on December 3, 1861, with Henry dressed in a borrowed suit and Annie bringing only a packet of books.
File:Henry George with Anna and Henry George, Jr. circa 1897.jpg|thumb|left|upright=0.8|George with his son Henry Jr. and daughter Anna 1897
The marriage was a happy one, and four children were born to them. On November 3, 1862, Annie gave birth to Henry George Jr., a future United States Representative from New York. Early on, even with the birth of future sculptor Richard F. George, the family was near starvation. George's other two children were both daughters. The first was Jennie George,, later to become Jennie George Atkinson. George's other daughter was Anna Angela George, who would become mother of both future dancer and choreographer Agnes de Mille and future actress Peggy George, who was born Margaret George de Mille.
Following the birth of his second child, George had no work and no money and had to beg for food. As he approached the first well-dressed stranger he saw in the street, George, normally a lawful man, decided to rob him if he was unwilling to help. Fortunately, the man took pity on him and gave him five dollars.
George was raised as an Episcopalian, but he believed in "deistic humanitarianism". His wife Annie was Irish Catholic, but Henry George Jr. wrote that the children were mainly influenced by Henry George's deism and humanism.
Career in journalism
After deciding against gold mining in British Columbia, George was hired as a printer for the newly created San Francisco Times. He was able to immediately submit editorials for publication, including the popular What the Railroads Will Bring Us, which remained required reading in California schools for decades. George climbed the ranks of the Times, eventually becoming managing editor in the summer of 1867.George's first nationally prominent writing was his 1869 essay The Chinese in California, in which he wrote that Chinese immigration should be ended before Chinese immigrants overrun the western United States.
George worked for several papers, including four years as editor of his own newspaper, the San Francisco Daily Evening Post, and for a time running the Reporter, a Democratic anti-monopoly publication. George experienced four tough years of trying to keep his newspaper afloat and was eventually forced to go to the streets to beg. The George family struggled, but George's improving reputation and involvement in the newspaper industry lifted them from poverty.
Political and economic philosophy
George began as a Lincoln Republican, then eventually became a Democrat. He was a strong critic of railroad and mining interests, corrupt politicians, land speculators, and labor contractors. He first articulated his views in an 1868 article entitled "What the Railroad Will Bring Us." George argued that the boom in railroad construction would benefit only the lucky few who owned interests in the railroads and other related enterprises, while throwing the greater part of the population into abject poverty. This had led to him earning the enmity of the Central Pacific Railroad's executives, who helped defeat his bid for election to the California State Assembly.One day in 1871, George went for a horseback ride and stopped to rest while overlooking San Francisco Bay. He later wrote of the revelation that he had:
File:Henry George I. W. Taber Portrait Trim Edit.jpg|thumb|right|Portrait by I. W. Taber, taken shortly after writing Progress and Poverty
Furthermore, on a visit to New York City, he was struck by the apparent paradox that the poor in that long-established city were much worse off than the poor in less developed California. These observations supplied the theme and title for his 1879 book Progress and Poverty, which was a great success, selling over three million copies. In it George made the argument that a sizeable portion of the wealth created by social and technological advances in a free market economy is possessed by land owners and monopolists via economic rents, and that this concentration of unearned wealth is the main cause of poverty.
George considered it a great injustice that private profit was being earned from restricting access to natural resources while productive activity was burdened with heavy taxes, and he indicated that such a system was equivalent to slavery. This is also the work in which he made the case for a land value tax in which governments would tax the value of the land itself, thus preventing private interests from profiting upon its mere possession but allowing the value of all improvements made to that land to remain with investors.
George was in a position to discover this pattern, having experienced poverty himself, knowing many different societies from his travels, and living in California at a time of rapid growth. In particular he had noticed that the construction of railroads in California was increasing land values and rents as fast as or faster than wages were rising.
Political career
California
George first ran for public office in 1869, when he sought the Democratic nomination for California State Assembly. However, he refused to pay the party's assessment fee, and was therefore ineligible for consideration. Despite this setback, he remained active in the California Democratic Party. Governor Henry Huntly Haight, impressed by the young journalist, recruited George to manage the party's newspaper in Sacramento, and in 1871 he served as secretary of the Democratic state convention as it renominated Haight. Later that year, he finally received the party's nomination for State Assembly, but was defeated alongside the rest of the ticket in a Republican landslide.File:Henry George, Esq. 1878.jpg|thumb|right|upright=1.2|Advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle for the local Land Reform League featuring George and future Congressman James G. Maguire, May 21, 1878
In the 1875 election, George campaigned for Democrat William Irwin, who handily won thanks to Republican vote splitting. A few months later, George was forced to give up the Evening Post due to a financial dispute with U.S. Senator John P. Jones. Unable to find work or provide for his family, George wrote to Governor Irwin, who rewarded him with the office of State Inspector of Gas Meters. George held that office from 1876 to 1880, during which he was able to write Progress and Poverty. He also supplemented his income with paid lectures. Among those he consulted while writing the book were former State Superintendent of Public Instruction John Swett, University of California Regent Andrew Smith Hallidie, Sacramento Bee editor James McClatchy, future Congressman James G. Maguire and future San Francisco Mayor Edward Robeson Taylor.
Around the same time, the anti-Chinese Workingmen's Party led by Denis Kearney was seeing a meteoric rise in popularity. George supported the party and endorsed their platform, but took issue with Kearney himself. When California's Second Constitutional Convention was called in 1878, George was nominated as a delegate on both the Democratic and Workingmen's tickets, but lost the latter's nomination after he refused to recognize Kearney as leader of the party. While an anti-Kearney faction still nominated him, his refusal to toe the party line cost him the election, though he still polled the highest of any Democrat in the district.
While campaigning for the Democrats in California, George "cast black men in the South and Chinese in the West as tools of the corporations and the rich, and as threats to white manhood."
When the California State Legislature convened in 1881 to elect a U.S. Senator, State Senator Warren Chase nominated George. In his nomination speech, Chase eulogized George as follows:
George only received two votes out of 40 cast in the State Senate; one from Chase, and the other from fellow Workingmen's Senator Joseph C. Gorman.