Henry George was perhaps the most widely read writer on political economy in America during the late nineteenth century. His words and ideas thrilled radicals, roiled conservatives, and sparked widespread debate and consideration of previously dormant questions. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, it would be hard to find a politically active person who had not heard or read something about the “Prophet of San Francisco,” as his supporters called him after repurposing one critic’s sneer.Footnote 1 Indeed, his book sales at their height were second only to the Bible. Despite George’s immense fame during his life, the mention of his name today is likely to elicit blank stares among the general population. When posed to students of American history, he may be associated with the phrase “single tax” or his 1879 book Progress and Poverty, but just as likely is a confusion of his name for that of some other Gilded Age writer, such as Edward Bellamy or Henry Demarest Lloyd. Though he always manages to appear in surveys of the Gilded Age as a kind of eccentric antimonopoly John the Baptist, or as one of many social critics in primary source teaching compendiums, historians writing on the page or lecturing in the classroom are never quite sure what to make of him. He stands as an awkward appendage of the age whose words are heard but never quite heeded. In short, he is a historiographical enigma. Why?
Henry George, 1886. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
George’s biography reads like a cross between Herman Melville and Horatio Alger, with a dash of Thomas Hardy thrown into his familial life. Born into a lower middle-class Philadelphia family in 1839, he quit school and set sail aboard a merchant vessel to India and Australia at fifteen. Seeking higher wages, he migrated to the recently admitted state of California, where he witnessed the rapid recapitulation of the frontier boom-and-bust economy with all its attendant problems of land speculation and wage pressure. Working first as a typist, then as a journalist and editor, he emerged as a vocal defender of the working man against landlords, railroads, and, controversially, Chinese immigration. As with many Americans in the late 1860s and early 1870s, he was perplexed by the fact that, despite unprecedented economic and technological development, society was plagued by cyclical “hard times” and staggering poverty. His analysis of Californian and wider American social conditions led him to the conclusion that the problem lay neither with capital nor labor, but with land. Land and natural resources were required for all economic activity and even life itself. Though no human created land, its private ownership forced society to pay rent for its use, creating scarcity and deepening poverty in places like the streets of New York, where wealth was otherwise most obviously abundant. In his bestselling Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and the Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy (1879), he proposed solving the problem by taxing land at its full, unimproved value while doing away with all other forms of taxation—an idea his followers later, and to George’s chagrin, simplified as the “single tax.” This reform, he believed, would create a fair and efficient economy where monopoly rights were transferred to the public and rent-seeking speculation was eradicated. The upheaval of the 1880s propelled him onto the world stage and he expanded his argument in several new works that connected his land theory to numerous social problems. He became associated with reformers of all stripes, even running for mayor of New York City on an independent ticket in 1886 and, again, in 1897. Whatever the cause of his uncertain status today, it is not for lack of material (Figure 1).
The problem instead has to do with historians. Or, more precisely, it has to do with how historians have written about political-economic change during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and, subsequently, George’s role in the drama. Professional history is all about answering questions about the past, and the sort of history one gets depends heavily on the kinds of questions asked. For the better part of a century, historians have tended not to ask questions that led to a deep analysis of George and his place in American political history. George criticized American society at a fundamental level and from a rationalistic, non-pragmatic, and middle-class perspective that shunned interest-group politics, class analysis, and reform via managerial bureaucracy. Though coming from widely differing perspectives over the past century, historians since Charles Beard have shared many Progressive Era assumptions that appreciated George’s democratic and critical spirit while dismissing the substance of his land theory as an artifact of a simpler time. Modern historians are deeply shaped by their professional predecessors, typically developing their understanding of the pattern of the past and its most relevant questions from prior surveys, syntheses, and monographs (and usually in that order). In George’s case, historians have generally ignored early monographs and biographies in favor of a few influential surveys in shaping his placement in the narrative of the Gilded Age.
Fortunately, George’s place in American political history has experienced a gradual revision over the past few decades. As shifting social dynamics have sent historians searching the past with new questions, they are beginning to provide new answers. Whereas previous historians interpreted George variously as the indignant voice of fading small-town values, a stubborn ideologue lost in the void between capitalism and socialism, or an incisive social critic but hopelessly idealistic theorist, more recent historians, such as Edward T. O’Donnell, Alexandra W. Lough, and Christopher W. England, have been willing to take George’s ideas and their place in late nineteenth-century politics much more seriously. Collectively, these scholars have tended to see George not as a curious sideshow or anachronistic Jeremiah but as a man in many ways ahead of his time who helped reform traditional values of liberal democracy and the common good to meet the modern age.
To get to the bottom of the George question, and to strengthen our understanding of how historians conceptualize the political story of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, we must chart the ebbs and flows of George historiography from its headwaters, over the rapids of the twentieth century, to its general twenty-first-century drift. This exploration forces us to confront our own reliance on the assumptions of prior historians in forming our opinion of political-economic change and reform movements during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. At the same time, it asks contemporary historians to reflect on what preoccupations and presumptions guide their own inquiries, which usually vary considerably from those of their subjects. The facts of George’s life, deeds, and beliefs have not changed since the nineteenth century, but his reputation among historians and his supporting part in the telling of the Gilded Age certainly have, and they serve as a bellwether for historians’ fluctuating concerns. Lastly, this essay should help present-day scholars and teachers handle George intelligently, coming to understand him in conscious relation to specific questions, rather than from the inertia of received tradition.
A Note on George Biographers and Chroniclers
Henry George’s sudden death on October 29, 1897, during the final stretch of his second bid for the New York mayoralty, sealed his status as a semi-mythical martyr among the small but committed community of single taxers. Accordingly, George and the single tax movement found worthy biographers and chroniclers, including two of George’s own children, a few loyal disciples, and more objective scholars like Arthur N. Young (1916) and Charles A. Barker (1955). Invaluable as these works are to understanding the facts of George’s life and the development of his movement, their influence on the wider understanding of the politics of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, as well as George’s place in them, have been modest. This limited impact is due, in part, to an impressive but narrow focus on George himself that did little to weld him into the narrative of his period. Rather than being a part of his time, their lionized George transcended it. Even Barker, who carried the most scholarly weight, saw George’s role as primarily inspirational in a moral, not concrete, sense for later reformers, dwelling at last on society’s eventual forgetting of George. The origins of mainstream conceptions of George’s place in American history are instead to be found with early surveys of the period.Footnote 2
The Dawn of an Age
Though rarely cited by historians today, our basic framing of a “Gilded Age” and a “Progressive Era,” as well as reformers like Henry George’s place within that picture, is the handiwork of a few progressive historians, namely Charles and Mary Beard, along with Vernon Louis Parrington. The Beards, and especially Charles Beard, wrote the first grand narratives of the period that emphasized the clash of economic interests, viewing politics as a proxy theater for underlying and determinative social forces. From Contemporary American History, 1877–1913 (1913) to the History of the United States (1921) and the Rise of American Civilization (1927), the Beards established the familiar pattern for understanding the process of America’s industrialization and its associated political battles. Appropriating Twain and Warner’s phrase for the first time in an academic setting, they identified the late nineteenth century as a “Gilded Age” dominated by business interests and a growing producing-class discontent that was succeeded by a period of either “progressive” politics or “social democracy” in the early twentieth century. Social conflict and power, in a Marxian tone, were manifestations of shifting economic relationships, with the rise of industrial capitalism standing as the signature force of the late nineteenth century.Footnote 3
The Beards identified a chorus of middle- and working-class critics during the Gilded Age that included Henry Demarest Lloyd, Edward Bellamy, and Henry George, though the Beards did not link the three reformers as closely as historians do today. The Beards recognized George as the “first approach to a critical diagnosis” of the broad social problem with Progress and Poverty in 1879. Their George was decked in journo-prophetic guise, sounding the tocsin of reform with “eighteenth century” doctrines and an attractive but simplistic single tax. Noting his wide influence, the Beards concluded that although George succeeded in “helping to make the country at least dimly aware of the social question,” his movement “bore little fruit in legislation and gave no serious qualms to the managers of politics.” Followed by similar, if more modern, prognoses by James Bryce and Henry Demarest Lloyd, George had inaugurated the first wave of consciousness-raising critiques, but he stood isolated from the more consequential labor and agrarian movements and the later progressive reformers. George, in short, played a significant functional role, but his ideas were an antiquated throwback to old America and were not terribly important.Footnote 4 Charles Beard, like most progressive historians, placed a heavy emphasis on economic motivations and questions, and he did not take the details of intellectual argumentation, especially rational-idealistic argumentation, seriously. Whereas George met economic problems with a priori principles of justice and rights, Beard and many of his disciples saw ideas as mostly derivative of economic realities. While both Beard and George sought a more democratic society, Beard no longer saw value in George’s epistemological perspective and therefore stressed George’s functional role, not his substantive views. His assessment has cast a century-long shadow.
The major alternative to the Beardian iteration of progressive history came from Vernon Louis Parrington. Parrington has had a decidedly less far-reaching influence in historiographic genealogy but is worth noting for his treatment of George. He, like Beard and other progressive historians, was dedicated to the analysis of history by way of economic forces and relationships, believing that American history could be explained by competing elitist and democratic tendencies. Where he broke markedly from the pack, however, was in his equal devotion to intellectual history and the evolution of socio-economic ideology. For Parrington, American history witnessed a dialectic of economics and ideas in tandem, with the social order and ideology interacting and shaping each other dynamically. Identifying himself with the democratic tradition, Parrington harbored a deep sympathy for George’s commitment to democratic equality, economic theory, and big ideas.
Parrington placed George firmly in the Jeffersonian, democratic tradition (as opposed to the Hamiltonian, hierarchical one), titling his section on George “[A] Democratic Economics.” He credited George more than any other for turning attention toward the “origins of exploitative capitalism,” while conceding that his rather simple economic assessment should be applied beyond land rent. Though Parrington did not hold George’s status as an “arch-idealist” against him, as might other progressive historians, he did consign George’s mode of thought to an earlier era, that of Thomas Paine and the French Revolution, implying a historicized obsolescence not unlike Beard. Drawing on the work of early George chroniclers, Parrington put George in opposition to elitist, academic economists like Francis A. Walker or William Graham Sumner and noted his importance in discrediting laissez-faire. In Parrington, therefore, was a survey presentation of George that took his ideas seriously and acknowledged their importance outside of strict consciousness-raising without fully embracing them. While valuing ideas, Parrington, like his progressive colleagues and most historians since, was more evolutionary and historicist than rationalist in his thinking and did not seize the land issue with special conviction as George had done.Footnote 5 In this way, Parrington anticipated the outlook of several of the most recent George historians. When consensus historians dismissed their progressive forbears at mid-century, however, Parrington and his honored place for George’s thought were more or less forgotten, and the sea change would set George’s memory adrift amid a flotsam of diverse antimonopoly agitators as far as mainstream surveys were concerned.Footnote 6
After World War II, Henry George’s reputation sank even lower in the mainstream of scholarship. George’s radical critique of American society did not square with the primary questions of postwar so-called consensus historians who emphasized shared themes and perspectives in the American experience. Richard Hofstadter did not mention George once in The Age of Reform (1955), although he did mention Bellamy in passing and Lloyd at several junctures in relation to populism.Footnote 7 George is mentioned once in The American Political Tradition (1948) but only for having outperformed Theodore Roosevelt in the 1886 New York mayoral race.Footnote 8 George, likewise, is completely absent from Louis Hartz’s Liberal Tradition in America (1955).Footnote 9
A Tale of Two Georges
Nevertheless, George’s place in Gilded Age historiography persevered in dissenting traditions. Barker’s biography came out the same year as Hartz’s Liberal Tradition, and while Beard and Parrington were overturned by the grandees of the profession, Beard’s legacy and interpretive perspective lived on in discrete places. One such important and underappreciated place was the work of Matthew Josephson, whose trilogy of The Robber Barons, The Politicos, and The President Makers, published between 1934 and 1940, was popular, masterful, and entertaining.Footnote 10 Although academic historians do not usually treat him seriously today, Josephson’s books enjoyed a circulation much wider than most scholarly histories and found influential readers in such esteemed figures as Robert H. Wiebe. In The Politicos, the relevant volume for present purposes, Josephson (who had dedicated The Robber Barons to Charles and Mary Beard), adopted a Beardian stance regarding George’s role and ideas. Josephson’s George was a consciousness-raising celebrity author who questioned the validity of the economic status quo, a sort of reformist gadfly. Josephson was busy describing a party-political system that served business interests and got little else done; he maintained a progressive skepticism of ideas and kept his eyes on economic motives, not rationalistic theory. At the same time, Josephson had certainly read both Henry George Jr.’s biography of his father and Progress and Poverty, having quoted George repeatedly in The Robber Barons. Footnote 11 He sympathized with George and dug deeper to identify his place with Bellamy and Lloyd in the wider protest-reform movement of the late 1880s and 1890s. For Josephson, George remained a leader of the populist opposition through the dramatic campaign of 1896 where the downtrodden forces of the rural West and the tenement-dwelling East were crushed by the consolidated forces of capital. This framing, cursory as it was, placed George, as well as Bellamy and Lloyd, in the grand reform-populist coalition at the end of the Gilded Age. It tied the question of George’s wider significance to the question of what one should make of 1890s populism and preserved George’s narrative presence during the consensus drought in the academy.
Although the oft-disparaged Hofstadter did have some incisive observations about agrarian populism beyond the lightning rod of antisemitism, the consensus answer to the populist question has fared poorly since the 1970s and had next to nothing to say about George. The first relevant answer for what to make of populism, and by extension George, instead began with what we may call the labor-populism tradition. In 1946, as a by-product of his research on Henry D. Lloyd, Chester M. Destler published American Radicalism, 1865–1901, which explored the ideological nexus of American radical politics during the late nineteenth century with the intent of challenging Turnerian interpretations that had described western radicalism as a strictly home-grown rural product. Destler showed that there was extensive cross-pollination between urban-eastern radicals and rural-western ones, identifying similarities in collectivist ideology across populism, socialism, antimonopolism, and all the rest. George, as the most popular radical writer of his day, appeared frequently in these debates, but as Destler pointed out, he and the single taxers were an odd fit in the radical crowd. While George believed in common land ownership and was a firm antimonopolist, he was also highly averse to other kinds of collectivism, denouncing socialism and urging single taxers to stay out of the Populist third party. Populists and socialists, for their part, often accused single taxers of being obsessed with a singular solution to a complex social problem. There was no consistent uniform body of “radical” thought; it was a hodgepodge of competing ideas, as evinced by the Californian anarcho-socialist Burnette Haskell’s attempt to fuse together aspects of anarchism, socialism, Georgism, and Jeffersonianism. But Destler was presenting the ideological atmosphere that he found in the sources, and the George of American Radicalism found himself deeply tinged by the populist-radical brew, if only by association.Footnote 12
In the 1955 second volume to his decades-spanning History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Philip S. Foner partly drew on Destler’s observations in his chapter on “Labor-Populism.” He charted the temporary joining of forces between agrarian populists and members of the organized labor movement during the economic tumult of the 1890s. There again, George and the single tax played an awkward role. Lloyd had used George’s 1887 ejection of socialists from his short-lived New York United Labor Party as a warning to populists not to reject socialists if they were willing to compromise, and rank and file single taxers joined with socialists, farmers, and unionists in the third-party movement against the commands of men like George, Daniel De Leon, and Samuel Gompers.Footnote 13 Put simply, George and his ideas influenced many people in the labor-populist wheelhouse, but their influence was deeply inconsistent and only partial. In Foner’s work, George appeared like a loud ideological neighbor whose words were constantly heard through the window, but who was seldom ever fully in the labor-populist room, except during the election of 1896 when populism went mainstream. Thus, even while historians increasingly associated George with the labor-populist ecosystem, there still was something oddly bourgeois and middle-class about him. He simply did not fit neatly into a narrative that located authentic radical ideology outside of mainstream party politics.
The other significant twentieth-century George interpretation was simpler and revived the Beardian George. Probably no other synthesis of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era has had the staying power of Robert Wiebe’s The Search for Order (1967), and for good reason. Wiebe presented the organizational synthesis, combining insights from progressive history, consensus history, and modernization theory, producing a narrative that was both original and compelling while at the same time feeling familiar. Though, as a survey, Search for Order contained no footnotes, Wiebe did provide a helpful bibliography that declared the “much-maligned and invaluable” Rise of American Civilization of the Beards as the best overview of American history and identified Josephson’s work as among the best surveys of the period.Footnote 14 Wiebe focused on the big picture in his explanation of the era’s key transformation. Identifying the breakdown of autonomous communities in the face of an industrialized, marketized “distended” society and the creation of new socio-political values and institutions to manage that change as the main event, he placed the array of small-town populistic reformers on one side and the new middle-class progressive bureaucrats on the other of that shift. George, as part of the former camp, was crucial in reorienting public thought toward the abandonment of theoretical individualism to, counterintuitively, preserve substantive individualism and community autonomy; but he and reformers like Lloyd or Bellamy were chasing a dream of the past. Obsolete before they began to fight, George and his fellow celebrity critics were essential to the cultural milieu of Wiebe’s Gilded Age, but they were also destined to be replaced by practical, pragmatic regulatory managers.Footnote 15
By the end of the 1960s, then, George had found himself in two similar but distinct historiographic positions. In the main tradition, that of Beard and Wiebe, he was a mainstream figure who, alongside the usual suspects, heralded the demise of the old America and proposed novel solutions to restore it, but was superseded by new men willing to “transcend rather than preserve” it.Footnote 16 In the secondary labor-populist tradition of Destler and Foner, attention focused on the substance of what radicals were saying and proposing, with George as an odd appendage. Neither tradition put much stock in the validity of George’s actual theory but were instead interested in how he fit into the main current of antimonopoly reform. His historiographic fate hung with how one classed the reformers: if they were doomed to failure, so was he; if they were onto something, then perhaps George was, too.
Each of these twentieth-century formulations came to a head in two very different books: Lawrence Goodwyn’s Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (1976) and John L. Thomas’s Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Adversary Tradition (1983). The perspectives represented by these two books contrasted sharply in their intended emphasis and, yet, for George their effect was surprisingly similar.
In Democratic Promise, Goodwyn took the populist phenomenon of the last decades of the nineteenth century and made it something special. Populism, which, for Goodwyn, began as a farmers’ cooperative movement on the Texas frontier, took off and came to encompass the producers of the nation in a radical revolt against the looming, impersonal capitalist modernity. Rejecting a dehumanizing future driven by profit, exchange, and efficiency, these Populists asserted the importance of community, cooperation, and self-determination. In some ways, Goodwyn’s Populists represented what Wiebe had indicated, only Goodwyn championed them as America’s last hope for a democratic society that governed in the public interest. But George’s historiographic flirtations with labor-populism had come to an end. Goodwyn, though influenced by Destler and Foner in his coverage of the 1894 Chicago Populist scene, was done with ambiguity; he was ready to draw lines and point fingers. Sharpening Foner’s muted observation into a spear, Goodwyn identified George as a critic of Populism from the right, largely based on his opposition to the third-party movement, aligning him instead with the “shadow movement” that ultimately hijacked and ruined Populism via Bryan’s 1896 campaign.Footnote 17 Cast from the Populist limelight into the periphery of the shadow movement, George neither belonged to the host of democracy nor to the ranks of progressive capitalism. Worse than a mere progressive, Goodwyn’s George was homeless and nearly irrelevant to the grand drama of the period.
In Alternative America, on the other hand, Thomas compared George at book-length with Bellamy and Lloyd. George came across as a lovable, all-American crank journalist who rose to fame among swaths of the working class that did not necessarily understand his abstract, rationalist land theories but who saw value in his critique of monopoly, a theme as old as Arthur Young’s Single Tax Movement (1916).Footnote 18 Even his middle-class adherents apparently liked him more for the posture than the specifics of his argument. Thomas classed George, with the other writers, as a pastoral, millennial utopian from America’s localized, Christian roots, which were fast passing away. They imagined a sublime tomorrow predicated on a simple, perfect moralization of the economy. Thomas’s George was a man out of time whose theories, despite some influences in urban planning, were shipwrecked with Bryan and populism in 1896, destined only to impart a crusading ripple within the succeeding tide of progressivism. George’s second and self-sacrificial campaign for New York mayor under the banner of Jeffersonian Democracy only cemented his semi-tragic moral legacy.Footnote 19
Alternative America effectively adopted Wiebe’s spartan framework for George and his fellow reformers (he thanked Wiebe in his preface), but filled in the missing rich detail, color, biography, and footnotes. Most importantly, Thomas’s interpretation would become the dominant, stock reference point for survey-level George history for the better part of three decades. This trend, in which historians mostly used George to establish the tenor and flavor of social unrest while viewing his specific ideas as hokey middle-class novelties, was exemplified in textbook fashion by Nell Irvin Painter’s Standing at Armageddon (1987).Footnote 20 Successors to this default tradition included such worthy titles as Michael Kazin’s The Populist Persuasion (1995), Eric Foner’s The Story of American Freedom (1999), James Green’s Death in the Haymarket (2006), Jackson Lears’s Rebirth of a Nation (2009), H. W. Brands’s American Colossus (2010), and, partly, Rosanne Currarino’s The Labor Question in America (2011).Footnote 21 No mover, the twentieth-century George was a mere ornament of the age.
Thus, by the dawn of the 1990s, George had come to a dead end. But, then again, so had the political inheritance of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Progressivism as a movement had been largely discredited and vilified by the New Left, or entirely denied the conceptual privilege of existing, while populism stood in a positive light but was distinct for having been stamped out.Footnote 22 Goodwyn’s lauding of a lost tradition whose defeat had been so complete and distant seemed to present a past about as usable as that of the Nashville Agrarians. Yet there was another problem for historians who would find solutions in the past for present problems. Most of the few heroes left standing from decades of merciless critique had been the producers, the working class, or the mythical unions. But where was the working class at the close of the Cold War? Outsourcing, automation, free trade, and neoliberalism were triumphant. There was hardly an identifiable working class to be found. In the new America, cashiers and plastic surgeons alike imagined themselves to be members of the sturdy middle class, a class that many earlier historians, particularly of the New Left, had spent so much energy discrediting. And yet, in a bourgeois world, who better to turn to for inspiration than bourgeois heroes of yesteryear? At the twilight of the century, therefore, stood an opportunity for the rehabilitation of the dreadfully middle-class Prophet of San Francisco.
The New George Historians
The breakdown of the progressive movement as a coherent concept opened space to study in detail the period’s sub-movements that were more narrowly identifiable. Subsequently, there was a small revival of George’s legacy in places like the labor or Social Gospel movements that lived primarily in articles, theses, and dissertations produced since 1970. Though these contributions did not fit a clear pattern (not every master’s thesis is written with an eye to historiographic trends, after all), and did not divert the main current, they did signal a gradually renewed interest in George himself.Footnote 23 The turn of the millennium promised to be kinder to George for another reason, too. Neoliberal reforms from Reagan through Clinton, and, frankly, down to the present, ushered in socio-economic conditions that evoked the term “Second Gilded Age.” As wealth measured in salaries and asset prices ballooned in the decades succeeding the malaise of the 1970s, and as that wealth went overwhelmingly to the top of the heap, so many of the themes of George’s day returned: wealth stratification, housing costs, politicians that said much and did little, speculative booms and busts, corporate intransigence, mass immigration, and the perpetually “vanishing” middle class. Maybe, it seemed, George’s critique, which pitied laborers made into “mere feeders of machines,” had not been so unrealistic after all.Footnote 24
Beginning in the latter 1990s, a trickle of revised secondary George history began to swell. Though largely independent of any new developments in monographical George history, it nevertheless primed the field to consider George in a new light. Beginning with his study of the evolving relationship between workers and wage labor, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (1997), Lawrence B. Glickman welcomed George back into the general labor dialogue, albeit in a highly limited role, using George quotations to illustrate larger points. In this context, George’s main influence was to assist in the rethinking of the causes of low wages and to break free of old classical theory.Footnote 25 Alternatively, Daniel T. Rodgers made one of the single most significant big-picture George reinterpretations in Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (1998), where, in addition to mounting a rehabilitation of progressivism as a movement, he established George as a highly influential figure for young progressive economists by shattering the grip of classical theory. In doing so, he not only re-emphasized George’s international influence (a latent theme in the George-specific literature), but took George seriously as an economic thinker, even if he did not dive deeply into the specifics of the land theory. What was more, he carried the story of single tax reformers further, discussing at length the importance of Tom L. Johnson’s efforts toward municipal ownership in Cleveland, Ohio, a point then seldom seen outside the cloisters of Georgist history or its related economic literature.Footnote 26
Jeffrey Sklansky offered another significant step toward taking George’s economic analysis seriously again with his article, “Pauperism and Poverty: Henry George, William Graham Sumner, and the Ideological Origins of Modern American Social Science” (1999), and his book, The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–1920 (2002). The Soul’s Economy focused on charting the evolving conception of the “self” and its wider relationship to society and the economy. In that context, George featured as the champion of labor against William Graham Sumner as the apologist of capital in a grand economic debate that helped move the theoretical dialectic beyond classical theory. The relevant portion of the book regarding George is mostly to be found in the earlier article which presents the same comparison. While the basic finding—that George helped redefine the perspective of economic theory and acknowledge that the world was not a place where all things were equal—was not radically new, it offered the insight in modern context and would therefore prove more attractive as a citation in future works.Footnote 27
Just as important in other ways was Robert D. Johnston’s The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (2003), which, using the local context of Portland during the Progressive Era, aimed to “rehabilitate” the middle class as the core of democratic populism and a positive force for challenging social and economic elitism. Identifying George as “the most prominent middle-class radical of the late nineteenth century,” Johnston charted the influence of single-tax ideology and claims to socially produced land value in inspiring waves of municipal reforms during the early twentieth century.Footnote 28 Even Charles Postel welcomed George back into the conversation with populism in The Populist Vision (2007). Although, as with Goodwyn’s populists, Postel’s subjects still represented a path not taken, they now embodied a broad (even overly broad), modernizing vision: an alternate, democratic, cooperative-capitalist modernity. Identifying George’s single tax as “one of the most influential … visions of future possibilities” that held populism together, Postel emphasized that George was not looking backward but intended his single tax reform to unlock the fruits of industrial progress for all people. In his astute concision regarding George, Postel was unmatched.Footnote 29 George’s forward-looking influence as a background theme remained present in Postel’s more recent book on the racial limits of nineteenth century social reform, Equality: An American Dilemma (2019), and was reinforced by Gregg Cantrell’s recent study of Texas populism, The People’s Revolt: Texas Populists and the Roots of American Liberalism (2020), which, in pursuit of its main goal of examining the roots of modern liberalism, also measured the influence of George’s ideas among the Texas populists.Footnote 30
Building from and going beyond these steps toward reconceiving George’s reformer status was a new set of three historians who we may collectively call the “new George historians”: Edward T. O’Donnell, Alexandra W. Lough, and Christopher W. England. O’Donnell had an early start with his “New Political Forces” dissertation at Columbia in 1995, though he would not complete his relevant book, Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age, until 2015. Working in the interval were Lough and England, at Brandeis and Georgetown, respectively. Lough completed her dissertation, “The Last Tax,” in 2013 and has produced several articles on George and single-tax influence from that work, while England defended his dissertation in 2015. That latter work was spotlighted in the notes of Richard White’s The Republic for Which it Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 (2017) and has since reached maturity with England’s Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism (2023).Footnote 31 Each of them made a significant advancement in the literature by creating George histories that forcefully brought George into conversation with the wider context of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in a way the earlier biographical histories never did. Each in their own way also aimed to explain why George mattered then and why he matters today.
Although O’Donnell and England focused on extremely different areas of George’s life and legacy, with O’Donnell concentrating on George’s place in New York City politics from 1880 to 1886 and England on George’s long role in the modernization of liberalism from the 1870s through the 1930s, their overarching interpretive frameworks and approaches to George’s ideology are relatively similar. Well-versed as O’Donnell and England are in the specifics of George’s land philosophy and related writings, the particularity of his land reform agenda is secondary to their concentration on what they interpret as his general social vision of substantive equality. Their guiding concern was not whether George was correct about private land ownership but for the lasting functional effect that his social critique had on the trajectory of mainstream American political ideology, especially regarding the extent of property rights and the need for active state intervention in the economy. In their emphasis on George’s functional role over the specifics of his land theory, their interpretations still retained something of the spirit of the traditional surveys, albeit going well beyond them.
In Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality, O’Donnell interpreted George’s thought and function through the lens of republicanism, a term George himself used frequently. Although republicanism, with its emphasis on the common good, is traditionally juxtaposed against liberalism, with its emphasis on individual freedom, in analyzing political ideology across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, O’Donnell uses the terms almost interchangeably, instead highlighting varieties of egalitarian and hierarchical republicanism or liberalism. Admittedly, this usage is probably closer to the fuzzy ways in which contemporaries used the terms. For O’Donnell, republicanism and its egalitarian ideals of “free labor” and the common good were first conceived as tangible realities and not as mere theoretical precepts. George grew up in an urban, working-class environment that remembered fondly the fading values of “artisanal republicanism,” which emphasized co-dependence and an environment of relative economic and political equality. The forces of industrialization and commercialization, however, broke down the worlds of apprenticeship and artisanal mastery, replacing them with an individualized economy of wages that produced a new laissez-faire ideal of “entrepreneurial republicanism.” Laissez-faire, according to O’Donnell, reinterpreted free labor in negative terms as the freedom of contract, as opposed to the positive vision of substantive equality and opportunity.Footnote 32 The new economy based on private property ownership and the fungibility of labor generated poverty as rent accrued to the owners of land and capital while the laboring classes were reduced to a kind of serfdom, making a farce of republican equality. George, in O’Donnell’s framing, confronted the problem, first, by identifying the need for good “public policy” to defend “republican equality” and, second, in asserting “that the state, as opposed to the market alone, must play the key role in securing this end.” His reformulation answered the concerns of a budding “working-class republicanism” and pushed it further.Footnote 33
For O’Donnell, George’s importance lay in reformulating the terms and conditions of a substantive republican equality, standing effectively as an American prophet of “social democracy.” This contribution O’Donnell formulated as at least one basis of “progressivism.” Specifically, he claimed for George the distinction of not only being one of the earliest clear articulators of the new progressive republicanism, but also in being the primary apostle of it to the people at large, as opposed to the more academic efforts of thinkers like Richard T. Ely. O’Donnell’s interpretation worked to reconnect progressivism with the needs of working people in a democratic republic and to rescue the legacy of middle-class progressivism. Although O’Donnell saw the particularities of George’s theory of land monopoly as being important both to George’s reaching his conclusions and, to an extent, in his audience’s acceptance of them, they were less significant than his general vision of material equality. Even George’s concentration on private property in land was appreciated in Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality more generally as a broad critique of the absolute right to private property. The rest of the book—most of it in fact—was spent situating that vision in the context of urban, ethnic, and working-class politics during the early 1880s with a deep focus on New York City, the Irish diaspora, and the build-up to George’s 1886 mayoral campaign.Footnote 34
England’s approach to George and his movement in Land and Liberty differed from O’Donnell’s in two primary ways. First, it followed Georgism from its roots in liberal theory and George’s life and personal development, on through the course of the single tax movement that concluded as the last members passed from the scene by the end of the New Deal. Second, England made a concerted effort to distinguish liberalism from progressivism, with George belonging to the former tradition, whereas O’Donnell’s progressivism (or progressive republicanism) was a much broader concept that might be read synonymously with either modern liberalism or social democracy.Footnote 35 Under both frameworks, there were at least three different iterations of either “republicanism” or “liberalism” that progressed from an original good, equality-driven ideology, to a corrupted hierarchy-defending ideology, to a renewed and reinvigorated egalitarian-freedom ideology. For England, however, George and his movement performed both the general task of anticipating an activist state for the promotion of social equality while also helping to preserve a rights-oriented liberal tradition during an oppressive period of progressive statism. England’s George not only recovered egalitarian liberalism from the clutches of laissez-faire, he and his followers defended it against the dominant progressive alternative to laissez-faire until modern liberalism’s later fruition during the New Deal and beyond. Maintaining this distinction between elitist, coercive progressivism and modernized, democratic liberalism, however, is difficult to execute and made England’s argument more elusive than O’Donnell’s.Footnote 36 The task was only made harder by the lack of formal organization that, as England rightly notes, defined the single tax movement. That said, his willingness to pursue that nettlesome thread over so much new terrain also resulted in a far more intriguing study of political genealogy and George’s many diffuse legacies.
England argued that George’s significance in reforming modern liberalism lay in his rescuing the “democratic and egalitarian strand of liberalism” from its corruption at the hands of Darwinian, laissez-faire liberalism. George accomplished this rescue through his land theory and identification of society’s role in producing land values, making the case that poverty “was a function of political design, not genetic essentialism” and that the government should provide social services as a return on the value created by society as a whole.Footnote 37 In this way, George reshaped the creed of equal rights and individualism to enable the modern welfare state, thereby reconciling the goals of capitalism and socialism. His insistence on free enterprise and the sanctity of personal property was essential to bringing along old free-labor liberals, while his faith that good public policy and a welfare state could resolve social inequalities kept alive a freedom-focused, rights-loving alternative in the face of coercive, statist progressivism of the likes of Herbert Croly. In this manner, England saw George’s function as a “link in a chain,” or temporary “midpoint,” which preserved the promise of liberalism through a trying period that was not necessarily a desirable result itself. Indeed, considering eventual Georgist opposition to New Deal reforms based on statism and economic planning, England deemed Georgism to have been “important” but “not necessarily sufficient” to save liberalism.Footnote 38
Thus, both O’Donnell and England revised the traditional understanding of George’s legacy in American politics by finding for him a tangible presence in modern political ideology—whether it be progressivism, social democracy, or liberalism—that went beyond a strictly inspirational role. They have restyled George as a pivotal theoretical reformulator. Nevertheless, they retained aspects of the old understanding that George’s primary importance was not to be found in his land theory but in his broader argument and vision. Indeed, both England and O’Donnell looked for George’s significance and legacy beyond the single tax, which England specifically argued had blinkered too many scholars. Accordingly, the bulk of Land and Liberty assessed George’s impact after his death through the careers of notable Georgists, like Tom L. Johnson, Louis F. Post, and George Creel, following their work in urban reform, conservation policy, and New Freedom and New Deal programs, most of which had little to do with land value taxation. As a history of the single tax movement and George’s subtle influences in the Democratic Party, England’s work is without modern comparison.
And yet, one wonders if George the man would recognize himself in either England’s or O’Donnell’s portrait of “modern liberalism” or “social democracy” shorn of the land question and stripped of natural rights and moral absolutes. George did not imagine his work to be a useful transition from one brand of republicanism or liberalism to another. Rather, he believed that a just society of republican equality was based on the correct allocation of three eternal factors of production: land, labor, and capital. His emphasis on the collective nature of land value is what distinguished him much more than his belief that government could make society more equitable. If one desires an assessment of George’s role in Gilded Age politics that would be recognizable to George, the land question is essential, even as scholars are tempted to look beyond it to make George more relatable. The closest we have to a corrective against the beyond-the-land approach is the work of Alexandra Lough, whose contributions, though less crystalized than O’Donnell’s or England’s, merit exploration should one desire to appreciate the full scope of George’s social critique.
Where England and O’Donnell attempted to find George’s greater significance in his broader, more generalized message, Lough has labored to center George’s historical role and prominence precisely in the “significance of land ownership and distribution in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thought and discourse.”Footnote 39 Although Lough, anticipating England, did seek George’s influence in several avenues of reform, her focus was consistently on the power of his land theory. Indeed, Lough maintained this analytical posture throughout her dissertation, “The Last Tax,” and across her George-related articles, highlighting land’s significance in American history, the specific appeal George’s land arguments had to both the American and global public, and how succeeding Georgist reformers found inspiration in George’s philosophy. Though O’Donnell and especially England also grappled with these themes, they were both more intent on moving the discussion beyond the particularity of land tenure, whereas Lough was comfortable maintaining a more Georgist insistence on the land question itself. Like the others, Lough saw George as a fulcrum of modernization, only her main concern was not for republicanism or liberalism. She viewed George as taking the traditional American land-opportunity vision and updating it to account for the inevitable shortage of available land.Footnote 40
In his preoccupation with American land access, noted Lough, George anticipated Frederick Jackson Turner by decades and was joined by countless other Americans.Footnote 41 George extracted the universal principle of land access from the accident of Turner’s “unoccupied” land and proposed a reform that would preserve the fundamental opportunity amid changing socio-economic conditions. The single tax would carry the promise of American land-based democracy into the future. If one takes land seriously as a fundamental component of human existence, and as a major source of American prosperity, then Lough’s interpretation assigned for George a key place in modernizing the land-based liberal, democratic political tradition in America; one keeping with the values of Jefferson, with which George identified until his dying day.Footnote 42 In her analysis of George’s spectacular first campaign for the New York mayoralty in 1886, Lough pushed back against the tendency to downplay the importance of land to George’s popular appeal. George’s “commitment to make land common,” she maintained, was an essential part of his early successes with the middle and working classes.Footnote 43 In her telling, George drew from America’s rich tradition of free-labor republicanism, which had seen in land ownership the road to independence, competency, and freedom from wage labor. That freedom had been the goal of Young Americans like George Henry Evans and Horace Greeley and had resulted in reforms such as the Homestead Act. Amid urbanization and industrialization, however, George still “sought to liberate workers from the chains of wage labor and poverty by granting them access to land,” albeit by thoroughly novel means.Footnote 44 His appeal was painfully clear to workers who were packed into lightless tenements and subject to sudden eviction. For Lough, then, George represented an evolution and modernization of the American tradition of land-based democracy.
Although Lough explored key areas of direct Georgist influence, such as in the municipal reform efforts of Hazen Pingree and Tom L. Johnson, her assessment of George’s place in the story of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era is less immediately gratifying than O’Donnell’s or England’s.Footnote 45 That is because it, like Charles A. Barker’s biography, implicitly suggests that George primarily represents a path not taken rather than a living strain within modern liberalism. But given the apparent breakdown of confidence in conventional liberalism’s ability to meet modern social problems, especially in the face of ballooning real estate prices and the growing sense of despair among those locked out of the property ladder, a study of the ways in which Progressive Era reformers, and even mid-twentieth-century ones, ignored George may prove just as fruitful as studies that attempt to link him to them. The lessons of the boardgame Monopoly, invented by single taxer Lizzie Magie, are as relevant to the dwellers of today’s San Francisco as when the “prophet” wrote Progress and Poverty there in 1879.
Taken as a whole, then, the new George historians have striven to present usable interpretations of George’s legacy. One form emphasizes George’s influence in developing modern liberal-progressive ideals of state and society, while the other insists on the centrality of land not only to understanding George but also recurrent American values of equality and opportunity. Together, they have taken a great stride in correcting George’s shortchanging at the hands of Gilded Age historiography, but how will the yeoman’s work of the monographers affect the work of the narrative-shaping synthesizers?
What the Future Will Bring Us
It is difficult to tell, so close to the action, how the work of the new historians will affect George’s mainstream historiographical perception. Predictably, their work has already been cited in the niche circles of Georgist economics, municipal governance, land tenure policy, and labor history. But the best indicator of their influence on Gilded Age historiography must come from two synthetic tomes: Steven Hahn’s A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (2016) and Richard White’s aforementioned Republic for Which It Stands (2017).Footnote 46 Both works have incorporated George far more attentively than has any survey since Parrington’s, and, though spanning different periods, both fit George firmly into the “antimonopoly” current, include discussions of his land theory and first mayoral campaign, and indicate his influence on subsequent reformers. This last theme was most relevant in Hahn’s book, given its coverage of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era as a time of multiple “reconstructions.” White’s shorter periodization in Republic for Which It Stands, ending in 1896, and his neo-progressive insistence upon the gildedness of the age, resulted in an ambiguous legacy for George. Both scholars drew upon revisionist and traditional George accounts, and White brought prior experience with George given his work on railroads and western history.Footnote 47
Hahn’s account leaned heavily on O’Donnell and Thomas, mixing new and old. His discussions of George’s land theory formation and of George’s 1886 campaign closely followed O’Donnell’s line of interpretation in Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality, while his emphasis on George as a “pastoral” thinker longing for old opportunities, as well as his frequent grouping with Bellamy and Lloyd, was similar to Thomas’s Alternative America. Hahn used this composite George to introduce his section on antimonopoly and retained his presence there as a flavorful leitmotif. Hahn’s George, therefore, emerged as a man with the heart of old America who, through his careful take down of classical theory, nevertheless opened the path to social democracy for succeeding reformers like Richard T. Ely or Walter Rauschenbusch.Footnote 48
Like Hahn, White emphasized the perceptive and rigorous argumentation of George’s theory, its wide reception, and its power in knocking down classical liberal orthodoxy; but he was also critical. He highlighted George’s early California anti-Chinese rhetoric (as with Hahn, not mentioning his later significantly changed views on race) and summarized George’s land doctrine as “quixotic, reductionist, and full of unintended consequences.”Footnote 49 White depicted George as being crucial to launching the barrage of antimonopoly protest, while ultimately being left behind by the evolving course of events.Footnote 50 Thus, although White took advantage of all the latest devices, and gave people like George more airtime, the story of disappointment would be familiar to Matthew Josephson, albeit with much smaller egos for the “Robber Barons.” If less enigmatic, George’s place in the grand narrative remains contested and ambiguous. Though his functional role of kickstarting the spirit of reform is more appreciated than ever, his specific critique of land in American society is discarded as a novelty of the era.
George persists as an awkward presence in Gilded Age historiography because we have not met him on his own terms. Although we have begun to ask many of the same questions in this “Second Gilded Age” as George did in the first, we have also often attempted to make him fit into our own preferred set of outcomes and answer our own concerns, rarely wondering if his most important message was one that we ignored. The risk of histories like O’Donnell’s and England’s—brilliant as they are—is that they can serve the function of a just-so story: George helped create modern liberalism, modern liberalism is good, so we should thank George. Alternatively, grand narrators satisfied with lumping George in the elastic construct of “antimonopoly” are pleased to fit him into a pattern of either opposing modernity or merely paving the way for more realistic reformers. Meanwhile, his core critique of land ownership, even among the most sympathetic historians, is still primarily regarded as the quirky artifact of a lost age—an ideological non sequitur. But it is a strange history that condemns the Dawes Severalty Act while dismissing Georgism. Perhaps, instead, George deserves more of the Postel or Lough treatment; perhaps we should consider that George was not simply anticipating a primitive version of our contemporary ideals, or even longing for a fleeting past, but was instead articulating a radical, republican alternative to both how society operated in his time and continues to operate in our own. Such a consideration is particularly prescient in the contemporary environment of wealth stratification and real estate and asset speculation—supported in no small part (if unintentionally) by government policies stretching back to the supposed birth of modern liberalism.
Any future history that would do George justice should, of course, place him in historical context and look for his legacies in today’s world, but it should also consider at length his fundamental critique of modern liberal-capitalist society; namely, that any society built on private property in land and natural resources will inevitably produce systemic inequities through rent and speculation. Historians engaged primarily with getting from the point A of the past to the point B of the present, or even those who have otherwise delighted in plumbing the depths of systemic social inequities, have simply not taken George’s fundamental point seriously. Thomas was correct that George imagined an “alternative America,” but, as Postel indicated, George proposed a brighter future, not a romanticized past. Like Postel’s own assessment of populism, that interpretation of George holds profound implications for our understanding of the Gilded Age’s relationship to the Progressive Era and, indeed, to the present. This observation is not to suggest that historians should become advocates of the single tax. It is merely to say that, if historians are to get the most out of history, they should not only seek answers to the questions of their own day but should also entertain without prejudice the questions asked by their subjects. In doing so, historians may not only place past events in perspective; they may shift their own perspective as well. We can only hope that future historians will extend to us the same courtesy.
