Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality

Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age

Edward O'Donnell

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231539265
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: History

America's remarkable explosion of industrial output and national wealth at the end of the nineteenth century was matched by a troubling rise in poverty and worker unrest. As politicians and intellectuals fought over the causes of this crisis, Henry George (1839–1897) published a radical critique of laissez-faire capitalism and its threat to the nation's republican traditions. Progress and Poverty (1879), which became a surprise best-seller, offered a provocative solution for preserving these traditions while preventing the amassing of wealth in the hands of the few: a single tax on land values. George's writings and years of social activism almost won him the mayor's seat in New York City in 1886. Though he lost the election, his ideas proved instrumental to shaping a popular progressivism that remains essential to tackling inequality today.

Edward T. O'Donnell's exploration of George's life and times merges labor, ethnic, intellectual, and political history to illuminate the early militant labor movement in New York during the Gilded Age. He locates in George's rise to prominence the beginning of a larger effort by American workers to regain control of the workplace and obtain economic security and opportunity. The Gilded Age was the first but by no means the last era in which Americans confronted the mixed outcomes of modern capitalism. George's accessible, forward-thinking ideas on democracy, equality, and freedom have tremendous value for contemporary debates over the future of unions, corporate power, Wall Street recklessness, government regulation, and political polarization.

PART I

The Making of a Radical, 1839–1879

This association of poverty with progress, is the great enigma of our times…. It is the riddle which the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization, and which not to answer is to be destroyed.

—Henry George, Progress and Poverty

1

“To Be Something and Somebody in the World”

Thou Henry still art young,
And does not see the wonder Thou wilt tread…

—from a poem by George’s girlfriend at age 16

BORN BETWEEN TWO REVOLUTIONS

Henry George was born in Philadelphia on September 2, 1839. His mother, Catherine Pratt Vallance, came from an old family from that city. His father, Richard Samuel Henry George, published religious books for the Episcopal Church.¹ Henry grew up in a tiny, two-story brick house on Tenth Street located, as George later recalled, “almost within the shadow of Independence Hall.” The Georges eventually moved when the house became too small for their ten children.²

Philadelphia in the Age of Jackson was second only to New York City in terms of commerce and population. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the city’s economy grew at a phenomenal rate. As the very embodiment of “metropolitan industrialization,” the city’s hundreds of small workshops produced a huge variety of goods, the value per capita of which rose from $10.00 to $86.00 between 1820 and 1840 alone. Philadelphia’s population jumped from 112,000 to 220,000 over the same period. By the late 1830s, when George was born, Philadelphia was a city both steeped in tradition and galvanized by the revolutionary potential of the nascent market economy. Put another way, George was born between two revolutions. In 1839, the republican ideals of the American Revolution remained salient, yet they were fast being transformed by the new demands and opportunities presented by the Industrial Revolution. This duality would shape George’s worldview throughout his life.³

The very different experiences of George’s father and maternal grandfather exemplify this world of rapid change and competing values in which George was raised. His maternal grandfather, John Vallance, came to Philadelphia from Scotland at the age of twenty-one in 1791. Like his American-born contemporaries, he had come of age in a pre-industrial order centered on the artisan. These highly skilled men engaged in scores of craft occupations, producing finished goods ranging from boots to bread to books. Even though signs of commercialism and individualism among some craftsmen had appeared in the eighteenth century, for the most part the economy and society was still dominated by time-honored traditions, obligations, and codes that constituted what E. P. Thompson termed the “moral economy.”⁴ Although we have no record of John Vallance’s early life, it is clear that he received a traditional artisan’s training in the “art and mystery” of engraving while a young man in Scotland, a process that embodied the core elements of this pre-modern order, following the traditional path from apprentice, to journeyman, to master craftsman, and, once settled in Philadelphia, to shop owner by the 1790s.⁵

The culture of early nineteenth-century artisans like Vallance celebrated the independent lifestyle and flexible work routine made possible by the possession of special skills rather than the headlong pursuit of wealth. In some trades, spontaneous holidays (such as St. Monday) and ubiquitous drinking were especially revered. Most artisans aspired to acquire a “competence,” an income that allowed for modest material comfort, personal independence, social respectability, and an old age free of degrading want. The available evidence of John Vallance’s career makes it clear that he achieved these goals.⁶

Like many of his generation, Henry George grew up with both an awareness of and sentimental feelings for this system in which his grandfather had flourished. As he remembered it in an 1883 essay:

The workman may have toiled hard and long, but in his work he had companionship, variety, the pleasure that comes of the exercise of creative skill, the sense of seeing things growing under his hand to finished form. He worked in his own home or side by side with his employer. Labor was lightened by emulation, by gossip, by laughter, by discussion. As apprentice, he looked forward to becoming a journeyman; as journeyman, he looked forward to becoming a master and taking an apprentice of his own. With a few tools and a little raw material, he was independent. He dealt directly with those who used the finished articles he produced.⁷

This culture found ideological expression in an artisanal republicanism that drew upon key elements of eighteenth-century classical republicanism to support a belief that craftsmen occupied a special place within the American republican polity. Craft morality, it was argued, positioned artisans as the truest practitioners of republican citizenship. They were, as one put it in an 1809 Fourth of July oration, “the sinews and muscles of our country…the very axis of society.” When men of Vallance’s era gathered on such occasions, they also touted their own status as independent producers, free from economic, social, or political coercion in everyday life. Likewise, when artisans spoke of virtue—the placing of the common good above private interests—they emphasized a similar sensibility that dominated the master–journeyman–apprentice relationship, namely that virtue restrained the unbridled pursuit of self-interest over the well-being of the trade. Artisans, in other words, were the most authentic republicans.⁸

Yet this centuries-old artisanal world in which John Vallance prospered rapidly disintegrated in the decades following 1815. Evidence of a tendency among some master craftsmen toward profit-seeking, competition, and individualism existed at least as far back as the mid-eighteenth century, but it was not until the resumption of commerce following the War of 1812 that the foundation of this social order of mutuality, tradition, and obligation began to give way. Even as they expressed rhetorical fidelity to their craft, some master craftsmen, enthused and enticed by a growing ethos of individualism and the pursuit of higher profits, began to alter the traditional forms and rules of craft production. These entrepreneurial masters took in more apprentices but taught them only a portion of the craft. They set journeymen to perform only some of the necessary tasks needed to produce a finished product. In both cases, they began to substitute market-rate cash payments for customary obligations like food, board, and education. Gradually, the casual rhythm of the workday was eliminated in favor of longer days regulated by a clock, fewer breaks, and no alcohol.

As they advanced these new values and practices, profit-minded master craftsmen, shopkeepers, professionals, financiers, merchants, and others engaged in the new commercial marketplace began to articulate what might be termed an entrepreneurial republicanism, an ideology that celebrated and sanctified the new capitalist order as thoroughly republican in nature while rejecting the criticisms of radical journeymen. Entrepreneurial republicanism championed absolute private property rights, freedom of contract, and individualism, and it utterly repudiated any suggestion that American society was divided into conflicting social classes. Accordingly, its adherents deemed those who branded competition, individualism, and innovation as incompatible with republican principles as jealous, lazy, dangerously un-American, or a combination of all three. As the New York Journal of Commerce argued in 1836, “All combinations to compel others to give a higher price or take a lower one, are not only inexpedient, but at war with the order of things which the Creator has established for the general good, and therefore wicked.”⁹

By the late 1820s, these changes in practice and ideology signaled the passing of the traditional artisan’s world of small-scale production, craft integrity, mutual obligations, and anticipated advancement before a new reality of segmented work, low wages, and fading hopes among journeymen of ever obtaining a competence.¹⁰ Philadelphia’s journeymen organized to resist this revolutionary transformation of their world, but their Workingmen’s Party and General Trades Union efforts were no match for the emerging market economy.¹¹

Henry George’s maternal grandfather escaped the full impact of these changes; he died at the age of fifty-two a prosperous, though not rich, master engraver in 1823.¹² He thus represented a vanishing generation of men who grew up in the final phases of the artisan’s pre-commercial world. Had he lived another twenty years, Vallance might have enthusiastically embraced the new logic and rules of the market economy—or been crushed by them. Instead, an early death in 1823 meant his life would stand as the classic fulfillment of the traditional artisanal aspiration—from immigrant, to apprentice, to journeyman, to independent master craftsman. By the time Henry George was born in 1839, many features of this tradition had all but disappeared. However, as shown in later chapters, certain ideological and cultural aspects of the bygone artisan’s world would remain vibrant for many decades, wielding a powerful influence on George and many others of his generation.

In contrast to the experience of John Vallance, Henry George’s father took a very different career path. The son of a successful Philadelphia sea captain, Richard George did not receive an artisan’s apprenticeship. Rather, it appears from the available evidence that he entered the emerging commercial world as a clerk, itself a new form of apprenticeship for a future in capitalist enterprise. Just as Henry George’s grandfather embodied the economic traditions of the late eighteenth century, his father’s life symbolized the new era of entrepreneurship and individualism.¹³

As late as 1831, when he was thirty-two years old, Richard George worked as a clerk in the U.S. Customs House. Soon, however, he joined with a partner to open a shop that published religious books. Unlike the entrepreneurial master printers and binders that moved into manufactory production, Richard George was what Bruce Laurie has termed an “outsider,” someone who entered a modernizing trade without having any formal training in the field.¹⁴ George employed many skilled printers, compositors, and binders to handle the physical process making books, while he performed the functions of investor, manager, and marketer. The fact that his firm stayed in business during the severe depression of 1837–1844 suggests he performed these tasks well. Other evidence supports Richard George being an expectant capitalist. He was a devout evangelical, which, as studies of antebellum workers have shown, more often than not indicated an enthusiastic embrace of “Christian capitalism.” His decision to specialize in religious books undoubtedly stemmed in part from a commitment of faith, but it also likely reflected an entrepreneur’s awareness of a booming market for such works during the Second Great Awakening.¹⁵

Born in 1839, Henry George entered a social and economic order undergoing sweeping change. Though fading fast, the ideological legacy of the artisanal world of his grandfather would last well into his adult life and leave a lasting impression on his mind. At the same time, the entrepreneurial world of his father was, quite literally, gathering steam. Its promise of progress, both for individuals and society at large, as a reward for industriousness, perseverance, and risk taking would leave its mark on the worldview of Henry George, who would one day become famous as a radical seeking to save capitalism from itself by insisting upon the necessity of overturning one of its core principles—absolute private property in land.

“NEITHER POVERTY NOR RICHES”

George’s concern with poverty did not stem from a penurious childhood; he was raised in modest lower middle-class comfort. His family took small summer vacations and enjoyed a home with all the furnishings and simple decorations of bourgeois respectability. “Neither poverty nor riches,” wrote Catherine George to her son in 1858, “that is the happy medium. If only we can live comfortable and make both ends meet that is all I ask for. I hope that we will all possess the true riches, have an inheritance beyond the skies. This alone will bring true happiness.”¹⁶

Catherine George’s words illustrate vividly the first of two critical influences in Henry George’s early life: his family’s strong evangelical Christian faith. The Georges were among countless antebellum city dwellers caught up in the ideological fervor of the Second Great Awakening. The family belonged to nearby St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, whose congregation subscribed to a distinctly low-church, evangelical style more closely resembling Methodism than “high”-church Episcopalianism. They attended Sunday worship regularly and recited prayers together every morning and evening. Overall, they created within their home a pervasive atmosphere of faith marked by outward signs of piety—reading and studying the scriptures, supporting church missions, adhering to the Ten Commandments—as well as a vigilant introspection requiring one to consider all decisions and actions in the light of faith and salvation.¹⁷

Looking back on the life and writings of Henry George, it is easy to see just how extensive the influence of this evangelical upbringing was. All of his writings reveal not simply an intimate familiarity with the Bible, but also a spirituality of mission. Throughout his adult life, he took time to scrutinize his moral state and set about righting his course in pursuit of his goals. This sense of optimism and calling sustained him in his darkest hours of poverty and career failure. Through it all, he held fast to the belief that God had chosen him, much like He would a prophet, as one who would influence his fellow citizens and push humanity toward the realization of the millennium.¹⁸

The second critical influence in Henry George’s early life that shaped his outlook as an adult was the aforementioned emerging culture of entrepreneurial republicanism and its offshoot, the celebrated ideology of “free labor.” Although promoted by elite interests through their newspapers and speeches, it enjoyed widespread currency at all levels of antebellum Northern society. Where merchants and employers found their entrepreneurial efforts and commitment to liberal capitalism validated as “republican,” farmers, artisans, and laborers drew strength from the elements of free labor ideology that emphasized producerism, opportunity, and wage work as but a temporary stage on the way to economic independence. And in the increasingly contentious atmosphere around the slavery question, free labor offered Americans of all classes in the North a comforting cultural contrast to the South. “We know Southern men declare that their slaves are better off than hired laborers amongst us,” wrote Abraham Lincoln in 1854. “How little they know whereof they speak! There is no class of permanent laborers amongst us. Twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer. The hired laborer of yesterday labors on his own account to-day, and will hire others to labor for him to-morrow.” Antebellum free labor ideology offered Northerners in particular a basic set of shared civic values updated to accommodate a burgeoning commercial economy; at the same time, it remained sufficiently ambiguous to perpetuate faith in republican ideals and, more importantly, to discourage class consciousness and a search for alternatives to the market and capitalist production.¹⁹

Like many Americans of his generation, George absorbed the central mantras of free labor and the influence of these precepts never left him. As a young man in California (his very move out West is revealing enough), George exhibited all the signs of a young man on the make, seeking ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I. The Making of a Radical, 1839–1879
• PART II. The Emergence of “New Political Forces,” 1880–1885
• PART III. The Great Upheaval, 1886–1887
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index