Henry George

Henry George (September 2, 1839 – October 29, 1897) was an American journalist, social philosopher, and political economist. His widely read work helped inspire several reform movements during the Progressive Era. He gave rise to Georgism, an economic philosophy holding that individuals are entitled to the value they create themselves, but the economic value of land and natural resources belongs equally to everyone in society. George is best known for proposing a single tax on land values as a way to build a more productive and fair society.

His most famous book, *Progress and Poverty* (1879), sold millions of copies around the world. It explored why poverty and inequality grew even as technology and the economy advanced, examined the boom-and-bust cycles of industrial economies, and promoted land value taxation and other anti-monopoly measures as solutions. George also wrote in favor of free trade, the secret ballot, publicly funded utilities and transportation (paid for by capturing the rise in land values they created), Pigouvian taxes, and public ownership of natural monopolies.

George worked as a journalist for many years. His popular writings and speeches led him to run for mayor of New York City twice: in 1886 as the United Labor Party candidate, and in 1897 as the Jefferson Democracy candidate. In the first race, he got 31 percent of the vote and finished ahead of Theodore Roosevelt, who later became president. In the second race, he received 4 percent. He died during that second campaign. After his death, his ideas were kept alive by organizations and political leaders in the United States and other English-speaking countries. Mid-20th-century labor economist and journalist George Soule called George “the most famous American economic writer” and said his book had a larger worldwide circulation than any other economics work ever written.

George was born in Philadelphia to a lower-middle-class family, the second of ten children. His father, a publisher of religious texts and a devout Episcopalian, sent him to the Episcopal Academy. George disliked the religious instruction, left without graduating, and instead had his father hire a tutor. He also read widely and attended lectures at the Franklin Institute. His formal schooling ended at age 14. At 15, in April 1855, he went to sea as a foremast boy on the *Hindoo*, bound for Melbourne and Calcutta. He reached the American West in 1858, briefly considered gold prospecting, but instead started work that year as a typesetter in San Francisco.

In California, George fell in love with Annie Corsina Fox, who was from Sydney, Australia. They met on her seventeenth birthday, October 12, 1860. Orphaned, she lived with an uncle, a prosperous and strong-willed man who opposed the match because George was poor. The couple eloped on December 3, 1861, with Henry wearing a borrowed suit and Annie bringing only a packet of books. The marriage was happy. They had four children: Henry Jr. (born 1862), who later became a U.S. Representative from New York; Richard F. (born 1865), a future sculptor; Jennie (born about 1867); and Anna Angela (born 1878), who became the mother of dancer and choreographer Agnes de Mille and actress Peggy George. Early in the marriage, the family was near starvation. After the birth of his second child, George had no work and no money and had to beg for food. He approached a well-dressed stranger, planning to rob him if he refused help, but the man gave him five dollars. George was raised Episcopalian but later believed in “deistic humanitarianism.” His wife was Irish Catholic, but their son Henry Jr. wrote that the children were mainly influenced by their father’s deism and humanism.

After deciding against gold mining in British Columbia, George was hired as a printer for the new *San Francisco Times*. He quickly began submitting editorials, including the popular “What the Railroads Will Bring Us” (1868), which remained required reading in California schools for decades. He rose to managing editor by summer 1867. His first nationally prominent piece was the 1869 essay “The Chinese in California,” in which he argued that Chinese immigration should be stopped before Chinese immigrants overran the western United States. George worked for several papers, including four years (1871–1875) as editor of his own newspaper, the *San Francisco Daily Evening Post*, and also ran the *Reporter*, a Democratic anti-monopoly publication. He struggled to keep his newspaper afloat and was again forced to beg on the streets. But his growing reputation and work in journalism eventually lifted his family from poverty.

George began as a Lincoln Republican and later became a Democrat. He was a sharp critic of railroad and mining interests, corrupt politicians, land speculators, and labor conditions.