Alexandra W. Lough - The Annotated Works of Henry George: Progress and Poverty

The Annotated Works of Henry George

The Annotated Works of Henry George

Edited by Francis K. Peddle and William S. Peirce
with essays by scholars in the field

Volume I: Our Land and Land Policy and Other Works

General Introduction

Volume II: Progress and Poverty

Volume III: Social Problems and The Condition of Labor

Volume IV: Protection or Free Trade

Volume V: The Science of Political Economy

Volume VI: A Perplexed Philosopher

Concluding Essay

Bibliography

Appendices

Sponsored by the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation

With additional support from the Henry George Foundation of Great Britain

From a photograph taken in San Francisco shortly after writing Progress and Poverty.

The Annotated Works
of Henry George

Volume II

Progress and Poverty

Edited by William S. Peirce

With Alexandra Lough

FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

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ISBN 978-1-61147-941-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-61147-942-3 (electronic)

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Printed in the United States of America

Francis K. Peddle

Progress and PovertyStill a Watershed

By the time Progress and Poverty exploded onto a roiled American political and economic landscape in 1879, Henry George was already a polished journalist and publicist, barely forty years of age. Economic depressions and fluctuations certainly existed in the United States before the Great Crash of 1929, although few people today are aware of these distant upheavals. The earlier Panic of 1873 was one of the more pestilent, long lasting, and deep in the economic history of the country. It profoundly affected the young and ambitious George, who had sought his fortunes in California during the cutthroat days of the gold rush and unscrupulous land grabs. He had already penned some notable works, such as Our Land and Land Policy (1871), which reveal a confident and elegant writer with no shortage of research skills, facts, and ideas crowding into his innately acute economic mind. George was never satisfied with mere economic and political critique. He was on a mission and supremely confident in his solution for the malaise of his time. He needed to bring his remedy to the attention of the world. His natural writing skills and oratorical gifts would serve his mission well. Progress and Poverty fulfilled his desire for comprehensive explanation of what caused industrial depressions as well as how they can be stopped. After its publication, his life would never be the same.

George lived in San Francisco during the writing of Progress and Poverty. After failing in efforts to find a commercial publisher, George arranged privately for an edition of 500 copies, even setting some of the type himself. Once he was able to supply the plates, a New York publisher, D. Appleton and Company, agreed to produce a second, trade edition in 1880. This is the version presented in this volume with minor emendations. It sold out quickly, after George began writing, first from New York and then from Ireland and England, on the land war then taking place in Ireland. Progress and Poverty was soon being read by just about everyone who despaired over the abject condition of the masses and the malignant effects on working people of the extreme concentrations of wealth in the Gilded Age.

In 1886 George ran for mayor of New York with the feverish endorsement of labor. Thirty thousand people petitioned him to throw his hat into the ring. His was the most successful third-party candidacy of the period. In that tumultuous year he was able to accomplish more politically than any previous labor candidate in U.S. history. How was this possible in the seven short years since the appearance of Progress and Poverty? It is a complex story and one from which we can still learn many things about the tortuous interactions between economics and politics.

Progress and Poverty, carefully subtitled An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth; The Remedy, accomplishes in one fell swoop two essential ingredients in order to be a best seller. One ingredient is its strident social and economic critique. The other is the clear formulation of an obvious solution. As economic critique, Progress and Poverty strikes hard at two things which seemed blatantly wrong to the working classes. To the applause of labor, George discredited the grim world of Malthusian population theory as nothing but a defense of the European landed aristocracy from whose suffocating ministrations most in the United States were trying to escape. Frederick Jackson Turners frontier had not yet closed for a vast army of recent immigrants and ambitious Americans. The arithmetical and geometrical prognostications of the caustic Reverend Malthus were absurd and downright outrageous. George exposed its absurdities through well-knit arguments laced with moral broadsides.

The so-called wages fund theory provided the second line of defense of the moneyed interests in the nineteenth century. It declared that all wages come out of capital. The latter therefore constrains the former. Never mind the finer points of economic analysis, Georges critique of it in Progress and Poverty exposed the whole grand edifice of the theory as really nothing but an unconscionable effort to suppress, not advance, the wages of labor. Clothed in different language, one still hears the same arguments today. The wages fund theory was a deceptive apology for the supposedly benign interests of capital. George would always privilege labor over capital, even in the free trade debates of the 1880s, but in doing so he never thought for a moment that somehow if you abolished capital you might by some miracle save labor. Class warfare was not his road to economic salvation. Georges naturally synthetic mind sought large-scale reconciliations between labor, capital, and their use of natural resources.