Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [865]
George blamed crises on the “principle of competition upon which society is now based.” Under conditions of competition, American individualism, which he valued highly, too easily degenerated into “cruel selfishness and monstrous greed.” The republic had to reject cutthroat competition and become “a family, in which the weaker brethren shall not be remorselessly pushed to the wall.”
George also blamed hard times on the growth of monopolies, and the worst monopolists were landlords—parasites who cornered an irreplaceable resource and exacted outrageous charges for its use. When an increase in population and productive resources made land more valuable, landlords creamed off most of the benefit. Worst of all were speculators who deliberately held property off the market until its price reached unconscionable levels.
It was landlords’ gouging, George asserted, that forced factory owners to cut workers’ wages, in order to offset the high cost of land. The solution was straightforward: tax the landlords and confiscate all their unearned profits. This one single tax would generate such phenomenal revenues that the country could eliminate all other taxes. Unfettered entrepreneurs would then be able to pay fair wages. Capital and labor would be reconciled; strikes and poverty would become things of the past. The single tax would also “lessen crime, elevate morals, and carry civilization to yet nobler heights.”
George mailed off his manuscript to publishers in New York City. Harpers and Scribner’s turned it down, but D. Appleton and Company agreed to print some copies if George supplied the plates. The book received little attention in the press, however, so in August 1880 the forty-one-year-old author moved to New York City to promote it, as well as to look for work. He soon made modest headway on both fronts. The book received a series of notices that, while hardly all favorable—the Times and Nation damned it—attracted enough attention to land him several journalistic assignments. George brought his family east and relocated to a porter’s lodge on the outlying Kingsbridge Road.
The one really enthusiastic review for Progress and Poverty came from Patrick Ford’s Irish World. Ford liked George’s analysis of American conditions, and even more its relevance to Ireland’s current dilemmas. In the late 1870s crop failures, rack-renting, and mass evictions had revived fears of famine. Two hundred thousand angry tenants organized the Irish Land League, which demanded a halt to evictions and the transfer of property from aristocratic landlords to working farmers. The league was led by Michael Davitt, a militant Fenian and son of an evicted tenant farmer, and Charles Stuart Parnell, a wealthy Protestant landlord who had been fighting for home rule.
In 1880 Parnell came to New York City to raise funds and organize American branches. He was spectacularly successful. Catholic Irish Americans and mainstream Protestants alike gave him a jubilant reception and bountiful patronage, and by September 1881 the new American Land League had over fifteen hundred branches. In New York City the Catholic hierarchy, Tammany Hall, and the Irish-American middle class—many of whom had condemned Fenianism—rallied to the Land League, reassured by Parnell’s brand of constitutional and parliamentary nationalism. At the same time, the day laborers and servant maids for whom Ford was the leading spokesman were fired with enthusiasm for Davitt’s radical antilandlordism. It was this wing of Irish-American nationalism that found Henry George’s work compelling. Ford printed up a cheap edition of Progress and Poverty, and soon working-class chapters of the Land League were studying it avidly.
In October 1881 Ford dispatched George to Ireland as a special correspondent. Soon he was wiring back articles castigating English despotism and landlord oppression. He also lectured around the Irish countryside, blossomed into a commanding orator, was arrested by the authorities, and returned to New York an Irish-American working-class