14 Gronlund and Other Marxists

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The paradoxical relationship of the Jeffersonian individualist, Henry George, to the history of general socialism is a familiar story, well summarized by the following oft-quoted statements by Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw, respectively: "Little as Henry George intended it, there can be no doubt that it was the enormous circulation of his Progress and Poverty which gave the touch that caused all the seething influences to crystallize into a popular Socialist movement." (1) "When I was thus swept into the great Socialist revival of 1883, I found that five-sixths of those who were swept in with me had been converted by Henry George." (2) But when we examine the convoluted tale of George's relationship to Marxism as distinguished from socialism in the broader sense, we find ourselves on less familiar yet even more paradoxical ground. Marx and George never met. Upon receiving three copies of Progress and Poverty from various friends, Marx "looked it through" and dismissed it contemptuously as "the capitalist's last ditch," (3) characterizing George in a letter to F. A. Sorge as "behind the times" theoretically, and marked by the "repulsive presumption and arrogance that invariably distinguish all such panacea-mongers." (4) George's estimate of Marx was equally uncomplimentary; he regarded him as "a most superficial thinker, entangled in an inexact and vicious terminology," and as "the prince of muddleheads." (6) Despite Marx's low opinion of it, H. Hessel Tiltman observes that George's book "achieved the undoubted feat of making Karl Marx into a popular author, for chapters of Das Capital were published and read as sequels of Progress and Poverty. " (7) During George's lifetime his views were publicly attacked in Marxist circles, not, ironically, by Marx himself, who, as we have seen, considered him "repulsive," but mainly by two men with whom he had maintained friendly connexions, Henry Mayers Hyndman and Laurence Gronlund. Hyndman, a founder of the British Social Democratic Federation and the first British popularizer of Marx's thought, was introduced to George in 1882 by John Stuart Mill's step-daughter, Helen Taylor. Shortly thereafter, George and his wife accepted Hyndman's invitation to be houseguests at his elegant London home. Although the invitation was extended, according to the host's own account, "because I hoped, quite mistakenly as it afterwards appeared, to convert him to the truth as it is in Socialist economics," (8) Hyndman entertained a genuine, if rather condescending, feeling of affection toward George long after it had become clear that their theoretical differences could not be reconciled. (9) These differences emerged with increasing sharpness in two published exchanges between them: the first, a dialogue, in 1885; the second, a full-scale debate, in 1887. George first heard of Gronlund in 1883, when the latter was earning ten dollars a week and saving three of them to defray the cost of publication of his Cooperative Commonwealth, which came out the following year. According to Barker, George "admired and encouraged" the impecunious Danish immigrant, (10) and Gronlund reciprocated with generous references in his book to George, which were, however, interspersed with others that announced the principal points of disagreement that he was later to elaborate. Educated as a lawyer in both Copenhagen and Milwaukee, Gronlund left that profession as his socialist convictions ripened, in favor of an economically precarious career as a journalist and political lecturer. Eugene V. Debs, the labour leader and perennial Socialist Party candidate for president, acknowledged him as his ideological mentor. (11) During the period that concerns us Gronlund was a thorough Marxist, although he sought to play down the more incendiary aspects of the doctrine in order to make it less distasteful to the average American. In time he was to renounce the class struggle, and to move in the direction of Christian socialism. …