Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age

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Henry George became a living legend, which presents scholars with the challenge of detangling factual from fanciful. Edward T. O'Donnell offers a political biography of George that will not satisfy those hewing to a mytho-heroic image of the author of Progress and Poverty (1879) but one that places George within his Gilded Age context and adds nuance to our understanding of how George became an international phenomenon. The youthful George was an ambitious, insecure rolling stone. His magnum opus represented his conversion to labor republicanism via evangelical religion, free labor ideology, the Homestead Act (1862), and investigative journalism. The single tax aside, O'Donnell credits George with constructing a cogent explanation of how republican ideals were subverted—from “political freedom and equal access to economic opportunity” (p. 36) to “laissez-faire individualism” and “freedom of contract” (p. 38). George insisted that the panic of 1873 and the 1874 Tomkins Square riot rendered those distillations shams; he stripped the gilding from his age and exposed the power dynamics that simultaneously produced enormous fortunes and crushing poverty. George vigorously asserted that labor, not capital, created wealth; he infused economic theory with moralism; and he presented the single tax on unproductive land as the moderate alternative to radical socialism or laissez-faire individualism. Unlike revolutionary socialists, George saw government as a potential labor ally, embraced the ballot box, and called for restoration of older ideals of citizenship.