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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 July 2014
This essay provides a reexamination of Henry George by focusing on how ideas about gender and nature informed one of the key objectives of the George movement: the transformation of the Gilded Age city into a metropolis of working-class suburbs tied together by single-tax funded public transportation. George was hardly a conservationist, and his understanding of nature was very different from those urban elites who sought to preserve nature. He simply did not accept the conservationist notion of depleted resources, which was inconsistent with his natural law belief in a boundless nature, a point that in turn grew out of the producerist emphasis of his political economy. Yet, George appreciated the need for a nonproductive relationship with nature, and he and his followers articulated this in terms of developing a healthier and more moral domestic environment. He applied such thinking to his political efforts in New York City during the mid-1880s, condemning the moral as well as the physical consequences of overcrowding that he blamed on land speculation. George enthusiastically embraced emerging transportation technologies as facilitators of mass residential decentralization. In so doing, he articulated a vision of a thoroughly reconfigured city that integrated nature into family life by enabling the development of a more spread-out metropolis.
I am grateful for the generous readings that various drafts of this article received from Mark Eifler, Rick Jobs, Richard Schneirov, Jeff Sklansky, and Lisa Szefel. In addition, I want to thank Cay Hehner of the Henry George School of Social Science for the interest that he demonstrated in this project.
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11 Henry George to Annie George, London, Mar. 17, 1884, General Correspondence, Henry George Papers, New York Public Library.
12 Henry George to Annie C. George, Oct. 12, 1883, George Papers. Eight years earlier, George had written Annie of their marriage: “It is no contract or partnership affair with us, but a real marriage—we too are one—knit together in heart, thought and desire. And I wholly and thoughtfully acknowledge that as the greatest blessing which God has given me.” Henry George to Annie George, May 18, 1876.
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18 Ibid., 88.
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20 Instead of natural law, George claimed it was “social maladjustments that in the midst of wealth condemn men to want.” Progress and Poverty, 117, 124, 128, 139. For the emphasis on natural law in George's political economy, see Ronald Yanosky, “Seeing the Cat: Henry George and the Rise of the Single Tax Movement, 1879–1920,” (PhD diss., UC Berkeley, 1993).
21 Progress and Poverty, 141.
22 In this and in his rejection of the wage fund, Henry C. Carey preceded George in critiquing the pessimism of political economy. See Sklansky, Jeffrey, The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–1920 (Chapel Hill, 2002)Google Scholar. George had the advantage over Malthus and Ricardo in seeing the extraordinary gains in productivity that historians have ascribed to coal. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change, 19–23, 47–50; and Andrews, Thomas G., Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA, 2008)Google Scholar.
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24 Ibid., 240–41. For a discussion of the embrace of the city by the generation of urban reformers that preceded George, see Bender, Thomas, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America (Lexington, KY, 1975)Google Scholar.
25 Progress and Poverty, 257.
26 Ibid., 340–41.
27 Ibid., 413–14.
28 Leader (New York), May 10, 1887.
29 Henry George to Sister Jennie, Sept. 15, 1862, quoted in George, Henry Jr., The Life of Henry George (New York, 2006), 117–18Google Scholar.
30 Thomas, John L., Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd, and the Adversary Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 1983), 14, 49–50Google Scholar. For a more urban and industrial George—one that had little in common with the antebellum land reform tradition—see Yanosky, “Seeing the Cat,” 200–05.
31 Henry George to Thomas Walker, June 13, 1884, George Papers.
32 Henry George to Edward Taylor, Sept. 14, 1884, George Papers.
33 Henry George to Mrs. [Rebecca] Curry, May 29, 1858, George Papers; George Jr., Life of Henry George, 46.
34 Henry George to My Dear Coffey, Jan. 12, 1883, George Papers.
35 Henry George, quoted in Henry George Jr., Life of Henry George, 27, 67, 58.
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38 Henry George to Catharine George, July 19, 1854, George Papers. George's descriptions of nature reflect a broader American desire to resolve tensions between nature and technology. Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1964), esp. 220–26Google Scholar.
39 Henry George to “my Dear Carrie,” Aug. 18, 1869, George Papers. George did take advantage of scenery from time to time. In the summer of 1867, George departed from Sacramento, where he had attended a political convention, and made his way to Yosemite before returning to Annie and San Francisco. Entry of July 17, 1867, Diaries and Memoranda, 1855–1896, George Papers.
40 Henry George to Catherine George, May 8, 1876, George Papers. For George, the presence of charming country roads made a town all the more picturesque and inviting; for that reason he expressed a preference for Napa and San Jose over the Central Valley town of Stockton. Henry George to Annie George, May 18, 1876.
41 Henry George to Annie George, May 28, 1876, George Papers.
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43 C. P. Latimer to Henry George, July 24, 1856, George Papers.
44 Henry George to John Swinton, May 22, 1873, George Papers.
45 Henry George to Henry George Jr., July 11, 1872; Henry George to Annie George, May 26, 1876; and entry of Feb. 7, 1875, Diaries and Memoranda, 1855–1896, George Papers.
46 Henry George to Edward Taylor, Aug. 12, 1883, George Papers.
47 Entries of Mar. 30, Apr. 16, 19, and 21, May 2 and 23, 1891, George Papers.
48 Standard (New York), June 1, 1888. On the growing cultural interest in getting away to the country, see Aron, Cindy S., Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York, 2001), 156–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
49 Standard, Mar. 5, 1887.
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51 Leader, Oct. 23, 1886.
52 Post and Leubuscher, “The George-Hewitt Campaign,” 26, 28, 29; John Swinton's Paper (New York), Oct. 10, 1886.
53 Post and Leubescher, “The George-Hewitt Campaign,” 29.
54 Leader, Oct. 23, 1886.
55 Leader, May 10, 1887.
56 T. L. McCready, “A Sum in Proportion,” The Land and Labor Library, Mar. 15, 1887.
57 Leader, Oct. 23, 1886.
58 Standard, Mar. 19, 1887.
59 Ibid.
60 Standard, Apr. 28, 1888.
61 Standard, May 14, 1887.
62 Leader, Oct. 28, 1887. George had come out in support of public transportation in 1883, declaring, “either government must manage the railroads or the railroads must manage the government. There is no escape.” George, Henry, Social Problems (1883; New York, 1934)Google Scholar, 181. In this, George was imagining the kind of peripheral development of the metropolis that had previously benefited the upper middle classes. On such development, see Warner, Sam Bass, Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA, 1978)Google Scholar.
63 For Fishman, Robert, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York, 1987)Google Scholar, the suburbs were defined in part by their lack of lower-class inhabitants; the relocation there was a retreat of the bourgeoisie into a more natural environment. The movement of working people to the peripheries of urban centers in the mid-twentieth century, therefore, marked the end of classic suburbanization.
64 Leader, Oct. 20, 1886; New York Herald, Sept. 24, 1886.
65 Leader, Oct. 25, 1886; John Swinton's Paper, Oct. 31, 1886. On McCabe's affiliation with the Free Soil Society, see Yanosky, “Seeing the Cat,” 154.
66 Edward McGlynn, “The Cross of a New Crusade,” Standard, Apr. 2, 1887, 2–3, repr. in American Catholic Religious Thought: The Shaping of a Theological and Social Tradition, ed. Patrick W. Carey (Milwaukee, 2004), 342. For McGlynn's attack on Malthusianism, see idem., 333.
67 Sklar, Catharine Beecher; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 45–72.
68 George, Social Problems, 234–35.
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70 Leader, Oct. 21, 1886.
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