urgently needed but also possible. Described by George’s biographer as “a moral Mount Whitney of American protest,” Progress and Poverty was unmatched in its power to gather converts to radicalism and protest.38 “No single figure in the last two decades of the nineteenth century was more successful than Henry George in arousing public opinion to an awareness of the social origins of wealth and poverty,” one historian writes, while another believes that his writings “magically catalyzed the best yearnings” of the men and women of the ’eighties, helping to banish the arrogance and indifference of the previous generation.39 The famous writer, also a powerful orator, spoke in the Opera House in Des Moines in January of 1889 but no record survives to tell whether Gaston heard or met him.40
To George the central problems of the age were the unfair distribution of wealth and power and the deepening poverty that accompanied unprecedented material progress. “This association of poverty with progress,” he wrote in his most famous passage, “is the great enigma of our times. . . . It is the riddle which the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization and which not to answer is to be destroyed.” Why, George asked, and his Des Moines readers wondered, could not everyone benefit from society’s prodigious wealth-producing ability? Advancing material progress ought “to improve the condition of the lowest class in the essentials of healthy, happy life,” he wrote; instead, it made life worse for millions of people. Not to discover and then to apply a solution to this problem, George warned, was to ensure the decline of American civilization:
What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power. This same tendency, operating with increasing force, is observable in our civilization today, showing itself in every progressive community, and with greater intensity the more progressive the community. Wages and interest tend constantly to fall, rent to rise, the rich to become very much richer, the poor to become more helpless and hopeless, and the middle class to be swept away.41
As members of the threatened middle class, their consciences stirred by the poor who “become more helpless and hopeless,” Gaston and his friends pored over the works of George and Bellamy in the winter of 1889-1890. The two prophets, despite sharply different styles, wrote generally similar descriptions of the problem that cried out for solution. Each also wrote with a moral urgency that made ardent reformers of readers throughout the nation and abroad as well. The differing programs of action they offered to those converted readers, however, clashed in what appeared to be fundamental ways.42 Bellamy saw a logical development in the history of capital consolidation and favored national ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, a form of socialism he and his followers called nationalism. George, anguished by the same excessive individualism that outraged Bellamy, believed that its evils could be curbed, the spirit of cooperation nurtured, and the productivity of free individuals enlarged by socializing land, the one factor of production whose monopoly he believed accounted for poverty amidst plenty. “We have examined all the remedies, short of the abolition of private property in land,” he wrote, “and have found them all inefficacious or impracticable. . . . Poverty deepens as wealth increases, and wages are forced down while productive power grows,” he explained, “because land, which is the source of all wealth and the field of all labor, is monopolized.” Thus, to abolish poverty and make wages just, he concluded, “We must make land common property.” 43
Two years before Gaston and his friends began studying George, the radical message of Progress and Poverty had been somewhat muted by some of George’s least-radical followers who came up with the deceptive label “single tax.” Fearing popular objection to land nationalization, wishing to enlist businessmen in their cause, and unable to find an appropriate title for their movement, these Georgists argued that it was necessary only to nationalize the income from land, through taxation; land tides could remain undisturbed. All government revenue could be raised by such a tax on community-created land values, they believed, removing the justification for any other form of taxation—thus the label “single tax.” George himself “never regarded the term as describing his philosophy,” his son wrote, “but rather as indicating the method he would take to apply it.” 44
Henry George
Put differently, George saw the single tax as the fundamental reform, the basic structural change, that would make possible the flowering of his philosophy. The philosophy itself went far beyond a change in tax policy. George’s understanding of the subtle relationship between competition and cooperation and his awareness of society’s increasing complexity kept him from simple doctrinal solutions. He opposed a heavy government hand on individual initiative, but he advocated new cooperative functions. Putting it bluntly in his 1883 book, Social Problems, George wrote that “either government must manage the railroads or the railroads must manage the government.” And he added: “all I have said of the railroad applies ... to the telegraph, the telephone, the supplying of cities with gas, water, heat and electricity,—in short to all businesses which are in their nature monopolies.” 45
Gaston was profoundly influenced by George’s writings, and in time George would become the chief intellectual force in his life. But, at this early stage of his development, Gaston did not view Progress and Poverty as an exclusive guide to reform. Though persuaded of the iniquity of land monopoly, he still was convinced that socialized production and distribution were required in the ideal community.
Gaston’s socialist inclinations, nurtured by his reading of Looking Backward, may have been fortified by another book the group read that winter, Laurence Gronlund’s The Cooperative Commonwealth. Published in 1884, it never rivaled Looking Backward or Progress and Poverty in either influence or sales, but its Danish-born author believed he was the first writer to explain to an American audience the essentials of Marxian socialism. According to Gronlund, the Marxian road to socialism did not require class conflict. Instead, Gronlund described a scheme of evolutionary, peaceful development that led to a cooperative commonwealth in which the state would help “every individual to attain the highest development he or she has capacity for,” a state that would “lay a cover for every one at Nature’s table.” To lead the peaceful revolution, Gronlund called for the mobilization of “a vigorous . . . minority of intelligent and energetic American men and women,” mostly young people like Gaston and his associates in the Investigating Club. Bellamy believed that Gronlund would lodge too much power in the hands of the working class, complaining that “the germ of this coming order Mr. Gronlund professes to see in the trades union, while the nationalists see it in the nation.” 46
The eclectic reading habits of the Investigating Club members were typical of reformers of Gaston’s generation. Theirs was an age when heightened conscience, shocked and galvanized by the brutal realities of social change, was fortunately coupled with unusual flexibility—in ideas, in movements, and in social experiments. Ideas were in flux and ideological lines were constantly being tested and redrawn. Karl Marx, for example, was but one of many socialist writers; and, in fact, he had very little influence in America. Bellamy had never studied either Marx or German socialism when he wrote Looking Backward and, as the historian John Thomas puts it, he “snorted derisively” when his failure to discuss Marx was mentioned. The very word socialism, in fact, was a relative newcomer to the English language and still had uncertain meaning. Thus, intellectual excitement and hopes for change flourished because they were free of the blinding mental associations and reminders of failed
