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The Enigma of San Francisco: Henry George and the Historians
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2025
Abstract
Few figures appear so frequently and yet remain so poorly understood in the narrative of the Gilded Age as does Henry George. This historiographic essay traces George’s evolving role in historians’ accounts of the political drama of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. George’s popular memory has been shaped overwhelmingly by a few influential survey accounts that have tended to depict him either as a rear-guard apologist of old, small-town ideals or as one of many radical critics of modernity who were stamped out at the end of the nineteenth century. More recent historians have instead sought to present a nuanced George and to emphasize his more concrete and underappreciated contributions to American political thought; but even in many of their hands George’s unique ideas concerning land monopoly have proven difficult. In addition to charting these developments, this essay offers a lens for making sense of the “Prophet of San Francisco” in the twenty-first century.
- Type
- Review Essay
- Information
- The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , January 2025 , pp. 73 - 92
- Copyright
- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)
References
Notes
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32 Eric Foner hinted at this looming problem in the face of industrialization for free-labor republicanism; see Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (1970; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 316–17.
33 O’Donnell, Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality, xix–xx, 5–8, 35–41, 45–63, 154–66; main quotation on 63.
34 O’Donnell, Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality, xxiv, 54–63, 154–66, 272–76.
35 For a concise example of the fuzziness of the distinction between republicanism and liberalism, see England, Land and Liberty, 51–52. The problem might simply be solved by reconciling the two in a form like “liberal republicanism” (for example) as distinct from classical republicanism. Contemporaries never drew such contrast between republicanism and liberalism and seem often to have used them interchangeably. Republicanism’s creep forward into the nineteenth century, and especially in labor politics, was, of course, noted in Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79 (June 1992): 11–38, even including its link to Henry George (p. 29) and its overextension of the troubling reification of liberalism (p. 38). While O’Donnell’s earlier work embraced the concept, England’s later work minimizes it without quite abandoning it. For O’Donnell’s grouping of the terms, see O’Donnell, Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality, 60.
36 For examples of the distinction between progressivism and liberalism, see England, Land and Liberty, 6–7, 47–52, 131, 156–57. England is correct in identifying a liberal subcurrent, especially against imperialist nationalism (see pp. 94–96), although modern liberalism remains too squishy a concept to distinguish it from as many aspects of progressivism as liberalism. The two today are more or less synonymous and find precedents both in what England identifies as liberalism and as progressivism.
37 England, Land and Liberty, 36, 43.
38 England, Land and Liberty, 4–8, 47–51, 257–67.
39 Lough, “Last Tax,” 5.
40 For useful passages concerning her understanding of George’s role in political history, see Lough, “Last Tax,” 14–25, 36–37, 54–57, 71–75. Lough follows Barker’s model of the “Triple Legacy of Georgism”; for a starting framework, see “Last Tax,” 29. Lough’s more orthodox focus on Georgist land themes comport with her work with the Henry George School of Social Science, Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, and American Journal of Economics and Sociology—all key Georgist institutions.
41 Lough, “Last Tax,” 16. One other such American was Theodore Roosevelt, in his The Winning of the West (4 vols, 1889–1896); see England, Land and Liberty, 20.
42 Lough, “Henry George, Frederick Jackson Turner, and the ‘Closing’ of the American Frontier,” esp. 2–13, 20, 22–23. George died representing the “Democracy of Thomas Jefferson” in the 1897 New York mayoral election; George, Henry George, 604–05.
43 Lough, “Last Tax,” 144.
44 Lough, “Last Tax,” 152.
45 Lough, Alexandra W., “Hazen S. Pingree and the Detroit Model of Urban Reform,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 75 (Jan. 2016): 58–85 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Tom L. Johnson and the Cleveland Traction Wars, 1901–1909,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 75 (Jan. 2016), 149–92. For her insightful analysis of George’s role in the roots of the Social Gospel movement, see Lough, “Last Tax,” 184–235. For an engaging exploration of two Georgist single-tax colonies, see Lough, “Last Tax,” 282–326.
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48 Hahn, Nation Without Borders, 6, 402–04, 412, 424–25, 445–46, 452, 462, 465, 487, 500, 562.
49 White, Republic for Which It Stands, 118, 132–34, 275–76, 452–58, quotation on 457. For a concise account of George’s shift toward racial egalitarianism, see O’Donnell, Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality, 24–25.
50 White, Republic for Which It Stands, 560–78.