This scrapbook assembles photographs, caricatures and a few newspaper articles from the last third of the nineteenth century, about American economic reformer Henry George (1839-1897).
Biographical/historical: In an 1871 pamphlet, Our Land and Land Policy, Henry George first set out his theory of rent as the primary cause of monopoly and poverty, and advocated a single tax on land. Between 1877 and 1879, he pursued work on a major treatise, his masterpiece, Progress and Poverty. After failing to find a publisher, George brought out five hundred copies on his own. The publisher Appleton then reprinted the plates, and the book soon became a sensation, translated into many languages and assured George's fame. At the heart of his oft-repeated critique of Gilded Age capitalism was the conviction that rent and private land-ownership violated the hallowed principles of Jeffersonian democracy and that poverty was an affront to the moral values of Judeo-Christian culture." Though George died relatively young, never authored another major treatise, and never held elected office, his ideas eventually led to reform legislation in parts of the United States, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe.