Henry George

Formal school ended at 14. He had already walked out of the Episcopal Academy his publisher father sent him to, and at 15 he shipped out of Philadelphia as a foremast boy on the Hindoo, bound for Melbourne and Calcutta. He reached the American West in 1858, considered prospecting, and set type in San Francisco instead. He met Annie Corsina Fox on her 17th birthday, and when her uncle refused to have a penniless suitor the two eloped, George in a borrowed suit and Annie carrying a packet of books. Their second child arrived into a household near starvation. With no work and no money, George stopped a well-dressed stranger in the street and asked for help, and the man gave him five dollars.

He said the idea arrived on horseback. Resting above San Francisco Bay in 1871, he asked a passing teamster what land went for, and the answer — a thousand dollars an acre for pasture so distant the cattle looked like mice — told him why poverty deepened as wealth grew. Population raises the value of land, and the people who work it pay the owner for the privilege. Progress and Poverty, published at his own expense in 1879 and written in the evenings while he drew a state salary as California's inspector of gas meters, argued for taxing that value alone and leaving buildings, wages and capital untaxed. It sold in the millions and was the first economics book ordinary people bought. In 1886 he ran for mayor of New York and finished second, ahead of Theodore Roosevelt.

The man who held that the earth belonged equally to everyone spent a decade arguing that Chinese immigration had to be stopped. His first piece to draw national notice, in 1869, said so outright. Campaigning for California Democrats he cast Black men in the South and Chinese laborers in the West as tools of the corporations and threats to white manhood, and in an 1876 speech he asked his audience to picture Chinese voters, Chinese militia, Chinese judges, Chinese school directors, and a state looted to the tune of 50 million dollars. He endorsed the platform of Denis Kearney's anti-Chinese Workingmen's Party while refusing to accept Kearney as its leader, and it cost him the party's nomination to California's constitutional convention in 1878.

The second run for mayor killed him. A stroke in 1890 had left him permanently weakened. He campaigned in 1897 against his doctors, saying he would make the race if he died for it, and a second stroke took him four days before the election. About 100,000 people filed past the coffin at Grand Central Palace and about as many were held outside. Tammany Hall lowered its flag and cancelled its rally. The single tax never arrived whole. The argument kept surfacing anyway: single-tax colonies at Arden, Delaware and Fairhope, Alabama, a 1904 board game built to teach it that mutated into Monopoly, and a 1977 result in public finance that economists named the Henry George theorem.

Henry George's life against the full span of the corpus.

• What the Railroad Will Bring Us article
  Published in the Overland Monthly. It earned him the enmity of the Central Pacific. 1868
• San Francisco Daily Evening Post company
  His own paper, run for four years and lost in a dispute with Senator John P. Jones 1871
• Progress and Poverty book
  Self-published, then sold in the millions worldwide 1879
• Protection or Free Trade book
  His case against the tariff, which set him against the Knights of Labor 1886
• The Standard company
  A weekly he founded and mostly edited, running to 1890 1887
• The Science of Political Economy book
  Unfinished at his death and published the following year 1898

• April 1855 aged 15 Ships out of Philadelphia as a foremast boy at 15 The Hindoo was bound for Melbourne and Calcutta.
• 1858 aged ~19 Reaches the American West and takes work as a typesetter in San Francisco
• December 3, 1861 aged 22 Elopes with Annie Corsina Fox against her uncle's wishes He wore a borrowed suit. She brought a packet of books.
• October 1868 aged 29 Publishes What the Railroad Will Bring Us in the Overland Monthly Central Pacific executives helped defeat his run for the state assembly.
• 1871 aged ~32 A teamster above San Francisco Bay names the price of pasture A thousand dollars an acre. George said the whole argument came to him at once.
• 1876 aged ~37 Appointed California's inspector of gas meters The salary paid for the four years it took to write Progress and Poverty.
• 1879 aged ~40 Publishes Progress and Poverty at his own expense
• November 2, 1886 aged 47 Finishes second for mayor of New York, ahead of Theodore Roosevelt Tammany's Abram Hewitt won. George's supporters alleged fraud.
• October 29, 1897 aged 58 Dies of a second stroke, four days before the election he was contesting

• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. outpolled in 1886
• Helen Keller 1880–1968
  Deafblind author and lecturer who became the leading American advocate for blind and disabled people. converted by his book
• John Dewey 1859–1952
  Philosopher and educational reformer whose progressive ideas shaped modern American pedagogy. ranked him with Plato
• Albert Einstein 1879–1955
  German-American theoretical physicist whose theory of relativity revolutionized modern physics. admirer
• Joseph Stiglitz b. 1943
  Nobel Prize-winning economist whose work on information asymmetries reshaped development economics. named a theorem for him
• William Jennings Bryan 1860–1925
  Three-time Democratic nominee and orator who made monetary reform, popular democracy, and moral politics central national issues. eulogized him