{"id":26163,"date":"2017-03-03T12:30:15","date_gmt":"2017-03-03T17:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/?p=26163"},"modified":"2024-01-27T18:40:06","modified_gmt":"2024-01-27T23:40:06","slug":"single-tax-movement","status":"publish","type":"egp_essays","link":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/essays\/single-tax-movement\/","title":{"rendered":"Single Tax Movement"},"content":{"rendered":"

During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Philadelphia helped give birth to the single tax movement, one of the country\u2019s more influential, if less well-remembered, reform movements. The idea of a \u201csingle tax\u201d on the unimproved value of land, rather than on productive activities, was popularized by Henry George (1839-97), a native of Philadelphia. The city was also home\u2014at least periodically\u2014to one of the movement\u2019s most prominent twentieth-century leaders, Joseph Fels<\/a> (1853-1914). Thus, the Philadelphia region became a major epicenter for a movement that maintained that the value of land should benefit the whole community, rather than serve as a source of wealth for private individuals. By the 1920s, the region was home to a prominent communal single-tax experiment and to substantive tax reform inspired by George\u2019s ideas.<\/p>\n

Henry George developed the economic theory of the “single tax.” (Library of Congress)<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The son of a Democratic Party activist, George was influenced in his youth by the city\u2019s vibrant social movements, particularly abolitionism and the Working Men\u2019s Party<\/a>. The first of these inspired in George a belief in the free market, whereas the second instilled the idea that access to land was important for truly free competition. Later in his life, George developed close personal relationships with some notable veterans of both movements. However, George did not fully formulate his philosophy until after he moved to San Francisco in 1858. There he gradually concluded that high urban rents were consuming all the gains of industrialization. He came to believe that increasing population and demand for natural resources caused the value of the world\u2019s finite stock of land to increase in value, skewing wealth toward the elite, even when owners did nothing but idly hold their property.<\/p>\n

In 1879, George published Progress and Poverty<\/em>, in which he argued for what his followers later called the \u201csingle tax.\u201d All government revenue, he posited, should be derived from a tax equivalent to the full rental value of land. George, an advocate of free trade, was eager to end the federal tariff system, but also to fund social welfare programs. Land values were defined as the value of natural resources and premiums for urban locations. Buildings\u00a0were\u00a0not to be taxed because they were\u00a0the product\u00a0of labor and contributed to the progress of the community. Land, on the other hand, was created by God and belonged to all in common. George believed that industry should be free from taxation and regulation and that the confiscation of land rents would be sufficient to fund programs such as free public transportation and higher education. George\u2019s unique combination of classical liberalism and socialism won a wide hearing. He campaigned twice for mayor of New York City, even outpolling his Republican opponent, Theodore Roosevelt<\/a> (1858-1919), in a three-way race during the campaign of 1886. By the time of his death in 1897, about five million copies of George\u2019s books had been distributed throughout the world, making him one of the most widely read American writers of the nineteenth century.<\/p>\n

During the election of 1896, Georgists formed the Single Tax Party to wage a concerted campaign for control of Delaware\u2019s state government. Single taxers believed that because Delaware was such a small state a nationally organized campaign would have disproportionate influence there. However, splintering voters from the major parties during that year\u2019s hotly contested presidential election proved impossible; George himself largely stayed away from Delaware to cover the campaign of William Jennings Bryan<\/a> (1860-1925). However, Delaware\u2019s Single Tax Party connected local Georgists who would be active in the state during later years. In 1900, Georgists created a village outside of Wilmington, Delaware, as an experiment in the single tax. They founded this village, Arden, as a private corporation that owned the land and leased it to residents. The corporation used the revenue from leasing land to fund community projects and cover the residents\u2019 taxes, largely realizing the goal of paying all taxes in the form of land rent. Arden not only survived the twentieth century with its system of revenue, but grew, annexing adjacent towns.<\/p>\n

Joseph Fels was instrumental in the spread of the single tax movement, both in the United States and the world. (Library of Congress<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Though George never returned to Philadelphia, one of his most prominent followers, Joseph Fels, resided in the city periodically. Fels made a fortune marketing Fels-Naptha soap, one of the most commercially successful detergents of the era, and used his wealth to propagate both Zionism and the single tax. Fels helped form the Philadelphia Vacant Lots Cultivation Association in 1897. To demonstrate how the poor could help themselves if land was not held idle for speculation, this organization took abandoned lots in the city and lent them out for working-class families to farm. In 1909, Fels donated tens of thousands of dollars to create the Joseph Fels Fund, which spread Georgist propaganda across the globe and sponsored single-tax political campaigns. In the United States, it campaigned to have referendum processes established in several states, and then used the referendum to try, unsuccessfully, to enact the single tax.<\/p>\n

Georgists obtained one of their largest legislative victories in Pennsylvania. They pushed for property tax reform following a study by J. T. Holdsworth, the dean of the School of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh, that demonstrated that the city suffered from unusually high rents. Georgists attributed the city\u2019s high rents to a property tax system that underassessed land. In 1913, the state legislature enacted a law that enabled Pittsburgh and Scranton to impose a greater tax burden on land than improvements. This \u201csplit-rate\u201d or \u201ctwo-rate\u201d tax did not remove taxes on buildings, but it did cut them in half, shifting the burden onto land values. By the latter half of the twentieth century, supporters of land value taxation cited Pittsburgh, which maintained relative prosperity during deindustrialization<\/a>, as one of the chief examples of the benefits of land value taxation. In subsequent years, Pennsylvania\u2019s state legislature expanded the law to allow other municipalities to shift the property tax burden onto land at progressively higher rates. Other cities later adopted the system, including Allentown and Harrisburg.<\/p>\n

As American politics took a conservative turn in the 1920s, mass support for the single tax waned, although, throughout the world, taxes based on George\u2019s plan remained in effect. The single tax movement retained some adherents throughout the twentieth century. The twenty-first century experienced an uptick in interest in land value taxation, primarily because rising urban rents resurrected concerns about real estate\u2019s effect on the distribution of wealth. Philadelphia continued its important role in the movement, in part because it was George\u2019s birthplace and in part because Pennsylvania offered the premier examples of land value taxation in the United States.<\/p>\n

In 2013, the Henry George School of Social Science began operating Henry George\u2019s Birthplace in Philadelphia as a museum and archive. The city\u2019s unique history with the single tax has survived the test of time, becoming an integral part of Philadelphia\u2019s heritage.<\/p>\n

Christopher England<\/strong> has taught U.S. history at Georgetown University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his Ph.D. from Georgetown University, where he wrote his dissertation on the single tax movement. (Author information current at time of publication.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Philadelphia helped give birth to the single tax movement, one of the country\u2019s more influential, if less well-remembered, reform movements. The idea of a \u201csingle tax\u201d on the unimproved value of land, rather than on productive activities, was popularized by Henry George (1839-97), a native of Philadelphia. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":26167,"template":"","egp_featured_subjects":[1991,1998,2004,2011,2036],"class_list":["post-26163","egp_essays","type-egp_essays","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","egp_featured_subjects-activism","egp_featured_subjects-business-industry-and-labor","egp_featured_subjects-economic-development","egp_featured_subjects-government-and-politics","egp_featured_subjects-wealth-and-poverty"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/egp_essays\/26163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/egp_essays"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/egp_essays"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/43"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/egp_essays\/26163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39910,"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/egp_essays\/26163\/revisions\/39910"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"egp_featured_subjects","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/egp_featured_subjects?post=26163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}