Thread by @ErikLoomis

This Day in Labor History: October 5, 1886. Henry George accepted the nomination of the United Labor Party for the mayor of New York City. Let's talk about this reformer and his ideas to fix the unequal economy of the Gilded Age!

The rise of industrial capitalism after the Civil War disturbed many Americans, not because they opposed capitalism but because they thought it was going to create a relatively fair system.

The promises of free labor ideology turned out to be lies for most Americans, as the power of corporations to control all aspects of American life meant that both factory labor and farm labor were denied the fruits of their work.

The idea that the hard work of a white man was not going to lead to a fair shake from capitalism was really genuinely very hard for people to deal with. White Americans really loved the idea of capitalism! It took decades for them to understand that this system would oppress them

And of course, many, many, many whites would never be able to get over the hump that capitalism wasn't their best friend.

But by the 1880s, new ideas began entering the minds of Americans who believed that if ONLY THIS ONE THING WAS FIXED the natural balance between capital and labor would be restored and capitalism would be A-OK

That could be the 8-hour day, Chinese exclusion, Bellamyism.

As the analysis of capitalism was not very sophisticated among most native-born Americans, the solutions to these problems tended to focus on the one thing that we could do that would fix everything.

Obviously Marx and Engels, not to mention many other socialists, had developed far more complex analyses of the problems of capitalism, but those would not become prominent in the U.S. for another decade, with the waves of immigrants that would begin in the 1880s.

One person stepping into this void was Henry George. George made one of the most important forays in solving the problem of industrial capitalism.

George started his political life as a Lincoln supporting Republican in the Civil War but soon came to criticize the growing system of industrial capitalism, especially the dominance of railroads over American life, as well as the influence of Chinese labor on white wages.

In 1879, George published Progress and Poverty, arguing for the Single Tax as the surest way to bring corporations under control. The single tax was a basic property tax.

At its core was the idea that people earned the value of own their own labor, but that land was a common resource for all and should essentially be quasi-socialized with very high taxes on large landowners.

George’s ideas quickly spread beyond the U.S. and were especially popular with the English and Scottish working classes, as well as the Irish resisting British domination.

George had moved to New York in the early 1880s and became an obvious candidate when laborites and socialists decided to form a working class challenge to the duality of Tammany Democrats and plutocratic Republicans who both disdained a strong labor movement.

His mayoral campaign generated a tremendous amount of enthusiasm. His campaign lasted less than a month, but he gave over 100 speeches around the city.

Check out this speech from his mayoral campaign. It's too long to put on Twitter, but it gives you a strong sense of his appeal.

historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5321/

The United Labor Platform also had a provision against police interference in strikes, a reaction to police repression during the Haymarket violence, not to mention the remembered police violence of Tompkins Square a decade prior.

George faced a rising Republican by the name of Theodore Roosevelt, a man who also stood for reform, albeit of a different kind.

The Democrats responded the George threat with Abram Hewitt, who attacked Roosevelt as a tool of the plutocrats and set himself as a responsible working class voice, claiming that socialists and anarchists controlled the ULP.

In the end, Hewitt won with 41 percent of the vote. George finished second with 31 percent and Roosevelt trailed in third with 28 percent.

This was an auspicious start for an independent labor political movement, but, like most 3rd party challenges in American history, it was made up of diverse forces that collapsed almost immediately after the election.

Specifically, it split over socialism in 1887, with the expelled socialists creating an alternative political party.

The ULP tried to revive in some form for several years, but it never again made a serious run as a real labor challenge to the 2-party system.

George slowly migrated to the Democratic Party in the last years of his life, supporting Grover Cleveland because they both opposed high tariffs.

George suffered a stroke in 1890, recovered enough to campaign for William Jennings Bryan in 1896, and then died of another stroke in 1897, a week before another mayoral election in New York where he became a candidate on an anti-Tammany Democratic ticket.

George himself didn't make a huge difference in American life over the long run, but he's highly symbolic of the kind of one-off simplistic reforms white Americans would look to in order to fix capitalism in the Gilded Age.

But not until the rise of socialism would there be a systematic critique that would recognize the complexity of the system and offer a comprehensive response that still influences us today, now more than anytime in decades as we are now in the New Gilded Age.

Back Thursday with a discussion of the 1933 Pixley strike, one of the big farmworker strikes of California in the Great Depression.