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Hamlin Garland and Henry George
Russel B. Nye
[Reprinted from The Freeman, May, 1943]
The effects of the Georgist movement in
literature during the late nineteenth century have never been
adequately charted, though it clearly was of importance. The
writers of what Mark Twain aptly called "the Gilded Age"
were becoming socially and economically conscious, and the
principles of Henry George found more than one adherent among
the so-called "radical" set of younger men who
published their stories in the small new magazines in New York
and Chicago, and who, almost alone among the writers of their
time, gave realistic treatment to the problems of their era.
Hamlin Garland, who died in 1940 at the age of eighty, was the
sole survivor of this pioneer group, and the most significant
artist of those who knew and believed in Henry George. The
author, RUSSEL B. NYE, a member of the English department of
Michigan State College, is interested in the literary
manifestations of political and economic thought in the
nineteenth century.
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THE IMPACT OF HENRY GEORGE'S thought upon his times was very great,
and many literary men, interested in finding a way out of the tangle
of social and economic problems which beset the late nineteenth
century, took up George's ideas with enthusiasm. Unfortunately, most
of those writers who adopted Georgist themes were not among the best
qualified to exemplify them in fiction; though certainly deserving of
consideration by the best literary minds of the period, the single tax
movement found expression primarily in minor novels such as Henry
Oelrich's A Cityless and Countryless World, Costello Holford's
Aristopia, Arnold Clark's Beneath the Dome, Samuel
Crocher's That Island, and others, novels which, though often
interesting and uniformly ingenious, lack the vital spark of literary
skill. The single exception was Hamlin Garland, who contributed the
only artistically significant body of creative writing immediately
devoted to the Georgist philosophy. Garland was singularly well fitted
to his task. Born in Wisconsin of a farming family, familiar with the
related questions of land and poverty through actual experience on
Iowa and Dakota farms, he was ready, when he picked up by chance a
copy of the Lovell edition of Progress and Poverty on a Dakota
homestead, to accept the truth of George's ideas. "Up to this
time," he wrote later in his autobiography, A Son of the
Middle Border, "I had never read any book or essay in which
our land system had been questioned.
I caught some glimpse of
the radiant plenty of George's ideal Commonwealth. The trumpet call of
the closing pages filled me with a desire to battle for the right. . .
." For some time he had been searching for the cause of the
misery and poverty which he saw about him in the lives of the
homesteaders, and with Henry George as his guide he discovered the
answers for which he searched. In Boston a few years later he heard
George address a meeting in Faneuil Hall (an experience he described
in detail in A Son of the Middle Border), and he came away
convinced that he now knew the cause of poverty. He shortly joined the
Anti-Poverty League which had sprung up under George's influence,
spoke from the platform in defense of the movement, and did his best
to convince his friends, among them William Dean Howells, of the need
for economic and social reform. He had not yet turned his mind to
literature, but when Joseph Kirkland, the author of Zury, a
grimly realistic novel of farm life, encouraged him to "write the
truth" about what he saw, he began in 1887 to write stories of
the life he had known in the Midwest, drawing upon his own experiences
for the background of his work and upon Henry George for its
controlling philosophy.
Garland was too finished an artist to write stories of pure
propaganda, knowing that grinding an axe too obviously destroyed its
effectiveness. Unlike most of those who attempted, as he did, to
translate into concrete terms the principles of Georgist philosophy,
Garland made his stories primarily works of creative skill, with the
theme of social and economic justice implicit rather than apparent. He
was concerned first of all with presenting, as Kirkland and Harold
Frederic had done, a realistic picture of the farmer's life, its
labor, poverty, bleakness, and ugliness, but unlike the local-color
realists, he probed further, making the reason for it clear- that is,
the monopoly of the land by speculators. "With William Morris and
Henry George, I exclaimed," he wrote in A Son of the Middle
Border, " 'Nature is not to blame. Man's laws are to blame'!"
Garland's most significant Georgist work appeared in the stories
collected in Main Travelled Roads (1891), Prairie Folks
(1892), and in his novel Jason Edwards (1892). His thesis was
simple and compelling-as a result of economic maladjustment the lives
of many farmers were filled with drabness, suffering, and, want; the
cause lay in monopolistic landholding; the cure lay in the abolition
of such monopoly. Garland went to the heart of the Georgist body of
thought, seized upon the basic principle, and gave it external
embodiment in his sharply-etched stories of real life. "Up the
Coolly," "Under the Lion's Paw," "Sim Burns' Wife,"
"A Branch Road," "A Day's Pleasure," "Among
the Corn Rows," and other stories were, to varying degrees of
emphasis, stirring indictments of the economics of land. Of these, "Under
the Lion's Paw" is the most directly associated to his consistent
denunciation of land monopoly and speculation; it is, said Garland in
Roadside Meetings, "a single tax story," and it
remains probably the finest literary product of the Georgist movement
during the times. The story concerns an industrious farmer, Haskins,
who falls into the hands of Butler, a man who "believed in land
speculation as the surest way of getting rich." Haskins and his
family toil like slaves for three years on one of Butler's farms,
paying interest at ten per cent, turning the rented, rundown land into
a prosperous farm, only to find that, when he wishes to purchase the
land, all his work has simply resulted in adding to the value of
Butler's land-the rent is doubled, the price is doubled, and Butler
has done nothing. The law affords no escape; Haskins, bitter and
broken, is "under the lion's paw" of the speculator and
landlord. Not only is the story a dramatic translation into human
terms of Henry George's principle of rent and unearned increment, but
it is as well Garland's finest piece of work, a nearly perfect balance
of thesis with literary skill, of propaganda with the realist's art.
Though Garland never again reached the perfection of "Under the
Lion's Paw," he gave the same theme a more complete treatment in
Jason Edwards, which he adapted from an earlier play and published as
a novel in 1891. Jason, a Boston workingman, flees from Boston and the
poverty that low wages and high rents have forced upon him, to take a
homestead in Minnesota and to become his own master. He finds,
however, that the fertile land has been bought up in advance by
speculators, and in order to settle, he must mortgage his farm.
Payments of interest and principal, storms, drouth, and crop failures
force him to the wall, and he ends a dispossessed man. Actually the
novel is simply a larger view of the problem of Haskins, a
continuation of George's principle that poverty is the entail of land
rent, and, like the earlier short story, the book, in its picture of
the life of the farmer who is at the mercy of the system, is a
vigorous arraignment of the monopolists. A following novel, A Spoil of
Office (1892), traced the rise of the Grange movement and the Farmer's
Alliance, and though its emphasis is political rather than economic,
the same theme is still evident, the cause of poverty is still
monopoly. After the publication of his first two novels Garland's
career divided sharply, and with the exception of Rose of Dv.tcher's
Coolly (1895), a realistic but generalized picture of farm life, he
gradually abandoned his crusade against economic injustice. Though he
wrote two single-tax articles for B. O. Flower's Arena in 1894, the
Georgist element disappeared from his literary work. From The Captain
of the Gray Horse Troop, a novel about Indian affairs, and Hesper, a
labor novel of Colorado, he turned more and more from his quest for
social and economic betterment to criticism, local color stories,
biography, and finally to autobiography. Whether his sense of social
justice atrophied, whether the local colorist triumphed over the
realist in his literary makeup, whether financial success softened his
spirit, or whether he simply wrote himself out, Garland became finally
a literary raconteur, drawing upon his reminiscences of his
acquaintance with nearly every important figure of his day for the
body of his later work.
In some ways Hamlin Garland's career ended in disappointment, for he
had the equipment necessary to both a reformer and an artist,
equipment of which he never made full use. He possessed a burning
sense of the injustice of the economic system, a wealth of experience
from which to draw, a keen and intelligent mind, a realist's clear
vision, and an undoubted literary genius. He seemed from the first
destined to become the artist of the single-tax movement, the man best
qualified to carry Henry George's ideas into literature of a high
order; but Garland could never fix his purpose, uncertain whether he
was a reformer, a local colorist, a critic, or a biographer. The
promise of "Under the Lion's Paw" was never fulfilled.
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