Contemplating American History in an Age of
Globalization
I want to talk today about historical interpretation in the United States. There are a couple of reasons for doing this. One is that in my discussion with the two students who very graciously showed me around the Forbidden City, Yujie Chen and Xia Zhiling, I learned that many academics in China now look at the period of the beginning of the twentieth century in the United States as a period from which they can learn a great deal about transformations going on in their own society as it goes through the great changes that are so evident in Beijing today. Whereas before, Chinese academics (and those determining the curriculum in schools and colleges) may have wanted to focus more on the period of the American Revolution, perhaps wanting to learn about what creating a new society would be like in the aftermath of a great transformation of power away from colonial and other elites, such commentators and academics are now more interested in seeing what the effects of rapid economic and political growth on American society were like as a means to understand more fully such changes occurring in China today.
This is good news for me, as this period is the one in which I specialize. But, beyond this, there is something to learn about the writing of American history itself from this new-found interest among Chinese scholars in the Progressive Era. The point is that Americans also look at the past through the lens of the present, and decide what kinds of events are important and how they should be interpreted as a result of their own predilections and political disposition. What this means, hopefully, is that the study of American history should be less intimidating for you students, because it is open to interpretation; indeed, it is more important that you intervene in these debates and develop your own interpretations than that you get it right in accordance with the currently favored historical interpretation.
Henry George
I want to start, then, with Henry George – and the publication of his important work, Progress and Poverty, and then talk about how the work has been treated by historians since. What I am going to do, essentially, is provide a historiographical reading of Henry George and his text, and this means basically providing an account of how interpretations have changed over the years since its publication in 1879. [This is basically the kind of thing that you need to do as you come to write a thesis about any topic. You will need to know what has been written about that particular topic and how debates about it have changed over time, so that you are then in a position to develop an original thesis.]
Anyway, Henry GeorgeÕs Progress and Poverty is widely acknowledged to have been one of the most influential texts of the nineteenth century, and certainly the most widely read economics text in the United States. From the time of its publication on, it provided the theoretical underpinnings for much of the progressive reform that occurred in the last two decades of the 19th century, and it became the most significant counterpoint to Marxian socialism. In addition, it provided the basis for Anglo-American utopian literature and the movements that grew out of them, influencing Edward BellamyÕs Looking Backward (the third best-selling work in the United States behind the Bible and Uncle TomÕs Cabin), Henry Demarest LloydÕs Wealth and Commonwealth, and Ignatius DonnellyÕs CaesarÕs Columns, and Progress and Poverty also became the economic backbone for much of Fabian socialism in Britain. Finally, Henry GeorgeÕs influence in Ireland, Australia, Russia (especially on Tolstoy) and India, was great, his theories about land reform and taxation provided an impetus to anti-colonial and reformist movements. And considering that Progress and Poverty was a work of economics, and not the easiest read by any means, its popularity is really quite stunning.
One of the reasons for the popularity of this economics text was that it re-imagined the world in a more positive way than economists had tended to do previously. Where before there was a sense that economics was a dismal science and that societies were trapped within certain environmental or class-bound limits – so that, if one were a Thomas Malthus one would believe that disease and famine would place a limit on population growth, or if one were a Karl Marx, the growing immisseration of the poor would lead to a social revolution – after Henry George, there was a clear sense of possibility within the American capitalist system. Most Populists and many Progressives in the United States, therefore, were inspired by and referred back to Henry George.
So Progress and Poverty was an important work and Henry George was crucial to the development of social thought in the Progressive era. Given this, I want to take a look at how he has been viewed over the years and what historians have done with his work.
Political and Intellectual History
Most history before the 1960s tended to be political and intellectual in nature, focusing on political elites and political philosophers. Such historians, then, paid considerable attention to Henry George, along the lines I have just outlined, linking him to Populism, Progressivism, and the New Deal. They made comparisons between George and MarxÕs economic systems, and they recognized George for his considerable contribution to Anglo-American political economy and for, they argued, helping to establish an American way of looking at the world.
Intellectual historians asked whether his idea was correct that Land Reform would bring about all the changes that were needed in society and end poverty? Karl Marx certainly believed that George was utopian, and that any such reform would merely shift the focus of attention to other methods of exploitation tied to industrial capitalism. What George contributed, however, was a way for liberal and working-class radicals to think about bringing about reform of capitalism that didnÕt lead down the road of revolution. It created the possibility of capitalists even seeing that some of their actions were self-destructive leading them to reform themselves – to some extent.
The merits of GeorgeÕs analysis shouldnÕt really detain us. What is important is the way he was viewed and the way this reflected a particular set of historiographical practices. The point here is that historians tended to focus on politics in a very narrow sense, and GeorgeÕs influence was examined in terms of its impact on the political elites and their policies. He was seen as a precursor of reformist politics that led through agrarian reform of the Populist era (the 1880s through 1896), through urban reform leading up to World War One, and the New Deal in the 1930s. He was almost always viewed exclusively in American terms, even while he clearly had an influence on Irish Land Reformers and British Fabian Socialists.
As long as the New Deal system remained intact and economic growth continued in the United States, in other words until the middle of the 1960s, Henry George would receive some attention as an architect of that liberal welfare state, providing an ideological foundation for American society that was similar to but not as great obviously as MarxÕs foundation for Communist ones.
Social Historians
In the 1960s, Social History emerged in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, fashioned around the work of English radical historians who were (in many instances) breaking from their Communist past in reaction to revelations about Stalinist Russia. These historians and the American historians who followed them tended not to want to focus on individual thinkers and politics narrowly defined, but wanted to look at the social milieu out of which such thinkers emerged. Intellectual and political history went into decline significantly, as positions in history departments across the United States were given to social historians, and those intellectuals from the past came to be viewed less in their own terms, than in terms of how they reflected certain social trends of the period in which they lived.
A shift occurred in writing, then, away from analysis of people like Henry George to the social movements themselves, and the descriptions of these movements were grounded not so much in the ideas of the intellectuals, but in the ideas of the people at the grassroots level – people whose impulses were reflected in rather than inspired by the ideas of the intellectuals.
As a result, Henry George, along with his work, all but disappeared in the minds of American historians – along with John Dewey, Randolph Bourne, Henry Demarest Lloyd, Ignatius Donnelly and a host of others who had been seen as the founders of modern American liberalism. He remained a source of comment in that he reflected what many American historians considered the uniqueness or exceptionalism of their society. Social historians were uncovering a great deal of ethnic division in the working classes, arising out of the high levels of immigration to the United States, and this (some would claim) accounted for the fact that the working classes tended not to come together in a revolutionary fashion, or even to develop a strong labor or socialist political party (because they were so divided among themselves), and also accounted for why ideas like those of Henry George would remain more fashionable than the more revolutionary ideas found among supporters of Karl Marx in Europe.
Ironically, then, while the Political Historians had been more American in their emphasis, focusing on American political traditions and institutions, they had remained somewhat international in their focus and their discussion of transatlantic political traditions, Social Historians, who highlighted the workers who were coming to the United States from all over the world, approached them in ways that made them seem very narrow and American – at least politically – using their heterogeneity and diversity to define them as such.
The limitations of Social history gradually became apparent to many. Each group was being studied in great detail, but the totality remained unexamined or un-interrogated. Many historians began to look for ways to get a better sense of the whole picture of American history and to do this some turned to Comparative History.
Comparative
History
Essentially, this involved comparing American history with other nationsÕ and societiesÕ histories, and this came into vogue in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
While Comparative history led to some interesting work, the overall result was to largely reaffirm what was already being suggested in the work of Social Historians. Often historians compared the United States with different countries in a bifurcated way – in other ways comparative history was split between those works that made racial comparisons and others that made class comparisons. Those that made racial comparisons did so by contrasting the United States with other former slave societies, allowing the American historians by and large to argue that American slavery and racial codes were less harsh and more malleable – providing the soil out of which the Civil Rights movement could grow, and which therefore could be seen as a logical extension of American traditions and history. Other historians, meanwhile, compared American labor relations with those in Europe and found that American class relations were less fractious than those in Europe. Such findings were made in spite of the fact that many European radicals had been under the impression that the revolution would occur first in the United States, since it was the most developed industrial nation, and that American workers were more radical than those in Europe. This was partly why many of the worldÕs radicals, from Trotsky to Jose Marti to Indian Marxists like M.N. Roy, were to be found living in cities in the United States prior to returning to participate in the social upheavals in their countries of origin. No comparative historians managed to think about class and race relations together, in ways that would allow them to really question the interpretations and vision created by Social historians.
And still Henry George remained out of the picture in comparative studies. Most of the emphasis was on comparing social systems or social groups rather than on intellectuals, so focusing on work like Progress and Poverty remained uncompelling to these historians.
Internationalizing
American History
Historians once again took note of Henry George, when scholars started to call for an increased awareness of linkages and connections between different societies, what came to be known as ÒInternationalizing American History.Ó For example, Daniel T. Rodgers, in Atlantic Crossings (published in 1998) recognized Henry GeorgeÕs critical contribution to European social thought, and this was very much a part of this trend.
This sense of the need to understand how the United States fit within world history reflected changes occurring in American society in the 1990s. Once again, historiographical developments reflected the social context in which they emerged. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, many in the United States came to believe that one system – theirs – had won, and that globalization and capitalism would henceforward proceed hand in hand. The sense grew also that historical writing now needed to be more global and so historians needed to look for the roots of such a development in American History.
However, as I summarized this trend in an article called, ÒMaking the World Safe for American History,Ó these historians seemed to assume particular kinds of global trajectories based upon unexamined assumptions of what they considered to be the fundamental elements of American history. As a result, they tended to be very Euro-American in their focus, not recognizing that ideas and movements were not always emanating from Europe and America and then influencing the rest of the world – a Eurocentric practice that fit very comfortably alongside old fashioned views of European imperialism that it had brought so much benefit to the poorer regions of the world.
What tended to be missed was what anti-colonial and postcolonial historians had already been focusing on for many years. Many things tended to be overlooked in these sanitized histories like the fact that much of the capitalist growth was a product of things like the Atlantic Slave trade and slave-produced commodities, like the forcing of opium onto the Chinese for the benefit of the British Empire, and so forth, and that indeed there was, as Henry George, had pointed out in 1879, a significant on-going connection between so-called progress and the poverty on which it was founded and on which, in many instances, it depended.
And given this alternative historical reality to the ones most Americans historians were fostering in their project of Internationalizing American history, Henry George becomes an even more compelling person than he had ever really been envisioned as being before. For, his economic theory was based on his attempt to examine the roots, not of poverty in industrial society alone, but of all societies, especially colonial ones. His own concern for poverty emerged from his experience as a sailor on the ship called the Hindoo in 1855, prior to the American Civil War, when he witnessed bodies of Indian peasants floating down the Hooghly River near Calcutta in the wake of a famine that he later argued, correctly, was not the result of some demographic pressure placed on the land by overpopulation, as claimed by Malthus, but rather was the product of the misguided policies of the British rulers.
Indeed, one of Progress and PovertyÕs most important contributions lay in its assault on Malthusianism, which George believed was one of the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of combating poverty. Thomas MalthusÕ Essay on Population had persuaded many liberally inclined intellectuals to rethink their commitment to policies of amelioration, such as the English Poor Laws. Malthus had argued that, Òpopulation tended to increase faster than the means of subsistence, [so that] workers were inevitably condemned to lives of privation. Wars, diseases, and famines operated to check population growth and therefore could lessen pressure on resources and arrest declines in wages. In contrast public benevolence to the poor, such as relief offered through the poor laws, eventually made conditions worse [according to Malthus] because it encouraged the poor to have more children and helped them to stay alive. In MalthusÕ words, the poor laws Ômay be said therefore in some measure to create the poor which they maintain.ÕÓ[i]
In the chapter of Progress and Poverty
entitled ÒInferences from Facts,Ó George endeavored to show how the philosophy
of Malthus had been developed around certain misconceived inferences from the
fact of Indian and Chinese poverty.
India and China had become the testing ground for MalthusÕ ÒEssay on
PopulationÓ because historians had endeavored to make the histories of India
and China conform to Malthusian theory. But lands of great potential like India
and China had been turned into wastelands of poverty and famine, George
asserted, not because of overpopulation, as Malthus had claimed, but because of
particularly harsh social conditions. These oppressive social conditions had
had a long history, George felt:
In both countries great natural resources are wholly neglected. This arises from no innate deficiency in the people, for the Hindoo, as comparative philology has shown, is of our own blood, and China possessed a high degree of civilization and the rudiments of the most important modern inventions when our ancestors were [no more than] wandering savages. It arises from the form which the social organization has in both countries taken, which has shackled productive power and robbed industry of its reward.
After a long description focusing on the system of oppression in India, George ended with the question, ÒIs it not clear that this tyranny and insecurity have produced the want and starvation of India; and notÉthe pressure of population upon subsistence that has produced the want, and the want the tyranny?(95-96)[ii]
If things were bad, as George claimed, under the
Rajahs who had ruled India they were to become immeasurably worse under British
Colonial Rule. George turned to the authority of MacaulayÕs essay on Lord
Clive, which had described the Òenormous fortunesÉrapidly accumulated at
Calcutta, while millions of human beings were reduced to the extremity of
wretchedness.Ó Indians, Macaulay
had averred, Òhave been accustomed to live under tyranny, but never under
tyranny like this.Ó(97-8) If Macaulay only touched on the horrors of East India
Company rule, Edmund BurkeÕs Òvivid eloquenceÓ painted a more complete picture,
with Òwhole districts surrendered to the unrestrained cupidity of the worst of
human kind, poverty-stricken peasants fiendishly tortured to compel them to
give up their little hoards, and once populous tracts turned into deserts.Ó(98)
While George noted that this Òlawless license of early
English ruleÓ had been restrained and had given way to Òthe just principles of
English law,Ó nevertheless, he noted, ÒWith increasing frequency famine has
succeeded famine, raging with greater intensity over wider areas.Ó(98) George
laid out the traditional view, in order to refute it, thus:
Is not this a demonstration of the Malthusian theory?É Does it not show, as Malthus contended, that, to shut up the sluices by which superabundant population is carried off, is but to compel nature to open new ones, and that unless the sources of human increase are checked by prudential regulation, the alternative of war is famine? This has been the orthodox interpretation.(98)
But George disagreed with this orthodoxy. The reasons for the famines
lay in the nature of English colonialism, regardless how ordered and fair
colonial rule was intended to be:
The millions of India [he said] have bowed their necks beneath the yokes of many conquerors, but worst of all is the steady, grinding weight of English domination – a weight which is literally crushing millions out of existence, and, as shown by English writers, is inevitably tending to a most frightful and widespread catastrophe. Other conquerors have lived in the land, and, though bad and tyrannous in their rule, have understood and been understood by the people; but India now is like a great estate owned by an absentee and alien landlord. A most expensive military and civil establishment is kept up, managed and officered by Englishmen who regard India as but a place of temporary exile; and an enormous sumÉis raised from [an impoverished] populationÉ.is drained away to England in the shape of remittances, pensions, home charges of the government, etc. – a tribute for which there is no return. (98-9)
George ended this passage by quoting Florence Nightingale: ÒWe do not care for the people of India. The saddest sight to be seen in the East – nay, probably in the world – is the peasants of our Eastern Empire.Ó ÒThe real cause of want in India has been, and yet is,Ó George concluded, Òthe rapacity of man, not the niggardliness of nature.Ó(101) While Malthus blamed the poor for their misery, George argued instead, Òthat everywhere the vice and misery attributed to over-population can be traced to the warfare, tyranny, and oppression which prevent knowledge from being utilized and deny the security essential to production.Ó This fact was obvious, he claimed, Òwith regard to [both] India and China.Ó It was clear also in the case of the potato famine in Ireland, which had brought so many laborers to the United States.
What we find in Progress and Poverty, then, is that the British Empire, India and China had been placed front and center in the establishment of a new progressive economic theory. For the dichotomy of poverty and progress to become lodged in the American readerÕs imagination, an understanding of the conditions of the poor in India and China was required. Without GeorgeÕs grappling with India and China there could be no refutation of Malthus; and without that there could be no new and coherent progressive economic system. Without the stark descriptions of British land practices in India there would be no easily proven, widely accepted example (especially once the Slave Power in the American South had been vanquished in the Civil War) to show the dangers of rent and monopoly; and without that there would be no justification for the State to introduce its ÒSingle TaxÓ on rent, thereby transgressing laissez-faire convention for the benefit of capitalism.
This focus on India and China was why Progress and PovertyÕs influence would extend beyond the Atlantic world. Amrita Lal Roy, who came to live in New York City for three years in 1885, immediately saw the significance of Henry GeorgeÕs work. For Roy, its significance lay in its consideration of the global predicament of poverty. As a result, he thought, Progress and Poverty had Òstartled the whole civilized worldÓ and it held out Òhopes of a bright future to millions of suffering men who have for centuries been offered as a sacrifice to a heartless philosophy.Ó This text, whose genealogy as I noted can be traced back to India, would return there in Amrita Lal RoyÕs carpetbag, and receive considerable coverage in his published travelogue.[iii] It would also make its way back to India via other more circuitous routes, through the influence of the Irish Land League among Indian nationalists and through Count TolstoyÕs correspondence.[iv] George continued a long correspondence with Leo Tolstoy, who came to believe that the American Òhad formulated the next article in the programme of the progressist<sic> Liberals of the world.Ó No direct link between George and Mohandas K. Gandhi was made (George died before the latterÕs success in South Africa brought him worldwide acclaim), but the fact that Gandhi listed Tolstoy among his most important influences suggests that GeorgeÕs ideas filtered down into the pool of social theory that Gandhi would tap liberally.[v] In addition, George greatly influenced the English socialist, H.M. Hyndman, and he in turn contributed to the emergence of the Òdrain theoryÓ associated at the end of the century with Dadabhai Naoroji and Romesh Chunder Dutt. NaorojiÕs Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, published in 1901, and DuttÕs Famines in India, published a year earlier, resembled in many ways GeorgeÕs earlier critique of British colonial rule in India.
Return to Malthus?
The world has been shaken quite considerably since 2000 and the triumphalism that seemed to be embedded in AmericansÕ historical writing during the 1990s has been shaken. One area where this is clear is in the growth of communalism, nationalism, and identity politics around the world leading to the disaster that has occurred since 9/11, most particularly in Iraq. But, in addition to this there has been a transformation resulting from an end of the kind of economic optimism fostered by Henry George, and an apparent return to the more Malthusian vision of a world of limits. Great expansion of wealth and industrialization may continue to occur across the world, but there are two features to it that would have to be considered fundamentally un-American in nature.
The first is the degree to which we have moved from the American Century to perhaps a Chinese one – with the domination of the global economy shifting across the Pacific – potentially leaving the United States behind. In the United States this means that there will be attempts from different groups to find ways to hold on to its position, even in some self-defeating ways through isolationism – by keeping immigrants out and through economic protection.
The second reflects the resurgence of what might be called neo-Malthusianism. Many now believe that whatever growth occurs will happen at a price. It is doubtful whether the minerals and other resources that made possible the industrial, commercial and information revolutions of the last two centuries will remain available for too much longer; in addition there is the question of whether, with global warming, we can afford to continue along the same direction we have been going. For American society, this means that there will continue to be considerable conflict around issues of the environment, as some people endeavor to grab for the last available resources, while others try to control and ration them. On global terms the problems will likely arise as the United States either opts out of climate controls (as with the Kyoto Treaty), or, when it doesnÕt do so, appears to be stopping others reaping the benefits of the kind of behavior that made the United States wealthy in the first place.
In light of such things, understanding Henry George and Progress and Poverty seems more pressing. On the one hand, the world may appear to have passed on from George and to have returned to Malthus. And in a world that has moved on from Colonialism and imperial domination, a Malthusian theory may no longer simply appear to be just an economic rationale developed to protect entrenched elites – as MalthusÕ economic theory so clearly was.
But such developments will not be entirely at GeorgeÕs expense. There is the more fundamental question of whether we can survive as a species and this must further unite us in a global endeavor – something that Henry George would have understood. Moreover, while we may now be confronted by a world of limits, these are limits, as George would have quickly pointed out, of our own making. We also have not moved on from the fundamental question asked by George. Is progress necessarily progress for all? Might it be dependent on the poverty of the many? May Progress also ultimately be our undoing?