[Reprinted from Time magazine,
22 August, 1938]
|
The U. S. people may be suckers for free lunches and one-cent
sales, but they do not go out of their way to get free
education. Nor do they often work up an appetite for warmed-over
ideas. Consequently, the gratuitous revival last week of a
school of thought that had its heyday more than 40 years ago
made news. As the Henry George School of Social Science bought a
$50,000 building in Manhattan for schoolhouse and headquarters,
disciples of Georgism disclosed that the single-tax doctrine
today has some 21,000 student followers throughout the U. S., is
growing rapidly.
Henry George (1839-1897), who proposed to end depressions and
poverty by levying a single tax on land values, thus freeing the
land for productive use and restoring to capital & labor the
profits wrested from them by landowners, was nearly elected
mayor of New York City in 1886. After his death, his creed
languished. Only a handful of believers were left when in 1932
one Oscar H. Geiger, a businessman, started the Henry George
School. Geiger gathered 84 pupils, taught them one course with
George's Progress and Poverty as the text, died at the end of
the year. Next year the school got a new director and a business
manager, soon was giving free lessons, mostly to middle-aged
people, in Y. M. C. A.'s, settlement houses, clubs, schools.
Today there are classes in some 200 U. S. cities and seven
foreign countries, and 5,000 people study Georgism by
correspondence. New teachers cannot be trained fast enough.
Honorary president of the school is venerable Philosopher John
Dewey.
Director is burly Frank Chodorov, quondam schoolteacher,
traveling salesman, manufacturer, editor, who constantly has a
pipe or cigar in his mouth. Director Chodorov last week had a
simple explanation for Georgism's revival: its simplicity. So
simple that the school claims the man-in-the-street can be
trained to teach it, Henry George's doctrine, according to Mr.
Chodorov, sweeps aside the "academic gibberish" with
which orthodox practitioners of the "dismal" science
of economics clothe their confusion. Director Chodorov also
claimed that the Henry George School is free from propaganda: "We
don't make the students swallow anything they don't like and we
don't mind arguments." Enrolled in the school are
Communists, Republicans and in-between shades. Warring equally
against land monopoly and collectivism, Georgism makes its
greatest appeal to lawyers, teachers, public accountants,
businessmen.
|
|