Back in the dark days of 1932, when a despairing world and its
culture were being torn asunder by a major catastrophe, the worst
economic depression ever known, a man who is foremost among America's
few living exponents of belles-lettres wrote in his diary under the
date of Oct. 27; "Now that Roosevelt has dug up W.G. Sumner and
the Yale Press shows signs of life enough to republish his writings, I
should think someone might soon be rediscovering Henry George. If so,
he will find that George was one of the first half-dozen minds of the
nineteenth century, in all the world."
The man who set that down in his characteristically small, fine
hand, an essayist and historian who is one of the chief catalyzers of
the intellectual ferments of our time, was noting no passing fancy.
The idea returned to him and on Oct. 31 he recorded: "I have been
looking over the biography of Henry George, by his son Harry, a
painstaking sort of book. The best one can say for it is that it is
competent. There should be a better one, for George was undeniably a
great man."
Not only was Albert Jay Nock, the chronicler just quoted,
thinking of these things. In New York the editors of Scribner's
Magazine had the same notion and they commissioned Mr. Nock to do the
job. The essayist went abroad the following February and through the
Spring lived in his beloved low countries, breaking his stay at last
for a junket through France and Spain into Portugal. With his papers
full of commissions, some of which he would not do, some he might do
and a few he would do if time, and the business of living fully,
permitted, the assignment from Scribner's caused him no preoccupation.
But the personality of George kept popping up: at Port Cros, watching
a schooner put off ten tons of coal on March 31, he mused: "All
by hand labor, with the help of one donkey. I wonder whether most of
our labor-saving devices have really saved anything worth saving.
Henry George attacked this problem, in 'Progress and Poverty', and
solved it, but his solution, being valid, will not be accepted in a
hurry."
Through his friends he was keeping in close touch with hectic
America. Henry L. Mencken wrote him, after the fiasco of the World
Economic Conference: "The republic proceeds towards hell at a
rapidly accelerating tempo." Nock was not profoundly stirred; he
spent the next day at the Lisbon museum. But the idea of recreating
Henry George was still rankling him. On June 9 he wrote in the diary:
"Overnight at Porto, on the way to Vidago, where I hope to find a
pleasant place to stop awhile and write an overdue paper for
Scribner's on Henry George."
Soon he was in Vidago where "one sees miserable dwellings,
occupied by people absolutely lost in poverty and filth, built of
magnificent huge granite blocks after the Roman fashion"; in
Vidago among a Portuguese people whom he found, nevertheless "without
a single exception, the kindest people I have ever seen." On June
15 he noted. "Working steadily at quite high pressure on my
article for Scribner's on Henry George, so the days pass very quickly.
I hope it will call attention to him, though I suppose nothing will do
so effectively as long as Americans are what they are, or until
tremendous hardship puts an end to their being drugged and doped by
nostrums dealt out to them by demagogues and scoundrels." In his
idyllic refuge -- "what a superb climate and what grand scenery"
he remarked of Vidago -- America became remote to him; "one can
hardly convince oneself, while here, that it exists." But George,
along of all his environment, persisted and on June 26 Mr. Nock
recorded: "I am done with Henry George, and shall leave here
tomorrow. What a great man he was, and how well he managed to get
himself misjudged and forgotten! I suppose Scribner's people will pull
a long face over getting a really serious piece of work -- I often
think of that dreadful person, Bok, writing to Lyman Abbott for 'a
short, snappy life of Christ."' The aftermath was typical of the
man; on July 29 he noted: "Scribner's people seem satisfied with
my piece on Henry George, and say it will come out in November, so I
suppose all the single-taxers in the country will curse me afresh."
That is how "Henry George, Unorthodox American" came
to be written, as anyone can see for himself in Mr. Nock's "A
Journal of These Days: June 1932-December 1933" (Morrow, 1934.)
But to understand how this tabloid biography came to be the unique
study it is, even when one compares it with the admirable similar
studies by Broadus Mitchell and Rexford C. Tugwell, one must recall
Mr. Nock's career. He took his bachelor's degree at St. Stephen's
College, where he steeped himself in the classical languages and their
literatures. With Francis Neilson he wrote "How Diplomats Make
War" (1915; 2d Ed., 1916). From 1920 to 1924, he edited the old
Freeman in company with Neilson, Suzanne LaFollette and others equally
notable, setting unexcelled standards in periodical journalism. During
that period he wrote "The Myth of a Guilty Nation" under the
pseudonym of Historicus (1422) and edited "The Selected Works of
Charles F. Browne (Artemus Ward)" (1924), in the latter work
establishing the native humorist as the social satirist he was.
A scholar's life-time job found fruit in his "Jefferson"
(1926). He followed this with a collection, "On Doing the Right
Thing and Other Essays" (1928). Then, with Catherine Rose Wilson,
he wrote "Francis Rabelais, the Man and His Work" (1924),
first fruit of another life-time interest. With Miss Wilson, he edited
the Urquhart-Le Matteaux translation of the works of "Francis
Rabelais" (2 vols., 1931), concluding a monumental work of
scholarship with his book, "A Journey Into Rabelais's France"
(1934). Meanwhile he had served as visiting professor of American
history and government at Saint Stephen's and had published, under the
pseudonym of Journeyman, "The Book of Journeyman" (1932)
together with a noteworthy stricture on an institution close to him, "The
Theory of Education"(l932).
The contradiction between state and society, in which Ludwig
Gumplowicz and Franz Oppenheimer had interested him long before,
resulted in a work as significant in a social sense as "Rabelais"
and "Jefferson" had been in literary and historical senses, "Our
Enemy the State" (1935). He followed this with "Free Speech
and Plain Language" 1937). Throughout all these dates a stream of
essays on contemporary themes poured from his pen, to find critical
and keenly appreciative hearings among the readers of The New
Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Mercury and similar
literary papers.
What we have then, in "Henry George, Unorthodox American,"
is a living portrait of one unusual citizen of the world by another.
WILL LISSNER
Editor-in-Chief
The American Journal of Economics and Sociology
