Henry George’s *Poverty and Progress* (1881 edition) – The Public Domain Review

Until the mid-1880s, American industrialist Tom L. Johnson had little interest in anything other than his business results. At the age of fifteen, he had used a family connection to the Du Pont dynasty to learn about the streetcar industry. Soon, newspapers described Johnson as a “street railroad magnate” after he bought controlling stakes in the transportation infrastructure of Indianapolis, Cleveland, and Detroit. “He was just a businessman making money,” reads a 1910 magazine profile reported“and it probably would have remained that way had there not been a trivial incident.” The possibly aprocryphal incident involved a paperboy, who approached him on the train about buying a book by the economist and social reformer Henry George. Johnson refused, but the conductor overheard the conversation and urged him to read the text. And he did so voraciously, and then went on to read Henry George’s magnum opus: Progress and poverty (1879), which shattered his fiscally ruthless worldview. Johnson, nervous, offered his lawyer a retainer of $5,000 in late nineteenth-century money to fact-check the claims: “I must get out of the case, or prove this book wrong.” The story ends with Johnson in a New York hotel room with his lawyer, one of the Du Ponts, and the steelmaker Arthur Moxham. The men pour over the text and can’t find a single mistake. “All four of us were converted to a nameless philosophy, by an unknown prophet, an obscure man we had never heard of before.” Soon after, Johnson met George, who inspired him to enter politics and campaign on a platform of anti-monopoly reform.