1886 New York City Mayoral Election
Henry George's run for Mayor of New York on a land-reform platform — the high-water mark of Georgism as an electoral force, finishing ahead of Theodore Roosevelt.
Overview
The 1886 New York City mayoral election was the most significant electoral moment in the history of the Georgist movement. Henry George, by then internationally famous as the author of Progress and Poverty, ran as the candidate of the United Labor Party on a platform centred on his land-value-tax ideas.
The Campaign
George was drafted by a coalition of labour unions and reformers and campaigned on capturing land rent for public benefit and breaking the grip of land monopoly on the city. The campaign mobilised an unusually broad working-class coalition and alarmed the city's political establishment.
The Result
George finished second, defeated by the Tammany Hall Democrat Abram Hewitt, but ahead of the third-place Republican candidate, the 28-year-old Theodore Roosevelt — a future US president. Georgists have long argued the count was affected by Tammany's machine; regardless, polling ahead of a future president demonstrated the movement's genuine electoral reach.
Significance
The 1886 race marked the peak of Georgism as a mass political force in the United States. George ran again in 1897 but died days before that election. The 1886 campaign remains the clearest historical case of land-value-tax ideas contending seriously for executive power in a major city.
See Also
Sources
- Christopher England (2023), Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Single Tax Movement, Johns Hopkins University Press. Publisher
- Henry George (1879), Progress and Poverty — the book that made George a national figure. wiki summary