The 1897 New York City Mayoral Campaign (Henry George's Last Campaign)

Overview

In 1897, eleven years after his famous 1886 run, Henry George ran a second time for Mayor of New York — now the newly consolidated Greater New York, formed that year by the merger of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island into the world's second-largest city. He entered the race against his physicians' explicit warning that the strain would likely kill him, and died of a stroke four days before the election. His son Henry George Jr. was nominated to complete the ticket in his place; Tammany Hall's Robert Van Wyck won the first mayoralty of Greater New York.[1][2][3]

The Greater New York Consolidation

The election was itself a byproduct of consolidation. New York, Kings (Brooklyn), Queens, and Richmond (Staten Island) county voters had approved merger into a single city in an 1894 referendum, effective 1 January 1898 — a change the state legislature ratified as the Greater New York charter, signed by Governor Frank Black on 5 May 1897, over the incumbent New York mayor's veto.[2] Because the new consolidated city's term of office would not begin until 1 January 1898, incumbent Mayor William L. Strong's term was extended by a year and the regular mayoral election was pushed from 1896 to November 1897 — the winner would become the first mayor of the enlarged, roughly 3.4-million-person city.[2] That stake — control of the mayoralty of "the second city in the world in respect to population," as George's son put it — is what drew George back into electoral politics.[1]

Decision to Run

George's health had been declining through 1897. In March a severe bilious attack — nausea, dizziness, muscular weakness — brought a warning from his physician, Dr. Kelly, that work must stop; George refused, saying only "I must finish the book before anything else," meaning his unfinished last work, The Science of Political Economy.[1] Then, on 2 May 1897, his married daughter Jennie died suddenly after a short illness, a blow from which those close to him said he never fully recovered; George buried her at Green-Wood Cemetery beside a spot he chose himself, with Edward McGlynn — who had married her two years before — conducting the service.[1]

By June, rumors were already circulating that George would be asked to run as an independent candidate for the new office. His doctor warned against the ordeal; a neighbor and old California friend, Dr. M. R. Leverson, recorded the exchange directly: asked what the worst outcome of running could be, Leverson told him plainly, "It will most probably prove fatal." George asked, "You mean it may kill me?" — "Most probably, yes." George's reply, as his son records it: "Dr. Kelly says the same thing, only more positively. But I have got to die. How can I die better than serving humanity? Besides, so dying will do more for the cause than anything I am likely to be able to do in the rest of my life."[1] His wife Annie, when friends appealed to her to dissuade him, answered that she had "never once crossed him in what he has seen clearly to be his duty" and would "give him all I can — devotion."[1] George called on an older debt to hold her to that: fifteen years earlier, during the 1882 Phoenix Park crisis, when he asked what the imprisoned Michael Davitt should do, Annie alone among the guests at a dinner party had said Davitt "should go to Ireland by the first train, and be a leader to the people in this hour of dismay," adding, "How could Michael Davitt die better than with his people?"[1] Recalling those words to her now — in his own paraphrase, that Davitt should "go to Dublin and be with his people, even though it should cost him his life" — George told her, "I told you then that I might some day ask you to remember those words. I ask you now."[1] After a friends' conference at the Johnson Company's New York office in early October, he decided to run.[1]

The Field: Van Wyck, Low, and Tracy

Three other men anchored the race. Tammany Hall put up Judge Robert Van Wyck, whom George's biographer treats as a Tammany figurehead in a contest reduced to a "spoils-of-office" issue — a man who "had for some years sat upon a judicial bench, but who outside of strictly local legal circles was scarcely known."[1] The Republican organization nominated General Benjamin F. Tracy, a Civil War veteran who had "held a portfolio in President [Benjamin] Harrison's cabinet" as Secretary of the Navy (1889–1893).[1][4] Running as an independent, reform, anti-machine candidate on the Citizens' Union ticket was Seth Low — twice elected Mayor of Brooklyn (1881–1885) and, since 1890, president of Columbia University.[1][5] George himself drew a sharp distinction with Low rather than attacking him: "I am not with Low. He is a Republican and is fighting the machine, which is all very good as far as it goes. But he is an aristocratic reformer; I am a democratic reformer. He would help the people; I would help the people to help themselves."[1] To a friend who wrote that he would vote for Low, George replied simply, "Vote for Low or vote for me, as you may judge best. I shall in any event, be true."[1]

Low's Columbia presidency intersects the wiki's Georgism-and-academia thread in one further way: according to Mason Gaffney's account, John Bates Clark — George's chief academic critic at the 1890 Saratoga debate — had been recruited to Columbia by Low, who was already a rival of George's in New York politics; a detail Gaffney's Corruption of Economics frames as evidence of academic patronage running through the same political rivalry (D-claim; Gaffney's interpretation, not independently verified here).[6]

The Campaign

George accepted the nomination of "The Party of Thomas Jefferson" — recorded on the official ballot as the Jeffersonian Democracy line — at Cooper Union on 5 October 1897, arriving "with thin body and ashen face" and having "almost fainted on his way to the hall," but spoke with his old defiance: "Whether it be success or failure matters nothing to me... To make the fight is honour, whether it be for success or failure. To do the deed is its own reward." He closed: "From henceforward I am your candidate for the Mayoralty of Greater New York."[1][3] Leaving the Johnson Company's office after the nominating conference, he passed within feet of Tammany boss Richard Croker, "whose misrule he should denounce almost with his dying breath," without either man recognizing the moment.[1]

Over the following three weeks he spoke at three to five meetings nightly — by his son's account, more than the other three candidates combined — financed chiefly by Tom L. Johnson and August Lewis, the two men to whom George had dedicated The Science of Political Economy; Lewis became the campaign's treasurer.[1] Willis J. Abbott chaired the campaign committee.[1] The campaign's total fund was, in the biographer's words, "ridiculously small in comparison with the other party funds."[1]

Death

On his last night of campaigning, Thursday, 28 October — five days before the election — George spoke at Whitestone, College Point, and Flushing, visibly weakened but still lucid through most of the evening; his final speech that night, in Manhattan's Central Opera House, was, in his son's account, "disconnected and rambling," a marked contrast to the earlier meetings. He returned to the Union Square Hotel near midnight and complained to his wife Annie of mild indigestion before retiring. In the early hours of 29 October 1897 she found him standing rigid in an adjoining room, repeating the word "Yes." Dr. Kelly arrived to find him unconscious: "A stroke of apoplexy had fallen. The great heart had worn out the physical body, and a thread in the brain had snapped."[1] He died four days before the election, at 58.[1][2]

His party "put forward the dead man's oldest son and namesake to carry the campaign banner"; George Jr. was formally nominated to complete the Jefferson Democracy ticket, but, in his father's biographer's words, "drew only the votes that his unknown and untried personality could command."[1][7] An estimated 100,000 people passed his casket lying in state at the Grand Central Palace on Sunday, with a contemporary newspaper estimating another 100,000 turned away; the funeral procession that evening passed a darkened, hushed City Hall — where, the biography notes, he might have presided had he lived — before crossing to Brooklyn.[1] Father Edward McGlynn, who had officiated at Jennie's wedding and funeral, spoke at the service, praised for "the pulsing sympathy" of his eulogy alongside clergy of several denominations, including Rabbi Gottheil and Dr. Lyman Abbott.[1] George was buried on 1 November 1897 at Green-Wood Cemetery beside his daughter Jennie; his headstone carries the closing words of Progress and Poverty: "The truth that I have tried to make clear will not find easy acceptance... But it will find friends — those who will toil for it; suffer for it; if need be, die for it. This is the power of Truth."[1]

The Election Result

Voting proceeded as scheduled on 2 November 1897. Of 523,560 votes cast, Van Wyck won with 233,997 (44.7%), Low placed second with 151,540 (28.9%), Tracy third with 101,863 (19.5%), and George Jr., on the Jeffersonian Democracy line, fourth with 21,693 (4.1%); and Socialist Labor candidate Lucien Sanial polled 14,467 — the five totals accounting for the full vote as reported.[3] Van Wyck was sworn in on 1 January 1898 as the first mayor of the consolidated City of Greater New York.[2][3]

Aftermath and Significance

Van Wyck's administration was engulfed within three years by the 1900 "Ice Trust" scandal, when he was found to hold roughly $680,000 in stock in a company that held a monopoly on the city's ice distribution while setting its wholesale prices as a municipal appointee; a later investigation found no direct personal wrongdoing, but the episode ended his political career and contributed to Tammany's loss of the mayoralty in 1901.[2] Seth Low, defeated in 1897, ran again on a fusion ticket in 1901 and served as Mayor of New York from 1902 to 1903, reducing police corruption before losing re-election.[5]

George's death mid-campaign, four days before a contested municipal election, drew tributes reported as arriving from Great Britain, France, Germany, and Denmark, and from Africa, Australia, Japan, and China.[1] It did not end the single-tax movement — organized single-tax clubs remained a political force behind Progressive-era tax reforms in several US cities into the 1920s[8] — but it removed the one figure capable of holding the New York movement together as a unified electoral force, and no comparably prominent Georgist candidacy for the city's highest office followed it.

See Also

• Henry George — the candidate
• 1886 New York City Mayoral Election — his first, more successful run
• Henry George Jr. — his son, nominated to complete the 1897 ticket
• Tom L. Johnson — chief financial backer of both campaigns
• Edward McGlynn — spoke at George's funeral
• The Saratoga Single Tax Debate (1890) — the earlier George–academy confrontation that touches Seth Low and John Bates Clark
• New York City — jurisdiction profile, including the 1886 campaign
• The Life of Henry George (George Jr., 1900) — the primary source for this page
• The Science of Political Economy — the book George was racing to finish when he died

Sources

1. Henry George Jr. (1900), Life of Henry George, Third Period Ch. III (the 1882 Davitt exchange), Ch. XIV (the 1897 campaign and death) — public domain, reproduced on this wiki: life-of-henry-george — used for the decision to run against medical advice, Jennie's death, the field of candidates as the family described them, the Cooper Union nomination speech, the campaign's final weeks, the stroke and death, the funeral, and the epitaph (A-claims for quoted letters/speeches and reported dates/crowd estimates; a sympathetic filial biography written by a son who was present for these events, cited accordingly — its account of the election result itself was not available, since the book was written before the fact and covers only through the funeral).
2. "1897 New York City mayoral election," Wikipedia, citing Kenneth T. Jackson (ed.), The Encyclopedia of New York City (1995) and "Democrats Take All," The New York Times, 4 November 1897 — used for the Greater New York consolidation timeline (the 1894 referendum, the charter signed 5 May 1897, the term extension moving the election from 1896 to 1897), the election date, and the Van Wyck Ice Trust scandal (A-claims; general reference, not independently cross-checked against the cited primary sources this session). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1897_New_York_City_mayoral_election
3. "1897 New York City mayoral election," Wikipedia — used for the exact final vote totals and percentages (Van Wyck 233,997; Low 151,540; Tracy 101,863; George Jr./Jeffersonian Democracy 21,693; Sanial 14,467; total 523,560) and Van Wyck's 1 January 1898 inauguration (A-claim; general reference). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1897_New_York_City_mayoral_election
4. Miller Center, "Benjamin F. Tracy (1889–1893)" — used for confirming Tracy's tenure as Secretary of the Navy under President Benjamin Harrison (A-claim). millercenter.org/president/bharrison/essays/tracy-1889-secretary-of-the-navy
5. "Seth Low," Wikipedia — used for Low's Brooklyn mayoralty (1881–1885), Columbia presidency (1890–1901), his loss in 1897, and his later 1901 fusion-ticket win and 1902–1903 mayoralty (A-claim; general reference). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Low
6. Mason Gaffney & Fred Harrison, The Corruption of Economics (1994) — used for the claim that Seth Low recruited John Bates Clark to Columbia while a political rival of George's (D-claim; Gaffney's framing, attributed, not independently verified this session). Book page · Publisher
7. "Henry George Jr.," Wikipedia — used for confirming that George Jr. was formally nominated to succeed his father on the Jefferson Democracy ticket after the death (A-claim; general reference, no citation given in the source article itself for this specific fact). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_Jr.
8. Mason Gaffney (rev. 2001), "The Resurgence of New York City After 1920: Al Smith's 1920 Tax Reform Law and Its Aftermath," University of California, Riverside, Department of Economics — used for the claim that organized single-tax clubs, described as the legacy of George's 1886 and 1897 New York mayoral campaigns, were a political force behind 1920s NYC tax reform (D-claim; Gaffney's framing, attributed). Free PDF · wiki summary