Anti-Poverty Society

Overview

The Anti-Poverty Society was founded in New York City in the spring of 1887 by Henry George and Father Edward McGlynn, in the immediate aftermath of George's 1886 mayoral campaign and McGlynn's ecclesiastical conflict with Archbishop Michael Corrigan over his support for George. The idea originated with Thomas L. McCready of the staff of George's weekly newspaper The Standard, who proposed "a militant society against poverty" to carry land-question education directly into the city's tenement districts.[1] McGlynn served as founding president and George as vice-president, with Benjamin Urner as treasurer and Michael Clark (of the Irish World) as secretary.[1]

Activity

The Society's declared object was "to spread... a knowledge of the truth that God has made ample provision for the need of all men during their residence upon earth, and that involuntary poverty is the result of the human laws that allow individuals to claim as private property that which the Creator has provided for the use of all."[1] Its first public meeting, at Chickering Hall on 1 May 1887, was packed to overflowing; subsequent meetings moved to the larger Academy of Music and were held regularly every Sunday evening, drawing both religious and secular audiences and mixing George's economic argument with McGlynn's religious framing of social justice.[1] A parade and demonstration in McGlynn's honor that summer, held as his excommunication became imminent, was estimated by the (unsympathetic) New York Herald at seventy-five thousand participants.[1]

Significance

The Society was the single-tax movement's principal organizational vehicle in New York through 1887–1888, and its Sunday meetings gave McGlynn a public platform to keep preaching Georgist land doctrine through his years under Church discipline, up to his December 1892 reinstatement.[1] It illustrates a distinctive feature of the movement's peak period: an alliance between a radical economic argument and an explicitly religious, quasi-revivalist mode of mass persuasion.

See Also

• Henry George — vice-president and the Society's principal economic voice
• Edward McGlynn — founding president
• 1886 New York City Mayoral Election — the campaign that produced the alliance behind the Society
• Single Tax — the doctrine the Society existed to popularize
• The Life of Henry George (George Jr., 1900) — the primary source for this page

Sources

1. Henry George Jr. (1900), Life of Henry George, Third Period, Ch. IX — public domain, reproduced on this wiki: life-of-henry-george — used for the Society's founding, officers, declared object, meeting pattern, and the McGlynn demonstration crowd estimate (A-claim for the founding and officers; the crowd estimate is explicitly sourced by the biography to a contemporary newspaper, not verified independently here; a sympathetic filial biography, cited accordingly).