Commonwealth Land Party

Overview

The Commonwealth Land Party was the 1924 renaming of the Single Tax Party, a minor Georgist political party in the United States that advocated replacing all other taxation with a single tax on land values.[1] The Single Tax Party (organized in 1910 out of the campaign for a single tax in New York) had already run a presidential ticket in 1920 — Robert C. Macauley and Richard C. Barnum, who polled 5,353 votes (0.02% of the total) in eight states, last among nine candidates.[1] Under its new name, the party nominated William J. Wallace of New Jersey for president and John C. Lincoln, a Cleveland industrialist, for vice president in the 1924 election, polling only 1,532 votes.[1] Gaffney and Harrison's The Corruption of Economics names Lincoln among the figures touched by the single-tax movement's reach into American public life.[2]

The party's 1924 platform called for a single tax on land to replace all other methods of taxation, attributed economic depressions, wars, poverty, and crime to "land monopoly," opposed income taxes, and attacked the incumbent Coolidge administration over the Teapot Dome scandal.[1] Its vote totals illustrate the gap between the single-tax movement's intellectual influence — reaching figures such as Winston Churchill and Leo Tolstoy — and its negligible traction as an electoral vehicle in the United States.

See Also

• Single Tax — the underlying proposal and movement the party was built around
• Henry George — the movement's founding figure, though he died in 1897 before the party's founding
• Joseph Fels — soap manufacturer who funded single-tax campaigns in the US and UK during the same era
• The Corruption of Economics (book) — the discovery source, which names John C. Lincoln as the party's 1924 vice-presidential candidate

Sources

1. "Single Tax Party," Wikipedia — used for the party's 1910 founding, 1920 and 1924 presidential tickets, vote totals, and 1924 platform (single tax on land, opposition to income taxes, Teapot Dome resolution). The article covers the party under its original name and notes the 1924 rename to Commonwealth Land Party. Wikipedia
2. Mason Gaffney, Fred Harrison, and Kris Feder, The Corruption of Economics (Shepheard-Walwyn, 1994), Stratagem essay §1 — the discovery source, identifying John C. Lincoln of Cleveland as the party's 1924 vice-presidential candidate.