Henry George and the crisis of inequality: progress and poverty in the gilded age

America's remarkable explosion of industrial output and national wealth at the end of the 19th century was matched by a troubling rise in poverty and worker unrest.

As politicians and intellectuals fought over the causes of this crisis, Henry George (1839-1897) published a radical critique of laissez-faire capitalism and its threat to the nation's republican traditions. 'Progress and Poverty' (1879), which became a surprise best-seller, offered a provocative solution for preserving these traditions while preventing the amassing of wealth in the hands of the few: a single tax on land values.

George's writings and years of social activism almost won him the mayor's seat in New York City in 1886.