Henry George’s *Poverty and Progress* (1881 edition) — The Public Domain Review

Until the mid-1880s, the American industrialist Tom L. Johnson had little interest in anything beyond his bottom line. At the age of fifteen, he had leveraged a family connection to the Du Pont dynasty to learn about the streetcar business. Soon, newspapers were describing Johnson as a “street railroad magnate”, after he bought controlling stakes in the transport infrastructure of Indianapolis, Cleveland, and Detroit. “He was just a money-making man of business”, a 1910 magazine profile reported, “and would probably have remained so but for a trivial incident.” The possibly aprocryphal incident involved a newsboy, who approached him on a train about buying a book by the economist and social reformer Henry George. Johnson declined, but the conductor overheard the exchange and urged him to read the text. And so he did, voraciously, and then proceeded to read Henry George’s magnum opus, Progress and Poverty (1879), which shattered his fiscally ruthless worldview. Johnson, unnerved, offered his lawyer a retainer of $5000 in late nineteenth-century money to fact-check the claims: “I must get out of the business, or prove that this book is wrong.” The story ends with Johnson in a New York hotel room with his lawyer, one of the Du Ponts, and the steelmaker Arthur Moxham. The men pour over the text and can’t find a single error. “All four of us . . . were converted to an unnamed philosophy, by an unknown prophet, an obscure man of whom we had never before heard.” Soon after, Johnson met George, who inspired him to go into politics, campaigning on a platform of anti-monopoly reform.