George was born in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to a lower-middle class family, the second of ten children of Richard S. H. George and Catharine Pratt (Vallance) George. His formal education ended at age 14 and he went to sea as a foremast boy at age 15 in April 1855 on the
Hindoo, bound for
Melbourne and
Calcutta. He returned to Philadelphia after 14 months at sea to become an apprentice typesetter before settling in
California. After a failed attempt at
gold mining he started to work his way up through the
newspaper industry in 1865, starting as a printer, continuing as a reporter, and ending up an editor and proprietor. He worked for several papers, including four years (1871-1875) as editor of his own
San Francisco Daily Evening Post. Some of his earliest articles to gain him fame were on his opinion that Chinese immigration should be
restricted. Although he thought that there might be some situations in which immigration restriction would no longer be necessary and admitted his first analysis of the issue of immigration was "crude", he
defended many of these positions the rest of his life.
In California, George fell in love with Annie Corsina Fox, an eighteen-year-old
Australian girl who had been orphaned and was living with an uncle. The uncle, a prosperous, strong-minded man, was understandably opposed to his niece's penniless suitor. But the couple, defying him, eloped and married in late 1861, with Henry dressed in a borrowed suit and Annie bringing only a packet of books. The marriage was a happy one and four children were born to them. Fox's mother was
Irish Catholic, and while George remained an
Evangelical Protestant, the children were raised
Catholic. On
November 3, 1862 Annie gave birth to future
United States Representative from
New York, Henry George, Jr. (1862 -
1916). Early on, with two sons born by 1865, the family was near starvation, but George's growing reputation and involvement in the newspaper industry lifted them from poverty.
George began as a
Lincoln Republican, but then became a
Democrat, once losing election to the
California State Assembly. He was a strong critic of railroad and mining interests, corrupt politicians, land speculators, and labor contractors.
One day in 1871 George went for a horseback ride and stopped to rest while overlooking
San Francisco Bay. He later wrote of the revelation that he had:
I asked a passing teamster, for want of something better to say, what land was worth there. He pointed to some cows grazing so far off that they looked like mice, and said, 'I don't know exactly, but there is a man over there who will sell some land for a thousand dollars an acre.' Like a flash it came over me that there was the reason of advancing poverty with advancing wealth. With the growth of population, land grows in value, and the men who work it must pay more for the privilege.<ref>Quoted in [[Albert Jay Nock
Furthermore, on a visit to
New York City, he was struck by the apparent paradox that the poor in that long-established city were much worse off than the poor in less developed California. These observations supplied the theme and title for his 1879 book
Progress and Poverty, which was a huge success, selling over 3 million copies. In it George made the argument that a sizeable portion of the wealth created by social and technological advances in a
free market economy is captured by land owners and
monopolists via
economic rents, and that this concentration of unearned wealth is the root cause of
poverty. George considered it a great injustice that private profit was being earned from restricting access to natural resources while productive activity was burdened with heavy taxes, and held that such a system was equivalent to
slavery - a concept somewhat similar to
wage slavery. The appropriation of oil royalties by magnates of petrol-rich countries may be seen as an equivalent form of
rent-seeking activity: since natural resources are given freely by Nature rather than being products of human labor or entrepreneurship, no single individual should be allowed to acquire unearned revenues by monopolizing their commerce. The same holds true about every other mineral and biological raw resource.
George was in a position to discover this pattern, having experienced poverty himself, knowing many different societies from his travels, and living in California at a time of rapid growth. In particular he had noticed that the construction of
railroads in California was pushing up land values and rents as fast or faster than wages were rising.
