Introduction
The Life of Henry George

Part 1
- Conversation: A New Theory of Language
- Henry George: The Man Who Wrote Milton Friedman’s Favorite Book on Trade
- Father McGlynn and Catholic Social Doctrine
- Henry George and The Reconstruction of Capitalism

Part 2
- American, Irish and Australian connections
- Two commentaries by Dr. Robert V. Andelson
- Professor Michael Hudson finds fault

Part 3
Selected Biographies
- The Encyclopaedia of Greater Philadelphia
- Museum of San Francisco
- Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Henry George.org

The Life of Henry George
At the height of his popularity across the 1880s and 1890s, Henry George was the third most famous American, behind Mark Twain and Thomas Edison, and his liberal philosophies on taxation, copyrights, poverty issues, and more, continue to influence progressive movements today.

As a youth, he sailed around the world as a cabin-boy and then chose a career in journalism, beginning as a typesetter, when he settled in San Francisco. In 1861, he married Irish Australian-born Annie Corsina Fox (1843-1904), whose Anglo-Irish parents, English officer Major John and Elizabeth Fox, had settled in Australia: Following the death of her parents, Annie was sent to live with her wealthy uncle in Oakland, California, where she met Henry George. Her uncle disapproved of her alliance with the poor journalist: Legend has it, she carried only a stack of books when they eloped in 1861, on her 18th birthday. Their three children, and their granddaughter, have provided extensive biographical insight.

At the age of 40, Henry George self-published his first book, Progress and Poverty (1879):

“Out upon nature, in upon himself, back through the mists that shroud the past, forward into the darkness that overhangs the future, turns the restless desire that arises when the animal wants slumber in satisfaction. Beneath things, he seeks the law; he would know how the globe was forged and the stars were hung, and trace to their origins the springs of life. And, then, as the man develops his nobler nature, there arises the desire higher yet--the passion of passions, the hope of hopes--the desire that he, even he, may somehow aid in making life better and brighter, in destroying want and sin, sorrow and shame. He masters and curbs the animal; he turns his back upon the feast and renounces the place of power; he leaves it to others to accumulate wealth, to gratify pleasant tastes, to bask themselves in the warm sunshine of the brief day. He works for those he never saw and never can see; for a fame, or maybe but for a scant justice, that can only come long after the clods have rattled upon his coffin lid. He toils in the advance, where it is cold, and there is little cheer from men, and the stones are sharp and the brambles thick. Amid the scoffs of the present and the sneers that stab like knives, he builds for the future; he cuts the trail that progressive humanity may hereafter broaden into a highroad.” -- Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879), p. 136

See the George family archive HERE
For example:
1/ Son, Henry George, Jr. (1862-1916)
A journalist, like his father, Henry George, Jr. (1862-1916), served as Democratic member of the New York House of Representatives across two terms, from 1911-1915.
Shortly after his father's death, in 1897, Henry George, Jr. wrote a deeply informative biography documenting the life of his father and his family, which was published in 1900.

The Life of Henry George (1900), by Henry George, Jr.,
(1900), Doubleday & McClure, New York, and republished by Cosimo Books (2006). Now available on the Internet Archive.

Excerpt.
The San Francisco “Times” was started on November 5, 1866, with Henry George in the composing room setting type. James McClatchy, who, as editor of the "Sacramento Bee," had won a reputation as a forcible writer, became editor of the new paper, and it was mainly through him that George’s hope of advancement lay, having won McClatchy’s friendship while in Sacramento. McClatchy, having a clear, sound mind himself, was liberal enough to recognise and encourage merit in others. He may be said to have seen signs of promise in the young printer. At any rate, three editorial articles from George were accepted and published in quick succession. The first, for which he received $5, was entitled, “To Constantinople,” and was published eleven days after the paper was started. ...” (CH XI, p 173)

At the age of 27, Henry George went on to become Managing Editor and Correspondent for the San Francisco "Times."

Further excerpt - (CH XI, pp. 176-177):
... George was managing editor from June, 1867 to August 1868. His editorials made him many friends. Later on in life, he reflected that writing editorials was “valuable practice in terse statement. The development in thought was manifested in editorials on the larger questions of the day, such as free trade, government paper money and interconvertible bonds in place of national bank notes; personal or proportional representation; public obligations attached to public franchises; and the abolition of privilege in the army.
But perhaps the most important advance in thought appeared in an article entitled “What the Railroad Will Bring Us” in the “Overland Monthly” in October 1868, just after Mr. George left the "Times." That San Francisco periodical was then in its fourth number, having started in July of that year, and was edited by Bret Harte, who, with two of its contributors, Mark Twain and Joaquin Miller, constituted "The Incomparable Three" of lighter literature in California...
. . .
["What the Railroad Will Bring Us," Overland Monthly 1, no. 4 (Oct. 1868) (Archived)]
"What the Railroad Will Bring Us" was a forecast of the era of California which the operation of the then almost completed trans-continental railroad would usher in — adding enormous artificial advantages to the already great natural advantages that San Francisco possessed, and laying foundations for her rapid rise to commercial and intellectual greatness that should not only make her mistress of all the coasts washed by the vast Pacific, but indeed, as to population, wealth and power, cause her eventually to overtake and surpass New York and London, and make her the greatest city in the world...

Wikipedia shares more details:

Excerpt: One day during 1871 George went for a horseback ride and stopped to rest while overlooking San Francisco Bay.
He later wrote ...

“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."

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 great 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 possessed by land owners and monopolists via economic rents, and that this concentration of unearned wealth is the main 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 indicated that such a system was equivalent to slavery - concept somewhat similar to wage slavery.

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 increasing land values and rents as fast or faster than wages were rising... >>> more

2/ Daughter, Anna George DeMille (1877-1947)
Born in San Francisco to Henry and Annie George and mother of the famed American dancer and choreographer Agnes de Mille, Anna George DeMille became a prolific advocate of economic justice, along with her brother, Congressman Henry George Jr. (1862-1916).

Anna George de Mille (1944), Henry George: The Fight for Irish Freedom,
The American Journal of Economics and Sociology
Vol. 3, No. 2 (Jan., 1944), pp. 251-272
Excerpt, p. 1:

In 1879, THE LAND question in Ireland was a burning topic of the day. The Irish peasants, oppressed by their landlords most of whom were absentee, were suffering eviction as well as poverty almost to the point of starvation. The Irish National Land League had been formed to “bring about the reduction of rack rents.” During that same year Henry George had written an article on the situation which was published in The Bee of Sacramento.[ Dec. 21, 1979, The Christmas Bee] Rack rent he had explained as “simply a rent fixed by competition at short intervals. . . . In our agricultural district, land is rented from season to season to the highest bidder. This is what in Ireland is called-rack-rent”

Charles Stewart Parnell, with a background of English conservatism, was president of the League. But it was one of the honorary secretaries, Michael Davitt, who seemed to be the soul of the organization. He proclaimed the principle of “the land for the people.” Released after having served seven years in Portland Prison, England, for his adherence to the cause of Irish independence, he visited New York in the summer of 1880. There he met Henry George and read “Progress and Poverty” with an enthusiasm that led him to pledge the Land League to push the book in Great Britain.

George, deeply stirred by the situation in Ireland, started to write an article on the subject for Appleton’s Journal, but the work grew under his pen until it became a small book of seventeen chapters. He called it “The Irish Land Question: What It Involves And How It Can Be Settled.” In it he showed that inorder to relieve Ireland of the horror of rack-renting and to give the benefits of their labor to the Irish people, it was necessary to take the annual rental value of land alone for community needs, using the new source of revenue to relieve industry and thrift from taxation. Under such a system the laborer would get what he created; no one would have an advantage as a mere landholder. And even though the owner of the land be an Englishman living in England, the value of the land of Ireland would accrue to the Irish people as a whole. - p. 1.

3. Grandaughter, Agnes George de Mille (1905-1993) was famous in her own right as a choreographer and the founder of the Agnes de Mille Heritage Dance Theater, she received the Handel Medallion, New York’s highest award for achievement in the arts. She was the author of thirteen books.

“We are on the brink. It is possible to have another Dark Ages.
But in George there is a voice of hope.”
– Agnes George de Mille, New York, January, 1979
~
Who Was Henry George?
by Agnes George de Mille
January, 1979

Excerpt:
A HUNDRED YEARS AGO a young unknown printer in San Francisco wrote a book he called Progress and Poverty. He wrote after his daily working hours, in the only leisure open to him for writing. He had no real training in political economy. Indeed he had stopped schooling in the seventh grade in his native Philadelphia, and shipped before the mast as a cabin boy, making a complete voyage around the world.

Three years later, he was halfway through a second voyage as able seaman when he left the ship in San Francisco and went to work as a journeyman printer. After that he took whatever honest job came to hand. All he knew of economics were the basic rules of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and other economists, and the new philosophies of Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill, much of which he gleaned from reading in public libraries and from his own painstakingly amassed library. Marx was yet to be translated into English.

George was endowed for his job. He was curious and he was alertly attentive to all that went on around him. He had that rarest of all attributes in the scholar and historian that gift without which all education is useless. He had mother wit. He read what he needed to read, and he understood what he read. And he was fortunate; he lived and worked in a rapidly developing society. George had the unique opportunity of studying the formation of a civilization — the change of an encampment into a thriving metropolis. He saw a city of tents and mud change into a fine town of paved streets and decent housing, with tramways and buses. And as he saw the beginning of wealth, he noted the first appearance of pauperism. He saw degradation forming as he saw the advent of leisure and affluence, and he felt compelled to discover why they arose concurrently.

The result of his inquiry, Progress and Poverty, is written simply, but so beautifully that it has been compared to the very greatest works of the English language. … >>>more

Henry George:
The Man Who Wrote Milton Friedman’s Favorite Book on Trade
Friedman's favorite book on trade has also been called "the best-argued tract on free trade to this day.”
Wednesday, October 17, 2018
By Mark J. Perry

The excerpts below are from Henry George’s 1886 book Protection or Free Trade, which was Milton Friedman’s favorite book on trade, according to the Cato Institute’s Jim Powell, who wrote about the Henry George classic in his 2016 Wall Street Journal op-ed “Milton Friedman’s Favorite Book on Trade.”
[https://www.wsj.com/articles/milton-friedmans-favorite-book-on-trade-1465597043 ]
Friedman called it the most rhetorically brilliant book ever written on trade, and it was also the first book to be read entirely into the Congressional Record. According to Powell, Protection or Free Trade was probably the best book on trade written by anyone in the Americas. He compared it to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. George Mason economist Tyler Cowen wrote in 2009 in that George’s 1886 book “remains perhaps the best-argued tract on free trade to this day.”

Some of the Henry George quotes below were featured in Jim Powell’s WSJ2016 op-ed, but I’ve expanded some of those, and I’ve also included additional ones from the full text of Protection or Free Trade,  available online here from The Liberty Fund. This should be required reading for Donald Trump and all other protectionists/scarcityists who think trade is win-lose and who advocate tariffs and protectionism as a way to make the United States better off economically.

1. Maximize Imports, Not Exports: If foreigners will bring us goods cheaper than we can make them ourselves, we shall be the gainers. The more we get in imports as compared with what we have to give in exports, the better the trade for us. And since foreigners are not liberal enough to give us their productions, but will only let us have them in return for own productions, how can they ruin our industry? The only way they could ruin our industry would be by bringing us for nothing all we want, so as to save us the necessity for work. If this were possible, ought it seem very dreadful?

2. Voluntary Trade is Mutually Beneficial: Trade is not invasion. It does not involve aggression on one side and resistance on the other, but mutual consent and gratification. There cannot be a trade unless the parties to it agree.

3. Exposing Protectionist Fallacies: In a profitable international trade the value of imports will always exceed the value of the exports that pay for them, just as in a profitable trading voyage the return cargo must exceed in value the cargo carried out. This is possible to all the nations that are parties to commerce, for in a normal trade commodities are carried from places where they are relatively cheap to places where they are relatively dear, and their value is thus increased by the transportation, so that a cargo arrived at its destination has a higher value than on leaving the port of its exportation. But on the theory that a trade is profitable only when exports exceed imports, the only way for all countries to trade profitably with one another would be to carry commodities from places where they are relatively dear to places where they are relatively cheap. An international trade made up of such transactions as the exportation of manufactured ice from the West Indies to New England, and the exportation of hot-house fruits from New England to the West Indies, would enable all countries to export much larger values than they imported. On the same theory the more ships sunk at sea the better for the commercial world. To have all the ships that left each country sunk before they could reach any other country would, upon protectionist principles, be the quickest means of enriching the whole world, since all countries could then enjoy the maximum of exports with the minimum of imports.

4. Exposing Tariff Fallacies: To every trade there must be two parties who mutually desire to trade, and whose actions are reciprocal. No one can buy unless he can find someone willing to sell; and no one can sell unless there is some other one willing to buy. If Americans did not want to buy foreign goods, foreign goods could not be sold here even if there were no tariff. The efficient cause of the trade which our tariff aims to prevent is the desire of Americans to buy foreign goods, not the desire of foreign producers to sell them. Thus protection really prevents what the “protected” themselves want to do. It is not from foreigners that protection preserves and defends us; it is from ourselves.

5. On the Fallacy of Protecting Infant Industries: What are really infant industries have no more chance in the struggle for governmental encouragement than infant pigs with full-grown swine about a meal-tub. Not merely is the encouragement likely to go to industries that do not need it, but is likely to go to industries that can be maintained only in this way, and thus to cause absolute loss to the community by diverting labor and capital from remunerative industries.

6. Protectionism = Force: Trade does not require force. Free trade consists simply in letting people buy and sell as they want to buy and sell. It is protection that requires force, for it consists in preventing people from doing what they want to do. Protective tariffs are as much applications of force as are blockading squadrons, and their object is the same—to prevent trade. The difference between the two is that blockading squadrons are a means whereby nations seek to prevent their enemies from trading; protective tariffs are a means whereby nations attempt to prevent their own people from trading. What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.

7. On the Fallacy of Trade Retaliation: And in the same way, for any nation to restrict the freedom of its own citizens to trade, because other nations so restrict the freedom of their citizens, is a policy of the “biting off one’s nose to spite one’s face” order. Other nations may injure us by the imposition of taxes which tend to impoverish their own citizens, for as denizens of the world it is to our real interest that all other denizens of the world should be prosperous. But no other nation can thus injure us so much as we shall injure ourselves if we impose similar taxes upon our own citizens by way of retaliation. >>> more

Father McGlynn and Catholic Social Doctrine
In 1967, New York Times economics reporter Will Lissner (founder of the American Journal of Economics and Sociology in 1941) revealed how ecclesiastical bureaucrats in Rome had been misled in his article (Archived) on Father Edward McGlynn (1837–1900), the Progressive Era priest beloved by New York Irish Catholics.
Excerpt:

. . . forming the mistaken opinion that Henry George and Father McGlynn held doctrines which were inconsistent with those traditionally held by the Church. . . . And it is interesting that in the end, Henry George and Edward McGlynn won the greatest vindication — adoption of their position by the Magisterium, the teaching authority of the Church. ... Pius Ninth’s effort to save the monarchs, of whom he himself was one, from their inevitable doom, lost to the Church millions of workingmen and intellectuals who allied themselves with the growing democratic movement around the world.

When Leo XIII became Pope one of his first concerns was to undo the damage. In furtherance of this campaign he issued the encyclical letter, Rerum Novarum (On the Condition of Labor), on May 15, 1891. This document did much to update the antedeluvian thinking of Catholic conservatism. But it was muddled on radical land reform; it left the impression that there was a private right to possess land which superseded the common right of all men to the use of the earth — that common right that had been asserted by the Latin and Greek Fathers of the Church from the Apostolic Age onward. Henry George read the Pope a lesson in the history of economic doctrines and in the relations between economics and ethics in his The Condition of Labor, an Open Letter to Pope Leo XIII. This work of George’s had a profound influence upon Catholic social thinking in Europe and America.

When Father McGlynn was invited to write out a memorandum of his beliefs, it was fortunate that he had at his elbow Father Richard Burtsell. Like McGlynn he was a product of the Roman seminaries — a very quiet man who believed with McGlynn in the things he spoke about and in his right to say them. What they did was to set out that there are two rights: the common right to the use of land and the private right to possess it, and that an ethical land policy reconciled the two rights. On this basis the theologians judged that there was in McGlynn’s belief nothing contrary to Catholic doctrine, and he was restored to his full offices.

But there is an aspect of the McGlynn case that is often overlooked. The position for which McGlynn was condemned was not the one held by George which admitted the necessity for private possession of land, but rather the view [suggested] in Progress and Poverty, that land was common property. Indeed, McGlynn went further than George and held that private possession of land was immoral. >>> more

(Also of interest: Will Lessner 1937 report on Franco's Spain,
"Why Spain is Torn Asunder")

During 1881 and 1882, Henry George, at age 42-43, toured Ireland with Michael Davitt, as a journalist for The Irish World, funded by Patrick Ford, and reported: ”It is not merely a despotism; it is a despotism sustained by alien force, and wielded in the interests of a privileged class, who look upon the great masses of the people as intended but to be hewers of their wood and drawers of their water...." – Henry George, THE IRISH LAND LEAGUE MOVEMENT: 
Third Period, CH. III, 1881-1882

Henry George was arrested in Ireland by the Crown, (as a reporter for the Irish World). The consequent favorable review of Progress and Poverty (1879) in The New York Times catapulted George onto the international stage.

See notes on Michael Davitt and the Irish Land League HERE 
See notes on the Australian history, Part 3, Foreign Influence, HERE

Two commentaries by the late Dr. Robert V. Andelson (1931-2003) (Obituary).
1.
Henry George and The Reconstruction of Capitalism (1994)
by Dr. Robert V. Andelson, Professor of Philosophy, Auburn University, and Distinguished Research Fellow, American Institute for Economic Research.
Excerpt:

With the fall of the Iron Curtain, people all over the world seem to be searching for a “Middle Way.” Except in North Korea and Cuba, doctrinaire Marxism has been repudiated virtually everywhere, even by the Left. Socialism has become passé. Its adherents are no longer riding the crest of the wave of the future. Even the most energetic apostles of federal meddling, John Kenneth Galbraith, for example, eschew the Socialist label.

Yet, on the other hand, the free market economists of the classical period would scarcely recognize Capitalism as we know it in America today. Such luminaries of industry and finance as Lee Iacocca and Felix Rohatyn advocate a measure of government intervention that would have seemed entirely insupportable to Cobden or Ricardo. In the political field, the major candidates differ mainly on matters of degree. It is not so much a question of “Shall there be federal aid?” as of “How much federal aid shall there be?” or of “How shall it be administered?” As long ago as the late 1940s, “Mr. Conservative” himself, Senator Robert A. Taft, sponsored a bill for federal housing. Later, another Senate Republican leader, Bob Dole, was a major architect of the food stamp program, which is itself a dole, not just for the poor, but, above all, for agribusiness. A Republican president, Richard Nixon, instituted price controls, and cut the dollar loose from its last tenuous backing with the cynical quip, “We are all Keynesians now.”

But what we are presented with, from Right to Left, is not a coordinated structure embodying the best elements from both sides, not even a well-thought-out attempt at syncretism, but rather a bewildering welter of jerry-built solutions, each one based on political and emotional considerations and lacking any functional relationship to a unified system of socio-economic truth — let alone any rootage in a grand scheme of teleology or ethics.

A little Socialism here, and a little Capitalism there; a concern for the public sector here, and a concession to the profit motive there; a sop to the “underprivileged” here, and a bow to incentive there — put them all together, and what have you got? Nothing but a great big rag-bag, a haphazard pastiche of odds and ends without any bones and without any guts!

Nevertheless, there is a Middle Way. There is a body of socio-economic truth which incorporates the best insights of both Capitalism and Socialism. Yet they are not insights that are artificially woven together to form a deliberate compromise. Instead, they arise naturally, with a kind of inner logic, from the profound ethical distinction which is the system’s core. They arise remorselessly from an understanding of the meaning of the commandment: “Thou shalt not steal.” This Middle Way is the philosophy associated with the name of Henry George. >>> more

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2.
On Separating the Landowner’s Earned and Unearned Increment:
A Georgist Rejoinder to F. A. Hayek
Dr. Robert V. Andelson, (1931-2003) was Professor of Philosophy, Auburn University, and Distinguished Research Fellow, American Institute for Economic Research.
First published: 07 January 2003, Wiley

Abstract
On a given site, some increments of rent or land value may reflect improvements by the owner, either to it or to adjacent sites he or she also owns. Because these increments cannot always be distinguished with precision from the value arising from natural features and/or from improvements due to communal efforts, F. A. Hayek dismissed the Georgist paradigm as fatally flawed. This paper disputes Hayek’s criticism on the following grounds: 1. As Professor Backhaus observed, the degree of certainty in measurement demanded by Hayek is more rigorous than that required in practice for enforceable tax assessment. 2. Under a Georgist-style system, landowners who improve their land would, in any case, get to keep much more of the fruits of their efforts than under any alternative public revenue system. 3. The distinction between value produced by the owner, on the one hand, and that produced by nature and society, on the other, remains authoritative as an ideal even if not perfectly realizable in practice; hence, there is a sense in which even the theoretical elegance of Georgism is not undercut by Hayek's criticism. >>> more

Professor Michael Hudson finds fault:
Henry George’s Political Critics, 2008 (pdf)
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 67/1

ABSTRACT. Twelve political criticisms of George were paramount after he formed his own political party in 1887: (1) his refusal to join with other reformers to link his proposals with theirs, or to absorb theirs into his own campaign; (2) his singular focus on ground rent to the exclusion of other forms of monopoly income, such as that of the railroads, oil and mining trusts; (3) his almost unconditional support of capital, even against labor; (4) his economic individualism rejecting a strong role for government; (5) his opposition to public ownership or subsidy of basic infrastructure; (6) his refusal to acknowledge interest bearing debt as the twin form of rentier income alongside ground rent; (7) the scant emphasis he placed on urban land and owner occupied land; (8) his endorsement of the Democratic Party’s freetrade platform; (9) his rejection of an academic platform to elaborate rent theory; (10) the narrowness of his theorizing beyond the land question; (11) the alliance of his followers with the right wing of the political spectrum; and (12) the hope that full taxation of ground rent could be achieved gradually rather than requiring a radical confrontation involving a struggle over control of government. >>> more

Selected Biographies
- The Encyclopaedia of Greater Philadelphia
- Museum of San Francisco
- Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Henry George.org