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Henry George and the shakers: evolution of communal attitudes towards land ownership
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, April, 1996 by John E. Murray
I
Introduction
The influence of Henry George on the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, better known as the Shakers, has been misunderstood. By the late nineteenth century, the New York Shakers owned several thousand acres of land, on which ever fewer Shakers were available to work. Other eastern Shakers were developing interests in social issues of the day. It was natural that Shaker concerns would gravitate toward land reform as the single tax proposed by Henry George offered the possibility of more equitable land distribution. Shaker enthusiasm for George's work (Desroche, 1971) was encouraged by Elder Frederick W. Evans, the most prominent Shaker of the day. Evans tirelessly wrote pamphlets and letters to newspapers urging both the Society and the outside world to adopt George's ideas.
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The Shakers were (and are) a Christian communal group. They owned their property communally, refused to join local militias because of their pacifism, and lived celibately so as to concentrate on more spiritual matters. Eighteen of their communes, scattered in an arc between Maine and Kentucky, lasted at least 75 years. Although best known for their music and furniture, the interaction of their religious beliefs and the economic incentives created by their communal structure makes them eminently suitable for study by social scientists (Murray 1995).
Motivations behind Shaker writings on Henry George were complex. Shaker support for George has hitherto been attributed to the very real concern of Elder Evans that administration of Shaker land holdings was diluting the Society's spiritual life. More personal reasons lay behind Evans's passion for land reform, however, which can explain his confusion regarding Henry George. Earlier in the century Evans had energetically aided his brother, George Henry Evans, in creating the most effective of the antebellum land reform movements, the National Reform Association. National Reform featured demands for limits on the amount of land any one person could own and limits on the amounts of land that could be bequeathed to heirs. The Shakers, among whom by this time was Frederick Evans, reacted ambivalently to a movement that in some small way was directed against them as large landowners.
By the time of Henry George, land was as much a burden for the shrinking number of Shakers as it was an asset. Frederick Evans, now a prominent Shaker Elder, saw in George's popularity a way to force the Society to do what it seemingly lacked the will to accomplish on its own: sell off its excess land. Evans thought that George would endorse laws to limit Shaker land ownership that would require the Shakers to sell off much of their holdings. Why Evans thought this is unclear, as George had no interest in the land reforms that had first been proposed earlier in the century. The plans of both G. H. Evans and Henry George bore some similarities (Zahler, 1941, 197; Perlman, 1928, 183-86; Ely, 1886, 41-43).(1) But the single tax, according to George, would make ownership restrictions unnecessary. Evans's support for Henry George seems to have been due to his spiritual beliefs: he wrote that Henry George was a reincarnation of George Henry Evans. Elder Frederick thus promoted Shaker support for Henry George's land reform program for reasons otherworldly as well as worldly.
II
The Evans Brothers and Early Shaker Experience with Land Reform
Frederick Evans and George Henry Evans emigrated in 1820 from England. They settled with their father in Binghamton, New York. Both boys served craft apprenticeships, George Henry as a printer and Frederick as a hatter. After experimenting with membership in an Owenist community in Ohio, Frederick moved to New York City in 1830. There, he briefly rejoined George Henry, who was beginning his life's work.
George Henry Evans was a publisher of reformist newspapers. In them, he stressed the need for land as a safety valve for labor: the easier it was for land to draw off surplus urban labor, the greater the possibilities for workers to earn more than subsistence wages. The message met an uneven reception. Financial problems, in addition to George Henry's ill-health, kept his papers out of print from 1835 to 1841. In his papers of the 1840s, he developed a consistent theory to support his land reform proposals. He claimed that since land was not the result of human labor and was necessary to human life, therefore the principles of equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence required that it not be made into alienable private property. By this reasoning, the public domain should be thrown open to settlers, land bequests should be sharply limited, a maximum quantity of land that could be owned by any one person should be set (usually 160 acres was proposed), and creditors should no longer be able to seize a debtor's homestead (Zahler, 1941; Evans, 1888). These were the essential ideals of the National Reform Association, founded by George Henry Evans and colleagues in Feb., 1844.
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