Matt Stoller's take on the traditional July 4th US Independence Day oration in the year 2025. My abridged cut and paste follows. Read the whole thing at Stoller's substack Big:
“Is there not growing up among us a class who have all the power without any of the virtues of an aristocracy? We have simple citizens who control thousands of miles of railroad, millions of acres of land … who choose the governors of sovereign states as they name their clerks … and whose will is as supreme with the legislatures as that of a French king sitting in bed of justice.” - Henry George, 1879
The most famous [July 4th] oration is one we know about today, it’s Frederick Douglass’ speech in 1852, asking “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
Douglass didn’t reject America, though his was a biting speech. He lauded the greatness of the American founders for their high ideals and accomplishments, while pointing out they were not extended to the large slave population. “The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me,” he said. “The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”
In 1861, Lincoln offered the framework of economic equality in a speech about the Civil War, with a specific focus on the oligarchy of Southerners who thought the hired or enslaved worker was an inherent class, that capital came first, and it put people to work. That was not true, he argued. Capital deserved a fair return, but, he noted, “Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
Lincoln’s political economy framework was populist, viewing the basis of American republicanism as the hired laborer turned small proprietor. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself,” he said, “then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This is the just and generous and prosperous system which opens the way to all, gives hope to all, and consequent energy and progress and improvement of condition to all.”
The heir to the abolitionists in the late 19th century was another thinker and political actor - Henry George, who focused, as Douglass did, on land values. In his 1879 book Progress and Poverty, lauded by many former abolitionists and their children, George showed that urban land values drove inequality. Land, which cannot be created or destroyed, increased in worth not based on the effort of the owner, but based on whether there was social activity occurring around it. As such, an owner increased rents based on work he himself did not do, extracting unfairly from both labor and capital.
Georgists were pivotal in the Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson administrations, helping to structure the Federal Reserve and the national park system, as well as influencing a generation of politicians who made the New Deal. Georgeists ultimately won the debate [about political economy], created the New Deal in the 1930s, and the 20th century was a Georgist century.
Unlike the absurd libertarian view that government is an alien force, it’s right there in the Declaration [of Independence] that we establish a government to secure our rights.
In 1970, Milton Friedman, representing a new generation of would-be oligarchs presented a different set of values. He wrote an article in the New York Times preaching the shareholder theory of the firm, or absolute liberty for capitalist. “There is one and only one social responsibility of business,” he wrote, “to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.” Friedman’s theory was ahistorical nonsense; Americans have used corporations in all sorts of ways, at its heart a firm is a state-chartered collective endeavor meant to help us mass people and capital to do something socially useful while offering a fair return on investment.
In America today, we have many of the same challenges faced in George’s day. There’s an out-of-control financial sector engaging in speculation over resources that should be managed for the public good, not just land, but things like data, natural resources, knowledge, and even low orbit space and the atmosphere. And there is an undercurrent of unsatisfied rage.
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Love George. A real populist hero and seminal character in American history, and often mocked by mainstream economics as a one-issue crank and overlooked in the US history textbooks.
George was calling out speculation and bankers in the Gilded Age; the original one, late 1800s. But if you do reduce him to his signature issue, ending land speculation, socializing private land holdings, and thereby ending private property as we know it, this one idea was comically out of step with the carrot Lincoln was dangling out there in his "free labor"/not slave labor, "free soilers" speech, quoted above.
It's not just that the worker wants fair or living wages but believes, in Lincoln's classic telling, that they ought to get paid enough that if they work hard and they get the job done they ought to be able to save up a little and eventually own a home of their own or even go into business for themselves or strike out west for a piece of land of their own. Lincoln was translating the frontier spirit in American history into an expression of the American Dream for common labor or the common American worker. It's a crucial populist sentiment and was in the air that I breathed in the working class home I grew up in and I imagine is widespread in working class households, of any color or religious creed, going all the way back to Lincoln, or even Jefferson and Franklin.
George thought, by contrast, everyone would be better off without private trading and speculation in land, and he might have been right, no question financial speculation has much to do with the crime of poverty, as he liked to call it, but so much for the republican experiment and the ownership society, still a big populist deal even today. People like the idea, the promise, that they can someday own their own little piece of the American dream.
Nonetheless, in actuality, Henry George was hardly a one-issue crank but a kind of dynamo for populist democratic uplift and opportunity. He is credited with almost single handedly instituting the use of secret ballots in elections, developing public utilities, and spreading the use of progressive taxes. He was the godfather of rent controls. He was a champion of the industrious little guy like few others in American history. It was said of his funeral procession in NYC, so grand was it, that in that time it was second only in size to Lincoln's.
In his famous July 4th oration Douglass explains how the promise of equality is denied many Americans like him and then Lincoln explains how slavery undermines the rights of free labor. Many northerners still racist to the bone in the 1860s supported an end to slavery, or more specifically that it not be extended to new states and threaten the opportunities of "free soilers" spreading into the north and west. In other words, they were ready to fight a war to end slavery so as to protect the rights of free labor over race slavery or slave labor of any kind.
In the late 19th century, George, wrote and organized against the railroads and Robber Barons, urging governments, locally and nationally, to reform some of the worst abuses of private capital in the Gilded Age; abuses that were turning land rents and work into wage slavery. It's no wild claim to suggest George's efforts culminated in a farmer's populist movement and many Progressive Era reforms by the turn of the 20th century that protected workers and extended the rights of labor.
Nor a stretch to suggest Stoller views America's "populist soul," in the 19th century anyway, as embodied in the triumvirate of Douglass, Lincoln, and George. And now Stoller sees faint signs of real political rebellion, in the spirit of that triumvirate, brewing again; some populist George in democratic socialist NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Hope he's right.