Jackson Ralston and the California single tax campaign, 1933-1938

The depression decade of the 1930's produced in California a myriad of popular programs to restore prosperity and establish economic justice. One of the little known among these movements was a sustained effort by the single taxers from 1933 to 1938 to pass an initiative proposal that would have introduced land value taxation in California. It is the object of this study to examine this campaign both as an aspect of the impact of the depression on California and in the context of the history of the single tax. While this single tax campaign had much in common with the other protest and reform movements of the time, it is understood only in relation to the entire single tax movement. Propounded by Henry George in Progress and Poverty (1879), the single tax was a social reform vigorously and seriously debated in the United States until World War I. George, who was called "America's most original economist" by V. L. Parrington, has been a powerful influence on American thought. Few other thinkers have commanded so devoted a following. As a political force, however, the single tax perished during World War I, and the followers of Henry George turned to other outlets for their zeal. The revival of the single tax issue in politics in California during the 1930's was a spontaneous and ephemeral recrudescence of a political tradition that had been interred for a decade.