To preface this post, this particular topic fits into a much wider debate on why the Populist movement and other reform movements of the late 20th century were unsuccessful. Some, in particular, Nell Painter have argued that the development of these reform movements in the 1880's and 1890's were hampered by the involvement of the United States in foreign politics. Henry George came to the conclusion that the primary problem of society at the time was the "unequal distribution of wealth." Henry George spearheaded the single tax movement, which argued from a particular worldview which was the result of the Great Railroad Strike (or Great Upheaval). This worldview argued that the domination of the wealthy over the apparatus of government, over the laboring classes, was unjust and unjustifiable. This conclusion was not universal. John Hay argued almost the exact opposite of the perspective from which Henry George did in his 1884 book The Breadwinners, that the better breeding, education, and logical decision making. According to Painter, this book was "the most widely read novel of the [Great Railroad] strike." She furthermore asserts that the use of journalism and nationalism in the Spanish-American War contributed to the death of the early reformist movements. Wars, as events that required national unity, would hamper reforms and calls to change the nation, as these were inherently divisive efforts.

Aside from the opposition, there are other explanations for the decline of George's ideas. Mark Wahlgren Summers argued in Party Games that the absence of a party system and the absence of an independent political machine led to the marginalization of the third-party movements including the single taxers (or Georgists), Populist Party, Labor Party, and others. They were thus forced into unsavory alliances with the party machines, as was the case with Henry George in 1886, where he gained support from the Irving Hall machine in New York in return for several thousand votes for Democratic candidates. After the formation of the United Labor Party and increasing labor unrest, Democratic and Republican candidates began to adopt policies supported by labor unions. This was the case of the state Democratic Party of New York in 1886. David B. Hill spoke for the state party committee, where he successfully made commitments to labor, decreasing support for an independent party. The parties eventually absorbed the movements that challenged them, discrediting the challengers that advocated for them.

The historian Shelton Stromquist argued that the Progressive movement argued against the ideas of class conflict that seemed prevalent during the 1880's and 1890's. They argued that class cooperation was the best means of achieving change and improving the lives of all people in American society. The Progressives, who were more active during the early twentieth century, had experienced the labor unrest of the Pullman Strike and the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Many of them were concerned that class conflict was tearing the United States apart, and that the only way to preserve the union was through the adoption of class cooperation. George, in fact, argued that this was the case. Progressives held much the same views as George, arguing that an established independent group ought to direct the resources of the community to prevent conflicts between labor and capital. Stromquist, however, notes that this view was contradictory. A commentator at the time noted that "between organized labor on the one hand and organized capital on the other, the large class which lives by rendering services to both stands an excellent chance of being crushed as between the upper and nether millstones." The reformers in the tradition of George and others divided over the issues of labor organizing, that is the mobilization of either class in service to their goals, and over the First World War. This led to the dissolution of the Progressive movement, which Stromquist traces to its precedents in Henry George and other reformers. With the failure of this movement, the economic realities of advancing industrialization hopelessly discredited the ideas of people such as George, Jane Addams, James Weaver, and others prominent in the Progressive and Populist movements.

While Poverty and Progress didn't go away, and is still reprinted (most recently by the Dodo Press in 2009), many of its ideas were no longer relevant as economic conditions advanced. For this reason, with increasing class conflict, political failures, the diversionist tactics adopted during the Spanish-American and First World War, Georgism became increasingly marginalized. Government responses to the Great Depression further made Henry George's ideas impractical. Economists still read the book *Progress and Poverty--*Hayek attributed his interest in economics to George's book--but it is no longer influential among the general populace.

References in order:

Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era, 2nd Edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008), 25, 26.

Mark Wahlgren Summers, Party Games: Getting, Keeping, and Using Power in Gilded Age Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 159, 221–223.

Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing "The People:" The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).

Robert V. Andelson, "On Separating the Landowner's Earned and Unearned Increment: A Georgist Rejoinder to F. A. Hayek," American Journal of Economics and Sociology 59, no. 1 (2000): 109–17. doi:10.1111/1536-7150.00016. Hayek wrote, "It was a lay enthusiasm for Henry George which led me to economics."