“We must make land common property”
Henry George’s Moral Crusade
From Promontory Summit, Utah, about seventy miles northwest of Salt Lake City, the vast expanses of the American West stretch in every direction. Here, on May 10, 1869, Leland Stanford, a cofounder of the Central Pacific Railroad, tapped a symbolic golden spike into a final piece of track that linked his firm’s line running east from Sacramento to the Union Pacific Railroad’s line running west from Omaha. After Stanford, who was also a former governor of California, completed his allotted task, a crowd of railroad workers and dignitaries cheered. Then a four-character telegraph message was sent to New York and San Francisco: “D-O-N-E.”1
The completion of the transcontinental rail link marked another victory over geography and topography for the rapidly expanding American republic. It also signaled a fresh triumph for American industrial capitalism, which just four years earlier had prevailed over Southern plantation capitalism in the Civil War. From distant London, Karl Marx saw this clearly. As long as slavery survived in North America, Marx believed, it would restrict industrial development and slowed the rise of a revolutionary class of wage workers. “Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin,” Marx wrote in the first volume of Capital.2 But “a new life immediately arose from the death of slavery. The first fruit of the American Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation, which ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California, with the seven-league boots of the locomotive.”3 In August 1866, labor activists meeting in Baltimore had announced the creation of the National Labor
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