“I must get out of the business, or prove that this book is wrong,” declared Tom L. Johnson after reading Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879).
Johnson was not alone in having his world shattered by Progress and Poverty. The author and activist Emma Lazarus claimed that anyone capable of understanding the arguments would never again be able to “dine or sleep or read or work in peace until the monstrous wrong in which we are all accomplices be done away with”.