The Last of the Georgists: The Forgotten 19th-Century Tax System Still Practiced in Arden, Delaware
Arden is governed by an obscure economic philosophy known as Georgism and was one of Joe Biden’s childhood hometowns. What secrets does it harbor?
All names of Arden residents have been changed to protect privacy.
In December of 2022, I visited one of the most fascinating communities in America: Arden, Delaware. Arden, a village of under 500 people in the northern end of the state, was established in the aftermath of the failed 1896 “Delaware Invasion,” an attempt by a group from Pennsylvania to convert the state government of Delaware to the radical principles of economist Henry George. When the Georgists’ campaign to flip the legislature failed, they decided to show the people of Delaware what they were missing by founding a town that would demonstrate the beauty of Georgism in action. This town was Arden.
Georgism, also known as the single tax movement, is a deceptively simple economic theory that won rabid converts in the late nineteenth century. The core idea of Georgism is that rather than owning land, people should essentially rent it from the government. This rent, the Land Value Tax, is the only tax that people pay in a true Georgist system.
The benefits of the Land Value Tax are theoretically many. First, it would eliminate what George regarded as society’s great evil: land speculation. Land speculators buy up tracts of land that they expect to go up in value and let them sit vacant until they can flip them for the greatest possible price. This practice was particularly virulent in the nineteenth century when the railroad boom created an exploding demand for Western land; the land the speculators amassed was no longer accessible to ordinary people seeking a home on the range.
If land ownership were eliminated, one could no longer make a living buying and selling land. The only way to make money off of land would be to do something productive on it—something that could make you more money than you were paying out in Land Value Tax. Thus, land monopolies would be broken up, and the land would be occupied by people who would establish farms, build enterprises, and construct houses on it. Whatever income they made from these efforts wouldn’t be taxed a cent. Opportunity would be restored, and poverty and homelessness would vanish.
So the theory went. Arden still operates on these principles (sort of–more on this later). No one owns the land they live on; they lease it from the local government, which owns all land in the town. The only tax Ardenites pay to the town is the Land Value Tax for the parcel they reside on. Technically, Arden is a commune, a living example of Henry George’s dream.
Arden constitutes one of the only surviving Georgist institutions in the U.S., along with the small Henry George School of Social Science in Manhattan. But during its heyday, Georgism attracted millions of people caught up in the tribulations of the Second Industrial Revolution. Americans who had aspired to be yeoman farmers and independent tradespeople now faced the prospect of lifelong industrial wage labor. Georgism seemed to offer a way out.
In 1886, Henry George nearly became mayor of New York on the United Labor Party ticket, backed by discontented working-class voters. After his death in 1897, his philosophy would gradually slide into irrelevancy, leaving behind little evidence of the movement it once ignited. However, Georgism has continued to win diverse converts through the years, from Winston Churchill to William F. Buckley to online dissident @Logo_Daedalus. As this lineup suggests, Georgism is inherently difficult to locate on the political compass. George wrote in a time before the reference points of contemporary political debates were established, a time when the future of America appeared open-ended in ways that are difficult for us to imagine today. The fact that, in an age when nearly everyone seems to be strait-jacketed by media-manufactured political identies, there is a place in Delaware still hanging on to this uncategorizable vision of utopia fascinated me.
There is one more thing I have to mention: Joe Biden lived in Arden when he was 12 years old, a fact that has brought Arden to the attention of a small cadre of conspiracy theorists on Twitter who accord Arden a central place in the Illuminati-Satanist-Q-Anon ecosystem. Beyond this, no one seems to notice the place. I had to see it for myself.
The Gild Hall. All photos by the author
My first stop in Arden was the Gild Hall, a large refurbished nineteenth-century barn that functions as the town’s community center. The founders of Arden were committed to medieval aesthetics in addition to Georgism, a commitment that is reflected in the numerous “Gilds” to which Ardenites belong, as well as the picture-perfect cottages and the lush village green. I was at the hall for a community dinner put on by the Dining Gild, to raise funds for the Swim Gild’s activities in the coming summer.
Inside the hall I found a large room filled with long tables. I got in line for dinner, stewed beef over mashed potatoes. A broad-shouldered woman with thick white hair asked me if I was new. “Yes,” I said, “I’m visiting from New York. I’m writing an article about the town.” She and everyone in the vicinity nodded and ah-ed with recognition. Apparently, word of my visit had traveled fast.
After a hushed conference with her neighbor, the woman introduced herself as Georgina Maris, one of the Village Trustees, and said that we should talk after dinner. I agreed, collected my beef, and went looking for a seat. I chose one across from a fifty-ish bald man in an International Workers of the World sweatshirt. As a barely-recovered leftist myself, I figured we could find some common ground. When I asked what brought him to Arden, he explained that he “had followed a blonde all the way to Minnesota” and after spending “three miserable winters” there, decided it was time to “get the hell out.”
Then the man next to him introduced himself. He told me that his father had been an engineer for the DuPont chemical corporation and had been drawn to Arden because it appealed to him as a “European.” A moment passed in which I entertained and dismissed the speculation that his father had been a Nazi. He proceeded to explain that many DuPont scientists came to Arden because it was a pocket of arts and culture in an otherwise philistine area. I reflected that the chemistry majors I had known in college had few cultural interests outside of hentai and ping pong but perhaps it was different at the top. The man told me that he had lived in Pennsylvania for most of his life and then, when looking for a place to retire, had drifted back to Arden.
It was notable to me that neither of these men were here in Arden because of any great commitment to the Land Value Tax. They didn’t seem to be Georgists at all. Maybe this wasn’t the esoteric community I had thought it was.
My thoughts were interrupted by the loud crash of a gong, struck by a 6’3’’ Santa Claus lookalike in a tie-dyed shirt. He bellowed his thanks to us for supporting the Arden Swim Gild and named those responsible for the beef, engendering friendly applause from the diners. I felt a thrill go through me at being in the presence of community spirit. Maybe this town wasn’t the radical commune I had come to find, but it had a nice vibe.
A few moments later, Georgina, the Village Trustee, returned with her husband and pulled up a chair next to me. “So what do you want to know?” She asked. I asked whether Joe Biden had really lived in the Ardens. She smiled slightly. “Why yes he did.”
Her husband told me that Joe Biden used to be a regular attendee at the annual Arden festival when he was a senator.
“Wow, I hadn’t realized he stayed so connected with the community,” I said.
“Oh, sure,” Georgina replied.
“But I personally don’t see Joe as a real Georgist,” her husband said, “more of a liberal.”
We talked for another half hour about the town and its history, but nothing was said that topped that statement.
Before I showed up, an Arden woman who I had messaged on Facebook had given me the names of some “real Georgists” in the community she said I should talk to. The next day I set out to do so. First up was Rachel Sanderson, who I arranged to meet outside the Buzz Ware Village Center, named for a deceased crafstman and Arden luminary. A chill drizzle descended from the ash-colored sky as I approached the Center. Rachel, a short blonde woman in her 50s was waiting outside.
She took me to her house, a gorgeous medievalist manor with a plaque outside announcing its name: The Estate. Inside, settled among stained glass windows and gilt paintings of knights and damsels, I spoke with Rachel and her husband Teddy.
I learned that they were members of a small club known as the Arden Georgists. The group centered on Mark Crispin, a figure of international repute in the Georgist community. Their purpose was to defend the Georgist principles of Arden against those who would let them lapse. “There’s always someone every few years at a town meeting who says ‘why don’t we get rid of the land tax?’” Teddy told me. Rachel and Teddy were adamant that without the Land Value Tax, there would be no Arden.
A house in Arden, Delaware.
I struggled to understand this at first. After spending a night and part of a day in Arden, it had begun to seem to me that, aside from a few olde tyme flourishes, the place resembled a typical upper-middle-class suburb. Black Lives Matter and Science is Real signs adorned driveways containing new-model Subarus. There was certainly no evidence of the industrial and agricultural development that Georgism was supposed to unlock; I guessed that most residents who worked commuted to white-collar jobs in Wilmington. And yet Rachel and Teddy told me that the great thing about Arden was that it was not “a cookie-cutter community.” Over the course of our conversation, I began to understand what they meant and to revise my first impression of the town.
I was struck when Teddy praised the town’s diversity by saying it had every kind of person under the sun– “just about every ethnicity you can imagine, just about every sexual orientation you can imagine, hardcore radical left and hardcore radical right.” One doesn’t often hear someone praise their community for having “every sexual orientation you can imagine” and for having a “hardcore radical right” in the same breath. It was at this point that I began to realize that Teddy and Rachel, at least, were not typical suburbanites. Their worldview didn’t fit into the binaries that define the cultural-political geography of 2020s America. As Teddy told me later in our conversation, “I’m not right-wing or left-wing, I’m a Georgist!”
Even more interesting were their responses when I pressed them on why they fought so hard to keep the tax in place. After all, it didn’t really seem to be doing any of the things Henry George had claimed it would do. What did it really add to Arden? Teddy and Rachel freely acknowledged that Arden wasn’t a true vindication of Georgism. In fact, Rachel admitted, Arden doesn’t even collect the full value of the land in tax. Instead, the tax is just based on the size of one’s lease. However, they said, this didn’t mean that the land tax didn’t matter. It mattered for the simple reason that it made Arden a “real community.” Not only did they all share the land they lived on, but the residents shared the common oddity of residing in a town run on an obscure economic theory.
This point was echoed in a conversation I had later with a resident who told me she didn’t think of herself as a Georgist. “Still,” she told me, “there’s a perverse pleasure in being different.” The very weirdness of Arden’s history and economic system continues to give its residents a sense of common identity and purpose, even after few true believers remain.
The sense of commonality fostered by the tax system is responsible, in Teddy and Rachel’s telling, for the extraordinarily high level of civic participation in Arden. Through town meetings, all residents are able to vote directly on community decisions. According to the Sandersons, the town meetings are always well-attended and can drag on for hours with heated debates over such issues as whether to put up a sign saying “Welcome to Arden.” “Why is that so controversial?” I asked. “Well nobody wants a sign!” Rachel snapped. Clearly, Arden is a place where the minutiae of town government can inspire real passion.
Not only does everyone participate in decision-making, but in between town meetings, the government is run almost entirely by volunteers. And then there are the Gilds, putting on plays, concerts, dinners, dances, and fairs. The upshot of this is that Arden occupies a far more central place in the lives and identities of its residents than a typical suburb. That is what makes it a “real community.”
“You went to dinner when you came here right? That’s what it's all about,” Rachel said. I thought of the warmth I had felt in that room full of long tables when the man in the tie-dye clanged the gong to make his announcement. There was something to what the Sandersons were saying, I decided.
My next visit was to the alpha Georgist himself, Mark Crispin. The interior of Mark’s house was crammed with books, mostly on economics and taxes. Over his fireplace was an oil portrait of Henry George, and posters propagandizing the Land Tax decorated his walls. If there was one real Georgist in Arden, I was with him now. The tall white-bearded man greeted me with a hug, and I felt steely ropes of muscle under his flannel shirt. He looked something like the weathered yeomen Henry George had imagined would benefit from his system. He brewed me a cup of coffee while I settled myself in a big, cracked leather chair.
My conversation with Mark ended up being Georgism 101. If I was able to succinctly and accurately summarize Georgism at the outset of this article, it is thanks to what I learned from Mark. This is not to say that everything Mark told me was crystal clear. Mark had an endearing and frustrating habit of following everything he said with a little rhetorical question that made it seem that he had just said something a child could see the logic of. Stuff like, “Now if the accrual of fixed assets is amortized through capital expenditures, nobody’s likely to take residuals at 10% in a big hurry, now are they?” Nevertheless, after an hour of being subjected to this Socratic harangue, I realized I had learned a lot.
Mark Crispin’s mantle.
Our conversation was interrupted at one point in a manner that is worth noting. Mark’s phone rang and he answered, after which he chatted enthusiastically with the person on the other line for about ten minutes. After he returned he apologized and said, “that was one of the prisoners who takes my Georgism classes.” Apparently, Mark had started a program of Georgist instruction that now operated in several prisons throughout the country. The prisoners were drawn to Georgism, Mark said, because it was about how everyone should be given a fair opportunity, and many of them felt they had been deprived of one. This prisoner in particular had been sentenced to life for murder-for-hire. “He says he killed the guy but no one paid him to do it,” said Mark.
My last night in Arden, I went to a Scottish-English folk-dancing night put on by the Dance Gild. There was a serious rainstorm that night, and I wondered if I would be the only one in attendance. To my pleasant surprise, I opened the door of the Gild Hall onto about 12 Arden-ites decked out in kilts and high socks. I hadn’t gotten the dress code memo but was nonetheless warmly received. I was just in time to be tutored for the next dance.
For those who don’t know what folk dancing is, it involves a group of people moving through a complicated series of positions via various twirls, gliding steps, and hand-offs. When executed properly it creates a pleasingly geometric pattern of movement. When executed poorly, it creates a dazzling trainwreck. And in order for the former and not the latter to take place, everyone has to do their job correctly.
I made it through the first dance more or less without incident. Things started to get tricky when we moved on to the “Beggar’s Hornpipe,” but I steeled my nerves and stuck with it. My fellow dancers assisted me with emphatic pointing and head nods, and I gradually began to catch on. By the last dance, I was finally feeing the rhythm of the group, its energy. As the rain poured down outside, I briefly knew the joy of moving as one.
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