The Correspondence and Publications of Joseph Dana Miller, 1897-1939

Collection Overview

Title: The Correspondence and Publications of Joseph Dana Miller, 1897-1939

Predominant Dates: 1915-1922

Arrangement: Arranged in three series: 1) Correspondence; 2) Articles and Addresses; and, 3) The Single Tax Review

Biographical Note

Joseph Dana Miller was a prolific writer, editor, and agitator for the single tax. Born in 1865, Miller was only 20 years old when he participated in Henry George’s first campaign for mayor of New York City in 1886. He served as secretary of the Hudson County Single Tax Club and in 1901, founded and edited The Single Tax Review – a bi-monthly periodical of the single tax movement. In 1913, he changed the name to Land and Freedom, which he continued to edit until his death on May 9, 1939.

Miller authored dozens of articles and several books including two volumes of poetry – Verses from a Vagrant Muse (1894) and Thirty Years of Verse Making (1926). In 1917 he published The Single Tax Yearbook, an encyclopedia of the movement to enact Henry George’s single tax on land values.

In 1919, Miller served as secretary of the Single Tax Party and in 1921, was the Commonwealth Land Party (formerly, the Single Tax Party) nominee for mayor of New York City. Miller was a close friend of Oscar Geiger and a founding trustee of the Henry George School of Social Science. He also served on the Board of Trustees of the Henry George Foundation of America and the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation.

Following his death in 1939, Stephen Bell, a close friend and single taxer, penned the following tribute, testifying to Miller’s wide influence of the movement:

We have lost a friend, a brother, a wise counselor, a man of renown, but we are fortunate in having had him so long. He was one of those to whom were given the vision of the Promised land, the Civilization that will be when men have grown up to mental and spiritual maturity, but were not permitted to enter it.

For half a century he cherished that vision, which will be realized when men have learned the deep significance of Abraham Lincoln’s prayer at Gettysburg—“That this nation, under God shall have a new birth of freedom,” the freedom to earn an honest livelihood, a freedom in which every man may sit under his own vine and fig tree with none to vex him and make him afraid—and sought to show the vision to others.

Whatever may be one’s lot in life, to have had this vision of the civilization that will be when Freedom truly reigns over the world, and to have done somewhat to bring that civilization nearer, is something to make life worth living, and to none was the vision clearer than to Joseph Dana Miller, who did what he could in his day to hasten that day, when “Thy will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

My grief at his passing is born of a deep sense of personal loss, but it is tempered by a feeling of exaltation and thankfulness that I was privileged to know him for over a period of forty-five years, and can say ‘He was my friend.’ And I have an abiding faith that I shall see him again, face to face, for our social philosophy long ago ‘revived a faith that was dead.’

References

Stephen Bell, “Tribute to Joseph Dana Miller” (May 10, 1939)