Henry George was a self-taught economic theorist who died in 1897 while running for Mayor of New York City. John C. Lincoln was a Cleveland industrialist and devotee of Henry George’s thinking and writing. The two men’s legacies were the subject of extensive litigation in Phoenix, Arizona, over the past several years, resulting in an Arizona Court of Appeals decision addressing who has the authority to challenge the actions of a charitable foundation.

Henry George was most famous for writing Progress and Poverty, first published in California in 1879. In that book and several that followed, George advocated a system that, he insisted, would permit government to function on the revenues generated by a "single tax" on the value of real estate. He theorized that such a tax system would be fairer than the multitude of different taxes even then in place, and that it would push landowners to make their property more productive rather than hold it for speculation.

John C. Lincoln was very interested in George’s economic theories—to the point that he established the Lincoln Foundation in 1946 to "teach, expound and propagate the ideas of Henry George." Because John C. Lincoln was a Phoenix-area resident (and booster) by that time, the Foundation was established in Arizona. For many years the Foundation made substantial gifts to the Henry George School of Social Science in New York and other organizations active in the Georgist movement.

After John C. Lincoln’s death his son David C. Lincoln took over management of the Foundation. Over the ensuing decades some of the more vociferous proponents of Henry George’s theories began to complain that the Foundation was drifting away from its founder’s single-minded interest in those theories.

In 1999 and 2002 a number of advocates of Henry George’s theories filed two lawsuits against the Lincoln Foundation, individual Foundation Board members, the Arizona Attorney General and others. The lawsuits, planned, threatened and discussed over a number of years (see, for example, the Phoenix New Times article describing the possibility of litigation as early as 1995), argued that the Foundation should be forced to adhere to what the complainants saw as its original mission, that individual Board members should be removed and replaced with more supportive individuals, and that the Arizona Attorney General should be forced to step in and monitor the operation of the charitable Foundation. Two separate probate judges in Phoenix dismissed the lawsuits.

The Arizona Court of Appeals upheld the dismissals, finding that the complainants could not show that they had any "special interest" in the operation of the Foundation entitling them to bring a lawsuit. The Court adopted the view that not just any individual or organization can challenge the actions of a charity, and that merely being a possible beneficiary of the charity is not enough to confer standing. Robert Schalkenbach Foundation v. Lincoln Foundation, Inc., June 17, 2004.

According to some analysts, Henry George's Progress and Poverty was one of the most important books to come out of California in its early days. His personal story is interesting, and his theories (though little-known and seldom discussed today) continue to have some vitality and to attract a varied collection of devotees.

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