![microman arden microman arden](http://thefwoosh.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/featuredarden-592x231.jpg)
So in July 1911, aggravated by the shoemaker's antics, a group left the town limits, found the appropriate authorities, and swore out a warrant for Brown's arrest. The Ardenfolk had institutions-the trustees who set the rents had a certain degree of power, and there were regular town meetings too-but they weren't a municipality and they didn't have any police. And anarchists, like our sexually explicit friend George Brown, who kept a cottage there with his common-law wife. It was a largely lower-middle-class crowd, with a high number of artists and craftsmen it attracted not just Georgists but other sorts of nonconformists, from socialists to vegetarians. (Or a summer camp-many of the part-time residents slept in tents.) But by the end of the decade, particularly after the founders made some tweaks to the lease agreement in 1908, a year-round community had formed. I just called Arden a "town," but for its first few years it was essentially a summer resort. And with that double experiment in communalism and privatization, Arden was born. In other words, they set up a private town and enacted the Single Tax program contractually. In 1900 they acquired some farmland outside Wilmington, created what amounted to a community land trust, leased out plots to anyone who wanted to move in, levied rents based on the value of the unimproved land, and used the rent money to pay for public goods. Unable to achieve their ideas at the ballot box, a group of Georgists decided to take another approach. Not only did their gubernatorial candidate get only 2.4 percent of the vote, but within a year the movement's foes would insert a provision into the state constitution that made a George-style tax impossible. More than a few got tossed in jail for their efforts.
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The campaigners crisscrossed the state in armbands, knapsacks, and Union Army uniforms, delivering streetcorner speeches and singing Single Tax songs ("Get the landlords off your backs/With our little Single Tax/And there's lots of fun ahead for Delaware!").
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No income tax, no sales tax, no tax on the improvements to a property-just one tax on land. The Single Taxers were followers of Henry George, a 19th century economist who argued that government should be financed solely by a tax on land values. Arden's origins go back to the Delaware Invasion of 1895 and '96, when the Single Tax movement tried to take over the state. I should back up and explain a few things. Not, at least, in the usual sense of the word. In fact, the town of Arden didn't have a government at all. But that required outside help, because the town of Arden did not have a police force. He broke up the next meeting too, and finally, Sinclair wrote, "declared it his intention to break up all future meetings."Īt this point some of the locals wanted to have him arrested for disturbing the peace. When the club asked him to cut it out, Brown declared his free-speech right to continue and kept talking until he'd broken up the meeting. According to the novelist Upton Sinclair, who lived at the time in a little Arden house that his neighbors had dubbed the Jungalow, Brown insisted on "discussing sex questions" at the Arden Economic Club. This was a pattern: Brown liked to talk, and not everyone liked to listen to him. Many "onlookers needed assurance," The Single Tax Review reported, that Brown "was only 'part of the show.'" But Brown decided to add it to the program anyway, so he dressed in rags, caked himself with mud, and invaded the proceedings, taunting the other characters and demanding alms from the audience. This annoyed some of the other players, because no such role had actually been written.
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One Ardenite, an anarchist shoemaker named George Brown, played a beggar. They held a town pageant in Arden, Delaware, on September 5, 1910: a medieval procession with performers dressed as knights, troubadours, pages, and squires. Courtesy Arden Craft Shop Museum and the Arden Archives.