Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1440

Carbon of letter from Heath to Crane Brinton, 98 Widener Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

October 25, 1945

 

 

Dear Dr. Brinton:

 

     Your very kind letter of October 10, 1945, was duly received. I am pleased to know of your safe return from your extended service abroad to a more pleasant and normal life. Although you may not be in New York before the end of this year, I shall certainly be delighted to know whenever you are coming and to contribute to your enter­tainment here so far as you will permit me to do so.

     I, myself, have just returned from a tour in Central and Western New England and am planning now to be at Andover and Cambridge on October 30, or October 31. I shall be most happy if at that time I can have your company as my guest and perhaps exchange a few ideas and impressions with you over the luncheon or dinner table or other convenient resort.

     I must thank you for placing my critique of Henry George so soon after the “annoying odds and ends” on your calendar and hope you will find in it something of much greater value than the merely destructive criticism, with which the latter, however, I think it abounds.

     I am always impressed by the apparent impossibility of putting down false theories and beliefs by anything less than the disclosure of relevant facts or relationships that were previously obscure or unknown.

     Apropos of the SRL /Saturday Review of Literature/ editorial board and other “highbrow” juntas bewailing the supposed obsolescence of “modern man,” it seems to me that these intellectual geese (steppers) react to the Atomic Bomb as rationally as the more feathered kind do when an explosion takes place in their midst. They all fly to the political bait, the governmental decoy and totalitarian blind. Mass circulation must follow the masses — down the road to serfdom. Freedom, I surmise lies not in the middle or between, but in the opposite direction.

Sincerely yours,