Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2130

Quote from a speech by Roy E. Larsen, President of Time, Inc. and Chairman of the National Citizens Commission for the Public Schools, as reported the following day in the New York Herald-Tribune of

June 11, 1950.

 

 

 

 

Roy E. Larsen, President of Time, Inc. and Chairman of the National Citizens Commission for the Public Schools, called for a new kind of thinking about our social problems and declared there is an urgent need “to break away from the vicious assumption which burst upon all of us in the ‘30s, that with regard to social matters private parties are irresponsible and that neither individuals nor corporations are capable of responsible and social action.”

     “The turn away from dependence on government for social responsibility must be expressed in concrete action,” Mr. Larsen declared. “I find in the community the incubator out of which the renewed concept of democratic freedom can be born.”

     “In developing initiative the local community is the indispensable management unit. Let’s develop a new kind of thinking about approaching our problems, a person-to-person approach. The sum total of local solutions will be a national solution.”

 

 

 

/Heath shortened this as follows. Emphases by Heath:/

 

The turn away from dependence on government for social responsibility must be expressed in concrete action. I find in the community the incubator out of which the renewed concept of democratic freedom can be born. The

local community is the indispensable management unit. Let us develop a new kind of thinking about our problems. The sum total of our local solutions will be the national solution.