Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2465

Carbon of letter from Spencer MacCallum to his aunt, Beatrice O’Connell, in Winchester, Virginia, Treasurer of the newly incorporated Science of Society Foundation

October 17, 1956

 

 

Dear Aunt Beatrice:

     I’ve been on the point of writing you for several days now, but we’ve been terrifically busy since before the weekend. Popdaddy conceived of a possible solution for the Suez problem, whereby the interested governments, including Egypt, would invite the principal users to form a corporation, chartered by all of the governments and on agreement with the corporation to give up all present or future sovereignty or taxing power over the Canal territory. The corpora­tion, a proprietary oasis in the midst of a political world, by international acknowledgement of its owner­ship, would from its revenues and from the sale of shares pay a large sum to Egypt for giving up all present sovereignty over the Canal territory, and also buy the equity rights of the lately expropriated owners (which wouldn’t come very high!). The only way to get rid of future jealousies, favoritism and discrimination in the administration of the Canal would be to substi­tute for political control by one or more nations some such purely proprietary administration that everyone would feel bound to respect — out of self-interest if for no other reason.

     In the name of the Foundation, for the most part, Popdaddy has written individual letters (and very good ones, too) to fourteen people, all containing the same substance as the copy of our letter to The London Times, enclosed. The others went to Frank Chodorov, John Chamberlain, HUMAN EVENTS, NATIONAL REVIEW, WALL STREET JOURNAL, LONDON TIMES, BALTIMORE SUN, WASHINGTON STAR, Titus Podea, Mrs. Russell Davenport, Harry F. Byrd, J. Bracken Lee, Bernard Baruch, Winston Churchill.

     So that’s a project of the Foundation accomplished — proposal of a non-political solution of the Canal problem that would satisfy the interests of all parties.

     The main reason for writing now, though, was that I’m afraid I didn’t explain clearly what the main, big reason for reading proof at this point is. It’s not an editorial job, but a job of checking — for grammatical mistakes of spelling and punctuation or typographical errors. (And occasionally maybe a mistake in logic). The other is secondary. Crawfish and Cather picked up two grammatical mistakes in the first batch, none in the second, that we had missed in spite of our own care­ful reading; and we delighted. So if I made it sound like a major editorial job, I’m sorry; excuse me. Each batch shouldn’t have taken more than a couple of hours careful reading.

     Crawfish, as a typical academic physicist, insists that Popdaddy cannot properly group social energy and mechanical and physical energy all in the same category as different manifestations of the same, basic stuff or energy of the Universe. But Popdaddy has finally found a legitimate physicist who not only supports Popdaddy, but goes a whole lot further and even brings conscience and moral considerations into the one large pattern of universal energy! He’s Dr. John J. Grebe, Director of Physical Research for the Dow Chemical Company. Popdaddy’s having a wonderful time reading his stuff and
thinking how to write to such a grand generalizer and synthesizer. Like Popdaddy, he describes all ultimate reality as events, which he calls “cycles”, in the fluent transformations of energy manifestations. (Big words; ugh.)                          

     How do you like Popdaddy’s enclosed outline of talks? I think it’s fine looking. The other pamphlets are ready but we haven’t had time to pick them up from the printers. Now it comes back to me, the immediate reason for this letter; I had a feeling there was some important, contemporary thing that had slipped out of mind:

Will you please pay the enclosed bill from the Quality Printing Company by an early mail? We promised that we would pay it promptly.

Now that the reason for this letter has finally come back to mind, I’ll stop rambling and close. You’ll be seeing Popdaddy this weekend, and I expect that I may come down too.

So long,         Secretary