Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2671

Letter from Arline Stallings, Preferred Employment Service,

211-12 Tower Building, Baltimore 2, Maryland, with carbon of her rough draft of a letter of same date to Malcolm Muir, Editor-in-Chief, Newsweek, Newsweek Building, Broadway and 42^nd Street, New York 36, New York

August 5, 1957,

 

 

Dear Mr. Heath:                   August 5, 1957

 

I am enclosing herewith copy of letter sent to Mr. Muir of Newsweek. I hope it will prove sufficiently interesting to intrigue Mr. Muir as it intrigued me.

 By the way, tell Spencer MacCallum I decided not to “Drop the names of Dr. Virgil Jordan and Dr. Felix Morley in the letter” because it might weaken rather than strengthen the case. Instead, I just casually forgot to take it out with the other enclosures therein.

 Now we shall wait and see what we shall see, and hope for the best. In any event, I have crashed ‘the party’, and whether we shall be invited to stay and share the banquet or whether we shall be put to the task of washing the dishes for the rest of the guests for such audacity is also in the laps of the gods.

   Best wishes always.

Cordially yours,

/s/ Arline Stallings

___________________________

[Note: Excuse rough typing — forgot to put carbon in final letter,

and time limited, but with corrections, this is the letter sent. AVS]

 

Dear Mr. Muir:                             August 5, 1957

Has the attached book “Citadel, Market and Altar” by Spencer Heath, come to your attention? If not, I can think of no other magazine more qualified to review this refreshingly new approach to modern business and governmental trends than Newsweek and I am, therefore, enclosing this book with this thought in mind.

      Why am I, as a private individual, approaching you with the above indicated object in view? Well, first, because as a private individual, I am particularly interested in both the present and the future of ‘me and mine,’ secondly, as a Personnel Counselor, I am daily concerned with employment problems in the governmental trends, which appear to be gradually regimenting individuals into a system of controls at the expense of private decision and incentives.

      Granted the choice “to be or not to be” is still individual, to a degree, at the same time, regimentation is more and more in definite evidence.

      Therefore, from this individual viewpoint, at least, it appears the socialization trend as an octopus of governmental centralization reaching more and more into States’ rights territory, and States’ rights in turn becoming less and less representative of individual rights therein.

      And while Mr. Heath’s little book is certainly not a guaranteed cure-all to nullify the Platonic theory that seems to have fathered the philosophies advanced since His Day, it certainly represents an original approach that should challenge other thinkers into dynamic action to stem the tide of progressive socialization.

      I particularly liked Mr. Heath’s commonsense application to this new line of reasoning as a “Research Engineer’s Report” form, outlining “Modern market technology of free enterprise to provide public as well as private services at a profit (in place of chronic debts and deficits.”) It was simply these two quotations that whetted my curiosity to read the book and the more I read the book, the more interested I became. It is simple, direct, positive, practical. Hence my hope you will likewise be interested in its challenging appeal to the individual’s contribution through “Services and Contracts.”

 

                        Very truly yours,

AS/vt                        Arline Stallings