Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2931

Letter from Spencer MacCallum, Box 180, Tonopah NV 89049, to Heath’s physicist friend Fred Singer, Science and Environmental Policy Project, 4084 University Drive, Fairfax VA 22030

September 23, 1998

 

Original is missing.

 

 

Dear Dr. Singer,

 

What a pleasure talking with you this morning and discovering that you are indeed the Fred Singer that my grandfather, Spencer Heath, so enjoyed knowing years ago. I worked closely with my grandfather, assisting him in various ways including helping in the publication of his major work, Citadel, Market and Altar, and in turn he was my teacher and mentor from whom I learned to think. (He once said all people think alike–so far as they think at all!) I inherited his books and papers and now am organizing his writings to make them accessible for study. They’re now computerized but not indexed; that’s the next major task after completing a book I’m writing tentatively entitled, RECONCILIATION OF PROPERTY IN LAND with Classical Liberal Thought.

     Meanwhile, a friend and colleague, Alvin Lowi, Jr., who also knew Spencer Heath, is drafting a paper on the scientific orientation of Heath’s thought. This is the paper that I asked if you would critique, since it deals at a fundamental level with science and the prospects for an authentic natural science of society. The extent, of course, of any comment you might make would depend entirely on how interesting you found the paper — which could mean as little as no comment at all. The enclosed draft comes to you with that understanding.

     You asked about me. I’m a free-lance social anthropologist, 67 years old, doing research and writing on my own. You might enjoy my article on Somalia, enclosed, from the June number of The Freeman. The one book to my credit thus far is The Art of Community, published by the Institute for Humane Studies many years ago when Baldy Harper was still living. I’ve also edited and published some books on free-market money from the papers of the late E.C. Riegel, whose intellectual estate my wife, Emalie, and I administer.

     In addition, I devoted the better part of ten years working with a village of extraordinarily motivated, wholly self-taught pottery artists I chanced upon in northern Chihuahua in 1976. My role, by encouraging quality, doing articles and arranging museum exhibitions, workshops and demonstration tours from New England to California, was to build a market for the best work they had it in them to produce. In this way I had the privilege of gradually introducing them to the art world (I graduated from Princeton in art history in 1955). Happily their work has now gained international recognition and is the frequent subject of books and major museum exhibitions. It can be explored on internet under the name of the village, Mata Ortiz, or that of the master potter, teacher, experimentalist and artist who was responsible for it all happening, Juan Quezada.

     As for us, Emalie and I bought a house a year ago and put down roots here in Tonopah, Nevada. Besides being very much my colleague in ideas, Emalie is a nurse practioner and devotes a major part of her time to being the community health nurse for Tonopah.

     I can’t tell you how much we both admire your readiness to speak out for science. We loudly applaud SEPP. What a surprise it was when Elaine Hawley on the telephone this morning told me that SEPP is housed in the same building as IHS. Incidentally, when you are in the Harper Library next time, if you will look to the left of the door as you enter, you will see a bronze bust of Spencer Heath. The bust was sculpted at his farm at Elkridge, Maryland, which I think you must have visited, by Lily Rona (the wife, incidentally, of physicist Felix Ehrenhaft), using clay dug from the property.

 

With cordial good wishes,

 

 

 

 

 

 

Encls:    Alvin Lowi, Jr., working draft, “The Legacy of Spencer           Heath”

 

          MacCallum, “A Peaceful Ferment in Somalia,” Freeman,             June, 1998