Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3089

Holden Correspondence – to, from, and about Arthur Cort Holden

1949-1961

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1781

Pencil notes for a letter to the Architectural Record over the

name of Arthur C. Holden on the subject of Community Organization

No date

 

Gentlemen:

Architecture is the organization of environment.

Men had environment before they had houses — environment as organized by nature and from which they sprang. Architecture is the human organization of environment. It began, doubtless, with temporary structures — shelters, dwellings, altars and shrines, and as these grew into larger and more permanent forms architecture became perhaps a cult and from that a profession and eventually under its plans not buildings alone but their common settings and surroundings, small communities, even splendid cities, arose. These ancient organizations of material elements into beauty and use were acts of archi-technology, highest art, things dreamed and made, but of them only ruins remain.

All this physical creation was based on the political organization of men. The grandeur that rested on tribute and taxation, on captives and slaves could not endure and now only crumbling ruins remain. These cities were only citadels of authority and power, of the arch-rulers and destroyers of men, for their indulgence and munificence, their depravities and displays. There was no architecture of industry and exchange nor the habitations of common men. Only after the old empires went down, and since wider freedom and deeper knowledge of physical things taught men how to create wealth faster than the modern political states could capture or destroy it, has there been any architecture of industry and exchange or of the haunts and habitations of productive men.

Cities of today are not built on the spoil of kings or subsidies from the hand of taxing powers. They are founded on wealth uncaptured from its producers and left to the free enterprise of those who created it. This their architecture reflects. For their sites and streets and the structures thereon — their real (permanent) estate — is given over almost entirely to productive uses. These properties, largely unappropriated by government, remain under the free enterprise of their owners; thus they are occupied productively (so far as free enterprise and employment thereby is permitted to extend). Theirs is the architecture of production and peace. Only small parts of the real estate of modern cities (except in Washington, D.C.) is “socialized,” under full and outright control of the political state. The function of these /small/ parts is substantially as of old. For they too are built and maintained by the same political authority from revenue similarly derived; and the architecture of these public buildings and works still bears much of the style and stamp of their ancient predecessors.

The modern city is distinguished from the ancient chiefly in that basically it is a community of property under productive instead of profligate administration. And its architecture bears out this distinction. In the replanning of a city or any regional part this should be kept unfailingly in mind; for it is not sufficient that the plan be adequate and efficient in the design and organization of its physical elements. The design of its administrative organization is vital to its enduring success. For it is vain to wish and plan ideal results and ends until the truly authentic means is sought and designed. Only one alternative appears: Either the __________________ and new building must be financed by expropriation of owners (or by funds levied politically on other productive property) and the project therefore administered under the old-time political authority with its age-old corruptions and waste as in the ancient cities, or the project must be financed and administered by some form of organization of the regional owners in which their proportionate ownership and final authority is retained. It is useless to attempt compromise of these opposites, for all experience teaches that no proprietary or voluntary authority can escape ultimate domination by a coercive authority to which it is in any way attached. The material interest may be selfish in both cases, but in the one that interest is served only by and in return for giving services to others, while in the other case the material interest is served or most served by reducing others to servitude under it.

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1454

Letter to Arthur C. Holden,

57 West 78th Street, New York City

July 16, 1949

 

Dear Mr. Holden:

 

Having some dates with my daughters and others at Virginia Beach and Winchester, Virginia, I am spending the greater part of July in these parts. But I have been remembering with pleasure the hospitality of your mind with respect to what seem to me the actualities of public or community administration so far as it has as yet socially evolved.

I refer primarily to the present existing and actually operating mode of public administration under which the owners of the real — the fixed and permanent — property that constitutes a community (a place having common defense) make a contractual (uncoerced) allocation of the sites and resources. This is the basic public service without which there could be no occupancy or use except upon terms arbi­trarily prescribed and coercively enforced by some domina­ting political power. This public service is the social usufruct arising from the owners each pursuing his own interest through voluntary and rational (measured) ex­change relationships with their fellow men. The recompense that they receive currently for this basic public service is ground rent; its capitalization, land value.

The community owners are not as yet among themselves in any established contractual or organic relationship. Their unity is entirely functional (all being distribu­tors) instead of organic; hence they are rivals competing in the general market for tenants or purchasers — within the politically limited and therefore usually small effec­tive demand. Although their services to the public are not conscious or deliberate, they are nevertheless, in effect, protective against the utmost exactions and oppres­sions of the political authority — so far as property in land is permitted or remains undestroyed.

While the community owners remain thus unorganized and the political authority increasingly taxes away the freedom to exchange and with it the incentive to produce and thereby diminishes the demand for land, the services of land owners are less and less needed and their incomes and values thus progressively decline. When land owners deliberately and effectively unite for common service to and protection of the populations who occupy their communities they will thereby create rents and values in proportion to the social need and the utility of the protection and services thus consciously (and for profit) performed. There will then be a growing proprietary public authority thriving on the public protection it affords and the public services it performs. And this non-political public authority, in its localized units, will become competent not only to serve and protect but also to administer profitably the existing public capital and improvements but also /and? check original/ to carry out profitably vast re­constructions and modernizations of the community pro­perties of all kinds.

I am convinced that the physical and material achieve­ments that characterize and distinguish modern civiliza­tion have resulted solely from the historically recent evolution and development of the property, and thereby of the contractual, relationship among men. Hence I believe that ideal plans such as you have made for the development of the physical community await for their realization only the practical business (proprietary) organization necessary and competent profitably and continuously to carry them out.

Sincerely,

 

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1458

Letter from 11 Waverly Place, New York City, to Arthur C. Holden,

570 Lexington Avenue, New York 22, New York

August 24, 1949

 

Dear Mr. Holden:

I was delighted a week or so ago to receive from you the Harper’s Magazine of November, 1931 containing your article on the then critical situation confronting owners of real estate, particularly in New York City. I have long hoped that such clear and sound appraisements as yours would be made and something done about it — something constructive in intent and also practical in operation, — which is to say, the organization of owners to give and provide community protection and services in a broad way and obtaining thereby due recompense and profit from the whole property thus widely and wisely protected and served. Your article is a trenchant diagnosis of the stagnation of what is potentially and is yet to become, under free enterprise and initiative, an enormous regionally organized and capitalized community service organization.

Your diagnosis is keen, both as to the practice of real estate owners individually buying speculative chances, when the bidding is inflated and brisk and then waiting for wind-falls on the one hand and their failure to assemble and organize their properties under productive administra­tion for the sake of sound income on the other hand. Your contrast between real estate and commercial and in­dustrial organization is certainly well drawn.

It is only when particular properties are brought together as a functioning whole and their owners take undivided interests in the whole instead of particular ownerships of separate parts that properties become highly effective for giving services and producing income, their actual values widely known and their certificates of part ownership freely liquid, — as titles to unorganized real estate certainly are not.

Titles to whole and undivided properties, either as single units or as assemblages of lesser units, are naturally less liquid than titles to undivided interests. This is especially true when the assembled properties are skillfully administered for the use and benefit of an occupying or a consuming public and thereby for a wholly legitimate income, profit and appreciation. Such properties, taken as single units or entireties, are far from liquid. The legal or administrative title is single and entire, but where the beneficial or “use” title is not single but held in a multitude of units as single shares then there may be a very wide and active market and all the separate owners enjoy a highly liquid position as you have pointed out.

The modern development of separating the administra­tive title from the use title, the one being single and the other multiple, is what has made possible the enormous production of goods, services, incomes, profit and capital values that has so distinguished the least regulated and relatively free societies of the western world.

Your proposed application and operation of this prin­ciple in the field of real estate holds vast promises for the future. It will enable community-wide assemblages of real estate to function productively for income, as the large organization of other kinds of property has done. It will bring into existence administrative or­ganization adequate for the need of voluntary financing not only of modern community developments designed for individual or exclusive use, such as the housing of pri­vate persons and of particular business organizations. What is even more important, it will open up a field of sound and profitable business operation in all those com­munity improvements, services and facilities that the inhabitants enjoy not separately but in common, such as rights of way and all common facilities and services attached to or incorporated in or supplied through them. For these public properties are no less improvements on the real estate of the community as a whole than is a building an improvement of the particular site on which it stands.

When real estate is assembled and organized for service as other great properties are organized, then its public improvements and services can be likewise vol­untarily financed and administered under the legitimate motivation of income and profit. The non-political com­munity organization will then be performing public ser­vices at a profit. This alone, without any necessary dependence on altruism or public spirit, will be sufficient inducement for it to assume eventually, and still on a self-financing basis, the entire public administration and to create enormous income and capital values thereby. Compulsory taxation will thus be outmoded and abandoned in favor of the productive mode of raising revenue.

Your article approaches the whole subject, it seems, from the standpoint of the poor condition of real estate. It makes sound recommendation for the advancement of organization in that field and it does this with apparently little realization of its profound implications as regards the crisis in civilization that the advancing governmentalization of property and of the functions of society portends.

Within the nineteenth century alone there was, in the Western world at least, a phenomenal development of society, through the free relations and processes of pro­perty and contract, far exceeding the growth of govern­mental usurpation and control. The present-day advance of government against the productive properties and free

processes of society would seem to be due to the failure of free enterprise, so potent in all other fields, to advance, through the organization of real estate, beyond the necessary limitations of private and individual serv­ices into the field of those services that can be provided only en masse for the common participation of the entire population of a community. Until such advance, always potential in society, is hastened or made there would seem to be no alternative to a continuing social relapse towards the monolithic states and slave societies of the entire ancient world.

Your proposal of self-organization for the relief of real estate goes much further than that. It points the way in which society can perform for itself and by its own free processes those public and common services which alone have seemed to afford any ground of necessity for the violence of taxation (the aim and goal of all conquest and aggression) in an otherwise free society. The outlook today is not encouraging, but thinking such as yours is fundamental and creative. Once it takes form in community affairs the institutions of property and contract, of human freedom and abundance, may be depended on to go forward on a phenomenal scale. And it is likely to take place with such rapidity as to parallel the very recent conquest of the air and many similar advances in the natural and physical world. For in all these advances the voluntary and flexible organization of property has been the practical, sufficient and only enduring means of social availability and of popular instead of privi­leged and exclusive participation in them.

Let us think of the nature of property, of its true nature. When we think of it apart from its social conno­tations, as mere possession, we must think of it as an individual relationship subsisting between a man and a thing to the exclusion of or even inimical to all other men. But when we think of it in its social context we find that ownership implies an acknowledged title — a social authority by common consent, an entitlement, not to exclude but to include others in its benefit or use and to do this by the non-political, wholly social and non-coercive process of distribution, with due recompense for doing so, that is called contract — the only process in which men are related not arbitrarily but rationally and in mutual freedom from aggression one upon another. But this relationship cannot be practiced without refer­ence to some subject-matter and whatever is the subject-matter of contract that is thereby property as between the parties. /Sentence? check original/ Property therefore is the prime essential to all free and productive, all service or exchange rela­tionships among men; and the functional organization of property in higher and higher administrative units is the method of true and enduring social progress and pros­perity. Government cannot forever prevail against this, for freedom alone gives men lifeward growth and advancing length of days.

The possibilities of income from real estate when organized as you have proposed baffle the imagination.

Economic tax researchers in New York City since many years ago have found reason to believe that the amount of public capital devoted to community purposes (out of private cap­ital formation) is in all communities about equal to the amount of capital privately engaged in non-community affairs. Yet the net income to bare land, apart from any private improvements upon it, is the only revenue that land owners realize out of this vast capital expenditure for the public improvement of their total properties.

The reason for this meager and precarious income is that in their present unorganized condition land owners cannot engage themselves in the general administration of their public improvements as community capital but must rest content with what they receive as mere distribu­tors of any net community advantages (if and when there are any above the disadvantages) that arise from the present irresponsible political administration of the great public capital that is taken forcibly out of pri­vate production. Yet were it not for this essential pub­lic service of distribution sites and resources could have no exchange values at all, and possession or use of them would rest wholly upon political privilege and permission, favor and discrimination.

But when organized real estate assumes further public services, primarily the protection of private capital, then the vast public capital will become self-supporting and highly profitable to real estate through the resulting increased private demand for and utilization of the pub­licly improved sites and resources through which its public will be served.

Private capital being so prospered and the public capital thus made productive and self-supporting, taxation will naturally fall into disuse. The private economy thereby freed of its political burden and bonds will ex­pand doubtless many fold and the public economy, organized real estate, administering productively a like amount of public capital, will similarly expand. In these two great systems, each serving and being served by the other through the contractual or proprietary and thereby productive adminis­tration of properties assembled and organized as working capital, private and public, both under concentrated administration but with their units of ownership and voting control widely, perhaps universally dispersed, mankind may yet enjoy the peace and abundance it has for long ages dreamed and the high self-achievements towards which it has as yet only vaguely aspired.

After reading and reflecting on your article in Harper’s I had my article in the Appraisal Journal for July, 1939, copied at the Library. Upon returning your magazine a few days ago in the envelope in which you mailed it to me I enclosed this article of mine, “Why Valuable Land Lies Idle,” and also a further article entitled, “Why Land Value Should not be Taxed,” which was requested but never published.

At the same time I discovered by accident that your covering letter of August 12th had remained stuck in the envelop unknown to me until then. Hence the very consid­erable delay of my reply.

I look forward eagerly to much company and discussion with you and hope that together we may bring some of the ideas and understanding that we have so similarly developed to the attention of some other persons capable of grasping their workable practicality, even if not their ultimate social significance.

Sincerely yours,

 

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1463

Letter to William H. Amend,

15 William Street, New York City

April 18, 1950

Dear Mr. Amend:

As a former research engineer, I have been for some years engaged in examining that organization of mankind other than political and coercive — under voluntary contractual engagements and processes — in which the general modern society functions and basically consists.

This research identifies the free interchange of contractually organized human energies in the form of services and goods as a highly evolving part of the general energy system of the natural and physical world — and as exhibiting similar uniformities or laws.

My very good friend Arthur Holden directs me to you as one who knows something of his various efforts towards the regional organization of New York real estate so that regional or community (public) services and immunities can be provided and profitably sold and great real estate and locations values thereby created wholly within the free system of contract and exchange.

This impending extension of the free process into the field long dominated by political administration I regard as the spearhead of the next great advance of freedom into this ancient and essentially totalitarian field. I shall therefore be greatly interested to hear from you something of the practical steps that have been taken or attempted in New York City — this with a view to some further publicizing of these business possibilities and their peculiar, not to say profound, social significance.

Your secretary has my invitation for luncheon, evening meal or other appointment more convenient or agreeable to you.

Very truly yours,

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2426

Letter from Arthur C. Holden,

Holden, Egan & Associates, 215 E. 37^th Street, New York City 16

October 30, 1955

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

Here are a few extra sheets from my series of sonnets which I am calling Art and Finance. I’d be glad to have you read them and give me your criticism at your leisure.

Always with sincere regards,

 

/S/ Arthur C. Holden

 

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2427

Carbon of letter to Arthur C. Holden,

57 E. 78^th Street, New York City

October 30, 1955

 

Dear Mr. Holden:

  It was pleasant to talk with you at the Unitarian Church today.

  I am enclosing the little brochure on Father McGlynn that I spoke of. I wish I could refer you to the book a friend of mine wrote some years ago about Father McGlynn and all the excitement he created in New York some years ago, under the title, Rebel, Priest and Prophet. It is published by the Schalkenbach Foundation, 50 E. 59^th St., N.Y.C. 21. But the author’s name escapes me for the time being. He was editor of one of the financial journals in Wall Street.

  I shall be most happy to see those sonnets you told me about. It is extraordinary to treat of economic topics in the sonnet form.

  The sonnet writer to whom I referred is E. Merrill Root, Professor of English at Earlham College, Lafayette, Indiana. He is in my view a very marvelous poet-philosopher with a flare for economic freedom and poetic artistry. I have in mind his sonnet sequence entitled, Ulysses to Penelope, published by Marshall Jones Co., Francistown, N.H. The publisher says, “Mr. Root makes the great wanderer the symbol of man’s adventure towards his highest dreams …… and Edwin Markham has said his poetry is the greatest since Emily Dickinson.”

Sincerely,

SH/m

Encl: “The Trojan Horse of ‘Land Reform’”

 

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2432

Carbon of letter to Arthur C. Holden,

215 East 37^th Street, New York City 16

November 1, 1955

 

Dear Mr. Holden:

So many thanks for your economic sonnets. I have enjoyed them immensely. I note you are still tinkering with them, or some of them; so, I hope you will forgive me for some casual whimsies of my own that I have noted marginally, just to be glanced at and none to be followed, — unless you should want to adopt one or more of them as your own.

 These sonnets are wonderful bits of work. Judging by these, I am convinced the whole series will sing beauty as they will speak truth.

 The same mail brought me a delightful letter from my philosopher-poet friend, E. Merrill Root, of 3221 Berwyn Lane, Richmond, Indiana, who writes wonderful sonnets and other things of great significance. I can hardly wait for him to see these sonnets of yours.

 It would be a great personal gratification to me if I (or you for me) would send him some of your “extra sheets” just as you sent them to me. I would like him to take pleasure in reading them as I have, and as I am sure he would.

 I return herewith your “extra sheets” as requested.

Sincerely,

SH/m

Encl.

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2655

Penned letter from Arthur Cort Holden,

Holden, Egan, Wilson & Corser,

215 East 37^th Street, New York City 16

July 19, 1957

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

The day I attended the party at the Plaza to honor you on the publication of your book, I tried to buy a copy. Your grandson told me there were very few copies available that day and that he’d appreciate it if I let him send me a copy later which he promised to do. He also promised to get you to autograph the copy for me.

 I haven’t heard anything, and this is a reminder. I’d still like to buy a copy and to have it autographed.

Sincerely,

/S/ Arthur C. Holden

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1454

Letter to Heath at Elkridge from Arthur C. Holden,

Holden Egan Wilson & Corser, 215 East 37^th Street, New York 16, New York

July 30, 1957

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

 

     Thank you for the complimentary copy of your new book “Citadel, Market and Altar.” I am going to put it on the table beside my bed so that I can read it in the freshness of the early morning. I am glad to have this book, and glad to have it with the very touching inscription.

 

     I will write you again after I have had time to spend upon it. In the meanwhile, I merely want you to know the book arrived safely. With good wishes to you always, I am

 

                        Sincerely yours,

                        /s/ Arthur C. Holden

                       Arthur C. Holden

ACH/c

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1647

Extract from letter to Arthur C. Holden, New York City,

regarding his Sonnets for My City

September 25, 1957

 

I have read your coordinated Interludes and Appendix with even greater interest. Clearly the artistic in you is stirred by mystic dreams of the grace and beauty potential in the great cities of today. The basic principle of the coming transformation is plain: the conversion of unrelated ownerships of particular properties into respectively equal but undivided interests in the whole. Your forecast of this kind of arrangement on a regional scale is the creative technology which any rational analysis of our present wholly empirical social processes is bound to disclose.

… With respect to finance becoming the handmaiden of art, I hope your reading of my Citadel Market & Altar, especially Chapters 23 to 26, may be as rewarding to you as your sonnet sequence and especially its Sixth Interlude have been to me.

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2985

Typed letter to Heath from Spencer MacCallum,

11 Waverly Place, New York City 3

February 18. 1960

Dear P.D.:

I thought about you this afternoon as I was reading a couple of interesting articles by Arthur Holden in the public library. I remembered your once saying that you thought his stuff was good, but that he was too material­istic — too much concerned with physical structures and too little concerned with the spiritual or psychological aspect of society. This afternoon, I read the close of his book which he wrote in 1940 on the function of banking, entitled, MONEY IN MOTION. I thought you’d enjoy it, so I’ve copied it out as follows:

“It is our belief that banking has the capacity to become a spiritual as well as an economic force which will lead our civilization beyond that point where other civiliza­tions have turned to decay and dissolution.

“The urge to serve and to exchange services is evidence of a civilized society. The urge to require specialized competence in order to increase the benefit of services exchanged is evidence of a developed society. Failure to realize the benefit of potential specialized competence is evidence of a society which has reached the turning point. Failure to grow; failure to build, after special­ized competence has been achieved, is evidence of failure of spirit.

“America will not cease to build; America will not cease to grow, if the banking judgment, which is the arbiter of the relationships between productive civilized individuals, realizes its potentiality. The banking function is not a passive function; it is a progressive spiritual force. As banking increases its effectiveness as a social agency to facilitate and measure exchange, we may look forward to the liberation of the full potential energies of mankind and the equitable exchange of the fullest services which men are capable of performing.”

 I was glad to note three sonnets of Arthur Holden’s published in the March, 1959, issue of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects.

 If you like what he wrote about banking, it would be nice if you’d send him a short note to that effect. I haven’t tried to get in touch with him yet, so he doesn’t know I’m in New York.

 If the Foundation wants three legs to stand on, it could consider the work of Holden, Riegel and Heath — three contemporaries all of whose work needs publicizing by some organization like SSF.

 The girls have both gone to Florida for a three-week auto vacation, so I’m looking after my own meals and such again. They certainly had me spoiled — especially Elfriede.

                            Best wishes,

                            /s/ Spencer

 

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3089

Letter from Heath, 312 Halesworth Street,

Santa Ana, California, to Arthur Cort Holden

August 24, 1961

Dear Mr. Holden:

     Except for a few months last summer, I have been away from my home in Maryland and other parts of the East more than two years now and sometimes too much out of touch with friends and acquaintances there — including especially you with whom I have so many concepts in common concerning community administration and public affairs. In addition to this I remember very much the kind consideration received personally from you and Mrs. Holden at various times.

I presume you are fully aware of the current rapid development of proprietary communities here in California and throughout the land, which is so much in line with your own thinking for a good many years. I am happy that my grandson, Spencer MacCallum, has re­ceived his Master’s degree in anthropology and is, through his writings, making significant contributions in the same line.

I often wonder about those very clever sonnets of yours, in which you gave such ingenious expression to economic principles in political /poetic?/ form.

With many pleasant recollections and kindest regards,

 

Cordially,

 

Spencer Heath

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3089

Penned letter to Heath from Arthur C. Holden, 57 East 78^th Street,

New York 21, New York

December 21, 1961

 

Dear Spencer Heath:

   The Sonnets from “Ulysses to Penelope” by your friend E. Merrill Root reached me this evening. I’ve been reading in it and have already discovered that the author is a true philosopher with real poetic feeling. I like the sonnets and thank you for your thoughtfulness in wishing me to possess this book.

   Thank you too for the little folder that you sent as a Christmas card. It contains an essential truth in which you know I believe. I think you have stated the case for pooling of interests in real estate tersely and well. Thank you for letting me see this statement.

Sincerely yours friend,

/s/ Arthur C. Holden

To Spencer Heath Esq.

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