Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3099

MacCallum Correspondence – to, from and about Heath’s grandson Spencer MacCallum, as well as another grandson, Irvan O’Connell

1953-1962

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2878

Penned letter from Heath to Spencer MacCallum

No date

 

Dear Spencer —

Another card from you today. Mrs. Manning and I have mailed your Durkheim book and I’ve been through all my papers without finding any carbons of letters to Bierly, Boyden and Mrs. Kirk Miller. I’m sure you must never have typed or mailed them. I’m glad you will do it even now, for it is better late than never, especially Bierly and Boyden. The latter should have known he was not to hold the type any longer, but only the dies and cuts or plates. If my letter to him does not mention these, please add to it, by P.S. or otherwise, the following:

 It is of course understood that all the dies and plates or cuts, these having been specially paid for, will not be destroyed but will be held for further instructions if not further use.

 Tomorrow Mr. Hoiles is taking Mr. Knott and me to Campbell House for lunch and the afternoon with Ingebretsen and Greenfield & Co for a farewell. The next evening I am slated for a talk on “The Common Law” at Chapman College here in Santa Ana. And then on the 31^st for Grand Canyon, Colorado Springs, Detroit and New York all by rail.

 In reference to sovereignty, I enclose a mighty fine editorial, in two parts, taken from today’s “Register” and written by Mr. Wilkenson, I think. You can see how he is hitting close to the mark, even though largely in a negative way. He sees that all “natural” — not “artificial” — (meaning social) organization is based on contract or, at least, on consent even though he does not yet quite see how the general community organization can be so based. But he is coming along, as is also Bob LeFevre and Dr. Kershner who very specially wants to see me again soon in New York.

 Historically, I think, sovereignty, and all that it implies, developed out of slavery. It has not been stressed or made so much of in those parts of the world — at least in Europe and Asia — where mass slavery and the conquest of masses could not be carried on. North Europe and north Asia bred /prowess?/ but not political dominion. In Europe that came from the south via Rome. In Asia it was absorbed again and again by the fecundity of the Chinese and their family solidarity but established itself in the Middle East and burst through the mountain barriers to spread over India and there, much as in China, to be partially absorbed. I think history likely will credit the Teutonic tribes of north Europe as the principal seed bed and source of the proprietary and thus contractual method of public administration.

 Sovereignty always claims to be absolute but, like slavery, never quite is. There must always be some degree of voluntarism if men are to live. It is the same with anarchy. It can never be complete. There must always be some order. As in all nature, entropy is only a partial turning towards “chaos and dark night” whereas organization, order, which is Life can and must indefinitely and increasingly prevail.

And so to bed.

Affectionately

 

Sorry I can’t find Bob LeFevre’s recent booklet on “Freedom and Anarchy” to send you. Maybe I can later.

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2953

Typed letter from Heath’s grandson Irvan Thomas O’Connell, Jr.,

at Harvard, acknowledging gift of a check

April 23 (year not given)

 

Dear Popdaddy,                                     April 23, St. George’s Day,

 

Well I’ll be damned! Really, I’m overwhelmed. Thank you very much Popdaddy. I plan to spend some of it, at least, on Oxford Texts of the Classics which I have been wanting. I might even try to find some volumes of the Cambridge Ancient History. There’s no end of things that I might do with it. Indeed, the idea of buying things gives as much pleasure, almost, as the buying and possession itself; especially when there’s no limit to the things that one can imagine.

  As usual, I have been intending to write all term; I’m a little abashed that it takes this to get a letter out of me. Everything here is fine. Next week Mother and Daddy are coming up. This is the only time that they will see me here in my habitat so I will have a lot to show them.

  I have been reading a lot lately, especially of the history of the Roman Empire of the third and fourth centuries. It is interesting and profitable work. And I have been messing with a theory of history. You would like this one. It owes enough to you, and the big theories are the most fun to work with. Popdaddy, could you come up sometime on one of the weekends in May, and we could spend a night or two talking at each other. If you can, send me a note, and I’ll line things up.

                        Love and thanks,

                               Irvan

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1500

Letter to his grandson, Irvan T. O’Connell, Jr.,

with the Marines in Korea

November 24, 1953

 

Dear Irvan:

Sometime ago, August 23rd to be exact, we (Spencer and I) sent you a letter with a number of things enclosed that we had been advertising and sending out by way of undelusioning and enlightening the world. We have been wondering whether you received it. We surely hope so because we are just now on the point of sending you a recently published scholarly work by Dr. Russell Kirk entitled, The Conservative Mind, sending it to the same address as before. I think you will like this book even though, like Toynbee, it shows conservatism traditionally and historically all dressed up but without any place in particular to go. Anyhow, I hope you will enjoy reading it and will accept it along with the good feeling and best wishes of your P.D.

What is your mind doing about thinking – any ideas coming in or being put out? I dare say you have had heavier responsibilities put upon you, judging by what your commanding officer had to say about you some six months ago. Whatever you are doing, get it done as fast as you can and come on back here.

We will shortly be spending Thanksgiving in Waterford and Winchester. Hope there will be more news from you at that time.

Best wishes,

 

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2351.

Letter to Heath and Spencer MacCallum from Heath’s grandson,

Irvan O’Connell, with the Marines in Korea, MABS-12  MAG-12,

FMAW FMF, c/o FPO San Francisco

December 12, 1953

 

Dear Popdaddy and Spencer,

I have just finished reading the book you sent me which arrived here two days ago. But it is unwise for any man to write about Burke and especially to quote from him. Isn’t it Hazlitt who described his style, ‘forked and playful as the lightning, crested like the serpent’. I find myself scanning Kirk’s prose looking for the quotations. I liked his passage on Randolph, and it is well to remind men of de Tocqueville but these men are far better read than read about. But Burke is the clarion. It was my Junior year I found him. If you have not read ‘Reflections on the French Revolution’ lately, you must do so. Do not read it through, rather, mine it section by section. And remember that he wrote down those reflections in 1790, in the Kerensky stage of that revolution, when there had been no great violence. He speaks as if he were touched with some kind of magic that let him see what was to come in that revolution and in the two centuries that followed. The copy I brought here with me has an introduction by some Nineteenth Century worthy who admires Burke as he ought and apologizes for the man’s horror of democratic tyranny and his exaggerated idea of the importance of men’s property. Burke’s intuition and his common sense carried his thoughts on society way beyond any other man, at least anyone relying on those tools. You are the biggest influence in the things that I think. I’ll grant that. But that corrupt Irishman named Edmund Burke is far and away number two.

    I have been dealing with Burke just lately, teaching him to Jun and Pang and Lee, my friends here. These boys know English well; they are intelligent and some of them are learned in Chinese literature. But the English they read has come from textbooks, and the textbooks they are used to they have got from the Japanese. Now the Japanese are pagans, while the Koreans somehow are not. I will not explain this here; I do not type well enough. If you could look at a Japanese textbook that is supposed to contain the best of the tradition of English literature, you would know what I mean. I have looked at several; they are all the same: a piece from John Dewey, perhaps one from Julian Huxley, something from Bertrand Russell; and lots of passages from Herbert George Wells. He represents to the Japanese the best any of us have done or thought. That is what I mean when I say the Japanese live and move and have their being in utter darkness. Not so the Koreans. Of course they loathe the Japanese and all their works, and therefore include in their dislike the authors I have mentioned. Then too the Koreans have a certain difficulty in understanding why Russian Land Reform in North Korea is very bad, while this same reform, provided it takes place south of the parallel is progress. I could make these problems of theirs into a list. Basically they have trouble understanding why all the things that are obviously tyranny in the North are to be considered the temporary accompaniments of Pure Democracy when they occur in the South. They look at you and grin a little sadly and say isn’t that what the Communists say too. Though I am not being fair to Dr. Rhee’s regime which the people here actively support, if only because the State in the North combines a communist and Asiatic brutality that would startle Genghis Khan.

     I have been introducing my friends here to Burke and the Areopagitica, passages from Shakespeare, little bits of Eliot, but mainly Burke. I think John is in his tent now, turning him into Korean. For forty years this people, or the educated ones among them, planned and plotted for a free and democratic Korea. The missionaries had taught them well, and they knew that Pure Democracy and Self-determination and The Kingdom of Heaven were synonymous. To phrase it very mildly, their society has not developed as they expected these last eight years. Rather than question what they have been taught they have tended to look for some fault in themselves, trying to find what was the matter with themselves personally that kept Korea from turning into a little Switzerland. One of them told me he had felt a little ashamed of himself for thinking the same ideas he found in my books. All this has been a great pleasure for me. I  seem to be fated to preach, if not one thing then something else;  though it’s all the same to me.

     What have I been thinking about? A good deal, and you would approve. I’ve been musing on the same stuff. I have lots of time here, my books, and a room to myself. I’ve been thinking on just what is slavery or ownership; and how a thing ought to be defined by what it does, not by what you want it to do; how therefore a statute, a tax, a war, conflict are actually synonyms. Same old stuff. I know very well where I got it. Somewhere in that book you sent me Mr. Kirk tells how an idea must be sown in a man’s mind like a seed, Paul’s seed. The seed is placed there, and means little to the recipient and seems to die. Then something very much later causes this seed to burst forth. The man (or the boy) nourishes his new-grown idea and is proud of it as his very own. Only later when he has become accustomed to the idea and is reflecting on it does he see that it once came from somewhere else.

     I enjoyed your comments in the margin, Popdaddy. Send me some more books like that. It’s like having you visit. I keep on being more impressed with the old duality of chaos and order, though duality is not quite the right word; and how order can come out of that chaos. I like the part you have given man, showing how he can create. I like your medieval man, part animal, who can be part Godling. In the East one runs across the Rev. Dr. Malthus. I don’t know of any other answer to him. You have shown how men can live together so that they create more than they consume; then more people, I mean an addition to the population, comes to be welcomed, not dreaded. A Korean is not worth one of my bags of rice to another Korean. There is little society here in our sense. A man produces little; what is important is rice paddy. Even that has been ‘reformed’ so often that it has little value. If a man is killed it is no loss to anyone outside his family. I had not been around physical cruelty and revenge before. Now if the confiscations and taxes would permit one of the Koreans I know here to open a machine shop, as he is well qualified to do, and this country needs such a thing, then they would realize what a valuable man he was as they came to depend on him to fix the jeeps we give them instead of selling them for junk; and when he was murdered someone besides his family would mourn, and they would see that the next man who had a machine shop was protected because he did something for them. As this practice of serving one another grew, men would come to value one another. But you-all know all this. I am trying to explain why a neighbor’s misery is a matter of such unconcern to these people.

     Well, Good Night to you both. Write again. Thanks for the book,

/S/ Your Grandson Irvan

 

And a very merry Christmas to you both.

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2363

Letter from Heath’s grandson, Irvan Thomas O’Connell with the Marines in Korea, MABS-12 MAG-12, MAG-12, FMAW PMP c/o FPO San Francisco, to Heath’s grandson, Spencer Heath MacCallum

March 8, 1954

 

You are coming to deserve your name, 0 Spencer Heath. Instead of sending me the exhange of letters between Popdaddy and Mr. Kirk, you sent me two copies of Popdaddy’s. So send me a copy of the reply, if you would.

 My honcho’s house burned down last night. Korean houses are made of mud and thatch; when once the thatch lights the  occupant is lucky to get himself out alive. Honcho woke up, got himself out alive with his wife in one arm and his new sewing machine under the other. Everything else, “All gone, no anything left.” My cooks took up a collection for him. Today I was inquiring into the price and rents of houses roundabout the base. I find that a small, good native house costs $75.00 to build. I base my dollar calculations on an exchange rate of 400 Hwan to the Dollar, a rate that can be obtained after negotiations of some intricacy and risk. A house of this type in turn rents for $75.00 a year. If I had known these things before I would have gone into the business here. I could own fifty houses by now. On purpose I have not bothered to find out the difficulties involved in this venture. 100% return does not grow on trees. Without having to ask I can imagine some good reasons for investing elsewhere. Since 1950 the Communists have come down into this area twice. Very discouraging those people to budding landlords. The Hwan depreciates at one third of a percent per day. If the free rate of exchange continues in greenbacks, the decline need not discourage an investor in real estate. At present there is no rent control and no exchange control, not that the state here wants these matters to be free so much as it lacks the means for manipulating them — at present. I can assume that there is a confiscatory rate of taxation. That could be adjusted. The governor here is a good man, but he is only paid 1500 Hwan a month. Still, I would like to own some mud huts.

 Learn all you can from Popdaddy, Spencer. He has got hold of some hunks of The Truth. Some night he is going to run his automobile into an immovable object of one sort or another.   It will be a little lonely not having our own oracle to go to any more. As you have found out yourself I suppose, if you can get him to work on an idea that is new to him, or to go beyond in his thinking where he was before, you will find yourself following along with his thoughts and therefore interested.  Or perhaps it is that one becomes familiar with what I would call his ‘frame of reference’. He has a vocabulary of special words which have special meanings of his own. These must be learnt. Even to admit that the word ‘market’ or ‘politician’ can be used validly as he uses them is to admit the validity of half his thesis. One is not going to understand his language until one knows his words. But no one will learn his words if one thinks the whole language is gibberish, as it is unless one knows what he means by his terms. But I have reduced this simile into too simple terms myself. Then again original thinkers do not think like other people. Nor does Popdaddy. There are a swarm of logical objections that any fool knows to the thinking of any new thought. If there were not many logical objections, any fool would have thought the idea up long ago. The real mind had to feel its way through and somehow above these ‘reasons against’, sensing that there are hidden fallacies in them somewhere and that he will only find them by continuing his line of thought beyond where the others have stopped. When the thinker finds something in ‘the beyond’ that seems to justify his excursion, for a long time it will only seem to him to justify it. The chances are that the objections to his line of thought are based on a whole wrong theory, be it of oxidation or the solar system, and it will take months of examination to right these fallacies even in the thinker’s own mind. His examination of the fallacy would be in terms of pure common logic, but his ‘lead’ without which he cannot examine the fallacy fruitfully has come to him part guess-work part feeling. You know Popdaddy on inspiration and the Holy Spirit, and he is good here. So that a valuable thinker appears at times to be quite without logic. Certainly our Grandfather is not bothered by other people’s thought-trains. Whether or not this is a prerequisite to original thought, as I have tried to show that it is, this is a poor type of mind for converting people. That type of priest must be aware of just what his pupil thinks he is thinking and, more important, of what the pupil is feeling. But then this man could not think for himself. Rather, his mind is like a vine than a tree.

 For the sources of Popdaddy’s thought, or at least for the tools with which he has worked, go to Emerson’s essays for some bits of his philosophy and to Henry George for some of the economic terms. Popdaddy would explode at this last, but he was involved with these people for so long that he does use certain of their terms even though he disagrees with them. Indeed, PD would not like my tracing sources of any kind; such activities ought to be left for scholars and other low-life. Though Emerson is America’s one philosopher and George her one political theorist. Emerson is not fashionable now, not enough dogma to him, but he is a great man.

 Spence, write me a real letter sometime. And I must write
your brother and my cousin, and his family. I try to work something out on the typewriter each evening to maintain some kind of motion in the fluids upstairs. Let me read this thing over and see what the Hell I have written..

Yours,

Cpl O’Connell

He has been promoted though, and is now ‘The Lieutenant’

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2366

Letter from Spencer MacCallum, as a senior at Princeton, enclosing copy of his Bricker Amendment article together with copy of a letter from Heath to each of the 29 Maryland State senators, General Assembly of the State of Maryland, State House, Annapolis, Maryland

March 10, 1955

 

 

Hi Popdaddy,

 

Hope you’re having a good trip. Your letter to the “Tribune” was published on Thursday, March 9. I’ll order a batch and send half a dozen or so down to you.

     Enclosed is a carbon of your letters to the Maryland Legislators (twenty-nine of them: all the senators). They were written on an IBM machine and were certainly about the finest looking letters we have sent out. Enclosed with them went copies of my “Bricker” speech as it has been improved some and mimeographed for the second time. Enclosed also is a copy to you.

     Thesis is taking a lot of time and is very interesting, especially now that I am handling the actual pieces from the Museum collection here and getting ready to photograph them for illustrations.

     Ruth Berryman wrote that she has called together a group which discussed the Bricker Amendment after I sent her material on it, and that it is stirring up lively interest. I called Mrs. Custer here in Princeton, and she has planned an evening get-together with a number of people and her son from Harvard to talk about the Amendment. This will be at her house and sometime in April.

Best of everything with you,

 

                               /s/ Spencer

 

Ask Aunt Beatrice how she’s making out with the Bricker Amendment in Winchester, and whether it’s stirring up any interest.

_____________________________________

Senator Joseph A. Mattingly,

General Assembly of the State of Maryland,

State House, Annapolis, Maryland

March 10, 1955

 

Dear Sir:

To my own certain knowledge many citizens of our beloved Maryland Free State, following the lead of our own United States Senator Butler, are morally and intellectually alive to the menace of international communism with which our free institutions are now gravely endangered by the irresponsible manufacture of “treaty law.”

     As a citizen of Maryland proud of her traditions and free insti­tutions, I am eager to see her in the forefront of resistance to this modern attempt to re-introduce European tyranny on our American soil. Eight states of our Union have already taken official cognizance of the danger and, by their legislatures, passed resolutions urging the Federal Congress to pass a Constitutional amendment such as the “Bricker” Amendment for protection against the imposition of inter­national “treaty law” for the governing of our purely internal and domestic affairs.

     The purpose of this letter is to urge you personally to introduce such a resolution into the Maryland Legislature or,   if one is already pending to devote your best efforts towards its quick adoption.

     Appreciating your public services to date and trusting the free citizens of Maryland will be able to extend you further gratitude, I am

Sincerely yours,

                            /s/ Spencer Heath

 

Enclosure: “Bricker Amendment: Most Critical Issue Since

            the Adoption of the Constitution.”

_________________________

 

A speech given before a public speaking class at Princeton University by Spencer MacCallum, a senior who together with Heath actively promoted passage of the ill-fated Bricker Amendment

December 10, 1954.

 

THE BRICKER AMENDMENT:

THE MOST CRITICAL ISSUE

SINCE THE ADOPTION OF THE CONSTITUTION

Do you realize that at this moment the president of the United States and his cabinet are not legally bound in any way by the Consti­tution or the Bill of Rights? That the president right now, if he had the force to back it up, could begin ruling this country according to his own will by dispensing with the Bill of Rights and disbanding Con­gress – and that our Supreme Court has full legal ground for agreeing with him? The Constitution offers no legal restraint on the executive, and the conduct of government is at his discretion. If things got too bad and we had to fight, as the people do in the countries to the south of us, we would have no legal aid on our side. Of course noth­ing this extreme would happen – not right away or all at once. But for the first time in our history we haven’t an effective constitution, We are carrying on in Constitutional forms only by momentum.

     What is the solution to all of this? The solution is a proposed amendment to the Constitution offered to Congress by Senator Bricker in February, 1952. This proposed amendment was drafted by the ablest Constitutional lawyers in the United States, representing the American Bar Association. The American Bar Association has endorsed the Brick­er Amendment three times through its House of Delegates, the last time by a vote of 117 to 33. The Amendment also has the strong endorse­ment of the National Association of Attorneys-General, representing the chiefs of the legal departments of all 48 states. Eight state legislatures and the Bar Associations of 21 states have volunteered resolutions of endorsement for the Bricker Amendment. Other organi­zations supporting the Amendment include the American Medical Association, the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, the Nation­al Grange, the American Farm Bureau Federation and the American Coun­cil of Christian Churches.

     Before I consider the proposed amendment any further, I want to explain very carefully the need of an amendment; so, I shall ask you to listen as carefully and as critically as you can.

     The “Achilles’ Heel” in our Constitution was Article VI, called the “treaty clause,” which reads, “…all treaties…shall be the supreme law of the land…anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.”

     This clause makes treaties self-enacting as internal, domestic law – the “supreme law of the land.” It would seem unnecessary to have such a clause, since treaties deal with foreign powers for spe­cific, external purposes such as protection of citizens abroad and the setting of international boundaries, and we have Congress to legislate for domestic affairs. In fact the United States is the only major country in the world today whose treaties are self-enacting as inter­nal law. Why, then, do we have such a clause? The answer lies in the dual character of our government, which includes both the federal government and the states’ governments. Originally it was thought im­portant that treaties made by the federal government should be binding on the states’ governments, because otherwise, in the matter of bound­aries, Maine or New Hampshire, for example, or states on the western border, might have refused to recognize national boundaries fixed by the federal government by treaties with other countries.

     But how does this threaten our individual liberties in this coun­try, if our domestic law is enacted by Congress and Congress is limi­ted in its legislation by Constitutional guarantees and the Bill of Rights? It was early recognized that the “treaty clause” in our Con­stitution could enable the executive to make domestic law directly and without such Constitutional limitations by making treaties with pro­visions relating to domestic affairs. Jefferson, Hamilton and others took pains to write that the Intention of Article VI was not to enable the president and the ratifying Senate to enact by “treaty law” what the whole government otherwise is not allowed to do under the Constitution.

     This threat of “treaty law,” unlimited by Constitutional guarantees, has only materialized within the last ten years. In 1945 we joined the united Nations and became a party to its Charter by treaty. Thereby the United Nations Charter became “supreme law of the land.” The California State Supreme Court has already over-ruled two state laws of California on the grounds of the U. N. Charter. When Mr. Truman seized the steel mills, Chief Justice Vinson and two other justices of the Supreme Court argued in their dissenting opinions that Truman was justified and entitled to seize the steel mills, not under our Consti­tution, but under the United Nations Charter, to which we are a party by treaty. A clause in the Charter gives the Executive unlimited authority during a declared “emergency” – one which, of course, he declares.

     As a supra-national organization, the United Nations has no af­fairs of its own but the affairs of its member nations. Nor does it confine itself to trying to keep peace among its member nations – that is, to its member-nations’ foreign affairs – but since 1945 it has drafted resolutions and covenants and prepared over 200 treaties de­signed to affect the economic and social affairs of its member nations. Examples of these treaties, which have been submitted to our Senate for ratification, are the Genocide Convention, the Covenant on Human Rights, and the Convention on Freedom of Information.

     The Genocide Convention would have made it a crime to give “mental harm” to members of any national, ethnic, racial or religious group, for the alleged violation of which an American citizen would be subject to arrest and trial outside the United States by foreign courts.

     Contrary to our own Constitution, which says that Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, period, the Covenant on Human Rights declared that freedom of religion, speech and press should be subject only to such limitations…as are reasonable and necessary to protect the public safety, order, health, or morals. In other words, it could be left to the discretion of the executive.

     The Convention on Freedom of Information would have enabled our government to censor news in time of peace and “correct” a news dis­patch sent from the United States to another country or from another country to the United States.

     The Truman administration supported all three of these proposed treaties, tried to get them ratified, and continued to support them after they were tabled. Except for the study, and opposition on the floor of Congress, given these treaties by the American Bar Associ­ation, it is perfectly conceivable that one or all of them would have been ratified.

     Now what is the Bricker Amendment which would correct all this? It provides that provisions of treaties shall not become effective as domestic law unless implemented by legislation which would be valid in its own right if there were no treaty. The text of the amendment reads:

1. A provision of a treaty or other international agreement which conflicts with this constitution shall not be of any force or effect.
2. A treaty or other international agreement shall become effective as internal law in the United States only through legislation which would be valid in the absence of treaty.

     It is the opinion of the American Bar Association that the Bricker Amendment would have passed Congress and gone to the states for ratification in February, 1954, had it not been for the vigorous oppo­sition of the administration.

     What are some of the arguments that have been advanced against the Bricker Amendment?

     First, that it would obstruct the administration’s conduct of foreign policy. But the proposed amendment in no way affects the mak­ing of treaties or the international commitments of treaties. Further­more, the United States is the only major country which has self-enacting treaties as domestic law. I quote from an article in the Canadian Bar Review of November, 1951: “It is a well-established rule of Anglo-Canadian law that the provisions of a treaty, though binding upon the state under international law, do not become part of the law of the land unless they are implemented by legislation.”

     Secondly, that Senate ratification is sufficient safeguard against treaty law. But Senators often have to decide about treaties on the spot and under pressure from the State Department, and not only are treaties sometimes complex, but neither are Senators qualified as Constitutional lawyers. Furthermore, ratification is by 2/3 of the members “present and voting,” and in 1952 one treaty was ratified by only two senators, Senator Sparkman in the chair and Senator Thye in the Senate Chamber. And another, which could conceivably involve us in war in defense of Greece and Turkey, by only six Senators. Finally, treaties can be presented at any time; some day we might wake up and find that the Covenant on Human Rights has been taken from the table and presented late one afternoon, and ratified without previous public announcement.

     Thirdly, Mr. Dulles has said that we can trust in the integrity of the present administration not to misuse the treaty power. But after his speech to this effect, the United States representative in the United Nations formally signed the Genocide Convention.

     Lastly, it is said that unwritten custom in the United States is strong enough to insure us against the dangers of “treaty law.”

     The Senate Judiciary Committee, to which the resolution for a Constitutional amendment was first referred by the Senate, made a study, including nearly three months of public hearings, of the objections raised against the proposed amendment. At the end of its study, the Committee recommended the amendment to the Senate in substantially its present form by a two to one vote. The American Bar Association con­cluded in a study, which has been published and remains unanswered, that the legal arguments raised against the Bricker Amendment are un­founded.

     What is the real nature of the opposition to the Bricker Amendment? We considered the answer a few weeks ago in this class when we read a mimeographed debate on nationalism versus world government. The desire for world government has never died in this country, and the ex­ercise of “treaty law” granted in Article VI of our Constitution is one effective step towards transferring the law-making process of the United States to an international organization, the United Nations. The American Association for the United Nations and the United World Federalists are among the organizations that oppose the Bricker Amendment.

     Do these people really think United States citizens would be secure under United Nations rule? Gentlemen, I appeal to you, that whether you are for or against the idea of world government in principle the world government we are specifically heading towards, through the United Nations Organization and the treaty power, is anything but a restrained government, with adequate guarantees for our individual liberties such as are embodied in the Bill of Rights of our Consti­tution.

     Secondly, those who look forward to social and economic “reforms,” through unlimited extension of government regulations in this country, support “treaty law” because of the complete freedom of action it would give to the executive.

     The issue is liberty and our Bill of Rights. Frank Holman, past president of the American Bar Association, who received last year for his work on the Bricker Amendment that Association’s award for the most outstanding service towards its first objective, which is “to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States,” writes, “‘Treaty Law’ can be more dangerous to American Rights and the Ameri­can form of government than total war.” Gentlemen, the Bricker Amend­ment will come up for debate in Congress in January. We must devote all our effort and determination to seeing it through to a successful conclusion.

     In concluding, I want to paint a picture. I am reminded of the story of the little Dutch boy who found a small leak in the sea-dike and stayed out all night with his finger in the hole to keep it from growing bigger and washing away the dike. In the morning the people came out and found him and plugged the hole with clay and stone. In the tensions of the world today, more and more leaks are springing in the constitutional bulwarks everywhere defending men’s liberties. Such a leak has sprung in the United States, and a little boy is holding the leak with his finger. That little boy is traditionalism – only force of custom, and the avowed integrity of the present administra­tion. Some people are passing him by, saying, “He’s doing all right; let him keep on holding it.” But I say to you that we must go out and collect clay and stone.

     You can help by writing your Senator, your newspaper, and explain­ing in your town, the issue involved. Gentlemen, we must pass the Bricker Amendment in this Congress!

_____________________________

Basic Bibliography:  Holman, Frank E.:

1. Story of the “Bricker” Amendment (First Phase), The Argus Press, Seattle, Washington.

 

2. “The Erroneous Arguments of the Opponents of a Constitutional Amendment on Treaties and Executive Agreements,” The Argus Press, Seattle, Washington.

 

3. “The Increasing Need for a Constitutional Amendment on Treaties and Executive Agreements (the 1955 ‘Bricker Amendment’),” Feb., 1955. The Argus Press, Seattle, Washington.

Single copies of these booklets may be had on request from Frank E. Holman, Hoge Building, Seattle 4, Washington.

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2691

Carbon of letter from Spencer MacCallum, September 1, 1957, to Laura Jean McAdams, Florence State College, Florence, Alabama, and the latter’s response of September 5, 1957, plus carbon of note from MacCallum to Dr. Marie Baldwin, Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina, September 23, 1957

 

Dear Laura Jean:

It was certainly fun having you visit us here, and meeting and talking with you. I’m looking forward to a time when we can all be together again, and I’m especially happy that Popdaddy is going to be with you some this fall, getting his kettle boiling with some new ideas, and maybe getting some of them written down!

     Going over the last things I have to do before leaving here, I’ve come across a notice of a Prize Contest in writing that I have been bringing to Popdaddy’s attention every little while over the past year. I think it’s worth passing on to you; maybe you’ll find it fitting in with something you and he are working on together sometime.

     It’s the Bross Foundation Award, given by the Bross Foundation, Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, Illinois. The prize is $6,500.00, closing date: 1960.

     The conditions: “For unpublished manuscript concerning relation of Christian religion to other branches of knowledge.”

                            Many best wishes,

        S M

________________________________________________________

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3099

Letter from Lara Jean McAdams to Spencer MacCallum

September 5, 1957

 

 

Dear Spencer /MacCallum/:

I was quite thrilled to receive the lovely letter from you. I did enjoy my visit to Roadsend Gardens tremendously. And I cannot refrain from thanking you for all the lovely things you did for me. Those were most thoughtful gestures on your part, and they made me very happy, indeed. Of course, I also enjoyed talking with you. Never shall I forget your charm, brilliance, and kindness!! Here’s to your brilliant career!!

     I do hope that I can get “Popdaddy” to write down a whole new book this year! Keep your fingers crossed! I shall do my best at any rate. At present, I am quite concerned over his “loss” of you! Here’s hoping he will not try to drive too much and will watch all the “red lights.”

     After my exciting vacation, I am now buried in very prosaic household and college routine. The next few months will be “a madhouse,” for the opening of college has so many countless “uncalled-for” tasks.

     By the way, I am really interested in the Bross Foundation contest. Maybe I can inspire “Popdaddy” to keep writing on that subject and then piece his letters into an essay! At least that’s a project to work on.

     I know that you will enjoy your year in the West. Do not work yourself to death, however!

     Right now, I am wondering what the two poor kitties are going to do without you! How are they? I fed them Puss and Boots the last morning I was there.

     Thank you for sending the books to the four gentlemen! Here is a list of several who will enjoy Citadel, Market and Altar and will “spread the gospel.”

/There follow the names and addresses of 34 academics, not here transcribed but available in the original./

 

     I suppose this is a rather long list for one time. As soon as college opens, I can get a college directory in the library and check on others whom I know but have lost their addresses.

     Please send a number of copies of “The Practice of Christian Freedom” (if you have them) to:

Dr. Marie Baldwin

Highland Hospital

Asheville, N. C.

 

She read my copy and wanted others to give to her patients. I also gave her one of my C M and A’s. She is head of the Women’s Psychiatric Div. there and is from my hometown, Due West, S.C.

     Best wishes always and sincere gratitude ever!! Best “love” to “Popdaddy!!”

                            Laura Jean

 

P.S. Please send me Ada’s address!

 Thanks a million times. Ever, LJM

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3099

Letter from Spencer MacCallum to Dr. Marie Baldwin,

Highland Hospital, Ashville, North Carolina

September 23, 1957

 

 

Dear Dr. Baldwin:

The enclosed nine copies of Mr. Heath’s address, “THE PRACTICE OF CHRISTIAN FREEDOM,” are being sent to you by request and with the compliments of Dr. Laura Jean McAdams.

     We would enjoy receiving any comment that may occur to you.

     With best wishes, we remain

Sincerely yours,

Spencer MacCallum

SECRETARY

SM/p

Enclosures

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2717

Carbon of letter from Spencer MacCallum,

Men’s Residence Hall, 1101 University Parkway,

Seattle 5, Washington, to Mrs. Anita Stead

(who was assisting Heath in MacCallum’s absence),

The Science of Society Foundation,

1502 Montgomery Road, Elkridge 27, MD

October 6, 1957

 

Dear Mrs. Stead:

Well I’m all settled in school and think I’m going to like it very much. The anthropology department seems to be really alive, people doing and thinking new things.

 There are a whole lot of things to say in this letter about SSF — miscellaneous things I thought of in New York and/or forgot to do before leaving Elkridge. I hope everything is working out smoothly for you, finding things and so on and that there has been some exciting mail. Well here goes:

     About 250 letters are being typed in New York to all the people who received complimentary copies of CMA, bringing them up to date with how the book is being received. If Popdaddy hasn’t run into any snags, you should be receiving these before very long. We had them made up in your name, to be signed by you, like the sample copy enclosed. With each letter should go four pages of quotations, the first of which you already have and three more of which you should be getting from Enquire Printing Company very soon if Popdaddy hasn’t brought them down with him. One of the letters was to Dr. Detlev Bronk; but I left him out of the list at the last minute, thinking you might like to say something more personal to him than the form letter does, since you know him and your name will be at the bottom of the letter. So when you send out the letters, remember that he was left out and needs one too.

     I’m putting together something to pass for minutes of meetings for SSF, from notes I made up just before leaving. This I’ll send on as soon as possible. It would help if you should think, whenever you’re about to mail me anything, to look in the minute book and see what dates Aunt Beatrice made up her Treasurer’s Reports. She has kept these up to date, and the dates should coincide with meetings.

     My address here is:      Men’s Residence Hall

1101 University Parkway

Seattle 5, Washington.

 

     I’m enclosing a personal check for $40.00, which represents the amount I had left in PETTY CASH when I left to come out here. It will give you a start. I usually tried to keep the level at about 40 to 50 dollars, but you’ll find out what seems best to you. I’m glad you can keep records of your expenditures. This is more business­like and better for the Foundation, and something I couldn’t seem to manage to do. It must be a wonderful skill!

     Also enclosed is my ignition key to Popdaddy’s car, which I said I’d send on. It will do more good in Elkridge than out here in Seattle. The trunk key is not with it because the old trunk lock gave up the ghost and had to be replaced with a new one, making my key obsolete.

     I’ve been worrying about the white pines at Elkridge. Popdaddy’s trees have caught a fungus-like infection that looks a little like white cottage cheese on the trunks and under sides of the limbs. Mr. Smeltzer, the tree man on Route 40, came out once to look at them, but we weren’t home. He left his card. If he looked at them while he was there, after he found we weren’t home, maybe he could tell you what he thinks about them over

the phone — whether he thinks the situation serious enough

to call for spraying the trees. If Mr. Smeltzer does think it serious, you might bring it up to P.D. I’ve talked with him about it, so he knows what the problem is. I’d hate anything to happen to those trees; they’re one of the important assets of the Foundation.

     It should make it much happier working upstairs if the windows were cleaned. I found out about it once, and then went to Virginia or somewhere and didn’t have it done. There are several window cleaners listed in the yellow pages of the Baltimore directory. They are glad to come out, and washing the second-floor windows only (excluding the sun porch, which is unfinished and in which the windows could be reached from the inside anyway), should cost about eight dollars. If you like clean win­dows as I do so you can look out at the trees, you might call a cleaners and ask them to come out. It’s a proper expense of Petty Cash.

     Add these new people to the SSF mailing list:

(l) Mr. Henning Prentice, Armstrong Cork Co., Lancaster (?),

(2) Dr. Robert Weidehhammer, University of Pittsburgh,

(3) David Lawrence and (4) Fulton Lewis, Jr.

Dr. Weidenhammer is a new acquaintance of Popdaddy’s from Leesburg, where he lives in the summer, and seems much interested in his thesis. He may teach political science, though I’m not sure.

     You might be thinking about sending out about 1300 (unsigned) multigraphed, straight form letters to all the reviewing media that received CMA for review, bringing them up to date on how the book is being received elsewhere and jogging their interest by the sheets of quotations (I’d only use three pages — omitting  the page of libertarians). I don’t know: probably this couldn’t hurt, and it might help some. It’s just an idea I had. I had enough of the quotations extra printed in New York so that you could do this if it seemed like a good idea. This list would include all the magazine file and all the entries initialed CMA in LITERARY MARKET PLACE (various lists).

     I’ve sent Popdaddy in a separate letter a list of people in Baltimore and Washington who need some personal attention about now — as they occurred to me flying out her — as well as a list for New York. This isn’t a com­plete list, but it’s something I gave him to work on.

     I’d sure like to have a copy of the sheets of quota­tions when you get them from New York, especially the page with the quotation by Ruth Underhill, the anthropo­logist. I just might be able to use that to advantage out here.

     I hope the book cartons arrived okay and that the work in Laurel is progressing apace.

     A letter I hoped to get off (or two of them) before leaving was left on the table in pencil notes, and I don’t know if I said anything about it to you or not. It was a letter to the Egyptian Embassy in Washington, sending them a copy of the Suez proposal with printed comments and also a couple of pages of additional comments type­written, and a second letter similar to the first with the same contents to be sent directly to Nasser. It’s ironical that we didn’t do this before when we were actively proposing this solution, but we put it off be­cause of the lack of governmental recognition we were receiving generally, the considerable academic support that was coming in and that by giving it prestige in that quarter increased the chances of an eventual hearing, and the hope that it might reach the Egyptians indirectly. Anyhow, for symmetry and to properly wind it up, we should send the results on to the Egyptians now. As for the letter to Nasser, instead of using a similar letter to the one to the Egyptian Ambassador in Washington, if you have time and the interest, it might be interesting to add something of an argument in the letter itself, pointing out in a diplomatic way that besides the immediate financial advantage, Nasser (or Egypt) could well represent his part in the negotiations as a benefactor and peace-maker before the world. This could be extremely important to him prestige-wise. (To Egypt, he could represent it as a net gain.) For these couple of letters, you will also have to type new copies of the two additional pages of quotations, which I think I left with the pencil notes in the form of carbon copies.

     Popdaddy sometimes writes personal checks to cover Foundation expenses when we want to save the time of writing to Aunt Beatrice (Mrs. Irvan T. O’Connell, Rutherford House, Winchester, Va.). We keep track of these, and Aunt Beatrice reimburses him with a Foundation check.

     Popdaddy should get a list of the officers of The U.S. Trust Co. of New York. He had an idea that he might want to give some of them complimentary copies of CMA.

     Just an extraneous thought that may or may not appeal to you: the way I devised of setting up letters on the Foundation stationery was to use two margin settings, accord­ing to the length of the letter. For short letters, I’d set the margins to coincide with the margins of the letterhead (20 on the left side), and for longer letters, 15 on the left and 70 on the right. I found the shorter form looks best on plain sheets without P.D.’s name at the left, and the longer form on the more formal sheets, where the left margin of 15 centers under P.D.’s name.

      I hope you’ll get Popdaddy to do a lot of dictating of
ideas — off the cuff and informally. Provoke him to produce — anything that interests you. I made it serve a double purpose by making it a way of getting to understand things I was curious about or didn’t understand about his ideas. Whenever he said something that really clicked, I’d get him to dictate an outline of it.

     Now if this letter hasn’t got everything out of my system, I don’t know what will! This is all you’ll hear from me about this kind of thing from now on, except as any miscellaneous questions come up in your work. Remember that I’m only a couple of days away by airmail — not like 2,400 miles — and I promise to get some kind of an answer to any kind of question at all in the return mail every time!

     Tell P.D. that a new man in the Department here that I’m going to be working closely with as my Research Advisor is especially interested in early voluntary social organiza­tion and is working right now on a study of the Cherokee village communities and how under pressure of encroachments by English and Indians they were slowly forced into political federation for more adequate defense. The process fits perfectly into the scheme of development of political states outlined in CMA. All in all, I’m starting out finding anthropology very stimulating,

     Incidentally, will you please send me a copy of CMA? I didn’t bring one, and parts of it fit right into this study of early community.

     Best wishes to you,

So long,

 

/Penned note/ Enclosures being sent under separate cover — I can’t find a large envelope right now. SM

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2723

Extracts from (incomplete) penned letter from Spencer MacCallum,

University of Washington, Seattle, Washington

November, 1957

 

Dear Popdaddy,

… Say, P.D., next time you write, tell me how your new glasses are. I’ve been wondering all fall if they were helping your reading any — especially since the last book I sent you had such small print. I hope you’re enjoying Radcliffe-Brown as much as I do. He didn’t catch sight of modern contractual organization, but he sure had a lot of insight into primitive organization — which is of course background for more sophisticated social (societal) organization.

     In studying kinship this fall, I’ve come across an interesting fact. The kinship system of the early Anglo-Saxons was a rare type which occurred in very few other parts of the world, and I think there may be grounds for believing that, other things being equal, the transition to individualism could most easily be made from that type than from any other. So when you said the Anglo-Saxons in England were specially favored for proprietary administration by having migrated by sea, I think we might be able to say they were also favored by the very structure of their kinship organization. The reasons are roughly as follows.

                                 /Succeeding pages missing/

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2725

Letter from Spencer MacCallum,

Room 229, 1101 Campus Parkway,

Seattle 5, Washington

November 6, 1957

 

Hi Popdaddy:

I’ve been putting off writing you until I could write a regular “letter”; but now I’m not going to wait any longer and I’ll just send this note.

     Enclosed is a copy of a paper I wrote last month for a seminar. Corpy read it too, and the marks in the margin on this copy are his; I thought you’d like to see the kinds of things he marked. The paper was very successful, so I’m starting off on the right foot!

     You’ll notice that the paper doesn’t go very far in the direction of CMA — but I didn’t mean it to. I want to become a good anthropologist first — in the conventional sense. And there’s a lot that’s sound in conven­tional anthropology! Everything about kinship, village community, development of property, can be groundwork on which to build later on.

     On page 20, you’ll see a new thought about the possible causes for the transition from village community to political organization that we didn’t get in CMA. It’s an interesting thought, and maybe we’ll get it into one of the new editions.

     A new development out here of the last couple of years has been a growing cooperation between the sociolo­gists and the anthropologists. I understand that as recently as five years ago, there was an atmosphere of aloofness, if not hostility. The sociologists are recognizing the need to understand the foundations and beginnings of society, and the anthropologists are recognizing the inadequacy of studying just the primitives. Some anthropologists are making analyses of some U.S. and Canadian communities after the pattern of their studies of aboriginal communities in Australia and such places. So far, they are limiting these analyses to small towns — which show the most resemblance to the primitive communities they are familiar with. I^’ve been thinking that perhaps I could make such a socio-anthropological analysis in a couple of years from now, of a modern hotel as a community and after establishing the analogy (or homology), show the differences and bring out the implications of corporate organization. If it were done right, I think this could be very acceptable as an academic paper, and be thought of as something decidedly new but not necessarily as radical. Well, we’ll see.

     In line with the changes that are taking place in anthropology, some of the graduate students the other night over coffee were rebelling against the exclusively data-gather­ing approach of anthropology in the past and saying that the time must be here, or very rapidly approaching, when we can begin looking for generalizations and laws in society — when we can begin using the data we have collected. These were older students, some of whom have been out working in the field, and they had been talking about the tremendous advances anthropology has made just since the War in gathering informa­tion.

     I haven^’t said anything about proprietary adminis­tration — there hasn’t been any time to anyhow. But I have donated a copy of CMA to the Library, and the jacket may be displayed in a general reading room.

     Also, I’ve corrected a considerable oversight on our part. I checked at a local book store and discovered that CMA is not listed in the standard reference lists of published books. This means that bookstores cannot find out where to order copies of CMA unless they get the information from a library. Checking the library here, I found that this is difficult unless the library is large enough to have a Union Catalogue of the Library of Congress. HOWEVER, this is corrected now. I’ve written CUMULATIVE BOOK INDEX and have heard from them, and have listed CMA (with Bookmailer as the distri­butor) in their next volume. I also wrote and am expecting to hear from BOOKS IN PRINT and PUBLISHERS’ TRADE LIST ANNUAL, both published by Bowker Company. These should complete it.

     Please send me some more sets of quotations about the book. And what’s been happening this fall? What mail, and what have you seen of Dr. Harper and FEE? Any reviews appearing anywhere yet?

     Oh, I forgot to say above, when I was talking about anthropology, that I’ve found a successor for Sir Henry Maine! — an English anthropologist (who died last year!): his name is A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. His studies don’t go beyond the primitive community, so he didn’t see contract as the relationship setting off Western society from kinship and political organization. But his background was both law and science, and his generaliza­tions about primitive institutions, and his prognosis of an objective science of society are a joy to read. He was a pro­fessor at Oxford. I think his studies are going to be one of the big influences in anthropology in the next ten and twenty years, now that the reaction is beginning to come about in anthropology against the “particularistic”, or “rags and patches” approach to society as a hodge-podge of “culture traits”. Some considerable attention is being given him this year in one of the courses here — for the first time, I believe.

     Did you get the book by Seebohm on early English communities that I sent you? Keep track of it, because I’m having to renew it each two weeks at the library here.

     Popdaddy, you’ve launched Proprietary Administra­tion, and it’s got a good tight hull. It’s structurally sound and will keep afloat, and sooner or later someone is going to put a good strong engine in it. Enough people have the book and are interested in it for one reason or another that it will be talked about and will circulate for a long time to come. And in the meantime, we have sufficient good endorsements of it that we can command the attention of almost anyone we might want to.

     I’m saying this, because I’d hate to see the promotion, or even the improvement of CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR taking up very much of your time. I’d like to see anything more you do in that direction; but the direction, at least, is clearly laid out. Now what I’d really like to see you work up is a clear science of physics. I’ve been worrying some lest the advertising of CMA cut into your time and attention.

     I’d personally like to work with you on the religious-esthetic side, the deadline for that being 1960 — the Bross Foundation Award. And I’d love nothing better than to read chapters of that as you write them and send them out here to me. But the deadline for that is two years away. Maybe you could put some summers or odd times in on that. What I’d really like to see you work up is your physics.

     What I’m trying to say is that socionomy is done now; it’s well presented, and I’d like to see you go on to develop religion and physics, leaving socionomy behind pretty much as a closed chapter. Regarding the religion, I’d like to work up something with you for the Bross Competition in 1960. But between these two, religion and physics, I’d like to see you give precedence to the physics.

     Well, those are just my ideas about it. It lets you know how I’m thinking.

     I’d better pull this out of the typewriter and send it on to you. If I’d known how long this was going to be, I’d probably be putting it off still!

     Let me know how things are going.

So long,

 

A final correction on my address: they’ve asked us to use the Room Number as well. So it now stands officially:

Room 229

1101 Campus Parkway

Seattle 5, Washington

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2819

Letter to Heath from Spencer MacCallum

January 7, 1958

Hi P.D.:

Studying anthropology certainly is giving your ideas a lot of meaning. I keep working up a principle or idea and then recognizing it as one of yours in a different form. An interesting thought occurred to me a while ago about primitive property being inalienable from the group which held beneficiary interest in it. Property hasn^’t changed, only the circumstances surrounding it; the interested group now includes all of mankind as potential beneficiaries. Property is still inalienable – from the whole human race. Another thought that has been forcing itself on me is that private property goes all the way back to the very beginnings of society. It’s beginning to appear from anthropology that private property antedates settled communities and was well developed among nomadic hunters. So it is not property that has changed so much (except in complexity) but our mode of account keeping, of measuring reciprocal equivalences among people. The big change was from keeping accounts by feel, in which elaborate kinship systems and highly formalized gift exchanges were developed as empirical aids, to keeping accounts quantitatively. Another thought has been that property of every kind in primitive societies has always carried with it the obligation on the part of the owner to put the part that he does not consume to the use of others. The “wolf” idea of property can probably be attributed in every case where it occurs to political influence. Effective use of the materials of nature is the great principle underlying the convention of property.

     These were some of the thoughts in my head tonight, and I thought I^’d run them through the typewriter to you. I’ve had a lot of thoughts this fall, but mostly I’ve been very very busy. This term I’m much busier still and am somewhat concerned if I can get through it. I’ve four papers assigned to me to write in the next nine weeks, three of them on books I haven’t read yet, besides keeping up with everything else!

     I’m taking an interesting course on typography and advertising lay-out which is fun. I hope I can keep it up with everything else I’m trying to do.

     Send the Radcliffe-Brown books back when you can. I haven’t had time to read his NATURAL SCIENCE OF SOCIETY, and may not this term, but if you think well of it, I might like to send it to Dr. Harper to look at. (I haven’t written him and owe about four letters, and feel very bad about it. He’s sent me several extremely interesting leads about people looking in our direction in anthropo­logy, and I don’t want him to stop!).

     Send me a novum organum on physics! Or some of the chapters of it.

So long,

 

/Undated fragment written from Seattle/

 I started this letter a couple of days ago, and will go on to finish it now. What I was going to say about kinship systems was this:

 Most kinship systems in the world are not based simply
on nearness of relationship, regardless of side, as ours is,
but recognize descent (of status) through unilineal groupings
which are exogamous. So you inherit status in your mother’s
or your father’s exogamous clan, depending on whether the
organization tends to patriliny or matriliny, and the system
is consistent with mathematical precision throughout. (By
this definition, the Scottish “clans” were not true clans but
something more like tribes.) Unilineal reckoning has two
advantages over cognatic reckoning (where nearness of relationship is all that counts). It’s a device to classify a much larger number of people and thereby systemize their jural rights and duties and integrate them into a much larger cooperating whole than is possible under simple cognatic reckoning, which gets almost hopelessly complex for practical purposes beyond third cousins — descendants of a common great-great-grandparent. Secondly, it allows the formation of corporate groups which keep their identity from one generation to another — just the membership changing. These corporate groups then can develop traditional cooperative relationships in the primitive society with other corporate descent groups. Under cognatic reckoning, the kin group is somewhat different for every individual, and corporate groups cannot develop. The network of established symbiotic relationships, the system of recognized interdependency that develops among the unilineal kin groups, beginning with the exchange of mates under the rule of exogamy and extending to ceremonial and economic func­tions, ties together a large population into a common culture.

     So the Anglo-Saxon kinship system seems to have been a relatively unspecialized and primitive type, dispersed families with a minimum of corporate identity. Since the groups were small and essentially families, they were the more easily broken up by a migration by sea.

     I can probably explain this better than I’ve written it, but the general idea seems to suggest again the rule that adaptation and specialization are opposed to the emergence of new forms, and that when individualism and contractual organiza­tion did occur as a step beyond the level of kinship organiza­tion, it occurred among a people who had the least specialized form of kin grouping.

     P.D., if you think it would be worthwhile from the Foundation’s standpoint to bring me back for a week or so during Christmas to review the fall correspondence and write a batch of letters, I’ll be glad to do it. The transportation cost would be about $220.00. It may be that you and Anita have everything going on at a good rate. My last exams are on the 18th of December. I’m interested to see what has developed with the Foundation over the fall, but I have things I could equally well do here. The two balance out. So you decide if you think it would be desirable or worthwhile from a Founda­tion viewpoint and let me know about it.

     That’s quite a review Rev. Westhof has written for you!

     I had a nice Thanksgiving with Beatrice. Ted is home again, and things seem to be going well with them. Corpy sends his greetings and respects too.

     Are you planning to go to Winter Park in January or after Christmas? I hope so. I wish we could exchange some Winter Park weather for the weather we’ve got out here. The sun came out one day here two weeks ago, and it seemed so bright that my eyes couldn’t adjust to it all day. Some mornings it seems as if we were living on the bottom of the sea.

     Well, so long for now; I’ve got a lot of German grammar to master for a test tomorrow. Say hello to everyone in Waterford and Elkridge and New York for me.

So long.

 

 

________________________________________________________________

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2819

Letter to Heath from Spencer MacCallum

January 29, 1958

 

Dear Popdaddy:

Your letter has just come, and I’ve been on the point of writing you for the last week; so I’m glad I wasn’t able to get to it until now.

     First of all, I admired the typing of your letter and decided you must be in the pink of health and spirits if your artistry on the typewriter was any indication. Then in closing you let the cat out of the bag. So say hello to the “lovely young lady” for me too!

     What I needed to write you about was to ask you to arrange for Mark to sell some of my Standard Oil of California stock for me. Thanks for your offer to lend me something to tide me over until the market lifts — to be repaid out of “future profits on investments.” However, I’ve been very im­pressed in the last six months with the uncertainty of future profits. And besides, your investments must certainly be making more profits than mine are now (Standard Oil is down to 145.00).

     I am wondering how much I should sell now. My needs until the end of school are $600, due in these amounts:

February 15: $200

March 15: $400.

There’s not much time for leeway, but perhaps timing isn’t as important for such a small number of stocks anyhow. Fifteen shares at the present market price would meet my requirements through the spring. (I don’t suppose it would be worthwhile to divide the sale in two parts, 5 shares now and 10 in March.)

     The advertisements for CMA look fine. Roscoe Pound’s quote was certainly used to good effect! And the note to the Prospective Reader is also very well expressed. The Note is nicely reproduced and on a fine quality of paper. It looks to me as though Mr. Munson did that job for you; it’s his style.

     I had a very nice letter from Dr. Harper the other day. He didn’t know about Radcliffe-Brown either (somebody should have brought him to his attention!), and said he’d try to get a copy of the book in Irvington. I’d rather lend him my copy with your marginal notes in it, and maybe get some more notes from him too! That’s one of the things that makes a book especially interesting. So will you please send me back the book as soon as you can? I hadn’t had a chance to look at it before I sent it to you, and as soon as I’ve read it, I’d like to send it on to Dr. Harper (hoping he won’t already have got a copy of it).

     Here are my plans for the summer:

     School lets out on Friday, June 13th. I’m no longer planning to go to Harvard in the fall, but expect to come back here in September to finish my Master’s Degree. Therefore, I wouldn’t be returning with you to the East at the end of the summer.

     For catching up on Foundation work, there’s no place so nearly ideal as Elkridge, where we have our records, correspondence, stationery and typewriters, etc.

         Unless you get an invitation to come out to California earlier, how about my coming back to Baltimore and our picking up our correspondence and reviewing all Foundation work up to that time there — accessible to Baltimore and New York — and when we have our work squared away and an itinerary planned, come out West perhaps the first half of July. This way, perhaps we could get some correspondence started that we could follow up during the rest of the summer.

     This is just my first reaction to your letter. There’s lots of time, so let me know what you think of it.

     Hey, when you get to Elkridge, send me copies of the reviews of CMA. I may not have time to make translations of the Spanish ones now, but I can translate any parts that we might be able to use, and I’d like to read anything in print about CMA. Also, C.J. and Cather have asked me to send them on to them after I’ve seen them.

 I’m real glad you’re getting down to Florida before Febru­ary’s traditionally bad weather starts. It’ll get you away from being bothered with CMA, too. P.D., the most important, the most interesting, the most urgent, the most promising thing now is for you to pursue physics and see what you can make of it.

If this letter reaches you in New York, you might con­sider trying to visit that fine physicist who wrote A Sextet of Sibyls (his name slips me right now) on your way to Elkridge — call him from New York and stop over at Princeton if necessary.

 Oh – I didn’t tell you why I decided against applying to Harvard. I’m not sure what I want to do yet in anthropology, and am thinking about some small colleges and (not very seriously) the University of London. In the meantime, as a result of the reorganization of this department, it may be one of the best on the West Coast in a few years. So a degree from here may be good professionally, besides giving me more time to look into other schools.

               So long and all the best,

               /s/ Spencer

 

 Here’s a thought for today, nothing special but an
interesting comparison that occurred to me. (Incidentally,
I find I have to use “society” for primitive groups too; there
isn’t any other to fill the need. And anyhow, we don’t deny
babies the appellation “human”. But I do distinguish it as
primitive and modern. And also, we can speak of primitive
societies in the plural, whereas we can only speak of
modern society in the singular.):

      In normal society, primitive or modern, every extension of property or service to another is reciprocated and a balance maintained among the membership. The reciprocation may come from the same party or from another or from a number of others, and it may come at the same time or at a different time or at a number of different times.

      In modern society, a man commonly puts property or services to the use of another in exchange for a draft on the general market. He receives equivalence at his option from the same or, more often, from different persons — in the market at different times. Services of all kinds are readily measured against a common numerical standard of equivalence — the prevailing market price.

      In primitive society, each person has many statuses, which take effect only as they are called upon — depending on the person to whom he is relating and the occasion for the contact. Therefore a man commonly puts property or services to the use of another because that person is a kinsman and occupies a certain status in relation to him. He receives back from other persons at different times according to his status towards them. (Immediate completion of a trade between two persons is barter and is rare both in primitive and in modern — or status and contractual — society.)

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2819

Letter to Heath from Spencer MacCallum,

3000 Indiana N.E., Albuquerque, New Mexico

September 27, 1958

 

Dear Popdaddy:

It was good talking with you on the telephone this morning.

     Enclosed is copy for the coupon which I said I would send. I have sent copies of this to Mr. Fink and to Mr. Meeks. If this is satisfactory, will you give Mr. Meeks your okay so that he can go ahead with it?

     Sorry we delayed Mr. Fink by not getting the letter of instructions to him. The last time I saw the letter, it was on the left-hand side of the big desk under your brief case. But the carbon copy of the letter will cer­tainly do as well. If you didn’t find the carbon filed under Fink, look under Lewis Advertising, and then in the file box labeled “General Promotion of Cit.M.A.” But I’m sure you found it all right on the first try.

     Popdaddy, I’d like very much to see the letter from Mr. Fink restating the terms of our arrangement with him. You were going to send it on to me, but it hasn’t arrived yet. Not that I don’t think it’s all right — you could judge of that — but I’m just genuinely interested in it. I’m interested in how business people talk to one another — the common law of business practice. So will you forward it on to me?

     Enclosed is a carbon of my letter to Mr. Fink. I sent a similar letter to Mr. Meeks covering the corresponding points, but neglected to make a carbon. I’m now waiting to receive from Mr. Meeks the galleys of the booklet of reviews, the proof of the coupon envelope, and finally the silver print (is that the right word?) of the finished circular.

     I got a nice letter from Aunt Marguerite yesterday that you forwarded (thanks), asking, among other things, if I could tell her something of Heath Charles. So I’m sending her his present address. He must be as bad a correspondent as we are.

     Cather says you told her you might be coming out before very long on your way to California. That sounds swell. Don’t wait until you’ve arranged your reception in California in advance — that’s too uncertain!

      Cather’s still working on her short story writing and trying to publish. If you ever wonder what the appropriate gift to her might be, the typewriter she uses is a horror — it’s a small Remington portable used after the first World War by her father when he was a young man, and that he gave her to use in college. For Gosh sakes, don’t let Cather know I’ve said anything about this to you.

     When do you think you might be coming through? Lucy is thinking about coming out and visiting too, I think, if she can arrange it.

     Keep in touch with me about the advertising. C.J. and Cather are very much impressed with the circular. They think it’s in good taste.

Best in everything,

 

P.S. I won’t bother to send back the proof I now have of the circular since I’ve no comment on it.

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2819

Letter to Heath from Spencer MacCallum,

3000 Indiana N.E., Albuquerque, New Mexico

October 24, 1958

 

Dear Popdaddy:

Here’s the proof of the circular, and I’m sorry it has been so much delayed. I’ll write you later about the things that have been happening that held it up.

     I’m sure you remember Mr. Fink saying, on the last day that I was in Baltimore, that 6″ lengthwise was too long to fit easily into the envelope. He asked that we reduce the long dimension by about 1/8″. That informa­tion apparently didn’t get to Mr. Meeks, since the folded size is still 5 ¼ X 6”. We can remedy this if we reduce the pages, exactly in the proportion that they are, until the short dimension is 5″ even. This will leave the length something under 6”.

      I notice on the first page, you have moved the decorative monogram up 3/16″ and right 1/2″. I vote for the monogram inside as Mr. Meeks placed it — my reasons being that it gives a tighter organization of the page and a more clearly defined organization, since it then aligns with the end letters of the words POUND and APPROACH, above and be­low. This inner margin thus defined is important because it forms the right-hand side of the perfect inner square I have marked lightly in pencil. Moved out, the monogram aligns only with the margin below and with nothing above, since as you have noticed, the line, “CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR” is extended out beyond the page margins on both right and left to give it more prominence. (The monogram is set back with rubber cement — so can be moved.)

     The photograph of the book is just wonderful! The top and bottom edges of the book exactly parallel the slope of the line, “CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR”. Is the rather dark, grey background in the photograph to be removed when the half-tone is made? It should be.

     On pages 2 and 3, the words “DISTINGUISHED APPRECIA­TION” have always been planned for red, but they appear black on this proof. Is this a change made on purpose or is it a mistake? If a mistake, it should be corrected; I think red is very desirable.

     On page 6, I pulled a boner. I intended asking Mr. Meeks to crop the photograph of you so that your head would be proportionately larger, instead of reducing the picture that we gave him exactly as was. I was thinking so much in terms of this end result that I took all for granted and forgot to note it for Mr. Meeks. The photo should be corrected. The head is definitely too small and lost in the half-tone area, with too much dead space around it re­sulting. This portrait should be the attention-focusing spot of importance on the page. As it is, it is a weak spot instead. I have penciled in a smaller frame of same proportions as the half-tone cut, to show how I think this should be. It is a question now of enlarging this to the size of the present half-tone cut.

     I note your penciled directions on the proof to trans­pose pages 5 and 6, which have got out of order, and to delete the last line on what will be page 5 when these are transposed.

     Crawfish and Cather pointed out as a weakness of the circular the fact that it only carries the comment of individuals and no names of familiar periodicals or publications. Crawfish then also made the happy suggestion of including as a third insertion — besides the circular and the collection envelope — a single sheet the same size as the folded circu­lar with nothing on it, at all, but our three reviews from American periodicals of highest standing, namely, MODERN SCHOOLMAN, NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE, and WASHINGTON POST (which are chosen in this order on the basis of content). I think those three alone are all that are wanted, and that the page would need no word of explanation but would be self-explanatory. Neither would the page need to be in two colors; one color would do the trick. Finally, this would be printed on one side only, so that the unprinted side could lie in­serted against the face of Mr. Fink’s large mailing envelopes and thus have no printing showing through the front of our final letters as they go out to our prospects in the mail. You will of course need to arrange with Mr. Fink to handle this extra insertion if you decide to go ahead with it. I think it’s distinctly worth doing, and am grateful to Crawfish for suggesting it.

     I’ll write you a good letter about my calculus and other studies right soon. I wrote Dr. Harper and got a nice letter in reply. When are you coming out???

So long for now,

/s/ Spencer

Carbon copy to Mr. Meeks

I’m sending photo of book directly back to Mr. Meeks.

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2819

Letter to Heath from Spencer MacCallum,

3000 Indiana N.E., Albuquerque, New Mexico

October 25, 1958

 

Hi P.D.:

It was swell hearing you on the telephone last night. I’ve finished the letter to you commenting on the circular proof, and enclose it. I’m writing two letters to you because the one containing the information about the circular, I typed in duplicate and sent a copy to Mr. Meeks, along with the photograph of the book.

     Here’s a paragraph I decided to leave out of the other letter when I thought I would make a carbon for Mr. Meeks. I’ll enclose it here just for the record:

“At considerable risk of seeming garrulous, even boorish, I’ll mention again that on page 4, it seems out of character with the “low pressure” sales effect of the whole circular to run the sentence about CMA being reviewed in 14 “leading countries” and irrelevant how many languages these reviews were written in. It seems a jarring note in what is, however, an otherwise very harmonious circular. So pass over this with only a light curse, and I hope maybe a little indulgence.”

I’m glad you like the idea of perhaps finding Cather a typewriter. She’s spent so much on overhauls for this one that it seems she might almost have been able to rent one (a figure of speech, since I don’t really know how much typewriter rentals are). I’ve rigged up a rubber band spring for the carriage to keep it from piling up letters, but it’s slow to use. How about giving her one of the Foundation typewriters and getting a new one for the Foundation? I should think the kind we have, Smith Corona, would be very satisfactory. And Christmas time might be the most appropriate time. A good typewriter will certainly be the perfect gift for Cather, for everyday use as well as considering her aspirations towards short-story writing.

     I’m really sorry this proof has been delayed this way. I’ve been alternating diarrhea and constipation since I’ve been here, combined with some flu or something. I’ve had two exams in Calculus and Organic, we’ve been trying to lay a floor and finish off a room for me to live in here, and I kept thinking I wanted to do this circular all at once instead of in sessions — combined with inertia that runs in our family. I’m sorry.

     Again, P.D., if you’re going to wait until you have California connections lined up, you might as well do your waiting out West! So I’ll hope to see you sooner or later and I know Corpy would like you to come out to Seattle. Good luck at the College down south!

/s/ Spencer

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2819

Letter from Spencer MacCallum, 3000 Indiana N.E., Albuquerque, New Mexico, to

Ben Meeks, John D. Lucas Company, Printers, 26th and Sisson Streets, Baltimore, Maryland

November 10, 1958

 

Dear Mr. Meeks:

I have just had a letter from my grandfather, in which he enclosed a favorable review of his book from “The Solicitor” of London for October. I have written him back, suggesting that the name of this magazine be added to the “Index of Reviews” in the back of the booklet, “SAMPLING THE REVIEWS”, that you are making page proofs of for us now.

     The new entry would read: “The Solicitor, London, 10-58;” and would be inserted alphabetically immediately after the entry, “Santa Ana Register …”, a few lines before the end of the Index. This would also require changing the words, “September, 1958”, on the front cover, to read, “October, 1958”.

     I told my grandfather that I would send this sug­gestion on to you so that he could simply authorize it or not, and you would know exactly how to proceed.

     I hope everything is progressing well. Everyone certainly seems pleased about the circulars; I haven’t seen them yet, but am looking forward to getting some Popdaddy has sent so that they can be shown to the rest of our family out here.

     Before long, I shall be looking forward to getting some page proofs of the little booklet.

With very best wishes,

Spencer H. MacCallum

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2819

Letter to Heath from Spencer MacCallum,

3000 Indiana N.E., Albuquerque, New Mexico

November 12, 1958

 

Hi Popdaddy,

Thanks for the letter and enclosures, which I am returning for the files. They look fine.

     The circulars have not come yet. I’m hoping they will, because Lucy is a fine person for distributing them, and she’s contacting interesting University people here — Dr. Hibben included, who is head of the Anthropology Department. I was taking a graduate seminar with Dr. Hibben in anthropology, along with the math and chemistry, but have had to drop it for lack of time. I attended the last session today, and am very sorry to have to let it go.

     How far has the book of reviews gone at the printers? Is it too late to add the name of “The Solicitor, London, 10-58” to the Index of Reviews? This insertion would come immediately following the “Santa Ana Register”, about three or four lines from the end of the Index. This would also entail a change of the date on page 1 from “September, 1958” to “October, 1958” — which is good because it makes the pamphlet more current by a month.

     I’m dropping this suggestion to Mr. Meeks tonight in a separate note, copy enclosed. So will you please let him know your opinion on it? If you decide to do it, then he will already have the instructions, and can go ahead when he receives your authorization. So will you please tell him one way or another on this? Thanks. (Incidentally, I think it’s worth doing — it gives us a complete record now.)

     We all enjoyed reading the “Solicitor” review at the table tonight, and hope you make a big contribution at Salemburg, N.C. — Wish I were going to be there!!

Best wishes — So long,

                        /s/ Spencer

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2819

Letter to Heath from Spencer MacCallum,

3000 Indiana N.E., Albuquerque, New Mexico

February 18, 1959

 

Dear Popdaddy:

I received the gift check from you, for which much thanks, indeed! Also for your two letters.

     About that tax-form for 1958, here are the best sugges­tions I can give. You might check each of these methodically, and then if it still hasn’t turned up, ask Ada to take a morn­ing off from her work and make a thorough search through everything, including a second search of her own through the following points:

1. I do not think it could be in the attic.

     2. Check both the Active File and the 1958 File under the _v following categories, in this order:

Science of Society Foundation

Taxes

Foundation

Government

U.S. Government

     3. Check in the Minute Book, which should be in one of the drawers of the metal file cabinet (active file) or in the bookcase under the orange (inactive) file boxes.

4.  Call Mr. Bartlett and ask if he possibly has a copy.

     5. Look on the top shelf of the large wardrobe (the only reason I suggest looking here is that I forget what is supposed to be there.

     6. Look for a large clasp envelope marked something like, “OBSOLETE BUT TO BE KEPT”, which may be on the long table, on the bottom of the steps leading to the attic, or somewhere else. This envelope has some superseded copies of Aunt Beatrice’s Treasurer’s Reports. It should not contain the tax-forms; but I am trying to include all of the places where these could remotely have been misplaced.

     The booklets came this afternoon from Mr. Fink, and all the letters (some eighty of them) should be out by tomorrow. I’ve typed in the date of January 6th on all of them.

     I’m relieved that the repairs on the car are not as much as they might have been. That was a real whack I gave it, and it’s been on my mind. I have my new driver’s license, and all that is in order now. I own a bright red motor-scooter now that takes me to school and back each day at about 35 miles an hour and goes well over a hundred miles to a gallon. It would seem like just the thing to have at Elkridge to go down to the village on. I got an unheard-of bargain on it, nearly 50% less than regular price, so that I’ll get my investment out of it, if not interest as well, when I sell it in June. Actually the way I got it was to buy a 1956 super model from an individual for $70 (there was the bargain!), for which I was allowed $200 trade-in value a few days later on a very slightly used 1958 economy model which the dealer had marked at $225.

     This typewriter is really a honey! There’s another bargain at the same pawn shop, a “new” Clipper model of the Smith Corona exactly like your typewriter with the standard type. It’s $70, which is $25 less than the retail price. Not as good a buy as this typewriter you got for Crawfish and Cather, but it looks very good indeed. Shall I pick it up for you? I’ll be glad to.

I just got back from a weekend spent with an old Andover classmate, Byron Harvey (of the Fred Harveys), as guests in a distant Hopi Indian village for some religious ceremonies. Byron has a number of friends in the village, including the Chief Priest. The Hopis have no Christian church of any denomination that I saw, and no pretentions whatever of being Christians. They have a richly developed culture of their own with roots as deep into the past as ours, which is still intact and living, unmarred by contact with European ways — usually so corrosive of folk cultures on first contact.

     Sure do hope your analysis from California comes up with some good results!! It could mean a lot to a lot of us, not to mention your own self. You want to put these next fifteen years to good use, not have to drag through them. So best wishes,

     Best to the MacCallums and Lyneses,

So long,

/s/ Spencer

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2819

Letter to Heath from Spencer MacCallum,

60 Richardson Road, Berkeley 7, California

August 14, 1959

 

Hi P.D. —

How are things coming? I’m still in the reading stage of my thesis. Did I tell you I met with my advisor from Seattle, when he was visiting in Berkeley for a day, and he approves of my thesis subject? Also, I’ve been offered an assistantship in the Museum in Seattle for this year if I want to take it.

     Here’s a copy of a letter I’ve just finished writing to Corpy. It occurs to me you might like to see the kind of letters your grandsons write to each other, and also it will tell you some more about what I’m doing. Corpy wrote offering to reserve space with his Russian family if I’d like to come there to live this fall.

     I just wrote a letter to Mr. Holden in New York, asking him for the references to his articles on consoli­dating realty for urban renewal projects.

     A lot of my reading for my thesis has come out of the Appraisal Journal and the real estate journals. In thinking about your Elkridge property, you might sound out the MOSS-ROUSE COMPANY in Baltimore about an economic analysis to determine the best use of the property — whether a garden-apartment development, residential development, shopping center, office buildings, industry or whatnot. They were credited in 1955 with making some important innovations in this kind of analysis with respect to shop­ping centers. They also developed the Mondawmin Shopping Center in downtown Baltimore, which has had a lot of publicity. Of course, Homer Hoyt Associates in Washington, D.C., are topnotch. And the Ring Construction Company in Washington has had a lot of publicity as innovators and builders of garden-apartment developments.

     Does the Foundation really want to sell the land (assuming it will get title)? Maybe the land is a good investment. If it were leased to a good purpose now, wouldn’t it always be salable as an investment? By leasing it, it could be developed immediately, if that seemed the best thing to do, and the title transferred to the Foundation whenever that was most convenient. I should think the first consideration would be to find out the best use of a piece of land. If it’s developed to a good purpose, I should think the ownership or leasing arrangements could always be negotiated advantageously. (I like that word, “negotiate” — in Spanish, negocio is the general word for “business”).

 Well, so long for now. Give my best to Lucy.

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2819

Letter from Spencer MacCallum to Irvan T. O’Connell, Jr.

August 14, 1959

 

Hi Corpy,

Thanks for your letter! Things are progressing here, but not fast. I’m hoping to have the worst of my reading done by the end of this month and then start organizing and outlining for the writing. But it looks in any case as though I won’t be able to start school until the second quarter. Also, the tax exemption hasn’t come through for the Foundation yet, and things are in a mess at Elkridge — income tax returns etc. I think I ought to try to schedule a few weeks there. That tax status has to come through if anything is ever going to be done with the land.

     So thanks for the invitation, but don’t hold any space for me.

     Want to hear a sort of new thought? Victor Gruen, the architect, describes the shopping center development in terms of our urban life crystallizing around new centers. That’s quite a sweeping picture, but there’s nobody around who’s offering to contradict it. The old retail districts have been in absolute decline since the end of the War, and there’s a lot of hue and cry about what to do with them. I think they are going to consoli­date just the way P.D. has been predicting they would, and that we will have proprietary shopping and business districts in the old city areas just as we have in suburban areas. These centers then, both in the urbs and in the suburbs, will act as seed crystals for all the remaining area, each being set up to take increasing areas of surrounding land in exchange for stock in the develop­ment corporation — both for speculation, to profit from the rising values caused by their own operation, and because they are in the business of land management. So this may be the mechanism by which Popdaddy’s prediction will come about.

     Thanks for the good word on Hobhouse, Wheeler and Ginsberg. I’ve put it on my reading list.

     One thing I think you could predict a priori about the Yakut or any sedentary community below the level of sovereignty, is that the land in any kinship group will be held in single ownership and the title (distributive function) explicitly vested in one individual. This gradually fades in the earlier groups as the distribu­tive function within the group becomes less important. In some cases the ownership authority comes into sharpest focus around other kinds of valuable property such as domesticated cattle or reindeer. Don’t quote me here; I’m just serving out of the top of my hat.

     Have you had a chance to look at V. Gordon Childe? I think his whole thesis is concentrated in a couple of chapters, the ones I marked in the table of contents. If I were editing the book, I’d leave everything else out. I’ve adopted his characterization of sovereignty as a kind of authority that is not general throughout the population — an authority of a different order than is exercised elsewhere in the society. In a proprietary community, on the other hand, the public authority is an authority of ownership, the same kind of authority as is general throughout the society with respect to different kinds of things than land. So the sovereign community is a split personality, whereas the proprietary community is all of a piece.

From here I could go on and write my whole thesis; I think I’ll take the easier course and quit.

So long,

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2819

Letter to Heath from Spencer MacCallum,

September 7, 1959

 

Hi P.D. —

You haven’t heard from me for a long time, so I expect it’s time you did.

     This thesis is coming along so well that I’m almost afraid to talk about it — for fear it will disappear or get up and walk away. BY GOLLY, but you were on the right track about the development of society towards proprietary real estate management! In the ‘thirties, when you got the idea, it was hardly visible. I can’t see how you could have caught it. You or Arthur Holden, because his writings on the development of real estate are superb. But now it’s BLATANT. Yet I haven’t found anyone else who has articulated it or caught the full significance. Why, it wasn’t until the ‘thirties that appraisal and property management were developed far enough to support professional associations. You certainly gave me an exclusive scoop, as the newspapermen say, and I’m writing the best damn story on it I know how.

     You couldn’t possibly have an inkling of all the development that has taken place since the early ‘forties. We hear most about the shopping centers (estimates are that there will be 10,500 in operation by 1976, a center for each 21,000 of the projected 1976 population of 221 million. Nearly 3,500 of these are already built), but other kinds just as significant are busting out all over — industrial, professional, commercial (wholesaling and warehousing), and residential (garden apartment developments, rental housing developments, complete with their own business and shopping centers). There is such profusion of kinds and combinations that the only word to describe them all is “real estate com­plexes”. One of the most important developments, but one that you hear the least about, have been large, organized industrial districts, which are so well architected, land­scaped and controlled (smoke, noise and such nuisances) that they are not only being called “industrial parks” but are compatible with exclusive residential areas, and are being so considered now by urban planners. The origins of these developments, some of them, go back into the 19th century, but the modern form and development of them has all come since 1940.

     The contribution to social theory for anthropology is just as exciting to me. It’s a natural. I’m enough of a partisan anthropologist now to be glad the sociologists didn’t see it first. But it fits so well with the development of primitive villages that it seems appropriate now for anthro­pology to be the discipline to study this further step.

     Listen to me boast about something I haven’t started writing yet! But the worst part of the reading is out of the way. In the last ten weeks I’ve read or scanned over 50 books and 700 articles in journals and magazines of every description and have over 1,000 5×8 cards of notes. I have my ideas generally organized — I’ve outlined and re-outlined the thesis several times — and hope to get to the actual writing next month. I’m making arrangements to register again in Seattle for their second quarter, which begins just after New Year’s. I’m very much hoping to have a first pencil draft of the thesis by the end of November. This is taking on the dimensions of a doctorate, so I may just adapt a part of it for a Master’s thesis; but that won’t be hard to do once I have something to work with.

     I think when this is all over, I’ll take a vacation to a South Pacific island, no Melanesian natives or anybody, and just sit on the sand, and when I get to feeling active again, dig a hole in the sand or maybe find a tide pool to look at.

     I was glad to hear from you that things went well in New York. The architect family I’m staying with are enjoying the last part of CMA, which I recommended to them. They’re very interesting and perceptive people. I haven’t talked much with them about what I’m doing, though, because I’m finding out as Crawfish did with his physics, how hard it is to talk intelligently with laymen. But with an anthropologist, some­one who knows something about primitive kinship structure, there’s not the least trouble communicating. I’ve never yet drawn a blank look. The language of anthropology seems made for developing your kind of ideas, P.D. But your ideas have undertaken such a development in this peculiar direction, that I think that you won’t recognize them at first and will be right pleased to meet them again.

     An unusual animal got into my room from the outside the other day: an arboreal salamander (Aneides lugubris), about six inches long with a prehensile tail to swing from the twigs and branches! It’s an unusual animal, and after noting all its peculiarities properly, I let it go. A Dr. Anderson of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, down at the University, identified it for me the next day beyond all question as an albino of the species, a rarity indeed since an albino of this species has yet to be described in the litera­ture. Needless to say. Dr. Anderson was interested, and I regret that I let it go so soon.

     Have you thought much of the suggestions I made about the Elkridge property? The name of the Baltimore firm slips my tongue just now, or I’d make them again. I’ve read more good things about that firm since.

     Well I have to hang up now; the library opens again in less than 8 hours.

So long,

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2819

Letter to Heath from Spencer MacCallum,

60 Richardson Road, Berkeley 7, California

September 17, 1959

 

Hi P.D.:

I forgot in my last letter to say that Dr. Harper was telling me about the tax exemption fight his own foundation had been in for the past few months. It seems most applications were “put on ice” by the government during the past year while the new regulations governing tax exemption were being drawn up. (The new requirements have been out now for a couple of months). What made their own application seem hopeless was that they were actually refused exemption during the time when most applications were being held on ice. But they have a lawyer in San Francisco who specializes in tax exemptions and in whom Dr. Harper has a great deal of confidence. Their lawyer appealed the rejection with such success that the decision was re­versed and the organization now enjoys full tax exemption.

     Dr. Harper suggested that it might be well worth while talking with this lawyer, who seems to be expert in this field, and get his perspective on our case. I said that I didn’t know how our case might have changed since I was last in touch with it (has it changed at all, or does it still stand as it did?), and that I felt I should check with you first. My own feeling is that we couldn’t lose much by it and that we might get a new slant if this lawyer is as informed and energetic in this field as Dr. Harper thinks he is.

     The name I’d forgot is James W. Rouse, real estate analyst and financier in Baltimore. His firm is considered one of the best and most live-minded in the country. I’d be proud to have his estimate as to what is the most profit­able long-term use for the Elkridge property.

     P.D., for a long time I went along with your definition of society as a very recent phenomenon, no older than the development of impersonal contractual relations. But I didn’t try to adopt your strict use of words because it was too difficult to do — it left primitive society, based on kinship, neither fish nor fowl and nothing to call it by; and primi­tive society, after all, has been the main object of study of anthropology. But now I’m beginning to think my expediency has the support of sound principle as well. My thinking runs this way: property is the criterion of society. Contract and kinship (systematized kinship rights and duties as opposed to mere biological relation) are techniques whereby the proprietary principles can be realized. True, contract is a technique infinitely more suited for developing the poten­tialities of property. I say infinitely, because it is impersonal and thereby not limited, as kinship is, to the numerical possibilities of the face-to-face situation. But kinship can also be utilized by man as the basis for for partially realizing the implications of the abstrac­tion of ownership or property right.

     The art of the Northwest Coast, which ranks with the most sophisticated art styles of all of mankind’s history, is not the product of mere animal behavior. It was the result of men entertaining an abstraction, property, and then arranging their rela­tions in accordance with this principle. Property in the social sense is explicitly recognized in the higher kinship cultures. “Property” in the “monkey” sense I think is one of the side-effects of sovereignty. The Anglo-Saxons were not unique at all in associat­ing the concepts of owe and own (Did you know that ought was a past tense of the same verb?). In Tikopia, an island in Oceania, the natives may disapprove a chief’s exercise of his authority regarding the land in some instances, but they never dispute his right to exercise it. And they are ready with an explanation of their attitude: “The land is his: he owns it.”

     Sure, kinship belongs to the animals. But imagination and abstraction are human. And I think the abstrac­tion of property is the key to social organization. At an early time, men implemented the proprietary principle with what they had at hand, which was simply the recog­nizable facts of procreation. On the basis of these recognizable facts, different groups of men fashioned the most beautiful and complex systems of rights and duties, each of a design most suitable to their own condition (physical environment, level of technology and number of population). The proprieties of the systems were observed by consensus, and the authority recognized in each was proprietary in basis. When men learned marketing and accounting, then this opened up a far superior social technology, a brand new technique involving impersonal agreements, or contract. But contract is an improved technique: the fundamental abstraction, property, remains the foundation of society.

     What do you think?

                                 So long,

                                                                                               /s/ Spencer

What about the lawyer?

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2819

Letter to Heath from Spencer MacCallum,

355 Yale Avenue, Berkeley 8, California

November 8, 1959

 

Hi P.D.:

Thanks for the letters and all the enclosures. The material about Dr. Alpenfels is interesting, since she went to the University of Washington and has studied the Haida Indians on Queen Charlotte Islands, the very group I’ve studied more than any other. I don’t believe I’ve read her work on the Haidas, though I haven’t got my bibliography here to check against. I want to look it up.

     The New York Times review of Vernon and Hoover’s Anatomy of a Metropolis is also mighty welcome. There is no reason why there should be an absolute decline of the core areas of cities in retailing that I see except the social-organizational advantage of the suburban shopping centers. Downtown can’t grow as fast as the fringes; but it seems the downtown merchants would have no trouble holding their own if they could achieve the coordination of effort and the leadership possible under proprietary organization. To the extent that downtown retailing declines, we have a measure of the relative superiority of proprietary organization. In the downtown vs. suburbs situation, I think we have a picture of direct competition between two kinds of social organization, proprietary on the one hand and “co-operative” laced with political on the other. There are plenty of uses, it seems to me, for “co-operative” efforts (which I’m tending to call “volunteer organization”, as opposed to the proprietary); but one of them is not the basic organization of any kind of community involving real estate. Its value seems to me to be as an auxiliary form of organization in the scheme of things, with social and esthetic considerations predominating.

     The article by William H. Whyte, Jr., in Readers’ Digest, I had already read as published by the Urban Land Institute. There’s an organization that I think would be the most appropriate group to promote and develop the principle of proprietary organization. Did you see the fine editorial they published in the October, 1957 issue of Urban Land about CM&A? I came across it several weeks ago, and think it must be one we missed. If cultivated, I think the Urban Land Institute could become your most effective ally in the East, if not in the country. It would certainly complement your Claremont association in a nice way.

     One way you could establish rapport with them would be through recalling your pioneering interest in landscaping for subdivision in Elkridge. Their inspirational, or spiritual roots go back to Mr. Bouton, of the Roland Park Company in Baltimore shortly after the turn of the century. A lot of the pioneering ideas about good subdivision practices being good business practice — ideals wedded with business — were talked out in Mr. Bouton’s home. The members of that circle, including Jesse Clyde Nichols, Hugh Prather and Hugh Potter, went out and carried these ideas further in practice in developments in Kansas City, Dallas and Houston respectively. These men were all guiding forces in the Urban Land Institute, which is today turning out the best research in the country on community land planning. Their periodic reports on shopping centers, residential developments and planned industrial districts and the interrelations between these and other facets of real estate development including urban renewal, are the best in the field. The Institute is staying very close to the tradition and ideals of these early developers.

     In thinking about fundamentals, I’ve about half a dozen questions I’d like to get the benefit of your thinking on when I see you next time.

If Mrs. Manning hasn’t got you booked up for Thanksgiving, how about a train ride to Albuquerque? That would make a good short-length holiday from what I’m doing. But from what I hear from Mrs. Manning, she’s arranging a lot of nice things for you, and among them may be something for Thanksgiving.

     You asked me what I’m using for money. I’m using some of the proceeds from the sale of my motorscooter (at a profit) in Albuquerque, $100, which I had let Crawfish and Cather use and they paid back last month, and $100 cash balance from dividends with B.F. Hutton Company. Living here is fairly economical, at about $125 a month. I have planned to sell, at the end of this month, 10 shares of Standard Oil of New Jersey.

     I pretty much misjudged the length of time it would take to do this piece of research. There was a lot more material available on it than I had expected, so I’m just working on with it without any definite schedule in mind. I had wanted to get back East for Christmas for a visit if possible, besides some small things like some dental work from Dr. Madden in Winchester and an eye examination from Dr. Apell. Ideally, I had hoped for a refresher course at the National Hospital in New York; I’ve been having serious trouble with stuttering for the first time since leaving the Clinic, and have been taking some therapy here, but they use a different technique here that hasn’t been giving very good results; so it may be best to stop it. (The clinician here is a stutterer himself, although he has been directing therapy for over 20 years, and furthermore he’s opposed to the methods of the Nat’l Hospital on grounds that I sus­pect are more than a little colored by professional jealousy). In any case, I’m straying from the subject. I’m not finished with a first draft of the thesis by any means, as I had hoped I might be. And I feel too busy with what I’m doing to interrupt it. On the other hand, it just occurs to me as I’m writing this letter that I finished in the library last week and am now wholly engaged in organizing and writing. So the library is no longer holding me in Berkeley, and I could go East and get a month of good work at the Clinic while working on writing this thing. The argument against that is the inertia of moving and the fact that I have a good place to work here — although the apartment would be equally good. As far as distraction in either place, I’d probably see Muriel in New York, and she can be a distraction, as well as an inspiration; but not more distraction than friends I’ve made here in Berkeley now. So it’s mostly a question of inertia — and of course the cost of traveling there. If I felt sure of being at a good stopping point in this thesis (that is, a completed first draft) by January when the second quarter at Seattle starts, then that would be a strong argument for going East to the Clinic now for a session, since there won’t be an opportunity once I’ve begun school again. But I’m not sure where I’ll be at in this project in January. It has taken the proportions of a full-length book, even though I’m skinning down the outline to a purely anthropologically-oriented theoretical study, saying what I have to say in the least words and trying to avoid repeating. The human significance of the ideas in the thesis are to be limited to a single chapter which will be included as an Addendum, so that the thesis will stand on its own theoretical feet apart from the value implications that can be drawn from it.

     Well you see why I don’t discuss my plans more often with other people; I hardly know my own mind enough to. It would seem a shame, too, to go East just at the time when you’re coming out here.

     I’ve heard from Corpy a couple of times, but am not just sure what he’s doing. He says he has some research in mind that might interest us.

     Darn it, just before that last paragraph I went out to the store on my bike and had a bad spill, which leaves me with sore hands and shoulders so that it’s hard to type. I guess I’ve said everything, though, so I’ll quit. Say hello to Lucy and Aunt Beatrice for me. And lots of success in Chicago. Henry George certainly made a contribution, as you have said, in emphasizing rent as the natural social revenue. Wish I could be with you.

So long,

/s/ Spencer

 

 I’ll make a copy of that URBAN LAND editorial tomorrow morning and enclose it to you. Notice that it’s by Max Wehrly, the executive director of the Urban Land Institute.

 Darn — Didn’t get this off in time and now will have to send it to Santa Ana.

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3099

Letter to Heath from Spencer MacCallum,

355 Yale Avenue, Berkeley 8, California

December 4, 1959

 

Dear P.D.,

It was mighty good to hear your voice the other night. You sound in fine fettle.

      I thought I had told you about my living arrangements. The name of the family, for your record, is Mr. and Mrs. C.R. Routsong. Another time, please call before 10:30, which is what time the family goes to bed. I know I hadn’t said anything about that, and I’m sorry, because I should have.

      I’ve a very interesting job now, working mornings for the Museum at the University. My job right now is wrapping Egyptian material, getting it ready to be moved to a new building. I’ve been assigned to the perishable materials, like baskets, cloth, wood carvings and even dried fruit and other food, many of them already more than a thousand years old when Christ was alive. Afternoons and evenings I spend on my own work, mainly the thesis. This is being delayed just now because I’m in the process of transferring the bulk of the information I’ve collected onto a punched card filing system. A lot of thought has to go into setting up the particular punch card system that will be most useful for my special purposes, before the laborious job of transferring all the old information from the
old cards to the new.

     Punch card filing systems are a mighty interesting development in data processing for business that has come into use in about the last ten years. There are manual systems as well as the variety of electronic systems. The basic idea in the kind I’m setting up is that you have a stack of cards with a uniform series of holes punched just inside the edge all the way around the cards. All cards in a file are alike so that the holes align when the cards are grouped together in any order with their edges even. Certain holes or combinations of holes in the cards are coded by you to predetermined categories of interest. When you write some information on a card to be filed, you decide what different fields of interest this information relates to; and then with a hand punch you notch out the edge of the card at the holes corresponding to the appropriate categories. Wherever the card was notched, there is now a V-shaped wedge missing from the edge of the card instead of a closed hole.

     You put all the cards together now and run a sorting tool, fashioned like a knitting needle with a handle on it, through all the cards at the hole corresponding to the subject that you want to separate out. Lift the cards on the sorter, give them a shake, and all those cards that have been notched for the particular category you’re sorting for will drop out onto a tray. When you’re finished with these cards, you just put them back into the file in any order instead of searching for the right place for each one — which takes so much time and is so liable to error in the old-fashioned filing.

     The chief advantage of punch cards, besides not having any refiling to do and the file never getting out of order, is that you can code so many different kinds of information on one card instead of having to make duplicate cards for different filing purposes. For example: I could make up a simple filing system for the Foundation’s mailing list which would occupy no more space than the present one, and in which I could separate out the names of persons in just a few quick sorts for the following purposes:

1. By name
2. Persons who were sent any particular piece of literature
3. Persons who were added to the file on, before, or after a      given date
4. By category of interest, such as religion, philosophy, city planning, etc.
5. By geographic location

6. Persons who are described in WHO’S WHO or belong to certain organizations

etc.

Finally, a few chosen sorts will arrange the whole file in alphabetical order if that should be desirable for checking against other lists.

     There are different kinds of punch cards, some with double rows of holes, as well as various systems of coding the holes to correspond with the subject-matter. I’ve been figuring out what’s the best set-up for my own needs. With 2,000 cards of information, the chore of organizing them in the conventional way seemed like a back-breaking job. Now I’ll be able to expand the file and keep it up to date, and still have it flexible and useful.

     Did you know that Crawfish is a published physicist now? He co-authored an article recently in the JOURNAL OF APPLIED PHYSICS.

     Enclosed is a page of quotations from Dorothy Thompson’s article that I think I wrote you about in the summer. Isn’t this swell writing? She’s a gal you should be in touch with.

     Oh yes – the letter to Baltimore went off immediately after it came, on the day after you called.

      I’m sorry I haven’t any part of my paper finished to send to you. It’s taking a lot longer than originally planned, so better not publicize it prematurely.

      I guess it’s not proper for me to invite you up here; youngsters are supposed to go to their elders instead of vice versa. But there seems too much work spread around on the floor here to leave just now. I felt left out that you didn’t come up this fall. I’ve been wanting to have a bull session with you all fall as questions about certain points have come into sharper focus. I doubt if they’re the kind of questions you’d have a ready answer for, but they need talking about. It will have to wait now, though, because I’m thinking more of going East and will stay at least through January and possibly through February, depending whether I decide to register for courses this Spring here or in Seattle. It will be a job lugging all this material, whatever traveling I decide to do.

     I feel sort of disoriented tonight, so I’ll quit talking.

     Oh — One thing I wanted to say is: If you should decide to call again, let me know by way of a 3-cent postcard first so that I can plan for it and we’ll make the best use of the call. This last one caught me unawares, and I didn’t think of the things I wanted to talk about and questions I had for you until the next morning.

     Let me hear what you’re doing from time to time.

           So long,

          /s/ Spencer

 

Northland Shopping Center

“Commercialism” has been blamed for most of the faults in American life, and buying and selling associated with rapacity, its principle being defined as buying cheap and selling dear. The struggle to attract the public eye in an advantageous location has been blamed for land speculation, the inflation of real estate values, and the creation of commercial and residential slums. The commercial spirit has been described as the antithesis of the esthetic, defacing beautiful landscapes with screaming billboards, blotting out the sky with neon signs.

     Commercialism has been accused of cut-throat competition, and socialists and other social reformers have declared private commerce incompatible with cooperative planning. Thus has the case against the tradesman been built up.

     As in most cases, there has been an element of truth in the accusations, as usual unbalanced by other truths. The trader has been the great opener-up of the world, the bridge between human cultures, and between country and city. He has been the purveyor of news as well as wares.

     More than any other group, merchants created the city and urban civilization, with all its graces and amenities. One of commercialism’s greatest recent accomp­lishments is Northland. It is prosaically described as a “shopping center,” and that is what it is — together with several other things besides. It is the most ambitious of such mercantile centers in America or the world. It is a model of enlight­ened planning, and of social cooperation — between merchants, architects, sculptors, artists and civic-minded citizens — and it is entirely the creation of private enter­prise; in fact, the creation of one great Detroit department store, J.L. Hudson Co., a family enterprise which has capitalized and financed it to the tune of #25 million for no other reasons than that much-deplored “profit motive”, the capacity to think ahead, and the very human desire to create something admirable and worthy of repute.

Northland — which flies its own flag, a white (wind rose) sunburst on a blue ground, and, of course, the Stars and Stripes as well — is not one market place but a series of ten connected courts (piazze they would be called in Italy), terraces, malls and lanes. The largest of these — the “courts” — like the “terraces” are squares, the courts open on one side; these one enters from the parking lots. Malls are twice as long as they are wide; lanes are smaller. But characteristic of all of them is that their central areas are beautiful gardens. Fountains spray water into the air; everywhere there are solid and handsome oak benches where one can sit and gossip or smoke, and in every court or mall a delightful piece of modern sculpture attracts the eye — and suggests meeting places.

     These centers are sponsored and financed by department stores, real estate de­velopers and builders. /All of them/ refute the notion that civic planning can be successfully accomplished only by government and supported only by government subsidy. … There is room in America for all sorts of planning, under all sorts of auspices; the question is only who will have the greatest interest in doing it beautifully, practically and economically.

     Given not so very much time — and no war — America promises to be a very beautiful country, not only because of its beauties of Nature, but out of the imagination and initiative of its citizens. What has been ill-done will be undone. What has successfully been tried will be improved. America, as Walt Whitman observed, does not reject the past but translates and adapts it to modern needs. Its spirit looks for­ward, upward, and aspires. And like the builders of Solomon’s Temple, the much-berated shopkeeper gilds the columns of his emporium with the lily-work of art.

     … give us time, freedom and peace.

Dorothy Thompson, “A New Look for Commercialism”

ARCHITECTURAL FORUM, page 156. November, 1954

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2980

Carbons of letters from Spencer MacCallum to Heath and his aunt, Beatrice Heath O’Connell regarding the Science of Society Foundation, with marginal penciling by Heath reproduced between slash marks.

January 27, 1960

 

Dear Popdaddy,

Here are notes for the two Annual Meetings which will bring the Foundation Minutes up to date. Using these notes, will you please write up a draft of the Minutes and send them back to me for copying into the Minute Book? You will see many gaps where I lacked information as to dates, names, etc. I may be able to resolve some of these gaps when I go down to Elkridge again, but not all of them. So please fill them in to the best of your ability when writing up the material.

      A verbatim copy of the last minutes appearing in the Minute Book (Eleventh meeting, 9/3/58) is enclosed. I think it advisable to amend these Minutes to include some material and especially a point of view that we did not write up at the time. I think you can best word it. I’ll give you first an idea of what should be inserted, and then my reasons why:

     In September, 1958, we had been waiting for tax exemption to come through before (1) attempting to raise money from outside sources, (2) building up wider membership entailing donations or fees which would be tax exempt, (3) undertaking projects involving considerable expense, such as, especially, additional publishing ventures. — In general, broadening the base of the Foundation.

      We thought that we had applied for tax exemption on July 27th, 1956, and that after the Foundation had been in operation for at least one year from that time, the Government would investi­gate our activities and pass upon the application. However, this was a mistaken impression. Upon investigating the delay before the eleventh meeting on 9/3/58 (Minutes enclosed), we discovered that our application had not gone through in July, 1956, but that we had been notified that we would have to submit the application after we had been in operation for one year (see Bartlett letter 8-3-56). In other words, we found that the next step had been up to us and not up to the Government as we had thought. The result of this mistake was that the main work of the Foundation, depending as it does on exemption, had been delayed by a year.

      We need some recognition of this situation to emphasize (1) that expanding work of the Foundation depends on exemption, and (2) that the Foundation has not slowed down in spirit as might appear from the relative inactivity of 1958-59, but has been delayed by factors beyond its control. This last is im­portant to support the impression that the Foundation has the supporting interest of outsiders beyond the family only — in other words, to negate any impression that the Foundation has declined for lack of outside support.

      Enough for the Minutes. When you’ve written these up, adding anything you can remember of importance that I might have left out, send them back. I’ll visé them again at this end before copying them into the Minute Book.

      Since our hope in winning the hearing will depend in large part on demonstrating that the ideas promoted by the Foundation are not original with you — so that the Foundation will qualify as a bonafide educational institution and not as the propagandist of one individual’s outlook on life — I regret that CM&A has no bibliography. And especially that you com­mented at the end of your Bibliographic Note as you did. What I would suggest now is that you write the copy for the new bibliography for CM&A that you have several times said that you intend to do. If reference is made to the lack of bibliography at the hearing, it might help to be able to produce copy of such a bibliography intended for a second edition of CM&A when and if such is published. Here are some possible titles I jotted down at Elkridge:

 

Bridgman, Percy W.     The Logic of Modern Physics

Grebe, John J.         (COSMIC CHART — Didn’t see its title.)

Lillie, Ralph Stayner    General Biology and Philosophy of

                            Organism

Radcliffe-Brown, A.R.  Toward a Natural Science of Society

Riegel, Edwin C.       Free Enterprise Money

Whitehead, Alfred North  Process and Reality

Von Mises, Ludwig.     Human Action

Maine, Sir Henry Sumner  (All of his works — about five)

George, Henry            Progress and Poverty

deBroglie, Louis         The Revolution in Physics

Kropotkin, Petr          Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution

Matchette, Franklin J. Outline of a Metaphysics

Scherman, Harry          The Promises Men Live By

Schroedinger, Erwin      What Is Life?

Sherrington, Sir Charles Man on His Nature

Sinnott, Edmund W.     Cell and Psyche

Whitehead, Alfred N.   Science and the Modern World

 

      Since it would be hard for a book like CM&A to have a complete bibliography, this might be written rather in the form of a tribute to certain outstanding works.

      Thinking further how we could demonstrate that the fundamental ideas of the Foundation did not originate with you: (1) Ground rent the basis of public services. Strongly founded in Henry George, and he got it from whom? Physiocrats and who else? (2) Natural science of society — Radcliffe-Brown and many others going back to the beginnings of sociology. The Foundation ex­pects to take on an increasingly anthropological turn as I become more active in it. (3) Principle of voluntarism in human and social affairs — Kropotkin and Maine and classical economics, Adam Smith, Henry George. (4) That the aesthetic is the socially significant element in religion — Robert Bridges, Santayana.

      Popdaddy, I think we should have asked Baldy to become a Trustee of the Foundation long before now. Would you sound him out on that and see if we can get that accomplished before the hearing? Also, I think Arthur Holden would make an excellent Trustee. I’d like George Resch eventually to be a Trustee, although probably not yet. Lucille Cardin Crain would be an excellent Trustee. Max Wehrly, Executive Director of the Urban Land Institute might be an excellent candidate for a Trustee after we get to know him. I wonder if by any chance Percy Greaves might know him or vice versa, since both are in the Washington area. For purposes of the hearing coming up, Percy Greaves would be an excellent person to have as a Trustee, though I don’t know if he understands how radical your departure from gold-standard-libertarianism is. Still, that’s not essential, since I can think of no possible area of conflict. I suppose the only limitation on the number of Trustees is the difficulty of getting a quorum together for a meeting. In studies of small group dynamics, it^’s been found that either five or six (I forget which) is the optimum number for maximum cooperation. In any event, let’s ask Baldy right away, shall we?

      Looking through the reviews down at Elkridge, I really couldn’t find any that it seemed we could benefit from by getting in touch with at this time. Almost none show any real understanding of CM&A — a very different situation from that which obtained with the Suez Canal proposal. Perhaps the best of any was the editorial in Urban Land, written by Max Wehrly, about whom I told you and Fran in Santa Ana. Another good review was that in Main Currents in Modern Thought, but I don’t have a reference here of the man who wrote that or when it appeared. You may have it among your things. The short review in Freeman was good, but how much weight do the libertarians carry in Washington? Or in scientific circles? Murray Rothbard wrote that review. He has a degree, but no standing as yet. I notice that Fred Singer, at the University of Maryland, wrote you in reply to your last letter about CM&A, “Stimulating ideas and concepts. … It is the sort of book that One wants to return to … and read and understand more deeply each time one does so.” Your best response by far to CM&A was from persons, and not from the review media. A.H. Hobbs, libertarian sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and friend of Lucille Cardin Crain, certainly showed interest in the book at one time, although we haven’t had any word from him for a couple of years. Dr. Sylvester Petro might be glad to help in any way that he can.

      I^’d certainly feel more reassured if you’d bring Dr. Harper’s expert lawyer into the case, at least to the extent of a consul­tation, since he apparently knows the ropes so thoroughly and is fresh from winning the same sort of an appeal as ours for the Foundation for Voluntary Welfare (Baldy^’s organization). I don’t know just how you’d talk with him, though, being in San Francisco.

Now for some personals:

      Elfriede /Eckmann/ is keeping the apartment spotless. Both she and Gene were concerned about the large white enamel cooking pot that they said you were looking for and could not find. As I remember it, that pot was burned beyond use on the bottom and by consensus of the two of us found its way to the trash. Elfriede bought a very attractive piece of blue material for a cover for the living room couch.

      We have a nice arrangement about language: Every time I can correct her use of English, she teaches me a word or a point of grammar in German. It’s a nice way to learn.

      The time has come when I must sell 20 more shares of Standard Oil of New Jersey. I remember you offered to buy these yourself in order to save me brokerage fees and to keep the loss only a paper loss within the family. I appreciate it and hereby turn over twenty shares to you. Is this sufficient record of our transaction? A day or two ago when I looked at the paper, the price stood at 47, which makes a total cost of $940.00.

      I closed my account at the Bank of America in Santa Ana and now am keeping my main account in Leesburg with a very small checking account up here in the Corn Exchange Bank.

      I’m sorry I wasn’t better at communicating on the phone the other night. Lucy and the two kids had got in late, and I was perhaps over-anxious to keep from waking them. Also, the last thing I’d read before falling asleep that night was a terribly negative review of CM&A, one of eleven foreign reviews that I’d had translated. It’s the only negative review that’s ever depressed me, and it really did depress me.

      Lucy had a good time here in New York with the boys, and we had a nice visit.

      Let me hear back quickly about this Minutes stuff. And work on it! You’ll notice I called attention in the last meeting to the type for CM&A having been killed. This is calculated to combat the impression that this is a one-man, one-publication foundation. The publishing of CM&A is essentially completed now, and the Foundation is looking around hungrily for big, new projects of both an educational and a scientific nature — which it will undertake as soon as a favorable Government ruling lets it set itself up on a firm basis.

     Best wishes to you and to Fran,

                                        

 

 

Sorry I forgot the Lily Rona article. I know how to direct Ada to find it if necessary. Shall I do that?

      I’ve written Aunt Beatrice tonight about getting the Treasurer’s Reports in order for the Minute Book. Also sent her a copy of this letter.

 

/Opposite the list of authors and books for a new bibliography for CM&A, Heath penciled: “Have to do this at Elkridge for reference to publishers etc.” He then added three more names: “Burt — philosopher; A. N. Berrill; Cannon Walter, Wisdom of the Body, etc.”/

==============================================

Spencer Heath Archive

11 Waverly Place

New York 3, N.Y.

January 27, 1960

Dear Aunt Beatrice,

Popdaddy called the other night and asked me to go down to Maryland and get the material for bringing the minutes of the meetings up to date. I did so and have just sent him a long letter with the material. I wrote it up so that it’s nearly in finished form now, but I hope he’ll smooth it up before we transcribe it into the Minute Book. Oh — I meant to say that the Government hearing on the appeal for tax exemption that was denied us at first is postponed until April 5th (I think it’s the 5th).

      For this hearing, we’ll need to have the Minute Book and the Treasurer’s Reports in shining good order. Will it be a long job to unravel that business of the foreign exchange on the checks?

Here’s what we need: Reports for the periods

July, August, September    1958
October, November, December 1958
January, February, March   1959
April, May, June            1959

July, August, September    1959

October, November, December 1959

     The last report, for the 4th quarter of 1959, is desirable but not essential at this time. It will be due in March, since the reports are one step behind the quarterly meetings.

     I’m enclosing copy of the letter I’m mailing to Popdaddy tonight, to keep you in on what’s going on. Since it’s the only copy I made, please keep it with your Foundation things.

I hope things are going well in Winchester. It was certainly nice to visit and see you and Uncle Irvan and the Christmas things.

With best wishes,

________________________________________________________________

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2985

Typed letter to Heath from Spencer MacCallum

at 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

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

________________________________________________________________  

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2988

Two typed letters to Heath, a day apart, from

Spencer MacCallum at 11 Waverly Place, New York City 3

March 24,25, 1960

Dear Popdaddy:                        March 24, 1960

Ada called last night, asking if I knew the whereabouts of copies of income tax returns for 1958 and 1959. I had the Maryland State form for 1959 here, and so am sending it on to you. I don’t know where any others might be, but told Ada two places where she might look.

     A letter came from Baldy a week or so ago, in which he said a little bit about our Foundation situation. I’ll quote the paragraph, for whatever interest it may hold for you:

^“Popdaddy called me from Santa Ana the other day about the Foundation protest hearings. Dick Cornuelle and I have seen his preliminary materials, in part, and I had given some suggestions. Dick says: ^“Don’t take a lawyer along to that hearing. It is not a legal matter really, but a judgment of indirect evidence that lawyers often foul up.”  Frankly, your case needs all possible evidence to show that it is not just a family foundation to escape the tax; that it is broad in participation and purpose; etc. Much will depend on the impression in this respect that the officers make on the Treasury representatives.”

     I saw Mr. Holden in church last week and had some pleasant words with him. I hope to see him again fairly soon.

     I had a good thought this morning, one I should have thought of sooner but for some reason had not seen as clearly as now. I was mulling over the dividing line between public and private services, which seemed a little obscured by the fact that every business — drugstore, haberdashery, etc. — is performing public services inasmuch as it caters to the entire public. But the difference between these and community services is that the latter are always enjoyed in common with others in the community instead of separately and apart. /Heath pencils in the margin, “Just so”/ With respect to the individual businesses in a community, the availability of all the diverse services they offer is the community service that is here involved. This ^“stand-by” service, as you have called it, is the community service or amenity that all enjoy collectively all the time. It is not important (for our defini­tion) who stands ready to perform these individual services, whether it be the public authority or private persons. But seeing to it that these services are available in the right number and combination for the community is the special province of the owning authority

/“the sellers”/. This is the service of econo­mic planning.

     Conversely, of course, the proprietary authority is desirous of serving its (business) tenants in the best possible way by locating them conveniently to their natural market and to compatible (complementary) businesses, in order to arrive at the most efficient use of the land. So we are brought again to the conclusion that the concern of the proprietary authority is not for one class of tenants or another, but its interest lies in the over-all, balanced functioning of a whole community.

     I was glad of this thought, because I’d come to the point in my writing where I had to discuss public services, and now this ties it in well with other points I’ve been making, especially about modern developments in real estate, particularly in land planning.

     Hope you’re keeping cheerful. Elfriede sends her love. She and Gene took a vacation in Florida (driving) for a few weeks but are back now. Elfriede’s always concerned about being a trouble to somebody, and she’s afraid of taking advantage of your hospitality by staying so long (her ship sails in May). I tell her that’s nonsense, especially with her keeping the apartment so sparkling. It’s good to have regular meals. They both spoil me.

     I have my first draft of the thesis written. Poor as a first draft is, it gives me something more tangible to work with. I wrote it out of the air and am now enriching and amending it by the notes and jottings I’ve collected for so long. It occurs to me this morning that if you got to know Max Wehrly of the Urban Land Institute when you get back, and if there were enough of my thesis completed by then for him to see that it is a worthwhile study, a note to that effect might help in the hearing. It would show that I have serious intentions about the ideas of the Foundation and conversely that the Foundation is more broadly justified. The thesis is in a terribly incomplete and fragmented state now, but there just may be enough of it to get something of its intent across to Mr. Wehrly.

Bestest wishes,

 

Best wishes to Fran, too.

     If you’d like to send the signed tax returns to me with penciled entries, I could type the entries in before mailing and have a chance to visé them — for whatever advantage that might be.

________________________________

March 25, 1960

Dear P.D. — Just a footnote for your thoughts about the social significance of the lengthening of adult years:

Wheeler, William Morton. Social Life Among the Insects.

New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1923. pp 10-11:

     ^“John Fiske and others have claimed that human society has been rendered possible by a lengthening of infancy and childhood, since this obviously involves more elaborate care of the young by parents and a greatly increased opportunity of learning on the part of the child. This is true, but it is equally true that the adult life of the parents must also be prolonged to cover the retarded juvenile development, and the insects show us that the lengthening of the adult stage comes first and makes social life possible. In solitary insects, of course, it is just the brevity of adult life that prevents the development of the social habit, no matter how long the larval period may be. The period may, in fact, extend over months or even years in certain insects which have an adult stage of only a few days or hours.

     “Momentous consequences necessarily follow from the lengthening of the adult life of the parent insect and the development of the family, for the relations between parents and offspring tend to become so increasingly intimate and interdependent that we are confronted with a new organic unit, or biological entity — a super-organism, in fact, in which through physiological division of labor the component individuals specialize in diverse ways and become necessary to one another’s welfare or very existence.”

________________________________________________________________

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3099

Typed sample letter on Science of Society Foundation letterhead from Spencer MacCallum sent to Heath with penned query asking for his suggestions for improvements. Five words in brackets are penciled in by Heath.

July 4, 1960

 

 

SAMPLE FORM

 

Mr. William G. Catlin

Faraday and Williams Associates

27 Forsythe Street

Chicago, Illinois

 

Dear Mr. Catlin:

 

     Please examine the enclosed proposal for redeveloping small business districts along strictly private lines by owners without recourse to government.

     The Foundation for Voluntary Welfare, in Burlingame, California, is presently looking for a suitable site for redevelopment to serve as a pilot project utilizing this approach of voluntary property pooling.

     I should be glad to have any comment that may occur to you concerning it. In any case, if you think well of it, please pass it along to those persons [who you think would be] most interested.

Sincerely yours,

Spencer MacCallum

SHM/p

Enclosure

__________________________________

   /Penned note to Heath:/

Hi P.D. – I’m thinking of sending this form letter to a considerable number of planners with the enclosed article. What do you think of it? Then I’ll follow up answers with personal interviews to get leads on possible sites and suggestions about the project.

     Any suggestions? The ending of the article is pretty weak. I have some half-formulated ideas for strengthening it. What are your ideas?

                        Best – Spencer

 

________________________________________________________________

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3099

Carbon of letter from Heath to Spencer MacCallum

dictated to and typed by Mrs. F.N. Manning

July 6, 1961

Dear Spencer:

I’ve had you on my mind quite a lot since my very happy visit with you, Irvin and Beatrice, all the more so since receiving the second installment of your present work.

I am very happy about this. I read it just after having quite a long talk with Al Johns, real estate editor of The Los Angeles Times and Reg Wood, whom you also know. These men are really excited about the Real Estate business coming to be a real business..the administration of property..for the production of income and thereby the creation of capital values.

Al Johns especially hails this as a tremendous development..just beginning..says he is resigning from the L.A. Times so he can give all his time writing about it and presenting this idea of proprietary administration for income among the largest Real Estate interests in this country and abroad, mentioning such people as Webb and Knapp, the Irvine Co. and some groups he tells me have recently acquired 47,000 acres of waterfront in California with the definite plan of building an exclusively planned proprietary city on it..he withholds details saying “all will be released soon”..

Mrs. Manning in her recent thirteen thousand mile trip, visited Knoxville and talked with various people there and reports Knoxville project is going ahead powerfully, but under somewhat different plan than the one you know about.

Looking forward very much to seeing you not later than August 1..better let me know when and how you are coming South..I expect to leave here several days before August 1. Mrs. Manning will drive me up and most likely be at The Whitcomb (F.N. Manning..on the register) where I will be and where it will be good to meet you..Mrs. M..wants me to meet the man with Stanford Research whom I met..also several others including Dan Whiteside, who is supposed to be dramatizing CMA.

Either on my way up or back, I want to do considerable visiting at Emerson College, at Pacific Grove. It might be good for you to be with me at Emerson, this is the one-man enterprise with like-minded associates who want to institute a non-institutional college..they are in protest against “learning” and their students all come with the knowledge they will not receive any degrees or academic credit benefits toward degrees which suggests they may attract a superior student body.

It is almost wildly radical but if its “leader” has managerial capacity to match his ideals he may demonstrate something of enormous importance.

Baldy, George and I visited the place one whole afternoon and I stayed overnight after spending the evening with Durskin and some of his associates. I was glad to be invited spending considerable time visiting them. ..while going up and down the coast I think we should visit San Luis Obispo in connection the several lots your mother and Aunts own..I think the Palos Verdes property must have advanced in value..there has been a great deal of Real Estate activity and a great deal has been in the papers about it. Mrs. M. visited San Luis Obispo and found a firm something like the Tarkington Co. at Palos Verdes who can give information and good services. I’m going to be in L.A. today (July 6, 1961) and expect to see the lawyer, Joseph McGuire, 510 S. Spring about the property as your mother has asked me to do so. I think it has come pretty well to the point of getting rid of the legalistic paraphernalia..all the court-hangers on lawyers, etc..being paid off.

There are a lot of things I want to talk to you about..many plans and arrangements of various kinds..so I’m looking forward..keep me advised.

Affectionately,   P.D.

_____________________________________________________________________________

 

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3060

Typed letter from Spencer MacCallum at 312 Halesworth Street, Santa Ana, California to Mrs. Irvan T. O’Connell, Winchester, Virginia

April 21, 1962

 

Dear Aunt Beatrice,

I have sent three packages of Popdaddy’s things to your house, and have made up and mailed an additional dozen boxes to Elkridge for storage. In the packages going to Winchester are a selection of books Popdaddy made before leaving here. They are books he thought he would like to have near him, rather than having them sent to Elkridge with the other books he had out here. This selection consists of the following titles:

Acton – Essays on Freedom and Power

Bible – Red Letter Edition

deChardin – The Phenomenon of Man

Eiseley – The Immense Journey

Gomme – The Village Community

Heisenberg – Physics and Philosophy

Heyl – The Philosophy of a Scientific Man

Hoyle – Frontiers of Astronomy

Hunter – Introduction to Roman Law

Jennings – The Universe and Life

Johnson – The Imprisoned Splendor

Matchette – Outline of a Metaphysics

Moulyn – Structure, Function and Purpose

Parkinson – The Law and the Profits

Peattie – Flowering Earth

Planck – The Universe in the Light of Modern Physics

Radcliffe-Brown – A Natural Science of Society

Reichenbach – Atom and Cosmos

Reichenbach – The Rise of Scientific Philosophy

Santillana – The Origin of Scientific Thought

Schreiner – Dreams

Schroedinger – What is Life?

Sherrington – Man on His Nature

Sinnott – Cell and Psyche

Sullivan – The Three-Dimensional Man

Tocqueville – The Old Regime and the French Revolution

Whitehead – Process and Reality

This isn’t a list of his favorite books of all time, but just some he wants for some reason to have with him now. It would be fun to have a list of his all-time favorites.

I’m forwarding the brass candlesticks to you that you left here in the beach house. I hope they’re worth the postage.

Enclosed is a check to the Foundation for books. The books have been delivered to the CCI Bookshelf.

Tomorrow is Easter, and I’ll go to the St. James Church here in Newport Beach. Weather here is beautiful. Hope you have the same in the East.

All best wishes,

Spencer

________________________________________________________________

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2940

Typed letter to Heath, Waterford, Virginia from Spencer MacCallum at Apt 11-C, 11 Waverly Place, New York City 3

July 17, 1962

Dear Popdaddy:

When are you going to be well and up and around again, anyway?? People are asking about you and wondering when they’ll be seeing you up here in New York again. Greta Bergquist phoned the other day and hoped to see you if you were here. Bob Smith and Ed Facey are involved in some kind of an ideological free-for-all up at Irvington and would like you to be here for them to stop in and talk to about it when they come in to N.Y.U. several nights a week. They were preaching a purer form of libertarianism in some summer sessions at F.E.E. where there were a number of students visiting from other countries — and apparently with some success. But as a result, they were asked to leave F.E.E. and not come back on the property — charged with corrupting the youth. F.E.E. is waving the red-hot brand of “Anarchy” about, and I’m just drafting another letter to Opitz, following up on our earlier exchange, trying to prevent you and me from being branded with that iron. I think it’s unfortunate that so many people are finding that position attractive, and would certainly like to convert some of these younger kids from “Anarchism” to “Alternativism.” Robert Hamoway, one of the editors of the “New Individualist Review” that you liked so much, is here in New York this summer and has said to Bob Smith that he wants to meet me while he’s here and get to know more about the positive approach. Hamoway’s just finishing his Doctorate, though I think he’s a couple of years younger than I.

     Popdaddy, I’ve scheduled a couple of hours every morning to work on editing your Chapman College talks for Dr. Davis. Then I go to the Library with a sack lunch and work on my own Proprietary Community project until the Library closes at 9:45 at night. Then I walk down from the Library to the apartment here, which gives me enough exercise for the day. This has been a fine, workable schedule — and I’ve got a lot done — except for one thing! I get absorbed in your Chapman College talks and don’t get away to the Library until afternoon some days. And on Sunday, I worked the whole day on the Chapman material and didn’t get up to the Library finally until after supper! Working with all this recorded material, I’m getting to know more about the tricks and habits of your speech and grammar than I’ll bet you ever guessed at! And it’s coming out fine, though about as slow as molasses, since I’m trying to keep your style and content absolutely intact. I very seldom supply words of transition. The creativeness comes almost entirely in selecting and arranging. Here’s the progress report: The typescript, or clear copy of the six tapes is finished, and the first of the six talks is finished the preliminary editing. It comes to 30 pages alone with the discussion from the floor, so you see there’s plenty of material for a new little book! I’m half way through the first editing of the second talk now. I never realized it would be so much work. But I’m tremendously enthused about it. No wonder Dr. Davis kept after me these two years to do this job. You’ll be surprised when you see it how smooth your talks become with just some judicious trimming out of surplussage. As with most pruning, the trouble usually lies with cutting too little. But that can always be remedied later if it should need to be. In my first editing through the talks, I’m mostly just cutting out all the dead wood so we can see where we are. Well I’m sure I’ve talked enough about this; you^’ll start getting qualms about what’s hap­pening to your baby! Well I can guarantee you’ll be impressed, as I am, when you see it.

     Do you remember that a man, Erwin Phillips, wrote you a note from New York about your Christmas card, “The Gospel in Our Time,” and you sent it on to me to answer or do whatever seemed best about it? I had a long visit with him one evening a week ago and got quite an education in anthroposophy. I think I had absorbed enough of the principles of it from you at various times that I must have seemed an apt pupil. Mr. Phillips lives in a very fine old people’s home (Jewish I think) uptown and carries on a lot of writing for anthroposophical papers and correspondence from there. He carries on from there the way you used to from the apartment here.

     I must quit this now and get up to the Library for today. I^’ve been reading in a lot of different areas, all touching in one way or another on the question of land, and am getting a much wider world picture of the whole subject of land tenure than I’ve ever had before.

     It was sure encouraging to hear that we might be finding out something about what it is that’s been troubling you all this time — that it’s not a question of hardening of the arteries at all with you but may have been some toxic poisoning that will clear up now that you had your operation. Is this still the picture, or am I behind the times? It was so tremendously encouraging that I^’ve let myself fall into the definite expectation that you’ll recover in Waterford a large part if not all of your old effectiveness and continue as an influential force for some years more.

     I’m still stuck for a title for your Chapman talks. How about something like, “Christian Reality in Economic Practice”? I wish you’d have Lucie jot down some ideas when you’re thinking about that.

So long for now,

/s/ Spencer

 

George Palmer of Hutton Company sends his best greetings.

 

________________________________________________________________

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3099

Typed letter from Spencer MacCallum to Heath

August 5, 1962

 

 

       11 Waverly Place

            August 5, 1962

Dear P.D.:

      Not much to say, but I thought I’d let you know things are still going along well and that I enjoyed getting your letter. Of course everybody sends their regards to you. Greta Bergquist, Elmo Brown and Mr. Solomon. I met Mr. Solomon on the street and told him that you had an operation and are recover­ing from it, and he asked me specially to say to you that he’s looking forward to having some lunches with you and some afternoon discussions. He had a lot more to say in that deliberate manner of his — as if he were handing down an important judicial decision — about your greatness of mind and heart and how he values your friendship. I was impressed. Oh yes, a letter of some­what similar warmth came to me from your neighbor-over-the-way, Felix Morley. He’s on his way to California to do some lecturing and hoped to hear news of you. He was very much touched by our gift of Maine’s Popular Govern­ment to him that you inscribed when I saw you last in Win­chester.

      My work is progressing pretty well on all fronts, both the work on your Chapman College lectures (I’m about to begin the preliminary rough editing of the sixth lecture) and my own at the Library on 42nd Street. I’ve nearly completed my reading of the core of the anthropological literature on property and land tenure. It’s opened up a lot of new dimensions to the question that neither of us had seen before. I’ve filled a whole notebook of notes this summer.

      It’s good working on these Chapman lectures. I’m beginning to see that you’ve made the same kind of a fundamental revision in religion that you have in the social science field and that Al Lowi thinks you have done in physics. It isn’t just your feeling good about religion; you’ve a whole rational system of theo­logy to back you up. I’d like to ask Corpy about some of this. He supposedly knows some theology, and I just know what I’m learning from you and building on deduc­tively from there. It’s beginning to make sense.

      I got a good note from Corpie the other day. He’s settled in College Park and busy. We’ve tentative plans to drive West together next month, I as far as Chicago and he on to Claremont. Enid writes asking for your address and telling about a wonderful summer she and John and the family are having. They’re at Klinger Lake, Michigan. So much news for now.

Best wishes,

       /s/ Spencer

 

_____________________________________________________________________________

 

 

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2946

Typed letter to Heath from Spencer MacCallum, Department

of Anthropology, University of Chicago, Chicago 37, Illinois

October 10, 1962

 

Dear Popdaddy,

You certainly don’t have to get well, if you and I can only know as a secret between us that you are still a little bit interested in the wonderful things of the Spirit you have created so much of during your life — that you do love life, for all it brings, and that there can still be some bursts of spring in your life to warm and gladden your heart occasionally. They can be secret times.

     Like all your 16 descendents around the country (21 in the tribe when you count affinal relatives), I’m busy here in Chicago. It’s the most rigorous intellectual climate I’ve met, and it’s a challenge whether I can swim in these waters. I’m taking five courses instead of the normal load of three. And I’m enjoying knowing the Monroe family. They’ve a very gracious kind of a home life. You picked your friends well when you picked them.

     A nice letter came from Ivan Firth, wishing you well and replying to my letter to him about keeping in touch with the Riegel papers until they can properly be made available to those who will use them.

     Monday evening, I visited with Dr. Davis, who was in town for a couple of days. You surely influenced that man’s life in a positive way, Popdaddy. Last night he stayed up late reading your six talks and discussions that you gave at Chapman, and this morning he telephoned to say he had made an appointment today with the editors of Christian Century (the same Church affiliation as Chapman College — Disciples of Christ), whom he hopes to interest in publishing your talks and perhaps serializing them first.

    Best wishes, Popdaddy, to keep by you and use sometime when you want them.

Love,

/s/ Spencer

 

 

________________________________________________________________  

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2819

Letter to Heath from Spencer MacCallum,

Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago,

Chicago 37, Illinois

October 30, 1962

 

Dear Popdaddy —

School is certainly working out well. It’s a good department and they’ve plenty of good ideas. My advisor, Prof. Lloyd A. Fallers, has some specially fine ideas on primitive law. He has that gift that anthropology is supposed to cultivate — perspective. I’ve just sent out a copy of an article he wrote in criticism of C.P. Snow to Baldy, thinking he’ll enjoy it.

      I continue to see the Monroes. They’re certainly faithful friends of yours.

                                 Best,

                                 /s/ Spencer

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2819

Letter to Heath from Spencer MacCallum,

Dept. of Anthropology, University of Chicago,

Chicago 37, Illinois

October 30, 1962

 

Dear P.D.:

I won’t stop to say very much right now because I’m working on three papers that are converging and due to be handed in next week. One, I think you’ll enjoy seeing. It’s pretty much phrased in academic language, but it’s about the whole institution of property (and not just as it pertains to land) treated from a general theoretical point of view. The other two are on archeology. Incidentally, archeology is coming more and more to look like social anthropology with a time dimension. It certainly has changed as a field in the last ten years, since it got a way (the radio carbon method) of dating things in the past with definiteness.

     Enclosed is a copy of a fine letter from Dr. Davis that I’ve been wanting to send along to you. It’s sure a pleasure having Dr. Davis and Baldy so enthu­siastic about getting the Chapman talks published by the best publisher. I’m looking forward to this Christmas vacation to have a chance to finish up what’s needed on the manuscript to get it in best form, and maybe get a number of copies made.

      Thanks an awful lot for the apartment last summer, Popdaddy. It was more than a convenience. It was a real pleasure living and working there, and I appre­ciate it very much.

      I’m looking forward to being home for a few days over Christmas. So, until then,

                            Best wishes and heaps of love,

/s/ Spencer

________________________________________________________________

Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2819

Letter to Heath from Spencer MacCallum,

Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago,

Chicago 37, Illinois

April 25, 1963

 

Dear Popdaddy:

Spring is here. Isn’t it grand? January was the coldest month in recorded history for Chicago. But the birds are back now and the days are warm again.

     Chicago is certainly a fine place for learning.

     Enclosed is a reprint of an article I’ve published in a student journal, Anthropology Tomorrow.

     I’m writing a second article to read at the “Institute on Freedom and Competitive Enterprise” at Claremont Men’s College in June, for which I’m being paid an honorarium of $300 plus travel expenses. I can’t think of a finer way to start off the summer, and I’ll have a chance to see our friends like Galambos who are promoting CM&A.

     Because I don’t write doesn’t mean I’m not thinking of you.

Love,

 

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2819

Letter to Heath from grandson Irvan O’Connell, Jr.,

Claremont Men’s College, Claremont, California

June 23, 1963

 

Hello Popdaddy,

I hope this is a nice day for you.

      I was reading last night in Thoreau’s Walden. I had never looked at the thing seriously, certainly not at that last part.

     Did you ever read Thoreau seriously? I bet you want to make fun of that year-round camping venture of his. But at this point in my life often he seems to talk straight to me. Do you know these passages?

“Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

“I learned this, at least, by my experiments that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some new things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and with him; or the old laws be expanded and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.”

     It’s strange writing to you now, my Grandfather. I know you will read what I say, or have it read to you. And you will respond in your old way to these visions, maybe not on the first reading, but later you will when nobody is looking. But you’ll never answer me. But that doesn’t matter. You will be close to me, Popdaddy, in some part of my mind you’ll be there, just as you were ten or twenty years ago, and as you are now.

“What youthful philosophers and experimentalists are we! There is not one of my readers who has yet lived a whole human life. These may be but the spring months in the life of the race.”

Love, from your Grandson,

/s/ Irvan

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2819

Letter to Heath from Spencer MacCallum,

c/o Alvin Lowi, Jr.

2146 Toscanini Drive, San Pedro, Calif.

July 11, 1963

 

Dear Popdaddy:

Here’s just a note to break the silence. I was certainly happy to get the fine article and letter by Richard Weaver from you just before I left Chicago. You also enclosed a handwritten draft of your reply to him, and since I didn’t know whether this was just to let me know how you had written him, or whether you meant for me to type it up and send it to him, I transcribed it and sent it to him. It wasn’t a bad letter; I liked your succinct statement that “Profit through service is the right incentive of all organization,” especially. So if you had already written him, he’s had it double-barreled now and so much the better. I also enclosed a note about my own reactions to his article. He certainly seems to be coming our way.

     I gave a paper out here at the June Conference at Claremont Men’s College. The paper was about some theoretical aspects of property, from an anthropological point of view. It was based on one I wrote last fall in Chicago. When I get some copies made pretty soon, I’ll send you one. Right now I’m in the middle of a summer’s intensive study of shopping centers which is being financed by a grant from the Department of Anthropology in Chicago. By interviewing and collecting case histories, I’m trying to build up an argument that the proprietary arrangement affords a framework of human relations that facilitates the resolution of disputes that arise among the tenants, in this case merchants. It’s a kind of study designed to fit into the traditional anthropological frame of reference.

     A number of people I’ve seen send their best to you, including especially Louis Spadaro, Ralph Raico, Chauncey Snow, Joseph Galambos, Al Lowi and Mina, and of course Baldy. Oh yes, and Dr. Davis.

Chauncey Snow is tremendously taken with your Chapman talks on religion. I was a house guest with him and his wife to talk with them about it and your background and religious development. I represented you as best I could, but sure wished you had been there.

     The Free Enterprise Institute is still growing. I wish I knew where Galambos gets all his energy. Al and Mina Lowi are letting me use their address for the summer while I’m out here chasing down shopping centers.

     I’m writing this in Corpie’s apartment tonight, in Claremont. He sends a lot of first-rate good wishes to you. I’ll sign off for the time being, because there are things still to do tonight before turning in. I’m looking forward to a week or maybe two weeks in Waterford this September before going back to Chicago. In the meantime, I’ll try to write oftener and keep you up on what I’m doing.

Lots of love,

/s/ Spencer