Spencer Heath Archive

Item 711

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath

October 17, 1956

I’ve often had in my mind how some clever writer might write a story. It would be about a clever or intelligent young man being taught by a historian, giving him vivid pictures of what was going on during the first half of the 20th century. The young man would be hard put to believe that political administration, imitating that of Rome, had so long survived. For in his own time, he would know none but proprietary administration, and would have great difficulty to believe the world ever got along any other way. There could be discussions of a whole college class covering this period, in which doubting young minds would contend against the professor that any such things ever were.

     It would make a good story, something like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, except that, the proprietary system being without public violence of any kind, the story would be impregnable against all logical attack.