Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1318

Carbon of a letter to L. D. Beckwith, 1325 East Poplar Street, Stockton, California

January 7, 1941

Dear Mr. Beckwith:

The immediate purpose of this letter is to ask you to send your “No Taxes” to my able and excellent friend, Clifford H. Kendal, 29 Bellevue Avenue, Summit, NJ, for which I enclose my check for Three Dollars ($3.00), to cover two years.

Mr. Kendal was one of the trustees under the will of Joseph Dana Miller who so ably edited Land and Freedom for a short time, and was in the way of guiding that publication along some of the intellectual paths that you have already been breaking on the Pacific Coast.

While I have this occasion to write to you, I feel somewhat like carrying out an often deferred intention of complimenting you on your indefatigable labors and the intellectual progress you have made for yourself and so many others towards a proper understanding of ground rent. I refer particularly to your doctrine that rent is not paid for the things of nature but only for the things that men do and create. I regard this as a most important break in the intellectual log jam that has encumbered the teachings of Henry George for a half century or more.

It was my good fortune to get acquainted with Oscar Geiger just before he founded the New York School, and I had the privilege of being the very first financial contributor to that project. About a year from its first inauguration, Mr. Geiger asked me to come to New York and assist with the teaching. I did so and shortly afterwards took an apartment in New York and put in altogether something like three and one-half years teaching in the school, the greater part of which was before the untimely death of Oscar Geiger. My association with him was most delightful, valuable and wholly harmonious, not withstanding a decided tendency on my own part to break new ground much of it in the direction of your progressive ideas — and beyond.

I am not a controversialist (except as a matter of sport and recreation when it is all done in good fun and everybody so understands it), and so do not set any high value on picking out the errors or showing the inadequacies of anyone’s philosophy. I find it much more profitable to try to pick out the gold from what has gone before and from what others are maintaining and use this constructively, together with my own contributions for the development of newer, more valid and more practicable conceptions. Pursuant to this, I have written occasional letters to friends and others who seemed in a way of expanding their ideas, trying to add to the values we already possess.

I am taking the liberty of sending you a copy of one of these letters — one taken from a series of several exchanged with the present director of the Henry George School. I do not expect this letter or the ideas expressed in the memorandum attached to be any more immediately acceptable to you than to him, but I will say that I came to these ideas by the same intellectual road that you follow whenever you give your analysis of ground rent. I am confident that you, or possibly your successors, will eventually come to the same point of view.

Having been one of the secretaries of the Chicago Single Tax Club in 1900 and 1901, and having supported what we called “Single Tax” work continuously since 1898, I am almost perfectly familiar with all of the ideas that have been developed and put forward down to the present time. You will observe that in what I am sending you I am, at least, not thrashing over any old straw. I am not asking from you any comment or reaction because I feel perfectly confident that I already know what it would be, so much in fact that I believe I could write it for you in almost the same words. But I have reason to believe, with a number of others here in the East, that you are intellectually honest and, therefore, able to give candid consideration to a point of view which seems utterly at variance with what you most strongly hold. In your own economic philosophy, namely, the philosophy of freedom, you hold, as I do, certain fundamental principles. Beyond this, you make certain assumptions that are in no way derived from the basic principles. It is only with these assumptions and the ideas resting on them, that the material I am sending you will clash. I shall be pleased, therefore, to have you give this material your thoughtful consideration and test it rather by reference to your most fundamental conceptions with reference to individual freedom in a social organization. I hope you will consider it not as something to be accepted or rejected but rather as something that may possibly lead to some intellectual illumination and aid.

Appreciating the advance ground you have already taken, and wishing you much progress and prosperity intellectually as well as otherwise.

Very truly yours,