Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1450

Carbon of incomplete letter from Heath at 11 Waverly Place, New York City 3, to Frederick W. Roman, Associated Forums, Ltd., 2101 South Grammercy Place, Los Angeles 7, CA. A page seems to be missing.

February 26, 1948

Dear Dr. Roman:

    You have been very kind to me in sending me from time to time news of your public work in association with Dr. Griggs and your other wonderful assistants. I wish to thank you for all this and particularly for your letter of March 19, 1947 which has remained so long unanswered.

     I am glad to know of the fine development and pro­gress of your work and of the very attractive new head­quarters at which I am addressing you. I would love to visit you and have, if possible, some participation in your work. I greatly appreciate the invitation suggested in your March letter and further kindly referred to in your letter of April 2 following.

     It interests me to note that you are having a study made — rather that you were having a study made — of the leaflets I sent. I do not remember exactly what these were, but in any event I know they were exceedingly inade­quate in their scope. They form only a small portion, perhaps I should say, only one angle, of approach to the large social situation and heretofore hidden beneficences involved in the institution of property and land — in the contractual, as opposed to the political and thereby arbitrary public administration and distribution of the sites and resources of a community. The fragments I have sent you are, for the most part, excerpts from or early versions of chapters contained in a fairly compre­hensive book length outline of the existing social or­ganization (as distinguished from the political) that I have been compiling for several years, under the title, “Citadel, Market, and Alter.” John Chamberlain has be­come greatly interested in the discoveries I have made of the autonomous processes by which the social organi­zation maintains itself and which I have taken some pains to disclose that he has urged publication of my work, particularly by the Yale University Press and has very definitely engaged himself to write a foreword for it as soon as publication becomes imminent. I am sending you a printed sheet which recites some of the high points and on the back of which there is printed a diagram of the basic philosophy which, to my mind, underlie the origin and development of all the sciences and in particular is the foundation from which the coming new science of society, Socionomy, must, as I conceive it, arise.

With one exception, I think everything I have written about society has been almost wholly constructive and even studiously non-critical.