Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1529

Carbon of a letter from Heath to Donald W. Douglas, 1433 San Vicente Boulevard, Santa Monica, California.

September 12, 1954

 

 

 

Dear Mr. Douglas:

    I am writing to you out of very many years admira­tion for you as a pioneer in aviation, a successful executive, and most of all a man of extraordinary quali­ties of imagination, integrity and powers of personality.

     I also in my small way pioneered in aviation. I was almost a charter member of the Aero Club of America, from which I became founder of the American Propeller & Mfg. Co. of Baltimore, Maryland, in 1910. Through this I came to have business with most of the pioneers, the two most outstanding of which were Edson Gallaudet and yourself, although I never had any direct contacts or personal relations with you. In 1930 I sold out to the Bendix Aviation Company all my patents and other pro­perties and was engaged by them as research engineer for the next couple of years.

     Since that time I have taken no active part in the great development of aviation in which you and your company have played so important a part. I have given myself almost exclusively to examining the structure of the modern voluntary social organization, entirely apart from political powers and processes which continue very largely to inhibit its development.

     This I have found esthetically and intellectually very rewarding, and, under the title Citadel, Market & Altar, I have made a systematic report of startling dis­coveries in a field of beauty and rationality that almost all my predecessors have approached only with pathological concern. As G.P. Kettering says, “their reaction is to see the wrongness, to obliterate 90 percent of rightness which the average eye cannot see for the sake of 10 per cent wrongness which the conventional eye always sees” and, even if seen, “the great possibilities that the new idea opens up, will not be visualized”.

     So far I have published very little, but am begin­ning to do so in a small way. My principal report, Citadel, Market & Altar, is just about 100 per cent positive and constructive, dealing entirely with the modus operandi of our social and contractual organiza­tion with little if any reference to, or examination of, the political and those lesser coercive processes that retard the normal functioning and development of the voluntary Society.

     Of late however, I have looked into some of the historic fallacies that have become almost standardized as a part of our general academic instruction and education now climaxing in the tragic menace of world collectiv­ism. One example of this is the fallacy of “unearned increment” and its companion fallacies of “unearned” profit or other recompense for responsible administrative and distributive services. It might interest you to see with what force and authority this fallacy has in­culcated the academic and even the religious field. I enclose therefore as one small item a recent exposé of the land-communist fundamental following Ricardo, Mill and Henry George, as set out some years ago by the Rev. Dr. Edward McGlynn and after much controversy accepted by the highest Papal authority. This is a kind of sequel to my “Progress & Poverty Reviewed and Its Fallacies Exposed” as published by the Freeman Magazine a year or so ago.

     In writing to you now my immediate impulse comes from a statement of your conception of the personality essentials requisite in a successful executive, as re­ported in Newsweek of September 13, 1954. I hope you will not take it as an intrusion.

Sincerely yours,

 

SH:m

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