Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2268

Letter (second page missing) to Heath from Pyrrha Gladys Grodman

January 13, 1942

 

            Henry George School of Social Science

CHARTERED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK

LONG ISLAND EXTENSION HEADQUARTERS

207-12 JAMAICA AVENUE, BELLAIRE, L. I.

TELEPHONE  HOLLIS  5-1211

Dear Mr. Heath:

As I informed you in a previous letter, I sent Mr Lissner two copies of your reply to Mr Woodlock of December 31st. I assumed Mr Lissner was a reader of The Wall Street Journal or if not, would see the issue of the 29th particularly because of the appearance of Mr Chodorov’s letter printed below yours. But it seems I was mistaken. I know you will be inter­ested in the following excerpt from Mr Lissner’s letter to me of January 10th:

“Please accept my thanks for the copies of Mr Heath’s letter of Dec. 31 to The Wall Street Journal. No, I haven’t read The Wall Street Journal of Dec. 29. All I have read is Mr Woodlock’s column of Dec. 17. I’d like very much to have a copy of the page in the issue for Dec. 29. I’d like also to compare the published version with the original text. I believe the controversy is still running; if it is, I wish you’d let me know about any other letters that are printed in connection with it…  I’m anxious to get a full picture of the course of the controversy; public philosophical discussions, you know, are rather rare these days…  You know, you ought to encourage Mr Heath to work out his new ideas in philosophy in a formal way and pub­lish it in the weekly “Journal of Philosophy”. In that way he would bring them before an audi­ence trained to pick every flaw in the development of his ideas and he would obtain criticism which, if he has avoided fundamental error, would enable him to complete his work.

 Insofar as I did not make copies of the print­ed version of your first letter, and that of Mr Woodlock’s column of the 29th, two solutions present themselves: (1) if you mail me the clipping of the 29th, I will make the necessary copies and send them to Mr Lissner, returning the clipping to you for your files; (2) you may commu­nicate directly with Mr Lissner in this matter and the recommendation concerning publication of your ideas in the “Journal of Philosophy”. If you have not seen the letterhead of The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, I believe their “byline” will interest you; “Published Quarterly under grant from the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation in the interest of constructive syn­thesis in the social sciences”. The last ten words