Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2300.

Carbons of an exchange re Citadel, Market & Altar between Heath and Will Durant at 5608 Briarcliff Road, Los Angeles, California, intermediated by S.A. Schneidman, 207-12 Jamaica Avenue, Bellaire, Long Island, NY

September 26, 1945

 

 

 

Dear Dr. Durant:                      September 26, 1945

You may remember me as the veterinarian who took care of your police dog a few years back when you lived in Great Neck. Your good wife and her sisters also I knew when they held forth in Greenwich Village. I am also an old friend of our mutual friend, Hugo Pollock, the lawyer.

     I now write you on behalf of Spencer Heath, a mature, original thinker — whose light should not be hid under a bushel — a man whose original and somewhat startling ideas have been set out in manuscript form under the title, CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR. I have known Mr. Heath for a number of years, since his retirement from a successful engineering career to undertake similar research in the field of social phenomena.

     He tells me that the abstract philosophies (so bril­liantly reflected in your own notable compendia) were the de­light of his earlier years, but that now, upon a background of the physical and biologic sciences (the ones that have successful technologies) and by boldly applying their basic conceptions and modes of energy analysis in the field of so­cial phenomena, he has come upon the matter from a wholly new and most promising angle of attack.

     Mr. Heath is very modest and unassuming, without any axe to grind. He has independent means and is not a professional writer. His present objective is to obtain such auspicious publication of his methods and results as will command the at­tention of a goodly number of enterprising and outstanding minds.

This, he thinks, is a necessary preliminary towards inducing in those substantial persons — those who in all communities have the major ownership in the sites, resources and im­provements — some conception of the incomes (and hence enormous permanent values) they can create for themselves by combining and organizing, as owners, to give protection (primarily against governmental oppressions) and other public services to the wealth-producing populations using and inhabiting the lands (sites and resources) and other fixed properties of their com­munities.

     Mr. Heath believes that, once the fundamental principle (the performing and supplying of public services, as well as the private ones, upon the basis of free contract and measured exchange) begins to be understood, then the owners of communities — and eventually of nations — will, under economic motivation, automatically combine and by extending their services as owners creating voluntarily paid income, they will gradually displace without serious opposition the political and coercive community administration.

     Mr. Heath holds that governmental revenues are not gauged to or even dependent on any public services being performed; and that only those who are voluntarily and automatically recompensed for so doing — namely, the owning or proprietary authority in a community — as in a hotel — can protect without tyranny and thus truly serve its people — make and leave them free.

     Your arresting volume, PHILOSOPHY AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM, is often referred to by my friend Heath as showing how the greatest minds have strained without seeing any primary principle of social functioning (such as contractual displacing coercive pro­cesses) and therefore not coming to any definite focus. He holds that in the social field, as in the physical, it is only by appli­cations of new knowledge, and not by education in the old, that improvements and advancements are made.

     The manuscript (original) is being considered by Yale University Press. The Editor-in-Chief, Eugene Davidson, is thought to be favorable — even eager, it seems. But upon a set of ideas so arresting yet so contrary to nearly all the accepted thinking of the past, he hesitates to risk the verdict of the usual spec­ialists in social and economic theory and tradition.

 

     It has been suggested that a historian would be likely to take the wider and less confining view. That is why I am anx­ious to have you examine this (I think epoch-making) manuscript. If you think well of it and that in these times it ought to be widely read and discussed I understand that you will be invited to report officially upon it.

     Mr. Heath, no less than myself, is a great admirer of your writings and work — of your analytical skill and literary artistry in presenting and interpreting not only complex ideas but also the simple and solvent — the profound.

     We are both eager to know how these unorthodox ideas im­press you, at least in a general way, and will await your com­ments accordingly.

     I hope your visit to California is for pleasure or bus­iness only, and not from necessity to recover any health sac­rificed to your many — and prodigious — labors.

     With all sincere regards to you and to Mrs. Durant, I remain,

Yours for Social Harmony out of present chaos,

(Signed)

              

The manuscript will be sent to you under separate cover. Dr. Will Durant, 5608 Briarcliff Road, Los Angeles, California

 

_______________________________________________________________

 

 

Dear Dr. Durant:                      September 26, 1945

My good friend, Dr. S.A. Schneidman, of Bellaire, Long Island kindly offered to write requesting you to examine my manuscript en­titled, CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR. I was very pleased to have him do this and am, accordingly, forwarding you a copy of it by Railway Express—Air Transport.

     Among the ideas I have organized in this manuscript believing them to be novel and possibly very fruitful are the following:

1. That the successive generations of men are energy waves whose frequency period is the average life span.
2. That it is the function of the social organization continu­ously to re-build and re-create its environment — and thus, in­directly, itself.

3. That this functioning of society lengthens the average life-span and thereby lowers the frequency of re-generation of its energy waves — transforms its own energy.

4. That this transformation of energy is a qualitative

change — a durational gain — that can be rationally advanced.

5. That Coercion, Co-operation, Consecration (Citadel, Mar­ket and Altar) are the basic human techniques (and institutions).

6. That the free feudal community of reciprocal services and obligations (not its military and servile corruption) is the authentic social pattern – the proto-genic type.

7. That property in Land is the basic agency of social (i.e. contractual) distribution of community resources and advantages, potential for general public administration. — Community services, protection, for automatic recompense — revenue without rulership.
8. That the Utopian Ideal of social solidarity, abundant life, ecstatic existence, is implicit in the evolution of a state-eman­cipated system of free enterprise, contract and exchange.

     I hope you will find some of these ideas (and their implications) arresting and of possible aid in the search for a kind of knowledge that will advance Society and retard its opposite. If you feel that the ideas developed in the manuscript are worthy of being published and widely discussed I look forward to the prospective publishers requesting your professional examination and report.

Sincerely yours,

 

When you have sufficiently examined the manuscript kindly return, by air transportation if possible, all charges collect.

_____________________________________

Carbon from Heath to Will Durant,

Hotel Sherman, Chicago, Illinois

Dear Doctor Durant:                   October 17, 1945

My good friend Dr. Schneidman referred to me your letter of October 9^th written from Chicago. This led me to ascertain through the Leigh Agency that the manuscript, CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR, that I had sent to your California address by first class air mail, had been returned here to New York and was being held by them. I am also advised by the Agency that you will be back at the Sherman House in Chicago for the 18th and 19th of October. Noting your expectation of its being forwarded to you from California, I have had the manuscript sent on, using this time the Airplane Express. I hope it will come safely to your hand and that I may have word from you that it has done so.

     I anticipate you may find in this manuscript a not unfruitful attempt to carry the basic conceptions of the natural sciences into the social field and thereby lay ground here also for an expanding ration­al technology upon the narrow empiricism to which the imperfect func­tioning of the social organization has been historically confined.

 

     The emphasis is for disclosing how the technique of free enterprise for private recompense and gain is extendable into the public field, and for relying upon that dependable motivation for the development and extension of public services, as of other services, without coercion. Given the necessary new intelligence, the implication of this is profound, — an automatic, non-political solution of the critical world-problem of today, namely, by what agency can either a local or a world-wide community secure services without tyranny, the protection of power without need for defense against it? (Ch. 11, 18)

     The manuscript proposes a solution believed to correspond in princi­ple with the effective procedures employed by all the natural sciences; requiring no legislation or other coercion, abrogating no liberty or prop­erty, creating great incomes and values, yet consonant with all the high­est aspirations and social ideals.

     By way of self-extenuation, if any need be, for this infliction upon you, let me say, in the manner of Emerson: “Senates and sovereigns can confer no compliments and honors like the presenting of a worthy thought and presupposing its intelligent examination.

     My compliments, and my best wishes in everything that you pursue.

Sincerely,

 

 

_______________________________________________________________

 

Two penned notes to Heath from Will Durant, the first from

The Hotel Sherman in Chicago, Illinois, the second from

the Hotel Nicollet in Minneapolis, Minnesota

October 21 and 23, 1945

 

 

Dear Mr. Heath:                       October 21, 1945

I received your manuscript here today, and your letter. I shall read the manuscript as soon as I get thru Bertrand Russell’s HISTORY OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY, which I have undertaken to review.

Hastily,

(signed) Will Durant

______________________________________

 

Dear Mr. Heath:                       October 23, 1945

 

Noticing how long a time had elapsed since you sent your MS to Los Angeles, I put Bertrand Russell’s book aside and gave your CITADEL, MARKET AND ALTAR a sympathetic reading. I know how much labor must have gone into this book, and wish I could recommend it to my publishers. But (forgive my frankness) you have not succeeded in transforming your complex economic and philosophical thought into a form comprehensible and attractive to the readers you aim to reach. Many pages seem to be restatements of generally held ideas in a new terminology, so that you tend more from one abstract idea to another with too little of those pointed concrete applications which give life to speculations or theoretical thoughts.

     It’s a back-breaking job to make the abstract concrete, but otherwise you’ll be an unheard voice.

     I may be wrong; don’t let me discourage you; submit the MS to others — say Stuart Chase, or George Soule, or Bruce Bliven — and get their reaction.

Sincerely,

/s/ Will Durant

 

I am returning the MS today by registered mail.

 

/Quotation penciled by Spencer

MacCallum from Heath about Stuart

Chase — “a featherhead anyhow.”/