Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2372

Letter from Russell Kirk, Mecosta, Michigan

May 20, 1954

 

Dear Mr. Heath,

I enclose two recent pieces of mine which may interest you. I have been speaking here and there recently, and have been planting ten thousand trees up here in my stump-country; so I am two months late in replying to your kind and interesting letter. I should like very much to see the manuscript of Citadel, Market, and Altar.

 Have you seen Dean R. A. Nisbet’s The Quest for Community (Oxford University Press, New York, 1953)? I think you would like it. He realizes fully the need for voluntary organizations through which the vigor of society finds its best expression.

 No institution is held in greater contempt, among the avant garde, than private property in land; and the greater the landed property, the greater the envy and resentment. Yet I know of no other social institution to equal it as an agency for good.

 We need urgently some journal in which such questions may be discussed intelligently. Mr. Henry Regnery and I are hopeful of getting up a serious monthly review on conservative principles; I enclose a prospectus. We intend to get out a sample issue in September, and to appeal to the great foundations for a three-year subsidy on the basis of that accomplish­ment. Just now I am looking for some seven thousand dollars with which to defray the cost of printing and distributing about ten thousand copies of the sample number.

 I expect to be here at Mecosta most of the time until October, when I shall go abroad for some months. I resigned from the staff of Michigan State College some months ago in protest against the lowering of standards there; so I should be addressed here at Mecosta, where I type this letter on the cranky machine of my great-uncle Raymond, who died in 1919. I have had the typewriter restored out of piety and out of a hope of propitiating his spectre, which is said to stalk this old house.

 I wish I could write at greater length just now, for your letter wakened all sorts of reflections in me; but I must away to the planting of my spruces and pines, and will try to write at greater length another time. I hope to hear from you. Best wishes.

 

Cordially,

/s/ Russell Kirk