Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2874

Typed letter to Spencer MacCallum

October 12, 1959

 

 

Dear Spencer:

Here I am at last starting to answer those two or or more letters that you have sent me since you holed in at Berkeley to collect materials for that THESIS of yours. Your mother told me some time ago that you were doing wonderfully with it and finding CM&A a fine foundation. You surely can think accurately and well, and you have shown already that you can write elegantly as well. (This is a brand new ribbon but it writes like h–l)

 So many things I have wanted to talk with you about I hardly know how to begin. Starting with your July 22 letter, that was a fine enclosure about marketing. Keep it for reference. It is good you are happy in your re­search; and having so many new thoughts. It is fine that your thesis adviser knows about it and approves and I know how that personal contact can be stimulating to you. What about that book of the English economist who seems to understand the distributive function of land owner­ship and that taking taxes off from business creates more land value than taxes on land can destroy. I think that book should be in our Library. Some time I want to have a list of the books on hand from which I drew most of the factual materials for the basis of CM&A. Such a list might well be appended to a future printing.

 I have had an awful time getting myself to write some important and necessary letters. Carbons of some two or three of them are enclosed. It doesn’t seem to be getting any easier for me to write.

 I see now that you got those paragraphs on marketing from a text book. Your comments are much to the point. Yes, we should write him and to Leslie White too, if, with his heavy obsession about the inexorable tyranny of “Cul­ture” you think there is any hope for him.

Now for yours of Sept. 17:

 About tax exemption for the Foundation — we have been running just about parallel with Dr. Harper’s experience with Volker. Back in May the Treasury Dept. wrote to the Foundation asking for a whole lot more information but the folks thought it was an advertisement so did not for­ward it. (I’ve just got to get another ribbon)  Then in July they sent another letter saying that the application was denied. I referred this to Bartlett, Poe and Claggett and they wrote saying the May letter had never been received. Then in August your Aunt Bee and I spent a lot of time on it and got all the required information into the hands of Mr. Doub of B. P. &. C. and he got it all off to Washington about two weeks ago feeling very sure things would come through all right. I saw him again yesterday and he says he will write a follow-up letter and perhaps telephone also about it. He seems right confident.

About the land:  I have been to see the J. W. Rouse Com­pany. They are specialists in land for shopping centers all over the country. Do not handle residence property. They say the Boulevard frontage will be very right for such purpose but the time for it has not come yet. They recommend handling the other sixty acres or so on a residence basis and for such purpose think it should be sold outright. Their Mr. Jenkins made some inter-office inquiries and got report that residence land in this vicinity should bring from $1000 to $2000 per acre, depending on local circumstances etc. He said the agents are usually more interested in making a sale than in getting the best price. I went to Pinkards and told them I was holding sixty acres more or less on the Montgomery road side at $1500 and not offering the other part at all at the present time. They did not seem to think much of it. You will see by the en­closed clipping that time favors delay, especially on the non-residence part.

 That is a fine lot you wrote me about the definition of Society. I agree with it all the way along. We just haven’t got any other word to include the amenities of both kinship and contract. However, family, clan and tribe ought not to be treated as on all fours with Society which by reason of its infinite potentialities ought to be treated as strictly human and transcending all that even men do by reason of their animal instincts alone. As in other sciences, language will have to evolve with the understanding.

 I am much taken with what you say about “property” and contract and how the consensus of property is fundamental to all
those human interrelations, including the development of arts and sciences, — characterized by imagination and the power of enter­taining abstractions — perhaps everything above the merely in­stinctual or tropismicas (?) level.

 Now your of Sept. 7: Hooray for you in your enthusiasm for the coming development of proprietary real estate management. Something like a real “wave of the future”. I think I got it purely from the standpoint of theory and principle and Arthur Holden came to it as an expedient out of the difficulties of getting the owners of property together for the united improve­ment of a region..

 Gosh I am grabbing a bus for New York. Will have to finish and mail this from there.

October 16.

 Here I am in New York. Couldn’t get back to this letter until today.

 Dr. Harper has sent me, from time to time, matters of much interest and importance. The latest is reproduction from a page of The Palo Alto Times of October 5, 1959 with big headlines “PRIVATE COMPANY ORGANIZES CITY”. I want you to see this, or perhaps a copy which I may make and enclose. I wish Dr. Harper would send me about six of these reproductions that he had made. John Chamberlain wants to see it and many others will be interested too I am sure. It seems the Crocker Land Company owns the whole district in northern San Mateo County near Brisbane, and the California legislature has given to its subsidiary company, the Guadalupe Valley Municipal Improvement District, almost unlimited municipal powers, and this apparently with full approval of important political figures. However, the proprietary character of the project may have an Achilles Heel in the statement that “the law has plen­ty of safeguards to ensure democratic control of the district when indus­trial properties are sold off to individual owners.” But this might be overcome if those in charge of the project could become sufficiently enlightened while the project is in progress upon the tremendous advantages to everybody of an exclusively proprietary administration. Maybe through the influence of Dr. /Harper?/ the William Volker fund people could have some influence in that direction. Anyhow it seems to be a prime example pro­spectively of the subject-matter of your thesis on the development of communities under proprietary administration. As soon as public attention is called to their widely multiplying and to more of the possibilities inherent in them, in which your thesis may play a very important part, influential magazines and periodicals of national circulation such as LIFE and FORTUNE and the Business Reviews and READER’S DIGEST will be sure to publicize it on a large scale and its benefits may become apparent and per­suasive before the inevitable mossback conservatives and the socialistic can arouse any strong popular movement against it, and without this latter even the professional politicians may refrain or perhaps even go along. Things that have been in embryo even for centuries can develop mighty fast once a practical start is made in accordance with sound theory or general principles. Witness Aviation and the whole wide field of electronics now bursting suddenly into bloom — all within a single ordinary life time.

 I suppose you have been told of the death on October 9th of your Aunt Margaret’s husband, Merton McConkey. Charles went home for a few days but is now back in New York. While there he talked a good deal about doing some college work in Lansing but didn’t seem to want to leave New York — so his mother said to me by telephone. I must see him and have sent him a card to say so. Your mother wanted to go to the funeral but after talking to her sister decided by my help that it would be better to go a week later for a better visit. She is fond of her sister and also has been writing some very lovely letters to me of late.

 It is wonderful that you have dug up so much about shopping centers that have been developing since about 1840 and all the other types of similar or­ganization. This phenomenon alone, apart from any theory about it, is almost certain to be played up before long in FORTUNE and other influential maga­zines. You are laying some fine groundwork for this not only for the magazines but as a sound theoretical contribution in the field of social anthro­pology and this will give the latter a big boost over the pretentious muddlings of the Social scientists, so called, under the label of “Sociologists”. It is marvelous how you can make easy headway with the anthropologists and put the fundamentals of CM&A across to them from their own standpoint and in their own language. Next thing, but quite a while ahead, you will have me immortalized in something more enduring than bronze. It is wonderful how one can contribute to future mankind not only his physical offspring but also, and through one of them, the children of his mind.

 Let me know what you hear from Arthur Holden in New York.

 Gee, I was glad to see the copy of your letter to “Corpy”. You surely did give him some good food for thought. I wonder how responsively he replied to it. I sometimes imagine that you and he may work together a lot, perhaps on the Foundation, which certainly has been in a “mess” without you. Been missing you personally a heap too. Must hie to California soon for stimulation.

S’long,

P.D.

 

Will be here in New York for another week.