Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2883

Courtney Correspondence – To, from and about Ralph Courtney, 1958-1963

 

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2883

Penciling by Heath on a printed sheet accompanying a typed letter from

Ralph Courtney, Threefold Farm, Spring Valley, New York, calling for political action to reform government by eliminating special-interest lobbying.

February 8, 1958

 

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

 

It was nice to hear from you again through the receipt of the jacket of your new book. Although your threefolding of society is not like ours, I look forward to a closer knowledge of what you have to say.

 

 My present point of view is that since power now rests with the political state, there must be political action to lift the state’s foot from the economic life, on the one side, and from the cultural life, on the other.

 

Yours very sincerely,

 

/s/ Ralph Courtney

RC/sk

 

 

/A sentence on his accompanying, well written, printed sheet titled, “Under Centralism, You Can’t Win”:/

 

“What is most needed today is a political movement commanding enough votes to crack the opposing phalanx of socialism.”

 

 

 

 /Heath’s penciling:/

 

New political movement, if successful, would only result in a new set of politicians.

 

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item Includes a one-page printed newsletter, Threefold: A Movement for Social Decentralism, PO Box 84, Spring Valley N.Y., November-December 1961, with article “The United States and the Common Market: A Solution in Keeping with Economic Realities”

December 26, 1961

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

 

I am in receipt of your leaflet saying that we should be doers of the Word. It would be interesting to me to hear whether you have a picture in mind of what a Christian social order would be like. I don’t refer to the way in which people should behave towards one another, but to how society should be organized to provide the right milieu for Christianity.

 

 

Yours very sincerely,

 

/s/ Ralph Courtney

 

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2883

Letter to Spencer MacCallum from Ralph Courtney,

Threefold Farm, Spring Valley, New York,

October 28, 1963, in reply to Spencer MacCallum,

Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago,

Chicago 37, Illinois

October 18, 1963

 

Dear Mr. Courtney:

My grandfather, Spencer Heath, passed away on Sunday afternoon, October 6th. As his executor, in going through his effects, I found your letter of December 26^th, 1961, which he must have received just prior to his extended illness of a year and a half or more, and which appears never to have been answered.

     If I understand your letter rightly, you made an important distinction when you wrote to my grandfather, “It would be interesting to me to hear whether you have a picture in mind of what a Christian social order would be like. I don’t refer to the way in which people should behave towards one another, but to how society should be organized to provide the right milieu for Christianity.”

 

The picture my grandfather envisioned is a natural organization of society which would come about gradually by the continued business evolution of the institution of property in land. He developed these ideas fully in his volume, Citadel, Market and Altar, published in 1957 and presently being distributed through the CCI Bookshelf, Box 45651, Los Angeles 45, California, for $6.00, and touched on them in the enclosed pamphlet, “Notes On the Organization of Real Estate.” The prospect for a soundly based, totally free society is also being vigorously explored by the personnel of The Free Enterprise Institute in Los Angeles Alvin Lowi, Jr., 2146 Toscanini Drive, San Pedro, Calif.), though not from the religious approach. Mr. Chauncey E. Snow, of 518 E. Cypress Street, Glendale, California, however, is interested in the religious approach. I have an article slated for a forthcoming issue of American Anthropologist that deals with the nature of property and touches on the institutional changes in land tenure in the United States in the last two decades that may portend a free society. I shall he happy to send you a reprint of that when it comes out, if you like.

     I am sorry your letter was neglected so long, and that my grandfather could not answer it in person. It occurs to me that you might also be interested in a forthcoming volume of my grand­father’s that is to be published, hopefully, within a year, and that is tentatively titled, Song and Work of God. I hope I have been of some assistance in this letter. Please be free to write at any time.

                      

                         Sincerely yours,

                        

                         Spencer Heath MacCallum

Encls.

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October 28, 1963

                                              

Dear Mr. MacCallum:

 

I am very sorry that your grandfather did not give us an answer to my question about a Christian social order. The title of his book, Citadel, Mar­ket and Altar, suggests to me that his ideas were not very far from those of Rudolf Steiner. Steiner’s thought was that the cultural life of society, its political life and its economy, fulfilled quite se­parate and distinct functions. They needed also different internal arrangements. The cultural life should be founded on liberty, the political life of rights should bear the stamp of equality, and the economy should operate freely except for respecting common and equal rights.

     When the cultural and religious life of humanity emerged from its earlier polytheistic character, it tended towards the setting up of a single overall deity whom we see in the Old Testament as Jehovah. Not much attention has been paid to the fact that monotheism has become transformed into a trinitarianism that should, perhaps, in turn, find an echo in the form of the modern Christian social order.

     In saying this, I am not quoting anything I have read in Steiner’s works, but I believe this point of view should be interesting to anyone like Mr. Snow, who takes the religious approach. I should be de­lighted to have the opportunity of seeing your paper in the American Anthropologist. I enclose two of my own most recent sheets.

Yours very sincerely,

RC/sk                        /s/ Ralph Courtney