The following story is part of Walter Block's Autobiography Archive.

Looking Back and Forward

by Spencer Heath MacCallum
by Spencer Heath MacCallum

An account of my intellectual path has to start before I was born – with my grandfather, Spencer Heath (1876–1963). He taught me most of what I know about thinking, and my own thinking is very much an outgrowth from his.

About 1898, attracted not by the Georgists' attack on property in land but for their strong free-trade stance, Spencer Heath became recording secretary for the Chicago Single Tax Club and continued in close association with the movement for the next 40 years. He assisted Henry Geiger in founding the Henry George School in New York City and taught there for several years in the early 1930s, until Frank Chodorov fired him for not hewing closely enough to the Georgist line. By 1934, he had concluded that George's animus toward land was misplaced and that the institution of land ownership was essential to a functioning society. Indeed, he came to believe that the further evolution of property in land was the key to society outgrowing its subservience to the state – which he saw as social pathology.

The story of my close association with my grandfather during the last half-dozen years of his life (he died in 1963 at the age of 86) actually begins in the Depression year of 1930. He had come down from New York for a visit in Winchester, Virginia where he found his daughter, my mother, in tears because my father thought they couldn't afford a second child (my brother had been born two years earlier). My grandfather left the room. He returned moments later with a check for a thousand dollars, a princely sum of money in those years, and asked, "Will this help?" So, being bought and paid for, I was named after him: "Spencer Heath MacCallum." Years later, when I became the only member of the family interested in working with him to publish his major work, Citadel, Market and Altar, and in preserving and carrying forward his ideas in other ways, he said it was the best investment he ever made.

A working relationship didn't develop, however, until a chance happening in 1952, my sophomore year at Princeton. For a European literature course, I'd read Franz Kafka's The Trial, an articulate nightmare expressing the paradoxical theme that no one deserves to live as a human being unless he goes through the act of destroying himself. I'd grappled with this argument for some six weeks and had become dangerously depressed when, one afternoon, "Popdaddy," as everyone called him, drove through Princeton on a trip and stopped for a visit. I told him about Kafka, and we sat up all night in my room in Edwards Hall talking about it. By the first light of morning he had shown me, by a logic I felt Kafka would not have liked but would have had to accept, an escape from the paradox.

What, briefly, was his argument? As I look back upon it, it was that we must always seek to understand things in context. We must seek the relatedness of things. Kafka dismissed the outer world of events and only looked within for ultimate truth. But all he found there was a burden of negative feeling. He disdained looking outside himself. If we, on the other hand, look outside and around us, what do we see that could account for Kafka's choice to look only within – and for what he found there?

We are the cultural heirs, Popdaddy suggested, to two legacies that have come down to us from very ancient times in various degrees of admixture. One is of slavery, from the easy-going lands and fertile plains where productivity was great and there could be the marching and marshaling of armies. The other is of freedom and cooperation, from the more rugged and mountain lands that could not support slavery because one man's product could only support himself and his limited family with nothing left for a ruler class. Each of these legacies has a psychological component, and in particular that of slavery can be seen as twofold – the psychology of the slave and the psychology of the master.

What is the slave psychology bred into men over many millennia? It is that a person has no worth in and of himself, but only as he can serve someone else, in whom all worth resides. And the master psychology? It is to maintain control, the status quo, to an important degree by distancing one's self symbolically and otherwise from the slave. The master is what the slave is not. And what is that? The slave works; he deals with the physical world. So his master eschews that world as beneath him – as the mandarin grew long fingernails to show he could not possibly do manual work. He cultivates instead the inner world, creating marvelous systems of religion and philosophy. But what would be the content of these? They would have little if any practical consequence, little development of science, since that, after all, would involve coming to terms with the outer, objective world, the province of slaves. They could not avoid having an emotional content, however, and what would that be? The smaller ruling classes could not have escaped the influence of the emotional life of the great surrounding sea of population, which was slave. This burden of feeling would have come down to us from the slaves, directly and non-verbally, and from the masters through our inherited systems of religion and philosophy.

Here was a unique perspective from which to view Kafka's rejection of the outer world and also to explain what he found within. It sufficed for my need in the moment. What Popdaddy did not go into on that occasion but would elaborate upon subsequently was that there is an alternative to such pure subjectivism. The alternative is that that we can and do transcend this legacy as we develop knowledge (scire – science) of the world of which we are a part and come into our creative capacities by rebuilding that environment to our bodily needs and the inner dream. Then we experience the joy and fulfillment of creation, which God is said to have enjoyed in Genesis. As we do this, we rise out of our dependent creaturehood and become creators, an image Popdaddy made much of in his treatments of religion.

Helping me through the Kafka paradox and giving me a perspective from which to deal with my own inner feelings was something my professors had never attempted and, I felt, could not have done. So I began listening to what else this gentleman might have to say. What I heard was amazing. He maintained that the only realistic way to conceive of human society was in the total absence of government as we know it – the absence, that is, of any form of legislated laws or other institutionalized coercions. He believed that people in society are fully capable of providing for every social need through the further, free development of the normative institution of private property.

I was astonished to hear such extreme ideas from a person seemingly level-headed, who had been preeminently successful in not one but three careers in engineering, law and business. As a pioneer in early aviation, he had developed before World War I the first mass-production of airplane propellers that took the place of the man who stood at a bench and carved them out by hand, and by 1922 he had demonstrated at Boling Field the first engine powered and controlled, variable and reversible pitch propeller. Over the next two years, therefore, I listened closely and at times incredulously to every word he spoke, while interposing questions and objections, intent to know if he really was the purist in this regard that his words implied.

Prior to this, "Popdaddy" had been a vague figure in the family who was "always writing" but was unable to find a publisher. Looking back on it, anyone with his views would have had little chance of finding a publisher in the 1940s and '50s. Now, having learned what his writing was about, I proposed that when I finished at Princeton, I'd help him self-publish his book. We'd do it together, I said. Thus began a productive working relationship. After his death ten years later, I collected every scrap of his writing, much of it in longhand, and numbered and transcribed each on typewriter for a total of more than 2,000 items: what I call the "Spencer Heath Archive."

I was slow maturing and, in my teen years, was incapacitated in many ways by a severe stutter. Popdaddy found out about the National Hospital for Speech Disorders in New York City and offered me his apartment, which he only used at intervals, on Waverly Place just east of Washington Square in Greenwich Village. The apartment was within walking distance of the Hospital, where I could attend daily group therapy. I accepted his offer and left Princeton for a year. It was a wonderful year, having my own apartment in the Village, exploring the used bookstores on Fourth Avenue that I passed walking to and from the Hospital, and finding there and reading, among other things, everything ever written by Sir Henry Sumner Maine. After Princeton, I came back and spent another year with Popdaddy in New York and then at his country place, Roadsend Gardens, in Elkridge, Maryland south of Baltimore.

I graduated from Princeton in art history. For the required undergraduate thesis, I wrote on Northwest Coast Indian art, then went to graduate school in anthropology at the University of Washington in order to be able to be near enough to visit and learn first-hand something of Northwest Coast Indian life and culture. Because these people had had a traditionally stateless society, echoing Popdaddy's ideas and those of Maine on the village community, my interest turned strongly toward social anthropology. Determined to write my Master's paper on Popdaddy's notion of an altogether proprietary, non-political community, for which he would often take the hotel as a heuristic model, I decided to read everything I could about hotels and write on the hotel as a community.

I went to Berkeley for a summer to take advantage of the good libraries there. Soon after I'd gotten well into reading about hotels, I discovered the shopping center. A month later, I was reading about office buildings, and then marinas, mobilehome parks and similar phenomena, all members of the class of the relatively recent and evolving phenomenon of "multi-tenant income properties." Wanting to read everything about all of these, I extended my stay beyond the summer and through an entire winter. Returning to Seattle in the spring, I submitted my thesis. It was rejected. I devoted the summer to recasting it, and in the fall it was accepted. Several years later, following a suggestion made to F.A. Harper by Sartelle Prentice, Jr., the Institute for Humane Studies published it under Alvin Lowi's suggested title, The Art of Community. "Art" in the title referred to the empirical art of community which I then saw developing in commercial real estate in multi-tenant income properties, paralleling the way that empirical arts like Toledo steel, dye making and the like had developed in the middle ages before we had any science or rational understanding of the matter.

At various times while at the Berkeley libraries, I would visit Baldy and Peg Harper and their family. I bought a lightweight bicycle propelled by a little Italian "Mosquito" motor and would bicycle over from Berkeley to Menlo Park. Baldy was an important mentor. We'd gotten acquainted when he was at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). I'd accompany Popdaddy on his occasional drives up the Hudson to FEE to visit with Leonard Read, Baldy, and others on the FEE staff. Baldy had a great sense of optimism about the future of humanity and by that time had clearly adopted, as his compass setting, the concept of a "total alternative" to political government. This became the ideal goal by which he corrected and guided his mundane decisions much as North Star enables the mariner to make continuous course corrections and so come safely into Liverpool. (My wife, Emalie, puts almost the same thing a little differently: "We must entertain the ideal of no government if we are ever to realize limited government.)

Baldy said that he didn't know just how he had arrived at this philosophical position, but he thought it might have come about from John Chamberlain, who was Popdaddy's friend, forwarding him a working draft of Citadel, Market and Altar. John had told Baldy that he didn't really understand it but nevertheless thought there might be something important here; perhaps Baldy could make something of it. Baldy read it through several times and about a year later found himself advocating, as an ideal toward which to strive, a society totally free of structures of institutionalized coercion.

Considering Baldy's role in my life as a mentor, it's worth digressing here to say some more about this unassuming teacher with such a down-to-earth grasp of economics and impeccable intellectual hospitality who encouraged me to a better appreciation of Austrian economics, including Hayek. Although Baldy had been the first staff member recruited by Leonard Read for FEE at the end of World War II, Baldy could never prevail upon Leonard to adopt at FEE any but the conservative policy of promoting what was already discovered and known about freedom. Leonard may have felt constrained by the exigencies of fund-raising. Whatever the reason, Baldy felt there was much more to be discovered and wanted to give more encouragement at the growing edge of ideas. Without taking Leonard into his confidence, therefore, he began in the early 1950s to plan an independent institute, which would be called the "Institute for Humane Studies." But he did take Popdaddy into his confidence, and they planned much of it together. For a campus, Popdaddy offered to donate Roadsend Gardens, his 100-acre country place outside Baltimore in the direction of Washington. Baldy and his family came down one weekend and walked over the land with Popdaddy and me, but ultimately Baldy decided that the then intellectual climate in California would be more hospitable for what he wanted to accomplish.

Baldy's dream was to create a special kind of a community of scholars. He wanted to create an environment that would be conducive to breakthroughs in social thought. The Institute would cater to young people, recognizing that breakthroughs in any field tend to be made by the young. But it would cater also to seasoned scholars from many diverse fields (law, physics, biology, not excluding even the paranormal as represented by Dr. Rhine at Duke University) who were retired but intellectually active – and who could use the Institute's tax-exempt status in pursuing their work.

The Institute would find living arrangements nearby and offer its library and other facilities including private office space, so that visitors – young people and senior scholars – could work alone so far as they liked or mix with others in the library and in the Institute dining room, as had been done so successfully at FEE. The active or vital ingredient in Baldy's formula would be the give-and-take between seasoned scholars and enthusiastic youth. This interplay, he thought, would lead toward the breakthroughs he felt were sorely needed in contemporary thinking about society.

Returning to the thread of this account, while I was pursuing my graduate studies at the University of Washington and then at Chicago, Popdaddy had been invited to Santa Ana, California as a house guest of Frances Norton Manning, who had undertaken to actively promote intellectual contacts for him and had been very successful at it. On my visits there I became acquainted, among others, with Walter Knott, of Knott's Berry Farm, John L. Davis, president of Chapman College, and Andrew J. Galambos and two associates, Alvin Lowi, Jr. and Donald H. Allen. The last three were colleagues in the defense industry. Galambos, an astrophysicist, was entrepreneuring with Don Allen on the side in mutual fund sales and in free-market education and was just then independently arriving at the notion of the "total alternative" (my phrase which Baldy and several others adopted). Al Lowi encouraged Galambos to found the Free Enterprise Institute (FEI), which quickly became a full-time proposition. Al was for some years "Senior Lecturer," and Don managed the bookstore.

The main thing I learned from attending some of the basic courses at FEI was the multifaceted role that insurance could play in a free society. This was a major idea in Galambos' teaching that had originated with one of his students, Piet Bos. Galambos' ideas about intellectual property, on the other hand, made little sense to me. I came to believe, with Al Lowi, in the importance of giving credit for ideas, which is simply good scholarly practice, and that the time to contract about ideas is before they have been disclosed. I learned little from FEI that I hadn't already learned in principle from Popdaddy, but Galambos had a profound effect on many people who gained their first vista of the "total alternative" through him, comparable to my awakening experience with Popdaddy. My relationship with Alvin Lowi, by contrast, has continued to grow through the years, helping stretch my intellectual grasp well beyond where it was with my grandfather and Baldy Harper. In particular, I've gained an appreciation from him of the meaning and implications of the scientific method. Alvin became well acquainted with Popdaddy in the short time before his death. Afterward, at the timely suggestion of Don Allen, he assisted greatly in organizing and evaluating the Spencer Heath Archives.

Soon after completing my Master's at Seattle in 1961, I went on to the University of Chicago for a doctorate. Unaccountably, however, my work slowed down. I continued to get high marks in my class work, but often took many months to complete course assignments. Finally I dropped out, after fulfilling the residence and course requirements but short of the dissertation. For the dissertation, I had planned to do an ethnography of a shopping mall, looked at in its internal organization as a community of landlord and merchant tenants. In preparation for this, the University had given me a summer scholarship to drive the length and breadth of California visiting shopping centers and collecting case histories of dispute situations and finding how they were handled. This gave me a store of empirical data, and I selected the mall in which I wanted to do the fieldwork for my dissertation. That was not to be, however. My last accomplishment before leaving Chicago was publishing in Modern Age (9:1, Winter 1964-65) a paper that I still think important, "The Social Nature of Ownership." For the summer of 1965, I was invited to consult on a project with the UCLA Economics Department with Armian Alchian and Harold Demsetz. I had difficulty fulfilling that commission.

I supposed my problem to be psychological. Was I not motivated? Why was I having serious problems tracking conversation where several people were present? The next ten years were a lost decade. I couldn't start anything at all with the expectation of being able to finish it. Then, after all those years, the answer came. The diagnosis was severe hypoglycemia, which was largely resolved by the simple expedient of eliminating all sugar from my diet. I began to pick up the pieces of my life, but I never returned to academia.

About this time, a couple of interesting projects unfolded. The first was discovering the rigorously free-market monetary ideas of E.C. Riegel. He had been a friend of Popdaddy's, living in Greenwich Village, in the last stages of Parkinson's Disease when I met him. On a hunch that his papers might contain valuable ideas, knowing that Popdaddy endorsed his ideas on money, I kept in touch with the family who received his papers on his death in 1955. Ten years later I was on hand to save them from being dumpstered. Almost ten more years went by, and I showed an essay from them to Harry Browne, who in his best-selling You Can Profit from a Monetary Crisis (Macmillan 1974), called it "The best explanation of the free market I've seen." A flurry of requests for the essay encouraged me to systematically examine all the papers and eventually edit and self-publish two books from them, The New Approach to Freedom (1976) and Flight from Inflation: The Monetary Alternative (1978). From Riegel I came to respect the notion of an abstract unit of value whereby exchange might be facilitated by simple accountancy among traders in the market. Issue of new units would be by traders monetizing their future productivity, then redeeming them as they offered goods or services competitively in the market. Inasmuch as political governments are not traders in the market, they would have no place in such an exchange system. Should such a unit of account come to be preferred over legal tender for its constancy, political governments would no longer be able to deficit-finance. Not being traders, they would have no issue power, and having no issue power, they would have no means of watering the money supply. This is radical thinking, but I have fostered interest in it whenever opportunity has arisen. Riegel's material is on a website and soon will be on another.

The other project that developed about that time was with Werner Stiefel, head of Stiefel Laboratories, a family-held multinational firm. In exchange for a small equity in the project, Werner in 1971 commissioned me to draft a master lease form for a multi-tenant income property to be constructed somewhere on the ocean outside of any political jurisdiction. Werner had been profoundly influenced by Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and wanted literally to create a new country, to be called "Atlantis." Inspired by Ayn's "Galt's Gulch," he envisioned a place to which, as conditions became untenable in the United States (signs were even then showing), people could flee as they had to the United States when conditions deteriorated in Germany in the 1930s. Werner devoted a great part of his life and many millions of dollars of his own personal assets to this project. At a critical point he was at a loss to know what form of government he could institute that wouldn't repeat the same, tired, round of tyranny of all governments in history. I made a suggestion. Among his assets at the time was a motel in Saugerties, New York. I pointed out that his motel was a community. It was a place, after all, that was divided into private and public areas, and he provided public services to the residents there. But instead of citizens, he had customers, and the provision and maintenance of community services was contractual, carried out through ordinary business means. Why not keep this entirely non-political form of community organization and transfer it to the ocean? People could own any improvements on the land, but the land itself would be leasehold only. By opting not to subdivide, he would preserve a concentrated entrepreneurial interest in the whole. The master lease form would be the social software that would generate the actual constitution of the community – which would consist of all of the leases and subleases in effect at any given time.

The lease form I worked up survived Werner's project, and over the years it has taken on a life of its own as many people have critiqued it and added valuable inputs. It has become a prime heuristic aid in thinking through questions of community administration in the absence of legislation or taxation. Several iterations were published as a master lease form for "Orbis," Orbis being one among a cluster of imaginary settlements in outer space. The reason for presenting it that way was to avoid calling attention unnecessarily and prematurely to the notion of settling the oceans outside the jurisdiction of nation states.

The most recent of many innovations in the master lease form over the years has been to incorporate into it, and hence into the contractual structure of the community, a system of natural law with appropriate procedural rules, authored by the late Michael van Notten, a protégé of the Belgian natural law scholar, Frank van Dun.

The idea of incorporating a system of natural law arose after several years of consultation with the Samaron Clan of northwestern Somalia. The Samaron are a traditionally stateless people, many of whom would like to come into full participation in the modern world if they could do so without coming under the domination of a government, their own or any other. Their idea of how to accomplish this is to lease a portion of their territory with access to the sea for a private consortium (governments or government agencies need not apply) to develop and manage as a purely commercial, multi-tenant income property writ large. This is described in Appendix B of Michael van Notten's forthcoming The Law of the Somali: A Stable Foundation for Economic Development in the Horn of Africa. If successful, the Samaron would then have a thriving freeport like a latter-day Hong Kong in their own back yard, from which to pick and choose among the many opportunities it would offer for jobs, education, technical training, entrepreneurial venturing, investment, and so forth. It would be their stepping stone to the modern world.

Except for these projects, however, I continued to be apart from any very serious intellectual life until the mid 1990s. First, I was taken up for eight years beginning in 1976 with a private economic development project of my own that I stumbled into involving a village of pottery artists in Mexico. Because of space limitations I can't describe it here, but it was successful beyond anyone's dreams – for the village (see for example www.mexicanceramic.com). For me, it exhausted the modest inheritance that had sustained me. For the ensuing decade I had little time for anything but to work for a living. I worked as a very small businessman – and found it enjoyable.

The return to ideas came after my mother's death in 1993. A small inheritance from her allowed me to turn my thoughts again to the phenomenon of society. In my wife, Emalie, I'm fortunate to have an outstanding in-house critic of ideas. An invitation in 1997 from David J. Theroux, of the Independent Institute, to attend a Liberty Fund Conference on "The Voluntary City" helped settle me once again into the groove of thinking and writing on social organization, and University of Santa Clara economist Daniel Klein has given constant encouragement. The first fruit of that Liberty Fund Conference was a constructive critique of the entire problem of homeowners' associations scheduled to appear in Critical Review (winter 2004). A fresh perspective on environmental incentives will appear in the Journal of Libertarian Studies 17:4 (fall 2003). I'm also editing the late Michael van Notten's The Law of the Somalis for posthumous publication, as well as a small, inspirational book of my grandfather's The Spiritual Life of Free Men. Finally, I'm nurturing a growing public interest in E.C. Riegel's work setting out the rationale for an abstract unit of exchange. If I could think how to do it, I'd perhaps like more than anything else to encourage thoughtful consideration of a highly original concept of my grandfather's in the philosophy of science. It entertains the thought of reformulating physical science in terms of action rather than energy.

My mother maintained that her seventies were the best decade of her life. Two years into my own seventies, I'm finding the same thing. In the small Mexican town of Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, fifteen miles from the pottery village of Mata Ortiz, Emi and I have bought a century-old adobe. We look forward to making the most of life there, including entertaining friends who visit. I plan to continue writing and hope to inspire in a few others the passion for life that I've come to feel in these later years.

December 19, 2003

Spencer MacCallum [send him mail] is a social anthropologist currently living in Tonopah, Nevada.

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