Weld and Marjorie Carter

Weld Carter: An Introduction to Henry George  pdf
Weld Carter: A Clarion Call to Sanity, to Honesty, to Justice

Marjorie Carter: My Introduction to Henry George

The Committee on Taxation, Resources and Economic Development

Weld Carter carried in his wallet two quotations:

The law of causation is simply another way of stating the basic assumption behind all science. Its very essence is an insistence on the universality of the reign of law, and science cannot move an inch without making that basic assumption. — Daniel Sommer Robinson

Justice is a relation of congruity which really subsists between two things. This relation is always the same, whatever being considers it, whether it be God, or an angel, or lastly a man. — Montesquieu

Born in 1900 in East Orange, New Jersey, as a young man Weld Carter was personal mathematician to Thomas Edison in the last years of his work in northern New Jersey. (Weld delighted in describing this to young people, and clarifying to them that he and Edison were not the same age! One of his prize possessions was an autographed picture of Edison, given to Weld in lieu of a requested raise!)

Weld discovered the ideas of Henry George about 1940, and devoted much of the rest of his life to sharing these ideas, as education director of the Henry George School in Chicago; visiting college economics faculty to encourage their exploration of George's ideas, under the auspices of the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, in the 50s and 60s (his "Intro to HG" was something he sent ahead of his visits) and then as Executive Secretary of the Committee on Taxation, Resources and Economic Development (TRED), which was funded by Schalkenbach and later the Lincoln foundation.

His first wife, Marjorie Orr Carter, and his older son both took the first Henry George course with him in northern New Jersey around 1941, taught by Archie Matteson. Weld went on to take other courses, teach them and serve as trustee of the NJ school. Marjorie's "My Introduction ... " (above) is her fictional description of the effect of that first course on family and friends. She went on to write short stories published in a number of magazines in the 40s and early 50s. When they lived in Chicago in the 50s, she was assistant to the head of the American Bar Association. Marjorie died, too young, in 1963, and in 1964, Weld remarried to Jessie Tredway Matteson, who had long ago been Archie Matteson's wife and had later been part of the Henry George School in Chicago. (Some of her writing appears in Georgist journals in the 1940s.) They were married for nearly 25 years. Both Archie and Jessie were long time family friends. Weld and Jessie's Georgist commitment continued throughout the rest of their lives — Weld through TRED and his Clarion Call (above), Jessie through writing activist letters to encourage people to explore the contemporary relevance of George's ideas. I have much of their extensive library today.