Notes
The impact of REASON articles continues to grow. Our March cover story on entrepreneurship at Maine State Prison was featured in Business Week's Economic Diary (Mar. 22). Two of the participants in that experiment—ex-warden Richard Oliver and novelty king Jack Harrelson—were guests on WKIS radio in Orlando, Florida, the first week of March, and the author of the story, Boston University law student Jeffrey Shedd, was interviewed on WIS radio in Columbia, South Carolina, on March 16.
Kelly Ross's "Vanishing Farmland?" has also attracted notice. Ross was interviewed on WIS radio on March 19. Kenneth Scheibel discussed the article in his "Washington Farm Beat" column of March 1, and the Harrisburg (Penna.) Evening News ran an op-ed adaptation of the article on March 12. Ross also presented a paper based on his article at a conference on Agricultural Land Preservation sponsored by the Center for Political Economy and Natural Resources at Montana State University.
A shortened version of our February article by Laurence Beilenson and Kevin Lynch, "Should We Spill Blood over Oil?" has been printed by a number of newspapers. Jack Anderson quoted from Steve Hanke's March article, "Privatize Those Lands!" in his March 19 syndicated column. Gaines Smith's "Stormy Weatherization" (Feb.) was the subject of articles in the Eugene (Oreg.) Register-Guard and the Willamette Valley Observer.
Even our October 1981 cover story on electric utility competition keeps attracting notice. It was written up in the January/February issue of Regulation and was cited in an editorial in the Orange County Register in March. It was also one of the sources used by Susan Lee to prepare an op-ed piece on electric utility deregulation in the Wall Street Journal (Mar. 23). Subsequently, on March 31, the Journal published my letter adding more details on the existence of competing electric companies in 23 cities.
Felix Morley, R.I.P.
Felix Morley died on March 13 at age 88. He was remarkably productive to his last days despite having been crippled with arthritis for two decades. His last article for REASON, "Facing Foreign Realities," appeared in the March issue.
He grew up in Baltimore, where his father taught mathematics at Johns Hopkins University. He and his brothers—Frank, the editor, and Christopher, the author—are a triad awaiting a brilliant joint biography.
Morley was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and served in the Friends ambulance corps in France during World War I. After the war he became a reporter for the Sun Papers (one of his most interesting works was Our Far Eastern Assignment [1926], about his visit to Japan, China, and the Philippines when the Communist Chinese movement was beginning to be evident). Morley was the head of the American League of Nations Association office in Geneva, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, and author of The Society of Nations (1932). He won a Pulitzer prize for his editorials in the Washington Post but left the paper when his critiques of American moves to get into World War II did not meet with the publisher's inclinations.
After serving as president of Haverford College, he became a founding editor of Human Events but departed when he differed with the other editors on criticism of America's role in the Cold War. Thereafter, he was engaged in organizing research for the early American Enterprise Institute, wrote for Nation's Business, and was commentator on the Sunoco Three Star Extra radio daily news program. He wrote The Power in the People (1949), The Foreign Policy of the United States (1951), and Freedom and Federalism (1959) and edited several volumes.
During the last decades of his life, Felix Morley worked with the William Volker Fund, the Institute for Humane Studies, and the Liberty Fund. A few years ago, an article about him described him as a Commonwealthman, a true constitutionalist. With Felix's passing, we are down to a corporal's guard.
—Leonard P. Liggio, Institute for Humane Studies