An American Idyll by Cornelia Stratton Parker

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In thinking over the intimate things of our life together, I have
difficulty in deciding what the finest features of it were. There was so
much that made it rich, so much to make me realize I was blessed beyond
any one else, that I am indebted to the world forever for the color that
living with Carl Parker gave to existence. Perhaps one of the most
helpful memories to me now is the thought of his absolute faith in me.
From the time we were first in love, it meant a new zest in life to know
that Carl firmly believed there was nothing I could not do. For all that
I hold no orthodox belief in immortality, I could no more get away from
the idea that, if I fail in anything now--why I _can't_ fail--think of
Carl's faith in me! About four days before he died, he looked up at me
once as I was arranging his pillow and said, so seriously, "You know,
there isn't a university in the country that wouldn't give you your
Ph.D. without your taking an examination for it." He was delirious, it
is true; but nevertheless it expressed, though indeed in a very
exaggerated form, the way he had of thinking I was somebody! I knew
there was no one in the world like him, but I had sound reasons for
that. Oh, but it is wonderful to live with some one who thinks you are
wonderful! It does not make you conceited, not a bit, but it makes a
happy singing feeling in your heart to feel that the one you love best
in the world is proud of you. And there is always the incentive of
vowing that some day you will justify it all.

The fun of dressing for a party in a hand-me-down dress from some
relative, knowing that the one you want most to please will honestly
believe; and say on the way home, that you were the best-looking one at
the party! The fun of cooking for a man who thinks every dish set before
him is the best food he _ever_ ate--and not only say it, but act that
way. ("That was just a sample. Give me a real dish of it, now that I
know it's the best pudding I ever tasted!")

CHAPTER XVI

As soon as the I.W.W. article was done, Carl had to begin on his paper
to be read before the Economic Association, just after Christmas, in
Philadelphia. That was fun working over. "Come up here and let me read
you this!" And we'd go over that much of the paper together. Then more
reading to Miss Van Doren, more correctings, finally finishing it just
the day before he had to leave. But that was partly because he had to
leave earlier than expected. The Government had telegraphed him to go on
to Washington, to mediate a threatened longshoremen's strike. Carl
worked harder over the longshoremen than over any other single labor
difficulty, not excepting the eight-hour day in lumber. Here again I do
not feel free to go into details. The matter was finally, at Carl's
suggestion, taken to Washington.

The longshoremen interested Carl for the same reason that the migratory
and the I.W.W. interested him; in fact, there were many I.W.W. among
them. It was the lower stratum of the labor-world--hard physical labor,
irregular work, and, on the whole, undignified treatment by the men set
over them. And they reacted as Carl expected men in such a position to
react. Yet, on the side of the workers, he felt that in this particular
instance it was a case of men being led by stubborn egotistical union
delegates not really representing the wishes of the rank and file of
union members, their main idea being to compromise on nothing. On the
other hand, be it said that he considered the employers he had to deal
with here the fairest, most open-minded, most anxious to compromise in
the name of justice, of all the groups of employers he ever had to deal
with. The whole affair was nerve-racking, as is best illustrated by the
fact that, while Carl was able to hold the peace as long as he was on
the job, three days after his death the situation "blew up."

On his way East he stopped off in Spokane, to talk with the lumbermen
east of the mountains. There, at a big meeting, he was able to put over
the eight-hour day. The Wilson Mediation Commission was in Seattle at
the time. Felix Frankfurter telephoned out his congratulations to me,
and said: "We consider it the single greatest achievement of its kind
since the United States entered the war." The papers were full of it and
excitement ran high. President Wilson was telegraphed to by the Labor
Commission, and he in turn telegraphed back his pleasure. In addition,
the East Coast lumbermen agreed to Carl's scheme of an employment
manager for their industry, and detailed him to find a man for the job
while in the East. My, but I was excited!

Not only that, but they bade fair to let him inaugurate a system which
would come nearer than any chance he could have expected to try out on a
big scale his theories on the proper handling of labor. The men were to
have the sanest recreation devisable for their needs and
interests--out-of-door sports, movies, housing that would permit of
dignified family life, recreation centres, good and proper food,
alteration in the old order of "hire and fire," and general control over
the men. Most employers argued: "Don't forget that the type of men we
have in the lumber camps won't know how to make use of a single reform
you suggest, and probably won't give a straw for the whole thing." To
which Carl would reply: "Don't forget that your old conditions have
drawn the type of man you have. This won't change men over-night by a
long shot, but it will at once relieve the tension--and see, in five
years, if your type itself has not undergone a change."

From Washington, D.C., he wrote: "This city is one mad mess of men,
desolate, and hunting for folks they should see, overcharged by hotels,
and away from their wives." The red-letter event of Washington was when
he was taken for tea to Justice Brandeis's. "We talked I.W.W.,
unemployment, etc., and he was oh, so grand!" A few days later, two days
before Christmas, Mrs. Brandeis telephoned and asked him for Christmas
dinner! That was a great event in the Parker annals--Justice Brandeis
having been a hero among us for some years. Carl wrote: "He is all he is
supposed to be and more." He in turn wrote me after Carl's death: "Our
country shares with you the great loss. Your husband was among the very
few Americans who possessed the character, knowledge, and insight which
are indispensable in dealing effectively with our labor-problem.
Appreciation of his value was coming rapidly, and events were enforcing
his teachings. His journey to the East brought inspiration to many; and
I seek comfort in the thought that, among the students at the
University, there will be some at least who are eager to carry forward
his work."

There were sessions with Gompers, Meyer Bloomfield, Secretary Baker,
Secretary Daniels, the Shipping Board, and many others.

Then, at Philadelphia, came the most telling single event of our
economic lives--Carl's paper before the Economic Association on "Motives
in Economic Life." At the risk of repeating to some extent the ideas
quoted from previous papers, I shall record here a few statements from
this one, as it gives the last views he held on his field of work.

"Our conventional economics to-day analyzes no phase of industrialism or
the wage-relationship, or citizenship in pecuniary society, in a manner
to offer a key to such distressing and complex problems as this. Human
nature riots to-day through our economic structure, with ridicule and
destruction; and we economists look on helpless and aghast. The menace
of the war does not seem potent to quiet revolt or still class cries.
The anxiety and apprehension of the economist should not be produced by
this cracking of his economic system, but by the poverty of the
criticism of industrialism which his science offers. Why are economists
mute in the presence of a most obvious crisis in our industrial society?
Why have our criticisms of industrialism no sturdy warnings about this
unhappy evolution? Why does an agitated officialdom search to-day in
vain among our writings, for scientific advice touching
labor-inefficiency or industrial disloyalty, for prophecies and plans
about the rise in our industrialism of economic classes unharmonious and
hostile?

"The fair answer seems this: We economists speculate little on human
motives. We are not curious about the great basis of fact which dynamic
and behavioristic psychology has gathered to illustrate the instinct
stimulus to human activity. Most of us are not interested to think of
what a psychologically full or satisfying life is. We are not curious to
know that a great school of behavior analysis called the Freudian has
been built around the analysis of the energy outbursts brought by
society's balking of the native human instincts. Our economic literature
shows that we are but rarely curious to know whether industrialism is
suited to man's inherited nature, or what man in turn will do to our
rules of economic conduct in case these rules are repressive. The
motives to economic activity which have done the major service in
orthodox economic texts and teachings have been either the vague
middle-class virtues of thrift, justice, and solvency, or the equally
vague moral sentiments of 'striving for the welfare of others,' 'desire
for the larger self,' 'desire to equip one's self well,' or, lastly, the
labor-saving deduction that man is stimulated in all things economic by
his desire to satisfy his wants with the smallest possible effort. All
this gentle parody in motive theorizing continued contemporaneously with
the output of the rich literature of social and behavioristic
psychology which was almost entirely addressed to this very problem of
human motives in modern economic society. Noteworthy exceptions are the
remarkable series of books by Veblen, the articles and criticisms of
Mitchell and Patten, and the most significant small book by Taussig,
entitled 'Inventors and Money-makers.' It is this complementary field of
psychology to which the economists must turn, as these writers have
turned, for a vitalization of their basic hypotheses. There awaits them
a bewildering array of studies of the motives, emotions, and folkways of
our pecuniary civilization. Generalizations and experiment statistics
abound, ready-made for any structure of economic criticism. The human
motives are isolated, described, compared. Business confidence, the
release of work-energy, advertising appeal, market vagaries, the basis
of value computations, decay of workmanship, the labor unrest, decline
in the thrift habit, are the subjects treated.

"All human activity is untiringly actuated by the demand for realization
of the instinct wants. If an artificially limited field of human
endeavor be called economic life, all its so-called motives hark
directly back to the human instincts for their origin. _There are, in
truth, no economic motives as such._ The motives of economic life are
the same as those of the life of art, of vanity and ostentation, of war
and crime, of sex. Economic life is merely the life in which instinct
gratification is alleged to take on a rational pecuniary habit form. Man
is not less a father, with a father's parental instinct, just because he
passes down the street from his home to his office. His business raid
into his rival's market has the same naive charm that tickled the heart
of his remote ancestor when in the night he rushed the herds of a
near-by clan. A manufacturer tries to tell a conventional world that he
resists the closed shop because it is un-American, it loses him money,
or it is inefficient. A few years ago he was more honest, when he said
he would run his business as he wished and would allow no man to tell
him what to do. His instinct of leadership, reinforced powerfully by his
innate instinctive revulsion to the confinement of the closed shop, gave
the true stimulus. His opposition is psychological, not ethical."

He then goes on to catalogue and explain the following instincts which
he considered of basic importance in any study of economics: (1)
gregariousness; (2) parental bent, motherly behavior, kindliness; (3)
curiosity, manipulation, workmanship; (4) acquisition, collecting,
ownership; (5) fear and flight; (6) mental activity, thought; (7) the
housing or settling instinct; (8) migration, homing; (9) hunting
("Historic revivals of hunting urge make an interesting recital of
religious inquisitions, witch-burnings, college hazings, persecution of
suffragettes, of the I.W.W., of the Japanese, or of pacifists. All this
goes on often under naive rationalization about justice and patriotism,
but it is pure and innate lust to run something down and hurt it"); (10)
anger, pugnacity; (11) revolt at confinement, at being limited in
liberty of action and choice; (12) revulsion; (13) leadership and
mastery; (14) subordination, submission; (15) display, vanity,
ostentation; (166) sex.

After quoting from Professor Cannon, and discussing the contributions
that his studies have made to the subject of man's reaction to his
immediate environment, he continues:--

"The conclusion seems both scientific and logical, that behavior in
anger, fear, pain, and hunger is a basically different behavior from
behavior under repose and economic security. The emotions generated
under the conditions of existence-peril seem to make the emotions and
motives generative in quiet and peace pale and unequal. It seems
impossible to avoid the conclusion that the most vital part of man's
inheritance is one which destines him to continue for some myriads of
years ever a fighting animal when certain conditions exist in his
environment. Though, through education, man be habituated in social and
intelligent behavior or, through license, in sexual debauchery, still,
at those times when his life or liberty is threatened, his
instinct-emotional nature will inhibit either social thought or sex
ideas, and present him as merely an irrational fighting animal. . . .

"The instincts and their emotions, coupled with the obedient body, lay
down in scientific and exact description the motives which must and will
determine human conduct. If a physical environment set itself against
the expression of these instinct motives, the human organism is fully
and efficiently prepared for a tenacious and destructive revolt against
this environment; and if the antagonism persist, the organism is ready
to destroy itself and disappear as a species if it fail of a psychical
mutation which would make the perverted order endurable."

And in conclusion, he states:--

"The dynamic psychology of to-day describes the present civilization as
a repressive environment. For a great number of its inhabitants a
sufficient self-expression is denied. There is, for those who care to
see, a deep and growing unrest and pessimism. With the increase in
knowledge is coming a new realization of the irrational direction of
economic evolution. The economists, however, view economic inequality
and life-degradation as objects in truth outside the science. Our
value-concept is a price-mechanism hiding behind a phrase. If we are to
play a part in the social readjustment immediately ahead, we must put
human nature and human motives into our basic hypotheses. Our
value-concept must be the yardstick to measure just how fully things and
institutions contribute to a full psychological life. We must know more
of the meaning of progress. The domination of society by one economic
class has for its chief evil the thwarting of the instinct life of the
subordinate class and the perversion of the upper class. The extent and
characteristics of this evil are to be estimated only when we know the
innate potentialities and inherited propensities of man; and the
ordering of this knowledge and its application to the changeable
economic structure is the task before the trained economist to-day."

A little later I saw one of the big men who was at that Economic
Association meeting, and he said: "I don't see why Parker isn't
spoiled. He was the most talked-about man at the Convention." Six
publishing houses wrote, after that paper, to see if he could enlarge it
into a book. Somehow it did seem as if now more than ever the world was
ours. We looked ahead into the future, and wondered if it could seem as
good to any one as it did to us. It was almost _too_ good--we were dazed
a bit by it. It is one of the things I just cannot let myself ever think
of--that future and the plans we had. Anything I can ever do now would
still leave life so utterly dull by comparison.

CHAPTER XVII

One of the days in Seattle that I think of most was about a month before
the end. The father of a great friend of ours died, and Carl and I went
to the funeral one Sunday afternoon. We got in late, so stood in a
corner by the door, and held hands, and seemed to own each other
especially hard that day. Afterwards we prowled around the streets,
talking of funerals and old age.

Most of the people there that afternoon were gray-haired--the family had
lived in Seattle for years and years, and these were the friends of
years and years back. Carl said: "That is something we can't have when
you and I die--the old, old friends who have stood by us year in and
year out. It is one of the phases of life you sacrifice when you move
around at the rate we do. But in the first place, neither of us wants a
funeral, and in the second place, we feel that moving gives more than it
takes away--so we are satisfied."

Then we talked about our own old age--planned it in detail. Carl
declared: "I want you to promise me faithfully you will make me stop
teaching when I am sixty. I have seen too much of the tragedy of men
hanging on and on and students and education being sacrificed because
the teacher has lost his fire--has fallen behind in the parade. I feel
now as if I'd never grow old--that doesn't mean that I won't. So, no
matter how strong I may be going at sixty, make me stop--promise."

Then we discussed our plans: by that time the children would be looking
out for themselves,--very much so,--and we could plan as we pleased. It
was to be England--some suburb outside of London, where we could get
into big things, and yet where we could be peaceful and by ourselves,
and read and write, and have the young economists who were traveling
about, out to spend week-ends with us; and then we could keep our
grandchildren while their parents were traveling in Europe! About a
month from that day, he was dead.

* * * * *

There is a path I must take daily to my work at college, which passes
through the University Botanical Garden. Every day I must brace myself
for it, for there, growing along the path, is a clump of old-fashioned
morning glories. Always, from the time we first came back to teach in
Berkeley and passed along that same path to the University, we planned
to have morning glories like those--the odor came to meet you yards
away--growing along the path to the little home we would at last settle
down in when we were old. We used always to remark pictures in the
newspapers, of So-and-so on their "golden anniversary," and would plan
about our own "golden wedding-day"--old age together always seemed so
good to think about. There was a time when we used to plan to live in a
lighthouse, way out on some point, when we got old. It made a strong
appeal, it really did. We planned many ways of growing old--not that we
talked of it often, perhaps twice a year, but always, always it was, of
course, _together_. Strange, that neither of us ever dreamed one would
grow old without the other.

And yet, too, there is the other side. I found a letter written during
our first summer back in Berkeley, just after we had said good-bye at
the station when Carl left for Chicago. Among other things he wrote: "It
just makes me feel bad to see other folks living put-in lives, when we
two (four) have loved through Harvard and Europe and it has only
commenced, and no one is loving so hard or living so happily. . . . I am
most willing to die now (if you die with me), for we have lived one
complete life of joy already." And then he added--if only the adding of
it could have made it come true: "But we have fifty years yet of love."

Oh, it was so true that we packed into ten years the happiness that
could normally be considered to last a lifetime--a long lifetime.
Sometimes it seems almost as if we must have guessed it was to end so
soon, and lived so as to crowd in all the joy we could while our time
together was given us. I say so often that I stand right now the richest
woman in the world--why talk of sympathy? I have our three precious,
marvelously healthy children, I have perfect health myself, I have all
and more than I can handle of big ambitious maturing plans, with a
chance to see them carried out, I have enough to live on, and, greatest
of all, fifteen years of perfect memories--And yet, to hear a snatch of
a tune and know that the last time you heard it you were
together--perhaps it was the very music they played as you left the
theatre arm-in-arm that last night; to put on a dress you have not worn
for some time and remember that, when you last had it on, it was the
night you went, just the two of you, to Blanc's for dinner; to meet
unexpectedly some friend, and recall that the last time you saw him it
was that night you two, strolling with hands clasped, met him on Second
Avenue accidentally, and chatted on the corner; to come across
a necktie in a trunk, to read a book he had marked, to see his
handwriting--perhaps just the address on an old baggage-check--Oh, one
can sound so much braver than one feels! And then, because you have
tried so hard to live up to the pride and faith he had in you, to be
told: "You know I am surprised that you haven't taken Carl's death
harder. You seem to be just the same exactly."

What is _seeming_? Time and time again, these months, I have thought,
what do any of us know about what another person _feels_? A smile--a
laugh--I used to think of course they stood for happiness. There can be
many smiles, much laughter, and it means--nothing. But surely anything
is kinder for a friend to see than tears!

When Carl returned from the East in January, he was more rushed than
ever--his time more filled than ever with strike mediations, street-car
arbitrations, cost of living surveys for the Government, conferences on
lumber production. In all, he had mediated thirty-two strikes, sat on
two arbitration boards, made three cost-of-living surveys for the
Government. (Mediations did gall him--he grew intellectually impatient
over this eternal patching up of what he was wont to call "a rotten
system." Of course he saw the war-emergency need of it just then, but
what he wanted to work on was, why were mediations ever necessary? what
social and economic order would best ensure absence of friction?)

On the campus work piled up. He had promised to give a course on
Employment Management, especially to train men to go into the lumber
industries with a new vision. (Each big company east of the mountains
was to send a representative.) It was also open to seniors in college,
and a splendid group it was, almost every one pledged to take up
employment management as their vocation on graduation--no fear that they
would take it up with a capitalist bias. Then--his friends and I had to
laugh, it was so like him--the afternoon of the morning he arrived, he
was in the thick of a scrap on the campus over a principle he held to
tenaciously--the abolition of the one-year modern-language requirement
for students in his college. To use his own expression, he "went to the
bat on it," and at a faculty meeting that afternoon it carried. He had
been working his little campaign for a couple of months, but in his
absence in the East the other side had been busy. He returned just in
time for the fray. Every one knows what a farce one year of a modern
language is at college; even several of the language teachers themselves
were frank enough to admit it. But it was an academic tradition! I
think the two words that upset Carl most were "efficiency" and
"tradition"--both being used too often as an excuse for practices that
did more harm than good.

* * * * *

And then came one Tuesday, the fifth of March. He had his hands full all
morning with the continued threatened upheavals of the longshoremen.
About noon the telephone rang--threatened strike in all the flour-mills;
Dr. Parker must come at once. (I am reminded of a description which was
published of Carl as a mediator. "He thought of himself as a physician
and of an industry on strike as the patient. And he did not merely ease
the patient's pain with opiates. He used the knife and tried for
permanent cures.") I finally reached him by telephone; his voice sounded
tired, for he had had a very hard morning. By one o'clock he was working
on the flour-mill situation. He could not get home for dinner. About
midnight he appeared, having sat almost twelve hours steadily on the new
flour-difficulty. He was "all in," he said.

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