An American Idyll by Cornelia Stratton Parker

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I remember our first night in Munich. We arrived about supper-time,
hunted up a cheap hotel as usual, near the station, fed the babies, and
started to prepare for their retirement. This process in hotels was
always effected by taking out two bureau-drawers and making a bed of
each. While we were busy over this, the boys were busy over--just busy.
This time they both crawled up into a large clothes-press that stood in
our room, when, crash! bang!--there lay the clothes-press, front down,
on the floor, boys inside it. Such a commotion--hollerings and
squallings from the internals of the clothes-press, agitated scurryings
from all directions of the hotel-keeper, his wife, waiters, and
chambermaids. All together, we managed to stand the clothes-press once
more against the wall, and to extricate two sobered young ones, the only
damage being two clothes-press doors banged off their hinges.

Munich is second in my heart to Heidelberg. Carl worked hardest of all
there, hardly ever going out nights; but we never got over the feeling
that our being there together was a sort of gift we had made ourselves,
and we were ever grateful. And then Carl did so remarkably well in the
University. A report, for instance, which he read before Brentano's
seminar was published by the University. Our relations' with Brentano
always stood out as one of the high memories of Germany. After Carl's
report in Brentano's class, that lovable idol of the German students
called him to his desk and had a long talk, which ended by his asking us
both to tea at his house the following day. The excitement of our
pension over that! We were looked upon as the anointed of the Lord. We
were really a bit overawed, ourselves. We discussed neckties, and
brushed and cleaned, and smelled considerably of gasoline as we strutted
forth, too proud to tell, because we were to have tea with Brentano! I
can see the street their house was on, their front door; I can feel
again the little catch in our breaths as we rang the bell. Then the
charming warmth and color of that Italian home, the charming warmth and
hospitality of that white-haired professor and his gracious, kindly
wife. There were just ourselves there; and what a momentous time it was
to the little Parkers! Carl was simply radiating joy, and in the way he
always had when especially pleased, would give a sudden beam from ear to
ear, and a wink at me when no one else was looking.

Not long after that we were invited for dinner, and again for tea, this
time, according to orders, bringing the sons. They both fell into an
Italian fountain in the rear garden as soon as we went in for
refreshments. By my desk now is hanging a photograph we have prized as
one of our great treasures. Below it is written: "Mrs. and Mr. Parker,
zur freundlichen Erinnerrung--Lujio Brentano." Professor Bonn, another
of Carl's professors at the University, and his wife, were kindness
itself to us. Then there was Peter, dear old Peter, the Austrian student
at our pension, who took us everywhere, brought us gifts, and adored the
babies until he almost spoiled them.

From Munich we went direct to England. Vicissitudes again in finding a
cheap and fit place that would do for children to settle in. After
ever-hopeful wanderings, we finally stumbled upon Swanage in Dorset.
That was a love of a place on the English Channel, where we had two
rooms with the Mebers in their funny little brick house, the "Netto."
Simple folk they were: Mr. Meber a retired sailor, the wife rather worn
with constant roomers, one daughter a dressmaker, the other working in
the "knittin" shop. Charges, six dollars a week for the family, which
included cooking and serving our meals--we bought the food ourselves.

Here Carl prepared for his Ph.D. examination, and worked on his thesis
until it got to the point where he needed the British Museum. Then he
took a room and worked during the week in London, coming down to us
week-ends. He wrote eager letters, for the time had come when he longed
to get the preparatory work and examination behind him and begin
teaching. We had an instructorship at the University of California
waiting for us, and teaching was to begin in January. In one letter he
wrote: "I now feel like landing on my exam, like a Bulgarian; I am that
fierce to lay it out." We felt more than ever, in those days of work
piling up behind us, that we owned the world; as Carl wrote in another
letter: "We'll stick this out [this being the separation of his last
trip to London, whence he was to start for Heidelberg and his
examination, without another visit with us], for, _Gott sei dank!_ the
time isn't so fearful, fearful long, it isn't really, is it? Gee! I'm
glad I married you. And I want more babies and more you, and then the
whole gang together for about ninety-two years. But life is so fine to
us and we are getting so much love and big things out of life!"

November 1 Carl left London for Heidelberg. He was to take his
examination there December 5, so the month of November was a full one
for him. He stayed with the dear Kecks, Mother Keck pressing and
mending his clothes, hovering over him as if he were her own son. He
wrote once: "To-day we had a small leg of venison which I sneaked in
last night. Every time I note that I burn three quarters of a lampful of
oil a day among the other things I cost them, it makes me feel like
buying out a whole Conditorei."

I lived for those daily letters telling of his progress. Once he wrote:
"Just saw Fleiner [Professor in Law] and he was _fine_, but I must get
his Volkerrecht cold. It is fine reading, and is mighty good and
interesting every word, and also stuff which a man ought to know. This
is the last man to see. From now on, it is only to _study_, and I am
tickled. I do really like to study." A few days later he wrote: "It is
just plain sit and absorb these days. Some day I will explain how tough
it is to learn an entire law subject in five days in a strange tongue."

And then, on the night of December 5, came the telegram of success to
"Frau Dr. Parker." We both knew he would pass, but neither of us was
prepared for the verdict of "_Summa cum laude_," the highest
accomplishment possible. I went up and down the main street of little
Swanage, announcing the tidings right and left. The community all knew
that Carl was in Germany to take some kind of an examination, though it
all seemed rather unexplainable. Yet they rejoiced with me,--the
butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker,--without having the least
idea what they were rejoicing about. Mrs. Meber tore up and down Osborne
Road to have the fun of telling the immediate neighbors, all of whom
were utterly at a loss to know what it meant, the truth being that Mrs.
Meber herself was in that same state. But she had somehow caught my
excitement, and anything to tell was scarce in Swanage.

So the little family that fared forth from Oakland, California, that
February 1, for one year at Harvard had ended thus--almost four years
later a Ph.D. _summa cum laude_ from Heidelberg. Not Persia as we had
planned it nine years before--a deeper, finer life than anything we had
dreamed. We asked Professor Miller, after we got back to California, why
in the world he had said just "one year in Europe."

"If I had said more, I was afraid it would scare you altogether out of
ever starting; and I knew if you once got over there and were made of
the right stuff, you'd stay on for a Ph.D."

On December 12 Carl was to deliver one of a series of lectures in Munich
for the Handelshochschule, his subject being "Die Einwanderungs und
Siedelungspolitik in Amerika (Carleton Parker, Privatdocent,
California-Universitaet, St. Francisco)." That very day, however, the
Prince Regent died, and everything was called off. We had our glory--and
got our pay. Carl was so tired from his examination, that he did not
object to foregoing the delivery of a German address before an audience
of four hundred. It was read two weeks later by one of the professors.

On December 15 we had our reunion and celebration of it all. Carl took
the Amerika, second class, at Hamburg; the boys and I at Southampton,
ushered thither from Swanage and put aboard the steamer by our faithful
Onkel Keck, son of the folk with whom Carl had stayed in Heidelberg, who
came all the way from London for that purpose. It was not such a brash
Herr Doktor that we found, after all: the Channel had begun to tell on
him, as it were, and while it was plain that he loved us, it was also
plain that he did not love the water. So we gave him his six days off,
and he lay anguish-eyed in a steamer-chair while I covered fifty-seven
miles a day, tearing after two sons who were far more filled with
Wanderlust than they had been three years before. When our dad did feel
chipper again, he felt very chipper, and our last four days were
perfect.

We landed in New York on Christmas Eve, in a snowstorm; paid the
crushing sum of one dollar and seventy-five cents duty,--such a jovial
agent as inspected our belongings I never beheld; he must already have
had just the Christmas present he most wanted, whatever it was. When he
heard that we had been in Heidelberg, he and several other officials
began a lusty rendering of "Old Heidelberg,"--and within an hour we were
speeding toward California, a case of certified milk added to our
already innumerable articles of luggage. Christmas dinner we ate on the
train. How those American dining-car prices floored us after three years
of all we could eat for thirty-five cents!

CHAPTER VIII

We looked back always on our first semester's teaching in the University
of California as one hectic term. We had lived our own lives, found our
own joys, for four years, and here we were enveloped by old friends, by
relatives, by new friends, until we knew not which way to turn. In
addition, Carl was swamped by campus affairs--by students, many of whom
seemed to consider him an oasis in a desert of otherwise-to-be-deplored,
unhuman professors. Every student organization to which he had belonged
as an undergraduate opened its arms to welcome him as a faculty member;
we chaperoned student parties till we heard rag-time in our sleep. From
January 1 to May 16, we had four nights alone together. You can know we
were desperate. Carl used to say: "We may have to make it Persia yet."

The red-letter event of that term was when, after about two months of
teaching, President Wheeler rang up one evening about seven,--one of the
four evenings, as it happened, we were at home together,--and said: "I
thought I should like the pleasure of telling you personally, though you
will receive official notice in the morning, that you have been made an
assistant professor. We expected you to make good, but we did not expect
you to make good to such a degree quite so soon."

Again an occasion for a spree! We tore out hatless across the campus,
nearly demolishing the head of the College of Commerce as we rounded the
Library. He must know the excitement. He was pleased. He slipped his
hand into his pocket saying, "I must have a hand in this celebration."
And with a royal gesture, as who should say, "What matter the costs!"
slipped a dime into Carl's hand. "Spend it all to-night."

Thus we were started on our assistant professorship. But always before
and always after, to the students Carl was just "Doc."

I remember a story he told of how his chief stopped him one afternoon at
the north gate to the university, and said he was discouraged and
distressed. Carl was getting the reputation of being popular with the
students, and that would never do. "I don't wish to hear more of such
rumors." Just then the remnants of the internals of a Ford, hung
together with picture wire and painted white, whizzed around the corner.
Two slouching, hard-working "studes" caught sight of Carl, reared up the
car, and called, "Hi, Doc, come on in!" Then they beheld the Head of the
Department, hastily pressed some lever, and went hurrying on. To the
Head it was evidence first-hand. He shook his head and went his way.

Carl was popular with the students, and it is true that he was too much
so. It was not long before he discovered that he was drawing unto
himself the all-too-lightly-handled "college bum," and he rebelled.
Harvard and Germany had given him too high an idea of scholarship to
have even a traditional university patience with the student who, in the
University of California jargon, was "looking for a meal." He was
petitioned by twelve students of the College of Agriculture to give a
course in the Economics of Agriculture, and they guaranteed him
twenty-five students. One hundred and thirty enrolled, and as Carl
surveyed the assortment below him, he realized that a good half of them
did not know and did not want to know a pear tree from a tractor. He
stiffened his upper lip, stiffened his examinations, and cinched forty
of the class. There should be some Latin saying that would just fit such
a case, but I do not know it. It would start, "Exit ----," and the exit
would refer to the exit of the loafer in large numbers from Carl's
courses and the exit from the heart of the loafer of the absorbing love
he had held for Carl. His troubles were largely over. Someone else could
care for the maimed, the halt, and the blind.

It was about this time, too, that Carl got into difficulties with the
intrenched powers on the campus. He had what has been referred to as "a
passion for justice." Daily the injustice of campus organization grew on
him; he saw democracy held high as an ideal--lip-homage only. Student
affairs were run by an autocracy which had nothing to justify it except
its supporters' claim of "efficiency." He had little love for that
word--it is usually bought at too great a cost. That year, as usual, he
had a small seminar of carefully picked students. He got them to open
their eyes to conditions as they were. When they ceased to accept those
conditions just because they were, they, too, felt the inequality, the
farce, of a democratic institution run on such autocratic lines. After
seminar hours the group would foregather at our house to plot as to ways
and means. The editor of the campus daily saw their point of view--I am
not sure now that he was not a member of the seminar.

A slow campaign of education followed. Intrenched powers became
outraged. Fraternities that had invited Carl almost weekly to lunch, now
"couldn't see him." One or two influential alumnae, who had something to
gain from the established order, took up the fight. Soon we had a
"warning" from one of the Regents that Carl's efforts on behalf of
"democracy" were unwelcome. But within a year the entire organization of
campus politics was altered, and now there probably is not a student who
would not feel outraged at the suggestion of a return to the old system.

Perhaps here is where I can dwell for a moment on Carl's particular
brand of democracy. I see so much of other kinds. He was what I should
call an utterly unconscious democrat. He never framed in his own mind
any theory of "the brotherhood of man"--he just lived it, without ever
thinking of it as something that needed expression in words. I never
heard him use the term. To him the Individual was everything--by that I
mean that every relation he had was on a personal basis. He could not go
into a shop to buy a necktie hurriedly, without passing a word with the
clerk; when he paid his fare on the street car, there was a moment's
conversation with the conductor; when we had ice-cream of an evening, he
asked the waitress what was the best thing on in the movies. When we
left Oakland for Harvard, the partially toothless maid we had sobbed
that "Mr. Parker had been more like a brother to her!"

One of the phases of his death which struck home the hardest was the
concern and sorrow the small tradespeople showed--the cobbler, the
plumber, the drug-store clerk. You hear men say: "I often find it
interesting to talk to working-people and get their view-point." Such an
attitude was absolutely foreign to Carl. He talked to "working-people"
because he talked to everybody as he went along his joyous way. At a
track meet or football game, he was on intimate terms with every one
within a conversational radius. Our wealthy friends would tell us he
ruined their chauffeurs--they got so that they didn't know their places.
As likely as not, he would jolt some constrained bank president by
engaging him in genial conversation without an introduction; at a formal
dinner he would, as a matter of course, have a word or two with the
butler when he passed the cracked crab, although at times the butlers
seemed somewhat pained thereby. Some of Carl's intimate friends were
occasionally annoyed--"He talks to everybody." He no more could help
talking to everybody than he could help--liking pumpkin-pie. He was born
that way. He had one manner for every human being--President of the
University, students, janitors, society women, cooks, small boys,
judges. He never had any material thing to hand out,--not even cigars,
for he did not smoke himself,--but, as one friend expressed it, "he
radiated generosity."

Heidelberg gives one year after passing the examination to get the
doctor's thesis in final form for publication. The subject of Carl's
thesis was "The Labor Policy of the American Trust." His first summer
vacation after our return to Berkeley, he went on to Wisconsin, chiefly
to see Commons, and then to Chicago, to study the stockyards at
first-hand, and the steel industry. He wrote: "Have just seen Commons,
who was _fine_. He said: 'Send me as soon as possible the outline of
your thesis and I will pass upon it according to my lights.' . . . He is
very interested in one of my principal subdivisions, i.e. 'Technique and
Unionism,' or 'Technique and Labor.' Believes it is a big new
consideration." Again he wrote: "I have just finished working through a
book on 'Immigration' by Professor Fairchild of Yale,--437 pages
published three weeks ago,--lent me by Professor Ross. It is the very
book I have been looking for and is _superb_. I can't get over how
stimulating this looking in on a group of University men has been. It in
itself is worth the trip. I feel sure of my field of work; that I am not
going off in unfruitful directions; that I am keeping up with the wagon.
I am now set on finishing my book right away--want it out within a year
from December." From Chicago he wrote: "Am here with the reek of the
stockyards in my nose, and just four blocks from them. Here lived, in
this house, Upton Sinclair when he wrote 'The Jungle.'" And Mary
McDowell, at the University Settlement where he was staying, told a
friend of ours since Carl's death about how he came to the table that
first night and no one paid much attention to him--just some young
Westerner nosing about. But by the end of the meal he had the whole
group leaning elbows on the table, listening to everything he had to
say; and she added, "Every one of us loved him from then on."

He wrote, after visiting Swift's plant, of "seeing illustrations for all
the lectures on technique I have given, and Gee! it felt good. [I could
not quote him honestly and leave out his "gees"] to actually look at
things being done the way one has orated about 'em being done. The thing
for me to do here is to see, and see the things I'm going to write into
my thesis. I want to spend a week, if I can, digging into the steel
industry. With my fine information about the ore [he had just acquired
that], I am anxious to fill out my knowledge of the operation of
smelting and making steel. Then I can orate industrial dope." Later:
"This morning I called on the Vice-President of the Illinois Steel
Company, on the Treasurer of Armour & Co., and lunched with Mr. Crane of
Crane Co.--Ahem!"

The time we had when it came to the actual printing of the thesis! It
had to be finished by a certain day, in order to make a certain steamer,
to reach Heidelberg when promised. I got in a corner of a
printing-office and read proof just as fast as it came off the press,
while Carl worked at home, under you can guess what pressure, to
complete his manuscript--tearing down with new batches for me to get in
shape for the type-setter, and then racing home to do more writing. We
finished the thesis about one o'clock one morning, proof-reading and
all; and the next day--or that same day, later--war was declared. Which
meant just this--that the University of Heidelberg sent word that it
would not be safe for Carl to send over his thesis,--there were about
three or four hundred copies to go, according to German University
regulations,--until the situation had quieted down somewhat. The result
was that those three Or four hundred copies lay stacked up in the
printing-office for three or four years, until at last Carl decided it
was not a very good thesis anyway, and he didn't want any one to see it,
and he would write another brand-new one when peace was declared and it
could get safely to its destination. So he told the printer-man to do
away with the whole batch. This meant that we were out about a hundred
and fifty dollars, oh, luckless thought!--a small fortune to the young
Parkers. So though in a way the thesis as it stands was not meant for
publication, I shall risk quoting from Part One, "The Problem," so that
at least his general approach can be gathered. Remember, the title was
"The Labor Policy of the American Trust."

"When the most astute critic of American labor conditions has said,
'While immigration continues in great volume, class lines will be
forming and reforming, weak and instable. To prohibit or greatly
restrict immigration would bring forth class conflict within a
generation,' what does it mean?

"President Woodrow Wilson in a statement of his fundamental beliefs has
said: 'Why are we in the presence, why are we at the threshold, of a
revolution? . . . Don't you know that some man with eloquent tongue,
without conscience, who did not care for the nation, could put this
whole country into a flame? Don't you know that this country, from one
end to the other, believes that something is wrong? What an opportunity
it would be for some man without conscience to spring up and say: "This
is the way; follow me"--and lead in paths of destruction!' What does it
mean?

"The problem of the social unrest must seek for its source in all three
classes of society! Two classes are employer and employee, the third is
the great middle class, looking on. What is the relationship between the
dominating employing figure in American industrial life and the men who
work?

"A nation-wide antagonism to trade-unions, to the idea of collective
bargaining between men and employer, cannot spring from a temperamental
aversion of a mere individual, however powerful, be he Carnegie, Parry,
or Post, or from the common opinion in a group such as the so-called
Beef Trust, or the directorate of the United States Steel Corporation.
Such a hostility, characterizing as it does one of the vitally important
relationships in industrial production, must seek its reason-to-be in
economic causes. Profits, market, financing, are placed in certain
jeopardy by such a labor policy, and this risk is not continued,
generation after generation, as a casual indulgence in temper. Deep
below the strong charges against the unions of narrow self-interest and
un-American limitation of output, dressed by the Citizens' Alliance in
the language of the Declaration of Independence, lies a quiet economic
reason for the hostility. Just as slavery was about to go because it did
not pay, and America stopped building a merchant marine because it was
cheaper to hire England to transport American goods, so the American
Trust, as soon as it had power, abolished the American trade-union
because it found it costly. What then are these economic causes which
account for the hostility?

"What did the union stand in the way of? What conditions did the trust
desire to establish with which the union would interfere? Or did a labor
condition arise which allowed the employer to wreck the union with such
ease, that he turned aside for a moment to do it, to commit an act
desirable only if its performance cost little danger or money?

"The answer can be found only after an analysis of certain factors in
industrial production. These are three:--

"(_a_) The control of industrial production. Not only, in whose hands
has industrial capitalism for the moment fallen, but in what direction
does the evolution of control tend?

"(_b_) The technique of industrial production. Technique, at times,
instead of being a servant, determines by its own characteristics the
character of the labor and the geographical location of the industry,
and even destroys the danger of competition, if the machinery demanded
by it asks for a bigger capital investment than a raiding competitor
will risk.

"(_c_) The labor market. The labor market can be stationary as in
England, can diminish as in Ireland, or increase as in New England.

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