An American Idyll by Cornelia Stratton Parker

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"In industrial labor and in business employments a new concept, a new
going philosophy must be unreservedly accepted, which has, instead of
the ideal of forcing the human beings to mould their habits to assist
the continued existence of the inherited order of things, an ideal of
moulding all business institutions and ideas of prosperity in the
interests of scientific evolutionary aims and large human pleasures. As
Pigou has said, 'Environment has its children as well as men.' Monotony
in labor, tedium in officework, time spent in business correspondence,
the boredom of running a sugar refinery, would be asked to step before
the bar of human affairs and get a health standardization. To-day
industry produces goods that cost more than they are worth, are consumed
by persons who are degraded by the consuming; it is destroying
permanently the raw-material source which, science has painfully
explained, could be made inexhaustible. Some intellectual revolution
must come which will _de_-emphasize business and industry and
_re_-emphasize most other ways of self-expression.

"In Florence, around 1300, Giotto painted a picture, and the day it was
to be hung in St. Mark's, the town closed down for a holiday, and the
people, with garlands of flowers and songs, escorted the picture from
the artist's studio to the church. Three weeks ago I stood, in company
with 500 silent, sallow-faced men, at a corner on Wall Street, a cold
and wet corner, till young Morgan issued from J.P. Morgan & Company, and
walked 20 feet to his carriage.--We produce, probably, per capita, 1000
times more in weight of ready-made clothing, Irish lace, artificial
flowers, terra cotta, movie-films, telephones, and printed matter than
those Florentines did, but we have, with our 100,000,000 inhabitants,
yet to produce that little town, her Dante, her Andrea del Sarto, her
Michael Angelo, her Leonardo da Vinci, her Savonarola, her Giotto, or
the group who followed Giotto's picture. Florence had a marvelous
energy--re-lease experience. All our industrial formalism, our
conventionalized young manhood, our schematized universities, are
instruments of balk and thwart, are machines to produce protesting
abnormality, to block efficiency. So the problem of industrial labor is
one with the problem of the discontented business man, the indifferent
student, the unhappy wife, the immoral minister--it is one of
maladjustment between a fixed human nature and a carelessly ordered
world. The result is suffering, insanity, racial-perversion, and danger.
The final cure is gaining acceptance for a new standard of morality; the
first step towards this is to break down the mores-inhibitions to free
experimental thinking."

If only the time had been longer--if only the Book itself could have
been finished! For he _had_ a great message. He was writing about a
thousand words a day on it the following summer, at Castle Crags, when
the War Department called him into mediation work and not another word
did he ever find time to add to it. It stands now about one third done.
I shall get that third ready for publication, together with some of his
shorter articles. There have been many who have offered their services
in completing the Book, but the field is so new, Carl's contribution so
unique, that few men in the whole country understand the ground enough
to be of service. It was not so much to be a book on Labor as on
Labor-Psychology--and that is almost an unexplored field.

CHAPTER XII

Three days after Carl started east, on his arrival in Seattle, President
Suzzallo called him to the University of Washington as Head of the
Department of Economics and Dean of the College of Business
Administration, his work to begin the following autumn. It seemed an
ideal opportunity. He wrote: "I am very, very attracted by Suzzallo. . . .
He said that I should be allowed to plan the work as I wished and call
the men I wished, and could call at least five. I cannot imagine a
better man to work with nor a better proposition than the one he put up
to me. . . . The job itself will let me teach what I wish and in my own
way. I can give Introductory Economics, and Labor, and Industrial
Organization, etc." Later, he telegraphed from New York, where he had
again seen Suzzallo: "Have accepted Washington's offer. . . . Details of
job even more satisfactory than before."

So, sandwiched in between all the visits and interviews over the Book,
were many excursions about locating new men for the University of
Washington. I like to think of what the three Pennsylvania men he wanted
had to say about him. Seattle seemed very far away to them--they were
doubtful, very. Then they heard the talk before the Conference referred
to above, and every one of the three accepted his call. As one of them
expressed it to his wife later: "I'd go anywhere for that man." Between
that Seattle call and his death there were eight universities, some of
them the biggest in the country, which wished Carl Parker to be on their
faculties. One smaller university held out the presidency to him.
Besides this, there were nine jobs outside of University work that were
offered him, from managing a large mine to doing research work in
Europe. He had come into his own.

It was just before we left Berkeley that the University of California
asked Carl to deliver an address, explaining his approach to economics.
It was, no doubt, the most difficult talk he ever gave. There under his
very nose sat his former colleagues, his fellow members in the Economics
Department, and he had to stand up in public and tell them just how
inadequate he felt most of their teaching to be. The head of the
Department came in a trifle late and left immediately after the lecture.
He could hardly have been expected to include himself in the group who
gathered later around Carl to express their interest in his stand. I
shall quote a bit from this paper to show Carl's ideas on orthodox
economics.

"This brings one to perhaps the most costly delinquency of modern
Economics, and that is its refusal to incorporate into its weighings and
appraisals the facts and hypotheses of modern psychology. Nothing in the
postulates of the science of Economics is as ludicrous as its catalogue
of human wants. Though the practice of ascribing 'faculties' to man has
been passed by psychology into deserved discard, Economics still
maintains, as basic human qualities, a galaxy of vague and rather
spiritual faculties. It matters not that, in the place of the primitive
concepts of man stimulated to activity by a single trucking sense, or a
free and uninfluenced force called a soul, or a 'desire for financial
independence,' psychology has established a human being possessed of
more instincts than any animal, and with a psychical nature whose
activities fall completely within the causal law.

"It would be a great task and a useless one to work through current
economic literature and gather the strange and mystical collection of
human dispositions which economists have named the springs of human
activity. They have no relation to the modern researches into human
behavior of psychology or physiology. They have an interesting relation
only to the moral attributes postulated in current religion.

"But more important and injurious than the caricaturing of wants has
been the disappearance from Economics of any treatment or interest in
human behavior and the evolution of human character in Economic life.
This is explained in large part by the self-divorce of Economics from
the biological field; but also in an important way by the exclusion from
Economics of considerations of consumption.

"Only under the influence of the social and educational psychologists
and behaviorists could child-labor, the hobo, unemployment, poverty, and
criminality be given their just emphasis; and it seems accurate to
ascribe the social sterility of Economic theory and its programme to its
ignorance and lack of interest in modern comparative psychology.

"A deeper knowledge of human instincts would never have allowed
American economists to keep their faith in a simple rise of wages as an
all-cure for labor unrest. In England, with a homogeneous labor class,
active in politics, maintaining university extension courses, spending
their union's income on intricate betterment schemes, and wealthy in
tradition--there a rise in wages meant an increase in welfare. But in
the United States, with a heterogeneous labor class, bereft of their
social norms by the violence of their uprooting from the old world,
dropped into an unprepared and chaotic American life, with its insidious
prestige--here a rise in wages could and does often mean added
ostentation, social climbing, superficial polishing, new vice. This
social perversion in the consuming of the wage-increase is without the
ken of the economist. He cannot, if he would, think of it, for he has no
mental tools, no norms applicable for entrance into the medley of human
motives called consumption.

"For these many reasons economic thinking has been weak and futile in
the problems of conservation, of haphazard invention, of unrestricted
advertising, of anti-social production, of the inadequacy of income, of
criminality. These are problems within the zone of the intimate life of
the population. They are economic problems, and determine efficiencies
within the whole economic life. The divorcing for inspection of the
field of production from the rest of the machinery of civilization has
brought into practice a false method, and the values arrived at have
been unhappily half-truths. America to-day is a monument to the truth
that growth in wealth becomes significant for national welfare only
when it is joined with an efficient and social policy in its
consumption.

"Economics will only save itself through an alliance with the sciences
of human behavior, psychology, and biology, and through a complete
emancipation from 'prosperity mores.' . . . The sin of Economics has been
the divorce of its work from reality, of announcing an analysis of human
activity with the human element left out."

One other point remained ever a sore spot with Carl, and that was the
American university and its accomplishments. In going over his writings,
I find scattered through the manuscripts explosions on the ways, means,
and ends, of academic education in our United States. For instance,--

"Consider the paradox of the rigidity of the university student's scheme
of study, and the vagaries and whims of the scholarly emotion.
Contemplate the forcing of that most delicate of human attributes,
_i.e._, interest, to bounce forth at the clang of a gong. To illustrate:
the student is confidently expected to lose himself in fine
contemplation of Plato's philosophy up to eleven o'clock, and then at
11.07, with no important mental cost, to take up a profitable and
scholarly investigation into the banking problems of the United States.
He will be allowed by the proper academic committee German Composition
at one o'clock, diseases of citrus fruit trees at two, and at three he
is asked to exhibit a fine sympathy in the Religions and Customs of the
Orient. Between 4.07 and five it is calculated that he can with profit
indulge in gymnasium recreation, led by an instructor who counts out
loud and waves his arms in time to a mechanical piano. Between five and
six, this student, led by a yell-leader, applauds football practice. The
growing tendency of American university students to spend their evenings
in extravagant relaxation, at the moving pictures, or in unconventional
dancing, is said to be willful and an indication of an important moral
sag of recent years. It would be interesting also to know if Arkwright,
Hargreaves, Watt, or Darwin, Edison, Henry Ford, or the Wrights, or
other persons of desirable if unconventional mechanical imagination,
were encouraged in their scientific meditation by scholastic experiences
of this kind. Every American university has a department of education
devoted to establishing the most effective methods of imparting
knowledge to human beings."

From the same article:--

"The break in the systematization which an irregular and unpredictable
thinker brings arouses a persistent if unfocused displeasure. Hence we
have the accepted and cultivated institutions, such as our universities,
our churches, our clubs, sustaining with care mediocre standards of
experimental thought. European critics have long compared the repressed
and uninspiring intellect of the American undergraduate with the mobile
state of mind of the Russian and German undergraduates which has made
their institutions the centre of revolutionary change propaganda. To one
who knows in any intimate way the life of the American student, it
becomes only an uncomfortable humor to visualize any of his campuses as
the origins of social protests. The large industry of American college
athletics and its organization-for-victory concept, the tendency to set
up an efficient corporation as the proper university model, the
extensive and unashamed university advertising, and consequent
apprehension of public opinion, the love of size and large registration,
that strange psychological abnormality, organized cheering, the curious
companionship of state universities and military drill, regular
examinations and rigidly prescribed work--all these interesting
characteristics are, as is natural in character-formation, both cause
and effect. It becomes an easy prophecy within behaviorism to forecast
that American universities will continue regular and mediocre in mental
activity and reasonably devoid of intellectual bent toward experimental
thinking."

Perhaps here is where I may quote a letter Carl received just before
leaving Berkeley, and his answer to it. This correspondence brings up
several points on which Carl at times received criticism, and I should
like to give the two sides, each so typical of the point of view it
represents.

_February 28_, 1917

MY DEAR CARLETON PARKER,--

When we so casually meet it is as distressing as it is amusing to me, to
know that the God I intuitively defend presents to you the image of the
curled and scented monster of the Assyrian sculpture.

He was never that to me, and the visualization of an imaginative child
is a remarkable thing. From the first, the word "God," spoken in the
comfortable (almost smug) atmosphere of the old Unitarian congregation,
took my breath and tranced me into a vision of a great flood of
vibrating light, and _only_ light.

I wonder if, in your childhood, some frightening picture in some old
book was not the thing that you are still fighting against? So that,
emancipated as you are, you are still a little afraid, and must
perforce--with a remainder of the brave swagger of youth--set up a
barrier of authorities to fight behind, and, quite unconsciously, you
are thus building yourself into a vault in which no flowers can
bloom--because you have sealed the high window of the imagination so
that the frightening God may not look in upon you--this same window
through which simple men get an illumination that saves their lives, and
in the light of which they communicate kindly, one with the other, their
faith and hopes?

I am impelled to say this to you, first, because of the responsibility
which rests upon you in your relation to young minds; and, second, I
like you and your eagerness and the zest for Truth that you transmit.

You are dedicated to the pursuit of Truth, and you afford us the
dramatic incidents of your pursuit.

Yet up to this moment it seems to me you are accepting Truth at
second-hand.

I counted seventeen "authorities" quoted, chapter and verse (and then
abandoned the enumeration), in the free talk of the other evening; and
asked myself if this reverence of the student for the master, was all
that we were ultimately to have of that vivid individual whom we had so
counted upon as Carl Parker?

I wondered, too, if, in the great opportunity that has come to you,
those simple country boys and girls of Washington were to be thus
deprived,--were to find not you but your "authorities,"--because Carl
Parker refused (even ever so modestly) to learn that Truth, denied the
aid of the free imagination, takes revenge upon her disciple, by
shutting off from him the sources of life by which a man is made free,
and reducing his mind--his rich, variable, potential mind--to the
mechanical operation of a repetitious machine.

I feel this danger for you, and for the youths you are to educate, so
poignantly that I venture to write with this frankness.

Your present imprisonment is not necessarily a life sentence; but your
satisfaction in it--your acceptance of the routine of your treadmill--is
chilling to the hopes of those who have waited upon your progress; and
it imperils your future--as well as that hope we have in the humanities
that are to be implanted in the minds of the young people you are to
instruct. We would not have you remain under the misapprehension that
Truth alone can ever serve humanity--Truth remains sterile until it is
married to Goodness. That marriage is consummated in the high flight of
the imagination, and its progeny is of beauty.

_You_ need beauty--you need verse and color and music--you need all the
escapes--all the doors wide open--and this seemingly impertinent letter
is merely the appeal of one human creature to another, for the sake of
all the human creatures whom you have it in your power to endow with
chains or with wings.

Very sincerely yours,
BRUCE PORTER.

MY DEAR BRUCE PORTER,--

My present impatient attitude towards a mystic being without doubt has
been influenced by some impression of my childhood, but not the
terror-bringing creatures you suggest. My family was one of the last
three which clung to a dying church in my country town. I, though a boy
of twelve, passed the plate for two years while the minister's daughter
sang a solo. Our village was not a happy one, and the incongruity of our
emotional prayers and ecstasies of imagery, and the drifting dullness
and meanness of the life outside, filtered in some way into my boy mind.
I saw that suffering was real and pressing, and so many suffered
resignedly; and that imagery and my companionship with a God (I was
highly "religious" then) worked in a self-centred circle. I never
strayed from the deadly taint of some gentle form of egotism. I was then
truly in a "vault." I did things for a system of ethics, not because of
a fine rush of social brotherly intuition. My imagination was ever
concerned with me and my prospects, my salvation. I honestly and soberly
believe that your "high window of the imagination" works out in our
world as such a force for egotism; it is a self-captivating thing, it
divorces man from the plain and bitter realities of life, it brings an
anti-social emancipation to him. I can sincerely make this terrible
charge against the modern world, and that is, that it is its bent
towards mysticism, its blinding itself through hysteria, which makes
possible in its civilization its desperate inequalities of
life-expression, its tortured children, its unhappy men and women, its
wasted potentiality. We have not been humble and asked what is man; we
have not allowed ourselves to weigh sorrow. It is in such a use that our
powers of imagination could be brotherly. We look on high in ecstasy,
and fail to be on flame because 'of the suffering of those whose wounds
are bare to our eyes on the street.

And that brings me to my concept of a God. God exists in us because of
our bundle of social brother-acts. Contemplation and crying out and
assertions of belief are in the main notices that we are substituting
something for acts. Our God should be a thing discovered only in
retrospect. We live, we fight, we know others, and, as Overstreet says,
our God sins and fights at our shoulder. He may be a mean God or a fine
one. He is limited in his stature by our service.

I fear your God, because I think he is a product of the unreal and
unhelpful, that he has a "bad psychological past," that he is subtly
egotistical, that he fills the vision and leaves no room for the simple
and patient deeds of brotherhood, a heavenly contemplation taking the
place of earthly deeds.

You feel that I quote too many minds and am hobbled by it. I delight
just now in the companionship of men through their books. I am devoted
to knowing the facts of the lives of other humans and the train of
thought which their experiences have started. To lead them is like
talking to them. I suspect, even dread, the "original thinker" who knows
little of the experiments and failures of the thinkers of other places
and times. To me such a stand denies that promising thing, the evolution
of human thought. I also turn from those who borrow, but neglect to tell
their sources. I want my "simple boys and girls of Washington" to know
that to-day is a day of honest science; that events have antecedents;
that "luck" does not exist; that the world will improve only through
thoughtful social effort, and that lives are happy only in that effort.
And with it all there will be time for beauty and verse and color and
music--far be it from me to shut these out of my own life or the lives
of others. But they are instruments, not attributes. I am very glad you
wrote.

Sincerely yours,
Carleton H. Parker.

CHAPTER XIII

In May we sold our loved hill nest in Berkeley and started north,
stopping for a three months' vacation--our first real vacation since we
had been married--at Castle Crags, where, almost ten years before, we
had spent the first five days of our honeymoon, before going into
Southern Oregon. There, in a log-cabin among the pines, we passed
unbelievably cherished days--work a-plenty, play a-plenty, and the
family together day in, day out. There was one little extra trip he got
in with the two sons, for which I am so thankful. The three of them went
off with their sleeping-bags and rods for two days, leaving "the girls"
behind. Each son caught his first trout with a fly. They put the fish,
cleaned, in a cool sheltered spot, because they had to be carried home
for me to see; and lo! a little bear came down in the night and ate the
fish, in addition to licking the fat all off the frying-pan.

Then, like a bolt from the blue, came the fateful telegram from
Washington, D.C.--labor difficulties in construction-work at Camp
Lewis--would he report there at once as Government Mediator. Oh! the
Book, the Book--the Book that was to be finished without fail before the
new work at the University of Washington began! Perhaps he would be back
in a week! Surely he would be back in a week! So he packed just enough
for a week, and off he went. One week! When, after four weeks, there
was still no let up in his mediation duties,--in fact they increased,--I
packed up the family and we left for Seattle. I had rewound his
fishing-rod with orange silk, and had revarnished it, as a surprise for
his home-coming to Castle Crags. He never fished with it again.

How that man loved fishing! How he loved every sport, for that matter.
And he loved them with the same thoroughness and allegiance that he gave
to any cause near his heart. Baseball--he played on his high-school team
(also he could recite "Casey at the Bat" with a gusto that many a friend
of the earlier days will remember. And here I am reminded of his
"Christopher Columnibus." I recently ran across a postcard a college
mate sent Carl from Italy years ago, with a picture of a statue of
Columbus on it. On the reverse side the friend had written, quoting from
Carl's monologue: "'Boom Joe!' says the king; which is being
interpreted, 'I see you first.' 'Wheat cakes,' says Chris, which is the
Egyptian for 'Boom Joe'"). He loved football, track,--he won three gold
medals broad-jumping,--canoeing, swimming, billiards,--he won a loving
cup at that, tennis, ice-skating, hand-ball; and yes, ye of finer
calibre, quiver if you will--he loved a prize-fight and played a mighty
good game of poker, as well as bridge--though in the ten and a half
years that we were married I cannot remember that he played poker once
or bridge more than five times. He did, however, enjoy his bridge with
Simon Patton in Philadelphia; and when he played, he played well.

I tell you there was hardly anything the man could not do. He could draw
the funniest pictures you ever saw--I wish I could reproduce the letters
he sent his sons from the East. He was a good carpenter--the joy it
meant to his soul to add a second-hand tool ever so often to his
collection! Sunday morning was special carpenter-time--new shelves here,
a bookcase there, new steps up to the swimming-tank, etc. I have heard
many a man say that he told a story better than any one they ever heard.
He was an expert woodsman. And, my gracious! how he did love babies!
That hardly fits in just here, but I think of it now. His love for
children colored his whole economic viewpoint.

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