An American Idyll Part 7

Then his visit with John Dewey. "I put up to him my regular questions--the main one being the importance of the conflict between MacDougall and the Freudians... . He was cordiality itself. I am expecting red-letter days with him. My knowledge of the subject is increasing fast." Then a visit with Irving Fisher at New Haven. The next night "was simply remarkable." Irving Fisher took him to a banquet in New York, in honor of some French dignitaries, with President Wilson present--"at seven dollars a plate!" As to President Wilson, "He was simply great--almost the greatest, in fact is the greatest, speaker I have ever heard."

Then a run down to Cambridge, every day crammed to the edges. "Had breakfast with Felix Frankfurter. He has the grand spirit and does so finely appreciate what my subject means. He walked me down to see a friend of his, Laski, intellectually a sort of marvel--knows psychology and philosophy cold--grand talk. Then I called on Professor Gay and he dated me for a dinner to-morrow night. Luncheon given to me by Professor Taussig--that was _fine_... . Then I flew to see E.B. Holt for an hour [his second visit there]. Had a grand visit, and then at six was taken with Gay to dinner with the visiting Deans at the Boston Harvard Club."

(Mr. Holt wrote: "I met Mr. Parker briefly in the winter of 1916-17, briefly, but so very delightfully! I felt that he was an ally and a brilliant one.")

I give these many details because you must appreciate what this new wonder-world meant to a man who was considered n.o.body much by his own University.

Then one day a mere card: "This is honestly a day in which no two minutes of free time exist--so superbly grand has it gone and so fruitful for the book--the best of all yet. One of the biggest men in the United States (Cannon of Harvard) asked me to arrange my thesis to be a.n.a.lyzed by a group of experts in the field." Next day he wrote: "Up at six-forty-five, and at seven-thirty I was at Professor Cannon's. I put my thesis up to him strong and got one of the most encouraging and stimulating receptions I have had. He took me in to meet his wife, and said: 'This young man has stimulated and aroused me greatly. We must get his thesis formally before a group.'" Later, from New York: "From seven-thirty to eleven-thirty I argued with Dr. A.A. Brill, who translated all of Freud!!! and it was simply wonderful. I came home at twelve and wrote up a lot."

Later he went to Washington with Walter Lippmann. They ran into Colonel House on the train, and talked foreign relations for two and a half hours. "My hair stood on end at the importance of what he said." From Washington he wrote: "Am having one of the Great Experiences of my young life." Hurried full days in Philadelphia, with a most successful talk before the University of Pennsylvania Political and Social Science Conference ("Successful," was the report to me later of several who were present), and extreme kindness and hospitality from all the Wharton group. He rushed to Baltimore, and at midnight, December 31, he wrote: "I had from eleven-thirty to one P.M. an absolute supergrand talk with Adolph Meyer and John Watson. He is a grand young southerner and simply knows his behavioristic psychology in a way to make one's hair stand up.

We talked my plan clear out and they are _enthusiastic_... . Things are going _grandly_." Next day: "Just got in from dinner with Adolph Meyer.

He is simply a wonder... . At nine-thirty I watched Dr. Campbell give a girl Freudian treatment for a suicide mania. She had been a worker in a straw-hat factory and had a true industrial psychosis--the kind I am looking for." Then, later: "There is absolutely no doubt that the trip has been my making. I have learned a lot of background, things, and standards, that will put their stamp on my development."

Almost every letter would tell of some one visit which "alone was worth the trip East." Around Christmastime home-longings got extra strong--he wrote five letters in three days. I really wish I could quote some from them--where he said for instance: "My, but it is good for a fellow to be with his family and awful to be away from it." And again: "I want to be interrupted, I do. I'm all for that. I remember how Jim and Nand used to come into my study for a kiss and then go hastily out upon urgent affairs. I'm for that... . I've got my own folk and they make the rest of the world thin and pale. The blessedness of babies is beyond words, but the blessedness of a wife is such that one can't start in on it."

Then came the Economic-Convention at Columbus--letters too full to begin to quote from them. "I'm simply having the time of my life ... every one is here." In a talk when he was asked to fill in at the last minute, he presented "two arguments why trade-unions alone could not be depended on to bring desirable change in working conditions through collective bargaining: one, because they were numerically so few in contrast to the number of industrial workers, and, two, because the reforms about to be demanded were technical, medical, and generally of scientific character, and skilled experts employed by the state would be necessary."

Back again in New York, he wrote: "It just raises my hair to feel I'm not where a Dad ought to be. My blessed, precious family! I tell you there isn't anything in this world like a wife and babies and I'm for that life that puts me close. I'm near smart enough to last a heap of years. Though when I see how my trip makes me feel alive in my head and enthusiastic, I know it has been worth while... ." Along in January he worked his thesis up in writing. "Last night I read my paper to the Robinsons after the dinner and they had Mr. and Mrs. John Dewey there. A most superb and grand discussion followed, the Deweys going home at eleven-thirty and I stayed to talk to one A.M. I slept dreaming wildly of the discussion... . Then had an hour and a half with Dewey on certain moot points. That talk was even more superb and resultful to me and I'm just about ready to quit... . I need now to write and read."

I quote a bit here and there from a paper written in New York in 1917, because, though hurriedly put together and never meant for publication, it describes Carl's newer approach to Economics and especially to the problem of Labor.

"In 1914 I was asked to investigate a riot among 2800 migratory hop-pickers in California which had resulted in five deaths, many-fold more wounded, hysteria, fear, and a strange orgy of irresponsible persecution by the county authorities--and, on the side of the laborers, conspiracy, barn-burnings, sabotage, and open revolutionary propaganda.

I had been teaching labor-problems for a year, and had studied them in two American universities, under Sidney Webb in London, and in four universities of Germany. I found that I had no fundamentals which could be called good tools with which to begin my a.n.a.lysis of this riot. And I felt myself merely a conventional if astonished onlooker before the theoretically abnormal but manifestly natural emotional activity which swept over California. After what must have been a most usual intellectual cycle of, first, helplessness, then conventional cataloguing, some rationalizing, some moralizing, and an extensive feeling of shallowness and inferiority, I called the job done.

"By accident, somewhat later, I was loaned two books of Freud, and I felt after the reading, that I had found a scientific approach which might lead to the discovery of important fundamentals for a study of unrest and violence. Under this stimulation, I read, during a year and a half, general psychology, physiology and anthropology, eugenics, all the special material I could find on Mendelism, works on mental hygiene, feeblemindedness, insanity, evolution of morals and character, and finally found a resting-place in a field which seems to be best designated as Abnormal and Behavioristic Psychology. My quest throughout this experience seemed to be pretty steadily a search for those irreducible fundamentals which I could use in getting a technically decent opinion on that riot. In grand phrases, I was searching for the Scientific Standard of Value to be used in a.n.a.lyzing Human Behavior.

"Economics (which officially holds the a.n.a.lysis of labor-problems) has been allowed to devote itself almost entirely to the production of goods, and to neglect entirely the consumption of goods and human organic welfare. The lip-homage given by orthodox economics to the field of consumption seems to be inspired merely by the feeling that disaster might overcome production if workers were starved or business men discouraged... . So, while official economic science tinkers at its transient inst.i.tutions which flourish in one decade and pa.s.s out in the next, abnormal and behavioristic psychology, physiology, psychiatry, are building in their laboratories, by induction from human specimens of modern economic life, a standard of human values and an elucidation of behavior fundamentals which alone we must use in our legislative or personal modification of modern civilization. It does not seem an overstatement to say that orthodox economics has cleanly overlooked two of the most important generalizations about human life which can be phrased, and those are,--

"That human life is dynamic, that change, movement, evolution, are its basic characteristics.

"That self-expression, and therefore freedom of choice and movement, are prerequisites to a satisfying human state."

After giving a description of the instincts he writes:--

"The importance to me of the following description of the innate tendencies or instincts lies in their relation to my main explanation of economic behavior which is,--

"First, that these tendencies are persistent, are far less warped or modified by the environment than we believe; that they function quite as they have for several hundred thousand years; that they, as motives, in their various normal or perverted habit-form, can at times dominate singly the entire behavior, and act as if they were a clear character dominant.

"Secondly, that if the environment through any of the conventional instruments of repression, such as religious orthodoxy, university mental discipline, economic inferiority, imprisonment, physical disfigurement,--such as short stature, hare-lip, etc.,--repress the full psychological expression in the field of these tendencies, then a psychic revolt, slipping into abnormal mental functioning, takes place, and society accuses the revolutionist of being either willfully inefficient, alcoholic, a syndicalist, supersensitive, an agnostic, or insane."

I hesitate somewhat to give his programme as set forth in this paper. I have already mentioned that it was written in the spring of 1917, and hurriedly. In referring to this very paper in a letter from New York, he said, "Of course it is written in part _to call out_ comments, and so the statements are strong and unmodified." Let that fact, then, be borne in mind, and also the fact that he may have altered his views somewhat in the light of his further studies and readings--although again, such studies may only have strengthened the following ideas. I cannot now trust to my memory for what discussions we may have had on the subject.

"Reform means a militant minority, or, to follow Trotter, a small Herd.

This little Herd would give council, relief, and recuperation to its members. The members of the Herd will be under merciless fire from the convention-ridden members of general society. They will be branded outlaws, radicals, agnostics, impossible, crazy. They will be lucky to be out of jail most of the time. They will work by trial and study, gaining wisdom by their errors, as Sidney Webb and the Fabians did. In the end, after a long time, parts of the social sham will collapse, as it did in England, and small promises will become milestones of progress.

"From where, then, can we gain recruits for this minority? Two real sources seem in existence--the universities and the field of mental-disease speculation and hospital experiment. The one, the universities, with rare if wonderful exceptions, are fairly hopeless; the other is not only rich in promise, but few realize how full in performance. Most of the literature which is gripping that great intellectual no-man's land of the silent readers, is basing its appeal, and its story, on the rather uncolored and bald facts which come from Freud, Trotter, Robinson, Dewey, E.B. Holt, Lippmann, Morton Prince, Pierce, Bailey, Jung, Hart, Overstreet, Thorndike, Campbell, Meyer and Watson, Stanley Hall, Adler, White. It is from this field of comparative or abnormal psychology that the challenge to industrialism and the programme of change will come.

"But suppose you ask me to be concrete and give an idea of such a programme.

"Take simply the beginning of life, take childhood, for that is where the human material is least protected, most plastic, and where most injury to-day is done. In the way of general suggestion, I would say, exclude children from formal disciplinary life, such as that of all industry and most schools, up to the age of eighteen. After excluding them, what shall we do with them? Ask John Dewey, I suggest, or read his 'Schools of To-morrow,' or 'Democracy and Education.' It means tremendous, unprecedented money expense to ensure an active trial and error-learning activity; a chance naturally to recapitulate the racial trial and error-learning experience; a study and preparation of those periods of life in which fall the ripening of the relatively late maturing instincts; a general realizing that wisdom can come only from experience, and not from the Book. It means psychologically calculated childhood opportunity, in which the now stifled instincts of leadership, workmanship, hero-worship, hunting, migration, meditation, s.e.x, could grow and take their foundation place in the psychic equipment of a biologically promising human being. To ill.u.s.trate in trivialities, no father, with knowledge of the meaning of the universal bent towards workmanship, would give his son a puzzle if he knew of the Mecano or Erector toys, and no father would give the Mecano if he had grasped the educational potentiality of the gift to his child of $10 worth of lumber and a set of good carpenter's tools. There is now enough loose wisdom around devoted to childhood, its needed liberties and experiences, both to give the children of this civilization their first evolutionary chance, and to send most teachers back to the farm.

"In the age-period of 18 to 30 would fall that pseudo-educational monstrosity, the undergraduate university, and the degrading popular activities of 'beginning a business' or 'picking up a trade.' Much money must be spent here. Perhaps few fields of activity have been conventionalized as much as university education. Here, just where a superficial theorist would expect to find enthusiasm, emanc.i.p.ated minds, and hope, is found fear, convention, a mean instinct-life, no spirit of adventure, little curiosity, in general no promise of preparedness. No wonder philosophical idealism flourishes and Darwin is forgotten.

"The first two years of University life should be devoted to the Science of Human Behavior. Much of to-day's biology, zoology, history, if it is interpretive, psychology, if it is behavioristic, philosophy, if it is pragmatic, literature, if it had been written involuntarily, would find its place here. The last two years could be profitably spent in appraising with that ultimate standard of value gained in the first two years, the various inst.i.tutions and instruments used by civilized man.

All instruction would be objective, scientific, and emanc.i.p.ated from convention--wonderful prospect!

"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 a.s.sist the continued existence of the inherited order of things, an ideal of moulding all business inst.i.tutions 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 pa.s.sed 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 h.o.m.ogeneous labor cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.s, 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 emanc.i.p.ation from 'prosperity mores.' ... The sin of Economics has been the divorce of its work from reality, of announcing an a.n.a.lysis 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 ill.u.s.trate: 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."