An American Idyll Part 8

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 inst.i.tutions, 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 inst.i.tutions 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 G.o.d I intuitively defend presents to you the image of the curled and scented monster of the a.s.syrian sculpture.

He was never that to me, and the visualization of an imaginative child is a remarkable thing. From the first, the word "G.o.d," 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, emanc.i.p.ated 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 G.o.d 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 repet.i.tious 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 att.i.tude 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, pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d (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 emanc.i.p.ation 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 G.o.d. G.o.d exists in us because of our bundle of social brother-acts. Contemplation and crying out and a.s.sertions of belief are in the main notices that we are subst.i.tuting something for acts. Our G.o.d should be a thing discovered only in retrospect. We live, we fight, we know others, and, as Overstreet says, our G.o.d sins and fights at our shoulder. He may be a mean G.o.d or a fine one. He is limited in his stature by our service.

I fear your G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sed 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.

"There is the thing that possessed Parker--the perception of the destructive significance of the repressed and balked instincts of the migratory worker, the unskilled, the casuals, the hoboes, the womanless, jobless, voteless men. To him their tragedy was akin to the tragedy of child-life in our commercialized cities. More often than of anything else, he used to talk to me of the fatuous blindness of a civilization that centred its economic activities in places where child-life was perpetually repressed and imperiled. The last time I saw him he was flaming indignation at the ghastly record of children killed and maimed by trucks and automobiles. What business had automobiles where children should be free to play? What could be said for the human wisdom of a civilization that placed traffic above child-life? In our denial to children, to millions of men and women, of the means for satisfying their instinctive desires and innate dispositions, he saw the princ.i.p.al explanation of crime, labor-unrest, the violence of strikes, the ghastly violence of war[1]."

[Footnote 1: Robert Bruere, in the _New Republic_, May 18, 1918.]

He could never pa.s.s any youngster anywhere without a word of greeting as from friend to friend. I remember being in a crowded car with him in our engaged days. He was sitting next to a woman with a baby who was most unhappy over the ways of the world. Carl asked if he could not hold the squaller. The mother looked a bit doubtful, but relinquished her child.

Within two minutes the babe was content on Carl's knees, clutching one of his fingers in a fat fist and sucking his watch. The woman leaned over to me later, as she was about to depart with a very sound asleep offspring. "Is he as lovely as that to his own?"

The tenderness of him over his own! Any hour of the day or night he was alert to be of any service in any trouble, big or little. He had a collection of tricks and stories on hand for any youngster who happened along. The special pet of our own boys was "The Submarine Obo Bird"--a large flapper (Dad's arms fairly rent the air), which was especially active early in the morning, when small boys appeared to prefer staying in bed to getting up. The Obo Bird went "Pak! Pak!" and lit on numerous objects about the sleeping porch. Carl's two hands would plump stiff, fingers down, on the railing, or on a small screw sticking out somewhere. Scratches. Then "Pak!" and more flaps. This time the Obo Bird would light a trifle nearer the small boy whose "turn" it was--round eyes, and an agitated grin from ear to ear, plus explosive giggles and gurglings emerging from the covers. Nearer and nearer came the Obo Bird.

Gigglier and gigglier got the small boy. Finally, with a spring and a last "Pak! Pak! Pak!" the Obo Bird dove under the covers at the side of the bed and pinched the small boy who would not get up. (Rather a premium on not rising promptly was the Obo Bird.) Final ecstatic squeals from the pinched. Then, "Now it's my turn, daddo!" from the other son.--The Submarine Obo Bird lived in Alaska and ate Spooka biscuits.

There was just developing a wee Obo Bird, that made less vehement "paks!" and pinched less agitatedly--a special June-Bug Obo Bird. In fact, the baby was not more than three months old when the boys demanded a Submarine Obo Bird that ate little Spooka biscuits for sister.

His trip to Camp Lewis threw him at once into the midst of the lumber difficulties of the Northwest, which lasted for months. The big strike in the lumber industry was on when he arrived. He wrote: "It is a strike to better conditions. The I.W.W. are only the display feature. The main body of opinion is from a lot of unskilled workers who are sick of the filthy bunk-houses and rotten grub." He wrote later of a conference with the big lumbermen, and of how they would not stay on the point but "roared over the I.W.W. I told them that condemnation was not a solution, or businesslike, but what we wanted was a statement of how they were to open their plants. More roars. More demands for troops, etc. I said I was a college man, not used to business; but if business men had as much trouble as this keeping to the real points involved, give me a faculty a.n.a.lysis. They laughed over this and got down to business, and in an hour lined up the affair in mighty good shape."

I wish it were proper to go into the details here of the various conferences, the telegrams sent to Washington, the replies. Carl wrote: "I am saving all the copies for you, as it is most interesting history."

Each letter would end: "By three days at least I should start back. I am getting frantic to be home." Home, for the Parkers, was always where we happened to be then. Castle Crags was as much "home" as any place had ever been. We had moved fourteen times in ten years: of the eleven Christmases we had had together, only two had been in the same place.

There were times when "home" was a Pullman car. It made no difference.

One of the strange new feelings I have to get used to is the way I now look at places to live in. It used to be that Carl and I, in pa.s.sing the littlest bit of a hovel, would say, "We could be perfectly happy in a place like that, couldn't we? Nothing makes any difference if we are together." But certain kinds of what we called "cuddly" houses used to make us catch our breaths, to think of the extra joy it would be living together tucked away in there. Now, when I pa.s.s a place that looks like that, I have to drop down some kind of a trap-door in my brain, and not think at all until I get well by it.

Labor conditions in the Northwest grew worse, strikes more general, and finally Carl wrote that he just must be indefinitely on the job. "I am so home-sick for you that I feel like packing up and coming. I literally feel terribly. But with all this feeling I don't see how I can. Not only have I been telegraphed to stay on the job, but the situation is growing steadily worse. Last night my proposal (eight-hour day, non-partisan complaint and adjustment board, suppression of violence by the state) was turned down by the operators in Tacoma. President Suzzallo and I fought for six hours but it went down. The whole situation is drifting into a state of incipient sympathetic strikes." Later: "This is the most bull-headed affair and I don't think it is going to get anywhere." Still later: "Things are not going wonderfully in our mediation. Employers demanding everything and men granting much but not that." Again: "Each day brings a new crisis. Gee, labor is unrestful ... and gee, the pigheadedness of bosses! Human nature is sure one hundred per cent psychology." Also he wrote, referring to the general situation at the University and in the community: "Am getting absolutely crazy with enthusiasm over my job here... . It is too vigorous and resultful for words." And again: "The mediation between employers and men blew up to-day at 4 P.M. and now a host of nice new strikes show on the horizon... . There are a lot of fine operators but some hard sh.e.l.ls."

Again: "Gee, I'm learning! And talk about material for the Book!"

An article appeared in one of the New York papers recently, ent.i.tled "How Carleton H. Parker Settled Strikes":--

"It was under his leadership that, in less than a year, twenty-seven disputes which concerned Government work in the Pacific Northwest were settled, and it was his method to lay the basis for permanent relief as he went along... .

"Parker's contribution was in the method he used... . Labor leaders of all sorts would flock to him in a bitter, weltering ma.s.s, mouthing the set phrases of cla.s.s-hatred they use so effectually in stirring up trouble. They would state their case. And Parker would quietly deduce the irritation points that seemed to stand out in the jumbled testimony.

"Then it would be almost laughable to the observer to hear the employer's side of the case. Invariably it was just as bitter, just as unreasoning, and just as violent, as the statement of their case by the workers. Parker would endeavor to find, in all this heap of words, the irritation points of the other side.

"But when a study was finished, his diagnosis made, and his prescription of treatment completed, Parker always insisted in carrying it straight to the workers. And he did not just tell them results. He often took several hours, sometimes several meetings of several hours each. In these meetings he would go over every detail of his method, from start to finish, explaining, answering questions, meeting objections with reason. And he always won them over. But, of course, it must be said that he had a tremendously compelling personality that carried him far."