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American Idyll: The Life of Carlton H. Parker

<h2>CHAPTER XII</h2> 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. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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