Cornelia Stratton Parker

“ From May, when college closed, to October, when he left for the East, he read prodigiously. He had a mind for assimilation—he knew where to store every new piece of knowledge he acquired, and kept thereby an orderly brain. He read more than a book a week: everything he could lay hands on in psychology, anthropology, biology, philosophy, psycho-analysis—every field which he felt contributed to his own growing conviction that orthodox economics had served its day. ”

“ We looked back always on our first semester's teaching in the University of California as one hectic term. We had lived our own lives, found our own joys, for four years, and here we were enveloped by old friends, by relatives, by new friends, until we knew not which way to turn. In addition, Carl was swamped by campus affairs—by students, many of whom seemed to consider him an oasis in a desert of otherwise-to-be-deplored, unhuman professors. Every student organization to which he had belonged as an undergraduate opened its arms to welcome him as a faculty member ”

“ The ranch owner, a nervous man, was harassed by the rush of work brought on by the too rapidly ripening hops, and indignant at the jeers and catcalls which greeted his appearance near the meetings of the pickers. Confused with a crisis outside his slender social philosophy, he acted true to his tradition, and perhaps his type, and called on a sheriff's posse. What industrial relationship had existed was too insecure to stand such a procedure. It disappeared entirely, leaving in control the instincts and vagaries of a mob on the one hand, and great apprehension and inexperience on the other. ”

“ Most of the people there that afternoon were gray-haired—the family had lived in Seattle for years and years, and these were the friends of years and years back. Carl said: "That is something we can't have when you and I die—the old, old friends who have stood by us year in and year out. It is one of the phases of life you sacrifice when you move around at the rate we do. But in the first place, neither of us wants a funeral, and in the second place, we feel that moving gives more than it takes away—so we are satisfied." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Any student who continued his economic studies did so in spite of the introductory work, not because he had had one little ounce of enthusiasm aroused in his soul. Carl would walk the floor with his hands in his pockets when kindred spirits—especially students who had gone through the mill, and as seniors or graduates looked back outraged at certain courses they had had to flounder through—brought up the subject of Economics at the University of California. ”

“ If one must be dogmatic, then I say, "A fellow should never work at anything he does not like." One of the things in our case which brought such constant criticism from relatives and friends was that we changed around so much. Thank God we did! It took Carl Parker until he was over thirty before he found just the work he loved the most and in which his soul was content—university work. And he was thirty-seven before he found just the phase of economic study that fired him to his full enthusiasm—his loved field of the application of psychology to economics. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The second anniversary was in Cambridge. We always used to laugh each year and say: "Gracious! if any one had told us a year ago we'd be here this September seventh!" Every year we were somewhere we never dreamed we would be. That first September seventh, the night of the wedding, we were to be in Seattle for years—selling bonds. What a fearful prospect in retrospect, compared to what we really did! The second September, back in Oakland, we thought we were to be in the bond business for years in Oakland. ”

“ In the dignifying of vagabondage through their crude but virile song and verse, in the bitter vilification of the jail turnkey and county sheriff, in their condemnation of the church and its formal social work, they find the vindication of their hobo status which they desire. They cannot sustain a live organization unless they have a strike or free-speech fight to stimulate their spirit. It is in their methods of warfare, not in their abstract philosophy or even hatred of law and judges, that danger lies for organized society. ”

“ The most despicable thing to-day is the whine of our cities lest their inadequate catering to their own homeless draw a few vagrants from afar. But when the agony of our winter makeshifting is by, will a sufficient minority of our citizens rise and demand that the best technical, economic, and sociological brains in our wealthy nation devote themselves with all courage and honesty to the problem of unemployment?"
Carl was no diplomat, in any sense of the word—above all, no political diplomat. It is a wonder that the Immigration and Housing Commission stood behind him as long as it did. ”

“ Though a favorite popular belief is that we must 'work to live,' we have no current adage of a 'right to work.' This winter there are shoeless men and women, closed shoe-factories, and destitute shoemakers; children in New England with no woolen clothing, half-time woolen mills, and unemployed spinners and weavers. Why? Simply because the mills cannot turn out the reasonable business profit; and since that is the only promise that can galvanize them into activity, they stand idle, no matter how much humanity finds of misery and death in this decision. ”

“ Our conventional economics to-day analyzes no phase of industrialism or the wage-relationship, or citizenship in pecuniary society, in a manner to offer a key to such distressing and complex problems as this. Human nature riots to-day through our economic structure, with ridicule and destruction; and we economists look on helpless and aghast. The menace of the war does not seem potent to quiet revolt or still class cries. ”

“ It is a conventional economic truism that American industrialism is guaranteeing to some half of the forty millions of our industrial population a life of such limited happiness, of such restrictions on personal development, and of such misery and desolation when sickness or accident comes, that we should be childish political scientists not to see that from such an environment little self-sacrificing love of country, little of ethics, little of gratitude could come. ”

“ We swore an oath in Berlin that we would make Heidelberg mean Germany to us—no English-speaking, no Americans. As far as it lay in our power, we lived up to it. Carl and I spoke only German to each other and to the children, and we shunned our fellow countrymen as if they had had the plague. And Carl, in the characteristic way he had, set out to fill our lives with all the real German life we could get into them, not waiting for that life to come of itself—which it might never have done. ”

“ The I.W.W. has importance only as an illustration of a stable American economic process. Its pitiful syndicalism, its street-corner opposition to the war, are the inconsequential trimmings. Its strike alone, faithful as it is to the American type, is an illuminating thing. The I.W.W., like the Grangers, the Knights of Labor, the Farmers' Alliance, the Progressive Party, is but a phenomenon of revolt. The cure lies in taking care of its psychic antecedents; the stability of our Republic depends on the degree of courage and wisdom with which we move to the task. ”

“ Hence, while his immoral or unpatriotic behavior may fully justify his government in imprisoning or eliminating him when it stands in some particular danger which his conduct intensifies, this punishment in no way either explains his character or points to an enduring solution of his problem. Suppression, while very often justified and necessary in the flux of human relationship, always carries a social cost which must be liquidated, and also a backfire danger which must be insured against. The human being is born with no innate proclivity to crime or special kind of unpatriotism. ”

“ If we are to play a part in the social readjustment immediately ahead, we must put human nature and human motives into our basic hypotheses. Our value-concept must be the yardstick to measure just how fully things and institutions contribute to a full psychological life. We must know more of the meaning of progress. The domination of society by one economic class has for its chief evil the thwarting of the instinct life of the subordinate class and the perversion of the upper class. ”

“ I feel like digressing here a moment, to assail that old principle—which my father, along with countless others, held so strongly—that a fellow who is really worth while ought to know by his Junior year in college just what his life-work is to be. A few with an early developed special aptitude do, but very few. Carl entered college in August, 1896, in Engineering; but after a term found that it had no further appeal for him. "But a fellow ought to stick to a thing, whether he likes it or not!" ”

“ 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. ”

“ When we left Oakland for Harvard, the partially toothless maid we had sobbed that "Mr. Parker had been more like a brother to her!"
One of the phases of his death which struck home the hardest was the concern and sorrow the small tradespeople showed—the cobbler, the plumber, the drug-store clerk. You hear men say: "I often find it interesting to talk to working-people and get their view-point." Such an attitude was absolutely foreign to Carl. He talked to "working-people" because he talked to everybody as he went along his joyous way. ”

“ 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? ”

“ The motives of economic life are the same as those of the life of art, of vanity and ostentation, of war and crime, of sex. Economic life is merely the life in which instinct gratification is alleged to take on a rational pecuniary habit form. Man is not less a father, with a father's parental instinct, just because he passes down the street from his home to his office. ”

“ The history of the migratory workers shows that, starting with the long hours and dreary winters on the farms they ran away from, or the sour-smelling bunk-house in a coal village, through their character-debasing experience with the drifting 'hire and fire' life in the industries, on to the vicious social and economic life of the winter unemployed, their training predetermined but one outcome, and the environment produced its type. ”

“ As a stimulus to a programme or ethical generalization, it is the cause of vast inaccuracy and sad injustice. American syndicalism is not a scheming group dominated by an unconventional and destructive social philosophy. It is merely a commonplace attitude—not such a state of mind as Machiavelli or Robespierre possessed, but one stamped by the lowest, most miserable labor-conditions and outlook which American industrialism produces. ”

“ I wish every one on earth could feel it. I do not care if they do not save a cent.
Only I do wish my Carl could have experienced those joys a little longer. It was so good—so good, while it lasted! And it was only just starting. Every new call he got to another university was at a salary from one to two thousand dollars more than what we were getting, even at Seattle. It looked as if our days of financial scrimping were gone forever. We even discussed a Ford! nay—even a four-cylinder Buick! And every other Sunday we had fricasseed chicken, and always, always a frosting on the cake. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Carl wrote: "He is all he is supposed to be and more." He in turn wrote me after Carl's death: "Our country shares with you the great loss. Your husband was among the very few Americans who possessed the character, knowledge, and insight which are indispensable in dealing effectively with our labor-problem. Appreciation of his value was coming rapidly, and events were enforcing his teachings. His journey to the East brought inspiration to many; and I seek comfort in the thought that, among the students at the University, there will be some at least who are eager to carry forward his work." ”

“ 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. ”

“ The heart of the problem, the cause, one might well say, of unemployment, is that the employment of men regularly or irregularly is at no time an important consideration of those minds which control industry. Social organization has ordered it that these minds shall be interested only in achieving a reasonable profit in the manufacture and the sale of goods. Society has never demanded that industries be run even in part to give men employment. ”