About this time we had a friend come
into our lives who was destined to mean great things
to the Parkers-Max Rosenberg. He had
heard Carl lecture once or twice, had met him through
our good friend Dr. Brown, and a warm friendship had
developed. In the spring of 1916 we were somewhat
tempted by a call to another University-$1700
was really not a fortune to live on, and to make both
ends meet and prepare for the June-Bug’s coming,
Carl had to use every spare minute lecturing outside.
It discouraged him, for he had no time left to read
and study. So when a call came that appealed
to us in several ways, besides paying a much larger
salary, we seriously considered it. About then
“Uncle Max” rang up from San Francisco
and asked Carl to see him before answering this other
University, and an appointment was made for that afternoon.
I was to be at a formal luncheon,
but told Carl to be sure to call me up the minute
he left Max-we wondered so hard what he
might mean. And what he did mean was the most
wonderful idea that ever entered a friend’s
head. He felt that Carl had a real message to
give the world, and that he should write a book.
He also realized that it was impossible to find time
for a book under the circumstances. Therefore
he proposed that Carl should take a year’s leave
of absence and let Max finance him-not only
just finance him, but allow for a trip throughout the
East for him to get the inspiration of contact with
other men in his field; and enough withal, so that
there should be no skimping anywhere and the little
family at home should have everything they needed.
It seemed to us something too wonderful
to believe. I remember going back to that lunch-table,
after Carl had telephoned me only the broadest details,
wondering if it were the same world. That Book-we
had dreamed of writing that book for so many years-the
material to be in it changed continually, but always
the longing to write, and no time, no hopes of any
chance to do it. And the June-Bug coming, and
more need for money-hence more outside
lectures than ever. I have no love for the University
of California when I think of that $1700. (I quote
from an article that came out in New York: “It
is an astounding fact which his University must explain,
that he, with his great abilities as teacher and leader,
his wide travel and experience and training, received
from the University in his last year of service there
a salary of $1700 a year! The West does not repay
commercial genius like that.”) For days after
Max’s offer we hardly knew we were on earth.
It was so very much the most wonderful thing that
could have happened to us. Our friends had long
ago adopted the phrase “just Parker luck,”
and here was an example if there ever was one.
“Parker luck” indeed it was!
This all meant, to get the fulness
out of it, that Carl must make a trip of at least
four months in the East. At first he planned to
return in the middle of it and then go back again;
but somehow four months spent as we planned it out
for him seemed so absolutely marvelous,-an
opportunity of a lifetime,-that joy for
him was greater in my soul than the dread of a separation.
It was different from any other parting we had ever
had. I was bound that I would not shed a single
tear when I saw him off, even though it meant the
longest time apart we had experienced. Three
nights before he left, being a bit blue about things,
for all our fine talk, we prowled down our hillside
and found our way to our first Charlie Chaplin film.
We laughed until we cried-we really did.
So that night, seeing Carl off, we went over that
Charlie Chaplin film in detail and let ourselves think
and talk of nothing else. We laughed all over
again, and Carl went off laughing, and I waved good-bye
laughing. Bless that Charlie Chaplin film!
It would not take much imagination
to realize what that trip meant to Carl-and
through him to me. From the time he first felt
the importance of the application of modern psychology
to the study of economics, he became more and more
intellectually isolated from his colleagues. They
had no interest in, no sympathy for, no understanding
of, what he was driving at. 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. And
how he gloried in that reading! It had been years
since he had been able to do anything but just keep
up with his daily lectures, such was the pressure
he was working under. Bless his heart, he was
always coming across something that was just too good
to hold in, and I would hear him come upstairs two
steps at a time, bolt into the kitchen, and say:
“Just listen to this!” And he would read
an extract from some new-found treasure that would
make him glow.
But outside of myself,-and
I was only able to keep up with him by the merest
skimmings,-and one or two others at most,
there was no one who understood what he was driving
at. As his reading and convictions grew, he waxed
more and more outraged at the way Economics was handled
in his own University. He saw student after student
having every ounce of intellectual curiosity ground
out of them by a process of economic education that
would stultify a genius. 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.
Off he went then on his pilgrimage,-his
Research Magnificent,-absolutely unknown
to almost every man he hoped to see before his return.
The first stop he made was at Columbia, Missouri, to
see his idol Veblen. He quaked a bit beforehand,-had
heard Veblen might not see him,-but the
second letter from Missouri began, “Just got
in after thirteen hours with Veblen. It went
wonderfully and I am tickled to death. He O.K.s
my idea entirely and said I could not go wrong. . .
. Gee, but it is some grand experience to go
up against him.”
In the next letter he told of a graduate
student who came out to get his advice regarding a
thesis-subject in labor. “I told him to
go to his New England home and study the reaction
of machine-industry on the life of the town.
That is a typical Veblen subject. It scared the
student to death, and Veblen chuckled over my advice.”
In Wisconsin he was especially anxious to see Guyer.
Of his visit with him he wrote: “It was
a whiz of a session. He is just my meat.”
At Yale he saw Keller. “He is a wonder
and is going to do a lot for me in criticism.”
Then began the daily letters from
New York, and every single letter-not only
from New York but from every other place he happened
to be in: Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cambridge-told
of at least one intellectual Event-with
a capital E-a day. No one ever lived
who had a more stimulating experience. Friends
would ask me: “What is the news from Carl?”
And I would just gasp. Every letter was so full
of the new influences coming into his life, that it
was impossible to give even an idea of the history
in the making that was going on with the Parkers.
In the first days in New York he saw
T.H. Morgan. “I just walked in on
him and introduced myself baldly, and he is a corker.
A remarkable talker, with a mind like a flash.
I am to see him again. To-morrow will be a big
day for me-I’ll see Hollingworth,
and very probably Thorndike, and I’ll know then
something of what I’ll get out of New York.”
Next day: “Called on Hollingworth to-day.
He gave me some invaluable data and opinions. . .
. To-morrow I see Thorndike.” And the
next day: “I’m so joyful and excited
over Thorndike. He was so enthusiastic over my
work. . . . He at once had brass-tack ideas.
Said I was right-that strikes usually started
because of small and very human violations of man’s
innate dispositions.”
Later he called on Professor W.C.
Mitchell. “He went into my thesis very
fully and is all for it. Professor Mitchell knows
more than any one the importance of psychology to
economics and he is all for my study. Gee, but
I get excited after such a session. I bet I’ll
get out a real book, my girl!”
After one week in New York he wrote:
“The trip has paid for itself now, and I’m
dead eager to view the time when I begin my writing.”
Later: “Just got in from a six-hour session
with the most important group of employers in New
York. I sat in on a meeting of the Building Trades
Board where labor delegates and employers appeared.
After two hours of it (awfully interesting) the Board
took me to dinner and we talked labor stuff till ten-thirty.
Gee, it was fine, and I got oceans of stuff.”
Then came Boas, and more visits with
Thorndike. “To-night I put in six hours
with Thorndike, and am pleased plum to death. . . .
Under his friendly stimulus I developed a heap of
new ideas; and say, wait till I begin writing!
I’ll have ten volumes at the present rate. .
. . This visit with Thorndike was worth the whole
trip.” (And in turn Thorndike wrote me:
“The days that he and I spent together in New
York talking of these things are one of my finest
memories and I appreciate the chance that let me meet
him.”) He wrote from the Harvard Club, where
Walter Lippmann put him up: “The Dad is
a ‘prominent clubman.’ Just lolled
back at lunch, in a room with animals (stuffed) all
around the walls, and waiters flying about, and a
ceiling up a mile. Gee!” Later: “I
just had a most wonderful visit with the Director
of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, Dr.
Solman, and he is a wiz, a wiz!”
Next day: “Had a remarkable
visit with Dr. Gregory this A.M. He is one of
the greatest psychiatrists in New York and up on balkings,
business tension, and the mental effect of monotonous
work. He was so worked up over my explanation
of unrest (a mental status) through instinct-balkings
other than sex, that he asked if I would consider
using his big psychopathic ward as a laboratory field
for my own work. Then he dated me up for a luncheon
at which three of the biggest mental specialists in
New York will be present, to talk over the manner in
which psychiatry will aid my research! I can’t
say how tickled I am over his attitude.”
Next letter: “At ten reached Dr. Pierce
Bailey’s, the big psychiatrist, and for an hour
and a half we talked, and I was simply tickled to
death. He is really a wonder and I was very enthused.
. . . Before leaving he said: ’You
come to dinner Friday night here and I will have Dr.
Paton from Princeton and I’ll get in some more
to meet you.’ . . . Then I beat it to the
‘New Republic’ offices, and sat down to
dinner with the staff plus Robert Bruere, and the subject
became ‘What is a labor policy?’ The Dad,
he did his share, he did, and had a great row with
Walter Lippmann and Bruere. Walter Lippmann said:
’This won’t do-you have made
me doubt a lot of things. You come to lunch with
me Friday at the Harvard Club and we’ll thrash
it all out.’ Says I, ’All right!’
Then says Croly, ’This won’t do; we’ll
have a dinner here the following Monday night, and
I’ll get Felix Frankfurter down from Boston,
and we’ll thrash it out some more!’ Says
I, ‘All right!’ And says Mr. Croly, private,
‘You come to dinner with us on Sunday!’-’All
right,’ sez Dad. Dr. Gregory has me with
Dr. Solman on Monday, and Harry Overstreet on Wednesday,
Thorndike on Saturday, and gee, but I’ll beat
it for New Haven on Thursday, or I’ll die of
up-torn brain.”
Are you realizing what this all meant
to my Carl-until recently reading and pegging
away unencouraged in his basement study up on the Berkeley
hills?
The next day he heard Roosevelt at
the Ritz-Carton. “Then I watched that remarkable
man wind the crowd almost around his finger. It
was great, and pure psychology; and say, fool women
and some fool men; but T.R. went on blithely as if
every one was an intellectual giant.” That
night a dinner with Winston Churchill. Next letter:
“Had a simply superb talk with Hollingworth
for two and a half hours this afternoon. . . .
The dinner was the four biggest psychiatrists in New
York and Dad. Made me simply yell, it did. .
. . It was for my book simply superb. All
is going so wonderfully.” Next day:
“Now about the Thorndike dinner: it was
grand. . . . I can’t tell you how much these
talks are maturing my ideas about the book. I
think in a different plane and am certain that my
ideas are surer. There have come up a lot of odd
problems touching the conflict, so-called, between
intelligence and instinct, and these I’m getting
thrashed out grandly.” After the second
“New Republic” dinner he wrote: “Lots
of important people there . . . Felix Frankfurter,
two judges, and the two Goldmarks, Pierce Bailey,
etc., and the whole staff. . . . Had been
all day with Dr. Gregory and other psychiatrists and
had met Police Commissioner Woods . . . a wonderfully
rich day. . . . I must run for a date with Professor
Robinson and then to meet Howe, the Immigration Commissioner.”
Then a trip to Ellis Island, and at
midnight that same date he wrote: “Just
had a most truly remarkable-eight-thirty
to twelve-visit with Professor Robinson,
he who wrote that European history we bought in Germany.”
Then a trip to Philadelphia, being dined and entertained
by various members of the Wharton School faculty.
Then the Yale-Harvard game, followed by three days
and two nights in the psychopathic ward at Sing Sing.
“I found in the psychiatrist at the prison a
true wonder-Dr. Glueck. He has a viewpoint
on instincts which differs from any one that I have
met.” The next day, back in New York:
“Just had a most remarkable visit with Thomas
Mott Osborne.” Later in the same day:
“Just had an absolutely grand visit and lunch
with Walter Lippmann . . . it was about the best talk
with regard to my book that I have had in the East.
He is an intellectual wonder and a big, good-looking,
friendly boy. I’m for him a million.”
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 nobody 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 analyzed 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
analysis 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 analyzing Human Behavior.
“Economics (which officially
holds the analysis 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 institutions
which flourish in one decade and pass 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, sex, could grow and
take their foundation place in the psychic equipment
of a biologically promising human being. To illustrate
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 Mécano
or Erector toys, and no father would give the Mécano
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, emancipated 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, zooelogy, 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 institutions
and instruments used by civilized man. All instruction
would be objective, scientific, and emancipated 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 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.