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American Idyll: The Life of Carlton H. Parker

<h2>CHAPTER XIV</h2> At the end of August the little family was united again in Seattle. Almost the clearest picture of Carl I have is the eager look with which he scanned the people stepping out of our car at the station, and the beam that lit up his face as he spied us. There is a line in Dorothy Canfield's "Bent Twig" that always appealed to us. The mother and father were separated for a few days, to the utter anguish of the father especially, and he remarked, "It's Hell to be happily married!" Every time we were ever separated we felt just that. In one of Carl's letters from Seattle he had written: "The 'Atlantic Monthly' wants me to write an article on the I.W.W.!!" So the first piece of work he had to do after we got settled was that. We were tremendously excited, and never got over chuckling at some of the moss-grown people we knew about the country who would feel outraged at the "Atlantic Monthly" stooping to print stuff by that young radical. And on such a subject! How we tore at the end, to get the article off on time! The stenographer from the University came about two one Sunday afternoon. I sat on the floor up in the guest-room and read the manuscript to her while she typed it off. Carl would rush down more copy from his study on the third floor. I'd go over it while Miss Van Doren went over what she had typed. Then the reading would begin again. We hated to stop for supper, all three of us were so excited to get the job done. It had to be at the main post-office that night by eleven, to arrive in Boston when promised. At ten-thirty it was in the envelope, three limp people tore for the car, we put Miss Van Doren on,—she was to mail the article on her way home,—and Carl and I, knowing this was an occasion for a treat if ever there was one, routed out a sleepy drug-store clerk and ate the remains of his Sunday ice-cream supply. I can never express how grateful I am that that article was written and published before Carl died. The influence of it ramified in many and the most unexpected directions. I am still hearing of it. We expected condemnation at the time. There probably was plenty of it, but only one condemner wrote. On the other hand, letters streamed in by the score from friends and strangers bearing the general message, "God bless you for it!" That article is particularly significant as showing his method of approach to the whole problem of the I.W.W., after some two years of psychological study. "The futility of much conventional American social analysis is due to its description of the given problem in terms of its relationship to some relatively unimportant or artificial institution. Few of the current analyses of strikes or labor violence make use of the basic standards of human desire and intention which control these phenomena. A strike and its demands are usually praised as being law-abiding, or economically bearable, or are condemned as being unlawful, or confiscatory. These four attributes of a strike are important only as incidental consequences. The habit of Americans thus to measure up social problems to the current, temporary, and more or less accidental scheme of traditions and legal institutions, long ago gave birth to our national belief that passing a new law or forcing obedience to an old one was a specific for any unrest. The current analysis of the I.W.W. and its activities is an example of this perverted and unscientific method. The I.W.W. analysis, which has given both satisfaction and a basis for treating the organization, runs as follows: the organization is unlawful in its activity, un-American in its sabotage, unpatriotic in its relation to the flag, the government, and the war. The rest of the condemnation is a play upon these three attributes. So proper and so sufficient has this condemnatory analysis become, that it is a risky matter to approach the problem from another angle. But it is now so obvious that our internal affairs are out of gear, that any comprehensive scheme of national preparedness would demand that full and honest consideration be given to all forces determining the degree of American unity, one force being this tabooed organization. "It would be best to announce here a more or less dogmatic hypothesis to which the writer will steadfastly adhere: that human behavior results from the rather simple, arithmetical combination of the inherited nature of man and the environment in which his maturing years are passed! Man will behave according to the hints for conduct which the accidents of his life have stamped into his memory mechanism. A slum produces a mind which has only slum incidents with which to work, and a spoiled and protected child seldom rises to aggressive competitive behavior, simply because its past life has stored up no memory imprints from which a predisposition to vigorous life can be built. The particular things called the moral attributes of man's conduct are conventionally found by contrasting this educated and trained way of acting with the exigencies and social needs or dangers of the time. 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. Crime and treason are habit-activities, educated into man by environmental influences favorable to their development. . . . "The I.W.W. can be profitably viewed only as a psychological by-product of the neglected childhood of industrial America. It is discouraging to see the problem to-day examined almost exclusively from the point of view of its relation to patriotism and conventional ventional commercial morality. . . . "It is perhaps of value to quote the language of the most influential of the I.W.W. leaders. "'You ask me why the I.W.W. is not patriotic to the United States. If you were a bum without a blanket; if you left your wife and kids when you went West for a job, and had never located them since; if your job never kept you long enough in a place to qualify you to vote; if you slept in a lousy, sour bunk-house, and ate food just as rotten as they could give you and get by with it; if deputy sheriffs shot your cooking-cans full of holes and spilled your grub on the ground; if your wages were lowered on you when the bosses thought they had you down; if there was one law for Ford, Suhr, and Mooney, and another for Harry Thaw; if every person who represented law and order and the nation beat you up, railroaded you to jail, and the good Christian people cheered and told them to go to it, how in hell do you expect a man to be patriotic? This war is a business man's war and we don't see why we should go out and get shot in order to save the lovely state of affairs that we now enjoy.' "The argument was rather difficult to keep productive, because gratitude—that material prerequisite to patriotism—seemed wanting in their attitude toward the American government. Their state of mind could be explained only by referring it, as was earlier suggested, to its major relationships. The dominating concern of the I.W.W. is what Keller calls the maintenance problem. Their philosophy is, in its simple reduction, a stomach-philosophy, and their politico-industrial revolt could be called without injustice a hunger-riot. But there is an important correction to this simple statement. While their way of living has seriously encroached on the urgent minima of nutrition, shelter, clothing, and physical health, it has also long outraged the American laboring-class traditions touching social life, sex-life, self-dignity, and ostentation. Had the food and shelter been sufficient, the revolt tendencies might have simmered out, were the migratory labor population not keenly sensitive to traditions of a richer psychological life than mere physical maintenance." The temper of the country on this subject, the general closed attitude of mind which the average man holds thereon, prompt me to add here a few more of Carl's generalizations and conclusions in this article. If only he were here, to cry aloud again and yet again on this point! Yet I know there are those who sense his approach, and are endeavoring in every way possible to make wisdom prevail over prejudice. "Cynical disloyalty and contempt of the flag must, in the light of modern psychology, come from a mind which is devoid of national gratitude, and in which the United States stirs no memory of satisfaction or happiness. To those of us who normally feel loyal to the nation, such a disloyal sentiment brings sharp indignation. As an index of our own sentiment and our own happy relations to the nation, this indignation has value. 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. To those who have seen at first-hand the life of the western casual laborer, any reflections on his gratitude or spiritual buoyancy seem ironical humor. "An altogether unwarranted importance has been given to the syndicalist philosophy of the I.W.W. A few leaders use its phraseology. Of these few, not half a dozen know the meaning of French syndicalism or English guild socialism. To the great wandering rank and file, the I.W.W. is simply the only social break in the harsh search for work that they have ever had; its headquarters the only competitor of the saloon in which they are welcome. . . . "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. It is unfortunate that the scientific findings of our social condition must use words which sound strangely like the phraseology of the Socialists. This similarity, however, should logically be embarrassing to the critics of these findings, not to the scientists. Those who have investigated and studied the lower strata of American labor have long recognized the I.W.W. as purely a symptom of a certain distressing state of affairs. The casual migratory laborers are the finished product of an economic environment which seems cruelly efficient in turning out human beings modeled after all the standards which society abhors. 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. "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." In this same connection I quote from another article:— "No one doubts the full propriety of the government's suppressing ruthlessly any interference of the I.W.W. with war-preparation. All patriots should just as vehemently protest against all suppression of the normal protest activities of the I.W.W. There will be neither permanent peace nor prosperity in our country till the revolt basis of the I.W.W. is removed. And until that is done, the I.W.W. remains an unfortunate, valuable symptom of a diseased industrialism." <hr style='width: 45%;' /> I watch, along with many others, the growth of bitterness and hysteria in the treatment of labor spreading throughout our country, and I long, with many others, for Carl, with his depth and sanity of understanding, coupled with his passion for justice and democracy, to be somewhere in a position of guidance for these troublous times. I am reminded here of a little incident that took place just at this time. An I.W.W. was to come out to have dinner with us—some other friends, faculty people, also were to be there. About noon the telephone rang. Carl went. A rich Irish brogue announced: "R—— can't come to your party to-night." "Why is that?" "He's pinched. An' he wants t' know can he have your Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' to read while he's in jail." <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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