As soon as the I.W.W. article was done, Carl had to begin on his paper
to be read before the Economic Association, just after Christmas, in
Philadelphia. That was fun working over. "Come up here and let me read
you this!" And we'd go over that much of the paper together. Then more
reading to Miss Van Doren, more correctings, finally finishing it just
the day before he had to leave. But that was partly because he had to
leave earlier than expected. The Government had telegraphed him to go on
to Washington, to mediate a threatened longshoremen's strike. Carl
worked harder over the longshoremen than over any other single labor
difficulty, not excepting the eight-hour day in lumber. Here again I do
not feel free to go into details. The matter was finally, at Carl's
suggestion, taken to Washington.
The longshoremen interested Carl for the same reason that the migratory
and the I.W.W. interested him; in fact, there were many I.W.W. among
them. It was the lower stratum of the labor-world--hard physical labor,
irregular work, and, on the whole, undignified treatment by the men set
over them. And they reacted as Carl expected men in such a position to
react. Yet, on the side of the workers, he felt that in this particular
instance it was a case of men being led by stubborn egotistical union
delegates not really representing the wishes of the rank and file of
union members, their main idea being to compromise on nothing. On the
other hand, be it said that he considered the employers he had to deal
with here the fairest, most open-minded, most anxious to compromise in
the name of justice, of all the groups of employers he ever had to deal
with. The whole affair was nerve-racking, as is best illustrated by the
fact that, while Carl was able to hold the peace as long as he was on
the job, three days after his death the situation "blew up."
On his way East he stopped off in Spokane, to talk with the lumbermen
east of the mountains. There, at a big meeting, he was able to put over
the eight-hour day. The Wilson Mediation Commission was in Seattle at
the time. Felix Frankfurter telephoned out his congratulations to me,
and said: "We consider it the single greatest achievement of its kind
since the United States entered the war." The papers were full of it and
excitement ran high. President Wilson was telegraphed to by the Labor
Commission, and he in turn telegraphed back his pleasure. In addition,
the East Coast lumbermen agreed to Carl's scheme of an employment
manager for their industry, and detailed him to find a man for the job
while in the East. My, but I was excited!
Not only that, but they bade fair to let him inaugurate a system which
would come nearer than any chance he could have expected to try out on a
big scale his theories on the proper handling of labor. The men were to
have the sanest recreation devisable for their needs and
interests--out-of-door sports, movies, housing that would permit of
dignified family life, recreation centres, good and proper food,
alteration in the old order of "hire and fire," and general control over
the men. Most employers argued: "Don't forget that the type of men we
have in the lumber camps won't know how to make use of a single reform
you suggest, and probably won't give a straw for the whole thing." To
which Carl would reply: "Don't forget that your old conditions have
drawn the type of man you have. This won't change men over-night by a
long shot, but it will at once relieve the tension--and see, in five
years, if your type itself has not undergone a change."
From Washington, D.C., he wrote: "This city is one mad mess of men,
desolate, and hunting for folks they should see, overcharged by hotels,
and away from their wives." The red-letter event of Washington was when
he was taken for tea to Justice Brandeis's. "We talked I.W.W.,
unemployment, etc., and he was oh, so grand!" A few days later, two days
before Christmas, Mrs. Brandeis telephoned and asked him for Christmas
dinner! That was a great event in the Parker annals--Justice Brandeis
having been a hero among us for some years. 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."
There were sessions with Gompers, Meyer Bloomfield, Secretary Baker,
Secretary Daniels, the Shipping Board, and many others.
Then, at Philadelphia, came the most telling single event of our
economic lives--Carl's paper before the Economic Association on "Motives
in Economic Life." At the risk of repeating to some extent the ideas
quoted from previous papers, I shall record here a few statements from
this one, as it gives the last views he held on his field of work.
"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.
The anxiety and apprehension of the economist should not be produced by
this cracking of his economic system, but by the poverty of the
criticism of industrialism which his science offers. Why are economists
mute in the presence of a most obvious crisis in our industrial society?
Why have our criticisms of industrialism no sturdy warnings about this
unhappy evolution? Why does an agitated officialdom search to-day in
vain among our writings, for scientific advice touching
labor-inefficiency or industrial disloyalty, for prophecies and plans
about the rise in our industrialism of economic classes unharmonious and
hostile?
"The fair answer seems this: We economists speculate little on human
motives. We are not curious about the great basis of fact which dynamic
and behavioristic psychology has gathered to illustrate the instinct
stimulus to human activity. Most of us are not interested to think of
what a psychologically full or satisfying life is. We are not curious to
know that a great school of behavior analysis called the Freudian has
been built around the analysis of the energy outbursts brought by
society's balking of the native human instincts. Our economic literature
shows that we are but rarely curious to know whether industrialism is
suited to man's inherited nature, or what man in turn will do to our
rules of economic conduct in case these rules are repressive. The
motives to economic activity which have done the major service in
orthodox economic texts and teachings have been either the vague
middle-class virtues of thrift, justice, and solvency, or the equally
vague moral sentiments of 'striving for the welfare of others,' 'desire
for the larger self,' 'desire to equip one's self well,' or, lastly, the
labor-saving deduction that man is stimulated in all things economic by
his desire to satisfy his wants with the smallest possible effort. All
this gentle parody in motive theorizing continued contemporaneously with
the output of the rich literature of social and behavioristic
psychology which was almost entirely addressed to this very problem of
human motives in modern economic society. Noteworthy exceptions are the
remarkable series of books by Veblen, the articles and criticisms of
Mitchell and Patten, and the most significant small book by Taussig,
entitled 'Inventors and Money-makers.' It is this complementary field of
psychology to which the economists must turn, as these writers have
turned, for a vitalization of their basic hypotheses. There awaits them
a bewildering array of studies of the motives, emotions, and folkways of
our pecuniary civilization. Generalizations and experiment statistics
abound, ready-made for any structure of economic criticism. The human
motives are isolated, described, compared. Business confidence, the
release of work-energy, advertising appeal, market vagaries, the basis
of value computations, decay of workmanship, the labor unrest, decline
in the thrift habit, are the subjects treated.
"All human activity is untiringly actuated by the demand for realization
of the instinct wants. If an artificially limited field of human
endeavor be called economic life, all its so-called motives hark
directly back to the human instincts for their origin. _There are, in
truth, no economic motives as such._ 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. His business raid
into his rival's market has the same naïve charm that tickled the heart
of his remote ancestor when in the night he rushed the herds of a
near-by clan. A manufacturer tries to tell a conventional world that he
resists the closed shop because it is un-American, it loses him money,
or it is inefficient. A few years ago he was more honest, when he said
he would run his business as he wished and would allow no man to tell
him what to do. His instinct of leadership, reinforced powerfully by his
innate instinctive revulsion to the confinement of the closed shop, gave
the true stimulus. His opposition is psychological, not ethical."
He then goes on to catalogue and explain the following instincts which
he considered of basic importance in any study of economics: (1)
gregariousness; (2) parental bent, motherly behavior, kindliness; (3)
curiosity, manipulation, workmanship; (4) acquisition, collecting,
ownership; (5) fear and flight; (6) mental activity, thought; (7) the
housing or settling instinct; (8) migration, homing; (9) hunting
("Historic revivals of hunting urge make an interesting recital of
religious inquisitions, witch-burnings, college hazings, persecution of
suffragettes, of the I.W.W., of the Japanese, or of pacifists. All this
goes on often under naïve rationalization about justice and patriotism,
but it is pure and innate lust to run something down and hurt it"); (10)
anger, pugnacity; (11) revolt at confinement, at being limited in
liberty of action and choice; (12) revulsion; (13) leadership and
mastery; (14) subordination, submission; (15) display, vanity,
ostentation; (166) sex.
After quoting from Professor Cannon, and discussing the contributions
that his studies have made to the subject of man's reaction to his
immediate environment, he continues:--
"The conclusion seems both scientific and logical, that behavior in
anger, fear, pain, and hunger is a basically different behavior from
behavior under repose and economic security. The emotions generated
under the conditions of existence-peril seem to make the emotions and
motives generative in quiet and peace pale and unequal. It seems
impossible to avoid the conclusion that the most vital part of man's
inheritance is one which destines him to continue for some myriads of
years ever a fighting animal when certain conditions exist in his
environment. Though, through education, man be habituated in social and
intelligent behavior or, through license, in sexual debauchery, still,
at those times when his life or liberty is threatened, his
instinct-emotional nature will inhibit either social thought or sex
ideas, and present him as merely an irrational fighting animal. . . .
"The instincts and their emotions, coupled with the obedient body, lay
down in scientific and exact description the motives which must and will
determine human conduct. If a physical environment set itself against
the expression of these instinct motives, the human organism is fully
and efficiently prepared for a tenacious and destructive revolt against
this environment; and if the antagonism persist, the organism is ready
to destroy itself and disappear as a species if it fail of a psychical
mutation which would make the perverted order endurable."
And in conclusion, he states:--
"The dynamic psychology of to-day describes the present civilization as
a repressive environment. For a great number of its inhabitants a
sufficient self-expression is denied. There is, for those who care to
see, a deep and growing unrest and pessimism. With the increase in
knowledge is coming a new realization of the irrational direction of
economic evolution. The economists, however, view economic inequality
and life-degradation as objects in truth outside the science. Our
value-concept is a price-mechanism hiding behind a phrase. 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. The extent and
characteristics of this evil are to be estimated only when we know the
innate potentialities and inherited propensities of man; and the
ordering of this knowledge and its application to the changeable
economic structure is the task before the trained economist to-day."
A little later I saw one of the big men who was at that Economic
Association meeting, and he said: "I don't see why Parker isn't
spoiled. He was the most talked-about man at the Convention." Six
publishing houses wrote, after that paper, to see if he could enlarge it
into a book. Somehow it did seem as if now more than ever the world was
ours. We looked ahead into the future, and wondered if it could seem as
good to any one as it did to us. It was almost _too_ good--we were dazed
a bit by it. It is one of the things I just cannot let myself ever think
of--that future and the plans we had. Anything I can ever do now would
still leave life so utterly dull by comparison.