An American Idyll
By . Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press. 1919. Portrait frontispiece. Crown 8vo, vi + 190 pp. $1.75.
THE typical American once again. How well we know him! Lover of liberty, lover of country, lover of men; homespun idealist and champion of the plain people. Great names at random recall him: Sam Adams, Lincoln, Emerson, Lowell, Whitman, Cleveland, Roosevelt — and now this young Westerner just emerging from obscurity, dead on the threshold of the House of Fame, but nobly true to type.
The portions of the Idyll printed in the Atlantic, chosen as they were to emphasize the purely human side of the man, his relations with his family and friends, his magnetism and temperamental boyishness, could not do full justice to his serious intellectual qualities or to his originality as a thinker in social economics. This aspect
Mrs. Parker brings out through well-chosen quotations from her husband’s addresses and magazine articles, giving an intelligent exposition of his theory of labor-psychology, and emphasizing the analysis of the motives of migratory labor, which is his distinctive contribution to economic theory. These chapters give dignity and body to a book which might otherwise seem too exclusively occupied with the superlatively happy married life of the effervescent young Parkers.
Of the reticence which is customary in family chronicles there is not a trace. None of the ordinary inhibitions of custom or of diffidence restrain the author from sharing her domestic intimacies with the outer world. For her they are an inexhaustible treasure-house, with doors open wide for every chance comer. Nobody with what Easterners call a ‘ background ’ could conceivably have written this book; nobody who has ever felt the repressive hand of an ancestor or been conscious of the bond which custom forges. Mrs. Parker is not thinking of the world. She is thinking of her husband. Under the spell of that pure and passionate remembrance Carleton Parker lives again, and his story becomes a kind of parable of the vital spirit in American life.
What books would come to if every biographer loosed at will the flood-gates of the past is quite another thing, but this happily is not the place for a discussion of this fruitful topic. Many readers, however, who gladly forgive the candor of the story for the sake of its electric interest, may criticize Mrs. Parker for allowing her husband’s slang to bubble so irrepressibly through these pages. The ecstatic ‘Gee’s’ of his conversation bring out the boy in him with a fidelity that most biographers would hardly dare to face, but risk an impression of immaturity and crudeness not justified by the facts. The practical economist who was mediating strikes through the crucial years of war, using his broad sympathies and expert knowledge in efforts toward industrial peace acceptable to both sides, was handling large problems with mature American judgment. Mrs. Parker would be the last to wish to obscure this fact.
In nothing perhaps is Carleton Parker’s short career more typical than in its untiring zest for constructive work. He gave his life in the great American adventure of making a living — not his own living merely, but everybody’s living; the adventure which supplies the vital spark in all schools of economics. In those last hurried months before he died, when he was organizing his new department at the University of Washington, Parker was also attending conferences on lumber-production, street-car arbitrations, making three cost-of-living surveys for the government, and conducting thirty-two strike mediations! Struck down by overwork in the cause of the common man, he died for his country as truly as those other Americans of 1918, who gave their lives upon the field of France.
S. C.