David MacLean Parry | |
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 Portrait of David MacLean Parry | |
| Born | February 28, 1830 |
| Died | May 12, 1915 |
Burial place | Crown Hill Cemetery and Arboretum, Section 14, Lot 6 39°49′12″N 86°10′33″W / 39.8199038°N 86.1759133°W |
| Spouse | Hessie Daisy Maxwell |
| Children | Lydia Maxwell Parry, Cora Parry Oakes, Lydia Maxwell Parry Teasdale, Maxwell Oswald Parry, David MacLean Parry Jr. |
David MacLean Parry (26 March 1852—12 May 1915) was an American industrialist and writer.
David MacLean Parry was born on a farm near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He worked briefly as a clerk, a traveling salesman, a reporter on The New York Herald and later became a successful businessman. He was president of Parry Manufacturing Co., and Parry Oil and Pipe Line Co., the Parry Auto Co.
Parry served for a time as president of the American Educational Society, the Citizens' Industrial Association of America and the National Association of Manufacturers.
Parry was well known for being extremely hostile to labor unions and workers' rights. He authored the anti-socialistic dystopian novel The Scarlet Empire. The book was written as a satirical counterblast to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. He was a thirty-second degree Mason, a Shriner, and an Odd Fellow.
The entire program of organized labor is comprised in the two words, 'get more.'... The program of getting more, however, involves the strike and the violence attendant upon it; the boycott and the intolerable cowardice attendant upon it; the picket, and the marauding and murder about the mill which are attendant upon it. The peaceful strike, which might be called the walkout pure and simple, is purely a misnomer. If the men simply walked out and did no more, their places could be filled, and doubtless would be filled; sometimes, possibly, by a considerable proportion, perhaps seventy per cent., of the union men themselves who had walked out, because of the belief on, the part of that majority that as well as they could do under the circumstances was well enough for the present. The strike can not be made effective without the picket or the boycott. The strike can not help breeding violence; the boycott can not help becoming a conspiracy.
The commonest of all objections to the socialist ideal is that a state of socialism would, endanger individual liberty. From such unimaginative novelists as Eugen Richter and David M. Parry, whose conceptions of the socialist commonwealth are those of the modern factory regulations extended to the scope of a national order, up to the thinker of the keenness of mind and universality of knowledge of Herbert Spencer who asserts that "all socialism implies slavery," all bourgeois philosophers seem to take it for granted that mankind is to-day enjoying a large measure of individual freedom and that socialism would greatly curtail if not entirely suppress it.
It is obvious from the evidence of The Scarlet Empire that Parry considered Bellamy and his ideas, like other reforms and remedies of the time, no more than snares and delusions that could only be detrimental in their consequences. They would lead not to prosperity, progress, and an improved human race but in exactly the opposite direction. Ultimately, they would lead to tyranny and, if we take Parry literally, to cataclysmic disaster. The novel describes not only the consequences of such mistaken notions but also explains why, in Parry's view, these consequences were inevitable.
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