<h2><SPAN name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></SPAN>CHAPTER IX</h2>
<p>The second term in California had just got well under way when
Carl was offered the position of Executive Secretary in the State
Immigration and Housing Commission of California. I remember so
well the night he came home about midnight and told me. I am afraid
the financial end would have determined us, even if the work itself
had small appeal—which, however, was not the case. The salary
offered was $4000. We were getting $1500 at the University. We were
$2000 in debt from our European trip, and saw no earthly chance of
ever paying it out of our University salary. We figured that we
could be square with the world in one year on a $4000 salary, and
then need never be swayed by financial considerations again. So
Carl accepted the new job. It was the wise thing to do anyway, as
matters turned out. It threw him into direct contact for the first
time with the migratory laborer and the I.W.W. It gave him his
first bent in the direction of labor-psychology, which was to
become his intellectual passion, and he was fired with a zeal that
never left him, to see that there should be less unhappiness and
inequality in the world.</p>
<p>The concrete result of Carl's work with the Immigration
Commission was the clean-up of labor camps all over California.
From unsanitary, fly-ridden, dirty makeshifts were developed
ordered sanitary housing accommodations, designed and executed by
experts in their fields. Also he awakened, through countless talks
up and down the State, some understanding of the I.W.W. and his
problem; although, judging from the newspapers nowadays, his work
would seem to have been almost forgotten. As the phrase went,
"Carleton Parker put the migratory on the map."</p>
<p>I think of the Wheatland Hop-Fields riot, or the Ford and Suhr
case, which Carl was appointed to investigate for the Federal
government, as the dramatic incident which focused his attention on
the need of a deeper approach to a sound understanding of labor and
its problems, and which, in turn, justified Mr. Bruère in
stating in the "New Republic": "Parker was the first of our
Economists, not only to analyse the psychology of labor and
especially of casual labor, but also to make his analysis the basis
for an applied technique of industrial and social reconstruction."
Also, that was the occasion of his concrete introduction to the
I.W.W. He wrote an account of it, later, for the "Survey," and an
article on "The California Casual and His Revolt" for the
"Quarterly Journal of Economics," in November, 1915.</p>
<p>It is all interesting enough, I feel, to warrant going into some
detail.</p>
<p>The setting of the riot is best given in the article above
referred to, "The California Casual and His Revolt."</p>
<p>"The story of the Wheatland hop-pickers' riot is as simple as
the facts of it are new and naïve in strike histories.
Twenty-eight hundred pickers were camped on a treeless hill which
was part of the —— ranch, the largest single employer
of agricultural labor in the state. Some were in tents, some in
topless squares of sacking, or with piles of straw. There was no
organization for sanitation, no garbage-disposal. The temperature
during the week of the riot had remained near 105°, and though
the wells were a mile from where the men, women, and children were
picking, and their bags could not be left for fear of theft of the
hops, no water was sent into the fields. A lemonade wagon appeared
at the end of the week, later found to be a concession granted to a
cousin of the ranch owner. Local Wheatland stores were forbidden to
send delivery wagons to the camp grounds. It developed in the state
investigation that the owner of the ranch received half of the net
profits earned by an alleged independent grocery store, which had
been granted the 'grocery concession' and was located in the centre
of the camp ground. . . .</p>
<p>"The pickers began coming to Wheatland on Tuesday, and by Sunday
the irritation over the wage-scale, the absence of water in the
fields, plus the persistent heat and the increasing indignity of
the camp, had resulted in mass meetings, violent talk, and a
general strike.</p>
<p>"The ranch owner, a nervous man, was harassed by the rush of
work brought on by the too rapidly ripening hops, and indignant at
the jeers and catcalls which greeted his appearance near the
meetings of the pickers. Confused with a crisis outside his slender
social philosophy, he acted true to his tradition, and perhaps his
type, and called on a sheriff's posse. What industrial relationship
had existed was too insecure to stand such a procedure. It
disappeared entirely, leaving in control the instincts and vagaries
of a mob on the one hand, and great apprehension and inexperience
on the other.</p>
<p>"As if a stage had been set, the posse arrived in automobiles at
the instant when the officially 'wanted' strike-leader was
addressing a mass meeting of excited men, women, and children.
After a short and typical period of skirmishing and the minor and
major events of arresting a person under such circumstances, a
member of the posse standing outside fired a double-barreled
shot-gun over the heads of the crowd, 'to sober them,' as he
explained it. Four men were killed—two of the posse and two
strikers; the posse fled in their automobiles to the county seat,
and all that night the roads out of Wheatland were filled with
pickers leaving the camp. Eight months later, two hop-pickers,
proved to be the leaders of the strike and its agitation, were
convicted of murder in the first degree and sentenced to life
imprisonment. Their appeal for a new trial was denied."</p>
<p>In his report to the Governor, written in 1914, Carl
characterized the case as follows:—</p>
<p>"The occurrence known as the Wheatland Hop-Fields riot took
place on Sunday afternoon, August 3, 1913. Growing discontent among
the hop-pickers over wages, neglected camp-sanitation and absence
of water in the fields had resulted in spasmodic meetings of
protest on Saturday and Sunday morning, and finally by Sunday noon
in a more or less involuntary strike. At five o'clock on Sunday
about one thousand pickers gathered about a dance pavilion to
listen to speakers. Two automobiles carrying a sheriff's posse
drove up to this meeting, and officials armed with guns and
revolvers attempted to disperse the crowd and to arrest, on a John
Doe warrant, Richard Ford, the apparent leader of the strike. In
the ensuing confusion shooting began and some twenty shots were
fired. Two pickers, a deputy sheriff, and the district attorney of
the county were killed. The posse fled and the camp remained
unpoliced until the State Militia arrived at dawn next morning.</p>
<p>"The occurrence has grown from a casual, though bloody, event in
California labor history into such a focus for discussion and
analysis of the State's great migratory labor-problem that the
incident can well be said to begin, for the commonwealth, a new and
momentous labor epoch.</p>
<p>"The problem of vagrancy; that of the unemployed and the
unemployable; the vexing conflict between the right of agitation
and free speech and the law relating to criminal conspiracy; the
housing and wages of agricultural laborers; the efficiency and
sense of responsibility found in a posse of country deputies; the
temper of the country people faced with the confusion and rioting
of a labor outbreak; all these problems have found a starting point
for their new and vigorous analysis in the Wheatland riot.</p>
<p>In the same report, submitted a year before the "Quarterly
Journal" article, and almost a year before his study of psychology
began, Carl wrote:—</p>
<p>"The manager and part-owner of the ranch is an example of a
certain type of California employer. The refusal of this type to
meet the social responsibilities which come with the hiring of
human beings for labor, not only works concrete and cruelly
unnecessary misery upon a class little able to combat personal
indignity and degradation, but adds fuel to the fire of resentment
and unrest which is beginning to burn in the uncared-for migratory
worker in California. That —— could refuse his clear
duty of real trusteeship of a camp on his own ranch, which
contained hundreds of women and children, is a social fact of
miserable import. The excuses we have heard of unpreparedness, of
alleged ignorance of conditions, are shamed by the proven human
suffering and humiliation repeated each day of the week, from
Wednesday to Sunday. Even where the employer's innate sense of
moral obligation fails to point out his duty, he should have
realized the insanity of stimulating unrest and bitterness in this
inflammable labor force. The riot on the —— ranch is a
California contribution to the literature of the social unrest in
America."</p>
<p>As to the "Legal and Economic Aspects" of the case, again
quoting from the report to the Governor:—</p>
<p>"The position taken by the defense and their sympathizers in the
course of the trial has not only an economic and social bearing,
but many arguments made before the court are distinct efforts to
introduce sociological modifications of the law which will have a
far-reaching effect on the industrial relations of capital and
labor. It is asserted that the common law, on which American
jurisprudence is founded, is known as an ever-developing law, which
must adapt itself to changing economic and social conditions; and,
in this connection, it is claimed that the established theories of
legal causation must be enlarged to include economic and social
factors in the chain of causes leading to a result. Concretely, it
is argued:—</p>
<p>"First, That, when unsanitary conditions lead to discontent so
intense that the crowd can be incited to bloodshed, those
responsible for the unsanitary conditions are to be held legally
responsible for the bloodshed, as well as the actual inciters of
the riot.</p>
<p>"Second, That, if the law will not reach out so far as to hold
the creator of unsanitary, unlivable conditions guilty of
bloodshed, at any rate such conditions excuse the inciters from
liability, because inciters are the involuntary transmitting agents
of an uncontrollable force set in motion by those who created the
unlivable conditions. . . .</p>
<p>"Furthermore, on the legal side, modifications of the law of
property are urged. It is argued that modern law no longer holds
the rights of private property sacred, that these rights are being
constantly regulated and limited, and that in the Wheatland case
the owner's traditional rights in relation to his own lands are to
be held subject to the right of the laborers to organize thereon.
It is urged that a worker on land has a 'property right in his
job,' and that he cannot be made to leave the job, or the land,
merely because he is trying to organize his fellow workers to make
a protest as to living and economic conditions. It is urged that
the organizing worker cannot be made to leave the job because the
job is <i>his</i> property and it is all that he has."</p>
<p>As to "The Remedy":—</p>
<p>"It is obvious that the violent strike methods adopted by the
I.W.W. type agitators, which only incidentally, although
effectively, tend to improve camp conditions, are not to be
accepted as a solution of the problem. It is also obvious that the
conviction of the agitators, such as Ford and Suhr, of murder, is
not a solution, but is only the punishment or revenge inflicted by
organized society for a past deed. The Remedy lies in
prevention.</p>
<p>"It is the opinion of your investigator that the improvement of
living conditions in the labor camps will have the immediate effect
of making the recurrence of impassioned, violent strikes and riots
not only improbable, but impossible; and furthermore, such
improvement will go far towards eradicating the hatred and
bitterness in the minds of the employers and in the minds of the
roving, migratory laborers. This accomplished, the two conflicting
parties will be in a position to meet on a saner, more constructive
basis, in solving the further industrial problems arising between
them. . . .</p>
<p>"They must come to realize that their own laxity in allowing the
existence of unsanitary and filthy conditions gives a much-desired
foothold to the very agitators of the revolutionary I.W.W.
doctrines whom they so dread; they must learn that unbearable,
aggravating living conditions inoculate the minds of the otherwise
peaceful workers with the germs of bitterness and violence, as so
well exemplified at the Wheatland riot, giving the agitators a
fruitful field wherein to sow the seeds of revolt and preach the
doctrine of direct action and sabotage.</p>
<p>"On the other hand, the migratory laborers must be shown that
revolts accompanied by force in scattered and isolated localities
not only involve serious breaches of law and lead to crime, but
that they accomplish no lasting constructive results in advancing
their cause.</p>
<p>"The Commission intends to furnish a clearinghouse to hear
complaints of grievances, of both sides, and act as a mediator or
safety-valve."</p>
<p>In the report to the Governor appear Carl's first writings on
the I.W.W.</p>
<p>"Of this entire labor force at the —— ranch, it
appears that some 100 had been I.W.W. 'card men,' or had had
affiliations with that organization. There is evidence that there
was in this camp a loosely caught together camp local of the
I.W.W., with about 30 active members. It is suggestive that these
30 men, through a spasmodic action, and with the aid of the
deplorable camp conditions, dominated a heterogeneous mass of 2800
unskilled laborers in 3 days. Some 700 or 800 of the force were of
the 'hobo' class, in every sense potential I.W.W. strikers. At
least 400 knew in a rough way the—for them curiously
attractive—philosophy of the I.W.W., and could also sing some
of its songs.</p>
<p>"Of the 100-odd 'card men' of the I.W.W., some had been through
the San Diego affair, some had been soap-boxers in Fresno, a dozen
had been in the Free Speech fight in Spokane. They sized up the
hop-field as a ripe opportunity, as the principal defendant,
'Blackie' Ford, puts it, 'to start something.' On Friday, two days
after picking began, the practical agitators began working through
the camp. Whether or not Ford came to the —— ranch to
foment trouble seems immaterial. There are five Fords in every camp
of seasonal laborers in California. We have devoted ourselves in
these weeks to such questions as this: 'How big a per cent of
California's migratory seasonal labor force know the technique of
an I.W.W. strike?' 'How many of the migratory laborers know when
conditions are ripe to "start something"?' We are convinced that
among the individuals of every fruit-farm labor group are many
potential strikers. Where a group of hoboes sit around a fire under
a railroad bridge, many of the group can sing I.W.W. songs without
the book. This was not so three years ago. The I.W.W. in California
is not a closely organized body, with a steady membership. The rank
and file know little of the technical organization of industrial
life which their written constitution demands. They listen eagerly
to the appeal for the 'solidarity' of their class. In the
dignifying of vagabondage through their crude but virile song and
verse, in the bitter vilification of the jail turnkey and county
sheriff, in their condemnation of the church and its formal social
work, they find the vindication of their hobo status which they
desire. They cannot sustain a live organization unless they have a
strike or free-speech fight to stimulate their spirit. It is in
their methods of warfare, not in their abstract philosophy or even
hatred of law and judges, that danger lies for organized society.
Since every one of the 5000 laborers in California who have been at
some time connected with the I.W.W. considers himself a 'camp
delegate' with walking papers to organize a camp local, this small
army is watching, as Ford did, for an unsanitary camp or low
wage-scale, to start the strike which will not only create a new
I.W.W. local, but bring fame to the organizer. This common
acceptance of direct action and sabotage as the rule of operation,
the songs and the common vocabulary are, we feel convinced, the
first stirring of a class expression.</p>
<p>"Class solidarity they have not. That may never come, for the
migratory laborer has neither the force nor the vision nor tenacity
to hold long enough to the ideal to attain it. But the I.W.W. is
teaching a method of action which will give this class in violent
flare-ups, such as that at Wheatland, expression.</p>
<p>"The dying away of the organization after the outburst is,
therefore, to be expected. Their social condition is a miserable
one. Their work, even at the best, must be irregular. They have
nothing to lose in a strike, and, as a leader put it, 'A riot and a
chance to blackguard a jailer is about the only intellectual fun we
have.'</p>
<p>"Taking into consideration the misery and physical privation and
the barren outlook of this life of the seasonal worker, the I.W.W.
movement, with all its irresponsible motive and unlawful action,
becomes in reality a class-protest, and the dignity which this
characteristic gives it perhaps alone explains the persistence of
the organization in the field.</p>
<p>"Those attending the protest mass-meeting of the Wheatland
hop-pickers were singing the I.W.W. song 'Mr. Block,' when the
sheriff's posse came up in its automobiles. The crowd had been
harangued by an experienced I.W.W. orator—'Blackie' Ford.
They had been told, according to evidence, to 'knock the blocks off
the scissor-bills.' Ford had taken a sick baby from its mother's
arms and, holding it before the eyes of the 1500 people, had cried
out: 'It's for the life of the kids we're doing this.' Not a
quarter of the crowd was of a type normally venturesome enough to
strike, and yet, when the sheriff went after Ford, he was knocked
down and kicked senseless by infuriated men. In the bloody riot
which then ensued, District Attorney Manwell, Deputy Sheriff
Riordan, a negro Porto Rican and the English boy were shot and
killed. Many were wounded. The posse literally fled, and the camp
remained practically unpoliced until the State Militia arrived at
dawn the next day.</p>
<p>"The question of social responsibility is one of the deepest
significance. The posse was, I am convinced, over-nervous and,
unfortunately, over-rigorous. This can be explained in part by the
state-wide apprehension over the I.W.W.; in part by the normal
California country posse's attitude toward a labor trouble. A
deputy sheriff, at the most critical moment, fired a shot in the
air, as he stated, 'to sober the crowd.' There were armed men in
the crowd, for every crowd of 2000 casual laborers includes a score
of gunmen. Evidence goes to show that even the gentler mountainfolk
in the crowd had been aroused to a sense of personal injury.
——'s automobile had brought part of the posse.
Numberless pickers cling to the belief that the posse was
'——'s police.' When Deputy Sheriff Dakin shot into the
air, a fusillade took place; and when he had fired his last shell,
an infuriated crowd of men and women chased him to the ranch store,
where he was forced to barricade himself. The crowd was dangerous
and struck the first blow. The murderous temper which turned the
crowd into a mob is incompatible with social existence, let alone
social progress. The crowd at the moment of the shooting was a wild
and lawless animal. But to your investigator the important subject
to analyze is not the guilt or innocence of Ford or Suhr, as the
direct stimulators of the mob in action, but to name and
standardize the early and equally important contributors to a
psychological situation which resulted in an unlawful killing. If
this is done, how can we omit either the filth of the hop-ranch,
the cheap gun-talk of the ordinary deputy sheriff, or the
unbridled, irresponsible speech of the soap-box orator?</p>
<p>"Without doubt the propaganda which the I.W.W. had actually
adopted for the California seasonal worker can be, in its fairly
normal working out in law, a criminal conspiracy, and under that
charge, Ford and Suhr have been found guilty of the Wheatland
murder. But the important fact is, that this propaganda will be
carried out, whether unlawful or not. We have talked hours with the
I.W.W. leaders, and they are absolutely conscious of their position
in the eyes of the law. Their only comment is that they are glad,
if it must be a conspiracy, that it is a criminal conspiracy. They
have volunteered the beginning of a cure; it is to clean up the
housing and wage problem of the seasonal worker. The shrewdest
I.W.W. leader we found said: 'We can't agitate in the country
unless things are rotten enough to bring the crowd along.' They
evidently were in Wheatland."</p>
<p>He was high ace with the Wobbly for a while. They invited him to
their Jungles, they carved him presents in jail. I remember a talk
he gave on some phase of the California labor-problem one Sunday
night, at the Congregational church in Oakland. The last three rows
were filled with unshaven hoboes, who filed up afterwards, to the
evident distress of the clean regular church-goers, to clasp his
hand. They withdrew their allegiance after a time, which naturally
in no way phased Carl's scientific interest in them. A paper
hostile to Carl's attitude on the I.W.W. and his insistence on the
clean-up of camps published an article portraying him as a
double-faced individual who feigned an interest in the under-dog
really to undo him, as he was at heart and pocket-book a
capitalist, being the possessor of an independent income of
$150,000 a year. Some I.W.W.'s took this up, and convinced a large
meeting that he was really trying to sell them out. It is not only
the rich who are fickle. Some of them remained his firm friends
always, however. That summer two of his students hoboed it till
they came down with malaria, in the meantime turning in a fund of
invaluable facts regarding the migratory and his life.</p>
<p>A year later, in his article in the "Quarterly Journal," and, be
it remembered, after his study of psychology had begun, Carl
wrote:—</p>
<p>"There is here, beyond a doubt, a great laboring population
experiencing a high suppression of normal instincts and traditions.
There can be no greater perversion of a desirable existence than
this insecure, under-nourished, wandering life, with its sordid
sex-expression and reckless and rare pleasures. Such a life leads
to one of two consequences: either a sinking of the class to a low
and hopeless level, where they become, through irresponsible
conduct and economic inefficiency, a charge upon society; or revolt
and guerrilla labor warfare.</p>
<p>"The migratory laborers, as a class, are the finished product of
an environment which seems cruelly efficient in turning out beings
moulded after all the standards society abhors. Fortunately the
psychologists have made it unnecessary to explain that there is
nothing willful or personally reprehensible in the vagrancy of
these vagrants. Their histories show that, starting with the long
hours and dreary winters of the farms they ran away from, through
their character-debasing experience with irregular industrial
labor, on to the vicious economic life of the winter unemployed,
their training predetermined but one outcome. Nurture has triumphed
over nature; the environment has produced its type. Difficult
though the organization of these people may be, a coincidence of
favoring conditions may place an opportunity in the hands of a
super-leader. If this comes, one can be sure that California will
be both very astonished and very misused."</p>
<p>I was told only recently of a Belgian economics professor, out
here in California during the war, on official business connected
with aviation. He asked at once to see Carl, but was told we had
moved to Seattle. "My colleagues in Belgium asked me to be sure and
see Professor Parker," he said, "as we consider him the one man in
America who understands the problem of the migratory laborer."</p>
<p>That winter Carl got the city of San José to stand behind
a model unemployed lodging-house, one of the two students who had
"hoboed" during the summer taking charge of it. The unemployed
problem, as he ran into it at every turn, stirred Carl to his
depths. At one time he felt it so strongly that he wanted to start
a lodging-house in Berkeley, himself, just to be helping out
somehow, even though it would be only surface help.</p>
<p>It was also about this time that California was treated to the
spectacle of an Unemployed Army, which was driven from pillar to
post,—or, in this case, from town to town,—each trying
to outdo the last in protestations of unhospitality. Finally, in
Sacramento the fire-hoses were turned on the army. At that Carl
flamed with indignation, and expressed himself in no mincing terms,
both to the public and to the reporter who sought his views. He was
no hand to keep clippings, but I did come across one of his milder
interviews in the San Francisco "Bulletin" of March 11, 1914.</p>
<p>"That California's method of handling the unemployed problem is
in accord with the 'careless, cruel and unscientific attitude of
society on the labor question,' is the statement made to-day by
Professor Carleton H. Parker, Assistant Professor of Industrial
economy, and secretary of the State Immigration Committee.</p>
<p>"'There are two ways of looking at this winter's unemployed
problem,' said Dr. Parker; 'one is fatally bad and the other
promises good. One way is shallow and biased; the other strives to
use the simple rules of science for the analysis of any problem.
One way is to damn the army of the unemployed and the
irresponsible, irritating vagrants who will not work. The other way
is to admit that any such social phenomenon as this army is just as
normal a product of our social organization as our own
university.</p>
<p>"'Much street-car and ferry analysis of this problem that I have
overheard seems to believe that this army created its own degraded
self, that a vagrant is a vagrant from personal desire and
perversion. This analysis is as shallow as it is untrue. If
unemployment and vagrancy are the product of our careless,
indifferent society over the half-century, then its cure will come
only by a half-century's careful regretful social labor by this
same tardy society.</p>
<p>"'The riot at Sacramento is merely the appearance of the problem
from the back streets into the strong light. The handling of the
problem there is unhappily in accord with the careless, cruel
attitude of society on this question. We are willing to respect the
anxiety of Sacramento, threatened in the night with this
irresponsible, reckless invasion; but how can the city demand of
vagrants observance of the law, when they drop into mob-assertion
the minute the problem comes up to them?'"</p>
<p>The illustration he always used to express his opinion of the
average solution of unemployment, I quote from a paper of his on
that subject, written in the spring of 1915.</p>
<p>"There is an old test for insanity which is made as follows: the
suspect is given a cup, and is told to empty a bucket into which
water is running from a faucet. If the suspect turns off the water
before he begins to bail out the bucket, he is sane. Nearly all the
current solutions of unemployment leave the faucet running. . .
.</p>
<p>"The heart of the problem, the cause, one might well say, of
unemployment, is that the employment of men regularly or
irregularly is at no time an important consideration of those minds
which control industry. Social organization has ordered it that
these minds shall be interested only in achieving a reasonable
profit in the manufacture and the sale of goods. Society has never
demanded that industries be run even in part to give men
employment. Rewards are not held out for such a policy, and
therefore it is unreasonable to expect such a performance. Though a
favorite popular belief is that we must 'work to live,' we have no
current adage of a 'right to work.' This winter there are shoeless
men and women, closed shoe-factories, and destitute shoemakers;
children in New England with no woolen clothing, half-time woolen
mills, and unemployed spinners and weavers. Why? Simply because the
mills cannot turn out the reasonable business profit; and since
that is the only promise that can galvanize them into activity,
they stand idle, no matter how much humanity finds of misery and
death in this decision. This statement is not a peroration to a
declaration for Socialism. It seems a fair rendering of the
matter-of-fact logic of the analysis.</p>
<p>"It seems hopeless, and also unfair, to expect out-of-work
insurance, employment bureaus, or philanthropy, to counteract the
controlling force of profit-seeking. There is every reason to
believe that profit-seeking has been a tremendous stimulus to
economic activity in the past. It is doubtful if the present great
accumulation of capital would have come into existence without it.
But to-day it seems as it were to be caught up by its own social
consequences. It is hard to escape from the insistence of a
situation in which the money a workman makes in a year fails to
cover the upkeep of his family; and this impairment of the father's
income through unemployment has largely to be met by child-and
woman-labor. The Federal Immigration Commission's report shows that
in not a single great American industry can the average yearly
income of the father keep his family. Seven hundred and fifty
dollars is the bare minimum for the maintenance of the
average-sized American industrial family. The average yearly
earnings of the heads of families working in the United States in
the iron and steel industry is $409; in bituminous coal-mining
$451; in the woolen industry $400; in silk $448; in cotton $470; in
clothing $530; in boots and shoes $573; in leather $511; in
sugar-refining $549; in the meat industry $578; in furniture $598,
etc.</p>
<p>"He who decries created work, municipal lodging-houses,
bread-lines, or even sentimental charity, in the face of the
winter's destitution, has an unsocial soul. The most despicable
thing to-day is the whine of our cities lest their inadequate
catering to their own homeless draw a few vagrants from afar. But
when the agony of our winter makeshifting is by, will a sufficient
minority of our citizens rise and demand that the best technical,
economic, and sociological brains in our wealthy nation devote
themselves with all courage and honesty to the problem of
unemployment?"</p>
<p>Carl was no diplomat, in any sense of the word—above all,
no political diplomat. It is a wonder that the Immigration and
Housing Commission stood behind him as long as it did. He grew
rabid at every political appointment which, in his eyes, hampered
his work. It was evident, so they felt, that he was not tactful in
his relations with various members of the Commission. It all galled
him terribly, and after much consultation at home, he handed in his
resignation. During the first term of his secretaryship, from
October to December, he carried his full-time University work. From
January to May he had a seminar only, as I remember. From August on
he gave no University work at all; so, after asking to have his
resignation from the Commission take effect at once, he had at once
to find something to do to support his family.</p>
<p>This was in October, 1914, after just one year as Executive
Secretary. We were over in Contra Costa County then, on a little
ranch of my father's. Berkeley socially had come to be too much of
a strain, and, too, we wanted the blessed sons to have a real
country experience. Ten months we were there. Three days after Carl
resigned, he was on his way to Phoenix, Arizona,—where there
was a threatened union tie-up,—as United States Government
investigator of the labor situation. He added thereby to his
first-hand stock of labor-knowledge, made a firm friend of Governor
Hunt,—he was especially interested in his prison
policy,—and in those few weeks was the richer by one more of
the really intimate friendships one counts on to the
last—Will Scarlett.</p>
<p>He wrote, on Carl's death, "What a horrible, hideous loss! Any
of us could so easily have been spared; that he, who was of such
value, had to go seems such an utter waste. . . . He was one of
that very, very small circle of men, whom, in the course of our
lives, we come <i>really</i> to love. His friendship meant so
much—though I heard but infrequently from him, there was the
satisfaction of a deep friendship that was <i>always there</i> and
<i>always the same</i>. He would have gone so far! I have looked
forward to a great career for him, and had such pride in him. It's
too hideous!"</p>
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