An American Idyll Part 4

The red-letter event of that term was when, after about two months of teaching, President Wheeler rang up one evening about seven,--one of the four evenings, as it happened, we were at home together,--and said: "I thought I should like the pleasure of telling you personally, though you will receive official notice in the morning, that you have been made an a.s.sistant professor. We expected you to make good, but we did not expect you to make good to such a degree quite so soon."

Again an occasion for a spree! We tore out hatless across the campus, nearly demolishing the head of the College of Commerce as we rounded the Library. He must know the excitement. He was pleased. He slipped his hand into his pocket saying, "I must have a hand in this celebration."

And with a royal gesture, as who should say, "What matter the costs!"

slipped a dime into Carl's hand. "Spend it all to-night."

Thus we were started on our a.s.sistant professorship. But always before and always after, to the students Carl was just "Doc."

I remember a story he told of how his chief stopped him one afternoon at the north gate to the university, and said he was discouraged and distressed. Carl was getting the reputation of being popular with the students, and that would never do. "I don't wish to hear more of such rumors." Just then the remnants of the internals of a Ford, hung together with picture wire and painted white, whizzed around the corner.

Two slouching, hard-working "studes" caught sight of Carl, reared up the car, and called, "Hi, Doc, come on in!" Then they beheld the Head of the Department, hastily pressed some lever, and went hurrying on. To the Head it was evidence first-hand. He shook his head and went his way.

Carl was popular with the students, and it is true that he was too much so. It was not long before he discovered that he was drawing unto himself the all-too-lightly-handled "college b.u.m," and he rebelled.

Harvard and Germany had given him too high an idea of scholarship to have even a traditional university patience with the student who, in the University of California jargon, was "looking for a meal." He was pet.i.tioned by twelve students of the College of Agriculture to give a course in the Economics of Agriculture, and they guaranteed him twenty-five students. One hundred and thirty enrolled, and as Carl surveyed the a.s.sortment below him, he realized that a good half of them did not know and did not want to know a pear tree from a tractor. He stiffened his upper lip, stiffened his examinations, and cinched forty of the cla.s.s. There should be some Latin saying that would just fit such a case, but I do not know it. It would start, "Exit ----," and the exit would refer to the exit of the loafer in large numbers from Carl's courses and the exit from the heart of the loafer of the absorbing love he had held for Carl. His troubles were largely over. Someone else could care for the maimed, the halt, and the blind.

It was about this time, too, that Carl got into difficulties with the intrenched powers on the campus. He had what has been referred to as "a pa.s.sion for justice." Daily the injustice of campus organization grew on him; he saw democracy held high as an ideal--lip-homage only. Student affairs were run by an autocracy which had nothing to justify it except its supporters' claim of "efficiency." He had little love for that word--it is usually bought at too great a cost. That year, as usual, he had a small seminar of carefully picked students. He got them to open their eyes to conditions as they were. When they ceased to accept those conditions just because they were, they, too, felt the inequality, the farce, of a democratic inst.i.tution run on such autocratic lines. After seminar hours the group would foregather at our house to plot as to ways and means. The editor of the campus daily saw their point of view--I am not sure now that he was not a member of the seminar.

A slow campaign of education followed. Intrenched powers became outraged. Fraternities that had invited Carl almost weekly to lunch, now "couldn't see him." One or two influential alumnae, who had something to gain from the established order, took up the fight. Soon we had a "warning" from one of the Regents that Carl's efforts on behalf of "democracy" were unwelcome. But within a year the entire organization of campus politics was altered, and now there probably is not a student who would not feel outraged at the suggestion of a return to the old system.

Perhaps here is where I can dwell for a moment on Carl's particular brand of democracy. I see so much of other kinds. He was what I should call an utterly unconscious democrat. He never framed in his own mind any theory of "the brotherhood of man"--he just lived it, without ever thinking of it as something that needed expression in words. I never heard him use the term. To him the Individual was everything--by that I mean that every relation he had was on a personal basis. He could not go into a shop to buy a necktie hurriedly, without pa.s.sing a word with the clerk; when he paid his fare on the street car, there was a moment's conversation with the conductor; when we had ice-cream of an evening, he asked the waitress what was the best thing on in the movies. When we left Oakland for Harvard, the partially toothless maid we had sobbed that "Mr. Parker had been more like a brother to her!"

One of the phases of his death which struck home the hardest was the concern and sorrow the small tradespeople showed--the cobbler, the plumber, the drug-store clerk. You hear men say: "I often find it interesting to talk to working-people and get their view-point." Such an att.i.tude was absolutely foreign to Carl. He talked to "working-people"

because he talked to everybody as he went along his joyous way. At a track meet or football game, he was on intimate terms with every one within a conversational radius. Our wealthy friends would tell us he ruined their chauffeurs--they got so that they didn't know their places.

As likely as not, he would jolt some constrained bank president by engaging him in genial conversation without an introduction; at a formal dinner he would, as a matter of course, have a word or two with the butler when he pa.s.sed the cracked crab, although at times the butlers seemed somewhat pained thereby. Some of Carl's intimate friends were occasionally annoyed--"He talks to everybody." He no more could help talking to everybody than he could help--liking pumpkin-pie. He was born that way. He had one manner for every human being--President of the University, students, janitors, society women, cooks, small boys, judges. He never had any material thing to hand out,--not even cigars, for he did not smoke himself,--but, as one friend expressed it, "he radiated generosity."

Heidelberg gives one year after pa.s.sing the examination to get the doctor's thesis in final form for publication. The subject of Carl's thesis was "The Labor Policy of the American Trust." His first summer vacation after our return to Berkeley, he went on to Wisconsin, chiefly to see Commons, and then to Chicago, to study the stockyards at first-hand, and the steel industry. He wrote: "Have just seen Commons, who was _fine_. He said: 'Send me as soon as possible the outline of your thesis and I will pa.s.s upon it according to my lights.' ... He is very interested in one of my princ.i.p.al subdivisions, i.e. 'Technique and Unionism,' or 'Technique and Labor.' Believes it is a big new consideration." Again he wrote: "I have just finished working through a book on 'Immigration' by Professor Fairchild of Yale,--437 pages published three weeks ago,--lent me by Professor Ross. It is the very book I have been looking for and is _superb_. I can't get over how stimulating this looking in on a group of University men has been. It in itself is worth the trip. I feel sure of my field of work; that I am not going off in unfruitful directions; that I am keeping up with the wagon.

I am now set on finishing my book right away--want it out within a year from December." From Chicago he wrote: "Am here with the reek of the stockyards in my nose, and just four blocks from them. Here lived, in this house, Upton Sinclair when he wrote 'The Jungle.'" And Mary McDowell, at the University Settlement where he was staying, told a friend of ours since Carl's death about how he came to the table that first night and no one paid much attention to him--just some young Westerner nosing about. But by the end of the meal he had the whole group leaning elbows on the table, listening to everything he had to say; and she added, "Every one of us loved him from then on."

He wrote, after visiting Swift's plant, of "seeing ill.u.s.trations for all the lectures on technique I have given, and Gee! it felt good. [I could not quote him honestly and leave out his "gees"] to actually look at things being done the way one has orated about 'em being done. The thing for me to do here is to see, and see the things I'm going to write into my thesis. I want to spend a week, if I can, digging into the steel industry. With my fine information about the ore [he had just acquired that], I am anxious to fill out my knowledge of the operation of smelting and making steel. Then I can orate industrial dope." Later: "This morning I called on the Vice-President of the Illinois Steel Company, on the Treasurer of Armour & Co., and lunched with Mr. Crane of Crane Co.--Ahem!"

The time we had when it came to the actual printing of the thesis! It had to be finished by a certain day, in order to make a certain steamer, to reach Heidelberg when promised. I got in a corner of a printing-office and read proof just as fast as it came off the press, while Carl worked at home, under you can guess what pressure, to complete his ma.n.u.script--tearing down with new batches for me to get in shape for the type-setter, and then racing home to do more writing. We finished the thesis about one o'clock one morning, proof-reading and all; and the next day--or that same day, later--war was declared. Which meant just this--that the University of Heidelberg sent word that it would not be safe for Carl to send over his thesis,--there were about three or four hundred copies to go, according to German University regulations,--until the situation had quieted down somewhat. The result was that those three Or four hundred copies lay stacked up in the printing-office for three or four years, until at last Carl decided it was not a very good thesis anyway, and he didn't want any one to see it, and he would write another brand-new one when peace was declared and it could get safely to its destination. So he told the printer-man to do away with the whole batch. This meant that we were out about a hundred and fifty dollars, oh, luckless thought!--a small fortune to the young Parkers. So though in a way the thesis as it stands was not meant for publication, I shall risk quoting from Part One, "The Problem," so that at least his general approach can be gathered. Remember, the t.i.tle was "The Labor Policy of the American Trust."

"When the most astute critic of American labor conditions has said, 'While immigration continues in great volume, cla.s.s lines will be forming and reforming, weak and instable. To prohibit or greatly restrict immigration would bring forth cla.s.s conflict within a generation,' what does it mean?

"President Woodrow Wilson in a statement of his fundamental beliefs has said: 'Why are we in the presence, why are we at the threshold, of a revolution? ... Don't you know that some man with eloquent tongue, without conscience, who did not care for the nation, could put this whole country into a flame? Don't you know that this country, from one end to the other, believes that something is wrong? What an opportunity it would be for some man without conscience to spring up and say: "This is the way; follow me"--and lead in paths of destruction!' What does it mean?

"The problem of the social unrest must seek for its source in all three cla.s.ses of society! Two cla.s.ses are employer and employee, the third is the great middle cla.s.s, looking on. What is the relationship between the dominating employing figure in American industrial life and the men who work?

"A nation-wide antagonism to trade-unions, to the idea of collective bargaining between men and employer, cannot spring from a temperamental aversion of a mere individual, however powerful, be he Carnegie, Parry, or Post, or from the common opinion in a group such as the so-called Beef Trust, or the directorate of the United States Steel Corporation.

Such a hostility, characterizing as it does one of the vitally important relationships in industrial production, must seek its reason-to-be in economic causes. Profits, market, financing, are placed in certain jeopardy by such a labor policy, and this risk is not continued, generation after generation, as a casual indulgence in temper. Deep below the strong charges against the unions of narrow self-interest and un-American limitation of output, dressed by the Citizens' Alliance in the language of the Declaration of Independence, lies a quiet economic reason for the hostility. Just as slavery was about to go because it did not pay, and America stopped building a merchant marine because it was cheaper to hire England to transport American goods, so the American Trust, as soon as it had power, abolished the American trade-union because it found it costly. What then are these economic causes which account for the hostility?

"What did the union stand in the way of? What conditions did the trust desire to establish with which the union would interfere? Or did a labor condition arise which allowed the employer to wreck the union with such ease, that he turned aside for a moment to do it, to commit an act desirable only if its performance cost little danger or money?

"The answer can be found only after an a.n.a.lysis of certain factors in industrial production. These are three:--

"(_a_) The control of industrial production. Not only, in whose hands has industrial capitalism for the moment fallen, but in what direction does the evolution of control tend?

"(_b_) The technique of industrial production. Technique, at times, instead of being a servant, determines by its own characteristics the character of the labor and the geographical location of the industry, and even destroys the danger of compet.i.tion, if the machinery demanded by it asks for a bigger capital investment than a raiding compet.i.tor will risk.

"(_c_) The labor market. The labor market can be stationary as in England, can diminish as in Ireland, or increase as in New England.

"If the character of these three factors be studied, trust hostility to American labor-unions can be explained in terms of economic measure. One national characteristic, however, must be taken for granted. That is the commercialized business morality which guides American economic life.

The responsibility for the moral or social effect of an act is so rarely a consideration in a decision, that it can be here neglected without error. It is not a factor."

At the close of his investigation, he took his first vacation in five years--a canoe-trip up the Brule with Hal Bradley. That was one of our dreams that could never come true--a canoe-trip together. We almost bought the canoe at the Exposition--we looked holes through the one we wanted. Our trip was planned to the remotest detail. We never did come into our own in the matter of our vacations, although no two people could have more fun in the woods than we. But the combination of small children and no money and new babies and work--We figured that in three more years we could be sure of at least one wonderful trip a year.

Anyway, we had the joy of our plannings.

CHAPTER IX

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 pa.s.sion, and he was fired with a zeal that never left him, to see that there should be less unhappiness and inequality in the world.

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."

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. Bruere in stating in the "New Republic": "Parker was the first of our Economists, not only to a.n.a.lyse the psychology of labor and especially of casual labor, but also to make his a.n.a.lysis 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.

It is all interesting enough, I feel, to warrant going into some detail.

The setting of the riot is best given in the article above referred to, "The California Casual and His Revolt."

"The story of the Wheatland hop-pickers' riot is as simple as the facts of it are new and nave 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... .

"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 ma.s.s meetings, violent talk, and a general strike.

"The ranch owner, a nervous man, was hara.s.sed 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.

"As if a stage had been set, the posse arrived in automobiles at the instant when the officially 'wanted' strike-leader was addressing a ma.s.s 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 circ.u.mstances, 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."

In his report to the Governor, written in 1914, Carl characterized the case as follows:--

"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 Sat.u.r.day 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.

"The occurrence has grown from a casual, though b.l.o.o.d.y, event in California labor history into such a focus for discussion and a.n.a.lysis 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.

"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 a.n.a.lysis in the Wheatland riot.

In the same report, submitted a year before the "Quarterly Journal"

article, and almost a year before his study of psychology began, Carl wrote:--

"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 cla.s.s 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."

As to the "Legal and Economic Aspects" of the case, again quoting from the report to the Governor:--