"(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 competition, if the machinery demanded by it asks for a bigger capital investment than a raiding competitor 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 Brulé 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 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.
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. 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.