"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?
"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."
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.
A year later, in his article in the "Quarterly Journal," and, be it remembered, after his study of psychology had begun, Carl wrote:—
"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.
"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."
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."
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.
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.
"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.