“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 Jose 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.