Back again in New York, he wrote:  “It just raises my hair to feel I’m not where a Dad ought to be.  My blessed, precious family!  I tell you there isn’t anything in this world like a wife and babies and I’m for that life that puts me close.  I’m near smart enough to last a heap of years.  Though when I see how my trip makes me feel alive in my head and enthusiastic, I know it has been worth while. . . .”  Along in January he worked his thesis up in writing.  “Last night I read my paper to the Robinsons after the dinner and they had Mr. and Mrs. John Dewey there.  A most superb and grand discussion followed, the Deweys going home at eleven-thirty and I stayed to talk to one A.M.  I slept dreaming wildly of the discussion. . . .  Then had an hour and a half with Dewey on certain moot points.  That talk was even more superb and resultful to me and I’m just about ready to quit. . . .  I need now to write and read.”

I quote a bit here and there from a paper written in New York in 1917, because, though hurriedly put together and never meant for publication, it describes Carl’s newer approach to Economics and especially to the problem of Labor.

“In 1914 I was asked to investigate a riot among 2800 migratory hop-pickers in California which had resulted in five deaths, many-fold more wounded, hysteria, fear, and a strange orgy of irresponsible persecution by the county authorities—­and, on the side of the laborers, conspiracy, barn-burnings, sabotage, and open revolutionary propaganda.  I had been teaching labor-problems for a year, and had studied them in two American universities, under Sidney Webb in London, and in four universities of Germany.  I found that I had no fundamentals which could be called good tools with which to begin my analysis of this riot.  And I felt myself merely a conventional if astonished onlooker before the theoretically abnormal but manifestly natural emotional activity which swept over California.  After what must have been a most usual intellectual cycle of, first, helplessness, then conventional cataloguing, some rationalizing, some moralizing, and an extensive feeling of shallowness and inferiority, I called the job done.

“By accident, somewhat later, I was loaned two books of Freud, and I felt after the reading, that I had found a scientific approach which might lead to the discovery of important fundamentals for a study of unrest and violence.  Under this stimulation, I read, during a year and a half, general psychology, physiology and anthropology, eugenics, all the special material I could find on Mendelism, works on mental hygiene, feeblemindedness, insanity, evolution of morals and character, and finally found a resting-place in a field which seems to be best designated as Abnormal and Behavioristic Psychology.  My quest throughout this experience seemed to be pretty steadily a search for those irreducible fundamentals which I could use in getting a technically decent opinion on that riot.  In grand phrases, I was searching for the Scientific Standard of Value to be used in analyzing Human Behavior.