The casual laborer, and other essays

THE CASUAL LABORER
AND OTHER ESSAYS

By

CARLETON H. PARKER

i 06561*

From the collection of the

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San Francisco, California
2006

THE CASUAL LABOKEK
AND OTHEE ESSAYS

BY

CARLETON H. PARKER

SOMETIME HEAD OP THE ECONOMICS DEPABTMENT

DEAN OP THE SCHOOL OP BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

UNIVERSITY OP WASHINGTON

WITH INTRODUCTION BY

CORNELIA STRATTON PARKER

NEW YORK

HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE
1920

COPYRIGHT, IQ20, BY
BARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC.

nv

$0

TO

THOBSTEIN VEBLBN

GUGGENHEIM MEMORIAL LIBRARY

MONMOUTH COLLEGE
WEST LONG BRANCH, NEW JERSEY

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION 3

I. TOWARD UNDERSTANDING LABOR UNREST . 27

II. THE CASUAL LABORER 61

III. THE I. W. W 91

IV. MOTIVES IN ECONOMIC LIFE 125

APPENDIX

Foreword 169

Report on the Wheatland Hop Fields1 Riot . 171

THE CASUAL LABORER

INTRODUCTION

A TREMENDOUS responsibility rests upon anyone
who undertakes to publish posthumous writings.
Even though they may have been written to ap-
pear in print here and there, one cannot be sure
that in later years the author would have wished
them given to a wider public in more permanent
form. Yet the time may come, as I feel it has in
this case, when the value in publishing certain
manuscripts seems greater than the drawback
that possibly their author would have preferred
to let them rest in more or less oblivion.

The only real reluctance I feel about publishing
the following papers concerns itself with the first
manuscript, and one which in many respects is
perhaps the most vital paper of all. This article
was not written for publication in any form.
Back in the winter of 1916, Carl Parker journeyed
East on what has been termed his Research Mag-
nificent, to lay his thesis, mulled over until then
in comparative solitude in his Berkeley hillside

3

\

4 THE CASUAL LABORER

study, before the big minds of the country in his
field.

In New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore,
his soul exulted in chance after chance for telling
discussions and arguments concerning his loved
subject, the application of the newer psychology
to a study of labor problems. Letter after letter
brought back to California accounts of rich con-
versations with the men he had most hoped to
interest in his thesis, and the resultant stimulus
and encouragement. Along toward Christmas he
felt the time had come when he should put his
thesis into writing and thereby receive even more
definite criticism from the men whose ideas he
valued. This he did, and under date of January
6th, 1917, he wrote: "... I redressed my talk
down and raced to read it to Professor Holling-
worth. We spent four hours on it and I had
numerous criticisms and hints. None adverse to
the thesis, only suggestions as to places where I
might strengthen it. ... I read my paper to
Walter Lippmann tomorrow and then Monday
I'll be ready to type it and get carbons to send
you. All tomorrow morning I'll labor on getting
it into better shape. Oj course it is written in
part to call out comments, so the statements are

INTRODUCTION 5

strong and unmodified. I am sure that I'll see
just how it will be developed into a complete book
form before I am done with this reading of it. I
feel it in my bones. . . ." This paper I have
titled: "Toward Understanding Labor Unrest."
In a chronological arrangement it would have ap-
peared second. It gives a perspective to Carl
Parker's approach to the study of labor problems;
it is the most intimate paper of all — it was given
first place.

The second paper, "The Casual Laborer/' ap-
peared in 1915 in the November Quarterly Journal
of Economics under the title "The California
Casual and His Revolt." From November, 1913,
to November, 1914, Carl Parker was Executive
Secretary of the California State Immigration and
Housing Commission. In the spring of 1914 he
was deputized to investigate the Wheatland Hop-
field Riot for the Federal Government. As inti-
mated in the first paper, perhaps this was as fruit-
ful an incident, judged from the intellectual view-
point, as he ever experienced. By its very dra-
matic quality, it focused his interest, as it fo-
cused the interest of the State, on the problem of
the migratory, the casual, the I. W. W. From
that time on he kept pegging away at the whys

6 THE CASUAL LABORER

and wherefores, and at the very time of his death
was more intent than ever on understanding the
lower strata of labor, their troubles and the pos-
sible solutions. Somehow the glaring inadequacy
of even supposedly intellectual handling of the
labor problem ate into his soul from the time of
the investigation of that Riot on, and he gave up
the rest of his life to digging as far below the
surface of labor unrest as he could get.

In January, 1917, he addressed a gathering of
Wharton School people in Philadelphia on the
subject of the Western Labor Problem, and the
Wheatland case in particular. I came across the
following notes, the introduction to that talk:

"Any university, or in fact any modern, an-
alysis of the labor problem is composed of a series
of formal briefs on temporary instruments which
for the moment find themselves used in industrial
society, such as conciliation and arbitration, ap-
prenticeship, trade union structure, child labor
legislation. University labor treatment is a pho-
tographic sub-science. It is like a New Hamp-
shire village church service to a decayed gentle-
woman: it is sane and gently daring. It has the
pleasant reactions of slumming in a picturesque
but not underfed immigrant quarter. Labor, to
the undergraduate, is an interesting subject.

INTRODUCTION 7

"The real labor problem is not this. It is one
of individual psychology. What are men when
they die as laborers or business men? What kind
of grandchildren follow them? What is their so-
cial heredity? What is the psychic balance sheet?
It is a relation between a plastic, sensitive, easily
degenerated nervous organism called "man" and
an environment. The product is human character.
The labor problem is one of character-formation.
. . . The importance of the western labor
problem is that a human, irrational, de-mechan-
ized, dynamite-using labor type rose and func-
tioned. ..."

The third paper, on "The I. W. W.," is a re-
print from the Atlantic Monthly of November
1917, written at the request of the Editor, Mr.
Sedgwick. No one can claim that Carl Parker
took a detached academic view of the I. W. W.
without any actual contact with the class of whom
it wrote. From the time of the Wheatland Hop-
field Riot to his death, he was only at rare in-
tervals ever out of touch with the I. W. W. move-
ment, studying it first hand at every possible
point. He numbered many personal friends and
enemies among I. W. Ws. To him the problem
was never one of three letters in large type on the

8 THE CASUAL LABORER

front page of the morning paper. Human Beings
made up the movement — not all of them awaited
eagerly by Saint Peter at the Starry Gates, yet
just as true not all doomed to boil forever in the
caldrons of the damned. Not every Republican
or Democrat is a chosen emissary of the Lord.

The reaction to this I. W. W. article interested
us greatly. One business periodical of the North-
west grew almost breathless in alarm — the State
University was harboring a dangerous rebel in its
midst — he might even be a Socialist ! The only
safe thing was to do away with him. But on the
whole, readers were extremely interested in Carl
Parker's viewpoint. I have before me some of the
letters that came in from friends and strangers
and the carbons of his replies. These latter are
more informal than scholarly in their mode of ex-
pression. One friend wrote from Canada: ". . .
I want to thank you for the calmness with which
you have discussed these people and for the way
in which you have brought it home (at least to
my way of thinking) to society that the I. W. W.
is of its own spawning. Your insistence on the
psychological analysis is most opportune. . . ."
In part the reply ran as follows: "... That
article of mine which you referred to would more

INTRODUCTION 9

or less tell you where my modern interests lie. I
have had a good deal better reports on it than I
thought I would. ... I feel that the general
unrest is spreading so fast that this nippy little
civilization of ours will literally go to pot unless
we do something to iron out the economic and
psychological inequality. The riots in Germany
today are to the point. If we had a Napoleon
scheming it we couldn't have a more developed
unrest than there is in the Pacific Northwest. The
working classes, both skilled and unskilled, sus-
pect the war and the Government, the aims of
the Allies, the aims of the Germans, and the aims
of the business men; and the business men and
the Allies and the Germans all suspect the work-
ing men. Both sides suspect the intellectuals and
the intellectuals are sore at both sides, and no-
body has gotten any relief and so on and so on.
The Department of Justice is going to make us
all patriotic if it has to arrest and convict us in
order to do so. So, generally, Bill, somehow things
seem to be unrestful."

One of the country's big psychopathologists
wrote: "... I am glad to see that you are
in the School of Business Administration for I
know that the psychopathological point of view

10 THE CASUAL LABORER

will be of great use therein. I have just read your
article on the I. W. W. in the current Atlantic
and have been recommending it to everybody.
. . . Hoping some day to achieve the eu-
phoria of the hobo, I am ..." In reply to
this letter Carl Parker wrote: ". . .1 think it
is up to the two of us to actually do something
for the euphoria of the hobo as well as for several
other tough-working subdivisions of his psycho-
logical nature. He is certainly now wearing a
stack of crowns of thorns reaching twenty to
thirty feet in the air vertically.

"The I. W. W. is the best little object of com-
pensatory activity for the unheroic to work their
compensating patriotism off on that has existed
in modern times. . . . This is a great time to
live in the world and have a little abnormal psy-
chological literature at your elbow. ... I have
taken up my third job for the War Department
and am now mediating on a threatened long-
shoremen strike. The longshoremen have got the
Bolsheviki looking like a rather dilapidated
Christian Endeavor Convention. In their last
little economic struggle out here they killed off
some twenty participants and their present plans
remind one of what is alleged to be the plans of

INTRODUCTION 11

the Bulgarians upon the prospect of their invasion
into Servia. As I said before this is a good time
to muss around in economic affairs."

A lawyer wrote: "I have not yet written and
told you what I think of your Atlantic article. It
is ripping, and I do not see how you could have

done better with it. A bunch of us were at 0 's

place a few Sundays ago and went over it to-
gether. ... I have heard that even has

spoken approvingly of the article which is a trib-
ute to both of you, for it is not so very long since

was encouraging the Fresno police to 'drown

out the rats in the jail.' I hear that conditions
are already improving in the lumber camps up
your way and that the eight-hour day is now be-
coming the rule, also that the camp conditions are
greatly improved and the lot of the migratory
worker in the lumber camps is beginning to show
distinct signs of betterment, and I take great
pleasure in recogniing that you have had your
hand in all of this. ..." In reply to this letter
Carl Parker wrote: ". . . I am just now more
excited over the Bolsheviki and its children, the
German strikes, than anything else that has hap-
pened. I could not see how men who had cast
loose their intellectual moorings from all the old

12 THE CASUAL LABORER

inequality conditions would ever contemplate
going back home and putting themselves meekly
into the industrial mess. I have an idea that the
psychic basis of these revolts is a fear of a resump-
tion of the old life. It seems fair to prophesy that
the old order is done though of course it must in-
fluence the character of the new order. Even if
there should be an apparent resumption of the old
affairs in form, this would not last long. Over
here at American Lake you can hear all kinds of
the most radical of talk and I feel that some kind
of a new deal is on the boards for the post-war
period.

"Here in Seattle I am running up against a
pretty reactionary group of employers, but even
among them I find people who have read that
small Atlantic Monthly article and are anxious to
talk about it. I have gotten some fifty letters
from all kinds and conditions of people about
it. . . .

"I am working hard on trying to get the lum-
bermen to willingly clean up their camps and hold
some kind of a sincere hand out to the workers,
and I think I see perhaps where it is beginning to
bear fruit. I put over what was apparently a
slightly premature acceptance of the eight-hour

INTRODUCTION 13

day in the entire lumber industry of the Spokane
district. The operators now show a slight ten-
dency to back slide. I am working for three
federal commissions now on different labor
troubles and I am learning a heap and getting
batted over the head with monotonous fre-
quency. ..."

And lastly I quote from the letter of a strange
Professor: "... I think you have put one
over in your article on the I. W. W. in the current
Atlantic. More of the same sort of thing in similar
places will help the cause of liberalism and de-
mocracy enormously. . . ." And here Carl
Parker wrote: ". . . I feel that the 'cure' of
the I. W. W. lies in the well-known modern
method of educational practice and theory and
that the achievement of such a social renovation
is much easier than our hysterical fellow patriots
believe. It comes down to that sad old compari-
son between the use of suppression in contrast
with a system of wise social prevention. At times
I feel that those who pretend to be working patri-
otically for unity are, in fact, the active agents of
serious disunity in our nation. Many seem to
forget that being a melting pot carries with it
certain serious attributes. ."

14 THE CASUAL LABORER

I find some loose pages of manuscript among
Carl Parker's papers which give in a short space
his approach to the I. W. W. and certain forms of
labor unrest: "... The labor turnover sta-
tistics in America are startling. The growing em-
ployee inefficiency is a subconsciously planned
neglecting of the work. Union recognition, the
closed shop, the sympathetic strike, are not pur-
sued by the unionist because of any deep realiza-
tion of the ethical or strategic significance of the
issue, but because it is a means of expressing re-
sentment at the stresses and strains of their po-
sition. This diverted energy becomes a relief
activity, an activity tending, curiously, to re-
establish the unionist's dignity in his own eyes.
It is impossible for man to suffer economic and
social humiliation without an important feeling
of inferiority, of minder wurtigkeit. A common
cure for this, it has been observed, is a resort to
some enterprise in pugnacity. In modern trans-
lation this means a strike of more or less violence,
a riot, or at least some conflict with the law. Re-
lief has been found by dissociation from social
rule and giving some liberty and dominance to
the more primitive desires of the sub-conscious.
A rabid Socialist, an I. W. W. (even today a paci-

INTRODUCTION 15

fist), has dissociated himself more or less com-
pletely from the going norms of society. His sub-
conscious is completely in the saddle. His fixed
idea is a mental complex supported by a strong
emotion and runs back for its explaining cause to
a life of extreme stress or privation or a neuras-
thenic disposition. The I. W. W. are recruited
from the most degraded and unnaturally living
of America's labor groups. Their inherited in-
stincts are in toto either offered no opportunity
for functioning, or are harshly repressed. They
are without home security, have no sex life ex-
cept the abnormal, they are hunted and scorned
by society; normal leadership, emulation, con-
structiveness, is unknown to them. And it is both
psychically and physiologically a sound deduction
that they will at all social costs seek some relief
activity. The one prerequisite for a permanent
acquisition of crop- and barnburning as a habit
for this migratory group is that the law and so-
ciety should show itself properly and openly
fearful. This, as events in California, Arizona,
and the Middle West show, is the very contribu-
tion of society. Deportation, bull-pens, imprison-
ment, is food for the sore dignity of the
syndicalist. It is the psychological parallel to the

16 THE CASUAL LABORER

newspaper publicity of the ego crazed mur-
derer. . . ."

Also I came across the following short and to-
the-point statement of what Carl Parker con-
sidered the I. W. W. problem: "The I. W. W. is
a symptom of a distressing industrial status. For
the moment the relation of its activities to our
war preparation has befogged its economic origins,
but all purposeful thinking about even the I. W.
W.'s attitude towards the war must begin with a
full and careful consideration of these origins.

"All the famous revolutionary movements of
history gained their cause-for-being from intimate
and unendurable oppression, and their behavior-
in-revolt reflected the degree of their suffering.
The chartist and early trade union riots in Eng-
land, the revolution of 1789 in France, the Ni-
hilists' killings in Russia, the bitter attacks on the
railroads by the Grangers of the Northwest, the
extremes into which the Anti-Saloon League
propaganda has evolved, are a small part of the
long revolt-catalogue of which the I. W. W. is
the last entry. Each one of these movements had
its natural psycho-political antecedents and much
of the new history is devoted to a careful describ-
ing and revaluation of them. At some later and

INTRODUCTION 17

less hysterical date the I. W. W. phenomenon will
be dispassionately dissected in somewhat the fol-
lowing way :

(1) There were in 1910 in the United States
some 10,400,000 unskilled male workers. Of these,
some 3,500,000 moved, by discharge or quitting,
so regularly from one work town to another that
they could be called migratory labor. Because of
this unstable migratory existence the labor class
lost the conventional relationship to women and
child life, lost its voting franchise, lost its habit
of common comfort or dignity, and gradually be-
came consciously a social class with fewer legal or
social rights than is conventionally ascribed to
Americans. The cost of this experience was ag-
gravated by the ability and habituation of this
migratory class to read about and appreciate the
higher social and economic life enjoyed by the
American middle class.

(2) The unskilled labor class itself experienced
a life not markedly more satisfying than the mi-
gratories. One-fourth of the adult fathers of
families earned less than $400 a year, one-half
earned less than $600. The minimum cost of
decent living for a family was approximately $800.
Unemployment, destitution, and uncared-for sick-
ness was a monotonous familiarity to them.

18 THE CASUAL LABORER

(3) The to-be-expected revolt against this so-
cial condition was conditioned and colored by the
disillusionment touching justice and industrial
democracy and the personal and intimate indig-
nities and sufferings experienced by the migra-
tories. The revolt-organization of the migratories,
called the I. W. W., failing, most naturally, to
live up to the elevated legal and contract-respect-
ing standards of the more comfortable trade union
world, was visited by severe middle class censure
and legal persecution.

"This sketch is fairly complete and within cur-
rent facts. No one doubts the full propriety of
the government in suppressing ruthlessly any in-
terference by the I. W. W. with the war prepara-
tion. All patriots should just as vehemently pro-
test against the suppression of the normal eco-
nomic protest-activities of the I. W. W. There
will be neither permanent peace nor prosperity in
our country till the revolt-bases of the I. W. W.
are removed, and till that is done the I. W. W.
remains an unfortunately valuable symptom of a
diseased industrialism."

The fourth paper, "Motives in Economic Life/'
represents the last piece of writing Carl Parker
completed. This was read before the American

INTRODUCTION 19

Economic Association in January, 1918, three
months before his death. He was, of course, tre-
mendously excited at the opportunity to get his
new doctrines before a body of economists. After
the paper he sent a joyous telegram back to Cali-
fornia that it had gone vastly better than he had
dared hope for. How eager he was to get his
ideas in book form ! He was working on this book
until mediation duties in the Northwest took his
entire time.

There was in the heart of Carl Parker, as there
must be in the heart of many true scholars, more
than the desire merely to add to the sum total of
earthly wisdom. He possessed that quite under-
standable and altogether worthy belief that be-
sides adding to the world's knowledge, he had
something intellectual to give which would actu-
ally increase the larger happiness of men — could
his theories be sensed by enough people to assure
their application. Certain injustices loomed large
to him — the maladjustment of present income
distribution in a pecuniary order where money
was of necessity to gratify most of normal instinct
cravings; the unequal workings of the law (he
never forgot at the time of his Federal investi-
gation of the Wheatland Riot finding a friendless

20 THE CASUAL LABORER

nineteen-year-old lad in a country jail who had
been there eight months without any charge
whatever against him, — his name not even down
on any record. He had been hurled into jail in
one of those God-fearing clean-ups when we rid
society of all vestiges of the to us unpleasant and
feel thereafter we can look our Maker compla-
cently face to face. "Well done thou good and
faithful servant!" How long the boy would have
remained in his contaminous surroundings had
Carl Parker not run across him no one knows.)
And too he felt the yearning of the worker himself
to understand the forces around and against him.
He always kept a letter from a member of the
Cooks and Waiters Union Local 295, written from
Douglas, Arizona, in 1915:

Mr. Parker Prof of Economics State Univosity of

Cal.
Dear Sir

You were in Phoenix last fall on industrial relations
Between Capital & Labor I had the opertunity of
hearing you once in Trades Councle Hall as I did
not get to hear your full report on plan to settle
Labour Disputes and on Industrial commissions I
would like to know wether it is Posible for you to
send me one of those charts or Practical Plans by
whitch Labour Troubles can be avoided as I am
only 1 among many Millions of peopple that has to

INTRODUCTION 21

pay the Price of my rong Conceptions and under-
standing of life
I remain yours as student for Information

E. E. B.

Yet the debt he felt he owed was to no one class
— he labored to lift the veil of uncertainty and
doubt from his own eyes, and then share his find-
ings with seekers after light be they rich or poor,
young or old, employer or employed. While in-
tellectually he might have to recognize classes in
our social structure, in his heart he knew none —
no distinctions. Except indeed between those
who were content to let creation drift — "God's
in his Heaven, all's well with the world" — who
held to a complacent aimless feeling of optimism,
who believed everyone got ahead in this country
who deserved to get ahead, — and those who felt
that now was the time to strain every intellectual
nerve in an honest, unembittered desire to under-
stand the world, and each according to his abilities
to help in the struggle for more sanity, more
justice, more good-will. He blamed no one. He
tried to comprehend the forces at work which
made for certain conditions. He tried to under-
stand the motives which led to certain types of
conduct. And, as expressed in his report to the

22 THE CASUAL LABORER

Governor on the Wheatland Riot, he pleaded that
man should not be judged apart from his back-
ground, his environment. "Environment has its
children as well as men."

Thus has one of his colleagues described Carl
Parker's intellectual stand.1 "There have very
recently emerged in America a few men who
might most appropriately be called the new fron-
tiersmen. These men have the same simplicity,
the same wander-spirit, and the same ruggedness
that we so justly admire in the best of our older
adventurers. But since the geographical frontier-
line of America has become at least temporarily
fixed on Pacific coasts, the new frontiersmen have
sought the Hesperides in a new class-conscious-
ness, or rather inter-class-consciousness. They
have migrated not necessarily from their native
states but away from many of the superstitions
which bound them. . The elusive and ever-moving
frontier-line is now economic rather than geo-
graphical. But 'economic' is perhaps a vague and
dangerous adjective because of its narrower con-
notations. These men have not migrated from
one economic class into another. They have
merely emancipated themselves from the idols

1 Herbert E. Cory in University of California Chronicle, 1918.

INTRODUCTION 23

and taboos of the class in which they were born
and reared, though with no intention of spurning
anything that is really noble in these old associ-
ations. On vital questions the new frontiersmen
take no pallidly non-partisan view. But they
choose their sides. Carleton H. Parker was one
of these new frontiersmen. He defied his foes and
he defied his friends. He aroused their anger and
he aroused their love. He was not too proud to
confess his ignorance in a day when so many men
and women deepen the perils of civilization by
assuming that oracular attitude which stills mo-
mentarily even their own murmuring fears. He
read consumedly but with increasing profit the
books of the bolder men who today seek light, as
Descartes sought light three hundred years ago
as a pioneer of a great reconstructive movement,
by accomplishing first of all a complete spiritual
house cleaning. Professor Parker moved with
tireless energy among the huts of lumberjacks, in
the depths of mines, in city labor councils, in the
withering heat of the hopfields at harvest time,
in the most intense class battles in California, in
Arizona, in Washington. He won the paternal
interest of a number of brave American scientists
who from different parts of the country have

24 THE CASUAL LABORER

sounded their warnings during the last ten years
to a population profoundly cursed with the 'op-
timistic squint/ In a word he recognized, what
all thoughtful men today must recognize, that the
chief hope for the salvation of western civiliza-
tion lies in some sort of alliance between the labor
movement and the newly oriented sciences which
deal with the behavior of men, their modes of or-
ganization, their inherited unit-characters, and
their institutional habits. For this alliance, in
the interests of his country in its great crisis,
Carleton Parker worked and worked until, worn
out by incessant exertion in a storm center of
labor difficulties, he died untimely, consecrating
a precious life to American solidarity.

"The open-minded economist is forced today to
take the best account he can of the biological
sciences (particularly of heredity and of animal
behavior), of ethnology, of psychology, of phil-
osophy (particularly those branches of philosophy
which today dub themselves 'the problem of con-
sciousness/ 'the logic of science/ and 'the study
of values'). This great duty Carleton Parker
recognized and set himself with courage and en-
thusiasm to fulfill. We must be content

INTRODUCTION 25

here to emphasize the unique character of Pro-
fessor Parker's contributions. He made substan-
tial progress in standardizing the various conflict-
ing inventories of human instincts (not unmindful
of the dangers of lapsing back into a 'faculties
psychology') and he sketched briefly but very
suggestively the specifically economic significance
of these instincts. And above all, he had thrown
the searchlight of psychopathology on economic
phenomena in a way which, despite the disputes
among psychopathologists themselves, will as-
suredly prove the beginning of a very important
contribution to the social sciences. Only those
of us who knew something of his manuscripts and
who sat under him week after week in his courses
can appreciate how rapidly and broadly his
mastery was coming when he gave his life to
democracy. . . .

"Carleton Parker's most elaborate and trying
experiences and investigations and most of his
published writings dealt mainly with the un-
skilled workmen. For years Professor Parker fra-
ternized with, remonstrated with, studied and
wrote about our I. W. W., concerning whose bare
name so many people had hardly heard six
months ago. Professor Parker belonged to a

26 THE CASUAL LABORER

group of radicals which searches for the roots of
things with all the scientific acumen and tech-
nique at its command. These radicals are work-
ing fearlessly and tirelessly for the best interests
of the United States. . . . Undoubtedly Carle-
ton Parker's most permanent contribution to
science and to his country was his amazing
ability to turn all sorts and conditions of men
and women from hedonists, cynics, sentimen-
talists, predatory egoists, and dilettantes into de-
voted workers for humanity. . . . For all the
tragedy of his sudden death it may be said quite
literally that his work has only begun. He has
left behind him a host of men and women, old
and young, employers, employees, students, min-
isters, lawyers, scientists, whose lives have been
made vastly different by his life, who are deter-
mined to carry on work like his very much as
he laid down the programme, who will carry it
on with recurrent acknowledgements of indebted-
ness to him, and who love to quote as he loved to
quote the words of Woodrow Wilson:

" 'We are in a temper to reconstruct economic
society as we were once in a temper to recon-
struct political society/ "

CORNELIA STRATTON PARKER.

TOWARD UNDERSTANDING
LABOR UNREST

A SHORT history will explain my thesis. 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 burn-
ing, sabotage, and open revolutionary propaganda.
I had been teaching labor problems for three years
and had studied it in two American universities,
under Sidney Webb in London, and in four uni-
versities of Germany. I found that I had no fun-
damentals 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,

27

28 THE CASUAL LABORER

14

then conventional cataloguing, some rational-
izing, some moralizing, and an extensive feeling of
shallowness and inferiority, I called the job done.

By accident at this time 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 the stimu-
tion I read during a year and a half general psy-
chology, physiology and anthropology, eugenics,
all the special material I could find on Mendelism,
works on mental hygiene, feeblemindedness, in-
sanity, evolution of morals and character, and
finally found a resting place in a field which seems
to be best designated as Abnormal and Be-
haviouristic 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
of that riot. In grand phrases I was searching for
the Scientific Standard of Values to be used in
analyzing Human Behavior. In order to clarify
my peculiar intellectual position I will make this
additional statement regarding my trade.

Nearly all modern economics is a descriptive
sub-soienoe. It is concerned in the main with

UNDERSTANDING LABOR UNREST 29

estimating the efficiencies of various instruments
to produce goods, or services, or Jaw and order,
etc., without any important reference to the in-
fluence of any of these things upon the evolution
of the human species. The training of a bird dog
is full of infinitely more human attentions. This
has allowed economics (which officially holds the
analysis of labor problems) to devote itself al-
most entirely to the production of goods and to
neglect entirely the consumption of goods and
human organic welfare. The lip homage given
by orthodox economics to the field of consump-
tion seems to be inspired merely by the feeling
that disaster might overcome production if
workers were starved or business men discour-
aged. So while the official economic science
tinkers at its transient institutions which flourish
in one decade and pass out in the next, abnormal
arid behavioristic psychology, physiology, psy-
chiatry, are building in their laboratories by in-
duction from human specimens of modern eco-
nomic life, a standard of human values and an
elucidation of behavior fundamentals which we
must use in our legislative or personal modifica-
tion of modern civilization. It does not seem an
over statement to say that orthodox economics

30 THE CASUAL LABORER

has cleanly overlooked one of the most important
generalizations about human life which can be
phrased, and that is,

That human life is dynamic, that change, move-
ment, evolution, are its basic characteristics.

That self expression, and therefore freedom of
choice and movement, are prerequisites to a satisfying
human state.

Modern economics tends to think in and talk of
static states, the market price, an exchange value,
constitutionality, reasonable freight rates, a just
rate of interest. The old economic theory and its
assumptions were fatally faulty in their sim-
plicity, in their obvious practicality, in their easy
usableness.

I have just completed a pilgrimage to various
shrines within the human nature field, beginning
with Veblen in Missouri and ending here in New
England. The loot of this trip, modified by my
personal intellectual bias is as follows:

Man, to quote John Dewey specifically and to
condense the general theory of Thorndike, is a
mosaic of original, uneradicable, and unlearned
tendencies to action, an equipment of behavior
unit characters. It matters little whether these
begin psychically isolated from each other and

UNDERSTANDING LABOR UNREST 31

numerous, or whether they begin with Brill's two
basic instincts of hunger and sex, or Trotter's
four instincts of self-preservation, nutrition, sex,
and gregariousness, and then gain number by the
numerous possible arithmetic combinations. As
good a Freudian as Adolf Meyer, with a health-
bringing constant contact with human laboratory
stuff, said that he could not account for much in
human behavior without postulating a man born
with numerous fixed and unlearned tendencies to
action. John B. Watson is ready to announce the
successful isolation and description of five in-
stincts through his remarkable experiments with
new born babies. I personally looked on with
astonishment, mixed with conventional moral in-
dignation, while he forced an hour-old and wailing
American infant to swing seven minutes by its
one-handed grip on a pencil. A negro baby with
a more recent and virile biological memory swung
fourteen minutes.

Human action, shortly after birth, tends to find
itself exercising along certain stereoptyped be-
havior channels, and so, to avoid that border land
of pseudo-metaphysical speculation touching the
parentage of these tendencies, I have selected for
strict phrasing instead of "instincts," the words

32 THE CASUAL LABORER

"unlearned tendencies to action" as describing the
original physical baggage, the so-called instincts,
which accompanies the remarkable anatomical
contraption we have called man. However, I
shall use "instincts" and "unlearned tendencies"
as equivalent expressions.

My only attempt at any deductive theorizing
regarding instincts is this: Given, that order and
preparedness which variation and selection has
guaranteed to that life on this earth which sur-
vives, it seems that as complex, intricate, and de-
fenseless a machine as man's body would not be
found turned loose in its highly dangerous en-
vironment without a guiding, a warning, a be-
havior system. It seems technically impossible
to have expected a survival of the human species
if, taking biological competition as it is, man had
been forced to learn through trial and his errors a
complete scheme of conduct. Therefore, it seems
fair to deduce for man an unlearned bundle of
instincts or tendencies having for the organism
high survival value. Without these tendencies
the human organism would have had a brief tragic
struggle with its parasitic or flesh eating rivals,
and man's participation in mundane affairs would
have been the furnishing of important fossil re-

UNDERSTANDING LABOR UNREST 33

mains to some future sober congress of the sur-
viving earth species. Certainly, if we should
compare the high degree of weakness of physical
competition which man has developed in contrast
with his vertebrate and germ enemies, and also
hi contrast with his own remote ape ancestors,
one could in retrospect see that the survival of the
human species must have had as a prerequisite a
rich and varied instinct equipment which removed
man from the necessity of learning a complete
scheme of behavior via the dangerous trial and
error method. The species without some un-
learned and protective capacities would not have
lasted the instruction.

The importance to me of the following descrip-
tion of the innate tendencies or instincts lies in
their relation to my main explanation of economic
behavior which is :

First, that these tendencies are persistent, are far
less warped or modified by the environment than we
believe, that they function quite as they have for sev-
eral hundred .thousand years, that they as motives in
their various normal or perverted habit form can
at times dominate singly the entire behavior and act
as if they were a clear character dominant.

Secondly, that if the environment through any of the
conventional instruments of repression such as reli-

34 THE CASUAL LABORER

gious orthodoxy, university mental discipline, economic
inferiority, imprisonment, physical disfigurement,
such as short stature, hare lip, etc., repress the full
psychological expression in the field of these tenden-
cies, then a psychic revolt, a slipping into abnormal
mental functioning, takes place, and society accuses
the revolutionist of being either wilfully inefficient,
alcoholic, a syndicalist, supersensitive, an agnostic, or
insane.

I am willing to admit I am about to hang a
psychological wreath about the neck of the roll-
ing stone, the law breaker, the mentally unbal-
anced. As Trotter has said, if we should revamp
our conventional idea of normality by a study of
human evolution, there might be a sensational
change in the general social character of the popu-
lation of our institutions of detention. An in-
mate of an asylum hi answer to the bromidic
question, "Why are you here, you look all right?"
said : "Lady, I'm in the minority, that's all." The
minority membership runs true from St. Francis
of Assissi to the MacNamaras. Perhaps one
should stop to most seriously emphasize this con-
cept of a new human normality and also to appre-
ciate the handicap to discussion which comes
whenever every analyzer at a round table has a
very different brand of human normality in mind.

UNDERSTANDING LABOR UNREST 35

There is that theoretical one hundred per cent
normality which is gained for individuals by free
mobility plus full environmental equipment of
persons and instruments and which results in a
harmonious and full expression of his psychic po-
tentialities. Since each vigorous experimentation
under these conditions would generate wisdom in
direct proportion to the experiment, I think that
an evolutionary and also conventionally desirable
progress could be prophesied as a result. This
progress has no so-called idealistic goal or di-
rection. It has merely a potentiality for more
wisdom. Not being in possession of that wisdom,
we today cannot prophesy its probable scheme of
conduct.

A second normality would be produced by that
human mobility and freedom, and that environ-
ment, which would give far more unconventional
experimentation, far more wisdom, than we now
have, but not the amount which would crack hu-
man nature by hurrying its change of mores too
much, or destroy those institutions of civilization
which could be modified with some hope of their
higher usefulness. Conscious that man will
change, if he is to change, to this compromise
normality concept, it is such a normality that I

36 THE CASUAL LABORER

have in mind when I use the term. It is in the
end in the interests of such a new Darwinian nor-
mality that the following list of the innate and un-
suppressable tendencies is presented. The list is
a tentative and naturally an incomplete enumer-
ation of those tendencies which we can, I think,
safely use in a trial diagnosis of present day af-
fairs and irregularities.

A tendency to be sexual and under stereotyped
stimuli to follow a universally observed method of
gratifying that desire.

To be hungry.

To think (to go over into multiform activity) .

To experience mother-love, etc.

To be gregarious.

To be curious (to manipulate, to dissect, to experi-
ment) .

To fear.

To collect, to hoard, to gain and hold property.

To migrate, to be mobile.

To feel revulsion at confinement (cause of prison
psychosis) .

To dislike the unmeasured, the unlimited, to dis-
like to lie or die in the open.

To fight, to be near fighting, to call for the knock
out, to be cruel, to be pugnacious.

To lead a group, a gang, a class, to be elected to
political office.

To follow a leader.

UNDERSTANDING LABOR UNREST 37

To display, to be ostentatious, to be vain, to be un-
conventional in dress.

To be workmanlike, to show a quality sense, to
show a harmony sense in self expression.

To hunt (the sex chase, persecution of the weaker,
to bully).

To vocalize.

Watson has shown, I am confident, that an
original tendency for instance, like grasping, can
claim priority in the life story of man. He has
experimented on children a minute old and his
handling was, within practical reason, the first
real nervous experience of the infant. He feels
that such an act could be called the only first ex-
perience of the child, since the next act would be
modified by the nervous system matured and
changed by its important, if single, experience.
This ignores the possibility that Watson will be
able to deduce a prenatal habituation in grasping
due to the fortuitous position of the infant in the
womb which seems to favor the right in contrast
to the left hand.

So, following the illuminating motor pattern
theory of E. B. Holt, one can say that far back in
the life of the child, such a complementary subtle
influencing of not only every instinct by every

38 THE CASUAL LABORER

other, but the influence of all past experiences
upon the developing act in progress, forces one to
contemplate each behavior act as the external
manifestation of an inner-instinct-experience-
agglomeration. The general character of an act
thus analyzed seems to the uninitiated or mentally
inert hopelessly accidental and complicated. So,
to escape the labor of puzzling out the haze of a
behavior man and also to avoid the burden of or-
dering one's own life after so demanding a plan,
man turns with relief to the simple expedient of
reducing the salvage in human beings to a soul
and saving it in due and convenient time by the
energy generated through hysteria. Billy Sunday
should be the idol of lazy and bewildered min-
isters. Hence a father who has neglected his son
for twenty years endeavors to correct the dissolute
and diseased organism well beyond its plastic
period by a "man to man" talk or by turning him
indignantly out of the house. So a mother who
has not informed her daughter of her sex dispo-
sition turns frantically to the psychiatrist; or an
inefficient university teacher to examinations in
order to stimulate.

Man seems to be psychically both a blend and
a mosaic. An abnormal repression of one's innate

UNDERSTANDING LABOR UNREST 39

tendency modifies to an important extent the
method of gratification and the insistence for the
gratification of every other tendency. Each act
and its behavior can only be accurately described
as being the visible indication of a sort of com-
posite sentiment which includes in its basis every
experience we have ever lived through, and added
to this, the bundle of innate tendencies within us.
A short discussion of some of the conventional
influencing of one innate tendency by another will
illustrate. The innate tendency to think or medi-
tate can be sex day dreaming or musing over rail-
way rates. Its duration and character is largely
dominated by the activity of our own innate ten-
dency to be workmanlike. An innate gregarious
tendency, Trotter maintains, must be accepted in
order to explain our universal subservience to
public opinion and convention. This innate sub-
servience modifies our sex expression, our experi-
mentation, our pugnacious satisfactions, our van-
ities, even our father and mother love. Veblen
has said that a standard of workmanlike conduct
influences profoundly the manner in which all
innate tendencies find their gratification. The
followers of Freud have written the sex instinct
preponderantly into every human act. This is,

40 THE CASUAL LABORER

I think, a misuse of a structural truth. Every
act-emotion has a strain of sex running through it
as it has a strain of every other innate tendency.
The quarrel with Freud's followers seems to be
only one of over-emphasis. I do not think that
life taken in the mass, or the newer psychological
experiments, afford evidence for their emphasis.
It affords, it is true, evidence for an emphasis
vastly beyond anything that convention will
allow. Freud is probably right also in estimating
that convention's opposition is heavily re-en-
forced by those who for mixed reasons fear an ex-
pose of their psychical state. Sex has so
manifestly mixed itself up with migrations, war,
vanity, leadership, fear, curiosity, etc., that one is
forced to wage, in the name of observed fact, an
incessant warfare with one's own religion, family
mores, university utilitarianism and current liter-
ature. Nothing becomes the economic world so
ill as their record under the touchstone of the sex
problem. The fact that ninety per cent of the
migratory workers have no women awakens no
train of thought. Economists are apparently one
with the Chicago Vice Commission, — the Sex In-
stinct can be abolished.
Leadership acts in the interests of a dozen other

UNDERSTANDING LABOR UNREST 41

manifest tendency-satisfactions. Authority gives
to the tendency to be curious, to investigate, to
wonder about, and speculate, not only tremendous
evolutionary value but great preeminence among
the tendencies striving for general dominance. It
is the proclivity which has made so-called progress
possible and its inhibition, as Trotter argues,
through conservatism and orderly moulding of life,
is the cause of well grounded pessimism about the
future of the human race.

If these be the unlearned tendencies, how do
they function? And perhaps if the problem be
not too appalling, what is a full functioning, a
complete psychological life? Since Freud, the
pioneer in such an analysis, began with a descrip-
tion of manifest anti-normal functioning, the evi-
dence is mainly in this field, and one is practically
driven to paint the picture of a true normal life
by the crude method of describing the opposite.
At any rate the practice of first labor would be to
free man from balkings and inhibitions. And then
for the moment, trust like an idealist that the re-
leased human energy would muddle man to a con-
ventionally nicer level. The innate tendencies,
making up as they do the total motive power of
man, gain an expression depending absolutely on

42 THE CASUAL LABORER

the liberty afforded them by the environment and
on the quality of the tools at hand. For sex, for
migration, gregariousness, collecting, leadership,
etc., there seem methods of satisfying which not
only feel right and just to our experienced selves,
but these methods seem to have a place in the
scheme of conduct of biologically vigorous per-
sons.

So we ascribe a high degree of normality to
these methods of satisfying. In contrast to these
in reality rare if desirable ways, are countless ways
of gratification which are compromises between a
fair approximation of this norm and a gratification
so pitiful or so psychically costly or nauseatingly
revolting or so egotistically brutal that much of
orthodox religion is devoted to the simple task
of either hiding these or damning them to death.
Denied a normal expression one is said to sub-
limate the energy, evaporate it off through de-
votion to a different satisfaction. One is also said
to compensate through a kindred substitute-ac-
tivity for the thwarting of the direct instinct ex-
pression.

One of the great discoveries of Freud was that
in early childhood all the psychical equipment is
present and pressing for gratification, and that the

UNDERSTANDING LABOR UNREST 43

highly repressive character of the conventional
discipline for children guaranteed an immense
number of minor and major thwartings and the
attendant complexes. These complexes arise in
such a manner as this: Little children have a uni-
versal and instinctive interest in manipulating
anything they can get their hands on, in pulling it
to pieces and looking at its insides. Toys in the
hands of free children are soon reduced to their
elements, the young of their pet animals die under
their experiments. The fact that our own family
cat had presented the household with an expected
bunch of kittens came to me through the query of
my four-year-old son as to why little kittens could
not swim. Experiments of his on the brood of
blind kittens in a horse trough had produced en-
ligtening if fatal consequences. The results of
balking innate dispositions of children are il-
luminated by the details of a case taken from the
records of a New York psychiatrist (Brill). A
small child born into a wealthy family was neg-
lected from infancy by her parents. Her only
relation with them was a daily interview with her
mother in which the condition of her clothing was
inspected and a nurse's recital of her breaches of
discipline heard. The nurse told the mother one

44 THE CASUAL LABORER

day of the child's breaking a valuable vase by
pulling it off the table. The mother at that mo-
ment was nervous and annoyed by some other
event and had burst out with unexpected fury.
She whipped the child before the nurse. It was
the first time she had ever touched the child. The
child during the whipping had hysterically re-
peated over and over again, "I only wanted to
see what was inside the vase." The nurse in order
to stand well with the mother instituted a cal-
culated system of activity repression for the child,
and to gain enforcement of her rules, built up by
threats and terrifying stories a horde of spirits
and devils who inhabited the dark forbidden
rooms or bric-a-brac. The child, for relief to
her innate demands, began to build up phan-
tasies and delusions. Frequently she would stand
an hour or more looking out a window at a vacant
lot. Later this nurse was discharged, and a loving
and mystical old woman hired in her place. This
person entered into the spirit world of the child
with enthusiasm and the two developed this phan-
tasizing, this habit fixation, into infinite detail.
When later this nurse was discharged for intem-
perance the girl, then past adolescence, developed
immediately a high irrationality, was very fearful,

UNDERSTANDING LABOR UNREST 45

and suffered extreme night terrors. The psy-
chiatrist found that the child had identified the
nurse with her obsessional and perverted phan-
tasy habit and that with her gone, life was an ir-
resistible terror. The intemperate maid was re-
hired and an interview had with the mother in
which the scientific results of her mother infidelity
were enumerated. The mother is now trying to
give to her daughter something of those experi-
ences lost to her in her childhood and to become a
satisfaction-feature of the child's life rather than
a dreaded guilt-reminder, a repression-spectre who
is to be hated, avoided and fooled. In lesser de-
gree and with milder results this story is repeated
in the lives of millions of children. If we should
sympathetically take the tentative list of innate
human proclivities here presented, and using
them as norms investigate the infinite detail of
the lives of one hundred children in the period
between birth and their year of adolescence, we
should uncover literally thousands of serious com-
plexes and fixations. Mothers, fathers, teachers,
ministers, playmates, the sophisticated street
idler, all taken together Trotter's social censor —
conventional society — gives the repressive force.
Fear of punishment by parent or teacher, fear of

46 THE CASUAL LABORER

public scorn, fear of a playmate's ridicule, fear of
being caught kissing one's mother, fear of the po-
liceman, of being uninvited, the educated fear of
the darkness and its population of devils, fear of
the unknown and the limitless, fear of a cheap
funeral, fear of being out of style, fear of being off
the band wagon, fear of not being right, all these
give us our psychic hot points, our obsessions.

An interesting generalization can be made here.
These guilt obsessions result almost universally in
an inferiority phobia, a "minderwertigkeit," a feel-
ing of guilt. This inferiority-realization creates
two types of reaction — either the person affected
is weak kneed, submissive, yellow streaked, a back-
slider, a fair weather friend; or secondly, he be-
comes a strange creature who compensates for his
inferiority by an aggressive ordering of his life as
if he were imbued with the opposite character
virtues. Among notable inferiority compensations
of this class are :

Bragging of the timid.
Bravery of the physically small.
Cheerfulness of the dying (Tuberculosis Psychosis) .
Washing mania of the immoral.
Orthodoxy of Rockefeller.
The vociferously "fair" to laborers.
Ostentatious interest of cotton mill owners in the
welfare of the child workers.

UNDERSTANDING LABOR UNREST 47

The peace work of Carnegie in contrast to his
Homestead strike policy.
Acquisition of the dyspeptic.
Dilettante intellectualism of the self-made.
Patriotism of the unheroic.
Generosity of the saloon-keeper to the poor.

By this devious path I come now to the char-
acter of evolution in the field of modern indus-
trialism. Children of the middle class without
doubt have a more unhealthy psychic life than
those of the working class. But following the
statistics of evident malnutrition, short school
experience, and the abnormally high death rate
of children of mill towns, our conventional mores
have moved us to general if mild conviction that
children of the working class are woefully badly
off. It seems, however, that the necessary laxness
of working home discipline, the decay among the
working population of respect for conventional
rules and law, the favorable opportunities for the
children to quit school, the plasticity of the codes
governing street social life, all work in an impor-
tant manner towards allowing a relatively free
and healthy psychic development of the children
affected by it. Working mothers have not the
time to enforce minutely the best current moral

48 THE CASUAL LABORER

standards, for it takes much of the day's energies
of the upper middle class mother to create by
such an enforcement that atmosphere whose fre-
quent and almost normal product is the above
analyzed sexual and economic abnormalties.

However, at a later date in the life of these
working class children, certain powerful forces in
their environment, though they work on the less
susceptible and less plastic natures of mature in-
dividuals, produce obsessions and thwartings
which function at tunes, exclusively almost, in
determining the behavior of great classes of the
industrial population. The powerful forces of the
working class environment which thwart and balk
instinct expression are suggested in the phrases
monotonous work, dirty work, simplified work,
mechanized work, the servile place of labor, in-
secure tenure of the job, hire and fire, winter un-
employment, the ever found union of the poor
district with the crime district, and the restricted
district with prostitution, the open shop, and
labor turnover, poverty, the breadlines, the scrap
heap, destitution. If we postulate some twenty
odd unit psychic characters which are present
under the laborer's dirty blouse and insistently
demand the same gratification that is with painful

UNDERSTANDING LABOR UNREST 49

care planned for the college student, in just what
kind of perverted compensations must a laborer
indulge to make endurable his existence? A
western hobo tries in a more or less frenzied way
to compensate for a general all embracing thwart-
ing of his nature by a wonderful concentration
of sublimation activities on the wander instinct.
The monotony, indignity, dirt and sexual apolo-
gies of, for instance, the unskilled worker's life
bring their definite fixations, their definite irra-
tional inferiority obsessions. The balked laborer
here follows one of the two described lines of
conduct :

First, either weakens, becomes inefficient, drifts
away, loses interest in the quality of his work, drinks,
deserts his family, or,

Secondly, he indulges in a true type-inferiority com-
pensation and in order to dignify himself, to eliminate
for himself his inferiority in his own eyes, he strikes
or brings on a strike, he commits violence or he stays
on the job and injures machinery, or mutilates the
materials; he is fit food for dynamite conspiracies. He
is ready to make sabotage a part of his regular habit
scheme. His condition is one of mental stress and
unfocussed psychic unrest, and could in all accuracy
be called a definite industrial psychosis. He is neither
wilful nor responsible, he is suffering from a stereo-
typed mental disease.

50 THE CASUAL LABORER

If one leaves the strata of unskilled labor and
investigates the higher economic classes he finds
parallel conditions. There is a profound unrest
and strong migratory tendency among department
store employees. One New York store with less
than three thousand employees has thirteen thou-
sand pass in a year through its employ. Since the
establishment in American life of "big business"
with its extensive efficiency systems, its order and
de-humanized discipline, its caste system, as it
were, there has developed among its highly paid
men a persistent unrest, a dissatisfaction and de-
cay of morale which is so notable and costly that
it has received repeated attention. Even the con-
ventional competitive efficiency of American
Business is in grave question. I suggest that this
unrest is a true psychosis, a definite mental un-
balance, an efficiency psychosis, as it were, and
has its definite psychic antecedents — and that
our present moralizing and guess-solutions are
both hopeless and ludicrous. We blindly trust
that a ten per cent wage increase will cure that
breakdown which a sympathetic social psychia-
trist might, if given all power, hope merely to al-
leviate. Other economic classes suffer from the
limited outlet their environment affords — a

UNDERSTANDING LABOR UNREST 51

narrow thwarted life drives unmarried women into
France as nurses. Students, disappointed and
balked by the impersonal and perfunctory instruc-
tion given in American universities, compensate
by an enthusiasm over athletics and student ac-
tivities which, if part expended in intellectual
exercise, would revolutionize society. College
athletics is a sort of psychic cure for the illness of
experiencing a university education. The ac-
tivity of many particularly placid people in the
interests of peace might be identified as a com-
pensatory and satisfying identification of their
fearful selves with a desirable state of bloodshed.
Many unmarried and repressed women gain a vi-
carious sex equivalent in a morbid interest in
births, funerals, fires, and collecting things having
sex symbolic value.

The most notable inferiority compensation in
industrial life is the strike. The strike has two
prerequisites, — a satisfactory obsession in the
labor mind, and a sufficient decay in the eyes of
labor of the prestige of social norms, to allow the
laborer to make those breaches of law and conven-
tion which a well run strike of today demands.
The violence of the strike varies directly with
both the psychic annoyance due to the obsession

52 THE CASUAL LABORER

and with the extent of decay in the striker's eyes
of conventional mores. Veblen has shown how
modern machine technology gives a causal, de-
terministic bias to labor class thinking and how
this bias makes impossible the acceptance at face
value of the mystic, anthropomorphic pretensions
of law and business rights. These pretensions
seem fitted to endure only in a society experienc-
ing a placid, unaroused and ox-like existence, or
in one where the prestige of law and order is main-
tained by a large professional army and a policy
of frightfulness not rendered inefficient by the in-
opportune presence of emotional religions.
Neither of these prerequisites is present in
America, so our strikes tend to reflect without
serious modification both the psychic ill-health
generated by the worker's experience, and the
rapid and interesting decay of the respect and
popularity of the law, the courts, property, and
the rich man. Trotter has described modern so-
cial revolt as the war between man stimulated by
his sore psychical experiences and the Power of
the Herd. This is but a Veblenesque description
of the strike.

My main thesis might be stated as a plea to
consider the states of conventional "Willfulness,"

UNDERSTANDING LABOR UNREST 53

such as laziness, inefficiency, destructiveness in
strikes, etc., as ordinary mental disease of a func-
tional kind, a sort of industrial psychosis. If we
accept this approach then the cure for these men-
acing social ailments beckons to us from the field
of abnormal and comparative psychology. We
must, however, be prepared for a thorough mental
house cleaning, Conventional thinking, conven-
tional economics and its standards of value, are
ruled out because they assisted in the promotion
of evolutionary inefficiency. For instance, most
economists glory in cheap and much food, cheap
and much timber, cheap and good land, though
it seems that these easy and unearned gifts have
given the American part of the human race a
psychic bias towards uncritical waste, an undis-
turbed liking for rapid and spectacular consump-
tion, and a listlessness over questions of the ul-
timate problems of human survival, which make
our intellectual processes curiously like those of
primitive man.

The habituation of the higher constructive in-
stinct in us has been slurred (except where they
are narrowly concerned with production for
waste) and the more genuinely indicative and
more difficultly attained workmanlike qualities of

64 THE CASUAL LABORER

contemplative thinking: art, poetry, evolutionary
speculation, behavior study, philosophy, etc., are
notoriously neglected and in possession of mani-
festly inadequate and unsatisfactory norms.

If I might be allowed to propose a program for
reform this is such a program: Reform needs a
militant minority, or to follow Trotter, a small
Herd. This little Herd would give counsel, relief,
and recuperation to its members. The members
and the Herd will be under merciless fire from the
convention-ridden members of general society.
They will be branded outlaws, radicals, agnostics,
impossible, crazy. They will be lucky to be out
of jail most of the time. They will work by trial
and study, gaining wisdom by their errors as
Sidney Webb and the Fabians did. In the end,
after a long time, parts of the social sham will
collapse, as it did in England, and small promises
will become milestones of progress.

From where, then, can we gain recruits for this
minority? Two real sources seem in existence, the
universities, and the field of mental disease spec-
ulation and hospital experiment. The one, the
universities, with rare if wonderful exceptions,
are fairly hopeless, the other is not only rich in
promise but few realize how full in performance.

UNDERSTANDING LABOR UNREST 55

Most of the literature which is gripping that great
intellectual no-man's land of the silent readers is
basing its appeal and its story on the rather un-
colored-up and bald facts which come from Freud,
Trotter, Robinson, Dewey, E. B. Holt, Lippmann,
Morton Prince, Pierce Bailey, Hart, Overstreet,
Thorndike, Campbell, Meyer, Stanley Hall, Adler,
White and Watson. It is from this field of com-
parative or abnormal psychology that the chal-
lenge to industrialism and the program of change
will come.

But suppose you ask me to be concrete and give
an idea of such a program. Take simply the be-
ginning of life, take childhood, for that is where
the human material is least protected, most
plastic, and where most injury today is done. In
way of general suggestion I would say, exclude
children from formal disciplinary life, such as that
of all industry and most schools, up to the age of
eighteen. After excluding them, what shall we
do with them? Ask John Dewey or read his
"Schools of Tomorrow" or "Democracy and Edu-
cation." It means tremendous, unprecedented
money expense to insure an active trial and error
learning activity, a chance to naturally recapitu-
late the racial trial and error learning experience,

56 THE CASUAL LABORER

a study and preparation for those periods of life in
which fall the ripening of the relatively late ma-
turing instincts, a general realizing that wisdom
can come only from experience and not from the
Book. It means psychologically calculated child-
hood opportunity in which the now stifled in-
stincts of leardership, workmanship, hero worship,
hunting, migration, meditation, sex, could grow
and take their foundation place in the psychic
equipment of a biologically promising human be-
ing. To illustrate in trivialities, no father, with
knowledge of the meaning of the universal bent
towards workmanship, would give his son a puzzle
if lie knew of the Mecano or Erector toys, and no
father would give the Mecano if he had grasped
the educational potentiality of the gift to his child
of $10 worth of lumber and a set of good car-
penters tools. There is now enough loose wisdom
around devoted to childhood, its needs, liberties,
and experiences, both to give the children of this
civilization their first evolutionary chance, as well
as to send most teachers back to the farm.

In the age period of eighteen to thirty would
fall that pseudo-educational monstrosity, the un-
dergraduate university, and the degrading popular
activities of '^beginning a business" or "picking up

UNDERSTANDING LABOR UNREST 57

a trade." Much money must be spent here. Per-
haps few fields of activity have been conventional-
ized as much as university education. Here, just
where a superficial theorist would expect to find
enthusiam, emancipated minds, and hope, is
found fear, convention, a mean instinct life, no
spirit of adventure, little curiosity, in general no
promise of preparedness. No wonder philosophical
idealism flourishes and Darwin is forgotten. The
first two years of university life should be devoted
to the Science of Human Behavior. Much of to-
day's biology, zoology, history, if it is interpre-
tative, psychology if it is behavioristic, philos-
ophy, if it is pragmatic, literature if it had been
written involuntarily, would find its place here.
The last two years could profitably be spent in
appraising with that ultimate standard of value
gained in the first two years, the various insti-
tutions and instruments used by civilized man.
All instruction would be objective, scientific, and
emancipated from convention — wonderful pros-
pect!

In industrial labor and in business employ-
ments a new concept, a new going philosophy
must unreservedly be accepted which has, instead
of the ideal of forcing human beings to mould

58 THE CASUAL LABORER

their habits to assist the continued existence of
the inherited order of things, an ideal of moulding
all business institutions and ideas of prosperity
in the interests of scientific evolutionary aims and
large human pleasures. As Pigou has said, "En-
vironment has its children as well as men." Mo-
notony in labor, tedium in office work, time spent
in business correspondence, the boredom of run-
ning a sugar refinery, would be asked to step be-
fore the bar of human affairs and get a health
standardization. Today industry produces goods
that cost more than they are worth, are consumed
by persons who are degraded by the consuming of
them, destroying permanently the raw material
source which science has painfully explained could
be made inexhaustible. Some intellectual revo-
lution must come which will de-emphasize busi-
ness and industry and re-emphasize most other
ways of self expression. In Florence around 1300,
Giotto painted a picture and the day it was to be
hung in St. Marks the town closed down for a
holiday and the people with garlands of flowers
and songs escorted the picture from the artist's
studio to the church. Three weeks ago I stood in
company with 500 silent, sallow-faced men at a
corner on Wall Street, a cold and wet corner, till
young Morgan issued from J. P. Morgan and Co.

UNDERSTANDING LABOR UNREST 59

and walked twenty feet to his carriage. We pro-
duce probably per capita one thousand times more
in weight of ready made clothing, Irish lace, arti-
ficial flowers, terra cotta, movie films, telephones,
and printed matter, than these Florentines did,
but we have with our 100,000,000 inhabitants yet
to produce that little town, her Dante, her Andrea
del Sarto, her Michael Angelo, her Leonardo da
Vinci, her Savonarola, her Giotto, — or the group
who followed Giotto's picture. Florence had a
marvelous energy-release experience. All our in-
dustrial formalism, our conventionalized young
manhood, our schemitized universities, are in-
struments of balk and thwart, are machines to
produce protesting abnormality, to block effi-
ciency.

So the problem of industrial labor is one with
the problem of the discontented business man,
the indifferent student, the unhappy wife, the
immoral minister, — it is one of mal-adjustment
between a fixed human nature and a carelessly
ordered world. The result is suffering, insanity,
racial perversion, and danger. The final cure is
gaining acceptance for a new standard of nor-
mality. The first step towards this is to break
down the mores-inhibitions to free experimental
thinking.

II

THE CASUAL LABORER
I. The Wheatland Episode

LABOR history, more than any other subdivision
of economic history, seems to be written in terms
of impressive events. In August, 1913, in the hop
fields of Wheatland, California, such an event took
place : an unusual strike, as strange as any in the
annals of western labor. Men were killed, the
country side cast into hysteria, the militia called
out, and the State was made to realize overnight
that San Francisco unionism was not the sum
total of her labor problem. California long had
known that nowhere in the country was there as
unionized a city as San Francisco, that wages were
high even as compared with the New York Build-
ing Trades, that the Exposition had been built as
a closed shop, and that a candidate, be it for
Governor, who was lukewarm regarding the pol-
icies of organized labor, had a remote chance of
election. To Californians this for more than

61

62 THE CASUAL LABORER

twenty years had been their labor question. With
the dramatic entry of the hop pickers on the stage
there began such a widespread and agitated dis-
cussion of the condition of the state's casual
workers, that the two years of 1913 and 1914 will
be known in western labor history as the "period
of the migratory worker."

The story of the Wheatland hop pickers riot is
as simple as the facts of it are new and naive in
strike histories. Twenty-eight hundred pickers
were camped on a treeless hill which was part of
the Durst 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. Eight small toilets had been
erected and four days use had made them revolt-
ingly filthy. No toilets had been allotted to
women. There was no organization for sanita-
tion, no garbage disposal. The temperature dur-
ing the week of the riot had remained near 105
degrees and though the wells were a mile from
where the men, women, and children were pick-
ing, 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

THE CASUAL LABORER 63

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 in-
vestigation that the owner of the ranch received
half of the net profit earned by an alleged inde-
pendent grocery store which had been granted the
"grocery concession" and was located in the center
of the camp ground.

An examination of the wage system of this ranch
for both the seasons of 1912 and 1913 showed
an interesting phenomenon. Each day there ex-
isted four possible wage rates. If many hop
pickers had drifted in by wagon and train and foot
during the previous day, and as a result an un-
employed crowd hung about the check window
at sunrise, then 90 cents per hundred pounds was
hung up as the piece price for hop picking. If
there were unemployed still desirous for work
even after this wage announcement, and a surplus
hung about the window the following morning,
it was the custom to lower the wages to 85 cents
per hundred pounds. Like the immigrant at Ellis
Island, the hop picker arrives at the job without
a money reserve. The dictator of the wage policy
of this ranch explained that if the pickers grew
disgruntled at either rate of pay or the average

64 THE CASUAL LABORER

income and drifted away, leaving work checks un-
called-for, then the wage scale would be raised to
95 cents or even a dollar. There had been certain
days in the past, he said, when a labor exodus had
forced the price to as high as $1.10 before the
workers would flow in and allow the rate to sink
to a more profitable level. In order to counter-
act any wavering in allegiance to the job, 10 per
cent of the gross wages was held out by this ranch
to be paid to those who remained through the
season. The ranch owner argued that this was a
real bonus, because so many left before the season
was out that they, the deserters, fixed the real
average wage; therefore those who remained to
receive the ten per cent were paid just that
amount more than the average. In a private hear-
ing before the Governor, an attempt to establish
whether a bonus should be taken from the wage
fund or the profit fund was without success. Pos-
sibly this failure illustrates a certain general con-
fusion upon the issue. To uphold this wage
system it was necessary to advertise throughout
California and in southern Oregon and western
Nevada that everyone who applied on or before
the day picking was to begin could obtain a job.
It is difficult to estimate the vast number of mi-

THE CASUAL LABORER 65

gratory workers who make this ranch a short stop-
ping place at some time in the five weeks of hop
picking.

The pickers in August, 1913, were drawn from
three sources. About a third came from Cali-
fornia towns and cities, men and boys who form
the great class of town casuals, and the wives and
children from various stratas of the middle class.
Another third were families from the Sierra foot-
hills, quasi-gypsies, with carts or ramshackle
wagons. The final third were the migratories, —
the pure hobo, or his California exemplar, the
"fruit tramp" ; Hindus ; and a large body of Jap-
anese. There was much old-time California blood
in this group, and even if the individuals had
come upon evil economic days, their idea of per-
sonal dignity and their devotion to certain strange
western "rights" had remained most positive.
They began coming to Wheatland on Tuesday,
and by Sunday the irritation over the wage scale,
the absence of water in the fields, plus the per-
sistent heat and the increasing indignity of the
camp, had resulted in mass meetings, violent talk,
and a general strike.

The ranch owner, a nervous man, was harassed
by the rush of work brought on by the too rapidly

66 THE CASUAL LABORER

ripening hops, and indignant at the jeers and cat-
calls which greeted his appearance near the meet-
ings of the pickers. Confused with a crisis out-
side 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 in-
stincts and vagaries of a mob on 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 mass
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 circumstances, a member of
the posse standing outside fired a double barrelled
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 of the strikers, the posse
fled in their automobiles to the country seat, and
all that night the roads out of Wheatland were
filled with pickers leaving the camp. Eight
months later two hop pickers, proven to be the
leaders of the strike and its agitation, were con-

THE CASUAL LABORER 67

victed of murder in the first degree and sentenced
to life imprisonment. Their appeal for a new
trial was denied.

Dramatic because of the deaths and its sudden-
ness, sordid in its details, in some way the episode
caught and held the attention of the state. It is
impossible to understand California's ensuing in-
spection on the subject of its peculiar labor prob-
lem without a description of the Wheatland
episode. This brought the state to some degree of
self-realization. The Federal Commission on In-
dustrial Relations and the State Commission of
Immigration and Housing turned their initial in-
terest in the significance of the hop pickers riot to
the problem of the migratory worker in the west
thus dramatically introduced. The riot in the
end served many purposes, one of which was to
lend dignity to the I. W. W. in a very appreciable
manner. Sympathy with syndicalism and ultra
radical theories appeared in the most unexpected
places. A group of women who had been identi-
fied with the most notable agitations in the Cali-
fornia feminist movement went from trade union
to union begging for funds to defend the indicted
hop pickers. It was disclosed that many trade
unionists in San Francisco were interested in the

68 THE CASUAL LABORER

I. W. W., some going so far as to have cards in
both organizations. It was disclosed in the trial
that certain suspects among the hop pickers had
been held in jail many weeks without being
charged or given a court hearing, a record of their
arrest existing only on a so-called "secret blotter."
This fact, in addition to an unexplainable par-
ticipation of a private detective agency in the
case, was a focus for very warm opinion. The
county authorities' traditional treatment of va-
grants and migratory workers with "no visible
means of support" gave a sickening picture, and
an uncomfortable hint of a vast amount of cruelty
and injustice. Any romance which the Far West
had thrown around a sheriff's posse was rudely
stripped from the institution, and the prophecy
was accepted that if the posse be the police power
in any period of agricultural strikes and disorder,
a large measure of dangerous inefficiency is as-
sured. The most important result of the riot was
the study of the economics of the labor field thus
suddenly disclosed; and it is the results of this re-
search to which we now turn.

THE CASUAL LABORER 69

II. The California Casual

California is a natural economic entity, insu-
lated from the rest of the world by an ocean on
the west, a desert south, and high mountains north
and east. This gives a fair basis for isolating the
labor problem to be considered under the present
caption. The census shows the existence in the
state of some 175,000 workers in the casual-using
occupations. Of these, 72,157 are farm laborers
"working out." A dependable estimate of the
number of laborers in labor camps of the state at
the time of maximum population is 75,000. The
State Immigration Commission gathered statistics
for 876 labor camps with a capacity of 60,813
workers. There has been a noteworthy industrial
and agricultural specialization by districts in the
state. Mining and the two diverse kinds of coast
lumbering, i.e. the Sierra pine belt and the lower
lying redwood belt, have given three detached
labor fields. Agricultural California today is
spotted with districts devoted to highly special-
ized and seasonal crops, running geographically
from the oranges of the south through the walnuts
of Santa Barbara, the raisins of Fresno, the arti-
chokes of Half Moon Bay, the berries of Santa

70 THE CASUAL LABORER

Clara, to the early peach and the olive regions of
the northern Sacramento Valley. Each town is
a specialist and each Chamber of Commerce a
"booster club" for a single product. This nature-
ordained agricultural specialization is the basic
cause of the existence of the California migratory
worker. Another important factor is the circum-
stance that California for the last five years has
been the scene of more railway and highway con-
struction than any state in the West. Thus there
was added to the local casuals a new element, the
middle West railway laborer, the "construction
work hobo." He has transplanted his personal
habits and labor psychology into western soil
without western adaptation.

In 1913-14 an investigation was carried on in
California which utilized schedules covering 222
typical migratory workers, and from the resulting
report the following generalizations appear well-
based. Nearly half (48 per cent) were native
Americans. The statistics of the Chicago Munic-
ipal Lodging House for 1910-12, covering 30,888
cases, of whom 60 per cent were estimated as mi-
gratories, give the percentage of "Americans" as
53.5. Of the California number investigated, 76
per cent were unmarried and 7.1 per cent had

THE CASUAL LABORER 71

abandoned their wives. Four years of Chicago
statistics show nearly 90 per cent unmarried. Of
the 222, 47 per cent were under thirty years of age.
A study in Chicago of 38,256 casuals in 1910-12
showed 44 per cent below thirty years of age. In
California 33 per cent were between thirty and
forty years of age, in Chicago, 27 per cent. Of the
30,888 examined in Chicago, 80 per cent were un-
skilled; 52 per cent of the California group ad-
mitted no trade training whatsoever. Of the Chi-
cago group, but 21 per cent had been long enough
in that city to establish a legal residence. Of the
222, 73 per cent had worked at their last regular
job in some locality other than the one in which
they were examined. Twenty-one per cent had
had their last job outside the state. Forty-one
per cent had been casual laborers less than six
years, and 36 per cent between six and fifteen
years. The per cent who admitted their inten-
tion of "floating" with no idea of looking for
steady work was 67. Thirty-five per cent left their
last job voluntarily. This hints at a conclusion
which finds support in all the studies of the casual,
the tramp, or the vagabond: that casualty begets
a labor type permanently under normal. There
is today sufficient evidence from various quarters

72 THE CASUAL LABORER

to make this grave charge against seasonal work.
For instance, in Belgium the statistics of ad-
missions in 1908 to The Wortel Beggars Depot
shows 1,222 committed for the first time, 435 for
the second, 261 for the third, 163 for the fourth,
and 717 for the fifth time or oftener.

Some of the more intimate statistics of the Cali-
fornia group are suggestive: 22 per cent had be-
longed to a lodge ; 29 per cent had been members
of a Protestant Church, 18 per cent of the
Catholic ; 48 per cent gave no preference for a po-
litical party, yet 37 per cent advocated the com-
plete destruction of the present political system.
Despite the Wheatland riot and the extensive
propaganda of the I. W. W. among this very labor
class, but 8 per cent belonged to that organization.
Forty-one per cent had ceased writing or main-
taining any connection with relatives, and 86 per
cent said no one was dependent upon them.
Somewhat similar evidence is the fact that out of
thirty suicides in the men's cheap lodging houses
in San Francisco, in the month of December, 1913,
but two left behind any word as to their source or
relatives. The schedule examiners reported that
74 per cent were in good or fair physical condition,
and 24 per cent sick. The Chicago statistics cover-

THE CASUAL LABORER 73

ing 130,053 cases reported 84.8 per cent "able-
bodied." Seventy-seven per cent of the 222 in
California were alcoholic, and 26 per cent ad-
mitted a jail record. The Department of Educa-
tion of Stanford University tested two hundred
unemployed of the migratory labor class and al-
most an even 25 per cent were found feeble-
minded. Binet tests made in 1913 by the Eco-
nomic Department of Reed College, Portland,
covering 107 cases taken from the unemployed
army showed the percentage of feeble-minded to
be 26.

A California state official of long technical ex-
perience, whose duties bring him in direct contact
with the young vagrant, believes that he has the
data to prove a widespread practice of homo-
sexuality among the migratory laborers. Inves-
tigation reports of a most dependable and tech-
nical nature show that in California lumber camps
a sex perversion within the entire group is as de-
veloped and recognized as the well known similar
practice in prisons and reformatories. Often the
men sent out from the employment agencies are
without blankets or even sufficient clothing, and
they are forced to sleep packed together for the
sake of warmth. Investigations are beginning to

74 THE CASUAL LABORER

show that there are social dangers which a group
of demoralized, womenless men may engender
under such conditions of greater menace than the
stereotyped ill effects of insanitation and malnu-
trition.

III. The Labor Camps and the Labor Turnover

An investigation of the labor camps of the state
was carried out in the summer of 1914 by the
State Commission of Immigration and Housing
under the direction of the present writer. Eight
hundred and seventy-six camps were examined in
which at some time in the summer 60,813 men
were to be housed. Of these camps 297 (34 per
cent), holding 21,577 workers, were pronounced
in good condition; 316 (36 per cent), housing
22,382 men, fair; and 263 (30 per cent), housing
16,854 men, were so insanitary and destitute of
essentials that they were entered as bad. In this
investigation "fair" was below the minimum es-
tablished by the State Board of Health. Of the
berry camps investigated, 68 per cent had toilets
statistically noted as "filthy." The toilets were in
this same condition in 37 per cent of the fruit
camps, 69 per cent of the grape camps, 38 per

THE CASUAL LABORER 75

cent of the highway camps, 62 per cent of the 135
hop camps, 42 per cent of the lumber camps
(though they could be described as permanent in
many cases), 37 per cent of the mining camps, and
61 per cent of the ranch camps. The large cor-
poration made an interesting break in this recital,
for but 24 per cent of the railway camps were
"filthy" ; and in the oil fields, where Standard Oil
and The Union Oil Company are largely in con-
trol, the percentage was 27. In 29 per cent of the
construction and 25 per cent of the highway
camps there were no toilets whatever. For all
the 876 camps, 13 per cent had no toilets, 31 per
cent maintained filthy toilets, 20.4 per cent fairly
sanitary, 23.4 per cent sanitary and fly screened.
Among all camps 40 per cent provided no bathing
facilities at all, 39 per cent offered tubs or
showers. Of the 537 labor camps using horses, 27
per cent allowed the manure to accumulate in the
vicinity of the kitchen and mess tent. Thirty-
five per cent of the kitchen and mess tents had no
screens. Twenty-five per cent of the camps had
no garbage disposal, the kitchen refuse being al-
lowed to accumulate indefinitely. It is a proverb
in the health service of the two great valleys that
every labor camp has its typhoid carrier. Certain

76 THE CASUAL LABORER

fruit towns expect their ten cases of typhoid per
year.

It will be seen that the camp conditions at
Wheatland constituted no isolated case. The
early California population was a pioneer com-
munity and their complete acceptance of individ-
ualism gave little room for social realizations.
This doctrine remains the current philosophy of
the country districts, and despite the statewide in-
fluence of the social legislation of the Johnson ad-
ministration, the inherited psychology of the
employer of casual labor remains the same.

Resistance by the worker to an employer's
labor policy takes one of two forms: either an
open and formal revolt, such as a strike; or an
instinctive and often unconscious exercise of the
"strike in detail," — simply drifting off the job.
The latter phenomenon is called by the employers
"undependable labor," and ideas concerning this
willful unreliability constitute the layman's usual
version of the California labor problem. In the
light of the recent investigations it would appear
that the California employer obtains the labor to
whom his conditions of employment are attrac-
tive. A study first of the "strike in detail" in the
state is convincing.

THE CASUAL LABORER 77

Statistics were obtained from the books of the
Southern Pacific and Northwestern Pacific, the
two systems carrying on the most important rail-
way construction in the west.

NORTHWESTERN PACIFIC

In a camp called the "Tunnel Camp," during
the five months from January to May, 1914, 529
men worked 7414 days, an average of 14 days per
man. Following are the statistics in detail:

Jan. 133 men worked 2169 days, average 16.3 days per man.

Feb. 107 " " 1554 " " 14.5 " " "

Mar. 138 " " 1471 " " 10.6 " " "

Apr. 90 " " 1153 " " 12.8 " " "

May 61 " 1067 " " 17.5 " " "

In the "Grade Camp" of the same company ad-
joining the "Tunnel Camp," during the seven
months from June to December, 764 men worked
7723 days, an average of 10.1 days per man.

June 68 men worked 825 days, average 12.1 days per man.

July 82
Aug. 73
Sept. 56
Oct. 171
Nov. 166

765

944

850

1599

1612

9.3
13.3
152
9.3
9.7

Dec. 146 1128 7.6

In the year 1913 the two adjoining camps had
employed 1293 men working 15,137 days, an
average of 11.7 days work per man.

78 THE CASUAL LABORER

SOUTHERN PACIFIC

In the "Grade Camp" of this company, statis-
tics covering March 10 to July 8, show 480 men
working 4145 days, an average of 8.6 days per
man.

Mar. 10 days, 74 men worked 250 days.

Apr. 136 " " 1262 " average 95 days.

May 180 " " 1459 " " 8.0 "

June 164 " " 1424 " " 8.7 "

July 8 days, 68 " 234 "

These figures bear out the employment agency
proverb that there are three crews of men con-
nected with the job, one coming, one going, one
on the job.

A big dried fruit packing firm in Fresno re-
ported that to keep up a skilled crew of 93 men,
41 per week had to be hired throughout the
season. A large ranch with a fruit season of nine
weeks reported a monthly turnover of 245 per
cent. One power house construction job in the
Sierras gave figures showing that to maintain a
force of 950, over 1500 men a month were shipped
to them.

It seems that when a laborer has earned a sum
which road tradition has fixed as affluence, he
quits. This sum is known as a "jungle stake,"
and once it is earned the hobo discipline calls upon

THE CASUAL LABORER 79

the casual to resort to a camp under a railroad
bridge or along some stream, a " jungle," as the
vernacular terms it, and live upon this "stake"
till it is gone. Thereupon he goes north to a new
maturing crop. Weeks spent among the casuals
by two investigators lead them to attach great
importance to this custom. In the words of a re-
port, "The sum which usage prescribes that a
jungle stake should be, taken in relation to the
wage in the district, fixes the casual's endurance
on the job. Today between ten and fifteen dollars
is a proper stake." The statistics of the 222 Cali-
fornia casuals examined show that but 29 per
cent left their last job because work gave out.
Taking into calculation both the tendency to drift
away from a fairly permanent job, as shown by
the construction work figures, and also the normal
short duration of the fruit or harvesting work,
such generalizations as the following, gathered by
the investigators, seem to be dependable. The
duration of a job is:

In lumber camps 15-30 days

" construction work 10 "

" harvesting 7 "

" mining 60 "

" canning 30 *"

" orchard work . . 7-10 "

80 THE CASUAL LABORER

IV. Winter Unemployment; the Revolt

California is a state of summer employment.
The seasonal activity of the canneries, the state's
principal industry, illustrates this fully. In
August, 1909, California canneries employed
16,047; in February, but 2781. Of the 150,000
migratory workers employed in the summer, a
mass of direct and indirect information indicates
that fully 100,000 face sustained whiter unem-
ployment. Driven out of the lumber and power
construction camps and mines of the Sierras by
the snow, out of highway camps by the regular
winter shut down, and out of agriculture by its
closed winter season, with a winter's stake esti-
mated to be on the average $30, these tens of
thousands "lie up" for from five to six months in
the cities of the coast. A San Francisco canvas
of the ten and fifteen cent lodging houses and the
cheap hotels of the foreign quarter, made in De-
cember, 1913, showed that over forty thousand
were "lying up" in that city. A Los Angeles es-
timate gave twenty-five thousand; Sacramento
showed approximately three thousand; and im-
portant additions came from Stockton, Fresno,
and Bakersfield. The whiter of 1913 was a hard

THE CASUAL LABORER 81

one for the lodging house man. His stake was
small, and by October there were hungry men on
the San Francisco streets and talk of a bread line.
One of those odd creatures who inhabit the border
land of labor, "General" Kelly, appeared, and in
two weeks had organized an unemployed "army"
whose enlistment soon reached two thousand.
The recruits were a fair cross section of the thou-
sands of migratories lying up in the city: those
who were penniless and evicted from lodging
houses, the younger gentry looking for adventure,
the quasi-yegg looking for disorder, the border line
defectives attracted by the military form, and
lastly the normal casuals weary of monotonous
privation. After a few weeks the inaction caused
the more restless and able to drift away. By De-
cember, through this segregation, the "army" had
become a human scrap heap and the wet and dis-
consolate camp on a vacant lot a social caricature.
With doubtful generosity the city turned over to
the army a vacant building near the City Hall.
The use of this building is best described in the
words of an investigator of the State Immigration
and Housing Commission:

"The building runs from Market Street to City
Hall Avenue, containing stores on the ground floor

82 THE CASUAL LABORER

and fifty rooms of the Marshall Hotel on the
second floor. Both the stores and the hotel have
been dismantled and are vacant.

"According to instructions, your investigator
arrived at the building at 11 :30 p. M., Wednesday,
February 18. There was a very heavy rain fall-
ing at the time and the men were pouring into
the place at all the entrances. In the store, No.
1500 Market Street, 132 men were already sleep-
ing side by side in rows along the floor, and several
were standing by the stove. These latter were
soaking wet, and a volume of steam was arising
from their clothing. The air of the place was foul
and stifling, all the doors and windows being
closed in order to shield the sleepers from the cold
air. Newspapers constituted the bedding of the
sleepers. In the next vacant store were 187 men
sleeping under like conditions.

"In the store which occupied the City Hall
Avenue corner were 211 men. Here the men were
sleeping upon the window platforms and so closely
packed upon the floor as to make passage between
them impossible. Seventeen men occupied the
floor space of the main entrance of the up-stairs
section, leaving barely enough room for persons
to get through the doors. Three men were sleep-

THE CASUAL LABORER 83

ing on the middle stairway landing. Lying on the
floor of the upper hallways of the hotel were 138
men, all using newspapers for bedding. The men
lay with their clothes on, with the exception of
their shoes, which were utilized for pillows. There
are 50 rooms on the second floor, and they aver-
aged 14 men on the floor of each room. — Some
of the rooms were so closely packed with men that
it was impossible to open the door. They were
lying in every shape and direction upon the floors
of every passage and hallway of the house. In
round numbers there were 700 men in the upper
stories and over 500 in the vacant stores of the
ground floor, a total of over 1,200 men with a
constant stream of new-comers. A few men were
standing in the shelter of the doorways, and in
conversation they stated that they were driven
out of the building by the odor and vermin. One
of these men had been a resident of San Francisco
for 20 years, and stated that this is his first ex-
perience of being without a bed and meal. He
further stated that people he knew were unable to
aid or give him credit until he obtained work. An-
other man, who is a discharged U. S. Army man,
stated that he was living in a tent with Company
M of Kelly's Army at Fifth and Mission Streets,

84 THE CASUAL LABORER

and had come over to seek shelter owing to the
heavy rain, but that he was going back to stay in
the tent hi preference to accepting the city's hospi-
tality. This man accompanied the investigator
through the Marshall Hotel. Lying directly at the
head of the main stairway was a Mexican in the
last stages of consumption. He was coughing and
spitting all over the floor in his vicinity, the spu-
tum making a disgusting and sickening sight.
Men could be heard coughing in all parts of the
building, and a number were sleeping in their
rain-soaked clothing. The air was putrid and
left a nauseating odor upon contact with the
fresh air."

A few weeks later the Army began its demoral-
ized march on the National Capital. It left San
Francisco by ferry, landed in Oakland, was passed
rapidly by armed Oaklanders through the city on
to Richmond. Here the mayor of that exasper-
ated town organized transportation and passed
the hungry legion on to Sacramento by train.
This town, after a day of fruitless cogitation, de-
scended on the camp with pick handles and fire
hose, drove the army across the river, and burned
the blankets and camp equipment. Guards with
rifles kept the bridge. The writer had the oppor-

THE CASUAL LABORER 85

tunity of remaining most of four days with this
now broken and dispirited body of men, studying
some fifty-odd closely. They were willing to talk,
many being in a highly excited and uncontrolled
state. Over half, through either long malnutrition
and privation, or through constitutional defects,
had reached an undeniably abnormal mental con-
dition. There were defectives even among the
"officers," and much of their "strategy" against
the businesslike riflemen at the bridge was curi-
ously like the scheming of small boys. The suf-
fering and helplessness, the pitiful inefficiency of
this broken mob, the bitter humor of the feeble
military form to which it still clung, made the
entire picture an economic cartoon. It was im-
possible to be there and not get a vivid impression
of a class inferior, unequal, and with fewer rights
than normal American tradition seems to promise
to its citizens.

Within three weeks the Army, rained on and
starved out, melted away, and its members joined
that restless migration into which the first spring
days had stirred the lodging house population.
The Army's psychology had dissolved into the
larger psychology of the migratory 150,000, and
its winter's experience added to that collection of

8G THE CASUAL LABORER

strange complexes which make up the California
casual's mob mind.

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 in-
efficiency a charge upon society; or the result will
be revolt and guerilla labor warfare.

The Wheatland strike was the latter. This was
engineered by the I. W. W.; and though there
were but a handful of members and a single leader
at the Durst ranch, the strike was momentous in
results. The trade unions themselves have given
but perfunctory notice to the migratory laborer.
Though the skilled railway employees are com-
pletely unionized, their interest has not extended
to the railway construction workers, whose living
and working conditions are utterly deplorable.
California, an investigation showed, has between
4500 and 5000 active members of the I. W. W.

THE CASUAL LABORER 87

Up to the Wheatland affair their energy in the
west had gone into free speech fights, notably at
Fresno and San Diego. Since Wheatland they
have devoted themselves entirely to organizing
the migratory laborer. The destructive efficiency
of the I. W. W. strike tactics, that of "direct ac-
tion" and sabotage, was shown in the organized
hop strike of 1914, though the strike failed. Even
in the spring of 1915 barn and kiln burnings oc-
cured in the hop fields up and down the state, —
a back fire of the riots of 1913. It is not difficult
to understand the light allegiance to law and
order, to the sanctity of property, which is an out-
standing characteristic of this group. Much of
their so-called syndicalistic philosophy analyzes
down to a motive of resentment. Investigators
report that sabotage and "putting the machine
out of business" are the topics to which the road
meetings turn. The group in all its character-
istics is the poorest of raw material for labor or-
ganization. Shifting, without legal residence,
under-nourished as a universal rule, incapable of
sustained interest, with no reserve of money or
energy to carry out a propaganda, they cannot
put forth the very considerable energy which co-
operation demands. Their numerous strikes in

88 THE CASUAL LABORER

California have been but flashes of resentment,
and when their leaders in 1914 planned a great
picketing of all the hop fields of the Sacramento
valley, they found that their pickets after a week
of patience began to slip onto freight trams and
disappear to the south. The needed two thousand
dwindled to a handful and the "great strike"
flickered out. Hopes are high for the 1915 season;
agitation is rife, and numerous fires to date give
evidence of "direct action" already carried out on
the part of the I. W. W. It remains to be seen
how far the 1915 tactics of the organization will
embarrass the agricultural employers of Cali-
fornia, but the word has gone out that "no crop
is to be harvested" until the indicted hop pickers,
referred to in connection with the Wheatland af-
fair, are freed.

As a class, the migratory laborers are nothing
more nor less than the finished products of their
environment. They should therefore never be
studied as isolated revolutionaries, but rather as,
on the whole, tragic symptoms of a sick social
order. 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,

THE CASUAL LABORER 89

starting with the long hours and dreary winters of
farms they ran away from, through their char-
acter-debasing experience with irregular indus-
trial labor, on to the vicious economic life of the
winter unemployed, their training predetermined
but one outcome. As the Harvard biologist words
it, nurture has triumphed over nature, the en-
vironment has produced its type. Difficult though
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 would be both very
astonished and very misused.

Ill

THE I. W. W.

ANY economic problem arising in the United
States today is seen in a vivid setting of war ex-
pediency. The particular national danger to
which the population is becoming increasingly
sensitive colors every issue, social, economic, or
moral, and the old logical approaches to them are
rapidly going into the discard. Today prostitu-
tion, drink, and the free and easy American con-
sumption of food and goods have been assailed
with a vehemence and impatience astounding
when compared with the gentle analyses in vogue
a few years ago. [This tendency gives the consid-
eration of such a phenomena as the I. W. W. a
dual nature, — first, the now dominant one of the
I. W. W. in relation to the war psychology of
America; and second, the I. W. W. in relation to
the stable sweep and evolution of American in-
dustrialism. The intensity of the war temper
which plays about the I. W. W. makes it very

91

92 THE CASUAL LABORER

difficult to advance an analysis of a scientific na-
ture touching even this latter relationship. Ex-
cept in the form of complete and unconditioned
denunciation, interest in this American manifes-
tation of syndicalism is taboo. The Federal Gov-
ernment has within very recent weeks judged the
I. W. W. as a menace to America's preparedness
in war, and the union's leaders are either in prison
or jeopardy. This positive action by the Depart-
ment of Justice has so emphasized the relation of
this union to the worries and expediencies of our
war state that the I. W. W. as an economic prob-
lem has practically disappeared. But since the
war-time behavior of the I. W. W. finds its only
psychological explanation in its economic en-
vironment and experiences, the latter and tabood
relationship must be the major concern of this
article.

Another unappreciated consideration might be
noted in passing. The domination of the Ameri-
can press over the form and method of publicity
has given Americans a deep-seated bias in favor
of a vivid and dramatic presentation of all prob-
lems, economic or moral. The rather gray and
sodden explanation of any labor revolt by refer-
ence to the commonplace and miserable experi-

THE I. W. W. 93

ences of the labor group would lack this demanded
vividness. Just as the French enjoyed the mean
stories of the debased life of the petty thief when
framed up and titled "A Picture of the Parisian
Apache/ ' so the casual American demands white
hoods and mystery for the Kentucky night riders
and a dread, sabotage-using underground appari-
tion for the I. W. W. Some important portion of
I. W. W. terrorism can be traced directly back to
the inarticulated public demand that the I. W. W.
news story produce a thrill.
\The futility of much conventional American
social analyzing is due to its description of the
problem in terms of its relationship to some rela-
tively unimportant or artificial institution. Little
of the current analyses of strikes or labor violence
uses the basic standards of human desire and in-
tention which control these phenomena. A strike
and its demands are usually praised as being law-
abiding, or economically bearable, or are con-
demned as being unlawful, or confiscatory. These
four attributes of a strike are important only as
incidental consequences. The habit of Americans
thus to measure up social problems to the current,
temporary, and more or less accidental scheme of
traditions and legal institutions, long ago gave

94 THE CASUAL LABORER

birth to our national belief that passing a new law
or forcing obedience to an old one was a satisfy-
ing cure for any unrest. The current analysis of
the I. W. W. and its activities is an example of
this perverted and unscientific method. The I.
W. W. analysis which has given both satisfaction
and a basis for treating the organization runs as
follows: The organization is unlawful in its ac-
tivity, un-American in its sabotage, unpatriotic
in its relation to the flag, the government, and the
war. The rest of the condemnation is a play upon
these three attributes. So proper and so sufficient
has this condemnation analysis become that it is
taboo to reapproach the problem. But now our
internal affairs are so obviously out of gear that
any comprehensive scheme of national prepared-
ness would demand full and honest consideration
be given to all forces that determine the degree of
American unity, one force being this tabooed or-
ganization^?

It would be best here to announce a more or
less dogmatic hypothesis to which the writer will
steadfastly adhere and which is: human behavior
is the rather simple, arithmetic combination of
the inherited nature of man and the environment
in which his maturing years fall. Man will be-

THE I. W. W. 95

have according to the hints for conduct which the
accidents of his life have stamped into his memory
mechanism. A slum produces a mind which has
only slum incidents with which to work, and a
spoiled and protected child never rises to ag-
gressive competitive behavior, simply because its
past life has stored up no memory imprints from
which a predisposition to vigorous life can be
built. The particular things called the moral at-
tributes of man's conduct are conventionally
found by contrasting this educated and trained
way of acting with the exigencies and social needs
or dangers of the time. Hence, while his immoral
or unpatriotic behavior may fully justify his gov-
ernment, standing in some particular danger
which his conduct intensifies, hi imprisoning or
abolishing him, this punishment in no way either
explains his character or points to an enduring
solution of his problem. Suppression, while very
often justified and necessary in the flux of human
relationship, always carries a social cost which
must be liquidated and also a back-fire danger
which must be insured against. The human being
is born with no innate proclivity to crime or
special kind of un-patriotism. Crime and treason
are habit activities educated into man by environ-

96 THE CASUAL LABORER

mental influences favorable to their development.
There is one current objection to the above reason-
ing, and that is the opportunist one that this
psychological explanation softens society's criti-
cism of the act, say in this case sedition, and
makes difficult its suppression. This may in fact
take place, but since it is a result of the transitory
state of affairs itself, it does not then justify the
abolition of proven and scientific methods of
analysis. Also, since any preparedness which can
be relied upon in the coming dangerous years of
our war participation must be based on fact cal-
culation and not the loose and pseudo-hysterical
emotions of desire, there is more need of proven
scientific methods of social analysis than America
has yet felt. The modern psychological study of
behavior makes it impossible to view an I. W. W.
as a mobile and independent agent, exercising free
will and moral discretion. \ The I. W. W. is the
result of a social admixture; he is a more or less
finished product and any explanatory analysis
should deal and deal alone with the antecedent
experiences which produce in a most natural and
every-day manner those practiced habits which
we describe as "being an I. W. W." Syndicalism
is then like patriotism or pacificism, a condition
of mind, f

THE I. W. W. 97

There have been recently in the state of Wash-
ington mass meetings, private and public, devoted
to the problem of the I. W. W. In one informal
meeting a lumber mill operator of long experience
advanced a policy of suppression, physical vio-
lence, and vigilante activity. A second operator,
listening, observed, "If you lost your money, you
would be the best I. W. W. in the state." It was
this identity of mind which struck the second
operator. It is accurate and also obvious to say
that the upper reaches of business and society
possess its I. W. W. The state of mind charac-
terised by ruthlessness, high egotism, ignoring of
the needs and helplessness of much of society,
breaks out at different social levels under different
names, but the human elements and even much
of the vocabulary remains the same.

It must be reiterated that any attempt to use,
at this particular day in our history, modern be-
havioristic psychology in an analytic way is not
only under taboo but has resulted in an immediate
persecution of the scientist who so offends. A
certain editor in Yakima, in the State of Wash-
ington, has been known beyond his state limits
for his strong and individual editorial policy. His
editorials are more widely quoted than those of

98 THE CASUAL LABORER

any paper in the state. This editor inadvertently
put the I. W. W. horror to the practical test by
interviewing some fifty I. W. W.'s interned in a
Yakima jail. These individuals had held the
Yakima Valley in terror and local feeling made
lynching and the most extreme of violence not
only possible, but incidents of the most reasonable
expectancy. The editor observed in an editorial
the following day, that the I. W. W. were much
like the agricultural workers he had known all
his life. Their desires were similar, and the de-
tails of their complaints touching the life they led
were worthy of sympathetic investigation. They
were not even, he thought, incorrigibly unpa-
triotic. He thought that he could even trust some
of them. These observations almost resulted in
an immediate ostracising of the editor. His
method of analysis had been a very fair, if rough
and ready, approximation of that used by modern
dynamic psychology.

The interesting contradiction that these modern
replicas of ancient intolerance and persecution
will be carried through by a people sincerely ready
to sacrifice kin and wealth in the cause of liberty,
becomes no difficult problem to analyse and ex-
plain. Little has been written or made current

THE I. W. W. 99

to show how open to phobia and mob suggestion
a nation is which, accustomed and set in the
habits of peace and all-occupying business ends,
has the props of this life suddenly cut out from
under it. In a daze America has seen conscrip-
tion come, prices fixed, industrial plants com-
mandeered, freedom of speech modified. This is
not an overturning of merely an unimportant
feature of American life, it is the negation of
nearly the entire Kultur of the nation. The habit
and order of every-day thinking is made ineffi-
cient and inapplicable. While outwardly "busi-
ness as usual" seems to an extent enforced, in-
wardly and in the hitherto secure mental back-
ground is chaos and the potentiality for almost
any kind of irresponsible reasoning. Even in the
rather secure social retreats of small town life
take place, for instance, bursts of spy hunting, so
cruel and in such variance with all the ideas of
fairness and control which had been long accepted
as American virtues, that one sees how adrift and
helpless the psychological ship can become. Jo-
siah Royce has said that America's nation-danger
was her openness to mob suggestion. Her century
of service as an immigrant melting pot carried its
costs, and it was beyond reason to expect to see

100 THE CASUAL LABORER

rise, from a scramble of transplanted nationalities,
who had broken with their traditional religions,
their rules of dress, morality, and political life, a
nation which, in Ross' words, possesses a sturdy
prophylactic against the hysteria of mob move-
ment. The I. W. W. can be profitably viewed
only as a psychological by-product of the neg-
lected childhood of industrial America. It is dis-
couraging to see the problem today almost
exclusively examined regarding its relation to
patriotism and conventional commercial morality.
The heart of the current condemnation of the
I. W. W. is that it is a viciously unpatriotic or-
ganization. The writer of this article made a
special investigation upon the above issue among
the I. W. W. leaders. He pointed out that our
nation was fighting a nation which suppressed
free speech, not only opposed a free individualism,
but moulded a citizen's mind to suit the particular
and competitive needs of the state, and if it sub-
jected us, would bloodily suppress just such dis-
quieting agencies as the I. W. W. Methods of
discipline would be turned back a hundred years
to the ancient system of gaining citizenship unity
through fear, and these policies would be enforced
by a harsh military organization, flushed and con-

THE I. W. W. 101

fident from its victory. This presentation was in-
variably met by the I. W. W. leaders with a recital
that for them there was only one war, and that
the class war between the "master class' ' and the
"slaves." It was, they argued, purely incidental
whether a German or an American ruled the po-
litical machinery. It made even less difference
whether the industrial master were a German or
American. The class war was without national
lines.

In answer to the argument that a bad political
system might postpone in an important way the
evolution they desired in class conflict, the leaders
decried the importance of war and its political
results. They quoted with astonishing facility
the rises in the cost of meats, textiles, shoes, and
so on. Their figures proved to be accurate. They
had circulated through their lectures the fact that
steel plates had risen from $26.50 a ton in
1913 to $200 in 1917, and the story of the increase
in the surplus earnings of United States Steel,
Bethlehem Steel and the powder companies.
This they joined to a dissertation on the increase
of farm tenancy. Presumably they were better
acquainted with American social statistics than
the academic class in which the writer lives. It

102 THE CASUAL LABORER

is perhaps of value to quote the language of the
most influential of the I. W. W. leaders.

"You ask me why the I. W. W. is not patriotic
to the United States. If you were a bum with-
out a blanket; if you had left your wife and kids
when you went west for a job, and had never lo-
cated them since; if your job had never kept you
long enough in a place to qualify you to vote; if
you slept in a lousy, sour bunkhouse, and ate food
just as rotten as they could give you and get by
with it; if deputy sheriffs shot your cooking cans
full of holes and spilled your grub on the ground ;
if your wages were lowered on you when the bosses
thought they had you down ; if there was one law
for Ford, Suhr and Mooney, and another for
Harry Thaw; if every person who represented
law and order and the nation beat you up, rail-
roaded you to jail, and the good Christian people
cheered and told them to go to it, how in hell do
you expect a man to be patriotic? This war is a
business man's war and we don't see why we
should go out and get shot in order to save the
lovely state of affairs which we now enjoy."

The argument was rather difficult to keep pro-
ductive because that rather material prerequisite
to patriotism, i.e. gratitude, seemed wanting in

THE I. W. W. 103

their attitude towards the American government.
Their state of mind could only be explained by re-
ferring it, as was earlier suggested, to its major
relationships. The dominating concern of the
I. W. W. is what Keller calls the maintenance
problem. Their philosophy is, in its simple reduc-
tion, a stomach philosophy, and their political-
industrial revolt could be called without injustice
a hunger riot. But there is an important correc-
tion to this simple statement. While their way of
living has seriously encroached on the urgent min-
imums of nutrition, shelter, clothing and physical
health, it has also long outraged the American
labor class traditions touching social life, sex life,
self dignity, and ostentation. Had the food and
shelter been sufficient, the revolt tendencies might
have simmered out, were the migratory labor pop-
ulation not keenly sensitive to traditions of a
richer psychological life than mere physical main-
tenance. Considering their opportunity, the I. W.
W. read and discuss abstractions to a surprising
extent. In their libraries the few novels are white
paged while a translation of Karl Marx or Kaut-
sky, or the dull and theoretical pamphlets of their
own leaders, are dog-eared. Few American ana-
lysts have realized what firmly held traditions have

104 THE CASUAL LABORER

been established throughout all the working
classes by the muckracking literature of the last
twenty years. It is rather a hair-raising experi-
ence for a conventional member of the middle
class to inquire of almost any labor group how
they esteem the morals of the commercial middle
class. Veblen's acute reasoning touching the de-
cay among industrial labor of the prestige of law
and order, of the conventional rights of property
and individual liberty seemed to find abundant
illustration. A statement that the present indus-
trial order and its control promises a reasonable
progress and happiness (and that the middle class
are forced to claim) is not only received as a hu-
morous observation by the I. W. W. but today by
American Trade Unionism as well.

There will be as many degrees and shades of
patriotism as there are social classes in our so-
ciety. The patriotism which placed fifty thou-
sand volunteers on the rolls of the Officers' Re-
serve Corps is not an inborn sentiment or any-
thing which arbitrarily came with habitation on
American soil. It was an acquired habit of mind
and reflected a rich background of social satisfac-
tions, which in the mind of a young officer had
sprung from his country, America. Not only the

THE I. W. W. 105

self-sacrificing quality of this patriotism, but the
very patriotism itself, depends on the existence of
these social satisfactions. Cynical disloyalty and
contempt of the flag must in the light of modern
psychology come from a mind which is devoid of
national gratitude and for whom the United
States stirs no memory of satisfaction or happi-
ness. To those of us who normally feel loyal to the
nation, such a disloyal sentiment brings sharp in-
dignation. As an index of our own sentiment and
our own happy relations to the nation, this indig-
nation has value. As a stimulus to a program or
ethical generalization, it is the cause of vast in-
accuracy and sad injustice. American syndicalism
is not a scheming group dominated by an uncon-
ventional and destructive social philosophy. It is
merely a commonplace state of mind. Not such
a mind state as Machiavelli or Robespierre pos-
sessed, but a mind stamped by the lowest, most
miserable labor conditions and outlook which
American industrialism produces. To those who
have seen first hand the life of the Western casual
laborer, any reflections on his gratitude or spiri-
tual buoyancy seem ironical humor.

An altogether unwarranted importance has
been given to the syndicalistic philosophy of the

106 THE CASUAL LABORER

I. W. W. A few leaders use its phraseology. Of
these few, not half a dozen know the meaning of
French syndicalism or English guild socialism. To
the great wandering rank and file, the I. W. W. is
simply the only social break in the harsh search
for work they have ever had, its headquarters the
only competitor of the saloon in which they are
welcome. They listen stolidly to their frequent
lecturers with an obvious and sustained interest.
The lecturer's analysis and dissection of the in-
dustrial structures is often as abstract as an eco-
nomic professor's dissertation on Value. The ap-
plause comes when the point is illustrated by some
familiar and vigorous action through which the
boss is humiliated graphically, told in phrases
taken from camp speech. The command of their
alleged philosophy is exactly equal to the capacity
of a Pittsburgh Republican's to discuss the sig-
nificance of Schedule K, but the concrete details of
industrial renovation find eager interest. The
American I. W. W. is a neglected and lonely hobo
worker, usually malnourished and in need of
medical care. He is as far from a scheming syn-
dicalist, after the French model, as the imagina-
tion could conceive. His proven sabotage activi-
ties hi the West total up a few hop kiln burnings.

THE I. W. W. 107

Compared to the widespread sabotage in prison
industries, where a startlingly large per cent of ma-
terials are intentionally ruined, the I. W. W. per-
formance is not worth mentioning. It is to these
less romantic economic phases that we must turn
for the problem's true cost.

The characteristic of the I. W. W. movement
most worthy of serious consideration is the decay
of ideals of thrift and industry. To this can be
added, in place of the old-time traditional loyalty
to the employer, a sustained antagonism to him.
The casual laborer of the West drifts off the job
without reflection as to the effect of this on the
welfare of the employer, feels little interest in the
quality of workmanship, and is ever not only a
potential striker, but ready to take up political or
legal war against the employing class. This sullen
hostility has been steadily growing in the last
ten years. It is not as melodramatic as sabotage,
but vastly more important. To the student it is
of major importance because it can be linked up
more directly and with more accuracy to its psy-
chological causes. To be short, it is a natural
psychic outcome of a distressing and anti-social
labor condition. This sullen hostility develops
very naturally the surface manifestations of un-

108 THE CASUAL LABORER

patriotism, anti-religion, and unlawful action, but
the more important characteristic is the deeper
economic one of the growing unreliability and
decay of the workmanlike spirit among the mi-
gratory laborers.

To revert for a moment to the economic view
point. The I. W. W. movement with complete
accuracy can be described as the extension of the
American labor strike into the zone of casual, mi-
gratory labor. All the superficial features, such as
its syndicalistic philosophy, its sabotage, threats
of burning and destruction, are the natural and
normal accompaniments of an organized labor dis-
turbance in this field. The American strike in
contrast with the English and German has
evolved, for certain psychological reasons, into a
militant and violent affair. To the American em-
ployer the breaking of a strike satisfies a curious
medley of desires. It appeals to his strong and
primitive sporting instinct, it is demanded by his
highly cultured American individualism, and it-
satisfies what of legal rights he has imbibed from
the loose traditions of laissez jaire. Taking all
the environmental influences which focus on in-
dustrial management and property ownership in
this country, strike breaking is a very normal

THE I. W. W. 109

managerial activity. Like Calhoun in San Fran-
cisco, the American manager has been willing to
stake his entire fortune on an anti-union venture,
which from no standpoint promised profits or
peace. Nowhere else in the world exists the
unique American custom of importing strike
breakers. The nation-wide anti-union program of
the National Manufacturers' Association is even
as uniquely American. And these highly individ-
ualistic industrial habits are practiced upon a
labor class which is in a most peculiar way un-
fashioned to acquiesce peacefully.

For those who care to see, there is abundant
evidence that the Trade Union movement in the
United States has become revolutionary. The
much advertised split between the American Fed-
eration of Labor and the I. W. W. is bridged over
with suggestive ease when the prosecution of an
I. W. W. case suggests the class struggle. This
temper has not prevented the leaders of the
American Federation from giving a traditional
American patriotism to the present war. But no
publicist of note has dared to analyze the spread
of embarrassing strikes throughout the United
States during the past two months, the most
critical months of our war activities. A reasonable

110 THE CASUAL LABORER

induction from the industrial facts would be
that the American labor class is not par-
ticipating in the kind of patriotic fervor that
is in vogue among the upper middle class. It is
not sufficient to say that their wage demands oc-
cupy their attention. Plus this ancient interest
is a set of traditional and complicating forces
which condition labor's war attitude. The re-
cital of the war profits in steel, in copper, in foods,
in medicines, does not fall on ordinary mind re-
ceptors. It falls on a labor class mind with a
long cultured background of suspicion.

As has already been said, the most vivid chap-
ter in American periodical literature was the
period of magazine muckraking. A new and re-
markably effective school of pamphleteers arose
and operated hi a psychologically ripe situation.
Their audience had been played on from the early
days of the granger movement and was tuned to
absorb as truth the bizarre expose of industri-
alism. While the magazines a few years ago
dropped the propaganda, Federal commissions and
state investigations continued and gave dignity
and substance to the earlier and more tempera-
mental denunciation. Few members of the middle
class know how revolutionary is the material to

THE I. W. W. Ill

be found in the Federal Immigration Com-
mission's report, the Federal report on Woman
and Child Wage Earners, the Massachusetts
Minimum Wage Commission's report, or even the
volumes on Occupations of the United States
Census. For instance this latter sober source sol-
emnly announces on page seventy-one of its vol-
ume on Occupational Statistics that 609,000 of
the small boys of the United States between the
ages of ten and thirteen are to be accurately cata-
loged as "workers gainfully employed." The la-
bor class in the United States reads much more
on economic matters than the middle class and is
more accustomed to meetings and debate in which
the material of the reading is used. The middle
class is strangely innocent of the publicity deal-
ing with its own activities. Those who teach col-
lege economics to the sons and daughters of the
middle class are constantly amazed at the con-
trast between them and the few labor class chil-
dren who reach the university.

It is not a far cry from the American labor class
attitude toward the war to any analysis of the
I. W. W. The I. W. W. is, as has been said, the
aggressive American labor movement, emerging
at the lower and less disciplined social level. The

112 THE CASUAL LABORER

not surprising inability of the American citizen to
note the growing class consciousness of the Trade
Union movement guaranteed that neither would
he make that reasonable prophecy touching the
strike methods which would be manifest when
this class struggle gained force and form among
the migratory casual labor of the West. If the
American Trade Union world is only conditionally
patriotic in its attitude toward the war, the I. W.
W. is violently negative for the same, if more
deeply held, reasons. Casualties and deaths in
the trenches with its all-diverting suffering at
home will reinforce patriotism and silence for a
time the class demands and cries, but the in-
gredients of the social mixture will not be changed
in any important degree. War to the American
labor world is an episode, and for them the making
of a living which dominated their thoughts before
the war runs on through the war period itself. So
patriotism, in this logic, rests upon the degree of
satisfaction and content with which labor views
its lot. The labor mind in America is in profound
unrest, and it is imperative that those Americans
on whom falls the duty a* thinking and planning
accept such facts as all-determining and do not
misuse the moment by useless if admirable moral
indignation.

THE I. W. W. 113

n

The I. W. W. is a union of unskilled workers in
large part employed in agriculture and in the pro-
duction of raw materials. While the I. W. W.
appeared in the East at Lawrence, Patterson, and
certain other places, at the height of strike activ-
ity, its normal habitat is in the upper middle West
and the far West from British Columbia down
into Old Mexico. But within the past year, apart
from the Dakota wheat fields and iron ranges of
Minnesota and Michigan, the zone of important
activity has been Arizona, California, Washington,
Idaho, and Colorado. The present wartime I. W.
W. problem is that of its activity in the far West.
It is fortunate for analysis that the I. W. W. mem-
bership in the West is consistently of one type,
and one which has had a uniform economic ex-
perience. They are migratory workers currently
called hobo labor. The terms "hobo miner,"
"hobo lumberjack," "the blanket stiff" are fa-
miliar and necessary in accurate description of
Western labor conditions. Very few of these mi-
gratory workers have lived long enough in any
one place to establish legal residence and vote,
and they are also womanlessA Only about ten per

114 THE CASUAL LABORER

cent have been married, and these have either lost
their wives or deserted them. Many claim to be
"working out," and expect eventually to return
to their families. But examination usually dis-
closes the fact that they have not sent money
home recently or received letters. ^They are
"floaters" in every social sense. Out of thirty
suicides in the cheap lodging houses in San Fran-
cisco in the month of December, 1913, but two
left behind any word as to their homes or their
relatives. Half of the migratories are of Ameri-
can birth, the other half being largely made up of
the newer immigration from Southeastern Europe/^

The dues-paying membership of the I. W. W. is
an uncertain and volatile thing. While a careful
study in California in 1915 showed but 4,500
affiliated members of the I. W. W. in that state,
it was very evident that the functioning and
striking membership was double this or more.
In the State of Washington, during the lumber
strike of this year, the I. W. W. membership most
probably was not over 3,000, but the number of
those active in the strike and joining in support of
the I. W. W. numbered approximately 7,000. A
careful estimate of the membership in the United
States gives 75,000. In the history of American

THE I. W. W. 115

labor there has appeared no organization so sub-
ject to fluctuation in membership and strength.
Several times it seemed on the point of joining the
Knights of Labor in the graveyard of labor class
movements, but energized by some sudden strike
flare it appears again as an active force. This
tenacity of life comes because the I. W. W. is not
only incapable of legal death, but has in fact no
formal politico-legal existence. Its treasury is
merely the momentary accumulation of strike
funds. Its numerous headquarters are the result
of the energy of local secretaries. They are not
places for executive direction of the union as much
as gregarious centers where the lodging house in-
habitant or the hobo with his blanket can find
light, a stove, and companionship. In the pro-
hibition states of the West, the I. W. W. hall has
been the only social substitute for the saloon to
these people. The migratory workers have almost
all seen better economic and social days, and
carry down into their disorganized labor level tra-
ditions, if faint ones, of some degree of dignity and
intellectual life. To this group of old time desires
the headquarters caters. In times of strike and
disorder the headquarters becomes the center of
the direct action propaganda. But when this is

116 THE CASUAL LABORER

by, its character changes to the casuals' rest house,
and as such is unique in the unskilled workers'
history.

It will be of great value to understand the
matter of fact conditions under which the Ameri-
can unskilled worker lives and works and is pre-
pared for the drop down into the migratory class.

In 1910, of the 30,091,564 male persons in the
United States listed as bread winners, 10,400,000
approximately were in that particular unskilled
work from which the migratory is recruited.
Under what conditions did this population which
furnished the present migratory group work?
What was their wage, and how long a period
each year were they employed ? A typical Chicago
slaughter house in 1912 paid 82 per cent of the
employees less than 20 cents an hour. This
company worked their men on the average of
37^ hours in the week, and this gave the 55 per
cent of the men who averaged 17 cents an hour,
an income of $6.37 a week. In the steel industry
the Government Report of 1910 shows that
twenty-nine per cent of the employees worked a
seven-day week and twenty per cent a seven-day
week with a twelve-hour day. Forty-three per
cent worked a twelve-hour day six days a week.

THE I. W. W. 117

This Federal study reports that 49.69 per cent
of the employees received less than 18 cents
an hour. This 49.69 per cent is the group of
the unskilled. In the steel industry eight per cent
of the workers earned less than fourteen cents per
hour, and twenty per cent under sixteen cents.
The Federal Immigration Commission's report
(1910) announced that not one of the twelve
basic American industries paid the average head
of a family within $100 a year of the minimum
for family subsistence, and two-thirds of the
twelve industries paid the family head less than
$550 a year. Professor Frankfurter's brief before
the Supreme Court in the minimum wage case
(1916) alleges that half of the wage earners' fami-
lies in the United States have an income below
that needed for adequate subsistence. To quote
the authoritative research of Warren and Syden-
stricker of the Federal Public Health Service, "in
the principal industries, fully one-fourth of the
adult male workers who are heads of families
earned less than $400, one-half earned less than
$600, four-fifths earned less than $800, and less
than one-tenth earn as much as $1,000 a year.
Approximately one-fourth of the women workers
eighteen years of age and over employed in the

118 THE CASUAL LABORER

principal manufacturing industries earned less
than $200 a year, and two- thirds less than $400."
In reference to the even more vital statistics of
total family income these two investigators say,
"the conclusion is also indicated that one in every
ten or twelve working class families had at the
time of the investigation (1912 to 1914) an an-
nual income of less than $300 a year ; that nearly
a third had incomes of less than $500, and over
one-half of the families had incomes of less than
$750 a year." The numerous cost of living studies
of this period are fairly unanimous that $800 is
absolutely necessary for the adequate minimum
of subsistence for an American labor class family.
Professor Fairchild of Yale said in 1913 "if we
fix these standards of living in mind, and then
look back over the wage scales given on the fore-
going pages, we are struck with the utter inade-
quacy of the annual incomes of the foreign born
to meet even these minimum requirements of
decency."

It is reasonable to argue that working class
parents suffer in the conventional way in the
death of their children. The Federal Children's
Bureau reports "for all live babies born in wed-
lock the infant mortality rate is 130 7/10 in a

THE I. W. W. 119

thousand; it rises to 255 7/10 when the father
earns less than $521 a year or less than $10 a
week, and falls to eighty-four when he earns $1200
or more."

The irregularity of industrial employment is as
important an element as the height of the wage
scale. Dr. Devine says that unemployment heads
the list of the causes of American destitution. The
American coal miner must expect unemployment
one-fourth to one- third of his time. In 1908 the
unemployment in all trades was 35.7 per cent.
Statistics pointed to nearly a twenty per cent loss
for all industrial workers in the year through un-
employment during this period. The combina-
tion of low wages, the unskilled nature of the
work and its great irregularity, tends to break the
habit and desire for stable industry among the
workers. Millions drift into migrating from one
industrial center to another in search of work. In
these centers nearly all saloon keepers run an em-
ployment agency business of a more or less in-
formal kind, and to the saloon the job hunter
turns. His fee for the job is to drink up part of
his pay check and invariably his history here be-
comes spotted with a recital of excuses sent to the
distant wife instead of money. The worker slides

120 THE CASUAL LABORER

down the scale and out of his industry and joins
the millions of unskilled or lost-skilled who float
back and forth from Pennsylvania to Missouri
and from the lumber camps to the Gulf states and
California. They lie up in the winter in the cheap
lodging houses, in a state of pseudo-hibernation.
Thirty dollars plus a few weeks of ice cutting will
weather the winter through. Some 150,000 are
in Chicago, as many in New York, 40,000 in San
Francisco, even 250 in Phoenix, Arizona. In one
San Francisco lodging house, out of 250 beds,
there were eight with outside ventilation. A
New York study disclosed that the lodging house
inmates were eleven times more tubercular than
the average population. The beds seldom have
linen and the covers are usually dirty quilts
which have to be repeatedly fumigated during
the winter for vermin. The migratory lies up
for the winter with a thirty-dollar stake, accord-
ing to the report of the Chicago Commission
on Unemployment. This often will not stretch
over the period, so recourse is had to the street,
the saloons, and the city. In a ten-year period,
the Chicago police stations gave lodging to
1,275,463 homeless men, and the municipal lodg-
ing house to 370,655. Only twenty per cent of
these were residents of Chicago.

THE I. W. W. 121

In the spring this labor group drifts out
toward the first work. In main, they beat their
way. Between 1901 and 1905 23,964 tres-
passers were killed on American railroads, and
25,236 injured. These were largely tramps and
hoboes. The railroad companies calculated that
there were 500,000 hoboes beating their way or
waiting at stations to catch on a train, or walking
the tracks at any one time. This group might be
called the fraction of the migratory millions actu-
ally in transit. Numerous statistical studies show
that the average period on a job of the migratory
is between ten and fourteen days. With a stake
of $10 he will retire to a hobo camp beside some
stream, his "jungle," as the road vernacular has
it, and adding his daily quarter or half a dollar to
the "mulligan fund" will live on until the stake
is gone. If he tends to live further on the charity
of the new comers he is styled a "jungle buzzard"
and cast forth. He then resumes his haphazard
job-search, the only economic plan in his mind a
fault realization that about August he must be-
gin to accumulate his $30 winter stake. Each year
finds him physically in worse disrepair, psycho-
logically more hopeless, morally more bitter and
anti-social. His importance to any forecast of our

122 THE CASUAL LABORER

nation's future lies in the uncomfortable fact that
proportionally he is increasing in number and his
recruiting group above is increasing in unrest and
economic instability. The menace of this drift
has not escaped the critical authorities. John R.
Commons, of Wisconsin, in an analysis of the
labor unrest in America and the danger of class
conflict said, "While immigration continues in
great volume, class lines will be forming and re-
forming, weak and unstable. To prohibit or
greatly restrict immigration would bring forth
class conflict within a generation." And no less
a careful political scientist than Woodrow Wilson
wrote in 1913: "Don't you know that some man
with eloquent tongue, without conscience, who did
not care for the nation, could put this whole coun-
try into a flame? Don't you know that this coun-
try from one end to the other believes that some-
thing is wrong? What an opportunity it would be
for some man without conscience to spring up and
say 'Follow me!' — and lead in paths of destruc-
tion. . . . We are in a temper to reconstruct eco-
nomic society as we were once in a temper to
reconstruct political society."

It is a conventional economic truism that
American industrialism is guaranteeing to some

THE I. W. W. 123

half of the forty millions of our industrial popu-
lation a life of such limited happiness, of such
restrictions on personal development, and of such
misery and desolation when sickness or accident
comes, that we would be childish political scien-
tists not to see that from such an environment
little sacrificing nation-love, little of ethics, little
of gratitude could come. It is unfortunate that
the scientific findings of our social condition must
use words which sound strangely like the phrase-
ology of the Socialists. But that identity should
be embarrassing logically to the critics of these
findings, not to the scientists. Those who have
investigated and studied in the lower strata of
American labor have long recognized the I. W. W.
as purely a symptom of a certain distressing state
of affairs. The casual migratory laborers are the
finished product of an economic environment
which seems cruelly efficient in turning out
human beings modeled after all the standards
which society abhors. The history of the migra-
tory workers shows that starting with the long
hours and dreary winters of the farms they ran
away from, or the sour-smelling bunk-house in a
coal village, through their character-debasing ex-
perience with the drifting "hire and fire" life in

124 THE CASUAL LABORER

the industries, on to the vicious social and eco-
nomic life of the winter unemployed, their train-
ing predetermined but one outcome, and the en-
vironment produced its type. The I. W. W. has
importance only as an illustration of a stable
American economic process. Its pitiful syndi-
calism, its street corner opposition to the war, are
the inconsequential trimmings. Its strike alone,
faithful as it is to the American type, is an il-
luminating thing. The I. W. W., like the Grang-
ers, the Knights of Labor, the Farmers' Alliance,
the Progressive Party, is but a revolt phenomena.
The cure lies in the care taking of its psychic an-
tecedents, and the stability of our Republic de-
pends on the degree of courage and science with
which we move to the task.

IV

MOTIVES IN ECONOMIC LIFE

THE first quarter of this century is breaking up
in a riot of economic irrationalism. The carefully
selected efficiency axioms of peaceful life are
tosfeed on the scrap heap, and all society seems to
be seeking objects and experiences not found in
any of our economists7 careful descriptions of the
modern industrial order. War allies refuse to
unify their military policy, Russia is called on to
exhibit a sedate and stable economic life when
she lacks wholesale all the attributes to it. And
we Americans, despite the notorious record of
stringent social accounting imposed by the stand-
ards of war efficiency, still lean with fine confi-
dence upon the structure of genial optimism
which dominates so much of our national psy-
chology. We look hopefully to see patriotism flow
pure and strong from an industrial stratum whose
occasional phenomena are Lawrence, McKees
Rock, Paterson, Colorado Fuel and Iron, the

125

126 THE CASUAL LABORER

Durst hop ranch in California, Everett in Wash-
ington, Butte in Montana, Bisbe in Arizona.
Though strikes have increased some 300 per cent
over peace times, though the American labor
world is boiling and sputtering disturbances, be-
wildering in then- variety and rapidity of appear-
ance, our cure is a vague caution to "wait until
casualties begin to come," an uneasy contempla-
tion of labor conscription, or a wave of suppres-
sion.

Though national unity, economic and military,
seems the obvious and essential aim of the pa-
triotic citizen, much done in the name of unifica-
tion seems to be curiously efficient in producing
disunity. The following commonplace incident
illustrates this: Note first that Seattle is in a
state of extreme industrial unrest. During a
single short period this summer, that city had a
two weeks' strike paralysis of its street-car system,
a threatened walk-out of the gas workers, was the
strike center of a complete tie-up of the lumber
industry of the state, experienced a building-
trades strike involving the entire city, had a walk-
out of 30,000 shipbuilders, an express drivers'
strike, a candy workers' strike, a newsboys' strike,
and enjoyed the beginning of an organization of

MOTIVES IN ECONOMIC LIFE 127

domestic servants. This city so described becomes
the environment for the following incident:

The I. W. W. is strong in the Pacific North-
west, and though it bitterly fights the American
Federation of Labor, some of the federation trade
unions found in the rough-handed trades, such as
lumbering, stevedoring, and even shipbuilding,
have drifted toward syndicalism and many of
their members even carry secretly the red cards of
the I. W. W. The federal government has met
the anti-war agitation of the I. W. W. with fair
cleverness. When arrests have been made, pub-
licity has been given to the alleged treasonable
activity of the leaders, and the government case
sustained before the public. The economic ac-
tivities of the rank and file of the I. W. W., how-
ever, have not been interfered with, and their
meeting halls in the Northwest continue thronged
and the center of their strike activity. * A Mrs.
Sandburg, a Finnish woman, widow, with two
children of three and six, lives on a small farm
near Seattle. Being destitute she had been
awarded a mothers' pension by King County. On
November 17 of this year this pension was cut off

* It must be remembered that this statement was written in
November, 1917.

128 THE CASUAL LABORER

and the woman recommended for deportation be-
cause federal officers asserted that "she was ac-
tively working in the interests of the I. W. W.,
meetings had been held at her home, and mem-
bers of the organization had visited there fre-
quently." Nothing could be more ingeniously
done to focus the interest of a large unrestful
labor group hi the state of Washington on syn-
dicalism than this incident. This well-intentioned
and conventionally patriotic act is not merely in-
opportune, it is unhappily creative. The great
emotional outflow stimulated into existence by
the startling announcement of our national dan-
ger is being transferred from its desirable nation-
alistic object and focused on such activities, dis-
tressing both socially and economically. It seems
an accurate example of the Freudian iibertragung,
the transference of emotional expression.

It is a far cry from pseudo-political eco-
nomic problems to a consideration of the delin-
quencies of modern economics, but there is a vital
relation. Our conventional economics today
analyzes no phase of industrialism nor the wage
relationship, nor citizenship in pecuniary society,
in a manner to offer a key to such distressing and
complex problems as this. Human nature riots

MOTIVES IN ECONOMIC LIFE 129

today through our economic structure with ridi-
cule and destruction, and we economists look on
helpless and aghast. The menace of the war does
not seem potent to quiet revolt or still class cries.
The anxiety and apprehension of the economist
should not be produced by this cracking of his
economic system, but by the poverty of the
criticism of industrialism which his science offers.
Why are economists mute in the presence of a
most obvious crisis in our industrial society? Why
have our criticisms of industrialism no sturdy
warnings about this unhappy evolution? Why
does an agitated officialdom search today in vain
among our writings for scientific advice touching
labor inefficiency or industrial disloyalty, for
prophecies and plans about the rise in our indus-
trialism of economic classes unharmonious and
hostile?

The fair answer seems this: We economists
speculate little on human motives. We are not
curious about the great basis of fact which dy-
namic and behavioristic psychology has gathered
to illustrate the instinct stimulus to human ac-
tivity. Most of us are not interested to think of
what a psychologically full or satisfying life is.
We are not curious to know that a great school of

130 THE CASUAL LABORER

behavior analysis called the Freudian has been
built around the analysis of the energy outbursts,
brought by society's balking of the native human
instincts. Our economic literature shows that
we are but rarely curious to know whether in-
dustrialism is suited to man's inherited nature,
or what man in turn will do to our rules of
economic conduct in case these rules are re-
pressive. The motives to economic activity
which have done the major service in orthodox
economic texts and teachings have been either the
vague middle-class virtues of thrift, justice, and
solvency; or the equally vague moral sentiments
of "striving for the welfare of others," "desire for
the larger self," "desire to equip oneself well"; or
lastly, that labor-saving deduction that man is
stimulated in all things economic by his desire to
satisfy his wants with the smallest possible effort.
All this gentle parody in motive theorizing con-
tinued contemporaneously with the output of the
rich literature of social and behavioristic psychol-
ogy which was almost entirely addressed to this
very problem of human motives in modern eco-
nomic society. Noteworthy exceptions are the
remarkable series of books by Veblen, the articles
and criticisms of Mitchell and Patten, and the

MOTIVES IN ECONOMIC LIFE 131

most significant small book by Taussig entitled
Inventors and Money-Makers. It is this com-
plementary field of psychology to which the
economists must turn as these writers have turned
for a vitalization of their basic hypotheses.
There awaits them a bewildering array of studies
of the motives, emotions, and folk ways of our
pecuniary civilization. Generalizations and ex-
periment statistics abound ready-made for any
structure of economic criticism. The human
motives are isolated, described, compared. Busi-
ness confidence, the release of work energy,
advertising appeal, market vagaries, the basis of
value computations, decay of workmanship, the
labor unrest, decline in the thrift habit, are the
subjects treated. A brief list of these economic-
psychologists is impressive: Veblen, Thorndike,
Hollingworth, Dewey, James, Watson, Holt,
Thomas, Stanley Hall, Jastrow, Patrick, Hob-
house, MacDougall, Hart, Shand, Wallas, Lipp-
mann, Freud, Jung, Prince, Southard, Glueck, Brill,
Bailey, Paton, Cannon, Crile, and so on. One
might say, with fairness, that each one of these
has contributed criticism touching the springs of
human activity of which no economic theorist can
afford to plead ignorance. The stabilizing of the

132 THE CASUAL LABORER

science of psychology and the vogue among econ-
omists of the scientific method will not allow these
psychological findings to be shouldered out by the
careless a priori deductions touching human na-
ture which still dominate our orthodox texts. The
confusion and metaphysical propensities of our
economic theory, our neglect of the consequences
of child labor, our lax interest in national vitality
and health, the unusableness of our theories of
labor unrest and of labor efficiency, our careless
reception of problems of population, eugenics, sex,
and birth control ; our crass ignorance of the rela-
tion of industry to crime, industry to feeble-mind-
edness, industry to functional insanity, industry
to education; and our astounding indifference to
the field of economic consumption — all this de-
linquency can be traced back to our refusal to see
that economics was social economics, and that a
full knowledge of man, his instincts, his power of
habit acquisition, his psychological demands and
endurance were an absolute prerequisite to clear
and purposeful thinking on our industrial civi-
lization. MacDougall, the Oxford social psychol-
ogist, said in direct point: "Political economy
suffered hardly less from the crude nature of the
psychological assumptions from which it pro-

MOTIVES IN ECONOMIC LIFE 133

fessed to deduce the explanations of its facts, and
its prescriptions for economic legislation. It would
be a libel not altogether devoid of truth to say
that the classical political economy was a tissue of
false conclusions drawn from false psychological
assumptions."

What then are the facts of human nature which
the newer psychology offers as the beginning of
economic theorizing?

Man is born into his world accompanied by a
rich psychical disposition which furnishes him
ready-made all his motives for conduct, all his
desires, economic or wasteful, moral or depraved,
crass or aesthetic. He can show a demand for
nothing that is not prompted by this galaxy of
instincts. He is a mosaic of unit tendencies to
react faithfully in certain ways when certain
stimuli are present. As MacDougall has graphic-
ally put it, "Take away these instinctive disposi-
tions with their powerful impulses and the human
organism would become incapable of activity of
any land ; it would lie inert and motionless like a
wonderful clockwork whose mainspring had been
removed or a steam engine whose fires had been
drawn. These impulses are the mental forces
which maintain and shape all the life of individ-
uals and societies, and in them we are confronted

134 THE CASUAL LABORER

with the central mystery of life and mind and
will."

Thorndike, the Columbia psychologist, in his
analysis of human motives, has written, "The
behavior of man in the family, in business, in the
state, in religion, and in every other affair of life,
is rooted in his unlearned original equipment of
instincts and capacities. All schemes of improv-
ing human life must take account of man's orig-
inal nature, most of all when their aim is to
counteract it."

Veblen wrote in his book, The Instinct of Work-
manship, "for mankind, as for the other higher
animals, the life of the species is conditioned by
the complement of instinctive proclivities, and
tropismatic aptitudes with which the species is
typically endowed. Not only is the continued life
of the race dependent upon the adequacy of its
instinctive proclivities in this way, but the rou-
tine and details of its life are also, in a last resort,
determined by these instincts. These are the
prime movers in human behavior, as in the be-
havior of all those animals that show self-direction
or discretion. The human activity, in so far as it
can be spoken of as conduct, can never exceed the
scope of these instinctive dispositions by initia-

MOTIVES IN ECONOMIC LIFE 135

tive of which man takes action. Nothing falls
within the human scheme of things desirable to be
done except what answers to these native pro-
clivities of man. These native proclivities alone
make anything worth while, and out of their
working emerge not only the purpose and effi-
ciency of life but its substantial pleasures and
pains as well."

John Dewey wrote in his Democracy in Edu-
cation: "The instinct activities may be called,
metaphorically, spontaneous in the sense that the
organs give a strong bias for a certain sort of op-
eration — a bias so strong that we cannot go con-
trary to it, though by trying to go contrary we
may pervert, stunt, and corrupt them."

Cannon, the Harvard physiologist, has said:
"More and more it is appearing that in men of
all races, and in most of the higher animals, the
springs of action are to be found in the influences
of certain emotions which express themselves in
characteristic instinctive acts."

Instincts to their modern possessor seem un-
reasoning and unrational, and often embarrassing.
To the race, however, they are an efficient and
tried guide to conduct, for they are the result of
endless experiments of how to fight, to grow, to

136 THE CASUAL LABORER

procreate, under the ruthless valuing mechanism
of the competition for survival. These instincts
have in the most complete sense of the word,
survival value. In fact, outside of some rela-
tively unimportant bodily attributes, the instincts
are all that our species in its long evolution has
considered worth saving. When one considers
the unarmed state in which the soft-bodied
human is shoved out in the world to fight for
his existence against creatures with thick hides,
vise-like jaws, and 'claws, it becomes clearly
evident that if man had not been equipped with
an instinctive and unlearned code of efficient com-
petition behavior his struggle on this earth would
have been brief and tragic. And also in contrast
with his own remote ape ancestors, one could in
retrospect see that the survival of the human
species must have had as a prerequisite a rich and
varied instinct equipment which removed man
from the necessity of learning a complete scheme
of behavior via the dangerous trial and error
method. The species, without some unlearned
and protective capacities, would not have lasted
the instruction. Within the past ten thousand
years nothing in our brilliant experiment with
the environment called civilization has been long

MOTIVES IN ECONOMIC LIFE 137

enough adhered to to bring about a psychical ad-
justment capable of physical inheritance, and so
the basic motives of the business man today re-
main those of his cave ancestor. The contribu-
tion of civilization has been merely an accumu-
lation of more or less useful traditions touching
habits accidental in character and questionable
in desirability.

All human activity, then, is untiringly actuated
by the demand for realization of the instinct
wants. If an artificially limited field of human
endeavor be called economic life, all of its so-
called motives hark directly back to the human
instincts for their origin. There are, in truth, no
economic motives as such. The motives of eco-
nomic life are the same as those of the life of art,
of vanity and ostentation, of war and crime, of
sex. Economic life is merely the life in which in-
stinct gratification is alleged to take on a rational
pecuniary habit form. Man is not less a father
with a father's parental instinct-interest just be-
cause he passes down the street from his home to
his office. His business raid into his rival's mar-
ket has the same naive charm that tickled the
heart of his remote ancestor when in the night he
rushed the herds of a near-by clan. A manufac-

138 THE CASUAL LABORER

turer tries to tell a conventional world that he
resists the closed shop because it is un-American,
it loses him money, or is inefficient. A few years
ago he was more honest when he said he would
run his business as he wished and would allow no
man to tell him what to do. His instinct of
leadership, reinforced powerfully by his innate
instinctive revulsion to the confinement of the
closed shop, gave the true stimulus. His oppo-
sition is psychological, not ethical.

The importance to me of the description of the
innate tendencies or instincts to be here given lies
in their relation to my main explanation of eco-
nomic behavior, which is:

First, that these instinct tendencies are persistent,
are far less warped or modified by the environment
than we believe ; that they function quite as they have
for a hundred thousand years ; that they, as motives in
their various normal or perverted habit form, can at
times dominate singly the entire behavior and act as
if they were a clear character dominant.

Secondly, that if the environment through any of the
conventional instruments of repression, such as ex-
treme religious orthodoxy, economic inferiority, im-
prisonment, or physical disfigurement, such as short
stature or a crippled body, repress the full psy-
chological expression in the field of the instinct
tendencies, then a psychic revolt, a slipping into ab-

MOTIVES IN ECONOMIC LIFE 139

normal mental functioning, takes place, with the
usual result that society accuses this revolutionist of
being either wilfully inefficient, alcoholic, a syndi-
calist, supersensitive, an agnostic, or insane.

Convention has judged the normal man in eco-
nomic society to be that individual who main-
tains a certain business placidity, is solvent, safe
and not irritating to the delicate structure of
credit. Trotter, the English social psychologist,
has said that today's current normality has noth-
ing to do with either stability of institutions or
human progress. Its single important character-
istic is that it is conventional. He urges the im-
perative need of a new concept of economic
normality.

Perhaps one should stop to most seriously em-
phasize this concept of a new human normality,
and also to appreciate the handicap to discussion
which comes when every analyzer at a round table
has a very different brand of human normality
in mind. There is that theoretical 100 per cent
normality which is gained for the individual by
free mobility plus a full and fine environmental
equipment of persons and instruments, and which
results in a harmonious and full expression of his
psychic potentialities. Since each vigorous life

140 THE CASUAL LABORER

lived under these conditions would generate wis-
dom in direct proportion to it, I think that an
evolutionary and also conventionally desirable
progress could be prophesied as a result. This
progress has no so-called idealistic goal or direc-
tion. It has merely a potentiality for more wis-
dom, and that wisdom might lead to any of count-
less possible developments.

A second normality would be that produced by
that freedom in instinct expression and that en-
vironment which would give far more unconven-
tional experimentation, far more wisdom than we
now have, but not the amount which would crack
social life by hurrying the change of traditions too
much, or destroy those civilization institutions
which could be modified with some hope of their
higher usefulness. Conscious that man will
change, if he is to change, to this latter compro-
mise-normality concept, it is such a normality
that I have in mind when I use the term.

In establishing a catalogue of instinct unit
characters, one must first meet Thorndike's criti-
cism of such a scheme. He sees the evolution in
instinct theorizing toward an acceptance of the
theory that there are innumerable special situa-
tions and special stimuli each possessed of its

MOTIVES IN ECONOMIC LIFE 141

particular behavior reflex. All the important
new evidence seems to back up this Thorndike
contention. However, if the behavior analysis
is a less delicate one and laboratory exactness is
not demanded, and if merely consistent behavior
tendencies are the objects of classification, it seems
not unreasonable to build up a working hypothe-
sis in the concrete form of general unit characters
of behavior. The innumerable distinct reflex
acts described by Thorndike separate out, as he
in truth has separated them, into useful groups.
These groups can, with great analysis efficiency,
be used as unit characters and, properly named,
can make up a usable catalogue of man's inherited
social tendencies. This the writer has attempted.

The following catalogue of instincts includes
those motives to conduct which, under observa-
tion, are found to be unlearned, are universal in
the species, and which must be used to explain the
innumerable similarities in behavior, detached in
space and time from each other.

I. Instinct of gregariousness. — This innate
tendency is exemplified in two ways. Modern
economic history is full of that strange irrational
phenomenon, "the trek to the city." Even in
thinly settled Australia, half the population lives

142 THE CASUAL LABORER

in a few great cities on the coast. In South
America and on the Pacific Coast, this same ab-
normal agglomeration of folk has taken place.
The extraordinary piling-up of labor masses in
modern London, Berlin, New York, Chicago, has
created cities too large for economic efficiency, for
recreation or sanitation, and yet, despite their in-
efficiencies and the food and fire risk, the massing-
up continues. Factory employment, though
speeded up and paid low wages, grows popular for
it caters to gregariousness, and domestic service
is shunned for it is a lonely job. Huddle and
congestion seem the outstanding characteristics
of the modern city.

The second exemplification is seen in man's ex-
treme sensitiveness to the opinion of his group —
which is an irrational gregarious reflex. This in-
stinct is the psychic basis for his proclivity to
react to mob suggestion and hysteria. In a strike,
each striker has a perfectly biological capacity for
violence if the group seems to will it. Because of
this same gregariousness, a panic can sweep Wall
Street, or an anti-pacifist murmur turn into per-
secution and near-lynching. The crowd members
find themselves fatally gripped in the mob drift,
they press forward willingly, all yell, and all shake

MOTIVES IN ECONOMIC LIFE 143

fists and the most gentle spirited will find himself
pulling at the lynch rope. Royce has said, "Woe
to the society which belittles the power and
menace of the mob mind." The lonely sheep-
herders become in the end irrational, and solitary
confinement ends in insanity or submission.

The slavish following of fashion and fads is
rooted in gregariousness, and the most important
marketing problem is to guess the vagaries of
desire which the mob spirit may select. A great
crowd or festival is satisfying for its own sake.
The installation of a president of a university
needs behind the rows of intellectual delegates a
mass of mere onlooking humanity, and it gets it
by various naive maneuvers. Crowds seldom dis-
perse as rapidly as they might. They are loath
to destroy their crowdishness, and therefore ir-
rationally hang about. If gregariousness should
weaken, a panic would seize municipal values, and
professional baseball, the advertising business,
and world fairs and conventions would become
impossible.

2. Instinct of parental bent: motherly be-
havior: kindliness. — In terms of sacrifice this is
the most powerful of all instincts. This instinct,
whose main concern is the cherishing of the young

144 THE CASUAL LABORER

through their helpless period, is strong in women
and weak in men. The confident presence in eco-
nomic life of such anti-child influences as the
saloons, licensed prostitution, child labor, the po-
lice control of juvenile delinquency, can be well
explained by the fact that political control has
been an inheritance of the socially indifferent
male sex. The coming of women into the fran-
chise promises many interesting and profound
economic changes. What little conservation ex-
ists today goes back to the male parental instinct
for its rather feeble urge.

The disinterested indignation over misery-pro-
voking acts which comes from the parental in-
stinct is the base stimulus to law and order, and
furnishes the nebulous but efficient force behind
such social vagaries as the Anti-Saloon League,
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,
the Associated Charities, the movement for juve-
nile courts, prison reform, Belgian relief, the
Child Labor League. The competitive egotism of
pecuniary society has stifled the habits which ex-
press the parental bent. We are not habituated
to humanitarianism.

3. Instinct of curiosity: manipulation: work-
manship. — Curiosity and its attendant desire to

MOTIVES IN ECONOMIC LIFE 145

draw near, and if possible to manipulate the curi-
ous object, are almost reflex in their simplicity.
Of more economic applicability is the innate bent
toward workmanship. Veblen has said that man
has aa taste for effective work, and a distaste for
futile effort." This desire and talent that man
has to mould material to fancied ends, be the
material clay or the pawns in diplomacy, explains
much of human activity, while wages explain
little. Prisoners have a horror of prison idleness.
Clerks drift out of stereotyped office work, and the
monotony of modern industrialism has created a
new type of migratory worker. As James has said,
"Constructiveness is a genuine and irresistible in-
stinct hi man as in the bee or beaver." Man is
then not naturally lazy, but innately industrious.
Where laziness exists it is an artificial habit, in-
culcated by civilization. Man has a true quality
sense in what he does : there is, then, a "dignity of
labor," and it is the job and the industrial en-
vironment that produce the slacker, and not" the
laborer's willful disposition.

4. Instinct of acquisition: collecting: owner-
ship.— Man lusts for land, and goes eagerly to
the United States, to South America, to Africa
for it. It is the real basis of colonial policy and

146 THE CASUAL LABORER

gives much of the interest to peace parleys. A
landless proletariat is an uneasy, thwarted mili-
tant proletariat. The cure for unruly Ireland is
proven to be peasant proprietorship, and the so-
cial menace in the American labor world is the
homeless migratory laborer. Russian peasants re-
volted for land, and this is the single consistent
note in the anarchy chaos in Mexico. Man, much
of the time, acquires for the mere sake of acquir-
ing. A business man is never rich enough. If,
however, making more money uses his acquisitive
capacities too little, he may throw this cultivated
habit-activity into acquiring Van Dykes or
bronzes or Greek antiques, or on a smaller and
less aesthetic scale, postage stamps, signatures, or
shaving mugs. Asylums are full of pitiful, eco-
nomic persons who, lost to the laws of social life,
continue as automatons to follow an unmodified
instinct in picking up and hoarding pins, leaves,
scraps of food, paper. The savings banks in large
part depend on this inborn tendency for their
right to exist.

5. Instinct of fear and flight. — Man has the
capacity to be fearful under many conditions. His
most important fear from an economic standpoint
is the stereotyped worker's or business man's

MOTIVES IN ECONOMIC LIFE 147

worry over the insecure future. This anxiety or
apprehension which is so plentiful up and down
the scale of economic life has a profound and dis-
tressing influence on the digestive tract, and ii?
turn on the general health. Much of nervous in-
digestion so common in the ruthless economic
competition of today is "fear-indigestion," is in-
stinct reaction, and can only be cured by removing
the cause. This removal of the cause is performed
many times by an equally instinctive act, flight.
Flight in business may take the conventional form
of retirement or selling out, but often adopts the
unique method of bankruptcy, insanity, or sui-
cide.

6. Instinct of mental activity: thought. — To
quote Thorndike : "This potent mover [workman-
ship] of men's economic and recreated activities
has its taproot in the instinct of multiform mental
and physical activity." To be mentally active, to
do something, is instinctively satisfying. Much of
invention springs costless from a mind thinking
for the sheer joy of it. Organization plans in
industry, schemes for market extension, visions of
ways to power, all agitate neurones in the brain
ready and anxious to give issue in thought. A
duty of the environment is not only to allow, but

148 THE CASUAL LABORER

to encourage, states in which meditation naturally
occurs.

7. The housing or settling instinct. — In its
simplest form, the gunny-sack tents of the tramps,
the playhouses of children, the camp in the thicket
of the hunter. The squatter has a different feel-
ing for his quarter section when he has a dugout
on it. Man innately wants a habitation into
which he can retire to sleep or to nurse his wounds,
physical or social. The Englishman's home is
his castle.

8. Instinct of migration: homing. — To every
man the coming of spring suggests moving on.
The hobo migration begins promptly with the first
sunshine, and the tramp instinct fills Europe with
questing globe-trotters. The advice, "Go West,
young man," was not obeyed on account of the
pecuniary gain alone, but because the venture
promised satisfaction to the instinct to migrate as
well.

9. Instinct of hunting. — Man survived in
earlier ages through destroying his rivals and kill-
ing his game, and these tendencies bit deep into
his psychic make-up. Modern man delights in a
prize fight or a street brawl, even at times joys in
ill news of his own friends, has poorly concealed

MOTIVES IN ECONOMIC LIFE 149

pleasure if his competition wrecks a business rival,
falls easily into committing atrocities if conven-
tional policing be withdrawn, kills off a trade
union, and is an always possible member of a
lynching party. He is still a hunter and reverts to
his primordial hunt habits with disconcerting zest
and expediency. Historic revivals of the hunt-
ing urge make an interesting recital of religious
inquisitions, witch burnings, college hazings, per-
secution of suffragettes, of the I. W. W., of the
Japanese, or pacifists. All this goes on often under
naive rationalization about justice and patriotism,
but it is pure and innate lust to run something
down and hurt it.

W. Instinct of anger: pugnacity. — In its
bodily preparation for action, anger is identical
with fear, and fear constitutes the most violent
and unreasoning of purposeful dispositions in
man. Caught up in anger, all social modifications
of conduct tend to become pale, and man func-
tions in primordial attack and defense. Anger and
its resulting pugnacity have as their most com-
mon excitant the balking or thwarting of another
instinct, and this alone explains why man has so
jealousy, through all ages, fought for liberty.
Pugnacity is the very prerequisite of individual

150 THE CASUAL LABORER

progress. Employers fight a hampering union,
unions a dogmatic employer; every imprisoned
man is, in reality, psychically incorrigible; stu-
dents rebel against an autocratic teacher; street
boys gang together to fight a bully; nations are
ever ready, yes, hoping, to fight, and their mem-
ory of the cost of war is biologically rendered a
short one. In fighting, there is a subtle reversion
to the primitive standards, and early atrocities
become the trench vogue of later months. Pa-
triotism without fighting seems, to western na-
tions, a pallid thing. Most of the vigorous phases
of modern civilization remain highly competitive
and warlike. Ethics has a long psychological way
to go in its vitally necessary task of sublimating
the pugnacious bent in man.

11. Instinct of revolt at confinement: at being
limited in liberty of action and choice. — As above
noted, man revolts violently at any oppression, be
it of body or soul. Being held physically helpless
produces in man and animals such profound func-
tional agitation that death can ensue. Passive
resistance can only be possible when nearly
all of man's inherited nature is removed. In
primitive days, being held was immediately ante-
cedent to being eaten, and the distaste of physical

MOTIVES IN ECONOMIC LIFE 151

helplessness is accordingly deep-seated. Belgium
would rather resist than live; an I. W. W. would
rather go to jail than come meekly off his soap
box; the militant suffragettes go through the de-
pravity of forced feeding rather than suffer their
inequality; and the worker will starve his family
to gain recognition for his union. Man will die
for liberty, and droops in prison. So psychically
revolting is confinement that the alienists have
been forced to create a new disease, a "confine-
ment insanity," a prison psychosis.

12. Instinct of revulsion. — The social nausea
which society feels towards discussions of sex,
venereal disease, leprosy, certain smells, is not
founded on willfulness. It is a non-intellectual
and innate revulsion to the subject. It is only
within the last twenty-five years that the scien-
tific attitude itself has been able to overcome this
instinctive repugnance and attack these problems,
intimate and perilous to human society, which
have languished under the taboo.

13. Instinct of leadership and mastery. — It
often appears that man seeks leadership and mas-
tery solely because their acquisition places him in
a better position to gratify his other instinctive
promptings. But there also seems a special grati-

152 . THE CASUAL LABORER

fication in leading and mastery for their own sake.
Modern life shows prodigious effort, paid only in
the state of being a boss of the gang, a 'leading"
college man, a "prominent citizen," a secretary or
a vice-president, a militia captain or a church
elder. A secret ambition to some day lead some
group on some quest, be it ethical or economic, is
planted deep in our nature. Every dog longs to
have his day.

14. Instinct of subordination: submission. —
In contrast to leadership, man longs at times to
follow the fit leader. Soldiers joy in a firm cap-
tain, workmen quit a lax though philanthropic
employer, instructors thresh under an inefficient
though indulgent department head. Eternal inde-
pendence and its necessary strife are too wearing
on the common man and he longs for peace and
protection in the shadow of a trust-inspiring
leader. To submit under right conditions is not
only psychically pleasant, but much of the time to
be leaderless is definitely distressing.

15. Instinct of display: vanity: ostentation. —
This old disposition gives the basic concept for
Veblen's remarkable analysis of the economic ac-
tivities of America's leisure class. The particular
state of the industrial arts with its trust control

MOTIVES IN ECONOMIC LIFE 153

and divorce of producer and consumer, plus po-
litical peace, has taken from man his ancient op-
portunity to show his unique gifts in ownership
of economic goods and in valor. So he is driven in
his yearning for attention to perverted activities.
He lives to waste conspicuously, wantonly, origi-
nally, and, by the refined uselessness of his wast-
ing, to show to the gaping world what an
extraordinary person he is. The sensitiveness of
social matrons to mention in the society columns,
the hysteria to be identified with the changing
vagaries of the style, the fear of identification with
drab and useful livelihoods, offer in their infinite
variety a multitude of important economic phe-
nomena.

16. Instinct of sex. — Of the subjects vital to
an analysis of life, be they aesthetic or economic,
sex has suffered most from the revulsion taboo.
Manifestly an instinct which moulds behavior and
purposeful planning profoundly, sex as a motive-
concept is barred from the economic door. De-
spite the proven moral and efficiency problems
which arise with the postponement of marriage
due to modern economic conditions, the massing
of unmarried immigrant men into tenement
rooms, or the condemning of some millions of mi-

154 THE CASUAL LABORER

gratory workers to a womanless existence, con-
ventional morality meets every situation by
denying the sex instinct, by a blind belief that in
some strange way modern economic civilization
allows its inmates "to mortify the deeds of the
body."

While at any particular moment in our be-
havior we are a blend or composite of many in-
stinct activities, it is accurate to describe much of
behavior as dominated at any one time by either
a single instinct or at most two or three. A cer-
tain environment can habituate man to a special-
ization in gratification of a single or a pair of
instincts. For instance, war matures and educates
habits gratifying the instincts of pugnacity and
hunting. At the war front, this habit bent gives
basis for gradually sloughing off the humane re-
strictions governing the fighting, and armies mu-
tually obey their new psychology. Machine-gun
men know they will not be taken prisoner and
their service is now known as the suicide squad.
Hospitals or undefended towns are bombed, a very
conventional minimum of attention is fixed for
the enemy wounded, the primitive method of
warfare of the French African troops which at

MOTIVES IN ECONOMIC LIFE 155

first disturbed the ethics of the Allies is now for-
gotten under the more liberal interpretation under
the revamped war psychology. At home the
citizens of the belligerent countries gain a
cathartic for their overstimulated pugnacious bent
by rioting the People's Council, or tar-and-
feathering the I. W. W., or organizing a man-hunt
for a lately immigrated Austrian or German. It is
quite natural that the actors in these domestic
dramas should build up explanatory rationaliza-
tions for their activity. It is their mild bow to
the fast dimming conventions and traditions of
peace. As a gentle and aged lady deplored, "I
cannot fight, but I can at least go about and listen
and report on the unpatriotic."

The tongue-tied and paralyzed after-dinner
speaker is a single-minded expositor of the strange
instinct of subservience. The worried father of
a sick child seated at his office desk is not an
economic man. His behavior is dominated by
the parental motive, and in this fact is found the
only explanation of his distracted conduct. Veblen
in a shrewd analysis of industrial evolution noted
that the early pre-capitalistic culture, with its
handicraft production and small intimate social
groups, stressed the habits which express the in-

156 THE CASUAL LABORER

stinct of workmanship and the parental instinct.
With the industrial revolution and the immer-
gence into the pecuniary scheme of things of a
small property-owning class and a large prole-
tariat, life presented habit opportunities which
stressed, in the master class, the so-called ego-
tistical instincts of leadership, hunting, ostenta-
tion and vanity, and for the working class re-
moved the opportunities to express the instinct of
workmanship and reduced and restricted the other
avenues of expression or perverted them to non-
evolutionary or anti-social behavior. Instinct
perversion rather than freely selected habits of
instinct expression seems broadly a just character-
ization of modern labor-class life. Modern labor
unrest has a basis more psychopathological than
psychological, and it seems accurate to describe
modern industrialism as mentally insanitary.

A remarkable analysis of instinct dominance
over behavior is illustrated by the experiments at
the Harvard Medical School and described by
Professor Cannon. He notes that among the in-
stinct emotions active in man those which are
identified with a physical struggle for existence
have both a physical and mechanical authority
over all other instinct urges to conduct. Like the

MOTIVES IN ECONOMIC LIFE 157

military general staff, they shoulder aside, in
times of stress, the aesthetic and peaceful enthu-
siasms and mobilize every mental and physical
efficiency to their war purpose. The central
nervous system is divided by Cannon into three
parts, all of which, under peace, function nor-
mally. If, however, the brain be stimulated to
fear or anger, one of these parts, the so-called
"sympathetic part," becomes the dictator. Its
particular nerve fibers are, of the three parts, by
far the most extensive in their distribution, and
permit immediate mobilization of the entire body.
Its mobilization consists in "secession of processes
in the alimentary canal, thus freeing the energy
supplied for other parts, the shif ting of blood from
the abdominal organs whose activities are defer-
able to the organs immediately essential to mus-
cular exertion (the lungs, the heart, the central
nervous system), the increased vigor of contrac-
tion of the heart, the quick abolition of the effects
of muscular fatigue, the mobilizing of energy-
giving sugar in the circulation — every one of
these visceral changes is directly serviceable in
making the organism more effective in the violent
display of energy which fear or rage or pain may
involve."

158 THE CASUAL LABORER

But the most unique war-footing activity of
the body in this vigorous preparedness is the
functioning of the adrenal gland. To use
Cannon's words: "Adrenin, secreted by the
adrenal glands, in time of stress or danger, plays
an essential role in flooding the blood with sugar,
distributes the blood to the heart, lungs, central
nervous system and limbs, takes it away from the
inhibited organs of the abdomen, it quickly
abolishes muscular fatigue and coagulates the
blood on injury. These remarkable facts are fur-
thermore associated with some of the most primi-
tive experiences in the life of the higher organ-
isms, experiences common to man and beast —
the elemental experiences of pain and fear and
rage that come suddenly in critical emergencies."

The conclusion seems both scientific and logical
that behavior in anger, fear, pain, and hunger is a
basically different behavior from the behavior
under repose and economic security. The emo-
tions generated under the conditions of existence-
peril seem to make the emotions and motives
generative in quiet and peace, pale and unequal.
It seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that
the most vital part of man's inheritance is one
which destines him to continue for some myriads

MOTIVES IN ECONOMIC LIFE 159

of years ever a fighting animal when certain con-
ditions exist in his environment. Though, through
education, man be habituated in social and in-
telligent behavior, or, through license, in sexual
debauchery, still at those times when his life or
liberty is threatened, his instinct-emotional na-
ture will inhibit either social thought or sex ideas,
and present him as merely an irrational fighting
animal.

Since every instinct inherited by man from his
tree and cave ancestors, literally sewed into his
motivating disposition, has survival value, an en-
vironment which balks or thwarts his instinct
expression, arouses directly and according to the
degree of its menace this unreasoning emotional
revolt in him. The chemical proof of this emo-
tional revolt is found by Cannon even in indi-
viduals suffering from vague states of worry or
anxiety. Here the single problem is the manner
in which the angry or fearful person coins his
revolt emotion into behavior, and this largely de-
pends upon the right and proper method which
society has selected for expressing psychical dis-
satisfaction. There are folk ways of distress be-
havior just as certainly as there are of religious
enthusiasm or patriotism. Since the emotional

160 THE CASUAL LABORER

tone stimulated by the balking of "minor" in-
stincts would naturally be lower than that intense
tone generated by a threatened rending of one's
flesh, or imprisonment, to the same degree is the
behavior stimulated by the lower-toned emotions
less vivid and noteworthy than the blind and
frantic resistance to the direct physical threat.
The behavior reflex to the emotions generated in
a state of worry, anxiety, economic servility, or
personal humiliation, instead of expressing itself
in violent revolt, is shown in states of mental in-
ertia, loss of interest and power of attention, labor
inefficiency, drifting off the job, drink and drugs.
These behavior states which under conventional
and economic moral theorizing are barrenly and
inaccurately described as willful acts, are ele-
mental, irrational, and blind reflex activities.
Under conditions which allow the satisfactory ex-
pression of man's original inherited proclivities,
this warlike specialization of the mind and body
is avoided. There the cranial or sacral sections of
the peace-footing "automatic" section divide with
the warlike "sympathetic" section the authority
over the body. Health and nerve reserve are built
up, a quiet brain permits rational orderings of the
associations of the mind, social behavior habits

MOTIVES IN ECONOMIC LIFE 161

can influence the order and connections of the
neurones and insure their perpetuation; in short,
intellectual progress becomes possible.

The instincts and their emotions, coupled with
the obedient body, lay down in scientific and ex-
act description the motives which must and will
determine human conduct. If a physical en-
vironment set itself against the expression of
these instinct motives, the human organism is
fully and efficiently prepared for a tenacious and
destructive revolt against this environment; and
if the antagonism persist, the organism is ready
to destroy itself and disappear as a species if it
fail of a psychical mutation which would make
the perverted order endurable.

Even if labor-class children evade those re-
pressive deportment traditions that characterize
the life of the middle-class young, at a later date
in the life of these working-class members certain
powerful forces in their environment, though they
work on the less susceptible and less plastic na-
tures of mature individuals, produce obsessions
and thwartings which function at times, exclu-
sively almost, in determining the behavior of
great classes of the industrial population. The
powerful forces of the working-class environment

162 THE CASUAL LABORER

which thwart and balk instinct expression are
suggested in the phrases "monotonous work,"
"dirty work/' "simplified work," "mechanized
work," the "servile place of labor," "insecure ten-
ure of the job," "hire and fire," "winter unemploy-
ment," "the ever found union of the poor district
with the crime district," and the "restricated dis-
trict of prostitution," the "open shop," the "labor
turnover," "poverty," the "bread lines," the "scrap
heap," "destitution." If we postulate some six-
teen instinct unit characters which are present
under the laborer's blouse and insistently demand
the same gratification that is, with painful care,
planned for the college student, in just what kind
of perverted compensations must a laborer in-
dulge to make endurable his existence? A western
hobo tries in a more or less frenzied way to com-
pensate for a general all-embracing thwarting of
his nature by a wonderful concentration of sub-
limation activities on the wander instinct. The
monotony, indignity, dirt, and sexual apologies of,
for instance, the unskilled worker's life bring their
definite fixations, their definite irrational, in-
feriority obsessions.

The balked laborer here follows one of the two
described lines of conduct: First, he either weak-

MOTIVES IN ECONOMIC LIFE 163

ens, becomes inefficient, drifts away, loses interest
in the quality of his work, drinks, deserts his fam-
ily; or secondly, he indulges in a true type inferior-
ity compensation, and in order to dignify himself,
to eliminate for himself his inferiority in his own
eyes, he strikes or brings on a strike; he commits
violence, or he stays on the job and injures ma-
chinery, or mutilates the materials. He is fit food
for dynamite conspiracies. He is ready to make
sabotage a part of his regular habit scheme. His
condition is one of mental stress and unfocused
psychic unrest, and could in all accuracy be called
a definite industrial psychosis. He is neither will-
ful nor responsible, he is suffering from a stereo-
typed mental disease.

If one leaves the strata of unskilled labor and
investigates the higher economic classes, he finds
parallel conditions. There is a profound unrest
and strong migratory tendency among depart-
ment-store employees. One New York store with
less than three thousand employees has thirteen
thousand pass through its employ in a year. Since
the establishment in American life of big business
with its extensive efficiency systems, its order and
dehumanized discipline, its caste system, as it
were, there has developed among its highly paid

164 THE CASUAL LABORER

men a persistent unrest, a dissatisfaction and de-
cay of morale which is so noticeable and costly
that it has received repeated attention. Even the
conventional competitive efficiency of American
business is in grave question. I suggest that this
unrest is a true revolt psychosis, a definite mental
unbalance, an efficiency psychosis, as it were, and
has its definite psychic antecedents; and that our
present moralizing and guess-solutions are both
hopeless and ludicrous.

The dynamic psychology of today describes the
present civilization as a repressive environment.
For a great number of its inhabitants, a sufficient
self-expression is denied. There is for those who
care to see, a deep and growing unrest and
pessimism. With the increase in knowledge is
coming a new realization of the irrational direc-
tion of economic evolution. The economists, how-
ever, view economic inequality and life degrada-
tion as objects, in truth, outside the science. Our
value concept is a price mechanism hiding behind
a phrase. If we are to play a part in the social
readjustment immediately ahead, we must put
human nature and human motives into our basic
hypotheses. Our value concept must be the yard-
stick to measure just how fully things and insti-

MOTIVES IN ECONOMIC LIFE 165

tutions contribute to a full psychological life. We
must know more of the meaning of progress. The
domination of society by one economic class has
for its chief evil the thwarting. of the instinct life
of the subordinate class and the perversion of the
upper class. The extent and characteristics of
this evil are only to be estimated when we know
the innate potentialities and inherited propen-
sities of man, and the ordering of this knowledge
and its application to the changeable economic
structure is the task before the trained econo-
mists today.

APPENDIX

FOREWORD

THE following report was written about March
1914. Its purpose was to acquaint the Governor with
actual conditions under which migratory and casual
labor lived and worked in California. These con-
ditions described were more or less typical of much of
farm and construction work throughout the state at
that time. It is only fair to state that the ranch re-
ferred to in this specific report has since been turned
into a model labor camp. One must read this de-
scription of conditions as they were to be able to ap-
preciate the fact that at present, among other revo-
lutionary improvements, there is a reading room for
men, with books, magazines and a victrola. Ford and
Suhr are still in jail, but the California Casual can
hardly recognize today the fly-proof, sanitary haunts
of his unscreened, ungarbaged past. The clean-up of
camps under the State Immigration and Housing Com-
mission has been a concrete accomplished fact. It has
not brought the millennium — for one thing memories
die hard. This report was written before the author
had begun his psychological studies. I imagine at a*
later date he would have stressed more vividly the
fact that the proper housing is but one step, though a
vitally important step, toward peaceful industrial re-
lations. Even so, bad housing and camp conditions

169

170 APPENDIX

loomed too large in California in 1914 to deserve any-
thing less than the spotlight. And a psychologist
comes to know, perhaps better than anyone else, that
you cannot make over the whole world at once. It is
a step forward to clean house.

In editing this report to the Governor certain some-
what unwilling concessions in the form of omissions
were made to what we are wont rather approvingly to
consider the sensitive feelings of the reading public.
In a measure such concessions are justified, yet it was
a strongly held theory of the author of this report that
it was through just such concessions that society was
allowed its continued ignorance in, and thereby
cruelly inadequate provisioning for, the physical and
psychological wants of the individual. Because of
social taboo, human beings must needs continue to
find such satisfaction of their normal needs as is pos-
sible under conditions which humiliate and degrade.

No point is made in the original report that is not
amply substantiated by affidavits. In the main these
affidavits have been omitted.

I cannot refrain from calling attention to one
phrase in this report which I believe cannot be found
in any writings of Carl Parker's after he began his
study of psychology. That is the expression on
page 189, "he should have. ..." It comes peri-
lously near what he was wont to call "the illogic of
blaming." The last function of the psychological
economist is to pass moral judgments.

C. S. P.

A REPORT

TO HIS EXCELLENCY HIRAM W. JOHNSON, GOVERNOR OF
CALIFORNIA, BY THE COMMISSION OF IMMIGRATION
AND HOUSING OF CALIFORNIA ON THE CAUSES AND
ALL MATTERS PERTAINING TO THE SO-CALLED
WHEATLAND HOP FIELDS* RIOT AND KILLING OF
AUGUST 3, 1913, AND CONTAINING CERTAIN RECOM-
MENDATION AS A SOLUTION FOR THE PROBLEMS DIS-
CLOSED.

EXCELLENCY:

The occurrence known as the Wheatland Hop
Fields' Riot took place on Sunday afternoon, August
3rd, 1913. Growing discontent among the hop pickers
over wages, neglected camp sanitation and absence of
water in the fields, had resulted in spasmodic meet-
ings of protest on Saturday 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 upon a John Doe warrant Richard Ford, the
apparent leader of the strike. In the ensuing con-
fusion shooting began and some twenty shots were
fired. Two pickers, a deputy sheriff and the district

171

172 APPENDIX

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
bloody, event in California labor history into such a
focus for discussion and analysis of the state's great
migratory labor problem that the incident can well be
said to begin, for the commonwealth, a new and mo-
mentous 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 re-
lating 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 con-
fusion and rioting of a labor outbreak; all these prob-
lems have found a starting point for their new and
vigorous analysis in the Wheatland Riot.

California is yearly becoming more agricultural and
less industrial; more seasonal in its demands for
labor, more dependent for the harvesting of the yearly
crops on the migratory, roofless worker. This new
labor status in the State is menacing in its poten-
tiality for spasmodic waves of unrest and sudden,
perplexing strikes of unorganized workers. "Passive
resistance," the new method in labor warfare, not at
all the product of the orthodox labor movement, be-
comes paralysis because the method, being new, finds
no effective legal doctrine or procedure to combat it.
The Wheatland affair marks the emergence into
strong light of a new and vital problem.

THE HOP FIELDS' REPORT 173

This incident, known as the "Hop-fields' Riot," con-
cerned the hop-pickers employed and camped upon

the D hop ranch at Wheatland, California, and a

Yuba County sheriff's posse which was largely re-
cruited from the county seat, Marysville. There were
about 2800 men, women and children camped on the
D ranch on a low unshaded hill. The camp com-
prised a motley collection of tents, timber stockades
called "bull-pens," gunny sacks stretched over fences,
and camp wagons. Toilets were scattered at irregu-
lar intervals among these shelters.

A general average taken from 22 affidavits on the
subject of the total number of people in the camp
gives 2738. This, taken in connection with oral state-
ments made to the investigators by Mr. D and

D Bros/ employees, and a careful inspection of

the books of D Bros, is the foundation for this

estimate of 2800 campers.

The general average of the total number of women
and children in the camp, as taken from 19 affi-
davits, is 1005.

The general average of the total number of aliens
or foreigners in the camp, as taken from 18 affi-
davits, is 1438. It may be noted that during the
course of the trial a hop inspector testified that in his
gang of 235 he counted 27 different nationalities. One
witness testified that he heard speakers using seven
different languages at the meeting on Sunday.

Among the important alien groups were Syrian,
Mexican, Spanish from the Hawaiian sugar planta-
tions, Japanese, Lithuanian, Italian, Greek, Polish,
Hindu, Cuban, Porto Rican, and Swedish. These

174 APPENDIX

aliens were unskilled laborers, and many were ig-
norant of English. They lived in their own native
quarters on the grounds, crowded into as few tents or
"bull-pens" as was physically possible. They had, as
a rule, unclean personal and camp habits, exposed
themselves at the pumps in washing, and were inde-
cently careless in the presence of women and children.
The Americans were in the main a casual-working,
migratory labor class, with an indifferent standard of
life and cleanliness. They were recruited in part from
the poor of the country towns, and in part from the
impoverished ranches and mining camps of the Sierra
foot-hills. A small, but essentially important, fraction
were American hoboes. There were many exceptions
to these generalizations. Many families were of the
better middle class and have been in the habit of
using the hop and fruit seasons to get their "country
vacations." They were evidently deeply humiliated
by their experience, and their indignant condemna-
tion of the filth and sanitary neglect has been, for our
investigation, the best standardization of this phase.

Method of the Investigation

This report is founded on a careful personal investi-
gation of the physical facts by all the investigators
employed by the commission; upon a close study of
the trial of Ford, Suhr, Beck and Bagan at Marys-
ville; upon interviews with witnesses at the trial and
with pickers who were present on the ranch during
the days before August 3rd and who were not present
at the trial, but scattered throughout the State; and
upon interviews with residents of Yuba County. The

THE HOP FIELDS' REPORT 175

investigators, in taking testimony, were careful to call
upon the witnesses in their own homes, where amid
familiar surroundings the witnesses could talk easily
and without excitement or prejudice. The testimony
may be classified as follows :

(1) Written statements and affidavits totaling 67.

(2) Of these statements, 52 were made by parties

who were not called as witnesses at the trial,
and who were not at any time present in
Marysville during the course of the trial.

(3) Two of these statements were made by wit-

nesses called by the prosecution at the trial.

(4) Thirteen of these statements were made by

witnesses called by the defense at the trial.
Some of these trial witnesses' statements
were taken from testimony given under oath
at the trial.

The large number of defense witnesses is accounted
for by the fact that the defense called many more
witnesses from the people who were laborers on the
hop ranch before the riot; the prosecution's testimony
dealing almost exclusively with the facts of the riot
itself.

(5) Of these written statements, 49 were made by

men and 18 by women.

(6) In addition to these written statements, there

were 30 people interviewed at Marysville
and Wheatland during the investigation,
whose oral statements corroborate the gen-
eral conclusion of this report.

There is, therefore, a grand total of 97 witnesses to
the facts contained in this report.

176 APPENDIX

The witnesses who made the written statements
have been characterized by the investigators who ob-
tained the statements as follows:

A (1) Perfectly reliable 67

(2) Doubtful reliability 10

B (1) Keenly observant of conditions. .52

(2) Fairly observant of conditions. . .15

The proportions of this characterization of those
making written statements apply also to the oral state-
ments and interviews.

Wage Conditions

The first important item in the discussion of the
labor situation on the ranch is naturally that of wages.
In the advertisement for hop-pickers, a copy of which

is attached to this report, and which D sent

broadcast throughout the state, he stated:

"The going price paid for clean picking. A BONUS
to all pickers helping us and doing satisfactory work,
to the completion of the season — a period of three or
four weeks."

This indefinite statement as to the going price seems
to have led to no little confusion in the minds of the
pickers who were eventually employed.

Ninety cents per 100 pounds was paid by D

during the first week for hop picking in 1913, to which
a so-called "bonus" of 10 cents was added if the picker
stayed the three or four weeks' season through. If
the pickers quit before the last day of the season, this
so-called "bonus" reverted to D .

THE HOP FIELDS' REPORT 177

If there be a type, or "going" hop-pickers' wage for
1913 in California, it was roughly $1.00 per 100
pounds of hops. There are many affidavits to this
effect, and it would certainly seem that this $1.00 per
100 pounds should have been the "going price" on

the D ranch and the "going price" alluded to in

D >g advertisements, especially when taken in con-
nection with the extra cleanliness required in picking,
later discussed herein.

If the "going" wages in that part of the State for
hop picking had been paid by D , and the so-
called "bonus" was clearly a reward above this wage
for remaining the season through, this system would

have been legitimate and blameless, but D paid

90 cents per 100 pounds picked when the "going" wage
was $1.00, so his alleged "bonus" was in reality a
hold-back out of the normal hop picking wage of 1913.
He had no more right to the 10 cents than he would
have had to 50 cents out of the dollar. There is cir-
cumstantial evidence that this alleged bonus was in-
tended at the opening of the season to be, and really
acted as, a whip to force pickers to stay out the season
in order to receive in the end their normal wage for
their weighed and recorded picking. It is suggestive

that on the Monday after the Sunday's riot, D

hastily instituted the wage rate of $1.00 per 100
pounds straight, without the alleged bonus. McCrea,
the manager of the D ranch, stated to your in-
vestigator that wages, in fact, had in past seasons been
varied from day to day. If a surplus of pickers came
to the grounds and camped during a day, the wage
was lowered for the next morning, as the competition

178 APPENDIX

of these usually destitute work seekers would insure
enough pickers, even at the reduced rate. If the
pickers were dissatisfied and drifted out, wages were
raised the next morning. If the drift threatened to
seriously deplete the force, a " white check," giving a
rate of $1.05 for 100 pounds was hastily issued for the
next day. This illustrates the use made of the list of
variable bonuses noted above. The pressing need of
the casual laborers seemed to establish the wage for hop
pickers on this ranch, and it is difficult to understand

D 's reference hi his advertisements to the "going"

or ruling price which was to be paid for picking his

hops. On the other hand, D found by Friday of

the first week that he had about 1000 too many

pickers. There is evidence that D planned,

through State-wide advertising, to bring more pickers
to his ranch than he could possibly keep in the field.
Some of the pickers state in their affidavits that after
they found only occasional opportunities to pick they
became disgusted with the work and the increasing
filth of the camp and left.
Taking the "bonus" for forfeitures of previous years

as a standard, the "bonuses" accruing to D

through the departure of these discontented workers
in 1913 must have been $100 to $150 per day. It will
never be settled just how many pickers left before the
shooting because of intolerable camp conditions and
thus forfeited their "bonus," and how many left be-
cause of the shooting and riot. One prior normal
year of hop picking showed more than $500 accruing
to Durst through forfeited "bonuses" with a pay roll
slightly over $19,000.

THE HOP FIELDS' REPORT 179

D 's hop-drying ovens could not care for the

picking of more than 1500 steadily employed pickers,
so that one-third of the campers hung around the
camp or the office waiting for field tickets. In spite of
these facts, it is to be noted that in his advertisements
for pickers, D stated:

"All white pickers who make application before
August 1st will be given work."

It is evident that this broad promise is one that
would be well-nigh impossible to fulfill, yet it held
out a hope for work to the scattered laborers through-
out California, Nevada, and Southern Oregon, and
there was no way for them to know whether or not

D would have sufficient pickers by the time they

arrived.

D made no effort to reduce the campers In

number to correspond to the force needed. The D

management, knowing exactly what was the sanitary
condition of the camp, and aware of the threatened
migration of part of the picking force because of it,
had in its refusal to correct the abuses, laid itself open
to the suspicion of intentional carelessness, because

of the gain accruing to D in the share of the

"bonuses" thus forfeited on account of the pickers
leaving.1

1 In relation to the above statement as to the surplus num-
ber of pickers, the following statement in the affidavit of a
hop inspector is noteworthy:

"Adequate facilities for loading and sacking hops were not
provided. There were not enough sacks. On one day, after
having filled a sack and box by 11 A. M. I was forced to wait
until 3 P. M. of the same day, at which time I turned my hops

180 APPENDIX

Oral statements were also made to the investi-
gators to the effect that the pickers were not furnished
with enough sacks to keep them busy picking. This
situation not only cut down the earning capacity of
the pickers but naturally led to dissatisfaction and
discontent. There was on this ranch patently no
danger of a dearth of labor in this period, even though
a part migrated.

D has always demanded an unusual standard

of cleanliness for his hops, and inspectors have very
often forced pickers to go up to the kilns to pick their
bags over. We are convinced that the average first
picking on this ranch was, in cleanness of hops, up to
the average of the district, so that this demand of the
inspectors was a material handicap to the pickers.
This strict inspection of hops, in connection with the
unusual thinness of the hops on the vines, a result of
the dry year, accounts in part for the prevailing low
average wage of the week's picking prior to the out-
break. The following are typical days' earnings for
this period: $1.31, $1.30, $1.11, $.90, $1.80, $1.32,
$1.90, $1.25, $.70, $.92, $1.32, $1.82, $1.18, $1.27, $1.41,
$1.15. These figures were taken at random from
D 's books.1

over to a third party to have weighed, but they were not
weighed until 5 P. M. During this time the hops dried in the
hot sun and lost weight and I remained idle. I observed this
same thing in the case of other persons."

1 The following extracts from affidavits as to the conditions
of picking and the cleanliness required in the hops indicate
the difficulties encountered by the pickers, as well as their
state of mind:

"I worked for D Bros, in 1912, and the requirements

for picking hops clean were not as strict as in 1913. They did
not allow small stems or leaves in the hops. Many pickers

THE HOP FIELDS' REPORT 181

Sanitary Condition of Camp

In answer to D 's misleading advertisements

scattered throughout California, Oregon, and even
Nevada, about 3000 people arrived on the ranch
within four days. They came by every conceivable
means of transportation. A great number had no

had to pick their hops over again whenever the inspectors
found that the hops contained a few stems or leaves. The

previous year I worked for D Bros. I was able to average

$3.00 a day for the season but in 1913 I just barely made 85
cents a day and worked harder than the previous year."

Following is an extract from the affidavit of an experienced
hop picker:

"I have picked hops in other places and have made as

much as $4.00 a day, but on the D ranch I never made

more than 90 cents a day. D required the hops to be

picked too clean. He never supplied high-pole men and the
pickers — women and children — had to get poles themselves
and get the hops down. We would also have to pack the hops
about 200 yards to have them weighed and were also com-
pelled to carry them several feet and load them on the wagon.
The hop inspectors would make me and other pickers pick
the hops over again, even if they were clean. The inspectors
would dump the hops out and have us pick them into another
sack. They compelled us to pick little stems and leaves out
of the hops even if not larger than a nickel."

The following last extract from an affidavit on this point
carries great weight, as it was made by a hop inspector on the
ranch :

"The inspection was made so close that the best pickers
could not make over $1.50 a day (when combined with short-
age of sacks, etc.). Because D had about 3000 pickers

(he had about 2800 numbers and several worked under one
number) he said he would make an extra clean inspection and
would allow only two hops on one stem, and no leaf bigger
than a nickel, while pickers are usually allowed to strip off
whole handfuls, leaves and all. These conditions were not
stated in his advertisements and no one expected them. All
the pickers were used to making from $2.50 to $5.00 per day
and then, under the above conditions, came down to 85 cents
to $1.50 a day. Right after August 3rd these standards were
lowered to the usual ones and att «achs needed were furmehed"

182 APPENDIX

blankets and slept on piles of straw thrown onto the

tent floors. These tents were rented from D at

75 cents a week, though some old tents were donated
by him free of charge. Before these and other ac-
commodations were ready, many slept in the fields.
One group of 45 men, women, and children slept
packed closely together on a single pile of straw. The
moral conditions of these hop-fields are notoriously
lax, and this camp was no exception. At least one-
half the campers were absolutely destitute, and those
who got an opportunity to work were forced to cash
in their checks each evening to feed tent companions.
There are many recorded instances of actual suffering
and hunger.

Perhaps the most vicious sanitary abuse was that
of toilets. There were very probably nine of these
for the 2800 people. There were certainly not less
than 8, nor more than 11. D 's camp toilet ac-
commodations were one-tenth of the army ncdnimum.

[NOTE. There follow twenty-four affidavits testify-
ing to the consequent unsanitary condition of the
camp, and especially its effect on the women and
children.]

Garbage

Despite the easily forecasted garbage problem that
must of necessity arise in a camp of nearly 3000
people, no real provision was made to take care of
the garbage. Food and refuse were thrown out be-
side and behind the tents and even in the paths. A
group of families killed a sheep about Thursday or

THE HOP FIELDS' REPORT 183

Friday of the week of the riot, and on Monday a
military surgeon saw the entrails lying beside the
tent in the sun as he went there to attend a sick child.
This absolute want of garbage disposal without a
doubt accounts for a dangerous epidemic of dysentery
which had run through the camp by Saturday of that
week.

There is ample evidence that the lack of garbage
collections was not confined to only one or two lo-
calities in camp, but that the refuse was scattered
generally over the camp ground.

[Ten affidavits follow describing the condition of the
camp due to improper garbage disposal.]

Water

The wells, probably because the water supply had
been diminished by two dry years, were absolutely in-
sufficient for the camp. Two of the wells were often
pumped dry by sun-up, and the campers were forced
either to go to town for water, or to distant wells, or
to wells among the ranch buildings. There are nu-
merous affidavits and statements to the effect that
two of the wells were out of order or failed to pump
water a great deal of the time. . . .

There are numerous statements to the effect that
every morning and evening there were lines of from
10 to 35 people at each well waiting to get water.
According to the weight of testimony, there were
available for the hop pickers on August 3rd, 1913, 5
wells and 2 hydrants.

It is also evident that the condition of the wells was

184 APPENDIX

not what it should have been. The platforms were
made of rough board planking and the people were
allowed to wash, not only their persons, but their
clothes, under the faucets, and on these platforms, al-
lowing the dirty water to drain back into the wells.
Moreover, around at least two of the wells small ponds
of stagnant water were allowed to form, and garbage
and refuse collected in these dump holes and this water
drained back into the wells.

The water itself seems to have been the average
good valley water, although numerous affidavits state
that it had an alkali taste and was often roily and
muddy. Moreover, the fact that dirty water was
allowed to drain back into the wells signifies that after
a few days the supply must necessarily have become
more or less contaminated by the disintegrating gar-
bage and vegetable matter.

An important part of the hop field was more than
a mile away from the wells, but despite the great heat
of this week, ranging from 106 to 110 in the shade, no

water was transported to the pickers. D told

your investigator that although he knew, as a rule,
that picking began on the ranch by Thursday or
Friday, he never planned to have the water wagon go
out to the fields until the following Monday. Upon
being asked a reason for this failure to send out a
water wagon during these three days of intense heat,

Mr. D explained that the hop vines were growing

in the roadways in the field and would not allow the
wagon to enter the field. Confronted with his own
statement and also the evidence in numerous affi-
davits, that a stew wagon and a lemonade wagon

THE HOP FIELDS' REPORT 185

went about the field during these three days selling

their goods to the thirsty pickers, Mr. D answered

that the water wagon, in addition to the stew and
lemonade wagons, would have "cluttered up the field
with wagons."

The pickers during this week would be in the fields
by dawn, about 4 o'clock, and about 200 to 300
children were taken into the fields with the women.
By noon, under the burning sun beating down on the
still air held between the rows of vines, the children,
many of whom were very small, were in a pitiable
condition because of the lack of water. Numerous
instances of sickness and partial prostration among
children from five to ten years of age were mentioned
in testimony.1

Lemonade and Store Concessions and Ranch Store
'*.j»~

D had let a lemonade contract to his cousin,

J D , who offered lemonade in the fields at

five cents a glass. This lemonade was proven, upon

V

1 The few following extracts from affidavits and statements
go further to emphasize the hardships caused by the lack of
drinking water in the fields than any amount of description:

"I carried water to the field in a demijohn and it would
only last about 3 hours and it took an hour to go to camp
for more water."

"We had to carry our own water. A demijohn only lasted
about half a day and we had to walk from a mile to a mile
and a half to refill it. There were a great many children in
the field who cried for water and it was very pitiful to see them
suffer for want of it. Many times I gave my water away to
little children."

"My own boy had to go back nearly two miles to camp
every day at noon and get drinking water and this got hot as
hell and took time from work."

186 APPENDIX

the testimony of the druggist's clerk with whom J

D traded, to have been made largely from citric

acid. . . .

There was also a concession to sell stew and a stew
wagon went out about noon each day among the
pickers. There is a fact in connection with these
lemonade and stew concessions that is tinged with a
certain irony. The lemonade and stew concessions
were entrusted with the duty of furnishing drinking
water to the pickers. It is not strange that all the
witnesses testify that the man who was selling lemon-
ade refused to give away drinking water unless the
thirsty pickers bought lemonade, or that the stew man
gave water only to those who bought stew.1

There was absolutely no excuse given for the ab-
sence of water in the fields, and the failure of the
ranch management to provide for this suggests, almost
more than any other single incident, the absolute in-
ability of the D management to realize any kind

1 The following is a sample collection of extracts from
the almost pitiful affidavits on this point:

"Water was brought out on the lunch wagon to the field,
but it was free only to those who bought lunches. No other
water was given away."

"J D sold ice cream cones and lemonade in the

fields and was supposed to give the pickers water for this
privilege. He always had a barrel of water with him on
the wagon and one day we asked him for the water: 'If I give
water away, I will not be albe to sell lemonade or soda.' "

"There was no drinking water furnished to pickers, but there
was a man selling lemonade and ice cream cones. This man
was supposed to furnish drinking water, but refused to give
any away free. He told two boys he would let them have
water at five cents per quart. I purchased a pint of lemonade
Saturday afternoon and I and my children were almost per-
ishing for a drink of water. The lemonade contained a great
deal of citric acid and almost cut the insides out of us."

THE HOP FIELDS' REPORT 187

of social responsibility for the condition of the human
beings employed on the ranch.

Store

It is a pertinent fact that D , while admitting

that delivery wagons from Wheatland grocery stores,
butcher shops, and bakeries, were strictly forbidden
to come on the camp grounds, also admitted that he
had a 50 per cent share of the profits of a general food
store built by him on the grounds.

Sickness

In due time, and as a natural result of these un-
sanitary conditions, sickness developed. There is a
considerable evidence that dysentery and diarrhoea
were prevalent in the camp, and there are also re-
corded instances not only of malarial fever, but of
typhoid. These facts are not surprising considering
the fact that the toilets were in such a dilapidated
condition; that flies were allowed to breed there, as
well as in the horse manure at the barn, by the thou-
sand, and then the uncared for garbage provided an
abundant food for these flies so that they became
ever-increasing and active carriers of the intestinal
infection in the toilets.1

Two women, mothers of large families, have written

1 Following are extracts from affidavits in regard to sick-
ness in the camp:

"I had malarial fever. So did some other women I know."
"I know of one family that all had typhoid."
"I had malarial fever, which lasted until I came to San

188 APPENDIX

in and reported the existence in their families of
typhoid, which originated beyond reasonable doubt

at the D ranch. In one case, it is alleged that

four out of a party of five had typhoid. It is a matter
of common knowledge that there are at present in
every labor camp in California active typhoid carriers
and the careless conditions at this camp afforded an
excellent opportunity for spreading the disease.

The Employer

R D , 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 class 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 Cali-
fornia. That D could refuse his clear duty of

trusteeship of a camp on his own ranch which con-
tained 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 hu-
miliation repeated each day from Wednesday to Sun-
day of that week. Even where the employer's innate

Francisco, and my friends also had it. Many became ill with
malarial fever."

"Two of my children got malarial fever and had to leave
on Saturday, August 2nd."

"Every year I worked for D there were cases of ma-
laria and typhoid in the camp/1

THE HOP FIELDS' REPORT 189

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 D ranch is a California contri-
bution to the literature of the social unrest of America.

The I. W. W.

Of this entire labor force at the D ranch, it

appears that some 100 had been I. W. W. "card men"
or had had affiliations with that organization. There
is evidence that there was in this camp a loosely
caught together camp local of the I. W. W., with
about 30 active members. It is suggestive that these
30 men, through a spasmodic action, and with the aid
of the deplorable camp conditions, dominated a hetero-
geneous mass of 2800 unskilled laborers in 3 days.
Some 700 or 800 of the force were of the "hobo" class,
in every sense potential I. W. W. strikers. At least
400 knew in a rough way the — for them curiously
attractive — philosophy of the I. W. W. and could
also sing some of its songs.

Of the 100 odd "card men" of the I. W. W., some
had been through the San Diego affair, some had been
soap-boxers in Fresno, a dozen had been in the Free
Speech fight in Spokane. They sized up the hop field
as a ripe opportunity, as the principal defendant,
"Blackie" Ford, puts it, "to start something." On
Friday, two days after picking started, the practical
agitators began working through the camp. Whether

or not Ford came to D 's ranch to foment trouble

seems immaterial. There are five Fords in every camp

190 APPENDIX

of seasonal laborers in California. We have devoted
ourselves in these weeks to such questions as this:
"How big a per cent of California's migratory seasonal
labor force know the technique of an I. W. W. strike?"
"How many of the migratory laborers know when
conditions are ripe to 'start something'?" We are
convinced that among the individuals of every fruit
farm labor group are many potential strikers. Where
a group of hoboes sit around a fire under a railroad
bridge, many of the group can sing I. W. W. songs
without the book. This was not so three years ago.
The I. W. W. in California is not a closely organized
body with a steady membership. The rank and file
know little of the technical organization of industrial
life which their written constitution demands. They
listen eagerly to the appeal for the "solidarity" of
their class. In the dignifying of vagabondage through
their crude, but virile, song and verse, in the bitter
vilification of the jail turnkey and county sheriff,
in their condemnation of the church and its formal
social work, they find the vindication of their hobo
status which they desire. They cannot sustain a live
organization unless they have a strike or free speech
fight to stimulate their spirit. It is in their methods
of warfare, not in their abstract philosophy or even
hatred of law and judges, that danger lies for organ-
ized society. Since every one of the 5000 laborers in
California who have been at some time connected with
the I. W. W. considers himself a "camp delegate" with
walking papers to organize a camp local, this small
army is watching, as Ford did, for an unsanitary
camp or low wage scale, to start the strike which will

THE HOP FIELDS' REPORT 191

not only create a new I. W. W. local, but bring fame
to the organizer. This common acceptance of direct
action and sabotage as the rule of operation, the songs
and the common vocabulary are, we feel convinced,
the first stirring of a class expression.

[Class solidarity they have not. That may never
come, for the migratory laborer has neither the force
nor the vision nor tenacity to hold long enough to the
ideal to attain it. But the I. W. W. is teaching a
method of action which will give this class expression
in violent flare-ups such as that at Wheatland. ]

[The dying away of the organization after the out-
burst is, therefore, to be expected. Their social con-
dition is a miserable one. Their work, even at the
best, must be irregular. They have nothing to lose in
a strike and as a leader put it: "A riot and a chance
to blackguard a jailer is about the only intellectual
fun we have."

Taking into consideration the misery and physical
privation and the barren outlook of this life of the
seasonal worker, the I. W. W. movement, with all its
irresponsible motive and unlawful action, becomes in
reality a class protest and the dignity which this
characteristic gives it perhaps alone explains the per-
sistence of the organization in the field. J

Those attending the protest mass meeting of the
Wheatland hop pickers were singing the I. W. W. song
"Mr. Block" when the sheriff's posse came up in its
automobiles. The crowd had been harangued by an
experienced I. W. W. orator — "Blackie" Ford. They
had been told, according to evidence, to "knock the
blocks off the scissor bills." Ford had taken a sick

192 APPENDIX

baby from its mother's arms and, holding it before the
eyes of the 1500 people, had cried out: "It's for the
life of the kids we're doing this." Not a quarter of
the crowd was of a type normally venturesome enough
to strike, and yet, when the sheriff went after Ford, he
was knocked down and kicked senseless by infuriated
men. In the bloody riot which then ensued, District
Attorney Manwell, Deputy Sheriff Riordan, a negro
Porto Rican and the English boy were shot and killed.
Many were wounded. The posse literally fled and the
camp remained practically unpoliced until the state
militia arrived at dawn the next day.

The question of social responsibility is one of
deepest significance. The posse was, I am convinced,
over-nervous and, unfortunately, over-rigorous. This
can be explained in part by the State-wide appre-
hension over the I. W. W.; in part by the normal
California county 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.

D 's automobile had brought part of the posse.

Numberless pickers cling to the belief that the posse

was "D Js 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 dan-

THE HOP FIELDS' REPORT 193

gerous and struck the first blow. The murderous
temper which turned the crowd into a mob is incom-
patible 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 im-
portant subject to analyze is not the guilt or inno-
cence 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.
hacl 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 Wheat-
land 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 be-
ginning 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 Wheat-
land. 1

194 APPENDIX

Legal and Economic Aspects

The position taken by the defense and their sym-
pathizers in the course of the trial has not only an
economic and social bearing, but many arguments
made before the court are distinct efforts to introduce
sociological modifications of the law which will have
a far-reaching effect on the industrial relations of
capital and labor. It is asserted that the common
law, on which American jurisprudence is founded, is
known as an ever-developing law, which must adapt
itself to changing economic and social conditions and,
in this connection, it is claimed that the established
theories of legal causation must be enlarged to in-
clude economic and social factors in the chain of
causes leading to a result. Concretely, it is argued:

First, That when unsanitary conditions lead to dis-
content so intense that the crowd can be incited to
bloodshed, those responsible for the unsanitary con-
ditions are to be held legally responsible for the blood-
shed as well as the actual inciters of the riot.

Second, That if the law will not reach out so far as
to hold the creator of unsanitary, unlivable conditions
guilty of bloodshed, at any rate such conditions ex-
cuse the inciters from liability, because inciters are
the involuntary transmitting agents of an uncontrol-
lable force set in motion by those who created the un-
livable conditions.

This involves the problem of how far an inciter or
agitator may go without overstepping his "Right of
Free Speech." It is contended by the defense in the
trial at Marysville that when men are made to work

THE HOP FIELDS' REPORT 195

under conditions which normally lead to discontent
and revolt, that the words of the agitator are not real
factors in producing criminal and bloody results, and
that the agitator is to be allowed more latitude and
can go further without being legally held responsible
than can the agitator who maliciously urges a crowd
to violence under normal and ordinary conditions.
And this is one of the grounds on which it is urged
that the famous "Anarchist's Case" of Spies v . The
People of Illinois, is to be distinguished from the
Wheatland case; that here in Wheatland, the condi-
tions are more vital, overwhelming forces in leading
to the riot than were the economic forces in the Spies
case, and, therefore, phrases and actions which there
were held to go beyond the "Right of Free Speech"
would here be within the right, as immaterial and
non- contributing causes.

Furthermore, on the legal side, modifications of the
law of property are urged. It is argued that modern
law no longer holds the rights of private property
sacred, that these rights are being constantly regu-
lated and limited, and that in the Wheatland case
the owner's traditional rights in relation to his own
lands are to be held subject to the right of the laborers
to organize thereon. It is urged that a worker on
land has a "property right in his job" and that he
cannot be made to leave the job, or the land, merely
because he is trying to organize his fellow-workers to
make a protest as to living and economic conditions.
It is urged that the organizing worker cannot be made
to leave the job, because the job is his property and it
is all that he has.

196 APPENDIX

So another curious result of this isolated riot is that
the courts are to be brought directly into such con-
troversies, not only to decide technical legal questions,
but to consider the cause and effect of economic forces.

Problem

The problem is the great problem of the growing,
dangerous friction between the men who hire and
those who work, and for the study of which the great
Federal Commission on Industrial Relations has been
established.

The concrete problem in California is: What must
be done to in fact remedy the evils of the existing
industrial relations between casual, seasonal workers,
and their employers, so as to forestall or prevent the
insidious, violent work of the agitator who, not in-
terested in improving living conditions and wage con*
ditions, looks upon these only as affording oppor-
tunities for stirring up discontent to fan the flames
of the "revolution" of his dreams? The seasonal
workers are migratory, careless and disorganized, so
that there is no effective unit with which the employers
can deal or through which the workers can present
their demands. Besides, there is ill-will and suspicion
and fault on both sides. It is also confidently to be
expected that both sides will refuse honestly to take
stock of their own deeds and intentions, and condemn
the wrong they cannot help but disclose. Therefore,
the remedy, of necessity, means the intrusion of a third
party.

THE HOP FIELDS' REPORT 197

The Remedy

It is obvious that the violent strike methods adopted
by the I. W. W. type agitators, which only incident-
ally, although effectively, tend to improve camp con-
ditions, are not to be accepted as a solution of the
problem. It is also obvious that the conviction of
the agitators, such as Ford and Suhr, for murder is
not a soluton, but is only the punishment or revenge
inflicted by organized society for a past deed. The
Remedy lies in prevention.

The laws of the state already provide for the regu-
lation of the sanitation of labor camps, and the Com-
mission of Immigration and Housing has made definite
preparations for the enforcement of these laws. The
inspectors of this Commission are already at work in
the field, and when the camps are opened up at the
beginning of the summer season the Commission, act-
ing in conjunction with the State Board of Health,
will condemn all dangerously unsanitary camps, and
will, if necessary, prosecute the employers to the full
extent of the law, which imposes both a heavy fine
and imprisonment.

It is the opinion of your investigator that the im-
provement of living conditions in the labor camps will
have the immediate effect of making the recurrence of
impassioned, violent strikes and riots not only im-
probable, but impossible, and furthermore, such im-
provement will go far towards eradicating the hatred
and bitterness in the minds of the employers and in
the minds of the roving, migratory laborers. This
accomplished, the two conflicting parties will be in a

198 APPENDIX

position to meet on a saner, more constructive basis,
in solving the further industrial problems arising be-
tween them.

As a preliminary to the active enforcement of the
labor camp regulation laws, the Commission of Im-
migration and Housing is preparing to start a state-
wide campaign of warning and education among the
large employers of migratory laborers and among the
workers themselves. The employers must be shown
that it is essential that living conditions among their
employees be improved, not only in fulfillment of their
obligations to society in general, but also in order to
protect and promote their own welfare and interests.
They must come to realize that their own laxity in
allowing the existence of unsanitary and filthy con-
ditions gives a much-desired foothold to the very
agitators of the revolutionary I. W. W. doctrines
whom they so dread. They must learn that unbearable
aggravating living conditions inoculate the minds of
the otherwise peaceful workers with the germs of
bitterness and violence, as was so well exemplified at
the Wheatland riot, giving the agitators a fruitful field
wherein to sow the seeds of revolt and preach the
doctrine of direct action and sabotage.

On the other hand, the migratory laborers must be
shown that revolts accompanied by force in scattered
and isolated localities not only involve serious
breaches of law and lead to crime, but that they ac-
complish no lasting constructive results in advancing
their cause.

The Commission intends to furnish a clearing house

THE HOP FIELDS' REPORT 199

to hear complaints of grievances, of both sides, and
act as a mediator or safety valve.

Respectfully submitted,

CARLETON H. PABKER.

Executive Secretary for the
State Immigration and
Housing Commission of Cal-
ifornia.

DATE DUE

ii :

JE6 W

HD

8072

P25

80587
Parker, Carleton H.

The casual laborer and
other essays.

DATE

ISSUED TO

MR 2 Obt

HD

8072

P25

80587