rk--We figured that in three
more years we could be sure of at least one wonderful trip a year.
Anyway, we had the joy of our plannings.

CHAPTER IX

The second term in California had just got well under way when Carl was
offered the position of Executive Secretary in the State Immigration and
Housing Commission of California. I remember so well the night he came
home about midnight and told me. I am afraid the financial end would
have determined us, even if the work itself had small appeal--which,
however, was not the case. The salary offered was $4000. We were getting
$1500 at the University. We were $2000 in debt from our European trip,
and saw no earthly chance of ever paying it out of our University
salary. We figured that we could be square with the world in one year on
a $4000 salary, and then need never be swayed by financial
considerations again. So Carl accepted the new job. It was the wise
thing to do anyway, as matters turned out. It threw him into direct
contact for the first time with the migratory laborer and the I.W.W. It
gave him his first bent in the direction of labor-psychology, which was
to become his intellectual passion, and he was fired with a zeal that
never left him, to see that there should be less unhappiness and
inequality in the world.

The concrete result of Carl's work with the Immigration Commission was
the clean-up of labor camps all over California. From unsanitary,
fly-ridden, dirty makeshifts were developed ordered sanitary housing
accommodations, designed and executed by experts in their fields. Also
he awakened, through countless talks up and down the State, some
understanding of the I.W.W. and his problem; although, judging from the
newspapers nowadays, his work would seem to have been almost forgotten.
As the phrase went, "Carleton Parker put the migratory on the map."

I think of the Wheatland Hop-Fields riot, or the Ford and Suhr case,
which Carl was appointed to investigate for the Federal government, as
the dramatic incident which focused his attention on the need of a
deeper approach to a sound understanding of labor and its problems, and
which, in turn, justified Mr. Bruere in stating in the "New Republic":
"Parker was the first of our Economists, not only to analyse the
psychology of labor and especially of casual labor, but also to make his
analysis the basis for an applied technique of industrial and social
reconstruction." Also, that was the occasion of his