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Abstract
Carleton Parker was involved in investigations of the Industrial Workers of the World relating to the Hop Field Riots in California in 1913, and in an attempt to link economics with psychology in the understanding of labor disputes. In this he was influenced by Thorstein Veblen, William McDougall, and by many other psychologists. The culmination of his work was his paper “Motives in Economic Life” given at the AEA meetings in 1917. Parker’s work on “labor psychology” generated great excitement at the time, connected him with many other liberal progressives, and was an influence on early members of the institutionalist group. Unfortunately, Parker died in the 1918 influenza pandemic. His wife, Cornelia Parker, worked to secure his legacy and attempted to carry on his work. She wrote a biography of her late husband, edited his papers, moved to New York to attend The New School and did her own research on the working woman. This paper deals with the lives and work of these two extraordinary people, and the intellectual environment that surrounded them.
The author also acknowledges the encouragement received from Meredith Michaels, Carleton and Cornelia Parker’s granddaughter.
Notes
1 Morgen Witzel in his entry on Cornelia Parker makes the extraordinary statement that “little is known of Parker’s life.” Cornelia wrote extensively about her life in her own autobiography Wanderer’s Circle (1934). See Witzel (Citation2001, 793).
2 Frederick remarried, and had two further children, but his second wife died in 1913. Frederick suffered a “nervous breakdown” and committed suicide in 1915.
3 Information on Cornelia Stratton’s undergraduate career was obtained from the University of California General Catalogue (UC, Berkeley Citation1870-2011), the Directory of Graduates of the University of California, 1864-1916 (UC, Berkeley Citation1916) and The Blue and Gold (UC, Berkeley Citation1874-1924).
4 Bucher’s book Industrial Evolution was popular in the United States and dealt with the rise of the National Economy and the industrial economy from “primitive systems.” Weber dealt with issues in industrial location. Gotheim worked on cultural and economic history. Brentano was a founding member of the Verein fur Socialpolitik and a student of English trade unions. Many American students had gone to Germany for graduate work before the turn of the century. Parker must have been one of the last as World War I cut off the flow.
5 This was at least partly motivated by monetary concerns due to the debts they had incurred during their time at Harvard and in Europe. Berkeley was paying Parker $1,500 at the time and never paid him more than $1,700. The job with the Commission paid $4,000 (C. S. Parker Citation1919, 69).
6 Cross was a former Commons student from Wisconsin who went on to Stanford to do his PhD. He moved to Berkeley in 1914. Cross and Parker became close friends. The information about Parker’s and Peixotto’s role in his hiring to Berkeley comes from an interview conducted by Joann D. Ariff in 1967 and available in electronic form: (Cross Citation1967).
7 Nick-named “June-Bug” and later just “June.”
8 University of California General Catalogue (UC, Berkeley Citation1870-2011). I have not been able to discover what courses she took.
9 (Suzzallo Citation1917). Theresa Schmid McMahon was also teaching at the University of Washington from 1911 onwards. She was a Wisconsin PhD and student of J. R. Commons and E. A. Ross. Her own work dealt with women in the labor market, standards of living, and labor economics more generally. She also wrote on labor unrest and IWW issues in the Pacific Northwest (McMahon Citation1919a and Citation1919b).
10 For a brief discussion of Parker’s work as a mediator in the Northwest lumber disputes see H. M. Hyman’s introduction to the 1972 edition of Carlton Parker’s The Casual Laborer and Other Essays (Hyman Citation1972, xi). The production of spruce for airplane manufacture was particularly vital.
11 Again, I have not been able to discover what courses she took.
12 This article and another piece on “The Technique of American Industry” (C. H. Parker 1920b) were excerpted from Carleton Parker’s 1914 version of his PhD thesis by Cornelia and published in 1920 after his death.
13 The Report was written in March 1914 and published later in Cornelia’s posthumous collection of Carleton’s work The Casual Laborer and Other Essays (C. H. Parker 1920c). Parker also provided reports on the Wheatland episode, his investigation of labor relations in Phoenix, and on migratory labor in California, as well as testimony, to the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations. This section of the paper relies on Rutherford (Citation2012).
14 Particularly because of its anti-war attitudes the IWW increasingly became the subject of governmental efforts at active suppression. Parker resigned from the Commission in October 1914, possibly due to frustration with political appointments and interference in his research (C. S. Parker Citation1919, 88).
15 There is a suggestion that both Mills and Brissenden contracted malaria.
16 Parker’s notion of instincts is very close to that proposed by William McDougall. Veblen’s much smaller list of instincts presented them as broader, more general, ends of action with actual behavior shaped more by prevailing social institutions. Nevertheless, both men shared the idea of an institutional system at odds with the free expression of instinctive human nature.
17 As Asso and Fiorito (Citation2004) point out, Parker’s notion of instincts came under criticism from Wesley Mitchell and Frank Fetter. Morris Copeland was also critical, having been influenced by anti-instinct psychologist J. R. Kantor. Even Tugwell, who admired Parker, and was also interested in psychology and economics had issues with his psychology (Tugwell Citation1922). There was also discussion between Mitchell and Lippmann on Freud and the role of the unconscious (Goodwin Citation2014, 21). Both Parkers maintained an interest in Freudian psychology.
18 See also Hyman (Citation1963) and Tyler (Citation1967) for lengthy discussion of the wartime issues in the lumber industry. There has been much debate about the extent to which the IWW membership benefited. See Ficken (Citation2008) for a view contrary to Hyman’s.
19 I also presume that his help came largely from Peixotto.
20 Information on courses and course titles came from New School Course Catalogues: (New School for Social Research Citation1919-1921).
21 Cornelia did have some other models to follow in this undercover work. Pittenger mentions Paul Göhre’s book Three Months in a Workshop, translated into English from German in 1895 with a prefatory note by R. T. Ely, as having an impact in the United States. Ely’s daughter, Anna worked undercover in a Milwaukee tool manufacturer and at a New York cannery while a PhD student at Wisconsin, and there are several other examples (Pittenger Citation2012, 11-18). Cornelia may have briefly considered a career lecturing and writing on labor psychology, but decided her talents lay elsewhere (C. S. Parker Citation1934, 115-116). For interesting work on women economists at Wisconsin and Columbia see Johnson (Citation2019) and Mattei (Citation2019). Virtually all of these women worked on issues in labor economics.
22 In a later work Kaufman modifies this assessment to argue that Meyer Bloomfield, Walter Dill Scott, and J. R. Commons should be credited as the founders of Human Resource Management (Kaufman Citation2008, 306).
23 Both Taylor and Lange divorced their partners and married in 1935.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Malcolm Rutherford
Malcolm Rutherford is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.