Robert Hunter

Background

Robert Hunter was born on April 10, 1874, at Terre Haute, Indiana to William Robert and Caroline “Callie” (née Fouts) Hunter. He was christened Wiles Robert but as an adult dropped his first name.

Education

The son of a wealthy carriage manufacturer of Scottish descent, he was educated in the Terre Haute public schools, by private tutor, and at Indiana University, from which he received the B. A. degree in 1896.

Career

Hunter was appalled by the unemployment and misery of the depression of 1893, particularly the suffering among workers laid off at his father's factory, and upon graduation decided to become a social worker. From 1896 to 1902 he served as organizing secretary of Chicago's Board of Charities, residing at the famous Hull House for the last three of those years. He also belonged to numerous social reform organizations. His first publication, Tenement Conditions in Chicago (1901), was a survey of working-class housing undertaken for one such group, the City Homes Association.

Owing to the income he received from the family business, Hunter was able to travel widely. In the summer of 1899 he visited London's Toynbee Hall, the original urban settlement house, where he met European reformers and socialists. Hunter left Chicago for New York City in 1902 to become head worker at the University Settlement on Rivington Street. He also became chairman of the Child Labor Committee, set up in 1902 by New York social workers, and directed its successful campaign for a statewide child labor law, enacted in 1903.

Giving up his Rivington Street post in 1903, he thereafter held no regular position. In 1904 Hunter published his most important book, Poverty, the first general statistical survey of America's poor. The work was perhaps naive by later sociological standards; Hunter employed racial stereotypes when describing immigrants and moralistic categories in portraying vagrants. He nevertheless proved by careful statistical investigation that most poor families suffered as a result of social forces beyond their control, not because of personal immorality or sloth. Contrary to the older American tradition, he further asserted that the working poor – "underpaid, underfed, underclothed, badly housed, and overworked" – were worse off than the dependent pauper, and that improving their conditions was the best way to combat dependency. Hunter developed a typology of poverty and an analysis of the "culture of poverty" similar in many ways to that "originated" fifty-odd years later by Oscar Lewis and Michael Harrington.

Shortly after his marriage, Hunter had again visited Europe, renewing his acquaintance with Continental socialists and also making a pilgrimage to Tolstoy's estate in Russia. In 1905 he declared himself a socialist, and that September he was elected to the first executive board of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. As he later explained it: "The aims, scholarship, and mental equipment of the theoreticians of the socialist movement acted like a magnet to one seeking, as I was, a sovereign remedy for poverty". Hunter rose rapidly in the Socialist party, as befitted a young man of wealth, social position, and fame in a political organization eager to become "respectable" and "American. " In 1908 he stood as Socialist candidate for the New York state assembly and in 1910 (having moved to Noroton, Connecticut) for the governorship of Connecticut. At the same time he served on the party's national executive committee (1909 - 12) and represented American socialism at the 1907 convention of the Third International in Stuttgart and the 1910 meeting in Copenhagen.

In 1914 Hunter left the party. More a romantic than a "scientific" socialist, he lacked substantial grounding in Marxist history, economics, and sociology; most of his rather rudimentary ideas seem to have been drawn from shallow socialist journalism and polemics. After his break with the party he drifted away from social work and reform. In 1918 he moved to California, living in Berkeley and lecturing in economics and English at the University of California (1918 - 22). He next resided at Pebble Beach (1926 - 29), a period during which he wrote The Links (1926), a book on golf-course design, and laid out several West Coast golf courses. He moved to Santa Barbara in 1930. During the last years of his life Hunter became an inveterate critic of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal and an admirer of the right-wing Committee for Constitutional Government. In his book Revolution (1940) he totally rejected Marxism and asserted that revolutions result from conspiratorial activities, not objective social conditions, and that, despite the Great Depression, capitalism, especially the American variety, had abolished poverty and produced social harmony.

After a prolonged illness, Hunter died of angina pectoris in 1942 at Montecito, Calif. , near Santa Barbara; his remains were cremated.

Achievements

• Robert Hunter is remembered as an American sociologist, and progressive author. Though Hunter's later writings add little to his reputation, none can gainsay the brilliance and impact of Poverty, or his solid achievements as a social worker in Chicago and New York.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Socialists at Work (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Socialists at Work Europe and America to Ja...)

  • Violence and the Labor Movement

    (Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)

  • Why We Fail as Christians (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Why We Fail as Christians Nor is Tolstoyism...)

  • Labor in Politics (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Labor in Politics Elia? Ammons, Farmers' ni...)

  • Poverty
  • The Links
  • Revolution Why, How, When?

Politics

Within the American Socialist party Hunter allied with the faction that desired amicable relations with the American Federation of Labor, frowned upon the rhetoric of revolution and violence, looked askance at unlimited immigration, and scarcely differed from the more advanced wings of the Progressive movement. So antipathetic was he to violence and unrestrained radicalism that in 1914 he published Violence and the Labor Movement, a damning, if simpleminded, indictment of the Industrial Workers of the World, as well as of all other forms of anarchism and syndicalism. In it he paid tribute to the socialism of Marx and Engels, which, according to Hunter, stood "almost alone today faithful to democracy. "

Personality

Throughout his life Hunter remained the well-groomed, impeccably dressed gentleman, his entire demeanor conveying wealth and good breeding.

Interests

• He was an avid amateur golfer.

Connections

On May 23, 1903 he married to Caroline Margaretha Phelps Stokes, daughter of the New York civic leader Anson Phelps Stokes and a sister of Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes. This marriage brought him additional wealth and a place among the city's social elite. He and his wife had four children: Robert, Phelps Stokes, Caroline Phelps, and Helen Louisa.

Father:

William Robert Hunter

Mother:

Caroline “Callie” (née Fouts) Hunter

Spouse:

Caroline Margaretha Phelps Stokes

Daughter:

Caroline Phelps

Daughter:

Helen Louisa

Son:

Robert

Son:

Phelps Stokes

References

• The Socialist Party Of America A History