Hunter, (Wiles) Robert (1874–1942)

US socialist, social worker, and writer. He was organizing secretary of Chicago's Board of Charities 1896–1902, wrote a survey of working-class housing for the City Homes Association in 1901, became head worker at the University Settlement on Rivington Street, New York City in1902, directing their successful campaign to enact child labour laws in 1903, and published his most important book, Poverty in1904, the first general statistical survey of the USA's poor. Declaring himself a socialist in 1905, he was elected to the first executive board of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, was Socialist candidate for the New York state assembly in 1908, represented American socialism at the Third International in Stuttgart in 1907, and ran as Socialist candidate for the governorship of Connecticut in 1910. He left the party disillusioned because socialism had failed to prevent the outbreak of World War I. By the end of his life, he had turned right-wing, repudiated the New Deal, and wrote Revolution 1940, which rejected Marxism and revolutions.

He was born in Terre Haute, Indiana. Appalled by the misery of the depression of 1893, he decided to become a social worker. Antipathetic to violence and unrestrained radicalism, he published an indictment of the Industrial Workers of the World, Violence in the Labor Movement 1914. He lectured on economics and English at the University of California, Berkeley 1918–22. He wrote Links 1926, a book on golf course design, and he laid out several West Coast golf courses.