environment which seems cruelly efficient in turning out beings moulded
after all the standards society abhors. 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, starting with the long hours and dreary winters of
the farms they ran away from, through their character-debasing
experience with irregular industrial labor, on to the vicious economic
life of the winter unemployed, their training predetermined but one
outcome. Nurture has triumphed over nature; the environment has
produced its type. Difficult though the 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
will be both very astonished and very misused."

I was told only recently of a Belgian economics professor, out here in
California during the war, on official business connected with aviation.
He asked at once to see Carl, but was told we had moved to Seattle. "My
colleagues in Belgium asked me to be sure and see Professor Parker," he
said, "as we consider him the one man in America who understands the
problem of the migratory laborer."

That winter Carl got the city of San José to stand behind a model
unemployed lodging-house, one of the two students who had "hoboed"
during the summer taking charge of it. The unemployed problem, as he ran
into it at every turn, stirred Carl to his depths. At one time he felt
it so strongly that he wanted to start a lodging-house in Berkeley,
himself, just to be helping out somehow, even though it would be only
surface help.

It was also about this time that California was treated to the spectacle