Evening star., 1934-12-23

| In the Autumn they would move
South, drifting back in the Spring.
They slept under bridges, in ragged
communities built Of piano boxes, or
anywhere they could find q scrap Of
shelter.
1t Is, perhaps, dismal to rehearse
these conditions which most people
realized all too well. The purpose is
to emphasize that they had the effect
Of producing q numerous nation of
strangers. for very few could stay long
enough to find anything like a per-
manent home or even begin to accli-
mate themselves. Month by month,
even year by year, they remained
strangers. And that Is the value to
the planning agencies Of DR.. Woods
study of the stranger as phenomenon
of society.
Human beings have a curious COM
bination of gregariousness and sus-
picion, with extraordinary degrees of
variation among peoples and indivie-
uals. One notes. for example, tl1eH
the English people have a reserv-
/ which often is mistaken for unfriend-
illness whereas Russians 60 to the op-
posite extreme, yet both are funda-
mentally Nordic. These differences
make the problem of the stranger
deeper in this country than in some
others. The United States having
been the goal Of so many immi-
grants Of so many nationalities and
races, one finds the problem of the
stranger compounded.
There doubtless are economic
springs traceable in many practices
that the people of the South Sea
Islands were among the most trust
ing and friendly of any in the world
and the stranger was eagerly well
coined in most of the islands. That
probably is closely connected with the
fact that life was extremely easy.
there was plenty of food growing wild
everywhere, there was no money, but
there was tradition Of sharing.
Perhaps the reserve toward strangers
OF some other peoples in less heavily
lowered regions is due to a necessary
consciousness of self-preservation. The
unknown stranger might bear a threat
to the little sustenance available.
Whole Problem Reviewed.
Religion and caste have played their
part in building up the role of stran-
ger and, of course, military fear or
precaution. The individual trait that
makes a religious hermit or a miser
cannot be ignored. Pride on the
one hand and what the psychologists
| term a defensive mechanism on an
other should not be neglected as agen-
cies helping to create the stranger.
| The Importance to the officials and
others seeking to smooth the paths
to better and more harmonious times
in the course of social as well as eco
nomic recovery Of such a work is in
proportion to the size of the problem
which has developed in the depressed
period. Other nations have known
whole groups of strangers such as
the Jews in Spain and Germany and.
at one time, the Irish in America,
but here a situation has developed
within borders of a Nation of some
millions of strangers who are not
group. They have become wanderers,
strangers to jobs and. because of their
wide seeking. strangers to each other
And the most unhappy lot which the
creative genius of mankind has ever
conjured up has been that Of the
Wandering Jew, the Flying Dutchman,
the Swimmer and those other Legend
| ary outcasts No sadder line has ever
been written than that referring TO
a stranger in strange land.