The Lost Boys Read online

  THE LOST BOYS

  Gina Perry is an Australian psychologist and writer. She is author of Behind the Shock Machine: the untold story of the notorious Milgram psychology experiments, and was a co-producer of the ABC Radio National documentary ‘Beyond the Shock Machine’, which won the Silver World Medal for a history documentary in the 2009 New York Festivals radio awards. In 2013 she was runner up for the Bragg UNSW Prize for Science Writing, and her work has been anthologised in Best Australian Science Writing (2013 and 2015). Her feature articles, columns, and essays appear in publications including The Age, The Australian, and Cosmos. Gina has a PhD from the University of Melbourne, where she is an associate in the School of Culture and Communication. Learn more about Gina at www.gina-perry.com.

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  First published by Scribe 2018

  Copyright © Gina Perry 2018

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  9781925322354 (Australian edition)

  9781911344391 (UK edition)

  9781925548303 (e-book)

  CiP records for this title are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.co.uk

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One

  1 Tangled Beginnings

  2 In the Wild

  3 Lost and Found

  Part Two

  4 The Watchers

  5 Initiation

  6 Showdown

  7 The Robbers Cave

  8 Nation States

  9 Sweet Harmony

  Part Three

  10 Empire

  11 Burning Memory

  12 America and Back

  13 Oklahoma

  14 The Museum of Innocence

  A Note on Sources

  Chapter Notes

  References

  Acknowledgements

  ‘No social science is more extravagantly autobiographical than psychology.’

  Jill Lepore

  Prologue

  Robbers Cave State Park, Oklahoma, 1954

  After the sun had gone down, the boys raced one another from the swimming hole to their cabins. They were still jubilant from their win, fizzing with excitement, eager to get back and pass around their prize again, the handsome silver knives fanned out on a stiff cardboard stand. Will shouted ‘Told y’all!’ triumphantly when he reached the cabin first. Panting and laughing, he threw open the cabin door — and stopped dead. Mattresses hung drunkenly from the bunks; pillows and clothes and comic books spilled across the floor. The knives, which they’d put on a makeshift table by the window, were gone. He let his breath out in a rush, then turned and started running, pushing past the group of dismayed boys who had crowded in behind him.

  Outside, the long twilight was fading, and the stone huts dotted through the park were disappearing into the dark. He heard the others calling to him to wait up, but he didn’t stop. He ran along the dusty track, feet pounding, and across the stream, his heart racing so hard he could hear his blood thrumming in his ears. Behind him the others had almost caught him up. The jumble of their voices quietened and the air was full of the sound of panting breaths. No need to stop and think, they just followed their instincts — an animal need to retrieve what was theirs. Will raced past the mess hall, where the sounds of a cowboy tune twanging on the radio and the clatter of dishes reminded him of home, of his parents’ heads bowed as they said grace over supper. But he ran faster, thrusting those images behind him. His parents couldn’t help him now. And prayers were no use here. But he wasn’t afraid — he was as fierce as the soldiers and the Indians whose spirits whispered in the trees. When he first came here, he tried not to think about what animals were moving through the dark. Now he bared his teeth as he ran. Tonight he wouldn’t be scared if a mountain lion stepped out of the shadows, or a bear climbed down from a tree. Behind him, the other boys rushed. They were a single panting pack, zigzagging in and out of trees, feet flying, crushing pine needles, startling birds.

  He bashed on the cabin door with both fists. ‘Come on out and fight!’

  At the edge of the clearing, man-sized shadows moved into the trees.

  The biggest boy, who they called Red, sneered at them from the open doorway. ‘Look who it is! The babies!’ He swung the door open wide to reveal the boys inside the cabin, who huddled together, talking in low, urgent voices.

  Will caught the glint of a knife in Red’s hand. ‘Give them back!’

  ‘Get on your belly and crawl,’ Red jeered, and pushed him hard in the chest.

  Will staggered back. Behind him someone taunted, ‘Come out, yellow bellies!’

  Will rushed forward, howling and punching the air, but Red shoved him with both hands, and Will sprawled in the dirt. As he got to his feet, Red slapped his face with an open palm. Will’s cheek stung and his eyes filled with water. The boys behind Will shrank back.

  ‘Crybaby!’ Red laughed.

  ‘Am not.’ Will used his head as a battering ram and threw himself at Red’s stomach. They both fell, rolling and grabbing at each other, punching and struggling. Some of the boys inside the cabin ran out. One threw a punch and it was game on: they shoved and spat at one another, their faces contorted with fear and rage. The air was filled with shrill, frightened cries.

  Social psychologist Muzafer Sherif, disguised as the camp caretaker, scribbled excitedly in his notebook, hardly able to tear his eyes away from the boys rolling and punching and kicking. Here was the proof for the theory that he’d been working on for years, that normally upstanding and fair-minded eleven-year-olds could turn into brutal savages. An observer coming across the scene, he later wrote proudly, would never have known that these ‘disturbed, vicious … wicked youngsters’ were actually boys who were ‘the “cream of the crop” in their communities’.

  Will rolled on top of Red, but Red grabbed his hair and pulled hard. They were both howling, but neither would let go. Then hands were trying to pull them apart, and Will heard adult voices. Will tried to resist but the man had hold of his arm and pulled him to his feet. ‘Cut it out now, fellas,’ the man said. ‘Or someone’s gonna get hurt.’

  Will was too busy trying to take a swing at Red to notice how pleased the man sounded.

  Part One

  1

  Tangled Beginnings

  It was a hot, overcast summer day in 1954 as a yellow bus drove twelve boys towards the foothills of the San Bois Mountains in south-eastern Oklahoma. The drive from Oklahoma City took just over four hours, and most of the boys, who had been strangers when they boarded the bus, had made new friends by the time they arrived.

  Social psychologist Muzafer Sherif had chosen the location carefully. The attractions of the nearest town, McAlester, with its soda fountains and picture theatre, were far behind, but the boys didn’t mind. The Robbers Cave State Park would be theirs for the next three weeks. It was their first summer camp, a sojourn that promised excitement and adventure. Outside of McAlester, the bus took a winding dirt road and ascended the mountain. Thunder rolled in the distance, promising rain that never came.

  They tur
ned off at a pyramid of logs carved with the letters ‘Robbers Cave State Park’, named because it was the hiding place of legendary outlaws such as Jesse James and Belle Starr. It seemed an ideal setting. A handful of pretty stone cabins dotted the treed park. There were lakes and a stream for swimming, a mess hall, a baseball pitch. And the mountains, with their hidden caves.

  The boys explored the park, hiking, canoeing, and swimming. After they saw two rattlesnakes at the creek, they named themselves the Rattlers. For a few days they had the place to themselves, and pretty soon they felt as if they owned it. What they didn’t know was another yellow bus had arrived, carrying a second group of boys from Oklahoma City, and that soon they would be locked in fierce competition.

  Two weeks later, their faces covered with camouflage paint, the Rattler boys crept up in the darkness towards the cabin of their enemy, the interlopers who called themselves the Eagles. The Rattler boys raided the cabin, upturning beds, emptying suitcases, and terrorising the frightened Eagles. The midnight raid sparked days of retaliation and violence.

  Nothing like the Robbers Cave experiment had been done before or has been done since. Dr Muzafer Sherif and his team of researchers, disguised as camp staff, closely observed the two groups during what the boys had been told was a regular summer camp. Sherif predicted that when he brought two groups together in a week-long contest of games and feats of skill, for which only one group would win a much-valued prize, the boys’ attitudes would intensify from friendly rivalry to something closer to hatred. Normally well-adjusted boys would become ‘nasty’ and ‘aggressive’ towards the members of the rival group.

  Social psychologist Muzafer Sherif is best known for this experiment in the wilds of Oklahoma, and what it says about the bonds of loyalty and the power of groups. He argued that it wasn’t the boys’ personalities that made them behave like savages — after all, he had deliberately chosen normal, well-adjusted kids. And it wasn’t differences in ethnicity or religion, either. He deliberately chose boys from similar backgrounds. Prejudice and conflict arises between groups of people, he argued, because of competition for limited resources. When groups of people compete for a valuable prize and there’s only one winner, hatred and violence is inevitable. But it is reversible, according to Sherif. If groups cooperate to find a solution together, the boundaries between them dissolve, hatred is forgotten, and enemies become friends.

  When Dr David Baker at the Archives of the History of American Psychology in Akron, Ohio, told me that the Sherif family had just donated all the papers, films, and recordings related to the Robbers Cave experiment, I only pretended to know which experiment he was talking about. As far as I recalled, Sherif’s work was not included in my undergraduate psychology textbooks at La Trobe University or in any of my subsequent postgraduate training. That might have been because the kind of psychology I studied was very much the ‘rats and stats’ variety that aligned itself with the hard sciences. Bona fide social psychological research at my university had been laboratory-based and highly structured, using adult subjects and statistical techniques that reflected a kind of rigour and control and attested to the scientific credentials of the researcher in charge. A three-week field experiment that relied heavily on observation would have belonged over in the school of sociology, alongside the work of Sherif’s mentors and colleagues, such as William Foote Whyte and his study of a Chicago slum, or in the school of anthropology, alongside Margaret Mead’s equally famous research in Samoa. The truth is, Sherif’s work didn’t fit neatly into either discipline, and after I began to research his life I began to see this difficulty in categorisation as a metaphor for Sherif himself.

  Dr Baker told me how the Robbers Cave would make a great book. But I was visiting the archives towards the end of four years of research about Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments, and the prospect of embarking on another project was the last thing on my mind. As part of my research for the book on Milgram, I had listened to hundreds of gruelling hours of recordings of the obedience experiments, in which participants believed they were delivering electric shocks to a stranger: the repeated cries of an actor pretending to receive electric shocks and the pleadings and distress of the men and women being ordered by a stern experimenter to keep increasing the voltage. I’d also tracked down and met with some of Milgram’s subjects, who, fifty years later, were still agitated and troubled by the experience. In the course of it all, I had traded the idea of social psychology as an exciting discipline that shed light on human nature for a much more cynical view. Experiments such as Milgram’s, that I’d so admired at university for their clever construction of elaborate theatrical scenarios to disguise their purpose, seemed to offer little beyond the rather obvious conclusion that people can be deceived and manipulated into doing things they would never normally do. As for the experimenters, I had spent enough time trawling through Milgram’s papers to feel disenchanted with the valorisation of the daring and brilliant scientist whose fearless pursuit of the truth justified any pain he might have inflicted on his subjects. I was burnt out.

  Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment might have sat at the intersection of the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and psychology, but it was similar in some key ways to Milgram’s obedience experiments. Both used deception and subterfuge to observe subjects in secret; both constructed a scenario where participants in the drama faced a moral dilemma. In Milgram’s lab, the subjects’ dilemma was whether to obey or disobey an experimenter’s instructions to give electric shocks to another person. In Sherif’s state park, the boys were caught between the dictates of conscience that told them not to inflict harm and the powerful pull of their need to belong. I felt angry on behalf on Milgram’s subjects, whom I’d come to see as victims of a discipline that cloaked lessons about humanity’s moral weakness and vulnerability in the language of science. I had no appetite for research into another experiment of that kind, especially given that Muzafer Sherif’s subjects were children.

  But I feigned interest as Dr Baker showed me round. I spent the rest of the afternoon looking through files and folders, taking photographs of documents, in a desultory and half-hearted way. Yet in the space of those few hours, I began to see that Sherif’s work was markedly different to Milgram’s. And the more I compared the two men, the more interested I became in Sherif.

  In contrast to Stanley Milgram, who seemed to flit from one increasingly kooky experiment to another during his career, privately agonising over whether his research was more art than science — or if it meant anything at all — Sherif’s papers revealed a man with a singular focus and an apparently unshakeable faith in his own theory. Sherif made Milgram look like a dilettante. It wasn’t just the volume of material Sherif wrote that struck me, but the fact that over a fifty-year research career, he explored variations of a single theme: the power of tribal loyalty, in-groups and out-groups, to shape our worlds.

  Both Milgram and Sherif devised experiments that were part of a wider struggle to understand how ordinary people came to participate and collude in the brutality and violence of war. For Milgram, exploring the behaviour of Germans under the Nazi regime, the question was whether it had something to do with the German character. Had the surge of anti-Semitism encouraged by National Socialism been lying dormant all along? Milgram attributed it to a universal instinct for following orders. Sherif was convinced that the answer lay in the power of the groups we belong to and identify with, which shapes the way we behave. For Sherif, a group was more than a collection of individuals: once bonds were formed, tribes developed their own culture, with leaders and followers, rules and standards distinct from the ones an individual might hold dear. The group takes on a life and a personality of its own.

  Milgram’s shocking results, as well as an entrepreneurial streak and gift for self-promotion, propelled him and his obedience experiments into lasting fame. But when I googled Muzafer Sherif and the Robbers Cave experiment, I was surprised at how brief both
pages on Wikipedia were, offering few details beyond a summary of the research and the bare facts of Muzafer Sherif’s life. There were articles about the experiments, of course, and academic monographs. But still. Why wasn’t Muzafer Sherif better known?

  He certainly had the personality and the chutzpah. Many of his contemporaries describe him as a man who loved being the centre of attention, who could be charming sometimes, arrogant others, and was always convinced of his own genius. Sherif took credit for converting shy young Solomon Asch to the idea of studying psychology during their time at Columbia University. The social psychology family tree being what it was, without Solomon Asch there would be no Stanley Milgram. Sherif bragged to colleagues that with the Robbers Cave experiment he’d broken the mould of social psychological research. Yet Sherif made only one foray into the popular press, in 1969, fifteen years after the Robbers Cave experiment was over, when he wrote an article about it for The Washington Post. A Hollywood producer contacted him almost immediately, saying he wanted to make a film based on the experiment, but Sherif refused to have anything to do with it. If Sherif’s reticence wasn’t due to shyness, I wondered, what was it that made him shrink from the public gaze?

  The small amount I knew about Muzafer Sherif was contradictory and confusing — he both craved attention and shied away from it, he was cautious and a risk-taker, highly regarded and an outsider.

  The brief biography online told me that he was born in Turkey and his American career started with great promise, first at Harvard, then at Princeton and Yale. So how and why did Sherif end up at a comparatively lowly university like the University of Oklahoma? What led him to these remote locations, these groups of warring boys? If, as historian Jill Lepore argues, psychological research is autobiographical, what mirror did the Robbers Cave experiments hold up to Sherif’s own life?

  Archivist Lizette Royer Barton pulled on white cotton gloves to carefully unpack a grubby calico flag. It was the size of a couple of pillowcases, featuring a childish painting of an eagle with a snake in its talons. The flag was among hundreds of items that Sherif brought away with him from the experiment and stored in a wooden trunk that eventually made its way to the archives after his death. Lizette then carefully unfurled a paint-spattered pair of jeans with the words ‘The Last of the Eagles’ painted in orange capital letters down both legs. In photos of the experiment, you can see a group of boys holding them on a pole like a flag, taunting their opponents. The theft and vandalism were acts of aggression, the denim trophy the symbol of a nation state in Sherif’s eyes.