by Gina Perry
Yet this trip had set something in motion in both of us, and raised more questions for Doug than I had answers for. What had his parents been told exactly, he wondered. Who were the men behind this experiment, and what had they been trying to prove? How much had parents such as his known about what they were sending their sons away to do? How exactly was he experimented on? Did he carry within him some hidden, unconscious legacy from the experiment, or was it just a couple of dimly remembered weeks of holiday?
I felt guilty, grubby, for stirring up these questions and having inadvertently started a process whereby Doug began to re-examine his life in view of this new information.
By the time we got back to Schenectady later that afternoon and he recounted the day’s events to June, I knew that our discovery of the site of Sherif’s mysterious footnote, instead of putting something to rest, was just the beginning. And I felt I owed it to Doug to find some answers.
Part Two
4
The Watchers
The cabins and the mess hall were surrounded by long grass when Marvin Sussman first visited the campsite in early June 1953. The Camp Fire Girls, the Girl Scout–like group that owned the property, hadn’t used the place for a while and it felt abandoned, the small cabins hunched in the shadow of the woods. But Sussman was getting desperate: so many local campsites had already been booked out that he didn’t have much choice.
Later in life, Sussman would usually wear tinted aviator glasses and a Stetson hat, but in 1953 he was clean-cut, with heavy black glasses and a plump, boyish face. He was one of five men Sherif had employed as part of his research team that summer, and it was his job to get things ready before the others arrived, recruiting staff, choosing subjects, and making sure the campsite was up and running. He’d worked with Sherif before, in the 1949 study — the one that took place in Litchfield Hills in Connecticut, where Sherif engineered conflict between two groups and had difficulty eradicating it, the one that gave Sherif the idea to look at ways to engineer peace between hostile groups — and found him an inspiring figure. In that study, Sussman had been a participant observer: a person who pretended to be a camp counsellor but whose real job was to surreptitiously watch and make notes on what the boys said and did. But this was a much bigger undertaking, with more responsibility, more funding, more staff, and more pressure. And even though Sussman had sought out the job with Sherif, he was beginning to feel the full weight of it.
He wiggled the key in the padlock and the hinge groaned when he pushed the door open. Inside, the mess hall would have smelt damp and musty, and I could imagine Sussman propping the door open with a block of wood and taking a moment to fill his pipe and light it, clamping it in his teeth as he stepped inside and looked around. Since he last worked for Sherif, he’d completed his PhD and now had his first academic job, at Union College in Schenectady, but he felt unappreciated there and was desperate to get out of the place. This study was his chance.
Sherif took Sussman on because he was a hard worker who could organise the practical details. When they met, Sussman was a Yale graduate student who worked eighteen- to twenty-hour days supporting a young family. As well as studying full-time, he worked part-time as a research assistant, worked nights at a diner, and took in extra work helping out in his father’s business in watch and clock repair. When Sherif offered him the job of research collaborator for his upcoming summer research, and co-authorship on a book about it, Sussman jumped at the chance. Sherif, a leading figure in social psychology, with influential connections, was giving him a boost up the academic ladder, a way out of a small college to a bigger city, a better job.
Sussman started working for Sherif in May 1953, and with the experiment planned to begin at the end of June, he threw himself into the detail of arrangements. His job was to be on the ground, organising the logistics under the approval of Sherif, who was down in Oklahoma. It might have sounded straightforward enough, but Sherif could be an infuriating boss, prevaricating on major decisions and micromanaging small ones. While he promptly fired the camp nurse Sussman had hired because she was too pretty and likely to be a distraction to the men, Sherif delayed giving the go-ahead on booking a campsite. With just four weeks before the experiment was due to start, they had no campsite booked, and without a location for the experiment or a confirmed date, Sussman was unable to recruit staff or select subjects.
By the time Sherif agreed on a site, most of the families Sussman had contacted had already signed their sons up for summer camp. They moved the camp date forward so that Sussman had more time to complete arrangements. His letters to Sherif in the weeks preceding the camp were increasingly plaintive; he was worried that so much of his time was being squandered on mundane organisational tasks rather than on developing the theoretical framework for their book. Sherif’s wife, Carolyn, urged her husband to put himself in Sussman’s shoes to understand his frustration. ‘You must be able to imagine how dreadful it must be to be stuck in a little one-horse college with 3 children where no stimulation or accomplishment is possible and with just enough to make out on …’ But Sherif was unsympathetic. This kind of hard work was the price of groundbreaking research, he wrote to Sussman, calling the task ‘Herculean’ but reassuring him that he had the sort of spirit needed to ‘succeed in this “frontier” attempt’.
For Sussman, perhaps this demanding and often frustrating supervision was the price of working with a genius. He persisted, and by mid-July, after contacting fifty-three local ministers and thirty-five school principals, and cold-calling two hundred and twelve parents, Sussman had twenty-four boys signed up.
The six members of the research team who converged on the campsite on 18 July 1953 hit the ground running. With just five days before the boys arrived, the men were up early each morning and finished late at night. Even if there’d been time for long walks in the woods or swimming in the lake, Sherif would never have allowed it. Renowned for a ferocious work ethic, he expected nothing less from his staff.
By day, amid sounds of sawing and hammering, as workmen connected electricity, gas, and phone; installed plumbing for running water; and drained and repaired the dam so it could be used for swimming, Herb Kelman sat inside the stuffy cabin the staff had commandeered as an office, typing furiously. Sherif had invited the twenty-six-year-old he’d met at Yale to be research consultant, the scientific conscience of the study, ensuring that the men were rigorous and objective in their approach. I had never heard of someone being invited into a research to play this kind of role before, and it seemed to be an innovation of Sherif’s. Kelman was already making his name as pacifist who urged his fellow psychologists to apply their expertise and the discipline of science to advance the psychology of peace, not war. His role in the experiment was to develop scientific standards for the experiment and, as a roving observer, ensure the men kept to them.
But Sherif and Sussman had to do more than demonstrate their objectivity in their observations of the boys to prove the experiment was a success. They needed measuring devices to gauge the amount of trust and loyalty between the boys. This was to be the PhD research project for OJ Harvey and Jack White, two of Sherif’s graduate students from Oklahoma. They spent most of the five days stripped to the waist, hammering and sawing in the shade of the mess hall, constructing a ballgame and target board that would act as a friendship-measuring device.
The sixth man was Jim Carper, who Herb Kelman had recommended when Sherif was looking for another observer. Carper had plenty of practical skills developed from working in conscientious objector camps during the war, and during those five days he helped out the others, mowing grass and chopping wood in preparation for the arrival of the boys.
It seems an idyllic portrait, six men working alongside one another to prepare the scene for one of the most complex and daring field experiments of the era. Yet, much as they would with the two groups of boys, tensions were already brewing between the experimental team. Sh
erif’s letters in the months leading up to this time were full of dread and foreboding, and he seemed unable to trust Sussman to do a good job. He was convinced that this research was the most challenging and important project he had ever embarked on, and securing a huge grant for it — $38,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation — seemed another testament to its merit. The grant was one of eight the Foundation funded, and surpassed the American Museum of Natural History’s study of community life on Manus Island, led by Margaret Mead. Yet instead of filling him with confidence, the grant seemed to have done the opposite. In March 1953, he had written to his mentor, Carl Hovland, that the experiment ‘is such a huge job that the burden of responsibility for doing justice to it is weighing heavily on me’. Perhaps Sussman, as the leading man on the ground, was the recipient of Sherif’s anxiety.
In contrast to his rather gloomy letters to Sussman, there’s a kind of longing in Sherif’s letters to his graduate student and research assistant OJ Harvey as they negotiate how soon Harvey will be able to join the team, with Sherif urging him to hurry and get there as soon as he can. I imagine when Harvey’s blue 1949 Plymouth rumbled into camp after the long drive from Oklahoma that Sherif rushed out to greet him and Jack White, before immediately setting them to work.
On Kelman’s advice, Sherif had divided the six men into the research team and the operational team, kept physically separate and housed in different cabins to guard against bias. The research team, with Sherif as director, included Kelman, Sussman, and OJ Harvey. They had a small, two-storey cabin to themselves, plus a tent in the birch grove, particularly for Sherif’s use. The two participant observers, Jim Carper and Jack White, who would spend most of their time with the boys, shared a cabin of their own.
For those five days, from 18 to 22 July, before the camp began, the six men worked on their roles. Two would pretend to be caretakers, two would be camp counsellors, two would be camp managers. They memorised the main hypotheses for each stage: that groups would develop their own identity and sense of belonging during the first stage, that each group would develop negative attitudes towards their rivals during the competition phase, and that group friction and boundaries would dissolve when the groups faced a problem that required them to cooperate to find a solution — a forest fire that threatened the camp — in the final stage. The men also practised and tested their observational skills and perfected their disguises, taking turns in snapping group photos with the new cameras Sussman had bought to record the experiment. The suave-looking Sherif of earlier photos I’d seen had been replaced by a rather portly middle-aged man wearing a rumpled grey janitor’s uniform. His wife, Carolyn, a budding social psychologist herself, who did all sorts of behind-the-scenes work for Sherif, including co-writing books and journal articles and soothing his professional anxieties, likely chose the outfit for him.
It’s hard not to read something into the photos the men took of themselves in the days before the experiment began. I noticed how the only photo of Sherif in which he looks relaxed is the one where he stands between his two graduate students from Oklahoma. His hands in his back pockets, smiling around a cigarette hanging from his lip, Sherif is half turned to a handsome young Billy Jack White, or Jack, as he was known, who wears a tight white t-shirt and an army cap pulled down to shade his face. With his olive skin and his sleek black hair, Jack White reminded me of one of the Italian boys from West Side Story. He looks as though he is telling Sherif a joke or a funny story, a cigarette pinched between his fingers and half raised to his mouth. On the edge of the photo, with his back to them but facing the camera, OJ Harvey smiles along as if he is anticipating the punchline, his hands on his hips and his eyes on the horizon. OJ’s brown hair, Brylcreemed in a series of sculpted waves, makes him look dependable, someone you can rely on when things get rocky.
The men that stand beside him in the photos were Sherif’s bulwark against failure, each of them chosen to play a particular role, all of them at the start of their careers, unlike forty-seven-year-old Sherif. In one photo, Marvin Sussman, with his fleshy face and round glasses, a baseball cap tipped back on his head and swinging a box brownie from one hand, looks like a dad about to head off to a baseball game. On the other side of Sherif stands Herbert Kelman, wearing a plaid shirt and a leather cap, the brim pulled low over his heavy black glasses. With the stubble of a black beard coming in, he looks swarthy and slightly disreputable. The plan was that Sherif and Kelman, posing as caretakers and shuffling about the campsite picking up rubbish, raking leaves, or chopping wood, would be able to move freely from group to group, boy to boy, making observations and ‘asking naïve questions’, supposedly without drawing attention to themselves. But Sherif, if not Kelman, had been seriously miscast. He had grown up with servants and had never been a handyman, had never used a screwdriver or fixed a squeaky door.
I had already encountered a Harvard professor called Herbert Kelman whose work on ethics I had come across in my research on Stanley Milgram. But as hard as I looked online, in his lengthy curriculum vitae and in interviews about his life and work, Kelman made no mention of working with Muzafer Sherif. I was intrigued.
‘That’s me,’ Herb Kelman said when I showed him the photo of the group of men, pointing at the rather shady-looking character with the leather cap and the dark stubble. ‘I decided not to shave for the duration of the camp.’ With his white hair swept back from a bald pate, Kelman didn’t look anything like the man in the 1953 photo, except that he wore the same kind of heavy-framed black glasses. ‘I was known as Mr Herbee, a handyman,’ he said with a chuckle.
Two years before that photo was taken, in 1951, Kelman, a graduate student at Yale, had been ‘very excited’ to hear that Muzafer Sherif would be visiting the university. He’d been a big admirer of Sherif’s work. Despite the age difference — Sherif was almost twice Kelman’s age — the two hit it off. Sherif had just finished his first 1949 study, where he had brought two groups to conflict, and, when they met, Sherif was developing a theory for the next stage: how to bring about peace. ‘I liked his work very much — he was beginning to develop his theory of conflict and moving from hostility to harmony. His general approach was to look not at individuals but at the relationships between groups of people and the social context in which violence and hostility occurs.’
Kelman’s interest in peace research was personal. As an eleven-year-old in Vienna, he had witnessed the arrival of Nazi troops after the Anschluss and the horror of Kristallnacht before he and his family fled to America. Sherif had asked Kelman for feedback on a chapter he had been writing, and Kelman noticed how insistent Sherif was that conflict and war was not the result of human nature, of a person’s authoritarian upbringing, or of frustration in early childhood. ‘He spent an awful lot of time in his writing tearing down other approaches, particularly psychoanalytic explanations of groups and group behaviour. And I tried to tell him, “Why do you do that? It isn’t really necessary. You don’t have to tear other theories down in order to come in with your own. You could say yes, here are other theories, they have their limitations, this approach is an attempt to deal with those limitations.” So I stress this because it became an issue in the later work. He had a fatal flaw. He could never admit when he was wrong.’ But Sherif admired Kelman’s frankness and invited him along as a kind of safeguard against scientific bias.
As Kelman would soon learn, for Sherif, inviting advice would prove much easier than acting on it.
Nine boys stood in a ragged line in a clearing, holding their bows and arrows. An impatient queue of six other boys watched from the sidelines, waiting for their turn. Peter Blake held his bow expertly, and was trying to get the others’ attention, calling out loudly to watch how he did it. Almost thirteen, Peter was small for his age, but he had the easy confidence of a boy who was used to being in charge. He stood with one hand on his jutted hip, frowning impatiently. Some boys were shooting already, others were still trying to get their arrows correctly
in the bow. Peter called that they should do it all at the same time.
It was the first day of the camp, the first time Doug, a slight, sandy-haired eleven-year-old, had held a bow and arrow. He told me how he loved archery: and what boy wouldn’t? It was a thrill to feel the tautness of the bowstring when he pulled the arrow back, the tingling anticipation of letting the arrow fly, even when it fell short and hit the ground instead of the target. I can picture him waiting patiently with the others on the sidelines until it was his turn again. He loved the danger of it. When he went back home after the camp, he pestered his parents to be able to practise archery in the backyard. But their answer was an emphatic no.
Peter lifted his bow and inserted an arrow. ‘Ready,’ he called and squinted along the arrow, aiming it at the target ten metres away. ‘Aim!’
Just then, a smaller boy darted out in front of the line to retrieve his arrow from where it had fallen short of the target and lay in the grass. Another boy let his arrow go and it whizzed towards the target. Peter stamped his foot. ‘Hey!’ he yelled angrily. He spotted Jim Carper, a camp counsellor, lounging against a tree by the edge of the woods, smoking a cigarette. ‘Jim!’ Peter appealed to Carper. ‘Can you call the commands?’
Twenty-eight-year-old Carper, with the quiff of dark hair that flopped onto his forehead, James–Dean style, called back, ‘You’re doing fine!’ and gave Peter a lazy thumbs-up.