The Lost Boys

by Gina Perry

  Peter made an exasperated noise and turned away.

  Beneath his casual pose, Carper was watching intently, memorising the scene so he could write it all down later. He described this exchange in his daily observation notes as proof for his new boss Muzafer Sherif that he was fulfilling his role as disinterested observer. Carper was the only one of the research team who hadn’t met Sherif before the experiment, and I imagine that at the same time as he was trying to get the measure of the man, he was eager to prove he would do a good job. I don’t know if it was money or idealism that brought Carper to this camp — or if it was the chance to work with a renowned social psychologist — but he had had enough of the rat psychology he had been studying at John Hopkins. After the sour smell of the animal laboratory, the warm Adirondack air, cut with the smell of mown grass, would have been invigorating.

  Today, the boys had free run of the campsite, and it was the job of the six men disguised as camp staff to watch them mingling and playing and make note of who was making friends with whom. But reading Carper’s description of the chaos and exuberance of the archery range on the first day at Camp Talualac, it’s impossible not to feel worried for the boys’ safety and sympathy for frustrated Peter Blake. In his attention to observing detail, Carper seemed oblivious to danger.

  The boys’ over-exuberance in the archery session was a release of pent-up energy. It had been raining most of the day and they’d been stuck indoors. The rain had started just before the bus had pulled off the muddy dirt road and into the camp, and there’d been a scramble to get their bags off the bus and into the mess hall without getting drenched.

  Doug waited his turn, watching the boys around him fooling around, shouting encouragement, and boasting about how they’d hit the bullseye. He would have felt puny in comparison. He was a ‘dweeby’ kid, he told me, who looked younger than eleven — a fact his father, who had fought during the war and now ran a pharmacy in Schenectady, was always trying to help him compensate for. He made Doug wear an oversized coat in the schoolyard to help him look bigger and gave him boxing lessons. But Doug had already intuited that physical size wasn’t what got you respect in the schoolyard. It was personality. So he didn’t boast as he waited his turn, didn’t brag like some of the others about how close he got to the bullseye.

  It had seemed like a long trip to eleven-year-old Walt Burkhard. Then again, a trip to Schenectady, to go to the library with his mother, from their small village of Alplaus seemed like a big deal too. Schenectady felt like a ‘metropolis’ compared to Alplaus, which had just a post office, a garage, a general store, and a tiny four-roomed schoolhouse. But Walt was shocked by how isolated this camp was. There was no town nearby: they were right out in the woods with just a big dark mess hall and five drab cabins, surrounded by thick woods overgrown with vines that draped from the trees like cobwebs. It was the first time he’d been away with a group of people he didn’t know. And in a small place like Alplaus, Walt was used to knowing everyone.

  After a welcome by the camp director, an introduction to the staff, and an inspection by the nurse, the boys were encouraged to claim one of the twenty-four beds that had been set up at one end of the mess hall and unpack.

  The wet weather might have ruined Sherif’s plans for the day’s activities, but it was a stroke of luck for those boys who felt far from home. With twenty-four children and ten adults inside and the rain falling steadily outside, the large room was warm, crowded, and cosy.

  Walt and Doug quickly made new friends. Doug found a buddy in John Wilkinson, who on the bus had impressed them all by knowing at a glance the make and model of every car they passed. That wet afternoon, John and Doug lay on their bunks, reading comic books together. Walt overcame his shyness and joined in a game of cops and robbers after a serious-looking boy in glasses called Irving asked him to play, and a group of them ran around the mess hall, using sticks as guns, while around them other boys wrote letters home, or played Parcheesi or Crazy Eights. Meanwhile, Harold McDonough, a boy with an interest in all things scientific, sat alone, and I imagine him reading a copy of Popular Mechanics, with its offers of correspondence courses in industrial electricity, build-your-own power mower kits and crystal radio sets. He kept himself to himself. He was the kind of boy with an interest in how things worked and expected adults to be able to explain things and answer his questions. Except that he noticed that the adults here had trouble explaining things. When he asked Jim Carper that first morning what the microphones in the rafters in the mess hall were for, Carper stammered and said they were there for when Mr Ness made camp announcements. But they were microphones, Harold pointed out, not loudspeakers. Jim just looked uncomfortable and hurried away.

  In the kitchen, divided from the main room by a partition, the cook and his helper fried chicken croquettes, hash browns, and buttered carrots, and boiled green beans for lunch. The air was steamy and fugged with food smells, the heat of warm bodies, and the men’s cigarette smoke.

  After lunch, one of the counsellors brought out his mandolin, and two boys — Eric on the accordion and Irving on the ukulele — joined in to play ‘On Top of Old Smokey’. Irving’s shoulders hunched, and his glasses slipped closer and closer to the end of his nose as he stared intently at his hands as he played, so determined to get it right that he forgot to sing. Eric played enthusiastically, not noticing or not caring that he was playing out of tune. A boy named Laurence joined in, substituting the lyrics to ‘On Top of Spaghetti’ and waving his arms to get the others to collaborate.

  By mid afternoon, the rain had cleared and the boys headed out to the archery range. A hot breeze dried what was left of the muddy puddles. Irving was having trouble with archery. The humid air fogged up his glasses, so it was hard for him to see the target. Despite never being able to hit the target, and despite the urging of some of the boys for him to give up his turn, Irving persisted, lining up again and again but never getting any closer to the bullseye. At supper, he saved Walt a seat beside him. After supper, John and Doug sat on the jetty and John showed off his knowledge of fishing to his new friend, demonstrating to Doug how to bait a hook before casting the line out into the stream. They fished together until it got dark.

  It was hard for the boys to sleep that night, even though it had been a full day. There was a lot of giggling and excited talk after lights out. Although some were quiet, trying not to think about home, others bragged about their exploits in archery, and a few told knock-knock jokes or shouted mock insults in the dark. But soon one of the camp counsellors came in and told them to settle down. Gradually the talk died, as one by one the children fell asleep. Jim Carper, listening at the door, noted what time it was when the room went quiet and the last boy had gone to sleep.

  The next morning the sky was clear, the puddles had almost disappeared, and the only evidence of rain was the mosquitoes swarming in the shade of the trees at the edge of the clearing. After a breakfast of ham and scrambled eggs, Marvin Sussman rounded everyone up outside the mess hall to take some group photos.

  Sussman was the only adult the boys had met before. He had visited their homes to talk to their parents about the camp. I imagine they lined up eagerly and followed Sussman’s directions: taller boys in the back row, the front row seated cross-legged on the grass. They were a neat, well dressed bunch. Most of them looked as though they had had their hair cut for camp, and wore bright striped t-shirts, or neat checked shirts tucked into jeans. Many looked relaxed, expectant. Some looked shy. You wouldn’t know, looking at the photo, that just the day before they were strangers.

  But like everything at this camp, the photos had another purpose. Once they were processed, Muzafer Sherif pinned the group portraits to the wall of their small office so the men could more easily memorise the faces and names of their subjects.

  After the photos, the boys raced towards the archery range, while those who missed out played games of Horseshoes while they waited for their turn.
Even though they had only been at camp a short time, the boys were already forming strong connections. Sherif predicted that the boys would make friends during this first stage, and the observers’ job on the first day was to record ‘emerging friendships’. But it seemed from the documentary evidence that there was nothing fledgling about the camaraderie that was developing between the boys. I wondered if they unconsciously understood that there was something different about this summer camp, if it was a reaction to adults who did so little to organise them and yet seemed ever present and strangely watchful that the boys instinctively bonded.

  For the boys, the second day of camp seemed an extension of the first. At the archery range, new buddies Peter and Laurence had established a system and set up rules, and the rest of the boys seemed happy to follow their lead. They made a good team: Peter, with his bossy and rather serious manner, kept order, and stocky Laurence, the comic, with his gift for funny faces and knock-knock jokes, entertained the others while they waited their turn. The boys now formed a straight line and fired in unison and only on command.

  That afternoon, the campers went spontaneously from one activity to the other, unfettered by adult intervention. The boys believed the camp was run by Harry Ness, an emaciated man with a mournful face who wore small shorts that exposed startlingly long pale legs. Ness carried a clipboard and wore a whistle around his neck, and it was he who announced the day’s activities and gave instructions to the two junior counsellors, students at Union College, Ken Pirro and Rupe Huse, who spent most of the day with the boys, supervising activities, supplying equipment, and generally making sure things ran smoothly. Then there were Jim Carper and Jack White, introduced as the senior counsellors, who also spent most of their day around the boys. But in the shadow camp, Ness and his team were puppets whose every announcement, every move, was dictated and choreographed by Muzafer Sherif, whose plans Sussman passed on to Ness and the others each morning before breakfast.

  Sherif’s strategy was for the boys to pass through four stages. The first stage was mingling and making friends, or ‘spontaneous group formation’, and it would last just a day or two. In the second stage, ‘intragroup relations’, the boys would be separated into two groups and each group given a chance to develop its own identity. In stage three, ‘intergroup relations’, the groups would take part in a series of competitions that would cause hostility and conflict between them. Stage four was the ‘integration phase’, where the two groups would come together in the face of a larger, shared problem. The hostility and competition between the groups would vanish, and they would regroup as a harmonious whole. That was the plan.

  At every stage in these first days, watchers such as Carper were on hand, observing, writing notes, and recording on film and audiotape when they could. But how do you transform the jostling, noisy, and chaotic interactions between groups of children into a set of scientific observations and data that others will understand? How do you show that the hunches you have are borne out by your observations?

  In the five days before the experiment started, Herb Kelman hammered out three drafts of detailed instructions on his portable typewriter, and they are an eye-glazing read. As well as a staff policy that included a rule of no drinking, Kelman wrote five densely typed pages of advice for the participant observers in how to maintain a hands-off approach. ‘Since the observers are familiar with the hypotheses, they may tend to expect certain kinds of behavior … and may be selectively perceptive … They should try in every way possible to counteract this tendency …’ The instructions were full of warnings about what not to do. Page one told them, ‘Nobody is to be a leader to the boys.’ Staff were to remain low-key and were not to distinguish themselves in any way that might detract from the boys’ relationships with one another: ‘We do not want boys to develop attachments to certain staff members …’ They were not to influence the behaviour of the boys in any way, and in particular not to usurp the role of the groups’ natural leaders. To this end, staff were not to make suggestions, question the boys, display special talents, form attachments, or wear insignia. Instead they were to be unobtrusive observers, taking photos and movie film covertly, memorising their observations so that later, when they could get away from the group, they could write notes without arousing suspicion.

  In addition, the counsellors were not try to ‘influence’ campers, were not to take initiative ‘in introducing activities’, and were not to ‘counsel campers’. They were also not to initiate anything without the direction from research staff. ‘It is better to do nothing than to begin a course of action which may prove deleterious to the operations of the study,’ the booklet makes clear. Kelman also warned that the research team would be watching to make sure they complied. They were reminded, too, that the camp could well take an unexpected turn, but that no matter how strange, ‘Be assured … that it is done with the best judgement regarding the success of the project and the participants.’

  But reading these instructions, I was struck by what they didn’t say. How, in practical terms, could the counsellors implement these directives given they were the ones supervising activities and spending all their time with the boys? It seemed an impossible ask.

  On the first day of camp, the researchers’ goal had been simply to record friendships, such as Peter and Laurence’s, and Walt and Irving’s. On the second day, they were preoccupied with assessing the boys’ skills in a range of activities so that later, when the boys were split into groups, the two sides would be equally matched. But the men seemed to have underestimated or perhaps didn’t notice just the strength of the bonds developing between the boys.

  Walt had no idea that he and his friends were being studied — he didn’t notice anyone observing them or taking notes. Initially the camp was just as he imagined a normal summer camp would be, although that afternoon none of the adults comforted a boy who had the ‘sniffles’ when it came to swimming, and no one encouraged a quiet boy called Tony who seemed ‘reluctant to mix’.

  As the second day wore on, it became clear to Sherif as he roamed the camp, dressed in a janitor’s uniform, that assessing the twenty-four boys spread out across the woods and grounds was too difficult. I pictured Sherif prowling the campsite pretending to pick up litter, watching with irritation at what he would have viewed as aimless activity as the boys — some in groups of two or three, others on their own — drifted from one pastime to another: tinkering at an old piano outside the mess hall, shooting arrows, playing badminton, and tossing horseshoes. He decided they had to change plans. The only way to successfully differentiate and compare the boys was by getting them in the same place at the same time to play a game.

  After lunch, when Ness suggested a soccer game, the boys ‘rejected’ this. Fifteen minutes later, the junior counsellors ‘forcefully’ rounded the reluctant boys up for a game of volleyball, although four boys still refused to play. With Ness as umpire, the six observers watched from different vantage points on the sidelines, ready to rate each boy in terms of size, sporting ability, and leadership potential in games. But it was sweltering in the sun; the boys were tired from the morning’s activities and ‘unenthusiastic’ about playing. Next, Ness announced a game of softball and took the boys to the baseball field, but when they got there the boys again refused. Finally, most of the boys agreed to a game of prisoner’s base, but it soon degenerated into ‘general apathy and chaos’. Carper wrote that Ness’ instructions for how to play were confused, and once play did start, ‘many of the captured prisoners accepted their incarceration as an opportunity to sit down and do nothing’, and were not interested in being rescued. Teammates such as John and Doug sat in the shade and read comics while Harold ‘went hiking in the woods, alone’. Eventually the men gave up and the boys wandered off to swim, play badminton, and practise with the bows and arrows. I can imagine Sherif’s irritation that such a seemingly straightforward exercise in observation had proved so difficult, and his unhappiness with the men’s
inability to inspire the boys to play. But the afternoon had highlighted a weakness in the researchers’ view of their subjects. The boys were not passive pawns, and their cooperation was crucial to the experiment’s success.

  The second day of camp ended happily for the children. Around a campfire, they took turns in telling ghost stories and, later, joined in a sing-a-long. The whole group sang ‘Hail, Hail, The Gang’s All Here’, but Herb Kelman later wrote in his notes that they all ‘balked’ at singing the word ‘hell’ in the line ‘What the hell do we care’ because it was a curse word.

  By eight o’clock, the campers were in bed and settled. If any of them had stayed awake after the others had fallen asleep, if they’d listened hard, they might have heard above the steady click of crickets the tap-tap-tap of typewriters coming from a cabin on the other side of the birch grove as the two watchers typed out their observations of the day. Side by side, Jim Carper and Jack White typed without speaking, forbidden from discussing their view of the day’s events with each other — their fingers flying faster as the time neared 10.30 pm, when they were scheduled to present their observations to Muzafer Sherif.

  Sherif had specified this deadline, annotating Kelman’s instructions with his pencilled scrawl. It was a pattern I recognised from his letters to Marvin Sussman: the adding of more detail to already exhaustive instructions. He dictated what time participant observers Carper and White must finish observing the boys each day, how and when and to whom they were to turn in their notes (Sherif), who would read their notes (Sherif and Kelman), and who they could and couldn’t discuss their observations with. Pooling their men’s typed observations with their own, the research team of Sherif, with Kelman, Sussman, and Harvey would formulate and finalise plans for the next day, rarely getting to bed before 2.00 am.