by Gina Perry
After the long hike, White’s Panthers were relieved when they reached their campsite and excited at the sight of water glinting through the trees. They dumped their belongings and raced straight to the inlet. It was a shaded swimming spot where a forest stream widened and flowed over a jumble of flat rocks before emptying itself into the lake.
After the swim, the boys were hungry, but the truck with their food supplies hadn’t arrived, so they set up their tents and collected rocks to make a fire ring. With still no food in sight, White wrote in his notes that two boys suggested that to pass the time they should play strip poker. In brackets, White added for Sherif’s benefit,
(All of the boys are very careful not to disrobe in the presence of others. Most of them put their pajamas on under their blankets after getting in bed. Playing strip poker is considered quite daring, and one of the penalties instituted by the boys for losing is that the loser must do a hula dance in the nude when he is completely stripped. XX [name removed] informed the P.O. [participant observer] that he was forced to do the hula when he lost recently).
I did a double take when I read this. White’s casual tone implied that this was not the first time the boys had played this game. The contrast between their modesty, getting changed under the cover of blankets, and the image of a naked boy dancing in front of the others disturbed me. Who had instigated the game, and how had the boys’ seemingly powerful taboo against nakedness been reversed, and in such a short time? For all Sherif’s neutral language about group norms ‘arising spontaneously’ in his proposals about this research, this shift in the boys’ inhibitions seemed out of character. The dirty talk, the initiations, the humiliation games sounded the kind of antics and hazing that happened in frat houses or army barracks, rather than among ten- and eleven-year-old boys. Or was I being naive? I called Brian, I emailed Doug.
Brian didn’t remember much, but guessed it could have been just talk, more evidence of the boys’ attempts to get the adults to take charge. ‘We kept waiting for the counsellors to react, to do something. To a kid like me, who liked rules and who was always out to please, it was a pretty uncomfortable situation.’
Doug didn’t recall it either. ‘That almost sounds too bizarre even for those clowns — in 1953 we wouldn’t have even known swear words or understood strip poker. If that had happened, it would have been awful for boys of that era.’
Was Jack White a reliable narrator, I wondered. Perhaps as a graduate student whose dissertation relied on this experiment, White was consciously or unconsciously shaping his notes to please Sherif rather than to reflect reality. I compared Herb Kelman’s observations of the group on that same afternoon. There is no mention of strip poker. Kelman described the boys’ pride in their Panther flag, and how he watched them playing by the stream, where Irving took off his shirt, ‘revealing his Panther t-shirt underneath. He said: “This is a job for Super Panther!’’’ Here Kelman added an explanatory note in brackets, thinking that Sherif might not have been familiar with superheroes: ‘(imitating Superman, who always takes off his regular clothes and reveals his Superman outfit before getting into action).’ A little later, Kelman wrote, the boy put his shirt on again and said: ‘Now I’ll get back into my disguise’, to the cheers of the other boys. Could both accounts be true — the mini-men playing strip poker and the innocent boys playing at superheroes?
I could guess which account Sherif favoured. It was day five of this second stage, and White’s group had a name, a flag, a uniform. Kelman’s observation pointed to a benign shared group identity, but White’s took it even further. Strip poker was proof that the norms of the group were so powerful they overrode individual conscience.
At the lake, the truck finally arrived and the Panther group helped unload it and began cooking lunch. The air filled with the smell of woodsmoke and hamburgers. After lunch, the sky clouded over and the lake was grey and choppy. They spent the rest of the afternoon at a nearby airfield, where the boys played on an abandoned B-24 bomber, pretending to fly over enemy territory. Irving claimed the captain’s spot in the cockpit and refused to move, arguing that his uncle was a decorated fighter pilot so he was best qualified to be captain. In contrast, Doug took turns with the other boys in the co-pilot seat and tried to persuade Irving to be fair. Peter stood below the cockpit with his hands on his hips and yelled up at Irving, who ignored him. Peter complained to the two counsellors that Irving wouldn’t give anyone else a turn, but Jack White waved him away, telling him it would be fine. By the time they rounded the boys up for the trip back to camp, no one waited for Irving, who was the last to scramble down from the plane and he had to run to catch up with the others.
Back at camp, Irving flopped down by the campfire, which Peter was fanning as Brian lay twigs on the embers to try to get it going. The wood was damp and smoke poured from the fire. Irving turned his head away, squeezing his eyes against the smoke and fanning at his face. ‘Hey!’ he complained.
‘You could get up and help,’ Peter said. ‘You’ve sat down all afternoon!’
‘I want to do the cooking.’ Irving coughed and wiped at his eyes. ‘You guys never let me.’
‘That’s because you burn everything!’ Peter said. ‘You say you’ll do something and then you walk away and leave it to someone else.’
‘I want to cook,’ Irving said. ‘You can do the dishes for a change.’
‘I’m cooking!’ Nathan said angrily to anyone who’d listen. He pointed at Irving. ‘You look after the fire.’
‘We’ll make a roster — we’ll list all the jobs and make sure everyone does their share,’ Peter said. ‘Go and get a pen and paper,’ he told Nathan.
‘You’re not the boss!’ Nathan took a step towards Peter.
‘Yeah,’ Irving muttered.
Peter shrugged, threw the large leaf that he had been waving at the embers into the fire, then sat down and crossed his arms.
‘You!’ Nathan turned on Irving, who stood up quickly and began to back away. Nathan lunged at him and threw him to the ground. ‘This is for bragging all afternoon about your “war hero” uncle!’ Nathan yelled, tugging at the zip on Irving’s pants. Irving struggled and yelled. Boys came running from the woods. Some ran and piled on top of Irving. Others, like Brian, looked to Peter, waiting for him to intervene, which he usually did. But Peter frowned into the fire as if he couldn’t hear a thing. Irving was gasping for air and sobbing so loudly that Jack White came out from his hiding place. ‘I had to call the boys off,’ he wrote to Sherif.
Once freed, Irving, whose Panther t-shirt was covered in dirt, ran away to the bushes and cried. White sat on a log at the campfire and tried to draw the boys into a discussion about preparing supper, but Peter sulked and refused to be drawn and the others were subdued. Until now, Peter had been White’s pick as the leader who would take control and set boundaries for group behaviour, but his domineering manner irritated some of the boys, and he brooded when things didn’t go his way. White looked around impatiently, mentally crossing them off — Nathan, who was hacking away at a log with a hatchet, was too aggressive; Brian, who glanced worriedly at the silent Peter, was too weak. Then there was Doug, who moved around the edge of the clearing, collecting firewood. White had noticed him that afternoon too, and his knack for getting the others to take turns playing on the plane. As White watched, Doug turned and called, ‘Who’s gonna help me with this wood?’ balancing a pile in his arms, and three boys, including Nathan and Brian, darted forward to help him. Yes, White thought, even though he was one of the smallest boys, Doug Griset was a clear contender as group leader.
The trajectory of the Panthers was beginning to mirror that in Golding’s novel, where, after the initial chaos and confusion, the boys turned to a leader who was constructive and fair and who seemed to provide a sense of security in a shifting and uncertain situation.
Meanwhile, 30 miles to the north, two nights into their camping trip at Lake George, Jim Carper
’s boys woke up to the honking of ducks on the lake as the sun came up on Thursday 30 July.
Compared to the Panthers, Carper’s group seemed a relatively happy bunch, but there was still no clear leader taking charge. Most of the boys wanted to cook, so mealtimes were chaotic, with two fires going and boys jostling and no one coordinating. Hamburgers were fried and ready to eat before potatoes were even peeled, some boys were lining up for third helpings before others had had their first. John, who had plenty of camping experience, tried to give advice, but he wasn’t assertive enough and the others wouldn’t listen. Even Laurence, who was good at coaxing the others to do things with a laugh and a joke, gave up trying to get the boys to line up and take turns when it came to cooking and serving.
That morning, Carper decided he had to take action. None of the boys had washed the supper dishes from the night before, and there were plenty of animals in the Adirondacks, including bears and coyotes, who could be drawn to food scraps. Carper used passive voice in his observation notes to distance himself from directing the boys: they were, he wrote, ‘presented with an agenda’, which was ‘[s]tart fire, wash dishes, make breakfast, decide when they want to go home’. In response, the boys organised themselves efficiently, and after breakfast of hot chocolate and bacon and a thorough camp clean-up, the boys had a group meeting to decide the day’s activities and menu. Carper watched closely, waiting for a leader to emerge, but none did, and the chaotic-sounding meeting that he described in his notes took over forty-five minutes, with boys wandering in and out and shouting non sequiturs as the men looked on. If it was frustrating for the men, it was strange to the boys, who expected the adults to take the lead. Walt remembers this as one source of his uneasiness about the camp. ‘There was no one in charge saying, “We’re going swimming; we’re going boating; we’re going fishing.” It was very unstructured. We had a lot of time to do things on our own, we could do whatever we wanted.’
What’s striking about Carper’s notes is how he followed up with boys who weren’t participating, ones who he described as ‘on the periphery’. It wasn’t part of his scientific brief but a mark of his concern that each boy felt included. During the morning’s protracted and often rowdy meeting, he had sat with Mickey on the edge of the group and encouraged him to make suggestions. Later that afternoon, when the boys were swimming, Carper noticed that Laurence, who was usually in the thick of group activities, stayed back at camp and sat by himself at the campfire. When Carper asked him what he was doing, Laurence showed him how he was whittling a piece of wood that would be big enough to fit the names of all twenty-four boys on the camp. Carper paid attention to individual boys and described in his notes some who spent time on their own or thinking about their friends back at camp. Probably because he had little contact with the research team, Carper had little idea of the impact these kinds of details could have for Sherif and Sussman; he was simply reporting what he saw. In contrast, it seemed that White intuitively understood that his observation notes were meant to reassure Sherif that the experiment was going to plan.
For, back at the main campsite, Sherif was likely on tenterhooks. With both groups gone, he could not observe them for himself, and he waited impatiently for the sound of Harvey returning in the truck in the evenings with the men’s daily reports. He and Sussman had plenty to do in the boys’ absence — there were the preparations for the competitions to finalise, the planning of scenarios and the writing of scripts to make the tournament announcement seem natural. But I imagine he would have found it hard to settle.
On their final night at Sacandaga, the Panthers decided they wanted hotdogs for dinner because they were quick and easy to cook. But knowing how much his professor liked to double-check every small detail, White called Sherif from the store to get his approval for the evening’s menu. The boys were enthusiastic about cooking hotdogs on sticks over the fire, but White worried that Sherif would object because this wouldn’t involve any group work and he would have to come up with an excuse and an alternative for the disappointed campers. To his relief, Sherif agreed to the purchase, and White stocked up and headed back to Sacandaga. When he arrived back, the boys had built a fire with pine needles and logs, so they were soon cooking hotdogs over the fire, the fat spitting in the flames.
After dinner, talk around the campfire turned to extrasensory perception. The boys took turns to see if they could read one another’s minds. One boy put his hands over his eyes while the other stood around 20 feet away, looked up at the sky, thinking of a number. Brian told the group how he and his mother could often read each other’s thoughts, and White asked him what his mother was thinking now. Brian said it was too far, thoughts couldn’t travel that distance. Whether it was Brian’s talk of his closeness to his mother that conjured the image for each boy of his own mother, or the lights of High Rock Lodge that twinkled across the lake that reminded the boys of home, I don’t know. But later, in the tent, an argument broke out about the swearing club, and some boys threatened to go home unless it stopped: White wrote in his notes that Brian called out to him and asked him what time the next train left for Schenectady, and Peter, too, was loud in his protests. The arguing and the thoughts of home had stirred some of the boys, and sleep did not come easily.
Those who were still awake an hour later would have heard the truck rumble into camp. White’s phone call that evening had agitated Sherif. After he hung up, Sherif began worrying that allowing the boys to cook solo meals had been a mistake. With no means of contacting White, Sherif insisted that Sussman drive to the campsite, using the excuse that he had forgotten to supply groundsheets for the boys’ tent. But by the time they got there at 8.30 pm, the boys had already turned in.
Soon after, Doug began complaining of a stomach-ache. During the night he got up three times and woke White, saying that he felt sick. But with nothing in the first-aid kit to help him, White told Doug each time to go back to bed and wait till morning. The fourth time that Doug woke him, White told the junior counsellor to take Doug back to the dispensary at the camp. At 4.30 am, Doug was ‘marched through the woods’ for an hour, arriving back at camp at 5.30. White’s use of the word ‘marched’ sounds like a rebuke, as if the boy was being weak, suggesting White had little sympathy. Or perhaps it was that White anticipated that Sherif would be angry and blame him for allowing Doug to be returned to camp, so he made it clear in his notes that he wasn’t being soft on the boy.
Doug doesn’t recall the walk, but we both marvel at the image of his ten-year-old self hiking through the woods in the dark, the faint glimmer of the junior counsellor’s torch dancing ahead of him, his heart thumping, perhaps, at the scream of an owl, at the crackle of twigs and leaves that could signal an unseen animal in the undergrowth.
On Friday, their final morning at Lake George, Jim Carper and his junior counsellor took charge, cooking breakfast and delegating jobs so the boys would be packed up and ready in time for the truck’s arrival. On the way back to base camp, Carper wrote that all the boys were engaged in ‘individual activity’ — chewing candy, humming, and gazing out the back of the truck as it bumped along the dirt roads. Back at camp, Harold went to the infirmary with a ‘fever’, joining Doug from the other group, whom the nurse had already put to bed.
Sherif might have chosen Mrs Terani, the nurse, because he thought she would be no distraction to the men, but the infirmary seemed to be a magnet for some of the boys. The men’s notes from this time onwards are dotted with references to boys missing from mealtimes or games because they had gone to see the nurse about ‘medical issues’. I couldn’t work out if it was because the boys were genuinely ill, or if they went there for sympathy and comfort. For some boys, perhaps it was easier to say they were ill than to admit that they were longing for home.
After they’d unpacked their gear, Carper called in to the infirmary to see how Harold was feeling. The boy was sitting up in bed when Carper arrived. Harold was the kind of boy used to working
things out, who looked closely at things to figure out the logic behind them. But every time he asked the adults questions, he could never get a straight answer. From that first day, when he’d asked Carper about the microphones in the mess hall, he had the sense they were keeping something back. When Carper sat down on the edge of the bed, Harold told him he’d worked out it was important to the men that the boys make friends and get along in their new groups. He didn’t bother lying: he told the counsellor that nothing was really wrong with him, but he wanted to go home. Carper wrote, ‘He vowed I would not change his mind and that if we did not let him go home he would wreck the group. He prides himself on knowing everything that goes on around the camp.’
When Carper saw how determined the boy was, he gave up trying to persuade him. ‘I told him I would discuss it with Sussman. He said that Sussman would not let him go home and I should pass his threat along to Sussman. That evening we called his parents and although they were not eager for him to go home plans were made for him to leave the following day.’
Doug, who was in the room next door to Harold, was homesick too. While Doug doesn’t remember many details of the camp, he’s certain of this one thing. ‘Oh, I would have been homesick all right. I would have been homesick to beat the band,’ he told me. ‘You know, I’m speculating here, but you can see why they might not have wanted the parents to visit. All the kids would have been blubbering and saying, “I want to go home.”’
Doug’s homesickness triggered anxiety among the researchers. White and Sussman worried that because Doug was a popular boy and a potential leader, others might follow his lead. Already two Panthers, Peter and Brian, had threatened to go home. Sherif wrote in his notebook that White and Sussman were ‘gloomy’ about Doug’s ‘ills’ and ‘feared contagion’. They were seven days into the second stage, and the hypothesis that each group would share a sense of camaraderie and feel protective of its members, would have a clear leader and shared ways of doing things, seemed further away than ever. With the two groups failing to bond, and the risk of homesickness ruining their plans, Sussman and White argued for starting the next stage of competition between the groups. But Sherif agonised over whether to give the groups more time to bond. He worried aloud that the two groups were still too fragile; perhaps it was too soon. But the others argued that competitions and the prizes would ignite the boys’ enthusiasm and make them work as team. Finally Sherif was persuaded. He scrawled in his notebook that White and Sussman ‘urged me to start stage 3’.