The Lost Boys

by Gina Perry

  OJ Harvey wrote the next day, ‘Several Panthers want to go home so [we] brought stage 3 forward.’ The next stage, the men hoped, would rally the boys into working teams. And at first it seemed to work.

  6

  Showdown

  Harry Ness tugged the pencil out from behind his ear as he waited for the Panthers to finish clearing away their breakfast dishes. The script had been typed the night before, but that morning Sherif had revised it again, so Ness had had no time to practise it.

  In the kitchen, someone ran cold water into the frypan of bacon fat and hissing steam rose in a cloud. The boys jostled and jiggled at the table. Doug Griset had been coaxed out of the infirmary for breakfast, and the others were glad to see him.

  Jack White called, ‘Listen here, Mr Ness has something to say, y’all.’

  Ness cleared his throat and read from the clipboard, announcing that the other group of boys had challenged them to a three-day competition. The Panthers exclaimed excitedly, and he paused and waited for the chatter to die down. ‘This includes ballgames and feats of skill, such as tent pitching and tug of war.’ He turned to the shelf behind him. ‘The members of the team with the most points will win’ — here he tugged at a cloth that was covering something standing on the mantelpiece and glanced again at the clipboard — ‘these beautiful and expensive stainless-steel knives.’ Twelve knives fanned out in a half-circle on a stiff cardboard display stand. Ness shifted the stand so the silver caught the light and twinkled.

  It was as though the air had been sucked out of the room. There was complete silence until someone breathed ‘Whoa!’, and then everyone was talking.

  Ness raised his voice above the noise. ‘All the members of the group who win this tournament will enjoy the pleasure of owning such a fine camp knife. Remember, no one can win a knife by himself. So pull and work together. The only way you can win a knife is for your group to win — you have to get the most points by the time the tournament is over. So, go to it, fellows, work together as a team!’

  Doug held his breath, gazing at the knives.

  ‘Only the winning team would get a prize,’ he told me. ‘There was no consolation prize. They paraded those knives at mealtimes. And this was not some little thing, this was a bowie knife that they were giving ten, eleven-year-old kids. Probably illegal to carry. And I wanted that jackknife so badly — every kid wanted it. Boy, believe me, did we want that knife. They were real good at getting us to want that prize. I’ve never been someone who’s had a use for knives. I’m not a hunter or into weapons. It surprises me how much I wanted that knife.’

  Sherif had used expensive knives as a reward in his 1949 experiment and knew they were a good choice. He wrote that the boys in his first experiment ‘prayed for’ and ‘dreamed’ about those knives.

  Doug remembers how often his team checked the barometer propped on the mantelpiece that showed each group’s scores. ‘There were a great many competitions that they put us through — and I put it that way because it reminded me of my years in basic training: “putting us through” rather than enjoying. They were testing us all the time as to whether we could be better than the others.’

  Ness made exactly the same announcement to Jim Carper’s group, but they responded with mixed feelings. His inadvertently stilted delivery convinced the boys that he was still angry with them and didn’t want them to win. And their winning was even less likely given that Harold had gone home and they were one team member down. But they were excited to be seeing their friends again, and hurried off to the first game. When they arrived at the baseball field, they were surprised to see the other group kitted out in matching t-shirts and caps, with their Panther flag hanging from the backstop. Laurence made a joke of it, pointing at White, who also wore a Panther t-shirt, and saying, ‘You got a new recruit, fellas?’ But some, like Mickey, hung back. He told the others later that the men had outfitted the other boys because they were their favourite team.

  Marv Sussman, umpiring, was eager for the game to start and clapped his hands to get the attention of the new arrivals. Who was the captain, he wanted to know, and what was their team name? The boys glanced round at one another. I imagined Sherif on the sidelines, perhaps holding a rake as a prop, watching closely. After a moment, Laurence volunteered for captain and then looked round at the others and said ‘Eagles?’ tentatively. It was not a group decision, Carper wrote.

  Meanwhile, White had named Doug as catcher for the Panthers — a role best occupied by the team leader. Doug remembered being mystified by the staff’s choice. ‘I never was the catcher. I always batted first because I was small and fast and I could be the first person to get on base. But for some unimaginable reason they made me catcher. I had to be the smallest kid there. Catchers are big burly kids, like a block of granite, who are going to catch all the balls and block the plate.’

  But Doug was a good choice in terms of team morale. Despite the Panthers’ outward signs of solidarity, before the game started Nathan and Joe threatened to depants Irving if he struck out during the game. Irving pushed his glasses nervously up his nose. Doug went over to Irving. ‘Don’t pay any attention to them, they just have to have someone to take it out on. They all like you, just as I do,’ White observed Doug saying in his notes. But Irving didn’t look reassured, and kept glancing worriedly at Nathan. Doug guaranteed Irving that he had the ‘best batting position on the team and they were counting on him’.

  Soon the game was underway, and the sounds of the crack of the ball against the bat, the whistles and catcalls of the boys, and their ragged cheers drifted from the pitch towards the shadows of the trees, where Sherif stood well back, out of the full glare of the sun. The game went well for the Panthers, who got five runs in the first inning. When it was Irving’s turn to bat, he ‘hit a single and was cheered and embraced by his teammates’, White wrote. But then things took a dramatic turn.

  Doug remembered, ‘They had me be catcher and I’ve got no protection except for a glove. I’m a little twink of a kid and I’m in the firing line for every kid coming round third base trying to score. So here I am, and I go over to block the plate when this kid came for third base, and he ran right through me.’ Whoomp, and Doug was knocked out cold. The kid who knocked him down was a quiet boy called Tony Gianelli, who was described as a ‘low status’ boy, a term they used for shy or reserved individuals who ranked down the group’s hierarchy in terms of leadership potential. But Laurence and John and the rest of Carper’s group knew that Tony would never hurt someone deliberately. Okay, he didn’t say much and he wasn’t sporty, and sometimes he wet the bed, but there was no way he would have done something like that on purpose. Tony wasn’t a physically adventurous kid. He’d only come on this camp because his older brother, his hero, had convinced him, telling him how much fun he had on scout camps and jambourees.

  Doug’s teammates, the Panthers, raced across the field and gathered in a circle around Tony, accusing him of doing it on purpose. Tony had a shiny black pudding-bowl haircut that ended just above his prominent ears. His hands were balled into fists and his ears had turned red. He had a slow fuse, but it was lit now. OJ Harvey and Herb Kelman hurried over and lifted Doug between them, carrying him off the field. I imagined Sherif smoking furiously in the shade of the trees, exhilarated at this turn of events, to see his plans coming together.

  Sussman blew his whistle and called the teams back to the game. But the Panthers were outraged that Sussman didn’t censure Tony for knocking Doug over. Nathan sneered at Sussman, ‘What, are they paying you to root for them?’ When play resumed, the Panthers vowed to ‘win the game for Doug’ and took up their positions again. I guessed that Sussman did this deliberately. What better way to have the Panthers unite as a single group and forget all ideas of going home? Harvey noted their ‘sarcasm and aggressive behavior’: they were ‘hollering, spitting, calling names’, yelling ‘cream puff, rubber ass, sons of bitches’. At
first Harvey thought it was directed to the other team, but he was shocked to realise most of the Panthers’ hostility was directed at staff, who they felt had let Tony off the hook. Nathan called the other team’s junior counsellor, Rupe, ‘an overgrown turd bender’, a term that Harvey — who had been initiated into the Panthers’ swearing club and knew their rules — noted was the Panthers’ ‘most vulgar term’. What was the reluctant swearer Brian feeling now, I wondered.

  As captain of the opposing team, Laurence called encouragement to the other boys, but his heart wasn’t in it. They were still upset for Tony, who glowered at the Panthers, and they were worried about Doug, and intimidated by the aggression and cursing of the Panther team. They played desultorily in the grinding heat until Harry Ness closed the game down and declared the Panthers the winners.

  On the morning of the second day of the tournament, Carper’s boys lost both the tug of war and tent pitching, and on the way back to the mess hall for lunch, they concluded that the Panthers were a better team and deserved their win, the animosity of yesterday forgotten. But the last thing Sherif wanted was for Carper’s group to concede the tournament to the Panthers. If they ‘accept defeat’, he wrote, there was no chance of conflict. To lift their spirits, he sent Sussman to town to buy the boys a set of t-shirts as a surprise, and watched in the mess hall after lunch when Carper made a show of the mystery parcel, encouraging the boys to guess what was inside. They crowded round while he untied the string and exclaimed excitedly as he held up a t-shirt. With Carper’s encouragement, they chose a name for themselves. Some voted for Cobras, but finally they decided on the Pythons. Walt Burkhard didn’t know what a python was, but once Laurence explained it was like a boa constrictor, he embraced the name excitedly along with the others.

  Doug scoffed when I reminded him about the names for each team and wondered who had suggested them in the first place. ‘Why would you call kids Panthers and Pythons, two killing animals? And then have them fighting over jackknifes, which you could use to kill somebody? Why didn’t they call the teams Panda Bears and Dolphins or something? See, it’s the premise — they weren’t researching it, they were trying to prove they were right!’ Doug was by then on his own investigative trail. He had contacted the archivist in charge of the Sherif papers to ask for material that described him at the time. Doug was interrogating the story of the experiment, sifting through his memories to confirm how difficult it would have been to persuade American boys like him to fight one another.

  The Pythons seemed buoyed by the men’s attention. Carper was taking the lead with them, and they responded eagerly. Later that day, he wrote in his notes that he was gone for half an hour, and when he returned, all the Pythons had climbed on the roof of his cabin:

  I was fooling around with them a bit when they all decided to take me on. There was about a 15 minute tussle with everyone rolling round in the dust. At the end I was completely fatigued … At one point they were all in the counselors cabin and when they were finally put out with alot [sic] of difficulty they still hung around …’

  It was a striking passage — not just because of the affection and playfulness it revealed between Carper and his group but also because it was so different from the dry style that placed the men as passive observers of the action. Now, with Sherif’s approval, the men had to show they were keeping the boys happy and preventing the homesickness that had threatened the experiment. But didn’t Sherif realise that allowing the men to be cheerleaders and motivators of the boys prevented the development of group dynamics that he had intended?

  At night, Sherif and Sussman pored over the observers’ notes. The agonising wait for something concrete to happen in line with his predictions was taking a toll on Sherif. He rarely went to bed before 2.00 am, and he was so wound up that he had trouble sleeping. Flouting staff policy, he began to drink whisky after the boys were asleep. But that just made things worse. From their experience with Sherif at the University of Oklahoma, Harvey and White already knew that when he was drinking, unless Carolyn was around to keep it in check, he became paranoid and mistrustful and blamed those around him when things weren’t going to plan.

  Sussman did what he could to dispel Sherif’s suspicions. Luckily, he had a thick skin. It had been developed during the war when, as a conscientious objector, he was assigned to work as a hospital orderly, and he had endured abuse from staff and patients at a time when many regarded people like him as traitors, spies, and worse. He tried to calm Sherif, taking dictation and endless notes on what to say the next day to keep staff in order.

  At first, Sussman might have taken pleasure in this role: the satisfaction of feeling needed and important when he had begun to feel some days like a real-life administrator of the camp rather than the research associate that Sherif had promised he’d be. He stayed up with Sherif most nights, doing what he could to reassure Sherif that the next day would go without a hitch. But soon the lack of sleep began getting to him too.

  Carolyn wrote doggedly every two or three days, telling Sherif news of herself and the children and summarising any mail that had arrived. On his birthday she sent him a new sweater as a gift. But he didn’t answer her letters. Finally, she wrote in a burst of exasperation — and probably sensing something was wrong — ‘For goodness sake, let us hear from you!’ But the world outside the campsite had disappeared for Sherif. The isolated camp in the woods had become his ‘whole universe’. I imagine it was in the middle of one of these sleepless nights, after a few glasses of whisky, that he finally replied to her letters. In an undated and rambling note, he wrote that life at the camp was ‘hectic’ and demanding. ‘There is so much to do, so many significant and insignificant item to attend [sic]. I have to think and think hard to put all of them together — that means a constant state of alertness, tension and perspective. It is hard on everybody and especially on me.’ Here he drew an arrow to the margin of the page and added: ‘I suppose I should not have expected any lighter load than this. It is not fair to expect persons who are working so hard here to coordinate smoothly their pieces in this whale of a project to which I grew up during the last twenty years with so much pain and sweat.’

  During the day he prowled the camp, making last-minute changes and increasingly inserting himself in group activities so he could observe the boys with his own eyes instead of relying on the observations of the men.

  In this third stage of the experiment, Sherif was aiming for outright conflict. When the Panthers found a large fly in their tent, their counsellor suggested they name it after the other team and burn it. OJ Harvey ‘took photos of the cremation’, and, to make sure he got good-enough photos, White wrote, another fly was caught and ‘the burning was repeated’. But over lunch the same day — the first time the boys had eaten together since their separation more than a week ago — the observers noted the boys stopped at one another’s tables for ‘friendly chat’.

  And Carper’s Pythons, instead of being fired up about their losses, were demotivated. Rather than the hoped-for talk of anger and revenge against their opposing team, the Pythons felt outclassed. Without enmity and competition, the experiment couldn’t progress to the next stage. Sherif had used what he called ‘frustration exercises’ successfully in his earlier study: incidents where the men secretly vandalised the property of one group so they would blame their opponents and retaliate. It had been the flint that sparked physical fights between the groups in his earlier study, and he decided to use it again now.

  In the mess hall, hearing the dejection of the Pythons, Sherif decided it was time to up the ante. He waited until Carper and his boys left, and White brought his victorious Panthers in for their dinner. Perhaps he instructed Sussman to do it, perhaps he did it himself, but while the boys were eating, someone took a knife to the Panthers’ tent on the other side of the clearing and cut the rope of their Panthers flag, pulled it to the ground, and stamped on it with muddy boots.

  The boys were di
smayed when they got back to the tent and found their flag trampled. Peter saw Mr Musee and Harry Ness passing nearby and called out, asking if they’d seen what happened. The two men came over. Sherif answered that he hadn’t seen anyone cut the rope, but that the other group had been in the vicinity earlier. The boys showed Harry Ness the vandalised flag. Then Sherif intervened and ‘asked Mr Ness if it might be possible to have the two sides discuss their complaints together’. It’s a sign of Sherif’s impatience that he interjected. Did any of the boys wonder why the camp caretaker — whose job was to chop wood, run errands, and keep the grounds and buildings clean — weighed in like this?

  Reading the men’s observation notes against Sherif’s notebook and the published version of the experiments, at times it was as if Sherif chose only what he wanted to see in the observation notes. He had read the men’s descriptions of the ballgame, with the boys’ spitting, name calling, and physical bullying, and interpreted it as the boys in one team discriminating against and belittling the other. In Sherif’s eyes, this was evidence a major hypothesis had been proven: ‘[g]roup members will prefer friends from within their (new) group … Subjects whose initial personal preferences are in the other group … will develop negative attitudes verging on enmity towards the outgroup …’ But he seemed to ignore the evidence that all the men watching had noted in one way or another — the anger and disappointment of both teams directed at the adults involved in the games. Harvey wrote how the Panthers accused him of ‘interference’ in the play, and argued with the umpire over his decision. When Sussman called a Panther runner safe when he clearly wasn’t, the Pythons yelled, ‘Kill the umpire!’ Carper’s Pythons discussed with him at dinner that they felt the Panthers’ counsellors were coaching them to victory. The adults’ attempts to fan enmity by skewing the scores, first for one group, then for the other, backfired. Despite the division of the two groups and the competition, the boys shared a common view that the adults were playing favourites.