The Lost Boys

by Gina Perry

  Sherif left the camp later that afternoon, leaving Harvey and White to dismantle what was left of the study.

  When Doug heard the story of how the camp ended, he was thrilled. ‘I would have loved to have been part of that. I feel like I was there, talking about it. I’ve thought about it a lot the last few months: how it was just a few years after World War II, and atrocities and what people will do to others was not far from people’s minds, but to know that the boys had absorbed the sportsmanship concept — I think that’s what it is, anyway — to a greater extent than the combative concept is really appealing to me. It’s been a great opportunity to rethink a part of my life. It’s led me to think about a lot of things in different ways, good ways. It’s very uplifting!’

  We were sitting on the couch, facing the window that looked over his lush summer garden. Doug pulled at the ears of his little black dog, resting at his feet. But what exactly his parents knew about the camp still bothers him. ‘I once described my memory of the camp as a “dark memory”: not sharp and vivid but murky, unpleasant.’ Doug paused and scratched the dog under the chin. ‘And no one in my family ever talked about it afterwards. It was not made part of our family history, which is very unusual — except for my dad’s experiences in World War II, our family talked about everything. But not this camp. It’s like my family blocked it as much as I blocked it.’

  Doug, like all of the boys I’d spoken to, didn’t remember his parents telling him that it was anything other than a summer camp. But Doug thinks his father likely guessed. It’s a theory he came up with after talking it over with his brother and sister. ‘My father revered doctors his entire adult life. He was in the medical field — he was a pharmacist — and all his friends were doctors. But he considered psychiatrists and psychologist to be “quacks”, people who didn’t know what they were talking about, who were harmful and of no value. And I think it’s very possible that once he found out that he got duped into sending me off to this thing, he held that against the profession.’

  But Brian believes his parents never knew, and he wondered about his own role in keeping them in the dark. ‘They would have asked me when I got home what it was like, and I wasn’t the kind of kid who kept secrets — not at that point, anyway.’ Perhaps he felt protective, I suggested, he didn’t want to make them feel guilty? But it was as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘I could talk to my mother about anything,’ Brian said. ‘Why didn’t I talk to her about this?’

  Sherif set out to disprove theories that prejudice and conflict sprang from human nature, an authoritarian disposition, or a pathological personality, or were an expression of displaced frustration. Prejudice, hostility, and violence were the result of the attitudes and relationships between groups of people in society. Take a normal group of well-adjusted people who are friends, he argued, put them in groups competing against one another for a valued prize, and hostility, hatred, and even violence is inevitable. Friends will become enemies. For Sherif, the experiment was a failure because it did not deliver a scenario he had clear in his mind. In Sherif’s scheme of things, a ‘crucial’ test of his theory was that the ‘budding friendships’ between the boys in the first days of camp would be reversed.

  But none of the men seemed to have noticed that the staff enacted their own scenario of group prejudice and conflict. Initially a cohesive team focused on the goal of a groundbreaking study, under the powerful personality of Sherif the staff group fractured, Kelman and Carper were shunned and sidelined, and Sussman became a scapegoat for Sherif’s frustration. The only violence in the camp was Sherif aiming to slug Sussman and Harvey threatening him with a block of wood.

  I lost touch with Doug for a while after my visit. When I heard from him again he told me he’d been out of action, first in hospital, then for months in rehab. He’d been racing his mountain bike up a climb in the western part of New York State, ignoring the pain in his chest, until he collapsed with a heart attack. By the time they got him to the little local hospital, the staff decided he was ‘gone’, but a visiting cardio specialist injected him with ‘clot busters’ and saved him. He’d had a quintuple bypass requiring nine hours of open-heart surgery. After four months of rehab, he was just about to go back to work. He was playing it down, but it was clear that Doug had almost died.

  ‘You know, I don’t know if learning about this experiment had anything to do with it,’ Doug said in passing. Doug has a habit of saying serious things in a joking way that makes it hard to know whether to take him seriously or not, and by the time I’d drawn breath to follow this up, he’d moved on again. They say after open-heart surgery that all that handling and prodding of your heart makes you feel depressed. But was this what I had done too, prodding and poking around, getting into people’s memories, dredging up half-formed recollections they would have preferred to let lie?

  Doug said that being off work and recuperating, he’d had a lot of time to think, and he’d come to a different conclusion about the experiment this time. ‘It was wrong, by which I mean not just poorly planned but poorly judged. They misunderstood human nature. They certainly misunderstood children. Ultimately they were able to manipulate children, but they were morally wrong. And that’s where I came down on it.’

  So his feelings about it had changed?

  ‘Yes, and one of the things that changed it was having gone through my own health situation. I’ve learned from talking to somebody who gave me some great advice recently about this, that if you’ve had something significant happen to you — in this case it was trauma — the whole bit about going back through it cathartically is a mistake. All it does is make you relive it. It never diminishes it, it enhances it. It’s better to respect it, understand what happened, and then get on with your life because you didn’t die and you’re okay. Keep moving. And I think that translates to this camp thing for me a little bit. So while I was originally fascinated and glad, it doesn’t feel the same, it feels more like I was used. Not abused, but used. And that really makes me mad.’

  I was struck by the shift in Doug’s mood, the sense of anger and loss. I felt responsible in the sense that here I was, years later, unwittingly caught up and catching Doug up too in the moral ambiguity of Sherif’s experiment and its legacy. It didn’t matter how much I tried to be objective, I was tangled in the net of this history and its consequences.

  I thought of the other boys at this summer camp, who had bonded in the face of the men’s manipulation and defied the efforts of Sherif and the others to make them betray their friends and turn on them as enemies. Initially I construed that as a kind of victory, a triumph of the power of friendship to override adversity. A good-news story.

  But the fact that the boys had resisted did not mean they weren’t affected by the experience. Perhaps they had all put the summer of 1953 out of their minds, and this explained why for the boys I had spoken to, it was an effort to recall. It hinted not just at the ravages of time and memory but also at a suppressing of something they preferred to forget. Their participation in an experiment they had been unable to truly consent to had come at a cost. Debriefing the boys had been out of the question, given that Sherif had decided to run the study again, so they were sent home carrying doubts, secrets, unanswered questions. And now my presence — the researcher, a character in the broader frame of this story — had prompted an unofficial reckoning for some of them.

  How many other ‘lost boys’ did this era of social psychological experimentation generate, I wondered. How many psychological wounds were caused in the pursuit of scientific and historical understanding?

  7

  The Robbers Cave

  A year after Muzafer Sherif cancelled the Middle Grove experiment, he was behind the wheel of a university station wagon, heading south-east from Oklahoma City to Robbers Cave State Park. Sherif planted his foot on the gas. He drove like he was racing towards the future, the past disappearing in a cloud of dust behind him.

 
‘He just wanted to forget it,’ Herb Kelman says, leaning back in a chair beside a squeaking air conditioner that was losing the battle to keep the lounge room cool. The caretaker in the 1953 photos at Camp Talualac now has white hair swept back from a bald pate. He is clean-shaven, but he wears the same kind of heavy-framed black glasses that he wore back then.

  The details of the last dramatic last days of the Middle Grove experiment are not in any of Sherif’s files and boxes in the archives at Akron. But Herb Kelman has held onto his notes for sixty years because he was convinced that Sherif should have written about the study instead of trying to bury it. He’s dug out his notes and papers in preparation for my visit, and jokes that I’ve reinforced his habit of never throwing anything away. These days, Kelman has an international reputation as a pioneer in peace research. Since he retired from Harvard, he’s been trying to go through and sort all the papers and files that he’s brought home with him to his Cambridge apartment. At eighty-five, he is just back from Vienna, where he was awarded a Gold Medal of Honor from the city for his work in international peace research.

  ‘My feeling was an interesting thing happened, a terribly interesting thing happened!’ Kelman’s voice rises with excitement. ‘And it would be interesting to find out why it happened — these kids found their own way to reconciliation, and for anyone interested in these processes, it was a very exciting event! It didn’t have anything to do with the original experiment, but it was a great learning opportunity.’ He shook his head. ‘Yet it went against Sherif’s hypothesis and so he treated it as a failure. As far as he was concerned, the best thing to do with this study was to try and forget it. And to try as much as possible to blame it on others. It was easier for him to say it was a manipulation failure rather than to say, “There is some other variable operating here that I haven’t recognised in my theory.” Muzafer’s reaction was, “I wish this hadn’t happened. Take it away!”’

  Like Herb Kelman, Marvin Sussman didn’t want to forget the experiment either. He wrote to Sherif saying that even though he expected Sherif’s ‘continued mistrust’ and blame for the experiment’s failure, he believed it was important to write about its flaws: ‘You would then be actually making another contribution to Social Psychology. It seems to me and others that advances in group research are made both with successes and failures … Many social scientists have asked about the ’53 study and expect some kind of report.’

  But Sherif would have none of it. He was so intent on pushing the failed Middle Grove experiment out of his mind that six months after it was over, he still had not told the Rockefeller Foundation that he had aborted the study. It was only by chance that they found out. The Foundation received a letter of complaint from a man who had read about Sherif’s study in news reports of the Foundation’s 1953 annual report. The man wrote, asking:

  What is the professor’s background?

  Were the children in the camp underprivileged or orphans? If they had parents, did the parents know what the professor was doing to the minds and characters of their children?

  What benefit to humanity does your foundation expect to derive from the expenditure of $38,000 on this study?

  The Foundation contacted Sherif, asking for more detail about the experiment in order to draft a reply. In their exchange of letters, program officer Leland DeVinney was clearly dismayed at Sherif’s answer: ‘Do I understand correctly from your letter that the work last summer went only to the end of stage 2? If this is in fact true, is my inference justified that this must represent something of a disaster with respect to the main objectives of the grant?’

  Sherif replied saying that he just needed a little more time to run an additional small study, and to both reassure and distract the Foundation, he included the manuscript of his soon-to-be published book ‘Groups in Harmony and Tension’, which he described as a ‘manual’ for researchers containing his theory about group behaviour that he was about to test in his upcoming experiment. He didn’t mention that the major funded experiment — the 1953 study — was to be little more than a footnote in the book. Whether DeVinney bought this or remained sceptical, he reported to his superiors that

  Professor Sherif reported that a great deal had been accomplished to date as is evidence in the completion of the well-received book, Groups in Harmony and Tension, and in a number of research monographs and reports which are appearing in various journals. He feels it important, however, to re-check certain aspects of the field experiment during the coming summer before completing the project with the preparation of the final report …

  Sherif might have temporarily appeased the Rockefeller Foundation, but this 1954 trip to Robbers Cave was a last-ditch attempt, with just the crumbs of the original grant money, to rescue the project. No matter what undertakings he’d made to Harvey to hand over the reins on this next experiment, his instinct was to tighten his grip, not loosen it.

  ‘He was under enormous pressure,’ OJ Harvey told me. ‘He knew he had to make it work.’ And OJ, as I came to know him, felt the same. ‘We were both zealots, anti-Nazi. And we would have thrown ourselves off a cliff if it hadn’t worked.’

  OJ’s deteriorating eyesight made him a reluctant driver, so he had arranged for his friend and former student Gerry to pick me up at my motel on the highway. A bearish white-haired man with a gentle manner, Gerry told me on the drive that he hadn’t realised quite how much my trip meant to OJ until that morning, when his phone rang at dawn. It was OJ, checking once again that Gerry had the details right for my motel and pick-up time.

  We drove along the highway towards Boulder but then took a right-hand turn along a country road, past white picket fences and occasional long, low houses surrounded by paddocks, set back from the road. OJ came out to meet us. I recognised him from the photo I had seen of him posing with Sherif and White. He had the same open and curious smile, as if he was expecting the punchline of a joke. In his eighties, he was still sprightly, and although his features were softened with age, I glimpsed the eager young man with his hands on his hips I’d seen in the photos from Middle Grove in 1953, looking determined and gazing into the distance, as if he could see a better future there. Despite fifty years in Boulder, OJ’s Oklahoma accent is unmistakeable.

  The mountains visible from his back porch were capped with snow. OJ had been a shrewd businessman as well as a professor of psychology at the University of Colorado, and the house was large and comfortable, with long leather couches, slate floors, a throw rug over a rocking chair. It was a far cry from the sharecropper house where he grew up in south-east Oklahoma. OJ was proud of his roots. He picked up a long stick with a string net at one end from where it leaned against the wall. It was a ball stick, he said, used in a traditional Choctaw game. He swooped it through the air. Did I know that Native Americans invented lacrosse?

  But beneath his courteous manner, OJ seemed a bit nervous. I asked him what ‘OJ’ stood for, and he said his parents believed that if you named your child after someone bad, you inoculated them from the same behaviour. OJ was called after a notorious cattle rustler who preyed on poor families like his own, stealing away their livelihoods in the middle of the night.

  Since then, I’ve discovered that OJ was the first Native American man to get a psychology PhD. His friend Jack White, from the Kiowa tribe, was probably the second. Not that OJ would have told me that fact himself. He has a horror of bragging: he says that’s an ‘Okie’ thing. As a boy, he used to read to his parents at night because neither of them could read or write. OJ’s father impressed upon him that just because he could read, it didn’t make him any better than anyone else. How ironic that he teamed up with a professor who boasted that his theory eclipsed all other explanations of group behaviour, who dismissed Freudian psychological theory as ‘one-sided’, a ‘failure’ that lead to ‘blind alleys’. Was this another reason Sherif and OJ worked so well together, I wondered, with OJ as a kind of ballast to Sherif’s grandiose cl
aims?

  Despite OJ’s protestations that he had forgotten a lot of important detail, his recall was impressive. We began talking about Robbers Cave, but first I wanted to know about the earlier 1953 study. The story he wanted to tell was the scientific narrative. But it was impossible to talk about the experiments and the ideas they were exploring without also talking about Sherif’s personality. ‘I’m getting personal now,’ OJ would say, as if what he was about to confess was irrelevant. And I would straighten up, pay closer attention.

  By the summer of 1954, Sherif’s dejection and depression was gone. He was excited as he drove into what he called the Wild West, towards that corner of the country close to where the borders of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas cross. He had pushed last year’s failed experiment to the back of his mind and was full of a nervous energy.

  OJ sat in the passenger seat. In the intervening year, he had found an alternative experiment for his dissertation, a comparison of group solidarity among lower- and upper-class young men in Oklahoma; completed his PhD; and had a postdoctoral researcher position lined up at Yale for the fall. He stayed quiet and let Sherif talk. Sherif’s confidence seemed to have returned. This time, he told OJ, things would be different.

  Sherif trusted OJ, and asked his former student to call him Muzafer. But OJ was wary. He’d worked with him long enough to observe the bouts of paranoia and erratic behaviour that buffeted Sherif and then those around him. ‘I had to keep him at arm’s length because he was just so temperamental,’ he confessed.

  Sherif talked rapidly as he drove, waving his hands about and seeming to pay little attention to the road, telling OJ what they must do when they arrived. But OJ had his own plans for what would happen when they got there. He’d spent the past twelve months mapping them out. He was worried. It seemed that Sherif might have forgotten about their bargain.