by Gina Perry
Hollis’ pattern of resolving quarrels by vote and shortcutting disagreements made him popular with the other boys. Red, who tended to use his size and his fists to get his way, wasn’t well liked by the others, and the more he sensed it the more aggressive he became. The boys were torn between their liking for Hollis, who was jockeying with Red for the role of leader, and their desire to appease the bigger boy. The men noted how Red had ‘a pronounced tendency to rough up the smaller boys’ for his own amusement and how they resented the way he took over and allocated jobs. When Hood suggested the boys would need to dig a latrine at their hideout, Red ‘handed the shovel’ to one of the smaller boys, who later complained to staff, ‘We’re tired of just doing the things he leaves over.’ But the boy was too intimidated by Red to say it to his face.
Hood noted with satisfaction that by the end of the two-night camping trip a ‘toughness’ norm had emerged among the group, and gave plenty of examples to illustrate it. The boys’ games grew increasingly reckless, for one. At a reservoir, Red instigated a game of climbing the slippery dam wall, but made no effort to help the others up it. Three boys slipped, and Smut remembers his skinned knees and the combination of water and blood flowing down his lower legs. Despite these injuries, the men noted gleefully, the group frowned upon crying. It was Red who so often set the pace in games of daring, and under his influence none of the boys wanted to be seen as weak.
But for all their supposed toughness, the boys were happy to return to the familiarity of base camp in the late afternoon of the fifth day. That night, they had a campfire at the stone corral, where they told jokes and sang songs, accompanied by Bill on his ukulele. Hollis hung a hand-painted sign on their cabin door: Home Sweet Home.
Yet this was about to change.
While Hood’s Rattlers had been thrown in the deep end, left to deal with aggressive Red and the physical exertion of building latrines, pitching tents, and carrying water, back at the campsite Jack White’s group had been having an easier time of it. For the first few days, Davey Munroe was the leader of White’s boys. OJ had chosen him as a subject because he was a good athlete, but also, as the eldest of four, Davey was a good organiser. He had expressive black eyebrows that he wiggled as he spoke in a Donald Duck voice to cajole the others and get them on board, and the others looked to him to take charge in the first few days of camp.
By the second day, they had found a canoe near their hut — deposited there the night before by OJ and Sherif — and carried it downstream to a swimming spot. They were led by their junior counsellor, Bert Fay, who had recently fallen in love with geology (and would later make it his lifelong career), and along the way he pointed out fossils and interesting rock formations to the boys. In the water, the boys spotted a water moccasin and dubbed the place Moccasin Creek.
After their swim, the boys decided to build a rope bridge across the creek, and Davey coordinated the effort. A rather serious-looking boy called Will impressed them all with his knowledge of knots and the methodical way he measured out the spreader ropes. Dwayne, a skinny kid whose bony ankles stuck out from his too-short jeans, swam across the creek to tie the anchor ropes on either side. The job took most of the afternoon, and when it was finished, each of them crossed the creek, with boys on either side yelling advice as the bridge swayed over the rushing water. A chubby boy had trouble with the crossing, and he wobbled and several times looked like falling in. He got particularly loud applause when he made it to the other side.
‘You’re too fat,’ Dwayne told him when he stumbled off the bridge among the backslapping of the other boys. ‘You’ll break that bridge.’
‘Shut up,’ a few of the boys cried. Davey Munroe scowled at Dwayne and turned away.
‘I was an awkward kid, I always had my foot in my mouth,’ Dwayne told me on the phone. He had the confident voice of someone who had left that persona behind long ago. ‘My mother was always warning me. I used to say the first thing that popped into my head.’ His laugh was a sharp bark. ‘It was like I had no filter.’ His mother was always giving him advice about how to get on better with folks since they’d moved to Oklahoma City from their farm down south, he said, after his father got a job building a new turnpike.
Dwayne tried to make up for it the rest of the afternoon by making himself useful. He volunteered to hold the anchor ropes to keep the bridge steady when the boys wanted another turn walking across, and he built the campfire and got it going when the others had trouble.
Late in the afternoon, Virgil, the large boy, yelled out, pointing at a copperhead sliding towards them, just eight feet from where they were sitting. All the boys except for Dwayne huddled together as Jack White and Bert Fay hit it with a rock and killed it. ‘It didn’t bother me,’ Dwayne said. ‘I used to go hunting with my uncle, so I’d seen worse.’ He got them a stick to lift it up with so they could carry it off the path.
That night, while the boys were roasting potatoes and cooking hamburgers, junior counsellor Fay told them about the animals that used to be so plentiful in these parts, including bears and buffalo and mountain lions. After they’d gone to bed, the wind blew up and the boys listened to the rustling in the bushes outside. Perhaps it was the talk of mountain lions or the memory of the copperhead, writhing and bloodied, as the men pounded it with a rock, but one boy said that he missed his folks. Another boy started to sniffle. Will’s voice trembled: ‘They didn’t say anything about snakes.’ Davey told them all to settle, and the tent went quiet. In his sleeping bag, Dwayne silently prayed that the boys would like him better tomorrow.
8
Nation States
In the men’s office that night, when Jack White reported that two boys in his group were feeling homesick and a third was teetering, OJ Harvey sensed the change in Sherif’s mood like a change in the weather. Sherif leaned back in his chair, his head tilted towards the ceiling. He made a tutting noise that OJ recognised as a sign of disapproval.
OJ shook his head when he told me. ‘Oh lordy, if you think how much was involved — selecting and observing the subjects at their schools, going to their homes, visiting camps, arranging the buses. I’d spent a whole year on the logistics,’ OJ said. In total, he’d spent more than three hundred hours choosing the final twenty-two boys. And it seemed as though he had failed to exclude the types of boys who would get homesick. By now, the chair legs had hit the floor with a thud and Sherif was up out of his chair and pacing, his face like ‘thunder’.
‘Jack, go call the parents,’ OJ said quickly. ‘Tell them we’ll be bringing those two back home tomorrow.’ Then OJ plunged on with the next item on the agenda: plans for how they would let the two groups of boys know the next day that they weren’t alone in the park. What did Dr Sherif want them to say to the boys, OJ asked, and Sherif was soon distracted. But OJ could sense the tension in the man’s shoulders. Later that evening, Sherif would want to go over and over this fact of homesickness and where OJ had gone wrong, talking long into the night. OJ realised then how tired he was. They all were, and it was just the beginning of the study. ‘I had to nip it in the bud.’
At first I thought OJ was talking about his swift action to send the boys home, but he was talking about Sherif. That night, when the meeting was over and the only sounds were the whirr of crickets and the burp of frogs along the creek, OJ got in the truck, let out the brake, and rolled it down the road before starting the engine. He drove for eight miles, along dark country roads, until he saw the small can by the roadside, the secret signal that marked the turn-off, where he pulled in, switched off his lights, and bounced the truck slowly along the track until he came to a lean-to lit up by the light of a glowing fire. Then he made the reverse journey, this time with a bottle of moonshine.
OJ laughed at the memory. ‘I had to go get that bootleg whisky every night. He was under a lot of pressure. We both were. Back at camp I’d fix him up with moonshine, and away we’d go.’ The moonshine, much s
tronger than store-bought whisky, took the edge off Sherif’s tension until the next morning. It was the only way either Sherif or OJ could get any sleep.
The next day, the Rattlers heard the sounds of the other group playing on the baseball diamond and, according to the men’s notes, they reacted with dismay and immediately told Bob Hood they wanted to challenge the interlopers to a game. But I wondered at this aggressiveness of the Rattlers, and whether the searing heat and the tension of keeping up with Red the bully had made them irritable.
In contrast, when Jack White told his group that there was another lot of boys in the park, they were enthusiastic, pestering him about meeting up to play ball. Back at camp, in preparation for the ballgame they had chosen a team name — the Eagles — and stencilled it on hats, t-shirts, and a flag the men had provided. The Rattlers group did the same. ‘They were like little nation states. Both sides labelled everything as “ours” — “our creek” and “our mess hall”. They pretty much claimed the whole place as their own,’ OJ said with a chuckle.
As early as the second day of the camp, the observers’ description of each group had already started to take a particular shape. The Rattlers ‘conformed to a tough norm’, and the observers’ notes reflect a view of them as brave. When they hurt themselves — one burned his hand with fireworks, another dropped a heavy rock on his toe — they didn’t cry or complain but ‘cursed instead’, the book the men later wrote about the experiment reported. The Rattlers were so determined to be stoic that ‘staff had to remember to check’ one boy’s injured wrist and knee ‘because he never mentioned them’.
Smut remembers hurting himself in a dam-climbing game. ‘We would climb to the top of the dam wall and then slide down on our tail ends. I cut my leg pretty good. The men doctored it and bandaged it up.’ But it was painful, and when Smut cried, Hood wrote ‘he did not conform to this tough norm, and was completely ignored’ by the others in his group. Along with the ‘tough’ norm went a definite approval of cursing. Hood described how one night, two of the smaller Rattlers pulled out their baby teeth together, and Hood cited this as further evidence of the ‘toughness’ that had become the group’s rule.
The men described White’s Eagles as less masculine but more caring towards one another. After the two boys were sent home, the group developed a rule against homesickness, and they were scrupulous about taking turns to say grace. And while ‘swimming in the nude’ became standard practice, those boys who couldn’t swim stayed back at camp to fix lunch for the others. Unlike the Rattlers, who had named themselves in honour of the shooting of the snakes, most of the Eagles were frightened of the captured snake, and had given themselves a group name only after they heard there was a second group in the campsite, who they had wanted to play with instead of fight. The Rattlers dubbed their largest boy ‘Red’ for his ‘size and toughness’, but nicknames in the Eagles were ‘Nudie’ (for the boy who had instigated swimming with no bathers) and ‘Marilyn’ (for the boys who, during skits and songs, entertained the group by doing a ‘burlesque dance’, imitating Marilyn Monroe).
White made no direct comment in his notes about the Eagles’ machismo or lack thereof, but OJ recalled them distinctly as ‘crybabies’, with none of the bravado of the Rattlers. ‘A Rattler couldn’t cry,’ OJ told me. ‘And the Eagles, they were cissies.’ He chuckled. ‘How on earth do these different norms emerge?’
It seemed to me that the personality of the group’s leaders had a lot to do with it. The Rattler boys acted tough, and they cursed to appease the domineering Red. The tender-hearted Eagles valued fairness, and their leader, Davey, had been swift and clear in his disapproval of Dwayne’s tactless comments about other boys. Perhaps the Rattlers were acting tough to hide their vulnerability, and the Eagles were praying as a way of holding on to the values of home in a world where things were new and strange.
On Thursday 24 June, the fifth day of camp and the day each group heard there was a second group in the park, the men organised the first of the ‘frustration exercises’, designed to foster solidarity in one group and stir animosity in the other. It was Eagle boy Davey’s eleventh birthday, and that evening OJ and Sherif organised a surprise birthday party to ‘cement group feeling’ among the crew that had already lost two members to homesickness. The cook had baked a cake, and the boys crowded round and sang happy birthday to Davey, who blew out the candles in one long breath. Davey asked Jack White if he could invite the other boys. But in order to ‘stir animosity’ in the other group, White replied that the others were busy and there wasn’t enough cake to go around.
After the singing and the cake, the boys played charades. Across the creek, the Rattlers sat around their campfire listening to the singing and the hip-hip-hoorays, excluded from the fun. It reminded me of a story I’d heard when visiting Alcatraz: how the worst night of the year was New Year’s Eve, as when there was a southerly wind the prisoners in their cells could hear the sound of music and laughter and the tinkle of glasses blown across the water from the San Francisco Yacht Club. I could imagine how the Rattlers must have felt: cast in the role of outsiders, the boys likely sat there feeling a mixture of resentment and loneliness.
The next morning, Sherif’s voice was both solemn and excited as he leaned into the microphone and told the tape recorder that the team had hidden in the mess hall to record interactions, ‘Today, June 27, 1954, we have started Stage 2 of this experiment. There is going to be a series of contests or a tournament. Knives and medals will be used as rewards …’
The announcement of the tournament was a big day for the men. As with the competition in the Middle Grove study, it marked the end of the first stage of the experiment, which they called ‘in-group formation’.
OJ made the announcement to the Rattlers first, and then to the Eagles. When the Eagles had finished clearing away their dishes, OJ proclaimed that instead of just a ballgame, the counsellors for the two groups had gotten together and organised a ‘nice surprise’ tournament with ‘some fine prizes’. I imagined Sherif leaning in the doorway between the kitchen and the hall, sipping a cup of coffee and feigning a lack of interest, but his eyes following every move, every facial expression and verbal reaction of the boys. He would have nodded to himself approvingly as OJ made Sherif’s careful script sound like a casual announcement.
Yet as OJ outlined the activities involved and the point-scoring system, the Eagles were restless; they seemed overawed, rather than excited. Some, like Dwayne, were bothered by the extravagance of the prizes — a ribbon and a jackknife for each boy, as well as a trophy for the winning team, and nothing at all for the losers? On the tape you can hear the worry in their voices at the idea of such a serious competition. Perhaps Davey was concerned that the other boys were mad they hadn’t been invited to his birthday party. ‘Maybe we could just make friends with these guys,’ one boy said to OJ. Some of the others agreed that it didn’t seem fair not to have prizes for the losers, and that the group who lost the tournament were likely to be resentful. ‘Someone is going to get mad and hold a grudge,’ Will said nervously.
To OJ Harvey and Jack White, the boys’ reaction was further evidence that the Eagles were cissies rather than toughies. ‘They were timid,’ OJ said, ‘they weren’t rearing to go like the Rattlers.’ But I imagined some gesture of impatience from Sherif prompted Jack to step in. ‘Wait up,’ he said as the boys got ready to leave. ‘These here are real expensive knives, the best steel that can be bought in McAlester.’
‘Listen to Jack,’ OJ admonished them.
But the boys were eager to leave. Suddenly the friendly ballgame they had suggested had been transformed into a full tournament, including three baseball games, three tug-of-war contests, a game of touch football, three tent pitchings, daily cabin inspection, a skits-and-songs contest, and a treasure hunt — a total of sixteen events, scheduled over four days, in 100-degree heat. No wonder they were eager to get back to their swimming hole to p
lay and cool off. A full-on tournament where the winner got all the prizes didn’t seem fair. And despite OJ’s attempts to convince them that it was an unexpected bonus, it must have sounded more like hard work than fun.
Not that I could find any mention of the Eagles’ reluctance in the book the men later wrote, The Robbers Cave Experiment: intergroup conflict and cooperation. The book describes both groups at the end of this stage as rearing to compete. They were ‘unanimous’ and ‘insistent’, so much so that ‘delaying the contest became increasingly difficult’, the men wrote, as if they had to hold the boys back.
The book describes the experiment’s three stages as a smooth narrative. At the end of this first stage, the book stated, each group had a name and a ‘definite group structure’. They had flags, a symbol of their identity; they had group norms, or shared ways of doing things, like the nicknames they gave some boys; they had taken ‘ownership’ of territory. But how much of a hand did the men have in this remarkably neat unfolding of events? In the book, the researchers were invisible, their role kept carefully backstage. The story about how one group of boys named themselves the Rattlers in honour of their gun-slinging leader is not included, nor does it mention the party and games that favoured one group and fed the antipathy of the excluded boys.
The audiotapes, the handwritten notes, the memories of some of the boys I spoke with, as well as OJ, create a more complex picture. What else was being left out, I wondered, and who, if anyone, was playing the role of scientific conscience of this experiment and making sure the men were maintaining some kind of objectivity?
Towards the end of the first stage, Sherif wrote to his wife:
… My Carolyn — your letter and your phone call yesterday brought a warm touch to our hectic but exciting life here which is always on the move in various colorful and ever changing ways. One minute we’ll be attending to the drainage of boys’ showers here, the next moment it may be a highly abstract problem in group relations … We are in a fascinating transition stage now. One group adopted the name of Rattlers last night at the Robber’s cave during their camp fire. The other group named their swimming place, camp fire, and cabin … The great likelihood is that stage II will start to-morrow. The boys of one group are busy now 100 yards away from here putting their … name … on their shirts and caps …