by Gina Perry
If the two groups of boys seemed to have melded in the first week of the camp, Sherif and his fellow researchers seemed to have too. Gone was any mention in Sherif’s letters of the desperate loneliness he’d felt the year before or the melodramatic view of himself struggling alone under the yoke of a ‘Herculean’ task. In his letters, the first person ‘I’ had disappeared, and he refers constantly to ‘we’.
But OJ knew that Sherif’s jubilance could evaporate as quickly as it came. And also, at the first sign of a problem, how quick Sherif was to lay blame on one or all of his staff. After the announcement of the tournament and prizes failed to get the Eagles enthused, Sherif had begun to hector Jack White for not doing enough to get them riled up. OJ found that keeping Sherif busy helped. Despite his lack of practical skills, Sherif got great satisfaction from acting the role of handyman. As well as covertly observing, Sherif helped OJ with the demanding practicalities of the camp and arrangements that were often last minute. They had the broad outline of the three stages mapped out, but exactly how each group would spend each day, and what equipment and supplies they needed, were all decided the night before.
‘Our planning was one day at a time, for the most part. It was very intense,’ OJ told me. Sherif helped OJ unload equipment and supplies from the truck, prepared the baseball pitch for a game, unblocked drains, chopped wood, and delivered food for cookouts, where he and OJ lingered to observe preparations. They tried not to arouse the boys’ suspicion. ‘Early on, we started using a camera all over the place so the boys wouldn’t be bothered by cameras. And we tried to keep the note-taking out of the boys’ view. It was a task all right,’ OJ said.
But obviously they hadn’t managed to keep themselves completely out of sight. Sixty years later, Smut Smith told me, ‘I wasn’t surprised when you told me it was an experiment because I do remember the men had notepads that they wrote on. I wasn’t suspicious at the time, but I do remember that vividly.’
Smut’s observation of the men taking notes suggests that the research team had learned little from the failed 1953 study about the curiosity of the boys or that the observers themselves were subject to the boys’ scrutiny. Despite the men’s description of apparently scrupulous and surreptitious methods of recording, it was obvious that there was a gap between the ideal of an experiment as it was described in their publications and the reality of its execution.
On the day the tournament began, the Eagles voted Will captain of their team even though Davey was their unofficial leader. Will was their best ball-player. He applied the same methodical and patient approach to games as he had to the knot-tying on their rope bridge. The men were pleased with the choice because they felt it would likely head off Will’s tendency to homesickness. Davey Munroe took the vote with good grace, pounding Will on the back in congratulations.
In their cabin, Will gave the group a pep talk about staying focused during the game. The nine boys set off in their new t-shirts, with Davey carrying their flag, which featured a picture of an eagle with its wings outspread. They marched through the park and crossed the small creek and climbed up onto the baseball pitch, looking forward to meeting the other group of boys. When they arrived at the pitch and saw eleven Rattlers lined up and staring at them in sullen silence, the Eagles went quiet.
In photos, the Rattlers were strung out in a long line, watching the new group warily as they approached. I guessed that it was Red who was waving a flag with a large black snake on it and scowling. Hollis stood with his hands in his back pockets, sizing them up as the Eagles boys approached.
Perhaps Sherif sat on the sidelines with his back against a tree, his cap tipped back as if he had casually settled in to watch the game.
The Eagles were unnerved by the unfriendly reception. Davey let the flag droop and trail in the dirt. Once the game started, the Eagles were alarmed by Red’s cursing, and that the umpire did nothing to rebuke him. Red jeered, calling them ‘dumbasses’, and Virgil, on bat, ‘Tubby’ and ‘Little Black Sambo’, and a few of his teammates joined in. Davey defended Virgil and retaliated by calling one of the Rattlers a ‘retard’, but once the game entered its middle stages the insults died down.
At the end of the game, which the Rattlers won 16–14, they gave three cheers for the Eagles, a fact that Sherif scribbled in his notes, underlining the phrase ‘Exhibition of good sportsmanship on the whole (Am.norm)’ as a reminder of something to watch out for.
Back at the cabin, Eagles captain Will berated the boys for ignoring his earlier instructions and getting distracted by the tactics of the other team. They resolved that in future games they would ignore any cursing from the Rattlers and not engage in it themselves.
That night, after supper, the tug of war started. Each team lined up on one side of a heavy white rope, which Dwayne remembered was rough and scratchy in their hands. Straining at the rope, the Rattlers pulled one Eagle after another over to their side. Afterwards, they marched off together, singing, ‘The first Eagle hit the deck, parley vous, the second Eagle hit the deck, parley vous!’ all the way to their cabin on the far side of the park.
I imagined their voices carrying through the twilight, the sky streaked with violent pink as the sun went down, and a man stepping behind a nearby tree to listen and watch.
The Eagles stood around the white rope now, tumbled in the dirt. Davey kicked at the rope. ‘They’re much bigger than us.’
‘They’re eighth-graders — they must be, for sure!’ Will’s voice trembled and he looked about to cry.
Will turned to Davey. ‘And you! Why’d you drop the rope? You dropped the rope!’
‘We were beat,’ Davey said, shrugging his shoulders in a gesture of hopelessness.
The book reported the conversation above, naming each boy’s role in the episode that followed. On their way back to the cabin, the dejected Eagles spotted the Rattlers flag, which had been left on the backstop. They pulled it down and tried unsuccessfully to tear it. Then ‘someone’ suggested they burn it, the book notes. Who was the unnamed ‘someone’, I wondered? And who gave them the matches? The boys lit the flag and hung the burnt remnant on the backstop before running off.
‘The burning of the flag was exactly like a declaration of war,’ OJ said to me.
Of course, there was retaliation when the Rattlers found the remains of their flag the next morning. They swarmed towards the Eagles, and as they approached the pitch, shouting that the Eagles were ‘bums’ and ‘little shits’, some of them rushed forward and seized the Eagle flag out of Davey’s hands and ran off with it. Red grabbed Davey in a headlock and wrestled him to the ground, and they rolled in the dirt until Jack White and Bob Hood rushed onto the pitch to break it up.
But the fight electrified the Eagles. They huddled together before the game and, at Dwayne’s urging, said a fervent prayer before playing baseball with fierce energy and focus. The strategy they’d agreed on the night before was to fight fair, to be good sports, and not to cuss or brag in front of the other team. Despite the provocation of the Rattlers before the game and their continued cat-calling, the Eagles didn’t take the bait.
The Eagles were ecstatic when they won the game.
‘See? Didn’t I say so?’ Dwayne ran round excitedly asking each boy in the team, attributing their win to their prayers. But Virgil said the Rattlers lost because they cursed so much. Still, the Eagles gave three cheers for the Rattlers, who had felt so confident of winning at the start and were now downcast: Sherif wrote in his notes they were feeling ‘very low’.
In their book, the men noted, ‘This flag-burning started a chain of events that made it unnecessary for the experimenters to introduce special situations of mutual frustration for the two groups.’ He made it sound as if the men simply stood back and let the drama unfold. But it was far from that straightforward. Sherif was clearly bothered at the end of the game when the Eagles gave three cheers for the losing team. In his notes,
he commented anxiously that the earlier friction had evaporated, and wrote that what he observed was ‘the potency of the thoroughly ingrained sportsmanship norm’. He was troubled too because it raised the spectre of the failed 1953 study and the rules of fair play those boys had insisted on during games.
Back at their cabin after the loss, the Rattlers were turning on one other, ‘dejected because of the loss and fatigued from heat and exertion … tempers were short and the bickering went from bad to worse,’ Bob Hood wrote in his notes. Anxious that the boys were directing their aggression and blame towards their own members instead of to the other group, Sherif called a hurried meeting with OJ. It was time for another ‘frustration episode’ to bring the Rattlers together as a team and to kickstart conflict. But this time, the saintly Eagles would be the victims.
Close to midnight, the Rattlers huddled outside their cabin. That day, the Eagles had beaten the Rattlers in a tug of war by sitting down while they held the rope, which the Rattlers felt was ‘unfair tactics’. According to Sherif, ‘the mood was definitely favourable to a raid’. The Rattlers had painted their faces with soot from the fire ‘commando-style’, and the whites of their eyes glowed in the dark. Suddenly Hollis shot forward and they followed him, running, doubled over, across the patch of dirt between their cabin and the mess hall.
They moved as a pack across the creek and then paused again on the other side. Hollis was whispering and gesturing. Bill shot out ahead and hoisted himself up to the window of the Eagles’ cabin and threw himself against it, falling through the screen with a crash. A howl went up, and a blinding light went off as Bob Hood, supposedly being surreptitious, snapped the first photo. Boys yelled and shouted and whooped. Some boys ran around the building in circles; others ran inside. Red was yelling, ‘Eagles are chickens! Eagles are chickens!’ Inside someone was crying. Two boys had jumped out of bed and were running towards the doorway, waving their arms. Red shook the frame of one of the double bunks and, as two boys huddled under their blankets, he whooped and howled, picking things up and throwing them — books, towels, and other possessions — before he followed the others out again, where they pounded across the park in the dark.
It was all over in a few minutes, but in the Eagles’ cabin it was bedlam. No one could find the lanterns, so they couldn’t see. Someone was sobbing. Will was yelling ‘You yellowbellies!’ but no one was sure who he was yelling at, the Rattlers or the boys, like Virgil, who had stayed in bed, pretending to be asleep, until the noise and shouting was over. Jack White appeared in the doorway with a flashlight. The boys went quiet as White played the light across the trampled clothing, the books and cards spilled on the floor. Then they all started talking at once. Someone said they should go get the other boys and retaliate, but White said no. So what was White going to do about it? Will demanded. The Rattlers should be disqualified from the tournament for being such sore losers, Davey chipped in. White said he’d talk to OJ Harvey. In the meantime, Bert had arrived with some spare lanterns and the boys decided to clean up straightaway, rather than wake to the mess in the morning. As they shifted their beds and picked up the clothes, they went over and over what had happened. Virgil and Davey took a lantern outside to find some rocks so they could fill their socks with them and use them as weapons in case the Rattlers came back.
‘We didn’t like that other group, that’s for sure,’ Bill Snipes said. He had just retired after more than forty-five years in the Oklahoma police force, first as an officer, then as a detective.
‘We tried to outdo them, and then we started doing things to the Eagles group, raiding their cabin, messing up their stuff. It started with the tug of war,’ he continued loudly. He was taking me for a spin around Oklahoma City in his old Jaguar. Low to the ground, it roared and rattled, which at the best of times would have made it too noisy to talk, but was even trickier given Bill was hard of hearing.
‘I remember we called the Eagles group a lot of bad names. It was almost like the counsellors were building this animosity. Then we raided each other’s cabins. I climbed through their window and almost fell on Davey Munroe. I woke him up and he was not happy. He started swinging at me. We tore their place up. They did the same to us. But I don’t remember who started it.’
Bill might not remember who started it, but it was the staff who kept the animosity going. The boys clearly looked to the men to police the misbehaviour of the rival group. The next morning, when White visited the Eagles in their cabin, there was no longer any talk of revenge, and they told White that the Rattlers should be disqualified from the tournament. But White suggested they could even the tournament score by dumping mud in the Rattlers cabin while the other group were at breakfast. That way, the Rattlers would lose cabin inspection and the Eagles would take the lead.
Returning from breakfast to find buckets of dirt upended in their cabin and their clothes and bedding on the floor was all the provocation the Rattlers needed. By the afternoon’s touch football game, any sign of guilt on the part of the Rattlers was gone. They marched to the ground with Will’s jeans, now emblazoned with orange paint reading ‘The Last of the Eagles’, swinging on a new flagpole that they carried side by side with their Rattlers flag.
That week of the tournament, each day was like a tug of war, with the barometer in the mess hall inching up, putting the Eagles ahead one day, the Rattlers the next. Manipulating the scores in games was too risky, but there were other ways to control the scoreboard. ‘We cheated a bit. We wanted them to be neck-and-neck right to the last, so we created things like cabin inspection and songs and skits so we could keep the points close,’ OJ said.
On the night before the end of the tournament, White argued forcefully for making the Eagles the winners. ‘They were less sturdy, their morale was already low, and we figured if they lost, the study would be over. They’d want to go home,’ OJ remembered. ‘We knew the Eagles would fall apart if they lost. We knew the Rattlers were a stronger group, they could handle losing.’
When Will had seen the Rattlers parading his stolen jeans around the football ground as a trophy, his homesickness had returned. Virgil, who the Rattlers had continually mocked during the contests as ‘Fatty’, had also written home, saying how much he was missing his folks. Sherif regarded the name-calling, the skirmishes, the raids, and the retaliation as proof that competition leads to hostility. But the breakdown of the relationship between the boys carried risks, and to lose any more boys from the already depleted Eagles team now, after getting this far, would be a catastrophe. Sherif wrote in his notes, ‘We couldn’t take a chance on the Eagles getting dis-integrated.’ OJ and Sherif decided to take White’s advice.
The scores were so close at the end of the five days that the final event, the treasure hunt, would be the decider. The team who found their treasure fastest would win the tournament, and the knives, medals, and trophy.
Both groups were quiet and fidgety as Bob Hood made the final calculations on his clipboard. ‘Now, for the results of the last contest, the time for the Rattlers was ten minutes and fifteen seconds. The Eagles’ time was eight minutes and thirty-eight seconds, which gives the Eagles the —’ I couldn’t hear the rest of Hood’s announcement on the audiotape for the screaming and cries that came from the exultant Eagles, who, the observer notes told me, were jumping and hugging one another. Will ‘cried with joy’ and Dwayne danced around holding the trophy, with each Eagle taking a turn to kiss it while the Rattlers were ‘glum, dejected, and remained silently seated on the ground’. The tape didn’t record what happened next and nor do the observers’ notes, perhaps because it was an unwelcome spectacle. The men wrote in their book how during the tournament the ‘good sportsmanship’ norm ‘gave way’ to ‘hurling invectives’ and ‘derogation of the out-group’. The Eagles gave three cheers for the losing Rattlers, a fact Dwayne doesn’t remember but doesn’t find surprising. ‘We would have been so relieved it was over,’ he said. ‘The end of the tournamen
t meant the end of the fighting.’
The last thing Sherif wanted was any spontaneous gestures of reconciliation between the groups. The men had an impromptu meeting immediately afterwards, and in it, tensions ran high. This was the point in the study the year before when things began to fall apart. OJ told me how in the office Sherif jabbed his finger at White, accusing him of jeopardising the research, of not doing enough to fan animosity. White said nothing. One of his favourite sayings was ‘He who shouts first loses the argument’, his daughter Cindy told me, but he and OJ had exchanged a look.
OJ looked out the window in his Boulder home, at the mountains. Jack White had died in 1988, and OJ still missed him. ‘Jack was the dearest friend I ever had. We went hunting and fishing and riding and telling lies about the fish we caught and drinking …’
I gave him a moment, looked away.
He cleared his throat. ‘Where was I?’
‘I was angry, but I took care not to show it,’ he continued. ‘I said, “Now, Dr Sherif, you remember our agreement. You don’t do that.”’ And he looked from me to Jack and back again. He knew that if I wasn’t allowed to be in charge, Jack and I would both quit. I didn’t have to spell it out, but he understood it. Later, he apologised. But it came close. It came close to being ugly.’
OJ had averted an emotional showdown this time. But what struck me about the scene that he described was what it revealed about power. Contrary to Sherif’s own theory, the leader of the group was not the person with the most status but the one with the most power to derail events or deliver the study they had in mind.