The Lost Boys

by Gina Perry

  A wave of anti-communism was sweeping across America in the late 1940s. Unlike so many of his peers, Sherif seemed indifferent or unaware that political conservatives would view such research as suspiciously pro-communist. It was a dangerous time for a psychological scientist to be seen to be anything but impartial. Especially one without a visa, whose status in the United States was still so uncertain. But he seemed oblivious to the peril of expressing such a view.

  Between the early draft of a paper about the study that he sent to Hovland in November 1949 and its publication in April 1950, China fell to the communists, the Soviets detonated the atom bomb, and Senator Joe McCarthy made the sensational announcement that he had a list of the names of communist spies in the state department.

  Hovland suggested changes to the draft. Given that Hovland provided high-level advice to a number of leading organisations who funded communications research, including the US Air Force, he was well placed to advise Sherif. Hovland — the precise, careful experimenter — was also on the board of several military-related funding bodies and knew both how to frame research findings to suit an audience and how important it was to appear neutral and systematic. In his own research, Hovland kept his focus narrow and was very careful never to show his hand when it came to ideology or beliefs.

  This wasn’t unusual. Small-group research, which had thrived during the pre-war years, was adapted for the military, so social scientists, and particularly those with a political-activist past, were careful to reframe their projects as politically neutral. For example, those who promoted racial equality and argued that systemic injustices such as poor education, poor nutrition, and poverty disproportionately affected minorities reframed their stance away from notions of changing the balance of political power. Researchers in racial prejudice keen to distance themselves from leftist politics shifted away from social revolution to politically safer territory. Instead, they focused on just one part of the solution — altering people’s attitudes and thinking, which had none of the connotations of social revolution. In a time when the boundaries of what was politically acceptable shrank daily, appearing as an impartial and value-free scientist with no political allegiances and no commitment to an ideology offered some protection against attack.

  Sherif took Hovland’s advice to heart. In the new draft, a kind of paralysis overtakes his writing. Gone are references to class, how the experiment reflected the dynamics of a capitalist society, or the alienation the system breeds between workers who regard one another as rivals in an economic competition. Any inference that a capitalist system sets up inequality between groups in society by granting unequal access to money, power, or resources, and so breeds social discord, was gone. Sherif’s language in the final draft was sanitised, cleansed — and deadly dull. There was no reference to real-world politics. There was no longer anything revolutionary lurking in those pages.

  The final published version of Sherif’s 1949 study was scrupulously anchored in the detail of the campsite at Happy Valley and made no reference to a broader social or political context. Somewhere between the earlier drafts, his recklessness had been replaced with caution. Any mess or uncertainty was replaced with confidence and fact.

  Sherif downplayed issues that might raise questions about the study’s ethics and removed reminders that the subjects were children. Between the drafts and the published report, the word ‘games’ was substituted with ‘competitions’, ‘adults’ became ‘experimenters’, and ‘children’ became ‘subjects’. Between the drafts, staff became more rigorous. In an early draft, a participant observer had the ‘assistance of the Junior Counsellor who was under his supervision’, but this was later reworded; the junior counsellor in the published version of the report was ‘under [the participant observer’s] direct control and followed his lead’. Tellingly, Sherif wrote that staff were under strict instructions to follow the experimental protocols, hinting that there were lapses: ‘The tendency to depart from the observance of these instructions on the part of any staff member was forcefully called to his attention so that it might be corrected.’ The actions of staff in generating resentment and conflict among the children, while it was mentioned, was downplayed as ‘mildly frustrating situations’.

  Of course, I expected a draft to be transformed by the time it appeared in print, but the final description of the two groups of boys reads like a caricature. Named the Bull Dogs and the Red Devils, they could as easily have been called the good guys and the bad guys. In the Bull Dogs group, one boy called Crandall rose to leader by getting others on board in planning and carrying out activities, such as putting the letter ‘B’ on the door of the bunkhouse and building a ‘chinning bar’. He also led the group on a hike, and was helpful to others by bandaging a blister and fixing a belt. He used praise and encouraged the others in the group to do the same: ‘We did a good job, boys. We should be proud of ourselves.’

  If the Bull Dogs were a model of the democratic group, the Red Devils were the opposite. Their leader was Adam ‘Babyface’ Severin, a tall, good-looking boy who looked fifteen instead of eleven, and whose nickname conjures images of gangsters and thuggery. Severin became leader through his ‘daring’ and ‘toughness’: Sherif described Severin as tyrannical and autocratic in his dealings with the other members of his group, all of whom called him ‘Captain’. He ‘enforced his decisions by threats and actual physical encounters’ on members of his own group. When two or three of these boys were seen to be seeking out their old friends — now members of the rival Bull Dogs — Severin branded them as ‘traitors’ and his henchmen ‘threatened them with beatings’.

  Sherif’s description of the differences between the two groups reads just like a description of the differences between democratic and autocratic groups Kurt Lewin and his colleagues had described ten years earlier. The symbolism of their names, too, seems no coincidence. The victors and winners of the knives, the Bull Dogs — named after Yale’s mascot — have a fair-minded leader who inspired his group and fostered an atmosphere of mutual respect and encouragement. The dysfunctional Red Devils, with their autocratic ‘captain’ and his ‘lieutenants’, using bullying tactics to subjugate other members of the group, are the losers in the competition. It seemed just that it was the Red Devils who lost the competition, and inevitable that they were the treacherous ones, planning sneak attacks when the other group thought ‘war’ was over.

  It’s impossible not to read Sherif’s description of the two groups and their fate as a tribute to the superiority of democracy over totalitarianism. Even before his account of the study had been published, it caught the attention of American military, who saw a range of useful applications for research about cohesion and relationships between small groups. Whether he was aware of this possibility or not, Sherif’s results could be used in ways he may never have considered. Getting black and white, American and foreign troops, working together was critical in wartime. Without esprit de corps, troops were likely to surrender, defect, or lose the battle. Small-group research could also inform efforts for using peer pressure to get reluctant soldiers enthusiastic about fighting, and influencing how citizens would embrace or reject propaganda.

  Yet when members of the military first approached Sherif and expressed their interest in funding more of his research, he wrote to Hovland, telling him the news, and seemed genuinely surprised.

  Over the next decade, Sherif worked on several projects funded by the military, and apparently turned down some that involved studying the effects of being in a fallout shelter because he was opposed to the nuclear arms race. So how was it that such a left-wing psychologist, interested in group conflict with the aim of engineering peace, had not been alert to the broader political and social currents that circulated around his work and the potential ways his results could be used for political and military advantage?

  At the University of Oklahoma campus, inspired by the architecture of Oxford and Cambridge, the turrets of th
e gothic buildings rise above the trees, and the curving archways and leadlight windows create a sense of history and tranquillity. Sherif had been wooed to the university, which was looking to improve its standing. His international reputation and ability to garner research funds brought prestige and status to a university that was more famous for its football team than its academic credentials. When Sherif arrived there, the university was little more than fifty years old, and underneath its peaceful veneer Cold War tensions crackled.

  His first four years at the university were nightmarish at times. In March 1951, the Oklahoma state government turned its attention to local universities as part of its hunt for communists. He and Carolyn built a fire and burned incriminating books and papers. The government passed a law requiring all local and state employees to sign a loyalty oath. Sherif signed the oath that same month, swearing that he was not a communist, that he would be loyal to America, and that, in the event of an attack, he would bear arms and fight for the nation. His daughters remembered the tension and anxiety of those McCarthy years and how one afternoon, their parents, unexpectedly dressed up, with their father in a suit and tie and their mother in her best dress, told them to play quietly in their room while a group of men in suits came to visit.

  In April 1951, Sherif was arrested because his visa had again expired. The US government had plans to deport him. Turkey was an increasingly dangerous place for leftist scholars, and Carolyn lobbied furiously on his behalf, marshalling all her contacts and acquaintances, arguing that his pro-Allied stance in Turkey at a time when such views were unfashionable proved his loyalty to America. That same year, the Turkish government instigated proceedings against him to recoup the salary he’d been paid during his leave of absence. His brother, the lawyer, represented Sherif at the trial, but their relationship soured as a result. Another major communist trial was also underway in Turkey, and Sherif stopped writing letters home around this time, probably because many of his friends were implicated. He became circumspect about talking about Turkey in public. At a speech he gave at Columbia during this period, he told the audience he had seen ‘human conflict and misery of all kinds in one of the very delicate spots of the world — my own country of Turkey. I cannot go into concrete details as I would like to tonight, but prefer to stay on the theoretical level. I hope the implications will be clear.’

  The continued military support for and interest in his research did not assuage government concerns about his patriotism or loyalties. Soon after arriving at the University of Oklahoma, Sherif began work on research for the navy using his autokinetic experiment in officer selection training. As a foreign national working on US Navy projects, Sherif came under suspicion. In August 1952, J Edgar Hoover directed the Oklahoma branch of the FBI to investigate him. The investigation lasted almost a year, and aimed to establish whether Sherif was a security risk and whether he had access to any classified information as part of his work on naval research. An FBI investigation into communism among Turkish students in America also turned up his name. FBI agents across the country interviewed Sherif’s mentors and colleagues, librarians and landladies, shopkeepers and administrative staff who had known him in America, as well as some who had known him in Turkey, about their views of his communist leanings. At the same time, many members of the Society for the Study of Psychological Issues — an organisation of psychologists committed to pacifism and social change, including his mentors Gordon Allport and Gardner Murphy — were also under investigation.

  Did Sherif notice on those afternoons when he called into the campus post office to collect his mail that the postmistress could no longer meet his eye? Did he ever wonder who the stranger was lurking in the corridor outside the dean’s office?

  I’d like to think someone let him know about the FBI investigation. I’m not sure any of them did. But Sherif was clearly wary. OJ Harvey remembered that one night he was giving a review paper about classless societies, and a couple of men who were visiting from the American Psychological Association wanted to sit in on the class. ‘Sherif was very concerned. He wasn’t sure they were from the APA, he thought they were from the government. He was concerned because he was going to talk about communism in the context of my paper on classlessness but he was worried about whether we should talk about something else instead,’ OJ recalled.

  Most of the people interviewed by the FBI reported that Sherif was a respected and even exceptional scholar, but it’s striking how many said they didn’t like him. At first I wondered if this was a ploy, an attempt to distance themselves from someone who was under suspicion. But the more I read, the more obvious it became that Sherif invested little energy with his peers in being likeable. One colleague from Sherif’s time at Princeton, Herbert Langfeld, said that he and Sherif talked mostly about psychology and never about politics, and ‘although he did not especially like him due to his arrogance, conceit and a desire to be the center of attraction at all times’, he had no reason to think either Sherif or his wife were communist or Russian sympathisers.

  Sherif’s by now former friend Hadley Cantril described Sherif as so thoroughly ‘obnoxious’ that he had arranged for Sherif to work from home instead of coming to campus. While Sherif was an ‘outstanding’ scholar, he was very ‘unstable and erratic … arrogant, highly conceited, intellectually dishonest and a hypocrite’. Cantril said he suspected that Sherif was ‘psychotic’. When they worked together at Princeton, Cantril said Sherif continually voiced his admiration of the Soviet Union and the way things were handled there. Cantril told the FBI he believed that Sherif ‘would have no hesitation in providing all the information he might possess to the Russians’. Cantril likely knew better than most how tenuous Sherif’s status was in America, and how dangerous things would be for him in Turkey. So I was intrigued that Sherif’s former friend had turned on him this way.

  I tried to get to the bottom of Cantril’s accusation. I wrote to some scholars far more familiar with the man than me, but they could only speculate that perhaps it was a case of professional jealousy. Yet surely there had to be more to it than petty vindictiveness? Despite working for the government on anti-communist psychological warfare, Cantril himself was subject to extensive surveillance and repeated interrogations of his loyalty up until 1956. For example, his FBI files show that at one point Cantril was implicated in a major Soviet spy ring. Agents wrote that Cantril had been responsible for recommending an important Soviet spy for a government job, and his name was found in the address book of another spy accused of passing on material from the Office of Strategic Services to the Russians. In his interviews with the FBI, Cantril seems to have used the opportunity to feed them damaging information about colleagues such as Sherif, but whether it was as a way to eliminate competition, realise a grudge, or prove his own cooperativeness and loyalty, it was impossible to say.

  No one else repeated Cantril’s claim about Sherif and the Russians. But all repeated Cantril’s complaint about how difficult Sherif could be to get along with. According to his colleagues at Oklahoma, he was ‘not popular with either students or faculty’ because of his overzealous focus on work. He spent ‘every waking hour in pursuit of some psychological theory’. They implied that Sherif was given fewer teaching hours because of his unpopularity. Instead, he spent more of his time on research with graduate students. Another said that when Sherif first arrived, it was clear ‘other professors would not be able to tolerate him because of personal characteristics’, but there was no question he had an outstanding international reputation that was an asset to the university.

  If the university was a comparative backwater, it did allow someone as competitive as Sherif to feel important. He showed up in the office of the dean or the university president unannounced, ignoring the protocols of making appointments, walking straight past the desks of their secretaries. He convened meetings of colleagues from across the country in a series of symposiums, and publicly and tactlessly pointed out the weaknesses as well as
the strengths of their presentations. For Sherif at this time, it seemed that the idea of cooperation over competition was all right in theory, but he had trouble putting it into practice. He often got on better with his graduate students than his colleagues, and with peers outside rather than inside his own discipline.

  As a teacher, Sherif could be ‘tough, energetic, demanding … ruthless and heavy-handed’ at the same time he could be ‘warm, affectionate, patient … and would go out of his way and to great lengths to help people who he thought needed and deserved his help’. But sometimes his assistance could be disconcerting, especially during the final academic step for graduate students, the oral examination, in which they defended their thesis to a university committee. It was not unusual if Sherif thought the student wasn’t doing a good job for him to butt in and take over the defence for them.

  But woe betide any student in Sherif’s classes who admitted to admiring psychoanalysis or behaviourism, which Sherif dismissed so roundly. Social psychologist Serge Moscovici wrote in a review of one of Sherif’s books that Sherif’s scornful attitude to researchers working on similar problems was ‘unjust’. Moscovici wondered: ‘Why reserve all affection for humanity in general and so little for his colleagues in particular?’

  But while his closest colleagues may have found his arrogance off-putting, his wife Carolyn remained his most steadfast fan. Soon after they arrived in Oklahoma, the local paper wrote a story about Muzafer, calling him ‘one of the world’s greatest psychologists’. But Carolyn complained to a friend that they’d got it wrong: ‘He is the greatest.’

  At first I read these descriptions of Sherif’s complex and sometimes contradictory behaviour as something new, pointing, perhaps, to disappointment at trading the prestige of Yale for Oklahoma, or to the way in which his work had overtaken his life. But then I remembered letters between his mentors Gordon Allport and Beryl Parker twenty years earlier that hinted at difficulties with Sherif’s temperament — his intelligence and intractability, his emotional highs and lows. Was it that in Oklahoma the stress of recent events were taking their toll on Sherif, providing an environment for his temperamental inclinations to flourish?