The Lost Boys
Page 29
Without her, he was devastated. He was in and out of hospital over the next three years, and attempted suicide at least once during this time. It seemed impossible that he would recover.
Just before his eightieth birthday in 1986, Sherif and three of his graduate students from Penn State took a road trip to Robbers Cave. He was on a lithium regime by then and, according to his family, a changed person. The new Muzafer was mild-mannered and moderate, rather than extravagant and opinionated. Sherif talked social psychology most of the way, but at the park, he was quiet for a while. Then he took the students on a guided tour, pointing out the cabin where after the experiment he and Carolyn used to come and stay on vacation with their daughters, before moving deeper into the park to find the mess hall, the baseball pitch, and, of course, the cave.
At the park’s entrance, by the pile of logs carved with white letters spelling out ‘Robbers Cave State Park’, Sherif sat and posed for a photo. He had a copy made and later sent it to OJ with a note saying how great it was to revisit the place after all those years — the note where he thanked him again for making the experiment happen.
It took me a moment to recognise the old man in the photo when OJ showed it to me. His cheeks were hollow; his grey hair was long and straggly. But his ravaged face looked peaceful.
A year later, in 1987, OJ began making arrangements for the book they had written about Robbers Cave to be published. Perhaps because Sherif had so recently written enclosing his photo at the state park, or maybe simply because OJ knew how pleased it would make him, he wrote to Sherif to let him know. Sherif’s response was jubilant:
Dear O.J. — old friend!
Warm thanks for your letter of April 13. I do appreciate the close feelings conveyed in it. It is high time that at last a university press decided to publish the Robbers Cave … I am also very happy that the introduction is to be written by Don Campbell and not by any lesser person in theory and methodology … With heartfelt appreciation for all your activities in Norman and since then … Sincerely, Muzafer.
I don’t know if Sherif saw the book before he died the following year — whether he held the slim volume in his hands and turned it over to see the impressionistic drawing of the boys engaged in tug of war on the front cover. It hardly mattered. It would have been enough for him to know that finally, over thirty years since the research at Robbers Cave, their work stood alone. I could imagine the frisson of pleasure he would have felt reading the words of Don Campbell, a psychologist he so admired, emblazoned on the book’s cover: ‘There have been no subsequent studies of anywhere near the magnitude of the Robbers Cave experiment …’
The next time I went to Robbers Cave, I climbed the track up to the top and sat on the sandstone rock to look out across the valley. It was mid-morning and the colours were still deep. I closed my eyes. Up here on top of the high ledge, with a breeze ruffling the trees and my thoughts full of outlaws, I could be on Mount Bozdağ, with its own robbers caves, its stories of bandits hiding in the hills. I thought of the moment in the experiment where Sherif knew the thrill of success — when the formerly pious and timid Eagles threw themselves in fury at the enemy group, the Rattlers. What prompted it was not competition, as Sherif argued, but the theft of the boys’ knives. It was an act of banditry.
I remembered the story of the new mother on Mount Bozdağ the year that Sherif was born, and her terror hearing that her baby would be stolen from her by the brigand Charkirge and his outlaw gang. And how, down in the main street of Bozdağ today, a statue of a bandit Poslu Mestan Efe now stands, he and those like him now immortalised as heroes for the guerilla war they conducted against the invading Greek army. Muzafer Sherif’s childhood was marked by these violent reversals. In the absence of a Turkish army, the lawbreakers and bandits in Ottoman times became heroes of the new Republic, resistance warriors who marched with Atatürk at the head of parades, receiving military rank and pensions for their services. I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps Sherif hoped for his own kind of reversal, where instead of being shunned and marginalised in his homeland, he could be welcomed and feted on his return.
I had found some notes Sherif had made for a talk at Princeton around 1945, soon after he arrived back in America:
Perhaps I am the first Turk you ever saw in your lives. But you have undoubtedly heard about the Turks … you surely must have listened to the stories about us — ‘the Terrible Turk’ — with a dagger in his hand killing people whenever he can, starving the poor Armenians etc. etc. … That is not the Turk I know.
In a series of bullet points, Sherif jotted down evidence of the modernisation of Turkey — education, dress, transport, and literacy, his attempts to counter his audience’s prejudice with facts, as a way of changing their minds. The Turk he knew was civilised, educated, forward-thinking, and passionately patriotic about his country.
I had gone back and forth in my thoughts on Sherif’s motivations during my research, discarding one hypothesis then another. Sherif’s camp studies, including the final and successful Robbers Cave experiment, were a mirror of his past; a celebration of his ideals; a tribute to the power of collectivism; a testament to Marxism; a triumph of social engineering. Perhaps it was all these things, a historical canvas onto which I could project any number of hypotheses or explanations.
But knowing what I knew now about Sherif’s persecution and exile, the experiment’s exploration of themes of friendship and betrayal, identity and belonging, and the call to let go of rivalries and bring enemies into the fold, made it seem like a love letter to the young Republic, the early years of the new Turkey.
Perhaps it was in the Ottoman period, on Mount Bozdağ, that Sherif experienced his earliest and most powerful notion of reconciliation. A week after the picnic the young mother had held in his honour, the bandit Charkirge returned the invitation. On the plateau, almost at the top of the mount, the Levantine families arrived to find a lavish spread, with roasting lamb, pilaf, yoghurt, and sweet kadayif. Afterwards, all the guests gathered wild blackberries together for the families to take home and make jam, and instead of her earlier anxiety, the young mother felt ‘comfortable’ with the bandits and their families. The crisis was averted; the baby boy was safe. Her fear evaporated. ‘Now we were friends,’ she wrote.
Down on the path I heard a boy laugh. Someone called out ‘Echo echo echo,’ and the call travelled out from the ledge and back again, boys’ voices bouncing and calling from the present and the past.
What was the Robbers Cave experiment about? What were they trying to prove? All of the boys I have met and interviewed have asked me the same question. And I have struggled with an answer. It was about groups and fighting, and then groups making peace, I said, but it sounded weak. Is there any answer I can give that doesn’t sound like a truism? And they sense it’s not as simple as that, either — some wonder if they have been part of someone else’s ethical drama. The experiment might have been a metaphor for nations or countries or ideologies in conflict, but since I met some of the boys and they realised that they were unknowing participants in an experiment, they have begun a struggle to understand its moral implications and what effect it has had in their lives. Some, like Doug, have made a kind of peace with it and moved on. For others, that journey is just beginning. The now-adult boys I’ve spoken to are still affected in their own ways by being in Sherif’s experiment. As I was drafting this chapter, one of them emailed me, wanting to know when the book was coming out. ‘Can’t wait to share with family and friends so they will understand why I am a bit odd,’ he wrote, adding a smiley-face emoji to show he was joking. Or was he?
Reckless and cautious, egalitarian and elitist, last generation of an empire and first of the new Republic, adored husband, often infuriating colleague, loving father, driven man. I have hoped to shape a figure from the slippery clay of anecdotes and actions, from gossip and snatches of history from a forgotten era. Running through it all, a thrum
ming thread of energy, was Sherif’s unshakeable belief in a theory of power of tribal loyalty, in-groups and out-groups, that reflected his own experience as an outsider looking for a place to belong.
I had read Orhan Pamuk’s memoir Istanbul in preparation for my trip to Turkey. In it, he evoked the Istanbul of his childhood, haunted by ‘hazun’: a deep sense of loss and melancholy; the hollow left by a disappearing world, and an intense nostalgia for the glory days of the Empire. Istanbul, once the centre of the Ottoman Empire, had been abandoned as the capital, after the seat of power moved to Ankara.
In Istanbul, I had walked around in circles, up and down hills in the city’s Beyoğlu district, looking for Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence, a building that Pamuk planned along with the novel of the same name.
When I finally found it, I wondered how on earth I’d missed it. A tall traditional wooden house with an overhanging bay window, it’s painted a bright modern red and sits dramatically on the corner of a steep street. Pamuk bought the building in the 1990s, when the area was rundown and the building was dilapidated. Now the neighbourhood has sprouted fashionable coffee houses and galleries. But his novel was finished and published well before the renovation of the building was complete, and the museum did not finally open until 2012.
Inside the Museum of Innocence, Pamuk has gathered together everyday objects and organised them to tell the story of the characters of his novel. A salt shaker, playing cards, lottery tickets, soap, a cinch-waisted 1950s dress covered with roses, movie posters, identity papers, newspaper clippings displayed in glass cases — all document the story of a failed romance and provide a vivid picture of life in post-1950s Istanbul. I smiled to myself, realising that in coming to Turkey I had naïvely hoped to find something similar to tell me as much about the everyday life, the emotions, and the experiences of a young Muzafer Sherif. As if such a thing could have existed.
In the lobby, what at first seemed to be a wall of cuneiform script turned out, when I stepped closer, to be an entire wall covered with over 4,000 cigarette butts, some smudged with lipstick, all skewered with pins and annotated with the date and place each was smoked by the narrator’s beloved.
I spent the afternoon in the museum, wondering at its obsessiveness and its charm and its moving depiction of the lives of the characters. Pamuk had created an entire world, right down to the loft bedroom where Kemal, the narrator, told his story. It was a self-contained world, referring to the particulars of a specific time and place. I wondered at its almost complete absence of any reference to Turkish politics.
Perhaps it was that I was still looking for connections, but in a strange way, the narrow focus, the obsession with detail, the careful avoidance of any direct political commentary reminded me of Sherif’s work at Robbers Cave, as if the experiment was a novel, the earlier experiments drafts of the later, completed opus. Perhaps Sherif’s experiment wasn’t just a metaphor about Cold War politics or the idealism of the Kemalist years. It was more personal than that; it was more like the kind of story that people tell themselves to make sense of wars and violence, a narrative with heroes and villains. Throughout his life, Sherif was emotionally conflicted, struggling with competing and sometimes violent feelings of love and hate, trust and suspicion, sanity and madness. At Robbers Cave, he had created a perfect moment, or recaptured an old one: a world where wounds were healed and what was lost was restored, a place where all was whole and complete, while in the world outside, things were falling apart.
When the young woman called to me from the bottom of the stairs that the museum would be closing in fifteen minutes, I didn’t want to leave, to go outside again. It felt safe here, surrounded by these objects, caught in the embrace of this unfolding story.
A Note on Sources
On a high shelf in a vast back room at the Centre for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron is a wooden trunk. A label dangles from it addressed to Muzafer Sherif, 728 Chatacqua Street, Oklahoma. The wood looks battered, and it’s likely the same trunk that Sherif first brought with him from Turkey, containing a few changes of clothes, some photographs, and his precious psychology books. Later, he used it to store different mementoes, and the props and paperwork for his most famous experiment. Sherif’s science is like that trunk — its beginnings far from rural Oklahoma, tangled up in the life of Muzafer Sherif, the dissolution of an empire, and the traumatic birth of a new nation.
In writing this book I wanted to recreate the backstage world of the Robbers Cave experiment, to explain where it came from, how it started, and why when it ended, Muzafer Sherif seemed to fade away. It’s been a slow and often frustrating research process. While I have had access to detailed scientific records describing how the boys were recruited, and daily descriptions of particular behaviour Sherif and his team were looking for, the men’s observer notes often make for dull reading. The flesh and blood of this story — the lived experience of the boys themselves — appears only in brief flashes.
When Dr David Baker at the Archives of the History of American Psychology at Akron first told me excitedly that the ‘gem’ of their collection was the newly acquired material from the Robbers Cave experiment, I told myself the trail was too cold. The boys, and who knew how many of them were still alive, would be impossible to find. Sherif had died, hence his family’s donation of the material to the archives. And I, in the middle of researching a book about Stanley Milgram’s research, didn’t have the time or the energy to pursue it.
David also told me how one of Sherif’s assistants at the Robbers Cave, OJ Harvey, had recently visited the archives to help with the cataloguing of the collection. It had been an emotional visit for Harvey. Sometimes he wept, sifting through the papers and photographs and letters. At the university he gave a couple of guest lectures about the experiment, which were received enthusiastically by the students. Perhaps it was the students’ interest in his behind-the-scenes reminiscences, or his awareness that he was the last researcher from Sherif’s famous study still alive, or that with Sherif gone he felt free to tell his version. But OJ was keen to tell the story, David told me. And because David and his staff have been so good to me over the years, I felt bad turning such an opportunity down. I travelled to Boulder in May 2010 with my recording equipment and spent three days interviewing OJ Harvey. By the time I left, I was hooked.
The French philosopher and sociologist of science Bruno Latour refers to the ‘Janus face’ of science. On one side you have the public view, the face that scientists and researchers want us to see, the official frontstage presentation of facts by objective-technologists-in-white-coats. It’s the PR face. Then you have the other face, the view backstage. It is messier, sometimes ugly, but always more interesting. From here you can see how and why science — and in this case, social psychological science — is made. It’s a world of human beings, not impersonal experts in lab coats, but an array of individual characters with personal histories and emotions that rarely make their way into public view.
In public accounts of the experiment, the individual boys who took part in Sherif’s research get lost in discussions of Sherif’s theory of group conflict and applications of the research. They cease to be children and become stand-ins for countries, ethnicities, ideologies, humankind. But they were individual boys who brought their own backgrounds and expectations, family histories and hopes, to that camp in the summer of 1954.
The boys in Sherif’s camp experiments are lost in many ways. While there are hundreds of pages of observations about them in the archives, the commentary is often about the group as a whole, rather than individuals, or about leaders rather than followers. When a single boy is mentioned, his name has been redacted. When Sherif or one of his assistants describe a disagreement between boys, they don’t often include information about what prompted it or how the fight developed. I didn’t want to write a book in which the boys were an undifferentiated group of faceless individuals with a hive mind.
I followed different leads. I made contact with Muzafer Sherif’s daughters and made tentative plans to meet up with his eldest daughter, Sue Sherif, in Las Vegas, where she was attending a conference. But it didn’t work out and instead we talked on Skype, she from her home in Alaska, where her father was living with her when he died in 1988. Later still I called his daughter Joan, who shared her memories of her parents, and his daughter Ann sent along a photo that captured their spirit.
I knew so little about Turkey — how did I know so little about Turkey? — that when I started to read about its history it was like trying to put the pieces of a jigsaw together without the picture on the lid of the box. I read indiscriminately, following first one strand, then another. I got lost in the Lausanne Treaty, the cult of Atatürk, the life of Ottoman sultans, a whole book on the outlawing of the fez. I read the diaries of American missionaries and diplomats, peppered with dismissive and often supercilious analyses of the shortcomings of the Turkish people. I read memoirs written by Levant ladies yearning for the lost days of Smyrna, their servants, and leisure and wealth, written from their exile in grimy brick flats in London.