THE WHARVES ARE A FAVORITE MEETING PLACE FOR THE GANG

THE BOY
AND HIS GANG

J. ADAMS PUFFER
Director of Beacon Vocation Bureau, Boston

ILLUSTRATED

BOSTON NEW YORK CHIGAGO
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge

PREFACE

Sixty-six boys who were members of gangs are responsible for this book. They told me the stories of their gang life and I wrote them out in the form illustrated in Chapter II. I showed these stories to President G. Stanley Hall, who asked me to present them in the Pedagogical Seminary, where an article appeared in June, 1905. These original stories of Boys’ Gangs and Boy Leaders later became the basis for a series of lectures on Boy Problems. In revising my material for book publication, many interesting criticisms by parents, teachers, and social workers, in various sections of the country have been consciously or unconsciously incorporated into it. I have found a wide interest in and demand for such a book as this—bearing upon the group psychology of boyhood—and a lamentable scarcity of readable literature on the subject.

For aid in preparing this book I am indebted first of all to the boys for their confidence, which I have tried to keep; to President G. Stanley Hall for his kindly encouragement at the right time; to President Edmund C. Sanford and Professor William H. Burnham for pedagogical guidance; to my wife, E. Hope Puffer, who has shared in the task from the beginning; to Mr. E. T. Brewster for his invaluable assistance in editing the book, and to McClure’s Magazine for permission to reprint the illustrations.

J. Adams Puffer.

Preface		iii
Introduction		[xi]
I.	The Eternal Boy	[1]
	The nature of the problem, and the persons to whom this work is addressed.
II.	The General Nature of the Gang	[8]
	Importance of gangs—Their neglect in the literature of boyhood—The single conspicuous exception—The author’s own experience with boys’ gangs and its lessons—Boys’ own stories of six specimen gangs—Fundamental likeness of all gangs—Their instinctive basis.
III.	The Organization of the Gang	[26]
	Age of members—Their habitat, nationality, and social class—Permanence of and definiteness of organization of gangs—Their names—Times and places of meeting—Officers—Initiation ceremonies—Rules—Resignations and expulsions—Method of settling disputes—Emergence of the group mind.
IV.	Certain Activities of the Gang	[39]
	Analysis of gang activities—Survivals from pre-gang stage—Group games—Tribal industries—Boys’ reports of these—Their significance—“Plaguing people”—Boys’ reports—Instinctive nature of the impulse—Stealing—Reports.
V.	Further Activities of the Gang	[50]
	Migration—Reports—Truancy—Reports—Theatre-going—Reports—Fighting—Personal fights—Fights between groups inside the gang—Fights between gangs—A case of war between federations of gangs.
VI.	The Anthropology and Psychology of the Gang	[72]
	Certain human instincts—Differing instincts of boys and girls—Many instincts of boyhood are survivals from savagery—The Recapitulation Theory, therefore, the key to boy psychology—Not, however, a complete explanation—Certain qualities of the young look toward the future—Illustrations of these—Ancestral qualities persist when useful—Examples from instincts of both boys and girls.
VII.	The Control of the more Primitive Impulses	[83]
	Certain maladjustments of human instincts to civilized life—These especially noteworthy in boyhood—Instinctive basis of cruelty in boys—Other causes of cruelty—Psychology of “plaguing people”—Pedagogic worthlessness of the impulse—Its cure—Impulse to plague girls of a different nature—Apparently protective—The love of fighting—Its instinctive nature—Fighting is, on the whole, a virtue—Its pedagogic value—Practical treatment of the problem—Two working rules—Self-limiting nature of the evil.
VIII.	The Management of the Predatory Impulses	[94]
	Transitory nature of instincts—Acquisitiveness the basis of boys’ thieving—Self-limiting quality of stealing—Effect of collections—Of common property—Cure of thievery must regard origin—Practical hints—Effect of gardens and shops—Unconscious element in anti-social impulses—Unfortunate position of city boy—Analysis of reasons for theft—Removal of specific causes—Summary of two chapters on anti-social gang activities and their cure.
IX.	The Tribal Instincts and the Wanderlust	[109]
	Inherent goodness of the gang impulses now to be discussed—Balance of home and gang life—General nature of the problem—Wholesomeness and spontaneity of these interests—Their usefulness in training for work—Their religious aspect—Uses of Sunday—Control of the Wanderlust—Its imperiousness—Its dangers—Its good side—Practical suggestions—Excursions to interesting places and historic spots—Camping trips—Truancy—Limitations of athletics—Advantage of non-competitive sports over games—Their value as permanent sources of happiness.
X.	The Individualistic Activities and the Group Games	[124]
	Education through games—Their social training—The problem of playgrounds—Example of the best English schools—Value of swimming—Opportunity and supervision—Skating and dancing—Their peculiar function at the end of the gang period—Theatre, circus, and picture show—Analysis of their influence—Wholesomeness of melodrama.
XI.	The Special Virtues of the Gang	[141]
	Psychologic value of the gang period—Biologic aspect of moral education—Loyalty the foundation of the gang—The boy’s devotion to ideals—Mistakes of parents and teachers—Why all boys are not in gangs—Gangs are the natural training-schools for the social virtues—Pedagogic value of even anti-social acts—High social value of nearly all gang activities—This illustrated by typical rules of gangs—Gangs inculcate coöperation, courage, and other manly virtues—Late reversal of opinion with regard to the influence of gangs.
XII.	The Gang in Constructive Social Work	[157]
	The Boy Scouts—The sound psychology of the organization and its relation to the boys’ gang—The Church—The psychology of religious training and its practical method—The Sunday School—The Home—Prerequisites of good gangs—Families should unite to provide these—The Boys’ Club—The Playground—The Summer Camp—its common failings—Suggestions for the improvement of these—Proper subjects for study in camp—Special fitness of instruction in hygiene and morals.
XIII.	The Gang and the School	[177]
	The nature of the problem—Necessity of comprehending the gang spirit—Illustration from fighting and by an incident of real life—Difference between boys and girls—Boys’ motor-mindedness—Practical hints—Importance of using natural groups—Illustrated by gymnastics—By nature study—By work in practical arithmetic—By other coöperative efforts—By pupil self-government—The important matter is to utilize the great passions of boyhood.

ILLUSTRATIONS

The wharves are a favorite meeting place for the gang	[Frontispiece]
Boys “jump freights” because they “like to go and see places”	[20]
“We fought for the fun of it”	[20]
A football game between city gangs	[44]
“A shanty or clubhouse in the woods”	[44]
An inadequate playground	[170]
A model playground	[170]

INTRODUCTION

The gang spirit is the basis of the social life of the boy. It is the spontaneous expression of the boy’s real interests. A boy must have not only companions but a group of companions in which to realize himself. This book had its origin in the minds and hearts of boys still active in their gangs.

It is evident that nearly all the activities of boys in their group life are not injurious but wholesome, or can readily be made so. What grown people too often interpret as done from evil motives the boys in the gang do from their love of fun. The educational world has not yet taken the interesting view point, that in the group activities of boys are cultivated the great fundamental virtues, coöperation, self-sacrifice, and loyalty. Now that we are coming to understand and realize what the gang life means, and what can be done with it, the surprise grows that it has until so recently been left almost entirely out of account in the work of helping and saving boys.

Mr. Puffer as a graduate student and fellow at Clark University has taken time to acquaint himself with the literature in this and adjacent fields, and as a practical worker has shown himself unusually sympathetic with boys and helpful to them. Mr. Puffer’s writing is uniquely effective and his book ought to be read by all parents and friends of boys.

G. Stanley Hall.

Worcester, Mass.,
February 12, 1912.

THE BOY AND HIS GANG

CHAPTER I
THE ETERNAL BOY

We adults do not commonly understand boys. Half of us, to be sure, were boys ourselves; but when we became men and settled down to our work, we did not merely put away childish things—we went further and forgot them. To-day, we read a story of boy life and we say, “Why, yes. That’s just the way boys do. I used to do exactly that sort of thing myself.” But the next hour we have forgotten again, and the boy we were is once more a stranger. Boyville is so far removed, both from Delos and from Babylon, that we seldom think the thoughts of its inhabitants, nor see the world with the boys’ eyes. Only a few men are at home in both worlds,—Lindsay, George, some schoolmasters, an occasional father,—and these can do anything with a boy.

The difficulty seems not so much to be that we have forgotten the incidents of our boyhood as that we have lost its feelings. So far as specific doings are concerned, we probably remember those crowded years more distinctly than any equal period of our entire lives. Most of us, too, remember them happily, as happily probably as any years we have lived. No, the trouble is not with the memory, but with the self. The experiences of life since we were boys have shifted our psychic centre of gravity, so that we realize the particular incident far more easily than we realize the being to whom it occurred. We do not completely feel that the boy that was is quite ourselves; and while the memory of the fact is sharp, the memory of the mental state that went with it has become dim. Therefore, it costs a distinct effort to put one’s self in the boy’s place. Any proper man will recite by the hour tales of the old swimming-hole in the summer. But if men actually felt toward the water as boys do, every club and half the private houses would have a swimming tank instead of a smoking room.

But if we men fail to comprehend boys, what shall we say of the women! The experiences which we have forgotten, they have not even had; if there is a psychic fence which separates men from boys, there are at least knot-holes in the boards; but between boys and women there is a solid wall. There are parts of a boy’s soul which any woman may observe or imagine, but which no woman can ever feel. That women often do understand boys, understand them sometimes better than men do, is simply one of the marvels of feminine insight.

This book is, then, addressed, first of all, to fathers, with the hope that it will, in some sort, serve to revive memories of boyhood days, not so much of specific acts of boyhood as of long-dead impulses and past ways of envisaging the world. Every man who sits down and thinks out for himself, not only what he did as a boy, but also how it feels to be a boy, and how the world and the people in it appear through a boy’s eyes, has taken a long step toward the understanding and the control of his own sons. A scientific account of certain aspects of boy psychology, such as this book aims to be, may aid this introspective process.

On the other hand, so far as this book is an account of the natural history of the genus boy, it may well be an aid to mothers, and to other women who, with no children of their own, are yet concerned for the welfare of adolescent males. If it does not help these to a sympathetic understanding of a boy’s soul, one may at least hope that it will serve to warn them of those regions of it most foreign to their sex. Next to a knowledge of boy nature, comes the knowledge of when to keep hands off and let some man have his chance. To the smaller group of women, mothers and aunts and elder sisters, and especially teachers, who already possess the heaven-sent gift of understanding boys, any assistance may well seem superfluous. Still, intuition may often be supplemented by science. The clearest insight does sometimes fail, and need to be helped out by a more analytical approach from another side than its own. To men, women, and teachers, then, this book,—an ‘apology,’ in a sense, to women, of men who once were boys.

Whoever it was that opined that

“Men are but children of a larger growth”

knew little about boys. The child becomes a youth, and the youth becomes man, by virtue of a process not so very different from that which transforms the caterpillar into a butterfly or the tadpole into a frog. As truly as the caterpillar takes on wings, and the tadpole lungs and limbs, of which neither had any trace before, the child and the boy take on not only habits and instincts and ways of getting on in the world, but actual new structure as well. Boyhood begins with the second set of teeth; it ends with the advent of the beard and a new set of enzymes in the blood. Neither child nor boy nor grub nor pollywog passes on to the next stage of his existence by any mere enlargement.

Nor is it altogether true that with the approach of manhood

“Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy.”

The little child, in his father’s house and under his father’s care, feels the stir of newborn gregarious instincts, and takes his first steps into the larger life of the world. Boyhood proper begins with the rise of impulses which make us citizens and lead us to take care of ourselves; and it ends with the rise of impulses which make us heads of families and lead us to take care of other people. Each step is an enlargement of life. Each transition is marked by a psychic change so profound that it makes the previous narrower condition appear as shadowy almost as a dream, and almost as difficult to recall.

We are concerned here with the second of the seven ages of men: with the period, that is, which begins at about the age of ten with the rise of the herding instincts, and ends with the rise of the mating instincts at, say, eighteen. The child, who thus far has been a solitary animal, suddenly becomes a social one. He is profoundly interested in youth of his own sex, while at the same time he cares less than nothing for youth of the other. Therefore, he associates himself with other boys and forms gangs.

The gang, therefore, while it lasts, is for the boy one of the three primary social groups. These three are, the family, the neighborhood, and the play group; but for the normal boy the play group is the gang. All three are instinctive human groupings, formed like pack and flock and hive, in response to deep-seated but unconscious need. Like all such instinctive associations, the gang appears useless or stupid to those who have never felt the inner impulse which caused it, or who, having felt, have forgotten. The boy’s reaction to his gang is neither more nor less reasonable than the reaction of a mother to her babe, the tribesman to his chief, or the lover to his sweetheart. All these alike belong to the ancient, instinctive, ultra-rational parts of our human nature. They are felt, and obeyed; but only in part are they to be explained, for no man understands any of them fully unless he knows how it feels from the inside.

CHAPTER II
THE GENERAL NATURE OF THE GANG

The gang age, from ten to sixteen, is one of the most important eras in a boy’s life. One man out often may belong to a church, one out of five to a fraternity: but as Sheldon has shown, three boys in every four are members of a gang; and the character of this gang determines in no small degree what sort of men these boys shall become. Taking our lives through, our parents probably make us most, and next to these our wives. But next to our wives, in their influence over our characters and careers, come for most of us, the group of companions whom we knew as boys and who together with us formed our special gang. Our domestic education takes place in our parents’ home and in our own; but our social training has had at least its foundations in our gang.

Curiously enough, in spite of the fact that three quarters of all boys are members of gangs, the gang plays a somewhat inconspicuous part in the literature of boyhood. Neither in “David Copperfield,” nor in “Being a Boy,” nor in “A Boy’s Town,” nor in “Tom Brown,” does the gang, qua gang, appear. There are traces of it in Owen Johnson’s Lawrenceville stories, and in certain tales of Elisha Kellog, dear to the heart of a generation ago. Only one story of boy life, so far as I know, gives the gang anything like its full value in boy psychology.

This tale is “The Story of a Bad Boy” of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. The “Centipedes,” to which the Bad Boy belonged, were a real gang. They had their local habitation, their badges, their ceremonies, their secrets. They went camping together, swam and boated and fished, snowballed the constables, fought the boys from the other end of the town, bombarded the sleeping inhabitants of Rivermouth on the night before the Fourth, and altogether comported themselves like the indefatigable young savages which all proper boys have been since boys were. The story is said to be highly autobiographical, to be, in short, the inside history of Aldrich’s own gang. At any rate, it seems to be the most adequate account yet in print of a typical boys’ gang, told with insight and skill. One can hardly imagine a better introduction to the ways of all boys than this story of a bad one.

Like most persons who were once boys, I was myself in my boyhood days a member of a gang; but I never began to realize the spirit and power of gang life until, between 1902 and 1905, I sat behind the Principal’s desk in an Industrial School for Boys. Before that desk stood each new-comer, and it was my duty to place each boy in his school work, and to be responsible in part for his discipline. I soon learned that rightly to guide a boy in the School, it was essential that I know pretty thoroughly, not only the boy’s personal traits, but also the social conditions of his home and of his neighborhood. I asked, therefore, many questions about home, school, and playmates, especially about playmates and the way in which the boys spent their leisure time.

Many boys, after a short acquaintance, told me freely the inside stories of their gang life. Occasionally, to start a narrator when he stopped talking, I would put in a question: “When do you meet?” “Where?” “What do you do nights?” “Saturdays?” “Sundays?” “Whom do you let in?” “Have you any rules?”—and the like. Where a boy had a good memory and a fair command of English, no questions were necessary; he simply went ahead and told me quite frankly all he knew, while I wrote down the story as nearly as possible in the boy’s own words. Later when, as probation officer in a juvenile court, I became responsible for the behavior of dependent and delinquent boys, I carried the study further.

As a result of this information, it soon became evident that certain gangs were doing irreparable harm. Two boys, for example, out of one gang had been sent to the State Reform School on the same day; another contributed to the same institution, five of its six members. Good, promising boys, too, they were, though the world thought otherwise. Apparently, then, some gangs at least were pretty thoroughly bad.

On the other hand, some gangs proved to be almost as thoroughly good. Their members were real boys, but on the whole the gang was helping them to become worthy citizens and upright men.

I have especially full information concerning sixty-six gangs; and I pass without more ado to the boys’ account of certain of them. Most men who read these pages can supply the inside history of at least one other.

The Morse Hollow Athletic Club

This is a typical all-round gang, though its main purpose was to play games. Its membership varied somewhat with the game, but it usually contained from nine to eleven boys, between twelve and seventeen years of age. Of these one was Irish, two were French, two Americans, one Negro, and one Scotch. The historian of the gang is the Scot, a distinctly bright boy who is now doing well at the printing trade.

“Met nearly every day in vacation time; had a shanty for a clubhouse over in the woods; met there most of the time; met on R. A’s hill.

“R. A. was the leader. One that could jump the farthest was made president; one could jump next farthest, vice-president; next, secretary; one that could jump least distance of all was made treasurer; club was for athletics, so that was the way we wanted it.

“We played baseball in the spring and football in the fall. We didn’t let a fellow into our club unless he could play baseball or football. Nights we would meet on the corner of the street and talk over games. We have been going together four years; we take in a new lot of younger boys every year. Sometimes we put a fellow out of the club because he will not pay his share of the expenses.

“Sundays we went to church; sometimes we would go up on R. A’s hill in the afternoon and watch some men play cards for money; they gave coppers to the boys.

“We often jumped a freight to Gates Crossing and then went berrying or after nuts. We used to play Indians in the woods; one boy captured the others and put them in a hole. We had three detectives. We stole some apples out of orchards. We had a fight with the ‘Garden of Eden’ gang; we were coming home from football; we guyed them for beating us; they fired sticks at us; we made some swords out of wood, got an air rifle, and made an attack on them and drove them up on to a haymow in a barn.

“We sometimes ran away from school; two of us would go out at a time, so as not to throw any suspicion on the gang. Our rules were that all members should be present Wednesdays and Saturdays, and each boy should pay equal parts for ball. When there were disputes the officers would most always settle them.”

The Tennis Club

This is a thoroughly good gang, one of the best gangs I know. In fact, I came to know about it at all only because one of its members dropped out, joined the distinctly evil “Dowser Glums,” the account of which immediately follows that of the Tennis Club, and as a result got himself into various kinds of trouble. The same boy gave me the stories of the two gangs, adding frankly, “If I had stopped in the Tennis Club, I should never have been sent to a Reform School.” A thoroughly worthless man, twenty-six years old, was in the Glums, while Mr. M., the father of one of the boys, was practically in the Tennis Club. The contrast cannot be described in words.

There were fifteen boys in the Tennis Club, twelve to seventeen years of age, all Americans except two Swedes.

“Met at tennis court at M.’s house. Met after school, nights and Saturdays. Had a captain of baseball nine, captain of football, and treasurer. Treasurer collected things at M.’s house,—gloves, rackets, etc. If a fellow was a good ball player or an all-round athlete, let him in. Sometimes fellows [by way of initiation] pounce on a fellow and give it to him for two or three minutes. Tell a fellow he didn’t belong there and he would leave. Been going together for seven months when I left off going.

“M.’s parents would buy things for their boy and we could use them. We played tennis, baseball, football, cricket; went bicycle riding; camping out. Went a little ways from M.’s house; went out to camp days, swimming, boating. Made a boat and went fishing for pickerel and perch. Play ball and cricket after supper till dark. Sit in porch and talk over stories a little after dark.

“Ring doorbells and play tick-tack on windows of fellows of our club. Sometimes would have a fight; other fellows would stop it. Never let a big fellow pick on a little fellow. We were against smoking.”

The Dowser Glums

This tough gang contained four Irish boys, three French, one American. The members were for the most part seventeen or eighteen years of age, except the man of twenty-six. The place-names, I suppress, as of no interest.

“Met out in the woods back of an old barn on Spring Street. Met every day if we did not get work. Any fellow could bring in a fellow if others approved. Put a fellow out for spying or telling anything about the club. Tell him we didn’t want him and then if he didn’t take the hint force him out. It had been going for two years; broke up now, I think.

“We played ball; went swimming, fishing, and shooting. Each of us had a rifle. Meet [at night] and tell stories of what we had done during the day. Go to shows. Go and watch dancing class. Sundays we loafed around streets. Sometimes went on a trip in the country. Went shooting. Other days catch a freight and go to W—— and L——. Went to B—— to shows and circus.

“Purpose of club was to steal; most anything they could get their hands on; fruit off from fruit stands; snag ice-cream at picnics. Robbed a store and put it in an old barn,—revolvers, knives, and cartridges. Work for two or three days, then loaf round and spend our money; spend money for circus. Sometimes folks would make us spend for clothes. Play cards,—poker, whist, high low jack. Played in the woods. Smoke cigarettes, pipe, and cigars. Biggest fellow drank; he tried to make the other fellows drink but they wouldn’t.”

The Island Gang

Twelve boys: four Irish, three French, two Poles, two Germans, one Jew. Ages between twelve and eighteen, but generally about fifteen. The boy who told me the story, one of the Frenchmen, said with much pride, “We never got caught stealing.” I have since watched boys stealing from the big markets; they certainly have reduced it to a science!

“Met on L. Street; all lived on that street. Would not let any gang on that street. Give a strange boy a licking.

“M. was ring-leader,—steals most; says, ‘Come on’; biggest and oldest. Didn’t let anybody in after we started; been going together five years. M. started it, and asked us to be in the gang.

“We played run-sheep-run, tag, relievo, hide and seek. Stay out all night; have a fire down by the foundry. Go to shows Monday and Saturday nights; like Railroad Jack, Great White Diamond, White Eagle; like plays where there was fighting.

“Jumped freights to S—— and P——. Ran away from home to U——; stayed up there two weeks. Hated to go to school; ran away because I didn’t like to study. Saw boys out, so I liked to stay out and play baseball. Go to W—— Market in a crowd; steal apples, candy, grapes, and peanuts; we never got caught.

“Put wires across the sidewalks. Fight with another gang; fought for the fun of it, to see which was the strongest; fought with clubs. If there was a dispute in our crowd, leader settled it. If two fellows were fighting for a thing, the leader took it away from them and gave it to another fellow. If a member of the gang lied to one of us fellows, we called him a squealer; if he told on us, we called him a spy.

“Get our money from junk. Drink beer. All smoke. We had our best times bunking out, ringing doorbells, and tying cats’ tails together. We like to plague girls,—ask them for a kiss, and things like that.”

The Medford Street Gang

Six boys: two Americans, four Irish. Ages between twelve and fifteen. This is, paradoxically, a bad gang of good boys. Five out of the six members landed in Reform Schools, and I knew personally four of the five. All were distinctly above the average, and all are now doing well in life.

BOYS “JUMP FREIGHTS” BECAUSE THEY “LIKE TO GO AND SEE PLACES”

“WE FOUGHT FOR THE FUN OF IT”

“Met on corner of street. We had three different leaders; I was leader; St. J. was leader. When we first moved there we gathered together and kept together all the time.

“We played baseball, football, cricket, tag, and hide and seek. We had a tent,—stayed out nights. We stole pigeons, broke into slot machines. We all divided up about the same. If a fellow lied to one of us, we put him out of the crowd for a week. Used to think school was too hard; didn’t want to go because there was a show in town; stayed away just for the fun of it. Best time was going to theatre, like comical plays, Irishmen and fighting.

“We never used to think of girls, [“How do you treat them?” I had asked.] I don’t know how to treat them; never tried it.”

Another boy’s report of the same Gang—one year later

The gang now contained seven boys: four American, three Irish.

“Met every day, right after school, corner Medford Street and Somerville Avenue; thought that Medford Street belonged to us. If a strange boy came around, try to pick up a fight with him to see if he was a good fighter. A. was leader; St. J. was leader sometimes. Anybody moved around there we thought safe to come in, would let him in. Put a fellow out if he go and tell on us. We have been going together five or six years.

“We play baseball, hoist the sail, how many miles to Barbery; go to beach; go to theatre once or twice a week, City Square and Grand Opera House; like love plays best. Sundays go around in city; wander around the streets; go to beach. Other days go down to freight yards and jump freights. We used to snowball Jews who came to slaughter house to get food. Plague a man down there; ring doorbells; play tick-tack. Steal money, candy, hens, iron, and fountain pens.

“All of us smoked. Get lager beer Saturday nights off beer wagons. Boys gamble with dice; shoot craps. Chuck a fellow out who made a dispute.”

The Methuen Gang

Six boys: five Irish and one “Yankee,” between thirteen and sixteen years of age. This is an especially adventurous gang, whose chief amusement is travel. Note especially the characteristic initiation to test the candidate’s resourcefulness.

“I was called ‘Bull-dog,’ because I stuck to it when I started a thing. C. called ‘Gulliver’ because he traveled around so much. M. called ‘Puggie’ because he had a flat nose. O. was leader; biggest and best fighter.

“When one fellow went out, let another fellow in; get a fellow who would keep things to himself; make him take an oath. Put him [as initiation] on a freight train and send him off alone to see if he could get back alone; if he came back he was a member of the gang.

“Been going together three years. All live on the same street. Play baseball, football, punch bag, tag, hide and seek, bull in the ring, leap frog. Build forts and capture them.

“Go to boys’ club twice a week. Go to shows two or three times a week. Like tragedies. Get up shows ourselves and let fellows from the district in. Went to a show and traveled with the show as far as W——. Stay out all night sometimes. Go off to different cities. Jump freights. Sundays sometimes go off on a fishing trip, or a picnic out in the country.

“Plague the ragman; upset his cart; run off with the rags. Ran away with banana team. All work for a spell and then all loaf a while. If one of the gang got hit, stand up for one another. Save up our money and then go off for a good time; go to B—— Saturday afternoons; buy our tickets on that trip.”

* * * * *

Boys’ gangs, then, as one may readily infer from the foregoing accounts, are of various types. They may be large or small, good or bad, long-lived or evanescent. Yet with all their superficial differences, they are fundamentally alike. Each exists for the sake of a definite set of activities—to play games, to seek adventure, to go swimming, boating, and playing Indians in the woods, to make mischief, to steal, to fight other gangs. Few are the groups which do not, at one time or another, do all these things. Especially noteworthy is the desire of the gang for a local habitation—its own special street corner, its clubroom, its shanty in the woods.

All normal gangs, in short, are so much alike that if we discovered any group among the lower animals acting with equal uniformity, we should unhesitatingly ascribe their behavior to instinct. Without doubt, there is a gang-forming instinct set deep in the soul of boyhood. Whoever, therefore, would understand boys, must study their spontaneous organizations.

CHAPTER III
THE ORGANIZATION OF THE GANG

The gang age, as we have seen, is from ten to sixteen. In a few cases, this organized group life begins as young as seven; in a few, also, it lasts up to eighteen or nineteen. Between thirteen and fourteen is the average age; and in a general way, the boy’s social education in the gang takes about five years. Before this period, the little boy plays a good deal by himself, or plays in company with other boys a good deal as if he were playing alone. After it, he cultivates individual friendships, or courts a girl.

Nearly always, the gang is a strictly local affair, limited to a certain district or to one or two streets. “We all live on L street,” run the boys’ reports. “We all come from one street and a little street off from it.” “Fellows who lived up that way could be in the crowd.” “Come from down around the wharves.” “If he lived down there, and the fellows knew him, he could get in with them.” The neighborhood spirit is strong in boys; it needs to be regarded in all social work.

Nationality and Social Class

As for nationality, the gang is apt to be thoroughly unprejudiced and democratic. To be sure, twelve of my sixty-six gangs were all of one nationality. But that is largely because the streets or sections of the city where the boys live are likely to be given up to a single race. Fifty-four of my gangs were of mixed nationality, while in only one was any line drawn at breed or color—“No Jews or Negroes allowed.” Far more than we realize, the boys’ gang is helping out the public school in the great problem of assimilating the diverse races in the United States.

Nevertheless, there are some curious differences of nationality in the membership of gangs. Irish boys are especially gangy, with Americans and French a good second. Jews, on the other hand, are conspicuous for their absence. I questioned several Jewish boys, without discovering a single typical gang; and only two of my sixty-six gangs had Jewish members, though Jews are decidedly numerous in the regions from which the boys came. The reader who is interested in race psychology will find food for thought in the differing instincts of Irishman and Jew.

There is also some social difference in boys’ gangs. Boys from well-to-do homes are, as one might expect, less gangy than those brought up amid poorer surroundings. In the case of the more fortunate boys, the gang is only one of a number of factors in their social development. But boys from bad, broken, or inefficient homes are forced to provide their own social life, and the gang is their one instinctive reaction to their social environment.

Curiously, too, boys from the better class of homes more often form their social groups de novo to suit their individual social needs; while boys whose home training is deficient tend more to become members of gangs already formed. For this reason the permanent and long-lived gangs are apt to be tough, with fixed and dangerous traditions. Thus, while among well brought up boys a gang rarely survives the boyhood of the group which formed it, among delinquents of my acquaintance hardly more than a quarter were original members of their gangs, or could tell how their gangs started. The bad gang, therefore, tends to be a persistent and dangerous institution, taking in new members as the older ones graduate. But the good gang dies young. This circumstance probably accounts in no small degree for the bad odor in which all boys’ gangs are commonly held.

Organization

In respect to definiteness of organization, there are marked differences in gangs. Some are loosely knit and of short duration; others are select in their membership and rigid in their structure, so that they last through several generations of boys. Some gangs are autocratic, some democratic,—this, naturally, depending largely on the leader.

Most of them have names,—The Hicks Street Fellows, The Bleachery Gang, Morse Hollow Athletic Club, Wharf Rats, Crooks, Liners, Eggmen, Dowser Glums. Most have a regular time and place of meeting, rules and officers, though only a few have written constitutions and by-laws. Moreover, the definiteness of the organization and the esprit de corps seem to be quite independent of any formality or written code. Two organizations may be equally definite and forceful; and yet one may have its organization explicit in articles of federation, while that of the other is covert in the brain and muscles of its leader.

Time and Place of Meeting

Boys at the gang age intend to get together whenever possible. They will use all the time in which they are free from work or school. I have known boys to leave their proper occupations to go with the gang; and to reckon out carefully the balance between a day’s fun with the gang and a general warming-up reception at night by father. Most of the sixty-six gangs met every day, many met morning, noon and night, or all day. The evening hours are, naturally, the most active and the most dangerous part of the day, for then mischief-making is likely to be rampant, encouraged under the veil of darkness.

During the larger part of the year in most parts of the United States boys prefer the outdoor life. In the cities, a certain street or corner is the customary meeting-place. In the fall and winter months boys look for shelter. In the country they build a cabin of boards or logs in the woods; in the city they get clubrooms, make a shanty in the back yard, or fix up an empty room in the cellar, attic, or shed. In one gang, for example, “the Club met down at one boy’s house—in the cellar of the shed. Fixed up the place, had pictures out of magazines and papers,—funny pictures. Made a little table and benches, had boxing-gloves. Two boys had them an hour. No fighting allowed. Spent our evenings in the ‘Clubroom.’ Go to church Sundays and then skip down to the club and read books.”

In general, about half the city gangs have their regular meeting-place on street or street corner. For the other half, my records show four gangs meeting in clubrooms; three in houses; two in a shed; and one each in a shanty, behind a barn in the woods, in a house made of old barrels in a back street, a hencoop, a hut in the woods, a tent in the woods, a tent in the yard, a dugout, an empty attic, and the cellar of a shed.

Boys do not like parlors. They prefer a rather rough and crude place in shed or attic which they can fix up to suit their own tastes. Benches, working-tools, boxing-gloves, punching-bags, pictures, magazines and books, form the natural furniture of a gang clubroom. Fortunate, indeed, are the parents who can provide the right kind of a room in their home for their boys, and are wise enough to let the neighbors’ boys use it freely, without too much attention to their muddy feet.

Naturally, the boys have a sense of ownership of their clubroom tents or camps; but we find the same sentiment of ownership developing over the street or corner where they meet. The following are familiar expressions of the boys in regard to ownership: “Had a shanty in the woods. Other fellows would come and tear it down. Had a right over it.” “Wouldn’t let any gang in that street. Gave a strange boy a licking.” “Thought that Medford Street belonged to us.” “Every corner has a gang. That corner belongs to us.”

Officers

Two boys said: “We didn’t have no leader.” This is not correct. Consciously or unconsciously there must be a leader in every social group. A few gangs have a long list of officers elected formally by ballot at stated periods. But forty-four gangs (66⅔ per cent) have one leader, who takes his position naturally with little form or ceremony. Of the sixty-six gangs—

1	gang had	six officers or leaders
1		four
4	gangs	three
8		two
44		one officer or leader
8		no regular leader

The following words express the spirit of the boys in reference to leadership:—

“J. was ringleader. Steals most; says, ‘Come on.’” “I was leader. Had stumps, and the one who could do the most stumps would be leader.” “D. was the leader. He could fight best and had most money.” “G. was leader. He gave you anything if he had it. Worst one in the gang.” “G. was leader. Big, strong fellow. He is always bringing a gang around him.” “D. was leader. Pretty good fellow. Most daring fellow. Choose him by ballot. He got seven votes.” “No regular leader. One fellow proposed a thing. He knew most about it, and take the lead.”

The leader of the gang is such an interesting personality that we shall make a more careful study of him later, in another work.

Initiation

Commonly when boys enter a new gang some form of a reception is tendered them. In winter the new fellow may get a rub in the snow; in summer months he may be given a ducking or a little rough-and-tumble good time. In the Jenhine Boys, the new fellow “had to wrestle with Gibson to see if he was strong,” while in the Tennis Club, they “pounce on a fellow and give it to him for two or three minutes.” In a few gangs there were definitely planned initiation ceremonies. In the Jeffries Point Gang they threw a new fellow up in the air for five or ten minutes to test his grit. “If he didn’t cry, let him in.”

The object of the initiation ceremony appears to be to test the new fellow’s grit and strengthen his spirit of loyalty.

Rules

In the sixty-six gangs we find—

18	rules as to	“squealing,” snitching, or tell-taleing
8		lying to one of the gang
8		standing by each other in trouble
5		“divvying up” or paying equal parts of the expenses
3		unjust fighting
2		using tobacco
1	rule	swearing
1		stealing

We find the demand for loyalty and justice in the foreground and for morality in the rear. Although the rules are rarely put on paper there are few gangs without an unwritten code. These rules are necessary for the existence of the gang. They must be strictly enforced or the gang is dissolved. Expulsion is the usual penalty.

Dropping out of Gangs and Expulsion

Boys drop out of the gang suddenly, so that very few remain after sixteen years of age. At this time boys are entering the second adolescent period, and become intensely interested in girls. They feel so far above boys twelve or thirteen years old that they no longer care to affiliate with them. In gangs where younger boys have been allowed to enter, the older boys retire without disturbance to the structure of the group or its object; but in a gang where younger members have not been admitted and the boys are about the same age, the group may sometimes continue with a new set of interests.

As for involuntary withdrawals, ten boys were expelled from their gangs for “squealing,” three for unjust fighting, one each for bossing, failure to pay dues, cowardice, getting fresh, and disobedience. “Kicked one fellow out,” ran the reports, “for telling on the others.” “Put a fellow out for fighting with another boy. The other fellow was in the right.” “Put him out because he would run off when needed to fight.”

Settling Disputes

Disputes are sure to arise in any social group and especially in a gang. “If there was any dispute, have a scrap over it. Fellow who got the worst of it, gave up.” “If there was a dispute the leader settled it.” “The officers would most always settle disputes, talk it over, get circumstances, and then settle it.”

These cases illustrate the most common methods of settling internal troubles. In ten cases the boys fought it out; in seven other cases the matter was settled by the leader, a bigger boy, or an outsider.

The typical boys’ gang, then, is no mere haphazard association. Accidents of various sorts—age, propinquity, likeness of interests—bring together a somewhat random group. Immediately the boys react on one another. One or more leaders come to the fore. The gang organizes itself, finds or makes its meeting-place, establishes its standards, begins to do things. It develops, in some sort, a collective mind, and acts as a unit to carry out complex schemes and activities which would hardly so much as enter the head of one boy alone. The gang is, in short, a little social organism, coherent, definite, efficient, with a life of its own which is beyond the sum of the lives of its several members. It is the earliest manifestation in man of that strange group-forming instinct, without which beehive and ant hill and human society would be alike impossible.

CHAPTER IV
CERTAIN ACTIVITIES OF THE GANG

The most active time of life is early adolescence. At this age, the normal boy has finished one stage in his development, and is resting before he enters upon the next. He has weathered the storms of childhood. He has completed some of the most difficult portions of the growth process, and has salted down his gains. Between eight years of age and twelve, lies a period of extraordinary toughness and resilience, when the boy can eat anything and do anything. He is simply one bundle of prodigious energy, which he must explode, and which he generally insists on exploding in his own way.

The gang, naturally, becomes the chief outlet for his activities. Sheldon, in his study of 851 boys who were members of gangs, found that the purposes of these spontaneous societies were:—

Athletics	61 %.
Migration, building, hunting, fighting, and preying	17
Industrial work	8½
Or to sum up, associations for purposes involving physical activity comprised	86½
While associations for social, secret and literary purposes comprised only	13½

My own more detailed study of sixty-six gangs reveals the following group activities:—

Group games,—baseball, football, basketball, hockey, etc.	53	gangs or	80 %
Tribal industries,—hunting, fishing, boating, building huts, going about in the woods, playing Indians, etc.	49		74
Predatory activities,—stealing, injuring property, etc.	49		74
Fighting	46		70
Swimming	45		68
Migrations	44		67
“Plaguing people”	44		67
Going to theatres	38		58
Running-games,—relievo, chase, tag, etc.	31		47
Smoking	50		45
Playing cards	25		38
Skating	20		50
Sliding	12		18
Drinking	9		11

Of these various group activities, the running-games belong properly to the pre-gang stage of the boy’s existence. The normal instincts of the little boy incline him to the individualistic games, of which tag and hide and seek are the type, in which the player acts for himself against the one who is “it.” The transition to the coöperative “group games” of the gang age not infrequently takes place by way of running-games of the prisoner’s base and relievo type, in which, though the game is still fundamentally individualistic, there is nevertheless some sort of loosely organized side.

Running being a deep-seated impulse of all young life, the formless running-games of childhood tend to hold over into the gang age. Thirty-one of my sixty-six gangs, or practically half of them, reported that they still clung to their pre-adolescent sports. Tag, hide and seek, and relievo are the favorites, being represented in twenty-one, fourteen, and twelve gangs respectively. Hoist the sail, chase, leap frog, and run-sheep-run, appear in five gangs or more. Some twenty other games, a few of them apparently local inventions, are mentioned at least once. Oddly enough, some of the oldest stand-bys of childhood, such as puss in the corner, blind man’s buff, and follow the leader, appear in but two gangs at most, while tops, marbles, and kites figure not at all. Only two gangs—more’s the pity—play hare and hounds; partly, let us hope, because of the limitations imposed by the city streets rather than altogether because of deficient wind and stamina in the city-bred boy.

Of the group games—of games, that is, which presuppose an organized side, a leader, rules, apparatus, and some sort of playing-field—baseball, as might be expected, comes easily first. Fifty-one gangs play baseball, of the fifty-three which devote themselves to group games. Football comes next, with thirty-six. Hockey and basketball make a bad third and fourth, with nine each. Cricket appears in six gangs. If, then, we lump together the cricket-playing and baseball-playing gangs, as we may fairly do since they are both bat-and-ball games of essentially the same type and really alternates of one another, we arrive at the significant fact that all normal boys, at the age when they have the native impulse to form gangs, have also the native impulse to hit a quick-moving object with a club. The precise significance of this conjunction, and the part which it ought to play in the boy’s education, will appear later.

Of swimming, also, and the minor sports of boyhood, of smoking and drinking and playing cards, I shall have more to say in another place. For the present we are concerned only with such activities as arise from the great fundamental instincts of the gang age.

Of these, next in importance to the group games come the so-called tribal industries,—hunting, fishing, building boats and rafts and sailing them, going to ponds or into the woods, building huts and playing Indians,—the various uncivilized occupations, in short, with which the savage tribes of the world fill the greater part of their lives.

On this point the most entertaining witnesses are the boys themselves. I quote, therefore, their own accounts.

“Played Indians in the woods. Went fishing after perch and pickerel. Went berrying. Got a pail full, then ate them.” “Went fishing and shooting. Each of us had a gun. Played cards in the woods. Met out in the woods back of an old barn. Sundays, went on a trip into the country.” “Went camping out. Stayed for a day or two. Made a boat. Went bathing, fishing for perch and pickerel.” “Went fishing. Had a tent in the woods for one month. Went boating.” “Went fishing. Went to woods on Sundays. Built bonfires. Went hunting.” “Went fishing for pickerel and perch. Went hunting for gray squirrels, pheasants, quails, rabbits, foxes. Shot three foxes, one silver fox. Had a shanty in the woods.” “Made boats and rafts to hold ten or twelve fellows. Twenty-three of us hired a tent for five days in woods.” “Played Indians. Made up two parties. One party captured others and put them in a hole. Met in a shanty or clubhouse in the woods.” “Had a tent and a dugout a quarter of a mile out in the woods. Stayed out five nights. Slept in a barn.”

A FOOT-BALL GAME BETWEEN CITY GANGS

The crosses indicate the leaders

“A SHANTY OR CLUB HOUSE IN THE WOODS”

These are sample reports. In one form or another, three quarters of our boys’ gangs find themselves impelled to revert to the conditions of pre-civilized days, and to enjoy what their savage forebears had perforce to endure. Considering that these gangs are nearly all made up of city boys, who have to put themselves to a great deal of trouble to get out into the country, the fact is most significant.

Closely allied to this instinctive liking for savagery is an instinct for “plaguing people.” All proper boys have it, while nearly seventy per cent of the boys of this study report that making themselves collectively disagreeable is one of the spontaneous activities of their several groups. As before, I subjoin the boys’ own account.

“Rap on doors. Push and pull people. Play tick-tack on windows.” “Plague Jews and Italians. Tip the rag teams of Jews over. Take the rags and sell them to some other Jew.” “Have a dead rat. Throw it at a Chinaman. Fire things at men to get the chase. Hit men out of doors to get the chase. Put a rock in a paper bag for men to kick.” “Tie a rope across the street and trip people up. Throw eggs at people. Throw cabbages at people. Ring doorbells. Break windows, electric lights. Plague Chinamen. Bring them in a bundle of paper [to wash]. Throw potatoes at Chinamen.” “Call persons names to get the chase. Throw eggs at Chinamen’s doors. Plague policemen.” “Go round in wood yard. Throw wood in street to get the chase.”

So the records run,—pure, wanton, useless mischief and cruelty. No wonder the gang is not popular. Yet we all did the same things in our day and have grown up to be very decent men. There is a time in the lives of normal boys when any form of distress—to other people—is instinctively amusing. Note also how frequently the boy annoys simply “to get the chase.” He has the hunting instinct; he has also the instinct for being hunted. Therefore he deliberately exasperates some adult beyond endurance, until the man “takes after” him, wrath in his eye and anticipation in the palm of his hand. The man, commonly, is the fleeter of foot; but the boy has the better wind and the advantage of a short start. As a last resort, he can dodge. The resulting game is, on the whole, the most thrilling experience of boyhood. Nine times in ten, the boy gets away; the penalties that follow being caught are a cheap price for the riotous delights of escaping with the skin of his teeth.

Somewhat allied to plaguing people is stealing. The stealing instinct is strong in boys, so that even the good country gangs, with all they want to eat at home, devote part of their time to their neighbors’ orchards and vineyards. The impulse is closely connected with the instinct for property, and is so entirely normal at the gang age that the boy, otherwise of good character, who steals in company, is seldom at all depraved. The boy who goes off by himself to steal is a different case.

That the crime of larceny reaches its climax before the age of twenty-one, shows that the predatory instincts and habits are early formed, or else that if the stealing instincts and habits increase in power after this age, the person becomes shrewd enough in stealing to escape the penalty of the law. The following reports of the boys in regard to stealing are instructive:—

“Go around stealing for fun. Go out to

The boys’ own reports of their thefts sum up as follows:—

(1) Things to eat (apples, pears, cakes, pies, oranges, bananas, etc.)	198	different things
(2) Things to sell (lead, coal, wood)	23
(3) Things used in games (balls, bats, gloves, etc.)	48
(4) Tools (saws, hammers, knives)	36
(5) Jewelry (watches, rings, etc.)	24	times
(6) Animals and birds (dogs and pigeons)	24
(7) Money	80
Total,	433	things and times

There was no use in asking the boys how many times they had taken fruit; life would be too short to take down the answers.

CHAPTER V
FURTHER ACTIVITIES OF THE GANG

There is probably no more characteristic difference between boyhood and middle age than the strange Wanderlust of youth. We adults are content to work year after year at the same desk, and think ourselves lucky if we can warm our feet year after year over the same register. But the boy,—

“He must go, go, go away from here,”

and “the old spring fret comes o’er him” at all seasons of the year.

Migratory Activities

The migratory impulse takes a sudden rise at the dawn of adolescence. Nearly all boys with good, red blood in their veins are touched by it. It appears to come as a strong wave at the gang age, and then gradually subsides; but it rarely entirely disappears.

Boys in their gangs love to tell and to hear stories of adventure, and there is no question that the gang is often a direct agent for stirring the call of the wild. In forty-four (67 per cent) of the sixty-six gangs there are records of the travel of one or more of the group. A boy who has taken some adventurous trip is a hero, and his stories are listened to with great zest. Boys rarely go off in large companies, for it is impossible for them all to get away at once. Commonly, not more than three or four go at a time; often a boy and his companion together; sometimes a boy goes alone.

In the following records, I have, as before, suppressed such geographical names as would be meaningless to most readers, and substituted for them some suggestion of the distance, or indicated whether the journey was from country to city, or the reverse.

“From A——

“Sometimes go on a trip in the country on Sundays. Catch a freight, go to [near-by towns]. Go to B—— to shows and circus.”

“Take a car, go to City Point, just for a little ride. Nice and breezy on the cars. Went to C—— on a freight. Got back same night about one o’clock. Go off for a trip on Sundays. Go out to A——, W——. Went to P—— [one hundred miles]. Had a tent in the woods for a month.”

“Jumped freights. Was going to New York. Stopped [on the way]. Went back, was arrested.”

“Took walks to Y—— Woods and R——’s Pond. Some saved up money and went to L—— Fair [one hundred and thirty miles each way]. Some went to [state capital] to ball-games.”

“Broke into a store and then ran away from home so we wouldn’t get caught. Went to B—— on a freight. Stayed at Hawkins Street Home one night. Went to O—— on freight. Stopped for a week in Armory in O——. Walked to N—— [ten miles] to sister’s. Stayed a couple of days. Went to W—— and then back to M——, and was caught. We planned to go to A—— [which would have taken them two hundred miles into three states].”

“Go off to different cities on freights. Went to P—— [one hundred miles], five or six times. Stayed a week once. Went to N—— twice. Stopped one day each time. Went to A—— six times. Stayed two weeks. Went to E—— five or six times [these are within fifty miles of home], stopped three or four days. Went [across into Canada three hundred and fifty miles]. Got a job in a steam laundry there. Saved up money and then went off for a good time.”

“Stay out nights three months to a time. Stay in cellars, freight cars, and entries. Sundays go out to

“Stay out nights. Go in back yards and sleep. Run away to [nearest large city]. Walked. Took four days. Got arrested there.”

“Go down to Apple Island in a boat. Stay out at night; stay in paper offices on Washington Street. Lots of boys get there at one and two o’clock for their papers. When woke up, say: ‘I am waiting for the papers.’ Run away from home several times. Get as far as W——, turn round and come back at nights. Say we would try it some other times.”

Or, to sum up:—

23	boys had	jumped freights to other towns or cities.
3		walked to distant towns or cities.
4		paid fares on cars to different towns or cities.
30		gone off to distant cities.
14	of the thirty had run away from home.
16	had stayed out nights.

In addition to the records of travel found in these gangs, the following records taken later are interesting:—

CHAPTER VI
THE ANTHROPOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF THE GANG

It is not easy to realize that it was only a single generation ago when we used to think that the animals are ruled by instinct, man by reason. We know better now. What was once the “new” psychology has taught us that man has more separate instincts than any other creature that breathes, and that however superior his rational life, it is still based upon a substructure of primitive instincts which he shares with the beasts of the field.

The newborn infant feels on his skin the air of a cold world, and sucks in his first breath without knowing how or why. He manages, the first time he tries, about as well as he ever will, the decidedly complex operation of taking breath and food at the same time, crossing the two streams in his throat, and sending each to its proper destination without confusion with the other. When the proper time comes, the child who has gone on all fours like an animal gets up on his hind legs to walk like a man.

We are all of us, therefore, man and animals alike, born with the particular set of instincts which prompt us, without our taking thought, to whatever acts are essential to our physical life. Some of these instincts are active at birth; more lie dormant, to ripen and manifest themselves only at the proper age, each in its proper time. The impulse to walk and to utter words comes suddenly, in babyhood. The mating instincts appear only toward the end of adolescence. Metchnikoff will have it that at the end of a well-spent life, an instinctive longing for death replaces the will to live.

The physical differences between boys and girls are strikingly correlated with a difference in instinctive interests. Brought up alike, in a hundred little ways they are dissimilar. I have seen at a children’s party, on the advent of a baby, every little girl leave the supper table to surround the new-comer, while every little boy kept on with his meal. Where the girl plays with dolls, the boy plays with bats and balls.

Among other divergences, the boy forms gangs. Girls do not form gangs. They belong to sets, and sets and gangs are quite different institutions. The set is exclusive, undemocratic. It has no organization, leaders, history, and it owns no property. The set snubs its rivals; the gang fights them. The members of a set also snub one another, quarrel, and backbite. There is none of the deep-seated, instinctive loyalty which the members of a gang have for each other. The normal boy may fight his friend; he does not “get mad at” him.

All this is only one aspect of the deep-seated difference between “the only two kinds of people there are in the world, men and women.” Barring dolls and the ability to hurl missiles, little girls and little boys, as they emerge from babyhood, are not so very unlike. But somewhere about the age of ten, the little boy begins to undergo a transformation, which in the girl never takes place at all. He begins to develop the gang-forming instinct. He begins to want to do things which he cannot do at all alone; and cannot, moreover, do with any real satisfaction except in conjunction with a special group of his fellows. The once friendly boy becomes shy of adults, so that only the rare man or woman can retain his full confidence. Girls he scorns. His games tend now to be of the coöperative type, in which there is a definitely organized side, with a leader and more or less specialized functions among the players, and where one side wins or loses to the other as a whole. It is no longer each for himself, but each for the team. A girl can be taught to like this kind of game; a boy takes to it like a duck to water.

Apparently, then, a boy joins a gang and a girl does not for precisely the same reason that he throws stones while his sister tends lovingly the dolls that are beneath his contempt. Each is doing instinctively, as a child, for play, what grown men and women have been doing these thousand years for work.

For obviously the instinctive activities of the boys’ gang are the necessary duties of the savage man. The civilized boy hunts, fishes, fights, builds huts in the woods, stands loyally by his fellows, and treats all outsiders with suspicion or cruelty, and in general lives the life and thinks the thoughts of the savage man. He is, for the moment, a savage; and he instinctively “plays Indians” as the real savage lives them.

General opinion has it that the boy instinctively plays Indians and follows the so-called tribal occupations as the direct result of his inheritance from some thousands of generations of savage ancestors who, willy nilly, have been doing these things all their lives. We commonly believe that the normal boy is possessed to throw stones at every moving object because his forebears got their livings or preserved their lives by throwing all sorts of missiles at prey and enemies, so that the fascination of sticks and clubs is but the reverberation of the not so very far off days when sticks and clubs were man’s only weapons.

According to this doctrine, such a game as baseball is an epitome of man’s prehistoric activities. To throw accurately and to run swiftly, to hit a quick-moving object with a club, is to revive, symbolically, the most absorbing of ancestral activities and the most vivid of ancestral memories. As the girl, tending her doll, is recapitulating the experiences of a hundred thousand mothers before her, so the boy, in the varied activities of his gang, is reproducing the life of long departed clans and tribes. The instinctive interests of both boys and girls are the result of the experiences of their ancestors.

All this, one need not point out, is the familiar recapitulation theory, the doctrine, that is to say, that the young of each species, our own included, tends to reproduce in the course of its youth the successive stages in the history of its ancestors. We are by turns invertebrates, gill-breathing vertebrates, lung-breathing vertebrates (we make the great change at birth), little monkeys, little savages, and finally civilized men and women.

It is an illuminating theory, and one, moreover, which goes far toward explaining many aspects of our human nature which without it would be largely meaningless. Especially is it the key to the behavior of boys at the gang age. The normal boy between ten and sixteen is really living through the historic period which, for the races of northern Europe, began somewhere this side of the glacial period, and came to an end with, let us say, the early middle ages. He is, therefore, essentially a savage, with the interests of a savage, the body of a savage, and to no small extent, the soul of one. He thinks and feels like a savage; he has the savage virtues and the savage vices; and the gang is his tribe.

Yet while nothing can be more evident than that certain characteristics of growing boys and girls, both physical and mental, are the result of a direct inheritance from the past, it is equally evident that certain others are not. In certain conspicuous traits, our children favor their long-departed ancestors; but in certain others they are even less like them than we. Our anthropoid ancestry were hairy; children are less hairy than adults. We have larger brains and shorter arms than our forebears, but our children have still larger brains, relatively, and still shorter arms than we. In a dozen different ways, the older a man grows, the more, not the less, apelike does he become; as, for example, in the curve of his back and the great bony ridges over his eyes. In these respects, the child looks rather to the future than to the past. The child, indeed, recapitulates the history of the race, but only so far as it is some real advantage to him to do so, and never merely for the sake of recapitulating. When Nature cannot utilize an ancestral quality here and now, out it goes, to make room for something wholly new.

Certain qualities of youth, then, are an inheritance from the past; they exist because of the men and women that were. Certain others are a prophecy of adult life, and exist because of the men and women who are to be. Most of our youthful characteristics are simultaneously of both these sorts. They have persisted from an immemorial past; but they have persisted, instead of being lost by the way, because they have proved themselves useful in this present. Thus, for example, we recapitulate a gill-slit stage, because we actually did have a fish ancestor; but we use these gill-slits, not to become adult fish, but as a convenient device for building an aortic arch such as no fish ever had. We are tailed embryos as a step in becoming tailless men; and in the same way, we are boy savages as a stage toward becoming civilized human beings. The savage impulses of a long departed past appear in every modern boy, both because they are an inheritance from that past and because they are a preparation for the boy’s future. We tend to recapitulate only so much of the ancestral experience as we can actually use.

Conversely, what we keep is useful; or else has been useful so very lately that we have not had time to change. Before the days of gunpowder—and how short a while, after all, that was—handling spear and javelin was a matter of life and death. Then, as now, boys had the missile-throwing instinct, and girls did not. They had it, on the one hand, because their ancestors had been spear-men; but they had it, on the other hand, and equally, and long before they were old enough to fight, in order that they might enjoy the long continued practice that taught them to throw well. Evidently, a spear-fighting people whose boys lacked the throwing instinct, so that they had to be coerced into doing their spear practice, would soon go down before a rival group whose boys found spear throwing a spontaneous play. In the same way, the children of girls who did not love dolls and pets and all small and helpless things could never, even under modern conditions, make head against the children of girls who did. All the peoples whose women tended their babies from a sense of duty have long ago gone to the wall.

The woman must tend her babies; therefore the girl loves dolls. The man, to be a member of any human society, whether civilized or savage, must stand by his fellows, follow his leader, act with his associates, be loyal to the death. Therefore the boy has the gang-forming instincts. These are, in a real sense, an inheritance from the past, but they are in an equally real sense a gift of the present to the future. Boys and girls alike repeat so much of their common ancestral experience as helps to make them efficient men and women, and no more. If there were no such thing as heredity, if each generation simply sat down and created the next to suit itself, we should still have to make the girls love dolls and the boys form gangs. Without these instincts, neither girls nor boys would become fully equipped adults.

CHAPTER VII
THE CONTROL OF THE MORE PRIMITIVE IMPULSES

We must, then, so far as we are good evolutionists, look upon the boy’s gang as the result of a group of instincts inherited from a distant past. So far as, in addition, we are good Darwinians, we must suppose that these gang instincts arose in the first place because they were useful once, and that they have been preserved to the present day because they are, on the whole, useful still.

Fortunately or unfortunately, however, the social evolution of Homo Europeus during, let us say, the last three or four centuries, has been vastly more rapid than any strictly biological evolution can possibly be. Inevitably, therefore, the bodily structure of man and his equipment of natural instincts, has of late years tended to fall behind the demands of civilization. Witness, for example, the professional man who falls in love at twenty, but must wait till thirty before he can support a wife; or the inconvenient superfluity of bone, muscle and lung in many an office worker. One notes incidentally how much better fitted for civilization, both in mind and body, women are than men. They were, the ethnologists tell us, civilized first.

Certain of the gang instincts, therefore, tend to fit the growing boy for conditions which no longer obtain, rather than for those which he will actually have to face as a man. To no small extent, the ancient virtues of savagery have become vices of civilization, so that the instincts on which they are based are by no means desirable in a modern boy.

Consider, for example, the “plaguing people” which, as we have seen, occurs in forty-four of our sixty-six reports. This is, of course, sheer savagery. “Most savages,” as Darwin says, “are utterly indifferent to the sufferings of strangers, or even delight in witnessing them”; and the modern boy does not fall far behind the ancient savage as every Chinaman and Jew and policeman can testify. The gang considers it the proper thing also to attack and misuse every strange boy who appears in its precincts. It gets no small part of its pleasure in giving displeasure to others.

Yet, after all, the cruelty of our savage forefathers was a hard necessity. A little tribe, perpetually fighting for its life against its rivals, could not afford to be sympathetic toward the discomfort of outsiders. In the primitive struggle for existence, the kindly tribe would pretty certainly be beaten by the cruel one.

So the boy is cruel and plagues people. But his cruelty is largely collective rather than individual, like that of the wolf rather than the tiger. As his ganginess fades with later adolescence, much of his native barbarity will go with it. Till that time comes, the wise adult will not attribute to thoroughgoing depravity what is only a temporary stage in the boy’s psychic evolution.

In part, therefore, the boy comes honestly by his teasing instincts. But “plaguing people” arises in part also from race prejudice; and so far as it does thus arise, it is entirely the fault of us adults. Boys, untaught, have no prejudice against any particular kind of stranger, so that the fault being ours, the remedy is quite in our own hands.

To a large extent, moreover, the practice of being disagreeable is, as the boys themselves report, merely “to get the chase.” “Plaguing people” is an exciting sport, which satisfies a natural thirst for adventure, and which is therefore most naturally controlled by judicious doses of adventure in other forms. The joy of getting the chase necessarily departs as soon as the running instincts begin to fade, and the growing boy begins to encounter the gang’s prejudice against fleeing from a pursuer not much stronger than himself.

Still, for the most part, this inconvenient impulse of boyhood is largely a spontaneous instinct, allied to the disposition to tease and bully. It is doubtful if it has any pedagogical value whatever. Its proper cure is in about equal measure, firm repression and a cultivation of the sympathetic imagination. But let the parent beware of cultivating a sympathy which is in the least sentimental. It is better to let the boy stay naturally cruel for a few years, and then as naturally outgrow it, than to make him morbidly philanthropic for life. After all, cruelty, however hard on the victim, so long as it is unconscious, does little moral damage to the perpetrator.

The tendency to plague the girls, however, seems to be an instinct of a different sort. In general, boys at the gang age do not naturally associate with girls, do not allow them in their organizations, nor have any interests in common with them. In fact, boys seem to be impelled by a well defined impulse to make themselves disagreeable to the other sex.

Only eleven of my reports so much as recognize the existence of the beings who, five years later, will become the most absorbing objects in life; while even in these, the information came only on inquiry, not spontaneously. To the question: “How does your gang treat girls?” typical answers are: “We never used to think of girls. I don’t know how to treat them. I never tried it.” “We never used to go with any girls.” “They never go round with any girls. They never say nothing to them. Sis at them.” “Sometimes do mean things to them. Swear at them. Fight them. Steal things off them. Call them names.”

Who can question that this instinctive hostility of boys to girls is a wise provision of nature, and a good thing—at least for the boys? It is a temporary stage which passes all too soon, and leaves the youth at the mercy of the first attractive girl who makes the sweet eyes at him. From ten years to sixteen, nature tries to keep the sexes apart; presumably she knows what she is about, and we shall do well to accept the hint which she offers us.

Closely allied to plaguing, and even more nearly universal in normal gangs, is fighting. Unlike plaguing, however, fighting is on the whole a virtue of the gang rather than a vice, notwithstanding its many regrettable aspects. Boys enjoy fighting, and they ought to. We come of a stock which has fought its way up from barbarism, and has known the joy of battle these hundred centuries. “We, the lineal representatives of the successful enactors of one scene of slaughter after another, must, whatever more pacific virtues we may also possess, still carry about with us, ready at any moment to burst into flame, the smouldering and sinister traits of character by which they lived through so many massacres, harming others, but themselves unharmed.”

“They have rights who dare maintain them,”

and many a long century will go by ere the world loses the necessity for the old fighting instincts. One may well believe that the men who are fighting corrupt political gangs in their manhood, fought the gangs of the next street in their youth, and so learned the fighting habit.

Fighting is like plaguing in being an anti-social impulse. Unlike the latter, on the other hand, it possesses great pedagogical value. There is nothing like a fight between individuals to teach physical and moral courage, self-reliance and self-control; and when, in addition, the battle involves the honor of the gang, it becomes one of the most forceful of lessons in the social virtues. Either the fighting experiences of boyhood, or the fighting instincts which persist into adult life, or both together, make it impossible for men ever to treat one another as rudely as women often do.

Nevertheless, this feature of boy life does present troublesome problems. We come suddenly upon two boys fighting, and our grown up standards of conduct compel us to separate them. Afterwards, when we think it over, we are apt to regret that we happened to appear on the scene at that precise moment. It would have been just as well, we realize, for all parties, if the battle had been fought out.