5

Initiation

The tents were a quarter of a mile apart, on opposite sides of a stream. The boys reluctantly gathered up their bags and belongings, with help from the caretakers Sherif and Kelman, and took them to their respective tents. Carper’s group was on the west side of the stream.

Harold, still carrying his Popular Mechanics magazine, wasn’t surprised they had been split up. He had noticed the men watching as they played games the day before, and when he saw the junior counsellors conferring with Harry Ness that morning, he guessed what they had in mind. Harold told Jim Carper that he knew the men had been watching to find out who the boys’ friends were and then separated them so they could make new friends. Carper insisted this wasn’t true but he included the information in his daily notes. Yet Harold must have kept his suspicions to himself because Walt, who was in the same group, remembers the separation as a shock. ‘We did everything together in those first couple of days. We got to know each other and developed a real sense of camaraderie.’

Looking back, Doug thinks their distress at being put in different groups says something about the situation the boys found themselves in. ‘When you think about it, there were twenty-four boys and none of us knew each other. We didn’t come from the same communities, neighbourhoods, or schools, so the fact that in just one or two days we became that friendly that we didn’t want to be divided is telling. I’m wondering if the place was so darn spooky that we didn’t want to be divided for that reason. Because this campsite was not your standard summer camp, with a pretty lodge and its little cabins or lean-tos. This was the woods, and you were a long way from your home, and I don’t get the sense that the counsellors were trying to be our buddies and supportive, so all in all it had to be a fairly unpleasant experience for everybody. Maybe we just felt, “At least we have each other.”’

Sherif wrote that after the boys had been moved to their new tents, ‘the pain of separation was assuaged by allowing each group to go at once on a hike and camp out’. But his notes were a case of wishful thinking. Distracting the boys from being separated would not be as simple as that. Soon after the boys were taken to their new tents, the men realised that Mickey, a quiet, stocky boy, was missing. Harvey, Sussman, and Ness fanned out across the campsite, but Mickey was nowhere to be found. Harvey and Ness got in the truck and drove up the road, and Kelman’s notes quote Harvey’s description of the scene. They spotted the boy ‘one mile from the camp in a fast run. He ran into the bushes and hid. When they got him he sobbed loudly all the way back. He said “The boys will call me a sissy” and “Please let me go home.”’ Kelman doesn’t make clear whether they got the boy out by force or by persuasion, but it sounded as if they hadn’t changed his mind. Harvey wrote in his notes that between sobs Mickey told him he ‘didn’t want to come to camp but his mother made him’.

When Mickey was returned to camp, Carper made a fuss of him, and in preparation for the day hike, ‘I gave him the first aid kit to carry.’ The boys were given haversacks, canteens, and mess kits, and some of the boys crowded round ‘excitedly’ to see them, Sherif wrote. Carper asked Mickey to help him assign the other boys their gear. ‘This cheered him quite a bit,’ Carper wrote. I was beginning to like this man. I imagined Mickey felt the same way.

The caretakers led each group on a day hike — the boys were told this was because they knew the area so well. Carper, junior counsellor Rupe, and Kelman, led their group of twelve boys — which included runaway Mickey, shy Walt, jovial Laurence, fisherman John, and Popular Mechanics fan Harold — north. By now Carper had memorised the boys’ names and was free to watch how their relationships were developing.

His started off as a large group, but once the path started to climb, they strung out in a long line. At the head of the group, John, an experienced hiker, kept pace with Kelman, or ‘Mr Herbee’. Behind him, in a loose group of four boys, Laurence, usually the joker, was subdued, flicking a stick at the long grass, saying little. Beside him, Mickey struggled to keep pace, sweating and puffing. The boys were clustered in groups of three of four, and Carper noticed how they avoided talking to Mickey. He had overheard the others complaining about Mickey, how he always wanted to be ‘different’, refusing to join in games, and today carrying his canteen inside his haversack instead hanging from his belt so that every time he stopped for a drink it took ten times longer than anyone else and they had to stop and wait. Faced with their irritation and getting tired, Mickey fell further back, and ‘focussed his attention on the counsellors (usually myself)’, Carper wrote.

They hiked across a meadow, the grass swishing and clouds of midges rising at their approach, with Kelman and John far ahead and the boys strung out in clusters of twos and threes, Mickey and Carper at the tail end. When they stopped beneath a massive spruce tree to rest in the shade, Kelman and Carper quickly conferred. To keep the boys together in a single group, Kelman gave John, who kept racing ahead, a large can of beans to carry to slow him down, and Carper shouldered Mickey’s backpack so he could more easily keep pace. There were certainly scientific reasons why they wouldn’t want to lose a subject from the experiment, but I wondered if I read sympathy in Carper’s notes, as if he could identify with a boy who felt like an outsider.

The day hike was the first of a whole range of group activities Sherif had scheduled for the next five days and the second stage of the experiment. He predicted that at the end of that time, the boys would identify closely with their new group, and would experience a ‘feeling of belongingness’. They would have a clear leader and express their collective identity in shared catchwords, group slogans, and ways of policing rivalry or friction between group members, all visible signs of what he called group norms. It was as though the boys would shed one identity and a new one would take its place. Sherif wrote that for each boy, ‘His sense of personal identity does not and cannot exist independent of the group setting. In short, the individual cannot be considered apart from or in contrast to the groups of which he is a member … the tired but still popular question concerning the individual versus the group … simply evaporates into thin air.’

By the time they got back to camp later that day, sweaty and tired, the men leading both groups had been fielding questions from the boys about their friends in the other group: what they were doing and when they were going to see them. The written instructions to staff were silent on how to handle the boys’ curiosity. It does not seem to have factored into their preparations. Sherif had Sussman instruct the men to tell them the ‘camp was organized to try out different camp activities … they were engaged in different activities and were not to be interrupted’. But this didn’t satisfy the boys and, back a camp, a now-glum Laurence and the other boys in Carper’s group hung around the kitchen and pestered the cook for an explanation. But he said he knew as little as they did. Sherif had Sussman revise the daily schedules and arrange for meals to be served at different times so the groups didn’t cross paths and there would be no contact between them, so it was likely the cook knew a little more than he was letting on.

At different times that afternoon, the adults organised a treasure hunt for each group, to build morale and to get them working as teams. I imagined the boys absorbed in the task, hurrying from clue to clue, in and out of the shade of the woods, down by the stream, to the mess hall, their tent, and back again, as the men silently shadowed them, noting any boys who seemed to take the lead, and which ones seemed happy to follow. Both boys won a $10 prize, as Sherif and Sussman had pre-arranged and noted in the day’s notes.

The second test of how the group was developing was how they made decisions about spending the prize money. Before supper, Jim Carper crept up to his group’s tent and listened outside as the boys discussed what they should buy with their money. The light was fading; one of them jiggled a torch, and shadows jumped and fell on the wall of the tent. ‘Hey,’ someone said, ‘don’t waste the battery.’ I imagine it was John, the practical one, who suggested they use the money to buy a Coleman lamp so they could play games after dark. Maybe it was Walt, one of a family of six boys, who objected that it would be impossible to divide up a lamp once the camp was over, that they should simply divide the money between them.

‘Rubbers, we should buy rubbers!’ one boy said. This sounded like Mickey to me, eager for attention.

‘You’ve got a head full of rubbers,’ another one said dismissively.

‘We could get a girl for the counsellors, with a conveyor belt so they don’t have to walk out of the tent,’ the boy I guessed was Mickey said loudly. ‘A conveyor belt with a whore at the end of it!’

There was a moment of shocked silence and then a jumble of annoyed voices drowning Mickey out. I imagined Carper straining to identify who was speaking in the excited muddle of voices that followed, suggesting that they use the money to rent a canoe, buy a horse, even buy a hot rod. I imagined his mounting impatience as he listened to this scene and the boys’ inability to settle and make a serious decision, offering instead a raft of increasingly ‘unrealistic suggestions’. How was he supposed to observe who exactly was making suggestions and how they were being received when he was out here in the dark, the mosquitoes whining, tired from the day’s exertion and the prospect of another long night ahead typing up notes before any possibility of going to sleep? And the boys clamouring, calling over one another, offering increasingly half-baked suggestions, no particular boy demonstrating that he had any more influence than the rest. According to Sherif, by now one boy should be taking charge and directing decisions.

But $10 was a huge amount to the boys, worth the equivalent of almost $100 today. In 1953, $10 would buy one hundred sodas, seventy hotdogs, or a week of canoe hire. The amount of money had unsettled them; it seemed excessive, and some were feeling uneasy about the way they’d ‘won’ it. Perhaps the prize money had been a test. They were also still bothered by the mystery of Harry Ness’s about-face and worried that he’d separated them from their friends as punishment. Maybe they could use the money to buy their way back into favour.

‘We should give some money to the counsellors.’

‘— five dollars to Mr Ness.’

‘Did you see after he gave it to us he walked away real quick?’ I imagine this might have been Harold, who paid such close attention to the men.

‘He didn’t say grace today. He always says grace.’

‘He’s mad at us?’

‘He split us up, didn’t he?’ a boy said impatiently.

‘But what did we do?’

There was a short silence.

‘We did something,’ another boy said glumly.

Their conversation was cut short by the clanging of the dinner bell.

While Carper’s group had come to no decision, Jack White’s group had decided after some discussion to buy something that could stay on at the camp after they’d gone. They opted for two flags — an American flag and a camp flag with an emblem on it. But what emblem? An eagle? A wolf? Under the sway of the ghost stories they’d been telling the night before, one boy suggested a picture of a wolf eating a gallbladder, but the others dismissed the idea. Perhaps under the influence of their jungle comic books, they finally decided that the second flag should decorated with the image of a black panther.

Once the table had been cleared, Carper announced that the caretaker was compiling a list of supplies for his morning trip into town: what did they want him to buy with their prize money? The boys exchanged glances and then John piped up that they’d decided on a Coleman lamp. Were they sure? Carper asked, glancing from boy to boy around the table, remembering the arguing that had gone on just an hour before. Was it a unanimous decision, Carper wanted to know. John turned to the rest of the group and asked for a show of hands. Sherif, hiding in the kitchen, would likely have watched impatiently, irritated by Carper’s questions. It was enough that the boys had fallen in with John’s suggestion. It showed a hierarchy had developed, with John as a leader whose plans the others followed. Still, Carper looked doubtfully at the group of boys, worrying that the quieter ones had been railroaded. Sherif hurried into the mess hall, in my imagination pulling out a small notebook and the stub of a pencil from his pocket, like an actor hurrying onto a stage. He licked the stub and flipped the notebook open, and in his heavy accent announced theatrically, ‘One Coleman lamp, coming up.’

Sunday morning was overcast, the air thick and muggy. The boys in Jack White’s group had rushed to the mess hall at breakfast time, expecting to see the others. But when they got there, the cook was wiping the second table with a wet rag and it was clear the other group had been and gone. The room would have felt empty and quiet with just the twelve of them there. It was beginning to dawn on these boys, like Doug and Peter and Irving, that they were not just in separate tents but were being kept apart. Peter, who had relished the archery games with his friend Laurence, was feeling resentful, and he called out sarcastically to the cook in the kitchen, ‘Hey Sandy, why don’t we eat together? Not allowed to see our friends, eh?’ But Sandy just shook his head at the boys, saying nothing.

After breakfast, while the others returned to their tent, Peter, Irving, and a boy called Nathan ran quickly in the other direction, towards their friends’ tent, hiding behind bushes and trees, keeping out of sight of the camp counsellors. But Jack White spotted them as they burst from some bushes and ran low across the stream, and he ran after them. In the last 100 yards, they called to their friends, ‘Laurence! Eric! Hey!’ The tent flap burst open and a group of boys spilled out, whooping hellos, but Jack White had caught up to the three runaways, blocking their path and saying that Mr Ness had insisted they return to the mess hall. He herded the reluctant boys away. For Irving, it had been a daring prank, and he was excited and cheered by the adventure. But Peter walked sullenly ahead of Jack White, saying nothing, while Nathan kicked at the dirt, raising dust.

Sunday church services, along with early morning reveille, were part of summer-camp tradition. But a visiting minister might ask questions or cause problems, so Sussman volunteered to fulfil these duties, eager to take a more active role in the study rather than being caught up in the daily chores of arranging food, supplies, and maintenance. He’d volunteered his services for this experiment because he felt under-appreciated at Union College, where at his first faculty meeting after his appointment as assistant professor in 1951, he was puzzled when the president introduced him not by his new job title but as coming from a long line of watchmakers with skills in restoration and repair. To his dismay, he discovered that five of the faculty — including the dean — were avid collectors of antique clocks. He spent most nights working late at his workbench, making repairs and trying to ignore his growing humiliation and the conviction that it was these vocational skills rather than his academic qualifications that had gotten him the job. Now here he was in a similar situation. Instead of being treated as an equal in the research project, he was stuck doing the menial work.

That afternoon, Sunday 26 July, each group cleared a separate space in the woods and fashioned an altar. Sussman took charge of the proceedings, and held two different services, complete with hymns and a homily on the importance of ‘clean minds’. The choice of topic was no coincidence. Both White and Carper had reported uncharacteristic swearing and dirty talk in both their groups. If Sussman preached against cursing and the boys continued to do it, it would demonstrate the strength and power of their ‘emerging group norms’.

Sussman’s sermon clearly touched a nerve because after the service someone from White’s group, Brian Kendall, a tall boy whose smile revealed a large gap between his two front teeth, came to see Jack White, looking troubled. Biting his lip, he confided to Jack that the night before, some of the boys had formed a swearing club, with an initiation ceremony. He told Jack that he didn’t believe in swearing and he didn’t like it, clearly expecting Jack White to intervene and put a stop to it.

‘That would have been me all right,’ Brian laughed on the phone. ‘I remember that in our group there were a few boys who just kept pushing the boundaries. Kids will do that,’ he said.

Brian’s conversation was peppered with these easy, authoritative statements about children. He had spent his working life as a junior-high teacher. When I spoke to him, he was retired. At the time of his conversation with Jack White, he didn’t yet know the camp was an experiment. But White’s response should have tipped him off. ‘He didn’t react the way you’d expect,’ Brian said. ‘You’ve got to remember even “damn” and “shit” were shocking words back then, and we never, ever used the f-word. This kind of language really was taboo. It wasn’t just vulgar — we were taught it was sinful.’

Brian’s memories of the camp were sketchy. He remembered little about the other boys, but he did remember feeling guilty about telling Jack White about the swearing club. But if he was worried about getting others into trouble, he needn’t have been. White had no intention of putting a stop to it. He was more interested in finding out from Brian exactly what was involved in the initiation ceremony — ‘saying a sentence of 6 words, of which 5 were profane’ — so he could describe this exciting development, proof that the group was developing its own rules, to Sherif.

But given how taboo Brian said swearing was, I was curious about just how it had started. How did it happen that boys who had refused to sing the word ‘hell’ on the first night of the camp because it was curse word had ended up just a few days later forming a swearing club? Perhaps Brian was right, that some boys were seeing how far the men would allow them to go. And they read the lack of censure as a form of approval.

Yet there’s a clue in the notes that the some of the men were actively encouraging it. OJ Harvey seemed to have a fluid role in the camp — disguised as assistant camp manager, he had free rein to drop in on either group on any number of pretexts, from asking what items boys wanted in stock in the camp store to collecting their mail. Harvey had been ‘initiated’ into the swearing club, earning membership by demonstrating his skill with foul language. No wonder Brian was bothered and approached Jack White after the Sunday service. But White’s response didn’t make him feel any better. ‘I was left with a kind of dirty feeling,’ Brian said on the phone. ‘Looking back, I guess I thought I was doing the right thing, but it didn’t feel like it. I probably sensed then that we couldn’t rely on those guys.’

In the background, classical musical swelled from a radio. There was a long pause.

Brian cleared his throat. ‘You know, I’m a volunteer at a community garden. A lot of city people, you know, don’t know much about gardening, and that’s part of what I do, I show them how. When I was growing up, my mother raised chickens and grew vegetables, but she could never get me interested, you know. I always had my head in a book. But I remember when I got home from that camp, the first thing I wanted to do was go out with my mother and feed the chickens and look for eggs.’ Brian laughed suddenly, like a trumpet blast. ‘I wonder what my mother made of that!’

At the time I was thrown by this seemingly abrupt change of subject. But later it occurred to me that Brian was connecting his interest in self-sufficiency to something that happened on the camp. Perhaps White’s failure to intervene and put a stop to the swearing had taught Brian a powerful lesson: don’t turn to others to look after you; you have to learn to do it yourself.

By Monday morning, the effort of keeping the two groups apart was proving too difficult to sustain. Sherif decided that getting more physical distance between the groups was a priority. He scheduled a three-night camping trip for each group, starting on different days and travelling in opposite directions.

The first group to leave was Carper’s, on Tuesday morning, and from his description of the boys it’s clear they were relieved to be getting away. They hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that Harry Ness was punishing them by keeping them from their friends. Ness was staying behind at the camp, so this trip meant they could forget about him for a while. They packed their new Coleman lamp carefully, then hoisted rucksacks and tents into the back of the truck and pulled over the tarpaulin, chattering excitedly as the truck bumped away from camp in the direction of Lake George. By the time they arrived, their worries about Ness and sense of guilt and unease from the night before seemed to have dissipated. They tumbled out of the truck and walked the last two miles to a campsite on a long finger of land that jutted out into the lake. In contrast to the deep green Camp Talualac, enclosed by woods, here their campsite overlooked the vista of the blue lake dotted with islands. The breeze off the lake was warm, but still a change from the muggy closeness of the camp in the woods.

After lunch, the boys took the small track down to the end of the point and round to a sandy bay, where they played in the water and John showed the others how to build a dam to trap fish, then supervised its construction. Mickey threw himself into the task, and even Harold, who had a habit of wandering off on his own, joined in, collecting rocks and building an elaborate wall to stop the rushing water and make a pond. Laurence seemed to have cheered up and taught the others to make farting noises with their wet armpits. I pictured Carper sitting on the beach, leaning casually back on his elbows, chewing a blade of grass, as if enjoying the view of the thickly wooded mountains rising on the other side of the lake. Through half-closed eyes, he watched the activities of different boys, and memorised snippets of conversation, as well as committing to memory who was giving instructions and who was carrying them out. Carper’s notes described not a single group of children but pairs, trios, and loners. Even so, they seemed to be content. I suspect that Jim Carper was feeling more relaxed too, free of the scrutiny of the intense and uptight duo of Sussman and Sherif. Reading Carper’s notes from this trip, it was the first time I began to wonder how the mood of the men may have affected the children and whether the push–pull of the men’s emotions could be mirrored in the boys’ interactions with one another.

While Carper watched the boys, I imagine he had time to think about the distance between the rules they’d agreed to and the reality. Sherif was eager for him to speed things up a bit, feeling that unanimous group votes on activities was slowing things down. But Carper’s notes hint he was uncomfortable with the idea. It was true that the research predicted a hierarchy would develop, but the idea that one or two boys be allowed to hold all the power and wield it over the rest didn’t sit right with Carper, and he stuck with his practice of encouraging group decisions. That night in his notes, he demonstrated his resolve to stick as scrupulously as he could to Kelman’s instructions. He described how neither he nor Rupe, the junior counsellor, took a leadership role or made an attempt to influence the boys that day. They didn’t help the boys in preparing and cooking their food or in pitching their tent, even though the boys were tired from the afternoon of swimming and struggled to put up the large canvas tent on their own. Harold yelled at Carper, ‘We need somebody’s advice.’ Carper wrote, ‘This was directed to the counsellors, who said not a word.’ But the impracticality of non-intervention was obvious to him too. He confessed in his notes that he had to ‘goad’ the boys into getting supper ready and set rules about when they went swimming.

While Carper was trying to maintain an arm’s length, back at base camp it seemed Sherif had abandoned this idea altogether. Straying from the research team’s agreement to shadow the boys in secret, Sherif had begun working enthusiastically alongside them on a series of chores around the campsite. Instead of standing back to watch how the boys made decisions and letting the group form naturally, Sherif seemed intent on moving things along. On Monday, they had to build a latrine, erect a hut, and dig out and remove a large boulder from the hut’s floor — all of which required the combined physical strength of the whole group and sometimes the assistance of Sherif-as-caretaker and Jack White as well. But the men only pretended to help, secretly pulling instead of pushing to make the boys work together all the more, and forcing one of them to take charge and give directions. I thought of Doug, a self-confessed puny kid, lifting and hauling rocks, and Brian the homebody, who loved reading, and how this labour sounded more like something to be expected of men in military training than eleven-year-old boys.

But as far as Sherif was concerned, whether they were a collection of children or an assemblage of men didn’t matter: groups as large as ‘ethnic groups or nations’ or as small as ‘a fraternity or sorority or a well-knit club’ shared the same properties. What Sherif apparently couldn’t see, or wouldn’t acknowledge, was the particularities of this group of boys that undermined this larger narrative and limited any generalisations he might like to make. They were children in an alien environment, surrounded by adults whose behaviour puzzled and sometimes troubled them, and they were far from home.

On Tuesday morning, just before they left for their camping trip, Sherif-as-caretaker came back from town with the flags the boys had ordered. They gathered around excitedly to unpack them. First they unveiled the American flag and were overawed at its large size. Before they could undo the other parcels, Jack White told them the story that Sherif had concocted that morning. Unfortunately when Sherif got to the store, he discovered the order for a Panther flag would not be ready before the end of camp, so instead Sherif had bought a plain flag that Jack could help the boys decorate. The good news was that the store had offered them a ‘special purchase’ — for fifty cents, each boy could have a t-shirt and a matching cap. But it was an ‘all or nothing’ deal — every boy had to buy them or the deal was off. I was surprised when I read this. Presumably Sherif had dreamt up this excuse so that he could demonstrate that the boys had created their own ‘group products’, but it was direct manipulation of the situation to a level I had not encountered in the notes before this point. It made me wonder if spending the treasure-hunt money on the flags had been entirely the boys’ idea after all, or if Sherif or Sussman had played a role in planting that notion as well.

A few boys made a start on decorating the plain flag, with camp manager Mr Sussman helpfully providing a picture of a panther’s head to use. But drawing on the fabric was difficult, so Jack White did most of the work. While the boys played a game of dodgeball, White stencilled the panther head onto the flag. Was it a spontaneous decision by the boys to have the word ‘Panthers’ stencilled on their t-shirts too? White’s notes certainly make it appear that way. Once one boy had it done, the others clamoured for the same design.

By mid-morning, when Jack White left with the boys for their camping trip to a spot near Sacandaga Reservoir, all of them, including Jack White and Ken Pirro, the junior counsellor, were wearing their uniform of Panther t-shirts and caps. They carried with them their new Panther flag. But was it deliberate or a mistake that White had left a critical detail the boys had requested — olive branches, symbolising peace — off the design? The flag flapped in the hot breeze as they hiked; the panther’s mouth snarled, its sharp black teeth silhouetted against the white background.

They might have had a group name and a flag, but at times there was little sense of camaraderie. White’s Panthers were a divided bunch. On one side were boys like Peter and Brian, and I’m guessing Doug too, who had protested about the swearing club. On the other side were boys like Nathan and Joe, who instituted ‘depantsing’, where they pulled the trousers off boys and threw them up into a tree as punishment for slowing them down or failing to do their share of chores. Jack White excitedly described this ‘corrective’ as a sign that the group was policing itself. Correctives were ‘examples of censure or punishment of boys either by other individual boys or by a whole group. Examples included being ignored, ridiculed, chided mildly, berated, physically punished.’ White, like Sherif, read the instigation of punishment as a healthy sign of the development of the group’s shared rules, ignoring the fact that some of the boys objected to it, and missing an alternative explanation — it was the behaviour of unhappy children.

After the long hike, White’s Panthers were relieved when they reached their campsite and excited at the sight of water glinting through the trees. They dumped their belongings and raced straight to the inlet. It was a shaded swimming spot where a forest stream widened and flowed over a jumble of flat rocks before emptying itself into the lake.

After the swim, the boys were hungry, but the truck with their food supplies hadn’t arrived, so they set up their tents and collected rocks to make a fire ring. With still no food in sight, White wrote in his notes that two boys suggested that to pass the time they should play strip poker. In brackets, White added for Sherif’s benefit,

(All of the boys are very careful not to disrobe in the presence of others. Most of them put their pajamas on under their blankets after getting in bed. Playing strip poker is considered quite daring, and one of the penalties instituted by the boys for losing is that the loser must do a hula dance in the nude when he is completely stripped. XX [name removed] informed the P.O. [participant observer] that he was forced to do the hula when he lost recently).

I did a double take when I read this. White’s casual tone implied that this was not the first time the boys had played this game. The contrast between their modesty, getting changed under the cover of blankets, and the image of a naked boy dancing in front of the others disturbed me. Who had instigated the game, and how had the boys’ seemingly powerful taboo against nakedness been reversed, and in such a short time? For all Sherif’s neutral language about group norms ‘arising spontaneously’ in his proposals about this research, this shift in the boys’ inhibitions seemed out of character. The dirty talk, the initiations, the humiliation games sounded the kind of antics and hazing that happened in frat houses or army barracks, rather than among ten- and eleven-year-old boys. Or was I being naive? I called Brian, I emailed Doug.

Brian didn’t remember much, but guessed it could have been just talk, more evidence of the boys’ attempts to get the adults to take charge. ‘We kept waiting for the counsellors to react, to do something. To a kid like me, who liked rules and who was always out to please, it was a pretty uncomfortable situation.’

Doug didn’t recall it either. ‘That almost sounds too bizarre even for those clowns — in 1953 we wouldn’t have even known swear words or understood strip poker. If that had happened, it would have been awful for boys of that era.’

Was Jack White a reliable narrator, I wondered. Perhaps as a graduate student whose dissertation relied on this experiment, White was consciously or unconsciously shaping his notes to please Sherif rather than to reflect reality. I compared Herb Kelman’s observations of the group on that same afternoon. There is no mention of strip poker. Kelman described the boys’ pride in their Panther flag, and how he watched them playing by the stream, where Irving took off his shirt, ‘revealing his Panther t-shirt underneath. He said: “This is a job for Super Panther!’’’ Here Kelman added an explanatory note in brackets, thinking that Sherif might not have been familiar with superheroes: ‘(imitating Superman, who always takes off his regular clothes and reveals his Superman outfit before getting into action).’ A little later, Kelman wrote, the boy put his shirt on again and said: ‘Now I’ll get back into my disguise’, to the cheers of the other boys. Could both accounts be true — the mini-men playing strip poker and the innocent boys playing at superheroes?

I could guess which account Sherif favoured. It was day five of this second stage, and White’s group had a name, a flag, a uniform. Kelman’s observation pointed to a benign shared group identity, but White’s took it even further. Strip poker was proof that the norms of the group were so powerful they overrode individual conscience.

At the lake, the truck finally arrived and the Panther group helped unload it and began cooking lunch. The air filled with the smell of woodsmoke and hamburgers. After lunch, the sky clouded over and the lake was grey and choppy. They spent the rest of the afternoon at a nearby airfield, where the boys played on an abandoned B-24 bomber, pretending to fly over enemy territory. Irving claimed the captain’s spot in the cockpit and refused to move, arguing that his uncle was a decorated fighter pilot so he was best qualified to be captain. In contrast, Doug took turns with the other boys in the co-pilot seat and tried to persuade Irving to be fair. Peter stood below the cockpit with his hands on his hips and yelled up at Irving, who ignored him. Peter complained to the two counsellors that Irving wouldn’t give anyone else a turn, but Jack White waved him away, telling him it would be fine. By the time they rounded the boys up for the trip back to camp, no one waited for Irving, who was the last to scramble down from the plane and he had to run to catch up with the others.

Back at camp, Irving flopped down by the campfire, which Peter was fanning as Brian lay twigs on the embers to try to get it going. The wood was damp and smoke poured from the fire. Irving turned his head away, squeezing his eyes against the smoke and fanning at his face. ‘Hey!’ he complained.

‘You could get up and help,’ Peter said. ‘You’ve sat down all afternoon!’

‘I want to do the cooking.’ Irving coughed and wiped at his eyes. ‘You guys never let me.’

‘That’s because you burn everything!’ Peter said. ‘You say you’ll do something and then you walk away and leave it to someone else.’

‘I want to cook,’ Irving said. ‘You can do the dishes for a change.’

‘I’m cooking!’ Nathan said angrily to anyone who’d listen. He pointed at Irving. ‘You look after the fire.’

‘We’ll make a roster — we’ll list all the jobs and make sure everyone does their share,’ Peter said. ‘Go and get a pen and paper,’ he told Nathan.

‘You’re not the boss!’ Nathan took a step towards Peter.

‘Yeah,’ Irving muttered.

Peter shrugged, threw the large leaf that he had been waving at the embers into the fire, then sat down and crossed his arms.

‘You!’ Nathan turned on Irving, who stood up quickly and began to back away. Nathan lunged at him and threw him to the ground. ‘This is for bragging all afternoon about your “war hero” uncle!’ Nathan yelled, tugging at the zip on Irving’s pants. Irving struggled and yelled. Boys came running from the woods. Some ran and piled on top of Irving. Others, like Brian, looked to Peter, waiting for him to intervene, which he usually did. But Peter frowned into the fire as if he couldn’t hear a thing. Irving was gasping for air and sobbing so loudly that Jack White came out from his hiding place. ‘I had to call the boys off,’ he wrote to Sherif.

Once freed, Irving, whose Panther t-shirt was covered in dirt, ran away to the bushes and cried. White sat on a log at the campfire and tried to draw the boys into a discussion about preparing supper, but Peter sulked and refused to be drawn and the others were subdued. Until now, Peter had been White’s pick as the leader who would take control and set boundaries for group behaviour, but his domineering manner irritated some of the boys, and he brooded when things didn’t go his way. White looked around impatiently, mentally crossing them off — Nathan, who was hacking away at a log with a hatchet, was too aggressive; Brian, who glanced worriedly at the silent Peter, was too weak. Then there was Doug, who moved around the edge of the clearing, collecting firewood. White had noticed him that afternoon too, and his knack for getting the others to take turns playing on the plane. As White watched, Doug turned and called, ‘Who’s gonna help me with this wood?’ balancing a pile in his arms, and three boys, including Nathan and Brian, darted forward to help him. Yes, White thought, even though he was one of the smallest boys, Doug Griset was a clear contender as group leader.

The trajectory of the Panthers was beginning to mirror that in Golding’s novel, where, after the initial chaos and confusion, the boys turned to a leader who was constructive and fair and who seemed to provide a sense of security in a shifting and uncertain situation.

Meanwhile, 30 miles to the north, two nights into their camping trip at Lake George, Jim Carper’s boys woke up to the honking of ducks on the lake as the sun came up on Thursday 30 July.

Compared to the Panthers, Carper’s group seemed a relatively happy bunch, but there was still no clear leader taking charge. Most of the boys wanted to cook, so mealtimes were chaotic, with two fires going and boys jostling and no one coordinating. Hamburgers were fried and ready to eat before potatoes were even peeled, some boys were lining up for third helpings before others had had their first. John, who had plenty of camping experience, tried to give advice, but he wasn’t assertive enough and the others wouldn’t listen. Even Laurence, who was good at coaxing the others to do things with a laugh and a joke, gave up trying to get the boys to line up and take turns when it came to cooking and serving.

That morning, Carper decided he had to take action. None of the boys had washed the supper dishes from the night before, and there were plenty of animals in the Adirondacks, including bears and coyotes, who could be drawn to food scraps. Carper used passive voice in his observation notes to distance himself from directing the boys: they were, he wrote, ‘presented with an agenda’, which was ‘[s]tart fire, wash dishes, make breakfast, decide when they want to go home’. In response, the boys organised themselves efficiently, and after breakfast of hot chocolate and bacon and a thorough camp clean-up, the boys had a group meeting to decide the day’s activities and menu. Carper watched closely, waiting for a leader to emerge, but none did, and the chaotic-sounding meeting that he described in his notes took over forty-five minutes, with boys wandering in and out and shouting non sequiturs as the men looked on. If it was frustrating for the men, it was strange to the boys, who expected the adults to take the lead. Walt remembers this as one source of his uneasiness about the camp. ‘There was no one in charge saying, “We’re going swimming; we’re going boating; we’re going fishing.” It was very unstructured. We had a lot of time to do things on our own, we could do whatever we wanted.’

What’s striking about Carper’s notes is how he followed up with boys who weren’t participating, ones who he described as ‘on the periphery’. It wasn’t part of his scientific brief but a mark of his concern that each boy felt included. During the morning’s protracted and often rowdy meeting, he had sat with Mickey on the edge of the group and encouraged him to make suggestions. Later that afternoon, when the boys were swimming, Carper noticed that Laurence, who was usually in the thick of group activities, stayed back at camp and sat by himself at the campfire. When Carper asked him what he was doing, Laurence showed him how he was whittling a piece of wood that would be big enough to fit the names of all twenty-four boys on the camp. Carper paid attention to individual boys and described in his notes some who spent time on their own or thinking about their friends back at camp. Probably because he had little contact with the research team, Carper had little idea of the impact these kinds of details could have for Sherif and Sussman; he was simply reporting what he saw. In contrast, it seemed that White intuitively understood that his observation notes were meant to reassure Sherif that the experiment was going to plan.

For, back at the main campsite, Sherif was likely on tenterhooks. With both groups gone, he could not observe them for himself, and he waited impatiently for the sound of Harvey returning in the truck in the evenings with the men’s daily reports. He and Sussman had plenty to do in the boys’ absence — there were the preparations for the competitions to finalise, the planning of scenarios and the writing of scripts to make the tournament announcement seem natural. But I imagine he would have found it hard to settle.

On their final night at Sacandaga, the Panthers decided they wanted hotdogs for dinner because they were quick and easy to cook. But knowing how much his professor liked to double-check every small detail, White called Sherif from the store to get his approval for the evening’s menu. The boys were enthusiastic about cooking hotdogs on sticks over the fire, but White worried that Sherif would object because this wouldn’t involve any group work and he would have to come up with an excuse and an alternative for the disappointed campers. To his relief, Sherif agreed to the purchase, and White stocked up and headed back to Sacandaga. When he arrived back, the boys had built a fire with pine needles and logs, so they were soon cooking hotdogs over the fire, the fat spitting in the flames.

After dinner, talk around the campfire turned to extrasensory perception. The boys took turns to see if they could read one another’s minds. One boy put his hands over his eyes while the other stood around 20 feet away, looked up at the sky, thinking of a number. Brian told the group how he and his mother could often read each other’s thoughts, and White asked him what his mother was thinking now. Brian said it was too far, thoughts couldn’t travel that distance. Whether it was Brian’s talk of his closeness to his mother that conjured the image for each boy of his own mother, or the lights of High Rock Lodge that twinkled across the lake that reminded the boys of home, I don’t know. But later, in the tent, an argument broke out about the swearing club, and some boys threatened to go home unless it stopped: White wrote in his notes that Brian called out to him and asked him what time the next train left for Schenectady, and Peter, too, was loud in his protests. The arguing and the thoughts of home had stirred some of the boys, and sleep did not come easily.

Those who were still awake an hour later would have heard the truck rumble into camp. White’s phone call that evening had agitated Sherif. After he hung up, Sherif began worrying that allowing the boys to cook solo meals had been a mistake. With no means of contacting White, Sherif insisted that Sussman drive to the campsite, using the excuse that he had forgotten to supply groundsheets for the boys’ tent. But by the time they got there at 8.30 pm, the boys had already turned in.

Soon after, Doug began complaining of a stomach-ache. During the night he got up three times and woke White, saying that he felt sick. But with nothing in the first-aid kit to help him, White told Doug each time to go back to bed and wait till morning. The fourth time that Doug woke him, White told the junior counsellor to take Doug back to the dispensary at the camp. At 4.30 am, Doug was ‘marched through the woods’ for an hour, arriving back at camp at 5.30. White’s use of the word ‘marched’ sounds like a rebuke, as if the boy was being weak, suggesting White had little sympathy. Or perhaps it was that White anticipated that Sherif would be angry and blame him for allowing Doug to be returned to camp, so he made it clear in his notes that he wasn’t being soft on the boy.

Doug doesn’t recall the walk, but we both marvel at the image of his ten-year-old self hiking through the woods in the dark, the faint glimmer of the junior counsellor’s torch dancing ahead of him, his heart thumping, perhaps, at the scream of an owl, at the crackle of twigs and leaves that could signal an unseen animal in the undergrowth.

On Friday, their final morning at Lake George, Jim Carper and his junior counsellor took charge, cooking breakfast and delegating jobs so the boys would be packed up and ready in time for the truck’s arrival. On the way back to base camp, Carper wrote that all the boys were engaged in ‘individual activity’ — chewing candy, humming, and gazing out the back of the truck as it bumped along the dirt roads. Back at camp, Harold went to the infirmary with a ‘fever’, joining Doug from the other group, whom the nurse had already put to bed.

Sherif might have chosen Mrs Terani, the nurse, because he thought she would be no distraction to the men, but the infirmary seemed to be a magnet for some of the boys. The men’s notes from this time onwards are dotted with references to boys missing from mealtimes or games because they had gone to see the nurse about ‘medical issues’. I couldn’t work out if it was because the boys were genuinely ill, or if they went there for sympathy and comfort. For some boys, perhaps it was easier to say they were ill than to admit that they were longing for home.

After they’d unpacked their gear, Carper called in to the infirmary to see how Harold was feeling. The boy was sitting up in bed when Carper arrived. Harold was the kind of boy used to working things out, who looked closely at things to figure out the logic behind them. But every time he asked the adults questions, he could never get a straight answer. From that first day, when he’d asked Carper about the microphones in the mess hall, he had the sense they were keeping something back. When Carper sat down on the edge of the bed, Harold told him he’d worked out it was important to the men that the boys make friends and get along in their new groups. He didn’t bother lying: he told the counsellor that nothing was really wrong with him, but he wanted to go home. Carper wrote, ‘He vowed I would not change his mind and that if we did not let him go home he would wreck the group. He prides himself on knowing everything that goes on around the camp.’

When Carper saw how determined the boy was, he gave up trying to persuade him. ‘I told him I would discuss it with Sussman. He said that Sussman would not let him go home and I should pass his threat along to Sussman. That evening we called his parents and although they were not eager for him to go home plans were made for him to leave the following day.’

Doug, who was in the room next door to Harold, was homesick too. While Doug doesn’t remember many details of the camp, he’s certain of this one thing. ‘Oh, I would have been homesick all right. I would have been homesick to beat the band,’ he told me. ‘You know, I’m speculating here, but you can see why they might not have wanted the parents to visit. All the kids would have been blubbering and saying, “I want to go home.”’

Doug’s homesickness triggered anxiety among the researchers. White and Sussman worried that because Doug was a popular boy and a potential leader, others might follow his lead. Already two Panthers, Peter and Brian, had threatened to go home. Sherif wrote in his notebook that White and Sussman were ‘gloomy’ about Doug’s ‘ills’ and ‘feared contagion’. They were seven days into the second stage, and the hypothesis that each group would share a sense of camaraderie and feel protective of its members, would have a clear leader and shared ways of doing things, seemed further away than ever. With the two groups failing to bond, and the risk of homesickness ruining their plans, Sussman and White argued for starting the next stage of competition between the groups. But Sherif agonised over whether to give the groups more time to bond. He worried aloud that the two groups were still too fragile; perhaps it was too soon. But the others argued that competitions and the prizes would ignite the boys’ enthusiasm and make them work as team. Finally Sherif was persuaded. He scrawled in his notebook that White and Sussman ‘urged me to start stage 3’.

OJ Harvey wrote the next day, ‘Several Panthers want to go home so [we] brought stage 3 forward.’ The next stage, the men hoped, would rally the boys into working teams. And at first it seemed to work.