8

Nation States

In the men’s office that night, when Jack White reported that two boys in his group were feeling homesick and a third was teetering, OJ Harvey sensed the change in Sherif’s mood like a change in the weather. Sherif leaned back in his chair, his head tilted towards the ceiling. He made a tutting noise that OJ recognised as a sign of disapproval.

OJ shook his head when he told me. ‘Oh lordy, if you think how much was involved — selecting and observing the subjects at their schools, going to their homes, visiting camps, arranging the buses. I’d spent a whole year on the logistics,’ OJ said. In total, he’d spent more than three hundred hours choosing the final twenty-two boys. And it seemed as though he had failed to exclude the types of boys who would get homesick. By now, the chair legs had hit the floor with a thud and Sherif was up out of his chair and pacing, his face like ‘thunder’.

‘Jack, go call the parents,’ OJ said quickly. ‘Tell them we’ll be bringing those two back home tomorrow.’ Then OJ plunged on with the next item on the agenda: plans for how they would let the two groups of boys know the next day that they weren’t alone in the park. What did Dr Sherif want them to say to the boys, OJ asked, and Sherif was soon distracted. But OJ could sense the tension in the man’s shoulders. Later that evening, Sherif would want to go over and over this fact of homesickness and where OJ had gone wrong, talking long into the night. OJ realised then how tired he was. They all were, and it was just the beginning of the study. ‘I had to nip it in the bud.’

At first I thought OJ was talking about his swift action to send the boys home, but he was talking about Sherif. That night, when the meeting was over and the only sounds were the whirr of crickets and the burp of frogs along the creek, OJ got in the truck, let out the brake, and rolled it down the road before starting the engine. He drove for eight miles, along dark country roads, until he saw the small can by the roadside, the secret signal that marked the turn-off, where he pulled in, switched off his lights, and bounced the truck slowly along the track until he came to a lean-to lit up by the light of a glowing fire. Then he made the reverse journey, this time with a bottle of moonshine.

OJ laughed at the memory. ‘I had to go get that bootleg whisky every night. He was under a lot of pressure. We both were. Back at camp I’d fix him up with moonshine, and away we’d go.’ The moonshine, much stronger than store-bought whisky, took the edge off Sherif’s tension until the next morning. It was the only way either Sherif or OJ could get any sleep.

The next day, the Rattlers heard the sounds of the other group playing on the baseball diamond and, according to the men’s notes, they reacted with dismay and immediately told Bob Hood they wanted to challenge the interlopers to a game. But I wondered at this aggressiveness of the Rattlers, and whether the searing heat and the tension of keeping up with Red the bully had made them irritable.

In contrast, when Jack White told his group that there was another lot of boys in the park, they were enthusiastic, pestering him about meeting up to play ball. Back at camp, in preparation for the ballgame they had chosen a team name — the Eagles — and stencilled it on hats, t-shirts, and a flag the men had provided. The Rattlers group did the same. ‘They were like little nation states. Both sides labelled everything as “ours” — “our creek” and “our mess hall”. They pretty much claimed the whole place as their own,’ OJ said with a chuckle.

As early as the second day of the camp, the observers’ description of each group had already started to take a particular shape. The Rattlers ‘conformed to a tough norm’, and the observers’ notes reflect a view of them as brave. When they hurt themselves — one burned his hand with fireworks, another dropped a heavy rock on his toe — they didn’t cry or complain but ‘cursed instead’, the book the men later wrote about the experiment reported. The Rattlers were so determined to be stoic that ‘staff had to remember to check’ one boy’s injured wrist and knee ‘because he never mentioned them’.

Smut remembers hurting himself in a dam-climbing game. ‘We would climb to the top of the dam wall and then slide down on our tail ends. I cut my leg pretty good. The men doctored it and bandaged it up.’ But it was painful, and when Smut cried, Hood wrote ‘he did not conform to this tough norm, and was completely ignored’ by the others in his group. Along with the ‘tough’ norm went a definite approval of cursing. Hood described how one night, two of the smaller Rattlers pulled out their baby teeth together, and Hood cited this as further evidence of the ‘toughness’ that had become the group’s rule.

The men described White’s Eagles as less masculine but more caring towards one another. After the two boys were sent home, the group developed a rule against homesickness, and they were scrupulous about taking turns to say grace. And while ‘swimming in the nude’ became standard practice, those boys who couldn’t swim stayed back at camp to fix lunch for the others. Unlike the Rattlers, who had named themselves in honour of the shooting of the snakes, most of the Eagles were frightened of the captured snake, and had given themselves a group name only after they heard there was a second group in the campsite, who they had wanted to play with instead of fight. The Rattlers dubbed their largest boy ‘Red’ for his ‘size and toughness’, but nicknames in the Eagles were ‘Nudie’ (for the boy who had instigated swimming with no bathers) and ‘Marilyn’ (for the boys who, during skits and songs, entertained the group by doing a ‘burlesque dance’, imitating Marilyn Monroe).

White made no direct comment in his notes about the Eagles’ machismo or lack thereof, but OJ recalled them distinctly as ‘crybabies’, with none of the bravado of the Rattlers. ‘A Rattler couldn’t cry,’ OJ told me. ‘And the Eagles, they were cissies.’ He chuckled. ‘How on earth do these different norms emerge?’

It seemed to me that the personality of the group’s leaders had a lot to do with it. The Rattler boys acted tough, and they cursed to appease the domineering Red. The tender-hearted Eagles valued fairness, and their leader, Davey, had been swift and clear in his disapproval of Dwayne’s tactless comments about other boys. Perhaps the Rattlers were acting tough to hide their vulnerability, and the Eagles were praying as a way of holding on to the values of home in a world where things were new and strange.

On Thursday 24 June, the fifth day of camp and the day each group heard there was a second group in the park, the men organised the first of the ‘frustration exercises’, designed to foster solidarity in one group and stir animosity in the other. It was Eagle boy Davey’s eleventh birthday, and that evening OJ and Sherif organised a surprise birthday party to ‘cement group feeling’ among the crew that had already lost two members to homesickness. The cook had baked a cake, and the boys crowded round and sang happy birthday to Davey, who blew out the candles in one long breath. Davey asked Jack White if he could invite the other boys. But in order to ‘stir animosity’ in the other group, White replied that the others were busy and there wasn’t enough cake to go around.

After the singing and the cake, the boys played charades. Across the creek, the Rattlers sat around their campfire listening to the singing and the hip-hip-hoorays, excluded from the fun. It reminded me of a story I’d heard when visiting Alcatraz: how the worst night of the year was New Year’s Eve, as when there was a southerly wind the prisoners in their cells could hear the sound of music and laughter and the tinkle of glasses blown across the water from the San Francisco Yacht Club. I could imagine how the Rattlers must have felt: cast in the role of outsiders, the boys likely sat there feeling a mixture of resentment and loneliness.

The next morning, Sherif’s voice was both solemn and excited as he leaned into the microphone and told the tape recorder that the team had hidden in the mess hall to record interactions, ‘Today, June 27, 1954, we have started Stage 2 of this experiment. There is going to be a series of contests or a tournament. Knives and medals will be used as rewards …’

The announcement of the tournament was a big day for the men. As with the competition in the Middle Grove study, it marked the end of the first stage of the experiment, which they called ‘in-group formation’.

OJ made the announcement to the Rattlers first, and then to the Eagles. When the Eagles had finished clearing away their dishes, OJ proclaimed that instead of just a ballgame, the counsellors for the two groups had gotten together and organised a ‘nice surprise’ tournament with ‘some fine prizes’. I imagined Sherif leaning in the doorway between the kitchen and the hall, sipping a cup of coffee and feigning a lack of interest, but his eyes following every move, every facial expression and verbal reaction of the boys. He would have nodded to himself approvingly as OJ made Sherif’s careful script sound like a casual announcement.

Yet as OJ outlined the activities involved and the point-scoring system, the Eagles were restless; they seemed overawed, rather than excited. Some, like Dwayne, were bothered by the extravagance of the prizes — a ribbon and a jackknife for each boy, as well as a trophy for the winning team, and nothing at all for the losers? On the tape you can hear the worry in their voices at the idea of such a serious competition. Perhaps Davey was concerned that the other boys were mad they hadn’t been invited to his birthday party. ‘Maybe we could just make friends with these guys,’ one boy said to OJ. Some of the others agreed that it didn’t seem fair not to have prizes for the losers, and that the group who lost the tournament were likely to be resentful. ‘Someone is going to get mad and hold a grudge,’ Will said nervously.

To OJ Harvey and Jack White, the boys’ reaction was further evidence that the Eagles were cissies rather than toughies. ‘They were timid,’ OJ said, ‘they weren’t rearing to go like the Rattlers.’ But I imagined some gesture of impatience from Sherif prompted Jack to step in. ‘Wait up,’ he said as the boys got ready to leave. ‘These here are real expensive knives, the best steel that can be bought in McAlester.’

‘Listen to Jack,’ OJ admonished them.

But the boys were eager to leave. Suddenly the friendly ballgame they had suggested had been transformed into a full tournament, including three baseball games, three tug-of-war contests, a game of touch football, three tent pitchings, daily cabin inspection, a skits-and-songs contest, and a treasure hunt — a total of sixteen events, scheduled over four days, in 100-degree heat. No wonder they were eager to get back to their swimming hole to play and cool off. A full-on tournament where the winner got all the prizes didn’t seem fair. And despite OJ’s attempts to convince them that it was an unexpected bonus, it must have sounded more like hard work than fun.

Not that I could find any mention of the Eagles’ reluctance in the book the men later wrote, The Robbers Cave Experiment: intergroup conflict and cooperation. The book describes both groups at the end of this stage as rearing to compete. They were ‘unanimous’ and ‘insistent’, so much so that ‘delaying the contest became increasingly difficult’, the men wrote, as if they had to hold the boys back.

The book describes the experiment’s three stages as a smooth narrative. At the end of this first stage, the book stated, each group had a name and a ‘definite group structure’. They had flags, a symbol of their identity; they had group norms, or shared ways of doing things, like the nicknames they gave some boys; they had taken ‘ownership’ of territory. But how much of a hand did the men have in this remarkably neat unfolding of events? In the book, the researchers were invisible, their role kept carefully backstage. The story about how one group of boys named themselves the Rattlers in honour of their gun-slinging leader is not included, nor does it mention the party and games that favoured one group and fed the antipathy of the excluded boys.

The audiotapes, the handwritten notes, the memories of some of the boys I spoke with, as well as OJ, create a more complex picture. What else was being left out, I wondered, and who, if anyone, was playing the role of scientific conscience of this experiment and making sure the men were maintaining some kind of objectivity?

Towards the end of the first stage, Sherif wrote to his wife:

… My Carolyn — your letter and your phone call yesterday brought a warm touch to our hectic but exciting life here which is always on the move in various colorful and ever changing ways. One minute we’ll be attending to the drainage of boys’ showers here, the next moment it may be a highly abstract problem in group relations … We are in a fascinating transition stage now. One group adopted the name of Rattlers last night at the Robber’s cave during their camp fire. The other group named their swimming place, camp fire, and cabin … The great likelihood is that stage II will start to-morrow. The boys of one group are busy now 100 yards away from here putting their … name … on their shirts and caps …

If the two groups of boys seemed to have melded in the first week of the camp, Sherif and his fellow researchers seemed to have too. Gone was any mention in Sherif’s letters of the desperate loneliness he’d felt the year before or the melodramatic view of himself struggling alone under the yoke of a ‘Herculean’ task. In his letters, the first person ‘I’ had disappeared, and he refers constantly to ‘we’.

But OJ knew that Sherif’s jubilance could evaporate as quickly as it came. And also, at the first sign of a problem, how quick Sherif was to lay blame on one or all of his staff. After the announcement of the tournament and prizes failed to get the Eagles enthused, Sherif had begun to hector Jack White for not doing enough to get them riled up. OJ found that keeping Sherif busy helped. Despite his lack of practical skills, Sherif got great satisfaction from acting the role of handyman. As well as covertly observing, Sherif helped OJ with the demanding practicalities of the camp and arrangements that were often last minute. They had the broad outline of the three stages mapped out, but exactly how each group would spend each day, and what equipment and supplies they needed, were all decided the night before.

‘Our planning was one day at a time, for the most part. It was very intense,’ OJ told me. Sherif helped OJ unload equipment and supplies from the truck, prepared the baseball pitch for a game, unblocked drains, chopped wood, and delivered food for cookouts, where he and OJ lingered to observe preparations. They tried not to arouse the boys’ suspicion. ‘Early on, we started using a camera all over the place so the boys wouldn’t be bothered by cameras. And we tried to keep the note-taking out of the boys’ view. It was a task all right,’ OJ said.

But obviously they hadn’t managed to keep themselves completely out of sight. Sixty years later, Smut Smith told me, ‘I wasn’t surprised when you told me it was an experiment because I do remember the men had notepads that they wrote on. I wasn’t suspicious at the time, but I do remember that vividly.’

Smut’s observation of the men taking notes suggests that the research team had learned little from the failed 1953 study about the curiosity of the boys or that the observers themselves were subject to the boys’ scrutiny. Despite the men’s description of apparently scrupulous and surreptitious methods of recording, it was obvious that there was a gap between the ideal of an experiment as it was described in their publications and the reality of its execution.

On the day the tournament began, the Eagles voted Will captain of their team even though Davey was their unofficial leader. Will was their best ball-player. He applied the same methodical and patient approach to games as he had to the knot-tying on their rope bridge. The men were pleased with the choice because they felt it would likely head off Will’s tendency to homesickness. Davey Munroe took the vote with good grace, pounding Will on the back in congratulations.

In their cabin, Will gave the group a pep talk about staying focused during the game. The nine boys set off in their new t-shirts, with Davey carrying their flag, which featured a picture of an eagle with its wings outspread. They marched through the park and crossed the small creek and climbed up onto the baseball pitch, looking forward to meeting the other group of boys. When they arrived at the pitch and saw eleven Rattlers lined up and staring at them in sullen silence, the Eagles went quiet.

In photos, the Rattlers were strung out in a long line, watching the new group warily as they approached. I guessed that it was Red who was waving a flag with a large black snake on it and scowling. Hollis stood with his hands in his back pockets, sizing them up as the Eagles boys approached.

Perhaps Sherif sat on the sidelines with his back against a tree, his cap tipped back as if he had casually settled in to watch the game.

The Eagles were unnerved by the unfriendly reception. Davey let the flag droop and trail in the dirt. Once the game started, the Eagles were alarmed by Red’s cursing, and that the umpire did nothing to rebuke him. Red jeered, calling them ‘dumbasses’, and Virgil, on bat, ‘Tubby’ and ‘Little Black Sambo’, and a few of his teammates joined in. Davey defended Virgil and retaliated by calling one of the Rattlers a ‘retard’, but once the game entered its middle stages the insults died down.

At the end of the game, which the Rattlers won 16–14, they gave three cheers for the Eagles, a fact that Sherif scribbled in his notes, underlining the phrase ‘Exhibition of good sportsmanship on the whole (Am.norm)’ as a reminder of something to watch out for.

Back at the cabin, Eagles captain Will berated the boys for ignoring his earlier instructions and getting distracted by the tactics of the other team. They resolved that in future games they would ignore any cursing from the Rattlers and not engage in it themselves.

That night, after supper, the tug of war started. Each team lined up on one side of a heavy white rope, which Dwayne remembered was rough and scratchy in their hands. Straining at the rope, the Rattlers pulled one Eagle after another over to their side. Afterwards, they marched off together, singing, ‘The first Eagle hit the deck, parley vous, the second Eagle hit the deck, parley vous!’ all the way to their cabin on the far side of the park.

I imagined their voices carrying through the twilight, the sky streaked with violent pink as the sun went down, and a man stepping behind a nearby tree to listen and watch.

The Eagles stood around the white rope now, tumbled in the dirt. Davey kicked at the rope. ‘They’re much bigger than us.’

‘They’re eighth-graders — they must be, for sure!’ Will’s voice trembled and he looked about to cry.

Will turned to Davey. ‘And you! Why’d you drop the rope? You dropped the rope!’

‘We were beat,’ Davey said, shrugging his shoulders in a gesture of hopelessness.

The book reported the conversation above, naming each boy’s role in the episode that followed. On their way back to the cabin, the dejected Eagles spotted the Rattlers flag, which had been left on the backstop. They pulled it down and tried unsuccessfully to tear it. Then ‘someone’ suggested they burn it, the book notes. Who was the unnamed ‘someone’, I wondered? And who gave them the matches? The boys lit the flag and hung the burnt remnant on the backstop before running off.

‘The burning of the flag was exactly like a declaration of war,’ OJ said to me.

Of course, there was retaliation when the Rattlers found the remains of their flag the next morning. They swarmed towards the Eagles, and as they approached the pitch, shouting that the Eagles were ‘bums’ and ‘little shits’, some of them rushed forward and seized the Eagle flag out of Davey’s hands and ran off with it. Red grabbed Davey in a headlock and wrestled him to the ground, and they rolled in the dirt until Jack White and Bob Hood rushed onto the pitch to break it up.

But the fight electrified the Eagles. They huddled together before the game and, at Dwayne’s urging, said a fervent prayer before playing baseball with fierce energy and focus. The strategy they’d agreed on the night before was to fight fair, to be good sports, and not to cuss or brag in front of the other team. Despite the provocation of the Rattlers before the game and their continued cat-calling, the Eagles didn’t take the bait.

The Eagles were ecstatic when they won the game.

‘See? Didn’t I say so?’ Dwayne ran round excitedly asking each boy in the team, attributing their win to their prayers. But Virgil said the Rattlers lost because they cursed so much. Still, the Eagles gave three cheers for the Rattlers, who had felt so confident of winning at the start and were now downcast: Sherif wrote in his notes they were feeling ‘very low’.

In their book, the men noted, ‘This flag-burning started a chain of events that made it unnecessary for the experimenters to introduce special situations of mutual frustration for the two groups.’ He made it sound as if the men simply stood back and let the drama unfold. But it was far from that straightforward. Sherif was clearly bothered at the end of the game when the Eagles gave three cheers for the losing team. In his notes, he commented anxiously that the earlier friction had evaporated, and wrote that what he observed was ‘the potency of the thoroughly ingrained sportsmanship norm’. He was troubled too because it raised the spectre of the failed 1953 study and the rules of fair play those boys had insisted on during games.

Back at their cabin after the loss, the Rattlers were turning on one other, ‘dejected because of the loss and fatigued from heat and exertion … tempers were short and the bickering went from bad to worse,’ Bob Hood wrote in his notes. Anxious that the boys were directing their aggression and blame towards their own members instead of to the other group, Sherif called a hurried meeting with OJ. It was time for another ‘frustration episode’ to bring the Rattlers together as a team and to kickstart conflict. But this time, the saintly Eagles would be the victims.

Close to midnight, the Rattlers huddled outside their cabin. That day, the Eagles had beaten the Rattlers in a tug of war by sitting down while they held the rope, which the Rattlers felt was ‘unfair tactics’. According to Sherif, ‘the mood was definitely favourable to a raid’. The Rattlers had painted their faces with soot from the fire ‘commando-style’, and the whites of their eyes glowed in the dark. Suddenly Hollis shot forward and they followed him, running, doubled over, across the patch of dirt between their cabin and the mess hall.

They moved as a pack across the creek and then paused again on the other side. Hollis was whispering and gesturing. Bill shot out ahead and hoisted himself up to the window of the Eagles’ cabin and threw himself against it, falling through the screen with a crash. A howl went up, and a blinding light went off as Bob Hood, supposedly being surreptitious, snapped the first photo. Boys yelled and shouted and whooped. Some boys ran around the building in circles; others ran inside. Red was yelling, ‘Eagles are chickens! Eagles are chickens!’ Inside someone was crying. Two boys had jumped out of bed and were running towards the doorway, waving their arms. Red shook the frame of one of the double bunks and, as two boys huddled under their blankets, he whooped and howled, picking things up and throwing them — books, towels, and other possessions — before he followed the others out again, where they pounded across the park in the dark.

It was all over in a few minutes, but in the Eagles’ cabin it was bedlam. No one could find the lanterns, so they couldn’t see. Someone was sobbing. Will was yelling ‘You yellowbellies!’ but no one was sure who he was yelling at, the Rattlers or the boys, like Virgil, who had stayed in bed, pretending to be asleep, until the noise and shouting was over. Jack White appeared in the doorway with a flashlight. The boys went quiet as White played the light across the trampled clothing, the books and cards spilled on the floor. Then they all started talking at once. Someone said they should go get the other boys and retaliate, but White said no. So what was White going to do about it? Will demanded. The Rattlers should be disqualified from the tournament for being such sore losers, Davey chipped in. White said he’d talk to OJ Harvey. In the meantime, Bert had arrived with some spare lanterns and the boys decided to clean up straightaway, rather than wake to the mess in the morning. As they shifted their beds and picked up the clothes, they went over and over what had happened. Virgil and Davey took a lantern outside to find some rocks so they could fill their socks with them and use them as weapons in case the Rattlers came back.

‘We didn’t like that other group, that’s for sure,’ Bill Snipes said. He had just retired after more than forty-five years in the Oklahoma police force, first as an officer, then as a detective.

‘We tried to outdo them, and then we started doing things to the Eagles group, raiding their cabin, messing up their stuff. It started with the tug of war,’ he continued loudly. He was taking me for a spin around Oklahoma City in his old Jaguar. Low to the ground, it roared and rattled, which at the best of times would have made it too noisy to talk, but was even trickier given Bill was hard of hearing.

‘I remember we called the Eagles group a lot of bad names. It was almost like the counsellors were building this animosity. Then we raided each other’s cabins. I climbed through their window and almost fell on Davey Munroe. I woke him up and he was not happy. He started swinging at me. We tore their place up. They did the same to us. But I don’t remember who started it.’

Bill might not remember who started it, but it was the staff who kept the animosity going. The boys clearly looked to the men to police the misbehaviour of the rival group. The next morning, when White visited the Eagles in their cabin, there was no longer any talk of revenge, and they told White that the Rattlers should be disqualified from the tournament. But White suggested they could even the tournament score by dumping mud in the Rattlers cabin while the other group were at breakfast. That way, the Rattlers would lose cabin inspection and the Eagles would take the lead.

Returning from breakfast to find buckets of dirt upended in their cabin and their clothes and bedding on the floor was all the provocation the Rattlers needed. By the afternoon’s touch football game, any sign of guilt on the part of the Rattlers was gone. They marched to the ground with Will’s jeans, now emblazoned with orange paint reading ‘The Last of the Eagles’, swinging on a new flagpole that they carried side by side with their Rattlers flag.

That week of the tournament, each day was like a tug of war, with the barometer in the mess hall inching up, putting the Eagles ahead one day, the Rattlers the next. Manipulating the scores in games was too risky, but there were other ways to control the scoreboard. ‘We cheated a bit. We wanted them to be neck-and-neck right to the last, so we created things like cabin inspection and songs and skits so we could keep the points close,’ OJ said.

On the night before the end of the tournament, White argued forcefully for making the Eagles the winners. ‘They were less sturdy, their morale was already low, and we figured if they lost, the study would be over. They’d want to go home,’ OJ remembered. ‘We knew the Eagles would fall apart if they lost. We knew the Rattlers were a stronger group, they could handle losing.’

When Will had seen the Rattlers parading his stolen jeans around the football ground as a trophy, his homesickness had returned. Virgil, who the Rattlers had continually mocked during the contests as ‘Fatty’, had also written home, saying how much he was missing his folks. Sherif regarded the name-calling, the skirmishes, the raids, and the retaliation as proof that competition leads to hostility. But the breakdown of the relationship between the boys carried risks, and to lose any more boys from the already depleted Eagles team now, after getting this far, would be a catastrophe. Sherif wrote in his notes, ‘We couldn’t take a chance on the Eagles getting dis-integrated.’ OJ and Sherif decided to take White’s advice.

The scores were so close at the end of the five days that the final event, the treasure hunt, would be the decider. The team who found their treasure fastest would win the tournament, and the knives, medals, and trophy.

Both groups were quiet and fidgety as Bob Hood made the final calculations on his clipboard. ‘Now, for the results of the last contest, the time for the Rattlers was ten minutes and fifteen seconds. The Eagles’ time was eight minutes and thirty-eight seconds, which gives the Eagles the —’ I couldn’t hear the rest of Hood’s announcement on the audiotape for the screaming and cries that came from the exultant Eagles, who, the observer notes told me, were jumping and hugging one another. Will ‘cried with joy’ and Dwayne danced around holding the trophy, with each Eagle taking a turn to kiss it while the Rattlers were ‘glum, dejected, and remained silently seated on the ground’. The tape didn’t record what happened next and nor do the observers’ notes, perhaps because it was an unwelcome spectacle. The men wrote in their book how during the tournament the ‘good sportsmanship’ norm ‘gave way’ to ‘hurling invectives’ and ‘derogation of the out-group’. The Eagles gave three cheers for the losing Rattlers, a fact Dwayne doesn’t remember but doesn’t find surprising. ‘We would have been so relieved it was over,’ he said. ‘The end of the tournament meant the end of the fighting.’

The last thing Sherif wanted was any spontaneous gestures of reconciliation between the groups. The men had an impromptu meeting immediately afterwards, and in it, tensions ran high. This was the point in the study the year before when things began to fall apart. OJ told me how in the office Sherif jabbed his finger at White, accusing him of jeopardising the research, of not doing enough to fan animosity. White said nothing. One of his favourite sayings was ‘He who shouts first loses the argument’, his daughter Cindy told me, but he and OJ had exchanged a look.

OJ looked out the window in his Boulder home, at the mountains. Jack White had died in 1988, and OJ still missed him. ‘Jack was the dearest friend I ever had. We went hunting and fishing and riding and telling lies about the fish we caught and drinking …’

I gave him a moment, looked away.

He cleared his throat. ‘Where was I?’

‘I was angry, but I took care not to show it,’ he continued. ‘I said, “Now, Dr Sherif, you remember our agreement. You don’t do that.”’ And he looked from me to Jack and back again. He knew that if I wasn’t allowed to be in charge, Jack and I would both quit. I didn’t have to spell it out, but he understood it. Later, he apologised. But it came close. It came close to being ugly.’

OJ had averted an emotional showdown this time. But what struck me about the scene that he described was what it revealed about power. Contrary to Sherif’s own theory, the leader of the group was not the person with the most status but the one with the most power to derail events or deliver the study they had in mind.

While the boys would have thought the tournament and the conflict was over, the men had other plans. The third and final stage of the experiment — the gluing together of the rival groups — could only work if the relationship between the Rattlers and the Eagles was completely broken.

That afternoon, while the Eagles were celebrating their victory at the lake, the Rattlers raided their cabin and stole their medals and knives, tearing the insect screens off the windows, overturning beds, ripping up comics and, down at the creek, setting the Eagles’ boats loose. Sherif’s notes read that ‘a very destructive job was done … staff had to put the brakes on’.

When they returned and saw what had happened, the Eagles, headed by Will, raced across the park to the Rattlers’ cabin. It was the scene of a ‘most dramatic’ fight, Sherif wrote. Will confronted the Rattlers. Red said they would return the knives if the Eagles got on their bellies and crawled. Will demanded that he send someone his size out to fight, but Red just laughed. Will was ‘hysterical’ and rushed forward, and all hell broke loose. ‘They had thrown each other down and were slugging it out and I had to get in and break it up,’ OJ said.

With some trouble, the men separated the boys, and OJ shepherded the Eagles back to their cabin. Will’s voice began to shake as he recounted to OJ how the Rattlers didn’t want to fight fair — there were eleven of them and only nine of the Eagles — and how the counsellors should have taken out those two big boys so the groups were matched. Perhaps it was the sympathy in OJ’s voice, or the sight of the knives and the medals that he had returned to them, or that the adrenaline and anger of the fight was wearing off, but the boys’ earlier bravado evaporated. Sherif, standing outside the cabin listening, described in his notebook how the Eagles ‘… cried and sobbed’ and were ‘confused and insecure’.

‘The end result of the series of competitive contests and reciprocally frustrating encounters between the Eagles and Rattlers was that neither group wanted to have anything whatsoever to do with the other under any circumstances,’ the book states. But OJ was worried that things had gone too far. The emotional distress of the boys, and in particular the Eagles, could create problems with ‘public relations’ — a term he and Sherif used for complaints from parents and action from the university. That night, he and Sherif decided that the boys needed time to recover before the final stage of the experiment began. They kept the two groups separate the next day and took them out to boat and swim.

Giving the boys a day of fun in their own groups was also an attempt to avoid the kind of complaints the Rockefeller Foundation had recently fielded about Sherif’s group study, concerning his and his team’s treatment of the children.

In December 1953, a number of small-town newspapers ran stories about Sherif’s Middle Grove study, based on reports from a conservative journal called Human Events. One editorial, under the sarcastic headline ‘No (Public) Comment’, stated, ‘Dr Sherif deliberately, surreptitiously and secretly planted ideas in the heads of boys and played on their emotions in such a way that the friendly rivalry between the groups was converted into a hostile one. He also worked upon individuals in each group, causing each to brood … causing grudges and resentments.’ The notion of a foreign-sounding scientist preying on the minds of naïve children echoed widespread fears about vulnerable people falling sway to the power of communist brainwashing and propaganda. It also cast the Rockefeller Foundation’s willingness to fund it in a poor light.

Leland C. DeVinney, the Assistant Director of Social Sciences at the Foundation, wrote to his superiors that the articles were ‘sheer invention’ and ‘an astonishing distortion’: ‘fantastically distorted and hostile’. But at least one reader reacted, and wrote to the Foundation directly to ask for more information about Sherif and the study. Even without the implication that it was providing research support to America’s enemies, the Rockefeller Foundation was sensitive to accusations about its funding of research with children, having been at the centre of previous controversies for its financial support of what was deemed unethical experimentation — as early as 1911, Rockefeller-funded bacteriologist Hideyo Noguchi had caused a public scandal after he was accused of infecting children with syphilis.

Upon receiving the letter, DeVinney wrote to Sherif asking him to supply information so he could answer the man’s questions, in particular what exactly was it that parents had been told? When DeVinney answered the letter of complaint he wrote that the parents, ‘while they did not know the study design’, were ‘told this was an experimental camp’. But what he didn’t add was that Sherif had, he wrote to DeVinney, told the parents it was a ‘study of camping procedures’, not a study of intergroup hostility.

The exchange had made Sherif anxious, and both he and OJ were careful at Robbers Cave to keep parents in the dark about the real nature of the study. Throughout, they read all the boys’ outgoing mail to make sure no news was going home that might cause trouble.

I imagine that the day’s break away was a welcome relief for the staff too. The 1949 study had ended at this point, and the 1953 study failed to get the boys fighting. ‘We had never reached this stage before, so it was unknown territory as far as we were concerned,’ OJ said. ‘We had real reason to be concerned about whether we could pull it off.’