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.”
[Illustration: A FOOT-BALL GAME BETWEEN CITY GANGS
The crosses indicate the leaders]
[Illustration: “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 [a town ten miles from the city]
for apples, pears, and things. Steal off baker’s team; take basket
of doughnuts and pies. Take milk out of doorways. Take bananas off
banana team. Steal clothes off of clothes lines; sell to ragman. Steal
junk; sell it to another ragman.” “Steal coal and wood. Build fires.
Steal anything we could get hold of off of fruit stand. Steal wood off
farmer’s team coming into the city.” “Hit a Sheeney. He drop his bag
and another fellow take it.” “Stole pigeons. Broke into slot machines.
Get lager beer Saturday nights off beer teams.”
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.