THE MANAGEMENT OF THE PREDATORY IMPULSES
We are to look upon the gang as an association essentially instinctive.
The boy at a certain age joins a gang, the gang pursues a definite set
of activities, from motives that are primarily irrational. The boy is
simply made that way. His behavior has the same instinctive basis as
the acts of any other wild creature.
It is, so the psychologists tell us, a peculiarity of instincts among
the higher animals, and especially of the instincts of mankind, that
they are essentially transitory. They arise at the proper period of
existence, persist in some cases only until the acts which they inspire
have time to become habits, and then fade away. The squirrel born in a
cage tries to bury nuts in the tin bottom. He tries it once or twice,
and fails. He does not try it again; and probably would not, even
though he returned to the woods. The tame beaver which builds its dam
of chairs and umbrellas across the parlor floor, does it only once. The
hen which cackles distractedly when her first brood of ducklings takes
to the water trots calmly off to the pond with her third or fourth.
But the duckling, kept away from the water for the first weeks of its
existence, fears it forever afterwards.
So it is with these human instincts. They arise at early adolescence;
they die down with the passing of youth. Meanwhile, they tend to
develop into persistent habits of mind. Whether they shall so develop,
and which shall persist and which die away, depends on the boys’
surroundings and education.
Consider, for example, the special human instinct which we share with
only a few of the brutes, the instinct of acquisitiveness. It is the
basis of most of our adult frugality, and of the institution of private
property. Too little of it makes us spendthrifts; too much makes us
misers and kleptomaniacs; with just the right amount we become solid
citizens and taxpayers.
Unquestionably, acquisitiveness is instinctive in boys; witness the
contents of their pockets, and their collections of all sorts of
useless truck. They steal things to eat and to provision their camps,
with about as much attention to the morals of their acts as the
squirrel who secretes nuts or the dog who buries his bone. They are
continually appropriating articles which they cannot possibly use,
merely for the sake of possessing them. It was a wise mother and a good
psychologist who, when her cake became too dry to put upon the table,
used to “hide it away for the children to steal.”
In the adolescent boy this entirely natural instinct usually shows
itself as a desire to steal, which is normal but not proper. On the
whole, the gang does encourage stealing; forty-nine of our sixty-six
gangs report this form of predatory activity. We all did it as boys,
and most of us have grown up to be fairly honest men.
For there seem to be inherent forces in the gang itself that tend to
check stealing. For one thing, both example and emulation among the
members of a gang reinforce the impulse to form collections of shells,
postage stamps, butterflies or minerals, and these in a natural and
wholesome fashion satisfy the acquisitive instinct and turn it away
from theft. The common property of the gang, too, its wood hut or
clubroom with their furnishings, the bats and balls and other common
tools of the gang probably act in the same way. Doubtless, too, the
boys’ grief when a hostile gang wrecks their property or runs off with
their bats and balls reinforces powerfully the law of _meum et tuum_.
Certain it is that experienced educators regard as vastly more serious
the case of the lad who goes off to steal by himself for his own profit
than that of the one who steals in company with his fellows and for the
advantage of the gang.
The predatory activities of the gang do, then, in no small measure,
tend to cure themselves. So far as they do not, they will naturally
have to be put down by force in the interests of law and order. Yet
even while we are curtailing these inconvenient activities, we
ought never to forget that the stealing of boys is too natural and
spontaneous to be, for them, a sin. Selfishness, disloyalty, cowardice,
gluttony, are far more serious matters, for these are unnatural vices
which grow worse with time. In putting down the anti-social gang
activities, as of course we must, let us do it as psychologists, with
an eye to the genesis and the nature of the disease which we combat.
The impulse to steal is not primarily an instinct to take, but an
instinct to acquire. What the boy desires is to secure property by some
effort of his own. The raft and the hut which he builds, his collection
of stamps and butterflies, the queer, useless treasures which he
hoards, all these are the objects of his acquisitive instinct, quite as
much as are the things that he steals.
The moral is clear. We may keep the boy from being a thief by making
him a collector, and by making him an artisan. We help him to satisfy
his natural desire for property in one way, and we check his tendency
to satisfy it for himself in another. In the same way, so far as
his thieving grows out of a love for excitement and adventure, as it
undoubtedly does to a far greater extent than we commonly realize, the
rational device for stopping it is to satisfy his desire for excitement
and adventure in some other way. If, then, we encourage the boy to make
collections of whatever he may be interested in, and give him some
other experiences as delightful as “getting the chase,” we shall have
removed two of the chief causes of his thieving at all.
The creation and possession of property of one’s own tend also to check
the impulse to meddle with other people’s in yet another way. I recall
the case of a little Greek boy who had been smuggled into this country
as a slave at a bootblack stand, and almost immediately after committed
to a State Reform School for stealing. The boys at this school have
each a little garden spot of their own which they plant and weed and
tend and watch, and finally produce, among other fruits of their
labors, melons. This little Greek had one melon plant on which in due
season appeared a single tiny green watermelon. Never did a mother care
more tenderly for her babe than this boy for his watermelon plant, and
its single melon grew responsively. One day in the fall the little
farmer said to his instructor, “Shall I pick my melon to-day?”
“No,” was the reply, “you had better leave it one more week.”
The next week when the boys went out for their gardening that single
melon had disappeared. The little owner, with difficulty keeping back
his tears, went sadly back to the schoolroom and asked to be permitted
to see the Master.
“Do you remember,” he said, “my watermelon?”
“Yes, indeed I do. What about it?”
“To-day when I went out to work in the garden, it was gone!”
“I am sorry. You have taken good care of that vine.”
“Yes,” returned the boy, “but I have learned a good lesson by it. I
have learned never to steal any more.”
“How did you learn that?”
“I have found out how much people are hurt when they have their things
stolen.”
The boy has, indeed, learned his lesson, for he has gone out from the
Reform School to lead an honest life. All boys are fundamentally alike,
and this same appeal to the sympathetic imagination must always remain
our chief reliance in combating the predatory and destructive impulses
of normal boyhood.
Let the boy, then, have property of his own which he has acquired by
his own effort and you have taught him the great lesson of respect
for the property of others. The boy who plants potatoes, hoes them,
kills the potato bugs and harvests a bushel of potatoes, has gained a
sufficiently correct sense of the value of potatoes so that he will
not, as I have seen a gang do, dig up a poor man’s winter stock of food
just to see who could throw a potato farthest. The boy who makes a
tool chest or a table can estimate the value of manufactured articles,
and generally has a deep respect for well made furniture. One of the
essential and fundamental elements in training for honesty and respect
for property has been sadly neglected in our schools. A new era of
promise is fast approaching when all boys and girls will receive a
thorough training in handicraft and the still more valuable moral
training which goes with it. Fortunate, indeed, and in more ways than
one, is the boy who has learned in his teens the value of common things
by the actual production of them.
It is well, also, for a boy to have a carpenter’s room where he can use
saws, hammers, and knives. If at Christmas time each year one good,
useful tool is presented to a boy, by the time he reaches the gang age
he has a useful kit in which he takes great pride. Then, too, this room
often becomes a very good meeting-place of the gang, so that the boy’s
companions also turn naturally to making for themselves some of the
objects which they require for their collective activities. Thus the
gang itself not only contributes to the boy’s manual education, but in
a very real sense helps to tie the boy to his home.
It is especially important in dealing with these predatory and
destructive instincts of the gang, to bear always in mind that they are
thoroughly natural and inevitable. Every one of us men used to steal
when we were boys; even Henry Ward Beecher confesses to having “swiped”
sundry desirable objects “off” his Uncle Samuel from the Charlestown
Navy Yard. “The man who says he never did it, does it now.” The object
of our training should not be to root out the instinct, but only to
prevent its developing into a habit before it has time to die down of
itself.
I was much struck with the thoroughly unconscious nature of these
anti-social impulses by the case of a boy under my charge, who came
to me for permission to go off into the woods with his gang during
school hours. He told me in the most matter-of-fact way that they had
just discovered the meeting-place of another gang, and they wanted
permission to go there while the other gang was at school, loot their
property, and destroy their habitation. It struck these well brought
up boys that this highly piratical expedition was the only possible
reaction on that particular fragment of their environment. It had not
occurred to one of them that it was possible to let the other gang’s
property alone. The other gang, moreover, had carefully hidden their
abiding place, taking it for granted that any other boys who discovered
it would put it to sack.
Curiously too, the members of the two gangs were perfectly good
friends, and neither looters nor looted would, apparently, have
cherished the least grudge against the other. They were simply living
up to their boy nature with no more thought of the reason for their
acts than when, as children, they used to eat the paint off their
Noah’s ark, or when later, as young men, they will dance attendance on
the girls whom they now despise.
It is important, too, for the parent, and still more for the teacher
and the social worker, not only to recall his own youth and to be
as charitable as his station in life will allow, but to remember in
addition that in one way the city boy’s environment is more against him
to-day than ever before in history. The city boy takes fruit from a
fruit stand, is arrested and given a record. In the eye of the law he
is now a criminal, with an indelible smirch on his reputation.
If we elders had been treated after this fashion in our home towns and
villages, who of us would lack a criminal record? We had a chance to
steal fruit out of the orchards; and boylike, we preferred to steal
sour apples from a mean neighbor rather than take sweet ones as a
parental gift. The owner caught us, not the policeman; and after the
dust had been thoroughly removed from the seats of our breeches, we
were given a new start, none the worse. The consequences of the two
sorts of theft are out of all proportion to their inherent sin.
Nevertheless, when all is said, stealing is a pretty serious matter,
and it may help in handling the practical problem to follow out a
little further the study of an earlier chapter, as to the reasons for
theft. It appears from the boys’ own reports, as well as from their
chance remarks, that probably nine tenths of the objects stolen by
youths before the age of sixteen are things to eat. The desire for
food, therefore, is one of the most powerful contributory forces toward
the formation of thieving habits. One obvious method, then, is to
satisfy the hunger and thirst demands of boys. Well-fed boys from good
homes do steal, but, other things being equal, the chances are vastly
against the underfed. This aspect of the matter, unfortunately, takes
us off into questions of economics and social science which, although
important, have no place here.
Next to food in importance comes money, and objects such as lead, coal,
wood, junk, and the like, which may be converted into money. Here again
the remedy is obvious. Spending money for his reasonable desires, or a
chance to earn it, should protect the boy from the second of the great
temptations to theft. The parent who treats his boy to ice-cream or the
circus, while he gratifies a natural desire, removes also a natural
temptation.
Third in importance as causes of thievery come things to use,--saws,
knives, hammers, and other tools, balls, bats, gloves, and the other
implements of sport. In a sense the boy has a right to these things, as
he has a right to textbooks and the other apparatus of the schoolroom.
They are the instruments of his education, a part of his reasonable
claim on society.
Last of our groups of things stolen come pets. All boys love a good
dog; most boys like to house, feed and care for pigeons, rabbits,
cavies, mice, almost any sort of pet. They steal food to eat, tools
to use and money to spend; but they steal pets to take home and love.
Here, surely, is a demand of boy nature that every parent ought to
manage to satisfy.
In brief, then, we have in the three most conspicuous anti-social
impulses of the gang--stealing, fighting and plaguing people--three
independent elements of boy psychology, each with a separate genesis,
and each requiring a different treatment for its suppression or cure.
Plaguing people is a survival from the past, which was presumably
useful once but certainly is so no longer. The impulse must be put
down by force or removed by education before it fixes itself as a
habit. The fighting impulse is also a survival, highly useful once
and of great pedagogic value now. Too much belligerency needs to be
curtailed; too little needs to be increased; the plain boy has just
about the right amount, and needs a good deal of letting alone. After
all, the warfare-varied-with-armed-neutrality of boyhood is nature’s
own great training-school for certain of the finest of the egoistic
virtues.
Stealing is in still a different category. It arises from an instinct,
useful in the past and still more useful now. The problem is to
suppress the inconvenient manifestation without impairing the basal
impulse. Seldom, therefore, is it sufficient merely to know that a
boy is a thief. One must know why he stole, and why he stole this
particular object rather than some other. Only then shall we lead him
still to desire, while he ceases to covet.