Disputes are sure to arise in any social group and especially in a gang. “If there was any dispute, have a scrap over it. Fellow who got the worst of it, gave up.” “If there was a dispute the leader settled it.” “The officers would most always settle disputes, talk it over, get circumstances, and then settle it.”
These cases illustrate the most common methods of settling internal troubles. In ten cases the boys fought it out; in seven other cases the matter was settled by the leader, a bigger boy, or an outsider.
The typical boys’ gang, then, is no mere haphazard association. Accidents of various sorts—age, propinquity, likeness of interests—bring together a somewhat random group. Immediately the boys react on one another. One or more leaders come to the fore. The gang organizes itself, finds or makes its meeting-place, establishes its standards, begins to do things. It develops, in some sort, a collective mind, and acts as a unit to carry out complex schemes and activities which would hardly so much as enter the head of one boy alone. The gang is, in short, a little social organism, coherent, definite, efficient, with a life of its own which is beyond the sum of the lives of its several members. It is the earliest manifestation in man of that strange group-forming instinct, without which beehive and ant hill and human society would be alike impossible.
CHAPTER IV
CERTAIN ACTIVITIES OF THE GANG
The most active time of life is early adolescence. At this age, the normal boy has finished one stage in his development, and is resting before he enters upon the next. He has weathered the storms of childhood. He has completed some of the most difficult portions of the growth process, and has salted down his gains. Between eight years of age and twelve, lies a period of extraordinary toughness and resilience, when the boy can eat anything and do anything. He is simply one bundle of prodigious energy, which he must explode, and which he generally insists on exploding in his own way.
The gang, naturally, becomes the chief outlet for his activities. Sheldon, in his study of 851 boys who were members of gangs, found that the purposes of these spontaneous societies were:—
| Athletics | 61 %. |
| Migration, building, hunting, fighting, and preying | 17 |
| Industrial work | 8½ |
| Or to sum up, associations for purposes involving physical activity comprised | 86½ |
| While associations for social, secret and literary purposes comprised only | 13½ |
My own more detailed study of sixty-six gangs reveals the following group activities:—
| Group games,—baseball, football, basketball, hockey, etc. | 53 | gangs or | 80 % |
| Tribal industries,—hunting, fishing, boating, building huts, going about in the woods, playing Indians, etc. | 49 | 74 | |
| Predatory activities,—stealing, injuring property, etc. | 49 | 74 | |
| Fighting | 46 | 70 | |
| Swimming | 45 | 68 | |
| Migrations | 44 | 67 | |
| “Plaguing people” | 44 | 67 | |
| Going to theatres | 38 | 58 | |
| Running-games,—relievo, chase, tag, etc. | 31 | 47 | |
| Smoking | 50 | 45 | |
| Playing cards | 25 | 38 | |
| Skating | 20 | 50 | |
| Sliding | 12 | 18 | |
| Drinking | 9 | 11 |