“Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy.”
The little child, in his father’s house and under his father’s care, feels the stir of newborn gregarious instincts, and takes his first steps into the larger life of the world. Boyhood proper begins with the rise of impulses which make us citizens and lead us to take care of ourselves; and it ends with the rise of impulses which make us heads of families and lead us to take care of other people. Each step is an enlargement of life. Each transition is marked by a psychic change so profound that it makes the previous narrower condition appear as shadowy almost as a dream, and almost as difficult to recall.
We are concerned here with the second of the seven ages of men: with the period, that is, which begins at about the age of ten with the rise of the herding instincts, and ends with the rise of the mating instincts at, say, eighteen. The child, who thus far has been a solitary animal, suddenly becomes a social one. He is profoundly interested in youth of his own sex, while at the same time he cares less than nothing for youth of the other. Therefore, he associates himself with other boys and forms gangs.
The gang, therefore, while it lasts, is for the boy one of the three primary social groups. These three are, the family, the neighborhood, and the play group; but for the normal boy the play group is the gang. All three are instinctive human groupings, formed like pack and flock and hive, in response to deep-seated but unconscious need. Like all such instinctive associations, the gang appears useless or stupid to those who have never felt the inner impulse which caused it, or who, having felt, have forgotten. The boy’s reaction to his gang is neither more nor less reasonable than the reaction of a mother to her babe, the tribesman to his chief, or the lover to his sweetheart. All these alike belong to the ancient, instinctive, ultra-rational parts of our human nature. They are felt, and obeyed; but only in part are they to be explained, for no man understands any of them fully unless he knows how it feels from the inside.
CHAPTER II
THE GENERAL NATURE OF THE GANG
The gang age, from ten to sixteen, is one of the most important eras in a boy’s life. One man out often may belong to a church, one out of five to a fraternity: but as Sheldon has shown, three boys in every four are members of a gang; and the character of this gang determines in no small degree what sort of men these boys shall become. Taking our lives through, our parents probably make us most, and next to these our wives. But next to our wives, in their influence over our characters and careers, come for most of us, the group of companions whom we knew as boys and who together with us formed our special gang. Our domestic education takes place in our parents’ home and in our own; but our social training has had at least its foundations in our gang.
Curiously enough, in spite of the fact that three quarters of all boys are members of gangs, the gang plays a somewhat inconspicuous part in the literature of boyhood. Neither in “David Copperfield,” nor in “Being a Boy,” nor in “A Boy’s Town,” nor in “Tom Brown,” does the gang, qua gang, appear. There are traces of it in Owen Johnson’s Lawrenceville stories, and in certain tales of Elisha Kellog, dear to the heart of a generation ago. Only one story of boy life, so far as I know, gives the gang anything like its full value in boy psychology.
This tale is “The Story of a Bad Boy” of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. The “Centipedes,” to which the Bad Boy belonged, were a real gang. They had their local habitation, their badges, their ceremonies, their secrets. They went camping together, swam and boated and fished, snowballed the constables, fought the boys from the other end of the town, bombarded the sleeping inhabitants of Rivermouth on the night before the Fourth, and altogether comported themselves like the indefatigable young savages which all proper boys have been since boys were. The story is said to be highly autobiographical, to be, in short, the inside history of Aldrich’s own gang. At any rate, it seems to be the most adequate account yet in print of a typical boys’ gang, told with insight and skill. One can hardly imagine a better introduction to the ways of all boys than this story of a bad one.
Like most persons who were once boys, I was myself in my boyhood days a member of a gang; but I never began to realize the spirit and power of gang life until, between 1902 and 1905, I sat behind the Principal’s desk in an Industrial School for Boys. Before that desk stood each new-comer, and it was my duty to place each boy in his school work, and to be responsible in part for his discipline. I soon learned that rightly to guide a boy in the School, it was essential that I know pretty thoroughly, not only the boy’s personal traits, but also the social conditions of his home and of his neighborhood. I asked, therefore, many questions about home, school, and playmates, especially about playmates and the way in which the boys spent their leisure time.