Joseph Adams Puffer

“ For boys at the gang age, I would choose as a Sunday School teacher the sort of man who makes a good scout-master, even if he himself made no profession of religion whatever, rather than the stanchest pillar of the church who has forgotten his boyhood, or than the most angelic maiden lady that ever lived. ”

“ If he spends too much time with his gang, the wild and savage impulses of boyhood receive too much exercise, and he becomes wolfish. The boy must, for the most part, make his social adjustments for himself, and the safest time for doing it is while he is still in the home. Boys who have been kept too close, up to the time when they go away to make life for themselves, too often afford most striking lessons in how not to do it. In college and in business, under their unaccustomed liberty, they go all to pieces for lack of the education which they should have had as boys in the gang. ”

“ Especially is it the key to the behavior of boys at the gang age. The normal boy between ten and sixteen is really living through the historic period which, for the races of northern Europe, began somewhere this side of the glacial period, and came to an end with, let us say, the early middle ages. He is, therefore, essentially a savage, with the interests of a savage, the body of a savage, and to no small extent, the soul of one. He thinks and feels like a savage; he has the savage virtues and the savage vices; and the gang is his tribe. ”

“ But there appears to be no road to self-respect and social independence except for the youth to fight for his rights. The boy who refuses to fight, and runs away when he is being imposed upon, feels himself a coward. ”

“ Last, but by no means least, of the gang virtues comes courage. Now courage and self-reliance are partly a matter of habit. One simply gets accustomed to danger, and so meets it without fear, knowing that he can take care of himself. Baseball and football are both brave games. The boy who is afraid to get his shins kicked, or to stand up to bat against a swift pitcher, has no place in either. Fighting often demands high courage, especially in group fight, where one cannot stop to pick an opponent of his own size but must stand his ground against all comers, little and big. ”

“ For public hygiene, therefore, and for private, a well-managed camp is an ideal school.
Most especially is a camp an ideal spot for instruction concerning sex. The candor and wholesomeness of camp life, the busy days and the solemn nights, the absence, one must confess, of one half the human race, all make for purity of heart. At no time, probably, can a high-minded man do so much toward setting a boy’s feet along the narrow way. ”

“ A fight between gangs is often a desperate and sometimes a dangerous affair. It is a fight to a finish; and it calls for the highest kind of courage, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. A small boy often has to fight a large boy on the opposite side, and to hold his undivided attention while the fortunes of war are being settled on another part of the field of battle. In a single-handed fight a boy will acknowledge personal defeat; but in a gang fight, never until the whole gang is worsted. ”

“ The place to play is too often the point at which the boy’s education breaks down. Consider the conditions in almost any house-bordered street in the more thickly settled parts of any large city. It is the breathing-space, nursery, thoroughfare, market, and playground for crowded tenements. Here the boys congregate and play, and come daily into conflict with the officers of the law,—the very worst possible education that can be given to a boy. This conflict causes enmity to spring up between the boys’ gang and the organized government, where there should be coöperation and good will. ”

“ What I especially urge, then, is that the good home shall recognize the good gang as among the most efficient of its allies. As the careful parent keeps an eye on school and church and social set, so ought he to keep his eye on the gang. He should make it his business to know, not only that his boy gets into the right gang, but that he enters it at the right age, neither too early nor too late, and that he graduates at the right time, after the gang has done its perfect work and more would be too much. ”

“ The child becomes a youth, and the youth becomes man, by virtue of a process not so very different from that which transforms the caterpillar into a butterfly or the tadpole into a frog. As truly as the caterpillar takes on wings, and the tadpole lungs and limbs, of which neither had any trace before, the child and the boy take on not only habits and instincts and ways of getting on in the world, but actual new structure as well. ”

“ Of all the gang-nurtured social virtues, loyalty and its allies stand easily first. The gang, indeed, exists only because of the loyalty of its members to one another. Without this mutual loyalty there could be no gangs. All the great leaders and successful trainers of boys use the lever of loyalty in reaching and holding their boys. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One may well believe that the men who are fighting corrupt political gangs in their manhood, fought the gangs of the next street in their youth, and so learned the fighting habit.
Fighting is like plaguing in being an anti-social impulse. ”

“ Boyville is so far removed, both from Delos and from Babylon, that we seldom think the thoughts of its inhabitants, nor see the world with the boys’ eyes. Only a few men are at home in both worlds,—Lindsay, George, some schoolmasters, an occasional father,—and these can do anything with a boy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Apparently, then, a boy joins a gang and a girl does not for precisely the same reason that he throws stones while his sister tends lovingly the dolls that are beneath his contempt. Each is doing instinctively, as a child, for play, what grown men and women have been doing these thousand years for work. ”

“ To a large extent, moreover, the practice of being disagreeable is, as the boys themselves report, merely “to get the chase.” “Plaguing people” is an exciting sport, which satisfies a natural thirst for adventure, and which is therefore most naturally controlled by judicious doses of adventure in other forms. The joy of getting the chase necessarily departs as soon as the running instincts begin to fade, and the growing boy begins to encounter the gang’s prejudice against fleeing from a pursuer not much stronger than himself. ”

“ Like the spontaneous gang, the patrol puts special emphasis on coöperation, loyalty, obedience, and honor. The scout is a soldier; he may discuss and argue and protest to his heart’s content—afterwards. But he will obey first. The scout is a gentleman; whatever he declares “on his honor” is to be received without question. He is to stand by his friends, to respond to the call of any other scout. These are the simple rules of the organization, as they are the rules, written or unwritten, of every boys’ gang that ever existed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Such wrangling and disputings as there are, such refusals to play unless each can have completely his own way, such protracted controversy over each least difference of opinion! Shortly, to begin with, each little boy takes his bat or his ball, and departs for home and sand pile. The next day they will play together a little longer. They are beginning to learn one of the great lessons of life, and by the time these boys have “made” their college team, their nice adjustment of nerve and muscle will be hardly more manifest than their utter conformity of intelligence and will. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The treatment of the first of these qualities of boyhood is perhaps a problem for superintendents and school boards rather than for individual teachers. One rejoices to see that, more and more every year, attention is being given to this aspect of boy nature. Manual training, industrial education, practical work of all sorts are relieving boys from the unnatural burden of acquisition and offering them instead their proper chance to do. Why is it, when we can all see so clearly the general superiority of the color sense in girls, we are so blind to the boy’s preëminence in the muscular sense! ”

“ Of course, it’s a serious matter, this Wanderlust of boyhood, and the boy who indulges it often comes to irreparable harm. But, after all, what is there like this going to and fro in the world to teach self-reliance and a knowledge of men? All normal boys want to run away; it is rather to their credit when they remain at home. ”

“ There is never any difficulty about filling in the idle time of the gang with these tribal activities, while there is no doubt that the rugged experiences of tramping, mountain climbing, and camp life, of hunting, fishing, and boating, with the almost infinite forms of manual training involved, wherever the boys do their own cooking and camp work, and care for their own rods, guns, and kits, afford one of the best, as it is one of the most natural, forms of manual education. There is, besides, for the city boy, a training in resourcefulness and gumption which he can hardly get elsewhere. ”

“ Certain it is that this strange Wanderlust of man has been a tremendous force in history. It drove the Angles and Saxons into Britain, the English into North America, and the New Englanders into the great West. The traditional Westerner is planning to sell out and move farther on. The mere sight of the horizon is a challenge; and the boy longs to repeat the ancestral experience. ”

“ Thus, for example, we recapitulate a gill-slit stage, because we actually did have a fish ancestor; but we use these gill-slits, not to become adult fish, but as a convenient device for building an aortic arch such as no fish ever had. We are tailed embryos as a step in becoming tailless men; and in the same way, we are boy savages as a stage toward becoming civilized human beings. The savage impulses of a long departed past appear in every modern boy, both because they are an inheritance from that past and because they are a preparation for the boy’s future. ”

“ The Old Guard at Waterloo, the Spartans at Thermopylæ, the Boy on the Burning Deck, the Roman Guard at Pompeii, Horatius, Arnold von Winkelried,—who of us was not brought up on these stories? The manly virtues are instinctive in proper men, but men first learn their practice in the gang.
Almost every activity of the gang is a lesson in coöperation. Not only the group games and the fighting, but the peaceful tribal occupations,—the hunting, fishing, exploring, hut-building, swimming, skating,—all have to be done more or less in common. ”

“ There are parts of a boy’s soul which any woman may observe or imagine, but which no woman can ever feel. That women often do understand boys, understand them sometimes better than men do, is simply one of the marvels of feminine insight. ”

“ These lose, perforce, the education that comes in the gang. But the rest who stay out of the gang, stay out for the gang’s good. They have been trained, often against their nature, to do violence to the gang’s standard of honor. They fail to pass through the normal development of human males; they lack a fundamental virtue and their fellows will not trust them, boy or man.
In the gang, then, we find the natural time and place for the somewhat sudden birth and development of that spirit of loyalty which is the foundation of most of our social relations. ”

“ What better education in skill of hand than that boat-building could be found for a crowd of boys on a summer vacation; what better introduction to the joy of labor!
The life of the woods has, moreover, yet another important function in the development of a boy’s inner life. I have often, in taking cross country walks with boys, attempted to switch out from among the trees into open meadow or pasture land to save distance. ”

“ The problem of the school is to utilize, to the full, the great moving passions of boyhood,—its loyalty, its self-sacrifice, its desire for coöperation, its thoroughgoing gregariousness. We do that best, in school and home and everywhere, when we learn to think of each boy in his gang relations, and to utilize these natural groupings as the basis of our artificial assemblages, and our guide in forming them.
Good citizens are sometimes quite as much the product of good gangs, as of good schools or good homes. ”

“ The child has become a savage, and he worships the red gods.
With the later gang period and the stage which immediately succeeds it, comes normally the veneration of a hero. By this time the boy leader of the gang has emerged from the general ruck of its members, and his word has become law. Now is the time of greatest influence of the man leader—father, trainer, scout-master, pastor, or older friend. Now, for the first time, the boy, beginning to find himself, becomes capable of special and enduring friendships; probably, too, he falls frequently in love. ”