and are chiefly among boys. These include bands of robbers, clubs for hunting
and fishing, play armies, organized fighting bands between separate districts,
associations for building forts, etc. This form of association is the typical one for
boys of twelve. After this age their interests are gradually transferred to less
loosely organized athletic clubs. Sheldon's statistics are as follows:
Age 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Total No. of predatory 4 5 3 0 7 1 1 3 1 0 25 =
Girls societies 4 2 17 31 18 22 (11) 7 1 0 111 = Boys
Innocent though these predatory habits may be in small boys, if they are not
naturally and normally reduced at the beginning of the teens and their energy
worked off into athletic societies, they become dangerous. "The robber knight,
the pirate chief, and the marauder become the real models." The stealing clubs
gather edibles and even useless things, the loss of which causes mischief, into
some den, cellar, or camp in the woods, where the plunder of their raids is
collected. An organized gang of boy pilferers for the purpose of entering stores
had a cache, where the stolen goods were brought together. Some of these bands
have specialized on electric bells and connections, or golf sticks and balls. Jacob
Riis says that on the East Side of New York, every corner has its gang with a
program of defiance of law and order, where the young tough who is a coward
alone becomes dangerous when he hunts with the pack. He is ambitious to get
"pinched" or arrested and to pose as a hero. His vanity may obliterate common
fear and custom as his mind becomes inflamed with flash literature and "penny
dreadfuls." Sometimes whole neighborhoods are terrorized so that no one dares
to testify against the atrocities they commit. Riis even goes so far as to say that
"a bare enumeration of the names of the best-known gangs would occupy the
pages of this book."[13] The names are sufficiently suggestive—hell's kitchen
gang, stable gang, dead men, floaters, rock, pay, hock gang, the soup-house
gang, plug uglies, back-alley men, dead beats, cop beaters, and roasters, hell
benders, chain gang, sheeny skinners, street cleaners, tough kids, sluggers, wild
Indians, cave and cellar men, moonlight howlers, junk club, crook gang, being
some I have heard of. Some of the members of these gangs never knew a home,
were found perhaps as babies wrapped in newspapers, survivors of the seventy-
two dead infants Riis says were picked up on the streets in New York in 1889, or
of baby farming. They grow up street arabs, slum waifs, the driftwood of
society, its flotsam and jetsam, or plankton, fighting for a warn corner in their
resorts or living in crowded tenement-houses that rent for more than a house on
Fifth Avenue. Arrant cowards singly, they dare and do anything together. A
gang stole a team in East New York and drove down the avenue, shopping to