Featured Authors Emeritus Professor Hendrik A. Hartog Explores Jack Robbins' Efforts to Help Troubled Youth in New Book 

The book: In his new book, Nobody’s Boy and His Pals, Hendrik A. Hartog tells the story of Jack Robbins and the Boy’s Brotherhood Republic — a social program founded in 1914 to uplift and empower wayward youth. The group of boys governed themselves and lived by this mantra: “So long as there are boys in trouble, we too are in trouble.” Robbins served as supervisor of this ground for nearly 30 years. Nobody’s Boy and His Pals (Chicago Press) examines the history of American childhood and law through Robbin’s journey. 

Excerpt: 

It was in 1913 that Jack Robbins first became the “big brother” to “chanceless waifs.” Newspaper readers soon learned much about how he befriended boys living on city streets and how he advocated for them. 

In 1914, he and a group of Chicago boys he worked with created the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic, an alternative institution that challenged conventional understandings of boyhood and citizenship. He and the boys imagined a boyhood in which they might live as free citizens of an empowering and rights-based and self-consciously legalist republic. The boys governed themselves, democratically and with care for one another, without parents or parent substitutes — indeed, mostly without any other adults at all. 

The constitution they then drafted for the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic denied that boys who did wrong, “bad boys,” or, we might say, juvenile delinquents, needed to be separated from other boys. The group’s mantra was, “So long as there are boys in trouble, we too are in trouble.” It resisted the prevalent notion that adolescent boys were “dependent,” in need of adult care. At a time—in America’s Progressive Era—when reformers were arguing about whether the answer to the “boy problem” lay with parents or with creating alternative structures, run by adults, that would replicate what parents ought to have offered, Jack Robbins and his adolescent collaborators imagined a republic where boys would be “pals” to one another. The goal was to ensure that a boy had “pals” who would be there to care for and to support him, regardless of the trouble the boy found himself in.  

The Boys’ Brotherhood Republic would inevitably negotiate with an adult world of powerful and sometimes violent institutions, with juvenile courts and reform schools and with the police, among others. But it did so as one republic dealing with another. As such, the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic became a part of Chicago’s landscape of reform institutions, controversial and singular but also integrated into its public life. 

And so it survived for the better part of 30 years.  

After his death in 1958, Jack Robbins left a will that included a trust that promised care for a particular subset of troubled children: “the Negro child or children” of men and women convicted of and imprisoned for political crimes. The terms of his will, drafted in explicit rejection of the norms of Cold War America, produced a 1962 California judicial decision that, in its own small way, challenged the legal conformity of the era and looked forward to the social disruptions of the later 1960s. 

Robbins’s will concluded with a kind of credo, one that underlay the provisions that he had just set out and that looked back forty years and more to a time when he had been a prominent, even a notorious, figure in American culture. “Unorthodoxy or lack of conformity” he wrote, had never been a “governing factor” in his life. Beyond that, he had always believed in “full, complete, and unabridged freedom of expression in a democratic society.” He wished to preserve the right to be “different.” And that is why he drafted the will that he had. 

The particular “difference” that Jack Robbins had worked to preserve, one that had animated him and had gained him a great deal of public attention 40 years before, was the right of adolescent boys to live in republican freedom and to care for one another, extracted from adult control and from the coercive institutions of a repressive state. The Boys’ Brotherhood Republic he had worked to create would stand apart as a legal entity. It embodied a countercultural identity, one not controlled by the state or by parents or by reformers, and a site where free speech, debate, and argument were valued. 

Jack Robbins’s story begins with the “boy problem.” It ends with an uncelebrated episode of late Cold War litigation in the early days of the civil rights movement. Neither the beginning nor the ending has any place in familiar constitutional and legal histories of American freedom and of American criminality. 

Place is also significant, as the story begins in one famous and emblematic location, Progressive Era Chicago, and it ends in mid-century Los Angeles, another site of famous and infamous conflicts. In the early twentieth century, Chicago was the paradigm of a city gripped by “the boy problem.” It was where what today is called “juvenile justice” was modeled and first institutionalized. But Chicago was also where some reformers imagined new ways of understanding boyhood and of supportive care and citizenship. Los Angeles was where the anti-communist crusade of the Cold War, the Red Scare, had many battles and victories. The city was notorious for the violence of its policing, the conservatism of its leading newspaper, and the docility of its major industries, in the face of the “inquisitions” of the Cold War. It was noteworthy, too, for the resistance of its power structure to African American aspirations. But as we will see, Los Angeles also was a site for novel legal strategies that responded to a changing America. 

This book charts one American story, held together by the life and words of one odd individual, Jack Robbins. It is about how Robbins thought about American freedom and care and responsibility and criminality — and how he was thought about by others. Jack Robbins was of his time, involved with other radicals and reformers, some prominent and some obscure. He was one of several “boy workers” in early twentieth-century America, all of whom were then absorbed by the “boy problem.” Across a half century of American history, across a changing America, Jack Robbins adjusted his thinking and his expressed political commitments — and he told many lies, especially to newspaper reporters. Yet he remained doggedly focused on the needs of and the harms experienced by adolescent children. The institution he had helped to create in 1914 and that, for the next 30 years he “supervised,” the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic, articulated ways of understanding boyhood and care and criminality that have not received the attention they deserve. The will he drafted in the late 1950s suggests that he continued to think about and to worry about uncared-for children, even as the political and legal contexts that shaped children’s lives changed dramatically.  

Telling this story has required particular research strategies. Jack Robbins left no archive of personal papers. Nor is there an archive for Chicago’s Boy’s Brotherhood Republic. All that survives are fugitive notes and files and documents and images in scattered libraries, a few reports by potential funding agencies, and a large number of journalistic accounts and descriptions. Much of the early story can be told because, for a time, between 1913 and the early 1920s, Robbins and the boys he worked with fascinated a national public of newspaper and magazine readers. American journalists met that demand by writing and publishing hundreds of articles about him and the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic (BBR). Yet, once the fascination passed, once urban America stopped worrying about “the boy problem,” once his particular kind of radicalism no longer seemed interesting, no longer “news,” Jack Robbins mostly disappeared from public view.  

And today both Jack Robbins and the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic are long forgotten. 

Still, it has been possible to reconstruct aspects of a life and, even more, of the projects that animated him and that made him “news,” to tell a story about a way of being that may seem lost to us. 

My ambitions for this book are both modest and grandiose. Jack Robbins may remain a sideshow to predominant legal histories of Progressive reform, of childhood, of criminality, of repression, of race and ethnicity, and of free speech, although he may have had a marginal impact on larger narratives, and though he certainly had interesting things to say about those themes. I don’t imagine that I have produced a new version of Law and the Conditions of Freedom, or of The Transformation of American Law, familiar titles that signify general histories of law and of how Americans, mostly those with resources and capacity, have managed to use and to understand law. His story, or my version of his story, remains a small and particular story, even as it taught me to see aspects of modern American history in new ways. 

Still, I believe this book models one way to go beyond the conventional wisdoms that have had determinative weight in American constitutional and legal history, particularly the focus on economically competent, mostly white and mostly middle-class participants in the legal culture, those adults who were sometimes capitalist producers and always consumers in the economy. How should legal historians make space for others — for the diverse and strange lives, words, and legacies of women and men like Jack Robbins, and for the adolescent boys of the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic, some among the many non-elites who have embodied relatively underground streams in American legal culture? How are we to treat both him and the boys as living complex but free lives both in and against the law, and as the creators of forms of participatory citizenship, of resistance to subordination, and of community responsibility? That is the project that became this book. 

And along the way I found a story, one that uncovered episodes of American history and culture, and one that engaged themes of childhood and adolescence, state power and violence, care, community, race and ethnicity, sexuality, wealth, radical politics, and civil liberties, across much of the 12th century, a period sometimes called the American Century. 

Reviews:  

“Hartog is a brilliant storyteller and this is stunning, prescient history writing. He raises important questions about how legal historians should address the diverse and strange lives of those women and men who are frequently neglected.” — David Sugarman, Lancaster University  

“With his characteristic eye for the telling tale, Hartog traces the life of a self-governing republic of boys and its enigmatic creator, Jack Robbins, from Progressive Era Chicago to Cold War era Los Angeles. Hartog’s account is as revelatory in its unexpected turns as in its deep reflections on adolescent selfhood, freedom, governance, and law. It offers a model and a critical reminder that law and legal history belong as much to the young, to wrongdoers and wronged, and to idiosyncratic figures who dare to think and live against the grain as it does to those with economic and political power.” — Barbara Y. Welke, author of Law and the Borders of Belonging