Nobody's Boy and His Pals: The Story of Jack Robbins and the Boys Brotherhood Republic

"Hendrik Hartog's lively investigation of the legal histories of Progressive reform, childhood, criminality, repression, and free speech revolves around the mysterious Jack Robbins, an iconoclastic social reformer dedicated to the ideals of virtuous boyhood. In early twentieth-century Chicago, Robbins's Boys' Brotherhood Republic sought to keep boys out of the clutches of both vice and the nascent carceral state. The curiosity of Robbins's story is compounded by the racially and politically charged legalcase that arose from his will, which established the extent to which last wishes must conform with dominant social values. Hartog crafts a twisty and engaging book full of surprising connections and persistent mysteries"--
An engaging account of social reformer Jack Robbins, the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic, and their legacy. In 1914, social reformer Jack Robbins and a group of adolescent boys in Chicago founded the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic, an unconventional and unusual institution. During a moral panic about delinquent boys, Robbins did not seek to rehabilitate and/or punish wayward youths. Instead, the boys governed themselves, democratically and with compassion for one another, and lived by their mantra “So long as there are boys in trouble, we too are in trouble.” For nearly thirty years, Robbins was their “supervisor,” and the will he drafted in the late 1950s suggests that he continued to care about forgotten boys, even as the political and legal contexts that shaped children’s lives changed dramatically.  Nobody’s Boy and His Pals is a lively investigation that challenges our ideas about the history of American childhood and the law. Scouring the archives for traces of the elusive Jack Robbins, Hendrik Hartog examines the legal histories of Progressive reform, childhood, criminality, repression, and free speech. The curiosity of Robbins’s story is compounded by the legal challenges to his will, which wound up establishing the extent to which last wishes must conform to dominant social values. Filled with persistent mysteries and surprising connections, Nobody’s Boy and His Pals illuminates themes of childhood and adolescence, race and ethnicity, sexuality, wealth and poverty, and civil liberties, across the American Century.