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

Review

by Amol Saghar
published on 04 October 2024

This book is recommended for university-level students, academics, and history enthusiasts interested in learning about the words and life of an individual, Jack Robbins, who left a deep impact across the United States. The intended readers of the book range from general history enthusiasts to university-level students and research scholars. The eye-catching title of the publication makes it particularly engaging.

Hendrik Hartog's Nobody’s Boy and His Pals is about one of the little-known social reformers of the United States, Jack Robbins. This book provides an engaging account of the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic and its legacy. Boys’ Brotherhood Republic was formed with the help of Jack Robbins and a few adolescent boys in Chicago in 1914. It was, as the author shows, quite an unconventional and unusual institution for its time. The intended readers of the book range from general history enthusiasts to university-level students and research scholars. The eye-catching title of the publication makes it particularly engaging.

As the title suggests, the book narrates the story of Jack Robbins and the critical role he played in teaching delinquent boys how to govern themselves independently of any supervision. Robbins was active during a phase in American history that is often associated, among other issues, with the moral panic about delinquent kids. This panic, as Hartog indicates, was quite discernable in places like Chicago and Los Angeles. It was, in fact, in these cities that Robbins spent most of his days as a social reformer. Moreover, as the book goes on to show, it was with the help of delinquent kids belonging to Chicago that Jack Robbins was able to form the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic, which had an interesting motto: “So long as there are boys in trouble, we too are in trouble”.

Divided into eight chapters with an Introduction and Conclusion, a fascinating story of an understudied yet important phase of American history is weaved by Hartog. In the initial chapters, besides introducing the protagonist of the story, concepts like “Big Brother” in the context of “chanceless waifs” and the panic of delinquent children are explained at length. In the same group of chapters, the contemporary socio-economic and political scenario that led to the formation of the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic is also discussed. In the latter chapters, fascinating insights into the otherwise little-known personal life of Jack Robbins are provided. The controversies and the problems that he faced, especially about his ideas on the rehabilitation of delinquent boys and the functioning of the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic, occupy a major portion of these sections. The chapters on Jack Robbins’s will (which he had drafted just before he died in 1958) and the legal battle that ensued relating to the will and the working style of the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic are the most engaging. The arguments which were made and the judgments which were passed in this relation had far-reaching consequences, particularly concerning child laws, in the United States.

Hendrik Hartog is Princeton University’s Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty, Emeritus. For more than a decade, he directed Princeton’s American Studies program. Given that Jack Robbins did not leave behind any archival notes or documents of his activities and in the light of the absence of an archive of the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic, Hartog has done a commendable job of bringing to light an important aspect of the evolutionary history of child laws in the specific context of America. The rare photographs from the time when Jack Robbins and Boys’ Brotherhood Republic were active and the extensive bibliography and citations add to the richness of the book. Moreover, the detailed floor maps of buildings from where the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic functioned and some unique newspaper clippings throw light on the child laws as they evolved in the United States. The expansive view of the book, from Progressive Era Chicago to Cold War Los Angeles, allows readers to understand the captivating history of the social reform movement in the United States, through the personality of Jack Robbins. Because the book has been written in a lucid manner and for more than one type of audience, it interests both general readers and specialists in law and history.

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