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Nobody’s Boy and His Pals

The Story of Jack Robbins and the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic

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. 
 

328 pages | 22 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2024

Biography and Letters

Chicago and Illinois

History: American History

Law and Legal Studies: Legal History

Sociology: Social History

Reviews

"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 reflection 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'

"Why would a man living in the midst of the anti Communism mania of the 1959s leave his self-created wealth to provide for support of children whose parents had been convicted of political crime? Hartog's curiosity about this small matter leads to virtuoso research and now this fascinating book shining a light on inventive efforts to encourage young people, prevent crime and mobilize volunteers to help. It also offers intriguing glimpses of the fledgling industries of advertising, journalism, animation and ice cream franchises - and idealism, and human kindness remote from the prosecutors, social workers, and criminal systems of mass incarceration. Nobody's Boy and His Pals is a gem!"

Martha Minow, author of 'When Should Law Forgive?'

"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

Table of Contents

Introduction
(One) The Big Brother
(Two) On the Boy Problem
(Three) Jack Robbins, Supervisor, and the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic
(Four) As Clara Laughlin Saw It: War, Energy, and Democracy
(Five) Who Was Jack Robbins? Or, Things Unsaid, 1920–1958
(Six) Jack Robbins’s Will
(Seven) Enter the Lawyers
(Eight) And Then What Happened?
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography

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