Thrasher, Frederic M. (1892–1962)

Frederic Milton Thrasher's Ph.D. dissertation, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1927 as one of the 18 volumes contained in the renowned Chicago Sociological Series. Within its first year, The Gang went through four printings. A second edition was released in 1936, and in 1963, James F. Short Jr. contributed a preface to the book and cut some dated material. That edition sold a hefty total of slightly more than 27,000 copies before it went out of print in 1969. In 2000, a small press reprinted the initial edition of The Gang, complete with the spot map that pinpointed the locations of gang activity in Chicago.

Today The Gang often is labeled as a “pioneering,” “seminal,” and “classic” study. One commentator has called it “unparalleled in the field” (Hardman, 1967:6), and 34 years after its publication, David Bordua (1961:130) regarded it as “still the best book on gangs and gang delinquency.” The persisting significance of Thrasher's scholarship is testified to by a citation count. Seventy-one years after the book's appearance, 14 references to The Gang appeared in the Social Science Citation Index. Since 1981, when the index began, Thrasher's work has received slightly more than 200 references.

The Gang is perhaps best known for its focus on the ecology of gang development—that is, the relationship between ganging and the surrounding physical environment. Thrasher maintained that gangs tended to come into being primarily in interstitial areas—deteriorated sites near the central city where speculators refused to upgrade the housing and other amenities because they presumed that, in time, they would be able to sell their holdings at a considerable profit to meet the needs of the expanding central city.

[Page 374]Thrasher's monograph was the product of extensive fieldwork with gang members, law enforcement personnel, and social service providers. Perhaps its least successful element was its failure to pinpoint precisely what was meant by the term gang. Thrasher suggests that gangs are formed spontaneously and then integrated through conflict with outsiders, and that they are characterized by face-to-face meetings, milling, movement through space as a unit, and a degree of planning. Such collective behavior is said to lead to traditions, solidarity, and attachment to a local territory. Critics have pointed out that it would be but a slight exaggeration to suggest that according to Thrasher's definition, the Harvard and Notre Dame football teams as well as most other teams and Mardi Gras revelers could be regarded as gangs.