Modern Manhood and the Boy Scouts of America
Title | Modern Manhood and the Boy Scouts of America PDF eBook |
Author | Benjamin René Jordan |
Publisher | UNC Press Books |
Pages | 306 |
Release | 2016-03-07 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1469627663 |
In this illuminating look at gender and Scouting in the United States, Benjamin Rene Jordan examines how in its founding and early rise, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) integrated traditional Victorian manhood with modern, corporate-industrial values and skills. While showing how the BSA Americanized the original British Scouting program, Jordan finds that the organization's community-based activities signaled a shift in men's social norms, away from rugged agricultural individualism or martial primitivism and toward productive employment in offices and factories, stressing scientific cooperation and a pragmatic approach to the responsibilities of citizenship. By examining the BSA's national reach and influence, Jordan demonstrates surprising ethnic diversity and religious inclusiveness in the organization's founding decades. For example, Scouting officials' preferred urban Catholic and Jewish working-class immigrants and "modernizable" African Americans and Native Americans over rural whites and other traditional farmers, who were seen as too "backward" to lead an increasingly urban-industrial society. In looking at the revered organization's past, Jordan finds that Scouting helped to broaden mainstream American manhood by modernizing traditional Victorian values to better suit a changing nation.
"A Modest Manliness"
Title | "A Modest Manliness" PDF eBook |
Author | Benjamin René Jordan |
Publisher | |
Pages | 410 |
Release | 2009 |
Genre | Conservation of natural resources |
ISBN |
This dissertation examines an enormously influential organization that gave shape to normative American assumptions about the relationship between gender, race, citizenship, and the environment in the early twentieth century. The Boy Scouts of America [BSA] garnered a broad range of popular and government support for promising to teach a universal model of character and leading citizenship to all boys. However, many officials doubted that non-white, working class immigrant, and rural boys were capable of such training. Administrators justified allowing local councils to discriminate against "undesirable" groups as permitting "self-determination" in local matters. This research revises one of the central tenets of Progressive Era gender history. A number of works incorrectly use Scouting as the key proof for a flawed argument that native-born white, middle class men's ideal of manhood shifted to a virile self-reliance that idealized "primitive" non-white races. Virile primitivism, however much it may have shaped men's fantasies, was of little practical use in an urban-industrial society. The BSA actually garnered support from across the socio-economic spectrum for its articulation of a new vision of balanced, "modest manliness." Scout manliness hedged pioneer-like virility with Victorian self-control and the expert management, scientific efficiency, and hierarchical loyalty that native-born white, middle class men needed to adapt to the corporate industrial workforce and to reinforce their dominant position in an urbanizing social hierarchy. Girls and non-white boys worked to overcome their obstacles to participation in Scouting. Environmental historians studying the early twentieth century have emphasized the battle over public land usage between utilitarian natural resource conservationists and pristine wilderness preservationists. Attention to the BSA points to the power and popularity of a third vision. BSA leaders insisted that forests should be set aside because they were rich with masculine history and provided an arena for reordering an increasingly diverse, feminized society. Natural resource conservation taught boys modern virtues like expert management and scientific efficiency. BSA officials encouraged members, as future leaders, to apply conservation's categorization of species based on productivity to the differential treatment of human groups based on character capacity. Scouts learned to manage human resources by conserving natural resources.
Our Frontier Is the World
Title | Our Frontier Is the World PDF eBook |
Author | Mischa Honeck |
Publisher | Cornell University Press |
Pages | 274 |
Release | 2018-05-15 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1501716190 |
Mischa Honeck’s Our Frontier Is the World is a provocative account of how the Boy Scouts echoed and enabled American global expansion in the twentieth century. The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) has long been a standard bearer for national identity. The core values of the organization have, since its founding in 1910, shaped what it means to be an American boy and man. As Honeck shows, those masculine values had implications that extended far beyond the borders of the United States. Writing the global back into the history of one of the country’s largest youth organizations, Our Frontier Is the World details how the BSA operated as a vehicle of empire from the Progressive Era up to the countercultural moment of the 1960s. American boys and men wearing the Scout uniform never simply hiked local trails to citizenship; they forged ties with their international peers, camped in foreign lands, and started troops on overseas military bases. Scouts traveled to Africa and even sailed to icy Antarctica, hoisting the American flag and standing as models of loyalty, obedience, and bravery. Through scouting America’s complex engagements with the world were presented as honorable and playful masculine adventures abroad. Innocent fun and earnest commitment to doing a good turn, of course, were not the whole story. Honeck argues that the good-natured Boy Scout was a ready means for soft power abroad and gentle influence where American values, and democratic capitalism, were at stake. In other instances the BSA provided a pleasant cover for imperial interventions that required coercion and violence. At Scouting’s global frontiers the stern expression of empire often lurked behind the smile of a boy.
On My Honor
Title | On My Honor PDF eBook |
Author | Jay Mechling |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Pages | 350 |
Release | 2004-03-01 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 0226517039 |
In a timely contribution to current debates over the psychology of boys and the construction of their social lives, On My Honor explores the folk customs of adolescent males in the Boy Scouts of America during a summer encampment in California's Sierra Nevada. Drawing on more than twenty years of research and extensive visits and interviews with members of the troop, Mechling uncovers the key rituals and play events through which the Boy Scouts shapes boys into men. He describes the campfire songs, initiation rites, games, and activities that are used to mold the Scouts into responsible adults. The themes of honor and character alternate in this new study as we witness troop leaders offering examples in structure, discipline, and guidance, and teaching scouts the difficult balance between freedom and self-control. What results is a probing look into the inner lives of boys in our culture and their rocky transition into manhood. On My Honor provides a provocative, sometimes shocking glimpse into the sexual awakening and moral development of young men coming to grips with their nascent desires, their innate aggressions, their inclination toward peer pressure and violence, and their social acculturation. On My Honor ultimately shows how the Boy Scouts of America continues to edify and mentor young men against the backdrop of controversies over freedom of religious expression, homosexuality, and the proposed inclusion of female members. While the organization's bureaucracy has taken an unyielding stance against gay men and atheists, real live Scouts are often more open to plurality than we might assume. In their embrace of tolerance, acceptance, and understanding, troop leaders at the local level have the power to shape boys into emotionally mature men.
Handbook for Scout Masters
Title | Handbook for Scout Masters PDF eBook |
Author | Boy Scouts of America |
Publisher | |
Pages | 360 |
Release | 1913 |
Genre | Boy Scouts |
ISBN |
The Official Handbook for Boys
Title | The Official Handbook for Boys PDF eBook |
Author | Boy Scouts of America |
Publisher | |
Pages | 448 |
Release | 1997-08 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9781557094414 |
Combines guidance in the meaning, spirit, and activities of scouting with detailed information on camping, hiking, nature and wildlife, first aid, and good citizenship
The History of the Boy Scouts of America
Title | The History of the Boy Scouts of America PDF eBook |
Author | William D. Murray |
Publisher | |
Pages | 592 |
Release | 1937 |
Genre | Boy Scouts |
ISBN |