Modern Manhood and the Boy Scouts of America: Citizenship, Race, and the Environment, 1910-1930

In this illuminating look at gender and Scouting in the United States, Benjamin René 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.

Author: Benjamin René Jordan
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 04/25/2016
Pages: 306
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.04lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.69d
ISBN: 9781469627656

Review Citation(s):
Choice 12/01/2016

About the Author
Benjamin René Jordan is associate professor in history and political science and director of the Living Learning Communities at Christian Brothers University.