Are You a Crusader?

Moving into the postwar period, this chapter demonstrates how the figure of the endangered and civically engaged boy was mapped onto U.S. constructions of a Cold War citizenry prepared to protect the “free world” from Soviet aggression and the menace of a nuclear holocaust. Tripling its membership with the influx of the baby boomers, the BSA was ideally positioned to marshal the rising generation around the project of a liberal empire in pursuit of domestic and global order. An updated version of “world brotherhood” presented patriotism and peace as indistinguishable duties, recast the exercise of U.S. power as benevolent support for an ailing planet, and taught American Scouts that assuming global responsibilities would earn them the friendship and gratitude of foreign youths. Cold War Scouting’s insistence on paternal authority and religiosity, to be sure, depended on the active participation of boys growing up to the sounds and images of a modern teen culture and a swelling civil rights movement.

A Junior League of Nations

Internationalism provided another momentous frontier for U.S. Scouts eager to inscribe themselves in debates about America’s global role in the interwar period. Focusing on the first two decades of the world jamboree movement, chapter 3 details how BSA delegates, both old and young, participated in the cultural reconstruction of nations and empires through world Scouting. Although the world jamborees thrived on a rhetoric of demobilization, identifying peace as a worthwhile pursuit for young men, the colorful parades of Boy Scouts from across the globe, whose performances of universal brotherhood were curtailed by national loyalties and imperial rivalries, rejuvenated old ideas of civilizational difference. Economic disparities, colonial hierarchies, and a persistent Anglocentrism made the world jamborees an uneven affair, with serious implications for how U.S. Scouts learned to balance global aspirations and duty to the nation.

From Africa to Antarctica

This chapter explores how the BSA globalized the masculine myth of the frontier to combat the rise of a largely peer-regulated, frivolous, and sexualized youth culture in the 1920s. As the propagated “return to normalcy” after World War I had not led to a reinstatement of prewar gender norms but was contradicted by working and voting women as well as men struggling to find proper peacetime masculinities, Scout leaders rediscovered the foreign as a field to discipline youth and mold men. They arranged two spectacular expeditions, one to Africa and the other to Antarctica, which sent four Eagle Scouts abroad in the hope that their age-appropriate and consumer-friendly enactments of a young frontier masculinity would stabilize dominant hierarchies of age and gender. While the official narratives of these expeditions offered reassurance to white elites, the boys’ appropriations of manhood and empire were often idiosyncratic and inconclusive, pointing to the incongruities between adult projection and youthful experience.

Brothers Together

This chapter lays the contextual groundwork for all succeeding chapters. It revisits the social, political, and cultural catalysts that led to the transnational flowering of organized youth after 1900. Unlike the default narrative, which emphasizes the British roots of the Boy Scouts, this chapter locates the movement’s inception in uncertainties about the future of youth and manhood that haunted imperial societies on both sides of the Atlantic. In crafting a young imperial masculinity that pivoted on physical exercise and hygiene, sexual abstinence, strict gender segregation, and a heroic understanding of white Anglo-Saxon history, the U.S. architects of Boy Scouting walked a fine line between drawing on foreign precedents and framing their remasculinization scheme as thoroughly American.

The White Boy’s Burden

Waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates rarely got a chance to relive the lighter days of his youth. One such moment came on July 28, 2010—a day of celebration at Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia. The year marked the one-hundredth birthday of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), and Gates’s keynote address set the tone for a big patriotic show featuring flags, paratroopers, antiaircraft cannons firing blank shots, and a flyover of F-16 jets. Despite the jubilant occasion, the Pentagon chief had not come to spin campfire yarn. Amid the cheers of almost fifty thousand Scouts gathered at the army installation, Gates, an Eagle Scout from 1958, reaffirmed the movement’s intergenerational contract that promised a relationship of mutual allegiance between boys and men. “I believe that today, as for the past 100 years, there is no finer program for preparing American boys for citizenship and leadership than the Boy Scouts of America.” Reciting the themes of crisis, anxiety, and salvation that supporters of the nation’s foremost youth organization had evoked since its founding, Gates extolled scouting as the best remedy for an America “where the young are increasingly physically unfit and society as a whole languishes in ignoble moral ease.” While many youths had degenerated into “couch potatoes,” the BSA continued to make men and leaders, men of “integrity and decency … ​moral courage” and “strong character—the kind of person who built this country and made it into the greatest democracy and the greatest economic powerhouse in the history of the world.” More was at stake than the fate of the nation. “The future of the world itself,” said Gates, depended on the “kind of citizens our young people” would become. Only with the ...