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

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

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

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

by Benjamin René Jordan

Paperback(New Edition)

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Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781469627656
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date: 04/25/2016
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 306
Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

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

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

In this persuasively argued book, Benjamin Rene Jordan shows that the American Boy Scouts were eager and able to adapt to the changes in American social and economic life and to help create citizens and workers prepared for life in a management economy. In his examination of the Scouts and their relationships with immigrants, African Americans, and others in the early twentieth century, Jordan's insights on American masculinity in the nineteenth century prove timely and important.—Paula S. Fass, University of California, Berkeley



Well written and engaging, this book acts as a corrective for an understudied area in American history, the history of youth and the history of Scouting. An essential look at how the Scouts influenced American masculinity.—Tammy M. Proctor, Utah State University

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