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75 Dissonant Ideas: Other Boyhoods 4 A s Ontarians strove to regulate boyhood, a key issue was the bad boy. For many adults, this version of boyhood stood in direct contrast to the normal boy. The bad boy was imagined as probably from a workingpoor neighbourhood and as incapable of integrating himself with the “normal” world, and thus as a potential delinquent. Commentators taught the reading public that bad boys came from urban, not rural environments.1 The bad boy preferred disorder, committed physical acts of social transgression, hated morality, and denied society’s laws. He was capable of misdemeanours and petty crimes. The bad boy was dangerous to a society concerned about security. “From earliest childhood,” postwar experts warned adults, the problem boy did not “think and act in the ways of the community.” His nature, they cautioned, found “all submissiveness … odious and he refuses to respect any rule.”2 This understanding of the bad boy motivated middle-class experts, including psychologists , to encourage individual men and groups of men (and some women) to develop methods, volunteer time, and donate money to create masculinitybuilding organizations and boys clubs that would rejuvenate a “healthy” masculinity and, by extension, suppress bad boy behaviour.3 This chapter focuses on the public statements that constructed the postwar bad boy, or juvenile delinquent. Although these labels are used interchangeably, the term juvenile delinquent is primarily a legal one that defines a particular kind of person in Ontario courts of law. Carrigan, in his history of juvenile delinquency in Canada, states that in Ontario a juvenile delinquent was someone under the age of sixteen who committed criminal acts such as theft or vandalism.4 Canada’s 1908 Juvenile Delinquency Act defined a juvenile delinquent as “any boy or girl apparently or actually under the age of sixteen years.”5 The Hope Report offered an official definition of delinquent but refrained from limiting it to an age or to specific acts of criminality. Rather, the commission classified a delinquent as a child or youth in possession of an antisocial attitude. ONTARIO BOYS 76 According to the Hope Report, a delinquent was marked by “stealing, stubbornness , waywardness, truancy, trespassing, fighting, sex offenses, etc.”6 Sangster has remarked that in postwar English Canada, the image of the juvenile delinquent was male-defined.7 Although researchers, theorists, and popular discourse often employed it as a gender-neutral term, much of the postwar preoccupation with juvenile delinquency was focused on boys’ social and moral transgressions and their impact on society.8 For adults concerned with Ontario’s stability and security, the main problem was the misguided, poor or working-class, often immigrant boy.9 Boys clubs were central to addressing the issue of problem boys. Boy workers believed that through boys clubs, they could fill the gap left by the enforced absence of fathers, occupy boys’ time constructively, and prevent boys from causing trouble and assuming lives of future deviancy. By investing time, money, and manpower in the regulation of boyhood, Ontario boy workers attempted to build future, law-abiding citizens who would be honest, play fair, and safeguard the future. Of course, a belief that they could instill a masculine character into boys began with the assumption that boys were not innately bad. “No Such Thing as a Bad Boy”10 It was a dominant postwar belief that there was “no such thing as a bad boy”: Despite the fact that Cpl. Charles Holman of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has felt the tang of salt spray on his lips while harpooning whales from a canoe in Hudson’s Bay; lived dangerously in the underworld of black market and narcotics; done his share of lonely patrols on the blizzard swept plains of the west and the icy waters of the north and acted as a guard and escort for the recent tour of Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh—he still gets his greatest thrill in proving to society there is no such thing as a bad boy.11 Manypostwarchildexpertsviewedboyhoodasapliabletimeinaboy’slife—that is, a time when his moral character was forming and his personality contained the seeds of both good and bad. Canadian child psychologist and educator W.E. Blatz registered his thoughts on this subject in Maclean’s on 1 March 1946: “Every child has within him or her the seeds of good and the seeds of bad; that any child can be made a useful member of society under constant parental guidance and discipline. But that...

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