Boy Scouts of America: A Centennial History, and: The Scouting Party: Pioneering and Preservation, Progressivism and Preparedness in the Making of the Boy Scouts of America (review)

The large number of popular and amateur history works on organized childhood, particularly schools and voluntary youth organizations, has produced a conundrum for professional historians. On the one hand, academic historians can benefit from the vast, often local primary source bases unearthed by amateur historians as well as the public enthusiasm generated for history and the particular topic. On the other hand, the presence of numerous popular, narrative histories might suggest that a subject has been overdone or will distract interested readers from professional historical analysis. Such complexities pervade American Boy Scouting and its history and bring to light fundamental questions about who should control the production of history and if some ways of engaging with history are more valid than others. Boy Scout teaching lessons, publications, and promotional efforts have for a century employed historical analogies and myths in the form of Native American, medieval knight, frontier pioneer, and soldier Scout "ancestors" as role models to attract members and to teach the organization's vision of good character and leading citizenship. A number of Scouters and alumni engage the past by collecting Boy Scout historical memorabilia such as honor and merit badges, uniforms, handbooks, fiction, and other items via well-attended swap meets and collectors' stores. Scouters and alumni have written many books and produced film documentaries and museum exhibits about troops, local councils, and the national organization. Amateur historians have embraced the Internet to digitize primary sources and share their histories of Scouting. Doing a Boy Scout history is a popular project for teenagers working to earn the organization's top honor, the Eagle Scout badge. The murky and contested story of who originated Boy Scouting and who definitively shaped the American branch has led to multiple amateur histories of Scouting's birth. Critiques of Scouting in the last half-century have spurred supporters to revive the past in order to articulate and defend the organization's value while encouraging a broad range of academics inside and outside the discipline to engage with Boy Scout history.

This review examines two prominent examples from the many books, articles, documentaries, and exhibits produced recently by amateur historians for the centennial anniversary of Boy Scouting. Veteran writer, editor, and Scouter Chuck Wills worked with DK Publishing to assemble a handsome, large volume, Boy Scouts of America: A Centennial History, which serves as the Boy Scouts of America's [BSA] official centennial commemoration. BSA curators, archivists, and records managers helped imbue nearly every page with large, crisp photographs, artist sketches, brochures, and advertisements that convey the wealth of primary historical sources at the BSA's National Museum, Archive, and Headquarters near Dallas. Full-page photographs of arranged Scout toys, knives, books, uniforms, equipment, and diaries cleverly blur the line between a two-dimensional book and a visit to a well-conceived museum.

Wills explains the Boy Scouts of America's 1910 emergence and rapid growth by invoking the usual list of causal factors cited by historians studying early twentieth-century youth organizations and broad gender and environmental shifts: advanced industrialization, rapid urbanization, the closing of the western frontier, and increasing concern for nature preservation and natural resource conservation. He overemphasizes the early organization's nostalgia for rural farm boyhood and its desire to preserve the legacy of Native American cultures, but these misperceptions pervade the existing historiography. A Centennial History does offer more critical social analysis of Boy Scouting than have previously published overviews for the general reader. For example, Wills explains that the BSA national office encountered early resentment from American labor unions for its emphasis on being loyal to employers, drew flack from some military leaders for what they saw as a...