On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth (review)

Jay Mechling has written this book to be a volley in the cultural wars involving the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) over the last decade. The book is fascinating, with Mechling claiming to portray actual behavior of scouts and scouting events, based on his own notes of real-life observations, for the ostensible purpose of clarifying the ongoing BSA cultural debates. Yet the work comes across as half novel and half introspective lectures of a Freudian folklore theorist attempting to explain adolescent behaviors and BSA politics. Mechling selects experiences he has witnessed as an adult observer over a twenty-year period and from his own youth as a scout to construct a narrative of an idealized two-week summer BSA camp, complete with composite characters. Using this fictionalized Troop 49 BSA camp as a touchstone, Mechling freely speculates upon and discusses current BSA political issues, the background history of scouting customs, and the psychoanalytic symbolism that he perceives in scouting experiences.

Would that this narrative had been developed into a really first-rate, smart, and timely novel on the BSA and the American political scene. Instead, the reader is asked to accept the carefully constructed camp life narrative as an ethnographic study of a scout camp and of actual boy behavior. What is presented, however, is a set of summer camp events selected more to supply opportunities for the author to speak to his favorite political and psychoanalytical topics than to provide an objective ethnography. Certainly there is no way for one to discern which of the described events are based on actual single events, which are composite events, or which events the author chose to exclude. As such, the case for this work as an ethnographic study of a scout camp is based on essentialism, where actual variations of time and place do not really matter so long as the author's perceived core ideal of an "event" is represented.

So one is left looking at the book primarily as a political vehicle by which Mechling espouses his own social philosophy. The great strength of this work is his considerable passion for his arguments; he never hesitates to make full use of his bully pulpit. As he mentions in the introduction, a basic premise of the book is that the national office of the BSA does not represent the experience of being a scout. It is clear that the composite narrative was constructed to confront the BSA national administration with examples of grass-roots scout behavior in order to show that the membership is not in lock-step with the political maneuverings of their administration. Overall, Mechling provides a very personal view of the Boy Scouts and his understanding of the scouting experience. The importance of the BSA in his own life as an Eagle Scout and later as an adult Scout leader is clearly evident. It will be interesting to see the reactions of other scouts and scholars to this book, as it is consciously designed to provoke further political discussions as to the future of the BSA.