Our Frontier Is the World: The Boy Scouts in the Age of American Ascendancy by Mischa Honeck (review)

With its neatly pressed uniforms, merit badges, and commitment to performing "good turns," the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) is at first glance the quintessential embodiment of youthful virtue and earnestness. But the sincerity of the BSA's scores of young members has served less-than-innocent purposes. Mischa Honeck's thought-provoking and deeply researched book, Our Frontier Is the World: The Boy Scouts in the Age of American Ascendancy, demonstrates how the BSA both grew alongside and reinforced the United States' expanding global empire across the twentieth century. Cloaking white male hegemony in the mantle of boyish play and adventure, Honeck contends, the BSA "provided a beguiling solution to America's imperial dilemma, furnishing a template for doing empire in a nation notoriously invested in negating its own imperiality" (5).

Honeck is not the first scholar to explore the ways in which youth, as both symbols and as actors, blunted the sharp edges of empire. Nor is he the first to examine the history of the BSA. But in placing global constructions of masculinity at its center, and in employing a broad chronological view—opening with the BSA's founding in 1910 and ending in the 1970s—Our Frontier Is the World covers much fresh ground. Indeed, Honeck's expansive narrative provides new insights on a wide variety of topics, from the development of mass media to the commodification of Native American culture to the role of youth in waging the Cold War. Because the BSA played such a decisive role in the construction of American national identity, an exploration of its history sheds light on numerous facets of U.S. culture and society.

Our Frontier Is the World opens in the early twentieth century, as Americans struggled to come to terms with their country's new global empire—and as widespread social fears decried the emasculating effects of urban modernity on young men. The BSA offered a solution to both these vexing problems, positioning its members as "agents of imperial regeneration" (53). Cultivating an ethos of jovial fun in its many interactions with people across the globe, the BSA rewrote U.S. expansionism as youthful adventure even as it promised to turn boys into real men. Adapting to new foreign policy imperatives and to shifting masculine ideals, the BSA would retain its position as the preeminent American boys' organization for over half a century. Not until the seismic social revolutions of the Vietnam era would the BSA's brand of boyish imperialism lose its cultural currency.

The appeal of the BSA's take on imperialism and masculinity extended beyond its youthful members. The men who served as the BSA's organizers and leaders utilized the perceived moral purity of their young charges to cast as innocent their own complicity in the construction of U.S. empire, Honeck demonstrates. Employing the rhetoric of international brotherhood, these men cultivated and deployed youthful idealism in ways that ultimately shored up their own power.

Our Frontier Is the World illustrates how adding a global perspective can shed new light on seemingly domestic organizational histories. For example, historians have understood the BSA's outreach programs to nonwhite youth, initiated in the 1920s, as a response to American activists' calls for racial inclusion. Employing a global view, however, Honeck argues that efforts to recruit non-white youngsters were actually a means of maintaining existing power hierarchies: BSA leaders cultivated the loyalty of colonial youth while inducting them into a decidedly unequal brotherhood. Calls for independence in the Philippines and Puerto Rico would be countered, not amplified, by the cadres of indigenous youngsters reciting the Boy Scout oath.

Things, of course, did not always go as planned. From boys who returned from world jamborees bearing Nazi armbands to nonwhite youth who used their Boy Scout training to subvert the racial hierarchies the organization was intent on maintaining, Our Frontier Is the World is...