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4 Playing Indian The Rise and Fall of the Woodcraft Youth Movements Getting the Treatment If the young hooligans who vandalized the property of Ernest Thompson Seton in the spring of 1901 had only known that their behavior would directly inspire the largest youth movement in American history, they probably would have lobbied for some honorary mention, but to this day they remain largely unknown. Although the fact is not included in any of the official histories, the original impetus of Seton’s Woodcraft Indians, who would later become the Boy Scouts of America, was a desire to protect what was his by keeping the neighborhood bullies busy and thus out of trouble. As Seton tells the story in his 1928 piece,“The Rise of the Woodcraft Indians,” his dream of partitioning off a small tract of woodland outside of New York City, to use for experiments in conservation and restocking , was consistently frustrated by a gang of neighborhood boys who saw fit to destroy his fence, shoot his animals, and paint “wicked pictures” on his gate—pictures, mind you, “not even a Sunday paper would have dared to print.” Frustrated, Seton sought advice from a learned friend who informed him there was simply no other option but to arrest the whole ugly lot and pray that the worst of them would get sent to jail. But “knowing something of boys,” indeed, being “much of a boy myself,” Seton resisted the temptation for lockdown and instead proceeded to buck conventional wisdom by inviting the young lads to spend a weekend camping, “Indian-style,” on the very patch of land they had so sorely abused. After two days of hollering, skinny-dipping, gorging, and participating in the establishment of a basic constitution and governing structure, come Monday morning, “instead of forty-two little reprobates, doing all the mis- 94 Chapter 4 chief they could to me and mine, I had forty-two staunch friends” who all turned out to be “high-class citizens” in the end.1 News of Seton’s miracle treatment for the characteristically troubled years of adolescence spread quickly. In 1902 a series of seven articles in the Ladies’ Home Journal, entitled “Ernest Thompson Seton’s Boys,” described his success.2 Within a year there were fifty other “tribes,” consisting of fifty members each, scattered throughout the country.3 In 1906 Seton’s official manual of the Woodcraft Indians, The Birch-bark Roll, was co-opted by British war hero Lord Robert Baden-Powell and turned into Scouting for Boys, the book that launched the Boy Scout youth movement. Seton’s ability to subdue the seemingly unruly and irresponsible adolescent appealed to a society that was becoming increasingly concerned about this new and frightening segment of the population. His talent for instilling a sense of adventure into the youth organization—or “picturesqueness,” as he was fond of saying—appealed to a nation of “modern” youth who, in Seton’s opinion, were being ruined by city life, and just plain needed to get outside. Seton’s solution offered a way of keeping this segment of the population busy and out of trouble and addressed as well broader anxieties over urbanization and industrialization. On the one hand, the Woodcraft Indian , as constructed by Seton, allowed a return to nature that cultivated those qualities of self-reliance and virility that many believed were concomitant with American greatness, qualities that had been lost as America moved into the modern age. In addition, the Woodcraft Indian instilled a devotion to the “tribe” that would counteract the selfishness that characterized capitalist society. The texts surrounding the Woodcraft Indians were so popular and read by so many boys and their parents because they both articulated prevailing anxieties and appeared to provide a solution to them. Such an attempt to monopolize and systematize the social activities of teens was the common structural feature of youth organizations at the turn of the century. Seton’s youth movement, and its sister organization the Camp Fire Girls, can be seen as a solution to a rise in juvenile delinquency and, more broadly, as an answer to the widespread anxiety over what this new and characteristically unruly segment of the population would do if left to its own devices. Years later, as the Woodcraft Indian is eclipsed by the much more popular figure of the Boy Scout, and Seton’s early writings are reconfigured by Baden-Powell and others, this unique cultural moment comes to an end; American society becomes...

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