Modern Manhood and the Boy Scouts of America

Benjamin René Jordan’s book opens with a striking cartoon from a 1926 Boy Scouts of America (BSA) publication. An ax and a typewriter, each grinning widely, are shaking hands. “I like your type,” the ax assures the typewriter. “You have a good head, keen too,” the typewriter tells the ax. The amicable meeting between typewriter and ax lies at the center of Modern Manhood and the Boy Scouts of America, which uses the BSA as a lens for scrutinizing mainstream American masculinity during the 1910s and 1920s. In promoting the union of ax and typewriter—the merging of bureaucratic corporatism with a structured engagement with the outdoors—the BSA articulated and spread a new masculine norm. The Scouts, Jordan argues, successfully updated Victorian manhood, equipping young men with the skills and character virtues necessary for an urban, corporate-industrial society. During an era of widespread nativism, the BSA provided a venue through which white working-class and non-Protestant immigrants could achieve the dominant masculine ideal. Ultimately, though, the ax and the typewriter would not be on equal footing. While the BSA incorporated select elements of an older male ideal, the ax, and the rural boys who wielded it, would be pushed to the margins of an organization increasingly infatuated with hierarchy, scientific efficiency, and corporate loyalty.

Ancient history · Boy Scouts · Ideal (ethics) · Loyalty · Mainstream · Masculinity · Political science · Procession · Sociology · White (mutation) · American History and Culture · Gender Studies · History · Law · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

• Girlhood

  Lenie Brouwer, Miriam Brunell et al.•Girlhood•2020

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