Mischa Honeck. Our Frontier Is the World

Mischa Honeck’s Our Frontier Is the World: The Boy Scouts in the Age of American Ascendancy demonstrates how fields of historiography can fruitfully overlap if not quite merge. Linkages between masculinity, gender more broadly, and America’s imperial ventures are frequent. Studies of American foreign relations commonly discuss all manner of nongovernmental agencies. Racism, white middle-class privilege, and resistance by powerful American institutions to even hesitant reform are hugely familiar. Honeck also situates his account within the burgeoning historiography of childhood and youth—in this case a story of male youth and adults who sought through the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) to shape and sometimes personally recapture boyhood. In a splendidly researched and forcefully argued narrative, these strands intertwine in clear view, enlivened by quotations and anecdotes. Honeck’s discussion stays almost entirely between the 1910s and the late 1950s, when the U.S. was moving toward ascendancy without quite admitting it and more or less achieving it during World War II and the early Cold War. The BSA, Honeck recounts, exercised “soft power” long before the term itself was coined, yet mainly as a form of self-deception (258). Scouting projected an image of American empire in which smiling boys, usually white, served as surrogates for an ideal America—although the main audience appears to have been domestic; evidence of significant influence upon foreign opinion is scant. Honeck highlights the centrality to Scouting of “boy-men,” notably Robert Baden-Powell, the British general who founded the Scouts, and the American Daniel Carter Beard (11). The BSA was run by its powerful Chief Scout Executive James West, and it was supported by philanthropic businessmen. But old “Uncle Dan” famously symbolized frontier backwoodsmanship, strident Americanism, and boyish enthusiasm. Although no equivalent symbolic figures emerged after Baden-Powell and Beard died in 1941, Honeck concludes that continued “boyification” enabled the BSA to “recast imperial practices” as benignly boyish “masculine adventure,” allowing “white upper- and middle-class men . . . to engage the world with clean hands” (284).

Art · Boy Scouts · Criminology · Elite · Frontier · Genealogy · Historiography · Literature · Masculinity · Media studies · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · White (mutation) · World War II · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies