Benjamin René Jordan. Modern Manhood and the Boy Scouts of America

In recent years there has been an outpouring of scholarship about gender formation and American manhood during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much of it suggests that middle-class and elite white men experienced a “crisis of masculinity” resulting from the combined forces of urbanization, industrialization, immigration, and feminization that challenged their traditional American ideals of male identity. Older cultural markers of successful self-made manhood—independent entrepreneur, yeoman farmer, and master craftsman—were increasingly unattainable for many boys and no longer adequate for defining masculinity in a rapidly industrializing, urban, and diverse nation. Education experts of the time cautioned that school experiences and the home, especially one run by a mother, could not prepare boys for their futures as economic, civic, and social leaders. These dynamics spurred a cultural reexamination of patriotic manhood by the 1910s and prompted a closer look at how to best prepare boys for modernity. In his splendid new book Modern Manhood and the Boy Scouts of America: Citizenship, Race, and the Environment, 1910–1930, Benjamin René Jordan explores how the Boy Scouts of America stepped into this realm of gender formation and forged a new sense of American masculinity for the modern age. In contrast to other organizations of the era that rooted adolescent boys’ training in mythological “Indian lore,” militarism, athletics, religion, or primitivism, Jordan argues that the Boy Scouts successfully amalgamated traditional male personal values with contemporary corporate and civic preparation, thereby reinforcing for participants their social superiority and confidence about their futures. Through mediated nature experiences and within a closely controlled hierarchical structure, respected adult male mentors taught Boy Scouts the leadership skills, management techniques, democratic responsibility, and Victorian character habits that would enable them to tame the urban, industrial, and corporate world in which they lived.

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