Scouting

According to their web site: "The Scout Association provides adventurous activities and personal development opportunities for 400,000 young people aged 6-25. Internationally, we have over 28 million young people enjoying the benefits of Scouting across 216 countries." The Scout movement was founded by Robert Baden-Powell.

History

Michael Rosenthal obtained a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to help him research his book, The character factory: Baden-Powell and the origins of the boy scout movement (Collins, 1986). He notes that:

"Scouting in fact flourished from the very outset, but if its instant popularity surprised even Baden-Powell, there was nothing haphazard about it. By the time he ran his demonstration camp at Brownsea Island in the summer of 1907, Baden-Powell, together with C. Arthur Pearson, the newspaper publisher and savvy public-relations expert, had labored diligently to ensure the widest possible interest in Scouting."

"While Scouting's identification with the simple pleasures of outdoor living certainly constituted one of its attractive features, it should not lead us into overlooking Scouting's powerful ideology, an ideology intent on producing, out of the morally dubious, unformed lower-class youths, a certain kind of serviceable citizen for the empire. In a telling image, Baden-Powell cuts through the rhetoric about selfhood and the joys of woodcraft that have always been associated with the movement in the popular mind to define his sense of Scouting's purpose:

Our business is not merely to keep up smart "show" troops, but to pass as many boys through our character factory as we possibly can: at the same time, the longer the grind that we can give them the better men they will be in the end.

"Factories manufacture uniform products under detailed specifications for particular uses. While the Scout factory for the turning out of serviceable citizens could not vouch for the uniformity of its finished product, its aspirations for such uniformity were nonetheless real. Both specifications and uses, in this case, were supplied by a coherent ideology stressing unquestioning obedience to properly structured authority; happy acceptance of one's social and economic position in life; and an unwavering, uncritical patriotism, for which one would be willing, if necessary, to die, as the key both to social utility and personal fulfillment."

"Taking his inspiration for Scout character from the values embodied in the public schools, Baden-Powell attempted to translate them into a form appropriate for the masses of the rising generation. If the public schools were made to produce gentlemen prepared to lead, the Scouts were intended to produce young men ready to follow. One important distinction must be made here between the means each institution employed to achieve its goals."

Militarism

"From its very beginning Scouting always defined itself as staunchly antimilitaristic. The opening pages of Scouting for Boys distinguish between war scouts and peace scouts, emphatically making the point that the Scout movement is devoted entirely to training the latter, a position from which no public Scout statement or policy document ever wavered. At the same time, the major charge brought against Scouting from its very beginning was precisely that it did serve as a kind of paramilitary organization, bent on preparing Britain's youth to fight ably in defense of the empire. Accusations of Scouting's secret agenda have been as impassioned as the protestations of innocence from official Scout spokesmen, with each side earnestly repudiating the claims of the other."

Baden-Powell's Admiration of Fascism

In the 1930s, Baden-Powell had "an immense admiration for the Balilla, the fascist youth organization Mussolini had established in Italy for similar purposes. His enthusiasm for the methods, aims and spirit of the organization was matched by his delight in Mussolini himself and his vision of the role appropriately educated youth would play in the future of Italy." Baden-Powell "thought it a brilliantly successful 'experiment in applying Scout training to the national education.'"

"By 1940, however, admiration for the vision and achievements of Italian fascism was not something one was happy to acknowledge, and it is fascinating to watch Baden-Powell, a year before his death, try to repair the evidence of his earlier misplaced enthusiasm. Sending Percy Everett some notes on youth-training schemes, Baden-Powell presents his 1933 interview with Mussolini in a somewhat different light. Here he indicates he criticized the Balilla on four grounds: It was obligatory instead of voluntary; it aimed for a narrow nationalism; it was purely physical, lacking any spiritual dimension; it encouraged mass cohesion instead of stimulating individual character growth."

"...Baden-Powell's retroactive displeasure with the Balilla does not obscure the fact that in the group of young boys snapping to attention to give the Fascist salute he found an appealing model of a disciplined, efficient patriotism that any country would be proud to generate. Salesmen of socialist perfidy, Baden-Powell realized, would not fare well in their midst."

"Despite the advice of his International Bureau, particularly Hubert Martin, its director, he was eager for the Scouts to establish official relations with the Hitler Jugend as late as 1937. In response to a statement of Martin's' that a certain Herr Riecke, a German youth leader who wanted to form a genuine Scout Association to offer alternatives to the Hitler Jugend, had been sent to a concentration camp for his efforts, Baden-Powell rallied to the defense of the government by telling Martin that "The man whom you quoted as sent to prison, Rieke [sic], was sent there, not for international tendencies, but for homosexual tendencies!""

Contact

Web: http://scouts.org.uk

Resources and articles

Related Sourcewatch

• Boy Scouts of America