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Chapter One examines the ideological origins of New Deal conservation and the CCC. It begins by showing how the idea for the Corps originated both from Roosevelt's early experiences with the Progressive conservation movement, and, more surprisingly, from his lifelong involvement with the Boy Scouts. Similar to many progressive reform efforts such as the city beautiful, playground, and urban parks movements, the Boy Scouts promoted the notion that social behavior could be shaped by manipulating one's physical surroundings or environment. Chapter One illustrates how this philosophy not only influenced Roosevelt's decision to create the Corps, which like the Boy Scouts took young men from diseased urban settings and placed them in healthful environments in nature, but also greatly influenced early New Deal politics. The creation of work relief programs that put urban men to work in rural areas, Roosevelt knew from experiences as governor of New York, significantly raised his political capital. Creating the Corps, this chapter concludes, not only introduced the Boy Scout philosophy to the conservation movement but also helped the new president jump-start the New Deal.

This chapter examines the Supreme Court's decision in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale. Since age eight, James Dale had been a Scout in his home town of Monmouth, New Jersey. By 1988, when he finished as a youth Scout on his eighteenth birthday, he had earned twenty-five merit badges and had become an Eagle Scout, one of the highest honors in Scouting. At age 19, Dale “came out” while attending Rutgers, and became actively involved in the university's lesbian and gay organization. He later received a letter from the Boy Scouts of America saying that he no longer met its standards for leadership, since avowed homosexuals were not permitted in the organization. Dale sought to appeal the decision, but to no avail. He was dismissed from his position as assistant scoutmaster, and his adult membership in the Scouts was revoked. Dale sued, claiming that the Scouts' decision was illegal under the terms of the New Jersey public accommodations law. Dale's lawsuit ultimately prevailed in the New Jersey Supreme Court. The Boy Scouts then appealed the case to the United States Supreme Court. In order to get to the Supreme Court the Scouts had to argue that the New Jersey law could not constitutionally be applied to the Boy Scouts based on its First Amendment right of free speech.

This chapter discusses the shift in image of the Cold War child into an activist for the promotion of government-led peace around the world and a symbol of international legitimacy for the Soviet Union and United States. This new child would be able to face the multifarious threats that menaced the young, the family, and the nation at home and abroad. He or she would be willing and able to slough off the comforts of domestic insularism in exchange for the challenges and rewards posed by the outside world. Youth organizations assumed responsibility for promoting this new image of the young. The two biggest youth organizations in the Soviet Union and the United States, the Pioneers and the Boy Scouts of America, helped to create this new image and the consensus around it. They promoted an image of peaceful mobilization that would unite a population and hopefully quell the rising uncertainty around them.

The question of national physique was catapulted to the forefront of public debate amidst revelations of high rejection rates among military recruits during the Boer War, 1899‐1902. Military recruitment statistics were represented as a barometer of racial fitness and attention focused on the male body which became a symbol of national strength. This chapter traces the debate about physical deterioration. The Inter‐departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration paved the way for the Edwardian welfare reforms. The deterioration debate further precipitated the launch of new pressure groups and voluntary associations including the Eugenics Education Society, the Empire Day Movement, the Boy Scouts, and the Health and Strength League. In response to the deterioration debate, physical culture and life reform promoters, public health officials, and leaders of voluntary organizations redefined the cultivation of a fit male body as a duty of citizenship and a patriotic response to the needs of the British Empire.

Paul Hanly Furfey chose to pursue Social Work in his doctoral studies as a way to best witness to the Christian tradition. As a graduate student, Furfey served in a parish near the university and worked for John O’Grady at Catholic Charities. At Catholic Charities, Furfey became involved in a broader debate over the extent to which Catholic youth should mix with Protestant or secular communities for recreation. Furfey disagreed with Boy Scout leaders who urged Catholics to mix indiscriminately with other children at their camps. Furfey agreed that should Catholics attend BSA camps but only under Catholic auspices. Furfey also disagreed with his Catholic counterpart, Kilian Hennrich of the Catholic Boys Brigade. Hennrich insisted that Catholic boy scouts remain completely separate from non-Catholic institutions where the children might be pulled away from the Catholic Church by Protestant proselytizers or secular indifference. Furfey argued that a compromise was possible in maintaining a Catholic ethos among Catholic boys within a broader secular camping experience. Furfey’s dissertation, later published as a book, The Gang Age, engaged the latest research in the burgeoning field of boyology. His work at the parish and Catholic Charities provided him direct contact with the field.

This chapter examines the reasoning in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale. It argues that the Supreme Court's opinion in the case offers a useful cautionary lesson in First Amendment jurisprudence: determinations of what is protected speech cannot defer either to individual speakers or to the culture as a whole, because such deference produces bizarre results.

James Jackson and Esther Cooper were raised in similar middle-class, talented-tenth black households with politically engaged parents. Jack grew aware of race, segregation, and economic inequality by engaging with the tobacco workers in his community, whom he later organized into a union, and by protesting segregation in the Boy Scouts of America. Esther was active in college organizations dedicated to supporting the opposition in the Spanish American War and then worked in a segregated Methodist settlement house in Nashville, Tennessee, where she was exposed to extreme poverty. They each attended college during the Great Depression and joined the Communist Party before meeting. They met in 1939 and worked with the Southern Negro Youth Congress, which Jack founded, before marrying in 1941.

This chapter examines three private initiatives of national recovery during the main period of English revivalism. It states that the Boy Scouts of Robert Baden-Powell and the English folk-dance movements that were founded by Mary Neal and Cecil Sharp used both modern and traditional resources for similar revivals. The chapter also suggests the disorderly influence of conflicts about gender, race and class in the development of a new vision of Englishness.

This chapter explores the pedagogy of “habit” through a reading of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). By tracing the novel's formal inversion of the realist modes of readerly identification that defined the “bad boy” literary genre of the 1870s and 1880s, it demonstrates how Twain mimics and models in the allegorical structure of the novel itself the institutional practices of “boyology” that were taking shape at the moment of A Connecticut Yankee's publication. In aligning these practices with the Yankee's own brand of cultural imperialism, the novel implicates such character-building agencies as the Boy Scouts of America—and the forms of homosocial chumminess, “Indian” identification, and military training around which they were organized—in the ideology of “Americanization” that increasingly dominated debates over racial segregation, Native American sovereignty, immigration policy, and overseas expansion in the 1890s. The chapter traces the cultural work of such character-building agencies to the broader discourse of habit as it was developed in the pragmatist psychology of William James, as well as in one of the most popular nonfiction genres of the period, the success manual. It argues that the ideological function of the complex pedagogy of will training and self-habituation articulated in such works is to obscure the reification of class difference through a democratization of middle-class character.

This chapter argues that the Boy Scouts of America's (BSA) policy is, in pertinent ways, the moral equivalent of racial discrimination. It begins by identifying what is essentially morally malignant about racism: the stigmatizing of people as intrinsically inferior. Next, it demonstrates that some, but not all, objections to homosexuality do the same thing and are similarly malignant. Finally, it shows that the BSA's policy falls within this malign category of antigay positions.

This chapter explores how education was used to train both the mind and body to promote active participation in society, a belief common to Indian and Western understandings of the connection between a citizen’s physical health and service to society The leaders of the subcontinent’s social service organizations were keen that healthy Indians became active, patriotic, and efficient citizens. The chapter focuses on the educational interventions of the Arya Samaj, the Kanya Mahavidyalaya, the Theosophical Society, The Servants of India Society, The Kangri Gurukul, among others. Students were also encouraged to reject colonial employment in favour of social service. The observation of brahmacharya was encouraged amongst male students. The chapter also describes the physical capabilities of Professor Ramamurti Naidu, the athletics instructor of Central Hindu College. The influence of Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys (1908) is discussed as is also the threat posed by the growing number of Boy Scout movements to British power.

Freedom of association is not explicitly mentioned in the First Amendment. This freedom makes its first Supreme Court appearance in the 1927 case Whitney v. California. Over time, culminating in the case Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, the freedom has come to permit organizations both privacy of their membership rosters and control over who can be admitted as members. Although at one time, freedom of association was arguably limited to only intimate associations and expressive associations, after Dale it appears invocable by any association that happens to engage in expression, regardless of whether it was organized as an explicitly expressive association or not. For reasons discussed previously, the postmodern corporation has expressive potential, whereas the modern corporation does not. Consequently, freedom of association ought to be a right recognized by postmodern corporations but not by modern corporations.

This chapter shows that the war consolidated the cave man’s status as a global cultural character. Cave men have since been frequently depicted on stage, in films, in advertisements, literature, and more recently on television. Hollywood finally embraced the British conception of comic cave men in the 1920s. By then the character was so completely divorced from earlier evolutionary associations, that religious fundamentalists ignored it. The character has subsequently followed an almost unrelenting downward trajectory into b-movies, cheap comedies and cartoons, and productions that paraded hyper-sexualised women. The slide decelerated in 1960 when The Flintstones, the most influential depiction of cave men, debuted on American television. The series satirised middle-class, suburban America, in much the same spirit as E.T. Reed had once viewed Britain. The chapter concludes by briefly examining more recent depictions of cave men and prehistory in film and television to show that comedy predominates alongside healthy doses of action and attempts at scientific accuracy. Various examples are used to show that women continue to be portrayed in dismissive and overtly sexualised ways and that prehistory still denigrates and dismisses racial minorities. At the same time, the seemingly endless popularity and profitability of cave men films and television series mean that they will continue to be made for years.

The Great War, from 1914 to 1918, hastened many changes in the American news trade that transformed both the meaning and experience of child street peddling. The war redefined the role of children in civic affairs and enhanced newsboys’ reputation for patriotism. From New York to Seattle, peddling papers came to be regarded less as a demoralizing form of labor and more as a branch of national service. Child labor reformers, many of whom opposed the war, lost much of their clout, while publishers gained stature and profit mobilizing newsboys to sell war bonds and form Scout troops. Thousands of former newsboys became part of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) and dozens won distinction for heroism. Those too young to bear arms sometimes showed their mettle by harassing “slackers” or German Americans. Yet boys who cried false news or mounted strikes faced their own charges of disloyalty. Whether as soldiers, sailors, strikers, or street sellers, America’s newsboys now entered the world’s stage.

This chapter examines the Court's latest foray into the freedom of association question in Rumsfeld v. FAIR. It argues that the Court in that case restrained the worst excesses of Dale while leaving the law fundamentally unsettled.

Joe B.’s brother Billy, now a teenager, has friends his own age and no longer wants to spend time with his little brother. Hurt at first, Joe B. goes on to create a life of his own, excelling in sports and in academics. His new prescription eyeglasses improve his life, his studies, and his view of world―for the first time he can see things he didn’t know existed. He works on his uncle’s farm and also lifts weights and runs to get physically stronger. He wants to play on the football team. He buys his first car, an old Model T, and paints it his high school colors.