Publisher Description

In this illuminating look at gender and Scouting in the United States, Benjamin Rene Jordan examines how in its founding and early rise, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) integrated traditional Victorian manhood with modern, corporate-industrial values and skills. While showing how the BSA Americanized the original British Scouting program, Jordan finds that the organization's community-based activities signaled a shift in men's social norms, away from rugged agricultural individualism or martial primitivism and toward productive employment in offices and factories, stressing scientific cooperation and a pragmatic approach to the responsibilities of citizenship.

By examining the BSA's national reach and influence, Jordan demonstrates surprising ethnic diversity and religious inclusiveness in the organization's founding decades. For example, Scouting officials' preferred urban Catholic and Jewish working-class immigrants and ""modernizable"" African Americans and Native Americans over rural whites and other traditional farmers, who were seen as too ""backward"" to lead an increasingly urban-industrial society. In looking at the revered organization's past, Jordan finds that Scouting helped to broaden mainstream American manhood by modernizing traditional Victorian values to better suit a changing nation.

Author Biography

Benjamin Rene Jordan is visiting associate professor of history at Christian Brothers University, USA.

Review

This history of scouting . . . becomes a social and cultural history of the era. Recommended.--Choice Jordan's story of a transforming and adopting masculinity is compelling. His work will reward scholars of gender, of the early twentieth century, and of the ways that popular organizations managed the transition to industrial modernity.--Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era I have been a member of the Boy Scout movement for over 50 years and I am blessed by having been a part of it. This book shows why.--Doc Kirby, WTBF-AM-FM, Troy, AL Benjamin Rene Jordan delivers well on his central thesis, complicating previous arguments that Scouting was centrally about primitive virility and martial aggression.--Journal of Southern History An extensively-researched book that should be essential reading to anyone interested in early-twentieth-century American masculinity.--Journal of Social History An accomplished account of the complicated ideas of training for civic virtue in a modern, corporate setting. It should be essential reading for those who want to understand how the world of a century ago continues to influence our own.--Memphis Commercial Appeal A welcome and well-researched history of the BSA. . . [it] shows how the BSA both reflected and gave shape to major cultural anxieties, tensions, and contradictions in the first two decades of its existence. . . . Will be the definitive history of the organization for a while.--Jay Mechling, Boyhood Studies A splendid reinterpretation of the BSA's early years and growth.--H-Net Reviews In his splendid new book . . . 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.--American Historical Review An accessibly written and delightfully illustrated history of America's largest and most enduring youth organization.--Journal of American History An important contribution to our understanding of how early twentieth-century Americans thought about nature and gender.--Environmental History Modern Manhood and the Boy Scouts of America promises to find an enduring place in the historical literature on race, gender, and citizenship.--Journal of American Ethnic History

Review Quote

This history of scouting . . . becomes a social and cultural history of the era. Recommended.-- Choice

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