Nothing seems so antimodern as the military: it is tribal, martial, an ancient institution steeped in ritual and atavistic virtues. But nothing seems quite so modern as the military either: it is bureaucratic, standardized, efficient, technologically adept, a modern society in full, replete with social and political hierarchy. In the early twentieth century the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) represented such oppositions as the bureaucrat vs. the outdoorsman. In a cartoon entitled “Typewriter vs. Axe” from a 1926 issue of the Scout Executive, the two sides—the antimodern virtues represented by the axe, modern rationality by the typewriter—shake hands in agreement. “I like your type” says the axe; “you have a good head too” replies the typewriter. It turns out that the typewriter and axe are not dichotomous but intertwined sets of values in need of each other (2).

Like the military, the BSA promoted structured engagement with the natural world and existing Victorian character virtues such as modesty and self-control. It argued that these values could help shape young men into scientifically rational and bureaucratically adept citizens who could thrive in—and thus retain control over—modern society. This is the burden of Benjamin René Jordan's Modern Manhood and the Boy Scouts of America. Urban, corporate-industrial society did not imperil manhood in the ways that scholars have previously argued, but rather institutions such as the BSA “effectively adapted Victorian manhood to modernization; the mature organization's masculine and civic norms expressed and ensured its many adherents’ superiority and confidence rather than their anxiety” (11). The BSA created a powerful and mainstream version of masculinity that spread across a wide range of men and boys.

A good example of Jordan's thesis comes in his excellent chapter on nature and conservation in the BSA. The BSA rejected the “soft” and “sentimental” sides of nature study that advocated using contact with nature as a way to experience spiritual awe and reverence for the nonhuman world. BSA nature study, according to the handbook for American Scoutmasters, was about the “forces and laws of operation which underlie the manifestations of nature,” lessons that required rejecting any “mystery and romance” associated with the natural world (125). Thus the BSA, argues Jordan, taught “modern manhood and civic leadership through—but not for—nature” (123). BSA nature study was not just generalized advice but came with specific instructions. Hiking, for example, could be useful or ineffective. Hikers could adopt the Scout's Pace that efficiently alternated fifty walking steps with fifty jogging steps while focusing on such skills as route-finding. Or scouts could embark upon city hikes that explicitly connected them to corporate, industrial America. In contrast to such purposeful walking, scouts might encounter another kind of hiker: the carefree tramp as represented in a cartoon from the August 1922 issue of Boy's Life. (Jordan does a nice job of incorporating images into his textual analysis.) The young, black, barefoot tramp is a clownish Sambo, sauntering along without purpose, selfishly borrowing things instead of using self-control and thrift to pay for his own way. This is no morally decent future leader, but a victim of laziness and selfishness (132).

The cartoon tramp highlights the complicated relationship of the BSA and race. The BSA claimed to be open to all boys, but in practice local BSA chapters restricted membership and generally assumed that African Americans were of inferior moral character. That assumption was key to the creation of segregated scout troops. A Memphis investment banker and scout enthusiast named Bolton Smith argued that the segregated Scouting plan employed in Louisville, Kentucky “is a good illustration of what can be done … to develop the right sort of colored boy and man” (201). Such development would help blacks in more ways than one because it would help whites begin to respect their black counterparts. “The negro scout will rarely, if ever, be guilty of any of those acts which bring about racial conflict” claimed Smith. Viewed in such light, the BSA could be an effective way to connect “the negro” with “white ideals of civilized conduct” (202). Despite such bias and segregation, many blacks did join the scouts. Because many civic and government officials admired, and sometimes even revered the BSA, some blacks found that “even Scouting with restrictions represented a halfway step to demonstrating [the] modern manhood and civic leadership that many African American boys and men eagerly grasped” (208). The story of blacks in the BSA, then, supports Jordan's thesis because “it is more apt to describe early Scouting as a new means of allocating power and privilege between and among generations and socioeconomic groups of males” than as a children's leisure organization (213).

African Americans were not the only subaltern group subject to this logic. The BSA felt that light-skinned immigrant boys—what the BSA described as “white nationality groups”—could be relatively easily assimilated into white manhood and American citizenship. Jordan describes BSA thinking as believing that working-class immigrant children could adopt “a universal model of modern manhood and participating citizenship.” Such citizenship was a way to ease the “growing tensions in America's urbanizing, industrializing society” (155). Those tensions were manifested in social problems such as juvenile delinquency. Scouting, many socially powerful leaders felt, could cure juvenile delinquency and social noncooperation among immigrant and working-class youth. For example, Jane Addams started a Hull House Scout troop, believing that it might be particularly helpful for the “rough sort of boy.” She wrote that she was glad that working class boys could experience the “pleasure and also the training which comes from military drill, without any touch of military spirit” (156).

Too often historians write about the BSA as solely a militaristic organization, especially when compared to its predecessors such as the Woodcraft Indians or the Sons of Daniel Boone. Jordan's story of a transforming and adopting masculinity is more 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.