Building Character in the Boy Scouts

Abstract

In On My Honor, a well-written, insightful, thoroughly researched book about the Boy Scouts, Jay Mechling contends that white Americans are experiencing a "crisis of masculinity" (p. xv). As evidence, he points to their concern about a number of recent developments, including changing models for manhood and rising male student violence at suburban schools. Such developments are especially unwelcome at the Boy Scouts' national headquarters in Irving, Texas. From this redoubt in Middle America (arguably a better stronghold for conservative ideals than the Boy Scouts' former headquarters in New Brunswick, New Jersey), Boy Scout leaders have issued forth to do battle against juvenile delinquency, atheism, and gay rights. In their fight to uphold what Mechling characterizes as outmoded nineteenth-century values, they have won some important victories, including a 2000 U.S. Supreme Court decision that enables them to exclude gays from their organization. But Mechling, an American Studies professor at the University of California, Davis, believes that Scouting's leaders ought not to promulgate a narrow, inflexible, exclusively heterosexual definition of masculinity." Instead of responding to the twenty-first-century "crisis of masculinity" in a reactionary manner, Scout leaders, in Mechling's opinion, would greatly benefit young Scouts by "fostering new definitions and practices of what it means to be a man" (pp. 234-5).