Our Frontier Is the World: The Boy Scouts in the Age of American Ascendancy

Abstract

Mischa Honeck's Our Frontier Is the World reconstructs the border-crossing history of the Boy Scouts of America (Bsa). This original and incisive portrait of scouting's shifting global frontiers demonstrates the centrality of this iconic youth organization to the construction and maintenance of U.S. imperial power over the twentieth century. Honeck foregrounds scouting's significance as an evolving nexus of intergenerational, transnational, and international encounter. Originally associated with Anglo-Saxon reformers worried about rejuvenating the white race, the turn-of-the-century scouting movement was institutionalized in the United States during a period of heightened public discussion about the ideological contradictions and practical challenges posed by imperial expansion and conquest. From its beginnings, the Bsa sought to strengthen both the national body politic and American global influence in the world. It did this by brokering collaborative relationships between men and boys that bolstered structures of white masculine authority while also contributing to the “boyification” of powerful men who were the main agents and beneficiaries of empire. This process took place not only within the settler colonial United States but also across various foreign sites as the Bsa over ensuing decades actively pushed to globalize American scouting and its leaders' visions of social and political order.