Troops and Tribes: Masculinity, Playing Indian, and the Social Politics of Ernest Thompson Seton's Expulsion from the Boy Scouts of America

Abstract

In recent years the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) have reversed several long-standing and controversial rules aimed at barring the participation of certain groups from its programs based on their gender, gender identity, and/or sexuality. In 1988, the BSA allowed adult women to serve in leadership roles. In 2013, they lifted the ban on gay boys, and followed by allowing gay adults to serve in leadership roles in 2015. In 2017 the BSA opened their membership to transgender boys.1 Finally, in 2019, the BSA rebranded itself “Scouts BSA,” and for the first time allowed girls to participate in their mainline youth program. These changes all came after decades of legal and social pressure. Despite the changes, public perceptions remain that the organization is not a welcome place for LGBTQ people, girls, or women.2Issues of masculinity and sexuality in the Boy Scouts have been intertwined with the predominantly white, male leadership's appropriations of American Indian identities since the organization's beginnings in 1910. Both youth and adult Boy Scouts regularly participate in what Philip Deloria calls “Playing Indian” by participating in an honor society called the Order of the Arrow, dressing in Native American-inspired regalia on Indian dance teams, and clothing themselves in symbols drawn from Indigenous religion and history.34 The Boy Scouts regularly cite positive yet damaging stereotyped traits about Native Americans such as strength, endurance, and connection with nature as important aspects of their youth training program while ignoring the diversity of cultures and gender identities in contemporary and historical Indigenous groups.5 The Boy Scouts’ reliance on tropes of indigeneity and the complex ways in which they are used as referents for manhood and masculinity, were inspired by several earlier youth training groups for boys, including the Woodcraft Indians, which were founded in Connecticut by the Greenwich naturalist, artist, and author, Ernest Thompson Seton.Seton was a great believer in a self-researched understanding of Native American philosophy and was a self-proclaimed pacifist. When the United States entered World War I in 1914, a wave of nationalistic fervor forced the Boy Scouts to evolve into something unlike its original iteration. Seton's desire to see the Boy Scouts engender boys with a rugged sense of pacifist individualism modeled on his interpretation of Indigenous masculine values was overpowered by a more nationalist approach championed by his political opponents. The organization of today can find the roots of its struggles with gender and sexuality in this early period.Early twentieth-century Americans imagined links between the ideas of patriotism, masculinity, nature, and Indigenous Americans. Theodore Roosevelt, for example, believed that ruggedness gained from long periods spent in nature was the path to essential manliness.6 Unlike Seton, he envisioned Native Americans as being of nature, and by extension opposed to civilization. Many historians are guilty of accepting Roosevelt's vision of manliness as both deeply rooted and singular in its contemporary acceptance. In reality, different strains of social politics existed on the subject. Ernest Thompson Seton envisioned a different sort of outdoor manliness, one that viewed Indigenous people not as savage enemies but as the proper role models of masculinity. He based this model on deeply held stereotypes about Indigenous gender that linked Native American men with idealized traits such as strength, stoicism, resilience, and a natural equilibrium. These were deeply damaging appropriated identity traits, long connected by the turn of the twentieth century with the practice of heritage-theft conducted by white Americans seeking to boost the credentials of their connection to a landscape they had dispossessed from Indigenous peoples.7Many of the Boy Scouts’ founding members held deep fascination with nature and Native Americans. Especially Seton, who became deeply invested in the topic of Indigenous history while on a 1905 trip to Los Angeles. As recounted in his 1936 memoir, Seton and his second wife Julia received a summons from a “strange woman” shortly after arriving in the city. The couple went to meet her at her home in the outskirt neighborhood of Beverly Hills, then a sparsely populated community full of white-washed cottages.8 Three decades later, Julia Seton described the woman as “thirty or a hundred years old” with skin “like yellow parchment, and covered with thousands of faint lines not deep enough to be wrinkles” and eyes absorbed with “the faraway look of a mystic.” She introduced herself to the couple as a Mahatma from India, who had studied under some of the “great masters.”9 “Don't you know who you are?” exclaimed the woman to Seton upon their meeting, “You are a Red Indian Chief, reincarnated to give the message of the Redman to the white race, so much in need of it. Why don't you get busy? Why don't you set about your job?”Seton said that this experience left a lasting mark on her husband's life, giving him the sense that he was on a mission to save and spread the spiritual philosophy of the “Red Man.” But for all its exoticism and drama, Seton's tale may not be all that it seems. The woman with the mystical gaze, Julia Seton admitted, hailed from Iowa, not the Far East. And while Ernest Thompson Seton was not a “Red Man,” his identification with Native American culture was indicative of early twentieth-century Indigenous appropriation.10 Non-Indigenous people at the turn of the twentieth century were often willing to twist the reality of Indigenous lives to serve their own purposes and desires.Born in 1860 to Scottish parents in South Shields, England, Seton emigrated with his family to Lindsay, Ontario before his seventh birthday. Seton excelled in the arts from an early age. He won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Art in London but due to an illness returned to Canada in 1881 after only two years of study. His early years spent in Ontario afforded Seton a respect for nature, and by his twentieth year he had grown into an avid naturalist. Wishing to pursue his passions professionally and also seeing an opportunity to remove himself from the presence of his hated father, whom he described later in life as a man “who had the words of Jesus on his lips and the acts of Nero on his heart,” Seton moved to New York City to pursue a career as a wildlife artist.11 After spending most of the 1890s studying art (and meeting his first wife, Grace, in 1894) in Paris, the recurrently ailing Seton was forced to move to New Mexico on the advice of his doctors. The arid landscapes of the Southwest quickly became the incubator for Seton's talents as a writer, artist, and naturalist. This period preceded his most productive years, in which he wrote dozens of books and thousands of popular articles that earned him international acclaim. Staying true to his interests, Seton drew his inspiration and his subjects from the animal world, nature, and Native American cosmology.12Seton did not remain in the Southwest for long. Within a few years he had made his way back to the East Coast, settling first in New York City where he and Grace married. He moved again in 1896 to a 120-acre estate in Cos Cob (a district of Greenwich), Connecticut.13 Seton's move to the East Coast introduced him to a new set of social opportunities. Although, he corresponded with Theodore Roosevelt starting in the 1880s about naturalist materials. It was in 1896 in New York that the two met for the first time.Seton and Roosevelt's competing philosophies on manliness and nature clashed from the start. Seton's pacifistic philosophy, especially towards animals, conflicted with Roosevelt's love of big-game hunting. Despite their many shared interests Roosevelt refused to extend Seton an offer of membership in his Boone and Crockett Club, which bothered Seton who sought the peerage of Gifford Pinchot and Owen Wister.14 Despite missing this opportunity, Seton stayed true to his belief that manliness should be achieved through a communion and respect for nature, rather than through its destruction.Seton continued to find success in the first decade of the twentieth century, and his passion for his particular interpretation of American Indian philosophy became a thing of local legend in Cos Cob. So much so that in 1904, the local Greenwich newspaper memorialized the birth of Seton's daughter Anne, with a full-page article entitled “The Thompson Setons’ ‘Outdoor Baby’—Rigorous Schedule for the Little New Arrival—To Be Raised by the ‘Indian Method.’”15 Seton would later extend this “method” to the development of a youth training program for boys on his estate, Wyndygoul, in rural Cos Cob.In 1901, Cos Cob experienced an uptick in youth-driven property destruction. The suspected culprits were a group of apparently bored young boys from the neighborhood. Seton saw these boys as a symptom of a broader societal ill; the combined effects of modernization and industrialization in an increasingly urban America were leading to an effeminized malaise and mischief among the country's male youth.16 He believed this stemmed from “bad influence during the period of character growth,” which ranged from between “the years fourteen to eighteen.”17Seton argued that time in nature, which represented everything opposite to the smog-choked cities of the late-industrial period in his imagining, would provide these young boys a stronger moral core. The popular image of the American Indian, whose representation as entangled and politically divided at the turn of the nineteenth century as it is today, was paramount in Seton's conceptualization of the natural world.18 Indianness, Seton believed, was the gateway to a holistic, healthful, and natural life.Seton invited the boys for an overnight stay at his estate where he taught them woodcraft and helped them make Indian regalia. The project, which would come to be called first the “Seton Indian Program,” and later the “Woodcraft Indians,” and which Seton soon widened to other local boys, quickly grew into a success. In 1902, Seton published an article on the program in Ladies Home Journal. And later published a series of books, including Two Little Savages and The Birch Bark Roll.19 Greenwich was perhaps the perfect place to incubate an organization like the Woodcraft Indians, the then-rural Greenwich struck a balance between the naturalistic environment Seton espoused as central to his philosophy with the convenience of a nearby cosmopolitan center.The Woodcraft movement gained some traction in the following years, but ultimately failed to gain the international attention Seton desired. In 1906, Lord S.S. Baden-Powell approached Seton and offered him a plan to achieve greater recognition. Baden-Powell was an even better-known celebrity than the now famous Seton, having been knighted for his military service and his use of British “Scouts” in the Boer War.20 Baden-Powell now hoped to recreate his military success with the youth of England. With a nascent idea for a youth training organization in mind, Baden-Powell read and was impressed by the writings of Seton. Seton and Baden-Powell's partnership would lead to the founding of the Boy Scouts of America in 1910.The first five years of the Scouting movement were a time of philosophical and pedagogical contradictions. Historian John Neaubauer described Scouting's early programs as an “amalgam of naturalism and militarism” with its naturalistic roots being the brainchild, primarily, of Seton. The nature-ideal became embodied in the values of the organization when Baden-Powell “adopted a number of the games and outdoor activities from Seton” which Seton had previously developed as a part of his Woodcraft movement.21American engagement in the First World War led to a shift in public sentiment and a corresponding one in the Scouting movement. Baden-Powell and other key figures in the Scout's leadership of the 1910s began to see the Boy Scouts as having both a patriotic and a militaristic mission meant to “advocate loyalty, discipline, altruism, and the submission of the individual to a community or an ideal.”22 Alternatively, Seton meant to use the Scouts as a means to instill in boys a hearty, masculine, and nature-centric upbringing that was opposed to the loss of individualism affected by modernism, incorporation, and industrialization. Both Baden-Powell and Seton represented larger ideological beliefs prevalent at the time of the Boy Scouts’ founding.Seton wrote of his societal philosophy some three decades after his split with the Scouts: “Our system has broken down. Our civilization is a failure,” and still further that when left to its own devices it created “one millionaire and a million paupers.”23 Seton's pessimistic vision of the era's social constructions of masculinity, as associated with an industrialized and incorporated self, aligned him with the Bohemian thinkers of the Fin de Siècle like Nietzsche and Toulouse-Lautrec.24This self-styled philosophy does not perfectly map with a Bohemian worldview, rather it appears that Seton adopted aspects of this understanding of proper manliness into a masculine-ideal more prevalent in America and certainly associated with American Indian stereotypes. The strong and stoic Native man and the pacifist and sentimental Parisian intellectual fit perfectly within Seton's conceptions of proper manhood. Seton's writings, especially those related to the Boy Scouts and the Woodcraft Indians, suggest that Seton viewed stereotypes about Indigenous masculinity as waypoints for white boys. Seton lived in an era when the notion of the “noble savage” was on the rise, a philosophy which viewed American Indian groups and their lifeways through an idealized lens. Adaptations of the writings of Rousseau and the continued popularity of the works of James Fenimore Cooper and others may have informed Seton's perspectives on the inherent superiority of Indigenous ways of being, particularly in the sphere of gender.Seton adopted a particular aspect of masculinity, the one associated most closely with a back-to-nature attitude that rejected the opinions of “Bourgeois male elites.” Seton rejected these elites who were “entranced by developments in science, medicine, economics, and political thought” and who thought that these developments were both progressive and positive.25 It was this sentiment, perhaps developed during Seton's years studying art in Paris, which he hoped to make available to every boy in the Woodcraft Indians and, later, the Boy Scouts.One of Seton's greatest contributions to the Scouting movement in America was his role in the writing of the first BSA handbook released in 1910. This text, which would heavily influence every handbook that followed it, represented a codified version of the Boy Scout philosophy. Perhaps more importantly, the handbook was the means by which that philosophy was communicated to the organization's youth membership. By co-authoring the handbook, Seton hoped to ensure that his philosophies would be central to the Scouting movement for generations.Seton's arguments are most apparent in the volume's introduction where he wrote that “manhood, not scholarship, is the first aim of education.”26 He hoped to train the organization's boys to avoid becoming “flat-chested cigarette smokers” and otherwise battle what he perceived to be the effeminizing effects of the modernist movement.27 It is worth noting that Seton originally developed this method for his daughter.28 His writings in the Handbook suggest that at some point Seton started to see youth training through a significantly more gendered lens.The majority of the text is purely instructive, consisting of what Seton called a “dictionary of woodcraft.”29 The brief preface and introduction however, reflect his criticism of twentieth century notions of progress, railing against “the growth of immense cities, with the consequent specialization of industry” and that development's “resultant narrowing of mental horizons.”30To combat this, Seton reasoned that the proper goal of boyhood education was not to train scholars, professionals, or efficient producers for industry, but rather to turn boys into men of good moral fiber. His definition of manliness was far from universally accepted and it was not the period's most popular. Seton admitted in the handbook that Baden-Powell's scouting movement was growing more quickly than his Woodcraft organization and although the Woodcraft and Scouting movements claimed similar goals, Seton and Baden-Powell's approaches continued to be strikingly divergent. Seton grew uncomfortable with the militaristic nature of Baden-Powell's conceptions of the Scouts. Concurrently, Baden-Powell and the other founders were reticent of the anti-modern and what they believed were anti-nationalist aspects of Seton's message. Despite his misgivings, Seton saw the growing status of the Scouts as an opportunity to raise awareness about societies “degeneracy” and the loss of an imagined earlier, simpler, and better time.31 Nineteen eleven may have represented a relative high in Seton's hopes of winning this philosophical debate.The start of the World War I caused difficulty for Seton, as the increased patriotic fervor that was incited by the sinking of the Lusitania just four months after Seton's trip on the ship proved to be the “final death knell” of his woodcraft philosophy's influence in the Scouts.33 The second year of the first great European conflict was also the year in which Seton was unceremoniously ejected from the Boy Scouts of America.Seton's expulsion from the Boy Scouts can be linked most directly to two of the other founders of the organization. The first was the aforementioned Baden-Powell, who gave the Scouts its militaristic feel and a great deal of its early popularity by lending his celebrity to the project. The other was James E. West, whom Seton described as “a lawyer, who is a man of great executive ability but without knowledge of the activities of boys; who has no point of contact with boys, and who, I might almost say, has never seen the blue sky in his life.”34 The start of World War I put in motion a series of events that eventually gave West what he had desired for years, an excuse to rid himself, and the Scouts, of Seton.America's new role as a global power and ally in a global war led to an increased call for patriotic organizations to train future soldiers, and West believed the Boy Scouts were perfectly suited for the role. West needed an ideological shift to ensure the Scouts could play the part. He needed to expunge Seton's woodcraft ideas, which were bolstered by his writings on tropes of Indigenous masculinity, in favor of a newfound focus on the patriotism and militarism of Baden-Powell's model. It came to West's attention that Seton, being born in England and having lived most of his young life in the British colony of Canada, had never become a naturalized American citizen. Over the course of two years, West used this fact as a wedge to permanently dislodge Seton from the Scouts.Julia Seton's 1967 biography of her husband offered an insider's perspective on Seton's life.35 The biography was unabashedly defensive of Seton. Julia claimed from the outset that her husband was primarily responsible for the founding of the Scouting movement in America. For this reason, she believed that her husband should have been given greater leniency in regards to the issue of his citizenship.The consensus views of Seton's other biographers was that West's charges regarding Seton's citizenship and patriotism were actually a cover for deep personal conflicts between the two men.36 In 1911, West oversaw revisions of the Boy Scout Handbook without consulting Seton. Seton never forgave West for what he believed was a significant overreach. Within a year of the organization's founding, West had successfully stripped Seton of both his material and ideological influence and sealed his fate as historically invisible, obfuscated by Baden-Powell's primacy. Seton biographer Allen H. Anderson noted that “West was clearly seeking to steer the organization away from the Woodcraft Indian theme's continued dominance” in order to ensure the Boy Scout's position as the patriotic military training ground for America's future soldiers.37 West feared Seton's beliefs, including the fact that he “was disturbed at the militant fervor the Lusitania disaster generated in America.”38 Seton was charged with being a pacifist, a socialist, and an anarchist. Anderson believed that “Seton's ouster . . . had more to do with his chronic objection to Scouting's military aspects then with his citizenship,” and that these objections were not shared by the other founders.39West further believed that a new focus on Baden-Powell's vision was the best possible avenue for the future success of the program and when the opportunity arose, he “looked about for some way to discredit Seton so that he could be justifiably dumped without damaging the BSA's image.”40 Seton had repeatedly and publicly stated that he was morally opposed to “all aggressive warfare.”41 Roosevelt denounced Seton both publicly and in private letters to James West. Roosevelt wrote in November of 1915 that “certain leaders . . . have used the Boy Scouts organization as a medium for the dissemination of pacifist literature and . . . as a propaganda for interfering with the training of our boys to a standard of military efficiency.”42 There is little doubt that the “certain leaders” to whom Roosevelt referred included Seton.As America turned its eyes towards the war in Europe it found itself in need of an earlier training ground for its soldiers. West and Baden-Powell opportunistically volunteered the Boy Scouts for the role. Seton's moral opposition to war made him an aberration. As 1915 concluded, Seton returned to Connecticut and refocused on his Woodcraft Indians where he spent much of both his remaining years and efforts. To Seton's disappointment, the group never gained the popularity enjoyed by the Boy Scouts.At the turn of the twentieth century. masculinity existed as a complex idea with any number of individuals and groups claiming to be the progenitors of its true form. Seton's understanding of masculinity, which centered on a strong and noble Indigenous stereotype as its imagined protagonist, ran counter to a less pacifistic idea championed by both Baden-Powell and Teddy Roosevelt. The Boy Scouts would go on to adopt this latter interpretation of proper manliness as a centerpiece of their developing philosophy. The Boy Scout leadership of 1915 renegotiated their original ideals to fit a changing world. This new reality saw Baden-Powell's military inspired troops trump the more pacifistic tribes of Seton's desires. By doing so the Boy Scouts embarked on a philosophical path that led them to issues that have repeatedly made them the center of media attention.Today's Boy Scouts still use Indigenous stereotype and appropriations as a symbol of many activities. The Order of the Arrow, dance teams, and the names of camps and councils are drawn from a revisionist version of native history and culture in order to capture an experience within nature. Although these traditions are meant to honor Native Americans they have often attracted the indignation of members of Indigenous communities. By understanding the history of native representations in the Scouts, the organization could adopt a more nuanced approach: One that includes a realistic understanding of contemporary Native America rather than relying on a highly romanticized conception of an imagined past. This will be a challenging project. As Deloria points out, “Seton's departure from Scouting in 1915 signaled . . . a new era in boy scouting in which leaders attempted to redefine Indianness as something less than 100 percent Americanness.”43It has now been nearly a century since the Scouts abandoned even a tokenized approach to gender-inclusivity, and that shift changed the history of the institution and on white Americans’ perceptions of Native Americans. Today, the Boy Scouts are embroiled in debate over what accounts for proper and moral masculinity. By exploring the philosophies of Seton, the Scouts could come to understand that their own ideological underpinnings accepted a plurality of beliefs and a broader interpretation of what it meant to be a proper man.The answer to the Scout's problems does not lie in the beliefs of Seton, who espoused damaging and false notions of Indigenous gender norms. In addition to flattening the gender dynamics of a diverse set of Native American cultures, Seton did not recognize Indigenous gender or sexuality beyond his own binary and heteronormative expectations. Instead, the Scouts could acknowledge that their own traditions in regards to gender-inclusion have always been multifaceted, deeply flawed, and complex and act to use this fact as an impetus for needed change. It would behoove the scouts to do something Seton did not, consult and include the voices of Indigenous people, including Two-Spirit people, in their project of transformation.