Month: May 2017

Boys’ Life

~ Editors

Following up on Mischa Honeck’s interesting post, “Innocent Ignorance: Whitewashing an Empire with the Boy Scouts of America,” which includes a link to a 1914 Boy Scout Handbook, we have found a year’s worth of Boys’ Life from 1915 at the Internet Archive. This official BSA magazine contains stories, Scouting news, advice, photographs, advertisements, and more—some 580 pages of it in 1915. Below are four of the covers, one of them created by Norman Rockwell, an artist who was famous for capturing much that was ostensibly “innocent” about America.

Rodin’s Thinker, the New Deal, and Libraries as Spaces of Knowledge

~ Kerstin von der Krone

Commenting on his famous work Le Penseur, or The Thinker, a century ago, the French sculptor Auguste Rodin described his subject in terms of its utter (masculine) physicality. “What makes my Thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back, and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes.”1 Rodin’s corporeal Thinker embodies the tension between thought and action, spirit and body. It reminds us that thought and knowledge are crafted not only in one’s mind but though ones actions and experiences. Moreover, one’s physical existence impacts how one interacts with the world, how this knowledge is formed, and how it becomes manifest, that is, how one displays and conveys it.

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Innocent Ignorance: Whitewashing an Empire with the Boy Scouts of America

~ Mischa Honeck

The history of organized youth has much to offer scholars interested in processes of knowledge formation and dissemination. This is particularly true of an organization as easily recognizable and widely influential as the Boy Scouts of America (BSA). Popular culture in the United States is replete with images of cheerful Scouts roaming the woods or helping strangers in need. Among the more popular fictional representations are the Junior Woodchucks, which the Disney cartoonist Carl Barks created in 1951 to poke gentle fun at some aspects of Scouting. The Junior Woodchucks’ Guidebook, a satirical take on the BSA’s Handbook for Boys, appeared as a magical reservoir of knowledge that provided information on every conceivable subject, but was small enough to fit into a Junior Woodchuck’s backpack.

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Sources: Child Labor in the United States

~ Mark R. Stoneman

On this May Day, it is interesting to read a Progressive Era speech by Florence Kelley from December 1905 entitled “The Federal Government and the Working Children.” 1 Kelley was arguing for a federal solution to the dearth of accurate and timely data about child labor in the United States. The industrial and agricultural interests that objected to a federal role, she pointed out, were quick to band together when it came to demanding protection for their own commercial interests.

Never again can it be a matter of merely local concern what hours the children are working. They will be the Republic when we are dead, and we cannot leave it to the local legislators, here and there, to decide unobserved what sort of citizens shall be produced in this or that State, whether they shall be strong in body, mind and character, or whether they shall grow up enfeebled by overwork in early childhood.

Of course, compiling and disseminating the data would have political consequences.

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