The Boy Scout and Girl Guide movements arose in the first decades of the twentieth century, an era of social and political unrest, and they were initially the center of intense controversy in Britain. 1 By the 1920s, however, they had become an established part of what came to be seen as the British "way of life." The movements also began a sustained international expansion, winning acclaim from educators, government officials, social organizations, and even the League of Nations. Yet this extension of the Scout and Guide program into other countries produced problems both abroad and at home, as contradictions appeared in the ideologies and activities of the two groups. Practically speaking, they both faced difficulties in accommodating different races, religions, languages, and nations in the new global brother/sisterhood. Although the situation in South Africa was and is in many ways exceptional, 2 it is the best case to use in examining how the Guides and Scouts approached a new, post-World War I internationalism. South African society was extremely stratified, with deep racial, ethnic, class and religious divisions. Yet Scouts and Guides were drawn to South Africa, both because they saw it as a place where their organizations could heal the cleavages in the white community, and because of its place in the origins and mythology of movements. It was in South Africa that Scouting and Guiding had to confront the contradictions inherent in their policy of separating sexes, races and religions to fit political necessity. South African society also exposed the organizations' inability to move beyond racial prejudice and gendered visions of race. Ultimately, South Africa encapsulates many of the issues that the two movements and Britain itself were struggling to articulate in the interwar period. At the center of the Guide and Scout vision was a fundamental contradiction: the colonies represented both the idealized home of simple outdoor living to 605
This article analyzes the ordeal that became the 'Louvain Library Controversy' in order to demonstrate competing visions of postwar memory and reconstruction that emerged in the 1920s. As a country trying to mediate between the claims of its larger neighbors (Germany, France, and Britain), Belgium provides an excellent window into the climate of postwar Europe and US intervention. I argue that the controversies that surrounded the Louvain Library reconstruction reflect three main themes that plagued European-US relations in the 1920s: first, US pretensions as Europe's cultural protector; second, US economic power over debt and reparation questions; and last, the question of reconciliation in the wake of war. For Belgium and other European nations, the experience of being the object of aid for the United States of America led to a reassertion of sovereignty and autonomy in the face of external interference, exposing the gaps between Americans' assumptions about their roles and responsibilities in Europe and Europeans' sense of their own role in rebuilding their world. For Americans, the controversy demonstrated the perils of US 'generosity' and its price in postwar Europe.
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