Book Review: On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth

Abstract

The cover photo of Jay Mechling's On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth shows over a hundred Boy Scouts and a few scout leaders. The figures fill the entire frame, receding to dots of color on the horizon and giving a sense of a much, much, larger gathering beyond what the photographer shows us. This image of an enormous crowd of boys and men (at the 1985 National Scout Jamboree attended by over 30,000) who are very similar in appearance (age, clothing, mostly white), could be read as evidence of the mass conformity and enforced militarism that critics of the Boy Scouts often single out. That same emphasis on organizational hierarchy and formality of uniform evident in the picture might also be read as an example of the kind of order and discipline that, advocates and defenders of the Boy Scouts argue (especially its corporate executives), builds 'character' in young men.Jay Mechling, however, offers the readers of On My Honor a third way to interpret this picture. The boys and men most visible in the foreground are, their uniform patches tell us, all members of the same scout troop. This troop, like all troops, Mechling tells us, is organized into smaller units, patrols of six to eight boys -also visible in the boys' patches in the photo. While they sit and wait the boys engage in myriad activities. One eats. Some rest from the heat. Others play cards or listen to headphone music. One or two look directly back at the camera/photographer. Two boys read what looks to be scouting literature (one boy's face expresses intense concentration; perhaps he is committing to memory, if not internalizing, tenets of scouting). Here is where the perceived uniformity of scouting, bad or good, ends. In all this variation, beneath the first-impression-orthodoxy our preconceptions lead us to see, the cover photo provides a glimpse of the 'everyday life' in 'natural settings' that Mechling convincingly proves is a better picture of who Boy Scouts 'really are and how they fashion their lives' (xvii). Mechling's inter-disciplinary study of boys at Boy Scout summer camp emphasizes the scout troop and its patrols as the basic, and most important, units of scouting.On My Honor is a masterful combination of ethnographic observation, folklore analysis of children's culture, history of childhood and scouting, and social science