Scoutmaster Podcast 20

And now for you, Scoutmaster. So one of my favorite authors is Mark Twain.

You know, good old Samuel Langhorne Clements. He was kind of cross-grained and contrarian.

So I thought, hey, wouldn't it be interesting to see if he had anything to say about the scout law? Now, yeah, he was never a Boy Scout.

But, you know, he had a way with words. And I thought if I could find a Mark Twain quote for every point of the scout law, it would probably be pretty funny. And it would probably be pretty poignant. Here's one that I found about being trustworthy. I am different from George Washington, he said. I have a higher, grander standard of principle.

Washington could not lie. I can lie, but I won't.

So who are you more like? Are you more like George Washington or Mark Twain? I'm a lot more like Mark Twain. Right. Yeah. Hey, this is podcast number 20.

Oh, number 20. Hi, welcome back to the Scoutmasters podcast. This is Clarke Green. In this edition, we're going to listen to an interview that I recently conducted with author David C. Scott, whose new book, The Scouting Party, is due to be released very soon.

And I think you'll find The Scouting Party a very worthy read. But let's go ahead and listen to the interview, and I'll be back with a couple of comments.

Today I am speaking with historian, author, and scouter, David C. Scott, who has a new book that will be available the end of this month, June of 2010, called The Scouting Party, subtitled Pioneering and Preservation, Progressivism, and Preparedness in the Making of the Boy Scouts of America. Good afternoon, David.

How are you? Hello, Clark. Doing great.

You were kind enough to send me a review copy, and I devoured it, and it is a really interesting and thorough take on the – it's about the first 10 years of the scouting movement, is it not? I would say that that's a fair assessment, yes. I took a lot of time to put as much as I could into those first 10 years, the first decade, since they were the – that was the most important in terms of criticality, if you will, on the formation of the Boy Scouts of America. And the party we're talking about in the title, the scouting party, is Ernest Thompson-Seaton, Baden Powell, and Dan Beard. This is a study of their relationship as three founders of scouting.

There are different influences and everything, and it wasn't always an easy relationship between these three, was it? No, there are three massive egos, and I'm sure that a couple of them wouldn't have made it out of a room, but they were all three put together in the same room and started their negotiations of how to make it work.

So it was very rare that all three of them were seen together, once in 1910 and once in 1912. But that was about the extent of it.

And, yes, photographs were taken, so we do have documentation that they were together, and they all three survived. But it was – it had to have been quite a meeting of the minds when they were together.

What I found really fascinating was – and I think anybody who's been around a little bit in scouting and has worked in a troop or a pack or a crew and worked in a district or council-level position understands that it – like you said, it takes a massive ego sometimes to make things go, and they don't always get along, but the product is really what we keep our eyes on. I was fascinated to learn that Ernest Thompson-Seaton seems to be the guy with the original idea.

Well, he was. And when he met with Robert Baden-Pohl in October of 1906, BP was finishing off the creation of what he would eventually call his Boy Scouts, but he didn't have all of the framework set down. And when he did speak with Seaton at that meeting on October 30th, the pieces were finally put into place, and BP was able to finalize his plan in several pamphlets that he published in 1907, actually published two of the three, Boy Scouting a suggestion, and they talked about Brown Sea and his plan.

And that's what finally gelled into what we know now as the Boy Scouting movement, which I consider being born, really philosophically born on October 30th, 1906, but in reality officially born of January 15th, 1908, dating to the publication of BP's seminal work, the first fortnightly issuance of Scouting for Boys. The interesting thing is that when Baden-Pohl sat down to do this, he had already seen Ernest Thompson Seaton's material about the Woodcraft Indians.

Well, he had, in fact, when Baden-Pohl was – and I say Baden-Pohl because that's the way he pronounced his name. I know that it's going against the grain, but I have a bad habit of doing that. But anyway, that being said, BP was vacationing at the house of his publisher, Pearson. I can't recall his first name. See, Arthur Pearson. At his house in Surrey, England in the summer of 1906, and this package arrived, this parcel arrived, and it was shipped by Ernest Seaton to BP because Seaton wanted BP's opinion on how to work with him in terms of broadcasting Seaton's Woodcraft Indians.

And the book was the birchbark role of the Woodcraft Indians. And that would be the book which would help provide the final piece for BP to help create his Boy Scouting scheme, as he called it.

So that package arrived. An unexpected package, mind you. But it arrived nonetheless, and that's when the gelling began. To kind of fill people in about Ernest Thompson Seaton, tell us just a little bit about his history.

Well, Ernest Seaton was a Scots-born Canadian, and he came to the United States in the late 1890s to eventually get married, essentially is what it was. But he and his wife, her maiden name being Gallatin, her name is Grace Gallatin, they got married and moved to New York in the late 1890s. And Seaton published a book of his animal stories called Wild Animals I Have Known. And in that story was – or in that book was a story that was based upon his experience with a wolf in the New Mexico lands, a desert out there named Lobo. And the popularity of Lobo's story, the King Wolf of the Karumpa, that skyrocketed his fame through this book because he had already originally published the story of Lobo in Scribner's magazine.

And so people knew about Lobo. Well, they wanted to hear more about these animal stories or these animals that he had come across.

So what he did was he created a genre of – a type of story to which gave human-like personalities and characteristics to the animals. And so these stories were incredibly popular. And in fact, he made a contract with his publisher, Scribner, that he would take no royalties on the first 2,000 copies of his book because he – they didn't think they would sell.

Well, he knew that it would. So – but for every copy above 2,000, he would take a double royalty in a sense 20 percent.

Well, after – see, that was done around March or April of 1898. And by December, they had gone through multiple printings, and he was up about – in today's dollars, about $4 million.

So he was – about 200,000 in royalties, but about $4 million today. So he was quite a wealthy guy. He could do whatever he wanted to at that point. And the scouting thing appealed to him. His approach to nature study was based a lot on Native American spirituality that he had picked up in his travels. Absolutely.

He was more concerned with the great spirit as opposed to classic traditional Christianity. And he believed that the Native American – or as he referred to them, of course, the Red Man – the Native American was a superior human being in terms of their spirituality because they lived off the land. And they did not – they did not desecrate it. They didn't destroy it.

They didn't harm it in so much as they could. So they lived and used the bounty of Mother Nature. And they respected her. That was his model for the way an American boy should grow up, being more like in the model of Tecumseh than anyone else.

I think that was kind of a minority opinion at the time. Well, it would have to have been a minority opinion. Most definitely, yes. Seton was – he was a bit of a visionary as compared to his compatriots Powell and Beard. If you look at Baden-Pol and his work on scouting for boys, he considered the backwoodsmen or the knights of the old chivalric years, knights of King Arthur, as his model for the scouts.

Well, Daniel Carter Beard, Uncle Dan, Dan Beard as we call him, he looked at it as the pioneer, the plainsman, the buckskin man as the model for the American boy. The likes of a Theodore Roosevelt and the likes of a George Washington and the likes of an Abraham Lincoln. Those were his ideas of the model that an American boy should follow.

And it's interesting to me that the movement that we have today comes from these kind of disparate influences. And you can't call one of them right and one of them wrong, but they all came together to form a scouting movement that's been pretty durable for the past hundred years.

Well, if you look at the contributions, you would have to think that Dan Beard's patriotism, that's infused in the Boy Scouts Amendment. Baden-Pol, looking back to his knights, that was heroics and heroism. That is built in the Boy Scouts. You look at Seton. You look at his vision of the Great Spirit. That was just one.

You look at Christianity and Judaism, and you see that multi-religious faiths are built in the Boy Scout model. I mean so they're all in there. There's not one particular model that completely dominates, completely dominates. BP certainly has the bulk of the system, but it doesn't completely dominate.

I mean you look at the Order of the Arrow, well, that goes back to Seton. And the Order of the Arrow is a huge program in the Boy Scouts of America.

So again, you can't say that one completely dominates, but there are certainly major influences by those three individuals. You know, a lot of histories of scouting that I have read over time take this era, and they kind of encapsulate it in a few paragraphs. While they will mention some of the conflicts and controversies amongst these three men, they kind of downplay it. What I really enjoy about your work, David, is you just go straight at it. You don't downplay it or anything to kind of celebrate the fact that they were able to work together. It was the fact of what they were able to contribute to each other, whether they liked it or not.

And that's the good thing about it. The accomplishments speak for themselves.

And how long do you think you spent working on this thing? Well, I tag it to about 10 years, writing about 8 to 10.

For my lights, it was well worth it for the product. Well, thank you very much. I know my wife would like to hear that. Because there were many a night in the early days of the early 2000s to which I was staying up until 2, 2.30 and 3 in the morning with these piles of papers at the dinner table in my computer. And I'm just typing away. I'm thinking, this is horrible.

This is terrible. There's nothing going to come out of this besides a big pile of trash. Eventually, it turned into something.

So that was a good thing. There are a couple other major players in here. And one would be a familiar name to most scouters who've studied a little bit about the history of the BSA. And that's West. James West was the first executive secretary.

And within a year or so, he, of course, made the title, created the title of chief scout executive. Jim West was an incredibly difficult taskmaster. And if he saw a messy desk, he would take that cane that he walked around with and he would sweep that desk clean and say, go pick it up, put it in the right spot. He would have a good time at my house. He would wear his cane out.

Well, I'm sure he wouldn't be very pleased if he saw the 2,400 square feet of warehouse that are loaded up with books over where I write. He comes off as being very businesslike and very motivated.

But also, he was kind of a cold fish, wasn't he? Well, he absolutely was. His biggest goal was to be successful. We understand that part. But in a personal level, he wanted to be beloved by the boys as were Dan Beard and Ernest Seton. But he did not have those skills.

He was a cold fish. He did not have much of a personality other than to make people do exactly what he wanted them to do. But he could not get along with the boys to the extent that Beard and Seton were.

They were the symbols of American scouting for those years, Seat 45 and Beard for the remaining 25 or so while he was alive. But that's why he received the moniker of Uncle Dan, the beloved uncle of Boy Scouts.

Just as with the other three, without West, we don't have scouting as we have it today. If you didn't have West, you wouldn't have had the last three points of the scout law, brave, clean, and reverent. Those were added by West. Oh, no kidding. Oh, absolutely, yes. They took the original nine points, soon to be ten points under BP, and they added brave, clean, and reverent.

And that was done at the direction of Jim West. Another big influence and big personality that weaves its way through your narrative in the book is Boyce.

Well, William D. Boyce, William Dixon Boyce, was a publisher in Chicago. He was in England in December of 1909. And it is at that point that the Boy Scout story began. And that's actually when, according to the information I was able to dig up, that was the time period to which he was escorted across the street by the unknown Boy Scout. Not if it happened, but it's plausible, and the details are listed in the book.

It's kind of a story that's been around, kind of a legend of the Boy Scouts of America, and it's been kind of controversial as to whether it actually happened or not. But your conclusion was? My conclusion is I would hate for facts to get in the way of a good story, but it is in fact plausible. Okay. It is plausible based upon the dates and the one day of fog that existed in his area in 1909 in December. It would have given him just enough time to go to London, be in London, go to the scout office, and take off for Southampton on the steamer going back to the United States the next day.

That kind of helps set that to rest, doesn't it? I mean… Yeah, I was skeptical as well. There's not enough facts to say it didn't happen, and if you can't prove it didn't happen, you can't deny that it did, to a certain extent.

So it's just one of those things that you have to look at as saying, yeah, it's possible. These three, Beard and Powell and Seton, make conflicting claims as to who started what and when.

What's the real conclusion that you find about some of these conflicting claims and things like that? Well, if you look at the timeline, Seton would have based his Woodcraft Indians organization from 1902, and it was based upon Indian lore.

Well, now you have Dan Beard dating his organization, the original sons of Daniel Boone, and the boy pioneers date back to 1905. Well, then you work on to – BP should theoretically date his organization. You can pick two dates. You can pick Brown Sea in July and August of 07 or the actual publication that I do of Scouting for Boys in January of 1908.

And then the BSA, of course, 1910, February. So, I mean, there's several things that you can look at Seton as being the originator of, but BP changed the names and called it something else.

And so he – his story actually – his organization actually lasted longer and was more powerful and more interesting to other people. Therefore, he gets all the credit. In the contest of ideas, a lot of this we would put right in Seton's lap as being the originator of a lot of these ideas. I would say that he has a legitimate claim on the origination of certain aspects of the program. Actually, for the rest of Seton's life, he always claimed that Baden-Pol plagiarized him, and that wasn't exactly the case. But that was the lifelong hatred that he had for BP, and it never really went away, even in the latest years of their lives.

But BP always blew it off. But they never made it public.

I mean, Seton never came out public and said, you know, BP, you're a plagiarist. But he did say in his personal letters saying, you know, the guy plagiarized me, and so-and-so said I was the originator of the scouting idea. I can't believe that other people don't see this. But he never came out and called it a problem. He just sort of sat and stewed in his own little world.

It seems to me the real message and the real miracle behind this history is that even though, you know, these guys had their back and forth and their problems, they were all champions of a single set of ideas that really has become what we enjoy today. Well, it was for the boys, and everything was for the boys, and that you couldn't have a strong military and you couldn't have a strong citizenry if you didn't have strong character. The growth of the youth movement and youth education and patriots and good citizens was long underway when BP was creating his scouting movement because that's exactly what Seton and Beard were setting off to do earlier in that decade. This is the way that you conclude the book, if you'll allow me to read it. It's a very modest conclusion to this, David, and I'm wondering if you'd like to expand on it for us.

Well, I didn't write the book to be a dissertation upon how the Boy Scouts of America have succeeded or failed in recent years in their program. That is for the reader to decide whether the Boy Scouts have been successful or not.

But what we can say is in order for the Boy Scouts of America to be successful in the next 100 years, they have to appeal to the boys that live today. And I've met a number of boys who would just forego advancements for simply being out in the woods. And that old adage goes that scouting is three-quarters outing, and that's exactly what it is. A lot of boys just don't care to advance. They just want to get out and be boys.

You know what? That's the same as it was back in 1910. Back in 1902. Back in 1905. That's what boys want to do. They want to be out.

They want to be free. They want to be running around. They want to have some focus on what to accomplish, whether that's through games or whatever. But they want to have fun. F-U-N. Capital F-U-N.

And they can do that through scouting, and the Boy Scouts have to appeal to those types of boys in order to survive. And I suggest that going back to the woods and staying in the woods and making sure that you have enough scout camps and activities at scout camps, that's the way that you're going to help grow.

Now, it doesn't mean that you're not going to keep creating advancements like the video games activity pen for the Cub Scouts because that's part of life today as well. So you have to remain focused upon what boys want to see.

And I think it's good marketing if they do do something like that, and they have. So they have to focus as well on the outdoors and the camping activities, and a number of council districts are doing exactly that.

I think what's really remarkable is that this, as you just said, is just as attractive and exciting and engaging to boys now as it was 100 years ago. Boys are the same. They just have new toys. Every once in a while, I hear somebody my age talk about how good things used to be and how things have changed and things are either easier or harder or something like that. But when you get right down to it, the things that appealed to boys in 1910 about scouting are the same things that appeal to them today. Absolutely.

Being outside, messing around, having a good time. And whether they like it or not, they're probably going to get some training in citizenship. The book is due to be published at the end of this month, of June of 2010. It will be released right around there, right around June 30th. It's at the press right now.

And if I want to get a copy of this right now, what's the best way for me to preorder? Well, the best way is to go to Amazon.com and go to the Scouting Party's book page and preorder there. Okay. And I'm going to make sure to have a link to that for everybody on the blog.

David, I really appreciate the book, and I think you've done a great service to us, shining a light on this period of scouting. And there's many lessons to be learned. I really encourage people to read it.

Well, thank you, Clark. I really appreciate that. It's a no-holds-barred view at what actually happened. And it's a fascinating story about these fascinating men who create a fascinating organization. I really appreciate your time and talk to us on the Scoutmaster podcast.

Well, thank you for your kind words. Well, I really enjoyed talking with David, and I hope you enjoyed listening to the interview. I also enjoyed reading the book. And I really want to suggest that it would be a great read for you if you're a Scout leader.

And here's why. I'll reiterate something I said during the interview. At one point within the next week or the next month, if you're an active Scouter, you're going to end up in a committee meeting somewhere. It's going to be a troop committee meeting or a district committee meeting or a council committee meeting. Maybe you're on the committee for a campery or something like that. Hey, we're all going to be working with other Scouters and volunteers.

And we're going to find some of them to be a little acerbic in their manner. And we're going to find some of them to have ideas that we differ with. But the fact that Baden Powell and Ernest Thompson-Seaton and Daniel Carter Beard, even though they really didn't like each other, were able to work together from a distance.

And to use their ideas together to form the movement that we have today should be a real lesson to us in the way that we conduct ourselves when we're working along with other volunteers. Now, I am very opinionated.

I'm so opinionated that I have a podcast and I'm sitting here talking into a microphone because I think that I have some pretty good ideas. There are other people who are going to have ideas that might not jive with mine, but in that dynamic tension of ideas may help us keep us lively and centered on the things that really make Scouting what it is.

In my part of the world, we have a very active and vibrant Amish community. And now, if you're not familiar with the Amish, they live a very simple lifestyle.

So their culture is a bit removed from the culture that I experience. But I get to go and speak with them and talk to them at our farmer's market. And it's always interesting to talk to somebody with a different set of views or a different take on things. And I was talking to one of the fellows the other day and he said, some people lean left and some people lean right.

And we need the both of them because if we didn't have that, we'd all fall over. You know, we need to have a little bit of that dynamic tension built into every part of our lives. Within the next several months or the next several days or the next several weeks, you are going to be sitting in a committee meeting somewhere. It's going to be a troop pack crew committee. It's going to be a district committee. It's going to be a council committee.

Maybe you're working on putting a campery together or something like that. And there's going to be somebody there who you just don't completely agree with. And that is okay. That's fine.

Because if Daniel Carter Beard and Ernest Thompson Seton and Robert Baden-Powell could somehow get along just long enough so that their ideas formed the Boy Scouts of America, that's a great demonstration of how this dynamic tension can create something good. So when we run across contrary ideas and things like that, it's best to examine them and to try and examine them without judgment, without, you know, trying to judge whether they're right or wrong, and to see if we can see something in them that brings the dynamic tension of creation to our own ideas. And it'll make being in a committee meeting a lot more interesting. Which is really difficult sometimes. But, hey, I hope you'll read the book. And as I said, I hope you enjoyed listening to the interview.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.