The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [58]
In June 1910—owing in part to Roosevelt’s outdoors philosophy and his African safari—the Boy Scouts of America was founded in New York City by Robert Baden-Powell; it would soon become the biggest youth organization in the United States.20 The front porch of the CFCA headquarters in Chappaqua, New York, surrounded by beautiful wilderness, was the site where this founding had first been thought of. Young boys needed to learn how to survive in the wild, how to tell a poisonous plant from an edible one. According to Daniel Beard, a founder of the Boy Scouts, Roosevelt’s promotion of faunal naturalism was the main impetus for creating an outdoors-oriented youth organization. Beard had been concerned that young boys had admired antiheroes like Blackbeard, Laffite, and Billy the Kid, so he tried to promote the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Robert Peary. He believed that boys needed to develop honor, as well as outdoor skills such as knowing how to build campfires, tie knots, fly-fish, and use a jackknife, if they were to develop into first-class men. Only when boys understood that a bird’s egg was the most perfect thing in the world would their character be strong enough to resist the lurid carnival of American decadence. Shortly after the Boy Scouts was created, Beard had a private audience with Roosevelt. There was a direct lineage from the Boone and Crockett Club to the CFCA to the Boy Scouts; Roosevelt linked all three. “The Colonel,” Beard later boasted in Outlook, “gave me the authority to use his own name.”21
By September 1910, Roosevelt was praising the Boy Scouts and the CFCA on his book tour. American boyhood, Roosevelt often said, should be oriented toward the outdoors and woodcraft, and away from the open-hearth furnaces of Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo. Youngsters needed to be able to identify a common rock wren, appreciate the beauty of the tall-grass prairie, and smell fir boughs beside a campfire at night. Being in touch with nature and honoring all humans and wild creatures would help develop high moral character. Instead of becoming apathetic brats whining about money and profits, youngsters would develop into citizen conservationists of the highest order.22 “I believe in the Boy Scouts movement with all my heart,” Roosevelt said. “The excessive development of city life in modern industrial civilization which has seen its climax here in our own country, is accompanied by a very unhealthy atrophying of some of the essential virtues, which must be embodied in any man who is to be a good soldier, and which, especially, ought to be embodied in every man to be really a good citizen in time of peace.”23 Roosevelt regularly touted Alaska, the Rockies, and the Pacific Northwest as great places for a young man to climb mountains, camp, and hike—wilderness zones where the young man could test his mettle against nature. By 1914, in part owing to Roosevelt’s plea, there were five Boy Scout troops in Alaska, with four scoutmasters and thirty scouts.24
As the Boy Scouts developed into a nationwide idea, Rooseveltian conservation became one of the organization’s central tenets. The new generation of American boys needed to be both citizen-naturalists and citizen-scientists. The original Boy Scouts Handbook sold 7 million copies in three decades, a number second only to the Bible.25 By 1914, the Boy Scouts had awarded its first William Temple Hornaday Gold Medal for “conservation excellence” and the Gifford Pinchot Award for