Boy Scouts no more.

 

The Boy Scouts of America is changing its name to Scouting America

Boy Scouts of America has announced it will rebrand as Scouting America, which, if media impressions are any measure, is a very big deal. Within days of the announcement, the collective online impressions of the news surpassed 14 million, according to the organization — a staggering figure that underscores the institution’s widespread influence.

Article in the Tribune. 

Does it really suggest the "institution's widespread influence", or its tragic decline from what had been that influence?

I teed this up quite a while back and since that time the Southern Rockies Nature Blog, which is linked in here, has a really nice and personal blog entries on this item, entitled Bye Bye Boy Scouts.  I can't really say goodbye to the Scouts that way, as I never was much of a Scout.

Usually I say I was never a Boy Scout, but that's not true.  I was briefly.  Probably around when I was in 6th Grade, or at whatever point it is when a person goes from Cub Scout to Boy Scout, when there were Boy Scouts.  I didn't really last long in it, and it's hard to say exactly why.  Part of it was, I think, as they group I was in, while they did do things, was slow to get around to doing them.  The several merit badges I earned while I was in, I just picked out and did by myself.  That "by myself" thing probably had a lot to do with it also, as by this time my lifelong introvert nature was firmly set in, and unless compelled by external forces or acclimated by long exposure to a group, you'll feel uncomfortable in a group.  Usually I say that I'm "not much of a joiner", with this being, I think, part of it.

Another part may simply be that I'm highly rural and was then.

We don't tend to think of it this way, but Scouting was an urban movement.¹   Aware of the inadequacy of young British men in the Boer War, Lord Baden-Powell, who after the war became the British Army's Chief of Cavalry, founded the Boy Scouts.  The idea was twofold, those being 1) British boys had become a bunch of anemic unskilled wimps who needed some manning up from nature, and 2) British boys had become a bunch of anemic unskilled reprobates who needed some Muscular Christianity.

The original organization had no place for girls.  Girls wanted to participate in things, and soon had their own organizations.  The two didn't mix.

And frankly it didn't mix for good reason There are such things as manly, and womanly virtues.  Much of what the original Boy Scouts sought to address was spot on in its observations, and Scouting did a really good job of addressing them.  Often affiliated with churches, Scouting groups were successful in teaching boys a lot of valuable outdoor skills that often stuck with them for life, and they were benefitted in that goal by the absence of girls, who at a bare minimum are extremely distracting to boys and young men.  Given their natures, young women are usually, although not always, much less distracted by young men.

There's been a lot written on the decline of the Boy Scouts, and there are various theories about it.  One of the blogs linked in here, The Southern Rockies Nature Blog, has an article about it that's worth checking out.  Whatever it was that brought it to its current state, it was still a pretty strong organization in the 1970s, when I had my brief association with it. At that time, even in the rural West, a lot of boys were part of it, and for that matter quite a few of their fathers had a strong association with it.  Being in the Boy Scouts (which my father never was), was part of a multi generational thing.

Signs of decline were there even then.  Of my good friends, only one was a Boy Scout, which his father had been.  Another had a father who had a strong history of Scouting, but my friend wasn't in it.  I was in a youth organization in my early teens, but it was the Civil Air Patrol, which with its martial aviation theme was a completely different type of organization.  Rural kids, of whom I knew a lot, tended to be in the FFA, which had direct practical application to them.

I wish I could pinpoint what was going on, but I really can't.  I've tried to do so here before, and probably haven't been successful.  Looking at the topics addressed in this thread, however, I think part of it may have been that in the post World War Two era that went into the 1970s, the retained gaze upon the rural really faded.  Even television reflected that as programming went from the rural focused on the 1960s, such as The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverley Hillbillies, and Green Acres, the last two of which anticipated the change, to urban centric dramas such as Newhart, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, WKRP In Cincinnati, etc.  Americans had been moving into the cities for a long time, but suddenly they quit looking outside of them.  Even a gritty urban environment depicted in something like The French Connection was celebrated in a way.  It's notable that a figure like Clint Eastwood, who had come up in westerns, started appearing as Dirty Harry in urban California at the same time, and Dirty Harry, like Popeye Doyle, wasn't portrayed as any sort of Boy Scout.

The atmosphere of the late 60s also brought in destructive forces that we're still dealing with.  The resolute male admired and celebrated from the era of The Strenuous Life on to the Ballad of the Green Berets suddenly, in the Strauss Howe fashion, yielded to the feminized and marginalized male, at least in the dominant WASP culture.  It's never really recovered, and we can see some of the reactions to that playing out in society now.

In that atmosphere, Scouting attempted to adapt, but that's part of the problem.  The campaign hat went out, and the red beret came in.² Out with the old, and in with the new.  The institution already had, however, its close association with Christianity and a sort of "goody two shoes" reputation.  It probably should have just doubled down on that and its rural focus, but it tried to adapt instead.

Like other institutions that were heavily male and which had become somewhat soft, it also began to be plagued, apparenlty, with male on male sexual conduct.

People hate to discuss this part, so the realities of this should be noted.  One of the byproducts of keeping boys and girls separate in Scouting is that it not only allowed boys to focus, but it kept boys and girls out of close proximity to each other. Scouting involves teenagers.  No matter how focused or watched, when male and female teenagers are together, some of them will misbehave in ways that create life changing byproducts.  A person only has to look at the expansion of the role of women in the military in order to appreciate this.³ 

We already know that the largest group of abusers of teenagers in this fashion are teachers.  The decline in personal morality brought about by the Sexual Revolution helped unleash this, and I'd wager that a person could easily find a story of a teacher engaging in this conduct with a teenaged charge nearly every month.  I ran across one just last week, in which the assailant was a female teacher and the victim something like a mere 13 years old.  If this happens in an institution in which being discovered will result in the end of a career and jail time, and in which getting caught is highly likely, it's going to happen in situations in which this is much less discoverable.

Put bluntly, as the Muscular Christianity focus waned, the Sexual Revolution came on, and an overall feminization of society advanced, predatory homosexuality in the Boy Scouts became inevitable to some degree, and it had probably always been there at least to some extent.  It's customary at this point to note that not all homosexuals are predatory, and that only a minority are, which is absolutely true, but it happened.  That some people would let their behavior go in an all male setting shouldn't be any more surprising than those instances of male coaches preying on young teenage female athletes.  It's reprehensible, but without additional external controls, it was going to occur.

This helped cause Scouting's popularity to drop off massively, and not surprisingly. Parents quit encouraging their children to be Scouts.  Not really knowing what to do about it in the context of the culture, Scouting opened its doors to girls. This predictably hasn't helped, and it won't.  Scouting will, I'd guess, be largely taken over by girls, but it won't be an organization that Boy Scouts prior to the 1970s would recognize.

There's something to all male bonds between conventionally oriented males that is unalterably different from ones with women.  Probably our biology has a lot to do with it.  The mateship that exists in military units, for example, which are all male, is completely different from an organization that has even one female in it.

The larger tragedy is that the very thing that Scouting was created to address in the first place, in large measure, is probably need as much now as it was then.  The source of the problem is large the same, the urbanization of the country and the corrupting influence of urban life, combined with the absence of male roles, something that existed in the very early 20th Century and something that exists now, albeit for different reasons.  Scouting, by having gone first soft, and then semi feminized, is no longer the organization that it was, that addressed that.

Footnotes:

1. Recently I read Doug Crowe's book A Growing Season, which is extremely off color, but extremely interesting.  The back of the book, where the short review is, terms it a novel, but it isn't.  The figures in it are all real, I either know of them or actually knew some of them.

It occured to me in posting this that part of the reason that the Boy Scouts lost its appeal to me here is that in a highly rural setting the first purpose of scouting, to introduce the outdoors, will be taken up by those who have a strong affinity towards it, which most young men do, all on their own.  Going to Scouting events actually retards a person's ability to go outdoors and do what you want, with your young male associates, once somebody is of driving age, or at least it did then. As soon as somebody was 16, we were pretty much loose in the world.

As noted, not surprisingly, our companions in these forays were all male.  I can't recall going on an outdoor adventure of any kind with a female of my own age until I was at the University of Wyoming.  Nature segregates us in that fashion, even if society doesn't want us to.  As A Growing Season demonstrates, that certainly gives rise to opportunities to engage in vice, although did not in any serious fashion, and the few of my fellows who really fell into it did so, notably, in town.

2.  Only if troops adopted it, however.

3.  Without putting too fine a point on it, two women I know of who were justifiably very proud of their military service, and neither of which might be regarded as libertine, had early discharges from the service for this very reason, followed by the birth of their oldest child not long after.  The service with the biggest problem, seemingly, is the Navy, where close proxmity on ships has caused an alaraming pregnancy rate in some instances.

Related threads:

Youth organizations. Their Rise and (near) Fall, or is that a myth? And, did you join?

No place for boys. . .

Exit the Boy Scouts Stage Left. Boys, Men, the "Masculinity Crisis" and the "BSA" as an example of it.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part 7. One more won't hurt me. . .

Today In Wyoming's History: May 8. The LDS severs ties with the BSA.

Blog Mirror: What Scouting Has Lost

January 8, 1941. Death of Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts.

January 8, 1941 date stamped on reverse.

Lord Robert-Baden Powell, 1st Baron Baden Powell, died on this day in 1941 in Kenya.  He was 83 years old at the time.

Baden Powell was a British cavalryman who founded the international "Scouting Movement" and who lived to see it rise to enormous popularity during the "Muscular Christianity" era. Creation of the movement was a result of his experiences in the Boer War in which he admired the scouting skills of troops raised in the region and those recruited or otherwise from North America.  

First issue of Scouting for Boys, 1908.

At the time of the movements founding Baden Powell, the son of a professor who was also an Anglican Priest who died when he was three  years old, had already served a long and distinguished military career, but its for the creation of Scouting that he is principally remembered.  The movement became enormously successful almost immediately and from its inception until some time into the 1960s it was a very significant youth organization for boys.

Illustration by Baden Powell form the Wolf Cub Handbook, 1916.

Baden Powell was also instrumental in the formation of the companion groups for girls, but he likely would have been  horrified by later developments in Scouting, including the scandals associated with the Boy Scouts USA in later years and the co-ed nature of the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts today.  Indeed, there's a lot of say for his original vision of the organization over its current form which sought to bring bushcraft to youth who were losing it and which was an outwardly Christian organization.

Lady Olave Baden Powell, widow of Robert Baden Powell.

Married late in life, he left a widow 36 years his junior and three children, ages 8, 6 and 4.

The RAF bombed Naples.  Thai forces advanced against Vichy French forces near Siem Reap.

Other events in World War Two, including Canada's decision not to enlist Japanese Canadian citizens into its armed forces, can be read here:

Today in World War II History—January 8, 1941

And also here:

Day 496 January 8, 1941

On this day, this old building in Morristown, New Jersey, was photographed.

And more employees of banks and trust companies were as well.

Saturday, October 24, 1914. Woodrow Wilson spoke at the YMCA in PIttsburgh.

The Germans attacked Allied positions at Gheluvelt, Belgium and attempted to overrun French defenses on the main canal leading to the Lys at Armentières.

Rebel Boers were defeated in the Maritz Rebellion causing General Manie Maritz to flee to Germany.  He returned to South Africa and was convicted of treason in 1923, but freed by a Boer administration in 1924.  He became a Nazi sympathizer in the 1930.  He was killed in a car wreck in 1940 at age 64.

Woodrow Wilson spoke at the YMCA in Pittsburgh.

Mr. President, Mr. Porter, Ladies and Gentlemen:

I feel almost as if I were a truant, being away from Washington to-day, but I thought that perhaps if I were absent the Congress would have the more leisure to adjourn. I do not ordinarily open my office at Washington on Saturday. Being a schoolmaster, I am accustomed to a Saturday holiday, and I thought I could not better spend a holiday than by showing at least something of the true direction of my affections; for by long association with the men who have worked for this organization I can say that it has enlisted my deep affection.

I am interested in it for various reasons. First of all, because it is an association of young men. I have had a good deal to do with young men in my time, and I have formed an impression of them which I believe to be contrary to the general impression. They are generally thought to be arch radicals. As a matter of fact, they are the most conservative people I have ever dealt with. Go to a college community and try to change the least custom of that little world and find how the conservatives will rush at you. Moreover, young men are embarrassed by having inherited their fathers' opinions. I have often said that the use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible. I do not say that with the least disrespect for the fathers; but every man who is old enough to have a son in college is old enough to have become very seriously immersed in some particular business and is almost certain to have caught the point of view of that particular business. And it is very useful to his son to be taken out of that narrow circle, conducted to some high place where he may see the general map of the world and of the interests of mankind, and there shown how big the world is and how much of it his father may happen to have forgotten. It would be worth while for men, middle-aged and old, to detach themselves more frequently from the things that command their daily attention and to think of the sweeping tides of humanity.

Therefore I am interested in this association, because it is intended to bring young men together before any crust has formed over them, before they have been hardened to any particular occupation, before they have caught an inveterate point of view; while they still have a searchlight that they can swing and see what it reveals of all the circumstances of the hidden world.

I am the more interested in it because it is an association of young men who are Christians. I wonder if we attach sufficient importance to Christianity as a mere instrumentality in the life of mankind. For one, I am not fond of thinking of Christianity as the means of saving individual souls. I have always been very impatient of processes and institutions which said that their purpose was to put every man in the way of developing his character. My advice is: Do not think about your character. If you will think about what you ought to do for other people, your character will take care of itself. Character is a by-product, and any man who devotes himself to its cultivation in his own case will become a selfish prig. The only way your powers can become great is by exerting them outside the circle of your own narrow, special, selfish interests. And that is the reason of Christianity. Christ came into the world to save others, not to save himself; and no man is a true Christian who does not think constantly of how he can lift his brother, how he can assist his friend, how he can enlighten mankind, how he can make virtue the rule of conduct in the circle in which he lives. An association merely of young men might be an association that had its energies put forth in every direction, but an association of Christian young men is an association meant to put its shoulders under the world and lift it, so that other men may feel that they have companions in bearing the weight and heat of the day; that other men may know that there are those who care for them, who would go into places of difficulty and danger to rescue them, who regard themselves as their brother's keeper.

And, then, I am glad that it is an association. Every word of its title means an element of strength. Young men are strong. Christian young men are the strongest kind of young men, and when they associate themselves together they have the incomparable strength of organization. The Young Men's Christian Association once excited, perhaps it is not too much to say, the hostility of the organized churches of the Christian world, because the movement looked as if it were so non-sectarian, as if it were so outside the ecclesiastical field, that perhaps it was an effort to draw young men away from the churches and to substitute this organization for the great bodies of Christian people who joined themselves in the Christian denominations. But after a while it appeared that it was a great instrumentality that belonged to all the churches; that it was a common instrument for sending the light of Christianity out into the world in its most practical form, drawing young men who were strangers into places where they could have companionship that stimulated them and suggestions that kept them straight and occupations that amused them without vicious practice; and then, by surrounding themselves with an atmosphere of purity and of simplicity of life, catch something of a glimpse of the great ideal which Christ lifted when He was elevated upon the cross.

I remember hearing a very wise man say once, a man grown old in the service of a great church, that he had never taught his son religion dogmatically at any time; that he and the boy's mother had agreed that if the atmosphere of that home did not make a Christian of the boy, nothing that they could say would make a Christian of him. They knew that Christianity was catching, and if they did not have it, it would not be communicated. If they did have it, it would penetrate while the boy slept, almost; while he was unconscious of the sweet influences that were about him, while he reckoned nothing of instruction, but merely breathed into his lungs the wholesome air of a Christian home. That is the principle of the Young Men's Christian Association—to make a place where the atmosphere makes great ideals contagious. That is the reason that I said, though I had forgotten that I said it, what is quoted on the outer page of the program—that you can test a modern community by the degree of its interest in its Young Men's Christian Association. You can test whether it knows what road it wants to travel or not. You can test whether it is deeply interested in the spiritual and essential prosperity of its rising generation. I know of no test that can be more conclusively put to a community than that.

I want to suggest to the young men of this association that it is the duty of young men not only to combine for the things that are good, but to combine in a militant spirit. There is a fine passage in one of Milton's prose writings which I am sorry to say I cannot quote, but the meaning of which I can give you, and it is worth hearing. He says that he has no patience with a cloistered virtue that does not go out and seek its adversary. Ah, how tired I am of the men who are merely on the defensive, who hedge themselves in, who perhaps enlarge the hedge enough to include their little family circle and ward off all the evil influences of the world from that loved and hallowed group. How tired I am of the men whose virtue is selfish because it is merely self-protective! And how much I wish that men by the hundred thousand might volunteer to go out and seek an adversary and subdue him!

I have had the fortune to take part in affairs of a considerable variety of sorts, and I have tried to hate as few persons as possible, but there is an exquisite combination of contempt and hate that I have for a particular kind of person, and that is the moral coward. I wish we could give all our cowards a perpetual vacation. Let them go off and sit on the side lines and see us play the game; and put them off the field if they interfere with the game. They do nothing but harm, and they do it by that most subtle and fatal thing of all, that of taking the momentum and the spirit and the forward dash out of things. A man who is virtuous and a coward has no marketable virtue about him. The virtue, I repeat, which is merely self-defensive is not serviceable even, I suspect, to himself. For how a man can swallow and not taste bad when he is a coward and thinking only of himself I cannot imagine.

Be militant! Be an organization that is going to do things! If you can find older men who will give you countenance and acceptable leadership, follow them; but if you cannot, organize separately and dispense with them. There are only two sorts of men worth associating with when something is to be done. Those are young men and men who never grow old. Now, if you find men who have grown old, about whom the crust has hardened, whose hinges are stiff, whose minds always have their eye over the shoulder thinking of things as they were done, do not have anything to do with them. It would not be Christian to exclude them from your organization, but merely use them to pad the roll. If you can find older men who will lead you acceptably and keep you in countenance, I am bound as an older man to advise you to follow them. But suit yourselves. Do not follow people that stand still. Just remind them that this is not a statical proposition; it is a movement, and if they cannot get a move on them they are not serviceable.

Life, gentlemen—the life of society, the life of the world—has constantly to be fed from the bottom. It has to be fed by those great sources of strength which are constantly rising in new generations. Red blood has to be pumped into it. New fiber has to be supplied. That is the reason I have always said that I believed in popular institutions. If you can guess beforehand whom your rulers are going to be, you can guess with a very great certainty that most of them will not be fit to rule. The beauty of popular institutions is that you do not know where the man is going to come from, and you do not care so he is the right man. You do not know whether he will come from the avenue or from the alley. You do not know whether he will come from the city or the farm. You do not know whether you will ever have heard that name before or not. Therefore you do not limit at any point your supply of new strength. You do not say it has got to come through the blood of a particular family or through the processes of a particular training, or by anything except the native impulse and genius of the man himself. The humblest hovel, therefore, may produce you your greatest man. A very humble hovel did produce you one of your greatest men. That is the process of life, this constant surging up of the new strength of unnamed, unrecognized, uncatalogued men who are just getting into the running, who are just coming up from the masses of the unrecognized multitude. You do not know when you will see above the level masses of the crowd some great stature lifted head and shoulders above the rest, shouldering its way, not violently but gently, to the front and saying, "Here am I; follow me." And his voice will be your voice, his thought will be your thought, and you will follow him as if you were following the best things in yourselves.

When I think of an association of Christian young men I wonder that it has not already turned the world upside down. I wonder, not that it has done so much, for it has done a great deal, but that it has done so little; and I can only conjecture that it does not realize its own strength. I can only imagine that it has not yet got its pace. I wish I could believe, and I do believe, that at seventy it is just reaching its majority, and that from this time on a dream greater even than George Williams ever dreamed will be realized in the great accumulating momentum of Christian men throughout the world. For, gentlemen, this is an age in which the principles of men who utter public opinion dominate the world. It makes no difference what is done for the time being. After the struggle is over the jury will sit, and nobody can corrupt that jury.

At one time I tried to write history. I did not know enough to write it, but I knew from experience how hard it was to find an historian out, and I trusted I would not be found out. I used to have this comfortable thought as I saw men struggling in the public arena. I used to think to myself, "This is all very well and very interesting. You probably assess yourself in such and such a way. Those who are your partisans assess you thus and so. Those who are your opponents urge a different verdict. But it does not make very much difference, because after you are dead and gone some quiet historian will sit in a secluded room and tell mankind for the rest of time just what to think about you, and his verdict, not the verdict of your partisans and not the verdict of your opponents, will be the verdict of posterity." I say that I used to say that to myself. It very largely was not so. And yet it was true in this sense: If the historian really speaks the judgment of the succeeding generation, then he really speaks the judgment also of the generations that succeed it, and his assessment, made without the passion of the time, made without partisan feeling in the matter—in other circumstances, when the air is cool—is the judgment of mankind upon your actions.

Now, is it not very important that we who shall constitute a portion of the jury should get our best judgments to work and base them upon Christian forbearance and Christian principles, upon the idea that it is impossible by sophistication to establish that a thing that is wrong is right? And yet, while we are going to judge with the absolute standard of righteousness, we are going to judge with Christian feeling, being men of a like sort ourselves, suffering the same temptations, having the same weaknesses, knowing the same passions; and while we do not condemn, we are going to seek to say and to live the truth. What I am hoping for is that these seventy years have just been a running start, and that now there will be a great rush of Christian principle upon the strongholds of evil and of wrong in the world. Those strongholds are not as strong as they look. Almost every vicious man is afraid of society, and if you once open the door where he is, he will run. All you have to do is to fight, not with cannon but with light.

May I illustrate it in this way? The Government of the United States has just succeeded in concluding a large number of treaties with the leading nations of the world, the sum and substance of which is this, that whenever any trouble arises the light shall shine on it for a year before anything is done; and my prediction is that after the light has shone on it for a year it will not be necessary to do anything; that after we know what happened, then we will know who was right and who was wrong. I believe that light is the greatest sanitary influence in the world. That, I suppose, is scientific commonplace, because if you want to make a place wholesome the best instrument you can use is the sun; to let his rays in, let him search out all the miasma that may lurk there. So with moral light: It is the most wholesome and rectifying, as well as the most revealing, thing in the world, provided it be genuine moral light; not the light of inquisitiveness, not the light of the man who likes to turn up ugly things, not the light of the man who disturbs what is corrupt for the mere sake of the sensation that he creates by disturbing it, but the moral light, the light of the man who discloses it in order that all the sweet influences of the world may go in and make it better.

That, in my judgment, is what the Young Men's Christian Association can do. It can point out to its members the things that are wrong. It can guide the feet of those who are going astray; and when its members have realized the power of the Christian principle, then they will not be men if they do not unite to see that the rest of the world experiences the same emancipation and reaches the same happiness of release.

I believe in the Young Men's Christian Association because I believe in the progress of moral ideas in the world; and I do not know that I am sure of anything else. When you are after something and have formulated it and have done the very best thing you know how to do you have got to be sure for the time being that that is the thing to do. But you are a fool if in the back of your head you do not know it is possible that you are mistaken. All that you can claim is that that is the thing as you see it now and that you cannot stand still; that you must push forward the things that are right. It may turn out that you made mistakes, but what you do know is your direction, and you are sure you are moving in that way. I was once a college reformer, until discouraged, and I remember a classmate of mine saying, "Why, man, can't you let anything alone?" I said, "I let everything alone that you can show me is not itself moving in the wrong direction, but I am not going to let those things alone that I see are going downhill"; and I borrowed this illustration from an ingenious writer. He says, "If you have a post that is painted white and want to keep it white, you cannot let it alone; and if anybody says to you, 'Why don't you let that post alone,' you will say, 'Because I want it to stay white, and therefore I have got to paint it at least every second year.'" There isn't anything in this world that will not change if you absolutely let it alone, and therefore you have constantly to be attending to it to see that it is being taken care of in the right way and that, if it is part of the motive force of the world, it is moving in the right direction.

That means that eternal vigilance is the price, not only of liberty, but of a great many other things. It is the price of everything that is good. It is the price of one's own soul. It is the price of the souls of the people you love; and when it comes down to the final reckoning you have a standard that is immutable. What shall a man give in exchange for his own soul? Will he sell that? Will he consent to see another man sell his soul? Will he consent to see the conditions of his community such that men's souls are debauched and trodden underfoot in the mire? What shall he give in exchange for his own soul, or any other man's soul? And since the world, the world of affairs, the world of society, is nothing less and nothing more than all of us put together, it is a great enterprise for the salvation of the soul in this world as well as in the next. There is a text in Scripture that has always interested me profoundly. It says godliness is profitable in this life as well as in the life that is to come; and if you do not start it in this life, it will not reach the life that is to come. Your measurements, your directions, your whole momentum, have to be established before you reach the next world. This world is intended as the place in which we shall show that we know how to grow in the stature of manliness and of righteousness.

I have come here to bid Godspeed to the great work of the Young Men's Christian Association. I love to think of the gathering force of such things as this in the generations to come. If a man had to measure the accomplishments of society, the progress of reform, the speed of the world's betterment, by the few little things that happened in his own life, by the trifling things that he can contribute to accomplish, he would indeed feel that the cost was much greater than the result. But no man can look at the past of the history of this world without seeing a vision of the future of the history of this world; and when you think of the accumulated moral forces that have made one age better than another age in the progress of mankind, then you can open your eyes to the vision. You can see that age by age, though with a blind struggle in the dust of the road, though often mistaking the path and losing its way in the mire, mankind is yet—sometimes with bloody hands and battered knees—nevertheless struggling step after step up the slow stages to the day when he shall live in the full light which shines upon the uplands, where all the light that illumines mankind shines direct from the face of God.

 Last edition:

Thursday, October 22, 1914. Battle of La Bassée and First Battle of Ypres, German advances.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, Battle of La Bassée, British Army, First Battle of Ypres, German Army, Kansas, Motorcycles, World War One

Monday, March 9, 1914. Surprising news on Mexico.

Jesús Salgado, a lieutenant of Emiliano Zapata, surrounded Chilpancingo, the capital of Guerrero, with s force of 5,000 men.

Other news of the Mexican Revolution hit the front page of the Laramie Boomerang, including some surprising "facts" about Pancho Villa.

The story on the fire in St. Louis was tragically accurate.

Mexico figured in the headlines of the Cheyenne paper as well.

Prime Minister H. H. Asquith proposed to allow Ulster to vote on whether to join a Home Rule parliament in Dublin.

YMCA Convention, Salina Kansas:

Last Prior:

Sunday, March 8, 1914. International Women's Day, Berlin.