We've discussed Boy Scout uniforms and caps. . . so we should take a look at the Girl Scouts. "“Activities at the Girl Scouts Camp, Central Valley, New York. Line of the Girl Scouts waiting their turn to get their wash basins full of water at the water pipes.” July 21, 1918.

But I don't know much about them.

Girls Scouts on July 21, 1918.  Note the semi military uniforms, which pretty closely reflect the uniforms adopted by female auxiliaries of various types providing service during the Great War.

Except there's few hats in evidence.  Indeed, only one.

Is that a sailor's Dixie Cap?

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Addendum: 

I followed up on this thread with a new one actually on the evolution of Girl Scouts uniforms:

So, having babbled about Boy Scout uniforms, perhaps I should address the Girl Scouts as well.

And, in looking that up, I think I've come to the conclusion that the 1918 photograph that is featured in this photograph shows very early American Girl Scouts and Camp Fire Girls.  The white uniforms are probably Camp Fire Girls. The Camp Fire Girls were originally supposed to be a female version of the Boy Scouts and at this point in time there was a serious effort to unite the two organizations.  That effort ultimately fell apart, but my guess is that this camp had girls from both groups in anticipation of them being united.

Can you trace the decline in an organization through the sad decline of its headgear (and its uniform in general)?

Boy Scouts, New York City, 1917.

Okay, probably not.

Very young Boy Scouts in Chicago, 1942.   This was right about the time that the uniforms started to change.  The campaign hat of this period was extremely similar, if not identical, to the M1911 Army campaign hat.

Or can you?

Well, again, probably not . . .there's been some really goofy headgear out there over the years used by any uniformed group.

But hats and caps do tell a story.

Part of that story has been told here before, of course, one of the most popular threads here of all time is the long running one on caps and hats.  That thread looks at all kinds of caps and hats and their history, and the history of certain specific types of caps at hats.  And some are indeed organizational in nature, as various military caps and hats are addressed.

But what about the Boy Scouts (and perhaps the Girl Scouts)?  It's sort of interesting, although we should dare not to presume too much from it.

The first Boy Scouts were British. And of course, therefore, the first Boy Scout headgear was. . . the "Montana Peak Stetson".

Eh?

Yup.  the peaked broad brimmed hat known by that name at the time, and in later years following adoption by the U.S. Army and Marine Corps and later the United States Park Service as the "campaign hat", the "big brown round", "the DI's hat" or the "Smokey the Bear Hat".

Only you can prevent bad headgear.

The original Boy Scout hats were campaign hats, and not just in the US but in the UK.  Lord Baden Powell started the Scouts as, as we have already explored, an outdoors organization hoping to boost outdoor skills and manly Christian values in the British young.  It rapidly leaped the Atlantic to the US and Canada, and every other English speaking place, and then to darned near everywhere else.

Lord Baden Powell in his younger, pre Scouting, days.  He brought the campaign hat over into the Scouts with him. . . and indeed the early Scouting uniform was unmistakably military in origin.

Lord Baden Powell had been a career British military officer and served in various regular and irregular capacities in the British Army in Africa in the late 19th and very early 20th Century before becoming the British Chief of Cavalry.  This included service in the British South Africa Scouts in the Matabele War where he met and was influenced by American adventurer Frederick Russell Burnham.  Burnham, in spite of an odd penchant for serving in British colonial wars, was an American westerner (born on a Sioux reservation in Minnesota and full of scouting lore.  He also wore, sometimes, an American Montana Peak hat.  Baden Powell may have picked up the hat directly from that influence, but it has to be noted that Montana Peak hats became hugely popular with Dominion and Colonial forces in this time frame anyhow, introduced at least in part by the Canadians who adopted them wholesale.  New Zealand soon followed, and of course so did the United States in 1911.  When Baden Powell formed the scouts they too adopted the campaign hat, with the original British ones being of the Canadian type.

The Scout campaign hat was a really practical outdoor hat.  All of the felt hats of that type, whether they are campaign hats or cowboy hats or slouch hats, if made out of quality materials, shed rain and snow and keep the sun off our your head and out of your eyes.  I've dealt with this elsewhere but their demise came about not due to style, but because of the helmet, in military service.

Long suffering high quality campaign hat of the M1911 type.  Note the brim stitching which was a feature of early M1911 campaign hats..

Now, with the Scouts, I don't know what caused them, the campaign hats that is, to fade, but it wasn't the helmet, so Scouts weren't faced with trying to pack around a big hat and a helmet at the same time, like soldiers were.  I suspect with the Scouts they just followed the Army trend and that caused the changes.  It's been interesting.

The 1911 style campaign hat's fortune began to officially fade in Scouting in 1943 when the Scouts added the garrison hat to their chapeau stable, following the Army's lead.*  The campaign hat was, nonetheless, still in nearly universal use in the 1940s.

In the Army, the M1911 campaign hat went from universal issue to a cavalry and competitive Army rifleman's item during World War Two. There were still units at the start of the war where 100% of soldiers in the units had campaign hats, indeed most did. By 1945 that was no longer true for the reasons noted above.  Scouts were still all wearing campaign hats, but not for long.  Scouting uniforms in general were changed in the 1940s, following an earlier change post World War One, and the change pretty closely mirrored garrison duty uniforms of the U.S. Army, incorporating a greenish khaki cotton uniform to match the Army's garrison (and theoretically field) khaki uniform). Among the Army uniform changes followed by the Scouts was the introduction of leggings and a garrison cap.   Breaches and World War One style uniform coats had gone out already during the 1920s.** The new uniform heavily resembled the Army's khaki uniform of the 1940s, albeit with some notable differences including its light green color.***

This uniform was still around into the 1970s with modifications.  This uniform very much recalls the Army's khaki uniform of the 1930s and 1940s.  They were made of heavy cotton with epaulets.  The shirts were nice outdoors uniform shirts. The trousers were much like Army chinos, but had a really distinct buttoning pocket that recalled the same feature on Army Field Pants.  As noted, the Army appearance of the uniform was completed by leggings, theoretically, and brown boots.

Boy Scout and Girl Scout uniforms of the mid 20th Century.

Anyhow, garrison caps entered the U.S. Army's stocks during World War One and then disappeared thereafter only to reappear in the 1930s.  The garrison cap is close to being one of the most worthless hats ever devised and came about only because you have to have something on your head. They were first introduced into the U.S. Army late in World War One when the M1917 helmet became universal in France.  You will sometimes see it claimed that M1911 campaign hats didn't make it to France at all, but that is way off the mark.  In fact, M1911 campaign hats were worn widely in France throughout and after the war, but as the flood of conscripted soldiers began to arrive in the Spring of 1918 the garrison cap made its gigantic ugly appearance.  Also really making an enormous appearance at the same time, but somewhat forgotten, was the wheelhouse cap, or peak cap, which was favored by officers as it is a much better looking hat.

American soldiers marching in Lyon, France, shortly after the garrison cap was introduced. This photograph was taken on July 14, 1918, during a Bastille Day parade.

Black U.S. Army soldier standing guard overseas during World War One.  While the date of this photograph is uncertain, it's likely late in World War One.  The soldier is wearing the American pattern of Garrison, or Overseas, Cap  that started to replace the M1911 Campaign hat in France.  He's also wearing puttees rather than leggings, and wartime roughout Pershing Boots rather than American Munson Last Marching Shoes.  His jacket, moreover, appears to be on of the British supplied jackets with a fold down collar rather than the American standard issue jacket of the same period.  He is carrying a M1917 Enfield Rifle.

Garrison caps are a hat that made a bit appearance in the French Army, with the style spreading to the American Army, during the Great War.  In its original form its a folded up piece of wool cloth fabricated in such a fashion that it can be pulled down over the ears.  In its wool form, it served to keep the head moderately warm and to protect the ears, but it doesn't do anything else.  It's real advantage, and its only real one, is that it's really easy to pack. That fact was a virtue in the helmet era of the military and it spread far and wide in various militaries as a result.  By early World War Two the hat had spread from the French Army to the American Army (which wore it, in France, in World War One), to the British Army, German Army Army and Red Army.  Also by the Second World War the functionality of the original hat had been lost, to the extent there ever was one, in some armies, including the American Army (but not the British and German armies) in that in some versions you can no longer pull down ear flaps.  The hat simply sits on a person's head doing nothing else.

Army pattern Garrison Caps being worn as part of the Civilian Conservation Corps uniform. . . showing the militarized nature of the CCC as well as a rather odd use of the impractical cap.

Nonetheless the U.S. Army went big into garrison caps during World War Two and you'll even see them in use, officially, by soldiers in field uniforms outside of combat.  That ended after World War Two but it was common during World War Two.  During the war the U.S. Army issued khaki and olive pattern garrison caps, the Navy issued khaki ones (although Naval officers very much preferred wheelhouse caps) and the Marines issued dark olive ones.  During this period, or near it, the Boy Scouts went to their light green/khaki pattern garrison cap that matched their uniform.

Signal Corps officer during World War Two in dress uniform.

It's a totally worthless cap.  Even the Boy Scouts own history of its uniforms notes this.

Today the garrison cap, we'll note, hangs on in military service but its fortunes in the U.S. Army have faded in favor of the beret, which we will address in a moment.  All the services retain the cap, but the Army wears it the least.  I wouldn't be surprised to see it fade from Army use entirely.

Spry looking Red Army veteran of World War Two wearing the Red Army pattern of garrison cap while Russian (military?) school children wearing the enormous Russian pattern of wheelhouse cap walk across street at WWII commemoration event in 2008.  Assuming that this man's uniform matches his service, he was in the NKVD, given his blue trousers.  He seems to be drinking a beer.

Indeed, it's a weird hat, and it ought to go.

Now, a couple of things before I become completely unhinged, unmoored and unintelligible.

First of all, when the Scouts changed their uniform in the 1920s through the 1940s it made a lot of sense.  The old Scouting uniform, which was wool, with wool shirt, wool breeches and wool coat, except for summer when they had, I think, a heavy duty cotton shirt was getting a bit dated to say the least.  The new, very martial (like the first) uniform reflected an update in technology that I've already addressed, the washing machine, and was practical.  It probably took a lot of the washing burden down for mothers who had to wash the uniforms for one thing, as it allowed the use of washing machines that were coming into homes, and indeed already had.  And the elimination of breeches for trousers, which the Army had also done (save for cavalry) was practical as well. Shorts were retained in pretty much the same form as they had been.  Boots that featured leather leggings were phased out in favor of boots with canvas leggings, as noted. All leggings are a huge pain but the latter was at least more practical for a "dismounted" man than the former, and indeed the Army had canvas puttees for ground pounders for decades prior to the Scouts adoption of them, although ironically the Army (but not quite the Marine Corps at that time) were on the verge of phasing leggings out forever in favor of higher boots.  Nobody missed leggings.

An interesting aspect of this is that the modern image of a Boy Scout really solidified and still sort of remains.  Somehow or another the Boy Scouts developed an association with Norman Rockwell who started illustrating the covers to their manuals.  Rockwell had illustrated Scouts going back to his early work, as part of his cover illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post, although he was not alone in that.  Indeed, Boy Scouts were a popular cover topic in the teens and not only Rockwell by J. C. Leydecker used Boy Scouts in their uniforms of that era as frequent cover illustration topics.  Leydecker has been forgotten in the popular imagination, but this sort of illustration sort of defines in a way the modern concept of Rockwell even, who is associated with an Americana so strong that the fact that he also painted some contemporary political scenes from the Civil Rights movement is missed.

1963 Boy Scout handbook.

But how accurate was Rockwell by 1963? We've noted of course that this new uniform came in during the 1940s and it very heavily leaned on the existing Army uniform.  The Scout wore an Army style garrison cap with red piping (I have no idea as to why red).  His cotton shirt was quite heavy and was of the odd light green color that closely approximated the color used at first by U.S. airborne infantry during World War Two until switched to the Olive Drab after Normandy.  The new trousers approximated the Army's airborne field pants as well with pockets that would button up, although they admitted the utilitarian cargo pockets (that would come much later, as we'll see).  And the Scout wore russet boots topped off with leggings.

So depicted Rockwell, but period photographs show that this full uniform was rarely ever actually worn, so what we are seeing in his romantic portrait is in fact romanticized.  In reality, Scouts of the 40s kept the campaign hats for awhile in some groups and abandoned them rapidly in others.  The shirts were universally worn, but it's pretty much impossible to find a photo of a Scout at any point in this era wearing leggings.  Leggings, as noted, are a uncomfortable piece of footgear and widely disliked even by those who were supposed to wear them by compulsion. And in terms of trousers, after the wool trouser was abandoned Scouts seem to have often simply worn some sort of chino at first, which were popular trousers at the time anyhow, and by the end, which is close to my brief time as a Scout, if the Scouts I knew were any guideline, the trousers were a baggy green chino officially but Levis were much more often worn. So in reality, only the shirt and the garrison cap was really common. So what does this tell us of Rockwell's portrait for the handbook? Well, that Rockwell was so associated with wholesome Americana at the time that he was the Scout's natural choice for what a Scout ought to look like, and perhaps by implication be, rather than what they did look like.

The only thing that wasn't really practical about the new Scout uniform of the 1940s was the garrison cap, but in fairness here too Scout Troops were allowed to retain campaign hats if they wished to as noted. Most didn't seem to, and that may have been due to the expense.  Campaign hats were undoubtedly more expensive than garrison caps, which are cheap, if worthless.  And as broad brimmed hats became less common in society at large, the costs of the good ones rose while the quality of bad ones became worse.

As a worthless cap its interesting to note that the soldiers of the giant Army of World War Two began to defeat the wearing of the garrison cap during the war, even though it had enormously widespread use. This was due to the fatigue hat, fatigue cap, and the jeep cap.

Poster depicting U.S. Army garrison cap of World War Two.  In this case, the red piping would indicate that the soldier was an artilleryman. This cap was very close in pattern to the Boy Scouts' cap that came in during the 1940s.  Indeed, it's basically identical, although a green one one as depicted here would have been a wool garrison cap.  The Scouting caps were always cotton. 

Prior to World War Two, indeed very much prior, dating back in at least the cavalry and artillery branches back to some point close in time to the end of the Civil War, the Army had adopted fatigue uniforms for dirty work.  These heavy cotton uniforms acknowledged that, even in the pre washing machine era, cotton was a lot easier to wash than wool.  Early on they were made of white cotton duck clothing, and associated with mounted men. By the late 19th Century they had become brown cotton duck, like Carhartts, to which they bore a remarkable resemblance.  That uniform was actually pressed into service as a field uniform during the Spanish American War, but after that, at some point, the brown cotton duck uniform, which was suitable for field use in a pinch, was phased out in favor of a blue denim uniform.

U.S. Army Coastal Artilleryman at Ft. Story, Virginia, in 1942.  This photograph is unusual in that this Sergeant is wearing a blue denim fatigue uniform as a duty uniform, which apparently was sufficiently widespread in this unit such that orders had been given to sew rank insignia on to the fatigue jacket, a practice falling outside of regulation.  My guess is that Coastal Artillery were not being issued the new herringbone tweed field uniforms and they didn't want to get their khakis or wool OD uniform dirty in a job that's dirty by nature. By late 1944 this soldier was almost certainly serving as an infantryman in France.

That blue denim uniform included a floppy brimmed hat which very much resembles the modern "boonie hate" used by the Army and even more closely resembled the boon hat used first by the Red Army and now by the current Russian Army.

Immediately prior to World War Two the Army went to an "olive drab" fatigue uniform made out of cotton herringbone tweed cloth, which the Army in turn almost immediately adopted as a hot weather combat uniform (although that uniform saw much less use in the the ETO and North Africa than imagined. . . it saw huge use in the Pacific).  When that was done, the Army retained a the floppy hat in that cloth, but it also adopted a "mechanics hat" based on the working man's cap that was strongly associated with railroad men at the time.  Soldiers liked the mechanics cap a lot and it was very widely issued.  As a result of that, that hat became the most common off duty hat for men wearing field uniforms, even though the garrison cap was likewise an official cap.  Indeed, the mechanics hat was not liked a great deal by Army brass as it contributed to a pretty causal appearance on the part of off duty soldiers.  Be that as it may, it was that cap that went on to be the official cap to go with field uniforms when not wearing the helmet after World War Two, replacing the garrison cap in that role.

 Railroad engineer wearing the archetypal railroad cap in the standard blue and white pinstripe pattern.  This cap became the basis for a variety of Army and Marine Corps fatigue caps, and its lineage can still be seen today in the Marine Corps utility cap.

And the reason for that is, no how limited in utility a cap with just a bill may be, at least it has a bill.

I prefer this pattern of cap over a regular baseball cap, so when I found a reproduction one offered, I bought a couple.  This is a reproduction of the originally World War Two Herring Bone Tweed cap that was introduced early in the war.  A version of the cap stayed in use into the 1950s in the Army and survives today in the form of the Marine Corps utility cover.

But it is sloppy looking for the most part, which is no doubt why the Boy Scouts never adopted it. And its likewise no doubt why the Army replaced it in that role with the Patrol Cap by 1950.  The Patrol Cap very strongly resembles a type of cap called a "Painter's Cap" due to its use by that occupation, but it has in its original, and then revived, form ear flaps inside.  Its not a great winter cap by any means and its not even as dually useful as the German Gebirgsmutze or M1943 cap but it definitely has more utility than the mechanics cap.  By the Korean War it was standard for field uniforms and its therefore slightly surprising that the Boy Scouts didn't adopt it.  It's hard to imagine a Boy Scout version of that cap, but only because it wasn't done.

U.S. Army First Lieutenant and Captain wearing the cotton uniform of the Korean War, including M1951 Field Caps, which were themselves a version of the M1943 cap.  It's popular to imagine the Korean War uniform as being the same as that of World War Two, but it definitely is not.  Following the war a stiffened version of the cap was used for some time as the Ridgeway Cap.  The M1943 pattern returned with the Army's Battledress Uniform and a version of it is still used today.  The pattern has even become popular with civilians

That cap in Army use has gone through various permutations but as this isn't the "history of Army caps" thread we'll omit further discussion on the Patrol Cap here and go back to the Scouts.  As noted, by the 1940s the Scouts had adopted a cotton Garrison Cap.  That cap hung on all the way into the 1980s, at least, just as the campaign hat apparently also did, but in declining use staring with the adoption of the beret in the 1970s.

Fidel Castro in 1959.  While being a dedicated opponent of the U.S., Castro ended up being sort of a living museum of late 1950s U.S. Army uniforms.  He never abandoned the M1953 pattern of U.S. field jacket and he loved the "Ridgeway" cap for some reason.  Next to him here is a rather hairy Camilo Cienfuegos Garrigarian wearing a U.S. Air Force flight jacket that even has an Air Force insignia stenciled on the sleeve.

Yes, the dred beret.

Or a baseball cap.  We'll get to that in a moment.

As any reader here already knows, I view the beret about the same way as I view the Garrison Cap. They're worthless. They may not be as completely worthless as the garrison cap, as used by the post World War One U.S. Army, but they're darned close.

Berets are a traditional European cap worn by the peasantry who couldn't afford anything better.  They were never great by any means, but in the damp cold and then sometimes hot weather of southern Europe they were better than nothing.  Not by much, but better than nothing.

Berets, it should be noted, were not originally a military cap and its quite difficult to tell when they became so and where.  Some would claim the gigantic beret of the French Chasseurs Alpin, an adoption of peasant headgear by French mountain troops, brought it in.  Others would cite to Scottish tams as the original example, and they're certainly a similar cap.  Be that as it may, early use of such caps, which would include through World War One, was limited to special troops or ones from distinct regions where such caps were common in civilian use.

French mountain troops with their distinctive berets during World War One.

It was following the Great War that berets made their appearance in earnest.  The first army I'm aware of to adopt one outside of those mentioned was the Germany Army, oddly enough.  After Germany began to rebuild their army under Hitler, it adopted a whole host of new uniforms and including berets for German tankers.

Less manly depiction of a beret, 1918.

Now that undoubtedly seems odd and if you see photographs of them, it really is odd.  The Germans adopted a gigantic black beret to go with the black uniform they adopted for tank crews.

The choice of black was due to the dirty greasy nature of tank service.  Berets were adopted, however, as the Germans also adopted a helmet for tankers and the beret was designed to fit over it.  Sort of an uber beanie if you will.

German armor in Poland, 1939.  The tankers are wearing the short lived German super sized beret.  Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1976-071-36 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

The British followed suit but not with a helmet, but simply a beret, introducing a black beret for tankers and then following to introduce a "khaki", by which they meant greenish brown or brownish green, beret for general use, and various colors for distinct service.  Maroon famously became the color of the airborne.  Green became the color of the Special Boat Service.  The distinct British beret and its color coding had arrived.

British Special Air Service troops, 1944. Their berets should be blue.

But not with the US. That would take another twenty plus years when the Special Forces were able to convince the service that a green beret, leaning on the beret color of the Special Boat Service, wold be a cool addition for them.   Hence the arrival of the Green Berets.

Indeed, hence the arrival of berets in U.S. service in general, although in a  highly confusing fashion.  Unofficially during the Vietnam War Marine Corps, Marine Corps Reconnaissance units also adopted the green beret, figuring that they were as special as the Special Forces and, intentionally or unintentionally, replicating the prior use of that color by the Special Boat Service.  Army Ranger units for a time unintentionally adopted black berets. At the same time armored personnel in the U.S. Army stationed in Germany were allowed to unofficially adopt black berets, including armored cavalry units, even though at the same time some of their branch co-horts in Vietnam had unofficially adopted Stetsons.  At least armored use of the black beret matched the identical British use.  Air Force Security police officially adopted a blue beret, which while it was in a different shade, recalled sort of the use of that color by the British Special Air Service.

Starting late in the Vietnam War and then into the 1970s the Army told all of its units wearing berets, except for the Special Forces, to knock it off and they all went, save for the green beret.  In the 1980s (I think) however, the maroon beret associated with British airborne was adopted for American airborne.  Following this the Army determined to adopt the black beret for everyone else.  The Rangers were unhappy and were ultimately given their own khaki beret, which is ironic considering that's the basic soldier color for the original mass beret issuing army, the British.

At the same time the beret began to gain some cache with other disparate groups.  The Basque beret, the universal peasant cap for the Basque region of Spain, became associated, probably inaccurately, with the Spanish Republicans so that beret picked up in use by various Socialist extremist around the globe, most notably, but certainly not exclusively, by Che Guevera.

Che Guevera wearing a basque beret in the most famous, cropped, photo of the rather horrible individual.

A less Basque, but still rather cropped, version was used, for example, by Jonas Savimbi, the socialist but also Catholic revolutionary in Angola.

Anyhow, it was 1971 when the Boy Scouts, seeing which way the wind was blowing the caps, adopted the red beret.  It first came in for the "Leadership Corps", today's "Venture Crew" which was an advisory board in the Boy Scouts in which selected members advised their leaders.  In other words, the red beret was at first a sort of distinctive honorary uniform item, somewhat the way the maroon beret, green beret, etc., are in military service.  In 1975 it spread to general use, beating out the Army's adoption of the universal black beret by twenty six years.

I don't know if there was any flak about this at the time, I suspect not.  I suspect there would be now.  One thing about that time is that the U.S. military was in an all time low in terms of public respect and therefore there likely wouldn't have been a visceral reaction to such a thing as there would now, when accolades to everything military are often grossly over done.  At any rate, the Boy Scouts were no doubt not trying to leap on board the Airborne bandwagon but it sort of had that odd appearance to it. Scarlet is pretty close to maroon to most people, so it looks pretty darned close to the airborne beret.

It was that useless cap that was in use when I was briefly a scout and while I don't have any other item of my Boy Scout stuff, I still have that.  But then I like hats.  At some point after I got out I took off the Boy Scout fluer de lis and so it has no insignia on it. Why, well I was thinking it would look like a cool British Airborne beret at that time.  And it sort of did.  Not that I wore it, it was just part of a collection.

Like every other hat we've discussed here, the beret remains an official Boy Scout cap but it's very rare. At some point it must have occurred to the Scouts that everyone looks like a goof, a Communist guerrilla, and just wacky wearing a red beret. They can still be worn, but they're no longer being offered by Scouting suppliers.

In their place came. . .

yes. . .

the dred cap that has sucked all the air out of the room.  The trucker's variety of the baseball cap.

Comparison and contrast.  Finnish police wearing patrol type baseball caps with Finnish border guards wearing the uncommon fat type of garrison cap.  Fat garrison caps are pretty close to the German feldmutze bizarrely absent a brim.  Feldmutze are a traditional northern European cap that have seen a lot of military and outdoors use and are a truly useful cap.

Well, actually the Boy Scouts adopted baseball hats at the same time as they adopted the beret.

Now, I've written about baseball caps before and I'm not really hugely opposed to baseball caps.

Well, to put it more bluntly, I actually am basically opposed to baseball caps even though I wear a different style of them all the time.

The thing about baseball caps is that they've taken over everything but are really not suitable for most things. They're a great hat for sports as they're simple and easy and in their modern cotton version, easy to keep and wear.  It was those qualities which caused the longer billed version to first make an appearance in the Navy on the decks of aircraft carriers during World War Two and then spread to the USAF for men on flight lines by the Korean War. They made sense in that application.

But as an outdoors field cap they really suck.

They don't protect the ears or the back of the neck and they simply become sodden in the rain.  They have made a major appearance in the game fields and everywhere else, but they aren't really an appropriate outdoor cap and ought to go in that use.  But they won't be any time soon.

In fact the opposite is largely true.

They are better than the beret or garrison cap, as an outdoor cap, however.

Baseball caps (using the term generically) have over a century of existence but it wasn't until after World War Two that they really started to become ubiquitous.  Indeed, as noted in our earlier thread, they would have been regarded as indecent for most uses until that time and while they do start showing up in some photos of working men in the 1930s, it wasn't really until the war that they started to spread.  As already noted, during World War Two they spread into Navy use in a form with a modified gigantic brim and they shortly thereafter spread into Air Force ground crew use. By the Korean War the USAF was using them very widely as an unofficial flight line cap in dark blue, which made some sense as ground crews otherwise, at that time, used a variant of the OD mechanics cap discussed above. By the 1960s it was very common in the USAF and remained so for a very long time.  

Also in the 1960s the U.S. Army adopted a type of baseball cap for Army use.  It was hideous.

The Army cap is universally regarded as one of the ugliest attempts at military headgear ever adopted by the U.S. Army in modern times.  It seems to have come about as service in Vietnam required a hat that wasn't so warm as the Army's existing fatigue cap.  It was lighter, but the stiffened front was weird and nobody like it.  In spite of that, it was adopted by the Army and the Air Force and the door was hence open to widespread military use, for a time, of the baseball cap.

Only for a time, however, as when BDU's came in during the early 1980s the hated baseball cap went out in favor of the patrol cap once again.  Both the Army and the Air Force adopted the patrol cap as a fatigue cap and its remained in service ever since.  Looked at that way, the patrol cap has nearly a half century or more of use now with the Army.

Be that as it may, the baseball cap was on its way into to outfits using uniforms and worst of all in its hideous trucker's hat form, that being a shorter brimmed, square front, version with a mesh back.  Indeed, the Army's baseball cap was so hideous that a trucker's hat variant of that even made a brief unofficial appearance in Army units, and it actually looked better than the issue cap.

In 1972, as the same time it was adopting the beret, the Scouts adopted a uniform patter of the baseball cap.  It was a really basic ball cap with no frills other than the Scout insignia on the front.  In adopting it, the Scouts sort of followed the Army's lead, but less so.

Some time after the 1970s, and I don't really know when, the Boy Scouts adopted the trucker's hat type baseball cap.  It features a mesh back and a colored front.  It's a useless outdoors cap.

In 1980 all the Scout uniforms underwent a major, and at the time somewhat controversial, overhaul courtesy of Oscar de la Renta, the fashion designer, who was retained for the project.  The result was a severing from the old military influenced uniform to one that more Forest Service or Park Service like (except that the Park Service, in addition to issuing baseball caps itself, still retains the M1911 campaign hat as prt of its official uniform).**** Green shirts were phased out for khaki.  Dark green trousers, ultimately with massive cargo pockets (probably a good addition) were brought in, completing, no doubt unintentionally, the Boy Scout's ode to the World War Two paratrooper uniform..  The new uniform didn't look completely non military, but it sure looked a whole lot Park Service.  Except for the hat, of course.


In 06 or so, the Scouts adopted the patrol cap version of the baseball cap and it seems to have replaced the trucker's hat. That at least is a slightly positive turn of events.

Current patrol cap style of baseball cap, this one by the Australian military suppler and outdoors company Platypus Outdoors.  The patch on the front is a Velcro backed State of Wyoming flag in subdued desert colors which is designed to affix to military uniforms and apparel, such as this.

The patrol cap version of the baseball cap shouldn't be confused with the regular service patrol cap. Rather, that version of the baseball cap is a modern long-billed style of baseball cap with no mesh.  That style of cap, much better looking than the truckers cap, seems to have come over from. . . baseball.  It was picked up in strength by special military units, for some reason, early in the war in Afghanistan and soon thereafter manufacturers started making them specifically for servicemen, with Velcro panels for the attachment of insignia and ultraviolet reflective panels. They have not been officially adopted by any branch of the service but they are very widespread.

The Scouts seem to have picked up on this and in 06 started issuing an OD patrol cap type baseball cap.  In the Scouts it seems to have replaced the trucker's cap, which continues to afflict the Cub Scotus and the Webelos.

Additionally, in apparent recognition that baseball caps are a poor choice for outdoor use, the Scouts adopted a version of the boonie cap. 

U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2001 wearing boonie caps

Boonie hats are a type of brimmed soft cotton cap that has been around since at least World War Two in one form or another. Back then the hat was in blue denim and was not a field service hat.  After the war it disappeared but a hat nearly identical to the later American pattern was used by the British for jungle and desert service.  It spread to Australian service during the Maylay Emergency and then to U.S. service during the Vietnam War.  It's been around ever since.  The Scouts, realizing that baseball caps aren't ideal, began authorizing a version of it fairly recently.

Malayan police in British jungle kit.

And they also, oddly, adopted the ugly looking wool felt version of a broad brimmed hat usually affected by people who are ignorant of broad brimmed hats.  Using the least suitable felt for that type of hat, it usually looks thick. But folks who are ignorant on hats like that type as they think it looks like a fedora.

Which it does not.

All of which is odd, and not, as its a full circle sort of thing.  Boonie caps definitely have their place but they're not as useful as campaign hats, although they're a lot cheaper.  And for some odd reason they can look great or goofy depending upon the design, even though it doesn't vary much.  Much of that is knowing how to wear one and being comfortable with it.

So, what does this evolution of uniform design tell us. Well probably not all that much, maybe.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*The Boy Scouts have never made any one hat or cap they've approved officially obsolete. They can all still be worn and the M1911 type campaign hat is actually still offered fro purchase by Scout suppliers.

**Congress made the wearing of military uniforms by civilians of any type illegal in 1916 but had made an exception for the Boy Scouts, whose uniform very closely resembled that of the U.S. Army. The doughboy style uniform went out in 1923, but of note the Army was also overhauling uniforms at that time and also abandoned its prior uniform at that time.

***In addition to going from breaches to trousers, one big change was the adoption of shorts in the 1930s for Boy Scouts, having been mandated for leaders over some protest in 1920.

Shorts are very common now but even when I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s they were something worn only by small children as a rule.  There's no earthly way that I would have been caught wearing shorts after I was about ten years old and I can recall actually declaring that I would no longer wear them, to some slight expression of sadness from my mother.

****Indeed, Park Service uniforms also descent from the Army's uniform, and from the same original period.  The Park Service was created just prior to World War One and relieved the Army from the role of patrolling the National Parks.

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

 From our companion blog, Today In Wyoming's History:

Today In Wyoming's History: May 8: 2018  Following the Boys Scouts official departure from being an organization in anyway dedicated to the development of young men, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) severed association with the Boy Scouts.  The joint statement issued by the Boy Scouts and the Mormon church stated the following:

A Joint Statement from
 The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
 and
 The Boy Scouts of America
May 8, 2018 

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Boy Scouts of America have been partners for more than 100 years. The Scouting program has benefited hundreds of thousands of Latter-day Saint boys and young men, and BSA has also been greatly benefited in the process. We jointly express our gratitude to the thousands of Scout leaders and volunteers who have selflessly served over the years in Church-sponsored Scouting units, including local BSA districts and councils. 

In this century of shared experience, the Church has grown from a U.S.-centered institution to a worldwide organization, with a majority of its membership living outside the United States. That trend is accelerating. The Church has increasingly felt the need to create and implement a uniform youth leadership and development program that serves its members globally. In so doing, it will be necessary for the Church to discontinue its role as a chartered partner with BSA. 

We have jointly determined that, effective on December 31, 2019, the Church will conclude its relationship as a chartered organization with all Scouting programs around the world. Until that date, to allow for an orderly transition, the intention of the Church is to remain a fully engaged partner in Scouting for boys and young men ages 8–13 and encourages all youth, families, and leaders to continue their active participation and financial support.  

While the Church will no longer be a chartered partner of BSA or sponsor Scouting units after December 31, 2019, it continues to support the goals and values reflected in the Scout Oath and Scout Law and expresses its profound desire for Scouting’s continuing and growing success in the years ahead.

While the severance of relations, effective on December 31, 2019, more than one year away at the time it was announced, was issued as a "joint statement", it was a slam to the the BSA in more ways than one.  For one thing the Mormons had been traditionally huge supporters of Scouting,

continuing on a relationship with churches that in some ways reflected an earlier era when Scouting was heavily invested in churches.  The line "While the Church will no longer be a chartered partner of BSA or sponsor Scouting units after December 31, 2019, it continues to support the goals and values reflected in the Scout Oath and Scout Law" is a shot right under the water line at the Scouts at that, as by severing its relationship with the BSA it implicitly is indicating that it feels that the BSA itself is no longer really true to its original mission and that the LDS church must accordingly break its ties to it.

Where this will go is far from clear, but the public severance by the Mormons nearly closes out an era of close association of various religions with the BSA and reflects a wider societal split on what some very basic values in our society are going to be.  It's also a brave move for the LDS as its takes them very decidedly out into the currently prevailing winds, while at the same time it may be one more move that indicates that Scouting itself is basically coming to an end as it tries to accommodate social trends which run contrary to its original existential purpose.

This is posted here on this site, of course, as the Mormon church is widely represented in some areas of Wyoming as are Scout troops associated with it.

I could have gone on from here.  It was clear that the Mormons were having trouble with their association with the BSA the last few years in general.  With the latest BSA move the Mormons simply could no longer, apparently, accommodate themselves to the socially "progressive" direction the BSA seems to be determined to accommodate, or at least knuckle under to.  In its statement it notes that the LDS church has more members overseas than it does in the US, and that too is telling as the Mormons may have correctly picked up on something that some other churches in the US and Europe have failed to grasp, which is that not only is the majority of the globe not following the western world in certain "progressive" developments, the opposite is in fact the case.  Most of the world, including those parts that have adopted western liberal democratic ideas, are increasingly socially conservative, not socially liberal.  Organizations with a global reach should be at least somewhat aware of that.

It'll be interested to see how this develops.  It would seem likely that the Mormons will form their own Scouting type organization based on the original Scouting concepts.  If they do, they won't be forming the first such organization.  I'll be curious if, assuming they do that, they limit that organization to an all Mormon one or unite it with other severing groups.  I'd guess  they'd do the latter.

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

Boy Scouts in more muscular days.  Examining a Browning M2 .50 BMG machinegun during World War Two.

In some circles, it's popular to speak about there being a "Masculinity Crisis" in our society, by which is meant Western Society.  And I've started such threads a couple of times, and then determined not to post them or even complete them.

Although I have posted one on the decline and fall of the Boy Scouts before.  Indeed, fairly recently, here:

No place for boys. . .

or at least no officially sanctioned ones, anyway.  There will still be groups of boys organized without girls, probably largely self organized, and that's a problem.

The Third Liberty Load was a World War One era liberty loan drive.  Nearly every single thing about this poster would be regarded as abhorrent by our social guardians today.*

When I wrote that, it turned out I was actually a bit premature.  But only a bit.  Now the "Boy Scouts" have gone so far as to make sure there's no "boy" in scouting. . . at least not in the name.  Now the organization is officially neutered. . . and I meant that just the way it sounds.

Lord General Baden Powell, once the British Army's Chief of Cavalry, reviewing the Boy Scouts in November 1918.  These scouts look pretty young, so they'd be, I'd guess, the equivalent of Cub Scouts.  He'd be pretty appalled by the modern Boy Scouts of America. .  or rather Scouting BSA.

Before I go any further, I should note, I have no real personal connection with Scouting.  I may have noted that earlier, but I was only very briefly a Boy Scout. So briefly that I usually just say I was never a Scout, which isn't quite true.  I was a Cub Scout when I was a kid, as was probably every boy in my grade school.  I can't say that experience left much of an impression on me.  It made even less of one on my son who was a Cub Scout for a little over a year and then gave it up, the second year truly being a lame experience.  I was never a Webelo, that intermediate mysterious stage in scouting.  I joined the Boy Scouts at some point in late grade school and was only in it for a few months.  I think I did as a good friend of mine who is still a good friend of mine did the same.  It showed some promise but for some reason, perhaps a family trait of being non joiners, I didn't retain interest in it very long.  Just, if I recall correctly, one late spring, the following summer, and a little bit of the fall.  I obtained a couple of merit badges in that time and still have my red BSA beret around somewhere.  Soon after that I was into junior high and joined the Civil Air Patrol, which I was in a little over three years, which I liked much better.

Badge of Better Boyhood or not, my stint in the BSA was short.  Not as short as my father and his brother, however. They were never in the Scouts which was unusual for their time.

I'd note that this is oddly emblematic for some reason of my immediate family.  Neither my father nor his brother were Scouts of any type.  My father went to his final year in high school here when JrROTC was a requirement, but as he transferred into the school in his last year he was only required to take it for one semester, rather than three years.  He later served in the USAF.  His brother wasn't a Scout either, but did do three years in JrROTC as he had no choice.  He later served in the Army.  I didn't do JrROTC but did do CAP, as noted.  I later served in the National Guard.  Nobody has ever been successful in getting any of us to stay in any fraternal organization for long either.  My father was only Knight of Columbus very briefly and probably because he didn't have much of a choice.  His brother was, but probably not for a real long time.  I never have been.

Guess we're not joiners unless it involves heavy weapons somehow.

Anyhow, I note this as I'm not in the personal nostalgia camp on the Scouts, having never really had much association with them.

Nonetheless, I think the decline of the Scouts from a Boys Organization into whatever it is now is pathetic and a reflection of a culture that's increasingly pathetic.  So, yes, there is a bit of a masculinity crisis in Western Society.

And increasingly there's no legitimate place for boys and men.

Now, I didn't say there's  no place. There always well be.  Men will form such associations one way or another.  The founders of organizations like the Scouts knew that and sought to direct it.  And that's something that's important.

Like it or not, there are real differences between male and female in our society. Right now, the "progressives" amongst us really don't like that, and for that matter they don't even like the concept of gender much or the simple fact that gender is biologically determined.

Elsewhere, earlier in this blog, I went into the "muscular Christianity" movement of the early 20th Century and how that gave rise to Scouting.  While I'll note that I'm pretty pessimistic about Scouting here, one thing I did there was to somewhat question whether youth organizations have declined as much as supposed.  What can't be doubted, however, is that their character has significantly changed and to a degree, over time, and to a great degree in some organizations, they've become feminized in the dual sense of the word.  I.e., they've become more feminine and they've become feministic to a degree.

Now this would vary by organization, but anyone who has looked at them much can't really dispute that and that's been part of a process that has also been a dual one.  One part has been the fully legitimate expansion of the role of women in society in the modern age, a byproduct I've argued was largely due to the mechanization of the household.  That development, while so often focused on, was much more natural in the organic sense than people are willing to even begin to acknowledge, and therefore much less radical no matter how it might appear to social historians. The other part has been, however, something truly radical in the form of the more radical feminist movement.  Always a minority of women, it's been a progressive cause that's not so much sought to advance opportunities for women as to ultimately argue that men and women don't even exist.

Always a factor of the extreme left, that movement has combined with other social goals of the extreme left for an odd progressive stew.  Indeed an interesting book, based on the author's interview (I haven't read it and am not going to) has been written by a former writer from Cosmopolitan who detailed how in that magazines radical heyday she and others in the magazines simply made stuff up to support the concept of the cause, with that concept being a radically libertine one.  Indeed, she maintains that the magazine was even successful in co-opting some of the original feminist who were much more feminine than their followers and who were more in the category of the "Me Too" movement of today, and who even originally opposed abortion.

Such views, interestingly enough, have always been a feature of the really extreme left, which again makes it surprising to see how successful they've become in modern Western Society in our own day.  The early Socialist radicals who would become Marxists took Marx very seriously and argued that "all wives should be held in common" as Marx had, by which they meant that they were opposed to marriage and any kind of sexual restraint at all.  What Mrs. Marx thought of that I don't know, but if you look at the lives of their children it would seem that the concepts of the father of various types brought personal disaster upon the psychological well being of the children.  Lenin, of course, had a wife and a mistress. Stalin had the the pre marriage moral behavior of an alley cat and is suspected in the death of his wife, but perhaps here is where the interesting aspect of the Marxist view starts.  She wanted to work and Stalin, who had a string of paramours before he married her, wasn't keen on that at all.

Indeed, while Communist revolutionaries in the early days discouraged marriage and encouraged abortion and basically lived lives of pretty amoral abandon in this area (the life and writings of Whitaker Chambers provide some interesting insights into that) generally once they started to be successful they took the opposite approach to a radical degree, showing perhaps that the test of that area of Marxist thought failed pretty quickly. The Soviets in power were downright puritanical in Soviet culture and not tolerant at all of what they'd previously espoused and engaged in.  That spread to the later Communist movements which likewise held that view. So much so, in fact, that the British were able to use that as propoganda against Malaysian Communist who had to live lives of strict conduct in these regards including obtaining permission to marry from their superiors. When it could be shown by the British that the superiors privately didn't behave that way, a door was open to disillusion the rank and file who naturally reacted with "hey?"

All of which is pointed out only because concepts put to the test in this area uniformly fail, none the less we're deep in the midst of them.

And one of the things we're deep in the midst of is an outright attack on masculinity and things male.

Now, that may seem like an exaggeration and it can indeed be grossly exaggerated.  And it might not really be fully understood.  But what can be fairly easily determined is that even a pool of average guys today, selected at random, contains a lot more effeminate men than a similar pool would have two or three decades ago.

Not that this hasn't happened before.  It has.  It's seemingly a cyclical sort of thing.

That takes me back to citing the Strauss Howe Generational Theory which always causes me to note that I'm not a proponent of it.  I've cited it enough however to note that I do feel there's something to it, and here what I think there is to it is that feminization of men does seemingly occur on a repeated basis and I'd tend to agree that in part men tend to be what women want them to be.  In eras when the wolf is at the door men tend to be, if you will, more manly.

But I also think that in our own era there's been a real attack on the basic nature, and the ingrained organic nature at that, of being male.  And its an area where those who attack the media have some traction.  I've heard some really sbsurd analysis, for example, on how Donald Trump is emblematic of old maleness that's passing, and this on one of the news shows.

Oh, bull.

But when you are in an era in which the most feminine of men are celebrated, and indeed men who are so confused on their gender that they wish to become women, are celebrated, you know things have become more than a little confused in terms of comporting with nature and biology.

Well, all things straighten out in the end.  It's often said that nature abhors a vacuum but more than that nature simply squashes, on her own time, things that can't exist naturally.  Nature will get you one way or another.  And as such views are uniquely those of a narrow sector of the wealthy, European (which would include European American) Western Society, and not the globe at large, it's pretty arrogant to think that they views will last long

But while they do, some ridiculous and harmful things are made to occur. And the squashing of boys organizations are one of those things.

The Scouts, as detailed before in our earlier threads, were formed because Lord Baden Powell was distressed that British youth had lost its more rugged values.  Coming up in the Protestant Muscular Christianity era and part of it, it sought to combine the lessons and virtues of the outdoor life with Christian values.  It was not a religious organization per se, but it was a Christian one and that really cannot be doubted.  For years and years, and even now, Scout Troops were primarily associated with churches.  Nearly ever major church had one and that meant that Scouting Troops were all Christian as a rule and they were beyond that, sectarian by default if not by design.  Lord Baden Powell himself noted in a book actually entitled Scouting & Christianity that; "Scouting is nothing less than applied Christianity".  Upon the foundation of the movement he had stated:

..We aim for the practice of Christianity in their everyday life and dealings, and not mearly the profession of theology on Sundays....The co-operation of tiny sea insects has brought about the formation of coral islands. No enterprise is too big where there is goodwill and co-operation carrying it out. Every day we are turning away boys anxious to join the Movement, because we have no men or women to take them in hand. There is a vast reserve of loyal patriotism and Christian spirit lying dormant in our nation today, mainly because it sees no direct opportunity for expressing itself. Here in this joyous brotherhood there is a vast opportunity open to all in a happy work that shows the results under your hands and a work that is worth while because it gives every man his chance of service for his fellow-men and for God

You can't get much clearer that that.  Scouting was specifically designed to instill manly virtues in boys in hopes that they'd retain Christian manly virtues as adults.**

This may seem odd to us benighted moderns, but one of the things that has often and periodically been complained about in regards to Christianity is that can become highly feminized.  The reasons for this are often debated but it can be said that one of the reasons is that many of values of Christianity that are associated with compassion seem to lend themselves more naturally to women rather than men. This is so much the case with some that it is easy to forget that not all Christian virtues by a long-shot can be defined by compassion and reducing Christianity to that is grossly in error.

Anyhow, what this has done is to cause cycles in which women predominate in churches. These are cycle, not permanent evolutions, and they don't happen uniformly by any means. The expression of this in the Orthodox churches, for example has been in a different fashion than it has been other churches.  This is true in the Catholic Churches as well, which as is often noted have all male clergy, which doesn't mean that they've been immune to it.***  It's most pronounced in the Protestant churches, some of which have reduced their theology nearly to the "it's nice to be nice to the nice" level.

The Muscular Christianity movement came as a reaction to that in the Protestant Churches in the late 19th Century.  This phenomenon skipped the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, and the Jewish synagogues, at the time, so it was really a Protestant movement.  It was a pretty successful movement however and at least some elements of it, including the Boy Scouts, spread into at least all aspects of the Christian churches in the West.  And it was such a successful movement it proved to be a problem for anti Christian movements in various places.  Nazi Germany, for example, banned the Boy Scouts.

In the spirit of dumping on the Baby Boomers once again, the decline and now the fall of the Scouts is yet another part of their legacy to a degree.  Scouting started to take a hit in the 60s and 70s when the Boomers, who are now the same demographic that wants you to join the Rotarian's, the Elks or one of the two big political parties, didn't want to join anything that featured a uniform.

And the more radical edge of the Boomer movement of the time attacked standards in general and the Boy Scouts were an organization that had them.  Indeed, this was so much the case that to call somebody a "Boy Scout" as a slander is well known.  It's the same as calling somebody a Goody Two Shoes, a slander that absentmindedly recalls the story of an impossibly good maiden whose virtue is rewarded by foot-gear and a happy marriage.

The story upon which a diss is based, although few people probably realize the origin of the phrase.

That in and of itself is interesting as to slam somebody for their virtue is essentially to confess being enraptured by the "glamour of evil".  Nonetheless, the Boy Scouts have slowly succumbed to the pressure of a decline of values and standards. Even by the 1970s the organization wasn't what it was in the 1950s and certainly wasn't what it was in the 1930s.  Hit by some scandals in the late 20th Century and early 21st Century it failed to really urge for a societal examination of the source of those scandals as has every other organization that was hit by the same set of them (and it should be noted that schools, uniquely, continue to be beset by the same phenomenon unabated and were always were they were most expressed, and yet this remains unaddressed and unnoticed).  As homosexual advocates gained ground in their advocacy for the normalization of their attractions in the early 21st Century the Boy Scouts prohibition on homosexual leaders and openly homosexual members came under attack and while the Scouts initially leaned back on the organizations Christian underpinnings it soon yielded. Whether it should have or not can be debated, but the fact that the organization basically first relied upon its Christian underpinnings and then rapidly changed course signaled pretty clearly that it was drifting rapidly away from its original organic purpose.

The Community Hall

The sign reads "Community Hall, Restored 1976, Gillette FFA".

Between Wright and Edgerton.

There are a fair number of these.

Little halls for isolated rural communities.  Communities that were really too far from town to go to town's regularly.  Even as late as the 1970s, when this one was restored, I can recall one in northern rural Carbon County that received a fair amount of use.

Now, I'd guess none of them do

No place for boys. . .

or at least no officially sanctioned ones, anyway.  There will still be groups of boys organized without girls, probably largely self organized, and that's a problem.

The Third Liberty Load was a World War One era liberty loan drive.  Nearly every single thing about this poster would be regarded as abhorrent by our social guardians today.

The Boy Scouts of America's board of directors has unanimously agreed to welcome girls into the Cub Scout program and to forge a path for older girls to pursue and earn the highest rank of Eagle Scout, the organization said Wednesday.

And why?

Well, because boys will be boys, and we can't have that.

There's basically a war on masculinity going on in this country and in Western society as a whole, waged by social theorists and backed and staffed by members of my profession, lawyers, whose allegiance is principally to the theory that everything presents a good cause of action.  And its destroying things.  I'd say that at some point it becomes dangerous, but we've passed that point long ago.  It needs to stop, and in a major way, but nobody has the guts to really take it on.

And this is an example of this.

I've posted on the Boy Scouts fairly recently.  In that item I went into the history of the Boy Scouts and how they came about. As noted in that post, the Boy Scouts were an expression of the "Muscular Christianity" movement, a movement principally focused in Protestant Faiths (the Catholic and Orthodox branches of Christianity already had a strong masculine expression at the time).  The Boy Scouts specifically came about as Lord Baden Powell was getting concerned that British youth was exhibiting all the foundation of a mass of boiled noodles and looking rather pathetic in comparison to their equivalents in Africa who had been raised in a heartier more outdoorsy fashion.

That was, of course, because those Boer youth in Africa had been raised in a very outdoors fashion and the English were by that time largely urban, just as Americans are today.  But that concern existed even at that time in the United States and not without good reason.

And underlying theme of the early Boy Scouts was to instill Christian virtues in boys.  At a time in which a lot of children started working in their early teens there was reason to be concerned.  Looking back, its fairly amazing the extent to which American youth of that era did largely stick to the values they had been exposed to early on, as the pressure in the opposite direction was enormous.  I know, for example, that my grandfather was a loyal Catholic his whole life and that he was good friends with the Monsignor who was at the local parish.  He'd left home at age 13 and worked first in San Francisco.  How much strength of character must have that taken (and how adult were 13 year olds at that time)?

But that wasn't true of everyone.

 

Boy's scouting. . . but not in a good way.  Coal thieves, 1917.

One of the tragedies of the very recent modern world and a major problem for European society (of which we are part) has been the acceptance that there is such a thing as the feminine and denial that there is such a think as the masculine.  Both exist by nature, but modern social theorist abhor that fact.  This has meant, over time, that anything that is either masculine by social construction, or even more disturbingly by nature, has been attacked and has to be dismantled.  This has given is a bizarre world where female athletics must be protected, in that fashion, under Title IX while at the same time sports that are fairly naturally male (and which revert that at the professional level) must be open to any girl foolish and reckless enough to subject themselves to them.  Combat, the unfortunate occupation of men since the dawn of time, now must be open to women too, even though anyone even remotely familiar with what that means should be horrified.  And no male organization can stands.

Critics might reply that female ones are likewise open to men, but for the most part, men and boys want nothing to do with them. Yes, the Girl Scouts are open to boys but generally most boys would not want to join it, and those who do are likely unusual or have parents who are rather unusual.  Usually in their teens the attention of males starts focusing on females, but not in the sense that most teenage men want to hang out in a large group of teenage girls and attempt to engage them on that level.  Even as adults most men do not like being the only man in a group of women as the talk and interactions will rapidly become gender unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and uninteresting (let alone exceedingly complicated. . . the relationship between women, by nature, is subject to a set of seemingly genetically foreordained rules that no man understands or wants to understand).

In the real world, the world where young men form gangs by nature and where the attention of young men is naturally outdoors (as it naturally is for older men as well), and where the influences on the school yard and locker room are often highly immoral, having an organization dedicated to boys alone, lead by virtuous men, and with a focus on nature, would be a good thing.

But now, the societal Nazis have taken one of the few ones that existed down, to the loss of us all.  Can a feminist BDM be far behind?

__________________________________________________________________________________

Lest anyone wonder, as I've noted before, yes I was a Cub Scout, but I was only a Boy Scout for about 2.5 seconds.  Even in my day, which is now long ago, the Boy Scouts weren't what they once were, at least in my experience.  But they were boys.

Anyhow,. my comments here aren't due to any residual nostalgia for my days in Scouting. Frankly, I wasn't terribly impressed back then. But I also recognize that my experiences are just mine.  And I also feel that boys ought to have some place that they can seek to develop as men, without having to have the constant influence of the better half.  They'll get plenty of that elsewhere.  Having a few places they can go with just men and boys isn't too much to ask.

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

Granted, we may now have the single most confusing title for an entry on this site, but then this will be a scrambled and confusing thread. So there.

 Boy Scouts writing home from camp, Hunter's Island, New York.  The one guy behind them looks so old that he could have served in the Mexican War.

Recently, I posted this item:

Lex Anteinternet: Military preparedness and World War One. Training ...:  Bayonet Drill. At one time the concept of boys and girls "going to camp" was so common that it was kind of a running joke....

As I noted in that post, although it wasn't the main point of the post, at one time Scouting was huge.  Scouting, that is, in the Boy Scouts sense. Girl Scouts, or Girl Guides, too, although we'll get to those in a moment..

And not just the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts (Guides), but also a host of other similar uniformed, and non uniformed youth organizations, most of which came in during the very late 19th to mid 20th Centuries and most of which, we're told (but is it true?) are now in decline.

Well, we track trends and experiences where.  Let's look at this.  It's an interesting topic.

Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts

And let's start with the Scouts.

 A retired Lord Baden-Powell, dressed in a Scout uniform, with King George,

The Scouts originated due to Lieutenant General Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell, OM GCMG GCVO.  Powell was a never married British Army officer who rose to prominence in the British Army during the Second Matabele War.  In that war, as a cavalryman, he lead mounted reconnaissance operations and met American adventurer Frederick Russell Burnham DSO.  Burnham was, as noted, from the United States but he fit into a group of Americans who found the concept of adventure in the expanding British Empire to be a huge lure, so after an early life of adventure if the United States he decamped to Africa, ended up in the  British forces there, and ultimately rose to high rank in the British Army, a fairly unusual career.

Now, during that time Burnham met Baden-Powell and taught him a lot about what he'd learned about out back life to Baden-Powell, which the latter then employed in Africa.  It made a deep impression on the British cavalryman who soon came to believe, and deplore the lack of manly outdoor skills possessed by British youth.

The UK was a heavily urbanized country by that time, but we can't help but note that it was surely a bit more agricultural then, as compared to now.  Nonetheless, Baden-Powell was likely observing a real phenomenon.  British youth probably was pretty short on woodcraft and outdoor skills, and hence the Boy Scouts came into being as a means of introducing them to that.  It took off like wildfire, being introduced in the UK in 1908 and crossing the Atlantic in to the United States (1910) and Canada (1909).  As in the UK, there was a deep concern in the US that the country was becoming rapidly urbanized and that, as a result, American youth were loosing these skills.

 Baden Powell late in life.

It was really big.  Nearly any established church had a Boy Scout and Girl Scout "Troop", which made sense as originally Scouting emphasized what was (and is, if used correctly) "muscular Christianity".  That is, it was an organization that not only sought to introduce children to the outdoor life and teach them outdoor skills, but which was further premised on the concept that a vigorous outdoor life complimented the vigorous Christian life, although not in a completely overt and stated fashion.  An early version of the Boy Scout handbook proclaimed:

The Boy Scout Movement has become almost universal, and wherever organized its leaders are glad, as we are, to acknowledge the debt we all owe to Lieut.-Gen. Sir Robert S. S. Baden-Powell, who has done so much to make the movement of interest to boys of all nations.

* * *

In these pages and throughout our organization we have made it obligatory upon our scouts that they cultivate courage, loyalty, patriotism, brotherliness, self-control, courtesy, kindness to animals, usefulness, cheerfulness, cleanliness, thrift, purity and honor. No one can doubt that with such training added to his native gifts, the American boy will in the near future, as a man, be an efficient leader in the paths of civilization and peace.

It has been deemed wise to publish all material especially for the aid of scout masters in a separate volume to be known as "The Scout Masters' Manual."

We send out our "Official Handbook," therefore, with the earnest wish that many boys may find in it new methods for the proper use of their leisure time and fresh inspiration in their efforts to make their hours of recreation contribute to strong, noble manhood in the days to come.

The manual, when defining scouting, specifically related it to war (that is, acting as a scout in military service), and noted in that context:

Wherever there have been heroes, there have been scouts, and to be a scout means to be prepared to do the right thing at the right moment, no matter what the consequences may be.

The way for achievement in big things is the preparing of one's self for doing the big things--by going into training and doing the little things well. It was this characteristic of Livingstone, the great explorer, that made him what he was, and that has marked the career of all good scouts.

Lord Baden Powell himself stated on numerous occasions how he conceived of the movement as a Christian movement. In 1917 he declared in 1917 that:  "Scouting is nothing less than applied Christianity" in his book Scouting & Christianity.  Upon the foundation of the movement he had stated:

..We aim for the practice of Christianity in their everyday life and dealings, and not mearly the profession of theology on Sundays.... The co-operation of tiny sea insects has brought about the formation of coral islands. No enterprise is too big where there is goodwill and co-operation carrying it out. Every day we are turning away boys anxious to join the Movement, because we have no men or women to take them in hand. There is a vast reserve of loyal patriotism and Christian spirit lying dormant in our nation today, mainly because it sees no direct opportunity for expressing itself. Here in this joyous brotherhood there is a vast opportunity open to all in a happy work that shows the results under your hands and a work that is worth while because it gives every man his chance of service for his fellow-men and for God

A modern (there's no such thing  as "post modern, so get over that) might look at this in our current era with a degree of skepticism.  That is, it's unlikely that scouts of the very recently closed Frontier Era were universally "prepared to do the right thing".   That might be true, depending upon how a person looked at it,   Prepared to do the morally virtuous thing probably doesn't quite fit that definition in our view today, but at the time the recently closed Frontier Era wasn't looked at quite the same way.

 Boy Scout, 1918.  This particular scout is in a troop sponsored by the American Red Cross.

Anyhow, Scouting took off like wildfire and became huge in no time. We've seen photographs of early scouts put up here in the context of the Great War and we could do the same with World War Two quite easily.  I don't know what percentage of American boys joined the Boy Scouts, or its companions the Girl Scouts and the Camp Fire Girls but it was pretty big.

 Girl Scouts in camp, 1912.  These girls are dressed in a completely inappropriate fashion for what they are doing.

Oh, I keep mentioning the Girl Scouts, what was up with them?

Well, not long after the foundation of the Boy Scouts the Girl Guides, which became the Girl Scouts in most places, was founded.  Like the Boy Scouts, it focused on outdoorsy stuff but naturally it didn't focus on manly virtues.  Having said that, it's interesting in that it took a principal focus of scouting, the outdoor life, and took a "us too" approach to it in regards to girls.  

Princess Mary, in 1922, on the occasion of her nuptials, with the Girl Guides.

I know a lot less about the Girl Guides or the Girl Scouts than I do about the Boy Scouts simply because I've never been exposed to them, really, except annually during their famous cookie sales. But fairly clearly, they leaned heavily on the Boy Scouts in principal ways, but not in every way.  The founder, who hailed from Scotland, originally focused on female roles in farm families, but upon the arrival of World War One, they did drill, like Boy Scouts, a very military focus.

 Girl Scout garden during the big gardening push of World War One.  While the Girl Scouts also had an outdoor focus, many of its original aims also aimed at traditional female roles.

An odd thing about the Girl Scouts, however, is that it had a rival organization nearly immediately, or at least there were two expressions of the movement almost immediately.  In 1910, the United States, men who had boys in the Boy Scouts felt the need for a companion organization for girls and formed the Camp Fire Girls.  The organization attempted a merger with the Girl Scouts in 1912 but it was rejected by the organization as it was the bigger of the two.

 Camp Fire Girls in 1917.  These girls are all dressed in Indian fashion showing a then current fascination with Indian Tribes in an idealized fashion.

Joining these youth organizations wasn't universal, however, in spite of what some might like to think.  I know, for example, my father, born in 1929, was never  a Boy Scout and I don't think his younger brother ever was either.  My mother, however, was a Girl Guide in Quebec. 

The Scouts, both Girl and Boy, had competition right from the onset.  Sure proof that Lord Baden Powell had tapped into something is provided by the fact that copycat organizations sprung up right away.  Most of these  organizations rose and fell pretty quickly, and most of them were pretty much copies of the Scouts but without the large organization backing it up and the all that went with it. So its' not too surprising that they didn't last all that long.  Some were a little more militaristic than the Scouts, particularly early on, and emphasized things like shooting, although that was an aspect of the Scouts as well.  I won't, therefore, dwell much with them.  I will note, however, that oddly enough the Boy Scouts itself competed a bit against it self in this area when, in 1912, it organized the Sea Scouts, a youth organization that was focused on the sea and seafaring skills, but which very clearly modeled itself on the Navy in uniform and early appearance, showing how close to being a quasi private military training organization the Scouts really were.

Taking this forward the Scouts remained really strong for a really long time.  I don't know what percentage of American youth belonged to the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, etc., but it seems to have been a fairly large percentage.  As recently as the 1950s it seems to me that there was sort of an assumption that boys and girls became Scouts.  Even as recently as the 1970s quite a few were, although I was only a Boy Scout myself for a few months (so few that I usually say I was never a Scout, too few to really count).

 Boy Scouts, Camp Fire Girls, and the United States Forest Service in a joint poster commemorating the 50th anniversary of the youth organizations.  As an aside, this poster demonstrates the change in Boy Scout headgear as, by this time, the Boy Scouts had generally gone to garrison caps, a pretty worthless type of hat for outdoor wear but which had come into U.S. use during World War One and which had increased in use during World War Two.  Some time in the 1970s the Boy Scouts would introduce the equally worthless beret.

Moreover, only one of my close friends was a Scout. And that's remarkable given that of my close friends at least two had fathers who had been very involved in Scouting and all of us were very outdoorsy.  The one of my friends, moreover, who was very involved in Scouting was a Mormon and the LDS faith had a very close relationship with Scouting, fielding their own troops.

Indeed, that latter fact is remarkable as I've heard that in the 1930s and 1940s all the local churches had their own troops. This is no longer true at all.  The one I was very briefly in met in a church, but it had no obvious connection with it.  I've heard that our local Parish still retains a connection with a Boy Scout Troops, but I've never seen any evidence of that (perhaps its really more closely associated with the Parish's school).   Anyhow, I don't see much evidence of a Boy Scout Troop at church.

This would suggest that whatever has been going on with Scouting, at least in our local area, there's been a decline in youth involvement since at least the 1970s, which would be before any of the currently cited reasons for such a decline set in.

That there has been very much a decline in recent years seems very well established by statistics.  And some have analyzed it and claimed a variety of reasons for it.

If I had a more solid grasp on that, I'd take a look at more closely, but I don't.  The loss of closely connected Christian values is one cited source as the organization has undergone an assault from the "tolerance means acceptance" brigade and its Christian message has definitely occurred.  The concept that there must be no place whatsoever where men can gather in an official setting where women can't be let in has been cited as well, and I think there's a little to that.  The Boy Scouts opened up to girls some time ago and frankly a Boy Scout organization that's co-ed, no matter how little its co-ed, isn't going to quite be focusing on "manly virtues" in the same way, but rather will inevitably do it in a washed out meaningless fashion.  The Girl Scouts is also open to boys, but the nature of boys will largely preclude them from joining it very much anyhow.

Having said all of that, at least by way of my personal observation, I"m not so sure Scouting is in as much trouble as some think.    Going back to my own friends, one of my lifelong friends, whom I was in the Cub Scouts with, has two sons who will make Eagle Scout.  Neither of us were Boy Scouts.  Another friend of mine has a son who will make Eagle Scout.  He was never a Boy Scout.  One of my co-workers had two sons stop by here selling Boy Scout popcorn this year (apparently only one was supposed to).  So, at least by way of observation, Boy Scouts around here appear to be rebounding.

As we've seen from above, the early Boy Scouts recalled military scouting pretty strongly. Even the Girl Scouts did to a degree.  But they weren't the only youth organizations at the start of the 20th Century that looked to the military for inspiration.  Let's take a look at them.

Cadets

Recently on this site we discussed JrROTC, which like Scouting, is now just over 100 years old.  Its about a decade younger than Scouting, having gotten rolling with World War One.  As I just posted on this, and I don't want to repeat what I already wrote there, I'm going to quote a fair amount from that recent entry here, which is the one that inspired this post.

The Great War sparked a huge national movement towards preparedness, and not just in the Boy Scout motto "Always Be Prepared" vein.  Republican elements urged the US to enter the war early on and when the US did not, those who backed entry into the war sponsored military training camps for young men.  Men in their 20s and 30s, that is.  These camps were staffed by Regular Officers of the U.S. Army and sought to train men to serve as Army officers should the need arise, which it was suspected that it might.  The most famous of these was at Plattsburg, New York, but it wasn't the only one by any means.  And they weren't limited to men.  Prior to the country's entry into the war there were also camps for women, teaching them field craft and some military skills, such as the use of semaphore flags, skills that would prove to be more militaristic than they'd actually need for service in the Great War given the roles they were given.

 

 Playing the dread, and stupid, mumbly peg knife game.  Note the hat cords on their M1911 Campaign hats.  I wish this was in color so we could get the branch designation.

And by 1916, the Preparedness Movement, having seen the war in Europe spread to Asia and having seen a semi war break out along the border with Mexico, spread to teenage boys.

The Reserve Officer Training Corps was established in 1916 under the National Defense Act of 1916.  With two expressions, ROTC and JrROTC it covered young men in their high school and college ages.  ROTC, the college aged version, sought to train college men to serve as officers should the need arise.  JrROTC, in contrast, sought to teach high school aged boys basic military skills that would give them a jump in serving as enlisted men in the Army, should that need arise.

 July.  Its hot.

The story of JrROTC has remained a confused one, and somewhat under addressed, for years.  One thing about it is that the 1916 start of it in some ways picked up what was already going on.  In some schools, including the one I graduated from in 1981, an organization like JrROTC was already in place.  You can find, for example, photographs of Natrona County High School boys drilling in uniform in 1915, a year prior to the creation of JrROTC, and the school now boast the oldest surviving JrROTC unit in the United States.  I note that here as I don't think the kids in these photographs are in JrROTC (some might have been, or would soon be), but rather a military organization run by the State of New York that was really darned close to it.  Indeed New York's Military Commission was given broad authority to organize the military instruction of youth during its brief existence (it ceased to exist in 1921).  It basically ran what was JrROTC in New York, which was so extensive that its authority extended to young men who were employed outside of schools, ie., who had dropped out.  In Wyoming JrROTC took off so fast that in 1916 there were state drill competitions between different JrROTC unis across the state.  It was a big deal.

Semaphore signals remained a necessary military skill at the time.

I'll pick up with another quote again in a second, but carrying on with this, what you'd expect to have been the case, that JrROTC would have died with the recoiling against the Great War that occurred in the United States after World War One, did not. Now, huge efforts to train every kid in an entire state, like that of New York did pass away. And lots of high schools that had JrROTC did in fact drop it. But it didn't disappear completely by any means.  Indeed, it didn't disappear locally and it remained a  mandatory class at our local high school.  As will be noted, it did until the 1970s.

We continue:

In our kinder and gentler age, JrROTC has undergone quite a century long evolution and so have events like this. When I was in high school JrROTC did have a summer encampment at the National Guard's Camp Guernsey.  Now, I was never in JrROTC and when I was in high school in the late 1970s and early 1980s "Rotcey" didn't have a lot of general student body respect.  The program had gone from being a mandatory one for boys, dating back to at least 1915, to an elective one in around 1976, and even those who had some concept of serving in the military were a bit leery about it.  It was classified as a physical education class, perhaps justifiably, but that meant it was filled with an odd combination of boys who knew that they were entering the service with certainty and those seeking to avoid PE.  Anyhow, the only time I ran across them in their summer camp was when I was a National Guardsmen working at the Armory who went to Guernsey about this time of year, after we'd already done our Annual Training.  We tended not to be impressed if, for no other reason, the uniform liberties they were given meant that they were sporting a lot of late Vietnam War type uniforms and berets and the like, prior to any of that being uniform gear in the Army itself.

Anyhow, over its century of existence JrROTC has undergone quite a transformation.  I guess all organizations for boys have.  In 1917, such as during the same period when these July 16, 1917 photographs were taken, it was real military training with real gear.  The boys doing bayonet drills up above aren't using weapons at all, but still, they're learning to kill in a pretty up close and personal way.  In the 1930s and 1940s I know that the local school drilled with M1917 Enfields and the rifle team, which was excellent, competed across state lines using M1903 Springfields.  In the 1970s it became an elective here but I can still recall their having a few M14 rifles for demonstration purposes and a collection of M1 Garands for the drill team.  Girls came in at some point (I'm not sure when) and now I'm told that the rifle team uses air rifles. When I was in high school the rifle team used .22 target rifles, which are at least a real rifle.  Not that air rifles don't have their virtues, they do.

Picking back up, if you had asked me in 1981, when I graduated from high school, if I would expect to see JrROTC still there nearly forty years later, I'd have said no. At the time, in the post Vietnan War wake, even here in Wyoming where the war was never unpopular, JrROTC seemed to be on its way out.  And during my time in the National Guard JrROTC certainly did nothing to endear itself to me and folks like me, as when were were down in Camp Guernsey after annual AT, and the JrROTC was there, they looked ridiculous, all decked out in Vietnam era camouflage uniforms and sporting, in some instances, berets when only the Special Forces, at that time, wore them.  But JrROTC is still there and, as with the Boy Scouts, I'm not too certain that something hasn't gone around the other way.  I've been really surprised by how many kids I somewhat know that are in it or have been recently.  It's obviously more broadly popular than it was in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

JrROTC isn't the only organization in this category, I'd note.  While the Boy Scouts started moving away from its more military features sometime after World War One (although you wouldn't have known that to look at the Sea Scouts) not only did JrROTC keep on keeping on, but it received a little competition from the Civil Air Patrol.  Here's one organization that I actually do have experience with.

 

Civil Air Patrol members, Bar Harbor Maine, during World War Two.

The Civil Air Patrol got its start during World War Two when the United States Army Air Corps enlisted the service of the nations numerous private pilots.  For the most part, during the Second World War, the CAP is associated with quite successful coastal patrols for submarines where tehy proved to be a real irritant to the Kreigsmarine.  They did a little more than that, however, including some patrols on the border with Mexico.  By the end of World War Two the CAP had located 173 German U-boats, attacked 57 of those, hitting10 and sinking two.  Sixty four CAP pilots lost their lives during the war, no doubt mostly to accidents (if not all to accidents).

Following the war, surprisingly, the Air Force retained the CAP as an "auxiliary" organization, converting its mission to search and rescue.  However, seeing a good recruiting tool at hand, it also created a cadet wing which essentially amounted to a type of Air Force JrROTC.

Now some may note that the Air Force has a JrROTC branch, as does the navy (and even, albeit a very small one, the Marine Corps). But this wasn't the case originally.  At first every JrROTC unit in the country was an Army one. The Air Force apparently saw a way to branch into this and make use of a great inducement for youth, aircraft.  CAP, not surprisingly, is very aircraft centric.

 Civil Air Patrol poster, including a CAP cadet, from 1955.

I was in the Civil Air Patrol in the 1970s and at that time it was in fact very much like Air Force JrROTC.  Drill and Ceremony was a big deal with it, for example.  We wore Air Force uniforms and normally the fatigue version of that.  We focused on aircraft, of course, and on the CAP's mission of search and rescue.  Looking back it seems like I was in it for a long time, but in reality that simply reflects the concept of time possessed by youth.  I was in it while I was in junior high, three years.

Looking back, and I can recall it only dimly, I probably thought when I joined it in 7th Grade, after learning about it at the junior high, of staying in it until I was in high school and could join JrROTC.  However, I enjoyed it in its own right.  For reasons I can't really recall, once I was of high school age I dropped my membership entirely.  Once I walked in the door of NCHS, I didn't walk back in the door of the CAP Wing's building here.  I couldn't tell you why, I just didn't.

CAP still has a youth wing but I don't know anything about it.  It appears to be focused on aircraft still, of course, but also on "leadership", something a lot of youth organizations focus on.  If it resembles the old organization much, I wouldn't know.  It's still around, but how popular it is I don't know.  I don't know of any kids that I know being in it, but here the opposite is true as compared to the Scouts.  I'm often quite surprised by how many people I'll run into that were in the CAP as teens.  I know that two of my best friends were in it when was first in it, although they dropped out (just getting there was an ordeal for one who lived out in the country) and I know adults here and there that were.  Just the other day the Byzantine Catholic priest from the Catholic Stuff You Should Know podcast mentioned having been a CAP cadet.

Down on the farm, sort of.

Going from uniformed service, I suppose, to the field, there's long been a collection of youth organizations centered around rural life, and there still are.  We should look at them as well.

The biggest and most well known of these is 4H.  4H got its start in the late 19th Century at a time in which there was a great deal of interest in expanding education to rural communities and youth.  At the same time the nation's land grant colleges and high schools were being very much focused on and, while less than 50% of all Americans graduated from high school, there was a big emphasis on improving average lives through education.  4H came about as part of that.

 Boys at the 4H Fair in Cimarron Kansas, 1939.  County fairs were done away with in Kansas during the Depression, but 4H stepped in and filled the gap nearly entirely.

As this should perhaps indicate, 4H is a lot broader of program than some might imagine who aren't familiar iwth it.  Over time it's become one of the very rare Congressionally recognized special corporations and its quasi governmental in its organization, being under the United States Department of Agriculture and administered state by state by each state's university programs. Wyoming's is administered by the University of Wyoming, which is a land grant university.

Given this origin its not too surprising that 4H has a semi rural but semi vocational focus.  Many people are familiar with its farm related activities, which have been part of it since the very beginning, but its expanded out a lot and not only retains those but many other programs as well.  Locally, for example, it has many farm related programs but it also has sporting related programs, as it does in every state, and programs that might be called domestic.  It's amazingly broad.  Given that, its trajectory doesn't follow that of other youth organizations.  4H peaked out in membership, for example, in 1974.

 4H member with lamb at 4H fair in Kansas, 1939.  Animal raising and showing remains a big part of 4H, but it's not limited to livestock by any means.

Given that fact it's prehaps no surprise that when I was quite young I was in a 4H program locally, but only for about a year or so (I guess I'm not much of a joiner).  My father never was, even though he lived in a family growing up that was extremely closely associated with agriculture.  I suspect that was because he lived in town, even though associated with agriculture, and, at that time, most 4H members were likely living by farms and ranches.  I can recall, for example, him having a distinct memory of a young woman riding a prized bull into the packing house, which would surely have been a Fair Prize bull and likely a 4H bull.

By the time I was in it, in the early 1970s, it had expanded into town but not terribly effectively in our area.  Now, all that has changed.  The shooting sports program it runs in this county dwarfs that of any other organization by far.  Rifle competitors, for example, in this county alone probably outnumber all the JrROTC competitors for the entire state, and the 4H shooters are using firearms, not air rifles.

 4H Cat Show.

I've been associated with 4H as an adult as my kids were/are both in it.  Quite a few other people I know can tell similar stories. So here too, maybe what I expected to report here I can't honestly report.  4H seems to be doing just fine.

That takes me to FFA, the Future Farmers of America.  I can't say much about the FFA as I don't know anything about it at all.  It's also a youth centered farm organization but a more recent one than most of the ones I've written about here, coming about, apparently, in 1928.  Locally it was always very strongly associated with being in a farm or ranch family and when I a kid it was exclusively associated with that.  By the time my wife was in it, and she was, a decade later this was less true and kids from the edge of town were sometimes in it. This seems to still be the case today.

 FFA members, 1942.

Which brings up a peripheral point that's a bit interesting.  In the late 1970s when I was in high school to dress, shall we say, in an agricultural fashion was something truly limited to kids who lived on farms and ranches. When we saw a kid in the hall with a cowboy hat, we knew for sure he was really a cowboy. There were some there who dressed that way everyday, but that look was definitely honestly maintained.  Something here has changed too in that its pretty common now, meaning only that a person is associated with the agricultural class or perhaps aspires to it.  The membership of FFA, locally, has expanded in that direction a bit too, I believe.

I'm hindered in saying much else about the organization.  I know that they have a big annual convention back east and that livestock judging is part of its range of activities locally.  I also know that public speaking is part of what it requires.  It tended to focus on education and skills as 4H does, but in a more limited fashion, I think.  I'm always really surprised when I meet an adult out of context and find that he was in FFA as that tells me that he must have a more rural background that I'd suppose, something that people are often surprised to learn about me as well.

The other thing I can note about FFA is that when I was in high school FAA students had cool blue corduroy jackets with the big FFA symbol on the back of them. They still do.

Based on Faith

Before closing this out, I should note faith based organizations.

 Young Men's Christian Association magazine. The YMCA is not a youth organization, but it had a young focus originally, and its a partial inspiration for some true youth organizations.

In a way, by doing that, I"m circling back to where I started, albeit in an awkward way.

One of the thing we noted about the Boy Scouts is that they were originally Christian themed and remain somewhat so today.  Not surprisingly, therefore, organizations that are very strongly focused on faith and particular denominations came into being at about the same time, or in some cases a little later in the 20th Century.

Its hard to ignore the YMCA in this context, even though it is not a youth organization by any means.  It was, however, an expression of the Muscular Christianity movement which in part focused on the thought that giving an athletic expression to increasingly urban young men would help to keep them from falling into vice.  The YMCA is famous in these regards but it actually isn't unique.  Indeed, a prior Catholic organization in Germany was likewise focused on the plight of newly urban men, although without the athletic focus.

Anyhow, prior to the early 20th Century it would be my guess, and its just a guess, that the need for youth organizations based on Faith were few, as in that slower more localized world young people were more likely to be incorporated into the faith lives of their community and churches.  By the early 20th Century, however some things had begun to change.

 YMCA youth group, 1967, looking for all the world just like a youth group from 1967.

Here, as with some of the organizations noted above, I'm embarrassed to admit that I'm not all that personally familiar with these organizations.  I do recall that the Catholic one, the Catholic Youth Organization, was pretty active here in town.  What I recall about it is that it had a basketball league and that it sponsored dances.

Looking it up I find that the basketball league was natural, as the CYO had taken its inspiration in part from the YMCA.  In fact a quick search of CYO symbols reveals that a basketball and the basketball hoop are prominently incorporated in a lot of them. Basketball was the original urban indoor sport, so that's not too surprising.

This is one organization that I"m pretty sure has taken a hit in participation over the past thirty or so years and I don't think there is a CYO in this town anymore, which says something as this is the second largest city in the state.  I think Cheyenne may still have one.  I'm  not sure what occurred here but whatever did, this seems to have declined.  This may simply be because CYO organization shave to compete with a plethora of other activities, particularly sports activities, many, indeed most of which, are sponsored by the schools.  School sporting facilities have gotten so good, I'd note, that its hard to image parish basketball courts competing very well with them.

Of course, the local history of the CYO here might not mean much, so I probably can't comment too much, but I would note that there has been a small rise, over the past twenty or so years, in youth programs associated with various religions.  To at least some degree these stand apart  from organizations like the CYO as the CYO, and similar organizations, are informed more by the YMCA than they are by organizations like the Boy Scouts, and the opposite is otherwise true for these revived organizations.

For example, the Mormons had a massive participation in the Boy Scouts after initial hesitancy was overcome.  In recent years the LDS has been the biggest single faith in the Boy Scouts by participation.  However, with Scouting having felt forced to accommodate first girls and then, and more seriously, homosexuality, the LDS have withdrawn their participation in some Scouting activities and it seems pretty up in the air where this will lead.  here this will go is not currently all worked out.

Where's its partially lead is to a revival of Scouting inspired movements that are definitely strongly associated with certain religions, rather than just broadly Christian.  This trend might continue to develop, we'll see, and if it does it might pose a bit of a threat to Scouting in a way, although I think that threat would be simply to weaken it overall.  It also might lead to a bit of a revival of Christian youth organizations that are more local, more CYO like if you will

So, I don't really have a sweeping conclusion here.  Things have changed, but it's hard to define how.

So, were you a member of any youth organization?

And did you go to camp?