Read any good books lately?

[Miki101]

I can give it a go in a couple of days, if that's ok. I'm sure others will have interesting lists as well.

[Kahuna]

I'd put Bill Hillcourt's Baden-Powell, Two Lives of a Hero at the top.

 

Others that come to mind in no particular order:

 

William Murry, The History of the B.S.A.1937.

Rowan's To Do My Best on James E. West already mentioned above.

Tim Jeal, The Boy-Men.

Michael Rosenthal, The Character Factory. 1986. Not very favorable or particularly reliable, but gives some interesting info and comparisons.

J.S. Wilson, Scouting Round the World. An international perspective.

 

I'm sure others will come to mind, but that's a start.

[Miki101]

If I had to pick 10 books that would best explain who, what, when, where, and why Scouting was started and still succeeds today, I couldn't, because I would need these 15 titles for my trip to a desert island. They pretty much cover the topic and are "best of breed" in my humble opinion. They are excellent crash course books with regard to Scouting history.

 

Boyce - Janice A. Petterchak, Lone Scout: W.D. Boyce and American Boy Scouting

 

Beard - Cyril Clemens & Carroll Sibley, Uncle Dan: The Life Story of Dan Beard

D.C. Beard, The American Boy's Handy Book

 

Seton - H. Allan Anderson, The Chief

Ernest Thompson Seton, The Birch-Bark Roll of the Woodcraft Indians

 

B-P - Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys

Tim Jeal, The Boy-Man

Malcolm Flower-Smith & Edmund Yorke, Mafeking! The Story of a Siege

 

West - Edward L. Rowan, To Do My Best: James E. West and the History of the Boy Scouts of

America

 

Scouting - Robert Peterson, The Boy Scouts: An American Adventure

William D. Murray, The History of the Boy Scouts of America

Robert H. MacDonald, Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement

David I. MacLeod, Good Boys Made Better: The Boy Scouts of America, Boys Brigades

and the YMCA Boys Work 1880 1920

Edgar M. Robinson, The Early Years: The Beginnings of Work with Boys in the YMCA

Peter Schmitt, Back to Nature

 

David C. Scott

[hot_foot_eagle]

Thanks for the suggestions. My wife is always asking what I want for my birthday, etc. Now I have a list!

 

I have a copy of Hillcourt's "Two Lives. . ." and enjoyed it thoroughly.

 

[Kahuna]

Pretty good list, David. Some of those books I haven't read, but will correct that soon. Some are on Amazon, the others will take some library diving.

 

Thanks for posting that.

[troutmaster]

Just finished reading (or re-reading?; thought I had but was not overly familiar) Black Wolf, by Keller. It is a biography of Seton and focuses mostly on his personal life. There is direct mention of his disagreements with B.P. and the BSA, but it generally talks about his work and family life. Still, good read.

[Miki101]

I found the Keller bio of Seton was too biased being overly pro-Seton and anti-BP. (I have copies of Seton's papers in my archive that refute some of her core "BP is evil" arguments). I feel that it is not as well researched as it needed to be and rather simplistic in viewpoint. Keller is a Canadian herself and seems to have taken a pro-Canadian view of her fellow British Empire countryman. (As far BP goes, his fellow countryman, Tim Jeal, goes in the opposite direction and goes out of his way to damn the man by simply implying - not convicting - problems with BP's character.)

 

However, John Wadland's book/dissertation - a Canadian himself - is much better than Keller's book and much more scholarly. Yet Anderson's book is the best all-around,fair and complete one in the lot. That is why I prefer it among these three. A new one by the Mellon Press is way too expensive and challenging to read. Not user friendly at all.

 

My 5 cents.

 

David C. Scott

[troutmaster]

David; I too found it to be lacking in depth. Felt she did not support many of her inuendos very well. Also, she danced all around Seton's tendency towards persecution, but never really dealt with it. I have read a half dozen or more BP biographies, and came to the conclusion that BP, while certainly borrowing from others, used it in a more viable manner which led to the Boy Scouts' success. Overall, BP appears to me to have been fairly typical in his attitudes and approach to things as most men of his position in English society from that period. Seton, on the other hand, has always struck me as a very egocentric, but accomplished artist, author, and naturalist. I can easily see how he and West would have not seen eye to eye on most things. Reality is that BSA would probably not be what it is today without all of their contributions. But the English model, while giving a firm foundation, really would never have fit well in our country, in my opinion.

 

Am looking forward to seeing some of your research soon in publication.

[Miki101]

Troutmaster,

 

You have clearly been doing you reading and, IMHO, correctly identified the Seton and BP contributions to the overall origins of the Scouting program. All of these persons, Beard, BP, Seton, West were incredibly ego-centric and I hesitate wto say who was the worst. However, Scouting today is the benefcialry of their visions that combined each one's specialties.

 

As I state in my upcoming thesis of Scouting creation, The Scouting Party, Seton symbolized and formulated the overall "back-to-nature" movement, of which BP's Scouting was a small part. However, the popularity of that small part eventually became larger than the base movement itself. I wrote on Scouting Milestones' website that Seton actually created the larger pie but was dwarfed by the image of the international "Hero of Mafeking," whose own program Seton should have embraced more readily and avoided his own problematic ego to a certain extent.

 

In my Theodore Roosevelt & Scouting book (We Are Americans, We Are Scouts) that is in page proofs right now, TR had three major faults, but he kept them pretty much in check and never allowed them to be a problem...he liked to eat a lot, he was not too thrifty, and he had a large ego. However, his obsessive demand of moral integrity in every person allowed him the position to be a preacher for morality without appearing overbearing to the average American. Today, some of his words may be to the extreme, but then they were right in line with civic attitudes of his time and he has remained a popular icon of Americanism for the 21st century. So, ego worked in his favor. Sadly, Seton, as brilliant a thinker as he was, was not as capable on that ego issue.

 

David C. Scott