--- title: Improvement Era description: Monthly periodical of the Mormon church, 1897 onward. This library holds the issues of November 1897 to December 1930. authors: - Jacob A. Riis collections: - periodicals tags: - magazine - improvement-era periodical: Improvement Era volume: 17 number: 9 published: 1914-07 publisher: Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations publisher_place: Salt Lake City language: en type: magazine reference: 'Jacob A. Riis, "The Boy Scout," *Improvement Era* 17, no. 9 (July 1914): 869–880.' source: url: https://archive.org/details/improvementera1709unse transcription: Transcribed from the Internet Archive scan of each issue (the item for each issue is named in the issue's own source); unnumbered advertising leaves are omitted, printed page numbers are kept as page markers. identifier: improvementera1709unse start_page: 869 end_page: 880 rights: status: public-domain basis: US publication 1930 or earlier (published 1914-07) source: https://archive.org/details/improvementera1709unse publication_year: 1914 note: The Internet Archive item metadata carries a blanket "© Copyright by Intellectual Reserve, Inc." notice. The library owner judged it inapplicable because this issue was published in 1914, before 1931; a scan-level notice does not restore copyright. --- # The Boy Scout — The Boy Scouts BY JACOB A. RIIS [This striking article, teeming with human interest and c ntain- ing a pointed message to fathers and mothers who are interested in the welfare of boys, is re-printed in the Improvement Era, by special permission of the publishers, from The Outlook, of October 24, 1913. Since this was written and printed, the author, who was well-known in Utah, having lectured before the young people in Salt Lake City on several occasions, has passed away. Mr. Riis, who was mostly noted for his social work but who has written several important books, died at his summer home at Barre, Mass., May 26, 1914. He was born at Ribe, North Denmark, in 1849, being the thirteenth child of a Latin teacher in that place. Not being fond of school, he be- came a carpenter's apprentice, and finally decided to come to America. He came over in the steerage and landed in New York with a "pair of stout hands and enough stubbornness for two," but with little else as capital. He came near starving several times, but finally began work in the newspaper profession which was to be his life work. He started first a little newspaper in South Brooklyn and finally was employed on the New York Tribune, where he made good, and after that time things came easier. In 1875 he returned to Denmark and mar- ried the playmate of his childhood, Elizabeth Nielsen, daughter of a wealthy man of his native town, of whom he has written so beauti- fully in "The Making of an American," which is practically his auto- biography. While a reporter, Mr. Riis saw much crime and wicked- ness, but he always strove to see the best side of everything, and he wrote eloquently of the wrongs and injustice that he saw about him upon all sides. These experiences he placed in a book entitled "How the Other Half Lives," which created a sensation and resulted in great reformation in the tenement districts of New York. When Col. Theodore Roosevelt was police commissioner of New York, Mr. Riis attacked the evils of police station lodging-houses, winning his points and making of Mr. Roosevelt a strong ally in his efforts of re- formation. He drove the bake shops out of tenement basements, succeeded in having laws passed for abolishing child labor, and that no school shall be built without adequate playground. This latter having been declared to be the "briefest, wisest and best statute on the books of New York." He served twenty-seven years as a re- porter, and then continued lecturing and laboring for the welfare of the poor. Besides the books mentioned above, he wrote "The Chil- dren of the Poor," "The Battle with the Slum," "Children of the Tenements," "The Old Town," "Theodore Roosevelt, The Citizen," "Hero Tales from the Far North." His books made New York City a better, purer and healthier place to live in. Play grounds and parks were laid out and recreation piers built, mainly through his untiring efforts. He took prominent part in social reforms in New York in the last twenty years, and for this reason Colonel Roosevelt has called him "America's most valued citizen." "Mr. Rns is an ex- ample of what any body of like high ideals may be, if he has cour- age and determination." The Editors.] 870 IMPROVEMENT ERA A score of well-known men sat around a table in East Twenty- eighth Street, New York City, one afternoon in May three years ago, discussing plans for the permanent organization of the Boy Scouts of America. To each one in turn was put the straight question if he thought the Scouts would serve a useful purpose, and in what way. When it came the turn of one of them, he took up an evening paper he had been scanning and read an item about the grief of Park Commissioner Stover over the loss of two of his handsomest swans in the Central Park lake. They had been stoned to death by boys. "Now," said the man, "ten to one these boys were not out to kill the swans. They were on a hunt, pioneers or Indians likely, and they came across this splendid game and -rxrwo „,tc stalked it. They had no idea of grieving the JACOB rark n a A. RIIS -n i • ,? ., °. Commissioner or causing the city loss. — They were engaged in legitimate sport legitimate from the boy's point of view. The city had shut him up between its stone walls with all his primitive instincts, and had provided no outlet for him. That last is what scouting does. Being Indians, they killed the swans as scouts they would have protected them. And ; — they would have had just as much fun more; they would not have had to run from anybody. Everybody would have been the gainer. The swans would have been saved, the boys would have been saved, for if they are caught they will be locked up. Commissioner Stover's temper, too. It is all loss now. There it is, the whole case in a nutshell. The Scouts win." Last spring two of those men had front seats on the platform at the Scout rally in the Thirty-fourth Street Armory. Between them sat a man who breathlessly watched every stunt done by the boys. He applauded when they pitched camp, when they wig-wagged, tied up sprained ankles, and did a hundred other exciting things. When at last a troop halted right in front of where he sat and did the great and stunning trick of building a fire without matches, by rubbing two dry sticks against each other, his eyes fairly bulged, and when the fire blazed up amid the thundering applause of the spectators he turned to his neigh- bors_ with a sigh of satisfaction. "This is what we have been waiting for a hundred years," he said. And they nodded for it; was. Every boy, every camper, every normal, man who has his moments when he would give all of civilization and its wonders to be back in the woods and the wilds for a day, a single happy day, cherishes back in his soul the unattained ambition of making a fireIndian fashion and these had done it. ; Between the two incidents lies the explanation of the tremend- Last summer the Richfield Scouts made their summer camp at Fish Lake. The above picture was taken just before they left home. One of the "daily good turns" of these scouts is cutting wood for the old people and the widows. After cutting the wood, they stack it up in the shape of an Indian wickiup, which is a sign to the scout master that his scouts have been at work there. ous impetus that in three brief years has organized an army of more than three hundred thousand boys with seven thousand scout masters, and broken down every imaginary barrier of sect and caste and the opposition that once fell afoul of the mistaken notion that we had here to do with the military spirit in the young. It is something much broader and bigger than that. It is getting at the boy on his own ground, setting him to do the things he ardently wants to do, but, in our cities with their twisted social conditions, doesn't know how to do. The Boys' Club started in to do it, but almost immediately came up against the problem of how to set the boys to work and keep them interested. The Scouts solved it at once. Every boy has in him a little savage and a potential good citizen. The question is which is to get the upper grip upon that depends what kind of a man he is going to be. ; He would rather be good than bad, all things being even. But they are not even. Give him the street and the gutter for a playground, rob him of his play, and he joins the gang and learns the lessons that do not lead to respect for authority or property. Yet in the gang he will yield that respect to the boy who is bolder and abler than the rest, who is fit to lead. The savage has come uppermost, and he lives the law of the jungle. Put before him the other alternative, and he will adopt the Scout law to be duti- ful, obedient, helpful, and clean, with the same enthusiasm. They really start from the same point it is the way they work out that ; makes the difference. Is he to kill, swans or vultures when he is a man? Everything depends on the guide-post where the roads fork. i Write the one word "don't" there, and only that, and the ; 872 IMPROVEMENT ERA boy, if he has any spirit, will take to the jungle. Every father knows it every teacher has learned it, if he has learned anything. ; The word is not in the Scout law. It is all affirmative. A Scout is he is helpful, he is friendly, courteous, kind he is obedi- loyal, ; ent, cheerful, thrifty,and brave he is clean in body and thought, ; stands for clean speech, clean sport, clean habits, and travels with a clean crowd. And he is reverent toward God, faithful himself, and respectful toward the convictions of others. These are the Scout laws, and he obeys them not only because he has promised, but because he wants to. There isn't a "don't" in the lot. It is as easy as all that. Which is not to say that scouting makes an angel of him at once. I should expect it to last less than three years longer if it did, and I should be impatient to have them over and have my human boy back again. It gives him the right start, that is all but it is a good deal. Incidentally it gives every boy a chance to be in the game. The trouble with baseball and football is that they do not do that. They are good as far as they go, but they do not go around. Nine or eleven boys take a hand in them, a hundred or a thosuand sit and shout. They have no other part in it. Granted that there are many nines and elevens. Still there are many more whom the game really robs of a boy's most precious quality — initiative ; it pauperizes the boys, physically and mentally, by making them take their fun at second hand. But play, said Froebel, is the normal occupation of a child, through which he grows character; and we know Froebel was right. Scouting is all initiative, all individual effort. The ques- tion was asked by one boy's father at National Headquarters whether in Mr. Thompson Seton's unique camp up in Connecticut they had baseball. The official to whom it was put said, offhand, "Surely," remembering his own boyhood that would have been a dreary waste without baseball. But when he happened to speak of it to the Chief Scout, Mr. Seton scratched his head. "Too bad," he said "as a matter of fact, we don't play base- ; ball," and he explained that they had never thought of it. But, seeing that the promise had been made, he agreed that there must be baseball. An outfit was provided and notice was given in camp that any of the boys who wanted to join a nine would be welcome. Not one joined. They didn't have time. They were all too busy with other things they would rather do. I am not knocking baseball because we didn't know the game when I was a boy in Denmark. I am simply saying what must have been in the minds of many a boys' leader, in and out of school, all these years. The National game can take care of itself. I am glad scouting has come to fill in the chinks, as it were. If some of the fierce com- petitive spirit is lost that has run riot in the past, the standards are not. Scouting, as I have shown, set up definite standards to BOY SCOUTS 873 which the boy must come up and which will stand being matched against any boys' game anywhere. It is easy enough to understand how scouting came to be taken for play soldiering. The fame as a campaigner of General Baden Powell, whose genius gave shape and direction to the movement that had been in the air on this side of the water for years, accounted for some of it the uniform and the long marches ; for most of the rest. But the khaki uniform, smart though it be, The M. I. A. special normal class, held at the Ricks Academy, Rexburg, Idaho. This was one of the largest three-day classes of the series held at the different Church schools. does not make a Scout. The soldierly virtues of honor, loyalty, and obedience are part of his equipment, but not all. Something of the spirit of the early pioneers, even of the knights of old, he must have caught to pass muster. When it crops out in his home, in school; when father, home from office, rubs his spec- tacles and takes another look: "What is the matter with Tom? I never knew him to be that way before; is he sick, or some- thing?"—then he is the real thing. He is the same boy all right, as the folks will have occasion to note before many moons but ; his energies have been run into a new channel. The "gopd turn every day" is the capstone of scouting, and quite unlike any fighting scheme I ever heard of. It is enlisting with consummate wisdom the good in the lad in the making of the man through his play. That the better citizen, when he is made, will be the bet- 874 IMPROVEMENT ERA ter able to defend the flag- which the Scouts have been taught to love, goes without saying; and are we the worse off for that? As to the marching, fancy soldiers "on a hike !" The Scouts know their outings by no other term. Let me illustrate by my own experience what Tom's father meant. I know it so well. In my home village our church stood in the old days in a half-acre lot that grew up in weeds — mean weeds at that. The Sunday school had a way of bringing sheaves to the granary on Thanksgiving Day, bags and bundles for the poor in the city, tomatoes, apples, pumpkins and potatoes and ; that was good as far as it went. But the trouble was that it went no farther back than to mam's larder. The children hadn't reaped their sheaves themselves, and it didn't do them a bit of good, if it didn't do them positive harm. I rather think it did; for when it was proposed that they should work that half-acre as a potato field themselves and gather their own crops, they weren't willing, and their parents were not either. That chance was lost. Great elms and maples shaded the village streets, and it seemed a pretty good idea to have gray squirrels make their homes there, as they do in many Western and Southern towns. But no the boys ! would kill them, said their elders. And the boys came up to the estimate put upon them, as boys and men will as long as the world stands. Pretty soon there was trouble among them. Some of them were arrested and got into jail, and from the parents of those who walked straight we heard the complaint that their children had to seek their associates elsewhere there weren't any ; at home that were really fit. It didn't occur to them that they had let another opportunity pass of enlisting their broods for civiliza- tion instead of letting them loose in the jungle. A little later on, when the local woman's club presented a handsome drinking fountain to the town and they found themselves helpless to save it from the ravages of the children, I think a glimmer of it all dawned on some of them but then the fountain was a dead loss, ; and some other things besides that were of more account. I might easily extend the list, but this will do. Take Tom now on the new tack— the s"ame Tom; boys in a lump are all alike—and look at him. I grab at random a handful of "good turns" from the Headquarters mail-bag. Please understand that they are intended for information, not for parade. Here are two little Scouts coming upon a horse that has up- set his dinner and scattered the oats on the pavement. Seeing that he cannot get his head down, the bovs sweep up the oats and hold the box till he has eaten. In St. Paul, Minnesota, the spring thaw has flooded a street and threatens the cellars of the abutting houses. I am afraid I would have hailed the chance to dam up a lake to sail ships in when I was a lad, and I know some others that would have joined me. These fellows have twice as much BOY SCOUTS 875 fun making channels for the water to run off. It is their good turn of that day. In Nyack on the Hudson the Scouts run to fires with a coffee boiler presented to the department by the W. C. T. U., and feed the fire-fighters, if need be, all through the night. In New York City the Health Department enlists the Scouts in the "Clean City Campaign." They did it in Yonkers so well that the oldest inhabitant would not have known the bank of the Nep- perhan that had been the general dump of the city for a genera- tion. The Scouts of a Pennsylvania town take turns unchecking the horses at the drinking fountain, and when tips are offered, re- fuse. It is against the rules to take money for doing a good turn. In another town they are belling the cats to protect the song-birds. The Presbyterian church could get no laborers to NINTH WARD, OGDEN, M. I. A. SCOUTS IMPROVING GROUNDS AROUND THE MEETING HOUSE regrade its lot the Scouts did it and had a good time over it every ; evening for a whole week. A squirrel has its head caught in an old tin can a Scout hears it cry, sets it free, and lets it go. That ; last ough to get the lad a hero medal — to miss the chance of se- curing a pet squirrel ! But here is a whole troop in the town of Edgewood, Pennsylvania, taking over the care of the grounds at the orphans' home, chopping down dead limbs and cutting them up for firewood, filling up a cesspool that was dangerous, pruning grapevines, and grafting apple trees. "I am a crossing watchman," writes a man from Philadelphia, "at Second and Girard Avenue, and a cripple. I have a signal on a high post, and every evening I have to put a lighted lamp up : 876 IMPROVEMENT ERA there and take it down in the morning to refill it. It is hard work and risky for me, for I have only one leg. So there is a little Scout who passes every morning at six o'clock, serving milk for his uncle. He takes my lamp down for me. He told me it was his duty every Scout was to do a kind act every morning ; of his life. Three cheers for the Boy Scouts!" Another grab (in the mail-bag) brings up scout masters' reports in the boys' own language. That is unusual, for it is no part of the plan to make little Pharisees of the fellows, but this was an attempt to get at what they themselves thought of it. This is what they thought A man had a horse and it was young and it would not stand for him, so he asked me if I would please get him his mail, so I did. A man was on his moter cicle and he lost his glove and I picked it up and gave it to him. There were two men and they wanted to know where a lady lived, and I told him. There was a boy and he had to get out of a team to take the bars down, it was raining hard so I took them down for him. There were some men in an automobil and they wanted to know the way to the Groton School and I told them. I get a man's paper for him every morning. There was a man and his tire on his bicycle was flat and I asked him if he wanted to take my pump, so I let him take it. I gave an axe to a neighbor who's was broke. I filled my mother's wood-box for it was baking day. I buttoned Mary's dress because mama was busy. I shut up the hens, so my father would not have to. I gave a man his crutches. I done up a finger for a friend. T wiped the dishes for my mother. My grandmother lost her, glasses and I found them. I separated some roosters from the pullets. I fed the calf at night. T led a blind man to his house. T straightened a screw-driver for Mrs. Boynton. There was a cat in a steel trap and I went and let him out. I picked up a little bird under a tree and climbed up and put it in its nest. I done an errand for an old lady. I saw a dog that was hungry and fed him. They were little things, of course but put yourself in grand- ; mother's place looking for her lost glasses and get her opinion of them. The pullets and roosters I know about. We keep hens. Tom's teacher in school can tell his father what it is that has come BOY SCOUTS 877 over him. "If I want anything done promptly," she says, "I give it to a Scout." Besides, there are plenty of bigger things to report, if you choose to call them so. It depends upon how you look at it. Seen from one angle, the doing of the little things every day until it has become a habit and the great come naturally when the chance offers, might seem the biggest thing of all. In the spring floods in the Middle West the Scouts were of great service, patrolling, helping, and even taking a hand in saving life. The Scouts in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, voted two hun- dred dollars they had saved for their summer camp for the relief of the flood sufferers, and collected three hundred garments be- sides for them. In Chicago the Scouts are waging war on the caterpillars and all their kin, which is no mean service to render. In Pittsburg a Scout found forty-five dollars in the street and took M. I. A. SCOUTS CLEANING UP THE BACK YARD OF A HOME, SALT LAKE CITY the money to the Kingsley House, refusing to "divvy" with his fellows who were with him. The money turned out to have been lost by an Italian woman who had caused the arrest of a neighbor on the charge of stealing it. At the inauguration of President Wilson, and at the Suffra- gette parade that brought the Washington police such well- merited reproof, the Scouts were of great service— not in the line of the parade, but on it. They were messengers, ambulance corps, and, when the police failed to give the women protection on their march, the boys were there, too, and took their place. At Gettysburg the four hundred Boy Scouts detailed to receive the 878 IMPROVEMENT ERA veterans and make them comfortable "made good with a bang," in the words of the correspondent of the Evening Post. Mere parading is discouraged by their leaders, but wherever they can be of real service the Scouts are at hand. First aid to the injured is their specialty. Their training to this end is very thorough, and they enter into it with a vast enthusiasm. The world does move. I well remember the first case of that kind that came to the old St. Mark's Place Club. It was three years since the boys had been instructed in the principles of first aid by a young surgeon when, one night, a man in a fit fell down the cellar stairs into the room. The whole club rose to the emergency with a jump. One unbut- toned his collar, another slapped his hands, a third yelled for a silver dollar to put between his teeth. Those were the instruc- tions but there was no dollar in the crowd, not even a quarter, ; and the man lay gritting his teeth until one of them remembered his jacknife, and the day was saved. I have dwelt on the "good turn daily" feature of the move- ment because it is, to my mind, the core of it all, full of promise in our dealings with the problem of the boy. Shall we wake up the imp or the angel in him ? The while we are deciding against the imp and for the manhood of the tomorrow the lad himself is having an everlasting good time. I saw them on their hikes last winter in the South, while on my lecturing travels as far west as Texas, straight as young ramrods, with knapsacks and staffs and shining morning faces, making for the hills and the woods. If the makers of the Standard Dictionary had been there with me, they would have cashiered the whole edition to get the libelous definition of "hiking" out of its pages: "To go about in a dragging, slouching way," indeed ! They should be subpoenaed to attend the next rally of Scouts and made to sit in the front seat, where they could see and be seen of us all. I remember one of those towns below Mason's and Dixon's line, typical of the new and stirring South; business booming, population trebled in a dozen years, every influence for good and bad working overtime and with no one as yet to check them off churches filled, Sunday ; schools too, but not a playground, no juvenile court or probation officer. The Grand Jury had made an attempt to check things up ninety-five boys in town had been in the police court from one : to twenty times. What to do with them the police didn't know, nor the Grand Jury either. There had been two attempts to or- ganize the Scouts, and both had failed for the want of leaders. Then the Men and Religion Forward Movement came to town^ and out of it issued one of the boys' own choice, a young lawyer with little time but much devotion. He took hold, not because he wanted to, but because he "had to." The call' was to him When I was there, he had enlisted seven of the ninety-five—the seven worst, some of the citizens told me—and they all made o-ood BOY SCOUTS 879 He and the troop were giving them a chance to be good rather than bad, and they took it. The town that had poohpoohed the Scouts was getting behind them, Chamber of Commerce, Woman's Club, and all. These were working hand in hand for a juvenile court and a social center in connection with the parish house of a local church. And the boys? As I said, they were having a good time they were not thinking of ; the tomorrow, not they, but of the fun they could have today. They had a camp two miles away where they slept in tents, did all the chores, wigwagged from knob to knob, and explored the bowels of the earth, for it was a cave country. In bad weather they held their meetings in town, did stunts in the gym of the Congregational church, and flourished exceedingly. Two new groups were forming, and leaders were coming out of the old and of the Normal College. The whole town looked toward a brighter future. Even the police approved. In a city in the Middle West that has since suffered devasta- tion by terrible floods the Scouts came to escort me to my lecture, and a fine little band they were. Their master was an elderly man with a rather sad face who seemed to command the unbounded de- votion of "his boys." It was a pathetic little story the towns- folk told me of their friendship. He was the criminal bailiff of the town, unmarried, and without ties until the Scouts came into his lonely life. His hungry soul adopted them one and all, He goes hiking with them Saturday afternoon and Sunday, rests with them in the shade by the river, baits their hooks, and helps them cook and eat their fish. Sometimes he takes them through the jail, of which he has charge, and shows them what a lawless life leads to. He is their captain, judge, and friend. They love and obey him, and his life that was empty is filled and rich. When he would have resigned, the whole troop threatened to do the same. In the town they laugh at it all a little, but own that they are all the better for it. When the Christmas holidays came around last year, and there was a demand for extra clerks and mes- sengers, his Scouts turned in to help, and the storekeepers had cause to thank him for the efficient, clever, and honest fellows he had sent them. The Scouts do not compete they are glad to join hands with ; whatever organization offers the chance. They themselves rank as a movement rather than as an organization. To the Young Men's Christian Association they are usually a welcome ally now ; and then, where the machinery has stiffened into forms that forget that all service is in its essence religious, they help to wake it up. If the door creaks a bit as it swings open, it soon limbers up under the new impulse. I am thinking of one of the seaboard cities typical of the old South that made room reluctantly for the Scouts. It was not that it was lacking in the social service spirit; 880 IMPROVEMENT ERA it was there, but it did not know how to harness it. Once there, the Scouts went on with their troop meetings and their hikes, leaders from other cities came to talk to them on their obligation to be dutiful, helpful, and clean, and then something happened. The town, as I said, was a seaport. It had its slums and its social evil problem, and a bad one to boot. The Ministerial As- sociation had been struggling with it and with itself in its efforts to break through the old reserve into the new day, but without much result. When these newcomers talked right out in meeting, took up sex hygiene with the grown people, and told the truth plainly, a fresh breeze swept through the old town. The ministers the shackles falling off, a civic circulation felt was started up, so to speak, and the people made ready to deal with their problem. This I saw in one town. It has sometimes seemed as if FIRST AID A coat is slipped on each end of the Scout's piles through the sleeves. The injured boy is then car- ried upon a ready-made stretcher. the greatest heritage this generation could bequeath to the one com- ing after might be the conviction made fact that there can be but one moral standard for men and women, for boys and girls and as ; often have we stood powerless to bring it about, for our sins. Who shall say that it may not come on this path ? I have quoted from the Scout law that the Scout is to be "clean in body and thought, stand for clean speech, clean sport, clean habits, and travel with a clean crowd." Clean sport puts up the bars against gambling, which goes hand in hand with all the mischief of the street and opens the door to every crime on the calendar. The very spirit of the movement breathes loyalty to authority, to law, a lesson our boys need to learn, East and West, North and South. If this be the quality of its service to our day, what greater could any one render? And shall not scouting be justified of its fruits?