From the Archives: The Birth of the Boy Scouts
In the summer of 1899, no one would have pegged Colonel Robert Baden-Powell as a potential military hero. He had spent the first twenty years of his army career in small colonial wars in Afghanistan and Africa, involved more often in map-making and scouting than in battle. When he wasn’t spying, he spent his time on polo, pig-sticking, and amateur theatricals. He supplemented his income writing instruction manuals for the British Army and exaggerated accounts of his adventures for the popular press.
As far as the British public was concerned, Baden-Powell’s well-publicized defense of the siege of Mafeking was the only bright spot in the morass of British failure and inefficiency that marked the first months of the Second Boer War. When Baden-Powell returned to Britain in 1903, he discovered that he was not only a popular hero, but a role model. His military manual, Aids to Scouting, was being used as a teaching tool by boys’ groups, especially those directed at salvaging young urban “wasters and slackers”*. Encouraged to create a similar manual specifically for boys, Baden-Powell wrote Scouting for Boy.
Published in January, 1908, the book was a crazy quilt of adventure tales, practical tips on woodcraft and other “frontier” skills, and high-minded rhetoric that caught youthful imaginations in a way no one expected. In a matter of months, existing organizations formed scouting troops all over Britain. Where no adult-sanctioned troops existed, groups of boys, and a few enterprising girls, formed themselves into patrols.**
Scrambling to catch up, Baden-Powell founded the Boys Scouts at the end of 1908. By 1910, the organization had 100,000 members, more than all the other youth groups in Britain combined.
*The Edwardians had no concept of political correctness. Today the phrase for this group is “at-risk” youth.
**A home-grown patrol of this kind plays a central role in one of my favorite adventure novels: Huntingtower by John Buchan. The “Gorbals Diehards” are a hard-scrabble group from the slums of Glasgow that would reduce any scoutmaster to tears. More than a match for the adult villains of the piece, they prove themselves to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty and heart-stoppingly brave. Courteous, clean and reverent, however, are beyond them.
From the Archives: Why I Want to Go to Omaha
Omaha has been on my bucket list for a while now. (The post below first ran in 2012,) Today I’m packing my bags for a trip to Nebraska City, which is close enough to Omaha to make no difference. I suspect a blog post or three will come out of the journey. Later, y’all.
Why is Omaha on my travel list? Two words, okay three: The Bodmer Collection.
In 1832, German naturalist Prince Maximilian zu Weid-Neuweid led one of the earliest expeditions to the American West.* As anyone who has snapped a picture of the Grand Canyon or the Grand Bazaar knows, expeditions need to be recorded. Instead of a Canon Powershot, Prince Maximilian brought along Karl Bodmer, a young Swiss artist with a talent for watercolor.
Prince Maximilian and Bodmer traveled the rivers of the American West for two years, going from Saint Louis to North Dakota and back. They saw an Indian raid, a wild prairie fire, and herds of buffalo and elk at close range. They suffered through a harsh winter in North Dakota, trapped by snow and bitter cold. At one point their boat caught fire.
Bodmer painted through it all, even when it was so cold that his paints froze solid. He captured images of the landscape, the animals, and. most notably, the Native American peoples they met. Bodmer’s depictions of the early American West have been described as the visual equivalent of Lewis and Clark’s journals. Although originally intended as “notes” to Prince Maximilian’s account of their journey, Bodmer’s paintings and sketches are now seen as the most important work of the expedition.
Today the Bodmer Collection is housed at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. Put it on your list.
*Prince Maximilian wasn’t just a rich man with a yen for travel. He had a bee in his bonnet. He thought the native peoples of the Missouri and Mississippi river basins would help him prove that humankind developed from a single set of parents, presumably Adam and Eve.
Dorothy Sayers, Black Cat Cigarettes, and WWI
My second favorite novel by British mystery author Dorothy Sayers is Murder Must Advertise,* in which her dashing sleuth Lord Peter Whimsey goes undercover as an entry level copy writer at an advertising agency where evil is afoot. He solves the murder of course, because that’s the way these things happen. But he also gets caught up in the advertising business and creates the idea for an advertising campaign for a cigarette company called Whifflets that takes off in a big way: people collected coupons and used them first to travel and later to collect all manner of worldly goods. Except coffins, it not being “admitted that any Whiffler could ever require such an article.”
The campaign, and the clever language in which Sayers describes it, always amuses me. So imagine my amazement when I discovered something similar on a smaller scale in the form of Black Cat cigarettes while tracking down a factoid for my latest article for MHQ:The Journal of Military History.
Black Cat cigarettes were first introduced in 1904. The company began to use their cigarette packages as a vehicle for promotion almost immediately. At various points in the years prior to World War I they offered a program similar to S & H Green Stamps,** the Black Cat Library of Short Stories (a series of forty adventure tales), and a popular coupon program not unlike Whimsey’s Whifflet promotion.
If that was all Black Cat did, I would have just enjoyed the moment when fiction and history collided, but in the First World War, Black Cat stepped up. The company sent gift packages to British troops, with French phrase books inside the Black Cat cigarette packs. In 1914, they offered miniature cardboard Allied flags. And in 1916 they produced the first cigarette cards–similar to baseball cards in bubblegum packs.*** These cards didn’t celebrate anything as innocent as the national pastime–they were produced in alliance with the British wartime propaganda effort. The first set of cards was a series of 140 political cartoons by Dutch cartoonist Louis Raemaekers, with the motto “Lest we forget” on the reverse. But it was the second set that caught my fancy: a series of fifty cards illustrating “Women on War Work.” Each card showed a smiling woman doing a job that women would not have done before the war, including ambulance driver, postal carrier, tram conductor, and furnace stoker. The reverse of each card described the work involved.
A small and engaging illustration (literally) of women’s history.
*My absolute favorite is Gaudy Night. This does not make me unique.
**For those of you too young to remember Green Stamps, you can look it up here: http://www.al.com/living/index.ssf/2016/04/whatever_happened_to_sh_green.html
***I assume those of you who are too young to remember this can figure it out.