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On my honor I will do my best
to do my duty to God and my country
and to obey the scout law;
to help other people at all times;
to keep myself physically strong;
mentally awake, and morally straight.
The Boy Scout Oath

Boy Scouts in Front of Capitol,
Washington, D.C.,
John Rous, photographer,
circa July 1941.
FSA/OWI Photographs, 1935-1945

On August 21, 1912, Arthur R. Eldred of Oceanside, New York achieved the rank of Eagle Scout, the highest rank in the Boy Scouts of America. He was the first person to earn the award.

The Boy Scout movement began with the 1908 publication of British Lieutenant General Robert S.S. Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys. In 1902, nature writer Ernest Thompson Seton advocated organizing a boys' club called "Woodcraft Indians." Seton inspired Baden-Powell's efforts to marshall existing boys' groups into scout patrols. Baden-Powell's book describes the games and activities he developed to train cavalry troops during the South African War and suggests an organizational framework for scouting. The appeal of Scouting for Boys reflected the popular fascination with nature-based recreation as a means of character development.

The Boy Scouts of America was founded in 1910 with President William Howard Taft as honorary president. By 1912, every state could claim a band of Scouts. Soon, the organization inaugurated its program of national civic Good Turns--promotion of a "sane and safe" Fourth of July was among the earliest of these campaigns. Congress granted the Boy Scouts a Federal Charter in 1916, authorizing a Scout uniform similar to a U.S. armed services uniform.

In the 1930s, Vito Cacciola, an Italian immigrant living in New England, extolled the virtues of scouting to Merton Lovett in an interview for the Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration. According to the conventions of the day, Lovett attempted to capture Cacciola's accent by transcribing his words in dialect:

I thinka de Boy Scouts is good for boys . . . de Italian boys maka good Boy Scouts . . . It maka de boys strong. It maka them acquainted with nature. Some Italian boys does not know de flowers and de trees. The wilds animals and birds they does not recognize. Yes, it is better than playa on de street. And I thinka they learna some good lessons, what?
"Interview with Vito Cacciola," circa 1936-1940.
American Life Histories, 1936-1940

In 1912, Juliette Gordon Low started the Girl Scouts in Savannah, Georgia. Her efforts to bring fresh-air activities to girls proved popular. By the following year, national headquarters were established in Washington, D.C. The Girl Scout cookie sale quickly became an important fund raiser for the organization. Initially homemade, by the 1930s Girl Scouts peddled precursors of the commercially-baked delicacies we know today.

Use the American Memory Collection to learn more about the roots of Scouting in the United States:

Learn more about the conservation movement and its influence on scouting. Track down Ernest Thompson Seton's best-selling book Wild Animals I Have Known (1898) in the American Memory collection Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920.

"The Boy Scout's Dream,"
V. Paul Jones, music
1915.
Historic American Sheet Music, 1850-1920
The South Texas Border: The Robert Runyon Photograph Collection contains a wonderful panoramic photograph of Texas Boy Scouts from May 20, 1916.
Architecture and Interior Design for 20th Century America, 1935-1955 holds a series of interior and exterior shots of the Girl Scouts of America's former headquarters at 3rd Avenue and 51st Street, New York City. Search the collection on Girl Scout to access these photos.
Search on the keyword boy scout in the collection Prosperity and Thrift, 1921-1929 to find an address given by President Calvin Coolidge to the National Council of the Boy Scouts of America in 1926, and to see an image of Coolidge with 1500 boy scouts who visited the White House in 1927.
Search across all the American Memory collections on the term scout to see images, not only of boy scouts and girl scouts but also military scouts. See, for example, A Gentleman of the "Old West": Scout, Indian Figher, Hunter, Trapper from the collection The Northern Great Plains, 1880-1920 and Scouts Report from Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian.

Sources

The Library of Congress