Campfire Diplomats: American Boy Scouts at the 1933 World Scout Jamboree

Turmoil was brewing on a planetary scale when 406 American boys and their scout leaders crossed the Atlantic in July 1933 to join 25,000 fellow scouts from various parts of the globe for a two-week encampment around the Hungarian royal palace of Gödöllo. Pitching their tents eleven miles outside of Budapest, the young scouts exchanged visits, traded souvenirs, wrote autographs, and staged Indian pageants and Wild West shows for their distant peers. The World Scout Jamboree in Hungary was the fourth of its kind, and for the task of representing their nation at this self-proclaimed youth rally for world brotherhood, the American delegation received praise from the highest levels of government.

My paper takes a critical look at the internationalist discourse promoted by American boy scouts within the framework of post-World War I global scouting. Despite the fact that many imagine Americans as intensely inward-looking and even isolationist during the Interwar Years, U.S. citizens journeyed abroad more often, and organizations like the boy scouts widened America’s external footprint in this volatile period. I argue that the young scouts and their leaders attending the 1933 world scout jamboree constituted diplomats in their own right, with the power to participate in the cross-border bargaining over national values and prestige and share their “knowledge” of foreign lands with others back home. What kind of cultural diplomacy efforts did American boy scouts undertake, and why were they important? What was boy scouting’s place in the international order after World War I, and how did it help Americans – adolescents as well as adults – re-imagine their position in a new, more integrated age of transatlantic and global experiences? These are some of the questions my paper wants to explore.