Burying the Hatchet: The Boy Scouts and the Infantilization of Peace, 1920–37

Burying the Hatchet: The Boy Scouts and the Infantilization of Peace, 1920-1937

This paper analyzes the construction of young fraternal masculinities at carefully choreographed youth peace festivals in the interwar period that became known as the World Scout Jamborees. What started in London in 1920 as an indoor pageant of Boy Scouts of various nationalities expanded into mass open-air encampments that were held almost every four years in different European countries (Denmark, England, Hungary, the Netherlands) until the outbreak of World War II. Though the Scout organizations of the British Empire were a dominant force at the outset, Boy Scouts from continental Europe, Latin America, China, Japan, and the United States turned these rallies into a much more global spectacle. The paper demonstrates how the jamborees enabled adult planners and young participants to articulate a cautious internationalism that projected youthful and “clean” national identities bound together through the trope of “brotherhood.” Obscuring Scouting’s militaristic roots after the cataclysm of World War I, participants enacted a vision of regenerative youth capable of whitewashing their societies’ violent pasts. At the same time, however, the clash of different organizational cultures and the parading of different national bodies nurtured new, potentially antagonistic nationalisms. Scouting’s boyish campfire diplomacy, which was always subject to adult supervision, barely captured the political, economic, and cultural interdependencies of the era. Establishing boyhood as a category of international relations led to the infantilization of peace and peacemaking, even as this process served adult interests. The myth of youthful innocence, my paper contends, was deployed to aid the reconstruction of masculinities, nations, and empires ravaged by war, exculpating the same elites who had made mass destruction possible in the first place.