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Book Review

Sons of Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement 1890-1910

Sons of Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement 1890-1910. Robert H. MacDonald. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. Pp. 258. $35.00.

In Sons of Empire, Robert H. MacDonald explores the place of the colonial military scout--the tracker, forward observer, or guerrilla-like irregular--as a popular figure in British military units and British public imagination at the end of the last century. Brought to military prominence by the exigencies of colonial warfare and to public attention by popular American accounts of frontiersmen and Indian fighters, the scout was Anglicized in the African campaigns and boy's adventure fiction of the nineties. But the most powerful promotion of the scouting ideal was through the Boy Scout movement. Founded by Baron Baden-Powell in 1908, the organization numbered over 150,000 members by the eve of World War I.

MacDonald links public fascination with the scout to fin-de-siècle anxieties of degeneration and decadence. These anxieties, he argues, led many Englishmen to equate life in the [End Page 108] "old countries" of the metropolitan core with enervating domesticity and effeminacy, and to seek regeneration in the more virile territories of the imperial frontier: "This book argues that the frontier, and its stereotypical hero, the war scout, provided British society at the beginning of this century with an alternative ethic, answering this general fear about the condition of the nation's virility" (5). MacDonald works assiduously to document the identification of scouting with bracing virility and the good work of empire. But a more interesting explanation of the scout's popularity is everywhere suggested in his study. In this explanation, the scout emerges as a secret sharer in many of the most transgressive dreams and practices of late Victorian decadence and as a deserter from the civilizing forces he also serves.

While MacDonald convinces us that fin-de-siècle propagandists of empire did represent the scout as the perfect answer to metropolitan decadence, the image of the scout that develops from his detailed examination of autobiographical and journalistic accounts, popular literature, and pageants such as Buffalo Bill's "Wild West" Show reveals a figure whose credentials as a representation of conventional masculinity and the civilizing mission are strikingly problematic. The historical and fictional scouts MacDonald describes are liminal figures. Like those glamorous pariahs of popular colonial romance, they are men who have "gone native," lived with the "savages," taken on "native" names, costumes, customs, and perhaps even beliefs. And like the demonized decadents of metropolitan urban culture, they are (in many cases) extravagant dandies who let their hair grow long and affect flamboyant costumes. Finally, they pursue secret lives like those of the deadly doppelgängers who haunt English fiction at the end of the century. Thus Baden-Powell is described during the siege of Mafeking by a correspondent for The Times as a kind of heroic Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde. "In the daytime," writes MacDonald, summarizing the correspondent's portrait, "he was the perfect administrator; when darkness fell, he became the daring scout" (97). MacDonald's depiction of such figures--from Buffalo Bill to Fred Burnham ("He-Who-Sees-in-the-Dark") to fictional characters such as Haggard's Allan Quartermain and Kipling's Kim--corroborates Elaine Showalter's observation that "the borderline between hypermasculinity and homoeroticism was as tricky to negotiate" on the imperial frontier "as in London's Clubland." ¹

The second half of MacDonald's study depicts the founding of the Boy Scout Movement and explores its paradoxical pedagogy. Baden-Powell, an ex-scout and the hero of the siege of Mafeking, organized the Scouts in 1908, after publishing his immensely popular Scouting for Boys. His goals were to save British youth from degeneration and to prepare them for war. But his methods were somewhat unorthodox. In the process of creating the Scout program, MacDonald writes, Baden-Powell "plundered native cultures and appropriated their symbols," so that to become a Scout--to wear the clothing, sing the songs, participate in the ceremonies--was to be initiated into a peculiarly "impure" and creolized culture. Scouts, who were expected to become exemplary imperial citizens and soldiers, enacted the charge of Zulu warriors in highly choreographed displays at scouting rallies, sang African war songs around the campfire, and for a time dressed in the "buckskins and moccasins" (143) identified with American Indians.

All this, MacDonald argues convincingly, made the quasi-military training and militaristic ideology of scouting appealing to youthful Britons anxious to escape domestic routine but likely to be leery of the even greater regimentations of conventional military life. And it was consistent, as he shows in a particularly interesting section of his study, with certain evolutionary theories of developmental psychology that held that children should pass through stages of controlled savagery on the way to civilized maturity. Finally, it was consistent as well with the long-standing imperial tradition of honoring "martial . . . races" (135). After all, to respect as well as slaughter the Zulus, the Sioux, and the Pathans of the Northwest Frontier was to display a certain aristomilitary magnanimity.

MacDonald does a good job of canvassing the sources of scouting's appeal and the logic of [End Page 109] its legitimation. But one wishes he had reflected more strenuously on its subversive and even "modernist" aspects: its celebration of the elusive and culturally androgynous "irregular" over the more regimented soldier and its promiscuous mixing of elements from "civilized" and "primitive" cultures. For the astounding fact is that in 1908 a widely respected British imperial officer, backed by the King of England himself and by the pro-imperial press, formed an organization dedicated in part to helping British boys to "go native."

Scouting, viewed from this perspective, seems less a protest against metropolitan decadence than a remarkably successful attempt to mobilize vigorous "decadent" impulses in the service of imperial rule. For the scout--unlike the metropolitan dandy or the white man who goes to live across the imperial lines--wins his right to transgress by putting himself at the service of the very discourses and interests he partially rejects. Having preferred a life of intimate contact with "savage" cultures over "civilized" life in the metropolis or the colonies, he sells his knowledge of "savage" ways to the agents of "civilization" and wins their protection. Having repudiated conventional models of masculinity in favor of feminized forms of dress, he presents himself as an icon of conventional virility and an enemy of all effeminacy. By negotiating this compromise with widely felt subversive impulses, the imperial authorities gained new recruits for the armies of empire. How many thousands of young Englishmen, one wonders, were drawn by dreams of heroic irregular warfare on the African veldt into the bloody slaughter grounds of the European front, where massed troops charged machine guns under clouds of gas?

MacDonald's reconstruction of the Scout as a figure of sanctioned colonial mimicry is thorough and illuminating. But his ability to explore the significance of his findings is limited by his apparent unfamiliarity with relevant work in recent cultural studies. To write "a study of masculinist ideology" (6) without drawing on the accumulated insights of feminist students of gender construction is self-defeating, and one wishes as well that MacDonald had made use of such illuminating studies of fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century masculinity as Elaine Showalter's Sexual Anarchy and Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies. It is equally disappointing to find, in a study dedicated to the history of imperial ideology, that MacDonald simply ignores Edward Said's groundbreaking studies of colonial discourse. As for colonial mimicry and creolization, these have been vigorously explored by Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Sara Suleri, and others, yet their work too goes unacknowledged and unused. Sons of Empire turns up all sorts of interesting historical material and gives it plausible narrative shape. But the material it uncovers, and the story it tells, deserve now to be reconsidered from the more theoretically informed and analytically rigorous perspectives of contemporary cultural studies.

John A. McClure
Rutgers University

Notes

1 Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Penguin, 1991), 94.

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