Jennie Rothenberg Gritz digs up some unsettling history of the original founder of the Boy Scouts of America, Robert Baden-Powell:
[He] was equally enthusiastic about the fascism that began spreading through Europe after World War I. He visited Italy in 1933 and wrote admiringly about the “boy-man” Benito Mussolini who had absorbed his country’s Boy Scouts into a thriving new nationalist youth movement. The dictator explained that he’d accomplished this feat “simply by moral force” – an explanation Baden-Powell felt “augers well for the future of Italy.”
If Baden-Powell had had his way, the Boy Scouts might have formed close ties with the Hitler Youth. In 1937, he told the Scouts’ international commissioner that the Nazis were “most anxious that the Scouts should come into closer touch with the youth movement in Germany.”
But at least he was able to give Pink Floyd some inspiration:
You should remember that being one fellow among many others, you are like one brick among many others in the wall of a house. If you are discontented with your place or your neighbors or if you are a rotten brick, you are no good to the wall. You are rather a danger. If the bricks get quarrelling among themselves the wall is liable to split and the whole house to fall.
No wonder he had such a soft spot for Mussolini’s politics; or that the Mormon Church dominates Scouting in the United States. Jennie quotes Hitchens (who highlighted the brick in the wall quote), and profiled the man in 2004:
Baden-Powell was not a megalomaniac (though he did at one point say that the Scout motto, “Be Prepared,” was inspired by his initials, which were also his scouting nickname). Nor was he a sadistic, repressed pederast. He was a racist and an imperialist and a monarchist, all right, but most of the time to a temperate degree. The British skill at “pig-sticking” was, he asserted (in another reference to a subject he could hardly bear to stay away from), proof of a natural superiority. He had charm and courage, and a knack with the young, and he could draw excellent freehand illustrations.
That’s one of his above: of a boy viewed from behind.
(Photo: Robert Baden-Powell and the first Scout at the first Scout encampment, August 1907, Brownsea Island, England.)
The Dish 
