Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, built an organization on military survival skills and cultural appropriation from Ernest Thompson Seton while committing war crimes in colonial Africa. Despite warnings about his repressed sexuality and fascination with nude boys, including photographer A.H. Todd, Baden-Powell prioritized expansion over safety, refusing to vet volunteers effectively. This systemic negligence allowed pedophiles like Dr. Patterson and H.D. Byrne to infiltrate the ranks, leading to a cover-up culture where abusers were quietly dismissed rather than prosecuted. Ultimately, the episode argues that the scale of sexual abuse within the Scouts mirrors the Catholic Church's scandals, rooted in Baden-Powell's foundational refusal to treat abuse as profound evil. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Financial Literacy Month Kickoff00:02:35
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Take to interactive CEO Strauss Selnick and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
Listen to Math and Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hey there, folks.
Amy Roebuck and TJ Holmes here.
And we know there is a lot of news coming at you these days from the war with Iran to the ongoing Epstein fallout, government shutdowns, high-profile trials, and what the hell is that Blake Lively thing about anyway?
We are on it every day, all day.
Follow us, Amy and TJ, for news updates throughout the day.
Listen to Amy and TJ on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Based in record pill recording.
Dark Secrets of the Scouts00:03:24
Test, test.
Test, test.
Print all of this.
Chris, all of this.
Matt, this topic is.
We've already introduced the show.
It started.
That's behind the bastards.
We have a dark one today.
We have a bad one today.
I'm Robert Evans.
Matt Lieb, my guest.
Matt, how are you doing today?
You know, I was doing well until you guys started talking real ominous about what the subject is.
Oh, boy, Matt, you are going to be a very unhappy person.
Oh, fun.
I love it.
Yeah.
No, as we get into three hours.
Yeah, that's about right, Matt.
So let me start this with a simple, humble question, Matt.
A very simple question.
How do you feel about the Boy Scouts of America?
Oh, fuck.
I have a very, like, I don't have feelings one way or the other because I never did it.
No, you weren't.
Okay.
Yeah, I know people who did like, you know, there was like a Jew Scouts, but they were.
That's a funny name for something to be.
Yeah, yeah.
But I, and I knew some people who were like Cub Scouts and Eagle Scouts and stuff like that, but I never, I never was in that club.
So I feel excluded.
That's how I feel about it.
You know, as a kid, I wanted to be a part of it.
Why couldn't you?
I think because like, you know, you have to like apply and stuff, and then you got to like tell your dad and he's got to not be, he's got to be in a good mood.
And, you know, I mean, yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, I never, I never got a chance to do it.
So I just weirded out.
I mean, so this is going to be a weird one for me because like I was in the Boy Scouts for years and years and years.
And I loved it.
I had a really good time.
I learned where I learned a lot of like the first lessons I learned about like woodcraft and like hiking.
And I had a lot of really went on like a 20-mile river rafting trip on the Brazos for days and did some like, you know, like primitive kind of like you have like the contents of a matchbox and a pocket knife and you have to go for two days or whatever, like some really cool shit.
Had some great experiences.
Like I really, to be like, I personally have nothing but positive memories of the Boy Scouts of America and my time in them.
End of podcast.
Thank you for listening.
So it's, it's, it's fucked up.
Like I played like my very first games of Dungeons and Dragons.
I played at like Cub Scouts campouts, which was like a huge part of my life.
And like, yeah, it's, it's, it's weird.
I can confidently say my life would have been very different if I had not been a Boy Scout.
And I can also confidently say that that is true of 100,000 or so other boys for a much worse reason.
Oh, God.
Because as we're going to discuss, the Boy Scouts of America, despite, you know, my, and I'm sure a number of people listening can think back to positive experiences they had in the BSA.
I know my dad can.
He was an Eagle Scout.
And like, I know a lot of people who felt very fondly about their time in the scouts.
But despite all of that, the Boy Scouts from the beginning is an organization that was poisoned in a fundamentally inescapable way.
And that poison led to its evolution into an organization that facilitated the rape and molestation of like a city's worth of young boys.
This is a dark one, my man.
This is a dark one.
The Imperialist Origins Problem00:15:01
Yeah.
Oh, God.
I love going in cold.
You're probably really regretting that email you sent me.
I would love to come back up.
Yeah.
Hey, I'll be back anytime.
Yeah, motherfucker.
You want to come on our show?
I thought we were going to talk about Nazis again.
Yeah, baby.
Oh, yeah.
No, I'm excited, man.
This sounds like a lot of fun.
You know, it sounds like Boy Scouts, you know, are going to be a great organization to learn more about.
So let's strap in.
Yeah.
Well, might not want to say that given what comes in part two.
But yeah, let's do the episode.
Spoilers up, Top.
Do you know anything about the founder of the Boy Scouts, or at least the guy most often credited as founding the Boy Scouts, Robert Baden Powell?
I do not know him.
No.
Okay.
Well, part one, we're largely going to be talking about the founder of the Boy Scouts.
And then part two, we're going to be talking about all of the rapes and how the organization facilitated them over a century.
But let's talk about Robert first, the other Robert.
So Robert Baden-Powell, his full name at the end of his life, gives you a pretty clear idea of the kind of social position This guy enjoyed.
When he died, his full title was Lieutenant General Robert Stevenson Smythe Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell, O-M-G-C-M-G, G-C-V-O-K-C-B-K-S-T-J-D-L, which are all like different orders and awards and like knightly shit that you he was he was English as fuck.
You could not be more English than this motherfucker.
He had a whole alphabet.
That's insane.
He had all these goddamn titles.
Yeah, and he was born high.
Like he was born to rule, be one of the people who helped run the British Empire.
Like that was his.
Yeah.
He was born on February 22nd, 1857, in Paddington, London, England.
His father was the Reverend Professor Baden-Powell and was a geography.
Reverend Professor?
Both.
Yeah, motherfucking Reverend Professor.
I love that comes from a line of people who are like, we must have multiple titles.
Like these, everyone in his family has a thousand fucking titles, and they're all very fancy people.
So his dad, the Reverend Professor, is a geometry professor at Oxford University and a priest at the Church of England.
Yeah.
God damn.
You know, those geometry priests.
You know, it's like you get one degree and then you're like, I'm going to just throw on a little bit another hat for my hat.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So his mother was Henrietta Grace Smythe and she was the oldest daughter of Admiral William Henry Smyth, who was a famous admiral, you know, like, and that's like the biggest thing you can be in the British Empire as a fucking admiral.
Like, that's like the top of cool British shit to be in this period.
Right.
They got that navy, and people said it was a good one.
Yeah.
So Reverend Professor Baden-Powell was an old man when he married Henrietta Grace Smythe.
She was his third wife, and he was, again, not a young man when he had Robert.
And in fact, Robert's born in 1857, and his dad dies in 1860.
So our Baden-Powell never really knows his father.
And this brings to an interesting note.
So Professor Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scout, his name is Baden Hyphen-Powell, right?
His dad's first name is Baden, and his dad's last name is Powell.
His mom's last name is Smythe.
So why does he, why is his last name Baden hyphen-Powell?
That's an interesting question.
So when he died, when his dad died, his mom changed the family last name after his death to be their father's full name, with a hyphen in it, in order to distinguish the children she had had with him to the kids he'd had in previous marriages.
Oh damn so it's just petty shit.
Yeah, it's like petty, weird English bullshit.
Um, so yeah, like Baden-powell, you would think, with a name like Baden Powell like oh, his dad was a Baden and his mom was a Powell, and they just did the thing that you know fancy people do when they hyphenate their names.
But no, it's much dumber than that.
Yeah, so Robert was raised by his mother.
She was a forceful person, and he later recalled that quote.
The whole secret of my getting on was in his mother's uh, very powerful personality.
She was described by one writer Either a great motivator or simply overbearing, depending on who was talking about her.
Since the family had money and the upper crust British kids inevitably went away to private schools.
Well, they were public schools, but we call them private schools.
Like a public school in England is like a fancy private school, you know?
Oh, I didn't know that.
Yeah, it's weird.
Everything's wrong over there.
Right?
They drive on the wrong side of the road with the fucking paper.
Public private.
Yeah.
And Robert spent his youth in a series of fancy all-boys schools.
He was very intelligent and was given to throwing himself completely into any task set before him.
He particularly pushed himself to succeed at tasks that were likely to make him popular.
So he became an excellent singer.
He became a skilled sketch artist and an actor in the school's drama productions.
Holidays Back Home, Holidays Back Home were spent on yachting expeditions with his, again, quite wealthy family.
He first came to the practices of scouting while he was at school, though.
These are boarding schools, and the forests near his school, which occupied an old monastery, were filled with game animals.
And so he would escape from school.
He wasn't supposed to be doing this and hunt and butcher game meat.
This was like his hobby when he was in school.
With what?
Like a knife?
I assume he had a gun or something, like some sort of English shotgun.
Yeah, I really, that is unclear to me.
It would be bad.
If he's just knifing deer in the woods.
That's what a scout would do.
That's one of the merit badges I have always assumed.
Yeah, stab a fucking deer in the neck.
Just mass murder stags with a single pocket knife.
A gun ain't fair.
Look, the deer's got a knife.
You got a knife.
You got knives on your head.
I got knives on my hand.
It's perfect.
Now, British accent.
Yeah, with a British accent.
In 1876, he graduated school, and he found himself somewhat adrift and uncertain of what he wanted to do with his life.
His mother pushed him to join the military, and he quickly fell in love with the adventure and camaraderie of that life.
He particularly enjoyed spending all of his time in close proximity with other young men, separated from mainstream British society.
He was an yeah, he's definitely his sexuality is something we'll discuss in a bit.
Sure.
There's a lot going on here and a decent amount of it's uncomfortable.
He became an officer because that's the role men in his part of English society were born to occupy.
A write-up in the book Scout's Honor notes.
As an officer, he was known for his teaching skills, sense of discipline, and obsession with physical and moral cleanliness.
He must have seemed a bit of a square.
He tried to sway his men from using brothels and advised them to be the type who could be trusted on their honor to do a thing, who are guided by a sense of what is their duty rather than by their own inclination, who are helpful and kind, especially to the weak, and who, by their personal self-respect and avoidance of bad habits, give themselves a manliness and dignity which no humbug can attain to.
So, that's uh, he's kind of a stickler.
Yeah, I mean, it sounds like you know, perfectly good rules to live your life by, you know?
I mean, so far he's nothing that's like a great dude.
Yeah, kind of a little bit like uptight.
You get the sense that like he would have been kind of frustrating if you're a young man in the military.
No, he's not very fun, but certainly not, you know, like very distinctly not about like cavorting and going out and like drinking and whoring and doing stuff that soldiers do, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because soldiers are all dirty, dirty bastards.
So he first served as a hussar in India, which is like a mounted soldier.
He was sent to Africa in the 1880s, where he fought as a scout officer against the Zulu in what is today South Africa.
His courage and competence earned him repeated commendations.
In 1890, he was promoted to major and made senior aide-de-camp to the governor of Malta, who also happened to be his uncle.
Because again, that's how everything works in this empire.
Oh, there's a lot of nepotism.
He's very good at what he does.
Everyone seems to agree with that.
But he's also, there's a lot of nepotism that he benefits from.
For the next three years, he did this job and he also worked part-time as an intelligence officer.
And among other things, he would disguise himself as a butterfly collector so he could travel around to foreign military installations and bring back intelligence to the British.
He would just show up as a butterfly guy and be like, Yeah, I'm looking for some butterflies.
Mind if I check out your cannons?
Yeah, yeah.
Mind if I read these documents?
I'm just going to, I'm trying to see if there's butterflies.
And this is the period, if you read about like the British invasions of Afghanistan and the great game between Great Britain and Russia, which is happening in like this period, spying at this point, there's not like intelligence agencies.
It's a bunch of like rich fancy boys on both sides who travel around in a fancy together and they bring back intelligence.
And it's, yeah.
They just, you know, it's basically just gossip from like, you know, the local soiree.
Yeah.
In 1896, he returned to Africa and he fought in the Second Matabele War.
This was a revolt of the indigenous Matabelli people against the British South Africa Company.
So again, corporations are running all of these colonies at this time, and the British Empire exists to like enforce their right to control large chunks of a continent.
The Matabelli are like, it's kind of a raw deal for us, and they try to fight back.
And Baden-Powell is among the soldiers sent in to brutally crush them.
This is like three now.
This is three different colonial wars that he's been part of.
He fights in a lot of colonial wars.
He sees a lot of combat, and it is all in the name of furthering the British Empire and the economic interests of British corporations.
And he understands it this way.
He is an unrepentant imperialist.
Baden-Powell had no issue deploying industrial armed might against a subject people who had starved due in part to cattle pests brought over by the British colonizers.
This campaign was important to the Boy Scouts for two reasons.
One, it was there that Baden Powell met an American scout who introduced him to the concept of woodcraft, the Stetson cowboy hat, which becomes an icon of the Boy Scouts, and the Necker Chief, which is another icon of the Boy Scouts.
So he's very impressed by this American scout, and he adopts a lot of these aspects of his dress, which later become things that the Boy Scouts do.
Secondly, this is where Lord Baden-Powell committed his first war crime, or at least the first war crime we have documentation of.
The gist of it was that there was an indigenous Matabelli chief named Uwini.
He was thought to be a major inspiration for the uprising and was accused of murdering white settlers.
We might say that those white settlers were trying to steal land and the ability to produce food from indigenous people and they fought back.
Right, yeah.
A number of ways you could.
So much murder is self-defense.
Self-defense from an invasion, yeah.
So Uwini gets wounded in battle and he surrenders under the promise that his safety would be guaranteed, that like he won't be like murdered for surrendering.
Baden Powell has him executed, which was definitely illegal.
We call that the old Baden switch.
Yeah.
I was waiting for that.
That was destined to happen.
It was just waiting for my moment.
I'm sorry.
So the simple summary of what happened is that, yeah, he committed a war crime against a black man fighting for the freedom of his people.
Baden-Powell's biographer, though, a guy named Tim Geal, we'll talk about Tim in a second, defends it this way.
Because the chief was wounded during capture and Baden-Powell doubted he would survive a long journey to the Cape to face a civil court, he court-martialed him on the spot.
The verdict was death, so he was shot.
Baden Powell had exceeded his orders.
So Tim Geal acknowledges this was illegal, but he also was like, well, the guy was wounded.
He was going to die away.
It was like a mercy killing, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
That's why we're decimating this village because we stole all of the things we did to him.
What do you want to do?
You want to watch them suffer?
That's fucked up.
No.
Get the flamethrower over here.
So Tim Geal, who you're going to hear from a lot in this because he's Baden-Powell's biggest, probably best biographer.
Regular listeners will recognize him because he also wrote a biography we used of Henry Morton Stanley, who was one of the archest imperialists in the history of imperialism.
This is a guy who scouted, quote unquote, discovered a shitload of Africa, murdered just a tremendous number of people, and basically was responsible for conquering the Congo for King Leopold via like a series of fake treaties.
Like he tricked them basically on behalf of Leopold.
One of the worst people who's ever lived.
Tim Geal wrote a biography about him that's very positive.
And Tim Geal, this is what he does.
So Geal is definitely kind of right-wing.
He loves the British Empire.
He is frustratingly good at the technical aspects of writing biographies.
So he's really good at going through thousands of pages of people's notes and diaries and synthesizing them.
So you actually get really good information from his books.
The information, the facts he provides are generally pretty solid, but you also get it with Tim's framing of the facts, which is always like ludicrously positive and forgiving of these nightmarish war criminals.
I love imperialism Stan, who is the primary source.
Just every other page is yes, literal king.
Yeah, he is deeply frustrating, Tim Geal.
Now, in this case, he calls Baden-Powell's execution of this guy, quote, the most damaging charge made against Baden-Powell's honor.
Now, this is in spite of the fact that in 1898, Robert Baden-Powell was in charge of an operation to track down Zulu rebels, and he lost control of his men who murdered at least three people.
Geel defends this by arguing, quote, even if he had given orders to spare the rebels' lives, it's incredibly unlikely that his Zulu mercenaries would have obeyed.
A lot of trouble stemmed from this, and he was lucky not to lose his career.
It's like, well, how do you know that?
How do you know that he couldn't have stopped this?
How do you know they were actually rebels?
Like, you just know what this guy wrote and is like Jeal never actually, like, he's great at giving you what these people were writing and saying to each other.
He's not so great at, like, seeing the people they were doing violence to as human beings and maybe investigating their side of the case and being like, well, is this true?
He's like, not my job.
I'm a biographer for people who've done nothing wrong.
Yeah.
The most famous moment of Baden-Powell's military career came the next year in 1899 with the outbreak of the Second Boer War.
This is one of those rare colonial wars where there's not really anyone who's like a good guy here because the Boers, horrible people, a lot of them, horrible people, very racist.
This is where we get apartheid South Africa.
Colonial Wars and Genocide00:12:23
A chunk of that comes from this.
But also, they're fighting the British Empire who put them in concentration camps and kill a huge number of women and children.
So my sympathy overall is with the Boers, I guess, because they're the people put in death camps.
Yeah, technically, I'm like, well, I do hate imperialism.
Yeah.
I guess.
They're both kind of imperialists.
They are both imperialists, but what's a more powerful one?
Yeah, it's not a fun war to read about.
The gist of it is that the Boers, who are kind of Dutch, were fighting the British, who didn't like the idea of Boers running shit in South.
Anyway, whatever.
You don't need to know too much about this.
The war is most noteworthy because it was where the British first deployed concentration camps, an idea they had kind of cribbed from the Spanish, who had kind of cribbed it from what the Americans did to the indigenous people.
And yeah, this led to the deaths of a lot of Boers, but also many more black Africans.
A lot of Boers do starve.
That's worth noting.
But like a huge number of the people who starve as a result of British policies in this war are black Africans.
But at the time, this becomes kind of the most famous fallout of the Boer War because the Nazis pay attention to the British use of concentration camps and it has a big inspiration on that.
But anyway, At the time, the most famous battle of the war, back home in Merry Old Ingoland, was the siege of Mafeking.
Robert Baden-Powell, who was by this point a colonel, was the man in charge of the garrison there.
And basically, he's got about 1,500 men, a mix of British soldiers and like local African auxiliaries, and he gets besieged by a force of 8,000 Boers.
And this battle lasts close to a year.
It's like 200-something days that they're under siege.
So it is this horrifically bloody battle.
By the end of the fighting, like two-thirds of a year's worth of fighting, Baden-Powell's lost more than half of his men.
The Boers lose 2,000 men.
A shitload of people starve to death.
And it is front-page news the whole time.
This is like the most, like the biggest story in the British Empire back in the Isles for the better part of a year.
And it makes Robert Baden-Powell into a celebrity because he's the heroic commander of this scrappy defense under incredible odds to like defend Mafeking from the Boers.
And he's also, he's handsome, right?
Like he's generally noted by women at the time of having been a good-looking man.
And so you've got this like handsome young war hero in the siege that's front page news for months.
It makes him into one of the most famous people in the entire British Empire.
And he's only getting more handsome because, you know, as the food runs out, he's just getting skinnier and sniffing.
He's just getting skinnier and skinnier, right?
Those cheekbones are just getting like prominenter.
Yeah, sharp.
Yeah.
Now, the siege held several influential moments in the development of scouting.
For one thing, in order to free up men for the fight, he deputized a bunch of teenage and preteen boys to act as messengers.
The Mafeking Cadet Corps, consisting of 12 to 15-year-old boys, is often seen as a precursor to the Boy Scouts.
So that's one thing.
Not quite child soldiers, because he's not trying to have these guys fight.
He's using them to free up soldiers who can hold a rifle and stuff.
In addition, from the book Scouts Honor, quote, One key to victory at Mafeking was scouting.
Always fond of the outdoors as a boy, Baden-Powell, as a soldier, had developed a passion for tracking animals and people, sneaking up on the enemy, and living off nature.
He wrote scouting books for adults and trained soldiers for a scouting unit.
He found the business of survival in the wild not just a necessity, but an intriguing science, Jill writes.
Once, when desperately short of water, he had seen a buck scratching in the sand and, by digging at the same spot, had found water.
So he's this is like all kind of coming together for Robert Baden-Powell.
And he's maybe the only guy who could have like pulled off this defense for the British because he has a lot of this experience.
He actually is not, he's not, you get a lot of these aristocratic officers are like useless in a hard situation.
He's not.
He is legitimately good at being a soldier.
I think most historians today agree that he was a very competent combat commander.
Another thing that Baden-Powell did at Mafeking was arguably commit another war crime.
Now, this is in fairness is a more muddled story than the others, which in my mind are very clear war crimes.
The short of this story is that allegedly, when food stores ran low, he chose to feed white people and let black residents in Mafeking starve to death.
This excerpt from the Irish Times gives a good overview of the war criminal allegations.
Faced with food shortages, he simply chose to deprive most Africans in the town of any food whatsoever, even their own, which he had earlier forcibly requisitioned.
A few vital African laborers were allowed to buy rations.
Others were reduced to scavenging dog corpses in rubbish heaps.
So that is the war crime allegation against kind of what he does here.
He ordered one group of 33 Africans out on a cattle drive of Boer herds, otherwise to be flogged.
The Boers captured and murdered all but one of the poor devils.
Unperturbed, Baden-Powell then evicted several hundred African women from the town.
Many were murdered by the Boers, and a few pitiful survivors were stripped naked, flogged, and sent back.
Yet their shameful fate troubled him not the least.
And you'll hear a couple of different death tolls for this.
I think 2,000 is kind of like the upper number of like how many people died as a result of Baden-Powell making these calls.
Now, Tim Geal, true to form, has a ready defense for Baden Powell here.
He says of these allegations, quote, this is an absolute lie.
He opened soup kitchens and shot all of his cavalry horses so he could feed them.
And in this case, Geal's not entirely wrong here.
Again, how exactly you come down on this is messy.
He is an actual biographer, so he's not making up shit.
Baden-Powell did have his horses slaughtered in order to provide soup for the people in Mafeking.
Yeah, historians debate whether or not Baden-Powell intentionally starved black residents at Mafeking.
One South African historian said in 1999, this can only be described as a crime against humanity for which he deserves to be reappraised as a war criminal.
But in 2000, a pair of military historians, Edmund York and Malcolm Flowersmith of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, analyzed diaries from soldiers and civilians during the siege, including Baden Powell's diaries, and they came to a different conclusion.
And I'm going to quote from The Guardian here.
Baden-Powell had based garrison rations on a prospect of relief within two months.
Kitchener, who's the high general in charge of the whole war, ordered him to send as many women and children and natives as possible away to save rations.
So Kitchener orders him, get the non-combatants out of the city so you don't have to feed as many people.
But the authors say the papers indicate that this harsh policy was not aimed at the township's 7,000-strong majority of blacks, the Baralong tribe, who were valued soldiers and boosted food stocks by rustling Boer cattle.
Its victims were 2,000 outside Africans, including Shangans, who were like, so a different tribe of Africans, a smaller subset of the population.
Their food rations in Mafeking were cut off.
Baden-Powell negotiated safe passage for them, for the Shanghans, with the besieging Boers to British-held territory, supplying a military escort and food wagon.
But the truce was broken.
The first attempt to drive 900 blacks out at night was scattered by Boer snipers.
The second by day saw them decimated by Boer attacks.
The policy of forced evacuation was a blunder, Dr. York said.
Baden-Powell was the reluctant victim of external military imperatives.
He realized his errors and dropped it.
So that's complicated.
Yeah, that's complicated.
Because like, yeah, his calls get a bunch of people killed.
He's also acting on orders.
He's not trying necessarily to get people killed.
He's trying to get them out of there so that they can go to British territory where there's more food.
The Boers attack these people.
Like, you could argue he didn't, like, it's unlike, and I'm not a historian because obviously these scholars who are saying, no, no, what he did was understandable.
He wasn't trying to kill anybody, are British military historians from the Royal Military Academy at Sanders.
So have a bias.
I mean, I feel like, you know, I'm inclined to not give him the benefit of the doubt and just say he probably did that shit.
I think what's probably true is that he was not trying to get anybody killed, but also the fact that these people, not just that they're black, but they're black members of this tribe that is not valuable to him.
He's not troubled by what happens to them really.
And it's not, he probably could have done a lot more to make to not get them killed.
It is true that after this happens, he kills all his horses.
He creates soup kitchens to feed starving people.
But distribution of food from those kitchens was biased towards Europeans and elite members of the Baralong tribe.
These British military scholars note this, but say, quote, he was no more racially prejudiced than the vast majority of his generation.
Oh, good.
Which isn't wrong, but doesn't make it not like a war crime also?
Well, I mean, to be fair.
Yeah.
To be fair.
Yeah.
He wasn't racist er than everyone else.
He's like, well, yeah, but did his policies get more of them killed because he gave food to white people instead of, well, yeah, but he didn't do it because he was more any racist person back then, which was everyone would have done this.
I'm like, well, okay, yeah.
But like, that doesn't.
Do you see why that's not good?
I love the idea of just, well, you know, relative to the time period.
Look, you don't know what a piece of shit everybody was back then.
We all sucked.
I mean, come on.
Give him a pass.
This is not to give him a pass, but it is fair to describe the war crimes he committed that way as in.
And again, this is not to give him a pass.
This is actually just to condemn the British Empire.
As a war criminal, within the context of British officers in his time, he was more restrained and respectful of the life of non-white people than most of his colleagues.
Okay.
Who, again, had often committed genocides.
Like, that's what, like, in saying that, like, the SS commander who just starves Jewish people rather than driving them to the gas chamber is like, well, he was more restrained than the others.
I thought it was pretty cool.
Yeah.
It's like, yeah, I mean, it's not, again, this is not to, this is not to defend Baden-Powell.
This is to put him in the context of the British Empire.
He does count as like relatively mild based on the other military officers of his generation in that position.
And again, what he does in Mayficking is mild compared to the fucking concentration camps that Kitchener's setting up.
Yeah.
Again, not to whitewash the man, to put him in context, because for one thing, you should always, you can never be emphatic enough about how bad the British Empire was.
And another part, because there actually is a lot of inaccurate anti-Baden-Powell propaganda out there.
One of the things people sent me before I did this, because they wanted me to do this, was like a book that had been written by this guy in which he alleges that Robert Baden-Powell and Kitchener were both like pedophiles on like a grand, massively abusive scale.
And among other things, alleges that Robert Baden-Powell, early in his career, authorized the execution of two 16-year-old Irish soldiers who he sodomized before murdering, which like that's pretty bad if that's the thing that happened.
Here's the thing.
The book that that allegation comes from, and I found it nowhere else, that book was written by a guy who also wrote a book alleging that Adolf Hitler was a British spy.
So there is a strain of people who are unreasonably anti-like, it's not unreasonably anti-British Empire, but who are like anti-British Empire in a way that's not that.
From a weird perspective.
Yeah, that's like, no, the evil of the British Empire isn't that they invented Hitler.
It's all of the genocide.
Like there's a lot to hate about the British Empire.
Kitchener didn't like train Adolf Hitler to create World War II to further British prophets or whatever the fuck this guy believes.
I mean, you know, it's in general, it's always okay to hate the British Empire.
But, you know, if your source is someone who's like, and therefore, really Nazism, though, she's just Brits.
So yeah, Baden-Powell probably didn't execute and sodomize two 16-year-old Irish soldiers.
And you know who else probably didn't?
It's Sophie.
Is that a bad way to go to ads?
It's a really bad way to go to ads.
I said probably didn't.
I said probably.
Somebody on Twitter this week asked me if we've ever gotten a complaint from sponsors about your transition to ads.
Bleeped Ads and Bad Timing00:04:05
I'm like, no, but maybe now.
Maybe now.
We can just bleep it out.
That'll leave people wondering.
Like the last time we bleeped something out.
Every time we've bleeped something out, which is always done just as a joke, people get like really conspiratory.
Like, oh, they must have gotten the legal threat from this person or that person.
No, I thought it was funny.
It's funnier if you bleep things out sometimes than saying them.
The mystery box is always funnier.
Yeah, but yeah, let's bleep out that Sophie and then never explain it.
Motherfuckers.
I went and sat on the little Ottoman in front of him.
Hi, Dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Come on.
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Cultural Appropriation Concerns00:16:20
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All right, we're back.
Sophie, come on.
Professionalism.
Jesus.
Get it together.
You got to be professional, Sophie.
People come to us expecting a degree of professitude.
I think it's come on.
At the very least, all my elementary school friends who have reached out to say they listen to this show, they told me they listened to it for the professionalism.
For the professionalism, right?
That's what we all say.
Nobody has ever given me that feedback.
Well, you have the wrong elementary school friends.
That's right, Sophie.
I've been saying that for years.
So, when it comes to aspects of Robert Baden-Powell's early life that are relevant to his founding of the Boy Scouts, we should probably get into his sexuality, which is there's a lot that's messy here.
For one thing, he was almost certainly homosexual.
That's not questionable.
Tim Geal even agrees, like this, he was almost certainly gay, right?
Like, and this is not uncommon.
A significant number of the men who build the British Empire, there's a really good argument to be made that they may have been and possibly like celibate home, like gay men.
Because again, it is illegal to be gay at this period.
Like, people go to prison for having homosexual relationships and stuff.
It is extremely for, and so a lot of these guys would.
I mean, I doubt Baden-Powell considered himself homosexual, but like a lot of the guys who build the Empire are these men who have these who don't like Henry Morton Stanley doesn't like women, is kind of disgusted by like the female body and has all these incredibly intense, like loving relationships with men that are probably not sexual.
Like, we really don't know because obviously they wouldn't have written about it if it was, because it was a felony.
Um, there's a lot of this going on in the British Empire, and Baden-Powell is almost certainly one of those guys, one of those guys who maybe like I again, I'm certain would never have accepted to himself that he was gay, probably never had gay sex.
We certainly don't have any evidence of that.
Um, but he loved the homies, you know, he loved the male body beautiful and the female body disgusting.
Which, right?
Like, what are you like?
Take what you will, take what you will out of that.
Um, the big debate isn't around, like, was this a guy with like some homosexual like inclinations?
It is, was he also a pedophile?
Um, and I should be clear up front because this is going to get real murky.
We do not have any evidence that he was a child molester, and I think I think that's unlikely that he ever.
But the question is, like, was he attracted to kids?
Um, or was he attracted to just kids?
Like, we really, it's it's messy.
Um, he definitely had some very intense romantic relationships with young men who were adults, so it wasn't like whatever his attraction was, it wasn't exclusively to kids if he was attracted to kids.
Um, he seems to have preferred men in their teens, like 16 to 19, was like his kind of sweet spot.
I think are we about to go into that?
Like, well, technically, that's not pedophilia.
No, no, but also, you can join the military at like 16.
True, like, it is there are some.
I'm not trying to like this is a different kind of culture, and I don't think he actually does anything with any of these boys, like, which also does matter.
Um, so we'll talk more about this later.
There's a lot of this is a very murky and anytime you're talking about the sexuality of a man in a period in which his likely sexuality was criminalized from what you have in his diaries, that's going to be imperfect.
But it is necessary to discuss because of how the Boy Scouts is made in his image.
It's part of the story.
Yeah.
So, he returns in like the early 1900s.
He gets back from the Boer War, and he's a hero, one of the most famous men in the British Empire, and also just like in the Western world.
He's incredibly prominent at this point.
And he is seen as a man's man.
Like, he's considered handsome.
He's this war hero.
He's like been through a bunch of shit.
He's legitimately, like, hard man.
Like, he's he's gone through some stuff.
One government minister even creates the Baden Powell League of Health and Manliness in his honor, which is absolutely, that is, I think we can all agree, the straightest name an organization has ever had.
Oh, that's amazing.
Yeah, that's incredible.
It was named after what is most likely a gay man.
It's just like, yeah, the health and manliness.
Yeah, it's very funny.
Yeah, it's very funny.
It's technically a civil rights icon.
Yeah.
Members were, quote, expected to do good turns, eschew tobacco until they were 21 and lead healthy and physically strenuous lives.
This is according to Tim Geal.
League members wore badges with pictures of Baden Powell on them.
It was a huge success.
A lot of guys get interested in this.
Yeah.
And this fact helps to convince Baden Powell after he returns home from the war that the young men of England are desperate for an organization that can give their lives structure and train them up for a grand purpose.
Proud boys.
Yeah, a little bit of that.
I mean, not this is really focused on, because it's not about her.
It's not like a really paramilitary.
It's not about like, it's about teaching them useful life skills.
Well, trying to be proud and boys at the same time.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, a big part of it is you have England is industrialized rapidly in this period.
There's this huge population of young men, many of whom don't have fathers because their dads died in some sort of like industrial accident.
Like a chimney accident.
Yeah, chimney accident.
And a bunch of them are like, they've lived in cities their whole lives.
They don't know anything about the outdoors.
They don't know anything about like survival and stuff.
And he wants to, he wants to like teach these people useful skills to give them, to like deal with this kind of the malaise that's growing under capitalism.
You see this in the U.S. too, like all of these like angry, disaffected, miserable urban populations.
He sees this and his answer is like, well, give them some sort of structure, teach them useful skills, get them out of the city, you know?
Which is not a bad idea.
Sure.
Yeah.
From Scout's Honor, the book, quote, Baden-Powell had always gotten along with children.
His love for children is perhaps his ruling passion, one journalist wrote of his work in Africa.
He is never happier than when surrounded by them.
They surrounded him back home as well, as he stepped into the effort to strengthen England's young men physically, mentally, and spiritually.
Youth brigades and clubs were sprouting all over.
In 1907, Baden Powell rewrote Aids to Scouting for NCOs and Men, which he had originally written for soldiers, to make it suitable for boys.
Several of Baden-Powell's friends had been suggesting the rewrite, as well as the creation of an outdoor boys' club.
So that summer, Baden-Powell and an army friend ran the first Boy Scout camp to see how the idea would work.
So this is kind of the genesis of this, and it's happening.
A lot of stuff's happening in culture.
There's other boys' clubs kind of starting up, and he has this idea to take these scouting guides that he wrote for soldiers in Africa, rewrite them for little kids, and give them a place to actually get out of the city and learn this stuff.
Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, just so not the proud boys, but more like the Hitler youth.
How about that?
Yeah.
And in fact, Baden-Powell is really interested in the Hitler youth.
Now, there's a lot of argument as to like whether or not, and he said a lot of nasty stuff about Hitler.
I don't know that I don't think, I wouldn't call him a Nazi, but there's certainly elements of his belief system that were like friendly with some early aspects of fascism.
Like he was very intrigued by the Hitler Youth.
Although, in fairness, the Nazis considered the Boy Scouts a subversive organization in Germany.
So like there's a lot going on there.
We're not going to get into that much.
You can find a lot written about it.
I'm not going to like delve in and take a side on this like historical debate of how sympathetic was he?
Like what, whatever.
Now that account from a book written critical, The Scout's Honor is written about sexual abuse within the Boy Scouts.
Like based on the title, you might think it was like a pro-Boy Scouts history.
It is not.
Oh, no, I assumed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was written in 1993.
I think it was 93.
It was the early 90s.
And that account of like how the Boy Scouts get started is generally in line with the story that I heard growing up.
But the actual origins of the Boy Scouts are a bit more complex and more rooted in cultural appropriation and also outright theft.
Baden Powell is not the only founder of the Boy Scouts.
I'm not going to go into too much detail about this because it's not relevant to the actual story we're telling.
But it is worth noting that in 1902, so that's like five years before Baden Powell rewrites his book about scouting, an American named Ernest Thompson Seton had some property vandalized by rambunctious boys.
And instead of punishing them, he invited them onto his land for the weekend.
And he taught them like some camping stuff.
And he claimed all of these like this like woodcraft he was teaching them, he claimed were like Native American like wilderness lore and whatnot.
I think a lot of it's just stuff he'd learned and he was like making up stories that weren't true because he liked stories about Native Americans.
And he would tell them like folk stories about Native Americans.
Again, I don't know how much of any of this was accurate.
He's certainly appropriating it because again, he's as white as they come.
Yeah, again, I don't know how accurate any of this was.
In any case, The Weekend was a hit.
This is like really successful and he thinks it helps these boys out.
So he keeps doing it.
And he eventually forms an organization that he called the Woodcraft Indians.
This was so successful.
It gets very popular.
I think it was particularly in like the eastern chunk of the U.S. that after a couple of years, he writes a book called The Birch Bark Roll, which lays out his lessons in boys.
And it's all rooted in like, here's Native American wisdom for white boys who want to learn how to be woodsmen.
Seton was successful enough that this word of what he was doing crossed the pond.
And in 1906, Seton traveled to England to give Robert Baden Powell a copy of his book.
And Baden Powell may have gone to the United States to attend one of his birch bark gatherings.
It was a huge influence on scouting for boys.
We have letters from Baden Powell saying, like, I'm taking a lot of what, like, you put in this book into like the thing that I'm writing.
And when the Boy Scouts as an organization were created in 1910, they were heavily influenced by the structure of the Woodcraft tribe.
Seton was angry for years.
He gets really angry that his idea has been stolen.
And there's a lot of debate as to how true that was.
People will point out that Baden Powell, he'd had boys organizations that he'd been involved with before.
He'd clearly been playing with this idea before.
He's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, I've been hanging out with little boys.
I love having hanging out with boys before you were born.
Exactly.
But today, Seton is recognized even by the BSA as one of the founders of the Boy Scouts.
And there's some people who argue that he was kind of more left-wing and that the Boy Scouts wind up being kind of right-wing because Baden-Powell dominates it.
I don't know how accurate I think that is because Seton is like, again, ton of cultural appropriation here.
I think that people have a tendency to kind of like idolize him over much.
Yeah, I will note that while Satan definitely did a lot of cultural appropriation to make his organization, I don't have any evidence that he deliberately enabled a culture of child sex abuse, which Robert Baden Powell absolutely did.
So if you've got to pick a favorite Boy Scout founder, I do think I pick cultural appropriation over child molestation.
I think I'm going to give it to that.
There are levels.
I mean, they're both problematic.
We can say that.
Yeah, they are.
They're definitely both problematic.
I mean, both are grounds for a cancellation, but one more so than another.
Yeah, I think if I'm prepping to cancel Canon, I'm going for the guy who enabled child molestation on a massive scale first, probably.
That's probably a good call.
Speaking of child molestation on a massive scale, that shouldn't be an ad break, should it, Sophie?
Back to Baden Powell.
Let's get back to Baden Powell.
So he rewrites Aids to Scouting for NCOs and Men in 1907.
And shortly thereafter, that same summer, they start the first Boy Scout camp.
And the Boy Scouts aren't an organization until 1910.
They're kind of like testing out, like, let's get a bunch of boys on the land.
Let's teach them.
Let's see if this is actually a good idea, if kids like it, if it's got legs, basically.
This is their beta test.
So they bring a bunch of boys to the land, this land they've got.
They spend a week with them hiking, teaching them how to make tents.
And according to the book Scout's Honor, quote, at the end of the day, there were rub downs and stories around the campfire.
So that's potentially problematic.
Oh, man.
That's potentially problematic.
The stories around the campfire was fine.
It was just like they get.
It's the rub downs.
It's the rub downs.
Rub downs.
You know, rub downs and stories around the floor.
Maybe no rubdowns.
And like running hands through the hair of children, and then also like looking at the stars.
I think a couple things can be true.
One is that we currently have a problem in our culture where like men who feel like called to teach young boys things, like mentor young boys, they get like unfairly accused and like people get suspicious.
It's like, why would a man like care about, which it's actually good for men to like care about the mentoring and the upraising of the people?
Being tender with a child is not bad, but having just good, actually.
Rub downs.
Rub downs is a line.
It is a line that has been crossed.
When you're doing rub downs of the boys in your care, things have crossed the line, in my opinion.
There's levels of tenderness.
Yeah, and rub downs cross that line.
How about pat on the head?
Little pat.
And I guess, yeah, I don't, you could argue that the rub downs were not like necessarily sexual assault because I don't know like what, but certainly you're on a line there.
You're at an uncomfortable point.
It's a gray area, that rub down area.
However far these went, Baden Powell seemed to get something intensely powerful out of the experience.
His widow would later tell an interviewer that, though he'd spoken at many youth groups since his return from the war, quote, this was different.
These boys were his, his for a week, to work with, to play with, to learn from, and if his ideas were right, to guide, to influence, to mold.
So, again, I know, like, I know playing with kids is good.
You should, it's good.
It's good to care about.
If you said that sentence, I'd like you to delete it.
I just, you can't say these words.
Problematic.
Play with kids, like activities.
Do activities.
Do activities with kids.
Yes.
Yeah.
God damn it.
The language around it is just very difficult.
He took his strong feelings during this week as a sign that his new calling was to mentor boys.
In 1908, he published his rewritten book as Scouting for Boys, and this included within it the Scout Oath, which is, on my honor, I will do my best to do my duty for 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.
That's a famous, and the scout law is that a bunch of shit you're supposed to be.
Helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, reverent, like all that shit.
That's like, this is still like, yeah, rub downs.
Morally straight, baby.
You got to be morally straight.
Yeah, I mean, if there's one person who screams straight to me, it's Robert Baden Powell.
So that is a straight, manly guy.
That's a straight, manly man right there.
You will generally run into a few different theories as to what the overall purpose of scouting was.
The sinister theory is best summarized by this passage from an Irish Times article.
Quote, for him, the Boy Scout movement was an unarmed paramilitary expression of the empire.
So that's one angle that he's trying to train up the soldiers of the future, right?
He's getting boys ready to fight for the British Empire.
Biographer Michael Rosenthal shares this opinion, writing, all of scouting can be properly understood as Baden Powell himself understood it, as an organization expressly designed to churn out admirable, obedient lads.
Scouting sought to guarantee for society the complete submission of its members.
And there's a lot to be said.
We won't get into it enough about like World War I's impact on scouting because a huge chunk of the British soldiers who die in World War I were former Boy Scouts.
Unarmed Paramilitary Training00:04:36
And kind of one of the, it had been very British up to World War I, and it becomes much more international after that point and much less kind of dedicated to specifically British imperialism.
And I don't really know enough about like, did Baden-Powell look at like how gung-ho all these young men were to go have an adventure overseas that led to them getting mowed down by machine guns, fire, and sucked into mud and be like, ah shit.
Because other people who were like, like Teddy Roosevelt is like horrified by World War, like one of his kids dies there, who he like really pushes to go fight and like dies horribly.
And he's like, ah, Jesus.
Yeah.
A lot of people have.
I thought this was going to be simple, like the Philippines or whatever.
Yeah.
Rujord Kipling has kind of a similar like it has this like profoundly almost radicalizing experience on Kipling.
Kipling's a fascinating guy.
Wrote some really like some of the most imperialist shit ever written and also some like really profoundly anti-imperialist stuff about like you know groups of like indigenous people like destroying empires and stuff and like all this like fascinating dude.
So Tim Geal, on the other hand, writes that Baden-Powell's purpose was more protective than this.
Quote, adult life was full of dangers.
Women could deprave them.
Politicians mislead them and gambling and drunkenness could wreck their lives.
But in his boys-only world, he would counteract these dangers with hiking, camping, cheery sing songs, and other safe activities.
And I think both these views are probably accurate.
I think Baden-Powell did legitimately care about the health and well-being of boys, and he wanted to help them grow up healthy.
He was fiercely protective of them.
I also think he wanted them to become good little soldiers of empire because he was an imperialist.
Yeah.
He grown up because he thought that was a good thing.
It's not like he loved it.
That wasn't sinister for him.
No, that was like, yes, you know, this is what men are supposed to do.
You will, yeah, men are supposed to learn how to like carve things into wood, make macaroni pictures, and fucking, you know, and oppress indigenous peoples.
Yeah.
Right, exactly.
Yeah, for the wealth of, you know, whatever.
It's also kind of worth noting here that Baden-Powell grew up fatherless, as we stated.
He never had a father.
And he, a big part of his angle is there's a bunch of kids in Great Britain in this period who don't have fathers.
And part of his goal for the Boy Scouts, which is an admirable goal for an organization, is to provide, he wanted to train up hundreds of scout masters who could act as like surrogate fathers to children who didn't have them.
So like, okay, if you're a single mom, you're kind of struggling to figure out how to raise a boy.
This organization will provide him with healthy male mentorship, right?
Right.
Which is certainly like Boys and Girls Club.
There's kind of similar themes in a bunch of good organizations.
It's not a bad idea.
However, there's also problematic aspects of this.
Because one of the reasons he thinks that he needs to train up scout masters to be surrogate fathers for the boys of Britons is that because, quote, except where the scout masters take the father's place, the boys have no one to consult on intimate subjects.
So from the beginning, he's like, well, well, you know, obviously they need a man in their lives to teach them, you know, manly things, but also like to talk about sex.
Right.
This is from the beginning, yeah.
Which is not, again, yes, not necessary, but maybe not this way.
I think it's nothing wrong with talking to your kids about fucking.
But having said that sentence, I would like to say.
You need an adult and generally an adult of the same gender identity they have to talk to them about sex.
That's a good thing.
I mean, it is.
Yeah.
It just depends on where we're going.
But it can go very wrong, is the point.
And so, like, yeah.
Again, all of the, all of the founding boy is this stuff where it's like, yeah, but where are we going?
Which way are you going to take this?
Because we got to trust you, but I'm on the same time.
To be able to.
And this is one of the things some scholars have pointed out is that one of the groundbreaking things about the Boy Scouts is that it was the only really organization of its size and popular culture that explicitly was like, we are, one of the things we're here to do is to talk to young men about sex, about their sexual development, right?
Which is progressive, right?
But and we're going to get to the butt.
But first, you know what else is sexually progressive, Matt?
You know what else gets straight to the butt?
Building a Strong Legacy00:04:01
The products and services that support this podcast.
I'm trying to think what the funniest ad it could be right now.
Meundies, for sure.
Oh, yeah.
The meundies days.
It is fun to like chart the growth of podcasts in the areas of ads.
Like I came of age during the mattress day.
Yeah.
Oh, remember when we used to get free things?
I got two free mattresses.
It was red.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
Hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Come on.
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If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
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Repressed Puberty Talk00:16:04
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Oh, we're back and we're all just having a great time.
So much fun, dude.
A guy who's not at all deeply problematic.
They're going to be able to cut out snippets of this podcast and cancel me for generations.
Oh, yeah.
No, you are going to be canceled well into the 23rd century.
Oh, damn it.
Yeah.
When the Federation of Planets starts up, there's going to be a galaxy-class starship named The Cancellation of Matt Lieb.
Just on loop and place a thing where I just say, I think it's good to play with kids.
That's the noise it makes when it goes into warp.
Good times.
So the fact that one of the purposes of scouting is to provide boys with male mentors who can talk to them about intimate issues.
One of the things that this means is that naturally the scout masters who are mostly volunteers that Baden Powell is bringing in are going to have to talk to boys about sexual issues like masturbation.
And again, this was somewhat revolutionary for its day, but it's also worth noting that like the fact that they're talking about this is revolutionary.
Their attitude towards it is profoundly conservative.
Abstinence is the only thing ever encouraged.
But at the same time, the mere fact that their literature addressed masturbation as a topic was kind of progressive for the era.
Yeah, they talked about the existence of it.
Yeah.
I mean, that's...
This is not a good thing necessarily.
As we'll discuss, Baden Powell's impulse to discuss boys' sexuality came from a really problematic place.
But I want to read to you his advice on masturbation as it was written for the first draft of his book on scouting.
Because I know this is something you need in your life.
Please, this is going to be fun to listen to.
Let me get my old-timey voice ready.
You all know what it is to have at times a pleasant feeling in your private pots.
And there comes an inclination to work it up with your hand.
The result of self-abuse is always, mind you always, that the boy, after a time, becomes weak and nervous and shy.
He gets headaches and probably palpitations of the heart.
And if he carries it on too far, he very often goes out of his mind and becomes an idiot.
A very large number of lunatics in our asylums have made themselves mad by indulging in this vice.
Although at one time, they were sensible, cheery boys like you.
Jesus.
First of all, that was like the Carnival Barker from Hell told me not to jerk off.
And I do love the idea of like the, well, you know, if you jerk off too much, you become insane because it's a theory so easily disproven.
Yeah.
By just generations.
By the sanest man in the world.
Yeah.
I'm trying to figure out what the funny.
Yeah, Matley.
Yeah, there we go.
I mean, it's.
It's also, we should, I should note, I'm sure our regular listeners will have caught this.
If you listen to like the Kellogg episodes, he's not inventing this stuff.
He is, when he talks about masturbation in this way, he is actually like sharing mainstream medical conclusions.
Like the mainstream of the medical establishment in this period broadly agrees with everything he said.
So this is not like Baden Powell isn't introducing this, although he is, it is unique that he is as like a youth group leader talking, trying to talk about this so openly.
Now, that passage I just read doesn't get published in the first Boy Scout manual.
His publisher is like, wait a second.
Why are you talking about masturbating so much in this book?
I have some notes.
Yeah, I have some notes.
Most of it is good.
The whole section about coming, jerking off.
Maybe we trim that down.
Quick note.
It's going to affect book sales.
Yeah.
So they rework it to make this much vaguer, simply cautioning children not to touch themselves and noting that if they feel an urge to do so, this is critical.
Quote, go to your father or your scout master and talk it over with him and all will come right.
So that could be problematic right there.
Yeah.
Having these children, if you want to masturbate, go to your volunteer unvetted scout master.
And he'll teach you how to come right.
You can see this is a situation in which if the wrong kind of people become scout masters, this could be a profoundly abusive situation.
A lot of trust.
A lot of trust in these scout masters.
Probably undue trust.
Yep.
Yep.
So it's here we should probably again discuss the sexuality of Robert Baden Powell in a little more detail.
So again, Tim Geal is convinced that he was gay.
And the strongest piece of evidence for this is that when he was in the army, he falls madly in love with a young army officer, again, an adult named Kenneth McLaren, who he called the boy.
Now, again, I don't know, like, we might have called, I think, I'm not sure if Kenneth was like 18, but like he was, he was an officer in the army.
He was an adult kind of by the standards of the time, right?
Right.
Calling him the boy is just probably, that's a term of endearment.
I call people who are like in their mid-30s.
I'm like, oh, those kids over there.
Yeah, those fucking kids.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's probably fine.
Yeah.
Geal calls this Baden Powell's only close friendship in like his entire life.
Like this is like a really unique relationship with him, which right there says something.
The two bunked together, which also says something.
They vacationed together.
They exchanged gifts.
And when the boy was captured by Boers during the Siege of Mafeking, Baden Powell had to be stopped from trying to rescue him.
Jeal calls this an emotionally homosexual relationship because there's no actual evidence that these two fucked.
And again, given a lot of, this is not an uncommon kind of relationship.
Maybe they did.
That's also total.
I'm sure a lot of these guys that we just don't know if it was just emotional or if they actually, like, I'm sure a lot of them did and just couldn't say anything and go to prison.
Yeah.
Maybe.
Like, I don't, but also that you can't overstate how repressed they are.
Like, that's true.
Would they even have known how?
Like, really, would they even have known how?
You can't, you can't entirely, the impulses, because human beings are human beings, are the same as they've always been.
Their understanding of like ways in which to handle those impulses, that is cultural.
And like, it is, you, you can't entirely get in their heads just given the fact that like you know that like, you know, like the basics of like how sodomy works, right?
Like that that's like a thing you can do.
Like who knows what these guys know?
Yeah.
It is true.
Like even straight British people are just edging at all times.
Yeah.
Like they're all repressed.
Like who knows what these people know about fucking kissing?
Like, this is an incredibly repressed, not just time, but like class, because these are the upper crust.
These have only ever, like, I don't know what I don't know.
I like, again, it's hard to get too much into anybody's head here because, like, their understanding of like what is possible in a relationship between two men physically is just at such a different level.
There's no internet, you know?
Not that there's not ways there is pornography.
There are like way Oscar Wilde exists in this period.
Like, it's not impossible to figure it out.
There's some books on it, for sure.
There's some books on it.
You can, in fact, figure this shit out.
But I don't know what these guys knew.
And these are very common, you know, among kind of the imperialist class who are actually like doing the shit overseas.
Baden-Powell did get married kind of later in life.
He had a couple of kids, but among other things, he was noted to regularly sleep outside on the porch because he couldn't bear to be near his wife.
So again.
It could be because he's gay.
It could be because she's a British.
She must just have sucked.
I don't know.
I mean, you know, like I've seen British people.
It's just an island full of Jesus Christ.
Wow.
Wow.
Every British person is ugly as except for like all right.
Wow.
Chris, throw in three or four random bleeps in that sentence just to make it even more mysterious.
So Jill concludes that Baden Powell's intimate diaries reveal a revulsion towards naked women and a fascination with naked male bodies.
Quote from the book Scout's Honor.
In his advice to boys, Baden Powell treated women as a hazard to be avoided.
Again, not uncommon for the time.
He mocked boys for girlitis if they paired off with young ladies and wrote that young fellows are apt to excite their lust by talking about love or toying about with girls.
But this is all bad for you.
Rovering to success, one of his books for boys, includes a chapter titled Women, in which he warns about the rutting season, that time when a boy is growing to manhood and finds himself obsessed by lust.
He was writing about puberty, but compared it to an illness.
He said it would last only a few months, sometimes a couple of years, and told boys to get over it just as they would get over the measles or any other youthful complaint.
An entire chapter just dedicated to talking about how girls have cooties.
Yeah, and girls have cooties and you don't need to fuck.
Yeah.
Exactly.
He noted with remarkably little excitement that most boys would get married at some point.
And like he was kind of like, yeah, like you want to delay this as long as possible.
You'll probably get married because it's the only way to carry out the creator's law that is to make children, right?
Yeah.
But that's all that women are.
Like they're not a partner.
They're not, there's nothing attractive about this.
It's just the only way we get babies.
That's his attitude.
And yeah, he repeatedly stated that women's bodies were repellent, just as he wrote about how wonderfully made the bodies of young men and boys were.
As the Boy Scouts got off the ground, he engineered many opportunities to watch naked boys.
Much of this happened at scout camps where nude swimming was traditional.
And this is normal in swimming in general.
Like there's a lot of nude swimming in England.
But he liked this a lot.
He repeatedly described naked boys at the swimming hole as a delightful sight.
As yummy.
This did start to, like I said, this was kind of normal in the world he grew up in.
It started to change in this period.
And in fact, during this period, the police in London banned boys from swimming naked in Hyde Park Lake.
Baden Powell is enraged by this, and he writes, How dare they?
My boys!
What is this?
God giving right to look at little boys as I run into the Hyde Park Lake and dance and jump and jiggle.
He writes a beautiful sight, straight from God.
I will build my own lake and they will all swim in it.
A woman walks by in a long dress and he's like, oh, God, get that away from me.
Police!
I saw an inhuman creature, Lord's Woman.
I assume he had jeals, but he's probably really handsome and talk great.
He was as a younger man, at least.
At least people at the time consider that.
Everybody always gives me shit if they don't find it.
Like, I'm just saying, people at the time wrote that he was.
And in fact, there are women at the time who write, he's very handsome, but women, like, he seems to have no interest in women.
Like, other people note this about him.
Yeah.
And also, some of his, like, if you look at it, like, this guy, I don't see why people would find this handsome.
He's a war hero, which has an impact on people.
So, when the police in London banned boys from swimming naked in Hyde Park, like, Baden Powell writes a column for Scout magazine suggesting that Scout Masters, quote, educate the boy by encouraging his self-expression instead of disciplining him by police methods of repression.
And it's so funny because it's like self-expression is naked bathing.
Yeah.
I mean, there is like part of me where it's just like, you know, it's ridiculous to, you know, penalize people for skinny dipping.
Yeah, I wouldn't want to arrest someone for skinny dipping, but like, you're not coming at this from a holy place, Robert.
Yeah, he's not at all about self-expression.
No.
No.
Well, there goes my fucking Saturday.
Oh, God.
I was going to put on my loosest pants and walk down to Hyde Park.
I got a charcuterie plate and everything.
I was going to have quite a time.
Police.
He's just ACAP.
This is what gets him ACAP.
Is them bringing out bathing suits for the boys.
G-Fun, the mommies.
So one of Baden-Powell's friends at this time is a teacher named A.H. Todd.
A.H. Todd's hobby was taking pictures of nude boys.
He called them figure studies.
But the library he donated his album to after his death destroyed all of these photographs in the 1960s to, quote, protect Todd's reputation.
Because these pictures were not, in fact, artistic figure studies.
They were child pornography.
Jill, I think, falls short of calling them child porn, but he does note that the poses of the nude boys in these photos were, quote, contrived and artificial.
And he notes that they're artificial and contrived in the same way as the poses of naked women at the time that were sold as art but were really softcore pornography, right?
Porn you couldn't get, but you could get these art photos that were based that functioned as porn.
That's kind of what this guy's doing, but for little boy, well, I think they're like young boys at least, certainly.
Definitely children of some sort.
I don't know the exact age frames in all cases.
Baden Powell spent quite a lot of time with Todd.
In 1919, he stayed at the man's home and wrote, Todd's photos of naked boys and trees, etc.
Excellent.
Naked boys and trees, pantry, ducks.
He has people swimming in ponds.
He has a boy playing with himself.
He has a bear.
He has fruit sitting on a table.
He has two boys playing with themselves.
Oh, God.
So he goes to hang out with Todd for a night or two, and he looks at his picture book.
And he immediately, as soon as he gets home, he sends Todd a letter asking if he can visit again and noting, possibly I might get a further look at those wonderful photographs of yours.
I know, right?
It's pretty fucked up.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
I'm imagining that dude sliding into people's DMs because sometimes on Twitter I just see like people will post screen caps of like thirsty dudes sliding into their DMs and it sounds very similar.
Do I have to be a subscriber to OnlyFans to see the little boy pictures again?
Yeah.
And again, there's no evidence or even allegations whatsoever that Robert Baden-Powell himself assaulted any boys.
I think there was a lot of gross lasciviousness going on.
I think there's evidence he enjoyed child pornography.
I don't think he physically, again, I don't know that he ever had sex other than the three times necessary with his wife to conceive children.
Because he was a repressed motherfucker.
So like, right?
In this case, maybe that was good.
Cause I, it's it doesn't, it seems likely he never personally abused any boys.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It seems like like with repression, you know, it's largely bad, except in very few cases.
Except for maybe in this case, it helped out.
But although not really, because while he personally probably didn't, I can't obviously categorically say anything.
He absolutely encouraged the nudity of young boys.
Justice for Child Molesters00:12:09
He also in scouts and he encouraged those young boys to go to their scout masters to discuss sex, nakedness, and masturbation.
A not insignificant number of those men turned out to be child molesters.
And how Robert Baden-Powell dealt with those men was telling.
Scouting rapidly grew larger.
It became an international organization in like a decade or so.
It spreads all over the world.
It gets very big very quickly.
This brought up a need for an ever-expanding pool of men to work as scout masters.
These were volunteers, unpaid volunteers, which is quite a lot of work to ask of someone who has no ulterior motives for doing the job, right?
My scout masters were just like really nice people who loved the outdoors and wanted to teach kids.
I don't think there's ever been any allegations against them.
I certainly never experienced anything.
Those people happen.
But also, there are people who join the Boy Scouts because it's like, oh, I can be alone with a lot of naked boys and I can do things, you know?
That is a major thing happening.
Now, again, as propressed as this time was, people are not ignorant of the fact that there are child molesters in the world.
There are people within the Boy Scouts and within like the government who are like interfacing with the Boy Scouts who recognize this as a risk, who see what Baden Powell's building are like, well, if the wrong person became a scout master, he could really hurt a lot of boys.
And they go to Baden-Powell and they're like, the Boy Scouts need to set up a way to screen volunteers in order to protect kids.
We have to have something, right?
We have to attempt to stop people who might hurt these kids.
And crucially, Robert Baden-Powell said no.
Quote, and this is from a letter he wrote, I don't think we ought to make the test of scout masters too stringent for fear of putting them off.
Again, it's expanding rapidly.
It can only expand as much as there are adult volunteers.
He doesn't want to slow the expansion of the organization by making sure that there aren't pedophiles in the race.
I mean, obviously.
Yeah, how do you do a pedophile test, though?
Even if he had cared, I'm sure it would have fallen short.
And it was inevitable.
And this is the kind of thing.
The Boy Scouts are not evil because some men who got into the organization molested kids.
In an organization that at its peak has like 7 million kids, some of the adult volunteers are going to molest some of those kids.
That is inevitable.
Just it's scaled up.
In a town of 7 million people, some of the adults will molest children.
That is inevitable.
That doesn't mean the organization's evil.
What is evil is the way that they deal with it or rather fail to deal with it.
And that his evil is that, like, again, if he had attempted to screen for this and just failed, that would have been like, well, he tried.
And what like, yeah, how could you screen?
How do you screen for this, right?
This is an ongoing conversation we as a civilization continue to have.
The problem is not that he failed in screening them.
The problem is like, I don't think screening is a good idea because it's going to slow down our expansion, right?
That's the issue.
Sounds like an imperialist mindset, and I love it.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
He's all about that growth.
Yep.
Now, the fact that damn near any adult man could become a scout master becomes an issue as the organization ages and expands.
In a 1920 book about scouting in British schools, one headmaster said, One of the weak spots in the scout movement, generally, it seems to me, is that there is no guarantee of the capacity or character of the scout master.
Any man or callo youth could get together a number of boys, form them into a scout troop, and become their scout master.
And there was no safeguard whatsoever against his being a man of most pernicious influence.
So, again, when we talk about like damning people by the standards of their time, people raise the alarm from the beginning of the Boy Scouts.
People are telling Robert Baden-Powell, you are not being careful enough with these boys.
And he does not listen.
These concerns proved absolutely valid within Baden-Powell's lifetime.
In 1923, a scout master was caught molesting a boy at the camp at Baden Powell, like Baden Powell's camp.
He gets sentenced, he gets caught by the police, and he is sentenced to three years in prison.
Now, when this happened, this is a big story, obviously, right?
Like, this gets out, this isn't like hushed up.
And Baden Powell writes a column in The Scouter, which is like the adult Boy Scout, it's a magazine for the adult leaders within the Boy Scouts.
And in this column, he is effusive in his condemnation of the man.
He noted that if the law had let him, he would have punished the man by flogging.
In the same article, he correctly notes that the abuse of these children by the scout master was a failure of the Boy Scouts to honor their grave responsibility of ensuring the safety of boys.
But at the same time, he describes the sexual abuse of a child by a scout master as a man going too far in quote sentimentalism.
What the fuck?
What the fuck indeed?
What is that mean?
What the fuck indeed?
I think that is him covertly acknowledging: yes, a number of us are attracted to the boys, but you don't touch them.
That would be too sentimental.
Not that I think the reality is like it is there's a very complicated conversation to have about people who are attracted to children and do not molest them.
But I think one thing that is clear is that if you are that kind of person, it is imperative that you do everything in your power to not go anywhere near children.
Like, don't like that's that's critical.
Don't fucking go near kids if you're attracted to kids and you don't want to be a monster.
You're not a monster just because you grow up with like this thing in your fucking head, as long as you don't put yourself in a position where you're going to hurt anybody, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, just that, make that your number one priority.
Yeah, not being near fucking kids, right?
What that is.
Above eating and drinking.
Yeah.
And stay away from children.
Stay away from children.
Brush your teeth.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And Baden-Powell's being like, well, of course, it's fine that a lot of us are attracted to the boys, but this guy went too far in his sentimentalism, which reveals a tremendous amount about him, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, as the book Scouts Honor notes, Baden-Powell was even more problematic in his attitudes towards the sexual assault of boys in his care during his private conversations than he was in, again, this public column.
In 1922, a doctor named Patterson was put in charge of the main camping field at Gilwell, which is the first and chief scout camp.
So, Dr. Patterson is responsible for the health of all these boys.
He sleeps in a medical hut that's near the field where the boys camp, so he can be near the boys to watch over them because he's, again, he's the doctor.
He was extremely trusted for years.
Mothers would often write to Lord Baden-Powell asking if he could pair their sons with Dr. Patterson so he could talk to them about sex.
And Robert would send them to Patterson, right?
Like, they would be like, my son, I'm a single mom.
My son needs a man to talk to about sex.
And be like, I'll send them to the doctor.
Which, again, on the surface, if this guy isn't a child molester, perfectly reasonable.
Like a boy has questions about sex, send him to the doctor.
Send him to a doctor.
Right.
Right.
Here's the problem.
Dude's a child molester.
In August 1922, several boys complained that Dr. Patterson had given them painfully thorough physical examinations at night in his medical hut.
An investigation commenced, and Baden Powell allowed Patterson to be quietly fired rather than going to the authorities or taking any kind of punitive action beyond kicking him out.
So they do not go to the police.
They do not make this a criminal matter because they don't want this to blow up.
Right.
This is the first time that happens.
This will become the pattern for more than a century of the Boy Scouts of America.
It is established by Robert Baden-Powell.
Now, again, when cases of sexual abuse did go public, as that one did in 1923 that we talked about earlier, Baden-Powell was very loud in public about decrying the abuse.
But as the book Scouts Honor notes, however, Patterson's successor, the doctor who follows after he gets quietly pushed out, H.D. Byrne, proved to be no different.
After a decade in charge of the camping field, someone picked up, quote, a fat diary in Byrne's room and discovered it to be filled with detailed descriptions of sexual encounters with boys.
He too was dismissed quietly, Jill writes.
Headquarters evidently preferred not to let it be known that for almost 15 years, the one job in the movement requiring men of unimpeachable integrity had been occupied by a succession of active pederists.
God.
Well, a whole section of them, huh?
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
That's a grip.
That's a grip of pederists.
That's too many pederists.
That's too many pederists, I think.
I would say one, probably two men, but again.
And again, to be fair here, the evil is not that like a pedophile, especially in a new organization, wound up in a position and hurt boys.
It's that their answer to it was to hide it and then promote another pedophile to that position because they don't take any care to actually screen these fucking people.
And again, if their screening had been imperfect, that's a thing that happens.
At least they tried.
They didn't.
And Baden-Powell's instinct was to try to cover it up and not to punish these people, to treat it as a moral slip rather than an act of profound evil.
That is how he seems to be like, ah, these men slipped.
It's like, no, no, no.
They abused children.
Yeah.
Firing them.
That's not a slip.
You showed up late to work twice.
Yeah.
It's like, no, it's not.
This is not a firing thing.
This is a...
These people need to be removed from society.
They have harmed children.
The worst thing you can do.
Some justice needs to be served.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The founder of the Boy Scouts would die in 1941, but the patterns he established would follow the organization as it aged.
They are, in brief, an avowed refusal to properly check the men who volunteer to watch over boys, a willingness to overlook problematic behavior, and a commitment to hiding the cases of abuse that they are forced to acknowledge.
So.
Oh, fuck.
This is.
We're going to talk in part two about the modern BSA, but it is just very important to note that everything we'll be talking about in part two, that stuff that goes up to like 2015, to right now, really, starts with Baden-Powell.
This is not a case of a man founding a beautiful organization that later people fail on.
From the beginning, everything problematic that has led to mass sexual assaults in the Boy Scouts was present from its founding.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, it's founded by a guy who kind of wanted to fuck kids.
Kind of wanted to fuck kids.
That's, you know, that's a recipe for disaster.
That's a little bit of a, yeah, it's not great.
Not great.
Probably.
Again, I had a great time in Boy Scouts.
I think an organization with the broad goal of teaching kids self-reliance and survival in the woods is wonderful and absolutely necessary.
I think damn near 100% of kids can benefit from something like that.
Sure.
Probably shouldn't be founded and formed by a succession of pedophiles.
Probably a bad idea.
Probably a bad idea.
My note on the Boy Scouts, less pedophiles.
Yeah, yeah.
If I had one like four-star Yelp review, everything's good, but the pedophiles and perpetuating pedophilia throughout the United States and the world is that sucks.
Yeah.
It's one of those things.
I'm sure there are people who'd be like, why didn't you do the Catholic Church?
We have talked about the Catholic Church a couple of times, including like all of the horrible abuses in the residential schools in Ireland and whatnot.
But like one of the things that is worth noting here is that when you talk about the pedophilia problem in the Boy Scouts, it's on the same scale as the Catholic Church.
Like at least in modern times, right?
Catholic Church goes back a lot.
Like we're talking again, at the present time, at least 100,000 alleged victims just who have come forward in a couple of years.
Like this is an enormous scale of problem.
Like this is not, we're not talking about a kid here and a kid here.
We are talking about cities full of children who were molested by their scout masters and other adult leaders.
Fun!
Cool!
It's a fun, fun time for having today.
So Matt, this seems like a good time to ask if you've got any pluggables to plug.
Oh, sure, dude.
Yeah, no, totally.
I do two podcasts, Pod Yourself a Gun, a Sopranos podcast, which is about the Sopranos.
And we go through it episode by episode, me and Vince Mancini.
And then we also do film podcasts where we just shoot the shit, kind of talk about movies called the Film Drunk Frontcast.
So check those out.
We rarely talk about pedophilia, but, you know, it's still fun.
It's still a fun time.
So check those out.
Matt Leap Jokes and Pluggables00:03:09
And follow me on Instagram at Matt Leap Jokes.
Follow him on Instagram at Matt Leap Jokes.
And follow your heart.
Unless your heart says to create an organization for boys and have them swim naked in a field so that you can watch them.
Then don't follow your heart.
Don't listen to a single fucking word your heart says.
Move.
If that's what your heart says, move alone to the woods.
Yes.
Yeah.
Make friends with like a bear.
Yeah, a bear.
It's fine to make friends with a bear in that case.
Yeah.
At least it can fight back.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh boy.
Okay.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
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Listen to Math and Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
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Amy Roebuck and TJ Holmes here.
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