A Queer History of the United States (ReVisioning History Book 1)

by Michael Bronski

Roosevelt embraced eugenic thought. For Roosevelt, masculinity and nationhood were completely tied up with worries about “racial degeneracy.” In a speech to the National Congress of Mothers on May 13, 1905, Roosevelt bemoaned the idea of family planning and claimed that “if the average family in which there are children contained but two children the nation as a whole would decrease in population so rapidly that in two or three generations it would very deservedly be on the point of extinction.” He added that such “race suicide” would not be regrettable, since a race that wants to have fewer children does not deserve to exist.12 As Roosevelt was becoming the emblem of American manhood, a group was forming in Great Britain that would soon affect American boys. In 1907 Robert Baden-Powell, a noted lieutenant general in the British Army stationed in India and Africa, adapted a military training manual, Aids for Scouting, for boys. A year later he wrote Scouting for Boys and founded what would become an international movement, the Boy Scouts.