SCOUTING AND AMERICANIZATION.
Mr. James E. West, Chief Scout Executive, makes the following statement in his tenth annual report rendered to the National Council, Boy Scouts of America:
The tremendous value of the Boy Scout movement in the Americanization problems of this country has been recognized by the division of citizenship training, Bureau of Naturalization, Department of Labor, from whom was received a request that Boy Scouts distribute letters and cards among aliens in the interest of the educational work of the division of citizenship training. A study of the indorsements of the movement by national leaders (selected from the many received) will reveal similar recognition in such quarters. Many leaders in the organization, from coast to coast, have long recognized that the Boy Scouts of America enjoy a high privilege as well as a high responsibility in truly democratizing the boyhood of this country.
The foreign-born boy and the son of foreign-born parents sit side by side with native-born boys (as they should) in our schools. They mingle in their play and in their homes. They are one boyhood. But it is a boyhood of marvelously diverse racial characteristics and tendencies. Moreover, this boyhood is the future manhood of America. And the boy inside each individual in this 8,000,000 or so of American youth instinctively responds to the Boy Scout program. As America is the melting pot of the nations, even so scouting is the melting pot of the boys of the nations.
Fortunately, the program needs no modifications or special manipulation to "Americanize" its followers. It is inherently an Americanizing program. In Manhattan's crowded East Side, since 1912, when the first scout troop was founded there, thousands of boys have taken the Scout Oath and Law and followed its principles and lived its out-of-door life. To-day there are 25 troops in New York City, numbering 800 boys. Every scoutmaster and assistant scoutmaster in the district is an ex-scout. These troops have a splendid record of war-service work, and it has been declared of them that they were the greatest single agency in operation rightly to interpret the war to their foreign-born neighbors.
The aggressive introduction of scouting into all our industrial sections, the enlistment of the men of those sections (who are eligible) as local council members, troop committeemen, scoutmasters, the fullest possible round of scouting activities for the men and the boys in this country who do not yet know America, but aspire to be her sons, will help to solve all our industrial problems and preserve our national ideals and institutions.