In Defense of Scouting: Gerald Ford

Featured

Mar 14

Recent times have been tough for Boy Scouts of America. Although still one of the largest youth organizations in the US, its ranks have dwindled from about 3 million in the 1970s to fewer than 800,000 today. It has been rocked by controversies over bullying, gays in leadership positions, and sexual abuse claims, all contributing to a decline in its popularity and a 2020 bankruptcy filing. With scouting seemingly on the ropes, the time is ripe to call on one of scouting’s greatest boosters, the nation’s 38th president and the only one to attain the rank of Eagle Scout, Gerald Ford.

To understand what scouting meant to Ford, it is important to revisit his remarkable biography. Born Leslie King Jr. in Omaha in 1913, his father was the son of a prominent banker. Unfortunately, he was also an abusive alcoholic who threatened his wife and 16-day-old son with a knife. Ford’s mother Dorothy and the infant escaped, eventually landing in the home of her parents in Grand Rapids. There she divorced her husband, gaining full custody of her son. Four years later, she married Gerald Ford, whose family owned a paint company, and her son began to be known as Gerald Ford Jr.

Ford’s new father was active in church and civic organizations, including an organization that he helped to create known as the Youth Commonwealth, which assisted young boys growing up in poverty, as well as the fledgling Boy Scouts. Ford became eligible to join at the age of 12. He earned the rank of Eagle Scout in 1927, a moment that he later acknowledged as one of the proudest of his life. He treasured his Eagle Scout badge and regarded scouting as a vital formative influence in his own life and that of countless other young people.

From the White House, Ford later wrote, “My early years as a boy scout were invaluable in helping to shape the course of my later life. Throughout my public service and extensive travels around our country, I have seen firsthand evidence of the immeasurable worth of the basic values taught by scouting. The Scout Oath to help other people, keep physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight, and to do one’s duty to God and our country provides a solid basis on which to build both individual and national strength.”

We live in an age of satire and iconoclasm, when it can prove difficult not to suspect that some measure of irony or cynicism must lie behind such words. But Ford was speaking ingenuously. He really meant it. He continued, “The three great principles scouting encourages – self-discipline, teamwork, and moral and patriotic values – are the building blocks of character. By working for these principles, those who belong to and support the Boy Scouts of America add greatly to the vitality of our society and the future well-being of its people.”

Ford reminds us that a democratic nation cannot be better than the character of its people. Only if we have been well educated for liberty will we be adequately prepared to live freely. Book learning and civics classes have an important role to play. Yet so too does the opportunity to acquire a love for the nation’s natural splendors, to learn self-reliance and collaboration, and to undertake the life-long task of building good character. In an age when the importance of character education sometimes seems to have been forgotten, scouting serves as a bulwark against relativism and nihilism.

As Ford indicated, the US is not a building or a monument. It is an ongoing experiment in democracy, whose outcome in each generation remains uncertain. For it to thrive, the people must be prepared to govern ourselves and defend our rights. Documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers, and Lincoln’s addresses are vital. But Americans too young to read and grasp the full meaning of such documents have always needed to be prepared for the day when we can do so, and this is precisely the role that scouting plays.

Gerald Ford got off to a rather difficult start in life, threatened as an infant by his knife-wielding father. His prospects for surviving, let alone thriving, appeared dim. Yet new people and new organizations came into his life, above all his new father and the Boy Scouts of America. They helped him tame the unruly aspects of his disposition and develop what was best in himself, providing stars by which he would henceforth steer. To say that scouting saved Ford’s life might be an overstatement, but there is no gainsaying the fact that it profoundly shaped and helped to guide him for the rest of his life.

When Ford spoke in December of 1974 at the “Scouter of the Year Dinner,” he talked about how he had recently been criticized for being too much of a boy scout in the way he had conducted himself as president. Reviewing the scout law, which says that a scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent, Ford responded that “If these are not the goals the people of the United States want their president to live up to, then I must draw this conclusion: either you have the wrong man, or I have the wrong country.”

Ford continued, “I truly believe that the ideals and aspirations of all Americans and all Boy Scouts are as one, and I will continue to use these ideals as a guide and a compass in all my official duties. I think our goal should be more scouts in government, not less.” He invoked the nation’s history as the “new world,” where people could leave behind “oppressions and injustices that had darkened old civilizations,” and heralded the long, hard work of building a better nation that “still goes on today as we tackle new problems and challenges.”

“This is where scouting comes in,” he said. “The teamwork, self-discipline, and just as important, the sense of adventure that grows out of the scouting experience are the very things we need today to build a better America.” Scouting, in other words, prepares young people to be better citizens and human beings. Recalling the words of US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, “In most Americans, there is a spark of idealism that can be fanned into a flame,” Ford called scouting “one of the things that keeps that spark of idealism alive.”

Photo courtesy of the National Archives Catalog, Gerald R. Ford, Joseph McIntosh; Eagle Scouts – standing at attention outside barracks at Mackinac Island State Park, August 1929.