Abe Lincoln and the Boy Scouts

Two anniversaries fall this week. February 12 is the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. February 10 was the 99th anniversary of the Boy Scouts of America. As it turns out, the two observances are closely related.

Lord Robert Baden Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, explained the purpose of his movement. “Everything on two legs that calls itself a boy has God in him, although he may … be the most arrant little thief, liar, and filth-monger unhung. Our job is to give him a chance.” On another occasion, Baden Powell replied to a communist critic of Scouting, “Our aim is to help the poorer boy, independent of all political questions, to get his fair chance of happiness and success in life.”

Of course, Baden Powell was deflecting criticism when he said that the Boy Scouts’ “aim” is “independent of all political questions.” The irony of the quote is that the “aim” he identified with the Boy Scouts—the aim toward a “fair chance,” is the single most important political question of all.

Lincoln, knowing this, once wrote about the majority of governments in world history who held that some people were not fit to govern themselves. “They said, some men are too ignorant, and vicious, to share in government. Possibly so, said we; and by your system, you would always keep them ignorant, and vicious. We proposed to give all a chance; and we expected the weak to grow stronger, the ignorant, wiser; and all better, and happier, together.”

An equal chance: that’s what makes Lincoln and the Boy Scouts so very alike. Both championed the God-given right of all human beings to govern themselves. Both affirmed the dignity of a person regardless of background, skin color, or class.

If each human being has the equal right to govern himself, it is no less true that he must learn the art of self-government. Lincoln said in his Lyceum speech that the American experiment was the “the practical demonstration” of “the capability of a people to govern themselves.” About that practical experiment nothing was guaranteed. The unalienable right to self-government was one thing. The practical demonstration of self-government—restraining passions, cultivating the mind, building character, all without the rule of a tyrant—was another. At the end of the day, it was for each American to decide for himself whether he would be truly free, whether he would be his own master.

We must rise to self-government. This is best accomplished in strong communities of families, schools, churches, and businesses where we may learn to be “trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.”

That, of course, is where the Boy Scouts come in. The art of self-government is nowhere better expressed than in the Boy Scout Oath: “On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to 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.”

I have a feeling that if Abraham Lincoln had lived when the Boy Scouts of America had its start, he would be among its most avid enthusiasts. There was something akin in Lincoln’s character and in his principles to the character and principles of a Boy Scout. Or perhaps, since Lincoln lived before the Boy Scouting movement, we could say that Lincoln is one of the best models for what it means to live out the Scout Oath and Law.

“Perhaps there is no better example of chivalry than the life and experience of Abraham Lincoln, the greatest of all our American men,” says the original Boy Scout Handbook of 1911. “Every boy ought to read the story of his life and come to understand and appreciate what it means ... Lincoln’s life and career should be the study and inspiration of every boy scout. He became familiar with all of the things for which the Boy Scouts of America stand.”

So should we.