Behind the Bastards - Part One: Robert Baden-Powell: Founder Of The Boy Scouts

Episode Date: November 2, 2021

Robert is joined by Matt Lieb to discuss Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts of America.FOOTNOTES: https://time.com/longform/boy-scouts-sex-abuse/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-12-19/bankruptcy-on-the-table-as-boy-scouts-confront-sex-abuse-claims https://archive.md/1livE#selection-2825.0-2829.173 https://archive.md/ePU2Q#selection-2483.0-2537.46 https://documents.latimes.com/arthur-w-humphries/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210304192148/https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-scouts-leaders-2-20121231-story.html https://archive.md/ExPOA#selection-3545.0-3522.30 https://archive.md/w4Ij7#selection-2241.47-2265.90 https://abcnews.go.com/US/12000-boy-scout-members-victims-sexual-abuse-expert/story?id=62573567 https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/boy-scouts-lobby-in-states-to-stem-the-flow-of-child-abuse-lawsuits/2018/05/08/0eee0a44-47d8-11e8-827e-190efaf1f1ee_story.html https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54971579 https://www.sgtlaw.com/case/ex-boy-scout-awarded-more-than-12-million-in-sex-abuse-case-following-jury-trial/ http://exitinterview.biz/essays/bl_noped/index.htm :https://www.jstor.org/stable/25475829 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/gloucestershire/8403956.stmrober https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-dorset-53007902 https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/boy-scouts-have-been-one-of-the-worst-culprits-of-cultural-appropriation https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/may/16/historybooks.books https://www.irishtimes.com/news/a-man-and-his-manual-1.1151580 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/06/young-men-in-shorts/302962/ http://scoutguidehistoricalsociety.com/setonfeud.htm https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/01/christopher-hitchens-on-the-mildly-fascist-founder-of-the-boy-scouts/272683/ https://www.policeprostitutionandpolitics.com/pdfs_all/CHILD%20MOLESTATION%20PORNOGRAPHY%20TEACHERS%20ETC/Catholic%20Church%20Other%20Clergy%20%20and%20Boy%20Scout%20Sex%20Scandals/Scout's%20Honor.pdf Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Based in Record Peld. I'm recording. Test, test, print all of this, Chris, all of this. I just want to say, I'm so sorry, Matt's topic is... We've already introduced the show. It started, but this is behind the bastards. We have a dark one today.

We have a bad one today. I'm Robert Evans, Matt Leib, my guest. Matt, how are you doing today? I was doing well until you guys started talking real ominous about what the subject matter was. Matt, you are going to be a very unhappy person. Oh, fun. I love it. Let's do this for 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 very... I don't have feelings one way or the other because I never did it. No, you weren't. Yeah, I know people who did... There was like a Jew Scouts, but they were... That's a funny name for something to be.

Yeah, yeah. And I knew some people who were like Cub Scouts and Eagle Scouts and stuff like that, but I never was in that club, so I feel excluded. That's how I feel about it. As a kid, I wanted to be a part of it. Why couldn't you? I think because you have to apply and stuff and then you got to tell your dad and he's got to not be... He's got to be in a good mood and...

Yeah, I mean... Yeah. So I never got a chance to do it. So I missed out. I mean, so this is going to be a weird one for me because I was in the Boy Scouts for years and years and years. And I loved it. I had a really good time. I learned a lot of the first lessons I learned about like woodcraft and like hiking, and I had a lot of really... It went on like a 20-mile rifer rafting trip on the Brazos for days

and did some like primitive kind of... You have the contents of a matchbox and a pocket knife and you have to go for two days or whatever. And really cool shit. Had some great experiences. 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 fucked up. I played my very first games of Dungeons & Dragons.

I played it like Cub Scouts, Camp Outs, which was like a huge part of my life. Yeah, 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 it 100,000 or so other boys for a much worse reason. Because as we're going to discuss, the Boy Scouts of America, despite 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. 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 a city's worth of young boys. This is a dark one, my man. This is a dark one. Oh, God. I love going in cold. You're probably really regretting that email you sent me. I would love to come back.

Yeah, 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, I 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, at 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, first 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 nightly shit that you... He was English as fuck. You could not be more English than this motherfucker.

That's the whole alphabet. That's insane. He had all these goddamn titles. Yeah, and he was born high. He was born to rule, be one of the people who helped run the British Empire. That was his... He was born on February 22nd, 1857, in Paddington, London, England. His father was the Reverend Professor Baden Powell and his father was a geometry...

Reverend Professor? Both. Yeah, motherfucking Reverend Professor, even better than Reverend Doctor. I love that he comes from a line of people who are like, we must have multiple titles. Yeah. 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. Goddamn. You know those geometry priests? You get one degree and then you're like, I'm going to just throw on a little bit of analogy on top. Get another hat for my hat. Yeah.

So his mother was Henrietta Grace Smythe and she was the oldest daughter of Admiral William Henry Smythe, who was a famous admiral. And that's the biggest thing you can be in the British Empire, is a fucking admiral. That's the top of cool British shit to be in this period. 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. 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 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. So yeah, like Baden Powell, you would think with a name like Baden Powell, 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, yeah, 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 very powerful personality. She was described by one writer as either a great motivator or simply overbearing

depending on who was talking about her. Since the family had money and the uppercrust 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?

Yeah, they're driving on the wrong side of the road. Yeah, fucking English. 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. Yeah, holidays back home. Yeah, 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.

I would hope so. Like an English shotgun. Yeah, I really... That is unclear to me. It would be badass though. If it was just knifing deer in the woods. That's what a scout would do. That's one of the merit badges I have always assumed.

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 in your head. I got knives on my hand. It's perfect.

Except with the British accent. Yeah, with the 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... He's definitely... His sexuality is something we'll discuss in a bit. 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. Up in the book, Scouts Honor notes... So... Well... He's kind of a stickler.

Yeah, it sounds like, you know, perfectly good rules to live your life by, you know? I mean, so far... Yeah, he's a good man here. Like a great dude. Yeah, kind of a little bit uptight. You get the sense that he would have been kind of frustrating if you were 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 to camp to the governor of Malta, who also happened to be his uncle. Because again, that's how everything works in this empire. There's a lot of nepotism. He's very good at what he does, that 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 like 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 like a butterfly guy and be like, oh, don't worry about it. Yeah, I'm looking for some butterflies. What if I check out your cannons? Yeah, yeah. Mind if I read these documents? I'm just gonna, 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 the 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 go, it's basically just gossip from like, you know, the local soiree, yeah. Yeah. In 1896, he returned to Africa and he fought in the Second Matabelli 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 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 like colonial like 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. Yeah. 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. 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.

Yeah. 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. In a number of ways. 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 he won't be 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. I was just waiting for my moment. Yeah.

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 Geel, 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 Geel acknowledges this was illegal, but he also was like, well, the guy was wounded. He was going to die anyway. It was like a mercy killing, you know? Yeah, yeah.

That's why we're decimating this village, because we stole all of the food. They're going to starve because of the things we did to him. They're going to starve anyway, dude. What do you want to do? You want to watch them suffer? That's fucked up. Yeah, no.

Get the flamethrower over here. So Tim Geel, who you're going to hear from a lot in this, because he's Baden Powell's 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, like, archist imperialists in the history of imperialism. This is a guy who, 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. He's one of the worst people who's ever lived. Tim Geel wrote a biography about him that's very positive.

And Tim Geel, this is what he does. So Geel is definitely kind of right-wing. He loves the British Empire. He is frustratingly good at the technical aspects of writing biography. So he's really good at going through thousands of pages of people's notes and diaries and synthesizing them and providing.

So you actually get really good information from his books. 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 the imperialism Stan, who's a primary source. He's just on every other page.

He's yas literal. Yeah, he is deeply frustrating, Tim Geel. 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, Whitey, 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 in his life. Geel 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? Yeah, 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. A chunk of that comes from this. But also, they're fighting the British Empire, who put them in concentration camps and killed 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. I guess more... They're both kind of imperialists. They are both imperialists, but one's a more powerful one. Yeah, it's not a fun war to read about. The gist of it is that the Boers, who were kind of Dutch,

were fighting the British who didn't like the idea of Boers running shit in South Africa. 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 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 Ingeland, was the siege of Mephiking. 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 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 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 defend Mephiking 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 skinnier. He's just getting skinnier and skinnier, right?

Those cheekbones are just getting, like, prominent. 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 Mephiking 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 Mephiking 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 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. 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 do agree

that he was a very competent combat commander. Another thing that Baden Powell did at Mephiking 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 Mephiking 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 number of how many people died as a result of Baden Powell making these calls. Now, Tim Geel, 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, he's 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 Mayfeking.

Yeah, historians debate whether or not Baden Powell intentionally starved black residents at Mayfeking. 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-competence 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 Mayfeking were cut off. Baden Powell negotiated safe passage

for them for the Shangans, 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. 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. You could argue he didn't... And I'm not a historian, because obviously these scholars who are saying, no, what he did was understandable.

He wasn't trying to kill anybody. He was a military historian 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 overly. And he probably could have done a lot more 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 Barrelong tribe. These British military scholars like note this, but say, quote,

he was no more racially prejudiced than the vast majority of his generation. Which isn't wrong, but doesn't make it not like a war crime also. To be fair, we all hate black people. He wasn't racist-er than everyone else. But did his policies get more of them killed because he gave food to white people instead?

Well, yeah, but he didn't do it because he was more any racist person back then, which was everyone would have done this. Well, okay, yeah. But that doesn't... Do you see why that's not good? I love the idea. Just relative to the time period. You don't know what a piece of shit everybody was back then.

Yeah, 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. Who, again, had often committed genocides. In saying that the SS commander who just starves Jewish people rather than driving them to the gas chambers

was like, well, he was more restrained than the others. That guy was pretty cool. It's like, yeah, I mean, it's not, again, this is not to defend Baden Palin. 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 maficking is mild compared to the fucking concentration camps that Kitchener's setting up. 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 in other part, because there actually is a lot of inaccurate anti-Baden Pal 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 Palin and Kitchener were both like pedophiles on like a grand, massively abusive scale.

And among other things, alleges that Robert Baden Pal, early in his career, authorized the execution of two 16-year-old Irish soldiers who he's 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 chain 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 actual... Yeah, that's like, no, the evil of the British Empire isn't that they invented Hitler, it's all of the genocides.

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 profits or whatever the fuck this guy believes. Like, it's... 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... Oh, shit, it's a Brit, if you look at it. So, yeah, Baden-Powell probably didn't execute and sodomize two 16-year-old Irish soldiers. And you know who else probably didn't? Oh, fuck. It's Sophie. Is that a bad way to go to ads?

No, 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 and 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 conspiratorial, 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, because, yeah. The mystery box is always funnier. Keep out that, Sophie, and then never explain it. Yeah. Mother fuckers. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected

that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes,

you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story

is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good-bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time,

and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, or wherever you get your podcasts. With no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit

when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space.

313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science

you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens

when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial

on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. Sophie, come on. Professionalism, Jesus. Get it together. You gotta be professional, Sophie.

People come to us expecting a degree of professitude, but at the very least, all my elementary school friends who have reached out to say they listened to the show, they told me they listened to it for the professionalism. For the professionalism, right. Nobody has ever given me that feedback.

Well, you have the wrong elementary school friends. Apparently. That's right, Sophie. I've been saying that for years. So, when it comes to aspects of Robert Badenpal'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 Geel even agrees like this. He was almost certainly gay, right. 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 gay men. Because again, it is illegal to be gay in this period. People go to prison for having homosexual like relationships and stuff. It is

extremely, and so a lot of these guys would, I doubt Badenpal considered himself homosexual, but like a lot of the guys who build the empire, these men who have these who don't like Henry Morton Stanley doesn't like women. It's 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. There's a lot of this going on in the British Empire and Badenpal is almost certainly

one of those guys, one of those guys who maybe like, 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. But he loved the homies, you know? He loved, he found the male body

beautiful and the female body disgusting. Right. Like what do you like? Take what you will. Take what you will out of that. The big debate isn't around like, was this a guy with like some homosexual like inclinations. It is, was he also a pedophile?

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? Or was he attracted to just kids? Like

it's messy. 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. 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 them like, well, technically that's not pedophilia. No, no, but also you can join the military at like 16. True. There are some, I'm not trying to like, I'm trying to explain this is a

different kind of culture. And I don't think he actually does anything with any boys, like, which also does matter. 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 very to discuss because of how the Boy Scouts has made in his image. It's part of the origin 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. 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.

Technically 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 Geel. 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 life structure and train them up for a grand purpose. Yeah.

Yeah, a little bit of that. I mean, not this is really focused on because it's not about hurt. It's not like a really paramilitary. It's not about like it's about teaching them useful life skills. Proud. 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 they're sort of like industrial accident or war. 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 Scouts 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 aides 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. Yeah. I mean, just so not the proud boys, but more like 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 general.

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 with whatever. Now that account from a book written critical, the Scouts 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 1993. 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-Pal 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-Pal rewrites his book about scouting, an American named Ernest Thompson Seaton had some property vandalized by rambunctious boys. And instead of punishing them, he invited them on to his land for the weekend. And he taught them like some camping stuff.

And he played all of these like this like woodcraft he was teaching them. He claimed to 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 it makes it sound like stories about Native American. 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. 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's particularly like the chunk of the U.S. that after a couple of years he writes a book called The Birch Bark Role which lays out his lessons and boys. And it's all rooted like here's Native American

wisdom for white boys who want to learn how to be woodsmen. Seaton was successful enough that this word of what he was doing crossed the pond. And in 1906 Seaton 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 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. Seaton 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.

I've been hanging out with little boys. I love having been hanging out with boys before you were born. Exactly. But today Seaton is recognized even by the BSA as one of the founders of the Boy Scouts. There's some people who argue that like he was

kind of more left-wing and that like 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 Seaton is like again telling a cultural appropriation here. I think that people have a tendency to kind of like, I analyze him over much. Yeah.

I will note that while Seaton definitely like 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'd 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. 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 the 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 so be. Back to Baden-Powell. Let's get back to Baden-Powell. So he rewrites aides 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 like 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 this land they've got. They spend a week with them hiking teaching them how to make

tents and according to the Book Scouts honor, quote, at the end of the day there were rub downs and stories around the campfire. So that's that's potentially problematic. That's potentially problematic. The stories around the campfire was fun. It was just like

it's the rub downs, it's the rub downs. Rub downs, you know, rub downs and stories around the fire and spores 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 and like mentor young boys they get like unfairly accused and like people get suspicious as like what would a man like care about. Which it's actually good for men to like care about

the mentoring and uprising of young boys. Being tender with a child is not bad. Rub down is a line 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. Yeah, and I guess yeah, I don't you could argue that the rub downs were not like necessarily sexual assault

cause 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, I know playing with kids is good. You should it is. It's good. It's good to care about said that sentence. I'd like you to delete it. I just you can't say these problematic play with like

activities do activities do activities with kids. Yeah. God damn it. The language around it is 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 scout oath, which is on my honor. I will do my best to do my duty for God in 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 shades above the helpful friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, thoughtful, thrifty, brave, clean, reverent, like all that shit. That's like this is still like rub downs. Morally straight, baby.

You gotta be morally straight. Yeah. I mean, if there's one person who screams straight to me, it's Robert Peyton Bowell. Oh, 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 was 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 Peyton 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 and we won't get into enough about like World War I's impact on scouting because a huge chunk of the British soldiers who died in World War I were former Boy Scouts 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 Peyton 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, fired and sucked into mud and be like ah shit. Because other people who were like, like Teddy Roosevelt is like horrified by one of his kids dies there who he like really pushes to go fight and like dies horribly and he's like ah Jesus a lot of people have

thought this was going to be simple like the Philippines or whatever. Yeah, Ruyard Kipling has kind of a similar like it has this like more profoundly, almost radicalizing experience on Kipling. Kipling is 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 Geel on the other hand

writes that Peyton Powell's purpose was more protective than this. Quote, and I think both these views are probably accurate. I think Peyton 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 had grown up because he thought that was a good thing. He thought that was a good thing. He thought that was a good thing. He thought that was a good thing. He thought that was a good thing.

He had grown up because he thought that was a good thing. It's not like he looked at that. That wasn't sinister for him. That was like, yes, you know, this is what men are supposed to do. Yeah, men are supposed to learn how to like carve things into wood, make macaroni pictures

and fucking, you know, and oppress indigenous peoples. Exactly. Yeah, for the wealth of, you know, whatever. It's also kind of worth noting here that Peyton Powell grew up fatherless as we stated. He never had a father. And 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 the 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 Britain 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, you know, obviously they need a man in their life 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 necessarily. But maybe not this way. I think it's nothing wrong with talking to your kids about fucking. But having said that sentence,

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 think. Yeah. Yeah. Just depends on where we're going.

But it can go very wrong, is the point. And so, like, yeah. Again, all of the founding boys is this stuff where it's like, yeah, but where are we going with this? Which way are you going to take this?

I want to trust you, but I'm on this box. And this is one of the things, some scholars will point 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?

Mm-hmm. The products and services that support this podcast. I'm trying to think what the funniest ad it could be right now. Me undies, for sure. Oh, yeah. The me undies days. It is fun to like chart the growth of podcasts and the

areas of ads. Like, I came of age during the, during the mattress Oh, yeah. Oh, remember when we used to get free things? I got two free mattresses. It was rad. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected

that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. At the FBI, sometimes

you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story

is a raspy-voiced cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of goods. He's a shark. And not in the good, bad way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then

for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that

when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me.

About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union,

is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest,

I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Oh, we're back and we're all just having a great time talking about 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. Yeah, when the federation of planets starts up, there's going to be a galaxy class starship named

the cancellation of Matt Leib. Just on loop in place of the thing where I just said, I think it's good to play with kids. That's the noise that makes when it goes into warp. Good times. 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 the fact that they're talking about this is revolutionary. Their attitude towards it is profoundly conservative.

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. This is not a good thing necessarily. As we discussed, Baden Powell's impulse to discuss boy 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 boys to go. Ready? You all know what it is to have at times

a pleasant feeling in your private parts. 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 telling me not to jerk off. Yeah. 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 that's so easily disproven by just generations. By the sanest man in the world. I'm trying to figure out what the funny... Yeah, Matt, there we go.

I mean, it's also... I should note, I'm sure our regular listeners will have caught this. If you listen to the Kellogg episodes, he's not inventing this stuff. When he talks about masturbation in this way, he is actually like sharing mainstream medical conclusions. Like the mainstream of the medical establishment

period broadly agrees with everything he said. Right. 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. Most of it is good. The whole section is about coming. Jerking off.

Maybe we can trim that down. Yeah. Quick note. It's going to affect book sales. 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 trusts. A lot of trusts in these scout masters, probably undue trusts.

So, it's here we should probably again discuss the sexuality of Robert Baden Powell in a little bit. So, again, Tim Geel 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, we might have called, I think, I'm not sure if Kenneth was like 18, but he was an officer in the army. He was an adult kind of by the standards of the time, right? Calling him the boy is just probably that's the term of endearment. I call people who are like in their

30s, I'm like, oh, those kids over there. Yeah, those fucking kids. So, it's probably fine. Yeah, Geel 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 Bowers during the Siege of Mephikin, Baden Powell had to be stopped from trying to rescue him. Geel calls this an emotionally homosexual relationship because there's no actual evidence that these two

fucked. And again, given a lot of there's, 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 because you go to prison. Maybe, like I don't, but

also that you can't overstate how repressed they are. Like, would they even have known how? Like, really would they even have known how? You can't entirely, the impulses, because human beings are human beings, are the same as they've always been. Their understanding of ways in which to

handle those impulses, that is cultural and like, it is, you can't entirely get in their heads just given the fact that, like, you know that, like, you know the basics of how sodomy works, right? That's a thing you can do. Like, who knows what these guys know?

It is true. Even straight British people are just edging at all times. 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, 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, WAIP. Oscar Wild exists in this period. Like, it's not impossible to figure it out. I just don't know. There's some books on it. 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, not... It could be because he's gay. It could be because she's a British lady. She must have just sucked. I don't know. I mean, you know, like, I've seen British people. It's just an island full of shit. Jesus Christ.

Wow. Wow. Every British person is ugly as except for, like, all right. Wow. And three or four random bleeps in that sentence just to make it even more mysterious. So, Gilles concludes

that Baden Powell's intimate diaries reveal a revulsion towards naked women and a fascination with naked male bodies. Quote from the book Scouts 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 girls 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 point.

I love an entire chapter. An entire chapter just dedicated to talking about how girls have cooties. Yeah, 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. There's nothing attractive about this.

Yeah, you gotta put a baby in them. 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, like, 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 and 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 a...

How dare they! My boys! What is this? It's a God given right to look at little boys as they run into the Hyde Park Lake and swim... As they dance and jump and jiggle. Yeah.

It's a beautiful sight, faithful God. I will build my own lake and they will all swim in it. A woman walks by in a long version. He's like, oh God, get that away from me. Police! I saw an inhuman creature known as woman.

I assume he had gels, but he's probably handsome and talk great. He was as a younger man at least. Everybody always gives me shit if they don't fight. I'm just saying people at the time wrote that he was. In fact, there are women at the time who write. He's very handsome, but women... He seems to have no interest in women.

Other people note this about him. Yeah. And also some of his... I don't see why people would find this handsome. He has an impact on people. So, when the police in London ban boys from swimming naked in Hyde Park Lake,

Baden Powell writes a column for Scout Magazine. Suggesting that Scoutmasters 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. There's 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. No. He's not at all about self-expression. No. Well, there goes my fucking Saturday. Hahaha. Hahaha. Hahaha.

Oh, God. I was going to put on my loosest pants and walk down to Hyde Park. Hahaha. Hahaha. I got a charcuterie plate and everything. Hahaha. I was going to have quite a time. Hahaha.

So... He's just ACAP. This is what gets him ACAP? He's then bringing out bathing suits for the boys. Hahaha. To fund the bommies. Hahaha. 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. Hahaha. Geel, 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 are artificial and contrived in the same way as the poses of naked women at the time that were sold as art but were really soft-core pornography. Right? If you're 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... Well, I think they're like boys at least certainly. Definitely children of some sort. I don't know the exact age range 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. Hahaha. Hahaha. Naked boys and trees. He has elephants. He has 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 himself. 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. Hahaha. I know, right? It's pretty fucked up. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Just like, I'm imagining that dude sliding into people's DMs

because sometimes on Twitter I'll just see like people will post screen caps of like thirsty dudes sliding into their DMs and it sounds very, very similar. Yeah. Do I have to be a subscriber to only fans 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. Right? In this case, maybe that was good because it seems likely he never personally abused any boys. Yeah.

It seems like with repression, 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. 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. Those people are happen. But also,

there are people who join the Boy Scouts because they're 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 prepressed 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 been 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 ranks. Obviously. How do you do a pedophile test though, you know?

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 at the scale that it is. In a town of 7 million people, some of the adults will molest children. That is inevitable. That is not 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 be 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 that. Yeah, exactly. 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, quote, 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 calo 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 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 like Baden Powell's camp. He gets sentenced, he gets caught by the police and he is sentenced to three years in prison. Now, 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 does 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. Yeah, I would be too sentimental of you. 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. Yeah.

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 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, I mean, just make that your number one priority.

Yeah, not being near fucking kids, right? Right above eating and drinking. Yeah, 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. 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 in 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. 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 them 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 peterists. God. Well, a whole

section of them, huh? That's that's a grip. That's a grip of peterists. That's too many peterists. That's too many peterists, I think. I would say one, probably two minutes. 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 their 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 we see it. It's like, ah, these men slipped. It's like, no, no, no. They abused children.

Yeah, you're just firing them as if it's like 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. Yes, they have harmed children. The worst thing you can do.

There's some justice needs to be served. 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. We're going to talk, yeah. 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 wonder 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 is good, but the

being founded 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 the, 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 like when you talk about the pedophilia problem in the Boy Scouts, it's on the same scale as the Catholic Church. Yeah. At least in modern times, right? Yeah. Catholic Church goes back a lot. Right. Like we're talking

again at the present time, at least a hundred thousand alleged victims. Just to have come forward in a couple of years. Like we're, 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 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 we also do a film podcast where we just shoot the shit, kind of talk about movies called

the film drunk front cast. 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. And follow me on Instagram at Matt Leib jokes. Yeah. Follow him on Instagram at Matt Leib

jokes. And follow your heart unless your heart says to create an organization for boys to have them swim naked in the field so that you can watch them. Then don't follow your heart. Do not listen to a single fucking word your heart says. Move. If that's what your heart says,

move alone to the woods. Yes. Make friends with a bear and fucking games. Yeah, a bear was fine to make friends with a bear in that case. Yeah. At least they can fight back. Yeah, yeah. Ooh, boy.

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And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest,

I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days

that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.