ABSTRACT
The aim of the Woodcraft movement, observed its founder Ernest Thompson Seton, is "to make a man." For Seton, a cofounder, along with Baden-Powell, of the boy scouting movement at the tum of the century, the craft of making men was the antidote to anxieties about the depletion of agency and virility in consumer and machine culture. As Seton puts it in the first Boy Scouts of America handbook (1910), he began the Woodcraft movement in America "to combat the system that has turned such a large proportion of our robust, manly, self-reliant boyhood into a lot of flat-chested cigarette smokers, with shaky nerves and doubtful vitality." In this system, "degeneracy is the word." Hence if the scouting "movement is essentially for recreation, " this is to understand recreation as re-creation, as "the physical regeneration so needful for continued national existence."1
