On My Honor: The Secret History of the Boy Scouts of America by Kim Christensen
Thank you for joining me this week for Book Beginnings on Fridays where participants share the opening sentence (or two) from the book they are reading. You can also share from a book you want to feature, even if you are not reading it at the moment.
MY BOOK BEGINNING
A few weeks after he left the White House in March 1909, Theodore Roosevelt sailed to Africa on a wildlife expedition to collect specimens for the Smithsonian Institute's new Natural History Museum.
-- from On My Honor: The Secret History of the Boy Scouts of America by Kim Christensen, Chapter 1, "Feuding Founders and the Boy Problem."
On My Honor exposes the Boy Scouts of America's long history of childhood sexual abuse and its cover up. Kim Christensen, a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist, worked on this book for years, although it was sadly published right after he died of cancer. Christensen poured through BSA's own "Perversion Files" on child molesters in Scouting and worked with lawyers like me to get the record straight.
This book is heartbreaking for me because I've spent the past 18 years representing adults who were sexually abused when they were children in Scouting. I've heard all the stories and seen for myself the way sexual abuse left these men -- and several women -- emotionally and psychologically damaged.
YOUR BOOK BEGINNING
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"They fought tooth and nail that we didn't get those [Perversion] files, and they dumped them on us a week before trial," recalled Portland attorney Gilion Dumas, a member of the Lewis's legal team. . . . But even from her first-glance reading, Dumas said, clear patterns of children sexual abuse -- and the organization's response to it -- leaped out.
Since its founding in 1910, the Boy Scouts of America has been the nation’s premier youth organization, espousing self-reliance and honor. More than 100 million Americans have been Boy Scouts, from Bill Gates to Martin Luther King Jr. Today, however, Scouting faces an existential threat of its own making: more than 82,000 former Scouts have filed claims alleging they were sexually abused—seven times the number of similar allegations that rocked the Catholic Church two decades ago.
On My Honor untangles the full story of the Boy Scouts of America, tracking its creation, growth, influence, and the massive generational trauma it has caused. Using the iconic institution to tell a story of American values over the last century, the book grapples with America’s changing understanding of what it means to “make men.”