After years of begging, little brothers everywhere finally got to join Scouting in the 1930s.

The decade opened with the creation of Cubbing, later Cub Scouting, a program for younger boys that drew on Native American traditions and Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book for much of its flavor.

First BSA National Jamboree, 1937

In the 1930s, America remained in the grip of the Great Depression, a crisis that Scouts addressed in 1933 by collecting 1.8 million items of clothing, household furnishings, foodstuffs, and supplies as requested by President Roosevelt.

The economic crisis didn’t affect plans for the BSA’s first National Scout Jamboree in 1935, but polio did. An outbreak forced the event’s cancellation just two weeks before it was scheduled to begin. Two years later, the rescheduled jamboree was held in Washington, D.C. The 27,232 attendees camped around the Tidal Basin in the shadow of the Washington Monument and enjoyed historical pageants, tours of D.C. landmarks, a three-game baseball series between the Washington Senators and the Boston Red Sox, and a review by President Roosevelt.

1938 Scout Show, Austin, Texas

More than 600 reporters and photographers covered the Jamboree, including a Time magazine reporter who glimpsed the event’s significance: “The Boy Scouts of America is today no amateur movement but a full-grown U.S. institution, one of the most elaborately integrated, self-perpetuating social mechanisms in a nation which dotes on organization.”

In 1938, Tulsa oilman Waite Phillips donated 35,857 acres of his ranch near Cimarron, N.M., for the creation of a Boy Scout camp. After a further donation of 91,538 acres in 1941, the property would become Philmont Scout Ranch, the largest youth camping facility in the world. Early attendance at Philmont was light, with just 189 campers showing up the first season.

 
(Primary sources: BSA 2010 Decades Fact Sheet - 1930, Harris & Ewing Collection)