James Edward West was an American social worker, lawyer, and Boy Scout leader.
Background
James Edward West was born in Washington, D. C. , the only child of James Robert West and Mary (Tyree) W. His father, who has been described as a Tennessee merchant, died before or shortly after the boy's birth, and his mother, who supported herself as a seamstress, died of tuberculosis before he was seven. In the Washington orphanage where he was placed he was punished as a malingerer until a medical examination revealed that he had contracted tuberculosis of the hip and knee. Sent to a hospital, where he remained nearly two years (including many months strapped to an orthopedic board), he was returned to the orphanage as an incurable. Strength of character, rooted in a Presbyterian religious faith that nurtured the will to serve others, apparently enabled the boy to surmount his bleak prospects as a physically handicapped orphan. The experience molded his life. It explains both his adoption of a career in child welfare and his preference for social work programs that stressed character building rather than environmental change. An important episode in West's personal quest for fulfillment occurred around the age of twelve, when Mrs. Ellis Spear, a friend of his deceased mother, brought him home to play with her children and aroused his interest in literature. Gradually his consciousness extended beyond the confines of his orphanage and his handicap. His reading triggered ambitions and revealed latent qualities of leadership. West persuaded the authorities to allow him to supervise the orphanage library, and he secured permission for readers to stay up an hour later; sometimes he bribed other children to read by paying them a penny a book. The orphanage next consented to his request that a group of children be permitted to attend a regular public school.
Education
After completing grammar school at the age of sixteen, enrolled in Washington's Business High School, where he managed the football team, supervised the library, and edited the school paper. West became a student in Washington's National University; supporting himself as a YMCA employee and War Department stenographer. He received the degrees of LL. B. and LL. M. in 1901.
Career
Following his high school graduation in 1895, West secured a regular job on the orphanage staff and launched an improvement campaign that included painting, rat extermination, and exposure of mismanagement to the board of directors. He then secured a bookkeeping position at a bicycle shop (at which time he learned to walk without crutches and even to ride a bike). His urge for self-improvement led him to an attorney's office, where he read law while participating in YMCA work. In 1901 he was admitted to the bar. The influence of Theodore Roosevelt, with whom he had become acquainted and whom he admired throughout his life, helped get him an appointment to the Board of Pension Appeals in 1902. West later moved to the Department of the Interior as assistant attorney, and entered a private legal practice in 1906. During the first decade of the twentieth century West devoted his spare time to child welfare activities. He was involved in the citizens' committee that secured a juvenile court for Washington, D. C. As secretary and director of the Washington Playground Association, he assumed a major role in establishing that community's public playground system. In 1908 he collaborated with Theodore Dreiser, then editing the Delineator Magazine, in a "child-rescue" campaign, which succeeded in placing more than two thousand dependent children in foster homes. He interested Roosevelt in the campaign, and Roosevelt endorsed his proposal for a White House Conference on dependent children. West made the arrangements for the conference, which met in January 1909 and formally resolved in favor of placing dependent, but normal, children in homes rather than institutions; it also condemned the separation of children from natural parents for reasons of poverty alone. Representing a kind of children's Magna Carta, the White House Conference provided a major stimulus to the enactment of mothers' pension legislation in nearly every state within the next decade. When the Boy Scouts of America was incorporated in Washington, D. C. , in February 1910, prominent New York and Washington social workers recommended West for the position of executive officer. He declined at first, but finally agreed to accept a temporary assignment beginning January 1911. He remained with the organization as chief scout executive until his retirement in 1943. He also served on the nine-member International Scout Committee and edited Boys' Life, a scout periodical, from 1922 to 1943. West and the Boy Scouts made an ideal combination. Scouting enabled West to devote his life to child welfare and, equally important, scouting was compatible with his personal preference for youth programs that stressed character development. The Boy Scouts, in turn, desperately needed West's idealism, dedication, and administrative talents in order to survive. During the early years they had to compete with similar organizations such as the Woodcraft Indians of Ernest Thompson Seton, the Boy Pioneers of Daniel Carter Beard, and the American Boy Scouts, which had briefly enjoyed the support of William Randolph Hearst. Under West's leadership the Boy Scouts of America devised techniques that enabled them to absorb the other groups or surpass them in prestige and membership. The combination of scout symbols and activities - uniforms and other visible insignia of membership (designed by Beard), the scout oath and laws, emphasis on the outdoors, the troop and patrol system, merit badge progression, community service ideals - were shrewdly designed to fulfill a variety of boyhood needs and drives. They appealed to a boy's quest for adventure and security, for individuality and belonging, for competitive achievement and cooperative association with his peers, and for autonomy and adult authority. The hegemony of the Boy Scouts was rooted also in a sophisticated public relations program. West continually stressed the services of the scouting movement to the community and nation. He carefully emphasized that scouting merely supplemented other institutions such as church, home, and school, and indeed had no facilities of its own except for camping. Most important, scouting made provisions for the active participation of thousands of volunteers through its elaborate hierarchy of patrols, troops, local councils, and national council. Scouting flourished, finally, because of the image of the movement that West projected. It was an extension of his own personality and ideals - conservatism and Americanism, wholesomeness, utility, character building, and citizenship based upon religious faith. West's view of the direction scouting should take was not unanimously endorsed by the national council. Seton and Beard, though themselves embroiled in a personal feud, publicly assailed West for his alleged preoccupation with bureaucratization, money raising, and the courting of powerful support. The English founder of the Boy Scout movement, Lord Baden-Powell, urged that the American organization not sacrifice the "jolly game" aspect of the movement for the sake of efficiency and membership gains. The removal of Seton from the national council effectively undercut his influence, but Beard remained a vigorous, and at times petty, critic of what he regarded as the downgrading of the strenuous outdoor and woodcraft tradition. West prevailed in the end. West participated in three later White House conferences on children, called by Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt. He received many awards for his welfare services, including three honorary degrees. Five years after his retirement as chief scout executive, he died of Addison's disease in New Rochelle, N. Y. , where he had made his home for a quarter of a century. He was buried in Kensico Cemetery, Valhalla, N. Y.
Achievements
West was one of the outstanding child welfare workers of the twentieth century. Through the White House Conference of 1909 he helped launch a revolt against the institutionalization of normal, dependent children. He then shaped one of the major youth agencies of the United States, one that touched the lives of millions of children and adults.
Personality
His perspective, to be sure, was limited. He always remained the nineteenth-century moralist, enunciating truisms about the importance of character and its ability to triumph over adversity: "With a worthwhile goal, hard work, training, and the determination to succeed, there is hardly anything that a young man today may not hope to attain. " Yet one must concede, in the end, that in West's case the truisms were true. "
Connections
He married Marion Olivia Speaks on June 19, 1907. Their first child, James Edward, died in childhood; the others were Arthur Pratt, Marion, Helen Margaret, and Robert.
