Not every Boys State program operates the same way. A daughter of one of the founders of Boys State once said in an interview that when her father found out the Young Pioneer Camps were “basically the Communists,” he got inspired to “get the Legion to get involved in a program to teach our government to the students.” 85 years later, Boys State is still going strong, with programs in every U.S. Teaching an alternate form of government to our nation’s youth wasn’t exactly hunky-dory in the Red Scare era. It was founded by the American Legion in 1935 to, as they put it on their website, “counter the socialism-inspired Young Pioneer Camps”–children’s programs in the 1920s and '30s run by Communist-tied groups that taught American kids about, well, Communism. But like everything about my week at Boys State, it’s not something I’d ever forget.īoys State is a week-long all-boys politics camp that smacks of old-school, communist-fearing American nationalism. I don’t often think about my first hemorrhoid. But there it was, a confusing little gob of discomfort and irritation that, despite my best efforts, would just not go away. It was the summer of 2008, I was 17, I had been assigned the role of "councilman," and I really had no idea what to do about a hemorrhoid. There, in a dorm room at Rider University in Central New Jersey, I can recall the hot air from my box fan blowing as I unfurled sheet after sheet of toilet paper, wiping vigorously at an itch that had spread around the diameter of my rear-end like a colony of fire ants. It was the end of my Junior year, and I’d been selected to represent my high school at the hallowed–albeit not widely-known–student government camp run by the veterans' organization American Legion.
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