Briarcliff Manor and the Girl Scouts Movement, Part 1: Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon - Notebook 2024-7

By Joanna Howson

This is the first part of a series on Briarcliff Manor Girl Scouts history.

Briarcliff Manor has a perhaps surprising prominence in the history of the Girl Scouts. Founded in 1912 in Savannah, Georgia by Juliette Gordon Low, the Girl Scout movement was meant to be an American, female adaptation of the ideals of Robert Baden-Powell, whose Scouting movement in Britain had proved popular. Girl Scouts today still recite the ‘Girl Scout Pledge’ that Low developed, and I remember learning about her when I was a Girl Scout. The Girl Scouts grew rapidly in the aftermath of World War I–then called simply ‘the Great War’. Perhaps the motives for this expansion can be seen in Baden-Powell’s preface for the Girl Scout Handbook, published in 1920, where he writes, “If the women of the different nations are to a large extent members of the same society and therefore in close touch and sympathy with each other, although belonging to different countries, they will make the League {of Nations, the precursor to the UN founded in the wake of WWI} a real bond not merely between the Governments, but between the Peoples themselves and they will see to it that it means Peace and that we have no more of War.” And it was shortly after WWI that Briarcliff Manor became part of the quickly growing Girl Scout movement. There are two major connections between Girl Scout history and Briarcliff Manor. The first national Girl Scout camp, Camp Andree Clark, is located in Briarcliff Manor, across from the Edith Macy Conference Center which was also an early center of Girl Scout activity. And Briarcliff Manor resident Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon was the author of the very same Girl Scout Handbook I quoted above.

Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon was born Josephine Dodge Daskam in Stamford, Connecticut, on February 17, 1876. She graduated from Smith College, which currently houses her papers, in 1898. Opened the year before Daskam Bacon was born, Smith was founded exclusively to educate women–as it still is–and would have been one of the first institutions in the country to provide higher education for American women. Two years later, her first book of short stories, titled, appropriately, Smith College Stories, was published. Daskam quickly became a famous and popular writer, with stories and articles in publications such as The Atlantic, the Saturday Evening Post, and The New York Times. By 1902 she had achieved enough prominence to have President Theodore Roosevelt reading her books and commenting on his enjoyment of her stories. “Are you not ever going to get to Washington? I should so like to see you,” he wrote to her. In 1903, she married lawyer Selden Bacon, who claimed to be a descendant of Sir Francis Bacon. Over the course of several decades, Daskam wrote poetry, short stories, novels, and essays. Her most popular novel was 1904’s Memoirs of a Baby, and her short story “The Ghost of Rosy Taylor”, originally published in the Saturday Evening Post, was made into a short silent film in 1918.

Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon’s house on the border of Briarcliff Manor and Mount Pleasant

Also published in 1918 was her book On Our Hill. She dedicated the book to her three children, Anne, Deborah, and Selden, and it is about their lives, using the pseudonyms Prima, Secunda, and Tertius to describe their upper-middle class childhoods at the Briarcliff Manor mansion Beech Hill, which can still be seen today. Their lives seem to have been idyllic, with a happy family life and good education for the children. The book is a fascinating picture of life in the earliest days of Briarcliff Manor. Selden Bacon would later become a researcher of alcoholism. The Bacon family circle at Beech Hill would have had many prominent visitors. Daskam Bacon’s friends included suffragist Narcissa Vanderlip, also a Briarcliff Manor resident, and Smith professor of English Mary Augusta Jordan, who was Selden Jr.’s godmother. Daskam Bacon was not only a prominent and prolific writer, with over 35 books published in a 60-year writing career, but a public intellectual, who was called on to lecture all over the country.

On Our Hill features a fictionalized version of Daskam Bacon who has casual conversations about philosophy with her children and has to fend off interviewers over the phone. She wrote articles on topics as varied as the state of American literature to childcare. One topic she lectured on was against women’s suffrage, taking a position Narcissa Vanderlip would have disagreed with: in a 1912 New York Times article, she argued that in her opinion, most suffragists went wrong by claiming not that they wanted the vote for its own sake–an aim that she has some sympathy with–but by instead saying that women voting would improve the state of the country, a position she takes issue with. In another article, she argued that women would be better off sticking to traditional women’s roles such as raising children, rather than taking part in politics, and even spoke disparagingly of her own writing ability. Daskam Bacon seems to have felt that the Girl Scout movement was perhaps more useful for women especially as she was interested in preparing women for their traditional roles as homemakers. She began serving on the Girl Scouts Executive Committee when her daughters were Scouting age, and stayed there for ten years, writing the official handbook and also editing the Girl Scout Magazine, where her literary skills would have come in handy. In a 1930 article for the North American Review, she praised the Scouting movement for allowing children autonomy and responsibility. Ten years earlier, while she was working for the Girl Scout Executive Committee, she wrote an article in the Journal of Education advocating for the Girl Scout movement, praising it for democratic structure and allowing girls of all classes and religions to participate, as well as for giving girls domestic skills. Daskam Bacon had many political interests and was prominent in many national discussions. Another cause of interest to Daskam Bacon was the League of Nations: she won the first prize and $100 in a nationwide contest for her “Hymn of Nations” in 1933, an anthem for the League of Nations intended to be set to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Many published books in multiple genres, contributions to the history of organizations as disparate as Girl Scouting and the League of Nations; Josephine Daskam Bacon was a forgotten but notable writer and intellectual whose Briarcliff Manor connection was fascinating to research!

Karen SmithJuly 9, 2024