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The First Girl Scout: Portraits of Daisy Gordon Lawrence

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How often is a preteen celebrated as a genuine pioneer? In 1912 Savannah, Georgia, one 11-year-old girl named Daisy Gordon earned that lofty, evocative appellation when she became the first ever Girl Scout in the United States.

Daisy’s aunt, Juliette Gordon Low — also known as “Daisy” to family and friends — was the founder of the Girl Scouts of America. Juliette was inspired to start the organization during a trip to the United Kingdom in early 1912. When she returned to Savannah in March, she resolved to create a new type of sorority for girls modeled on the Boy Scout movement she’d witnessed and so admired in England. On March 12, 1912, at a “Girl Scout” party at Juliette’s Savannah home, her niece Daisy was the first to sign the new organization’s membership register. The rest, as they say, is history.

Daisy Gordon Lawrence, "The First Girl Scout," and a friend in 1948

Here, on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Girl Scouts of America — an organization that today has more than 3 million members and has been central to the lives of more than 50 million American women through the years — LIFE.com pays tribute to the GSA with a gallery of pictures (some never before published) featuring none other than “the first Girl Scout,” Daisy Gordon herself.

In its November 22, 1948 issue, LIFE — a magazine as proudly and forthrightly patriotic as the Girl Scouts themselves — ran a feature titled, like this gallery, “The First Girl Scout.” The subtitle of the article, meanwhile, was even more enticing — “She shows off a new uniform and some old tricks” — and indicated what was to come: namely, pictures of Daisy Gordon Lawrence (47 years old and married when the article appeared) wearing new Girl Scout duds while also showing contemporary Girl Scouts how to tie knots, start a fire with a “firebow” and work semaphore flags.

“Girl Scouts,” LIFE wrote, “have proved an important force in the nation’s youth. Today they can get proficiency badges in anything from journalism to international affairs. When Daisy was a Scout, the program was more violent. Her guidebook taught how to stop runaway horses (‘run as fast as the horse and throw your full weight on the reins’), how to shoot guns, and fly airplanes (‘it is best not to go out in a hurricane.’) ‘Rubber,’ it warned, ’causes paralysis.’ To make First Class Scout a girl had to ‘show a list of 12 satisfactory good turns’ or ‘swim 50 yards in her clothes.’ Daisy stayed Second Class.’

Daisy remained active in the GSA for years; in 1958 she co-authored a book on her aunt, titled Lady of Savannah: The Life of Juliette Low. Daisy Gordon Lawrence died in Seattle in 1982.



Weeping for FDR: In a Classic Photo, the Face of a Nation’s Loss

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Leaving aside, for a moment, the question of how effective they really were while in office, some American presidents simply loom larger in the public imagination than other Oval Office occupants: several of the Founding Fathers, for example; John F. Kennedy and his deeply romanticized “thousand days”; Ronald Reagan; Lincoln, of course.

And then there’s FDR. The only man elected not three but four times to the nation’s highest office (although he would die within months of being sworn in to his final term), Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s greatness can be measured, in one very elemental sense, by the passions he excites in both his supporters and detractors. To the former, he was a courageous and compassionate leader — a politician born into great privilege who nevertheless oversaw the creation of America’s government-run safety nets for the least powerful among us; a steady hand at the helm during the darkest days of World War II; and a man willing to spend most of his political capital pushing for policies and programs that were controversial and even revolutionary in their time, but today are seen as part of the bedrock of the American social contract.

To his naysayers, of course, FDR’s New Deal was not far removed from communism — an astonishing and egregious example of governmental overreach — while his political philosophy (actually quite pragmatic, at heart) smacked of class betrayal and hinted at an un-American belief that the feds can solve every single problem that comes along, no matter how large or small, how transient or catastrophic.

His wife Eleanor, meanwhile, was even more progressive(and polarizing) than her husband. While her humanitarian work all over the globe in her later years would win her near-universal praise, as a First Lady she was something of a radical — giving her own press conferences (the first woman in her position ever to do so), arguing for expanded workers’ rights and sometimes publicly disagreeing with her husband on national issues.

One national issue on which the Roosevelts agreed — to a greater or lesser extent — was that of civil rights. Eleanor was the more vocal and adamant of the two, but it was FDR who signed Executive Order 8802 in June 1941. Geared toward defense workers, 8802 was the first federal action designed to prohibit employment discrimination in the United States. It was, arguably, the most significant action by an American president in the realm of civil rights until LBJ signed the historic Civil Rights Act itself in 1964.

(Roosevelt’s record on civil rights as a whole is somewhat more checkered, however — especially in light of the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War.)

Ed Clark’s photograph, meanwhile, of an openly weeping Chief Petty Officer (USN) Graham Jackson playing “Goin’ Home” on his accordion as FDR’s flag-draped casket passes by in April 1945 has, through the years, come to symbolize not merely a nation’s grief, but black America’s acknowledgement of Roosevelt’s efforts on behalf of civil rights while he was in office.

It’s tricky, of course — even dangerous — to presume that one person’s emotions can be seen as emblematic of the feelings and thoughts of millions of other people, merely because those people are of the same race. After all, by all accounts Jackson had played for FDR, and for countless other people at and around the so-called “Little White House” in Warm Springs, Ga., many times in the past. The two men had, so to speak, a history. The tears coursing down Jackson’s cheeks are, assuredly, the outward sign of an inward, deeply personal grief.

But nothing is simple in iconic pictures, and while ascribing the status of “symbol” or “emblem” to Jackson (and his sorrow) in light of FDR’s record on civil rights might be problematic, the fact remains that significant photographs invite interpretation. The searing pain on Graham’s face is not his pain alone; in Ed Clark’s masterful, unforgettable picture, we see — and, what’s more, we feel — a nation’s loss.


Bigotry in the USA: Photos From a Klan Initiation in 1946

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According to a recent report (March 5, 2013) by an Alabama-based civil rights group, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of extremist and anti-government “Patriot” groups in the U.S. reached an all-time high in 2012 — “the fourth consecutive year,” the SPLC noted on its website, “of powerful growth by a movement that is becoming increasingly militant as President Obama enters his second term and Congress debates gun control measures.”

The SPLC report identified 1,360 Patriot groups in the U.S. in 2012, including more than 300 militias. “These numbers,” the SPLC says, “far exceed the movement’s peak in the 1990s, when militias were inflamed by the 1993 Brady Bill and the 1994 assault rifle ban.” Neo-Nazis, “Christian Identity” cults, white supremacist militias and other extremist, anti-Semitic, anti-foreign “nativist” groups currently exist in all 50 states.

When it comes to hate groups in America, of course, the longest-lived and most readily identifiable remains the Ku Klux Klan, which has been operating at varying degrees of influence and strength for close to 150 years. Hundreds of Klan groups are actively working and recruiting in the U.S., with more than two dozen in Texas alone. The KKK’s fortunes as a cultural and political force have waxed and waned over the decades, with the Klan membership peaking in the 1920s, during the era of the “Second Klan.” (The First Klan, in the post-Civil War South, lasted from 1865 to 1874; the Second Klan from 1915 until about 1944; and the Third from roughly the end of WWII until today.

[MORE: Read the TIME.com article, "'KKK Figure' Prompts Oberlin College to Cancel Classes."]

The Klan claimed literally millions of members at the height of the Second Klan era; today, Klan watchers estimate that number to be fewer than 10,000. The good news is that’s a precipitous drop, to say the least, in the number of people officially associated with the KKK; the bad news is that many thousands of Americans who might have joined the Klan in the past have instead aligned with a host of extremist splinter groups, militias and other organizations, making far-right fringe as dangerous as it’s ever been.

In May 1946, LIFE magazine ran a series of remarkable pictures from a Klan initiation in Georgia, at the start of the Second Klan era. Titled “The Ku Klux Klan Tries a Comeback,” the article noted that the KKK pledged initiates “in a mystic pageant on Georgia’s Stone Mountain.” The language that accompanied photographer Ed Clark’s pictures, meanwhile, made clear that, as newsworthy as the story of this particular initiation might have been, LIFE’s editors considered the figures in their white robes and hoods to be almost laughable — if their disgusting rhetoric and arcane, pseudo-mystic shenanigans weren’t so profoundly un-American.

On the evening of May 9 at 8 p.m. a mob of fully grown men solemnly paraded up to a wide plateau of Stone Mountain outside Atlanta, Ga., and got down on their knees on the ground before 100 white-sheeted and hooded Atlantans. In the eerie light of a half-moon and a fiery 200-by-300-foot cross they stumbled in lockstep up to a great stone altar and knelt there in the dirt while the “Grand Dragon” went through the mumbo jumbo of initiating them into the Ku Klux Klan. Then one new member was selected from the mob and ceremoniously “knighted” into the organization in behalf of all the rest of his fellow bigots.

This was the first big public initiation into the Klan since the end of World War II. It was put on at a carefully calculated time. The anti-Negro, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-foreign, anti-union, antidemocratic Ku Klux Klan was coming out of wartime hiding just at the time when the CIO and the A.F. of L. were starting simultaneous campaigns to organize the South … But it is doubtful that the Klan can become as frighteningly strong as it was in 1919. One indication of the Klan’s impotence was its lack of effect on Negroes, who were once frightened and cowed by the white-robed members. More than 24,000 Negroes have already registered for next July’s primaries in the Atlanta vicinity alone, where the Stone Mountain ritual was held.

(NOTE: As mentioned in one of the picture captions above, the Stone Mountain ceremony was put off many times during the preceding year because of wartime sheet shortages during WWII. At least, that’s what LIFE reported at the time.)

The magazine also made a point of characterizing the garb and actions of members at Klan meetings (slides #10 through 15) as both incredibly creepy and profoundly pathetic. “Childish ritual and secretiveness,” the magazine noted, “have always been the great attractions for the kind of people who make good Klansmen.”

To which we would only add, in light of the SPLC’s report: the more things change …

— Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com






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