Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis," described the frontier as the lifeblood of American ideals and warned that the frontier's closing would mean the factors that once enabled America to prosper could no longer be relied on in the century ahead. Boy scouting was shaped by a similar nostalgia for the vanishing frontier as well as a "crisis of masculinity" arising from the anxiety that frontier discipline would no longer rub off on the youth of an increasingly urbanized culture. In this article, Henry Jones examines how the Boy Scouts in their formative years attempted to establish a virtual, "reconstructed frontier" as a substitute for the lost geographic frontier. However, the evolution of Boy Scout character education between 1908 and 1940 mirrored changes in the frontier thesis itself, reflecting a rapid transformation of the frontier's "rugged individualism" into a "corporate individualism" more aligned with the bureaucracies of managerial capitalism and the regulatory state.