To the leaders of two million Girl Scouts the name Juliette Gordon Low has all the special meaning which surrounds the founder of any idealistic movement. The official biography of Mrs. Low in early editions of the Girl Scout Handbook recounts that in 1912 when she returned to Georgia from England she telephoned a close friend:
"Come right over, Nina, I've got something for the girls of Savannah and all America and all the world and we are going to start it tonight." Start it she did, and the 1947 edition added: "The concept of 'One World' had taken shape in her lively mind many years before the phrase became common. She was one of the first true internationalists."
Local Scout executives with copies of the new Handbook must have been somewhat bewildered when in August, 1954, they received a twelve-page pamphlet ordering a number of changes in the text. Conspicuous among the "corrections" was the striking out of the "one world" and the "true internationalist" description of Mrs. Low's ideas. Substituted was the single sentence: "The concept of 'international friendship' had taken shape in her lively mind long before the phrase became familiar to everyone."
This emergency pamphlet was the more confusing because an entirely new edition of the Handbook had been issued only eleven months before. Every six or seven years the Girl Scouts completely revise their manual. In between—ordinarily—the book remains the same during additional printings except for minor typographical corrections.