2

CHURCH, CONCRETE, POND

How Innocence Got Disrupted

The Fresh Air story began in church, came out of concrete, and ended in ponds. Without religion’s support, the city’s contrast, or swimming’s attraction, the redemption story at the center of Fresh Air would have appealed to few. To sell Fresh Air to donors, promoters told the same tale again and again. It went like this: Susie—or Buster or Johnny or Jane—suffered from living in the hot, dirty, dangerous city where she—or he—was boxed in by concrete walls and pavement-covered streets. However, little did Susie know that a group of upstanding Christian—though sometimes Jewish—citizens were preparing to invite her to suburban homes and country camps. When Susie escaped from the city, she brought a swimsuit with her because she had been told she would get to swim—every day if she wanted. And swim she did, leaving her cares behind as she splashed in a pond—or lake or pool—often with minimal adult supervision. She had been redeemed from the burden of concrete, buoyed up by the wonder of water.

That story had little room for complication. Donors wanted a simple story free of any disruption. They had no interest in hearing that hosts and their guests did not always meet the expectations of the Fresh Air redemption tale. Few desired more details about the freedoms and advantages of living in the city. Rarely did a supporter want to know why the children talked so much about swimming. The redemption story succeeded because those who crafted the narrative edited out the children’s disruption.

A closer examination of the themes of church, concrete, and pond reveals a different, more complex story. Churches and synagogues did provide the most widespread foundation for the programs, but Fresh Air children resisted the very religious expectations meant to save them from the city. Even widely lauded Mennonite and Amish hosts often failed in their efforts to redeem the children. Multiple anecdotes gave plenty of evidence that the city could be an uncomfortable place to live, but Fresh Air narrators seldom drew on equally ample evidence that city children delighted in their urban environment. All signs indicate that the vast majority of Fresh Air children reveled in swimming, but those who donned swimming suits with such excitement did so as much for the opportunity to frolic without adults directing them as for the refreshment of water play. Fresh Air children complicated the story told about them by doing what children have always done: They sought out spaces of their own, free of adult oversight.¹ In the end, the children’s disruptions of an oft-told Fresh Air tale reveal more about the conceptions of innocence prominent in this period than they do about redemption.

Church

The story told by Fresh Air supporters flowed from and fed into intellectual currents about innocence long present in Western thought. Christian theology proved particularly influential. Much of the promotional copy echoed early Christian sentiment that one must become like a child “to enter into heaven.” According to Clement of Alexandria and other early church patriarchs of the first and second centuries, “uncontaminated” children set an example for adults in that they had no interest in or knowledge of sexual pleasure and thus centered all their affection on the divine.² During the late fourth and early fifth centuries, Saint Augustine developed the doctrine of “original sin,” which maintained that infants bore the “taint of sin” and could be saved only through baptismal rites. By the time of the Reformation, Martin Luther continued to promote a version of original sin but also maintained that children embodied innocence up until they reached the age of five or six.³ Members of the Radical Reformation, those who would go on to found Anabaptist groups such as the Mennonites and Amish, opted for the notion of “complex innocence”: Children were culpable as inheritors of original sin but did not yet actively sin and so were covered over by God’s grace until the age of accountability, a perspective extended to all children, not just the children of believers.⁴

Fresh Air promotional copy also echoed eighteenth-century romantic notions popularized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Swiss-French philosopher maintained in his 1762 novel Émile that society corrupted children over time but that children entered the world with none of the depravity claimed by proponents of original sin.⁵ Highly influential in both secular and sacred circles, Rousseau’s thought amplified the stream of Christian doctrine already present in the work of Clement of Alexandria and later developed by German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, both of whom supported childhood innocence.⁶ However, Rousseau’s intervention did not eradicate the idea that children came into the world bearing evil and depravity. The duality of Christian thought as represented by these competing claims about children’s evil and innocence continued to echo through the twentieth century.⁷

Cast into a role of cooperative protagonists by the church’s redemption stories, Fresh Air children often played against type. Despite religion’s powerful influence on the movement, many children challenged the instruction they received. One camper simply refused to attend planned religious services in 1948.⁸ During the 1950s, others did not attend Sunday School regularly enough in their home community in order to be “worthy” of a Fresh Air trip.⁹ Through the 1970s, Fresh Air visitors also interrupted worship services that they had been required to attend, got into arguments with their hosts over religious matters, and came to doubt their hosts’ religious dictates.¹⁰ In short, during the post–World War II period, Fresh Air children consistently disrupted the religious narrative told about them.

The Fresh Air movement’s story began in a church. As told repeatedly in press accounts and promotional materials, the Reverend Willard Parsons invited members of his Presbyterian congregation to host children from tenements made “unbearable” by the heat of the city.¹¹ In a sermon given early in the summer of 1877, Parsons reflected on the time he had spent at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and enjoined his congregants to welcome “the least of these” into their homes.¹² Although a secular newspaper eventually sponsored the program that he started, those who followed after him celebrated these religious roots. In every decade of this study, multiple published accounts referred to Parsons and his congregation.¹³

Parsons emerged from a long tradition of Protestant ministry to urban children. During the Progressive Era, evangelical organizations and their secular partners lobbied against child labor and sought to provide good nutrition, health care, and religious instruction.¹⁴ Even when employed by the Herald Tribune, Parsons and subsequent Progressive Era directors valorized the inspirational influence of Christian role models and households.¹⁵ By the middle of the twentieth century, churches responded to the perceived threat of juvenile delinquency by offering athletic programs, games, arts and crafts, drama clubs, bible studies, and “moral, social, and health education.”¹⁶ Parsons’ own denomination administered an extensive program for city children in San Francisco in the 1960s that included a bagpipe player parading on sidewalks to usher children to “songs, games, and class.”¹⁷ Fresh Air programs replicated those activities—including religious instruction—but did so in the country at both homes and camps.¹⁸

Parsons also inspired rural and suburban congregations to support their urban counterparts by organizing, promoting, and funding Fresh Air ventures—a pattern of rural support for urban ministry that lasted through the 1970s. Clergy headed local hosting committees.¹⁹ Ministers recruited hosts and donations by offering appeals “from their pulpits.”²⁰ Entire congregations in rural communities near Boston, Chicago, and Des Moines oversaw the transportation of thousands of city children to the country.²¹ Church leaders of the small town of Olean, New York, collaborated with their mayor to proclaim Sunday, June 13, 1948, as “Fresh Air Children’s Sunday” in honor of the children hosted in their community.²²

Religious groups also did far more to implement Fresh Air visits than did civic organizations, businesses, or public personalities. Service organizations like the Kiwanis, Rotary, and Lions would sometimes sponsor local Fresh Air ventures, but in turn relied on churches for publicity and logistical support.²³ Businesses and related foundations provided in-kind donations and grants, yet rarely became involved in the actual execution of the programs. Politicians and celebrities lent their status, names, and dollars to Fresh Air programs, but they also avoided logistical work. Through the 1970s, the Amish, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Mennonites, Methodists, Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, and members of nondenominational congregations continued to promote, organize, and sponsor Fresh Air visits. Even the ostensibly secular Fresh Air Fund relied on donations of time and money from congregations and religious organizations such as Catholic Charities, the East Harlem Protestant Parish, Glad Tidings Mennonite Church, and the True Life Lutheran Chinese Church.²⁴ As church attendance rates dropped across the country, religion remained integral to the Fresh Air world.²⁵

The religious leaders who organized Fresh Air operated within a post–Great Depression realignment of faith-based charity assumptions. In the early twentieth century, social gospel proponents like Walter Rauschenbusch urged mainline denominations to become involved in ministry to the poor based on the assumption that their efforts could eventually bring an end to poverty. Government intervention was not necessary. The scope of economic hardship during the Great Depression led many in the church community to recognize the insufficiency of resources available through private charities and religious communities; government resources needed to be marshaled as well.²⁶ Even as government programs began to address long-term poverty through President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, however, church leaders backed away from calling for systemic transformation.²⁷ The Fresh Air model dovetailed well with the post-Depression mind-set that churches had a mission to serve the poor, but the scope of that mission need not extend beyond short-term, relationally focused, charity-based programs.

In the context of that foreshortened scope of ministry, religious leaders held more sway as gatekeepers than as organizers. In order to shield hosts from children deemed uncooperative, problematic, or “real delinquents,” all Fresh Air programs carefully vetted guest applicants.²⁸ While health care professionals screened potential Fresh Air candidates for medical conditions, church workers and social service personnel screened the children for behavioral problems. In Chicago during the 1960s, parish ministers “selected” which children would get “to participate in the program.”²⁹ In New York City in 1970, church staff offered their “recommendation” as to which children would best benefit from a country vacation.³⁰ One year later in Cleveland, staff of the Emmanuel Episcopal Church “helped recruit and prepare” the children for their visits.³¹ Although at least one religious leader claimed in 1976 that he and his colleagues did not dangle the prospect of a summer vacation in front of children “as bait” to lure them into church, other church leaders made clear that children who misbehaved during worship or proved unfaithful “in attending Sunday School” would be denied summer vacation visits.³² Further amplified by the practice of requiring rural hosts to get the signature of a “minister, priest or rabbi” in order to participate, the power and influence of the religious community within the Fresh Air movement had no parallel.³³

Christianity’s central role influenced hosts’ and reporters’ expectations. A 1946 report stressed that, “as the fundamental units of society,” Fresh Air homes offered children “their first spiritual impressions.”³⁴ In 1955 a local organizer claimed that hosts put their “Christianity to work” by opening their homes.³⁵ Participants in a 1962 Fresh Air meeting in southeast Pennsylvania concluded by singing “Jesus loves the little children of the world.”³⁶ In 1975 a reporter echoed religious themes when remarking that a trip to the country “could amount almost to salvation.”³⁷ Through 1979, reporters highlighted hosts’ Christian identity.³⁸ In addition to making Jewish participants invisible, such descriptions made Christian emphasis on and interpretation of innocence normative.

And denominationally based programs made much of the children’s unsullied state. In 1946 a Mennonite author praised the “sacredness of childhood” by equating the face of a child with the face of an angel.³⁹ In 1961 an Episcopalian editor captioned a photo of a boy on a playground swing as “The Innocent Years.”⁴⁰ Such innocence claims influenced the broader movement. In 1955 a small-town newspaper editor in Oneonta, New York, featured a photo of a young girl kneeling in prayer for a summer home visit to emphasize her innocence and piety.⁴¹ In 1971 a Fresh Air recruiter assured potential hosts that “these are little children, innocent kids.”⁴² Although in the early 1970s an alternative narrative suggested that “little kids” from the city were “no longer little kids,” religious and secular promoters stuck to the message that the children came to host homes free of worldly knowledge, untainted by sexual activity, and open to religious devotion.⁴³

Through the early 1970s organizers undergirded their religiously focused narrative by allowing hosts to select their guests’ religious affiliation. Already in 1949, Fresh Air Fund staff told potential hosts that they could “specify the age, color, and religion” of the child that they would bring into their home.⁴⁴ In 1966 a Boston-based program assured hosts that Protestant children would be “placed with Protestant families, Roman Catholic children with Roman Catholic families.”⁴⁵ Chicago organizers discontinued race selection in 1968 while allowing hosts to continue selecting their guests’ religious affiliation.⁴⁶ After 1971, however, the Fresh Air Fund stopped permitting hosts to designate religion and race in an effort to remove bias from the placement process.⁴⁷ Religiously based programs continued to vet children through their mission agencies and thus made sure that the majority of sponsored children had at least a degree of familiarity with the basic tenets of their faith. Although religious vetting had ended, religious instruction continued in many Fresh Air homes.⁴⁸

Some Fresh Air children enjoyed that religious instruction. In the 1940s and 1950s, campers listened to formal religious instruction from camp staff or off-site clergy.⁴⁹ Those sent on home visits had a wider range of experiences, with some attending Bible school, others kneeling for bedtime prayers, and still others accompanying their host families to church and Sunday school.⁵⁰ In addition, hosts asked their guests to memorize Bible passages and religious songs for later recitation during church services and family devotions.⁵¹ Through the 1970s, some children participated eagerly and highlighted churchgoing as a favorite activity.⁵² Looking back on her experience as a Fresh Air child with a Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, family, Peggy Saporato wrote, “The thing I think I liked best of all was going to church.”⁵³

Other children countered the story told about them. In particular, Fresh Air children placed in Mennonite and Amish homes disrupted the redemption tale. Like their counterparts in the Christian Reformed Church, the Episcopal Church, and several ecumenical partnerships, Mennonites and Amish followed the model first created by Parsons. Children from the city—or in the case of one Mennonite-sponsored program, the rural South—traveled to suburban or country homes for one- to two-week stays often described as vacations. The designation of age ranges, program purposes, and strategies for dealing with issues like homesickness likewise followed Parsons’ model. The primary difference came in the form of specific religious practices that shaped and molded both guests and hosts.

Members of the Mennonite and Amish communities brought historical, cultural, and religious particularities to their Fresh Air work. Emerging from the Radical Reformation in early-sixteenth-century Europe, the Anabaptist movement that would eventually give rise to both Mennonites and Amish as well as the Hutterites and Brethren focused on adult confession of faith—hence the term Anabaptist or rebaptizers because most early believers had been baptized as infants into the Catholic Church—communal discernment of the scriptures, the refusal to bear arms, and nonconformity to the standards of the secular world. Mennonites gained their name from an early church leader, Menno Simons, and the Amish took their label from Jakob Ammann, the leader of a group who separated from the larger Mennonite community in 1693 following a disagreement over how best to practice church discipline. Fleeing persecution for their faith, Mennonites arrived in Pennsylvania in the late seventeenth century and had constructed their first meetinghouse by 1708 in Germantown. The Amish likewise moved out of the Palatinate region of western Germany in the eighteenth century and settled in Pennsylvania as well as neighboring states before moving south and west in search of land.

Decades of religious persecution instilled a separatist identity in both groups. Visible in prayer veils, straw hats, and horse-drawn buggies, the Anabaptists and their value of nonconformity became as well-known to the broader public as the community’s penchant for barn raising and pacifism. Although committed to spiritual and social separation from worldly influences, Mennonites and Amish also cherished a strong service ethic that prompted them to provide practical assistance to those afflicted by natural disasters or other tragedies.

A desire to serve the less fortunate coupled with an impulse to proselytize the unchurched prompted Mennonites and Amish to participate eagerly and often in Fresh Air ventures. They did so in two ways. First, several Mennonite groups ran their own Fresh Air programs. In 1896 a group of Chicago mission churches started a program that ran somewhat sporadically through the 1960s.⁵⁴ Mennonites from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, founded their own program in 1949 focused on bringing “Negro children” from urban mission sites to rural Mennonite homes.⁵⁵ Another group of Mennonites serving in a variety of social service projects in Gulfport, Mississippi, began transporting groups of African American children by bus to Kansas, South Dakota, and Michigan in 1959.⁵⁶ In all three of these sites, Mennonite participants enthusiastically brought “the mission field” into their homes by hosting city children.⁵⁷

Second, an even larger group of Mennonites and Amish participated in the Herald Tribune’s Fresh Air program, where they received unabashed accolades for their work. In Paradise and Mount Joy, Pennsylvania, Mennonites Emma Denlinger and Gertrude M. Spangler organized local Fresh Air hosting committees for nearly a quarter of a century between them.⁵⁸ In 1964 the Fresh Air Fund released Summer’s Children, a promotional film that featured children hosted in Mennonite homes.⁵⁹ For almost thirty years, Alice Trissel, a Mennonite from Harrisonburg, Virginia, coordinated Fund activities in one of their few active southern sites, where she sent thousands of children to Mennonite homes.⁶⁰ Administrators from the New York-based program heaped praise on the groups; executive director Lisa Pulling said that Mennonite hosts made Pennsylvania “the most popular place to go,” and another administrator exclaimed that the “Amish are fantastic for taking children.”⁶¹ In addition, staff from the Fund noted that children sent to Mennonite and Amish families had re-invitation rates as high as 80 percent, a significant increase over other groups, which often reached only 50 percent.⁶² As presented to the public, the Mennonites and Amish were “good and generous and kind” hosts who “refused plaques and scrolls and requests to be photographed for publicity.”⁶³

Public opinions about the Mennonites and Amish who hosted Fresh Air children mirrored those expressed about the decency and goodness of plain people in general as well as the children who visited them. The Amish in particular garnered the distinction of being “innocent, pure, plain” people.⁶⁴ Both groups’ “plain” dress patterns furthermore cast them as leading characters in “the myth of white racial purity.”⁶⁵ Just as Fresh Air promoters assured hosts that the children knew nothing of worldly matters—whether sex, race, or political matters—those same administrators assured the broader public that their best hosts were equally untainted. According to reports that most donors encountered in the course of a fund-raising season, the meeting of plain people with city children matched innocence with innocence. Neither group would be sullied or made worldly by the encounters.

In these Anabaptist settings the children’s disruptions became most evident. Following pietistic commitments of their community, Mennonites and Amish renounced dancing, wearing makeup, listening to the radio, or participating in the occult. Despite being informed of these strictures, the young guests in Mennonite and Amish homes often refused to cooperate with the restrictive dictates. One guest received a scolding for dancing.⁶⁶ Another young girl from Harlem by the name of Margie Middleton learned to resist the messages her hosts gave her about proper conduct when she returned to the city from visits with Mennonite families. Her hosts decried listening to the radio, dancing, going to the movies, putting on lipstick, and wearing earrings. Only after talking with her mother, who engaged in all the activities her hosts condemned, did Middleton decide that “God judges the heart” as much as external appearances.⁶⁷ Yet another child told scary stories about “spooks and ghosts” to his host siblings, causing much consternation in the household.⁶⁸

In other instances, tensions emerged around Mennonite and Amish dress customs. Although many children came to their host homes wearing new clothing purchased by their parents or given by donors prior to their arrival, rarely did a child have a wardrobe that included Amish prayer veils or cape dresses in bold primary colors. When placed in a conservative Mennonite or Amish home, many guests looked for ways to blend into their environment. Although few boys sported wide-brimmed straw hats or wore suspenders in the Amish style, some girls adopted local dress patterns in order to look like their hosts. As one local organizer from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, noted, “We end up sending them back to New York dressed like the Amish. Their hair is parted in the middle with the girls in long, brightly colored dresses and black aprons.” Although they could not change other aspects of their appearance, dress did afford the young girls a measure of camouflage so that they would not look “different” while on their summer sojourn.⁶⁹ In at least one instance, Amish costume even made Natasha Brown feel glamorous, “with the deep maroon color against her dark skin, her almond-shaped Polynesian eyes, and her hair gleaming in tight braids under the bright white covering.”⁷⁰

Yet the decision about whether to dress in a conservative fashion distressed some guests. Middleton remembered that both she and her friend Pat had “accepted Christ” as their savior at the Mennonite church they attended in New York City, but only Pat had decided to wear a prayer covering as a sign of that commitment. As a result, the Mennonite family in Lancaster who had hosted them both the previous summer extended a re-invitation to Pat but not to Middleton.⁷¹ The host family rejected the young city guest who would not conform to their ways. Decades later, Middleton still carried with her the memory of the rejection and separation from her best friend.

The Mennonites and Amish who received such accolades for the quality of their hosting had a mixed record. In addition to condemning many of the children’s behaviors and excluding those who did not conform to their practices, some hosts put the children to work as inexpensive farm hands, rejected children once they became teenagers, and used racial epithets.⁷² In more than one area, members of the Anabaptist community physically and sexually abused their guests, a reality examined at greater length in chapter 4.⁷³ By assuming that Mennonite and Amish hosts would never harm a child, administrators deflected attention away from such problems and increased the likelihood that abuse would recur.

Here again the children disrupted the prevailing narrative. In a hosting movement that presented children as free of moral corruption, adults expected their guests to conform to their religious precepts. Children like Middleton chose alternate paths based on their parents’ instructions, their own preferences, and the sheer love of dancing or telling scary stories. Even among hosts lauded for their generosity and wholesomeness, or perhaps especially in those settings, Fresh Air children did not conform to their sponsors’ script.

Concrete

Every Fresh Air visit concluded with concrete. The programs did not permanently remove the children from the city; they took them away in order to bring them back. Although foster care was sometimes an option in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by the mid-twentieth century hosts rarely adopted or extended foster care to Fresh Air guests. And so, nearly all the children came back to the cement-filled environs that purportedly threatened, oppressed, and limited their horizons.

The return home nonetheless delighted many of the children. Upon emerging from the subway into the streets above, one boy sniffed the air, turned to his escort, and exclaimed, “Gee, it smells good to be home.”⁷⁴ Another adult chaperone recalled how frequently she witnessed train cars full of Fresh Air children cheer when they pulled into Penn Station in New York City.⁷⁵ The instance of homesick children longing to return to their families and more familiar surroundings likewise speaks to children enamored with a place said to do them great harm.⁷⁶ For example, David Son, a “Chinese guest” of the Schilling family of Salisbury, Maryland, returned home early because he missed his city home.⁷⁷ Although the young age of many of the Fresh Air guests and their attachment to parents and siblings were certainly factors, those labeled as homesick knew the city as a place of comfort and familiarity.

Such fondness for the urban center counters widely held notions of the city as a site of deviance and moral decadence. From 1920 onward, more than 50 percent of the U.S. populace lived in cities, and so those social reformers who advocated for children to be exposed to the country in order to receive a “normal childhood” in truth pushed for access to an abnormal one.⁷⁸ Many influential historians through the 1960s emphasized the wholesomeness and normality of the countryside, while casting city spaces as “impure.”⁷⁹ Reformers expanded on this notion with a lexicon of “overlapping idioms” they used to describe the “industrial city”: “vicious destroyer of the common good,” “necessary mirror of American civilization,” and “a threat to democracy, Protestantism, and virtue alike.”⁸⁰ In particular, New York City embodied Americans’ fears of urban perils, a perception not incidental to the success of the Tribune Fresh Air program.⁸¹ Although also a site of redemption because of the very depravity hosted therein, the urban environment became by the middle of the twentieth century a place where bad things came from, not where good people went.⁸²

The children’s delight in returning to the city disrupted the central message of the Fresh Air movement. Promoters made the point that the country held the power to restore and rejuvenate children, but this idea depended first on the conviction that the city had the power to oppress the children. If the city did not look bad, the children had nothing from which they needed rescue. Fresh Air promoters cast the ugly, threatening city as a troll, the antagonist in their story. References to children enjoying their return to the city appear so anomalous not only because they countered the prevailing narrative but also because they made it into the written record.

Cities stood at the center of the Fresh Air project from their inception. By the end of the 1960s, programs varied in how much they emphasized cross-racial connections or urban/suburban ones, but none of the initiatives lost their primary focus on the city as the children’s point of origin. As of 1970, the list of sponsoring cities included Denver, Des Moines, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Toledo, in addition to the long-term sites of Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, and Philadelphia.⁸³ Other than the city itself, a Fresh Air program needed only two other ingredients to thrive: transportation to take the children away from city streets and suburban or rural homes in which to welcome them.

Those who whisked the children out of the city employed the same narrative line. First and most consistently, program promoters noted that the city held heat. Whether facing “baking,” “blistering,” “unbearable,” “oppressive,” “torrid,” or “sweltering” conditions, children stayed “trapped in the high-wall heat of the city” until cooled by country environs.⁸⁴ Children also escaped crowds. According to promotional accounts, crowded streets and cramped housing made life miserable and play nearly impossible.⁸⁵ Fresh Air accounts by the 1970s described neighborhoods defined first by drugs, crime, and gangs.⁸⁶ In such urban communities, overwhelming cacophony, drab aesthetics, and street fights created what Fresh Air recruiter Shelby Howatt deemed “a jungle atmosphere.”⁸⁷ Howatt’s description invoked a racial blackness that further alienated the city from white Fresh Air sponsors (see figure 3).

Publicity materials continued to emphasize the city’s heat, overcrowding, danger, ugliness, dirt, noise, and cement through the 1960s, even as some of the earlier tropes disappeared. Although concern for children’s malnutrition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been a Fresh Air hallmark, few programs described the city as a place of hunger after the 1950s. Likewise, post-1960, most authors stopped using labels like “bad” or “evil” to describe the city as such moral contrasts had become clichés.⁸⁸ After the 1960s, descriptions of housing projects began to replace those of tenements and “slums,” and fewer authors described the city as a prison.⁸⁹ Those seeking to promote Fresh Air programs had become more careful in how they described urban environments, but their underlying judgment remained. As a college student and child of long-time hosts declared in 1967, children from the city lived “dreary, disorganized, hollow and uninspired” lives.⁹⁰

FIGURE 3. Unidentified participants from the Henry Street Settlement House in New York City prepare for a trip to the country, 1965. Used by permission of Henry Street Settlement House, New York, NY. Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

Such small changes in promotional rhetoric echoed larger shifts brought about by urban renewal. The 1949 Housing Act channeled federal dollars into programs designed to eradicate substandard housing. Given an increasingly urban population, much of that money went to tearing down tenements and building in excess of 800,000 new public housing units. The 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act likewise altered cityscapes as contractors demolished homes and split neighborhoods in order to construct elevated highways to the suburbs.⁹¹ As a result, suburbs erupted: Chicago’s suburbs charted a 117 percent increase, and New York City’s outer ring posted a 195 percent increase at the same time that both urban centers lost residents.⁹² The designers of the housing projects that arose above the rubble of historic neighborhoods seldom took into account residents’ physical needs, comfort, or safety. Compounded by substandard construction materials and inadequate maintenance budgets, the housing developments quickly deteriorated at sites such as Cabrini-Green in Chicago and Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis.⁹³

The promoters stayed on message amid this urban change. In the Fresh Air narrative, the city had always made its residents uncomfortable. Urban denizens, depicted as primal and uncivilized through repeated references to the “jungle” of the city core, had suffered in the heat for all time.⁹⁴ In perpetuity, the masses shoved and pushed their way through city streets, leaving little room for children to play. Quiet never settled on the streets. At no point did city dwellers smell sweet air, walk safely on the sidewalk, or enjoy trash-free stoops. The lives of urban children had always been “bound by the crowded, blistering streets.”⁹⁵ Frozen in time, devoid of attraction, a monolith of “din and dirt,” in Fresh Air stories the city did not change.⁹⁶

Youthful participants in Fresh Air ventures began to reflect a similar negative mind-set about the city. In 1952 a young camper wrote his counselor after returning home to complain that it was “to [sic] hot in the city and dirty.”⁹⁷ One reporter described the words of Carlos Rivera, a twelve-year-old from the Bronx who had spent four summers with a family in Schenectady, New York, as he expounded in 1971 on the Fresh Air experience to a group of first-time travelers: “It’s better out there…. Here they’s junkies everywhere. There…. It’s clean, man, it’s clean. Anywhere you go, you don’t run into trouble. And one more thing, it don’t smell.”⁹⁸ Nine-year-old Jaquelyn Schofield had a similar perspective in 1975. She explained that in comparison to her Queens home, Troy, New York, felt “much colder and not as hot” and was “clean,” not “dirty and polluted.”⁹⁹ Through the 1970s, other Fresh Air children commented on “burned houses,” noise, and crime; too often they described their neighborhoods accurately.¹⁰⁰

Rooting out the source of such sentiment may not be possible. The children certainly heard program promoters and administrators speaking in negative terms. Even their host siblings asserted that “real life” could be found only in the country.¹⁰¹ Structurally the programs made these kinds of unflattering comparisons implicit. The children did, after all, leave the city behind. They did not simply commute to another borough. Staff and administrators likewise ensured that the children visited stable, middle-class homes in the suburbs and country where the contrast with the city would be even more apparent. And the process of changing to a different environment, living with different people, and getting to do new activities made the old and familiar less appealing.

Some children grew so dissatisfied with the city that they left it at their first opportunity. Looking back on her experience as a Fresh Air child during the 1950s, Helen Regenbogen said, “It was my dream my whole life to get out of the city and move to the country.”¹⁰² She not only realized that dream but went on to host Fresh Air children of her own. Former Brooklyn resident James Hinton left the city for a while during a tour of duty with the Marines, moved back to a “crowded section of Brooklyn” to start a family, but aimed in 1966 to bring his wife and three sons “back to Fresh Air country, to live.”¹⁰³ In 1978 a former Fresh Air participant relocated from Brooklyn to Croton-on-Hudson, about forty-five miles north of New York City, in order to live with his host family and attend high school. Although he grew homesick midyear for the city’s “action,” he stayed with his mother for only a few weeks before returning to Croton.¹⁰⁴

At the same time, adult critics and some children pushed back against the rhetoric perpetuating urban stereotypes. A few children explained to their hosts that they had in fact seen trees in the city and knew how to climb them.¹⁰⁵ Others, by simply showing that they were not addicted to drugs, engaged in crime, or pursuing sex, countered sentiments such as those held by a thirteen-year-old host who claimed in 1956 that 90 percent of New York’s school-age children drank “strong drink.”¹⁰⁶ Adults also challenged prevailing anti-urban sentiment when they, like Margie Middleton’s mother, stated plainly that the host parents “shouldn’t implant” in the minds of the children “that the city was wicked.”¹⁰⁷

Black Power activists in the 1960s intensified the criticism. For nearly a century, few observers had publicly criticized Fresh Air programs. Under scrutiny by black activists, however, many white-led social service programs found themselves under attack. Fresh Air was no exception. As noted in the introduction to this book, critics denounced the practice of busing children to the country because it instilled false expectations about their ability to relocate to the suburbs. In keeping with the damage imagery used by liberal reformers and black activists in their efforts to counter societal racism, still more critics claimed that the programs and others like them exuded paternalism, wreaked psychological havoc, and needed to be revised so that white suburban kids could be transported to the inner city.¹⁰⁸ The intensity of the criticism emerged from a sense that white liberals sought to undermine the black community in particular by attempting to influence the children at an early age. Black Nationalist critics and their white and Latino allies asserted that white liberals targeted the most vulnerable members of their community rather than speaking as equals with adults.¹⁰⁹ In an era when Black Power calls for self-determination rocked many a white-led service agency, the Fresh Air movement faced such blunt criticism through the middle of the 1970s.

Promoters and organizers responded by changing their rhetoric and promotional techniques. First, they brought parents of Fresh Air children before audiences of prospective hosts to testify that the programs “had done more to inspire than to hinder.”¹¹⁰ Prior to the 1960s, urban parents had played little to no role in the program as a whole, let alone in promotional efforts. In a similarly innovative move, at least some promoters dropped, however temporarily, the language of naïveté and began asserting that the children knew more than their hosts about racial and class dynamics. Rosemary Sandusky, a host and promoter in the town of Elk Grove, Illinois, claimed that the children visiting her and other hosts in the Chicago suburbs were “very wary” of their hosts and recognized that they would be able to stay only for a two-week visit. Moreover, she asserted that the children “are far more realistic than the people into whose homes they come.”¹¹¹ Along similar lines, Herald Tribune Fresh Air executive director Frederick Lewis said that the children had enough savvy not to become bitter or full of despair but rather that they gained confidence from the visits to “face this world and make something” of themselves.¹¹² A 1979 self-study for the Fund likewise emphasized that children returned from their vacations having matured and having become more aware of the world around them.¹¹³ Instead of ingenuous waifs, suddenly the children appeared knowledgeable and wise.

The city, too, got a facelift. In the aftermath of the most intense criticism and following leadership changes at the Fresh Air Fund, promotional copy and program initiatives presented the city in a far more positive light. In addition to including references to those who cheered upon pulling into Penn Station or took a deep breath of city air, other organizers referenced children chattering about “playing stick ball” or “walking the dog” when they returned home.¹¹⁴ Barbara King, a local organizer from Garden City, about thirty miles east of New York, admitted, “The city is where their friends are. It is where they are loved.”¹¹⁵ A photo of Fresh Air child Savina Arenas hugging her mother upon her return home sent a similar message.¹¹⁶ In an even bolder move, the Fresh Air Fund celebrated its centennial in 1977 by initiating programs to “get our kids to appreciate the city where they spend most of the year.” Although the Fund did not discontinue its normal rural-focused programming, it hosted children at baseball games, led them on historic tours of their neighborhoods, and took them to the Dance Theater of Harlem.¹¹⁷ For at least a short while, the city became beautiful in the eyes of the leaders of the Fresh Air movement.

Many Fresh Air children had known of the city’s pleasures long before administrators like Lewis included their perspectives in their promotional package. During the 1940s, neighborhood children flocked to summertime athletic competitions organized by settlement houses.¹¹⁸ Other social service groups planned city-focused adventures. In one example, a group of young Italian immigrant boys hiked through city streets in the summer of 1940 and climbed eight floors to the top of “Mount Roof” in Manhattan, where they enjoyed a corn feast, set up tents, and camped overnight.¹¹⁹ A photographer captured the sentiment of at least one New York graffiti artist in the middle of the twentieth century who scrawled on a brick wall, “Summer in the City is Fun.”¹²⁰ By the late 1970s, Fresh Air promoters admitted that it sometimes took “encouragement” to get children to leave the city.¹²¹ In addition, other children decided not to leave so that they could participate in local baseball programs or find summer employment.¹²² Nicol Roberts, a youthful correspondent for the “To Kids from Kids” column in the New York Amsterdam News, responded to a letter writer’s query by asserting, “The city may be hot, dirty and muggy to you, but I always find things to do in it. You can too. Good luck!”¹²³ In the course of the 1970s, both promoters and children disrupted the corrupted city discourse.

Other programs kept children in the urban neighborhoods they loved. For example, New York’s Union Settlement Association ran a summer day camp during the 1950s that took children to zoos, baseball games, swimming pools, and local parks within the city limits.¹²⁴ Staff of the “Summer in the City” program offered social and artistic activities for children and their parents in New York City in the late 1960s. Funded by the federal Office of Economic Opportunity, the program staffed thirty-nine offices in Manhattan and the Bronx in order to connect the children “with their own richnesses and with those of their neighbors.”¹²⁵ Participants sculpted papier-mâché, painted wall murals, decorated playgrounds, and performed in plays.¹²⁶ In contrast to the home- and backyard-based activities common in the suburbs, programs like “Summer in the City” celebrated the front stoop- and sidewalk-centered culture of many of the urban communities.¹²⁷

Fresh Air administrators kept sending children out of the city even as they temporarily moderated their urban negativity. Promoters had long emphasized the city’s depravity in order to sell a story of rescue and relief. But in the face of harsh criticism, Fresh Air administrators took note. They had begun to pay attention to a barrage of criticism that was “if not frontal, then at least questioning.”¹²⁸ Peter F. Carlton, the director who followed Lewis in 1972, questioned whether the program should even continue “as a ‘distribution conduit’” for children.¹²⁹ At a time when Fresh Air programs across the country experienced a drop in their hosting volunteer base, administrators experimented with telling a different story about the city, one not quite so dependent on calling it and those who lived there awful.¹³⁰

The positive take on the urban environment proved short-lived. Two years after the Fund’s centennial program celebrated the city, promoters started to disparage the urban core once more. Children again received a “wonderful break from the hot and noisy city streets.”¹³¹ They again escaped lives spent “surrounded by concrete and asphalt.”¹³² Once more they received “respite” from “deteriorating” neighborhoods.¹³³ Even as late as 2005, promotional materials continued to emphasize the need to save children from the “hot, noisy, dangerous streets of our city’s poorest neighborhoods.”¹³⁴

The old tropes resurfaced in part because the most critical voices turned quiet. Following the deliberate suppression of Black Power activists by local and federal authorities and the concomitant breakdown of a unified black political platform in the aftermath of the highly contentious 1974 National Black Political Convention in Little Rock, Arkansas, a concerted critique of the Fresh Air movement disappeared.¹³⁵ With less vocal criticism to answer, promoters continued to offer “street-wise, country-innocent” children a break from the city that purportedly oppressed them.¹³⁶ Those children who celebrated their return home disrupted the city’s disparagement but did not stop it altogether.

Pond

Roosevelt “Teddy” Mayes loved to swim. During a 1970 Fresh Air trip to a host family in one of Chicago’s northwest suburbs, he longed to take a dip in the local municipal pool. However, his hosts at the time could not take him. At eleven years old, Mayes decided that his hosts’ schedules would not interfere with his summer fun. According to his host the following year, the young boy from the south side of Chicago went to the pool by himself.¹³⁷ Mayes wanted to swim, and he made certain that he did.

Mayes’s independence and love of swimming represent a site of great freedom for hosted children amid Fresh Air programs’ many restrictions. Of all the sites that children from the city visited while vacationing, swimming ponds, pools, and lakes received the most consistent praise. Although adults often watched over them from the periphery and sometimes joined in aquatic adventure, the children expressed their independence while swimming. Despite facing real danger from drowning, having to negotiate racial boundaries at the waterfront, and listening to still more derision directed at the city, Fresh Air children made the pond and all such swimming sites their own.

Public pools have a long history as sites of social contestation. Up until the 1920s, municipal pools brought together white and black laborers across racial lines but remained segregated by gender and class. During the following three decades, city leaders segregated pools by excluding African Americans while simultaneously bringing bathers together across class and gender lines.¹³⁸ Starting in the mid-1940s, African American swimmers and their white allies successfully agitated for admission to municipal pools.¹³⁹ White flight from cities, white refusal to swim in integrated settings, and an eroding urban tax base by the 1970s led to many municipal pools crumbling in disrepair.¹⁴⁰

Yet suburban and small-town swimming opportunities never disappeared. In segregated settings, municipal pools remained vibrant. Where municipal pools became integrated, new private swimming clubs sprung up, a phenomenon especially common after 1950 in suburbs populated by white families fleeing cities in which public pools had become integrated.¹⁴¹ Backyard pools also became more common from the 1950s onward as income increased, pool construction became more affordable, and white suburban families vied for even more control over their swimming partners.¹⁴² As hundreds of thousands of water enthusiasts switched from municipal to private swimming, race remained central to their decisions.

Children like Teddy Mayes came to love swimming regardless of racial stereotypes that discouraged black and brown children from water sport. Despite sustained interest in summer swimming, few African Americans found their way into pool-based athletics. Although the actual reasons primarily lie in cultural tradition, role modeling, and lack of access to swimming facilities, physiologists of the time attempted to explain black absence from aquatic competition by creating theories about buoyancy, body type, lung capacity, and specific gravity.¹⁴³ Such conjecture, stamped with the authority of science, drew popular attention away from racial discrimination at swimming pools by suggesting that African Americans were biologically unsuited for water sport.

Mayes and his city playmates nonetheless dealt with remote, crowded pools as they clamored to swim. Prior to the desegregation of public pools in the 1940s and 1950s in the Northeast and Midwest, where Fresh Air programs proliferated, African American and Latino swimmers in Harlem, for example, had to travel up to three miles to the Colonial Park pool because white managers at the nearby Jefferson Park pool denied them entrance.¹⁴⁴ During the 1960s and 1970s the few pools available to children in major urban centers drew so many swimmers on a hot day that some waited more than an hour for a chance to splash in shallow, tepid water.¹⁴⁵ Ten-year-old Lauren “Flip” Bailey told a reporter in 1977 that swimming pools near her home in the Bronx grew “so crowded it was impossible to swim.”¹⁴⁶ Alexander Cruz, a Fresh Air participant from Brooklyn, hesitated to accept his host’s offer to swim simply because he was used to crowded swimming facilities and “no one else was in” the backyard pool when his host invited him to take a dip.¹⁴⁷

Interest in swimming only increased on a Fresh Air vacation. When asked to describe the highlights of a trip to camp or home, the children referred to swimming more than any other activity. Some also enjoyed riding bikes, playing baseball, or romping with pets and farm animals.¹⁴⁸ A few highlighted the opportunity to make money by harvesting onions or blueberries.¹⁴⁹ However, the overwhelming majority simply said, as did “Santiago” in a letter describing his visit to the home of “Mis Blomson” in the early 1950s, “I like to go swimming.”¹⁵⁰ Another camper, identified only as Floyd, wrote in 1969 that “most of all I liked … swimming.”¹⁵¹ A decade later, nine-year-old Troy declared that he most looked forward to “swimming every day” on his upcoming trip.¹⁵² A Fresh Air camp director summarized the children’s sentiment by noting, “[S]wimming is the most important activity during a vacation.”¹⁵³

Few children expressed disdain for getting in the water. Those who did prove the rule. One camper explained his refusal to swim in 1948 as a dislike of cold water.¹⁵⁴ In 1951 a five-year-old camper informed his counselor that he did not want to go swimming because he would have to expose his body.¹⁵⁵ Yet expressions of such dislike rarely appear in the written record or individual participants’ recollections. The vast majority of the children demanded more time in the water rather than less.

Swimming attracted so many Fresh Air children largely because of the independence it afforded them. In their bid for freedom from adult control, the children joined a long tradition of swimming pool autonomy. Administrators of swimming pools in the latter half of the nineteenth century found they could not curtail the rowdy behavior of the working-class boys who flocked to municipal pools.¹⁵⁶ In the same way, Fresh Air guests joined groups of local children who left adult supervision to have, as one host mother noted, “a grand time … going to some swimming hole of theirs.”¹⁵⁷ At some camps, children convinced their counselors to let them hike to a swimming pond and go for midnight swims, activities that demonstrated the increasing autonomy and agency demonstrated by children while at camp.¹⁵⁸ With the advent of backyard pools by the 1970s, others took full advantage of the ease and proximity of the swimming facility. Kevin Miller, an eleven-year-old from West Harlem, reported that the family he stayed with in Pennsylvania let him swim in their pool whenever it took his fancy.¹⁵⁹ Although hosts had to sometimes supply bathing suits, the children literally dove into pools and away from adult control once properly attired.

The Fresh Air Fund took swimming independence to another level through its program for physically disabled children at Camp Hidden Valley. Nestled in the wooded expanse of the Fund’s Sharpe Reservation near Fishkill, some seventy miles north of New York City, the facility catered to children with a variety of conditions, including “congenital amputations, cerebral palsy, post-polio, muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, rheumatic fever and spina bifida.”¹⁶⁰ Regardless of their condition, all Hidden Valley campers spent time in the pool, as per camp requirements.¹⁶¹ The professionally designed pool allowed “both handicapped and able-bodied children” to play together.¹⁶² After being allowed to swim and play on their own in the water, many children returned home with a new sense of adventure that often surprised their parents.¹⁶³ The experience of solo swimming prompted the campers to seek other forms of independence as well.

Yet watery depths could prove perilous. In 1951, and again in 1962, 1963, and 1967, Fresh Air children drowned while visiting hosts.¹⁶⁴ Although they experienced drowning rates well below the national averages at that time of 5.1 per 100,000, or .005%—according to available data, Fresh Air drowning rates reached the .005% figure only four times in a two-decade spread—parents of the children who drowned dealt with the additional trauma arising from the circumstances of the tragedy: Their child died in the care of hosts that the family of origin had never met in a distant location that most of them had never visited.¹⁶⁵ One young host described a tale of swimming trauma. The young girl’s older brother abandoned her and a Fresh Air visitor in the middle of a deep swimming hole until her guest “started yelling with all her might … as if she would never stop.”¹⁶⁶ At least one other former Fresh Air participant in the 1960s “nearly drowned” while swimming in Lake Michigan.¹⁶⁷ Given the prevalence of water sport, other unreported water accidents seem likely. Amid complications born of economic, racial, and cultural dislocation, the very aquatic activity that enlivened so many Fresh Air visitors often proved deadly. Tragically, the danger continued past the 1970s. A 2006 study revealed that African Americans, like many of those endangered by swimming during Fresh Air visits, had been “disproportionately victims of accidental drowning” because of limited access to pools and proper training in water safety.¹⁶⁸

Fresh Air administrators responded to these deaths though an aggressive education campaign. Beginning in the 1950s, these water safety initiatives reflected a social shift toward viewing children as priceless rather than replaceable as the twentieth century progressed.¹⁶⁹ In 1964 a Red Cross safety director spoke to Fresh Air coordinators at their annual gathering in New York.¹⁷⁰ The same year that George Bonilla drowned while visiting Winchester, Massachusetts, in 1967, the Herald Tribune Fund had informed every host about the importance of providing children with proper swimming supervision.¹⁷¹ From the mid-1960s onward, individual hosts also enrolled their guests in swimming classes during their stays.¹⁷² By 1978, Fresh Air camps provided swimming instruction to all campers who needed it as staff and administrators recognized that “more than 90 percent of the youngsters cannot swim.”¹⁷³ Because of such concerted efforts, the danger of death by swimming while on a Fresh Air venture diminished.

Racial tensions also made swimming treacherous. Since the 1930s, the prospect of interracial swimming at municipal pools had fomented discord across the country.¹⁷⁴ While public protests against Fresh Air children integrating swimming sites rarely, if ever, took place, African American and Latino children nonetheless faced overt racism in the midst of water play. In the early 1960s, Fresh Air host Kathy Knoll Larson went to the Graafschap beach in Michigan along with her parents and brother only to be told that Harvey, their African American guest from New York, could play on the beach but would not be allowed in the water. The entire family and their guest left in protest.¹⁷⁵ Other children endured comments about their “wonderful tan[s]” and dealt with racist taunts and harassment from children in the pool or pond.¹⁷⁶ Given instances of racial harassment of African American children by white children well into the early 1990s, Fresh Air children in the middle decades of the twentieth century probably underreported instances of racial harassment while swimming.¹⁷⁷

Few local residents objected to Fresh Air swimmers because staff kept the dose small and segregated by sex. Although some communities hosted upwards of fifty guests at a time, more typically administrators dispersed the children in small batches. Given their short stay and limited numbers, the African American and Latino children who showed up to swim at municipal pools posed little threat. Problems emerged at public pools only when permanent residents vied for swimming space. In the early 1950s, around the time that activists forcibly integrated many northern swimming pools, Fresh Air camp personnel voluntarily followed suit but reduced the threat of interracial, cross-gender contact by scheduling separate swimming periods for girls and boys. Promotional materials through the 1970s featured photos of lakes and ponds integrated by race but seldom by gender.¹⁷⁸ Exceptions include a photo of a white, female water safety instructor teaching two young male African American campers how to swim and one of an integrated group of very young Fresh Air campers splashing in a wading pool.¹⁷⁹ In these latter instances, the slim chance of sexual contact across racial lines threatened few.

The proliferation of backyard pools also reduced racial tension. As the number of backyard pools increased from 575,000 to 800,000 between 1965 and 1970, Fresh Air children began to speak of swimming at their hosts’ homes.¹⁸⁰ Through the 1970s, the guest children continued to comment on the delights of backyard swimming.¹⁸¹ Fewer instances of racial harassment took place in these backyard swimming sites, where hosts could temper racial animus. Given that most guests came from African American and Latino homes, by the time that private pools became common, hosts had decided to allow dark-skinned children into their pools long before the children arrived on the doorsteps of their “domestic haven.”¹⁸² By inviting the children to swim at home, the hosts could demonstrate their racial largesse without compromising the privacy and status of their backyard oasis.¹⁸³

Even class tensions submerged when Fresh Air children took a dip. Given the high status bestowed upon suburban pool owners and the low status attributed to urban children who relied on charity to obtain swimwear, class tension should have increased whenever swimming came up in conversation.¹⁸⁴ Even as more middle-class families purchased and installed swimming pools, more poor families turned to public assistance. Between 1960 and 1970, the number of people receiving some form of welfare doubled.¹⁸⁵ In the midst of that economic disparity, a few tensions surfaced. One reporter overheard a Fresh Air guest exclaiming, “I’ve got a new pair of swim trunks,” only to hear his host brother reply, “And I’ve got a new swimming pool at home.” Although the reporter treated the exchange as evidence of the two boys “thinking along the same lines,” the guests noticed the difference in economic station.¹⁸⁶ Lawrence Phifer, a ten-year-old from Brooklyn, also noted class differences when he declared to his train seatmate, “I told you we were getting near when you start seeing the swimming pools.”¹⁸⁷ Yet most of the guest children set aside talk of economic inequity in favor of immersing themselves in the luxury of a “backyard pool.”¹⁸⁸

A willingness to diffuse class differences, countenance racial discomfort, brave physical danger, and visit unfamiliar places in order to swim to their heart’s content suggests that the children paid little attention to what promoters claimed about their aquatic fixation. From the 1950s through the 1970s, Fresh Air publications featured nostalgic descriptions of swimming in the summer as promoters attempted to keep revenue streams strong in the face of cuts to social programs. The publicity copy also highlighted the wonders of rowing boats, milking cows, hiking trails, and riding horses, but swimming received first mention (see figure 4).¹⁸⁹ In 1975 the Fresh Air Fund’s executive director Lisa Pulling went so far as to claim that learning to swim while on a Fresh Air trip prevented juvenile delinquency.¹⁹⁰ Through the 1970s, even more references to the delights of swimming in ponds and lakes appeared despite evidence that most children by that time swam in pools when on a Fresh Air vacation.¹⁹¹ Regardless of the adults’ nostalgia, the children celebrated rare freedom in the water.

FIGURE 4. Two boys demonstrate their rowing prowess in 1949 at a Fresh Air Camp sponsored by the New York Episcopal Diocese. Used by permission of the New York Episcopal Diocese, New York, NY (Episcopal Diocese of New York, Records of the Protestant Episcopal City Mission Society, Box: Summer Camp Photos 1940’s—1960’s, SC7423, SC 7400 Series, dated July 1949, Elko Lake Camps, Parksville, New York).

Fire hydrants highlight the independence children found in getting wet. When denied access to swimming pools, city residents often beat the heat by turning on fire hydrants. Fresh Air promoters regularly derided the practice as an inferior substitute for country swimming. In 1948, rather than “splattering under a hydrant on a dirty street,” Fresh Air participants could take “a long swim in a clear, country stream.”¹⁹² A local organizer in 1976 pitied city children who “would go through the summer without going swimming—except for an occasional fire-hydrant spray.”¹⁹³ But Fresh Air participants seldom felt deprived by fire hydrant frolics. According to one eyewitness in 1962, children darted “in and out of the gushing fountain” of a fire hydrant and sat “down, beaming joyfully beneath it” even while keeping an eye out for the police.¹⁹⁴ Just as was the case when swimming in a pool or pond, the children found freedom in the streaming water as they danced, shouted, screamed, and even roller-skated through the cascading torrent. In a conversation with a travel chaperone during a return trip home, one Fresh Air participant explained that he had missed “the fire hydrants with sprinkler caps” in his neighborhood.¹⁹⁵

That love of water independence even helped shift national priorities. In 1966 children frolicked in an open fire hydrant on Chicago’s West Side. When two police officers shut down the stream, local residents objected and defied the police order by reopening the hydrant before the police had left the block. Asserting that only black neighborhoods saw the citywide ban enforced, residents threw debris at the officers as they arrested Donald Henry, the man who had reopened the fire hydrant. Only after Illinois Governor Otto Kerner sent in 1,500 National Guardsmen did the subsequent three days of rioting and rebellion come to an end. In the aftermath, city officials in Chicago and other major urban centers followed the lead of President Lyndon Johnson in announcing plans to construct new swimming pools. Although most of that new construction resulted in small, shallow, and overcrowded pools, the children had changed their surroundings by standing before a fire hydrant.¹⁹⁶

Fresh Air children made sure they got to swim. Some, like Teddy Mayes, ventured to local community pools on their own. Others confronted overt racial discrimination when doing so. Still others learned to swim in order to tame the water’s dangers. Many ignored class tension in order to swim all they wanted. Regardless of what promoters wrote about them and their love of swimming, Mayes and his companions dove into water where they splashed, dunked, paddled, and moved their bodies as they desired. In such a watery environment, from the 1940s through the 1970s, Fresh Air children claimed pool and pond as their own. Adults may have segregated them by sex or set lifeguards to hover nearby, but children ruled the waters when they swam.

A Disrupted Redemption Story

Those who told the story of religiously motivated families saving children from the city to swim in country ponds based their redemption tale on a changing notion of innocence. Prior to World War II, the innocence used by Fresh Air promoters had suggested naïveté, femininity, and natural wonder. In the postwar period, movement leaders continued to call the children innocent but used the term to indicate sexual inexperience, religious piety, obedience, and general receptivity to host instruction. The rest of the redemption story followed suit. Hosts had to be faultless to exercise redemption. Children had to be wholesome to shed the city’s contagion. Ponds had to be pure to cleanse those who swam in deep waters. The Fresh Air redemption story fell apart if host families were imperfect, the city not so bad, and ponds irrelevant as sites of purification. Although few of the principal storytellers, people such as Frederick Lewis, discussed how much they depended upon innocence to fund their programs, it remained a staple of the movement across four decades and beyond.

The repeated telling of this redemption tale obscured underlying narrative disruptions. In the church’s case, the Fresh Air redemption story drew much of its legitimacy from Protestant-inflected idioms of innocence, but leaders from that same religious community often failed in their efforts to shape the children according to their core values. Religious leaders vetted children on one end and, to a lesser extent, hosts on the other in order to block contagion from either direction. The efforts proved futile. Even though hosts selected the children’s religion and prescribed Christocentric instruction, the children did not cooperate. Mennonite and Amish hosts, the most persuasive and upright of the hosting corps, still found that many guests resisted their ideas. Although religious practitioners offered innocence in idiom, they could not offer innocence in fact.

Concrete also disrupted the redemption tale. Despite decades spent describing the city as unremittingly hot, crowded, dangerous, ugly, and uncomfortable, administrators and publicists could not hide that children grew homesick for the city, loved the games they played on cement sidewalks, and cherished neighborhoods where everyone knew them. In response to the Black Nationalist critics who excoriated the programs from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, boosters and other Fresh Air supporters began to celebrate the city as they spoke of the sage counsel that the children brought the suburbs. Yet even as organizers turned away from such urban adoration and again lambasted the city, children continued to cheer when they returned home and sniffed the air with satisfaction. Those children who rejoiced in all things metropolitan undermined the redemption story by making the country appear less virtuous and the city look less evil.

Even pristine ponds could disrupt the redemption tale. Concepts of purity—and by extension innocence—depend upon clear separation. Something cannot be innocent or pure unless it is separated from something else that is corrupt or dirty. Dirt is itself nothing more than matter out of place.¹⁹⁷ Innocence means little if those who use it do not maintain conceptual order, structure, and boundaries. In the racially contested sites of swimming pools and ponds, children of color from the mid-1950s onward disrupted Fresh Air’s innocence rhetoric by crossing the boundaries intended to separate black from white and city from country. In their bid for independent play and physical relief from heat in the city, children swam through dangers both imagined and real as they faced death by drowning, racial harassment, and economic inequity.

And so the children disrupted a redemption story told about them. They did not accept their religious instruction, misbehaved in church, and challenged belief. They flipped the script on calling the city bad. And they did all they could to find freedom in the water regardless of what program executives said about them. Yet the promoters covered over their disruptions by telling the redemption story again and again. From their perspective, it was the only story that mattered—the only one that they found to be true.

In the end, the Fresh Air model could not achieve the redemption it claimed or the freedom it offered because the children always went back home. Two weeks of focused religious instruction, country environs, and swimming in ponds was never quite enough. Because they returned to the city, the children again risked urban corruption. And so the redemption story proved self-defeating. Fresh Air saved children from the city but only for a while. The organizers then returned them to the very urban monster they had imagined in their bid to save them in the first place. Church, country, and pond could not fully save.

But that was not the only story.

Amid the themes of grass, color, and sass, another story emerged. As chapter 3 will show, even where manicured lawns purported to welcome all regardless of race, the children found ways to challenge adult authority and tell another tale that only got whispered on the margins of the Fresh Air community. In the contested space where black and brown children interacted with white adults, an alternative vision of the meaning of Fresh Air emerged. In the midst of adult limitations on their behaviors, Fresh Air children entered a racial freedom struggle on their own.