Introduction

A RECKONING OF CHILDHOOD, RACE, AND NEOLIBERALISM

Since 1877, Fresh Air programs from Maine to Montana brought hundreds of thousands of urban children to rural homes and camps for summer vacations. Through the 1950s, few had criticized the annual ventures. That changed in the 1960s. In 1963 a resident of Bennington, Vermont, noted that African American Fresh Air children became an “economic and social threat” to their former hosts after they reached adolescence. Although younger children could share intimate home space, white residents “repulsed” black teens.¹ Three years later another critic called such social service programs “paternalistic arrogance.”² By 1967, black and Latino residents from the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan labeled programs like Fresh Air “irrelevant, discriminatory, and not really committed to integrating.”³

But it was not until the 1970s that the most intense criticism erupted. When the National Association of Black Social Workers declared in 1971 that placement of black children in white homes for fosterage and adoption was cultural “genocide,” Fresh Air critics intensified their rhetoric.⁴ In addition to ironically calling for city-based “stale-air” vacation programs directed at white suburban children, critics asserted that taking black and brown children out of the city was, in fact, “psychologically damaging.”⁵ Busing children to the country or suburbs, asserted the critics, harmed the children by instilling false expectations about their ability to relocate to such nonurban settings. That same year a blistering critique of the Cleveland “Friendly Town” Fresh Air program appeared in the pages of the historic black newspaper Call and Post excoriating the Inner City Protestant Parish for transporting children to “areas which lock them out” the rest of the year. Under the heading “Brushing up on Paternalism,” reporter Ellen Delmonte mocked not only the short duration of the suburban vacations but also the “magnanimous” gift of a new toothbrush given to each child as she or he climbed aboard buses bound for southern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and rural New York. As Delmonte queried, “[W]as this their way of showing how they love all the little ‘cullud’ kids?”⁶

Such acerbic criticism marks one end of the Fresh Air movement’s narrative arc. Two Weeks Every Summer: Fresh Air Children and the Problem of Race in America tells the story of the Fresh Air movement’s efforts to bring city children to the country for summer vacations in homes and camps from the onset of World War II through the end of the 1970s. In addition to the words and actions of both adult hosts and critics, the exploits and insights of the Fresh Air children guide this narrative.⁷ Together they tell the story of a movement that was active in twenty states, that was based out of more than thirty-five cities, and that connected with more than one and a half million children from its inception through 1979.⁸

That Fresh Air story hinges on four themes. First is the centrality of nature discourse to the Fresh Air enterprise. Promoters returned time and again to the notion that city children had never encountered lawns or green space. In the process, they promoted the countryside by disparaging the city. A second theme focuses on the multiple ways in which guest children protected their interests even while the adult hosts and administrators dismissed their actions as simple recalcitrance. The children surprised their hosts by their politeness as much as their truculence but had to face racial bias about their standards of behavior at every turn. The third central theme, the pursuit and promotion of innocence through age caps, follows from the second. Hosts preferred younger children because the older the guests became, the more problems the hosts perceived. A final theme emerges from the adult promoters’ persistent concern about sex. Program administrators fixated on the children’s knowledge of intimate matters as they tried to keep interracial romance from blossoming. Each chapter expands on these themes and introduces related topics such as health care, religion, swimming, finance, and power.

At some point in the forty years analyzed here, nearly every major urban center in the Northeast and Midwest hosted an initiative to offer short summer stays for children from the city. Although rarely found in the Deep South, each of those programs based in Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and elsewhere sent children out and collected them back (see figure 2).

The thousands of Fresh Air households who responded to invitations to join in Fresh Air work were usually white, rural or suburban. The hosts were usually home owners with their own children tended by a stay-at-home parent—most often the mother. Although poor white ethnic children had been the programs’ original beneficiaries, the hundreds of thousands of children who received invitations for summer vacations in host homes or Fresh Air–run camps usually were—after the 1950s—black or brown, came from poor families, had been vetted by both social service and medical providers, and (in the vast majority of the cases) lived inside a city’s limits. The cadre of organizers, administrators, boosters, and volunteers who wrote promotional pieces, managed logistics, vetted the children, and raised funds were also white, came from both the city and the country, had become increasingly professional in the course of the twentieth century, and believed fervently that their efforts had long-lasting effects on the children’s lives. They took a far more positive view of the programs, contributing to an initiative designed “to bring inspiration, education and fun to children of all races and creeds trapped in … [the city’s] stone caverns.”⁹

FIGURE 2. This map locates more than 1,100 hosting sites from 1939 to 1979, culled from archival sources, newspaper accounts, and publicity materials. The Fresh Air Fund alone claimed more than 2,500 hosting sites but would not provide a list of those locations. Map designed by Bill Nelson based on data compiled by Molly Williams.

Four types of programs structured the movement. Those run by newspapers like New York City’s Herald Tribune emerged during the Progressive Era and outlasted other sponsors. Originally concerned both with generating goodwill for the paper and combating malnutrition, newspapers dropped their official sponsorships by the 1960s as budgets tightened and nonprofits professionalized. The independent nonprofits that remained made nature, race, and poverty their chief concern amid the effects of the second Great Migration and the subsequent white flight. Denominational-run programs like those offered by the Christian Reformed Church proliferated during the middle of the twentieth century, driven by a concern for child evangelism. Throughout the four decades on which this book concentrates, religiously affiliated programs became increasingly focused on racial matters as church groups dealt with the aftermath of desegregation and the advent of civil rights activism. Social service agencies and settlement houses like New York’s Union Settlement Association included Fresh Air vacations among the broad range of programs they offered from the beginning of the twentieth century onward. Although also providing city-based summer programming, such agencies focused more on day trips and longer camp excursions but did help send children to private homes as well, usually in an effort to expose children to nature and white norms. Civic-religious associations like the joint venture run by the Ecumenical Metropolitan Ministry and the Seattle Public Schools or the cooperative initiatives organized by local congregations and Rotary or Kiwanis clubs appeared after World War I. These groups placed racial and class concerns at the forefront of their efforts as civic leaders searched for ways to respond to growing racial foment and urban unrest.

The interlocking but organizationally distinct groups that made up the movement used the same terminology and program design to market their initiatives. As the oldest, largest, and highest-profile rural hosting program, the Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund provided the model, and others copied it. Independent groups like Chicago’s City Missionary Society and the Episcopal Diocese of New York adopted the Tribune’s “Fresh Air” label to describe their overall efforts and borrowed the “Friendly Town” title to publicize the home-based portion of their initiatives. All involved treated the home stays and camp stays as part of a single effort to save children from the city.¹⁰ To indicate this programmatic unity, “Fresh Air movement,” “Fresh Air program,” or simply “Fresh Air” will refer to the full breadth of rural hosting ventures for children from the city, including both those that sent children to homes and those that sent them to camps. At the same time, the term “Fresh Air Fund” or simply the “Fund” will be reserved for the Herald Tribune’s program. Independent sponsors will be noted where indicated.

The children’s experience during the summer vacations varied widely. Some children returned to the same host family for more than one summer, in a small number of cases as many as six or seven times. About half the children returned to the same home at least twice, but only about 10 percent returned to the same home more than two times. In other communities, hosts rarely offered re-invitations. A smaller percentage got to stay for extended visits of a month or longer, and some programs only offered a week or weekend vacation, but the vast majority returned home after two weeks. Between 1939 and 1979, an overwhelming majority of the children stayed in homes rather than camps. Upon occasion a select group—at most 10 percent of the total participants—spent Christmas vacation with their rural hosts. And although sponsors rarely found it difficult to recruit children interested in participating in the programs, a familial and social rumor network relayed cautionary tales about what to do and what to avoid doing when traveling to the country.

Despite strong interest from the children, many critics joined the vitriolic columnist from Cleveland in raising questions about Fresh Air. Even the director of the Herald Tribune program acknowledged the “perennial and persistent” criticism that their programs did “more harm than good,” an assessment in keeping with similar criticisms of white-led social service programs by African American and Latino urban leaders during the 1960s and 1970s. The children, said the critics, would “become disillusioned” and “embittered by sampling a much better life.”¹¹ As another queried, “What is the good of exposing these youngsters to the comfort and pleasure of country life and then sending them back to the same dismal slums?”¹²

The emergence of such criticism coincided with the shift to hosting children of color. This book begins with the onset of World War II, in 1939, when the hosting of a child of color in a white home was still a rarity and ends in 1979, the year that staff and local organizers at the Fresh Air Fund admitted that racial prejudice and a “rising tide of suburban apathy” had dramatically curtailed their volunteer host base.¹³ Within the space of forty years, the Fresh Air movement transitioned from a program that brought an almost exclusively white group of children to stay with white families to a program that brought an almost exclusively black and brown group to stay with white families. As urban racial demographics shifted, so did the various programs’ goals. Rather than restore the children’s health and counter malnutrition, Fresh Air ventures became much more focused on bridging the racial divide and introducing children to middle-class suburban values. That transition to serving children of color offered Fresh Air programmers their most daunting challenge. The story of how they responded spans the middle four decades of the twentieth century while also tracing the shifts and patterns in the discourse about childhood innocence and its often ironic intertwining with racism in the United States. In sum, Two Weeks Every Summer examines the racially transformative years between 1939 and 1979 in order to explore how one-on-one models of social change influenced patterns of racial subordination.

The tensions evident in a program both lauded and excoriated for its race relations record reveal the social forces at play from the beginning of the 1940s through the end of the 1970s. In particular, the qualities of childhood innocence reiterated by promoters and lambasted by critics served political purposes—in this case, to promote a particular response to mid-century racial conflict.¹⁴ Fresh Air promoters did not just offer their ventures alongside other, more confrontational efforts to address racial inequity; they also argued that their measures were superior. Comparing their hosting ventures to those of the 1961 civil rights Freedom Riders, one promoter insisted that Fresh Air initiatives created “better relationships and better understandings.”¹⁵

And the boosters had a point. By comparison to other interracial initiatives, the rural summer visits offered greater intimacy, more interaction, and less risk for white participants. During civil rights marches, black and white activists rubbed shoulders for several hours but usually returned home to separate living rooms. The activists who crossed racial lines in the early years of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s integration efforts and voter registration drives lived together for a time, but these interracial practices generally came to an end by 1966. Schoolchildren who attended interracial classes did connect across racial lines, but those relationships frequently snagged on the controversies surrounding school desegregation during the 1950s and 1960s and busing during the 1970s. Other interracial venues like military barracks and sports locker rooms did build interracial bridges but affected proportionately fewer individuals.¹⁶ By contrast, Fresh Air programs integrated living rooms, lasted for decades, and bused black and brown children to white communities with no legal interference.

Boosters, administrators, and volunteers in the thousands countered their critics by telling a nonthreatening story. They focused on crafting a narrative about black and brown children restored to full health and well-being through short stays in the country.¹⁷ The rhetoric worked. Although hosting efforts waned by the end of the 1970s, during the peak years between 1968 and 1975 white hosts welcomed upwards of 16,000 children per summer—the vast majority of them African American and Latino—in the Fresh Air Fund’s program alone. Many of those children, once on site at their hosting locale, disrupted the story told about them by wrinkling their noses at the smell of manure, complaining about bugs, and growing homesick for their urban homes. Yet the children’s efforts to challenge the racism they encountered and participate in the programs on their own terms could not entirely refute the rhetoric of innocence that brought them out of the city. During the period of peak civil rights activity in the 1950s and 1960s, leaders of the Fresh Air movement stuck tenaciously to a common narrative, a story focused on individual change, told by well-intentioned white people, featured in the media, and divorced from demonstration. Most Fresh Air hosts and organizers genuinely desired an end to racial strife. They believed that hosting children of different racial groups for two weeks in the country could solve the country’s racial problems one child at a time. In so doing, the hosts’ feelings dictated the national narrative about Fresh Air vacationing.

When approached from the perspective of the children, however, a different story emerges. This narrative, one that few adults recognized at the time, shows how the young Fresh Air visitors engaged in their own civil rights struggle. In far more intimate settings than those entered by Martin Luther King Jr. and his associates, the children integrated racially segregated neighborhoods, challenged racist stereotypes, and demanded respect. Even though most ventured into white communities for short, two-week stints at a time, they nonetheless confronted crank phone calls, stood up to racial epithets, and dealt with verbal harassment in living rooms and camp cabins where no reporters witnessed their efforts. Sometimes the children fought back with words. Other times, with their fists. Whether withholding information about their home life, objecting to rules that excluded teenagers, or refusing to spend their vacations working without pay, the children did not always conform to their hosts’ visions of cooperative, well-mannered, compliant innocents. The hosts viewed them, in short, as sassy. But the children’s actions speak more of nascent activism than disrespectful behavior.

By paying attention to these three interlocking narratives—of the boosters, critics, and children—this book expands and refines much of what has been written about U.S. racism by revealing the complex negotiations involved in the hosting of children across racial lines. Some authors have attempted to explain why racial inequity persisted through the 1970s by examining voting rights, presidential elections, and congressional acts.¹⁸ Others have focused on interracial marriage, housing patterns, and cultural stereotypes.¹⁹ Without question, historians need to analyze public policy and social and cultural patterns to understand racism’s longevity. For example, activists and elected representatives shaped the outcomes of the civil rights struggle. Yet the Fresh Air movement’s well-meaning hosts, trenchant critics, and redoubtable children also helped determine what would and would not change in the country’s racial constellation. Hosts focused energy on integrating their homes and neighborhoods through carefully structured, time-limited visits. Critics called foul at one-way, white-led, parent-demeaning programming. Guest children challenged the attitudes and actions of the white adults they encountered and the host children they befriended.

In addition to revealing the complexities of mid-twentieth-century racial negotiation, the Fresh Air story also shows the close association that Americans have posited between nature and childhood innocence, a notion employed by adults throughout this period first and foremost as a quality of untroubled naïveté about sex. Although innocence could also refer to freedom from the demands of work, politics, and culture, intimate matters remained most salient. Throughout the nineteenth century, artists, writers, and philosophers linked the idea of childhood innocence with nature and the country.²⁰ Historians such as Sarah Burns have suggested that this nature-centric impulse intensified as adults pined for forgotten youth in the face of industrialization.²¹ Yet Fresh Air promoters attempted, and in many ways succeeded, in extending the linkage of nature and childhood innocence far into the twentieth century. In donor campaigns such as the Fresh Air Fund’s 1962 “give summer to a child” advertising blitz, publicists and administrators effectively froze in time and space the idea of childhood wonder before all things natural.²² Rapturous prose about the children’s immersion in nature appeared as frequently in the 1970s as it did in the 1940s. Although various scholars have warned against making claims about innocence devoid of the particularities of time and place, participants in the Fresh Air movement stabilized the linkage between nature and childhood through sheer force of repetition.²³

Innocence in Fresh Air programs also involved sex. To be certain, promoters evoked innocence as they extolled the country and sought to keep the children under control. Likewise, critics touched on innocence as they denounced programs that cut black and brown adults out of the equation. But it was sex and the hosts’ attendant fears of interracial romance that generated sustained attention. The Fresh Air story reveals just how central concerns about interracial sexual attraction—even concerning prepubescent children—remained during the middle three decades of the twentieth century.²⁴ In keeping with the tradition of Romantics like William Wordsworth who emphasized the holiness and redemptive capacity of children, most Fresh Air promoters countered all hints of sexuality by describing the children as wholesome waifs whenever possible.²⁵ Critics shied away from addressing the issue at all. And the children, especially preteens and adolescents, fell in love, tested sexual boundaries, and in too many instances dealt with adult sexual predators in homes they had been told would be safe havens. Although program promoters invested significant energy in shielding white households from the perceived threat of black teenagers, in truth white men proved far more threatening to the guest children.

Grounded by the 1960s in a rhetoric of sexless, nature-bound, hope-filled, health-infused, race-based innocence, Fresh Air provided a model by which white suburbanites and rural residents judged other racial exchanges. During what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the most segregated hour” of 11:00 on Sunday mornings, hosts proudly pointed out the “shiny black faces” scattered through their sanctuaries during a 1960 Fresh Air venture.²⁶ In 1963 a church leader from Newton, Kansas, claimed that sending mission groups to the South did not confront white prejudice as effectively as did hosting black Fresh Air children.²⁷ When racial rebellions erupted in urban centers in 1968, reporters noted the concern expressed by the white suburban hosts for the safety of their young guests who had returned to the city.²⁸ As one host asserted in 1962, because “a mixture of all races” lived “together peaceably” during Fresh Air trips, adults should be able to do the same.²⁹ Although evidence of the long-term effects of hosting Fresh Air children remains as scant as evidence of the effects of being hosted, the claims that Fresh Air programs improved the racial order for all involved received widespread attention, influencing opinion across the country. The extent of the national coverage suggests that positive sentiment about white-led Fresh Air ventures prompted at least some white suburbanites to more readily criticize black-led activism. Contemporary scholars have simply ignored the race relations benchmarks established by Fresh Air programs.³⁰

Six thematically focused chapters tell the story of the Fresh Air movement. Chapter 1, “Knowledge, Girl, Nature: Fresh Air Tensions prior to World War II,” examines foundational stressors in the early Fresh Air programs. During the late nineteenth century, adults participated in the movement in part because the programs allowed them to exercise a modicum of control over their lives in the face of ever more impersonal bureaucratic forces. The concrete and accessible design of the program prompted white, middle-class hosts to bring urban children—the vast majority of them poor, white ethnics from immigrant families—into their homes. Those children came to embody three central tensions within the movement during this period: knowledge against ignorance, girl against boy, and nature against city. Adults in the programs claimed more knowledge than their charges, preferred female guests, and trumpeted the superiority of the country over urban environs. In response the children resisted discipline, expressed preferences for placement, and renewed their hosts’ appreciation of nature. As they negotiated these innocence-inflected pressures, children and promoters drew national attention to their efforts and garnered far-reaching support for continuing the summer vacation programs.

The next four chapters focus on the movement’s defining themes during the central period under study, the four-decade spread between 1939 and 1979. Fresh Air hosting was never just about programs that directed well-meaning adults down a particular path of service; children also played an important role in defining program outcomes. The first of these chapters emphasizes the children’s responses to their white hosts.³¹ In chapter 2—“Church, Concrete, Pond: How Innocence Got Disrupted,” the children emerge as independent actors.³² Rather than conform to the arc of a redemption tale in which the country saves the city by the intervention of well-meaning adults, the children themselves expressed their love of urban pastimes, streetscapes, and swimming. As they sat in pews and relaxed in camp cabins, the children told stories about themselves and the world around them that disrupted the Fresh Air narrative. In swimming, girls and boys especially found freedom from adult control even as they confronted racial barriers blocking their access to aquatic adventure.

“Grass, Color, Sass: How the Children Shaped Fresh Air,” the third chapter, explores three of the central arenas in which children found ways to shape the programs. Program promoters certainly managed to present the hosts and guests as unblemished pairs. Yet, within the discourse about the beauty of the natural world, the value of good race relations, and positive behavioral conduct, children subverted these messages by spurning nature’s wonders, taking on the role of teacher to their hosts, and refusing to cooperate with their hosts’ directives. In the midst of the storm of criticism arising from the black and brown freedom struggles, some of the children pushed back against white control despite disciplinary measures instituted to heighten the adults’ authority. Rather than being passive recipients of white largesse, the children practiced their own racial code of conduct that at times frustrated and astounded hosting families and camp staff. In the course of their visits to the country, the children acted out race relations struggles, mirroring the social issues on the nightly news.

Chapter 4, “Sex, Seven, Sick: How Adults Kept the Children in Check,” analyzes how the children’s bold responses met the primary control mechanisms employed by Fresh Air administrators. In response to children who schooled their hosts, distrusted rural environments, and reworked the stories of redemption being told about them, adults involved in Fresh Air put in place strict gender segregation and age caps. Those in charge of the programs also instituted rigorous medical vetting procedures designed to protect hosts from contagious illness and sexually transmitted diseases by screening out unhealthy children; the hosts and their children received no such scrutiny. By the end of the period, promoters included black and brown children in their rhetoric about innocence but only for those children deemed medically fit and preadolescent. Once the specter of interracial sex appeared, administrators removed children from any setting where they might become romantically involved with a member of the opposite sex. In the end, the adults instituted control mechanisms at odds with their goal of “interracial harmony.”³³

The fifth chapter, “Milk, Money, Power: How Fresh Air Sold Its Programs,” demonstrates the ways in which adult boosters packaged and sold the cultural, social, and democratic relevancy of the Fresh Air ventures to national audiences. Those efforts resulted in a thoroughly American institution, one associated with pristine symbols of the country, backed by the financial engines of capitalism, and associated with power brokers in politics, entertainment, business, and the military. A potent blend of volunteerism, charity, agrarian husbandry, and high-profile endorsements laid a foundation for long-term success despite criticism of contradictions implicit in the boosters’ egalitarian narrative and restrictive policies. In the process, a set of social service organizations kept the public’s attention on interpersonal, short-term, charity-based programs rather than on institutional equality and systemic change.

The final chapter, “Greeting, Gone, Good: Racialized Reunion and Rejection in Fresh Air,” tells the contrasting stories of two Fresh Air children in order to highlight the breadth of the children’s experience. Luis Diaz cherished the memories of carefree summers spent with families. However, Janice Batts found the trips traumatic, harmful, and filled with troubling memories of events she continued to unpack long into her adulthood. The prevailing legacies of the mid-twentieth-century Fresh Air movement lie somewhere in the midst of these twin tales. Diaz embodies the program’s “greeting” or racialized reunion, the idea that racial freedom could be realized if everyone got along as well as did Fresh Air participants. Batts embodies the departures—i.e., “gone”—or racialized rejection, the idea that interracial relationships were not worth supporting once children became equals. Fresh Air movement leaders carried both legacies into the twenty-first century. Images of racialized reunion peppered publicity; age caps fostered racialized rejection. Despite the good will, interpersonal connections, and childhood initiative fostered by the programs, the Fresh Air movement remained bound by these two themes. Participating organizations relied on both reunion and rejection to foster the exchange—i.e., the “good”—between white adults and black and brown children, a historical insight which suggests that the black and brown freedom struggles depended as much on ideas of racial separation as on the notion of a racially integrated “beloved community.”³⁴

Two Weeks Every Summer concludes with an epilogue that connects the end of the 1970s with the present.

Back in the Municipal Stadium parking lot in 1971, where Fresh Air children prepared to leave Cleveland with a free toothbrush in hand, all the players made their bids. The organizers directed children on to the correct buses, hoping that all would arrive safely at their assigned suburban homes. The critics wrote an editorial intended to expose the program’s paternalistic underbelly. The children sought the benefit of a vacation, even knowing they were headed toward always unfamiliar, many times unwelcoming, and sometimes hostile white communities. And the parents of the children—often reluctant, frequently suspicious, and invariably pushed to the margins of the Fresh Air story—were also present, many times instructing their children on what to say and what not to say to the strange white people that they would soon meet.

The photographer who snapped a picture of the blonde and blue-eyed emissary laden with new toothbrushes for each child captured a tableau of twentieth-century neoliberalism. A thorough history of the racially focused strands of that liberalism requires the perspectives of those the photographer featured: white liberals like the Pro Brush representative, her employers, and the Fresh Air organizers. But the perspectives of those outside the frame—the children, their parents, the critics—help craft a much more complex history. The story told here examines deeply intimate spaces where connections at the level of family, home, and sex were both fostered and severed. It allows us to identify the widespread anxieties that limited true social reorganization. It prepares the ground for a more honest reckoning of the promises and failures of civil rights era programs. This history, in the end, assesses the themes of nature, control, inequality, and innocence in order to present a clearer picture of the problem of race in America.