5

MILK, MONEY, POWER

How Fresh Air Sold Its Programs

Bryant Fearon and Danford Mojica carried milk pails from cows to containers with pleasure. Even though they struggled to keep the milk from slopping, the two young Harlemites took to their task with gusto. They worked all the harder given that a photographer from the Associated Press had come to visit the farm of J. B. Vaughn in Hinesburg, Vermont, where the two boys vacationed in 1950 (see figure 9). In the photo that preserves a moment of their dairy chore, the boys appear satisfied, proud even, of their ability to work in a barn with cows.¹ Photos like this one documented for interested donors that Fresh Air staff did what they claimed. They brought children into close contact with the smells, sounds, and symbols of the country. Amid the bellowing of cattle, the rich odors of bovine lactation, and the photographer’s flashbulbs, Fearon and Mojica learned firsthand about milk’s origins. The two African American boys did their part to make Fresh Air programs into some of the wealthiest and most well-known charities in the nation.

The photo of Fearon and Mojica tending to dairy chores resulted from careful Fresh Air marketing. Administrators, hosts, celebrities, and politicians made Fresh Air ventures relevant by crafting highly successful promotional campaigns. The adults who ran the programs linked the summer sojourns with pristine symbols of the country like cows and the milk they produced, pursued donors with some of the most sophisticated publicity measures available, and fostered relationships with some of the country’s most powerful individuals. By using milk, money, and power, they created a thoroughly American institution. Combining volunteerism, charity, agrarian husbandry, and patriotism, Fresh Air made a long-term home in the United States.

FIGURE 9. “Invited to spend a couple of weeks vacationing in the hills of Vermont, these Negro youths from Harlem gladly lend a helping, if inexperienced, hand at milking time on the farm operated by J. B. Vaughn (left) and his son Roger (center) at Hinesburg, VT. Boys are Bryant Fearon (right) and Danford Mojica, who were part of a group of 79 children from Harlem invited to visit in Vermont homes” (from label on back of 1950 original photo). New York Public Library, Schomburg Collection, Children, 23–012.

Milk

A Hinesburg, Vermont, dairy barn opens a door into the cultural, financial, and civic themes of the Fresh Air movement. The photographer who captured Fearon and Mojica carrying milk pails in 1950 depicted a quintessential rural scene. In a state known for its dairy industry and a town known for its cheddar cheese, cows dominated the landscape, work flow, and economy. In 1946 the state listed 370,800 human residents and 296,000 bovine inhabitants.² Amid this dairy-intensive culture, the two young Harlemites, like the seventy-seven others who had traveled with them and the thousands who visited New England each summer, knew farm life by getting close to cows.³

More so than silos, tractors, pitchforks, or horses, the cow evoked the country. Because of efforts of the dairy industry to create a “dairy-consuming culture” and of reformers to ensure proper nutrition, North Americans perceived milk as a dietary necessity by the 1930s.⁴ Many milk advertisers initially avoided using cows in promotional campaigns, opting instead for babies and, curiously, birds. Borden bucked the trend by introducing Elsie the cow in the 1930s.⁵ Because of advertising campaigns like Borden’s and the proliferation of pastoral images depicting cows grazing in a field or chewing their cud while a suspender-wearing farmer squirted milk into a tin pail, cows came to represent both the place and practice of rural life. As represented in a host of commercial and decorative products, by the middle of the twentieth century animal husbandry defined the country as much as did open fields.⁶ Cows had come to stand in for what one saw and what one did when outside the city.

By the end of World War II, Fresh Air programs had been devastated. Having sent out more than 14,000 children each year between 1923 and 1934, by 1947 the number had dropped to 3,118. Communities that had hosted children for as long as six decades were no longer participating.⁷ Both hosting and hosted families had seen sixteen million of their sons, brothers, and fathers march to war. Women who had been available to host had joined the paid workforce.⁸ Children had answered the call to support the war effort by collecting scraps of metal, bits of rubber, old newspapers, and tin cans.⁹ Cows helped restore Fresh Air in the midst of this disruption. As males returned from the battlefield, women left the workshop, and children traded recycling tasks for playground games, Fresh Air programs ramped up their efforts by riding on the backs of cows.

Fresh Air promoters used bovine references in the 1940s to emphasize the abundant food made available to children who traveled to the country. Cut off from the largely urban-focused milk delivery industry, the residential homes that hosted children from the city frequently featured a small herd of cows to ensure that young visitors received “plenty of milk and cream.”¹⁰ Likewise, Fresh Air camps during the same period boasted of the volume of milk used to feed the children and mandated up to one quart of milk per camper per day for use in cooking and drinking, nearly four times the average consumption in the United States during the 1940s.¹¹ One reporter noted that kitchen staff at a camp run by the Fresh Air Fund “used 75,000 quarts of milk” in 1947 to “keep the small fry full.” Another camp run by the Salvation Army offered three pints of milk each day for every child that it hosted.¹² The children who went to the country could expect to both see cows and be fed by them.

The children often had to travel far to visit such milk-infused locales. Early on, staff at the Fresh Air Fund began to recognize that costs increased as children traveled greater distances. Although the cows looked the same in Pittstown, New Jersey, as they did in Hinesburg, Vermont, it cost nearly ten times as much to travel to the latter as it did the former. Fund staff responded by instituting zones encircling New York City at 150-, 250-, and 350-mile increments. A higher proportion of Fresh Air children traveled to the nearer zones than those farther away.¹³ As Fearon and Mojica traveled to Hinesburg, they joined a privileged group carefully selected to represent the Fund at such choice, remote locales.

Those who enthused about the milk supplied for the children did not appear to notice the irony that this cherished symbol of health made some children worse rather than better. Although generally unacknowledged at the beginning of this period, lactose intolerance affected as significant a portion of the children brought to the country as it did the entire population.¹⁴ Over time, as more children of African descent participated in the program, a greater percentage of Fresh Air children were lactose intolerant.¹⁵ Thus, a significant percentage of the children brought to the country could not tolerate the dairy products so amply provided. The very product said to improve the children’s health left some of them with a stomachache.

The same Fresh Air promoters who referred to cows as signs of rural abundance also used the animals to emphasize the children’s ignorance. As had been the case prior to World War II, boosters continued to stress how little the children knew. At base, published accounts highlighted the children’s lack of knowledge about cows’ appearance. From the 1940s through the 1970s, hosts and reporters exclaimed that the children had “never seen a cow.”¹⁶ The reports also poked fun at the uninformed guests. In 1963 two Puerto Rican children asked to ride the “horses”—in actuality, Angus cattle—they saw grazing.¹⁷ Fifteen years later another guest, only five years old, exclaimed, “[L]ook at the doggies” upon encountering a herd of cows.¹⁸ Promoters also made light of the children’s lack of knowledge about milk production. One reporter quoted a “darling boy” in 1948 who wished to find his way to a farm so that “he could milk a horse.”¹⁹ Another related the story of a young guest who, in 1972, came upon a case of milk bottles and rushed to tell her host that she had found “the cow’s nest!”²⁰ A year earlier, another booster quoted five-year-old Herbert King’s retort to his friend’s assertion that milk came from cows: “‘Don’t give me that,’ said Herbie in great contempt. ‘Milk comes from the store.’”²¹ In every case, the accounts emphasized that the children knew less about cows, and by extension life in the country, than did their hosts.

Declarations of simple ignorance shifted by the 1970s to more frequent claims of sheer wonder. Although promoters continued to note that children like a Fresh Air guest named Orlando Correa “had never seen a cow milked or known where milk came from except from a bottle,” the program boosters also began to emphasize the children’s awe in the face of their natural surroundings.²² Already in the 1950s, one reporter related a young boy’s simple query—“What color is a cow?”—to emphasize his and others’ “wide-eyed wonder” rather than their ignorance.²³ By the early 1960s, boosters had begun to entice new hosts with the promise of “pure enjoyment” gained from watching a “little fellow” encounter a cow for the first time.²⁴ A decade later, reporters and program promoters emphasized the children’s fascination with milk production and other “minor miracles” of the countryside.²⁵ One host claimed that the children loved learning about “how milk comes out of a cow” so much that they “would rather watch the farming than eat.”²⁶ As with other charities active in the 1970s, program promoters became more sophisticated in their publicity and drew on modern psychological theories to design their promotional campaigns.²⁷ Having learned of the relative ineffectiveness of ridicule as a marketing strategy and having become sensitized to the racial stereotypes underlying depictions of black children as naïve and uneducated, boosters invested more heavily in nostalgic representations of nature. They began to tell a story of children who were not just ignorant about cows and the country but truly “awed by the dairy cattle” they encountered.²⁸

The addition of wonder and awe to ignorance in the Fresh Air presentation of children in the country allowed promoters to emphasize the educational value of the vacation trips. Hosts and camp counselors first made sure that the children knew how to identify a cow and other farm animals. By the 1960s and 1970s, when farm stays had become a rare treat because of the increasing disappearance of small-scale, family-run agriculture, camps and local hosting committees planned visits to dairy barns so that the children could encounter cows firsthand.²⁹ Staff from the Fresh Air Fund collaborated with Cornell University and a nonprofit organization known as New York Farmers to construct a fully functional, twenty-acre farm on the grounds of their Sharpe Reservation camping center in 1966.³⁰ In addition to seeing where eggs came from, tasting fresh cucumbers off the vine, and learning that popcorn “grew on trees”—i.e., corn stalks—the campers got close enough to touch and brush livestock.³¹ As one Fresh Air promoter noted, “It is one thing to read about cows … but it is another to actually see them.”³² Various Fresh Air directors made sure their supporters knew that children would no longer confuse cows with doggies thanks to their educational initiatives.

Some children even took their turn at milking. As indicated in the anecdote that opens this chapter, children like Fearon and Mojica readily participated in dairy culture. Their eagerness increased when they actually got a chance to squat down and squeeze milk into a tin pail. A 1957 annual report from the Fresh Air Fund featured a photo of a small boy smiling as he leaned into a large cow and pulled on her udder.³³ By the 1970s, reporters regularly referred to children who had “overcome their fears enough to try milking a cow.”³⁴ Emphasizing the children’s response to the tactile experience also proved popular. As one child noted in 1978, the cow’s teat felt “sort of rubbery at first.”³⁵ Although boosters clearly used the children’s enthusiasm to their own promotional ends, the young visitors who got to try their hand at milking seldom forgot the experience.

Fresh Air cow stories also highlighted the children’s curiosity. Some hosts spun yarns about former guests that again emphasized their ignorance. Although Fearon and Mojica appear fairly relaxed as they stood next to a row of cows, other Fresh Air children received a big surprise when they first encountered the large animals. A rural host from Michigan related the story, told by his father, of a Fresh Air guest who “wandered into the barn” only to hear a cow moo. The unexpected sound so startled the young boy that he “came flying out of the barn” with “eyes as big as saucers.”³⁶ In 1962 another guest, visiting a farm in Port Royal, Virginia, ventured into the barn against the advice of his host mother. While unknowingly watched by his host father, the young boy lost his composure as a cow “rolled her eyes and let out a terrific ‘Moo.’” Although startled, the boy stayed to introduce himself. “Hello. I’m Marty,” he declared.³⁷ Other children held their curiosity in check enough to avoid solo barn ventures but still impressed their hosts with their cow fixation. A twelve-year-old named Jack even became “fascinated by certain aspects of the private lives of cows,” none of which the reporter specified.³⁸

The cows the children encountered also represented work. In many children’s telling, both at the time and in later recollections, getting to milk cows seldom seemed burdensome. For example, Fearon and Mojica appear to be enjoying themselves as they hauled cans in the milking parlor. Having not grown up with the routine demands of farm labor, Fresh Air children often found milking and other tasks like gathering eggs, herding cows, or sweeping the barn quite novel.³⁹ In some areas of the country, children earned money during their stay by performing odd jobs or working alongside the children of their host family picking berries, harvesting onions, or gathering other cash crops (see figure 10).⁴⁰ By the latter part of the 1970s, when most farm families found children to be an economic drain rather than a supplement to farm labor, the Fresh Air Fund sent older Fresh Air alums to work on country farms, some of them Amish, as hired hands in exchange for room, board, and a stipend of fifty dollars each week.⁴¹ A few older Fresh Air children worked on the cattle farm of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s son, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., for the same weekly stipend, and at least one guest assured a reporter that he did “not resent Mr. Roosevelt’s wealth.”⁴² Many children from the city embraced the demands of farm work as a unique opportunity.

FIGURE 10. A boy identified only as “Ervin Krehbiel’s son” of the Newton, Kansas, area (left) and Johnny Jefferson of Gulfport, Mississippi, with a young calf on the Krehbiels’ farm (1960). Used by permission of the Mennonite Library and Archives, Bethel College, North Newton, KS (Mennonite Library & Archives, Bethel, Kansas: Photo collection; folder: “Mississippi—Gulfport”).

Yet not all found work obligations so appealing. Alanzo, a child who visited Hesston, Kansas, in 1961, refused to meet his hosts’ expectations. Despite acknowledging that his trip from Gulfport, Mississippi, was a “vacation,” his hosts nonetheless asked Alanzo to put on an apron and get to work.⁴³ In this instance, Alanzo took off the apron and left the store. As his host mother later complained, he would not “fit himself into the program.”⁴⁴ At a time when most youths sought employment in order to participate more fully in the consumer culture, Alanzo’s refusal to cooperate makes sense.⁴⁵ He had nothing to gain by laboring without pay. In another instance ten years before, a host wrote to the program administrator that she couldn’t get her guest to work.⁴⁶ Other more oblique references to guest children’s “lack of cooperation” may also refer to children refusing to work given how often rural families relied on their own children to provide no-cost or low-cost labor.⁴⁷ Most children traveled to the country to swim, ride bikes, and enjoy themselves around animals. Spending their trip caring for livestock or harvesting crops was not a priority.

Such varied work expectations speak to class tensions around the extent and reach of vacations. Even though the number of poor people in the United States had decreased between 1960 and 1969, the economic gap between hosts and guests remained wide during this period of especially intense Fresh Air activity.⁴⁸ Despite that gap, the children reached across to claim a symbol of wealth and privilege, a vacation away from the city. Children who refused to work during their vacation stressed that their visit would center on recreation rather than remuneration and so gave notice that they deserved just as much of a break as did the wealthy urban dwellers who flocked to the Adirondacks or the New Jersey shore during the summer months. Although they seldom referred to the class differences between hosts and guests in their promotional materials, program boosters such as Executive Director Lewis consistently referred to the children’s trips as vacations.⁴⁹ By so doing, they too participated in the project of extending leisurely respites to the masses, an effort that held more in common with labor unions than charity organizations by the middle of the twentieth century.

The themes of wonder, work, and curiosity that cows came to represent in the Fresh Air programs contained a racial subtext especially evident by the 1960s. The AP photographer described Fearon and Mojica in 1950 as “Negro youths.”⁵⁰ The host who related the story of the young boy flying out of the barn with “eyes as big as saucers” also reported that his “kinky hair” tried “to straighten itself” as he ran, a description reminiscent of racist tropes marketed in vaudeville shows, slapstick comedy, and cartoons.⁵¹ When describing Marty’s self-introduction to a dairy cow in 1962, his host specified him as a “little Negro boy.”⁵² Likewise, the description of two boys asking to ride the Angus “horses” referenced their Puerto Rican ancestry.⁵³ As was common practice during the breadth of the twentieth century, white children in the same accounts received no such racial designation. As the nation turned its collective attention to the racial foment of the era, hosts looked for ways to encourage positive race relations—a theme explored at length in chapter 3. From the hosts’ perspective, the lessons they offered in agrarian husbandry and the Protestant work ethic bridged the racial divide to correct what they saw as racially determined deficiencies in the children’s upbringing. By educating the children, they sought to decrease the racial distance between them. Yet each time they told a story about a child of African American and Latino descent who needed guidance and correction, whether about cows or chores, the hosts also demonstrated both their superior knowledge and their good intentions, a pattern visible in multiple Fresh Air programs. In this, as was the case in most white-led, mission-focused enterprises of the post–World War II era, the message sent said more about white superiority and racial separation than it did about black and brown equality and racial integration.⁵⁴

An even more common pattern twined through the programs as cows and nature became synonymous. Children, according to boosters in 1945, got to see “lakes and woods and cows.”⁵⁵ They laid eyes on “grass, trees, cows, grasshoppers.”⁵⁶ And they moved among “grazing cows” and “tree-lined streams” and looked at “cows milling about” next to a “waterfall and a bridge.”⁵⁷ Across a span of more than thirty years, the pairing of rural vistas and dairy animals continued unabated. In each decade analyzed in this book, the children followed suit by likewise referring to “cows and cornfields” and mentioning cows when they described their country vacations.⁵⁸ From the perspective of both boosters and the guest children, to see a grazing cow was to encounter resplendent nature.

The children and the cows that they so adored thus infused the country with wonder by way of the city. Although few involved with Fresh Air promotion at the time acknowledged or knew the history, one of the reasons cows proliferated in rural settings was that the city demanded milk. Consumption of cow’s milk as a breast milk replacement and dietary supplement for young children began in urban centers and thereby created the modern dairy industry.⁵⁹ Although some city children like Herbie had forgotten milk’s origins, dairy farmers had not. They knew that urban centers provided the market they needed to maintain their large dairy herds. In essence, dairy cows and Fresh Air children originated in the city. Thus, these two urban products—children and cows—renewed hosts’ appreciation for nature. The adults found their wonder renewed as they watched the children delight in encountering cows and other country sights for the first time. The very program designed to take city children into the country depended on the city to promote the country. In short, city cows and city children kept rural communities fresh. Children like Fearon and Mojica and the placid cows they came to see kept the programs running and the connection between city and country ever more apparent.

Money

Introducing children to cows and country depended on money. The photographer who took Fearon’s and Mojica’s picture as they worked in the barn participated in a long-standing arrangement between reporters and Fresh Air boosters. Pictures like that of the two boys publicized the programs and offered proof of their integrity. The photos demonstrated that Fresh Air initiatives did what they claimed: send children to the country. Without the publicity and the money that it generated, the two boys would never have left the city to meet cows in a dairy barn.

As more and more children like Fearon and Mojica sought country vacations, the work of raising funds to send children to the country came to overshadow the work of actually sending children to the country. More than hosting, donating defined Fresh Air by the 1970s. Far more groups and individuals connected to the programs through fund-raising ventures than through actual hosting. In 1971, for example, an estimated 20,600 individuals donated more than $700,000 to the Fund’s unrestricted operating budget, thirty gave endowment bequests totaling more than a half million dollars, and nineteen contributed a total of $33,000 to the Fund’s endowment for “vacations-in-perpetuity.”⁶⁰ By contrast, only 13,832 actually hosted children in their homes.⁶¹ Although some hosts also contributed financially, most gave through the act of hosting. Moreover, the Fund concentrated its fund-raising efforts on those who lived in New York City and who thus, by definition, could not themselves host a child. Subsequently, Fresh Air boosters developed an extensive, creative, and effective fund-raising machine rivaled by only a few other charities and dependent upon class contrast and comparison. As in the case of the American Red Cross or the Salvation Army, many more constituents participated by letting go of money than letting in the less fortunate.

Those contributors who kept Fresh Air coffers flush participated in a remarkable array of civic, religious, educational, social, and business groups. The diversity of contributing organizations peaked during the 1950s, with volunteer service groups such as the Elks, Jaycees, Kiwanis, Optimists, and Rotary being joined by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, local mothers’ clubs, congregations from nearly every mainline denomination and the Salvation Army, as well as newspapers, business clubs, and, somewhat unexpectedly, labor unions.⁶² Yet even as volunteerism flourished in the 1950s, more people donated money than hosted children.⁶³ In what proved the decade’s high point, in 1955 an estimated 25,000 donors contributed to the annual fund while well under 10,000 opened their homes to children.⁶⁴ Although critics and changing demographics would somewhat dampen the enthusiasm for Fresh Air in the subsequent two decades, the innocuous vision of children like Fearon and Mojica encountering cows kept donor dollars flowing.⁶⁵

The donor-friendly profile of the various Fresh Air programs at times attracted particularly novel contributors. In the 1950s, contributions from a parent teacher association at a private Catholic school in Maryland or a high school Spanish club in New York drew little attention.⁶⁶ When fraternity brothers held a Fresh Air fund-raiser in 1972, however, reporters’ interest increased.⁶⁷ Five years later, a group of recovering alcoholics stepped forward with a contribution of $57 from the sale of their leather craft that again drew press attention.⁶⁸ Both reporters and administrators highlighted a $50 check received from the Pennsylvania Lifer’s Association in 1979. The group’s president, Gerard McKenna, explained that the incarcerated members of his group hailed from “areas similar to the home cities of the fresh air children” and believed in the benefit of offering summer visits to the country.⁶⁹ In these cases the sentimental coverage of rowdy frat boys, sober recovering alcoholics, and rueful life prisoners played well with the public and prompted others to give.

Reporters in the 1970s also favored stories of wealthy children giving to poor children for similar sentimental reasons. Sixth-grade students at a well-funded public school in Howard Beach, New York, held an annual carnival fund-raiser for the Fresh Air Fund and, according to the school’s principal, wrote “themes about” and discussed the Fund to get the “affluent” children to “learn to share.”⁷⁰ In an example of the prevailing pattern among post–World War II 501(c)(3) nonprofits, the elite children from Queens P.S. 232 apparently never met Fresh Air participants. By the 1970s, most voluntary organizations had no clear social dimension. Although prior to World War II, membership in groups like the Fresh Air Fund meant meeting with other people, after that point membership meant making a donation.⁷¹ And so, rather than meeting Fresh Air participants, the Howard Beach students saw films, read handouts about the program, and explained to the “smaller children” participating in the carnivals that the proceeds “sent youngsters from poor districts” on country vacations.⁷² Likewise, in 1975 a group of young women from another elite school, this one in Long Island, washed cars to raise $200 for the Fund, again lacking direct contact with the program or its participants.⁷³ In 1979 publicists for the Fresh Air Fund highlighted a Brooklyn third-grade class along with a “group of naval reservists” and a business executive in a list of loyal donors.⁷⁴ At a time when many adults expressed anxiety about a rapidly shifting moral and cultural terrain, stories of gifts from young people allayed fears that the young had lost their moral footing and spurred others to offer financial gifts as well.⁷⁵

Yet the fund-raising efforts extended beyond youthful donors to encompass a broad range of participants. From the 1940s through the 1960s, local committees sponsored hot dog roasts, fashion shows, vaudeville performances, and tag days, the latter a fund-raising practice in which donors received a small card or tag to indicate their support of the sponsoring charity.⁷⁶ The community-based efforts continued though the 1970s, although tagging no longer proved viable as shop owners expressed concern that overeager fund-raisers beleaguered their customers.⁷⁷ The summer residents of Fire Island, a resort community off the coast of New York, held fairs to support Fresh Air.⁷⁸ Farther west in Guthrie County, Iowa, a Fresh Air committee recruited the county extension agent to select hosts and publicize the program.⁷⁹ And in a rare example of African American parents becoming involved in Fresh Air fund-raising, in Cleveland the women of an historic African American congregation, the Mount Zion Congregational Church, held a Friendly Town Day to sponsor children’s visits to homes outside the city.⁸⁰ Although the local events seldom brought in substantial funds, they connected a striking array of donor groups to the Fresh Air movement regardless of whether individual members actually hosted children.

Staff at the various Fresh Air headquarters developed much more sophisticated methods than carnivals and hot dog roasts to meet their development goals. Although centralized fund-raising campaigns like those run by the United Way had become increasingly common, most Fresh Air initiatives conducted their own campaigns.⁸¹ Like other charities with roots in the Progressive Era, the Fresh Air Fund and its many imitators had become larger, more bureaucratic, and more specialized in the course of the twentieth century.⁸² Yet Fresh Air boosters had found a way to make their appeals personal and connect donors to the program even though most of them would never host children. From the inception of the movement, the public learned about Fresh Air by reading newspapers. Building on Willard Parsons’ long-term relationship with the Herald Tribune, Fund staff enjoyed free and unfettered access to the paper’s publicity machine. In 1953 alone, the Herald Tribune ran more than 150 Fresh Air stories and photos.⁸³ By the 1960s, Fund staff fostered relationships with regional and local newspapers by handing out awards for best local coverage of Fresh Air programs. In 1963, for example, the Bennington Banner (Vermont) won the Fresh Air newspaper award for its coverage of visiting children like Fearon and Mojica.⁸⁴ By 1966, 300 local newspapers ran Fresh Air stories.⁸⁵ Although the Herald Tribune and the Fresh Air Fund parted ways in 1966, the Fund built on past positive relationships with the New York Times and received editorial and reporting coverage from it through the 1970s.⁸⁶ To make its programs personal, Fresh Air first turned to print.

The newspapers that gave such positive coverage to country visits also lavished attention on sports fund-raisers. Although they generated more income from newspaper-based appeals, Fund staff still took full advantage of Americans’ love of sport. By 1939, the Fund had been sponsoring an annual all-star football game for four years that regularly drew in excess of 40,000 fans.⁸⁷ Despite the commentator who criticized the annual event for lackluster showmanship in 1947, crowds continued to gather through 1951 and generated media coverage across the country from Connecticut to Kansas, a national reach uncommon for a program run out of a single city.⁸⁸ Fund staff extended the All-Star concept to the basketball court in 1946 by bringing top-tier collegiate players to Madison Square Garden. Through 1958, more than 13,000 fans gathered for each game.⁸⁹ Although the Cleveland-based Friendly Town program arranged a fund-raiser at a 76ers–Cavaliers game in 1976, development officers in that program preferred baseball tie-ins.⁹⁰ Back in New York, the Fresh Air Fund arranged for its children’s chorus to perform at Yankee Stadium, sent thousands of children to Mets and Yankees games, and persuaded embattled New York Mayor Abraham Beame to leave his financial worries long enough to make a pronouncement in honor of the Fund’s centennial at Shea Stadium in 1977.⁹¹ In these latter instances, the Fund had moved away from using sports events for direct revenue, choosing instead to generate publicity by associating with popular athletes.

The same staff members who used newspaper coverage so effectively turned their attention to electronic media as well. Already in 1939, Herald Tribune staff members arranged for Fresh Air children to appear on the CBS radio junior quiz show March of Games.⁹² Ten years later, a Fresh Air committee in Hagerstown, Maryland, scheduled radio interviews for Fresh Air hosts.⁹³ Soon after the 1941 founding of the first U.S. television station, Fresh Air staff produced and distributed promotional films.⁹⁴ Through the 1970s, local television affiliates aired Holiday for Danny (1955), For All the Children (1959), Spud’s Summer (1965), and Summer’s Children (1965).⁹⁵ Although other charities and social service groups also made ready use of emerging electronic media to promote their programs, the Fresh Air Fund in particular latched on to the power of moving images to make the children’s stories personal and immediate. Children walked into donors’ lives through stories in the newspaper, but they leapt off the screen into donors’ hearts through stories on the television. As they had throughout the history of the Fresh Air movement, adult promoters used every available technology to distribute their message.

High-society charity events also drew media attention. As fund-raisers have long realized, gala events make only about thirty cents on the dollar and require extensive volunteer hours to organize. Yet such events engage elite donors and confirm the status of those involved and of the organization they promote.⁹⁶ Like many other charitable organizations in the middle of the twentieth century, Fresh Air boosters recognized the benefits of engaging the elite and did so with abandon. In the early 1940s, the Harlem Children’s Fresh Air fund proved particularly adept at hosting gala events. Demonstrating the cross-racial appeal of the Fresh Air model to donors in the city, the Harlem group drew in the wealthy to socialize and support children’s country vacations. From fashion shows to cocktail parties—one that featured an African American ice skater doing tricks on a six-foot square “midget ice rink”—the Harlem initiative brought black and white elites together for this charitable cause.⁹⁷ However, the Fresh Air Fund brought out even more socialites to galas at the well-appointed Hotel Astor on Times Square in the 1950s, including one in which heiresses and business magnates alike “swiveled … deluxe, red, yellow and blue” hula hoops in a benefit that raised $25,000.⁹⁸ Although the Fund did have its limits, having rejected a staff proposal to sell tickets to a preview of the violent World War II film The Dirty Dozen in 1967, both board and staff members happily accepted income from the sale of a Renoir painting and an original Jamie Wyeth graphic, the latter at a 1977 fund-raiser at the Tavern on the Green in Central Park, where entertainment stars mixed with wealthy donors.⁹⁹

Corporations also saw the benefit of offering both in-kind and financial support to the Fresh Air movement. In keeping with a larger trend of business leaders becoming involved in civic pursuits during the twentieth century, Fresh Air administrators called on corporate interests.¹⁰⁰ Having drawn business executives such as investment banker and American Stock Exchange governor Blancke Noyes to their board, the Fresh Air Fund eagerly cultivated corporate sponsors during the 1960s and 1970s.¹⁰¹ In 1966, Lord and Taylor, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Spalding, and Elmer each offered trademark items such as shopping bags, bandages, motion sickness pills, footballs, and arts and crafts materials.¹⁰² Thirteen years later, corporations pursued a similar strategy as Barney’s men’s clothing store donated sneakers, Burlington textile manufacturers offered arts and crafts fabric, and the aptly named Popsicle Industries contributed five thousand popsicles to Fresh Air camps.¹⁰³ Although in-kind donations helped summer camp programming, they did not go as far as did the thousands of dollars contributed by blue-chip corporations such as American Express, Coca-Cola, IBM, Mobil, Sony, and Western Electric.¹⁰⁴

The elite who contributed to the Fresh Air Fund went against typical twentieth-century fund-raising patterns. In the aftermath of the Great Depression, most philanthropists assumed that the government should supply a social safety net for the poor and needy.¹⁰⁵ They turned their attention to museums, colleges, hospitals, and civic pursuits that ultimately served themselves and members of their class more than the poor and oppressed.¹⁰⁶ In the case of Fresh Air, however, the involvement of upper-class figures like Herald Tribune chairman Whitelaw Reid and Museum of Modern Art president John Hay Whitney ensured other elite donors of the organization’s credentials. Likewise, the Fresh Air model dovetailed well with the post–World War II shift toward a more conservative political agenda among philanthropists that emphasized the values of self-help and individual responsibility.¹⁰⁷ Although at root it operated as a charity, the Fresh Air program expected children to do something with the opportunity they had received in the form of a summer vacation. Although they could not offer the personal gratification available by supporting a museum or the symphony, Fresh Air fund-raisers did provide donors the assurance that their investment would pay dividends in the form of more well-adjusted and cooperative citizens.

The combination of local events, newspaper coverage, sports contests, socialite galas, corporate sponsorship, and contributions from major donors built large reserves for the Fresh Air Fund. Despite a series of recessions in the latter part of the 1960s and a major financial collapse in New York City from 1974 through 1978, the Fund steadily expanded its financial base.¹⁰⁸ By the end of 1955, the Fund’s assets had risen to excess of 2.3 million dollars.¹⁰⁹ By the middle of the following decade, the figure had risen to over 5.5 million.¹¹⁰ By the 1970s, the Fund reported assets in excess of 8.6 million.¹¹¹ Even though the Fund ran deficit budgets upon occasion, its considerable reserves allowed the financial picture to improve even in years when individual donors gave less than the organization spent.¹¹² The mid-1950s claim that the Fund was “unable to dramatize their needs to the public as readily as” other charities rang hollow in light of its long-term fund-raising success.¹¹³ In an era that saw the collapse and disappearance of a host of charity organizations, the Fund’s long-term financial success stands out as remarkably consistent.¹¹⁴

Such robust financial development hinged on emphasizing the children’s poverty. Hosts opened their homes and donors offered their dollars to support children constantly described as poor. Summarizing her experience as a long-time Fresh Air area coordinator, Anna Buckwalter opined that the children and their families “have lived on welfare for so long that they have lost their self respect.” She asserted that the urban parents “should have to do something to get that welfare check.”¹¹⁵ Although Buckwalter’s comments may reveal more about her and other hosts’ urban stereotypes than the statistical reality of urban poverty, children did face harsh class realities. In the United States as in most of the world, class determines a child’s well-being more than any other factor.¹¹⁶ A large percentage of U.S. children learned the truth of that assertion in poor families. During the postwar era in the nation as a whole, almost one-third of children grew up in families with incomes near or under the poverty line.¹¹⁷

Urban environments concentrated that poverty, racial disparity intensified it, and Fresh Air programs exposed hosts to its effects. Even though black family income improved overall between 1947 and 1977, African American children remained disproportionately poor and, along with Latino children, overrepresented among those selected for Fresh Air visits.¹¹⁸ Of course, some children never made it out of the city because of their poverty. Some parents simply could not afford to pay registration fees or the cost of clothing for camp.¹¹⁹ But given that most hosting programs had dropped or reduced registration fees by the middle of the 1960s, many more children brought evidence of their poverty into host homes. One 1962 account emphasized a young guest’s “surprise at being given a toothbrush ‘just for myself,’” pleasure in having his own bed, and “horror” at those who fed hot dog ends or ice cream cones to their dogs.¹²⁰ In 1977 another host reported that her visitor had a nightmare about losing the one precious dollar that she had brought with her to the country.¹²¹ Long-time Fresh Air Fund executive director Frederick Lewis declared in 1971 that the only eligibility requirement for a child to go on a summer vacation is that she or he be “poor and human.”¹²²

The long-term emphasis on poverty led to donors and hosts alike defining the children by their impoverished state. Fresh Air programs used a common 1970s strategy of highlighting the children’s deficiencies, an approach that attracted donors interested in preparing children for inclusion in a capitalist society rather than in challenging economic systems.¹²³ Rather than rely on crisis-based requests as did organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, staff at the Fund based their appeals on enduring poverty.¹²⁴ According to published reports during the 1960s and 1970s, the children were “all victims” of poor homes, lived in “miserably closed conditions,” and were “extremely needy.”¹²⁵ In fact, in a shift from prior practice, organizers in the early 1970s advised hosts to invite at least two children at a time because the city visitors were “used to large families and crowded neighborhoods” and therefore would be happiest when surrounded by more children.¹²⁶ During the same period, other administrators encouraged giving individualized attention to guests because they came from large families crammed into small quarters.¹²⁷ The physical poverty in turn led to emotional neediness as camp counselors in 1964 described Fresh Air participants as “more dependent” and “more insecure” than children hailing from middle-class homes.¹²⁸ By the 1970s, reports also emphasized that most of the children came from “broken homes” with only one parent, usually the mother, living with the child.¹²⁹ Before the children ever arrived in the country, their hosts had received many messages about the children’s material, social, and psychological poverty.

Many hosts offered genuine empathy for the impoverished conditions faced by their temporary charges. At the sight of an undernourished girl getting off the train upon her arrival in Mount Union, Pennsylvania, in 1951, several of the host mothers gathered at the depot let out “sighs of anguish” even as they observed that the Brooklyn youngster “had boundless pep” and “swung like a gymnast on the fence rails.”¹³⁰ Four years later, Alice Trissel in Harrisonburg, Virginia, expressed concern about the home environment of the two young girls she hosted because their older teenage brothers “lived from house to house with friends, who would let them stay” because of crowded conditions in their family’s apartment.¹³¹ By 1976, concern for guests’ living conditions remained as Kay Barbel, a host mother in Westbury, New York, expressed delight that the two boys visiting her could each sleep in their own beds; they had to share a single one at home in the Bronx.¹³²

Hosts expressed even more concern about the condition of the children’s clothing. Although Fearon and Mojica appear outfitted in dapper and durable clothes, others arrived dressed in a manner deemed unsuitable. One host mother in the mid-1960s described her eight-year-old charge who arrived with an “old leather ‘strap’” wrapped twice around “his tiny waist.”¹³³ During the same decade, state policies aimed at removing unwed mothers from federal welfare programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children increased the number of Fresh Air children struggling with poverty.¹³⁴ Piteous descriptions became even more common. Another host detailed the entire contents of the paper bag containing her guest’s clothing by listing “a flimsy, ill fitting dress, slip, underwear, torn socks … the rundown shoes she wore, … one set of underwear, one bathing suit sizes too large, a pair of shorts and a polo shirt.”¹³⁵ Most dramatically, in 1963 yet another host mother related the story of a guest who refused her host’s invitation to stay an additional two weeks because, the young girl admitted in a whisper, “I have to go home and give my sister all my clothes, so that she can go to the country next week for HER vacation.”¹³⁶ By the 1970s, when even work incentive programs had failed to improve the economic conditions of poor families, many of the Fresh Air programs, including several African American congregations in cities like Cleveland, raised money to supply the children with clothing when they went on their visits.¹³⁷ When it came to clothes, white hosting communities and at least a limited number of black congregations found common ground in ensuring that the children arrived in the country looking respectable.

Individual hosts often responded to their guests’ poverty by giving gifts. Although organizers frequently cautioned hosts against offering presents, their words had little impact.¹³⁸ The children and reporters alike referred to the gifts they brought home. On their return trips, girls frequently wore new dresses given to them by their hosts.¹³⁹ Although boys also received new clothing, they more typically described bringing home a frog, bat, or puppy.¹⁴⁰ In contrast to a culture ever more filled with consumer goods, children boasted of receiving homemade presents ranging from toys to snake rattlers and from home-baked bread and jelly to “a large bag of empty butter cartons.”¹⁴¹ Having listened to organizers exclaim over the children’s poverty, hosts responded by making sure that children took home some kind of gift from their stay. As one host organizer in Oneonta, New York, noted in 1971, “You can’t help laugh sometimes when you see them returning with their arms loaded … sometimes you can hardly see the kid through all he carries.”¹⁴²

Yet the giving of gifts brought complications. Theorists note that children take part in the gift-giving process by mocking or affirming the gift giver based on their assessment of the gift’s quality. The children’s response thus either causes embarrassment or satisfaction.¹⁴³ Reports about Fresh Air gift giving focused on the kinds of gifts given rather than the emotional dynamics of the exchange, but other evidence makes clear that gift giving could become complex. Johnnie Stanley, a Fresh Air guest in Kansas in 1963, insisted that his host sister had given him a silver dollar that his host parents asserted he had stolen.¹⁴⁴ Another Fresh Air visitor from 1978 packed toys from his host’s home in his suitcase under the assumption that, since they had been left out in the yard, no one needed them. The boy’s host father complained to the Fresh Air program, making clear he had not thought them gifts.¹⁴⁵ Conversely, in 1963 one host mother arranged a birthday party for Pearl, her young guest, after discovering Pearl had never had one. After the party, the host mother found Pearl dividing up her presents to share with her two host sisters. Despite the host mother’s objection that the gifts were intended only for the birthday girl, Pearl insisted that she loved her host sisters and was “going to share with them.”¹⁴⁶ Furthermore, children returning from the country with bags full of clothes found themselves ridiculed by neighborhood peers.¹⁴⁷ Only truly poor children needed such gifts. Regardless of what was given, gift giving invariably added complex, often awkward dimensions to the hosting relationship.

Such complexities frequently heightened class differences between host and guest. In the early 1960s a Fresh Air child named Linda brought her host family to tears when they discovered that she had taken a train to an after-school job in order to earn enough money to buy them gifts.¹⁴⁸ A thirteen-year-old girl named Ruth admitted in 1957 that she had gone without lunch at school for two weeks in order to save up enough money to buy flowers for her host mother after Ruth learned that the woman’s husband had died.¹⁴⁹ In urban communities where many single mothers had to choose between spending quality time with their children or working to pay the bills, the sacrifice of the children proved even more poignant.¹⁵⁰ In no instance did the giving of gifts diminish the class differences between guest and hosts, and in at least one program by 1970, a program administrator claimed that the children did “not wish to be patronized with gifts or in any other way.”¹⁵¹ Although the administrator may have been reflecting attitudes of parents influenced by the Black Nationalist thought of the day, the comment suggests that gift giving may have done more to appease residual guilt on the part of the host than remove the all-too-apparent class differences between guests and hosts. As one host mother in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, proclaimed with pride, “He arrived in Pittsfield with a half-full suitcase and left with enough for two people to carry.”¹⁵²

The children hardly needed gifts to make them aware of the class differences between themselves and their hosts. Most often they commented on two of the most prominent symbols of white-flight fueled suburbanization: houses and cars. In 1959, seven-year-old Deborah Jean Taylor noted that, in comparison to her home in New York City, “[w]e have apartment houses and people here have private houses.”¹⁵³ By 1966, other children continued to express their amazement that “a single family lives in a single house.”¹⁵⁴ In addition to houses, children equated suburban and country wealth with cars. Margie Middleton noted that her hosts “had lots of money” and “big cars.”¹⁵⁵ Twelve-year-old Pauline Colon put it bluntly when she said of Bennington, Vermont, “People in New York aren’t so good at money that they can afford a car, here everybody has a car.”¹⁵⁶

Attention to those class differences prompted some participants to yearn for a return to rural communities. Despite many boosters’ assertions that time in the country did not create unrealistic expectations or change the children’s attitudes about their homes, in 1950 nine-year-old Carol Hopewell said that she hoped to someday “live in a lovely house” in the country.¹⁵⁷ Some of the children who grew to love the rural settings they visited as children did return as adults and lived, at least for a short while, outside the city. In a typical example, Elba Rosa traveled from Manhattan each summer to attend the Fresh Air camp in Fishkill, New York, where she met her future husband. The couple then moved to upstate New York and invited Fresh Air children into their home.¹⁵⁸ In other instances, former Fresh Air children stayed to attend high school or find work.¹⁵⁹ The stories that boosters repeated more often focused on those like Rosa or another former Fresh Air child named Orlando Vasquez who considered himself “fortunate to have gotten out” of the “noise and squalor” of the city when he moved his family from the Lower East Side of New York City to Annville, Pennsylvania, a town that had originally impressed him with its quiet streets, plentiful Christmas decorations, and abundant toys in his host home.¹⁶⁰ For the limited number of children who did return as adults, very few of whom were African American, their interest in relocation could not be separated from the material wealth and sense of security they remembered from their youthful visits. No record exists of Fearon and Mojica relocating to Hinesburg, and such a move, even if pursued, would have made them as much an object of curiosity as had been Shubael Clark, a lone “colored man” who attended the Baptist Church in Hinesburg during the nineteenth century.¹⁶¹

The Fresh Air program model simply could not support large-scale, permanent relocation to the countryside. In the early 1970s, staff at the Henry Street Settlement House in New York City proposed a far more likely scenario. Staff imagined a program that would transport children from “welfare hotels” to Echo Hill Farm in Yorktown Heights, about an hour north of the city.¹⁶² Funded by New York’s Department of Social Services, the day camp trips not only offered “a natural setting, free from the stresses of immediate pressing problems” but also provided both group and one-on-one counseling.¹⁶³ The only initiatives that ever saw fruition always returned the children to their families in the city.

The day trip counseling sessions helped children cope with exposure to poverty, not exposure to rural wealth. Reporters and boosters did not speak of negative effects resulting from poor children crossing class lines. In fact, prior to early 1960, hardly anyone criticized the Fresh Air program in print.¹⁶⁴ By 1963, reflecting the liberal turn toward rhetoric that emphasized the damage done to African American and other victims of social oppression by even well-intentioned social services, some critics asked whether children would be harmed by discovering the “advantages others have and then return[ing] to poorer neighborhoods.”¹⁶⁵ Although boosters regularly asserted that no harm took place, they did not develop a uniform response until the later 1970s, when they began to compare Fresh Air visits to amusement park trips.¹⁶⁶ As one host explained in 1976, “It is nice and really special for a while, but it is also nice to come home.”¹⁶⁷ From the administrators’ perspective, exposure to a stable family, middle-class values, and pristine nature improved the children’s chances for success even if they ended up feeling inferior about their homes in the city.

Yet the trade-off had mixed results. In keeping with the myth of American success common from the end of the nineteenth century onward, Fresh Air reporters touted individual achievement.¹⁶⁸ As was the case with most charities, social service agencies, and professional social workers by the 1970s, institutionalized barriers of class or race received at most passing mention.¹⁶⁹ The children would succeed, claimed the reporters, as long as they followed the example set by their rural and suburban hosts. At times, the children agreed. Looking back on their summer vacation trips from their perspective as adults, some former Fresh Air guests appreciated having been prodded to look for options outside their immediate neighborhoods.¹⁷⁰ Others expressed ambivalence over having visited wealthier and whiter homes and criticized the programs for not attending to the systemic roots of poverty.¹⁷¹ In the end, boosters asserted that country visits led to lifelong success, but they relied almost exclusively on anecdotal evidence to make that claim.

The contrast of wealthy hosts and poverty-stricken guests proved so central to Fresh Air funding that hosts objected when their guests did not seem poor enough. Given the Fresh Air fund-raisers’ unrelenting emphasis on providing free summer vacations to poor children, hosts expected that their guests would always arrive in tatters. However, the children sometimes arrived in their Sunday best. Representing the politics of respectability whereby members of the African American community in particular claimed equal status with whites by conforming to middle-class norms of dress, manner, and diction, some girls dressed in frilly skirts and white stockings and boys in dress coats and ties.¹⁷² When the children did not conform to the hosts’ expectations of what a child from the “most deserving” poor should look like, the hosts complained.¹⁷³ Said one mother of her well-dressed guest in 1961, “She came from too wealthy a home to really appreciate what we had here.”¹⁷⁴ Hosts repeated those complaints from the 1950s through the 1970s, with little understanding that parents scraped and saved so that their children could conform to their hosts’ dress standards.¹⁷⁵

Such class pressures eased when hosts came from less wealthy backgrounds. In a few instances, children visited families living in trailer homes. According to at least one local coordinator, some of the “happiest children” he encountered had spent their two-week vacation with a family in a trailer park.¹⁷⁶ Given the physical displacement, unknown surroundings, strange food, and new customs faced by Fresh Air visitors, staying with a poorer family offered welcome familiarity. Such placements were rare, however, as middle- and upper-class families interested in helping the needy populated the hosting ranks.

Hosts thus joined administrators and donors in first viewing Fresh Air ventures as a financial undertaking. Although the pre–World War II programs gave priority to hosting and direct care, by the 1950s programs focused on fund-raising campaigns in order to raise budgets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and sustain million-dollar endowments. Many postwar charitable organizations made similar shifts to more-professional development efforts that crafted fund-raising appeals supportive of the existing social and financial hierarchy.¹⁷⁷ However, Fresh Air fund-raising campaigns necessitated class comparisons that ratcheted up the attention to money. Staff repeatedly assured hosts that their guests “were from poor families, without question.”¹⁷⁸ Along with milk, money mattered to the Fresh Air movement.

Power

Fresh Air programs sought and received support from U.S. power brokers. Drawing on the military, the government, law enforcement, and the entertainment industry, those involved in bringing children to the country infused their rhetoric with central U.S. themes such as patriotism, citizenship, democracy, and equal opportunity for all. Rarely content to limit their efforts to the logistical enterprise of taking children to the country for a summer vacation, program promoters integrated Fresh Air into the very fabric of the nation. Through endorsements from politicians, police, entertainers, and the press, the Fresh Air movement came to represent the hopes of a people for prosperity and fulfillment while legitimizing the possibility that all could succeed. Regardless of their relative penchant for patriotism, the children came to represent a fully democratic, egalitarian, and open society.

Fresh Air boosters first appealed to patriotic themes. Such appeals intensified during World War II. Between 1939 and 1945, the global conflict shaped the lives of children in profound ways, instilling both patriotic values and lasting trauma. In the midst of these formative forces, children eagerly participated in domestic defense activities such as gathering recyclable materials like scrap metal, newspapers, and rubber.¹⁷⁹ Other “nonfarm” youths, often older high school students from the city, answered the government’s call to help farmers harvest their crops.¹⁸⁰ As in the case of the privately run Fresh Air programs, some of the youths lived on the farms and others in camps, but all heard adults around them praise the programs “for stimulating mature personality and responsible, democratic character in the lives of average city boys and girls.”¹⁸¹ In many parts of the country, government officials and parents had already encouraged patriotism in the young people before any of them set foot on a Fresh Air farm or rural homestead.

The violence and trauma surrounding the children could be as intense as the patriotism. In schools, art classes turned into spontaneous therapy sessions as young boys drew airplanes strafing the ground. Game playing took on new meaning as “Junior Commando” members received orders to eat lots of carrots so that their night vision would improve as they kept vigil for enemy parachutists, and sandy beaches became potential entry points for invading navies. One adult recalled listening to a soldier at a nearby base instructing a group of five- to seven-year-olds to “maintain frontal fire while using part of your force to encircle and attack from the rear.”¹⁸² The violence of a nation at war inundated the children and left vivid impressions of their role—whether real or imagined—in waging war against the enemy.

Fresh Air promoters claimed that their programs could help restore children to an untrammeled state free of worry about war. In 1940 an editorial writer in Altoona, Pennsylvania, proposed bringing European refugee children to country homes in the United States. Although the attack on Pearl Harbor a year later shattered the image of the United States as a haven from wartime violence, at the time she penned her proposal the author claimed that “in this country children are still carefree.” Her hope, however unrealized, stemmed from a desire to restore an “innocent childhood” to as many children as possible. Even in the midst of war, she claimed that children still deserved “an untroubled, carefree, happy time.”¹⁸³ Like hundreds of Fresh Air boosters across the country, the editorial writer looked to the countryside to provide a childhood free of trauma.

The Fresh Air enterprise took on a fresh coat of patriotism during the war years. Hosting children at home came to mean supporting democracy abroad. In 1941 New York Episcopalians advertised their program with a full-color photo of two boys raising an American flag.¹⁸⁴ Two years later, as the war dragged on, promoters in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, implored families with a son or daughter serving in the armed forces to fill their “vacant bed and chair” with a child from the inner city in order to be part of a “patriotic effort.”¹⁸⁵ Fresh Air campers planted victory gardens, sent arts and crafts to convalescing soldiers and sailors, and pledged allegiance each evening around the flagpole.¹⁸⁶ In 1945 a Fresh Air home in upstate New York showed children gathered in a circle for “flag-raising time.”¹⁸⁷ That same year, Fund staff publicized donations they received from former Fresh Air children then serving in the U.S. Army in China.¹⁸⁸ Like many other social service organizations at the time such as the Boys Club and the Boys Athletic League, Fresh Air programs positioned themselves as part of the war effort, intent upon working with children in order to sustain the nation.¹⁸⁹

Program administrators continued to resist foreign influences by idealizing rural life. As Fresh Air boosters promoted patriotism during the war, they employed a single phrase, “real America.” One particularly enthusiastic supporter wrote in 1942 that Fresh Air vacations showed children “what REAL American home life is like” in order to “make them realize what our country is fighting to preserve.”¹⁹⁰ As a booster explained one year later, the “real American” life, people, and ideals that the children experienced during their vacations countered those found in the “foreign quarter of the city” that the children called home.¹⁹¹ Making his point explicit in 1945, another booster stated that the rural hosts represented “decent, upstanding Americans,” whereas the “foreign” urban dwellers lived “in homes that are dirty and smelly from poverty.”¹⁹² Although people of color would rapidly take the place of foreigners in Fresh Air discourse, during World War II administrators focused on bringing foreigners into the American fold.

Yet the “real American” rhetoric lingered on for several years past the war’s end. As the Cold War settled in and government officials kept alive the threat of foreign infiltration, Fresh Air administrators continued and, in some cases, intensified the idealization of the rural home. At first, they simply repeated the contrast between the life and ideals of real “American folks” and those of the foreign quarter, but by 1948 they had begun to wax even more eloquent about the “great, sunshiny, beautiful, fragrant, wide-spreading altogether glorious” American homes in the country.¹⁹³ Likewise, the disparaging of the city grew worse as boosters described in the same year the “unhappy sections” of the city as “breeding places for many movements hostile” to democratic values.¹⁹⁴ Fresh Air administrators continued to employ the “real American” rhetoric through 1956, consistently contrasting rural havens with the less desirable versions of America found in urban tenement districts like Harlem.¹⁹⁵

Another, even more long-lasting rhetorical strategy focused on democracy and citizenship. For a span of thirty years, at least from 1947 through 1977, Fresh Air program administrators promoted their efforts on the grounds that they instilled in hosted children the ideals of democracy and prepared them to be effective citizens. When visiting homes, the children received “valuable lessons” about getting along with other Americans.¹⁹⁶ Like many other camping programs interested in forming young citizens, Fresh Air campers learned about democracy, patriotism, cooperation, and fair play.¹⁹⁷ In small towns they saw how “Americanism works.”¹⁹⁸ The child could “grasp” how democracy unfolded in a town’s “government, offices, factories, farms, schools, stores, [and] points of interest.”¹⁹⁹ At the height of the discourse in 1963, Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund executive director and former military officer Frederick Lewis proclaimed that programs he oversaw embodied “the essential genius of democracy itself.”²⁰⁰ Although seldom returning to such lofty rhetorical sentiment, Fresh Air staff continued through 1977 to proclaim the value of teaching children “to be good citizens” because they held “the nation’s future in their hands.”²⁰¹

The pervasive rhetoric influenced the children as well. Felix J. Cuervo, a former Fresh Air child, provides one example of how patriotic messages influenced young program participants. In 1949 Cuervo offered his first testimonial in support of the program when he wrote a sentimental letter in memory of his former host, Mrs. Rena L. Coburn of Croydon, New Hampshire. In his letter, that the Fresh Air Fund then released, Cuervo described his rise from a “little slum kid with a running nose” to a government clerk and navy seaman, a true example of the “decent hard-working and loyal citizens” that Cuervo claimed the Fund sought to create.²⁰² Nine years later, Cuervo spoke again on behalf of the Fresh Air Fund, noting that the Fund gave him his “first contact with American people, American food, American attitudes,” which led him to write an essay that won the prestigious Freedoms Foundation Award.²⁰³ Through the 1960s, Cuervo continued to praise the Fund for making “a better American of me.”²⁰⁴ Although by 1977 he seemed to have reconciled himself to his city—he served as the president of the Native New Yorkers Association and gave historical tours of New York City streets—he supported the Fresh Air fund during its centennial celebrations.²⁰⁵ Not every alumnus of the program became such a proud, patriotic booster, but those who did, like Cuervo, found much meaning in their assimilation to one version of the American ideal.

The hosts also found patriotic import in the hosting project. Mrs. J. Walter Coleman, a Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, host and local chairperson, asserted in 1948 that Fresh Air hosting helped “preserve the American way of life.” Concerned that “un-American” influences in the “crowded unhappy sections of the big cities” threatened the country “from within,” she contended that children in Fresh Air programs gained a “new outlook on life” by exposure to “our homes” and “the way Americans live.”²⁰⁶ In the same vein, W. C. “Tom” Sawyer, the executive vice president of the Freedoms Foundation and an active Fresh Air Fund supporter, touted the program for taking children out of highly regimented cities where democracy was “in peril.” In the country, city children could immerse themselves in the “American way of life” by encountering chickens and geese, walking “barefoot in the dewy grass,” and swimming “au naturel in a pool.”²⁰⁷

Cuervo’s experience dovetailed well with the Cold War anticommunist sentiment that likewise pervaded the Fresh Air programs. Following a lengthy defense against accusations that communists had “infiltrated” summer camping programs in 1954, Frederick Lewis went on the offense.²⁰⁸ In addition to emphasizing the benefits of democracy and exposure to “real Americans,” Lewis began to promote rural vacations as “one of the most effective antidotes” to “the spread of Communistic ideas.”²⁰⁹ Returning again to a favorite source, the executive director quoted Cuervo, who maintained that the love and affection he experienced in the country allowed him to refute the communists who said that “Americans were all fat capitalists.”²¹⁰ Lewis continued to promote an anticommunist agenda at least through 1963, when he quoted an anonymous Fresh Air alum—most probably Cuervo again—who said that the promise of annual trips to the “green fields” of the country kept him from turning into a “criminal, a communist, a bum.”²¹¹ For Lewis and other promoters, their job of sending children from the city to the country carried the burden of patriotic duty, one that reached out far beyond the borders of the nation to thwart those perceived to threaten the foundations of democracy.

Willard Parsons’ original goal of nurturing children back to emotional and physical health through summertime trips to the country had become a much grander undertaking by the middle of the twentieth century. By the 1960s, promoters no longer stopped after making sure that the children had enough food to eat and grass to stomp. They now imbued their efforts with patriotic themes that called hosts and donors to contribute their time and effort for love of country as much as love of children. As such, promoters positioned the Fresh Air programs to garner wide publicity and gain the attention of those in power, a particularly adept move as government bodies increasingly sought through the 1970s to return responsibility for health care and social welfare to the nonprofit sector.²¹² By linking urban children’s rural summer trips to the popular sentiments of democracy, citizenship, and anticommunism, Fresh Air boosters wrapped themselves in patriotic rhetoric and attracted the powerful to their pursuits. In the process, the interests of the children often took second place.

Fresh Air program supporters thus found willing collaborators in military officials. Frederick Lewis again led the way. During World War II he served as a lieutenant commander in the intelligence division of naval air combat in Japan and then worked for a short time in the Special Devices Division of the Office of Research and Inventions before turning to youth work with the Fund.²¹³ His naval experience helped open doors with funders, board members, and the military itself.²¹⁴ Servicemen gave money to the Fund.²¹⁵ Former navy officers served as Fund officials.²¹⁶ And, in an example of particular privilege, air force bombers flew New York City children to Cape Cod on their way to Martha’s Vineyard on July 10, 1958.²¹⁷ Lewis even brought in members of the army reserves to complete work on a garbage trench at the Fund’s campgrounds.²¹⁸ Given such close connections with the military and the relative lack of employment opportunities for many of the children, Fresh Air alums often ended up in military service following their time in the program, serving in all four branches of the armed forces.²¹⁹

Fresh Air programs also partnered with law enforcement officials. J. Edgar Hoover hosted Fresh Air children at FBI headquarters in 1949.²²⁰ In the 1960s and 1970s, local precincts and officers encouraged youths to take vacations in the country. In some areas, police officers helped select and register children for the summer trips.²²¹ In others, precinct officers planned and developed summer programs for city youths that included Friendly Town visits as one of many available activities.²²² At least one detective used part of his vacation in 1972 to volunteer at a Fresh Air camp.²²³ Police officers also gave talks on drug addiction to visiting Fresh Air hosts, spoke at fund-raisers, and sometimes ran their own Fresh Air programs.²²⁴ Although relationships with local African American communities could still prove tense, as in 1968 when Westchester, New York, police chief Albert Vitolo referred to “you people” in the course of trying to thank African American leaders for “keeping his summer from being too long and hot,” the police who partnered with Fresh Air programs gained a measure of goodwill from the families and children who had positive encounters during their rural sojourns.²²⁵ As with the case of the military, a significant number of Fresh Air alums went on to become police officers themselves.²²⁶

The military and criminal justice network built by staff, board members, and donors extended into the political sphere. At all levels of government, politicians gravitated toward Fresh Air programs. Mayors such as John V. Lindsay of New York City and Oscar V. Newkirk of Kingston, New York, as well as New York governors Thomas E. Dewey and Nelson A. Rockefeller, gained political capital by associating with Fresh Air from the 1940s through the 1970s.²²⁷ At the presidential level, Eleanor Roosevelt promoted the Fund during the 1950s, and Vice President Richard Nixon recognized the advantage of publicly supporting the programs when he and his wife contributed more than $1,000 to the Fund in 1957.²²⁸ A decade later, President Lyndon Johnson praised the Fund through comments made by Sargent Shriver of the Office of Economic Opportunity in thanks for Fresh Air’s support of the War on Poverty, and then, in 1967, Johnson used the Fund’s slogan—to “share summer” with “disadvantaged children”—in urging his fellow citizens to host city children.²²⁹

Politicians paid their highest compliment to the Fresh Air concept by cribbing from the program. In 1968 New York City mayor John Lindsay and Vermont governor Philip H. Hoff, a liberal Democrat concerned about racial integration, brought African American youths from New York City and white youths from Vermont to live together for extended summer stays at colleges and camps.²³⁰ Although controversial, the 1969 Vermont-New York Youth Project garnered more than $400,000 in federal, city, and private funds and brought more than 300 New York children to Vermont for six-week visits.²³¹ The project copied the Fresh Air model in all but name and budget. Most Fresh Air programs sent several thousand children to the country for what it cost the politicians to send fewer than 500.

The combined roster of military, law enforcement, and political Fresh Air supporters fell far short of the list of celebrities who endorsed the programs. During the 1940s, performers from “stage and screen” frequently appeared at fund-raisers.²³² Although few held the national profile of later boosters, singers like the Peters Sisters and performers like Etsy Cooper and Tommy Watkins drew local crowds nonetheless.²³³ As the Fund’s profile rose in the 1950s, so did the caliber of its celebrity support. Internationally respected writer and editor Norman Cousins penned a thoughtful defense of the Fresh Air Fund in 1955 in which he proclaimed that he had “decided to run, not walk, to the nearest telephone to get a child.”²³⁴ During the same years, performers like Benny Goodman, Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, the Radio City Rockettes, and the Von Trapp family also lent their support.²³⁵ Building on past enthusiasm, celebrity involvement reached a new high in the 1960s. In addition to ongoing support from Martin, Merman, and others, A-list celebrities including Ginger Roberts, Joan Crawford, and Harry Belafonte joined in Fresh Air promotion, as did Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme.²³⁶ Playwright Paddy Chayefsky, actress Lauren Bacall, jazz legend Duke Ellington, novelist James A. Michener, and songwriters Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein also helped promote summer vacations.²³⁷ Although the Fund continued to draw celebrities to its promotional ranks well beyond this era, the 1960s lineup shone with a particular brilliance. In addition to new actors and artists, the Fund also recruited athletes such as Willie Mays and Arthur Ashe in the 1970s to further extend its reach.²³⁸ In particular, the support of black celebrities like Ashe, Belafonte, Ellington, and Mays endowed the Fund with a modicum of racial legitimacy during a time of racial unrest and criticism of white-run social programs.

The social and cultural reach of the Fresh Air Fund became evident with the addition of corporate executives to the group’s promotional ranks. A fund-raiser in 1959 featured a “walking pilgrimage” to the private offices of “some of the world’s most famous figures.” The itinerary included visits to the “inner sanctums” of the chairman of RCA, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United Nations, the director of the Museum of Natural History, the president of the real estate firm Webb and Knapp, and the chair of the powerful bank Manufacturers Trust Company.²³⁹ In addition to such influential supporters, the floor traders of the New York and American Stock Exchanges emptied the trading room in 1972 to play stickball, handball, and stoopball in a fund-raising stunt for Fresh Air on Broad and Wall streets.²⁴⁰ At a time when the number of nonprofit organizations nationwide had increased from 12,000 in the 1940s to 600,000 in the 1970s, the Fresh Air Fund rose above the competition and found its base among the wealthy and elite.²⁴¹

High-profile contacts infused Fresh Air in popular culture. Already in 1949, a local newspaper editor wrote that a visitor would “probably feel like a Fresh Air.”²⁴² He took for granted that his readers would understand the reference. Two years later, a columnist featured in a North Carolina newspaper described the antics of a group of reporters who established a “Fresh Air Fund for Stray Cats.”²⁴³ Again, the writer offered no background on Fresh Air funds. In 1956 the nationally distributed Steve Roper comic strip made a reference to boys posing with a starlet for a “fresh air fund poster.”²⁴⁴ In 1969 a reporter for the Chicago Tribune made the point that a juvenile detention center was not “something out of a fresh air fund.” Even the meticulous columnist William Buckley dropped in a reference to “the local fresh air fund” in 1978 without comment.²⁴⁵ The Fresh Air Chorus, a racially integrated group of past and current participants in the Fund’s programs—ages six to sixteen—appeared on the Today show and at prestigious venues such as the Pan Am Building, Yankee Stadium, and Madison Square Garden.²⁴⁶ As a result, the term fresh air became synonymous with more than a quality of the climate. Although less well known in the South and Southwest, in the Northeast, upper Midwest, and parts of the Northwest, Fresh Air meant summers in the country.

Such well-known, politically connected, celebrity-promoted, militarily supported, patriotic organizations had situated themselves at the center of society. In exchange for their endorsement, Fresh Air boosters received public thanks and association with a “feel-good” project. By seeking out high-status, powerful, and famous supporters, Fresh Air Fund staff members ensured a strong and sustainable organization. Even in the midst of the stagflation of the 1970s, when other nonprofits struggled to survive and many smaller Fresh Air programs collapsed, the Fresh Air Fund in New York City thrived. Connections with the elite, the influential, and the wealthy made that stability possible. As was the case with most successful nonprofits in the middle of the twentieth century, fostering such high-profile, elite connections required a conservative, charity-based, individualized outlook on poverty and oppression.²⁴⁷

Yet these powerful supporters who so eagerly associated themselves with Fresh Air often had the least amount of contact with the children or the environment from which they came. Other than congratulating Fresh Air chorus singers after a performance or appearing with a child in a television promotional, most of the highest-profile donors had little interaction with the children who traveled each summer to the country. Although a few, like Norman Cousins, did themselves host children, most of the celebrities, politicians, and writers who supported Fresh Air with such enthusiasm did not fit the profile of hosts who lived on farms or in walking distance from streams, ponds, and grassy lawns. Many of the promoters thus endorsed a program with which they had little or no practical experience.

Marketing Innocence

If Fresh Air programs sold anything, they sold the idea of innocence. Program boosters’ promotional rhetoric wove together milk’s purity, poverty’s virtue, and power’s decency to convince donors and hosts alike that children from the city posed no threat. When promoters described children who drank milk and stared at cows, they evoked the same sort of wonder that had countered the jaded cynicism of an industrializing nation since the end of the nineteenth century. When reporters through the 1970s described children arriving in tatters and departing in new shirts and dresses, they echoed the Progressive Era conviction that well-intentioned do-gooders could save the deserving poor. Like most philanthropists involved in charitable pursuits in the post–World War II period, those who supported the Fund and other Fresh Air programs with major gifts asserted they knew best how to solve the problems of the poor.²⁴⁸ When recruiters attested to the program’s connections to the powerful, they claimed that the city-bred unseemliness could, at least temporarily, be overcome. To the public, the Fresh Air movement fostered only innocent children: bearers of awe, stripped of all wealth, correct and respectable.

Yet more striking than the promotional content of Fresh Air publicity was its reach. During the Cold War, adults cultivated an image of children unburdened with adult knowledge by producing movies such as Bambi and television shows that featured Bozo the Clown and Lassie.²⁴⁹ However, the narrative developed in Fresh Air programs from the onset of World War II through the end of the 1970s extended beyond the realm of popular culture to the spheres of agriculture, finance, and medicine. It was not just entertainment moguls like Walt Disney or television producers like Robert Maxwell and Larry Harmon who marketed the image of uncorrupted children; social service providers did as well. In the case of Fresh Air programs, executive directors like Frederick Lewis marketed adorable children rather than adorable fawns, collies, or clowns.

And the rhetoric used to promote the image of golden childhood lasted a long time. Although the racial demographics shifted from Italians, Slavs, and other European ethnics to African American and Latino youths during the 1950s, the rhetorical strategies remained remarkably consistent. As is evident in chapter 3’s treatment of “grass, color, and sass,” Fresh Air promoters and hosts—who themselves remained white—focused on the children’s unblemished state in much the same way regardless of the children’s racial profiles. By linking the children with symbols of the pristine countryside, establishing the faultlessness of their poverty, and stamping them with politicians’ and celebrities’ seal of approval, the promoters used such time-tested strategies to overcome widespread racial prejudice against hosting children of color.

Those promotional efforts found their staying power in the era’s rising expectations. During the Cold War, many Americans believed that the United States would improve the international community even while creating a better society within its borders.²⁵⁰ By shaping the world around them to match their ideals and by fostering a nation grounded in equal opportunities and unbound by class, all would benefit. In particular, white Americans held a profound belief that the U.S. class structure was both flexible and permeable.²⁵¹ Anyone could succeed. The tripartite presentation of Fresh Air children as milk-pure, wealth-deprived, and power-approved dovetailed with these widespread expectations. Organizers sent children like Fearon and Mojica on Fresh Air trips to be improved in body and mind, taken out of poverty, and given the opportunity to rise—like the country itself—to new heights. During a time when so many saw their fortunes improve over that of the generation before them, few felt the need to assess whether the programs achieved the ends they sought. To the promoters and those who joined them in the Fresh Air effort, the belief that children from the city could transcend class via two-week stays in the country mattered more than did the actual outcome.

The binding of milk, money, and power contextualizes the intense criticism that surfaced in the 1960s and 1970s. Those who said the programs “did more harm than good” knew of the trauma experienced by young children separated from their families.²⁵² They knew of the disparaging remarks made about the children’s neighborhoods. Although at times staff would assert that the children came “from good homes” and had parents who “love[d] them dearly, and wish[ed] them the best on their vacation,” more often staff derided the children’s home communities.²⁵³ As one booster explained in 1955, the Fund sought to “rescue” children from their “substandard homes, and substandard neighborhoods” by providing them with the “comfort and enjoyment of a real home.”²⁵⁴ Critics like Ellen Delmonte, the editorial writer at the Cleveland Post who observed that white suburban hosts locked out Fresh Air children “the other 51 weeks of the year,” recognized the underlying philosophy of the hosting programs: The children’s home environments—including their parents—held them back; they needed to be distant from, and therefore different from, their families to succeed.²⁵⁵

The marketing of innocence thus came with a trade-off. Children got trips to the country. They learned about new ways of living. They got to milk cows and drink milk. The evidence suggests that Fearon and Mojica smiled because they genuinely enjoyed carrying cans of milk around a dairy barn. They did not just grin for the photographer. Likewise, the children’s parents cooperated with the programs and ultimately gave permission for their offspring to travel to the country for the summer vacations. As New York City parent Margaret Joyner said in 1979, “They get to meet new people, it breaks their daily sometimes monotonous summer vacations in the city.”²⁵⁶ Yet, as critics pointed out to leaders of many mid-twentieth-century social service agencies, neoliberal programming came at a cost.²⁵⁷ In exchange for summer vacations, the children and their parents listened to promotions that criticized their home communities and often muted their voices.

But that is not all that happened. Somewhere between the greeting and the good-bye, hosts and children experienced transformation. Not always. Not in overwhelming numbers. But in many instances, adults and children left their two-week visits changed. Chapter 6 calls for a more thorough examination of the breadth of that change because the Fresh Air movement could instill both despair and delight.