Epilogue

CHANGING AN INNOCENCE FORMULA

The Fresh Air formula had remarkable staying power. The instructions were simple. First, filter out those most likely to make trouble before they arrived at camps or homes. Second, limit the ages of those who could return. Next, allow hosts to determine the gender of their guest. Follow this by transporting the children from the city to the suburbs or country but rarely if ever in the reverse direction. Let everyone know that the children will be able to run barefoot in the grass for the first time. Finally, tell the hosts at every opportunity that they undermined racism by hosting black and brown children. Fresh Air programs had settled on all but the last step by the beginning of the 1940s. The racial transformation of the program over the next two decades completed the instructions. Other nonprofit service agencies could only wish for such staying power.

And what a shelf life. Although only a few programs survived the significant decline in host participation and camp programming by the end of the 1970s, the Fresh Air Fund continued.¹ Stabilizing at around 9,000 participants a year being placed in approximately 4,000 host homes and the rest in camps, the Fund went on to report over fifteen million dollars in annual income in 2014 and net assets worth more than 138 million.² Although it had been tweaked along the way, the Fresh Air formula still worked.

A 1996 report demonstrates the remarkable staying power of the Fresh Air prescription. Since the 1930s, reporters had emphasized many of the same themes. A regional newspaper in southeastern Pennsylvania, the New Era, stressed that Fresh Air children arriving in the town of Ephrata had come from New York City, where cabs careened past X-rated movie theaters, noises proved deafening, streets filled with filth, and concrete soaked up heat. In contrast to the sweltering city, the cool countryside of Lancaster County provided healthy, wholesome fun. The young visitors, noted the reporter, shared a “near-unanimous desire to swim.” He also quoted Jeane Flood, who, at nine years of age, had already traveled out of the city for five years, indicating that she had first arrived when only four. Beneath a photo of African American children embracing their white host sibling, the reporter also highlighted the “good relationship[s]” made possible by the program. Although one host hinted at some disciplinary challenges when she noted that “the children don’t come tranquilized,” no other hints of discord appeared.³ All the children quoted were under the age of twelve, except for a lone thirteen-year-old who had been invited back by his host. Every major element of the Fresh Air formula from age to race remained in place.

This approach persisted because the rural hosting model had survived the most dramatic demographic shift of the twentieth century. The same movement that had served few children of color at the onset of World War II came to serve few white children by the end of the 1970s. That stunning demographic shift—one fueled by the Great Migration of blacks to cities and white flight to suburbs—transformed many other urban programs. Settlement houses disbanded. The YWCA adopted a central imperative to eliminate racism. Urban churches changed the style of their preaching, the mode of their music, and the breadth of their programming.⁴ The Fresh Air model stayed the same. Children still traveled to the country for limited summer stays in homes and camps.

However, the guests’ complexion had changed. Bringing poor black or brown children into white middle-class communities opened up an entirely different set of social dynamics than did bringing poor white children into the same settings. Yet administrators did not alter the programs’ parameters. Although they recognized the racial shift and discussed its implications, they stayed true to their model in hopes of including all the children and challenging those hosts not ready to cross the color line in their living rooms. Yet the administrators had to stifle more and more of the children’s disruptions of a model that did not work as it had prior to the shift in racial demographics. Even when race compounded class, the adults kept telling the same story.

The Fresh Air Fund in particular remained invested in its rural and suburban hosting formula, one that was guarded with great jealousy. Readers will have noted by this point what has and has not been included in the body of evidence that supports this study. More than 1,500 newspaper articles from a diverse array of publications, including regional weeklies, national dailies, and historic black newspapers, provided the basis for the public story of the Fresh Air movement. A body of fictional literature about Fresh Air children expanded that public narrative. Memoirs by and interviews with more than forty-five Fresh Air hosts, guests, administrators, and supporters provided essential anecdotal material.⁵ In addition, over 5,000 pages of minutes, promotional brochures, correspondence, financial reports, staff memos, and photographs from eighteen archives offered insight into the internal workings of the sponsoring organizations. Other than annual reports available on its website, however, none of these materials came directly from the Fresh Air Fund.

Unfortunately, the Fund refused to open its records to me. Although I conducted research at many other archives, administrators at the Fund turned down repeated requests for access to theirs. Despite initial enthusiasm and support for this project and a warm welcome when I visited their offices, once they heard about the race-focused nature of my work, they informed me that they had had a bad experience with a master’s student and had decided to close their archives to all researchers.⁶ Fortunately, I was able to gain a clear picture of the internal workings of the organization thanks to financial records, board reports, and correspondence donated to the Library of Congress by Helen Rogers Reid, a long-time Fresh Air Fund board member and supporter. Given the picture of an institution deeply concerned about its public image that emerged from the Reid files, the Fund’s decision to close its archives to outside researchers raises a host of questions that will only be answered by reversing that decision at some point in the future. As history has shown, secrets will not remain hidden forever.

One element of the Fresh story had never been stashed away. The crowd that gathered to greet the 150 children bused in from New York City in 1996 would have known about the wonders of grass. Or at least how much Fresh Air children purportedly loved to run in it. Barbara Horst, the local coordinator for the Fresh Air program in Lancaster, emphasized that children participating in the program received a “feeling of security” through their summer vacations. Horst also extolled the simple pleasures that awaited the children such as learning “what green grass is like to run on barefooted.”⁷ Here was the image that promoters had been returning to time and again for well over a hundred years, a child running innocent, free, and unencumbered by shoes. Although few children ever actually fit that image, the icon still evoked enough nostalgia and good feeling that Horst returned to it with ease when approached by an eager reporter.

And that image of grassy green proved even more long lasting. A 2013 feature in the New York Times on the Fresh Air Fund extolled the pleasure of running in grass. The same article returned to other familiar themes as well by celebrating swimming, contrasting the city’s heat with the country’s shade, highlighting host amazement at children’s manners, featuring city children’s dislike of bugs, and noting age caps set at twelve.⁸

In 2013 as in 1943—or 1953 or 1963 or 1973, for that matter—the image of children running in grass without shoes on their feet captured the story that promoters wanted to tell better than any other. But entrenched racial inequity in the United States has never been—and almost certainly never will be—solved by depictions of black and brown children running through white-owned lawns. Although by no means the principle cause of racism in the United States, the Fresh Air program remains a powerful indicator of racism’s persistence and an enduring symbol of the prevalence of neoliberal approaches to social inequity.

Perhaps a change in the formula might be in order. Youthful idealism about grass and innocence—even in an organization with more than 140 years of experience—has done little to change the racial order. Perhaps the Fresh Air Fund, and all white-led social service organizations and related nonprofits, might start that change process simply by being more honest and open about their past. The monolith of racial inequity and subordination will not change if the past does not inform the present. And we cannot understand that past if it remains shrouded in secrecy.

History calls us to the future. Formulas are meant to be modified. Perhaps someday the Fresh Air Fund will help answer history’s call. Like the green grass so loved by Fresh Air boosters, good growth needs open air, clean sunlight, and new rain. The Fresh Air Fund could also grow by opening its archives to the light and watering its organization with new ideas for bringing adults together without paternalism, speaking directly about racism, and finally realizing that, no matter how attractive, calling everyone innocent will never change injustice.