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KNOWLEDGE, GIRL, NATURE

Fresh Air Tensions prior to World War II

Prolific illustrator James Montgomery Flagg, best known for his patriotic posters of Uncle Sam, captured Fresh Air appeal in a pencil drawing. Flagg depicted a nine-year-old girl preparing her five-year-old brother for a Fresh Air trip to the country. In the sketch, the young girl washes her brother’s face. Flagg penned a caption to accompany the drawing: “You must be washed, dear, we’re goin’ ter the country an’ you might get the beautiful flowers dirty.”¹ In his 1910 drawing, Flagg featured the themes most central to Fresh Air narratives prior to World War II: the naïveté of children, the prominence of girls, and the restorative power of nature. He portrayed two young urbanites who knew little of country life, offered a sympathetic portrayal of a girl taking charge of her brother, and referred to an abundance of natural flowers. Like the fund-raisers who solicited his artwork, Flagg sold Fresh Air based on depictions of nature-centric, female-centered, naïveté-dependent children.

Flagg had good company. Between 1877 and 1938, Fresh Air boosters described children from the city in sweeping generalities that emphasized the young visitors’ nature-centered condition. In promotional accounts the children’s innocent state—one defined by freedom from adult responsibility, lack of sexual knowledge, and proximity to the divine—turned on their simple union with nature. A staple of Fresh Air literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the image of children at play in the sun-drenched, tree-filled, grass-strewn countryside filled the pages of newspapers and magazines. For instance, in 1912 Fresh Air enthusiast Alexander Hynd-Lindsay effused over “a band of little children … out under the deep blue of God’s sky, playing upon Nature’s own green carpet.” He described the children’s laughter as “sweeter than an angel’s song,” emphasized their “innocent vision,” and recounted their “marvel … wonder … and … joy” as the “sweets of Nature” enveloped them.² Whether or not the children’s voices filled the accounts, program promoters like Flagg and Hynd-Lindsay peppered their reports with assurances of the children’s unsullied state.

Promoters featured such accounts from the Gilded Age through the eve of World War II. During these first sixty-one years, promoters, hosts, and the guest children themselves contributed to the growth and development of a program few anticipated would have the staying power and cultural reach to rival venerable charities such as the American Red Cross. The varied interactions between the rural adult hosts and their urban guests reveal three dichotomies at the programs’ roots: naïveté/knowledge, girl/boy, and city/country. Those three dichotomies remained consistent as the movement grew and developed in the midst of increasing urbanization, the rise and fall of the Progressive Era, and an awakened conscience regarding race relations among white northern churchgoers. The combination of ideas about the children’s innocence and the overt historical forces of urbanization, industrialization, and bureaucratization prompted hosts to invite children of all ethnic and racial backgrounds into the intimate environments of kitchens, parlors, and bedrooms. Presented as ignorant of country ways, free of sexual knowledge, and enraptured with nature, the children who stood in such apparent wonder before nature’s glory offered hundreds of thousands of adults a way to counter a growing sense of helplessness in the face of ever more impersonal charity, encroaching federal bureaucracy, and the fading memory of a rural way of life.³ By taking in credulous children but not their worldly wise parents, the hosts felt that they could make a difference. In the midst of offering their hosts fresh hope, the children also took hesitant steps toward establishing their own agency.

The ambitious project of relocating children to the country and returning them to the city drew on a variety of intellectual resources. Early Gilded Age reformers focused on notions of natural bliss. By the turn of the century, promoters focused on hygienic purity. Later Progressive Era activists drew on patriotic ideals to assimilate foreign children into the nation.⁴ Yet the dichotomies of naïveté/knowledge, girl/boy, and city/country reveal how consistently program promoters used and shaped the idea of innocence through 1938.

And they crafted the idea carefully. The boosters first brought Christian-infused ideals of freedom from knowledge of sin, sexuality, and ethical responsibility to their interactions with the children. But as they promoted Fresh Air programs they also linked innocence to nature, focused on fund-raising, and negotiated race, class, and gender. Only tangentially did they connect their ideas about innocence to the actions taken by the children during their country visits. In their passion to bring as many children as possible to the country, the promoters declared that the innocence they had crafted was not just a condition; it was also a location, one found outside the city. By the time World War II began, Fresh Air promoters had long practice in emphasizing the children’s naïveté, focusing on the white and feminine, and immersing the children in nature.

Knowledge

An exploration of the rhetoric and response to children’s knowledge first requires a brief recap of the breadth, growth, and development of Fresh Air programs during their initial sixty years. Prior to the founding of the Fresh Air movement, various organizations in Britain, Germany, and the United States had transported children from the city to the country. Some children became indentured to rural employers; others joined farm families as foster children.⁵ By 1854, the Children’s Aid Society (CAS), under the leadership of Charles Loring Brace, had instituted a “placing out” system—also known as “orphan trains”—in which children from New York City traveled west by train until chosen by farm families. In return for room, board, schooling, and religious instruction, the children worked on the farms, but, unlike indenture, the arrangements remained informal.⁶ The host family could request a replacement at any time, and the CAS agent could remove the child if the host family proved unsatisfactory.⁷ Although fraught with problems ranging from neglect to abuse and burdened by controversy over whether institutions or home placements offered more benefit to destitute children, the placing out movement brought as many as 350,000 children from the city to the country from the mid-nineteenth century through the end of the Progressive Era.⁸ Although focused on long-term work placements rather than short-term vacation stays, the orphan trains provided an early example of how to take children out of the city and bring them to rural settings.

One organization led all others in building on such rural placement models to establish Fresh Air practice, reach, and popularity. The Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund, so named by 1882 in honor of its primary publicity partner, developed the movement and established its most enduring practices.⁹ Originating seven years prior to the Fund’s founding in 1877, Country Week of Boston and the Country Week Association of Philadelphia offered week-long visits to the country for poor children; however, the Fund was the first to provide two-week stays.¹⁰ Because of the efforts of Willard Parsons, a Presbyterian minister who served as the organization’s executive director through 1906, the organization grew to provide country sojourns for as many as 13,000 children per summer by his retirement.¹¹ Working alongside leaders from other Progressive Era organizations like the Children’s Aid Society, the National Playground Association, and the Camp Fire Girls, Parsons joined efforts to protect children from the city. According to Parsons and his contemporaries, as the embodiment of the nation’s future the children needed saving.¹² A series of capable administrators followed Parsons and initiated camping programs, promoted home visitations under the “Friendly Town” slogan, and saw the organization through the 1916 polio epidemic, the stock market crash of 1929, and the influenza outbreaks of 1918 and 1930.¹³ Despite such setbacks, by 1931 the organization had doubled its clientele base with the help of a vibrant network of religious institutions, social service agencies, and civic organizations that selected and registered potential Fresh Air visitors.

Developing in an era defined by both burgeoning bureaucracy and an increasing emphasis on “democratic, affectionate, and child-centered” family life, the initiative flourished.¹⁴ From 1920 through 1939, the Herald Tribune’s Fresh Air Fund served an average of 14,628 children per year, with a low of 9,740 in 1920 and a high of 17,514 in 1925. By 1939, the Fund served about 14,000 children in a year. Through the 1930s roughly half of the children ended up in homes and half in Fresh Air camps, a split that would become more and more weighted toward home stays following World War II. As sustained by frequent reports in a host of media outlets, the Fresh Air Fund defined the field of rural hosting from its inception through the start of World War II and beyond.

The Fresh Air Fund’s predominance at points obscured a host of programs operating under the “Fresh Air” name. Some, like the Herald Tribune’s primary competitor, the New York Times, challenged the Herald Tribune’s leading role by claiming in 1890 that it had originated the Fresh Air work, an unfounded assertion.¹⁵ Others forged ahead by the middle of the 1890s with their own versions of the program such as the Christian Herald’s Montlawn summer home for tenement children in Nyack, only a few miles north of New York City on the Hudson River.¹⁶ The Summer Outing Program of the Charity Organization Society mirrored the Fresh Air efforts at the end of the nineteenth century by placing children in country homes so that the youngsters could benefit from the “mental uplift which comes from the sight of waving grain and swaying corn.”¹⁷ Philanthropic organizations like the Salvation Army and the Volunteers of America likewise developed their own Fresh Air initiatives. Day picnics, steamboat rides, and camping trips rather than home visits typified these programs, which were active through the first two decades of the twentieth century, but the scale of the day-long endeavors outmatched many of the Fresh Air Fund’s highest-profile efforts. In Chicago, for example, the Volunteers of America sponsored a summer picnic in Washington Park that attracted as many as 25,000 children to the 1896 festivities.¹⁸ Altogether, groups in New York City provided 188,742 outings in 1895, a number more than matched by the 356,531 combined outings provided in other cities that same year.¹⁹ By that time, city children also had the opportunity to attend Fresh Air camps sponsored by the Boy Scouts, the Camp Fire Girls, the Sons of Daniel Boone, and the Woodcraft Indians.²⁰

Fresh Air work proved popular in the international community as well. Dutch reformers initiated a program in the 1870s.²¹ Canadians marked the founding of another Fresh Air fund in Toronto in 1901.²² Even more prominently, yet another organization, separate from both the New York- and Toronto-based programs but carrying the same name, operated out of Great Britain beginning in 1892 under the auspices of newspaper publisher C. Arthur Pearson.²³ Active throughout the twentieth century, this Fresh Air Fund purported to serve more than a quarter million children in a single year by 1913, the vast majority of them sent on day trips to the country.²⁴ Other programs eventually began in Scotland and France as well, often in response to articles featuring the Fund’s work.²⁵

The Fresh Air ventures thus grew at a phenomenal rate amid this breadth of international programming. The Christian Herald’s Montlawn program had hosted 40,000 children by 1913.²⁶ In New York City the Harlem Children’s Fresh Air Fund, a smaller program sponsored by the African American community with the backing of the historic black newspaper the Amsterdam News, served a thousand children at a time through day-long outings in metropolitan parks in 1927.²⁷ Although the numbers vacillated somewhat because of the economic constraints of the Great Depression, the Fresh Air Fund alone served more than 600,000 children prior to World War II.

Such growth stemmed in part from the Progressive Era shift away from church-based charity toward professional relief organizations. Organizations like the Fresh Air Fund and its many imitators readily integrated modern business practices to organize and implement the massive logistical undertaking involved in transporting tens of thousands of children from the city to the country and back again. No longer focused on saving souls for the church, charity leaders believed that they could end poverty itself if they designed organizations according to scientific principles and good business practices.²⁸ Sending children to the country in as efficient and sustainable manner as possible became a hallmark of the modern business practices that Progressive Era reformers held so dear.

The Fresh Air programs that would come to sponsor children like the girl who busily cleaned her brother’s cheeks operated in much the same way. Most centrally, the initiatives aimed to save children from the harmful effects—identified in social and physical terms—of the ever more industrial city.²⁹ Adults need not apply. Fresh Air and other charity workers maintained that the city had damaged adults beyond repair.³⁰ As a result, from 1877 through the beginning of World War II the programs publicized their efforts by abasing the city and valorizing the country. Whether in Boston or Seattle, reformers sought to provide children with a healthier environment for their development.³¹ Such efforts flourished across the long Progressive Era wherever concern for protecting childhood coincided with efficient bureaucracies and transportation networks capable of managing the logistics of shuttling thousands of children to and from the countryside.

Yet time and region diversified the movement. Gilded Age evangelical Fresh Air programs focused on redeeming children weakened by malnutrition through no fault of their own. During the Progressive Era, a more scientific approach attempted to mold children and shape them—especially at camps—to pursue civic goals that would save the entire city. By World War I, Fresh Air programs had become a packaged commodity focused on exposing children to middle-class values.³² Following the Great Migration, the programs took on the additional burden of bridging the racial divide.

This chronological shift from recuperative redemption to racial reconciliation unfolded amid limited regional diversity. Some cities simply started later than others. The Fresh Air hub in and around New York City set trends picked up in other metropolitan centers. By 1897, twenty-four cities representing thirteen states reported Fresh Air programs. Fresh Air programs flourished in Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. All these efforts began after the founding of the Fresh Air Fund. For example, initiatives in Chicago started only after New York organizations had tested their programs for a decade.³³

However, regional differences in chronology and size did not lead to substantial program variations. Some planners offered longer stays than others but not according to any discernible regional pattern. Midwest and West Coast hosting ventures included proportionately more religiously sponsored programs and fewer newspaper-funded initiatives than in the Northeast, but this trend had as much to do with date of program founding as with geographical spread. Only when looking to the South did significant regional differences appear.

Southerners rarely joined in Fresh Air exchanges. Excepting anomalies like a few placements in Virginian households, a racially segregated camp-based program in Florence, South Carolina, and a denominationally sponsored initiative to bring children from Gulfport, Mississippi, to the upper Midwest, few southerners participated. From the 1950s onward, northern organizers attributed the lack of southern participation to racial prejudice on the part of rural hosts, a plausible explanation. It was not by accident that the Gulfport program sent participants on 24-hour-long bus rides to the North in order to find willing hosts. At the same time, unlike most white, middle-class suburbanites and rural residents in the Northeast and Midwest, white southerners had opportunities for home-based contact across racial lines, often through employer-employee relationships with cleaning and other domestic staff. In the South, intimate racial contact offered little novelty.

The relative absence of southerners in Fresh Air programming underscores the centrality of race to the hosting ventures. Already in 1882–1884, the pages of the Christian Recorder, a Philadelphia-based newspaper published by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, included conflicting accounts about whether the Fresh Air Fund allowed “colored children” in its program. At first, T. Thomas Fortune, editor and publisher of the short-lived African American newspaper the New York Globe, informed Recorder staff in 1882 that he had made inquiries at the Herald Tribune. According to Fortune, Fresh Air staff admitted that African American children had “not enjoyed the benefit of the fund” up to that date, but they planned to include a “limited number” in a subsequent trip.³⁴ A year later, however, editors at the Recorder asserted that the Herald Tribune had “refused to allow colored children to share the benefit of the Fund,” an accusation repeated the following year.³⁵ At this early stage, African American children rarely took part in Fresh Air ventures, a pattern consistent with other late-nineteenth-century initiatives like the orphan trains.³⁶ Starting in the 1930s, the Children’s Aid Society’s Camp Wallkill provided vacation opportunities for black children, but the workers there did so on a strictly segregated basis and reached only a small fraction of New York City’s 50,000 African American children.³⁷ Like most Progressive Era charities, Fresh Air programs followed the segregationist patterns prevalent at the time.³⁸

Historic black newspapers then stepped into the void. The editors at the Freeman in Indianapolis published an appeal by William Johnson in 1896 that called for the formation of a “Fresh Air Guild” to serve the “helpless waifs” from “indigent” African American neighborhoods.³⁹ By 1908, some communities had formed their own programs, often with the backing of local black newspapers. With the support of the Amsterdam News and the leadership of long-time program director Guilford A. Crawford, the Harlem Children’s Fresh Air Fund conducted frequent fund-raisers to send African American children to camp by the 1920s. Through the 1920s, these and related groups maintained separate camps for African American children in facilities within driving distance of New York, Pittsburgh, and Chicago.⁴⁰ In some locations, upper-crust African American families from New England sent their children to camps as well appointed as those frequented by the children of wealthy white families.⁴¹ However, most of the camp-based Fresh Air programs sponsored by African American newspapers and charitable organizations focused on poorer children. Despite these efforts, camping options for African American children remained few and far between through the middle of the twentieth century.

Policy makers at the Fresh Air Fund modified their approach even as the racially segregated programs developed. By 1919, they claimed to serve “poor children of Greater New York, without respect to color, creed or nationality.”⁴² Editors at the Chicago Defender, one of the country’s oldest and most influential black newspapers, praised the Fund for establishing racially integrated facilities and encouraged their readers to support the effort.⁴³ Through 1938, however, the Fund had no black directors, permanent staff people, or board members, and no record exists of African American hosts participating in the program. Furthermore, the Fund sent African American, Latino/a, or Asian American children only if a host requested them. Concurrent with most other white social service workers at the time, those few Fresh Air sponsors who focused on racial contact believed more in their ability to take control of and correct the black community than they did in racial equality.⁴⁴ As a result, movement toward racially egalitarian programming inched forward through the 1930s.

In sum, more than fifty organizations offered Fresh Air programs during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Although an exact figure remains elusive given a lack of official record keeping in the smaller organizations, average service rates suggest that well over two million children participated in a Fresh Air venture of a day or more in length through 1939. Amid such momentum and institutional vibrancy, administrators in white-led organizations only haltingly included African American children; black-led hosting organizations then founded their own programs. Such numerical growth and racial segregation became intertwined with promotion of the children’s lack of awareness about the world around them. Turning to a discussion of the first of three promotional dichotomies prominent prior to World War II—naïveté/knowledge—reveals how sponsors controlled the children’s image and the children themselves by making sure that the young visitors looked like they knew nothing about the country.

Fresh Air promoters called city children naïve at a time when new child labor laws led to changes in the notion of childhood. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, activists had lobbied for child labor regulation. After repeated attempts, reformers finally saw passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, legislation that regulated child workers’ ages and hours. No longer would children work all day in sweatshops. Except in the case of farms or other family-owned businesses, the instance of adults and children working side by side dissipated quickly. Even in rural settings, by 1918 all states required that children attend school at least through their elementary years. Although legislators included additional exceptions for newspaper delivery, domestic service in private homes, and the entertainment industry, the prospect of children toiling in dangerous, machine-intensive, industrial workplaces had begun to disappear. Rather than worldly wise laborers familiar with workplace banter and tavern talk, the children appeared more ignorant about worldly matters as they worked less and studied more.

Legislative shifts led to changes in conceptions of childhood itself. During the latter part of the eighteenth century, adults began to view children as “innocent, malleable, and fragile” and thus in need of protection. Rather than a time of forced labor, childhood had become a period of sheltering “from contamination.”⁴⁵ In 1905 Chicago Hull House resident and child labor activist Florence Kelley coined the phrase “a right to childhood.”⁴⁶ The slogan implied that children should be able to spend time in play and exploration free of the need to garner wages. Such notions drew on Elizabethan conceptions of childhood as an unencumbered period of frolicking in the grass. With the onset of World War I, however, these romanticized, European ideals grew out of favor.⁴⁷ Instead, during and after the 1920s, movie marketers and commercial vendors propagated images of “cute and loving children.”⁴⁸ As the presentations of childhood spread, so did the assumption that children from all backgrounds, not just those depicted on the silver screen or products for purchase, first and foremost knew little of adult affairs; although they would gain awareness as they grew older, the line between them and adults hardened. As the twentieth century opened, the boundary separating children from adults grew ever more distinct.⁴⁹ Childhood had become its own country. Adults only gazed on it from afar.

The administrators’ attempts to maintain the image of perfectly paired guests and hosts relied on an increasing measure of scientifically based control. Following the growing attention to efficiency, bureaucracy, and rational design made famous by Frederick W. Taylor and other Progressive Era reformers, camp and home hosts touted the “scientific management” principles used to order their programs and combat the social evils that they so disdained.⁵⁰ Hosts and camp directors applied such bureaucratic tenets with particular enthusiasm as they tracked the children’s weight gain.⁵¹ Upon the children’s arrival, usually in public and often at the train station, through the 1930s local organizers lined the children up in front of a scale, weighed them, and recorded the data. They repeated the process upon departure and noted the increases with great satisfaction. “In nearly every case an increase in weight was shown,” declared one administrator of a Baltimore program in 1901.⁵² Parents in the 1920s also participated in the shift toward science as they increasingly relied on psychologists to help them manage bed-wetting, recalcitrance, and other behavioral issues.⁵³ Fresh Air staff soon did the same. The adults likewise supervised children with an intensity that countered a trend toward “free play” present in the 1930s. Rather than reject earlier efforts to mold children from working-class immigrant communities into proper Americans, Fresh Air staff kept the children under “constant watch.”⁵⁴ Whether in monitoring weight gain, drawing on psychological expertise, or supervising recreational activities, boosters managed the children as if the young travelers had no knowledge of the adults’ interest in shaping their bodies and their minds.⁵⁵

Fresh Air promoters marketed their programs based on the children’s naïveté. In winsome accounts, boosters emphasized the children’s lack of knowledge in all matters but especially regarding the country. Some simply reported that the children had never seen “green pastures, cows, chickens and other everyday sights” of the country.⁵⁶ Others told stories about the children’s humorous misadventures, a common tendency in children’s programming at the time.⁵⁷ One Fresh Air veteran explained to a host in 1899 that he had seen many chickens before but only “generally … after they was peeled.”⁵⁸ In 1907 a reporter featured the exclamation of a young girl who mistook a greenhouse for an “onion factory.”⁵⁹ In droll tones another reporter quoted Fergus McArdle, a Fresh Air traveler in 1935 who carried “a brand new fishing-rod all poised for action” but did not know the names of his quarry other than that he wanted to catch “fish—just little green fish, that’s all.”⁶⁰ In every instance, Fresh Air promoters invited hosts to educate their city guests. In return, the hosts told stories of the children’s naïveté and the wonder exhibited by their urban guests. As one account noted in 1934, many of the children had “never seen the typical signs of country life and marveled at the sights they saw from the windows of their train.”⁶¹ Hosts relished the children’s awe at newfound country sights.

Administrators fostered that sense of awe by carefully selecting the children. Second only to fund-raising and transportation logistics, the vetting of children demanded the bulk of staff time. In essence, Fresh Air programs focused on sending only certain children to the country. They did not welcome all. It was not enough for a child to desire to go to the country; that child had to fit agency criteria to be awarded a vacation. Despite the thousands served, many thousands more did not pass through the screens. Those not selected for a summer vacation joined summer day camps, participated in settlement house recreational clubs, swam in city pools, or played in the streets and sidewalks. For example, the Children’s Aid Society sent white children on day boat outings and maintained the Harlem’s Children Center to serve African American children through a robust offering of basketball, boxing, singing, cooking, carpentry, drama, and arts.⁶²

Despite such attractive city-based options, a trip to the country remained a sought-after prize. Upon hearing reports from their siblings and friends about the country trips, others asked to be included. Given that the children’s demand for vacations was consistently greater than host supply, Fresh Air administrators could pick and choose whom they wanted to send.

This highly selective process allowed administrators to imagine ideal exchanges between hosts and children. Even as program promoters sought “ideal surroundings” and “ideal locations,” they also sought ideal children.⁶³ Staff identified specific criteria during this period. The children had to live in the city, be connected with a sending agency, come from an impoverished home, be free of contagious disease, have no record of disciplinary problems, and be of sound body and mind. In short, children had to be “deserving” of charity and free of both physical and moral defect.⁶⁴ Selected children could then “gain” from their hosts’ “nobler,” “new ideals.”⁶⁵ In the exchange presented by boosters, the children’s naïve state fit the hosts’ informed condition. A knowledgeable, country host would be found to carefully correct the naïve nine-year-old girl who had expressed such concern about making flowers dirty with city grime.

The rigorous vetting process also attracted donors. The subsequent reports of contagion-free children visiting rural-wise hosts made charming stories. Fresh Air founder Willard Parsons wrote such copy for decades. The news coverage that he and other boosters generated hinged on the children’s naïveté. Any child who demonstrated knowledge of adult affairs, whether sexual or criminal, or who challenged adult authority would not travel to the country. Only those most likely to accept host discipline and learn from their knowledge of the countryside passed the vetting screens. In addition, childhood reformers’ “beliefs in children’s potential, the restorative power of the outdoors, and a child’s right to play” supported the ideal of an uninformed child.⁶⁶ From the program’s inception through the beginning of World War II, narratives about children’s naïveté piqued the interest of donors anxious about social instability.⁶⁷

Girl

Discussions about gender also helped bring Fresh Air children to the country. During the first sixty years of the movement, gender trumped race and class as hosts focused on whether to invite a girl or boy. As had been the case when program promoters sought to establish the children’s naïveté, the hosts who selected girls more often than boys also helped promote the program.

The preference for girls permeated Fresh Air ventures. Re-invitations highlighted the pattern. Notably, during the 1930s only girls appear as re-invited guests in available published reports.⁶⁸ More broadly, rural hosts expressed a preference for girls regardless of the decade or region.⁶⁹ As a reporter in 1934 mentioned in passing, “Evidently girls were more popular in Frederick County” by a ratio of three to one.⁷⁰ Although an Ohio-based day outing program did plan a “stag” picnic for Fresh Air boys, local police officers, and firefighters in 1937, such male-centered programming remained rare.⁷¹ Whether because of conceptions about preadolescent girls being easier to manage than preadolescent boys or the ability of girls to develop stronger host relationships, girls dominated both first-time and re-invitation lists.

However, boys populated Fresh Air camp rosters. As noted, rural hosts preferred to invite girls. Because hosts could choose the age, the gender—and until the 1960s—the race and the religion of their guests, the trend toward inviting girls meant that many boys did not receive invitations to visit country homes. Instead, organizers sent them to camps. The Brooklyn Urban League announced in 1926 that it had sent 25 “children to private homes” while intending to transport 150 “boys to camp.”⁷² Business groups such as the Rotary Club supported efforts to send city youngsters to boys-only camps.⁷³ In the late 1930s a group of 33 boys who had received neither home invitations nor camp scholarships traveled to a lakeside camp for a weekend in mid-September as a consolation prize.⁷⁴ Although unwelcome in many homes, boys enjoyed camps even if for only a weekend.

The drive to place boys in a camping environment stemmed in part from G. Stanley Hall’s recapitulation theory. In the early twentieth century, Hall, a developmental psychologist, provided educators and social reform advocates with new ideas to reinvigorate their efforts.⁷⁵ Most significantly, he argued that children repeated—hence recapitulated—the trajectory of human evolution as they transitioned “from savagery through barbarism to civilization.”⁷⁶ This recapitulation process, Hall contended, could only come to fruition in white people because the darker, less well developed, and inferior races had not yet advanced to full civilization.⁷⁷ As such, Hall asserted that a childhood devoid of savagery made white boys incapable of coping with the demands of adulthood. To counter this civilized coddling, they needed to run wild and be exposed to nature in the raw.⁷⁸ Camp provided white boys with just such an opportunity.

Hall’s ideas then dovetailed with concerns about the domestic environment and inexpert parenting. Following Hall, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, summer camp directors sought to protect boys from becoming too feminized. Rather than spend summertime with their mothers in the country while their fathers stayed in the city to work, boys went to camp to escape female pampering.⁷⁹ By the 1920s, the wilderness models on which many camp directors based their programs also began to draw on masculine notions of the frontier, lending further support to the premise that boys best became men when kept away from women.⁸⁰ By the 1930s, developmental psychologists had raised the alarm that the home environment did not offer the scientific parenting methods found in camp settings.⁸¹ In short, through the 1930s, camps protected boys from their mothers.

The hosts who preferred girls over boys could count on receiving a white female guest unless they specifically requested otherwise. As already noted, the inclusion of children of color in the programs’ early years had been anemic. Selecting a girl for a Fresh Air visit prior to the onset of World War II meant bringing a white girl from a particular ethnic community. With black and brown children so seldom included, organizers paid much more attention to whether an Italian, Slavic, Polish, or Scandinavian child would be entering a host home. Even though a 1933 newspaper editorial exclaimed over the “poverty, overcrowding, disease, and unemployment” disproportionately affecting African American children in communities like Harlem, and the Children’s Aid Society raised similar concerns, few hosts responded by asking for black girls in their homes.⁸²

Racial selection thus undergirded gender preference. In addition to institutional records and newspaper accounts, fiction of the era and host testimony made clear that rural farmers and small town residents favored girls. The descriptions they offered of golden-locked, curly-haired, sun-dressed city visitors frolicking in the grass emphasized that the young girls posed no threat to their hosts.⁸³ As white girls proliferated in homes and white boys and African American children in camps, these gender-differentiated, race-specific components of the Fresh Air movement depended upon the presentation of nonthreatening girls. Hosts chose guests they thought to be naïve, cooperative, nonsexualized, and female. Prior to 1939, those fundamental choices shaped donor perceptions of the programs’ foundational values. Hosts and program promoters alike strove to allow golden-haired girls to adorn green grasses while keeping both white boys and African American children out of hosts’ homes. As they did so, the adults placed a premium on the one environment that in their view engendered leisure, simplicity, and wonder; they valorized nature.

Nature

Above all else, program promoters emphasized the theme of city and country. More than naïveté against knowledge or girl against boy, the comparison of city and country drove the Fresh Air movement forward. Boosters repeatedly contrasted urban and rural environs to demonstrate the superiority of the country and its ability to restore children to a state of wholeness, health, and purity. If not for the belief that the city harmed children and the country saved them, the Fresh Air program would mostly have remained a backwater curiosity.

Those writing about Fresh Air programs rarely nuanced the urban/rural dichotomy. As established by the muckraking enterprises of journalist Jacob Riis, Progressive Era reformers depicted the city as unhealthy, dirty, crowded, and morally corrupting.⁸⁴ In 1901 the president of Baltimore’s Fresh Air Society reported that the city teemed with “poverty and squalor,” while the country pulsed with “abundance and … elevating influences.”⁸⁵ According to a 1908 account from Denton, Maryland, the “musty city streets” oppressed children cut off from the “smell of clover and buckwheat and the fragrant odor of apples.”⁸⁶ And in 1924, an enthusiastic reporter exclaimed that the “noise, … confusion and … abnormalcy” of the city dulled the senses of children deprived of the country’s “peace and quiet.”⁸⁷ Like others reacting to an increasingly urban world, Fresh Air promoters claimed that distance from the city brought safety, quiet, cleanliness, and freedom from disease, congestion, and crime.

The idea that the country held restorative properties gained much of its potency from nostalgic representations of nature untrammeled. This idea had been a central tenet of the environmental movement from its inception in the late nineteenth century.⁸⁸ In order to promote remedies to urban ills, Progressive Era reformers had long drawn on urban dwellers’ nostalgia for country towns.⁸⁹ For example, Chicago’s Charity Organization Society sought to renew the nation by infusing “small-town values” into urban communities.⁹⁰ With a practiced hand, reformers in social service agencies and cultural institutions continued to draw on misty-eyed memories of the country when describing children’s journeys from the city.⁹¹ In an 1883 account, a fictional Fresh Air child named Dot listened to her mother describe memories of the country, a place with “wide, clean streets, … big trees and blue sky and flowers.”⁹² Above all else, grassy green stood for the country. In multiple Fresh Air reports, children walked on, ran across, scampered around, and gazed at “the green grass.”⁹³ The “wholesome” country contained no ills.⁹⁴

Nonetheless, city children spent their days much like their country counterparts. In the eyes of reformers, the city children lived in wretched conditions. The statistics support their impression. In an era of burgeoning urbanization, human density increased, and temperatures rose. Entire families crowded into rooms meant for single occupancy.⁹⁵ The all-too-recent memory of yellow fever epidemics enhanced the impression of tenement districts as disease-ridden pits of despair.⁹⁶ Yet children also played games, did chores, worked with adults, developed friendships, gossiped about relationships, and dealt with parents. Reformers in the city parks and playground movements built spaces where children could have access to green spaces and recreational equipment.⁹⁷ These activities did not vary tremendously in form and function from those of children in the country. The similarities of the city and country children’s lives did not impress program promoters, however, as much as did the contrasts between home environments in urban tenements and rural towns.

The promoters also asserted that the city further damaged children by distorting the natural order. Once immersed in the country, claimed one 1924 report, Fresh Air children could finally relish their “first experience of real existence.” By contrast, the city’s “canyons” contained a “dazzling, dizzying brilliancy” and dusty, choking fumes that left urbanites confused and disoriented amid “the abnormalcy of a great city.”⁹⁸ According to the unidentified writer, city children came from a place so artificial and polluted that it could no longer be called real. From this perspective, an abnormal, unreal environment would warp the children and stunt their development.

The very supporters who emphasized the unreal nature of the children’s city homes often lived in urban settings themselves. The bulk of those who contributed to, wrote about, and administered the programs lived in the same cities as did the children. Although rural hosts also contributed financially, the highest-profile donors came from the city itself. Those wealthy donors, like many upper-crust urbanites from the late nineteenth century onward, had long practiced summer vacationing, often for extended stays, outside the city proper.⁹⁹ They, too, tried to get away from the city’s summer heat. In essence, the donors paid for the children to do what they themselves did in an August swelter.

Yet the urban donors did not actually live in the same city as the children. Through fund-raising and publicity efforts, two cities emerged: the city of the children and the city of the donors. To be certain, by the turn of the century, many wealthy city dwellers had themselves relocated to the suburbs that had begun to ring the inner city.¹⁰⁰ The proliferation of the automobile accelerated the process but did not remove all donors from the urban settings where they worked, socialized, and read the newspapers that sustained the programs. As such, the city from which boosters helped the Fresh Air children “escape” meant one thing and the city peopled by Fresh Air donors meant another.¹⁰¹ The tenements of the immigrant-populated community of the Lower East Side never met the park-front mansion properties of the Upper East Side. Children in the former community prompted Fresh Air Fund founder Parsons to start the program.¹⁰² Residents of the latter included industrialist Andrew Carnegie and various members of the wealthy Vanderbilt family who avidly supported Fresh Air ventures.¹⁰³

Regardless of where they lived, donors gave to a program based on exposing poor city children to the country, not on exposing them to the wealthy. Even though the country families who hosted Fresh Air children had more financial resources and material wealth than did their urban visitors, program promoters highlighted the contrast between country and city and downplayed the difference between wealth and poverty. In a nation that by the 1930s celebrated self-made millionaires even while underplaying class differences, promoters had little to gain by highlighting class.¹⁰⁴ Rather, they contributed to the voyeurism of the emerging social journalism field in which reporters like Jacob Riis described the destitution of the urban poor for the benefit of a wealthy reading public.¹⁰⁵

The apparent inattention to class did not extend to matters of health and disease. If avoiding class defined Fresh Air administrators’ approach to the city up until World War II, focusing on contagion defined their approach to the country. From the onset of the programs, Fresh Air workers assured hosts that every child sent from the city had been examined thoroughly to ensure that they carried no “contagious disease” or “vermin.”¹⁰⁶ In the late nineteenth century, one Fresh Air chronicler claimed that only a third of the 15,000 children inspected by physicians “passed muster” for passage to the country.¹⁰⁷ By the 1920s and 1930s, nearly every publicity article written about a Fresh Air program pointed out that the children were “thoroughly inspected for disease,” often twice, with the second examination taking place either as the children boarded the train or within twenty-four hours of their departure.¹⁰⁸ The practice, common at the time among camp programs and charity organizations like the Children’s Aid Society, could also include checks for venereal disease, often offered with little or no explanation to the parents or children.¹⁰⁹ Program promoters made certain that the children they sent to the country would not infect their hosts.

Such disease-prevention measures went only one way. Program promoters did not require hosts or their children to undergo medical examinations. Even as promoters assumed that guest children would carry disease, they assumed that hosts would not. The hosts who welcomed guests like the young girl and boy depicted in James Montgomery Flagg’s drawing never had to fill out a medical form, go to a doctor’s office, or have their house examined for disease. According to available records from the program’s first sixty years, administrators simply assumed that homes in the country harbored no contagion. By Fresh Air fiat, country homes thus countered city sickness. As such, few considered that possibility that country people also took ill. By the 1930s, none took measures to ensure that a visitor to a farm, for example, did not bring back a case of measles or scarlet fever to tenement apartments.

At least one physician in the Fresh Air movement challenged the assumption of urban contagion. Dr. Charles R. Conklin, the Children’s Aid Society medical director in 1936, reported that children from the tenements of Manhattan who traveled to the country were “actually healthier than the country boys and girls who lived on the nearby farms.” He explained that, contrary to popular perception, city children resisted disease better than country children because of more-sanitary water supplies, easier access to health care, and more-robust immune systems. Exposure to urban pollution, he claimed, allowed city children to build up “anti-bodies, immunities and tolerances to microbes and other dangerous conditions.”¹¹⁰ To further support his argument, he noted that whooping cough, small pox, typhoid, influenza, and malaria occurred more frequently in rural populations.

Despite such evidence, Fresh Air promoters rarely substantiated their claims about rural superiority. The rhetorical contrast proved far easier to maintain than a fact-based comparison of the respective health benefits of city and country. Anecdotes describing sickly anemic waifs turned into ruddy-cheeked robust cherubs dominated press copy. Convalescent homes set up in the country furthered the image even though the facilities themselves offered good medical care that had little to do with their location.¹¹¹ In those cases where the children had more access to food while on country vacations, health did improve. Yet children could be fed anywhere. Improvement came from better nutrition, not the rural environs themselves. Moreover, those who valorized the country during the first decades of the twentieth century felt that the “purity of nature would protect and preserve the purity of childhood.”¹¹² The country could thus mend both body and soul. In essence, promoters claimed that the city was inferior to the country because the country was better than the city.

Claims about the country’s curative powers returned repeatedly to the food available there. Progressive Era reformers focused on three central childhood concerns: child labor, juvenile justice, and childhood health.¹¹³ Fresh Air organizers attended to the third. To improve Fresh Air children’s health, hosts put food before their guests in copious quantities. Well before the Progressive Era, in the second year of Parsons’ initiative, a booster described the parcels of food taken home by the children that held “apples, pumpkins, butter, eggs, mosses, leaves, vines, ferns, clubs, melons, beechnuts, butternuts, ripe tomatoes, grapes, crab-apples, gourds, plums, and sticks of black birch.”¹¹⁴ More than thirty years later, reporters still described the “beefsteak, potatoes, vegetables and milk” offered to the undernourished children.¹¹⁵ The message was clear: In the country, food abounded.

That abundance came to be represented by wholesome and nutritional milk. Just as grass stood in for nature, milk stood in for food. More so than any other foodstuff, references to milk proliferated throughout the first fifty years of the Fresh Air programs and, as chapter 5 will demonstrate, for many years to follow.¹¹⁶ The reporters who referred again and again to “pure rich milk” created a symbol of the wholesome experience and nutritional value that organizers desired for the children.¹¹⁷ As a cultural icon firmly established within North American culture by the end of the 1930s, the mention of milk evoked rustic farmers squatting on stools before cows’ udders; tall, cool glasses filled with white liquid; and the assurance of a pure product free of all taint and contagion.¹¹⁸

Promoters intensified their grass-covered, milk-fed, city-country rhetoric during the summer. The administrators asserted that their young charges most needed rescue when temperatures soared. Although mid-twentieth-century Fresh Air staff would appeal to hosts based on far more romantic descriptions of summer, through the 1930s boosters associated July and August with discomfort and danger to the children. At times the depictions of the season verged on the piteous as boosters described children “who drag their weary little limbs across the hot sun-baked pavements.”¹¹⁹ In contrast to the humid, sleep-depriving conditions of summer in the city, the country offered safe, comfortable “summer glories” where “the undefiled air of summer blows with health and vigor.”¹²⁰ Fresh Air promoters promised that, amid fresh breezes, the children would be energized, enjoy sunny skies, and embrace the wonders of the country.

The Fresh Air narrative thus told the story of nature rescuing children from the city through full immersion in the country. In 1883 one child “ran nearly wild with delight” as she “reveled among the daisies in the deep soft grass.”¹²¹ By 1905, children still embraced “the joy of wallowing” in the green turf.¹²² Seven years later, the rhetoric had changed little as “children steeped in the sweets of Nature” played “upon Nature’s own green carpet.”¹²³ Because they had been so doused in daisies, grass, and “sweet air,” the children knew no evil, a conviction consistent with the popular conception—in place by the end of the nineteenth century—of childhood as a time of innocence and freedom.¹²⁴ Whether suffused with “God’s … bounty and purity,” “akin to Nature” in “innocence, purity, simplicity, modesty, credulity and humility,” or enraptured with “the great world of Nature” that imbued them with an “innocent vision,” the children who embraced the natural world nearly glowed with goodness.¹²⁵ Although such romanticized descriptions proliferated from the 1880s through the 1910s, they continued through the 1930s as rural nostalgia found a home in Fresh Air programs.¹²⁶ By virtue of such depictions, the children came to represent an innocence defined by freedom from the burdens of knowledge, sex, and urban complexity.

Upon occasion, however, organizers let slip that the casual access to nature provided by rural hosts could not bestow this tripartite goodness on all children. Those deemed medically fit but socially troubled required fuller immersion. Personnel from the Fresh Air Fund made clear in 1934 that they sent “incorrigibles” and “rougher types” to camps rather than homes.¹²⁷ In the more controlled and rustic environments offered by camps during this early stage of Fresh Air program development, these difficult cases met nature unrefined. Even in Fresh Air sites modeled after military boot camps, some campers could not be saved by nature as staff deemed them “too tough” and sent them home.¹²⁸ Those who did stay found facilities where camp directors took great pains to leave nature intact. In a move common to camps through the interwar period, designers of a Salvation Army Fresh Air camp kept much of their site in a “natural wooded condition.”¹²⁹ The children sent to the camps played, hiked, ate, and in some cases slept out of doors. As one director exclaimed about her campgrounds, “I’ve never seen the woods so sweet. The grass has never been so green, I’m sure.”¹³⁰

Such nature-centered rhetoric often concealed the children’s efforts to shape their vacation trips. Newspaper accounts like those describing Fresh Air children concerned about dirtying country flowers made the children look like passive recipients of adult largesse. Yet at least some children pushed back. To counter assumptions about their poverty, a few children made up stories about the size and beauty of their city homes.¹³¹ Others attempted, not always successfully, to determine their own bathing schedule. One girl resisted a scheduled shampooing but, after a spirited debated with her host, finally relented.¹³² Still others wrote to their former hosts asking to be given the chance to return the following year.¹³³ Given the children’s frequent preference for the familiar, the possibility also remains that at least some of the “incorrigible” children may have preferred the structured environment of a camp to a home stay and so manipulated the vetting process to ensure their placement on camp grounds.¹³⁴ Whether by expressing preferences or resisting discipline, some children participated in creating what the organizers assured them would be “the thrill of a lifetime.”¹³⁵

Only when discussing nature did promoters highlight the children’s role in shaping the programs. In the midst of contrasting the city and country, boosters acknowledged that the children helped their hosts notice nature anew. More typically, through the 1930s Fresh Air staff and administrators viewed the children’s attempts to order their own lives as material for gentle ridicule. Those who exaggerated about the grandeur of their city homes protected their egos by reflex. The girl who did not want to shampoo her hair demonstrated the city children’s ignorance about proper hygiene. The ones who requested return visits simply responded to their hosts’ beneficence. Yet when it came to the country, staff and volunteers acknowledged the children’s agency by pointing out that the young guests helped their hosts appreciate their rural surroundings. As Willard Parsons’ eulogist declared in 1912, by serving as “a wholesome object lesson in benevolence,” the children “taught” their hosts that they had “something which the city can never give” in their “green fields and running brooks, pure sweet fresh air, and that pastoral peace which is Nature’s tonic to a weary brain.”¹³⁶

The Benefits of Naïveté

Fresh Air boosters thus linked appreciation of nature to the children’s naïveté and goodness. As the program supporters described the children’s influence on their hosts, they emphasized that the children evoked new awareness and elicited fresh compassion from their adult hosts because the children knew so little. At the same time, the boosters rarely discussed the children’s willful resistance. Worldly wise, recalcitrant children did not move the hearts of donors; naïve but cooperative children did. Children capable of manipulating a system designed to save them could not serve as passive conduits of wonder for their hosts’ benefit. They knew too much. By emphasizing time and time again that the children lacked all knowledge of the country, exercised no volition of their own, and stood ready to be amazed by the beauty of the countryside, the boosters built a loyal donor base.

No wonder then that adults were enthusiastic about Fresh Air. The innocence that these programs had crafted offered an alternative to a growing sense of collective loss. Cities may have been expanding, but donors and hosts could yet put children in contact with nature’s remains. Charities may have otherwise become ever more impersonal, but Fresh Air programs offered hands-on contact with poor people grateful for the service and “deserving” of the opportunity.¹³⁷ Even as bureaucracies grew more complex, Fresh Air stayed simple. In the face of growing cities, professionalizing social services, and burgeoning bureaucracies, a program focused on doing only one thing well offered a hopeful contrast. Even the hard-boiled editors of New York’s Communist Party paper Daily Worker called in 1937 for the city to set up dozens of Fresh Air camps so that every child in New York could experience “health and happiness” in the country.¹³⁸ Within the confines of Fresh Air during the programs’ first sixty years, the adults who worried about controlling their own lives could at least take a child into their home—or by giving make it possible for others to do so—and so better the world.

The anecdote that starts this chapter captures the most foundational of the themes prior to 1939. What could be more appealing than a Fresh Air child concerned about sullying flowers with city dirt? The image of this child so deliberately crafted by Flagg gave adult donors and potential hosts clear evidence of her naïveté, her nonthreatening gender, and her nature-focused purity. Such a girl and her very young brother proved so attractive because promoters promised that they would be rigorously vetted before being brought into their hosts’ homes: not too old, well off, sick, misbehaved, or dark skinned. In essence, the boosters had crafted the innocence that the sketch evoked. Such a presentation—one wrapped in summer, bedecked with nature, girded by fundraising, and embedded in the countryside—would eventually be recast by future boosters and called by other names. As chapter 2 makes evident, the children themselves would also disrupt the stories told about them. The young visitors made choices that knowledge, girl, and nature did not always obscure.