6
GREETING, GONE, GOOD
Racialized Reunion and Rejection in Fresh Air
Luis Diaz felt like a member of the Cooley family because of diabetes. Not his—his host brother’s. In the middle of the 1970s, at the age of ten or eleven, Diaz told his host mother, Anne Cooley, that he did not mind spending his vacation in the hospital, not if his host brother Timothy needed medical treatment. Diaz told Anne that he wanted to be at the hospital also. He was willing to give up his summer to be with Timothy. As he told Mrs. Cooley, “If Timothy is hurting, I feel like I should be in the hospital with the rest” of the family. He could tell that this made her happy. Even if it meant shortening his summer-long visit to three weeks or, in subsequent summers, learning to give insulin shots to his host brother, he “felt like he was part of the family” by spending his Fresh Air days breathing hospital air.1 He had been greeted well.
Diaz crossed multiple boundaries to spend time with the Cooleys. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1965, Diaz moved with his family to New York City, where both his mother and father found jobs out of the home. The first time he visited Anne and Roger Cooley and their three sons, David, Bradley, and Timothy, in Califon, New Jersey, in 1974, he became aware that some families earned enough income to allow the mother to stay home full time. Roger Cooley’s job at the World Trade Center allowed Anne to focus on the three boys. Diaz crossed over from relative poverty into wealth every time that he traveled to Califon. He also entered Lutheran territory as a Roman Catholic and stayed with white people as a Latino. Even so, he called his host parents “mom and dad” and his host brothers’ grandmother “Grandma Rich.”2
Greeting
The Cooley family greeted Diaz each summer in the context of a shrinking program. Even though children across the country continued to clamor for Fresh Air vacations, the number of available slots had begun to diminish. As an organizer in Cleveland had already noted in 1971, “There are always more children who want to come than we can accommodate.”3 Through the 1970s, other program administrators attributed the drop-off in host volunteers to the economy, mothers working outside the home, time-consuming work assignments, and “a rising tide of suburban apathy.”4 Between 1969 and 1979, the number of Fresh Air Fund annual placements in camps and homes dropped from a high of almost 18,000 to 13,000, a number that would continue to decline through the 1990s until stabilizing in the range of 8,000–9,000 summer placements. The Cleveland program dropped from a high of 2,000 down to 900 placements by 1979. Other programs simply stopped sending children altogether, shortened stays to a week’s time, or, in one instance, arranged only weekend trips.5 Return visits also began to disappear as organizers tried to cycle as many children as possible through the program.6 Unlike so many other children interested in rural vacations, Diaz not only got to be greeted by the same family each summer; he also got to stay for weeks on end.
The Cooley family strengthened Diaz’s sense of belonging by integrating him into all their routines. When he stayed in Califon, Diaz had his own bed and received new clothes. Like his host brothers, he earned an allowance by doing chores. He had his own bike when he visited and used it to ride around in a “bicycle gang” with his host brothers and their cousins.7 They spent their allowances at a nearby country store on sweets and snacks that they would then trade with one another. When Anne and Roger Cooley went on a date, they left Diaz, as the oldest of the four boys, in charge. The Cooleys also disciplined Diaz like they did their own children. On one occasion, Diaz got into a fight with an older cousin who had been bothering his host brothers. Although Mrs. Cooley docked his allowance, in private she thanked him for intervening on behalf of her children. Diaz felt so welcomed by the Cooleys that one year he spent two winter weeks with his summer hosts.8
Yet the warm greeting Diaz received from the Cooley family came with caveats. Even though he stayed longer than most Fresh Air children, he had to return home in the fall. Only once did he spend time with the Cooleys in the winter. With the exception of an afternoon the Cooleys spent visiting Diaz in New York City, Diaz always had to travel in their direction. When life in Califon got too stressful, as when Timothy’s medical condition required professional attention, Diaz’s stay shortened. He had a bike when he visited, but he could not bring it back to New York City.
He also became a teacher to his adopted family. Like so many other Fresh Air children before him, Diaz taught racial lessons to his hosts. As a light-skinned Puerto Rican, he helped his hosts learn about the tremendous racial diversity within the Latino community. As his younger brother Nilson explained about his white hosts, we “changed their minds around” because they “had never seen an Hispanic before.”9 Diaz also interpreted the city to his host family. The Cooley brothers thought he came from a “concrete jungle” devoid of vegetation and expressed amazement at his ability to climb trees. He explained to them that “of course” he knew how to climb trees. Just because he lived in the city did not mean that “absolute concrete” surrounded him. He also taught Anne Cooley about the men who partnered with men and the women who partnered with women in his home community.10 He expanded the worldview of his hosts simply by telling them about his life.
Along with teacher, he played the role of a grateful recipient. The Cooley family gave him the run of their extensive property and that of a nearby pond that Grandma Rich kept stocked for the boys’ fishing expeditions. While living with the Cooleys each summer he learned how to swim, build a fort, play tennis, compete in dodgeball, outrun a bull, and toss cowpucks—dried cow manure—in country fields. He ate a yam for the first time as well as a potato with the skin still on it. One summer he even joined his host siblings at 4-H camp. Another time, he accompanied the Cooley family on their summer vacation.11 As long as he expressed appreciation, cooperated, and did not sass back, he had a summer home.
That is until he turned sixteen. The Fresh Air Fund would send re-invited children to their hosts only until that age. Thirteen-year-olds, as already noted, who did not get re-invited could no longer participate. For example, Luis’s brother Nilson did not return to his host family after his twelfth birthday.12 However, Luis had found a family willing to extend their invitations through 1979, the year of his sixteenth birthday. That summer, or perhaps the one before—the details blurred in Diaz’s memory—he had a crush on an older girl in the community. Although his affection remained unrequited, he did briefly date another local girl in one of those last summers. Given his light skin and long-term connection to the community, no one seemed to mind. He did remember with much greater clarity an argument he had with Anne Cooley that last summer. They discussed religion. It did not go well. He never went back. The greetings had ended.
The family that had welcomed him so well for six consecutive summers lost touch with Diaz. After he served in the Marine Corps and returned home to build a life as an adult in New York City, more than a decade passed before Diaz looked up the Cooleys in the phone book and gave the family a call. Although the timing of the contact found his former host family in a crisis that left them with little time to reconnect with their former Fresh Air guest, he did try again several years later and reconnected via a social networking site. At the time of this writing, Diaz hoped to someday greet Anne, Roger, and a few of their children in New York City, where he would take them to dinner and a Broadway show.
Diaz had nothing but praise to offer his former host family despite their relative lack of contact. The summers he spent in Califon made him “into the man that I am now.” The care and inclusion he felt from his host parents and brothers kept him from a life of drugs and crime. He stated, “I never had a drug problem and I have never been arrested.” Moreover, because of the example set by the Cooley family, he felt challenged to improve his life condition. “I bettered myself,” he said, “by being around people” like the Cooleys.13 The Fresh Air program worked for Luis Diaz. He had, indeed, been greeted well.
Gone
Janice Batts could not claim the same. One summer in the latter part of the 1960s, Batts stayed with a Fresh Air host family in the Midwest. Batts had been traveling to towns in Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana from her home in the Pilsen neighborhood on Chicago’s Near West Side since 1962, when she turned four (see figure 11).14 About six years later her hosts took her and another guest, a young boy from a different church in Chicago than the one she attended, to a public swimming pool.
When her hosts announced the plans for the day’s recreation, she remembered exchanging a nervous glance with the other guest. Both of them knew that black children like themselves could not go to public swimming pools in Chicago. They assumed that they would experience the same kind of harassment in the country that they did in the city. Unfortunately, they assumed all too correctly. On their way into the pool, a group of boys started calling out, “Look at the niggers.” Rather than turning back to the car and leaving or confronting the boys to make them stop, Batts’s hosts told the children to ignore the chanting even as it escalated and the boys repeated “nigger” over and over again. Batts and her hosts stayed until it became too uncomfortable for the hosts, and they finally went back to the car.15 Her hosts never discussed the incident with her.
Batts connected with the Fresh Air movement through the Mennonite Community Chapel on 18th Street in Chicago. Since 1957, white Mennonites had gone door to door in an effort to bring local community members into their largely white congregation.16 Unlike many members of the Pilsen community, Batts’s foster mother welcomed the visitors into her home and soon took her young daughter to the storefront church building. Because she was one of the few black residents to do so, Batts’s mother received special attention and invitations to visit sister congregations in downstate Illinois. While on those visits, Janice Batts endured humiliating stares, unwanted touching, and inappropriate questions about the size of her nostrils and the texture of her hair.17 Even before she arrived on one of the visits, she wanted to be gone.
FIGURE 11. Four-year-old Janice Batts holds a kitten while on a 1962 Fresh Air visit to the farm of Earl Gingerich in West Chester, Iowa. Used by permission of Janice Batts.
Her Fresh Air visits included some of the same treatment but also had some benefits. For example, the train rides to Iowa provided much excitement, as did getting to run barefoot in the grass. She got to connect with other children her own age and, as she later recalled, enjoyed being somewhere other than the city. In addition, she had two weeks in the country away from the beatings she received at the hands of her foster mother, who would force Batts to strip naked before she would beat her, and her alcoholic foster father, who would often beat her in the middle of the night. When she first started participating in the program—and for several years to follow—she looked forward to going to the country.
Yet racial and sexual land mines riddled the terrain frequented by Batts and other African American children from Chicago. Although the train rides excited them, they also found the 2:00 or 3:00 A.M. arrival process in Iowa City unsettling. “It was like a slave auction,” Batts explained. The local organizers called out the names of the white hosts followed by the names of the black children. Although eventually discontinued, the practice of draping identification tags around the children’s necks enhanced the image of children being distributed to the highest bidder in the hope that she or he would get, as a host in Kansas once wrote, “the best one” of the group.18 Although sponsoring organizations experimented with various transportation methods, most programs arranged for the children to be picked up at a train station or large parking lot, a practice that led invariably to auction-like scenes. The hosts came, picked up their charges, and were gone.
The hosting environment itself proved even more challenging for Batts. During the mid-1960s she spent many summers with the Troyer family in Kalona, Iowa. Although Batts remembered with fondness unusual events like living in a turkey shed while the Troyers built a new house, she vacillated between boredom at being the only child with an older host couple and terror at the possibility of being assaulted by one of the Troyers’ grandsons. A year or two older than Batts, the grandson hit her without fear of reprisal. When she complained, the adults explained that the boy had “problems” and just needed to take a nap.19 In the process, no one protected her from physical harm.
Batts also learned to expect inappropriate questions and racial ignorance. Like the children she met on church visits in downstate Illinois, children in Kalona and other Fresh Air sites asked her, “Why is your nose so wide? Do you sunburn? Why is your hair curly? How [do] you know when you are dirty?” Her hosts, as well as the hosts of the other girls who traveled with Batts, had no knowledge of how to care for a black girl’s hair. Consistent with the experience of many other Fresh Air children across the country, the girls in Batts’s group returned home at the end of the two-week visit looking “hideous” because their host mothers had not even touched their hair, let alone treated it properly.20 Her own hair would get matted and foul smelling for lack of someone to help her care for it. Batts recalled, “Some of them would say, ‘I just don’t like the way it feels.’ … We’re kids. Why would you say that to us?”
The worst had yet to come. She finally found the courage to ask for different hosts. In the summer of 1969, Batts, an eleven-year-old veteran of seven years of Fresh Air hosting, traveled to northern Indiana to stay with an older couple. In this instance, the host mother worked outside the home during the day, and the host father worked from their home, the parsonage of the church where he was pastor. On the first day of her arrival, the pastor gave Batts a tour of the property. In their garage, he invited Batts to sit on the seat of a John Deere riding mower while he climbed on the hitch behind her and put both of his hands on her breasts. Years later she remembered, “It felt like a bolt of electricity had hit me. And I just froze. I did not know what to do. I immediately knew I had no power in this situation. I was totally out of my element. I’m black. I’m a kid. These people have invited me to my home. And for Christ’s sake, the man is a minister.”21 She knew no one would listen to her.
The abuse continued through that visit and that of the following summer. With the host mother out of the house during the day, the host father had no reason to limit his access. Feeling trapped, Batts learned to reciprocate his touching. When the couple invited her for a third visit, Batts knew that if she went back again, she and the host father would start having sex, so she told her mother that she had outgrown the program and no longer wanted to participate. It was time to be gone from Fresh Air. Batts carried the secret of the abuse until she finally told someone while at college. To her knowledge, the host father never received any penalties for his actions.
Batts never again participated in Fresh Air visits but did return to Kalona to attend high school. Sponsored by a church-run program known as High Aim that brought “minority” youths to Mennonite schools, Batts experienced what most Fresh Air children could not, living in a former host community as an adolescent.22 She soon realized that the local community had never fully accepted her. Young women she had played with during Fresh Air visits refused to socialize with her. Her host mother accused her of stealing a ring only to apologize a few days later after finding it between the floorboards of her own bedroom. However, romance brought the most heartache. Some of the young men at Iowa Mennonite School told her they could not date her because their “friends and family [would] quit talking” to them. But one young man did invite her on a date. Two days later, he walked past her on the school bus and sat down without saying a word. When she confronted him at school, he explained that his father had told him he could not see her anymore because she was black. “Those words hurt so bad,” Batts said, “because that was one thing I couldn’t change. If [he] said because you smell or something like that, I could take a bath. Anything else I could change if I still wanted to. And I just took off running and ran the length of the school down to the girls’ bathroom. I just cried and cried.”23
Batts assesses her Fresh Air experience bluntly. Memories of inhaling fresh air and of running barefoot in the grass stayed with her, “but the rest of it can go to hell…. I wish I had not had that experience because it was two weeks of being afraid, two weeks of people staring at us, poking at us, asking us ludicrous questions.”24 At the end, she wanted it all to go away.
Good
Two stories from former Fresh Air children cannot represent the entirety of the Fresh Air movement from 1939 through 1979. Given that hundreds of thousands of children participated during that period, even a book based on thousands of written reports and dozens of oral histories can claim only to identify the broadest of trends. However, Diaz and Batts do represent the two most influential legacies of the mid-twentieth-century Fresh Air movement: the greeting and the gone or, to be more specific, racialized reunion and racialized rejection.
Diaz’s story captures the theme of racialized reunion. During this period of racial transformation, when programs shifted from serving mostly white ethnic children to serving African American and Latino children, leaders of the Fresh Air movement promoted the idea that all racial problems could and would be solved if only the rest of society got along as well as did the children of color and their white hosts. Diaz and the Cooley family embodied this ideal. Even though they had never before met a Puerto Rican, the family greeted Diaz without reservation. Despite hints of paternalism and the inherent limits of distance, age caps, and length of stay, Diaz and the Cooley family did as best they could to reconnect each summer, upon occasion even during the year. Diaz did lose touch with the family after he turned sixteen, but his host family accepted his phone call years later and responded positively to his request to connect via e-mail.
Batts’s story illuminates the second central theme: racialized rejection. In this instance, Fresh Air movement leaders built a program on the idea that interracial relationships were not worth supporting once children of color became adolescents. Batts’s experience in high school made evident that hosting a teenager interested in romance introduced numerous complications that most white, rural, and suburban communities would not confront. The multiple problems she faced as a preteen including physical and sexual abuse as well as overt racial harassment only underscore how unwilling and ill equipped most hosting communities were to truly welcome children of color even before puberty became an issue. As Fresh Air alum Cindy Vanderkodde explains in chapter 4, “[O]nce I became an equal … there was just no interest there.”25
The two legacies intertwined. As leaders of the Fresh Air movement sought to remain relevant, they developed both themes. Images of racialized reunion peppered publicity materials; age caps fostered racialized rejection. Despite the goodwill generated by the programs, the person-to-person connections they supported, and the initiative displayed by the children in educating their elders, the Fresh Air movement could not escape these two legacies. Racialized rejection invariably compromised racialized reunion. Some former Fresh Air children did go on to successful careers as attorneys, CEOs, actors, police officers, teachers, and national magazine editors.26 Several of them credited their experience with Fresh Air for their achievements.27 Yet the bulk of the success stories told by eager press agents for the various Fresh Air ventures came from children in the era prior to the racial shift. Fewer of the African American and Latino alums who had been rejected once they became teenagers told such stories.
Racialized reunion and rejection connect at the point where the rhetoric of innocence employed by Fresh Air promoters—the “good” of this chapter’s title—defines them both. A fictionalized anecdote distributed widely by Fresh Air staff first reiterates the centrality of innocence in the movement’s promotional efforts.
In 1962 Richard Crandell tried to subvert racism by writing a story about an urban child and a frog log. Crandell, the public relations director of the Fresh Air Fund, had penned a story of a black child teaching a white adult; “Carol” led “Bill Stout” by the hand into the wilderness. The frog log of Carol’s and Stout’s interest jutted through algae-covered water into a pristine lake. Carol did not let go of Stout’s hand until they arrived at a muddy shore, where Carol stretched on a log to peer into the water. After reporting that she had seen only “a water snake … and a minna,” Carol invited her white visitor to take a turn but to be careful because he was “too heavy.” Despite Carol’s warning to the contrary, Stout stepped on a tuft of grass and promptly fell face first in the mud. With Carol’s encouragement, he then cleaned himself as best he could and ventured out to the frog log. As he gazed beneath the surface of the water, Stout saw “another world” filled with bright pebbles, flashing sunfish, swimming frogs, and “waterbugs that pirouetted like some aquatic ballet.” A poor, eight-year-old African American camper at the Fund’s reserve in Dutchess County, New York, had opened the eyes of a white adult visitor bused in to see the Fund’s work firsthand. In gratitude for his new appreciation of nature, Stout made his way back to the muddy lakeshore, where, in Crandell’s words, Carol waited for him with “innocence and love and faith.”28
Many others joined Crandell in celebrating the children’s innocence. While World War II raged on, Ruth Millett from Altoona, Pennsylvania, sought to initiate a new Fresh Air program in 1940 that would ensure a “happy, innocent childhood” for children affected by the trauma of combat.29 In 1953 a host wrote an entire article describing the wide-eyed wonder and innocence of a New York City youngster who built a birdhouse and “showed stars in his eyes” as he displayed it to his host mother.30 In 1969 a Chicago reporter described youthful Fresh Air participants as “innocent victims of poverty and legalized racism.”31 Veronica Anthony, the Friendly Town Program director in 1971, stressed “these are little children, innocent kids.”32 As long as they remained young enough for the programs, up until they entered adolescence, the children’s innocence featured prominently in boosters’ rhetoric.
The rhetoric of innocence did change somewhat with time. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, innocence came to mean freedom from cares and worries. By the 1960s, program promoters shifted away from a long-standing emphasis on children’s openness to religious instruction. More importantly, in response to the mid-1950s demographic shift from a predominantly white corps of visitors to a predominantly black and brown one, boosters intensified their rhetoric in part to compensate for the perception that children of color did not belong in white rural and suburban communities. Promotional copy began to feature stories stressing the children’s obedience, their respectable appearance, their ability to foster friendship across racial lines, and their never—under any circumstances—posing a danger or threat to their hosts. While still emphasizing the previous qualities of innocence, by the 1970s promoters added the wrinkle that, although the children knew little of the country, they knew much of the city and could instruct their hosts about that world.
Crandell’s focus on Carol’s ability to renew Stout also demonstrates how the newly minted idea of black children free of moral contagion served white ends. Up to the middle of the twentieth century, childhood innocence had only one color: white.33 It took the civil rights movement to establish that black children could also be innocent.34 In the process, racial innocence became a “form of deflection, a not-knowing or obliviousness that can be made politically useful.”35 In the context of Fresh Air, the perceived faultlessness and naïveté of African American children like Carol made white adults like Stout feel good. By twice referring to Carol’s “brown hand” and describing Stout as “settler” and “Dan’l Boone,” Crandell made sure that his readers understood the racial terrain.36 In Crandell’s account, the unfamiliar territory of black innocence moved Stout nearly to tears.
A thorough exploration of the innocence rhetoric exemplified in Crandell’s story begins with the work of Shelby Steele. Steele made much of innocence as faultlessness in his 1990 book on race in the United States. He contended that white guilt for black victimization kept the two groups mired in “racism and racial disharmony” as they struggled over who got to claim more innocence and therefore more power.37 “Innocence is power,” explained Steele, because “our innocence always inflates us and deflates those we seek power over. Once inflated we are entitled; we are in fact licensed to go after the power our innocence tells us we deserve.”38 As a result, blacks sought to maintain their guiltlessness by focusing on racism rather than “individual initiative,” and whites sought to reclaim a blameless state by “helping the disadvantaged.”39 According to Steele, in a world of such racialized blame swapping, no one escaped his or her assigned roles.
Steele failed first by ignoring the initiative the children took while on their trips. Steele claimed that a theme like racialized rejection furthered victimization and maintained the status quo. According to his analysis, focusing on racism led only to a community remaining mired in poverty and oppression. However, the African American and Latino children who participated in Fresh Air programs faced down the racism they encountered and established themselves as teachers, not victims, of their adult hosts. Children like Diaz and Batts taught their hosts how to negotiate racial minefields, a process that revealed much more about the children’s expertise than their victimization. Steele did not take into account children who never thought of themselves as victims and confounded prevailing expectations about who should be teaching and instructing whom.
Fresh Air children also complicate Steele’s argument as purveyors of blamelessness rather than guilt. Other charity-based programs predicated white innocence on black victimization. In the Fresh Air movement, by taking children out of the communities where the victimization occurred, organizers could, at least for a short while, drape a new racial mantle over the children. Rather than being trapped in victim status, the children found natural wonder, color-blind friendship, and barefoot bliss. Promoters and publicists thus tried to have it both ways. By emphasizing racialized reunion, they presented hosts who bore no blame for racial strife because of their willingness to invite a black or brown child into their home. The discourse about the hosting ventures likewise depicted fault-free children enraptured with nature and eager to make friends with white people. Steele’s formula breaks down when everyone gets to be innocent.
The boosters’ presentation of that all-embracing faultlessness thus grounded Fresh Air. One of the central reasons that programs proliferated throughout the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West Coast during the 1960s and 1970s was that, in the recurrent and consistent Fresh Air rhetoric, everyone involved got to be free of blame for racial strife. Fresh Air publicists and boosters actively promoted ideas about the children’s blameless state while also lauding the fault-free hosts who opened their homes during a time of racial foment. Reporters and publicity staff praised the adults for hosting a Fresh Air child and for their selfless sacrifice. Involving little of the controversy of a sit-in but offering all of the decency of an adoption, a Fresh Air visit simply made the hosts look good in the eyes of other white liberals. White suburbanites or rural farmers interested in doing the right thing about race had only to invite a child into their home for a two-week stay to participate in one of the few programs of the civil rights period that enhanced the reputation of all involved. The critics who called the programs into question rarely penetrated the publicity shield maintained each summer by heartwarming stories in the national press.
Fresh Air programs attracted so much attention for so long for two other central reasons. First, summer hosting ventures offered symbolic relief to collective concern about urban growth. From the end of the 1930s to the end of the 1970s, the United States had shifted from a country evenly split between rural and urban communities to one dominated by city centers. That shift engendered widespread fear about the deleterious effects of urban living on the young. Sending children from the city to rural communities assuaged those fears on an annual basis. The Fresh Air program promised that two weeks surrounded by nature would make up for fifty more surrounded by concrete. Moreover, program promoters avowed that they would insert children into rural environs in a way that would promote democracy. The Cold War environment fostered keen interest in any program that countered assertions of American hypocrisy. A country that supported democracy abroad often failed to do so at home in the face of widespread racial and class inequities. Bringing poor black and brown children to the country demonstrated the values of liberty and democracy in action.
A pervasive rhetoric of innocence undergirded the program’s long-term success. The greeting and the gone turned on the good. Hosts appeared faultless because of racialized reunion. If they embraced a dark-skinned child, they had no need to do anything else to demonstrate their concern about racial inequality. If they rejected that child once she or he entered adolescence, the hosts remained blameless because they had simply followed program guidelines. The Fresh Air promoters who told story after story of racialized reunions wove the themes of sexual ignorance, worldly inexperience, natural wonder, racial openness, and overall decency into their tales. The critics who countered that narrative did so by noting that racialized rejection corrupted those same exact themes. Both promoters and critics relied on innocence to make their case.
Yet an analysis of the rhetoric of innocence cannot explain all the historical dynamics of Fresh Air. For example, the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas offers purity as an interpretive trope. Douglas notes that when members of a group differentiate between the pure and impure, they define boundaries and create order and security. That which they define as impure or dirty is nothing more than matter out of place. It is dirt because it does not belong.40 And that which does not belong is dangerous because it threatens order in society.41 From this perspective, the children, no matter how young, represented danger from the very start because they were out of place. Hosts ameliorated that danger by limiting the amount of time the children spent in their homes and using age and gender preferences to get them to fit in with their families. As the children grew older, they fit in less and less, the desire to maintain boundaries grew more urgent, and the danger expanded. Hosts rid themselves of the impurity they had tolerated for a short while. Fears born of urbanization and the Cold War could overcome concerns about purity for a short time only.
A focus on nature provides additional insight. The idea of nature itself as a social construct imbued with the hopes of days past and those to come, especially as expressed in the concept of wilderness, has defined the difference between civilized and uncivilized in the twentieth century.42 In the process, nature in its pristine state has been highly racialized and treated as a paradise for white people.43 The Fresh Air children soaked up the possibility of becoming civilized by immersing themselves in natural surroundings. They became a kind of noble savage—in tune with nature, capable of instructing white people, possessing insight even at their young age.44 Nature, as a restorative force, cured them of the ills of modernity and corruption found in the urban environment. Yet they could revel in nature for only so long. Once the children became jaded about nature, they no longer received a welcome. The racial paradise returned to its previous state.
Yet attention to the construct of innocence used by Fresh Air boosters enhances these and other interpretive approaches. Where analysis based in purity unearths the boundaries that separate clean from unclean, interpretation grounded in innocence reveals those boundaries’ permeability. In the midst of the multiple pressures of the Cold War era, Fresh Air children reached out from the city to push through the dividing wall of race, class, and status separating them from their hosts to influence the adults even as the adults influenced them. Where analysis based in nature lays bare the irony of wilderness civilizing urban residents, interpretation grounded in innocence shows why that civilizing impulse so often alienated those it sought to serve. Amid urbanization’s corrosive effects, Fresh Air children shrugged off the mantle of innocence by expressing disdain for streams, woods, and grassy fields because they found little of value in water, leaf, and blade, preferring instead the pulse and quickstep of city streets. Likewise, a study of the rhetoric of innocence also allows for a more rigorous interpretation of the relationship of the center and periphery. By attending to innocence, the constant exchange between the core and the margin in the midst of historical change becomes evident.45 Leaders in the Fresh Air movement refreshed and rearticulated their innocence-focused narratives by physically transporting children from the center city to the suburban and rural margins. The physical relocation made possible the figurative connection between country and city.
Civil Rights and Childhood
In the midst of this recurring fixation on innocence, the black and brown freedom struggle unfolded in Fresh Air camps and homes. Both historians and the broader public have underestimated the efforts of black and brown urban children who negotiated the racial problems of their day in the living rooms and backyards of suburban and rural homes. Yet, as acknowledged here, children like Batts may have made small gains in reducing individual prejudice, but many adult hosts offset those advances when they used their participation in Fresh Air to distance themselves from the systemic adjustments sought by street-based civil rights activists. So how can the children then be called freedom fighters for racial justice?
The answer turns on an evaluation of failure. The civil rights campaigns in Albany, Georgia, in 1961–1962 and in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1963–1964 saw few immediate gains, which led many at the time to deem them failures. Historians now note that in the long run, both campaigns bore significant fruit. In the same way, despite ongoing racial subordination at Fresh Air hosting sites, the children entered important battlegrounds in the black and brown freedom struggle. That Fresh Air children still faced racism before, during, and after their rural vacations does not negate that they took part in a movement to redefine racial freedom. The crossing of racial lines itself established the historical significance of Fresh Air hosting grounds as a site of civil rights activism.
Fresh Air sites become even more historically significant when we consider not just racialized rejection and reunion but their interdependence. In his work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King Jr. extolled the vision of a “beloved community.”46 Despite the prominence of Black Power and separatism after 1966, the idea that the civil rights movement was predicated upon its own form of racialized reunion remained long after King’s death in 1968. The images of whites and blacks walking hand in hand down the streets of Washington, Selma, and Detroit remain powerfully evocative even today. But just as those who marched together almost always separated when they finished walking, so too did Fresh Air children return to their racially segregated homes after visiting the suburbs. With the exception of integrated communities such as Koinonia Farms in Americus, Georgia, and Mennonite House in Atlanta, most civil rights movement participants did not live in integrated settings.
If we accept Fresh Air hosting sites as battlegrounds in the struggle for racial freedom, a central irony becomes evident. The programs relied on both integration and separation. Far fewer hosts would have signed up if they would have been required to host a child of another race all year round or after they became teenagers. Only by guaranteeing that the visits would not last too long did the programs last so long. Little bits of integration worked better than the long-term kind.
The broader black and brown freedom struggle contained a similar irony. There, too, little bits of integration worked better than the long-term kind. Marching hand in hand made for arresting photo ops. Longer-term relationships across racial and gender lines rarely offered dramatic tableaus. King himself emphasized that the “Negro’s primary aim is to be the white man’s brother, not his brother-in-law.”47 Some integration proved necessary; too much would bring even more wrath than the activists already faced. SCLC leaders did their best to avoid the specter of interracial romance from the late 1950s through the 1970s, and so did Fresh Air leaders. Regardless of how problematic such assumptions may appear to contemporary readers, leaders of both groups came to similar conclusions. They depended just as much on the idea of separation as they did on integration to pursue their organizations’ goals.
The Fresh Air movement also defined key elements of childhood between 1939 and 1979. Contrary to the message sent by Crandell’s frog log story, childhood has rarely offered a perfectly innocent, protected state. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, children labored in the workforce or cared for younger siblings.48 In the latter part of the twentieth century, children dealt with divorce, increasing isolation from adults, and ever more standardized, impersonal academic instruction.49 In the process, even the perception of childhood innocence grew shorter.50 In the main, as Steven Mintz has written, “Childhood has never been insulated from the pressures and demands of the surrounding society, and each generation of children has had to wrestle with the social, political, and economic constraints of its own historical period.”51 Fresh Air promoters predicated their programs on a state of innocence that simply did not exist.52
As an exploration of the rhetoric of innocence has made evident, the programs set limits on the duration of childhood for African American and Latino children by placing and enforcing age caps. In addition, the programs linked childhood with nature. Even before the onset of World War II, Fresh Air promoters sent the message that a child truly experienced childhood only when given a chance to connect with the natural world. The program boosters stuck to that script for the next four decades. And, by corollary, the adult promoters convinced many that those children confined to the city lost an irretrievable portion of their childhood by staying inside city limits. Through their fund-raising efforts, program promoters also treated childhood as a commodity used to garner funds. Likewise, Fresh Air policies made childhood more feminine in the earliest years as hosts expressed their preferences for girls over boys.
Yet the children themselves participated in defining childhood. During the same four-decade time span, the children linked childhood with independence as they sought spaces to swim. Many children made childhood a time of teaching adults rather than being taught as they instructed their hosts on the realities of racism and cross-cultural connection. And the children overturned the idea of childhood compliance by exercising their own power as they made trouble in homes and camp environments.
The most enduring message about childhood sent by those involved in the movement dealt with sex. To be a child, as defined by the mid-century parameters of Fresh Air, one could be neither sexually active nor aware. Sophisticated girls lost their bid at summer camp and their childhood because they knew too much. Boys who showed signs of interest in the girls they encountered on their trips never got asked back, their childhood revoked. As Fresh Air children walked through green grass, they pounded into place many childhood markers; sex was the most central. Initial vetting, age caps, gender selection, publicity material—each of these major design elements winnowed out children who did not conform to the sexually innocent image of childhood that so many in the movement cherished.
Such desexualized notions of childhood and the rhetoric of innocence they fostered held social purchase long after the 1970s. Yet those notions of children’s sexual naïveté, awe of nature, unsophistication, malleability, and racial acceptance helped shape the racial order in a far different manner than suggested by Shelby Steele. Steele claimed that the desire to escape blame—to be seen as innocent of racial fault—encouraged white paternalism and black victimization and thereby kept racial inequity in place. But Steele missed the point so glaringly evident in this, the largest, longest-lasting, and most influential racial exchange program the country had ever seen. Fresh Air program supporters made the claim that if black and brown adults were taken out of the equation, it could be an innocent exchange. Everyone could be innocent. There would be no guilty parties. In the midst of intense racial pressures across the country, Fresh Air promoters treated black and brown children as innocent while also cutting their parents out of the picture. In so doing, many people felt good, but the fundamental inequities of access to housing, education, job opportunity, and health care remained the same. The innocence narrative, in this case, allowed those inequities to remain in place untouched and uninterrupted.
The story that Luis Diaz told about his Fresh Air experience dovetailed with that told by promoters from the end of the 1930s to the end of the 1970s. However, the one told by Janice Batts did not fit. Few wanted to hear about rejection, corrupted hosts, or children far more aware of sex than anyone would desire. Yet to understand the persistence of racial inequality in the middle of the twentieth century, the stories told by Diaz and Batts are both necessary. Only by attending to the ways in which children charmed their adult hosts and suffered at the hands of the same, prompted those around them to deal more directly with race, and yet were ultimately kept in check by the stories of innocence told about them will the legacies of that time become apparent. The Fresh Air children may here, yet again, serve as instructors.