Two Weeks Every Summer

Miller Shearer Tobin

Description

Two Weeks Every Summer, which is based on extensive oral history interviews with former guests, hosts, and administrators in Fresh Air programs, opens a new chapter in the history of race in the United States by showing how the actions of hundreds of thousands of rural and suburban residents who hosted children from the city perpetuated racial inequity rather than overturned it. Since 1877 and to this day, Fresh Air programs from Maine to Montana have brought inner-city children to rural and suburban homes for two-week summer vacations. Tobin Miller Shearer brings to the forefront of his history of the Fresh Air program the voices of the children themselves through letters that they wrote, pictures that they took, and their testimonials. Shearer offers a careful social and cultural history of the Fresh Air programs, giving readers a good sense of the summer experiences for both hosts and the visiting children. By covering the racially transformative years between 1939 and 1979, Shearer shows how the rhetoric of innocence employed by Fresh Air boosters largely served the interests of religiously minded white hosts and did little to offer more than a vacation for African American and Latino urban youth. In what could have been a new arena for the civil rights movement, white adults often overpowered the courageous actions of children of color. By giving white suburbanites and rural residents a safe race relations project that did not require adjustments to their investment portfolios, real estate holdings, or political affiliations, the programs perpetuated an economic order that marginalized African Americans and Latinos by suggesting that solutions to poverty lay in one-on-one acts of charity.

Sujets

• États-Unis
• History of the Americas
• USA
• Histoire

Informations

• Publié par: Cornell University Press
• Date de parution: 11 avril 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781501708466
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

TWO WEEKS EVERY SUMMER

A volume in the series American Institutions and Society Edited by Brian Balogh and Jonathan Zimmerman

A full list of titles in the series is available at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.

TWO WEEKS EVERY SUMMER Fresh Air Children and the Problem of Race in America

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Tobin Miller Shearer

ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2017 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 2017 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Names: Shearer, Tobin Miller, author. Title: Two weeks every summer: fresh air children and the problem of race in America / Tobin Miller Shearer. Other titles: American institutions and society. Description: Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2017. | Series: American institutions and society | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016047308 (print) | LCCN 2016049195 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501707452 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501708459 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501708466 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Freshair charity—United States. | African American children— Social conditions. | Race relations—United States. Classification: LCC HV934 .S54 2017 (print) | LCC HV934 (ebook) | DDC 362.71—dc23 LC record available at https:// l ccn.loc.gov/2016047308

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Cover: Unidentified Fresh Air participants from the Henry Street Settlement House in New York City on a bus headed to the country, 1965. Used by permission of Henry Street Settlement House, New York, NY (top); Host mother greeting guest to Linville, Virginia, 1978. Used by permission of the Daily News-Record,Harrisonburg, VA (bottom).

Contents

Preface Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Reckoning of Childhood, Race, and Neoliberalism 1.  Knowledge, Girl, Nature: Fresh Air Tensions prior to World War II 2.  Church, Concrete, Pond: How Innocence Got Disrupted 3.  Grass, Color, Sass: How the Children Shaped Fresh Air 4.  Sex, Seven, Sick: How Adults Kept the Children in Check 5.  Milk, Money, Power: How Fresh Air Sold Its Programs 6.  Greeting, Gone, Good: Racialized Reunion and Rejection in Fresh Air Epilogue: Changing an Innocence Formula

Appendix 1. Fresh Air Organizations Appendix 2. Documented Fresh Air Hosting Towns, 1939–1979 Notes Bibliographic Note Index

vii xi

1

13 33 58 91 111

142 159

163 167 177 235 241

Preface

Ten years ago, when I was working in the record room of Eastern Mennonite Missions (EMM), an agency supported primarily by Lancaster Mennonite Con ference congregations in Pennsylvania, I encountered a photo that grabbed my attention (see figure 1). It was most likely taken by volunteer host Anna Denlinger to help promote the Children’s Visitation Program, an initiative begun on October 11, 1949, to bring—in the now dated and problematic language of the day—“colored chil 1 dren of our city missions” into church member homes. The program copied the much older and larger initiative known as theHerald TribuneFresh Air Fund or the Friendly Town Program. The Fresh Air Fund had since 1877 brought children from New York City to the country and suburbs for one to twoweek summer vacations at little or no cost to the children or their parents. Dozens of cities along the Eastern Seaboard, the Midwest, and some portions of the West Coast had replicated the model, and by 1962 well over a million children had partici pated. Urban congregations, social service agencies, settlement houses, and other nonprofit organizations vetted the children while rural churches, civic organiza tions, and women’s groups organized the home stays and camp visits. Although originally designed to restore malnourished white ethnic children to health, by the early 1970s white hosts and African American and Latino guests dominated the program. The Lancasterbased initiative had focused on African American and Latino children from its inception. But it was the image itself that arrested me. When I first saw the photo, I won dered how such an event came to pass. Who had proposed sending African

vii

viiiPREFACE

FIGURE 1.Edith and John Boll of Easter Mennonite Missions with unidenti fied Fresh Air participant at Lancaster City, Pennsylvania, train station, circa late 1950s. Used by permission of Eastern Mennonite Missions, Salunga, PA.

American children from the city to spend time with white people in the coun try? Why was the girl so young? Where were her parents? What motivated the white hosts to flock in such large numbers to the pickup point? What was awry? What caused the expressions of consternation? Had the young girl’s hosts failed to show up? Were the white adults and the girl simply uncomfortable being pho tographed? And why were the girl’s eyes closed? Was she imagining a more famil iar place than the one where a crowd of religiously garbed white women and children—along with one man, out in front, holding some document—hovered around her? I set out to discover more. As I began to present my initial findings at conferences and public lectures, I often featured this photo. Every time I presented my research, without excep tion, someone in the audience had either hosted a Fresh Air child or had been one. Often, both former hosts and guests came up to me after a talk. The vast majority of the hosts expressed positive memories about picking up their guests at train stations like the one featured in the photo. However, the former Fresh Air children spoke with far more ambivalence. Some shed tears because of the feel ings evoked by their Fresh Air memories; a few grew quite angry as they recalled insults and indignities like the ID tag draped around the girl’s neck. One Fresh Air child said such tags made her feel like she was the subject of a “slave auction”; others expressed gratitude for their hosts’ generosity even while raising questions 2 about the programs’ disparagement of the city.

PREFACE ix

Reactions to my first forays into writing about Fresh Air were likewise mixed. Some readers found the research fascinating and sent me photographs and news paper clippings from Fresh Air programs in their communities. Others found my critical stance unfair. A few reprimanded me for writing about the program at all because they felt it was just too important of a resource to bring under academic scrutiny. But the vast majority of readers wanted to know more. So I kept on writing. I continued to travel to archives and interview partici pants. This book is the result of a decade’s worth of research that began when I first encountered that photo in the EMM record room. As I near the completion of this book, I realize that I know much more about the white people featured in the photo than I do about the African American girl. I do not know exactly when it was taken, but most probably in the late 1950s. Although I do not know the names of the white crowd members, I do know that John Boll, a Mennonite farmer and businessman from Manheim, Pennsylvania, holds papers in his hands as his wife, Edith Boll, cradles one of their children in her arms. Like many white Mennonites in southeastern Pennsylvania, the Bolls hosted children connected to Mennonite urban congregations. However, I know much less about the Fresh Air girl. She appears to be fairly young—perhaps seven or eight—although not as young as some participants. I do know that the photo was taken at the train station in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, soon after her arrival from New York City. The tag around her neck indicates that she has been labeled for pickup at a location far removed from friends and family who could identify her on sight. I have not been able to discover her name. Hundreds of thousands of children like the girl featured in this photo spent summer vacations away from their families in ventures fueled by anecdotes alone. All those involved in promoting and organizing the programs asserted that a twoweek stay in the country had a meaningful impact on the life of a city child. However, these promoters used only anecdotes and carefully crafted stories to defend their practice. At no point between 1939 and 1979 did any of the pro grams present convincing, researchbased evidence that the programs improved 3 children’s lives. The assumption that fourteen days of interracial connection had enough power to transform the lives of children had widespread support but little empirical grounding. The white volunteers pictured in the photo represent the rural and subur ban residents who hosted Fresh Air children for decades and saw themselves as champions of the downtrodden. Through the 1940s, many hosts participated in order to offer a simple act of charity to white ethnic children of city tenements. Beginning in the 1950s, many more signed on to host an African American, Asian American, or Latino child as part of a massive, widespread race relations effort. During the height of the Cold War, still others sought to take part in—as Fresh Air Fund administrator Bud Lewis came to call it—an experiment in the