Michael B. Smith

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to Enviromental History online. About 498 words from this article are provided below; about 15866 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to Environmental History, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the Environmental History, you can:: • get subscription information here.
• Purchase this article in PDF form for $10.00.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of Environmental History (8.1-present).
Instititutions can:: • get subscription information here to receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

Michael B. Smith | 'The Ego Idea of the Good Camper' and the Nature of Summer Camp, | Environmental History, 11.1 | The History Cooperative

'the ego ideal of the GOOD CAMPER' AND THE NATURE OF SUMMER CAMP

ABSTRACT

In the late nineteenth century the organized summer camp movement developed as a response to anxieties about the effects of the urban-industrial age on children. Camping advocates wanted to create a countermodern alternative to the world their campers inhabited most of the year. These advocates subscribed to a set of values and assumptions about what is "natural" for children that eventually provoked a debate over the uses of nature in socializing children. Environmental historians can learn much from this debate as they try to make sense of how nature has been constructed both literally and symbolically in the twentieth century.

City life is definitely not made for children. It is not geared to their needs. It is not natural to them.

Kenneth Webb, Farm and Wilderness Camps Director (1964)

How sentimental we get about camping! We hear about "being close to nature" as if cities were unnatural. We talk about "life in the raw" as if Chicago were not raw enough. We talk about Nature as if God made it just like we see it.

Edwin Barker, YMCA Camp Director (1959)

THE HISTORY OF organized summer camping in the United States resounds with contending voices about what the camp environment could do for children and what a camp experience should be.¹ As the epigraphs suggest, in debating the value of a summer camp experience, camp leaders such as Kenneth Webb and Edwin Barker also were debating the meaning and value of nature and childhood in a rapidly urbanizing nation. These rich and largely unexamined debates tell a story that complicates our understanding of the nature/culture tension environmental historians have examined for so long.

The sharply contrasting sentiments mask, however, the extent to which summer camp advocates have, in varying degrees, embraced the ideals about nature, childhood, and modern urban civilization Webb expressed. A powerful force in organized camping for more than fifty years, Webb was nonetheless something of a maverick, carrying his back-to-nature ideals so far as to advocate nudity at his camps.² Few other leaders went to such lengths, nor did many match his unwavering and often strident condemnation of the city. That said, the source material from more than a century of organized camping reveals that at any given time, most camping advocates have viewed nature as inherently salubrious for children—and expressed at least some ambivalence about the effects of city (and eventually suburban) life on children. This is hardly surprising given the movement's origins in the back-to-nature ideology of the late nineteenth century. What is intriguing, if not surprising, about these ideas about nature, childhood, and urban life is their durability over a century of profound change. As the United States has changed, human life has become ever more mediated—by radio, television, film, and more recently the Internet—strengthening the appeal of the idealism and romantic view of nature embodied in summer camping.

. . .

There are about 15866 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.