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." 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. The host family could request a replacement at any time, and the CAS agent could remove the child if the host family proved unsatisfactory. 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...