'The ego ideal of the good camper' and the nature of summer camp

Environmental History

Volumn 11, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 70-101

  Smith, Michael B ^a  

^a ITHACA COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CHILD DEVELOPMENT; ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECT; NATURE-SOCIETY RELATIONS; OUTDOOR RECREATION;

EID: 33645767672     PISSN: 10845453     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/envhis/11.1.70     Document Type: Article

References (194)

1. The kind of camping I am concerned with in this article is organized summer camping. By this I mean a permanent or semi-permanent encampment conducted primarily during the summer months with young-adult and adult leaders overseeing the activities of children and youth campers. My main focus is on camp experiences lasting for at least a week - the so-called "sleep-away" camp. The word "camp" evokes many things, from a military training facility to an impermanent encampment in a clearing in the woods where a person or small group of people spend a night or two. In this article I use the word camp to mean organized summer camp. Indeed, in the interest of lexical variety I use the words or phrases "camping," "summer camp," "summer camping," "organized summer camping," and "organized summer camp" more or less interchangeably. Within organized summer camping itself there are and have been camps for adults and families. Although the existence of these other kinds of camps and the camping practiced at them illuminate many of the same tensions I examine here, I have limited my analysis to childhood and adolescent (ages 5-18) experiences.
2. Kenneth Webb referred to nudity as "the fifth freedom," which, along with freedom from fear, want, hunger, and religious persecution would help recreate the conditions of that first Garden. For other examples of Webb's philosophy of camping, see "Camps Can Set a New Life Style," Camping Magazine, January 1976, 10-12;
3. "The Wilderness Can Be Your Best Facility," Camping Magazine, September-October 1974, 6-8;
4. and Kenneth Webb, As Sparks Fly Upward: The Rationale of the Farm and Wilderness Camps (Canaan, N.H.: Phoenix Publications, 1973), 190-91.
5. See also "A Modern Camp for the New Generation," an occasional paper issued by the Fund for the Advancement of Camping; Camping Magazine, February 1979, 15-18;
6. "Summer Camps: Security in the Midst of Change," an occasional paper issued by the Fund for the Advancement of Camping, ACA Archives;
7. and Kenneth Webb and Susan Webb, Beyond Our Wildest Dreams: The Story of the Farm and Wilderness Camps, 1939-1989 (Springfield, Vt.: Curtis-Lieberman, 1990), written with his wife.
8. William Morse, "From the University of Michigan Fresh Air Camp: Some Problems of Therapeutic Camping," The Nervous Child (April 1947): 211-12.
9. For this idea of countermodernity I am indebted to Jennifer Price. See Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999), esp. 235-56.
10. Folklorists have been more sensitive to this dimension of summer camp history than historians. See especially Jay Mechling, "Children's Folklore in Residential Institutions: Summer Camps, Boarding Schools, Hospitals, and Custodial Facilities," in Children's Folklore: A Sourcebook, ed. Brian Sutton-Smith, et al. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1999), 273-91.
11. See also Jay Mechling, On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), which brings together several decades of studies of folklore at a Boy Scout camp;
12. and Bill Ellis, "The Camp Mock-Ordeal: Theater as Life," Journal of American Folklore 94 (198l): 486-505.
13. Leslie Paris, "Children's Nature: Summer Camps in New York State, 1919-1941" (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2000);
14. and Leslie Paris, "The Adventures of Peanut and Bo: Summer Camps and Early Twentieth Century American Girlhood," Journal of Women's History 12 (Winter 2001): 47-78.
15. See also Susan A. Miller, "Girls in Nature/The Nature of Girls: Transforming Female Adolescence at Summer Camp, 1900-1939" (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2001).
16. The literature on the construction of childhood is vast. For a good overview of the recent work on children and nature see Bernard Mergen, "Children and Nature in History," Environmental History 8 (October 2003): 643-69.
17. Of particular interest to historians of summer camp and outdoor education are Edith Cobb, The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), especially 25-31;
18. Louise Chawla, In the First Country of Places: Nature, Poetry and Childhood Memory (Albany, N.Y.; SUNY Press, 1994);
19. Richard Coe, When the Grass Was Taller: Autobiography and the Experience of Childhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984);
20. Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1982), 96-108;
21. Gary Paul Nabhan and Stephen Trimble, The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994);
22. Chris Jenks, Childhood (London: Routledge, 1996);
23. Alison James, Chris Jenks, Alan Prout, Theorizing Childhood (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1998).
24. This list does not include the specialty camps - for sports, computers, weight-loss - that have developed since the 1960s and now number in the hundreds. While some of these camps retain some patina of the traditional sleep-away summer camp, most do not fall under the definition of summer camp I am using here.
25. See, for example, Peter Kahn and Stephen Kellert, eds., Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).
26. Peter Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (New York, 1969);
27. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1980);
28. Paul S. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Harvard University Press, 1978), esp. 132-233;
29. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, chaps. 6-10,
30. William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon, (New York: Norton, 1996), 76-80.
31. Until quite recently, the only historical account of the summer camp movement writ large was a rich but poorly documented and organized book published by the American Camping Association: Elenor Eell's History of Organized Camping: The First 100 Years, (Martinsville, Ind.: ACA, 1984).
32. Other historians have examined elements of the early movement in the service of a larger argument. See Schmitt, Back to Nature, 95-105;
33. Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 101-2, 111-13;
34. Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 108-15, 156-61;
35. David I. Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983);
36. Timothy Bawden, "Reinventing the Frontier: Tourism, Nature, and Environmental Change in Northern Wisconsin, 1890-1930" (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 2001), 240-90.
37. Four recent dissertations have examined the history of children's summer camps or elements of that history. See Miller, "Girls in Nature;
38. Sharon Wall, "Negotiating Modernity: Nature and Nurture at Ontario Children's Camps, 1920-1955" (PhD diss., York University, 2003);
39. Paris, "Children's Nature";
40. and Michael B. Smith, "'And They Say We'll Have Some Fun When It Stops Raining': A History of Summer Camp in the United States" (PhD diss, Indiana University, 2002).
41. Many histories of the origins of organized summer camping begin with an undocumented account of one Frederick Gunn's camp for boys who attended his private school in Connecticut in the years following the Civil War. Apart from the repetition of the experience over several summers, it seems to have had little in common with the organized camps for children that developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. See Eell's History, 5-7;
42. and Carlos E. Ward, Organized Camping and Progressive Education (Fairfax, Va.: 1935), 2-7.
43. Eell's History, 9;
44. and Ward, Organized Camping, 5.
45. See also H. W. Gibson, "The History of Organized Camping," Camping Magazine, January 1936, 15-16.
46. See George W. Hinckley, Roughing It with the Boys (New York: Association Press, 1913).
47. Ernest Balch, quoted in A Handbook of Summer Camps (1926), 18 (an annual published from 1924-1936).
48. See also A. Balch, "Camp Chocorua;
49. A Boy's Republic," McClure's Magazine, 1 (1893): 242-48.
50. The best recent history of the world of these early private boys camps is W. Barksdale Maynard, "An Ideal Life in the Woods for Boys': Architecture and Culture in the Earliest Summer Camps, "Winterthur Portfolio 34 (1): 3-29.
51. Interestingly, one prominent dimension of summer camp ideology that was entirely absent from Balch's camp was the use of Native American rituals and names. The impetus for this turn in the development of camping, speculates Philip Deloria in his study of Native American imagery in American culture, seems to have been Frederick Jackson Turner's famed pronouncement of the end of the frontier several years later. See Playing Indian, 100-101.
52. Robert W. Lovell, American Physical Education Review 6 (December 1901): 302.
53. Winthrop T. Talbot, "Summer Camps for Boys," World's Work 10 (May 1905): 654.
54. On Camp Asquam, see Maynard, "An Ideal Life," 8-9.
55. On the Children's Aid Society, see Stephen O'Connor, Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001);
56. and Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1999).
57. See Dominic Cavallo, Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 1880-1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981);
58. Carry Goodman, Choosing Sides: Playground and Street Life on the Lower East Side (New York: Schocken Books, 1979).
59. On Gulick, see Stephanie Wallach, "Luther Halsey Gulick and the Salvation of the American Adolescent" (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1989).
60. Quoted in Louis Rouillon, "Summer Camps for Boys," Review of Reviews 21 (June 1900): 703.
61. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence; Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (New York: Appleton and Co., 1904), xi.
62. See also Amy S. Green, "Savage Childhood: The Scientific Construction of Girlhood and Boyhood in the Progressive Era" (PhD diss., Yale University, 1995).
63. Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).
64. On Hall's connection to antimodernism see Lears, No Place of Grace, 247-51.
65. On the response to Hall in youth work circles see Green, "Savage Childhood," 100-120;
66. and Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), chap. 3.
67. William. H. Kinnicutt, "The School in the Camp," The Outlook 83 (July 28, 1906): 706.
68. Quoted in James F. Page, Socializing the New Order (Rock Island, Ill.: Augustana College, 1919), 45.
69. Peter Clarke MacFarlane, "Schools of Fun and Fellowship," Good Housekeeping, May 1914, 585.
70. Calvin Lewis, "Camps," The Outlook 80 (June 19, 1905): 378.
71. For examples of the effect of the war on the theory and practice of camping, see Dr. J. H. McCurdy, "Lessons from France," American Physical Education Review 24 (May 1919): 351;
72. and "Camp Roosevelt - Boy Builder," Playground 16 (April 1922): 18.
73. See also Lillian Evertson, "Camp Roosevelt as a Boy Builder," Modern Medicine 3 (January 1921): 9-10;
74. and "Camp Roosevelt," Playground 14 (May 1920): 685-86;
75. Charles K. Taylor, "A Boys' Camp of Tomorrow" The Outlook 130 (18 January 1922): 107.
76. Eell's History, 60. Estimates of the number of camps and campers at any one time have varied widely since no comprehensive census has ever been taken and camps, especially in the early twentieth century, could be rather inaccessible.
77. Luther H. Gulick and Grace Potter, "The 'Why' of the Summer Camp for Boys and Girls," Good Housekeeping, June 1912, 829.
78. Henry Wellington Wack, "Give Every Child a Chance," in Camps and Camping, ed. Lehman (New York: American Sports Publishing, 1926), 56, emphasis in original.
79. An annual published from 1922-1935. Sargent wrote, "The camping instinct is primeval. Camping was the primal and original mode of life of our remote ancestors. Most of our primitive virtues are due to this outdoor life of our remote ancestors, who were perpetual campers in the closest contact with nature. These same primitive virtues were brought out in the pioneer life of the earliest settlers of this country." A Handbook of Summer Camps (Boston: Sargent, 1926), 17.
80. Henry Wellington Wack, More About Summer Camps (New York: Red Book, 1928), 146;
81. and Henry Wellington Wack, The Camping Ideal: The New Human Race (New York: Red Book Magazine, 1925), 35.
82. H. W. Gibson, "Camp as a Social Adjustor," Camping Magazine, February 1927, 1.
83. See, for example, Charlotte V. Gulick, "The Organized Camping Movement: A Radio Address," reprinted in Camps and Camping, 1925, ed. Lehman, 57-64;
84. E. L. Gulick, 85, who wrote "a good camp educates for leisure and the durable satisfactions of life";
85. and Frederick L. Guggenheimer, "Camp Association Exhibit in Parents' Exposition in New York City," Camping Magazine, May 1928, 1.
86. The title of the exhibit, proclaimed by an enormous banner, was "TRAINING FOR LEISURE." On the contemporary concerns about the impending surfeit of leisure time, see George B. Cutten, The Threat of Leisure (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926);
87. Herbert L. May and Dorothy Petgen, Leisure and Its Use (New York: A.S. Barnes and Co., 1928), 6.
88. For a general history of the ideas and use of leisure in the modern West, see Gary Cross, A Social History of Leisure (State College, Pa.: Venture Publishing Co., 1990), esp. chaps. 8 and 11 on leisure debates in the first few decades of the twentieth century.
89. See Frederick L. Guggenheimer, "Balancing the Camp Program," Camping Magazine, January 1934, 1-4;
90. and "What of the Morrow?" Camping Magazine, April 1933, 2.
91. Henry Wellington Wack, The Camping Ideal, 38-48;
92. Hedley Dimock and Charles Hendry, Camping and Character: A Camp Experiment in Character Education (New York: Association Press, 1939), 5;
93. Ben Solomon, "Camping as a National Movement," Camp Life, March 1930, 39.
94. Frank Hackett, "Camping: A Life Experience," Camping Magazine, January 1932, 10-11.
95. "The Place of Camping in the Field of Education," ACA Archives, History Box 1.
96. "What Is the Answer?" Camping Magazine, June 1932, 2.
97. See Paul S. Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002).
98. Ward, Organized Camping, 139.
99. Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg, "Shall It be Camp this Summer?" Child Study 16 (April 1939): 161;
100. "Subtleties of the Camp Environment," Camping Magazine, April 1933, 12;
101. Dimock and Hendry, Camping and Character, 4.
102. See Eduard Lindeman, The Meaning of Adult Education (New York: New Republic, 1926);
103. Joshua Lieberman, Creative Camping (New York Association Press, 1931);
104. Louis H. Blumenthal, Group Work in Camping (New York: Association Press, 1937);
105. Ernest G. Osborne, Camping and Guidance (New York: Association Press, 1937).
106. Margaret J. Johnston, "The Ministry of Nature," Camping Magazine, March 1937, 5.
107. A. E. Hamilton, "Is America Camp Crazy?" Parents, May 1931, 23.
108. Gruenberg, "Shall It be Camp this Summer?" 161.
109. H. W. Gibson, "Better Citizenship through Camping," Camps and Camping, ed. Lehman, 82.
110. Bernard Mason, Camping and Education (New York, The McCall Company, 1930), 236, 20.
111. Ralph Hill, "What Kind of Camp?" Child Study 15 (April 1938): 207;
112. and "Creative Activity in the Summer Camp," Progressive Education 4 (April/May/June 1927), 113.
113. Boyd I. Walker, "Some Viewpoints Underlying Program Building," Camping Magazine, January 1985, 3-4.
114. Hamilton, "Is America Camp Crazy?" 62-64.
115. William Kilpatrick, "Introduction," Camping and Character, xi.
116. James L. Hymes, Jr., "Year-Round Value from Camp," Parents, February 1937, 23, 67.
117. Dimock and Hendry, Camping and Character, 6.
118. Bernard Mason remained more sanguine, writing that although, "on his return [the camper] tends to take on the ways of home society again ... his reaction to the home and neighborhood environment is different because of his experience at camp." Camping and Education, 19.
119. The first war summer of camping witnessed the inclusion at many camps activities such as "making a list of things you might want to do in your leisure time in a fox-hole on the Bataan Peninsula" and "coordinating a camp defense unit with the community defense plans." William Gould Vinal, "A Program for Wartime Camping," Camping Magazine, June 1942.
120. The editor of Camping World wanted a change in camp music, "less of the sweet soft, sentimental type of song, more of the patriotic, militant warlike song." L. Noel Booth, "What Shall We Do at Camp This Summer?" Camping World, May-June, 1942, 7.
121. The Michigan Camping Association took this philosophy even further, devoting its entire February 1943 newsletter to the theme of camping's contributions to military life and to war production, showing how the survival skills learned through campcraft could benefit future soldiers. See Newsletter, February 1943, Michigan Camping Association, ACA Archives, History Box 1.
122. See, for example, "Camping as the American Way," Vivian Carter Johnson, and "Summary of Workshops," ACA Central States Convention, 1944, ACA Archives, History Box 1;
123. Howard Zahniser, "Campers Go Gardening," Camping Magazine, April 1943, 3;
124. Symposium on Harvest Camping, "Camping and Wartime Agriculture, A Symposium," February 1943, 2-7, ACA Archives, History Box 2;
125. "Some Standards for Harvest Camps as They Relate to Living and Working Conditions," San Francisco Wartime Harvest Council, ACA Archives, History Box 1.
126. The entire 1940 ACA convention was devoted to the theme of democracy and camping. See ACA Convention Proceedings, 1940, ACA Archives.
127. See also "Camping in a Democracy: A Report of the Camp Seminar Held at George Williams College, 1940" (New York: Association Press, 1940);
128. Hedley Dimock, "The Contributions of the Camp to Democracy," Camping Magazine, April 1939, 3-5, 23-24.
129. On the experience of being a child during the war, see William M. Tuttle, Jr., "Daddy's Gone to War": The Second World War in the Lives of America's Children (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
130. See also Robert Wm. Kirk, Earning Their Stripes: The Mobilization of American Children in the Second World War (New York: Peter Lang, 1994).
131. Hedley Dimock, "Camps on the March," Camp Director's Handbook, February 1942, 6.
132. "The Summer Camp and War," ACA Bulletin #1, 1942, ACA, History, Box 1.
133. Ross Allen, "Camps Forward March!" Parents Magazine, May 17, 1942, 34
134. "Camping and Community: A Report of the Camp Seminar Held at George Williams College, 1942" (New York: Association Press, 1942), 8.
135. Barbara Ellen Joy, "Simple Living in the Out-of-Doors," Camping Magazine, February 1942, 4;
136. Boyd Bode, "The Role of Camping in a Living Democracy," Camping Magazine, February 1942, 71-2.
137. L. B. Sharp, "The Role of Camping and Our American Heritage," Camping Magazine, February 1942, 33.
138. Fay Welch, "The Role of Camping and the Natural Setting," Camping Magazine, February 1942, 28-29.
139. John B. Kelly, "Hale American and Camping!" Camp Director's Handbook, February 1942, 8-9.
140. "Addresses and Discussions," Annual Camp Director's Conference, November 20-21, 1942, ACA Archives, History, Box 1.
141. "Camping and Community," 8.
142. Rogers, 17. On the ubiquity of war in children's lives see Tuttle, "Daddy's Gone to War," esp. 91-93.
143. "Camping - A Wartime Asset, A Report of a Conference of the American Camping Association with Representatives from Eleven United States Government Agencies," October 22-25, 1942, Alexandria, Virginia, ACA Archives, History, Box 1.
144. "Camping Today," Camp Fire Girls Camping Bulletin, 1942. Camp Fire Girls Archives (CFGA), PR.c7.30.
145. See Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995).
146. Marvin Rife, "Achieving Goals for Children's Camps Today," NSWA - A Report of the One-Day Institute on Camping, April 4, 1955, 18, NSWA Papers, Box 27, Social Welfare History Archives;
147. Klein, 16; Barbara Ellen Joy, "Better Camping for All," ACA Region V Convention, ACA Archives.
148. Graeme Berger, "Camping in a Changing Community," NSWA Assembly Camp Consultation, NSWA Box 27, SWHA.
149. Herman, The Romance of American Psychology, 12.
150. See also Stephen Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of Family Life in America (New York: Free Press, 1988), 187-90.
151. Herman, The Romance of American Psychology, 12. McNeil, 3.
152. Ernest R. Groves and Gladys Hoagland Groves, The Contemporary American Family (Chicago: Lippincott, 1947), 200.
153. See also Tuttle, "Daddy's Gone to War," 236-53.
154. "Report: It's Everybody's Camp!" NSWA Committee on Camping, NSWA papers, Box 27, SWHA.
155. William G. Vinal, "The Roots of Camping Education Go Deep," Education 73 (September 1952): 27.
156. On Redl's life and work see Joseph Masling, "Speak, Memory; or Goodbye Columbus," Journal of Personality Assessment 78 (February 2002): 4-10;
157. William C. Morse, "A Half Century of Children Who Hate: Insights for Today from Fritz Redl," Reclaiming Children and Youth 10 (Summer 2001): 75-78, 82;
158. Henry W. Maler, "Pioneer House: Reflections on Working with Redl and Wineman in 1947," Reclaiming Children and Youth 10 (Summer 2001): 71-74.
159. See also Harold L. Raush, "Fritz Redl," American Psychologist 47 (September 1992): 1143.
160. Fritz Redl, "Psychopathologic Risks of Camp Life," The Nervous Child 6 (April 1947): 139.
161. Ibid., 142.
162. Ibid., 139.
163. Ibid.
164. Ibid., 143.
165. Howard McClusky, 14, emphasis mine.
166. "The Significance of Group Experience I Modern Society," Proceedings of the Middle Eastern Conference of the ACA, 1949.
167. Gerald Burns, The Program of the Modern Camp (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1954), 24.
168. Rudolph M. Wittenberg, "The Inner Reality of the Camper," Pacific Camping Federation Biennial Conference Proceedings, 1953, ACA Archives, History Box 1.
169. C. Walton Johnson, "The Unique Mission of the Summer Camp" (Weaverville, N.C., 1960), 5.
170. Joy, "Better Camping for All," ACA Archives.
171. Ledlie, "The Camp Community," 98-99.
172. Johnson, "Unique Mission," 6.
173. Ibid., 7-8, 24.
174. Ibid., 16, 21-2.
175. Mary Hanwiler, "How Your Campers Can Follow the Trail of the Redman," Camping Magazine, December 1956, 12;
176. Dan O'Gara, "Kids' Lives Can Change in a Few Weeks," Camp Manitowish Newsletter, 6 May 1955, YMCA Archives.
177. Kenneth Webb, "The Wilderness Can Be Your Best Facility," Camping Magazine, September-October 1974, 6-8.
178. James A. Mason, "Uncertain Outposts: The Future of Camping and the Challenge of Its Past," an occasional paper issued by the Fund for the Advancement of Camping, ACA Archives, 29.
179. Ibid., 25.
180. Ibid., 31.
181. Among the most dramatic changes in organized camping was the emergence of specialty camps that focused not on traditional camp activities but on computing or even investing. The rise of the modern environmental movement also shaped camping profoundly. For a detailed description of these changes, see Smith, A History of Summer Camp, 189-234.
182. Gibson, "History of Organized Camping," 18-19, 26-27;
183. Charles H. Hopkins, History of YMCA in North America (New York: Association Press, 1950);
184. Sherwood Eddy, A Century with Youth: A History of the Y.M.C.A. from 1844-1944 (New York: Association Press, 1944).
185. "YMCA - 100 Years of Camping," Centennial of Camping file, YMCA Archives. There are manifold examples of this sentiment in the writings and speeches about camping from 1965 through the 1990s. See, for example, Theodore Cavins, "What Should Camps Stress in Our Affluent Society?" Camping Magazine, February 1965, 17;
186. Ernest F. Schmidt, "An Oasis for Youth," Camping Magazine, September/October 1969, 4;
187. Robert K. McClarty, Jr., "Spiritual Values in Camping," a speech delivered to the Southern Section of the ACA, Athens, Ga., October 1, 1966, ACA Archives, History Box 1.
188. Goodrich, "What Are the Essentials of Camping?" ACA Archives, History, Box 1, emphasis in original.
189. Webb, "Camps Can Set a New Life Style," 10-12.
190. Webb, "The Wilderness Can Be Your Best Facility," 6-8.
191. Webb, As Sparks Fly Upward, 190-91.
192. Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness," 87.
193. Michael Eisner, interview by Susan Stamberg, "Morning Edition," National Public Radio, July 3, 2001.
194. See Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America's Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), esp. chap. 5.