A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890–1960 (review)

Do not look here for a nostalgic view of summer idylls by the lake and the campfire, weaving lanyards and telling ghost stories. Abigail Van Slyck has written another penetrating investigation of modern American society and culture, deftly combining the evidence afforded by the camps themselves with camp marketing materials, contemporary publications by childhood and camp professionals, and photographic evidence, and looking at it all through the lens of current studies of childhood, and the theories of play, race, and gender. Her specific goal was to discern “the role of summer camps in the social construction of modern childhood” (xxxii), but more broadly, Van Slyck sought in this work to ascertain the process by which “institutional priorities are translated into material form” (xxxi). Summer camps, then, are here examined both in their role as shapers of modern youth culture and as the repositories of cultural precepts of youth. Intertwined in this story of changing definitions of youth are changing perceptions of gender roles and whiteness. A Manufactured Wilderness offers an illuminating look at childhood and at landscapes that many of us probably thought we knew.

In six chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue, Van Slyck examines “major trends in camp planning practices between 1890 and 1960” and “their impact on the construction of childhood” (xxxvi). As she states explicitly in her introduction, this is not a chronological narrative. Rather, she moves from camp layout to program activities to physical and psychological health (and the sleeping quarters crucial to that health), from cooking and eating to gendered camp spaces and personal hygiene, and finally to Native American motifs and the complexities of race. Nevertheless, we clearly see the transformation from summer camps of the 1890–1920 era, which were quite consciously antimodernist (and hence reflective of their own modern, cultural milieu), and which saw and sought authenticity in the past, to an era of professional camp design and management that consciously assayed, through modern psychology, health programs, planning, and technology, to shape campers into certain types of people and to prepare them for modern, white, middle-class life. In her epilogue, Van Slyck briefly examines architectural modernism at camps, and reiterates her point that architectural aesthetics are not an indicator of the presence or absence of modern attitudes. The most rustic youth camps of the mid-twentieth century still embodied and promoted “modern conceptions of children and childhood, which emphasized reforming gender roles while reinforcing racial hierarchies” (224), and the most modern camp architects “embraced the ‘primitive builder’ as their paragon” (220).

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, North Americans dwelled in ever increasing numbers in urban, industrial communities. Wilderness, now safely enclosed in designated parks and no longer a threat to civilized society, came to be ever more revered. The problem was that modern culture threatened to emasculate young men, rob them of their health, and turn them into a generation of consumers, if not ne’er-do-wells, no matter if they lived in the city or the suburbs. The solution was to find, or create, some semblance of wilderness close to urban areas where these youths could clear their lungs and their heads, and learn to do for themselves what modern life had robbed them of doing. The question of how that “wilderness,” usually some patch of formerly cultivated land, was created, shaped, and reimagined is a central part of Van Slyck’s study. As the definitions of childhood changed over the decades, so too did the threats to it, and the camp environment had to respond. Over the period covered here, camps evolved from simple clearings where campers could put up tents and perhaps swim in a nearby lake to carefully engineered spaces that protected children, now boys and girls, while trying to give them a sense of freedom from certain modern constraints. The balance between leaving civilization...