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2. Knowing Nature through Leisure: Outdoor Recreation during the Interwar Years
- University of Washington Press
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CHAPTER 2 Knowing Nature through Leisure: Outdoor Recreation during the Interwar Years “One of the significant trends in modern recreation,” Jesse Steiner wrote in Americans at Play (1933), his contribution to the Recent Social Trends studies commissioned by President Herbert Hoover, “is the increasing demand for great open spaces set apart for the enjoyment of those outdoor diversions which have become so eagerly sought as a means of escape from the noise and confusion of urban life.” As Steiner suggested throughout his study, widespread American participation in outdoor recreation was one of the signature developments of the interwar period, and he rightly saw a connection between outdoor recreation, the increasing popularity of commercial amusements, and “the rising tide of sports and games.” But the boom in outdoor recreation was not just the product of more time for leisure. “With the improvement of means of travel,” Steiner continued, “people are finding it possible to go even further afield in their search for recreation and readily travel long distances during week-ends and vacations to places of scenic interest where their favorite forms of outdoor life may be enjoyed [italics added].”1 One important result, he intimated, was the incorporation of remote natural areas into the recreational orbits of modern Americans. This unprecedented access to wild nature resulted in some important landscape changes during the interwar period—changes that would preoccupy wilderness advocates. The interwar boom in outdoor recreation also reshaped American conservation politics and played a complex role in the evolution of preservationist sentiment. Historians traditionally have assumed an easy congruence between the growth of American interest in outdoor recreation and a deeper appreciation of wild nature. This interest certainly led Americans to demand, in Steiner’s words, “great open spaces set apart” 19 for their leisure, thus lending the cause of preservation broader political support. But this simple association between recreational interest in nature and more sophisticated preservationist sentiment obscures political and cultural factors that complicated the equation. In political terms, the preservationist community was far from united during this period, and their differences were crucial in shaping preservationist ideas and policies. We tend to assume that the idea of wilderness emerged as a recreational alternative to the worked landscape, and that wilderness was meant to be a haven from the forces of production. But to stop there, as most scholars have, is to miss a much more important level on which wilderness advocacy operated. In the years between the two world wars, the modern wilderness idea emerged as an alternative to landscapes of modernized leisure and play, and it was preeminently a product of the discordant internal politics of outdoor recreation. More recently, as cultural historians have turned a critical eye toward the growth of American interest in recreational nature, the very notion of “appreciating nature” has become more complex terrain. Many have argued that the popularity of outdoor recreation and the growth of preservationist sentiment were less progressive intellectual developments than they were consumer trends, part and parcel of the cultural tectonics of the last century or so. Such arguments have performed the crucial service of historicizing and contextualizing Americans’ recreational affection for nature. Indeed, one purpose of this chapter is to show that knowing nature through leisure was a historical development to which the interwar era was crucial. But I hope, as well, to lay the groundwork for showing that wilderness advocacy arose in reaction to the landscape changes, the political changes, and the cultural and technological changes that shaped and accompanied the growing popularity of outdoor recreation. Modern wilderness was more a response to than a product of the ways in which Americans were coming to know nature through leisure during the interwar years.2 Outdoor Recreation Before World War I Traditional interpretations of when and how Americans came to know nature through leisure have focused on the years between 1880 and 1920, and have stressed urbanization and industrialization as overarching interpretive structures.3 During these decades, Americans produced and consumed a voluminous literature on natural and wild themes; they built 20 Knowing Nature through Leisure vacation homes and camps; they initiated a wide variety of programs in scouting and woodcraft; they developed a distinctive hunting culture and ethos; they adopted nature study as a prominent hobby; and they embraced the “strenuous life” that could be found only in the “great outdoors .” The era also produced a country life movement and early stirrings of the suburban exodus that would transform America later in the century . Authors...