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83 Chapter 3 The Landscape of Camp  One must begin with landscape if one is to end with soul. When You Hike, 1930 When girls’ organizations were first founded, camp, and indeed nature itself, was a casual affair. A leader who was so inclined took her girls for short hikes and nature walks, or “got up” a weekend excursion to a nearby farm or popular swimming hole. Leaders who lacked an affinity for the out-of-doors did none of these things, and their programs were judged to be none the worse for it. Camp and nature certainly had their places within the fledgling organizations, but the realities of recruiting volunteers, locating members, and raising money occupied the attention of most leaders. Summer camping trips were pleasant diversions, but were diversions nonetheless, an extra bonus for girls and leaders who had made it through a year of the real business of being a Girl Scout, Girl Pioneer, or Camp Fire Girl. As was suggested in the previous chapter, the Great War changed all that. Although seldom occupying more than two weeks of any particular girl’s experience, the camping program moved from the periphery to the rhetorical core of organizations’ self-definition. The popularity of wartime camps boosted membership rolls and brought girls’ organizations to the attention of the American public. The war’s legacy, however, was mixed. It was widely acknowledged that girls learned about pluck and patriotism at camp, but leadership also increasingly believed that the rigidity of their camps’ layout and programming had inadvertently encouraged an aura of militarism and autocracy. Thus, even as it elevated camping to a pivotal position in organizational programming, the war’s influence tainted camps’ natural landscape and subtly threatened the character of the campers themselves. This notion that the American landscape played a powerful role in forming the character of its inhabitants was ubiquitous in the first decades of the twentieth century. Directors of girls’ camps could cite no less a figure than 84 Growing Girls former president Teddy Roosevelt himself to support their contention that the natural world could, for good or ill, affect the nature of humans. Thus, leaders were obliged to pay careful attention to the contours of their camps’ geography , lest campers be shaped by untoward influences.1 By the early 1920s, directors were convinced that they had to cast off the military trappings that had become emblematic of girls’ camping experience by redefining the physical space in which their camps were located. If they wanted to end with their girls’ souls, they would have to begin by redefining the landscape of camp. Surveying the Landscape of Early Twentieth-Century America When the leaders of girls’ organizations looked around in the postwar years, they found a wide array of ideas about nature, wilderness, and the American landscape that they could use to craft a new, nonmilitary version of summer camp. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner put Americans on notice that the frontier, whose relentless western migration had become virtually synonymous with the nation’s identity, was now irrevocably closed. In the ensuing decades, Americans questioned what to do with a vast landscape that, if no longer technically a frontier, was still largely underused and uninhabited . The debate typically pitted proponents of conservation, a group that advocated utilitarian stewardship and was closely associated with Teddy Roosevelt, against John Muir, the Sierra Club, and other adherents of preservation . Each side claimed victories—the establishment of the National Forest Service for conservation, and the passage of the 1916 National Park Service Act for preservation. As historians point out, however, the ground-level results of both groups’ efforts, and especially the language with which they talked about the landscape, often looked and sounded remarkably similar.2 At a practical level, preservationists’ efforts—although ostensibly in opposition to the consumer exploitation of the land—often resulted in the solidification of a new “natural” economy grounded in the burgeoning tourist trade. Hundreds of miles of new rail lines and roads were built to accommodate the needs of holidaymakers and auto tourists who flocked to the lodges, camps, and resorts that now dotted the preserved landscape.3 While it is foolish to suggest that such developments had a comparable environmental impact to even the most conservatively managed mining and timber interests, it is true that preservationists, like their opposite numbers in conservation, tended to view the landscape through a highly anthropocentric lens. To many impassioned believers in...

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