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

Summer camps for youth seem like a permanent fixture of American childhood. For many upper-middle-class Americans, swims in the lake, s'mores by the campfire, and all the other adventures of a few weeks away from the parents are part of the natural order, existing untouched by time, like the wilderness that surrounds the camps. In A Manufactured Wilderness, however, Abigail Van Slyck demonstrates that summer camps are very much a historical product, and their seemingly "natural" layout has been calculated to reinforce the cultural work they perform.

The summer camp movement or movements began around the dawn of the Twentieth Century, largely as a response to upper-class fears of "overcivilization," especially for men. Individual camp enthusiasts, as well as YMCA leaders and others interested in youth, built particularly on the psychologist G. Stanley Hall's theory that young people "recapitulated" the stages of human progress from vigorous savagery to civilization, and they proposed that a dose of regulated savagery for children at camp was the proper antidote to an overdeveloped industrial culture. Over the next sixty years or so, summer camps for boys and girls alike dabbled in nature study, military strictness, free play, and various approaches to premodern folk crafts—whatever the increasingly professionalized camp directors considered to be the best approach for developing the health and character of their charges.

Along the way, directors restructured the camps' physical layout to reflect changing concerns over moral development, hygiene, and safety. Some of the camps featured tents arranged in straight military lines, as during the Great War; later, in a reaction against such strictness, directors often tucked tents or cabins into the landscape seemingly at random, with the premium now placed on privacy and the appearance of naturalness. In the pronatalist 1950s, camps often built cabins and meeting-halls in ways that mimicked suburban domesticity.

Other manufactured elements of the landscape were more directly practical. Thankfully, Van Slyck does not dodge the critical question of sewage disposal in the wilderness, and she includes illustrations for building and siting toilets and trash bins in the proper places. Campground directors and architects also spent a great deal of time pondering how many square feet of living space each camper needed, taking into particular account the necessity of fresh air for some of their campers from urban backgrounds.

Some features of the camps remained fairly constant. Boys and girls attended separate camps, and when boys performed "feminine" tasks, such as kitchen duty, or when girls took on traditionally male jobs, such as camp construction, it was understood that the role changes were temporary—for the boys, in particular, dabbling in "women's work" only in the context of camp actually reinforced the sense that more traditional gender roles applied back in the real world outside of camp. Similarly, the camps tended to reinvigorate class distinctions even as they harked back to a less differentiated past. The boys' playing at manual labor, for example, was a reminder that this work eventually would be merely a memory or a hobby for them, and not a vocation; it was not unlike campers "playing Indian" with tipis, costumes, and mock rituals.

As Van Slyck suggests in her strongest chapter, none of the campers went on to become a "real" American Indian, but the experience was supposed to connect them with the salutary impulses of a premodern world that they would never have to inhabit. In the end, Van Slyck invokes Jackson Lears' assertion that most of the antimodernist activity at the turn of the Twentieth Century ended up, paradoxically, preparing the participants to take their places in the modern industrial world.

Van Slyck is good at arguing that the campgrounds' landscape embodied shifting ideas about civilization and childhood among the middle class. But despite her promise early in the book to investigate the meanings that campers themselves placed on their experiences, she generally does not...