Two Weeks Every Summer: Fresh Air Children and the Problem of Race in America by Tobin Miller Shearer (review)

Since the 1870s, organizations affiliated with the Fresh Air reform movement have transported thousands of low-income children from their homes in cities around the United States for summer visits with rural and suburban families. Fresh Air programs served children of European descent almost exclusively until the end of World War II, when children of color began receiving invitations for exurban vacations and eventually, due to the changing racial composition of urban poverty, became the core subjects of Fresh Air reform. Tobin Miller Shearer investigates how Fresh Air programs' overwhelmingly white leadership and supporters reckoned with race during the period of demographic transition between 1939 and 1979. Boosters came to insist that Fresh Air work forged connections and sympathies across racial lines and thus promoted racial harmony. Shearer disputes this claim, arguing that the Fresh Air movement ultimately perpetuated racial inequality.

The Fresh Air movement, Shearer explains, appealed to many white Americans because it was a neoliberal reform effort that did not require them to relinquish power or resources. Private charities engaged in Fresh Air work insisted that the best way to ease racial tensions was to foster loving relationships between low-income children of color and prosperous white families, rather than economic restructuring, governmental intervention against poverty, or reckoning with a history fraught with racial oppression. The Fresh Air movement also tapped into longstanding beliefs that rural places were superior to cities and that contact with nature was an essential ingredient of childhood. By insisting that the Fresh Air movement simply gave underprivileged children experiences that they needed but could not otherwise access, boosters cast their work as an uncontroversial public good.

Fresh Air leaders, Shearer shows, presented hosting as an enriching experience for white families. Boosters described children of color as naïve and eager to learn about nature from their hosts until they changed tactics in the 1960s in the face of mounting criticisms that Fresh Air work exposed children of color to racist communities and encouraged white cultural hegemony. Promotional materials began presenting children as experts on race who could not only withstand discrimination, but could also teach their hosts about racism and black and brown cultures. Though narratives about the relationship between children and hosts shifted, Shearer demonstrates that Fresh Air programs consistently subjected children to heavy scrutiny in the form of medical and behavioral assessments, assuming that young guests threatened the communities they visited more than they could be harmed by their experiences away from home. Fresh Air organizations also instituted age caps to avoid the threat of interracial love blossoming between guests and white peers.

Shearer tempers official Fresh Air rhetoric with accounts of children's experiences, gleaned largely from interviews. Shearer finds that while many former Fresh Air children viewed their vacations favorably, others held deeply painful memories. Some experienced physical, emotional, and sexual abuse at the hands of hosts who were vetted only minimally. Others mourned when aging out of the program severed the familial love that their hosts had offered them as children. Shearer also examines how Fresh Air boosters' claims of bridging racial difference placed burdensome expectations upon children to be racial ambassadors in unfamiliar surroundings. Yet Shearer shows that many children did teach hosts to see their own prejudices, and he casts them as understudied activists who brought themes of the Civil Rights Movement into private white homes. Others, through unruliness and refusal to meet hosts' expectations, demonstrated resistance against Fresh Air reform itself.

Shearer gives readers much to think about, having successfully revealed biases embedded in and consequences of Fresh Air reform on both personal and systemic levels. Because Shearer is invested in telling a national story about race through analysis of the Fresh Air movement, however, readers sometimes lose regional specificity. Though an organization that brought children from New York City to the hills of Vermont would likely differ in important ways...