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Changing Strategies for Child Welfare, Enduring Beliefs about Childhood: The Fresh Air Fund, 1877–19261

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2012

Julia Guarneri
Julia Guarneri*
Affiliation:
Yale University
*
julia.guarneri@yale.edu
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Abstract

In 1877, a Congregational pastor started a modest effort to send New York City tenement children on two-week summer vacations in country homes. The pastor's Fresh Air Fund grew, in the following decades, into a hugely popular program and a celebrated cause. The charity thrived in part because its simple project adapted well to several different reform environments. The fund made a place for itself in the evangelical child-saving efforts of the Gilded Age, the civic-minded reforms of the Progressive Era, and the more individualistic pursuits of the 1920s. In each era, fund leaders cast country vacations as simple means to address middle-class New Yorkers' fears about their changing city, from the influx of immigrants to the spread of disease to rising class tensions.

Tracking the Fresh Air Fund over fifty years reveals the sea changes in child-welfare work between 1877 and 1927, but it also calls attention to continuities often overlooked in the history of child welfare. Throughout the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the fund tapped supporters' constant and deep-seated beliefs in children's potential, the restorative power of the outdoors, and a child's right to play.

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , January 2012 , pp. 27 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2012

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Footnotes

1

I thank JGAPE's two anonymous reviewers for their thorough and helpful comments. I am also grateful to Julia Irwin; Alison Greene; Barry Muchnick; my advisor, Glenda Gilmore; and my father, Carl Guarneri, for their assistance and feedback.

References

2 Quotations in Lovett, Eleanor I., “One Summer's Work,” Sunday Afternoon, 1877 or 1878, 1, Fresh Air Fund papers, Fresh Air Fund headquarters office, New York CityGoogle Scholar.

3 Lovett, “One Summer's Work,” 7.

4 Reverend Willard Parsons in Christianity Practically Applied: The Discussions of the International Christian Conference Held in Chicago, October 8–14, 1893 in Connection with the World's Congress Auxiliary of the World's Columbian Exhibition and under the Auspices and Direction of the Evangelical Alliance for the United States. The Section Conferences (New York, 1894), 276.

5 The references to the Fresh Air Fund in existing scholarship include Paris, Leslie, Children's Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp (New York, 2008), 57, 69Google Scholar; Schmitt, Peter J., Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (New York, 1969), 97–98Google Scholar; and Walter S. Ufford, “Fresh Air Charity in the United States,” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1897).

6 On more radical child-welfare projects of this era, see Crenson, Matthew A., Building the Invisible Orphanage: A Prehistory of the American Welfare System (Cambridge, MA, 1998)Google Scholar; Hacsi, Timothy A., Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America (Cambridge, MA, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hawes, Joseph M., Children in Urban Society: Juvenile Delinquency in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1971)Google Scholar; Holt, Marilyn Irvin, The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America (Lincoln, NE, 1992)Google Scholar; and Platt, Anthony M., The Child-Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago, 1969)Google Scholar.

7 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1917, 21. All Fresh Air Fund annual reports were accessed at the New York Public Library.

8 Walter Ufford counted fourteen nonsectarian and nineteen denominational Fresh Air charities in the city in 1897. Ufford, “Fresh Air Charity in the United States,” 2. A brochure from a 1906 Fresh Air conference cited sixty-six such groups but noted that most served only “special classes or clubs.” Brochure for 1906 Conference on Fresh Air and Summer Hospital Work: “Fresh Air Activities,” folder 76, box 26, Community Service Society Collection, Columbia University. Willard Parsons headed two Fresh Air charities for a time; he volunteered to run Life magazine's smaller Fresh Air Fund until 1901, when it became a separate organization. Sharp, Lloyd Burgess, Education and the Summer Camp: An Experiment (New York, 1930), 10Google Scholar. The Life program continues today but is known as the Trail Blazers program. http://www.trailblazers.org/about-2/history/ (accessed June 15, 2011).

9 Peter J. Schmitt, Back to Nature, 97–98; Sharp, Education and the Summer Camp, 6–8. Ufford counted thirty-five major organizations doing fresh air work outside of New York City in 1897; they clustered in eastern and midwestern cities. Ufford, “Fresh Air Charity in the United States,” 11.

10 The Chicago Tribune sponsored Camp Algonquin beginning in 1909. The Chicago Tribune, Pictured Encyclopedia of the World's Greatest Newspaper (Chicago, 1928), 13. Schmitt, Back to Nature, 97, notes that Boston had thirty Fresh Air operations by 1895. On international Fresh Air Funds, see Sharp, Education and the Summer Camp, 8.

11 Mintz, Steven, Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood, (Cambridge, MA, 2004), ch. 4Google Scholar; and Clement, Priscilla Ferguson, Growing Pains: Children in the Industrial Age, 1850–1890 (New York, 1997), 36–121Google Scholar.

12 I use both “poor” and “working-class” to describe the children that the Fresh Air Fund recruited; most of the children came from families straddling those two categories.

13 Quoted in Lovett, “One Summer's Work,” 3. Another report of the first summer's work appeared in Lippincott's Magazine, Aug. 1881.

14 Quoted in Lovett, “One Summer's Work,” 3.

15 The fund opened homes for girls of this age in the early 1900s. I have no records of why they did not accept boys of this age, only a brochure from a 1906 Conference on Fresh Air and Hospital Work mentions as an “ever-recurring question”: “What of boys over twelve and fathers?” Brochure in “Fresh Air Activities” folder, folder 76, box 26, Community Service Society Collection. It seems most likely that teenage boys were considered employable and also made for unruly houseguests.

16 1912 fundraising brochure, box 1, Fresh Air Fund papers.

17 In 1882, 250 mothers traveled courtesy of the fund; New York Tribune, Nov. 12, 1882, 6. These numbers stayed relatively constant until the turn of the century. The fund sent mothers who especially needed the respite from tenement life or whose children were too small to make the journey alone.

18 1912 fundraising brochure, box 1, Fresh Air Fund papers.

19 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1911, 5–6.

20 Tribune Fresh Air Fund City Workers' Bulletin, 1925, folder 2, “Fresh Air Camp Sites, 1924–1925,” box 5, La Guardia House Collection, Columbia University. Articles assuring each child was worthy of aid include the New York Tribune, July 6, 1882, 5; Nov. 17, 1899, 9; July 19, 1906, 7; Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Reports: 1903, 6; 1905. 15; 1913, 24; fundraising brochure, 1916, box 1, Fresh Air Fund papers.

21 New York Tribune, Nov. 17, 1899, 9.

22 Fresh Air Fund materials referred often to choosing “the right sort” of children from “the right sort” of homes. See 1899 Annual Report, New York Tribune, Nov. 17, 1899, 9.

23 The fund explained its criteria thus: “It must be understood, however, that the purpose of the fund is to gather, not homeless vagabonds from the street, but those who have homes, however wretched, and who are for the most part in touch with the missions. Compliance with certain necessary demands can be obtained from them, and with them only is the work practical.” Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1903, 6.

24 One letter received by Leslie Marsland Conly of the Fresh Air Fund and Frank J. Bruno of the Charity Organization Society complained of guests' stealing. Mrs. Philip Murdock, Copenhagen, NY, to unspecified, Sept. 19, 1914. “Fresh Air Fund” folder, box 126, Community Service Society Collection. An annual report recorded one prank in which two children feigned headaches in order to stay home from church and then painted the family pig. New York Tribune, Nov. 12, 1882, 6.

25 Devins attended New York University and Union Theological Seminary, worked as a missionary on the Lower East Side, and managed the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor for twelve years. Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1907, 28. Leslie Marsland Conly attended the University of Rochester and worked as a schoolteacher and then as a New York Tribune reporter before becoming director of the Fund. Biographical sketch of Robert Leslie Conly, who wrote under the name of “Robert C. O'Brien,” by Sally M. Conly, http://www.thornvalley.com/library/articles/rcob/junior_authors.php (accessed Nov. 22, 2009).

26 Parsons partnered with the Brooklyn Daily Union and the New York Observer before settling into his position at the Tribune.

27 Kluger, Richard and Kluger, Phyllis, The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune (New York, 1986), 138–39, 182–84, 194Google Scholar.

28 Donation statistics as reported in collected Fresh Air Fund annual reports.

29 On newspaper charities that started for similar reasons but slightly later, during the depression of 1893, see Burgess, Charles O., “The Newspaper as Charity Worker: Poor Relief in New York City, 1893–1894,” New York History (July 1962): 249–68Google Scholar.

30 On more direct concern with newsboys' welfare, see Brace, Charles Loring, The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years' Work Among Them (New York, 1872), 101–13Google Scholar, and Hoyt, Edwin P., Horatio's Boys: The Life and Works of Horatio Alger, Jr. (Radnor, PA, 1974), 86–89Google Scholar. The Tribune helped raise funds for a separate newsboys' summer camp; see New York Tribune, May 14, 1916, section IV, 2.

31 Statistics listed in the New York Tribune, Nov. 12, 1882, 6, and Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1934, 24.

32 New York Tribune, May 27, 1890, 6.

33 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1913, 6. This arrangement is also detailed in the annual reports from 1909 and 1911–1914.

34 New York Tribune, July 10, 1899, 6.

35 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1922, 13.

36 The fund's preferences become clear in complaints about unsuitable hosts. On the role of local volunteers in vetting host families, see Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1917, 22–23. In 1914, the fund paid hosts between $2.50 and $4.00 a week for children's board. Letters from that same year tell of hosts who seemingly did take in children just for profit, who lived in too “urban” a setting, and who were accused of mistreating the children. Board figures: Frank J. Bruno to Rev. James Larson, July 31, 1914; on the mistreatment of guests: “Regarding the home of Mr. Andrew Scadden, Rigoes, N.J., where Fresh Air boarders have been sent by this Society,” Aug. 29, 1901, both in “Fresh Air Fund” folder, box 126, Community Service Society Collection.

37 Most surviving records of hosts' opinions are found in newspaper articles and annual reports; the organization's records contain almost no internal communications or correspondence with hosts and participants.

38 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1907, 18.

39 Miss Lottie Chase Ham of Saranac Lake, NY to Mr. William H. Matthews, 105 East 22nd Street, New York City. Aug. 27, 1917, folder 76, “Fresh Air Activities,” box 26, Community Service Society Collection.

40 For a description of such an event, see the New York Tribune, Aug. 4, 1902, 7.

41 “The Fresh Air Fund. Its Work Picturesquely Described by Some of its Beneficiaries. Youthful Writers Tell of their Happy Vacations in the Country. Additions to the Fund,” New York Tribune, Aug. 11, 1890, 6. The article does not say whether children's letter-writing was supervised and counseled by volunteers or if children wrote on their own. Similar letters were reprinted fairly regularly; for another example, see the New York Tribune, Aug. 8, 1902, 9.

42 “Youthful Writers Tell of their Happy Vacations in the Country,” New York Tribune, Aug. 11, 1890, 6.

43 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1907, 14.

44 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1915, 12.

45 New York Tribune, July 6, 1882, 5.

46 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1903, 10.

47 Letters home published in the New York Tribune, Aug. 11, 1890, 6.

48 Quoted in Lovett, “One Summer's Work,” 1.

49 On Christian charity and the nineteenth-century middle class, Young, Linda, Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia and Britain (New York, 2003), 24–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Willard Parsons, “The Story of the Fresh-Air Fund,” Scribner's Magazine, Apr. 1891, 518.

51 Quoted in ibid., 519.

52 Walter Ufford surveyed directors of Fresh Air charities on whether the work “pauperized” children and their families, leading them to expect more aid. The great majority answered that it did not. Ufford, “Fresh Air Charity in the United States,” 99. On Algerism and the American success ethic, see Cawelti, John G., Apostles of the Self-Made Man (Chicago, 1965)Google Scholar; Hilkey, Judy, Character is Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill, 1997)Google Scholar; and Weiss, Richard, The American Myth of Success: From Horatio Alger to Norman Vincent Peale (Urbana, 1988)Google Scholar. On turn-of-the-century beliefs about character building, see Hilkey, Character is Capital; and Macleod, David I., Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870–1920 (Madison, 1983)Google Scholar.

53 On this neighborhood stratification, Beckert, Sven, see The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 Parsons, “The Story of the Fresh-Air Fund,” 518.

55 New York Tribune, July 2, 1882, 7.

56 Parsons, “The Story of the Fresh-Air Fund,” 519.

57 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1904, 28.

58 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1912, 9.

59 Parsons, “The Story of the Fresh-Air Fund,” 518.

60 Quoted in New York Tribune, July 6, 1882, 5.

61 Parsons said he received several thousand letters per year that were to be forwarded to city children. Parsons, Christianity Practically Applied, 277.

62 Based on information from the 1900 U.S. census. Haines, Michael R. and Preston, Samuel H., Fatal Years: Child Mortality in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, 1991), 91Google Scholar. There are few health statistics available for New York before 1900.

63 Parsons, Christianity Practically Applied, 276.

64 Feldberg, Georgina D., Disease and Class: Tuberculosis and the Shaping of Modern North American Society (New Brunswick, NJ, 1995), 29, 32Google Scholar.

65 Parsons, Christianity Practically Applied, 276.

66 Dr. H. B. White of Brooklyn's Mayflower Mission Chapel, quoted from Nov. 1879 report for the Kings County Medical Society in Parsons, “The Story of the Fresh-Air Fund,” 521.

67 Quoted in Lovett, “One Summer's Work,” 1.

68 Quoted in Parsons, “The Story of the Fresh-Air Fund,” 523.

69 New York Tribune, July 6, 1882, 5.

70 On these broad trends in Progressive Era urban reform, see Boyer, Paul S., Urban Masses and Moral Order in America (Cambridge, MA, 1978)Google Scholar; Bremner, Robert H., From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the United States (New York, 1956)Google Scholar; and Flanagan, Maureen A., America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s (New York, 2007), 24–27Google Scholar.

71 Brochure for 1906 Conference on Fresh Air and Summer Hospital Work, folder 76: “Fresh Air Activities,” box 26, Community Service Society Collection. The Charity Organization Society organized two earlier conferences on Fresh Air work, in 1888 and 1891. These conferences devoted less time to methods for reaching the neediest New Yorkers and more time to the sheer logistics of Fresh Air work. Ufford, “Fresh Air Charity in the United States,” 3.

72 Partner organizations listed in Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1917, 19.

73 From 1909–1914 annual reports, back cover. The fund still excluded New York City's orphans and its most destitute children, even though it did not print those criteria in this list.

74 Parsons, “The Story of the Fresh Air Fund,” 516–17. On the search for places for black children to vacation, see Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1912, 21–22, and Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1914, 16.

75 Guide for local organizing committees, reprinted in the 1917 annual report, 19.

76 Letters including such requests found in folder 1: “Fresh Air Misc.,” box 5, LaGuardia House Collection, Columbia University. One pastor in New York City requested that his native-born, Protestant parishioners not be required to send their children to camps alongside Italians and Jews. George V. S. Michaelis to Bailey B. Burritt, General Director, Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, May 14, 1914, folder 76: “Fresh Air Activities,” box 26, Community Service Society Collection.

77 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1915, 7.

78 The fund jointly ran many camps with organizations such as sanitariums, local parishes, the Women's National Afro-American Union, and the National League on Urban Conditions among Negroes. Participating organizations and special camps listed in Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1917, 16–17.

79 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1913, 15.

80 On environment-focused progressive reforms for children, see Cavallo, Dominick, Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 1880–1920 (Philadelphia, 1981)Google Scholar; Macleod, David I., The Age of the Child: Children in America, 1890–1920 (New York, 1998); 26–31, 75–100Google Scholar; Nasaw, David, Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States (New York, 1981), 87–139Google Scholar; and Tiffin, Susan, In Whose Best Interest? Child Welfare Reform in the Progressive Era (Westport, CT, 1982), 110–40Google Scholar.

81 New York Tribune, Aug. 29, 1906, 7.

82 On the professionalization of charitable work from 1890 to the 1920s, see Tiffin, In Whose Best Interest?, 253–80, and Lubove, Roy, The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work As a Career 1880–1930 (New York, 1969)Google Scholar.

83 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1903, 13.

84 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1909, 23.

85 Quotation from Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1912, 9–10. In early annual reports, chaperones appeared with campers in nearly every picture. See especially 1904 and 1911 annual reports.

86 Progressive efforts ranging from mothers' pensions to supervised team sports also stressed the importance of constant adult supervision. See Cavallo, Muscles and Morals, and Ladd-Taylor, Molly, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (Urbana, 1994)Google Scholar.

87 New York Tribune, June 18, 1900.

88 Feldberg, Disease and Class; Kraut, Alan M., Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace” (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; and Tomes, Nancy, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA, 1998)Google Scholar.

89 Lovett, “One Summer's Work,” 9.

90 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1913, 23; Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1917, 20.

91 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1903, 9.

92 Berrol, Selma C., Growing Up American: Immigrant Children in America, Then and Now (New York, 1995)Google Scholar.

93 Kraut, Silent Travelers, 5, Rogers, Naomi, Dirt and Disease: Polio Before FDR (New Brunswick, NJ, 1992), 258Google Scholar; Feldberg, Disease and Class, 82.

94 Gordon, Linda, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 13Google Scholar.

95 New York Tribune, Aug. 8, 1902, 9. On nativism in this era, see Higham, John, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (repr. New York, 1963)Google Scholar.

96 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1909, 18.

97 New York Tribune, no date, likely 1880s, clipping in Fresh Air Fund papers; New York Tribune, July 2 1882, 7.

98 City Workers' Bulletin for the Tribune Fresh Air Fund, 1925, folder 2: “Fresh Air Camp Sites, 1924–1925,” box 5, LaGuardia House Collection.

99 From a sample menu at Kromm farm at Shokan, New York Tribune, Aug. 20, 1906, 7.

100 New York Tribune, July 2, 1882, 7.

101 John Devins, Tribune Fresh Air Fund fundraising pamphlet, 1910, Fresh Air Fund papers.

102 New York Tribune, Aug. 8, 1902, 9.

103 For a similar argument as it relates to Progressive Era public schooling, see Nasaw, Schooled to Order, pt. 2. On progressivism as an expression of middle-class culture and values, see McGerr, Michael, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York, 2003)Google Scholar.

104 On new definitions of childhood, see Mintz, Huck's Raft; MacLeod, Age of the Child; Cross, Gary, The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture (New York, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fass, Paula S., The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York, 1977), 53–118Google Scholar; and Alice Boardman Smuts, Science in the Service of Children, 1893–1935 (New Haven, 2006). On children as consumers, see Jacobson, Lisa, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century (New York, 2004)Google Scholar; and Mintz, Huck's Raft, 217–18.

105 Leslie Marsland Conly, fundraising brochure, 1916, Fresh Air Fund papers.

106 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1926, 8.

107 Conly, 1916 fundraising brochure.

108 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1915, 8.

109 Conly, fundraising brochure, 1912; Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Reports, 1922, 1925, 1926.

110 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1913, 17.

111 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1915, 7.

112 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1913, 17.

113 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1917, 27.

114 On nativism and pluralism in the 1920s, see Dumenil, Lynn, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York, 1995), ch. 5–6Google Scholar; Flanagan, America Reformed, ch. 13; Daniels, Roger, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882 (New York, 2004), ch. 1–2Google Scholar; and Higham, Strangers in the Land, ch. 9–11. Cohen, Lizabeth, in Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York, 1991)Google Scholar, analyzes immigrant assimilation through industrial employment and popular culture in the 1920s.

115 Quoted in Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1923, 11.

116 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1920, 12.

117 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1923, under title “Introducing the Real America,” 15–16.

118 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1924, 7–8.

119 Ibid., 8.

120 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1922, 8.

121 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1923, 13.

122 Ibid., 11.

123 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1919, 8.

124 Littman, Mark S., A Statistical Portrait of the United States: Social Conditions and Trends (Lanham, MD, 1998), 7Google Scholar; Shifflett, Crandall, ed., Almanacs of American Life: Victorian America, 1876 to 1913 (New York, 1996), 74Google Scholar.

125 Gregory, Ross, ed., Almanacs of American Life: Modern America, 1914–1945, (New York, 1995), 113, 117, 122Google Scholar. Farm incomes rose in this era but did not keep pace with growth in other sectors.

126 On demographic and social changes in a northeastern rural town, see Barron, Hal S., Those Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century New England (New York, 1984)Google Scholar. On rural tourism, see Brown, Dona, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, 1995)Google Scholar. On philanthropists' response to the “farm crisis” of this era, see Sealander, Judith, Private Wealth and Public Life: Foundation Philanthropy and the Reshaping of American Social Policy from the Progressive Era to the New Deal (Baltimore, 1997), 35–78Google Scholar.

127 Dumenil, The Modern Temper, 3–14, 56–97; Douglas, Ann, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York, 1995)Google Scholar.

128 Conly, fundraising brochure, 1912, Fresh Air Fund papers.

129 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1922, 8.

130 On wilderness and middle-class tourism, see Shaffer, Marguerite S., See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940 (Washington, 2001)Google Scholar.

131 For examples, New York Tribune, Aug. 9, 1922, 13; Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1919, 7, and 1924, 9–10.

132 City Worker's Bulletin for the Tribune Fresh Air Fund, 1925, 6, folder 2: “Fresh Air Camp Sites, 1924–1925,” box 5, LaGuardia House Collection.

133 On rules and suggestions about crippled children, mentally disabled children, and siblings, see City Worker's Bulletin, 1925, 3, 7. On thank-you letters, see City Worker's Bulletin, 1925, 10, folder 2: “Fresh Air Camp Sites, 1924–1925,” box 5, LaGuardia House Collection.

134 On changes and continuities between Progressive Era and 1920s reforms, see Arthur S. Link, “What Happened to the Progressive Movement in the 1920s?” American Historical Review 64 (July 1959): 833–51; and Flanagan, America Reformed, ch. 13.

135 The Fresh Air Fund's new framing of charity work resonates with a 1920s buzzword, “service,” that surfaced in business, advertising, and in civic and social groups. de Grazia, Victoria, Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 15–74Google Scholar; Dumenil, The Modern Temper, 32–33; Heald, MorrellThe Social Responsibilities of Business: Company and Community, 1900–1960 (Cleveland, 1970), 46–49Google Scholar; and Prothro, James Warren, The Dollar Decade: Business Ideas in the 1920s (Baton Rouge, 1954), 38–59Google Scholar.

136 City Worker's Bulletin, 1925, 7, folder 2: “Fresh Air Camp Sites, 1924–1925,” box 5, LaGuardia House Collection.

137 Tribune Fresh Air Fund Annual Report, 1926, 25.

138 Beyond works already cited on American childhood and child-welfare, works taking an international perspective include Cunningham, Hugh, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500, 2nd ed. (White Plains, NY, 2005)Google Scholar; and Heywood, Colin, A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times (Malden, MA, 2001)Google Scholar.