The history of summer camps is more or less what you’d expect. They were started in the late nineteenth century as a way for city-bound boys to get some fresh air and relearn masculinity and the virtues of being in nature. Industrialization had pushed many middle-class families into urban areas, where they quickly found themselves surrounded by new immigrants from Europe. In response, a group of proprietors—largely private-school operators who needed a way to expand their businesses to the summer—began to construct bucolic bubbles that would take young boys (and eventually girls) away from the filth of the city.
In her book “A Manufactured Wilderness,” the art historian Abigail A. Van Slyck convincingly lays out the case that summer camp represented a dual fantasy of health and exclusion. Describing the “middle-class, native-born Americans” of the eighteen-nineties, she writes:
In their eyes, the rise of large cities deprived modern children of wide-open, sun-filled spaces for active play, while overcrowded tenements and substandard sanitation threatened the very health and vitality of the young. Massive European immigration made these developments particularly troubling, flooding American cities with children who were not just culturally different from Anglo-Saxons, but understood to be racially inferior to them as well. How, these native born Americans wondered, would immigrant children learn the cherished values of the American republic in congested cities? What was to prevent urban youths from becoming hollow-chested toughs who would rather haunt the nickelodeon than engage in wholesome play?
If you grew up any time in the twentieth century in this country, you likely have memories of this rugged-yet-carefree vision of camp. My parents usually kept me and my sister at home during the summers, and camps were few and far-between, but many of my friends spent four weeks on the North Carolina coast at Camp Sea Gull, where they learned to race sailboats, shoot arrows at targets, and knit lanyards. Other friends went to the Talent Identification Program, or TIP, at Duke University, where they could take advanced classes in math, learn to write essays, and live together in dormitories with other bookish strivers from all over the East Coast. TIP is now essentially the Duke Pre-College Program; for the price of roughly five thousand dollars per two-week stay, your child can be given “access to cutting-edge curriculum and technology beyond the average classroom while connecting them with transcendent peers from around the world and influential professionals in their future field.”