For both the AFSC and their progressive education supporters, despite differences in emphasis, the focus of the work camp experience clearly was on the youth volunteer.
108 See also Kenneth Holland, Youth in European Labor Camps. Washington, D.C: American Council on Education, 1939.
109 For more on this progressive education vein of the work camp movement, see See Roy B. Chamberlin,
“Camp William James: A Case Study” in Donald Eberly, ed. A Profile of National Service (New York, Overseas Educational Service, 1966), 28-31; Algernon D. Black, The Young Citizens: The Story of the Encampment for Citizenship (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1962).
As AFSC executive secretary Clarence Pickett described, the camps were meant “to sensitize the consciences of our younger generation with regard to the social order, to toughen the moral, spiritual, and physical fiber of youth, and insure it to hard work, and withal to sensitize ... to the needed alternation and development in our present social structure.”110 Whether it was to help shape the next generation of pacifists or mold future leaders in the face of the enfeebling luxuries of modern living, the camps were meant to provide young women and men a novel experience of education and encounter,
especially so they could come to understand, as one camper put in a 1941 article, “that common men, unemployed, and social outcasts, are people very much like
themselves.”111 As the article demonstrates, the volunteer experience was in a real way the product of, and an attempt to address, an unequal dynamic. Campers had to have the luxury of being able to give up time and potential pay elsewhere to pursue a summer’s worth of hard work for and with “common men.”
Those served by AFSC work campers themselves were both primary and secondary foci of the experience. In the promotional and internal documentation on the camps, the host communities were largely absent. Tellingly, from early on the AFSC gave campers evaluations at the end of their camp experience. The evaluations, which campers were allowed to go home and reflect upon before mailing them back to the Committee’s Philadelphia offices, asked for comment on all facets of the camping experience. This included the pace of work, the value of speakers and field trips, group dynamics, and, keeping with the camp’s theological foundation, “How effectively could the “way of love and brotherhood” and of non-violent solutions be applied to the
110 Miller, “A Philosophy of Religious Voluntary Service,” I-8. BHLA.
111 R. Alfred Hassler, “Brotherhood in A-C-T-I-O-N.” Baptist Leader, February, 1941: 36.
problems with which the camp dealt?”112 Included in these questions was how relations with the local community were, but no such questionnaires were distributed to members of the local community for similarly thorough feedback.
The women, men, and children of the host community were of course important, and the AFSC and most campers labored diligently to get to know their temporary neighbors, work with them as allies, and at least try to avoid being heavy handed and paternalistic in their work. But even with these efforts, the focus was about the volunteer camper and their transformative encounter through their temporary sojourn across class, racial, and cultural lines into another world. As one write up in Independent Woman, the imprint of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Club wrote, the camps were “the most strenuous sort of vacation routine I’d ever heard of.”113 While not as relaxing and far more altruistic than a typical summer vacation, the work camp, like a vacation, was a limited experience. Privileged in both resources and geographic mobility, volunteers returned home after their summers at the flashpoints of American race and economic relations. But those they served, whether they were sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta, miners in Kentucky, or stuck in the ghettos of Chicago, had no such luxury. 114 They were already home.
In contrast to the aspirational language of the promotional literature for the camps, this private voluntary effort remained small. Through the 1930s and into the 1940s several hundred students participated in the projects. It certainly paled in
comparison to the somewhat similar government work camp programs that were born of
112 Social Industrial Section Work Camps Hazel Green, Kentucky, 1945. AFSCA. Though the questionnaires were consistent throughout the camps.
113 Kimball, “Work Camps,” 172.
114 Keliher, “Work Experiences,” 60.
necessity and driven by unemployment rather than voluntary aspirations. There were indeed limits to this private voluntary impulse.
The work camps were certainly not local panaceas, but nor did they harbor such aspirations. The work they did was helpful but, as George Abernathy wrote of his Dillonvale experience, limited in the face of the social issues that had led to those local realities of hardship and deprivation. Volunteer youth service from these beginnings was always ameliorative at best, a bandage rather than a disinfectant over societal wounds, relief rather than reform. But the Friends of the AFSC were not naive to these realities.
The emphasis on the transformative encounter indeed was recognition of the camps’
explicit educational aim. The camps were not the front lines but the training grounds for preventative pacifism. As AFSC camp organizer David Richie wrote, the initiative was meant to “provide an educational opportunity for both pacifist and non-pacifists students to better understand the economic and social injustice which cause violence, and to feel deeply through involvement the plight of human beings trapped in unemployment and desperate poverty.”115 The real challenge of rooting out poverty, racial tension and violence was the task of the former volunteers, equipped with their new understanding of the “plight of human beings” elsewhere in the country, in years to come.
Award-winning young adult author and Quaker Marjorie Hill Allee captured this ideal in her 1941 book, The Camp at Westlands, a fictional AFSC work camp loosely based on the first camp at Westmoreland. The central character of the book is Alice, a rich young woman from Chicago and college student who, at the book’s beginning, is self-centered, short with others, and barely capable of washing her small dog, Tuffy. She goes to the camp mainly to spite her parents who wished her to take a desk job offered by
115 Richie, Memories and Meditations of a Workcamper, 5.
a family friend. Throughout the book she is challenged by her experiences, locals, and volunteer friends at the Westlands camp, whether it is making new connections, or even running the camp’s washing machine correctly. By the book’s end she is a changed individual. As the book closes, Allee writes that the campers did not succeed much in the ways of their projects, “But they had begun to understand what needed to be done, not only at Westlands but in the wider world. They would go on trying, not just for the few more days of camp, but for all of their lives.”116
Some campers indeed seemed to be thusly moved by the experience. For others the result was not nearly so deep or nuanced. Rather, they just enjoyed what was a different and challenging summer break option. As one parent in article remarked of the camp’s effect on her son, “Since his summer in a work camp John is not only healthier, but happier, than I have ever known him to be.”117
These dynamics aside, this novel volunteer program continued to flourish in the years following its start at Westmoreland, even in spite of challenges posed by the outbreak of World War II, including a pronounced gender imbalance among campers as young men were conscripted into the army or found work within the greater war effort.
For some camp proponents, another world war made the Friends’ program even more necessary an outlet for creative, constructive, and practical work, as “waging peace”
became even more of an imperative.118 As one student author of The Intercollegian argued in January 1941, “We often think of making war and of keeping peace, whereas we must learn to think of making peace.” Citing the Quakers and their great success with the work camp programs, the author went on to write, “They have had work camps in the
116 Marjorie Hill Allee, The Camp at Westlands (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941), 240.
117 John French, “Pick-and-Shovel Holiday,” Survey Graphic, April 1937, 233.
118 Roy J. McCorkel, “We Must Wage Peace,” The Intercollegian, January 1941, 61.
summer, designed to give young men and women a chance to express in action their deepest Christian convictions in needy places.”119
By this time, the Quakers were also no longer alone in their pioneering efforts to creatively and constructively work for a more peaceful world through the labors of well meaning youth. In addition to the education–minded camps, other Protestants had followed their example, including the Church of the Brethren, the Congregationalists, Mennonites, Methodists, Unitarians, the Evangelical and Reformed Church, Disciples of Christ. This growth was in large part due to the deliberate and intentional policy of the AFSC, who encouraged the adoption of the program they had started. To this end, the AFSC would often co–sponsor a camp with another denomination, such as a 1937 camp in Quaker Bridge, New York with the Church of the Brethren and the Mennonites, or a 1941 Meron, Indiana Camp with the Congregational Work Camp Committee, to lend their expertise to the start of these new work camp ventures.120
The seed first planted by Pierre Cérésole in the ashes of World War I had by the time of another world war blossomed and yielded fruit of a new kind. Through the late Thirties and Forties well–meaning high school and college youth could be found giving their time and energies in the coal fields of the Appalachians, rural reaches of Georgia, neglected black neighborhoods in Chicago and Detroit, and migrant work camps in California and Washington.
In a 1940 article for the journal Christian Century, the author wrote of the first AFSC work camp at Westmoreland in 1934, recalling that “In 1934 the Friends declared war on negativism and passivism. That summer they set up a peace army camp forty
119 Ibid, 62
120Miller, “A Philosophy of Religious Voluntary Service,” I-9.
miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Enlistment notices involved only those willing to serve without pay at hard physical labor, willing to submit to rigid self-discipline, and able to live as menials in a community where conflict was brewing.”121 Years later a 1945 article in the Methodist youth periodical motive reflected on the continued success of this
“campaign” first launched a decade earlier. “They work for nothing–and pay for the privilege… . It is an astonishing reversal of our usual conception of the way things are done, and yet in the ten years the American Friends Service Committee has been sponsoring work camps in Maine and Mexico, in Missouri and New Jersey, over two thousand young people have done just that.”122 Indeed, contrary to what one might expect from young women and men who answered the call to fight the likes of “passivism,” the AFSC had served as creative pioneers of a new type of youth service that helped shape the volunteers as they worked to serve others. This new venture in youth development, combining direct service with a process of education that aimed for larger long-term results, helped begin a larger youth volunteer movement that would continue to grow and sprout new variations of the model in the decades to come.
121 Herman Keiter, “Soldiers of Peace,” Christian Century (October 2, 1940): 1202-1204:
122 Elizabeth Janet Gray, “Working for Nothing—Paying for the Privilege: A New Technique for Democracy,” motive, 1945, 28-29, 39.