voluntary service circles was In the Direction of Dreams, a 1949 publication by Violet Wood, who worked for the Missionary Education Movement, an educational office within the Presbyterian Church (USA) and later the National Council of Churches.213 The start of the book reflected the wider general sense of social imperative that helped drive the volunteer service movement’s growth. Wood wrote in the introduction, “In every community, state, and nation in the world there are situations calling for change, situations that good people talk about endlessly, situations about which nobody does a thing. ‘What can we do?’ they say, while the problems of nations and men are left unsolved, waiting for some magic answer that never comes.”214 The rest of the book stood in contrast to this passive point of contrast. In an age of anxiety, Christian social action was necessary. Moreover, for Protestant youth there was an increasing number of creative options through which they could do so. Further, in the nature of volunteer service as they actively helped others in the process they would further be shaped and grow themselves. As Woods wrote, through their efforts they helped create “the story of
212 FIfth Annual Conference on Youth Service Projects. Interdenominational Commission on Youth Service Projects, 1952. Unitarian Service Committee. Home Projects Department. Administrative Records, 1948-1953, Box 2. UUIR.
213 Violet Wood, In the Direction of Dreams (New York: Friendship Press, 1949).
214 Ibid, ix.
how with Christian purpose they worked in the direction of their dreams and turned common hours to magic for themselves and others.215
The book itself offered snapshots of different projects and interviews with volunteers from projects that took place in the summer of 1948. Together, the chapters richly illustrated the evolution of Protestant youth service in the postwar period, even at this relatively early point. Work camps remained the heart of the movement. As such, several chapters were devoted to different camps, such as the one depicting Alice Jordan who left her “sheltered college town where she had always lived.” Her migrant work camp placement was challenging, and transformative, though initially she found to her disappointment that the camp’s “Italian and Polish pea and bean pickers were not the least bit exciting or romantic.”216 As a point of comparison Woods also wrote about the high school students from the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago who spent a summer pouring concrete for foundations and a well at an Evangelical and Reformed mission in the rural Ozarks.217
But In the Direction of Dreams also depicted the growing diversity of volunteer projects. Her service vignettes included a Methodist youth caravan that was “an oasis of revival and rehabilitation to many churches that have no adequate youth programs,” an interracial camp in Phoebus, Virginia, students–in–industry in Hartford who explored
“with the framework of their Christian faith the economic, racial, political, and social problems of a great industrial city,” and Brethren Volunteers spending a year in agricultural “Town’s End,” Kansas.218 As Wood emphasized throughout, the projects
215 Ibid, xi.
216 Ibid, 1.
217 Ibid, 22.
218 Ibid, 109.
were both constructive for their host communities, and moreover, important means of inspiring volunteers to a lifetime of Christian action, a vocation of social change. She encapsulated this in the final pages of the book, wherein one volunteer asserted, “Each of us in this room has moved in the direction of his dream of a better world, but let’s not kid ourselves one minute. The dream will disappear unless we go on and on in the direction it points, not only for a few weeks of volunteer service but in every one of the common hours of our lives.”219
The work camp movement pioneered by the AFSC in the 1930s had sparked a new broader movement of youth volunteer service among peace church and mainline Protestant denominations. It was a movement of new projects and new organizations. By 1950, the Commission on Youth Service Projects estimated that three thousand students participated in summer service projects, alone. Throughout the decade many more participated in weekend work camps throughout the year, or summer camps or
community service programs too small to find a listing in motive or Invest Your Summer.
In Protestant youth outreach literature, service programs became a necessary part of a balanced church youth program. It was an impressive, optimistic, and increasingly normative impulse of social action in an age of anxiety.
The movement had not only diversified, it had begun to professionalize. As illustrated by the Commission on Youth Service Projects, volunteer organizations explored questions of administration, volunteer management, marketing, and program evaluation. One of the more significant steps in program evaluation was a 1952
publication by Harvard professor Henry Riecken that offered both a program evaluation and psychological evaluation of AFSC work campers. As Riecken wrote in the studies
219 Ibid, 163.
preface, the study acknowledged that programs like the AFSC work camps were
“important potential sources of social change and therefore worthy of study in their own right,” and that his work was an important first step in “evaluating the effectiveness” of the programs in how the volunteers were shaped by the experience.220
Riecken’s findings revealed both the value of youth service, as well as its limitations, characteristics that had been part of the work camp model and were
consequently imbued into the wider movement. For one thing, it remained a constructive and creative outlet for the desire of many young people to take action in an anxious age.
As he remarked, “Many young people—perhaps most young people—want to ‘do something’ to lessen human misery and to rectify injustice. Their practical idealism constitutes a bright beacon on today’s stormy sea of world discord and social disruption.221
Despite the promise of change within the volunteer experience, Riecken concluded that most of the volunteers he analyzed were not radically transformed.
Overwhelmingly they were already predisposed towards social action before their work camp experience, which did, however, strengthen their previously held beliefs. In short, they were a self–selected group.222 Further, Riecken warned that some volunteers ran the risk of becoming less, rather than more, connected to their fellow citizens, that their actions might buttress sentiments of superiority over “Average Americans.” This led
220 Henry Riecken. The Volunteer Work Camp: A Psychological Evaluation (Cambridge: Addison–Wesley Press, 1952), xvi.
221 Ibid, xiii.
222 Ibid, xvi.
Riecken to warn against the “danger that such alienation may lead to a species of self–
complacence and the separation of campers into a morally elite ‘in–group.’”223 As Riecken’s study also pointed out in more clinical language, for all of its rhetoric and anecdotes of concrete social action, volunteer service remained a limited exercise unto itself. As he further wrote, a program’s purpose could only, “Whet their [a volunteer’s] appetites for constructive service to others.”224 It remained a model by which short–term labor was thrown at long–term problems. The results of the most productive volunteer project could not get to the systemic root that had engendered the project’s need. Volunteer service was an effective flag of areas of social tension and conflict.
Throughout the 1950s, domestic volunteer placements continued to be in black inner city neighborhoods, Indian reservations, rural white communities in the broadly construed
“Appalachia,” and rural black communities in the South. But volunteer service was still an ameliorative rather than a curative exercise. As an enduring limitation of the
phenomenon, it could only “whet” a volunteer’s appetite for greater works and greater social change.
By the close of the 1950s the landscape of Protestant youth volunteer service had undergone tremendous shifts and changes. Shaped by World War II and the many overlapping concerns of an age of anxiety, the work camp movement grew into a wider, more professional, more normative movement of volunteer service. Thousands of high school and college students took advantage of these opportunities for Christian action.
Despite the movement’s growing spirit of cooperation and collaboration, as seen through the Commission on Youth Service Projects, it remained a Protestant endeavor.
223 Ibid, xvii.
224 Ibid, 174
But during this period a similar movement of Catholic youth volunteer service began to take shape as well. In many ways this Catholic parallel looked the same, as middle class college youth volunteered a year of their lives for little more than the value of the experience. But a deeper look reveals that this movement’s backstory and animating ideals were, as a product of a unique confessional context, quite different.