The New Promised Land: Maine's Summer Camps for Jewish Youth ...

While parents and campers certainly liked that summer camps gave children
the chance to live more simply, hone their athletic skills, and be more religious, we
must consider the most practical reason that camps became a more popular ground
for American children: summer camp gave children something to do during the
summer months. As Sargent commented, when the public school calendar was
created in the nineteenth century, the population was primarily agrarian. Therefore,
the calendar left the summer months open so that children could help their families
on the farms. However, as Sargent writes, “with increased urbanization the children,
no longer needed on the farm, were left with nothing to do.” 69 Paris also mentions
the nation’s public school system, and notes, “middle- and upper-class adolescents
attended [public schools] in growing numbers.” 70 Sargent comments, “twenty-five
million children turned out of school, the buildings closed and locked against them
for three months in the brightest time of the year.” 71
In an effort to fill this void, some children, especially children from less
fortunate families, worked during the summers. This was entirely possible because
Congress did not pass the Child Labor Amendment until 1924, meaning that
workplaces had no federal obligation to restrict child labor. However, according to
Paris, changing conceptions of childhood led “smaller middle- and upper-class
families…to adhere to increasingly less authoritarian and more affectionate child-
rearing practices in which the ability to keep one’s child out of the labor market
69 Sargent, A Handbook of Summer Camps, 20.
70 Leslie Paris, “The Adventures of Peanut and Bo: Summer Camps and Early-
Twentieth-Century Girlhood,” Journal of Women’s History 12 no.5 (2001), 52.
71 Sargent, A Handbook of Summer Camps, 20.
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