Tag Archives: Fresh Air Movement

“Diddy In A Buggy”: A Rapper, The Amish, and The Fresh Air Fund

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Tobin Miller Shearer

Hip-hop artist, rapper, and producer Sean “Diddy” Combs reminisced about his experience with the Fresh Air Fund (FAF) during an interview with talk show host Jimmy Kimmel on August 1, 2018. Combs described his time among the Plain people as a “beautiful” experience that formed his identity. He recalled milking cows, picking berries, riding buggies, and eating large Amish meals, all of which – in the absence of electronics – “taught him how to just relate with each other.” He concluded his reminiscence with a “shout-out to the Fresh Air Fund.”

Combs sounds nostalgic in the interview despite Kimmel’s repeated attempts to poke fun at the experience. Rather than a means to obtain cheap child labor – Kimmel suggested that the Amish had “somehow bamboozled this charity into sending you there to work” – Combs mentioned how often he thought about his host family and how they had contributed to his life. When Kimmel joked that Combs should hitch a horse to his Bentley to recreate the buggy rides of his youth, the rap star and actor stayed serious, emphasizing that he “truly appreciated” his summer in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Combs’s memory holds only positive associations with his summer hosting venture.

The juxtaposition of a world-wise, very wealthy, hip-hop artist with the world-wary, frugal, hymn-singing Amish captured the media’s attention. In addition to dozens of accounts on entertainment portals ranging from People magazine to Billboard.com, the venerable BBC News also reported on the exchange five days after the interview appeared. Always media savvy in their fundraising efforts, the FAF tweeted out a link to the Kimmel interview within forty-eight hours.

The story told by Combs echoes the prevailing narrative about the Fresh Air Fund. It is a tale composed with nostalgia, sung without discord, resonate with racial harmony. Since its founding in 1877, the Fund has brought city children to the country for summer stays – most of them of the one- to two-week variety. Combs purported two-month stay is much rarer. Beginning in the 1940s and 50s as white flight resulted in increasingly black and brown urban centers, the Fund shifted from sending white ethnic children from the city to white rural hosts to sending African-American and Latinx children from the city to white rural hosts. As told in thousands of glowing newspaper accounts generated by the Fund for distribution to regional newspapers, happy hosts welcomed happy children to rural and suburban communities invariably happy to host them.

There was no room for another narrative in the Fund’s accounts. Nostalgia from public figures like tennis champion Arthur Ashe, crooner Bing Crosby, comedian Jimmy Durante, actor Lauren Bacall, and singer Ethel Merman only offered positive testimonies.

Photo 1 - Eastern Mennonite Missions Train Station Pick-up

Eastern Mennonite Missions Train Station Pick-up (circa late 1950s): Edith and John Boll with unidentified Fresh Air participant at Lancaster City, Pennsylvania, train station. Used by permission of Eastern Mennonite Missions, Salunga, PA (EMM – Record Room, File Cabinets middle isle, Drawer marked, Information Services Picture File, File: Archives – Home Ministries, Children’s Visitation Program).

And the Amish and Mennonites frequently starred in those accounts. A 1958 press release praised the Mennonite family who hosted a family of five fresh air boys from New York City for an off-season Christmas visit replete with a feast of turkey and stuffing, sweet pickles, peas, carrots, cranberry sauce, plum pudding, fruit cake and ice cream for dessert. Summer’s Children, a 1964 promotional film produced by the Fund, featured Mennonite and Amish families. In 1976, the Fund’s executive director Lisa Pulling noted that Mennonites made Pennsylvania the “most popular place to go” other than New York itself. That same year, newspapers across the country featured a column by popular writer George Will in which he praised the Amish for their Fresh Air hosting in glowing terms every bit as nostalgic as those offered by Combs. After describing the “creak and jingle of harnesses, and the clippity-clop of hooves on pavement,” Will described the family of Benuel Smucker in Ronks, Pennsylvania, who “have no truck with modernity, including electricity, a fact which does not bother their guests from the Big Apple — twin eight-year-old black boys.” Combs was far from the only African-American child to have discovered the appeal of rustic, rural havens.

As the burst of interest in Combs’s story makes evident, the prospect of placing urban children of color with pristine symbols of the nation’s agrarian past – scholar and poet Julia Kasdorf refers to the Amish as “whiter than white:  innocent, pure, plain—Puritans but without their unhappy edge” – has mass appeal. When placing innocents with innocents, everybody wins. There is no racial loser; no antagonist; only the celebration of borders crossed and friendships won.

However, that formula of doubled innocence did not always balance. Children grew homesick and begged to return to the city. Busloads cheered upon crossing back over into New York City. Neighbors, townspeople, and sometimes hosts used racial epithets to refer to their charges. Accusations of theft abounded. Administrators had to remind the hosts that they were not just getting free labor. Assured that they were getting a vacation, some guests balked at the demands of chores and refused to toil without compensation. Up until the mid-1980s, the Fresh Air Fund paid little attention to screening hosts for a history of sexual abuse even while intensively screening the children for STDs and other communicable diseases. The narrative related by Combs is, at the very least, more complex than he suggested.

As much as I was fascinated to hear Combs talk about his Fresh Air experience, it was not the content of the narrative itself that drew my attention. While my research suggests a far more problematic story than the one he told – particularly when the model itself continues to be one-way, short-term, urban-negative, and racially paternalistic – it was the nostalgic way he told the story that I found most gripping.

No matter how hard Kimmel tried to make light of Combs’s reminiscences, he stayed sincere and focused on the positive memories that he held of his time with the Amish. Here was a highly successful entrepreneur whose personal worth tops $800 million, a man who lavishes expensive gifts on his children, a philanthropist who has founded his own program to assist urban youth – one that includes a summer camp each year – and who has given generously to both victims of Hurricane Katrina and students at Howard University. Amid that material success, he harkened back to his time with the Plain people, a group whose lifestyle and commitments seem light years from his own.

But through nostalgia – an emotion defined by sentimental longing and a wistful yearning for better times gone by – Combs made a connection. He saw in his life some measure of charity, hard-work, care for children, and simplicity. He claimed to have learned those values, at least in part, from the Amish; the experience “helped to make me what I am,” he explained in his interview with Kimmel.

Nostalgia is a powerful emotion. Our current president used its appeal to great effect in his most recent campaign. Yet, as was the case with Combs and the Fresh Air Fund, nostalgic appeals often cover over the complexities and underside of history and, in so doing, create a past that never really existed. That’s why the writing and research of history are so critical at this moment. Without a grounding in as much evidence as can be mustered, we risk basing our decisions on fanciful and false presentations of the past.

Combs said in the interview that he would love to know if his host family realized what he grew up to become. Apparently they do, since his sister, who also stayed with the same Amish family in eastern Lancaster County, recently contacted them.

Should Combs talk with his former hosts, I wonder what they would discuss. As is the case in the vast majority of Fresh Air exchanges, long-term relationships are rare, difficult to sustain, and often end when the children enter adolescence. A great deal of evidence shows that white host families are much more reluctant to host teenagers due to the possibility of interracial romance blossoming. Nonetheless, perhaps they would discuss Combs’s efforts to better the lives of other children from the city. Perhaps they would chat about additional memories Combs carries from his sojourn. They might even talk over the ways in which Combs life remains so far from their own.

But, if I had to guess, I would venture that they would spend at least some small measure of their time simply reminiscing about, in the words of Kimmel, the now incongruous image of “Diddy in a buggy.”

Works Cited

Crandell, Richard F., ed. The Frog Log and Other Stories About Children. New York: Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund, 1962.

“Fresh Idea in ’77 Becomes Fun Fund for City Children.” New York Times, Sunday, May 23, 1976, 51.

Hechler, David. The Battle and the Backlash: The Child Sexual Abuse War.  Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1988.

Kasdorf, Julia Spicher. “‘Why We Fear the Amish’: Whiter Than White Figures in Contemporary American Poetry.” In The Amish and the Media, edited by Diane Zimmerman Umble and David Weaver-Zercher, 67-90. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2008.

“Lancaster Holds Film Premier.” What’s In the Air, Fall 1964, 1-2.

Shearer, Tobin Miller. Two Weeks Every Summer: Fresh Air Children and the Problem of Race in America.  Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017.

Will, George F. “Amish Able Hosts to New York Children.” The Post-Crescent, Saturday, August 7, 1976, A-4.

 

[^1]: Richard F. Crandell, ed. The Frog Log and Other Stories About Children (New York: Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund, 1962).

[^2]: “Lancaster Holds Film Premier,” What’s In the Air, Fall 1964.

[^3]: “Fresh Idea in ’77 Becomes Fun Fund for City Children,” New York Times, Sunday, May 23, 1976.

[^4]: George F. Will, “Amish Able Hosts to New York Children,” The Post-Crescent, Saturday, August 7, 1976.

[^5]: Julia Spicher Kasdorf, “‘Why We Fear the Amish’: Whiter Than White Figures in Contemporary American Poetry,” in The Amish and the Media, ed. Diane Zimmerman Umble and David Weaver-Zercher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2008), 69.

[^6]: David Hechler, The Battle and the Backlash: The Child Sexual Abuse War (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1988), 29-54.

[^7]: I explore all these themes in my recent book: Tobin Miller Shearer, Two Weeks Every Summer: Fresh Air Children and the Problem of Race in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017).

[^8]: “Sean Combs, “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Combs#Charity_work_and_honors, Wikipedia, accessed August 7, 2018.

[^9]: Jennifer Kopf and Jenelle Janci, “Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs wants to find the Lancaster Amish couple he spent summers with as a Fresh Air Kid” LNP Monday, August 7, 2018 https://lancasteronline.com/features/entertainment/sean-diddy-combs-wants-to-find-the-lancaster-amish-couple/article_cd3b8412-9973-11e8-8892-4be24b7102d6.html

[^10]: Shearer, 79.

On Being a Watch Listed Historian in the Age of Donald Trump

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Tobin Miller Shearer

The evening of Monday, November 21, 2016, I received an email from a colleague. In it, she wrote, “You are on a ‘professor watch list’ compiled by a right-wing group.… Sorry to be the bearer of bad news….”

I had just returned home from leading a three-hour graduate seminar during which we discussed at length what it means to write advocacy history. Some students felt it essential to tailor their research and writing so that it could speak to present-day public policy. Others felt that contemporary interests fundamentally compromised historical scholarship. The only thing that mattered was whether you were true to the historical record.

Historians often tell uncomfortable truths about the past, truths that many in our church and society would prefer to forget.

In the subsequent days and weeks since my name showed up on the Professor Watchlist website and the list received national attention in the New York Times and elsewhere, I’ve given a lot of thought to the subject of advocacy and the practice of writing history. It is not accidental that the developers of Professor Watchlist have targeted more academics from the field of history than from any other discipline. Historians often tell uncomfortable truths about the past, truths that many in our church and society would prefer to forget. Frequently the truths we tell as historians do influence public policy in tangible ways, whether we want them to or not.

I’ve spent the better part of the last ten years researching the Fresh Air rural hosting movement, a summer vacation program for urban children in which white Mennonite families have regularly participated. From the end of the nineteenth century through to the present, white rural and suburban families hosted children from urban centers for one- to two-week summer vacations. My research focuses on the period between 1939 and 1979 when the program transitioned from white families hosting white children to white families hosting black and brown children.

mla-bethel-1960-gulfport-group-with-bus

Photo of group of twenty-one African-American youth from Gulfport, MS, preparing for Mennonite sponsored Fresh Air trip to Kansas in July 1960. Used with permission of Mennonite Library and Archives, Bethel, Kansas

Back in 2008, I contacted the director of the oldest and most well known hosting group, the Fresh Air Fund, based out of New York City. Formerly known as the Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund, the New York Times is now its primary publicity partner. In that initial phone conversation, I described my research to the director. Although at first she was quite thrilled to hear that I would be writing a book about the Fresh Air movement, her tone abruptly shifted when I explained that I would be examining the programs’ racial dynamics. She went from friendly to icy in a minute. Despite my best efforts to assure her that I was a trained, professional historian, she informed me that they had no archive and, even if they did, I would not be given access to it.

I followed up the conversation with subsequent requests for access to their materials and, several years later, arranged to stop by their offices while I was on a research trip to New York. Despite a warm welcome and a tour of their offices, my request for access to their records was again denied, this time by both their executive director and their board. They told me that they had had a bad experience with a graduate student and, therefore, no longer gave researchers access to their records. Interestingly, a short while after they denied me access, they opened their archives to a historian from an Ivy League school with whom I had begun to correspond. His focus on the program’s early years did not touch on race.

The Fresh Air were wary of my agenda. Those who put me on Professor Watchlist were likewise suspicious that I carry an agenda. In the case of the former, an agenda to expose a troubling truth about the way race worked in Fresh Air programs. In the case of the later, an agenda to expose a troubling truth about the way race worked in society.

In my line of work, being singled out for extra scrutiny is not new. In the past, right wing groups ranging from the KKK to a group called Campus Reform have targeted me. Thus far, little has come of such scrutiny other than ill-conceived and rather anemic death threats. Although we are in a new and deeply troubling political climate at the moment, I remain wary but not unduly concerned.

But that is not the point of my essay.

Rather, I want to explore the possibility that I do have an agenda, that I am somehow breaking an ethical code by pursuing advocacy history. That possibility bothers me far more than being included on a Watchlist.

In the discussion with my graduate students, I made the point that sometimes advocacy history keeps historians from asking certain questions because they don’t want the subject of their research to look good – or bad – depending on their topic and particular political interests. In a recent discussion about his research on the black freedom struggle in Alabama during the 1960s and 1970s, civil rights movement historian Hassan Jeffries described how difficult it was to write the last chapter of his book, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt. In that chapter, he had to describe the disappointing outcome of electoral politics in Lowndes County. Even though black citizens had finally earned the right to vote, black politicians lost touch with the freedom values that had brought them into office; they then betrayed their constituents. It was not a story that Jeffries wanted to tell, but he knew that he had to tell it or his historical project would have no integrity.

I’ve wondered if my own scholarship has that kind of integrity. On the one hand, when I’ve written about white Mennonites, I’ve been very conscious of the perception that I have an agenda, one bent on exposing Mennonite racism. As a result, I’ve been meticulous in my documentation, deliberate in my attempt to contextualize and explain, careful not to hold white Mennonites to a standard that was not present at the time.

In the instance of Mennonite involvement in the Fresh Air program, I’ve described the programs as one-way, short-term, paternalistic endeavors that valorized the country at the expense of the city. But I did so only after discovering that African-American leaders within the church were equally critical of the programs at the time that they were being offered. As my research expanded to look at the Fresh Air Movement in its entirety, I discovered even more critical voices calling for discontinuation of the programs. One critic famously exclaimed that the programs allowed children of color to visit white suburbs for one week every summer but then locked “them out the other 51 weeks of the year.”1

The book that emerged from those ten years of research, Two Weeks Every Summer: Fresh Air Children and the Problem of Race in America features those critics. Of course, I also include accolades from an adoring press. But, as I look back at that work and my body of research on Mennonites writ large, I have to agree with my critics at the Fresh Air program and Professors Watchlist. I do have an agenda. It is not, however, the one they have accused me of having.

Back in 2008, the Fresh Air Fund director accused me of emphasizing something that they had “never paid attention to.” She was referring to race. Yet my agenda is not so much to focus on race – even though I have reams of evidence that, at least by the 1960s, the program claimed race relations as its raison d’etre – as it is to engage in truthtelling. You can’t tell the truth if you don’t tell the whole story. At that time, the Fresh Air Fund simply didn’t want to hear the racial side of their story.

Professor Watchlist has accused me of talking about systemic racism and white privilege in my classes and, more generally, of “discriminat[ing] against conservative students and advance[ing] leftist propaganda in the classroom.” Again, they are off the mark. I do most certainly talk about systemic racism and white privilege in the classroom but make a point of inviting students to disagree and debate with me at every turn. The minute students feel that they can’t disagree with my perspective, I am no longer doing my job. Here again, my interest is in challenging my students to engage with a difficult truth, one that most of my students have not previously encountered.

So, yes, I do believe that there is such a thing as a historically determinable truth. It is not coincidental that the discourse of postmodernism – one which calls Truth with a capital T into question – has emerged at a point when female, black, brown, gay, lesbian, and trans voices have finally begun to be heard in society. Postmodernism suggests that there are only individual perspectives, that all truth is relative. My study of history has convinced me that, while there are many perspectives, there are also raw realities evident in the practice of slavery, the denial of women the vote, the institution of apartheid and Jim Crow, and the persistent and recurring evidence of racism, sexism, and abuse within the white Mennonite community, some of it directly connected to Fresh Air ventures as former Fresh Air participant Janice Batts has courageously made known. And so despite being denied access to the Fresh Air Fund records, I kept on writing; despite being put on a watchlist, I will continue to teach history and research difficult topics.

A coda: a week after the Watchlist came out, I received an email out of the blue from the new executive director of the Fresh Air Fund. A volunteer had sent her a link to a lecture I gave on the programs at Eastern Mennonite University this past January. She wanted to talk about “your studies, findings, perspectives, and thoughts of the ‘Fresh Air’ Friendly Towns, in particular.” It was a gracious note. We will be speaking in two weeks.

Like me, the Fund’s executive director is deeply concerned that we “now sit with the reality of a Trump presidency.” Although I expect that we will have differing perspectives on the contemporary worth and value of a program that I have found fundamentally paternalistic and based on assumptions of white superiority, I am equally convinced that we will have much to learn from each other. At this point I don’t know what the outcome of our conversation will be, but I am eager to discover where a path of advocacy history in a time of watchlisting will take us.

  1. Ellen Delmonte, “An Editorial Feature,” Call and Post, Saturday, July 3 1971. ↩