Terence Young. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017. xi and 367 pp., maps, diagrams, illustrations, notes, index. $35.00 cloth (ISBN 978080145402).
Occasionally, a book comes along on a topic with as little scholarly literature as the history of camping. When it does, it has a chance to be a foundational work. Terence Young's Heading Out is such a foundational book. It offers extensive treatment of a topic previously lightly explored and it ranges widely beyond camping, placing the subject in the context of U.S. history broadly. Together, these qualities make it a sturdy platform for subsequent work.
Although most of us camp without giving much thought to its past, it does have a history. Young's first and most important accomplishment is simply to explore that subject extensively. Comprised of seven chapters, each constructed around a historical figure (or a handful of them) who illustrates some aspect of camping history, the book runs from the 1870s through the 1960s. It concludes with a brief epilogue that considers the small but noticeable decline in camping since the late twentieth century. Although we might expect that camping is primarily a postwar activity, Young shows that many of Americans' camping habits—why they camp, how they camp, and the tight link between campers and their cars—were established early on, in a rich history in the 1920s and 1930s. The book covers much ground geographically, as well, spanning from the Adirondacks to the Pacific redwoods and stopping in the South, Midwest, and Rocky Mountains along the way. It even strays abroad on occasion. Three broad concepts knit the analysis together: modernity (and antimodernity), pilgrimage, and technology. Although these themes recur throughout the book, they are not rigid or confining categories. Rather, Young deftly describes their influence on camping in widely differing times and places. For example, pilgrimage—the act of going out and returning changed—characterized many of Young's campers at a general level, but by acknowledging the many variations on this general theme, Young accounts for individuals' distinctiveness as well as simultaneous evolution and stasis in America's camping motives over time.
In addition, the book ranges widely through important topics much larger than camping. At its core, the book argues that Americans camped in response to a variety of cultural stimuli, a contention that carries Young to many aspects of U.S. history. For example, the perceived end of the frontier after the 1890s and the threat it was widely believed to pose to national vigor sent many campers into the wilds in the early twentieth century. Later, during the Great Depression, tent trailers, despite enormous initial popularity in the 1920s, all but disappeared, their canvas sides evoking images of squalid Hoovervilles. The 1930s also inspired the first sustained calls for large-scale construction of trails, partly for recreation and also to give unemployed workers a New Deal job building them. “McDonaldization,” the term Young uses to describe the standardization of U.S. consumerism in the twentieth century, deeply shaped camping, as campers sought to bring the control, efficiency, and comforts of home into the outdoors, a tension that sparked debates about what kind of camping represented the most authentic experience. In 1923, camping promoter Elon Jessup captured this paradox between the antimodern impulses that motivated campers and their desire for modern conveniences by instructing his readers how to “rough it smoothly.” Young is also attentive to issues of race and gender. His discussion in chapter 3 of the ways that automobiles opened camping to women and an entire chapter on the desegregation of southern National Park campgrounds are but two examples. From fin de siècle anxieties to the nation's greatest economic crisis, to consumerism, race, and gender, Heading Out connects camping to many broad developments of modern America.
As Young acknowledges in the introduction, however, the book is not comprehensive. Still, the questions he leaves unanswered provide fodder for further study of the topic. For example, in the fabulous chapter on desegregation, which itself is worth the price of admission, Young focuses on William J. Trent, Jr., an aide to the Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, and Trent's influence that led to the National Park Service becoming the first federal agency to end segregation within its jurisdiction in 1942. Focusing on Trent's compelling story, however, raises some interesting questions. What was the saga of segregation in state parks or in National Parks in other regions? What about other peoples of color? Did Asians experience discrimination in the West or Latinos in the Southwest? Expanding the story of segregation (de facto and de jure) to a national scale would enrich our understanding of both camping and race in the United States. One hopes for a book just on this topic soon. Here is another example: Heading Out primarily (although not exclusively) examines people who would conventionally be identified as campers, but what about those Hoovervilles? Were their denizens camping? What about migrant farm laborers, devotees of the counterculture, recluses, and urban homeless people? There is probably an interesting story to be told about how these forms of outdoor living came to be defined as not camping. Finally, in Young's treatment, camping is camping wherever it happens, whether in eastern deciduous forests, the Rocky Mountains, or the desert Southwest. Did landscapes themselves (apart from what people thought about them) ever shape the history of camping? Heading Out does a superb job with cultural history, but historical geographers and environmental historians will be interested also in discovering more about the material and spatial aspects of camping. These are but a few of the intriguing trails that Heading Out leads to but does not have the space to follow. Paths not taken, of course, do not detract from the overall quality of this foundational book. Instead, Young's substantive and wide-ranging work has demonstrated the historical significance of the subject and constructed a platform for the scholarly treatment of this subject, on which others will continue to build.
Heading Out exhibits many other qualities as well. It is deeply researched in archives around the nation and in a truly impressive body of published primary sources including newspapers, magazines, and camping guides. By investigating topics such as how almost all campgrounds came to have nearly the same basic layout or why backpacking trails came to be so popular, Young encourages readers to think about one of their ordinary activities in historical terms and to conceive themselves as actors in one moment of a long-term national drama. In that drama, Americans began to think of living outdoors as fun instead of a hardship, and camping came to take on religious, nationalist, and social well-being implications in U.S. society. Importantly, Young relates all this in a thoroughly engaging narrative. The book is superbly organized and cleverly written in crystal clear prose, making it a fast and easy read.
For these reasons, it deserves a broad readership, including environmental historians and geographers, but also scholars of consumerism, popular culture, recreation, tourism, and intellectual history. In addition, everyone who has ever camped should read this book. It will enrich their understanding of what exactly they are doing when they head outdoors.