Social Regeneration and Social Recreation

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In his 1896 essay The Frontier in American History, Frederick Jackson Turner, in many ways the founder of American Studies, noted that the United States Census bureau considered the frontier closed in the 1880s. Jackson suggested that the end of the wilderness experience meant that the individual no longer had a ready place for social regeneration.

The end of "social regeneration" paved the way for nation wide "social recreation." After Henry Ford built the Model T, his "car for the great multitude," large numbers of individuals were free to flee the city on a regular basis in search of the newly domesticated "nature." Ford himself believed that the Model T's principle use would be to allow families to enjoy the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open space. Auto camping took off after World War I and in 1922, the New York Times would estimate that of 10.8 million cars, 5 million were in use for camping. Soon "auto-tents" designed to fit the Model T and trailers to be towed by it would follow.

At first, campers would simply park in empty fields or by the side of the road, but this led to confrontations with angry rural townsfolk, seeing their lives under threat not only from declining profitability but also from these early seekers of Exurbia. Soon campgrounds or "trailer parks" sprang up to provide places to stay with other campers on the road. Although campers sought nature and escape from a fixed community, they also sought to share this experience with their brethren.

Unlike The Metropolis, trailer parks were places of relative homogeneity. As a result, campers were able to tolerate living in remarkably close quarters.

Allan D. Wallis, Wheel Estate. The Rise and Decline of Mobile Homes, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

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