Camp Politics

Catching lectures, not frogs

The summer camp calls itself an "experimental lab." The director insists that even swimming is "political." The children put on plays about heroic workers. Mao's China? A Soviet youth Komsomol? No, Santa Barbara, Calif. Situated in a rundown redwood ranch house nestled among the scrub oaks and laurels in the hills above the city, a unique camp run by those indefatigable activists Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda opened this summer for 150 youngsters from 7 to 14.

Mostly the offspring of minorities and veteran left-wing activists, the children are schooled in such weighty issues as why farm workers should be unionized or why gas companies should not be allowed to construct a liquefied natural gas terminal on sacred Indian land along the California coast. Instead of sitting around the campfire singing "It's a Treat to Beat Your Feet on the Mississippi Mud," they learn union songs. Even traditional camp activities--sports, crafts, horseback riding--are pursued with a radical ideology in mind. "Swimming cannot be separated from the larger issues of society--the role of youth and the idea of competition," harrumphs Hayden. Chimes in Fonda, recalling the "authoritarian" camps of her youth: "We are interested in perfecting skills, not just in being No. 1." The Hayden/Fonda camp is "the better world," the counselors exhort their charges, because "you are going to make it better."

Identical rhetoric about campers learning to "build a better world" can be heard from Joseph Mehrten--only he is a spokesman for the eleven John Birch Society camps scattered across the country. Here the camp song is the Battle Hymn of the Republic, swimming races are meant to be won, and authority is still in vogue. "If you are late for a class, you get clean-up duties," says Mehrten.

Founded in 1970, the Birch camps take in some 1,100 youths between the ages of 14 and 22 every summer. The one-week sessions involve rigorous instruction in right-wing doctrine. Twenty lectures on "the rudiments of Americanism" are devoted to such themes as the dangers of gun control, Big Government and the Equal Rights Amendment. "The forces that work for total government" constitute the real enemy, campers are taught.

Both the Hayden/Fonda and the John Birch camps aim to produce future leaders of the Movement (left or right), not docile students. Says Hayden: "There is a real clash between what they pick up in the camp and what they go back to." For the Birchers, what their children learn at camp provides a corrective to the subversive ideas taught in school. "The kids are indoctrinated with statism in the public schools," claims Karen Fiddament, whose daughter attended a Birch Society camp this summer. "The camps indoctrinate them with another point of view."

Despite the emphasis on ideology, however, the kids sent to the camps are not necessarily a breed apart from contemporaries who spend their summers catching poison ivy and frogs instead of lectures on solar heating and Big Brother. When the Hayden/Fonda campers drew up their own bill of rights, the first item was one that might appeal to the Birchers--or any other kids--as well: peace from parents.

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