Chapter 4 focuses on how federal agencies responded to the growth of recreational camping—popularized among the middle class by the mass production of the automobile—and the challenge of new waves of transients and protestors during the Great Depression. In the 1930s, recreational camping gained state sponsorship as an exercise of democracy spurred on by the design of the loop campground and its related social philosophy. As the New Deal rapidly solidified the terms of a new social contract, campers added their own set of expectations. The vast expansion of a public landscape for recreational camping emerged as counterpoint to the unsettled masses of the Great Depression and became an effective tool for national recovery. By the 1940s, citizens were claiming rights of access to or, in the case of African Americans, protesting exclusion from this public camping landscape.
Main street in crisis: the Great Depression and the old middle class on the northern plains
