Nature Friends of America

NATURE FRIENDS OF AMERICA. Founded at the turn of the century in Germany by socialists and trade unionists to preserve wildlife and to provide workers with an affordable outdoor recreational organization, Nature Friends spread to America by 1910, when a US branch was formed by German and Austrian immigrants in the New York area. By 1930 a facility of nearly 150 acres, including a clubhouse and hiking trails, was established at Camp Midvale, which served as a hub for Nature Friends’ activities on the East Coast. Nowhere did the Nature Friends receive more attention and support than in the New Yorker Volkszeitung and among its aging supporters. For many of these comrades and others—mostly skilled workers sympathetic to socialist ideas—hiking in nature offered an escape from the old industrial class conflict to a broader vision of socialist transformation. Nature-lore, rarely seen in Marxist analysis, provided an essentially ecological perspective.

By 1940, Nature Friends’ camps sprang up in California, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Connecticut, with a wider variety of members. Most held progressive sympathies, and only those of “fascist convictions” were excluded by statute. Thus hikers raised funds for such causes as the “Scottsboro Boys,” the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, the Committee to Release the Rosenbergs, and the civil rights movement. Placed on the attorney general’s list of “subversive organizations” in 1947, Nature Friends saw its members severely harassed, and as a result individual camps disaffiliated. Camp Midvale itself was given to the Ethical Culture Society in 1968 in the hopes that it would be preserved as an ecological retreat. The California Nature Friends remain an outdoor organization with no overt political activities or associations.

Nature Friends Collection. Tamiment Library, New York University.

Lanset, Andy. “Camp Midvale: An Oral History.” Created for radio broadcast, 1988. Archived, with interviews of Nature Friends veterans, at the Oral History of the American Left, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive. New York University. http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/oh_015/