{"id":392,"date":"2014-04-04T19:43:34","date_gmt":"2014-04-04T19:43:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stampingamericanmemory.org\/?page_id=392"},"modified":"2016-06-09T20:38:39","modified_gmt":"2016-06-09T20:38:39","slug":"stamp-collecting-as-an-extra-curricular-activity","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/revisions\/learning-to-read-stamps\/stamp-collecting-as-an-extra-curricular-activity\/","title":{"rendered":"Stamp Collecting as an Extra-Curricular Activity"},"content":{"rendered":"

As it grew in popularity, stamp collecting appeared as extra-curricular activities sponsored by youth-focused organizations. In the early twentieth century, adult progressive reformers developed recreation programs to keep idle children busy with what they saw as productive activities, and they taught recreation coordinators that collecting stamps qualified as healthy indoor play, because it\u00a0 kept children busy and discouraged delinquency. ((\u201cLecturers Tell Teachers How To Teach Play,\u201d Washington Post<\/em>, July 15, 1934, sec. R, 10.))<\/p>\n

The After School Club embodied many of those sentiments. Much like the Boy Scouts of America, also founded in the 1910s, the American Institute of Child Life\u2019s (AICL) After School Club sought to fill all non-school hours with wholesome activities and acted as a \u201ccorrespondence recreation center.\u201d The After School Club\u2019s handbook recommended different activities by age group, and listed collecting stamps and other objects as an appropriate activity for seven to fourteen year olds. Each young collector worked toward earning \u201cdegrees\u201d after studying and learning from their objects. The Club also offered traveling collections of minerals, fossils, and stamps. Ultimately, the objective of this club was to make \u201cyoung people wholesomely happy and to help build them into efficient and useful citizens.\u201d ((American institute of Child Life and After School Club of America, Young Folk\u2019s Handbook<\/em> (American institute of Child Life, 1913), 3\u20134, 73\u20134, available, https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/youngfolkshandb00lifegoog<\/a>; and American Institute of Child Life and William Byron Forbus, Guide Book to Childhood: A Hand Book for Members of the American Institute<\/em> (American institute of Child Life, 1913). While the After School Club was established for boys and girls, the AICL\u2019s president authored studies on the \u201cboy problem.\u201d Stamp collecting was\u00a0 recommended as an indoor winter activity for boys as early as 1901. See William Byron Forbush, The Boy Problem<\/em> (The Pilgrim Press, 1901).)) The AICL and its board of leading scholars and researchers in the welfare and education of children, including child psychologist G. Stanley Hall, recommended stamp collecting as a wholesome activity that would shape young collectors into better citizens.<\/p>\n

Upon further investigation, we see that the AICL\u2019s mission to nurture young citizens was intertwined with emerging scientific fields studying and defining phases of childhood. In the 1910s, the AICL proclaimed their concern with the welfare of children and affiliated with many organizations \u201cconcerned with childhood.\u201d Mothers who joined the AICL received complimentary memberships to all affiliated groups, including the new Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, YMCA, U.S. Children\u2019s Bureau, Audubon Society, among others. Curiously the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) received a prominent position at the top of the list. The ERO collected family trait histories and its director H.H. Laughlin advocated for eugenics-based immigration legislation and policies restricting reproduction of the \u201cunfit.\u201d The eugenics movement enjoyed many supporters in the early twentieth century, including progressive reformers, who sought to improve the American population through a variety of means. ((Recommended reading for AICL parents included, Sacredness and the Responsibilities of Motherhood<\/em>; and A Better Crop of Boys and Girls<\/em>. ((American Institute of Child Life and Forbus, Guide Book to Childhood<\/em>.))<\/p>\n

It is difficult to know how these affiliations developed, but it is possible to see how collecting stamps appealed to the AICL. Collecting and arranging stamps requires an ordering of the world relying on identification of differences among nations and defining people by politically-determined geographic borders. Stamps are tools that unify a nation or empire through postal infrastructure and the visual imagery imprinted that erase cultural differences. By comparing stamps, a collector is encouraged to notice differences that are enforced in albums. Viewing visual representations of nations in stamps offer an opportunity to teach young people about the perceived scientific differences and racial hierarchies among peoples of the world. Stamp albums provide spaces to order the world that also respected and enforced boundaries. According to philatelic practice, a stamp fit exactly into a space designated for it and did not belong anywhere else. Philatelists organized stamps according to a world order as proscribed by stamp-producing powers. This, of course, does not mean philatelists supported eugenics merely because they collected stamps. But it allows us to see that stamp collecting appealed to many different groups. For another group, the world\u2019s stamps symbolized a gateway to spiritual duty and fulfillment.<\/p>\n

The Women\u2019s Missionary Union of the Southern Baptist Convention encouraged stamp collecting to inspire young people to become missionaries. Their publication for children, World Comrades<\/em>, started a stamp column in 1934 written by \u201cBob the Stamper.\u201d He introduced readers to foreign stamps so that those nations would \u201cbecome a call to the heralds of the Great Commission.\u201d One column told the story of a man who linked his Bible studies with the family\u2019s stamp album by writing a scriptural passage \u201cto fit the stamps\u201d on each page of the album. Each time anyone flipped through the album, the marginalia reminded them about the Bible and their faith. One reviewer praised the magazine for capitalizing on the collecting instincts of children \u201cin the interest of Bible study and the spread of Christ\u2019s Kingdom throughout the earth.\u201d ((A review of the World Comrades column appears in \u201cStamp Collecting as a Method,\u201d Missionary Review of the World<\/em> 57 (August 1934): 367. Founder and editor, Juliette Mather of the Women\u2019s Missionary Union of the Southern Baptist Convention, first created World Comrades<\/em> in 1922 because no Southern Baptist missionary publications existed for children.))<\/p>\n

The Women\u2019s Missionary Union believed that stamps possessed power to motivate young people to volunteer for Christianizing missions across the globe. If the stamps of each nation represented a path for pursuing the \u201cGreat Commission,\u201d then an album represented work to be done and the hope of salvation. Identifying nations, territories, or colonies imposed a different order on the world, and helped Southern Baptists visualize the scope of their missionary work. Southern Baptists, like other groups, found meaning in stamps beyond their face value. Bob the Stamper used stamps to teach young people about the potential for uniting the world in the name of Christianity, and the album provided motivation and a path for accomplishing this goal.<\/p>\n

Progressive reformers and educators preoccupied themselves with preventing idleness in children because, in their minds, idleness led to delinquency and vice. ((David Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners<\/em> (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). ))Stamp collecting was \u201csomething to do\u201d and kept youths \u201cout of all sorts of mischief and very often bad company.\u201d This sentiment motivated some philatelists to work with young people by starting clubs in YMCAs and places like the Boys Hotel for homeless boys in Kansas City, Missouri. Some saw this as \u201cmissionary work for the hobby,\u201d knowing that \u201cevery new collector adds to the stability of stamp collecting.\u201d Collectors donated old stamps, albums, and literature for the benefit of the boys and girls. Dealers also prepared stamp packets that contained a variety of common and inexpensive stamps for beginning collectors, sometimes referred to as the \u201cboy trade\u201d even though boys and girls received these packs. (( Untitled column, The Philatelic West and Collectors World<\/em> 75, no. 1 (October-November,1918): 31; \u201cEducation from Stamp Collecting,\u201d The Philatelic West and Collectors World<\/em> 74, no. 1 (May 1, 1918): 44.; \u201cCollectors of Dallas,\u201d The Philatelic West and Collectors World<\/em> 79, no. 2 (September 1922): np.; \u201cBoys Start Stamp Club,\u201d The Philatelic West and Collectors World<\/em> 78, no. 3 (March 31, 1922): np.; and \u201cLincoln Y.M.C.A., Lusty Yearling, Will Celebrate,\u201d Chicago Daily Tribune<\/em>, October 6, 1929, 17.))<\/p>\n

In 1929, one philatelist reported that 10,000 new stamp collecting after-school clubs had formed that year in American schools\u2014many with the help of its club members. The Oakland Philatelic Society, for example, organized 50 school stamp clubs from 1931 to 1932. In Los Angeles, philatelists organized fourteen Playground clubs by 1933. Both in Oakland and Los Angeles, California clubs sponsored competitive exhibitions where adult club philatelists judged and awarded ribbons to the winning students, such as from the Lincoln Heights playground in 1931<\/a>. Dealers, particularly in the late 1920s and 1930s, actively engaged in this \u201cmissionary work\u201d to groom new young collectors (and their parents) who one day might become customers. ((\u201cJ.R. Stout Heads Rotary,\u201d New York Times<\/em>, April 3, 1929, 18.; Harry E. Gray, \u201cBuilding Future Collectors,\u201d American Philatelist<\/em> 46, no. 3 (December 1932): 165.; \u201cStamp Exhibition Nearing, Boys to Display Washington Issue,\u201d Los Angeles Times<\/em>, January 11, 1932, sec. A, A14; \u201cCity to Sponsor Stamp Exhibit,\u201d Los Angeles Times<\/em>, April 10, 1933, sec. A, 5.; and \u201cPlaygrounds Foster Hobby,\u201d Los Angeles Times<\/em>, April 14, 1933, sec. A, 16; Washington Grant, Willard O. Wylie, and Thorn Smith, How to Deal in Stamps: A Booklet Designed for Those Who Would Like to Engage in a Lucrative and Clean Business<\/em>, vol. fifth (Portland, ME: Severn-Wylie-Jewett Co, 1931); Jacques Minkus, \u201cMerchandising of Postage Stamps,\u201d Journal of Retailing <\/em> 21, no. 2 (April 1945): 66\u201371.))<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As it grew in popularity, stamp collecting appeared as extra-curricular activities sponsored by youth-focused organizations. In the early twentieth century, adult progressive reformers developed recreation programs to keep idle children busy with what they saw as productive activities, and they taught recreation coordinators that collecting stamps qualified as healthy indoor play, because it\u00a0 kept children […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":370,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-392","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P9B6tX-6k","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/revisions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/revisions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/revisions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/revisions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/revisions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/revisions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":761,"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/revisions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/392\/revisions\/761"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/revisions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/revisions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}