All across the country, weeklong camps inspired by Glenn Beck, the Tea Party, and crazy love for our Founding Fathers are giving kids a crash course in American history. For the most part, it's harmless summer fun: dodgeball, tug-of-war. You know, camp. But that's not all they learn. Lauren Bans visited the very first Patriot Camp, in central Pennsylvania, and got a re-education she'll never forget
It's morning prayer time at Patriot Camp, and I'm squeezed onto the end of a picnic table at the front of a big, shady park pavilion in Paxtang, Pennsylvania, a strip-mall-speckled purlieu of the state capital. There are about fifty-five campers here, most ages 7 to 10, and my thigh is smushing a small kid with a buzz cut and milk-jug ears who's wearing a faded yellow T-shirt that reads IF YOU DON'T LIKE MY ATTITUDE, QUIT TALKING TO ME. For the past few minutes, though, he's been fixated on my voice recorder like E.T. spying his first Reese's Pieces, so I attempt small talk. Are you having fun? He half nods. What's been your favorite part so far? He stares at me blankly and gently fingers his left nostril. Seconds later we both jump at the sound of a microphone screeching to life.
"Okay, guys, let's bow our heads." Camp director Deborah Seneca, a.k.a. Miss Deb, a mother of two who could easily be mistaken for the butchier Indigo Girl, waits for a hush to fall over the campers. Today is day four of weeklong history camp run by Constitutional Champions, a national nonprofit that was founded in part with seed money from Glenn Beck. Patriot Camp's stated mission is to teach kids the "truth about our country's founding," in the way, I guess, you might send kids to math camp to learn the truth about the Pythagorean theorem. Today also happens to be June 28, the day the Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of Obamacare, a plan that has parted the country more severely than Wednesday Addams's hair.
"Lord," Miss Deb begins, "please be with our Supreme Court today as they make a decision that will have a huge impact on us all. Guide them to realize what's right for this country and our children. Amen."
For the past two summers, Miss Deb has held Patriot Camp in this park, which dates from before the Revolutionary War and is framed on its southern end by an eighteenth-century Presbyterian church and a historic cemetery where a handful of Civil War soldiers are buried. Just one turn off the town's main drag deposits you here into this quiet lush pocket, so fluorescent green it looks Photoshopped and big enough for its own area code. Miss Deb has invited me here to see what camp is all about, and I figured at the very least I'd get a civics refresher, considering what I remember of the Constitution wouldn't fill the exaggerated loop of the P in "We the People."
But my real reason for coming is to see how a camp inspired by Beck's right-wing sermonizing manages to school heartland America on history, culture, religion, values, and three-legged racing, all while maintaining its avowed, and legally required, apolitical stance. Everyone I spoke with as I planned my trip to Paxtang stressed that Patriot Camp was definitely, absolutely, exclusively about history. Though I was simultaneously warned that if— if—a splash of politics seeped into the bug juice, Constitutional Champions wasn't responsible. The nonprofit simply sells the blueprinty camp guidebook—available online for just $14.99, a price even the thrifty Ben Franklin could get behind—and it's up to each camp to teach it however they see fit. Late one morning in Paxtang, while we cheer on a tense game of tug-of-war between the "Confederate" and "Union" kids, Miss Deb makes her pitch. "Do you ever play the game where somebody says something in your ear, and then you whisper it to the next person, and so on, until it just comes out as nonsense?" she asks, squinting at the gob of Union bodies lying defeated in the grass. "We go back to the Constitution—the actual document itself—so we know our kids are getting it right."
After the prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance, and "The Star-Spangled Banner," the camp day begins. The kids are divided roughly into decuplets and cycled through three hours of scheduled activities with the efficiency of a 1950s Ford factory line: "Our Judeo-Christian Heritage," "Redistribution of Wealth" (see box). At around 11 A.M., I join a group taking a break for cold cuts and "prayer pretzels." I'd always thought of pretzels as nondenominational, so I ask one of the snack-table volunteers, a sweet redheaded senior who's made up like Tammy Faye Bakker, to explain. The camp's pretzels "are made in the image of a child praying," she tells me. "It's the way they did it in the olden days."
Tammy Faye and I kibitz for a few minutes by the coolers. She tells me she's from nearby Hershey, home of a pair of Hershey factories, land of chocolate-perfumed air. She loves volunteering because she loves kids, and as if to illustrate her point, she tells me about one of the camp sessions yesterday, when an instructor asked, "How do you get rid of a president who's doing a bad job?" Here Tammy Faye giggles and half covers her mouth like she's about to share the perfect kids-say-the-darnedest-things punch line. "A couple of them shouted out, 'Assassination!' "
IF I'M BEING completely honest, I have to admit I wasn't sold on the idea that this would be a politically neutral history camp. In fact, I envisioned a kind of "Take back our country from the black guy" ethos permeating the place, the same attitude that dotted the 9/12 March on Washington, a movement that likewise billed itself as nonpartisan. This is partly because of Beck's financial hand, but also because the first time I ever saw Miss Deb was in a 2011 clip from Beck's show on Fox News, which she had posted on the Patriot Camp website.
In the clip, Miss Deb is sitting in the studio audience, alongside two other Pennsylvania moms, explaining the inspiration behind their camp. The inspiration, it turns out, was Glenn Beck. "One day," she begins, "we heard you talk on your radio about Obama organizations doing summer camps, and we thought, 'No, we need to do our own!'" She goes on to describe how she and the other moms searched wide and far but couldn't find any decent American Revolution curriculums, how they were so excited by Beck's "Founders' Fridays"—a recurring segment on his show—that they decided to write one themselves. When she finishes, Beck adds: "And I started the fund-raiser for this, right? My wife and I wrote a check."
The Becks gave a "generous donation," according to Yvonne Donnelly, Beck's ex-sister-in-law and founder of Constitutional Champions, the umbrella nonprofit that propelled the moms' Patriot Camp idea nationwide. Donnelly was in the studio that day, too, nodding as Beck described his contribution. (Soon after this episode aired, Beck was criticized for a remark he made on-air about the massacre in Norway, when a right-wing terrorist killed sixty-nine people at a camp for leftist teens: "It sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler Youth or whatever. Who does a camp for kids that's all about politics? Disturbing.")
It was Donnelly who adapted the Pennsylvania moms' curriculum into a guidebook for volunteers eager to set up a Patriot Camp in their area. Under the federal tax code, Constitutional Champions is registered as a 501(c)(3), a tax-exempt designation for nonprofit organizations, which means it may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities and it may not participate in any campaign activity. This past summer there were at least 150 camps nationwide based on the book's outlines, many of which were created or sponsored by local Tea Party-affiliated groups.
Still, on my flight to Paxtang, I wondered if maybe I was being overly cynical—too prejudiced about what I was going to witness. Maybe this was just a camp. Albeit a camp that taught, instead of archery or the wedgie arts, a conservative take on American history—the nerd-bait equivalent of summer school for Lincoln-Douglas debaters or prepubescent water colorists. After three days here, I can tell you the vast majority of Patriot Camp was harmless. But on the few occasions it wasn't all dodgeball and kiddie-pooling, it really, really wasn't. And in those moments, the fact that this was a camp for little kids never stopped being, to use Beck's word, disturbing. Like 9-year-olds-joking-about-assassination disturbing. And yet Miss Deb and Yvonne had invited me—a stranger who they must've assumed believes the exact opposite of everything they do—to bear witness to how innocent it all was. Only I kept thinking: Do they really, truly believe this camp has nothing to do with politics?
···
EaRLY On MY second morning I catch Mr. Alex, who looks like Moby and works the rest of the year as a juggler at Hersheypark, as he's setting up his station. Mr. Alex's winning technique with the kids is injecting totally unrelated magic tricks into his lessons. He'll be explaining the Fifteenth Amendment while simultaneously making a ball of paper disappear into one of three cups. "Up until that point, blacks—or as they're called now, African-Americans—couldn't vote," he told one group as he shuffled the cups around. "Back then they were called Negroes, if you ever see that word in an old document. It all means the same thing."
Today he's wearing a HANDS OFF MY HEALTHCARE T-shirt and laying out his teaching materials: cups, lengths of rope, a printout of the Bill of Rights, three Bibles, one of which he will turn to during his lesson this morning to make the important observation that the Ten Commandments and the Bill of Rights both contain ten rules. Mr. Alex is one of the few grown-ups at Patriot Camp so far who doesn't seem thrilled to see me. He mostly answers my questions with questions of his own.
"I'm not trying to be confrontational," he says, sounding fairly confrontational, "but do you even know what document founded America?"
I answer: "Um, the Declaration of Independence?"
"Okaaaay. But do you know how it begins?"
I can't quote the preamble, but I describe the general sentiment. "Aha!" he lights up. "Specifics are important. Especially when you're teaching the Constitution."
He continues: "Let me ask you this: Are you married?"
"No."
"Sorry, that was a personal question. I don't need to know about your life. But let's just say you were married and having trouble. What would you do? Maybe see a marriage counselor, right? And that marriage counselor, in order to help save your marriage, would probably have you look at a list of the reasons you're together with your husband in the first place."
"Okay, sure."
"And...?" He looks at me expectantly for a beat. "That's exactly why we have a rule book like the Constitution. So we have a list of the reasons we're together. To remind us." Dramatic pause. "Do you see what I'm getting at?"
"The United States is getting a divorce?"
Mr. Alex frowns at me and goes back to setting up his table.
A volunteer poses as a Revolutionary War officer.
Later that day, I watch Bob McCloskey, a retired history teacher with a kind face and a crown of white hair, teaching a rapt group of kids about the Union army requirements. I take a quick liking to Bob, in no small part because of mad respect for his dedication to wearing a replica Civil War-era wool coat in eighty-five-degree air that already feels like wet wool.
Bob loves history. He laments the fact that he has to wear Confederate pants along with his Union coat, both on loan from a local history museum, because he "grew a little too big in the middle" to fit into the matching Union pants. He just saw Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter in the theater, and while he considered it "very well done," he tells me with a wink that he's worried people will believe Abe's mom, Nancy, "was really killed by a vampire."
For Bob, a week here is a chance for a brief return to what he did for forty-one years. The campers adore him. But some things about Patriot Camp get to him. Last year, apparently, one of the guest speakers "railed on Obama," and Bob says softly that he didn't approve of that sort of talk in front of the kids.
His next group comes bounding over, so I walk down the hill, where another bevy of kids are running in stumbles toward a tree, like tiny zombies on 5-hour Energy shots. Or at least half of them are. The rest of them are sitting on a low wooden stage that is shingled with boxes labelled EAST INDIA TEA COMPANY. The leader here is Mr. Rob, a father of two campers, who took time off from his job as a press agent for the Pennsylvania Dental Association. He tells the kids to "use your imagination" to turn the bare-bones stage into the Boston Tea Party ship.
"Okay, Ones, you've worked hard, and you deserve a reward," Mr. Rob proclaims, handing each of them a Tootsie Roll. He turns to address the "lazy partiers." "My Twos: Do you guys feel bad you don't get any candy?" They do, naturally. So he takes the Tootsie Rolls back from the Ones and gives them to the Twos.
"Now how do you Ones feel? Are you mad?" Incoherent yelps of agreement. "You see, sometimes our taxes go toward good things, like schools and roads," Mr. Rob explains. "But do you think it's fair to take someone's hard earnings and hand it over to someone who didn't work?"
They do not think it's fair. I don't think it's fair either, but more in a you're-really-doing-an-anti-welfare-exercise-with-8-year-olds? kind of way. The next morning, I catch Mr. Rob and ask him if he thinks camp is atiny bit biased. "I don't really, no," he says. "Obviously if you get into some areas where you're talking about the originalist intent of the founders, some of the older kids might later, you know, make the larger connections to things."
···
Is Patriot Camp, as one left-leaning blogger for Mother Jones labeled it, an "indoctrination camp"? Or does the political stuff just go right over these kids' heads? I witness plenty that suggests they aren't absorbing much of anything. At one point during Mr. Alex's intense lecture about God's hand in the drafting of the Constitution, a little girl raised her hand and interrupted him. "Mr. Alex," she pleaded, "can you do a magic trick to make me disappear?"
On the morning of my second day in Paxtang, Miss Deb introduces a guest speaker, a hefty man with a shiny comb-over, wearing a full black suit on this hot, humid day. His name is Bryce McMinn, and he's the head of Morning Star Pregnancy Services, an "alternative options" center.
Clutching a copy of Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who!, McMinn addresses the kids using the kind of singsongy voice people use to soothe a yapping dog. "This is my son's favorite book. And what does Horton say over and over in the movie and the book? A person's a person... no matter how small. That means that when each and every one of you were just little babies inside Mama's belly, only about the size of my thumb, you had the right to life!
Campers cycle through stations.
"Now, I mentioned that the right to life is written in our Constitution. Does anyone know where?"
A hand shoots up.
"Um...," the boy whimpers. The confi-dence he had just seconds ago is rapidly depleting. "I think it's in...the front?"
McMinn trudges on: "It's in the Fifth Amendment. A portion of the Fifth Amendment says, 'No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.' Believe it or not, there are people who run for all sorts of offices at the local level, the state level, and the federal level who don't understand that even little babies have the right to life. And you want to remember when you vote to only vote for candidates who only support the U.S. Constitution, who support the Declaration of Independence and the right to life, like we do."
After spending a few days in Paxtang, I start to see why some of the people here feel threatened, as though their grip is slipping on a certain way of life, how it's only a matter of time before the chemistry of their town, in all its ineffable Americanness, will be recombinated by the arrival of outsiders, by a globalized economy, by a different set of values. And how fighting to protect all that doesn't seem political to them as much as an act of self-preservation. No one explicitly said anything like this to me. It was just the undercurrent of every prayer, lesson, pledge: We love this. Don't touch it. On my first day at the camp, like all of the older campers, I was given a pocket-size Constitution. The writing is so small that without a pair of drugstore reading glasses, you'd need the eyes of a 7-to-10-year-old to make out the words. But it's not really meant to be read. It's more to carry around and keep close to you, like a locket with a strand of hair inside, part keepsake, part talisman.
"When I was a kid," Miss Deb had told me at one point, "there was not all of this stuff to do. In the summer, you hung out with your neighbors and rode your bike. You disappeared down to the creek for three hours, until your mom started yelling for you or until it got dark and your dad whistled and you came home. Now everybody's working. Moms didn't work back then. Now Mom's working, Dad's working. Our society just keeps getting busier and busier and busier." She pauses and meets my eyes. "That sucks, you know?"
I get it. I do. But still, there's a line. And Mr. McMinn just pole-vaulted over it. When he hands off the mike, I confront Deb. "It's a value debate," she protests. "I'll bet you a hundred million dollars that there may be some in the Democratic Party that are pro-choice and some that are pro-life." I argue that that's beside the point: A man she invited to speak just told about fifty-five prepubescents to vote pro-life. (Bob McCloskey, for one, also thinks the presentation wasnot kosher: "I didn't agree with him saying that in front of kids," he told me afterward.) "I'm not interested in the politics," Deb continues. "I didn't know he was going to say that. But you heard what he said about the Declaration of Independence. He talks about the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It's part of our founding documents. They should know what's in there. They need to believe it."
Later that morning, I'm at the crafts table, where a group of kids are making campaign bumper stickers. One of the volunteer moms is encouraging the creatively blocked: "Start drawing the things you like! Baseball? Spaghetti?" I spot two little girls at the end of the bench who need no encouragement. They've already commandeered about five of the Magic Markers and are hunched over, vigorously coloring. When I go stand behind them, they part to show me their work. The skinny little blonde girl on my left has drawn a crying woman standing next to a burning ball of fire. "Why is this lady so sad?" I ask her. She looks up at me with brown jellybean eyes, puts her index finger on her sun, and explains to me that "her baby is dead." That's when I realize I'm not looking at a sun. It's a bloody fetus, which she drew using orange and red. Apparently Crayola doesn't make a decent flesh- colored marker.
This image is still in my head later as Miss Deb asks all of us to close our eyes for the day's closing prayer.
Lord, bless our nation, and make it true to the ideas of freedom and justice and brotherhood for all who make it great. Guard us from war, compromise, from fear and confusion. Be close to our leaders; give them vision and courage as they make decisions affecting freedom and the future of the world. Make us more deeply aware of our heritage as Americans, realizing not only our rights but also our duties and responsibilities as citizens. Make this great land and all of its people clearly know your will, and give us the courage to walk with you in all that we do. Amen.
Lauren Bans is a GQ associate editor.
"Okay, guys, let's bow our heads." Camp director Deborah Seneca, a.k.a. Miss Deb, a mother of two who could easily be mistaken for the butchier Indigo Girl, waits for a hush to fall over the campers. Today is day four of weeklong history camp run by Constitutional Champions, a national nonprofit that was founded in part with seed money from Glenn Beck. Patriot Camp's stated mission is to teach kids the "truth about our country's founding," in the way, I guess, you might send kids to math camp to learn the truth about the Pythagorean theorem. Today also happens to be June 28, the day the Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of Obamacare, a plan that has parted the country more severely than Wednesday Addams's hair.
"Lord," Miss Deb begins, "please be with our Supreme Court today as they make a decision that will have a huge impact on us all. Guide them to realize what's right for this country and our children. Amen."
For the past two summers, Miss Deb has held Patriot Camp in this park, which dates from before the Revolutionary War and is framed on its southern end by an eighteenth-century Presbyterian church and a historic cemetery where a handful of Civil War soldiers are buried. Just one turn off the town's main drag deposits you here into this quiet lush pocket, so fluorescent green it looks Photoshopped and big enough for its own area code. Miss Deb has invited me here to see what camp is all about, and I figured at the very least I'd get a civics refresher, considering what I remember of the Constitution wouldn't fill the exaggerated loop of the P in "We the People."
But my real reason for coming is to see how a camp inspired by Beck's right-wing sermonizing manages to school heartland America on history, culture, religion, values, and three-legged racing, all while maintaining its avowed, and legally required, apolitical stance. Everyone I spoke with as I planned my trip to Paxtang stressed that Patriot Camp was definitely, absolutely, exclusively about history. Though I was simultaneously warned that if— if—a splash of politics seeped into the bug juice, Constitutional Champions wasn't responsible. The nonprofit simply sells the blueprinty camp guidebook—available online for just $14.99, a price even the thrifty Ben Franklin could get behind—and it's up to each camp to teach it however they see fit. Late one morning in Paxtang, while we cheer on a tense game of tug-of-war between the "Confederate" and "Union" kids, Miss Deb makes her pitch. "Do you ever play the game where somebody says something in your ear, and then you whisper it to the next person, and so on, until it just comes out as nonsense?" she asks, squinting at the gob of Union bodies lying defeated in the grass. "We go back to the Constitution—the actual document itself—so we know our kids are getting it right."
After the prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance, and "The Star-Spangled Banner," the camp day begins. The kids are divided roughly into decuplets and cycled through three hours of scheduled activities with the efficiency of a 1950s Ford factory line: "Our Judeo-Christian Heritage," "Redistribution of Wealth" (see box). At around 11 A.M., I join a group taking a break for cold cuts and "prayer pretzels." I'd always thought of pretzels as nondenominational, so I ask one of the snack-table volunteers, a sweet redheaded senior who's made up like Tammy Faye Bakker, to explain. The camp's pretzels "are made in the image of a child praying," she tells me. "It's the way they did it in the olden days."
Tammy Faye and I kibitz for a few minutes by the coolers. She tells me she's from nearby Hershey, home of a pair of Hershey factories, land of chocolate-perfumed air. She loves volunteering because she loves kids, and as if to illustrate her point, she tells me about one of the camp sessions yesterday, when an instructor asked, "How do you get rid of a president who's doing a bad job?" Here Tammy Faye giggles and half covers her mouth like she's about to share the perfect kids-say-the-darnedest-things punch line. "A couple of them shouted out, 'Assassination!' "
In the clip, Miss Deb is sitting in the studio audience, alongside two other Pennsylvania moms, explaining the inspiration behind their camp. The inspiration, it turns out, was Glenn Beck. "One day," she begins, "we heard you talk on your radio about Obama organizations doing summer camps, and we thought, 'No, we need to do our own!'" She goes on to describe how she and the other moms searched wide and far but couldn't find any decent American Revolution curriculums, how they were so excited by Beck's "Founders' Fridays"—a recurring segment on his show—that they decided to write one themselves. When she finishes, Beck adds: "And I started the fund-raiser for this, right? My wife and I wrote a check."
The Becks gave a "generous donation," according to Yvonne Donnelly, Beck's ex-sister-in-law and founder of Constitutional Champions, the umbrella nonprofit that propelled the moms' Patriot Camp idea nationwide. Donnelly was in the studio that day, too, nodding as Beck described his contribution. (Soon after this episode aired, Beck was criticized for a remark he made on-air about the massacre in Norway, when a right-wing terrorist killed sixty-nine people at a camp for leftist teens: "It sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler Youth or whatever. Who does a camp for kids that's all about politics? Disturbing.")
It was Donnelly who adapted the Pennsylvania moms' curriculum into a guidebook for volunteers eager to set up a Patriot Camp in their area. Under the federal tax code, Constitutional Champions is registered as a 501(c)(3), a tax-exempt designation for nonprofit organizations, which means it may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities and it may not participate in any campaign activity. This past summer there were at least 150 camps nationwide based on the book's outlines, many of which were created or sponsored by local Tea Party-affiliated groups.
Still, on my flight to Paxtang, I wondered if maybe I was being overly cynical—too prejudiced about what I was going to witness. Maybe this was just a camp. Albeit a camp that taught, instead of archery or the wedgie arts, a conservative take on American history—the nerd-bait equivalent of summer school for Lincoln-Douglas debaters or prepubescent water colorists. After three days here, I can tell you the vast majority of Patriot Camp was harmless. But on the few occasions it wasn't all dodgeball and kiddie-pooling, it really, really wasn't. And in those moments, the fact that this was a camp for little kids never stopped being, to use Beck's word, disturbing. Like 9-year-olds-joking-about-assassination disturbing. And yet Miss Deb and Yvonne had invited me—a stranger who they must've assumed believes the exact opposite of everything they do—to bear witness to how innocent it all was. Only I kept thinking: Do they really, truly believe this camp has nothing to do with politics?
···
EaRLY On MY second morning I catch Mr. Alex, who looks like Moby and works the rest of the year as a juggler at Hersheypark, as he's setting up his station. Mr. Alex's winning technique with the kids is injecting totally unrelated magic tricks into his lessons. He'll be explaining the Fifteenth Amendment while simultaneously making a ball of paper disappear into one of three cups. "Up until that point, blacks—or as they're called now, African-Americans—couldn't vote," he told one group as he shuffled the cups around. "Back then they were called Negroes, if you ever see that word in an old document. It all means the same thing."
Today he's wearing a HANDS OFF MY HEALTHCARE T-shirt and laying out his teaching materials: cups, lengths of rope, a printout of the Bill of Rights, three Bibles, one of which he will turn to during his lesson this morning to make the important observation that the Ten Commandments and the Bill of Rights both contain ten rules. Mr. Alex is one of the few grown-ups at Patriot Camp so far who doesn't seem thrilled to see me. He mostly answers my questions with questions of his own.
"I'm not trying to be confrontational," he says, sounding fairly confrontational, "but do you even know what document founded America?"
I answer: "Um, the Declaration of Independence?"
"Okaaaay. But do you know how it begins?"
I can't quote the preamble, but I describe the general sentiment. "Aha!" he lights up. "Specifics are important. Especially when you're teaching the Constitution."
He continues: "Let me ask you this: Are you married?"
"No."
"Sorry, that was a personal question. I don't need to know about your life. But let's just say you were married and having trouble. What would you do? Maybe see a marriage counselor, right? And that marriage counselor, in order to help save your marriage, would probably have you look at a list of the reasons you're together with your husband in the first place."
"Okay, sure."
"And...?" He looks at me expectantly for a beat. "That's exactly why we have a rule book like the Constitution. So we have a list of the reasons we're together. To remind us." Dramatic pause. "Do you see what I'm getting at?"
"The United States is getting a divorce?"
Mr. Alex frowns at me and goes back to setting up his table.
Later that day, I watch Bob McCloskey, a retired history teacher with a kind face and a crown of white hair, teaching a rapt group of kids about the Union army requirements. I take a quick liking to Bob, in no small part because of mad respect for his dedication to wearing a replica Civil War-era wool coat in eighty-five-degree air that already feels like wet wool.
Bob loves history. He laments the fact that he has to wear Confederate pants along with his Union coat, both on loan from a local history museum, because he "grew a little too big in the middle" to fit into the matching Union pants. He just saw Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter in the theater, and while he considered it "very well done," he tells me with a wink that he's worried people will believe Abe's mom, Nancy, "was really killed by a vampire."
For Bob, a week here is a chance for a brief return to what he did for forty-one years. The campers adore him. But some things about Patriot Camp get to him. Last year, apparently, one of the guest speakers "railed on Obama," and Bob says softly that he didn't approve of that sort of talk in front of the kids.
His next group comes bounding over, so I walk down the hill, where another bevy of kids are running in stumbles toward a tree, like tiny zombies on 5-hour Energy shots. Or at least half of them are. The rest of them are sitting on a low wooden stage that is shingled with boxes labelled EAST INDIA TEA COMPANY. The leader here is Mr. Rob, a father of two campers, who took time off from his job as a press agent for the Pennsylvania Dental Association. He tells the kids to "use your imagination" to turn the bare-bones stage into the Boston Tea Party ship.
"Okay, Ones, you've worked hard, and you deserve a reward," Mr. Rob proclaims, handing each of them a Tootsie Roll. He turns to address the "lazy partiers." "My Twos: Do you guys feel bad you don't get any candy?" They do, naturally. So he takes the Tootsie Rolls back from the Ones and gives them to the Twos.
"Now how do you Ones feel? Are you mad?" Incoherent yelps of agreement. "You see, sometimes our taxes go toward good things, like schools and roads," Mr. Rob explains. "But do you think it's fair to take someone's hard earnings and hand it over to someone who didn't work?"
They do not think it's fair. I don't think it's fair either, but more in a you're-really-doing-an-anti-welfare-exercise-with-8-year-olds? kind of way. The next morning, I catch Mr. Rob and ask him if he thinks camp is atiny bit biased. "I don't really, no," he says. "Obviously if you get into some areas where you're talking about the originalist intent of the founders, some of the older kids might later, you know, make the larger connections to things."
···
Is Patriot Camp, as one left-leaning blogger for Mother Jones labeled it, an "indoctrination camp"? Or does the political stuff just go right over these kids' heads? I witness plenty that suggests they aren't absorbing much of anything. At one point during Mr. Alex's intense lecture about God's hand in the drafting of the Constitution, a little girl raised her hand and interrupted him. "Mr. Alex," she pleaded, "can you do a magic trick to make me disappear?"
On the morning of my second day in Paxtang, Miss Deb introduces a guest speaker, a hefty man with a shiny comb-over, wearing a full black suit on this hot, humid day. His name is Bryce McMinn, and he's the head of Morning Star Pregnancy Services, an "alternative options" center.
Clutching a copy of Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who!, McMinn addresses the kids using the kind of singsongy voice people use to soothe a yapping dog. "This is my son's favorite book. And what does Horton say over and over in the movie and the book? A person's a person... no matter how small. That means that when each and every one of you were just little babies inside Mama's belly, only about the size of my thumb, you had the right to life!
Campers cycle through stations.
"Now, I mentioned that the right to life is written in our Constitution. Does anyone know where?"
A hand shoots up.
"Um...," the boy whimpers. The confi-dence he had just seconds ago is rapidly depleting. "I think it's in...the front?"
McMinn trudges on: "It's in the Fifth Amendment. A portion of the Fifth Amendment says, 'No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.' Believe it or not, there are people who run for all sorts of offices at the local level, the state level, and the federal level who don't understand that even little babies have the right to life. And you want to remember when you vote to only vote for candidates who only support the U.S. Constitution, who support the Declaration of Independence and the right to life, like we do."
After spending a few days in Paxtang, I start to see why some of the people here feel threatened, as though their grip is slipping on a certain way of life, how it's only a matter of time before the chemistry of their town, in all its ineffable Americanness, will be recombinated by the arrival of outsiders, by a globalized economy, by a different set of values. And how fighting to protect all that doesn't seem political to them as much as an act of self-preservation. No one explicitly said anything like this to me. It was just the undercurrent of every prayer, lesson, pledge: We love this. Don't touch it. On my first day at the camp, like all of the older campers, I was given a pocket-size Constitution. The writing is so small that without a pair of drugstore reading glasses, you'd need the eyes of a 7-to-10-year-old to make out the words. But it's not really meant to be read. It's more to carry around and keep close to you, like a locket with a strand of hair inside, part keepsake, part talisman.
"When I was a kid," Miss Deb had told me at one point, "there was not all of this stuff to do. In the summer, you hung out with your neighbors and rode your bike. You disappeared down to the creek for three hours, until your mom started yelling for you or until it got dark and your dad whistled and you came home. Now everybody's working. Moms didn't work back then. Now Mom's working, Dad's working. Our society just keeps getting busier and busier and busier." She pauses and meets my eyes. "That sucks, you know?"
I get it. I do. But still, there's a line. And Mr. McMinn just pole-vaulted over it. When he hands off the mike, I confront Deb. "It's a value debate," she protests. "I'll bet you a hundred million dollars that there may be some in the Democratic Party that are pro-choice and some that are pro-life." I argue that that's beside the point: A man she invited to speak just told about fifty-five prepubescents to vote pro-life. (Bob McCloskey, for one, also thinks the presentation wasnot kosher: "I didn't agree with him saying that in front of kids," he told me afterward.) "I'm not interested in the politics," Deb continues. "I didn't know he was going to say that. But you heard what he said about the Declaration of Independence. He talks about the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It's part of our founding documents. They should know what's in there. They need to believe it."
Later that morning, I'm at the crafts table, where a group of kids are making campaign bumper stickers. One of the volunteer moms is encouraging the creatively blocked: "Start drawing the things you like! Baseball? Spaghetti?" I spot two little girls at the end of the bench who need no encouragement. They've already commandeered about five of the Magic Markers and are hunched over, vigorously coloring. When I go stand behind them, they part to show me their work. The skinny little blonde girl on my left has drawn a crying woman standing next to a burning ball of fire. "Why is this lady so sad?" I ask her. She looks up at me with brown jellybean eyes, puts her index finger on her sun, and explains to me that "her baby is dead." That's when I realize I'm not looking at a sun. It's a bloody fetus, which she drew using orange and red. Apparently Crayola doesn't make a decent flesh- colored marker.
This image is still in my head later as Miss Deb asks all of us to close our eyes for the day's closing prayer.
Lord, bless our nation, and make it true to the ideas of freedom and justice and brotherhood for all who make it great. Guard us from war, compromise, from fear and confusion. Be close to our leaders; give them vision and courage as they make decisions affecting freedom and the future of the world. Make us more deeply aware of our heritage as Americans, realizing not only our rights but also our duties and responsibilities as citizens. Make this great land and all of its people clearly know your will, and give us the courage to walk with you in all that we do. Amen.
Lauren Bans is a GQ associate editor.
