Clubs vs. Camps

The large clubs that started to pop up in the Adirondacks around the late 1800s are very similar to the Adirondack Great Camps in terms of their exclusivity. In fact, the owners of the Great Camps were probably often members of the clubs, and used them for different recreation activities. The camps and the clubs were essentially the only way that the wealthy used the park, and they tended to separate themselves greatly from the rest of the population. The camp owners tended to be implicitly elitist, inviting only the 'best' to their dinner parties and refraining from interacting with locals other than their employees and their guides. The clubs, however, were explicitly racist, classist, and generally elitist. They had policies clearly stating the 'types' of people who were not allowed to stay their, or use it for recreation, including that of the Lake Placid Club (which we have talked about many times) and others that said simply "Hebrews need not apply" (Terrie, 121) or things of that nature. As we talked about with the Great Camps, the clubs also had a few redeeming factors. So, if we were to compare the two ways in which the ADK land was utilized by the wealthy, which would be better? Weirdly enough, I think one answer to this question would be that, in this case, bigger is better. Though the camps were often smaller and more secluded, I speculate they did not have the far-reaching positive consequences that the clubs were able to have. The camps may have provided jobs, but the clubs provided more jobs, needing people to both help their clients and protect the outskirts of the land. Along these same lines, the clubs, as they were often created from the pooling of many people's money, were generally able to protect more land than the camps were. However, was the explicit racism of the clubs and its influence on Adirondack society as a whole enough to make them not worth the unbelievable amount of land that they protected when the state couldn't afford to buy it all? This begs the question of what is most important in the Adirondacks; society, or the land itself? Were these clubs worth the class/race divides that they created? Without them, would the Adirondacks even have avoided this period of deep elitism?