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The Junior Red Cross goes to Healthland.

J F Hutchinson

Department of History, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.

An amusing reminder of earnest attempts to teach the principles of public health, Junior Red Cross Time brought plays and games about "Healthland" to schoolchildren in the 1920s. Explaining why health education became part of the mission of the Junior Red Cross raises larger issues, such as the ideology and practice of the American Red Cross in war and peace, the place of health in the moral education of children, and the transition from the activism of the Progressive Era to the markedly different social climate of the 1920s. The Junior Red Cross promoted Healthland largely because it was an innocuous concept that had been stripped of potentially controversial features to adapt it to the conservative mood of postwar America. This process of dilution mirrored the fate of the adult Red Cross, which briefly and unsuccessfully sought to reinvent itself as a national (and international) agency for the promotion of public health. The unreality of Healthland is no mere coincidence; its separation from the real world was a crucial part of its appeal to the Red Cross in the 1920s.