The ideology of the American urban parks and recreation movement: Past and future

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Abstract
The American parks and recreation movement has its roots within the 19th century reform era, during which upper‐class, educated men and women saw it as their aristocratic duty to raise the masses to the level of middle class standards. The transition from a reform movement to a profession is cast as an inevitability for the movement, just as it was for other American social science movements. Professionalization of the movement is traced through the evolution of the American Social Science Association. The ideologies that fueled both the reform movement and the professionally led movement reveal these two movements as disparate; yet both serve to preserve a class society. Professionalism is inherently transcendent of class, if championed by anarchistic professionals in the pursuit of truth; therefore, professionalism is an adversary of class‐creating forces: bureaucracy, hierarchy, domination, commercialism, and centralization.

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