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Over the first decades of the twentieth century, this model of urban governance was harnessed to unprecedented crises, both local and international. The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake inspired a national response to the disaster that extended the capacities of a still new organization, the American Red Cross. Closely linked to the presidency, the Red Cross came to function as a voluntary infrastructure for the extension of national efforts, an arrangement that would be solidified in the mobilization for the First World War. During that conflict, “voluntary” giving to a national cause was established as a model of good citizenship and institutionalized through the charitable deduction to the individual income tax.

In times of crisis, domestic or international, the capacity of American government has been enhanced by the large-scale mobilization of civic benevolence. Although the New Deal is often envisioned as marking an end to the era of voluntarism in the provision of public goods, President Roosevelt constructed new alignments of citizen philanthropy with national projects, represented by the March of Dimes against polio and the widespread equation of donating with patriotic citizenship during the Second World War. Following Roosevelt's death and the end of the war, both his allies and opposition competed to reinforce or replace this presidentially-centered regime of civic philanthropy with other configurations that varied in their degree of inclusion (particularly of organized labor) and local rather than national orientation. Within a decade, the result was a much more fragmented system of civic benevolence, oriented to particular causes rather than national crises and patriotic solidarity.

The mobilization for World War Two activated many of the public-private configurations that had been so important in the First World War. Yet there were questions of the actual contribution of all these efforts. Voluntary fund-raising hit new peaks, but these were dwarfed by the receipts from a greatly expanded federal income tax introduced in the early years of the war. Volunteers were called to serve, yet the actual contributions of these efforts were unclear given the technological advances in war-making. Instead voluntarism became increasingly recognized as a means to strengthen patriotic solidarity, particularly after the death of President Roosevelt.

The mobilization for the First World War had been organized through a powerful configuration of voluntary associations and national agencies. After the war, what use could be made of these arrangements? National organizations such as the American Red Cross struggled to define a new mission suited to domestic efforts during peacetime. Local organizations, notably the Community Chests, were increasingly influential as a civic alternative to municipal government. But with the Mississippi River flood of 1927 and the onset of the drought and unemployment that would become the Great Depression, these models were deployed to meet new and difficult crises. Prior to the New Deal, the limits of voluntary responses to the Great Depression created the context in which a substantial expansion of federal aid could be contemplated.

This chapter focuses on the American Red Cross's (ARC) phenomenal growth between 1917 and 1918. It shows how the ARC's leaders sold the organization to the U.S. public and worked to define foreign assistance as a new obligation, a patriotic duty, during World War I. It also examines the extent to which individual Americans consented to this new set of international humanitarian responsibilities, along with the varied meanings that they attributed to this concept of foreign aid. The chapter explains how the support and confidence of the public at large enabled the ARC to become the nation's preferred instrument for overseas civilian relief. Finally, it considers ARC's international humanitarianism as a major departure in U.S. foreign affairs.

The Great Depression brought unemployment and misery on a scale that overwhelmed the capacity of voluntary as well as municipal resources for emergency relief. Government relief efforts were massively expanded, while those of private voluntary agencies contracted in relative if not always absolute terms. Yet the New Deal did not bring an end to the role of voluntary associations in providing relief and services to those in need. Even with an expanded capacity to tax, government resources remained insufficient; voluntarism would be supported by new policies, including the corporate charitable deduction. At the same time, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his ally Harry Hopkins made new uses of national voluntary efforts to mobilize support for the president, notably through the March of Dimes to raise funds for polio treatment as well as research, and to strengthen patriotic solidarity.

This chapter focuses on the American Red Cross's (ARC) civilian relief efforts in Europe after the Great War. It considers how ARC leaders redirected the majority of their funds and personnel to Central and Eastern Europe and how ARC's ability to provide assistance was constrained by declining public enthusiasm for the organization and its foreign aid, and for U.S. international involvement more generally. It also explains how the ARC, in an attempt to adapt to the hostile postwar climate, refocused its efforts entirely on European children. The chapter highlights ARC's important role in American diplomacy and culture and the ways that individual Americans, both in Europe and back in the United States, perceived the ARC and its international humanitarianism.

This chapter focuses on the American Red Cross's (ARC) humanitarian activities across the globe during the interwar years and in the aftermath of World War II. More specifically, it examines ARC's continued role in U.S. international humanitarianism through disaster response, development initiatives, international cooperation, and foreign assistance. It also considers changes in both the international system and the American state and how they affected the role played by ARC's civilian aid in U.S. foreign relations.

This chapter discusses the American Red Cross's (ARC) civilian relief efforts in Europe during the Great War. Focusing primarily on Western Europe, it examines the initiatives of ARC workers not only in terms of material relief but also in the areas of health and welfare. More specifically, it describes ARC's anti-epidemic campaigns, the construction of health demonstration centers, and the provision of nursing education to local women. It shows how ARC's promises in the fields of diplomacy and international humanitarianism, envisioned at length in the wartime United States, were put to the test through the widespread provision of civilian assistance among the Allies of the Great War. Finally, the chapter places ARC's extensive program of civilian relief in the context of Great War-era foreign relations.

This chapter examines the origins of American international humanitarianism dating back to the early nineteenth century, focusing on the International Red Cross Movement and the American Red Cross (ARC). It charts the ARC's growth through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with particular emphasis on its expanding international reach and the relationships that its leaders forged with social scientists, philanthropists, and state officials in the United States, most notably Secretary of War William H. Taft. It shows how the ARC became an organization that, through its overseas civilian relief activities, represented a critical part of U.S. foreign relations and how its particular approach to foreign aid shaped American culture.

This chapter examines the American Red Cross's (ARC) place in the United States in the Great War era, focusing on the eight years prior to the country's entry into the war. It looks at how presidents William H. Taft and Woodrow Wilson became major supporters of the ARC, while their State Departments started relying on the organization's civilian aid in a number of conflicts and crises. It also considers the support for ARC by social scientists, philanthropists, and the business community. Finally, it examines how ARC's foreign assistance garnered wide enthusiasm among the American public.

This chapter examines women's voluntary associations' role in mobilization. It examining the Women's Committee of the Council of National Defense, the Young Women's Christian Association, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the National Association of Colored Women, and the American Red Cross, it analyzes the way in which women activists conjoined the war emergency to their own goals of staking their claim to full citizenship, and continuing their reform agendas begun in the Progressive reform era. As they did so, white women invoked “maternalism” and emphasized the instrumental role that women played in protecting the family. African American activists similarly focused on the centrality of women citizens, but did so in the specific context of racial uplift. Their engagement in meaningful war work encouraged them to view the war – over optimistically as it turned out – as an opportunity to achieve both long-standing reform goals and an enhanced role for women in public life.

This book examines the role of humanitarian assistance in American foreign relations. It documents the history of American foreign aid intended to guide the international community in peaceful cooperation and modernization towards greater stability and democracy in the early twentieth century. Focusing on the American Red Cross, it considers how the United States used overseas relief as a tool of statecraft and diplomacy and the ways that private organizations have served the diplomatic needs of the government. The book also looks at the emergence of voluntary humanitarian interventionism as the basis for a new set of American civic and political obligations to the international community. Overall, it tells the story of how Americans in the early twentieth century embraced a new Manifest Destiny for their country and strove to infuse the ideal of “indefinitely expanding brotherhood” into U.S. foreign policy.

American entertainers and politicians alike maintained an uneasy neutrality following the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914. In April 1915, the Cunard liner Lusitania sailed from New York. Before America's entrance into the war, the young Cole Porter wrote his first professional musical, “See America First,” which opened for a short run in March 1916. When America finally joined the Allies in April 1917, Theodore Roosevelt belligerently told an audience at Oyster Bay, Long Island, that Germany had become a menace to the whole world. When the United States entered the war, American musical theater suddenly seemed to come of age, prompted in large measure by the need to develop an alternative to Viennese operetta. Ingredients from operetta, musical comedy, and revue—all of European origin—were now amalgamated into an identifiably more American form that relied heavily upon the spirit of ragtime. Once America declared war, the American Red Cross became the ultimate symbol of compassion.

This chapter explores the formation of the idea of the “humanitarian imagination” and how it can motivate action (or not) through the case study of the World War One–era flooding of Baghdad and famines and shortages in Beirut and Jerusalem. It also introduces the concept of “unstrangering.”

This chapter discusses the elaboration of a new genre of knowledge production, the humanitarian report, as this genre developed in the eastern Mediterranean, and it links the form and content of the report to the practices of humanitarianism. Beginning with early Red Cross reporting, it continues through the construction of knowledge of the Armenian genocide. It also examines the beginnings of “indigenous humanitarianism” in the way Armenian intellectuals wrote about the destruction of their community.

Chapter 1 begins with the Great Southern Drought of 1930–1931, which destroyed the Delta’s cotton economy and left its poorest residents starving and its richest in debt. The chapter moves back in time to provide an overview of life in Memphis and the Delta from the end of the Civil War through the 1927 flood and up to the beginning of the drought, with a focus on the development of Jim Crow capitalism in both city and countryside. The chapter then outlines the limited local and federal response to the drought, which prompted both hunger marches in the region and demands for additional aid from within and without. This chapter stresses the suffering of poor farmers and the disorienting rapidity with which the Great Depression struck the region.

This epilogue assesses the nature of the American Red Cross's (ARC) civilian aid as an integral part of U.S. foreign relations. More specifically, it considers ARC's international humanitarianism as a reflection of a new Manifest Destiny for the United States and the infusion of the ideal of “indefinitely expanding brotherhood” into U.S. foreign policy. It places the history of ARC's foreign relief efforts within a larger process of American political and cultural expansion in the early twentieth century. It also explains how ARC's humanitarian assistance gave Americans the opportunity to forge cooperative, collaborative, and mutually beneficial relationships with civilians from other parts of the world. The chapter concludes by arguing that ARC's humanitarian interventions rationalized U.S. global expansion in a way that was viable, less violent, and potentially more cosmopolitan.

The epilogue skips ahead to the Johnstown flood of 1889, the deadliest disaster to date in U.S. history, and argues that the response to this debacle—due to because of advancements in communication and photography, and the advent of the American Red Cross—was in most respects comparable to that in twenty-first-century America. The main difference was the absence of federal involvement in disaster relief at Johnstown, though the U.S. government began providing disaster relief on an ad hoc basis in the post-Civil War era. The epilogue then examines the normalization of federal involvement in disaster relief and prevention in the twentieth century and the impact of social media on contemporary disaster reporting and relief efforts.