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Making the World Safe : The American Red Cross and a Nation's Humanitarian Awakening

ISBN: 9780199766406 | 0199766401

Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Pub. Date: 4/25/2013

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Summary Author Biography

At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States was growing by fits and starts into its new role as a global power. Unlike European empires, it sought to distinguish itself as a new kind of power. Corporations and media outlets were spreading American brands, ideas, and commodities worldwide, increasing we would today call soft power. Meanwhile, American citizens and government officials grappled with their nation's rising prominence and debated how best to engage with the wider world. One of those ways was to use foreign aid to define ... MOREthe nation's new role and responsibilities with regards to the international community. This first book narrates the early history of American foreign relief and assistance as a way of guiding the international community in peaceful cooperation and modernization towards greater stability and democracy. It tells the story of how the United States government came to realize the value of overseas aid as a tool of statecraft. A prime case in point is the American Red Cross, a quasi-private, quasi-state organization. Established in 1882, the ARC was a privately funded and staffed organization, primarily dependent on volunteer labor. However, it shared a special relationship with the U.S. government, formalized by Congressional charters, which made it the "official voluntary" aid association of the United States in times of war and natural disaster. Together, international-minded American progressives--a generation of American health professionals, social scientists, and public intellectuals--made the ARC into a vehicle for the global dissemination of their ideas about health, social welfare, and education. They urged their fellow citizens to reject their traditional attachments to isolationism and non-entanglement and to commit to "humanitarian internationalism." Their international activities included feeding, housing, and anti-epidemic projects in wartime France, Italy, Russia, and Serbia; the development of playgrounds, education initiatives, and child health clinics in postwar Poland and Czechoslovakia; correspondence programs to unite American children and their international peers; and the extension of all of these efforts to U.S. territories, sites where the conceptual lines between foreign and domestic blurred in the U.S. imagination. This history calls attention to the ways that private organizations have served the diplomatic needs of the U.S. state, as well as been an institutional space for Americans who wanted to participate in international affairs in ways that deviated from official state agendas. By the mid-1920s, voluntary humanitarian interventionism had become the basis for a new set of American civic and political obligations to the world community.

A history of the relationship between the United States and foreign countries through its humanitarian interventions in the early 20th century.

In Making the World Safe, historian Julia Irwin offers an insightful account of the American Red Cross, from its founding in 1881 by Clara Barton to its rise as the government's official voluntary aid agency. Equally important, Irwin shows that the story of the Red Cross is simultaneously a story of how Americans first began to see foreign aid as a key element in their relations with the world.

As the American Century dawned, more and more Americans saw the need to engage in world affairs and to make the world a safer place--not by military action but through humanitarian aid. It was a time perfectly suited for the rise of the ARC. Irwin shows how the early and vigorous support of William H. Taft--who was honorary president of the ARC even as he served as President of the United States--gave the Red Cross invaluable connections with the federal government, eventually making it the official agency to administer aid both at home and abroad. Irwin describes how, during World War I, the ARC grew at an explosive rate and extended its relief work for European civilians into a humanitarian undertaking of massive proportions, an effort that was also a major propaganda coup. Irwin also shows how in the interwar years, the ARC's mission meshed well with presidential diplomatic styles, and how, with the coming of World War II, the ARC once again grew exponentially, becoming a powerful part of government efforts to bring aid to war-torn parts of the world.

The belief in the value of foreign aid remains a central pillar of U.S. foreign relations. Making the World Safe reveals how this belief took hold in America and the role of the American Red Cross in promoting it.

Julia F. Irwin is Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Florida.

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