Our Journal: First World War Studies

This article explores how US humanitarian aid workers in Great War era Europe understood the war, their relief work and its significance. It argues that contemporary ideas about disaster and disaster assistance, formed in the decades before the war began, fundamentally shaped the way that Americans conceived of their wartime humanitarian aid and its significance. Through an interrogation of both the metaphorical and the material links between early twentieth century American ideas of war and natural disaster – and, by extension, war relief and disaster relief – this essay advances novel insights about the intellectual and cultural history of US humanitarian aid efforts for European civilians during the Great War era.

This article examines a particularly fraught zone where the British and American conceptions of food aid and moral guidance conflicted – the former enemy nations of Austria and Germany. These countries were considered special cases for food relief, not only because the British and American public had little interest in feeding their former foes, but also because each was seen by aid officials as societies that might succumb to social revolution if food security was not established. While the Americans had established a massive child-feeding operation in Europe under the auspices of the American Relief Administration’s European Children’s Fund and with US government financing, Austria, and especially Germany, posed unique challenges, given the public relations problem in Allied nations with aid to former enemies. To meet these challenges, the Society of Friends (Quakers) became a major player in the food aid schemes in Austria and Germany because, as known pacifists, the Friends championed the non-partisan delivery of relief to war victims. In this article, I argue that in both Germany and Austria, conflicts developed between American and English Quaker societies animated by competing ideals: a British imperial, missionary model couched in internationalist language and an American model emphasizing efficiency, scientific management, and self-help framed with the Wilsonian vocabulary of freedom. In addition, with American public funds propping up many of the foreign aid missions, Hoover and the American Friends wanted recognition of the American nature of the work, while English Quakers sought to identify the work as Quaker international work.

This essay investigates how representative American members of the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB) engaged with the world of occupied Belgium during their mission as neutral humanitarian agents. The essay uses the diaries and recollections of several members of the CRB to argue that while neutral and professional, the American members of the CRB engaged with the world around them often as tourists would in an effort to better understand their outsider status and better associate with those they were trying to help. These insights help us better understand how a humanitarian identity was formed during the First World War era and the role non-governmental American citizens played in continuing to develop the USA’s place in the world during this important historical moment.

This article examines the work of private American Jewish associations during the First World War. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in particular created complex, dynamic international networks in order to find information about suffering Jews on both sides of the Eastern Front and in Palestine and to channel funds for their relief during the war. It forged alliances with officials in the US State Department, foreign governments, Jewish organizations operating in the war zones, and relied on familial banking ties and their own commissioners who travelled throughout the war-ravaged regions to render humanitarian assistance. This article demonstrates the complexity of maintaining these aid networks and also the challenges American Jewish relief organizations encountered while attempting to maintain multi-governmental sanction for their aid services in the volatile sphere of wartime diplomacy.

By the early spring of 1915, grain and flour shortages had become a serious issue in the Greater Syrian provinces of the Ottoman Empire, and culminated into a full-fledged famine that would claim the lives of approximately one-third of population by the time Allied troops began occupying the region in October 1918. In the Ottoman provincial capital Beirut, food scarcities quickly became a matter of life and death, as the city became a gathering point for thousands of destitute refugees from miles around. In light of the tragedy, humanitarians rushed to provide aid to those in need. The historiography of wartime relief in the Ottoman Empire generally has focused on the well-documented international efforts in the Anatolian provinces, and in particular the tremendous work of foreign missionaries and relief organizations, such as the Near East Relief and the Red Cross. This focus on international relief agencies, no doubt, obscures the fact that humanitarian relief workers indeed operated in a crowded and competitive field. Taking Beirut as a case study, this paper shifts the gaze away from international organizations and analyses the politics of wartime relief from the perspective of state and local actors, which until now has received little attention. Considering the context of war and famine, this does not come as a surprise, since the memory of relief work in the city has long been overshadowed by the horrors of starvation and disease and written off as inconsequential and unsuccessful. Moreover, the legacy of Ottoman military dictatorship, notably its cruel policies culminating in the public execution of prominent Arab notables and intellectuals, left little room to consider the role of Ottoman officials in providing wartime relief. However, this study reveals that locally stationed Ottoman officials were not only concerned with civilian provisioning, but also engaged in a fierce political battle with local and international actors in an effort to monopolize the distribution of money and food. To prevent citizens from forming alternate political loyalties in response to services and goods received from extra-state actors, Ottoman policy was to eliminate potential competitors and substitute its own state-sponsored alternatives. This paper argues that the ability to distribute aid in the city was mediated by nationality, political affiliation and not the least gender, and would have long-lasting effects. First, wartime Ottoman policies of marginalizing non-governmental urban philanthropy significantly altered the relationship of the state with its citizens, permanently shifting citizens’ social welfare demands away from communal institutions towards the state. Second, the privileging of female volunteerism through the Syrian Women’s Association (jam˓iyat al-sayyidat al-suriyat), while illustrating the state’s attitude of women as apolitical subjects, whose work was seen as unthreatening and incapable of inspiring divergent allegiances, would prove to be the beginning of a politicization of women’s charities and inspired a new political consciousness.

This article examines the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) politics and policies in Asia Minor and Greece during the months that followed the end of the war between Greece and Turkey. It is articulated around two moments. The first takes place in Asia Minor during the summer and fall of 1922, right in the midst of the disastrous retreat and final defeat of the Greek Army, which eventually brought to the expulsion of hundreds of thousands Christians. I highlight the rising and relatively suspicious interest of the ICRC for Muslim civilian populations. The second moment takes place in Greece during 1922–1923 and focuses on the range of activities undertaken by the ICRC delegate Rodolphe de Reding Biberegg, when the Greek capital and the rest of the country faced the arrival of hundreds of thousands refugees.

On 20 July 1924, the American Committee for Devastated France (ACDF) formally transferred its property in the Aisne province to French authorities. The three-hour ceremony precipitated French and American commemorations of ACDF activities, and public and private expressions of French gratitude for the humanitarian aid 328 American ACDF volunteers had provided to the Aisne’s inhabitants for seven years. Yet the gifts, performances and speeches by local residents and international luminaries failed to catalyse what US Ambassador Myron T. Herrick hoped would become a greater ‘international partnership’ between France and the USA. This paper contends that this failure stemmed not from insignificant acts of remembrance towards the American Committee on the part of the Aisne’s beneficiaries and French and American statesmen. Instead, the ephemeral recollection of the ACDF’s legacy in both nations derived from the cognitive dissonance between the transnational goodwill the American organization and French citizens expressed towards each other, and the international antipathy with which each nation state generally regarded the other’s world view in the interwar era.

Since the inception of the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1863, the international Red Cross movement had developed under the leadership of European humanitarians. Imbued with Western values and practices, Red Cross humanitarianism reflected an ideology of civilization in the age of imperialism. The contemporary European notion of civilization characterized most Asian countries as ‘uncivilized’ others who needed benevolent instruction of Western humanitarians. This article examines the ideological politics of Red Cross humanitarianism between the West and East through an analysis of the activities of the Japanese Red Cross in the First World War era. While the dreadful calamity of total war drove relief associations to European battlefields on an unprecedented scale, the global war also stimulated the activities of the Japanese Red Cross on the other side of the world. During the war, the Japanese Red Cross endeavoured to live up to the Red Cross ideals of humanitarianism. Appropriating an ideological linkage of humanitarianism and civilization, the Japanese Red Cross attempted to enhance the international status of Japan as a ‘civilized’ nation, an exception in ‘backward’ Asia, by almost excessively complying with Red Cross principles of humanitarianism during the war. The relief activities of the Japanese Red Cross in the world war illustrate the functioning of the ideological politics of humanitarianism between the West and East in the early twentieth century. The First World War marked a watershed in the history of the international Red Cross movement. In the aftermath of the protracted war, Red Cross humanitarians envisioned the extension of their activities from wartime relief to peacetime public health programmes. Their aspiration culminated in the establishment of the League of Red Cross Societies in 1919. The new international organization embarked on a global project of creating an international public health order in a world disordered by the total war. Yet, when applied to areas outside of Europe, its public health programmes came to be tied to colonial control of the indigenous peoples. This article argues that the global project of establishing an international public health order provided a new means to maintain, and in fact strengthen, asymmetric relationships between the West and East in the post-war world by opening channel for connecting humanitarian aids with colonial rule. A close analysis of the Red Cross initiatives on public health in Asia illuminates the reality and limitations of cooperative internationalism emerging from the ashes of the First World War.