Julia Irwin

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.

Catastrophic Diplomacy offers a sweeping history of US foreign disaster assistance, highlighting its centrality to twentieth-century US foreign relations. Spanning over seventy years, from the dawn of the twentieth century to the mid-1970s, it examines how the US government, US military, and their partners in the American voluntary sector responded to major catastrophes around the world. Focusing on US responses to sudden disasters caused by earthquakes, tropical storms, and floods—crises commonly known as "natural disasters"—historian Julia F. Irwin highlights the complex and messy politics of emergency humanitarian relief.

Deftly weaving together diplomatic, environmental, military, and humanitarian histories, Irwin tracks the rise of US disaster aid as a tool of foreign policy, showing how and why the US foreign policy establishment first began contributing aid to survivors of international catastrophes. While the book focuses mainly on bilateral assistance efforts, it also assesses the broader international context in which the US government and its auxiliaries operated, situating their humanitarian responses against the aid efforts of other nations, empires, and international organizations. At its most fundamental level, Catastrophic Diplomacy demonstrates the importance of international disaster assistance—and humanitarian aid more broadly—to US foreign affairs.

Studying the history of US international disaster assistance policy, as this chapter shows, represents one way to gauge the effectiveness of US grand strategy at different periods of time. In any given era, were US government officials in a position to execute a flexible, adaptable response to catastrophes in other nations? Did they formulate systems and procedures to deal with the effects of disasters in a more structured, organized manner? Were they forward-thinking enough to undertake prevention and risk-reduction measures that would mitigate the harms of future foreign disasters? Just as thinking about grand strategy promises to provide important insights into the history of US international disaster assistance policy, the answers to these questions stand to inform the history of American grand strategy itself.

At its most fundamental level, this chapter makes two central contributions to the edited volume _Rethinking American Grand Strategy_. First, it argues for the importance of expanding the conventional analytical boundaries of grand strategy and of integrating less traditional subjects—in this case, international disaster relief—into studies of grand strategic thinking. Second, it demonstrates the value of viewing state-led humanitarian actions within a grand strategy framework. Such an approach, this chapter contends, allows us to better understand policymakers’ motivations for contributing (and in many cases, failing to provide) foreign disaster aid and other types of humanitarian assistance.

Disasters—and related topics such as risk, forecasting, and anthropogenic climate change—are of increasing interest to historians of science and allied fields. The very concept, however, is a slippery one, raising a host of related questions. What types of events or processes truly constitute “disasters”? How have disasters been defined historically, and how have these categories shifted over time? How have science and technology shaped social and cultural understandings of catastrophe? With an eye toward these questions, this Focus section examines the central, fundamental role that science has played in delineating disaster in the modern era. The contributors to this section interrogate the multifaceted relationship between disasters and the history of science. Taking a deliberately expansive view of both “disaster” and “science” as categories of analysis, their essays invite readers to consider catastrophe in novel ways and from a variety of perspectives.

This book chapter examines the conceptual and material links between humanitarian relief and development. As categories of international aid, “relief” and “development” might appear to be discrete – analogous in certain respects, but ultimately distinct in form, and driven by a very different set of concerns and objectives. At least, this is how they tend to be treated throughout much of the relevant scholarship. Yet as this essay argues, the boundaries between these two forms of international assistance have regularly blurred. In the course of providing international relief, donor countries and institutions have routinely attempted to effect more comprehensive social, political, and economic changes in the nations receiving their assistance. Far from distinctive, the discourses, practices, and genealogies of relief and development are more deeply intertwined than we may acknowledge.

To demonstrate and substantiate these claims, this chapter presents a case study of the disaster relief operations of one nation, the United States, in three Caribbean Basin countries – Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua – between World War I and World War II. During these years, the US government and US citizens provided money, material aid, and military assistance to dozens of disaster-stricken countries throughout the world. Among the most intensive and invasive, in terms of their duration and the degree of US involvement, were the US responses to earthquakes in Guatemala (1917–1918) and Nicaragua (1931), and to a hurricane in the Dominican Republic (1930). In each case, US disaster relief efforts evolved into months-long undertakings, designed and administered by committees of US diplomatic, military, and American Red Cross (ARC) officials. During their respective tenures of operation, these individuals not only secured considerable power over relief operations, but also wielded this clout to promote more lasting reforms. Through a close analysis of the policies and activities of these relief committees, and of the language, rhetoric, goals, and ideology of the US officials who carried them out, this chapter makes a case for the ‘development’ of humanitarian relief.

This article analyses the development of organised relief for global natural disasters in the years after the First World War, c. 1919 – 1932. It does so by telling two concurrent humanitarian narratives, one focused on a transnational institution, the other on the international affairs of a single nation-state. First, it examines the emergence of the United States as a key figure in global disaster relief at this time. Here, it pays close attention to the transnational connections that American citizens, voluntary associations, and government agencies forged with people in other nations through disaster aid. The article then traces the origins and rise of the League of Red Cross Societies as a leading institution of voluntary transnational disaster assistance during the 1920s and early 1930s, thus recovering the untold history of the organisation’s earliest disaster relief operations. Analysing these narratives in tandem and considering the links between them, I argue, offers important new perspectives on the history of transnational disaster relief at a key stage in its historical development, the interwar years.

This article analyzes disaster relief efforts for the 1954 Danube and Elbe River floods. Carried out jointly by the U.S. government and the Geneva-based League of Red Cross Societies, this food aid program affected Western and Eastern Europe, and marked an important moment in Cold War political and humanitarian history.

From late 1918 to 1922, the American Red Cross (ARC) enlisted roughly six hundred American nurses and scores of female auxiliary staff to labor in post–World War I continental Europe, Russia, and the Near East, mostly stationed in Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Balkan states, and Siberia. The ARC nurses ran health clinics, made home visits, and opened nurse training schools. Close readings of letters, diaries, official reports, and published articles help recover the place of these women in postwar European history and the history of U.S. foreign relations. Their writings reveal their perceptions about eastern European and Russian politics and culture, their assumptions about the proper U.S. role in the region’s affairs, and their efforts to influence popular U.S. discourse on these topics. This article argues that American nurses and support staff are central—yet neglected—players in the history of U.S.-European affairs. Through its bottom-up approach, it offers a more personal and intimate perspective on the history of U.S. international relations during this time.

This essay examines the history of American humanitarianism in the First World War and its aftermath. It analyzes both the diplomatic and cultural significance of humanitarianism to U.S. foreign affairs. It also considers the legacies of Great War-era relief.

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.

During the First World War and the 1920s, the Junior division of the American Red Cross played a leading role in bringing international education programs into American classrooms. Beginning in 1917, Junior Red Cross (JRC) leaders forged partnerships with thousands of schools across the country. Each month during the war and its immediate aftermath, the JRC sent teachers ideas for collecting relief supplies and raising money for Europe, activities meant to teach American children that they had global responsibilities. In the early 1920s, JRC leaders redesigned their approach. Hoping to shape a generation less insular and more cosmopolitan than their parents, they eschewed relief in favor of activities intended to foster international exchange and develop better world relations. While the JRC’s international education projects won wide support in 1917 and 1918, thanks in large part to a climate of wartime obligation, its peace program encountered resistance. Skeptical of allowing outside organizations to shape the curriculum, many schools turned against JRC leaders’ attempts to make their international education program permanent. Even at its nadir, however, the JRC curriculum reached more than 4,000,000 pupils per month. Enormously influential, the JRC’s work warrants consideration for what it suggests about international education and the relationship of voluntary associations to U.S. schools in the early twentieth century.

This article examines the work of the American Red Cross in Siberia from 1919 to 1921, and specifically on the organization's anti-typhus work along the Trans-Siberian Railway. It analyzes the political and diplomatic function of humanitarian assistance and the successes and failures of this venture.

From 1917 to 1923, the American Red Cross organized an array of long-term child health projects in Europe as part of its larger wartime and post-war humanitarian efforts. Across the continent, the organization established child health clinics, better baby shows, playgrounds, fresh air camps, and courses for women on infant and child hygiene. Hundreds of U.S. doctors, nurses, and other child welfare professionals traveled to Europe to administer these programs. These activities call attention to American efforts to reform the health of European youth and, in so doing, to reshape European medicine and European society more broadly. Moreover, they suggest the importance of child-centered medical relief—and the history of medicine more broadly—to the history of U.S. foreign relations.

During World War I and its aftermath, thousands of U.S. nurses put their domestic careers on hold to work overseas. Many volunteered in the wake of war and disaster. Others worked as instructors in nursing schools and as the staff of fledgling public health agencies. This article charts the international travels of four especially mobile nurses, whose globetrotting careers took them to Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean. These women aspired to tackle world health issues, motivated by the conviction that the spread of U.S. professional nursing ideas stood to modernize the world. This article tells these nurses' stories and analyzes their ideologies of development and progress. In so doing, it demonstrates that professional women, working outside state channels, played a principal role in expanding U.S. influence in the world. Moreover, it makes the case for the centrality of nursing history to the history of U.S. foreign relations.

During World War I, hundreds of Americans traveled to Italy as volunteers for the American Red Cross (ARC). Through their relief activities for Italian civilians, these individuals served both diplomatic and social-reform agendas. They packaged medical and social aid with a clear message of American alliance, presenting the ARC as a vanguard of the U.S. military that was prepared to assist Italy’s war effort in the absence of American troops. Emphasizing American methods, expertise, and alliance, ARC representatives also enacted reforms with the ambition to mold Italy into their vision of a modern western nation. This article argues that international humanitarian aid buttressed U.S. international involvement, both political and cultural, during the Wilsonian era. Further, by examining the connections between social politics and foreign relations in Italy, it demonstrates that the boundaries of the transatlantic progressive community extended beyond the North Atlantic.

Although much of the historiography of urban public health documents scapegoating of immigrant and working- class civilians during onsets of epidemic disease, the 1918 influenza epidemic in New Haven, Connecticut, suggests a very different story. A large number of industrial working-class Italians made up a significant proportion of the city’s population. During the epidemic, Italians succumbed to influenza at nearly twice the rate of other residents. But, contrary to historiographic expectations, the New Haven story is one narrated by piercing silences and a distinct lack of hostility towards the immigrant community. These silences must be understood as a product of the period’s political and social context. Influenza struck New Haven during the closing months of the First World War, a period marked by calls for unity, cooperation, and fierce patriotism. As Anglo citizens emphasized Americanism and assimilation, the Italian community’s middle- class leadership largely acquiesced. Italian editors, physicians, business-owners, and other professionals used the epidemic period to construct a new public face of the Italian community as a modernized, patriotic, and responsible ethnic group. Simultaneously, New Haven’s nationally renowned public health officials embraced a wartime vocabulary of voluntarism and civic obligation to alter civilian behaviours. They encouraged education and gentle persuasion in hygiene over more forceful coercion. Together, these community responses to influenza helped to quell potential hostilities. However, they also masked persistent inequalities in Italian health and limited the potential for real urban reforms of immigrant housing and health. Italian- and English-language publications demonstrate the diverse meanings of the influenza epidemic for different groups within the city. They also illustrate the many ways these groups used the epidemic to construct new definitions of citizenship and proper behaviour.

As I argue in this article, refugee camps and settlements have also served as critical spaces of humanitarian exhibition. At these sites, aid workers have historically put their philosophies of relief and their best practices on display. In these consciously designed spaces, humanitarians have attempted to influence camp residents — a necessarily captive audience — as well as wider publics, well beyond the formal boundaries of these sites.

Conceptualizing these humanitarian spaces as « model villages », they have utilized refugee camps to showcase not only modern methods of humanitarian relief, but also idealized sanitary, moral, and civic behaviors. Refugee camps, then, might be described as functional sites of humanitarian exhibition. They share many of the same characteristics as other, more obvious example of this genre — including the expositions, traveling shows, and summits discussed in this volume.

To illustrate these arguments, this essay analyzes two spaces for refugees displaced by disasters during the early XXth century. The first, a permanent resettlement scheme, was established in southern Italy, for survivors of a major earthquake and tsunami in 1908 ; the second, a temporary camp, housed survivors of the 1917 Hai River floods in northeast China. Both of these sites were financed by the American Red Cross and administered by U.S. military officers and troops, diplomatic officials, and civilian volunteers. The Americans who organized and oversaw these settlements understood them quite explicitly as exhibition sites, spaces in which to demonstrate best humanitarian practices while also modeling behaviors they deemed proper.
Although they viewed the Italian and Chinese residents of the spaces as their primary and immediate audiences, U.S. officials also labored to present them to the world at large. They invited influential visitors to tour these sites, published photographs and descriptions of them in mass-circulated books and periodicals, and created scale replicas of the camps to put on display. In addition to examining the settlements and camps themselves, this essay also considers these diverse forms of representation. In particular, it offers a close look at how American Red Cross leaders exhibited camps, settlements, and other international humanitarian projects to millions of spectators, attendees of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 in San Francisco, California.

Analyzing both the built (and re-built) environment of these spaces and the various ways humanitarians promoted and presented them, this article interrogates disaster refugee camps as functional sites of humanitarian exhibition.

Between 1900 and 1945, the United States became one of the world’s leading providers of international humanitarian assistance. Collectively, and often in close partnership, US citizens, American voluntary associations and private firms, and US governmental and military officials delivered considerable aid abroad. This assistance – in the form of money, food, material supplies, and logistical support – reached millions of people in dozens of different countries and colonies. Among these recipients of US aid were survivors of a diverse array of humanitarian crises, including war, political and social upheaval, famine, and natural disasters. Across these forty-five years, US officials and citizens routinely imagined and defined these aid efforts as untarnished demonstrations of American goodwill. The reality, however, was more complex. Domestic and international politics, cultural assumptions and racial stereotypes, and uneven economic and power dynamics between American donors and aid recipients, as this chapter will show, regularly limited the humanitarian and diplomatic potential of US foreign assistance.

The essay offers an overview of the humanitarian activities of the American Red Cross in Europe during the Great War and its aftermath. In this period, the American Red Cross (ARC) solidified its status as one of the United States’ most important humanitarian aid organizations. Between 1914 and the early 1920s, tens of thousands of Americans volunteered for service with the ARC, both in the United States and in the organization’s overseas commissions. U.S. citizens, meanwhile, contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to the ARC’s war relief campaigns. With these funds, ARC personnel delivered humanitarian assistance to millions of U.S. and European soldiers. They also provided aid to innumerable civilian men, women, and children, targeting both emergency relief needs and longer-term health and social welfare issues. By the early 1920s, this ARC assistance had reached roughly two-dozen countries, spreading throughout Europe, Russia, and the Near East. Collectively, these efforts represent one of the most significant examples of American philanthropic activity during the Great War era.

This article analyses the development of organised relief for global natural disasters in the years after the First World War, c. 1919 – 1932. It does so by telling two concurrent humanitarian narratives, one focused on a transnational institution, the other on the international affairs of a single nation-state. First, it examines the emergence of the United States as a key figure in global disaster relief at this time. Here, it pays close attention to the transnational connections that American citizens, voluntary associations, and government agencies forged with people in other nations through disaster aid. The article then traces the origins and rise of the League of Red Cross Societies as a leading institution of voluntary transnational disaster assistance during the 1920s and early 1930s, thus recovering the untold history of the organisation’s earliest disaster relief operations. Analysing these narratives in tandem and considering the links between them, I argue, offers impor...