Mobilizing the American Homefront: Humanitarians and the War against European Hunger, 1914–19

In August 1914 Americans found in Europe a cause demanding their humanitarian involvement.  Millions of refugees, the prospect of widespread famine among noncombatants, and the high incidence of disease and injury among soldiers powerfully catalyzed American sympathies.  Among the numerous preexisting charitable and community organizations that responded to the European plight, were the American Red Cross, the Federation of Women’s Clubs, and the Rockefeller Foundation.  Moreover, the creation of dozens of new, purpose-formed relief organizations in 1914 and 1915 revealed the extent to which Americans viewed their capacity for mitigating distress overseas as practically limitless.  The specter of starvation in German-occupied Belgium in 1914 transformed what would have constituted a widespread but fairly low-scale involvement in European relief into a prolonged national commitment, led by the Commission for Relief in Belgium.
    American humanitarians rallied their nation to raise food, funds, clothing, and medicine.  Their ecumenical appeal resonated equally among immigrant and established populations.  Humanitarians mobilized Americans at national, state, and local levels in virtually every community throughout the United States.  The effectiveness of several relief groups in particular at organizing American society in 1914-1917 not only anticipated national wartime mobilization upon the United States’ declaration of war, but arguably helped to unravel American neutrality by promoting intervention as a means to arrest the conditions requiring aid.  Upon the entrance of the United States as a belligerent in 1917 the often-altruistic motivations for relief widely transformed into using aid as an adjunct to military operations and an instrument by which the defeat of the Central Powers could be accomplished.  This paper is based upon multiarchival research in the leading organizations that effected the mobilization of the American people and government for the purposes of wartime relief.