“A Piratical State for Benevolence”: American Foreign Policy and the Commission for Relief in Belgium, 1914–19

Using sources from the Foreign Relations of the United States series, published and unpublished papers of the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB), and the papers and memoirs of Herbert Hoover and Woodrow Wilson, this paper seeks to understand the relationship the independent and international, but American run, CRB had with the foreign policy establishment and federal government of the United States between 1914 and 1917. Wilson advocated neutrality in “thought and deed” in the summer of 1914, but Hoover and others became intimately involved in the war by traveling to Belgium to work between the British blockade of the continent and the German occupation.
Questions this paper will deal with will include: How did the United States through the president and the State Department deal with having US citizens in the middle of a war zone? How did official US officials, like ambassadors and ministers in Britain and Belgium negotiate their role as honorary chairmen of the CRB and their government’s official distance from the Commission? What responsibility, if any, did the US government have toward the CRB and did the US citizens working in Belgium have toward the US? Most importantly, what role did national and Anglo-Saxon culture have in shaping official US policy toward the CRB?