Chapter Four
The World Wars and the Origins of
Contemporary U.S. Foreign Aid
Americans are barely aware of our history, much less anyone else’s.[1]
Roosevelt recognized that the prime minister [Winston Churchill] was “pretty much a 19th century colonialist,” as the diplomat Averell Harriman put it, and “that the old order could not last.” The war [World War II] was a fault line.[2]
Behold, we the American holy warriors have arrived…. We have come to set you free.[3]
Either the grants can be administered by experts from outside the depressed area or they can be turned over to representatives of the depressed group.[4]
Americans not only don’t know much about the rest of the world, we don’t care.[5]
War and the Origins of Foreign Aid
One can learn much about U.S. foreign aid policy during the period prior to 1948. It’s all there: missionaries, concern with terms of trade, idealism, commercialism and balance of power calculations. At the governmental level, by 1940, the United States had a fully developed technical cooperation program in Latin America in the areas of agriculture, education and health.[6] Elements of foreign aid and technical assistance were implemented in China, Persia and the Philippines. By the end World War II:
The potentialities of overlapping if not of competing field activity may be illustrated most strikingly by reference to Latin America. There a dozen or more agencies of the United States government engaged in multiform aid enterprises, some of them dating from the 1930’s.[7]
The U.S. also provided limited assistance to Liberia and Ethiopia in Africa and Iran and the Philippines, Thailand in Asia during the inter-war period. However, prior to World War II, it is fair to say that “aid-giving was an unstructured affair….”[8]
For many years, prior to President Truman’s Point Four Program, missionaries, traders, abolitionists and philanthropists, educators and businessmen all carried out technical assistance activities and contributed to the complex of values and assumptions that we see in the motives of individuals and countries as they interacted internationally with the developing world. However, the systems of foreign aid date back only to 1948 and the beginning of the Marshall Plan.
Humanitarian Assistance
The United States entry into the First World War and the peace negotiations that followed it reflected both change and continuity in terms of the country’s world view. According to Margaret MacMillan, “the United States…entry into the war became a crusade, against human greed and folly…and for justice, peace, and civilization.”[9] From the outbreak of war in 1914, the need for humanitarian assistance came to the fore as Europe plunged into war. As Curti and Birr point out, “During the first fifteen months of the war more than 250 nurses served in European countries under the direction of the Red Cross; and in addition American educational institutions, particularly Harvard, dispatched medical and relief missions.”[10]
In August of 1914, Herbert Hoover became the chairman and chief advisor of the Commission of Relief in Belgium. He continued to play the role of War Relief Czar through the war and into the Post-World War I period first in the non-profit sector and then as a senior U.S. government administrator.[11] He continued to have an interest in international assistance during his period as Secretary of Commerce and as President.
Technical collaboration became an increasingly significant feature of the work of various intergovernmental organizations in Europe after 1914.[12] Of particular importance from a humanitarian perspective, was, according to Walter Sharp:
The overseas work of the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations, the Unitarian Service Committee, and the American Friends Service Committee. The last-named group, established originally in 1917 as a relief agency, soon broadened its interests to include long-range rehabilitation work as well. Programs of famine relief and medical services were carried out in Russia, Poland, and Serbia between 1917 and 1931.[13]
In the aftermath of the First World War the U.S. government and its leadership exhibited several elements of a belief system that would have long term significance in terms of international assistance. Many Americans saw their national values as universal, and their government and society as a model for the world. To quote MacMillan again:
Faith in their own exceptionalism has sometimes led to a certain obtuseness on the part of Americans, a tendency to preach at other nations rather than listen to them, a tendency as well to assume that American motives are pure where those of others are not. And [President Woodrow] Wilson was very American. He came to the Peace Conference, said Lloyd George, like a missionary to rescue the heathen Europeans with his “little sermonettes” full of rather obvious remarks.[14]
The end of the First World War saw the development of new patterns of international assistance efforts in Europe. As Curti and Birr point out, “The early years of the period between the outbreak of the first world war in Europe and the Great Depression witnessed continued activities in the field of technical aid much like those that had already taken place.”[15] However, the formation of the League of Nations represented a new internationalism which engaged the United States despite the failure of the U.S. Senate to ratify the Treaty of Versailles.
Throughout Europe in early 1919, reports had come in from officials and private non-governmental organizations of the existence of millions of unemployed people, desperately trying to feed themselves and their families on stale bread, dried beans and rotten cabbage. Herbert Hoover, the U.S. relief administrator estimated that 200 million people faced famine. The humanitarian need was overwhelming.
One important humanitarian and technical support mission led by Hoover was to Russia. The American Relief Administration, (ARA) which operated from February, 1919, until the summer of that year, (just over six months) represented pioneering in large scale international relief. It was directed with efficiency and humanity by Herbert Hoover and supported by special congressional appropriations as well as by allocations from the Food Administration.[16] The ARA shipped millions of tons of food to Russia and Eastern Europe during the post-war period. The allies feared that without relief in Europe “there was likely to be complete social collapse.
Though this mission failed to keep Russia in the war, it was, like other humanitarian missions created to aid the war effort, evidence of a growing tendency to use official technical support missions in international crises.[17] In 1918, the U.S. sent 6.23 million tons of food to Europe. By the end of 1918, part of Hoover’s motivation for rapid response to refugees in part was fear that the poor and huddled masses of Europe would fall to “communism, the `collectivist infection.’”[18]
Hoover’s American Relief Administration was a complex organization with offices all over Europe running railways, supervising mining operations and waging “war on lice, with thousands of hair clippers, tons of soap, special baths and stations manned with American soldiers.”[19] Hoover hoped that the prompt delivery of food aid to Russia, Hungary and Germany would calm down revolutionary tendencies in those countries. To critics, foreign aid in the form of surplus food at the end of World War I also provided a “major potential dumping ground for America’s eighteen-million-ton agricultural surplus.”[20] By 1933, under the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the U.S. regularly began sending food shipments outside of emergency situations to poor countries.
Three legacies of World War I would impact upon the international assistance process. First, the concept of self-determination, as defined by Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech, became a watchword for developing and transitional states. Secondly, patterns of humanitarian assistance required that non-governmental organizations from the victorious powers feed the hungry and the displaced.Thirdly, national governments would, because of the size of the problem, provide significant financial support.[21]
During the inter-war period, the principal“carriers of technology and technical assistance…[remained] the missionary societies, private industrial firms, an impressive number of individuals directly employed by foreign governments, and a number of educational and philanthropic organizations.”[22] However, there were also sporadic foreign aid activities organized directly byWestern governments.At the same time, the Europeans became dependent on international assistance and U.S.postured universalism and humanitarianism. According to MacMillan:
Europeans resented [U.S.] reminders that the United States was supplying the bulk of Europe’s relief and the way in which [the Americans] promoted American economic interests, unloading, for example, American pork products and severely undercutting European producers.[23]
Resentment between European recipients and the American donor during and after the war had a modern ring.
Early Foreign Aid
Though the United States defined the foreign aid and foreign policy debate briefly during and after World War I, the U.S. during the inter-war period remained “a particularly parochial society with a poor record of deep or comprehensive interest in other societies.”[24] The United States, except for the last few years of the Woodrow Wilson administration, continued to be defined by isolationism particularly in relationship to Europe until 1941.
For many decades prior to President’s Truman’s Point Four proposal of 1949, American and other religious, philanthropic, educational, and business groups all over the world carried out what is now called international assistance, foreign aid and technical assistance using government, International Labour Organizationand League of Nations financing. Focus often was on Europe however since the bulk of the rest of the world was ruled by colonial systems. During the years after World War I international economists connected with the League of Nations paid little attention to the problems of poor countries. A 1938 League of Nations Survey had no mention of Africa or Asia and only one paragraph on Latin America.[25]
Internationally, most private sector humanitarian organizations had their origins in war and/or natural disaster during the period 1988-1939. The modern role of NGOs came to be shaped during the 20 year inter-war period between 1919 and 1939. The Save the Children Fund was created in 1919, World University Service in 1920, and what is now Plan International in 1937. The volunteer sending organizations owed their basic philosophy to the cross-cultural European work camps that sprang up after the First World War.
Most of the inter-war organizations “began with and retained a strong emphasis on emergency assistance.”[26] Oxfam and Care (which was originally called the Center for American Relief in Europe) were both founded in 1943. World Vision was formed after World War II. All three operated within patterns established in the inter-war period. Within a decade (by the early 1950s) many of these organizations came to focus on development assistance, including contracting with donors, as a means to prevent disaster and as organizations looked to governments to support their activity.
Influence, Values and Stereotypes in
Inter-war International Assistance
In commenting in his “presidential address to the American Economic Association in 1926 on the missions to the ten countries with which he had been associated, E. F. Kemmerer[27] noted a decline in the traditional preference of Latin-American governments for European advisors and an increasing tendency on the part of the countries in other continents to turn to the United States.”[28] Financial advisors during the inter-war period, “heralded the day when American financial and other economic experts were to play an even larger role on the world stage.”[29]
U.S. foreign aid and technical assistance, though increasingly important, faced considerable challenges during the inter-war period. There was always the problem of the U.S.’s parsimony of funds that were typical of the patterns of patronage seen in foreign aid after the end of the Marshall Plan. In one case a number of problems developed over the nature of patronage within the international administration service system and the “the habit…some in authority had of obliging [workers] to pay heavy discounts in order to cash their salary drafts.”[30]
Beyond this, technical assistance,to many host country critics, even during the inter-war period, was simple imperialism. This in turn led to a nationalist reaction in many cases that seriously handicapped American efforts in those recipient countries. It is worth noting again that until the Second World War, there was no systematic training for professional Foreign Service Officers of the United States beyond language training.
Authoritarianism was often an inadvertent result of U.S. interventions in Latin America, Africa and Asia in the inter-war period. As Curti and Birr point out:
An American-trained constabulary in Santo Domingo and Liberia made easier the path of a dictator in the former and strengthened an elite in the latter. Educational reforms aided many people, but they generally favored urban over rural folks.[31]
International security, humanitarian missions, technical assistance and diplomacy were all closely intertwined during the inter-war period. In Asia and Latin America, during the years following World War I there was a growing tendency to send military and naval missions to less developed countries. Technical missions restingon America’s enormous economic growth and prestige oftenhad a more positive impact. This was little different than similar interventions after the Second World War.
Ultimately, U.S. foreign aid was often seen by people in recipient countries as paternal in nature. It was based upon what Walter Lippmann called the “fatal universalism” of American thought.[32] The U.S. as a donor country represented a more advanced society than could be replicated in a developing country through foreign aid. Advisors sent out to teach the “natives”were often portrayed as older siblings. Often the recipient of such advice was portrayed as a bad pupil.
Prior to World War II, it was assumed that “native” peoples in Africa and Asia were doomed to low standards of living because of their inability to handle machines.[33] Mechanization was central to assumptions of white supremacy. Many American academics and practitioners in the early days of U.S. foreign aid saw the United Statesat the center of a universal model of modernization that should be aspired to by all people.[34]
Technical assistance in the period between World War I and World War II was strongly influenced by the instrumentalism of John Dewey.[35]In the field of education “[s]upported largely by foundation grants, the Institute for International Education of New York, established in 1919,…sponsored fellowships and scholarships, facilitated overseas lecture tours for professors and journalists, and promoted international summer schools and student work schemes.”[36] According to Walter Sharp, after World War I a number of University programs in the United States became involved in international assistance work and,
welfare, educational, research, and development activities now constitute[ed] an important feature of the work of the major companies engaged in foreign investment enterprises…. The object is to promote “joint enterprises” in which both American and local capital will participate, with emphasis on projects designed to improve living standards by reducing production and distraction costs in agriculture and mining.[37]
Those in favor of an imperial role for the U.S. at the end of World War I took a particularly strong position vis-à-vis Eastern Asia. The arguments in favor of expanding U.S. control in the Far East,
did not explicitly recommend technical aid, but it did include among the arguments suggested in favor of assuming the mandate the statement that the Near East presents the greatest humanitarian opportunity of the age - a duty for which the United States is better fitted than any other - as witness Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii, Panama, and our altruistic policy of developing people rather than material resources alone.[38]
There were two components of colonial and later foreign aid policy adopted by U.S. administrators and specialists:modernization through trusteeship and the need for the accumulation of wealth.[39] Prior to World War II, social equity and political rights would have been inconsistent with the underlying division of labor and trading patterns within the then existent colonial blocks. Rising expectations within developing countries only began with the end of the colonial period in the 1950s.[40]
Stereotypes were particularly common in Asia where it was assumed that Asians could only copy the creative impulses of the West. In Japan, one early observer, Horace Capron concluded in 1872:
For the Japanese people, whom he compared to children with new toys, he had a low regard; for the potentialities of Hokkaido‘[the northern most island in Japan] which, he thought, might in the hands of Anglo-Saxons be made ‘the garden spot of the world,’ an exaggerated one.[41]