International development contested: the American Child Health Section in Belgium (1922–1924)

ABSTRACT

Failed humanitarian projects provide us with an opportunity to shed light on the complex interactions and conflicts among international donors, humanitarian workers and local recipients. This article explores such a contested and terminated project in post-First World War Belgium. The Child Health Section (1922–24) was a US international development programme initiated by Herbert Hoover and the Commission for Relief in Belgium Educational Foundation. Its aim was to provide health education to school children. Despite reaching 113,136 Belgian children between the ages of six and 12 in 1221 schools across the country, the project was abruptly discontinued after only one year. This contribution examines why the development assistance programme failed by using a micro-historical approach combined with concepts from development studies. The well-kept records of the CHS on the enduring conflicts with Belgian administrations reveal how US assumptions about their role in transforming or modernizing Europe clashed with (the diverse) European views on their own post-war reconstruction. This case demonstrates that the shift from providing short-term, needs-based humanitarian assistance to investing in long-term international development assistance did not always go smoothly or uncontested in post-war Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• History of humanitarian aid
• child health education and protection
• international development
• transatlantic relations
• post-war reconstruction
• US philanthropy
• interwar period
• First World War
• supply-driven aid
• authorizing environment

This article tells the history of a US philanthropic programme on children’s health in Belgium after the First World War.¹ The Child Health Section (CHS) was a small-scale educational project that was set in motion by Herbert Hoover and the Commission for Relief in Belgium Educational Foundation (CRBEF) in 1922. At first glance, the project was impactful. Between 1922 and 1924, the CHS claimed to have provided health education to 113,136 Belgian children between the ages of six and 12 in 1221 schools across the country.² It reached a considerable number of educators, and supplied them with the material and tools to integrate health instruction in school curricula. The archival records, however, unveil a different story. After months of in-fighting with Belgian partners, the programme was ended abruptly by the New York office of the CRBEF after the first school year – much to the chagrin of the US director and part of the Belgian ‘consulting committee’. This contribution explores the work of the CHS, the nature of the Belgian–US partnership and the reasons behind its premature ending.

The first section sketches the history of the programme and its activities, and is mainly based on the well-kept archival records of the Belgian American Educational Foundation (Brussels, Belgium). This research joins recent scholarship that complements the top-down focus on the mission and leadership of international philanthropic organizations with an up-close examination of the dynamic and two-way interaction between international relief workers and local partners.³ There are few in-depth studies on humanitarian aid projects, like the CHS, that were contested and ultimately abandoned. Looking closely at failed projects, however, might provide us with valuable clues on the intricate relationships between donors and recipients. During conflicts, local partners might share unpleasant experiences and aid workers will have to explain frictions to the organizational leadership. Undercurrents of conflict and mutual misunderstanding, often overlooked in success stories recounted by donor organizations, thus have a larger chance of being recorded.

The second section of this article frames the work of the CHS in the wider historiography of humanitarian aid in the era of the First World War. The CHS’ work on children’s health was part of the large-scale reconstruction of war-scarred Europe in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. In Belgium alone, approximately 272,000 homes were either destroyed or damaged. In 1919 about half of the population was still reliant on food assistance.⁴ The amount of devastation required an unprecedented effort from local authorities, national governments and international organizations. Research on the reconstruction effort in the Great War era was originally focused on material and economic rebuilding, but has grown to include the social, cultural and political recoveries and transformations of family life, gender policy, medical infrastructure and children’s welfare.⁵ In the immense work of recovery from the war, international humanitarian organizations played an important role. Philanthropies such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the International Red Cross teamed up, worked in parallel and competed with national governments and local authorities.

Children were a key priority in the efforts to rebuild Europe; improving their health was a top concern for all actors involved, and in particular for international philanthropic organizations. Studies by Julia Irwin, Emily Baughan and Friederike Kind-Kovács show how Europe’s youngest became a flagship cause for, among others, the American Relief Administration, Save the Children and the American Red Cross.⁶ This article engages with that recent scholarship on US child aid after the war and how it – as Kevin O’Sullivan aptly described – ‘became a way of shaping the kind of world that the donors wished to mould’.⁷ The US interest in child education as a means to build stronger Europeans and structurally shape Europe’s future explains the decision to start a child health education project in Belgium four years after the war, by an organization solely dedicated to academic international exchange.

The third and fourth sections of this article focus on the conflict-ridden Belgian–US interactions that led to the programme’s failure. This contribution attempts to surpass the historical caricature of the supposedly modern, well-intentioned but unwelcome humanitarian versus the traditional and ungrateful recipient by applying a political economy approach, looking at the common and contradictory interests, incentives and power dynamics that underpinned the partnership.⁸

Crucially, this article considers the work of the CHS as an international development programme rather than a form of humanitarian assistance. It defines humanitarian assistance as short-term foreign relief during or immediately after a crisis focused on saving individual lives, typically substituting or working around government systems. International development assistance in turn commonly follows humanitarian relief operations and provides foreign mid-term/or long-term aid for economic, social and political development as a response to systematic societal welfare problems, frequently in direct collaboration with government services.⁹

The two forms of assistance in what is regularly called the humanitarian–development nexus are complementary and overlap, but the conceptual differentiation between international development and humanitarianism does matter. Each form of assistance presents different goals, mechanisms and challenges. Humanitarianism implies an independent and impartial position (although research has contested this supposed neutrality¹⁰), while development assistance heavily relies on government cooperation and is inherently, and often explicitly, political.¹¹ Despite the difference in meaning, humanitarian aid and humanitarianism are habitually used as umbrella concepts for both humanitarian relief and development programmes in historical research. The work of the CHS aimed at fostering long-term change in the health habits of children and was carried out in direct collaboration, and partly embedded in Belgian public services. It is a textbook example of development assistance.

In contrast with historians of international relief operations, who often have to rely on the archives and accounts of philanthropic leadership, researchers in development studies do structurally include unsuccessful aid programmes in their analysis. Because of the direct link with current humanitarian and development practices, failure is treated as ‘an educational moment and learning opportunity’, as Adeela Arshad-Ayaz, Ayaz Naseem and Dania Mohamad stated in a 2020 paper on failed humanitarian engineering projects.¹² Publications such as ‘Why Foreign Aid to Haiti Failed – and How to do Better Next Time’ (2008) and ‘Doing Bad by Doing Good: why Humanitarian Action Fails’ (2013) indeed supplement their analysis with scenarios to avoid future failures and maladaptation.¹³

This historical study fits in the tradition in development research of looking closely at what went wrong and why. It demonstrates how past projects dealt with very similar strategies and hurdles as development actors today, and makes use of conceptual frameworks in development studies to understand these dynamics. The concepts of ‘supply-driven aid’ and ‘authorizing environment’ were particularly useful for this study.

The concept of ‘supply-driven development’ is used to describe projects that answer to societal needs that are identified by the external donor-organization instead of the direct aid recipients, and therefore privilege the political and economic interests of the donor. In contrast, ‘demand-driven development’ answers to priorities formulated by the recipient and centres the recipient countries’ ownership of its own development process. In practice, demand-driven development can be only operationalized when donors recognize that the recipient is not a singular entity, but composed of many stakeholders operating on different levels (government agencies, public organizations, local authorities, academic elites, private sector actors and so on).¹⁴ In order for a development initiative to succeed, it needs to continuously identify the key actors and create an ‘authorizing environment’ that is willing to allow, participate in and/or facilitate the project. This contribution argues that despite the structural involvement of local actors at all stages of the process, the CHS failed to produce lasting results because the support was supply-driven and failed to understand existing structure systems as well as the ambitions, interests and incentives of Belgian agencies and actors working on child welfare.

1. The rise and fall of the Child Health Section

The Child Health Section was an organizational anomaly from the start, a deviation from the main focus on binational academic exchange of its parent organization, the Commission for Relief in Belgium Educational Foundation (CRBEF). The CRBEF had been established together with the University Foundation in 1919 with the remaining funds of Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB), the large-scale international philanthropic initiative that had helped save occupied Belgium and Northern France from starvation during the First World War.

The Brussels-based University Foundation supported Belgian universities and funded research under the leadership of the Belgian banker Emile Francqui. The CRBEF was led by Herbert Hoover. It was set up as an academic exchange programme between US and Belgian university students and researchers. The exchange programme was to some extent designed as a monument to the Belgian–US collaboration during the war, with offices in New York and Brussels.¹⁵ As of 1922, a small portion of the CRBEF budget was allocated to primary school children. This was the direct result of the strong personal interest in children’s health of the CRBEF director Herbert Hoover.

In August 1919, ‘the Chief’ had written to the Belgian Prime Minister Léon Delacroix that ‘une petite partie de cette somme serait, conformément à l’avis des trustees, employée à l’extension de l’enseignement concernant la protection de l’enfance’.¹⁶ Nearly three years later, in the spring of 1922, the CRBEF followed up on Hoover’s wish. Sally Lucas Jean, the director of the Child Health Organization of America, and Fanneal Harrison, former Junior Red Cross field director for Czechoslovakia, travelled to Belgium to scout the terrain for setting up a programme ‘for the protection and advancement of the health of school age children’.¹⁷ The experts recommended a health education project in Belgian schools and argued that this could be set up ‘without disturbing any plans now in operation’ and without ‘an expenditure of large funds’.¹⁸

The first stage of the project stayed well within the traditional CRBEF modus operandi of transatlantic student exchange. Lucas Jean and Harrison selected 15 Belgian teachers to study child health methods in the United States for one year and recommended the appointment of the US nutritionist Flora Rose (Cornell University) to research the health and food habits of Belgian children.¹⁹ In December 1922, however, Herbert Hoover decided to launch a more involved child health programme in Belgium and sent Fanneal Harrison and Red Cross worker Catherine Gavin to Belgium to ‘report back definite recommendations as to future work and to get something started’.²⁰ Both women had coordinated a children’s health educational project in Czechoslovakia by the Junior American Red Cross in 1919–1920.²¹ In June 1923, Harrison and Gavin proposed an applied project for child health work in Belgium that was similar in purpose and scope to the work they had done in Central Europe. They proposed to start with small initiatives in the school year 1923–1924 ‘and await local demands from Belgium before increase so that work could be built on [a] solid foundation’.²²

The programme aimed to teach Belgian educators and health officials novel US pedagogical practices concerning child health, in order to reach school children between the ages of six and 12. This initiative was part of the broader reconstruction efforts of US philanthropic organizations and aligned with a rising (inter)national commitment towards the betterment of child life. Since the late nineteenth century, children’s health and wellbeing had become a rising concern for most ‘Western’ nations, with a plethora of philanthropic organizations and social policies focusing on child welfare.²³

In the summer of 1923, 50 Belgian teachers were immersed in US health education methods during an intensive 10-day conference co-organized by the public child welfare agency l’Oeuvre National d’Enfance (ONE), and Belgian school inspectors attended a two-day conference co-organized by the Ministry of Arts and Sciences. The gatherings were led by Mabel C. Bragg, assistant superintendent of schools in Newton, Massachusetts. In the spirit of transatlantic knowledge exchange, it was also decided to send Léon de Paeuw of the Ministry of Arts and Sciences, Edmond Dronsart of the Belgian Red Cross, and Madeleine Kaiser and Jérôme Maquet of ONE to the United States for an educational visit on US child health methods. To expand public outreach a Child Health Exhibit was set up at the Egmont Palace in Brussels in February 1924. According to glowing internal reports, 15,000 children, teachers, school inspectors and parents attended the expo in 11 days.²⁴

The main work of the CHS, however, targeted Belgian school children directly. In primary schools throughout the country, teachers carried out a health programme that was designed by Fanneal Harrison and Catherine Gavin. Using material provided by the CHS (such as children’s books, posters, flyers, scales, tooth brushes and so on), teachers tracked children’s hygiene habits and playfully introduced healthy living through a ‘health game’. The rules of the health game were:

(1) Taking a bath more than once a week

(2) Brushing the teeth at least once a day, and preferably at night

(3) Sleep long hours, if possible, with windows open.

(4) Drink at least half a litre of milk each day

(5) Eat fresh vegetables and fresh or dried fruit each day

(6) Drink water between meals

(7) Play in open air every day

(8) Have a bowel movement every day.²⁵

Participation was voluntary, and by the end of the school year, reportedly 1221 schools and 113,136 children were involved in the project.

Despite the early successes in numbers and reach (approximately one-eighth of Belgian school children), the New York office of the CRBEF unilaterally pulled the plug on the programme before the school year was over. The main reason was the continuous opposition of the Belgian l’Oeuvre National de l’Enfance (ONE) and the ambivalent attitude of the Belgian Catholic Church, which was in charge of half the Belgian school system. ONE had been founded by the Belgian state in 1919 to continue the child protection work of the Belgian war philanthropy and CRB partner Comité National de Secours et d’Alimentation (National Committee for Relief and Food).

On 29 March 1924, the New York office gave permission to withdraw ‘as C.R.B. did not wish to compete with local organisations which were probably able to carry on work’.²⁶ Turning over the work to the ONE was ‘unthinkable’, and therefore it was decided to donate a small subsidy of 75,000 francs to the Belgian Ministry of Arts and Sciences (which was in charge of education) for publications on child health education as a goodbye gift.²⁷ The work was officially terminated on 31 July 1924. After the liquidation of all material and equipment, Fanneal Harrison and Catherine Gavin sailed back to the United States.

2. US aspirations for European children

While the Child Health Section might have been a rather short detour for the Commission for Relief in Belgium Educational Foundation, its focus on child health education was certainly in line with the broader US humanitarian presence in Europe at that time. Preventive child health had become the primary focus of the American Red Cross and the American Relief Agency.²⁸ During the war, the United States initiated massive civilian food and health relief projects in Allied countries. By 1919, however, US public support for international aid was waning, and US relief workers reported shifting needs and a growing European resentment of the perceived foreign intrusion.²⁹ The American Red Cross, the largest provider of aid, therefore decided to withdraw large-scale material relief operations, and replace it by more modest health and educational relief projects oriented towards children and child-rearing. US-sponsored public playgrounds, mobile libraries and health demonstrations popped up all over Europe.

In her seminal history of the American Red Cross, Julia Irwin described the child health education programmes as the final effort of US humanitarians to make a lasting contribution to European societies before leaving the continent.³⁰ Educating war-deprived children and making them more robust and healthier was seen as an investment in the future of Europe. The focus on children’s health and education came from a genuine concern with children’s wellbeing and a pragmatic preference for less costly and non-controversial activities. It was also driven by political motives, and explicitly so. In the eyes of US relief agencies, importing modern educational and nutritional practices would generate effective long-term change. With US help, Europe’s degenerated war generation could become healthy, industrious and productive citizens that lived up to US middle-class ideals (as opposed to communist ideals).³¹

In order to transform European youths, the American Red Cross and American Relief Association brought over US child health experts to share new scientific insights on children’s diseases, nutrition and health education.³² Irwin argues that these physicians, social workers and educators thus became ‘central political actors’ in the US foreign policy of achieving a more politically stable and democratic Europe.³³ This dovetailed with a broader international movement that saw, in the words of Joëlle Droux, a ‘new symbolic significance for the future of Western civilization’ in childhood, which also saw the rise of child-centred projects under the umbrella of the League of Nations and the Red Cross organizations.³⁴

Herbert Hoover was one of the leading figures in the spread of these ideas on the international (and specifically US) responsibility to protect children. Despite his function as the Secretary of Commerce (1921–28) in isolationist administrations, Hoover harboured a deep-seated belief in the leading role of the United States in the world, and saw international philanthropy as an important instrument to expand the United States’ influence. In addition, Hoover was personally and politically committed to child welfare. As an orphan, a Quaker and a social engineer, he believed that children were a nation’s greatest resource and that improving their lives was a country’s best chance for long-term social and economic stability.

At home, Hoover was a powerful ally of the progressive child welfare movement and president of the American Child Health Association (1922–29).³⁵ In 1930, the ‘children’s president’ convened a White House Conference on child health protection and published a Children’s Charter, which strongly emphasized hygiene, food and education. Under his leadership, the US foreign relief agency, the ‘American Relief Administration’, was renamed the ‘American Relief Administration European Children’s Fund’, when it changed its status from an official US agency to a voluntary organization.³⁶

Hoover’s dedication to child health education and his collaborations with the American Junior Red Cross explains the rather abrupt appearance of the child health education project in post-war Belgium. The CRBEF director and his US staff strongly believed in the importance of children’s health for Belgium’s future, and the need to export US know-how in these matters. In order for the programme to succeed, however, Belgians had to adopt these ideas in the long term. Establishing and sustaining local enthusiasm was essential.

3. Ungrateful beneficiaries?

‘It was a fine work, very successful. It began to make good but a politician came and destroyed all.’³⁷ This quote from the Belgian physician Auguste Slosse was used by the Commission for Relief in Belgium Educational Foundation secretary Perry C. Galpin at the end of his 16-page ‘Memorandum on the Origin, Rise and Fall of the Child Health Section’ to summarize what went wrong. The message is repeated throughout the internal correspondence of the CRBEF: the child health programme was noble in intentions and its activities had a positive impact, but was sabotaged by Belgian ‘cat and dog performances’ and the irrational, personal resentment of l’Oeuvre National de l’Enfance director Jérôme Maquet.³⁸

This notion of efficiency-obsessed, modern Americans versus traditionalist Europeans is notably present in the history and historiography of US foreign policy and relief in the era of the First World War.³⁹ The picture conveyed is that of US high-handedness and a tendency to change too much too soon in a society that is unwilling to adapt to modernity. There is undoubtedly some truth to this, and historians of humanitarian aid have also not been blind to US paternalism and the unequal relationship between donor and recipient. Julia Irwin, for example, described the tendency of US relief workers ‘to behave as guides rather than partners’ in the educational projects of the American Red Cross.⁴⁰

However, the historical question that is rarely asked is whether the recipients and local partners actually invited or even perceived the foreign aid as needed. This is mainly due to the lack of in-depth studies that connect the complex political economy of the receiving countries with the international aid. Local agencies had varying ideas on what the populations’ most urgent social needs were, and even more so on the appropriate responses and who should provide which kind of social and/or medical assistance. This is especially true when the armed conflict was over, and government apparatus took back responsibility over its citizens from foreign occupational regimes or/and philanthropic organizations.

To understand the long-term impact of humanitarian aid programmes, it is important to consider these internal differences. Doing so adds a new layer of complexity to the analysis of external support operations: by who – that is, which persons in which organizations and administrations – were the US relief agencies invited and/or welcomed, and to do what exactly? Did these local partner organizations have the cultural authority and political jurisdiction to identify and respond to the perceived societal needs throughout the course of the humanitarian work? And were the needs estimated and interventions proposed by the US partners accepted by both recipients (who probably had the least choice in the matter), local collaborators on all institutional levels and by the different local/national political administrations?

The leadership of the CHS did not wander blindly into Belgium’s political hornet’s nest. The parties involved were quite familiar with the country’s complex and tension-prone ideological landscape. CRBEF protagonists Perrin C. Galpin, Edgar Rickard, William Tuck and Millard Shaler had been with the Commission for Relief in Belgium from the start of the war, and were used to navigating the linguistic and ideological divisions. Belgium was indeed a deeply polarized country. Since the nineteenth century, political life was defined by fierce struggles between the secular, urban and progressive Liberal Party on the one hand, the rural and conservative Catholic Party on the other, and, since 1885, the Belgian Workers’ Party. The political division reached deep into Belgian society, with each political movement forming separate liberal, Catholic and socialist ‘pillars’ that shaped social and cultural life.

After the war, wide-ranging electoral reforms shook the political system, and ended three decades of homogeneous Catholic cabinets. A new coalition system was installed, effectively forcing Catholics to share power with liberals, Christian Democrats and socialists. The post-war years also saw the rise of the Flemish movement, which sought to advance the linguistic and cultural emancipation of the Dutch-speaking majority in the francophone-ruled public life.⁴¹ The new coalition system and the economic toll of the war caused political instability. Between 1918 and 1924, Belgium was ruled by six consecutive governments, in which certain posts were preserved to specific fractions. The Ministry of Arts and Sciences, for example, was traditionally held by a secularist liberal or socialist politician, who in turn did not contest existing state subsidies for the Catholic schools’ network.⁴²

This was a new, more complex reality for the former CRB workers, who had worked with the centrally led, national, philanthropic Comité National de Secours et d’Alimentation (National Committee for Relief and Food) during the war. Together with the CRB, the Comité had replaced and critically expanded pre-war social services, and became some sort of shadow government that worked in close collaboration with the CRB. A network of approximately 125,000 Belgian volunteers distributed the food and aid that the CRB collected and transported to occupied Belgium. This large-scale undertaking was coordinated by notables of all political colours and led by the liberal banker Emile Francqui. Ideological infights within the Comité and clashes with the US CRB were curbed by Emile Francqui, who preached a temporary ideological armistice, a Union Sacrée, between political fractions.⁴³

Post-war Belgium, on the other hand, was a multi-headed creature, with a complex public and private network of pillarized administrations, universities and social services. As director Fanneal Harrison wrote in a rather gloomy October 1923 report:

The antagonism between Catholics and official school continues. The struggle between Walloons and Flemish is never ending. Every day we are made to feel the petty jealousies among the different social organizations, and the little intrigues they employ to further their own ends.⁴⁴

The CHS nonetheless recognized the absolute necessity of successful local partnerships with all societal fractions – Catholic, liberal, Flemish and Walloon (but not socialist) – for the project to succeed. From its beginnings, the project applied what is now known as ‘localization’ in humanitarian action: the shift of power and responsibilities from international aid organizations towards local and national actors. Localization entails a structural inclusion of national governments, organizations and administrations and local communities, not only in practical implementation, but also in decision-making. In development studies, localization is consistently portraited as a prominent contemporary theme, inspired by a recent turn towards local agency and ownership for increasing aid effectiveness. The CHS demonstrates that the practice is much older than the concept, and that John Borton might have been right when he stated that the humanitarian sector is ‘locked into a state of “perpetual present”, with little knowledge of or interest in its history.⁴⁵

Capacity-building through participation and partnership was indeed front and centre in this interwar development programme. The CRBEF structurally engaged local and national actors and tried to achieve complementarity with them by obtaining ‘effective understanding of local capacity and goals and a commitment to working where gaps and opportunities exist’, as a 2019 paper on humanitarian localization suggests.⁴⁶ The children’s health education project was conceived by Fanneal Harrison and Sally Lucas Jean after discussing the matter with a number of Belgian teachers and representatives from ONE. The two experts concluded that the only formal health education in Belgian schools was physical training, and that ‘teachers with whom [they] talked have been eager to know a more vitalized program of health education’.⁴⁷

The project was meant to last four years, with a gradual handover of all activities to local agencies. It would start with four schools as demonstration centres, the structural engagement and education of Belgian personnel and the distribution of child health publications. Schools entered the project on a voluntary basis, and were subsequently sent teaching manuals and educational and hygiene materials (such as children’s books, tooth brushes, scales). An ‘advisory committee’ and smaller ‘executive committee’ entirely made up of prominent Belgian experts in children’s health and education was set up. The committee was headed by Emile Francqui and Paul Héger (president of the University of Brussels), and among its 21 members were representatives of the different school systems, the ONE, the Belgian Red Cross and nursing associations.

4. Unwelcome humanitarians?

Then why did the Child Health Section not succeed in creating fertile ground for children’s health education in Belgium? Two fundamental issues were at the root of the problem: the supply-driven character of the work, and, because of that, the lack of an authorizing environment.

The distinction between ‘demand-driven’ and ‘supply-driven’ aid has been developed in the four High-Level Fora on Aid Effectiveness organized by the UN and OECD between 2003 and 2011.⁴⁸ Demand-driven aid recognizes the country’s ownership of development, and the importance of building effective partnerships with local actors to align foreign aid with local development needs. Rather than anachronistically holding this apparently well-intentioned and carefully executed historical programme to current standards of effectiveness and accountability, this article wants to use the conceptual distinction to better understand the reasons behind the gap between the CHS, its Belgian ‘consulting committee’ and the failed localization attempts.

The CHS was supply-driven from the start. The programme was the result of a US commitment to protect child life in Belgium, and not a community-driven demand of the Belgian authorities or civil organizations. Its sole raison d’être was the vague intention of Herbert Hoover – who despite his other professional activities kept very tight control of the Commission for Relief in Belgium Educational Foundation – to devote part of the remaining CRB funds to child welfare.⁴⁹ Curiously, it was not the US CRBEF who had initially set this project in motion, but the Belgian University Foundation. To honour Hoover’s wish of 1919, in the autumn of 1921 the Foundation decided to set up a commission of Belgian children’s physicians, who were each asked to propose a project to increase the protection of children’s health. The most favoured proposal was to create a Hoover chair for child protection at the medical faculty of the four Belgian universities. The committee emphasized ‘the necessity of limiting their activities to higher education’, but made it clear that ‘the desire of the Board to adopt whatever plan will carry out in the largest possible measure Hoover’s ideas in this connection’.⁵⁰ The gentlemen (there were no female experts present) also expressed concern about potential conflict with existing Belgian initiatives for the protection of children’s lives.

Hoover was not impressed. At an all-day conference at the house of his friend Edgar Rickard, he seemed ‘determined on developing the child welfare work to the limit’. The ‘Chief’ wanted the CRB funds ‘used for living purposes’, rather than have it permanently invested in ‘Brick and Mortar’ in collaboration with the Belgian state (a reference to the plan to finance new buildings for the University of Brussels): ‘We are, naturally anxious to keep the C.R.B. funds in our own possession and this scheme of yours [new buildings for the University of Brussels] would permanently kick away useful capital.’⁵¹

The plan of the University Foundation, and its concerns about potential overlap with existing initiatives, were shrugged off. Instead, the CRBEF was ordered to seek ‘possible contact with the individuals who have been responsible for the best work in America’ in the era of child health education.⁵² This rather dismissive attitude towards the Belgian agency in deciding where to direct the funds confirms the findings of Kenneth Bertrams that the foundation of the CRBEF after the war (as opposed to funnelling the entire CRB funds to a Belgian foundation or government) ‘enabled Hoover to keep full control of the relief legacy and let him have free reins in directing programmes along the lines he deemed necessary’.⁵³

The work of the CHS was entirely based on US knowledge, methods and practices. This was apparent in the choice of publications, the teaching methods and the US experts that were sent to Belgium. Among the boxes of books that were shipped by the CRBEF New York office to Brussels were statistical reports on infant mortality in the United States, overviews of US child welfare programmes and the monthly magazine Mother and Child of the American Child Hygiene Association (of which Herbert Hoover was president). Further listed were dozens of publications by US educators and physicians such as the Psychology of Health Education (Beatrice Chandler Gesell), pamphlets such as Child Care and Whole Welfare by the Children’s Bureau of the US Department of Labour and 25 books on US child welfare education to distribute among Belgian partners. The Child Health Section was conceived by Sally Jean Lucas during a two-week visit to Belgium, and led by humanitarian relief workers Fanneal Harrison and Catherine Gavin.⁵⁴ These US experts in child welfare had no experience with Belgian administrations, school systems or child health infrastructure.

Belgium was, however, not a blank slate waiting to be filled with external know-how on child health, welfare and education. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the reinstated Belgian government had nationalized the child protection work of the Belgian war philanthropists, the Comité National de Secours et d’Alimentation.⁵⁵ The Oeuvre National d’Enfance (ONE) was founded in 1919, with a mission that was very closely related – albeit much broader – to that of the Child Health Section:

To encourage and develop child protection, including: promoting the dissemination and application of scientific rules and methods of child hygiene, in families and in public or private educational, aid and protection organisations; to encourage and support, through subsidies or otherwise, efforts relating to the hygiene of children; to exercise administrative and medical control over protected works.⁵⁶

A detailed description of the work in English and the above-mentioned mission can be found in the archives of the CRB, together with an internal meeting report of the ONE board – a testimony to the anxiousness surrounding the collaboration.⁵⁷ Because of the complementarity or, indeed, overlap, with ONE, the CRBEF was very keen to keep the welfare service on board. ONE’s director Jérôme Maquet was made part of the ‘executive committee’ of the CHS and went on a month-long guided tour of child health education initiatives in the United States at the foundation’s expense.⁵⁸ Despite these efforts, the US workers continuously reported a climate of ‘open warfare’ and resentment of Maquet on the ‘active intrusion of CRB Educational Foundation although glad to get our money to spend his way’.⁵⁹

The potential for conflict with existing national initiatives was foreseen by Emile Francqui, the director of University Foundation in a 1921 meeting (of which the minutes were shared with Herbert Hoover) on possible child protection initiatives from the CRBEF: ‘Il existe en Belgique de très nombreux organismes s’occupant de Protection de l’Enfance; la Fondation doit-elle prendre position et déclarer que cet enseignement est mal compris?’⁶⁰

Despite its deep social inequalities and high rate of child poverty, Belgium was a leader in the international movement for child welfare. In July 1921, the government organized an international conference in Brussels that saw the launch of the Association International de Protection de l’Enfance (AIPE), which would integrate in the Committee for the Protection of Children in the League of Nations in 1923.⁶¹ And with Ovide Decroly (1871–1932) and his New Education and the League of Red Cross Societies secretary-general and social work pioneer René Sand (1877–1953), Belgium housed some of the world’s most influential figures in child education and welfare of the time.⁶² (After returning to the United States in 1924, the Child Health Section directors Fanneal Harrison and Catherine Gavin opened a renowned out-of-doors school in Florida based on the Decroly educational method.)⁶³

These transatlantic exchanges on children’s education were not new nor were they uncommon. Throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, social policies were an international endeavour, and the subject of knowledge exchange across borders. Historian Daniel T. Rodgers pointed out that at first, the ‘flow of influence’ primarily went from Europe to the United States, with US progressives implementing novel European social practices.⁶⁴ The First World War turned this trend around. US relief workers, many of whom were highly educated female educators and social workers, ‘could not resist the temptation to change’ the societies they were sent out to help. The student became the teacher, and US style health and children’s play programmes were introduced in war-ravaged regions.⁶⁵

This reversal of roles, and the tensions that arose from it, is subtly present in the work of the CHS. In March 1923, the CRBEF invited Mabel C. Bragg, assistant superintendent and health education pioneer in the Newton school district (Massachusetts) and co-author of the booklet Suggestions for a Program of Health Teaching in the Elementary Schools (1922).⁶⁶ Perrin C. Galpin asked for her help ‘in establishing the child health education movement in Belgium on a well-directed, inspired and sound basis’. He assured her that her lack of French would not be a problem: ‘We feel sure that this will not interfere with or make difficult your teaching here.’⁶⁷

Mabel C. Bragg indeed came over to share her experiences with Belgian educators and officials during a conference on child health education organized by the CRBEF and the Ministry of Arts and Science. Among the presenters were a range of Belgian physicians and educators. Belgian newspapers duly reported the teachings of Mabel C. Bragg and Flora Rose, but devoted equal attention to the talks of Jérôme Maquet (ONE), Edmond Dronsart (Belgian Red Cross), Jean Demoor (Professor of Medicine at the ULB) and Léon de Paeuw (director general of Education in the Ministry of Arts and Science). In the internal correspondence of the CHS, however, the Belgian speakers were reduced to assistants.⁶⁸ Perrin C. Galpin communicated to Mabel C. Bragg that the day ‘will be centered on your teaching with assistance from Dr. O. Decroly and lectures from one or two medical men’.⁶⁹ Much appreciated assistants, that is. Fanneal Harrison reported to the New York office: ‘Dr. Demoor and Dr. Pechere were trumps. They stood by us like soldiers.’⁷⁰ The discrepancy in messaging around this conference suggest that the CHS was more interested in securing the support and access of Belgian experts than in using their expertise.

The supply-driven character of the CHS within the context of the existing structures in child welfare and protection helps explain the lack of an authorizing environment for the project in Belgium. The notion of ‘authorizing environment’ has recently emerged in development studies to construe the national/local setting in which the proposed development project receives and maintains the political backing and the administrative support of those in power. The premise behind this concept is that no high-level authorizer (such as a minister of education) can answer to all the demands of a development programme, and has the power to influence and control all agents (such as mid-level officials, teachers, parents and others) whose support the project needs. That means that development agents need to continuously build legitimacy with an expanding range of actors and agents on multiple levels, not only on how to change the system, but also on the desirability and the need to reform.⁷¹

In the case of the CHS, the US and Belgian partners did not differ fundamentally on the desirability of child health prevention per se, but they did have very different visions on the urgency, timing and organization of the project. While Herbert Hoover saw battling ignorance with teachers and parents through privately sponsored educational programmes as the best way forward, the Belgian partners were more in favour of structurally sponsoring public infrastructure to battle child poverty. The children’s physicians consulted by the Belgian University Foundation emphasized the multi-faceted character of child protection from the crib to adulthood and the many challenges ahead of this – as they emphasized – ‘question sociale’.⁷² As poverty reduction was no longer the domain of the CRBEF/University Foundation, the medical experts proposed to invest in education on child care, medicine and hygiene in universities through the University Foundation and in primary/secondary schools through the l’Oeuvre National d’Enfance.⁷³

But for Herbert Hoover, in his work abroad and at home, ‘the culprits [of poor health in children] remained ignorant or neglectful educators, parents, city and county officials, milk processors, and midwives’.⁷⁴ He had left the National Child Welfare Association in 1919 because – in the words of his biographer Kendrick A. Clements – ‘he felt uncomfortable with that group’s emphasis on government welfare programmes and the expansion of the powers of the Children’s Bureau’.⁷⁵ This individualized approach clashed with Belgian visions on child welfare. As historian Marie-Sylvie Dupont-Bouchat has shown, Belgian politicians had recently moved away from the Napoleonic idea that the safety and health of children was solely the responsibility of the father. In the decades before the war, this view had been slowly replaced by the more progressive notion of the state as protector of the child.⁷⁶

The CHS’ emphasis on research and education instead of material assistance and poverty reduction was difficult to sell to mid-level partners such as school teachers, inspectors and parents who had received direct US aid during the war. To their dismay, the Child Health Section did not distribute much-needed food or clothes, but children’s books, weight scales and toothbrushes. It sent a US nutritionist to schools in order to study the health and daily diets of 5000 children, but with the aim of educating them about healthy eating instead of sponsoring healthy food or medical/educational infrastructure. There was also concern with the sustainability of the child health education work, a legitimacy problem CHS director Fanneal Harrison seemed well aware of: ‘In order to interest Belgians it was necessary to show that work was not planned to be of temporary character.’⁷⁷

These internal hurdles were accelerated by the sensitive character of the work. Because of the experience during the war, the cause of helping children was regarded by the US organization as an uncontroversial, apolitical issue that was easy to ‘sell’ to potential donors and local partners. This was no longer the case in post-war Belgium. Even during the war, Belgian philanthropists working with the Comité National de Secours et d’Alimentation had opposed US meddling in internal domestic affairs, and after the war the CRBEF no longer had a national intermediary organization such as the philanthropic Belgian war Comité at its side to work with local administrations.⁷⁸ The Belgians expressed concern about undue US interference with the private homelife of Belgian citizens. During the first meeting of the Belgian Consulting Committee in May 1923, for example, ‘objections were made to questions on the Rose survey on family finances, baths, etc’.⁷⁹

To complicate matters further, child education was one of the most tension-prone areas of Belgian society. Schools had been the main battleground for the liberal and Catholic political factions and led to two parallel school systems, one secular and one Catholic. This fierce and ongoing political struggle for ‘the soul of the child’ was the main reason for the late adoption of compulsory primary education up to the age of 14 in May 1914. The CHS attempted to involve both liberal and Catholic educators and physicians. The Consulting Committee had representatives of the Catholic and official school systems, the more Catholic leaning l’Oeuvre National de l’Enfance and the more-liberal leaning Belgian Red Cross. But it was headed by the liberals Emile Francqui and Paul Héger: the academic world was solely represented by the liberal Université Libre de Bruxelles, with no fewer than five professors on the Committee.

While liberal support was translated into the immediate cooperation of many public schools, the Catholic school system and l’Oeuvre National d’Enfance were less willing to adopt the health education project. To win over the hearts and minds of the Catholic school teachers and inspectors, the CRBEF asked Mabel Bragg to organize a 10-day conference. According to Fanneal Harrison, she succeeded in garnering support:

For ten days she held them in her hand and Catholics, Liberals, Walloon, Flemish seemed to get down to rock bottom. All differences were forgotten in their eagerness to get the new ideas she had to give them. Socialists from Charleroi, stern rugged old teachers from the Ardennes, young dudes from Brussels, sisters and mean teachers from the devastated regions, all discussed and argued together, played games together, and had one grand good time. ⁸⁰

In an effort to persuade him, the sceptical ONE director Jérôme Maquet was sent to the United States to visit Mabel Bragg in Massachusetts. But with regret, the educator had to report back that ‘Mr Maquet thinks even less of America than he did when he came.’⁸¹ Until that point, the work of ONE had been primarily aimed at malnourished children and infant health. Maquet now wanted to expand its activities to health education in schools and rallied against what he saw as US interference. In the spring of 1924, the acclaimed Belgian professor of medicine Manille Ide (Catholic University of Leuven) published an article in Revue Medicale that criticized the US methods on child health developed by the paediatrician Emmett Holt that were employed by the Child Health Section, calling them ‘false hygiene’.⁸²

Despite Belgian scepticism, the project was steadily gaining ground in the Belgian educational system. Every month, more schools were integrating US child health education methods. However, the CRBEF grew increasingly alarmed over the opposition of the Catholic faction. The perceived lack of support of some of the Belgian partners was seen as a threat to the legitimacy of the whole organization, and, indeed, as Millard Shaler reported, ‘to all that we are trying to do over here in the way of promoting good feeling between the Belgian Universities and between Belgium and America’. On 13 March 1924, he sent a cable to the CRBEF New York office, stating: ‘Crisis arisen Child Health Section STOP, Oeuvre Enfance has encroached on field and unfortunate incidents multiplying to the point where organized open warfare exists.’ He added that the difficulties were fundamental and of a political colour, and that creating a situation was ‘undignified and intolerable for CRB and ourselves’.⁸³

The CRNEF secretary Perry C. Galpin stated that the Child Health Section ‘can not continue in Belgium unless a practically unanimous request comes to us for further help from the Belgian people themselves’.⁸⁴ No such request reached the CRBEF headquarters, and the project was quickly and quietly disbanded. From 1925 onwards, the foundation concentrated all its efforts on the Belgium–United States student exchange programme that is still running today.

5. Conclusion

The era of the First World War saw the start of a long-lasting tradition of external – often US – social interventions in the public affairs of peaceful partner countries within the context of larger geopolitical alliances. The Child Health Section can be viewed as an early example and, perhaps, a test case for US international development policy in the twentieth century. The small, short-lived international philanthropic programme demonstrates that the shift from providing short-term, needs-based humanitarian assistance to investing in long-term international development assistance did not always go smoothly or uncontested in post-war Europe.

This contribution offers a critical, close-up look at the way the project was carried out on the ground. The well-kept records of the CHS on the enduring conflicts with Belgian administrations reveal how US assumptions about their role in transforming or modernizing Europe clashed with (the diverse) European views on their own post-war reconstruction. The US programme explicitly involved Belgian partners and tried to build up legitimacy within the different ideological and administrative factions in the health and education fields. Nonetheless, the directors failed to gain the trust and full cooperation of the newly founded national child welfare agency l’Oeuvre National d’Enfance. The resistance can be partly explained by existing ideological tensions over the sensitive matter of children’s schooling in Belgium, but was also the result of fundamentally different visions of the prerogative of private foreign philanthropy to direct children’s education and bodies.

In addition to adding a significant case study to the historical record, this article hopes to make a methodological contribution to the field of humanitarian history as well. In order to understand the complex, asymmetrical partnerships and what went wrong, this article dips its toes in the related research domain of development studies. Compared to ‘the great humanitarians’ such as Herbert Hoover, who left behind interviews, memoires and institutional records, the actions and agency of mid-level humanitarian workers, local collaborators and recipients of the aid are much harder to uncover. This contribution proposes to surpass this methodological problem by following development studies’ focus on failed projects. Resistance and failure are an integral part of the history of humanitarian aid, and they can provide a way for historians to gain critical insight into the impact and reception of past projects. In addition, the theory and concepts used in contemporary development studies to understand the lack of effectiveness prove to be remarkably useful for the analysis of historical cases.

In his 2016 article for the European Review of History, John Nicholas Borton makes a case for ‘improving the use of history by the international humanitarian sector’.⁸⁵ That history traditionally starts in the 1940s, with the Marshall Plan and the beginning of modern international development. This contribution helps to set the historical timeline a few decades earlier. The case of the CHS and similar child education initiatives demonstrates that foreign aid supporting and supplementing public social welfare was an important part of the reconstruction effort after the First World War. While the humanitarian field could indeed benefit from a critical engagement with its history, this research demonstrates that the reverse is equally important. Contemporary conceptual tools, such as supply-driven aid and authorizing environment, which were originally developed for evaluating the effectiveness of international aid in present-day contexts, prove here to be valuable in the historical analysis of past humanitarian endeavours. Indeed, it is crucial for researchers to embrace and integrate both history and social sciences to enrich our interdisciplinary understanding of past and present humanitarian practices.

Acknowledgements

I thank Melanie Oppenheimer and Romain Fathi for their helpful suggestions and support and the reviewers for their constructive feedback. I also thank Renaud Bardez, who created the very useful archival guide to the archives of the CRBEF and sent me the digitized records of the CHS while I was abroad in 2019. This research was supported by the Belgian American Educational Foundation (BAEF).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Belgian American Educational Foundation [45.000].

Notes on contributors

Nel de Mûelenaere

Nel de Mûelenaere is Assistant Professor of Contemporary History at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Her research focuses on humanitarian aid, food and gender during and after the First World War. She held the Peter Paul Rubens Chair at UC Berkeley (2022) and was the BAEF Cabeaux-Jacobs postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University (2019). She holds a PhD in political history (2016) from Antwerp University. Her dissertation explored forgotten militarization processes in Belgian society between 1890 and 1914, and was published by Leuven University Press in 2019. Her current project examines the experiences and impact of female US relief workers in Belgium and France in the era of the First World War.

Notes

1. I thank Melanie Oppenheimer and Romain Fathi for their helpful suggestions and support as well as the reviewers for their constructive feedback. I also thank Renaud Bardez, who created the very useful archival guide to the archives of the CRBEF and sent me the digitized records of the CHS while I was abroad in 2019. This research was supported by the Belgian American Educational Foundation (BAEF).

2. There were in total 8151 Belgian primary schools in 1923–24. Annuaire Statistique de la Belgique et du Congo Belge: Cinquante-Troisième Année – 1923-1924, Tome Xlix, (Bruxelles: Imprimerie Lesigne, 1926), 90. The number of schoolchildren and schools mentioned here is based on the account of the CHS director Fanneal Harrison, who received monthly reports of the school teachers involved. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 256, Folder: Belgian Child Health Program. Cancellation of program. Memorandum concerning decision. Perrin C. Galpin, “Memorandum on the Origin, Rise and Fall of the Child Health Section,” New York, September 1924, 14.

3. Gatrell et al., “Discussion”; Piana, “The Dangers of ‘Going Native’”; Roberts, “A ‘Position of Peculiar Responsibility’”.

4. Gerard, Nouvelle Histoire de Belgique, 2010–1939, 10–11.

5. Verpoest et al., eds., Revival after the Great War; Audoin-Rouzeau and Prochasson, Sortir de la Grande Guerre; Bullock and Verpoest, Living with History 1914–1964; Claeys, “World War I and the Reconstruction of the Countryside in Belgium and France”; Clout, After the Ruins; David Gerber, “Disabled Veterans and Public Welfare Policy”; Orde, British Policy and European Reconstruction; and Purseigle, “La Cité de Demain.”

6. Baughan, Saving the Children; Irwin, “Sauvons les Bébés”; and Kind-Kovács, Budapest’s Children.

7. O’Sullivan, Hilton, and Fiori, “Humanitarianisms in Context,” 9.

8. See Bandura and Hammond, “A Demand-Driven Approach to Development”; Forsyth ed., Encyclopaedia of International Development; Harris and Tuladhar, “Humanitarian Localisation”; and Harris ed., Research in Ethical Issues in Organizations.

9. Lie, “The Humanitarian-Development Nexus.”

10. See for the era of the Great War: Baughan and Fiori, “Save the Children, the Humanitarian Project, and the Politics of Solidarity”; and Irwin, Making the World Safe.

11. Forsyth, Encyclopaedia of International Development; Götz and Herrman, “Universalism in Emergency Aid before and after 1970”; and Paulmann, Dilemmas of Humanitarian Aid.

12. Arshad-Ayaz, Naseem, and Mohamad, “Engineering and Humanitarian Intervention,” 1.

13. Coyne, Doing Bad by Doing Good.

14. Bandura and Hammond, “A Demand-Driven Approach to Development,” 14.

15. In 1938, the CRBEF was renamed the Belgian American Educational Foundation. On the CRBEF: Huistra and Wils, “Fit to Travel,” 4.

16. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 254, Folder: Belgian Child Health Program. Correspondence. Smith, H. Alexander 1922. Letter from Millard Shaler to Vernon Kellog, April 6, 1922.

17. The Michigan Alumnus, 172.

18. Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, New York State College of Home Economics records 1975–1979 (23-2-749), Box 52, Folder 1, Confidential report to CRB Educational Foundation inc. from Sally Lucas Jean and Fanneal Harrison, September 6, 1922, 8.

19. On the Belgian work of Flora Rose: Mûelenaere, “Still Poor, Still Little, Still Hungry?”

20. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 256, Folder: Belgian Child Health Program. Cancellation of program. Memorandum concerning decision. Perrin C. Galpin, “Memorandum on the Origin, Rise and Fall of the Child Health Section,” New York, September 1924, 2.

21. The two child educators were acquaintances of Tracy Barret Kittredge, former director of the Educational Fund of the Commission for Relief in Belgium and staff member of the League of Red Cross Societies. Citation of Perrin C. Galpin: ‘[…] the dear girls, whose temperament seems unchanged since Kittredge caught them going to it in Tshecho-Slovakia [sic]…’. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 256, Folder: Belgian Child Health Program. Cancellation of program. Memorandum concerning decision. Perrin C. Galpin, “Memorandum on the Origin, Rise and Fall of the Child Health Section,” New York, September 1924, 16; and Irwin, “Sauvons les Bébés,” 57.

22. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 256, Folder: Belgian Child Health Program. Cancellation of program. Memorandum concerning decision. Perrin C. Galpin, “Memorandum on the Origin, Rise and Fall of the Child Health Section,” New York, September 1924, 3.

23. See: Baughan and Fiori, “Save the Children, the Humanitarian Project, and the Politics of Solidarity”; Droux, “l'Internationalization de la Protection de l'Enfance”; and Meckel, Save the Babies.

24. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 257. Folder: Belgian Child Health Program. Report Child Health Section C.R.B. Educational Foundation, February 1924 (Fanneal Harrison), 2.

25. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 256. Folder: Belgian Child Health Program, Clippings, 1923 and undated. Clippings unidentified Belgian newspaper. My translation from French. Report Child Health

26. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 256, Folder: Belgian Child Health Program. Cancellation of program. Memorandum concerning decision. Perrin C. Galpin, “Memorandum on the Origin, Rise and Fall of the Child Health Section,” New York, September 1924, 10.

27. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 256, Folder: Belgian Child Health Program. Cancellation of program. Memorandum concerning decision. Perrin C. Galpin, “Memorandum on the Origin, Rise and Fall of the Child Health Section,” New York, September 1924, 14.

28. The ARC was a private organization, but an official partner of the US government and the principal US agency for humanitarian aid in 1917–18. Irwin, Making the World Safe, 39. The American Relief Agency was an official US food relief agency led by Herbert Hoover, which distributed billions of dollars in aid for food and reconstruction across Europe.

29. Ibid., 161–4.

30. Ibid., 171.

31. Ibid., 169.

32. Irwin, “Sauvons les Bébés,” 64.

33. Ibid., 42.

34. Droux, “A League of Its Own?” 92.

35. Giglio, “Voluntarism and Public Policy between World War I and the New Deal,” 431–2.

36. Weindling, “From Sentiment to Science,” 205.

37. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 256, Folder: Belgian Child Health Program. Cancellation of program. Memorandum concerning decision. Perrin C. Galpin, “Memorandum on the Origin, Rise and Fall of the Child Health Section,” New York, September 1924, 14.

38. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 256, Folder: Belgian Child Health Program. Cancellation of program. Memorandum concerning decision. Perrin C. Galpin, “Memorandum on the Origin, Rise and Fall of the Child Health Section,” New York, September 1924, 16.

39. Fathi, “Sovereignty, Democracy and Neutrality,” 13.

40. Irwin, Making the World Safe, 168.

41. Gerard, Nouvelle Histoire de Belgique, 117–18.

42. Matheve, “Une République des Camarades?,” 479.

43. Nath, Brood Willen We Hebben!

44. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 257, Folder: Belgian Child Health Program. Reports. 1923 October. Report Child Health Section C.R.B. Educational Foundation, October 1923 (Fanneal Harrison), 1.

45. Borton, “Improving the Use of History,” 199.

46. Harris and Tuladhar, “Humanitarian Localisation,” 35.

47. Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, New York State College of Home Economics records 1975–1979 (23-2-749), Box 52, Folder 1, Confidential report to CRB Educational Foundation inc. from Sally Lucas Jean and Fanneal Harrison, September 6, 1922, 8.

48. Bandura and Hammond, “A Demand-Driven Approach to Development,” 9.

49. Bertrams, “The Domestic Uses of Belgian–American ‘Mutual Understanding’,” 331.

50. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 254, Folder: Correspondence. Alexander, Smith. Letter to Vernon Kellog from Millard Shaler, April 6, 1922, New York.

51. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 254, Folder: Belgian Child Health Program. Correspondence Harrison, Fanneal 1922, Letter No. 411 to Alexander Smith from Edgar Rickard, New York, August 4, 1922.

52. Ibid.

53. Bertrams, “The Domestic Uses of Belgian–American ‘Mutual Understanding’,” 331.

54. Sally Lucas Jean (1878–1971) was a pioneering US public health advocate and educator. A former war and school nurse, she developed a programme for health education for school children for the People’s Institute in New York City in 1917. Lucas Jean became director of the newly founded Child Health Organization in 1918, and director of the Health Education Division for the American Child Health Organization in 1923. “Sally Lucas Jean (1878-1971), Pioneer Health Educator.”

55. On pre-war Belgian philanthropic programmes geared towards children’s health: Marissal, Protéger le Jeune Enfant, 22–9.

56. Own translation of: ‘d’Encourager et de développer la protection d’enfance, et notamment: de favoriser la diffusion et l’application des règles et des méthodes scientifiques de l’hygiène des enfants, soit dans les familles, soit dans les institutions publiques ou privées d’éducation, d’assistance et de protection; d’encourager et de soutenir, par l’allocation de subsides ou autrement, les œuvres relatives à l’hygiène des enfants; d’exercer un contrôle administratif et médical sur les œuvres protégées.’ Ibid., 130.

57. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 257, Folder: Belgian Child Health Program. Maquet, Jerome 1924–1938.

58. Jean (Jérôme) Maquet was the director-general of ONE between 1919 and 1921. He held degrees in Law and Social Sciences, and was attached to the Catholic political faction. Marissal, Protéger Le Jeune Enfant, 134–7.

59. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 256, Folder: Belgian Child Health Program. Cancellation of program. Memorandum concerning decision. Perrin C. Galpin, “Memorandum on the Origin, Rise and Fall of the Child Health Section,” New York, September 1924, 5.

60. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 254, Folder: Belgian Child Health Program. Correspondence Excerpt from minutes of April 1922 meeting of the Fondation Universitaire. Letter from M.K. Shaler to Vernon Kellog, April 7, 1922. No. 764.

61. Droux, “L’internationalization de la Protection de l'Enfance,” 26–8.

62. Eilers, “René Sand (1877–1953) and his Contribution to International Social Work, ISSW President 1946–1953”; and Depaepe, Simon, and Van Gorp, “The Canonization of Ovide Decroly as a ‘Saint’ of the New Education.”

63. Jeff LaHurd, Hidden History of Sarasota.

64. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 367.

65. Ibid., 369.

66. Andress and Bragg, Suggestions for a Program for Health Teaching.

67. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 254, Folder: Bragg, Mabel C. 1923 March–July. Letter to Mabel C. Bragg from Perrin C. Galpin, New York, March 22, 1923.

68. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 254, Folder: Bragg, Mabel C. 1923 August–December. Articles on the Dongelberg Conference, Le Peuple, August 17, 1923.

69. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 254, Folder: Bragg, Mabel C. 1923 March–July. Letter to Mabel C. Bragg from Perrin C. Galpin, New York, April 6, 1923.

70. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 254, Folder: Bragg, Mabel C. 1923 August–December. Letter to Perrin C. Galpin from Fanneal Harrison, August 27, 1923.

71. Andrews, Pritchett, and Woolcock, Building State Capability, 195–8.

72. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 254, Folder: Correspondence. Alexander, Smith. Report of E.W, March 7, 1922, 6.

73. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 254, Folder: Correspondence. Alexander, Smith. Report of M. le Docteur Maldague.

74. Giglio, “Voluntarism and Public Policy between World War I and the New Deal,” 444.

75. Clements, The Life of Herbert Hoover, 162.

76. Dupont-Bouchat, “l'E Père, L’enfant et l'Etat.”

77. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 256, Folder: Belgian Child Health Program. Cancellation of program. Memorandum concerning decision. Perrin C. Galpin, “Memorandum on the Origin, Rise and Fall of the Child Health Section,” New York, September 1924, 6.

78. Nath, Brood Willen We Hebben!, 75.

79. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 256, Folder: Belgian Child Health Program. Cancellation of program. Memorandum concerning decision. Perrin C. Galpin, “Memorandum on the Origin, Rise and Fall of the Child Health Section,” New York, September 1924, 3.

80. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 254, Folder: Bragg, Mabel C. 1923 August–December. Letter to Perrin C. Galpin from Fanneal Harrison, August 27, 1923.

81. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 254, Folder: Bragg, Mabel C. 1923 August–December. Letter to Perrin C. Galpin from Mabel C. Bragg, New York, October 25, 1923.

82. I have not been able to locate the original article. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 256, Folder: Belgian Child Health Program. Cancellation of program. Memorandum concerning decision. Perrin C. Galpin, “Memorandum on the Origin, Rise and Fall of the Child Health Section,” New York, September 1924, 10. Cited in Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 256, Folder: Cancellation of Program Brussels office correspondence. Letter to Paul Heger from Jérôme Maquet, March 7, 1924, 5.

83. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 256, Folder: Cancellation of program Brussels office correspondence. Letter to Perrin C. Galpin and Tuck Rickard from Millard Shaler, Brussels, March 13, 1924, 1.

84. Belgian American Educational Foundation Archives (Brussels, Belgium), Box 254, Folder: Bragg, Mabel C. 1923 August–December. Letter to Mabel C. Bragg from Perrin C. Galpin, New York, October 26, 1923.

85. Borton, “Improving the Use of History.”