The Great War, the child’s body and the American Red Cross

Abstract

This article examines the child-relief activities of the American Red Cross in Hungary in the aftermath of the Great War, offering an insight into the workings of humanitarianism in interwar Europe. A close look at this one Central European ‘playground’ of transatlantic intervention helps us understand the logic and the underlying political, economic and ideological motives behind Allied humanitarian aid to ‘enemy’ children. Analysis of the ways in which the war’s aftermath affected children, their bodies and their relief throws light on the relationship between violent conflicts, children in need and humanitarian intervention. The article looks particularly at the role of the child’s damaged body and its photographic representation, making it what Cathleen Canning calls an ‘embodied experience of war’. Exploration of the humanitarian discourse around the suffering child helps us identify the humanitarian reaction to the unforeseen social consequences of wartime confrontation. The article argues that the harmed body of the ‘enemy child’ served to mobilise transnational compassion that challenged the war’s deeply anchored ‘friend–foe’ mentality. The child turned into a means of configuring and translating human suffering beyond ideological and political borders. At the same time humanitarian child relief helped to further consolidate asymmetric international power relations.

Keywords:

• Great War
• aftermath
• child relief
• humanitarian intervention
• hunger
• history of the body
• American Red Cross
• Hungary
• Budapest

Introduction

The history of humanitarianism is closely linked to Europe’s darkest and most violent moments. The First World War and its aftermath were essential in triggering the professionalisation and internationalisation of humanitarianism. The paradox of the Great War and its troublesome aftermath lies in the fact that, though it created suffering, it also fostered care for the stricken civilian populations and a new solidarity with the innocent child victim. Yet, without the profound trauma the war and the postwar inflicted throughout Europe and beyond, there would have been no necessity for efforts at relief and rehabilitation. While the dismembered male body represented the prototypical victim of the war itself, the harmed body of the child, which was often badly affected through hunger, malnutrition, neglect and infectious diseases, turned into an icon of the war’s troublesome aftermath. American relief organisations were a key agent in responding to the child’s physical appeal for help by means of a great variety of child-relief activities. While European relief organisations, such as the British Save the Children Fund (SCF), had to invest much of their efforts into fund-raising activities¹, the American (National) Red Cross (ARC), which was closely collaborating with Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration (ARA)², had funding of a different scale as well as popular and governmental support at its disposal.³ The ARC represented in wartime ‘America’s largest and most influential […] voluntary relief agency’⁴, but it remained also in the war’s aftermath a major player in Europe’s humanitarian ‘playground’.

Exploring in this article the ARC‘s child-relief activities in Hungary after the Great War – its feeding, clothing and medical actions – will serve to understand the role of the ‘starving Hungarian child’ as one of the main objects of American humanitarian intervention in interwar Eastern Europe. A close look at Hungary as one key ‘laboratory’ of American humanitarian intervention to former ‘enemy’ countries will help us understand the underlying political, economic and ideological motives behind American intervention through the ARC. In this context the article seeks to shed particular light on the role of the child’s physical appearance – its photographic representation as an ‘embodied experience of war’, as Cathleen Canning has termed it.⁵ Analysis of the ways in which the war’s aftermath affected children, their bodies and their relief will reveal something of the destructiveness not alone of the war, but of the war’s aftermath. Exploration of the humanitarian discourse around the suffering and vulnerable body of the ‘poor’ Central European child will offer an insight into the new humanitarian reaction to the unwanted and unforeseen social consequences of wartime confrontation. It will be argued that the innocent but now physically harmed body of the ‘enemy child’ served to mobilise transnational compassion that challenged the war’s deeply anchored ‘friend–foe’ mentality. The child thus turned into an ideal object of configuring and translating human suffering beyond ideological, political and national borders. Shedding particular light on the visual imagery of the child’s suffering, the article aims to understand the visual language of humanitarian child relief.

Childhood in the postwar period

In the course of the Great War, which had ‘uprooted families, disrupted food supplies, destroyed homes and communities, and impaired mental and physical health’, the United States authorities wanted to ‘demonstrate their compassion as well as their military might’.⁶ Serving perfectly this goal, the ARC, which had been founded in 1881, started providing non-combatant relief in Europe and continued to do so throughout the hostilities. A month after the German troops had crossed the Belgian border, a ‘Red Cross ship sailed away, – –a German keel, painted with the authorized red strake which, by agreement of the nations, marked the mercy ship, —and distributed her hospital units and medical supplies, her gauze and anaesthetics, her hospital garments, cigarettes, and camp comforts for the fighting men’.⁷ During the war the ARC’s main focus was on the wounded soldiers and the mobilisation of children for the war efforts. By creating the Junior Red Cross, it wanted to give its own children back home ‘a share in the nation’s business’.⁸ Yet, soon it became clear that relief would not only be needed by the wounded and disabled soldiers, but also by Europe’s civilian populations. Especially children, who were entirely dependent on their parents or their countries’ welfare systems, faced almost total deprivation if their caretakers were killed or otherwise unable to supply food, health care and welfare. In some areas, this is exactly how things turned which made their relief inevitable.

After the war’s end, humanitarian relief became even more essential, as the defeated nations were not in a position to carry out the needed reconstruction work without external support. Since a large number of male breadwinners had either been killed in battle or had returned physically and/or mentally injured, the war had severely impaired the family system throughout Europe.⁹ These factors affected children’s lives in various ways: among other setbacks, they experienced starvation, malnourishment, neglect, bad health and poor hygiene. Having just gone through the violence, economic hardship, poverty and hunger of wartime, the children’s innocent bodies were now victims of the unpredictable and profound repercussions of its aftermath. As the conflict had not only destroyed major parts of the defeated nations’ infrastructure but had also severely impaired local health and welfare systems, the ARC put a special focus on providing relief to children and families.¹⁰

One of its first arenas for child relief still during the war was France, where the Red Cross started to fight child mortality, namely by providing relief to the ‘orphaned and the destitute’, to ‘those whose fathers were dead or at the front, whose mothers were gone, and who had none to care for them’.¹¹ From 1920 onwards the ARC joined Hoover’s ARA in providing relief to the children of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, further propagating the ‘ardent belief among American humanitarians’ that the ‘United States was the only nation equipped to carry out this vital work.’¹² The shortage of health-care supplies and medical provision prompted the ARC to become active in complementing as well as restoring health-and-welfare systems in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. In this way they hoped to reconstitute political stability.¹³ The belief in their own medical professionalism and expertise in social welfare and work played a central role in American humanitarian intervention. Relying on volunteers and humanitarian donations, the ARC offered relief work as well as provided children’s hospitals with clothing, food, medicines, bedding and equipment.

Yet, in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe it was not only the Great War but particularly the dissolution of the region’s multi-ethnic empires that created such suffering among the involved civilian populations and their children that transnational relief appeared inevitable. The collapse of the German, Ottoman, Russian and the Austro-Hungarian Empire¹⁴ went hand in hand with the brutal ‘mass unmixing’ of people, causing the death, displacement and persecution of large (ethnic) minority groups.¹⁵ The mere survival of this new mass of refugees and stateless persons became an everyday struggle. Although widely considered innocent victims of the war, children could do nothing but to share the destiny of their ‘unwanted’¹⁶ parents.

While the process of the Ottoman Empire’s dissolution caused a great part of the empire’s population to perish from ‘famine, disease and state violence’, it was the Armenian Genocide (starting in the late nineteenth century with its peak in 1915) that represented the first major trigger of children’s unprecedented suffering as well as of large-scale humanitarian intervention. The genocide and its aftermath affected children’s lives most radically, as the deportation and killing of over a million Armenians, specifically of the male population¹⁷, produced thousands of displaced and orphaned children.¹⁸ In response to this human (and childhood) disaster the League of Nations saw it as ‘one of its chief humanitarian obligations’ to repair the ‘damage the war had inflicted on select populations’¹⁹ and their children. The American charity ‘Near East Relief’ was installed to handle the catastrophic aftereffects of the Armenian genocide, securing in particular the survival of Armenian orphans by gathering them in newly established orphanages.²⁰ The Armenian orphan became a first icon of children’s suffering in Western humanitarian discourse and intervention.

The second cornerstone in the making of humanitarian child relief in Eastern Europe was the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 and the signing of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, which radically interfered with children’s lives as it forced the disintegration of multi-ethnic populations, producing abundant streams of refugees.²¹ This wave of migration, which was an essential element in the ‘making, unmaking, and remaking’ of Habsburg’s successor states, resulted in the abrupt social uprootedness of large parts of the affected populations and the sudden overpopulation of popular urban destinations like Vienna or Budapest.²² This development left large sectors of society unemployed, homeless and without financial resources. Also the making of a new Polish state, whose territory had been part of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and German empire, escalated the needs of its civilian population, which turned into a prime target of American relief operations.²³ Furthermore, the naval and economic blockade on the Central Powers that went on well beyond the official armistice escalated the severe food crisis in the successor states. The prevention of food deliveries caused famine among the targeted civilian populations, which also included the new German state, whose children turned equally into an icon of the defeated nations’ suffering.²⁴ An increased infant-mortality rate, which was caused partly through the lack of milk, as well as the evident physical suffering of surviving children, triggered collective fears as to the future outlook of these new nation-states.²⁵ Both Vienna and Budapest as havens of large flows of migrants and targets of the food blockade became prime targets of humanitarian intervention.

Yet, relieving the children of Budapest served further-reaching political aims. In Hungary, Béla Kun’s Bolshevik revolution and ‘red terror’ in 1919, the subsequent Romanian occupation and plundering of Hungary, and Miklós Horthy’s counterrevolution and ‘white terror’ were not helpful in restoring peace and prosperity. The starving, malnourished and neglected refugee child came to dominate the street scene. Local Hungarian child-welfare organisations such as the National League of Child Protection²⁶, founded in 1906 or the Stefánia Association for the Protection of Mothers and Infants, founded in 1915, were not in the position to provide the urgently needed emergency relief without financial and material support. While on the one hand Habsburg Central Europe had been quite successful with establishing ‘a nationally divided social welfare system’²⁷, in which ‘children “belonged” to the nation’²⁸, Hungary was unable to provide more than the most basic child welfare. This created a vacuum that allowed for transatlantic humanitarian intervention.

The third key moment in the making of humanitarian child relief in Eastern Europe was the collapse of the Russian Empire, whose most dramatic side-effect was a severe food crisis which became known as the ‘Russian Famine’ between 1921 and 1923. This famine left children wasting away from hunger, thus radically escalating the infant and child mortality rate. As even the ‘meager fare’ of ‘watery millet gruel, pea broth, and ersatz bread’ became an ‘inaccessible luxury’, Russia’s capital was ‘being mobbed by hordes of hungry children’.²⁹ Although quite troubled by the idea of indirectly supporting the Bolshevist regime through food relief, European and American humanitarian organisations delivered relief to Russia’s starving children for years.³⁰ One particular relief measure was to evacuate the starving children to better-off Western countries.³¹

These three major humanitarian crises that accompanied the dissolution of the region’s multi-ethnic empires pushed humanitarian organisations, including the ARC – along with the European Children’s Fund of the ARA and the Save the Children Fund and its international union (UISE)³² – to provide widespread support for the relief of children. Yet, from the perspective of the anti-Bolshevik American government, child relief in Russia could not stop Russia’s political course but instead ‘only’ serve to influence the mentality of Russia’s future generation. Hungary’s political future, on the other hand, was in 1919 not yet evident, leaving space for manoeuvre. A leaflet of the British National ‘Hands off Russia’ Committee from 1921 reported that it had been apparent to everyone involved, be it in ‘Paris and London or in the capitals of south eastern Europe’, that the ‘salvation of central Europe’ depended in the early summer of 1919 on the ‘immediate ousting of Bela Kun from his position as Bolshevist dictator of Hungary’.³³ In response to this threat Hoover’s ARA had been playing ‘the leading role in overthrowing the Hungarian Soviet Regime’.³⁴ While having provided ‘No Food for Bolshevists’, and blockading ‘Red Hungary’, the Allies agreed to lift the food blockade if a new government would be established.³⁵ Thus, within a few hours of Kun’s abduction, ‘supply trains, loaded to the guards, and coming from every direction, began to roll into Hungary’ and ‘people were eating the bread and the fats’.³⁶ Providing relief to this Central European country that had successfully managed to fight Communism perfectly fitted the ideals of American humanitarianism. In this the ARC and the ARA differed from European relief organisations, such as the Save the Children Fund, that were trying, above all, to evoke empathy for the innocent children of the former enemy and thereby hoping to end the punitive food blockade against the Central Powers.

The child’s body

Given the collapse of normal working systems in Hungary, the transnational social workers of the ARC felt entitled to ‘save’ Hungary’s poor children by attending to their physical conditions. In order to justify its humanitarian intervention, the ARC collected and researched information on the economic and social situation of the civilian populations of the defeated nations. Professional documentation of the need for relief in the target countries played a crucial role in humanitarian relief work. The body of the child served as a scientific and visual object in this documentation process. In contrast to the invalided soldiers, damaged children represented innocent victims of the war who had done nothing to deserve their plight. Yet, as the most basic needs of children in the war-stricken areas had often not been met during the war and were being denied in its aftermath, the child’s body started to deviate radically from the norms of natural growth. In an article in the New York Times (1920), Eva Vajkaj, head of the Hungarian League of Child Protection, recalled how she had entered the room of a poor family in which the mother ‘showed [her …] a bundle, which [she …] had not noticed before, as it was hidden in the bed. It was a baby. No: it was a sort of horrible little living corpse: its greenish skin hanging in folds round the bones of its wizened little face.’³⁷ The material body had been transformed into a starving, sick, fragile, rickety, impaired thing that ‘embodied’ and made horribly visible the war’s brutal effects on children’s bodies and health.

In this way ‘[t]he reality of war’ was not ‘just politics’ but rather ‘politics incarnate, politics written on and experienced through the thinking, feeling bodies of men and women’ – and children.³⁸ War became an ‘indisputable turning point in the body’s politization’.³⁹ The child’s particular vulnerability during and after the war was caused by combinations of geographic displacement, orphanhood, neglect, malnutrition, lack of appropriate housing and debarment from access to health care, welfare and education. It manifested itself in poor hygiene, weak physical and mental conditions, and a high infant-mortality rate. The compromised physical condition of children throughout Europe was a constant reminder of the insanity of this unprecedentedly destructive war and its aftermath. And it was the destitute child’s body, which turned into a new ‘battlefield of politics’⁴⁰, both symbolic and real.

Often it was the parents whose bodies had been severely affected, and because of this they could not provide for their children adequately. The mother of the ‘greenish-skinned’ child described above was unable to get out of bed and had sent the baby’s young brother out to fetch milk, which he had only been able to obtain four days later. The description the New York Times gave of the child’s body was meant to evoke certain associations in its readers – associations of pain and the threat of inevitable death unless well-wishers acted immediately to relieve the child’s physical suffering. In this way, descriptions and depictions of children’s suffering bodies were closely linked to appeals for humanitarian relief. Bodily representations of children’s hunger and poverty from all over Central and Eastern Europe were presented in dozens of articles in the major American and British newspapers of the time. The hungry and neglected bodies of children came to symbolise the negative repercussions the war and the postwar had had on the physical integrity of whole populations. Eyewitness reports and visual materials documenting the suffering of civilian populations brought to the public’s attention the continuing inhuman treatment of the former enemy. The physical wretchedness of the affected children was turned into a visible and emotive symbol supporting calls to end the on-going economic warfare and to spur transatlantic humanitarian intervention. In the case of Hungary, an eyewitness report of 1920 in the New York Times described ‘Starving Budapest, Capital of Human Misery’, and employed a wartime bodily description to describe the suffering of the civilian populations:

All Central Europe is a bleeding wound, but nowhere, perhaps, is life so poor a gift as in Austria and in Hungary. Civilization there is foundering, and amid the wreckage are to be found millions of human beings literally naked and cold, hungry and diseased, impoverished and hopeless.⁴¹

Similar eyewitness reports and propaganda appeals flooded American newspapers of the time. Key humanitarian figures expressed their deep concern for ‘the physical and moral restoration of the peoples of Eastern Europe, in giving them a chance for life and happiness, in changing their attitude of despair to one of hope’.⁴²

Official reporters evaluating the work of the ARC in Hungary in 1923 also used concepts of the body to describe the geo-political situation of the country itself: ‘Hungary looks like an agonizing human being, not wishing to die, but unable to live.’⁴³ Following this logic, the rescue of the child’s body at the same time meant rescue of the impaired, truncated national body of Hungary. Won over by this analogy, the US government happily joined in the revisionist rhetoric put out by the Hungarian state under Miklós Horthy, calling for the revocation of the Treaty of Trianon and the re-establishment of greater Hungary, and hoping to fend off any further Bolshevist threat.⁴⁴ Support for Hungary’s revisionist politics was perceived as a necessary means to bring about political and economic stability in the country and wider region. Any possibly problematic implications for Hungary’s future identity, should the revisionist plans not work out, were not taken into account.

Non-state philanthropists in the victorious and neutral nations used the impaired body of the child as a projection screen for public appeals to end and relieve the suffering of the crushed nations. Proposing an alternative approach towards the former enemy, transnational and transatlantic humanitarianism in this period challenged the logic of the war. While the interwar years were, as argued in a recent issue of the Journal of Global History, a time of ‘rising ethnic nationalism, of closing borders and anxious protectionist sentiment’, they were also, ‘paradoxically, the heyday of a vigorous internationalism, and one that reached further than ever before, across the world’. As a ‘truly global conflagration’, the Great War did ‘not simply pit peoples against each other’, but also ‘bred a growing sense of interconnectedness’ which fostered a ‘striking sense of simultaneity’.⁴⁵ The child’s body became a ‘site of [humanitarian] intervention’.⁴⁶ Also in the field of medical and orthopaedic rehabilitation, the war stimulated ‘extraordinary advances in the dissemination of therapeutic, rehabilitative, and surgical technologies for all cripples – male and female, adult and child, soldier and civilian’.⁴⁷

The children’s physical and mental suffering from the war’s side effects confronted the victorious nations with the question of ‘what peace has done to Europe’⁴⁸ – and especially to its children. Citing the eyewitness observations of Coningsby Dawson, Herbert Hoover acknowledged that most of the victimised children were ‘not born when the war was started’: they had ‘no voice in [the nations’] animosities’.⁴⁹ Yet they had been born into a world where ‘[m]any of them have never known what it is to be warm and not to be hungry’; in which the word ‘joy is a word utterly meaningless’.⁵⁰ And Hoover confronted his fellow Americans with the fact that ‘[t]wo years after our madness has ended, they [the children] are still paying the price of the adult world’s folly’.⁵¹ Fundamentally questioning any justification for this ‘crime against childhood, enacted with even greater shamelessness, for the war [has…] ended’, Hoover emphasised his belief in the power of child relief as one key ‘way of wiping out animosities’.⁵² The ‘culture of sensibility steadily broadened the arena within which humanitarian feeling was encouraged to operate, extending compassion to […] previously despised types of persons’⁵³, such as the children of the enemy. In this way, the child and its body were turned into a post-war means of transatlantic pacification and rapprochement.

Debates about nutrition and diet in the first decades of the twentieth century, and a growing expertise in this area, had aroused a special awareness of the dangers of malnutrition and starvation amongst Europe’s post-war children. There was believed to be a close link between a child’s physical and moral conditions. Reporting on his trips to Budapest and Austria in 1923, Andrew Cherna, Honorary Commissioner of the American Red Cross, stressed the connection between physical and psychological development:

Physical poverty means moral degeneration, or as it is called by a famous Viennese writer ‘rheumatism of the soul’. The juvenile court handles all cases of delinquent children. […] Incurable demoralized girls with peaked faces are tried in the same court. There is no help because these symptoms are the consequences of the above-described causes.⁵⁴

For that reason, it would be ‘inevitable that such immense and horrible physical disabilities should cause the children to grow up imbecile and morally degenerate’.⁵⁵

Children’s imagery

Visual representations of children’s suffering bodies were ideal materials for humanitarian appeals. The use of photographs proved an especially potent means of conveying the visible, and therefore ‘real’, suffering the post-war children were going through; and they could also document their ‘rescue’, should benefactors respond to appeals. Already in the late nineteenth century, the British child philanthropist Dr Thomas Barnardo had used images of ‘ragged children’ to expose the loose and unstable relationship between the state and children’s welfare. Indeed he had manipulated the images so that ‘artistic fictions’ could be used as ‘marketing tools’ for ‘philanthropy as big business’. The ‘power of [his] images of ragged children in promoting private benevolence and public welfare policies’ was therefore paradoxically dependent on ‘the utter powerlessness of street children themselves to make claims on the state and civil society’. These images – ‘unforgettable markers of poverty’ – were turned into instruments to relieve children’s suffering, but at the same time prevented efforts to tackle the ‘deeper structural problems’ that caused the underlying poverty.⁵⁶ Early twentieth-century child imagery, now publicising children’s suffering beyond national and imperial borders, was based on this historical foundation.

As Jack Thompson has convincingly argued in the context of missionaries’ depictions of Africans: ‘in an age before television’, such visuals had ‘a powerful effect’, not only ‘on how the western public … perceived people [as well as children] from other cultures’⁵⁷, but also on how they behaved towards these people after seeing the images. Humanitarian representations of children’s poor physical conditions ‘were taken at face value by those who viewed them’.⁵⁸ Though medical and humanitarian images did not convey the ‘assumptions about [racial or ethnic] inferiority’ the anthropological and missionary photographs in Africa projected, they were definitely meant to expose bodily features that showed ill health and stunted physical development.⁵⁹

Humanitarian imagery, as Davide Rodogno and Heide Fehrenbach have most recently and very convincingly shown⁶⁰, was far from subtle. It did not aim to ‘convey political and social complexities’; rather, its emotional effectiveness was dependent on ‘apparent simplicity and directness of emotional address’. Successful focusing of the ‘viewer[’s] attention on suffering’ was only achieved through the complete elimination of ‘distracting political or social detail’.⁶¹ The specific social and local circumstances behind a child’s suffering were thus of only marginal interest. Divorced from context, as Sabine Kienitz convincingly argued, not only the invalid bodies of war veterans turned into a ‘moralizing metaphor of a collectively made experience of war’⁶² and, in the words of Cathleen Canning, into one of Europe’s main ‘embodied memories’⁶³ of what war had brought about. Also images of the strained, suffering body of the child developed into a moralizing icon of the war. The use of such emotive photographs and of ‘[p]hoto-centered appeals forged communities of emotion and action’⁶⁴ that went beyond national borders. Photographs were a good means of mobilising transnational expressions and actions of solidarity, as they could wipe away the familial, national, local, ethnic, historical and political particularities of children’s suffering. Yet, beyond a general call for humanitarian help, photographs often also served the purpose of documenting the suffering of a specific national group of children. In this case, the images were properly and precisely labelled to link them with their national and political contexts.

Visual representations of the physical impact of the war on children’s bodies served especially as a means to trigger a ‘revolution in seeing and hearing’.⁶⁵ They mobilised compassion – even from afar – and thereby triggered the giving of direct relief from the victorious nations. As Karen Wells puts it, ‘the transparent emotional demand made by the figure of the child and the simplicity of the solutions offered to their problems contribute[d] to the moral legibility’⁶⁶ of the humanitarian relief actions. In a recent special issue on ‘The Ethics of Images’, Ian Wilkinson has argued that ‘humanitarian culture and experiences of humanitarian impulse’ can be identified ‘as integral features of the dominant social imaginaries of our time’.⁶⁷ As the child victims were so powerless, the distant spectator was to be mobilised to step in to relieve their suffering. A commentator on the situation in Budapest recalled how ‘[p]overty wherever [he … met] it, ha[d] the same distressing effect upon me. The deterioration of the human soul and body touche[d] me […] as a pathetic canvas, irrespective of nationality, race, or environment.’⁶⁸

From the body to relief

To prevent children’s physical and moral degeneration, the ARC implemented emergency relief action. In Hungary, with James G. Pedlow as Director, it inaugurated a ‘Child Health Action’ programme. On 27 July 1921, Pedlow assessed the situation of existing relief in Hungary as seriously challenging:

We are afraid that the government here will not be able to take proper care of these people and that outside assistance will be needed for some time to come. It will be necessary for many of those coming to live in freight cars, as the housing conditions are already so utterly bad that it would seem impossible to take any additional population.⁶⁹

Although the ARC was a non-governmental agency, its humanitarian activities abroad served American foreign policy perfectly, shaping an image of the United States as a selfless, altruistic nation, while it expanded its sphere of influence and secured its own political interests.⁷⁰ Though humanitarianism implies impartiality, neutrality and political independence⁷¹, transatlantic humanitarian intervention in the interwar period was closely linked to national and political interests. Its activities and the political ideologies of the sponsoring nations could easily be conflated. Michael Barnett has identified the ambivalence of humanitarianism, stating that as ‘a concept in motion’ it can refer (among its other aspects) to a ‘commitment to emancipation that can justify forms of domination’.⁷² As the very embodiment of economic and social ‘dependence, purity, and innocence’⁷³, the child was an especially easy target for domination.

The sick or destitute child was even easier to control and dominate. Yet, this was the type of child who most needed relief. In order that a child would be entitled to relief, their bodies had to show markers of difference to a nutritional norm and standard. Modern knowledge of nutrition and weight standards resulted in a quest for children‘s physiological normalcy, an average body weight and a healthy appearance. Any detectable deviation from the physiological and nutritional norms turned the concerned children into objects of humanitarian intervention. Markers of neediness consisted among others of extreme underweight, blown-up bellies, deformed extremities, pale-greenish skin tone and apathy. Once a child’s body was identified as ‘needy’, it had to undergo acts of professional physical examinations, consisting of weighing, examining, treating, controlling, reporting and documenting. The fight against children’s famine involved medical enactments to ‘repair’ children’s deficiencies. Hunger and malnutrition made the medicalisation of the child’s body necessary, turning the child body into a patient-body and the relief worker into the humanitarian saviour. The physical neediness produces an asymmetry between the medic and the starving child.

The physical state of the children meant that they had to be isolated from their parents, and their body became accessible to humanitarian workers. The relief workers were then in a position to access the child’s body physically. The need for close medical control and surveillance turned the examination rooms as well as the child’s body into ‘space[s] of surveillance’⁷⁴ under the eyes of the international social worker. Public educational or medical spaces, such as schools, gyms or hospital rooms were used for such scientific procedure. This allowed the public demonstration of the professional, scientific and thus modern approach of humanitarian relief organisations.

A compilation of four images published in the Hungarian magazine Erdékes Ujság in 1921 (Figure 1) documented the professional evaluation and selection process the ARC used for recruitment in their child-feeding initiative.⁷⁵ Three of the images were designed to show the children’s physical destitution and poverty. A special focus was put on rickety children, whose physical condition was the result of malnutrition and starvation. Such images of severely underfed and crippled children were issued to prove the urgent need for relief in the form of food and clothing. The upper left-hand image shows the physical examination of the targeted children, including careful weighing. To be eligible for food relief, children’s weight had to be below the standard.

Figure 1. Top left: ‘Physical examination of children to be fed “for free” through the ARC’. Present in the photo are Bowden, head of the American Red Cross Action and Count Redig Biberegg, representative for the Swiss Red Cross in Budapest in 1921. Bottom left: ‘Underfed, poor children recruited by the relief action of the American Red Cross’. Top and bottom right: ‘Rickety children recruited for the feeding initiative’. Source: Érdekes Ujság 9, no. 3, 20 January 1921, 23.

Such series of photographs were taken to demonstrate the close relationship between lack of food and the physical disabilities appearing in these post-war years, as well as to help determine the choice of children to be recruited and relieved. If children were considered incurable in the natural context of the family, children were separated from their families and placed in children’s sanatoriums, with better-off families in the countryside or abroad or in children’s summer camps. Two main ideas paved the way for children’s separation. First of all, parents were often so poor that they could not provide for their children appropriately. Thus, children’s temporary disintegration from their birth families was considered the fastest and best way to end their suffering from starvation, malnutrition or certain diseases. Secondly, parents still carried the stigma of war as belonging to the former enemy. Children were considered as innocent and as the embodiment of the future nation in which it was worth investing. Many of the visuals documenting child-relief activities exclusively picture masses of children, lining up for food, waiting for clothes or playing children’s games. Only when it came to infant relief would mothers be shown as key reference persons, without whom the survival of the infant could not be guaranteed. Otherwise, the relief worker or the medic would be entitled to take over the function of the parents in meeting the needs of the children.

The image compilation entitled ‘The Visit of the Foreign Missions at the Children’s Sanatorium at Lake Balaton’, also published in Érdekes Ujság, documents a visit from representatives of the foreign missions at two children’s sanatoria by Lake Balaton in the summer of 1921, as shown in Figure 2. The group of international representatives consists mostly of upper-middle-class men, except for the Swedish Red Cross representative, Asta Nielson. The inclusion of a Catholic nun in one of the images serves to emphasise the close affiliation between relief activities and the Catholic Church.

Figure 2. Top left: ‘Count Reding-Biberegg, representative of the International Red Cross, showers children with presents at Balaton-Almadi’. Top right: ‘Jenö Rákosi, the head of the children’s sanatorium greets members of the visiting foreign missions’. Middle row left: ‘The directors of the missions on the terrace of the sanatorium at Balaton-Szabadi’. Middle row right: ‘Rickety children in the sanatorium at Balaton-Szabadi’, showing “Uncle” Pedlow and Asta Nielson (from the Swedish Red Cross)’. Bottom left: ‘The children’s sanatorium at Balaton Almadi’. Bottom right: ‘The children’s sanatorium at Balaton-Szabadi’. Source: ‘Külföldi missziók látogatása a balatoni gyermek-szanatoriumokban’ [The visit of the foreign mission in the children‘s sanatoria at lake Balaton] Érdekes Ujság 9, no. 3, 20 January 1921, 23.

In the middle row of this picture compilation, very young children from the Balaton-Szabadi sanatorium are depicted naked, showing swollen bellies and deformed extremities. In this picture the representative of the ARC in Hungary, James Pedlow, lifts a rickety child up as if he were the child’s father. In the top left image, Count Reding-Biberegg, the representative of the International Red Cross in Hungary, is visiting another children’s sanatorium at Balaton – at Balaton-Almadi – and also holds a child in his arms. The symbolism of these images suggests the strong alleviating function of these male donors and the humanitarian institutions they represent. Both men showered the children with presents at the sanatoria, and in return were, the image suggests, warmly welcomed by these children with music. While the pictures are designed to show that the arrival of the donors and their gifts brought happiness, the material donations, apart from the presents, were exclusively for basic needs in the form of food and clothes.

Images like these do not tell anything about how the involved donors and recipients actually experienced the relief activities. They reveal much more about the relationship between the donors and the receiving children – a relationship based on inequality and dependence. The physical access of the ‘Western’ relief worker to the harmed body of the ‘Eastern’ European child reflects a new humanitarian invasion into the privacy of the target families and thus into the social system of the former enemy states. Through the intrusion of the American social worker, the relationship between the child and its own parents has been called into question. In this way, the postwar period served as an arena to create new social dependencies of the impoverished ‘East European’ child on the philanthropic and better-off ‘Western’ donor.

In such moments of crisis, the unlimited access of the parent to the child’s body is denied: the well-being and survival of the child becomes primarily dependent on the success of humanitarian intervention. In the years after the Great War, the agents of humanitarian child relief took the responsibility for children’s survival away from their parents. They did so by exercising power over the body of the child. If we understand the body as a target of power, object of disciplinary practices, and a ‘site where regimes of discourse and power inscribe themselves’⁷⁶, it becomes clear that post-war humanitarian relief agencies accessed and regulated the impaired child’s body.⁷⁷ In this way, ‘history [was] “inscribed” or “imprinted” onto [the] body’⁷⁸ not just by the war, but also by the physical relief offered after it. Humanitarian child relief was only possible through an invasion into the children’s most intimate lives, drastically altering the relationship between the state, the family and the outsider.

An especially large number of documentary photographs focused on the medical handling of children by the ARC health professionals. The exact procedures of the medical examinations and relief measures were shown, as well as testimonies to overall success and to appreciation of the relief activities. The ARC was very keen to show its new professional medical methods, standards and trained personnel to the public. Among its best-documented activities were its child-feeding programmes, which came under strict medical supervision. A report of 1922 claimed that ‘[s]upplementary feeding was to be placed entirely on a medical basis’.⁷⁹ Thus, before a child could receive feeding, ARC doctors and nurses carried out a precise examination of its physical needs.

Material relief

Apart from seeing to the professionalisation of its medical treatment, the ARC invested in the provision of new, up-to-date health-care equipment.

One ‘Mission of the American Red Cross’, as the title of an image compilation from an Érdekes Ujság issue of 12 November 1919 reads, was to replace worn-out or over-used health-care necessities in the White Cross Hospital in Budapest. Among the six images in Figure 3, the first three document the inadequacy of what the Budapest hospital could supply. They show the material neediness of the hospital through the examples of worn-out underwear, an old and dirty children’s mattress, and a used cotton nappy full of holes. These are each contrasted with the newly arrived replacements supplied by the ARC. The American Mission supplied children’s, women’s and men’s clothes, good blankets and new hospital equipment, including medical instruments. The images the ARC put out underlined its high medical standards and professionalism and compared these with the previous dire conditions in the Hungarian hospitals. Only through the gifts of American donors, the images suggested, could minimal medical and hygiene standards in the health-care facilities be reached.

Figure 3. ‘Mission of the American Red Cross. Help starts for hospitals in poor condition’. The upper caption reads: ‘The first three pictures reveal how poor the hospitals are: underwear currently in use at the White Cross Children’s Hospital; a children’s mattress; a diaper in a ragged state’. The lower caption announces: ‘Newly arrived samples from the American Red Cross: children’s clothes; underwear; women’s and men’s clothes; blankets; medicines, and medical instruments’. Source: ‘Az amerikai vöröskeresztes misszió’ [The mission of the American Red Cross], Érdekes Ujság 7, no. 42, 12 November 1919, 21.

The ARC, by its own account, brought large quantities of ‘hospital essentials into Hungary and effected a striking transformation in 122 hospitals with a capacity of 28,000 beds’.⁸⁰ Sixty per cent of these institutions owed their ‘continuance to Red Cross assistance, one of the most noteworthy examples being the famous Stephanie Children’s Hospital’.⁸¹ Three other children’s hospitals were ‘completely re-equipped by the Red Cross’.⁸² The ARC recommended simple objects that could alleviate people’s daily lives:

Countess Széchenyi says things most badly needed are clothes, thread, buttons, needles, shoes and stockings, especially for children, body and house linens, baby clothes, soap, medical supplies, rubber articles, and kitchen utensils.⁸³

Huge amounts of clothing, cotton, presents and everyday products were distributed ‘for free’ to the needy children. Apart from hospitals, ‘[t]hirteen orphanages, fifteen children’s homes […] were kept going by the Red Cross assistance’, which was why ‘twelve of them have placed tablets in their entrance halls to commemorate this fact’.⁸⁴

Though humanitarian in its origin, the giving of material assistance followed clear economic and capitalist goals. The moral ambivalence of the whole mission lay in the fact that ‘humanitarian reform not only took courage and brought commendable changes’ but it also ideally ‘served the interest of the reformers’.⁸⁵ Through the ARC’s material shipments, especially in the form of food, milk and clothing, an economic dependence on the donor country was created among the recipients. So long as Hungary was unable to provide for its children, humanitarian donations helped to establish economic ties that could later be used for other forms of transatlantic trade and economic investment. While this lasted, the hungry child represented the ideal consumer – fully dependent on the material shipments of the ARC.

Especially on festive occasions such as Christmas and Easter, Americans could demonstrate their generosity with considerable showmanship. The composite of images shown in Figure 4 was published in 1921 in Érdekes Újság. Entitled ‘The Christmas Celebration of the American Red Cross’, the images document the Americans’ Christmas ceremony in the grand Vigadó concert hall in Budapest. On the one hand, this display aimed to show the material wealth of the United States through the sheer abundance of humanitarian gifts for the needy children, both in the hall and in the arrival (bottom left) of children’s equipment outside it. Hungary’s material dependence on American donations was pressed home by the presence of American flags all over the interior. On the other hand, such images fostered a close connection between Hungary’s political representatives and the donors from America. The compilation starts off with an image of Miklós Horthy, his wife Magdolna Purgly, Princess August of Bavaria, and the papal nuncio, Schloppa, who, with others, have come to witness this lavish display of international charity. The attendance of Hungary’s political representatives at this American humanitarian celebration was meant as a performative and visual expression of Hungary’s gratitude for the American donations. It also suggests the United States’ over-favourable attitude towards Hungary’s nationalist government which, to the relief of the US government, had replaced Béla Kun’s Bolshevik republic.

Figure 4. ‘The Christmas celebration of the American Red Cross’. Top left: ‘The Governor, the Governor’s wife, Princess Augusta of Bavaria, and Papal Nuncio Schloppa at the distribution of humanitarian donations in the Vigadó’. Top right: ‘The presents in the ceremonial hall, decorated with American flags’. Middle left: ‘… [content missing] with children’s equipment’. Bottom left: ‘The hall with the presents’. Bottom right: ‘The Christmas tree with presents’. Source: ‘Az amerikai vöröskereszt karácsonyi ünnepe’ [The Christmas celebration of the American Red Cross], Érdekes Ujság 9, no. 1 (1921).

Health and welfare education

The ARC’s American Red Cross Action to Protect Mothers and Children in Hungary (Az Amerikai Vöröskereszt Anya- és Csecsemővédő Akciója) was a special programme designed to counter the high infant-mortality rate of the time and secure the wellbeing of very young children and their mothers. It relied on propagandistic means to provide modern health enlightenment and education, publishing leaflets, scientific articles, yearbooks, guidelines, posters, pamphlets and weekly calendars for mothers along with postcards.⁸⁶ It also organised travelling exhibitions, school ceremonies and public talks offering information on proper children’s hygiene, on nursing and on childrearing in general. One of the postcards dating from around 1922 (which also circulated in other languages and other national contexts)⁸⁷ attempts to represent the children’s perspective, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. ARC Postcard (1922), ‘What do we wish?’ – the perspective of the child. Source: Archival Holdings in the visual archive of the Néprajzi Muzeum [The Ethnographic Museum], Budapest.

In this postcard the children are presented as protesters. Their leader holds up a sign which reads, ‘What do we wish?’, turning the children into advocates of children’s rights. But as the postcard is entitled ‘The demands of our infants’, it clearly addressed the parents: the ARC was using children’s imagery and their voices to urge appropriate standards in childrearing. While the League of Nations’ Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1924) focused on the most basic rights of children, this postcard details their everyday needs, including appropriate feeding (breast milk at regular times), a wholesome environment (parents in good health, clean rooms with sunshine and air, and free of flies) and appropriate care (educated midwives, good motherly care, their own beds and sufficient times of quiet).

The topics covered on the ARC’s postcards included: how to handle infants in the best way (with warnings on how not to handle them); the importance of breastfeeding (see Figure 6); measures of hygiene; daily bathing; changing nappies; having a safe environment for the child to play in; and preventative health-care rules for mothers and children (contrasted with the dangers for the child in case of their non-observance).

Figure 6. An ARC postcard on the advantages of breastfeeding. Source: Archival Holdings in the visual archive of the Néprajzi Muzeum [The Ethnographic Museum], Budapest.

Figure 6 describes and visualizes the behavior of a little orphaned baby boy who is crying bitterly, as he refuses to be bottle fed. The caption and the illustration of a woman then calmly nursing the little boy suggest that the boy’s intuitive refusal of the bottle proves that there isn't anything better than mother’s milk. The emotional transformation of the child is used as an educative means to educate mothers about the advantages of nursing.

One of the most iconic postcards propagating the work of the American Red Cross in Budapest, seen in Figure 7, depicts an oversized, heroic ARC nurse carrying a naked child, against a background showing the chain bridge over the Danube and Buda Castle on its hill.

Figure 7. ARC postcard showing the saving figure of a nurse. Source: Archival Holdings in the visual archive of the Néprajzi Muzeum [The Ethnographic Muzeum], Budapest.

The text accompanying this picture reads as follows:

She educates the mother, protects the child,

She serves as a guardian angel:

She fights against death and poverty:

She calls all of us to such a fight!⁸⁸

The picture was used again in one of the ARC’s reports, as shown in Figure 8, but bore a different caption accentuating the special ability the ARC nurse had to ‘show the road towards health’ by ‘declaring the fight against infant death’.⁸⁹

Figure 8. The nurse’s saving figure in an ARC report. Source: Zentai, 'Jelentés az Amerikai Vöröskereszt Anya- és Csecsemővédő Akciójaról', 36.

Adopting the symbolism of a mother figure, the ARC volunteer nurse has the naked body of the child wrapped in her arms. The child returns the embrace, facing the viewer of the image. The function of such postcards was to persuade women and mothers to follow the example of the ARC nurse and volunteer as a local Red Cross nurse.

As it was not an option for the ARC to provide long-term relief in Hungary and the neighbouring countries, it became a crucial concern of humanitarian agents in this target region to strengthen local relief agencies. The ARC had long been convinced that ‘relief and rehabilitation would work only if local populations would be ready to help themselves’.⁹⁰ From this followed the ‘idea of self-help’⁹¹, which transformed purely humanitarian intervention into a means to strengthen and professionalise local welfare systems. In conformity with this logic, American ARC nurses arrived in Hungary not just to implement relief measures, but also to train local nurses. So the ARC made efforts to recruit local staff. Due to the language problem the English-speaking ARC personnel faced throughout Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, the training of local workers was of major importance: they alone could deal properly with the relief recipients in their native languages. An ARC nurse recalled the difficulties faced during a mission to Serbia: ‘The language was difficult, but we managed to learn a vocabulary of useful words and every-day phrases. […] Such words as boli (pain), noga (leg), rooka (arm) …’⁹² Beyond the language issue, the invitation to local people to join the humanitarian intervention was intended to mobilise solidarity and empathy among the local population.

An ARC report of 1923 about child relief work in Hungary explains how the grim aftermath of the Great War triggered the creation of a new profession. ‘[The] theory of social work and the profession of the social worker was in Hungary until recently unknown.’⁹³ But the ‘physical and psychological suffering’ brought about by the war induced ‘among all noble spirited Hungarian women that sincere desire, that moral value that deals with the given situation ingeniously, selflessly and tirelessly, gently and rigorously and can not rest until consolidation and help are provided’.⁹⁴ Being highly motivated, the Hungarian women who became involved were seen as equally efficient as their American counterparts who had received a full education as social workers: ‘[t]he spontaneously arising need of the Hungarian woman to help, which was the need of her own aching soul […] made up for the training and theoretical knowledge of the professional “social worker”.’⁹⁵ Yet, the report acknowledged the particular role of the ARC’s humanitarian intervention for the professionalisation of social work and child welfare. In almost every city hall throughout the country special events were organised at which local social and religious-welfare institutions were informed about the work of the ARC. The author of the report recounted how ‘[w]e presented the well-developed American mother and child relief program, the amazing moral and material support of the American Red Cross’, and concluded that only the help of the ARC had ‘made life for many infants possible, who were our only hope for a Hungarian future’.⁹⁶

The ARC worked closely with the still-functioning (though financially impaired) national child-welfare organisations in Hungary, such as the National League of Child Protection and the Stefánia Association for the Protection of Mothers and Infants. In a letter to James Pedlow dated 1 July 1922, the ARC nurse Mary K. Taylor expressed her vision of the ARC’s support for the local Stefánia Association. The ARC’s ‘work was to be done in close-co-operation with the Stefánia Society, an organization for the care of mothers and babies’. ‘The aims of this Society’ were ‘in close harmony with the aims of the [ARC’s] Child Health Program’, and it was ‘heavily subsidized by the government’, which made it the ‘natural agency for the carrying on of child health work under government auspices’. A large number of ‘[h]ealth visitors, who had received from 8 weeks to 10 months training under the Stefánia Society’ were already ‘visiting all the new-born children in certain cities’, though they could ‘obtain medical advice only for the sick, as there were no dispensaries for the examination of well babies’.⁹⁷ In designated examination rooms, the physical condition of each child was determined and documented in specially prepared ARC questionnaires and in individual written reports. Children’s bodies were undressed, measured and photographed.⁹⁸ In the top image of Figure 9 the body of the ARC volunteer nurse and the child’s body are jointly depicted, serving to show the relief worker’s professional and successful handling of her charge. If a child qualified for relief, arrangements were made for it to receive free food or rations. One joint relief measure was the provision of free breakfasts to destitute mothers as well as their children in the Stefánia Association building, and this is shown in the bottom picture of Figure 9.

Figure 9. Top: ‘The American child relief action provides not only free lunch but also free breakfast on behalf of poor children. They recruit those who are eligible to receive breakfast. Our picture: Weighing a small one’. Bottom: ‘Mothers with their infants in front of the Stefánia Foundation in Újpest, waiting for free breakfast’. Source: Érdekes Ujság 9, no. 13 (1921), 3.

During the war and its aftermath, it was emergency relief for those suffering most acutely that dominated child protection, replacing the largely-impaired local child welfare system. Yet the emergency humanitarianism for children was not only ‘a humanitarianism that largely limit[ed] itself to saving lives’, but a ‘humanitarianism that add[ed] the desire to remove the causes of suffering’ too.⁹⁹ In the long term, the professionalisation of hospitals and childcare facilities by means of modern equipment and thorough training of personnel transformed local health and welfare services. Mary K. Taylor, the ARC nurse quoted earlier, declared that the ‘enthusiasm and loyal support’ of the local Hungarian staff-workers brought ‘constant joy’, and she especially appreciated their keenness to grasp ‘new ideas of work and organization’. It made her feel that there was ‘hope of a real structure being built on the foundation’ laid.¹⁰⁰

Asymmetric power relations

Reports on the work of the ARC in Hungary consistently emphasised donors’ amazing generosity towards the civilisations in need. In a letter of 27 January 1922, James Pedlow reported that these donors ‘had given out large quantities of material and wool in August and September and many of the made up articles were kept for Christmas distribution’.¹⁰¹ This enabled the ARC ‘to close up in a blaze of glory and a fitting end to [their …] work in that line’.¹⁰² One report on the work of the ARC in Hungary went so far as to state that ‘[t]he recognition and gratitude of the Hungarian nation for the help of the American Red Cross was unparalleled. […] The commissioner of the ARC was the most popular man in the country in the last three years.’¹⁰³ Both donors and recipients publicly announced their satisfaction with the relief programme. Hungarian politicians were happy to join in with these plaudits, as this guaranteed financial support. They extolled the United States as the saviour of their children and their country: ‘It is not only for the lives and health of our children that Hungary is thankful to America, but for the resultant effort in political and economic stability and social improvement.’¹⁰⁴

On 11 May 1922, the New York Times even reported an official ceremony put on by the Hungarian government to thank ‘Uncle’ James Pedlow for his relief work in the country. It was announced that, in the municipal park, the ‘first European statue to a living American has been erected by Hungary in honor of James A. Pedlow, American Red Cross Commissioner here’. In his speech at the unveiling ceremony, Count Albert Apponyi, the Hungarian revisionist politician who had headed the Hungarian peace delegation in Paris, declared that ‘the Americans are the only real pacifists in the world who are showing a spirit of reconciliation in their generous charity toward the vanquished’; and ‘[t]housands of children in gala dress paraded in front of the statue and heaped flowers around it.’¹⁰⁵ Before ‘Uncle’ Pedlow left Hungary on 1 July 1922, after two-and-a-half-years of relief work, he had ‘luncheon […] with Admiral Horthy, the Regent, in his country castle at Gödöllő’, and ‘Admiral Horthy expressed the thanks of the entire nation [to him] for feeding Hungary’s children and conferred a decoration upon his guest.¹⁰⁶ The Hotel Ritz, the headquarters of the ARC, was ‘besieged by children bringing toys and flowers and weeping bitterly’ as ‘Uncle Pedlow’ left. ‘Crowds of children escorted him to the ship, where a bareheaded multitude sang the American and Hungarian national anthems.’¹⁰⁷ Having relieved the physical suffering of those children who were crippled or ‘in pain’¹⁰⁸, the Western humanitarian relief workers were rewarded with carefully orchestrated appreciation. Public demonstrations of children’s thankfulness towards the ARC’s humanitarian programme displayed and further strengthened the unequal social and political power relations between the donor and recipient countries.

Through its humanitarian intervention in former enemy countries, the ARC simultaneously succeeded in providing relief to the stricken populations, and in meeting the foreign-policy aspirations of the US government. As ‘saviour’ of Europe’s children, the ARC hoped to nurture long-term appreciation among the civilian populations of Europe. Yet, while the ‘heads of [local] welfare institutions’ are reported to have accepted the humanitarian donations ‘with real acknowledgement’, the ‘individual’, it seems, only accepted this charity ‘with slight appreciation or no appreciation at all’, as he/she ‘resist[ed] the idea of being fed by a luckier human being’. Acceptance of the relief was induced by the needy individual’s ‘instinct of self-preservation’, but ‘emotionally he[/she] resent[ed] it’.¹⁰⁹ However, despite the misgivings individuals had in accepting charity, it was widely believed that the ‘most desirable compensation, which America received for her generosity’ was the ‘admiration for American social conscience’ and ‘moral influence’ that had been made manifest in the form of humanitarian intervention.¹¹⁰

Note on contributor

Friederike Kind-Kovács is Assistant Professor at the Department of Southeast- and East European History at Regensburg University and associate postdoctoral researcher at the Graduate School of East and Southeast European Studies. She graduated from St Andrews University in Modern History and completed her Ph.D. in 2008 at Potsdam University. She is the author of Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed The Iron Curtain (New York and Budapest: Central European University Press 2014), for which she won the 2015 University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies. She also co-edited a volume Samizdat, Tamizdat, and Beyond. Transnational Media during and after Socialism (New York: Berghahn, 2013). Currently she is working on her second monograph: The Needy Child: Child Poverty and Humanitarian Relief in Central Europe after the Great War.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Ethnographic Museum [Néprajzi Múzeum] as well as the Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library [Fővárosi Szabó Ervin Könyvtár] in Budapest for the permission to reprint the above images. In case I have by any chance and involuntarily infringed any copyright, I hereby declare that the use of the images is entirely non-commercial and serves solely educational purposes. Therefore, I claim that the use of the images is fulfilling the requirements of the fair use statute.

Notes

1. For instance, Save the Children established a modern and very successful publicity and propaganda department for fundraising purposes.

2. Olds, “Memorandum,” 360–1.

3. Rodogno, “The American Red Cross and the International Committee of the Red Cross’ Humanitarian Politics and Policies in Asia Minor and Greece (1922–1923),” 85.

4. Irwin, Making the World Safe, 6.

5. Canning, “Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn,” 394. See also Canning, Gender History in Practice.

6. Irwin, Making the World Safe, 71.

7. Davison, The American Red Cross in the Great War, 2.

8. Davison, The American Red Cross in the Great War, 95.

9. On women’s bodies and war, see: Canning, “Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn.”

10. On the relationship between war and welfare, see Dwork, War is Good for Babies and Young Children.

11. Davison, “The American Red Cross in the Great War,” 165.

12. Davison, “The American Red Cross in the Great War,” 165.

13. Irwin, Making the World Safe, 107.

14. See, for a comparative study on the dissolution of the empires, Von Hagen, After Empire.

15. Brubaker, “Aftermaths of Empire and the Unmixing of Peoples,” 193.

16. Marrus, The Unwanted. The chapter on the Nansen Era gives a great introduction to the plight of refugees at the time, 51–121.

17. Tusan, “The Business of Relief Work.”

18. Watenpaugh, “The League of Nations’ Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920–1927,” 13–18.

19. Watenpaugh, “The League of Nations’ rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920–1927,” 13–18.

20. “Near East Relief” http://chgs.umn.edu/histories/armenian/theArmenians/nearEast.html (Accessed 12 June 2015).

21. Brubaker talks of 424,000 Hungarian migrants in the first six years immediately following the First World War. See Brubaker, “Aftermaths of Empire and the Unmixing of Peoples,” 160.

22. Brubaker, “Aftermaths of Empire and the Unmixing of Peoples,” 155.

23. See the article by Rodogno, Piana and Gauthier, “Shaping Poland.”

24. On the hunger blockade of Germany see Cox, “War, Blockades, and Hunger: Nutritional Deprivation of German Children 1914–1924.”

25. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, 23.

26. The Hungarian names of the institutions are: Országos Gyermekvédő Liga, Országos Stefánia Szövetség az Anyák és Csecsemők Védelmére and Zöldkereszt.

27. Zahra, “Each Nation only Cares for its Own,” 1380.

28. Zahra, “Each Nation only Cares for its Own,” 1380, 1401.

29. Smirnova, “The Outcomes for Soviet Children Evacuated to Czechoslovakia in the Early 1920s,” 27.

30. Among the organisations that provided relief to Russia’s children were the British Save the Children Fund, the International Save the Children Union, the International Red Cross and the American Relief Administration. On child relief in postwar Russia, see Cabanes: “The Hungry and the Sick: Herbert Hoover, the Russian Famine, and the Professionalization of Humanitarian Aid,” in his recent monograph The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism. 1918–1924, 189–247; Mahood and Satzewich, “The Save the Children Fund and the Russian Famine of 1921–23,” or Breen, “Saving Enemy Children: Save the Children’s Russian Relief Operation, 1921–23” or the published report on the work of the American Relief Administration: Beeuwkes, American Medical and Sanitary Relief in the Russian Famine.

31. See on this the article by Smirnova, “The Outcomes for Soviet Children Evacuated to Czechoslovakia in the Early 1920s.”

32. On the Save the Children Fund, see Baughan, “Every Citizen of Empire Implored to Save the Children!,” 116–37.

33. “Russian Famine,” cover page.

34. “Russian Famine,” cover page.

35. “Russian Famine,” page 3.

36. “Russian Famine,” back page.

37. Chenery, “Starving Budapest, Capital of Human Misery,” 2.

38. McSorley, “War and the Body.” In McSorley, War and the Body, 1–33 (1). See also this author’s conclusions in the same work, 233–44: “Rethinking War and the Body.”

39. Canning, “Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn,” 394.

40. Kallio, “The Body as a Battlefield,” 285–97.

41. Chenery, “Starving Budapest, Capital of Human Misery,” 2.

42. “Our Help is Needed and Must be Given,” New York Times, 18 May 1920, 10.

43. Andrew Cherna, “Report to the American Red Cross on Investigation in Austria and Hungary”, 1923/09, 5, Records of the American National Red Cross 1917-1934, 953.08, Hungary, Budapest Unit WWI, Reports, Statistics, Surveys and Studies, National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, College Park, MD.

44. On the US approach to Hungary, see: McElroy, Morality and American Foreign Policy, 63.

45. Arsan, Lewis and Richard, “Editorial – The Roots of Global Civil Society,” 162–3. This is the source of the quotations immediately above.

46. Canning, “The Body as Method?,” 500.

47. On the interrelationship between crippled children from “peace times” and crippled soldiers from “war time”, see: Koven, “Remembering and Dismemberment,” 1193 and 1200.

48. Herbert Hoover, “What Peace has Done to Europe,” New York Times, 27 March 1921, BRM 1.

49. Hoover, “What Peace has Done to Europe.”

50. Hoover, “What Peace has Done to Europe.”

51. Hoover, “What peace has done to Europe.”

52. Hoover, “What Peace has done to Europe.”

53. Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain,” 303.

54. Cherna, “Report to the American Red Cross,” as in n. 43.

55. See Cherna’s report (as in n. 43), “The Meaning of Starvation,” 14.

56. This and the above quotations are from Koven, Slumming, 132–3.

57. Thompson, Light on Darkness?, 1–2.

58. Thompson, Light on Darkness?, 2.

59. Thompson, Light on Darkness?, 2.

60. Fehrenbach and Rodogno, Humanitarian Photography.

61. Fehrenbach and Rodogno, “Introduction: The Morality of Sight: Humanitarian Photography in History,” in their Humanitarian Photography, 1–21 (6).

62. Kienitz, Beschädigte Helden, 15.

63. Canning, “The Body as Method?,” 506.

64. Fehrenbach and Rodogno, “Introduction: The Morality of Sight: Humanitarian Photography in History,” in their Humanitarian Photography, 4.

65. Last, “Putting Children First,” 195.

66. Wells, “The Melodrama of Being a Child,” 279.

67. Wilkinson, “The Provocation of the Humanitarian Social Imaginary,” 264.

68. Cherna, “Report to the American Red Cross,” as in n. 43.

69. Letter by James Pedlow to A. Ross Hill, Budapest, 27 July 1921, Sheets 1–6, Sheet 5. Records of the American National Red Cross 1917-1934, Commission to Hungary, WWI Reports, 943.62/08. National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

70. Irwin, Making the World Safe, 72.

71. Skinner and Lester, “Humanitarianism and Empire,” 730.

72. Barnett, Empire of Humanity, 21.

73. Murdoch, Imagined Orphans, 17.

74. Foucault, “5 March 1975,” Abnormal, 231–62 (245).

75. Érdekes Ujság, Vol. IX, No.3, 20 January 1921, 23. Sources of illustrations are listed after the endnotes.

76. Butler, “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions,” 601.

77. Butler, “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions,” 606.

78. Butler, “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions,” 607.

79. Letter by Mary K. Taylor, Society Service, American Red Cross in Hungary to Captain James G. Pedlow, Director of American Red Cross in Hungary, 1 July 1922, Sheets 1–4, Sheet 1. Records of the American National Red Cross 1917–1934. 953.62/08, Commission to Hungary WWI Reports, National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, College Park, MD.

80. “The American Red Cross in Hungary, 1921.” Sheet 1–5, Sheet 3. Records of the American National Red Cross 1917-1934. 953.62/08, Commission to Hungary WWI Reports, National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, College Park, MD.

81. Philip C. Jeans, “The American Red Cross in Hungary, 1921,” Records of the American National Red Cross 1917-1934, 953.62/08, Commission to Hungary WWI Reports, National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, College Park, MD.

82. Jeans, “The American Red Cross in Hungary, 1921,” as in n. 81.

83. “Cooperation by Red Cross. Warehouse offered to Committee for Hungarian Sufferers,” New York Times, 2 May 1920. Online at: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=FA0E17F7385B11728DDDAB0894DD405B808EF1D3 (Accessed 13 November 2015).

84. Jeans, “The American Red Cross in Hungary, 1921,” as in n. 81.

85. On the capitalist roots of humanitarianism, see: Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility,” Parts 1 and 2.

86. Zentai, “Jelentés az Amerikai Vöröskereszt Anya- és Csecsemővédő Akciójaról,” 31.

87. Irwin, “Sauvons les Bébés.”

88. Postcard from the American Red Cross Collection at Néprajzi Múzeum [The Ethnographic Museum], Budapest.

89. Zentai, “Jelentés az Amerikai Vöröskereszt Anya- és Csecsemővédő Akciójaról,” 36.

90. Rodogno, “The American Red Cross and the International Committee of the Red Cross’ Humanitarian Politics and Policies,” 84.

91. Rodogno, “The American Red Cross and the International Committee of the Red Cross’ Humanitarian Politics and Policies,” 84.

92. Gardner, “American Red Cross Work in Serbia,” 37.

93. Sarolta, “Az Amerikai Vöröskereszt Anya- és Csecsemővédő Akciójanak szociális munkássága,” 41.

94. Sarolta, as in n. 93.

95. Sarolta, as in n. 93. He uses the English term “social worker.”

96. Sarolta, as in n. 93.

97. Letter by Mary K. Taylor, Society Service, American Red Cross in Hungary to Captain James G. Pedlow, Director of American Red Cross in Hungary, July 1, 1922, Sheets 1–4, Sheet 1, Records of the American National Red Cross 1917–1934, Commission to Hungary, WWI Reports, 943.62/08. National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

98. Letter by Mary K. Taylor, as n. 97.

99. Barnett, Empire of Humanity, 21.

100. Letter by Mary K. Taylor, as in n. 97.

101. Letter by J. G. Pedlow, Director ARC in Hungary, to Ernest P. Bicknell, Commissioner for Europe, American Red Cross, Paris, Budapest, 27 January 1922. Records of the American National Red Cross 1917–1934, Commission to Hungary, WWI Reports, 943.62/08. National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

102. Letter by J. G. Pedlow, as in n. 101.

103. Jeans, “The American Red Cross in Hungary,” 6 as in n. 81.

104. Letter from F. Bernolak, Royal Hungarian Minister of Public Affairs, to Herbert Hoover, November 1922. Printed in: Hoover, An American Epic, 429–30.

105. “Hungarians Erect Monument to American Red Cross Chief,” New York Times, 11 May 1922, 1.

106. “Magyar Children Cry as ‘Uncle Pedlow’ Goes,” New York Times, 2 July 1922. On-line: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F60F17FD3B5D14738DDDAB0894DF405B828EF1D3 (Accessed January 17 2016).

107. “Magyar Children Cry as ‘Uncle Pedlow’ Goes,” as in n. 106.

108. Dauphinée, “The Politics of the Body in Pain.” See also: Scarry, The Body in Pain, 4–13.

109. Cherna, “Report to the American Red Cross,” as in n. 43, 17–18.

110. Cherna, “Report to the American Red Cross,” as in n. 43, 21.