At (Red) cross purposes: American Red Cross humanitarian ‘arrogance’ and France’s Great War relief and reconstruction, 1917–20

Abstract

ABSTRACT Directors of American Red Cross (ARC) 1917–20 French civilian relief electively addressed and ignored France’s First World War-triggered needs. ARC leaders’ programmes during the organization’s three-year period of active French service voluntarily embraced and discarded Francophile policies endorsed by their subordinates, their colleagues and their superiors. ARC wartime assistance allotments increasingly, and sometimes perplexingly, favoured US servicemen over French non-combatants. Post-War ARC aid allocations deliberately advanced embryonic Eastern European activity over enduring and extensive known and indefinite French privations. ARC executives even periodically proposed and imposed orders that made France and its people unwitting underwriters of the American Red Cross’ focus on Eastern Europe, even as that process expressly reduced French civilian aid. Their self-confident, repeated and arbitrary conduct vis-à-vis Great War-afflicted French non-combatants advanced ARC purposes at Frenchmen’s expense. It thus meets current definitions of ‘arrogant’ humanitarianism.