Introduction Excerpt for Foreign Aid and State Building in Interwar Romania

Introduction

IN 1923, QUEEN MARIE of Romania presided over a meeting on the future of child welfare in the country over which she reigned. Government officials, scientific experts, and representatives of various Romanian philanthropic societies that had long placed the plight of Romanian children at the heart of their work attended the gathering. It was a reportedly tense event, as many of these participants pondered differing ways their ambitions to design child-specific programs would match the financial and infrastructure realities of the country’s limited postwar economic capacity. Still, one way for their ambitions regarding child assistance to be met came from abroad, through the aid programs proposed by the Rockefeller Foundation. Nobody was more enthused by the prospect of Rockefeller money than the then-Minister of Labor, Public Health, and Social Welfare, Gheorghe Mârzescu. “It would be for the good of the country, for the sake of an ideal, and for humanity,”¹ exclaimed Mârzescu at the thought of cooperating with the American foundation.

The Rockefeller Foundation officers were more than happy to report on this enthusiastic response of Romanian elites to their proposed philanthropy. By 1923, the foundation had already transferred aid meant for construction and reconstruction of the various successor states of east-central Europe that had emerged from the collapse of European empires in 1918. By philanthropists’ standards, Romania was a latecomer. However, Mârzescu’s note quickly signaled the government’s openness for collaboration.

This episode is an exemplary one, as Gheorghe Mârzescu was one of the many statesmen who turned to foreign aid in the name of a projected ideal of Romanian state building during, but especially after World War I. In 1917, an American Red Cross humanitarian mission landed in what was then the belligerent Kingdom of Romania.² It was a small mission that tackled medical and food emergencies around the main battlefields of this country. This was, however, a mere first encounter between some foreign aid givers and their Romanian recipients. Once the armistice was declared in November 1918, multiple organizations arrived with agendas to assist the rebuilding and the overall transformation of Romanian society. By 1923, various western and mostly American humanitarian organizations had participated in, or were still actively engaged in, Romanian reconstruction efforts.

This book examines the ways that different forms of foreign aid pervaded dimensions of the state building process in interwar Romania. For two decades, a plethora of American aid organizations came to Romania with the goal of relieving war-suffering populations and rehabilitating and modernizing a society that humanitarians and philanthropists perceived as inherently backward. However, this aid was not merely one-directional and deeply civilizing in this country of reception. I argue that various Romanian state builders actively pursued, accessed, and instrumentalized American humanitarian and philanthropic aid to advance their own aspirations and domestic endeavors of postwar reconstruction and modernization³ during this time of social, political, and economic upheaval. In the process, foreign aid organizations reinforced various nationalizing projects that defined the making of Greater Romania in the interwar period.

This book is a study of one case in the broader narrative of interwar foreign aid. From humanitarians’ and philanthropists’ vantage point, Romania was one of the many countries of action. The World War I era and the interwar period saw the crystallization of professionalized aid for civilians, with the United States taking the lead as a donor nation. US assistance abroad rapidly grew and became a tool of statecraft for the United States as a new world power, a self-proclaimed strong, benevolent nation, committed to guiding the world in peaceful cooperation. American humanitarians and philanthropists considered east-central Europe an ideal space of action following the collapse of European empires. New states were born, redefined, or expanded out of imperial pieces. At the same time, they were destructed in war, institutionally feeble, politically endangered, and economically shattered. As this analysis of interwar Romania shows, these aid givers believed that feeding and clothing the population, as well as that supporting the potential of local expertise in east-central Europe would transfer novel ideas of what “modern” and “civilized” meant within shifting local and national contexts in these new states. Stabilizing and modernizing east-central European states was, in their view, fundamental to democracy and civilization in the whole of Europe.

At the same time, this book illuminates ways in which aid recipients and their ambitions, contexts, and circumstances shaped the shifts and turns of aid trajectories in this period of growing civilian-focused humanitarianism and philanthropy. Thus, Romanian state builders looked abroad and proactively sought and used avenues of foreign aid to support the establishment and strengthening of institutions of governance, as well as various projects designed to sustain nation-state consolidation in the interwar period.

The first Czechoslovak president Tomáš G. Masaryk famously claimed that the entire continent was a “laboratory atop a mass graveyard”⁴ after World War I. Across east-central Europe, state leaders like Masaryk and policymakers contended with new geopolitical and social configurations and the challenges they posed after the war, after the imperial collapse in Europe, and after the redrawing of borders. In this context, creating institutions of governance and managing and, at times, “fixing” and/or “controlling” populations (i.e., their numbers, their ethnicity, their representation, their way of life) emerged as the backbone of state building in east-central Europe in the period.⁵

In Romania, the idea of a homogeneous nation within an independent state was not a product of the World War I era. The 1848 revolutionaries who fought for Romanian autonomy from Turkish, Greek, and Russian domination developed the idea of a union of provinces then existing under imperial rule into a national and social program.⁶ The building of a national identity was a recurring narrative as Romanians inhabited different regions and provinces, often under foreign rule. Wallachia and Moldavia were under Ottoman control by the fifteenth century; Transylvania was under Habsburg, Ottoman, and Hungarian rule; Bukovina was under Austrian control from 1775; and Russia seized Bessarabia in 1812. Principalities Wallachia and Moldavia united in 1859, and in 1866 they came under the rule of King Carol I of the German Hohenzollern dynasty. The United Principalities were recognized as formally independent by European powers after the 1877–1878 War of Independence, and in 1881 the Kingdom of Romania was proclaimed.⁷

In the summer of 1916, the incumbent National Liberal Party led by Ion I. C. Brătianu made the decision for Romania to enter World War I on the side of the Allies. The National Liberal group was the political successor of the 1848 revolutionaries, and by the early twentieth century, the party line called for “unification at all costs.”⁸ State leaders politically exploited the decision to enter the war as an act of bravery, meant to achieve the long-sought union of “lost” territories and a triumph of sovereignty from the European empires. An eventual union was the condition Brătianu asked when he made the decision for Romania to join the Allies’ military. In the end, he believed that if this entry into battle and the ultimate goal of the union of all provinces were to fail, it would be only temporary. He pointed to the nineteenth-century German and Italian unification movements as models to be emulated: despite setbacks, they had ultimately achieved their goals.⁹

Brătianu and his political associates’ gamble succeeded, however. The Allies won the war, and the Habsburg, Russian, German, and Ottoman empires collapsed and Romania united with provinces previously under imperial rule: Transylvania, the Banat, Crişana, Bukovina, and Bessarabia.¹⁰ In this context, the participation in the war became a moment of triumph, which contemporaries described as a “sacrifice” made by Romanians for the specific purpose of realizing the long-envisioned national ideal of the Great Union and the creation of the sovereign Greater Romania nation-state.¹¹

The union of all provinces in 1918 brought opportunities for a national redefining. The question of establishing a national identity through the strengthening of Romanian national consciousness in an enlarged Greater Romania, a site of multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic populations, informed politics and policies for the following two decades.¹² The assimilation of minorities, the policies of Romanianization of territories that joined the Old Kingdom,¹³ the unification of economic systems of unequal capabilities, and the centralization of state institutions construed a process of state building qua national homogenization.

However, the story of a successful military and human sacrifice around the making of Greater Romania is incomplete. World War I and the union came with their own sets of challenges, as the havoc caused by the military conflict hampered the projected national ideal. For one, the war caused considerable human loss and material destruction. Albeit incomplete, numbers tell a grim story. Statistics have included human loss of the Old Kingdom at a population deficit of 14 percent from the prewar population. This was higher only in Serbia and Montenegro, at 31.3 percent, and Russia, at 18.5 percent. Among the territories united with the Old Kingdom in 1918, the estimates are even less clear as statistics included these either as parts of Austria-Hungary or Russia. The losses were high regardless: besides Russia’s above-mentioned percentage, in Austria-Hungary losses amounted to 9.5 percent, when the European average was 7 percent.¹⁴

The war’s high material and human destruction, coupled with the impact of the union itself, further complicated Romania’s economic capacity. The new frontiers perturbed existent economic flows and hit the western regions of postwar Romania, which had been gravitating economically toward Austria and Hungary. Moreover, institutions of the original state (i.e., the Old Kingdom) lacked human and material resources when compared to those seceding from the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.¹⁵ Overall, the new state was crippled by enormous public debt, wartime material damage, the heavy costs of unifying prewar separate entities, and feeble central institutions of governance, which were unable to thoroughly address social issues.

Outside the challenges of the postwar and transitional periods after the union, a defining social aspect of interwar Romania was its largely agrarian population, with around 80 percent living in rural areas. In the period after the war, Romania and many other east-central European states faced the challenges of reforming their political systems, adapting their economies, and restoring their internal social order. This had a great impact on Romania’s rural population whose multiple roles as economic producers, political actors, and citizens had to be redefined.¹⁶

In this context, the creation of the “ideal Greater Romania” did not mean only formally establishing a sovereign nation-state. It also meant addressing political, social, and economic challenges posed by war destruction and the union itself. Postwar reconstruction entailed the establishment of central institutions and bureaucracies that would achieve economic advancement and foster administrative integration, cultural consolidation and assimilation, and legislative harmonization across provinces.¹⁷ At the same time, it also required transforming the agrarian nature of the Romanian state and negotiation of the rural–urban divide. Given this context of political ambitions meshed with the realities of a frail nation-state, in the next two decades after the union, various state builders sought to strengthen the sovereignty and autonomy of this newly formed Greater Romania, to ensure a strong national identity of the population, to engineer postwar reconstruction efforts, and to conceptualize and implement modernizing projects.

This book follows a diverse cast of characters who attempted to address these postwar and post-union challenges. I look here at various political leaders, individuals and communities that constructed a form of welfare-oriented civil society, or scientific experts acting as agents of modernization. Despite apparent heterogeneity, they all shared the common goal of nation-state consolidation once the new borders were established after the union. For some, this meant imposing conditions of sovereignty or passing legislation and policies that strengthened institutions of governance and emboldened social transformation and/or economic growth; for others, it meant assisting vulnerable populations; and others believed in the use of scientific innovation in the making of a Romanian state and society.

Political actors fundamentally defined, formed, and reformed avenues regarding the establishment of Greater Romania as a social and economic project. Politicians belonging to different factions and ideologies worked within and shaped the institutional apparatus of the state and its social outreach. They used their positions to organize infrastructural development, create new institutions, draft policies, and ratify laws that created or re-created national identities and framed what was permissible. They intervened in people’s lives at home, and they negotiated on international stages as they attempted to mitigate the consequences of war destruction, to enable a national consciousness of the ethnically diverse population, and to create paths of modernization.¹⁸

However, state building ambitions went beyond the more traditional political arena and outside the realm of a governance apparatus. In his magnum opus on the history of the Habsburg monarchy, Pieter Judson points to the mutually reinforcing relationship between state and society. Judson describes the state as a “far more than discretely defined realm of politics, or a set of formal institutions separated from society. Instead, the state [. . .] refers to a broad range of diverse cultural, religious, and social practices while society constitutes an equally important site where politics functions.”¹⁹ Judson’s wide-ranging understanding of state building applies to the case of interwar Romania as presented in this book. Following Judson’s framework, I argue that a second tier of state builders mobilized resources and used knowledge to develop their own toolkits of relief, rehabilitation, and modernization of interwar Romanian society.

A welfare-oriented form of civil society materialized during and after the war. This period of heightened destruction and widespread suffering created the backdrop of the birth and the growing proactive work of formal institutions that generated an effort of postwar reconstruction. Established or managed by various elites (i.e., women related to the aristocracy, bankers, businessmen, or religious figures), these institutions became part of a domestic network of philanthropy that tackled alleviation of various forms of human suffering. In practice, they targeted the spread of disease, various hunger crises, or the immediacy of the plight of war-suffering children. These institutions originated outside the government. However, they adopted the language of state consolidation as they formally framed their agendas in relation to the future of the Romanian nation.

Much like these domestic philanthropists, scientific experts of the interwar period also believed that they possessed solutions to postwar and post-union challenges. The scientific experts I focus on were health professionals, medical researchers, statisticians, and sociologists. They aimed for their research work to infuse policymaking, designed to control and eventually mold populations and society in general. In practice, they believed in the institutionalization of knowledge production, alongside scientific and technical advancement, as means to overcome the problems caused by war destruction and the formal creation of Greater Romania. Many of these experts considered the use of science for projects of social engineering: the elimination of so-called foreign subjects (i.e., ethnic or religious minorities) in various polities, control of the population along eugenic lines, or deep institutional (including state) intervention in public lives and in creation of habitats. In the process, they mobilized narratives of backwardness and the need to overcome it as fundamental to the future of the Romanian nation-state. While not purebred politicians, Romanian scientific experts often came in and out of the state apparatus, as some collaborated with or became part of national institutions of governance. Ultimately, they played the role of mediators between state and society as they defined and applied their vision of modernity.²⁰

Nationalist expressions lie at the heart of this book’s various characters’ aspirations. The state builders I analyze here were elite nationalists, whether in or out of institutions of governance. Namely, they each conceptualized their ambitions and practical agendas as frameworks of political, social, economic, ethnic, or cultural nationalization.²¹ However, the postwar realities of porous borders, crippled economy, feeble institutions, and an overwhelmingly fragile population challenged long-drawn ambitions of an ideal Greater Romania. I argue that, in this context, these nationalists sought and engaged with international avenues of assistance to support their vision of what the Romanian nation and Romanian state could and should be. Diplomacy was one way, as negotiations around territorial absorption, self-determination, or minority treatment marked the early postwar period. However, this book departs from the hallways of the League of Nations in Geneva and moves away from the ministries in Paris, London, or Rome. It talks about a different form of internationally oriented negotiation in the period as it looks at how non-state (or quasi-non-state) “foreign aid” emerged as an alternate avenue to sustain various homegrown nationalizing blueprints of state building.

The largest and most influential humanitarian and philanthropic organizations of the interwar period were headquartered in the United States. Driven by a seeming moral compass and technocratic ambitions, they pervaded nearly every dimension of foreign aid in Europe during and after World War I. American humanitarian expansion during World War I was, at first glance, a paradox. When the war began in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson was quick to declare in the Senate chamber on August 18: “The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name.”²⁵ There was a certain intent to throw the United States in European infighting from a diplomatic and military standpoint. At home, however, various diaspora groups made of migrants, whether foreign workers or refugees, felt the call of their homelands. Whether volunteering for the Serbian and German armies, working in the battlefields of France or Italy, or fundraising and lobbying to alleviate the civil suffering in Belgium, US citizens or naturalized individuals coming from Europe were increasingly involved through a spurring of nationalism as a reaction to the crisis in the Old Continent.²⁶

At the same time, from the earliest days of the war, US citizens of all backgrounds organized and supported the major European relief undertaking. Thousands gave money to different formal organizations, collected food, knitted clothing, prepared bandages, and committed to fundraising schemes. As the United States remained non-belligerent, hundreds of volunteer men and women traveled to Europe to address health and welfare crises, in both Allied and Central Powers nations, to both soldiers and civilians. It was a moment that signaled what Julia Irwin has poignantly described as a “nation’s humanitarian awakening.”²⁷

It is perhaps unsurprising that the US entry into the war in April 1917 further intensified the American commitment and practical work for humanitarian purposes. Moreover, it was fully government-backed, as Woodrow Wilson and his administration correlated the entry in the war to the unselfish “fight [. . .] for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its people.”²⁸ Politically, generous civilian mobilization was a way to implement Wilsonian ideals and progressive values abroad,²⁹ selflessly securing peace and global welfare.³⁰ This required not only an Allied victory but also the existence of orderly postwar societies that would be prepared to put Wilson’s plans into action. Allied non-combatants were to be healthy and well-fed, children were supposed to receive proper education, workers to be productive, home life to be preserved. As such, not only was the assistance of the combatants required in the battlefields, but civilian aid, too, was crucial. It had to provide relief to people living behind the lines. Indeed, the fate of civilians, both in the immediate moment and in the long term, was in the nation’s self-interest.³¹ In this context, a landscape of foreign aid agents crystallized. Some were driven by missionary zeal; others had strong beliefs in the power of expertise and implemented technocracy to engineer immediate relief and potential postwar reconstruction in ailing states and societies abroad. In its essence, this was a view of state building projected from America to the world, disconnected from the potential capacity of various world societies to adapt.³²

Woodrow Wilson’s beliefs regarding the potential of immediate and long-term aid in war-affected and institutionally weak states transferred to the ideational framework of a few humanitarian organizations that grew or developed in this era of World War I. One fundamental institution was the American Red Cross (ARC). The organization quickly became a leading agent of foreign aid during the years of US presence in the war in 1917 and 1918. Established in 1881 under the presidency of Clara Barton, a schoolteacher from Oxford, Massachusetts, the ARC’s formation coincided with the zenith of American Protestant overseas missionary activities. However, the organization’s leadership preferred to emphasize its agenda in “material and modernist” terms, focusing on physical, rather than spiritual, salvation.³³ During World War I, the ARC moved its aid work abroad, driven by incredible home support and governmental help. This translated in impressive numbers: one-third of the population joined as members, $400 million was donated in 1917 and 1918 alone, and bankers and businessmen took charge of its institutional organization. This was strengthened by an impressive spirit of volunteerism as American physicians, social workers, nurses, and other professionals crossed the Atlantic with the purpose of relieving war sufferers. During and after the war, the ARC became a professional humanitarian organization, as it incorporated in its agenda voluntary civic engagement sustained by expert-driven, efficient, and accountable scientific management.

Once the war ended, the American Relief Administration (ARA) joined the ARC in organizing relief in Europe. The story of the ARA, its management, and its programs, is tightly connected to Herbert Hoover, the head of the organization. Hoover had been the leader of the American Food Administration, the national food authority and wartime agency created by Woodrow Wilson in 1917. A mining engineer, Hoover was well known by then as having helped repatriate more than 200,000 American tourists stranded in Europe in August 1914. Subsequently, he accepted a position as a Commissioner of Belgium Relief, a semi-official body, directing food supplies to Belgium and France.³⁴ Hoover’s work soon expanded. In a unique political move up to that point, in February 1919, President Wilson issued an executive order to create the ARA, an organization charged with acquiring, transporting, and distributing foodstuff to European civilians. Congress funded the organization with $100 million for emergency operations through June 30, 1919, and approved Herbert Hoover’s formal appointment as head of the organization.

The main method the ARA employed in its assistance was food relief. In Hoover’s perception, food was both a core vulnerability in the international order and an instrument of US influence. Periods of riots in poor corners of American cities and Hoover’s European experience during prolonged periods of scarcity during World War I confirmed “that bread shortages led to unrest.”³⁵ During the war, he told his staff that the “wheat loaf has ascended in the imagination of men, women, and children as the emblem of national survival and national tranquility.”³⁶ Moreover, Hoover was convinced that Europe’s economic situation and political stability was in danger as empires were dismantling. Ultimately, he informed Wilson that the United States would have to undertake food relief efforts in forty-five countries “if we are to preserve these countries from Bolshevism and rank anarchy.”³⁷ The new ARA then poured food into open ports of Europe, with Hoover’s men taking control of telegraph offices, port administration, and railways. In this process, the ARA aided both wartime friends and foes, as Hoover was convinced that resources and distribution would make the difference in installing order and peace in agitated areas.³⁸

Besides a moral duty to aid the suffering populations, Hoover also believed that “the food situation” could have important strategic benefits for the United States in matters of financial gains and management.³⁹ In his view, food was also a matter of credits, as he thought that European agriculture would have recovered gradually, but in the short term, many states would have had to use borrowing schemes to feed their people. In his interpretation, loans could only come from the United States, due to its capital and food surplus.⁴⁰ Ultimately, if relief was in the form of loans rather than the ARC-preferred gifts, the United States would have been able to have open doors for trade and investment through its economic leverage. And by helping the needy, the United States would have won friends and stopped any British and French ambitions to seize European business. Self-interest, in the form of markets for surplus American agricultural production, thus converged with the benevolent dimension of relief.⁴¹ Hoover regarded the two goals as compatible and even complementary.

The matrix of American humanitarianism in the World War I era included aid specifically designed to help Jews caught in the European maelstrom. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) was established in 1914 as the Joint Distribution Committee of American Funds for the Relief of Jewish War Sufferers, aiming to relieve non-combatants in the Jewish communities of east-central Europe in particular.⁴² During the war the JDC became the leading organization engaged in relief work and served primarily as a distributing agent of American Jewish fundraising organizations to Jewish victims of war. The leaders of the JDC were well-known New York–based bankers and lawyers involved in various philanthropic initiatives.⁴³ Furthermore, many of these individuals were close contacts of the American president at the time of war, Woodrow Wilson.⁴⁴ Financial assistance organized by these politically influential and wealthy Jews came through charity, based on fundraising that saw American Jewish communities across the country work together to save Jews abroad. After the war, the JDC ended the scheme of aid from afar and entered “the field” with systematic programs focused on food relief, healthcare, or rehabilitation for refugees and children. Similar to other organizations, the JDC also had a professional dimension, as the organization’s workers were engineers, doctors, young social workers, or military officers. In these humanitarian efforts, the JDC’s leadership promoted itself not only as neutral in relation to political changes in Europe but also as primarily American, often in collaboration with the in-place ARC and ARA.⁴⁵

The first few years of peace meant a shift in the scope of humanitarianism. Organizations recalibrated their agendas to include the more rehabilitative nature of aid. Emergency and palliative action to feed, clothe, or provide medicine transformed into caretaking with a bigger timeframe. Indeed, as other historians have rightly noted, interwar humanitarianism meant the meshing of relief and rehabilitation.⁴⁶ Much of this rehabilitative work focused on child aid. Concerns for the physical development of children in countries devastated by war, battling famine and various diseases, were at the forefront of these organizations’ drive to continue work. Notable was Herbert Hoover’s involvement in establishing and developing child-specific relief and rehabilitation work through the creation of the ARA’s offspring, the European Children’s Fund (ARA-ECF) in July 1919. Hoover consistently emphasized the importance of his efforts to save European children. He wrote that the plight of children in postwar Europe had moved him more than any other aspect of the suffering he witnessed. Malnourished, orphaned, diseased, and stunted children, he believed, were “pitiable,” but more importantly, their distorted minds would make them “a menace to their nations” and eventually “a menace to all mankind.”⁴⁷ He essentially believed that underfed and suffering children would lead to a disintegration of the nation-states.⁴⁸ In a tour organized to convince Americans to donate to his initiative, he revealed that helping children was part of a bigger vision for Europe and the overall impact on the world. In his view, American participation to this Herculean effort to feed children would, in the end, be a step forward for peace, democracy, and general humanity.⁴⁹

The language of the long-term transformation of countries and societies through humanitarian aid pervaded the realm of the Red Cross as well. As part of the plan of rehabilitation, during the post-Armistice period the ARC began organizing preventive and positive welfare measures administered by its Junior division. The Junior Red Cross (JRC) was established in the United States in 1917 and had proved a remarkable success, with over eleven million children becoming members of the organization by the end of 1918. After the Armistice, leaders transformed it into a channel for children’s donations to Europe. Children became the main object of the ARC’s postwar agenda. As Julia Irwin notes, “ARC personnel acted according to the belief that they, as Americans, had a special responsibility to ameliorate the ‘distant suffering’ of European youth.”⁵⁰ Over the next four years, funded in part by the donations of US schoolchildren, hundreds of American child health professionals traveled to Europe as JRC representatives. Through their work, they aimed to instill the main principle of the JRC, namely to cultivate and maintain “a spirit of friendly helpfulness toward other children in all countries.”⁵¹ Lyman Bryson, the Association Director of the JRC in Europe summarized the premise of childcare abroad: “The children of all Europe, from the Seine to the Black Sea and north into farthest Russia have a long fight ahead of them, a fight for health, for rudimentary education, and for a chance to earn a livelihood.”⁵² In this narrative, America and its children were European children’s allies in fighting the war-caused physical degradation and in shaping them for the future sustaining of their nations.

Once the crises of war subsided and humanitarian organizations exited the various territories that they had landed in to assist various survivors of war, American philanthropy took center stage. The immediacy of relief was abandoned for the more long-term ambitions to (re-)build Europe’s societies. Through philanthropy, American aid meant support for technical development, human and material infrastructure, or institutionalization of knowledge production in areas of the world perceived to be backward. Continuing the mantra of “helping others to help themselves” established by humanitarian work, philanthropy contoured an internationalist agenda that, according to its architects, aimed to spur an American brand of modernizing what they considered to be the less advanced populations. During the interwar period, philanthropists developed global ambitions that transferred into foreign aid to postwar Europe, but also to Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. This encapsulated a vision of philanthropy as a tool of modern expertise that transferred into local peripheries.⁵³

The largest philanthropic organization of the postwar period was the Rockefeller Foundation (RF). Focused on an explicit agenda of “constructive aid,” a form of juxtaposition to emergency humanitarian aid, the formal mandate of the foundation was “to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world” by means of science. To achieve this, the board of the RF followed a few premises. First, philanthropy was not to be confused with charity. Philanthropy represented an investment in human betterment. Second, aid was to be offered to government agencies, not individuals; it was to be of limited duration so as to stimulate self-help, not dependence. And it was to be withheld unless recipients showed promise of continuing work after aid had ended. This was a golden rule that was rarely broken; ultimately, mere charity and emergency relief were alien concepts.

In practice, much of the RF’s work remained centered on aid for public health. In 1917, the RF organized its first commitment to Europe with the establishment of the Commission for the Prevention of Tuberculosis in Paris. In 1919, its International Health Board, led by Wickliffe Rose, signaled the intention to establish “a series of schools of hygiene at strategic sites all over the world [. . .] including the building up of public health organizations, statistics, and public health laboratory services.”⁵⁴

By the end of the 1920s, the foundation added financial support for social sciences to its agenda. The RF’s international investment in social sciences had a strategic twist, as philanthropists claimed that this would advance international goodwill. More crucially yet, it happened within a global political milieu that looked substantially different after 1918. The United States was, after its victory in World War I, at the heart of the liberal-democratic capitalist model that claimed world hegemony. Helping to set and defend a socio-global agenda was, in the eyes of the leaders of the RF, their right. In this context, the RF’s support for social sciences abroad meant support for institutions buffering this liberal-democratic capitalist model.⁵⁵

I argue that American humanitarian and philanthropic organizations had multiple motivations to provide aid in east-central Europe in the interwar period. First, the destruction of war and the effects on the general population impressed in the headquarters of humanitarian organizations.⁵⁶ During the war, stories of east-central European war sufferers’ poverty, illness, homelessness, or displacement influenced the turn of these organizations to pay attention to this region. Once the war ended, it was the pain of children in these affected areas that mobilized leadership of humanitarian organizations across the region. Humanitarians wrote of the “starving Hungarian child”⁵⁷ or the “young and unspoiled”⁵⁸ Polish girls as motivators to mobilize aid for these states in the postwar and the post-empire period of (re)construction.

Second, aid givers perceived the rather weak sovereignty and the postwar political feebleness of these new or newly expanded states to be a good motivator. Aid organizations arguably thrived on the weakness and the need of their recipient nations. This weakness stemmed not only from the material destruction of war but also from the transitional period of their post-empire existence. In this context, American humanitarians and philanthropists became convinced of the power of their aid programs to strengthen frail institutions in this region. They believed that it was through their aid that east-central Europeans would be able to strengthen their newly acquired autonomy. From aid givers’ vantage point, people of this region could refute the potential spread of a seemingly uncivilized Bolshevism, German militarism, revolution, chaos, and instability as long as they had access to food, medicine, and other forms of financial and material aid.

Third, the potential economic capacity of east-central European states was important for various American leaders and representatives of these organizations. Most notable were the ARA leaders’ interests in not only feeding populations in need but also in reviving commerce within the region. Aiding the basic infrastructure of these countries, Herbert Hoover and his associates believed, would ultimately improve the financial capacity of these countries. This idea was best described by Thomas Dickinson, the ARA’s staff historian, regarding the underlying economic scope of the organization’s humanitarian work in the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy: “Everywhere throughout Central Europe, there was the impression of a great market full of buyers and sellers, if only the two could come together.”⁵⁹

Lastly, American aid givers believed in the civilizational powers of their actions in this region. Many considered the people of east-central European countries to be more backward than white Americans or western Europeans. They believed that these countries were firstly deeply affected by war’s events and destruction and in need of aid to depart from “flawed” imperial and Germanic influences. Moreover, ideas of the backward Slavs or the poor Ottoman influences appear time and time again in the sources produced by American humanitarian and philanthropic organizations. They relied on a fundamentally orientalist trope of the region and its people, deemed too backward because much of their history and suffering from little to no change if left to their own devices.⁶⁰ At its essence, humanitarians believed that relief workers who took food and medicine in these countries and taught people how to manage resources would be able to instill American progressive values in these uncivilized corners of the world. Furthermore, philanthropists aimed to transplant principles of modernity to the largely rural and socially and politically feeble states that emerged out of the collapse of European empires. Nonetheless, at the same time, these aid givers also considered that those living in this region were still European enough and had some potential to absorb American and deeply civilizational models of modernization.

The case of Romania in the broader narrative of interwar American aid is perhaps unexceptional. After all, this was one country out of many in east-central Europe where American humanitarians and philanthropists landed with ambitions to quickly help war-suffering populations but also to transform these seemingly backward societies. The scope of this book is not to claim the uniqueness of the Romanian case in the American story of aid. Rather, it proposes a focus on one case to explore one key question: how were American aid, its actors, and its practices received in east-central Europe, at a time when the countries of the region were undergoing their own processes of sociopolitical and economic transformation? By exploring this question, I reflect here on foreign aid through its multiple trajectories in this period rather than as a unilateral actor of change. But even more than that, the book highlights ways that aid recipients manifested their agency in shaping these trajectories, driven by their own circumstances of postwar transformation. Here I argue that Romanian state builders energetically pursued and attracted the transfer of western ideas and resources. In the process, foreign aid organizations, either humanitarian or philanthropic, strengthened domestically produced nationalizing projects in this country of reception.

Notes

1. Summary report of a meeting held at the Royal Palace, Bucharest, at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, January 30, 1923, under the Presidency of HM the Queen of Roumania, to discuss the cooperation of welfare activities between the Roumanian and Foreign Authorities, RG 1.1, Series 783, Box 3, Folder 18, Collection Projects, Rockefeller Archives Center (hereafter RAC), Tarrytown, NY, USA.

2. For the sake of brevity, I will hereafter use “Romania.”

3. I understand the concept of “modernization” from two perspectives in this book. On one hand, foreign aid givers conceived it as a form of “westernization” and overcoming of “backwardness.” Their perspective fits with the conventional understanding of “modernization,” often defined as a path to progress and, in the case of east-central Europe, a way to catch up with the West. On the other hand, I look at the meaning of “modernization” in the specific context of Romania and east-central Europe. In this sense, when looking at Romania’s postwar and post-union trajectories, I depart from the trope modernization qua westernization and I focus on domestic establishment of institutions of governance, development of political parties, crystallization of policymaking within new state institutions, infrastructure building (i.e., in education, health, or agriculture), or industrialization. Some of the state builders I write about sometimes do conceive “modernization” as westernization, but other times they conceptualize it in terms of looking inward and as a measure of Romanian cultural traditions. See, for example, Kenneth Jowitt, ed., Social Change in Romania, 1860–1940: A Debate on Development in a European Nation (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1978).

4. Taken from Alexander Prusin, The Lands Between: Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870–1992 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 98.

5. The unpacking of the arguably loaded idea of “fixing” populations in east-central Europe in the period is found in Nick Baron and Peter Gatrell, Homelands: War, Population and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia, 1918–1924 (London: Anthem Press, 2004).

6. Keith Hitchins, The Romanians 1774–1866 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1996), 198–230; for further studies on the 1848 moment see Alex Drace-Francis, “Cultural Currents and Political Choices: Romanian Intellectuals in the Banat to 1848,” Austrian History Yearbook 36 (2005): 65–93; James Morris, “The European Revolutions of 1848 and the Danubian Principality of Wallachia” (PhD thesis, Cambridge University, 2020).

7. See Barbara Jelavich, Russia and the Formation of the Romanian National State, 1821–1878 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Charles and Barbara Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804–1920 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986).

8. Stephen Fischer-Galați, “Romanian Nationalism,” in Nationalism in Eastern Europe, ed. Peter Sugar and Ivo Lederer (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969), 389; Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 4; Ovidiu Buruiană, “Cea din urmă oaste: Consideraţii asupra elitelor Partidului Naţional Liberal în România interbelică,” in România interbelică: Modernizare politico-instituțională și discurs național, ed. Sorin Radu and Oliver Jens Schmitt (Bucharest: Polirom, 2023), 333–63.

9. Keith Hitchins, Ionel Brătianu: Romania, Series Makers of the Modern World: The Peace Conferences of 1919–23 and their Aftermath (London: Haus Publishing, 2011), 82.

10. This is a brief snapshot of events. Keith Hitchins details the steps to union by each province in Rumania, 1866–1947 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1994); other sources are Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977); Cristina Florea, “City of Dreams, Land of Longing: Czernowitz and Bukovina at the Crossroads of Empires” (PhD thesis, Princeton University, 2016); Alberto Basciani, La difficile unione. La Bessarabia e la Grande Romania 1918–1940 (Rome: Aracne, 2005); Svetlana Suveica, Post-Imperial Encounters: Transnational Designs of Bessarabia in Paris and Elsewhere, 1917–1922 (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022).

11. For roughly contemporary examples see Constantin Kirițescu, Istoria războiului pentru Întregirea României (Bucharest: Editura Casei Școalelor, 1925); C. de S. Wainright, Gogu Negulesco, and T. Tileston Wells, Rumania’s Sacrifice: Her Past, Present, and Future (New York: The Century Co., 1918).

12. See Dimitrie Gusti, ed., Enciclopedia României. Vol. 1 (Bucharest: Imprimeria naţională, 1938).

13. In Romanian the terminology Old Kingdom (i.e., vechiul regat) refers to prewar Romania.

14. Bogdan Murgescu, România și Europa: Acumularea Decalajelor Economice (1500–2010) (Bucharest: Editura Polirom, 2010), 206.

15. Transylvania remained a poor area (arguably the poorest) when compared to other parts of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. For an analysis of private institutions in the aftermath of war see Máté Rigó, “The Long First World War and the Survival of Business Elites in East-Central Europe: Transylvania’s Industrial Boom and the Enrichment of Economic Elites,” European Review of History 24, no. 2 (2017): 250–72; on the growth of public and private institutions, see Scott Eddie, “Economic Policy and Economic Development in Austria-Hungary, 1867–1913,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe from the Decline of the Roman Empire, ed. Peter Mathias and Sidney Pollard (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 814–86.

16. Numerous studies have discussed these aspects of the “peasant question” in interwar Romania. See for example David Mitrany, The Land and the Peasant in Rumania: The War and Agrarian Reform (1917–1921) (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1930); H. L. Roberts, Rumania: Political Problems of an Agrarian State (Hamden: Archon Books, 1969); Sorin Radu and Oliver Jens Schmitt, eds., Politics and Peasants in Interwar Romania: Perceptions, Mentalities, Propaganda (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017); Constantin Iordachi, “The Agrarian Question in Romania, 1744–1921,” in The Routledge Handbook of Balkan and Southeast European History, ed. John Lampe and Ulf Brunnbauer (London: Routledge, 2020); Dietmar Müller, Staatsbürger auf Widerruf. Juden und Muslime als Alteritätspartner im rumänischen und serbischen Nationscode. Ethnonationale Staatsbürgerkonzepte 1878–1941 (Wiesbden: Harrassowitz, 2005). For an overview of rural governance in the interwar Europe, see Kiran Klaus Patel, “The Green Heart of Governance: Rural Europe during the Interwar Years in a Global Perspective,” in Governing the Rural in Interwar Europe, ed. Liesbeth van de Grift and Amalia Ribi Forclaz (London: Routledge, 2017), 1–23; Jeremy Burchardt, “Editorial: Rurality, Modernity and National Identity between the Wars,” Rural History 21, no. 2 (2010).

17. See Hitchins, Rumania, 1866–1947, 222–346.

18. Keith Hitchins gives an excellent summary of various political groups in Rumania, 1866–1947, 387–98. For studies regarding the political landscape in Romanian historiography see Ovidiu Buruiană, Construind opoziţia: Istoria politică a Partidului Naţional Liberal între anii 1927 şi 1933 (Iași: Editura Universitatii “Alexandru Ioana Cuza,” 2013); Florin Müller, ed., Elite parlamentare şi dinamica electorală în România (1919–1937) (Bucharest: Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti, 2009); Florian Kührer-Wielach, Siebenbürgen ohne Siebenbürger (Oldenburg: De Gruyter, 2013).

19. Pieter M. Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 5.

20. Maria Bucur, Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2002); Marius Turda, “‘To End the Degeneration of a Nation:’ Debates on Eugenic Sterilization in Interwar Romania,” Medical History 53, no. 1 (2009): 77–104; Marius Turda, “Conservative Palingenesis and Cultural Modernism in Early Twentieth Century Romania,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 9, no. 4 (2008): 437–53; Marius Turda, “Social Hygiene and Public Health in Hungary and Romania, 1920–1940,” Gesundheitswesen 68 (2006): 496–97; Zoltán Rostás, Sala Luminoasă: Primii Monografişti ai Şcolii Gustiene (Bucharest: Editura Paideia, 2003); Raluca Musat, “Sociologists and the Transformation of Peasantry in Romania, 1925–1940” (PhD thesis, University College London, 2011); Raluca Musat “‘To Cure, Uplift, and Ennoble the Village:’ Militant Sociology in the Romanian Countryside, 1934–1938,” East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 27, no. 3 (August 2013): 353–75; Emilia Plosceanu, “Corriger et proteger: La dynamique des reseaux reformateurs en Roumanie (1900–1950)” (PhD thesis, EHESS Paris, June 23, 2014).

21. On interwar nationalization see Rogers Brubaker, “Nationalizing States in the Old ‘New Europe’—and the New,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 19, no. 2 (1996), 411–37. Some relevant studies on minority policies, citizenship, antisemitism, and far-right are Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania; Raul Cârstocea, “Breaking the Teeth of Time: Mythical Time and the ‘Terror of History’ in the Rhetoric of the Legionary Movement in Interwar Romania,” Journal of Modern European History 13, no. 1 (2015): 79–97; Roland Clark, Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); on social categories and citizenship, see Gábor Egry, “The World Between Us: State Security and the Negotiation of Social Categories in Interwar Romania,” East Central Europe 44, no. 1 (June 23, 2017): 17–46; Constantin Iordachi, “Citizenship and National Identity in Romania. A Historical Overview,” Regio Yearbook (2003): 3–34; Karen Barkey, “Negotiated Paths to Nationhood: A Comparison of Hungary and Romania in the Early Twentieth Century,” East European Politics and Societies 14 (2009): 497–531.

22. Neville Wyle, Melanie Oppenheimer, and James Crossland, eds., The Red Cross Movement: Myths, Practices and Turning Points (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2019).

23. Davide Rodogno, Night on Earth: A History of International Humanitarianism in the Near East, 1918–1930 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 23.

24. Heather Jones, “The Great War: How 1914–18 Changes the Relationship between War and Civilians,” The RUSI Journal 159, no. 4 (2014): 84–91.

25. Woodrow Wilson, “Appeal for Neutrality,” The Annals of America: 491–2.

26. See Branden Little, “Band of Crusaders: American Humanitarians, the Great War, and the Remaking of the World” (PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2009), 75–96; Elisabeth Piller, “German Child Distress, US Humanitarian Aid and Revisionist Politics, 1918–24,” Journal of Contemporary History (June 2016): 1–34.

27. Julia Irwin, Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013).

28. Transcript of Joint Address to Congress Leading to a Declaration of War Against Germany, 1917. Accessed at https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=61&page=transcript.

29. On progressivism, see Daniel Rodgers, “An Age of Social Politics,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 250–73; Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); John Milton Cooper Jr., ed., Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson: Progressivism, Internationalism, War, and Peace (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

30. Irwin, Making the World Safe, 71.

31. Irwin, Making the World Safe, 72.

32. Julia Irwin, “Taming Total War: Great War–Era American Humanitarianism and Its Legacies,” Diplomatic History 38, no. 4 (September 2014): 763–75.

33. Irwin, Making the World Safe, 8–9; Clara Barton, A Story of the Red Cross: Glimpses of Field Work (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1927); Foster Rhea Dulles, The American Red Cross: A History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press Publishers, 1950); Marian Moser Jones, The American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

34. Clotilde Druelle, Feeding Occupied France during World War I: Herbert Hoover and the Blockade (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Elisabeth Piller, “Beyond Hoover. Rewriting the History of the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB) through Female Involvement,” The International History Review 45, no. 1 (2023): 202–24.

35. Kendrick Clements, The Life of Herbert Hoover: Imperfect Visionary, 1918–1928 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 72.

36. Taken from Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 21.

37. Cullather, The Hungry World, 22.

38. Cullather, The Hungry World, 22.

39. For emphasis on Herbert Hoover’s financial planning around aid, see Norman Gordon Levin, Jr., Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America’s Response to War and Revolution (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1968); Arno Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918–1919 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968).

40. Taken from Clements, The Life of Herbert Hoover, 73.

41. This meeting of agendas was emphasized in the case of relief of Russia; Bertrand Patenaude, The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 87; Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982), 75–7, 117–8; Benjamin Weissman, Herbert Hoover and Famine Relief to Soviet Russia, 1921–1923 (Stanford: Hoover Institution, 1974).

42. For an excellent analysis of the birth of the JDC and its work in the interwar period, see Jaclyn Granick, International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

43. Yehuda Bauer, My Brother’s Keeper: A History of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1929–1939 (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974), 3–7.

44. Jaclyn Granick, “Waging Relief: The Politics and Logistics of American Jewish War Relief in Europe and the Near East (1914–1918),” First World War Studies 5, no. 1 (2014): 55–68.

45. Granick, “Waging Relief,” 56.

46. On continuities and connections from relief to rehabilitation in history of humanitarianism, see Silvia Salvatici, A History of Humanitarianism, 1755–1989: In the Name of Others (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2019); Rodogno, Night on Earth.

47. Clements, The Life of Herbert Hoover, 3.

48. Herbert Hoover, “Children’s Relief and Democracy,” American Relief Administration Bulletin, series 2, no. 15 (August 1921).

49. Timothy Walch, Uncommon Americans: The Lives and Legacies of Herbert and Lou Henry Hoover (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003), 71.

50. Julia Irwin, “Sauvons les Bébés: Child Health and US Humanitarian Aid in the First World Era,” Bulletin of History of Medicine 86, no. 1 (2011): 55; idea of distant suffering found in Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media, and Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

51. Charlotte F. Kett, “International Development of Junior Red Cross,” The Red Cross Courier, August 15, 1925.

52. Lyman Bryson, “A Victory Yet to be Won,” Junior Red Cross News I (1919–1920), Box 449, American Red Cross Magazines, The National Archives at College Park (hereafter NARA), College Park, MD, USA.

53. This is an idea highlighted also in Helke Rausch, “Nongovernmental Organizations and Philanthropies,” in The Interwar World, ed. Andrew Denning and Heidi J. S. Tworek (London: Routledge, 2024); see further Helke Rausch and John Krige, eds., American Foundations and the Coproduction of World Order in the 20th Century (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012).

54. Elisabeth Van Meer, Casper Andersen, and Ludwig Goldschmidt Pedersen, “Science, Health and American Money. Small State Strategies in Interwar Czechoslovakia and Denmark,” in The Politics of Smallness in Modern Europe: Size, Identity and International Relations since 1800, ed. Samuël Kruizinga (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 99.

55. Beardsley Ruml, “Recent Trends in Social Science,” in The New Social Science, ed. Leonard R. White (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1930), 99–111; Merle Curti, American Philanthropy Abroad: A History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963), 305–306; Katharina Rietzler, “Before the Cultural Cold Wars: American Philanthropy and Cultural Diplomacy in the Interwar Years,” Historical Research 84, no. 22 (2011): 148–64.

56. See for example the various essays written by Ernest P. Bicknell, the ARC director during the war, and published in The Red Cross Courier: Ernest P. Bicknell, “When Disease Joined in War Against Serbia,” The Red Cross Courier, May 1936; Ernest P. Bicknell, “From Kief to Bucharest in War Time,” The Red Cross Courier, April 1936; Ernest P. Bicknell, “The Convent of Czenstochowa—Poland in Wartime,” The Red Cross Courier, January 1936.

57. Friederike Kind-Kovács, “The Great War, the Child’s Body and the American Red Cross,” European Review of History 23, no. 1–2 (2016): 34.

58. Matthew Lloyd Adams, “Herbert Hoover and the Organization of the American Relief Effort in Poland (1919–1923),” European Journal of American Studies 4, no. 2 (2009): 13.

59. Taken from Bertrand Patenaude, “Race against Anarchy: Even after the Great War Ended, Famine and Chaos Threatened Europe. Herbert Hoover Rescued the Continent, Reviving Trade, Rebuilding Infrastructure, and Restoring Economic Order, Holding a Budding Bolshevism in Check,” Hoover Digest, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 183+.

60. See Diana Mishkova, Beyond Balkanism: The Scholarly Politics of Region Making (London: Routledge, 2018); Maria Todorova, “The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of Eastern European Nationalism,” Slavic Review 64, no. 1(2005): 140–64; Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009).