The NGO CARE and food aid from America, 1945–80: 'Showered with kindness'?

By Heike Wieters

This book provides a historical account of the NGO CARE as one of the largest humanitarian NGOs worldwide from 1945 to 1980. Readers interested in international relations and humanitarian hunger prevention are provided with fascinating insights into the economic and business related aspects of Western non-governmental politics, fundraising and philanthropic giving in this field. Not only does the book contributes to ongoing research about the rise of NGOs in the international realm, it also offers very rich empirical material on the political implications of private and governmental international aid in a world marked by the order of the Cold War, decolonialization processes and the struggle of so called “Third World Countries” to catch up with modern Western consumer societies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781526117236

Book preview

Introduction

Charity is a big business and as such it should be run with business efficiency.¹

Richard Reuter, 1953

In 1990 Harold Gauer, former regional director of CARE in the American Midwest, published his professional memoirs entitled Selling Big Charity: The Story of C.A.R.E. In this book Gauer recalls his first CARE conference in the agency’s New York headquarters in 1950. Having gained the impression that out-of-towners like him would do well to just keep quiet and listen, Gauer silently observed how during the meeting a parade of home office folk took turns telling the story of their jobs and how they did them. Which according to them was very capably indeed. After the CARE delegates from other US cities had responded with tales of their own special local situations and with copious advice on how to run the home office, a group of young intense managers from the Lever Brothers Company showed up:

They described a gigantic national advertising promotion involving Bob Hope, the National Broadcasting System, Young and Rubicam, and a host of spearbearers. People would send soap wrappers to CARE and in response CARE would send Lever Brothers soap to the needy abroad. At day’s end, a select group [of CARE employees] retired through the back way, across a narrow canyon between tall buildings called Exchange Place, to the Hargus Cafe. The Lever Brothers fellows were buying. The place featured a stock ticker at the front with tickertape flowing into a wastebasket, and gibsons which were martinis with an onion, merely, and free platters of french fried meatballs. There was more talk about the soap wrapper promotion and extravagant predictions by the field people on how well the idea would play in their areas.²

This brief scene – which might possibly remind readers fond of pop culture of the TV series Mad Men – provides a highly subjective, yet very interesting insight into what was, at the time, one of the largest humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) worldwide. Aware and proud of CARE’s charitable purpose, its central role in global humanitarian relief, and its public visibility in international politics, Gauer alludes to various aspects of humanitarian practice that are usually ignored or hidden. Not only does he discuss money, fundraising, and CARE’s business relations with commercial enterprises, broadcasting networks, and advertising agencies, but he also confronts us with organizational hierarchies, internal networks among co-workers, and the exclusive parties where these networks were forged and extended. While mostly ironic in tone, seemingly random in its choice of anecdote, and written from an idiosyncratic third-person perspective, Gauer’s book shows that caring for others in a humanitarian NGO is a comfortable bedfellow with making money, professionalism, organizational growth, and a business-like attitude.

Whereas Gauer’s perspective and his style of writing may have been unique, his perception of charity as business certainly was not. As indicated by the opening quote from CARE’s third executive director, Richard Reuter, many of those involved in CARE felt that helping others and engaging in humanitarian relief required much more than goodwill. They considered CARE’s work to be a serious business, and humanitarian engagement to be an activity that demanded entrepreneurial skills, steady professionalization, and a continuous expansion of the organization, its impact and its visibility.

This contemporary view of charity as business has informed my understanding of CARE. Despite it being a non-profit enterprise – promoting contemporary humanitarian ideas and specific practices that were (and still are) identified with altruistic behavior and normative notions of global solidarity – CARE operated in a market environment. As such, it competed with other agencies for dollars, ideas, publicity, and people. In addition, CARE had to deal with challenges similar to any business enterprise: management and corporate governance, acquisition and finance, technology and innovation, marketing and distribution, accounting and communication, fundraising and staffing; all alongside the need to respond to changing and globalizing markets.³ In writing this book on CARE, I have thus profited greatly from methodological tools, concepts, and ideas originating in business history, organizational sociology, non-profit research, and institutional theory.⁴ These readings have helped me make sense of CARE as both a value-driven humanitarian player, and a highly professional non-profit enterprise in the expanding international humanitarian relief and development aid sectors in the second half of the twentieth century.⁵

Focusing on the evolution of CARE from 1945, when it was founded as the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe as a temporary private American relief organization, to 1980, by which time it had been transformed into CARE International, this book looks at CARE from two angles. The first is the angle of modern organizational history, meaning that it is concerned with CARE’s development as a singular organization with its own particular mission, internal governance, processes of decision making, as well as economic strategies and administrative routines. This perspective includes individual people and their respective roles in CARE’s development. Secondly, this book aims to add a historical-empirical bottom-up perspective to the increasingly popular (but rather abstract) scholarly narrative of NGOs successfully finding their niche in the evolving global nervous system of humanitarian affairs.⁶ In recent years, many scholars have suggested that we are witnessing a gradual retreat of the state,⁷ or the evolution of new global modes of governance without government⁸ in many sectors of society. The apparent evolution in the role of the state is often linked to the absolute increase in the number, size, and social impact of non-state actors since the 1920s on both national and international stages.⁹ Given that the twentieth century was marked by two world wars, the bipolar international order of the Cold War, together with the turbulence of decolonization and sundry civil wars, it should not surprise us that private agencies subsequently became preeminent in the realms of conflict-related humanitarian relief, international disaster relief, and hunger prevention. Nevertheless, the idea of a significant rise of NGOs in the global provision of humanitarian assistance provides us only with a macro-perspective. Such a view from the top is certainly useful in seeing the big picture.¹⁰ However, by using CARE as a bridge between a macro-perspective focusing on changing structures of humanitarian governance after 1945, and a micro-perspective that gives full recognition to the organization itself and to the individuals that shaped it, this book provides a complementary standpoint. Through CARE and its specific agency, both changing relations to government players, other NGOs, and corporate organizations, and these players’ joint impact on alterations to the institutional foundations and normative rules of humanitarian governance during the second half of the twentieth century are analyzed.

CARE proves a rich source of material for shedding light on both particular events and general trends in humanitarian governance during the period under investigation. Having started out as a temporary private voluntary venture geared toward delivering food packages to needy individuals in Europe after the Second World War, the agency soon managed to become a highly prominent player in American overseas relief work.¹¹ As the Cold War increased in intensity, private relief to Europeans had a threefold effect. First, it helped to significantly alleviate the post-war food crisis. Secondly, it enlisted private Americans into the international relief drive. Thirdly, it contributed to the creation of a positive image of the United States and its citizens abroad. Given that official US reconstruction programs in Europe were predominantly geared toward the reconfiguration of markets and infrastructure, private relief – and CARE packages in particular – conveyed the message that the American people cared enough to provide even former enemies with food. In addition, American foodstuffs and sanitary products, such as Lever Brothers soap, gave the recipients of CARE packages a taste of and displayed the variety of Western products, thus serving as a harbinger of the eventual rise of global America’s consumer culture overseas.¹²

As the 1950s approached, physical want in Western Europe began to wane. With its original mission becoming irrelevant, but still eager to put its skills and organizational apparatus to use, CARE’s leaders foresaw the transition of private and public American relief activities from Europe to the so-called developing countries. CARE’s managers grasped fairly quickly that there was a growing yet untapped market in overseas aid. While international relief and official (development) aid soon became an integral part of both international diplomacy and many governments’ foreign policies, many private players understood that there was room enough to accommodate private initiative. Changing its name into Cooperative for American Relief to Everywhere, CARE reoriented its focus.

By connecting private humanitarian relief activities with new institutions, public funding, and ideas drawn from modernization and development theories, the agency was instrumental in constructing a new type of public–private partnership in the field of food aid distribution. CARE’s leaders consciously forged alliances with US agricultural producers, the US government, other NGOs, and political leaders all over the world. They thereby turned CARE into a major advocate for the use and distribution of American agricultural products in the Global South. As a food relief agency, CARE was present during the wars in Korea and Vietnam, at the Suez crisis in Egypt, in Colombia and Nicaragua, and in more than four dozen other countries around the world by the late 1970s. The organization’s members took part in United Nations global conferences, organized and joined international charity campaigns, and dined with political and corporate leaders at global fundraisers. With hundreds of paid officers, and a multi-million dollar annual turnover, CARE also became a substantial economic player: between 1946 and 1951, CARE had already delivered private aid worth almost US$120 million to other nations (more than US$1 billion in 2015 prices). By 1975, its annual income alone exceeded US$170 million (US$749 million in 2015 prices).¹³ Having started with a single standard package containing canned lard, sugar, oil, and other rather modest consumer goods, CARE had, by the late 1970s, broadened its portfolio to include emergency food aid, community building, the large-scale feeding of schools, medical aid programs, educational activities, volunteer training, and various forms of development consulting.

This organizational perspective, from small to large, from transatlantic to global – together with the timeframe under discussion – may suggest that this book simply narrates an unequivocal NGO success story: a teleological tale of continuity, expansion, and prosperity in the golden era of the post-war economic boom.¹⁴ However, such a portrayal would be a one-dimensional account, as CARE’s development is inexplicable without its many failures, crises, and manifold roads not taken. As an organization, CARE struggled repeatedly for its own survival. It came perilously close to bankruptcy on more than one occasion, and countless internal and external critics called into question its business model, its legitimacy as a private relief organization, and its humanitarian achievements. Moreover, both success and failure are highly contingent and subjective categories. For decades scholars have debated the practices, ideas, achievements, and detrimental effects of Western charitable and humanitarian engagement – food aid in particular.¹⁵ The many dilemmas of humanitarian aid, such as the political or economic implications of relief in a politically bipolar world, the asynchronous relations between donors and recipients (or NGOs and governments), as well as ethical questions regarding advertising practices, the choice of aid projects, and the internal use of funds have all troubled both researchers and practitioners.¹⁶ Hence, the history of CARE is also one of conflict and competition between CARE itself and the many other NGOs, international organizations, enterprises, and government bodies that had stakes in international humanitarian action, hunger prevention, and development throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Being, as it was, closely embedded in an institutional field, CARE constantly constructed and reconfigured its institutional environment through conflict, communication, financial transfers, and the administrative practices it shared with the players mentioned above.¹⁷

Just as importantly, there was also conflict among the individuals who constituted CARE. As Harold Gauer reminds us, no organization is a homogeneous entity. Active CARE members were to be found in various functions and positions across the globe: CARE board members, management in the New York head office, field representatives all over the United States, overseas officers and local staff working in the CARE missions abroad. These several hundred employees experienced and represented the organization in manifold different ways. They were willing to fight for their ideas and beliefs, as well as for their professional networks and, crucially, their paychecks.¹⁸ Indeed, organizations as social systems do not function despite the messy, multifaceted humanness of actors, but because of it.¹⁹ From its inception, CARE’s members, directors, and employees cooperated and competed, argued and agreed, negotiated and conspired with each other, and with colleagues from other NGOs, governments, and international organizations. This was all in order to push a general humanitarian agenda, the organization’s specific goals, and their individual career interests. They were a part of the tremendous internationalization, institutionalization, and rationalization of global affairs in the twentieth century and adapted their organizations to a constantly changing environment, new social, political, and technical trends, new frames of knowledge, and volatile economic circumstances.²⁰

In order to do justice to CARE’s growing dimensions and to try to make sense of the various challenges arising from international operations, I have complemented the five main chapters on CARE’s organizational development from 1945 to 1980 with three case studies. These chapters specifically focus on CARE operations overseas, on communications between head and foreign offices, and on the way CARE conducted its business in a foreign environment. The first case study on Korea sheds light on CARE’s transition from Europe to everywhere and on the way the organization positioned itself in the precarious diplomatic environment of the Cold War. The second case study deals with Egypt. It analyzes CARE’s overseas operations, highlights the reasons for its exponential growth in the 1950s and 1960s, and shows how the new public–private partnership in the field of food relief came about. The last chapter on CARE and the Peace Corps in Colombia provides deeper insights into the difficulties CARE experienced with extending its portfolio from food relief to development consulting. Other case studies could have been chosen, of course. The Philippines (where CARE started operating in 1949), Vietnam (1954), or Lesotho (1969) would certainly have offered highly interesting perspectives and insights into humanitarian dilemmas and operational conflicts as well. However, when studying an agency that has had offices on practically every continent, one must inevitably single out certain examples. The case studies in this book are thus exemplary, but I have done my utmost to do justice to CARE’s international operations, its various types of humanitarian practice, as well as to the contemporaries’ diverse perspectives and their historical frames of knowledge. Hence, this book tells CARE’s story on two different yet connected levels: first as a history of individuals and their interactions, conflicts, initiatives, and alliances within CARE, and secondly as an organizational history focusing on institutional networks, CARE’s role in international diplomacy, and its embeddedness in the emerging new humanitarian international order of the second half of the twentieth century.²¹

The American tradition of voluntary overseas relief – perspectives

Terms and concepts are not neutral. They are instead imbued with meaning and reflect the changing nature of human ideas and practices.²² This is equally true for the term non-governmental organization. While I have thus far been using the term to classify CARE and other private relief organizations, it is important to underscore that NGO is first and foremost a generic concept that reflects a specific ideal model of state–society relations. Originating from the United Nations’ classification system, it marked a clear divide between states, international organizations, and all other (presumably minor) players that concerned themselves with international politics.²³ However, outside the sphere of international affairs and the scholarly field of international relations theory, the term NGO was far less common for most of the twentieth century. CARE, like most other American relief organizations, referred to itself as a private voluntary agency, or sometimes as a [humanitarian] non-profit organization. Both terms are linked to a particular American charitable tradition and institutional culture of voluntary overseas relief.²⁴ Naturally, this tradition has been shaped by transnational influences and the international circulation of ideas, goods, and people.²⁵ However, specific American legislative processes, cultural norms, and particular social and economic realities have left a visible imprint on the ideas, practices, and institutional configuration of voluntary associations in the United States.²⁶

The specific form of American humanitarian action abroad dealt with in this book dates back to the late eighteenth and nineteenth century.²⁷ Emily S. Rosenberg and others have convincingly argued that the first philanthropic activities outside of the United States were often conducted by religious organizations that wanted to tackle not only perceived spiritual needs, but also all kinds of physical diseases born out of poverty, hunger, and purported backwardness. Over time, many of these religious organizations gradually developed a more secular, professional-scientific cast toward the field of relief work.²⁸ With the world constantly shrinking thanks to advances in transportation, commodity markets, and communications, the task of spreading the American dream to other less affluent societies became increasingly important to these organizations.²⁹ By broadening their missions from the religiously oriented to the increasingly universalistic (simultaneously often maintaining a religious bias), these proto-humanitarian missionary groups eventually reoriented their ideas and practice toward the wellbeing of all of mankind in a broader sense.³⁰

Both nineteenth- and twentieth-century contemporary discourse, together with widely read authors of international relations theory, tended to assume that NGOs or private voluntary agencies were categorically different and independent from government institutions.³¹ After all, the very concept of non-governmental organizations is unthinkable without the nation-state and national governmental institutions representing the other side of the coin. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that this divide between voluntary agencies representing civil society and government bodies representing the nation-state is not as clear cut as academic theory and popular discourse may suggest.³² National governments have been powerful and important partners for private humanitarian organizations for over a century, facilitating access to foreign countries and providing both infrastructure and political leverage in international diplomacy.³³ Despite a traditional rhetoric indicating otherwise, most American voluntary agencies have cooperated very closely with governments (national and foreign) by accepting juridical, diplomatic, and political guidance, alongside building joint networks and accepting direct financial subsidies. In addition, the barrier between the sectors was, in terms of careers, permeable, with leaders of humanitarian NGOs often switching from jobs in the non-profit sector to government posts and back again.

The First World War was undoubtedly instrumental in fostering new forms of cooperation between NGOs and governments.³⁴ The atrocities and hardship caused by industrial warfare led to a dramatic surge in the number of private humanitarian organizations both in the United States and in Europe, a fact that points toward the relationship between the bellicosity of states and private relief activity in modern societies. While many other established forms of cross-border philanthropy (for example in the arts or education sector) stalled during the war, the era of large-scale private humanitarian involvement had just begun.³⁵

It was against the backdrop of war and interwar upheaval that relations between private voluntary organizations, government, and military players became increasingly formalized.³⁶ In the United States new sophisticated forms of government–NGO cooperation emerged – including transnational arrangements, as Tammy M. Proctor has recently shown.³⁷ Under the auspices of the semi-governmental American Relief Administration (ARA), established by President Wilson in early 1919, and the American Red Cross, a large number of private relief agencies coordinated their efforts to channel relief goods from American to European ports in order to feed and clothe civilians affected by war.³⁸ This relief drive marked a turning point in American humanitarian activities abroad. Somewhat paradoxically, it heralded the unprecedented involvement of individuals and civil society organizations in international relief activities, while concurrently food relief became increasingly politicized, with humanitarian relief soon becoming a significant anti-Bolshevik foreign policy tool.³⁹ The post-war relief drive demonstrated the effectiveness of public–private humanitarian coordination and established a precedent for large-scale transfers of public funds through private players.

While many of these arrangements stalled during the interwar years, and – as we shall see – new and ever-closer forms of institutional cooperation developed after the Second World War between voluntary agencies and international governments, the overall trend is clear. It is overly simplistic to posit a retreat of the state in the area of humanitarian relief and foreign aid in the second half of the twentieth century. Rather, NGOs and governments developed increasingly sophisticated forms of cooperation, financial transfers, and joint institutional patterns. As statistics for the United States show, government co-funding of private voluntary activity has constantly increased since the 1920s, for the first time exceeding 50 percent of all non-profit expenditures by the mid-1960s.⁴⁰ These macro-data certainly need further qualitative interpretation, particularly in regards to the practical (political) effects of public funding on NGO agencies in different fields. However, the fact that economic transfers from the public to the private sector have indeed increased quite remarkably during the period of investigation clearly supports one of the central hypotheses of this book: that the rise of (humanitarian) NGOs in the twentieth century was hardly detached from the politics, legal frameworks, and funding strategies of national governments and their administrations. On the contrary, NGOs such as CARE developed into highly professional private international relief agencies, not despite or in antagonism to the nation-state, but instead as integral partners to government.

Hence, while the upcoming eight chapters focus on CARE as a particular organization with a distinct political, economic, and organizational agenda in the field of humanitarian food relief and development aid, I have put much emphasis on its innate embeddedness in social relations to partners and competitors on both sides of the somewhat blurry public–private divide. Against this backdrop, CARE’s history serves as a revealing case study, one that helps to unravel the multifaceted institutional connections and interdependencies between the diverse players that had stakes in twentieth-century international humanitarianism.

Notes

1  Special Collections, Rutgers University Archives, Papers of the American Council of Voluntary Agencies for Foreign Service (henceforth ACVAFS), Box 33, copy of testimony of Richard W. Reuter of CARE presented before the New York State Joint Legislative Committee at a public hearing, Wednesday, December 16, 1953.

2  Harold Gauer, Selling Big Charity. The Story of C.A.R.E, Glendale, WI, 1990, pp. 16–17.

3  Henry B. Hansmann, The Role of Nonprofit Enterprise, The Yale Law Journal 89 (1980), pp. 835–901 (p. 838); Hartmut Berghoff, Moderne Unternehmensgeschichte. Eine themen- und theorieorientierte Einführung, Paderborn, 2004, pp. 22–9; Eleanor Brown and Al Slivinski, Nonprofit Organizations and the Market, in Walter W. Powell and Richard Steinberg (eds.), The Nonprofit Sector. A Research Handbook, New Haven, CT, 2006, pp. 140–58; Burton Allen Weisbrod, The Nonprofit Mission and its Financing. Growing Links between Nonprofits and the Rest of the Economy, in Burton Allen Weisbrod (ed.), To Profit or not to Profit. The Commercial Transformation of the Nonprofit Sector, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 1–22 (p. 4); David C. Hammack and Dennis R. Young, Introduction. Perspectives on Nonprofits in the Marketplace, in David C. Hammack and Dennis R. Young (eds.), Nonprofit Organizations in a Market Economy. Understanding New Roles, Issues, and Trends, San Francisco, 1993, pp. 1–19; Atina Grossmann, Grams, Calories, and Food: Languages of Victimization, Entitlement, and Human Rights in Occupied Germany, 1945–1949, Central European History 44.1 (2011), pp. 118–48.

4  See, for example, Louis Galambos, Nonprofit Organizations and the Emergence of America’s Corporate Commonwealth in the Twentieth Century, in David C. Hammack and Dennis R. Young (eds.), Nonprofit Organizations in a Market Economy. Understanding New Roles, Issues, and Trends, San Francisco, 1993, pp. 82–104 (p. 87); Susan Rose-Ackerman, Altruism, Ideological Entrepreneurs and the Non-profit Firm, Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations 8.2 (1997), pp. 120–34; Philip Scranton and Patrick Fridenson, Reimagining Business History, Baltimore, MD, 2013; Werner Plumpe, Die Unwahrscheinlichkeit des Jubiläums – oder: warum Unternehmen nur historisch erklärt werden können, in Joachim Ehmer (ed.), Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Berlin, 2003, pp. 143–58.

5  Patrick Fridenson, Business History and History, in Geoffrey Jones and Jonathan Zeitlin (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Business History, Oxford, 2008, pp. 9–36.

6  Kevin O’Sullivan, A ‘Global Nervous System:’ The Rise and Rise of European Humanitarian NGOs, 1945–1985, in Marc Frey et al. (eds.), International Organizations and Development, 1945–1990, Basingstoke, 2014, pp. 196–219.

7  Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State. The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy, Cambridge, 1996.

8  See James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel (eds.), Governance without Government. Order and Change in World Politics, Cambridge, 1992.

9  Thomas Risse-Kappen (ed.), Bringing Transnational Relations Back In. Non-State Actors, Domestic Structures, and International Institutions, Cambridge and New York, 1995; Bob Reinalda, The Ashgate Research Companion to Non-State Actors, Burlington, VT, 2011; Lester M. Salamon, The Rise of the Nonprofit Sector, Foreign Affairs 73.4 (1994), pp. 94–124; Helmut K. Anheier and Lester M. Salamon, The Nonprofit Sector in Comparative Perspective, in Walter W. Powell and Richard Steinberg (eds.), The Nonprofit Sector. A Research Handbook, New Haven, CT, 2006, pp. 89–114.

10  Kim D. Reimann, A View from the Top: International Politics, Norms and the Worldwide Growth of NGOs, International Studies Quarterly 50.1 (2006), pp. 45–67; Shaughn McArthur, Global Governance and the Rise of NGOs, Asian Journal of Public Affairs 2.1 (2008), pp. 54–67.

11  Paul Baur, From Victim to Partner: CARE and the Portrayal of Postwar Germany, in Katharina Gerund and Heike Paul (eds.), Die amerikanische Reeducation-Politik nach 1945. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf America’s Germany, Bielefeld, 2014, pp. pp. 117–25.

12  Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider (eds.), Global America? The Cultural Consequences of Globalization, Liverpool, 2003; Patrick J. Hearden, Architects of Globalism. Building a New World Order during World War II, Fayetteville, AK, 2002; Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire. America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe, Cambridge, MA, 2006.

13  National Archives II at Maryland, United States (henceforth NARA), RG 469, UD 658-A, Box 1, CARE Schedule ICR (compiled for ACVFA), resources received for foreign operations 1946–1952, May 18, 1953; the exact figure was US$119,380,894. Real price commodity value (1951 US$ converted to 2015 US$) would be approximately US$1,090,000,000; see http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/relativevalue.php (accessed June 6, 2016); for CARE’s 1975 income, see Bureau for Population and Humanitarian Assistance, Office of Private Voluntary Cooperation of the Department of State (ed.), Voluntary Foreign Aid Programs 1975, Washington DC, 1975, p. 13.

14  Catherine R. Schenk, International Economic Relations since 1945, London, 2011, pp. 9–19; Stanley Buder, Capitalizing on Change. A Social History of American Business, Chapel Hill, NC, 2009, pp. 294–320; John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, Boston, 1998 [1958].

15  David Rieff, The Humanitarian Trap, World Policy Journal 12.4 (1995), pp. 1–11; Bernard Hours, NGOs and the Victim Industry, Monde Diplomatique, November 2008, https://mondediplo.com/2008/11/14ngos (accessed September 11, 2015); see also R. Glenn Hubbard and William R. Duggan, Can Business Save the World? Hard Truths about Ending Poverty, New York and Chichester, 2009; Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid. Why Aid is not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa, New York, 2009.

16  See the introduction as well as the essays in Johannes Paulmann (ed.), Dilemmas of Humanitarian Aid in the Twentieth Century, Corby, 2016.

17  Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio, ‘The Iron Cage Revisited.’ Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields, American Sociological Review 48.2 (1983), pp. 147–60 (p. 148); Stefanie Middendorf, Ulrike Schultz and Corinna R. Unger, Institutional History Rediscovered: Observing Organizations’ Behavior in Times of Change, Comparativ 24.1 (2014), pp. 8–17.

18  Renate Mayntz and Fritz Wilhelm Scharpf, Der Ansatz des akteurszentrierten Institutionalismus, in Renate Mayntz and Fritz Wilhelm Scharpf (eds.), Gesellschaftliche Selbstregelung und politische Steuerung, Frankfurt and New York, 1995, pp. 39–72; see also Thomas Welskopp, Commentary. Institutional History Rediscovered. Observing Organizations’ Behavior in Times of Change, Comparativ 24.1 (2014), pp. 81–6 (p. 83).

19  Kenneth Lipartito and David B. Sicilia, Introduction. Crossing Corporate Boundaries, in Kenneth Lipartito and David B. Sicilia (eds.), Constructing Corporate America. History, Politics, Culture, Oxford, 2004, pp. 1–26 (p. 15).

20  Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity, A History of Humanitarianism, Ithaca, NY, 2011, p. 21; Matthew Hilton et al., The Politics of Expertise. How NGOs Shaped Modern Britain, Oxford, 2013, pp. 54–78; Peter D. Hall, A Historical Overview of Philanthropy, Voluntary Associations, and Nonprofit Organizations in the United States 1600–2000, in Walter W. Powell and Richard Steinberg (eds.), The Nonprofit Sector. A Research Handbook, New Haven, CT, 2006, pp. 32–65 (pp. 59–60).

21  Barnett, Empire of Humanity, pp. 97–106.

22  Reinhart Koselleck, Einleitung, in Reinhart Koselleck et al. (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Vol. 1, Stuttgart, 1972, pp. xiii–xxvii.

23  Thomas Davies, NGOs. A New History of Transnational Civil Society, Oxford, 2014, p. 3; see also Volker Rittberger, Bernhard Zangl, and Andreas Kruck, Internationale Organisationen, Wiesbaden, 2013, pp. 28–31.

24  Peter D. Hall, Inventing the Nonprofit Sector and Other Essays on Philanthropy, Voluntarism, and Nonprofit Organizations, Baltimore, MD, 1992, p. 2; see also David C. Hammack, Introduction. The Growth of the Nonprofit Sector in the United States, in David C. Hammack (ed.), Making the Nonprofit Sector in the United States. A Reader, Bloomington, IN, 2000, pp. xv–xix.

25  Lawrence Jacob Friedman, Philanthropy in America. Historicism and Its Discontents, in Lawrence Jacob Friedman and Mark Douglas McGarvie (eds.), Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 1–21; on the concept of transnationalism, see Patricia Clavin, Defining Transnationalism, Contemporary European History 14.4 (2005), pp. 421–39; Christian Topalov, Les ‘reformateurs’ et leurs reseaux: enjeux d’un objet de recherche, in Christian Topalov (ed.), Laboratoires du nouveau siècle. La nébuleuse réformatrice et ses réseaux en France, 1880–1914, Paris, 1999, pp. 11–58.

26  See, for example, Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings. Social Politics in a Progressive Age, Cambridge, MA, 1998.

27  The standard study is still Merle Curti, American Philanthropy Abroad. A History, New Brunswick, NJ, 1963; see also Julia Irwin, Making the World Safe. The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening, Oxford, 2013.

28  Emily S. Rosenberg, Missions to the World. Philanthropy Abroad, in Lawrence Jacob Friedman and Mark Douglas McGarvie (eds.), Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 241–57 (p. 242); William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World. American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions, Chicago, 1987; Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility. American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China, New Haven, CT, 1984; Amanda Porterfield, Protestant Missionaries. Pioneers of American Philanthropy, in Friedman and McGarvie (eds.), Charity, pp. 49–69; Ussama Makdisi, Bringing America Back Into the Middle East. A History of the First American Missionary Encounter with the Ottoman Arab World, in Laura Ann Stoler et al. (eds.), Imperial Formations, Santa Fe, NM, and Oxford, 2007, pp. 45–75; Kathleen D. McCarthy, American Creed. Philanthropy and the Rise of Civil Society 1700–1865, Chicago, 2003.

29  Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream. American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945, New York, 1993, esp. pp. 108–21.

30  Barnett, Empire of Humanity; Peter Walker and Daniel Maxwell, Shaping the Humanitarian World, London and New York, 2009; Johannes Paulmann, Conjunctures in the History of International Humanitarian Aid during the Twentieth Century, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 4.2 (2013), pp. 215–38 (p. 217).

31  Elisabeth S. Clemens, The Constitution of Citizens. Political Theories of Non-profit Organizations, in Walter W. Powell and Richard Steinberg (eds.), The Nonprofit Sector. A Research Handbook, New Haven, CT, 2006, pp. 207–20 (pp. 209–10).

32  Jürgen Kocka, Civil Society From a Historical Perspective, European Review 12.1 (2004), pp. 65–79 (p. 69); John Keane, Global Civil Society?, Cambridge, 2003.

33  Rosenberg, Missions to the World, p. 242; Curti, American Philanthropy Abroad, pp. 229, 395; Harald Fischer-Tiné, Global Civil Society and the Forces of Empire. The Salvation Army, British Imperialism, and the ‘Prehistory’ of NGOs (ca. 1880–1920), in Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier (eds.), Competing Visions of World Order. Global Moments and Movements, 1880s–1930s, New York, 2007, pp. 29–66.

34  Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924, Cambridge, 2014.

35  Walker and Maxwell, Shaping the Humanitarian World, p. 25; from a European perspective, the founding of Save the Children in the same year marked the initialization of the first fully fledged NGO of a kind we would recognize today. This perspective is at least partly contested by Rebecca Gill, Calculating Compassion. Humanity and Relief in War, Britain 1870–1914, Manchester, 2013.

36  See, for example, Daniel Roger Maul, Silent Army of Representatives. Amerikanische NGOs und die Entstehung internationaler Mechanismen humanitärer Hilfe 1917–1939, in Christoph Meyer and Sönke Kunkel (eds.), Aufbruch ins Postkoloniale Zeitalter. Globalisierung und die außereuropäische Welt in den 1920er und 1930er Jahren, Frankfurt a.M. and New York, 2012, pp. 105–22.

37  Tammy M. Proctor, An American Enterprise? British Participation in US Food Relief Programmes (1914–1923), First World War Studies 5.1 (2014), pp. 29–42.

38  Irwin, Making the World Safe, pp. 70–8, 174–82.

39  Helen Zoe Veit, Modern Food, Moral Food. Self-control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century, Chapel Hill, NC, 2013, pp. 58, 76; Matthew Lloyd Adams, Herbert Hoover and the Organization of the American Relief Effort in Poland (1919–1923), European Journal of American Studies 2 (2009), pp. 1–16 (pp. 4–5), http://ejas.revues.org/7627 (accessed June 5, 2015); Bertrand M. Patenaude, The Big Show in Bololand. The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921, Stanford, CA, 2002; Benjamin M. Weissman, Herbert Hoover and Famine Relief to Soviet Russia, 1921–1923, Stanford, CA, 1974.

40  C. Eugene Steuerle and Virginia A. Hodgkinson, Meeting Social Needs. Comparing the Resources of the Independent Sector and Government, in Elizabeth T. Boris and C. Eugene Steuerle (eds.), Nonprofits and Government. Collaboration and Conflict, Washington DC, 2006, pp. 71–98; see also Virginia Ann Hodgkinson et al., Nonprofit Almanac 1996–1997. Dimensions of the Independent Sector, San Francisco, 1996.

1

Setting up a non-profit enterprise (1945–47)

The American aid endeavor for Europe

The current economic upheaval in Europe makes it a problem for an adult alone to survive and forage for his daily bread. If to this is added the parents’ responsibility of providing for children at home, you have touched on the most poignant human problem in Europe today.¹

When the Second World War ended with the official and unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany in early May 1945, a whole continent lay in ruins. During the first phase of the war, while conquering and occupying most of Europe, German troops had recklessly seized whatever food, raw materials, and industrial supplies they had been able to lay their hands on, as a means of supporting their own war machinery and domestic economy.² Ground fighting, air raids, and mass bombings – particularly toward the end of the war – had contributed to widespread destruction of the industrial as well as the agricultural bases.³ The Second World War was unprecedented not only in terms of mass violence, mortality rates, and the means employed for the extinction of perceived German enemies, but also in terms of the degree of destruction and humanitarian emergency in Europe. City infrastructure was shattered, agricultural land was devastated, and many people were seriously undernourished.⁴ Hence, from the perspective of the civilian population in Europe, as of May 8, 1945 the war was not yet over. Official fighting may have ceased that day, but survival was far from certain, and starvation was an everyday threat for the victors and the defeated alike. There are no reliable official figures that account for those who died after the war from starvation, exhaustion, or minor diseases that could not be cured for lack of pharmaceuticals, but scattered contemporary sources report vast numbers of post-war casualties.⁵ The overall situation was further impaired by the downturn of the economy and an increasing lack of purchasing power among the urban populations.⁶ The food situation in particular worsened, as literally millions of people were trying to return to the places they considered home.⁷ This included those returning from German prisons and concentration camps, along with Germans who had been expelled from the formerly annexed eastern territories. Others did not have a place to go at all: these so-called displaced persons wandered about Europe, and for years to come this would remain one of the most pressing social problems in that region.⁸

This state of humanitarian emergency did not remain a regional secret. The war and its consequences were widely broadcast to almost every corner of the globe, which triggered a widespread international humanitarian response.⁹ In Europe and Canada, private relief committees, such as the Oxford Famine Relief Committee (Oxfam), Save the Children, the French Ecumenical Aid Service, and the Canadian Organization for Rehabilitation through Training stepped up.¹⁰ In the United States, even prior to Germany’s assault on Poland in 1939, private voluntary groups had already been running information and aid campaigns to help their kin in Europe.¹¹ And as early as September 1941, almost two months before the United States officially declared war on Nazi Germany and its allies, the US Office of Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation Operations was established to provide assistance to needy civilians in the Allied North African campaign.¹² In 1943 this body was transformed into the considerably larger and internationally staffed United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) under the leadership of the American director general Herbert H. Lehman.¹³ Originally initiated by the United States, Great Britain, China, and the Soviet Union, and officially undersigned by 44 nations in November that year, UNRRA represented a major coordinated international effort to address the deteriorating humanitarian situation on the European continent.¹⁴

International cooperation has often been described as a difficult process of learning, requiring some degree of active commitment to the concept of cooperation and the establishment of common norms, international conventions, and standards.¹⁵ At the same time (according to both neo-realist and institutional theory), states tend to be careful not to grant international organizations too much autonomy and genuine influence on politics.¹⁶ While this must not always be the case in practice, it was certainly true for UNRRA. After a phase of fairly successful cooperation and operational impact in the field of refugee relief,¹⁷ impending Cold War tensions and diverging ideas about internationalism among its members began to put a heavy strain on this organization.¹⁸ Withering trust between the parties enrolled in UNRRA hampered its effectiveness and appeal and eventually destabilized the organization.¹⁹ After massive funding cuts from the United States, UNRRA was partially dismantled and replaced by unilateral aid in the midst of what came to be known as the hunger winter of 1946/47 in Europe. The United States in particular decided to conduct further aid via channels that allowed it more direct control and supervision, thus avoiding any further international commitment.²⁰ The resultant bilateral US aid track record is quite remarkable: in eleven years, from 1940 to 1951, the United States spent more than US$82 billion on aid to other nations, seven-eighths of which took the form of grants, which were never directly repaid. Although the largest share of this was military aid during the war, the United States’ post-war aid between 1944 and 1950 still amounted to approximately US$28.3 billion.²¹ Official US government aid to Europe is today probably best remembered for the European Recovery Program (ERP), better known as the Marshall Plan. The ERP’s major impact on the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Europe and its economies has been established by various eminent scholars.²² There is, however, still an academic void when it comes to the private organizations that joined the cluster of official government institutions and effectively complemented the picture of overall American aid to Europe. Not only did private groups supplement the picture, but they made up for a fundamental weakness of the government-run programs, namely their focus on great schemes and their structural difficulties in reaching out to individuals in need. As United States Senator Arthur Vandenberg put it in 1948, the Economic Cooperation Administration, managing European recovery, deals in fundamental economics. It is indispensable to the reconstruction of over-all economic systems. It cannot and does not substitute for the direct aid to stricken peoples as delivered by private organizations.²³

Vandenberg, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was well aware of the fact that the rebuilding of Europe – no matter the magnitude of any governmental recovery program – would have taken much longer had it not been for numerous private organizations. Long before the Marshall Plan was even born, and far ahead of the establishment of any US government office dedicated to relief efforts, private organizations had begun to feed, clothe, and cure the civilian war victims of Europe. In fact, it was private relief efforts that accounted for the major portion of overall aid to civilians outside the US during the war.²⁴ There is no scholarly agreement on the exact dollar amounts that left the United States, but recent research suggests that the quantities were far greater than those registered by the State Department.²⁵ What started out as a small trickle of relief for Europe in 1939 grew decisively as the end of the war approached. In 1945 alone private relief efforts accounted for almost US$2.4 billion, bringing the total amount of contributions for the entire war to almost US$5 billion.²⁶ All kinds of private American organizations – with religious, secular, ethnic, or labor-oriented backgrounds – collected enormous sums of donor dollars and organized food, clothes, blankets, medicine, and shelter for the war victims abroad. This hodgepodge of private groups in the United States was far from homogeneous, however. There was certainly a core group of more traditional American welfare organizations, which for the most part had been established in the wake of the First World War. Among them were the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC), and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJJDC). Organized labor, particularly the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), contributed significantly to this enormous relief endeavor as well.²⁷ Apart from these already established agencies, hundreds of newly founded organizations entered the field during the first years of the Second World War. While there had been roughly 240 relief agencies registered in 1939, by the mid-1940s their number had risen to over 540.²⁸ Against this backdrop of exponential growth, public authorities, as well as many of the private agencies themselves, felt that this sector somehow required supervision and control in order to prevent fraud or misuse of well-meant donations. Given that public authorities considered both overseas trade and relief potentially to run contrary to US policies of non-interference, all voluntary agencies were obliged to report directly to the Department of State.²⁹ These reporting rules left deep imprints on the institutionalization of American overseas relief as a sector beyond a clear private–public divide. In early March 1941 the President’s Committee on War Relief Agencies was established. It was headed by Joseph E. Davies, former ambassador to Russia, Frederick Keppel, long-time president of the Carnegie Corporation, and Charles P. Taft, director of the Federal Security Agency. Only a few months later, in summer 1942, this committee was shifted, remodeled, and renamed the President’s War Relief Control Board (PWRCB). This body was not only entitled to register new agencies but also to oversee the agencies’ fund-raising, management, and distribution of relief overseas.³⁰ In order to live up to these tasks, new staff had to be added to its ranks. In Arthur Ringland, a man was hired who had significant experience in relief administration from his assignments with the American Relief Administration in the 1920s. As Ringland later put it in an interview, he and his colleagues aimed to bring some coordination into a time of confusion by forcing down the number of competing agencies.³¹ The PWRCB’s job was thus twofold: it facilitated cooperation between different agencies, and castigated inappropriate business practices – hence interfering heavily with some of the private sector privileges that had been valid during peacetime.³²

This regulatory approach was mostly welcomed by the private agencies, as the well-established organizations particularly were alarmed by the high number of pop-up relief ventures and dreaded that a few bad apples might be ruining the reputation of private relief in general. It was against this backdrop that some of the largest voluntary organizations, among them the American Friends, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Mennonite Central, YMCA and YWCA, initiated the establishment of a self-regulatory body in fall 1943. This body, established as the American Council of Voluntary Agencies for Foreign Service (ACVAFS), was intended to provide a means for consultation and action as well as for planning and coordination both among themselves and with the appropriate government agencies.³³ Confronted with rapidly expanding governmental and intergovernmental relief machinery, the agencies were eager to make themselves heard. The fact that administrative responsibility and control of operations in the liberated areas, including supervision of the voluntary agencies in Europe, was quickly taken over by a volatile framework of governmental, military, and international organizations made cooperation among the private agencies a necessity.³⁴ Officially presented as a service to UNRRA and the US government and military, self-coordination was also an intrinsic organizational imperative. Most leaders of the traditional agencies were well aware of the fact that as – relatively speaking – smaller private bodies, they required a united front if they wanted to avoid further subjugation to Allied armies and UNRRA.³⁵ The formation of the ACVAFS was therefore also a process of institutionalizing a growing self-awareness in a sector that was in the process of rapid transformation.³⁶

Despite the American Council’s humble beginnings, governed by agency representatives and run by a minimal staff of first one and a little later two full-time executives, it soon made its mark. As a fast-growing joint umbrella body, the ACVAFS became instrumental in facilitating cooperation between government agencies and private voluntary relief organizations and – at the same time – fostered a process of self-formation and orientation among the private agencies concerning the ethics, possibilities,