The NGO CARE and food aid from America, 1945–80: 'Showered with kindness'? 9781526117229

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The NGO CARE and food aid from America, 1945–80

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HUMANITARIANISM This series offers a new interdisciplinary reflection on one of the most important and yet understudied areas in history, politics and cultural practices: humanitarian aid and its responses to crises and conflicts. The series seeks to define afresh the boundaries and methodologies applied to the study of humanitarian relief and so-called ‘humanitarian events’. The series includes monographs and carefully selected thematic edited collections which will cross disciplinary boundaries and bring fresh perspectives to the historical, political and cultural understanding of the rationale and impact of humanitarian relief work. Islamic charities and Islamic humanism in troubled times   Jonathan Benthall Humanitarian aid, genocide and mass killings: Médecins Sans Frontières, the Rwandan experience, 1982–97   Jean-Hervé Bradol and Marc Le Pape Calculating compassion: Humanity and relief in war, Britain 1870–1914   Rebecca Gill Humanitarian intervention in the long nineteenth century   Alexis Heraclides and Ada Dialla The military–humanitarian complex in Afghanistan   Eric James and Tim Jacoby Donors, technical assistance and public administration in Kosovo   Mary Venner

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The NGO CARE and food aid from America, 1945–80 ‘Showered with kindness?’ Heike Wieters

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Heike Wieters 2017 The right of Heike Wieters to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

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www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN  978 1 52611 721 2  hardback First published 2017 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of figures  List of tables Acknowledgements Abbreviations

vi viii ix xi

Introduction 1 1 Setting up a non-profit enterprise (1945–47) 13 2 From Europe to Asia and beyond (1948–55) 43 3 In search of a new mission in Korea 92 4 New cooperative horizons (1955–61) 109 5 Food aid and private–public cooperation in Egypt 145 6 From American relief to international development cooperation (1961–68)167 7 CARE and the Peace Corps 214 8 Toward multinational enterprise (1969–80) 239 Conclusion 276 Bibliography  Index

288 317

List of figures

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Figures

1.1 CARE organizational chart, sketch [1945]. 24 2.1 Cooperative advertisement CARE/Swan Soap (Lever Brothers), 1949. Ad*Access On-Line Project – Ad # BH1327. John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, Duke University, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, http://library.duke.edu/ digitalcollections/adaccess.46 2.2 Bob Hope at a CARE package promotion event in the early 1950s. Image courtesy of CARE. 47 2.3 Ingrid Bergman at a CARE package promotion event in the early 1950s. Image courtesy of CARE. 48 2.4 CARE organizational chart after reorganization, May 1947. 49 3.1 American soldier with child and CARE package. World Telegram & Sun, April 1953. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, NYWT&S Collection, LC-USZ62–113484. 98 4.1 CARE organizational chart, August 1955. 111 4.2 CARE Food Crusade poster, January 3, 1957. World Telegram & Sun. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, NYWT&S Collection, LC-USZ62–113487. 112 4.3 Window advertising Vicks CARE Crusade [undated]. Image courtesy of CARE and the New York Public Library. 121 6.1 A CARE worker sits behind a large stack of mail containing contributions. World Telegram & Sun, December 1963. Photographer: Fred Palumbo. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, NYWT&S Collection, LC-USZ62–113483. 188 7.1 One of CARE’s special kits – the midwifery kit. World Telegram & Sun, May 1960. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, NYWT&S Collection, LC-USZ62–113485. 222 7.2 Advertising Council-sponsored Peace Corps campaign poster, 1968. Image courtesy of the Peace Corps. 231

List of figures

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Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material, and the publisher will be pleased to be informed of any errors and omissions for correction in future editions.

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Tables

2.1 Income for foreign relief – CARE 1946–51 56 2.2 Expenditures for CARE foreign relief 1946–52 57 2.3 Total commodity shipments by voluntary agencies for foreign service 1950–first quarter 1954 (plus biggest commodity users) 68 2.4 Relief by type, 1953–55 68 2.5 Status of CARE personnel, August 15, 1949/50 77 2.6 Value of goods shipped against expenses incurred, July 1, 1950 through June 30, 1955 77 4.1 CARE value of goods shipped from inception to June 1964 113 4.2 and 4.3 Bennett-Chaikin poll on CARE donor preferences 118 4.4 Private contributions to CARE, US and international origin 121 4.5 Relief shipments made by registered voluntary agencies to countries and areas participating in the ocean freight subsidy program128 4.6 Dollar breakdown of cash sales, year ending June 30 129 6.1 CARE income by type, fiscal years 1960–70 172 6.2 Dollar value of PL 480 distributed by private voluntary organizations180 6.3 Pledges to the WFP 189 6.4 Total value of food aid shipped under PL 480 190 6.5 Biannual income/budget of CARE, CRS, CWS and the WFP 1969/70 190 8.1 Resource flows from the US to developing countries (official development assistance and non-governmental) in millions of US dollars 244 8.2 Summary statement of income of CARE according to data submitted to the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid (based on Schedule C Report) 246

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Acknowledgements

I have been looking forward to writing these acknowledgements for years now. However, now that I have the opportunity to finally thank all the fine people who have made the last years and my research possible and worthwhile, I realize that I do not have the adequate words to express the gratitude I feel. I wish it were different. Thank you to my friends Isa, Margrit, Philipp, Oliver, Laura, Karim, Julia, Dominique, Jule, Atthei, Corinna, Wiebke, and Nicolas for being you and for being there even if I wasn’t. Thank you Hannes. Thank you to my parents – you have been my inspiration all along – and to my sister Imke, you are my person. There are countless friends, colleagues, and academic teachers to whom I will always be grateful. They have read chapters of my book, they have questioned my impatience, they have commented on my ideas, provided useful advice and practical guidance, and they have made the manuscript better in many, many ways: Laura Rischbieter, Corinna Unger, Martin Rempe, Karim Fertikh, Dominique Gareis, Friederike Runge, Nils Exner, Claudia Prinz, Daniel Maul, Kim Priemel, Wiebke Glaesser, Julia Eichenberg, Anne Lammers, Christiane Berth, Susan Levine, Dietmar Süß, Julia Irwin, Ruth Jachertz, Florian Hannig, Joel Glasman, Maria Framke, Martin Lutz, Wolfgang Marquardt, Stephan Malinowski, Kiran Patel, Gabriele Metzler, Andreas Eckert, Sandrine Kott, Johannes Paulmann, and all the other colleagues from the various colloquia and international conferences I have visited throughout the last years to present my research and to learn about yours. A special thanks goes to Matthias Schmelzer; it was and is a pleasure having you as a friend and partner in crime throughout our PhD candidacy and afterwards. I owe a great deal to my academic advisors Alexander Nützenadel and Helge Pharo. Both have offered copious advice, practical help, and guidance, while allowing me to learn my own lessons. My warmest thanks for this to both of you. I am grateful to all the people in the archives and libraries that I consulted; they do excellent work and they made my research worthwhile. My friend Hae-Lin, her parents-in-law, as well as their friend Rachel and her husband opened their homes to me during my archival visits in New York and

xAcknowledgements

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New Brunswick, which was not only extremely kind but also highly interesting and instructive. I met many wonderful people in Washington DC, Claudia and Andre in Rome, Christie and Scott in New York, Marina and Christina in Washington – it was a privilege to get to know you. My final thank you goes to Bertrand Taithe for including my book in the series and to the people of Manchester University Press, Andrew Kirk in particular, for their work. Danke

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Abbreviations

ACVAFS American Council of Voluntary Agencies for Foreign Service ACVFA Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid AFL–CIO American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations AFSC American Friends Service Committee ARA American Relief Administration CLUSA Cooperative League of the United States of America CRS Catholic Relief Services CWS Church World Service ECA European Cooperation Administration FAO Food and Agriculture Organization FFH Freedom from Hunger FOA Foreign Operations Administration FOCC Future of CARE Committee ICA International Cooperation Administration ICVA International Council of Voluntary Agencies MBDM Minutes of the Board of Directors Meeting (CARE) MECM Minutes of the Executive Committee Meeting (CARE) NARA National Archives II NCWC National Catholic Welfare Conference NEA Bureau of Near Eastern, South Asian, and African Affairs until August 20, 1958; thereafter Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, Department of State NIB National Information Bureau PHA/PVC Office of Voluntary and Private Cooperation (State Department) PWRCB President’s War Relief Control Board UNICEF United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund UNRRA United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration

xiiAbbreviations

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USAID USOM WFP WHAC

United States Agency for International Development United States Operating Mission World Food Program (United Nations Agency) World Hunger Action Coalition

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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

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hidden. Not only does he discuss money, fundraising, and CARE’s b­ usiness relations with commercial enterprises, broadcasting networks, and advertising agencies, but he also confronts us with organizational hierarchies, internal networks among coworkers, 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

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Introduction

3

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 government”8 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

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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

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Introduction

5

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

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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

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Introduction

7

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

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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.

Introduction

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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.

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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

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Introduction

11

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).

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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.

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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

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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

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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 o­ rganizations – 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

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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

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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 fulltime 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, and limitations of private engagement within the field of overseas relief. With 16 founding members in 1943, the ACVAFS quickly grew to include some 68 agencies by 1947.37 It acted as a vanguard organization and served as a liaison agent with governmental organizations and international actors such as UNRRA. Ultimately, it added up to what organizational sociologists have referred to as an institutional field, meaning “those organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life.”38 The ACVAFS was instrumental in shaping, defining, and expanding this newly emerging sector of overseas relief and developed into one of its cornerstones. Not only did it coordinate already existing organizations, it was also instrumental in the formative process of several new agencies, one of which is this study’s main object, CARE, Inc. Why CARE? In late 1945, when CARE was officially incorporated under the name Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe, Inc., as a non-profit organization, it had already come a long way.39 In contrast to many other private American relief agencies that started out relatively small and then grew during the operating process, CARE was set up to be “big from the start.”40 Created by a group of people from very diverse organizational backgrounds, CARE was designed to have a visible impact on the overall amount of material relief delivered to Europe. At the same time it was set up to be a temporary organization, which was supposed to go out of business as soon as its mission, as a service organization to its more than twenty constituents, had been fulfilled. While the establishment and design of for-profit businesses and governmental agencies has been studied extensively, the set-up and initial organizational design of private non-profit organizations has been largely neglected in the existing scholarly literature.41 There are hardly any organizational histories of non-profit organizations that focus on the initial outlook and development of the agencies in question. It comes as no surprise then that most histories of CARE describe how a handful of men and women with vision and charitable hearts set about turning an idea into a reality. While a history-of-ideas approach, as well as an emphasis on the charitable nature of the drive to help others, is certainly justified, this is hardly the only thing that is of interest when it comes to the formative period of CARE. The making

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CARE and food aid from America

of CARE as a whole new organization, its internal power structures, as well as its particular place within the humanitarian community, is incomprehensible without a thorough understanding of its institutional background. In fact, with many other non-profit relief agencies already in existence, and with US government authorities trying to minimize the number of private agencies, it is reasonable to wonder why CARE was set up in the first place. The answer to this lies in the functions the organization was meant to perform. CARE was designed to facilitate a job that most of its 22 founding members would have liked to offer but, for logistical and technical reasons, could not: to distribute individualized person-to-person relief, meaning the purchasing, packing, handling, transportation, and distribution of food packages on behalf of private American donors to designated individuals overseas. This interactive and personalized approach – “overwhelmingly Smith to Schmidt” as one State Department representative later put it – is what singled the agency out and allowed it to stand out among the many other American voluntary agencies in the first place.42 The general idea of a parcel delivery service was not completely new. It was most notably the American Relief Administration of the First World War – headed by Herbert Hoover – that served as a blueprint for CARE both in terms of operating schemes and of generating publicity. Established in early 1919, the ARA had coordinated private relief activities by agencies like the American Red Cross, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and the YMCA, and had supervised, purchased, and transported supply packages from American to European ports – especially to Poland and Russia.43 While the ARA’s reputation at home and abroad was not exactly flawless, “Hoover’s ARA” still served as a lucid example of private–public engagement that was cited time and again in the United States when it came to the question of how to make relief after the Second World War more efficient.44 It therefore comes as no surprise that it was one of Hoover’s subordinates in the ARA, Arthur Ringland, who first brought up the idea of a new cooperative parcel service at the height of the next war. In his personal recollections, Wallace J. Campbell, then secretary of the Cooperative League of the USA (CLUSA), remembered that sometime around the winter of 1943/44 Ringland “was beginning to talk to friends in Washington about the possibility of recreating the kind of food package service on which he had worked more than 20 years earlier.”45 Initially, Ringland himself had favored the idea of having a private business run this project. After some investigation he found, however, that none of those many “fly-by-night outfits” he had contacted could actually assure delivery.46 Together with Lincoln Clark, a colleague from UNRRA, Ringland thus began looking for other solutions. The two men approached Campbell at the Cooperative League – first because it was the obvious organization to turn to when it came to new cooperatives, and secondly for financial reasons. Both Ringland and Clark knew that CLUSA had been raising some US$100,000 as part of a so-called Freedom Fund. They were hoping CLUSA would use some of

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this money to implement their new pet project. Campbell, hesitant at first, eventually persuaded Ringland and Clark to broaden their perspective and to persuade the ACVAFS to support the idea.47 Thus, starting in early 1945, under the roof of the ACVAFS, a series of meetings was held on a possible joint venture organization.48 After the summer, in which all agencies were busy with their arrangements for the immediate post-war relief drive, two similar yet competing plans, one drafted by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union and the other by UNRRA officials, were on the table. Even though no final decision could be reached, those present agreed to investigate the possible formation of a “central, non-profit agency” and to continue talks with Washington officials on the establishment of a relief package plan for Europe.49 Lincoln Clark, who had taken it upon himself to draft a prospectus for such a non-profit cooperative, agreed to consider Washington’s official position on such a venture. He reported back a short while later that State Department officials, while being “quite enthusiastic” about the plan, strongly recommended “that this be kept a strictly American show.”50 As tensions with the Soviet Union were rising, US authorities wanted to avoid any trouble with international coordination and clearly stated their preference for a national relief plan.51 Clark thus made sure that his government counterparts were well aware that he had set up the prospectus for the new agency in his “personal capacity” and not on behalf of UNRRA or any other (inter-)governmental authority.52 Clark’s plan imagined a non-profit organization, designed to “provide an economical and non-profit method for interested Americans to send food overseas to designated individuals and groups.” 53 The agency was to be a cooperative, owned by already existing relief organizations with its own headquarters in New York and with separate overseas offices in Europe. These overseas offices were to supervise the distribution of food packages and organize remittances that would allow the parcel operation to be reciprocal, connecting sender and receiver. Not only the prospectus but also the fact that the name Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe – CARE in its catchy and memorable acronym form – had been found and roughly agreed upon spurred inter-agency discussions. With a written outline at hand, most agencies felt that things were finally taking direction. Furthermore, it had become apparent that time would turn out to be a crucial factor, as several “grocers’ associations, commercial houses and apparently UNRRA were interested in promoting similar individual package organizations.”54 In order to speed things up, Wallace Campbell from CLUSA, Eastburn Thompson from the AFSC, and Georg Miles from NCWC decided to take three weeks’ leave from their regular jobs. These three men were experienced non-profit professionals who held leading executive positions in their respective organizations and were willing to “export” their expertise and know-how to set up suitable organizational structures for CARE. With administrative assistance from Charlotte Owen, executive director of the ACVAFS, they managed to bring order to a rather complex situation involving actors from all the different organizational strands – private, public, and international.55 In a

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series of personal meetings, the task force persuaded more than twenty agency representatives to join the project. While official endorsement and practical engagement were eventually won, finances turned out to be the project’s weak spot. Initial plans had envisaged a rather low capitalization of the new organization, and counted on privileged access to government food purchases on 2–3 year long-term credit bases instead.56 It became clear quite quickly, however, that government authorities would not be persuaded to support CARE unless it could show other significant sources of financial support.57 Arguing that any such “unusual” project required not only “a particular kind of executive and technical ability,” but also considerable assets, neither government officials nor army authorities were prepared to grant support without a sound business plan.58 This demand was well placed, as the project’s founders had identified a way to turn the venture into reality in the meantime: provided that the yet to be established organization could come up with sufficient funds, it would be allowed to purchase and re-sell millions of leftover food rations from the army, which were more or less ready for use.59 Faced with this new challenge, Campbell and his two full-time colleagues agreed to do the rattling with the hesitant agencies. Given that some of the agencies were already starting to get cold feet due to CARE’s projected size and the potential costs involved, this job was far from easy.60 Despite these challenges, Campbell, Thompson, and Miles were ultimately successful in raising CARE’s effective capital to US$180,000, and in addition they were able to come up with pledged capital of US$787,500.61 By this time 21 agencies had agreed to pay between US$5,000 and US$15,000 as working capital, and to pledge sums of between US$2,500 and US$135,000 as a backup, raising the overall capital to almost a million dollars.62 Finally, a first official board of directors meeting at which the articles of incorporation were to be signed was called for November 28, 1945.63 The whole process had taken place in quite a rush, which certainly affected internal communication structures. At that point, many future member agencies still had more questions than answers and some of them even took a negative view of the soon to be established cooperative, which they thought of as “commercialized relief.”64 From a certain perspective, this impression was not completely wrong. At first glance CARE’s business model did indeed seem to rely on regular business transactions only. The idea was to purchase food or, to begin with, large amounts of ready-made army rations. These would be purchased at a fixed price and then sold to American donors, who would pay a certain net margin or over-price to cover handling, transportation, operation, and personnel costs, and also to cover the costs of the member agencies’ investments in CARE. The impression of CARE as a commercial venture was certainly made more acute by the fact that its first chief operating officer was Donald M. Nelson, a former executive vice-president of Sears Roebuck, head of the War Production Board, and president of the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers.65 As a well-known American business executive and an experienced man

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in the mail-order business, Nelson seemed a real win for CARE. His willingness to jump on board of this only half-floating ship was remarkable, since this was at a time when there was no actual food to be transported to anyone, no personnel to manage, and no operation to steer (not even an office to meet at). However, in late November the first official CARE meeting was held. Representatives from all 22 future member organizations, representatives from the ACVAFS and the President’s War Relief Control Board, along with a number of committed individuals like Lincoln Clark, met at the National Arts Club and set the whole venture in motion by establishing a formal board of directors. Every member agency had one vote, and in a competition between General William Haskell, president of Save the Children, and Murray D. Lincoln, president of the Cooperative League and the Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance Company, the latter won his third corporate presidency.66 Since Nelson had agreed to work pro bono, Clark was formally invited to serve as CARE’s first fully paid executive officer. Just a day later a committee structure was established with provisions for bodies of finance, distribution, procurement, membership, promotion, publicity, and internal organization.67 Even as early as this, lines between the voluntary, public, and business sectors were extraordinarily permeable. Despite the fact that CARE was by definition a private body, it would not have come into existence without continuous backing and initiative from a public servant at the State Department, Arthur Ringland. While the process of organizational inception was indeed fueled and engineered by individuals from the private voluntary sector, CARE’s first employee hailed directly from an international organization, and its first executive director was a man from the business world. It was this particular “embededness”68 of CARE’s founding members and leading executives into different – yet connected – societal and economic spheres that made CARE extraordinarily visible and enabled its prominent starting position in the first place. CARE’s original connections with all “three sectors” gave it a potential strategic advantage over less well-connected organizations and turned out to be at least one reason for its rapid ascent.69 However, with the formalities settled, the real problems were just beginning. Nelson had taken the job as CARE’s executive director because he had envisioned CARE as a big “one-shot” operation.70 Previous talks with US government and military officials as well as with UNRRA had promised to yield the enormous number of more than seven million 10-in-1 army rations, which CARE would purchase and distribute abroad. But within days of the November 28 meeting, it became clear that UNRRA, despite previous letters indicating utmost support, was not ready to hand over the entirety of its US army rations. Governor Lehman of UNRRA agreed instead to a transfer of less than three million packages, which seriously diminished the scale of projected operations. What could have been a manageable problem soon turned into a major one for CARE, as Nelson was unwilling to devote his time to CARE under these changed conditions. Angry about what he considered to be “sabotage” by certain UNRRA members, he decided to step down.71 His

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main argument, though, was organizational. He felt that CARE was in sore need of a full-time business executive, and due to his other business commitments it was a role he could not fill. So, at a meeting of the board of directors on December 26, a mere month after he had officially accepted the position as executive director, Nelson announced his resignation.72 This came as a shock to CARE’s members, and publicity-wise CARE’s loss of its recently acquired “big name”73 could have been a disaster.74 The board, however, reacted extremely quickly, and within two days it had named the former military general William Haskell as the new executive director. Haskell had failed in his first bid for CARE’s presidency but had a good reputation in relief, having worked at the ARA after the First World War. The CARE board also invented the position of honorary president for Nelson, sparing CARE some bad press and offering Nelson a way to support CARE from the rear echelons.75 The decision to name Haskell as the new executive director was not without some dissent, however. Haskell was a reasonable and even strategically sound choice, given his close military ties. This was particularly favorable in light of the ongoing negotiations on spare army rations. But for a few agency representatives, Campbell, Thompson, and Miles among them, this decision was not happy news. In their minds, “the General, at age 70, was too old to do the job.”76 Frustration also had to do with the general’s position as a former member of the military. His leadership style clearly reflected his military past, which some deemed inappropriate for a private voluntary organization. In a letter to the ACVAFS’s Charlotte Owen, who had been among those who objected to the new leadership, Eastburn Thompson of the Quakers – an organization with a decidedly non-military tradition and thousands of conscientious objectors – confessed that he believed that “CARE as we knew it – a democratic, cooperative, non-imperial undertaking – is now a thing of the past and that under the new directorship, it will be more or less an ARA at least with its weaknesses; and we can only hope with its strengths.”77 Haskell indeed had his own ideas about CARE’s future outlook. Alongside Lincoln Clark, he hired Elmer Burland as his deputy. Burland was a former State Department official, and Haskell knew him from his time at the ARA. In this way, the boundaries between the public and the private sector were blurred even further. Alexander Hawes, a Washington attorney who had drafted CARE’s Articles of Incorporation, was contracted as legal counsel to Haskell’s fast-growing executive team.78 Haskell did not agree with established business practices in the voluntary relief sector either. When asked about his ideas concerning his executive salary, he demanded US$20,000 per year for himself and between US$8,000 and US$15,000 for his team members. CARE, he argued, was yet a “month-to-month” operation, and it would only be able to attract skilled professionals if it offered them a decent salary.79 In 1946 US$20,000 a year was far more than other agencies were paying their executives and even more than high-ranking public servants earned. But the board, having installed Haskell in the first place, finally agreed to these e­ xceptionally high salary demands and the underlying philosophy.80

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With the executive team standing, CARE was finally ready to begin operations, at least from a technical point of view. It had found office space and moved from a room it had been sharing at the ACVAFS headquarter to a whole floor at 50 Broad Street, New York, only a few blocks from Wall Street. Furthermore, negotiations on the spare army rations with the State Department, the Office of War Mobilization Resources, and Lehman from UNRRA had finally borne results – a process that was remembered as a “trip through a bureaucratic maze.”81 By early 1946 CARE was ready to purchase 2.8 million 10-in-1 rations containing “rich, concentrated food products, over one-third meat” – clearly reflecting American dietary habits and the needs of soldiers in the field. The rations had been designed to feed ten combat soldiers for one day and contained approximately 45,000 calories. Packages had originally cost the army US$12 each, but a deal was reached that granted these rations to CARE at roughly half the price. CARE, meanwhile, planned to sell these packages to American donors for about US$12.50 (which was eventually increased to US$15).82 Since overseas shipping and handling charges were estimated at a maximum price of US$3 per package, a sales value of US$35 million and accordingly an estimated operating surplus of US$9.8 million was expected to be necessary for working capital.83 The idea was to ship most of the rations to cooperative warehouses overseas and enter into agreements with European governments, which would then offer duty-free entry and low-cost assistance in ground transportation of the packages. On February 18, 1946, after official US government consent had been secured, CARE finally signed a contract with the War Assets Corporation, now in charge of the coveted leftover army rations, which authorized CARE to purchase up to 2.8 million food packages for delivery to needy people abroad. It was, after all, a very favorable deal built on special terms. Not only were the first allotments granted on a credit basis, but CARE was also allowed to ship the parcels on an on-demand basis directly from army warehouses. In exchange, the US government called for the establishment of basic principles, involving tax-free entry to be negotiated with foreign governments, adequate insurance of goods during transport, and non-discriminatory distribution schemes abroad.84 In late February 1946, several newly assigned CARE country officers left for Europe to begin negotiations with the European governments.85 At last, CARE could finally start thinking seriously about commencing operations and give more thought not only to its internal organizational structure but also to the actual delivery of supplies abroad. Setting up a non-profit enterprise As the sociologist Mark Granovetter once put it, the “distinction between the ‘formal’ and the ‘informal’ organization of the firm is one of the oldest in the literature, and it hardly needs repeating that observers who assume firms to be structured in fact by the official organizational chart are sociological babes in the woods.”86

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Executive Director

Special Director

Special Assistant

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Overseas Director

General Counsel

Public Relations

Deputy Director

Procurement Director

Finance Director

Director Administrative Services

Director of Promotion

Country office

Purchasing

Remittances

Shipping and Warehousing

Publicity

Country office

Packaging

Accounting

Personnel

State and Community Organization

Office Communication

Promotion Materials

Country office Country office Country office

Figure 1.1  CARE organizational chart, sketch [1945]. Despite this useful reminder, CARE’s organizational chart of 1945 (Figure 1.1) is still a good point from which to approach the organizational structures as envisioned by its founders. It is especially challenging to analyze those structures with regard to customary models, since most of these models apply to straight business firms.87 With CARE, however, both the supposed product of the company, as well as its customers, and finally even its patrons are difficult to determine, making it rather challenging to apply a commonly used scheme to the organization. As Figure 1.1 shows, CARE’s creators had a rather hierarchical organizational model in mind.88 The cooperative was divided into several departments, all of which were dedicated to and grouped around one central product. This product was not necessarily the food parcel itself but was rather a service: the delivery of a designated food package to a recipient overseas as well as documentation for the sender. Those who purchased packages did not wish to keep them, but wanted them to be delivered to people in need overseas. This suggests that, in a way, CARE was not a “typical”89 cooperative in which “the roles of owners [are united] with c­ onsumers

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or producers” benefitting from it.90 CARE’s patrons were not necessarily the members of the cooperative but were instead the recipients abroad, as well as those individuals buying the remittances. The relief agencies of which the cooperative was composed came only secondarily and did not benefit from CARE directly.91 While both sender and recipient were necessary for a complete transaction circle, only the American customers had a legitimate claim to CARE once the organization had accepted their donations. In a letter to Charlotte Owen, Wallace Campbell even explained with regard to the content of the packages, “Realistically the wishes of the donors are probably more important than the wishes of the recipients since it would result in more food being shipped.” 92 This statement suggests that entrepreneurial considerations and a good pinch of economic realism with regard to actual relief concepts were inherent in CARE’s agenda from the start. Indeed, with even cigarettes being included in the first CARE packages, diverging interests in terms of package content soon arose. In Germany, for instance, cigarettes were heartily welcome, as they could be used as alternative “currency” on the black market for other transactions.93 For CARE, however, this was a source of trouble, as it resulted in some of the packages being cut open during transport by pilferers. In order to avoid further legal and financial hassles, cigarettes were quickly excluded from the packages – despite their obvious value for the overseas recipients.94 This overarching mindset regarding primacy of donor interests and organizational imperatives explains the comparatively menial position allotted to the country offices in the original chart. These offices were meant to work as delivery service units and had, at least in the beginning, no autonomy or independent function. The main part of the service being provided was concerned with the American donor. While this may – at least to a certain extent – be a rather non-specific character trait of philanthropy in general, the focus on duty-based ethics and less preoccupation with consequences and side-effects of relief abroad is specific to this early phase of post-war humanitarianism.95 Within the existing organizational structure, accountability was meant to be organized in a clearly hierarchical way, with all division heads reporting to one person at the top of the hierarchy, namely the executive director or his deputy. Nevertheless, the sheer number of European offices being planned reflects the initial intention for CARE to begin as a large-scale organization. CARE set up offices in most northern and central European countries, in the former Allied countries and in Germany, Austria, and Italy. 96 In early May 1946 the total CARE workforce consisted of 68 employees, four of whom were already based in Europe and seven more of whom were on their way across the Atlantic.97 The staff increased rapidly, soon growing to include several hundred employees both in the United States and overseas. The entire executive team and directorate were based in New York, however, making it fairly clear that the lion’s share of operations was meant to take place in the US, not in Europe or elsewhere. At this early stage, CARE’s organizational center, like its institutional focus and background, was clearly an American one and accordingly only marginal

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resources, staff-wise as well as with regard to planning and operation, went into the European section of the organization. Indeed, it was not the overseas agreements that troubled the board most. The majority of European governments were happy to allow duty-free entry for CARE packages.98 What proved to be more difficult was selling the idea of this person-to-person concept to American donors. With the packages ready and at least basic country agreements and overseas facilities established, it had become clear that the actual sale of packages had become the next task. While the US$15 package price, which was announced to the readers of all major American newspapers in April 1946, was not unreasonable when compared to other offers and general market prices of private competitors, selling the parcels turned out to be more difficult than expected.99 In 1946, US$15 presented quite a big share of most people’s overall incomes – more than US$180 when projected to 2014 prices.100 Thus, for the many Americans willing to follow official appeals to help friends and relatives in Europe, a CARE package was still a rather costly good deed. In an attempt to change CARE’s course, Lincoln Clark, in his capacity as new sales manager, arranged for a well-publicized event on the symbolic date of May 8, 1946 when 100 CARE packages were sold to President Truman.101 He also made a special effort to publicly sell further packages to Eleanor Roosevelt and other celebrities. Nevertheless, initial sales figures were overwhelmingly disappointing. Hence, in May the board of directors allocated US$10,000 for large-scale advertising in newspapers and magazines. Even with this effort, however, sales remained far below expectations.102 By early September 1946, four months after the first CARE package had actually arrived at the port of Le Havre in France on May 11, CARE had sold a mere 50,000 packages, making for an increasingly desperate situation. With a steadily growing number of employees, a large office to rent, increasingly heavy advertising costs, and a serious debt to the Chase Bank of New York (which had granted a credit line of US$3 million to cover initial parcel transportation costs), most CARE members realized that the organization was far off track.103 Matters were made worse by the costly advertising campaign designed by Benton and Bowles, a project that only served to create friction among the members due to its commercial character and its implications for other agencies’ programs. As early as June 1946 some board members – particularly those whose agencies had relief programs of their own abroad – had first insisted that CARE should do its utmost to avoid advertising campaigns that put it in competition with its member agencies or encouraged donors to buy packages for recipients picked at CARE’s discretion.104 Initial agreements had stipulated that about one-quarter of CARE relief was to be “general,” as part of an attempt to counter “the practice of certain national or religious groups to send relief only to particular national or religious groups in Europe.”105 Now, however, some CARE board members were turning against their initial agreements, even demanding that general relief – meaning undesignated donations – be returned. This was met with protests by members

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of the CARE executive staff and many of the founding members, who were eager to refute accusations that CARE relief tended to “discriminate in favor of those who had an ‘uncle in America.’”106 After some heated debate, the resultant resolution omitted a clear restriction on undesignated packages and allowed for certain managerial freedom.107 Relieved, but nevertheless a little frustrated, Elmer Burland, CARE’s deputy executive director, reported back to his former colleague from the Department of State, Arthur Ringland, that he was pleased to have been let off the hook by the board but that it nevertheless seemed to him that there was “still some confusion” regarding CARE’s objectives and politics.108 Burland was not mistaken in his concern regarding some kind of deep-rooted internal ambiguity or even ongoing organizational power struggle. Only weeks earlier, executive director Haskell had asked for a thorough review of CARE’s Articles of Incorporation, which stipulated that upon dissolution of CARE, any open debts and loans to its members would be repaid and that all remaining funds would then be channeled to the ACVAFS. Haskell, however, as well as some other board members, suggested that upon dissolution of CARE any possible remainders might be distributed to the CARE members instead.109 These proposed changes, while seemingly marginal, were highly difficult in practice, as they would have put CARE’s member organizations into the position of being direct beneficiaries of CARE’s commercial success. While the matter was thoroughly investigated, Haskell’s approach was finally rejected by the board in order not to endanger CARE’s nature as a non-profit organization.110 Instead, an amendment was passed with an affirmative vote of more than two-thirds of the membership, stipulating that any balance after deduction of costs and debts should be made available for financing further operations in the field of relief and rehabilitation. Since such appropriations by the board were meant to take place regularly and prior to any dissolution of CARE, it was not expected there would be any leftover funds at the end of CARE’s term.111 Apart from dropping the ACVAFS from the Articles of Incorporation and to a certain extent loosening the close ties CARE had originally had to the umbrella organization, this amendment also allowed CARE to use possible surplus for operational matters and new programs.112 This amendment, however small the changes in the wording, did indeed alter CARE’s character. It opened a window of opportunity for CARE to stretch its patterns of service and was a first step in transforming it from a temporary into a permanent organization, as it enabled the agency to go on as long as internal revenue allowed operations in the black. Thus, it was not without cause that some CARE members felt that their former brainchild was slowly but surely growing into an organization of its own that was no longer subject to their immediate control. These internal frictions added up to growing leadership issues and mounting financial problems resulting from persistently disappointing sales figures. In search of someone to take the blame, Haskell fired his sales manager, Lincoln Clark. While this move was greeted with dismay by many board members, Haskell did not seem

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to welcome outside guidance and further engaged in unilateral action, which only aroused animosity even further. In an official letter to Haskell, CARE’s treasurer, Alexander Landesco, spelled out his criticism rather bluntly – not only questioning CARE’s efficiency but also Haskell’s leadership skills: “We have never agreed on a clear definition of our objectives and have formulated no plan of operation for the guidance of our own staff or of those cooperating with us from the outside.” Clearly frustrated, he went on: “We know that there are hundreds of thousands of repeating package purchasers in this country; we know we have the biggest value for the lowest price; there must be a way to bring this package and those buyers together.”113 Confronted with spiking losses for which Haskell did not seem to have any solution, the board finally decided to get outside help. In the “interests of lower expenses and increased efficiency,” it hired Paul Comly French to streamline operations.114 French, a young Quaker and newspaperman, who had been recommended by the American Friends Service Committee, immediately began his assignment and started reviewing what some members had come to regard as a hopelessly “inflated organization.”115 In addition, a supporting subcommittee was established to help French with his assignment. The resultant report proposed far-reaching changes. Haskell’s income was reduced from US$20,000 to US$12,000 annually – a measure Haskell himself had offered. As Elmer Burland gave up his role as deputy executive director no replacement was sought, and the position was abolished altogether. The committee under French’s leadership proposed a suspension of all existing public relations contracts and the elimination of the publicity division as presently constituted, which resulted in a staff reduction from 77 to 33. French also merged the finance and remittance departments, which meant further temporary personnel cuts, from 197 to approximately 162. The staff was to remain at reduced levels until parcel figures reached daily levels of more than 8,000. The committee then called for an assistant in charge of traffic and supplies (amalgamating another two departments) and for the appointment of an assistant in charge of overseas operations. It also called for the appointment of an office manager to make up for further personnel cuts among the office personnel. These massive organizational cutbacks, French and the committee hoped, would yield yearly savings of approximately US$400,000. The report of the subcommittee – as well as the appointment of French – were an open affront to Haskell, who felt that he had been cornered and aced out by a man he had “known for only little over a month.” French had been assigned the job of carrying out the organizational changes and had done so without reference to Haskell. According to the latter, this had taken place during meetings “of which there were no minutes […] and, contrary to the bylaws […] the executive director was not asked to be present.”116 From Haskell’s perspective this was too much to stomach. Even before the changes were enacted on October 18, he offered his resignation and proposed that CARE be liquidated as soon as possible in a well-regulated manner. While the board had clearly intended to curtail Haskell’s power by bringing in

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French, most members were hesitant to dismiss a decorated retired army general who also happened to be the director of a member organization. Accordingly, most were not ready to accept Haskell’s resignation and decided to look for other solutions that would allow him to stay aboard. After several meetings and lengthy internal discussion, in early November French was promoted to the newly created post of general manager. Hence, French joined Haskell in what was supposed to be a dual executive leadership.117 The necessary changes in the organization’s by-laws confirmed what previous developments had already indicated: Haskell was stripped of almost all executive powers, while his representative functions were confirmed and even strengthened. Paul French was installed as manager with far-reaching commercial authority and effectively absorbed Haskell’s former position. In his personal recollections, CARE’s first president, Murray D. Lincoln, willingly admitted that the CARE board was “composed of people experienced in welfare and relief administration,” but that almost no one – apart from himself and three ­bankers – “had any experience in running a business.”118 Accordingly, in a time of crisis, when rapid decision making was crucial – at least from the perspective of efficiency and managerial consistency – the board remained conspicuously silent. While the struggle between two men for managerial supremacy prolonged the internal conflict, the very circumstances that led to this sort of “solution” demonstrate that there are indeed striking differences concerning certain policies in the for-profit and non-profit sectors: CARE’s member agencies, or more precisely their representatives, were unwilling simply to terminate Haskell’s contract without offering him an easy and face-saving way out. As had been the case with Donald Nelson, Haskell was carefully pushed to the rear and offered an opportunity to decide on his own when to leave for good. This approach, however, was only an option because operational results had begun to improve quite remarkably in the meantime. When the tide finally turned it was not so much due to French’s organizational adjustments, as the US government’s decision to step up aid to CARE and lower the price of its 10-in-1 rations to US$4.25 a package.119 This circumstance – which once again points to the special relationship between the agency and the US government – allowed CARE to lower the retail price of its packages to US$10 – a price-cut of more than 30 percent. The new price policy had a remarkable effect on package sales, causing them to rise distinctly. In the holiday season of November and December 1946, sales amounted to over 600,000 packages, yielding US$6,038,132 and leading the agency into the black for the first time in its organizational existence.120 CARE’s first year in operation was a troubled one, mostly due to the constant internal friction that came from differing opinions on how it should be run and what its mission should be. CARE was, after all, composed of a large variety of independent relief groups. All of them had distinct concepts of relief, and they were all being run by people who felt compelled to make CARE (or rather the service it provided) fit their own organizational profiles. Consequentially, it was not easy for CARE to develop a life and mission of its own. When and where it did, it was

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almost impossible to avoid a conflict between CARE’s executives, who had quickly adopted the idea of CARE as an independent organization, and its board members, who had difficulties in coping with this development. CARE’s board meanwhile was outstandingly democratic in a formal sense, meaning that most decisions could be made with a simple majority vote, which did not help organizational peace. Sometimes, especially when majority margins were very thin, dissent would linger for weeks or even months, only for the decision then to be reversed with an equally narrow majority. It is also worth remembering that CARE at this time was being run by two executives, Haskell and Burland, who had very particular ideas about its outlook and wanted to shape the organization according to their own experiences from the previous war-relief drive at the American Relief Administration. This situation did nothing for organizational peace either. Haskell’s leadership style was rather straightforward, and over time fewer and fewer board members were ready to accept his decisions. Finally, with Paul Comly French, yet another source of irritation was (deliberately) inserted. It was French’s job to question Haskell’s decisions and to review organizational expenses, but when he became general manager the rift between Haskell, French, and the board became almost insurmountable.121 It did not take long for Haskell to finally decide to call it quits. In February 1947 he asked to be released from his duty as executive officer, making room for French to become CARE’s third executive director shortly afterwards.122 While this decision most certainly did not mean an end to intra-organizational friction, it marked the beginning of a six-year period of relative stability in which CARE remained under the ambitious executive leadership of Paul French. If, however, the board had hoped that French would be a less adamant executive manager, it was soon to be disappointed. He was probably even quicker than his predecessors in making CARE “his” organization and in appropriating organizational success. When it came to making CARE a more innovative organization, French’s ambition was not in any way compromised by intra-organizational protests or by outside pressure. Without being willing to push a heroic perspective on the role of manager-entrepreneurs, it is certainly safe to say that CARE’s new executive director pursued a distinctive path and – with differing degrees of success – shaped the organization according to his vision of a humanitarian enterprise.123 Between relief, business, and civic accountability While internal conflicts festered, and attempts to consolidate CARE yielded rather mixed results, developments outside of the organization continued at an impressive pace. Peace was an ambiguous concept, as demonstrated first by the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 and then by the lingering violence and civil-war like conditions that continued to haunt parts of Europe even after May 1945.124 By the end of winter of 1945/46 it was slowly becoming clear – both to the newly established European governments and to the Allied occupation

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troops – that the overall food situation was not getting any better but was actually getting worse. Confronted with the dilemma of explaining to the American public why both the domestic and the global food situations were actually deteriorating rather than improving, President Truman eventually decided to stir up jointly coordinated societal activities. Calling on enhanced government cooperation with civil society organizations and the American public, he invited several men and women from American business corporations and voluntary associations to the White House for a conference in February 1946. His guest-list included not only representatives from welfare organizations, newspapermen, and leaders of oil, food, and motion picture corporations, but also George H. Gallup, the “grandfather of free-standing public opinion polls.”125 In his invitation Truman stressed, “Government alone is not enough. We cannot meet this situation without an aggressive voluntary program on the part of private citizens to reduce food consumption in this country.”126 At the March 1 meeting Truman assured himself of his guests’ support and their readiness to serve on a public committee. Directly afterwards Truman officially appointed the Famine Emergency Committee for the purpose of coordinating the fight against world hunger. In cooperation with the Advertising Council, a private body that had sponsored previous nationwide information campaigns, an Emergency Food Collection Drive was initiated.127 Here, Truman not only called on American citizens to voluntarily save food wherever possible but, in a move that demonstrated his political gamesmanship and came to be recognized as a wise move for securing bipartisan backing for a plan that was at least in part heavily contested, he named the former republican US president Herbert Hoover honorary chairman of this committee.128 In this capacity Hoover went on two consecutive missions to the governments of more than a dozen nations in and beyond Europe to coordinate and enlist them in a “world front against hunger and food shortage.” In his public reports and especially via radio broadcasts he tried to raise public awareness in the United States, stressing that “saving these human lives” was not only an economic necessity but more importantly “a part of the moral and spiritual reconstruction of the world.”129 His trip resulted in a well-publicized brochure, which provided a thorough overview of the overall food picture country by country and informed the American public that far more than 20 million children were currently seriously undernourished.130 The Famine Emergency Committee in cooperation with the Advertising Council, as well as Hoover’s trips, certainly helped the campaigning effort on behalf of the private voluntary agencies as public awareness rose significantly. Driven by the urge to do at least something, all kinds of small private committees emerged that wanted to join the Emergency Food Collection Drive. Eventually, the Washington Post informed its readers that individual food collection of canned goods – while of course a possibility – was not necessarily the most economical solution, since private relief agencies like CARE and others could bargain for much better prices on large foodstuff purchases than individuals ever could.131

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Hence, it became clear once again that the constantly growing cosmos of famine emergency needed some kind of direction and order. After a drastic American curtailment of funds and the concurrent resignation of Governor Lehman in March 1946, UNRRA was no longer in shape to take over this task.132 The dissolution of the President’s War Relief Control Board, which had been a much valued interface and coordinating unit between the public, private relief agencies, and governmentoperated programs, further complicated the situation. Pretty early on the agencies organized within the ACVAFS had therefore expressed their conviction that a new government agency would be needed to authorize bona fide activities, prevent the unstable and racketeering type of organization which frequently springs up after a war, give positive guidance to new interested groups as to what is being done to be recognized, help channel within groups things or programs that might overlap or duplicate effort at a great expense.133

This active request for government surveillance of private sector institutions is remarkable indeed, showing quite clearly that the field of private overseas relief was deliberately integrated with government organizations. In May 1946 President Truman asked his Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, to set up a new Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid, comprised of outstanding citizens. Meant to tie together the governmental and private programs in the field of foreign relief, it was to coordinate its work with the Famine Emergency Committee and other interested agencies.134 A short time later, the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid (ACVFA) was formally established. This committee, which had, personnel-wise, many connecting links to its predecessor, the PWRCB, began with both an organizational and a clear-cut political goal. Not only was it supposed to coordinate voluntary activity, but it was also intended to keep an eye on private charity as a potentially valuable element of United States foreign policy. As Charles P. Taft, its newly appointed chairman, put it, the value of voluntary foreign aid is more than material evidence of the generosity of the American people. It reflects understanding and creates good-will in these times of tension [… it] complements the public funds which the United States provide through the Army, UNRRA or other authority, and therefore has its place in the consideration of our foreign policy.135

The Advisory Committee, itself a governmental body, played an important role within the emerging community of voluntary foreign relief agencies: it worked as an interface between the private and the governmental sectors and linked the two more closely together. Although there were, at this time, a multitude of relief agencies, the stringent documentation and standardized operating procedures required by the Advisory Committee meant that only a minority of private groups actually registered with it at first. Not only were registered agencies subject to restrictions on lobbying, they had to provide detailed monthly and quarterly reports on

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income and expenditures, the so-called “Schedule C” reports, which required a certain amount of administrative experience and neat book-keeping.136 Over time, however, the process of registration gained in importance. Not only did it allow the agencies better channels of information and possible influence on government decisions, but it soon also became a prerequisite for tax advantages and government subsidies, including ocean freight reimbursements for relief shipments and, later on, grants for rehabilitation programs. Generally speaking, the months after the end of the war were a very decisive period for the formation of a more narrowly defined community of American relief agencies. With the official end of the military intervention, a large window of opportunity opened up for private players. After years of comparatively “big government,” close control of the private sector, and even rationing in many parts of life, private players felt heartened to take advantage of the ever greater opportunities for initiative on behalf of government players and public opinion. As Peter D. Hall has put it, “rather than creating elaborate bureaucracies to provide the cultural, educational, health, and welfare services the public demanded, [the American government] created incentives for private enterprises to do so.”137 It is often acknowledged that private industry used these post-war years to spread its business models and of course its products and corresponding consumer ideology to the once again emerging markets on the old continent.138 What is often neglected, however, is the transatlantic spread of influence as it relates to voluntary agencies, which reached the European continent before any business organizations did. Hence, in many cases it was via these agencies that European consumers got their first taste of American chocolate, chewing gum, soap, and other special consumer goods.139 It was CARE’s executive director, Paul French, who first tried to capitalize on this observation. In early 1947 he wrote to Arthur Ringland, who had been transferred to the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid, that he felt that private agencies in general and CARE in particular had “a major responsibility to change the trend of thinking towards America in Europe” if there was to be “any hope of a stabilized world and a decent peace.” Side-lining existing channels of government liaison, he then asked directly for an appointment with Secretary Marshall or even with the president himself in order to discuss some of his ideas concerning CARE’s role in a plan involving food to be “used as evidence of good will rather than to implement power politics.”140 Along these lines, as he explained to Ringland a little later, in view of the tremendous amount of “goodwill” the CARE packages were creating for the United States, the US government itself should consider buying CARE packages on a large scale.141 French’s ambitious business plan, which would have boosted CARE package sales to unknown heights, was never implemented, although in early 1948, General Clay did indeed order packages worth a good three million dollars to be distributed in the American occupation zone in Germany.142 French’s attempt still shows, however, that it was not government players alone who recognized the value of voluntary agency contributions

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to the overall image of the United States in the rest of the world. Private agencies, too, were well aware of this power and tried to use it as leverage in their discussions with public authorities. French’s attitude and his straightforward approach in promoting CARE did, however, serve to exacerbate conflicts with the other voluntary agencies in the field. The ACVAFS was most concerned about a united appearance and a unified voluntary agency answer to the countless governmental drives.143 CARE’s rising star and the ambition with which its executive team promoted the agency presented a serious threat to the goal of ever forming a unified sector of private overseas relief – in the eyes of some of the ACVAFS members at least. What was more was that CARE’s approach to operations as well as the image it conveyed to the public was not necessarily compatible with the self-perception of several of the other ACVAFS members. Many of the agencies had been born out of religious and deeply moral humanitarian urges or callings.144 Particularly for the denominational agencies, the very concept of relief was therefore based on distinct cultural and religious traditions, a lack of which was detected in the professionalism and ambition with which CARE pushed its organizational agenda. While it was obviously difficult for contemporaries to tackle the problem, it soon became obvious that some agency representatives doubted that the service CARE was providing was actually still real relief. With its personalized packages CARE, some argued, was merely delivering “commercial” assistance, devoid of farther-reaching charitable and educational underpinnings. The clearly negative undertone of such accusations implicitly questioned CARE’s position as an equal among the other supposedly more devoted relief agencies and cast doubt on its entitlement to benefit from tax exemption, ocean freight subsidies, and the like.145 This was exemplified by an incident in 1946, which engendered major diplomatic resentment, not only with the ACVAFS but this time even with the Department of State. Having been approached by the US Children’s Bureau to cooperate in a united American fundraising appeal, CARE’s executive director Haskell had turned the request down. In a letter Haskell himself explained that CARE was “not a relief organization” but instead a “non-profit service organization” that contributed toward relieving the food situation in Europe.146 This letter of refusal made it to the ACVAFS (which in contrast to CARE heartily endorsed the bureau’s United Foreign Relief Appeal) and, thanks to Charlotte Owen, it even traveled to the government Advisory Committee in the Department of State. While the Advisory Committee’s members had always countered any agency bickering that CARE should be “put in the category of supplementary aid” instead of a relief organization, by underscoring that CARE would now and in the future enjoy all the pertaining “priorities and privileges” of a relief agency, this letter had quite a dramatic impact.147 Having witnessed months of internal trouble in CARE and with the agency’s situation being a “sensitive subject” in Washington, the letter was obviously the straw that broke the camel’s back. Behind the scenes, in a letter to Owen, Arthur Ringland confessed that he was nothing but “dumfounded

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[sic]” to see his brainchild drift away like that. Outraged, he eventually informed CARE that if the board wanted to underscore this self-appraisal and its refusal to take part in a collective fundraising drive, Washington would as of now “treat CARE as a commercial agency and of necessity cancel arrangements now in force.”148 The CARE board of directors was quick to reverse Haskell’s statement before it turned into a public issue, which was all the easier since Haskell had in the meantime cleared his desk. The situation did not help to bridge the rift between CARE and the ACVAFS, however. Neither the clarifying statement nor the resignation of a leading figure sufficed to allay the deep-rooted suspicions regarding CARE’s honest commitment to a common humanitarian cause. If Charlotte Owen had expressed the slight hope in her files in May 1947 that CARE might have a “recurring tendency as a relief organization” after Haskell had been replaced by Paul French, her hopes for a more cooperative relationship were quickly thwarted.149 Persistent conflict within CARE continued to poison the atmosphere, and it quickly turned out that French was no less ambitious than his predecessor. It was within this context that the executive team of the ACVAFS finally decided to apply the thumbscrews to CARE at the financial level. In view of CARE’s financial consolidation during 1947 and a management that was growing more and more confident every day, the ACVAFS decided to treat CARE as a full-fledged agency once and for all, raising its membership fee from US$250 to US$4,000 – in line with its annual financial turnover.150 In that regard, both actors, the ACVAFS and the government Advisory Committee, made it crystal clear that there were not only privileges but also responsibilities that came with CARE’s status as an officially registered relief agency and that CARE – if it wanted to be part of the community – would have to play by the rules. So it was, by mid-1947, after one and a half very troubled years in operation, that it became clear even to the last CARE member that the initial period of grace as a “new” agency was finally over. Notes  1 Maurice Pate to Herbert Hoover, Cairo, April 19, 1946, reprinted in Maurice Pate (ed.), The Children Are Hungry, Reports to the President’s Famine Emergency Committee, US Department of Agriculture, Washington DC, 1946, p. 2.  2 Christian Gerlach, Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord. Forschungen zur deutschen Vernichtungspolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg, Hamburg, 1998, pp. 13–30.  3 For an account of the situation in Europe immediately after the end of the Second World War, see Tony Judt, Postwar. A History of Europe since 1945, New York, 2005, ch. 1.  4 Giovanni Federico, Feeding the World. An Economic History of Agriculture, 1800–2000, Princeton, NJ, 2005, p. 196; J. Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, London, 2007, pp. 619–33.  5 Pate (ed.), The Children Are Hungry; Josef Kytir and Christian Köck, “Historical Regional Patterns of Infant Mortality in Austria,” European Journal of Population 11.3 (1995), pp. 243–59 (p. 244); Jay Winter and Joshua Cole, “Fluctuations in Infant Mortality Rates

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12 13 14

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CARE and food aid from America in Berlin during and after the First World War,” European Journal of Population 9.3 (1993), pp. 235–63, suggest that infant mortality is generally a good indicator of post-war casualties. Barry J. Eichengreen, “Mainsprings of Economic Recovery in Post-War Europe,” in Barry J. Eichengreen (ed.), Europe’s Post-War Recovery, Cambridge and New York, 1995, pp. 3–35 (p. 3). Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee, Oxford, 2013, pp. 89–117. Mark Wyman, DPs. Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–1951, Ithaca, NY, 1998; Ben Shephard, The Long Road Home. The Aftermath of the Second World War, New York, 2011; Tara Zahra, The Lost Children. Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II, Cambridge, MA, 2011. Gerd Horten, Radio Goes to War. The Cultural Politics of Propaganda During World War II, Berkeley, CA, 2002, particularly chs. 2, 4, and 5; Michael S. Sweeney, Secrets of Victory. The Office of Censorship and the American Press and Radio in World War II, Chapel Hill, NC, 2001. Brian H. Smith, More than Altruism. The Politics of Private Foreign Aid, Princeton, NJ, 1990, p.  42; Susan Armstrong-Reid and David R. Murray, ‘Armies of Peace’. Canada and the UNRRA Years, Toronto and Buffalo, NY, 2008. Big foundations such as Rockefeller underscored the role of food as a major topic of interest as early as 1943; see Corinna Unger, “Towards Global Equilibrium. American Foundations and Indian Modernization, 1950s to 1970s,” Journal of Global History 6.1 (2011), pp. 121–42 (p. 124). Elizabeth Clark Reiss, The American Council of Voluntary Agencies for Foreign Service, ACVAFS. Four Monographs, New York, 1985, vol. I, p. 6. Jessica Reinisch, “Internationalism in Relief. The Birth (and Death) of UNRRA,” in Mark Mazower et al. (eds.), Post-War Reconstruction in Europe. International Perspectives, 1945–1949, Oxford and New York, 2011, pp. 258–89 (p. 264). Ben Shephard, “‘Becoming Planning Minded.’ The Theory and Practice of Relief 1940– 1945,” Journal of Contemporary History 43.3 (2008), pp. 405–19 (p. 412); Silvia Salvatici, “‘Help the People to Save Themselves.’ UNRRA Relief Workers and European Displaced Persons,” Journal of Refugee Studies 25 (2012), pp. 1–24. Madeleine Herren, “Governmental Internationalism and the Beginning of a New World Order in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Johannes Paulmann and Martin H. Geyer (eds.), The Mechanics of Internationalism. Culture, Society and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War, London, 2001, pp. 121–44 (pp. 124–9). Kenneth W. Abbott and Duncan Snidal, “Why States Act Through Formal International Organizations,” in Paul F. Diehl and Brian Frederking (eds.), The Politics of Global Governance. International Organizations in an Interdependent World, Boulder, CO, 2010, pp. 27–65 (p. 60). Silvia Salvatici, “Between National and International Mandates: Displaced Persons and Refugees in Postwar Italy,” Journal of Contemporary History 49.3 (2014), pp. 514–36; Katerina Gardikas, “Relief Work and Malaria in Greece, 1943–1947,” Journal of Contemporary History 43.3 (2008), pp. 493–508. Reinisch, “Internationalism in Relief,” pp. 285–6. Flora Tsilaga, “‘The Mountain Laboured and Brought Forth a Mouse.’ UNRRA’s Operations in the Cyclades Islands, c.1945–46,” Journal of Contemporary History 43.3 (2008), pp. 527–45 (p. 529). Donald W. White, “History and American Internationalism: The Formulation from the Past after World War II,” Pacific Historical Review 58.2 (1989), pp. 145–72 (pp. 168–9); Andrew Harder, “The Politics of Impartiality. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation

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26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

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Administration in the Soviet Union, 1946–7,” Journal of Contemporary History 47.2 (2012), pp. 347–69 (pp. 363–4); Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War. World War Two and the Battle for Food, London, 2011. Office of Business Economics, US Department of Commerce, Foreign Aid by the United States Government, 1940–1951, Washington DC, 1952, p. 4, 10, table I, net foreign aid furnished, by region. Alan S. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe 1945–51, London, 2003; Eichengreen, “Mainsprings of Economic Recovery”; Nicolaus Mills, Winning the Peace. The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower, Hoboken, NJ, 2008; for the German case, see Werner Abelshauser, “American Aid and West German Economic Recovery: A Macro-economic Perspective,” in Charles S. Maier and Günter Bischof (eds.), The Marshall Plan and Germany, New York, 1991, pp. 367–409. NARA, RG 469, UD664, Box 2, Arthur Vandenberg to Paul C. French, July 23, 1948. See Rachel M. McCleary, Global Compassion. Private Voluntary Organizations and U.S. Foreign Policy since 1939, Oxford and New York, 2009, p. 57; Linda Griffin Kean, “Voluntary Foreign Aid. Forty Years of Serving Human Need,” The Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries XLIX.1 (1987), pp. 1–29. The President’s War Relief Control Board, Voluntary War Relief during World War II; a Report to the President by the President’s War Relief Control Board, Washington DC, 1946, p. 8, registers only a total of US$504 million from 1939–45. The comparatively low figures conflict with figures presented by Rachel McCleary. See McCleary, Global Compassion, p. 57, table 2.1. Merle Curti, American Philanthropy Abroad, A History, New Brunswick, NJ, 1963, pp. 450–32, 509; Curti estimates that organized labor contributed about 20 percent in 1943. See figure 2.1, PVO numbers in 1939 and 1941, in McCleary, Global Compassion, p. 39. Neutrality Act of 1939, November 4, 1939, Public Resolution No. 54, 76th Congress, Chapter 2, 2nd Session. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Executive Order 9205 Establishing the President’s War Relief Control Board, July 25, 1942, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=16287 andst=executive+Order+9205andst1=#ixzz1smg3oNkX (accessed September 6, 2015). Oral history interview with Arthur Ringland by Richard D. McKinzie, Washington DC, July 14, 1975, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/ringland.htm (accessed September 6, 2015). Joseph Edward Davies, Voluntary War Relief during World War II: A Report to the President by the President’s War Relief Control Board, Washington DC, 1946, pp. 6–9. ACVAFS, Box 6, signed ACVAFS document on purpose and aim of the organization, October 14, 1943. ACVAFS, Box 52, letter by G. M. Bookman (ACVAFS), April 1, 1944. Gerard Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake. Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order, New York, 2012, p. 61. “Voluntary Aid Necessary, United Nations Relief Agencies Helped by Independent Council,” by Joseph P. Chamberlain, Chairman of ACVAFS, The New York Times, March 6, 1945. ACVAFS, Box 6, ACVAFS membership list 1943–1984. 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).

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39 CARE was incorporated in late November 1945 under the legal provisions of the Cooperation Association Act of the District of Columbia. 40 Murray D. Lincoln, Vice President in Charge of Revolution, New York, 1960, pp. 205–6. 41 Milton Harris and Artur Raviv, “Organization Design,” Management Science 48.7 (2002), pp. 852–65. 42 CARE records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations (henceforth CARE), Box 26, Arthur Ringland to Paul Comly French, February 10, 1949. 43 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 August 24, 2016). 44 Bertrand M. Patenaude, The Big Show in Bololand. The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921, Stanford, CA, 2002; see also 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 (p. 112). 45 Wallace J. Campbell, The History of CARE. A Personal Account, New York, 1990, p. 8. 46 Oral history interview with Arthur Ringland by Richard McKenzie. 47 Campbell, History of CARE, p. 10. 48 CARE, Box 1, copies of invitation letters by Charlotte Owen to the heads of voluntary agencies, August 29, 1945. 49 ACVAFS, Box 7, minutes of ACVAFS meeting of subcommittee on cooperatives, September 6, 1945. 50 ACVAFS, Box 29, Lincoln Clark to Charlotte Owen, September 18, 1945; the two DoS officials were Arthur Ringland and Elmer Burland. 51 Harder, “Politics of Impartiality,” pp. 363–4; Mark Harrison, “The Soviet Union after 1945: Economic Recovery and Political Repression,” Past and Present 210 (2011), suppl. 6, pp. 103–20; Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron. Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954, Cambridge and New York, 1998, ch. 3. 52 CARE, Box 1, Charlotte Owen to Lincoln Clark, September 20, 1945; Lincoln Clark to Wallace Campbell, September 25, 1945. 53 ACVAFS, Box 29, draft of prospectus of CARE, Lincoln Clark, October 19, 1945. 54 ACVAFS, Box 7, minutes of ACVAFS executive committee meeting, September 26, 1945. 55 CARE, Box 1, Charlotte Owen to Arthur Ringland, September 7, 1945. 56 ACVAFS, Box 7, minutes of committee on cooperatives, October 16, 1945. The initial plan enticed capitalization of no more than US$100,000. 57 ACVAFS, Box 7, minutes of committee on cooperatives meeting (CARE), November 8, 1945; Washington authorities suggested an initial capitalization of at least US$1.5 million. 58 CARE, Box 14, Joseph Davies (PWRCB) to CARE, January 18, 1946. 59 ACVAFS, Box 7, minutes of committee on cooperatives meeting (CARE), November 8, 1945. 60 CARE, Box 1, William Rosebourough, Counselor at Law for American Relief to France, to  William S. Davenport, Import-Export Industries, Inc., Subject “CARE”, October 24, 1945. 61 ACVAFS, Box 29, CARE capital investment by member agencies as of November 27, 1945. 62 The last agency to join CARE’s initial set-up was American Relief to Italy.

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63 ACVAFS, Box 7, ACVAFS to member agencies of the council on cooperatives, November 19, 1945. 64 CARE, Box 1, Herbert H. Lehman to Wallace Campbell, November 23, 1945. 65 Paul A. C. Koistinen, State of War. The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1945–2011, Lawrence, KS, 2012, pp. 85–6. 66 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, November 28, 1945. 67 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, November 29, 1945. 68 Mark Granovetter, “Economic Action and Social Structure. The Problem of Social Embededness,” The American Journal of Sociology 91.3 (1985), pp. 481–510, esp. pp. 495–6. 69 The use of this term is slightly ahistorical here, as “the terms nonprofit sector, third sector, and independent sector entered scholarly usage in the 1970s and their appearance was specifically linked to the efforts of organized philanthropy to defend itself from government regulation and oversights”; see Peter D. Hall, Inventing the Nonprofit Sector and Other Essays on Philanthropy, Voluntarism, and Nonprofit Organizations, Baltimore, MD, 1992, p. 244. 70 Campbell, History of CARE, p. 21. 71 Stanford Orson Cazier, “CARE, A Study in Cooperative Voluntary Relief,” doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin 1964, pp. 49–50. 72 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, December 26, 1945. 73 ACVAFS, Box 7, minutes of ACVAFS council meeting, July 26, 1946. 74 “Cooperative Aids Overseas Relief; Donald M. Nelson Heads ‘World Mail-Order House’ Formed to Speed Food Supplies,” The New York Times, November 30, 1945, p. 2. 75 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, December 28, 1945. 76 Campbell, History of CARE, p. 23. 77 ACVAFS, Box 7, Eastburn Thompson (AFSC) to Charlotte Owen (ACVAFS), December 31, 1945; Charlotte Owen to Eastburn Thompson, January 8, 1946. 78 CARE, Box 7, report General Haskell to board of directors of CARE, March 7, 1946. 79 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, June 18, 1946. 80 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, December 28, 1945; MECM, March 1, 1946. 81 Campbell, History of CARE, p. 28; CARE, Box 1170, MDBM, December 8, 1945: CARE, Box 1170, MDBM, December 14, 1945. 82 CARE, Box 7, minutes of CARE executive and finance committee meeting, December 14, 1945. 83 CARE, Box 1, MBDM, January 8, 1946. 84 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, February 15, 1946. 85 ACVAFS, Box 8, minutes of ACVAFS meeting, February 26, 1946. 86 Granovetter, “Economic Action and Social Structure,” p. 502. 87 Milton Harris and Artur Raviv, “Organization Design,” Management Science 48.7 (2002), pp. 852–65. 88 Hierarchical structures in cooperatives are not uncommon, even though the US tradition was certainly less preoccupied with categories of “race, hierarchy, and ideology” than the European ones; see Brett Fairbairn, “Self-Help and Philanthropy. The Emergence of Cooperatives in Britain, the United States and Canada, from Mid-Nineteenth to MidTwentieth Century,” in Thomas Adam (ed.), Philanthropy, Patronage, and Civil Society. Experiences from Germany, Great Britain, and North America, Bloomington, IN, 2004, pp. 56–78 (p. 66). 89 See Richard C. Williams, The Cooperative Movement. Globalization from Below, Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2007, pp. 15–16.

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90 Marc Schneiberg et al., “Social Movements and Organizational Form: Cooperative Alternatives to Corporations in the American Insurance, Dairy, and Grain Industries,” American Sociological Review 73.4 (2008), pp. 635–67 (p. 637). 91 CARE, Box 1, William A. Roseborough to Moore Gates, December 1, 1945. 92 CARE, Box 1, Wallace Campbell to Charlotte Owen, September 13, 1945. 93 Richard Bessel, Germany 1945. From War to Peace, New York, 2009, pp. 372–3; Malte Zierenberg, Stadt der Schieber. Der Berliner Schwarzmarkt 1939–1950, Göttingen, 2008, pp. 279–87. 94 “Price for Food Kits to Europe is Cut. CARE Reduces the Charge for Packages to $10,” The New York Times, October 1, 1946, p. 23. 95 For thoughts on the shift from duty-based ethics to rather consequentialist concepts in Western humanitarianism, see, for example, Michael Barnett, “Humanitarianism Transformed,” Perspectives on Politics 3.4 (2005), pp. 723–40 (p. 732). 96 CARE, Box 1, CARE organizational chart, sketched by hand [1945/1946]. 97 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, May 2, 1946. 98 Karl-Ludwig Sommer, Humanitäre Auslandshilfe als Brücke zur atlantischen Partnerschaft. CARE, CRALOG und die Entwicklung der deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen nach Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges, Bremen, 1999, pp. 114–19; CARE, Box 1170, MECM, May 28, 1946; see also “Russians Protest Americans Teaching Baseball and Sending Food to Berliners,” The New York Times, September 11, 1946, p. 8; “CARE Protest Settled,” The New York Times, September 14, 1946, p. 3. 99 “7 Countries Waive Duty on U.S. Food,” The New York Times, April 8, 1946, p. 25; CARE, Box 1170, report of CARE finance committee, April 30, 1946. 100 Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson, Graphing Various Historical Economic Series, Measuring Worth, 2011, www.measuringworth.com/graphs/ (accessed September 7, 2015), projected via consumer price index. 101 Bess Furman, “Acheson Assails Three-Fifths Lag in May Food Relief,” Special to The New York Times, May 8, 1946, p. 1. 102 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, May 9, 1946; MBDM, June 18, 1946. 103 Cazier, “Study in Cooperative Development,” pp. 60–1. 104 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, June 18, 1946. 105 ACVAFS, Box 7, minutes of committee on cooperatives (ACVAFS), September 28, 1945. 106 CARE, Box 1, Charles Bloomstein, manuscript of history of CARE, p. 13. 107 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, June 18, 1946. 108 CARE, Box 26, Elmer Burland to Arthur Ringland, June 27, 1946. 109 CARE, Box 1, Alex B. Hawes to General W. Haskell, subj: changes in Articles of Incorporation, February 20, 1946; February 25, 1946. 110 CARE, Box 1, Thomas Keogh to the members and directors of CARE, March 14, 1946. 111 CARE, Box 1, CARE to the Recorder of Deeds, District of Columbia, March 25, 1946; Articles of Incorporation of CARE as amended March 19, 1946. 112 CARE, Box 1, Thomas Keogh to the members and directors of CARE, March 14, 1946. 113 CARE, Box 7, Alexander Landesco and Andre Meyer to General William Haskell, June 13, 1946. 114 Cazier, “Study in Cooperative Development,” p. 69. 115 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, September 25, 1946. 116 CARE, Box 7, William Haskell to board of directors, October 15, 1946. 117 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, November 6, 1946.

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118 Lincoln, Vice President in Charge of Revolution, p. 203. 119 ACVAFS, Box 5, minutes of ACVAFS committee on cooperatives, September 6, 1946. 120 NARA, RG 469, UD 664, Box 2, copy of CARE executive director’s report, January 7, 1947. 121 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, October 18, 1946. 122 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, April 23, 1947. 123 On the classical debate about entrepreneurs, see, for example, Mark Casson, The Entrepreneur. An Economic Theory, Cheltenham, 2003; Helmut K. Anheier et al. (eds.), Soziale Investitionen. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven, Wiesbaden, 2012; Leonardo Becchetti and Carlo Borzaga (eds.), The Economics of Social Responsibility. The World of Social Enterprises, London, 2010. 124 Judt, Postwar, pp. 41–62. 125 For the quotation as well as for an enlightening account on the way public opinion ­polling  changed American democracy, see Melvin G. Holli, The Wizard of Washington. Emil Hurja, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Birth of Public Opinion Polling, New York, 2002, p. 74. 126 “Truman to Leading Citizens Concerning the Need for a Voluntary Food Conservation Program,” February 27, 1946, in Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry S. Truman, 1946, Washington DC, 1962, pp. 135–6. 127 Daniel L. Lykins, From Total War to Total Diplomacy. The Advertising Council and the Construction of the Cold War Consensus, Westport, CT, 2003, pp. 65–6. 128 Remarks by President Truman to members of the Conference Called To Develop a Food Conservation Program, March 1, 1946, in Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry S. Truman 1946, Washington DC, 1962, p. 139; see also remarks of Frederick C. Smith (Ohio) regarding President Truman’s 39 Point food saving plan, in Appendix to Congressional Record, 79th Congress, 2nd Session, Annals of Congress Vol. 92, March 13, 1946, p. A1386. 129 Herbert Hoover, radio broadcast from Cairo, April 19, 1946, in Addresses upon the American Road, 1945–1948, New York, 1949, pp. 193–8. 130 Pate (ed.), The Children Are Hungry. 131 Dorothea Andrews, “Best Way to Help Is to Save on Food,” The Washington Post, May 13, 1946, p. 3. 132 “Truman Program Held Inadequate,” The New York Times, March 18, 1946, p. 11. 133 ACVAFS, Box 5, ACVAFS MECM, September 26, 1945. 134 NARA, RG469, UD658-A, Box 1, Harry Truman to Dean Acheson, May 14, 1946. 135 ACVAFS, Box 5, Charles P. Taft (ACVFA) to Secretary of State Dean Acheson, July 10, 1946. 136 ACVAFS, Box 5, minutes of ACVAFS council meeting, January 23, 1947. 137 Hall, Inventing the Nonprofit Sector, p. 15. 138 See, for example, Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire. America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe, Cambridge, 2006. 139 Jeff R. Schutts, “Born Again in the Gospel of Refreshment? Coca-Colanization and the Re-Making of Postwar German Identity,” in David F. Crew (ed.), Consuming Germany and the Cold War, Oxford and New York, 2003, pp. 121–50. 140 CARE, Box 26, Paul French to Arthur Ringland (ACVFA), January 27, 1947. 141 CARE, Box 26, Paul French to Arthur Ringland, February 13, 1947. 142 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, January 7, 1948. 143 ACVAFS, Box 6, Charlotte Owen to ACVAFS members regarding meeting of ACVAFS representatives with President Truman on February 27, 1947, March 5, 1947.

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144 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 (pp. 248–9). 145 ACVAFS, Box 7, minutes ACVAFS finance committee meeting, December 6, 1946. 146 ACVAFS, Box 29, William Haskell to Katherine F. Lenroot (US Children’s Bureau), December 20, 1946. The US Children’s Bureau was a division of the Federal Security Agency and thus a semi-governmental player. 147 ACVAFS, Box 7, ACVAFS material aid committee, June 26, 1947. 148 ACVAFS, Box 29, Arthur Ringland to Charlotte Owen, June 26, 1947. 149 ACVAFS, Box 29, Charlotte Owen, memo to files, May 21, 1947. 150 ACVAFS, Box 7, minutes of ACVAFS membership committee, May 8, 1946; ACVAFS minutes of joint finance, membership/EC meeting, June 24, 1947.

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From Europe to Asia and beyond (1948–55)

The making of CARE as a permanent organization Conflicts, both of issues and personalities are inevitable in any organization, I ­suppose. Somehow, though, they always seem especially painful in an organization that is idealistically motivated and democratically controlled.1

In June 1947 CARE’s executive director, Paul Comly French, proudly informed the State Department that he had been awarded the Order of Orange-Nassau by the Queen of the Netherlands.2 It was the first in a long series of awards, orders, and acknowledgements that CARE (or rather its representatives) received in recognition of the organization’s effort in helping the hungry overseas. While these honors were mainly of symbolic meaning, they underscored the fact that the CARE package was indeed effectively changing the picture of post-war relief in many European countries. This was particularly the case for Germany, which received by far the highest number of packages during the 1940s.3 A classified study conducted by the American military authorities in Germany in early 1950 showed that eight out of ten people in the American zones and almost everyone in Berlin and Bremen had heard of the CARE package at some point. Most Germans were aware that the packages came from individuals in the United States, and one out of eleven people in the American zone had even received such a package. In addition, the overwhelming majority of the 1500 people polled held a generally favorable opinion regarding CARE and expressed the conviction that packages were sent primarily to help, not for political reasons or out of a “profit motive.”4 While CARE’s success and its popularity in Europe are explained rather easily by the fact that surplus American food was ending up in European casseroles, an explanation for CARE’s success in the United States – which was of course the basis for CARE’s activity abroad – is maybe less obvious. One reason for CARE’s rising popularity among American donors was certainly rooted in the concept of personalized packages from individual to individual. With the CARE package every American, regardless of his or her socio-economic background, could do a charitable good deed. It was not just the economic elite or fabulously rich philanthropists who could participate. Now, everyone who was willing and able to

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spare a few d­ ollars could help alleviate human misery abroad. The broader (post-) war relief drive was characterized by a growing tide of mass charity. In particular, the many migrants and refugees from Europe tried to keep in touch with their countries of origin and repeatedly donated small sums or sent non-perishable foodstuffs abroad whenever their personal economic circumstances allowed. The introduction of the CARE package, however, amplified this tendency. It not only offered a well-organized and inexpensive concept of charity for everyone, but it also personalized the giving process. CARE packages were personally designated and could be traced back to the donor at any given point. The simple fact that the benefactor’s name was not lost or blurred after having made the gift, but was understood as an integral part of the whole undertaking, singled CARE out and lifted individual charity to a new level. Ultimately, however, it was more than just a good charity concept whose time had come. It was also about successful marketing. CARE was extraordinarily quick to develop marketing strategies that stood out from the numerous other relief appeals by private voluntary agencies. This is even more remarkable considering that, at the behest of French, CARE had temporarily abolished paid advertising in the autumn of 1946.5 Hoping to cut costs and convinced that it was inappropriate for a non-profit agency to be spending donor dollars on private company advertising, French had severed CARE’s relation with the advertising company Benton and Bowles and then in 1947 entered into cooperation with the Advertising Council instead.6 This body was a private non-profit group that had originally been founded in 1941 to mobilize public support for the war effort by promoting the sale of war bonds and the like. It connected American public relations professionals, media stations, and corporate sponsors in order to develop and run educational propaganda campaigns.7 At the end of the war, with its main mission accomplished, the Advertising Council carefully shifted to new fields such as public health, household safety, or the promotion of American foreign policy objectives.8 While officially a private and independent body, it relied heavily on sponsorship from big business and held close ties to the government.9 It was at the behest of Charles W. Jackson, acting chief of the Truman administration’s Media Programming Division, that contact between the Advertising Council and CARE was established in early 1947.10 Government officials had been quick to grasp CARE’s potential as a goodwill ambassador abroad and did not miss a chance to underscore the “splendid job” CARE was doing.11 As a secular organization with close ties to its now more than 27 member agencies – religious, ethnic, or political – CARE was an ideal partner in the eyes of government experts and the Advertising Council staff alike. Both parties saw CARE and its packages as “a valuable diplomatic and political weapon” in the setting of rising Cold War tensions.12 Hence, starting in the summer of 1947, a nationwide advertising campaign was planned and launched. It was free of charge for CARE and consisted of radio announcements, car cards, and massive billboard advertising. With a calculated

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value of US$2.5 million13 – had it been paid for on the open market – it not only boosted CARE’s sales figures from approximately 8,000 to 25,000 packages per week in 1947, but it also contributed vastly to CARE’s public recognition and helped establish it as a well-known name in American charity.14 As well as this partnership with the Advertising Council, CARE started several successful cooperative joint ventures with commercial firms in the food and cosmetics industries. In early 1948, the Texsum Company provided citrus juice for distribution in northern Europe, which was a first step toward further cooperation with commercial companies.15 Only shortly afterwards, in the winter of 1948/49 CARE and Lever Brothers launched a large advertising campaign. In return for every two Swan Soap wrappers sent in by American customers, one bar of soap was shipped to needy people in Europe.16 This cooperation with the consumer goods industry – one of the “publicity highlights of the year” as Paul French put it – turned out to be profitable for both sides. CARE was able to augment its relief goods for shipping with 1.3 million soap bars and also profited from additional advertising, since Lever Brothers “supported the campaign by making it the main theme of the highly popular Bob Hope radio show.”17 This additional publicity allowed CARE to reach out to new potential donors. From the perspective of a commercial firm like Lever Brothers, cooperation with CARE offered a welcome chance to demonstrate corporate social responsibility – long before this concept became commonplace – and to foster consumer identification with their products.18 On top of this, Europeans could be provided with free samples of American products – getting potential future customers acquainted with American brand names and consumer options. In addition to such slowly evolving forms of business cooperation, CARE extended its organizational basis further at the grassroots level. Starting in 1947, CARE initiated the establishment of citizen-run CARE committees in several dozen American cities. Thousands of volunteers in these subsidizing committees organized charity events for fundraising purposes at which CARE packages were promoted and donations were collected.19 Actor Douglas Fairbanks, known from silent movies like The Mark of Zorro, served as committee chairman and promoted the CARE idea to the public.20 In Philadelphia, for instance, CARE opened a promotion bureau at a Lit Brothers department store – adding yet another business cooperation to its records.21 With the support of the Advertising Council and fueled by various presidential endorsements, a good number of celebrities like Fairbanks, Bob Hope, and Ingrid Bergman could be persuaded to volunteer for radio commercials and public advertisements.22 These stars added a fair amount of glamour to the otherwise rather down-to-earth food package and helped spread CARE’s message to millions of potential American donors. This striking upsurge of CARE publicity and supportive statements by celebrities and politicians, along with the tireless work of the fundraising committees, soon resulted in private contributions to CARE nearly tripling from US$10.3 million in 1946 to US$28.5 million in 1947. In

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CARE and food aid from America

Figure 2.1  Cooperative advertisement CARE/Swan Soap (Lever Brothers), 1949. 1948 – three years after the war had officially ended – the sales volume for packages still remained stable at almost US$29 million.23 On January 1, 1948 CARE had the almost incredible number of 865 employees on its payroll.24 This enormous organizational growth came at a cost, however. In December 1947, the first member agency, the American Jewish Joint Distribution  Committee, declared its withdrawal from CARE, feeling no longer

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Figure 2.2  Bob Hope at a CARE package promotion event in the early 1950s.

able to participate “in the supervision of the management of what is in effect a large and complex commercial operation.”25 The CARE management was indeed caught in a constant struggle to stay in control of operations.26 Hence, in 1947 a first large external audit was commissioned from Price and Waterhouse.27 The report disclosed serious “weakness in organizational structure and lack of accounting control” and called for “the appointment of someone thoroughly qualified, at the toplevel reporting to the executive director and the executive committee, to assume full charge of finance and accounts.”28 Existing organizational structures had been outpaced by the company’s fast growth, which demanded the implementation of sound business methods by experienced personnel. In response, Paul Denzin, a “retired executive officer from a large chain store with a large amount of experience in the field of finances,” was eventually hired as new head of the accounting and finance division.29 Moreover, French and the executive committee implemented several s­ tructural adjustments in the course of 1947, not only installing an internal audit ­section

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CARE and food aid from America

Figure 2.3  Ingrid Bergman at a CARE package promotion event in the early 1950s.

but also dividing the enterprise into two separate departments for finance (including remittances, accounting, and a newly created treasury division) and operations (including supply, public relations, overseas, and office management divisions).30 French went on to hire two administrative assistants as a means of achieving closer control and coordination and also in hopes of ridding himself of the handling “of a large number of details.”31 Starting in early 1948, a regular home office accounting bulletin was published, which was sent to all sections and unit supervisors. In addition to these administrative changes, in December 1947 the CARE board hired a consulting firm “in the interest of bringing the ­operations of CARE to a maximum of efficiency and service.”32 The report by Loeb and Troper – focusing mainly on the overall purchasing operation – was submitted in March 1948 and led to further changes and structural adjustments.33 Not only was CARE’s hitherto extremely low cash position significantly strengthened, but renegotiations with insurance companies and packing firms also led to significant cost cuts per  ­package.34 In a­ ddition, further diversification of the packages was

49

From Europe to Asia and beyond Executive Director

Management Control

Administrative Assistant

Procedure

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Internal Audit Director of Personnel Accounting

Sales Promotion

Traffic & Supply

Overseas

Remittances

Office Management

Purchases Warehouses Traffic

Figure 2.4  CARE organizational chart after reorganization, May 1947.

initiated. In his executive d­ irector’s report after the reorganization, French – who kept a close eye on commercial companies and regularly commissioned surveys on c­ ompetitors’ services – proudly stated that a study of the general operating picture had shown that costs had been reduced and deliveries been speeded up.35 According to him, CARE was thus finally “coming close to the point when we can say that we have both an economical and efficient organization, by commercial standards.”36 Fundamental changes regarding acquisition and handling of CARE packages would have become necessary anyway, as the original 10-in-1 rations were slowly but surely becoming outdated. CARE’s Lou Scherer – having worked for the corporate mail-order giant Sears Roebuck earlier in his career – had proposed the development of new packages as early as the spring of 1946. It took until December 1946, however, before the board of directors finally cleared the general proposal and two CARE volunteers – one of them a learned nutritionist – could start to design new food parcels.37 Executive board member Harold Miner agreed to lead negotiations with various food companies and finally sealed a new package deal with the relatively small British-American Trading Corporation. While Miner had also approached corporate food giants, it had turned out that Standard Brands and others were not interested in the project – supposedly due to the small

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CARE and food aid from America

volume of operations.38 In addition to the new package deal, the board cleared French’s ­suggestion to r­ enegotiate with the packing company located at the port of Philadelphia from where CARE packages were shipped. French had originally considered installing an in-house packing unit but had abandoned the idea as too costly and decided instead to invite a number of other companies to bid for the job.39 He was successful in haggling down prices, and in “a highly businesslike manner” (as it would be contentedly reported at a meeting), CARE changed packaging firms, therewith significantly cutting per package costs.40 In his report to the board of directors, French proudly underscored some time later that “according to a study prepared by the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration in cooperation with the National Retail Dry Goods Association” it “costs the average large department store $1.11 to handle each customer transaction in 1947,” while CARE had been working at 92 cents to handle each order during the first seven months of 1948.41 It is noteworthy that CARE’s management took notice of such studies and did not balk at comparing their organization with commercial enterprises. The business horizon was ever present in CARE’s operations and was repeatedly acknowledged by government executives who applauded CARE’s “most economical and expeditious manner” of handling its affairs.42 Shortly after the new standard food package was introduced, the board gave permission for the exploratory development of a first non-food package, which would contain cotton and textile pieces. With this the door was opened for greater diversity in CARE’s overall package branch. In June 1947 management initiated a market research project in order to find out why sales to Italy were significantly below expectations – despite a large population of Italian immigrants in New York.43 The resultant study revealed that the original American package simply did  not match Italian dietary habits. Thus, an experimental Italian package was ordered that was tailored to the tastes of the Anglo-Italian community. This ­successful adaptation gave way to the general practice of diversifying package content in consideration of special national or regional dietary habits.44 In rapid succession, and parallel to CARE’s geographical extension, further special food (e.g. a kosher package) and non-food packages (e.g. a sewing kit or a seed package) were assembled in an attempt to broaden CARE’s appeal to new groups of donors, and to make recipients more willing to accept the donations. While the satisfaction of both old and potential new donors was a crucial factor for CARE’s executive management, financial arguments played an even more fundamental role. When a special low-price lard package was introduced in mid-1947, it was precisely its  enormous success among CARE customers that alarmed Paul French, as it s­ ignificantly diminished orders for the ten dollar standard package. Confronted  with this dilemma, French (energetically backed by CARE’s treasurer) immediately abandoned the package and blocked all attempts by other board members to reintroduce a low-price package that might potentially damage CARE’s bottom line.45

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It was largely thanks to CARE’s increased popularity and the implementation of new promotion strategies that the original donor group was significantly ­broadened. In addition to those who sent packages to family and friends, an increasing number of Americans without connections to the old continent decided to buy packages too, leaving it to CARE to pick a worthy recipient. The citizen-run CARE committees accelerated this phenomenon and increased the flow of small, undesignated donations to be spent for relief purposes at CARE’s discretion. One of the highlights was CARE’s participation in the so-called “silent guest” campaign under the auspices of Herbert Hoover, Eleanor Roosevelt, and others, which promoted private donations to CARE for a needy person overseas (the silent guest) on the occasion of Thanksgiving dinner.46 This overall increase in so-called undesignated packages and funds, in combination with CARE’s strong presence in the national advertising landscape, led to yet another internal crisis, however. To a certain extent it was precisely CARE’s success – underscored by its multiple awards, constantly high donor figures, and tremendous economic and political upswing – that led to growing intra-organizational frictions. In a sector large enough to be relevant in terms of financial turnover and public attention but still small enough to allow for personal relations between top-level executives, some of the agencies were not happy to see CARE taking over significant proportions of the overall media attention for the American post-war relief drive.47 What led to further unrest was the fact that some recent CARE ads had openly encouraged Americans to buy undesignated packages or to donate small sums to CARE for so-called general relief. Member agencies with foreign programs of their own were particularly alarmed and considered this to be a directly competitive action. Hence, French, as head of management, was urged to do his utmost to prevent CARE from going further into “the field of general relief” – which was felt to be beyond CARE’s original mission.48 In February 1947, in the interest of organizational peace and more harmonious member agency relationships, a resolution was passed that prohibited CARE from promoting general relief or the sale of undesignated packages. Further, the resolution decreed that any such contributions coming in were to be turned over to CARE’s individual member agencies.49 Although French officially declared his support for this policy, in practice he proved unable (and partially unwilling, some members believed) to concur.50 From his perspective there was nothing wrong with augmenting sales volumes. The fact that a chance to increase the organization’s size and financial base – as well as the value of overall relief shipped by CARE to the needy – was deliberately inhibited by the board of directors was a constant source of frustration for French, who felt that he was being deterred from doing his job.51 The problem was aggravated by government authorities repeatedly attempting to influence individual CARE members to change their stances. CARE had received enormous support in the past – not least of all from the Advertising Council – and there were high expectations for CARE to live up to its potential as a highly visible All-American “general relief agency.”52 Eventually, with pressure mounting both

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from within and without, a special committee, chaired by CARE’s treasurer Harold Miner, was appointed to develop suggestions for CARE’s future development.53 This committee, however, had been assigned an almost impossible reconciliatory task. As a paper on CARE member agency relations from 1955 observed: CARE’s member agencies could be classified roughly into two main groups; (1) those with their own operating relief programs overseas and (2) those with overseas interest, and often affiliates, but without a general relief operation. The attitude toward CARE, the use of CARE, and the idea of the future of CARE differed greatly between these two general categories of agencies [… with the latter hoping for] a program much more inclusive than the immediate food relief job.54

While most religious and operational agencies were strongly opposed to expanding CARE and its operations, other members felt that it was high time for CARE to aspire to more and to make up for the “discriminatory character of CARE which provide[d] no method to take care of people in those countries who do not have friends or relatives in the United States.”55 Among the latter was Harold Miner, who – in his capacity as chairman of the surplus distribution committee – urged his colleagues to reconsider the original resolution. CARE had already “been sold” successfully as a brand, he argued. Now, though, it was time for “something bigger than management and bigger than individual member agencies” – namely a “quasipublic institution” – one that could only live up to its potential by expanding into general relief.56 However, Miner’s suggestions “divided the Board square in the middle.”57 At a board meeting in January 1948 both parties eventually clashed. CARE founding member Wallace Campbell, who was strongly in favor of a “wider role for CARE,”58 pushed forward with an official letter from the government Advisory Committee, which urged CARE’s members to allow general relief for the sake of CARE’s organizational self-interest and also for its moral responsibilities to the American public and the needy of Europe.59 This frank reminder, however, failed to serve its purpose with those opposed to such a step. In “the heat of battle,” and by a margin of only one vote, a resolution was passed, obliging CARE to return all undesignated contributions to the original donors or to hand those donations over to the American Overseas Aid United Nations Appeal for Children (AOA).60 CARE skeptics had won a temporary victory – completely suspending CARE advertising and the organization’s capacity to collect donations that were not for designated packages.61 However, as the small margin of the resolution suggests, this was not the end. For many, the decision was merely a “victory of selfishness” for which there was little excuse.62 It was thus with low spirits that the next several CARE board of directors meetings were held.63 As it turned out, several aspects of the resolution – in particular the stipulation to hand over donations for CARE to the AOA campaign – were outright impossible, from both moral and legal perspectives.64 Paul French, feeling that he was being prevented from doing what was best for the organization, eventually confessed that while “he had been associated with

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various kinds of operations […] he had never found one as difficult as CARE.” Further increasing the pressure, he even argued that if the agencies of CARE would not “allow it to function” then there was, from his perspective, no choice but “liquidation of the agency.”65 In the course of spring of 1948 it became obvious that the CARE member agencies had maneuvered themselves into an organizational impasse. With the rift between board and management growing ever more vast, staff morale also continued to deteriorate. As the effects of suspended advertising started to make themselves felt, many employees began to fear for their jobs. In late March 1948 the Union of CARE Employees (UCE), a body that had only been established a few months earlier, sent a telegram to the CARE executive committee, denouncing the recent decisions that had resulted in “serious loss of CARE orders and support” as well as in lay-offs.66 In its letter, the UCE even accused CARE’s board of a violation of mutual contractual duties and called for immediate positive steps to allay the soaring uncertainty.67 It was a remarkable alliance that was by this time developing in and around CARE. It included CARE employees, fearing for their jobs, the executive management, hoping to guide CARE into becoming a state-of-the art non-profit relief agency, and several individuals in and outside of government-operated agencies and programs. All of them pressed for a reversal of the negative resolution. The government Advisory Committee in particular was employing every strategy possible – from careful persuasion to open threat – in order to bring CARE back on track.68 In late May 1948, CARE’s Survey Committee submitted its final report, stating: Board relations seem to have deteriorated and there is an obvious lack of basic unanimity. We have voted promotion restrictions and then complained about the consequent lack of promotion. […] We have talked of CARE as a “relief organization” when we distributed net margins and as a “commercial enterprise” when we object to promoting any undesignated gifts. Our actions are confusing and paralyzing to the entire staff. […] Management is […] placed in the unfair situation of seeing sales drop and being unable to protect the interest of CARE through the use of sound business methods. […] This Committee honestly believes that a successful continuation of any business is next to impossible with a Board so badly divided. Unless our Board can get together on a constructive program we believe […] those agencies who do not approve and use CARE to the fullest practicable extent may withdraw and permit those who wish it to continue to fill the place it has created among the American people.69

When the report was discussed in early June most members agreed that the crisis had to be solved in one way or another.70 CARE’s president, Murray Lincoln, being an ardent supporter of CARE’s potential extension, reminded his colleagues that both registration with the Advisory Committee as well as participation in the ECAfunded overseas program for 1948 was dependent on a positive decision regarding general relief.71 In order to underline his point, he even read out a note by William H. Draper from the Department of the Army who turned this conflict into a ­question

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of CARE being obliged to “fill its manifest destiny” in the relief field.72 This led to an éclat, however. Edmund Cummings, the representative of Church World Service, enraged by what he considered undue intervention by the government, introduced a counter-resolution urging an end to the debate and calling for the immediate dismissal of Paul French. Only after hours of debate and a vote of 14 to 10 with one abstention were promotional activities, as well as undesignated funds and packages, reintroduced, and French and his management team assured of further support.73 This turn of events laid the basis for the extension of CARE as an organization. In the process, though, the bond of trust between Paul French and some of the board members had been severely damaged. In October 1948 several members reiterated their allegations against French and did their best to bring an end to relations between CARE and its executive director.74 The committee set up to investigate the case needed weeks before it was even able to discover what French was actually accused of. In the end, French was cleared of all charges, which ranged from “financial irresponsibility and failure to follow directives of the Board” to “interference with operations of member agencies.” While there was agreement that “many mistakes have been made” (the committee found it questionable indeed whether expenses for first-class tickets to Europe were actually justified in a relief organization), no charges or criticism “of a sufficient serious nature to warrant dismissing the present Executive Director” could be substantiated. Instead, the committee eventually commended French for having done a good job in steering and streamlining the operation.75 Instead of being fired – as many members had hoped – French was offered a pay increase from US$12,500 to US$15,000 annually and was given the green light to steer CARE into a future that lay beyond European shores.76 American voluntary agencies going global It was with a good pinch of frustration that executive director Paul French informed CARE’s board of directors in early 1950 that with travel agencies reporting […] more than 400,000 American tourists visit[ing] Europe during the summer, and with the vast majority in a holiday mood seeking only surface brightness, CARE and all relief agencies were faced with the problem of combating reports from most of them that all was well again.77

French’s obvious discontent had two sources. First of all, he was familiar with the far less favorable reports he had received from his co-workers in the European missions, particularly with regard to the depressing economic and social situation of refugees and displaced persons still living at the margins of European society.78 Reports about the German economic miracle or holiday pictures of cheerful Americans in front of La Fontana di Trevi in Rome were clearly not helpful for drawing attention to the persistent misery still affecting large portions of the European population. Secondly, it was precisely these sorts of reports that reminded French that the

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fundamental reason for CARE’s existence, the very basis for the organization’s business model, was slowly but surely losing its appeal. The picture of Europe that CARE had been painting during the previous five years had – with every reason – been a rather dark one. It was a picture showing possible donors just how sorely Europeans needed American help – and quickly. Now, with Europe slowly but surely recovering, it was becoming more and more difficult for an agency like CARE to persuade Americans that donations for Europe were really necessary. With the visible upswing in Europe, CARE’s original mission, and with it the very reason for its existence, was coming closer and closer to the end of its term. French would have been an irresponsible chief executive if this had not occurred to him before 1950. In fact, as early as summer 1948 he had informed the board of directors that in the light of his discussions “with government ministers, American diplomatic representatives, industrialists, labor leaders and newspapermen,” it seemed likely to him that 1948–49 would be the last winter and spring in which CARE’s services in Europe would be needed.79 French was not, however, ready to accept the end of an organization that had – despite constant internal trouble – proven to be utterly successful in terms of relief output and general visibility. He had witnessed and pushed forward CARE’s “spectacular growth,” from a newcomer agency into a multi-million dollar non-profit relief organization in less than two years.80 He had also managed to keep CARE in business by presiding over the implementation of an enormous number of organizational and structural adjustments in the fields of accounting and controls, purchasing, transportation and distribution, personnel, and operating procedures. By mid-1948 CARE was at a temporary high in performance. From its inception through August 20, 1948, more than 5.2 ­million packages had been sold and – from an operational standpoint – the agency was doing miraculously well. Average sales rates amounted to approximately three million US dollars a month and by mid-August of 1948 an astounding 698 persons were on the CARE payroll – which was actually a 20 percent reduction from the top figure of 865 on January 1, 1948.81 However, both the CARE management and board were well aware that without a new perspective, beyond the field of CARE’s core relief parcel delivery to Europe, the organization would soon be facing difficult times. Over the course of 1949 sales diminished drastically by almost 50 percent, from roughly US$28.7 million in 1948 to approximately US$15.1 in 1949 (see Table  2.1). This downward trend reflected the growing conviction among many Americans that Europe was over the hump and did not need private help any longer. John Foster Dulles, in his capacity as Republican foreign policy advisor, described the understandable feeling among many Americans that finally the program “was to get home, to demobilize and to try to make up for the good times that had been lost because of the necessities of war.”82 The problem of sharply falling donations was not a dilemma that confronted CARE alone. The feeling among the American public that “need has passed with time” affected all private relief agencies, and during this period many organizations

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Table 2.1  Income for foreign relief – CARE 1946–51 (US$)1 Year

Total income foreign Private US sources Government relief sources

1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951

10,275,980 29,083,343 29,485,779 15,981,158 9,093.533 25,461,101

10,275,980 28,495,819 28,695,489 15,110,608 8,069,631 8,183,673

– 587,524 790,290 870,550 1,029,902 17,270,072

UN or other international sources – – – – – 7,356

1

NARA, RG 469, UD 658-A, Box 1, CARE Schedule ICR (compiled for ACVFA), resources received for foreign operations 1946–1952, May 18, 1953.

went out of business.83 The number of agencies registered with the government Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid fell from more than 100 in 1946 to about 60 in 1949.84 The agencies that terminated operations overwhelmingly lacked a certain size, and had not been delivering “general relief” but had been confined to a single European country or a particular region.85 CARE in contrast had developed a diversified structure and had in the meantime set up offices in all parts of Europe. While most packages went to north, central and southern Europe, there were also parcels going to Eastern Europe, particularly to Yugoslavia and Poland (see Table 2.2). The European offices, however, were expensive. Between April 1 and June 30, 1949 – at a time when the effects of falling donations were being felt – CARE’s organizational overhead rose to more than 16 percent of the overall income in private contributions, as revealed by a chart published by the Advisory Committee. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in comparison, showed an overhead figure of less than 3.6 percent.86 When the fact that CARE’s overhead was being presented as the highest of any American relief organization came to the attention of management, Paul French immediately asked his co-workers for clarification in order to “call it to Ringland’s attention and get a correction or an explanation.”87 In speaking to the government Advisory Committee, he expressed his feeling that such a chart might invite undue criticism from people “who do not appreciate how closely New York coordinates its work with that of the Missions.” He therefore asked for an extra sentence explaining that “CARE New York develops publicity and sales, plans and purchases contents for 25 packages and processes a signed receipt before and after delivery.” Finally, he even ordered the accounting division to review CARE’s operating expenses, in order to mark overhead expenses outside of the United States as “expenditures for relief,” which cut CARE’s official overhead to roughly half of the previous sum.88 It was foreseeable, however, that the problem of a too costly organizational apparatus – in relation to declining CARE package sales – would not vanish through any cosmetic adaptation of CARE’s

20,261,491 20,934,875 32,519,806 16,886,509 9,822,770 28,228,709 9,398,262 138,052,422

1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 Total

1,310,290 2,842,304 5,632,360 3,164,913 1,519,629 2,161,455 1,851,994 18,502,945

Northern & Western Europe 16,724,802 13,891,608 22,145,744 9,055,797 4,456,978 22,449,846 3,457,114 92,190,889

Central and South Europe 648,296 1,117,918 1,001,910 590,808 108,430 – – 3,467,362

Eastern Europe – 8,020 20,000 257,092 686,883 982,963 1,119,710 3,074,668

Africa & Near and Middle East – 3,000 243,330 380,959 395,310 725,877 964,176 2,712,652

Far East

– – 2,000 – – 537 14,809 17,346

Latin America

NARA, RG 469, UD 658-A, Box 1, CARE Schedule ICR (compiled for ACVFA), resources received for foreign operations 1946-1952, May 18, 1953.

1

Expenditure

Year

Table 2.2  Expenditures for CARE foreign relief 1946–52 (US$)1

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– – 2,000 15,946 28,664 – 330,490 377,100

All other areas

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accounts. Instead a thorough plan and certain adjustments of the business model were needed. To that end, a Future of CARE Committee was set up in 1949 to determine if there were areas where CARE could still “make a valuable humanitarian contribution before its carefully developed organization is dissolved.”89 At that point, CARE was still officially a temporary organization – based on a month-tomonth assessment of whether there was still a task for it to fulfill or not. Although the board decided to give the operation another shot and in 1951 amended CARE’s articles of incorporation – thereby extending CARE’s organizational life until 1955 – it was clear that in the long run only a new and altered business model would prevent CARE from bankruptcy.90 While internal strategies were discussed at length, it was the United States government that offered a first short-notice mechanism of compensation for diminishing donations. As early as spring 1947 the voluntary agencies were first informed that a US$350 million relief bill was awaiting passage in Congress.91 When Public Law 84 covering relief assistance to countries devastated by war was actually approved by Congress in late May 1947 it included roughly US$5 million for the reimbursement of expenses related to the ocean transportation of supplies donated to or purchased by American voluntary relief agencies.92 In the weeks before the passage of the act, the Advisory Committee staff (a liaison body connecting NGOs and government agencies) had worked tirelessly to get funds for voluntary agencies included in the bill, which hints at the active role this body played in facilitating cooperation and fostering voluntary agency activity.93 From the perspective of the Advisory Committee, American voluntary relief agencies had not only proven effective in the field but were also popular at home. While the American public was generally in agreement with “the main lines of United States Foreign policy,” as a contemporary study concluded, there was still need to enlist public opinion to this task.94 Voluntary agencies were just the right partners in this endeavor, as many Washington officials felt.95 It was against this backdrop that the Foreign Relief Act of 1948 – establishing the European Cooperation Administration (ECA) – included special funds for voluntary agencies, which were meant “to further the efficient use of United States voluntary contributions for relief” and allowed for the reimbursement of ocean freight costs.96 When these ECA funds were first released, CARE abstained from claiming them, so as to avoid taking funds away from other agencies that were less able than CARE to cover these expenses.97 However, since available government funds proved more than sufficient for all agencies, CARE eventually entered into an agreement with ECA as well. Between 1947 and 1949 the agency acquired more than US$2.2 million in reimbursements for ocean freight charges.98 These additional funds helped cut operating costs and allowed CARE to deliver more operational surplus – meaning undesignated packages – to the needy overseas.99 The funds provided for under Public Laws 84, 271, and by the Foreign Assistance Act of 1948 through the ECA were not, however, limited to deliveries to European countries. Although the main effort of the relief drive was directed toward Europe,

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several agencies – particularly religious ones with missionary backgrounds – soon began to (re-)establish connections with non-European countries. Others, such as CARE, approached this geographical shift from a rather entrepreneurial perspective. As early as 1947, CARE’s board of directors had given the green light “to explore the interest of Bulgarian, Rumanian, Albanian, Philippine and Japanese Americans in the country to support a CARE program in their home countries.”100 The survey that followed indicated both modest donor support and support from the American military authorities in Japan and Korea. Thus, shortly afterwards the first exploratory visits to these two countries were conducted by CARE staffers.101 By early 1948 CARE had officially expanded its services beyond Europe to Asia and opened its first offices in Tokyo and the port city of Busan, South Korea (see Chapter 3).102 Shortly afterwards, Paul French was authorized to investigate the possibilities for CARE’s service in China, India, and Pakistan.103 Upon his return from his trip he proposed an extension of “oriental operations” to these countries as soon as possible, and promised that operations would run without deficit within a period of six months.104 CARE’s plans for operational expansion were received very favorably by the government Advisory Committee. Arthur Ringland in particular expressed “nothing but curiosity” with respect to the CARE mission to China and enthusiastically applauded CARE’s extension to Syria and Lebanon – promising every support and close cooperation.105 Within CARE, however, French’s optimism was not unchallenged. The American Friends Service Committee, having operated in China before, warned that operations would face serious administrative, logistical, and cultural difficulties.106 At this time, however, these warnings did not dampen French’s optimism. He secured the board’s permission to open a mission in Canton, China in late May 1949 and saw to the establishment of further offices in Israel, Pakistan, the Philippines, and India a short while later.107 Throughout the early 1950s, CARE dramatically expanded its overseas apparatus, opening missions in almost a dozen other countries, among them Chile, Haiti, and Panama (1953), Honduras, Hong Kong, Macao, Egypt, and Colombia (1954). The idea of mobilizing donor support for the needy beyond Europe and, of course, the motivation and resources for setting up the logistical requirements abroad did not emerge out of the blue. On a more general level this entrepreneurial ambition – which was closely linked to CARE’s assessment that American donors would be ready to buy packages for beneficiaries in these countries – has to be linked to broader historical trends and discursive patterns that opened the door for CARE and other agencies. Much recent historical research has focused on the emergence of the development discourse, which is sometimes traced back to President Truman’s 1949 inaugural address in which he declared that “improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas” was one of the most distinguished obligations of the American people and the rest of the “free world.”108 From a scholarly perspective, it is certainly a simplistic interpretation to mark Truman’s Point Four ­statement as the sole starting point for  the age of development. First, such views

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largely ­disregard older discursive connections to colonial ideas and practices by both people and government institutions.109 Secondly, this perspective ignores the impact of private organizations like voluntary agencies, political foundations, and missionary movements since the late eighteenth century, which with every reason are referred to as “antecedents to foreign aid” for their instrumental role in transferring public resources at a transnational level and for functioning as intergovernmental agents.110 Truman’s Point Four speech in 1949 did, however, mark a significant and programmatic cornerstone for future official US foreign policy toward a very diverse set of states that were grouped together by the label “underdeveloped countries”. These countries were instructed or persuaded to undergo a series of social, political, and economic adjustments meant to help them transcend their status as latecomers. As Corinna R. Unger has convincingly argued, economic and technical aid played a key role in this modernization scheme that ultimately made “foreign interventions into Third World nations’ domestic politics appear as philanthropic missions.”111 While there are, of course, fundamental ideological patterns and academic traditions that shaped notions of “development” and modernity, I argue that it was in conjunction with the relative success of the European Recovery Program that these concepts gained ground – particularly at an administrative and policy level.112 If the introduction of a “development/underdevelopment couplet”113 justified the concept of intervention in the face of need abroad, the existence of an institution like the ECA opened a window of opportunity for the actual implementation of structural adjustments and policies, and also for the flow of money from the US to the developing countries. These “essential instruments of a successful policy in the arena of world politics” were, as Paul G. Hoffman, administrator of the ECA, remembered in his memoirs, developed under the Marshall Plan. Ideas and recipes that had been tested in Europe were transferred and modified for use in other regions of the globe.114 In addition, the ECA had demonstrated that the rebuilding of foreign economies provided gains for all parties involved.115 Economic stabilization, simplified market access, military aid, and administrative training were measures “aimed at creating states that could both be successful in their own development and be part of American containment policies against the Soviet Union and its allies.”116 Hence, in October 1950 the ECA’s institutional apparatus was complemented by the Technical Cooperation Administration (TCA), which grew out of Truman’s Point Four speech and coordinated all kinds of programs geared toward transferring funds and technical know-how to the developing world. TCA was established under the authority of the Secretary of State and had a clear foreign policy objective. With China on the verge of a revolution and the start of the Korean conflict “it became clear that the main front of the Cold War was swinging from Europe to the postcolonial regions.”117 Massive increases in bilateral (military) aid – particularly in South and East Asia where proxy conflicts soared – were the consequence.118 At the same time, however, the first civil programs were implemented to support developing nations on their way to industrialization and modern capitalist out-

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looks.119 As had already been successfully tested in Europe, some of these civil programs were conducted via private voluntary agencies, which had “rich knowledge and resources” to offer and were even pioneers in certain fields. A rather surprised State Department official informed his colleagues in the mid-1950s that American voluntary agencies had spent more than US$120 million in 1950, which was “more than the total spent by the U.S. and the U.N. combined.”120 US government authorities were thus increasingly keen to foster new public–private programs “designed to bring more directly to the attention of the people in those countries the humanitarian interest of the American people in their welfare, and to undertake forms of social services which would not otherwise be provided.”121 They outspokenly encouraged a transition from relief as such to rehabilitation and “independent social services,” and informed the voluntary agencies via various official and u­ nofficial channels of their interest in their program transition toward rehabilitation and developmental services.122 CARE grasped these incentives quickly. While the ACVAFS established a cooperative committee and decided to contact all relevant United Nations bodies and specialized agencies in an attempt to intensify cooperation, executive director French opted for a lone-warrior plan, immediately commissioning an in-house report, prepared by CARE historian Charles Bloomstein.123 Based on more than 600 pages of material, Bloomstein eventually laid out CARE’s strategic options. He  was rather skeptical and believed that Point Four’s international and multilateral character would limit CARE’s chances of securing a constant source of funding. Against this backdrop, he still found it worth investigating “whether or not CARE can become a new specialized agency of the UN, with a status similar to the ILO, WHO, FAO, UNESCO, etc.”124 While nothing came out of this rather quixotic proposal, over the next months the CARE management became more and more invested in pushing the agency toward government-donated food aid distribution, rehabilitation projects, and technical cooperation under Point Four.125 This movement did not go unchallenged within the agency; once again CARE’s board was divided along rather traditional lines.126 The agencies with their own programs overseas were against Point Four involvement, and those without representation abroad were in favor of it.127 Despite these internal tensions, CARE staffers went on to commission talks with US government officials through CARE’s mission chief in Asia, Paul Gordon, who also happened to be a close personal friend of the Deputy Point Four Administrator.128 Eventually the board gave its tentative approval for rehabilitation and technical assistance programs for the future.129 Between 1949 and 1951 CARE developed a book program in cooperation with the International Education Exchange Service of the State Department (and later with UNESCO) and in 1950 succeeded in delivering books and educational material worth more than US$783,247 to public libraries and educational institutions abroad.130 In addition, CARE added clothing packages, scientific and medical equipment, plows, and hand tools to its program. Slowly the CARE

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­ anagement began to observe a “gradual increase in emphasis on rehabilitation, m and less emphasis on relief.”131 This operational expansion was triggered by a variety of factors. First of all it was open encouragement and the prospect of increased government funding for programs outside of Europe that opened a window of opportunity.132 CARE as well as many other agencies hoped that government subsidies would help to prolong or even expand their programs – despite the fact that most of them were experiencing a significant drop in private contributions. It would be wrong, however, to narrow the focus to economic motives only. Apart from financial incentives there were fundamental humanitarian ones: it was outside of Europe that hunger and misery prevailed. Statistics from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization revealed that the global food situation was far from satisfactory, leaving hundreds of millions of people chronically undernourished or outright starving.133 After the worst crisis in Europe had been tackled – not least of all by agricultural surpluses from the United States – starvation, poverty, and instability in Asia, the Middle East, and soon in Latin America came into the limelight.134 For the voluntary relief agencies, it was only logical that they extend their services to the regions where need was the greatest. Additionally, the American voluntary relief agencies were not coming empty-handed. They could offer established organizational structures, a well-trained, flexible, and devoted staff, tremendous public appeal, and the ambition to put their well-tested business models to work in another context.135 Thus, when the focus of official US foreign policy started to shift from Europe to the developing world, it was – to a certain extent – out of convenience that existing institutions shifted along with it. There were, last but not least, ideological motives as well. Cold War discourse did not spare the voluntary agencies and certainly not CARE. While there were members who felt that the “extension to the Orient was a proposal to continue the life of CARE beyond its need,” many others hoped that “the goodwill value of the CARE operation” would one day help to change growing anti-Western attitudes abroad. Confronted with daily news about the advance of Soviet and Chinese communism, many board members felt that CARE not only had a chance but an obligation to help make friends for America.136 Below the line, the shifting focus from Europe to the developing world meant two things for CARE: a great chance and at the same time an enormous challenge. The realization that there was persistent need, at least from the perspective of possible recipients, was of course a great chance. If need was the basis for CARE’s existence, a broader focus on the billions of needy people in the so-called underdeveloped countries would prolong and even extend CARE’s mission to new and unknown levels. At the same time this finding was also a big challenge. There was not yet a recipe for converting CARE from being an organization focused on transatlantic relief to Europe to an organization that would deliver relief to the entire world. CARE was still dependent on its donors to buy the CARE packages. Family bonds to the old continent still provided for the largest percentage of packages

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shipped abroad, meaning that any reorientation would have to be accompanied by a strategy for convincing American donors to redirect their generosity from relatives or friends across the Atlantic to perfect strangers in more than distant lands. The board was ready to tackle this great task, and laid the ground for such an expansion on a symbolic level as well: at a special meeting of the members on October 22, 1952, CARE officially changed its full name to Cooperative for American Remittances to Everywhere – sticking to CARE as the proven short form, but indicating a shift in geographical focus and program direction.137 Securing American agricultural abundance for private relief By the end of the 1940s there were two types of private relief agencies organized in the ACVAFS: those in the process of phasing out and closing down operations in Europe and those contemplating an extension of service to the developing countries in one way or another. The latter, in particular, had a good number of difficulties to deal with. Apart from administrative problems, stemming from the need to adapt to a changing setting abroad, the dramatic downturn of financial means hampered an extension of operations. The realization that need in Asia was – at least in part – even greater than it had ever been in Europe did not help turn the tide among donors. Private contributions to voluntary agencies for relief purposes declined considerably. Between 1948 and 1950 the combined private income of all voluntary agencies registered with the government Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid fell by almost 45 percent from US$128.8 to US$71.2 million.138 This financial downturn presented the American voluntary agencies with an ethical dilemma as well. Most agency representatives shared the conviction that there was a moral duty to “meet basic immediate human needs” abroad and to be on the lookout for new sources of funding in order to sustain operations.139 By the end of the 1940s internal debates about a “world food problem” – characterized by possible overproduction in some parts of the world and widespread malnutrition and misery in others – grew more intense.140 Although huge amounts of American food were still going into Marshall Plan aid, it became obvious that the United States would again be facing significant agricultural surpluses.141 Wheat, corn, rice, and other commodities, produced in a protectionist environment that guaranteed fixed prices to American farmers, proved exceedingly unsaleable on the world market.142 American farmers, who had grown accustomed to wartime production incentives, were resisting policymakers’ attempts to fix a system that enticed structural overproduction.143 It was against this backdrop that the Department of Agriculture, in cooperation with the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), first contemplated the release of CCC-held food commodities for relief purposes – at home and abroad.144 Hundreds of thousands of tons of certain commodities were in excess, and storage costs were high. The Secretary of Agriculture, Charles F. Brannan, thus eventually informed the American public that “the world hunger problem now had reached

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the point where marketing, rather than production, was the biggest headache.”145 The suggested solution, distribution of American abundance to the needy in developing countries, met strong support from prominent foreign policy experts. Henry Morgenthau Jr. for instance – in allusion to concepts from the New Deal era – publicly urged the Truman administration to use American abundance as a means of helping the developing nations achieve the “four freedoms,” and certainly freedom from want – as a prerequisite for peace.146 Hence, when the Agricultural Act of 1949 was passed in fall of that same year, it contained a section that allowed for the disposal of US surplus commodities to other countries – on a concessionary basis, by barter, as grants, or as loans.147 While most of these commodities were meant to be given away on a bilateral basis, the act also included the possibility of these surpluses being distributed by voluntary agencies. As early as September 1949 the agencies organized within the ACVAFS had been offered a limited amount of these surplus commodities for distribution in relief programs abroad – free of charge. This opportunity was welcomed by the ACVAFS as a tremendous “possibility of good.”148 In the hands of private agencies, it was argued, American abundance would “nurture not only the free individual, free from all tyrannies, including the tyranny of hunger, but also the free society.”149 Accordingly, the ACVAFS was anxious to be ready and well prepared for cooperation with governmental agencies as soon as the project was set in motion.150 While most of the agencies in the ACVAFS decided to organize a cooperative effort, CARE’s executive director Paul French believed that CARE could shoulder the task just as well on its own. Even before the Agricultural Act of 1949 was passed, CARE had launched its own legislative proposal, which was promoted by several American senators. On a trip to Brazil, French had convinced his fellow traveler Senator Thomas of Oklahoma to include CARE in his amendment to the agricultural bill – which in practice meant that CARE turned out to be the only agency mentioned in the text. Delighted, French informed Arthur Ringland from the government Advisory Committee on Voluntary Aid about his efforts, which he deemed “in line with recent conversations we have had about the surplus problem.”151 French had missed his mark, however, as such a strong bias in favor of CARE was not in Ringland’s interest at all. On the contrary, the Advisory Committee felt that official government policy with respect to voluntary relief would be “completely negated” by an exclusive authorization granted to CARE and saw to a modification of the bill in favor of all government-registered agencies.152 When another amendment to the bill came up for discussion in early 1950, however, it became clear that French had not yet given up. In another attempt to convince the administration to put agricultural abundance to use abroad, he appeared before the House Agricultural Committee on Disposition of Agricultural Surpluses in early May 1950, where he expressed CARE’s strong support for an amendment to the Agricultural Act of 1949 that would have made surpluses available primarily for CARE.153 His “failure to get together on such important matters prior to action” infuriated the

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other agencies from the ACVAFS, however. Council executive Charlotte Owen speculated, correctly, that CARE was hostile to sharing this opportunity equally.154 When, a little later, while on a trip to Washington DC, Owen’s colleague Joseph Lehman learned that there were two more bills in the pipeline dealing with surplus commodities (the Granger bill and the Javits amendment) that provided a privilege for CARE to be responsible for the entire packaging and to ship all supplies to needy persons outside the United States, Owen was highly alarmed. As Lehman further uncovered, both bills had actually at least partially been “written up” by French and his Washington colleague, Josia Marvel. Having discovered this, Lehman and Owen alerted Ringland, and once again he foiled a plan that otherwise would have represented a stroke of genius on the part of the CARE leadership. Cooperatively, Lehman and Ringland were able to reduce the extent of the Granger bill and to re-write the Javits bill so that all voluntary agencies would profit collectively.155 Despite this setback, French was still optimistic about CARE’s future access to surplus commodities and built his strategy for its future on this option. Management saw food aid as a key element in transforming CARE from an organization for European recovery into an organization for international relief.156 In September 1950 French finally submitted a proposal to the board of directors that provided for the creation of three new packages, all using (government-donated) surplus food. American donors were to purchase these undesignated packages for a comparatively low price that would cover packing, handling, and other administrative costs. French presented his plan as a simple extension of the present system, indicating that it had official support from the Department of State, the Department of Agriculture, and the White House.157 The proposal was discussed heatedly but largely favorably, and in late September CARE’s president, Murray Lincoln, informed the Department of State that the CARE board had authorized the new program based on surplus agricultural products.158 This new line of programming was clearly geared at establishing CARE as an intermediary between the United States and recipient governments. It granted subsidies to CARE from both sides and helped lower CARE’s expenditures at home and overseas significantly. Since this was – in a way – a win–win situation for all parties involved, it was possible to work out the initial agreements without too much difficulty. CARE’s first surplus commodity program yielded 6.7 million pounds of commodities for general relief packages to Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, Greece, and Norway. The costs for packing and shipping were still borne by CARE at that point and had to be taken from financial surplus stocks of general operations. The following commodity operation in 1950/51, however, was a rather risky and highly politicized mission: “CARE agreed to accept the responsibility for the largest single relief operation ever carried out by a private agency in a single country,” and shipped foodstuffs worth approximately US$35 million, mainly egg powder, dried milk, and butter, to Yugoslavia.159 Under this agreement (which led to initial internal controversy due to its political implications),160 CARE as well

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as a few other voluntary agencies stepped in “as ‘neutral’ conduits through which the US government could furnish aid to the (mostly communist) countries such as Poland and Yugoslavia.”161 The private agencies thus acted as political buffers and somehow consciously (and in agreement with all parties involved) depoliticized classical Cold War settings. This new position as a private Cold War go-between fueled by agricultural surpluses was fairly promising for CARE. However, starting in early 1951, shortly after the outbreak of the war in Korea, the overall food situation at the global level was growing increasingly tense again. CCC stocks were running lower and lower, and US food commodities were increasingly being held in reserve by the government against the eventuality of war.162 Thus, at a CARE regional conference in Ceylon, management had to inform its overseas staff that “the entire surplus commodity program on which CARE had been counting to carry the organization for the most part in the future” was possibly falling apart. French warned his co-workers that upcoming shortages would entail potential budget cuts of up to US$600,000 – indicating further layoffs and hard economic decisions.163 His anticipation proved correct: while CARE’s commodity distribution for 1951 had amounted to a value of almost US$25 million, it dropped to a fraction of this in 1952 (US$248,400).164 And while these cuts turned out to be of a temporary nature only, the impact they had on CARE’s overall financial situation in 1952 and 1953 was devastating. It was the Agricultural Trade Development Assistance Act (Public Law 480), signed on July 10, 1954 by the recently inaugurated president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, that finally made a difference and provided a first real concept for food aid in the context of United States foreign policy. While its openly stated purpose was surplus disposal and the development of new markets for American agricultural products, it had a humanitarian basis as well.165 PL 480’s title I enabled government-to-­ government commodity sale in foreign currencies, whereas titles II and III provided commodities for humanitarian relief purposes – on a grant basis (II) or for programs of voluntary agencies (III).166 The provisions of the Act included CARE but did not privilege the agency over the other members of the ACVAFS. This was not due to lack of initiative on the part of CARE’s management, however: CARE staffers had been working tirelessly in an effort to bring the agency to the forefront of commodity distribution again. In early 1954 CARE published the widely recognized brochure Farm Surplus for Hungry People. The small booklet informed the American public that storage costs for American abundance amounted to a shocking US$460,000 a day and recommended the “use of farm surplus around the world as the basis of a national policy” as a solution. With the booklet, CARE vigorously promoted a stable partnership between private voluntary agencies, United States agriculture, and foreign policy administrators, and suggested several concrete amendments to existing bills dealing with surplus disposal. It was argued that food distribution by private agencies in particular would almost inevitably generate “good-will for the United States” and promote international peace and understanding.167 The brochure

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was widely acknowledged by other voluntary agencies and policymakers alike.168 Even Ezra Taft Benson, Secretary of Agriculture, commended CARE for its “highly constructive” suggestions and assured CARE’s leaders that these suggestions would be given every consideration.169 Throughout 1954 CARE lobbied extensively and sponsored various bills as a means of securing a place in the evolving architecture of government–NGO cooperation in the food aid sector. CARE staffers tried every strategy in this game of persuasion, and not only committed former ECA director Paul Hoffman to CARE’s cause but were also successful in appointing Norris Dodd, former Undersecretary of Agriculture and director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization, as a CARE consultant and spokesperson.170 There were several competing bills on the floor, and both New York management as well as employees from CARE’s Washington office – which had been set up in the meantime in order to be closer to policymakers and legislators – were working tirelessly toward a favorable deal for the agency.171 Considering the fact that for tax-exempt non-profit agencies, lobbying was only allowed within tight boundaries, this involvement was a little risky; in a worst-case scenario CARE might even have lost its status as charitable organization.172 But there was a lot at stake for all agencies involved, and accordingly all parties were watching each other carefully in order to prevent undue advantage.173 Within CARE, ambitions to push food aid delivery were discussed fairly bluntly. In a memo to French, his deputy Richard Reuter stated his conviction that the time was “right for CARE to go after a million dollar fund to expand American influence around the world through the increased utilization by CARE of farm surplus supplies.” Reuter hoped that the additional financial means generated by the increased use of agricultural abundance would help cover CARE’s running costs and provide the necessary “cash to allow us to compete with other agencies and negotiations with US and foreign governments.”174 CARE’s straightforwardness in offering its services and particularly in trying to establish itself as private buffer between the US government and foreign recipients provoked open criticism from other voluntary agencies. CARE’s efforts to establish cost transfer agreements with foreign governments was a particular thorn in the side of the ACVAFS. However, at a joint meeting with government officials, when a representative of War Relief Services accused CARE of “deviating from the practice of voluntary agencies by acting more as an intermediary between the US government and the foreign government,” Charles Taft from the government Advisory Committee made it perfectly clear that he, on behalf of the committee, would be “dealing with CARE wherever it acts improperly” but that CARE should also be praised for its “initiative and ability to get a job done with a minimum of wasted time and effort.”175 At that point, it seems, as long as CARE remained a useful and reliable partner in governmental food aid operations, the Advisory Committee was not interested in dealing with petty rivalries between the private agencies. CARE’s openly promoted efficiency and professionalism bore fruit for the agency. In 1951 CARE was the third biggest commodity solicitor (after War Relief

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Services–National Catholic Welfare Conference and Haddassah) and acquired roughly 18.5 percent of the total commodities shipped abroad for relief purposes by voluntary agencies (see Table 2.3).176 Interestingly enough, a mere five American agencies accounted for almost 90 percent of all commodities shipped at that time. This circumstance is explained by the fact that in many cases commodities were doled out selectively on a first-come-first-served bidding system, in which the agencies applied for the amount of funding they felt they could allocate in a given amount of time. This system was beneficial for sizable, well-known, and wellconnected agencies, and explains the remarkable concentration as well as a good deal of competition in this sector. CARE was able to profit from this set-up and tried vigorously to broaden its space and agency as well as the amount of surpluses distributed within its program. Between 1953 and 1955 the ratio of governmentdonated foods distributed as bulk shipments (and not as packages) increased from a mere 0.2 percent to almost 20 percent of all CARE relief (see Table 2.4). The overall amount of government-donated commodities was actually even higher, since most packages contained surplus commodities of some sort. Below the line, income from government rose constantly and represented 78 percent of CARE’s overall business volume in 1955.177 Adding growing quantities of government-donated surplus commodities to its portfolio was – at least from a strictly organizational perspective – a clear-cut survival strategy for CARE. Confronted with the diminishing appeal of its formerly successful business model, the agency began to look for means of adaptation to changing Table 2.3  Total commodity shipments by voluntary agencies for foreign service 1950–first quarter 1954 (plus biggest commodity users)1 Total shipments WRS-NCWC Hadassah CARE of all PVOs (lbs.) 364,226,979

116,171,020

Lutheran Church World World Relief Service

Combined amount shipped by big 5

83,201,350 67,073,200 33,532,000 27,405,589 327,383,159 (89.9% of total)

1

ACVAFS, Box 5, annex I to ACVAFS memo to all Council members, May 5, 1954: total pounds of surplus commodities shipped by all voluntary agencies for period approximately 12 months 1950; 3 months 1952 and 9 months 1953 to March 5, 1954 (figures supplied by the US Department of Agriculture).

Table 2.4  Relief by type, 1953–551 Type

1953

1954

1955

Regular package Self-help Surplus commodities (bulk shipments)

97.3% 2.5% 0.2%

88.4% 4.9% 6.7%

72.6% 8.1% 19.3%

1

CARE, Box 1171, MECM, March 23, 1956.

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environmental conditions and entered into a partnership with the US government. There is a lot of scholarly debate about the nature of public–private partnerships, which demonstrates that definition and evaluation of these relations in each case is a question of perspective. While several authors state that “public–private partnerships describe a form of government privatization” – thereby emphasizing a process in which it is the government institutions that are chiefly affected – I argue that it is imperative that the concrete agency of the respective actors – both private and governmental – not be ignored.178 In the case of this food aid partnership, both parties had a strong stake and interest in the program and deliberately entered into a relationship where the conditions were negotiated by both parties on their own behalf, and with their respective sets of interests and political, economic, and publicity-related goals in mind. It is thus important to emphasize that private players were perfectly aware of their assets, such as perceived political neutrality and humanitarian credibility in the eyes of recipients, and also their carefully developed technical and administrative know-how. Furthermore, they promoted these assets forcefully in pursuit of their strategic goals. It is, of course, difficult to differentiate between a sense of mission or humanitarian beliefs put forward by individuals within organizations on the one side and general issues of organizational perpetuation on the other. Although Paul French emphasized to the board that “from the management’s point of view, no one was interested in continuing CARE simply to provide jobs,” the question of what would become of the large number of CARE employees haunted CARE members and was never really off the table.179 Thus, there was only a thin line between individual idealism on the one side and, on the other, the collective urge to continue an organization that had a good chance of thriving and adapting to changing conditions within such a new partnership. While it is true that there was a strong economic predominance on the side of the United States government (being in possession of surplus commodities), the partnership agreement that was finally reached was nevertheless mutual: both partners contributed materially, symbolically, and with regard to responsibility for the outcome.180 Moreover, voluntary agencies like CARE presented a link between governmental foreign policy issues and the American public. CARE’s people-to-people concept was participative and allowed individuals to express their concern for people in other countries. Hence, voluntary agencies complemented the post-war paradigm shift in American foreign policy from the old continent to the developing nations. They helped to democratize America’s image abroad and involved private Americans in the Cold War struggle for the hearts and stomachs of the “little people” abroad – as CARE’s president Harold Miner put it in 1951.181 Not everyone inside CARE was entirely comfortable with this close relationship to the US government, however. For some, it had clearly grown too tight, raising issues of financial and political dependence on the goodwill of government administrators.182 It was within this context that Wallace Campbell, CARE board member and one of the agency’s founding fathers, finally dictated a statement for the record emphasizing that “CARE must always

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retain its independence, not only of governments overseas, but of our own government as well, because the voluntary character is a fundamental part for its reason of existence.”183 The fact that such a statement for the record proved necessary hints that the interests of board members and management did not always coincide. The line between loss of independence and doing a more constructive job with public funding – and in particular American agricultural abundance – was definitely very thin. Doing good or doing better? The US government, CARE, and the American Council of Voluntary Agencies It is gratifying that our church and lay agencies have effectively administered the freewill offerings of the American people for overseas relief. […] The intelligent giving and the planned distribution of these resources are an example of constructive philanthropy of continuing value. In the above connection, cooperation with government has been useful. Yet the essential voluntary and personal aspect, “people-to-people” has been maintained. […] This humanitarianism is a force of enduring strength that can bind together the peoples of the world. John Foster Dulles184

There is some scholarly agreement on the general observation that the post-war situation was a generally fruitful one for private players. After a period of heavy warinduced government regulation, many Americans were convinced that the time had come for a little more laissez-faire politics, economic deregulation, and “less government.” While this is certainly a correct observation – at least in large part – it does not mean that government influence did actually wane, giving way to complete deregulation and absence of state-centered policies. Following John G. Ruggie’s interpretation of the dawn of “embedded liberalism,” meaning the normative global (or, more precisely Western) orientation toward free trade and a trend toward interventionist government policies, less government in some areas meant more government in others.185 It is instructive to look at the American voluntary agencies from this angle. While private initiative in general bloomed, and while voluntary action reached unprecedented geographical extension, it was only in cooperation with governmental agencies that this high flight was possible in the first place. Or, put differently, private players took advantage of the chances that the emerging new architecture of international relations offered. Voluntary agencies were quick to recognize that a new political arena in the field of humanitarian aid and development assistance was in the making and leapt at the chance to offer their services and know-how to policymakers. At the same time, government officials were eager to include voluntary agencies in the picture as they attempted to shape a post-war order that included private agencies as visible proponents of social change. They argued that voluntary agencies, “if properly employed,” could work as transmission belts that could be of “tremendous value to U.S. foreign policy objectives in the

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‘cold war.’”186 Hence, in order to maximize the impact and visibility of these players, symbolic encouragements, as well as financial incentives, were offered to those agencies that were able and willing to play a role in this arrangement and subscribe to the primacy of US foreign-policy interests abroad. These new subsidies were not, however, doled out non-selectively. The government Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid – as liaison body and broker between the private agencies and the US administration – soon developed into a sort of clearing house.187 It demanded tight record keeping and standardization of accounts and procedures, as well as long-term statistics from those agencies that were interested in receiving government funds.188 It kept a neat register, and only organizations that subscribed to an “appropriate and productive use of voluntary contributions for foreign aid” were entitled to subsidies.189 The late 1940s and early 1950s proved seminal in this respect. The steady development of what David H. Lumsdaine has called an international foreign aid regime provided countless opportunities, and all parties involved reacted by implementing new regulations and standardized procedures.190 Hence, what was slowly evolving was an institutionalizing system of cooperation in which private and governmental players contributed to the development of norms that shaped the general perception of American humanitarianism done right. All parties involved held distinct views on the moral aspects of aid and charity as well as on organizational effectiveness, professional conduct, and good governance – both at an organizational level and at the level of global policy – and they worked toward the harmonization of their perspectives. This was not always a mutual and conventional process of agreement, however. In particular, the private agencies organized within the ACVAFS were quick to grasp that without the appearance of a united front it would be easy for government officials to play them off against each other in their struggle for government funds and grants. The umbrella organization had to fight off several attempts by government bureaucrats to implement procedures unilaterally. In late 1949, when ECA missions abroad were briefed by the government Advisory Committee on general future US policy toward voluntary agencies, Arthur Ringland not only suggested rigid controls with regard to funding guidelines and procedures but also picked out CARE (whose establishment he had initiated roughly five years earlier) as worthy of special support, suggesting that it had a “potential […] yet to be realized, and beyond the capacity or competency of voluntary agencies of special interest.”191 Predictably, this memo, which was circulated within the voluntary agency community, produced open protest. The ACVAFS immediately denounced any kind of favoritism and government attempts to unilaterally determine programs, purposes, and methods of work of the agencies.192 This alarm was well founded, as some government officials had indeed been trying to pick winners (and thereby also losers) among the voluntary agencies by channeling funds to certain agencies only. In an environment that tended to privilege sizable, well-known, and well-connected organizations anyway – and that was characterized by a growing scarcity of private

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charitable donations – competition among the agencies was a growing problem. While conflicts in general are not uncommon in membership organizations, the relationship between CARE and the ACVAFS had been under strain from the start. As a non-religious actor, CARE had filled a niche in promoting a new kind of secular humanitarianism that found strong resonance with large parts of American society. CARE resembled the ACVAFS in that it was composed of several independent agencies – which made it a rather influential agent within the community. It radically differed from the ACVAFS, however, in that it was an operational agency that had its own programs and could accordingly generate its own income for its projects. The ACVAFS meanwhile was almost completely dependent on membership fees (averaging around less than US$42 in 1950), a fact that definitely limited its outside appeal to private, corporate, or public donors.193 By the late 1940s, when many of the ACVAFS agencies were struggling to survive or had even closed down, the umbrella organization too was losing much of its financial base, making it even easier for CARE to challenge its position.194 Hence, “Washington’s ideas” of possibly pushing CARE toward a new role as American relief figurehead organization and representative body of all voluntary agencies were not overly well received within the ACVAFS.195 In addition, personal relations between the Council’s executive director Charlotte Owen and CARE’s Paul French were far from friendly. Owen took personal offense at French’s ambition, his competitive behavior, and his repeated tendency to engage in one-man shows. There were various incidents that demonstrated French’s disdain for other agencies and his reluctance to moderate his aggressive tone vis-à-vis other ACVAFS members.196 CARE executives in general were held to be rather competitive. From the beginning, the organization’s leadership had fostered a business culture based on ambition and merit. Unlike many other relief organizations, CARE’s leading employees were predominantly male. These proverbial “CARE-men” often showed a remarkable identification with CARE and its goals, and there was a widespread belief that lobbying and promotion created not only positive outcomes but even produced a kind of a “vested interest” in fields such as surplus distribution or grant acquisition.197 Understandably, this strong focus on entrepreneurial conduct, competition, and achievement was not overly popular with many of CARE’s fellow agencies. In a context in which even the use of the term management was still “at odds with what some regard[ed] as the essence of the sector: voluntarism, philanthropy, compassion and a concern for the public good,” CARE’s business culture and open competitiveness definitely collided with some of the established cooperative practices and concepts of non-interference put forward by other members of the ACVAFS.198 While economists and business historians are ready to concede competitive and even outright aggressive behavior to the executive personnel of for-profit firms, there are few studies that focus on this kind of conduct within non-profit enterprises.199 It is indeed striking that neoclassical economic models of utility maximization have difficulty in explaining non-profit competition and organizational growth, c­ laiming

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that “non-profit managers have little incentive to manage their firms efficiently since no one has a claim to the residual earnings.”200 For CARE’s executive management team there were, indeed, no direct financial stimulus, or shares and bonuses that would rise in proportion to the successful growth of the enterprise. CARE’s board of directors worked without monetary compensation at all, and the only bonuses they received were travel reimbursements if necessary. But while there were no financial appeals for outstanding or above average performance, there were other factors that triggered competitiveness and entrepreneurial ambitions among the CARE staff. First of all, there was a fairly strong moral vision or “humanitarian idealism” involved that motivated field staff and management alike.201 It was for the sake of humanity, the poor and the hungry, that CARE had been created, and many members felt that it was for a good cause that CARE was being prolonged and expanded.202 French in particular emphasized again and again that CARE was not there to provide jobs but instead had the task of making a useful contribution to humanitarian goals in the world.203 His quest to expand CARE does thus fit with the findings of current research indicating that “entrepreneurship is not only and not even mainly a quest for profit.”204 Despite the lack of sufficient historical data – such as thorough CARE staff questionnaires or polls – several sources suggest that the desire to serve the needy and to do good motivated the entire CARE personnel to devote extra time to their jobs and to attempt to improve organizational routines and performance.205 As Olive Clapper, who would become director of CARE’s Washington DC office in 1953, wrote in her memoirs, the job at CARE: captured my heart and my soul. Something happened to me, as I’ve seen it happen to many CARE employees at home and abroad. It might almost be called a spiritual experience, because it evokes astonishing dedication, a willingness to work yourself almost to death to uphold the program and keep it the pure essence of the American donor’s goodness of heart.206

It is doubtful, however, that humanitarian motives alone were responsible for the particular CARE business culture – after all, such motives played a role for most other voluntary agencies as well. Hence, a second factor has to be taken into account. The agency’s executive leadership was assiduous in providing promotion prospects and wage incentives to its employees.207 Based as much on merit as on belonging to collegial networks within CARE, employees who “fit in,” displayed interest, devotion, and the will to walk the extra mile had a good chance of job advancement in CARE.208 In addition to these internal promotions, which were very common, the CARE management repeatedly scouted external employees from for-profit firms. These employees’ expertise and career expectations, together with management’s explicit effort to be as good or even better than for-profit service providers, certainly helped to create some resemblance to for-profit business culture.209 Thirdly – and shifting from agency to structure – it would be erroneous to assume that the lack of a clear-cut profit motive exempts charitable organizations from

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market pressures and resulting competition. On the contrary, neither CARE nor any of the other voluntary agencies within the ACVAFS operated “outside the overall economy.”210 Despite the “non-distributional constraint” – meaning that surplus could not be distributed directly to members, owners, or personnel – CARE, like most other voluntary agencies, was under constant pressure to operate in the most cost-effective manner possible – or even to generate surplus for new charitable projects for which there was almost insatiable demand at home and abroad.211 While contemporary sociological literature on non-profit culture states that “pursuit of the same objective by two or more firms creates rivalry among nonprofits,” there are few historical studies that take a closer look at the concrete reasons for and conditions of this competition.212 In the case of CARE and the other voluntary agencies, there were several fields in which they contended. Markets with a stronger focus on demand than on supply were particular arenas of competition: the labor market, the “markets for physical and financial capital, and the ‘market’ for grants and charitable contributions.”213 The resulting pressure to do better than others – meaning the struggle for competent personnel, a fair share of available private and public donations, or the amount of media attention – put a heavy strain on most agencies and their employees, as it was – particularly toward the late 1940s – in many cases a question of organizational survival.214 These structural reasons for enhanced competition between the agencies collided, however, with certain cultural and rhetorical traditions in the voluntary sector. Ethnic and religious agencies, having dominated during the first half of the twentieth century, had mostly catered to their traditional clientele, leaving enough space for peaceful cooperation or easy ignorance. With the start of the Second World War, however, agency numbers had gone up. And while the market for charitable contributions was certainly regulated during the war by government authorities such as the President’s War Relief Control Board (and later the Advisory Committee), long-established structures began to crumble. CARE, as a secular crossover agency, contributed to this disintegration by challenging the traditional state of peaceful sharing. When CARE eventually started to concentrate on general relief and non-food products, many agencies felt that it was deliberately starting to fish within their territory. By the end of the immediate post-war era these differences were escalating. In 1952 CARE refused to submit financial reports to the ACVAFS, which basically meant that membership fees were dependent on (the waning) trust in CARE’s verbal statements only.215 While correspondence over this issue struck a sour note, CARE was busy remodeling its organization.216 Back in 1949 the agency had first set up a Future of CARE Committee (FOCC) that had been working on various issues of organizational continuity since then. In May 1954 this committee submitted its final report and proposed several structural changes – most prominently CARE’s withdrawal from the ACVAFS in combination with the extension of the board of directors via an appeal to possible new member agencies – preferably “large national organizations,” which would support CARE’s cause publicly.217 The plan was – if not explicitly then certainly in

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effect – an open c­ hallenge to the authority of the ACVAFS as the only umbrella body for all voluntary agencies. After thorough debate, repeated encouragement by Paul French, and in view of a bilateral agreement with the US government that granted the largest part of a government-sponsored Christmas relief package drive to CARE at the end of calendar year 1954, CARE left the ACVAFS.218 This decision had been enabled by a significant change in CARE’s board majorities due to a wave of organization withdrawals: between 1952 and 1954 several of the larger religious agencies and founding members, such as War Relief Services, Church World Service (1952), the Mennonite Central Committee, and the American Friends Service Committee (1954), quit their CARE membership.219 These agencies had been strong supporters of a CARE presence within the ACVAFS, and it was their withdrawal that allowed relations with the umbrella body to finally be severed. The new CARE members that replaced these traditional players, among them the National Grange as the oldest agricultural advocacy group in the United States, were different in nature. Critics claimed that the Grange was not by any means a welfare organization and was therefore not even eligible.220 This argument, however, found little resonance and was drowned out by those who hoped to alter CARE’s board to include a larger percentage of well-known public members who would be able to forge links with other societal actors and interest groups.221 This final victory for French, who had been pressing for CARE’s withdrawal from the ACVAFS for years, was ill-received in the American Council.222 However, bearing in mind that sometimes attack is the best defense, ACVAFS executives immediately approached the government Advisory Committee with a plan for sector-wide voluntary agency coordination of surplus food distribution under its own roof. As Public Law 480 was about to be passed, the ACVAFS proposed the establishment of country committees and close cooperation between surplus distribution agencies as a means of preventing over-allocation or waste of food resources. The proactive plan received wholehearted support from the government Advisory Committee, which was not overly happy with CARE’s withdrawal from the ACVAFS.223 When French was informed about the pending coordination effort under ACVAFS guidance he was far from amused, and insisted on the status quo of CARE predominance and direct cooperation with the government only.224 French had not, however, counted on a response from some of the senior CARE board members who disagreed with his single-handedness and instructed him to immediately enter into cooperative discussions with the other agencies. Government authorities turned their back on French’s unilateralism as well. After learning of French’s resistance to the ACVAFS coordination plan, William McCahoon from the government Advisory Committee publicly underscored his conviction that the proposal of the ACVAFS was nothing but common sense, and strongly urged French to reconsider his position.225 While French stubbornly insisted “that it would not serve any useful purpose for CARE to participate in this approach,”226 the CARE board members Wallace Campbell and Paul Gordon met with the ACVAFS in mid-September.227 After a constructive

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meeting, CARE’s executive committee finally voted to “cooperate and consult with the other agencies through their official bodies on the distribution of surplus commodities,” thereby accepting the recommendations of the ACVAFS and publicly castigating French’s u­ ncooperative behavior.228 It is ironic that a governmentsponsored agricultural surplus turned out to be the reason for both the division and the (re-)unification of the American voluntary agencies. It was over the matter of access to these commodities that conflict between CARE and the other agencies arose, and it was over the matter of the distribution of these same commodities that they were finally reunited again. Structural reasons for inter-agency competition per se did not vanish (though they did fade somewhat after the agencies had adjusted to the handling of these new resources), but ultimately it was due to both peer pressure and the encouragement of government authorities that realignment and closer practical coordination of private voluntary agencies was re-initiated in the field of food relief.229 The corporate crisis of 1954/55 From the late 1940s to the mid-1950s CARE was caught in an undeniable downward economic spiral. Despite geographical expansion, program diversification, government-donated surplus food distribution, and moves toward technical ­ assistance and rehabilitation with Point Four, problems still remained. CARE’s executive management was unable to make up for the losses incurred through the withering of private post-war generosity. Given CARE’s self-perception as an organization of professionals, it was a natural development that this trend provoked internal questions regarding its future concept and economic prospects. Personnel costs in particular were crushing CARE, so that in 1950 Paul French was forced to further reduce staff numbers from 502 to 339, as a means of bringing administrative expenses into line with CARE’s income (Table 2.5). While individual members felt that CARE’s growth and extension of operations to non-European countries had been “a proposal to continue the life of CARE beyond its need,” the majority of the members were at least open to an evaluation and assessment of CARE’s future chances as a permanent organization in the field of international relief and rehabilitation.230 In order to explore this, the Future of CARE Committee, consisting of several distinguished board members, had been set up. Its distinguished – and, reflecting a general trend among the CARE staff, all male – membership attempted tirelessly to carve out plans for making the agency into a permanent organization with a long-term perspective.231 Despite the FOCC’s political and managerial guidance, however, throughout the 1950s CARE’s financial situation eroded even further (Table 2.6). Ever declining package sales could not be counterbalanced, as neither surplus commodities nor sufficient developmental projects or government Point Four grants were acquired. In 1951, however, when losses were again at a temporary high, French, having been forced to lay off almost

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Table 2.5  Status of CARE personnel, August 15, 1949/501 Management Control Publicity Office Services Service Division Personnel Supply Overseas Operations (US) Donor Division Accounting Remittance Treasury Internal Audit Field Organizations (Overseas) Total

August 15, 1949

August 15, 1950

20 19 50 36 5 23 7 57 75 157 8 10 35 502

22 18 36 18 3 22 5 40 51 70 4 11 39 339

1

CARE, Box 3, Paul C. French, report for the board of directors meeting, September 13, 1950.

Table 2.6  Value of goods shipped against expenses incurred, July 1, 1950 through June 30, 1955 (US$)1 Fiscal Year

1951 1952 1953 1954 1955

Value of goods

44,500,000 9,460,000 7,700,000 11,200,000 38,000,0002

US overhead

% to value of goods

Overseas overhead

% to value of goods

2,047,652 1,937,907 1,860,436 1,823,093 2,035,000

4.6 20.5 24.2 16.2 5.4

709,244 642,499 630,992 712,091 951,300

1.6 6.8 8.2 6.4 2.5

1

CARE, Box 6, value of goods shipped against expenses incurred, July 1, 1950 through June 30, 1955. Handwritten at the side: $43,894,000.00.

2

50 percent of his employees between 1948 and 1950, insisted that no further personnel cuts could be implemented. Further layoffs, he argued, would damage the organization’s effectiveness and performance to an undue degree – risking CARE’s reputation and accordingly its future in the yet to be established field of technical assistance and food aid provision.232 Hence, in March 1952, in his report to the FOCC French laid down three possible paths: 1. [FOCC] can recommend that CARE be liquidated on the ground that it will require the use of surplus to maintain operations on the present basis. 2. It can recommend that the character of CARE be changed and that it operate either partially or wholly as a mail order business similar to Frazier Morris and other commercial package concerns. 3. It can recommend that CARE continue in the present pattern risking some surplus and developing broad areas of service which would absorb a portion of the overhead expenses to permit the program to continue to operate in the black.233

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Naturally, French lobbied for the third option, pointing to the findings of a study evaluating the relative value of CARE packages in the countries served. It revealed that CARE packages were actually still a good bargain and that there were only three missions that would have to be streamlined to bring operating costs down below the costs of a parcel post system in 1952. In addition, he emphasized that CARE had actually acquired an enviable position among the agencies, meaning that CARE had delivered almost one-quarter of the overall relief sum provided by all American voluntary agencies in the last quarter of 1951.234 While French found supporters within the committee – first and foremost CARE president Murray Lincoln, who had repeatedly opted for a more risk-prone entrepreneurial long-term approach to CARE’s strategy in the past – the rest of the CARE board was sorely concerned about possible bankruptcy and operating expenses that were greatly out of proportion.235 French was thus ordered to reduce operating expenses from more than US$600,000 biannually to a maximum of US$550,000.236 This directive did not quiet general concern about CARE’s future development, however. While French was progressing with the implementation of the cuts the board had forced on him, new problems arose. The ongoing transition of CARE activities “to increased emphasis on self-help and reconstruction programs” (vigorously backed by the FOCC) added significantly to advanced planning and research expenditures.237 This was particularly unfortunate given the FOCC’s objective of “keeping CARE’s operations as close as possible to a ‘balanced basis.’”238 This promise was put to the test only a little later, when CARE’s management presented its proposal to establish a CARE “Development Corporation” that would be responsible for promoting “relief rehabilitation, and reconstruction of the populations and economies of stricken and underdeveloped areas through the stimulation of agricultural and industrial production, the furnishing of technical assistance and the increase of international trade.”239 French had voiced similar ideas earlier, but it was June 1953 before he was ready to present a detailed plan for a subsidiary company called the CARE Development Corporation (CDC) that was to provide special handicraft products made in developing nations to benevolent buyers in the US.240 This plan was bold, given CARE’s perilous financial situation. But, in keeping with a certain tradition of entrepreneurial thinking and convinced that the sub-cooperative would further stress the CARE idea of reciprocity between donors and recipients, the board eventually authorized the establishment of the CDC and allocated US$50,000 for its stock. The new company, meant at least partially to help financially sustain the agency, progressed slowly, however. By the end of 1953 French was reporting financial difficulties and a general lack of funds.241 Almost a year later the CDC was still a stub, with a mere “$5200 worth of preferred stock” and only US$3,218 worth of its imported items having been sold.242 This was not due to a lack of commitment on the part of CARE’s members, however. Wallace Campbell for one missed no chance to promote the CDC. At a charity event organized by the wives of members

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of the Midland Cooperative, Campbell even tried to pitch the CDC as a “Private Point IV program” and vigorously promoted the handicrafts as useful and artistic charity items.243 In retrospect, however, Campbell admitted that what had seemed like a good idea in theory was in reality limited by “some hard facts of economic life.” The CDC was unable to guarantee a constant supply of handicraft goods to possible partners in American retail stores, and “could not mesh the two conflicting realities of hand-production and modern-mass merchandising.”244 Throughout 1954 the external CDC bobbed up and down, producing additional costs that most board members, in light of CARE’s ongoing financial difficulties even without the CDC, were increasingly reluctant to meet. In early 1955 the board finally admitted that the CDC had failed and authorized French to liquidate the company, either by making it an independent non-profit enterprise or by integrating the sound parts of the corporation into official CARE operations.245 In the meantime CARE had achieved an enormous geographical extension. By early 1955 the organization had offices in 42 countries in Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and northern Africa. While there was enormous and apparent need in the southern countries it was no longer justifiable to continue relief to northern and central Europe. Thus, the board decided finally to close its missions in the UK, Benelux, Norway, France, and Austria, and to abolish designated packages for Western Germany, “on the grounds that the American public could no longer be justifiably asked to support areas where conditions were substantially improved.”246 Although this decision was based mostly on ethical considerations, it was still a difficult one. Most of the European missions were still profitable – meaning that package sales left a slight margin that had helped to sustain CARE operations elsewhere. Phasing them out consequently meant losing some of CARE’s long-term donors and sources of income. It came as no surprise then that the fiscal year 1955 turned out even worse than the previous year, despite the astonishing increase in overall income from US$11 million to US$44.2 million. This quadruplication of assets was not, however, due to a sudden awakening among American donors. Instead it was the result of an enormous increase in the availability of government-donated surplus commodities that Public Law 480 had created. In the fiscal year 1955 alone, CARE distributed US$34.9 million worth of surplus commodities, while private donations amounted to a meager US$9.3 million. In CARE’s annual closing statement, operational expenses exceeded the organization’s cash income by US$785,619, leading CARE – despite its success in surplus acquisition – into the red.247 In addition, this situation raised the fundamental question of whether CARE was still an independent entity or – as a matter of fact – a government subsidiary, whose organizational apparatus was in large part carried by government resources.248 The majority of board members agreed that CARE “should not become a governmental or quasi-governmental agency,” and were convinced that there had to be ways to make use of these funds without surrendering CARE’s independence.249 Given that CARE’s income from government

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sources exceeded three-fourths of its overall business volume, it became clear that CARE was standing at the crossroads.250 It was Paul French, who – for the last time – provided a highly controversial and rather radical impulse that led to the reform of the organization. Paradoxically, he proposed CARE’s immediate liquidation. Instead of genuine organizational modernization, further cuts, or new concepts, he suggested to the board that CARE be dissolved “in a blaze of glory.”251 Presenting detailed plans regarding potential liquidation costs, he argued that it was better to end operations while CARE was still at a high point than to risk a slow demise – inevitably destroying the reputation of both CARE and its members.252 French’s refusal to even consider streamlining CARE’s inflated apparatus by making radical modifications or cutbacks provoked heavy protest, especially among CARE’s employees. In response to French’s suggestion, two leading staffers, Warren Pinegar and Philipp Holzer, circulated a competing proposal that called for radical reorganization and dramatic cuts, but that would ultimately preserve the enterprise. CARE’s president Murray Lincoln, meanwhile, took it upon himself to confer with CARE’s regional directors in a series of private meetings. Most of them underscored their conviction that there was indeed a future for CARE, and Lincoln too came out in favor of a sustainable continuation of the organization. In early July, Lincoln, the executive committee, and members of the FOCC discussed the two competing plans.253 Paul French, in an effort to underscore his conviction that CARE should be dissolved, had by then offered his resignation. The executive committee, however, was no longer prepared to play along with French. After long and intense consultation it finally determined that CARE should not be dissolved but should instead continue, as long as it was economically sound. When French grasped that he was actually losing not only a fight but actually his job and interpretational sovereignty over CARE’s future, he desperately tried to turn the situation. Hastily he informed select board members that he had come to the “reluctant conclusion” that a basic reorganization was essential – offering massive cuts in CARE’s annual overhead expenses from approximately US$2.9 million to less than US$1.9 million.254 For CARE’s board of directors, however, it was too late. Thanking French for his “outstanding job” in shaping and managing CARE, the board officially accepted his resignation effective July 15, 1955.255 In bidding farewell to French, CARE’s board of directors decoupled CARE’s future from that of its long-term executive director and opened the way for a new chapter in its history. This final break-up was ironic in several ways. First, Paul French had contributed as much to CARE’s reputation, remarkable extent, and renown as he had contributed to its organizational demise. While French’s ardent ambition, vigor, and stubbornness had certainly helped to build the organization in the first place, these same features had also contributed to its spiraling financial deficit and its massive overextension. His insistence on thinking big had ultimately prevented him from making the necessary organizational adjustments, and the board was not prepared to follow this haphazard managerial path any longer. Secondly, and even

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more paradoxically, French left CARE at a time when his harshest critics on the board of directors had already departed.256 French had survived several motions of no-confidence throughout his years as CARE’s executive director, but he was finally brought down by his own (apparently premature) resignation. After French’s departure, CARE had officially arrived in troubled waters. The agency was stuck in a major moral, economic, and leadership crisis and was in sore need not only of a new executive director but also of a new recipe for success – one that would turn an organization that had been largely reliant on quantity in the past into one based on sustainable quality in a yet to be established new field of service. Notes  1 Murray D. Lincoln, Vice President in Charge of Revolution, New York, 1960, p. 209.  2 CARE, Box 26, Paul French to Arthur Ringland, June 23, 1947.  3 Germany (all zones), with packages worth US$84,756,428 received almost as much as all other European countries combined; see CARE, Box 890, table “Total Value of CARE Aid by Country from 1946 to January 1, 1973,” June 1973.  4 NARA, RG 469, UD 668, Box 1, “How the Germany Public Views the CARE Organization,” classified report by Reactions and Analysis Branch Information Service Division of Public Affairs Office, March 6, 1950; on debates about hunger and its political implications in Germany, see the enlightening article by Alice Weinreb, “For the Hungry Have no Past nor Do They Belong to a Political Party. Debates over German Hunger after World War II,” Central European History 44.1 (2012), pp. 50–78.  5 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, October 18, 1946.  6 Stanford Orson Cazier, “CARE, A Study in Cooperative Voluntary Relief,” doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin 1964, p. 71.  7 Dawn Spring, Advertising in the Age of Persuasion. Building Brand America, 1941–1961, New York, 2011, pp. 69–84.  8 One of its early and best-known post-war campaigns (featuring Smokey Bear) educated the American public about the prevention of forest fires: http://www.state.sc.us/forest/ posters.htm (accessed September 6, 2015).  9 Robert Griffith, “The Selling of America: The Advertising Council and American Politics, 1942–1960,” The Business History Review 57.3 (1983), pp. 388–412 (pp. 388–9). 10 Daniel L. Lykins, From Total War to Total Diplomacy. The Advertising Council and the Construction of the Cold War Consensus, Westport, CT, 2003, pp. 65–6; see also CARE, Box 1170, MECM, June 11, 1947. 11 NARA, RG 469, UD679-A, Box 1, suggested outline for remarks of C. Tyler Wood, assistant to the Deputy Administrator, Economic Cooperation Administration, December 1948. 12 Griffith, “Selling of America,” p. 396. 13 NARA, RG469, UD664, Box 2, Alex Hawes to members of the board of CARE, November 21, 1947. 14 CARE, Box 3, Advertising Council brochure [1950], p. 17; Warren Berger, “Ad Council Aids a Battered Postwar World,” Advertising Age 62.48 (1991), p. A-6. 15 CARE, Box 69, memo on CARE member agency relations, 1955. 16 See announcement in American Journal of Public Health 39, November 1949, p. 1445; “CARE to Send Soap Abroad,” The Sprague Electric LOG, June 25, 1949, p. 1.

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17 CARE, Box 1, annual report for 1949 to the members of the CARE board by Paul Comly French. 18 On the development of corporate social responsibility and international codes of conduct, see Thomas Hajduk, “A Code to Bind Them All. The Multinational Dilemma and the Endeavour for an International Code of Conduct,” in Sandra Brändli (ed.), Multinationale Unternehmen und Institutionen im Wandel – Herausforderungen für Wirtschaft, Recht und Gesellschaft, Bern, 2013, pp. 311–39. 19 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, May 14, 1947. 20 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, April 28, 1948. 21 NARA, RG 469, UD 664, Box 2, copy of CARE acting executive director’s report, June 11, 1947. 22 See video, CARE endorsement by President Truman [May 7, 1946] (Harry Truman Sends CARE Packages to Hungry in Europe), http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=oDZ4s1WusNM (accessed June 30, 2012). 23 NARA, RG 469, DU 658-A, Box 1, CARE Schedule ICR (compiled for ACVFA), resources received for foreign operations 1946–1952, May 18, 1953. 24 CARE, Box 1, executive director’s report, September 1, 1948. 25 CARE, Box 24, Moses A. Leavitt (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) to Paul C. French, December 2, 1947; Box 1170, MECM, December 10, 1947. 26 CARE, Box 1170, report to annual meeting of members at CARE, March 17, 1947. 27 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, January 9, 1947. 28 CARE, Box 1170, Price Waterhouse to Harold Miner (treasurer), September 3, 1947. 29 NARA, RG 469, UD 664, Box 2, minutes of CARE executive committee meeting, October 15, 1947. 30 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, January 2, 1947. 31 NARA, RG 469, UD 664, Box 2, minutes of CARE executive committee meeting, October 15, 1947. 32 CARE, Box 1170, Harold Miner (treasurer) to Loeb and Troper, consultants, November 18, 1947. 33 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, March 15, 1948. 34 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, August 11, 1948; C. J. Reid and Co. Inc. to CARE, July 23, 1948; MBDM, October 20, 1948. 35 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, May 7, 1947. 36 CARE, Box 1, executive director’s report, September 1, 1948. 37 Wallace J. Campbell, The History of CARE. A Personal Account, New York, 1990, p. 45. 38 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, January 9, 1947. 39 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, May 7, 1947. 40 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, June 11, 1947. 41 CARE, Box 1, executive director’s report, September 1, 1948. 42 ACVAFS, Box 49, William J. Hayes (DoS) to Hans Faber (ECA), subj.: port utilization, February 11, 1949. 43 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, January 22, 1947; MECM, June 4, 1947. 44 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, August 6, 1947; MBDM, August 27, 1947. 45 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, September 10, 1947; MECM, October 8, 1947; special board of directors meeting, October 22, 1947. 46 ACVAFS, Box 7, ACVAFS MECM, December 11, 1947. 47 CARE, Box 1170, Alex Hawes to members of the board, November 21, 1947; MBDM December 3, 1947.

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48 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, January 22, 1947. 49 In fact more than US$2.2 million in CARE surplus and general relief was handed over to CARE members between 1946 and 1950; see CARE, Box 3, table: CARE member agencies and government participation in surplus and general relief distributions [1950]. 50 CARE, Box 1170, French to Harold Miner, chairman of special survey committee, November 16, 1947. 51 NARA, RG 469, UD 664, Box 2, CARE MECM, May 12, 1948. 52 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, July 30, 1947, quotation Arthur Ringland to board of directors, read aloud at the meeting. 53 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, May 28, 1947. 54 CARE, Box 69, report on CARE member agency relations, January 19, 1955. 55 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, February 5, 1947, statement by William Haskell (Save the Children and at that point still CARE executive director). 56 ACVAFS, Box 29, Harold Miner, statement regarding CARE policy on solicitation of funds for undesignated packages, December 1, 1947. 57 CARE, Box 7, CARE board of directors: transcript of meeting June 2, 1948; ACVAFS, Box 8, MECM, December 11, 1947. 58 “A Wider Role for CARE,” The New York Times, August 24, 1948. 59 ACVAFS, Box 29, Arthur Ringland (ACVFA) to Wallace Campbell (CARE) January 6, 1948 (copy in CARE, Box 1170). 60 CARE, Box 7, CARE board of directors: transcript of meeting June 2, 1948; among the resolution’s supporters were American Aid to France, CWS, GWR, Mennonite Central Committee, USC, War Relief Services and others, while AFSC, CLUSA, CIO, Tolstoy Foundation, YWCA, Save the Children and others were strongly opposed to it. [AQ] 61 CARE, Box 3, resolution of the board of directors of CARE, January 7, 1948. 62 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, January 7, 1948. 63 CARE, Box 1170, minutes of special meeting of the board of directors, January 28, 1948. 64 CARE, Box 3, résumé of the work of the implementation committee published as an addendum to the report of the survey committee dated May 26, 1948; Box 1170, minutes of meeting of subcommittee of the board of directors of CARE, January 26, 1948. 65 NARA, RG 469, UD 664, Box 2, CARE MECM, May 12, 1948. 66 CARE, Box 1005, leaflet announcing first meeting of Union of CARE employees on May 24, 1947; see also CARE, Box 1170, MECM, May 14, 1947. 67 CARE, Box 1070, copy of telegram by CARE Union to board of directors, March 24, 1948. 68 CARE, Box 1, Charles Bloomstein, manuscript history of CARE, pp. 216–19; Box 1170, minutes of meeting of subcommittee of the board of directors of CARE, January 23, 1948; minutes of meeting of committee on implementation of general policy resolution adopted by the board of directors on January 7, 1948. 69 CARE, Box 3, final report of survey committee to the CARE board of directors, May 26, 1948. 70 CARE, Box 7, MBDM complete transcript of meeting, June 2, 1948, quote by Wallace Campbell, chairman of meeting. 71 CARE, Box 1170, William Batt from the Advisory Committee to Murray Lincoln (president of CARE), May 28, 1948; Robert A. Lovett (DoS) to Murray Lincoln, June 2, 1948. 72 CARE, Box 1170, William H. Draper (Department of the Army) to Murray Lincoln (president of CARE), June 1, 1948. 73 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, June 2, 1948. 74 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, October 20, 1948.

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75 CARE, Box 1170, report of the committee on management, February 2, 1949; MBDM, February 2, 1949. 76 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, February 16, 1949. 77 CARE, Box 1, annual report to the board for 1949 by Paul Comly French. 78 Gerard Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake. Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order, New York, 2012, pp. 100–25. 79 CARE, Box 1, executive director’s report, September 1, 1948. 80 CARE, Box 3, final report of survey committee to the CARE board of directors, May 26, 1948. 81 NARA, RG 469, UD 664, Box 2, CARE executive director’s report, February 4, 1948. 82 John Foster Dulles, War or Peace, New York, 1950, p. 101. 83 CARE, Box 1, annual report 1949 by Paul Comly French. 84 Rachel M. McCleary, Global Compassion. Private Voluntary Organizations and U.S. Foreign Policy since 1939, Oxford and New York, 2009, p. 63 (see also fig. 3.1, p. 61). 85 Ibid., pp. 61–2. 86 CARE, Box 26, summary statement of income and expenditures of voluntary relief agencies registered with the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid as shown in their quarterly financial reports, April 1–June 30, 1949. 87 CARE, Box 26, Paul French to Lou Wester, undated [1949]. 88 CARE, Box 26, Paul French to Arthur Ringland (ACVFA), October 18, 1949. 89 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, January 17, 1951. 90 CARE, Box 1170, special meeting of the members, November 20, 1951. 91 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, May 14, 1947. 92 Public Law 84, 80th Congress, 1st Session, H.J. Res 152, Joint resolution providing for relief assistance to the people of countries devastated by war, May 31, 1947; CARE, Box 1, Bloomstein, history of CARE manuscript, p. 400. 93 NARA, RG 469, UD 662-A, Box 1, Arthur Ringland to Charles Taft, May 22, 1947. 94 Gabriel A. Almond, The American People and Foreign Policy, New York, 1950, pp. 158–9. 95 Arthur Ringland, “The Organization of Voluntary Foreign Aid: 1939–1953,” Department of State Bulletin, March 15, 1954, pp. 383–93 (p. 387). 96 “International Economic Cooperation: Foreign Assistance Act of 1948,” The American Journal of International Law 43.2 (1949), pp. 64–93 (p. 86). 97 Originally, every package sold had included a certain margin to cover administrative expenses, including ocean freight; see CARE, Box 1170, MECM, August 6, 1947. 98 NARA, RG 469, UD 658-A, Box 1, Schedule ICR, CARE prepared for ACVFA, May 18, 1953. 99 ACVAFS, Box 7, minutes ECA committee of ACVAFS, Paris, France, October 27, 1948. 100 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, January 9, 1947. 101 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, September 3, 1947. 102 NARA, RG 469, UD 664, Box 2, CARE executive directors report, April 14, 1948, 103 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, April 20, 1949. 104 CARE, Box 5, Paul French to the CARE board of directors, April 29, 1949; CARE, Box 1170, minutes of committee on future of CARE, May 10, 1949. 105 CARE, Box 5, Ringland to French, May 10, 1949; CARE, Box 26, Ringland to French, November 10, 1949. 106 CARE, Box 6, American Friends Service Committee to Paul C. French, May 12, 1949; in

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fact, and in retrospect, the AFSC foresaw most of the problems that a short while later led to CARE’s retreat from China. CARE, Box 6, French to Ringland, May 23, 1949 informing Ringland about the start of operations in the nearest future. Harry S. Truman, inaugural speech, January 20, 1949, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Harry S. Truman, 1945–1953, Washington DC, 1966. Quoted in Harry S. Truman Library, http://trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/viewpapers.php?pid=1030 (accessed September 6, 2015). David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission. Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order, Princeton, NJ, 2010, pp. 77–8. Carol Lancaster, Foreign Aid. Diplomacy, Development, Domestic Politics, Chicago, 2007, p. 27. Corinna Unger, “Modernization à la mode. West German and American Development Plans for the Third World,” GHI Bulletin 40 (2007), pp. 143–59 (p. 145). David Milne, America’s Rasputin. Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War, New York, 2008, pp.  41–71; Michael Adas, “Modernization Theory and the American Revival of the Scientific and Technological Standards of Social Achievement and Human Worth,” in David C. Engerman (ed.), Staging Growth. Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War, Amherst, MA, 2003, pp. 25–45. Gilbert Rist, The History of Development. From Western Origins to Global Faith, London, 2006, p. 76. Paul Hoffman, Peace Can Be Won, London, 1951, pp. 130–1; Daniel Speich Chassé, “Towards a Global History of the Marshall Plan. European Post-war Reconstruction and the Rise of Development Expertise,” in Christian Grabas and Alexander Nützenadel (eds.), Industrial Policy in Europe after 1945: Wealth, Power and Economic Development in the Cold War, Basingstoke, 2014, pp. 189–212. Robert E. Wood, “From the Marshall Plan to the Third World,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and David S. Painter (eds.), Origins of the Cold War. An International History, New York, 2005, pp. 239–49. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War. Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, Cambridge and New York, 2009, p. 25. Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future. Modernization Theory in Cold War America, Baltimore, MD, 2003, p. 44. U.S. Economic Assistance Programs Administered by the Agency for International Development and Predecessor Agencies, April 3, 1948–June 30, 1969, Washington DC, 1968, pp. 3, 7; Westad, The Global Cold War, p. 26. Corinna Unger, “Investieren in die Moderne. Amerikanische Stiftungen in der Dritten Welt seit 1945,” in Thomas Adam et al. (eds.), Stifter, Spender und Mäzene. USA und Deutschland im historischen Vergleich, Stuttgart, 2009, pp. 253–86; Ekbladh, The Great American Mission, pp. 102–11. NARA, RG 469, UD 191A, Box 20, office memorandum, DoS, Office of Foreign Affairs, Austin Sullivan to William J. Shepherd, September 14, 1954, subj.: job description. NARA, RG 469, UD 667, Box 3, Arthur Ringland (ACVFA) to Hans Faber (ECA), December 8, 1949. ACVAFS, Box 49, copy of memo prepared by ECA headquarters to ECA mission in various countries, copy sent by Joseph B. Lehmann to all ACVAFS agencies interested in ECA, January 25, 1950.

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123 NARA, RG 469, UD 679-A, Box 4, copy from Elisabeth Clark Reiss (ACVAFS) to sister councils abroad recommending closer liaison with government and international organization committees engaged in technical assistance, August 1, 1951. 124 CARE, Box 26, on Point Four, Charles Bloomstein to Paul French, July 27, 1950. 125 CARE, Box 1170, Paul French to members of board of directors, June 7, 1951. 126 CARE, Box 6, Labour League for Human Rights (CARE member) to Murray D. Lincoln, June 22, 1951. 127 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, April 11, 1951. 128 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, May 16, 1951. 129 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, October 17, 1951, attached report of the future of CARE committee; at that point CARE had already agreed to smaller projects beyond immediate relief, such as delivery of “laboratory equipment” to Finland; see CARE, Box 14, document of agreement between DoS and CARE, September 20, 1951. 130 CARE, Box 1170, special meeting of board of directors, March 1, 1949. The board released a book program by 13 to 6 votes; dollar figures, see NARA, RG 469, UD 658-A, Box 1, Schedule ICR, CARE prepared for ACVFA, May 18, 1953. 131 NARA, RG 469, UD 658-A, Box 1, Paul C. French, history and future of CARE, statement, undated [1952/53]. 132 NARA, RG 469, UD 679-A, Box 4, ACVFA position regarding Point Four, June 23, 1950. 133 See, for example, FAO, The State of Food and Agriculture. A Survey of World Conditions and Prospects, Rome, 1949, pp. 2–3, 49–50; see also Giovanni Federico, Feeding the World. An Economic History of Agriculture 1800–2000, Princeton, NJ, 2005, pp. 196–205. 134 John Shaw, World Food Security. A History since 1945, Basingstoke, 2007, pp. 12–13. 135 NARA, RG 469, UD 679-A, Box 5, restricted by Sullivan (Technical Cooperation Administration), The Role of Voluntary Agencies in the Point IV Program, January 27, 1953. 136 CARE, Box 1170, minutes of committee on future of CARE, May 10, 1949. 137 CARE, Box 1170, minutes of special meeting of the members, October 22, 1952. 138 ACVAFS, Box 52, summary statement of income and expenditures of voluntary agencies registered with the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid as shown in their quarterly financial reports, 1949–1950 (corrected figures). 139 CARE, Box 26, Paul French (CARE) to Arthur Ringland (ACVFA), March 2, 1950. 140 David B. Grigg, The World Food Problem, 1950–1980, Oxford and New York, 1985, pp. 40–1. 141 D. John Shaw and Edward J. Clay, World Food Aid. Experiences of Recipients and Donors, Rome and London, 1993, p. 216. 142 Federico, Feeding the World, pp. 196–205. 143 Virgil W. Dean, An Opportunity Lost. The Truman Administration and the Farm Policy Debate, Columbia, MO, 2006, pp. 13–18. 144 The Commodity Credit Corporation had been established by an executive order of President Roosevelt in October 1933 as part of a New Deal program to help the rural poor in the United States. The CCC was to withdraw excess commodities from the market and hold them on behalf of farmers until prices reached a certain marketable level again. For the development of feeding programs in the United States, see Beth Osborne Daponte and Shannon Bade, “How the Private Food Assistance Network Evolved. Interactions between Public and Private Responses to Hunger,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 35 (2006), pp. 668–90. 145 “Chief World Food Problem Now Regarded as Sending of Surpluses to Deficit Areas,” The New York Times, February 6, 1950.

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146 Henry Morgenthau, Jr., “Give Our Crop Hoard to Asia, Morgenthau Urges,” The Washington Post, October 30, 1949. 147 Christopher B. Barrett and Daniel G. Maxwell, Food Aid after Fifty Years. Recasting its Role, London and New York, 2005, pp. 13–16. 148 NARA, RG 469, US 667, Box 1, Joseph P. Chamberlain (ACVAFS) to Arthur Ringland (ACVFA), September 29, 1949. 149 ACVAFS, Box 8, ACVAFS statement (draft), “The Continuing Challenge of American Abundance,” November 13, 1956; see also ACVAFS statement, “The Moral Challenge of American Abundance,” ACVAFS statement before the Agricultural House Appropriation Committee, April 30, 1954. 150 NARA, RG 469, UD 667, Box 1, Joseph B. Lehman (ACVAFS) to Arthur Ringland (ACVFA), September 30, 1949. 151 CARE, Box 26, Paul French to Arthur Ringland (ACVFA), October 17, 1949. 152 NARA, RG 469(220), UD 667, Box 1, Arthur Ringland (ACVFA) to Florence Kirlin (Agriculture), October 14, 1949. 153 ACVAFS, Box 29, copy of testimony before House Agricultural Committee on disposition of agricultural surpluses, May 3, 1950 (HR 7137). 154 ACVAFS, Box 29, Charlotte Owen to Paul C. French, May 5, 1950. 155 ACVAFS, Box 47, confidential report, Joseph B. Lehman (ACVAFS) to file, July 27, 1949. 156 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, February 2, 1949. 157 CARE, Box 5, by Paul French to board of directors, subj: agricultural surpluses, September 8, 1950; Box 3, Paul C. French, executive director’s report to board of directors, September 13, 1950. 158 CARE, Box 6, Murray D. Lincoln to Charles Taft (ACVFA), September 29, 1950. 159 CARE, Box 1, Bloomstein, manuscript of history of CARE, pp. 373–6. 160 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, January 3, 1951. 161 Mitchel B. Wallerstein, Food for War – Food for Peace. United States Food Aid in a Global Context, Cambridge, MA, 1980, p. 33; actually neither Poland nor Yugoslavia was communist, but each had a socialist government under Soviet influence. 162 CARE, Box 17, Paul French to all country directors, January 5, 1951. 163 CARE, Box 4, report of CARE near east/far east conference, Colombo, Ceylon, January 29–31, 1951, undated. 164 CARE, Box 7, statistics, CARE surplus commodity program 1951–1955, stats compiled by CARE accounting division, October 19, 1955. 165 Kristin L. Ahlberg, Transplanting the Great Society. Lyndon Johnson and Food for Peace, Columbia, MO, 2008, pp. 21–2. 166 Wallerstein, Food for War – Food for Peace, p. 36. 167 CARE, Box 26, brochure Farm Surplus for Hungry People, A proposal by CARE, a nonsectarian, non-profit relief organization, covering the possible use of farm surplus around the world as the basis of a national policy, by Paul Comly French, February 1954. 168 CARE, Box 26, copy of minutes of ACVAFS meeting, January 27, 1954. 169 CARE, Box 26, Ezra Benson Taft to Paul French, February 19, 1954. 170 CARE, Box 30, Olive Clapper (CARE DC) to Paul Hoffman (Studebaker), April 23, 1954; ACVAFS, Box 8, A. W. Patterson (ACVAFS) to ACVAFS executive committee, confidential notes on trip to Washington, May 3, 1954. 171 ACVAFS, Box 47, A. W. Patterson (ACVAFS) to surplus commodities policy committee, shipping and purchasing executive committee, February 19, 1954.

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172 At the federal level, under Section 501(c)(3), charitable organizations (such as CARE) were barred from engaging in a “significant” amount of legislative lobbying; see Burton A. Weisbrod and Elizabeth Mauser, “Tax Policy Toward Non-profit Organisations: An Eleven-Country Survey,” Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations 2.1 (1991), pp. 3–25 (p. 18); see also Norman Isaac Silber, A Corporate Form of Freedom. The Emergence of the Modern Nonprofit Sector, Boulder, CO, 2001, ch. 4. 173 ACVAFS, Box 8, A. W. Patterson (ACVAFS) to ACVAFS executive committee, surplus commodities policy committee, shipping and purchasing committee, notes on trip to Washington, May 19, and developments re surplus commodity disposal, ocean and inland freight, etc., May 25, 1954. 174 CARE, Box 26, Richard Reuter to Paul French, April 17, 1954. 175 NARA, RG 469, P212, Box 1, summary minutes of Advisory Committee meeting, March 29, 1955. 176 ACVAFS, Box 7, minutes of ACVAFS executive committee meeting, January 25, 1951. 177 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, February 16, 1955. 178 Beth Gazley and Jeffrey L. Brudney, “The Purpose (and Perils) of Government-Nonprofit Partnership,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 36.3 (2007), pp. 389–415 (p. 319), provides a literature overview on organizational literature about PPPs. 179 CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, January 17, 1951. 180 Guy B. Peters, “‘With a little help from our friends.’ Public–Private Partnerships as Institutions and Instruments,” in Jon Pierre (ed.), Partnerships in Urban Governance. European and American Experience, Basingstoke and New York, 1998, pp. 11–33 (pp. 12–13). 181 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, October 17, 1951. 182 David Hulme and Michael Edwards, “Too Close for Comfort? The Impact of Official Aid on Nongovernmental Organizations,” World Development 24.6 (1996), pp. 961–73. 183 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, February 16, 1955. 184 John Foster Dulles, quote taken from Arthur Ringland, “The Organization of Voluntary Foreign Aid: 1939–1953,” Department of State Bulletin, March 15, 1954, pp. 383–93 (p. 383). 185 John Gerard Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,” International Organization 36.2 (1982), pp. 379–415; it is instructive to take a look at social security systems, which were clearly enhanced in the post-war era; in this respect, see Gabriele Metzler and Daniel Letwin, “Welfare: Entitlement and Exclusion,” in Christof Mauch and Kiran Klaus Patel (eds.), The United States and Germany during the Twentieth Century. Competition and Convergence, New York, 2010, pp. 70–83; see also Georg Schild, Zwischen Freiheit des Einzelnen und Wohlfahrtsstaat. Amerikanische Sozialpolitik im 20. Jahrhundert, Paderborn, 2003, pp. 170–242. 186 NARA, RG 469, UD 191A, Box 20, office memorandum, DoS, Office of Foreign Affairs, Austin Sullivan to William J. Shepherd, September 14, 1954, subj.: job description. 187 NARA, RG 469, UD 679-A, Box 4, position paper, Advisory Committee recommendation on Point IV, June 23, 1950. 188 ACVAFS, Box 8, Joseph B. Lehman to Charlotte Owen (ACVAFS), February 25, 1949. 189 NARA, RG 59, A1, 5322, Box 7, notification about establishment of ACVFA register on voluntary agencies, July 8, 1952. 190 David H. Lumsdaine, Moral Vision in International Politics. The Foreign Aid Regime, 1949–1989, Princeton, NJ, 1993.

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191 NARA, RG 469, UD 667, Box 3, Arthur Ringland (ACVFA) to Hans Faber (ECA), December 8, 1949. 192 ACVAFS, Box 52, ACVAFS explanatory attachment to ACVAFS to Advisory Committee, January 31, 1950. 193 ACVAFS, Box 5, progress report of committee of three, October 8, 1952. 194 ACVAFS, Box 7, ACVAFS MECM, December 8, 1949. 195 ACVAFS, Box 7, ACVAFS MECM, October 27, 1948; Box 55, report on recent problems of voluntary foreign aid, March 23, 1955. 196 In August 1948 French was quoted by a member of a Christian agency as having said that “there were only two agencies doing a decent job in Germany [CARE and the Quakers],” whereas the Church agencies in general and their umbrella organization CRALOG in particular “stank.” This led to considerable diplomatic trouble; see ACVAFS, Box 29, copy of received from Eldon Burke, August 6, 1948; copy of to all board members by Paul French, August 20, 1948; Charlotte Owen to Paul French, September 26 and November 4, 1948; Paul French to Charlotte Owen including counter statement to CARE board of directors, November 12, 1948. 197 NARA, RG 469, UD 667, Box 2, report Arthur Ringland (ACVFA) on conversation with Paul French, April 20, 1953. 198 Helmut K Anheier, “Managing Non-profit Organisations: Towards a New Approach, Civil Society Working Paper,” January 2000, p. 2, http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/29022/1/cswp1.pdf (accessed September 9, 2015); NARA, RG 469, P212, Box 1, summary minutes of Advisory Committee meeting, March 29, 1955. 199 Regarding for-profits, see Harold C. Livesay, American Made. Shapers of the American Econ­ omy, Boston, 2012, p. 67; Erik Stam et al., “Ambitious Entrepreneurship, High-Growth Firms, and Macroeconomic Growth,” in Maria Minniti (ed.), The Dynamics of Entrepreneurship. Evidence from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Data, Oxford, 2011, pp. 231–50; Erkko Autio, “High-Aspiration Entrepreneurship,” in Minniti (ed.), The Dynamics of Entrepreneurship, pp. 251–75; regarding non-profits, see Dennis R. Young, If Not for Profit, For What? A Behavioral Theory of the Nonprofit Sector Based on Entrepreneurship, Lexington, KY, 1983. 200 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 (p. 125); criticizing self-interest as the main driver for institutional change, see also Werner Plumpe, “Die Neue Institutionenökonomik und die moderne Wirtschaft. Zur wirtschaftshistorischen Reichweite institutionenökonomischer Argumente am Beispiel des Handlungsmodells der Rationalität,” in Karl-Peter Ellerbrock and Clemens Wischermann (eds.), Die Wirtschaftsgeschichte vor der Herausforderung durch die New Institutional Economics, Dortmund, 2004, pp. 31–57. 201 NARA, RG 469, UD 191A, Box 20, office memorandum, DoS, Office of Foreign Affairs, Austin Sullivan to William J. Shepherd, September 14, 1954, subj.: job description. 202 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, October 17, 1951. 203 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, January 17, 1951. 204 Matthias Benz, “Entrepreneurship as a Non-Profit-Seeking Activity,” International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal 5.1 (2009), pp. 23–44 (p. 29); Christine Letts et al., High Performance Nonprofit Organizations. Managing Upstream for Greater Impact, New York, 1999, pp. 7, 107–8. 205 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, May 14, 1947. 206 Olive Ewing Clapper, One Lucky Woman, New York, 1961, p. 414.

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207 Minutes of CARE executive committee meetings provide abundant proof of pay raises and promotion culture at CARE. 208 Harold Gauer, Selling Big Charity. The Story of C.A.R.E., Glendale, WI, 1990, is a valuable source pointing to the importance of networks among co-workers for promotion. 209 NARA, RG 469, UD 664, Box 2, minutes of CARE executive committee meeting, October 15, 1947. 210 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). 211 Thomas von Hippel, “Begriffsbildung und Problemkreise der Nonprofit-Organisationen aus juristischer Sicht,” in Klaus J. Hopt et al. (eds), Nonprofit-Organisationen in Recht, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Theorien – Analysen – Corporate Governance, Tübingen, 2005, pp. 35–46 (p. 37). 212 Howard P. Tuckman, “Competition, Commercialization, and the Evolution of Nonprofit Organizational Structures,” in Burton Allen Weisbrod (ed.), To Profit or not to Profit. The Commercial Transformation of the Nonprofit Sector, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 25–45 (p. 25). 213 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 (p. 140). 214 ACVAFS, Box 6, program and management study for the ACVAFS, conducted by social welfare consultants, Walter W. Pettit, Shelby M. Harrison and Eduard C. Lindeman, April 7, 1952. 215 ACVAFS, Box 29, folder membership fees, series of letters covering membership issues 1946–1954. 216 ACVAFS, Box 29, Harold Miner (CARE treasurer) to Clarence Krumbholz (ACVAFS chairman finance membership committee), June 30, 1953. 217 CARE, Box 6, recommendation to the board of directors, May 1954. 218 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, January 22, 1947; special meeting of the members, December 19, 1951; MBDM, January 28, 1953; MBDM, October 21, 1953; MBDM, June 2, 1954; ACVAFS, Box 55, report on recent problems of voluntary foreign aid, March 23, 1955. 219 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, March 24, 1954. 220 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, January 30, 1952: at this meeting the Grange was admitted. 221 CARE, Box 1170, report of the Future of CARE Committee, January 1953. 222 ACVAFS, Box 29, Leo Perlis (CARE secretary) to Charlotte Owen (ACVAFS), June 4, 1954; Charlotte Owen to Leo Perlis, June 7, 1954. 223 ACVAFS, Box 52, copy of William McCahoon (ACVFA, executive director) to Charles Taft (chairman of ACFA), June 29, 1954; on the government’s position on CARE’s withdrawal from the ACVAFS, see NARA, RG 469, P212, Box 1, summary meeting of ACVFA and ACVAFS members, March 29, 1955. 224 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, July 7, 1954. 225 ACVAFS, Box 52, copy of Paul French. 226 CARE, Box 7, executive director’s report to the executive committee, August 18, 1954. 227 ACVAFS, Box 8, minutes of ACVAFS council meeting, Nov 22, 1954. 228 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, September 15, 1954. 229 ACVAFS, Box 8, minutes of ACVAFS executive committee meeting, April 4, 1955. 230 CARE, Box 1170, minutes of committee on future of CARE, May 10, 1949.

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231 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, December 15, 1948; ACVAFS, Box 29, tentative draft of suggested report to the CARE committee on management, February 2, 1949. Among the FOCC members were CARE president Murray D. Lincoln, Kendall Kimberland (AFSC), Harold S. Miner (Congregational Christian Service Committee), Leo Perlis (CIO), Thomas Keogh (NCWC), Alexander B. Hawes (CARE counsel), executive director Paul Comly French, and Wallace Campbell (CLUSA). 232 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, December 19, 1951; MBDM, January 30, 1952. 233 CARE Box 3, Paul Comly French to Future of CARE Committee, subj.: March report, March 5, 1952 234 CARE, Box 3, Paul French, March report to FOCC, figures presented without reference to corresponding period of time; however, figures roughly match data provided for ACVFA Schedule C forms for last quarter of 1951. 235 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, October 17, 1951. 236 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, March 7, 1952. 237 Expenses actually quintupled and increased from US$2,000 to US$10,000 per month. 238 CARE, Box 1170, report of the Future of CARE Committee, January 28, 1953. 239 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, May 20, 1953. 240 CARE, Box 24, Paul French to all New York department heads, September 19, 1950; Campbell, History of CARE, p. 68. 241 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, November 18, 1953. 242 CARE, Box 7, executive director’s report to the executive committee, August 18, 1954. 243 Reprint from the Minneapolis Morning Tribune, December 9, 1954, “Countries offer World of Ideas. Handycrafts Aid Nations’ Rebuilding,” by Patricia Olness. 244 Campbell, History of CARE, p. 69. 245 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, March 23, 1955. 246 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, January 19, 1955. 247 CARE, Box 73, see CARE income sheets, 1954 and 1955. 248 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, February 28, 1951. 249 CARE, Box 3, for Mr. Wallace Campbell for use in presenting my views to the CARE board, by Harold Miner (treasurer), February 21, 1952. 250 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, February 16, 1955. 251 Campbell, History of CARE, p. 70. 252 CARE, Box 6, detailed line-up of estimated liquidation costs, 1955. 253 In May 1954 the Future of CARE Committee was renamed the Planning and Policy Committee; see CARE, Box 6, recommendation to the board of directors, May 1954. 254 CARE, Box 6, Paul French to Planning and Policy Committee, July 12, 1955. 255 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, July 13, 1955. 256 These were mainly the religious agencies, War Relief Services (from 1955 the Catholic Relief Services, CRS) and Church World Service (CWS).

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In search of a new mission in Korea

American voluntary agencies and the“aid rush” to Korea1 In a [… free] society, voluntary agencies are a healthy component providing faith, devotion, know-how and leadership in dealing with the mental, physical and spiritual needs of man.2

In a 2003 essay, the historian Gregg Brazinsky underscored his conviction that the Republic of Korea occupies “a somewhat paradoxical position in the minds of many Americans.”3 Since the end of the Second World War Korea has been a projection screen for America’s coming to terms with the consequences of its own modernization and development strategies abroad. South Korea in particular has – with good reason – been spoken of as a “proving ground” for US modernization policy in Northeast Asia.4 It was a laboratory for a new mode of US-led international cooperation and humanitarian policy that chose Korea as its place for proving the superiority of the Western way of life and the effectiveness of benevolence dealt out by its institutions. But it was not aid alone that mattered. Just as important was to demonstrate the merits of modernity and the institutions of (American) liberal democracy – including voluntary welfare agencies as visible proponents of the idea of voluntarism and democratic participation in modern societies.5 There is thus a lot to learn from a closer look at the way government agencies, NGOs, and recipients of aid cooperated and shaped the field of humanitarian assistance and development aid in Asia. CARE and several dozen American private voluntary agencies extended their services from Europe to Asia during the 1940s and early 1950s (expressed not least of all in CARE’s name change to Cooperative for American Remittances to Everywhere).6 If we are to understand how humanitarian relief and development aid went global after the Second World War, then it is of central importance that we understand the conditions for this expansion as well as the tight institutional framework both private voluntary agencies and government players found themselves embedded in.7 The Korean case is a model in this respect. South Korea, once it was freed from Japanese colonial rule, was one of the first non-European countries to receive ­post-war relief from the United States. Korea’s economy was depressed, education

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levels were low, and the brain drain caused by colonial occupation had severely weakened its leadership basis.8 Hence, Western experts from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) and the Allied forces agreed that external help was needed.9 After the hasty overnight agreement between the Americans and the Soviets in late August 1945 that established the 38th parallel as the dividing line between the Western and Eastern spheres of influence, the US government was quick to establish a US military government in the southern part of Korea.10 President Truman himself adjured America’s future in the Pacific region11 and agreed with his advisors that Korea had become an “ideological battleground” – an assessment that tied future Western influence in Asia to US success in Korea.12 The country had to become a Western nation – a development that it would not be able to shoulder on its own, as US foreign policy advisors agreed. Accordingly, massive aid increases to South Korea were necessary, a financial burden for the American taxpayer that seemed like a good investment, and was justified as a central prerequisite for building (supposedly from scratch) a new and “modern” South Korean nation-state.13 The most obvious goals – the establishment of an independent Korean government and a coordinating bureaucracy – were hampered, however, by the humanitarian crisis that complicated any kind of systematic approach. The country was living through massive political turmoil and was also witnessing the return of more than two million refugees from exile after the end of the Japanese occupation.14 Millions were homeless and sorely in need of material help like food, clean water, shelter, clothing, and medical assistance – all goods and services that voluntary groups had successfully provided to Europe during and after the Second World War. It was General MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in the Pacific region, who in 1946 first expressed his interest in establishing a private voluntary agency network for Korea that would be similar to the umbrella organization Council of Relief Agencies Licensed to Operate in Germany (CRALOG). US government officials as well as military authorities agreed that private aid – apart from its material value – would be an excellent reflection of American “understanding and […] good-will in these times of tension.”15 Drawing on official encouragement, a dozen or so American relief agencies convened in late 1946 to establish a special committee under the auspices of the ACVAFS. Conscious of the post-colonial setting they were about to enter, the agencies agreed that it would be “diplomatically wrong” to group Japan and Korea together.16 The resultant Committee on Korea included mainly religious agencies with missionary roots like the National Catholic Welfare Conference, Church World Service, Lutheran World Relief, Mennonite Central, and the American Friends Service Committee, which had been active in Korea before.17 CARE, as a newcomer agency, joined the committee as well. Devoid of any ties to Korea or Asia in general, however, CARE experienced some difficulties establishing an office abroad. Despite having won an endorsement from General MacArthur who cited CARE as “an example of how the single individual

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living in a democratic state can help to spread the ideals of peace and international goodwill through his own efforts” in April 1947, it took CARE almost two years to begin operations.18 Being new to the region, CARE started by sending scouts in order to find out what conditions were like in Seoul and the rest of the country. Throughout 1947 and 1948 several CARE staffers visited South Korea and returned with rather sobering reports on a lack of appropriate transportation and communication channels, which meant that operations would have to differ markedly from the European model and experience.19 As it turned out, operations in Korea would have to be based on general relief or even bulk shipments rather than on CARE’s traditional designated package model.20 Furthermore, external obstacles remained to be overcome. The August 1948 transition from Allied military rule to rule by the newly established Republic of Korea slowed communication significantly, as CARE now had to consult with the new Korean government under President Syngman Rhee, in addition to adhering to any agreements that had been reached with Allied military authorities or United Nations offices. In late 1948 CARE staffer Paul Gordon reported back from his trip to Korea that the Rhee government, “like infant governments of newly created countries everywhere,” was “struggling with almost insurmountable problems” of administrative and institutional provenience. Gordon pointed out that he had found himself in the impossible position of having to explain the chain of command and other matters of course to overly eager Korean bureaucrats. He underscored, however, that President Rhee’s tendency to “direct officials of the administration in a way a president of a better established government might not feel necessary” had so far worked to CARE’s advantage.21 Since President Rhee himself took an interest in having a CARE mission in Korea, Gordon was able to tackle the initial difficulties, and on January 20, 1949 the contract signed by CARE and the Government of the Republic of Korea took effect.22 It took until May 1949, however, for newly hired Robert J. Fairgraves, a relief professional with a Christian background and considerable experience in the relief and non-profit sector, to become CARE’s Mission Chief to Korea.23 His appointment was of rather strategic nature: CARE’s management expected the majority of donations to come from religious donors and deemed Fairgraves’ connection to church groups “most advantageous.”24 Fairgraves moved to Korea shortly after his appointment, but it took until August 1949 before he had actually hired local personnel, and finished negotiations on the terms of entry of goods.25 By late October the first CARE relief shipments, mainly blankets, clothing, and baby food packages, were arriving in Seoul. Distribution was hampered by the fact that CARE packages designated for Korea were not particularly popular in the United States, as most CARE donors did not have personal connections to Korea. In addition, the logistics of deliveries were extremely difficult since street names had been changed after the end of Japanese rule and beneficiaries had moved or could not be traced by the CARE staff. As the CARE scouts had warned, the personalized package concept was not suitable for the Korean environment. Fairgraves was thus

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happy to acquire funds from the ECA in late 1949 for a book program to support Korean libraries.26 On site, CARE was loosely associated with a local voluntary agency umbrella organization called LARA (Licensed Agencies for Relief in Asia), which had been set up to facilitate relief shipments and distribution in the region.27 LARA’s founding members had exclusively been religious agencies that had managed, in the course of 1948, to ship some US$250,000 worth of relief goods to Korea.28 Although the CARE officer in Korea had a Christian background himself, he was rather skeptical of the strong bias that caused the religious agencies in Korea to favor the Christian segments of the Korean populace. He criticized what he perceived as the “rice-Christian” program of the LARA agencies and opted for a stronger focus on general relief and government-run programs in order to support a more representative sector of the Korean population.29 His suggestions, if implemented, would have tied CARE more closely to the Rhee government and its modernization activities.30 Before they could be decided upon by CARE’s board of directors, however, North Korean forces invaded, and the program was stopped completely. When the news of the North Korean invasion struck, most local CARE staffers were located in the Pusan port region (one of the most southerly regions of the country) waiting to receive a fresh delivery of relief goods. Their return roads were blocked as the Northern forces advanced with tremendous speed southward down the peninsula, crossing the 38th parallel and conquering large parts of South Korea. Within days after the invasion, President Truman authorized the use of American military forces (including ground troops) to support the Republic of Korea. He also managed to convince the United Nations to set up an international command in defense of the country.31 CARE mission chief Robert Fairgraves, along with most other American voluntary agency representatives, was hastily evacuated and transported back to the United States. The evacuation left the status of the CARE office as well as the whereabouts of most of CARE’s local staff members uncertain. And while Fairgraves was able to secure the mission’s cash resources, in the end all mission records, accounting books, and material relief supplies were lost in the chaos of war. The hostilities that ensued resulted in almost four million casualties and millions of refugees and displaced people.32 Soldiers and mobilized civilians from more than a dozen nations, fighting on both sides of the frontline, died in a war that – from a solely geographical perspective – started and ended on the 38th parallel. The initial North Korean advance far into southern territory came to a halt in September 1950. From this point on, however, a violent civil war ensued that was fueled by money and military resources provided, on the one hand, by the United States and the United Nations, and on the other by the Soviet Union and China.33 The region descended into chaos, and the humanitarian crisis that emerged was so drastic that it had to be tackled in one way or another – even as ground fighting continued. Hence, as soon as the initial North Korean advance was brought to a halt, US

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authorities once again invited American private voluntary agencies to support a supplemental relief program that was meant to stabilize and support South Korea and help relieve the suffering of the local population.

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Divide et impera It was actually as early as September 1950, only a few weeks after the hasty evacuation of the private agency staff, that the American voluntary agencies represented by the ACVAFS attended a meeting at the United Nations office in New York to discuss the relief situation in Korea. At this meeting US government officials requested that the LARA agencies and CARE should act as the “nucleus for the establishment of a nationwide Committee for Aid to Korea.” Most private agencies were actually quite open and willing to return to Korea at the earliest possible moment – particularly since they were starting to feel considerable pressure from their constituents (that is, private donors), who were eager to “share in the reconstruction of the country through their traditional channels.”34 However, several agency officials left the September meeting dissatisfied with the terms and conditions presented by the government. What aroused the most criticism was the fact that the US government relief plan did not contain provision for direct agency representation in Korea but instead granted all operative functions to military or United Nations authorities. Having just been evacuated from Korea, the representatives of private agencies were eager to return and thus pushed for a plan that would allow private agency personnel to be attached to the US-sponsored part of the UN Relief Team.35 These requests and concerns, however, fell on deaf ears. After they had been presented to the government Advisory Committee (which served as central liaison between American humanitarian agencies and the US government, military, and UN authorities), its chairman, Charles Taft, reacted by presenting the only secular agency, CARE, with a competing request. In a letter to CARE’s president Murray Lincoln, Taft urged CARE to cover for the other agencies that, in his eyes, had shown that they were unable to “work in concert” due to their insistence on “official recognition of their officials in the field to supervise and distribute supplies.” Sidelining the ACVAFS as the official voluntary umbrella organization and its ongoing internal decision processes, Taft suggested that CARE should “serve as a channel for the many national organizations which desire to contribute assistance in the form of gifts-in-kind or otherwise,” and in doing so stylized the whole issue into a question of general standing, patriotism, and loyalty.36 CARE’s president – conscious that this was an incredibly hot potato – forwarded Taft’s request to the board of directors for serious consideration but without a personal suggestion.37 The decision was difficult, since CARE was a cooperative organization that hosted representatives from other member organizations of the ACVAFS – among them agencies that had objected to the initial government proposal. However, at a

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t­ urbulent special meeting of the board of directors on November 6, 1950, the CARE board approved a major – and at least partially single-handed – relief drive for Korea, thereby succumbing to government encouragement and taking a shortcut that catapulted CARE into the center of media attention.38 A mere week later, on November 14, 1950, President Truman himself launched the campaign, announcing that the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe and Asia [sic], at the request of the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid of the Department of State, is undertaking to channel relief packages from Americans to the thousands of families who have been left hungry and homeless by the fighting in Korea.

Unilaterally altering CARE’s official name by including Asia, Truman underscored his happiness that “a group of public-spirited citizens has agreed to cooperate in the effort to bring to the attention of the American people the needs of Korea and the service that the CARE for Korea Program can render to the people of this devastated country.”39 Over the next couple of months Truman repeatedly reiterated his support for CARE, underlining that “the battle” against poverty and hunger had just begun and that CARE was standing at the frontline.40 News of this incident and turn of events traveled quickly, and the ACVAFS was far from happy.41 Not only had CARE managed to absorb most of the available media attention and presidential endorsements, but by agreeing to the government’s terms and conditions it had also undermined the ACVAFS’s legitimate claim to integrate private agency personnel into the relief operation in South Korea. With this action, however, CARE did succeed in mobilizing public support for Korea that boosted its relief volume from a meager US$42,078 in 1950 to more than three times as much in the first half of 1951 alone.42 What was equally important, though, was that CARE was able to convey to the American public that there was still much left to do, even if Europe was showing clear signs of recovery. The outbreak of the Korean War and the ensuing humanitarian tragedy shattered  the feeling among many Americans that “all was well again,” and it was CARE that managed to sell itself as an active and adaptive humanitarian relief agency, enjoying widespread support from American civil and military leaders alike.43 After this rather sobering experience of being outplayed, the other agencies in the ACVAFS founded American Relief for Korea – a relief drive that excluded CARE and consisted of ten national, mostly religiously based, voluntary service agencies.44 These agencies did not, however, succeed in becoming an independent part of the relief endeavor in Korea – at least not in 1951 or 1952. The responsibility for war relief to Korea had been transferred from the ECA to the US army in September 1950, and from that point on all agreements involving on-site representation and ocean freight reimbursements were null and void.45 While the shipping of relief goods (mainly clothes) was handled by the army, inland transportation and final allocation was handled by the United Nations Civilian Assistance Command

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Figure 3.1  American soldier with child and CARE package. Korea (UNCACK).46 When the Korean War broke out, the American voluntary agencies failed to employ collective bargaining strategies or make a concerted fight for r­ epresentation and involvement in the overall relief endeavor by underscoring their goals of “serving non-political and objective ends.”47 Confronted with the government’s clear-cut divide et impera strategy, CARE gave in to government urging and in doing so maximized its short-term gain as an individual organization.48 This strategic choice was rendered possible by the fact that the Korean setting was somehow new and particularly complicated. First, it involved a highly politicized military conflict and actual fighting on the ground, which obviously limited the appeal and influence of civil society actors. Secondly, multiple parties were claiming primacy over voluntary agency interests – the US military, United Nations agencies, as well as local Korean authorities. In addition, the agencies

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were confronted with American donors and the media urging the agencies to start a relief drive for Korea as soon as possible. Confronted with the challenge of defending proven patterns of voluntary agency participation on-site at the cost of time-consuming collective bargaining, CARE chose the easy way out. By putting its own organizational interests first, CARE created a situation that led to considerable disturbance, however, as bonds of trust between the American relief agencies were seriously damaged. A solo with the Korean children’s choir? It would be wrong, however, to attribute uncooperative behavior – meaning the pursuit of organizational interests and competition among private humanitarian agencies – to CARE exclusively. On the contrary, all private voluntary agencies pursue the interests of their own respective organizations, and have been doing so “for the last century” at least – as Louis Galambos convincingly argued some time ago.49 The Korean setting was just one stage for demonstrating the general finding that under circumstances of uncertainty, risk, and scarcity of resources, competition is a key feature of non-profit agency.50 This is demonstrated by another episode that involved CARE, the American Korean Foundation (AKF), and a Korean children’s choir touring the United States.51 It was in 1951, at the height of the Korean crisis, that CARE’s executive director Paul French came up with a rather labor-intensive publicity and fundraising strategy that involved inviting a South Korean children’s choir to the United States. The plan envisioned a nationwide music tour, which would be organized as a charity event by CARE, in cooperation with appropriate government offices at home and in Korea. The event had a twofold purpose: to raise funds for Korean children and to promote CARE’s public image. The transportation of several dozen Korean children to the United States, however, turned out to be a problem. In late November 1951 CARE’s legal counsel, Alexander B. Hawes, who had agreed to lead the negotiations with US government offices, informed French that official endorsement by the State Department was dependent on who would assume the transportation costs.52 Since there were obviously high costs involved that neither CARE nor the State Department were ready to shoulder, the plan was adjourned. In October 1952 French re-approached Arthur Ringland from the government Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid, explaining the political implications of his plan and lobbying once again for government support. He argued that the choir tour offered the Koreans a chance to say thank you – a gesture that would be welcomed by Americans who were starting to feel that they were carrying the entire burden of the war. Ringland managed to arrange a meeting with officers from the State Department so that the issue could be debated again.53 This time the outcome was significantly more successful. The plan traveled for some time through different branches of the US administration, and finally, as one of his last acts in office, President Truman himself endorsed the idea, underscoring that such a tour would not only “stimulate that

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help which the American people are now extending to thousands of orphan children in Korea,” but also “further the national interest in the survival of the sorely afflicted Korean people” as such.54 Truman’s endorsement could have been the breakthrough for the tour, if it had not been for the 1953 presidential elections and subsequent change in office. The transition from Truman to Eisenhower was accompanied by a period of administrative drift so that the CARE management was once again forced to resume selling the idea door to door.55 What happened a short time later was a real blow to CARE and to Paul French in particular. In January 1953 CARE was informed that the State Department had given the green light for the Korean children’s choir to come to the United States, but that the tour would be hosted not by CARE but by the newly established AKF instead. Completely stunned, French contacted Arthur Ringland to ask how in the world this could have happened, since the tour had clearly been his idea.56 Ringland, though apologetic, could only report that the AKF had pulled the necessary strings at the Korean embassy in the US and had successfully persuaded Korean and US diplomats that it was the best organization to host such a tour.57 This incident must have been particularly bitter for French, not simply because he found himself stripped of an idea he had pursued for over a year, but also because his publicity tour had been “hijacked” by an agency that he had been aggressively trying to prevent from becoming registered as a Korean relief agency at all. In May 1952, in the midst of the Korean crisis, French had personally intervened with the government Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid. Not only had he voiced his conviction that the registration of the AKF would lead to “more competitive campaigns than can possibly succeed in the present situation,” but he had also bluntly concluded that it was “a major mistake for the Committee to register this agency until there is some clear understanding […] whether they will cross into the fields of already interested groups.”58 His efforts proved fruitless, however, and the Advisory Committee registered the AKF despite his protests. Since open intervention had not worked out, French tried another strategy to neutralize this new competitor. He sought a personal meeting with the AKF’s executive director Palmer Brevis to discuss the Korean situation and to press the AKF to refrain from establishing its own operating apparatus and to use CARE’s instead.59 This turned out to be of no effect, as the newcomer agency was not the least bit daunted or impressed and not only went operational but also took over CARE’s choir tour a short time later. After the dust had settled, CARE’s executive management made yet another move to exert influence on this obvious competitor. In June 1953 French contacted Robert Oliver from the School of Liberal Arts of Pennsylvania State College, who was institutionally connected to the AKF, and offered to serve on the AKF’s board: If you feel it would be useful, I would be willing to serve on the Board of the American  Korean Foundation. I am hopeful that the Foundation will not set up

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operating machinery in the field but will use what is available from the standpoint of  buying, shipping and operating so that all the funds raised can be used for projects.60

His hopes were shattered, however, and the AKF started its own Korea campaign in early summer of 1953, a campaign that was publicly endorsed by President Eisenhower and turned out to be fairly successful as well.61 As a last move, French tried to acquire US$10,000 of AKF funds for a CARE school project in Korea, but here too he was spurned by a blunt letter of refusal and a notice that the same amount of money CARE had asked for “would probably yield a greater amount of educational supplies” if applied to the AKF’s own Adopt a School program.62 This final rebuttal must have come across like a slap in the face – particularly to an organization that took pride in the credo that it was CARE that had lifted professional and business-like charity to a new level.63 The AKF had made it crystal clear that it was not willing to give in to attempts by a single agency to dominate the relief scene in Korea, and in doing so it effectively underlined its claims for organizational independence. At this point CARE completely abandoned all organizational contact and cooperation with the AKF, and it was only toward the end of the decade that Paul French’s successor, Richard Reuter, re-established a relationship with the organization. New governance of aid The average American donor contributing to the Korean relief drive via any of the private American relief agencies may not have been aware that between 1950 and 1952 his or her gift was actually being distributed by military personnel rather than civil voluntary agency staff. For the private agencies this situation was far from satisfactory, and as soon as frontlines had moved farther into the north, all agencies – including CARE – made it clear to government officials that they wished to return to Korea as soon as possible. The agencies were not left without official support either. The government Advisory Committee and Arthur Ringland in particular did his best to explain to military officials and United Nations Korean Rehabilitation Agency (UNKRA) members that the body of experience that has been developed [by American voluntary agencies] makes available personnel of unusual value, men and women who know the Korean language and its customs [… so that it would be] possible for the agencies to be represented by teams of highest caliber and ability to carry out effectively field programs once the resumption of agency responsibility can be undertaken.64

Ringland put much effort into lobbying for private agency involvement in Korea, which was necessary given that the situation in the field involved a multiplicity of military and civil, national and international, governmental and ­intergovernmental, as well as local and non-local players. The organization of humanitarian relief ­collided

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with military interests and was (despite Ringland’s talk of generally “harmonious” relationships)65 bedeviled by organizational rivalries over power, authority, and material/financial provisions. This is well demonstrated by a classified report that circulated between the US Office of Civilian Affairs and Military Government, the Office of United Nations Economic and Social Affairs of the State Department, and the Advisory Committee for Voluntary Foreign Aid in August of 1952. In this restricted memo, the origins of the policy directive excluding American voluntary groups from the relief drive in Korea were traced back to a United Nations Command resolution which was interpreted by the Commander in Chief as assigning “exclusive responsibility to the UC” and to its subordinate UNCACK to provide relief in Korea. While the author of the memo found that this interpretation was misinterpreting the original intention of the United Nations (which according to him was merely a coordinating function instead of an executive one), he underscored that military considerations had guided the final decision to keep private humanitarian agencies out of the picture. However, since the primacy of the military was by mid-1952 “not now as ‘necessitous’ as it was two years ago,” he assumed that there was a new window of opportunity opening up for the agencies.66 His prediction proved correct, as soon afterwards a new policy directive from the United Nations Command was circulated that changed the status of American NGOs in Korea significantly. It granted entry into southern Korea to eligible private relief agencies, provided that they registered with the Social Affairs section of UNCACK.67 Hidden beneath technocratic language and bureaucratic formulas, this directive had a deeply political background. After the military operation had gained ground and frontlines had been pushed further north, administrators of the Korean rehabilitation programs began to take a growing interest in the consolidation of peaceful societal structures. To that end, a further “increase in voluntary aid to Korea,” including its “‘by-products’ – ­understanding, sympathy and the people-to-people concept” seemed advisable to both US and UN officials.68 With peace in sight, perceived voluntary agency features such as “experience,” “altruism,” “flexibility,” and “mobility” started to appeal again to foreign policy specialists, who hoped that the agencies’ good names could help further American foreign policy interests abroad.69 While this change of heart was certainly abrupt, and there were some agencies that were rather skeptical about UNKRA’s new openness, feeling they had been “left in the dark” about the actual conditions of participation in the Korean relief endeavor, the majority of the American voluntary agencies did not object to these rather utilitarian considerations. CARE, for instance, would use the exact same arguments to gain access to relief operations that were officially controlled by military authorities or government offices.70 Declaring that distributions by private welfare agencies were received more favorably by the “suspicious” local people than “gifts from a foreign government,” CARE lobbied repeatedly for a minimum of government-to-government operations and a maximum of ­relations between ­private American agencies and private or local government agencies abroad.71 Similar, yet ideologically even farther reaching arguments were used by

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other American ­agencies. While material aid was certainly important, they argued that moral example was paramount.72 Based on the conviction that voluntarism was indeed the basis of any modern and democratic society, many agency leaders were convinced that the “very existence of voluntary agencies, and their activity in every corner of the Free World, bears witness everywhere to the reality of a free society, a society which permits and nurtures free associations formed by free men.”73 By helping “people understand ideologies and forms of government which are basic to a way of life that fosters, allows, and gives opportunities for recognition of the integrity of the individual” they argued that the presence of American voluntary organizations would eventually contribute to both a democratization and modernization of the Korean nation-state.74 After the scene in South Korea had been officially cleared for renewed private relief programs, CARE sent a representative, Charles Joy, to prepare the ground.75 In November 1952, after more than two years of channeling relief goods via external connections and military authorities, CARE finally informed the Social Affairs section of the UNCACK that it had reopened its mission in Korea. All parties that had to be consulted, including the Korean government, had agreed to the re-establishment of a CARE mission operating under the charter that had been established in 1948/49.76 In the first year following the resumption of activities in Korea, CARE provided relief assistance valued at roughly US$2 million. It went primarily to the more than three million refugees in the region devastated by the hostilities.77 Like all other private voluntary agencies, CARE concentrated on direct humanitarian relief and assisted those who had been dislocated by war. After the main post-war relief drive was over, however, the structure of the CARE program was gradually changed. As CARE’s first mission chief to Korea had proposed back in 1949, CARE tightened its connection to the Rhee government and soon began distributing American agricultural surpluses as part of programs that had stronger development characters – primarily school feeding programs.78 Parallel to this, CARE also started developing so-called self-help projects. Combining humanitarian programming with educational concepts (and partly with more or less paternalistic nudging),79 the idea was to establish programs that basically involved “finding out what the villagers want to do themselves for their own benefit and then giving them psychological encouragement, official approval, and small bonus payments when they undertake the work themselves.”80 CARE happily embarked on this path and started distributing tools, vocational equipment, and other materials for the development of small village industries. Between 1948 and 1974 CARE sent goods and services worth almost US$47.5 million to South Korea, including more than US$36.5 million derived from government-donated agricultural surplus, public contracts, and development supplies.81 Not all development projects were crowned with success, however. The “sewing and embroidery kit” CARE provided in cooperation with local authorities was “not as completely practical as originally planned” and – in the words of CARE’s deputy executive director – had to be “re-evaluated.”82 What this carefully selected rhetoric chosen for the special needs

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of government officials (who had, at least partially, financed the program) actually meant was that Charles Joy, mission leader in Korea, had discovered that the kits had not been going to a local orphanage, but instead had gone missing in a dubious institution controlled by a Korean government official.83 Difficulties with Korean authorities, US military officials, and – to an increasing degree – US government officials involved in nation-building activities and modernization schemes were familiar to all voluntary agencies operating in South Korea. The agencies found themselves in a setting in which the task of transferring American donor money, food, and development expertise to needy Korean people was not only hampered by spatial distance, an unsafe environment, and the lack of appropriate means of transportation, but also by a non-transparent framework of governmental, military, and intergovernmental actors.84 If competition for publicity and resources had initially divided the American voluntary agencies, the actual on-site experience in Korea eventually reunited them by demonstrating the practical necessity of cooperation.85 In May 1954 the Korean Association of Voluntary Agencies (KAVA) was established, and this time CARE was aboard.86 Having learned from the private agencies’ failure to cooperate in the past, KAVA was set up as coordinating body where ideas, problems, and program plans were shared and where voluntary agency interests could be protected vis-à-vis local authorities.87 This meant working as some kind of communication interface and liaison body with domestic and foreign diplomats. In addition, this organizational form also permitted its members to compare and exchange ideas and practices and to develop new strategies and common standards.88 This trend toward standardization is clearly traceable throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, when more and more private aid programs were developed in conjunction with the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and government authorities, indicating a clear shift from post-war relief to development aid and modernization policies.89 From a financial perspective, KAVA’s contribution was indeed noteworthy: the value of relief and rehabilitation supplies provided between 1952 and 1957 alone was estimated at over US$60 million.90 Compared to almost US$12 billion of official bilateral American aid (including military assistance) between 1945 and the mid-1960s, this may seem rather meager.91 But compared, for example, to the budget of the Korean Ministry of Health and Social Affairs, which spent less than half the money voluntary agencies provided in fiscal year 1960 on social programs, it becomes apparent that the American voluntary agencies, including CARE, indeed developed into a “dominant provider of social protection” in Korea.92 Notes  1 Helge Ø. Pharo and Monika Pohle Fraser (eds.), The Aid Rush. Aid Regimes in Northern Europe during the Cold War, Oslo, 2008.  2 ACVAFS, Box 63, luncheon address by Augusta Mayerson at annual KAVA Conference, June 15, 1955.

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 3 Gregg A. Brazinsky, “Koreanizing Modernization. Modernization Theory and South Korean Intellectuals,” in David C. Engerman (ed.), Staging Growth. Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War, Amherst, MA, 2003, pp. 251–73 (p. 251).  4 David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission. Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order, Princeton, NJ, 2010, pp. 114–15.  5 Olivier Zunz, Philanthropy in America. A History, Princeton, NJ, 2012, pp. 137–46.  6 CARE, Box 1170, minutes of special meeting of the members, October 22, 1952.  7 Michael N. Barnett, Empire of Humanity. A History of Humanitarianism, Ithaca, NY, 2011, p. 118.  8 Robert R. Nathan Associates, An Economic Program for Korean Reconstruction, Report Prepared for the United Nations Korean Reconstruction Agency (UNKRA), New York, 1954, p. 20.  9 Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War. Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes 1945–1947, Volume 1, Princeton, NJ, 1981, pp. 104–5; Ekbladh, Great American Mission, p. 121. 10 Jongsoo Lee, The Partition of Korea after World War II. A Global History, New York, 2006, pp. 37–53. 11 Robert J. Donovan, Conflict and Crisis. The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945–1948, Columbia, MO, 1996, p. 249. 12 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945–1953, Vol. VIII (The Near East and Africa), Washington DC, 1969, Ambassador E. Pauley to Harry S. Truman, June 22, 1946, pp. 706–14. 13 Gregg Brazinsky, Nation Building in South Korea. Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy, Chapel Hill, NC, 2007, p. 14. 14 George E. Ogle, South Korea. Dissent within the Economic Miracle, London, 1990, pp. 10–12. 15 ACVAFS, Box 5, Charles P. Taft (ACVFA) to Secretary of State Dean Acheson, July 10, 1946. 16 ACVAFS, Box 128, fact sheet, Committee on Korea, April 7, 1964. 17 Elizabeth Underwood, Challenged Identities. North American Missionaries in Korea, 1884– 1934, Seoul, 2003. 18 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, April 9, 1947; CARE, Box 944, undated, Douglas MacArthur to Paul French. 19 CARE, Box 2, Bloomstein manuscript, draft on Korea, pp. 7–8. 20 NARA, RG 469, UD 664, Box 2, CARE executive directors report, April 14, 1948. 21 CARE, Box 14, Paul Gordon to Paul French, December 16, 1948. 22 CARE, Box 14, Alex B. Hawes to John M. Chang (Korean Ambassador to the US), January 31, 1949; agreement between the government of the Republic of Korea and Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe, Inc., signed January 20, 1949. 23 CARE, Box 14, of appointment to Robert Fairgraves, May 13, 1949; Fairgraves graduated a Bachelor of Divinity (Yale University Divinity School) in 1939 and then joined the National Students Council of YMCA and worked for the World Students Fund (as assistant general secretary) before he joined CARE in 1949. 24 CARE, Box 2, Bloomstein manuscript, draft on Korea, p. 10. 25 CARE, Box 14, Ringland to CARE, August 8, 1949. 26 Hearing before a special subcommittee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, Eighty-First Congress, First Session on H. R. 5953 (A Bill to Authorize Contributions to CARE), August 23, 1949, US Government Printing Office, Washington DC, 1949.

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27 ACVAFS, Box 5, ACVAFS working paper, “Cooperation for Effective Programming of Overseas Assistance. A Growing Partnership Between American Voluntary Agencies and their Government,” ACVAFS paper prepared for Mr. James H. Smith Jr. (ICA director), December 16, 1957. 28 CARE, Box 14, Paul Gordon to Paul French, December 16, 1948. 29 CARE, Box 2, Bloomstein manuscript, draft on Korea. 30 As David Kang underlines: “Rhee was creating a nation, and filling the entire bureaucratic apparatus from scratch.” Modernization schemes necessarily involved massive education programs and school-building programs in particular; see David Kang, “Cut from the Same Cloth. Bureaucracies and Rulers in South Korea, 1948–1979,” in Steven Hugh Lee and Yunshik Chang (eds.), Transformations in Twentieth Century Korea, London and New York, 2006, pp. 186–218 (p. 191). 31 For a very short overview, see Elizabeth A. Stanley, Paths to Peace. Domestic Coalition Shifts, War Termination and the Korean War, Stanford, CA, 2009, pp. 67–70; for a more complete (but nevertheless concise) account of the Korean War, see Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun. A Modern History, New York and London, 2005, pp. 237–98. 32 Figures regarding casualties are notoriously imprecise (particularly as regards civilian victims), which explains the great variance of estimates of the numbers who died during the war, ranging from 1.5 million to 3 million. 33 Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, pp. 276ff. 34 CARE, Box 14, Paul C. French (CARE) to Arthur Ringland (ACVFA), July 21, 1950. 35 ACVAFS, Box 7, minutes of ACVAFS council meeting, report of Korea committee, October 23, 1950. 36 CARE, Box 5, Charles Taft (chairman of ACVFA) to Murray Lincoln (CARE president), October 6, 1950. 37 CARE, Box 5, Murray Lincoln to members of the board, October 27, 1950. 38 CARE, Box 1170, minutes of special board of directors meeting, November 6, 1950. 39 CARE, Box 2, copy of presidential statement for the press, November 14, 1950; “Care Urged for Koreans,” Special to The New York Times, November 15, 1950, p. 2. 40 CARE, Box 944, President Harry Truman to Murray D. Lincoln (CARE) April 27, 1951. 41 ACVAFS, Box 7, minutes of meeting of officers of the American Council of Voluntary Agencies, October 25, 1950. 42 NARA, RG 469, UD 660, Box 2 and 3, data compiled from CARE Schedule C reports for Advisory Committee 1950–1951. 43 For the quotation, see CARE, Box 1, annual report to the board of directors 1949 by Paul  Comly French; “Units of 11 Nations Fighting in Korea,” Special to The New York Times, January 14, 1951, p. 3; “C.A.R.E. to Aid Korea,” The New York Times, September 9, 1951, p. 59. 44 ACVAFS, Box 5, ACVAFS working paper, “Cooperation for Effective Programming of Overseas Assistance. A Growing Partnership Between American Voluntary Agencies and their Government,” ACVAFS paper prepared for Mr. James H. Smith Jr. (ICA director), December 16, 1957; James Sang Chi, Teaching Korea. Modernization, Model Minorities, and American Internationalism in the Cold War Era, Berkeley, CA, 2008, p. 127. 45 CARE, Box 14, Alex B. Hawes to R. H. Meyer, subject: Korean package program, April 4, 1951. 46 Sahr Conway-Lanz, “Beyond No Gun Ri. Refugees and the United States Military in the Korean War,” Diplomatic History 29.1 (2005), pp. 49–81 (pp. 73–4).

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47 Bruce Nichols, “Religion, Refuges and the US Government,” in Anna Bramwell (ed.), Refugees in the Age of Total War, London and Boston, 1988, pp. 86–110 (p. 102). 48 ACVAFS, Box 52, ACVAFS explanatory attachment to ACVAFS to Advisory Committee, January 31, 1950. 49 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. 97). 50 Howard P. Tuckman, “Competition, Commercialization, and the Evolution of Nonprofit Organizational Structures,” in Burton Allen Weisbrod (ed.), To Profit or not to Profit. The Commercial Transformation of the Nonprofit Sector, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 25–45 (pp. 26–7). 51 The American Korean Foundation was founded in 1952. 52 CARE, Box 14, for the files, Alexander B. Hawes, November 21, 1951. 53 CARE, Box 26, Arthur Ringland to Paul French, October 14, 1952. 54 CARE, Box 26, copy of Harry S. Truman to Dean Acheson, undated [1952/53]. 55 CARE, Box 26, Alexander B. Hawes to Paul French, January 23, 1953. 56 CARE, Box 26, Paul French to Arthur Ringland, January 30, 1953. 57 CARE, Box 26, French to Ringland, January 30, 1953; Box 26, Ringland to French, February 13, 1953; Box 26, French to Ringland, February 17, 1953. 58 CARE, Box 33, Paul French to Arthur Ringland, May 23, 1952. 59 CARE, Box 33, Paul French to Palmer Brevis, May 28, 1952. 60 CARE, Box 33, Paul French to Robert Oliver, June 1, 1953. 61 Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Statement by the President on the Fund-Raising Campaign of the American-Korean Foundation,” May 5, 1953, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ ws/?pid=9835 (accessed May 17, 2012). 62 CARE, Box 33, Palmer Bevis (AKF) to Paul French, November 17, 1953; Paul French to Palmer Bevis, September 18, 1953. 63 ACVAFS, Box 33, copy of testimony of Richard W. Reuter of CARE presented before the New York State Joint Legislative Committee at public hearing, Wednesday, December 16, 1953. 64 NARA, RG 469, UD 661, Box 14, Arthur Ringland to Mr. Millikan (Office of United Nations Economic and Social Affairs, Department of State), February 8, 1951. 65 NARA, RG 469, UD 661, Box 14, Arthur Ringland to Senator Taft, August 17, 1951. 66 NARA, RG 469, UD 661, Box 14, restricted Pedersen (Office of United Nations Economic and Social Affairs, Department of State) to Colonel Means (Department of Army, Office of Civilian Affairs and Military Government, cc. to UNA and VFA (Ringland)), August 18, 1952. 67 NARA, RG 469, UD 661, Box 14, Arthur Ringland to John C. Borton, Assistant Director Export Supply (Office of International Trade, Department of Commerce), November 14, 1952, attachment Standing Operating Procedure No. 16 (UNCACK), August 3, 1952. 68 ACVAFS, Box 128, report on the committee on Korea, October 28, 1953, quotation attributed to Philippe Ryan, Social Program Administrator, UNCACK. 69 NARA, RG 469, UD 679-A, Box 5, restricted memo by Sullivan (Technical Cooperation Administration), The Role of Voluntary Agencies in the Point IV Program, January 27, 1953; Phillips Ruopp (ed.), Approaches to Community Development. A Symposium Introductory to Problems and Methods of Village Welfare in Underdeveloped Areas, The Hague, 1953.

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70 NARA, RG 469, UD 661, Box 14, Arnold B. Vaught (executive director CWS) to Arthur Ringland, July 23, 1952. 71 CARE, Box 26, brochure, The Farm Surplus and Hungry People. A proposal by CARE, a non-sectarian, non-profit relief organization, covering the possible use of farm surplus around the world as the basis of a national policy, by Paul Comly French, February 1954, p. 2. 72 Philipp H. Lepenies, “Lernen vom Besserwisser. Wissenstransfer in der ‘Entwicklungshilfe’ aus historischer Perspektive,” in Hubertus Büschel and Daniel Speich (eds.), Entwicklungswelten. Globalgeschichte der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit, Frankfurt a.M., 2009, pp. 33–59. 73 ACVAFS, Box 5, ACVAFS paper “The Continuing Challenge of American Abundance,” November 15, 1956. 74 ACVAFS, Box 63, summary minutes of discussion group 1, KAVA annual conference, June 15, 1955. 75 ACVAFS, Box 128, report by J. N. Byler (Mennonite Central Committee) about Korean situation, June 6, 1952; NARA, RG 469, UD 661, Box 14, Paul French to Arthur Ringland, May 28, 1952. 76 NARA, RG 469, UD 661, Box 14, Charles Joy (CARE) to Thomas Netsker (UNCACK), November 2, 1952. 77 CARE, Box 377, historical sketch of CARE program in Korea, undated [1974]. 78 JFK, personal papers of Richard Reuter, Box 4, brochure, United States Food for Peace in Korea 1955–1964, USAID, [1965] unnumbered pages. 79 Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, “Libertarian Paternalism,” The American Economic Review 93.2 (2003), pp. 175–9. 80 CARE, Box 486, press release KOR/381, May 22, 1953, United Nations, Department of Public Information Press and Publications Bureau, UN, NY. 81 CARE, Box 377, historical sketch of CARE program in Korea, undated [1974]. 82 CARE, Box 377, Richard Reuter (CARE) to McCahoon (ACVFA) September 4, 1952. 83 CARE, Box 377, C. R. Joy, CARE-Korea to Paul French, July 28, 1953. 84 Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, p. 302. 85 ACVAFS, Box 63, minutes of working group II, annual KAVA conference, June 15, 1955. 86 CARE joined KAVA in 1955. 87 ACVAFS, Box 61, KAVA history, January 1959. 88 NARA, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files 1964–1966, Box 3228, airgram from the American Embassy in Seoul, Korea (Benjamin Fleck, Secretary to Ambassador) to Department of State, subj.: conference of KAVA 1964, July 4, 1964. 89 ACVAFS, Box 5, ACVAFS working paper, “Cooperation for Effective Programming of Overseas Assistance. A Growing Partnership between American Voluntary Agencies and their Government,” ACVAFS paper prepared for Mr. James H. Smith Jr. (ICA director), December 16, 1957. 90 NARA, RG 469, P211, Box 4, ACVFA report, The Korean Refugee Problem and Related Social Conditions, February 26, 1957. 91 Ogle, South Korea, p. 35. 92 Taekyoon Kim, “State Provision via Voluntarism. The State-Voluntary Welfare Mix in South Korea,” Waseda University 2009 (WIAS Discussion Paper No. 2009–003), p. 10, http:// www.waseda.jp/wias/achievement/dp/pdf/dp2009003.pdf (accessed June 11, 2016).

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Getting CARE back into the black During the past few years, although I have never been close to the operational center of our work, I have looked with some disquietude upon what seemed to me the wasteful way in which CARE was being run. I have wondered how long we could continue on this basis. That a crisis has at last arisen does not surprise me. I have long anticipated it.1

When Richard Reuter was appointed as CARE’s new executive director in mid-July 1955 he inherited a difficult task. The fiscal year 1955 had closed with a deficit of almost half a million US dollars, future operational directions and programming options were cloudy, and staff morale was low. Having served as deputy director under Paul French for a few years previously, Reuter was a clear in-house appointment, and to a certain extent – given his insights into CARE’s complex operational structures – he was the logical replacement for French. Born in 1918, Reuter had joined CARE in the fall of 1946 and had quickly risen to the top executive management. He had had a thorough business education, having graduated with a BA in economics at Amherst College in 1938 and having studied business administration at Columbia University afterwards. Before working at CARE, he had worked for Abraham & Straus Department Store and had then gained nearly two years of experience in the non-profit sector working with the American Friends Service Committee.2 When tasked with bringing CARE back into the black in July 1955 he was aware that serious restructuring would be necessary to streamline the bloated organization.3 In fact, the board conferred it upon Reuter to cut back overall operating costs by almost a third.4 This financial target meant that Reuter needed to lay off several dozen CARE employees. This prospect caused a lot of anxiety among the CARE staff.5 In order to make a naturally messy process less nasty, Reuter placed his hopes in cooperation and more transparent forms of corporate governance. As his first act in office, he asked the board to approve CARE’s re-application to the ACVAFS. In addition, he tried to involve CARE’s employees by asking for constructive suggestions regarding possible savings and cuts.6 While several of the staff suggestions ended up on Reuter’s list of future savings, he soon found himself

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despairing over the feeling that he had been given a “messy job.” Few staffers were ready to cut their own budgets and suggested (often minimal) changes affecting their co-workers instead. In addition, Reuter had to cope with suggestions that he fire “lazy” co-workers and deal with crestfallen former colleagues who were not ready to leave CARE without thorough compensation (some of them even threatened to withhold documents containing compromising information as “collateral” until a financial solution was found).7 Hence, Reuter’s job was certainly difficult. Both he and CARE’s Planning and Policy Committee, which had been installed several years earlier (initially as the Future of CARE Committee)8 as a permanent management support and control instance, had concluded that there was significant organizational overextension in staff matters, geographical spread, running operational expenses, and overhead.9 Thus, Reuter was forced to push through his proposed savings the hard way. Within a period of five weeks he ordered the closing of all overseas offices “whose volume did not justify the expenses” and “whose closing would not materially affect contributions.”10 What this meant was termination of CARE bureaus in Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Paraguay, Peru, and Japan.11 These close-downs clearly did not have humanitarian motivations, nor were they the result of positive assessments of improved overall food situations in the countries involved. Instead, they were a consequence of intra-organizational economic considerations alone. Only a short time earlier several European missions had been closed due to the improved situation on the continent.12 Together, this meant a reduction from 42 to 20 country programs for the year 1955. At a time when countless for-profit ­companies – particularly those in the consumer goods industry – were discovering that markets outside of the United States offered possibilities for growth and profit, CARE had outgrown these markets (or more precisely, the markets, the European ones at least, had outgrown CARE), and Richard Reuter now needed to shrink the organization back to manageable dimensions.13 Faced with the challenge of saving at least one million US dollars for the fiscal year 1956, Reuter closed the Internal Audit Unit, cut traveling costs considerably, and widened the intervals between CARE overseas conferences, which had inflated its expenses decisively.14 By August 15 he had reduced CARE’s New York operating budget by US$517,000, and had cut back on overseas operating expenses by US$518,000. Personnel numbers were reduced by more than 60 American staffers (not to mention the local employees laid off by the closing of the overseas missions), of whom 49 were staff members at CARE’s New York office. With management now “cut in half,” Reuter began a shakeout of the organization’s apparatus.15 He reorganized CARE into three major divisions according to function – operations, public relations, and finance and accounting – based on the hope that these changes would help increase efficiency. CARE’s new operational architecture was supposed to improve communication between units and to create less duplication of tasks and clearer reporting routines.

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Board of Directors General Counsel

Alexander B. Hawes

Executive Director Richard Reuter

Assistant Executive Director Frank Goffio

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Administrative Assistant Bernhard Kerbel

Public Relations Edward J. Flynn

Correspondence

Direct Mail

Personnel Director

Evelyn Nazaruk

Operations Frank Goffio

Office Manager

Traffic Manager

Controller Lou Wester

Claims and Insurance

Field Staff Coordinator

Overseas Operations

Accounting

Program Coordinator

Surplus Commodities

Treasury

Publicity

Procurement

Remittance

Figure 4.1  CARE organizational chart, August 1955. This special adaptation of a decentralized model, based on more independent divisions and less rigid reporting routines, paralleled the general idea that was being promoted by business consultants throughout the non-profit sector during the 1950s and early 1960s, as Christopher D. McKenna has shown in his book on the rise of consulting firms in the twentieth century.16 CARE thus implemented a more state-of-the-art corporate model that had been adapted from for-profit firms to the needs of non-profit enterprises in order to improve their organizational performance. In addition to organizational improvements and cutting costs, CARE’s revenue needed to be increased. It was both a lucky coincidence and the result of effective networking by Olive Clapper and her colleagues in CARE’s Washington DC office that in 1956/57 CARE was included in the Federal Service Joint Crusade, an umbrella group raising money for humanitarian purposes among federal employees.17 In the context of this campaign, every member of the federal and military establishment was asked to make a contribution either to CARE or Crusade for Freedom.18 Between 1957 and 1959 alone, CARE received more than US$1.2 million from this campaign.19 However, even before the start of this lucky federal inflow, Reuter and his remaining staff had been busy establishing a CARE fundraising drive. The new campaign aimed to raise an additional US$1.5 million from private donors.20 Building on CARE’s core competence in overseas food distribution, the board and

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Figure 4.2  CARE Food Crusade poster, January 3, 1957. management decided to pursue an idea that had been discussed earlier. This time, however, the plan was embedded in a professional marketing and fund­raising strategy. In the fall of 1955 CARE started its Food Crusade program which was intended to solve “the ever present problem of translating latent interest in overseas relief to actual financial support.”21 The idea was to offer low-cost packages to donors and to persuade them that it was actually not only simple but also inexpensive to relieve human suffering through CARE.22 Under the banner of the Food Crusade,

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for the price of one dollar American donors could purchase approximately 20 pounds of agricultural food excess which would then be sent to a needy individual or family abroad. The units contained cheese, powdered milk, and butter or butter oil in varying quantities, which were donated to CARE by the Department of Agriculture.23 The one dollar contributed by the American donor for each package paid for repacking and handling of these foodstuffs from large stocks of surplus commodities into smaller packages. A fixed percentage was further channeled into fundraising activities.24 The Food Crusade campaign was again supported by the Advertising Council, which had originally proposed the term Food Crusade as a catchword for any kind of surplus distribution by CARE. In late 1955 the term was redesigned to fit the one-dollar food packages – an idea that turned out to be a highly successful in raising both donor awareness and organizational revenue.25 The commodities were donated by the US government and were accordingly free of charge for CARE. They were billed as dollar income, which boosted the agency’s balance sheets. The actual package shipments were mostly reimbursed by the US government as well, and the one dollar donated by private supporters also left a small margin that could be redirected toward other CARE relief programs.26 Due to the fact that CARE conducted both direct mailing appeals to former CARE donors all over the country and various promotional fundraisers in New York and Washington DC, where CARE’s most important donor groups were located, the packages sold astonishingly well.27 From January 1, to September 30, 1956 CARE sold more than 462,000 packages and delivered almost five million units (this higher figure stemming from revenue earned from these package sales that was used to deliver additional packages) to recipients overseas. Thus, from a strictly economic perspective, CARE’s Food Crusade was an astonishingly effective program, which – since it was in fact “paying the bills at CARE” – was continued for well over a decade.28 Between the initiation of the program and June 1964 CARE and the US government contributed goods worth almost US$127 million to the CARE Food Crusade, turning it into a central pillar of CARE’s overall program (Table 4.1). While successful on a business level, the program had its downsides. First of all, many recipients were not accustomed to the kind of commodities they received under this program. Cheese and milk powder in particular were not common in many  areas of the world and introduced huge changes to traditional dietary Table 4.1  CARE value of goods shipped from inception to June 1964 (US$)1 Food Crusade government goods

Food Crusade CARE purchases

American surplus program

Standard packages

Self-help

Total

118,582,700

8,067,980

372,207,438

136,719,579

34,268,279

669,845,976

1

CARE, Box 55, graph “CARE value of goods shipped from inception to June 1964.”

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­patterns.29 In theory milk powder and cheese were good sources of animal p­ rotein – a finding that was underscored in several special studies prepared by the ACVAFS and presented to Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson.30 There were, however, several incidents in which “unfamiliar foods” spoiled because of extreme climatic conditions or improper handling and storage overseas, causing intestinal illness or even severe poisoning among the recipients.31 These packages were not overly popular among the American CARE overseas staff either, who were hoping to ­progress as soon as possible to more sophisticated development programs. There was a widespread belief that real development required long-term planning and knowledge transfer rather than mere resource movement.32 Particularly popular were the so-called self-help and community development programs. These programs, which were gaining in importance and appeal throughout the 1950s – not only among CARE staff but throughout the whole sector of American overseas programming – were based on a growing feeling that mere charity was actually an “embarrassing” concept.33 What was really needed instead, the proponents believed, was an approach that would help people “to help themselves.”34 This idea had been most prominently pronounced by Harry Truman several years earlier in his 1949 inaugural address in which he had stressed that real development for the “human family” could only be brought about “by helping the least fortunate of its members to help themselves.”35 While the concept of promoting self-help was not new and, as Hubertus Büschel has convincingly argued, it certainly dates back to colonial practices, programming involving self-help elements was gaining further  ground throughout the 1950s.36 Hence, CARE staffers repeatedly voiced their concern that CARE’s advance into this field was not going fast enough.37 CARE had pioneered self-help and community development projects in Korea, for instance, and had successfully delivered tools and vocational equipment in the  past. Staffers were thus keen to continue to develop programs that would have a long-term impact on recipients of American aid.38 If the crisis of 1955 had shown one thing, however, it was that providing relief and development aid was not only a calling and a moral duty but also that charity was a business that had to be sustained.39 Reuter thus repeatedly reminded his co-workers that the transition from relief to development programming entailed high costs which could only be born if the Food Crusade program continuously yielded additional revenue to CARE.40 Following his own advice, Reuter was eventually successful in consolidating CARE’s finances. As early as March 1956, barely nine months after he had taken over management, CARE’s debts were down to a mere US$14,000. The fiscal year 1956, ending in late June 1956, even closed with a surplus of US$91,165 – a tremendous success for Reuter and CARE’s board of directors.41 As CARE’s reorganization had shown, however, there was a close and intrinsic connection between careful business administration, innovative programming, and donor appeal. And while much of CARE’s future strategy was based on the promise of a lasting partnership with the

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US government in the food aid sector, private donors were still CARE’s core interest group and source of legitimacy as a private voluntary agency. Accordingly, more had to be done for private donors in order to strengthen this pillar of the enterprise. If increased private donations for development projects in Asia, Latin America, and eventually even Africa were CARE’s future, donors would have to be convinced to spend their charity money on long-term development projects, instead of sticking to short-term relief. Professionalizing fundraising and market research In the course of its now more than ten years of existence, CARE staff had developed a lot of experience in all issues relating to public relations, lobbying, and fund­ raising. CARE had acquired a remarkable reputation even among the highest ranks of political power. Most Presidents as well as their First Ladies were more than willing to provide press photos showing a check delivery to CARE for hungry children abroad on the steps of the White House.42 The agency had definitely “entered the golden age of mass fundraising,” and – like so many other organizations dedicated to philanthropy – it was perfecting its fundraising and marketing techniques in order to broaden its donor pool.43 Originally, the CARE public relations department had been staffed by special employees, each belonging to one of CARE’s various member organizations. This division of labor, however, had been abandoned after a while in favor of a more independent PR division that avoided getting into member agency promotion and primarily developed CARE campaigns.44 The department could boast a successful record of photo ops and good public visibility. Large national newspapers like the New York Times had been taking a particular interest in promoting CARE as a New York based charity, but CARE staffers had also been successful in getting human interest stories into magazines like LIFE or TIME, along with other visual media and radio advertising. CARE’s continued cooperation with the Advertising Council, as well as its grassroots structure of committees and liaison with other organizations throughout the country, contributed to its visibility. Additionally, in 1954 the CARE board of directors authorized the establishment of a National Advisory Committee. This committee was composed of well-known leaders of American economic life, mostly industry representatives, and included men like Gardner Cowles, president of Look Magazine; H. J. Heinz II, chairman of the H. J. Heinz Company; Paul G. Hoffmann, at that time president of the Ford Foundation; Felix Rondeau, president of Mutual Service Life Insurance Company; and Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association of America.45 These men were recruited to lend their experience and reputation to CARE in its task of “furthering international understanding, trade and peace” and in giving “self-help the same sense of urgency that the strictly relief appeal” had been given in the direct aftermath of the Second World War.46 CARE executives had high hopes for the practical assistance and

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improved visibility they thought the National Advisory Committee leaders might offer.47 From an analytical standpoint the establishment of the committee can be read as an attempt to increase CARE’s efficiency by increasing its social embeddedness in a network that interconnected and transcended the government, nonprofit, and for-profit sectors.48 These hopes were soon shattered, however, as it turned out that it was not possible to get pro-bono members “sufficiently involved to consider themselves part of the organization.”49 The committee ended up being little more than “window dressing,” as an internal CARE memo concluded, and it was discontinued in the late 1960s.50 While direct cooperation with representatives of sectors with common interests, namely agriculture with its surplus commodities, ended up working fairly well, general “sympathy” and mere societal bonds proved inadequate for yielding direct and measurable positive results for CARE. What was on the table, however (with or without the support of the National Advisory Committee), was the fundamental problem of transforming the interest of those donors who had been supporting the European relief endeavor into sustainable support for people in so-called underdeveloped countries. CARE’s management was quick to grasp that there was a whole new sphere of activity to explore in the development aid sector.51 This general finding led CARE to take a more psychological approach to fundraising and donor motivation. In late 1955 CARE president Murray Lincoln commissioned a study by the New York Institute of Motivational Research, a marketing institute led by the Austrian-born exile and “father” of motivational research and psychological marketing, Ernest Dichter.52 In his report Dichter put the case quite bluntly: The problem of securing increased donations for CARE seems an extremely simple one. It boils down to – identifying the psychological factors which impel people to give and then appealing to them; – identifying the forces which impel people to hold back and finding ways of overcoming them.

Underscoring the reasons “why people give donations” (as the study was somewhat unoriginally titled), Dichter and his colleagues emphasized that people who supported charities like CARE were fundamentally driven by morals, guilt, identification with the needy, the idea of “enhancing one’s status in the community,” and finally the urge to gain a sense of power and the idea of quid pro quo. “At a very deep level,” Dichter underlined, “donations are often a kind of bribe. The donor is in effect paying taxes to God.”53 Conversely, the factors preventing people from giving were even more diverse. While the report stressed that selfishness and a general lack of empathy might be difficult to overcome, there were other factors that could be counterbalanced. These included people’s desire to “veil their material affluence,” their fear of seeming too “soft-touch” or too generous, their “ignorance of how to give” (meaning the fear of appearing “clumsy and inept”), and finally the feeling that “charity begins at home,” meaning that people preferred to give to the needy within the United States only. Having come to these findings, Dichter’s

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solutions were rather down to earth. The report suggested that CARE continue basing campaigns on allusions to prosperity, human sharing, and people’s moral sentiments, while abstaining from stirring up guilt. Dichter explicitly applauded the CARE concept, which he believed was perfect for creating identification between donor and recipient. In addition, the study specifically emphasized that “it should be strongly suggested that giving to CARE will create a reservoir of good will which is like money in the bank – sure to prove of tangible value to America at some point later.” Finally, the report concluded that it was most important to stress to donors that everyone was giving, thus creating some degree of group pressure among the American public.54 These rather elementary findings, drawn from general psychological theory and motivational assumptions, without any intimate knowledge of CARE campaigns, did nothing to turn the tide. Given that CARE’s public relations department had not been capitalizing on people’s guilt before, Dichter’s suggestions were nowhere near the Holy Grail that would be needed to fundamentally change people’s feeling toward CARE’s self-help campaigns and development programming. However, the questions of what actually moved donors and how CARE was perceived by the American public were important ones. At a special executive committee meeting at the Nationwide Insurance Company headquarters in Columbus, Ohio (to which all CARE members had been flown in on the private company plane), the executive committee authorized US$19,500 for a study of the “public attitude toward CARE.” The study was to be performed by the New York marketing research agency of Bennett-Chaikin, Inc.55 Parallel to the growing impact of management consulting firms, which were successfully starting during the 1950s to look for “profit in non-profits,” consumer research institutes were entering the picture as well, offering their services to non-profit agencies like CARE.56 This “scientification of the social” produced results that were increasingly marketed and monetized and found recipients both in the private sector and in the field of socially oriented nonprofits.57 CARE’s management as well as its board of directors felt that, for a charitable organization like CARE, it was imperative that they gain sociological insights into what donors actually wanted. The study was conducted during the summer of 1958 and submitted to CARE in October of the same year.58 The Bennett-Chaikin special analysis team polled roughly 80 people in Atlanta and another 80 in Chicago and New York in order to determine “which appeals offer the best potential for developing copy ammunition for CARE that will excite people and motivate them to support CARE’s humanitarian activities.”59 The survey covered 17 (qualitative as well as quantitative) questions, ranging from questions on general attitudes toward United Nations aid to the needy abroad (which received an astonishing 81 percent approval rate among all respondents) to concrete questions on CARE advertising campaigns (Tables 4.2 and 4.3). The analysis showed that CARE executives had been correct in assuming that among potential donors there was a slight reluctance to give to the needy outside of the United States. While only 13 percent of those

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polled wanted assistance to go exclusively to Americans, 53 percent wanted the larger share of American aid to stay inside the US, and only 30 percent (40 percent in Chicago and New York) wanted aid to go to all countries. Asked what areas outside of the US people would be most interested in helping, the majority (43 percent) still wanted private US aid to go to Europe, whereas only 6 percent wanted it to go to “everywhere.”60 This finding was indeed a blow to CARE, as the agency was trying to redirect donor attention away from Europe and toward the newly developing countries of the world by carving out a new branch of the enterprise in the self-help and development aid sector.61 Slightly more reassuring was the fact that CARE’s overseas work was apparently even better known than that of the American Red Cross (ranking second). While CARE was still almost completely recognized as a food aid agency (by 84 percent of the respondents), almost as many people reported believing that “people in all walks of life, rich and poor” were contributing to CARE, a finding that underscored CARE’s success in providing a concept for mass giving.62 In addition, the survey showed that CARE, in cooperation with the Advertising Council, had done a fairly good job in advertising its cause, as only 13 percent had never seen a CARE advertisement at all.63 The Bennett-Chaikin report showed nevertheless that CARE’s Table 4.2  Bennett-Chaikin poll on CARE donor preferences1 “What areas of the world would you be personally most interested in helping?”* Europe The Middle East Mexico and Central America Africa Non-communist Asia South America All Do not know None

43% 25% 23% 16% 15% 13% 6% 4% 13%

*Multiple answers possible 1 CARE, Box 6, Bennett-Chaikin, Special Analysis of Atlanta, July 1958.

Table 4.3  Bennett-Chaikin poll on CARE donor preferences “In which of the following ways would you want your donation for helping people in other countries to be used?”* Food relief Medical aid Self-help Religious education Clothing, blankets Information about America *Multiple answers possible

66% 61% 36% 26% 24% 5%

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self-help and development projects had not yet been adequately recognized by potential donors. Despite increasing support for self-help programs, which rose from a mere 4.9 percent in 1954 to almost a third of private donor support in the fiscal year 1960, CARE was still largely seen as a food-aid distribution agency.64 Hence, all its many campaigns urging donors to donate tools, seeds, and vocational equipment “to put into hands hungry for work, food, and dignity” had found little reception. In comparison to short-term emergency relief, for the time being more complex CARE programs with a focus on long-term effects abroad remained shelf warmers.65 It was the Sackheim Report of 1960 that finally recommended that CARE make its peace with the fact that “in the very fine public image of CARE, it is identified predominantly with food package distribution.” Furthermore, the report pointed out, “CARE records amply prove that HUNGER is the number one appeal in terms of cash response.” Sackheim, Inc. thus proposed to “dramatize” yet another (actually the eighth) annual Food Crusade campaign “in headlines, copy, and most likely photos,” in order to “stimulate maximum response.” At the same time, the campaign was to include subtle hints at self-help programming in all advertising. While the Sackheim Report – like all the other reports before it – stressed that the personal connection between donor and recipient was one of CARE’s fundamental plusses, it also suggested special campaigns for business and financial publications in which CARE’s work would be interpreted “in terms of investment, with yield in human values.” The suggested slogan, “Where else can your dollar buy so much treasure?” was to be accompanied by a graphical “adaptation of a financial prospectus, analyzing investment returns in terms of growth stock, capital gains, immediate yield, safety.”66 This suggestion was adopted by CARE’s public relations department immediately. CARE had received media attention from papers like the Wall Street Journal in the past and had been running ads in it throughout the 1960s.67 The intention was to strengthen its profile as an organization that was not simply morally right, but that also took a business-like approach to all tasks of international cooperation. There were, however, certain limitations on appealing to private donors, whose contributions were usually rather modest, and who (in the words of CARE promotion employee Harold Gauer) “died, got sore, [or] forgot […] to mention CARE in their last will and testament.” In his rather offbeat Story of C.A.R.E., Gauer emphasized that CARE executives, anxious for “growth” wanted to see more and faster progress toward bigness [… and] conventional wisdom at CARE had it that only the tip of the corporate money iceberg was showing and ditto for foundation money and wealthy people money.68

Hence, in addition to professionalizing private donor appeal, CARE broadened its corporate advertising in an attempt at bringing larger segments of American

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i­ndustry into the picture as well. Over the years CARE received corporate donations from more than fifty well-known American companies, among them corporate giants such as the Pepsi-Cola Company, the Coca Cola Sales Company, American Express, Steinway & Sons, and Gillette Safety Razor Company.69 As Peter D. Hall has convincingly argued, during the early 1950s for-profit firms and corporations began looking for ways to improve their public images and thus proved more willing to invest in welfare schemes. Slowly but surely corporate charity turned into an executive prerequisite – a development CARE was clearly profiting from.70 In March 1960 CARE agreed to cooperate in the Vicks CARE Crusade. Vicks Chemical Company – best known for its popular cough-rub – was planning to spend more than one million dollars on a corporate advertising campaign, the revenue from which was to benefit CARE directly. Preliminary calculations presented by Vicks Chemical promised ultimate returns of nearly one million dollars for CARE.71 According to the plan, Vicks Chemical was to provide promotional sales units, which would be placed in supermarkets and drug stores throughout the country. The whole campaign had a lottery-like design. Participants were asked to donate 50 cents to CARE and then had to complete a sentence starting with “I CARE about my neighbors in other countries because…”72 Having completed both tasks, they were then eligible to win a fabulous journey to Europe. While the immediate return for CARE was well below expectations (by October 1960 CARE had not even received a quarter of the projected one million dollars), the board of directors were very pleased with the promotional effects of the campaign.73 In February 1961 a resolution was passed to launch a similar Vicks CARE Crusade in Europe – parallel to the trip the winners of the Vicks CARE Crusade were taking.74 In March 1961, 109 so-called “good-will ambassadors” went on a ten-day trip to Rome, Athens, Istanbul, and Paris, accompanied by three CARE staffers serving as tour guides and informing the winners about all the good CARE had been doing abroad with private American donations. Vicks Chemical Company paid for the trip as well as for the entire promotional effort, which, according to the report the company gave CARE, cost a total of US$1.3 million.75 The overall campaign did yield significantly less revenue for CARE than initially expected. In the final analysis though, the CARE board concluded that the project had been a success regarding both public attention and the establishment of viable cooperation patterns with large corporate players.76 During the mid-1950s and the early 1960s CARE took steps to significantly professionalize its advertising strategies and donor handling by stepping up promotion personnel numbers and by buying in specialized expertise. In doing this, CARE showed a remarkable degree of consumer orientation, with its management doing their best to understand the psychological drivers that made people buy certain CARE goods and services and want to support it as a charitable relief organization.77 Given that American donors tended to be fairly conservative, meaning that they clung to CARE’s image as a food-aid agency and preferred their donations to

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Figure 4.3  Window advertising Vicks CARE Crusade [undated]. Table 4.4  Private contributions to CARE, US and international origin (US$)1 Fiscal Year

Contributions

1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961

4,306,901 7,028,141 6,681,745 7,973,525 9,296,125 8,955,430

1

NARA, RG 286, UD 499, Box 144, CARE financial statement for fiscal year 1961 (fiscal year: July 1–June 30).

be goods rather than (political) messages or development education, the job of reconciling consumer orientation and strategic advertising was not easy. CARE spent a fair amount of money (at least 5 percent of its annual cash income in the early 1960s) on consumer research, professional advertising, and consulting during that period and tried to sell programs that the management felt would be more innovative and sustainable to both donors and recipients than food aid alone.78 These efforts bore fruit as the figures above show. From 1956 to the start of the new decade the organization was successful in more than doubling the total amount of private donations dedicated to self-help and the like (Table 4.4).

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Re-integrating CARE into the non-profit sector If the first half of the 1950s had shown one thing, it was that, when it came to the future of the American sector of private overseas relief, hardly anything was as difficult but at the same time as central as cooperation. In a long-range perspective, CARE’s extended imbroglio with some its own member agencies, as well as its withdrawal from the ACVAFS in 1954 (after a long phase of either latent tension or outright disputes), had brought nothing but competitive disadvantages for CARE. Thus, when Richard Reuter re-applied for membership a mere year later, he was aware that cooperation with the ACVAFS would be imperative for CARE’s survival.79 CARE’s return to the ACVAFS was greeted with “great satisfaction” by leading ACVAFS executive members, who were indeed happy to be able to finally close ranks.80 The prodigal son was re-admitted as a full member in late December 1955, and all parties concerned agreed that this step was both necessary and indispensable, particularly given their prevailing diversity. As Reuter put it, “each of the agencies cooperating through the American Council is also independent – very independent – and differing from other agencies in significant ways.”81 This diversity of policy, program, and practices, however, had to be managed. Not only did CARE invest increasing amounts of time and effort into collective ACVAFS matters, but CARE mission chiefs were also encouraged to join existing coordination committees overseas or to evaluate the necessity of establishing new ones abroad.82 This process took some time, as some institutional inertia and long-exercised reservations needed to be overcome. By 1958, CARE was present on 7 out of 15 existing overseas committees, and CARE’s overseas employees in particular were trying to familiarize themselves with this rather new perspective that had switched from demonstrative coexistence and partly even open competition to active cooperation and diversity-management.83 The process of institutional reunion with the ACVAFS lines up with a number of parallel attempts by philanthropic bodies, non-profit enterprises, and voluntary agencies to intensify cooperation and integration throughout the 1950s. Many private actors had grown aware that the post-war upswing in voluntary momentum was not to be taken for granted and that special emphasis would have to be put on the continuous advancement of non-profit activities for the future. The existent “assumption, shared by liberals and conservatives alike, that privatizing public initiative through the use of voluntary agencies was more flexible, responsive, economical and ‘democratic’ than statist alternatives”84 was not something that could be taken for granted. Philanthropic bodies – the agencies in the ACVAFS among them – were aware that there was much collective image work ahead, particularly in the foreign aid field. A multitude of different (international) NGOs and charitable foundations – increasingly working together as Private Voluntary Organizations (PVOs) or “volags” – were populating the emerging sector of

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humanitarian assistance and development aid and were looking for recognition and a common story.85 The ACVAFS, too, put much effort into consolidating its organizational structures and figuring out how to best sell private voluntary aid to the American public and the US government. In 1959 the agencies were present at the American National Exhibition in Moscow where an IBM “electronic brain” answered all sorts of questions relating to everyday life in the United States in general and to voluntary agency activities in particular.86 Given that in the eyes of some government officials, voluntary foreign aid was still an “extremely small tail on an extremely large dog,”87 the American voluntary agencies did their best to improve their public standing. They repeatedly (and successfully) pressed for regular sitdowns with the government Advisory Committee in order to gain direct access to decision makers.88 On an administrative wish-list that was handed out to several government officials in late 1958, the agencies emphasized that their function as a “great artery of the democratic process,” carrying “lifeblood to […] those communities and societies most threatened by the forces of enslavement,” would be best realized if regular interdepartmental consultations at the highest level were established.89 Trying to capitalize on their assets, the agencies underscored their know-how, flexibility, receptability (meaning higher acceptability in politicized conflict zones), cooperation, and adaptability to changing environments. They eventually even openly promoted their ability to “save the Government money,” allegedly by efficiently handling tasks and attracting enthusiastic personnel ready to work for low salaries.90 The private voluntary agencies thus tried vigorously to occupy a “market niche” that was unattractive for for-profits and inaccessible to government agencies but was still politically relevant enough to warrant public support and government subsidies.91 These attempts were complemented by various scientific studies the US government was commissioning at that time. The ongoing trend toward a closer entanglement between academic expertise and policy development that became visible in all Western societies after 1945 affected the voluntary agencies as well.92 In 1958 the ACVAFS took part in the compilation of a joint report on Foreign Policy Objectives and the Voluntary Sector of Overseas Activity. This report was part of a large private enterprise study that had been called for by an amendment to the Mutual Security Act of 1958.93 Interestingly enough, the agencies ended up with a highly politicized paper that displayed general and extensive agreement with government foreign policy objectives, which were considered to rest “on a belief in human dignity and freedom” and thus to be concerned “with the complete well-being of people everywhere.” The agencies clearly and affirmatively positioned themselves as partners in the ongoing “struggle for the minds and souls of men” and underscored that this struggle would be won not by words and “every means of propaganda” alone, but “by deeds and good example.” Presenting themselves as an integral part of the private sector, the agencies underscored that they were

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inseparably bound to the goals of American foreign policy and the common good.94 This was in stark contrast to 1951, when several groups (the American Friends in particular) had objected to some of the implications of the Mutual Security Act and argued that they did not want to be involved in “any military defense effort.”95 By the late 1950s, however, general approval of a nexus between private initiative and official US policy objectives seemed to have become part of the game. The Cold War had turned into a manifest reality, and the dissemination of Western concepts of development and modernity had become a task that was to be shared by most parts of society cooperatively.96 While cooperation between the agencies in the ACVAFS and the United States government in the overlapping fields of humanitarian assistance and development aid flourished, yet another closely connected private arrangement became more and more important. By the mid-1950s several private groups had successfully established themselves as charity watchdogs, fostering private voluntary accountability and the development of ethical standards in philanthropy – a phenomenon largely neglected in historical research and only more recently accounted for in political science literature.97 One of the larger East Coast organizations was the National Information Bureau, Inc. (NIB), a New York State non-profit corporation, which, like many of the agencies in the ACVAFS, was also exempt from income tax under section 501(c)(3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code. In its annual Wise Giving report, the NIB informed donors about the purposes and practices of their charities of choice. In 1955 the NIB established a set of basic standards in philanthropy that involved eight fields of accountability. First, the organization’s board had to be an “active and responsible governing body, serving without compensation, holding regular meetings” in which effective administrative control was established. Secondly, legitimate purposes had to be followed with reasonable efficiency in program, resource, and personnel management. In addition, evidence of consultation and cooperation with established agencies in the same or related fields had to be provided. With regard to programming, ethical promotion as well as sound fundraising practices had to be established, meaning that neither payment of commissions for fundraising nor mailing of unordered merchandise, nor “general telephone solicitation of the public” was allowed. Formal fiscal control had to be guaranteed by provision of independent annual audits. Last but not least, a detailed annual budget, translating program plans into financial terms, had to be made available.98 CARE had provided this required data starting in 1953/54. The actual Wise Giving report on CARE for 1954, however, was far from favorable. Giving a short run-down of CARE’s history, it commended CARE’s immediate post-war activities but criticized it for the fact that it had, contrary to specifications in its original Articles of Incorporation, continued and even expanded its operational life, despite the feeling of several of its member agencies that “the need for CARE as originally established ‘has passed.’”99 As several quoted passages suggested, the report was based on the statements of withdrawal issued by War

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Relief Services and Church World Services and clearly contained biased wording.100 CARE executives were alarmed by the negative report and immediately began pressing for a retraction and review of the document. This was, however, to no avail, and the 1955 report was even worse. Here CARE was accused of “political propaganda” with its book program, financial irresponsibility regarding its surplus distribution (mainly to Germany), and misleading advertising, particularly with its Food Crusade program, since the US$1 raised per package “did only a little more than pay for the fundraising, some of CARE’s costs, and the placing of an individual donor’s label on the Government surplus food.” It therefore concluded that CARE not meeting NIB standards.101 The second NIB report caused quite some outcry and shock among CARE’s board members.102 It was even deemed “libelous” by CARE’s legal counsel, who pressed for a renewed retraction and re-evaluation of the report.103 While some of the points raised (such as slight irregularities with surplus distribution in Germany)104 were not easy to dismiss, the NIB report did indeed suggest that hidden motives were involved.105 At least parts of the statements were either blatantly incorrect or based on false assumptions. In addition, NIB executive director Paul Reed continued to make negative statements to people asking for information on CARE (informing them that CARE was obviously a “complicated” organization engaging in “propaganda for the United States” and in the shipping of “luxury” goods), despite the fact that the report was under review.106 Throughout 1956 CARE executive officers and leading board members tried their best to invalidate accusations by explaining their circumstances and working routines and by demonstrating that CARE’s accounting practices were actually found to be in “accordance with generally accepted accounting principles” by its official external audit contractor.107 In order to solve the surplus problem with Germany, and thus the main base for charges of financial irresponsibility, CARE’s mission chief in Central Europe, George Mathues, even acquired a letter of support from the Adenauer government. This was, however, a task that he fulfilled only reluctantly, feeling that the Germans would not want to be drawn “into a kind of inter-American squabble.”108 The surplus issue with Germany could be solved, however, and even the government Advisory Committee which reviewed the feud found that CARE was meeting all conditions for registration.109 The NIB, however, was thoroughly unimpressed and responded with further criticism. Of particular concern to the NIB was CARE’s reluctance to provide detailed figures on its promotion and advertising expenses, as well as the fact that ever larger volumes of surplus commodities were being accounted for as income (thus lowering CARE’s relative overhead costs dramatically). The NIB criticized CARE for its “misleading” accounting/promotion practices – in direct violation of the NIB’s “ethical promotion” standards – and also for its questionable relationship with the government.110 Despite tireless ­diplomacy, official and unofficial paperwork, and social networking, each subsequent report up until 1960 was worse than the one

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before – a situation that drove CARE executives first into despair and finally into outright cynicism.111 It is somehow counter-intuitive that these negative reports by a private newcomer agency like the NIB should have been so problematic for a well-connected institution like CARE, with its relatively constant donor base and stable contracts with the US government. There were, however, several triggers that turned the whole affair into a real problem. First of all, CARE was dependent on its good reputation, particularly with regard to winning new donors for its expansion into the self-help field. The charity market was growing denser and more competitive, and CARE now had to compete for donations with other agencies offering similar services, particularly the large religious ones like Catholic Relief Services or Church World Service. When the first negative NIB report in 1954 carried the handwriting of these two disappointed former CARE member agencies, there was not too much CARE could do to change the situation, particularly given the fact that CARE had just left the ACVAFS – the only internal forum in which such questions could have been moderated. Even more important was the recognition that the Advertising Council, which still contributed large sums to CARE advertising, was alarmed by the negative NIB reports and demanded a resolution to the situation. Thus, CARE executives did their utmost to persuade the Advertising Council that the NIB accusations were false, biased, and an open affront to CARE’s leaders, who were also well-respected and financially responsible heads of large business concerns like Nationwide Insurance Company and Manufacturers Trust.112 In 1959, though, yet another problem emerged. Right at the height of the CARE/ NIB crisis the government Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid decided to expand its cooperation with the NIB. Lacking staff and sufficient funding (at least temporarily), the Advisory Committee was having increasing difficulties in assessing the status of both new applicants and current member agencies.113 It was thus increasingly dependent on additional outside information, and for its staff the NIB reports were “another reputable check-point for information about the bona fides of private agencies.”114 This, in turn, meant that in the event of continuously bad NIB reports, CARE was in danger of losing its status as an eligible agency for public support. Given these developments, CARE intensified its efforts to finally appease or otherwise persuade the NIB to give CARE a positive evaluation. In a multi-page letter (that had been drafted and redrafted for weeks), CARE’s former treasurer and newly elected president Harold Miner meticulously addressed every point of the NIB’s criticism.115 He explained accounting practices and emphasized that CARE’s surplus program was not any more or any less political than the programs being run by the religious agencies. In conclusion, he argued, CARE was actually “more effective and better managed than ever before,” and he asked for the chance to speak at a NIB board meeting to clear up any points that were still calling CARE’s “integrity” into question.116 After this failed and Miner had begun considering suing the NIB for libel, the government Advisory Committee

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finally agreed to step up.117 The NIB/CARE affair had become a political issue, as it not only had the potential to generate bad publicity in general but it also raised doubts about the Advisory Committee’s good judgment in its decision to register CARE.118 A personal meeting with Advisory Committee executive director William McCahoon and NIB director Paul Reed had not yielded any results, and in a letter to CARE’s president Harold Miner, McCahoon confessed that he himself found it “exceedingly difficult to understand the position which NIB continues to take.”119 An official hearing that was called for June 10, 1960 finally turned the tide. Not only did the government Advisory Committee clearly and unmistakably confirm CARE’s position as an independent, financially sound, and morally consistent charity organization, it also recommended that CARE secure statements of support and appreciation from its former members Church World Services and Catholic Relief Services. This, the Advisory Committee argued, was critical to demonstrate unity among the agencies of the ACVAFS to the NIB.120 In its final statement to the NIB chairman, Charles Taft underscored the Advisory Committee’s feeling that “the NIB has attempted to pass on certain matters as to which it does not understand the facts or possess the competence to evaluate.”121 In doing so the government Advisory Committee claimed final authority on questions of voluntary agency evaluation and gave CARE absolution regarding its ways and means of running the enterprise. In return for this support, CARE had to agree to changes in its accounting standards with regard to the calculation and disclosure of promotion and fundraising expenses. These rather minor changes were a small price to pay, given that the NIB’s allegations had been threatening CARE’s right to exist as a charitable tax-exempt non-profit at all. It was 1961 before the last dust resulting from this “time-consuming and, to say the least, frustrating” NIB affair (as Harold Miner put it in 1960) had settled.122 CARE and the NIB reluctantly made peace, and the NIB’s reports lost their horror for CARE’s leadership. CARE began looking for alternatives, however, and intensified its cooperation with other similar watchdog organizations. What changed, however, was the fact that information would increasingly not only be provided but also requested. Background knowledge on the revenue, purposes, and aims of other charities and foundations was becoming more and more critical, for both government institutions and private charities. Potential partners or competitors in international relief had to be monitored, and these watchdog organizations were not only able but also highly willing to offer crucial information to anyone who was ready to pay.123 From surplus disposal to food for peace Since CARE’s inception, its relief concepts had centered on food. Whether canned up and neatly boxed in CARE packages or stacked as bulk shipments for refugee camps and school feeding programs, the organization’s emphasis and dependency on food resources had steadily grown since the end of the Second World War.

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In a way, CARE had thus profited greatly from continuous agricultural overproduction in the United States.124 Starting in the late 1940s, the agency had been able to secure growing amounts of unmarketable food excess, donated to it by the US government. Initially, however, these foodstuffs were supplied on an availability basis only. Under these circumstances, long-term relief projects as well as reliable predictions regarding both the quality and quantity of available relief commodities had mostly been impossible. These conceptual shortcomings of early US food aid legislation were at least partly corrected by the 1954 Agricultural Trade and Development Assistance Act (PL 480).125 With this law, increasing amounts of surplus food became available for the general advancement of American agricultural trade and likewise for humanitarian and development purposes. PL 480 was therefore “both farm policy and foreign policy” – even though it addressed both issues in a rather pragmatic way.126 While the lion’s share of surplus commodities were still traded or bartered bilaterally (title I & title II of PL 480), title III authorized the Commodity Clearing House (CCC) to make growing shares of excess food commodities available to private humanitarian agencies. Between 1954 and 1955 the quantities available for private distribution almost quadrupled, and after 1955 they continued to rise steadily. In addition, the American private voluntary agencies were now reimbursed for their ocean freight expenses. This facilitated the transport of goods and allowed for even larger distribution schemes, meaning that most American food relief agencies considerably expanded their organizational aparatusses during this period (Table 4.5).127 CARE’s Food Crusade was but one (prominent) example of a very successful voluntary agency campaign that was based on the possibility of using governmentdonated food to help the needy in the developing world and to attract new donors and help strengthen private involvement in humanitarian aid.128 Other agencies, such as Catholic Relief Services and Church World Services, set up similar Table 4.5  Relief shipments made by registered voluntary agencies to countries and areas participating in the ocean freight subsidy program1 Fiscal Year

Quantity surplus foods (short tons)

1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 Total

8,240 72,698 236,262 402,052 627,360 659,064 2,005,676

1

Quantity other relief (short tons) 38,284 38,043 51,657 36,196 35,344 32,909 232,433

Ocean freight in US$ 1,346,653 4,828,387 11,638,495 14,655,341 25,269,391 25,886,734 83,625,001

Total US$ value of all shipments

Number of countries & areas

20,904,049 70,476,667 157,601,685 159,869,116 132,870,780 128,769,930 670,492,227

10 16 21 22 32 35

NARA, RG 469, Far East Subject Files, Box 91, ICA/ACVFA covering relief shipments made by registered voluntary agencies to countries and areas participating in the ocean freight subsidy program, November 10, 1958.

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programs in their overseas missions and with partner organizations worldwide. However, these agencies’ general applause for the surplus arrangement was accompanied by the slight fear that the gift horse might be coming with foul teeth. Throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s representatives of the ACVAFS repeatedly voiced their concern that taking on ever larger surplus distribution projects might eventually throw “into shadow the major reason for each agency’s existence.” 129 Boosted by government-donated food excess, some private food relief projects were indeed becoming massive. Both some ACVAFS members and select government officials were thus starting to fear that these agencies would eventually “become nothing more than agents of the Government.” 130 Against this backdrop, Lutheran World Relief and a few other Protestant agencies decided to cut back on soliciting government money by installing a ceiling on public subsidy by the late 1950s.131 The fear of overly “close liaison with government and other agencies” haunted the CARE board of directors as well.132 Throughout the 1950s there were indeed a couple of incidents when government authorities interfered with CARE’s humanitarian programming by cutting food commodities for political reasons (see Chapter 5). While these incidents justified the board’s alarm about a possible loss of “independence, identity and integrity,” it seemed fairly obvious that from an operational standpoint, there was no elegant way back to the pre-surplus era.133 As CARE’s executive management underscored, CARE was effectively helping millions of needy people through excess food commodities. Surplus commodities had become increasingly popular with recipient governments, which were ready to bear part of the administrative costs involved in food distribution. In addition, there was an intrinsic relationship between public subsidy and CARE’s organizational size, as surplus handling demanded operations of a scale that – once established – required regular acquisition of surplus food to sustain themselves. By 1956 surplus commodities accounted for 40 percent of the agency’s direct dollar income, resulting from the sale of food packages made from surplus commodities, and even almost twice as much if indirect billing of surplus commodities as dollar income was taken into account (Table 4.6). However, the rising availability of surplus commodities and retrievable ocean freight costs had an impact on other CARE traditions as well. The original CARE standard food package (which was still in use) had contained a variety of Table 4.6  Dollar breakdown of cash sales, year ending June 301 Sales income from governments (percent) Sales income from private sources (percent) 1

1953

1954

1955

1956

1957

1958

 4 96

18 82

40.7 59.3

43.6 56.4

20.4 79.6

22.2 77.8

CARE, Box 73, six-year summary, CARE dollar breakdown of cash sales by fiscal years, CARE accounting division, August 29, 1958.

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high-quality processed foods and – as NIB director Reed had ill-humoredly pointed out – also a moderate assortment of luxury goods like chocolate and coffee, which were highly valued as exchange articles abroad.134 In contrast, the contents of the new packages, retrieved from surplus stocks, were much more basic. There was nothing glamorous about Food Crusade packages or about the supplies received by institutional school feeding programs that CARE had established in Egypt, Korea, India, Panama, and more than a dozen other countries during the 1950s and 1960s.135 Deliveries consisted of milk powder, canned butter oil, cheese, flour, and sometimes corn in different stages of processing. These goods were not meant to supplement an otherwise poor local individual diet with high-quality foodstuffs; they were instead meant to feed masses of hungry people in so-called underdeveloped countries with whatever food was in excess and available for distribution in the United States. PL 480’s emphasis on surplus disposal and donor orientation – meaning the commixture of food aid with the “donor’s geopolitical, agricultural trade promotion and surplus disposal objectives” – has been analyzed thoroughly in the existing literature on early US food aid legislation.136 It is wrong, however, to depict the whole food aid distribution scheme as a mere dumping program. As Kristin Ahlberg, Michael Barnett, and others have convincingly argued, PL 480 – while instituted as a temporary means of managing mounting surplus agricultural commodities – was also tied to perceptions of global solidarity, “international community,” and humanitarian thinking.137 This utopian momentum – however dwarfed and buried beneath economic or political motives – is nonetheless critical in helping to understand the magnitude of the hopes that accompanied contemporary debates about America’s first major food aid program. Particularly, voluntary agency activities and donations to these private groups under title III stressed the inherent moral dimension of PL 480, and turned economic surplus disposal into global hunger relief.138 Throughout the second half of the 1950s, the outlook and emphasis of PL 480 changed from a more or less sophisticated instrument for surplus disposal into a major foreign policy program, (re-)named Food for Peace. This development had various roots. First of all, the voluntary agencies themselves continuously pressed for change. As a joint paper on the “continuing challenge of American abundance” published by the ACVAFS underscored in 1956, PL 480 as originally conceived disregarded the needs and dietary habits of recipients entirely. In addition, the agencies felt that PL 480’s institutional set-up was highly unclear, and fostered a lack of humanitarian accountability on the side of government authorities.139 Given that not only the Department of Agriculture, the Commodity Credit Corporation, and the International Cooperation Agency, but also the State Department, the government Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid, as well as a number of temporary committees were involved in facilitating the transfer of surplus to voluntary agencies, the lack of any clear line of authority was evident.140

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Conversely, there was some inquietude on the part of government officials as well. As a report put together by a governmental inter-agency committee under the chairmanship of Clarence Francis141 revealed in 1957, non-selective distribution of agricultural surplus to voluntary agencies had led to a severe overextension of some private programs, as well as to bureaucratic discomposure and insufficient government oversight.142 Hence, government officials felt that after “a long time of pioneering in which there was little finalizing of procedures,” it was now important to implement safeguards against unwanted side-effects of PL 480 – meaning the wasting of food or the agencies overcommitting themselves.143 In addition, and independent from the voluntary agency programs, various policymakers, including President Eisenhower himself, were generally critical toward continuously prolonging a farm policy that fostered overproduction.144 This situation was an easy working point for those who wanted radical changes to PL 480.145 Hence in 1958, Senator Hubert Humphrey stepped up with a proposal to restructure PL 480 into a more stringent program. Having spent most of 1958 working on several drafts, Humphrey introduced his Food for Peace Act (S 1711) which proposed the establishment of a central coordinating food aid office under presidential control in early 1959. The Minnesota senator was convinced of the need to overcome the scattered nature of US food aid, in which far too many government offices had a say. He pressed for a consistent policy, a humanitarian foundation of distribution, a stronger emphasis on voluntary agency involvement, and an extension of PL 480 in general. Humphrey’s support for private voluntary agency programs was vigorously backed by agricultural interest groups and lobbyists.146 When hearings on PL 480 were due in 1958, the National Farmers Union, for instance, supported an upgrade of PL 480 and did not forget to urge for greater participation by voluntary agencies in order to speed up the distribution and make sure that “supplies go to those in greatest need.”147 CARE in particular maintained close ties with agriculture; its long-term president Murray Lincoln also headed the Nationwide Insurance Company, which itself had developed out of Farm Bureau Mutual. Lincoln, who himself had agricultural roots, kept close relations with farm organizations throughout the country and had been instrumental in persuading CARE’s board to admit the National Grange and the National Farmers Union as member organizations back in 1952.148 Since then, both associations had actively helped design CARE’s educational and developmental programs, which involved surplus distribution abroad. In this way a situation was created in which the interests of the voluntary agency increasingly overlapped with the interests of the agricultural lobby in the United States.149 This tight web of cooperation, mutual reference, and support between voluntary agencies, politicians, and private farmers’ networks worked well during peacetime and even more so during crisis, as is illustrated by the so-called “dried-milk incident” of 1959. On October 13, 1959 the US Department of Agriculture announced a temporary suspension of non-fat dried milk and stopped all export sales.150 In practice this

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meant a complete retraction of milk powder from the list of available commodities, without any early warning and in clear violation of earlier promises the government had made to provide the voluntary agencies with several million pounds of dried milk for humanitarian relief purposes. This sudden suspension meant a real disaster for the voluntary agencies since they had already made fixed delivery promises to recipient governments that could suddenly no longer be fulfilled.151 As it turned out, organizational savings and emergency funds were not nearly large enough to compensate for this shortfall. Hence, the agencies feared that this suspension of milk powder deliveries meant “incalculable harm to the reservoir of confidence and trust” they had been building with the recipients abroad.152 In view of broken promises and the obvious lack of humanitarian accountability on the side of the US government, the agencies set a massive public relations campaign in motion. Parallel to the hasty search for individual alternatives – CARE, for instance, acquired a large milk powder donation of over one million pounds from the Canadian government – the affected agencies decried the incident publicly, denouncing the “hydra-headed administration of food disposal programs” in which “one arm of government [was] undermining the policies of another.”153 While officials from the Department of Agriculture emphasized that no harm had been intended as dairy products had simply run out, their colleagues from the International Cooperation Agency as well as from the government Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid were aware that the whole affair was “extremely disruptive” to the agencies’ foreign programs and tried their best to find a solution.154 Charles Taft, chairman of the Advisory Committee, informed Secretary of State Christian Herter about what he perceived of as an “extremely serious situation” and requested that he provide “a firm word in the right places” in order to work out some kind of substitution for the agencies.155 Herter responded promptly that he was more than willing to “explore every avenue to find a solution,” and, indeed, a short time later an emergency agreement was reached.156 In response to the agencies’ detailed tabulations of their expected shortfall, the ICA and USDA agreed to procure 60 million pounds of dried milk from the open market. This, in combination with private agency funds, enabled contract fulfillment by the agencies and prevented the imminent crisis of trust between donors and recipients, as well as between voluntary agencies and the US administration. Given the quick reaction that Taft’s letter to Herter had provoked, and in view of the orderly distribution process the agencies had helped to manage, it was with open satisfaction that the Advisory Committee staff commended the solution to the dried milk incident as “indicative of maturity, self-discipline and effective joint action.”157 Although the private agencies’ most pressing practical matters were now taken care of, Senator Hubert Humphrey was by no means prepared to miss this opportunity to apply further political pressure. In a letter to the director of the International Cooperation Administration, John Riddleberger, he insisted that the matter was shocking proof of the fact that “the right hand of government does not know what

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the left hand is doing.” According to him, the simple fact that something like this could have happened at all underscored the need for a single agency to integrate all operations under Public Law 480 – “in short, the Peace Food Administration,” which he had proposed earlier that year.158 His Food for Peace Act of April 16, 1959 had failed to pass in Congress, as had earlier plans to change the legislative status of PL 480. The dried milk affair was a welcome example that proved the need for action, and it was another chance to denounce both Republican farm policy and foreign policy as uninspiring, vague, and sad.159 With elections coming up in 1960 and Humphrey preparing to run for the Democratic Party nomination, this dried milk incident was too good an issue to simply let it slip away. As is well known, Humphrey was beaten by John F. Kennedy in the primaries and thus did not get to reap direct profit from the dried milk incident. “Food for Peace” remained an issue, however, and in that respect Humphrey came to exert remarkable influence on Kennedy’s agricultural policy.160 He toured the country with the presidential candidate, and in October 1960 when Kennedy established a Food for Peace Committee, which was supposed to make Food for Peace into a real program, “not a slogan,” Humphrey was very much involved. His fellow committee members were political and civic leaders with agricultural, health, and civic humanitarian backgrounds, and among them was Murray Lincoln, president of CARE. The committee’s task was to “change the emphasis upon short-term ‘surplus disposal’ in the present oversea food use program to a long-range basis,” to centralize administration into one government office, to prepare a second World Food Conference, and to increase the amount of food distributed by voluntary agencies.161 The chance for CARE’s president to be part of the committee was praised as a perfect opportunity to make “recommendations to the new administration concerning ways to utilize agricultural surplus commodities in the interest of peace.”162 Lincoln’s inclusion on the committee was neither coincidence nor luck but was instead the effect of long-term lobbying and cooperation with American agricultural and political leaders. His integration into the ideological and administrative creation of an independent Food for Peace office was proof of the influence CARE leaders had acquired as humanitarian experts during the 1950s.163 With Kennedy’s victory over Nixon this influence grew even stronger. Right after the elections, CARE’s founding member and future president, Wallace Campbell, was called on to advise the newly appointed Secretary of Agriculture, Orville L. Freeman, to facilitate the departmental transition. Freeman was a long-time friend of Senator Humphrey and Murray Lincoln, and the latter had used his professional and personal connections to install his deputy at Nationwide as Freeman’s aide. Campbell was a good choice, since he had acquired the reputation of being skilled, professional, and well connected in Washington. More important, however, was his vested interest in private food aid distribution, which he could use to CARE’s advantage. Campbell was successful in arranging for a private dinner between Secretary Freeman, CARE’s

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executive director Richard Reuter, and his deputy Frank Goffio. In his personal account of CARE’s history, Campbell remembered that at this meeting

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both men gave the incoming agriculture secretary a strong argument in building Food for Peace into a strengthened, stable, and effective tool for development – a tool that would pay dividend for the United States, for American farmers, and for hundreds of millions of people around the world.164

This spirit of global US responsibility paired with the general idea that surplus was a force for good and not only a reason for concern was widely shared by the Kennedy administration. In early 1961 Secretary Freeman, for instance, had his staff compile the first comprehensive study of the World Food Deficit, catching up with debates on the so-called World Food Problem that were gaining in appeal.165 On January 24, 1961, in his second official act of office, President Kennedy announced the establishment of a Food for Peace Program, which would be part of the Executive Office of the President. George McGovern was appointed as its first director.166 The establishment of the office was greeted with the highest expectations, and Lincoln, as chairman of the Food for Peace Committee, was publicly cited as having “told the President that an effective food for peace program required discarding the present concept of ‘surplus disposal’ legislation” in favor of prioritizing global orientation and help to the needy.167 One of McGovern’s first actions in office was to ban the term surplus dumping as a means of strengthening the humanitarian dimension of the program.168 This development can at least in part be attributed to the efforts of civic groups and agricultural experts, who had lobbied tirelessly for a meaningful concept for US surplus management that would include a streamlining of “the present administrative machinery,” simplification of the approval and allocation of surpluses, and the mobilization of US farm production “under a broad foreign aid concept.”169 Throughout 1960 and 1961 CARE executives were at the heart of governmental and administrative decisions and debates on Food for Peace, as demonstrated by internal memos on institutional developments.170 CARE executives felt that they had managed to build an organization that was in pole position to be used as a channel for the anticipated acceleration of food distribution under Food for Peace.171 They were thus hoping to further stimulate the “creative use of government owned agricultural commodities,” and it was no coincidence that its Washington staff was increased significantly during that time.172 CARE’s carefully maintained relationship with government food experts paid dividends when McGovern stepped down from his Food for Peace post to run for the Senate in April 1962. While it came as a surprise to many, it was actually a logical development when a CARE representative was selected in July 1962 to succeed McGovern as director of Food for Peace. CARE staffers had worked hard for their reputation as experts in food-related foreign policy issues and were taken seriously as partners and advisors in all issues relating to PL 480.173 The fact that

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it was Richard Reuter, CARE’s executive director, who was finally appointed as special assistant to the president and director of Food for Peace was a source of great pride to his colleagues and to Reuter himself.174 Reuter accepted the prestigious position, despite the fact that his annual salary of US$21,000 was significantly below the compensation of US$22,500 he had been receiving at CARE.175 In an interview with the Evening Star he emphasized that he had not been able to resist the challenge of “trying to get something done.”176 He left, however, amid great unrest and rapid change. CARE had just decided to merge with the humanitarian agency Medico and was working to develop this new cooperation. With Reuter on leave for a government position, it was his former deputy Frank Goffio who inherited the task of helping to steer CARE into the First Development Decade  that had just been announced by the General Assembly of the United Nations. Notes  1 CARE, Box 6, Charles R. Joy to Richard Reuter, July 20, 1955.  2 CARE, Box 883, biographical sketch of Richard Reuter; lamentably there is no extended biography of Reuter yet available.  3 CARE, Box 7, Richard Reuter, report to subcommittee on management, July 20, 1955.  4 CARE, Box 6, value of goods shipped against expenses incurred, July 1, 1950 through June 30, 1955; the exact figure was US$2,992,300.  5 Wallace J. Campbell, The History of CARE. A Personal Account, New York, 1990, p. 72.  6 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, July 13, 1955.  7 CARE, Box 6, Charles R. Joy to Richard Reuter, July 20, 1955; Richard Reuter to Paul Gordon, chief of missions region IV, July 22, 1955; George Mathues to Richard Reuter, July, 20, 1955; report by Francis X. Mayers to Reuter and Goffio, October 5, 1955.  8 In May 1954 the Future of CARE Committee was renamed the Planning and Policy Committee; see CARE, Box 6, recommendation to the board of directors, May 1954.  9 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, July 13, 1955; report by Program and Planning Committee. 10 CARE, Box 6, Richard Reuter to George Mathues, July 28, 1955; Richard Reuter, progress report no. 1, July 25, 1955. 11 CARE, Box 1070, MECM, September 21, 1955. 12 “CARE Service to Northern Europe Cut,” The New York Times, February 24, 1955, p. 6. 13 Stanley Buder, Capitalizing on Change. A Social History of American Business, Chapel Hill, NC, 2009, p. 304. 14 Stanford Orson Cazier, “CARE, A Study in Cooperative Voluntary Relief,” doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1964, pp. 302–3. 15 NARA, RG 469, Far East Subject Files, Box 91, progress report 3, Richard Reuter, August 15, 1955, attachment to Department of State instruction regarding changes in leadership and program of CARE, Inc., August 30, 1955. 16 Christopher D. McKenna, The World’s Newest Profession. Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge and New York, 2010, pp. 123–4; see also Boris Holzer, “Organisierte Globalität. Entgrenzung, Vernetzung und Institutionalisierung transnationaler Unternehmen,” in Andrea Maurer and Uwe Schimank (eds.), Die Gesellschaft

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CARE and food aid from America der Unternehmen – Die Unternehmen der Gesellschaft. Gesellschaftstheoretische Zugänge zum Wirtschaftsgeschehen, Wiesbaden, 2008, pp. 265–76 (pp. 271–2). CARE, Box 1171, MECM, March 27, 1957. Richard H. Cummings, Radio Free Europe’s “Crusade for Freedom.” Rallying Americans behind Cold War Broadcasting, 1950–1960, Jefferson, NC, 2010, p. 156. CARE, Box 56, CARE income from Federal Service Joint Crusade, undated datasheet, prepared by CARE accounting division; see also Box 1171, MBDM, April 26, 1961. NARA, RG 469, Far East Subject Files, Box 91, progress report 3, Richard Reuter, August 15, 1955, attachment to Department of State instruction regarding changes in leadership and program of CARE, Inc., August 30, 1955. CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, October 19, 1955; indirect quotation by Richard Reuter. CARE, Box 6, confidential Richard Reuter to William McCahoon, August 8, 1955 outlining Food Crusade plans and current stage of agreements. For a quick overview on the emergence of this arrangement, see, for example, Beth Osborne Daponte and Shannon Bade, “How the Private Food Assistance Network Evolved. Interactions between Public and Private Responses to Hunger,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 35 (2006), pp. 668–90; Mitchel B. Wallerstein, Food for War – Food for Peace. United States Food Aid in a Global Context, Cambridge, MA, 1980. CARE, Box 7, position paper on CARE’s utilization of US agricultural surplus (preliminary staff draft), [1956]. CARE, Box 26, Richard Reuter to Elizabeth Bromley (WMCA), December 28, 1955. For legislation concerning ocean freight reimbursements, see Chapter 5. On the long tradition of fundraising events and the role of fundraising in the charity market, see Sarah Roddy, Julie-Marie Strange, and Bertrand Taithe, “The Charity-Mongers of Modern Babylon: Bureaucracy, Scandal, and the Transformation of the Philanthropic Marketplace, c.1870–1912,” Journal of British Studies 54.1 (2015), pp. 118–37. CARE, Box 7, position paper on CARE’s utilization of US agricultural surplus (preliminary staff draft), [1956]. Paul Susman, “Exporting the Crisis. U.S. Agriculture and the Third World,” Economic Geography 65.4 (1989), pp. 293–313 (p. 306); regarding the influence of US food aid on dietary habits in Central America, see also Rachel Garst and Tom Barry, Feeding the Crisis. U.S. Food Aid and Farm Policy in Central America, Lincoln, NE, 1990, pp. 95–124; a less statistical and more cultural account on dietary change is provided by Susan George, Ill Fares the Land. Essays on Food, Hunger, and Power, Washington DC, 1984, pp. 19–44. Elizabeth Clark Reiss, The American Council of Voluntary Agencies for Foreign Service, ACVAFS. Four Monographs, New York, 1985, Vol. III, p. 102. NARA, RG 286, UD 447, Box 93, summary minutes of joint ICA/ACVFA meeting, March 15, 1957; CARE, Box 130, Fred Devine (CARE) to Martin Garber (Food Distribution Division, USDA, Agricultural Marketing Service), August 13, 1957; in 1962 several Indian school children died from spoiled CARE milk, allegedly because the bowls in which the milk powder had been compounded were dirty. Box 1171, MBDM, January 24, 1962. CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, April 18, 1956; Michael Cowen and Robert Shenton, “The Invention of Development,” in Jonathan Crush (ed.), Power of Development, London and New York, 1995, pp. 42–59. Clifton R. Wharton Jr., “Aiding the Community. A New Philosophy for Foreign Operations,” Harvard Business Review 32.2 (1954), pp. 64–72; Corinna Unger, “Investieren in die Moderne. Amerikanische Stiftungen in der Dritten Welt seit 1945,” in Thomas Adam

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37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

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et al. (eds.), Stifter, Spender und Mäzene. USA und Deutschland im historischen Vergleich, Stuttgart, 2009, pp. 253–86 (p. 270). CARE, Box 7, CARE position paper on self-help (preliminary staff report), undated [1955/56]. Harry S. Truman, inaugural address, January 20, 1949, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ ws/?pid=13282 (accessed September 8, 2015). Hubertus Büschel, “Eine Brücke am Mount Meru. Zur Globalgeschichte von Hilfe zur Selbsthilfe und Gewalt in Tanganjika,” in Hubertus Büschel and Daniel Speich (eds.), Entwicklungswelten. Globalgeschichte der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit, Frankfurt a.M., pp. 176–206. CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, July 25, 1956. CARE, Box 377, CARE Korea (George R. Bent) to CARE NY (Paul Gordon, Abram Becker, Jinty Edgar (Research Division)), subj.: Village Aid program, April 5, 1954; Box 73, guidelines for programming, ALMIS #81, Gordon Alderfer to all missions, January 21, 1958. ACVAFS, Box 29, testimony of Richard Reuter of CARE presented before the New York State Joint Legislative Committee at public hearing, December 16, 1953. CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, April 18, 1956. CARE, Box 73, data based on annual statements of income and disbursements. CARE, Box 7, executive director’s report, November 20, 1956; Olive Ewing Clapper, One Lucky Woman, New York, 1961, pp. 448–9. Olivier Zunz, Philanthropy in America. A History, Princeton, NJ, 2012, p. 176; see also John Burnett, Nonprofit Marketing Best Practices, Hoboken, NJ, 2007, p. 23; Benson P. Shapiro, “Marketing in Non Profit Organizations,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 3.3 (1974), pp. 1–16. CARE, Box 69, paper on CARE member agency relations, January 19, 1955. CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, February 17, 1954; CARE, Box 30, list of CARE National Advisory Committee members, 1954–1969. CARE, Box 30, report on the National Committee for CARE, undated [1953/54]. “Group to Assist CARE,” The New York Times, March 25, 1954, p. 27. Steven Rathgeb Smith and Kirsten A. Grønbjerg, “Scope and Theory of Government Nonprofit Relations,” in Walter W. Powell and Richard Steinberg (eds.), The Nonprofit Sector. A Research Handbook, New Haven, CT, 2006, pp. 221–42 (p. 237). CARE, Box 30, John T. Thatcher to Richard Reuter, subj.: National Advisory Committee, October 27, 1966. CARE, Box 30, Olive Clapper to Richard Reuter, November 28, 1958. CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, January 23, 1957. Rainer Gries, “Die Geburt des Werbeexperten aus dem Geist der Psychologie. Ernest Dichter: Der ‘Motivforscher’ als Experte der Moderne,” Medien and Zeit 20.4 (2005), pp. 4–17; see also Stefan Schwarzkopf and Rainer Gries (eds.), Ernest Dichter and Motivation Research. New Perspectives on the Making of Post-war Consumer Culture, New York, 2010. CARE, Box 854, study Why People Give Donations, submitted to the National Insurance Company, Columbus, Ohio, conducted by the Institute for Motivational Research, Inc. NY, Ernest Dichter, PhD, president, December 1955. CARE, Box 854: memo on Why People Give Donations, submitted to the National Insurance Company, Columbus, Ohio, conducted by the Institute for Motivational Research, Inc. NY, Ernest Dichter, PhD, president, December 1955.

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55 CARE, Box, Box 1171, MECM, May 27, 1959 in Columbus. 56 McKenna, The World’s Newest Profession, pp. 111–44. 57 Lutz Raphael, “Die Verwissenschaftlichung des Sozialen als methodische und konzeptionelle Herausforderung für eine Sozialgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22.1 (1996), pp. 165–93. 58 CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, October 22, 1958. 59 CARE, Box 6, suggested research program for CARE, January 1958. The analysis team did intensive interviews and went into quantitative as well as qualitative assessment of motivations and ideas. 60 CARE, Box 6, Bennett-Chaikin, Special Analysis of Atlanta, July 1958. 61 CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, January 23, 1957. 62 Zunz, Philanthropy in America, p. 75. 63 CARE, Box 6, Bennett-Chaikin, Special Analysis of Atlanta, July 1958; Help Freedom poster, see CARE, Box 1167. 64 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, report by the finance committee, March 23, 1956; MBDM, August 17, 1960: annual report for fiscal year 1959/60. 65 CARE, Box 881, CARE advertisement showing an Asian man with a rice hat, asking “Can you understand this man’s hunger for tools?”, undated [1960], including a coupon enabling the reader to donate tools for needy people via CARE. 66 CARE, Box 881, Sackheim Report, Sackheim Inc. Advertising, NYC, prepared by George Pampel and submitted to Richard Reuter, January 29, 1960. 67 “With Care and Caution,” The Wall Street Journal, February 28, 1955. 68 Harold Gauer, Selling Big Charity. The Story of C.A.R.E, Glendale, WI, 1990, p. 96. 69 CARE, Box 4, partial list of firms and organizations giving CARE bulk orders, undated. 70 Peter D. Hall, Inventing the Nonprofit Sector and Other Essays on Philanthropy, Voluntarism, and Nonprofit Organizations, Baltimore, MD, 1992, p. 62. 71 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, March 23, 1960. 72 CARE, Box 76, CARE press statement state winners to see “inside Europe” on CARE Crusade trip, October 1960. 73 CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, April 20, 1960; MBDM, October 26, 1960. 74 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, February 23, 1961. 75 CARE, Box 76, report on Vicks CARE crusade submitted by Luis Samia [undated]; report by Julian and Dorothy Howell [undated]; these figures, although official information handed out by Vicks Chemical Company, are at least questionable since the exact figure of US$1,317,000 was already on the table even before the crusade had started; see CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, April 20, 1960. 76 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, March 22, 1961. 77 Peter F. Drucker, The Practice of Management, New York, 2006, p. 37. 78 Until the fiscal year 1962 CARE did not present its promotion and publicity expenses separately in its annual reports, but instead assigned these expenses to overall operations and overhead. In addition, most CARE finance department files for that period were “routinely discarded”; see Laura K. O’Keefe, John S. Drew, and Laura Bailey (The New York Public Library), Guide to the Records of CARE, New York, 1991, p. 39. Records for the fiscal year 1962 show, however, that CARE used about 1.9 percent of its overall annual expenses (including surplus commodities) or 5.3 percent of its cash income (including freight reimbursements) or 13.3 percent of its private donor income for promotional issues. 79 CARE, Box 1170, MECM, July 13, 1955; MBDM annual meeting, October 19, 1955.

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80 ACVAFS, Box 29, Wayland Zwayer (chairman, finance membership committee ACVAFS) to Richard Reuter (CARE), January 6, 1956. 81 NARA, RG 286, UD 447, Box 93, comments for ACVAFS/ACVFA meeting by Richard Reuter for the agencies, November 19, 1959 (based on ACVAFS meeting November 17, 1959). 82 CARE, Box 71, Abram Becker to all missions, subj.: Councils of Voluntary Agencies, May 31, 1957. 83 CARE, Box 92, ACVAFS circular 1959, special issue, councils abroad, April 1959. 84 Hall, Inventing the Nonprofit Sector, p. 7. 85 Throughout the 1940s and 1950s the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations funded numerous studies aimed at gathering information that would pave the way for private development planning abroad; see Corinna Unger, “Investieren in die Moderne. Amerikanische Stiftungen in der Dritten Welt seit 1945,” in Thomas Adam et al. (eds.), Stifter, Spender und Mäzene. USA und Deutschland im historischen Vergleich, Stuttgart, 2009, pp. 253–86; Zunz, Philanthropy in America, pp. 180–9; NARA, RG 286, UD 447, Box 91, copy of application to Winthrop Rockefeller from the National Planning Association on behalf of a project “The Evaluation of American Voluntary Foreign Aid,” undated [1949]. 86 ACVAFS, Box 5, questions and answers concerning American voluntary agencies and their programs overseas (for use in the IBM RAMAC Electronic Brain at the American National Exhibition in Moscow), presented at the ACVAFS executive committee meeting, May 15, 1959; see also Marilyn Kushner, “Exhibiting Art at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959. Domestic Politics and Cultural Diplomacy,” Journal of Cold War Studies 4.1 (2002), pp. 6–26. 87 Neill H. Alford Jr., “Voluntary Foreign Aid and American Foreign Policy: The Element of State Control,” Virginia Law Review 46.3 (1960), pp. 477–515 (p. 480). 88 NARA, RG 286, UD 447, Box 92, transcript of proceedings of ICA/ACVFA/ACVAFS meeting, June 28, 1956. 89 ACVAFS, Box 5, “Foreign Policy Objectives and the Voluntary Sector of Overseas Activity, Some Suggested Administrative Recommendations,” December 1, 1958, attachment by Charlotte Owen to Robert S. McCollum (Department of State), December 8, 1958. 90 ACVAFS, Box 1, report on salient features of private international relief agencies, undated [late 1950s], prepared by Eugene Kidder, Georg Mathues, and Darrell D. Randall. 91 Henry B. Hansmann, “The Role of Nonprofit Enterprise,” The Yale Law Journal 89.5 (1980), pp. 835–901 (pp. 846–51, 880). 92 Torben Lütjen, “Vom ‘Gospel of Efficiency’ zum ‘War of Ideas.’ Zum Verhältnis von Wissenschaft, Politik und Ideologien in den Vereinigten Staaten,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 50 (2010), pp. 373–94; see also Steven G. Brint, In an Age of Experts. The Changing role of Professionals in Politics and Public Life, Princeton, NJ, 1994, pp. 129–48. 93 On the so-called Javits’ Amendment, see NARA, RG 469, UD 191 A, Box 81, summary minutes of joint ICA/ACVFA meeting in Washington DC, October 8, 1958; see also the study published by Ralph I. Straus, Expanding Private Investment for Free World Economic Growth: A Special Report Prepared at the Request of the Department of State, Washington DC, 1959. 94 CARE, Box 92, Foreign Policy Objectives and the Voluntary Sector of Overseas Activity, November 12, 1958. 95 Reiss, American Council, Vol. IV, p. 20. 96 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War. Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, Cambridge and New York, 2009, p. 35.

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97 A commendable exception is Zunz, Philanthropy in America; for a contemporary account, see Jordan E. Silvergleid, “Effects of Watchdog Organizations on the Social Capital Market,” New Directions for Philathropic Fundraising 41 (2003), pp. 7–26. 98 CARE, Box 73, NIB Basic Standards in Philanthropy for the year 1955 (my emphasis). 99 CARE, Box 6, NIB report for CARE, Inc., March 23, 1955. 100 NARA, RG 286, UD 447, Box 93, minutes of joint ICA/VFA meeting, June 10, 1960. 101 CARE, Box 73, NIB report on CARE, Inc., May 25, 1956. 102 NARA, RG 286, UD 447, Box 92, copy of CARE resolution regarding NIB report of May 25, 1945, June 28, 1956; CARE, Box 1171, MECM, June 27, 1956. 103 CARE, Box 73, Alexander B. Hawes (in his official function as legal counsel) to Richard Reuter, June 4, 1956. 104 CARE had used some of the surplus gained from package sales to Germany for projects in other countries. This was found not to be in accordance with CARE claims that surpluses would be used to the benefit of those countries that these surpluses had been won from. 105 CARE, Box 7, George Mathues to Richard Reuter, August 28, 1956. 106 CARE, Box 73, letter by Paul Reed to Mr. James W. Lane, St James, Long Island, March 13, 1956; CARE, Box 73, Paul Reed to Ben Touster, November 2, 1959, with handwritten note to Richard Reuter. 107 CARE, Box 73, letter by Richard Jessup (CARE) to Paul Reed (NIB), May 23, 1956; Ernst and Ernst, auditors to CARE, May 31, 1956 (forwarded to Paul Reed). 108 CARE, Box 7, George Mathues to Richard Reuter, August 28, 1956. 109 CARE, Box 73, report summarizing CARE relationships with NIB, prepared by CARE, June 1, 1960; on the solution to the situation in Germany, see Jessup (CARE) to Reed (NIB), February 11, 1957; Alexander Hawes to Lou Samia, January 13, 1959; CARE came to an agreement with the German government as well as with representatives of the Allied military government that all contractual obligations had ultimately been served by May 26, 1952. 110 CARE, Box 73, NIB confidential draft report, June 2, 1959. 111 CARE, Box 73, Alex Hawes to Richard Reuter, December 17, 1959; Hawes proposed a meeting with his friend who happened to be NIB president Valentine E. Macy’s brother; memo Olive Clapper to Abe Becker, December 9, 1958, connecting the CARE management to Bill Coulson (executive director President’s Committee on Fund Raising within the Federal Service in Washington DC); R. S. Jessup to Richard Reuter, subj.: NIB, May 18, 1956; Miner to Hawes, February 1, 1960; CARE president Harold Miner commented on Paul Reed’s statements regarding the NIB report as “Reed’s latest blurb.” 112 CARE, Box 73, Reuter to George Ludlam (Advertising Council), June 1, 1956; Harold Miner, CARE treasurer, to George Ludlum (Advertising Council), May 31, 1956. The Advertising Council was ultimately appeased and delayed its decision on whether or not it would drop CARE from its list; see CARE Box 73, letter summarizing CARE relationships with NIB, prepared by CARE, June 1, 1960 113 ACVAFS, Box 5, inter-office on the history of ACVAFS relations with Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid, March 20, 1964. 114 NARA, RG 469, UD 191 A, Box 81, ICA/ACVFA staff log, June/July/August, 1959. 115 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, October 16, 1957. 116 CARE, Box 73, Harold Miner to Paul Reed (NIB), September 18, 1959. 117 NARA, RG 286, UD 447, Box 93, carbon copy of Paul Reed (NIB) to Harold Miner, February 23, 1960.

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118 NARA, RG 286, UD 447, Box 93, minutes of joint ICA/VFA meeting, June 10, 1960. 119 NARA, RG 286, UD 447, Box 94, copy of William McCahoon (ACVFA) to Harold Miner (president of CARE), April 4, 1960; CARE, Box 73, William McCahoon to Paul Reed (NIB), October 2, 1959. 120 CARE, Box 73, Norris Wilson (CWS) to Harold Miner (CARE), June 15, 1960, stating that the report and the wording was “completely without justification”; see also Bishop Swanstom (CRS) to Richard Reuter, July 5, 1960: “Today in 1960 a fact that is most fortunate and gratifying is that we have a large American agency of so-called non-sectarian character, such as CARE, working side by side with us in the field of international voluntary relief effort.” 121 NARA, RG 286, UD 447, Box 94, copy of Charles P. Taft to the NIB, June 26, 1960. 122 CARE, Box 73, Harold Miner (CARE) to William McCahoon (ACVFA), October 6, 1960. 123 CARE, Box 73, Better Business Bureau to Lou Samia answering to a request for information on Jami At Al Islam, Inc. (San Francisco), May 13 and May 25, 1959. 124 Between 1954 and 1959, the United States disposed of unmarketable surpluses worth close to US$6 billion; see Robert M. Stern, “Agricultural Surplus Disposal and U.S. Economic Policies,” World Politics 12.3 (1960), pp. 422–33 (p. 422); see also Giovanni Federico, Feeding the World. An Economic History of Agriculture, 1800–2000, Princeton, NJ, 2005, pp. 83–116; Willard Wesley Cochrane, The Curse of American Agricultural Abundance. A  Sustainable Solution, Lincoln, NE, 2003. 125 Wallerstein, Food for War – Food for Peace, pp. 34–5. 126 Kristin L. Ahlberg, Transplanting the Great Society. Lyndon Johnson and Food for Peace, Columbia, MO, 2008, p. 6. 127 NARA, RG 286, UD 447, Box 93, confidential minutes of ACVFA meeting, March 28, 1958. 128 CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, January 27, 1960. 129 Clark Reiss, The American Council of Voluntary Agencies for Foreign Service, Vol. II, p. 92. 130 NARA, RG 286, UD 447, Box 93, confidential minutes of ACVFA meeting, March 28, 1958. 131 NARA, RG 469, UD 191 A, Box 81, statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by Dr. Paul C. Empie on behalf of Lutheran World Relief, July 8, 1959. 132 CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, July 25, 1956. 133 CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, July 25, 1956. 134 Karl-Ludwig Sommer, Humanitäre Auslandshilfe als Brücke zur atlantischen Partnerschaft. CARE, CRALOG und die Entwicklung der deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen nach Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges, Bremen, 1999, pp. 172–9. 135 Most notably Egypt and India where CARE was running the largest private schemes at that time. 136 Wallerstein, Food for War – Food for Peace, pp. 36–7; Christopher B. Barrett and Daniel G. Maxwell, Food Aid after Fifty Years. Recasting its Role, London and New York, 2005, pp. 18–19. 137 Michael N. Barnett, Empire of Humanity. A History of Humanitarianism, Ithaca, NY, 2011, pp. 102–5; Ahlberg, Transplanting the Great Society, pp. 24–5. 138 NARA, RG 469, Far East Subject Files, Box 91, United States Information Agency airgram (CA-70) to all USIS posts, subj.: food donations (certain opportunities inherent in PL 480 (Title II) Food Donation Program are emphasized), July 8, 1958.

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139 ACVAFS, Box 8, ACVAFS Surplus Commodities Committee, “The Continuing Challenge of American Abundance,” November 13, 1956. 140 NARA, RG 469, Far East Subject Files, Box 91, L. J. Saccio (acting director ICA) to Ezra Taft Benson (Secretary of Agriculture), February 13, 1959. 141 Dwight D. Eisenhower to Clarence Francis requesting him to serve as chairman of Interagency Committee on Agricultural Surplus Disposal, September 9, 1954, http://www. presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=10055 (accessed September 2, 2015); see also NARA, RG 286, UD 447, Box 93, minutes of ACVFA meeting, March 28, 1958. 142 NARA, RG 286, UD 447, Box 95, undated draft of inter-agency paper on proposed policies for PL 480 donations. 143 NARA, RG 286, UD 447, Box 95, minutes of inter-agency committee meeting with ACVAFS representatives on proposed policies on Title II Foreign Donations Program, April 29, 1958. 144 NARA, RG 469 P 168, Box 4, statement by the President (released by James C. Hagerty, Press Secretary to the President), September 21, 1959; see also Kathleen A. Cravero, “Food and Politics. Domestic Sources of US Food Aid Policies, 1949–1979,” in ETD Collection for Fordham University, 1982, pp. 1–394 (pp. 128–9); William Paul Browne, Private Interests, Public Policy, and American Agriculture, Lawrence, KS, 1988, p. 20; Ahlberg, Transplanting the Great Society, p. 24. 145 Browne, Private Interests, p. 217. 146 See, for instance, Polly J. Diven, “The Domestic Determinants of US Food Aid Policy,” Food Policy 26.5 (2001), pp. 455–74. 147 NARA, RG 469, P 168, Box 1, “Public Law 480 – An Instrument of Foreign Policy,” statement of the National Farmers Union before the House Committee on Agriculture, presented by Robert W. Downs, president of the Arkansas Farmers Union, May 6, 1958. 148 Murray D. Lincoln, Vice President in Charge of Revolution, New York, 1960, ch. 7. 149 CARE, Box 26, Wallace Campbell to Clyde Mitchell, University of Nebraska, Lincoln Nebraska (cc to Dr. Shirley Greene) April 19, 1956. 150 CARE, Box 160, copy of USDA directive 2873–59, October 13, 1959. 151 130 million pounds for CARE, 100 million pounds for Church World Service, and almost 190 million pounds for Catholic Relief Services; see NARA, RG 469, UD 191 A, Box 81, Charles Taft (ACVAFS) to Christian Herter (Secretary of State), October 28, 1959; CARE, Box 160, Richard Reuter to all missions, subj.: supply of dried milk, October 16, 1959. 152 NARA, RG 469, UD 191 A, Box 81, Catholic Relief Services (Bishop Swanstrom) to L. J. Saccio (acting director of ICA), October 30, 1959. 153 “Milk of Unkindness,” The Washington Post and Times Herald, October 27, 1959, p. A12; see also “US Food Surplus for World Drops. Federal Aide Tells CARE Officials That Other Lands Must Lift Own Output,” The New York Times, October 8, 1959, p. 2.; regarding the Canadian donation, see letter of thanks from CARE promotion department to Canadian government, The New York Times, November 27, 1959. 154 CARE, Box 160, copy of ICA circular to all ACVAFS agencies, October 27, 1959. 155 NARA, RG 469, UD 191 A, Box 81, Charles P. Taft (chairman of ACVFA) to Christian Herter, October 28, 1959. 156 NARA, RG 469, UD 191 A, Box 81, Christian Herter to Charles Taft, November 6, 1959. 157 NARA, RG 469, UD 191 A, Box 81, minutes of meeting of ACVFA, November 20, 1959. 158 NARA, RG 469, UD 191 A, Box 81, Senator Hubert Humphrey to John Riddleberger (ICA), November 11, 1959.

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159 Peter A. Toma, The Politics of Food for Peace. Executive-legislative Interaction, Tucson, AZ, 1967, p. 43. 160 Carl Solberg, Hubert Humphrey. A Biography, New York, 1984, p. 214. 161 Statement by Senator John F. Kennedy, Washington DC, October 31, 1960, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=74308 (acc­es­ sed September 8, 2015). 162 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, November 16, 1960. 163 See, for example, Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts. Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2006; for a very critical account of the role of experts in development practice, see Denis Goulet, “Development Experts: The One-Eyed Giants,” World Development 8 (1980), pp. 481–9; for an account of the general historiographic turn to “experts” as actors in policy processes, see, for example, Alexander Nützenadel, Stunde der Ökonomen. Wissenschaft, Politik und Expertenkultur in der Bundesrepublik 1949–1974, Göttingen, 2005; Wilfried Rudloff, “Einleitung: Politikberatung als Gegenstand historischer Betrachtung. Forschungsstand, neue Befunde, übergreifende Fragestellungen,” in Stefan Fisch and Wilfried Rudloff (eds.), Experten und Politik wissenschaftliche Politikberatung in geschichtlicher Perspektive, Berlin, 2004, pp. 13–58. 164 Campbell, History of CARE, pp. 153–4. 165 NARA, RG 469, P 168, Box 9, United States Department of Agriculture, First Comprehensive Study of World Food Gap Announced by Freeman, Washington DC, April 20, 1961; Foreign Agricultural Service/USDA, The World Food Deficit. A First Approximation, March 1961, Washington DC, 1961; see also Ruth Jachertz and Alexander Nützenadel, “Coping with Hunger? Visions of a Global Food System, 1930–1960,” Journal of Global History 6.1 (2011), pp. 99–119; David B. Grigg, The World Food Problem, 1950–1980, Oxford and New York, 1985; C. B. Baker, “U.S. Perspectives on World Food Problems,” Illinois Agricultural Economics 17.2 (1977), pp. 1–6. 166 “Executive Order 10915,” Department of State Bulletin 44 (February 13, 1961), p. 217; see also CARE, Box 94, press release, White House Press Secretary, Presidential for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies, January 24, 1961. 167 Felix Blair, Jr., “Expansion Urged in Food for Peace,” Special to The New York Times, January 25, 1961, p. 16. 168 George S. McGovern, The Third Freedom. Ending Hunger in Our Time, New York, 2001, pp. 52–3. 169 ACVAFS, Box 14, Some Food for Peace Objectives, attachment by ACVAFS representatives Ove R. Nielsen (surplus commodities policy committee) and Edward E. Swanstrom (ACVAFS chairman), March 6, 1961; CARE, Box 50, copy of speech given by Fred Devine, deputy executive director of CARE at the White House Conference on Food for Peace, September 1, 1960. 170 CARE, Box 94, confidential memo by Richard W. Reuter to all chiefs of mission, subj.: Food for Peace Program, February 1, 1961. 171 CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, January 11, 1961. 172 NARA, RG 469, P 168, Box 10, CARE report, International Programs Using American Farm Abundance through CARE. A report to the Honorable Orville L. Freeman, United States Secretary of Agriculture, for consideration in the continuing study of the creative use of government owned agricultural commodities overseas, January 20, 1961. 173 CARE, Box 78, Langdon to Devine, subj.: overseas publicity Title III program, October 30, 1961.

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174 CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, April 25, 1962; CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, July 25, 1962. 175 John F. Kennedy, White House Central Subject Files, Box 121, executive order fixing Richard Reuter’s compensation at US$21,000 per annum, July 31, 1961; CARE Box 1171, MECM, May 25, 1960. 176 “Reuter Can’t Resist Food Post Challenge,” The Evening Star, Washington DC, July 25, 1962, p. A4.

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Food aid and private–public cooperation in Egypt

Building bridges1 You know, I can control whom I choose, but I cannot control who chooses me.2 Gamal Abdel Nasser To gain more complete facts, I called Mr. Eastbrook, Senator Hubert Humphrey, Mrs. Olive Clapper of CARE, and Mr. Wallace Campbell of CARE. My research has led me to the unqualified conclusion that the CARE program [in Egypt …] was wonderful. […] Each jeep in which the Americans traveled carried the American flag. The Americans were the only ones that many of the Egyptians had ever seen, and I am told they made a very good impression.3 Peter Hill to John F. Dulles

When CARE first set up an overseas post in Egypt in 1954, the organization entered a country that had just undergone a revolution. Merely two years earlier, on July 23, 1952, a group of military officers had seized power in Cairo, forcing King Faruq into exile and declaring the former Kingdom of Egypt a republic. The self-proclaimed free officers, hoping to stabilize a country that had just thrown off decades of de facto colonial domination by the French and the British, set sail toward comprehensive modernization measures. These tasks were costly, however, and as Egypt was stuck in a severe economic and social crisis, the new leaders at the Nile welcomed the American offer that was immediately extended by the director of the Point Four Program for American technical assistance.4 However, as the course of events showed, there were divergent expectations in Washington and Cairo regarding the type of American aid.5 Military aid in particular, which was requested by the Egyptians, confronted US government officials with a huge diplomatic problem.6 Not only was there domestic opposition, but the British government was not happy at the prospect of any kind of US involvement in its former imperial backyard.7 Negotiations between Washington and Cairo thus lingered for months without any tangible results. In order not to endanger the new and still fragile relationship to the Egyptians under the leadership of the young and charismatic Gamal Abdel Nasser, US foreign relations strategists eventually came up with the idea of bringing in private voluntary agency food relief programs to serve as a bridge.8 Secretary of State John

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Foster Dulles underscored that it would be “advantageous for the record” to have made such an offer to both the Egyptians and the American relief agencies.9 He thus offered financial incentives such as ocean freight reimbursements and governmentowned surplus commodities free of charge in order to “encourage” private agencies to develop relief programs in Egypt.10 The incentives extended were of definite interest to CARE which was actively searching for new horizons in Asia and the Middle East now that European recovery had been successfully addressed. CARE had only recently acquired a very good reputation within certain government circles for its engagement in a Christmas package program called Operation Reindeer, which had been initiated by President Eisenhower in 1953.11 In this operation CARE and other private relief agencies had distributed government-donated foodstuffs and other goods worth some US$13.5 million to needy people all over the world.12 Encouraged by the success of this type of private–public cooperation, and reacting to the financial promises from Washington, the agency prepared for a mission to Egypt in the summer of 1954.13 This chapter analyzes the installation and development of this CARE mission in what was perceived as a newly developing country, as well as CARE’s evolution into a broker between governmental donors in the United States and the recipients of relief in Egypt. In addition, prerequisites, functional conditions, and conflicts characterizing this new public–private partnership in the field of food aid will be analyzed, with a special focus on the strain the crunch of bilateral relations during the Suez crisis inflicted upon these humanitarian arrangements.14 The chapter examines the attempts of all three parties (the private NGOs, as well as both governments) to use this cooperation as a means to reach particular individual goals, thus shedding light on the fundamental conflicts centered upon the politicization of American humanitarian aid in the context of the deepening Cold War. Great expectations The first CARE staffer in Egypt, regional director Fred Devine, arrived in Cairo on August 21, 1954. One of his first official appointments led him to the American embassy. At this high-level meeting, Devine was offered a gigantic food aid program, involving commodities worth more than US$30 million.15 Being in a position to point to CARE’s recent experience and expertise in handling an even larger program in Yugoslavia, Devine was ultimately given the green light to start negotiations on a food assistance program for 1955 with the Egyptian government. After about three months of discussions, a first official agreement between CARE and the government of the Republic of Egypt was signed.16 The agreement committed CARE to transferring donations from individuals or groups outside of Egypt as well as to procuring government-donated food commodities and delivering them to Egypt.17 In return, the Egyptian government granted tax-, toll-, and duty-free entry

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to all commodities, supplies, and equipment imported by CARE, including property and CARE income generated in Egypt. In addition, the Egyptian government agreed to support CARE in the distribution of commodities to the designated social programs, to provide warehouse facilities, and to protect CARE goods against theft or misappropriation.18 While this contract was essentially between two parties only, it was not an entirely private legal act. All steps taken by CARE in Egypt were accompanied by add-on agreements and legal statements between the American embassy in Cairo and the Egyptian government. In addition, to be eligible for surplus commodities and reimbursement of ocean freight, any voluntary agency serving Egypt had to register with the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid.19 While registration allowed the agencies to increase operational transaction volumes, it also committed them to certain reporting standards and monitoring procedures demanded by US government comptrollers.20 And while CARE repeatedly underscored its character as an entirely private organization, US Ambassador Jefferson Caffery made sure that Egyptian officials grasped that Washington would always have the last say.21 The fact that American government officials kept close track of private relief programs might suggest that private voluntary agencies like CARE were being used by the US government as a mere add-on to official US foreign policy. Seen from a (neo-)realist or theory-of-power perspective that regards states as main (historical) players, there is certainly something to this assumption.22 However, recent research has questioned historiographical perspectives that focus mainly on the agency of national states, thus rejecting various forms of “methodological nationalism” and the corresponding narrowing of cognitive interests.23 In addition, nation-state-­ centered approaches mostly ignore the (ever-present but certainly also rising) agency of private or international organizations in international relations.24 In this case, CARE, or rather its management, had many stakes in forging and shaping the arrangement and invested a lot into the new partnership on the Nile. From CARE’s perspective, the Egyptian program offered the chance to expand its outreach, expertise, and geographical focus as well as an opportunity to serve a maximum number of hungry people with a minimum amount of private (donations and organizational overhead) investment. This partly utilitarian perspective on hunger relief was supplemented by genuine political justifications. As early as in the spring of 1954, CARE had underscored in a widely publicized brochure that American voluntary agencies ought to be the channel of choice for the distribution of American agricultural abundance, arguing that direct US government involvement would almost automatically arouse “suspicion” among the recipients of food aid.25 A couple of months later, in a letter to Harold Stassen from the US Foreign Operations Administration (FOA), CARE officials further stressed that the CARE program in Egypt was of obvious strategic importance because of the “shift in power in that area of the world with the withdrawal of British troops from Suez.”26 By deliberately refraining from humanitarian arguments and by focusing

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instead on political and geostrategic reasons, the CARE management underscored both the organization’s status as an actor in its own right, but also its awareness of national security issues and its readiness to contribute to American policies and diplomacy in the overall context of decolonization and US containment policies in the Middle East.

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Reality bites – setting up a private–public partnership Once the project had started, expectations grew higher and higher, not only in the United States but also among the Egyptian officials. In order to formalize the newly established relations, President Nasser decreed the setting up of an InterMinisterial Committee (IMC) which was to deal with and coordinate American voluntary agency activities in Egypt.27 The committee consisted of representatives from the ministries of Education, Social Affairs and Health and was headed by General Osman Shedid, a high-ranking military official.28 Apart from the committee’s role as a communication and liaison interface, its second – and equally important – function was to process any agricultural commodities that eventually entered the country. After the formative process had been completed, the committee waited eagerly for the promised American surplus food. Egypt had at that point invested a lot into the partnership, as IMC infrastructure had been established, storage facilities had been rented, and office space had been given to some of the American voluntary agencies. When political indecision and misgivings in Washington deferred the start of the program in the spring of 1955, Egyptian representatives were far from happy, as every day without the awaited influx of food was a cost factor.29 Thus, in an act that did not lack some degree of intentional overdramatization, representatives from all three Egyptian ministries eventually visited the American embassy to express “astonishment and shock” at the delays and the rumors they had heard about the  deferral of the private American relief programs.30 CARE too had something to lose. At the beginning of 1955 the relief agency had set up an office in Egypt, flown  in  six American CARE staffers to supervise the distribution of relief goods and commodities, and hired local translators, drivers, and janitors.31 In cooperation with the Egyptians, the American voluntary agencies serving the country had set up an organizational framework that was designed almost exclusively for handling large quantities of US government donations and that was still running idle. That the US government was hesitating to clear the start of the program resulted at least partly from the evaluation of a second Christmas package program, named Operation Poinsettia, which CARE and the IMC had been undertaking in Egypt in 1954/55. Despite the fact that the American embassy had deemed the IMC/ CARE distribution performance to be largely satisfactory, some dark spots had appeared on the picture. It had come to light, for instance, that IMC officers had

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utilized their relative autonomy within the distribution process to attach stickers to the packages that read: “With the best wishes and greetings of the Public Relations Administration of the Armed Forces” – therewith obfuscating the American source of the goods.32 Although US government authorities rated this false labeling episode as a sign of slight IMC “overzealousness,” which had fortunately been corrected by CARE having subsequently added a corrected sticker, the incident had shown that their Egyptian counterparts had their own ideas about the recirculation of the goods they were receiving.33 At the same time there were obvious shortcomings and a degree of bureaucratic confusion on the part of the US government. The passage of Public Law 480 on July 10, 1954 had made substantial amounts of surplus commodities available for relief and technical assistance abroad. However, the administrative involvement of more than half a dozen US government departments led, inevitably, to initial difficulties in coordination and some vagueness concerning the objectives of the overall program.34 It thus took several months and constant negotiations until the long-awaited contract between CARE and the Egyptian ambassador for the enormous sum of 92 million pounds of commodities (mainly powdered milk, cheese, and butter oil) was eventually signed on March 4, 1955 in Washington.35 While CARE arranged for the shipping of the commodities to the port of Alexandria and kept the legal claim and a right to supervise operations, the IMC organized the actual distribution of the food to millions of recipients in school feeding programs, hospitals, and social projects all over Egypt.36 From the perspectives of both CARE and IMC, this arrangement was a win–win situation. CARE entered the government-donated commodities to its accounts on the credit side. This boosted CARE’s overall income and helped pay the significant expenses of the Egyptian program as well as reaping some revenue which could be used to subsidize less affluent CARE offices abroad.37 In addition, due to the maximal involvement of the IMC, personnel costs and administrative expenses for CARE were extraordinarily low, enabling the agency to run the world’s largest private feeding program in 1955 with a mere six American CARE staffers on location in Egypt.38 From the IMC’s perspective, the situation was equally attractive. The Egyptian government had embarked on state planning and had made this the ideological pillar of its “new technocratic modernism.”39 However, centrally planned modernization measures like the Aswan High Dam, for example, were cost-intensive and required large amounts of foreign currency, thus absorbing much of Egypt’s available resources.40 The food commodities entering the country under the CARE contract, by contrast, were almost free of charge and replaced a good part of those food imports which would otherwise have been necessary.41 In addition, the protein-rich American food made a real nutritional as well as a social and economic difference for Egypt. When, in early May 1955, CARE was finally able to report that the first large-scale shipment was arriving at the port of Alexandria, this was accordingly very much to everyone’s relief.42

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A partnership with strings attached The greater part of 1955 was marked by the establishment of tangible working routines between CARE and the IMC. Throughout 1955 and 1956 further private groups, such as the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the Church World Service, and the American Friends Service Committee, had begun advancing into Egypt and the Gaza strip, trying to set up long-term feeding programs as well. In order to coordinate this multiplicity of agencies, the Coordinating Council for Voluntary Agencies in Egypt was formed in September 1955. The growing number of American relief agencies in Egypt produced some stimulus for closer contacts between these  organizations, especially at the field level.43 CARE’s regional director Fred Devine was eventually appointed chairman of the committee, while the social welfare adviser of United States Overseas Administration in Egypt, Howell Williams, acted as secretary.44 The committee also included UNICEF, as an international organization with a focus on children’s welfare and nutrition.45 This constellation of private voluntary groups, US government personnel, and even representatives of international organizations – although it was not entirely new – was an innovative concept in that it brought together three different types of organizations with diverse institutional backgrounds and missions into a hybrid type of civil-society council. The organizations on the spot in Egypt obviously had the feeling of sharing not only a broadly common cause but also a physical field of operation that required some coordination and a set of agreed-upon rules. Despite the fact that ever-growing numbers of agencies were now getting involved in setting up programs in Egypt with the IMC, cooperation between the IMC and CARE was by far the most developed and institutionalized relationship in 1955 and 1956 and – from an economic as well as from an organizational viewpoint – slowly started to pay off. In the fiscal year 1956 CARE and the IMC delivered some 45,000 tons of food to more than 2.5 million recipients in Egypt, mainly schoolchildren and patients with tuberculosis. While the Egyptian side invested about 350,000 Egyptian pounds (about US$1.26 million) into the operations, the US government contribution accounted for well over US$40 million in commodity values and ocean freight reimbursements.46 This ratio obviously met with the IMC’s approval, since the committee pressed for a manifestly augmented program for the fiscal year 1957. Thus, in January 1956, CARE, on behalf of the IMC, submitted a program proposal for the fiscal year 1957 at the United States Overseas Mission in Egypt (USOM/Egypt), suggesting the distribution of more than 510,000 tons of US commodities, mainly wheat and corn, to Egyptian schoolchildren, sick people, and refugees. Had this program been accepted, it would have increased the value and size of the ongoing program more than elevenfold.47 The new program proposal, however, went far beyond the scope of any kind of program envisioned by US government officials. While the US government had rated CARE’s 1955 program as being administered “energetically and competently,”

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there were doubts about the willingness of the IMC to enlist wholeheartedly in the established routines.48 US government spot tests had given some indications that the Egyptians had illegally substituted CARE food rations for monetary grants that should have gone to needy people.49 Even earlier reports were leaked to the press concerning irregular rations for Egyptian customs workers on the payroll of the Ministry of Social Affairs.50 Regardless of the accuracy of such reports, US officials were thoroughly worried by the fact that American supervision was nearly impossible with only six CARE field workers controlling the more than 7,400 distribution centers throughout Egypt.51 Accordingly, social welfare adviser Williams suggested a CARE program check-up by a professional auditor in February 1956.52 In spite of the positive results of the inspection, the American embassy and USOM/Egypt decided to reject the original 1957 CARE program plan, proposing a significantly scaled-down version as an alternative. US agricultural experts felt that too large a program would not only include recipients not “economically needy in terms of Egyptian standards of living,” but might also cause adverse economic effects on food markets and local consumption patterns.53 This fear was triggered by a directive from Washington stating that any “interference [of private feeding programs] with other disposal efforts or normal marketing of farm products” had to be avoided.54 In addition to such economic and technical obstacles there were growing political concerns in Washington. Relations between Egypt and the United States had cooled off after Nasser’s successful consummation of an arms deal with the Czech government in September 1955 and the subsequent failure of US–Egyptian negotiations to reach a peaceful settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict.55 Nasser’s ongoing flirtation with Soviet offers of economic assistance and secret barter agreements over weaponry did not help matters either.56 Thus, after short but intense discussions within the State Department, it was decided that an expanded CARE relief program would run contrary to US intentions of “indicating to the Government of Egypt our displeasure in its policies in the Near East.”57 Even a previously approved small-scale relief program was put on hold, so that by mid-May the CARE stocks in Egypt had almost run out. Reacting to CARE’s insistence, the State Department eventually cleared a three-month transition program on May 10, 1956, but only six days later all possible agreements were rendered null and void by Nasser’s recognition of the People’s Republic of China and his subsequent nationalization of the Suez Canal.58 Crisis, what crisis? The events surrounding the Suez crisis that unfolded in the summer of 1956 opened a new chapter in US–Egyptian relations that eventually crushed any “hope for a new kind of relationship between the Third Word and the great powers” which President Nasser had previously voiced.59 The causes of the Suez crisis – Nasser’s nationalization of the canal region and the (ultimately unsuccessful) military inter-

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vention of France, Great Britain, and Israel – have been thoroughly investigated and will not be retold in detail here.60 What should be underlined, however, is that with the events in Suez and the parallel crisis in Hungary, the “pre-eminence of the Soviet Union and the United States in the global balance of power” was solidified.61 France and Britain as former colonial powers were forced to withdraw from the scene, and Egypt – which had been struggling to maintain neutrality – was integrated into the bipolar order of the Cold War. Egypt’s attempts to establish itself as a third party and proponent of the non-aligned movement ultimately failed.62 Both super­powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, had “fully entered the inter-regional struggle for hegemony” in the Middle East and were not ready to let Egypt off the hook any time soon.63 Even before the fighting and the Israeli invasion of the Canal Zone, Sinai, and the Gaza strip in late October, the humanitarian situation in Egypt’s border territories as well as in the Gaza strip had grown more tense. CARE’s regional director Fred Devine called the American embassy in mid-September, reporting a deterioration of the food situation and the danger of possible food riots among 80,000 “economic refugees” in Gaza, and pressing for the immediate release of US emergency relief commodities for the area.64 His calls for relief were certainly seriously hindered by the local director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, Alexander Squadrilli, who assured the embassy that there was no food crisis pending. Instead, he reported that the Egyptian government was “moving into the vacuum left by CARE.” Nevertheless, Squadrilli pressed for a renewed CARE program and reminded the embassy that failure to do so might not only be judged as a violation of UN resolutions, but also as an attempt to exert “economic pressure against [the] wrong people.” Squadrilli’s hints at a potentially negative public perception of US reluctance to comply with the relief commodity requests from private humanitarian agencies were taken seriously at the Department of State. Incoming press inquiries about the reasons for the discontinuance of the CARE program in Egypt left US Ambassador Raymond Hare highly alarmed. He feared that Egyptian “propaganda attacks” might eventually lead to even more attention from the US media.65 Hare was thus instructed by the State Department to inform international media people that a decision concerning the CARE program was pending and that no negative stance toward the program had been taken.66 At this point CARE was still strikingly patient and referred any press queries on the matter to Washington.67 The agency was obviously not willing to risk an adverse reaction from its government counterparts and was still hoping for approval for a new large relief program in Egypt. Nevertheless, the unsatisfactory situation slowly began to turn into a real problem, as the IMC representatives were starting to lose faith in CARE’s ability to reach an acceptable commodity deal.68 In addition there was growing concern within the organization that the suspension of food aid for the Egyptian program by the Department of State would have serious long-term effects on CARE’s status as a non-governmental agency and its

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non-political posture in general. The government blockade and CARE’s apparent dependence on government funds was repeatedly referred to CARE’s Program and Policy Committee, as a growing number of board members felt that nothing short of CARE’s reputation as an independent humanitarian organization was at stake.69 These debates came to a temporary halt in late October, however, when the fighting over Suez began. The Egyptian mission chief Fred Devine and his family were the last CARE people to be evacuated to Rome, and all mission duties were temporarily handed over to the American embassy or left with local employees until the immediate crisis had eased.70 What had started as a promising multi-party venture and a complex public–private relief partnership broke down under the pressure of political friction caused by regional as well as global political dynamics. From CARE’s perspective, it had become obvious that there were limits to the organization’s agency. During 1956 especially it had become apparent that negotiations with the US government as an equal partner were not on offer. CARE’s patience concerning US government approval of a program for 1957 had not paid off. On the contrary, CARE’s large-scale involvement in this tripartite commodity operation and the close relation with the US government that came with it had turned out to be a risk with the capacity to harm CARE’s status as an independent private organization and humanitarian relief agency. The formerly promising cooperative venture had dragged CARE into a buffer zone between two governments and their geopolitical and strategic power interests. Re-entering Egypt With the military actions in Egypt and the Gaza strip the recently established system of public–private cooperation ruptured; the evacuation of the American CARE officers halted all established routines. The situation, especially in the EgyptianIsraeli border area, in the Gaza strip, El Arish in the Sinai, and Port Said, grew constantly more tense during October and November and eventually developed into a humanitarian crisis. Tens of thousands of Palestinians and Egyptians fled the ground fighting and air strikes, leading to an aggravated refugee problem with a temporary food crisis and severe sanitation problems. On the US government side there was some inconclusiveness regarding how to react to the developing humanitarian challenge.71 In early November 1956 the American Ambassador Raymond Hare recommended channeling American humanitarian relief – if any – via UN agencies, in the hope of getting around a “direct propaganda battle with the Soviets.” Moreover, the embassy wanted to avoid the establishment of any sort of precedent that might have allowed the Egyptian government to press for further US engagement in the region.72 The Department of State agreed to Hare’s proposal and decreed that any US relief should be brought under UN authority or the Red Crescent, or channeled via voluntary agency connections.73

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Following this decision – and possibly triggered by reports about incoming Soviet relief – CARE was successful in securing Department of State clearance for an emergency relief shipment consisting of 10,000 food packages for Port Said in early December.74 But it was a clearance with strings attached: the State Department underlined that its approval was a one-time gesture resulting from humanitarian considerations and was not to be taken as indicative of the department’s position on any future CARE feeding program in Egypt proper.75 With at least a foot back on Egyptian soil, CARE’s executive management decided to change strategy and instructed CARE staffer Alex Sakalis, who in the meantime had returned to Egypt, to re-enter into careful negotiations with the IMC. Sakalis immediately started preparations for a CARE publicity campaign in order to work on CARE’s image in Egypt, which had been suffering lately.76 In January the agency requested 270,000 pounds of wheat flour, cornmeal, and cheese for distribution to 10,000 refugee families in and around Port Said.77 In addition, and starting a testcase in Washington, CARE liaison officers in the capital requested free air transport of 5,000 relief packages containing household items for displaced families in Port Said from the Aviation Division of the Department of State.78 The answer was polite but sobering and CARE’s advance was quickly turned down, indicating that the State Department was not ready to allow CARE back in on the scene.79 These and many other incidents showed that the assessment of the winds from Washington had become a real difficulty for CARE. This informational ice age complicated matters for the CARE staffers who had formerly prided themselves on their excellent relations with US government officials.80 Despite tiny positive signs concerning the establishment of a few short-term relief programs in Gaza and Port Said, no information on a future long-term feeding or rehabilitation program in Egypt was available. This was particularly challenging since it meant that the Egyptian partners, who became more and more impatient, had to be put off once and again. In mid-January 1957, Sakalis reported to New York that General Shedid from the IMC was demanding “greater effectiveness” in CARE’s efforts to establish a new large-scale feeding program in his country.81 This information was as good as it was useless, since CARE’s executive management had been working tirelessly on the Egypt case for months. Particularly CARE regional director Fred Devine was under heavy pressure, as he had to cope with high expectations from the Egyptians as well as uncooperative behavior from US government officials.82 As if to make matters worse, tensions were also building among the private relief agencies within Egypt, all of which were affected by growing insecurity and by their dependency on whatever sparse relief goods were released in Washington. In late April Devine reported back to headquarters in New York that an executive member of the American Friends Service Committee had allegedly stated in front of the IMC that CARE would never get any commodities for Egypt as it had, thanks to AFSC intervention, been virtually kicked out of the country. Clearly frustrated by these rumors of inter-agency competition and even sabotage, Devine admitted:

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Remembering Dick Reuter’s statement that CARE was not in competition with anyone in the field, this means as always I have maintained an openly cooperative attitude toward any and all American Voluntary Agencies […] but, quite frankly, there are about ninety-five pages I could write regarding the attitude and methods taken by other American Agencies to discredit CARE in the Middle East.83

Devine’s feeling of CARE being hoodwinked was not wrong, or at least not entirely so, since there were indeed attempts on the part of other American agencies to intervene against CARE – not only in Egypt but also in Washington. In a meeting with Department of State personnel in May, the executive director of American Middle East Relief, George Barakat, openly condemned what he called CARE “favoritism,” originating “from the ‘high levels’ of the Government” and coming at the expense of his organization.84 Some weeks later in another meeting he went even further and stated that CARE, in the eyes of the Egyptians, was nothing but “an arm of the US government.” Barakat’s rage was clearly the result of the total suspension of food commodities for private humanitarian programs in Egypt by the US government. While, from his perspective, he may have had a point in accusing his dialog partners of playing “politics with the misery of the people,” he was certainly wrong in suspecting favorable treatment for CARE, as the agency was as irritated by the administration’s stance as the rest of the American voluntary agencies.85 However, while Barakat opted for open conflict with the US government, the CARE management decided to embark on a double-track strategy. The first part of the approach was to look for political allies in order to mobilize support and even public pressure, while the second part involved the opening of yet another round of information and appeasement talks in Washington. Concerning the mobilization of possible allies, it was a fortunate occurrence for CARE that Senator Hubert Humphrey, the well-known Minnesota Democrat and a strong and influential supporter of the American food aid system, had visited Egypt in the spring of 1957.86 Humphrey, as chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Foreign Relations, had traveled to Cairo and the border territories where he not only met Egyptian government officials and visited the American overseas posts but also inquired about the overall humanitarian situation in the region. After meeting with CARE and hearing about the troubles the agency was experiencing in getting a feeding program under way, Humphrey reacted promptly. Back in the United States he gave an extensive interview to the New York Times, saying he had been shocked to learn “that the State Department was denying United States surplus food to Egypt” and its hungry people. He also directly cited CARE’s mission chief in Egypt, who confirmed “that Washington had taken no action on proposed expanded food program, submitted nearly a year ago.”87 This public sign of support from Humphrey and his citation of Fred Devine’s statement of criticism toward US government authorities was at least a small ray of light after a long period of stagnation in the Egyptian picture. Accordingly, Devine cabled a meeting dispatch to New York and asked for an immediate reaction to Humphrey’s request for a complete report on CARE’s

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program history in Egypt. He added that Humphrey had offered to subpoena all members of the US embassy and CARE representatives before his committee in Washington if the CARE programs in Egypt were to be blocked much longer.88 This threatened “crossing the blades” did indeed take place. After some weeks in which nothing changed regarding the status quo in Egypt, Senator Humphrey summoned a delegate officer from the State Department to a hearing in front of the Senate subcommittee in early summer 1957.89 In order to explain its policy and the course of events leading to the suspension of the CARE program, the State Department even prepared a confidential letter to Humphrey. The letter openly stated that the CARE program had been postponed because the food it had provided was seen as an “important item of budgetary support to the Egyptian Government” – and that the suspension of the program was accordingly being used as a disciplinary measure in US–Egyptian relations.90 The fact that Humphrey was not exactly impressed by these explanations became evident only a few days later when he again used his position to publicly attack the “Administration’s policy towards the Middle East as ‘too much concerned with kings and oil – too little with people and water.’” In this second article he also mentioned CARE and the blow American prestige had suffered in the Middle East due to the curtailment of “CARE food shipments to the hungry citizens of Egypt.”91 Humphrey’s open assaults and his public statements intensified the ongoing debate about the whole CARE in Egypt situation within the Department of State, forcing officials to break cover and find an official stance regarding the matter. Even though only a proportion of the internal documents have been preserved or declassified, available sources show that the affair was discussed within the highest circles of the Department of State.92 Opinions were fairly diverse, however. Those who emphasized that any action that implied that the voluntary agency program was being used as a political weapon would endanger the future of the whole (supposedly apolitical) American food aid program were opposed by those who feared public outrage but clung to the position that any “program of the type and size envisioned by CARE” was in reality a United States economic assistance program and as such not advisable.93 Since neither the Bureau for Economic Affairs nor the Bureau for Public Relations were able to come to a decision, the whole situation virtually imploded. If there had been any hopes for a new dynamic concerning this stand-off with CARE in Egypt being actuated by a final and stringent policy directive from the Department of State, in August 1957 they had to be buried – temporarily at least. Hence, it must have felt ironic when CARE’s executive director Richard Reuter, in a meeting at the Department of State, inquired if the high level in the department was “really acquainted” with the effort that CARE had been making in Egypt.94 When, in December 1957, USOM/Egypt rejected a rather small program proposal for another 10,000 relief packages to Port Said, it dawned on even the last CARE staffer that Washington had spoken and that there would not be a new CARE project in the region any time soon.95

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The situation in Egypt had eventually turned into a cul de sac, not only for CARE in particular but, on a more general level, also in terms of international state diplomacy. By the end of 1957 the implications of the Eisenhower Doctrine – the call for containment of the Middle East – had borne mixed results, as demonstrated by the unification of Syria and Egypt into the United Arab Republic in February 1958.96 As a matter of fact, Egypt had for the most part proved to be “immune from American financial coercion.”97 While American political pressure on Nasser and his government had been largely ineffective, the explicit suspension of the voluntary agency program had had severe consequences for the Egyptian population on a micro­economic and social level. The lack of foreign food commodities put a complete halt to the school feeding program in Egypt, thus inflicting the most harm to the most vulnerable elements of Egyptian society.98 US reluctance to lend a helping hand to the needy in Egypt was accordingly not well received, either in Egypt or at home. With Hubert Humphrey, CARE managed to mobilize a powerful ally within the Senate who dared to voice strong criticism of the administration’s shortfalls and denounce the State Department’s strategy of using food as a weapon in political conflict. But within the government bureaucracy as well, the strategy of openly denying food aid via private person-to-person channels raised growing criticism. The Egyptian case put the very concept of food aid as a means of generating goodwill for America and its citizens abroad into question – not only in the Middle East but elsewhere as well. Ironically, however, it had been precisely these considerations and “minority dissents” within the State Department that had led to the political stalemate in the first place.99 In fact, it might have been much easier for an organization such as CARE to cope with a definitive rejection of its program proposal from the US government earlier on, so that management could have come up with an orderly phase-out strategy. Instead, the lack of clarity and of official directive from the Department of State prevented both an organized phase-out and any chance to develop some sort of diplomatic counter-strategy. By the end of 1957 CARE’s management had grown so disenchanted und frustrated that its only tangible option was to go public and therefore risk open confrontation with the US government. With a little help from my friends… In January 1958 Hubert Humphrey personally contacted Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and specifically asked for a “justification” regarding the suspension of the CARE program.100 A little later, in early February, a series of articles in major American newspapers addressed the suspension of CARE programs in Egypt and clearly denounced the administration’s attitude toward private voluntary agency programs in general and hungry Egyptian children in particular.101 From the way the whole issue was presented it was clear that CARE and Senator Humphrey had directly provided this information to the papers, launching an outright media campaign in order to increase pressure on the State Department. What followed

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were not only further articles in daily papers but also a whole wave of letters from concerned citizens, senators, and congressmen asking for clarifications and decrying what they perceived as “Un-American action.”102 In the large pile of letters the Department’s public relations office had to answer, there was even a letter from John F. Kennedy – at that time Senator of Massachusetts – asking for a report concerning the CARE issue.103 This growing media initiative and public outcry via letters and queries to public representatives overlapped with general efforts by the US administration to foster a certain amount of relaxation in cultural and economic relations with what was now the United Arab Republic (UAR). John Foster Dulles, who had initially perceived of the creation of the UAR as a “Soviet victory,” had come to understand that this was not exactly the case.104 By March 1958 government officials and strategists admitted that the actions taken toward Syria and Egypt had not “concurrently produced desirable results in either political or economic terms.”105 The officials thus proposed a four-step plan, starting with the immediate delivery of withheld technical equipment and the lifting of trade restrictions on certain “quasi-military items” to Egypt. As a second step, and only if the United Arab Republic were to “adopt a more neutral position between the East and West,” the re-initiation of voluntary agency programs by CARE and other interested agencies was suggested.106 This information traveled with astonishing speed, and only a few days later Alexander Sakalis and Richard Reuter, who had immediately flown to Egypt, called for a meeting at the American embassy in Cairo. At this meeting neither the ambassador nor the present United States overseas mission personnel were ready to give open endorsement for CARE to enter into renewed negotiations with the Egyptians. Reuter, however, who had been informed about the positive results of CARE talks with Undersecretary of State Christian Herter in Washington, decided to take the risk and subsequently entered into talks with the Egyptian IMC.107 Reuter’s optimism paid off, as only a few days later Secretary of State Dulles authorized steps I and II in the “relaxation of US-UAR relations.”108 Parallel to this, CARE New York received written notice that the Department of State was now “disposed to give sympathetic consideration to a possible request by the United Arab republic (Egypt) for a modest CARE program.”109 Finally, the official CARE program proposal for a ten-month feeding program was submitted that would involve the distribution of approximately 350 million pounds of commodities (wheat, corn, milk powder, and cheese) to almost 2.5 million schoolchildren and sick people in Egypt.110 If CARE staffers had complained a few months earlier that this was “obviously not the time for receiving American aid openly and with public praise,” this time around CARE received a lot of local publicity in Egypt.111 This indicated a careful new opening for US–Egyptian relations, of which the large private American food aid programs had become an indicator and visible sign.112 Despite the fact that the ceremony CARE had organized on occasion of the resumption of the CARE program in Egypt fell through (none of the more than thirty journalists invited had

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been allowed to enter the docks where the cargoes were arriving, due to Egyptian naval exercises), all parties involved showed great confidence in positive future relations with the Egyptians.113 The resumption of voluntary agency programs did indeed end the ice age between the United States and the United Arab Republic. And while further means were employed to relax diplomatic relations, it is arguable that none of these initiatives gained as much visibility or at least real impact on a practical level in Egypt as the resumption of the large-scale school feeding program with CARE commodities. From the perspective of CARE as a private relief agency, this eventual victory certainly had a bittersweet aftertaste. While the agency had managed to mobilize tremendous public support, so that the resumption of the program appeared as a successful enforcement of private humanitarian concerns, it still committed it to business as usual in a setting which had actually not changed very much.114 The fact that the US government was still in possession of the central resource – food ­commodities – was of course a constant reminder that the general problem or context had not changed. It is an interesting side note that after the Egypt crisis, several religious relief agencies, most prominently Lutheran World Relief, decided to downgrade their entanglement with government-owned food resources, underscoring the “obvious danger” of being “regarded as an instrument of government.”115 CARE, however, decided to take the exact opposite stance. Even against the backdrop of recent experiences and lessons learned in Egypt, the agency opted to continue and even invest more deeply in its partnership with the US government. Apart from financial and general humanitarian reasons, it was to some extent precisely because of the politicized setting, “at a time when Soviet Russia [was] rising as a competitor to the United States in the field of foreign aid,” that CARE stressed the necessity of this private–public venture in the food relief sector. Accordingly, in a statement at a White House conference in 1960, CARE’s Fred Devine openly embraced the status quo, emphasizing that the essential “voluntary and non-political character of U.S. aid” could only be maintained in close cooperation with CARE and other private voluntary agencies.116 Given the picture presented in this chapter as well as this inside account of CARE’s role within the framework of US humanitarian relief to foreign countries, the question of whether CARE was in reality an instrument of official US foreign policy or not is perhaps wrongly put. There can be no doubt that CARE relief was indeed part of US foreign policy, at least in the eyes of most US government officials. In addition, it is true that in a world of states, no form of foreign aid will ever be apolitical or neutral (at least as far as long-term political and economic consequences are concerned), as Timothy Mitchell has convincingly argued.117 The question remains, however, as to what extent CARE’s aid was indeed identified as politicized by donors and recipients alike, and how exactly all parties involved tried to use the overall arrangement to advance their interests and maximize their gains. From this perspective, the Egyptian experience served as a huge litmus test, designed to fathom both

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the possibilities and the limitations of such a partnership under field conditions. The events in Egypt were, in addition, a milestone, paving the way toward a new understanding of public–private cooperation in the domain of American humanitarian aid. The American voluntary agencies, with CARE at their forefront, were able to demonstrate that they were claiming a certain dance space for themselves and that their willingness to allow the US government to tread on their feet was ultimately limited. Even if the US government, being in possession of central resources, had the upper hand in many regards, CARE had demonstrated that it was not only in a position to mobilize considerable public outcry and an impressive line-up of influential supporters, but also that any democratic government should take a vital self-interest in respecting the formal independence of private humanitarian players. Notes  1 A version of this chapter has been published as an article in German; see Heike Wieters, “Krisen, Kompromisse, Kalter Krieg. Die amerikanische NGO CARE und die Anfänge humanitärer Nahrungsmittelhilfe in Ägypten, 1954–1958,” Werkstatt Geschichte 68 (2015), pp. 45–63.  2 Statement of the Egyptian President Nasser, quoted in Muhammad Hasanayn Heikal, The Cairo Documents. The Inside Story of Nasser and his Relationship with World Leaders, Rebels, and Statesmen, Garden City, NY, 1973, p. 25.  3 NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files 1955–59, Box 4878, Peter Hill to John Foster Dulles, February 11, 1958.  4 William J. Burns, Economic Aid and American Policy toward Egypt, 1955–1981, Albany, NY, 1985, p. 11.  5 Kirk J. Beattie, Egypt during the Nasser Years. Ideology, Politics, and Civil Society, Boulder, CO, 1994, p. 72.  6 Burns, Economic Aid and American Policy, p. 13; see also Heikal, The Cairo Documents, p. 36.  7 Philipp A. Walker, Jr., “Lyndon B. Johnson’s Senate Foreign Policy Activism. The Suez Canal Crisis, a Reappraisal,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 26.4 (1996), pp. 996–1008 (pp. 996–8); on the British objections, see Roby Carol Barrett, The Greater Middle East and the Cold War. US Foreign Policy under Eisenhower and Kennedy, London, 2007, pp. 17–18.  8 An axiomatic statement about the general advisability of integrating voluntary efforts into US technical assistance had been issued as early as 1949; see NARA, RG 353, A1400A, Box 86, policy paper enlisting and aiding participation by private non-profit groups in the Point IV Program, Interdepartmental Advisory Committee on Technical Assistance (State Department), May 31, 1949, quoted from David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission. Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order, Princeton, NJ, 2010, p. 105. For the Egyptian case, enquiries were first made by the Department of State in early 1953; see NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files 1950–54, Box 5384, airgram from Department of State to American Embassy Cairo, May 29, 1953.  9 NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files 1950–54, Box 5384, John Foster Dulles (Department of State) to American Embassy in Cairo, June 29, 1953. 10 NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files 1950–54, Box 5384, joint state FOA message (Dulles) to American Embassy in Cairo, May 18, 1954.

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11 This operation was meant as “a one-time gesture aimed at wide distribution of individual packages to personalize a gift from the American people to those needy families or individuals who would most welcome it”; see NARA, RG 469, UD 661, Box 1, secret FDA digest concerning “operation reindeer,” date blurred, [September] 29, 1953. 12 Operation Reindeer had a strong focus on Europe and Latin America though. 13 CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, June 2, 1954; MBDM, July 7, 1954. 14 See, for example, Beth Osborne Daponte and Shannon Bade, “How the Private Food Assistance Network Evolved. Interactions between Public and Private Responses to Hunger,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 35 (2006), pp. 668–90 (pp. 669–75). 15 NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files 1950–54, Box 5384, foreign service dispatch, American Embassy in Cairo to Department of State, August 25, 1954. 16 CARE, Box 23, agreement between the Government of the Republic of Egypt and Cooperative for American Remittances to Everywhere, Inc., October 1, 1954; copy of agreement filed at NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files 1955–59, Box 4878. 17 NARA, RG 469, UD 1171, Box 4, cable Paul C. French (CARE) to American Embassy Cairo, transferred to Abdel Nabi (Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs), October 29, 1954. 18 CARE, Box 23, agreement between the Government of the Republic of Egypt and Cooperative for American Remittances to Everywhere, Inc., October 1, 1954; copy of agreement filed at NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files 1955–59, Box 4878. 19 The ACVFA was (after FOA was dissolved in 1954) transferred to the ICA and ultimately placed as a subcommittee under the authority of the Department of State. 20 NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files 1950–54, Box 5384, joint FOA/Department of State message, December 7, 1954. The registered agencies were the American Friends Service Committee, CARE, American Middle East Relief, Church World Service, and War Relief Services (National Catholic Welfare Conference). 21 NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files 1950–54, Box 5384, of understanding, Jefferson Caffery (American Ambassador Egypt) to Mahmud Fawsi (Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs), October 30, 1954. 22 John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, New York, 2001, pp. 29–54. 23 The term was first used by the sociologist Ulrich Beck, “The Terrorist Threat. World Risk Society Revisited,” Theory, Culture and Society 19.4 (2002), pp. 39–54 (pp. 53–4); on the larger context of the debate in the social sciences, see Daniel Chernilo, A Social Theory of the Nation-state. The Political Forms of Modernity beyond Methodological Nationalism, London, 2007, particularly ch. 1. 24 See, for example, Sandrine Kott, “International Organizations. A Field of Research for a Global History,” Studies in Contemporary History 8.3 (2011), pp. 446–50; Mira Wilkens, “The History of Multinational Enterprise,” in Alan M. Rugman and Thomas L. Brewer (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of International Business, Oxford, 2003, pp. 3–35; Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the World. International Organizations in Global Politics, Ithaca, NY, 2004. 25 CARE, Box 26, The Farm Surplus and Hungry People. A proposal by CARE, a non-sectarian, non-profit relief organization, covering the possible use of farm surplus around the world as the basis of a national policy, by Paul Comly French, February 1954, 18 pages. 26 NARA, RG 469, UD544, Box 3, Paul French (CARE) to Harold Stassen (FOA), November 8, 1954. 27 NARA, RG 469, UD 1169, Box 3, FOA report (Egypt to ICA Washington DC) on activities in Egypt in July, August 17, 1955.

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28 Initially the IMC had been headed by Hassan Ibraim, Minister of National Production, but he was soon replaced by Shedid; see NARA, RG 469, UD 1169, Box 3, FOA report (Egypt to ICA Washington DC) on activities in Egypt in July, August 17, 1955. 29 NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files 1955–59, Box 4878, cable, Department of State to American Embassy Cairo, January 14, 1955; reply, American Embassy Cairo to Department of State, January 18, 1955. 30 NARA, RG 59, C0027, Reel 13, Sign 874.49, cable, American Embassy in Cairo to Secretary of State, January 19, 1955. 31 CARE, Box 839, discursive report, Egypt mission as of December 1955, Fred W. Devine (CARE). 32 NARA, RG 469, Entry 1186, Box 1, copy of chronological record of CARE Christmas food parcel program, undated [January 1955]. 33 NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files 1955–59, Box 4878, Foreign Service Dispatch, Robert  M. Carr (Counselor for Economic Affairs, American Embassy Cairo) to Department  of  State,  enclosed report on 1954 food package program, Egypt, March 26, 1955. 34 Robert R. Sullivan, “The Politics of Altruism: An Introduction to the Food-for-Peace Partnership between the United States Government and Voluntary Relief Agencies,” The Western Political Quarterly 23.4 (1970), pp. 762–8 (p. 764); Mitchel B. Wallerstein, Food for War – Food for Peace. United States Food Aid in a Global Context, Cambridge, MA, 1980, pp. 34–6; Kristin L. Ahlberg, Transplanting the Great Society. Lyndon Johnson and Food for Peace, Columbia, MO, 2008, pp. 11–26. 35 NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files 1955–59, Box 4878, cable, Department of State to American Embassy Cairo, January 14, 1955; reply, American Embassy Cairo to Department of State, January 18, 1955; see also CARE, Box 839, discursive report, Egypt mission as of December 1955, Fred W. Devine (CARE). 36 JFK, Richard W. Reuter personal papers, Box 12, information sheet CARE school feeding program, undated [1962]. 37 CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, April 18, 1956. 38 NARA, RG 469, UD 1169, Box 1, Howell Williams (Social Welfare Advisor, USOM/Egypt) “Current Programs of Food Distribution in Egypt Under Provisions if Title III, Public Law 480,” November 30, 1955. 39 Roel Meijer, The Quest for Modernity. Secular Liberal and Left-wing Political Thought in Egypt, 1945–1958, London, 2002, p. 174. 40 Patrick O’Brien, The Revolution in Egypt’s Economic System, London, 1966, pp. 78–82; Robert Mabro, The Egyptian Economy, 1952–1972, Oxford, 1974, pp. 83–106. 41 Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts. Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity, Berkeley, CA, 2002, pp. 209–43. 42 See “Surplus Food for Egypt,” The New York Times, April 10, 1955, p. 12; “US Food Aid Pours into Egypt,” Christian Science Monitor, June 4, 1955, p. 7. 43 This initiative was indeed mainly in the interest of the other agencies, since as early as September 1954 the umbrella organization ACVAFS had raised accusations that CARE had left the impression with Egyptian officials that it represented “all United States accredited voluntary agencies” in Egypt; see ACVAFS, Box 29, Charlotte Owen (ACVAFS) to Paul Comly French (CARE), September 24, 1954. 44 NARA, RG 469, UD 1171, Box 47, minutes of coordinating council for voluntary agencies meeting, September 10, 1955, Cairo, Egypt.

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45 NARA, RG 469, UD 1169, Box 3, airgram, FOA/Egypt to ICA/Washington, monthly report for August, 1955, p. 2; NARA, RG 469, UD 116971, Box 47, airgram, FOA/Egypt to ICA/Washington, report on food distribution by voluntary agencies, September 1955, October 21, 1955. 46 NARA, RG 469, UD 1171, Box 39, USOM/Egypt, for files, June 7, 1956 (exchange rate 1956: US$1 = 0.36 EP); NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files 1955–59, Box 4878, NEA office John Shaw to Mr. Wilkins, subj.: CARE program in Egypt, May 10, 1956. 47 NARA, RG 469, UD 1171, Box 47, airgram, FOA/Egypt to ICA/Washington, report on food distribution by voluntary agencies, June 1956, August 18, 1956. 48 Ibid., p. 2. 49 NARA, RG 469, UD 1171, Box 47, airgram, FOA/Egypt to ICA/Washington, report on food distribution by voluntary agencies, October 1955, November 25, 1955, p. 1. 50 NARA, RG 469, UD 1171, Box 47, airgram, FOA/Egypt to ICA/Washington, report on food distribution by voluntary agencies, September 1955, October 21, 1955, p. 2. 51 NARA, RG 469, UD 1171, Box 47, airgram, FOA/Egypt to ICA/Washington, report on food distribution by voluntary agencies, September 1955, October 21, 1955, p. 2. 52 NARA, RG 469, UD 1171, Box 47, internal memo Howell Williams (Social Welfare Advisor, USOM/Egypt) to William H. Stubbs (Comptroller, USOM/Egypt), February 24, 1956. 53 NARA, RG 59, Coo27, Reel 13. Signature 874.49, confidential airgram USOM/Egypt to ICA/Washington, subj.: GOE proposed agriculture commodity distribution program, FY 1957, Title III, PL 480, March 2, 1956. 54 NARA, RG 469, UD 1171, Box 39, airgram, ICA/Washington to USOM/Egypt, March 20, 1956. 55 Barrett, The Greater Middle East, pp. 33–4; Peter L. Hahn, The United States, Great Britain, and Egypt, 1945–1956. Strategy and Diplomacy in the Early Cold War, Chapel Hill, NC, 1991, pp. 194–5. 56 See Burns, Economic Aid and American Policy, pp. 52–6, 72–5; Cole C. Kingseed, Eisenhower and the Suez Crisis of 1956, Baton Rouge, LA, 1995, pp. 32–3. 57 NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files 1955–59, Box 4878, secret office memorandum, Department of State, NEA, Fraser Wilkins to William S. Roundtree, March 15, 1956; NARA, RG 59, C0027, Reel 13, Sign. 874.49, William McCahoon (ACVFA (ICA)/Washington) to John F. Shaw (Deputy Officer in Charge of Economic Affairs, Near East, Department of State), March 9, 1956. 58 NARA, RG 59, C0027, Reel 13, Sign. 874.49, Shaw to Wilkins (Department of State, Near East), May 10, 1956; see also John Robinson Beal, John Foster Dulles. 1888–1959, New York, 1959, p. 257; Burns, Economic Aid and American Policy, pp. 80–3. 59 Ussama Makdisi, “‘Anti-Americanism’ in the Arab World: An Interpretation of a Brief History,” The Journal of American History 89.2 (2002), pp. 538–57 (p. 550). 60 For a detailed analysis of the events leading to the Suez crisis, see Diane B. Kunz, The Economic Diplomacy of the Suez Crisis, Chapel Hill, NC, 1991; Donald Neff and Lou Harpenau, Warriors at Suez. Eisenhower Takes America into the Middle East, Washington DC, 1982; Hahn, United States and Great Britain, pp. 180–239; William Roger Louis, Ends of British Imperialism. The Scramble for Empire, Suez and Decolonization; Collected Essays, London, 2006; see essays on Suez, pp. 589–725; Muhammad Abd el-Wahab Sayed-Ahmed, Nasser and American Foreign Policy, 1952–1956, London, 1989, pp. 97–145; Michael B. Oren, “Escalation to Suez: The Egypt-Israel Border War, 1949–56,” Journal of Contemporary History 24.2 (1989), pp. 347–73.

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61 Brian McCauley, “Hungary and Suez, 1956: The Limits of Soviet and American Power,” Journal of Contemporary History 16.4 (1981), pp. 777–800 (p. 794). 62 Dietmar Rothermund, “The Era of Non-alignment,” in Nataša Mišković et al. (eds.), The Non-aligned Movement and the Cold War. Delhi-Bandung-Belgrade, London and New York, 2014, pp. 19–34 (pp. 22–5). 63 Ray Takeyh, The Origins of the Eisenhower Doctrine. The US, Britain and Nasser’s Egypt, 1953–57, Basingstoke, 2000, pp. 142–4; see also Gail E. Meyer, Egypt and the United States. The Formative Years, Rutherford, NJ, 1980, pp. 181–96. 64 NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files 1955–59, Box 4878, cable, Hart (USOM/Egypt) to Secretary of State (Department of State/Washington DC), September 14, 1956. 65 NARA, RG 59, C0027, Reel 13, Sign. 874.49, telegram, Ambassador Raymond Hare USOM/ Egypt to John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State (Department of State/Washington), September 21, 1956. 66 NARA, RG 59, C0027, Reel 13, Sign. 874.49, telegram, Department of State to American Embassy/Egypt, September 24, 1956. 67 NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files 1955–59, cable, Raymond Hare (American Embassy/ Egypt) to John Foster Dulles (Department of State), September 22, 1956. 68 NARA, RG 59, C0027, Reel 13, Sign. 874.49, cable, Hollister (ICA Washington) to American Embassy Cairo, August 10, 1956. 69 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, September 26, 1956. 70 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, November 28, 1956. 71 See, for example, “Food Big Problem in Gaza,” Special to The New York Times, November 20, 1956, p. 3. 72 NARA, RG 59, C0027, Reel 13, Sign. 874.49, telegram, Raymond Hare to John Foster Dulles, November 7, 1956. 73 NARA, RG 59, C0027, Reel 13, Sign. 874.49, telegram, Department of State to American Embassy/Cairo, November 9, 1956. 74 NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files, 1955–59, telegram, Ambassador Raymond Hare to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, November 26, 1956. 75 NARA, RG 59, C0027, Reel 13, Sign. 874.49, telegram, Department of State to American Embassy/Cairo, December 11, 1956. 76 CARE, Box 284, Alex Sakalis (CARE Egypt) to CARE New York (Frank Mayers), January 5, 1957. 77 NARA, RG 59, C0027, Reel 13, Sign. 874.49, office George Rotunno (ICA/Washington) to Miss Edlen Fogarty (Department of State), January 14, 1957. 78 NARA, RG 59 Central Decimal Files 1955–59, Box 4878, Olive Clapper (CARE Washington DC) to Henry Snowden (Director of Aviation Division, Department of State/Washington DC), January 22, 1957. 79 NARA, RG 59 Central Decimal Files 1955–59, Box 4878, Snowden to Clapper, January 28, 1957. 80 See Heike Wieters, “Of Heart-felt Charity and Billion Dollar Enterprise. From Post-war Relief to Humanitarian Relief to ‘Everywhere’ – CARE, Inc. in Search of a New Mission,” in Marc Frey, Sönke Kunkel, and Corinna Unger (eds.), International Organizations and Development, 1945–1990, Basingstoke, 2014, pp. 220–39. 81 CARE, Box 130, Alexander Sakalis (CARE Egypt) to Francis X. Mayers, January 15, 1957. 82 CARE, Box 284, Fred Devine to Abe Becker, subj.: self-help kits for Port Said displaced people, March 12, 1957.

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83 CARE, Box 130, Fred Devine (CARE Egypt) to Frank Goffio (CARE NY) April 27, 1957. 84 NARA, RG 59 Central Decimal Files 1955–59, Box 4878, of conversation between George Barakat (American Middle East Relief, New York) and Edward L. Waggoner (Department of State, NE/Washington), May 3, 1957. 85 NARA, RG 59 Central Decimal Files 1955–59, Box 4878, of conversation between George Barakat (American Middle East Relief, New York) and Mr. Roberts (Department of State, NE/Washington), May 31, 1957, p. 2. 86 Hubert Horatio Humphrey became vice president of the United States during the second Lyndon B. Johnson presidency from 1965 to 1969. As a spokesman for US farmers’ interests he was also one of the most ardent supporters of using American abundance for humanitarian purposes; see, for example, Hubert Humphrey, Food and Fiber as a Force for Freedom. Report for the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry US Senate, Washington DC, 1959; for a general appraisal of Humphrey’s political career, see Carl Solberg, Hubert Humphrey. A Biography, New York, 1984. 87 “U.S. Slight to Egypt ‘Shocks’ Humphrey,” The New York Times, May 2, 1957. 88 CARE, Box 130, undated cable, Fred Devine (CARE Egypt) to CARE NYC [April 1957]. 89 NARA, RG 59, C0027, Reel 13, Sign. 874.49, file copy (author coded) announcing the hearing and a need for further information regarding the Department of State’s policy on CARE in Egypt, June 26, 1957. 90 NARA, RG 59, C0027, Reel 13, Sign. 874.49, file copy of confidential draft to Senator Humphrey, William Roundtree (NEA) to Thorsten Kallijarvi, June 27, 1957. 91 “Humphrey Asks More Middle East Aid,” The Washington Post, July 5, 1957, p. A5. 92 NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files 1955–59, Box 4878, confidential William S. Roundtree (Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern, South Asian, and African Affairs) to Under Secretary Christian A. Herter, July 12, 1957. 93 NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files 1955–59, Box 4878, secret draft of position paper on CARE and other voluntary agency programs in Egypt, William S. Roundtree (DoS/NEA) to Secretary of State Dulles, August 3, 1957; NARA, RG 59, C0027, Reel 13, Sign. 874.49, inter-office memorandum, Department of State, Willis C. Armstrong (DoS/Bureau of Economics) to Berry (DoS/Near Eastern Affairs), July 22, 1957; secret office memo, Edwin M. Kretzmann to William S. Roundtree, subj.: proposed to Secretary re the CARE program for Egypt, August 2, 1957. 94 NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files 1955–59, Box 4878, of conversation, participants of meeting: Richard Reuter, Walter Williams, Robert Murphy, September 26, 1957. 95 CARE, Box 130, Alexander Sakalis (CARE Egypt) to Bill Langdon (CARE NY), December 13, 1957. 96 Meijer, The Quest for Modernity, pp. 188–9; for a detailed account on the effects of US policies and intervention in the whole region, see Egya N. Sangmuah, “Eisenhower and Containment in North Africa, 1956–1960,” Middle East Journal 44.1 (1990), pp. 76–91; Irene L. Gendzier, Notes from the Minefield. United States Intervention in Lebanon and the Middle East, 1945–1958, New York, 2006. 97 Diane B. Kunz, Butter and Guns. America’s Cold War Economic Diplomacy, New York, 1997, p. 92. 98 Regarding the concept of vulnerability, see Greg Bankoff and Dorothea Hilhorst, “Introduction. Mapping Vulnerability,” in Greg Bankoff et al. (eds.), Mapping Vulnerability. Disasters, Development, and People, London, 2004, pp. 1–9. 99 NARA, RG 59, C00027, Reel 14, Sign. 874.56, Shaw to Rockwell, August 30, 1957.

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100 NARA, RG 59, A1–1321, Box 11, Hubert Humphrey to John Foster Dulles, January 3, 1958; see also NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files 1955–59, Box 4878, reply, Assistant Secretary of State William B. Macomber to Senator Hubert Humphrey, January 16, 1958. 101 “Humphrey Scores US Middle East Role,” The New York Times, February 2, 1958, p. 10; “No CARE for Egypt?,” Washington Post and Times Herald, February 2, 1958, p. E4. 102 NARA, RG 59, C0027, Reel 13, Sign. 874.49, copy of Lt. Gen. Stratemeyer to Senator Holland, April 8, 1957. 103 NARA, RG 59, A1–1321, Box 11, Senator John F. Kennedy to liaison officer at Department of State, February 15, 1958. 104 Interestingly enough it was his brother Allen, then director of the CIA, who moderated his judgment; see Malik Mufti, Sovereign Creations. Pan-Arabism and Political order in Syria and Iraq, Ithaca, NY, 1996, p. 100. 105 NARA, RG 59, A1–1321, Box 11, copy of inter-office by Stuart Rockwell and William S. Roundtree, “Proposed Relaxation on our Restrictions on the Cultural and Economic Relations with the United Arab Republic,” March 17, 1958. 106 Ibid., p. 3. 107 NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files 1955–59, Box 4878, foreign service despatch, Roswell, Whitman (Economic Counselor American Embassy Cairo) to Department of State, March 25, 1958. 108 NARA, RG 59, A1–1321, Box 11, copy of confidential (ICA), effect on ICA of proposed plan for restoration of normal relations with UAR (Egypt), recommended course of action, April 17, 1958. 109 NARA, RG 59, A1–1321, Box 11, copy of John W. MacDonald (executive secretary Department of State) to Wallace B. Campbell (CARE/Cooperative League of the United States), April 18, 1958. 110 NARA, RG 268, UD499, Box 144, and enclosed annual plan for CARE program in Egypt (of June 26, 1958), Fred Devine (CARE) to William H. Stubbs (Controller USOM/Egypt), June 28, 1958. 111 CARE, Box 130, Alexander Sakalis (CARE Egypt) to Francis X. Mayers, January 15, 1957. 112 See Al Ahram, September 6, 1958, p. 1, first column; “CARE will send Egypt $8 m. worth of goods,” Egyptian Mail, September 6, 1958, p. 3 (CARE, Box 17). 113 NARA, RG 59, A1–1321, Box 11, of conversation between Richard Reuter (CARE), John F. Shaw and William Eagleton (Department of State), subj.: recent visit to Egypt by CARE official, November 14, 1958. 114 “CARE Expands Aid to Egypt,” Christian Science Monitor, March 12, 1958, p. 13; “US Changing Policy Towards Arab Republic,” Los Angeles Times, April 28, 1958; “Shipments of US Foods Will Again Go to Pupils in Egypt,” Special to The New York Times, September 5, 1958, p. 9. 115 NARA, RG 469, UD 191A, Box 81, copy of statement by Paul C. Empie on behalf of Lutheran World Relief before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, July 8, 1959, p. 2; see also Rachel M. McCleary, Global Compassion. Private Voluntary Organizations and U.S. Foreign Policy since 1939, Oxford and New York, 2009, pp. 79–80. 116 CARE, Box 50, manuscript of speech given by Fred Devine at the White House Conference on Food for Peace, September 1, 1960. 117 Mitchell, Rule of Experts, pp. 240–3.

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From American relief to international development cooperation (1961–68)

Expanding the firm – the promise and peril of scale [F]ew business and political leaders had a truly global outlook, one of a world without significant borders, until the 1980s. […] Few understood how treating the world as a single marketplace both for sourcing and producing goods and for serving customers was transforming the marketplace.1 It is imperative that we may move even faster toward integrating our feeding program with our developmental goals. […] Failure to do so will result in the loss of our pre-eminent position among the voluntary agencies, but more important, we will have failed to respond effectively to one of the world’s most pressing and basic needs.2

There is more to organizational success than financial stability and the bottom line, a finding that is particularly true for non-profit enterprises. However, non-profit legitimacy is as much dependent on sound operations and financial arguments as it is on the accomplishment of societal goals and the fulfillment of a particular mission. Given the primacy of the non-distributional constraint in non-profit enterprises, organizational growth or expansion is unlikely to be driven solely by the profit interests of owners or shareholders.3 Hence, other reasons and stakeholder interests have to be put forward to explain non-profit growth and organizational expansion.4 Regarding CARE, it could be argued on a general level that agendas like fighting hunger or providing humanitarian aid actually demand large-scale operations, as enormous tasks require corresponding institutional solutions.5 However, this argument ignores the fact that only a handful of private American humanitarian players actually developed into particularly large organizations, whereas the majority of private voluntary agencies did not. Throughout most of the 1950s, membership numbers in the ACVAFS stagnated or even declined. Parallel to this trend, a select number of humanitarian agencies like CARE, Catholic Relief Services, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the American Friends Service Committee, Lutheran World Relief and Church World Service expanded their operations quite dramatically. This concentration process was triggered both by

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external structural factors – such as institutional ties and networks, historical donor preferences, and government funding guidelines that privileged large a­ gencies – and internal organizational factors, namely professionalization, increased organizational effectiveness, innovative programming, and successful marketing.6 At the start of the 1960s, however, the relatively comfortable position enjoyed by these “traditional” agencies was challenged, as new players entered the scene. The overall number of members in the ACVAFS increased from roughly 60 in 1960 to 80 in 1969, with a visible emphasis on new specialized agencies working in fields like healthcare, education, and technical assistance.7 Other agencies were founded that did not bother to become members of the ACVAFS at all. In contrast to the traditional agencies in the food relief field, these new agencies concentrated on the provision of technical expertise and special development projects and financed their operations via private and public grants. Without a relevant constituency of private donors and devoid of a large organizational infrastructure (making them less dependent on the continual influx of income), these agencies were more flexible and able to adapt quickly to the emerging international foreign aid regime.8 CARE, as a comparatively large agency, had more difficulty coping with major changes in the surrounding institutional environment. President Kennedy’s unification of the different US foreign aid offices into one central agency – the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) – in late 1961, the establishment of the Peace Corps as a civic development agency, the establishment of the Food for Peace Office, and finally the declaration of an Alliance for Progress with Latin America created a complex institutional setting that transformed foreign aid into a major US foreign policy tool in a bipolar world.9 Technical assistance, humanitarian (food) relief, and development programs were converging at an astonishing speed – a trend that affected CARE in many ways. Within a relatively short period, the agency had to adapt to the administrative implementation of Kennedy’s “New Frontier” – meaning altered programming routines, taking on new (and more ambitious) partners, and constantly changing funding guidelines.10 This setting caused some concern among the private relief organizations within the ACVAFS, which feared that institutional arrangements and long-established cooperation routines with US government bodies might be threatened by USAID’s claim to “assume leadership in marshaling and strengthening the country’s resources for the international development program.” Indeed, USAID’s mission statement underscored a new sense of purpose, stating that its main tasks were to “mobilize, activate, and encourage all segments of American life.” Given that USAID promised to give special regard to voluntary efforts, the agencies in the ACVAFS eventually decided to take the administrative reorganization as a challenge and as a chance to broaden their impact on US foreign (aid) policy. 11 With former CARE man Richard Reuter at the top of Food for Peace, CARE missions in almost three dozen countries, and a very good record in Washington, CARE started the turbulent new decade of the 1960s from a pole position. CARE’s

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leadership was aware of the fact that food commodities and material relief was only one pillar of its successful operations, with the other – and increasingly important one – being provision of specialized development expertise. In May 1961 CARE sealed a major deal with the newly established Peace Corps, helping it become operational abroad (see Chapter 7).12 This special kind of public–private partnership was a milestone in CARE–US government relations and underscored the degree to which CARE had become a recognized and esteemed player in humanitarian affairs. A second development, of equal importance, helped transform the 1960s into a decade of extraordinary growth and organizational expansion for CARE. In 1962 the agency merged with Medico, Inc., another private voluntary organization in the overseas healthcare sector. This merger deserves closer examination here. From a macroeconomic perspective it is an excellent example of the trend toward larger organizational size displayed by select private humanitarian agencies.13 Furthermore, from a microeconomic perspective, it illustrates CARE’s efforts to reduce transaction costs by buying in additional expertise in order to be able to compete in the emerging development field.14 It was in May 1959 that Olive Clapper from CARE’s Washington office first informed her co-workers in New York that “Paul [sic] Comanduras of Medico was eager to ‘work out means for closer liaison between CARE and Medico.’” Clapper had had a long talk with Dr. Peter Comanduras, Medico co-founder, only three days earlier and had reported to executive director Richard Reuter and his deputy Frank Goffio that Comanduras had “used the corollary of WHO and UNICEF as the kind of relationship he would like to work out between CARE and Medico.”15 This analogy – while not exactly fitting – hints that Medico intended to establish, at least on a practical level, a certain division of labor with the significantly larger agency CARE.16 This was, however, based on the assumption that CARE and Medico (like WHO and UNICEF) shared spheres of action and had similar working routines and logistical requirements.17 Incorporated in 1958, Medico was a fast-growing American non-profit organization, providing “health services in underdeveloped areas throughout the world,” with an emphasis on several Medico-run hospitals in Asia.18 Relying mainly on private donations and American medical volunteers to help treat tropical diseases, Medico maintained close ties to the International Rescue Committee (IRC), which helped in administrative matters and staff recruitment. As early as 1959, relations had cooled and Comanduras confided to Clapper that he had grown rather disillusioned about the IRC’s ability to serve Medico. Trying to avoid any misunderstanding with the IRC, CARE executives started covert negotiations aimed at “bringing Medico under the CARE tent.”19 Only a few weeks later, a first agreement of cooperation was reached that unburdened the IRC of its administrative duties for a constantly growing Medico and put CARE in the position of handling storage, transport, and warehousing for all Medico supplies and equipment. CARE billed Medico for the actual costs and included a 10 percent handling charge – designing the deal as a classic service contracting agreement.20

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However, when Thomas Dooley, the second Medico co-founder and public representative, died from cancer at the age of only 34 in January 1961, the organization was shaken by immense internal difficulties.21 Dooley had been an extraordinarily successful and popular fundraiser and the public poster figure for Medico’s cause in the past. After his death, his family and close associates set up the Dr. Tom Dooley Foundation, which started to compete with Medico and began draining it of sorely needed donations.22 After being forced to close four Medico hospitals for financial reasons before the end of 1961 and having come to the conclusion that Medico needed to focus on its practical work in the field instead of handling its complex organizational apparatus, Peter Comanduras approached CARE again in late 1961 and proposed a possible merger of the two organizations.23 Although CARE “was the logical place to go,” as both organizations were effectively cooperating already, the proposed merger was far from easy.24 Louis Samia, head of CARE’s finance department, immediately requested Medico’s organizational charts, articles of incorporation, and audit reports and forwarded these materials to his colleagues and to CARE counsel Alex B. Hawes for scrutiny.25 The fact that Medico’s last financial audit had taken place several months earlier added some risk to a possible deal. Medico – unlike CARE – held stocks that could be sold to cover some of its liabilities. Still, the financial side of the merger was not fully calculable. Another problem arose legally, as the organizations were incorporated under different laws and jurisdictions.26 Both obstacles were assessed to be manageable, however, and CARE informed the Medico board in late November 1961 that it was “desirous of affiliating and working with Medico in making more effective its medical programs.”27 A period of hectic work and legal background checks ensued that resulted in the proposed dissolution of Medico and the transfer of all assets and liabilities to CARE.28 In early January 1962 Reuter invited CARE board members to a meeting where he presented them with what he perceived to be the “first major step in recent years to reverse the trend toward fragmentation of effort overseas.” A little later (and before a final board vote had been taken), he informed the CARE field staff of the upcoming merger. With quite some sense of the historical weight of the upcoming events, he expressed his enthusiasm that for the first time since the end of the Second World War, two “established non-sectarian overseas agencies have combined to strengthen the quality of overseas programming, and at the same time reduce the number of appeals to the supporting public.” Reuter voiced his hopes for an increase in donor support but underscored that it was particularly the addition of professional competence and programming experience as well as “a significantly increased potential for contract programs with foundations and the U.S. and host governments” he was after.29 Reuter’s statement points to the fact that external funding, provided by government institutions or foundations like Rockefeller, Ford, or Carnegie, was clearly growing in importance.30 The players mentioned were eager to fund more sophisticated developmental projects for which they demanded comprehensive

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a­ pplications on a competitive basis. Against this background, a merger with Medico offered a perfect opportunity to strengthen CARE’s profile in the medical development sector and to acquire additional expertise and reputation, which was in some cases even more valuable than hard currency.31 Although some financial risk was involved, the merger was assessed to be a good deal because it added a functioning department and additional sources of income (namely donated medical supplies and private/public contributions) to CARE’s books – at least in theory. Additionally, it opened the door to the acquisition of medical volunteers – an almost unbeatable asset, as most Medico volunteers had to bear the expenses of their trips overseas themselves. By the end of January 1962, roughly 13 weeks after the merger had first been suggested, the deal was finalized.32 Effective March 1, 1962, Medico transferred its overseas medical program, its name, and all its assets and liabilities to CARE and integrated its projects under a new CARE division called “Medico – A Service of CARE.” Most former Medico board members took positions at the newly established “Medical Advisory Board,” while Peter Comanduras was promoted to CARE assistant executive director.33 On January 28 the New York Times announced the “World Medical Merger,” informing its readers that CARE and Medico were seeking “lower costs, increased efficiency and better service.” Drawing a direct comparison to corporate mergers, the author suggested that the expected “greater dividend” would – in contrast to private business – be shared with millions of Americans and needy overseas.34 With this merger, CARE added fuel to its well-cultivated image as a “hard-nosed, businesslike outfit” and as an organization of “penny-pinchers,” working to make the best use of American donations for the needy overseas.35 CARE’s new division operated two main programs. One focused on young medical professionals who agreed to serve for two years in clinics in developing countries. The primary focus of the second program was on volunteers who signed up for short-term stays in clinics or projects abroad in order to operate or provide otherwise unavailable expertise.36 These Medico specialists clearly added another dimension to CARE programs in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. However, after the initial euphoria over the merger had passed, difficulties “in meshing CARE and Medico work abroad” and at home began to appear.37 In April 1962 it became obvious that the merger made a complete reorganization of the CARE program department necessary – a fact that left CARE staffers with a heavy and time-consuming workload.38 What added to the list of difficulties was that Medico’s offices remained in Washington DC, while CARE’s headquarters were in New York.39 Communication conflicts emerged both in the foreign missions and between the American staffers – likely due to different organizational cultures and also to the fact that unpaid Medico volunteers were facing different challenges abroad than experienced (and well-paid) CARE field workers.40 Despite initial difficulties, CARE-Medico survived the first few years and slowly developed a method for coexisting that benefitted each of the formerly independent partners. Particularly

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with CARE trying to “accelerate the shift in programming emphasis from relief to development,” CARE and Medico programs were increasingly integrated with one another.41 The merger was a gateway to health-related programming, which later (in the late 1960s) turned out to be an enormous asset when health aspects of both foreign aid and development discourse came into the limelight.42 Apart from strategic and informational advantages, the merger had a positive financial impact as well, despite the initial reorganization costs for the program department. The fiscal year before the merger, 1961, closed with an income of US$53.1 million and a margin of US$597,653 after expenditures, while the 1962 fiscal year closed with an income of US$62.6 million and a financial margin of US$623,742.43 The general increase in overall CARE turnover stabilized throughout the 1960s (Table 6.1). Although the merger with Medico was only partly responsible for this, it still contributed to the process of expansion and widened CARE’s access to new programming opportunities. From the mid-1960s onwards, under the leadership of Kay Hastings, Medico increasingly specialized in education programs, tying basic health education with specialized training programs for local doctors. From a management perspective, the merger was viewed as a successful step in altering CARE’s structure according to changing needs and environmental conditions. With an expanded set of expertise and a more integrated approach to development programming, including health aspects, CARE was better prepared for the challenges and new funding opportunities lying ahead. The 1960s were not only about organizational extension, however. Geographical expansion played a large role as well. CARE had been approached by government Table 6.1  CARE income by type, fiscal years 1960–70 (US$)1 Fiscal Private donations and Year ocean freight

PL 480

1960 1961 1962 1963**

15,691,888 17,850,585 8,829,720 12,080,000

23,924,414 1,702,465 35,273,617 527,535 40,143,966 13,889,028 45,000,000 15,350,000

 39,616,302  53,124,202  62,862,714  72,430,000

10,688,648 15,904,312 18,320,340 13,953,935 15,123,957 16,864,456 16,433,656

71,504,469 23,363,401 59,169,546 985,288 61,259,800 742,081 70,369,204 972,171 56,238,977 3,568,304 75,352,195 4,193,152 51,040,540 7,264,798

105,565,318  89,343,618  92,916,411  98,979,775  85,271,441 106,806,074  89,659,583

1964 1965* 1966* 1967* 1968* 1969* 1970* 1

13,286,472 12,594,190 13,651,048 10,340,203 10,396,171 14,920,589

Other income/ Income grants/donations in kind

Expenditures

39,000,215 52,526,567 62,238,972 no figures available 105,278,832 89,304,880 92,807,797 98,000,797 84,982,289 106,713,158 90,813,923

CARE, Box 73, CARE annual statements of income and disbursements, 1961 and 1963; see also summary statement of Income of CARE according to data submitted to the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid (based on Schedule C Report) for corresponding years (*from fiscal year 1965 onwards private donations (left column) and ocean freight were accounted for separately **based on estimates).

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officials trying to encourage private programming to the African continent as early as 1955. Much to the disappointment of the diplomats in charge, this request had repeatedly been declined by CARE’s board and executive committee.44 Even at the beginning of the new decade, organizational memory of CARE’s overextension in the mid-1950s was still alive and several board members anticipated dangerous operational and financial problems stemming from renewed geographical advance.45 However, with the new government administration (which was in favor of a change of relations with what Kennedy perceived as the formerly “neglected” African continent), external pressure on private agencies increased.46 In early 1961, after considerable internal debate and having come to the conclusion that there was enough public interest to justify such a risky undertaking, CARE’s board of directors approved a three man task-force to explore Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Cameroon after the end of the rainy season in July.47 Parallel to this, CARE staffer Fred Devine was loaned to the State Department as a member of a special task force on Congo. The central African country had just declared its independence from Belgian colonial rule and was struggling with economic, political, and ethnic conflict that eventually led to a bloody civil war staged in a Cold War context and fed by foreign money and interests.48 As a humanitarian expert, it was Devine’s job to evaluate the prospects for any kind of private US emergency program – an assignment covered by the US government.49 Though the CARE mission to Congo fell through, as the safety situation on the ground was growing continually worse, CARE’s task-force to Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Cameroon was largely successful. Originally, only two new missions on the African continent had been planned, but eventually CARE launched new offices in each of the visited countries.50 Several factors contributed to CARE’s optimism. First, there was tremendous need and evolving food shortages in many areas which provided the basis for long-term and large-scale involvement in food aid provision. Secondly, public attention was increasingly shifting to the newly independent nations, meaning that there was growing donor interest in helping the former European colonies. Finally, there were clear signals of encouragement and financial incentives extended by AID officials. At a meeting in early 1964, the agencies of the ACVAFS were informed that out of the projected AID budget for Africa, ranging around US$219 million for 1965, up to US$83 million might go to the private agencies if proper program proposals were submitted.51 CARE’s expansion into Africa in 1963 transformed it into an enterprise with representation on five continents and a total of 32 overseas missions.52 However, CARE was still largely an American organization with its headquarters and operational center, consisting of five departments, the executive team, and board of directors, based in New York. Its commercial partners, like retailers, shippers, and service providers, were mostly based on the East Coast, CARE’s government liaison office was located in Washington DC, and the majority of its private and institutional donors were also in the United States, even though a small but rising percentage of ­private

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donations and institutional funding was coming from Canada and Australia.53 CARE’s overseas offices were dependent units run by American mission chiefs who reported to American regional directors and to headquarters in New York. The largest part of CARE’s permanent staff was American – local non-American employees in the overseas missions were mostly part-timers without access to any of the regular staff benefits, such as retirement plans, regular paid home leave, or family health insurance.54 Besides the fact that all overseas employees in leading positions were American, internal governance was a major issue. Communication and compliance was organized by way of hierarchical reporting routines, regular written orders from New York – so-called ALMIS (letters to all missions) – and increasingly standardized procedures laid down in detailed manuals.55 Administrative and management responsibility lay with one person – executive director Frank Goffio. Born in 1916, Goffio had joined CARE in 1947 on a temporary assignment to set up the remittance division and train personnel in “mechanized procedures” – meaning data processing via punch-card machines. A trained retailer, Goffio had worked his way up to the position of deputy executive director and eventually replaced his superior, Richard Reuter, when the latter left for a government post as head of Food for Peace in 1962.56 CARE was still a rather hierarchical and centralized agency, but the “nature of the world-wide operations” had led to a transfer of some of the top managerial functions to CARE’s deputy executive director and the executive staff, which consisted of five assistant executives heading the five CARE departments. Together, the executive staff was responsible for planning and policy determination for the entire agency.57 While the executive team answered to the board of directors, which convened for a meeting once every trimester, the board’s active role in policy determination was slowly diminishing. With quickly expanding operations, increasingly diversified and decentralized structures and the growing need to react quickly to challenges and opportunities, the role of executive management had been strengthened. The decision to admit public figures and diverse interest groups to membership (dating back to the mid-1950s) had enlarged and diversified the board to a total of 27 members. Sheer size had made it necessary to outsource many of the functions, hitherto executed or decided upon by the board, to management and the executive committee.58 From a certain perspective, the visible shift in the relationship between ownership and management in CARE paralleled the general process of managerialization which Alfred Chandler identified for industrial companies in the twentieth century.59 While it may be difficult to draw direct comparisons, as corporate governance processes and structures in non-profit enterprises clearly differ from those in industrial concerns, it is still striking that organizational growth and at least partial divisionalization – most visible in the merger with Medico – triggered a process in CARE that paralleled the general trend in the business world. The power shift toward executive management encouraged further emphasis on managerial techniques and thinking in terms of efficiency and operational advancement in CARE. In 1962 data processing was elevated to the next level, with the

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acquisition of new Remington Rand punch-card tabulating equipment, known as the Univac 1004. While “not exactly a computer,” this investment was meant to lower personnel expenses by US$9,318 annually by replacing two jobs. This points to the fact that saving labor costs through mechanization and r­ationalization – a process largely ascribed to commercial firms following profit-maximization ­strategies – was obviously a feasible way of increasing efficiency and cutting costs in a non-profit like CARE as well.60 A few months earlier, in October 1961, the board had even considered the acquisition of real estate in order to save rent and to allow for further expansion in the long run, as CARE had outgrown its current office space at 660 First Avenue. Other than general rationalization measures, this proposal was turned down for two reasons. First, the proposal was rejected in an attempt to keep operational functions low. Secondly, it was rejected because board members were concerned that the acquisition of real estate could convey the “erroneous impression of CARE as being no longer a non-profit organization.”61 Given the sound overall state of organizational affairs, it is hardly surprising that staffers and board members took pride in their agency. Many felt that CARE exemplified efficient and professional American generosity and acted as a “role model” of private initiative for the benefit of humanity. It was against this backdrop that Teymuraz K. Bagration, CARE board member for the Tolstoy Foundation, first proposed an internationalization of CARE to the board of directors. When he first touched upon this subject in October 1961, his idea was still somewhat vague. In light of CARE’s success and its admirable expansion, he suggested “the establishment of CARE units, or organizations similar to CARE in Western Europe” as a way of tapping the “tremendous need in under-developed countries.”62 Given the “spectacular” European recovery, to which CARE had contributed, he felt that the responsibility for “world problems” such as assistance to “underdeveloped nations” should be shared by yet to be established people-to-people organizations in Europe. Therefore, he proposed to spread the CARE concept abroad, hoping that these new organizations would eventually appease even those “European circles” that still felt that CARE’s generosity was nothing but “a veiled advance guard of American business interests.”63 While Bagration’s proposal was received with initial reservations, as some of board members felt that the idea of approaching top-level diplomats, OECD members, and international organizations like the FAO was too ambitious and beyond European affairs, he successfully pushed his agenda.64 With positive but noncommittal feedback from James W. Riddleberger from the OECD Development Assistance Committee and James N. Gardner, US Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs, Bagration was able to get some of his CARE colleagues on board.65 At a meeting in March 1962, Bagration successfully put forward a resolution announcing CARE’s general interest in the “establishment of CARE-type organizations in economically advanced countries” for the “purpose of greater coordination in planning and operation” of international development assistance. In addition, a committee staffed by Lewis Johnson (­AFL-CIO), Wallace

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J. Campbell (CLUSA), and Bagration himself (self-evidently named the Bagration– Johnson–Campbell committee) was set up to look into the matter.66 The committee’s strategy was twofold, as both high-ranking American diplomats working with European institutions or international organizations and CARE partner organizations at the grassroots level were approached following the March meeting. During the next couple of weeks, progress was made at an astonishing pace. The original plan had envisaged the provision of assistance and training programs for the establishment of “CARE-type” organizations abroad by bringing European volunteers to New York in order to get acquainted with “the CARE way of running the show.”67 Soon, however, the idea of establishing actual CARE spin-offs or even affiliates emerged.68 This development was characteristic of the can-do attitude all three committee members were known for and paradigmatic of the way CARE had approached new challenges and opportunities in the past. As it turned out, the idealistic enthusiasm behind the plan was clearly beyond the state of affairs in Western Europe. Beyond an omnipresent rhetoric of gratitude and admiration for CARE’s good deeds after the war, its European counterparts were far from ready to accept the American “blue-print for a do-it-yourself CARE” and had their own ideas about the proposal.69 In Hanover, for instance, Bagration set up a series of meetings with Hermann Heise, general manager of CLINOMOBIL, who had expressed the utmost interest in serving CARE’s cause. While Bagration imagined a CARE-Germany, designed as a “‘German-American’ organization, non-profit and on the model of CARE, in general” for which he was confident to win “President Loebke [sic] of Germany as honorary chairman” – his German counterpart had other plans.70 With Bagration busily trying to win support for such an initiative among German organizations and industry, it slowly dawned on his colleague Lewis Johnson that some caution might be advisable. He voiced his suspicion to Harold Miner that business interests might be involved on the German side, as CLINOMOBIL fabricated “health-units” that it was clearly hoping to promote abroad.71 In addition, Johnson felt that the organization’s name should not be given away easily, if only not to disturb American donors. Taking this into consideration, CARE’s brand name was registered as an international trademark in late 1962.72 Johnson’s intuition concerning CLINOMOBIL proved correct, as it was later revealed that the organization was indeed much more interested in becoming a subsidiary or outright business partner of CARE rather than in setting up a CARE itself. Eventually, all plans for a CARE-Germany were tabled and filed after a final meeting with Heise in Washington DC in late 1962.73 If CLINOMOBIL had been a somewhat sobering experience, Egbert de Vries from the Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands set things even straighter. After having received the high-flying proposal from Bagration, de Vries bluntly informed his American counterparts that there were “already too many operating agencies, rather than a dearth” of private groups involved in development assistance in Europe. In a roundabout way, he further stated that European organizations were doing quite well without interference from CARE, and added that “the

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mixing of intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations [as proposed by CARE, was] a very doubtful procedure” that he was far from finding advisable.74 It was with some meekness that the Bagration–Johnson–Campbell committee eventually informed the CARE board of directors that further efforts were to be continued “with caution in order to avoid misunderstanding and so as not to hurt European sensibilities.”75 With the failure in Germany, standstills in Finland, Italy, and Greece, and the frank Dutch rebuttal by de Vries, the committee finally admitted that “the original plan of establishing CARE-like agencies in other affluent countries should be adapted to European conditions.”76 Accordingly, CARE’s first internationalization was put on hold and shifted back to the initial idea of providing training programs for partner organizations abroad. Having approached USAID for funding and having received the friendly but frank answer that such a program would be turned down unless the ACVAFS was involved, CARE’s initiative to start such a process as a single agency died down as well.77 The whole process uncovered some interesting developments on the continent, however. It became obvious that Europe was far from being a voluntary wasteland. The “century of NGOs” – to use a well-known expression by Akira Iriye – was not nearly as American anymore as some CARE members had imagined.78 While CARE had to admit that it was culturally closer to voluntary agencies in Canada and Australia, European organizations such as Oxfam and Save the Children (Great Britain), Bread for the World and Caritas (Germany), or Namnden for Internationelt Bistand (Sweden) – just to name a few – had close thematic connection to CARE’s fields of service.79 In addition, a growing number of international bodies and associations were already working in the very field CARE had been willing to establish in the first place. With institutions like World Assembly of Youth, founded 1949 in London, or the International Council of Voluntary Agencies, founded in 1962 in Geneva, there was a lot of international activity already in full swing. At the International Conference on Voluntary Service in early 1963 which CARE attended “at the urgent request” of a Dutch development organization called NOVIB, CARE representatives were faced with questions about whether CARE actually still existed and, if so, what its legitimacy was in a rapidly changing word.80 Private development programming by European organizations had obviously progressed without CARE having – or having been – noticed. It was in this context that the immediate internationalization of CARE on an organizational level was put on hold, at least for the time being. What came to the forefront, however, was the question of international cooperation with other agencies in the development sector – a field that was integrating at astonishing speed and that needed to be addressed if lost ground was to be regained. ‘Developmentalizing’ food aid On December 19, 1961 the General Assembly of the United Nations officially announced the 1960s as the first Development Decade, thereby setting an

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i­nternational agenda focused on the “improvement of international institutions and instrumentalities to further economic and social development” in an attempt to eliminate “illiteracy, hunger and disease.”81 While the unanimously adopted resolution certainly set the tone for the 1960s and was approvingly discussed in the international media throughout the world, its content was neither shockingly new nor anything close to provocative. Development as a mindset and a way of making sense of global trends had been invented many decades earlier.82 The idea of having advanced nations or western societal groups help so-called underdeveloped or backward countries on their way to modernity dates back at least to the nineteenth century.83 From the 1930s onwards, it crystallized into a “vital new formulation” and acquired a sense of urgency and general applicability after the end of the Second World War, when Truman and his successors started creating offices and institutions to address this task politically and administratively.84 The Cold War conflict as well as decolonization processes turned development into a highly politicized dimension of international relations.85 Development was an agenda, a multi­ faceted discourse, and an institutional framework put forward by a variety of state and particularly non-state actors promoting and “doing” development in a number of different ways. At the beginning of the 1960s, however, it acquired a new status – ideologically as well as institutionally. Development became an international topic that was taken up by traditional international organizations and intergovernmental bodies like the FAO, WHO, UNICEF, and the European Economic Community, as well as by newly founded bodies such as the OECD Development Assistance Committee (founded in 1960), the International Development Association of the World Bank (1960), the World Food Program (1961), and the United Nations Development Program (1965).86 Moreover, most Western countries set up their own national development bureaucracies or refurbished colonial institutions into development bodies.87 Kennedy’s “New Horizons” – exemplified by a set of strengthened offices and public institutions working in development planning – were accordingly mirrored in Europe.88 Starting in the late 1950s and even more so throughout the 1960s, all European governments – whether the traditional colonial powers such as Great Britain, France, or the Netherlands (and Germany), or new players such as Denmark, Norway, and Sweden – set up new institutions or altered old ones and built their own national foreign aid infrastructure.89 For the US voluntary agencies, the first Development Decade had actually started at least ten years earlier, when initial Point Four grants were acquired for projects in non-European countries. CARE had set up its first explicit development projects in Korea, Colombia, and the Middle East in the early 1950s – therewith wedding material relief with the idea of self-help programming and sustainable community development. Thus, what actually changed at the beginning of the 1960s was the manifestation of a much stronger emphasis on long-term planning and clear-cut development rhetoric in nearly all of its projects. Step-by-step development became a selling factor for possible sponsors and government authorities. With this in mind,

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CARE tried to develop additional specialized expertise to be able to compete with private players and government experts alike. Furthermore, evaluation of projects increasingly came to include not only the intentions of the donors, but also – at least to a degree – the results and consequences of projects and action abroad. If original relief projects had been based on “deontological, or duty-based, ethics,” new developmental projects shifted to a more “consequentialist” point of view, thereby starting to question the results and impacts of these programs abroad.90 Gradually, development became a strategic tool that had to be refined and adjusted to the given situation, based on a careful assessment of a variety of criteria, like need, “local initiative,” and responsibility, as well as the more traditional donor-related factors of “economy and volume,” and “goodwill of American public.”91 CARE experimented a great deal in the 1960s with various types of programs. Development was an open field and a testing ground – and, as a private player, the agency had both the means and the flexibility to try new approaches before government players would officially get involved. Because CARE’s major field of action was still in the food relief sector, it was logical for most of its projects to involve this resource. When the idea of establishing food-for-work projects (re-)emerged at the onset of the 1960s – this time in the context of international development and not targeted at disciplining the domestic poor – CARE immediately submitted several proposals and started the provision of food in exchange for work in several pilot projects.92 The idea – tested on a national as well as an international level – was to speed up foreign social and economic development processes toward “take-off” (meaning the “transition of a society from a mostly agricultural to a mostly industrial base”) by rewarding activity through provision of additional food to laborers in public work-schemes.93 Leaving aside the ethical acceptability of the food-for-work concept, CARE’s responsiveness to a new (and from a contemporary perspective innovative) approach such as food-for-work highlights the fact that the humanitarian agencies with traditional stakes in food aid distribution were actively trying to transform their traditional domain into a central development resource.94 The large agencies in particular were expanding their programs of free food distribution as rapidly as their administrative capacities permitted.95 While Catholic Relief Services, Church World Service and CARE (which at that point distributed more than 90 percent of the total private voluntary agency share) had distributed US surplus worth US$135.7 million in 1961, they had already shifted more than US$180 million three and a half years later (Table 6.2). This general upward trend was at least partly the result of agencies’ receptiveness to new ways of strengthening the role of food in development. In 1963, for instance, CARE, CRS, and CWS implemented a pilot study with soy grits being fed to children in Bolivia, Colombia, Turkey, the Philippines, and Burundi that was financed by the US Department of Agriculture. The agencies integrated these supplements into their regular food appropriation schemes, thereby helping to evaluate “commercial prospects for this product as a source of protein in protein deficit areas.”96

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Table 6.2  Dollar value of PL 480 distributed by private voluntary organizations1 Period

CRS

CARE

CWS

All three combined

Total % of total distributed by distributed by all PVOs three

CY 1961 70,063,302 37,645,000 18,197,893 125,906,195 135,778,593 FY 1965 97,219,609 59,169,546 15,526,837 171,915,992 181,246,013

92.72 94.85

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Statistics based on Special Collections, Rutgers University Archives, Papers of the American Council of Voluntary Agencies for Foreign Service, Box 50, Voluntary Foreign Aid Programs for respective years.

Ethically speaking, this study may have been somewhere in the wasteland between humanitarian commitment and the extension of favors to agricultural recycling interests. However, such projects once again highlight the fact that the American voluntary agencies were at the forefront of uniting food aid and development issues without forgetting the interests of US agriculture and industry.97 This institutional nexus – apparently largely neglected in scholarly literature until recently – bore remarkable fruit during the 1960s.98 While the agencies had had difficulties in pushing USDA to hand out more acceptable foods to the hungry in the 1950s, a decade later there was a clear increase in projects that included new protein-rich foods. Products like CMS, a “mixture of cornmeal, soy powder and milk powder,” or vitaminized foods were often developed and provided by private American firms.99 While USDA worked as a proxy between voluntary agencies and industrial players on many occasions, CARE maintained its own relationships with agricultural producers as well as with the large food concerns. The “competitive struggle for market control between producers and retailers” was just about to be won by the latter as the industrialization of agriculture and global consumption of processed foods gained ground.100 Hence, CARE tried to carefully strengthen its relations to food processing firms. In 1967 CARE representative Fred Devine took part in the first International Agribusiness Conference in Chicago. At that meeting, participants agreed that “the business community at this time should […] consider the benefits of working with the [voluntary agencies] abroad, not only because of [their] managerial skills, but also their capacity in the area of testing new commodities and providing new markets.” Devine, for one, came home to New York with a deal with Fisher Flouring Mills – enrolling CARE in the testing of a new baby food based on bulgur wheat, provided that Fisher saw to the economic and technical feasibility of the program as well as the “palatability” of the product.101 A few weeks earlier, CARE executive director Frank Goffio had been invited to a Monsanto plant in St. Louis where “low-cost high-protein foods” were developed. At that meeting CARE provided the corporate giant with specifications and samples of the biscuits used in CARE’s feeding programs in Hong Kong and Guatemala to determine whether satisfactory comparable biscuits could be made from a soy base.102 The inclusion of these precursors to modern functional foods in private humani-

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tarian feeding programs shows that nutrition was slowly becoming a central issue in the field of humanitarian hunger prevention.103 Beginning in the 1950s, though perhaps more pronounced in the 1960s, malnourishment in the developing world came to be recognized as a central dimension of the so-called World Food Problem that dominated hunger discourse in both the scientific and public domains.104 Given the immensity of the alleged problem, international cooperation and global recipes for hunger prevention gained importance – with nutrition being one “central component of this ‘new international’ view of the global.”105 At the onset of the 1960s, the global “spread” of the calorie as a treatment for the alleged food gap – set in motion by Wilbur O. Atwater’s studies on calorific values of foods more than half a century earlier – was increasingly challenged or at least complemented by the finding that the lack of protein in particular was compromising hungry ­people’s health and hence the development of modern societal structures.106 In his international bestseller Geopolitics of Hunger, International Peace Prize winner and FAO chairman Josue de Castro even blamed any kind of alleged “racial inferiority” on “protein-hunger” – putting nutrition on top of the international development agenda.107 CARE, having just merged with the health-related organization Medico, quickly integrated this perspective into its programming and presented nutrition as “one of the main generative links in an interlocking series of vicious circles that influence economic productivity, educational opportunity, and health and population growth in the underdeveloped countries.”108 The agency started the provision of special products such as high-protein baby formula, powdered wheat-soy blend (WSB) and protein biscuits – a trend later mildly ridiculed by its own nutritionist as “the 60’s protein obsession.”109 While some of these products are still used in food aid programs today, these supplements were not always greeted with gratitude by the recipients.110 In Egypt, for example, CARE programs first struggled to introduce milk powder, as recipients were far more interested in other more familiar foods – wheat in particular.111 CARE faced even stronger opposition when it attempted to incorporate protein biscuits into its programs, as the cookies were outright rejected as inedible by Egyptian authorities and ultimately had to be disposed of as animal feed.112 Other projects were more successful. In 1969, for instance, CARE secured a USAID grant enabling it to conduct a nationwide experimental nutrition project in Korea. The project “was CARE’s first venture in the use of the Media as a programming tool” – meaning that CARE used colored booklets, calendars, and posters as well as radio advertisements to hand out instructions in infant and child care targeted at Korean mothers. After its completion, CARE was encouraged by USAID to develop a program that combined nutrition education, information on family planning, and supplementary feeding to nursing mothers and children at Korean day-care centers.113 The development of such integrated programs hints at yet another aspect apart from nutrition that was understood to be related to the World Food Problem – namely, population control and family planning. Starting in the mid-1960s, family planning

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became an important issue that occupied CARE’s board of d­ irectors for some time, due to its general ethical and religious implications. The link between hunger and demography has a long tradition and is often traced back to late eighteenth-century England and Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population. Using arithmetic progression and contemporary demographic predictors, Malthus had projected massive future overpopulation and corresponding starvation in many parts of the world.114 His scenario of human misery stemming from the lost race between human fertility and agricultural productivity hit a nerve. The essay was enthusiastically discussed in scientific circles in England and beyond – and the fear of having “too many people” populate the globe was reproduced by countless authors afterwards.115 Malthus’s math was certainly crude and has frequently been criticized from a methodological, political, and ethical point of view. However, it established a discursive connection between population growth and hunger that survived the following one and a half centuries and re-emerged as a powerful global paradigm following the Second World War.116 While this potential threat was nourished by several intellectual traditions – not the least of which was racial hygiene – it was particularly the shifting focus on international development and global hunger prevention that pushed the population question back onto the international agenda, as Matthew Connelly has convincingly argued.117 The rapidly internationalizing debate was characterized by a remarkable complexity of arguments and a multiplicity of actors with diverging agendas. It is an interesting side-note that contemporary fears concerning the “critical race between food and population” – as President Lyndon B. Johnson put it in early 1966 – were at least partly nourished by distinctly humanitarian considerations.118 The horrific scenario of uncontrollable human misery and starvation in an allegedly overpopulated world stirred up ethical disputes among humanitarians over global accountability on the one hand and moral principle on the other. Trying to avoid open conflict, it had “been CARE’s policy to eschew involvement in any kind of family planning or birth control” – as Frank Goffio wrote in a memo to all his overseas mission chiefs in 1965. The reasons for this abstention “were various and compelling” and included religious, political, and general ethical considerations.119 By the mid-1960s, however, family planning in developing countries (from sex education and free contraceptives to granting access to highly invasive procedures such as vasectomy) had become an important public topic and in addition a sector in which significant amounts of external funding could be obtained.120 Moreover, there was growing concern that famine and food shortage in large parts of Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East were just harbingers of a population crisis to come. In fact, there was even open (and rather cynical) criticism from William Vogt, author of the bestseller Road to Survival, that CARE was actively contributing to an alleged “population bomb” by prolonging the lives of people who might otherwise have naturally died.121 Having taken this into consideration, executive director Frank Goffio submitted a program proposal in June 1965 to provide medical equipment for a locally developed family-planning clinic

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in Egypt to the executive committee. He underscored that “the time had come for a policy decision to be reached in view of the importance of the subject of population control worldwide and the changing climate.”122 After considerable debate, a special committee started preparing an in-depth report for general discussion by the members of the board of directors. It meticulously listed all indirect family-planning activities CARE had been involved in since 1960 – from provision of medical units in India to the activities of Medico physicians offering advice on contraceptives and birth control. The report further described public opinion in  the United States regarding the issue, quoting opinion polls and articles in major (scientific) publications, and concluded that birth control had become a reality of American life in recent years.123 Underscoring that there was particular and “considerable need for population control” overseas, the report emphasized that the provision of knowledge of family-planning techniques was a humanitarian duty that was intrinsically linked to CARE’s activity in the life-saving business. Hence, in light of the multitude of potential additional financial sources, the committee supported a general CARE involvement in family planning.124 A heated debate followed, but eventually an affirmative vote was passed. Approval of general funds for family-planning projects would be conditional, however, depending on prior approval of the board of directors as well as additional substantial effort by management to obtain external funding for any such projects.125 With this decision the ground was prepared for a new type of activity, but it by no means marked the sudden onset of a new era in development programming. Trying to stop the rumors and uncertainties that these debates, as well as the protestfounded withdrawal of a public CARE board member, had generated among the staff, Goffio assured his co-workers that the decision was “not by any means a license to jump into the family planning field.”126 Initial programs were comparatively small and mostly financed by private donors or strictly ­supplemental – meaning that CARE was not involved in any direct medical measures as such.127 These initial reservations passed, however, as from 1966 onwards the Johnson administration started to tie together “food aid and other economic assistance,” meaning that self-help and family-planning aspects became a door opener to eligibility for voluntary agency food assistance programs.128 This development certainly highlights the slowly growing financial pressure exerted on private players to include the population aspect in their repertoire of potential services.129 CARE had anticipated this trend and modified its agenda accordingly. While, relatively speaking, family planning remained only a marginal part of its overall agenda, CARE delved deeper into various “integrated programming” designs involving food-for-work, nutrition, and family planning as the decade was closing.130 In 1971 the New York Times informed its readers about CARE’s involvement in a “colorful carnival style” event called “vasectomy fair” in India at which villagers were served meals and given 100 rupees (US$13) as well as saris for their wives in return for agreeing to the medical vasectomy procedure. CARE had provided half of the funds to pay

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the cash rewards, which “proved to be a major attraction for the poor of Kerala, whose monthly earning is less than a third of the reward,” as the author of the article concluded.131 These programs highlight the ambiguity of development programming in the 1960s and 1970s. Whether in the food-for-work, nutrition, or family-planning fields, CARE’s transition to developmental activities was clearly driven by humanitarian motives, despite the financial incentives that played a part in the equation. However, these contemporary considerations were infused with perceptions of Western superiority and global leadership – a perspective that obviously justified measures like symbolic rewards to the global poor in return for manual labor, the consumption of experimental foods, or even sterilization procedures. Though there should be no doubt that most of these measures were entirely well intended and may even have had positive effects in practice, the inherent instrumental relation to development planning as a tool in adjusting global trends corresponding to Western hegemonic ideas is undeniable. In that regard, it must be said that CARE’s involvement in development programming was by no means an exception, but rather the rule. What was unique to CARE, however, was the speed and strategic orientation with which its executive management adapted to this course – by ‘developmentalizing’ food and fitting it into discursive patterns and internationalizing structures. A new International against hunger In June 1963 the Second World Food Congress took place in Washington DC. Officially convened and sponsored by the FAO, the international gathering was a milestone in making global hunger prevention an international policy issue. President Kennedy gave the opening speech. Speaking with optimism regarding humanity’s capacity to “outlaw and banish hunger” by means of technical and agricultural progress, Kennedy summoned the participants to follow the lead of the United States and the FAO’s Freedom from Hunger campaign which its director general Binay Sen had officially launched in July 1960.132 Despite this official setup, the Second World Food Congress was far from being an exclusively government-level meeting. Thousands of private groups and nongovernmental organizations from Europe, Australia, Canada, and the United States had chosen the international campaign as a collective figurehead for their activities, and used the congress as a forum and networking opportunity.133 With roughly 1,300 participants from more than 100 countries, the Second World Food Congress was indeed a “people-to-people” congress that served as a “world platform for discussion of ways in which the food problems of the world can be solved.”134 To some extent, the congress thus marked a new era. If previous attempts to eradicate hunger on a global scale had mostly imagined (and failed to actualize) a systemic approach, the Second World Food Congress aimed at the heart of new international realities. It was a compromise, born out of the realization that hunger as an alleged global

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threat would have to be confronted by an international coalition of already existing private, governmental, and intergovernmental actors – not by a new yet to be established institution.135 This multi-institutional Washington setting should not be taken for granted, however. For most of the 1950s, American voluntary agency relations with UN agencies had been characterized by little more than friendly indifference. Despite the fact that many private groups had had great stakes in setting up the United Nations system in the 1940s, few attempts for closer cooperation with UN agencies had been made afterwards.136 This was certainly true for CARE. Apart from limited field coordination with UNRRA in the immediate post-war period, a few encounters with the United Nations Civil Assistance Corps Korea, UNICEF, and sporadic liaison with select FAO representatives, CARE had not invested much time in developing closer working relationships with United Nations bodies. This general situation had neither been changed by CARE’s move to enlist Norris Dodd, former director general of FAO, as a consultant nor by the decision to apply for formal consultative status as an NGO with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations in 1954.137 During most of the 1950s, United Nations agencies were not nearly as important for CARE’s everyday business as government bodies or other (American) voluntary agencies and were accordingly treated as a kind of background noise to international affairs.138 This indifference can only be partly attributed to CARE, however. Despite a number of affirmative statements regarding the general inclusion of so-called nongovernmental groups into the FAO or other United Nations bodies, few real offers for integration had been made to (American) voluntary agencies.139 In fact, for most of the 1950s, the whole concept of granting consultative status to non-governmental players in the United Nations system had been geared toward keeping these civic groups at arm’s length. Meticulously classified by functional criteria, NGOs were not allowed to speak or intervene but only to silently attend select meetings – a concept that was of little appeal to operational agencies that needed publicity and wanted to be taken seriously as humanitarian experts.140 The Freedom from Hunger (FFH) campaign set out to change this situation. From the beginning, Sen and his FAO colleagues had actively been trying to win civic groups for the campaign.141 By proactively enlisting civil society organizations, the FAO director general was hoping to “bring out the NGOs from their hitherto confined ‘Consultative Status’ [… as] somewhat distant and detached observers of the world” into the status of active participation in global affairs and international politics.142 Apart from this strategic reasoning about the changing role of NGOs in global affairs, Sen had other, even more political, organizational motives. When he had first tried to promote the campaign with several heads of state in the late 1950s, his plans had not been greeted with enthusiasm by the US administration in particular. President Eisenhower’s policy focus was clearly on “promoting trade rather than providing higher levels of aid,” so that Sen’s plans for a global campaign

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against hunger had raised a red flag in Washington.143 However, Sen had chosen to ignore these signs, and had approached civil society players instead in an attempt to counter the FAO’s budgetary problems and its dwindling political clout.144 Encouraging voluntary agency participation turned out to be a successful move, as FFH soon turned into a fast-selling item which made it a factual reality that the US administration found easier to embrace, or, as in the case of newly elected President Kennedy, to support.145 Sen’s official appeal to civic groups in April 1960, months before FFH was officially announced, was heartily welcomed by associations, clubs and community organizations in the United States. In the ACVAFS, however, Sen’s invitation aroused quite some irritation at first. This was mainly due to the fact that he had chosen US government channels and the American media to launch a call for participation.146 Certainly intended as an open invitation to a maximum number of American organizations, Sen’s broad public appeal clearly sidelined the traditional food relief agencies. Given their particularly significant role in food aid distribution and their large constituencies, the agencies felt that Sen had crossed a line by immediately going public without consulting them first.147 However, the FAO’s style in its call for partners was more a symbolic problem than the real underlying issue that the agencies disagreed with. The central problem actually was that with Freedom from Hunger, the FAO was actively trying to solicit funds from the American public in an attempt to counter its desolate financial situation.148 This was, however, a clear violation of a decade-long tacit agreement of UN non-interference in American fundraising activities. The ACVAFS immediately reacted by passing a resolution, declaring that “any effort in the United States of the intergovernmental and United Nations Specialized Agencies to finance their activities otherwise than through government appropriation produces confusion and disrupts the understanding of the proper relationship between” the two parties.149 The NGO umbrella organization thus made it clear that it would not tolerate any open fundraising campaign by the FAO in the United States. While the ACVAFS offered a frank but friendly reminder that there were rules that even the FAO had to adhere to, several of its member agencies were less moderate. The CARE management reacted with particular rage. Claiming that the FAO’s soliciting of the American public was a hostile act that directly threatened CARE’s own fundraising activities, CARE’s executive director Richard Reuter eventually even charged that FAO officials had finally discovered that “the American public [was] a gold mine they should tap.”150 Against this backdrop of direct competition, Reuter was determined that the ACVAFS should reject the FFH campaign and refuse cooperation with the FAO altogether. The problem with the campaign, however, was that it was already out in the world. Countless private American organizations outside the ACVAFS – from school projects to women’s clubs or community chests – were already actively subscribing to Sen’s initiative.151 This meant that some kind of compromise had to be

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found. Hence, in the interest of peace and international cooperation, the ACVAFS finally settled for coexistence with the FFH campaign and eventually even agreed to transfer funds and allow moderate amounts of fundraising to be performed by FFH committees. CARE on the contrary was not at all ready to give in so easily. Enraged by what its management perceived of as the intrusion of an international organization into private voluntary agency territory, CARE leaders threatened to withdraw from the ACVAFS again if concessions to the FAO were made. It was only after a couple of personal meetings among the chief executives of the largest agencies in the ACVAFS that the dust settled and CARE could finally be persuaded that FFH was “not a governmental or intergovernmental or UN campaign but […] a citizen undertaking.”152 Eventually, a United States citizen committee and a new foundation were established to coordinate the whole US campaign. The latter, christened the Freedom from Hunger Foundation, was set up in early 1962. Headed by James G. Patton (National Farmers Union) as president, Arthur Ringland (former head of ACVFA) as secretary, and Harry S. Truman as honorary chairman, the foundation relied on popular representatives with traditional stakes in US political, agricultural, and philanthropic affairs.153 The foundation’s functions were to “publicize and promote FFH, stimulate organizations, businesses, and so forth to undertake special projects for the foundation – but not a full-fledged public fundraising campaign – and to take responsibility for the forthcoming World Food Conference.”154 Realizing that further resistance to the FFH campaign would be futile, as there was no chance of turning things around, CARE finally decided to play along. Murray Lincoln, CARE’s former president and leader of Nationwide Insurance Company, took a post as trustee in the new FFH foundation and his right hand (and CARE founding father) Wallace Campbell was promoted to be James Patton’s assistant. This way, at least a steady flow of information and representation of voluntary agency interests within the American FFH context could be assured.155 In addition, it turned out rather quickly that CARE had a strategic advantage over the smaller or newly formed agencies in using FFH publicity for its own purposes. As a large agency, with its own public relations departments, mailing lists, and very strong ties to major newspapers and magazines, CARE was able to make the most out of heightened donor interest generated by the FFH campaign. To Reuter, a CARE public relations specialist would remark a little later that CARE had “everything to gain” from taking part  in the Advertising Council sponsored FFH publicity program. Given that CARE would get “top billing with an alphabetical listing,” he speculated that the FFH publicity would result in “an extra push for our Food Crusade and perhaps to some extent our Christmas card program.”156 Hence, CARE as well as several other agencies in the ACVAFS, decided to profit from the public focus on hunger prevention induced by the FFH campaign and successfully channeled media attention toward their own projects.157 Instead of continuing with open conflict, CARE eventually opted for a strategic embrace. It successfully took “advantage

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Figure 6.1  A CARE worker sits behind a large stack of mail containing contributions. of the ­campaign as much as possible,” fostering CARE’s identification as a major American overseas voluntary agency. CARE thus turned FFH into an opportunity to spread the word that the private agency was at the heart of events – in the US and on an international stage.158 It was against this backdrop that the FFH campaign – despite initial difficulties and clear rivalries – eventually turned into a milestone in organizing international cooperation in the field of hunger prevention. The “humanitarian international,” which had been formed in the wake of the two world wars, was now reconfiguring under starkly different accidentals.159 If post-war relief to Europe had been a reaction to the devastation of war, FFH now garnered a massive response from all over the world for a preventive campaign against hunger. Moreover, FFH demonstrated the effectiveness of fundraising within an international context that included governmental and non-governmental players alike. This mixed approach and particularly its success in enlisting private players into a global fundraising drive put the FAO into a leading position as the international agency addressing the World Food Problem – at least in the short run.160 In the wake of the congress, the FAO was able to convince its members that massive (almost tenfold) budget increases were in order.161 By enlisting groups and organizations, from the grassroots to the government level, FFH created a momentum that united all kinds of players in

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an attempt to measure, understand, and ultimately confront a problem that was increasingly perceived of as a global threat to both political stability and the future of humanity as such. It soon turned out, however, that apart from international cooperation, the compilation of data, and increased monitoring of global commodity markets, other, more practical forms of hunger prevention were needed. While voluntary agencies like CARE were already successfully providing large-scale food aid schemes, the FAO had hardly any practical skills to offer in this domain. It was against this backdrop that the World Food Program (WFP) – as an operational agency focusing on food aid distribution – was set up.162 After some initial organizational teething trouble, the WFP slowly developed into a new player in its own right in the field of international food aid provision.163 What had been an overwhelmingly American show for almost two decades slowly began to develop into a multilateral system, to which a growing number of national governments contributed their share of agricultural abundance and/or financial means (Table 6.3).164 One achievement of the so-called Kennedy round negotiations on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, 1963–1967) was a Food Aid Convention in 1967 supported by 12 governments – including Japan, Australia, Canada, the USA, and the EEC.165 It would be wrong, however, to overemphasize the impact of multilateral food aid. While US contributions to the WFP rose continuously between 1963 and 1971, this multilateral appropriation still formed a relatively small share given the magnitude of the overall American food aid program (Table 6.4). In addition, the Johnson administration from 1963 onwards began to tie PL 480 even more firmly to the administration’s foreign policy by relocating the Food for Peace office from the White House to the Department of State.166 With pressure in Indochina rising, and Cold War tensions as present as ever, Johnson had no interest in giving up a strategic resource such as US agricultural abundance by handing it over to an international agency entirely. Accordingly, from a government perspective, the WFP was a rather small player to begin with. However, from the perspective of the American voluntary agencies involved in food aid provision, the WFP’s a­ ppearance was seen Table 6.3  Pledges to the WFP (US$000, round figures)1 Selected donors

1963/65

1966/68

1969/70

1971/72

USA Canada Germany Norway EEC Total*

43,600 5,500 8,000 1,700 – 84,600

95,900 28,400 8,000 6,900 – 189,500

99,600 32,500 6,400 7,300 91,500 283,400

125,000 31,000 9,100 8,500 15,800 249,300

1 John Cathie, The Political Economy of Food Aid, Farnborough, 1982, p. 140, table 6.6 (*total comprised of pledges by all donors including those not listed here).

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Table 6.4  Total value of food aid shipped under PL 480 (US$000)1 Year

PL 480

1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971

1,115,866 1,316,366 1,495,498 1,456,269 1,417,993 1,570,487 1,345,879 1,270,818 1,279,464 1,038,590 1,055,815 1,022,963

1

Mitchel B. Wallerstein, Food for War – Food for Peace. United States Food Aid in a Global Context, Cambridge, MA, 1980, p. 53, table 3.1.1.

in another light, as the international agency worked with a budget that none of the private agencies could top. While its first years were more modest, its biannual budget in 1969/70 was already higher than each of the single budgets of the large US voluntary agencies (Table 6.5). Hence, in the WFP, a new player was on the rise – one that set up its own bureaucracy, hired its own personnel, and followed its own operational imperatives. As such, the WFP increasingly entered the traditional domain of CARE and the other agencies. Though the agencies generally welcomed this new international approach to food aid (and were partly also wooed by Addeke Boerma, who did not forget to visit CARE after having taken on his position as the WFP’s first executive director in 1962), there were a couple of initial problems stemming from the intrusion of the WFP into voluntary agency territory.167 At a meeting of the ACVAFS, concerns were voiced by various agency leaders that WFP activities would most probably lead to a duplication of programming, with the WFP potentially ending up being just “another CARE.”168 And indeed, in Korea, for instance, difficulties appeared when the WFP attempted to establish a school feeding program similar Table 6.5  Biannual income/budget of CARE, CRS, CWS and the WFP 1969/70 (US$)1 FY 1969 & 1970 1

CARE

CRS

CWS

WFP

196,465,657

258,627,233

69,646,249

283,400,000

For the data on CARE CRS, and CWS see, ACVAFS, Box 50, ACVFA reports “Voluntary Foreign Aid Programs, 1969/70”; for the WFP, see John Cathie, The Political Economy of Food Aid, Farnborough, 1982, p. 140, table 6.6.

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to the one CARE had been conducting for some time. What worried CARE most was not the fact that the WFP entered Korea in the first place, but the international organization’s plan to use US government-donated commodities – thus relying on resources that CARE and the American voluntary agencies felt more entitled to.169 Conflicts about resources were complemented by strife about international standing and prestige, as another incident illustrates. In 1964 CARE’s mission chief to Egypt bitterly complained to his USAID counterparts that the recently approved WFP feeding program for thousands of displaced Nubians in the Aswan area was almost precisely the same project [he had] submitted to USAID some time ago […] and which was disapproved. It would have entailed distribution control by the American CARE staff. The credit for the gift would have gone to the United States. The great majority of the food distributed in Nubia by the World Food Program will be a gift of the United States. Credit for the distribution will go to the United Nations.170

Such statements underline a certain notion of charitable nationalism and point to the degree to which private voluntary agency personnel had internalized the logic of an international system of states in which favors had to be amassed in order to “buy” goodwill abroad – if need be via private voluntary agencies. Complaints like these also point to the role that external (and often government-provided) funding had come to play in the private agencies’ calculations. By the mid-1960s CARE maintained overseas offices in more than thirty countries, and had an even higher number of programs worldwide – an organizational basis it wanted to maintain or even develop. To be able to do so, CARE had to pay its staff and cover its expenses by way of private donations and increasingly also government funding or surplus food. Accordingly, WFP interference was unwelcome and endangered the steady state of relations between USAID or Food for Peace and the private American agencies. From a general ethical perspective, the WFP was a welcome addition to the ranks of those agencies committed to hunger prevention; from a resource perspective, however, it was not. Throughout the 1960s, recurring tensions arose in the missions, most prominently when the WFP took over several former CARE feeding programs at the request of recipient governments.171 There was nothing CARE could do to protest this transition, as it had been set in motion by the foreign governments and not by the WFP itself. What was highly concerning, however, were the underlying causes for this transition. As a multilateral agency, the WFP had its own (lower) standards regarding end-use checks of commodities and required less bureaucracy and paperwork from its recipients than the US government and US voluntary agencies. This situation made collaboration with the WFP more attractive to recipient governments and put CARE and other American agencies in an adverse position in the long run.172 Precisely this issue had been discussed in Rome in November 1966 at the first official meeting between several large NGOs (among them Catholic Relief

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Services, Church World Services, and Oxfam) and the WFP. Officially geared at establishing “closer contact both at headquarters and in the field,” the agencies also used the gathering to underscore that some modesty regarding possible areas of “competition for US Government resources” should be exercised by the WFP.173 In addition, they highlighted that differing bureaucratic conventions would potentially allow recipient governments to play off the WFP against the voluntary agencies.174 The meeting, which was institutionalized in the long run to allow for continuous exchange of ideas, helped establish closer channels of communication and was a first step toward a planned assignment of responsibilities among private players and the WFP. From the late 1960s onwards, CARE actively tried to work out mutually advantageous areas of cooperation between both agencies.175 In August 1969, after a personal meeting with WFP director Francisco Aquino in Rome, Frank Goffio informed all CARE mission chiefs of the necessity to get acquainted with their “local WFP man” in order to prevent duplication or overlapping of ongoing programs. Both parties actively sought closer personal relations and agreed that this would prevent recipient governments from placing “WFP and CARE in competition with each other.”176 Despite repeated problems in some of the missions, this general policy statement helped to consolidate relations and built the foundations for the development of successful joint integrated feeding programs.177 On a more general level, however, the concern remained that the gradual but regular growth of the WFP was only an illustration of a global trend toward “working multilaterally, especially under UN auspices.” The agencies’ fear that “recipient nations [would] find it easier to take aid through a multilateral channel” had proven correct – at least in the realm of food aid. Hence, it was with more than a little anxiety that an internal CARE paper asked at the end of the decade: “If this trend continues … what will be the appropriate role for the American voluntary agencies? Five years from now? Ten years from now?”178 At the end of the first Development Decade, the need to come to terms with a rapidly growing number of new international players had become undeniable. What had been an overwhelmingly American domain was turning into a field in which agencies from all parts of the Western hemisphere, whether private, governmental, or intergovernmental, were trying to find a place. Confronted with this new challenge, only one thing was possible – CARE had to start looking for new international partners. The lesson the agency had learned from the American context more than a decade earlier applied once again for the international setting: There was no more room for unilateralism. Only through cooperation would CARE be able to thrive. A partnership with Oxfam CARE’s first approach toward internationalization at the beginning of the 1960s had clearly shown that Europe was not nearly as devoid of private organizations active in humanitarian relief and development planning as it might have seemed

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from afar. On the contrary, out of the many voluntary groups on the continent, there were several with a history and background similar to CARE’s. One of the largest and best-known agencies was Oxfam, a British non-governmental organization which had been founded in 1942 as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief by a group of Quakers, academics, and social activists.179 Providing food and clothes to the starving people in occupied Greece and helping in the general post-war relief endeavor, the committee’s subsequent development had paralleled that of CARE. From a (post-)war relief agency with a focus on southern and eastern Europe, it had shifted its fields of intervention toward humanitarian relief for refugees and development aid to non-European countries at the beginning of the 1950s.180 Unlike CARE, which financed operations through the sale of packages and private donations as well as through the acquisition of government-donated agricultural surplus and ocean freight, Oxfam operated a tight network of charity shops. Revenue was derived from private donations and the sale of clothes and a wide variety of donated goods. The income generated in Great Britain was then transferred to aid projects abroad. By the mid-1960s Oxfam was already a sizeable organization with a couple of foreign offices. However, it was not fully operational at the time, meaning that apart from projects coordinated by its five field directorates, it did not run its own aid programs overseas.181 Instead, Oxfam funded worthwhile projects by handing out one-time grants or long-term funding to other local private or international organizations. The first grants to American agencies were extended after a visit by an Oxfam delegate to Canada and the United States in 1961. The Oxfam delegate had met with representatives from the ACVAFS, as well as with members of select religious agencies that applied for Oxfam grants afterwards.182 At that point no meeting with CARE had taken place, despite the fact that the Oxfam delegate judged that CARE was “as near [to Oxfam] as anything I could find.”183 It was not until late 1964 that CARE and Oxfam established official relations. In the spring of 1965 Oxfam director Leslie Kirkley met Richard Reuter and Frank Goffio in New York, and it was after these high-level talks that CARE’s executive team, highly interested in a potential new source of external funding, applied for an Oxfam grant for the first time.184 The two agencies’ first official joint project in the field in Bangalore, India, warrants special attention here, as both parties nourished high hopes for this new cooperation and were, ultimately, hugely disappointed by the actual outcome. The CARE–Oxfam venture is thus a prime example that points to the difficulties inherent in establishing real transnational cooperation among independent humanitarian agencies with differing organizational philosophies and ambitions. In October 1965 George Taylor from the CARE office in Delhi first informed headquarters in New York that he was making positive in-roads into an Oxfam participation in parts of the CARE program in India. Having met the local Oxfam people as well as the agency’s director, Leslie Kirkley, he was confident that a basis for future cooperation was in reach.185 This meeting had indeed made quite

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an impression on CARE’s British counterparts. In his report on his trip to India, Kirkley remarked that the CARE people: invited us to lunch at the newest and most palatial hotel in Delhi called the “interContinental”. It was really a super premises; not completely finished and of course very sparsely populated […]. Anyway we had a very nice lunch at their expense, I would not have thought of entertaining in such surroundings, but of course CARE, with these other American agencies, have a very large surplus food programme which is useful to them in balancing their expenses.186

CARE’s program in India was indeed quite sizable. At that point, the agency was operating in 12 states in India running the largest private–public school lunch program in the world with US government-donated excess food.187 Oxfam programs in the region were, in comparison, much smaller and were, in addition, mainly operated by religious agencies on Oxfam grants. Given a slight unease with this religious bias and in view of reports of impending famine in the region and a new Oxfam policy that called for more involvement in India, a potential cooperative venture with the non-sectarian agency CARE was attractive to the Oxfam staff.188 The actual program in question concerned a “virtually brand new dairy” plant in Bangalore that had partly been financed by UNICEF and that was – according to local CARE coordinator Bruce Strassburger – running at around 15 percent of capacity due to a shortage of milk to process. The original idea was to have Oxfam finance milk for about 32,000 needy children, thereby increasing the dairy’s turnover from 8,000 to 40,000 bottles of milk per day.189 A possible Oxfam involvement was discussed, whereby Oxfam would theoretically provide roughly US$53,800 as a grant to CARE. Oxfam was fairly thorough in assessing the potential joint venture. The Oxfam field secretary for Asia, Major G. W. Acworth, commissioned professional expertise from scholars at the Oxford University Department of Agriculture, who discussed the CARE proposal and rated it to be “technically sound.”190 In addition several Oxfam staffers visited CARE’s programs in the Bangalore region. While Oxfam staffers Elisabeth Stamp and Jennifer Booth reported back that the dairy plant in question was still a “white elephant” – meaning a well-meant but useless industrial project financed by Western donors and planted in economic and social surrounding in which it did not fit – they were optimistic that Oxfam and CARE would be able to change things for the better.191 Oxfam regional representative James Howard – while admitting that mere feeding programs had become “a little unfashionable” lately – was even more enthusiastic.192 He reminded his colleagues in Oxford that the scheme would not only provide “many needy children with milk at such a relatively small cost,” but also “first class supervision at no charge to us,” as well as the chance to make Oxfam “a known body in a State setting [in India] for once.”193 Given these high hopes on both sides, negotiations between CARE and Oxfam proceeded smoothly. In early March 1966 Bruce Strassburger informed the Indian

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Secretary for Education that Oxfam had agreed to take part in a joint governmentrun emergency feeding program with milk from the dairy in Bangalore starting on April 1. CARE staffers were confident that minor difficulties, like the dairy plant not having enough bottles (requiring it to package the milk in cans), would soon be overcome.194 However, only a few weeks later in early June, it became clear that this optimism had been excessive. Officially in the hands of the semi-governmental Bangalore Corporation, neither skilled workers nor the necessary equipment such as bottles, crates, trucks, or tinfoil were available to get the dairy plant off the ground. As it turned out, there would be no milk available for feeding purposes any time soon.195 Greatly embarrassed, and without consulting CARE, New York, or Delhi, Strassburger eventually confessed to Oxfam that he had been riding “on a wave of euphoria about ‘famine’ programs in general” without paying attention to the fact that Bangalore “was not a ‘scarcity affected area’ in the meaning of famine legislation.” His euphoria had apparently led to ignorance of the fact that the Indian government was running enough public works schemes and fair price shops for the needy to cover temporary food shortages. Accordingly, the Oxfam grant, which had been officially announced as a contribution to emergency famine relief, could not be appropriated. As a solution, Strassburger proposed the redirection of the money to one of CARE’s regular feeding programs or to a basic health scheme in the Bangalore region.196 Strassburger’s letter had a shattering effect on Oxfam, as the organization’s publicity department had already presented the joint venture as “major plank” in Oxfam’s India campaign.197 Since prevention of an emergency situation had been one of the conditions for the grant, Strassburger’s idea to channel the funds to regular CARE school feeding programs or basic health centers was not what Oxfam had had in mind. In addition, Oxfam development guidelines did “not rate the needs of schoolchildren very highly,” so the board insisted on distribution to preschoolers.198 With Oxfam GB and Bangalore being “hopping mad,” CARE staffers were faced with the task of dispelling Oxfam’s feeling that CARE had been trying “to con Oxfam into supplying money purely to expand [its] normal program.”199 This whole affair was all the more problematic as it shed quite a negative light on CARE’s overall capacity to keep its house in order. By reaching out to Oxfam without first calling New York or at least Delhi, Strassburger had clearly overstretched his autonomy. He left shortly afterwards and was replaced by Robert Ciszewski, who had to cope with “the most embarrassing baby which [had been landed in his] lap” – as Oxfam representative Acworth commented.200 While the Oxfam committee felt that their organization had been let down severely, the situation was even worse for CARE.201 Apart from the US$53,800 grant in question, the affair endangered a whole package of pending Oxfam contracts which “could be of far greater value to CARE’s overall program than the bottling program in Bangalore,” which CARE officials dreaded. To avoid further embarrassment, George Taylor, CARE’s mission chief to India, immediately demanded clearance of any correspondence

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through him.202 The b­ iggest obstacle to a solution that would allow CARE to keep the original Oxfam grant was that CARE staffers in India had no idea where to find enough pre-schoolers for an alternative program. As simple as it sounds, there was no acute famine situation that would have justified program classification as emergency status, as demanded by Oxfam. Slightly unnerved by Oxfam’s insistence on redress but acknowledging that something had to be done “to allow Oxfam to make peace with its collective conscience,” CARE India eventually proposed a return to the original proposal.203 The new idea once again entailed distribution of milk from the dairy plant at a later time when technical and logistical problems had been overcome, and smaller milk allocations to pre-schoolers in the meantime in order to bring Oxfam back into line with its recent premature publicity.204 Up to that point, the whole affair had mostly been handled by the local CARE employees in India, who had done their best to find a way out of the mess. However, in the face of continual blame being placed on them by their Oxfam counterparts, rebellion and the desire “to write a check and hand it back” to Oxfam had begun to smolder among their ranks.205 Having received a frank letter from Kirkley on the state of affairs and the stalemate between the local CARE and Oxfam teams in India, CARE executive director Frank Goffio finally got involved.206 In view of the bigger picture and the funds at stake, Goffio decided to step up – rating the danger of injecting CARE New York into a local matter in India as significantly lower than that of losing a potential partner and large-scale contributor. In a personal letter to Oxfam, he apologized for what he declared to be a deplorable mistake and underscored his conviction that CARE had no right to the grant if it didn’t perform.207 In a final attempt to find a satisfactory solution, Goffio went on his knees, apologized again, and eventually promoted the latest compromise proposal from his staffers in India as a means to relieve the publicity-related pressure on Oxfam.208 Hence, it was at the level of top executives and by means of symbol politics that the Indian affair was finally solved. In late August 1966, almost a year after the first ideas between the two organizations had been exchanged, Leslie Kirkley of Oxfam informed Frank Goffio that he had instructed his co-workers in India to agree to the proposal – hoping that the new project would eventually “provide a useful example of co-operation between CARE and Oxfam in helping the needy.”209 Despite the rocky start in Bangalore, subsequent projects, most prominently during the famine in Bihar in 1967, went more smoothly. CARE employees had learned from their initial mistakes and carefully described the imponderability of the famine situation and the difficulty of foretelling the exact number of food recipients, before accepting Oxfam funding for an emergency feeding project.210 Before starting afresh, there were some personal animosities between local CARE and Oxfam staffers in India to be overcome. While most of these tensions resulted from the debacle surrounding the dairy plant, they also had another dimension. What puzzled the Americans most was their impression that the Oxfam representative was “questioning the ability of just about everybody in India to handle the Bihar

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emergency except Oxfam.” CARE staffers felt that their British counterparts were questioning their ability to provide useful and nuanced development aid (or in this case emergency relief) – an allegation that hit a nerve and would probably have done so even without the previous affair.211 Despite these minor difficulties, both organizations built what can be called a successful transnational working relation, leaving room for different levels of respective commitment. During the Bihar famine, more than 450,000 locals were regularly receiving CARE/Oxfam sponsored food in government-run feeding centers. On site, four ounces of grain provided by CARE and one ounce of dried milk provided by Oxfam were mixed and fed to children, expectant and nursing mothers, and the elderly in need.212 Pleased with CARE’s performance and the cooperative atmosphere on site, Kirkley eventually voiced his hope that “the collaboration between our organizations in Bihar may well set a pattern for the future.”213 On Oxfam’s initiative, CARE and other voluntary agencies from around the world received an invitation to Oxfam’s 25th anniversary in October 1967.214 Motivated by the successful cooperation between CARE and Oxfam in the field, Kirkley reached out to potential partner NGOs worldwide in an attempt to give transnational cooperation a new and more political meaning. The meeting was promoted as a gathering for those non-sectarian, non-partisan-political national NGOs “most deeply involved” in development aid, and was geared at finding a strategic approach to aid in light of the fact that governments and the public were l­essening their involvement. Oxfam was just beginning to contemplate lifting the crisis in Biafra/Nigeria onto its agenda and was struggling to “transform [its] actions into substantial public support in the absence of significant media attention on the crisis,” at least at this early stage of events.215 Hence the meeting was also planned as a way of uniting private agencies into a transnational front against ignorance and the rationality of state-centered diplomacy.216 The agenda for the anniversary meeting was visionary, in that it not only proposed an NGO inventory and assessment of the current state of affairs, but also joint planning for the next 5–10 years.217 CARE agreed to take part in the meeting, for which Oxfam distributed a questionnaire inquiring about the participants’ historical and organizational context, their strategic orientation, major external influences, financial basis and sources of income, “major obstacles to making a larger and more effective contribution” to development aid, as well as their relationship with the Freedom from Hunger campaign.218 CARE’s answers to the questions illustrate the degree to which the agency had changed its original program and purposes since 1945. With the start of PL 480 programming at the beginning of the 1950s, the transition of food into a development resource starting in the 1960s, and the move into health-related programming through the merger with Medico, CARE had repeatedly left the beaten track and changed its business model. Apart from the fact that food was still CARE’s main pillar and largest source of income, the agency had lately been taking a turn toward technical assistance in housing and well-digging, health programming, and community-based

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development programming. Sales of standard food packages were diminishing at astonishing speed as CARE moved “into more complex self-help programming.”219 While this transition was far from settled in late 1967, CARE did not shy away from declaring it a done deal. It was with unconcealed self-satisfaction that CARE announced to Oxfam that the only thing holding it back was the limited availability of funding.220 The actual NGO meeting in Oxford in late October 1967 was assessed to be a great success. Upon his return, Goffio reported that closer transnational cooperation would be realized with the participating agencies, particularly Oxfam. He immediately advised his co-workers to prepare funding proposals for potential joint CARE/Oxfam projects in Latin America where the British agency did not have representation.221 It was indeed a beneficial relationship that developed over the next couple of years. In addition to several grants for housing projects in East Pakistan, Oxfam provided funds to a number of other CARE development projects in the fields of nutrition, provision of potable water, and in the medical relief sector.222 By the late 1960s Oxfam had become a “VIP donor” and received special treatment and extra attention from CARE’s assistant executive director for programming and research, Merton Cregger.223 The classification as a “VIP donor” is rather telling when it comes to the assessment of the quality of this transnational partnership. While there was certainly much to be learned from Oxfam – particularly given the organization’s activity with regard to innovative development concepts and promotion of joint NGO activity on a global scale – actual cooperation was to some extent caught up in a hierarchical situation. Regarding actual projects, both CARE New York and CARE overseas tended to imagine CARE as the active operational partner and Oxfam as a mere provider of funds. However, Oxfam was certainly more than a mere cash cow and had its own ideas about programming and the use of donated funds. A large percentage of CARE project proposals did not pass Oxfam’s board. In many instances, geographical priorities as well as priorities regarding groups of recipients did not coincide, as Oxfam, unlike CARE, did “not touch schools” and continued to focus on particularly vulnerable groups such as pre-schoolers or nursing mothers.224 Moreover, it was clearly on Oxfam’s initiative that cooperation extended beyond the pecuniary dimension. Its staffers initiated an exchange of notes with regard to donor handling, fundraising, and Christmas card appeals to the public, as well as on computerized evaluation of projects and data processing in general.225 What might have continued indefinitely as a transnational transfer community – at least from the perspective of CARE – was disturbed by Oxfam’s accelerating shift into becoming an international and operational agency itself.226 Unlike CARE, Oxfam had succeeded in establishing spin-offs in other countries at the onset of the 1960s. With its “sister organizations” Oxfam Canada and Oxfam Belgium, founded in 1963 and 1964, the organization had successfully started a process of internationalization and diversification.227 While first ideas to form affiliates in India had

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not come to fruition, the agency continued to spread its wings, and in 1970 Oxfam officially incorporated an affiliate as a non-profit fundraising organization in the United States.228 An increase in fundraising appeals in Western countries followed an increase in genuine Oxfam-run development projects abroad. These projects began to conflict with CARE proposals, as exemplified by a brisk rebuff by Oxfam overseas director K. A. Bennett toward CARE program staffer Joel Montague in late 1969: I am far from clear about what you have in mind in forwarding these projects to us, or in possibly forwarding future ones. The general impression I have […] is that it is not so much a question as far as you are concerned of being unable to provide funds from some source for various projects as of believing that we in Oxfam have available funds for which we are seeking suitable outlets. […] As far as Oxfam is concerned we already have more good and urgent applications put up to us from very many sources, including our own field representatives, than we can fund. Thus the question of priorities arises and we have to consider which applications are more important.229

While Montague took the letter sportingly and decided that it might be best “to persuade their field reps that CARE projects ought to have priority,” this incident showed that Oxfam was on its way to other dimensions.230 CARE officials finally became alarmed when Oxfam started large-scale cooperation with the Australian NGO Community Aid Abroad (CAA), set up a joint representation in Indonesia in 1972 (eventually leading to affiliation of CAA with Oxfam), and informed CARE that it had finally decided to become fully operational.231 After a futile attempt to promote CARE as an alternative to developing an Oxfam “overseas staff somewhat in parallel to what CARE already has,” it dawned on CARE’s program strategists that Oxfam was “off to new pastures.”232 In a memo to his co-workers from the executive staff, Merton Cregger eventually confessed, I somehow get the feeling that we are being outflanked by this aggressive organization and would suggest that our rather low key effort at internationalization might be reexamined. I really believe that with each passing day it will be harder for us to become more international particularly with organizations such as Oxfam moving ahead so effectively. You will note that the approach they make is establishment of essentially autonomous national units. […] In any event, it would seem that we once again should give thought to the whole business of going more international.233

It was this memo that set the tone for the 1970s and gave the whole debate about finally going global a final push. By effectively and unwaveringly promoting the internationalization of its own organization, Oxfam was setting an example, and the CARE management was inclined to move faster in its attempt to keep pace. Hence, there were new accidentals for the upcoming second Development Decade. The 1970s would have to be about becoming a multinational organization – which meant that CARE would have to face those “major strategic and organizational issues” stemming from a confrontation with “alien policies, cultures, languages, and

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laws.”234 While CARE had successfully shouldered many of these challenges as a guest in foreign countries in the past, this time it would be about staying for good.

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Notes   1 Alfred E. Eckes and Thomas W. Zeiler, Globalization and the American Century, Cambridge and New York, 2003, p. 6.   2 CARE, Box 78 (ALMIS #1044), Merton Cregger to all overseas missions, report on Washington meeting, War on Hunger offices, August 2, 1967.   3 Thomas von Hippel, “Begriffsbildung und Problemkreise der Nonprofit-Organisationen aus juristischer Sicht,” in Klaus J. Hopt et al. (eds.), Nonprofit-Organisationen in Recht, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Theorien – Analysen – Corporate Governance, Tübingen, 2005, pp. 35–46 (p. 41).   4 Scott O. Stovall et al., “Corporate Governance, Internal Decision Making, and the Invisible Hand,” Journal of Business Ethics 51.2 (2004), pp. 221–7.   5 John Clark, “Democratising Development: NGOs and the State,” Development in Practice 2.3 (1992), pp. 151–62 (p. 154).   6 On the concept of “internal” and “external” factors triggering organizational development, see, for instance, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Gerald R. Salancik, The External Control of Organizations. A Resource Dependence Perspective, Stanford, CA, 2003 [1978], pp. 6–10, 11.   7 Rachel M. McCleary, Global Compassion. Private Voluntary Organizations and U.S. Foreign Policy since 1939, Oxford and New York, 2009, p. 84.   8 David H. Lumsdaine, Moral Vision in International Politics. The Foreign Aid Regime, 1949–1989, Princeton, NJ, 1993, pp. 244–5.   9 Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, All You Need is Love. The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s, Cambridge, MA, 1998; Fritz Fischer, Making Them Like Us. Peace Corps Volunteers in the 1960s, Washington DC, 1998; Jeffrey F. Taffet, Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy. The Alliance for Progress in Latin America, New York, 2007.  10 President Kennedy first mentioned the “New Frontier” in 1960 when accepting his nomination for the presidency; see John F. Kennedy, “Address of Senator John F. Kennedy Accepting the Democratic Party Nomination for the Presidency of the United States – Memorial Coliseum, Los Angeles, July 15, 1960,” http://www.presidency.ucsb. edu/ws/?pid=25966 (accessed September 8, 2015); see also Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept. John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, New York, 1991; NARA, RG 286, UD 447, Box 93, minutes of ICA/VFA meeting with voluntary agencies regarding reorganization of foreign aid, April 21, 1961.  11 CARE, Box 92, attachment to letter by David Mayer (Research, Evaluation, and Planning Assistance Staff) to Herbert Waters and other USAID colleagues (asking for comments on draft attachment), July 24, 1962, “Study of US Private Aid (non-governmental sources), statement of the problem, AID’s operational mandate.”  12 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, May 24, 1961; the contract was signed on May 4, 1961.  13 Johanna Siméant, “What Is Going Global? The Internationalization of French NGOs ‘Without Borders,’” Review of International Political Economy 12.5 (2005), pp. 851–83 (p. 855). While Siméant bases her argument on the visible trend toward globalized structures which became most apparent starting in the 1980s, I argue that the general mechanism, namely access to large-scale public funding, was already in place in the 1960s.

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 14 See, for example, Steven G. Brint, In an Age of Experts. The Changing Role of Professionals in Politics and Public Life, Princeton, NJ, 1994, pp. 66–7.  15 CARE, Box 33, confidential, Olive Clapper to Richard Reuter (cc Frank Goffio), May 29, 1959.  16 Other than WHO, which was mainly doing research and providing expertise to all kinds of players, both CARE and Medico operated practical programs in developing countries (as did UNICEF).  17 WHO and UNICEF officially started their cooperation in 1951, when Resolution WHA 3.46 (Third Session of World Health Assembly, 1951) set forth guidelines for WHO/ UNICEF joint action. Basis patterns were aimed at a particular division of labor, meaning operational aspects (supplies and services) toward government were to be provided by UNICEF, whereas WHO was to provide expertise to UNICEF and governments alike. In practice, this cooperation was most visible in the Joint Committee on Health Policy (JCHP) founded in 1948 at the first World Health Assembly; see Gian Luca Burci and Claude-Henri Vignes, World Health Organization, Alphen aan den Rijn, 2004, pp. 76–8; see also Kelley Lee, The World Health Organisation (WHO), London, 2009, pp. 19–20.  18 David Shavit, The United States in Asia. A Historical Dictionary, New York, 1990, p. 133.  19 CARE, Box 33, confidential memo, Olive Clapper to Richard Reuter (cc Frank Goffio), May 29, 1959; confidential memo, Richard Reuter to Olive Clapper, June 9, 1959.  20 CARE, Box 33, joint Medico/CARE memorandum on medical international cooperation between CARE and Medico, Inc., July 24, 1959; see also Frank Goffio to Peter Comanduras, March 31, 1960; this deal is a counter-example to the assumption that non-profits mainly relying on private funding will be less open to cooperation and contracting out, as discussed by Hee Soun Jang and Richard C. Feiock, “Public versus Private Funding of Nonprofit Organizations: Implications for Collaboration,” Public Performance and Management Review 31.2 (2007), pp. 174–90.  21 Not only did Dooley publish three books on his work himself (see Thomas A. Dooley, Dr. Tom Dooley’s Three Great Books. Deliver us from Evil; The Edge of Tomorrow; The Night they Burned the Mountain, New York, 1960), there are also some contemporary books on his life and deeds; see, for example, Teresa Gallagher, Give Joy to my Youth. A Memoir of Dr. Tom Dooley, New York, 1965; James Monahan, Before I Sleep. The Last Days of Dr. Tom Dooley, New York, 1961; a more recent publication is James T. Fisher, Dr. America. The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927–1961, Amherst, MA, 1997.  22 CARE, Box 1040, attachment to Medico minutes of December 1961, to Mrs. Morton May.  23 CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, October 25, 1961; Box 1040, copy of Medico minutes of October 13, 1961.  24 Wallace J. Campbell, The History of CARE. A Personal Account, New York, 1990, p. 183.  25 CARE, Box 33, Louis Samia (CARE) to Gen. Hastings (Medico, Inc.), November 2, 1961.  26 CARE, Box 33, Richard Vogler to Louis Samia, January 23, 1962; Alex Hawes, to Richard Reuter, November 22, 1961.  27 CARE, Box 1040, minutes of Medico executive committee meeting, November 29, 1961.  28 CARE, Box 858, confidential Medico proposal regarding staff reorganization, Harry Cooper to Richard Reuter, January 2, 1962.  29 CARE, Box 33, Richard Reuter to members of board of directors, subj: merger of CARE and Medico, January 8, 1962; ind. ALMIS #425, Reuter to all missions, January 18, 1962.  30 While Rubén Berríos, Contracting for Development. The Role of For-Profit Contractors in U.S. Foreign Development Assistance, Westport, CT, 2000, pp. 10–11, states that the 1960s can only

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be considered as “prehistory” to US out-contraction in the development sector, contracts and grants between government players and private organizations had already started to grow in importance throughout the 1960s; see Julian Wolpert, “Redistributional Effects of America’s Private Foundations,” in Kenneth Prewitt (ed.), The Legitimacy of Philanthropic Foundations. United States and European Perspectives, New York, 2006, pp. 123–49; see also CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, October 27, 1965.  31 Henry B. Hansmann, “The Role of Nonprofit Enterprise,” The Yale Law Journal 89.5 (1980), pp. 835–901 (p. 847).  32 CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, January 24, 1962; the merger was approved unanimously by the CARE board.  33 CARE, Box 33, administrative memo Richard Reuter to NY employees, January 26, 1962, subj.: CARE-Medico agreement.  34 Howard A. Rusk, “World Medical Merger. CARE and MEDICO Seek Lower Costs, Increased Efficiency and Better Service,” The New York Times, January 28, 1962.  35 Everett Groseclose, “Global Charity. CARE Keeps Cost Low As It Ships Necessities to the Poor Overseas,” The Wall Street Journal, September 27, 1967, p. 1.  36 CARE, Box 73, CARE to Better Business Bureau, June 14, 1962.  37 Campbell, History of CARE, p. 184.  38 CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, April 25, 1962.  39 CARE, Box 1040, minutes of meeting of members, October 13, 1962.  40 Campbell, History of CARE, p. 184.  41 CARE, Box 503, résumé of objectives and achievements 1966–1967, report by Program Department to the board of directors [undated].  42 See, for example, Ilona Kickbusch and Margarita Ivanova, “The History and Evolution of Global Health Diplomacy,” in Ilona Kickbusch (ed.), Global Health Diplomacy. Concepts, Issues, Actors, Instruments, Fora and Cases, New York, 2013, pp. 11–26 (pp. 16–17); Claudia Prinz, “Between ‘Local Knowledge’ and ‘Global Reach’: Diarrhoeal Diseases Control and the International Health Agenda,” in Klaas Dykmann and Katja Naumann (eds.), Changes from the “Margins”: Non-European Actors, Ideas and Strategies in International Organizations (Comparativ 4–5/2013), Leipzig, 2014, pp. 93–117.  43 CARE, Box 73, CARE annual statements of income and disbursements, 1961 and 1963; see also summary statement of income of CARE according to data submitted to the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid (based on Schedule C report) for corresponding years.  44 See Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–1957, Vol. XVIII (Africa), Washington DC, 1989, document 50, dispatch from the Consulate General at Nairobi to the Department of State, Nairobi, December 30, 1955, pp. 189–95, particularly p. 194.  45 CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, October 26, 1960; see also Box 6, Charles R. Joy to Richard Reuter, July 20, 1955 proposing an expansion to Africa as early as 1955.  46 James P. Hubbard, The United States and the End of British Colonial Rule in Africa, 1941–1968, Jefferson, NC, 2011, pp. 286–95; see also Thomas J. Noer, “New Frontiers and Old Priorities in Africa,” in Thomas G. Paterson (ed.), Kennedy’s Quest for Victory. American Foreign Policy, 1961–1963, New York, 1989, pp. 253–83.  47 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, November 16, 1960; MBDM, April 26. 1961.  48 For a short and concise account on the situation in the Congo and its embeddedness in the Cold War scenario, see Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War. Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, Cambridge and New York, 2009, pp. 136–43.

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 49 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, March 22, 1961.  50 CARE, Box 1171, minutes of committee meeting, September 27, 1961; on the situation in the region, see John Kent, America, the UN and Decolonization. Cold War Conflict in the Congo, London and New York, 2010, pp. 126–86.  51 CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, April 22, 1964; for an extended perspective on US NGOs (including CARE) in the African Sahel region, see Gregory Mann, From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel. The Road to Nongovernmentality, Cambridge and New York, 2015.  52 CARE, Box 526, chronology of CARE, undated [1976].  53 CARE, Box 6, office memorandum, Peg Ford to Frank Goffio, June 17, 1963. CARE had established an office in Canada as early as 1946, mainly for fundraising purposes. This office slowly widened its portfolio, but it took until 1973 before some degree of formal autonomy was agreed upon.  54 CARE, Box 525, CARE overseas administrative manual, first issued October 16, 1959, section 12A, p. 8.  55 CARE promulgated very specific orders regarding style and content of cables, letters and memos. In 1957 a new series of letters, called ALMIS, were introduced, in regular and red categories. While normal ALMIS did not demand an answer from the mission, red ALMIS required an immediate answer. See CARE, Box 525, CARE overseas administrative manual, first issued October 16, 1959, section 9A, p. 5.  56 CARE, Box 833, biographical sketch Frank Goffio, undated.  57 CARE, Box 525, CARE overseas administrative manual, first issued October 16, 1959, section 1A, p. 2.  58 The executive committee consisted of the executive management team and dedicated board members with special functions or responsibilities.  59 Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand. The Managerial Revolution in American Business, Cambridge, MA, 1977, p. 491.  60 CARE, Box 55, confidential, Bernhard Kerbel to executive staff, Reuter, Goffio, Devine and Samia, July 26, 1962.  61 CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, October 25, 1961.  62 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, November 29, 1961.  63 CARE, Box 6, proposal for European partnership with American non-profit aid to underdeveloped countries by Teymuraz Bagration (Tolstoy Foundation, Inc.), December 18, 1961.  64 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, 27 December 1961.  65 CARE, Box 6, Teymuraz Bagration to James W. Riddleberger, January 3, 1962; James Riddleberger to Teymuraz Bagration, January 19, 1962; Richard N. Gardner to Teymuraz Bagration, January 18, 1962.  66 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, March 28, 1962; see also Box 6, to CARE executive committee, proposal for the establishment of CARE-type organizations in economically advanced countries, March 28, 1962.  67 CARE, Box 6, Teymuraz Bagration to Lewis Johnson, August 14, 1962; “Preliminary Outline for a Training Program for Representatives of European Agencies for International Development Service,” undated [1962].  68 CARE, Box 6, Richard Reuter to K. J. Yates (Cooperative Institute Sydney, Australia), July 16, 1962; Wallace B. Campbell (CARE) to Andreas Korp (Vienna), July 18, 1962.  69 CARE, Box 6, Teymuraz Bagration to Lewis Johnson, August 14, 1962.  70 CARE, Box 6, Teymuraz Bagration to Frank Goffio, August 14, 1962.

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 71 CARE, Box 6, Lewis Johnson to Harold Miner (CARE president), September 27, 1962.  72 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, November 28, 1962.  73 CARE, Box 6, Dan Ostrander to Teymuraz Bagration, October 1, 1962; Dan Ostrander to Pastor Diehl, head of the Zentralausschuss der Spitzenverbände der Freien Wohlfahrtspflege in charge of distribution of foreign gifts (Liebesgaben), November 8, 1962.  74 CARE, Box 6, Egbert de Vries (ISS) to Teymuraz Bagration, September 3, 1962.  75 CARE, Box 6, progress report from the committee of members of the board of directors of CARE on CARE-like organizations, October 24, 1962.  76 CARE, Box 37, report of the committee of members of the board of directors on CARE-like organizations to CARE president Harold Miner, September 22, 1965.  77 CARE, Box 6, Gordon Alderfer on behalf of Frank Goffio to Herbert J. Waters (USAID), January 22, 1963; confidential, Julius N. Cahn (staff director of Committee on Government Operations) to Teymuraz Bagration, April 5, 1963.  78 Akira Iriye, “A Century of NGOs,” Diplomatic History 23.2 (1999), pp. 421–35.  79 In Norway alone, more than twenty private organizations were actively providing development aid before the 1960s; see Terje Tvedt, Angels of Mercy or Development Diplomats? NGOs and Foreign Aid, Oxford and Trenton, NJ, 1998, pp. 44–5. Oxfam delegates traveling in the United States remarked in the early 1960s that CARE and Oxfam bore strong resemblances; see MS. Oxfam PRG/2/4/2, “Factual Report on Behalf of Oxfam in Connection with Visit of Colonel Chris Widdowson to Canada and the United States, March 30 to June 14, 1961.”  80 CARE, Box 37, report of the committee of members of the board of directors on CARE-like organizations to CARE president Harold Miner, September 22, 1965.  81 Resolution 1710 (XVI), United Nations Development Decade, A programme for international economic co-operation (I), General Assembly of the United Nations, December 19, 1961, http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/167/63/IMG/ NR016763.pdf?OpenElement (accessed January 17, 2013).  82 There is some research that depicts post-war development as the “invention” of a new concept that did not exist before; see, for example, Gilbert Rist, The History of Development. From Western Origins to Global Faith, London, 2006, pp. 69–70. This position has been challenged in recent years; see, for example, David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission. Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order, Princeton, NJ, 2010, p. 3.  83 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.  84 The term “modernization” has been used since the seventeenth century, but it was in the 1930s that modernization as a model had some kind of a breakthrough; see Ekbladh, The Great American Mission, p. 3; see also Andreas Eckert and Albert Wirz, “Wir nicht, die Anderen auch. Deutschland und der Kolonialismus,” in Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria (eds.), Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichtsund Kulturwissenschaften, Frankfurt a.M., 2002, pp. 372–92 (p. 377); it is an interesting side-note that Henry R. Luce, who vigorously promoted American global interventionism and set the tone for the post-war development debate, is frequently forgotten when US development ideology is discussed; see, for example, Donald W. White, “The ‘American Century’ in World History,” Journal of World History 3.1 (1992), pp. 105–27; regarding the establishment of Point Four, see Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron. Harry S. Truman

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and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954, Cambridge and New York, 1998, pp. 278–9; Samuel Hale Butterfield, U.S. Development Aid – An Historic First. Achievements and Failures in the Twentieth Century, Westport, CT, 2004, pp. 1–6. Odd Arne Westad, “Rethinking Revolutions: The Cold War in the Third World,” Journal of Peace Research 29.4 (1992), pp. 455–64; Frederick Cooper, “Writing the History of Development,” Journal of Modern European History 8.1 (2010), pp. 5–23 (pp. 15–16); Marc Frey, “Entwicklungspolitik,” in Jost Dülffer and Wilfried Loth (eds.), Dimensionen Internationaler Geschichte, Munich, 2012, pp. 293–312 (pp. 297–8). Olav Stokke, The UN and Development. From Aid to Cooperation, Bloomington, IN, 2009, pp. 137–56; on the EEC, see, for example, Giuliano Garavini, After Empires. European Integration, Decolonization, and the Challenge from the Global South, 1957–1985, Oxford,  2012;  Urban Vahsen, Eurafrikanische Entwicklungskooperation. Die Assoziierungspolitik der EWG gegenüber dem Subsaharischen Afrika in den 1960er Jahren, Stuttgart, 2010. This is also true for those countries predominantly receiving aid; see James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine. “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, Minneapolis, MN, 2007; for an enlightening account on Senegal, see Martin Rempe, Entwicklung im Konflikt. Die EWG und der Senegal 1957–1975, Cologne, 2012; Andreas Eckert, “‘We Are All Planners Now.’ Planung und Dekolonisation in Afrika,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 34.3 (2008), pp. 375–97. For a short account of Kennedy’s “New Horizons” approach to foreign aid, see Sergey Y. Shenin, America’s Helping Hand. Paving the Way to Globalization. Eisenhower’s Foreign Aid Policy and Politics, New York, 2005, pp. 191–7. See, for example, Helge Ø. Pharo and Monika Pohle Fraser (eds.), The Aid Rush. Aid Regimes in Northern Europe during the Cold War, Oslo, 2008; Ferdinand Leikam, Empire, Entwicklung und Europa. Die Europapolitik Grossbritanniens und die Entwicklungsländer im Commonwealth, 1945–75, Augsburg, 2011. Scholars like Michael Barnett identify this shift in a later period, starting in the 1980s. I argue, however, that when it comes to the American NGOs, development planning from the early 1960s onwards started this discursive shift; see Michael Barnett, “Humanitarianism Transformed,” Perspectives on Politics 3.4 (2005), pp. 723–40 (p. 732). This finding is actually confirmed by the records of Oxfam (a British NGO), which show a strong focus on the actual impact and consequences of aid (particularly food aid) as early as in the 1960s; see, for instance, MS. Oxfam PRG 2/3/8/4/, Report of the Working Party Set up by the Council of Management (Reference Minute C28/66 of September/October Meeting 1966) To Examine Afresh the Place and Purpose of Oxfam, May 13, 1967, p. 7. CARE, Box 73, guidelines for programming, ALMIS #81, Gordon Alderfer to all missions, January 21, 1958. CARE, Box 1171, MECM, September 27, 1961; there may be a long distance between the British Poor Law of 1843 and twentieth-century food-for-work concepts, but James Vernon’s perspective on hunger and governmentality is still highly enlightening; see James Vernon, Hunger. A Modern History, Cambridge, MA, 2007, pp. 12–13. FAO, RG 12, SG OADG, Code FA 7/14, File ACUFS, office memorandum from P. V. Sukhatme, director Statistics Division, to Dr. M. Ezekiel, head of Economic Department, Surplus Disposal for Economic Development, December 1, 1960; the quote on modernization theory is from Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future. Modernization Theory in Cold War America, Baltimore, MD, 2003, p. 163.

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 94 For the contemporary debate on the ethical foundations of food-for-work projects, see Jamey Essex, “The Work of Hunger. Security, Development, and Food-for-Work in Postcrisis Jakarta,” Studies in Social Justice 3.1 (2009), pp. 99–116.  95 NARA, RG 286, UD 477, Box 94, Fowler Hamilton, memorandum for the President, subj.: status and potential for expansion of PL 480 Program in Latin America, March 19, 1962.  96 CARE, Box 94, prospect of pilot study on the value of supplementing children’s diet with protein from soy grits, USDA, April 5, 1963.  97 CARE, Box 60, program for CARE World Conference in Washington DC, May 23–27, 1965, at Hilton Hotel.  98 A commendable exception is the book by Susan Levine, School Lunch Politics. The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program, Princeton, NJ, 2008, pp. 151–78; see also Amy Bentley, Inventing Baby Food. Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet, Oakland, CA, 2014, pp. 71–103.  99 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, May 25, 1966; MECM, May 26, 1965. 100 Victoria de Grazia, “Globalizing Commercial Revolutions,” in Gunilla Budde et al. (eds.), Transnationale Geschichte. Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien, Göttingen, 2006, pp. 238–53 (p. 243); William Winders, The Politics of Food Supply. U.S. Agricultural Policy in the World Economy, New Haven, CT, 2009, p. 156; see also Joseph L. Anderson, Industrializing the Corn Belt. Agriculture, Technology, and Environment, 1945–1972, DeKalb, IL, 2009. A laudable contribution to this debate is the edited volume by David C. Goodman and Michael Watts (eds.), Globalising Food. Agrarian Questions and Global Restructuring, London, 1997; see particularly the chapter by William Boyd and Michael Watts, “Agro-Industrial Just in Time. The Chicken Industry and Postwar American Capitalism,” pp. 192–225. For a perspective centering around consumer interests and industrial relations, see the doctoral dissertation by Gabriella Petrick, “The Arbiters of Taste: Producers, Consumers and the Industrialization of Taste in America, 1900–1960,” University of Delaware, 2007, http:// search.proquest.com/docview/304860249 (accessed June 5, 2016). 101 CARE, Box 1172, MECM, May 24, 1967. 102 CARE, Box 1172, MECM, March 29, 1967. 103 John Young, “A Perspective on Functional Foods,” Food Science and Technology Today 10 (1996), pp. 18–21; functional foods are usually said to be a development of the 1980s. It could be argued, however, that modern functional foods were actually developed and tested much earlier, as the use of special nutrients in development and food aid programming shows. 104 David B. Grigg, The World Food Problem, 1950–1980, Oxford and New York, 1985, pp. 2–3. 105 Alexander Nützenadel and Frank Trentmann, “Mapping Food and Globalization,” in Alexander Nützenadel and Frank Trentmann (eds.), Food and Globalization. Consumption, Markets and Politics in the Modern World, Oxford, 2008, pp. 1–18 (p. 11). 106 Nick Cullather, “The Foreign Policy of the Calorie,” The American Historical Review 112.2 (2007), pp. 337–64 (pp. 340–1); Nick Cullather, The Hungry World. America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia, Cambridge, MA, 2010, pp. 14, 146. 107 Josué de Castro, Geopolitics of Hunger, London, 1952, pp. 93–4; de Castro’s book was translated into more than fifty languages and was awarded The Franklin D. Roosevelt Foundation Award in 1952. De Castro was awarded the Peace Prize in 1955. 108 CARE, Box 98, “Overview of CARE Programming Goals and Strategy,” undated [late 1960s]. 109 CARE, Box 176, Mary Ann Anderson (CARE nutritionist) to Jacques Lauriac and Irma Lashley (CARE mission Sri Lanka), June 18, 1974.

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110 See Christiane Berth, “Food, Politics, and Consumption in Nicaragua, 1970–1993,” unpublished Habilitation, University of Bern, 2016; see also Rachel Garst and Tom Barry, Feeding the Crisis. U.S. Food Aid and Farm Policy in Central America, Lincoln, NE, 1990, pp. 110–12; a contemporary perspective on the topic is provided by the WFP, http://www.wfp.org/ nutrition/special-nutritional-products (accessed January 3, 2013). 111 CARE, Box 130, Alexander Sakalis (Chief of Mission CARE Egypt) to George Taylor, January 21, 1957; both local authorities and recipients were more interested in other commodities like wheat and butter. In addition, milk powder was not familiar and most recipients did not use it for their everyday cooking. On the global spread of white bread, see Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread. A Social History of the Store-bought Loaf, Boston, 2012, pp. 133–48. 112 CARE, Box 111, Rignall (CARE NY) to Sykes (CARE Egypt), February 26, 1976. 113 CARE, Box 377, historical sketch of CARE work in Korea, undated. 114 Thomas R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Library of Economics and Liberty, http://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPop.html (accessed September 9, 2015). 115 See, for example, James P. Huzel, The Popularization of Malthus in Early Nineteenth Century England. Martineau, Cobbett and the Pauper Press, Aldershot, 2006. 116 On the long term-discursive shift, see Thomas Robertson, Malthusian Moment. Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism, New Brunswick, NJ, 2012. 117 Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception. The Struggle to Control World Population, Cambridge, MA, 2008, pp. 115–54; on the racial hygiene tradition, see, for example, Peter Engelman, A History of the Birth Control Movement in America, Santa Barbara, CA, 2011, p. 132; Rebecca M. Kluchin, Fit to Be Tied. Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1950–1980, New Brunswick, NJ, 2009, ch. 1; see also Susanne Heim and Ulrike Schaz, Berechnung und Beschwörung. Überbevölkerung. Kritik einer Debatte, Berlin, 1996, pp. 108–11. 118 Lyndon B. Johnson, “Special Message to Congress: Food for Freedom,” February 10, 1966, in Public Papers of the President of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson (1966), containing the public messages, speeches, and statements of the president, Volume I, Ann Arbor, MI, 2005, pp. 163–9. 119 CARE, Box 523, Frank Goffio to chiefs of mission only, December 6, 1965. 120 In addition to the US government and many other national governments, private foundations like the Ford Foundation became heavily involved in family-planning activities and provided grants for governments and private players alike; see, for example, Oscar Harkavy and Krishna Roy, “The Emergence of the Indian National Family Planning Program,” in Warren C. Robinson and John A. Ross (eds.), The Global Family Planning Revolution. Three Decades of Population Policies and Programs, Washington DC, 2007, pp. 301–23 (p. 319); Matthew Connelly, “Population Control in India: Prologue to the Emergency Period,” Population and Development Review 32.4 (2006), pp. 629–67 (p. 656). 121 One of the most prominent critics was ecologist and writer William Vogt (author of Road to Survival, New York, 1948, in which he addressed the agricultural tragedy in the “dust bowl” in the American Midwest during the 1930s), who accused the US government and agencies like CARE (which was explicitly mentioned) of “lowering death rates”; see “We Help Build the Population Bomb,” New York Times Magazine, April 4, 1965; the term “population bomb” was taken up by biologist Paul R. Ehrlich in his international bestseller The Population Bomb, New York, 1968. On the connection between early twentieth-century environmentalism and international population discourse, see Robertson, Malthusian Moment, pp. 36–60.

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122 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, June 23, 1965. 123 Which was at least partially true given the relatively widespread network of clinics offering family planning (whether preventive or remedial) in the United States; see Peter Engelman, A History of the Birth Control Movement in America, Santa Barbara, CA, 2011, pp. 75–180. 124 CARE, Box 37, committee to report on a policy as to CARE’s participation in programs of family planning assistance overseas to board of directors, October 4, 1965. The committee was comprised of Edwin J. Weseley, Ben Touster, and Lewis Johnson. 125 CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, October 27, 1965. 126 CARE, Box 523, Frank Goffio to chiefs of mission only (ALMIS), December 6, 1965. 127 CARE, Box 1172, MECM, September 28, 1966. 128 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Vol. IX, International Development and Economic Defense Policy; Commodities, document 46, from the director of the Bureau of the Budget (Schulze) to President Johnson, Washington, November 16, 1965, pp. 131–33, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964–68v09/d46 (accessed September 4, 2015). 129 CARE, Box 1172, MECM, May 25, 1966; MECM, May 20, 1970. 130 CARE had family-planning programs in India, Pakistan, Egypt, and many other countries; see CARE, Box 1172, MECM, June 25, 1969; MECM, February 28, 1968; MECM, September 24, 1969; MECM, May 20, 1970. 131 “‘Vasectomy Fair’ Success in India. Plans Are Made to Expand Sterilization Program,” The New York Times, October 24, 1971. 132 John F. Kennedy, remarks to World Food Congress delegates, 4 June 1963, papers of John F. Kennedy, Presidential Papers, President’s Office Files (Digital Identifier JFKPOF-044– 034), pp. 4–5, http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKPOF-044–034.aspx (accessed January 11, 2013). 133 For Canada, see Matthew James Bunch, All Roads Lead to Rome. Canada, the Freedom from Hunger Campaign, and the Rise of NGOs, 1960–1980, Waterloo, Ont., 2007; interestingly enough, CARE of Canada was involved in the Canadian mobilization of the FFH campaign, pp. 196–7. 134 CARE, Box 78, Frank Goffio to Lyle Webster, secretary general WFC, May 23, 1963; CARE, Box 1171, MECM, March 27, 1963; see also D. John Shaw, World Food Security. A History since 1945, Basingstoke and New York, 2007, p. 82. 135 Ruth Jachertz and Alexander Nützenadel, “Coping with Hunger? Visions of a Global Food System, 1930–1960,” Journal of Global History 6.1 (2011), pp. 99–119. 136 See Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World. America’s Vision for Human Rights, Cambridge, MA, 2007, pp. 190–1; Dorothy B. Robins, Experiment in Democracy. The Story of U.S. Citizen Organizations in Forging the Charter of the United Nations, New York, 1971, pp. 88–9. 137 ACVAFS, Box 8, A.W. Patterson to ACVAFS executive committee, notes on trip to Washington, May 3, 1954; on Norris Dodd’s influence and role in the FAO, see Amy L. S. Staples, “Norris E. Dodd and the Connections between Domestic and International Agricultural Policy,” Agricultural History 74.2 (2000), pp. 393–403; on CARE’s application to ECOSOC, see CARE, Box 1170, MBDM, June 2, 1954. A little later CARE also applied for membership of the National Conference of FAO; see MBDM, July 7, 1954. 138 It was not until 1960 that CARE became a member of the US Committee for the United Nations; see CARE, Box 70, Abe Becker to Dorothy Crook (executive director of the US Committee for the UN), July 8, 1960; response and admission July 11, 1960.

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139 FAO, RG 001,1 Series D 14, relations with organizations other than UN family 1947–1958, memo concerning relations with Non-governmental Organizations (Orbenya), undated [1950]. 140 Pei-heng Chiang, Non-Governmental Organizations at the United Nations. Identity, Role, and Function, New York, 1981, pp. 85–102; Felix William Stoecker, NGOs und die UNO. Die Einbindung von Nichtregierungsorganisationen (NGOs) in die Strukturen der Vereinten Nationen, Frankfurt a.M., 2000, pp. 64–7. 141 The campaign was officially announced as being in planning, for the international campaign had started by mid-1958; see FAO, RG 12, Sec 4, B-067 B15, FFHC background papers, draft proposal project for a Free the World From Hunger Year, July 16, 1958; see also Amy L. S. Staples, The Birth of Development. How the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and World Health Organization Changed the World, 1945–1965, Kent, OH, 2007, pp. 106–9. 142 Binay R. Sen, Towards a Newer World, Dublin, 1982, p. 280. 143 Staples, Birth of Development, p. 109. 144 Mark Mazower, Governing the World. The Rise and Fall of an Idea, London, 2012, p. 310. 145 Kristin L. Ahlberg, Transplanting the Great Society. Lyndon Johnson and Food for Peace, Columbia, MO, 2008, p. 38. 146 CARE, Box 31, Charlotte E. Owen (ACVAFS) to George McGovern (Food for Peace), March 10, 1961; ACVAFS, Box 50, announcement of Freedom from Hunger campaign, April 22, 1960. 147 CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, October 26, 1960. 148 Staples, Birth of Development, pp. 106–7. 149 ACVAFS, Box 14, ACVAFS position paper on solicitation of voluntary contributions by intergovernmental and United Nations agencies, approved by the board of directors, May 18, 1960. 150 CARE, Box 31, Richard Reuter to Sheri Eberhart, December 14, 1961. 151 ACVAFS, Box 50, Charlotte Owen, executive director ACVAFS, to all members of the executive committee, subj.: Freedom from Hunger Campaign – USA participation, November 17, 1960. 152 ACVAFS, Box 29, Charlotte Owen (ACVAFS) to Bishop Edward E. Swanstrom (CRS), July 17, 1961. 153 CARE, Box 73, confidential report on Freedom from Hunger Foundation [presumably written or at least forwarded by Wallace Campbell], October 4, 1962. 154 CARE, Box 31, Wallace Campbell to Murray Lincoln, January 22, 1962. 155 CARE, Box 78, Wallace Campbell (assistant to the president of FFH Foundation) to James Lambie (CARE), May 6, 1963. 156 CARE, Box 31, Harry J. Cooper to Richard Reuter, June 18, 1962: subj.: Ad Council program Join the Freedom from Hunger Campaign. 157 CARE, Box 31, Harry W. Edwards (CARE) to Chet Huntley (NBC news), January 9, 1963. Edwards proposed a program based on CARE’s contribution to a scientific food lab in Ecuador financed by CARE FFH donations; see also excerpt from Freedom from Hunger Foundation executive committee meeting, June 27, 1962. 158 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, February 27, 1963. 159 Michael N. Barnett, Empire of Humanity. A History of Humanitarianism, Ithaca, NY, 2011, pp. 97–106. 160 Shaw, World Food Security, pp. 83–4.

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161 The FAO’s budget increased more than tenfold between 1958 and 1967, from less than US$7 million to roughly US$83 million; see Staples, Birth of Development, p. 120. 162 Olav Stokke, The UN and Development. From Aid to Cooperation, Bloomington, IN, 2009, pp. 251–300; United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1496 (XV) on Provision of Food Surpluses to Food-deficit People through the United Nations System, 908th Plenary meeting, October 27, 1960. 163 D. John Shaw, The UN World Food Programme and the Development of Food Aid, Basingstoke, 2001, pp. 6–66; Aaron D. Rietkerk, “The Constructive Use of Abundance. The UN World Food Programme and the Evolution of the International Food-Aid System during the Post-War Decades,” The International History Review 38.4 (2016), pp. 788–813. 164 Christopher B. Barrett and Daniel G. Maxwell, Food Aid after Fifty Years. Recasting its Role, London and New York, 2005, pp. 61–2; see also John Cathie, European Food Aid Policy, Aldershot, 1997, ch. 4. 165 Ross B. Talbot, The Four World Food Agencies in Rome, Ames, IW, 1990, p. 51; for European programmes and practices in surplus distribution, see also Kiran Klaus Patel, Europäisierung wider Willen. Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland in der Agrarintegration der EWG 1955–1973, Munich, 2009, pp. 345–57, 427–52. 166 Ahlberg, Transplanting the Great Society, p. 74. 167 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, September 12, 1963; on IO expansion, see Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the World. International Organizations in Global Politics, Ithaca, NY, 2004, p. 15. 168 RUA, ACVAFS, Box 8, MECM, September 24, 1962. 169 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, May 22, 1963. 170 CARE, Box 115, George Mathues (CARE Egypt) to Constantion Cabooris (USAID), cc to Edwin Moline and Alan Strachan, December 19, 1964. 171 CARE, Box 35, Lawrence Delliquardi to Frank Goffio, subj: WFP, July 14, 1970. 172 David C. Hammack and Steven Heydemann, “Philanthrophic Projections. Sending Institutional Logics Abroad,” in David C. Hammack and Steven Heydemann (eds.), Globalization, Philanthropy, and Civil Society. Projecting Institutional Logics Abroad, Bloomington, IN, 2009, pp. 3–31. 173 CARE, Box 35, draft report of the tenth session of the United Nations/FAO intergovernmental committee of the World Food Program, WFP/IGC 10/23 Add.2, November 8, 1966. 174 CARE, Box 35, copy of report by Melvin B. Myers to James MacCracken, UN/FAO World Food Program, November 10, 1966. 175 CARE, Box 35, Frank Goffio (CARE) to Francisco Aquino (executive director WFP), July 24, 1969; reply, August 6, 1969. 176 CARE, Box 35, ALMIS #1229, Frank Goffio to chiefs of missions, subj.: WFP, August 7, 1969. 177 CARE, Box 35, Frank Goffio to Francisco Aquino (WFP/CARE cooperation in Indonesia), September 18, 1970; Frank Goffio to Francisco Aquino, July 6, 1972. 178 CARE, Box 58, draft of paper: “Some Agency Responses to Council’s Request for their Five ‘Concerns,’” undated [1970/71]. 179 On the prehistory of Oxfam and the establishment of the Oxford Committee on Famine Relief, see Maggie Black, A Cause for Our Times. Oxfam, the First 50 Years, Oxford, 1992, pp. 1–21. 180 Clare Saunders, “International Aid and Development. British Humanitarian, Aid and Development NGOs 1949-Present,” in Nick Crowson et al. (eds.), NGOs in Contemporary

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182 183 184 185 186 187

188 189 190

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Britain. Non-state Actors in Society and Politics since 1945, Basingstoke, 2009, pp. 38–57 (pp.  42–3); on Oxfam’s (and CARE’s) participation in relief to refugees and NGO ­participation in the World Refugee Year Campaign, see Peter Gatrell, Free World? The Campaign to Save the World’s Refugees, 1956–63, Cambridge and New York, 2011, pp. 122–40. MS. Oxfam PRG/2/4/2, draft paper on Oxfam “International Relations,” notes of discussion at Executive Committee Meeting, January 21/22, 1965, by T. H. G. Fletcher; Peter Gill, Drops in the Ocean. The Work of Oxfam 1960–1970, London, 1970, pp. 12–13. MS. Oxfam PRG/2/4/2, “Factual Report on Behalf of Oxfam in Connection with Visit of Colonel Chris Widdowson to Canada and the United States, March 30 to June 14, 1961.” MS. Oxfam PRG/2/4/2, “Factual Report on Behalf of Oxfam in Connection with Visit of Colonel Chris Widdowson to Canada and the United States, March 30 to June 14, 1961.” MS. Oxfam PRG/2/3/12/2, T. H. G. Fletcher (Oxfam deputy director) to Frank Goffio (CARE), February 2, 1965; Frank Goffio to T. H. G. Fletcher, February 5, 1965; Frank Goffio to T. H. G. Fletcher, September 3, 1965 CARE, Box 34, George Taylor (CARE India) to Fred Devine (CARE NY), October 11, 1965. MS. Oxfam PRF KN-G-004 = Box 443, “Director’s Tour, Leslie Kirkley, Autumn 1965. Report on Visit to India, November 16, 1965.” CARE, Box 1172, MBDM, January 26, 1966; the size of the program actually led to ­considerable – yet affirmatively concluded – debate as to whether CARE’s involvement in chronic famine prevention was in fact still “a voluntary agency job, or a problem for government”; see CARE, Box 73, guidelines for programming, ALMIS #81, Gordon Alderfer to all missions, January 21, 1958; on the debate and the decision by management, see Box 1172, MECM, February 23, 1966. Oxfam, MS. Oxfam PRG/1/2/1, “Confidential Report by James Howard, Field Director for Western Asia, September 24, 1965, A Report and Reflections on my First Eight Months for Oxfam in the Indian Sub-Continent.” CARE, Box 34, report on dairy plant in Bangalore, October 27, 1965. MS. Oxfam PRF KN-G-004 = Box 443, G. W. Acworth (Oxfam field secretary for Asia) to W. H. Beckett (Agricultural Economics Research Institute, Oxford), January 17, 1966; Beckett to Acworth, January 21, 1966; G. B. Masefield (University of Oxford, Dept. of Agriculture) to Acworth, January 22, 1966. Oxfam COM/3/3/1, “Confidential Report on Visit to India by Oxfam Staff Members, April 14–May 8 1966” (Elizabeth Stamp and Jennifer Booth, Oxfam Information Department). On the term “white elephant” see, for example, Dirk van Laak, Weiße Elefanten. Anspruch und Scheitern technischer Großprojekte im 20. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart, 1999, pp. 7–12; James A. Robinson and Ragnar Torvik, “White Elephants,” Journal of Public Economics 89 (2005), pp. 197–210 (p. 198). MS. Oxfam PRF KN-G-004 = Box 443, James Howard to Major Acworth, November 3, 1965. MS. Oxfam PRF KN-G-004 = Box 443, James Howard to Major Acworth, December 18, 1965; India 5391, Information Office CARE Milk Deeding Scheme, Bangalore, March 30, 1966. CARE, Box 34, Bruce Strassburger (CARE India) to B. R. Varma, secretary to the Government of Mysore, India, Education Department, March 11, 1966. CARE, Box 34, Bob Ciszewski (CARE Mysore) to George Taylor (CARE Delhi), June 21, 1966.

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196 CARE, Box 34, Bruce Strassburger (CARE Mysore) to Major Acworth (Oxfam), June 6, 1966. 197 Oxfam’s Information Department had used various CARE pictures for its publicity for the summer appeal as well as for its new pledged gift program; see MS. Oxfam PRF KN-G-004 = Box 443, Elisabeth Stamp (Oxfam Information Officer) to Bruce Strassburger (CARE India), June 3, 1966. 198 CARE, Box 34, G. W. Acworth (Oxfam field secretary for Asia) to Bruce Strassburger, June 13, 1966. 199 CARE, Box 34, Bob Ciszewski (CARE Mysore) to George Taylor (CARE Delhi), June 21, 1966. 200 CARE, Box 34, G. W. Acworth (Oxfam) to Robert Ciszewski (CARE), June 29, 1966. 201 MS. Oxfam PRG/1/2/1, Oxfam minutes of meeting of Field Committee for Asia, September 5, 1966 in Oxford 202 CARE, Box 34, George Taylor (CARE Delhi) to Robert Ciszewski, June 24, 1966. 203 CARE, Box 34, Bob Ciszewski to George Taylor, July 7, 1966. 204 CARE, Box 34, Bob Ciszewski to Major Acworth, July 18, 1966. 205 CARE, Box 34, private and confidential George Taylor to Bob Ciszewski, July 12, 1966. 206 CARE, Box 34, Leslie Kirkley to Frank Goffio, July 15, 1966. 207 CARE, Box 34, Frank Goffio to Leslie Kirkley, July 19, 1966. 208 CARE, Box 34, Frank Goffio to Leslie Kirkley, August 17, 1966. 209 CARE, Box 34, Leslie Kirkley to Frank Goffio, August 23, 1966. 210 CARE, Box 34, project outline CARE India to James Howard, Oxfam, February 8, 1967. 211 CARE, Box 34, George Taylor (CARE India) to Fred Devine (CARE NY), February 8, 1967. 212 CARE, Box 34, Miriam Gibson (Oxfam) to Frank Goffio, November 7, 1967, attachment: “Report on the Situation in Bihar.” 213 CARE, Box 34, Leslie Kirkley to Frank Goffio, May 10, 1967. 214 Oxfam had invited executives of Community Aid Abroad, CORSO, Novib, World Neighbors, Oxfam of Canada and Oxfam Belgique, and CARE. 215 MS. Oxfam COM/3/3/1 (strictly confidential), Philip Jackson to Oxfam area directors, November 20, 1969. The quote is from Kevin O’Sullivan, Ireland, Africa and the End of Empire. Small State Identity in the Cold War 1955–75, Manchester, 2013, p. 114; this neglect by the international media was remedied later, and Biafra has been analyzed as an “international media event” in which hunger became starkly politicized; see, for example, Lasse Heerten, “A wie Auschwitz, B wie Biafra. Der Bürgerkrieg in Nigeria (1967–1970) und die Universalisierung des Holocaust,” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 8.3 (2011), http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/16126041-Heerten-3–2011 (accessed March 12, 2013). 216 Alexander de Waal, Famine Crimes. Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa, London, 1997, p. 72. 217 CARE, Box 34, Leslie Kirkley, May 10, 1967. 218 CARE, Box 1172, MBDM, July 19, 1967; CARE, Box 34, invitation and questionnaire to Frank Goffio of CARE, August 8, 1967. 219 CARE, Box 55, John T. Thatcher to Everett Thorner, September 25, 1969, standard package availability list. 220 CARE, Box 34, CARE reply to Oxfam questionnaire [undated]. 221 CARE, Box 1172, MBDM, October 25, 1967.

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222 CARE, Box 34, list of CARE/Oxfam projects, enclosure to Frank Goffio to Richard Celandrella, Boston, undated [1975]. 223 CARE, Box 934, Franklin Irving to Richard Vogler, subj.: Oxfam, November 25, 1968; CARE, Box 519, Merton Cregger (CARE program department) to Franklin Irving (CARE service division), August 18, 1970. 224 CARE, Box 519, K. A. Bennet (Oxfam) to Merton Cregger (CARE), April 13, 1972; on the development of the vulnerability concept, see Greg Bankoff and Dorothea Hilhorst, “Introduction. Mapping Vulnerability,” in Greg Bankoff et al. (eds.), Mapping Vulnerability. Disasters, Development, and People, London, 2004, pp. 1–9. 225 CARE, Box 519, Elisabeth Stamp (Oxfam) to Sandra Ward (CARE), January 3, 1969; Sandra Ward (CARE) to Elisabeth Stamp (Oxfam), January 15, 1969; MS. Oxfam PRG/2/3/12/2, Mr. Jackson (special assistant to director of Oxfam) to Franklin Irving (CARE donor division), December 22, 1966; Franklin Irving (CARE) to J. W. Jackson (Oxfam), January 9, 1967. 226 MS. Oxfam PRG 2/3/8/4/, report of the working party set up by the Council of Management (Reference Minute C28/66 of September/October Meeting 1966), “To Examine Afresh the Place and Purpose of Oxfam,” p. 7, May 13, 1967; MS. Oxfam PRG/2/4/2, commented draft paper International Relations, January 1965, Appendix B to “Comment on Report Oxfam International Relations,” Henry Fletcher to K. A. Bennett, January 7, 1965. 227 MS. Oxfam PRG/2/3/13/22, Miriam Gibson (Oxfam Information Department, cc to the Director’s Office) to S. H. Posinsky, 168–14 127 Avenue, Jamaica, NY, USA, January 26, 1968. 228 MS. Oxfam COM/3/3/1, proposal to start an Indian Famine Organisation (INFAM) in collaboration with Oxfam, undated attachment to report on fundraising in India, G. W. Acworth to K. Bennett, July 31, 1967; MS. Oxfam PRG/2/3/13/22, T. H. G. Fletcher (executive director Oxfam of Canada) to Rosalind Dean (Oxfam Information Officer, Oxford), Subj.: re Oxfam-America Inc., April 17, 1970; to my knowledge there is no research available on Oxfam America; for general information, see http://www.oxfamamerica.org/ whoweare (accessed January 25, 2017). 229 CARE, Box 519, K. A. Bennett (Oxfam assistant director overseas) to Joel Montague (program officer, CARE), May 21, 1969. 230 CARE Box 519, partly handwritten by Joel Montague to Peg Ford, undated [May 1969]. 231 CARE Box 97, Christoph J. Sheiffele (CARE Indonesia) to Merton Cregger (CARE NY), April 1972; Merton Cregger to Frank Goffio, subj.: a new relationship with Oxfam, March 2, 1972. 232 CARE, Box 97, Merton Cregger to Frank Goffio, subj.: a new relationship with Oxfam, March 2, 1972; Merton Cregger to Kenneth A. Bennett (Overseas Aid Director Oxfam), March 10, 1972. 233 CARE, Box 97, Merton Cregger to Fred Devine and Louis Samia, May 3, 1972. 234 Geoffrey Jones, Multinationals and Global Capitalism. From the Nineteenth to the Twentyfirst Century, Oxford, 2005, p. 5.

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CARE and the Peace Corps

Colombian experiments The Peace Corps is not just a job. There are no 9:00 to 5:00 days in our operation. There will be little tolerance of a “tomorrow” philosophy and acceptance of an “it can’t be done because it hasn’t been done before” attitude.1 Sargent Shriver, Peace Corps director You may not, I’m afraid, fully understand how some of our internal policies create problems when we are “working for” you. A major reason good people want to work for us overseas is the relative autonomy we give them. They are willing – ­enthusiastic even […] – to take a CARE/Peace Corps assignment. But they remain CARE people, and after a tour or two, want to get back into the mainstream of their CARE careers.2 J. Lambie, CARE to F. Mankievicz, Peace Corps

Several years ago, in his book on ideology and US foreign policy, historian Michael H. Hunt concluded that the most apt definition for the developing world at the onset of the 1960s was “lands unfamiliar to Americans, even those making up the foreign policy elite.”3 While this assessment may be true for a majority of government diplomats and US foreign policy personnel around the world, there were exceptions to the rule. In transnational (immigrant) entrepreneurs and US voluntary agencies, at least two groups from the private sector had been working as intermediaries between the “first” and the “third” world for decades.4 In Latin America in particular, voluntary agencies offered a back door to the developing countries that was used again and again by US diplomats in search of cooperators, friends, and partners on the local level. Whenever difficulties arose, US officials tried “to sidestep national governments” and attempted to use special interest groups and American voluntary agencies as brokers between the government and local groups.5 By the early 1960s this function was increasingly formalized via contracts, grants, or special assignments awarded by US and foreign governments alike.6 This chapter examines the rise and decline of one such formal cooperation between the US voluntary agency CARE and a newly established US government agency – the Peace Corps – in Colombia during the 1960s, thereby shedding light

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on CARE’s attempts to develop new forms of operation and expertise in the growing field of development consulting.

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From CARE food relief to community development For most of the 1950s Colombia had been a country deeply entangled in a political, economic, and social crisis. Early twentieth-century economic prosperity had been shattered by the 1929 depression and the rapid decline of world market prices for the country’s most valuable commodity, coffee.7 After the assassination of the left-wing presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in April 1948, a decade-long violent civil war ensued that left approximately 200,000 people dead, wounded, or displaced.8 The country was divided between rural and urban populations, rich landowners and impoverished workers, as well as right- and left-wing forces. In 1953 Colombia, which had prided itself as the oldest democracy in South America, was eventually taken over by the military dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. While not unpopular with many of the country’s poor, Pinilla was unsuccessful in ensuring “peace, justice and freedom” as promised. In 1957 a general strike led by Colombian elites and oligarchs from the commerce, banking, and educational sector ended his rule, and a government of the national front under the leadership of Alberto Lleras Camargo reinstated what he perceived of as democracy in May 1958.9 CARE had started operations in Colombia back in 1954, in an attempt to bring food and milk to underfed Colombian children. In cooperation with the Colombian Ministry of Health, the American agency had set up an agricultural surplus package program.10 Starting out from a single office in the Colombian capital Bogotá, CARE quickly spread down to the state and departmental level and initiated cooperation with local government agencies and private Colombian welfare organizations.11 Under the new President Lleras Camargo, who enjoyed resolute US backing, CARE programming was lifted to another level. Vice President Nixon and his wife, for instance, used their first visit to Bogotá in 1958 to publicly distribute CARE packages to children. By mid-1958 CARE was already running feeding programs in four states and sixteen departments all over the country.12 In 1960, two years into Lleras Camargo’s presidency, the first plans to go into community development – and hence into social development planning on a long-term basis – were made by CARE and Colombian officials.13 Prepared in cooperation with the Ford, Rockefeller, and Kellogg foundations, the project proposal envisioned helping local Colombian coffee growers (cafeteros) to develop community programs and training sites for young workers in their respective neighborhoods across the country.14 CARE’s board of directors rated the plan to be “tremendously exciting” – a project potentially pointing the way toward “social evolution for Latin America.”15 Instead of concentrating on major capital investment projects for dams, railroads, and the like – something that was beyond reach for voluntary agencies anyhow – the community development project was geared at directing “skills and

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resources at the bottom of the [social] pyramid, where need is most immediate and desperate.”16 The concept was based on the conviction that civic engagement, as it was known in the United States, had to be adapted to local conditions elsewhere, in order to make allegedly underdeveloped nations learn from “advanced” ones.17 In other words, “only by becoming more like the United States could Latin American develop.”18 Given the context of violence and repeated social and political unrest in Colombia, the new CARE community development project was also clearly designed as a preventive measure against a socialist or communist upsurge. Before getting the program off the ground, local Colombian applicants had to complete a questionnaire requiring – among other information – statements of personal views on the revolution in Cuba. This twist allowed government officials to sort out almost 50 percent of the cafeteros as “politically unreliable,” as David R. Howie, CARE representative in Colombia, enthusiastically reported back to his American colleagues.19 Thus prepared, even US military strategists lauded the new program under the joint auspices of CARE and a newly created Colombian government office as an excellent means to spread “the spirit of liberty” and to prevent “communist subversive actions.”20 Howie was assigned as a CARE consultant to the Colombian office to promote and coordinate the program, assist in the actual training of the cafeteros, and finally to make sure that proper documentation of the efforts would be available – meaning the production of leaflets, radio programs, and even an educational documentary or promotional movie.21 The resultant contract committed the private agency to cover the expenses for Howie’s assignment as a consultant for one year and to bear the cost of planning and post-production of the motion picture. The rest, namely office space, a secretary, chauffeur and car, local production costs of the movie, and costs for the provision of educational material, was to be borne by the Colombian government.22 This arrangement was deemed a good start into social development planning and certainly stirred high hopes within CARE. Not only did it promise a new line of CARE programming beyond food aid, it even offered a potential new source of external funding provided by overseas governments ready to invest in CARE expertise.23 Toward cooperation with the Peace Corps Parallel to this new project with the cafeteros, another development was keeping CARE’s executive committee busy. In late February 1961 executive director Richard Reuter first informed his colleagues that CARE had been approached by proponents of a yet to be established US organization named the Peace Corps with a request for cooperation.24 This voluntary service for young Americans ready to direct their energy toward the “New Frontier” in the developing world was just being set up under the leadership of President Kennedy’s brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver.25 Shriver was a young liberal and a skilled lawyer who had worked as a

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political advisor for the Democratic Party in the past.26 Based on his own experience as a volunteer with Experiment in International Living (EIL) in Germany in 1934, Shriver was keen to make the Peace Corps into something special.27 Having read the US bestseller The Ugly American, which depicted official American Foreign Service personnel as loud, ignorant, and ostentatious, Shriver and his young team wanted to avoid any direct linkage of the future Peace Corps to official US foreign aid infrastructure.28 Instead they hoped that their new volunteer service would “add a new dimension to economic assistance that [would] be a supplement to technical assistance, capital goods, and consumption commodities” – in short “a doers, workers, and teachers operation.”29 Shriver and his supporters wanted a new generation of young Americans to go overseas with an organization that would “contribute to foreign policy” precisely because it was not an “instrument of foreign policy” – as Secretary of State Dean Rusk put it in affirmation of these plans.30 Despite strong headwinds, not least from President Kennedy himself, Shriver did ultimately succeed in designing the Peace Corps as an independent institution. However, without official connection to the State Department or the International Cooperation Administration (ICA, later USAID), practical support and expertise for this venture had to be found outside of these traditional foreign policy circles – at least in large part.31 It was against this backdrop that the Peace Corps began its  “talent search” among the many private American agencies that were already working in development aid, meaning that Shriver and his team approached CARE and a few other voluntary agencies as well as universities and foundations for help.32 The agencies approached quickly understood that cooperation with this brand new government agency was potentially advantageous in terms of their future impact on a central foreign aid institution. Hence, a Committee on the Peace Corps under the roof of the ACVAFS was set up immediately.33 The CARE management was particularly hopeful that cooperation with the Peace Corps in the social development field could ultimately result in greatly extended operations abroad.34 CARE’s 1961 fiscal year had begun with nearly a 10 percent loss in donor support – an unsettling development and a reason to be on the lookout for new opportunities.35 Selling expertise and experience to outside players, thereby “contracting for development” on a long-term basis, was viewed as a great opportunity for the future and a fitting task in addition.36 Thus, CARE staffer Ralf Greenlaw was taken off duty and reassigned to conduct negotiations with the Peace Corps. Only a short while later, a joint project in Colombia was agreed upon. The Latin American country was a highly symbolic choice insofar as it was part of the Alliance for Progress – the vast US economic and social assistance program with a counter-insurgency pretext that the president had just recently proclaimed.37 In addition, CARE and local Colombian officials and groups were about to begin their community development project with the coffee growers. All parties involved agreed that this project would provide a good basis upon which to build a first cooperative CARE–Peace Corps venture.38 The idea of tossing young and possibly overprotected young Americans into the Colombian

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environment, in which they would have to prove their “pioneering spirit” as tamers of underdevelopment, was a perfect match to the Peace Corps concept.39 Hence, months before President Kennedy signed the official Peace Corps Act in September 1961, preparations for a first CARE–Peace Corps mission to Colombia began.40 Within CARE, the upcoming cooperation was pushed forward with enormous efforts regarding staff assignments.41 Several replacements on the executive staff level were complemented by a special Advisory Board comprised of high-ranking CARE and Peace Corps representatives, a delegate from the Republic of Colombia, “and other citizens distinguished for their knowledge and experience in the field of overseas assistance programs.”42 The contract that was eventually signed on May 16, 1961 established CARE as a public service provider and a (rather ill-defined) partner of the Peace Corps.43 The contract regulated technical matters only, but CARE felt with some justification that it was more than an exchangeable contractor. As the first outside agency to enter into an official relationship with the Peace Corps and being entrusted with the preparation of the first Peace Corps volunteer unit, the agency had reason to feel that it was actually helping the new organization into the world.44 This implicit mindset was hardly challenged at that point, as the Peace Corps was still far from being established. In May of 1961 Shriver and his team were still canvassing in Washington, trying to raise funds and friends for their brainchild.45 The task was difficult insofar as they favored a “quantum jump” – meaning a large national program that would stand tall against the administrative apparatus in Washington.46 Instead of starting out humbly with a few hundred volunteers, as had been recommended by several experts, they wanted a bold program. When pledging appropriations with Congress in June 1961, Shriver asked for an initial US$40 million for the 1962 fiscal year, explaining that he was confident that the first group of volunteers would be in Colombia by September and that as many as 2,700 volunteers would be overseas within a year.47 Given the total lack of overseas structures, it was clear that outside help would be needed. Peace Corps officials reckoned that “substantial savings in time, money, and people would accrue to the Peace Corps by taking advantage of the firmly-established training centers and personnel now being used by voluntary agencies to prepare America’s youth for overseas service.”48 Thus, more than half of the US$40 million pledged with Congress was reserved for private voluntary agencies and US universities.49 These figures show that Shriver was well aware that it would almost entirely fall on “seasoned practitioners of overseas service” such as CARE to prepare the ground, help to administer the first groups of volunteers, and thus to make the Peace Corps operational in the first place.50 In search of the Peace Corps volunteer The public response to the first Peace Corps draft announcement in cooperation with the Advertising Council was remarkable.51 The promise of making a difference with the Peace Corps excited tens of thousands of young Americans. Extensive

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information campaigns at the country’s universities were started.52 Within weeks of the first posters, radio spots, leaflets, and newspaper articles announcing the search for volunteers, applications were piling up in Washington.53 Shriver and his team were planning to establish a top-notch organization and wanted top-notch volunteers. Thus, a painstakingly detailed procedure was created, for which applicants needed to bring no less than six personal references. In addition, they had to complete a detailed application form, pass a six-hour exam, and undergo medical and psychiatric screening. Only those who passed the initial tests were eventually admitted to the joint Peace Corps–CARE recruitment program at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. The choice of Rutgers University as a training facility created the first friction between CARE and the Peace Corps. Though Peace Corps representatives had originally encouraged maximum independence for the voluntary agencies, underscoring that they “should take upon themselves as much responsibility as ­possible” – including their own recruitment and screening – this generous invitation for an equal partnership changed rather quickly.54 When CARE took the Peace Corps’ encouragement seriously and announced its choice of Rutgers University (which was much closer to the CARE headquarters in New York than to the Peace Corps in Washington DC) to the press, Peace Corps officials were dismayed about what they perceived as embarrassing high-handedness by an outside agency. After having fought so fiercely for “their” Peace Corps, its new leaders were far from ready to accept interference with their autonomy, and claimed primacy over decisions of potentially far-reaching nature. Hence, CARE was immediately leashed and forbidden to make any further official statements to the press without clearance from the Peace Corps.55 These initial irritations aside, the joint project progressed. In  the early summer of 1961, the CARE–Peace Corps selection committee reported that 160 young men – women had been excluded from the first missions – had  been admitted to training.56 The training group, whose size would be deliberately reduced by more than 50 percent during training, was far from being a representative cross-section of the US population, however. Over 87 percent were the sons of middle-class families and business professionals, whereas a mere 11 percent came from a working-class background. In addition, the overwhelming majority of the applicants were fairly young (with an average age of 23) with about half of them holding a college degree.57 What awaited the “boys” – as they came to be called in the Peace Corps and the press – was a nine-week crash course in just about everything. Whatever dearth of experience the young men showed was meant to be compensated for by astonishingly extreme training. Daily routines for the courses taking place from June 26 to August 25, 1961 were utterly out of proportion, at least as regards the volunteers. Classes started at 8 a.m. and ceased at 10 p.m., six days a week. Apart from spending 16 hours per week learning Spanish, the aspiring Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) received lectures on “Spanish cultural factors in Latin American communities,” the

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“African negro background in Colombia,” and “cultural shock causes and how to deal with it.” Moreover, psychiatric exams rating the future PCVs’ probable success abroad, and “conditioning exercises” in which the volunteers were acquainted with “games popular in Colombia, such as soccer, basketball, and volleyball,” had to be passed.58 As a matter of fact, the first Peace Corps unit for Colombia may have been one of the most measured, checked-up, and continuously analyzed group of young males in post-war US history.59 In July the New York Times announced that the main question the future volunteers were facing at Rutgers was “to shave or not to shave” – given the amount of time reserved for preparatory classes, tests, and psychiatric exams.60 Classes were administered by a team of CARE staffers, language teachers, psychologists, lecturers from the Rutgers faculty and other academics. Despite the overwhelming workload, CARE staffers quickly noticed that the hastily set up schedule was largely inadequate. Passing on actual field expertise to a group of young middle-class adults who had largely never left the United States was not as easy as had been hoped – particularly given the fact that these young men had their own ideas about their assignment. While the time-strain helped to reduce PCV numbers, progress in language acquisition in Spanish stayed far below expectations, which boded ill for the upcoming cooperation with the Colombians.61 Additionally, it showed that there was an overrepresentation of applicants coming from humanities rather than technical backgrounds – much to the disappointment of some Colombian partners who had specifically requested experienced professionals instead of unskilled youngsters.62 A few weeks into the training, difficulties and communication problems between the Peace Corps, the Rutgers faculty, CARE, and the volunteers began to appear. The continued selection process worsened overall morale. Heavy workloads combined with lectures that some volunteers deemed to lack applicability eventually led to unrest and even protest assemblies by volunteers on campus. With Peace Corps officials present only occasionally when they came to visit the training ground, the major responsibility rested on the shoulders of CARE staffers and the Rutgers faculty.63 The fact that the Peace Corps was nevertheless keen to have the final say on questions of doubt led to repeated problems stemming from a lack of consultation between the organizers. Being available and thus receiving most of the blame for a selection procedure that most volunteers found grossly unjust, CARE’s performance at Rutgers was not exactly esteemed. In an interim evaluation, the volunteers judged that there had been “not enough Peace Corps presence at Rutgers, and too much CARE.”64 Finally, in August, after a strenuous nine-week training course, all the future PCVs got their official assignment and went home to prepare for the upcoming trip to Colombia. From the original team of 160 men, a mere 62 had graduated from the training program, while the rest had been set aside on the basis of countless  psychiatric tests, language exams, and “merit alone.”65 The winners signed a two-year contract with the Peace Corps and the others were sent home or put off

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to a later mission. Before leaving for Colombia, the volunteers were invited for a final visit to Washington DC. The young men were then not only given their official farewells but also received a press briefing in which they were educated about their responsibility in representing the Peace Corps and the United States abroad. Apart from a reminder to make wide use of publicity in general, the volunteers were also cautioned not to fall into traps set by “anti-American elements” abroad which could possibly be “used to embarrass Peace Corps programs.”66 Abroad and running The first CARE-administered group of PCVs arrived in Colombia in September of 1961.67 Those who had made it were enthusiastically welcomed to a last month of CARE-administered on-site training conducted by experts from more than a dozen national and international institutions at a camp near Bogotá.68 The volunteers were led by CARE staffer Merton Cregger and four Peace Corps leaders who had been chosen from their midst.69 They were received by the American Ambassador, Fulton Freeman, as well as Colombia’s President Alberto Lleras Camargo himself – an indication of the importance this CARE–Peace Corps mission had gained in the meantime on a diplomatic level for the United States and Colombian governments.70 In October, after further language training, introduction to community development techniques, and familiarization with basic programming and accounting routines, most volunteers left Bogotá and headed toward small communities all over the country to meet with their counterparts.71 These counterparts were Colombian nationals from the National Federation of Coffee Growers, the Cauca Valley Corporation, and the Division of Community Development, who introduced their new American companions to the local communities.72 In teams of two, the American volunteers were then assigned to plan and help in “village activities, such as construction of feeder roads, building small community schools, digging wells, excavating and stocking a community fish pond, [… and] setting up a recreation area for children, etc.”73 Most of these projects had a social focus and did not require much funding. Whenever costs accrued they were borne by the Peace Corps – an early proposal by CARE to negotiate a moderate amount of co-funding from the Colombian government had been rejected by the Peace Corps.74 Instead Lions International donated a full US$100,000 to CARE for technical equipment and special CARE kits to be used in the joint program.75 This way – even though by proxy – CARE contributed considerably to the Peace Corps at the beginning.76 The volunteers received a moderate monthly living allowance of a little over US$250 (the remuneration was dependent on the actual purchasing power of the dollar in the particular country where the volunteer was stationed), reimbursement of transportation costs as well as medical protection from the Peace Corps.77 CARE provided additional material, life insurance, and assistance in all questions of programming and accounting. The

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agency recovered its expenses by way of handing in checks for personnel costs as well as material costs to the Peace Corps in Washington. From a financial angle, this was an attractive arrangement for CARE, as the Peace Corps picked up the tab on all expenses incurred both in New York and Colombia plus the salary and related expenses of CARE representatives assigned to the project. In addition, a portion of CARE’s New York administrative expenses were reimbursed as well.78 Whenever CARE delivered self-help material or other commodities, a handling charge or 9 percent overhead was included.79 This lifted the Peace Corps project to an equivalent financial level with CARE’s regular country feeding programs – meaning that this cooperation generated an internal financial surplus which could be used to fill financial gaps elsewhere.80 From the contracts for its Colombian Peace Corps missions I and II alone, checks worth more than one million US dollars were reimbursed to CARE.81 In addition, the cooperation brought a lot of publicity and helped to further CARE’s reputation as an expert in development cooperation. It was against this backdrop that executive director Richard Reuter instructed his colleagues in Colombia “to do whatever [they felt was] necessary to see that this PC project is a success.”82 By the end of 1961 it was time for a first evaluation. Merton Cregger as CARE– Peace Corps unit leader handed in a first report informing the Peace Corps in

Figure 7.1  One of CARE’s special kits – the midwifery kit.

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Washington about the progress made. All 62 PCVs had arrived at their destinations by October 15. The country had been divided into four zones and 29 work sites. Each zone was supervised by one of the four Peace Corps leaders who reported to Merton Cregger and to Washington – a double structure which proved to be difficult at times in terms of loyalty and informational transparency. However, apart from minor difficulties regarding housing, transport, or a lack of understanding of the role of the PCVs in Colombia (“in one case the PCVs were thought to be representatives of the World Bank!”) everything had fallen into place.83 While some of the volunteers had had some difficulty in establishing close relations with their counterparts, who were “generally less advanced and more parochial in outlook,” as CARE director Richard Reuter put it in his rather frank style, most matches had worked out satisfactorily. A general difficulty resulting from the fact that local Colombians tended “to look on their work in the communities as a job whereas the Volunteers tend[ed] to approach their assignment with a kind of missionary zeal” was considered to be a temporary problem.84 In general, CARE rated the joint venture in Colombia to be a success – keenly underscoring that the basis for this had been laid during CARE’s seven years of operational experience in Colombia.85 The Peace Corps had indeed profited greatly from CARE’s already established contacts with government officials and civic groups in Colombia, as well as from the agency’s experience in overseeing the program on a technical, educational, and administrative level. CARE had readily shared its contacts, knowledge, and even the community development program which had previously been administered by CARE and Colombian officials only. Since this transfer of knowledge, experience, and personal contacts had been the general plan behind including CARE in the first place, Shriver agreed with CARE’s overall positive assessment. After a personal visit to the CARE/PC mission in Bogotá, he informed CARE that the Peace Corps was planning on sending a second group of volunteers to Colombia.86 However, given the difficulties experienced during training under a dual CARE–Peace Corps authority at Rutgers, the upcoming team would not be trained by CARE. Because the commixture of CARE and Peace Corps officials had led the volunteers to “protest and gripe against policies which they did not like by playing one off against the other,” future training in the United States would almost entirely rest in the hands of the Peace Corps and academic experts directly responsible to it.87 While based on good arguments and definitely scoring a point with the CARE management, which was not beyond self-critique, this demotion showed that the Peace Corps was moving away from its earlier promises to utilize “private voluntary agencies to the maximum.”88 By late 1961 the Peace Corps apparatus had progressed from its “embryonic stage” of earlier that year to a fully fledged organization.89 With the Division of Private Organizations, a liaison office for the voluntary agencies had been set up to handle all technical matters of cooperation.90 In addition, a Peace Corps program department had been organized. Intended to work as a central pillar in the new organization, program department employees were clearly trying to

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(re-)direct programming into their own sphere of influence. This process produced some tensions, not only for CARE but also for other voluntary agencies still hoping to establish cooperative projects with the Peace Corps. By late 1961 no more than three voluntary agencies (CARE, EIL, and the Heifer Project) had progressed to an operational stage due to the Peace Corps’ decisional inertia and its increasingly centrist structure. As a result, many private agencies found their traditional bias regarding government inefficiency confirmed and began to complain about the Peace Corps’ tendency to develop “into a bureaucracy with more rigid standards.”91 When Shriver informed the agencies in the ACVAFS that church-related organizations would be excluded from contracts ­altogether, disenchantment among the agencies, of whom the religious ones were an essential part, grew even further.92 CARE, a secular agency, was not directly affected by this decision but reported “both contractual and administrative difficulties in working with the Peace Corps” as well. The Peace Corps’ efforts to take control and undo previous promises of independence and real partnership were creating the feeling that “the agencies might [merely] be used by the Peace Corps as a source of material support.” 93 Hence, bit by bit, the initial enthusiasm began to fade among the private players who felt that they had somehow been tricked under false pretenses into helping a government agency come to life without compensation. Meanwhile, the second CARE–Peace Corps unit was preparing for service at the newly established training facilities at Arizona State University.94 CARE executives had some difficulties in adapting to this new situation. After having visited the volunteers for Colombia II, CARE staffer Gordon Alderfer informed his colleagues that the new training scheme for the volunteers (among whom he had spotted several “prima donnas” who lacked important “team quality”) was largely inadequate when it came to practical field knowledge and medical aid or health protection. Moreover, Alderfer complained that as an effect of CARE’s removal from training, the situation had arisen that “practically none of the teaching staff has had any experience in Colombia.” What was of even more concern was the fact that the new staff were “surprisingly unfamiliar with the role of CARE in this project.”95 Despite these concerns the second PCV unit arrived safely in Colombia and more volunteers were preparing for service by 1962. The year 1962 started with sad news, as two Peace Corps volunteers lost their lives in a plane crash in Colombia.96 This event overshadowed the otherwise successful development of the Peace Corps project. With a first group of volunteers already in the field, newcomers could be assigned to work with them, which proved to be a successful initiative with regard to integration and motivation of both old and new volunteers.97 In addition to rural programming, an urban community development project was set up in late 1962. The young volunteers, overwhelmingly stemming from the Midwest and the South of the United States, were even sent to “the slums of New York City” in preparation for their assignment.98 After having arrived in Colombian cities, they were strongly urged to work and live in the slums – an idea that caused puzzlement and even shock to

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their local Colombian counterparts and also to the volunteers, who were far from ready to move to areas they felt were unsafe.99 Unperturbed, Peace Corps officials in Washington insisted that the American volunteers had to compensate for their outsider position by becoming members of the community in los barrios.100 This demand illustrates a long-lasting and general friction that was developing within the Peace Corps. As time passed, many volunteers felt that the Peace Corps increasingly signified Washington bureaucrats making important decisions, demanding wildly unreasonable tasks, and cutting living allowances and free time without any first-hand knowledge and field experience.101 This not only caused internal conflict, but in some instances made individual CARE staffers an easy point of refuge for those volunteers looking for practical assistance and guidance in the field. It is not surprising that this led to barely hidden organizational competition for the loyalty, hearts, and minds of the volunteers, which was ill-received in Washington.102 When the third and fourth Peace Corps units arrived in 1963, women had been admitted to the group. With Colombia IV, 230 nurses and health professionals were  assigned to a country-wide health scheme that was for the first time completely  administered by the Peace Corps.103 By the end of 1963 the Peace Corps had about 7,000 PCVs overseas in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, about one fifth of whom were under voluntary agency administration104 What had become visible by then was the fact that the Peace Corps was clearly not a foreign aid agency,  but an organization that was most effective in educating and familiarizing young Americans with the non-American way of life. The Peace Corps shipped young Americans overseas who – in many cases for the first time in their lives – were  confronted by extreme poverty, social and political unrest, and even antiAmerican attitudes.105 These young men and women learned valuable lessons and grew into a generation whose account of the developing world was far less distant and detached from global social realities than that of their predecessors. However, in comparison with the social and educational effects on the young volunteers, the Peace Corps’ financial or material output in terms of economic assistance to developing countries was more or less marginal. This is evidenced by the fact that 75 percent of the Peace Corps’ appropriated funds were directly re-entering the US economy, while more than half of the remaining funds were spent on US citizens, namely the volunteers themselves.106 This focus on American volunteers, educational exchange (though rather one-sided), and diplomatic goodwill creation differed from the practice of most private agencies. CARE did not work with volunteers in the field but employed professionals willing to make a career at CARE in the humanitarian non-profit sector.107 These experienced professionals were not always easy to come by, ­however. Thus, when it became clear that the first PCVs would be coming home soon, the private agencies immediately saw an opportunity. An internal Peace Corps survey had shown that many homecoming volunteers were hoping to find either a government post in international affairs or a job at a private or i­ nternational

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agency.108 Therefore the ACVAFS immediately prepared an information sheet for homecoming PCVs, informing them about the American private voluntary agencies and their mission.109 For CARE, in particular, these volunteers were an attractive pool to recruit from. In Colombia, the volunteers had enjoyed a two-year education paid for by a federal agency but supervised by CARE staffers. On site, CARE experts had had enough time to evaluate the volunteers’ effectiveness and steer them into the direction most valuable to their own organization. When the volunteers left the Peace Corps, they were truly bilingual and ready to cope with whatever difficulty might result from field experience. This model worked overwhelmingly well. CARE recruited dozens of former PCVs over the next decades and still had a pool of more than 60 ex-PCV staff members by the mid-1970s.110 From organizational midwifery to the end of a friendship The ever-increasing number of volunteers, overwhelmingly good press in the United States, and the generally positive response to the volunteers in Colombia made the joint CARE–Peace Corps program appear successful from an outside perspective. Through a broad lens, there could have been reason for optimism and contentment for both parties. Instead, however, relations became increasingly clouded, as Peace Corps staffers progressively appropriated many of the functions that CARE had originally performed. Until 1964 this had generally been a casual process, and certainly one that did not bother CARE enough to make the agency question its overall engagement. By late 1964, however, CARE was confronted with an increasing number of Peace Corps officials openly voicing their conviction that the time of the voluntary agencies would soon be over, as the Peace Corps was tending toward self-administration.111 Though this sentiment was merely a confirmation of a longsuspected truth, such open declarations caused frustration among CARE staffers who had invested a lot of time and effort in the joint program.112 In total, CARE had 17 staffers working half- or full-time for the Colombian CARE–Peace Corps project and it was not certain what would become of them after the joint project ended. What bothered the CARE management most was the Peace Corps’ growing assertiveness and its way of handling matters in Colombia without consulting CARE. The original partnership had acquired a very asymmetrical character and CARE was increasingly forced into the role of a dependent public service provider. This role did not fit an agency with the self-perception of a value-driven organization of humanitarian experts and high-end professionals.113 In addition, CARE staffers had difficulty reconciling the Peace Corps’ high self-esteem with what they perceived, in many respects, as a lack of professionalism. Having been in business for almost two decades – and thus equipped with sound accounting experience – CARE staffers repeatedly despaired over the Peace Corps’ sloppy record-keeping, its slow and bureaucratic procedures, and its unilateralism in decision-making processes.114 With the Peace Corps fully operational, a fundamental difference in business

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cultures and overall attitude became apparent. However, this cultural unease and progressive estrangement was felt mutually. Peace Corps officials – the majority of them young men drafted for their attitude rather than long-term experience – were often puzzled by CARE’s businesslike and professional set-up. It was with very reluctant admiration that a Peace Corps auditor (after having downgraded CARE to the level of a professional supporter) noted: “One can’t help being impressed by the professionalism and experience of CARE. It is hard to see how anyone could be better equipped to respond to needs in material support.”115 While Merton Cregger enjoyed support both with the Peace Corps in Washington and among the volunteers in Colombia (who repeatedly praised him as “too good a man” to be working for CARE),116 the young generation of Peace Corps officials in Washington had some difficulties with the remaining CARE management. Richard Reuter’s competitiveness and his straightforward way of presenting CARE within the Peace Corps often disturbed his counterparts.117 Reuter repeatedly underscored his feeling that the Peace Corps was actually giving CARE “extra arms and legs to see that it reaches the local level”118 – a clear misperception of the kind of relationship CARE and the Peace Corps had, at least as far as the latter was concerned. Reuter was not the only, and maybe not even the main, problem in CARE–Peace Corps relations, however. When it came to administrative matters, the organizations failed to speak the same language – in some cases even literally – as the following statement illustrates. In late November 1963 the Peace Corps Director of Contracts informed CARE’s Washington liaison officer, James Lambie, that he had instructed his secretary to have a dictionary at hand whenever letters from Lambie arrived. Matters had escalated after Lambie had called his Peace Corps counterpart a “curmudgeon.” In reaction, the Peace Corps director replied: At first glance I thought it was some sort of a fish, but I see by the dictionary that I am one of two creatures – either an avaricious, grasping, churlish fellow or a cross, ill-natured cantankerous man. […] You, sir [sic], are nothing less than allitracious for alluding to me in such terms. But down to business. I resent your insidious attempts to deposit me in a rice paddy. I hate not only rice but also paddies. I know that your desire is not entirely unselfish. In fact, I consider that all your desires are motived entirely by selfishness and that your whole aim is to get me out of this chair, out of this office, and out of this job so that you can deal with somebody who is something less than a curmudgeon. But, since my most likely successor, Charlie Wood, is also a curmudgeon, things don’t look too bright for you in the near future.119

These kinds of semantic (and certainly personal) quarrels hint that problems between CARE and the Peace Corps often began at the personal level. Lambie was certainly not one to mince words, but while this worked well with foreign diplomats, he regularly clashed with Peace Corps officials who were far from ready to give in to his frank and aggressive way of negotiating. These personal scuffles were fortified by different perceptions regarding business practices and the handling of finances. When, in the temporary absence of CARE personnel, a Peace Corps volunteer

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made the local CARE clerks in Colombia hand out material without signing the necessary forms and reports, CARE staffers were baffled. When questioned about the incident, the Peace Corps man made things worse by replying: “What the hell, we are all in the same business, aren’t we?” CARE eventually complained to the Washington Peace Corps headquarters, “The answer to that is: yes, we are in the same business, but each of us has his own rules and approaches, prerogatives and restraints in going about it, and they should be mutually respected.”120 Toward the mid-1960s, these different rules and approaches generated more and more difficulties. The two organizations were vastly different, not only with regard to accounting procedures but also in terms of career advancement. Evidence of this can be found, for instance, in a scornful letter that CARE sent to the Peace Corps after the latter had issued a directive forbidding the use of the organization’s jeeps for private matters. Not only did this directive run absolutely counter to long-established CARE business practices, including provision of a “vehicle cum gas, oil, and maintenance – for personal and business use […] (take a look at their salaries!),” it also touched on recruitment issues and career patters in the non-profit sector. Clearly agitated, Lambie asked his Peace Corps counterparts: How many of our overseas personnel could we recruit for a tour in a CARE/PC project if our offer to them read: harder work and less pay but interesting and good experience, even though you would be temporarily out of the mainstream of your career and opportunities for advancement?121

This incident was only one of a series of organizational clashes and misunderstandings resulting from the fact that the Peace Corps had almost completed the replacement of CARE on the Colombian program. The installation of proper Peace Corps directors for Colombia, whose duties largely paralleled those of CARE staffers, cleared the agency of its last exclusive domain in Colombia. The Peace Corps downgraded CARE’s contract to professional support based on the internal assessment that it was “a strong agency” whose contribution to “conflicting loyalties and erosion of Peace Corps commitment by the volunteers was and is a serious one, to the point where CARE asked the Peace Corps staff not to meddle with our Volunteers.”122 Obviously, two strong organizations were colliding, which led to repeated conflict at the field level and quickly became a deplorable “matter of organizational or personal jealousy, of face, of stance, of reputation, of recognition, of credit, of position in the eyes of the volunteers” – as a joint CARE–Peace Corps memorandum recognizing the dramatic deterioration of relations reflected.123 While officially striving to clear the air, the option of phasing out was openly discussed inside CARE. Eventually, James Lambie informed the regional Peace Corps director for Latin America that the latest incidents in Colombia had demonstrated the “essential difference between a government operation and a private one” and supported the “wisdom of our not being totally in bed together.” Referring to problems on a semantic level again, he commented with regard to CARE’s plan of parting ways with the Peace Corps in

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Colombia: “I got a strong impression that when we speak of ‘phasing-out’ this is equivalent in your lexicon to ‘CARE quits; sticks out its lower lip; picks up its marbles and sulks home.’”124 When, in November 1965, the Peace Corps eventually adopted the Revised Peace Corps Cost Principles, relations turned openly hostile. According to these principles, overhead expenses such as office costs and electricity – hitherto readily reimbursed by the Peace Corps – were placed onto CARE’s shoulders. The lingering conflict over competence, functions, and expertise eventually turned into an open financial struggle. CARE’s finance department claimed that it did “not have the moral or ethical right to use contributor’s funds to support a Government project overseas when such project is under direct contract with the Government.”125 By January 1966 CARE’s executive management had finally decided to let go of the Colombian program.126 Shortly thereafter, both organizations agreed to dissolve their contractual relationship in Colombia within a period of 60–90 days, after “a series of circumstances over the past eleven months” which had made this “on both sides, the best course.”127 With this divorce, a partnership that had started as a promising joint venture between the private sector and a new start-up in the government branch came to a standstill. Up to this point, CARE had administered a total of 594 Peace Corps volunteers and turned over approximately US$2.2 million for administration and direction of the overall program in Colombia, as a statistical information sheet on CARE–Peace Corps relations summed up.128 This was not, however, the end of overall relations between CARE and the Peace Corps. Several smaller joint CARE–Peace Corps projects – 18 in total – existed in India, Sierra Leone, Turkey, and a few other countries. In March of 1966 Jack Vaughn, the new Peace Corps director and Sargent Shriver’s successor, even asked CARE to take over full administrative and professional support responsibilities for the entire Peace Corps country program in Paraguay.129 Despite these offers of consolation, relations remained tense. During 1966 and 1967 the Peace Corps repeatedly rejected CARE personnel for important posts, based on medical grounds, an alleged lack of expertise, or without any official explanation at all.130 When the problems in Turkey became insurmountable, James Lambie finally confided to his colleagues that he had given up hope, stating that After all these years PC hasn’t learned that CARE’s purpose is to work with them and through them (and around them, when necessary) for purposes of program accomplishment, not glory, nor credit with the embassy or whoever, not (for its own sake) identity, not for any of the myriad personal, self-aggrandizing, staff-supporting, volunteer-neglecting, face-saving, program be-hanged, status seeking, self-conscious, bureaucratic purposes that seem to animate them.131

Obviously, CARE and the Peace Corps had gone their separate ways and effectively ruined their formerly productive relationship. The final nail in the coffin occurred when a newly assigned local Peace Corps director from the Division of National Voluntary Service Programs asked CARE in 1967 for “information on the

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activities of CARE [and] on the types of programs CARE is involved in on a worldwide basis.”132 After half a decade of cooperation and contractual service provision, Lambie was dumbfounded. In a letter to Peace Corps director Jack Vaughn he stated sarcastically: Dear Mr. Vaugn, We have received an inquiry from one of your divisions, a copy of which is enclosed. In order for us to respond intelligently, it would be most helpful if we could know something about Peace Corps, other than your activities in subversion, proselytizing, and incitement to revolution – charges we are inclined to discount as canards. We understand that you have operations in quite a number of countries abroad, quite possibly of constructive nature. We, ourselves, after twenty years of experience, have contracts with several dozen countries. If we knew the nature of your work and where you are around the world it might well be that areas of cooperation could be discovered to our mutual benefit.133

Vaughn played along with Lambie’s acerbic reply to what he declared an “odd bureaucratic note from one of my charges.” He did, however, include a clear warning with a sardonic undertone: “My advice, sir, is to stay happy just as long as someone wants to know more about you and your recent operation.”134 The CARE management’s disappointment and even scorn is understandable, given its early engagement and the role the agency played in making the Peace Corps operational in the first place. CARE and several other private agencies had helped Shriver keep his promises to Congress and the American public, and were therefore dismayed to see that their efforts were seamlessly appropriated (see  Figure 7.2), taken lightly, or deliberately written out of Peace Corps history. To Jack Vaughn, Merton Cregger, CARE–Peace Corps director of the first hour, confided, I have just read your Fifth Annual Report with the sadness of nostalgia and with disappointment. The sadness arises because the report is a reminder of the relationship between our two organizations which no longer exists. As for the disappointment: what does it say for the Peace Corps when it publishes a report reviewing its five years of life without once making mention of the contributions of the many nongovernment agencies that played such an important part in the development of the Peace Corps?135

There was obviously no space left for other agencies and their achievements in the Peace Corps annals. It is not so surprising then that none of the monographs on the Peace Corps mention CARE and the other voluntary agencies at all. CARE had readily offered its experience, contacts, and even innovative programming concepts such as community development to the Peace Corps, and ended up leaving most of the program in Colombia to the Peace Corps. While CARE had clearly profited from its status as a consultant to the federal volunteer service for a period of time, the private agency had to realize eventually that relationships based on transfers of knowledge and competences are finite.

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Figure 7.2  Advertising Council-sponsored Peace Corps campaign poster, 1968.

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Notes  1 NARA, RG 490, P 65, Box 10, Sargent Shriver Jr. (director of the Peace Corps) to all staff and volunteers, November 25, 1961.  2 CARE, Box 1161, James Lambie (CARE) to Frank Mankievicz (Peace Corps) (cc to Goffio, Samia, Hamilton, Rayman and Helen Wilson (Peace Corps Washington)), April 27, 1965.  3 Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, New Haven, CT, 2009, p. 159.  4 On the term “Third World,” see Tom B. R. Tomlinson, “What Was the Third World?,” Journal of Contemporary History 38.2 (2003), pp. 307–21.  5 Jeffrey F. Taffet, Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy. The Alliance for Progress in Latin America, New York, 2007, p. 49.  6 ACVAFS, Box 14, statement, ACVAFS voluntary agencies and the Alliance for Progress, May 27, 1963.  7 David Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia. A Nation in Spite of Itself, Berkeley, CA, 2003, pp. 155–80.  8 Herbert Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán. Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia, Madison, WI, 1985; Doug Stokes, America’s Other War. Terrorizing Colombia, London and New York, 2004, p. 68.  9 Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia, ch. 10. 10 NARA, RG 469, UD 658-A, Box 1, copy of agreement between Cooperative for American Remittances Everywhere Inc. (CARE) and the Government of Republic of Colombia, signed January 15, 1954. 11 CARE, Box 839, discursive report, CARE Mission Colombia, February 17, 1959. 12 CARE, Box 839, discursive report, Colombia Mission, Mary Lowrie, June 1961. 13 CARE, Box 839, discursive report, “May 1958 and a glance back,” Mary G. Lowrie. 14 CARE, Box 92, Federation National de Cafeteros to Richard Reuter, December 27, 1960. 15 CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, January 27, 1960. 16 CARE, Box 1147, brochure, CARE-PC community development project for Colombia, 1961–1963, June 15, 1961. 17 Richard W. Poston, Democracy Speaks Many Tongues. Community Development around the World, New York, 1962. 18 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War. Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, Cambridge and New York, 2009, p. 35. 19 CARE, Box 92, Howie to Alderfer, January 20, 1961. 20 CARE, Box 92, copy of lecture delivered by Edward G. Lansdale, brigadier general, USAF, at the Counter Guerilla School, Special Warfare Center, Fort Bragg, February 24, 1961; CARE, Box 839, discursive report, Colombia, David R. Howie, December 1, 1960. 21 CARE, Box 92, translation of David Howie to Manuel Castellanos (director Division of Community Action), January 9, 1961. 22 CARE, Box 92, draft contract between CARE and Ministry of Colombian Government, undated [original version signed on February 17, 1961]. 23 CARE, Box 92, David R. Howie to Richard Reuter, February 24, 1961. 24 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, February 23, 1961. 25 The White House, press release announcing appointment of Sargent Shriver as first director of the Peace Corps, March 4, 1961, http://collection.peacecorps.gov/cdm/singleitem/ collection/p9009coll20/id/2/rec/1 (accessed August 26, 2015); Fritz Fischer, Making Them Like Us. Peace Corps Volunteers in the 1960s, Washington DC, 1998, pp. 12–15.

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26 Arthur Jones, “R. Sargent Shriver, Jr.: Biographical Portrait,” U.S. Catholic Historian 7.1 (1988), pp. 39–54. 27 The Experiment in International Living was founded in 1932 by Donald B. Watt. It established an international exchange network for American (and later international) high school students and was instrumental in arranging home stays with families abroad; see http://www.experimentinternational.org/ (accessed September 8, 2015) 28 Fischer, Making Them Like Us, p. 14; William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American, New York, 1958. 29 NARA, RG 490, P 47, Box 2, program for the Peace Corps, draft, March 9, 1961. 30 Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, All You Need is Love. The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s, Cambridge, MA, 1998, p. 99. 31 While executive order 10924 of March 1, 1961 had established the Peace Corps under the authority of the Department of State, the organization ultimately became an agency in its own right, dependent only on Congressional appropriations; see John F. Kennedy, Executive Order 10924, Establishment and Administration of the Peace Corps in the Department of State, March 1, 1961, http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/peacecorps/images/executive-order-01.jpg (accessed September 17, 2015). 32 Sargent Shriver, “Two Years of the Peace Corps,” Foreign Affairs 41.4 (1963), pp. 694–707 (p. 699). 33 ACVAFS, Box 124, on foundation of Peace Corps Committee, established March 2, 1961. 34 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, February 23, 1961. 35 CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, April 26. 1961. 36 Rubén Berríos, Contracting for Development: The Role of For-Profit Contractors in U.S. Foreign Development Assistance, Westport, CT, 2000, identifies this contracting culture as a phenomenon that came into full swing starting in the 1970s and 1980s. Agencies like CARE were early birds in this respect and deliberately and strategically forced their way into contracting by the late 1950s and 1960s. 37 Public Papers of the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy (1961), containing the public messages, speeches, and statements of the president, January 20 to December 31, 1961, Washington DC, 2005, document 78, John F. Kennedy, “Address at a White House Reception for Members of Congress and for the Diplomatic Corps of the Latin American Republics, March 13, 1961,” pp. 170–5. 38 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, March 22, 1961. 39 Transcript of Sargent Shriver’s briefing to the press held on March 6, 1961, http://​collection. peacecorps.gov/cdm/singleitem/collection/p9009coll20/id/1/rec/1 (accessed September 10, 2015). 40 See “Remarks upon Signing the Peace Corps Bill,” September 22, 1961, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy (1961), pp. 614–15; CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, April 26. 1961. 41 CARE, Box 1161, administrative # 159, Richard Reuter to executive staff, departments heads, division directors, supervisors overseas missions and field staff, subj.: CARE Peace Corps Colombia Unit, May 8, 1961; assistant executive director Gordon Alderfer was assigned as coordinator to the Colombian Peace Corps unit, Ralph Greenlaw was turned into Peace Corps training director, Louis Samia was put in charge of all financial issues, and publicity director Sam Kaufman was assigned for press relations. This new design was completed by deputy executive director Fred Devine as supervisor and James Lambie, who was assigned to Washington for liaison with Peace Corps headquarters.

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42 CARE, Box 1147, role of the CARE Peace Corps Advisory board, undated [1961]; further members were from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. 43 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, May 24, 1961. 44 CARE, Box 94, fact sheet CARE–Peace Corps Project in Colombia, October 1961. 45 Cobbs Hoffman, All You Need is Love, p. 51. 46 Warren Wiggins, “A Towering Task, February 1, 1961,” p. 11, http://collection.peacecorps. gov/cdm/singleitem/collection/p9009coll13/id/17/rec/5 (accessed September 10, 2015). 47 Peace Corps presentation of the fiscal year 1962 program to United States Congress, June 1961, p. 29, http://collection.peacecorps.gov/cdm/singleitem/collection/p9009coll14/ id/15/rec/1 (accessed September 10, 2015). 48 NARA, RG 490, P 47, Box 2, program for the Peace Corps, draft, March 9, 1961. 49 Peace Corps presentation of the fiscal year 1962 program to United States Congress, June 1961, p. 26, http://collection.peacecorps.gov/cdm/singleitem/collection/p9009coll14/ id/15/rec/1 (accessed June 17, 2015); the exact figure was US$26.1 million. 50 CARE, Box 34, Sargent Shriver to Richard Reuter, November 20, 1961. 51 Neither of the extensive studies on the Advertising Council (Dawn Spring, Advertising in the Age of Persuasion. Building Brand America, 1941–1961, New York, 2011; Daniel L. Lykins, From Total War to Total Diplomacy. The Advertising Council and the Construction of the Cold War Consensus, Westport, CT, 2003) includes the Peace Corps campaign that started in 1961. However, some of the posters are available on the Advertising Council website, http:// www.adcouncil.org/Our-Work/The-Classics/Peace-Corps (accessed January 18, 2013) as well as at the Peace Corps digital library, http://collection.peacecorps.gov/cdm/search/ searchterm/Marketing%20campaigns/mode/exact/page/2 (accessed September 10, 2015). 52 Cobbs Hoffman, All You Need is Love, p. 123. 53 Gerard T. Rice, The Bold Experiment. JFK’s Peace Corps, Notre Dame, IN, 1985, pp. 147–9. 54 ACVAFS, Box 124, minutes of committee on Peace Corps meeting, March 13, 1961. 55 NARA, RG 490, P. 30, Box 46, W. P. Kelly (Peace Corps Director of Contracts and Logistics) to Richard Reuter (CARE executive director), May 17, 1961. 56 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, May 24, 1961. 57 CARE, Box 1147, minutes of CARE–Peace Corps advisory board meeting, December 1, 1961. 58 CARE, Box 1147, copy of Dr. Israel Zwerling (Director of Psychiatry) to Dr. Nicolas Hobbs (Director of Selection, Peace Corps), September 18, 1961; Morris I. Stein (Director Research Center for Human Relations, NYU) to Ralf Greenlaw (CARE), November 13, 1961; summary of the Peace Corps training program at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, June 26 to August 25, 1961. 59 NARA, RG 490, P 46, Box 22, A Collation of Data Collected on the Colombia I Peace Corps Volunteers by January 1963 with a Discussion of Future Plans, by Morris I. Stein, Ph.D, Professor of Psychology and Director Research Center for Human Relations, New York University, progress report 12, January 1963; A Typology of Peace Corps Volunteers in Colombia I and Their Behaviors on Some Psychological Tests and in Their Sites, by Morris I. Stein, Professor of Psychology, New York University, progress report 16, July 1963. 60 Kenneth Love, “Training is Tough for Peace Corps. Rutgers Group Studies All Day and Most of Night,” Special to The New York Times, July 16, 1961, p. 34. 61 CARE, Box 1171, report on Peace Corps briefing session, Rutgers University, July 26, 1961. 62 CARE, Box 94, Maria Christina Salazar, director Universidad Jeveriana, Departamento de Servicio Social, Bogota, to Mary G. Lowrie (CARE Mission in Colombia), July 19, 1961. 63 NARA, RG 460, P 43, Box 4, Sargent Shriver to Richard Reuter, August 2, 1961,

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64 NARA, RG 490, P 30, Box 46, confidential Harry Kranz (Peace Corps) to Lawrence E. Dennis (Peace Corps), subj.: RE: events at CARE-Colombia Rutgers project, July 18–21, July 26, 1961 65 CARE, Box 1147, appendix A to Peace Corps-CARE contract, May 16, 1961, Article III Selection and Training. 66 CARE, Box 1147, Edwin R. Bayley (Peace Corps Director of Public Information) to all PCVs, undated [1961]. 67 CARE, Box 1147, of thanks Ralph Greenlaw to Lt. Col. Harry R. Swift, Camp Kilmer, Edison, New Jersey, August 15, 1961. 68 Institutions directly involved in the CARE training in Colombia were officials from the Colombian ministries, experts from USOM, Rockefeller and Kellogg foundations, FAO officials as well as Colombian academics from almost a dozen Colombian research centers; see CARE, Box 34, list of organizations directly involved in the CARE–Peace Corps training course at Tibaitata, undated. 69 CARE, Box 34, CARE NY to William Kelly (Peace Corps), August 31, 1961. 70 CARE, Box 838, discursive report, Colombia Mission, September, Mary Lowrie. 71 CARE, Box 92, David Howie to Richard Reuter and Gordon Alderfer, August 19, 1961; CARE, Box 839, CARE Colombia discursive report, October 1961, Mary Lowrie. 72 The Caica Valley Corporation was a “TVA-type agency in the Cali area” as a report on the CARE–Peace Corps program in Colombia remarked; see NARA, RG 490, P 46, Box 22, report by Pat M. Holt (Institute on Current World Affairs) to Richard H. Nolte (ICWA) on Peace Corps Colombia program, April 10, 1962 73 CARE, Box 94, fact sheet CARE–Peace Corps project in Colombia, October 1961. 74 CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, April 26. 1961; when it came to large-scale and long-term programs, CARE was in the habit of negotiating country agreements with foreign partners that included a co-funding element by the foreign partner (in most cases a government office). While from the perspective of CARE management this practice was mainly based on cost arguments, as some expenses could not be covered otherwise, co-funding also helped to foster identification with the program by the counterpart and made sure that both partners were serious about long-term involvement. 75 CARE, Box 94, statement to the press, June 22, 1961. 76 CARE, Box 1161, tabulation, CARE support for Peace Corps, through March 1965, commodities programmed for Peace Corps Colombia, undated [March 1965]; the overall sum was US$138,270. 77 CARE, Box 34, carbon copy of Shriver to volunteer Charles G. Perry, in Colombia, March 15, 1962; see also Peace Corps presentation of the fiscal year 1962 program to United States Congress, June 1961, pp. 30–1, http://collection.peacecorps.gov/cdm/singleitem/​ collection/p9009coll14/id/15/rec/1 (accessed September 10, 2015). 78 CARE, Box 80, Louis Samia to George Mathues, December 19, 1962. 79 NARA, RG 490, P 37, Box 6, report on backstopping activities of CARE, John Griffin (Peace Corps) to Warren W. Wiggins, R. Lane, N. Parmer, March 4, 1964. 80 CARE, Box 80, Louis Samia to George Mathues, subj.: Peace Corps activities, September 26, 1962. 81 CARE, Box 94, Peace Corps Negotiated Contract, Contract No. PC (W) – 4, Supplemental Agreement No. 5, January 15, 1962. 82 CARE, Box 94, personal and confidential # 93, Richard Reuter to Merton Cregger, December 4, 1961.

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83 NARA, RG 490, P 30, Box 46, confidential report by Merton Cregger (including reports of  the four Peace Corps leaders) on CARE–Peace Corps Colombia Unit, undated [November 1961]. 84 CARE, Box 1147, minutes of CARE–Peace Corps advisory board meeting, December 1, 1961. 85 NARA, RG 490, P 30, Box 46, confidential report by Merton Cregger (including reports of the four Peace Corps leaders) on CARE–Peace Corps Colombia Unit, undated [November 1961]. 86 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, November 29, 1961. 87 CARE, Box 1147, minutes of CARE–Peace Corps advisory board meeting, December 1, 1961. 88 Statement by Sargent Shriver before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, June 22, 1961, http://collection.peacecorps.gov/cdm/singleitem/collection/p9009coll14/id/4/ rec/3 (accessed September 5, 2015). 89 ACVAFS, Box 124, minutes of annual meeting of Peace Corps committee, 1961 report, January 25, 1962. 90 See Peace Corps brochure, Who’s Who in the Peace Corps Washington, Washington DC, 1963, http://collection.peacecorps.gov/cdm/singleitem/collection/p9009coll15/id/13/ rec/1 (accessed September 10, 2015). The Division of Private Organizations was under the leadership of Franklin Williams. Its name was changed to Division of Private and International Organizations in 1964. 91 ACVAFS, Box 124, minutes of committee on Peace Corps meeting, October 23, 1961. 92 ACVAFS, Box 124, minutes of annual meeting of Peace Corps committee, 1961 report, January 25, 1962. 93 ACVAFS, Box 124, minutes of committee on Peace Corps meeting, October 23, 1961. 94 NARA, RG 490, P 30, Box 46, Joseph F. Kauffman (Peace Corps Volunteer Trainer) to Lawrence E. Dennis (PCV), subj.: Opening Arizona State University Peace Corps Training Program Colombia II, February 4–5, February, 1962. 95 CARE, Box 94 confidential Gordon Alderfer to James Lambie, March 20, 1962. 96 CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, April 25, 1962; see also Box 839, discursive report, Colombia Mission, Mary Lowrie, April 1962. 97 CARE, Box 839, discursive report, Colombia Mission, Mary Lowrie, May 1962. 98 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, September 12, 1962. 99 NARA, RG 490, P 30, Box 46, field visitation report by Nancy B. Blackall, assistant director CARE–Peace Corps Colombia, January 11 through January 14, 1963. 100 NARA, RG 490, P 46, Box 22, report on conference of urban Peace Corps volunteers, Christopher B. Sheldon, Peace Corps director for Colombia, February 12, 1963. 101 NARA, RG 490, P 30, Box 46, report by George Nicolau on Termination of Service Conference of Colombia III in Bogota, March 10–12, 1964. 102 NARA, RG 490, P 37, Box 6, to the director, Frank F. Mankiewicz through Warren W. Wiggins and Charles Patterson, June 22, 1965. 103 CARE, Box 94, Louis Samia to Frank Goffio, Devine, Alderfer and Cooper, May 14, 1963. 104 ACVAFS, Box 124, minutes of committee on Peace Corps, December 5, 1963; minutes of committee on Peace Corps, October 30, 1963. 105 CARE, Box 34, handwritten by Colombian student leader, attachment to Merton Cregger to Jorge Arturo Porras (Secretary Comando del MRL Universidad Libre, Secretario de Educacion, Bogota), December 19, 1961.

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106 Shriver, “Two Years of the Peace Corps,” p. 705. 107 CARE, Box 1161, James Lambie (CARE) to Frank Mankievicz (Peace Corps) (cc to Goffio, Samia, Hamilton, Rayman and Helen Wilson (Peace Corps Washington)), April 27, 1965. 108 ACVAFS, Box 124, minutes of Peace Corps committee meeting, January 17, 1963. 109 ACVAFS, Box 124, from Charlotte Owen on behalf of ACVAFS to PCVs, March 13, 1963. 110 CARE, Box 34, Frank Goffio to David Searles (deputy associate director International Operations, ACTION), March 4, 1976. 111 CARE, Box 1171, MECM, September 23, 1964. 112 NARA, RG 490, P 37, Box 6, Frank Goffio to Sargent Shriver, Jr., August 11, 1964. 113 A distinction between public service contractors, allegedly looking for opportunities first and checking on moral implications later, and “traditional” value-driven voluntary agencies, which put their ethical objectives first, is often found in scholarly literature. This sharp distinction was first made by L. David Brown and David C. Korten, “Working More Effectively with Nongovernmental Organizations,” in Samuel Paul and Arturo Israel (eds.), Nongovernmental Organizations and the World Bank. Cooperation for Development, Washington DC, 1991, pp. 44–93 (p. 62), and is critically discussed in Mark Robinson, “Privatizing the Voluntary Sector. NGOs as Public Service Contractors,” in David Hulme and Michael Edwards (eds.), NGOs, States and Donors. Too Close for Comfort?, New York, 1997, pp. 59–78 (pp. 59ff.) 114 CARE, Box 34, James Lambie to Richard Reuter, January 30, 1962; James Lambie to Richard Reuter, February 1, 1962. 115 NARA, RG 490, P 37, Box 6, report on backstopping activities of CARE, John Griffin (Peace Corps) to Warren W. Wiggins, R. Lane, N. Parmer, March 4, 1964. 116 NARA, RG 490, P 43, Box 1, evaluation report on Colombia project, Dan Chamberlin, March 16, 1962. 117 NARA, RG 490, P 30, Box 46, Joseph F. Kauffman to Lawrence E. Dennis (cc Shriver), February 7, 1962. 118 NARA, RG 286, UD 447, Box 93, minutes of meeting, DoS, USAID, ACVAFS, April 13, 1962. 119 CARE, Box 1161, Chester Lane (Peace Corps) to James Lambie (CARE), November 22, 1963. 120 CARE, Box 1161, James Lambie (CARE) to Frank Mankievicz (Peace Corps) (cc to Goffio, Samia, Hamilton, Rayman and Helen Wilson (Peace Corps Washington)), April 27, 1965. 121 Ibid. 122 NARA, RG 490, P 37, Box 6, to the director, Frank F. Mankiewicz through Warren W. Wiggins and Charles Patterson, June 22, 1965. 123 CARE, Box 1161, draft for a joint CARE/Peace Corps statement regarding situation in Colombia, undated [1965]. 124 CARE, Box 1161, James Lambie (CARE) to Frank Mankievicz (Peace Corps) (cc to Goffio, Samia, Hamilton, Rayman and Helen Wilson (Peace Corps Washington)), April 27, 1965. 125 CARE, Box 1161, Louis Samia (CARE) to John J. Conway, Jr. (acting director of Contracts, Peace Corps) (cc to Frank Goffio, James Lambie, Diana McArthur (Peace Corps) and Richard Vogler), November 2, 1965. 126 CARE, Box 1171, MBDM, January 26, 1966. 127 CARE, Box 858, James Lambie (CARE NY) to all overseas missions (ALMIS #903) February 15, 1966, subj.: CARE/Peace Corps, Colombia.

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128 CARE, Box 1161, “History of CARE Peace Corps Contractual Programs, Colombia,” James Lambie, May 22, 1967. 129 CARE, Box 34, Jack H. Vaughn to Frank Goffio, March 3, 1966. 130 CARE, Box 80, confidential, James Lambie to Robert Golding (CARE/Peace Corps, Sierra Leone), April 4, 1966; Box 34, Goffio to Vaughn (cc to D. MacArthur), March 17, 1966. 131 CARE, Box 1161, James Lambie (CARE) to Rayman and Laskey (CARE/Peace Corps Turkey) (cc Mr. Norris and Mr. Conway (Peace Corps); Frank Goffio, Bertran Smucker, Louis Samia, Merzton Cregger, Mr. Laskey, Mr. Rayman and Mr. Ward (CARE)), February 7, 1967. 132 CARE, Box 1161, Raymond Parrot (Peace Corps) to CARE, January 24, 1967. 133 CARE, Box 1161, James Lambie (CARE) to Jack Vaughn, February 7, 1967. 134 CARE, Box 1161, Jack Vaughn (Peace Corps) to James Lambie, February 14, 1967. 135 CARE, Box 1161, Merton Cregger to Jack Vaughn (Peace Corps), May 12, 1967.

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Toward multinational enterprise (1969–80)

A new chapter in government–non-profit relations Since 1960, no President has been wholly successful in obtaining Congressional approval of his foreign aid proposals. […] Only when a program is perceived extremely important to peace […] or as serving the interests of a large segment of American society (Food for Peace) or as demonstrating purely humanitarian ­concerns […] is there little difficulty passing authorization and appropriations bills.1

There is currently a lively debate, spearheaded by several eminent historians, about the “shock of the global.” This debate identifies the 1970s as the decade in which the limits of a state-centered perspective on politics, social, economic, and ecological phenomena became striking, undeniable, and accordingly “real” to people all over the world in manifold ways.2 From international debt, oil prices, and food crises, to the transnational anti-war movement and the rise of the debate on “limits to growth,” at the beginning of the 1970s global interconnectedness as a concept and a hard fact of everyday life accelerated ongoing social, political, and economic transformation processes to unknown (and, as some felt, critical) dimensions.3 These irruptions of the global appeared again and again throughout the decade, despite few of the phenomena and structural drivers of these processes actually being new.4 It is remarkable that it is the rapid increase in non-governmental organizations in particular (by almost 50 percent between 1968 and the early 1980s) that is repeatedly cited as one of the most striking and visible indexes of political globalization on a worldwide scale.5 The underlying assumption is that the mushrooming of NGOs has (in some way or another) an intrinsic connection to the growing weakness of state-centered models of governance.6 While this assessment is rather unspecific and has been repeatedly challenged, it seems at least fitting that contemporary US historiography has often linked the 1970s to the slow decline of US supremacy in global political affairs.7 It is thus a common finding that between the “peaks of American power in the post-World War II and post-Cold War eras, the United States of the Vietnam era strangely found itself in the unfamiliar position of the weary titan,” which – overwhelmed with an emerging new international world order that it could not or would not control – retreated into conservative r­ egression.8 While the story

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of the weary titan, losing ground in both domestic and global affairs, is certainly rather dramatic and highly lopsided, it is true that several of the new foreign policy measures employed by the Nixon/Ford (and Kissinger) administrations did indeed have a major impact on relations between American voluntary agencies and official US government offices.9 Throughout most of the 1960s CARE and the other American voluntary agencies had enjoyed predominantly friendly relations with both Democrat administrations. The Kennedy years had augmented their visibility as private players in food aid, relief, and development assistance, despite growing competition from USAID experts and agencies such as the Peace Corps. Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society program, his focus on domestic and international poverty prevention, and the establishment of a War on Hunger office within USAID had also included the voluntary agencies as important proponents of overall US humanitarianism.10 And while CARE had used the 1960s to adapt to internationalizing standards, structures, and funding opportunities, it had been careful to nurture good relations with the US government. Involvement in highly controversial areas of operation such as Vietnam, through nation-building programs and humanitarian food provision, had clearly contributed to its reputation as a reliable partner.11 If the Vietnam era had shattering long-term effects on the relationship between the US government and many religious agencies, CARE’s connections to the administration remained overwhelmingly stable. The agency remained an important member in the small “cartel” of US voluntary agencies, receiving the lion’s share (more than 95 percent) of government contributions.12 When Richard M. Nixon entered office in 1968/69, government–voluntary agency relations took on a new tone, however. By the end of the decade foreign aid skeptics such as Otto Passman, who had repeatedly criticized US foreign aid as “wasteful and expensive,” were gaining ground.13 Domestic budgetary issues, along with opposition to US involvement in Vietnam, led to a strange alliance between liberals and conservatives, which translated into ever fewer foreign aid appropriations. This not only affected recipients of US foreign assistance but also meant severe cuts for US institutions like USAID. In an effort to counter-balance this attack on its very foundations, USAID eventually published an official brochure, arguing that foreign aid could actually help stabilize the US economy by improving the overall US balance of payments and was even making the United States richer ultimately.14 This was a futile effort, however, as US foreign aid budgets for 1969 and 1970 proved to be the lowest since 1958.15 It was against this backdrop that President Nixon, being more interested in foreign policy than in domestic affairs, promised a fresh start. In his special foreign aid message to Congress on May 28, 1969, he informed his audience of his plans to reorganize US technical assistance activities. Not only was he willing to “enlist the energies of private enterprise” in general, but he was also going to enhance US technical assistance personnel serving abroad with “the best of our American talent,” coming from private enterprises, universities, and

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non-profit service agencies.16 It was September 1969, however, before Nixon fulfilled these promises and assigned Rudolph Peterson, chairman of the Bank of America, to officially review the entire US foreign assistance program. Half a year later, and after having invited several civic American and international development experts to testify (among them CARE executive director Frank Goffio), Peterson and his task force presented their recommendations to the President and the informed public.17 Referring to other contemporary studies, such as Partners in Development prepared for the World Bank by former Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson, the Peterson Report suggested major structural and policy changes. Not only did it recommend a decisive shift in US development efforts to multilateral institutions, it also urged for a trisection of the overall US foreign assistance package – thereby separating development assistance from military aid. In addition, it called for the reversal of the continuing downward trend in official development assistance and a significant increase in private lending through a yet to be established development corporation.18 For CARE and the other American voluntary agencies, the Peterson Report was a mixed bag, containing both goodies and clearly unattractive items. Given that some of the recommendations were extremely far-reaching, potentially even leading to the complete abolition of USAID, the agencies immediately founded an ad-hoc committee.19 This committee was to deal with the report’s implications, which according to an internal CARE memorandum were “something of a nightmare,” given their potential impact on proven and effective means of private– governmental cooperation.20 What concerned the agencies most – apart from the attack on USAID – was their feeling that the American voluntary agencies were increasingly being lumped together with private enterprises, undefined non-profit organizations, and other bodies supposedly belonging to the private sector in general.21 From the agencies’ perspective there was a great difference between “truly voluntary” agencies and organizations “going under the broad terminology of nongovernment and non-profit.” This differentiation alluded to the growing number of small, development-oriented non-profits that were actively going after third party contracts and grants for development projects. From the perspective of the more traditional agencies, these new players were clearly trying to generate an internal profit that – while not distributed to a stockholder – was “shared amongst the staff.” Agencies like CARE, in contrast, “plowed” their margin back into other programs – a practice that they felt deserved special recognition and government protection.22 The use of an undifferentiated private sector label was thus seen as  proof of the general “lack of understanding of the nature and work of the voluntary agency” on the part of the new Nixon administration.23 This overall sense of disrespect had deeper roots, however, and these clearly went beyond the foreign aid reform. In fact, CARE and the other voluntary agencies had spent the previous months fighting the implications of the 1969 Tax Reform Act President Nixon had signed into law in late December of that year.24 This legislation

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was the result both of a continuing societal debate on the limits of government responsibility for social wellbeing and also of a crusade by a handful of congressional hardliners who were seeking to limit the allegedly uncontrolled proliferation of private foundations which were little more than covers for rich industrialists hoping to avoid taxation.25 Once again it was one proponent in particular, Congressman John W. Wright Patman, who had lobbied for a clear separation between the private and the government sectors, thereby lumping together all manner of private organizations, regardless of their structures or missions.26 The Act as finally approved was not nearly as aggressive as Wright Patman had hoped for and even slightly strengthened the incentives for making private cash contributions to American charities. But it did significantly curtail tax waivers on corporate contributions and in-kind donations to private institutions.27 These changes had clearly detrimental effects on the voluntary agencies that relied on donations of medical equipment or food – in some cases reducing agency incomes by as much as 30 percent.28 As Peter D. Hall has convincingly argued, the 1969 Tax Act “was predicated on the false assumption that nonprofits were – or should be – an autonomous sector in which reforms could be instituted without regard to the social, political, and economic infrastructure on which they depended.”29 Like most members of the ACVAFS, CARE relied on federal subsidies and corporate donations to sustain its feeding and developmental projects abroad. These long-established and highly institutionalized connections were thus under attack, which is why the agency did its best to bring its constituency and political supporters to the barricades.30 Throughout 1970 and 1971 all members of the ACVAFS were busy trying to push the administration into acknowledging the vital role of American voluntary agencies and insisting on representation in any potentially new foreign aid agency or institution.31 They even met with John A. Hannah, the new director of USAID, hoping to find an ally in the tarnished government agency. Between 1968 and 1973 USAID lost almost 40 percent of its staff and was thus in a continuous state of emergency.32 At the personal meeting with Hannah, which was thoroughly prepared and strategically planned, voluntary agency representatives did their best to present their objectives, work, importance, and concerns in order to clarify their traditional stakes in a partnership with the government “at the highest level.”33 It was also against this backdrop that the agencies put a lot of effort into the organization of joint festivities for the 25th anniversary of the government Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid.34 In cooperation with USAID officials, the voluntary agencies did their best to push the Advisory Committee to the front, hoping to remind both the American public and oblivious government administrators of the committee’s inherent value as a “bridge between the Government and voluntary agencies in providing humanitarian service to the world’s peoples on behalf of the American peoples.”35 In the course of 1971 it became clear, however, that many of the agencies’ preoccupations had been in vain, as the proposed foreign aid reform failed. While

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Nixon managed to establish the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, thereby strengthening the role of private lending in US development efforts, Congress – in bipartisan agreement and united in growing frustration over Nixon’s Indochina strategy – blackballed the aid authorization bill.36 This blow to Nixon’s high-flying plans merely postponed many of the notional changes to a later date. However, it gave foreign aid supporters some extra time to regroup and to intensify their lobbying efforts. Throughout most of the early to mid-1970s CARE and all agencies in the ACVAFS worked tirelessly to have themselves more prominently represented, in the event of the successful passage of foreign assistance legislation. When the Foreign Assistance Act of 1973, which came to be known as New Directions, was finally adopted, this was in large part the achievement of a remarkable coalition of congressmen, USAID officials, private foundations, research institutions, think tanks, private interest groups, and the American voluntary agencies.37 Select government representatives and administrators joined forces with non-governmental special interest groups in an attempt at developing an alternative to the continuing curtailment of foreign aid appropriations – thereby promoting a new form of soft power multi-level governance on a national level.38 Given the relatively minor role foreign assistance issues had played for policymakers in the past, this strategy involved a certain risk and required sound arguments. It was against this backdrop that the Overseas Development Council conducted a large and well-publicized study of American opinion on world poverty and development, the findings of which were both remarkable and unexpected. While Americans tended to be “generally very ignorant of development issues,” the report underscored that public support for the idea of giving US assistance was actually at a historic high of 68 percent. As might have been expected, most Americans in favor of US development assistance were young, liberal, and well educated. When it came to their overall political concerns, détente had already kicked in on a societal level too. The Cold War rationale for development aid was no longer terribly relevant, while purely humanitarian considerations were gaining in appeal.39 It was thus logical that most Americans clearly preferred programs to fight hunger, disease, and illiteracy over military or economic assistance – a finding that reflected ongoing cultural societal transformation, as well.40 These very optimistic findings, which clearly supported the voluntary agencies’ in their overall mission statements, did not go unchallenged.41 Nevertheless, after a summer packed with public testimonies before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, the new Foreign Aid Act was finally passed in October 1973.42 While its output in terms of official development assistance was not overly impressive, it provided strong incentives for private involvement in development activities for both the for-profit and non-profit sector (Table 8.1). In addition, New Directions strengthened the ties between voluntary agencies and the new and altered US Agency for International Development that had by then undergone a major reorganization.43 Not only was USAID’s Office of Private

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Table 8.1  Resource flows from the US to developing countries (official development assistance (ODA) and non-governmental) in millions of US dollars1 1973

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ODA (bilateral & multilateral) Private flows PVO grants PVO in %

1974

1975

1976

1977

1978

1973–78

2,968 3,439 4,007 4,254 4,682 5,663 39,894 3,996 5,273 11,635 6,399 6,159 8,287 41,422 905 735 804 789 840 931 5,004 11.5 7.8 4.9 6.9 7.2 6.3 5.8

1

Adapted figures, taken from Robert F. Gorman, “PVOs and Development Through Basic Human Needs,” in Robert F. Gorman (ed.), Private Voluntary Organizations as Agents of Development, Boulder, CO, 1984, p. 53, table 3.2, based on OECD figures.

and Voluntary Cooperation integrated more closely with the voluntary agencies, but USAID eventually acknowledged the special role of the American voluntary agencies in US development planning: As we develop a greater role for the voluntary agencies and as we offer encouragement to the concept of voluntarism, we are not unmindful of the fact that the constituencies of the American voluntary agencies, many and varied as they are, represent a great segment of the American people, and it is in our interests to get them to participate as directly as possible in the overseas development effort.44

New policy criteria for USAID programming were also putting growing emphasis on humanitarian efforts, population issues, and local projects at the community level, targeting the so-called Least Developed Countries.45 These countries had only recently begun to receive official US government attention, in line with a general shift away from large-scale economic planning toward basic human needs, health, and – once again – food provision. This in particular was a clear reason for joy and contentment within CARE, which had long focused on “socio-economic improvement with special emphasis on the local community level.”46 When New Directions was passed, CARE program director Fred Devine informed his superior Frank Goffio about the “great news” that humanitarian voluntary agency food aid programs had been moved right behind domestic requirements in political urgency.47 The Foreign Assistance Act of 1973 thus put more emphasis on areas that had traditionally been the domain of voluntary agencies. Administratively, this found expression in a shift of USAID programming from contractual relations with voluntary agencies to the provision of grants for development. However, these grants were only distributed to agencies ready to “operate within the priority areas of the foreign assistance legislation” – a stipulation that was obviously geared at channeling private efforts to areas strategically important for the US government.48 Although these guidelines were not received with great enthusiasm (CARE executives for instance detected rather patronizing attitudes, necessitating “aggressive CARE involvement to try to diplomatically improve” the guidelines’ language), they did offer a new source of income for those agencies able and willing to follow

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USAID’s lead.49 CARE, in any case, was quite successful in acquiring government grants, increasing its income in contracts and grants almost tenfold between 1972 and 1979 (Table 8.2).50 In the long run, this clearly augmented CARE’s ongoing transformation from a food relief agency into an agency for long-term development aid. It was thus no coincidence that CARE implemented its first five-year plan in 1973, taking a long-term perspective in terms of funds allocation and planning and evaluating the goals of its programming strategy.51 From a more general perspective, sourcing out responsibility for foreign assistance provision to the private sector, as implemented by the Nixon administration, was a political decision that must be linked to the broader government strategy of “devolution,” meaning the shifting of responsibility for social welfare from the state to the private sector.52 This should not be mistaken for complete deregulation and laissez-faire politics in foreign assistance affairs, however. Although US foreign aid in the 1970s and 1980s dropped continuously in relation to gross national product, the US administrations from Ford to Reagan and beyond continued to take an active and strategic interest in overall foreign aid.53 What changed on a material and structural level, however, were the ways and means of implementing programs and funds: Now, they were increasingly being implemented via private sector organizations. This in particular pushed American NGOs further to the front and opened a window of opportunity for those agencies able and willing to accept this bargain. From a certain perspective, it can be (and has been) argued that this process actually strengthened the role of government in controlling developmental projects.54 It was against this backdrop that several religious agencies eventually decided to refrain from taking advantage of these funds.55 CARE, however, decided to accept them, so that by 1975 the agency was generating less than 12 percent of its overall income from private contributions. Justifying this practice and rejecting the popular “government-aid-leads-to-government-control” allegation, CARE executive director Frank Goffio underscored in an interview in the mid-1970s: “If you are doing what you want to do without compromising your principles, you’re not prostituting yourself by taking money from the government and you’re not controlled by anyone.”56 CARE’s management thus kept stresssing that the mere transfer of funds said nothing about the conditions with which it was received. What is safe to say, however, is that vertical integration and interdependence between government offices and some of the large American voluntary agencies – and certainly CARE – had eventually reached a level that casts severe doubt on the traditional private sector rhetoric stipulating a sharp divide between government and private players. As a matter of fact, almost all large American voluntary agencies were highly entangled with US government authorities, and it was precisely this interdependence and institutional bonds that helps explain their rise and extraordinary growth in the long term. CARE staffers were certainly aware of this, and they were far from bemoaning the situation. In preparation for a 1975 seminar with

10,340,203 10,396,171 14,920,589 15,554,970 17,434,992 21,715,712 25,857,062 20,319,517 40,831,657 21,110,319 22,015,524 22,225,260 26,884,816

Private contributions & other income

Cash

15,123,957 16,864,456 16,433,656 18,557,344 21,541,230 21,414,193 21,601,491 35,221,554 30,760,167 37,348,276 43,705,610 43,244,712 40,241,765

Overseas freight paid by US government 56,238,977 75,352,195 51,540,540 62,483,642 69,392,809 62,747,335 70,069,758 91,160,601 93,734,248 109,178,102 120,682,453 112,395,922 91,842,075

PL 480 donated food

CARE income

447,522 592,100 1,625,594 1,213,771 2,793,801 4,233,966 5,239,682 8,466,636 9,147,908 15,201,599 24,201,757 25,031,874 22,540,419

(Government) grants & contracts

In kind

3,120,782 3,601,152 5,639,204 1,532,033 1,440,950 1,967,775 6,376,207 14,894,616 0 2,103,365 2,383,948 4,294,701 13,906,005

Donations of commodities & food 85,271,441 106,806,074 89,659,583 99,341,760 112,603,782 112,078,981 129,144,200 170,062,924 174,419,980 185,262,753 213,000,134 207,192,469 195,415,071

Total

Based on reports by the Advisory Committee (DoS/USAID): “Voluntary Foreign Aid Programs” 1968–75 (ACVAFS, Box 5); Information on fiscal years 1976–79 based on CARE consolidated income sheets for respective years, CARE, Box 1.

1

1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980

FY

Table 8.2  Summary statement of income of CARE according to data submitted to the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid (based on Schedule C Report)1

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USAID officials on the differences in programming and philosophy between CARE and USAID, CARE staffer Ralph Devone emphasized: There has been a shift [in USAID programming …] toward the development of rural areas and a direct improvement of the situation of the lower rural income groups. The greater recognition and support of PVOs is another indication of change, even though it may not have come spontaneously and totally willingly from within. [… Many differences, on the contrary,] can be attributed to the general nature of AID, the bureaucratic and political requirements made of it and its special relationship to various bodies of the USG. Its size and official nature create differences [and AID lacks the] flexibility that PVOs have to respond quickly and introduce innovative programming on a small scale that is often of great advantage. [… However,] it might be fruitful at this time to discuss not only differences, but the growing commonality between AID and an organization like CARE. It appears to me that we are reaching a point where AID and PVOs like CARE are becoming part of the same process, although we may be operating at different levels and at different stages of that process.57

Taking stock of a more than three-decade-long relationship between the American voluntary agencies and USAID and its predecessor agencies, Devone proved to be both an apt historical observer and something of a prophet, as CARE’s future development as an organization would indeed be increasingly linked to both governmental and intergovernmental institutions and their funding. As in the past, CARE would use its special nature as a private, non-profit agency to its advantage. Its ability to enlist volunteers, its capacity to react flexibly to outside challenges and new situations, as well as its willingness to serve “as a buffer between human needs and political pressures and ambitions” enabled CARE to preserve its identity as a voluntary agency, while at the same time enhancing its role as a professional mediator between private donors and the rapidly internationalizing sector of humanitarian assistance and development aid.58 From global food shortage to the World Food Conference We want [the] US to lead not lag in facing this challenging hunger problem.59 World Hunger Action Coalition to President Ford

In 1976 the political scientists Thomas G. Weiss and Robert S. Jordan concluded that the enormous difficulties in bringing order and progress to human affairs were ever more the result of global problems that needed to be “worked out within the present international system, which still operated according to the ground rules of autonomous and sovereign nation-states that evolved after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.”60 Having studied the policy processes surrounding the World Food Conference of November 5–16, 1974 in Rome, Weiss and Jordan felt that global problem solving finally needed a makeover. While solutions to problems such as world hunger and poverty would out of necessity have to be addressed

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by traditional political actors – governmental as well as intergovernmental – they had identified a promising add-on: Transnational interest groups and NGOs that were – in their majority – both willing and able to look for “a permanent solution to the most basic of human needs.”61 The World Food Conference in Rome marked a new stage in international food policy. Its main effect, however, was to increase awareness of the limits of global coordination – especially the limits of private humanitarian agencies, or NGOs in the official language of the United Nations.62 Although it was a partial success for private players to have been included in the conference line-up at all, it soon became clear to most of the NGOs that much hard work would be required before they would be able to exert any influence at this level of global politics. From a more general perspective, the World Food Conference marked the climax of at least half a decade of growing public concern about a deteriorating world food situation. Throughout most of the 1960s individual policymakers and humanitarian civil society organizations had warned that population growth would eventually exceed global food production levels, leading to mass starvation and potentially violent struggles for resources. While this general concern prevailed as an underlying assumption and discursive element, the early 1970s saw a decisive shift in additional ways of thinking.63 As it turned out, the alleged “race between food supply and population increase” could not be counterbalanced by increased productivity alone.64 By the early 1970s ecological concern was spreading, and it had also become clear that many of the world’s poor lacked the necessary purchasing power to buy even basic foodstuffs, thus relying entirely on subsistence farming.65 These people had no access whatsoever to the achievements of the so-called Green Revolution, meaning improved crops, fertilizer, or industrial farming methods.66 Few of the official economic development programs had actually trickled down to the levels of those most affected by poverty, hunger, and malnourishment. It was against this backdrop that US strategists, NGOs, and international policymakers eventually urged a new focus on the world’s poorest and Least Developed Countries.67 This shift in thinking provided a boost to US voluntary agencies that had long been concerned with tackling basic human needs and serving the most vulnerable parts of foreign societies.68 CARE was thus at the heart of events in the late 1960s when the situation in many of its feeding programs began to worsen considerably. Political famine crises in Bihar, India (1966–67) and Biafra/Nigeria (1968–69), continuing drought and hunger in the Sahel region (1968 to the mid-1970s), and severe food shortages in Asia, most dramatically in parts of Pakistan and Bangladesh, triggered the feeling that the global food picture was getting worse at an astonishing speed.69 Until 1972 CARE’s access to US government surpluses had enabled it to respond to the growing need for emergency feeding. In 1969, for instance, the agency distributed the single largest amount of PL 480 commodities in its 25-year history – foodstuffs worth more than US$75.4 million.70 By mid-1973, however, CARE executives were reporting a “rather grim picture” at both domestic and international levels. With “drought or flood stretching almost

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across the globe,” and a shortage of food even in countries that normally exported crops, the agency was seeing a “daily increase of 200,000 new mouths to feed.”71 Given the apparent need and CARE’s experience with large-scale food aid distribution in partnership with the US government, this situation might have boosted CARE’s overall feeding program had circumstances been different. Instead, the hitherto successful “marriage of surplus disposal and humanitarian relief” between the State Department, US agriculture, and the humanitarian voluntary agencies was severely put to the test by a historic low in government food surpluses between 1972 and 1975.72 In a secret deal, completed in July 1972, President Nixon had signed a long-term wheat agreement with the Soviet Union, authorizing the transfer of approximately 28 million tons of grain, worth more than a billion US dollars, to the Soviet Union.73 This move was intended to relieve the US government of its expensive food excess while at the same time pushing US agriculture from a protectionist to a free market environment. It turned out, however, to contribute to spiking food prices and rampant inflation toward the end of the year.74 When US harvests turned out considerably worse than expected in 1973, and the effects of the oil crisis – m ­ assive cost increases in fuel and fertilizer – were beginning to be felt, world market prices for basic food commodities such as rice increased by up to 500 percent.75 Thus, at a moment in history when food scarcity and even famine were spreading in many of the so-called Least Developed Countries, there was almost no surplus food left in the United States for humanitarian purposes.76 In early 1973 PL 480 commodities for distribution by voluntary agencies were cut back to a historic minimum, which severely hampered CARE’s feeding programs and confronted the agency with a serious ethical and organizational dilemma.77 Despite several emergency meetings with government officials from the different departments, the situation grew even worse, and between July and August 1973 no shipments were made at all.78 This was not only a difficult situation in terms of continuing CARE feeding programs in a time of crisis, it also dragged the agency’s financial balance into the red, as the executive team reported to the board of directors.79 It was against this backdrop that the voluntary agencies in the ACVAFS – with CARE at the forefront – eventually decided to fight back by building up public pressure, as had been successfully done in the past. Backed by their public relations departments, the agencies added fuel to a debate about US humanitarian accountability and world hunger that had already hit the US media. In September 1973 CARE executive director Goffio reported to the executive committee that his media people had been successful in “getting the press to pick up our plight” – which was something of an understatement, as almost all the major US papers had devoted front-page articles to the situation of the humanitarian agencies.80 A New York Times editorial in late August 1973 commented: It was relatively easy to play the part of a benevolent Uncle Sam as long as the granaries were bulging with surpluses and there was everywhere in the United States

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a surfeit of food. The real test of this country’s conscience and responsible world leadership comes now that American resources no longer appear unlimited.81

In addition to its media campaign to generate public support, CARE approached US policymakers directly. A resolution requesting additional US food aid drew a remarkable response. Many of the agency’s friends and public supporters – among them once again Hubert Humphrey – immediately increased the pressure on Congress and the Nixon administration, urging it to change its official food assistance policy in favor of agencies like CARE.82 With the media and the voluntary agencies in a state of ever greater outrage, Henry Kissinger’s advisors eventually warned: Voluntary agency feeding programs were cut substantially last year […]. Substantial additional cuts are being made now. Agriculture and AID both argue that further cuts would risk a major public, press and Congressional reaction against the Administration [… if] the strong U.S. voluntary agencies [were] forced to further dismantle their feeding programs – a major part of their international efforts. We also would risk some charges internationally that we were backing away from our traditional support of humanitarian programs which were not “politically oriented.”83

Only a little later the same advisors added that a complete stop to provisions for US voluntary agencies would almost certainly result in an effective press campaign, since voluntary agency programs had actually “the least foreign policy or economic importance but the strongest domestic support.”84 It was against this backdrop of an ever more urgent domestic and international debate on the humanitarian food crisis that Kissinger, the newly appointed Foreign Secretary, eventually decided to step up. In a speech before the UN General Assembly on September 24, 1973, he proposed convening an international conference under the auspices of the United Nations at which these mounting world food problems would be addressed.85 While he was not the first to propose such an international gathering – FAO director general Addeke Boerma had made a similar proposal in February as had the Non-aligned Movement in early September  – Kissinger had certainly taken an active interest in the international food markets in the past.86 After having been approached by Hubert Humphrey regarding this issue in early September, he had come to the conclusion that a proactive US position and increased cooperation with the United Nations and the FAO, which were to host and organize the conference, would be strategically sound.87 Given the administration’s overall strategy toward the United Nations, which developed “from tacit opposition to outright counterattack on several fronts” throughout the 1970s, as more newly independent nations critical of US positions joined the UN cosmos, Kissinger’s proposal was remarkable.88 At home in the United States, however, Kissinger’s proposal was mostly well received. The voluntary agencies in particular felt that such an international congress would help to push the issue of widespread hunger further to the center of

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public attention. At a CARE meeting in October, the board immediately passed a resolution commending Kissinger and Humphrey for their leadership and urging active integration of the voluntary agencies “in planning and implementing national and international food policy.”89 CARE’s interest in being included in the upcoming World Food Conference line-up had many sources. First of all, it was a question of strategy and prestige. The international arena, and thus multilateral as well as transnational coordination, was becoming more and more important, as past conferences such as the World Food Congress at The Hague in 1970 had shown.90 Even if the senior CARE representative Wallace Campbell had been completely overwhelmed and culturally estranged by the 1970 gathering, which had breathed the revolutionary spirit of decolonization and the global peace movement, the event had demonstrated that international coordination was the future for any sort of humanitarian action.91 Urging the inclusion of NGOs in a large-scale event such as the upcoming World Food Conference was a matter of being serious about private voluntary agency capacity and ambitions in this very field.92 In addition, the expected interest of the media in such a major global conference offered yet another chance to put pressure on domestic US policymakers, who were still reluctant to make any promises concerning an increase in PL 480 commodities for private feeding programs. Although Kissinger was not exactly hostile toward humanitarian programs, he saw the apparent food shortage as a chance to “scrub up” some voluntary agency programs.93 This position was in line with the White House’s long-term efforts to “tighten up the less effective Title II [voluntary agency] grant program” in favor of direct bilateral sales under Title I, which would offer the US government more direct leverage on recipient countries.94 Confronted with such attitudes on the part of select government offices, the upcoming World Food Conference offered a chance for the American agencies to push the US administration toward more direct humanitarian commitment in terms of additional food aid – without any foreign policy strings attached.95 In contrast to past instances, when scarcity of commodities had led to largely increased internal competition, the American voluntary agency community managed to close ranks by forming an official coordinating body called World Hunger Action Coalition (WHAC).96 This “coalition of the concerned,” consisting of more than 30 (and later up to 75) religious and secular American voluntary agencies, CARE among them, was both a joint fundraising effort and a politically coordinated approach intended to influence the US delegation and through it the World Food Conference.97 Shortly after its establishment, in the summer of 1974, the WHAC launched a widely acknowledged petition in which it applauded the World Food Conference initiative and urged “the building of a world food security system.”98 What raised the agencies’ hopes for further integration into the preparatory conference process was the fact that John A. Hannah, former director of USAID, had been appointed deputy to Sayed A. Marei, secretary general of the UN responsible for the World Food Conference. At a personal meeting with the voluntary agencies in

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New York, Hannah promised to work closely with the “NGOs and the volags” – thus offering a new level of voluntary agency integration at the international level.99 As a matter of fact, these promises were largely echoed by the rest of the preparatory team. At Marei’s request, Hans A. Dall, the FAO Freedom from Hunger coordinator, commenced consultation with various NGO representatives in the summer of 1974. At a meeting on July 4 in Geneva it was agreed that the UN would support NGO efforts not only on a symbolic but also on a practical level by granting meeting facilities and offices near the conference arena.100 In addition, it was agreed that up to 50 seats in the plenary hall would be reserved for NGO representatives, who were thoroughly briefed about official protocol with regard to circulating written statements and other contributions.101 What had seemed like an easy registration process for the NGOs turned out to be rather difficult in the end. Not only were there rigid bureaucratic registration requirements, but there also turned out to be too few direct conference invitations available for all of the interested agencies to attend.102 In mid-September a UN representative of the World Food Conference preparatory team contacted John Hannah in New York, requesting guidance on how to handle “the problem of the large number of U.S. national organizations [… such as CARE] whose ­relevance and useful input to the World Food Conference cannot be questioned, but because of their being national organizations from one member state should not dominate the NGO participation?”103 This request, merely eight weeks before the global event was scheduled to begin, shows quite clearly that the UN authorities were overwhelmed by the enormous interest of civil society organizations wanting to be involved. In addition, several high-ranking officials were not enthusiastic about  the NGOs being involved at all. Addeke Boerma, the secretary general of the FAO, for example, was still haunted by the experience of the 1970 World Food Congress in The Hague, where he had gained the impression that NGO representatives were in the main radical left-wing activists without proper haircuts, and he was thus highly reluctant to invite them back.104 It was against this backdrop that a number of large international NGOs eventually decided to form a joint contact group to make sure that their claims were heard. Although the contact group assured Marei that they understood that “the World Food Conference is a meeting of governments,” they still requested a significant increase in administrative assistance (secretaries, interpreters, translators, and messengers), logistical assistance (more NGO seats in the plenary room, adequate meeting facilities), and symbolic assistance (an official NGO statement during the opening general debate) for the NGOs at the conference.105 Instead of joining in this direct approach to Marei, at this still rather experimental level of direct international NGO diplomacy, CARE and most other American agencies relied on another, thoroughly proven strategy. In September 1974 CARE executive director Frank Goffio and a couple of other voluntary agency representatives attended a meeting at the State Department in Washington and

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“made a strong pitch to have NGO representation at the Conference” with the Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, who was to head the US delegation to the World Food Conference.106 With this meeting a direct line of communication between the leader of the US delegation and the American voluntary agencies was established, demonstrating that the hopes the agencies had placed in John Hannah, and his role in facilitating government–NGO cooperation, had been justified. This direct link between government administrators and the American agencies proved to be a valuable asset – and one of the few actual chances for the NGOs to be heard during the conference in Rome.107 Finally, in early November 1974, Goffio flew to Rome to attend the World Food Conference as an officially registered NGO observer. Henry Kissinger’s opening speech in particular was eagerly awaited, as all American agencies were hoping for a bold and affirmative statement regarding US leadership in the world food crisis. During the run-up to the conference there had been bitter intra-administrative fights over the question of whether Kissinger should come up with a concrete food aid commitment during the conference. Although USDA officials, most prominently Butz, and individual congressmen and senators such as Hubert Humphrey were in favor of an official US pledge, the recently sworn-in President Ford, backed by the Office of Management and Budget, was not.108 These internal differences eventually leaked to the press and were discussed at length in the New York Times.109 CARE, Catholic Relief Services, Church World Service, and Lutheran World Relief, well aware of President Ford’s position, sent him a letter urging him to reaffirm the humanitarian purposes of Food for Peace by returning to 1972 commodity donation levels.110 While Kissinger’s opening speech on November 6, 1974 was full of grand gestures and promises that within a decade “no child [would] go to bed hungry,” he refrained from any concrete commodity commitments.111 His otherwise demonstrative optimism collided with the tenor of the conference as it developed. As Frank Goffio, after returning to New York, pointed out to his CARE staff, Kissinger’s opening address was well received, at the time, but as we went on through the next 2 weeks – because we are a leadership nation – many people began to take pot shots at it in terms of “Was it a big enough commitment?” In all frankness, it was less of a commitment than we as an organization would have liked for the United States.112

Kissinger’s failure to follow the lead of his Canadian colleague, who had pledged an additional one million tons of food assistance, was not the only disappointment for the private agencies. As the conference progressed, it showed that chances to influence official conference protocol were limited, with no trace of an actual new phase in NGO–UN relations in sight.113 The World Food Conference, as an “exercise in ad hoc multilateral diplomacy,” was thus a constant struggle for the NGOs, who were hampered by the provisions of the 1968 ECOSOC Resolution 1296, which granted them passive observer status only.114 In addition there was

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limited ­agreement among the NGOs to begin with. The more than 170 NGOs were extremely diverse and clearly at different stages of development. The result was that they were often “unable to discuss, let alone agree on, any coherent strategy,” as attendees observed afterwards.115 It was against this background that Goffio admitted that the NGOs had had no real clout except as we were able to influence delegations that we were friendly with. We went our separate ways trying to make an input in terms of what should happen. We worked on the U.S. delegation constantly, and got a lot of help from congressmen and senators attending that conference.116

It was, in the end, the agencies’ genuine experiences in the field of public relations  and media cooperation that ultimately made some degree of difference. As part of a joint effort, the NGOs published a conference magazine called PAN that covered the whole event and employed catchy phrases (“they can’t eat your words”) to remind official and national delegates that actual achievements in terms of material help and systemic change were needed.117 The magazine proved to be a very useful tool in making the diverse NGO positions and goals known to the international press.118 In terms of official output, the NGOs managed to initiate  the inclusion of population issues and the aspect of women in food production into the official conference program. In addition, two official resolutions were passed by the NGO community. In urging for additional food aid, scientific monitoring, and long-term regulation of food markets, as well as for appropriate representation of NGOs in any future food policy, these resolutions were far from ground-breaking and indicated instead that they were the product of minimal consensus.119 It was still a clear disappointment when the Universal Declaration on the Eradication of Hunger and Malnutrition, passed by the official conference delegates, refrained from acknowledging the NGOs, proclaiming instead: It is a fundamental responsibility of Governments to work together for higher food production and a more equitable and efficient distribution of food between countries and within countries. Governments should initiate immediately a greater concerted attack on chronic malnutrition and deficiency diseases among the vulnerable and lower income groups. In order to ensure adequate nutrition for all, Governments should formulate appropriate food and nutrition policies integrated in over-all socioeconomic and agricultural development plans based on adequate knowledge of available as well as potential food resources.120

When it comes to the general assessment of the World Food Conference with regard to its impact on global food policy, there is no agreement in the existing scholarly literature. Recent research has mostly highlighted the chances that were missed, even though some of the institutions that resulted directly or indirectly from the conference, such as the World Food Council and the International Fund for Agricultural Development, were clearly heading in the right direction.121 For CARE, the World Food Conference was somewhere in between a huge success and

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a total failure. In speaking to his colleagues in New York, Frank Goffio emphasized that the conference had helped to highlight “the fact that we have one devil of a critical situation in terms of food.” He was justifiably rather optimistic that the US government would react to the obvious need sooner or later, judging that this would result from the pressure generated at this international gathering.122 In addition, the response from the American public, in terms of donations, in the lead-up to the conference had been remarkable. A direct mail approach to new potential donors, as well as CARE’s Empty Plate campaign, drew a tremendous response and boosted the agency’s 1974 income from private contributions by almost 66 ­percent compared to 1971 levels.123 While Goffio was generally skeptical regarding CARE’s chances of gaining actual policy influence at the international level, he drew a slightly positive conclusion. In the rest of the American voluntary community far more critical voices were heard, however. Soon after the conference, CARE was invited to attend a conference convened by the Policy Sciences Center in New York at which strategies for improving the impact of citizen action in the US on the world food crisis were discussed.124 In a preparatory policy paper on “Private Non-Profit Action and the World Food Crisis,” the author explained: The U.S. private non-profit role has not been what it could have been. In a study of its role in the politics of the World Food Conference it was found that: 1. prior to the Conference there was minimal influence over the U.N. secretariat, and the U.S. delegation’s position, 2. during the Conference there was limited influence on the 3 main working committees and little or no influence on the U.S. delegation.125

While the last point was not exactly true as far as CARE was concerned, the paper still hit a nerve. Through mostly relying on their traditional channels of influence, such as the national media, established contacts with the agency’s American supporters, and national government officials, the international arena had been severely disregarded. CARE’s main focus on a rise in US food aid for the American agencies had in fact inhibited effective participation in bargaining processes at the international level. The eventual lack of influence on decision making and actual food policy was thus not only the result of inflexible UN–NGO consultation guidelines, but also had to do with imperfect coordination among the American and international voluntary agencies and their lack of experience in handling United Nations bureaucracy. It thus showed that the NGOs, and most certainly the American ones, would have to change course if they wanted to develop into central proponents of a post-Westphalian world order of any kind. The ACVAFS, recognizing this problem, intensified its efforts to establish closer cooperation between voluntary agencies and the United Nations after the World Food Conference – eventually dispatching executive director Leon Marion to become chairman of the NGO executive committee related to the UN Office of Public Information.126 In this respect the World Food Conference had a catalytic effect on CARE and the other American voluntary agencies, which had learned

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from their experience in Rome that they needed to step up their efforts at coordination on the international level.127 There were several international coordinating approaches, such as the United Nations Disaster Relief Organization, founded in 1971, that offered untapped resources and new opportunities. It was, however, with a certain characteristic professionalism and a proven set of managerial techniques that the task of linking the system of the American voluntary agencies with interested international agencies was approached. In 1976, under the chairmanship of CARE executive director Frank Goffio, the ACVAFS assigned an international consulting firm to evaluate and facilitate the process of international humanitarian response in an attempt at making the most of this international dimension for both the recipients of humanitarian assistance and the American voluntary agencies, whose future in an international environment was at stake.128 CARE’s second “internationalization” and a look to the future The executive director briefly commented that part of our direction in the 70’s will be the “Internationalization of CARE.” That is to develop a CARE-USA, CARE CANADA, CARE-Germany, etc., eventually headed by an international Board of directors.129

It has repeatedly been argued by US historians that the 1970s were about diversity, or, more precisely, about inventing diversity as a new concept to describe sociostructural transformations in American society.130 After decades of struggle for the integration of minority groups, with affirmative action as a leading driver of social change, diversity and societal complexity shifted into the limelight of (scholarly) interest in the United States and beyond.131 When looking at CARE during the 1970s, it appears that a means of handling both societal diversity and rising organizational and environmental complexity was yet to be found. For CARE, the new decade was about realizing that “we are now ‘in the 1970s’”132 – meaning that longoverdue political and structural adjustments finally needed to be made. In early 1972 CARE was faced with a major class action suit by five of its female employees, who charged that it had “violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminating against female employees on the basis of their sex.”133 In a local New York newspaper the claimants underscored their conviction that CARE was engaging in discriminatory practices in the areas of hiring, promotion, salary, travel opportunity, and even in the organization’s health plan, where “the dependents of women were not given the same benefits as those of male employees.”134 While CARE’s legal counsel Markham Ball publicly rejected these allegations, CARE executives, fearing for its reputation, were highly alarmed by these accusations and immediately announced their willingness to hire “more women in the coming months.”135 After the class action suit had been settled, an affirmative action plan was devised to help increase the ratio of women at CARE, particularly among its overseas employees.136 Gender and race issues in the workplace, however, were but

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one of the agency’s many concerns at the time. As it turned out, Louis Samia, longtime assistant executive director in charge of finances and CARE executive director from 1979 until his discharge due to sexual harassment of female co-workers in the early 1980s, had embezzled more than US$100,000 between 1965 and 1981, a finding that shook the organization to the core.137 While Samia’s embezzlement cost the agency real money, public prestige, and was a huge blow to its self-perception of being a well-administered agency, there were also more abstract structural issues that haunted the CARE management. As a nationwide public opinion survey on the attitudes and motives of CARE donors and non-donors found in the 1970s, the overwhelming majority of contributors were white, with “disproportionally fewer Catholics and disproportionally more Jews in the donor group than in the public generally.” While this alone was not necessarily a reason for concern, the study also underscored that younger people, while “more receptive to CARE in a variety of ways,” were, paradoxically, very under-represented among the CARE donor group.138 This finding pointed to the genuine socio-economic dilemma that charitable donations to CARE were still mainly provided by comparatively old and well-off parts of society.139 Correspondingly, CARE’s in-house statistics recorded an increase in large bequests throughout the 1970s – which was both good, in terms of additional income, and bad, as these donors could definitely be erased from the files for the future.140 It was against the backdrop of the management’s strategic conviction that new, younger, and more diverse donors had to be reached that in May 1972 the executive committee authorized a five-year fundraising plan.141 The plan called for increases in the “amount of time devoted by CARE in gaining the support of foundations, corporations, large donors, bequests and benefits,” as well as a grassroots approach via the establishment of local fundraising committees. The hope was to optimize international information flows “needed to service sophisticated donors” from CARE’s overseas offices to New York.142 Furnished with almost half a million US dollars for the first five months alone, the plan turned out to be a rather successful leap forward in terms of winning over the targeted donor groups. CARE significantly intensified its efforts in three main fields: public promotion, direct mail, and person-to-person fundraising.143 In addition, CARE started the production of small promotional films, in which it explained its programs and demonstrated its outstanding connections with American political and business circles. These films, among them the documentary Our Small World, were specifically geared at American business leaders and aimed at strengthening CARE’s pitch in corporate fundraising.144 The fundraising plans’ considerable advance investment paid off, particularly during the world food crisis from 1973 to 1975, when volunteer fundraisers, contributions from the Walks for Development, and direct mailings to new donors boosted CARE’s private income to previously unknown levels.145 The positive trend – which was accompanied by a sector-wide agreement on ethical fundraising methods – continued and even s­ tabilized.146 In 1980 CARE ranked

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first among secular American voluntary agencies in terms of private contributions, and third, after Catholic Relief Services and United Israel Appeal, when religious agencies were included.147 CARE’s reorientation in the field of fundraising was accompanied by a careful readjustment of its management and programming techniques. In the early 1970s executive director Frank Goffio not only introduced annual physical exams for the field staff but implemented a grade and step system, thereby extending this managerial motivation and promotion technique from the more than 150 overseas employees to CARE’s New York management.148 In addition, in 1973 CARE introduced multi-year planning in an attempt to tackle rising internal criticism that the agency was displaying “a lack of professionalism in project design due to failure to evaluate” programs in a long-term perspective.149 This type of criticism had been growing for years, and the eventual shift toward long-range planning was understood as “the most significant change in CARE’s basic approaches and operating methods in recent years, perhaps since the beginning of the organization.”150 CARE’s sophisticated and quite innovative multi-page manual on multiyear planning showed that the new approach meant both a stronger emphasis on the study of the long-term impacts of its programs on socio-economic conditions abroad, as well as massive increases in paperwork for the CARE staff. In addition to major changes in programming methods, further steps toward the emerging computer age were taken in an attempt to facilitate the management of larger business volumes and also “to coordinate and standardize field and headquarters functions.”151 These technological measures proved timely, as CARE business volumes, both in terms of PL 480 food aid as well material and personnel flows for the agency’s developmental projects, increased continuously, more than doubling between 1970 and 1980.152 While these steps toward organizational efficiency and growth were not communicated to the public, the CARE public relations department was very active in conveying to its donors that every dollar spent on CARE would be administered by “hard-nosed do-gooders.” Interestingly enough, it was CARE’s demonstrative modesty with regard to its headquarters’ appearance, which was repeatedly described as containing “moth-eaten” carpets and being “in desperate need of new paint,” that eventually led the New York Sunday News to rave: “Usually, those engaged in charitable work are soft, gentle people who dream a lot. CARE’s workers play it tough – squeezing each buck, making the most of each penny.”153 This image of CARE employees as proud penny-pinchers was carefully guarded and promoted, both externally and internally. It was thus with quite some satisfaction that Goffio informed the board that he had been successful in steering CARE through the years of stagflation in the early 1970s.154 At that point most of CARE’s fundraising and decision making at the level of actual corporate governance was still taking place in the United States. Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere, Inc., while operating in more than thirty countries

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all over the world, was not yet a truly international enterprise, as all decisions – whether financial, political, or strategic in nature – had to be cleared by the New York office. Marc Lindenberg and Coralie Bryant, in their study on the transformation of relief and development-oriented NGOs in the last two decades of the twentieth century, adapted a convincing classification for the stages of “internationalization” or more precisely “multinationalization” of several large NGOs such as CARE, Oxfam, and Médicins Sans Frontières.155 Drawing on theories used to explain the emergence of multinational corporations, they identify three (or rather four) stages: Stage 1 Organizations having their home office in, and recruiting their staff and board members from their country of origin, while delivering goods to foreign countries, without establishing permanent overseas offices or recruiting local staff overseas. Stage 2 Organizations setting up permanent overseas offices, designing and delivering “its programs in overseas settings through its own registered organizations or affiliate partners,” and hiring local personnel “more likely in technical and support capacities than in upper management” without international representation on its board. Stage 3 Organizations taking on “multinational” features, having established many regional offices, carrying out service functions such as “auditing, staffing, and procurement” in the countries were these functions can be met most efficiently, with lower level executives from local countries but most board members and high-level management still from the country of origin. Stage 4 “Truly” multinational organizations, having multinational representation on every level, whether in decision making, procurement, staffing, support services, or sourcing.156 Any such classification is, of course, necessarily ideal-typical and cannot help but disregard concrete historical organizational developments or the many possible intermediate forms or stages. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that CARE Inc. was still largely in stage two at the beginning of the 1970s. While CARE’s organizational structure had changed a lot since its inception in 1945, the agency had remained an American organization. It had permanent overseas representation and local service employees, but its international boards and upper management positions were filled by Americans alone. With the turn of the decade this state of affairs came under serious reconsideration, however. The overall task of actually internationalizing the agancy in one way or another had already been discussed intensively yet without any real outcome in the early 1960s. At the start of the new decade, the debate on how to keep pace with a rapidly internationalizing environment resurfaced with a vengeance.

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The impulse for this development stemmed from several sources. First of all, the issue was brought up repeatedly by the CARE program department and CARE overseas officers who were directly confronted with organizations such as Oxfam that were – to their mind – moving ahead very effectively in the “establishment of essentially autonomous national units” – thus turning the British NGO into a transnational non-profit enterprise.157 This argument suggests that an analogy with multinational corporations in the for-profit sector is indeed at least partially suitable, as non-profit enterprises, like profit-driven multinationals, aim at finding “new markets, expressed by resource acquisition, […], brand promotion at the world wide level, the internationalization of personnel and the de-territorialization of the organization.”158 Confronted with an organization such as Oxfam, which was both a partner and a competitor in a field of limited resources, CARE employees repeatedly proposed the establishment of an international body to bridge the gulf between yet to be established national CARE fundraising agencies. The plan in its most radical form entailed a complete remodeling of CARE, Inc. and the transfer of hitherto American-run management and governance functions to a new international organization. This, it was argued, would not only allow CARE to keep pace with the complex dynamics of international humanitarian relief, but in addition it would help “lay to rest any concerns about political objectives on the part of CARE.”159 The general issue was, secondly, taken up repeatedly by those senior board members who had been involved in the first committee on the establishment of CARE-type organizations in economically advanced countries several years earlier. Active members such as Wallace Campbell, Lewis Johnson, and Teymuraz Bagration had kept in touch with the matter of going international, and it was no coincidence that the committee was eventually reactivated in October 1970.160 Several of CARE’s old friends responded to the committee’s appeal for suggestions and counsel – most prominently CARE’s first paid employee, Lincoln Clark, who proposed the establishment of a CARE International to be run by “still to be established quasi-independent national organizations” after the model of CARE, Inc. – thus coming fairly close to the actual outcome more than a decade later.161 A third and major drive toward a new round in the CARE internationalization debate emanated from the fact that the Canadian CARE field office in Ottawa, which had been established back in 1947, was starting to push for the establishment of a proper CARE Canada. While the Ottawa office had always conducted its fund­ raising activities for CARE projects planned (and mostly also staffed) in the United States, it possessed several special privileges that differentiated it from the status of CARE’s American field offices. Not only did the Canadians administer their own address lists and fundraising contacts, but they also facilitated a direct liaison with the Canadian government, most prominently with the Canadian International Development Agency and its predecessor agencies. In appreciation of these efforts, donations were identified as being of Canadian origin by a sticker with a maple leaf reading, “A gift from the people of Canada.”162 In 1968, however, prompted by a

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change in Canadian tax legislation and at the request of the Canadian CARE staffers themselves, the CARE board in New York ratified the establishment of a Canadian advisory board that was to counsel “CARE of Canada on all aspects of the work of CARE, Inc. in Canada.”163 This formulation guaranteed a maximum symbolic representation for Canada, but it still indicated formal dependence on the American organization.164 The 1968 agreement first allowed the Canadians to dedicate “their” contributions to CARE programs of their choosing, and granted them the right to devise separate financial statements for the Canada office. In view of massive increases in donor contributions during the early 1970s (almost 10 percent of CARE’s overall private income was of Canadian origin), it was a consequential development that the Canada advisory committee began to urge even greater organizational independence, arguing that these successes would only continue if CARE Canada became a real Canadian agency.165 Thus, in November 1973, at a meeting in New York, CARE senior members met with Henry E. Langford, chairman of the CARE Canada advisory board, to discuss “substantially increased autonomy for CARE Canada.”166 While a general agreement to investigate the issue of “Canadization” was reached, the term “autonomy” proved problematic.167 It soon turned out that the concept of autonomy was understood differently on either side of the border. The Canadians, arguing that identification with an American organization was hampering their fundraising activity, were hoping for a concession to incorporate as an independent non-profit corporation under the name of CARE Canada as soon as possible. This advance was carefully slowed down by the Americans, however. While assuring their Canadian counterparts that American and Canadian intentions were seemingly “largely complementary” – as long as the Canadians wanted “to be associated with the CARE name and organization, and to contribute meaningfully to CARE’s work” – CARE board members underscored that there were still many “areas of non-agreement.”168 From their perspective, there were two major issues to be solved. First of all, the Americans only wanted CARE Canada to be able to incorporate after the establishment of an organizational structure similar to the American one  – namely a membership organization comprised of independent non-profit enterprises in the field of social services. In addition, the American organization was not ready to license its name to an organization in which it would have no influence on funding and programming matters.169 The Canadians, in turn, were increasingly irritated by CARE New York’s attempts at making their autonomy subject to obtaining American consent for each and every important decision.170 By mid-1976, three years into the official investigation on Canadization, there was no solution in sight to the basic disagreements with regard to CARE Canada’s organizational structure, CARE New York’s future influence on decision-making processes, or the actual plan for affiliation.171 Negotiations were hampered not only by the particularities of the Canadian case, but also by the fact that the whole issue was so closely connected to the overarching question of internationalization in general. Frank Goffio’s strategic directive of 1971, urging bold efforts toward going

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international within a decade, was severely hampered by the lack of agreement on how to concretely approach this task.172 While internationalization in many ways sounded genuine and modern, there was also much perplexity in terms of how to move ahead without losing control of the process or endangering the whole enterprise. As a confidential discussion outline in 1974 summarized: There are clear indications that CARE can be more successful in seeking support from new sources, both at home and abroad if CARE were to become a truly international organization. However, to accomplish an effective internationalization of CARE will require substantial changes in the structure or the organization, and substantial effort to encourage public understanding of the organization throughout the world commensurate with its nature and purposes.173

The paper recommended starting to set up affiliates by steps, guided by the experience gained at each progressive stage, with Canada as a trial case. At the same time, it linked the question of Canadian autonomy to far-reaching policy decisions that hampered the process and added significant overload to the whole issue. Given the apparent incompatibility of the Canadian request for independence with CARE’s intention of maintaining at least some kind of control, it is not surprising that finding a solution to the issue of Canadian autonomy took even longer than setting up a CARE Europe from scratch. CARE Europe, which was officially incorporated in 1976, was, as a matter of fact, merely “a prelude to the organization of new independent national CARE organizations,” and was as such almost entirely controlled by the American CARE, Inc.174 The idea of establishing representation in Europe came out of a major fundraising drive by the German Lions and Bread for the World and their Thanks to CARE campaign during CARE’s 25th anniversary in 1971/72. After negotiations with German non-profit organizations and German government authorities, which were ready to give CARE plenty of leeway, the Americans decided to establish official CARE Europe representation as a test case.175 After the articles of incorporation for CARE Europe had been devised and general plans for a new semi-independent European CARE office in New York had been established, four American citizens (partly living in Germany) met in Bonn to sign the contract establishing CARE Europe as an association under German law.176 Among the signatories were Phil Johnston, future director of CARE Europe, and John T. Thatcher, representing CARE, Inc.177 More or less independently run by Johnston, all communication between the CARE field and country offices and CARE Europe was still recorded and cleared in the United States. While it had been established as a new organization, and decidedly not as a dependent fundraising office for the American organization, European CARE was not yet operational but focused on representative issues and solicitation of private and public funds on the continent which were then used in CARE’s overseas programs.178 In contrast to CARE Europe, CARE Canada was able to point to more than three decades of successful service, thus arguing with some justification that the

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Canadian office had little stake in being “a subsidiary of a US group or organization, especially with the word ‘American’ in its name.”179 It was their active demand for a chance of running their own Canadian show that made the American side so wary of granting them actual independence. The ultimate solution to this long-term stalemate was a compromise in the best sense of the term. On June 2, 1977 CARE Canada was finally incorporated under part II of the Canadian Corporations Act as a membership organization, with CARE as the founding member – thus making sure that CARE, Inc. retained some kind of control over CARE Canada.180 The Canadians had gotten their way, however, in incorporating first, and settling matters such as communication and future membership structure later – a solution that led to CARE Canada, unlike the other national CARE bodies, being developed into a direct citizens’ committee instead of a real membership organization as had been intended by the Americans. With CARE Canada and CARE Europe in full operation by the end of the 1970s and further national bodies joining the CARE family at the beginning of the new decade, among them CARE Norway (1980) and CARE Germany (1981), Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere, Inc. had finally progressed from stage two to stage three (or rather stage three and a half), following Lindenberg’s and Bryant’s definition for multinational NGOs. The organization had established not only regional offices but had actual overseas affiliates at national levels that were carrying out proper service functions such as auditing, staffing, and procurement. The American CARE, Inc. would remain the centre of CARE’s worldwide organization for the years to come, however, even after CARE International, the future international superstructure, was actually established in 1982. It would take far more than a decade for all the changes and problems of this internationalization project to be solved or at least reduced to manageable dimensions. In the interim (and up until today), CARE would linger somewhere between being a multinational organization (with its center in the United States and national affiliates abroad) and being a transnational enterprise, with largely independent entities without an identifiable national center, spread around the globe. At the end of the 1970s, however, this process was just beginning, and any future study tackling this process will have to go beyond Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere, Inc. to include the new national, international, transnational CARE organizations. Notes  1 NARA, RG 286, Entry 4, Box 1, “Historical Look at Objectives of Foreign Aid, Congressional Action and Legislative Changes, 1961–1982” (prepared by Jean Lewis, Commission on Security and Economic Assistance), undated [August 1983].  2 See Niall Ferguson et al. (eds.), The Shock of the Global. The 1970s in Perspective, Cambridge, MA, 2010.  3 Donella H. Meadows and Dennis L. Meadows, The Limits to Growth. A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, New York, 1972; see also the excellent

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CARE and food aid from America monograph by Matthias Schmelzer, The Hegemony of Growth. The OECD and the Making of the Economic Growth Paradigm, Cambridge, 2016. Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Geschichte der Globalisierung, Munich, 2003, pp. 24–7. Daniel J. Sargent, “The United States and Globalization in the 1970s,” in Ferguson et al. (eds.), Shock of the Global, pp. 49–64 (p. 53); 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 (p. 103); Akira Iriye, Global Community. The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World, Berkeley, CA, 2004, p. 108; Alfred E. Eckes and Thomas W. Zeiler, “Introduction,” in Globalization and the American Century, Cambridge and New York, 2003, pp. 3–9. James N. Rosenau, “Governance, Order, and Change in World Politics,” in James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel (eds.), Governance without Government. Order and Change in World Politics, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 1–29; see also Ronnie D. Lipschutz, “Reconstructing World Politics: The Emergence of Global Civil Society,” Millennium – Journal of International Studies 21.3 (1992), pp. 389–420. Ole Jacob Sending and Iver B. Neumann, “Governance to Governmentality: Analyzing NGOs, States, and Power,” International Studies Quarterly 50.3 (2006), pp. 651–72; Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies. The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics, Cambridge, MA, 2002, pp. 48–52; Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade. How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies, New Haven, CT, 2010. Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston, “Introduction. The Adventurous Journey of Nixon in the World,” in Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston (eds.), Nixon in the World. American Foreign Relations, 1969–1977, Oxford and New York, 2008, pp. 3–21 (p. 5). See, for example, Stephen Charles Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission, Cambridge, 1991, pp. 57–88; Gill argues that the 1970s were a decade of transition rather than decline. ACVAFS, Box 9, Eugene Shenefield (executive director) to all council member agencies, regarding reorganization of USAID, War on Hunger office, January 27, 1967; AID general notice, subj.: AID/W reorganization for increased emphasis on the private sector and the War on Hunger, February 10, 1967; see also Samuel Hale Butterfield, U.S. Development Aid – An Historic First. Achievements and Failures in the Twentieth Century, Westport, CT, 2004, pp. 83–6; Kristin L. Ahlberg, Transplanting the Great Society. Lyndon Johnson and Food for Peace, Columbia, MO, 2008, pp. 69–70, 189. Delia T. Pergande, “Private Voluntary Aid and Nation Building in South Vietnam. The Humanitarian Politics of CARE 1954–61,” Peace and Change 27.2 (2002), pp. 165–97; CARE’s “political” involvement in Vietnam, taking a careful but still rather open pro-American position, led to internal protest and even an incident with a (former) CARE staffer, James Riddle, who protested the US (and CARE) engagement in Vietnam while still on a CARE assignment. He was immediately laid off, but the matter occupied the CARE board for quite some time; see CARE, Box 1172, MECM, December 14, 1966; MECM, March 29, 1967; MECM, May 24, 1967; MECM, May 22, 1968; on the particularly partisan involvement of CRS, see Christopher J. Kauffman, “Politics, Programs, and Protests: Catholic Relief Services in Vietnam, 1954–1975,” The Catholic Historical Review 91.2 (2005), pp. 223–50. J. Bruce Nichols, The Uneasy Alliance. Religion, Refugee Work, and U.S. Foreign Policy,  New  York, 1988, pp. 100–7; Rachel M. McCleary, Global Compassion. Private

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Voluntary Organizations and U.S. Foreign Policy since 1939, Oxford and New York, 2009, pp. 75–6, 102. Randolph Jones, “Otto Passman and Foreign Aid: The Early Years,” Louisiana History 26.4 (1985), pp. 53–62; Carol Lancaster, Foreign Aid. Diplomacy, Development, Domestic Politics, Chicago, 2007, pp. 71–2; Jacob Viner et al., “The Report of the Clay Committee on Foreign Aid: A Symposium,” Political Science Quarterly 78.3 (1963), pp. 321–61 (p. 348, quote by Otto Passman). ACVAFS, Box 54, memorandum, Howard Kresge (ACVFA, DoS) to American voluntary agencies, August 15, 1968, attachment: USAID, “Facts on Foreign Aid, AID and the Balance of Payments, July 1968.” See US Congressional Research Service, Curt Tarnoff and Marian Leonardo Lawson, Foreign Aid: An Introduction to US Programs and Policy, February 10, 2011, Table 2 “Foreign Aid Funding Trends,” pp. 29–30, http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/157097. pdf (accessed September 4, 2015). Public Papers of the President of the United States, Richard Nixon (1969), containing the public messages, speeches, and statements of the president, Ann Arbor, MI, 2005, document 218, Richard Nixon, “Special Message to the Congress on Foreign Aid, May 28, 1969,” pp. 411–17. ACVAFS, Box 5, report to the President of the United States from the Task Force on International Development, US Foreign Assistance in the 1970s: A New Approach, March 4, 1970; CARE, Box 35, copy of testimony by Frank Goffio (CARE) before the Presidential Task Force on International Development, December 26, 1969. Robert A. Pastor, Congress and the Politics of U.S. Foreign Economic Policy, 1929–1976, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982, p. 277. See handwritten notes on copy of Peterson report: ACVAFS, Box 5, report to the President of the United States from the Task Force on International Development, US Foreign Assistance in the 1970s: A New Approach, March 4, 1970. CARE, Box 96, Ralph B. Montee to Merton Cregger, subj.: Development Assistance Committee meeting of the American Council on November 12, 1970, November 16, 1970; CARE, Box 31, Frank Goffio (CARE) to James R. Norris (assistant to the executive director of CRS), April 16, 1970. CARE, Box 97, ACVAFS paper by ad hoc committee on restructuring of foreign aid, points in common (or left unchallenged) made by the various papers, undated [1970]. CARE, Box 96, Ralph B. Montee to Merton Cregger, subj.: Development Assistance Committee meeting of the American Council on November 12, 1970, November 16, 1970. CARE, Box 97, ACVAFS paper by ad hoc committee on restructuring of foreign aid, points in common (or left unchallenged) made by the various papers, undated [1970]. Public Papers of the President of the United States, Richard Nixon (1969), document 501, Richard Nixon, “Statement on Signing the Tax Reform Act of 1969, December 30, 1969,” pp. 1044–6; on the reactions of the voluntary agencies, see ACVAFS, Box 9, Eugene Shenefield (executive director ACVAFS) to all member agencies, subj.: tax reform legislation, December 3, 1969; CARE, Box 1172, MECM, September 24, 1969. Peter D. Hall, “The Welfare State and the Careers of Public and Private Institutions since 1945,” in Lawrence Jacob Friedman and Mark Douglas McGarvie (eds.), Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 363–83, esp. pp. 371–5. Helmut K. Anheier and Stefan Toepler, “Definition und Phänomenologie der NonprofitOrganisation,” in Klaus J. Hopt et al. (eds.), Nonprofit-Organisationen in Recht, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Theorien – Analysen – Corporate Governance, Tübingen, 2005, pp. 17–33 (p. 18).

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27 Evelyn Brody and Joseph J. Cordes, “Tax Treatment of Nonprofit Organizations. A Two Edged Sword?,” in Elizabeth T. Boris and C. Eugene Steuerle (eds.), Nonprofits and Government. Collaboration and Conflict, Washington DC, 2006, pp. 141–75 (p. 151). 28 ACVAFS, Box 9, Howard S. Kresge (ACVFA) to ACVFA members, subj.: Tax Reform Act of 1969 and effect on voluntary agencies’ programs, September 24, 1971. 29 Peter D. Hall, Inventing the Nonprofit Sector and Other Essays on Philanthropy, Voluntarism, and Nonprofit Organizations, Baltimore, MD, 1992, p. 197. 30 CARE, Box 1172, MECM, September 24, 1969; MBDM, April 21, 1971; MECM, March 28, 1973; see also ACVAFS, Box 29, on legislative activities of charitable organizations, Markham Ball (CARE counsel) to Frank Goffio, July 15, 1975. 31 ACVAFS, Box 44, “Second Draft of What to Say to Dr. Hannah in Enlisting his Understanding, Support, Guidance and Action, May 22, 1970” [probably by Eugene Shenefield]; Box 5, “Restructuring Foreign Assistance programs of the United States. A statement of the voluntary agencies associated in the American Council of Voluntary Agencies for Foreign Service,” April 1, 1971; CARE, Box 58, “ACVAFS on Recent Council Activity in Connection with Current Foreign Aid Legislation,” December 12, 1971. 32 Vernon W. Ruttan, United States Development Assistance Policy. The Domestic Politics of Foreign Economic Aid, Baltimore, MD, 1996, pp. 101–2; regarding the figure of 40 percent cuts in USAID staffing, see Christian Gerlach, “Der Versuch zur globalen entwicklungspolitischen Steuerung auf der World Food Conference 1974,” Werkstatt Geschichte 31.3 (2002), pp. 50–91 (p. 57, n. 30). 33 ACVAFS, Box 51, Eugene Shenefield (ACVAFS) to all member agencies, subj.: meeting of ACVAFS delegation with Dr. John A. Hannah, Washington DC (September 2, 1970), September 4, 1970. Hannah was actually attentive to the work of the American agencies, as he had repeatedly offered to urge US voluntary agencies to take part in international activities in the field of agricultural development; see, for example, FAO, RG 9, OFD, SG V, File AID Addeke Boerma (FAO) to FAO country representatives, senior agricultural advisors, United Nations Development Program representatives, acting FAO representatives, regarding latest meeting with AID representatives (John Hannah), July 16, 1969, Annex I, cooperation in the field between AID and United Nations organizations with emphasis on the agricultural sector, reporting that the Americans had “offered to urge US nongovernmental organizations to participate in such planning.” 34 NARA, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1970–1973, Box 538, William P. Rogers (Secretary of State) to President Nixon, subj.: twenty fifth anniversary of Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid, April 19, 1971, recommending (and ultimately achieving) Nixon’s presence at the festivities. 35 AID officials were admittedly “intending to ‘upgrade’ the Advisory Committee and Kresge Office”; see ACVAFS, Box 44, report of discussion on the reorganization of foreign aid, the White House, February 2, 1971, meeting of government officials and CARE and CWS representatives; see also CARE, Box 31, copy of ACVAFS resolution in support and acknowledgement of the ACVFA, adopted April 11, 1971; “American Aid Overseas,” The Washington Post, May 14, 1971, p. A24. 36 Lancaster, Foreign Aid, p. 76; this agreement was certainly triggered by the rejection of further military spending for the war in Indochina. 37 Ruttan, United States Development Assistance Policy, pp. 111–14. 38 The term “multi-level governance” was coined in connection with political science research on the EEC/European Union; see, for example, Liesbeth Hooghe and Gary

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Marks, Multi-level Governance and European Integration, Lanham, MD, 2001. It has been transferred to other fields, notably to international relations and cooperation between governmental and non-governmental players; see, for example, Andrew Hurrell, On Global Order. Power, Values, and the Constitution of International Society, Oxford and New York, 2007, pp. 92–119. Paul A. Laudicina, World Poverty and Development. A Survey of American Opinion, Washington DC, 1973, pp. 4–5. On the dynamics of the relationship between the Nixon administration and the Peace Movement, see Randall Bennett Woods, Quest for Identity. America since 1945, Cambridge and New York, 2005, pp. 292–305. Even CARE executives were slightly skeptical but refrained from expressing this in public; see CARE, Box 49, Fred Devine to Robert Spitzer (Food for Peace), July 31, 1975. James McCracken (ACVAFS), testimony to US Congress House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Mutual Development and Cooperation Act of 1973, Hearings, 93. Congress, Session 1, Washington DC, 1973, pp. 517–18. CARE, Box 58, Leon O. Marion (executive director ACVAFS) to all council members, subj.: re-direction United States Agency for International Development, March 15, 1972; CARE, Box 31, copy of DOS/AID/ACVAFS Voluntary agency #13, October 11, 1972. ACVAFS, Box 50, copy of “AID and the Independent Voluntary Sector,” Bureau for Population and Humanitarian Assistance, June 2, 1972. Recognition and an international definition of the term “Least Developed Countries” was established in 1971 by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2768 (XXVI), November 18, 1971, http://www.unitar.org/resource/sites/unitar.org.resource/files/ document-pdf/GA-2767-XXVI.pdf (accessed September 3, 2015). US administrators used the term even earlier in 1969/70, however; see Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume E–10, Documents on American Republics, 1969–1972, Document 24, memorandum from the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Nixon, Washington, January 29, 1970, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969–76ve10/d22 (accessed September 3, 2015). CARE, Box 1128, “A Statement of Objectives and Operating Philosophy,” undated [1974]. CARE, Box 48, Fred Devine to Frank Goffio, October 3, 1973. CARE, Box 35, confidential Jarold A. Kieffer (AA/PHA) to Daniel Parker (A/AID), March 6, 1974; for a discussion of the implications of the growing “contract culture,” see Ralph M. Kramer, “Voluntary Agencies and the Contract Culture: ‘Dream or Nightmare?,’” The Social Service Review 68.1 (1994), pp. 33–60. CARE, Box 35, confidential Merton Cregger (CARE) to all CARE country directors, subj.: new Volag–AID relationship, March 22, 1974. CARE, Box 31, Merton F. Cregger (CARE) to country directors, subj.: guidelines for AID/private and voluntary agency relationship under the Foreign Assistance Program, August 19, 1974, with attached draft guidelines governing funding for private and voluntary organizations in connection with development assistance under the foreign assistance act (sent under different cover by John A. Ulinski Jr. (PHA/PVC) to working group on private and voluntary organizations, May 29, 1974). CARE, Box 1173, MECM, February 28, 1973; see also Box 97, revised “Overview of CARE Programming Goals and Strategy,” undated [1970s]. On development planning and its colonial underpinnings, see Andreas Eckert, “‘We Are All Planners Now.’ Planung und Dekolonisation in Afrika,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 34.3 (2008), pp. 375–97.

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52 Schulman, The Seventies, p. 26; on the long-term developments, see also Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture, Cambridge, MA, and London, 2012. 53 Rubén Berríos, Contracting for Development. The Role of For-Profit Contractors in U.S. Foreign Development Assistance, Westport, CT, 2000, p. 15, figure 1.1, “US Foreign Aid as Percentage of GDP”; similar data is also available online, http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/ spending_chart_1950_2016USp_13s1li111mcn_35f (accessed May 5, 2013). 54 Larry Minear, “The Forgotten Human Agenda,” Foreign Policy 73 (1988), pp. 76–93 (pp. 86–7). 55 CARE, Box 49, copy of Paul F. McCleary (CWS) to Mr. John Ulinski (PHA/PVC), November 10, 1975. 56 Harvey Katz, Give! Who Gets Your Donor Dollar?, Boston, 1974, pp. 178–9. 57 CARE, Box 96, Ralph Devone to Merton Cregger, June 23, 1975; Merton Cregger to Ralph Devone, June 22, 1975; see also invitation USAID to CARE (Cregger), June 5, 1975. 58 CARE, Box 78, draft position paper on PL 480, March 12, 1969, attachment by James Lambie (CARE) to Howard Kresge (USAID), February 9, 1970. 59 ACVAFS, Box 44, cable from World Hunger Action Coalition to the President of the United States (Ford), Rome, November 1, 1974 60 Thomas G. Weiss and Robert S. Jordan, “Bureaucratic Politics and the World Food Conference: The International Policy Process,” World Politics 28.3 (1976), pp. 422–39 (pp. 424–5); there is of course criticism, underscoring quite convincingly that the “Westphalian Order” as such has never existed, being a mere “icon for international relations scholars”; see Stephen D. Krassner, “Westphalia and All That,” in Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane (eds.), Ideas and Foreign Policy. Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change, Ithaca, NY, 1993, pp. 235–64 (p. 235). 61 Thomas G. Weiss and Robert S. Jordan, The World Food Conference and Global Problem Solving, New York and London, 1976, p. 135. 62 Gerlach, “Versuch zur globalen entwicklungspolitischen Steuerung,” pp. 68–9. 63 Thomas Robertson, Malthusian Moment. Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism, New Brunswick, NJ, 2012, pp. 152–200. 64 Lyndon B. Johnson, “Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union, January 10, 1967,” in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson (1967), containing the public messages, speeches, and statements of the president, Volume I, Ann Arbor, MI, 2006, document 3, pp. 2–14 (p. 11). 65 The President’s Science Advisory Committee, The World Food Problem. Vol I-III, Report of the Panel on the World Food Supply, Washington DC, 1967; C. B. Baker, “U.S. Perspectives on World Food Problems,” Illinois Agricultural Economics 17.2 (1977), pp. 1–6; Sayed Ahmed Marei, The World Food Crisis, London, 1976; summing up the debates since the 1950s, see also David B. Grigg, The World Food Problem, 1950–1980, Oxford and New York, 1985. 66 The term “Green Revolution” was allegedly coined by William Gaud, USAID administrator in 1968; see Nick Cullather, The Hungry World. America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia, Cambridge, MA, 2010, pp. 7–8; on the Green Revolution in the context of US foreign policy interests, see John H. Perkins, Geopolitics and the Green Revolution. Wheat, Genes, and the Cold War, New York, 1997, pp. 141–56; Corinna C. Unger, Entwicklungspfade in Indien. Eine internationale Geschichte 1947–1980, Göttingen, 2015, pp. 74–121. 67 See, for example, Olav Stokke, The UN and Development. From Aid to Cooperation, Bloomington, IN, 2009, pp. 157–74; see also Robert S. McNamara, “Address to the

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Board of Governors of the World Bank, September 24, 1973,” in Robert S. McNamara, The McNamara Years at the World Bank. Major Policy Addresses of Robert S. McNamara, 1968–1981, Baltimore, MD, 1981, pp. 233–61, in which he declared development strategies to have failed to reach the people most affected by poverty; see also UNESCO (ed.), The Pearson Report. A New Strategy for Global Development, Paris, 1970, http://unesdoc.unesco. org/images/0005/000567/056743eo.pdf (accessed April 12, 2013). Rolf H. Sartorius and Vernon W. Ruttan, “The Sources of the Basic Human Needs Mandate,” Journal of Developing Areas 23.1 (1989), pp. 332–62. On the situation in the Sahel region, see Gregory Mann, From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel. The Road to Nongovernmentality, Cambridge and New York, 2015; Joseph E. Thompson, American Policy and African Famine. The Nigeria-Biafra War, 1966–1970, New York, 1990; CARE, Box 1172, report on visit to Biafra, Michael Rellis (CARE), February 4–14, 1969. Regarding the Bihar famine, see Paul R. Brass, “The Political Uses of Crisis: The Bihar Famine of 1966–1967,” The Journal of Asian Studies 45.2 (1986), pp. 245–67 (pp. 251–7). ACVAFS, Box 50, Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid (Dept of State/USAID, Washington, DC), report on Voluntary Foreign Aid Programs, Washington 1969. CARE, Box 1173, MECM, June 27, 1973. Raymond F. Hopkins, “The Evolution of Food Aid. Towards a Development-first Regime,” Food Policy 9.4 (1984), pp. 345–62 (p. 346). Christian Gerlach, “Die Welternährungskrise 1972–1975,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 31.4 (2005), pp. 546–85 (p. 546). I. M. Destler, “United States Food Policy 1972–1976: Reconciling Domestic and International Objectives,” International Organization 32.3 (1978), pp. 617–53 (p. 626). Prices for fertilizer skyrocketed in 1973/74 and increased by 300 to 400 percent compared to 1964 levels; see Harriet Friedman, “The Political Economy of Food: The Rise and Fall of the Postwar International Food Order,” The American Journal of Sociology 88 (1982) suppl., pp. 248–86 (p. 275). Mitchel B. Wallerstein, Food for War – Food for Peace. United States Food Aid in a Global Context, Cambridge, MA, 1980, pp. 194–5. CARE, Box 1173, MECM, May 23, 1973; see also Foreign Agricultural Economic Report No. 142, PL 480 Concessional Sales, History, Procedures, Negotiating and Implementing Agreements, Washington (Economic Research Service, USDA), 1977, p. 9, table 1, US agricultural exports under the PL 480 program by type of agreement and total agricultural exports, value for fiscal years 1955–1976, indicating a decrease in PL 480 shipments of more than 25 percent when comparing 1968 and 1973 figures. The value of PL 480 commodities was the lowest since 1955. CARE, Box 1173, MECM, June 27, 1973; the agencies’ feeling was certainly justified, as Secretary Butz was openly hostile to PL 480, feeling that it should not be paid for by his department; see Wallerstein, Food for War – Food for Peace, p. 198. CARE, Box 1173, MBDM, July 25, 1973. CARE, Box 1173, MECM, September 19, 1973. “World Hunger, Editorial,” The New York Times, August 23, 1973; see also Kathleen Teltsch, “US Shortages Peril World Food Aid Plan,” Special to The New York Times, August 19, 1973. CARE, Box 9, food assistance resolution, October 24, 1973; see also responses by Robert Taft, Jr. (November 15, 1973); James B. Pearson (November 19, 1973); George McGovern (November 19, 1973); J. Glenn Beall, Jr. (November 28, 1973.); James L. Buckley (November 29, 1973); Hubert H. Humphrey (December 3, 1973) and others.

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83 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1973–1976, Volume XXXI, Foreign Economic Policy, document 247, memorandum from Richard Kennedy and Charles Cooper of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger), Washington, September 7, 1973, p. 862, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/ frus1969–76v31/d247 (accessed September 2, 2015). 84 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1973–1976, Volume XXXI, Foreign Economic Policy, document 253, from Charles Cooper (NCS staff) to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Washington, December 22, 1973, subj.: PL 480 in FY 1975 budget. 85 Henry Kissinger, “A Just Consensus, A Stable Order, A Durable Peace, made before the 28th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, September 24, 1973,” Department of State Bulletin 69.1790 (1973), pp. 469–73. 86 D. John Shaw, World Food Security. A History Since 1945, Basingstoke and New York, 2007, p. 121; Michael G. Schechter, United Nations Global Conferences, London and New York, 2005, p. 48. 87 Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, Boston, 1982, p. 429; Gerlach, “Versuch zur globalen entwicklungspolitischen Steuerung,” p. 59. 88 Mark Mazower, Governing the World. The Rise and Fall of an Idea, London, 2012, p. 310; see also chapter 11 on this issue. 89 CARE, Box 1173, resolution commending Humphrey and Kissinger to raise priority of food assistance to help needy of the world, MBDM, October 24, 1973. 90 Sanjeev Khagram and Sarah Alvord, “The Rise of Civic Transnationalism,” in Srilatha Batliwala and L. David Brown (eds.), Transnational Civil Society. An Introduction, Bloomfield, CT, 2006, pp. 64–81 (p. 66). 91 CARE, Box 1172, Wallace Campbell, report on the Second World Food Congress, The Hague, Netherlands, June 15, 1970, titled Was the World Food Congress a Failure? 92 CARE, Box 1173, MECM, February 27, 1974. 93 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1973–1976, Volume XXXI, Foreign Economic Policy, document 264, memorandum from the President’s assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Ford, undated [probably September 1974], http://history.state. gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969–76v31/d264 (accessed May 12, 2013). 94 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1973–1976, Volume XXXI, Foreign Economic Policy, document 276, memorandum from the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (Ash) to President Ford, Washington November 9, 1974, pp. 960–61. 95 The World Food Conference was officially announced on December 17, 1973 by UN General Assembly Resolution 3180 (XXVIII), to be held under UN auspices but with FAO support. 96 ACVAFS, Box 35, press release, “American Freedom from Hunger Foundation announcing the establishment of a World Hunger Action Coalition,” undated [April 1, 1974]. 97 ACVAFS, Box 44, working document of the World Hunger Action Coalition, undated [April 10, 1974]; CARE donated US$5,000 to get the WHAC off the ground; see CARE, Box 1173, MECM, March 27, 1974. 98 CARE, Box 10, copy of “World Hunger Action Coalition Petition Concerning World Hunger to the President and the Congress of the United States,” undated [made public in June 1974]. 99 CARE, Box 1173, MBDM, April 24, 1974. 100 FAO, RG 22, World Food Conference, 43–6, V1, NGOs, office Hans A. H. Dall to S. A. Marei, Secretary General World Food Conference, subj.: NGO involvement in the

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World Food Conference, July 18, 1974; the meeting was attended by FAO representatives, the chairman of the Conference of NGOs in consultative arrangement with ECOSOC, Cyril Ritchie, executive director of the International Council of Voluntary Agencies, seven major international NGOs, and three national coordination groups from the UK, US, and Italy. FAO, RG 22, World Food Conference, 43–6, V1, NGOs, inter-office memorandum, Angus Archer, chief Special Projects (CESI) to representatives of major international NGOs interested in the World Food Conference, subj.: notes on informal meeting of NGO representatives and the World Food Conference, Geneva, July 4, 1974; these agreements were disseminated to the American voluntary agencies that had not been present in Geneva, among them CARE, at a meeting in New York on July 10; see CARE, Box 1173, MECM, June 26, 1974; MBDM, July 24, 1974. FAO, RG 22, World Food Conference, 43–6, V1, NGOs, David Moore (FAO/World Food Conference) to Nancy L. Nicalo (CWS), July 31, 1974. FAO, RG 22, World Food Conference, 43–6, V1, NGOs, inter-office memorandum, Curtis Roosevelt, chief NGO Section ECOSOC to Dr, John Hannah, deputy secretary General World Food Conference, September 19, 1974. FAO, RG 12, com/UN 43/7 LNOR, minutes of meeting, Secretary of Agriculture Butz (USDA) with Addeke Boerma, October 23, 1973, cited from Gerlach, “Versuch zur globalen entwicklungspolitischen Steuerung,” p. 69, n. 107; this general impression was shared by CARE attendees as well, even though Campbell talked about these radicals in terms of “The Youth”; see CARE, Box 1172, Wallace Campbell, report on the Second World Food Congress, The Hague, Netherlands, June 15, 1970, titled Was the World Food Congress a Failure? FAO, RG 22, World Food Conference, 43–6, V2, NGOs, Larry Minear, rapporteur of the NGO Contact Group, Third Session of Preparatory Committee, to Sayed Marei, October 4, 1974. Contact Group members were CWS, Lutheran World Relief, ICVA, ICW, International Federation of Agricultural Producers, IPPF, UKDD2, WUCWO, and CRS. CARE, Box 1173, MECM, September 25, 1974. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume E-14, Documents on the United Nations, 1973–1976, document 153, “Report of the Delegation to the World Food Conference,” Washington, December 1974. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume E-14, Documents on the United Nations, 1973–1976, document 140, memorandum of conversation [Hubert Humphrey and Secretary Henry Kissinger], Washington, April 24, 1974, subj.: World Food Problem; Foreign Relations of the United States, 1973–1976, Volume XXXI, Foreign Economic Policy, document 276, memorandum from the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (Ash) to President Ford, Washington, November 9, 1974, subj.: announcing an increase in PL 480 food aid at the World Food Conference, pp. 960–1. Ash argued that there were clear budget constraints that would be violated by such a commitment and argued in addition that such an increase might spur inflation. Leslie H. Gelb, “Administration Divided on Whether to Double Food Aid Abroad,” The New York Times, July 28, 1974. CARE, Box 35, executive directors of CRS, LWR, CWS, and CARE to President Ford, September 5, 1974. Richard Jolly et al., UN Ideas that Changed the World, Bloomington, IN, 2009, p. 135.

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112 CARE, Box 1173, report to the board of directors by Frank Goffio on World Food Conference in Rome, November 5–16, 1974. 113 ACVAFS, Box 59, report on Annual Conference of the Non-Governmental Organizations Listed with the United Nations Office of Public Information (OPI), UN Headquarters, May 31–June 1, 1972, Theme: “The United Nations – The New Phase”; the ACVAFS had taken part in the conference as on observer only. 114 Weiss and Jordan, “Bureaucratic Politics and the World Food Conference,” p. 425; UN ECOSOC Resolution 1296 (XLIV) May 23, 1968, Arrangements for Consultation with Nongovernmental Organizations, in Pei-heng Chiang, Non-Governmental Organizations at the United Nations. Identity, Role, and Function, New York, 1981, pp. 295–308. The Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations in Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council found that UN appraisals to allow for further NGO cooperation in international development were still “vague on the strategy”; see CARE, Box 97, copy of review and appraisal of the objectives and policies of the UN international development strategy, agenda item 48, 26th General Assembly, undated [1971]; see also Antonio Donini, “The Bureaucracy and the Free Spirits: Stagnation and Innovation in the Relationship between the UN and NGOs,” Third World Quarterly 16.3 (1995), pp. 421–39 (pp. 421–2). 115 Robin Sharp, “Story of a People’s Movement, 1974–84,” Food Policy 9.4 (1984), pp. 279–80 (p. 279). 116 CARE, Box 1173, report to the board of directors by Frank Goffio on World Food Conference in Rome, November 5–16, 1974. 117 PAN, Newspaper of the World Food Conference 1 (1974), p. 1. 118 CARE, Box 1173, report to the board of directors by Frank Goffio on World Food Conference in Rome, November 5–16, 1974; see also Sharp, “Story of a People’s Movement,” p. 279. 119 Michel Cépède, “The Fight Against Hunger: Its History on the International Agenda,” Food Policy 9.4 (1984), pp. 282–90 (p. 288). 120 Universal Declaration on the Eradication of Hunger and Malnutrition, Adopted on 16 November 1974 by the World Food Conference convened under General Assembly Resolution 3180 (XXVIII) of 17 December 1973 and endorsed by General Assembly Resolution 3348 (XXIX) of 17 December 1974, my emphasis, http://www.ohchr.org/ EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/EradicationOfHungerAndMalnutrition.aspx (accessed September 3, 2015). 121 For an overall assessment of the WFC’s achievements, see Gerlach, “Versuch zur globalen entwicklungspolitischen Steuerung,” pp. 71–81; Shaw, World Food Security, pp. 143–8; for a more positive assessment, see Schechter, United Nations Global Conferences, pp. 51–3. 122 CARE, Box 1173, report to the board of directors by Frank Goffio on World Food Conference in Rome, November 5–16, 1974. 123 CARE, Box 10, copy of information sheet for mass mailing by Frank Goffio to potential donors, winter 1974; CARE, Box 1173, MBDM, April 23, 1975. 124 CARE, Box 48, Harold D. Lasswell (The Policy Sciences Center, Inc.) to Fred Devine (CARE), December 24, 1974. 125 CARE, Box 48, Frank Penna, “Private Non-Profit Action and the World Food Crisis,” December 26, 1974. 126 ACVAFS, Box 5, Leon O. Marion (ACVAFS) to select ACVAFS members (among them Frank Goffio of CARE), February 12, 1975. 127 For instance, by taking a more active interest in the the Conference of NGOs with Consultative Relationship with the United Nations (CoNGO).

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128 ACVAFS, Box 5, Leon O. Marion (ACVAFS) to Hans A. Dall (FAO, FFH coordinator), May 26, 1976. 129 CARE, Box 1172, MBDM, July 28, 1971. 130 See Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies. The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics, Cambridge, MA, 2002, pp. 68–77. 131 Ariane Leendertz, “Das Komplexitätssyndrom: Gesellschaftliche ‘Komplexität’ als intellektuelle und politische Herausforderung,” in Ariane Leendertz and Wencke Meteling (eds.), Die neue Wirklichkeit. Semantische Neuvermessungen und Politik seit den 1970erJahren, Frankfurt a.M., 2016, pp. 93–132. 132 CARE, Box 1128, John T. Thatcher (CARE) to Frank L. Goffio (CARE), subj.: CARE of Canada, December 7, 1973; as to the quote, Thatcher quoted Mr. Langford of CARE Canada who complained about the patronizing attitudes of CARE’s legal counsel Markham Ball toward the Canadian CARE organization. 133 CARE, Box 1172, MECM, February 23, 1972. 134 ACVAFS, Box 29, newspaper clipping (supposedly New York Daily News), February 4, 1972. 135 CARE, Box 1172, MECM, June 28, 1972. 136 CARE, Box 1173, MECM, September 19, 1973; MECM, December 12, 1973. 137 On the Samia case, see Wallace J. Campbell, The History of CARE. A Personal Account, New York, 1990, pp. 211–16. 138 CARE, Box 519, Information, Attitudes and Motives of CARE Donors and Non-donors, a nationwide study prepared for Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere, Inc., Response Analysis Corporation, Princeton, New Jersey, March 1970. 139 CARE, Box 1173, MBDM, January 22, 1975; this trend collided with the findings of a study by the Overseas Development Institute, Paul A. Laudicina, World Poverty and Development. A Survey of American Opinion, Washington DC, 1973. 140 CARE, Box 1172, MECM, March 3, 1971; see also Francine Ostrower, “Philantropische Aktivitäten New Yorker Eliten in den 1980er Jahren,” in Thomas Adam et al. (eds.), Stifter, Spender und Mäzene. USA und Deutschland im historischen Vergleich, Stuttgart, 2009, pp. 135–62. 141 CARE, Box 1173, MECM, May 24, 1972; MBDM, July 19, 1972. 142 CARE, Box 1172, MECM, June 28, 1972; MECM, September 13, 1972. 143 CARE Box 9, “CARE Fundraising Philosophy prepared by the Public and Donor Relations Department,” October 1973. 144 CARE Box 10, direct mailing fundraising letter by Frank Goffio to donors, winter 1974. 145 In 1970 alone, CARE received US$90,000 from the Hunger Walks conducted by young Americans on behalf of the AFFHF. These young activists organized a sponsor who was willing to donate a certain amount of money for every mile completed by the walker; see CARE, Box 1172, MECM, September 23, 1970. 146 ACVAFS, Box 6, ACVAFS Code of Fundraising Ethics, signed by Frank Goffio for CARE, March 30, 1978. 147 ACVAFS, Box 50, “Voluntary Foreign Aid Programs 1980, Bureau for Food for Peace and Voluntary Cooperation,” USAID, Washington DC, 1980. 148 CARE, Box 1172, MBDM, April 22, 1970; CARE, Box 1173, MECM, February 28, 1973. 149 CARE, Box 176, Mary Ann Anderson (CARE nutritionist) to Jacques Lauriac and Irma Lashley (CARE Mission Sri Lanka), July 18, 1974. 150 ACVAFS, Box 29, CARE programming process chart, attachment to Fred Devine to Leon O. Marion (ACVAFS), August 20, 1974.

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151 CARE, Box 1172, MECM, June 28, 1972. 152 ACVAFS, Box 50, “Voluntary Foreign Aid Programs 1980, Bureau for Food for Peace and Voluntary Cooperation,” USAID, Washington DC, 1980; see also table 2, chapter 8.1. 153 Phil Santora, “CARE’s Hard-nosed Do-gooders,” New York Sunday News, May 13, 1973, pp. 28–33, 46. On the quote regarding the moth-eaten carpets, see Katz, Give! Who Gets Your Donor Dollar?, p. 181; the chapter on CARE (“Charity with a Bonus,” pp. 177–87) was reprinted at the behest of Congressman Percy in the Congressional Record, Proceedings and Debates of the 93rd Congress, Second Session, 120.138, Washington, September 16, 1974. 154 Stagflation was a term used for the “unpredicted combination of economic stagnation and rapidly rising prices” in the early 1970s; see, for example, Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes. A History of the World, 1914–1991, New York, 1996, p. 409; Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture, Cambridge, MA, and London 2012, pp. 48–9; CARE, Box 1172, MBDM, October 27, 1971. 155 Marc Lindenberg and Coralie Bryant, Going Global. Transforming Relief and Development NGOs, Bloomfield, CT, 2001, pp. 6–8. 156 Lindenberg and Bryant, Going Global, pp. 6–7; Stephen H. Hymer, The Multinational Corporation. A Radical Approach, Cambridge and New York, 1979; Mira Wilkens, “The History of Multinational Enterprise,” in Alan M. Rugman and Thomas L. Brewer (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of International Business, Oxford, 2003, pp. 3–35; Geoffrey Jones, Multinationals and Global Capitalism. From the Nineteenth to the Twenty-first Century, Oxford, 2005. 157 CARE, Box 97, Merton Cregger to Fred Devine and Lou Samia, subj.: internationalization of Oxfam, May 3, 1972; according to the definition put forward by Lindenberg and Bryant, Oxfam developed into a hybrid form, somewhere between stages three and four. 158 Johanna Siméant, “What Is Going Global? The Internationalization of French NGOs ‘Without Borders,’” Review of International Political Economy 12.5 (2005), pp. 851–83 (pp. 852–3). 159 CARE, Box 869, personal Merton Cregger to Frank Goffio, subj.: internationalization of CARE, reference: Henry Sjaardema’s memo, same subject, June 14, 1967. 160 CARE, Box 1172, MBDM, October 28, 1970. 161 CARE, Box 31, Lincoln Clark to Frank Goffio, June 10, 1971. 162 As an agricultural exporter, Canada had repeatedly donated large sums of agricultural surplus to CARE programs, and it had been via the Canadian field office that these deals had been finalized; see CARE, Box 525, CARE Overseas Administrative Manual, October 15, 1959, Section 3 F (instruction added on April 3, 1961); CARE, Box 160, of thanks from CARE promotion department to Canadian government, November 27, 1959. 163 CARE, Box 1128, “Proposal for Establishment of CARE/Canada as an Affiliate of CARE,” John T. Thatcher, CARE, draft, November 22, 1974 as amended at meeting held at December 18, 1974. 164 CARE, Box 1172, MECM, June 26, 1968. 165 CARE, Box 1129, statement of Canadian contributions programmed Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere, Inc., year ended June 30, 1972. 166 CARE, Box 1128, memorandum regarding discussion and luncheon meetings held in New York, November 16, 1973 for the purpose of investigating the ‘Canadization’ of Dacana Ltd. and establishing CARE Canada as an affiliated organization with substantially increased autonomy. 167 CARE, Box 1128, prepared by Markham Ball (CARE legal counsel), subj.: Canadization of CARE of Canada: a proposed agenda, February 20, 1974.

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168 CARE, Box 1128, Frank Goffio to Ben Touster, Harold Miner, Wallace Campbell and Ed Weseley, February 22, 1974; CARE, Box 1173, MECM, September 24, 1975. 169 CARE, Box 31, to the files on long-term development with regard to autonomy of CARE of Canada, Frank Goffio, April 29, 1976. 170 CARE, Box 1128, from John T. Thatcher to Frank Goffio, subj.: CARE of Canada, December 7, 1973. 171 CARE, Box 1128, memorandum, Frank Goffio to Wallace Campbell (for your presentation to the board), July 28, 1976. See also attached by Markham Ball (CARE legal counsel) on “Autonomy for CARE Canada, principal policy questions on which the views of CARE and the CARE Canada Advisory Board differ,” July 16, 1976. 172 CARE, Box 1172, MBDM, July 28, 1971. 173 CARE, Box 1128, draft of confidential discussion outline, “The Internationalization of CARE,” November 21, 974. 174 Campbell, History of CARE, p. 192. 175 Bread for the World, for instance, donated more than US$100,000 to CARE projects overseas, whereas the German Lions collected US$380,640 for CARE in 1972; see CARE, Box 1172 (for Bread for the World), MBDM, July 28, 1971; Box 1173 (Lions), MECM, February 28, 1973. 176 CARE, Box 31, articles of incorporation of CARE Europe, undated [1976]. 177 CARE, Box 31, reference to the record on the founding of CARE Europe, December 9, 1977, attachment by John T. Thatcher to William Taft, December 14, 1977. 178 CARE, Box 31, Frank L. Goffio to all CARE country offices, ALMIS #1986, May 26, 1977. 179 CARE, Box 1173, MBDM, July 28, 1976. 180 CARE, Box 31, administrative #464, Frank Goffio to executive staff, department heads, division directors and diverse overseas personnel, subj.: CARE Canada, July 5, 1977.

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Conclusion

It is like the story of the blind men and the elephant. The shape of CARE’s story depends on where you stand – on what continent, or in what decade – to view its work.1

As I write the closing section of this book on the history of CARE from 1945 to 1980, the world is again confronted with a situation that many might have hoped belonged in the past. Hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war, political instability, terror, poverty, and hunger in Syria, Libya, and the north of Africa are currently trying to find refuge in Europe. With European governments struggling to respond properly, it falls once again to private initiative to tackle this humanitarian emergency. The current situation has shown, however, that proven concepts and patterns of humanitarian response have in some cases failed to be activated in time. Both the size and the highly politicized dimension of the situation as well as the fact that the provision of basic humanitarian assistance is once again necessary in the very heart of Europe has apparently caught many traditional humanitarian players off-guard. While all the major international NGOs have now started fundraising and programming activities, the situation uncovers pressing accountability issues and deficits in international emergency response patterns. Despite the fact that further developments in global humanitarian coordination have been made since the 1980s, for instance with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection Department (founded in 1992), and countless international NGO networks such as Inter Action and others, much remains to be done.2 There is, of course, more than a thirty-year gap between the current crisis and 1980, when this book on CARE ends. A lot has happened since then, and CARE is a truly international network providing diverse sorts of humanitarian assistance and development aid in more than 90 countries. To some extent, however, the agency’s ongoing return to emergency relief measures in Europe closes a circle. While response to refugees and victims of war has been on its agenda since 1945, Europe has not been on its map as an operational arena for decades.

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Founded out of a common urge on the part of private voluntary agency leaders, UNRRA officials, and US government experts for coordinated action vis-à-vis the apparent humanitarian crisis in post-war Europe, CARE was set up as a secular non-profit organization that would allow private American donors to become more personally committed to aiding European war victims. The CARE package, containing high-calorie foods and American-made consumer goods, offered the expected innovative concept for mass philanthropy. It allowed for new forms of symbolic connection between donor and recipient abroad that went beyond traditional forms of charity, as it strengthened the person-to-person aspect of relief. By 1948 CARE had sold more than five million packages to American donors and delivered them to needy Europeans on their behalf. Given the packages’ remarkable success both at home and in Europe, the agency soon altered its original mission. Instead of remaining a service provider to its 22 member organizations, CARE developed into an organization of its own, with a rapidly growing staff, a devoted and professional executive management, and a board that was highly divided regarding CARE’s growth. CARE’s progressive organizational independence would have been impossible had it not been for both the continuing large-scale demand for its services and a great many supporters from all strands of American society. It was this kind of crosssectoral support that first allowed CARE to grow from a temporary relief endeavor into a discrete organization. In addition, it was the executive team’s entrepreneurial stance toward making CARE a more effective organization that shaped its outlook. By continuously altering the CARE package according to donor demands, shaping CARE’s apparatus according to state-of-the-art organizational models, and finally by implementing new managerial techniques (partly from the for-profit sector), CARE grew to become one of the largest American voluntary agencies in the field of post-war relief. Equipped with a successful concept and a glowing reputation, by the late 1940s CARE executives had decided to include regions outside of Europe in its operations. Countries such as Japan, Korea, Pakistan, and the Philippines attracted potential new donors in the US. In addition, this geographical shift was prompted by extended encouragement from the US government. If CARE and all other American voluntary agencies had cooperated with government offices during the European relief drive, both sides now hoped to continue and advance their productive liaison outside of Europe. CARE’s transition from an organization focusing on relief for Europe to an agency focusing on Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East worked less well than many would have hoped, however. Despite special fundraising campaigns and sophisticated donor appeals, by the late 1940s private contributions were dropping. While many other American voluntary agencies decided to go out of business at this juncture, CARE executives took a more entrepreneurial approach in order to save the enterprise. In addition to attempts to change donor attitudes toward continuing support for the developing nations, CARE’s organizational apparatus was streamlined, and new sources of income were tapped. In the late 1940s agricultural surplus

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commodities came into the picture, as a result of the inability of US policymakers to reduce wartime production incentives. It was primarily due to voluntary agency efforts (in close cooperation with agricultural producers’ groups) that a growing proportion of these un-sellable surplus stocks were channeled through the private agencies for humanitarian purposes and hunger relief. These agricultural surpluses allowed CARE to invent new concepts and to broaden its programming base. By using excess agricultural goods to make low-price Food Crusade packages it became possible to acquire new American donors. The fact that CARE billed governmentsponsored food surplus as cash income allowed for a reallocation of larger shares of private donations for administrative and overhead costs, a calculation that would soon turn into a central pillar of CARE’s business model. In addition, CARE was able to promote large-scale school feeding schemes in cooperation with foreign governments. This new source of income quickly grew in scale and scope, boosting CARE’s overall revenue and its ability to develop more innovative programming tools in the emerging field of development assistance. Throughout the 1950s CARE intensified its efforts to develop self-help programs by offering tool packages, book programs, vocational equipment, and a limited amount of technical assistance – backed up and sustained by large-scale government subsidies. There is and has been bold rhetoric asserting the distinctly private nature of charitable giving in the United States. This is often underscored by the claim of alleged independence of American voluntary institutions from the government.3 These  lines of thinking have stylized private voluntary organizations as respectable representatives of American philanthropy, functioning as a parallel or even alternative to government (and to a much lesser extent profit-driven) activities. An examination of CARE and most of its fellow voluntary agencies, however, calls this interpretation into question. From day one CARE was highly entangled with both for-profit players and government institutions. Or, as Philip Scranton and Patrick Fridenson have put it: “wherever a state exists, it is already ‘in’ – in markets, business, law and more.”4 From its registration with the government Advisory Committee, its connection to the private–public Advertising Council, its distribution of government-owned food surpluses, and its involvement in grant-based development programming, there was no period in CARE’s history when public support, whether symbolic, publicity-wise, or financial was out of the picture. To put it even more bluntly, the entire private humanitarian post-war relief drive would have been unthinkable without the continuous support of government and military organizations and their technical, logistical, and financial assistance. While this finding may not be surprising for the war and immediate post-war period, given the obvious and traditional primacy of government interest during times of international armed hostilities, it deserves special mention that these close connections remained in place and were even partly extended after the war had ended.5 To some extent the continuing close connection between CARE and the US ­government resulted from the persistence of an altered war rationale, induced by

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growing systemic rivalry with the Soviet Union and its allies. Both the Cold War and parallel decolonization processes prolonged and redefined the state of international emergency, thereby fostering an extension of interventionist state policies at many levels.6 Making friends for America became a crucial argument for American government officials, and it was this rationale that CARE and many other American voluntary agencies incorporated and used to their advantage. By arguing that it was precisely their non-political character that would help America win in the systemic struggle for the hearts and minds of the developing world, the agencies pushed themselves to the front and to the center of attention of foreign policymakers. It was thus, somewhat paradoxically, precisely because of continuing and growing government support that CARE and many other American voluntary agencies were able to continue and even expand their operations from post-war relief in Europe to development assistance and hunger relief in the so-called Third World. While these underlying factors help to explain the general transition of many American voluntary agencies into development-oriented humanitarian NGOs during the 1950s and 1960s, questions remain with regard to CARE’s particular development. Given its rapid shift from a start-up into a large-scale humanitarian non-profit organization, there were many difficulties and teething troubles to be overcome. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s the agency was repeatedly shaken by leadership issues and internal corporate governance conflicts resulting from its structure as a membership agency which made for diverging interests of executive management and board members. In an environment characterized by limited resources, intense competition between American voluntary agencies was nearly inevitable. CARE was a particular trouble spot in the community, as the secular agency crossed into all fields of potential donors, whether religious, secular, political, or ethnic-oriented. This led to repeated conflict and open rivalry, not only with outside agencies but sometimes even with its own member organizations. In addition, CARE’s management clearly fostered an overall corporate culture that rewarded ambition and staff identification with the agency’s success. This drive, in combination with the open favoritism extended by certain government administrators, aggravated the rift between CARE and many of the other agencies. By the mid-1950s, after most of the large religious founding members had left CARE in protest at its course, the agency eventually even resigned from the American Council of Voluntary Agencies and in doing so cut all ties to this cooperative umbrella organization and turned its back on collective representation of voluntary agency interests. By this time CARE was at a crossroads. Geographical overextension (and the resulting excessive overhead costs), along with the unwillingness of CARE’s executive director to agree to further cuts in staff and labor-intensive services, led the agency into the red. Despite its large-scale involvement in government-donated food aid distribution, CARE’s management was unable to stabilize the agency’s accounts. In addition, the serious drawbacks to CARE’s resignation from the ACVAFS began to become evident. Government administrators continued their

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cooperation with the umbrella group and were unwilling to allow an exception for CARE. When surplus allocation was made dependent on a coordinated approach by all private voluntary agencies, CARE’s withdrawal from the council turned out to be highly counter-productive. It was only after a change in executive management and a subsequent major reorganization of the enterprise – including re-entry into the ACVAFS – that CARE could be set back on track. This reorganization was flanked by scientific support and professional expertise from outside business consultants that proposed a decentralization of the enterprise and a streamlining of procedures adapted from the for-profit sector.7 This indicates the role that the CARE leaders, who were partially drawn from the business world and therefore had a business outlook, attributed to organizational efficiency, and highlights their attempts to make CARE into a business-like outfit that would stand out from other non-profit organizations in the same sector. Throughout the 1950s CARE professionalized its fundraising procedures, decentralized its organizational divisions, and streamlined its bloated apparatus. Resulting terminations of country programs had almost exclusively operational reasons, indicating a clear-cut temporary primacy of organizational arguments over humanitarian ones. In addition, major changes in the composition of CARE’s board of directors, both by the addition of public members and by an exchange of religious voluntary agencies for agricultural producer groups, altered corporate governance structures. Massive increases in operational decision-making processes and the need for extended managerial expertise strengthened CARE’s executive management and pushed the board further into the position of a background control and support group, slowly stripping the agency’s formal owners of their former active steering functions. This process largely paralleled the process of managerialization, which Alfred Chandler has described for corporations in the for-profit sector in the twentieth century.8 Parallel to this, CARE intensified its efforts toward (re)integration with nonprofit organizations in the field of humanitarianism. In an international environment increasingly characterized by nationalist Cold War rhetoric, coordinated private voluntary agency activity was a useful shield against outside pressure from both the US and recipient governments alike. This proved to be extremely useful, as the drawbacks of (at least partial) dependence on government subsidies were becoming more and more apparent. Unilateral suspension of food aid to Egypt after the Suez crisis, implemented by the US government as a lever to moderate Nasser’s nationalist rhetoric and his stance toward Israel, demonstrated significant neglect of private humanitarian agency concerns on the part of US foreign ­policymakers. The fact that all private feeding programs had to be stopped during the crisis harmed CARE’s supposedly apolitical posture, presented the agency with a humanitarian dilemma, and demonstrated that the dangers of being drawn into international power politics were very real. Hence, CARE’s reintegration into the ACVAFS offered an opportunity to discuss and prepare collective voluntary agency

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demands for government moderation and to urge respect for certain cultural and symbolic character traits (such as political independence from government) of overall voluntary activity – thus providing collective leverage when negotiating with the administration and strengthening CARE’s profile as a non-governmental organization. By the start of the 1960s CARE’s strategically planned transformation into a development-oriented agency was in full swing. Parallel to the declaration of the first official UN Development Decade, major transformations were initialized in overall US foreign assistance policy and its institutional context. With USAID, Food for Peace, and the Peace Corps, several new government agencies in the development assistance sector were founded that offered potential junctions and opportunities for cooperation for CARE and the voluntary agencies in general. Both USAID and Food for Peace were important in terms of resource acquisition as they offered external funding in the form of grants and additional food aid to the private organizations. The fact that CARE’s executive director left the agency in the early 1960s to become the head of Food for Peace demonstrates the reputation and networking capacity CARE had gained in the US food aid sector. It shows, additionally, just how permeable the sectoral boundaries between the non-profit, for-profit, and government sectors in this particular field had become.9 In contrast to the (by then) customary direction of material transfers from the government to the private sector, the Peace Corps, as a completely new government-run volunteer service, offered an opportunity for recompense. Hoping to remain independent of the traditional US foreign assistance apparatus, the Peace Corps’ leaders approached the American voluntary agencies for assistance and expertise in order to become operational. The choice of CARE as a central service provider was particularly significant given the agency’s reputation, its long-term operating experience overseas, and its recent development of more sophisticated community development projects in Latin America. From the perspective of CARE, the Peace Corps offered a new opportunity for advancement and further expansion into large-scale development programming. By the early 1960s professional development expertise was slowly but surely becoming a valuable and marketable asset, and in this respect the Peace Corps was a testing ground. In addition, the government agency turned out to be an unbeatable source of highly skilled CARE employees. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s CARE recruited dozens of former Peace Corps volunteers for its overseas programs, thus siphoning away the experts that the Peace Corps had paid to train. Although the relationship with the Peace Corps ultimately failed and CARE executives interpreted the end of this major public–private partnership in the development sector as a case against overly intensive cooperation with government institutions, it had become clear that contracting-out was a market in the making. CARE’s expertise had proven highly valuable to outside players, whether from the government, non-profit, or for-profit sector. CARE’s merger with the health-oriented non-profit agency Medico in 1962 must thus be interpreted in

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light of its strategic motivation to broaden its range of expertise. This partnership, after all, offered a perfect opportunity to create an additional pillar of the enterprise in the health sector. International development planning was just beginning to address basic health issues, and the merger with Medico allowed CARE to diversify its range of products, that is, the scope of its expert knowledge, thus preparing the organization for a future in health-related development programming. The 1960s were not only relevant in terms of internal organizational developments and consolidation but were even more significant in terms of international networking. With the FAO Freedom from Hunger campaign and the start of NGO integration into major United Nations conferences, the American voluntary agencies intensified their hitherto rather low-key efforts for international ­cooperation with intergovernmental and other non-governmental players in the field of humanitarianism and development aid. These activities were largely driven by the management’s realization that international fundraising could offer new sources of income, as well as by the feeling that new international competitors were on the rise. Players such as the World Food Program and Oxfam altered CARE’s perspective and demonstrated that the former American dominance in development assistance and hunger relief was being lost. This scenario led to a first attempt at organizational internationalization. The initial plan was to set up CARE affiliates abroad. This, however, failed, partly because of a lack of strategic orientation and a misperception of the voluntary sector in Europe and partly because of developments in the United States that demanded immediate attention. Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, CARE was absorbed with keeping track of legislative changes regarding US tax laws for charitable purposes. In addition, CARE tried to broaden its appeal to US foundations and outside sponsors from the for-profit sector. Major attention was also paid to pending changes in US food aid legislation. By this time government-donated food commodities made for more than 70 percent of CARE’s annual income, which necessitated close monitoring of legislative developments in all matters pertaining to PL 480. Prompted by international debates about development aid and its future direction, the status of food was slowly changing. If the aspect of surplus dumping had played an important role in the US government’s rationale for food aid provision in the past, this changed during the 1960s, at least partially. Surplus was transformed into a strategic resource, both as a foreign policy lever and also as a means of promoting modernization efforts in developing countries. CARE reacted to this trend and tried to integrate food aid into its development programming activities. Not only did CARE set up food-for-work schemes and propagate the use of food as an incentive for family-planning measures (practices that were highly controversial internally), but it stressed the nutritional aspects of this resource. In cooperation with the US Department of Agriculture, Food for Peace, agricultural producers, and food concerns, CARE tested high-protein formulas and other processed foods in its overseas feeding programs, thus establishing a stable and mutually advantageous long-term relationship with agribusiness. This close

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industry liaison is characteristic of CARE’s continuing strategic attempt to enhance its cross-sectoral interconnectedness. Given its good reputation as a symbol of food relief among the American public, CARE was a particularly attractive partner for American agribusiness. This aspect of mutual NGO–industry cooperation is one of the most fascinating and least well-researched aspects of the field of contemporary development-related historiography and points to the disregard of overall business interests in this field of research. By the early 1970s both the American and international context of humanitarian NGO activity had changed. New Directions, the US foreign assistance reform of 1973, altered the range of voluntary agency activity and offered increased funding to private sector institutions. This was in line with partial de- or rather re-regulation of direct government involvement in social service provision in general. Throughout the 1970s and beyond external grants and third party financing were becoming more and more important for CARE and the many other new private players that now flooded the scene of (international) development. These new competitors forced CARE to strengthen its profile. Given CARE’s enormous size and its deeprooted connections to industry, American voluntary agencies, and (international) governments, it was able to meet the challenge and acquire growing amounts of external funding for its own programs. Government-sponsored grants, however, came with strings attached. Most co-sponsoring agreements were highly conditional and allowed for government influence on private programming through the back door. While several traditional American voluntary agencies with a religious (mainly Protestant/evangelical) background abstained from these grants, CARE decided to meet the challenge and even intensified its cooperation with USAID and foreign government institutions. At this point, the social embeddedness of CARE’s leaders as well as the agency’s close integration into the ACVAFS and the resulting collective pressure that could be generated allowed the agency to resist the most obvious attempts of government officials to unduly manipulate its activities. With almost 80 percent of its overall income coming from sources other than private contributions, however, the danger of governmental meddling in private affairs was still substantial, demanding concern or at least vigilance. It was, again somewhat paradoxically, this strong dependence on external funding that contributed to CARE’s second internationalization and its renewed efforts to transform itself from a clearly American-based non-profit organization into a multinational and eventually even transnational enterprise. By the 1970s CARE executives had become worried that CARE’s strong US bias was hampering international fund­ raising success and its influence within a rapidly internationalizing environment. Multilateral aid was clearly gaining in importance, and disaster response as well as large-scale development programming was becoming increasingly dependent on the international composition of its structures and the commitment of a variety of donors and cooperating agencies. With NGOs such as Oxfam showing that the ­establishment of affiliates in other countries was tangible and highly e­ ffective in

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terms of donor motivation, CARE officials felt heartened to intensify their efforts in order not to lose ground at the international level. In addition, CARE’s Canadian office pushed for an increase in independence and claimed a solution to its hitherto dependent status as a supporting organization for an otherwise exclusively American undertaking. It was thus against the backdrop of growing pressure from both external environmental and internal organizational sources that CARE’s second internationalization was initialized, ultimately transforming the agency into a multinational NGO. This organizational make-over would be a major prerequisite in helping CARE, Inc. and its new national CARE partners to meet the post-Cold War challenge of “liberal humanitarianism” in a world increasingly characterized by complex emergencies and public claims for broader, faster, and more complete NGO responses.10 An analysis of this process, which is, to some extent, still in the making, will require a follow-up study and future research to investigate the relations between CARE, Inc. and its new affiliates, or rather its international partners. CARE’s internationalization has altered corporate governance processes within the organization to an extent that lies beyond the scope of this book. It is thus with great curiosity and expectation that I look forward to reading future research on this topic. In connecting CARE’s development into the late 1970s to this book’s underlying question of what actually prompted NGO growth in general and CARE’s growth in particular, several factors need to be underscored. It was clearly not in the absence of state power that CARE was able to become a central non-governmental player in international humanitarianism. Instead, it was precisely CARE’s close relation to the US administration and most certainly massive amounts of government subsidies that fostered its development. This assessment (alluding to underlying structural factors) is valid for the whole sector of American voluntary agencies, even if there were individual counter-examples.11 During most of the period covered by this study the agencies in the ACVAFS intensified their cooperation and interconnectedness both among themselves and with government authorities. Despite an environment which promoted competition for resources, innovative concepts, and skilled employees, the agencies learned to cooperate, thus strengthening their profile as a distinct part of the private voluntary sector. This growing entanglement was certainly fostered by strategic considerations and structural drivers. Growing standardization was useful in terms of facilitating operational procedures and liaisons vis-à-vis the government and among themselves. In the long run, inter-agency exchange and proximity stimulated processes of “organizational isomorphism,” as the agencies shared certain managerial techniques or adapted successful strategies from other NGOs in the same field. Any study on CARE would therefore be incomplete without taking its institutional embeddedness into account.12 There were, however, special conditions that applied to CARE in particular, thus offering the agency additional opportunities to thrive. First of all, it was CARE’s secular orientation (without religious, political, or ethnic affiliations) that allowed it to be transplanted into almost every political, ethnic, or religious setting

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overseas. CARE’s non-sectarian humanitarianism thus predated future societal developments such as secularization and cultural diversification that would alter the character of many (Western) societies during the second half of the twentieth century. CARE’s secular nature was an advantage in terms of fundraising impact as well, enabling it to appeal to all Americans, regardless of race, creed, or gender. This made the agency into a signature badge of American-style humanitarianism and gave it a special position in US cultural diplomacy. In addition, special emphasis has to be put on CARE’s adaptability to outside conditions and the willingness of the agency’s leadership to push CARE to the front. CARE’s executive leaders between 1947 and the late 1970s had thorough business educations, as well as years of experience within the organization. The habitual transfer of executive leadership from one leaving director to his deputy guaranteed continuity, as well as the transmission of management techniques and a particular CARE business culture. This culture included a tendency to think big. During the entire period of examination, from 1946 to 1980, there was not a single situation in which the CARE leadership accepted stagnation or contraction as a viable option for organizational development. Other American voluntary agencies (such as Church World Service or Lutheran World Relief) occasionally refrained from taking advantage of the financial incentives extended by the US government or outside institutions. By putting ideological, religious, ethical, or cultural considerations first, they accepted stagnation of organizational income and a resulting decrease in aid volumes or shrinking overseas programs. CARE’s leaders, in contrast, consistently opted for a proactive and entrepreneurial stance in this regard. Outside funds were not primarily discussed in terms of their potential to compromise CARE’s independence but in terms of the opportunities for advancement they offered – both for the organization and for the needy overseas. This approach is highly characteristic for CARE in particular, but it also appears to be the case for several other large American voluntary agencies, which adopted comparable strategies during the period of examination.13 On a more general level, this finding underscores the need to reconsider central aspects of the scholarly discussion about the nature of non-profits and non-governmental organizations. Contemporary debate, it seems, still tends to define these organizations mainly in terms of their relative positions or connections to government institutions. In addition, the degree of NGO or non-profit independence from other sectors is still measured in absolute terms, thus casting doubt on the truly non-governmental nature of players that accept funds from non-private sources. There is clearly too much emphasis on the origin of funds and a lack of focus on fund management and the use to which these funds are put. My investigation of CARE, however, demonstrates that such a narrow perspective is inadequate. CARE’s neat integration into its institutional environment and its social and economic ties to other players – including government agencies – should not automatically be mistaken for political or economic dependency. CARE was not a quasi-autonomous (non-)governmental

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organization or a “for-profit in disguise,” despite several occasions when the boundaries were blurred.14 Generally speaking, however, CARE’s non-governmental and non-profit nature was a central element of its identity and function within American society. Only as a non-profit enterprise embedded within the American voluntary sector was it possible to generate the most important resource, that is, public trust in CARE’s dedication to the common good. Moreover, it is essential to recognize that neither NGOs nor non-profit enterprises are ever disconnected from their social and economic environments. CARE’s ascent as a humanitarian NGO was therefore the result of its historical institutional background, its embeddedness in the bipolar political order of the Cold War, as well as the ultimate success of its leadership in shaping the enterprise according to organizational models that had already proven to be highly effective in for-profit settings. It is against this backdrop that I hope that this study on CARE will contribute to a re-evaluation of the merits of organizational history for both NGO (or nonprofit) research and the understanding of the changes that have taken place in international relations during the second part of the twentieth century. And I hope that this long-term perspective on the development of humanitarian organizations and institutions after 1945 will help us to better understand and appreciate historical achievements and trends as well as the inherent difficulties and contradictions that always have and probably always will accompany Western humanitarian engagement in its many forms. Notes  1 Wallace J. Campbell, The History of CARE. A Personal Account, New York, 1990, p. 4.  2 Gilburt D. Loescher, Beyond Charity. International Cooperation and the Global Refugee Crisis, New York, 1996; on the current situation, see Ian Traynor, “Mediterranean Refugee Crisis: EU Reduced to Impotent Handwringing,” The Guardian, April 20, 2015, http://www.the​ guardian.com/world/2015/apr/20/mediterranean-migrant-crisis-no-european-migration-p​o ​l​icy (accessed September 6, 2015).  3 This line of thinking has repeatedly been criticized by Peter D. Hall, one of the most renowned researchers in the field of non-profit history; see, for example, Peter D. Hall, Inventing the Nonprofit Sector and Other Essays on Philanthropy, Voluntarism, and Nonprofit Organizations, Baltimore, MD, 1992, pp. 106–7.  4 Philip Scranton and Patrick Fridenson, Reimagining Business History, Baltimore, MD, 2013, p. 17.  5 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 (pp. 92–4).  6 David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission. Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order, Princeton, NJ, 2010, pp. 105–6; Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War. Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, Cambridge, 2008.  7 Thus following a general trend in non-profit management; see Christopher D. McKenna,

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The World’s Newest Profession. Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA, 2010, pp. 112–13.  8 Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand. The Managerial Revolution in American Business, Cambridge, MA, 1977.  9 Hall, Inventing the Nonprofit Sector, p. 102. 10 Michael N. Barnett, Empire of Humanity. A History of Humanitarianism, Ithaca, NY, 2011, pp. 161–219. 11 Dennis R. Young, “Complementary, Supplementary, or Adversarial? A Theoretical and Historical Examination of Nonprofit Government Relations in The United States,” in Elizabeth T. Boris and C. Eugene Steuerle (eds.), Nonprofits and Government. Collaboration and Conflict, Washington DC, 2006, pp. 31–67; Alan Abramson, Lester M. Salamon and C.  Eugene Steuerle, “The Nonprofit Sector and the Federal Budget. Recent History and Future Directions,” in Boris and Steuerle (eds.), Nonprofits and Government, pp. 99–139. 12 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. 13 This field offers new and highly intriguing possibilities for future research, however, as the exact mechanisms by which managerial techniques were transferred or adapted among NGOs remain in the dark. 14 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. 11).

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Bibliography

Primary sources Unpublished primary sources CARE records, 1945–1997 (bulk c. 1950–1989), New York Public Library, Manuscript and Archives Division, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Room 328, New York, United States CARE records are listed as follows: CARE (MssColl 470), Box Number (http://www.nypl. org/sites/default/files/archivalcollections/pdf/care.pdf) Series I, Management Files, Boxes 1–91 Series II, Program Department, Boxes 92–526 Series III, Overseas Operations, Boxes 527–851 Series IV, Public and Donor Relations Department, Boxes 852–1010 Series V, Financial Control and Procurement, Boxes 1011–1037 Series VI, Medico, Boxes 1038–1126 Series VII, CARE International, Boxes 1127–1145 Series VIII, Peace Corps, Boxes 1146–1165 Series IX, Audio Visual Material, Boxes 1166–1169 FAO Historical Archive, at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations FAO records are listed as follows: Record Group (RG), Identifier, File Name FAO, Record Group 9, Development Department, Office Files of Directors, Subgroup Five, Miscellaneous Subject Files 1952–1973, File: Agency for International Development, 1962–71 FAO, Record Group 22, UN World Food Conference, 1973–1974 (correspondence Files, Conference Documents and 184 tapes of debates in plenary and committees produced by the Italian radio), 43–6, V1, Liaison with NGOs, International, National Organizations and Institutions FAO, Record Group 01, 1 Series D 14, Relations with organizations other than UN family 1947–1958 Historical Records of Oxfam, Oxford University, Bodleian Library, Special Collections, ARCHON code: 2162

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Oxfam records are listed as follows: Shelfmark (of Box), Description of Document MS. Oxfam PRF KN-G-004 = Box 443 MS. Oxfam COM/3/3/1 MS. Oxfam PRG/2/3/10/11 MS. Oxfam PRG/2/3/10/18 MS. Oxfam PRG/2/3/10/37 MS. Oxfam PRG/2/3/8/4 MS. Oxfam PRG/2/3/10/10 MS. Oxfam PRG/2/3/12/2 MS. Oxfam PRG/2/3/13/22 MS. Oxfam PRG/2/3/13/24 MS. Oxfam PRG/2/3/13/23 MS. Oxfam PRG/2/4/2 John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Archives, Columbia Point, Boston, MA 02125, United States Material from the JFK Library and Archive is listed as follows: Name of Collection, Box Number JFK, Richard W. Reuter Personal Papers JFK, White House Central Subject Files, JFK, Richard W. Reuter Oral History Interview – JFK #1, 6/11/1964 National Archives II, Maryland, United States Records from the National Archives II listed as follows: Record Group (RG), Entry Number, Box Number NARA, RG 469, UD664, Box 2, Records of U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, Records of temporary committees, commissions and boards, Presidents war relief control board, Records regarding C.A.R.E, 1947–51 NARA, RG 469, UD658–A, Box 1, Records of U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, Deputy Director for Technical Services, Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid, Subject Files of Arthur C. Ringland, Executive Director 1946–1954 NARA, RG 469, UD 668, Box 1, Records of U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, Budget Files regarding Ocean Freight Subsidy, 1951–54 NARA, RG 469, UD 662–A, Box 1, Records of U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, Deputy Director for Technical Services, ACVFA, Name Files 1946–1948 NARA, RG 469, UD 191A, Box 20, Records of U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, International Cooperation Administration, Executive Secretariat, Office of the Director, 1952–57, Subject Files NARA, RG 469, UD 667, Box 2+3, Records of U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions and Boards ACVFA, Surplus Commodities Files, 1950–1954 NARA, RG 469, UD679–A, Box 1+4+5, Records of U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, Deputy Director for Technical Services, ACVFA General Records, 1948–1959 NARA, RG 469, P9, Box 8, Records of U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, International Cooperation Administration, Executive Secretariat, Policy Information Staff, Status reports, Meeting papers and other general records, 1953–1959

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290Bibliography NARA, RG 469, Entry 1186, Box 1, Records of U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, Mission to Egypt Social Welfare and Community Development Division Subject Files 1953.56, Christmas – Social Welfare NARA, RG 469, P212, Box 1, Records of U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid, Files of the Assistant to the Director, 1948–1959 NARA, RG 469, UD 191A, Box 81, Records of U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, International Cooperation Administration, Executive Secretariat, Subject Files of the Director 1952–1960, Codel Core/McGee “Deep Freeze” to Voluntary Agencies FY 1958–1960 NARA, RG 469, P 17, Box 9, Records of U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, Agency for International Development Office of the General Council, Subject Files, 1953–1962 NARA, RG 469, Far East Subj Files, Box 91, Records of U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, Deputy Director for Operations Office of Far Eastern Operations, Far East Subject Files, 1956–59 NARA, RG 469 P 168, Box 1, 3+4+9+10, Records of U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, Deputy Director for Op Office of Food and Agriculture Public Law 480 Division, Subject Files, 1955–1962 NARA, RG 469, UD 660, Box 2+3, Records of U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, Deputy Director of Technical Services ACVFA, Statistical Reports prepared by American Agencies Registered with ACVFA, 1948–52 NARA, RG 469, UD 661, Box 14, Records of U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, Deputy Director for Technical Services, ACVFA, Subject Files 1950–1957 NARA, RG 469, P211, Box 4, Records of U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, International Cooperation Administration, Office of the Deputy Director for Operations Voluntary Foreign Aid Staff, Country and Subject Files relating to Natural Disasters 1956–1961 NARA, RG 469, UD544, Box 3, Records of U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, Deputy Director for Operations Near East, S. Asia, and Africa Ops Near East Division, Subject Files Regarding Egypt, 1953–55 NARA, RG 469, UD 1169, Box 1+3, Records of U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, Mission to Egypt Office of the Director Subject Files and the Deputy Director Glen McClelland, 1955–56 NARA, RG 469, UD 1171, Box 4+39+47, Records of U.S. Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, Mission to Egypt Executive Office Subject Files (Central Files) 1951–1956 NARA, RG 286, UD 447, Box 91–95, Records of the Agency for International Development [AID], Voluntary Foreign AID Correspondence, 1962–1964 NARA, RG 286, UD 499, Box 144, Records of the Agency for International Development [AID], United States of America, Interests section of the Spanish embassy, CAIRO UAR, Serial File Airgrams from and to other missions NARA, RG 286, Entry 4, Box 1, Records of the Agency for International Development and ­Predecessor Agencies, Commission on Security and Economic Assistance, Reports prepared for the Commission 1983, Papers and Reports – W German Economic Assistance NARA, RG 490, P 65, Box 10, Records of the Peace Corps, Interim Policy Directives, 1961–1966 NARA, RG 490 P 61, Box 3, Records of the Peace Corps, Country Program Evaluations, 1961–1967 NARA, RG 490, P 47, Box 2, Records of the Peace Corps, Miscellaneous Correspondence, 1961–1966

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NARA, RG 490, P 30, Box 46, Records of the Peace Corps, Office of International Operations, Country Training Case Files, 1961–87 NARA, RG 490, P 46, Box 22, Records of the Peace Corps, Country Files, 1962–63 NARA, RG 460, P 43, Box 1+4, Records of the Peace Corps, Correspondence of the Office of the Director, 1961– (Directors Chronic Files) NARA, RG 490, P 37, Box 6, Records of the Peace Corps, Office of Evaluation, Program, Planning and Evaluation Files, 1961–67 NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files 1950–1954, Box 5384, General Records of the Department of State, Central Decimal Files 1950–1954 NARA, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files 1964–1966, Box 3228, General Records of the Department of State: Central Foreign Policy Files 1964–66 NARA, RG 59, A1–5322, Box 7, General Records of the Department of State, International Information Administration (Field Program for Germany (IFI/G)), Subject Files 1945–1953 NARA, RG 59, C0027, Reel 13, Sign874.49, General Records of the Department of State, Confidential US State Department Central Files, Egypt, Internal Affairs 1955–1959, Declass Nr: NND 867400, Signature C0027, Reel 13 NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal Files 1955–59, Box 4878, General Records of the Department of State, Central Decimal Files 1955–1959 NARA, RG 59, C0027, Sign: 874_00_11, Reel 2, General Records of the Department of State, Confidential US State Department Central Files, Egypt, Internal Affairs 1955–1959, Declass Nr: NND 867400, Signature C0027, Reel 2 (874.00.11) NARA, RG 59, C0027, Reel 14, Sign. 874.56, General Records of the Department of State, ­Confidential US State Department Central Files, Egypt, Internal Affairs 1955–1959, Declass Nr: NND 867400, Signature C0027, Reel 14 NARA, RG 59, A1–1321, Box 11, General Records of the Department of State, Lot Files No 61 D12 General Subject Files Relating to the Middle East, 1955–1958 Papers of the American Council of Voluntary Agencies for Foreign Service (ACVAFS), Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries, Archibald S. Alexander Library, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, United States ACVAFS records are listed as follows: ACVAFS (coll. MC 655), Box Number

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Index

Acheson, Dean 32 Acworth, William 194–5 advertising (CARE) 1–2, 4–5, 26, 44–5, 52–3, 115–21, 125–6 Advertising Council 31, 44–5, 51, 113, 115, 118, 126, 187, 218, 278 Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid (ACVFA) 32–5, 52–3, 56, 58–9, 63–4, 67, 71, 74–5, 96–103, 125–7, 132, 147, 242, 246, 278 AFL–CIO 15, 175 agriculture abundance (surplus) 62–70, 75–9, 103, 113, 116, 125–34, 146–9, 189, 191–4, 215, 248–9, 277–8, 282 producers 4, 180, 278, 282 Alderfer, Gordon 224 Alliance for Progress 168, 217 American Council of Voluntary Agencies for Foreign Service (ACVAFS) 16–23, 27, 32–5, 61–5, 70, 75–9, 103, 122–30, 167, 173, 176–7, 186–7, 190–3, 217, 224, 226, 242, 249, 255, 256, 280, 285 American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) 15, 16, 19, 28, 59, 75, 93, 109, 124, 150, 154 American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJJDC) 15, 16, 18, 46, 56, 167 American Korean Foundation (AKF) 99–100 American Middle East Relief (AMER) 155 American Red Cross (ARC) 8, 18, 118 American Relief Administration (ARA) 8, 16, 18, 30 Aquino, Francisco 192 baby food 94, 180, 181 Bagration, Teymuraz K. 175–7, 260

Ball, Markham 256 Bangalore dairy plant 194–6 Barakat, George 155 basic human needs 244, 248 Benson, Ezra Taft 67, 114 Benton and Bowles Inc. 26, 44 Bergman, Ingrid 45, 48 Biafra (Nigeria) 197, 248 Bihar famine 196–7, 248 Bloomstein, Charles 61 Boerma, Addeke 190, 250, 252 book program (CARE) 61, 95, 125, 278 Brannan, Charles F. 63 Burland, Elmer 22, 27, 28, 30 business culture (CARE) 72–3, 226–7, 285 butter (butter oil) 65, 113, 130, 149 Butz, Earl 253 Caffery, Jefferson 147 Campbell, Wallace J. 18–22, 25, 52, 69, 75, 78–9, 133–4, 145, 176–8, 251, 260 CARE Canada 256, 260–3 CARE Food Crusade 112–14, 119, 125, 128–30, 187, 278 CARE Germany 176, 256, 263 CARE International 2, 260, 263 CARE National Advisory Committee 115–16 CARE Norway 263 Catholic Relief Services (CRS) (see also War Relief Services; National Catholic Welfare Conference) 126–8, 167, 179, 191, 253, 258 charity as business 1–2, 4, 78, 101, 114, 171–4, 176, 183, 227, 280–3 campaigns 4, 45, 78, 99 watchdogs 124–7

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318Index cheese 113, 114, 130, 149, 154, 158 China 14, 55, 60, 95, 151 Christmas relief (CARE) 75, 146, 148, 187, 198 Ciszewski, Robert 195 civil society 7–8, 31, 98, 150, 186, 248, 252 Clapper, Olive 73, 111, 145, 169 Clark, Lincoln 18–19, 21–2, 26–7, 260 Clay, Lucius D. 33 Cold War 3, 5, 14, 44, 60, 62, 66, 69, 71, 124, 146, 152, 173, 178, 189, 239, 243, 279, 284–6 Colombia 4, 6, 59, 178–9, 214–30 Comanduras, Peter 169–71 Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) 63, 66, 128, 130 community development 4, 114, 215–17, 221–4, 130, 281 competition with government 5, 8, 179, 225, 240 with other NGOs 2, 5, 8, 16, 26, 51, 67–8, 72–6, 99–100, 104, 122, 126–7, 154–5, 169, 179, 186, 192, 251, 260, 279, 282–4 with private business 26, 49, 179 consumer culture/ideology 3, 33, 50 goods 1, 4, 33, 45, 130, 277 goods industry 1, 3, 33, 45–6, 110, 120, 180–2 orientation/research 45, 116–17, 120–1 Cooperative League of the United States of America (CLUSA) 18–19, 21, 176 corn 63, 130, 150, 154, 158, 180 corporate fundraising 4, 44, 45, 72, 119–20, 180, 242, 257 governance (CARE) 2, 109, 174, 258, 279, 280, 284 Council of Relief Agencies Licensed to Operate in Germany (CRALOG) 93 Cowles, Gardner 115 Cregger, Merton 198–9, 221–3, 227, 230 crisis (CARE) 4, 29, 51–3, 76–81, 109, 114, 126 Cummings, Edmund 54 Dall, Hans A. 251 Davies, Joseph E. 16 De Vries, Egbert 176 decolonization 3, 60, 92–3, 145, 148, 152, 173, 178, 251, 279 demography 182 Denzin, Paul 47 Department of Agriculture (USDA) 63, 65, 68, 113, 130–2, 180, 253, 282

Department of State (DoS) 15–16, 18–23, 27, 34, 43, 61, 65, 97, 99–102, 130, 151–8, 173, 189, 217, 249, 252 designated packages (CARE) 18, 24, 44, 52, 79, 94 developing countries (so-called) 4, 60, 63–4, 118, 171, 182, 214, 225, 244, 282 development assistance (aid) 4, 8, 70, 76, 92, 103–4, 114–19, 123, 128, 134, 167–8, 172, 176–84, 192–7, 217, 240–5, 248, 276, 278–82 discourse 59–60, 124, 172, 177–84, 198, 240–4 expertise (consulting) 4, 6, 104, 121, 169, 195, 215, 222, 241–4 of new markets 66, 169–70, 278, 281–3 of new packages 49–50, 94, 113, 129, 131, 222, 278 Devine, Fred 146, 150, 152–5, 159, 173, 180, 244 Devone, Ralph 247 Dichter, Ernest 116–17 dietary habits 23, 50, 113, 130, 149, 179–81, 282 diseases 7, 13, 169, 178, 243, 254 displaced persons 14, 54, 95, 154, 191, 215 Dodd, Norris 67, 185, donor acquisition 45, 50, 55, 72, 94, 112–13, 115–21, 128, 255, 257, 261, 277–9 interests 25, 72, 78–9, 94, 113–21, 130, 167–8, 173, 179, 187, 217, 258, 277, 283 Dooley, Tom 170 Draper, William H. 53 Dulles, John Foster 55, 70, 146, 157–8 duty-free 23, 26, 146 Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC) 153, 185 Egypt 4, 5, 59, 130, 145–60, 181, 183, 191, 280 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 66, 100–1, 131, 146, 185 European Cooperation Administration (ECA) 53, 58, 60, 67, 71, 95, 97 European Economic Community (EEC) 178, 189 European Recovery Program (see also Marshall Plan) 15, 60 expansion (of CARE) 2–4, 59, 62–3, 76, 92, 126, 167–9, 172–5, 281 Experiment in International Living (EIL) 217, 224 expertise/experts (CARE) 19, 73, 120–3, 146, 168–72, 179, 194, 215–17, 220, 229, 280–2

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Index Fairbanks, Douglas 45 Fairgraves, Robert J. 94–5 family planning 181–4, 282 Famine Emergency Committee 31–2 Farm Bureau Mutual 21, 131 farm policy (US) 128, 131–3 Federal Security Agency 16 Federal Service Joint Crusade 111 Food Aid Convention 189 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 61–2, 67, 175, 178, 181, 184–9, 250, 252, 282 food-for-work projects 179, 183, 184, 282 Ford Foundation 170 Ford, Gerald R. 239 for-profit enterprises 17, 72–3, 110–11, 120, 123, 260, 277–82, 286 France 26, 65, 79, 152, 178 Freedom from Hunger Campaign (FFH) 184–8, 197, 252, 282 Freeman, Fulton 221 Freeman, Orville L. 133–4 French, Paul Comly 28–30, 33–5, 43–51, 54–6, 59, 61, 64–9, 72–81, 99–101, 109 fundraising (CARE) 2, 16, 35, 45, 99, 111–16, 124, 127, 186–8, 198–9, 251, 257–62, 280–3 Future of CARE Committee (FOCC) 58, 74–8, 80, 110 Gallup, George H. 31 Gauer, Harold 1–2, 5, 119 gender relations within CARE 72, 76, 256–7 Germany 13–14, 25, 33, 43, 65, 79, 93, 125, 176–8, 217, 262 Goffio, Frank 134–5, 169, 174 Gordon, Paul 61, 75, 94 grants (public/private) 71, 168, 178, 181, 193–8, 214, 241, 244–6, 251, 278, 281 Great Britain 14, 152, 177, 178, 193 Great Society program 240 Greece 65, 177, 193 Green Revolution 248 Greenlaw, Ralph 217 Guatemala 110, 180 Haddassah 68 Hannah, John A. 242, 251–2 Hare, Raymond 152–3 Haskell, William 21–2, 27–30, 34–5 Hastings, Kay 171 Hawes, Alexander 22, 99, 170 health (-related) programming 172, 181–3, 197 Heifer Project 224

Heise, Hermann 176 Herter, Christian 132, 158 Hoffman, Paul G. 60, 67, 115 Holzer, Philipp 80 Hope, Bob 1, 45, 47 House Committee on Foreign Affairs 243 Howard, James 194 Howie, David R. 216 humanitarian accountability 30, 124, 130–2, 182, 249, 276 humanitarianism 8, 25, 70–2, 240, 280, 282, 284, 285 Humphrey, Hubert H. 131–3, 145, 155–7, 250–3 India 59, 130, 183, 193–8, 229, 248 Inter-Ministerial Committee (IMC) 148–54, 158 International Cooperation Administration (ICA) 132 International Council of Voluntary Agencies (ICVA) 177 international diplomacy 4, 6–7, 252 International Fund for Agricultural Development 254 International Labor Organization (ILO) 61 International Rescue Committee (IRC) 169 internationalization of CARE 175–7, 192, 199, 256–63, 282–4 Jackson, Charles W. 44 Japan 59, 92–4, 110, 189, 277 Johnson, Lewis 175–6, 260 Johnson, Lyndon B. 182–3, 189, 240 Johnson, Phil 262 Johnston, Eric 115 Joy, Charles 103–4 Kennedy, John F. 133–4, 158, 168, 173, 178, 184, 186, 189, 216–18, 244 Keppel, Frederick 16 Kirkley, Leslie 193–7 Kissinger, Henry A. 240, 250–3 Korea 4–5, 59–60, 66, 92–104, 114, 130, 178, 181, 190–1, 277 Korean Association of Voluntary Agencies (KAVA) 104 Lambie, James 214, 227–30 Landesco, Alexander 28 Langford, Henry E. 261 layoffs (CARE) 53, 66, 76–7, 109

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320Index Least Developed Countries (LDCs) 244, 248–9 Lebanon 59 Lehman, Herbert H. 14, 21–3, 32 Lehman, Joseph 65 Lesotho 6 Lever Brothers 1–3, 45–6 Liberia 173 Licensed Agencies for Relief in Asia (LARA) 95–6 Lincoln, Murray D. 21, 29, 53, 65, 78, 80, 96, 116, 131–4, 187 Lions International 221 Lleras Camargo, Alberto 215, 221 MacArthur, Douglas 93 Malthus, Robert 182 Mankievicz, Frank 214 Manufacturers Trust 126 Marei, Sayed A. 251–2 Marion, Leon 255 Marshall Plan 15, 60, 63 Marshall, George C. 33 Marvel, Josia 65 Mathues, George 125 McCahoon, William 75, 127 McGovern, George 134 Médicins Sans Frontières (MSF) 259 Medico 135, 169–74, 181–3, 197, 281–2 Mennonite Central Committee 16, 75 Miles, Georg 19, 20, 22 milk (dried/powder) 65, 113–14, 130–3, 149, 158, 180–1, 194–7, 215 Miner, Harold 49, 52, 69, 126–7, 176 modernization (theory) 4, 60, 92, 95, 103–4, 282 Monsanto 180 Montague, Joel 199 Morgenthau Jr., Henry 64 multinational organizations 199, 239, 259–60, 263, 283–4 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 145, 148, 151, 157, 280 nation building 104, 240 National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC) (see also Catholic Relief Services) 15, 68, 93, 150 National Farmers Union 131, 187 National Grange 75, 131 National Information Bureau (NIB) 124–7, 130 Nationwide Insurance Company 117, 126, 131, 133, 187

Nelson, Donald M. 20–2, 29 New Deal 64 New Frontier 168, 216 New York headquarters (CARE) 67, 110, 154, 158, 169, 171–4, 180, 193, 195–6, 198, 219, 222, 255, 257–9, 261–2 Nicaragua 4 Nigeria 173, 197, 248 Nixon, Richard M. 133, 215, 240–3, 245, 249–50 non-aligned movement 152, 250 non-distributional constraint 74, 167 non-profit enterprise/organization 2, 6, 13, 17–19, 23, 27, 34, 44, 53, 55, 67, 72–4, 79, 99, 111, 117, 122–4, 127, 167, 169, 174–6, 199, 225, 241, 247, 255, 260–2, 277, 279–86 nutrition 49, 63, 149–50, 181–4, 198, 254, 282 ocean freight reimbursements 33–4, 58, 97, 128–9, 146–7, 150, 172, 193 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 175, 178, 244, overextension (CARE) 80, 110, 131, 173, 279 Owen, Charlotte 19, 22, 25, 34–5, 65, 72 Oxfam 14, 177, 192–9, 282–3 Peace Corps 6, 168–9, 214–31, 240, 281 people-to-people relief 18, 69–70, 102, 175 Pinegar, Warren 80 Point Four speech (program) 59–61, 76, 79 145, 178 Poland 14, 18, 56, 66 population growth 181–3, 244, 248, 254 poverty 7, 62, 97, 225, 240, 243, 247–8, 267 President’s Committee on War Relief Agencies (PCWRA) 16 President’s War Relief Control Board (PWRCB) 16, 21, 32 presidential endorsement (CARE) 45, 93, 97, 99–101, 158 professionalism/professionalization of CARE 2, 7–8, 19, 34, 67, 71, 76, 101, 112, 115, 119–20, 168, 170, 175, 225–7, 256, 258, 277, 280 protein 114, 149, 179–81, 282 public funding 4, 8, 70–1, 76, 168, 178, 214, 244–5, 281 –private partnership 4–5, 8, 61, 69, 146, 153, 160, 169, 281 Public Law 480 (Agricultural Trade Development Assistance Act) 66, 75, 79, 128, 130–4, 149, 172, 180, 189–90, 197, 246–51, 258, 282

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Quakers 22, 28, 193 Reagan, Ronald W. 245 Red Crescent 153 Reed, Paul 125–7 refugee(s) 14, 44, 54, 93, 95, 103, 127, 150, 152–4, 193, 276 remittances 19, 24–5, 28, 48, 77, 111, 174 Reuter, Richard 1–2, 67, 101, 109–11, 114, 122, 134–5, 155–6, 158, 168–70, 174, 186–7, 193, 216, 222–3, 227 Rhee, Syngman 94–5, 103 Ringland, Arthur 16–21, 27, 33–4, 56, 59, 64–5, 71, 99–102, 187 Roosevelt, Eleanor 26, 51 Rusk, David Dean 217 Russia (Soviet Union) 16, 14, 18–19, 60, 62, 93, 95, 151–4, 158–9, 249, 279 Sahel (region) 248 Sakalis, Alexander 154, 158 Samia, Louis 170, 257 Save the Children 14, 21, 177, school feeding programs 103, 127, 130, 149, 157, 159, 190, 195, 278 Sears Roebuck 20, 49 self-help programming 68, 78, 103, 113–21, 126, 178, 183, 198, 222, 278 Sen, Binay 184–6 Shedid, Osman 148, 154 Shriver, Sargent 214, 216–19, 223–4, 229–30 soy 179–84 Squadrilli, Alexander 152 starvation 13, 62, 182, 248 Strassburger, Bruce 194–5 Suez crisis 4, 146–7, 151–3, 280 Syria 59, 157–8, 276 Taft, Charles P. 16, 32, 67, 96, 127, 132 technical assistance 60–1, 76–8, 145, 149, 168, 197, 217, 240, 278 Technical Cooperation Administration (TCA) 60 Thatcher, John T. 262 Third World (so-called) 60, 214, 279 Thompson, Eastburn 19–22 Tolstoy Foundation 175 Truman, Harry S. 26, 31–2, 44, 59–60, 64, 93, 95, 97, 99–100, 114, 178, 187

undesignated packages/donations (CARE) 26–7, 51–4, 58, 65 Union of CARE Employees 53 United Arab Republic (UAR) 157–9 United Israel Appeal 258 United Nations Development Program (UNDP) 178 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) 14, 16–19, 21, 23, 32, 93, 185, 277 United Nations Disaster Relief Organization (UNDRO) 256 United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) 152 United States Agency for International Development (USAID) 168, 177, 181, 191, 217, 240–9, 251, 281, 283 Vandenberg, Arthur 15 Vaughn, Jack H. 229–30 Vicks Chemical Company 120–1 Vietnam 4, 6, 239–40 volunteers (CARE) 45, 49, 169, 171, 176, 226, 247 War Relief Services (WRS) (see also National Catholic Welfare Conference; Catholic Relief Services) 67, 75 White House 31, 65, 115, 159, 189, 251 Williams, Howell 150–1 World Bank 178, 223, 241, World Food Conference (Rome) 133, 187, 247–8, 251–5 World Food Congress (Washington DC) 184 World Food Congress (The Hague) 251–2 World Food Council 254 world food problem (so-called) 31, 62–3, 134, 181, 188, 247–50 World Food Program (WFP) 178, 189–92, 282 World Health Organization (WHO) 61 World Hunger Action Coalition (WHAC) 247, 251 YMCA 16, 18, YWCA 16 Yugoslavia 56, 65–6, 146