Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Dear Foster Mother: This is the first time I write to you, a stranger, and call you
Mother. It seems very funny, daring, bashful, but I rely on your understanding,
Diplomatic History, Vol. 38, No. 2 (2014). ß The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University
Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. doi:10.1093/dh/dhu008
240
Child Sponsorship and International Affairs : 241
“O U R C H O S E N W E A P O N S ”
First pioneered by U.S. voluntary agencies during the thirties, child sponsorship
programs expanded rapidly during the years following World War II. The three
most prominent American child sponsorship agencies were Foster Parents’ Plan
(PLAN), the Save the Children Federation (SCF), and Christian Children’s Fund
2. For more on this argument, see Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the
Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley, CA, 2003).
3. Lenore Sorin to Thomas L. O’Hagan, June 20, 1956, Folder 20, Box 3, FPP.
4. On PLAN’s history, see Henry D. Molumphy, For Common Decency: The History of Foster
Parents Plan, 1937-1983 (Warwick, RI, 1984). On CCF, see Larry E. Tise, A Book About Children:
The World of Christian Children’s Fund, 1938-1991 (Falls Church, VA, 1993).
5. “Two Yank’s [sic] Encounter Outside a Barbershop-And the Result,” probably April 1953,
Folder 8, Box IB2, ChildFund International, Richmond, Virginia (hereafter CCF); Edmund W.
Janss, Yankee Si! The Story of Dr. J. Calvitt Clarke and his 36,000 Children (New York, 1961), 27.
6. J. Calvitt Clarke to Verent Mills, January 19, 1952, Folder 11, Box IB1, CCF.
242 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y
Some voluntary officials saw aid to children as intimately connected with bur-
geoning Cold War strategic concerns. In a 1947 report on aid to Poland, for
example, SCF’s Charles R. Joy argued:
It is very important that the Polish people should know that these things are the
gift of the western democracy. Therefore, it will be worth any cost in time or
trouble or money to label garments, and tag shoes, and stamp cartons and cases.
If the American flag could be used it would be wonderful. If the tags could be in
Polish it would greatly help. But the word America, whether in English or
Polish, should appear everywhere. After all we are fighting a battle for freedom
and democracy ourselves, even though our chosen weapons are food and shoes
7. Charles R. Joy, “Report on Poland,” November 3, 1947, Folder 19, Box 47, bMS 347,
Charles Rhind Joy Papers, Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School,
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
8. Joy to Mel Arnold, June 23, 1953, Folder 8, Box 48, ibid.
9. Clarke to William G. Taylor, Jr., November 20, 1950, Folder 16, Box IB21, CCF.
10. Edna Blue to Foster Parents of Polish Children, 1949 and Blue to Friends, Draft letter,
September 1950, Folder 4, Box 85, FPP.
Child Sponsorship and International Affairs : 243
more sponsors join the Federation Family.” These intimate meetings rarely made
headlines. But, the agency argued,
Their significance is communicated, durably and surely—sometimes in a village
school when a child tells his classmate about his “friend in America,” or when by
lamplight in a peasant hut a mother reads to her eagerly listening neighbors the
latest letter from “our American friend.” Those are the times when, no matter
what others say and no matter how insistently they may say it, an image of
America looms in their hearts and minds, warm, shining and beautiful.11
SCF cast its supporters as active participants in Cold War foreign affairs. It trans-
formed the notion of “fallout” from an agent of fear and destruction into a symbol
11. “‘Friendship Fallout’—A Sponsorship Review,” SCF World Reporter, Fall 1959, Folder
1960s, Save the Children Federation, Westport, Connecticut (hereafter SCF).
12. Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity
(Cambridge, MA, 2009), 160.
13. Andrew Tully, “Our Personal Foreign Aid,” ICA Digest 61, no. 11 (December 1960): 4.
244 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y
which was displeased with it for supporting the children of men and women who
had served with the communist rebels during Greece’s recent civil war.14 These
children lived with their impoverished families, and many had lost a parent during
the war. Greek authorities were concerned that money provided to these children
was being channeled to relatives in Iron Curtain countries or being used for “com-
munistic purposes” in Greece.15 PLAN agreed that support should be withdrawn
from families using American money to fund communism. But it refused to dis-
criminate against children based solely on their parents’ political affiliation, insist-
ing instead on dealing with potential abuses of funds on an individual basis. The
organization struggled to balance public opinion, which ran strongly against com-
munism, with its commitment to political neutrality. Finally, it decided to continue
14. Ismene Kalaris to Fred Mason, December 14, 1954, Folder 300, Box 140, FPP.
15. Kalaris to Mason, December 15, 1954, ibid.
16. Gloria Matthews to Mason, March 15, 1955.
17. Mason to Matthews, February 10, 1955; Mason to Matthews, April 22, 1955; Matthews to
Mason, April 26, 1955, ibid.
18. Matthews to Mason, March 15, 1955.
Child Sponsorship and International Affairs : 245
American foster parents thus brought about the first victory by Christian
Democrats in Monteflavio in a decade.19
LaCossitt’s lighthearted retelling of her work in Monteflavio angered Elma
Baccanelli Laurenzi. Laurenzi was surprised to learn that the story would be pub-
lished, she told her colleague Lenore Sorin in New York. She had recounted the
tale of the children’s antics to her American colleagues without the intention or
desire that it be used for publicity purposes. And she felt it a pity that a story to
mark the organization’s twentieth anniversary should focus on a political victory.
Sorin defended her decision to share the story with LaCossitt. “While it is abso-
lutely true that we are non-propaganda and non-political,” Sorin wrote in a letter
to Laurenzi, “every other agency’s material has been stressing the political.”
19. Henry LaCossitt, “The Amazing Brats of Monteflavio,” Parents’ Magazine and Family
Home Guide 32 (February 1957): 39.
20. Sorin to Elma Baccanelli Laurenzi, September 5, 1956, Folder 454, Box 158, FPP.
21. Sorin to Friends, undated, Folder 35, Box 86, ibid.
22. Faith Graves to Clarke, March 20, 1956, Folder 11, Box IB14, CCF.
23. Graves to Clarke, August 5, 1956.
246 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y
In crafting child sponsorship programs, American agencies relied upon and popu-
larized new psychological understandings of the family and its relation to child
development. By the forties, the rise of social constructionist thought, together
with the popularization of psychoanalysis, situated early childhood as a crucial
period of personality formation. As eugenics fell out of favor in the United
States, many scholars argued that the source of human difference lay not in
blood but rather in cultural conditioning during one’s youngest years. This under-
24. Foster Parents’ Report, May 1954, Folder 17, Box 86, FPP.
25. Joanne Meyerowitz, “‘How Common Culture Shapes the Separate Lives’: Sexuality, Race,
and Mid-Twentieth-Century Social Constructionist Thought,” The Journal of American History 96,
no. 4: 1057–84.
26. Ernest Nash to Clarke, December 1, 1955, Folder 9, Box IB8, CCF.
Child Sponsorship and International Affairs : 247
foster parents were extremely important to some children, who anxiously antici-
pated the monthly mail and reread the letters until they were no longer legible.
Youngsters often hung pictures of foster parents on their walls or decorated them
with wreaths of flowers, and some children’s letters conveyed warmth and deep
affection.31 “I have cried for my mother’s warm arms often and though you are
living in a far country across the ocean I am happy that you are my foster mother
and father,” wrote Kil Ja, a Korean youngster. “I have not had the words mother
and father on my lips for three years since they died.”32 Anna, a refugee child in
Germany, asserted, “A drop of Love is sometimes more precious than a whole sack
of money!”33 Children’s letters were at once an intimate medium of communica-
tion and a currency necessary to gain access to crucial material benefits from
31. “Miss Gloria Matthews, Director in United States and Canada, Visits the Children in
Europe,” 1957, Folder 27, Box 86, FPP.
32. Foster Parents’ Plan for War Children, “Foster Parents’ Report,” September 1953, 8,
Folder 14, Box IB23, CCF.
33. Memorandum from Elizabeth Whitmore to Director, Foster Parents’ Plan, “Quarterly
Report. Period: July 1-September 30, 1956, Supplementary to Report submitted for 2nd Quarter,”
October 1, 1956, Folder 12, Box 2, FPP.
34. Chung-lan to Eunice H. and Mattie F., July 2, 1949; Yu-sze to Muriel H., October 19,
1949; Van-un to Mrs. R.H. J., October 24, 1949, Folder 84; Feng-min[g] to Joy C., November 9,
1949, Folder 86; Fu-kun to Foster Parents, July 11, 1949, Folder 87, Box 115, ibid.
Child Sponsorship and International Affairs : 249
35. Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 153. On the relationship between American race relations and
the Cold War, see, for example, Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of
American Democracy (Princeton, NJ, 2000).
36. Mills to Clarke, February 9, 1952, Folder 11, Box IB1; Clarke to Mills, October 12, 1952,
Folder 4, Box IB2; Clarke to Mills, April 1, 1953, Folder 7, Box IB2, CCF.
37. Clarke to Mills, April 19, 1951, Folder 4, Box IB1, ibid.
38. Intercountry Adoption: A Multinational Perspective, ed. Howard Altstein and Rita J. Simon
(New York, 1991), 3.
39. Henry LaCossitt, “We Adopted a War Orphan,” Saturday Evening Post 224 (December 15,
1951): 103.
40. Janss, Yankee Si!, 57.
250 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y
efforts reflect a larger cultural shift within the postwar United States: the growth of
a therapeutic approach that offered, in the words of historian Elaine Tyler May,
“private and personal solutions to social problems.”41 Indeed, many American
workers saw democracy as rooted not in the structure of government but rather
in the intimate relationships between children and their caretakers. Child spon-
sorship agencies enlisted ordinary American families in the mission to protect the
free world.
American voluntary workers suggested that youngsters’ love of democracy and
freedom flowed naturally from child-rearing practices already acknowledged in the
United States to be in children’s best interest. This entanglement of personal and
political considerations allowed voluntary workers to sidestep thorny questions