American Red Cross WWi Italy

Nation Building and Rebuilding: The American Red Cross in Italy During the Great War1 By Julia F. lrwin, Yale University During World War I, hundreds of Americans traveled to Italy as volunteers for the American Red Cross (ARC). Through their relief activities for Italian civilians, these individuals served both diplomatic and social-reform agendas. They packaged medical and social aid with a clear message of American alliance, presenting the ARC as a vanguard of the U.S. military that was prepared to assist Italy's war effort in the absence of American troops. Emphasizing American methods, expertise, and alliance, ARC representatives also enacted reforms with the ambition to mold Italy into their vision of a modern western nation. This article argues that international humanitarian aid buttressed U.S. international involvement, both political and cultural, during the Wilsonian era. Further, by examining the connections between social politics and foreign relations in Italy, it demonstrates that the boundaries of the transatlantic progressive community extended beyond the North Atlantic.

On December 13, 1917, a hundred khaki-clad American volunteers paraded forty Ford ambulances into the courtyard of a Milan palace. The drivers arranged their cars into a horseshoe, its points facing a raised stage. There, the mayor of Milan, members of the Sanita Militare, the Italian Army's health division, representatives from the French and British military, and the president of the Italian Red Cross addressed die men, all members of the American Red Cross (ARC) Ambulance Corps.2 "Our men were received as the first American unit to reach the Italian front, to combat our common enemy and to stand with the Italian soldiers immediately after our declaration of war on Austria," recalled Grayson Murphy, the ARC's chief commissioner in Europe. "As our sections passed through the streets on their way to the front, after the ceremony, the streets werefilledwith enthusiastic crowds and Americanflagsfleweverywhere."3 The American Red Cross had staged a grand spectacle to introduce its men and its message to Italy, an event that did not escape criticism. "We are here for propaganda it seems—more than for ambulance work," complained 'I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticisms and suggestions. Many thanks also to Glenda Gilmore, John Harley Warner, Alison Greene, Julia Guarneri, Francesca Ammon, and K. Stephen Prince for reading and commenting on several drafts and to William Schneider for commenting on a version of this paper at the 2006 Great Lakes History Conference. 2

Paul U. Kellogg, Seven Weeks in Italy: The Response of the American Red Cross to the Emergency

(Paris, 1918), 25-26. 'Grayson Murphy to Henry P. Davison, published in the Red Cross Bulletin (U.S. ed.), Jan. 14,1918,4. Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 8:3 (July 2009)

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a twenty-one-year-old John Dos Passos, then a member of the Ambulance Corps, about the dedication ceremony. "We will be used in the most conspicuous way possible—we must show Italy that America is behind them. . . . We are here to help cajole the poor devils of Italians into fighting."4 Dos Passos interpreted the Milan dedication ceremony far more cynically than did the ARC's official chroniclers. Where Murphy celebrated the positive power of American propaganda, Dos Passos dismissed it as a strategy to dupe Italian soldiers. Champion and critic alike, however, recognized the ARC's significance as a vehicle for carrying American ideas, diplomatic and social, into Italy. Although novelists such as Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway later memorialized the role that the ARC Ambulance Service played in the United States' commitment to the Italian war effort, it represented only one piece of a much larger ARC bureaucracy in that country.5 At the beginning of the European conflict, Woodrow Wilson appointed a War Council to lead the ARC, which oversaw the organization's domestic and foreign activities and fund appropriations. The ARC War Council allocated over $20 million in funds and material goods to Italy during the course of the war, more than to any other country except France.6 By the summer of 1918, the ARC's Commission to Italy employed 949 surgeons, nurses, ambulance drivers, and other American personnel, as well as thousands of Italian workers.7 Their activities ranged from supporting hospitals, canteens, and rest houses for Italian soldiers to funding schools, orphanages, and workhouses for refugees and soldiers' dependents (Seefigure1). The ARC's unique position during World War I sustained these endeavors. With its membership numbering more than 33 million Americans in 1918 (20 percent of the U.S. population) and its designation as the official U.S. organization for foreign relief by the Geneva Treaty and Congressional mandate, the ARC was neither a wholly private relief organization nor an official arm of government.8 This quasi-governmental status held great significance, for it allowed the ARC to secure a level of credibility, support, and power that was unavailable to other relief organizations such as the YMCA or Knights of Columbus. Nevertheless, the ARC was not simply a 4

John Dos Passos, Diary, Jan. 1, 1918, in The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos, ed. Townsend Ludington (Boston, 1973), 115-16. 5 John Dos Passos, 1919 (New York, 1932); Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York, 1929). Hemingway also served in the ARC Ambulance Service in Italy. 'American Red Cross Annual Report, for the years endingjune 30,1918 and June 30,1919. 'Charles M. Bakewell, The Story of the American Red Cross in Italy (New York, 1920), 37. 8 Emily Rosenberg has called the Red Cross and similar organizations as "chosen instruments," which she defines as "governmentally favored private companies], informally designated to carry out national security functions"; Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945 (New York, 1982), 13.

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Figure 1: Map showing types of relief work started or assisted by the Commission to Italy. Charles M. Bakewell, The Story of the American Red Cross in Italy (New York, 1920), 109.

"militarized charity" organized to support American soldiers and their Allies.9 As an organization financed solely by private donations, the ARC had more flexibility than purely governmental organizations to set its own agenda. Its leaders chose to support the U.S. government in many ways but also pursued aims that differed from those of military or political policymakers. Through its relief and reconstruction projects for the civilian populations of Italy, 'For Red Cross organizations as "militarized charities," see John F. Hutchinson, Champions of Charity: War and the Rise of the Red Cross (Boulder, CO, 1996). Most authors focus on the International Red Cross, rather than on national Red Cross societies; see Nicholas O. Berry, War and the Red Cross: The Unspoken Mission (New York, 1997); Caroline Moorehead, Dunant's Dream: War, Switzerland, and the History of the Red Cross (London, 1999). The only book-length text on the ARC's history remains Foster Rhea Dulles's The American Red Cross: A History (New York, 1950).

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the ARC created an infrastructure that spanned the Italian countryside and undergirded these two different but related types of American interaction with Italy—the governmental and the private. Red Cross projects directed towards the immediate relief of civilian hunger, homelessness, and other material wants bolstered the aims and mission of the U.S. government during the war. The first members of the ARC came to Italy nearly a year before U.S. troops. They presented the Red Cross as a vanguard of the U.S. military through visible and public demonstrations of American assistance. Employees received instructions that all work should have "an American character pronounced enough to constantly remind everyone connected with it that this help comes from America."10 By assisting Italians materially and psychologically, the ARC believed that it could establish firm diplomatic ties and prove the U.S. commitment to the Italian war effort. As the head of the ARC's Department of Public Information declared, the Commission to Italy "symbolized the fraternity of Italy and America, the alliance in a holy cause, the pledge to stand side by side through the trial of war until victory crowned the efforts of the Allies to save civilization."11 Such efforts underscore the ARC's position as a fundamental player in the development of the discourse of the United States' benevolent, progressive internationalism during World War I.12 Red Cross workers acknowledged their ties to the U.S. government as they attempted to win the hearts and minds of Italian civilians with material assistance and moral support. In turn, the U.S. government supported the Red Cross in these endeavors, demonstrating its early recognition of "soft power" as a tool of American foreign relations.13 Both the ARC and the U.S. government hoped that relief would create lasting 10

Chester A. Aldrich, "Letter to All Delegates," Aug. 27, 1918, Charles Montague Bakewell Papers, 2004-M-090, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University (hereafter CMB), box 4, folder 26. "William R. Hereford, untitled m s , page 6, Feb. 4, 1918, CMB, folder 30, box 4. 12 Emily S. Rosenberg, Ian Tyrrell, and Victoria de Grazia, among others, have argued that throughout the twentieth century, the U.S. federal government gave increasing financial and political support to international projects originated by private interests. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream; Tyrrell, Woman's World, Woman's Empire: The WCTU in International Perspective, 1880-1930 (Chapel Hill, 1991); de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through TwentiethCentury Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2005). For "progressive internationalism," see Thomas Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (Princeton, 1992); Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and devolution (Princeton, 2003). Also useful to the U.S. conception of the ARC's ideological role is Melani McAlister's analysis of U.S. "benevolent supremacy." McAlister focuses on the Middle East after World War II, but it is helpful to consider the roots of this discourse in Great War Europe. McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 (Berkeley, 2001), esp. ch. 1. "Joseph S. Nye coined the term "soft power" in the 1980s to describe diplomacy based on attracting and persuading citizens of other nations rather than coercing them through displays of economic and military superiority. See Nye, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York, 1990).

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support from Italy's government and civilian population and ensure enduring ties between the two nations. Humanitarian assistance was inherently political and inextricably linked to U.S. foreign policy agendas.14 But to consider the ARC as purely an arm of the state is to ignore its role as a forum for the transnational exchange of ideas about social reform. With an eye toward permanent reform and reconstruction of Italian social politics rather than emergency relief, hundreds of ARC workers waged antituberculosis crusades, founded nursing schools, and developed childwelfare projects.15 The organization, construction, and even personnel of these activities resembled similar reform activities in the United States over the previous two decades.16 In introducing American ideas about public health and social welfare, these Americans acted as what Daniel T. Rodgers has referred to as "brokers of ideas"—men and women who facilitated the transatlantic exchange on the methods and philosophies of social reform. Rodgers argues that prior to WWI, Americans had been primarily the recipients of ideas coming from Paris, Berlin, and London; but by the late 1910s and into the 1920s, Americans contributed increasingly to this milieu.17 The story of the Red Cross in Italy supports these conclusions. But it also forces a reconsideration of what Rodgers and others have delineated as the transatlantic community. "Louis John Nigro's study on the work of the Committee of Public Information (CPI) in Italy argues that the ARC and the YMCA laid the ground for more intensive CPI activities. Nigro, New Diplomacy in Italy: American Propaganda and U.S.-Italian Relations, 1917—1919 (New

York, 1999). For Wilsonian foreign policy, see Arthur Stanley link, Wilson the Diplomatist: A Look at His Ma/or Foreign Policies (Baltimore, 1957); Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy in American Foreign Relations (New York, 2002); David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York, 1982). For Italian-American relations in World War I and the 1920s, see Piero Melograni, Storia politico della grande guerra (Bari, Italy, 1969); Liliana Saiu, Stati Uniti e Italia nella grande guerra, 1914-1918 (Florence, 2003); Daniela Rossini, Americariscoprelltalia : I'inqmry di Wilson e le origini della questione Adriatica, 1917-1919

(Rome, 1992). 15 "Report of the Department of Medical Affairs," issued by the ARC Department of Public Information, Rome, Nov. 1, 1918, CMB, folder 45, box 5. 16 And for good reason. In the early twentieth century, the ARC reorganized and began to hire many of its leaders from charity-organization societies, health and welfare philanthropies, and prominent schools of nursing and social work. In 1908, the ARC recruited Ernest P. Bicknell, general secretary of the Chicago Bureau of Associated Charities, to become its national director. During the war, many notable progressive reformers worked for the ARC in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, including Edward T. Devine, director of the New York School of Philanthropy; Homer Folks, secretary of the New York State Charities Aid Association; Paul U. Kellogg, editor of the Survey; and Jane Delano, director of the Bellevue Hospital Training School for Nurses. The ARC must be understood as a product of this intellectual milieu. For the scientific-charity movement in Chicago, New York, and nationally, see John Louis Recchiuti, Civic Engagement: Social Science and Progressive-Era Reform in New York City (Philadelphia, 2006); Lawrence J. Friedman, ed., Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History (Cambridge, 2002); Robert H. Bremmer, American Philanthropy (Chicago, 1988). "Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 1998).

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A shift in focus from the North Atlantic to the Mediterranean reveals that Italy was an important participant in American and western European discussions about social reforms. Starting in the 1880s with the passage of national public-health codes, Italian reformers created further sanitary laws, established public-health campaigns against malaria, pellagra, and tuberculosis, and constructed rural dispensaries for children, mothers, and agricultural workers. Supported by the Liberal government of Giovanni Giolitti in the fifteen years before the war, these reformers crafted health and welfare reforms that mirrored those in the United States and northwestern Europe.18 Italians took part in both the transadantic network of social politics that Rodgers has described and in a more global public-health community.19 The American reformers who came to Italy with the Red Cross found that the war had brought these developments to a screeching halt, thanks to the mobilization of physicians, the increase in epidemic diseases and malnutrition, and the redirection of funds from social reform to the military. Red Crossers intended to build upon this once-promising but now faltering set of reforms. But even as they emphasized cooperation and attention to cultural differences, there was a certain hubris associated with their interventions. Unlike contemporary sites of U.S. involvement in Haiti, Puerto Rico, or the Philippines, Americans understood Italy as a midpoint between civilized and barbaric, a nation once the pinnacle of civilization but currently lagging behind its counterparts in western Europe.20 The impact of Italian emigration to the United States created further concern with ensuring Italian physical and political health, and added to Italy's importance and potential as a site for reconstruction.21 ARC workers hoped ultimately to revive local 18 Frank M. Snowden, The Conquest of Malaria: Italy, 1900-1962 (New Haven, 2006); Giovanna Vicarelli, Alle radid delta politico sanitaria in Italia (Bologna, 1997); Giorgio Cosmacini, Storia della medidna e della sanitd in Italia: dallapeste europea alia guerra mondiale, 1348—1918 (Rome, 1992); and Cosmacini, Medidni e sanitd in Italia nel ventesimo secolo: dalla "spagnola" alia 2dguerra mondiale (Bad, 1989). "For the growth of international public health in this period, see Paul Weindling, ed., International Health Organisations and Movements, 1918-1939 (Cambridge, 1995); Paul Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890— 1945 (Oxford, 2000); Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medidne, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC, 2006); Anne-Emmanuelle Birn, Marriage of Convenience: Rockefeller International History and Revolutionary Mexico (Rochester, NY, 2006). 20 My thinking about American occupations in the period has been influenced by Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940 (Chapel Hill, 2001); Eileen Suarez Findlay, Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870-1920 (Durham, NC, 2000); Anderson, Colonial Pathologies; Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill, 2000). 21 Amy Fairchild and Thomas Guglielmo, among others, have argued that although U.S. citizens perceived Italians as a definite Other, reformers tended to regard them as easily assimilable. Amy Fairchild, Sdence at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force (Baltimore, 2003); Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 (Oxford, 2004).

Irwin I Nation building and Rebuilding 413 interest and control of public health in the country. However, their faith in their own expertise and in the value of American methods undercut the potential for real reciprocal exchange. In the upheaval that the Great War generated, American reformers found an ideal opportunity to extend their work across the Atlantic. By the 1920s, however, their inability to sustain either Italian or American interest in this paternalism limited the ARC's ability to establish lasting ties with Italy. Emergency assistance and the construction of permanent social-welfare institutions represented two complementary parts of a larger project of American engagement with Italy. Neither purely diplomatic nor purely cultural, the ARC's relief and reconstruction projects forged a nexus of these dual U.S. aims. The work of the ARC in Italy during the Great War unites the histories of foreign relations, social politics, and public health, and draws attention to Italian-American relations in transatlantic and global discussions. Caporetto, the Emergency Commission, and Laying the Groundwork of the ARC When the New York financier and philanthropist George F. Baker disembarked in Italy in late August 1917, he set foot in a country that had been mired for well over two years in the trench warfare of World War I. Desiring firsthand information about the conditions that the war had created, the War Council of the American Red Cross appointed Baker to survey the health and welfare of Italy's soldiers and civilians. Baker and his fellow investigators toured Italy's cities and battle lines for a month. This inspection left him convinced that the American Red Cross did not need to send personnel to Italy because Ambassador Thomas Nelson Page had already organized a system of charity that possessed the resources necessary to assist Italian soldiers and their families. Baker delivered a $200,000 War Council grant to supplement Page's work and then boarded a ship bound for America. But before Baker or his report ever reached the ARC's headquarters in Washington, the Austrian military broke through Italy's northeastern alpine front at Caporetto on October 25, forcing 500,000 civilian refugees to flee south.22 Page feverishly cabled the ARC's divisions in Washington and Paris for immediate assistance to help the flood of refugees. Grayson Murphy, the head of the ARC Commission to France, ordered his staff to pack twenty-four train cars with blankets, clothing, surgical instruments, and other supplies. Murphy also dispatched two members of the ARC's French Commission to Italy to lead an Emergency Commission. By November 11, when Murphy arrived in Italy to inspect the Emergency Commission's work, its members 22

"Red Cross Commission to Italy" Red Cross Bulletin (U.S. ed.), Aug. 1917; William R. Hereford, unpublished ms., CMB, folder 30, box 4.

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had distributed more than $250,000 to American consuls stationed in various cities throughout Italy. Yet as Murphy surveyed the chaotic conditions that the mass exodus of refugees had created, he recognized that the Emergency Commission required more funding "to operate effective[ly] under emergency conditions" and that it "must have authority to act immediately as occasion arises." He telegraphed the ARC War Council in Washington for an additional $500,000 for Italian relief.23 The ARC's rapid deployment of funding, supplies, and personnel constituted a conscious act of diplomacy, designed to prove that America supported the Italian war effort. The "essence of our value" Murphy recognized, "is [the] ability to show Italy immediately that American sympathy and loyalty are expressed not in words but in acts." Moreover, he concluded, the "Red Cross is apparendy [the] best qualified American organization to give such demonstration."24 As Murphy and other leaders recognized, the ARC could use its quasi-governmental status to express U.S. assistance without waiting for the U.S. government to commit troops or federal funds. "America apparendy had no available means of expression," the ARC explained to its patrons. "Congress was not in session. Our army could not act. Fortunately, however, the Red Cross was in a position not only to respond immediately to the call of the suffering, but also to carry the message of the American people to Italy in the hour of her distress."25 Prompt action, unhindered by governmental red tape, struck Murphy and others as particularly important. The ARC's leaders and members of the Wilson administration, including, most notably, Ambassador Page, viewed Italy as a particularly unstable ally. Although Italy had formed part of the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary since 1882, the country had remained neutral at the start of the war, a stance that the Vatican, the Socialist Party, and the Liberal majority in Parliament endorsed. In 1915, Italian prime minister Antonio Salandra and the minister of foreign affairs, Baron Sidney Sonnino, secredy signed the Treaty of London and entered the war on the side of Britain and France, whose leaders promised large territorial gains upon Allied victory.26 23

Thomas Nelson Page to Grayson Murphy, Nov. 3, 1917, CMB, folder 14; Murphy to Henry P. Davison, Nov. 11, 1917, folder 28, box 4. 24 Grayson Murphy to Henry P. Davison, Nov. 11,1917, CMB, folder 28, box 4. 25 "Red Cross Raises American Flag from One End of Italy to the Other," Red Cross Bulletin (U.S. ed.), Jan. 14,1918. 26 For Page's views, see his Italy and the War (New York, 1920) and Nigro, New Diplomacy in Italy. Salandra became prime minister in March 1914 after the Liberal prime minister Giovanni Giolitti stepped down. Although Salanda, too, claimed to represent a Liberal faction, he was a staunch nationalist in practice. The Italian people were quite divided on the issue of intervention. Giolitti supporters and Catholics, too, tended to endorse continued neutrality. While most Socialists rejected the "Imperialist War," a faction led by Mussolini urged intervention. Many Italian conservatives and nationalists favored intervention. Those in favor,

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In spite of this official alliance, many U.S. observers feared the influence of the Central Powers' propaganda on Italian morale, especially after the defeat at Caporetto. One ARC observer warned, "There had evidendy been a tremendous German propaganda throughout Italy and there is still an immense amount of this propaganda going on. They are teaching the peasants that it is the French and English that will not make peace and that it is the English of all others who are prolonging the war; that the Germans are anxious and ready to make peace and that the government of Italy would do the same."2' "The American Red Cross," a delegate to Sardinia recommended, "should start its work at once in order to help to counteract this pernicious influence."28 The ARC's leaders hoped to rout anti-American propaganda through the distribution of material aid and a message of alliance. The ARC's Commission to Italy also feared internal dissent. Most Italians had opposed entering the war in 1915. After more than two years of deadlock and the devastating retreat at Caporetto, support for war appeared lower than ever when the ARC arrived in late 1917. ARC personnel argued that Socialist Party strongholds such as Turin, "the centre of the neutralist and defeatist sections of Italy" demanded special attention, as did the "decidedly proAustrian" and pacifist Catholic Church.29 Convincing the Pope and other pacifists and neutralists that support for the war would ensure a lasting peace was as vital to their project as distributing blankets and food relief. Thus, the Commission recognized relief as not only humanitarian but also strategic at the popular as well as the political level. Delegates hoped that their efforts would improve the psychological condition of civilians and soldiers. The first Americans to reach Italy after Caporetto witnessed a sea of refugees "in pitiful condition" pouring south, packed in trains for up to eighteen hours at a time without food, their possessions left behind in the panic of retreat. ARC officials recorded "indescribably pathetic conditions," however, were divided on whether Italy should join the Central Powers or the Anglo-French alliance. In secret meetings with both sides, Salandra and Sonnino received promises of great strategic territorial gains from Britain and France in the Trentino and South Tyrol regions of Austria and several strategic points off the Dalmatian coastline to Italy's east. These promises ultimately pushed Salandra and Sonnino to intervene on the side of the British-French alliance. They signed the London Pact on April 26, 1915, to the dismay of the majority of the Italian peasantry who were hostile to the war, as well as to Giolittians, Catholics, and Socialists who remained neutralists. H. James Burgwyn, The Legend of the Mutilated Victory: Italy, the Great War, and the Paris Peace Conference, 1915-1919 (Westport, CT, 1993); Martin Clark, Modern Italy,

1871-1982 (New York, 1980); Denis Mack Smith, Italy: A Modern History (Ann Arbor, 2002). 27 Alexander Lambert, Report to James H. Perkins, "Trip to Italy, November 9th to 29th, 1917," Records of the American Red Cross Commission to Italy, Record Group 200, box 880, 954.06, National Archives, College Park, Maryland (hereafter ARCCI). . 28 Gorham Phillips Stevens, Report to Carl Taylor, "Report on Sardinia," CMB, box 4, folder 28. 29 B. Harvey Carroll, memo, Nov. 11, 1917; Alexander Lambert to James H. Perkins, "Trip to Italy, November 9th to 29th, 1917," ARCCI, box 880, 954.06.

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including mothers separated from their children and old men unable to understand the dialects of different regions.30 In response, they established soup kitchens and rest stations for refugees, set up communication services and warehouses for material goods, and tried to meet the concerns of the displaced masses. To broadcast American assistance and allegiance, the ARC required every kitchen and rest house to fly the American and Italian flags and to post a clear label with the words Croce Rossa Americana?1 "It is evident," one member of the Emergency Commission asserted, "that if the soldiers at the front feel that their families are attended to and theirfleeingwomen and old men are made happy and comfortable by American effort, that they will be more likely to give their best work in repelling the enemy from the soil of Italy."32 The ARC's early relief tactics thus served several purposes. The focus on civilians allowed the Commission to demonstrate American concern for the Italian situation and to bring order to the nation after the Caporetto retreat. As leaders brought stability to Italian civilians, they would in turn boost soldiers' morale and help them to concentrate on fighting rather than on their families. ARC leaders also aimed to convince American patrons back home that their presence in Italy was both crucial and justifiable. The ARC set (and surpassed) fundraising goals of $100 million in its War Fund Drives in 1917 and 1918. In spite of that success, the ARC guessed that donors might criticize allocations to Italy, where no American troops were stationed until very late in the war.33 The ARC defended its use of funds to help Italians in several ways. First, it assured American patrons that "our first obligation is to our people at home." Through tenuous reasoning, the ARC argued that it fulfilled this primary obligation through its Italian campaign. By supporting Italy and other Allied nations, the organization argued, it could help to bring the war to an end faster and thereby prevent American troops from being called to service and sacrificing their own lives.34 Support for the ARC became a civic duty, as the organization declared that "every American citizen who can afford to do so should become a member" by contributing at least one dollar.35 30

"Red Cross Raises American Flag from One End of Italy to the Other," Red Cross Bulletin (U.S. ed.), Jan. 14,1918; Kate E. Horton, "Solving Italy's Refugee Problem," unpublished ms., Sept. 10,1918, CMB, box 6, folder 57. 31 Edward Hunt, Report to Grayson Murphy, Nov. 16, 1917, CMB, box 4,folder28. 32 Harvey B. Carroll to Carl Taylor, Nov. 12, 1917, ARCCI, box 883, 954.62. 33 This guess was certainly accurate. For one example of criticism on spending, see correspondence between Howard E. Wurlitzer and F. P. Keppel, Nov. and Dec, 1919, box 884, 954.91, ARCCI. 34 For this argument, see Elizabeth Frazer, interview with Grayson M.-P. Murphy, "With the Red Cross in Italy: The Story of the Big Retreat," Saturday Evening Post, Feb. 9, 1918, 27-37. 35 "Why the Red Cross Needs a War Fund of $100,000,000," 1917; "What the Red Cross Is Doing in Europe," containing remarks by Grayson Murphy to the Atlantic Division of the

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Second, the ARC depicted Italians as especially worthy recipients of aid in photographs and essays in the organization's Bulletin and Magazine. Throughout the war, the ARC concentrated its relief efforts on refugees and on the wives and children of soldiers. It also established forms of relief that either required Italians to labor for wages or to pay some token amount for material assistance. The Commission opened and supported a number of laboratori in Italy where Italian women sewed surgical dressings and clothing. Other such organizations targeted adolescent boys and girls, keeping them off the streets and gainfully employed. Although there existed "a certain amount of unavoidable dead weight such as the sick and the old and the babies," officials maintained that "nothing should be undertaken that involves the continued support of healthy persons, men or women, in idleness."36 Finally, the ARC maintained that the Italian government had done everything possible to act independently. Reports stated that Italy had "made the very best use of the means available," but that the country's military and medical structures could not keep up with the burdens imposed by war.37 The ARC's director of public information declared that "not for one moment must the American people consider that Italy has not bravely helped herself."38 Italy's problems were too vast for one nation to overcome. The country required material and spiritual assistance from its international allies, and the ARC provided both. Regardless of whether the Commission convinced Italians or American donors of its importance, it certainly convinced the ARC's War Council of its strategic importance. The War Council allocated more to the Commission to Italy than to any other foreign division except France.39 By the time the Permanent Commission arrived on December 20, the members of the Emergency Commission had laid the groundwork for an immense ARC bureaucracy in Italy. The Emergency Commission had not only established a Red Cross presence but had also installed visible signs of American allegiance throughout Italy. "Whatever else we may have done or failed to do," the Red Cross Bulletin explained to its American readers, "we have raised the American flag from one end of Italy to the other."40 ARC, Jan. 23,1918; "Information Regarding the Obligations of the ARC to the Armed Forces of the United States," 1916; Miscellaneous Pamphlets on the European War, American Red Cross, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, call number Bi66 858dc. 36 B. Harvey Carroll to Edward Hunt, Report, CMB, box 5, folder 56. "Charles M. Baker, "Impressions of the American Red Cross Commission to Italy," Red Cross Magazine, Jan. 1918, 39^-4. 38 William R. Hereford, untitled ms, Feb. 4, 1918, CMB, box 4, folder 30. 3 The American Red Cross Annual Report, for the years ending June 30, 1918 and June 30, 1919. 40 "Red Cross Raises American Flag from One End of Italy to the Other," Red Cross Bulletin (U.S. ed), Jan. 14,1918.

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Figure 2: B. Harvey Carroll, American consul in Venice, (left) and Colonel Robert Perkins, ARC commissioner to Italy, at a day school supported by the American Red Cross. Carroll and Harvey demonstrate the virility, masculinity, and militarization that the ARC sought to promote throughout Italy. Folder 14, box 2, Charles M. Bakewell Papers, Accession 90-M-66, Yale University (hereafter CMB2. All photos c. 1918-19).

Wartime Relief and Spectacles of American Aid With the arrival of the Permanent Commission to Italy, the American Red Cross consciously constructed a new face of wartime relief, based on efficient, masculine assistance and a message of American fraternity. Commission leaders crafted this image of the ARC and instructed all delegates to work according to it. Through publicized spectacles of aid distribution and U.S. assistance, the commission emphasized America's physical and economic strength. Such propaganda was as important as the material relief afforded to Italian soldiers and civilians. The ARC had long styled itself as "the Greatest Mother in the World." Motherly, feminine depictions would persist throughout the war, in publicity and in the faces of thousands women who staffed canteens, volunteer circles, and nursing services. But the newly appointed ARC War Council believed that the complexity of the wartime bureaucracy demanded a new identity for leadership: one defined as rational, efficient, and masculine.41 The ARC 41

Mabel Boardman, secretary and de facto chief of the ARC since 1905, scaled back her own participation at the outbreak of the war. In 1915, she convinced her good friend William H. Taft to take over executive responsibilities and become the chairman of the Central and Executive Committees. With Woodrow Wilson's 1917 appointment of the War Council,

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promoted its leaders as able businessmen that brought "not alone their experiences but their methods" and who built "the big business machine of war for the Red Cross."42 On December 20, 1917, twenty-seven men arrived in Rome, chosen to lead the Permanent Commission because of "their special experience in relieving distress among the civil and military populations" of the United States. The men whom the ARC chose to lead the commission were successful executives and professionals in the United States. They included head commissioner Colonel Robert P. Perkins, whom the ARC described as "a businessman of great experience" (he was president of the BigelowHartford Carpet Corporation); Major Samuel Fuller, a New York banker, as head of the Department of Administrative Affairs; and Major Chester Aldrich, an architect who had designed setdement houses in the Italian New York neighborhoods, as head of the Department of Civil Affairs. Their appointments suggested a move toward efficient organization by a team of experts. Although these men were not members of the U.S. armed forces, the U.S. government allowed the ARC to assign its leaders military ranks, which further emphasized the masculine side of assistance and suggested that the ARC represented an arm of the U.S. military.43 (Seefigure2.) Women did much work as nurses, canteen staff, and social workers. But when Commissioner Perkins attempted to appoint Sarah Shaw, the head nurse of the Bellevue Hospital Tuberculosis Division, to his executive staff, ARC Headquarters in Washington was "loath to allow nurse to serve in any but a professional capacity" and denied his request.44 The ARC constructed the commission as a largely masculine form of assistance to Italy, which took the place of active military assistance. Its leaders did not want to appear so motherly anymore. The ARC believed that the propaganda associated with its work was a necessary component to its project, meant to bolster Italians' mental states just as other acts of relief supported them materially. Thus even as members of the Permanent Commission to Italy assumed control over the female leadership was relegated increasingly to activities considered suitable for women, and executive decisions were reserved for men involved in business or professional charity work. See letters exchanged between William H. Taft and Mabel T. Boardman, Mabel T. Boardman Papers, Library of Congress, boxes 7 and 8,. 42 Edward Hungerford, "The Business Side of the Red Cross," Red Cross Magazine, Dec. 1918,20-25. 43 Department of Public Information of the American Red Cross, "A Brief Survey of the Work of the American Red Cross in Italy from Its Beginnings up to March 1918," Mar. 31, 1918, CMB, box 4, folder 30. The U.S. War Department approved the use of these military ranks to make it easier for ARC representatives to maneuver through restricted war zones. It also authorized ARC members to wear U.S. uniforms, creating an appearance of U.S. military presence wherever the ARC went. However, these ranks did not make ARC members commissioned officers, nor did it subject them to military control. "The Use of Military Titles by American Red Cross Officers," Red Cross Bulletin (U.S. ed), Aug. 20, 1917. 44 Lavinia Dock, History of American Red Cross Nursing (New York, 1922), 862.

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Figure 3: Major James Byrne, an ARC delegate, organized Italian boys to provide an American-style welcome for ARC personnel coming to Monteporzio (near Rome). Folder 5, box 1, CMB2.

Emergency Commission's many activities, they also designed and staged a series of spectacles meant to demonstrate visibly the ARC's able and efficient commitment to Italians, the war effort, and to civilization. The architect behind this publicity was William R. Hereford, head of the ARC's Department of Public Information (DPI). The DPI and Commissioner Perkins sought to ensure that "in carrying out the immediate work of relief, the delegates may not lose sight of the best means to impress upon the Italian people the fact that America is with them in winning this war and is ready to give every man and every resource it possesses to attain that object." To leave this impression, the DPI directed ARC agents to organize a "small and short ceremony which will attract the attention of the people" whenever they delivered relief to a particular city. (See figures 3 and 4.) The DPI composed stock speeches for such occasions, which defined the work of the ARC in Italy as "an expression of the brotherhood of the American people with the people of Italy and an assurance that America will fight side by side with the Italian people until victory comes." ARC leaders also instructed delegates to meet newspaper editors to "acquaint them with their visit and its purposes" and to assure that all relief, from food aid to cash, had "an American character."45 45

Department of Public Information, "Suggestions to Delegates," 1918, and Chester Aldrich, Memo "To All Delegates," Aug. 27, 1918, CMB, box 4, folder 26.

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The DPI recognized the need for discretion in both the content and delivery of its propaganda. In the Great War, professional propaganda was a new form of public diplomacy. As the U.S. government experimented with propaganda strategies through the Committee for Public Information (also known as the Creel Commission, after its director), the ARC struggled to define good publicity for itself.46 The DPI understood that "the greatest care should be exercised not to have the American Red Cross appear immodest or boastful or self-advertised."47 Hereford objected to overt editorializing on the superior humanity of the ARC and censored press releases that he felt contained "a good deal of 'puff for ourselves."48 Hereford insisted that personnel emphasize U.S. friendship with Italy and directed how that propaganda should look. A month after the Milan ambulance exhibition and a few weeks after it took over relief activities in Italy, the Permanent Commission to Italy staged its first public demonstration at the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome, which Michelangelo designed in the sixteenth century in honor of Charles V's visit to the city. By the time the ARC set up a small platform bedecked with American and Italian flags there, Campidoglio served as a center of Italian political life. The ARC gathered its leaders there to meet King Victor Emmanuel III, Minister of the Treasury Francesco Nitti, the mayor of Rome, and various senators and ministers of state. In the shadows of an enormous and extravagant marble monument completed in 1911 to honor modern Italy's first king, crowds gathered to hear Robert Perkins, Thomas Nelson Page, and Guglielmo Marconi speak.49 The speakers that the commission chose for the occasion emphasized the ARC's role as an arm of the U.S. military. Perkins introduced himself and the rest of the commission in English and praised the Italian military's work. Page took the podium next. He defined the ARC as a "vanguard" force that the U.S. government sent to support Italy until troops arrived. He concluded with the promise, brimming with Wilsonian sentiments, that "the w

In 1918, the term "propaganda" carried a much less negative connotation than it would after World War II. I will use the term throughout this paper as it was used in its time, and I do not necessarily intend it to carry its more dubious connotations. For U.S. propaganda efforts, see George Creel, How We Advertised America (New York, 1920); J. R. Mock and Cedric Larsen, Words that Won the War: The Story of the Committee on Public Information (Princeton, 1939); Nigro, New Diplomacy in Italy; Vaughn, Holding Fast the Inner Uner, Gregg Wolper, "Wilsonian Public

Diplomacy: The Committee of Public Information in Spain," Diplomatic History 17 (Winter 1993): 17-34; Kennedy, OverHere. "Department of Public Information, "Suggestions to Delegates," 1918, CMB, box 4, folder 26. *"La Piccola America, May 1918; William Hereford to M. J. MacDonough, May 23, 1918, CMB, box 5, folder 42. 49 For the history of the Piazza del Campidoglio, see Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman, Architecture, from Prehistory to Post-Modernism: The Western Tradition (New York, 1986),

313-14.

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Figure 4: In Rome, A boy from Monteporzio celebrates the Fourth of July with a Garibaldini, a veteran from Italy's nineteenth-century wars for independence and national unification. Folder 5, box 1, CMB2.

conditions of the future peace will be dictated by the great democracies of the world—and then the world shall be free and safe, and Italy will be able to walk toward her higher destiny." As Page viewed the future, Italy and the United States would inevitably unite in a fraternal bond against "autocracy and militarism."50 The ARC would build the bridges to ensure this bond. 5O

"I1 Contributo Americano per la Guerra," 1M Giornale d'ltalia (Rome), Jan. 16, 1918.

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Marconi gave the keynote address. A celebrity in Italy and the United States, Marconi had credibility in the realm of Italian-U.S. relations. Marconi praised the leaders of the ARC's Permanent Commission and noted that none of them received compensation for their work in Italy.51 He emphasized that each American Red Cross worker had left behind "his home, his family, [and] his interests" to assist Italians. Yet, Marconi argued, Americans truly understood Italians, because both countries were in a fight for their "sacred rights and for the triumph of those democratic principles which are the life and hope of all progressive communities."52 The Campidoglio ceremony was an immediate success. "Every mention of America brought applause," the commission reported to Washington. Italian newspapers published Marconi's, Page's, and Perkins's speeches the next morning. Editors also answered the ARC's call to recognize the organization as an arm of U.S. military relief, rather than as a private humanitarian organization. But most important, the ARC declared that its message had rung loud and clear: At Campidoglio "there was not one, it seemed, who did not feel that in the bond that meant life or death Italy and the United States were joined, each pledged to do its part to the utmost limit of endeavor."53 In the months that followed the meeting at Campidoglio, the ARC's leaders searched for more ways to couple assistance with a message of American friendship. In April 1918, the ARC staged a large-scale cash distribution to assist the families of soldiers. In making the decision to give cash handouts without any accountability for how recipients spent the money, the ARC consciously rejected contemporary theories of social work. Yet, the commission argued, any "objections the professional expert in relief might raise in theory is silenced in this instance by the results obtained."54 Italy's Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando accepted the ARC's offer to distribute 6,850,000 lire (about US$1 million) in the spring of 1918.55 For two weeks in April, dozens of representatives visited 8,323 different regions and distributed cash to a reported 318,000 families of Italian soldiers and others whom local governments designated as worthy.56 ARC officials exploited the cash distributions' publicity potential. "Staging 51

This was intended, but never entirely true. Many of the commission's leaders received no compensation, but some were paid living expenses. Some who worked in the ARC administration also received small salaries. 52 Guglielmo Marconi, "In Onore della Croce Rossa Americana," Jan. 15, 1915, CMB, box 5, folder 45. "William R. Hereford, unpublished ms., Feb. 4, 1918, CMB, box 4, folder 30. 54 William R. Hereford, "Carrying America's Message to the Italian Front," 1918, CMB, box 6, folder 62. 55 This represented about 5 percent of the Commission's budget for the year. See the American Red Cross Annual Report, for the years ending June 30, 1918 and June 30, 1919. 56 Kate H. Horton, "The Big Drive of the American Red Cross," June 18, 1918, CMB, box 6, folder 62.

424 journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / July 2009

our visits," reported one representative, "was of prime importance." Representatives planned their visits with local leaders ahead of time, to ensure that the reception would be publicized and celebrated. As they rode into city stations or entered city walls wearing American military uniforms, they encountered staged local receptions and crowds of people. Others scheduled interviews with local newspaper editors, "to make sure that news of America's interest in Italy should be spread" broadly. Representatives gave each aid recipient a postcard with a picture of the U.S. and Italian flags woven together or sometimes a photograph of Woodrow Wilson. The ARC then asked each family to send these to their husbands and fathers at the front. The commission argued that it was easy "to imagine the effect upon a soldier's spirits to learn that his family has been cared for," and it maintained that soldiers would be more efficient fighters if they weren't anxious about families. Hereford emphasized the need to deliver cash relief "immediately to those to whom the war had brought the greatest distress" and to show "by the actual presence of American officers in uniform that America was at hand with aid." The commission enlisted local politicians and heads of charitable organizations to help them decide which citizens ought to receive American assistance. Although they distributed only moderate sums to each family, ARC officials hoped that recipients might use it to remedy immediate financial problems. Convinced that "the sight of American officers is a revelation to [Italians'] simple minds," ARC officers dressed up their aid with khaki uniforms and the Stars and Stripes in order to make the connection to American fraternity as clear as possible.57 Although cash distribution demonstrated the ARC's power to create a national network of relief, the Commission to Italy most emphatically proclaimed its strength when it decided to build a city. The refugee situation after the fall of Caporetto provoked profound American concern about Italian disorder and unrest. Some members of the commission commiserated with Italian families who had lost homes, employment, and community; others feared the disaster's potential to foment socialist tendencies or to create a "moral hazard to young girls."58 B. Harvey Carroll, the U.S. consul in Venice, proposed a solution that he believed would satisfy all of these concerns. Rather than working to maintain order and community by relocating refugees in existing cities, the ARC should simply build a new one. In late February ""Report on Distribution of Funds for Propaganda at Ancona," Apr. 8, 1918; "Report on Iesi, Osimo, and Macharata," Apr. 13, 1918; "Report of Trip, Captains Carroll and Stevens, Tolentino, San Severino, Camerino, and Recanati," Apr. 14, 1918; "Report of Distribution of Funds to the Needy Families of Italian Soldiers in the Provinces of Forli, Pesaro, Ancona, and Macerata, April 4th to April 15th, 1918," Apr. 15, 1918; "Report of Trip to the Abruzzi and Puglia, May 3 to May 14, 1918," May 15, 1918; William R. Hereford, "Carrying America's Message to the Italian Front," 1918, CMB, box 6, folder 62. 58 Edward T. Devine to Carl Taylor, Dec. 8, 1917, ARCCI, box 880, 954.101.

Irwin I Nation building and Rebuilding 425

1918, Carroll met with the leaders of the commission and proposed that the ARC fund and construct a colony outside Pisa for 15,000 Venetians. Carroll assured the commission that the Italian authorities "would be pleased to have us do this and in no other way can we so effectively demonstrate just what the American Red Cross is capable of doing."59 The commission agreed and on March 5 gave Carroll official approval to carry out his plans. On May 1 the ARC broke ground on thirty acres of formerly private property that the Italian government requisitioned for the project. The ARC scaled Carroll's original plan to house 15,000 refugees down to 2,000, and his proposal to name the village after Florence Page, the ambassador's wife, never caught on. Nevertheless, the Pisa Village, as it came to be called, was quite an undertaking. The ARC projected that the city would be complete in five months. The planned living space included eighty concrete homes, divided into several apartments of two to four rooms each. The Village also included a small garden, offices, shops, a community kitchen, a church, workrooms, schools, a hospital, and a concrete replica of Venice's famous Piazza San Marco—"all that makes for the happiness and safety of the family." The ARC advertised the village to Italian refugees as a place where they could reestablish their lives and their communities, support themselves through employment rather than charity, and raise their families in a stable and orderly climate.60 Yet the ARC marketed the Pisa Village to Americans as a "modern American city" (the notable exception of the Piazza San Marco notwithstanding). The designers followed contemporary ideas of hygienic housing, such as ensuring an abundance of light and air in each home. In building this modern domestic space, Red Cross workers complemented reformers of immigrant housing in the United States, who encouraged the reconstruction of housing and domestic behaviors according to a new middle-class sanitary ideal.61 Carroll demanded complete American autonomy in choosing which Italians were eligible for housing, and promised "that the colony would be strictly under the management of the ARC in all matters pertaining to relief." Successful completion of the Pisa Village would not only solve Italy's (and the ARC's) refugee problem, but would make a ready appeal "to the American press and to the American public and . . . lend itself to the camera and the cinema as a concrete example of what America can do when she bows her neck to 5

'B. Harvey Carroll, report to the American Red Cross Commission to Italy, Feb. 25, 1918; Carroll to Chester Aldrich, Feb. 26, 1918, CMB, box 5, folder 56. 60 Kate E. Horton, "Solving Italy's Refugee Problem," unpublished ms., Sept. 10, 1918, CMB, box 6, folder 57. 61 "The American City at Pisa," Red Cross Bulletin (Italy ed), July 20, 1918, 2. For hygienic housing, see Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Ufe

(Cambridge, MA, 1995), ch. 2.

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Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / July 2009

it."62 The commission envisioned the Pisa Village as a lasting testament to the ARC's innovative approaches to humanitarian aid and a model for Italian charities to follow. The ARC did not intend the Pisa Village itself to be permanently operated by Americans. The Commission to Italy did, however, clearly intend for the ideals and goals of American relief to take hold in Italy. The commission consulted with the Italian government and hired Italian workers to construct the village. The ARC also promised American patrons that "as soon as possible the direction of affairs" would be "turned over to the Italians themselves."63 This suggested a willingness to respect Italian autonomy over activities within its own country. At the same time, the ARC knew that U.S. patrons would not support indefinite American relief work in Italy and stressed that their commitment was only temporary, even as they built dozens of concrete buildings. As one member of the ARC put it, "we have no responsibility for the work beginning with the day on which it is necessary to recall our people."64 As it turned out, the Pisa Village was not even a temporary fix to the refugee situation. In fact, it was never completed. Despite glowing descriptions and photographs of the Pisa Village in the IW Cross Magazine and Bulletin that implied the contrary, no Venetian refugees moved into the city, nor did the ARC complete the church, school, or several of the other planned structures. Various sources attributed the failure to poor planning, unreliable labor, and the sudden ending of the war. Whatever the cause, the ARC turned over the site in its extant condition to the Italian Commission to the Ministry of War, to provide state housing to maimed soldiers.65 Designed to memorialize America's role in preserving Italian families and communities, the project became a lasting memory of the Great War's devastation. To highlight evidence of ARC propaganda is not to diminish the vast network of assistance that the Permanent Commission to Italy created. During 1918, the ARC War Council appropriated over $20 million to the commission for its relief work, the majority of which went to civilian relief.66 The commission employed thousands of American and Italian men and women who labored to promote order in a country wracked by the grim realities of 62

B. Harvey Carroll, report to the American Red Cross Commission to Italy, Feb. 25, 1918; Carroll to Chester Aldrich, Feb. 26, 1918, CMB, box 5, folder 56. 63 "A Red Cross City in Italy," Red Cross Magazine, Oct. 1, 1918. 64 E. O. Bartlett to Chester Aldrich, Nov. 2, 1918, ARCCI, box 882, 954.47. 65Edward D. Self to Henry P. Davison, Nov. 12, 1919; Chester Aldrich to F. P. Keppel, Dec. 11,1919, ARCCI, box 884, 954.91; Francesco Mauro, unpublished narrative, 1919, CMB, box 5, folder 56. 66 Approximately 64 percent of these funds went to the Department of Civilian Affairs, 13 percent each to the Department of Medical Affairs and the Department of Military Affairs, 7 percent to administration, 1 percent to the Department of Tuberculosis, and the remainder to miscellaneous groups. Account Ledger, CMB, box 1.

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All

67

war. Fourteen regional delegates oversaw the creation of soup kitchens and rest houses for soldiers and refugees. Members of the Department of Civil Affairs created workhouses for the wives of soldiers and for refugees, funded orphanages and health dispensaries for their children, and distributed free or reduced-price food and clothing in towns north and south. The Departments of Medical and Military Affairs funded and staffed five ambulance sections, distributed surgical supplies to base hospitals, and supplied seventeen rolling canteens with personnel, chocolate, cigarettes, and coffee for distribution at the front. (See figures 5 and 6.) These departments also assisted the few U.S. troops who composed the 332nd Infantry Regiment, deployed to Italy in late July 1918 and the only American unit to serve on the Italian front. These farreaching and diverse activities comprised the bulk of the ARC's daily work. They also provided much-needed assistance to thousands of Italians.68 Even in these myriad forms of individual, everyday relief, the ARC's leaders stressed the need to define assistance as distinctly American. While the ARC's spectacles and large-scale relief efforts showcased their American source, so did countless smaller acts. Some Commission to Italy members taught children in the ARC's schools and orphanages to sing the Star-Spangled Banner (II Vessillo Stellato) in Italian. Others distributed gifts tied with red, white, and blue ribbons or accompanied with a small speech "to show Italian soldiers that America was with them" in the war.69 In September, the commission feared that it would run out of flags and ordered 1.8 million U.S.flagson pins from the Washington headquarters for distribution among Italians. In every aspect of its war relief work, the ARC tried to show Italians that it represented a branch of American military assistance and that Americans shared in Italians' struggle for democracy. The Red Cross, declared Grayson Murphy, had "become something much greater than merely a vast humanitarian enterprise." Additionally, it had "become the ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary of the American people direct to the people of the Allied world. Its special mission is to explain and manifest America as she is today, to express her ideals in business, in science, in democracy."70 The ARC's leadership sent personnel to Italy to provide temporary relief, but they hoped to leave a permanent impression. 67

Bakewell, The Story of the American Red Cross in Italy, 37.

68

Chester Aldrich, E. O. Bartlett, and Ernesto G. Fabbri, "Department of Civil Affairs, American Red Cross in Italy, January 1, 1918—March 1, 1919"; "Report of the Department of Military Affairs"; both published by the ARC Department of Public Information, 1919. "William R. Hereford, undated report, CMB, box 4, folder 30; "Young Italian Soldiers Off for the War Cheer America," Red Cross Bulletin (U.S. ed.), Jan. 21, 1918; G. D. Gribble, "With a Rolling Canteen on the Piave," Aug. 6, 1918, CMB, box 6, folder 60. 70 Elizabeth Frazer, interview with Grayson M.-P. Murphy, "With the Red Cross in Italy: The Story of the Big Retreat," Saturday Evening Post, Feb. 9, 1918, 37.

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"*, , *#

1

Figure 5: In an ouvroir (workhouse) in Avellino, which the ARC established to employ Italian women and older girls. This particular site produced an adequate supply of American flags for ARC use. Folder 15, box 2, CMB2.

Reconstruction and Reform during the War and Beyond In a period of great social upheaval, the ARC seized its chance to dismantle Italian public-health and social systems and replace them with institutions and theories based on modern American models. Certainly, ARC workers spent most of their time on emergency assistance.71 But alongside canteens and medical-dressings factories, the ARC also ran an antituberculosis campaign, built schools for nurses and health aides, and developed a number of programs related to child health and welfare. Like the Rockefeller Foundation and other U.S.-based international health projects, the ARC served as a conduit for introducing American ideas about public health and medicine to Europe. The ARC intended to stabilize and enhance the Italian civic body by improving sanitation and health education. Health and socialwork professionals hoped that successful wartime projects would develop a local Italian desire for American ideas and institutions that would persist long after the ARC's postwar withdrawal.72 Italy was not a tabula rasa for these ideas. Before the outbreak of war, Italian reformers had been working in many of the same areas that drew Red ''Commission officials budgeted most of their money to feed, clothe, house, and employ refugees and the families of soldiers and to provide hospital supplies, ambulances, and material relief to the Italian military. Account Ledger, CMB, box 1. 72 American public-health reformers began increasingly to introduce sanitary reforms and wage campaigns against epidemic diseases throughout Europe and globally during this period. See John Farley, To Cast Out Disease: A History of the International Health Division of the Rockefeller

Foundation, 1913-1951 (Oxford, 2004); Alexandra Minna Stern, "Buildings, Boundaries, and Blood: Medicalization and Nation-Building on the U.S.-Mexico Border," Hispanic American Historical Review 79 (Feb. 1999), 41-81; Warwick Anderson, Colonial"Pathologies;Birn, Marriage of Convenience.

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Figure 6: An unnamed ARC delegate distributes beans and canned beef in Terracina, in the Pontine Marshes of Central Italy. Folder 6, box 1, CMB2.

Cross attention. Crusades against epidemic diseases and infant mortality in Italy paralleled campaigns in other countries in western Europe. By the eve of the Great War, as one historian demonstrates, the Italian antituberculosis movement had gained an "unquestionable confidence."73 Physicians and the government had waged a campaign against malaria that successfully decreased mortality from the disease.74 The ARC also celebrated the strength of the Italian Red Cross and worked alongside this organization in some projects. American reformers recognized that Italy was a participant in both Atlantic and global public-health conversations in the early twentieth century. Nevertheless, they did not see Italy as an equal partner in this exchange. Italy may have had its own networks of reform, but they had been largely dismantled because of war. Italy also did not conform to all of the ARC's stated ideas about modern public health. For example, the ARC criticized Italian physicians and military authorities for the disinterest they exhibited in the use of trained, professional nurses—a career only recently elevated in status in the United States.75 Such confidence in American methods suggests a return to American exceptionalism that Daniel T. Rodgers has charted as early as World War I.76 But it also underscores American reformers' sense that Italy was not yet an equal to its North Atlantic counterparts. 73

T. Detti, "Stato, guerra e tuberculosi (1915-1922)" in Malattia e medicinia, Storia d'ltalia, Annali n. 7 (Torino, 1984). 74 Snowden, The Conquest of Malaria. 75 Susan M. Reverby, Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing (Cambridge, 1987). ™Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings.

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Delegates believed that Italy had the potential to be a cultural peer to the other nations of western Europe. They did not view Italians as hopelessly barbaric, as they saw the residents of contemporary sites of U.S. intervention in Latin America or Asia.77 ARC leaders built their mythical vision of Italy on ideas of shared cultural traditions and similar interests in democracy and liberation. Delegates pointed to the historical glory of the Italian civilization and stressed that "for years, we Americans have sought out the treasures and gifts of Italy; her builders, poets and artists, her scientists and her statesmen have been our inspiration and teachers."78 Yet, the ARC argued, Italy had fallen behind in the move toward modernization and was "at a later stage of development in the solving of" civic problems.79 Through education in health and general literacy, the head of the Department of Medical Affairs argued, Italians could "take a leading place among the aggressive, successful nations of the world, and the reputation, deserved or undeserved, which they have for idleness, thriftlessness, inertia, and easy infraction of the laws of God and man will not be deserved."80 Only with American assistance and expertise could Italy hope to return to the path toward civilization and parity with other western nations. Significantly, the ARC did not intend to guarantee a future physical presence for American reformers. The emphasis on making sure the projects were sufficiendy "Italian" was an important strategy. Italians had to love and embrace American ideas, not simply be coerced into accepting them. The Commission to Italy urged delegates that "every institution run by the ARC should be put on such a basis that the plant can be turned over to some responsible Italian agency . . . capable of carrying on the work to the largest extent possible."81 Intervention in Italy was not about physical occupation, but instead an attempt to convince Italians of the righteousness of American methods. In Italy, as in other parts of the world, Americans argued that they knew the best available methods for promoting health and hygiene. The desire for modern public health, as much as the desire for American consumer goods and democratic government, would uphold the expansion of America's informal empire after World War I.82 Tuberculosis posed a significant public-health problem in Italy, as in all other industrial nations in the early twentieth century, and the ARC seized 77

For contemporary sites of intervention, see Renda, Taking Haiti; Findlay, Imposing Decency,

Anderson, Colonial Pathologies. 78

Edna Foley, report on "Future of the Section of Public Health Nursing" to William Charles White, May 16, 1919, ARCCI, box 881, 954.11/08. 79 Mary S. Gardner, "Report of the Commission for Tuberculosis, American Red Cross in Italy: Supplementary Report of Nursing Section," 1919, ARCCI, box 879, 954.08. 80

Joseph Collins, My Italian Year: Observations and Reflections in Italy during the iMst Year of the

U^r (New York, 1919), 9. 81 Aldrich, "Circular Letter to All Delegates," Oct. 9, 1918, CMB, box 4, folder 26. 82

See de Grazia, Irresistible

"Empire.

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the opportunity to revitalize the once thriving antituberculosis community through a new campaign.83 In November 1917, leaders of the Italian Red Cross approached Grayson Murphy to ask for assistance with repatriated prisoners of war who had been diagnosed with tuberculosis. The Italian Red Cross expected that thousands of these prisoners would reenter Italy over the next few months.84 Murphy enlisted Livingston Farrand and William Charles White, the heads of the Rockefeller Foundation International Health Board's Commission for the Prevention of Tuberculosis in France and prominent figures in the U.S. antituberculosis movement, to survey the tuberculosis situation in Italy. Farrand and White came to Italy from France, where they had worked with the local ARC Commission to build sanitariums, dispensaries, and preventoriums to protect civilian populations from the disease. Italy, like France, seemed to require U.S. know-how and financial support to stop the pernicious spread of wartime tuberculosis.85 After finishing their survey the next spring, Farrand and White advised the Commission to Italy that wartime intervention offered "an extraordinary opportunity for the American Red Cross to be of great assistance in planning an extensive campaign against tuberculosis throughout Italy." The commission envisioned a campaign that quickly surpassed any of the Italian Red Cross's plans, which it did not consider strong enough to fight the disease effectively. The ARC hoped that its campaign "would be most beneficial not only in reducing the mortality from the disease and thus rehabilitating the morale of the civil population of Italy, but in strengthening the bond of friendship between the Italian and the American peoples." The Commission to Italy proposed the creation of an autonomous Department of Tuberculosis, independent from the Rockefeller Foundation but still in close cooperation.86 In March 1918, the ARC War Council agreed, and appropriated $1.1 million to the new department. Although it was only about 5 percent of the Commission to Italy's annual budget, this sum paid the salaries and expenses of sixty personnel, including notable members of the U.S. medical and public-health professions and eighteen nurses.87 The department also 83 Many European countries had campaigned against TB before the war, only to see its rapid resurgence after 1914. See David Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth Century France (Berkeley, 1995); Giorgio Cosmacini, Lapeste Bianca: Milano e la lotta antitubenolare (1882-1945) (Milano, 2004); Iinda Bryder, Below the Magic Mountain: A Social History of Tuberculosis in Britain (Oxford, 1994). 84 William Charles White, "General Report of the Commission for Tuberculosis, American Red Cross in Italy" 1919, box 879, 954.08, ARCCI. 85 For antituberculosis work in the United States, see, for example, Georgina Feldberg, Disease and Class (New Brunswick, 1995); Tomes, The Gospel of Germs, ch. 5, 9. 86 American Red Cross Commission to Italy, "Report of the Department of Medical Affairs," Nov. 1918, CMB, box 5, folder 45. 87 William Charles White, future chair of the National Tuberculosis Association of America, headed the organization. His co-chair was R. H. Bishop Jr., public health commissioner of

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purchased ten mobile dispensaries and fourteen motion picture projectors for educational work.88 The department did not arrive in Italy until October 1918. Only several weeks later, as members setded into their assigned regions and surveyed the Italian conditions, the Armistice halted active warfare. Although the Armistice signaled an end to the ARC's wartime relief efforts, the newly formed Department of Tuberculosis developed an educationbased public-health campaign throughout 1919 and into the 1920s.89 The American Red Cross's international work was no longer limited to immediate relief. It now served as an institution for the dissemination of ideas about how to educate the public in the control of epidemic disease. To create the foot soldiers for this public-health education campaign, the ARC set up training schools for Italian women to become public-health nurses and educators. Nursing was one of the only sanctioned professional activities for U.S. women in the war.90 The Permanent Commission to Italy included several dozen nurses, under the direction of Sarah Shaw, the head nurse of the Tuberculosis Division at Bellevue Hospital in New York. These women quickly realized that neither Italian physicians nor Italian military nursing organizations wanted U.S. nurses involved in active work on the battlefields. Further, the American nurses admitted that they lacked sufficient personnel to serve Italy's relief needs even if Italy's military-medical service had welcomed them. Although ARC nurses patched together work in Italy, from the distribution of surgical dressings to caring for refugees, they soon began to consider alternate activities.91 Ignoring the resistance to professional nursing from many Italian circles, Shaw and her superiors in the United States decided to educate a corps of Italian public-health nurses in American methods and theories. The Italian Cleveland and founder of the antituberculosis movement in Ohio. Other notable names included John H. Lowman, a U.S. physician, Stephen A. Douglass, superintendent of the Ohio State Tuberculosis sanatorium, and Robert G. Paterson, secretary of the Ohio State Antituberculosis League. "Tuberculosis Unit Reaches Italy," Red Cross Bulletin (Italy ed.), Oct. 1918. 88 "Italian Tuberculosis Unit Organized and Will Sail in Few Weeks," Red Cross Bulletin (U.S. ed.), Sept. 1918. ''Several members of the Department of Tuberculosis criticized the leadership's decision to emphasize education over relief. See H. H. Jacobs, Address to the Milwaukee Chapter of the American Red Cross, Mar. 18, 1919, ARCCI, box 881, 954.108. '"Women volunteers staffed many canteens and rest houses or oversaw Italian women workers, but the ARC nursing school and Child Health Bureau were the only sites in which female American professionals possessed significant autonomy during war. As they worked to prove themselves to Italian women, U.S. nurses strove to prove their strength to men at home. Mary Gardner, for example, wrote to the U.S. head of ARC nursing that she had recently asked for a reduction in salary to help with wartime conservation, but only after three months at a higher salary, necessary to establish "the precedent that a woman's work was of equal value with a man's." Mary S. Gardner to Jane A. Delano, Dec. 30,1918, ARRCI, box 881, 954.11/08. "Pauline Jordan to Jane Delano, Dec. 7,1917; Clara D. Noyes to Sarah Shaw, Nov. 28,1917, in Dock, History of American Red Cross Nursing, 860—62.

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project coincided with global efforts at nursing education sponsored by other ARC Commissions and by the Rockefeller Foundation.92 On March 17, the Commission to Italy opened a public-health nursing school in Rome, followed by a second in Genoa on April 2.93 These schools enrolled fifteen or sixteen Italian women for a four-month course, and targeted students from rural areas who had had some experience as volunteer nurses. Seven trained American nurses worked in each school; one served as director and the other six instructed Italian women in dispensary work, school health, and home visiting. The schools also offered lectures by Italian and American physicians on such topics as the history of public-health nursing, the theory and methods of public-health work, child welfare, school hygiene, dietetics, obstetrical nursing, common diseases, and sanitation.94 Directors modeled the Italian schools' curriculums on those recently introduced into nursing schools in the United States.95 These individuals understood that publichealth nursing schools would provide education to only a tiny fraction of Italian women. But it envisioned that those women, in turn, would return to their hometowns and disseminate American public-health methods and beliefs throughout all of Italy. Italian nursing education corresponded with the ARC's stated interest in assisting Italian children.96 The Department of Civil Affairs focused much of its relief efforts on the children of refugees and soldiers and funded schools, orphanages, and summer colonies to restore Italian children's physical and mental health. (See figures 7 and 8.) Likewise, much of the nursing schools' curriculum focused on school hygiene and childhood diseases. In August 1918, the Department of Civil Affairs coordinated with the first graduates of the ARC nursing schools and organized a Children's Health Bureau. The ARC designed the bureau to be a site for coordinating child welfare work, and it established a training center in Milan to prepare Italian women to teach basic child hygiene to rural mothers. The training center demanded a smaller professional commitment from women than did the public-health nursing program but shared similar pedagogical goals. After finishing the course, Italian women could expect to know and be able to teach "how much 92

Anne Marie Rafferty, "Internationalising Nursing Education During the Interwar Period" in Weindling, International Health Organisations, 266-82. 93 A third school was scheduled to open in Florence in November, but was never completed. 94 Mary S. Gardner, "Report of the Commission for Tuberculosis, American Red Cross in Italy: Supplementary Report of Nursing Section," 1919, ARCCI, box 879, 954.08. 95

96

Reverby, Ordered to Care.

For more on child health in the 1920s, see Naomi Rogers, "Vegetables on Parade: American Medicine and the Child Health Movement in the Jazz Age" in Children's Health Issues in Historical Perspective, ed. Cheryl Warsh (Waterloo, ON, 2005); John F. Hutchinson, "Promoting Child Health in the 1920s: International Politics and the Limits of Humanitarianism" in The Politics of the Healthy Life: An International Perspective, ed. Esteban Rodriguez-Ocana (Sheffield, 2002); Roger Cooter, ed., In the Name of the Child: Health and Welfare, 1880-1940 (London, 1992).

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a child of a certain age should sleep, how often it should be fed, and such other information of like nature as any intelligent, moderately well educated, serious mother in a country like America possesses."97 The bureau considered these women valuable because they understood local language, culture, and prejudices. Public-health education served a modernizing function. Ideally, it would create a corps of Italian women able to educate their peers on American methods and a generation of strong, healthy Italian children—in short, a group who would infuse modern values into wider Italian society after the ARC's personnel withdrew.98 Unlike the Commission to Italy's wartime relief bureaus, neither the Department of Tuberculosis nor the two nurse-education projects planned to close immediately after the Armistice. Rather, the two organizational spheres cooperated on a more generalized public-health education campaign in Italy in 1918 and 1919. The Department of Tuberculosis commissioned surveys of the Italian tuberculosis situation and broadened its interests to include nursing, housing, general education, and school hygiene. Likewise, the nursing school did not abandon its ties with Italy completely. The last twenty-eight nurses remained in Italy until December 31,1919, under the charge of Edna Foley, superintendent of Chicago's Visiting Nurse Association and a leader in ARC nursing after the war.99 After the ARC left Italy, it continued to introduce U.S. methods to the country. In summer 1921, the ARC funded a visit to U.S. nursing and public-health schools for sixteen of the nursing schools' prized students. The ARC planned the visit to educate women "along the lines which English-speaking countries have found so efficacious."100 After witnessing the technological and pedagogical innovations at U.S. schools, these leaders in the Italian health movement could return to Italy and raise their peers to U.S. standards. Nurses knew that their prolonged protective stance toward Italy created problems but still wished they could maintain their international guidance. "It seems to me that it would be easier if we were working in a country where 97

"Report of the Department of Medical Affairs," 1918, CMB, box 5, folder 45. "Report of the Children's Health Bureau," Jan. 15, 1919, ARCCI, box 881, 954.11/08. Rural public-health, and nursing education in Italy mirrored contemporary introduction of "scientific mothering" in the United States, where ARC home hygiene departments and health and social-work professionals reached out to women to instruct them on modern mothering techniques. For "scientific motherhood," see Rima Apple, Mothers and Medicine: A Social History 98

of Infant Feeding, 1890-1950 (Madison, 1987), and Vitamania: Vitamins in American Culture (New Brunswick, NJ, 1996); Julia Grant, Raising Baby by the Book: The Education of American Mothers (New Haven, 1998); Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930 (Urbana, 1994); Sarah A. Leavitt, From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart: A Cultural History of Domestic Advice (Chapel Hill, 2002).

"W C. White to E. O. Bartlett, re: "Continuation of the Tuberculosis Work in Italy— Nursing Division," June 2, 1919, ARCCI, box 881, 954.11/08. '""Gardner, speech to Italian nurses touring U.S. medical establishments, Aug. 1921, ARCCI, box 883, 954.52.

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Figure 7: The train to a seaside camp in Nettuno, on the western coast of Italy, clearly demonstrated to arriving children that the United States had provided for their health. Folder 6, box 1, CMB2.

one spoke of natives and heathen and primitive elements, etc.," wrote Foley. "But," she continued, "working in a country whose civilization is older, and in many respects more advanced than our own, we have had a good deal to learn and to receive as well as to give."101 Foley conceded that nurses might engage in a profitable exchange with Italian reformers. At the same time, she and other nurses believed that their work would be easier if Italians would simply consent to American methods. New child-health and welfare projects grew particularly rapidly after the Armistice. The Great War left thousands of Italian children orphaned, and the American Red Cross's new Junior Division took up their cause. It collected money from U.S. schoolchildren and allocated it to the orphans in order to help support their feeding and education. The head of Junior Division work in Italy, Hollingsworth Beach, initially chose seventeen institutions to fund and eventually extended support to twenty-five orphanages. Costs averaged from $40 to $50 per child per year, all paid for by funds collected from U.S. schoolchildren. In return, Italian children "got their practice in the three 'R's' in writing post cards to the children of America, telling them of the progress of their work which they have helped to make possible through their generous gifts, and in so doing they are welding links in a chain of international friendship that disputes between the two Governments cannot break."102 The mission to "establish a very real bond of friendship between the children of America and Italy" thus had a clear diplomatic intent.103 ™Edna Foley to Clara Noyes, Dec. 9, 1919, box 881, ARCCI, 954.11/08. 102 Mildred Chadsey, "Work Started by American Red Cross in Italy Lives on Today," unpublished ms, 1919, ARCCI., box 880, 954.101 103 "War Orphans in Italy," Junior Red Cross Project No. 12, Oct. 12, 1919, ARCCI, box

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rFigure 8: Children celebrate their patrons at an ARC home for children in Albori, Salerno, in southern Italy near Naples. Folder 15, box 2, CMB2.

By 1921, the Junior Division stopped directly funding orphanages. Instead, it used U.S. children's money to fund playgrounds, gardens, libraries, and health education. With these changes, Americans contributed to a shift in contemporary Atlantic progressive thought from worrying about poor, hungry children to a concern with the positive health of the "normal child."104 Reaching out to Italian children more generally, rather than just to orphans, also extended the reach of the ARC's message. "When we work in children's institutions," noted Avis Jackson, a social worker, "we work almost in watertight compartments, with no chance that our influence can permeate whole families and normal communities." Through community playgrounds and education in public schools, however, the ARC could reach "the normal social fabric of Italy" in a way that earlier, more limited Junior Division programs never could. A sense of obligation to increase Italian interest in health and welfare motivated ARC reformers during the war and its aftermath. But they also feared the pathological condition of Italians, many of whom were potential emigrants to the west during the U.S.'s peak period of immigration. Investment in public health and would necessarily "bring a return to the United States." By improving international standards of health and civic education, the 883,954.621. 104 For the new focus on the "normal child," see Patricia T. Rooke and Rudy L. Schnell, '"Uncramping Child Life': International Children's Organisations, 1914-1939" in Weindling, International Health Organisations, 176-202. For playgrounds, see Dominick Cavallo, Muscles and Morals: Organised Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 1880-1920 (Philadelphia, 1981). For health

education, see Tomes, The Gospel of Germs. For city planning, see Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings. For professionalization of social work in this period, see John H. Ehrenreich, Altruistic Imagination: A History of Social Work and Social Policy in the United States (Ithaca, NY, 1985).

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United States could ensure that "it would make small difference whether life were begun in Italy or in America, because the transfer from one to another would be but the continuance of good citizenship in a world democracy."105 The ARC's permanent projects demonstrated a realization of the benefits of international cooperation and the threats—political and bacteriological— of an increasingly international world. As the ARC diverged from its traditional emphasis on emergency relief and moved toward reconstruction and construction afresh, its workers seized their new role as the couriers of American ideas to Italy and Europe more broadly. After the Armistice The November 11 Armistice may have signaled the end of active fighting in the Great War, but American Red Cross workers perceived it as an opportunity to move in myriad new directions. "Even with the peace," the ARC urged its patrons, "let no one suppose that the work of the Red Cross is finished."106 Initially, the Commission to Italy advised delegates that they should expect to work until March 1919 to help feed and house returning refugees and soldiers. But the continued interest in permanent health and welfare projects ensured sustained employment for scores of veteran and new Red Crossers. Samuel Fuller, who succeeded Robert Perkins as temporary commissioner after the Armistice, told delegates that "some formal ceremony should be held to mark the turning over of these activities. It must be borne in mind that the ceremonies should not take the aspect of a farewell," he instructed, "but rather of a new phase of our work, which consists in giving to the Italian societies the full control and means to carry on the activities."107 Red Cross workers intended to stimulate Italian commitment to American health projects and, at the same time, to maintain the diplomatic allegiance fostered by wartime aid. Despite this optimism, the ARC failed to anticipate the reconstruction period's chaotic conditions. At the Paris Peace Conference, Woodrow Wilson demanded that Italy revoke its territorial claims along the Austro-Hungarian border, which enraged many Italians and prompted the Italian delegates to the Peace Conference to withdraw from the negotiations.108 After this diplomatic debacle, the ARC hoped to reframe its work to emphasize its vital 105

William Charles White, "Report of the Commission for Tuberculosis, American Red Cross in Italy: Supplementary Report on Public Instruction in Italy," 1919, ARCCI, box 879, folder 954.08. 106 "Red Cross Must Continue to Represent the Heart of America," Red Cross Bulletin (U.S. ed), Nov. 18,1918. 107 Samuel Fuller, Letter "to all delegates and heads of departments," Jan. 13, 1919, CMB, box 4, folder 26. 108 Many historians have written about Wilson and the "Adriatic Question" over Italian territories at the Paris Peace Conference. See Nigro, New Diplomacy in Italy; Rossini, America Riscopre I'ltalia; Saiu, Stati Uniti e Italia nella Grande Guerra.

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diplomatic value. Although White believed that Italians exhibited "a great deal of sensitiveness" to Wilson's foreign policy, he and other leaders maintained that there was "a deep underlying feeling of affection for the American Red Cross which it will take many years to overcome."109 Because of its perceived special place in Italians' hearts, the Commission to Italy believed it had a unique civic opportunity to support the internationalist diplomatic aims of the Wilson administration. Intent, however, did not result in the grand effects of which ARC leaders dreamed. The ARC entered 1919 with ample funds, which for the first few years after the Armistice allowed it to fund health and reconstruction projects in Italy and throughout Europe. But U.S. public support for paying for international projects quickly diminished. At the same time, as wartime disorder began to stabilize, Italians yearned for a return to internal leadership in social and political activities. As Frank Snowden has argued, conservative postwar politics—soon accelerated by theriseof Fascism—enabled the Italian state to redirect public-health campaigns "along more authoritarian lines" in order to strengthen the military and productive force of the country.110 ARC workers noticed the change in Italian amenability to U.S. teachings. One woman who had worked in Italy throughout the war expressed reservations "as to the possibility of putting into practice in European countries American social service theories in their entirety," and argued that Italians objected to such overt U.S. control.111 Putting it more simply, nurse Edna Foley admitted that "Europe really wants us to go home."112 Red Cross workers ultimately failed to establish the strong, lasting structures of political allegiance and social welfare of which they dreamed. But their work in Italy underlines several important themes. First, the Commission to Italy's history demonstrates the important historic role that private organizations have played in U.S. foreign policy and diplomatic relations, supporting Ian Tyrrell's claim that "a large part of American expansion took the form not of political or even economic penetration but of the spread of institutions and cultural values."113 In the absence of armed intervention, the American Red Cross occupied Italy and established a significant and powerful U.S. presence there. ARC delegates such as E. O. Bartlett, the postwar head of the Commission to Italy, may well have convinced themselves that "the American Red Cross has nothing to do with politics and that political conditions can in no wise form the principles on 109

William Charles White to Edward Hunt regarding "Continuation of our work in Italy," May 20, 1919, ARCCI, box 881, 954.11/08. 110

Snowden, The Conquest of Malaria, 140^41.

m

Elsie Graves Benedict to R. P. Lane, June 17, 1921, ARCCI, box 881, 954.11/01. 112 Edna Foley to Clara Noyes, Dec. 9, 1919; H. H. Jacobs, Address to the Milwaukee Chapter of the American Red Cross, Mar. 18, 1919, ARCCI, box 881, 954.108. '"Tyrrell, Woman's World, Woman's Empire, 2.

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which it acts." Yet even as Bartlett mythologized the apolitical nature of his organization, he acknowledged, "It is impossible for us to avoid a political reaction as a result of whatever we do. We all know that the Italian people still preserve a love and sympathy for the American people only and entirely because of the American Red Cross."114 The ARC's members believed that they had established a bond between Italians and Americans that would only grow stronger among future generations. ARC foreign aid helped the United States develop as an informal empire with the diplomatic tools of soft power and persuasion.115 As Daniel T. Rodgers has argued, Americans took a more active role in Atlantic progressive-reform communities during World War I than they had before that period.116 Work in foreign aid organizations allowed thousands of Americans to contribute to transatlantic social reform discussions, and many hoped that the connections made during the war might provide the basis for permanent international peacetime work. But the history of the ARC in Italy clearly shows that these networks were not limited to the North Atlantic. Italians had already initiated many social reforms, and ARC workers built upon and tried to expand these efforts. Including Italy in this history, however, does not mean that Americans considered Italians as inherent equals to their French or British counterparts. ARC reformers embraced a strategic cultural sensitivity as they attempted to work with Italians and help them to take control of their own social institutions. By presenting their reforms as mutual exchange rather than imposed change, ARC workers hoped Italians would willingly accept them. However, U.S. reformers continued to assume that American intervention was crucial to saving Italy and returning the nation to its rightful place as a civilized country. American hubris undercut any balanced transnational exchange. The histories of foreign relief and reconstruction were two sides of the same coin: through both types of activities, the ARC attempted to carry American ideals to Italians to strengthen Italy's political and social conditions. The ARC Commission to Italy imbued disaster relief and humanitarian aid with a message of American exceptionalism. In so doing, it laid an early framework for a discourse of the United States as a benevolent and powerful democracy that deserved a leading role on the world stage, even as the United States failed to join that world in the League of Nations.

114

E. O. Bartlett to E. W White, Dec. 2, 1919, ARCCI, box 882, 954.11/101.

115 U6

De Grazia, Irresistible Empire; Nye, Bound to Lead. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings.