Raising the World: Child Welfare in the American Century by Sara Fieldston (review)

In early September 2015, many people were shaken by the death of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old who drowned off the Turkish coast as his Syrian family sought to escape war and gain asylum in Europe. After the images of Alan Kurdi spread across the Internet, a September 2^nd headline in the British newspaper The Independent asked, “If these extraordinarily powerful images of a dead Syrian child washed up on a beach don’t change Europe’s attitudes to refugees, what will?”

Portraits of suffering, injured, and dead children have long been used to sway public opinion. Sara Fieldston shows that in the decades following the Second World War, children became an important focus of American philanthropic organizations seeking to reverse “the physical destruction and the moral chaos that plagued the postwar world” (23). The work of groups such as the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), Christian Children’s Fund (CCF—today’s Children International), Foster Parents’ Plan (PLAN), Save the Children Federation (SCF), Unitarian Service Committee (USC), and many others reflected American attitudes about childhood, as well as the unavoidable complexities of Anti-Communism and Cold War politics. In the end, “American efforts on behalf of foreign children bolstered U.S. power even as they recast it as humanitarianism—and even as they ultimately revealed its limits and internal tensions” (11).

Sponsorships, a new form of foster parenting by proxy, became an important fundraising tool for the organizations Fieldston studies. By means of such contributions, organizations supported tens of thousands of children around the world living in orphanages, provided health care assistance, training in parenting, and support for children attending nursery schools and other forms of formal education and vocational training. The organizations also embraced and advocated “‘modern’ childcare theories, stressing the importance of play and the primacy of children’s psychological health” (2). While some foreign parents and other adults rejected modernization, the philosophy was embraced by influential international organizations such as UNICEF.

Using both a chronological and topical framework, Fieldston outlines the work done by organizations overseas and the changes in direction such groups took over time. She also astutely includes the voices of children through the letters they wrote to their American sponsors. Fieldston rightly recognizes that these letters were influenced by adults, but each also provides some insight into what kids experienced and wanted to share with their American sponsors. In addition, the letters from sponsors to children are a window into the thoughts of ordinary Americans. The practice of sponsorship was familiar enough that the 2002 Hollywood film “About Schmidt” included the main character writing to a sponsored child in Africa as part of the film’s storyline.

Raising the World is a well-written and thoroughly researched contribution to the literature on the history of children and youth in the latter half of the twentieth century. Memoirs such as Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2007), Sara Taber’s Born Under an Assumed Name: The Memoir of a Cold War Spy’s Daughter (2009), Steven Church’s The Day After the Day After: My Atomic Angst (2010), and Mary Lawlor’s Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War (2015) have brought new perspectives to Cold War history. Historians have also contributed to the discussion through books such as Victor Brooks’ Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up (2009), Anne Korda’s The Politics of Childhood in Cold War America (2013), and Marilyn Holt’s Cold War Kids: Politics and Childhood in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (2014). Margaret Peacock’s excellent comparative history, Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War (2014), reveals how governments simultaneously used children’s images to make contradictory arguments about capitalism and communism. Donald J. Raleigh’s Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation (2011...