Private Aid, Political Activism: American Medical Relief to Spain and China, 1936–1949 by Aelwen D. Wetherby (review)

This book chronicles in considerable detail how certain Americans mobilized to provide humanitarian assistance in the violent conflicts engulfing both Spain and China starting in the 1930s. Believing that their government and the affiliated American Red Cross were not being sufficiently active, these American citizens decided in favor of politicized assistance to particular fighting factions abroad. None of the three organizations studied here, one active in Spain and two in China, lasted beyond the targeted conflicts. Any broader influence from the three agencies remains slight. But the author believes they represent “an important story of the more complex internationalism of the U.S. in the 1930s and the development of new standards of aid in conflict” (p. 176).

The author, Aelwen D. Wetherby, is associated with the Oak Ridge Institute, a unit of the U.S. Department of Energy, and is an occasional lecturer at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. This book stemmed from her doctoral dissertation at Oxford University.

She focuses on the American Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy (AMBASD), the American Medical Bureau for Aid to China (ABMAC), and the China Aid Council (CAC). She lays great stress on the fact that each organization made little pretense of pursuing nonpoliticized assistance. Rather, commitment to a particular fighting party was evident.

The chosen title of AMBASD made clear that its concerns were in support of the Spanish elected government rather than with the fascist rebels under the leadership of Francisco Franco. She does not emphasize the point, however, that on the side of the democratic government one found various communist factions that had little commitment to democracy and spent much of their time fighting each other, and the social democrats, but not always the fascist opposition. On the other hand in the ABMAC one found Americans, some prominent, who committed to the Chinese nationalists under the corrupt and repressive Chiang Kai-shek and were bitterly opposed to the communists under Mao Zedong. By comparison, the CAC was most active in northwest China where its aid programs largely benefitted those under the control of precisely the Chinese communists. Not to put too fine a point on things, two of these organizations were left of center and one on the right.

Wetherby makes much of the fact that the American Red Cross (ARC), chartered by Congress but linked to a global network, was supposedly governed by key Red Cross principles endorsing neutrality, impartiality, and independence. These plus the norm of humanity were supposed to exclude politics. She is on target when she writes that “the line between political conviction and humanitarian idealism has historically been difficult to define” (p. 7). She might have noted that in the 1920s when the American Henry Davison was urging the ARC to be active in Europe, and when he wanted a new League of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies to dominate that global humanitarian network, he and the ARC were anything but neutral. Coming from Wall Street, Davison was a strong anticommunist who saw European postwar disorder as benefitting the Bolsheviks in Moscow. The ARC was much interested in helping White Russian refugees fleeing Lenin and his comrades. That organization made clear it would do nothing to help build up medical facilities in the Soviet Union. Then as now, Red Cross neutral humanitarian assistance was, to a great extent, left to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, the founding Red Cross agency whose all-Swiss governing board increased prospects for—but did not guarantee—neutral humanitarian action in violent politics.

Insofar as the three citizen groups studied in this book saw the ARC as too timid in Spain and China, that situation had more to do with American isolationism than with the purported neutrality of the ARC. There is no major study of the ARC and the ICRC in Geneva, but such a...