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c h a p t e r f o u r The Misfortunes of Other Nations in the 1890s, the American red cross began to address humanitarian crises abroad. Although clara Barton had mentioned “the misfortunes of other nations” in her pamphlet on the red cross, during its first ten years her organization limited its work to assistance in “national calamities” at home. As the century’s end approached, however , colonialism, mass newspapers, transatlantic telegraph cables, and international missionary networks were bringing distant suffering into the everyday consciousness of ordinary Americans and europeans. A new type of international humanitarian mandate began to emerge, demanding that citizens of these “civilized” nations work to alleviate human suffering in more “barbarous” places. With its established international status and growing reputation, the Arc was well poised to participate in the new imperial humanitarianism. The underlying motivations for these projects nevertheless challenged the Arc’s ability to remain neutral. Arc foreign relief efforts during the 1890s included aid to russian peasants during the famine of 1891–92, relief to Armenian survivors of the 1895–96 massacres in ottoman Turkey, and relief for starving cubans in 1898. The russian famine relief, in which the Arc sought unsuccessfully to consolidate the efforts of numerous relief committees, was driven by both transnational rural solidarity and American agricultural interests. While Barton eagerly embraced these goals, she had trouble with the christian missionary zeal that underpinned the Armenian relief project. The antimuslim diatribes of the christian groups raising money for the Armenians provoked the Arc to explicitly articulate for the first time its principle of religious neutrality. The project to aid starving cubans, discussed in chapter 5, involved defending neutrality amid a drumbeat for war with spain. in all of these foreign relief efforts, the Arc had to work under the rules and protection of foreign governments and organizations to gain access to populations in need. At the same time, it had to try to avoid becoming an instrument of American or foreign political interests. As Barton soon learned, the balancing act proved quite difficult. 62 The Barton Era humanitarianism meets imperialism in the 1870s, when Great Britain, France, and other european countries began to establish formal colonies around the world, lines of communication between imperial capitals and their colonies began to thicken. Press correspondents stationed in colonial outposts reported not only on the economic advances of the colonizers, but also on the suffering of colonized peoples. As a result, many readers in the capitals began to feel obligated to improve the lives of their country’s colonial subjects. in fact, republicans in France and liberals in Great Britain viewed the project of colonialism itself as one of humanitarian social improvement—a “civilizing mission.” in the United states, informal commercial and moral imperialism, rather than formal empire, is what stimulated interest in humanitarianism abroad. during the last decades of the century, American agricultural and industrial production reached unprecedented heights, while prices and profits remained depressed and workers revolted , leading farmers and capitalists alike to aggressively search for new markets for American products. For the first time, federal government officials sought not just to protect American producers from cheaper imports, but to clear the way for American commercial exports. While in european empires trade may have followed the flag, in the United states commercial imperialism preceded formal colonization and took precedence over it. in 1900 a state department official stated that the country’s territorial expansion was “but the by-product of the expansion of commerce.” meanwhile, even before Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed the closing of the western frontier in 1893, many Americans had begun to conceive of a new manifest destiny that extended beyond the nation’s continental boundaries. This ideology, which combined christianity with social darwinism, gained popularity among the pious Protestant middle classes, finding its most pronounced expression in the 1885 book Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis. in this popular work, social Gospel minister Josiah strong of new York proclaimed that God was “preparing in our [American] civilization the die with which to stamp the nations” and was “preparing mankind to receive our impress.” not only was the superior Anglo-saxon race of America destined to conquer the inferior races of the American West, strong argued; it was now also fated, owing to its “unequalled energy,” wealth, liberty, and “purest christianity,” to conquer all other inferior peoples and “spread itself over the earth.” As historian ian Tyrrell has shown, Americans sought to establish this...

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