"Democracy in Action:" International Adoption in Twentieth-Century America

The origins of international adoption are inextricably bound with American engagement in conflicts around the world. As authors Allison Varzally and Rachel Rains Winslow articulate, the children of these international conflicts have become adoptive kin for American middle-class families though a distinctive shifting in the meaning of family and race in American culture. Emerging out of what became an expression of "democracy in action," as one journalist put it, these model families created, shaped and expanded notions of family-making to include refugee children from foreign countries though transnational and transracial adoption (Winslow, p. 134). Scholars of race and ethnicity, childhood, and immigration histories will be interested in reading both Children of Reunion: Vietnamese Adoptions and The Politics of Family Migrations and The Best Possible Immigrants: International Adoption and the American Family to gain clearer sense of the ways in which family and nation are intimately bound through the articulation of race, gender, and citizenship. Rich with sophisticated analysis and insight into the complex maze of non-governmental agencies, government legislation, and private players, each book builds on a growing body of innovative adoption literature that engages with gender, whiteness, and American nationalism in relation to adoptive family-making.

Winslow's The Best Possible Immigrants provides a critically important account of the emergence international adoption, an "invisible and integral" element in family making today. In a clear and forthright manner, Winslow identifies four foundational frameworks that guided approaches to adoption and child welfare from the early post-war period to 1976, when her account concludes. The four paradigms—the consumer paradigm, the child welfare paradigm, the humanitarian paradigm, and the development paradigm—inflected approaches to providing for vulnerable children and families in various times and places. Allison Varzally's Children of Reunion: Vietnamese Children and the Politics of Family Migrations in many ways picks up where Winslow leaves off. Looking specifically at the experiences of Vietnamese adoptees and migrant children, Varzally uses stories and memoirs to examine the ways in which children themselves have grappled with their identities not only as racial minority adoptees, but also ambiguous symbols of commemoration of the Vietnam War. While Winslow focuses on the distinctive American approach of giving adoptive parents a prominent role in crafting adoption policy, Varzally opens up space for adoptees' voices and experiences, while remaining critical of the uses of children as political symbols of American humanitarianism.

Rachel Rains Winslow's The Best Possible Immigrants is a historical account of the policies and procedures that developed around international adoption in America. Between 1947 and 1975 Americans adopted 35,000 children from around the world. (p. 2) She focuses exclusively on intercounty adoptions that occurred between American families and children from Greece, South Korea, and South Vietnam to illustrate the uniquely American story of international adoption and the competing and occasionally complementary agendas at work in child welfare and child rescue. She argues that intercountry adoptions went from an ad hoc response to World War II war orphans to a respected institution, and succeeded because it was "in the interest of many."

From her introduction, Winslow situates international adoption in the domestic adoption context. Adoption in the 1950s was noteworthy for tensions between professional social workers employed by state agencies and in organizations operating from the child welfare paradigm, such as the Child Welfare League of America and the National Children's Bureau, and private individuals such as doctors, lawyers, and volunteers who matched babies with adoptive families for profit, operating from the consumer paradigm. The Children's Bureau and Child Welfare League acted only as advisory bodies and sought to regularize and control the emerging adoption market in the domestic United States. Social workers fought unsuccessfully to eliminate non...