The American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal

Introduction

i n t r o d u c t i o n on the day beforeThanksgiving in 1997, federal government carpenter richard Lyons climbed the narrow staircase in a dilapidated downtown Washington, d.c., building to check for leaks in the roof. As he walked through the unlit, cramped rooms on the building’s third floor, Lyons felt someone tap him on his shoulder. Turning to find nobody behind him, he shined his flashlight around the room. The beam flickered over an envelope sticking out of a crawl space in the ceiling. The envelope led him to a cache of old letters and files in the crawl space, as well as a blouse with an apparent bullet hole and a black and yellow metal sign proclaiming, “missing soldiers. office. 3rd story room 9. miss clara Barton.” With the help of an unseen force, Lyons had rediscovered the modest office from which Barton, a volunteer helper during the civil War and later the founder of the American red cross, had run a small organization to find soldiers who had not returned to their families. The building, now under the control of the government’s General services Administration, was slated for demolition , but after Lyons’s discovery it was saved from the wrecking ball and plans were made to turn it into a museum. Those inclined to believe in ghosts have speculated that the spirit of Barton had tapped Lyons on the shoulder to save her old office for posterity. if so, this was not the first time that Barton’s spirit played a role in efforts to preserve her legacy. dr. Julian hubbell, who served as Barton’s loyal assistant in her red cross work, alleged that Barton spoke to him through a medium in 1914, two years after her death. The spirit directed him to turn over to the medium sixty-one thousand dollars in property and bonds that Barton had deeded to him, so the medium could establish a clara Barton memorial foundation. six years later, when the credulous hubbell discovered that the medium had been using Barton’s assets for other purposes, he sued her. “hubbell says spirit made him Give Up $61,000,” read the news headlines. The court granted a stay to prevent the medium from disposing of Barton’s assets, including her house in Glen echo, maryland, where hubbell had been living. hubbell was allowed to remain in Barton’s house until his death in 1929; it was eventually acquired by the national Park service and turned into a national historic site.1 even today, clara Barton continues to lead an active afterlife. her spirit lives on in the U.s. government’s treaty obligations to adhere to the Geneva conventions, which she doggedly persuaded apathetic state department officials to sign in march 1882. Just as significantly, her spirit and ideals pervade the current activities of the Ameri- viii Introduction can red cross (Arc). Barton brought the Geneva-based international red cross movement to the United states in 1881, despite a national climate of distrust toward european institutions. To succeed in this mission, she had to reinvent the organization as an American one: the Arc would not just aid the army in wartime, as red cross societies in europe did; it would also provide organized voluntary assistance in “national calamities” such as floods, fires, epidemics, accidents, and social unrest in the United states and abroad. Barton nearly singlehandedly opened a new field of humanitarian relief and breathed new meaning into the ideal of humanitarianism. humanitarian relief in disasters has since grown into a widespread global practice. This book is an effort to bring the spirit of Barton out of the shadows by discussing and analyzing how she and her successors developed practices and ideals of disaster relief and humanitarian assistance during the American red cross’s first six decades. it explores how humanity and neutrality, the two ideals that Barton and other early red cross leaders chose as guiding principles for their philanthropic practices, took on varied and sometimes conflicting meanings over time. By critically interrogating the organization’s principles, practices, and policies, this book seeks to explode the myth that the Arc as a sacred national trust operates above interests of class, race, and politics. The book traces the highly contingent events that shaped the American red cross, which in turn influenced how Americans currently conceive of domestic and international humanitarian assistance. For example, we expect red cross volunteers and workers to show up...