Little Cold Warriors: Child Sponsorship and International Affairs

s a r a f i e l d s t o n

Little Cold Warriors: Child Sponsorship and

International Affairs

Dear Foster Mother: This is the first time I write to you, a stranger, and call youMother. It seems very funny, daring, bashful, but I rely on your understanding,even now I feel something sacred I lacked for a long time.1

In 1957, a twelve-year-old Vietnamese boy, Van, wrote these lines in a letter to anAmerican woman he had never met. This young correspondent was enrolled in aprogram often called “adoption” but commonly referred to today by the term“child sponsorship.” American child sponsorship agencies matched foreign chil-dren with “foster parents” in the United States. In doing so, they sought to forgefictive kinships that stretched across oceans, cultivated through the exchange ofletters, parcels, and, ideally, love. Sponsorship involved virtual, not legal, adoption:American “foster parents” committed to support a particular child for a certainperiod of time. “Adoption” programs proliferated during the years followingWorld War II, spurred in part by the challenge of caring for huge numbersof war orphans. By the late fifties, American child sponsorship agencies had estab-lished outposts across Europe and Asia.

American foster parents supplied their children with money, school supplies,clothing, and gifts. Youngsters and their sponsors in the United States alsoexchanged letters, which were coordinated and translated by agency staff. Manyadvocates of child sponsorship described relationships cultivated across the globe,particularly those involving impressionable children, as molding young minds andlaying the foundations of international kinship that would bolster America’s pol-itical alliances overseas. Child sponsorship programs promoted a new understand-ing of world affairs that transformed foreign relations from the realm of politiciansand diplomats into the province of ordinary men, women, and children. Theyreveal the seminal role of the family in influencing American understandings ofand responses to the Cold War conflict. They showcase the ways in which private,

1. Van to Foster Mother in Harry F. V. Edward, “Viet Nam-1957,” September 1957, 5,Folder 27, Box 86, Records of Foster Parents Plan International, Inc., Volume 2, University ofRhode Island, Special Collections Department, Kingston, Rhode Island (hereafter FPP).

Diplomatic History, Vol. 38, No. 2 (2014).! The Author 2014. Published by Oxford UniversityPress on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved.For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. doi:10.1093/dh/dhu008

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independent organizations became participants in global politics. And they en-courage a consideration of the significance of subjectivity and emotion in shapingthe contours of the Cold War. Indeed, child sponsorship programs suggest that theUnited States’ strategy of containment took place alongside a less-studied effort tounite America and her allies through the bonds of love and friendship.2

“OUR CH OSEN WEAPON S”

First pioneered by U.S. voluntary agencies during the thirties, child sponsorshipprograms expanded rapidly during the years following World War II. The threemost prominent American child sponsorship agencies were Foster Parents’ Plan(PLAN), the Save the Children Federation (SCF), and Christian Children’s Fund(previously China’s Children Fund, or CCF). Founded in 1937 in Britain by jour-nalist John Langdon-Davies and refugee worker Eric Muggeridge, PLAN firstsolicited “foster parents” to support children orphaned by the Spanish Civil War.The organization soon moved its headquarters to the United States and extendedsupport to children affected by World War II. By the late fifties, PLAN hadexpanded into Korea, Hong Kong, and Vietnam. Asia, organization officials deter-mined, was “now the critical area in world affairs.”3 PLAN maintained a statedcommitment to political neutrality and supported children without regard tocreed. SCF, an offshoot of the British Save the Children Fund, began assistingchildren in Appalachia in 1932. The organization turned its attention abroadduring World War II. By 1960, it ran sponsorship programs in Finland, France,Greece, Italy, Lebanon, South Korea, and West Germany. Like PLAN, SCF wasnonsectarian. J. Calvitt Clarke, a Presbyterian minister with extensive experiencein foreign relief work, founded CCF with his wife, Helen, in 1938. CCF mandatedBible teaching in the orphanages it supported and assisted only Protestant insti-tutions.4 Supported by individual donors, child sponsorship programs expandedrapidly throughout the fifties. In 1953, for example, CCF supported 12,000 chil-dren in twenty-three countries; by 1961, it cared for 36,000 children in forty-eightcountries.5 The organization frequently boasted, “The sun never sets on theorphanages of CCF.”6 CCF and its peers were gaining a breadth of influencethat—like the reach of the United States itself—spanned key areas of the globe.

2. For more on this argument, see Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in theMiddlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley, CA, 2003).

3. Lenore Sorin to Thomas L. O’Hagan, June 20, 1956, Folder 20, Box 3, FPP.4. On PLAN’s history, see Henry D. Molumphy, For Common Decency: The History of Foster

Parents Plan, 1937-1983 (Warwick, RI, 1984). On CCF, see Larry E. Tise, A Book About Children:The World of Christian Children’s Fund, 1938-1991 (Falls Church, VA, 1993).

5. “Two Yank’s [sic] Encounter Outside a Barbershop-And the Result,” probably April 1953,Folder 8, Box IB2, ChildFund International, Richmond, Virginia (hereafter CCF); Edmund W.Janss, Yankee Si! The Story of Dr. J. Calvitt Clarke and his 36,000 Children (New York, 1961), 27.

6. J. Calvitt Clarke to Verent Mills, January 19, 1952, Folder 11, Box IB1, CCF.

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Some voluntary officials saw aid to children as intimately connected with bur-geoning Cold War strategic concerns. In a 1947 report on aid to Poland, forexample, SCF’s Charles R. Joy argued:

It is very important that the Polish people should know that these things are thegift of the western democracy. Therefore, it will be worth any cost in time ortrouble or money to label garments, and tag shoes, and stamp cartons and cases.If the American flag could be used it would be wonderful. If the tags could be inPolish it would greatly help. But the word America, whether in English orPolish, should appear everywhere. After all we are fighting a battle for freedomand democracy ourselves, even though our chosen weapons are food and shoesand overcoats and kindness.7

An ardent anticommunist, Joy saw SCF as an integral participant in the fightagainst communism.8 Clarke also saw his organization as a player in a globalstruggle. “If I want to injure Communism in China,” he noted, “I know of nobetter way to fight it than to support the children in the orphanages of China’sChildren Fund because they have instilled in them a realization that America savedtheir lives.”9 Clarke’s anticommunist crusade in China, however, would be short-lived. In late 1950, the Chinese government ousted CCF and other Americanagencies from the country. Clarke prepared to continue the fight against com-munism in other countries across the Asian continent. He changed his organiza-tion’s name to Christian Children’s Fund (also known by the abbreviated CCF).From its new overseas headquarters in Hong Kong, CCF housed, fed, andeducated children from Korea to India to Vietnam.

CCF’s experience in China was replicated in Eastern Europe: by 1950,American child sponsorship agencies had been forced out of Poland andCzechoslovakia.10 American agencies’ rejection by communist regimes was frus-trating and costly. But it helped them to position themselves—and theirsupporters—as the agents of U.S. foreign policy. Shortly after Eisenhower andKhrushchev’s 1959 summit meeting in Washington, for example, SCF publishedan article in its World Reporter titled “‘Friendship Fallout’—A SponsorshipReview.” “As ‘Ambassadors of Goodwill,’ sponsors quickly and easily find theirway to a ‘meeting at the summit’ with the children and their families,” the organ-ization noted. “More than 8,000 sponsorships means that more than 8,000 such‘meetings at the summit’ are now in progress, and the number grows as more and

7. Charles R. Joy, “Report on Poland,” November 3, 1947, Folder 19, Box 47, bMS 347,Charles Rhind Joy Papers, Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School,Cambridge, Massachusetts.

8. Joy to Mel Arnold, June 23, 1953, Folder 8, Box 48, ibid.9. Clarke to William G. Taylor, Jr., November 20, 1950, Folder 16, Box IB21, CCF.10. Edna Blue to Foster Parents of Polish Children, 1949 and Blue to Friends, Draft letter,

September 1950, Folder 4, Box 85, FPP.

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more sponsors join the Federation Family.” These intimate meetings rarely madeheadlines. But, the agency argued,

Their significance is communicated, durably and surely—sometimes in a villageschool when a child tells his classmate about his “friend in America,” or when bylamplight in a peasant hut a mother reads to her eagerly listening neighbors thelatest letter from “our American friend.” Those are the times when, no matterwhat others say and no matter how insistently they may say it, an image ofAmerica looms in their hearts and minds, warm, shining and beautiful.11

SCF cast its supporters as active participants in Cold War foreign affairs. It trans-formed the notion of “fallout” from an agent of fear and destruction into a symbolof international amity. If the advent of the atomic age had, as some commentatorsargued, rendered governments powerless to protect their citizens, then the effortsof private individuals assumed outsized importance. American families, SCFsuggested, were ideal “Ambassadors of Goodwill.”

SCF was not alone in looking to private citizens to serve as de facto diplomats:child sponsorship programs reflected larger trends within U.S. Cold War foreignpolicy. During the fifties, U.S. officials actively promoted relationships betweenprivate citizens that crossed national lines as a means of burnishing America’simage overseas. This goal was most clearly articulated in President Eisenhower’s“People-to-People” program, launched in 1956 as part of the United StatesInformation Agency. Eisenhower’s program connected ordinary Americans withtheir counterparts overseas, seeking to build bridges of understanding that wouldhelp cement America’s foreign alliances.12 Child sponsorships were not officiallypart of the People-to-People program, but some government officials recognizedthat they represented a similar impulse. The International CooperationAdministration, the government agency charged with administering U.S. technicalassistance overseas, reprinted an article on American foster parents in its ICA Digestpraising the relationships between foster parents and their foreign children asevidence of the depth of American citizens’ commitment to the welfare of thoseoverseas.13

But the connections between international friendship and anticommunismwere not obvious or predetermined, and not all agencies wished to connect theirwork with Cold War imperatives. In fact, programs that promoted love and friend-ship across national lines could just as easily fall prey to accusations of nationaldisloyalty as receive praise for supporting America’s foreign policy objectives.PLAN’s experiences expose the multivalent nature of child sponsorship programs.In 1954, the agency came under investigation by the Greek intelligence agency,

11. “‘Friendship Fallout’—A Sponsorship Review,” SCF World Reporter, Fall 1959, Folder1960s, Save the Children Federation, Westport, Connecticut (hereafter SCF).

12. Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity(Cambridge, MA, 2009), 160.

13. Andrew Tully, “Our Personal Foreign Aid,” ICA Digest 61, no. 11 (December 1960): 4.





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which was displeased with it for supporting the children of men and women whohad served with the communist rebels during Greece’s recent civil war.14 Thesechildren lived with their impoverished families, and many had lost a parent duringthe war. Greek authorities were concerned that money provided to these childrenwas being channeled to relatives in Iron Curtain countries or being used for “com-munistic purposes” in Greece.15 PLAN agreed that support should be withdrawnfrom families using American money to fund communism. But it refused to dis-criminate against children based solely on their parents’ political affiliation, insist-ing instead on dealing with potential abuses of funds on an individual basis. Theorganization struggled to balance public opinion, which ran strongly against com-munism, with its commitment to political neutrality. Finally, it decided to continueassigning children of “rebel” parents to American sponsors. But organization of-ficials decided to withhold from American sponsors the details of parents’ politicalaffiliation, noting simply that the children had lost parents who fought in the civilwar.16 PLAN’s director in Greece agreed to monitor the mothers of childrenwhose rebel fathers had fled to the Soviet Union. The organization’s homeoffice in New York pledged to subject to special scrutiny the letters written bythese children to their American foster parents.17 “It would have been ruinous forPLAN here if it got around that we were helping Communists,” noted GloriaMatthews, the organization’s international executive director.18

But PLAN’s efforts to maintain political neutrality would soon be abandoned.In February 1957, writer Henry LaCossitt published a story in Parents’ magazinethat showcased the organization’s work in Italy. LaCossitt transported readers toMonteflavio, a small town of medieval stone houses and narrow, steep streetslocated thirty miles east of Rome. He introduced Elma Baccanelli Laurenzi, theAmerican woman at the helm of PLAN’s Italian program, and wrote about howAmerican friendship had transformed the impoverished town and its children.When Laurenzi began enrolling foster children in early 1956, LaCossitt wrote,there were only six overcoats in a town of 1,500 inhabitants. American aid clothedand nourished the town’s children. But it infuriated the local Communist Party,which derided U.S. assistance as a humiliating bribe. The town’s children, warm intheir new American coats and intrigued by the stream of letters arriving from theUnited States, stood by their American friends. When the town elections rolledaround, LaCossitt recounted, the youngsters made it their mission to ensure aCommunist defeat. They engaged in a series of humorous pranks and succeeded inturning the town against the Communists. The “adopted” Italian children of

14. Ismene Kalaris to Fred Mason, December 14, 1954, Folder 300, Box 140, FPP.15. Kalaris to Mason, December 15, 1954, ibid.16. Gloria Matthews to Mason, March 15, 1955.17. Mason to Matthews, February 10, 1955; Mason to Matthews, April 22, 1955; Matthews to

Mason, April 26, 1955, ibid.18. Matthews to Mason, March 15, 1955.





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American foster parents thus brought about the first victory by ChristianDemocrats in Monteflavio in a decade.19

LaCossitt’s lighthearted retelling of her work in Monteflavio angered ElmaBaccanelli Laurenzi. Laurenzi was surprised to learn that the story would be pub-lished, she told her colleague Lenore Sorin in New York. She had recounted thetale of the children’s antics to her American colleagues without the intention ordesire that it be used for publicity purposes. And she felt it a pity that a story tomark the organization’s twentieth anniversary should focus on a political victory.Sorin defended her decision to share the story with LaCossitt. “While it is abso-lutely true that we are non-propaganda and non-political,” Sorin wrote in a letterto Laurenzi, “every other agency’s material has been stressing the political.”PLAN had been accused of communism, Sorin noted, and the organizationneeded to defend its reputation. Furthermore, if PLAN refused to take a politicalstand, potential donors would devote their dollars to an organization that did. “Wehave to, in the end, take some position,” Sorin argued. “Here in this country thelines are drawn very tightly regarding the communist situation,” she noted regret-fully.20 Sorin pushed the organization’s nonpolitical stance to its breaking point. Ina promotional letter, she described PLAN as a nonpolitical organization. “But, inviewing our work of the past, the present and the current world situation,” shereflected, “it is evident that PLAN, wherever it operates, becomes an importantbulwark against Communism.”21

Eagerly or reluctantly, American child sponsorship agencies would come totether their work to U.S. foreign policy objectives. Voluntary agencies sometimessaw their own anticommunist rhetoric appropriated by beneficiaries as a means ofgarnering support. When CCF decided to revoke its support of a Brazilianorphanage in 1956, for example, an American missionary associated with the in-stitution warned Clarke that his organization’s withdrawal would be a boon toenemies of the United States. “I’m afraid the home will suffer—and I also fear thatsome leaders might use the opportunity to encourage ideas against the UnitedStates (for some are all too ready to seize any such opportunity),” she noted in aletter.22 When CCF reversed its decision and continued to fund the orphanage, themissionary thanked Clarke for bolstering the American cause. “By aiding in thisproject you are combating Communism which says that all the U.S. cares about isexploiting the wealth of this nation,” she told him.23 Even some foster childrenadopted anticommunist rhetoric. A Korean youngster wrote to his foster parents:“Due to Communist invasion I became a lonesome child. Thank you very muchfor aiding my helplessness. I tell you and promise that I will study hardest with the

19. Henry LaCossitt, “The Amazing Brats of Monteflavio,” Parents’ Magazine and FamilyHome Guide 32 (February 1957): 39.

20. Sorin to Elma Baccanelli Laurenzi, September 5, 1956, Folder 454, Box 158, FPP.21. Sorin to Friends, undated, Folder 35, Box 86, ibid.22. Faith Graves to Clarke, March 20, 1956, Folder 11, Box IB14, CCF.23. Graves to Clarke, August 5, 1956.





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money you gave me and sometime become a strong member of a democraticcountry.”24

BUIL DING A F AMIL Y O F NATIONS

In crafting child sponsorship programs, American agencies relied upon and popu-larized new psychological understandings of the family and its relation to childdevelopment. By the forties, the rise of social constructionist thought, togetherwith the popularization of psychoanalysis, situated early childhood as a crucialperiod of personality formation. As eugenics fell out of favor in the UnitedStates, many scholars argued that the source of human difference lay not inblood but rather in cultural conditioning during one’s youngest years. This under-standing cast human nature as infinitely malleable, at least during childhood. Itcharged parents, particularly mothers, with the task of providing children with thelove and security they needed to grow into well-adjusted democratic citizens.Indeed, youngsters’ emotional health had consequences that reverberatedbeyond the nursery. Some experts argued that the root of all conflicts—both per-sonal and international in scope—could be found in personal psychology, whichcoalesced during childhood.25

Voluntary organizations depicted international child sponsorships as a meansof creating a sphere of influence tethered to America by deeply personal bonds.“National forms and national governments are to an extent artificial and theirstructure changeable,” noted Ernest Nash, who directed CCF’s Korean operationin the mid-fifties. Governments were ill-equipped to create enduring internationalbonds between peoples, Nash argued. But private organizations—particularlythose tasked with caring for children in their formative years—were well pos-itioned to make lasting friends for the United States:

In our CCF homes thousands of Koreans, at the most impressionable ages ofchildhood and adolescence, are aware morning, noon and night, that their“fatherhood” and “motherhood,” to which they owe their very lives, arebeing undertaken for them by Americans. This knowledge is fixed in theirearliest consciousness. The certainty of this love of distant “parents” is thusineradicable through the years.26

Nash blurred the lines between familial love and diplomatic alliance, between filialduty and political obligation. He harnessed psychological theories of child devel-opment in the service of American prestige overseas. And he situated the intimatesphere of the family as a key site in the global struggle against communism.As Christina Klein has argued, the United States’ Cold War offensive relied not

24. Foster Parents’ Report, May 1954, Folder 17, Box 86, FPP.25. Joanne Meyerowitz, “‘How Common Culture Shapes the Separate Lives’: Sexuality, Race,

and Mid-Twentieth-Century Social Constructionist Thought,” The Journal of American History 96,no. 4: 1057–84.

26. Ernest Nash to Clarke, December 1, 1955, Folder 9, Box IB8, CCF.





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only on the strategy of containment but also on a “logic of inclusion,” an effortto welcome other members of the “free world” into a U.S.-headed familyof nations.27 The fight against communism was not solely a masculine project,Klein and other scholars have demonstrated, but was also crucially dependent onan ideological framework centered on family and domesticity. Love itself became apowerful weapon capable of reshaping the world order. American sponsorshipswould win young friends for the United States, while affection during the forma-tive years of childhood would produce citizens with the personal characteristics ademocracy needed to thrive. In a book about the work of CCF, author EdmundJanss cast doubt on the effectiveness of American armament assistance to thecritical regions in Asia threatened by communism. “The best investment, dollar-for-dollar,” Janss argued, “. . . will be the tangible love sent by Americans who‘adopt’ Asia’s babies.”28

Most of the children sponsored by Americans were not “babies”; some were asold as seventeen. Child sponsorship agencies extended psychologists’ theories re-garding the plasticity of early childhood and the deleterious efforts of familialdeprivation to all participants, from very young children to adolescents. Indeed,voluntary workers such as Nash helped to disseminate current theories regardingthe psychological importance of the family, and the impressionability of youngpeople more generally, to audiences both in the United States and abroad.

The ideal of the nuclear family, historians have demonstrated, loomed large inthe United States in the decades following World War II.29 Postwar culture pos-itioned the family as a haven of security in which to retreat to shut out a threateningworld. But the ideal of the family was just as apt to encourage Americans to lookacross the globe as it was to facilitate a psychological retreat into the single-familyhome. To American child sponsorship agencies, the family served not only as asource of shelter from an international crisis but also as a means of addressing thatcrisis. American organizations’ work with orphans centered on providing thesechildren with a sense of belonging to a family. Many American commentators sawthe family as essential not only to children’s healthy emotional development butalso to the perpetuation of democracy. In the context of the Cold War, the familybecame an icon in the fight against communism. American condemnations of thetotalitarian state frequently relied on images of broken families and children rearedin a spirit of militarism and blind obedience rather than love.30

Children’s relationships with American foster parents were intended to providethem with a sense of belonging to a family, albeit a far-flung one. Letters from

27. Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 151.28. Janss, Yankee Si!, 126.29. See, for example, Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War

Era (New York, 1988).30. See, for example, William H. Wilbur, “Russia Weans Babies from Family’s Love: Molds

Young to Communism,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 31, 1957, 6 and Margaret Wylie, Childrenof China (Hong Kong, 1962).





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foster parents were extremely important to some children, who anxiously antici-pated the monthly mail and reread the letters until they were no longer legible.Youngsters often hung pictures of foster parents on their walls or decorated themwith wreaths of flowers, and some children’s letters conveyed warmth and deepaffection.31 “I have cried for my mother’s warm arms often and though you areliving in a far country across the ocean I am happy that you are my foster motherand father,” wrote Kil Ja, a Korean youngster. “I have not had the words motherand father on my lips for three years since they died.”32 Anna, a refugee child inGermany, asserted, “A drop of Love is sometimes more precious than a whole sackof money!”33 Children’s letters were at once an intimate medium of communica-tion and a currency necessary to gain access to crucial material benefits fromAmerican sponsors.

Children’s missives, however, sometimes strayed from the expected script. In1949, the Communist revolution in China made its way across the ocean in theform of letters sent by Chinese children to their American foster parents.Hundreds of Americans who supported Chinese youngsters through PLANbegan receiving letters praising the new Communist government and denouncingthe Nationalists. “The people are all very happy about the liberation of Shanghaibecause the Liberation Army is very kind to the people. . . . Everyone hates theshameless and mad reactionaries,” Chung-lan reported. One child told herAmerican friends of her classmates’ delight in hearing childhood stories aboutChairman Mao. Another wrote of his eagerness to join the Communist YouthCorps. Feng-ming had actually participated in the revolutionary struggle. The girlwrote about her experience fighting alongside guerilla warriors in the hills and herdisappointment in having to return to school after being diagnosed with a heartailment. “Do you have communists in the States?” wondered Fu-kun. “Have youjoined them?”34 Mixing communist dogma with expressions of friendship towardAmerican foster parents, the children’s letters no doubt defied the expectationsof American voluntary workers and Chinese officials alike. Children’s letters totheir American foster parents reveal youngsters’ liminal position as both pawns andpolitical actors in their own right.

Child sponsorships allowed Americans to create virtual interracial families thatserved as an advertisement for America’s race-blindness—an asset in the Cold

31. “Miss Gloria Matthews, Director in United States and Canada, Visits the Children inEurope,” 1957, Folder 27, Box 86, FPP.

32. Foster Parents’ Plan for War Children, “Foster Parents’ Report,” September 1953, 8,Folder 14, Box IB23, CCF.

33. Memorandum from Elizabeth Whitmore to Director, Foster Parents’ Plan, “QuarterlyReport. Period: July 1-September 30, 1956, Supplementary to Report submitted for 2nd Quarter,”October 1, 1956, Folder 12, Box 2, FPP.

34. Chung-lan to Eunice H. and Mattie F., July 2, 1949; Yu-sze to Muriel H., October 19,1949; Van-un to Mrs. R.H. J., October 24, 1949, Folder 84; Feng-min[g] to Joy C., November 9,1949, Folder 86; Fu-kun to Foster Parents, July 11, 1949, Folder 87, Box 115, ibid.





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War.35 Americans responded enthusiastically to calls to “adopt” Asian children,though their racial liberalism was filtered through the lens of national concerns.Korean children, who were members of a country defending itself valiantly againsta communist attack, were extremely popular; Japanese youngsters, the offspring ofa recent enemy, were not.36 Moreover, black youngsters were largely excludedfrom sponsorship programs until the early to mid sixties. It is likely that racialconcerns played a role in American agencies’ reluctance to expand into Africaduring the fifties. CCF, one of the first organizations to include black youngstersamong its ranks of sponsored children, admitted in 1951 that “colored GI babies”were not very popular among American sponsors.37

In the fifties, child sponsorship took place against the backdrop of an increasingnumber of legal intercountry adoptions. Between 1953 and 1962, Americanfamilies legally adopted approximately 15,000 children from overseas.38 Forsome people—the unmarried, those outside the white Protestant mainstream—sponsoring a child may have served as a means of creating a family when optionssuch as legal adoption were difficult to avail themselves of or closed altogether tothem. Harvey Nash, a single fifty-two-year-old linotype operator from Wisconsin,was one such individual. Nash told a reporter that his adoption of Lidia, a littleItalian girl, “helped to ease the child hunger in my heart.”39 A physician whosponsored a Chinese child lauded her “son” as an antidote to her “frustratedmotherhood” and recommended child sponsorship to “all the ‘old maid’ school-teachers, editors, saleswomen, etc., that you can reach.”40

International foster families both challenged and reinscribed American socialhierarchies. They expanded the definition of “family” to include relationshipsforged across the boundaries of nation and race without the benefit of bloodties. In an era when single parenthood was taboo, they allowed unmarried menand women to create imagined families of their own making. But they excludedsome children from these families by virtue of their race. And they naturalized animbalance of power between the United States and the rest of the world: Americafilled the role of parent while Europe and Asia were invariably cast as children.

Through child sponsorship programs, American voluntary agencies cast prob-lems that could be seen as political in nature as deeply personal, best addressed atleast in part through interventions in the lives of children. In many ways, these

35. Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 153. On the relationship between American race relations andthe Cold War, see, for example, Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image ofAmerican Democracy (Princeton, NJ, 2000).

36. Mills to Clarke, February 9, 1952, Folder 11, Box IB1; Clarke to Mills, October 12, 1952,Folder 4, Box IB2; Clarke to Mills, April 1, 1953, Folder 7, Box IB2, CCF.

37. Clarke to Mills, April 19, 1951, Folder 4, Box IB1, ibid.38. Intercountry Adoption: A Multinational Perspective, ed. Howard Altstein and Rita J. Simon

(New York, 1991), 3.39. Henry LaCossitt, “We Adopted a War Orphan,” Saturday Evening Post 224 (December 15,

1951): 103.40. Janss, Yankee Si!, 57.





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efforts reflect a larger cultural shift within the postwar United States: the growth ofa therapeutic approach that offered, in the words of historian Elaine Tyler May,“private and personal solutions to social problems.”41 Indeed, many Americanworkers saw democracy as rooted not in the structure of government but ratherin the intimate relationships between children and their caretakers. Child spon-sorship agencies enlisted ordinary American families in the mission to protect thefree world.

American voluntary workers suggested that youngsters’ love of democracy andfreedom flowed naturally from child-rearing practices already acknowledged in theUnited States to be in children’s best interest. This entanglement of personal andpolitical considerations allowed voluntary workers to sidestep thorny questionsabout children’s agency and their suitability as political actors. After all, what reallyseparated the children of Monteflavio, whose pranks unseated the localCommunist Party, from Feng-ming, the Chinese girl who fought alongside thecommunist guerillas? American workers might have argued that the difference layin free choice as opposed to coercion. But how much choice did—or should—children in any nation really have with regard to their own upbringing? Americanorganizations’ conflation of the personal and the political made it possible for themto simultaneously embrace and deny the political nature of their work. Childsponsorship programs were thus at once altruistic outpourings of American con-cern for the most vulnerable and political projects aimed at cementing U.S. globalsovereignty. And children themselves were both innocents to be shielded frompolitics and little cold warriors essential to the United States’ victory overcommunism.

41. May, Homeward Bound, 14.





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Little Cold Warriors: Child Sponsorship and International Affairs