The Goodies, the Baddies, and the Baggies: U.S. Disaster Relief Since 1812
With Professor Julia F. Irwin
Immigration has been in the news week after week after week… after week after week after week. As a point of comparison, I thought we’d explore the history of U.S. humanitarian assistance, not at the border but in the countries immigrants often leave. In conversation, and in Catastrophic Diplomacy, Professor Julia F. Irwin (LSU) reveals that our government’s treatment of disaster survivors, even in their home countries, has rarely been motivated by a pure desire to help.
A condensed transcript of our conversation edited for clarity is below. You can also listen to the audio of our conversation, which includes a discussion of the formation of the Red Cross, World War II’s transformation of America’s global footprint, whether or not it’s okay to ship fish via the mail, and more:
Ben: To begin, I wonder if you could walk us through when the U.S. began providing disaster relief.
JFI: My book really starts with this pivotal moment in 1812. There was a major earthquake in Caracas, Venezuela, which had just declared its independence from Spain. Back in the States, many people wanted to assist. Congress sent a ship loaded with supplies, marking the first time the government provided disaster assistance.
It was only later on, though, that the U.S. became a rising power on the world stage. In the 1890s, it established footholds in Puerto Rico, Guantanamo Bay, the Philippines, and soon in the Panama Canal Zone. All of these sites became staging grounds for U.S. disaster relief operations.
When a volcano erupted in 1902 in Martinique, Teddy Roosevelt's administration was keen to respond. For the second time, the government sent aid and supplies (from the mainland and U.S. territories) to assist, much as it had done in Caracas 90 years earlier. Disaster relief took off from there.
Ben: How did it very quickly change into something beyond humanitarian aid?
JFI: We often think of humanitarian relief as aid that meets people's basic needs, like food, but in the early 20th century, there were several disasters where American relief officials remained involved for months following the onset of crises.
In places like Italy, where there was a major earthquake and tsunami in late 1908, U.S. officials stayed on to build cottages, a hotel to boost tourism, and an orphanage for Italian children, meant to teach them to be farmers.
Similar patterns played out in places like Guatemala and China. Philosophies of charity at the time suggested that you had to put disaster survivors to work, otherwise they’d become dependent on aid. Likewise, officials dispensing aid focused on who was “worthy” of receiving it.
Ben: You mention a guy named John Hicks working on behalf of the government and the Red Cross in Chile after an earthquake in 1906. Assuming Chileans “might waste the money if they had so much at once,” Hicks distributed assistance only in small sums, requiring relief recipients to make follow-up visits if they wanted more aid.
JFI: That’s right.
Ben: Can you imagine Hicks on Halloween? He’d give out raisins, one at a time, only to people whose costumes he deemed worthy.
JFI: To be fair, he wasn’t the only one acting like that. American paternalism was also tinged with racist and classist assumptions. Hicks and his fellow consuls in Latin America and China described the people they were supposedly there to help in really derogatory ways.
Ben: Despite the racism, you chronicle how aid recipients were often grateful for American assistance. At other times, like in Nicaragua in the 1920s, there was a lot of pushback. Can you elaborate, please?
JFI: Nicaragua is fascinating in all sorts of ways.
For the better part of 20 years, beginning in 1912, Nicaragua was under Marine occupation. An earthquake struck in 1931 just as Marines were beginning to leave. After the quake, the remaining Marines, together with Anastasio Somoza García, founder of the Somoza family dictatorship, declared martial law.
The Marines, according to their own records, were putting out fires, clearing away rubble, and preventing looters from stealing things and causing upheaval. At the same time, there was a lot of news circulating in the Nicaraguan press reporting the Marines were starting fires and shooting people on site, accusing them of being looters.
Clearly, whether or not the reports were true, many Nicarguans perceived the U.S. presence not as altruism but as a continued occupation. And I’ll add that in the same records that the Marines were talking about relief operations, they also detailed the number of people they killed each week while searching for Augusto Sandino, leader of the opposition to the U.S. occupation.
Ben: If Sandino sounds familiar, he inspired the name of the Sandinistas in the ‘70s, who were fighting a different Somoza amid the Iran-Contra affair.
JFI: And a different Somoza was in charge for an earthquake in the early ‘70s, too.
Ben: I’m getting the sense you just think of time in terms of earthquakes.
JFI: Yeah, it’s kind of a problem.
But the fact that the U.S. was committing acts of violence while claiming to be humanitarian reflects how militarism and humanitarianism sometimes go hand in hand.
Ben: The often convoluted goals of disaster relief segs us a little bit into the Cold War. Can you talk about some of the mixed results of humanitarian efforts then?
JFI: The onset of the Cold War and international decolonization created new motivations for providing aid. U.S. officials wanted to compete with the Soviet Union to win the hearts and minds of the world. There’s this indicative moment when three disasters happened at roughly the same time in 1963.
First, there was a major earthquake in Yugoslavia. The U.S. sent all sorts of assistance, like tents and rations, but a larger aid package was stalled in Congress because some representatives saw Yugoslavia as too communistic.
Soon after, a hurricane hit Haiti and Cuba. Some U.S. officials really wanted to give aid to Cuba because, as one of them said, it would “make us look like the goodie, while Fidel Castro will look like the baddie.” But Castro refused the aid.
Meanwhile, in Haiti, officials didn’t really know how to respond. They provided some aid, but they were worried François Duvalier, the dictator in power, would take it away. So the results of U.S. efforts were really mixed during the Cold War.
Ben: Right. I noted that Simone Duvalier, the Haitian first lady, requisitioned much of the American food aid and then re-bagged it in unmarked bags distributed by her own charitable foundation.
JFI: It’s actually a law that foreign assistance from the U.S. be labeled as a gift from the people of the United States. American officials were infuriated any time the labels were changed, in Haiti and elsewhere, suggesting their motivations were not just to help people.
Ben: I guess this history can be boiled down to the goodies, the baddies, and the baggies.
JFI: I should have changed the name of my book.
For decades, disaster relief was administered in an incredibly ad hoc manner. The government and Red Cross were sort of making it up as they went along. Finally, a few years after the creation of USAID in 1961, the government created a new coordinator of foreign disaster assistance. For the first time, there was a person in the U.S. government whose job it was to coordinate State Department, military, and voluntary relief efforts.
Disaster aid has since ballooned in size and budget, but the basic structures were in place by 1975 and they’ve essentially governed how U.S. foreign disaster aid operates ever since.
Ben: That kind of rounds us out from 1812 to the present.
Knowing this history, what comes to mind for you when seeing the U.S. deliver (or withhold) humanitarian aid today, especially with climate change looming?
JFI: I think there’s a lot of continuity; a lot of mixed motivations. There are a lot of really good people doing disaster aid work. Certainly some of the paternalism and resistance to listening to the real needs of disaster survivors can still be found, too.
There’s been a movement to push back against that: to think about local voices, local needs, local buy-in, right? Not just in disaster relief but in humanitarian circles as a whole. And I think that's a hopeful development: listening to what people want rather than telling them what they need.
Ben: You conclude, “At this critical moment, it is time to focus less on American diplomatic interests and strategic objectives, and more on the human consequences and authentic humanitarian possibilities.”
A great way to sum up the history. Thank you so much for being here, Professor Irwin.
JFI: Thank you so much, Ben. I really enjoyed the conversation.