The History of US Foreign Disaster Relief

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. 

On March 26, 1812, a devastating earthquake struck Caracas, Venezuela, killing an estimated 30,000 people and leaving the capital city in ruins. When news of the disaster reached the United States, a few weeks later, the United States Congress decided to help, an unusual step for the young country. The $50,000 pledge from the US Treasury, "for the relief of citizens who have suffered by the late earthquake," was of course, motivated by compassion. But it was also a way to support Venezuelan revolutionaries, who were then fighting for independence from Spain, without becoming directly involved in the war. This move to provide foreign aid for relief from a rapid onset natural disaster was so atypical for the United States that it wasn't repeated for nine decades, although the US did occasionally provide humanitarian relief for countries suffering from enduring crises, like war, or famine. 

By the late 19th century, the United States was not just older, but also bigger, having grown through a combination of conquest, treaty, and purchase, beyond its original borders, and to even beyond the land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, to include the territories of Alaska, Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, along with a number of uninhabited islands in the Pacific. In addition to the larger global footprint of the US, and its correspondingly larger military and state departments, the United States government also had an important new partner in disaster relief, the American Red Cross. A Swiss businessman named Henry Dunant, who witnessed the horrific aftermath of the Battle of Solferino in the second Italian War of Independence in 1859, advocated vociferously for voluntary relief organizations who could assist soldiers wounded in war, as well as for treaties that would protect the wounded and those caring for them. His ideas led to the formation both of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the 1864 Geneva Convention. American nurse, Clara Barton, who worked on the front lines in the American Civil War, visited Switzerland in 1869, while recovering her health. There she learned about the Red Cross, and when she returned home, she championed for the creation of an American branch. After facing some resistance from people who refused to believe that the United States would face such a war again, she succeeded in part by arguing that the organization could also assist victims of natural disasters, and the American Red Cross was founded in 1881. By 1900, when Congress first granted a charter to the American Red Cross, it acknowledged the Red Cross's role in providing relief in both times of war and in response to natural disasters, both within the United States and abroad. Although the American Red Cross remained separate from the government, it was granted the legal status of federal instrumentality, and delegated certain responsibilities by the federal government. 

When Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901, he brought with him to the White House, an imperialist outlook, and as the US approach to foreign affairs changed, its ability to respond to catastrophes around the world improved. By 1908, the US had become increasingly involved in relief efforts around the globe. On December 28, 1908, an enormous earthquake struck the Strait of Messina, off the southern coast of Italy. The earthquake and resulting tsunami destroyed cities, killing as many as 100,000 people. It was the most destructive earthquake to ever hit Europe. The United States responded to the disaster, with its efforts lasting nearly six months, and costing nearly $2 million, funded by both the United States government and the American Red Cross. This response included not just immediate assistance with food, shelter, and medical care, but also the construction of permanent housing, an orphanage, and even a hotel. 

Not every US relief effort worked out so well. Because the US response to international disasters crossed multiple federal agencies and external organizations, it could be haphazard and inefficient, and the legal regulations surrounding it were often murky. In order to address these issues, in 1956, the Operations Coordinating Board in the Eisenhower administration produced a manual for foreign disaster relief operations. A few years later, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, in an effort to improve the response time for initial relief efforts, charged chiefs of diplomatic missions with primary responsibility for evaluating a disaster to ascertain whether the US should respond, both on the basis of what assistance was required, and on whether it was, "in the interest of the United States to assist in meeting such initial emergency needs." To ensure that such assistance could be made, each ambassador or mission chief could distribute up to $10,000 from the foreign disaster emergency relief account, without receiving prior authorization. 

In December, 1975, the US Congress, in the International Development and Food Assistance Act, finally formally authorized the ability of the federal government to provide international disaster assistance, something it had of course, already been doing for 163 years at that point. This act marked one of the final steps in a long process to bring order to the system of US foreign disaster assistance. A decade earlier, in January, 1964, Stephen R. Tripp had been appointed to a newly created position within the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, itself a fairly new agency. With the creation of this position, the government finally pulled together the responsibility for oversight and troubleshooting of the US response to international emergencies from the State Department, military and voluntary sector, into one office. The USAID reports that it now responds to an average of 75 crises each year in 70 or more countries, with its aid reaching 10s of millions of people. It continues to provide relief after natural disasters, such as earthquakes and hurricanes, as well as to people affected by what it calls slow onset crises, things like war or drought. And increasingly, USAID focuses on providing people with the tools to survive future crises. 

Joining me in this episode is Dr. Julia Irwin, the T. Harry Williams Professor of History at Louisiana State University, and the author of, "Catastrophic Diplomacy: US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the American Century."

Julia, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Julia Irwin  11:15  
Thanks very much for having me. I'm looking forward to the conversation. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:17  
Yes, so I want to start by asking just how you decided to write this book. I know you had an earlier book on the American Red Cross. So it you know, how did you then decide to tackle this very large topic?

Dr. Julia Irwin  11:31  
Yes, larger than maybe it should have been. So I actually this this, as we noted in my first book was on the American Red Cross and the First World War era, especially at work on the history of humanitarian aid and its role in US foreign relations. So as I was researching what was my dissertation and became that first book, I became, I was focusing mostly on wartime humanitarian assistance. But I came across sort of instances of US disaster relief around the same period, so in the early 20th century, right after the First World War, as well. And so when I was finishing up that first project, I decided to go explore these these peacetime crises, most of them in peacetime, at least, and kind of became interested in the politics of disaster relief, and in times of earthquakes, tropical storms, floods and other sort of natural disasters. So that was, that was where the book began, many years ago. And it became a book really about US foreign disaster aid, and in the 20th century, and the politics of that assistance.

Kelly Therese Pollock  12:35  
So I took a look at your sources and the sheer number of archives. It was a bit astonishing. So tell me a little bit about the research for this book, all the places you needed to go to to find what went into this book.

Dr. Julia Irwin  12:49  
Yeah, so the book is really I'm, I'm focusing on sort of three different elements of of US foreign disaster aid, on one hand, the US State Department and its agents, on the other the US armed forces, well as the Departments of War and Navy, later, the Defense Department; and then the American voluntary sector, so groups like the American Red Cross, but other nongovernmental organizations that became involved in disaster relief. So a lot of that work had me going to the National Archives. The State Department's records are there as well as consular and diplomatic records. The American Red Cross has a wonderful collection there that I used in my first book, some military records as well. And then I went to a lot of presidential libraries. I think I made it everywhere from from Hoover up until Reagan. The Reagan stuff didn't even make it in the book, but I paid my my, my dues. So a lot of presidential libraries can have looking at disaster relief during this administration's, and then some overseas work as well. So this book is primarily about US international disaster aid. But I wanted to think about it in an international context as well. So I did a lot of work in the archives of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, and especially the League of Red Cross Societies, which was the kind of voluntary, the Red Cross body that responded to disasters. I did some work in Rome at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, which was probably my favorite research trip because it was overlooking the Colosseum, and it was just beautiful, and then a bit of work in the UK as well, thinking about how other governments were responding to, to these US foreign aid operations.

Kelly Therese Pollock  14:26  
Toward the end of the book, you cite there's I think a couple of studies that come out and one of them says something like the US has become like the world's fireman, like going putting out disasters everywhere. And so for my whole lifetime, your whole lifetime like that, that's been the role that seems very natural. But that wouldn't have had to have been the case. Could you talk a little bit about how that came to be over time. Of course, the US is not the only country that is responding to disasters, but to take on this role of like, disaster anywhere in the world, we need to go respond.

Dr. Julia Irwin  15:03  
Well, one of the things I think I'm trying to do with this book is to show that there's actually a much longer history of these, these foreign aid operations, and especially the government and military's involvement in these aid operations. And then we often think there's the sort of assumption that US foreign aid begins with with the Marshall Plan in the 1940s, or maybe with, you know, the creation of USAID. I myself, when I started this project, I know that the military plays a major role in disaster relief now, but I kind of imagined this was a like post Vietnam or post cold war reinvention of the military for for the late 20th century. As I started doing more research, though, I realized just how early the US was involved in disaster relief efforts, including the government and the military, but also them working in partnership with voluntary organizations like the Red Cross. The book begins in the 19th century. One of the first, the first instance that we know of official foreign disaster aid was in 1812, when the US responded to the Congress sent aid to survivors of an earthquake in Caracas, Venezuela. Throughout most of the 19th century, the United States wasn't all that involved in disaster relief, had a small global footprint. There weren't that many sort of Americans abroad, but technological changes and the expansion of US power in the late 19th century essentially kind of positioned the United States to play more of a role in this humanitarian field. So by the time you get to the early 20th century, you start to see disaster relief becoming just a really routine element of US foreign relations. One of the kind of next major events I looked at is a volcanic eruption in 1902. Congress responds. They sent military aid. The Red Cross is involved, other organizations. There's a major earthquake in southern Italy, six years later, in 1908. Ships with The Great White Fleet show up. They happen to be sailing around the world and are just a few days away, so they send a few battleships to the scene. So there are instances like these that really showed that kind of much earlier history of foreign relief than we often think of. And this is kind of what I wanted to highlight is this much longer trajectory of disaster aid in the book.

Kelly Therese Pollock  17:17  
You talk some about the different ways that it's decided, are we going to support this country in this disaster? How much are we going to support in what ways and one of those is just pure randomness? So I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit, because it ends up being really like throughout this whole history that you're looking at until toward the end of it, really ad hoc, really happenstance, what ends up happening. Some, it's very obvious, the US is going to get involved, but some, you know, it's like it, there were just too many disasters at once. And they, you know, they couldn't help all of them. So could you talk a little bit about that piece of it? 

Dr. Julia Irwin  17:56  
Yeah, and this is one of the the moments when I'm really happy I'm an I'm a historian and not a political scientist. I feel like if I were a political scientist, or an IR, I would need some sort of theory for when and why disaster relief happened, when in fact, it's often really random. And I, you know, sort of looked for, for reasons for causes, and certainly some of them makes sense. If a disaster is in a place that US people have a lot of connections due to sort of immigrant ties or just sort of feelings of connection and sentiment, they often are more likely to respond. Geography plays a major role that the US has people or territories nearby or military bases nearby, it's easier to to respond. If there are already pre existing economic or political interests in a region there's there's more likelihood. But for any given disaster, there's this just inherent randomness to to the response to how much people decide to give. Some of that is shaped by are there other things in the newspaper that week that capture people's attention? Have they just given to a major disaster somewhere else, and they sort of are done with compassion at that point. So some of them it is really kind of hard to to measure. One of the things that I struck me in doing the research is for a long time, when the State Department began, sort of more officially involved after World War II in relief operations, much of it was funded with what they call a contingency fund. So they understood that these things were contingencies that were going to happen. But this idea of a contingency fund I think, kind of speaks to that even even the people responsible for this realize that the disasters are very contingent events that can happen at any moment. But they also can change the course of of US foreign relations with other places and the course of global history itself. So I think that kind of exploring that contingency is a really, it tells us something about how how history works as well. So it's kind of fun to think about that way.

Kelly Therese Pollock  19:47  
Yeah,I found it so interesting when I was thinking about this like ad hoc notion that it's like every time something came up, it was like, "oh unpredictable thing we couldn't have guessed," and you know, most of these are unpredictable. You can't predict an earthquake or a hurricane very far in advance, but you can predict that things will happen. And so, you know, by the time they finally say, "Oh right, we need these contingency funds," you know, it's it's starting to come in, that "Alright, we're gonna keep having these disasters happen that we need to respond to."

Dr. Julia Irwin  20:16  
Yeah, yeah. And then trying to kind of make you make educated guesses about when they will happen, how many, you know how many they will be responding to in each in any given year? I mean, this is kind of part of the calculations that go into to planning and preparing for the potentially unknowable but yeah.

Kelly Therese Pollock  20:32  
So could you talk some about I mean, this is the crux of the book, but you know, the the way that this aid is being used as diplomacy, as a function of what the State Department is trying to accomplish, or the presidential administration is trying to accomplish with a given country. Sometimes it's a newly independent country, sometimes it's a country that could teeter into communism. So what are the ways that that that's really a super crucial piece of how it's decided who to help, how to help?

Dr. Julia Irwin  21:05  
Yeah, well, my book opens with an American Red Cross official named Sam Krakow, who was, he kind of led their international services department essentially for a couple decades, most of his career. And he's griping to his boss, who's who's a retired Army Commander heading the Red Cross. And he starts to complain about how the American government is, is politicizing all of the aid that it's sending to other countries. And he's he's really complaining and seeing this as a kind of new phenomenon. But in fact, what I argue in the book is that disaster relief has always been political, and very explicitly in policy and in various manuals and documents. There is a stated realization, right, that disaster relief should be not only for the interests of disaster survivors abroad, but also in the US national interest. So when disasters happen, State Department officials, both in Washington and sort of on the ground are quickly in communication to decide whether aid is needed for humanitarian reasons, but also whether that aid will serve US interests in some ways. They might be political, they might be economic, they might be strategic, but it is a calculation that they're making throughout. And those decisions to provide aid are often kind of shaped by by a desire to to burnish the United States image in other places, to reflect the sort of benevolence of the United States on the global stage. So there's a public diplomacy aspect to it. And this is also very conscious, a lot of the arrivals of aid for instance, as aid arrives and ships and planes, it's often very purposefully publicized by people who work for the State Department and the USIS, the Information Services, the USAAID Information Agency. They recognize the the potential positive publicity that that aid can bring. It also becomes a tool to, to try to influence affairs in other nations, sometimes in different sorts of ways. But the the aid that is provided, for instance, to political leaders can come with strings attached, or at least with the implication that some strings are attached as well. So there is this sense, just throughout that that aid has a political value and a diplomatic value, for better and for worse.

Kelly Therese Pollock  23:18  
And sometimes it doesn't work out, of course. Could you talk a little bit about, usually the aid is welcome and people are happy to receive it, may or may not be happy with the strings. But there are certain times that you talk about that it's just flat out refused when the US offers, or it's accepted, and then quickly, turns bad. Could you talk a little bit about that? 

Dr. Julia Irwin  23:43  
Yeah, and I think, you know, one of the interesting things is that most of these people have have said, said to me, "Oh, you're writing about humanitarian interventions." And I kind of reject that term, because the term humanitarian intervention suggest sort of an intervention in another country without that state's permission as sort of violation of state sovereignty, which is not really happening in most of these cases. In most cases, the US government is making an offer of assistance that is then accepted by a country that has been affected by disaster. Even so there's there's pretty powerful power dynamics at play. So a few of the examples, early on in 1907, there's a major earthquake in Kingston, Jamaica, which at that point is a British colony. In this case, what happens is a US naval commander arrives on the scene. There's a bit of miscommunication and he thinks he has permission to land his his troops ashore. He lands them and they they not only take part in relief efforts, but they start doing things like tearing down buildings that look like they're about to crumble. Some of them are also armed and they begin to help put down an uprising in a prison. Essentially, the governor finally gets wind of this and this miscommunication and he's furious. He says we're not allowed to land you know armed sailors in British territory without the state's permission. So it leads to this major kind of diplomatic kerfuffle that lasted several months. That's kind of one of the early examples. 55 years later, there's a major hurricane named Flora that that strikes both Cuba and Haiti, in 1963. In this case, the US government really wants to provide aid to Cuba for these political reasons. They're very sort of explicitly saying, "We want the Cuban people to show them that we care. And this is a great way to to essentially stick it to Castro." This is what they're saying. And the Cuban government refuses. They refuse to accept aid from either the US government or the American Red Cross. The US government is trying to figure out how to get aid into Cuba, because they so desperately want to do this for these political reasons. There are these moments kind of throughout the book, where the the kind of politics surrounding aid become inflamed for various reasons.

Kelly Therese Pollock  25:51  
 I want to dig in a little bit to the third pillar. So the American Red Cross and the other NGOs that are helping, and it's such an interesting relationship that especially the American Red Cross is  essentially a quasi part of the government at certain points in its history. But these are they have the ability, then to take these private donations. It was especially interesting when there would be US president saying to the country, "Please give money to the Red Cross," and then the government helps get the aid that the Red Cross has collected. So could you talk a little bit about this, this really unique relationship and and the ways that these NGOs are able to do some things that the government would not be able to do or to react in certain times when Congress isn't in session or something in a way that the government cannot? 

Dr. Julia Irwin  26:43  
Yeah, and this is something I've kind of that has been of interest to me, both throughout my entire research career. So my first book was really looking at the American Red Cross as essentially an arm of the US government during during wartime. But this also kind of goes back to what historian Emily Rosenberg, many years ago famously called the associational state. So this idea that governance is not simply something that happens from only through official channels, but through these these partnerships with what she called chosen instruments of US foreign relations. Brian Balogh more recently has also written about the associational state and this this kind of these private, private/public partnerships that allow US power to to function. And this is really a major part of the book. The Red Cross is unique among aid organizations in its relationship with the US government. It gets its first congressional charter in 1900, and then five years later, a second one, and shortly thereafter, has this major reorganization. After that reorganization, the Red Cross's headquarters moved to the same building as the State, War, and Navy Departments. So they're down the hall from the Secretary of State and they're talking nonstop. They're there until they get their own permanent headquarters, which is just two blocks away, but they're in constant communication with with the State Department and when disasters happen with often with the White House as well. And there is this kind of this this reliance on the Red Cross to to serve as the United States humanitarian arm before it really has the ability to do so itself. As we get into the mid 20th century, there are another a number of other organizations that come on the scene. They don't have the same relationship as the American Red Cross, but do forge these connections with the government. So these are groups like CARE, Church World Service, Catholic Relief Services. They're raising money from from private donors, but they get government benefits. The government allows them subsidies to to ship foreign aid abroad, mostly for free. It really helps their budgets. They get access to surplus commodities that the US government has in storage. So there's all of these ways that they benefit from this relationship. And then the government, in turn, has these essentially partners in the field of foreign aid who are doing, in communication with it and trying to serve US national interests as well. So it is I think, to to understand really the workings of of US power in the world, we have to think about these, these relationships. I often tell my students that state and non state are not anywhere nearly as separate as we often think they are. So thinking about the ways that they work together is really important part of this, too.

Kelly Therese Pollock  29:19  
Yeah, no, that was super fascinating. So I want to talk a little bit about the ways that racism and beliefs about certain peoples, certain countries, really shapes, maybe not always how much aid is given, but how the aid is actually dispersed, who is empowered to distribute the aid. So could you talk some about that and the way that plays out and it continues, you know, maybe in slightly different forms, but it continues really throughout your book? 

Dr. Julia Irwin  29:54  
Yeah. And this is, you know, it's it's most obvious and evident in the early 20th century, I think when, in part when people are more willing to to express their racism and prejudices openly. But what happens essentially, is that early in the 20th century, when the US government and the American Red Cross decide to aid another country, if that country is well, in Western Europe or Japan, sort of perceived by people at the time to be what they would have called a civilized country or sort of peer to the United States, they typically tend to turn over the funds to the Red Cross Society of that country or to other government officials, and let them use them as they see fit. In most other places, so in China, in much of the Caribbean Basin, and South America, where there's a lot of US aid in these years, what happens instead is that US diplomats and consuls are essentially charged with overseeing the distribution of aid. So they really become these responsible parties in deciding who is worthy of receiving assistance, who is allowed to to receive it, what types of aid are going to be given. There's a lot of concern among these people with with promoting dependency, or even the the sort of laziness and idleness of people who for the record, have, whose lives have just been totally, you know, overturned. But they, they want to ensure that these, that relief is not creating dependency, and it's even encouraging a strong worth work ethic. So a lot of the relief is is focused on getting people back to work into laboring as well. And, you know, it really varies, like there are some people in this book who are really admirable people who are doing good work and care and are really culturally sensitive. And there are others who are just blatantly sort of, especially behind the scenes and their private correspondence, criticizing the people that they're supposed to be helping, disparaging them for racial and sort of classist reasons. So I think that, you know, seeing that kind of behind the scenes look, is is interesting and helps to see, you know, where this this disaster diplomacy worked and where it didn't, right so that the people who were more culturally sensitive and more willing to work with people on the ground tended to have better outcomes in some cases than their counterparts.

Kelly Therese Pollock  32:06  
We talked a little bit about the way that it's the aid is acting as diplomacy. But I was thinking some about how disasters that have happened in our lifetimes in the US and how the response to the disaster might make or break a mayor or a governor or a president. And so it occurred to me as I was reading that, you know, helping helping a country get through a disaster may make that leader at the time look really good. You know, and maybe that's intentional. Sometimes, maybe that's not. I wonder if you could talk some about that piece, because it certainly is something that is they're thinking about that's being discussed in some of the correspondence. 

Dr. Julia Irwin  32:51  
Yeah, and there's there's some really interesting instances in in the Caribbean Basin, with with leaders who would essentially go on to be authoritarian dictators. So in this case, I'm thinking Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua. Both of these men are involved in disaster relief efforts in their respective countries to heal right after he has kind of taken power. Somoza as he is coming to power, he's he's kind of involved in the relief effort. US officials on the ground are praising these men for for being for promoting order and stability and countering lawlessness. And you know, in retrospect, right, knowing kind of what happens afterwards, it's it's really like there I want to describe them as writing love letters to Trujillo, which essentially the guy on the ground was was doing, the marine on the ground. So there is this kind of sense that like there is, you know, that this the ability to kind of create order out of chaos, right, I think for for these people on the scene that they sort of see this as as a virtue and as a benefit. It's not always quite so so nefarious either, though, I think. There are a lot of these diplomats on the ground also see this as a chance to the US diplomats as a chance to prove themselves. One of the sort of more positive examples happens in in Japan in 1923. There's a major earthquake and fire that destroys most of Tokyo and Yokohama. The US diplomat, the ambassador there, his name is Woods. He is actually incredibly, compared to a lot of us this kind of contemporaries, much more culturally sensitive, much more kind of aware of not sort of coming in and then stepping on sort of Japanese toes and and turning relief over into treating Japanese people as equals and as allies and he's able to really build a lot of respect for this. It's fairly quickly the the diplomatic benefits that he is able to kind of build unfortunately are pretty quickly dismantled, thanks to events in the United States. These sort of rising anti immigrant sentiments and efforts to ban Japanese immigration lead what sort of goodwill he had helped to create to to to crumble fairly quickly. But I do think there's this moment of, you know, this, this diplomat kind of recognizing that this is a time when he can make good on this this moment of crisis to help build better relations. So there's kind of these these different moments we can think about in that way.

Kelly Therese Pollock  35:14  
So I had coincidentally, right before reading your book had read, "How to Hide an Empire." And so as I was reading, I was seeing the global footprint of the United States grow and grow and grow. So could you talk a little bit about how that global footprint helps the US and, you know, really, over time, makes their ability, and technology has a role in this as well, but makes the ability of the US to respond to crises really everywhere, so much easier?

Dr. Julia Irwin  35:46  
Yeah, no, and I'm glad that you read that, and saw this connection, because I love that book, and it's certainly very much in my own thinking about how US power works, too. But one of the arguments that I'm making in this book is one of the things that really changed. In the beginning of our conversation, I mentioned that the early 20th century is this kind of moment where we really see disaster relief take off. One of the things that has just happened is the United States has acquired overseas territories in Puerto Rico, in the Philippines, in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, shortly thereafter, the Canal Zone. Each of these places becomes US military bases are built there and installations. But each of them also become the staging grounds for US relief operations in those regions. The Canal Zone especially becomes a really important kind of cog in US disaster relief, first in the Caribbean and Central America, but then eventually in South America.  And this is due in part, you mentioned technology, you know, as airplanes and air power, allow the United States to kind of connect to other parts of the world, the ability to send aid through the Canal Zone, to Chile, to Argentina, to other parts of South America becomes really kind of important. So a lot of the aid that I see early in the book is coming from these places where the military has tents, and it has rations, and it has people who can help respond. And so the kind of regions where the US is doing a lot of aid are in the Caribbean Basin and to a certain extent in East Asia. What changes during and after World War II is the United States becomes some what Immerwahr in his book calls a pointillist empire, or what other scholars have called a an empire of bases, um, since it comes out of the war, with access to or control of something like 2000 military bases and installations globally. That number shrinks and fluctuates, but still a lot, right? The US has this enormous footprint. And it's from these bases too, that we start to see US aid going out in military planes become very involved. They send, they carry not only American aid, but they're often carrying aid, especially in the 1950s kind of early on for other countries, who don't have this this airpower kind of capabilities to deliver aid. They're delivering aid for the International Red Cross at times. So it's really kind of striking to see how military power is sort of, becoming a military power, and then superpower, really enables the United States to project humanitarian power really more more successfully too. It's not just the military. It's also the kind of expansion of US diplomats so that the number of diplomats and embassies and consular posts really grows kind of steadily throughout the 20th century. So simply the the later development missions as well, but people are on the ground, people are more likely to be nearby and able to respond when a disaster happens, or they send back to Washington that it has happened. So there's a greater awareness just because there are people on the ground. So that kind of, yeah, that expansion of the United States global footprint really plays a role in in in all sorts of ways in influencing where, where and why the US is responding.

Kelly Therese Pollock  38:55  
So at the very end of your book, you talk a little bit about looking to the future. We know there are going to be increasing number of disasters that are going to disproportionately affect people going forward. So can you just talk a little bit about that? That's sort of what we can learn from the past to think about the future. 

Dr. Julia Irwin  39:16  
Yeah, and you know, it's, it's, it's always a tricky question or like, right, and how much, history does not repeat itself, right. But it does rhyme in some ways. And I think so much has changed, and the book that I wrote really focuses on the early 20th century up to the 70s, so about 50 years since. But 50 years have passed since the main kind of bulk of the book ends. A lot has changed in the last 50 years. A lot has stayed the same, sort of the basic structures that I that I outlined, kind of the development of the system of US disaster aid that we have in place today was what was built in the 20th century. So there are a lot of connections. I think, though, you know, one of the takeaways that I that I hope readers will will take away is that, you know, there are moments I think in this book, where the response was catastrophic. It was terrible, right that US officials did not do well, they were paternalistic, they were controlling, but there were also good moments, right? I mentioned the guy in Japan earlier, there, that sort of ambassador in Japan. There were a number of other moments where people did better, right, and then figured out how to communicate, to collaborate, to work with people on the ground. Um, so I think kind of thinking about those moments where it worked and where it didn't, where international cooperation was, was successful and effective, as opposed to the opposite of that, you know. I think taking away those moments is is helpful for thinking about foreign aid, as we move forward. I think history can help us think about our present in ways that it kind of can reflect some of the issues that we're thinking about today, hopefully, and in ways that help us learn from the past.

Kelly Therese Pollock  40:47  
I would love to encourage everyone to read the book. So how can they get a copy?

Dr. Julia Irwin  40:52  
Thank you. Well, it is available for sale at UNC Press. So I certainly encourage buying direct from from the press itself, but it's also available from a number of online bookstores. So wherever you choose to shop, so yeah, thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Kelly Therese Pollock  41:09  
Well, Julia, thank you. This was fantastic.

Dr. Julia Irwin  41:12  
Thank you so much. I do appreciate it. I enjoyed the conversation.

Teddy  42:04  
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