The Foreign Service Journal, May 2010

tims of violence in 1824, individuals, churches and other organizations raised funds and purchased clothes and other supplies. In 1827 and 1828 alone, Americans sent $3.8 million worth of goods to Greece, including as- sistance for agricultural development. During this same period private aid was sent to flood victims in France and famine victims in Cape Verde. Support for basic education was the primary form of development coopera- tion. But it was not the only one. In 1830, Peter Parker opened a health center in Canton, China, the first re- ported instance of foreign health assis- tance by U.S. based private groups. As this sector approach evolved, commu- nity development increasingly became a formal objective of work abroad. Partnerships among private groups and the growing scale of private organ- izations enabled more than 10,000 new missionaries to be sent overseas by WorldWar I. On average, they contin- ued their studies for six years beyond high school; their ranks included a large number of professionally trained med- ical specialists, agriculturalists and teachers. The sheer scale and value of these fi- nancial and volunteer efforts is notable. By 1890, annual private contributions by Americans for overseas missions to- taled $339million, adding up to billions of dollars over the decades. The Rise of Foundations Globalization and various social dis- locations during the late 1800s fostered the creation of new institutions, includ- ing “general purpose foundations,” “community foundations” and “donor- advised funds.” John Rockefeller es- tablished the International Health Commission in 1913, which soon launched the Rockefeller Foundation into international public health reform and capacity-building activities. In 1915 it launched a 30-year campaign against yellow fever. That same year, the China Medical Board under the Rockefeller Founda- tion started to expand and modernize a small Protestant missionary medical center in Peking, turning it into a full- fledged teaching hospital modeled on the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. (This is where my grand- parents served and my mother was born in 1923.) As the first century of private hu- manitarian relief and development co- operation came to a close, there was a notable increase in the number of pri- vate industrial foundations, integration of national philanthropic organizations, and experimentation with new public- private partnerships, such as the Amer- ican Red Cross. In contrast to earlier eras of private initiatives designed in- dependently of government, these in- dustrial foundations appear to have been partly oriented to working closely with government, providing research and acting as venture capitalists for public programs. U.S. Government Foreign Assistance and Cooperation In 1812, Congress passed an “Act for Relief of the Citizens of Venezuela” that funded the purchase and shipping of $799,000 in food aid. This was in re- sponse to an intense earthquake that killed 10,000 people in Caracas and destroyed 90 percent of the city. The motivation was both humanitarian and for trade development. Two years later, leaders of the Missouri Territory petitioned Congress for aid following the territory’s own earthquake, suc- cessfully citing the Venezuelan relief effort as a precedent. Congress allocated funds to support the founding of Liberia in 1847, yet at the same time it turned down as un- constitutional a proposal to give $14 million for famine relief in Scotland and Ireland. (The Creek Indians, from their reservation in Oklahoma, donated a hundred thousand bushels of food grains to the Irish.) Washington’s role in that crisis was limited to using mili- tary ships to transport private U.S. as- sistance for local distribution by British officials, the Catholic Church and the Central Relief Committee of the Dublin Society of Friends (Quakers). Promotion of U.S. food exports, an initiative launched by the private sec- tor in the 19th century, was later adopted by the federal government. Charles J. Murphy became known as the “Corn Missionary” because of his efforts to popularize corn in Europe, both to help American farmers market their surpluses and feed hungry Euro- peans. With the endorsement of the New York Produce Exchange, he toured the U.S. to raisemoney for a vast exhibit of corn and corn products at the Paris Exhibition of 1889. Not long thereafter, President Benjamin Harri- son’s Secretary of Agriculture, Jeremiah Rusk, named Murphy a USDA agent. Murphy’s initiative was a precursor to the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act, operated through the Commodity Credit Corporation as a mechanism for systematic shipment of food outside of emergency situations. Following in that tradition, a quarter of theMarshall Plan’s resources were dedicated to the provision of food, feed and fertilizer. After that program ended, U.S. farm- ers lobbied for continuation of food aid, resulting in the 1954 Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act (P.L. 480). For 150 years, U.S. foreign humanitarian relief and development cooperation evolved primarily under private- sector leadership. 46 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A Y 2 0 1 0