sara fieldston

Little Cold Warriors: Child Sponsorship and

International Affairs

Dear Foster Mother: This is the first time I write to you, a stranger, and call you
Mother. It seems very funny, daring, bashful, but I rely on your understanding,

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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 an
American woman he had never met. This young correspondent was enrolled in a
program 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 forge
fictive kinships that stretched across oceans, cultivated through the exchange of
letters, parcels, and, ideally, love. Sponsorship involved virtual, not legal, adoption:
American “foster parents” committed to support a particular child for a certain
period of time. “Adoption” programs proliferated during the years following
World War II, spurred in part by the challenge of caring for huge numbers
of 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 also
exchanged letters, which were coordinated and translated by agency staff. Many
advocates of child sponsorship described relationships cultivated across the globe,
particularly those involving impressionable children, as molding young minds and
laying 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 politicians
and diplomats into the province of ordinary men, women, and children. They
reveal the seminal role of the family in influencing American understandings of
and 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 of
Rhode Island, Special Collections Department, Kingston, Rhode Island (hereafter FPP).

Diplomatic History, Vol. 38, No. 2 (2014). ß The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University
Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. doi:10.1093/dh/dhu008

240
 Child Sponsorship and International Affairs : 241

independent organizations became participants in global politics. And they en-

courage a consideration of the significance of subjectivity and emotion in shaping
the contours of the Cold War. Indeed, child sponsorship programs suggest that the
United States’ strategy of containment took place alongside a less-studied effort to
unite America and her allies through the bonds of love and friendship.2

“O U R C H O S E N W E A P O N S ”
First pioneered by U.S. voluntary agencies during the thirties, child sponsorship
programs expanded rapidly during the years following World War II. The three
most prominent American child sponsorship agencies were Foster Parents’ Plan
(PLAN), the Save the Children Federation (SCF), and Christian Children’s Fund

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(previously China’s Children Fund, or CCF). Founded in 1937 in Britain by jour-
nalist John Langdon-Davies and refugee worker Eric Muggeridge, PLAN first
solicited “foster parents” to support children orphaned by the Spanish Civil War.
The organization soon moved its headquarters to the United States and extended
support to children affected by World War II. By the late fifties, PLAN had
expanded into Korea, Hong Kong, and Vietnam. Asia, organization officials deter-
mined, was “now the critical area in world affairs.”3 PLAN maintained a stated
commitment to political neutrality and supported children without regard to
creed. SCF, an offshoot of the British Save the Children Fund, began assisting
children in Appalachia in 1932. The organization turned its attention abroad
during World War II. By 1960, it ran sponsorship programs in Finland, France,
Greece, Italy, Lebanon, South Korea, and West Germany. Like PLAN, SCF was
nonsectarian. J. Calvitt Clarke, a Presbyterian minister with extensive experience
in foreign relief work, founded CCF with his wife, Helen, in 1938. CCF mandated
Bible teaching in the orphanages it supported and assisted only Protestant insti-
tutions.4 Supported by individual donors, child sponsorship programs expanded
rapidly 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-eight
countries.5 The organization frequently boasted, “The sun never sets on the
orphanages of CCF.”6 CCF and its peers were gaining a breadth of influence
that—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 the
Middlebrow 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.
242 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y

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, for
example, SCF’s Charles R. Joy argued:
It is very important that the Polish people should know that these things are the
gift of the western democracy. Therefore, it will be worth any cost in time or
trouble 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 in
Polish it would greatly help. But the word America, whether in English or
Polish, should appear everywhere. After all we are fighting a battle for freedom
and democracy ourselves, even though our chosen weapons are food and shoes

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and overcoats and kindness.7
An ardent anticommunist, Joy saw SCF as an integral participant in the fight
against communism.8 Clarke also saw his organization as a player in a global
struggle. “If I want to injure Communism in China,” he noted, “I know of no
better way to fight it than to support the children in the orphanages of China’s
Children Fund because they have instilled in them a realization that America saved
their lives.”9 Clarke’s anticommunist crusade in China, however, would be short-
lived. In late 1950, the Chinese government ousted CCF and other American
agencies 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, and
educated 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 and
Czechoslovakia.10 American agencies’ rejection by communist regimes was frus-
trating and costly. But it helped them to position themselves—and their
supporters—as the agents of U.S. foreign policy. Shortly after Eisenhower and
Khrushchev’s 1959 summit meeting in Washington, for example, SCF published
an article in its World Reporter titled “‘Friendship Fallout’—A Sponsorship
Review.” “As ‘Ambassadors of Goodwill,’ sponsors quickly and easily find their
way 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.
 Child Sponsorship and International Affairs : 243

more sponsors join the Federation Family.” These intimate meetings rarely made
headlines. But, the agency argued,
Their significance is communicated, durably and surely—sometimes in a village
school when a child tells his classmate about his “friend in America,” or when by
lamplight in a peasant hut a mother reads to her eagerly listening neighbors the
latest letter from “our American friend.” Those are the times when, no matter
what others say and no matter how insistently they may say it, an image of
America 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 symbol

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of international amity. If the advent of the atomic age had, as some commentators
argued, rendered governments powerless to protect their citizens, then the efforts
of private individuals assumed outsized importance. American families, SCF
suggested, 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 foreign
policy. During the fifties, U.S. officials actively promoted relationships between
private citizens that crossed national lines as a means of burnishing America’s
image overseas. This goal was most clearly articulated in President Eisenhower’s
“People-to-People” program, launched in 1956 as part of the United States
Information Agency. Eisenhower’s program connected ordinary Americans with
their counterparts overseas, seeking to build bridges of understanding that would
help cement America’s foreign alliances.12 Child sponsorships were not officially
part of the People-to-People program, but some government officials recognized
that they represented a similar impulse. The International Cooperation
Administration, the government agency charged with administering U.S. technical
assistance overseas, reprinted an article on American foster parents in its ICA Digest
praising the relationships between foster parents and their foreign children as
evidence of the depth of American citizens’ commitment to the welfare of those
overseas.13
But the connections between international friendship and anticommunism
were not obvious or predetermined, and not all agencies wished to connect their
work 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 national
disloyalty 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, Folder
1960s, 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.
244 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y

which was displeased with it for supporting the children of men and women who
had served with the communist rebels during Greece’s recent civil war.14 These
children lived with their impoverished families, and many had lost a parent during
the war. Greek authorities were concerned that money provided to these children
was being channeled to relatives in Iron Curtain countries or being used for “com-
munistic purposes” in Greece.15 PLAN agreed that support should be withdrawn
from 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. The
organization struggled to balance public opinion, which ran strongly against com-
munism, with its commitment to political neutrality. Finally, it decided to continue

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assigning children of “rebel” parents to American sponsors. But organization of-
ficials decided to withhold from American sponsors the details of parents’ political
affiliation, noting simply that the children had lost parents who fought in the civil
war.16 PLAN’s director in Greece agreed to monitor the mothers of children
whose rebel fathers had fled to the Soviet Union. The organization’s home
office in New York pledged to subject to special scrutiny the letters written by
these children to their American foster parents.17 “It would have been ruinous for
PLAN here if it got around that we were helping Communists,” noted Gloria
Matthews, 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’ magazine
that showcased the organization’s work in Italy. LaCossitt transported readers to
Monteflavio, a small town of medieval stone houses and narrow, steep streets
located thirty miles east of Rome. He introduced Elma Baccanelli Laurenzi, the
American woman at the helm of PLAN’s Italian program, and wrote about how
American 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 clothed
and 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 in
their new American coats and intrigued by the stream of letters arriving from the
United States, stood by their American friends. When the town elections rolled
around, LaCossitt recounted, the youngsters made it their mission to ensure a
Communist defeat. They engaged in a series of humorous pranks and succeeded in
turning 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.
 Child Sponsorship and International Affairs : 245

American foster parents thus brought about the first victory by Christian
Democrats in Monteflavio in a decade.19
LaCossitt’s lighthearted retelling of her work in Monteflavio angered Elma
Baccanelli 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 the
tale of the children’s antics to her American colleagues without the intention or
desire that it be used for publicity purposes. And she felt it a pity that a story to
mark 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 letter
to Laurenzi, “every other agency’s material has been stressing the political.”

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PLAN had been accused of communism, Sorin noted, and the organization
needed to defend its reputation. Furthermore, if PLAN refused to take a political
stand, potential donors would devote their dollars to an organization that did. “We
have to, in the end, take some position,” Sorin argued. “Here in this country the
lines are drawn very tightly regarding the communist situation,” she noted regret-
fully.20 Sorin pushed the organization’s nonpolitical stance to its breaking point. In
a promotional letter, she described PLAN as a nonpolitical organization. “But, in
viewing our work of the past, the present and the current world situation,” she
reflected, “it is evident that PLAN, wherever it operates, becomes an important
bulwark against Communism.”21
Eagerly or reluctantly, American child sponsorship agencies would come to
tether their work to U.S. foreign policy objectives. Voluntary agencies sometimes
saw their own anticommunist rhetoric appropriated by beneficiaries as a means of
garnering support. When CCF decided to revoke its support of a Brazilian
orphanage in 1956, for example, an American missionary associated with the in-
stitution warned Clarke that his organization’s withdrawal would be a boon to
enemies of the United States. “I’m afraid the home will suffer—and I also fear that
some leaders might use the opportunity to encourage ideas against the United
States (for some are all too ready to seize any such opportunity),” she noted in a
letter.22 When CCF reversed its decision and continued to fund the orphanage, the
missionary thanked Clarke for bolstering the American cause. “By aiding in this
project you are combating Communism which says that all the U.S. cares about is
exploiting the wealth of this nation,” she told him.23 Even some foster children
adopted anticommunist rhetoric. A Korean youngster wrote to his foster parents:
“Due to Communist invasion I became a lonesome child. Thank you very much
for 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 Family
Home 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 democratic

country.”24

BUILDING A FAMILY OF NATIONS

In crafting child sponsorship programs, American agencies relied upon and popu-
larized new psychological understandings of the family and its relation to child
development. By the forties, the rise of social constructionist thought, together
with the popularization of psychoanalysis, situated early childhood as a crucial
period of personality formation. As eugenics fell out of favor in the United
States, many scholars argued that the source of human difference lay not in
blood but rather in cultural conditioning during one’s youngest years. This under-

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standing cast human nature as infinitely malleable, at least during childhood. It
charged parents, particularly mothers, with the task of providing children with the
love and security they needed to grow into well-adjusted democratic citizens.
Indeed, youngsters’ emotional health had consequences that reverberated
beyond the nursery. Some experts argued that the root of all conflicts—both per-
sonal and international in scope—could be found in personal psychology, which
coalesced during childhood.25
Voluntary organizations depicted international child sponsorships as a means
of creating a sphere of influence tethered to America by deeply personal bonds.
“National forms and national governments are to an extent artificial and their
structure changeable,” noted Ernest Nash, who directed CCF’s Korean operation
in the mid-fifties. Governments were ill-equipped to create enduring international
bonds between peoples, Nash argued. But private organizations—particularly
those 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 of
childhood and adolescence, are aware morning, noon and night, that their
“fatherhood” and “motherhood,” to which they owe their very lives, are
being undertaken for them by Americans. This knowledge is fixed in their
earliest consciousness. The certainty of this love of distant “parents” is thus
ineradicable through the years.26
Nash blurred the lines between familial love and diplomatic alliance, between filial
duty and political obligation. He harnessed psychological theories of child devel-
opment in the service of American prestige overseas. And he situated the intimate
sphere 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.
 Child Sponsorship and International Affairs : 247

only on the strategy of containment but also on a “logic of inclusion,” an effort

to welcome other members of the “free world” into a U.S.-headed family
of nations.27 The fight against communism was not solely a masculine project,
Klein and other scholars have demonstrated, but was also crucially dependent on
an ideological framework centered on family and domesticity. Love itself became a
powerful weapon capable of reshaping the world order. American sponsorships
would win young friends for the United States, while affection during the forma-
tive years of childhood would produce citizens with the personal characteristics a
democracy needed to thrive. In a book about the work of CCF, author Edmund
Janss cast doubt on the effectiveness of American armament assistance to the
critical regions in Asia threatened by communism. “The best investment, dollar-

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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 as
old as seventeen. Child sponsorship agencies extended psychologists’ theories re-
garding the plasticity of early childhood and the deleterious efforts of familial
deprivation to all participants, from very young children to adolescents. Indeed,
voluntary workers such as Nash helped to disseminate current theories regarding
the psychological importance of the family, and the impressionability of young
people more generally, to audiences both in the United States and abroad.
The ideal of the nuclear family, historians have demonstrated, loomed large in
the 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 threatening
world. But the ideal of the family was just as apt to encourage Americans to look
across the globe as it was to facilitate a psychological retreat into the single-family
home. To American child sponsorship agencies, the family served not only as a
source of shelter from an international crisis but also as a means of addressing that
crisis. American organizations’ work with orphans centered on providing these
children with a sense of belonging to a family. Many American commentators saw
the family as essential not only to children’s healthy emotional development but
also to the perpetuation of democracy. In the context of the Cold War, the family
became an icon in the fight against communism. American condemnations of the
totalitarian state frequently relied on images of broken families and children reared
in a spirit of militarism and blind obedience rather than love.30
Children’s relationships with American foster parents were intended to provide
them 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, Children
of China (Hong Kong, 1962).
248 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y

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 them
with wreaths of flowers, and some children’s letters conveyed warmth and deep
affection.31 “I have cried for my mother’s warm arms often and though you are
living in a far country across the ocean I am happy that you are my foster mother
and father,” wrote Kil Ja, a Korean youngster. “I have not had the words mother
and father on my lips for three years since they died.”32 Anna, a refugee child in
Germany, asserted, “A drop of Love is sometimes more precious than a whole sack
of 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 from

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American sponsors.
Children’s missives, however, sometimes strayed from the expected script. In
1949, the Communist revolution in China made its way across the ocean in the
form of letters sent by Chinese children to their American foster parents.
Hundreds of Americans who supported Chinese youngsters through PLAN
began receiving letters praising the new Communist government and denouncing
the Nationalists. “The people are all very happy about the liberation of Shanghai
because the Liberation Army is very kind to the people. . . . Everyone hates the
shameless and mad reactionaries,” Chung-lan reported. One child told her
American friends of her classmates’ delight in hearing childhood stories about
Chairman Mao. Another wrote of his eagerness to join the Communist Youth
Corps. Feng-ming had actually participated in the revolutionary struggle. The girl
wrote about her experience fighting alongside guerilla warriors in the hills and her
disappointment in having to return to school after being diagnosed with a heart
ailment. “Do you have communists in the States?” wondered Fu-kun. “Have you
joined them?”34 Mixing communist dogma with expressions of friendship toward
American foster parents, the children’s letters no doubt defied the expectations
of American voluntary workers and Chinese officials alike. Children’s letters to
their American foster parents reveal youngsters’ liminal position as both pawns and
political actors in their own right.
Child sponsorships allowed Americans to create virtual interracial families that
served 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 in
Europe,” 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, “Quarterly
Report. 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.
 Child Sponsorship and International Affairs : 249

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 against
a communist attack, were extremely popular; Japanese youngsters, the offspring of
a recent enemy, were not.36 Moreover, black youngsters were largely excluded
from sponsorship programs until the early to mid sixties. It is likely that racial
concerns played a role in American agencies’ reluctance to expand into Africa
during the fifties. CCF, one of the first organizations to include black youngsters
among 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 increasing

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number of legal intercountry adoptions. Between 1953 and 1962, American
families legally adopted approximately 15,000 children from overseas.38 For
some people—the unmarried, those outside the white Protestant mainstream—
sponsoring a child may have served as a means of creating a family when options
such as legal adoption were difficult to avail themselves of or closed altogether to
them. 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 little
Italian girl, “helped to ease the child hunger in my heart.”39 A physician who
sponsored a Chinese child lauded her “son” as an antidote to her “frustrated
motherhood” 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 social
hierarchies. They expanded the definition of “family” to include relationships
forged across the boundaries of nation and race without the benefit of blood
ties. In an era when single parenthood was taboo, they allowed unmarried men
and women to create imagined families of their own making. But they excluded
some children from these families by virtue of their race. And they naturalized an
imbalance of power between the United States and the rest of the world: America
filled 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 at
least 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 and
the Cold War, see, for example, Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of
American 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 of
a therapeutic approach that offered, in the words of historian Elaine Tyler May,
“private and personal solutions to social problems.”41 Indeed, many American
workers saw democracy as rooted not in the structure of government but rather
in the intimate relationships between children and their caretakers. Child spon-
sorship agencies enlisted ordinary American families in the mission to protect the
free world.
American voluntary workers suggested that youngsters’ love of democracy and
freedom flowed naturally from child-rearing practices already acknowledged in the
United States to be in children’s best interest. This entanglement of personal and
political considerations allowed voluntary workers to sidestep thorny questions

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about children’s agency and their suitability as political actors. After all, what really
separated the children of Monteflavio, whose pranks unseated the local
Communist Party, from Feng-ming, the Chinese girl who fought alongside the
communist guerillas? American workers might have argued that the difference lay
in 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? American
organizations’ conflation of the personal and the political made it possible for them
to simultaneously embrace and deny the political nature of their work. Child
sponsorship programs were thus at once altruistic outpourings of American con-
cern for the most vulnerable and political projects aimed at cementing U.S. global
sovereignty. And children themselves were both innocents to be shielded from
politics and little cold warriors essential to the United States’ victory over
communism.

41. May, Homeward Bound, 14.