Do you know that it was in Reims, the city to suffer the most in the first world conflict, that the United States laid the groundwork for modern post-war international solidarity?
After the Great War, the United States helped financially, materially and in human terms several European countries – including Germany whose population had difficulties feeding itself – to recover from disasters on an unprecedented scale. But it was above all in France, the main theatre of military operations, and particularly Reims, where this aid was to be the greatest, the most diversified and the most symbolic. This was made possible not just by government action, but also by the energetic mobilisation of the American people.
The exponential development of American humanitarian action during the war owes much to Woodrow Wilson, the first president to break with the isolationism established from 1796 by George Washington and reaffirmed by James Monroe in 1823. It was President Wilson who pushed Congress to vote for entry into the war in April 1917 for reasons that stemmed at one and the same time from national interest and global altruism. On one side, the excessive submarine war waged by Germany against merchant ships that were indispensable for American trade risked, eventually, having disastrous consequences for the economy of the United States; and, on another, Wilson held the conviction that he and his country had to take an active part in the good functioning of the world so as to ensure peace and the wellbeing of peoples.
The American Red Cross, the spearhead of aid
Wilson decided to lead a humanitarian action of unprecedented scope. He chose the American Red Cross as the spearhead. It was a matter of relieving the suffering of populations affected by the war and also preparing the terrain to build up the image of the United States in the eyes of the international community. America would come out of this greater and could negotiate more easily with countries that were politically stable. In this way, American humanitarian action was seen by the Federal Government as a powerful diplomatic and economic lever.
To persuade the American population to enlist massively in the Red Cross and to support it financially, the war council named by Wilson put into place a propaganda campaign based on the methods used in advertising. Graphic images and hard-hitting slogans on posters and tracts, press articles, films and meetings were to convince millions of Americans to commit themselves to this cause.
This propaganda, together with emotion and patriotic enthusiasm, was to lead to an explosion in the number of members and funds raised. The American Red Cross that counted 22,500 adult members at the beginning of 1916, was to rise to 22 million at the beginning of 1919. As for the sums gathered, they reached $400 million in 1917 and 1918.
Everywhere in the United States, from April 1917 on, volunteers threw themselves into making millions of bandages and clothes for the fighters and civilians of Europe. In parallel, a huge logistical operation was put in place and tens of thousands of Americans crossed the Atlantic from June 1917 to serve as volunteers or employees of the Red Cross in many countries such as Serbia, Italy and especially France, where most of the battlefields were situated. Nurses, doctors, paramedics, stretcher-bearers, social workers or simple volunteers were to bring assistance to American and Allied troops and prisoners of war as well as to civilian populations. It amounted to a real revolution because, in December 1914, assistance by the American Red Cross had been limited to combatants alone.
In France, during the war, the American Red Cross essentially contributed, as far as aid to non-combatants was concerned, to transporting, housing, feeding, clothing and caring for refugees from the combat zones as well as people returning to France through Switzerland. Its efforts were then concentrated on the ruined and liberated regions. That was when the American Red Cross took part in the return of the inhabitants of 4,000 towns and villages in the north and east of the country.
The first action of the American Red Cross for Reims was to set up a canteen for refugees. From February to July 1919, Emily Bennet and Catherine Porter, the two nurses in charge of this canteen, and their assistants were to serve 240,000 meals.
At the start of 1919, Henry du Bellet, an American of French origin, was named director of the American Red Cross in Reims where he had been consul before the war. It was under his authority that the humanitarian organisation whose philosophy it is to intervene directly as little as possible was notably to support the work of Retour à Reims – Return to Reims – an association created by Reims notables to facilitate the re-settling of the inhabitants in their ruined city.
From February 1919 to June 1920, relying on the six big distribution depots set up in France, and most particularly on that of Châlons-sur-Marne (now Châlons-en-Champagne), the American Red Cross was to donate to Return to Reims food, clothing, furniture, pots and pans, crockery, woollen goods, gardening tools and prefabricated houses.
In a second phase, the organisation focused on the return to food self-sufficiency and children’s wellbeing through the distribution of chemical fertilisers, the building, among other things, of an ultramodern playground and financial and logistical support to send little Reims inhabitants on vacation.
It was also due to the American Red Cross that a Bureau of Reconstruction was created in France in March 1917. Its organisation was entrusted to the American architect and town-planner Geo B. Ford, a graduate of Harvard, the MIT and the Fine Arts and the former town-planning consultant for the city of New York.
In 1919, with the American Red Cross beginning its demobilisation, all the studies carried out by the Bureau of Reconstruction were transferred to the French enterprise La Renaissance des Cités – the Rebirth of the Cities – which called on Geo B. Ford. It was within this framework that he conceived the plan for Reims’ reconstruction that was to bear his name. Even if only two-thirds of this plan were respected – for essentially financial reasons – Ford nonetheless marked the rebirth of the city of Reims with his modernist vision.
Birth of mass philanthropy
Alongside the Red Cross, a number of humanitarian organisations were created in the United States during the Great War to come to the aid of French people in need. This was the case, for example, of Free Milk for France, a charity mostly financed by campaigns to collect funds, one of which took place during a parade in the streets of New York. Free Milk for France sent boxes of powdered milk to Retour à Reims.
Other associations that had existed before the war were to enlarge their usual field of action to accompany American troops in France; this was true for the YMCA – the Young Men’s Christian Association. This was behind the creation, together with the Salvation Army, or more than 1,500 hostels for soldiers, places of recreation aimed at maintaining troop morale where distractions considered morally healthy were offered. After the war, these Franco-American establishments, places for cultural exchange, were turned into civilian centres to serve the population. It was in the Foyer de Reims that basketball was to take root and to develop locally, leading to the Reims team winning the French championship in 1932 and 1933.
As well as the thousands of Red Cross nurses, other American women volunteered to bring humanitarian aid to Europe and particularly to France. This was the case for members of the American Committee for Devastated France and the American Women’s Hospital, organisations run exclusively by women.
The American Committee for Devastated France had at its head Anne Morgan, the daughter of the famous banker J.P. Morgan. With the help of Anne Murray Dike, she drew on her own fortune as well as a very active network in the United States to take charge of the rebuilding of four districts in the Aisne department in northern France. Her beneficence extended to Reims where she financed the building of the tennis club and where her organisation sent eight nurses to take care of hundreds of families living in temporary huts. The American Women’s Hospital was set up by women doctors to whom the American Army refused to grant rights equal to those of their male colleagues. Their first hospital in France was not operational until July 1918 but their action developed after the armistice into aid for civilian populations and, particularly, for refugees. That is how one of the women doctors, Dr. Marie-Louise Lefort, an American of French origin, went to work in Reims where she assisted in the creation of the American Hospital.
The Reims children’s hospital, called the American Memorial Hospital in memory of the thousands of American soldiers who fell on French soil, owed its creation to the determination of two American women: the aforementioned Dr. Lefort and Edith Bangs, the head of another organisation founded by women, the American Fund for French Wounded. The Reims benefactor, Jeanne Krug, was behind their project throughout its realisation.
Edith Bangs managed to raise $300,000 to build the hospital and $600,000 for its long-term operation through a campaign of appeals for donations throughout American territory. Many families, often those of soldiers killed in combat, participated in financing the project; every one of the 115 beds in the hospital carried the name of one of the soldiers. Marie-Louise Lefort ran the hospital until 1938.
It is now nearly a century that the American Hospital has been caring for the children of Reims and its vicinity with the still active support of the American Memorial Hospital Foundation. Its financial aid allows the regular modernisation of infrastructure, equipment and material, the successful completion of medical research, the training of Reims doctors in the United States and the running of social aid projects for parents of sick children.
The Role of Billionaires
To the mass philanthropy was added that of billionaires, in the first rank Carnegie and Rockefeller Jr., which went to the fields of culture and architecture with the building of a library and restoration work on the Reims cathedral.
Their concerns went way beyond the frontiers of the United States as is witnessed by their desire to seek the ‘progress of humanity’ for the Carnegie institutions and ‘the wellbeing of the human race’ for the Rockefeller Foundation. Their humanist and universal vision, encouraged by tax legislation favourable to philanthropic work, led these two organisations to come to the aid of a Europe mortified by war.
Why above all France and Reims? Americans as a whole have not forgotten the help brought by La Fayette at the time of the War of Independence; there exists among the elites, and therefore the country’s decision-makers, a clear Francophilia; France, a democratic country, was attacked by a Germany with an autocratic regime; the destruction suffered by French towns and villages was largely reported in the United States; as for the City of Coronations, as Reims is also known, the fire in its cathedral in September 1914 shocked the whole world and it became the martyred city of the Great War.
The personal preferences of Carnegie and Rockefeller Jr. were to become visible in the actions of their respective foundations in Reims.
For Carnegie, books were the ultimate tool of social progress. Thanks to him, some 1,700 free public libraries opened their doors in the United States. It was then through a desire to extend this cultural beneficence that the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace decided to finance the rebuilding of the libraries of three European cities badly afflicted by war: Belgrade, Louvain and Reims. The building, entrusted to the architect Max Sainsaulieu and decorated with great refinement in Art Déco style, was inaugurated in 1928.
Whereas the original library occupied one room in the city hall and was reserved for a handful of researchers, the new building has a big reading room and offers a free-loan service of thousands of works classified by subject.
John Davison Rockefeller Jr., for his part, was the heir to the biggest fortune in the United States. With no appetite for business, he was encouraged by his father to devote himself entirely to the family’s philanthropy: medicine and education … He believed it was his duty as an enlightened rich man to come to the aid of humanity. Passionate about history – for example, he financed archaeological research – and a lover of the arts, he naturally threw his heart into the Reims cathedral, where the fire in 1914 had moved the whole world.
In 1924, he made a first donation of $1 million for the restauration of the castles of Versailles and Fontainebleau as well as the Reims cathedral, followed by a second donation three years later. In a letter in 1924, Rockefeller clarified his priority: ‘My wish is that this sum can serve to rebuild the roof of the Reims cathedral.’
That is why the Reims architect, Henri Deneux, was entrusted with the task of rebuilding the roof. To head off any risk of fire and to avoid cutting down numerous trees, this was to consist of armed concrete parts. The inauguration of the restored roof took place in July 1938.
The Wilsonian parenthesis in the United States’ isolationism closed with the victory of the Republican supporters of ‘America First’ in the November 1920 presidential election. The national enthusiasm that Woodrow Wilson had promoted with regard to the American Red Cross faded and Americans returned to their domestic preoccupations.
However, the seeds of opening to the world had been sown and, as the history of Reims shows, non-governmental organisations as well as many private sector actors were to continue American humanitarian work.
The recognition of France and of the Rémois in particular with regard to all that had been done by the Americans became evident in the beginning of the 1920s through newspaper articles, speeches by political leaders, the award of decorations and the naming of streets … And, more recently, the symbolic planting of a pecan tree and the unveiling of a commemorative plaque by the Association of Friends of the American Memorial Hospital of Reims recalled just how alive the ties of friendship dating back a century between France and the United States still are.
From inquisitive boy scouts to enlightened billionaires, through Red Cross nurses, millions of Americans were mobilised, each according to his means, to provide assistance to a ruined Europe, and more particularly to France and Reims, thus writing a fertile chapter in the history of Franco-American relations by laying the groundwork for modern humanitarian action, the main expression of that universal value which is solidarity between peoples.