This dissertation reinterprets America's rise to international power between 1914 and 1924. It presents the decade as a watershed in the formation of a global community concerned with the mitigation of mass suffering produced by cataclysmic events, and explains how humanitarian relief shaped Wilsonian internationalism and the contours of U.S. interventionism thereafter.

The vast array of American-led relief and reconstruction programs for Europeans during the World War I-era effected this transformation by demonstrating the capacity of nascent nongovernmental (NGO) and governmental relief agencies to both deliver life-sustaining aid to tens of millions of civilians and soldiers and to influence the geostrategic environment in which famine and virulent diseases were epidemic. Foremost among the institutional agents of change ranked the Commission for Relief in Belgium, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Red Cross, and the American Relief Administration. Working in concert and in competition they forever altered the way in which the U.S. government and the American people participated in international affairs by establishing new mechanisms to remake the world in an American image through often-conjoined humanitarian and military action.

Veterans of Great War relief subsequently informed the development of the Marshall Plan and Cold War containment strategy, and founded UNICEF, CARE, and other permanent aid organizations in the wake of World War II to alleviate the desperate privation affecting Europe and parts of Asia, and to forestall the rise of ideological divisions leading toward another world war. Competing visions about and alternative configurations for the delivery of humanitarian relief reflected continuing negotiations between nation states, nongovernmental and international organizations. The enduring tensions between altruistically inspired NGOs, multi-representational UN bodies, and the interests of the United States are byproducts of this complex episode.