Sidney Brooks On U.S. Aid To Germany: 1918-1920

Sidney Brooks, America and Germany: 1918-1925 (New York:

The Macmillan Company; 1925), pp. 142, 143.

‘In the countries of Central and Eastern Europe after the war, not including Germany, there were estimated to be over 20,000,000 war orphans.

Hundreds of thousands more were refugees from Russia or other waifs astray in the general chaos of these territories that had been shut off from food supplies for over four years.

‘Under governmental supervision and with a Congressional appropriation of $100,000,000, the American Relief Administration [A.R.A.] came into being at the Armistice to furnish moral support and food supplies so these children could be brought back to normal condition.

At the time of the Armistice, Americans were carrying the burden of feeding 1,800,000 children in Belgium and northern France. . . .

‘During these years children were fed and clothing furnished by or through the A.R.A. to children in Finland, Esthonia, a portion of non-Bolshevist Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Danzig, Germany, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Roumania, Yugo-Slavia and Armenia. Besides the essential good worked by this great humanitarian effort it laid a foundation of sentiment for humane ideals, and for America, in every country in which it operated.

It is now an enormous, latent source of sentiment which, though it may lie dormant for years, will sometime, in moments of stress, be the most powerful influence for amicable international settlement.’

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