Red Cross, American

Red Cross, American. Clara Barton (1821–1912) founded the American Red Cross in 1881, one year before Congress belatedly ratified the 1864 Geneva Convention concerning wartime help for sick and wounded soldiers.Although Barton played a modest role during the Spanish‐American War, full official recognition eluded her, and impromptu disaster relief became her first priority. After 1900 she was pushed aside by prominent New Yorkers who reorganized the Red Cross and redefined its status, role, and scope: Theodore Roosevelt drafted a new charter that defined a closer relationship to the government and the army; Robert W. DeForest grounded its relief work on the principles of scientific philanthropy and the charity organization movement; and Henry P. Davison gave it legitimacy on Wall Street, headed its endowment fund, and directed its extensive operations during World War I. The Red Cross provided both planned assistance to the military and an outlet for civilian patriotic enthusiasm; the wartime boom brought the organization 20 million members and a treasury surplus of $127 million by 1919. Salaried administrators proliferated despite its tradition of voluntarism.

Ambitious plans for innovative peacetime public‐health and social‐welfare programs at home and abroad soon foundered on war‐weariness and isolationism, opposition from established agencies and interest groups, hostility from the newspapers controlled by William Randolph Hearst, and a grassroots suspicion among volunteers that the central office had been taken over by careerist professionals. Red Cross personnel and aspirations were quickly, if reluctantly, scaled back in response to diminished public expectations and a postwar drop in membership and contributions. Further criticism arose during the Depression of the 1930s, when the Red Cross refused a federal subsidy for assisting drought victims, soliciting private contributions instead, and then agreed to distribute government surplus wheat and cotton. Public controversy was fueled by claims that Red Cross leaders opposed the New Deal, disliked labor unions, and embodied typically white racial attitudes.

Beginning with World War II, improvements in the U.S. military's medical and nursing services changed the Red Cross's wartime role to one of providing generalized recreational services instead of auxiliary medical assistance. In the second half of the twentieth century, despite periodic pressure to assist the State Department's foreign‐policy agenda or White House public‐relations efforts, civilian disaster relief became its principal peacetime function. Over the years, the Red Cross's relationship with the American press and public has fluctuated from adulation to vilification and indifference. Unlike the great philanthropic foundations, its visibility and income varied with the public mood, increasing at times of natural disasters or other crises. An early 1990s survey found that it was the most highly regarded of major U.S. charities. During the Persian Gulf War, for example, donations soared to $26 million.

By the mid‐1990s, the American Red Cross was one of America's largest charitable organizations, with more than 1,300 local chapters, an annual budget of $1.8 billion (mostly raised by private and corporate contributions), a paid staff of around 30,000, and some 1.3 million volunteers annually. A fifty‐member volunteer board of directors governed the organization. Its national programs included disaster relief, a blood‐donor program that supplied about one‐half of the nation's blood supply, and health and safety services including minor‐injury treatment and blood‐pressure and cholesterol‐testing programs. A major initiative focused on increasing health services to minority groups and recruiting minority volunteers. The American Red Cross also worked with the International Red Cross and Red Crescent movement to meet human needs arising from natural disaster or conflicts in many countries, including, at the end of the 1990s, Kosovo and East Timor.
See also Galveston Hurricane and Flood; New Deal Era, The; Philanthropy and Philanthropic Foundations.

Bibliography

Foster Rhea Dulles , The American Red Cross: A History, 1950.
Patrick F. Gilbo , The American Red Cross: The First Century, 1981.

John F. Hutchinson