Children, Poverty and Nationalism in Lithuania, 1900–1940 by Andrea Griffante

Author:Andrea Griffante
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030308704
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Regardless of its divergent goals, American humanitarian aid was the fundamental source for children’s assistance in the region between 1919 and 1922. Though the whole East Central European region was depicted as the geopolitical bulwark against the spread of the “red plague,” the concrete dimensions of allocated aid depended on the strategic importance assigned to each country by the ARA and ARC and, ultimately, the US State Department. Data about the activity of the ARA’s Children’s Fund demonstrate this. By 1920, 1,300,000 out of 2,877,000 children to whom food supplies had been directed lived in Poland. In that respect, Lithuania was the smallest recipient of American food aid (40,000 children), even far beyond Latvia (60,000) and Estonia (70,000), where harsher civil war conditions had made the risk of social revolution much more concrete (Daily Meal for Two Million 1920, 3).

The American aid for Lithuania provided momentum through the mediation of the Lithuanian diplomatic mission in Paris. Between February and April 1919, Lithuanian diplomatic efforts led to the stipulation of a contract for food supplies with the ARA. The ARA mission to Lithuania lasted until June 1920. A second contract was signed in February 1921. Though the first to address the ARC were members of the Lithuanian representatives in the USA in 1918, it was in March 1919 that the ARC officials themselves asserted that support would be necessary in Lithuania and Latvia as a means to fight Bolshevism (Skirius 1995, 53–76).

Regardless of official praise for the ARC’s engagement in Lithuania, the ARC mission took place in a very tense context. The ARC operated in Lithuania by means of funds collected by US Lithuanian communities on Lithuanian Day, which was declared by President Woodrow Wilson in 1916. With the exception of about $40,000 used to support Lithuanian prisoners of war, the total budget of the ARC mission to Lithuania barely reached $135,000.25 This sum, however, was far too small to guarantee long-term delivery of food and first aid supplies to poor children in the country. While complaining of very low ARC support, the Lithuanian authorities made a claim for additional supplies in the fall of 1919.26 As in wartime, members of the Lithuanian diaspora in the USA were the most active fundraisers in the post-war years. Anyway, the American Lithuanian diaspora had been characterized by constant animosity between the clerical and liberal wings. Far from representing an exclusively internal matter, a tendency to conflict put one of the principal sources of relief financing at potential risk.

Being conscious of this danger, both members of the US Lithuanian diaspora and Lithuania’s political élite tried to mend the fences between opposing groups and sort out fundraising in the USA. A major effort to mediate between them was made by Laura Gozdawa de Turczynowicz. A Canadian opera singer living in Krakow and married to Polish Count Stanisław Gozdawa de Turczynowicz, Laura left Poland in 1916, where she had spent about 10 months under house arrest, and settled in the USA. In early 1919, Turczynowicz was

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