Defining public responsibility in a global age: Refugees, NGOs, and the American state

This dissertation examines U.S.-centric refugee aid initiatives, embedding their history within several signal markers of the twentieth century world order: colossal man-made devastation, organized efforts to assuage its effects, and the emergence of the United States as a global superpower. I trace the development of U.S.-based initiatives intended to provide political refugees with humanitarian aid overseas and resettlement assistance in the U.S. from the 1930s through the 1960s to better understand three phenomena: first, how the U.S. extended its reach dramatically across the globe during the middle 20th century through a spectrum of humanitarian aid initiatives performed by a range of governmental, intergovernmental, and nongovernmental actors; second, the connections forged between American political, legal, institutional, and social developments at home and abroad in an era when American governing capacities exploded both domestically and internationally; and third, how, why, and with what effects American people and institutions took responsibility for millions of victims of war and persecution, many of whom had either lost or forfeited their legal or practical citizenship to their home nation-states.;Each chapter is a case study of a major international relief initiative or domestic refugee resettlement program in the U.S. The refugee groups whom I primarily consider include Jewish victims of Nazism, Eastern and Central European "displaced persons" from World War II and postwar Soviet expansion, Hungarian "freedom fighters" of the later 1950s, and exiles from Castro's Cuba in the 1960s. Proceeding chronologically, the flow and focus of the chapters are designed to uncover both persistence and change in American refugee affairs.;The dissertation marshals a two-part argument. First, I contend that these projects of international aid and refugee resettlement in the U.S. should be understood, in part, as an expansion of American power and even sovereignty as the country embraced a new role of global hegemon. They comprised an important though little understood way that the U.S. engaged with the world and extended its authority internationally during this period: through initiatives designed to alleviate human suffering, whether for the primary purpose of stabilizing a region to garner geopolitical influence, embarrassing America's enemies by claiming to offer their former citizens a superior life in the U.S., or reaching out to international populations for which sectors of American civil society felt a cultural or political affinity and responsibility. The second argument contends that these relief and resettlement initiatives created remarkably fluid conduits for matters traditionally considered domestic (e.g., civil rights, labor policy, social security, religious and ethnic identity politics) to enter realms of activity normally conceived of as international (e.g., geopolitics, human rights), and vice versa. If, in other words, these war relief and refugee aid initiatives represented an outward projection of American authority onto a global arena, they also forced international pressures back onto the U.S. in some powerful ways. This dissertation interrogates issues that were at once transnational and local, about both geopolitics and domestic politics.