A flour sack with a delicately embroidered French phrase — “Merci L’Amerique,” or “Thank you, America” — is a good place to begin understanding the history of U.S. foreign aid.
After President Donald Trump ordered a freeze on the United States’ aid to the rest of the world, the website for the agency responsible for most of it — the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — has gone dark.
So we’ll fill in that error page by taking you into national and USAID archives that are still accessible under this administration to see how the United States got into the foreign aid business and what that means for us and the world.
“The people are actually starving and living in ruins,” the Evening Star of Washington reported on Nov. 29, 1914, in a story about the famine and destruction in Belgium during World War I.
The tiny, urbanized nation was occupied by the German army, which seized most Belgian food for its troops, triggering a British blockade.
The United States tapped Herbert Hoover, then a mining engineer living in London, to head the Commission for Relief in Belgium.
The commission shipped 5.7 million tons of food to Belgium, much of it sacks of American flour. Belgians repurposed the flour sacks by creating clothing, bags and decorative textiles, many of them embroidered with thanks to the United States.
More than three decades later, the devastation after World War II was massive, and the United States faced another decision on aid.
Secretary of State George C. Marshall understood there might be an urge to isolate.
“The people of this country are distant from the troubled areas of the Earth and it is hard for them to comprehend the plight and consequent reactions of the long-suffering peoples, and the effect of those reactions on their governments in connection with our efforts to promote peace in the world,” Marshall said in a June 5, 1947, speech at Harvard University.