I3. Philanthropy and the State in the Early Twentieth Century Chair: Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Columbia University - Devon Golaszewski, Colgate University: French colonial benevolent associations and infant health programs in Mali, 1918- 1950"
- John Carranza, Texas State University: “Life from an Iron Lung: Polio and Civic Participation in 1930s America”
- Valentina Parisi, Columbia University: “The Third Frontier”: The Development of Influenza “Observation Zones” by the Rockefeller Foundation during the mid-1930s through 1940s
This panel explores the relationship between philanthropic institutions and the state between 1900 and 1950, drawing on examples from different imperial and regional contexts. Paper 1 explores the role of French women’s benevolent associations such as the Berceau Africaine in the provision of reproductive health care in interwar colonial French Sudan (Mali). Paper 2 considers the role of the Rockefeller Foundation in the creation of “observation zones” and laboratory networks for the study of influenza and mitigation of pandemic threats during the interwar period and World War II. Lastly, Paper 3 examines the work of the Philippine Islands Anti-Tuberculosis Society in Manila and Hawaii during the early twentieth century, and the Society’s influence in transpacific tuberculosis control and management through concentrated programming in schools and sugar plantations.
The papers reveal the centrality of philanthropic organizations to national and imperial health systems during the first half of the twentieth century. These papers underscore complex partnerships between philanthropic institutions and different sectors of government–including the health system, schools, and the military–that targeted diverse population health issues, from infectious diseases to maternal health. The partnerships are diverse, reflecting both direct partnership between institutions and the state, as in the case of the Rockefeller organization and the military during wartime, as well as state co-optation of disease control procedures and educational models, such as in the case of the Anti-Tuberculosis Society.
These papers ask: How did philanthropic initiatives reflect and produce expectations about normative state services and interventions? Were these processes different in the context of formal or informal empire? Were philanthropic programs a response to missing state resources or gaps? How were different groups–from experts to companies to elite women–mobilized to act as proxies for state health services? Who funded these philanthropic organizations, and what was their relationship to commercial interests? How did philanthropic-state collaborations inform broader conceptualizations of race and population “hygiene,” citizenship, and security?
These papers highlight how philanthropic institutions shaped longstanding ideas of disease risk and surveillance, hygienic and unhygienic behaviors, and “model” populations with lasting influence on state approaches to disease control throughout the twentieth century.
