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Conclusion - Human dignity: from humanitarian rights to human rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2014

Bruno Cabanes
Bruno Cabanes
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
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Summary

One morning in April 1921, the citizens of a small town in New England awoke to the sight of 2,000 white crosses, planted in rows on their town green. Each cross symbolized the imminent death of a child suffering from famine in Central Europe. A representative of the Hoover Committee waited behind a stand. For a donation of $10, he would remove a cross and replace it with an American flag. Within a week, the symbolic graveyard had become a sea of red, white, and blue flags.

Although it's impossible to say exactly what the individual donors felt as those crosses disappeared, the vision of the flags offered a strong symbol of lives saved by the power of charity. Those who chose to donate must have been moved by the thought of innocent children suffering in the chaos of the post-war period; they empathized with these children, no matter how little they knew about the faraway countries where they lived or the tragedies they had endured.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924 , pp. 300 - 313
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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