What did it mean for Americans to save Europe after the Great War—and what did that perceived salvation reveal about the United States itself? This is the central question animating Tammy M. Proctor’s lucid and illuminating new monograph, Saving Europe: First World War Relief and American Identity. In this book, Proctor reconsiders the vast U.S. humanitarian aid project overseas not merely as acts of charity, but as a formative crucible for American identity. Proctor argues that between 1914 and 1924, U.S. relief and reconstruction campaigns in war-torn Europe helped define what it meant to be an American in a globalizing world. Humanitarian work over there, she suggests, shaped notions of belonging, race, and modernity over here. In the process, relief became both a performance of power and a framework for American-style empire.

Proctor’s book joins a growing body of literature that reexamines American humanitarian projects through the lens of imperialism and cultural politics. Yet Saving Europe differs from institutional studies of the American Relief Administration or the American Red Cross. Rather than tracing the bureaucratic mechanics of aid, Proctor’s focus is cultural and social: she explores how Americans, ranging from philanthropists and missionaries to college-educated reformers, imagined their work abroad as an extension of Progressive Era uplift and modernization. Drawing inspiration from Aimé Césaire’s reflections on colonialism, Proctor shows how Americans cast Europe as “a landscape for the fulfillment of American ambition,” echoing earlier interventions in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba (4).

The book unfolds in largely chronologically concurrent chapters, following American workers and institutions as they began relief campaigns in Europe during and after World War I. For those familiar with this period, the cast of institutions and figures is largely familiar. Herbert Hoover, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Red Cross, and the Quakers, among myriad other small aid groups, feature prominently. However, Proctor emphasizes that these were not isolated relief efforts but rather components of a transnational project intended to export an American model of modernity. Throughout Saving Europe, Proctor insists that humanitarianism was as much about self-definition as it was about altruism. Humanitarianism, in Proctor’s analysis, became an expression of national exceptionalism. This exceptionalism looked outward. As Proctor explains, “Americans increasingly understood their national mission as a universal one, believing that American goals led to global progress” (53). The Great War and its aftermath thus became a proving ground for what contemporaries framed as American managerial modernity: a new language of efficiency, systematization, and rational planning that elevated technical expertise over sentiment.

Relief work abroad, Proctor demonstrates, also reinforced racial and class hierarchies at home. The quasi-official aid organizations of the 1910s and 1920s opened limited avenues for women, immigrants, Jews, and Catholics to participate in U.S. humanitarian projects, but access remained tightly policed. Appeals to “save Europe” were grounded in a vision of America as a nation built by white Europeans, excluding others from the moral community of rescuers. Even those with “suspect” European backgrounds, particularly Jews and Catholics, often found their inclusion conditional or marginalized. In this sense, relief work abroad paralleled the racial nativism of the early 1920s, when new immigration restrictions codified the very hierarchies that humanitarian rhetoric professed to transcend.

This attention to race, gender, and class gives Saving Europe its sharpest edge. Proctor writes vividly about the social worlds of aid workers. She details histories of the women who left domestic reform for the European frontlines, the recent immigrants who used relief work to claim Americanness, and the professionals who reimagined philanthropy as a realm of purely technocratic expertise. Abroad, these workers articulated a vision “that emphasized their perception of Europe’s effeminacy and loss of vitality while helping to articulate the need for U.S. moral, military, and cultural intervention” (12). At home, their experience fed into broader progressive narratives of reform and uplift, even as racial violence and nativist restrictionism came to dominate domestic politics.

Proctor’s final chapters trace the long-lasting legacies of the slowly disintegrating American empire of relief. By the mid-1920s, as organizations like the American Relief Administration wound down, tensions with European partners, resentment over war debts, and domestic nativism eroded the transatlantic idealism of the wartime decade. Yet the cultural memory of saving Europe persisted. Americans, Proctor argues, emerged from this period with a clearer sense of their own civilizational mission and of Europe as an aging monolith. This sentiment dovetailed with the emergence of Western Civilization courses in American universities beginning in 1919, which fused U.S. and European histories into a single narrative of progress and moral responsibility. By World War II, this idea of the United States as the guardian of Europe had become enshrined in both curriculum and culture. By tracing these threads, Proctor persuasively demonstrates that the decade of humanitarian relief after World War I inaugurated new ways of thinking about American global power, civilization, and responsibility. Her argument reframes humanitarianism not as a side project of American foreign policy but as a generative force in the making of U.S. global identity—a prelude to the so-called American Century.

If this book has a limitation, it lies in its asymmetry: the European recipients of aid themselves remain faintly sketched. We learn much about the Americans who fed, surveyed, and studied them, but less about the recipients of aid or the local collaborators who shaped those interactions. Proctor’s analytical gaze is fixed squarely on the American imagination, which at times obscures the mutual exchanges that surely complicated the relief encounter. Did Europeans react with gratitude? Dependency? Resistance? Did they challenge or complicate the burgeoning claims of American identity embraced by their relievers? A deeper exploration of how Europeans perceived American aid would have enriched an already persuasive argument.

Still, Saving Europe is a detailed, elegantly written study that bridges diplomatic, cultural, and humanitarian history. For scholars who study the Progressive Era in the United States or abroad, it offers a powerful reminder that the moral vocabularies of domestic reform and global engagement were born together. By exporting progressive ideals overseas, Americans not only sought to rebuild Europe but to define themselves as the architects of a new moral order, one that fused commerce, compassion, and control. Proctor’s book shows how that project began, and how its echoes still reverberate a century later.