As the war ended, politicians and educationalists saw the American Junior Red Cross as a means to promote American ideals abroad. Consequently, the American Junior Red Cross shifted its focus on a new form of Americanization, using children as part of a cultural diplomacy that positioned the United States as the global Good Samaritan. Children reached out around the globe, waged war against diseases, dedicated much of their spare time to rescue foreign "brothers" and "sisters," and sponsored children overseas.

In organizing a juvenile division of the American Red Cross – the so-called American Junior Red Cross – in September 1917, Woodrow Wilson attempted to mobilize the nation’s twenty-two million schoolchildren. Consequently, the American Junior Red Cross became the first federal youth-focused organization to be specifically dedicated to mobilizing American youth in wartime. In designing this first national youth-focused organization, Wilson impeded radical interventionists and quelled educationalists’ concerns. While directing children’s energy to altruistic humanitarian tasks, the organization opened schools to federal oversight of efforts to instill loyalty and deter dissent. Federal authorities attempted to control teachers and relied upon the educational structures to instill loyalty in the future generations of Americanyouth.

This chapter brings together youth and disability as two major areas of work for the League of Red Cross Societies and its member Red Cross and Red Crescent National Societies. It focuses on the Junior Red Cross and Red Cross Youth, and how the Red Cross movement engaged with young humanitarians and disability. The chapter outlines the evolution of the Junior Red Cross and the role played by the League, and how the movement entered the field of children with disabilities. This built on earlier work of National Societies working with wounded, sick, and disabled ex-soldiers during war and afterwards. The chapter concludes with a case study of Haraldvangen, a summer camp run by the Norwegian Red Cross, to explore efforts by Red Cross Youth to bring disabled and abled children together in the 1970s.