UC Berkeley

This dissertation describes the historical development of American refugee relief before and during the Progressive Era, with special emphasis on the two transformative cases: the Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906, and the borderland refugee crisis that attended the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920. These catastrophes helped change notions of social obligation that had been contested in the United States for more than a century. While rare, appeals for federal relief in the Early Republic and antebellum era laid the groundwork for a new consensus about what the federal government was obligated to provide sufferers of catastrophe at home and abroad. Congressional representatives seized upon past examples of foreign aid to demand the same assistance for constituents and citizens. In so doing, they gradually domesticated foreign aid and forged a new tradition of federal disaster relief. The contours of state-sponsored relief continued to fluctuate as the boundaries of U.S. territory and citizenship dramatically expanded in the nineteenth century.

These changes culminated in the establishment of a new catastrophe relief regime established in 1906 amidst the ruin of the premier city of the West: San Francisco. As governments and people from around the world generously responded to the humanitarian crisis by sending aid to their fellow nationals and family members in distress, the United States boldly asserted sovereignty over those suffering from disasters within its borders. That precedent and innovations in international law compelled civilians, benevolent societies, federal troops, immigration agents, and local officials to respond to refugees of Mexico’s Revolution with energy and compassion only a few years later. Key architects of San Francisco’s relief program from the U.S. Army and the American National Red Cross moved from the Bay Area to the Mexican border. In the borderlands, these authorities established a refugee relief regime would have lasting consequences for the U.S.-Mexico border and for the borders of social obligation in the United States. The new refugee relief regime was contradictory; compassionate and violent, humanitarian and inhumane, it helped to produce the militarized border zone of the twentieth century.