From time to time, we will be posting profiles of our Gest Fellows. Michael E. McGuire is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Boston University.  His research is on “Quaker NGOs That Offered Humanitarian Aid to France During and After World War I.”

Michael E. McGuire 2009 Gest Fellow

I am researching the work of American non-governmental organizations (NGOs) formed to aid French civilians during World War I, and to assist France’s postwar reconstruction, to see whether such NGOs affected Franco-American relations. These NGOs include large umbrella organizations like the American Red Cross, and smaller NGOs like the American Friends’ Reconstruction Unit, which trained at Haverford before deploying to France. I am particularly interested in how American Friends were selected and trained for their work in France, how they integrated with existing English Friends’ operations, how the Friends cooperated with similarly-concerned governments and NGOs, how American Friends overcame the language barrier (many tried to brush up or learn French on the voyage or on the job), how both French and American cultures interacted when American Friends entered and remained in parts of France, and how both Friends and French people commemorated NGO work after it largely ceased in 1920.

Flight print by Joan Miro

When the Nazis occupied Paris in June 1940, thousands of European refugees fled to the south of France. In August of that year, the young American journalist Varian Fry arrived in Marseilles with a list of imperiled refugees taped to his leg. Over the course of the next year Fry, on behalf of the Emergency Rescue Committee, arranged for the escape of over 1,200 artists, politicians and intellectuals, most to the United States. His work was secretive and dangerous, and ultimately he was expelled from France for protecting Jews and anti-Nazis.

In the mid-1960s, in order to raise funds for what by then had become known as the International Rescue Committee, Fry began assembling a collection of prints on the subject of refugee flight. Twelve artists contributed to the project including several whom Fry had saved during the war: Eugene Berman, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Viera da Silva, Adolph Gottlieb, Wifredo Lam, Jacques Lipchitz, André Masson, Joan Miró, Robert Motherwell, Edouard Pignon, and Fritz Wotruba. 300 copies of the portfolio were produced in 1971 before the artists destroyed the plates.