ABSTRACT
The President's War Relief Control Board took on the task of maintaining comprehensive oversight, defining ethical standards for relief solicitation, setting accounting procedures, and registering fundraising groups. In time US relief activities, which had always been heavily weighted on the side of the Allies, shifted entirely to that side when the United States joined them as co-belligerent in 1917. As described by Merle Curti, "Of all American overseas relief programs in the aftermath of the war, the largest and most complex in character was that inaugurated for the Soviet Union in the summer of 1921." Belgian relief was a demonstration of the huge potential for private charitable responses to the clearly perceived needs of unknown people in a small and distant land. As private relief agencies proliferated in the United States, and particularly after the Pearl Harbor attack brought the country into the war, the government moved to establish substantial controls over the many nongovernmental relief organizations.
