Educating those who matter: Thomas Whittemore, Russian refugees and the transnational organization of elite humanitarianism after the First World War

Abstract

This article examines the work of the Committee for the Education of Russian Youth in Exile (CERYE) and its founder, the American scholar Thomas Whittemore. Established during the Russian Civil War, the CERYE rescued displaced Russian youth from Constantinople and placed them in schools and universities across Europe, but only if they could demonstrate sufficient intellectual merit. It made a virtue of its elitism and Whittemore revelled in its selectivity; the committee intended that its students would return to Russia following the completion of their education and constitute a new intellectual elite once the Bolshevik government had fallen. The article contributes to the growing historiography on humanitarianism in the era of the First World War by emphasizing that elitism and selectivity co-existed with discourses of universal suffering when describing the needs of displaced students. The article traces the emergence of the CERYE at the end of the First World War and explores its anti-Bolshevik political mission, its funding network in North America, and the experiences of a number of its students. It argues that the work of the CERYE was inherently anti-Bolshevik and an example of what Charles Maier called the ‘recasting of bourgeois Europe’. The article sheds light on an overlooked element of First World War era humanitarianism, namely, the many small-scale and amateur organizations which co-existed alongside larger bodies such as Save the Children. Assured of the financial support of an influential network of likeminded donors in America, Whittemore’s committee could pursue a narrowly focused and highly elitist humanitarian mission in the early 1920s.