Family and Friendship

This chapter assesses the promise of intimacy by exploring the intersection of kin-like relations and racial ideologies in the 1950s and 1960s. It focuses on mainline Protestant Christian Children's Fund (CCF), founded in 1938 and the largest organization of its type at the time, along with two of its evangelical competitors, World Vision and Compassion, founded in 1950 and 1952, respectively. These organizations are exemplary of a major shift in twentieth-century sponsorship from emergency relief into a form of permanent fundraising. The chapter then considers the role of race in sponsorship's promise of kin-like relations. Unlike their First World War antecedents, which principally focused on white children in need of wartime relief, mid-century sponsorship organizations solidified a pattern that continues today: the presumed white sponsor of the non-white child. The chapter also studies how organizations shaped children's letter-writing and the dynamics of U.S. family life in which the letters played a part.