’My Faith in Americans is Renewed with every Adoption’: Transnational and Transracial Adoptions in Postwar America

American writer Pearl. S. Buck, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, addressed the black readership of Ebony magazine in June 1958 by asking “Should white parents adopt brown babies?” Buck herself had founded the adoption agency “Welcome House” in 1949 and was an early advocate for adoptions from Asian countries. She had also adopted the Afro-German girl Henriette in 1951. Deeply committed to humanitarian activism as well as highly critical of social welfare practices, she addressed African-American families in the Ebony article and encouraged them to adopt, though she reasoned that children needed love and a nurturing home, not so much a “match” in terms of race or culture. The African American public, too, was deeply concerned about black German children born in the aftermath of 1945, and as early as 1946, the first reports about them appeared in the black press. Another female “non-professional” adoption advocate who wanted to bring these children to the US was Mabel A. Grammer, a journalist for the Baltimore Afro-American and the wife of a GI stationed in Germany. The Grammer’s had adopted several Afro-German children themselves, and Mabel Grammer initiated what she called the “Brown Baby Plan” in the late 1940s (Alexis Clark, „Overlooked No More: Mabel Grammer, Whose Brown Baby Plan Found Homes for Hundreds“).For Grammer, her activism was deeply political; a means to overcome the discriminatory practices of domestic adoption agencies (McRoy Zurcher. Transracial and Inracial Adoptees). Her writings for the Baltimore Afro-American illustrate that the “Brown Baby Plan” was a means to circumvent the discriminations African Americans faced by domestic adoption agencies, as well as an articulation of their humanitarian concerns. Being confronted with images of the normative American family (white, middle-class, with a male breadwinner and a female homemaker), the family became exactly the site where inequalities were painfully experienced (Potter. Everybody Else: Adoption and the Politics of Domestic Diversity in Postwar America). Far from being a private constellation, the postwar family was acutely political; through her adoption efforts, Grammer therefore exposed the classed, gendered, and raced notions of this family ideal. Viewed in this light, her activism also underscores the political dimension of constructed kinship formations.

The late 1940s and early 1950s witnessed the emergence of so-called “intercountry adoptions” to the United States. These transnational adoptions, which often happened to be transracial as well, were regarded as deviant, unconventional, or revolutionary. They subverted the premise of “matching,” that is finding a match between children and parents in terms of race, religion, or mental capacity (McRoy Zurcher. Transracial and Inracial Adoptees). Mabel Grammer and Pearl Buck received wide and favourable media coverage for her humanitarian commitment. However, the International Social Service (ISS) and the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) were highly critical of their reliance on proxy adoptions that did not involve social workers or a supervisory period for the newly established families. Buck and Grammer framed adoption as a humanitarian paradigm, closely related to war, occupation and sexual violence. In fact, US-American soldiers sent to Europe during or after the Second World War, and eventually to Korea, produced significant numbers of children in those countries. The fate of these “half-American” children, often identified as “racially mixed” and many of them discriminated against in their home country, attracted wide media attention in the United States. This coverage coincided with a “shortage” of healthy white babies and hence increased demand for “adoptable” children by American couples. In order to facilitate the emerging practice of international adoptions into the United States, the US immigration law broadened the definition of “orphan” considerably; from 1953, a child with two living parents could be categorized as an orphan. These children were obviously regarded as ideal immigrants and citizens, since they could be raised to become “true Americans” in the Cold War era.

The internationalism of the postwar period as well as the galvanizing civil rights movement and a belief in colorblind social policies challenged standard procedures such as “matching.” The public discussions and controversies that transnational and transracial adoptions elicited reflect the paradoxes inherent in American family formation and the formation of the American nation. On the one hand a liberal pluralist understanding – families can be made through voluntary association, a nation can be made through immigration and naturalization; and on the other hand the belief that blood ties determine belonging – into the family as well as into the nation. Especially transracial adoptions touched upon these notions in new and challenging ways. It was within this historical context, I argue, that discourses on civil rights, on idealized notions of “the American family,” on citizenship as well as Cold War rhetoric all intersected in the social practice that is transnational and transracial adoptions. This project is guided by several research questions: Why did these transnational and transracial adoptions generate such a huge media coverage, despite their relatively small numbers in the early years of international adoption, what were the larger political and cultural issues and sentiments these adoptions touched upon? Why did white Americans consider adopting a child from Korea, but not a racially mixed child out of the US foster system, why was the benevolent rhetoric of color blindness, multiracial families and child rescue not extended to these American children? Lastly, why were the ISS and the CWLA so critical of Buck and Grammer, how did they react to these “adoption activists”?

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