Demystifying Soup Kitchen Relief during WWI

French warship picking up a boat full of Armenian refugees fleeing from the massacre of their people by Turkish forces during WWI

Hunger and food aid in the twentieth century witnessed a complex evolution that is still shaping the popular consciousness today, especially the way we speak and think about those in need of food assistance. The origins of soup kitchens tend to be associated primarily with the Depression era, but they also have important roots in World War I. It is unsurprising that soup kitchens have often been mentioned or discussed in negative terms—except in times of large-scale or universal need. According to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, “The term [‘soup kitchen’] was popularized in 1839 to denote establishments serving minimum dietary essentials to needy people,” and in 1847 the British Temporary Relief Act that responded to the Irish potato famine was also known as the Soup Kitchen Act. Because this Act “replaced public works as the main form of relief,” it ultimately shifted responsibility for food aid from the public to the private sector, which led various charitable and religious organizations to dominate relief, often using soup kitchens as a means for proselytizing.

In the pre-WWI twentieth century, magazines continued to stress the presence of soup kitchens in alienating terms. In a letter to the editor from a 1909 issue of The New Age, for example, a member of the Christian Socialist Fellowship makes a point of saying they are “not a soup kitchen society.” About two years later, a passage in The New Age “Notes of the Week” discussing the Labour Party’s Right to Work Bill reads,

The organisation of employment by the State is one thing; the provision for unemployment is quite another. And we would go further and say that nothing has done more, or will, if persisted in, do more to discredit Socialism as a political and economic doctrine than the association of its principles with the principles of the soup-kitchen and relief-works. Mr. Clynes [a spokesperson for the Labour Party], we observe, was anxious to prove that a State scheme for directly employing the unemployed need not result in “relief measures.” The fact, however, is notorious that every such direct   employment of the unemployed degenerates sooner rather than later into relief.

Such anxiety about an “association” with “relief measures” is telling of how British pre-war culture viewed this “degeneration” of their times. Even in a setting that promoted cooperation and political “organization,” soup kitchens were often seen as contributors to the problem rather than as possible havens or sources of genuine help for people in need. This generally accepted viewpoint left no room to consider their benefits (such as community and physical stability), but only reinforced a sense of difference between people in positions of authority to condemn “relief measures” and people left in need of them.

All of this changed during wartime. Within a few months after the war began, the term appeared in the London Times to describe mobile kitchens “[s]pecially designed and constructed for Service at the Front” and “[e]quipped with stoves, oil and water tanks, [and] cooking utensils.” Later in the war after the US became involved, the Salvation Army would also send women directly to the front lines bringing comfort food—often freshly baked donuts—which earned them the nickname “Doughnut Girls.” Meanwhile, “institutional” soup kitchens also sprouted up throughout war-stricken areas, placing ads requesting funds and support. The Times Sick and Wounded Fund allowed donations to be directed toward specific needs, including “the provision of motor soup kitchens.” In the face of almost universal need, such assistance becomes not only necessary but acceptable. Although these war front ads imply that people already offering services to society are most deserving of direct aid, the abundance of soup kitchens for civilians and refugees during this period still reflects a more positive turn in philanthropic priorities.

A similar shift takes place in wartime journals. A line from an issue of The Masses declares that already by November 1914 “Soup kitchens were established everywhere” in Paris, while a “European correspondent” describes how a member of the Confederation Generale du Travail in Paris “[p]roudly . . . showed me a system of soup-kitchens which the C.G.T. is running on behalf of the government and themselves, to feed the workers.” Although one would expect a working-class magazine to draw attention to the “pride” that well-run soup kitchens can instill in poverty-stricken areas, this transnational development is significant, as more people were beginning to appreciate the need of food assistance and communal spaces during wartime.

For instance, in one ad for the Belgian Relief Committee in the last 1914 issue of Scribner’s, the headline reads: “SOS: Belgians Are Starving.” The organization informs American audiences that “in Brussels alone one hundred soup kitchens are feeding 100,000 hungry people. The daily cable dispatches, in unbiased news reports, are giving a continuous account of the appalling disaster and desolation.” To provide assistance from across the Atlantic, the Committee aimed to raise funds for “two purposes”: “To relieve immediate distress of Belgian refugees and the hundreds of thousands of destitute women and children and other non-combatants in Belgium,” and second, “To rehabilitate as soon as practicable the poor Belgian peasant and working classes by helping them get roofs over their heads and tools to work with.” In times of crisis, priorities shift, and as awareness of the War’s massive effects spread to other parts of the world, people became less concerned with “degenerative” relief efforts and more determined to combat “the appalling disaster and desolation.” Thus, print culture reflects shifting conceptions of what helping people looks like in the wake of human destruction as everyone directly or indirectly touched by the War sought ways to confront and articulate overwhelming problems of hunger and want.

Adding to these general examples, we can look more particularly to the work of Corinna Haven Smith, an American who helped provide direct relief to civilian war victims in France. Starting in 1916, she and her husband traveled to France multiple times to witness and document the horrors of the war firsthand. While there, she lived among war-torn families, “adopting” them in a sense, as a member of the Franco-American Committee for the Protection of the Children of the Frontier. Smith then shared these experiences with the rest of the world through books and lectures back in America, making the war as tangible as possible for people at a distance while also paying homage to those most deeply affected by it. Her writings illustrate two important aspects of how to consider approaches to the realities of hunger and people in need: the rhetoric we use to frame it and the attitude we ought to have toward those we would presume to help.

Illustration from Christian de Bartillat, La Marne, bataille du Multien, 5-10 sept. 1914.

Smith’s work not only provides a good practical example for how to marry direct assistance with cultural education, but her use of language also further illustrates appropriate ways to discuss these issues in the first place. In the preface to her 1920 book, Rising Above the Ruins in France, she informs readers up front, “The world at large will never know the full measure of the suffering of the population of the north of France, nor of the destruction wrought by the invading armies. . . . It is impossible to visualize the scene by reading the record of the impressions of other people; adjectives have ceased to carry meaning; generalities are without effect.” Rather than focusing on “adjectives” and “generalities,” then, she employs both photographic images and individual stories, letting the pictures and the people of France speak for themselves. She says of the photographs, “They leave much to the imagination, but it is hoped that they will give a true idea of certain phases of the world conflict as affecting individuals, their bravery in facing physical hardships, their tenacity of purpose in the struggle against crushing misfortune, their fight to maintain their splendid morale.” By orienting her readers in this personalized direction from the beginning, Smith simultaneously reveals her ethical conceptions of how to observe and encounter suffering and helps enact the experience for the viewer-reader. At the same time, though, she makes a point of acknowledging the difference between someone simply viewing the destruction and someone whose life has become defined by it, stressing that the war itself is something not quite comprehensible on a human level: “Just as the war is so much bigger than human beings, its aftermath is the same, and one is quickened by contact with it. Every roadside scene strikes home and the impression made is never to be forgotten and yet almost impossible to record.” This impression of “quickening” perhaps best sums up Smith’s way of doing good in the world. Throughout the book, she employs intimately personal language when discussing the people she worked with during the war, often referring to them with possessive pronouns (“our” or “my” families, “our” children). One could easily view this tendency as presumptuous if she had never actually met these people or only caught brief glimpses of their suffering. However, her continued presence among “her” families in the thick of their experience gives her a greater right to stake a claim in their lives.

Her rhetoric starkly contrasts with the way that public discourse continued to develop around hunger and need in the immediate aftermath of the war. Just over a year after the Armistice, for example, a piece in The Times emphasizes that “‘soup kitchen relief’ . . . is not enough.” Instead, “what is needed is to set them on their feet again.” While this practical emphasis may have its benefits, the point is that “soup kitchen relief” is already being used again as a pejorative term, complete with scare quotes, in December 1919. The same day’s paper also reprints a recent speech by British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, in which he claims in reference to continued relief efforts, “I agree that it is really only soup-kitchen relief. All that we can do is to relieve and mitigate sufferings. I agree that there is only one way, and that is to set them on their feet and let them work their own way through.” Lloyd George’s prescriptive language startlingly echoes the ways such themes would continue to be addressed the rest of the twentieth century. By insisting that there is “only one way” to help people, he and Europe at large continued to see those in need as having problems that are easily fixed. To think it is as simple as “let[ting] them work their own way through” makes manifest the sense of detachment from suffering latent in the dominant culture, a feeling that hunger (and, indeed, poverty) is something that must work itself out.

The first national kitchen at 104 Westminster Bridge Road, opened by Queen Mary on 21 May, 1917. BBC

While Smith also makes a point to emphasize the resources French civilians can use to set their lives back on course post-war, she never fails to speak empathetically. By stressing the need for people to help where they can, however they can, she illustrates a much more complete picture of what doing good really looks like in the aftermath of global destruction. Early in her post-war travels, Smith observes that “[i]mmediately after the Armistice the people began to struggle back, living on the site of their former homes in any kind of shelter. Despite their pluck there are families who might have been discouraged at the sight of general devastation that confronted them if there had not been someone to give a helping hand.” Her conviction to “give a helping hand” wherever it will be received is not accusatory or condescending, but rather a moving incarnation of her ethical bent—one that remains as relevant today as it was in the wake of modernity’s worst set of horrors to date.

Casie Dodd lives in Arkansas with her husband and two children. Her writing has appeared in This Land, Dappled Things, and other publications.