Publication Date
2025
Placement
Award Winner
Class Year
2025
Department
History
Advisor
Mary Lui
Abstract
This essay considers the role of the Children’s Bureau in the transnational adoptions of East Asian war orphans from 1950-1969. World War II and other Cold War conflicts left hundreds of thousands of children in Japan, Hong Kong, and Korea orphaned and displaced. This essay argues that the Children’s Bureau played an important role in the transnational adoptions of East Asian war orphans. The Bureau was the only federal agency involved in these adoptions explicitly devoted to child welfare. Cold War geopolitics imbued the Bureau’s approach. Through transnational adoptions, the agency simultaneously responded to Cold War pressures to help children fathered by American GIs abroad while promoting narratives of American altruism. World War II and the Cold War expanded notions of adoptability, but the Bureau struggled to reconcile its claims of “universal childhood” with the perceived racial differences of East Asian war orphans. As private, proxy adoption schemes like the Holt Adoption Program rose in prominence during the mid-1950s through the 1960s, the Bureau fought a losing battle against proxy adoptions and privatization. The Children’s Bureau played a significant role in the history of transnational adoptions, and it is one deserving of closer consideration.
Recommended Citation
Chen, Caroline, "Adopting America’s Future Citizens: The Children’s Bureau and the Plight of East Asian War Orphans, 1950-1969" (2025). Harvey M. Applebaum ’59 Award. 29.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/applebaum_award/29
