Dear Reader,
Many of you will recall that in the lead-up to UNICEF's 75 Anniversary in 2021, News & Views published a series of quarterlies providing glimpses of UNICEF's first 25 years, second 25 years, and the 25 years up to 2021. Many of you contributed articles and memories you keep of those years. In addition, our archives include a "History" label which will lead you to many other articles contributed by XUNICEF members.Starting in 2021 I authored a series titled, "A Little History". With the permission of the editors, I am now presenting that series in a rewritten and slightly cleaned-up form. I hope the series will encourage you and other members to contribute some of your own reflections on UNICEF's history.
Articles in this series will likely not appear every week. I have learned that rewriting, researching and editing takes a lot more time than I initially thought, so these articles will appear on a basis of 'when I get around to it' and 'the patience of the editors allows'. I will try to keep to some logical or chronological order, but I cannot guarantee that.
This has been a hard year for UNICEF, but it is helpful to look back now and realize that as individuals and as an organization, we have gone through other hard years and somehow always managed to persevere.
This has been a hard year for UNICEF, but it is helpful to look back now and realize that as individuals and as an organization, we have gone through other hard years and somehow always managed to persevere.
Please remember to celebrate our anniversary on December 11, 2026: UNICEF at 80. Let's use this opportunity to recommit to our mission for the rights and well-being of the world's children.
Thanks for any comments, additions, and corrections as this project develops.
Tom
Post-War Devastation and Response
The year was 1921. The Armistice had ended the terrors of World War I, but for millions of civilians across Europe—and especially in Eastern Europe and Russia—the war's devastation had barely begun. A terrible drought in the spring of 1921 compounded the disaster. Famine stalked the countryside. Populations already weakened by war, revolution, and civil war now faced waves of epidemics: typhus, typhoid, cholera—diseases that followed in the wake of displaced refugees, collapsed sanitation systems, and economic ruin.
Relief came from multiple quarters. Herbert Hoover's American Relief Administration began its massive intervention in Russia, eventually feeding 10.5 million people daily at its peak. The Red Cross, YMCA, Quaker groups, and the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee all mobilized to address immediate needs. Yet these organizations, however well-intentioned, were engaged primarily in emergency relief—food, medicine, temporary shelter. The deeper question remained unanswered: how could the world coordinate a systematic response to epidemic disease across borders?
The Rockefeller Foundation
One organization was already thinking differently. The Rockefeller Foundation, itself barely eight years old, had begun pioneering systematic approaches to international public health—first in China with investments in medical education and epidemic control, and now increasingly turning its attention and resources toward Europe's crisis.
The Foundation itself was a new kind of institution. In 1913, John D. Rockefeller Sr.—having accumulated one of the world's greatest fortunes through Standard Oil—established it "to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world." Behind this vision stood his principal advisor, Frederick Taylor Gates, a Baptist minister and business strategist who had persuaded Rockefeller to abandon what Gates called "retail giving"—responding to individual appeals—in favor of "wholesale investments in permanent corporate philanthropies for the good of Mankind." Gates had warned that unless Rockefeller created an enduring institution, his heirs might "dissipate their inheritances or become intoxicated with power."
The League of Nations
In his Fourteen Points of 1918, President Woodrow Wilson had pushed for the creation of what would become the League of Nations. His efforts and the support of other world leaders led to the League's official founding in January 1920 as a key outcome of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. The League's stated goals included "preventing wars through collective security and disarmament, settling international disputes through negotiation, and addressing concerns including labour conditions, human trafficking, the arms trade, global health, and protection of minorities."
The Rockefeller Foundation moved quickly to offer support to the League's efforts on global health, with particular attention to the crisis in Eastern Europe.
Dr. Ludwik Rajchman
In August 1921, the League of Nations appointed Dr. Ludwik Rajchman, a 33-year-old Polish physician, as the first director of the League's Health Organization, which would eventually become the World Health Organization.
Rajchman was not a conventional administrator. He had grown up as a social activist and revolutionary, spent time in prison for his convictions, and told his family he wanted to study law. Instead, they insisted he take up medicine. At university, he studied under a professor of bacteriology who had worked with Louis Pasteur—a connection that led to postgraduate studies at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and at King's College London. When Poland gained independence after World War I, the young physician returned home to establish the country's national institute of epidemiology and school of hygiene.
Paris - Pasteur, Curie, Labouisse and the Nobels
Rajchman emerged from Paris's most vibrant scientific institutions at a moment when their influence extended far beyond the laboratory. The institutions where Rajchman pursued this training would prove influential in other ways:The Pasteur Institute itself was a partner in a parallel research center, the Institut du Radium (later the Institut Curie), established in 1909 through a joint initiative of the Pasteur Institute and the University of Paris. There, Marie Curie directed research into radioactivity and its medical applications—work that would transform cancer treatment and public health.
Like Rajchman, Marie was a Polish national, born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw. Together with her husband Pierre Curie and physicist Henri Becquerel, she won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903. In 1911, she won a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of radium—the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and the first person ever to win two.
A Later Tie to UNICEF
The Curie family's commitment to human welfare would extend into the next generation. Marie's younger daughter, Ève Curie, became a journalist and humanitarian. In 1954, she married Henry Richardson Labouisse Jr., an American diplomat who would become the second Executive Director of UNICEF. Ève became known as the "First Lady of UNICEF," traveling to more than 100 countries to advocate for children. When Labouisse accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of UNICEF in 1965, it marked a remarkable convergence: the extended Curie family had, by then, accumulated six Nobel Prizes—a testament to generations devoted to advancing science and human welfare.
A Global Network for Public Health
Rajchman's task at the League of Nations was immense: to tie together the nascent national public health structures emerging across Europe in the post-war chaos and influenza pandemic, and to form as quickly as possible a global network. The Rockefeller Foundation, already active in establishing public health infrastructure, welcomed the new international organization and funded much of its early work.
Dr. John Grant, public health pioneer in China and father of Jim Grant
Rajchman's vision quickly expanded beyond Europe. In 1925, while visiting Japan, he received an invitation to tour China—engineered by the Rockefeller Foundation's Beijing representative, Dr. John Grant, who had built China's early public health structure. That visit began Rajchman's intensive engagement with Asia, and China became the focus of much of the League's public health work until war made it impossible. (Young Jim Grant, who would later become UNICEF's legendary Executive Director, was three years old during Rajchman's Beijing visit.)
A Turning Point for Rajchman and a Collapse for the League
Rajchman's path was not smooth. His strong anti-fascist convictions brought him under intense political pressure during the 1930s. He openly and strenuously denounced both Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. He publicly expressed admiration for the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War—a position that put him at odds with the League of Nations' official stance of neutrality and appeasement. The League's Secretary-General, Joseph Avenol, sympathetic to authoritarian regimes, forced Rajchman to choose between his League position and his independent work with China.The motivation was clearly tied to Japan’s rising power and Avenol’s desire to maintain good relations in the aftermath of Japan’s withdrawal from the League in March 1933 in response to the League’s condemnation of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria.
Rajchman's family was Christian, but they had a Jewish heritage. This became a particular stumbling block for the League's leadership in an era of rising fascism. This problem with the League was compounded by political changes in his native Poland, where his socialist background and former imprisonment for revolutionary activities made him a dangerous figure in the eyes of the increasingly right-wing Polish government.
After 18 years directing the League of Nations Health Organization—years in which he had transformed it from a provisional body into a permanent institution focused on international public health—Rajchman resigned in July 1939. He fled to the United States shortly before Paris fell to German forces in 1940, and only months before the League of Nations itself collapsed into irrelevance.
Working for Maurice Pate
In the United States, Rajchman found work with relief organizations including the Commission for Polish Relief, whose head was Maurice Pate, an American businessman with a remarkable track record in humanitarian work under Herbert Hoover. Pate had begun his career with Hoover's Commission for Relief in Belgium during World War I, and helped organize Hoover's American Relief Administration in the 1920s.
By 1943, even as war raged, Rajchman was already thinking beyond the immediate crisis. He published an article titled "A United Nations Health Service—Why Not?" and in 1944 joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), where his task was to develop programs for epidemiology and health for the flood of refugees expected when the war ended.
I will start this series as I did in the 2021 series - with the man who helped create and then led UNICEF at its inception: Dr. Ludwik Rajchman.
Most of this material appeared in my earlier article, A Young Man - One Hundred Years Ago, which in turn drew heavily on Maggie Black's 1986 book, The Children and the Nations and biographical material from Wikipedia and the internet. I have added additional material on Rajchman's later life from Marta Balinska's excellent biography of Rajchman For the Good of Humanity: Ludwik Rajchman, Medical Statesman.
Thanks for any comments, additions, and corrections as this project develops.
Tom
A Little History #1: Dr. Ludwik Rajchman— Father of UNICEF / God Father of WHO
By Tom McDermott
Post-War Devastation and Response
The year was 1921. The Armistice had ended the terrors of World War I, but for millions of civilians across Europe—and especially in Eastern Europe and Russia—the war's devastation had barely begun. A terrible drought in the spring of 1921 compounded the disaster. Famine stalked the countryside. Populations already weakened by war, revolution, and civil war now faced waves of epidemics: typhus, typhoid, cholera—diseases that followed in the wake of displaced refugees, collapsed sanitation systems, and economic ruin.
Relief came from multiple quarters. Herbert Hoover's American Relief Administration began its massive intervention in Russia, eventually feeding 10.5 million people daily at its peak. The Red Cross, YMCA, Quaker groups, and the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee all mobilized to address immediate needs. Yet these organizations, however well-intentioned, were engaged primarily in emergency relief—food, medicine, temporary shelter. The deeper question remained unanswered: how could the world coordinate a systematic response to epidemic disease across borders?
The Rockefeller Foundation
One organization was already thinking differently. The Rockefeller Foundation, itself barely eight years old, had begun pioneering systematic approaches to international public health—first in China with investments in medical education and epidemic control, and now increasingly turning its attention and resources toward Europe's crisis.
The Foundation itself was a new kind of institution. In 1913, John D. Rockefeller Sr.—having accumulated one of the world's greatest fortunes through Standard Oil—established it "to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world." Behind this vision stood his principal advisor, Frederick Taylor Gates, a Baptist minister and business strategist who had persuaded Rockefeller to abandon what Gates called "retail giving"—responding to individual appeals—in favor of "wholesale investments in permanent corporate philanthropies for the good of Mankind." Gates had warned that unless Rockefeller created an enduring institution, his heirs might "dissipate their inheritances or become intoxicated with power."
The League of Nations
In his Fourteen Points of 1918, President Woodrow Wilson had pushed for the creation of what would become the League of Nations. His efforts and the support of other world leaders led to the League's official founding in January 1920 as a key outcome of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. The League's stated goals included "preventing wars through collective security and disarmament, settling international disputes through negotiation, and addressing concerns including labour conditions, human trafficking, the arms trade, global health, and protection of minorities."
The Rockefeller Foundation moved quickly to offer support to the League's efforts on global health, with particular attention to the crisis in Eastern Europe.
Dr. Ludwik Rajchman
In August 1921, the League of Nations appointed Dr. Ludwik Rajchman, a 33-year-old Polish physician, as the first director of the League's Health Organization, which would eventually become the World Health Organization.
Rajchman was not a conventional administrator. He had grown up as a social activist and revolutionary, spent time in prison for his convictions, and told his family he wanted to study law. Instead, they insisted he take up medicine. At university, he studied under a professor of bacteriology who had worked with Louis Pasteur—a connection that led to postgraduate studies at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and at King's College London. When Poland gained independence after World War I, the young physician returned home to establish the country's national institute of epidemiology and school of hygiene.
Paris - Pasteur, Curie, Labouisse and the Nobels
Rajchman emerged from Paris's most vibrant scientific institutions at a moment when their influence extended far beyond the laboratory. The institutions where Rajchman pursued this training would prove influential in other ways:The Pasteur Institute itself was a partner in a parallel research center, the Institut du Radium (later the Institut Curie), established in 1909 through a joint initiative of the Pasteur Institute and the University of Paris. There, Marie Curie directed research into radioactivity and its medical applications—work that would transform cancer treatment and public health.
Like Rajchman, Marie was a Polish national, born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw. Together with her husband Pierre Curie and physicist Henri Becquerel, she won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903. In 1911, she won a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of radium—the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and the first person ever to win two.
A Later Tie to UNICEF
 |
| Éve Curie and Henry (Harry) Labouisse arriving in Paris following their wedding |
The Curie family's commitment to human welfare would extend into the next generation. Marie's younger daughter, Ève Curie, became a journalist and humanitarian. In 1954, she married Henry Richardson Labouisse Jr., an American diplomat who would become the second Executive Director of UNICEF. Ève became known as the "First Lady of UNICEF," traveling to more than 100 countries to advocate for children. When Labouisse accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of UNICEF in 1965, it marked a remarkable convergence: the extended Curie family had, by then, accumulated six Nobel Prizes—a testament to generations devoted to advancing science and human welfare.
A Global Network for Public Health
Rajchman's task at the League of Nations was immense: to tie together the nascent national public health structures emerging across Europe in the post-war chaos and influenza pandemic, and to form as quickly as possible a global network. The Rockefeller Foundation, already active in establishing public health infrastructure, welcomed the new international organization and funded much of its early work.
Dr. John Grant, public health pioneer in China and father of Jim Grant
Rajchman's vision quickly expanded beyond Europe. In 1925, while visiting Japan, he received an invitation to tour China—engineered by the Rockefeller Foundation's Beijing representative, Dr. John Grant, who had built China's early public health structure. That visit began Rajchman's intensive engagement with Asia, and China became the focus of much of the League's public health work until war made it impossible. (Young Jim Grant, who would later become UNICEF's legendary Executive Director, was three years old during Rajchman's Beijing visit.)
A Turning Point for Rajchman and a Collapse for the League
Rajchman's path was not smooth. His strong anti-fascist convictions brought him under intense political pressure during the 1930s. He openly and strenuously denounced both Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. He publicly expressed admiration for the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War—a position that put him at odds with the League of Nations' official stance of neutrality and appeasement. The League's Secretary-General, Joseph Avenol, sympathetic to authoritarian regimes, forced Rajchman to choose between his League position and his independent work with China.The motivation was clearly tied to Japan’s rising power and Avenol’s desire to maintain good relations in the aftermath of Japan’s withdrawal from the League in March 1933 in response to the League’s condemnation of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria.
Rajchman's family was Christian, but they had a Jewish heritage. This became a particular stumbling block for the League's leadership in an era of rising fascism. This problem with the League was compounded by political changes in his native Poland, where his socialist background and former imprisonment for revolutionary activities made him a dangerous figure in the eyes of the increasingly right-wing Polish government.
After 18 years directing the League of Nations Health Organization—years in which he had transformed it from a provisional body into a permanent institution focused on international public health—Rajchman resigned in July 1939. He fled to the United States shortly before Paris fell to German forces in 1940, and only months before the League of Nations itself collapsed into irrelevance.
Working for Maurice Pate
In the United States, Rajchman found work with relief organizations including the Commission for Polish Relief, whose head was Maurice Pate, an American businessman with a remarkable track record in humanitarian work under Herbert Hoover. Pate had begun his career with Hoover's Commission for Relief in Belgium during World War I, and helped organize Hoover's American Relief Administration in the 1920s.
By 1943, even as war raged, Rajchman was already thinking beyond the immediate crisis. He published an article titled "A United Nations Health Service—Why Not?" and in 1944 joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), where his task was to develop programs for epidemiology and health for the flood of refugees expected when the war ended.
UNRRA was a massive operation: operating since 1943, it employed 50,000 staff and would eventually distribute nearly $4.5 billion in aid across liberated Europe and Asia. Many future key staff in UNICEF came out of earlier service with UNRRA in China - I will cover these in a future article
UNRRA's End and UNICEF's Birth
By late 1946, however, Cold War tensions were already fracturing the Allied unity that had made UNRRA possible. The United States, its largest funder and target of mounting criticism for the organization's perceived mismanagement and political failures, prepared to wind down the agency. The crisis of European and Asian children—orphaned, displaced, malnourished, vulnerable to epidemic disease—would not end with UNRRA's closure.
In his role as Polish delegate to the UN, Rajchman saw an opportunity. He made a decisive proposal: all residual UNRRA funds should be directed to help the primary victims of war—the children. At UNRRA's final Council meeting in June 1946, Rajchman drew up a resolution to establish a UN International Children's Emergency Fund. The resolution passed unanimously. It was then approved by the UN Economic and Social Council in September 1946 and by the General Assembly in December 1946.
Rajchman's proposal aligned with powerful support at the highest levels. Herbert Hoover, now an elder statesman, had undertaken a grueling 50,000-mile world tour of 38 countries in 82 days at President Harry S. Truman's request, assessing food needs in war-devastated regions. Accompanying him was Maurice Pate. The Pate-Hoover report to Truman provided the empirical foundation for creating a permanent, child-focused UN agency.
80 Years Ago
UNICEF was born on December 11, 1946 under UN General Assembly Resolution 57(1) . Rajchman became its first Chairman of the Executive Board (1946–1950), recruiting Maurice Pate as its first Executive Director. Pate immediately assembled a core team, drawing many experienced personnel from UNRRA and the former League of Nations Health Organization—bringing with them both institutional knowledge and established networks across Europe, Asia, and the developing world. Early UNICEF programs operated in Albania, Austria, China, Czechoslovakia, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Yugoslavia, focusing initially on powdered milk distribution and feeding programs for malnourished children.
Flight Yet Again: The McCarthy Era
There was a cruel irony awaiting Rajchman. After playing the central role in creating UNICEF and serving as its first chairman, he fell under the suspicion of a new wave of anti-Communist rhetoric sweeping the United States. Rajchman's socialist background, his Polish nationality, and his prominence in international organizations made him vulnerable to McCarthy-era accusations. Despite his impeccable anti-fascist record and his recent services to humanity, he was excluded from any role in planning the new World Health Organization—the successor institution to the League's Health Organization that might have been his natural inheritance.
At the same time, the Polish government renewed its suspicions of his background. It revoked his diplomatic passport, effectively severing his official ties to his native country. As Congressional committees began investigating alleged Communist sympathies, Rajchman was summoned to appear. His FBI file stated that he was "one of those rather mysterious persons about whom we could prove nothing that was absolutely derogatory, and yet whom we could never completely remove from suspicion."*
Rather than face the inquisition, he fled the United States in 1951 and returned to France, settling at his home in Sarthe where he lived until his death from Parkinson's disease in 1965. It was a sad end to an extraordinary career: a man who had been persecuted for opposing fascism in the 1930s was now persecuted for suspected sympathies toward communism in the 1950s.
UNRRA's End and UNICEF's Birth
By late 1946, however, Cold War tensions were already fracturing the Allied unity that had made UNRRA possible. The United States, its largest funder and target of mounting criticism for the organization's perceived mismanagement and political failures, prepared to wind down the agency. The crisis of European and Asian children—orphaned, displaced, malnourished, vulnerable to epidemic disease—would not end with UNRRA's closure.
In his role as Polish delegate to the UN, Rajchman saw an opportunity. He made a decisive proposal: all residual UNRRA funds should be directed to help the primary victims of war—the children. At UNRRA's final Council meeting in June 1946, Rajchman drew up a resolution to establish a UN International Children's Emergency Fund. The resolution passed unanimously. It was then approved by the UN Economic and Social Council in September 1946 and by the General Assembly in December 1946.
Rajchman's proposal aligned with powerful support at the highest levels. Herbert Hoover, now an elder statesman, had undertaken a grueling 50,000-mile world tour of 38 countries in 82 days at President Harry S. Truman's request, assessing food needs in war-devastated regions. Accompanying him was Maurice Pate. The Pate-Hoover report to Truman provided the empirical foundation for creating a permanent, child-focused UN agency.
80 Years Ago
UNICEF was born on December 11, 1946 under UN General Assembly Resolution 57(1) . Rajchman became its first Chairman of the Executive Board (1946–1950), recruiting Maurice Pate as its first Executive Director. Pate immediately assembled a core team, drawing many experienced personnel from UNRRA and the former League of Nations Health Organization—bringing with them both institutional knowledge and established networks across Europe, Asia, and the developing world. Early UNICEF programs operated in Albania, Austria, China, Czechoslovakia, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Yugoslavia, focusing initially on powdered milk distribution and feeding programs for malnourished children.
Flight Yet Again: The McCarthy Era
There was a cruel irony awaiting Rajchman. After playing the central role in creating UNICEF and serving as its first chairman, he fell under the suspicion of a new wave of anti-Communist rhetoric sweeping the United States. Rajchman's socialist background, his Polish nationality, and his prominence in international organizations made him vulnerable to McCarthy-era accusations. Despite his impeccable anti-fascist record and his recent services to humanity, he was excluded from any role in planning the new World Health Organization—the successor institution to the League's Health Organization that might have been his natural inheritance.
At the same time, the Polish government renewed its suspicions of his background. It revoked his diplomatic passport, effectively severing his official ties to his native country. As Congressional committees began investigating alleged Communist sympathies, Rajchman was summoned to appear. His FBI file stated that he was "one of those rather mysterious persons about whom we could prove nothing that was absolutely derogatory, and yet whom we could never completely remove from suspicion."*
 |
| Ludwik and his wife, Maria on their apple farm in Sarthe in 1955 |
Rather than face the inquisition, he fled the United States in 1951 and returned to France, settling at his home in Sarthe where he lived until his death from Parkinson's disease in 1965. It was a sad end to an extraordinary career: a man who had been persecuted for opposing fascism in the 1930s was now persecuted for suspected sympathies toward communism in the 1950s.
At his burial in the cemetery in Chenu, only two persons attended: Robert Debré and Jean Monnet. Monnet had served as Rajchman's Deputy at the League and later carried on with much of the work Rajchman had begun for development in China. He is sometimes referred to as "one of the founding fathers of Europe in his efforts to create the European Coal and Steel Community (ECCS) in 1951 - what he called "a first step towards a United States of Europe".
Debré was a French pediatrician who served as president of France's National Institute of Hygiene and later founded the Centre International de l'Enfance dedicated to global health initiatives for children. He played a major role in French support for the creation of UNICEF. He is widely considered the father of modern pediatrics.
Monnet later wrote, "Above all, he (Rajchman) was a good man....I have known few men who seemed to possess as much as Ludwik Rajchman the sense of the universal. From one continent to another, beyond borders, beyond regimes, he maintained generous contacts ...the work of reason and heart he had accomplished survived him because he had known how to make it last. Rajchman believed in the generosity of men, but he had taken the precaution of founding institutions.."
The institution he had created outlasted all the political storms. UNICEF, transformed from a temporary emergency fund into a permanent UN agency in 1953, grew to become one of the most respected and effective organizations in the world—a living testament to Rajchman's conviction that children transcend all political divisions.
 |
| Caricature of Ludwik (artist unknown) from Banlinska's book |
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