{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.05108877721943048, 'fraction_numerical': 0.005862646566164154, 'mean_word_length': 4.800970873786408, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
A Complicated Kindness: The Iowa Famine Relief Movement and the Myth of Midwestern (and American) Isolationism

In December 1892, America’s ambassador to St. Petersburg wrote to an Iowa newsman regarding Russia’s ongoing famine. Claiming peasant diets consisted of bread made from “rye and straw, rye and bark, or even entirely of bark,” the ambassador encouraged Iowans to send aid. Shocked that Russians were eating “rye-bark bread,” the journalist fired a telegram to the Red Cross’s Clara Barton. The newsman’s call for famine relief, unfortunately, fell upon deaf ears. Maintaining “[t]here is always more or less suffering . . . in Russia,” Barton instead preferred to feed “our own poor.” Rather than launch a foreign-relief effort, Barton was busy securing a significant donation of land from Dr. John Gardner. Intended to serve as a “Red Cross Sanctuary,” Gardner wanted his 782-acre parcel in Indiana to provide the “one piece of neutral ground on the Western Hemisphere . . . [and] a perpetual sanctuary against invading armies.” Equidistant from Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago, the “sanctuary” was situated thousands of miles from Europe’s Old-World rivalries, internecine wars,