"Tired of reading about dying children" - Bruce Barton
Location
United States
Year
c. 1924–1926
Context
Long-format printed appeal by Bruce Barton (1886–1967), the advertising executive who in the 1920s wrote some of the most widely circulated humanitarian copy in American print and who later served as a Republican congressman from New York.
The piece is structured as a writer's confession: Barton recounts being asked repeatedly to write copy for NER, refusing each time on the grounds that earlier appeals had already exhausted the rhetorical vocabulary of starving children, and at last opening a small NER booklet that named a single orphan by case number - Child Number 4899 - whose individuated story moved him to write the present text. The illustration shows a hand holding the small "Emergency Fund of Near East Relief" booklet and its subtitle "Last Booklet the Child Number 4899."
The appeal is a distillation of NER's mid-1920s editorial pivot from mass-casualty headlines toward a single-named-child framing - the same technique that drove the direct-sponsorship plan promoted in NER's 1924-1925 brochures.
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"I am tired of reading about dying children. By BRUCE BARTON / When the Near East Relief asked for another advertisement about starving children I answered: 'I am through.' … I thumbed through the book … 'This book is a child; the child's number is 4899. If you fill in the book the child lives; if you throw away the book the child dies.' … NEAR EAST RELIEF / Room 1602, 151 Fifth Avenue, New York City."
