A flour sack with a delicately embroidered French phrase — “Merci L’Amerique,” or “Thank you, America” — is a good place to begin understanding the history of U.S. foreign aid.

After President Donald Trump ordered a freeze on the United States’ aid to the rest of the world, the website for the agency responsible for most of it — the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — has gone dark.

So we’ll fill in that error page by taking you into national and USAID archives that are still accessible under this administration to see how the United States got into the foreign aid business and what that means for us and the world.

“The people are actually starving and living in ruins,” the Evening Star of Washington reported on Nov. 29, 1914, in a story about the famine and destruction in Belgium during World War I.

The tiny, urbanized nation was occupied by the German army, which seized most Belgian food for its troops, triggering a British blockade.

The United States tapped Herbert Hoover, then a mining engineer living in London, to head the Commission for Relief in Belgium.

The commission shipped 5.7 million tons of food to Belgium, much of it sacks of American flour. Belgians repurposed the flour sacks by creating clothing, bags and decorative textiles, many of them embroidered with thanks to the United States.

More than three decades later, the devastation after World War II was massive, and the United States faced another decision on aid.

Secretary of State George C. Marshall understood there might be an urge to isolate.

“The people of this country are distant from the troubled areas of the Earth and it is hard for them to comprehend the plight and consequent reactions of the long-suffering peoples, and the effect of those reactions on their governments in connection with our efforts to promote peace in the world,” Marshall said in a June 5, 1947, speech at Harvard University.

The Marshall Plan was massive, with $13.3 billion (about $170 billion in today’s dollars) in assistance distributed among 16 countries. “[It] is considered by many to have been the most effective ever of U.S. foreign aid programs,” Curt Tarnoff, a specialist in foreign affairs at the Congressional Research Service, wrote in 1997. “An effort to prevent the economic deterioration of Europe, expansion of communism, and stagnation of world trade, the Plan sought to stimulate European production, promote adoption of policies leading to stable economies, and take measures to increase trade among European countries and between Europe and the rest of the world.”

In other words, foreign aid has always been a two-way street that benefits U.S. interests. The Marshall Plan had its critics, but it is often invoked as a blueprint for aid in similar situations.

The Marshall Plan was such a success that it inspired President Harry S. Truman to create the Four Point Program, which gave technological and economic aid to developing countries.

“Experience throughout our history has made it ever more clear that peace and trade are two sides of the same coin,” Truman’s assistant, John Steelman, told a convention of electrical contractors in Houston in November 1949, as he was selling the program to U.S. taxpayers.

This aid was also about containment and stability, a way to strengthen struggling nations against being subsumed by the Soviet Union.

“We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas,” Truman said in his second inaugural address on Jan. 20, 1949. “We should make available to peace-loving peoples the benefits of our store of technical knowledge in order to help them realize their aspirations for a better life.”

It was the teach-them-how-to-fish approach.

Those programs mushroomed into agencies such as the International Cooperation Administration, the Foreign Operations Administration, the Development Loan Fund and the Mutual Security Agency. That was a lot.

And when President John F. Kennedy looked at all that, the creation of a single agency to administer the aid seemed more efficient.

“For no objective supporter of foreign aid can be satisfied with the existing program — actually a multiplicity of programs. Bureaucratically fragmented, awkward and slow, its administration is diffused over a haphazard and irrational structure covering at least four departments and several other agencies,” Kennedy said in a special message to Congress on March 22, 1961.

At the time, the United States’ foreign aid was “a series of legislative measures and administrative procedures conceived at different times and for different purposes, many of them now obsolete, inconsistent, and unduly rigid and thus unsuited for our present needs and purposes,” Kennedy said.

The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 was passed six months after that message. USAID was born with Kennedy’s executive order creating an umbrella organization for all nonmilitary foreign aid.

It was the height of the Cold War, and aid through containment was a strategic issue. But Kennedy also emphasized the need for USAID on moral terms: “There is no escaping our obligations: our moral obligations as a wise leader and good neighbor in the interdependent community of free nations; our economic obligations as the wealthiest people in a world of largely poor people; as a nation no longer dependent upon the loans from abroad that once helped us develop our own economy; and our political obligations as the single largest counter to the adversaries of freedom.”

A month after creating USAID, Kennedy headed south to promote it.

The streets of Bogotá filled with more than half a million Colombians who came to greet Kennedy, crowding his limousine until it came to a standstill, when he visited the Andean capital, kicking off his foreign aid programs that year, according to a Dec. 18 Associated Press story.

“We in the United States have made many mistakes in our relations with the other American republics,” Kennedy said. “The leaders of Latin America, the industrialists and the landowners are, I am sure, also ready to admit past mistakes and accept new responsibilities.”

Americans usually overestimate the amount of money that goes to foreign aid, pinning it between 8 and 25% of government spending, according to a 2017 poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

The fact is, the USAID annual budget is roughly 1% of the national budget — it was $72 billion during fiscal year 2023. That sends aid to at least 100 countries.

USAID employees are the people who work to get struggling countries clean drinking water, medication and agricultural technology. They help fight poverty, build hospitals and schools. They promote programs for maternal and infant health. Their work in stabilizing these nations plays a role in global security.

What does that do for the United States?

It means there will be less disease in the world, more trade opportunities, fewer migrants having to cross borders because life has become unsustainable in their homelands.

On Sunday, Elon Musk posted on X his view of the organization and the work of about 10,000 employees. “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” Musk wrote.