This dissertation explores how the adoption of foreign children from Greece, Korea, and Vietnam to the United States moved beyond an emergency response in the 1940s to become an American institution by the 1970s. The rise of international adoption came as the United States was trying to redefine itself as a nation. The transfer of needy children across ethnic, racial, and national lines promised to bridge the developed and developing world, humanizing relations between countries while reinforcing the United States as an exceptional humanitarian power.

This dissertation argues that the institutionalization of intercountry adoptions enabled the United States to extend its political and cultural reach into intimate family relationships beyond its national boundaries. Driven by the demand for new "markets" of "adoptable" babies, some legislators, adoptive parents, social workers, the private adoption sector, and the media used international adoption as a way to tell a story about their nation as a benevolent power that used its authority to throw off colonial structures of racism and hegemony. In so doing, the United States built a new kind of empire---a "colorblind empire"---to legitimize foreign children's place in U.S. families.

As this dissertation contends, the colorblind empire's logistical success depended on the interaction of state institutions and private agencies. The efforts of private organizations and individuals to promote international adoption succeeded because the federal government expanded immigration policies, limited the regulation of adoption markets, and protected the private sector's policymaking. The advocacy of adoptive parents through political lobbying, interest groups, memoirs, and media campaigns further strengthened the cultural authority and institutional clout of the emerging private international adoption sector.

The lens of adoption unites several key themes in twentieth-century American history. Following a foreign orphan's path to the United States changes the trajectories of immigration history and child welfare policy as part of the larger welfare state. It explains how foreign orphans shaped conceptions of racial difference. It alters the image of a homogenous 1950s American family. It reveals how international adoption became the safest kind of nation-building platform, silencing critics that labeled the United States an empire.