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After WWII with the physical devastation of large regions, genocide, concentration camps, civilian deaths, and atomic bombs - combined with the Cold War that followed, people were reexamining the basic question - what is the place of individuals in a mass society capable of mass destruction? From this, came people wanting efforts made to reverse the world’s destructive trends, paving the road for a generation of youth who wanted to join in the effort to demonstrate the other side of America - our morality.
By the 1960s, the United States had participated in two world wars and had incomparable economic productivity. Following close behind was the Cold War, in which the U.S. used its new found power to become one of the top superpowers. “The New Frontier” that Kennedy spoke of was a nation that could use that newly gained power for good for all nations, not just for ourselves; this would move human history onto a new plateau in which strength and benevolence were joined. This was the U.S. that Kennedy wanted and spoke of often during his campaigning.
While under the leadership of Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, a desire to demonstrate actively the geopolitical power of the U.S. to do good became evident. Even in 1957, Congressman Henry Reuss and Senator Hubert Humphrey were trying to initiate a national service program to send people abroad. In 1960, both even introduced legislation, but it was John F. Kennedy that was widely perceived as the most attractive hero of the era. It was Kennedy who got the ball rolling. What was loved about JFK and why he was such a hit with the youth of that decade, was his notion that our nation needed a higher purpose to be genuinely heroic - he wanted to find something that would show the United State’s ultimate intentions. This was especially critical to Kennedy because at that time, we were located in Cold War “hot spots” like Vietnam.
Kennedy gave a speech at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on October 14th, 1960 to a crowd of 10,000 students. At this gathering, Kennedy made his first announcement for a program like the Peace Corps, challenged the students attending! He asked of everyone attending, who would be willing to spend ten years in Africa, Latin America, or Asia; how many who were becoming doctors would be willing to spend their days in Ghana, ect. This was the start of it all. Eight hundred students signed a petition during the three weeks that followed Kennedy’s speech and presented it to him, challenging him to go through with his challenge. Three days after the speech in Ann Arbor, Kennedy won the presidential election! The students that he inspired at colleges around the globe were not even able to help him win the election because back then, the voting age was 21. But, those college students were the ones that wanted to join the Peace Corps, and they were the ones that flooded Kennedy’s office with thousands of letters expressing their interest and trying to figure out how they could become a volunteer.
The youth of the 60s, whose parents had fought in WWII apparently craved a historical task of equivalent stature - and the Peace Corps became that task. With Kennedy warning the public that he was going to ask a lot of them beginning with his first speech as a nominee and continuing to challenging the younger generation to not “see what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” and repeating FDRs sentiments that they “have a rendezvous with destiny,” throughout his campaign, young people of the US were eager to join what JFK randomly called the Peace Corps during a campaign speech in San Francisco on November 2, 1960. Placing the voter, rather than the candidate, in a position of proving himself was one of Kennedy’s more ingenious campaigning techniques, and in the two months before he was inaugurated, Kennedy’s office received 25,000 letters from the American people inquiring how to join the “Peace Corps.” The book stated that more people wrote offering to work for the still nonexistent Peace Corps than for all the existing agencies of the government put together. Letters kept flowing in, including thousands more after Kennedy was formally inaugurated as the President of the United States on January 20, 1961.
The Peace Corps was created by Executive Order in May 1961 - although the Kennedy staff did borrow from the Humphrey and Reuss plans, it was Kennedy’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, who shaped the Peace Corps. The day after his inauguration, Kennedy called Shriver and asked him to head the task force to fashion the Peace Corps. There were many suggestions thrown around for how the Peace Corps should be approached and how it should be initiated into action, but Shriver, with the help of his right-hand-man Harris Wofford, who was Kennedy’s campaign adviser on civil rights, got the ball rolling. It was both Shriver and Wofford’s idea that the Peace Corps should not start slowly and on a limit pilot basis, they had bolder plans in mind. It was quickly realized that to merit recognition, the Peace Corps would have to operate on an entirely different scale from that of its predecessors - small volunteer programs lending a hand overseas such as the American Friends Service Committee (CARE) and the Heifer Project. One member of the task force stated “If you want to succeed with an idea that may fail, you have to do something big enough and bold enough to overcome the critics.” So, it was decided that a small Peace Corps would never attract the political talent, legislative attention, and public sympathy necessary to become successful. The task force was aiming for 5-10,000 volunteers to be in the field in the first year. Kennedy gave Shriver and the task force a month (February 1961) to develop a plan he could announce in response to the mail, polls and editorials that continued to pour in.
The task force decided that the only way to have the Peace Corps implemented immediately was to have the president pass an Executive Order. Passing new legislation would take a minimum of six months, which would mean the Peace Corps would miss out on the college students expected to graduate in June who would be looking for an after college experience - but with the Peace Corps not in place, all those graduates would turn elsewhere.
When Shriver gave Kennedy the final report for the Peace Corps logistics on February 24, 1961, his main concern was the Peace Corps autonomy. According to Shriver and the rest of the task force, the Peace Corps needed as much autonomy as possible from other foreign offices so the American people could start fresh. Starting the Peace Corps under the International Cooperation Agency (ICA) would identify the Peace Corps with the public, political and bureaucratic disabilities that presented themselves during the previous few years. Shriver wanted the Peace Corps to have its own identity and power! It was also in this final report that Shriver recommended the name the Peace Corps become the official name of the organization because he couldn’t come up with anything better, and because it was a name the public at large had already grasped emotionally and intellectually.
It took Kennedy only one day to read through and decide on the matter of the Peace Corps and on March 1st, 1961 he signed Executive Order 10924 creating the Peace Corps on a “temporary pilot basis” until Congress could consider legislation. This executive order put the president’s prestige on the line, because infringing upon Congress was not done very often, especially so early in a presidency, but it was a risk Kennedy was willing to take.
Getting the Peace Corps up and running was a non-stop task for Shriver and the task force. All at the same time, they had to devise a program, recruit volunteers, convince third world countries to embrace it, get it passed in Congress, and make sure Peace Corps met its own goals while helping to win the cold war.
Now it was time for Shriver to pave the way for congressional approval. He immediately organized a Peace Corps Advisory Board, drawing on a variety of Democratic luminaries, including Eleanor Roosevelt and David Lilienthal, and he also had Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who Kennedy had asked Shriver to include, as the Chairman of the Board. From the start, as it stated in his final report to Kennedy, Shriver did not want the Peace Corps associated with the ICA. Kennedy, however, did not seem to care as much as Shriver whether or not the Peace Corps ended up under the advisory of foreign service group - at this point, Kennedy had many things on his mind, such as coping with the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs invasion on April 17th, 1961. VP Lyndon Johnson, however was on Shriver’s side, putting it like this:
“This town is full of folks who believe the only way to do something is their way. That’s especially true in diplomacy and things like that, because they work with foreign governments and protocol is oh-so-mighty-important to them, with guidebooks and rulebooks and dos and don’ts to keep you from offending someone. You put the Peace Corps into the Foreign Service and they’ll put striped pants on your people….if you want the Peace Corps to work, friends, you will keep it away from the folks downtown who want it to be just another box in an organizational chart.”
It took Johnson pleading with Kennedy in a private meeting to finally have him agree to keep the Peace Corps out of ICA and the Foreign Service. However, Autonomy had its price. Now, came time to get the Peace Corps legislation through Congress with out the help of presidential assistants who were busy fighting for their own bill that was part of ICA. Shriver, with the help of Bill Moyers, one of his top staff, approached each member of Congress one by one. They spoke with 535 members of congress over two months. Shriver’s personal enthusiasm and careful preparation for legislative assault won converts for the Peace Corps in great numbers. Congress, however, threatened to postpone a decision on the Peace Corps out of annoyance over the Executive Order Kennedy issued. VP Johnson stepped in, speaking with members of the senate and personally lobbying for the Peace Corps. However, in August, the fight was still not over. Some members of Congress still wanted a smaller Peace Corps. At this time, Shriver went to Kennedy personally asking for help. It was then, shortly before the debates in Congress, that Kennedy announced his continuing strong support for the Peace Corps, asking for Congresses full support of The Peace Corps. On August 25th, 1961 - nearly six months after Kennedy’s executive order, the Senate cleared the Peace Corps with a voice vote. This was followed by a 288 to 97 vote in the House for the Peace Corps on September 14th.
The Peace Corps Act established three goals for the organization: First, to help interested countries meet their needs for trained men and women; second, to promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served; and third, to promote a better understanding of other people on the part of Americans. These became known as the Three Goals of the Peace Corps and are still the same to this day.
Shriver set in motion plans to put more than 650 volunteers in the field by January 1961 - only four months. He wanted to volunteers ready to begin training for Tanganyika within two weeks, the Philippines within three weeks, and Nigeria within four weeks. This meant there was still a lot of finding, interviewing, testing, selecting and setting up training programs to be done. Back then, all possible volunteers had to pass a placement test, testing general aptitude of knowledge of various skills needed for Peace Corps assignments, and language aptitude. (This test was removed in 1967)
As a result of Shriver’s desire to get things going as fast as possible and as big as possible in an act to earn admiration for the “spunk” of the Peace Corps, some countries received far more volunteers than could be absorbed into the communities. In the first year of the Peace Corps for example, the Brazil program quadrupled, India grew by almost 1,000, the Philippians reached 620 volunteers. Also, 600 volunteers were scattered through Micronesia in just a period of months. With these excessive numbers, neither the Peace Corps or the host countries could figure out ways to channel the volunteers’ contributions. Ghana and Malaysia had the best programs initially. However, in many countries the Peace Corps was more of a cruel joke because most of the volunteers did not have serious jobs to help their communities/countries. Angry volunteers and staff called it the “numbers game,” bigness for its own sake and to impress Congress, with little thought given to the consequences of overexpansion. In response to these numbers, Shriver began firing volunteers in countries that had far too many, beginning with Pakistan.
“Phony jobs,” which the lack of important rolls for Volunteers to play began being called, obviously happened because of the rapidity with which the Peace Corps expanded. But, possibly more importantly, these “phony jobs” became prevalent became the Peace Corps’ ideological commitment to a rugged individualism which called on volunteers to figure out, along with the peasants of a country, what they should be doing. People thought that volunteers needed more guidance after placement in a country and community, but unfortunately, it took years for the Peace Corps to substantially change the way they operated in that sense. And, to this day, the volunteer, working with their host country, is still primarily responsible for figuring out their exact duties.
The Peace Corps appealed deeply to the imagination of America and the world because it was rich in meaning and because the charismatic Kennedy had elevated it for all to see. Shriver decided that the Peace Corps volunteers, in comparison to government foreign service officers would be recruited from “every race and walk of life,” and they would be trained to speak the languages of the people they are working with as a way to integrate into their communities and build goodwill. However, as was pointed out by some, the Peace Corps had to rely on individuals who had the freedom to give themselves over to idealism and adventure, and this meant drawing mostly upon unattached, middle-class youth, which made recruiting from “every race and all walks of life” difficult. As well as actively seeking volunteers of color, the Peace Corps also sought all volunteers who would present the “desired image of America,” meaning the volunteer would have no prejudice against men and women of races, religions, nationalities or economic or social classes different from his or her own. Striver wrote in his book The Point of the Lance: “We were told that we couldn’t send Protestants to certain parts of Catholic countries in Latin America, but we sent them. We were told that we couldn’t send Jews to Arab countries, but we sent them.” This commitment to desegregation was one way Striver hoped the Peace Corps could reform America and the World.
A very powerful argument that arose for the Peace Corps was that people said the United States could not act as a model for other nations because it didn’t share their experiences. This ended up being used to recruit those volunteers that were ready to lead a “pioneer life” and experience different nations. Motivation for the Peace Corps also came from the book “The Ugly American.” In this book - American foreign policy was widely criticized saying that Americans in third-world countries were “time-serving, self-promoting, luxury-loving bureaucrats.” Foreign governments viewed these Americans as “stupid men.” It was the goal of Kennedy and Shriver to make certain that the Peace Corps did not represent in anyway that image that came across in “The Ugly American.” What they wanted to represent was the main character of the book who was able to “portray an America that can save itself and in the process the world by rediscovering its frontier character under frontier conditions.” This is where the idea for the ideal volunteer came from - someone who can learn local languages, eat local foods, initiate small, hands-on projects based on their own expertise, reject racism, and ultimately refuse to play the “superior white man” roll - the ideal volunteer integrates into their community, becoming equals. Shriver actually sent a copy of The Ugly American” to every member of the Senate when he was lobbying for the Peace Corps Act to be passed.
The United States was not the only country with the idea to send volunteers to third-world countries. Between 1958 and 1965, nearly every industrialized nation started volunteer programs to spread the message of economic development and international goodwill. The first county to do so was actually Australia. The National Union of Australian University Students sent a couple students to Indonesia to work at the level of the average citizen in the early 1950s and by 1954, an agreement had been ironed out by the two countries. By 1960, when The Peace Corps was coming around, Australians had already sent nearly 40 volunteers into Indonesia.
The British Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) was founded seven years after the Australian started their program, but came from the same desire to help third-world countries. Like the Australians, and later us Americans, the VSO founders showed a strong concern that their volunteers exhibit the right “attitude of mind.” They lectured that only people who could put aside cultural and race prejudice were wanted.
The Canadian Voluntary Commonwealth Service (CVCS) was proposed in 1961 with the goals of helping where it was urgently needed to build commonwealth understanding and to break down racial barriers among students who would form the opinion in the future. As the first Peace Corps volunteers were sent to Ghana in the summer of 1961, the CVCS sent six under-graduate students to Jamaica for four months. The CVCS and a couple other Canadian volunteer groups became part of the Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO) in 1964. The unified CUSO was able to obtain half a million dollars from their government to field 250 volunteers.
After the Peace Corps was formed, many free nations followed suit. By 1963, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, France, and Norway all started new volunteer programs. The Japanese were also working on creating a program at that time. Within the first four years of its creation, the Peace Corps had inspired volunteer organizations in nearly all the countries of the free world. This testified both to the perceived inherent merit of the idea and to the prestige of the United States.
The United States was, however, the first nation to incorporate volunteering into its foreign policy in an attempt to demonstrate one alternative to power politics, which in turn allowed it to enjoy generous government funding. The size of the Peace Corps was what distinguished it, which adds to the United States common characteristics - our preference for bigness; our impulse to create programs on a large scale in order to demonstrate that the activity they represent is important.
There was a lot of concern raised over the idea that the government was placing undercover CIA staff into the Peace Corps. In 1961, however, Shriver began efforts to keep spies out. Each Volunteer is required to obtain a national security clearance, and also, any person who had previously worked for the CIA or who was married to someone who had, was automatically disqualified from serving as a Peace Corps volunteer. Then, in 1978, the disqualification was extended to anyone who had had any family member in the CIA. At this time, returning volunteers were also prohibited from joining the CIA until five years after finishing their service.
Originally, the structure of the Peace Corps was much different than it is today. In the 60s, it was based on a boot camp model. A typical training day would begin at 7 a.m. with physical training, followed by eight hours of classes in area studies, languages, job training, U.S. History, current events, and basic first aide and disease prevention. This was six days a week and usually went until 10 p.m. This training was thought to provide “inner discipline,” measuring a man’s stamina, courage and resourcefulness - and in essence, his masculinity. Apparently the training for women was less clear and not as physically grueling, but still demanded physical confidence from them. These training camps were also held in the United States at contracted universities - such as UCLA. It wasn’t until 1973 that the initial 3-month training begain to take place in the host countries.
The first host country for Peace Corps volunteers was Ghana in August of 1961; 6 months after Kennedy had signed his Executive Order and just 1 month before Congress passed the Peace Crops Legislation. The President of Ghana wanted to focus on educating his country, and from the Peace Corps asked for as many English teachers as it could supply. As the Peace Corps only goes to countries that ask for assistance, those first few months were critical for Shriver. After the suggestion from Kennedy to visit different countries to peak interest in the Peace Corps, Shriver spent 26 days traveling to key states in Africa and Asia, including Ghana, Nigeria, Pakistan, India, Burma, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. Unfortunately, in that first year, Shriver didn’t meet his 5,000 volunteer mark. For the first year, the Peace Corps had 2,816 volunteers in the field. However, By 1965, there were 13,248. And From 1961 to 1990, the Peace Corps placed volunteers in more than 100 nations.
However, July 1965 marked the start of downward spiral for the Peace Corps. Lyndon B. Johnson, newly appointed president after Kennedy’s assassination, gave the orders to send massive troops into Vietnam. Before this event, the Peace Corps had grown from 10,000 volunteers to more than 15,000, and Johnson had said he hoped to see the Peace Corps reach more than 20,000 volunteers. Even after Johnson sent the troops into Vietnam in July, it took about a year for the effects to really set in. By 1967, it became apparent that the war was deterring people from volunteering for the Peace Corps. In 1966, the Peace Corps had 15,556 volunteers, but in 1972 a year before Nixon withdrew our troops from Vietnam, the volunteers in the Peace Corps had declined to 6,894. During Vietnam, protesting and petitions were not allowed by Peace Corps volunteers. When this became public that the Peace Corps, which had always emphasized that its volunteers were free men and women able to express their own views, tried to control the “free speech” of its volunteers, the organization began to lose its credibility.
However, by 1970 the percent of male volunteers was up from 55 percent to 70 percent - this obviously due to the draft for the war. Males who entered into the Peace Corps were not exempt from the draft (except for doctors), however the two directors the Peace Corps had during the war devoted a lot of time and energy into keeping their volunteers at their sites of service. Yanking volunteers from a host country was not fair to the volunteer or the country for which they were serving. A deferment was never granted, but for the most part if a man joined the Peace Corps, most draft boards would leave them alone, it was sort of an unspoken agreement. However, it was up to individual draft boards discretion. For example some small draft boards in Texas would not honor the “agreement” - to them, the volunteer needed to “go out and fight like a man.” In the first year of Nixon’s administration only 150 out of the 7,800 male volunteers were drafted out of their assignments. With our troops in Vietnam and the assassination of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, the hope that one person could make a difference, diminished, and the ideals of the Peace Corps began to fall through the cracks. People could no longer sustain faith in America’s good intentions.
In 1969, Richard Nixon assumed the presidency and appointed Joseph Blatchford as head of the Peace Corps. With the new administration came new ideals. Blatchford took the focus away from collage graduates and looked more for older, more technically skilled volunteers. It was said he wanted to get away from the “hippie” types that “infested” the peace Corps in the 60s. It was also Blatchford that eliminated having possible volunteers undergo psychological evaluations during training with the idea that recruits were responsible adults capable of knowing their own minds. The change to older, more mature volunteers reflected the increased need for knowledge in health, food, sanitation and business development in third world nations. When Nixon became president, a lot of people wanted to see the Peace Corps abolished, including the Committee of Returned Volunteers (CRV). They preferred to have the Peace Corps dissolved than have it wither away slowly under Nixon, a Republican president. However, Blatchford stood strong in support of the Peace Corps and its ideals, and thought he had the support of Nixon behind him, which after time, he realized was not the case.
Even with the makeover Blatchford was doing on the Peace Corps, within a year, Nixon had decided to eliminate it. He began slowly, starting with simply cutting the Washington staff by one-third. On March 26, 1970, Nixon began conspiring with other members of congressional affairs and told them to start “phasing out” the Peace Corps, and to begin by having the appropriations cut. It was also suggested to start exposing different Peace Corps “blunders” for Republicans on the Hill to investigate. Nixon told some member of his staff that the Peace Corps needed to be cut after the November congressional elections but not too close to the 1972 presidential election. At this time, he ordered the agency’s budget to be cut by one-third. Only two months after the November election, Blatchford received the proposed budget for the coming year. The Peace Corps’s budget had a proposed budget cut from $90 million to $60 million. With much pleading on Blatchford’s part, this did not happen until 1972, and a budget of $72 million was compromised on. To account for this severe cut, Blatchford began with cutting salaries and non-personal expenses, but still had to cut $5 million from somewhere. He decided the $5 million would come from cutting 2,313 Peace Corps volunteers. Blatchford announced that to Congress in an attempt to play hardball! This removal would be international embarrassment, and he knew it. Unwilling to be made fools of, certain members of congress found the extra need funds Blatchford needed to keep the 2,313 volunteers.
1971 became even more of a challenge for the Peace Corps, under Nixon, a plan was organized to merge all the volunteer groups, including the Peace Corps. Even with extensive testimony that this merger would destroy the distinctive identity of the Peace Corps, it couldn’t be stopped. The merger took time, but came into effect in July 1973.
On June 17, 1972 only three months after the Peace Corps budget crisis, the Watergate scandal began. Two years later, Nixon resigned. Nixon had planned to rein in American commitments abroad because, in his opinion, foreign interventionism on too broad a scale threatened the nation’s power. He also tried to create a more stable world system that would not call as frequently on the resources of the United States to enforce peace. It is thought that there was just no place for a “warm and fuzzy” Peace Corps spreading goodwill through the world in Nixon’s administration. If it could not fulfill a specific foreign policy function that gained the US an advantage in the world, Nixon thought it should be “chopped.” To do this conspiratorially was just his way.
Once Nixon was out of office, it was already too late for the Peace Corps. The harm was done. The number of volunteers had already dropped, and kept dropping even when he was out of office. The number of volunteers hit an all-time low in 1987 with only 5,212. The number of volunteers hovered around 5,000 from the 70s through the 90s, reflecting an uncertainty of Americans about their world role. However, even with the dropping numbers, the Peace Corps continued to be the largest of the volunteer sending organizations in the world.
With the election of Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, in 1976 came some hope from many Peace Corps supporters. However, they were gravely disappointed. He made no efforts to restore the Peace Corps autonomy and he waited five months before even appointing a director. The head of ACTION, which the Peace Corps was now part of thanks to Nixon, Sam Brown, had a very different idea about how the Peace Corps needed to act. He insisted that all English-language programs be removed and replaced and that we only work with the poorest of the poor countries - based on GNP. And Brown demanded that the Peace Corps pull out, rather than phase out any countries that did not meet that criteria.
The Peace Corps was pulled out of its slump in 1980 by its 10th director Loret Miller Ruppe, who was actually the heiress to the Miller brewing fortune. She was the director of the Peace Corps for eight years - longer than any other director. When the Regan administration appointed a former intelligence office as the head of ACTION, Ruppe laid her reputation on the line and lobbied for the Peace Corps returned autonomy because it was a direct violation of the traditional Peace Corps prohibition on any connection to intelligence gathering. To her delight, Congress supported her, and 10 years after the Republicans led the Peace Corps into ACTION, another Republican got it back out. It was Feb. 22, 1982 when the Peace Corps was reestablished as its own agency.
The number of volunteers began to rise again the mid 1990s, averaging 6,800, and now, the Peace Corps is standing even taller. In just 16 days, the Peace Corps will have its 50th anniversary! The mission and the experiences of the Peace Corps volunteers have hardly changed during the last 50 years, meaning it must be doing something right. There were some up sand downs, and some people had their doubts, but I’m excited to begin my journey, and am proud to represent an agency that has gone through so much, but has held on to its beliefs and is still just as much beneficial to the third-world countries of this world, if not more, than it was when it began 50 years ago. I agree with an article that I just read on the plane in the Alaska Airlines magazine. The next phase for the Peace Corps will be embracing the 21st century and all the technology that it has to offer. In the world we live in now, we need to use all the means we have available to us to help third-world countries become self sustaining! Last year, there were 8,655 volunteers in the field, and more requests from host countries for volunteers than the agency could send due to a budget constraint of $400 million. Now, more than 200,000 volunteers have served in the Peace Corps in more than 139 countries - I think Kennedy, and the recently passed Shriver, would be happy with where we are today.
Another really good source for this type of info is the book "Come as You Are" by Coates Redmon.
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