One of the most important books of the late 1950s was the novel, The Ugly American,by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick. The book’s hero was Homer Atkins, a skilled technician committed to helping at a grassroots level by building water pumps, digging roads, and building bridges. He was called the “ugly American” only because of his grotesque physical appearance. He lived and worked with the local people and, by the end of the novel, was beloved and admired by them.
The bitter message of the novel, however, was that American diplomats were, by and large, neither competent nor effective; and the implication was that the more the United States relied on them, the more its influence would wane. The book was published in July 1958. It was Book-of-the-Month Club selection in October; by November it had gone through twenty printings. It was so influential that in later paperback editions its cover proclaimed that “President Kennedy’s Peace Corps is the answer to the problem raised in this book.”
The authors summed up in a factual epilogue what should be done to improve the U.S. foreign service:
“Whatever the reasons, our overseas services attract far too few of our      brightest and best-qualified college graduates . . . . What we need is a small force of well-trained, well-chosen, hard-working and dedicated professionals. They must be willing to risk their comforts and - in some lands - their health. They must go equipped to apply a positive policy promulgated by a clear-thinking government. They must speak the language of the land of their assignment and they must be more expert in its problems than are the natives.”
The Cow Palace Speech
Six days before the 1960 election on November 2nd, Kennedy gave a speech at the Cow Palace in San Francisco - a speech written by Ted Sorensen, Richard Goodwin, and Archibald Cox. Referring to the charges in The Ugly American, Kennedy pointed out that 70 percent of all new Foreign Service officers had no foreign language skills whatsoever; only three of the forty-four Americans in the embassy in Belgrade spoke Yugoslavian; not a single American in New Delhi could speak Indian dialects, and only two of the nine ambassadors in the Middle East spoke Arabic. Kennedy also pointed out that there were only twenty-six black officers in the entire Foreign Service corps, less than 1 percent.

There was also, as there has always been, a search for a new frontier. That feeling was loose in America. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner has written about how America has continued to grow because of this search for another frontier. The Peace Corps gave all these young people a New Frontier.
A new generation
The Baby Boom had struck. 50 percent of the population was under 25 in 1960. For the first time a college education was within the grasp of the majority of young people. Unprecedented material wealth freed this new generation to heed their consciences and pursue their ideals. This spirit of generosity and participation had been sorely missed under Eisenhower. As one Peace Corps administrator puts it in Gerry Rice’s book: “The 1950s made ancient mariners of us all - becalmed, waiting and a little parched in the throat. Then we picked up momentum on the winds of change that Kennedy brought in - the New Frontier, the fresh faces in government, the vigorous, hopeful speeches, the Peace Corps.”
Founding Fathers
Two key people in Congress, Henry Reuss and Hubert Humphrey, both proposed the idea of the Peace Corps in the late 1950s.
Reuss voiced it in 1957 when he was a member of the Joint Economic Committee and traveled to Southeast Asia. He, by chance, came upon a UNESCO team of young teachers from America and other countries who were working at the village level. For three years after that, Congressman Reuss talked to student conferences about establishing a “Point Four Youth Corps” and wrote articles about it in magazines. In January of 1960, Reuss introduced in the House of Representatives the first Peace Corps-type legislation. It sought a study of “the advisability and practicability to the establishment of a Point Four Youth Corps.”
In the Senate, Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota was a member of the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In the late 1950s, he, too, suggested the enlistment of talented young men and women in an overseas operation for education, health care, vocational training, and community development. The idea was liked in the Senate, but the State Department was against it. Humphrey began to research the possibilities of such a program with his staff and realized there was a groundswell of popular support for the idea which he advocated during his unsuccessful campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in the spring of 1960.
In June of 1960, Humphrey introduced in the Senate a bill to send “young men to assist the peoples of the underdeveloped areas of the world to combat poverty, disease, illiteracy and hunger.”
What’s important here is this bill - Senate S. 3675 - was the first to use the specific name “Peace Corps.”
Now it was too late in the session for his proposal to have any hope of passing into legislation, but he wanted the bill to be printed and appropriately referred so as to focus the Congress and the public on the Peace Corps idea at a critical moment - just before the presidential election of 1960.
Meanwhile, Reuss’s bill was added as a rider to the Mutual Security Act which authorized $10,000 for a study of a Point Four Youth Corps.
Also in 1960, several other people were expressing support: General James Gavin; Chester Bowles, former governor of Connecticut and ambassador to India; William Douglas, associate justice of the Supreme Count; James Reston of the New York Times; Milton Shapp, from Philadelphia; Walt Rostow of MIT; and Senator Jacob Javits of New York, who urged Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon to adopt the idea. Nixon refused.

Those of us who follow the history of the Peace Corps agency know the term “peace corps” came to public attention during the 1960 presidential election. In one of JFK’s last major speeches before the November election he called for the creation of a “Peace Corps” to send volunteers to work at the grass roots level in the developing world.
     However, the question remains: who said (or wrote) “peace corps” for the very first time? Was it Kennedy? Was it his famous speech writer Ted Sorensen? Or Sarge himself? But - as in most situations - the famous term came about because of some young kid, usually a writer, working quietly away in some back office that dreams up the language. In this case the kid was a graduate student between degrees who was working for the late senator Hubert Horatio Humphrey.
     Today, forty-five plus years after the establishment of the agency in March of 1961, it is generally acknowledged that Peter Grothe, now the Director of International Student Programs at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, authored the term in the spring of 1960. I learned about the history of the naming from Peter when we exchanged a series of emails earlier this spring.
     “There would have been no Peace Corps without John F. Kennedy being elected President,” Peter told me first when he wrote me on April 19, 2006. The term “peace corps” came about when Peter, then Senator Humphrey’s Foreign Relations Adviser, drafted a bill in May of 1960 and used the words “peace corps.” This was on the eve of the U-2 incident and the West Virginia primary which Kennedy won, a victory that showed a Catholic could win in a traditional protestant state, and, therefore, could win a general election.
     “I gave the name “Peace Corps,” [in this draft of a Humphrey sponsored foreign assistance bill] in order to be consistent with the Senator’s Peace theme,” Peter explained. [Humphrey was also proposing an "education for peace" bill]. “I first, toying round, gave it the name “Works for Peace Corps,” but that seemed too cumbersome,” Peter remembers, “so I just shortened it to “Peace Corps” and Senator Humphrey approved. Some said that it sounded ‘communistic.’ Other said that it sounded too militaristic (corps). But somehow it stuck!”
     Peter also added this important - and missing - piece of information about his involvement with the “peace corps” idea. “When I left Humphrey to go back to do my Ph.D. work, I asked him if I could take the idea to Kennedy, who, by that time, had won the Democratic nomination. Humphrey said, ‘of course!’ I drafted a speech I hoped JFK would use in the campaign and took it to the head of Kennedy’s speech writers in the campaign, Archibald Cox.
     “I told Cox we had received an enormous amount of mail, many of it from organized letter writing by Protestant groups, because the Peace Corps reminded them of action-oriented, Protestant missionary work. Cox listened to this because, as you know, no Catholic had ever been elected to the presidency.
     “I returned to Stanford and was in the Cow Palace in San Francisco the night Kennedy chose to give the Peace Corps speech I had written. There were some changes, but about 75% of his speech was what I had written. The major change was that the Humphrey bill had the Peace Corps as an alternative to the draft, and Kennedy removed that provision (good politics!). I sat there in disbelief of Kennedy’s giving MY speech and I said to myself, “if the Lord wants to take me right now, Lord, I am ready to go.”
     Well, the Lord didn’t take Peter Grothe that night. He is still with us, and if nothing else, as he says today, he is forever “a footnote in Peace Corps trivia history.
     There are others who had the name ‘first’  as well, and among them was William James who formulated the idea for a “peace army” into which young Americans would be drafted in the service of peace. He voiced this idea in 1904 at the Universal Peace Congress held in Boston.
     John F. Kennedy once famous said, “victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.” We might say the same about the naming of the Peace Corps. It seems now that everyone had the brilliant idea to call the new agency, the Peace Corps.

The breaking news this afternoon is that the U.S. is planning to send hundreds of additional diplomats and civilian officials to Afghanistan…all part of the new post-Bush “civil-military” regional strategy that President Obama security advisers have scripted and now waits the president’s signature.

Okay, where are the “hundreds, if not thousands” of additional Peace Corps Volunteers that Candidate Obama promised to send overseas as soon as he got elected?

Remember, President Obama, you said you would double the number of PCVs to 16,000. Well, if the current cuts to the agency hold, based on the Omnibus Bill for 2009, the Peace Corps will eliminate 500 positions, dropping the number of new PCVs below 3,500. This is at a time when 22 + nations–including Indonesia, Sierra Leone, and Colombia–are asking for Volunteers.  

President Obama, the Peace Corps isn’t just a scribbled name in the margin of some paper on regional strategy for the United States. The Peace Corps has been the best face of America for nearly 50 years. Do better than Bush. Keep your promise to enlarge the agency. The Peace Corps is not part of your foreign policy problem; it is part of your solution.

As an ex-community organizer, you should be well aware of what men and women, PCVs living, working, and making friends in the villages of the world, can do for America.

Keep the faith. Keep the Peace Corps strong.

Let me start with a quote from Gerard T. Rice’s book, The Bold Experiment: JFK’s Peace Corps:  “In 1961 John F. Kennedy took two risky and conflicting initiatives in the Third World. One was to send five hundred additional military advisers into South Vietnam; by 1963 there would be seventeen thousand such advisers. The other was to send five hundred young Americans to teach in the schools and work in the fields of eight developing countries. These were Peace Corps Volunteers. By 1963 there would be seven thousand of them in forty-four countries.”
     Vietnam scarred the American psyche, leaving memories of pain and defeat. But Kennedy’s other initiative inspired, and continued to inspire, hope and understanding among Americans and the rest of the world. In that sense, the Peace Corps was his most affirmative and enduring legacy.
     Gerry Rice, in The Bold Experiment: JFK’s Peace Corps, points out that the United States, as a nation, was founded by missionaries, beginning in the sixteenth-century. By 1809, Christian evangelists from the United States traveled overseas not only to preach the gospel, but to build schools, teach trades, and educate. One of the Peace Corps’ first overseas directors suggested that Volunteers only carried out “in greater numbers and without religious connotations much of the same work which church and church-inspired groups have done for many years.” Kennedy himself, when he proposed the Peace Corps, expressed his admiration for the Mormon Church’s requirement of full-time voluntary service (often overseas) by its young members.
Private models
     The Peace Corps had other historical connections. The New York Timesin 1961 wrote that the Peace Corps could be traced back to the days when “the great procession of covered wagons rolled across our continent.” Kennedy remarked to the first group of Volunteers - road surveyors going to Tanzania -”I’m particularly glad that you are going there to help open up the backland.” And Sargent Shriver wrote in a letter to Congressman John Ashbrook that the Peace Corps was “a milestone on the way to a new era of American pioneering.”
     In the nineteenth century a Dr. Samuel Howe of Massachusetts went overseas to teach medicine. Harris Wofford, in the early 1950s, helped set up the International Development Placement Association, which sent a small number of college graduates to teach and do community development work in the Third World. Earlier, there was the International Rescue Committee and, of course, the Experiment in International Living which started in 1932. And Crossroads Africa, established by a Harlem minister, James H. Robinson, in 1957. There was the famous Tom Dooley, a doctor who went to Southeast Asia. But the private group most like the Peace Corps was the non-denominational International Voluntary Service (IVS), founded by Christian leaders from various countries in 1953.
     International precursors included Britain’s Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) established in 1958, Australia’s Volunteer Graduate Association, and West Germany’s Council for Development Aid.
The government predecessors
     The first “government” volunteer group like the Peace Corps was a program of President McKinley’s. Several hundred volunteers called “Thomasites” after the ship in which they sailed to their post - the U.S.S. Thomas, went to live and work in the barrios of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War of 1898.
     In 1904, William James proposed at the Universal Peace Conference in Boston that the government should conscript young men to work among those living in poverty in America. In his 1911 essay entitled “The Moral Equivalent of War,” James said that, for the greater good of society, “our gilded youths” should be packed off to do service.
     This was followed in the Depression years by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and FDR’s National Youth Administration. Over two million students and three million jobless youths took part in this domestic program.
     By the 1950s, a group of World Federalists wanted a voluntary “peace force” to work in developing countries. Also in the 1950s, Sargent Shriver suggested an adventurous people-to-people scheme to President Eisenhower - a plan for sending three-man political action teams to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Shriver said that “they would offer their services at a grassroots level and work directly with the people, contributing to the growth of the economies, to the democratic organization of the societies and the peaceful outcome of the social revolutions underway.” The Eisenhower administration ignored Shriver’s suggestion.
(Tomorrow, Part 3 of Extablishing the Peace Corps)

Over the next few months I’m going to post accounts of some of the significant moments in early Peace Corps history for anyone curious about how the agency was established, as I’m always surprised as how little current PCVs know about the history of the agency. Here to begin is the document that launched the Peace Corps. In future blogs I’ll tell you how this Executive Order 10924 came about, and what happened at the Mayflower Hotel in the winter of 1961.

ESTABLISHMENT AND ADMINISTRATION OF THE
PEACE CORPS IN THE DEPARTMENT OF STATE

     By virtue of the authority vested in me by the Mutual Security Act of 1954, 68 Stat. 832, as amended (22 U.S.C. 1750 et seq.), and as President of the United States, it is hereby ordered as follows:

     SECTION 1. Establishment of the Peace Corps. The Secretary of State shall establish an agency in the Department of State which shall be known as the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps shall be headed by a Director.

     SEC. 2. Functions of the Peace Corps. (a) The Peace Corps shall be responsible for the training and service abroad of men and women of the United States in a new programs of assistance to nations and areas of the world, and in conjunction with or in support of existing economic assistance programs of the United States and of the United Na tons and other international organizations.

     (b) The Secretary of State shall delegate, or cause to be delegated, to the Director of the Peace Corps such of the functions under the Mutual Security Act of 1954, as amended, vested in the President and delegated to the Secretary, or vested in the Secretary, as the Secretary shall deem necessary for the accomplishment of the purposes of the Peace Corps.

     SEC. 3. Financing of the Peace Corps. The Secretary of State shall provide for the financing of the Peace Corps with funds available to the Secretary for the performance of functions under the Mutual Security Act of 1954, as amended.

     SEC. 4. Relation to Executive Order No. 10893. This order shall not be deemed to supersede or derogate from any provision of Executive Order No. 10893 of November 8, 1960, as amended, and any delegation made by or pursuant to this order shall, unless otherwise specifically provided therein, be deemed to be in addition to any delegation made by or pursuant to that order.

JOHN F. KENNEDY

THE WHITE HOUSE,
March 1, 1961

Everyone wants to be first! We know Ghana One were the first PCVs to step onto the tarmac in Accra on September 1, 1961. Those in training joked, “Here today, Ghana tomorrow.”

But what nation made the first request to JFK for his Peace Corps Volunteers?

Well, in late April 1961, Ghana also was the first country to ask for PCVs, and they got the first Volunteers. Tanganyika One (now Tanzania) started and finished their training earlier, but Ghana arrived in West Africa a few days before the Tanganyika Vols reached Dar es Salaam.

Going to Africa in 1961, it took the Ghana group 21 hours in  a propeller-driven DC-7. When the 50 Volunteers arrived in Accra, Ken Baer, who had his B.A. from  Yale and his M.A. in history  from Berkeley, spoke for the group. He addressed the press and host country officials in Twi, saying in part, “We have come to learn as well as to teach.”

That greeting has become for the Peace Corps the way generations of new  Volunteers have entered a host country. It’s not a bad way to say hello.

Good friend Dennis Grubb (Colombia 1961-63) writes to remind me what the great historian Arnold Toynbee once said about all of us:

“In the Peace Corps Volunteer, non-Westerners are getting an example of Western man at his best.”

So, have a beer and tell your kids (and perhaps grandkids) another of your Peace Corps tales and feel good about yourself and know for sure: You’re better than Bush and Cheney and all the rest of that ilk.

When I was the Manager of the New York Recruitment Office, back in the mid-90s, I worked for Concetta Bencivenga (Thailand 1992-94). Well, actually I was her boss, but all of us in the office seem to end up working  for Concetta!

After her tour as a Recruiter, she won a full scholarship to Texas (given to RPCVs by the University, another benefit of being a PCV) and got her masters degree. She now is a hotshot VP at the Please Touch Museum in Philly. This is a letter that she wrote the President recently asking for an increase in funding for the agency. (A word to the wise…If I were you, President Obama, I’d listen to Concetta)

Dear President Obama:

I am saddened by your decision to overlook a funding increase for the Peace Corps.  I served as a volunteer in Thailand from 1992 - 1994 and as a Recruiter in New York (in the World Trade Center, actually) from 1995- 1999.

I went on to obtain a Masters Degree in public policy and am now the Chief Financial Officer for the Children’s Museum of Philadelphia.

Peace Corps is widely recognized as one of the best management training programs on the planet.  It is (or was) the largest employer of English Language teachers in the world.  For the past 8 years, Peace Corps has been on a subsistence diet that has kept it rolling along- somewhat anemically.  You have the opportunity to do what countless people-and presidents-have promised but not delivered- that is to fulfill President Kennedy’s dream of having 10,000 volunteers in the field.

To accomplish this goal by 2011- the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps- we need to start today. Right now. With the  $425 million you promised.

On the day of your inauguration, I rushed out and bought a big screen TV for the museum, so your littlest constituents could bear witness to a proud historic day for our nation.  I wept tears of joy throughout the entire ceremony. On Tuesday I was firing off messages on my blackberry to friends all over the world sharing in our pride and joy at your words and your plan.  This is probably why I am so baffled by your unwillingness to seize on an organization that is crucial to increasing our standing throughout the world and bringing home- year after year- Americans who as BIll Moyers says are “citizens of the world”.

I could continue to elaborate on the amazing return on investment the Peace Corps yields, or the creativity it spawns (From Paul Theroux, to a founder of Lucas Films, to the inventor of the Snugli to the entrepreneur who started NetFlix- all RPCVs).

Instead I will share with you, my president, a story that I have not shared before. In the summer of 2001, I led a group of American high school students on a trip through Thailand. We spent 6 weeks trekking around, learning about the culture, completing a service project and yes- returning to my small village for a reunion.  When I arrived at the school where I taught there was a huge banner that read “Welcome Home Ajaan Anne” (Ajaan means teacher and Concetta was too difficult to say in Thai).  While there, my friends were proud to display the new computer they had received. It was in the main office, shrouded in plastic and while they had heard of the internet, they weren’t quite sure how it worked.  Immediately I sprung into a crash course of the wonders of the world wide web and we even set up a “hotmail” account.  I left only partially convinced that this computer would ever be put to good use.

On September 15, 2001 I received an email.  It’s a bit hard to recollect the exact wording but in general it went something like this: “Dear Anne, We are very worried about you and your family.  We know that you work in the World Trade Center and that your family is all in New York.  Please write us soon to tell us that you are okay.  We have cancelled classes and are praying for you in the School’s temple. We miss you and hope that you are fine.”   Mr. President, can you think of a better reason to expand the Peace Corps than this?

Please increase the budget to $425 million- there are legions of people- families, parents, students, young people, retired people, Returned Volunteers, prospective volunteers, and villagers all over the world- just like mine in Thailand who will do whatever it takes to ensure it’s the best $425 million you’ve ever invested.
Thank You.
Sincerely,
Concetta Anne Bencivenga
RPCV Thailand 1992 -1994
N.Y Regional Office of the Peace Corps 1995-1999
Chief FInancial Officer, Please Touch Museum

Concetta Anne Bencivenga
Chief Financial Officer
Please Touch Museum
The Children’s Museum of Philadelphia
4231 Avenue of the Republic
Philadelphia, PA 19131

Rajeev Goyal (Nepal 2001-03) is the Coordinator of the MorePeaceCorps Campaign. Actually he is the only person working full time on this project. He works out of New York City, and is being funding by an RPCV, but the NPCA takes credit for his work. Don’t believe those folks in D.C. Rajeev is beating the bushes  for RPCVs to rally around an increase in funding for the Peace Corps.

The President has a bill now to provide $450 million to the Peace Corps in 2010 in his early April budget from OMB. The $450 million mark is what is laid out in the recently introduced “Peace Corps Expansion Act 2009″ (HR 1066)

The reason for the necessary increase in funding is because if there is no new funding the Peace Corps will shrink. It has already been downsized by 500 volunteers in 2009, dipping below 3,500 Volunteers, this is at a time when the White House pledged 16,000 Volunteers by 2011. But that was Bush’s pledge.

Some background information. RPCV Congressman Sam Farr (Colombia 1964-66) on February 13, 2009 and three other RPCVs in the House, introduced the Peace Corps Expansion Act 2009, HR 1066, which calls for $450 million, $600 million, and $750 million to the Peace Corps in 2010, 2011, and 2012.

The bill started out with 40 original co-sponsors and perhaps with RPCVs writing letters from across the country that number of co-sponsors was double. Of the 90 who have signed on now, 86 are Democrats. (What else is new when it comes to Republican support?)

What happens now is to get 218 out of 435 members in the House or Representatives to CO-SPONSOR it and get it passed.

In my next email, I’ll send a letter written by an RPCV that explains in part why we need a Peace Corps. The letter was written to President Obama by Concetta Bencivenga (Thailand 1992-94) and her letter gives us a great  reason why we need a Peace Corps.