On October 14, Kennedy flew into Michigan from New York, where he had just completed his third debate with Nixon. He had agreed to say a few words to the students at the university. Ten thousand students waited for him until 2 am, and they chanted his name as he climbed the steps of the student union building.
     Kennedy launched into an extemporaneous address. He challenged them, asking how many would be prepared to give years of their lives working in Asia, Africa and Latin America?
     The audience went wild. (I know, because at the time I was a new graduate student over in Kalamazoo. I was also working part time as a news reporter for WKLZ and had gone to cover the event.)
     According to Sargent Shriver, “No one is sure why Kennedy raised the question in the middle of the night at the university.” Possibly Kennedy thought of the Peace Corps at Michigan because someone reminded him that Professor Sam Hayes taught at the university’s International Studies Department. Samuel Hayes was an early advocate of the “Peace Corps idea,” and had been asked by Kennedy to prepare position papers on the idea of a national volunteer organization.
      Harris Wofford thinks that Kennedy’s remarks were a counterattack to a criticism that Nixon had made during the debate earlier in the evening. Nixon had said that the Democrats were the “war party.” In his book, Of Kennedys and Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties, Wofford writes: “Stung by Nixon’s words, Kennedy may have remembered the idea of a Peace Corps and spoken as he did in order to counteract the image of a Democratic war party.”
     After that speech - the next day, in fact - Chester Bowles, former governor of Connecticut and an advisor to Kennedy who would later become Kennedy’s Ambassador to India, gave a long talk on the same theme. (A day later in Kalamazoo I was part of the press that interviewed Bowles, who was following after Kennedy on this tour through the Midwest. What I remember most about this event was that in responding to my question of what area of the world would be most interesting in the next decade, Bowles said Africa, where vast changes would occur because of the end of colonial rule.)

JFK’s first direct association with the Peace Corps came on February 21, 1960. He was on a college television show called “College News Conference” and someone asked about the “Point Four Youth Corps.” Kennedy said he didn’t know what the legislative proposal was. Afterwards, he told aide Richard Goodwin to research the idea. Goodwin, who was the Kennedy link with the “brain trust” at Harvard, wrote to Archibald Cox at the university’s law school about the idea.
    Then in April and May of 1960, when Kennedy was running against Humphrey for the nomination, the idea was discussed further. Humphrey introduced his bill for a “Peace Corps” in the Senate in June, but after Kennedy won the nomination in July, Humphrey transferred all his research files to Kennedy’s office. The Cow Palace speech made by Kennedy right before the election, which revealed his growing commitment to the “Peace Corps” concept, owed a great deal to Humphrey’s ideas.
     In early September, Kennedy asked both Congressman Reuss, and  Professor Sam Hayes at the University of Michigan, to prepare position papers on a national youth service program.
     On September 22nd, at the University of Nebraska, Lyndon Johnson, the Vice Presidential candidate, called for a “Volunteers for Peace and Humanity” program and got a great campus response. He called Kennedy that night and told him that such a volunteer program would be a “great political asset.”
     In October, during the debates with Nixon, Kennedy discussed the Third World, the Communist threat, and the need for new foreign policy initiatives, but never mentioned a “Youth Peace Corps.”

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.

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.

Four remaining projects that Bill Moyers listed in his early memorandum started Training in the summer of ‘61. Come fall, the number of new Training groups rapidly increased on the campuses of the U.S. and at the Peace Corps Training Site in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. The Peace Corps was in full swing. I’ll stop listing them now, before I run out of space.

Pakistan (East and West): Two pilot projects in agriculture, education, and community development are being undertaken–one in West, the other in East Pakistan. Peace Corps Volunteers will serve as junior instructors in Pakistan colleges; teach new farming methods and maintenance of improved farming implements; organize youth clubs; and work in hospitals.

In West Pakistan, Volunteers stationed in Lahore and Lyallpur will work on hospital staffs, on college faculties and staffs, and as members of agricultural extension teams. Volunteers to East Pakistan will be assigned to government ministries, a village development academy, and the faculty of a university. They will also help build a planned satellite city. Volunteers required: 30 Volunteers in West and 33 in East Pakistan. Training: Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado August 30–November 1, 1961. It was directed by Pauline Birkey, Coordinator of the Peace Corps’ West Pakistan Project Committee. Trainees also went to Arecibo, Puerto Rico from November 10–December 7, 1961.

East Pakistan Volunteers Trained at The Experiment In International Living, Putney, Vermont, August 21-October 14, 1961.It was directed by Reed Alvord, Administrator of the Peace Corps’ East Pakistan Project, and Director of Information, the Experiment in International Living.

Philippines: Peace Corps Volunteers in the Philippines will assist in improving the quality of English spoken in rural areas and in raising teaching standards in both English and general science. They will help Filipino teachers of rural elementary schools teach their students to speak better English and increase understanding of scientific principles. Volunteers will be assigned as educational aides on Filipino teaching staffs in four major regions. They will supplement, not replace, Filipino teachers. It is expected that by June 1962 up to 300 Peace Corps Volunteers will be serving as educational aides. The first group of 128 Volunteers arrived in the Philippines in October, 1961.

Training was at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania. July 25-September 15, 1961.It was directed by Dr. Paul Bixby, Assistant Dean, in Charge of Continuing Education.

St. Lucia:The agricultural and rural community development project on the island of St. Lucia is designed to serve as a pilot project for other islands in the West Indies Federation which have similar economic and social conditions. 16 Volunteers were in the first group. Training was at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa from August 1-31, 1961. It was directed by Dr. Franklin P. Gardner, Professor of Agronomy, Iowa State University.

Tanganyika:Engineering, surveying and geological mapping–these were the tasks of the Peace Corps Volunteers in Tanganyika, a UN trust territory that gained full independence in December 1961. Volunteers were assigned to build a network of small farm-to-market roads extending to even the most remote agricultural areas, to develop a system of main territorial roads that will be passable in both the rainy and dry seasons, and to do preliminary geological mapping for exploration of mineral resources. Volunteers required: 10 civil engineers, 5 geologists (4 hard rock, 1 soft rock) and 20 surveyors were requested. Training was in three phases, covering four and one-half months in the United States, Puerto Rico and Tanganyika. The U.S. Training Center was at Texas Western College, University of Texas, El Paso, June 25-August 20, 1961. It was directed by Dr. Clyde Kelsey, Jr., Texas Western Professor of Psychology and Chair of the Inter-American Institute.