Archive - 2012

Congressman Henry S. Reuss of Wisconsin, representing the Milwaukee area, went to the Far East in the fall of 1957 on a foreign aid inspection tour. The U.S. government had recently paid thirty million dollar to build a highway through the Cambodian jungle that Reuss realized when he arrived in Cambodia was a road to nowhere. One day he drove for miles along the new highway without spotting a single motorist. He spotted a solitary farmer trudging down the edge of the deserted road, his water buffalo in tow. The road, and the $30 million spent on it, was all a waste of money. But then, and by happenstance, in the same jungles of Cambodia, he came upon a village, and a new elementary school being built in the clearing by four young American school teachers. They told Reuss they had built the school with primitive tools and manual labor. . . .

Some Peace Corps historians, including early Peace Corps staff, trace the idea for such an organization as ‘the Peace Corps’ back to the nineteenth-century American philosopher and psychologist William James, and his “moral equivalent of war” statement. Bill Moyers, who was around the agency at the very beginning, was still saying in 2011 in an interview in Vanity Fair that he considered the Peace Corps his greatest professional achievement, adding, “We were making a statement to the world about America that is still valid half a century later. Remember, there is a moral alternative to war.” William James wanted a “conscription of our youthful population” to form “an army against Nature.” Once conscripted, the young people would be assigned “to coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing , etc.” James’ idea wasn’t entirely altruistic. He felt that assigning young people into disciplined service would . . .

The Peace Corps wasn’t Kennedy’s idea. It wasn’t a Democrat’s idea. It wasn’t even Shriver’s idea. Writing In Foreign Affairs magazine about the creation of the Peace Corps, Shriver would quote Oscar Wilde comment that America really was discovered by a dozen people before Columbus, “but it was always successfully hushed up.” Shriver added, “I am tempted to feel that way about the Peace Corps; the idea of a national effort of this type had been proposed many times in past years.” Beginning in 1809, churches in the United States started to send missionaries abroad. Besides preaching the gospel, missionaries also built hospitals and educated doctors and nurses. They helped farmers and they developed health and social welfare programs. They did much of what Peace Corps Volunteers would also do later in the history of America. The missionaries weren’t the only ones going overseas to help others. In 1850, British . . .

As Thurston Clarke (Tunisia 1968)  points out in his book Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and The Speech That Changed America, and Chris Matthews (Swaziland 1968-70) alludes to in his recent book on Kennedy, Elusive Hero, most of JFK’s great speeches evolved over time with ideas and paragraphs of prose being sharpened and changed and improved from one speech to the next during the campaign of 1960.  The idea for the Cow Palace speech on the Peace Corps has such a gestation period. To begin with, Kennedy was well aware of a ‘youth crop’ talk in the halls of Congress. In 1958 the novel The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick was published. As a Senator Kennedy had sent a copy to every member of Congress. The bitter message of this novel was that Americans diplomats were, by and large, neither competent nor effective. The implication . . .

In these first few days of the New Year, I thought I might try and chart the impulses in America that brought about the creation of the Peace Corps. These ‘impulses’ we might say are close to being lost in the fog of history. There were, however, several generally accepted desires that coalesced in the last days of the Fifties, framed by a number of people in speeches and in prose, and with the election of John F. Kennedy, became a reality as a federal agency. Most of the early history of the Peace Corps, as we know, lives only as oral history. Still there are a few key books that spell out in some detail the foundations of the agency. Two important books are The Story of the Peace Corps by George Sullivan, and that has an introduction by Sargent Shriver. It was published by Fleet Publishing in 1964. . . .