# 21 Mad Men At The Peace Corps: Samuel Babbitt (Washington, D.C.)
Sam Babbitt was the Dean of Men at Vanderbilt, while I was a student there. Dean Babbitt was an absolutely…
In 1962 the Peace Corps received 20,000 applications, compared with 13,000 in 1961. Nevertheless, Recruitment couldn’t keep up with the staggering period of growth.
For example, in 1961 the Peace Corps was in 9 countries. A year later they were in another 32 countries. Then, in the early months of 1963, there was a dramatic decline in applications, and the Peace Corps suffered its first shortfalls. This happened just as more and more countries were asking for Volunteers.
The head of Recruitment–called then ‘Chief of the Division of Colleges and Universities–was the former Dean of Men at Vanderbilt University, Samuel F. Babbitt. Sam Babbitt was a low-key kind of guy. His idea for recruitment was to set up a single Peace Corps faculty contact on campuses all across the country with instructions to conduct a continuous but unaggressive information program.
Sam Babbitt in later years
Babbitt wanted to win the Peace Corps a reputation for honesty and thoroughness which, he told everyone, “would produce a consistent flow of high-quality applicants. He believed that any sort of hard-sell campaign might bring immediate results but would eventually damage the Peace Corps’ image and attract the wrong type of applicant.”
Babbitt wasn’t someone to be pushed around. As a junior at Yale he enlisted in the Army and got caught up in the Korean War. Going through combat at Hungnam Reservoir he was evacuated with the shattered Third Division from Korea and left the army as a master sergeant in 1951 to return to Yale and earn his B.A. in American studies. Then he got his M.A. and became the Dean of Men at Vanderbilt where he was asked to become the university’s liaison officer with the Peace Corps. He was there as a dean when Bill Moyers called and asked him to join the new Peace Corps. The only thing you might hold against Babbitt was that he was a member of the famed Whiffenpoofs at Yale, singing bass. He was also one of the founders of the Baker’s Dozen, which, I think, still sings on the Yale campus.
All of his qualifications aside, he was the target at the Mad Men & Mad Women Conference Table in the Maiatico Building. And things could get rough around the edges at the 5th floor Conference Table with all of those oversize egos. Staff meetings were brutal. Gale told me of one ferocious debate when an ‘ill-informed’ staff member fled a meeting and consequently offered his resignation. Shriver took it.) Now in March of ’63 at the conference table everyone was screaming: where are the Volunteers?
Bob Gale (then chief of Special Projects) spoke up, criticizing the Peace Corps’ recruitment methods as “amateurish” and argued that efforts on college campuses should be intensified. He advocated an in-depth, professional “sales” campaign. He attacked the methods being used, i.e., a lone recruitment officer on campus putting up a notice from time to time and then waiting for interested students to appear. He had a better idea on how to recruit Peace Corps Volunteers.
I think this always has been something of a mystery, and never clarified by the Peace Corps agency: Has the numbers of serving volunteers (against original aspirations) the result of lack of applications, lack of suitability of applicants (personal suitability or skills), insufficient agency budget, or lack of requests by host countries. Or something else. Over the years I have heard ALL of these. Whatever it was (or IS), it seems it would be significant to lots of things like NPCA advocacy for bigger budgets, More emphasis (incl RPCV participation) in recruitment, or project development, incl how BIG a project ought to be.
John, it is a simple answer. Every congressional season Congress votes to expand the number of PCVs to at least 10,000 and it never happens. The funding is never given to the agency to support that many PCVs. Every year the agency has more requests than they can fill. They just don’t have the Volunteers. The largest number of PCVs overseas was in 1966 at 15,556. The question now is will we even have a Peace Corps in the future….given President-elect Donald Trump’s world view.
I have a feeling that the reply is the cancel option.
Will it happen that the Peace Corps goes out before we pass by?
Will our country end submerged in some alien power?
Will the Peace Corps and the volunteers be recalled in the next generations?
At bottom because of Marian Hailey Beil and John Coyne there is a chance that our time’s hopes will exist in this story of stories (from people including Phyllis Noble, Robert Klein, Joanne Roll, Bill Moyers, Georianna McGuire, Alice O’Grady, the Arias brothers among them).
WE COME FORWARD
how the excluded or ignored come forward:
identities merge
doors closed, open
Anthony and Cleopatra exchange clothes
David and Jonathan switch ‘em
real story is how excluded, ignored come forward
wheels-up, square-long
mundane-ecstatic’s quotidian
daily vocabularies
bubbles of ancient air alive in glaciers
knocking in ordinary wrong places
making-nothing-happen witnessing
from life because the real story is
we come forward.
© copyright Edward Mycue
Topside leadership weave palls. Not appalling. Fresh become scentless potpourri.
Sam Babbitt was the Dean of Men at Vanderbilt, while I was a student there. Dean Babbitt was an absolutely marvelous
persont — one of the finest individuals I have ever known — in all the years since I graduated in 1962. I had been elected to the Student Senate — and we passed a ‘bill’ to integrate the undergraduate school. The graduate schools, law, medicine and Master’s and PhD programs were integrated, but not the undergraduate school. It was very controversial.
My father was concerned and came to Nashville to make sure that I wasn’t going to get thrown out. He met with Dean Babbitt in his Kirkland Hall offices. Dean Babbitt was very complimentary of what I and the Senate had done. He told my father that I had done the “right thing” and NOT ONLY was I correct — but he was going to see to it that upon graduation IF I chose to enroll at Vanderbilt Law that fall instead of UVA Law, that he was going to see that I received a scholarship PLUS he was going to give me a job IN CHARGE OF THE THREE FRESHMEN DORMITORIES — which would allow me to attend Law School basically “free of charge,”
I accepted Dean Babbitt’s offer, upon learning of it — and the great man was highly instrumental in my legal education, my ability to afford it and I will honor this great man.
He left VU a year later to WDC and running the Peace Corp. Whaeever is said to demean this man and his integrity is WRONG.
God Bless you Dean Babbitt — if your alive and if you’ve entered the Pearly Gates – save me a seat there, because I want to
shake you hand and give you a big ‘hug’ — because you played a huge ROLE IN MY SUCCESSFUL LEGAL CAREER.
J. Bruce Miller
J. BRUCE MILLER LAW GROUP
Waterfront Plaza, Suite 250
325 W. Main St
Louisville, Kentcky 40202
jbrucemiller65@gmail.com