The Man Who Named the Peace Corps

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 grassroots 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 speechwriter 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 a 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, sixty years after the establishment of the agency in March of 1961, it is generally acknowledged that Peter Grothe, later 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 back in 2006.

John Peter Grothe
1931-2012

“There would have been no Peace Corps without John F. Kennedy being elected President,” Peter said when he wrote me on April 19, 2006. The term “peace corps” came about when Peter, then-Senator Humphrey’s Foreign Relations Advisor, 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 traditionally 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 around, 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.’ Others said that it sounded too militaristic (corps). But somehow it stuck!”

Peter also added this important — and missing — a 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 speechwriters 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 and he is  forever “a footnote in Peace Corps trivia history.”

Thank you, Peter, for giving us a name that, as you say, has stuck.