Naming the “Peace Corps”

Naming the “Peace Corps”

by John Coyne (Ethiopia 1962–64)

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 campaign. 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?

Like in many situations, the famous term came about when a young kid — a writer! — working quietly away in a back office, dreamed up the language. In this case the kid was a graduate student working between degrees, for the late Senator Hubert Horatio Humphrey.

Peter Grothe

I learned about the history of the naming of our agency from Peter when we exchanged a series of emails in 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 just when the West Virginia primary had been won byJohn Kennedy, a victory that showed that a Catholic could win in a traditional protestant state, and, therefore, could win a general election.

“I gave the name “Peace Corps,” [in the 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, toyed round, and gave it the name ‘Works for Peace Corps,’ but that seemed too cumbersome,” Peter remembered, “so I shortened it to “Peace Corps” and Senator Humphrey approved. Some said that it sounded ‘communistic.’ Others said that it sounded militaristic (corps). But it stuck!”

Peter then added this important, but missing, piece of information about his involvement with the “peace corps” idea.

“Later I was leaving Senator Humphrey to go back to do my Ph.D. work, I asked him if I could take the idea of ‘Peace Corps’ to Kennedy, who, by that time, had won the Democratic nomination. Humphrey said, ‘of course!’

“I drafted a speech in which I hoped JFK would use ‘Peace Corps’ 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 supportive mail, many of it from organized letter writing by Protestant groups, saying that 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 for my studies, and was in the Cow Palace in San Francisco, and that night Kennedy chose to give the ‘Peace Corps’ speech I had written. There were changes, of course, but about 75% of his speech was what I had written.

“The major change was that the Humphrey version of the bill had the Peace Corps being an alternative to the draft, and Kennedy removed that provision (good politics!).

“I sat there in disbelief as Kennedy delivered MY speech and I said to myself, ‘if the Lord wants to take me right now, I am ready to go.’”

The Lord didn’t take Peter Grothe that night, but he would pass away on June 16, 2012, from brain injury caused by a fall, leaving behind a significant footnote in the long history of the Peace Corps.