Peace Corps
The Peace Corps is a U.S. government agency founded in 1961 under President John F. Kennedy, aimed at fostering international goodwill and understanding through volunteer service. Originally proposed during the late 1950s, the organization began with the mission to provide trained manpower to newly independent countries, enhancing mutual understanding between Americans and diverse cultures. In its early years, the Peace Corps grew rapidly, with volunteer numbers soaring from 500 in 1961 to over 15,000 by 1966, serving in various capacities including education, community development, and public works.
However, the Peace Corps faced challenges during the late 1960s due to domestic controversies surrounding U.S. foreign policy and the Vietnam War, which affected recruitment and public perception. The organization underwent several administrative changes and lost its independence until 1981. Despite fluctuating volunteer numbers over the decades, by 2016, the Peace Corps operated in over sixty countries, focusing on critical issues like health, education, and food security. Volunteers have reported their experiences as enriching, contributing to personal growth and intercultural exchange, even as they sometimes faced challenges in adapting to local needs and sentiments.
Peace Corps
A U.S. government overseas assistance agency. The Peace Corps attracted thousands of young Americans to serve as goodwill ambassadors and agents of development throughout the developing world during the 1960’s.
Origins and History
Although legislative proposals for a Peace Corps had been put forward in the late 1950’s, John F. Kennedy gave the idea impetus in the last week of his presidential campaign on November 2, 1960, when he proposed it as one way to rejuvenate U.S. foreign policy by promoting goodwill and peace using a volunteer corps of young Americans. One of the earliest acts of the Kennedy administration’s New Frontier policy was the signing of an Executive Order on March 1, 1961, by which the Peace Corps was officially inaugurated. President Kennedy appointed R. Sargent Shriver director of the corps. The Peace Corps attracted a number of young, prominent, energetic government officials who worked tirelessly from their offices in the Maiatico Building in Washington, D.C., overlooking Lafayette Park, to build an organization equal to the ideals set for it by President Kennedy. The Peace Corps, established as an independent agency, was to provide newly independent countries of the Third World with trained manpower to help those being served to better understand Americans and to help Americans better understand foreign peoples and cultures.
Growth in the early years of the Peace Corps program was remarkable. In 1961, only five hundred volunteers served in eight countries, but by 1963, seven thousand volunteers served in forty-five countries, and by 1966, the Peace Corps achieved its high point with more than fifteen thousand volunteers serving abroad.
Underlying the Peace Corps philosophy and program was the idea that the United States needed to combat the expansionist development programs of the communist bloc. Thus, the Peace Corps was partly a child of the Cold War. It aimed at improving the United States’ image abroad and overcoming the “Ugly American” stigma by establishing a people-to-people style diplomacy. Peace Corps volunteers were to become ambassadors of goodwill from the United States to the peoples of the developing world. The political dimension of Peace Corps work, then, remained an ever-present reality. When U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War escalated in the late 1960’s, the Peace Corps tended to attract many who sought to avoid the draft, unleashing a domestic controversy over abuses in Peace Corps recruitment. However, overall recruitment tended to decline at this time as many young Americans came to question not only U.S. foreign policy in general but also the role of the Peace Corps. Some former volunteers became involved in protest activities against U.S. foreign policy and the Vietnam War, particularly the Committee of Returned Volunteers, which moved to the forefront of anti-Vietnam War protest after its formation in 1966, giving the impression to patriotic Americans that the Peace Corps was populated not only by draft dodgers but also by political radicals. As disillusionment with U.S. foreign policy increased, fewer young Americans volunteered for the Peace Corps.
Subsequent Events
Under President Richard M. Nixon, the Peace Corps was made part of a new bureaucratic unit. The position of Peace Corps director became a revolving door, and the organization’s administration lost continuity. Not until 1981 did the Peace Corps regain its independence under the direction of Loret Miller Ruppe. By that time, about five thousand volunteers per year served overseas, barely one-third of the number that had served during the heyday of the Peace Corps in 1966. After the reorientation of the Peace Corps in the 1980’s, the average age of volunteers increased and the number of volunteers with specific technical skills rose. The agency experienced renewed vitality in the late 1980’s and 1990’s, having weathered the political storms of the 1970’s and having matured as an agency of overseas assistance.
Membership in the organization has risen and fallen over the succeeding decades according to changing political sentiments and funding for the program. As of 2016, Peace Corps volunteers were working in over sixty countries on initiatives such as prevention and treatment of AIDS and malaria, improving food security, and education of girls and women.
Activities
Peace Corps volunteers work in a variety of capacities. A very large percentage engage in educational activities, including teacher training, vocational and technical education, and sometimes university-level teaching. Others work in community development or social welfare programs such as child care, family planning, nutrition, sanitation and health projects, and small-scale rural development activities such as vegetable gardening, animal husbandry, fisheries projects, and development of water resources. Still others focus on public-works activities such as road building, housing and school construction, and rural electrification. Those volunteers involved in more specific and technical posts tend to have better experiences than their counterparts who work in more vague community development activities where they need to define for themselves how they can contribute to the communities they served.
Impact
The vast majority of volunteers through most of the Peace Corps's history have been college graduates with general credentials. Some specialists are recruited, but most volunteers go abroad without highly technical skills. This has tended to limit the impact of volunteers on the overall development of host countries, although it may have contributed somewhat to the other goals of promoting intercultural contact and understanding. A common complaint of early volunteers was that they were often sent abroad without explicit instructions and so had to devise their own ways of being useful to a rural community. Still, the vast majority of Peace Corps volunteers have reported their experiences abroad as having been personally rewarding. Most returning volunteers come back to the United States with enriched understandings of peoples from other parts of the world, but some experienced anti-United States sentiments overseas, and early resignations are not uncommon.
Additional Information
Lowther, Kevin, and C. Payne Lucas. Keeping Kennedy’s Promise: The Peace Corps Unmet Hope of the New Frontier. Westview Press, 1978.
Meisler, Stanley. When the World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years. Beacon Press, 2011.
Mostafanezhad, Mary. Volunteer Tourism: Popular Humanitarianism in Neoliberal Times. Ashgate, 2014.
Mueller, Sherry Lee, and Mark Overmann. Working World: Careers in International Education, Exchange, and Development. 2nd ed. Georgetown UP, 2014.
Redmon, Coates. Come as You Are: The Peace Corps Story . Harcourt, 1986.
Rice, Gerard T. The Bold Experiment: JFK’s Peace Corps. U of Notre Dame P, 1985.
Schwarz, Karen. What You Can Do for Your Country: An Oral History of the Peace Corps. William Morrow, 1991.