The Peace Corps was created to send American volunteers abroad to promote good foreign relations and “world peace” by bringing urgently needed social and technical services to developing countries.
The concept of a Peace Corps was first introduced during John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign. The idea was quickly realized with establishment of the corps by executive order on March 1, 1961, and the appointment of its first director, Sargent Shriver, Kennedy’s brother-in-law. Seven months after its inception, Congress approved legislation formally authorizing the volunteer-based agency.
An element in the foreign affairs component of Kennedy’s New Frontier, the Peace Corps became the most
Celebrated tangible response to the president’s inaugural challenge for commitment to public service. His stirring appeal, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” galvanized thousands of young Americans, inspired to create a better world, by devoting a minimum of two years of their lives as volunteers for the Peace Corps. The only stipulated requirements were that the volunteer be a U. S. citizen, at least 18 years of age, and have no more than two dependents under 18. Volunteers’ duties ranged from teaching and developing community projects to establishing vital agricultural and health programs in rural and urban areas of Aerica, the Near East, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia.
While many flocked to serve in the Peace Corps, others volunteered for Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), the domestic version of the Corps, or invested their efforts in the growing Civil Rights movement. All of these activists were motivated by Kennedy’s call to action, by his promise that they could indeed make a lasting difference, and by their own conviction that their selfless efforts on behalf of humanity would eventually bring about equality, freedom, inclusion, and opportunity for all. The possibilities for effecting concrete change, one volunteer recalled, seemed limitless.
The Peace Corps’s strong idealistic bent appealed to those who believed in the positive influence of government and an actively participatory citizenry. There was, however, another motive for the establishment of the Peace Corps other than the sole humanitarian version offered by the government. The volunteer agency was but one of several programs included in Kennedy’s policy of nation building. This policy, an integral component of his foreign affairs agenda, was crafted within the framework of the cold war. The policy of nation building advocated technical assistance and financial aid to help developing nations achieve economic and political stability. The policy’s overriding objective, however, was to win “the hearts and minds” of those caught in the cold war power struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, and to draw them into America’s sphere of influence.
Whether it was Kennedy’s Alliance eor Progress in Latin America, the Agency for International Development that distributed aid in developing nations, or the Peace Corps, these and other similar programs were specifically designed as valuable, noncombative tools in America’s efforts to stall the spread of communism worldwide. The Peace Corps, therefore, was not only a program used to export America’s most positive attributes—youthful idealism, compassion for those less fortunate, perceived moral superiority—but to help initiate the requisite developments needed to insure better futures for developing nations. The Peace Corps was one of America’s potent nonmilitary weapons in its cold war arsenal. By mid-1966, the agency announced it had 15,000 volunteers living and working in more than 50 countries, the largest number of volunteers in its history. It was deemed a great success.
The achievements of the Peace Corps, in terms of good public relations and valuable humanistic efforts, spawned the establishment of comparable organizations by other industrialized nations, including Great Britain, Canada, and Sweden, as well as by the United Nations. Yet, in America, numerous potential volunteers became disillusioned with the Corps’s principles of hope and idealistically driven activism, both of which began crumbling in the face of continued civil rights abuses at home and the nation’s increasingly unpopular involvement in the Vietnam War. And, despite having received full autonomy under President Jimmy Carter and status as an independent federal agency on its 20th anniversary, budget cuts in the 1970s and 1980s also took their toll on the organization. As a result, volunteer rates markedly dropped. In the 1990s, the Peace Corps began receiving greatly expanded federal support, increasing the agency’s budget by 50 percent in order to reach a goal of 10,000 volunteers by the year 2003. The cataclysmic political developments that occurred in Europe and in Asia during the 1990s also boosted the Peace Corps’s viability and visibility. For the first time in the agency’s history, volunteers were sent to the Soviet Union, China, and eastern Europe. The Peace Corps had outlasted its cold war objective. Today, it continues to promote its humanistic aims of friendship, understanding, and opportunity worldwide.
Further reading: Roy Hoopes, ed., The Peace Corps Experience (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1968); Gerald Rice, The Bold Experiment: JFK’s Peace Corps (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985); Karen Schwarz, What You Can Do for Your Country: An Oral History of the Peace Corps (New York: Morrow/Avon, 1991); David Searles, The Peace Corps Experience: Challenge & Change, 1969-1976 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1997).
—Irene Guenther
World History
