David Burner, “The Politics of the Peace Corps,” Reviews in American History 27.3 (September 1999) 491-496.
The Politics of the Peace Corps
David Burner
Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman. All You Need Is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. vii + 306 pp. Appendix, notes, and index. $27.95.
Fritz Fischer. Making Them Like Us: Peace Corps Volunteers in the 1960s. Washington, DC and
London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998. vii + 239 pp. Notes and index. $27.95.
Elizabeth Hoffman has given more than a critically sophisticated history of the Peace Corps and of the
volunteerist commitments that at the same time moved contingents of people in other countries.
(Australian youth, acting outside of government, had beat the Peace Corps by several years, and the
Canadians purposely got a program going just before that of their southern neighbor.) All You Need is
Love is a sensitive and rounded study of the cultural and intellectual phenomena and contradictions of the
age.
One of the most interesting portions of the book discusses the ethos that at the dawn of the sixties
motivated Peace Corps volunteers and their counterparts abroad. It drew upon a rendering of existential
philosophy that in place of a formal system of ethics prompts individuals to find and create their identity
through active involvement in the world. The result may be proportionate to the difficulty of the action. The
author centers on this way of thinking as it inspired Peace Corps volunteers. But a whole history is to be
told of the humane ethos of self-discovery in action and community as it also appeared in the early
Students for a Democratic Society as well as in the Mississippi civil rights movement. The early Peace
Corps, then, embodied a persuasion at radical odds both with Soviet and Maoist ideology and with the left
politics that later were to define race, ethnicity, and gender as ultimate categories of self-identity and
political discourse.
The Peace Corps was founded in a belief that human beings should be concerned for one another. The
idea did, of course, include the notion that participation would bring self-definition and fulfillment to the
volunteer: yet that is a realm of self-concern that is ordinarily ranked as virtuous. But you cannot sell
Congress and the opportunistic portions of the public on the [End Page 491] notion that the government
should--even inexpensively--do anything for anyone for no reason beyond the doing. Nor can you quickly
sell the public on the idea that Americans should undergo discomfort, or that they are capable of it. All
You Need is Love quotes an inquiry from one State Department official: "We feel confident that it is not
the intention that Americans should have no special privileges . . . and should live on African
standards" (p. 65). That particular query the supporters of the program could dispose of as abruptly as it
deserved. The larger problem was that of reconciling to national goals the altruistic ambitions of the
Peace Corps.
At first, the reconciliation was clear enough. The founders, notably President Kennedy and the first
director, Sargent Shriver, were aware that in building good will toward the United States, the effort would
be a counterpoise to Communist influence in the Third World. To that extent, the Peace Corps was in
accord with the Kennedy policy that combined militancy toward the Communists with some openness
even toward the nonaligned nations hated by the American right. At the same time, the Peace Corps
could make its contribution to the waging of the Cold War only insofar as it remained aloof from the
vocabulary of that combat. Most important was that it refuse any information gathering that cold warriors
might wish it to do. Possessing with some notable exceptions a fairly benign dedication to a democratic
development of society and economics, foreign as well as American, the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations could allow the Peace Corps to forego such combative activities.
David Burner, “The Politics of the Peace Corps,” Reviews in American History 27.3 (September 1999) 491-496.
In the disastrous years of the nation's extended war in Vietnam, however, the American left--a logical
source of volunteers and support for the Peace Corps--became accustomed to seeing all policy coming
from Washington as prosecuting the Cold War. They also decided that the Western objectives in that war
were wholly evil. An earlier generation of cold warriors would have argued that the building of even
slightly more democratic and libertarian societies abroad was concordant with the best intentions of
Western society. They could even discover in democratic socialist movements abroad allies in their
combat against Communist totalitarians (mildly liberal in its early years, the Central Intelligence Agency
was capable of doing so). But the war in Vietnam destroyed any possibility that either democratic leftists
or the Cold War contingent could see in the other a comrade in the struggle. When numerous returning
Peace Corps volunteers came to denounce the agency as a naive or witting collaborator in Vietnam and
the rest of American policy, attacks on the Corps intensified on the right while assaults on the left put
potential volunteers on the defensive. All You Need Is Love examines much of this predicament with a
sympathy and closeness remarkable in an era when it is common to expect that no good has ever come
of Washington. [End Page 492]
Rich in its analysis of the ethos and the historical context of the Peace Corps, the study is also
informative on the more technical quandaries it faced. An important resolution was that the workers would
not set themselves apart in living standards from the impoverished communities in which they labored.
But suppose a nation or a village wanted to treat its guests with the hospitable comforts befitting good
hosts: should the volunteers dismiss the services of a cook, thereby insulting both the host nation and the
host village, meanwhile depriving the cook of a job? The problem exemplifies the sensitive enterprise that
the Peace Corps was set to carry out. The very fact of going to foreign countries, quick to detect
arrogance among Americans, and instructing villagers in community organization of agricultural
management risked looking like an instance of that arrogance. And any attempt to overcome such
perceptions by a studied adaptation to native standards could take on an appearance of condescension.
To single out these facts from a book of extraordinary breadth and bearing upon the 1960s--it briefly looks
at the later years of the Peace Corps--is to do inadequate justice to it. Issues involving the Peace Corps
marked the contrast between the humane self-fulfillment in community that moved much of the left early
in the decade and the angry ideologies that soon defined American radicalism. Arguments bearing on the
program defined the conflict between a left liberalism that trusted American government and the attacks
on the government from left and right.
Would the nation's better contribution to development be through generalists in the liberal arts, prepared
to enter a community and invent a program on the spot, or through the technical skills on which the
country prided itself? That was an often unstated but always latent question. The remarkable novel The
Ugly American, antedating the Peace Corps by only a few years, makes its bluntly and modestly roughfeatured hero an innovator precisely in his trained dedication to technical solutions; would the Peace
Corps ever come to see that these qualities are more complementary than antagonistic?
A nation's culture injected its differing values into the Peace Corps and the claims for and against it. All
You Need Is Love provides an entrance not only into the foreign policy of the years it covers but into the
American mentality of the era.
Fritz Fischer, focusing less on the idea that Washington held of the Corps than on the experience
undergone by the volunteers, adds importantly to the story of the enterprise, bringing to his work a
valuable analysis of the contingencies affecting such well-intended efforts. In his inquiry into what early
administrators of the Corps had in mind, Fischer speaks not of such things as the existential ethos at the
beginning of the venture but of something not far different: the idea that the volunteers would be pioneers
on John [End Page 493] Kennedy's New Frontier. In their forays into the Third World, they were
supposed to revive the virtues of independence, innovation, resilience, and making do that had been the
strength of the nation's earlier frontiersmen (an oversimplification of the American frontier past, Fischer
might have added).
In the qualities sought by the early Peace Corps administration as Fischer describes them, this made a
remarkable turn. An innocent observer might have thought that what American volunteers could bring to
David Burner, “The Politics of the Peace Corps,” Reviews in American History 27.3 (September 1999) 491-496.
the impoverished parts of the globe were expert knowledge and technical skills of the sort that the
unpolished hero of The Ugly American applies to an Asian village. But the Peace Corps administrators
were so wedded to the frontier ideal, and so convinced that what the settlers had brought to the West was
not skill but the ability to invent skill on the spot, that they almost denigrated any kind of learned
knowledge. Individuals thrown upon their own would presumably intuit what a third-world hamlet needed
done, whether it was building a well or practicing crop rotation; the ability to think anew would thereby be
imparted to the host nationals. To a practitioner of one of the humanities it is good to learn that generalists
in the fields of the liberal arts were most sought out, no doubt because we are thought to have broad and
inquisitive minds. The Corps, at any rate, had something close to an aversion to narrow training, which it
imagined would inhibit innovation. It is astonishing to see how inflexibly the leadership held to the virtue of
a flexibility born in ignorance. It did so without the assent of the volunteers, who repeatedly complained of
the lack of practical training.
The Corps did give the trainees the kind of conditioning thought necessary: an exposure to outdoor
hardships. What it overlooked here were the specific kinds of hardship the volunteers who would be sent
to the most destitute areas were going to encounter. Toughening recruits to the clean rigors of simple
outdoor living, it did not prepare them for the more culturally foreign details of filth, untended disease, and
the relentless daily condition of helpless poverty. The Corps meanwhile subjected them to batteries of
psychological testing designed to see who could meet the imagined demands and who must be, in the
language of technocrats, selected out. Among the many contradictions Fischer depicts of the Corps in its
early days is that of an agency committed to open-ended, unschooled inventiveness with unlimited faith in
the expertise of the psychological professions. Expecting its volunteers to achieve spontaneous,
uncoerced cooperation with their third-world clients, the Peace Corps put the selection process in the
hands of experts with what seems an enormous appetite for control. One of the initial causes of
antagonism on the part of volunteers toward the administration was the experience, during their training,
of psychological testers who scrutinized recruits for the slightest deviance from the model of smooth selfconfidence the Corps had designated as desirable. [End Page 494]
Fischer also argues that the early Peace Corps used a fallacious model of the Third World and its needs.
According to the leadership's view, development was a linear process from primitiveness to social,
technological, and scientific achievement. It was presumed that humankind everywhere was about the
same--an American engineer or accountant latent within the brain of everyone--so that what worked on
the United States frontier and since would work throughout the world once people were exposed to it. The
American volunteers found, to their dismay, that they were encountering not simple cultures waiting to be
advanced but highly complex cultures resistant to change because, for worse or better or both, their
inhabitants lived by patterns that seemed rational to them.
Americans determined to be cooperatively egalitarian came face to face with third-world peoples who
insisted on elevating them as privileged guests: one African student rebuked an American teacher for
failing to maintain a properly aloof superiority to the class. Teachers imbued with the idea that learning
and reasoning are acts of initiative--initiative, after all, constituted much of what the program was intended
to bring to the Third World--had to decide how to deal with students conditioned to schooling by rote
memorization of unexamined materials. Some volunteers, expecting to be warmly greeted, encountered
considerable hostility to white Americans in Asia, some of it as vicious as they had believed only whites
could be against non-Caucasian peoples. Women holding, like their male colleagues, to egalitarian ideals
had to put up with third-world practices that would soon fall under the cloud of sexism. The few black
volunteers--black suspicion of the Corps is a story in itself--found out that they were neither African in
some romantically primal sense nor perceived as Africans: they had to recognize that they were simply a
particular kind of American. Volunteers were to be respectfully nonjudgmental of peoples differing from
them. Did this mean that egalitarians were to be tolerant of hierarchy, libertarians to accept governmental
authoritarianism, female volunteers, at the dawn of the women's movement, to accept secondary status?
And if so, what were the volunteers supposed to be bringing to the Third World?
Adding to the confusion was the discovery on the part of some of the workers that they had to endure not
Spartan hardship but festering disease, and many others that they were not exposed to any hardship but
instead were working in comfortable urban surroundings. This last was especially distressing to the
David Burner, “The Politics of the Peace Corps,” Reviews in American History 27.3 (September 1999) 491-496.
teachers, the largest contingent of volunteers, who did not experience much in the way of conventionally
rough conditions and, as practitioners of a skill, did not quite fit the Corps' ideal of unprepared inventors.
The final twist to all this is that Fischer's American volunteers did prove to be innovators in a way the
Corps had not anticipated. They discovered an [End Page 495] immeasurably more complex Third World
than they had been taught to assume and to respect its apartness from their homeland, and in the
process reinvented themselves. Fischer's study is especially enlightening in its depiction of the diverse
responses of volunteers to their new surroundings. They even managed in their daily work something of
the self-directed innovating the Corps had expected of them. Fischer describes volunteers who, for want
of an opportunity to do a full day's work at a formal skill, went about devising simple and useful tools for
the communities in which they were placed. And as absurd as the early Corps' near antagonism to
professional skill seems to be, it was not completely off the mark. Some of the most perceptive volunteers
knew that however much they ached to get a job done--say, build a roof--they had to refrain, instead
enticing villagers to build it. Modern technology, after all, isn't so much an accumulation of knowledge as a
mentality eager to address problems in new and diligently applied ways; this was what the volunteers
were commissioned to exercise themselves and to encourage their clients to practice.
David Burner, Department of History, SUNY at Stony Brook, is the author of John F. Kennedy and a New
Generation and Making Peace with the 60s.