Executive Order 10924: Peace Corps

Context

Many cite Senator Henry Reuss as the Peace Corps's father, John Kennedy as its icon, and Sargent Shriver as its driving force, but the organization also sprang from an age and a set of philosophical and social circumstances that made the time ripe for American volunteerism. The Peace Corps was a child of World War II and the cold war. The Holocaust, global war, and nuclear annihilation philosophically inspired a view that life itself was absurd. In response, a person could create meaning and morality only through individual action—the more heroic and self-sacrificing the better. It was determined that effort, not results, mattered.

Unlike the “Greatest Generation” that fought the war, the “New Generation,” which the Peace Corps would tap, was searching for serious purpose and significant work. Writers of the time captured the male malaise in such books as Growing Up Absurd, The Organization Man, and The Lonely Crowd, all describing colorless, deadening work and empty lives. The Feminine Mystique depicted the constraints and frustration felt by American women. Across the globe, young people were sensing the same need for a release into meaningful lives, with many of them finding fulfillment in missionary-like volunteering in foreign countries.

Meanwhile, the United States felt the impact of a cold war with the Soviet Union that was corroding U.S. prestige and self-image. While Americans sought the comforts of modern life, the country was allowing racism and injustice to tear at its national fabric of freedom. On the other hand, throughout the 1950s Communism spread to new nations, including Cuba—just ninety miles from the United States. To that insult to American hemispheric sovereignty, the Russians added the indignity of Sputnik, the 1956 rocket that sent the first man into space. For the first time, nations were openly criticizing the perceived imperialism of the world's leading democracy. In Kennedy's view, America's “ill-chosen, ill-equipped, and ill-briefed” ambassadors created an “Ugly American” image abroad (Hoffman, p. 41). The cold war was going the wrong way. Citizens wondered where the vaunted American ingenuity, creativity, kindness, vigor, and drive had gone, and the pioneering spirit that marked the founding of the country, the opening of the frontier, and building of international stature and leadership.

Young Americans, however, were already responding to the questions and the crises. On college campuses, students were demanding free speech and working as civil rights volunteers. Leaders such as Senator Ruess and Senator Hubert Humphrey already saw altruistic volunteerism as one way to satisfy the aspirations of young people for heroic action and significance in their lives. President Kennedy responded by empowering his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver to create a Peace Corps that would embody the New Frontier spirit and Americans' love for size, speed, and action. (The “New Frontier” was a term coined by Kennedy in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. It soon became a descriptor of his administration's domestic and foreign programs.) It would be big, bold, ambitious, and mobile and would set in motion even before Congress could deliberate. In his proposal for the Peace Corps, called “A Towering Task,” Warren W. Wiggins outlined three goals: “To help interested countries meet their need for trained men and women. To promote better understanding of America on the part of the people served. To promote better understanding of other people on the part of Americans.” The Peace Corps would provide an avenue for the altruism of the country's youth and an answer for the diplomatic needs of its government. Those twin functions would create an enduring tension of giving and getting at the heart of the Peace Corps.